Prospero's Books

On top of the sieve

On Big Think, Sam McNerney writes

A curse of the 21st century is the belief that the new prevails over the old and that the new is superior to the old. I’ve realized the opposite is true with respect to ideas. What survives must possess intrinsic value that time recognizes but our cognitive laziness usually misses. A thought experiment to explain.

If a Martian visited Earth he might wonder why only a tiny fraction of ideas that we humans have conjured still exist while the vast majority have perished. The answer is that an invisible hand discriminates ideas based on their value in the same way a sieve filters desired materials based on their size. Think about it. Every generation produces a number of ideas but only a few survive into the following generation and even fewer survive into the generation after that ad infinitum. Call the percentage of ideas that survive the leap from one generation to the next the “sieve constant.” It is a very small number, and the implication is that most valuable ideas that exist today are ancient. As the cliché goes, they’ve stood the test of time – they’ve managed to stay on top of the sieve. 

[Illustration from Wikimedia Commons]

The circle of those whom we do not kill

From Chet Raymo's Science Musings blog, in an essay originally published shortly after the events of September 11, 2001:

It is as Loren Eiseley wrote: "Instability lies at the heart of the world." The criminals who wreaked havoc on New York and Washington were acting out an ancient biological script.

Yet there is ground for hope. Our brains are of sufficient complexity to give rise to that mysterious thing known as self-awareness. Our genes may predispose us to act in certain ways, good or bad, but they do not constrain us. We are effectively free to choose good over evil. Humans alone, of all the things we know about in the universe, can escape the bipolar logic of evolution.

To a cheering extent we have done so. As Margaret Mead pointed out, the circle of those whom we do not kill has steadily expanded throughout human history. The optimists among us imagine that the circle will ultimately embrace the entire planet.

From nature's point of view, there is no such thing as the Problem of Evil: order and disorder, life and death, cooperation and competition are the twin principles of nature's creative force. What humans uniquely face is the Problem of Good: How to create on this tiny planet an oasis of unalloyed peace.

The gene that makes you go to see Nicholas Cage movies

A hilarious three-minute video of John Cleese explaining the genetic basis of both fundamentalist religion and mechanistic science.

(Thanks to Dean Radin at Entangled Minds.) 

Working creatively together

At first glance, astrophysicist Bernard Haisch, in The Purpose-Guided Universe, seems to be making a case for the God of deism: the watchmaker who has wound the watch and walked away:

What I am proposing—and it is no original idea of mine—is that God chooses to deliberately stay off the playing field . . . .

But as Haisch finishes that sentence and paragraph, he clearly lets us know that this is not a God who has walked away:

. . . . in order to let freedom of choice create the new and original experiences that the Universe affords and that God seeks through us. By this I do not mean that God is inaccessibleto us; rather that he does not interfere in the evolutionary process and the workings of nature. If we are actually sparks of God, we can cultivate a relationship with him through prayer, or meditation, or just talking to an invisible friend. Working creatively together with God we can to some extent shape our present reality and our future. Clearly we cannot just create any reality we want, but the power of our intention to shape what happens in our lives should not be dismissed" (23-24)

A more impressive feat of intelligence

"Let me be clear. This has nothing to do with so-called Intelligent Design. In the view I propose, Darwinian evolution is essential for fulfilling God's purpose. The unpredictability and novelty afforded by evolution is absolutely necessary; otherwise existence would be a preordained puppet show. It is the particular character of the Universe itself—an issue that has come to the fore in astrophysics—and its origin in the Big Bang that I attribute to an infinite intelligence, not the microengineering of life-forms. It is, in fact, a more impressive feat of intelligence to drum up a few essential laws that can give rise to a universe in which life can evolve, than it would be to tinker around designing creatures . . . . " (21-22)

—Bernard Haisch, The Purpose-Guided Universe

Co-creative participants in an adventure-driven mystery

From Darryl Reanney's Music of the Mind: An Adventure into Consciousness:

"I believe society is sick, at least in part, because we have lost the 'story' that bound us together. It is part of our human necessity that we need to be animated by some deep sense of common purpose, of shared meaning, if our lives are not to become pointless irrelevancies. Without an underpinning foundation of explanatory story we find it hard to experience enthusiasm in the true sense of its original meaning--being en (in) theos (God).

"Paradoxically, however, the agent that destroyed the old sense of shared myth may itself be the midwife that gives birth to the new. A revelatory story is emerging from modern science, a story which no longer sees human beings as accidental side issues in a mechanical universe but as co-creative participants in an adventure-driven mystery. At the centre of this evolving story is the ethic of interconnectedness; science is now validating the central insight of the sacred tradition, 'all is one', showing that the part has no meaning outside the whole, that to explain anything you have to explain everything" (v-vi).

Cosmos, Nature, and Culture

This weekend I'm presenting a paper in Phoenix at "Cosmos, Nature, and Culture: A Transdisciplinary Conference," sponsored by the Metanexus Institute. I've just posted the paper, "A 'Mirror up to Nature': Cosmos, Nature, and Culture in Shakespeare," on this site. It's my first long essay that grew directly from writing I've done for this blog.

If you're a reader of this blog and would be interested in getting together with me in Phoenix this weekend, please let me know.

"Farewell lecture"

This spring, my colleague, Richard Turner, and I were asked to give "farewell lectures" on the occasion of our retirement from fulltime university teaching. Mine was about the transparency and opacity of language and the "cosmic" importance of stories. If you'd like to read my lecture, I've posted it on this site.

Prospero's Books Book of the Year

In my library, Ervin Laszlo is tied for fourth most represented author, after Jung, Campbell, and Shakespeare. Since the early 1970s I've been reading almost everything he has published.

Laszlo's 2008 book Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World is (1) a next step in Laszlo's lifetime work on systems theory and evolution, (2) a survey of several recent, albeit controversial, discoveries in physics, (3) an application of these discoveries to the solution of the world's problems, and (4) a description of Laszlo's Club of Budapest and several of its programs. For its thoughtfulness, sweep, and passion, Quantum Shift is the 2008 Prospero's Books Book of the Year.

Laszlo's book joins 2006's Museum of Lost Wonder by Jeff Hoke and 2007's Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies.

As common as grass

"Systems thinking looks at a variety of natural systems--from organisms and ecosystems to social systems--and sees them as open systems in a steady state. They are 'open' in that they require constant throughput of energies, substances, and information. They maintain a steady state by self-repair of their internal structures. These internal structures are not fixed, like a clockwork mechanism, but are self-organizing. Thus when conditions outside a system change substantially, the system survives through self-transformation. It makes a sudden, creative advance into novelty.

"Fundamental transformation is not only possible, it is the routine way natural systems evolve. Radical change is as common as grass in world history, because it is as common as grass in the life of all living systems."

--Marjorie Kelly, "On the Very Real Possibility of Transformational Change," Tikkun, July/August 2008, p. 36.