Prospero's Books

Whither it goes

Chapter One of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism begins with an epigraph from the Gospel of John:

The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit (iii,8).

The field of chaos theory began with an almost identical observation by Edward Lorenz, that the nonlinear system we call weather is utterly determined yet utterly unpredictable. For the author of John, the Spirit, too, is a nonlinear system, far from equilibrium, on the very edge of chaos.

It's called literature

From John Horgan's response to a letter in the May-June 2008 issue of Science and Spirit:

Many so-called emergent phenomena can be understood, at least partially, through conventional reductionist methods. Particle physics has yielded extraordinary insights into the origin, composition, and evolution of the entire cosmos. Molecular biology has illuminated once opaque mysteries such as conception, heredity, and speciation. But some emergent phenomena, notably that of the human mind, stubbornly resist reductionist analysis. Fortunately we do have a "different methodology" for understanding ourselves. It's called literature (6).

Leaving out a lot of reality

Sunday's LA Times carried a fascinating op-ed piece, by Seed magazine editor Jonah Lehrer, on the limitations of contemporary neuroscience. He writes:

The success of modern neuroscience represents the triumph of a method: reductionism. The premise of reductionism is that the best way to solve a complex problem -- and the brain is the most complicated object in the known universe -- is to study its most basic parts. The mind, in other words, is just a particular trick of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.

But the reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into tiny pieces. Look, for example, at a Beethoven symphony. If the music is reduced to wavelengths of vibrating air -- the simple sum of its physics -- we actually understand less about the music. The intangible beauty, the visceral emotion, the entire reason we listen in the first place -- all is lost when the sound is reduced into its most elemental details. In other words, reductionism can leave out a lot of reality.

Lehrer isn't a fuzzy-headed idealist. He credits reductionist neuroscience with, for example, great and beneficial advances in pharmaceuticals. "A work of art," he writes, "obviously isn't a substitute for a scientific experiment -- Proust isn't going to invent Prozac." But, he continues:

the artist can help scientists better understand what, exactly, they are trying to reduce in the first place. Before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together.

As a lover of Joyce's Ulysses, which traces many of the thoughts of a character during a single day, I am grateful to Lehrer for a quotation I didn't know about:

Virginia Woolf . . . famously declared that the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness."

And as a lover of Shakespeare's Tempest, which gives this blog its name, I especially noted Lehrer's conclusion:

Unless our science moves beyond reductionism and grapples instead with the messiness of subjective experience -- what James called a "science of the soul" -- its facts will grow increasingly remote. The wonder of the brain is that it can be described in so many ways: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. What we need is a science that can encompass both sides of our being.

In between the passages I've quoted are many more I could have. In my browser, the essay is less than four screens long; you'll be rewarded for the time you spend.

(Thanks to Seed magazine for the link.)

Neither arbitrary nor absurd

Yesterday, after naming Paul Davies's Cosmic Jackpot as the Prospero's Books Book of the Year, I spent some time skimming the book again, especially the notes I have made in it. Here's a passage that stands in contrast with Richard Dawkins's portrayal, in The God Delusion, of religion and science as polar opposites:

. . . there were religions, especially monotheistic faiths, which encouraged belief in a created world order. The founding assumption of science is that the physical universe is neither arbitrary nor absurd; it is not just a meaningless jumble of objects and phenomena haphazardly juxtaposed. Rather, there is a coherent scheme of things. This is often expressed by the simple aphorism that there is order in nature (6).

Book of the Year

The second annual Prospero's Books Book of the Year is Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life, by physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies.

A few sentences from the first pages of the book (especially when read alongside this blog's description, at the top left of each page) may suggest why it was chosen:

About 350 years ago, the greatest magician who ever lived finally stumbled on the key to the universe--a cosmic code that would open the floodgates of knowledge. This was Isaac Newton--mystic, theologian, and alchemist--and in spite of his mystical leanings, he did more than anyone to change the age of magic into the age of science . . . .

The word science is derived from the Latin scientia, simply meaning "knowledge." Originally it was just one of many arcane methods used to probe beyond the limitations of our senses in the hope of accessing an unseen reality. The particular brand of "magic" employed by the early scientists involved hitherto unfamiliar and specialized procedures, such as manipulating mathematical symbols on pieces of paper and coaxing matter to behave in strange ways. . . .

The ancients were right: beneath the surface complexity of nature lies a hidden subtext, written a subtle mathematical code. This cosmic code contains contains the secret rules on which the universe runs (4).

(The 2006 Book of the Year was The Museum of Lost Wonder.)

Ultimate and Absolute Mystery

Chet Raymo, whom I often refer to as today's finest science writer, has posted a characteristically thoughtful piece on "A Reality Inscrutable." He begins with a quotation from 19th-century thinker Herbert Spencer (as quoted in turn by Jeremy Campbell):

In the early days of Darwinism, the nineteenth-century scholar Herbert Spencer wrote that religions tend to harbor a secret fear that everything may some day be explained, which suggests they are hiding a residual doubt as to whether God as an Incomprehensible Cause is really as incomprehensible as they supposed. What they must face up to, Spencer said, is that it is only in the assertion of a reality utterly inscrutable that religion can be reconciled with science. "A permanent peace between science and religion," he said, "will be reached when science becomes fully convinced that its explanations are proximate and relative, while religion becomes fully convinced that the mystery it contemplates is ultimate and absolute.

Raymo responds:

As Campbell notes, the first of Spencer's two conditions has arguably been met. As we enter the 21st century, I don't know any scientist or philosopher of science who does not admit that scientific knowledge is partial, tentative and subject to change. There is no theory of science so thoroughly entrenched that it would not be overthrown if the evidence demanded it or if a more economical theory came along.

But we are no closer to meeting the second condition than we were in Spencer's time. Indeed, it could be argued that God as Ultimate Mystery is in full retreat. Billions of people right across the planet claim to know God's mind, or claim a personal relationship with the presumed creator of the universe. The God of many churches, mosques and temples is not Ultimate and Absolute Mystery -- to which all of us might reasonably bend our knee in adoration -- but a cross between an avuncular Bill Gates and Michelangelo's po-faced Moses, a God who turns his ear to the congregant's every prayer and asks nothing in return but a generous tithe, or perhaps blowing oneself up in a crowded marketplace.

I agree fully with Raymo. But I would want him to know (as he surely does) that there are many of us religious people, in all faith traditions, who rejoice in the findings of science but who also give the totally inadequate name "God" to the Ultimate and Absolute Mystery--as an inexpressible answer to the unanswerable question "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Back in May 2006, I quoted Bruce Feiler, author of Where God Was Born, Walking the Bible, and other books:  

Religion . . . breeds overconfidence, and one challenge for today's believers is to rediscover in the fire of faith the source of warmth that can overpower the flames of destruction. This change can only be achieved by fellow believers, I think. The first conviction I took from my journey is that the only force strong enough to take on religious extremism is religious moderation.

Feiler's term "moderation" should not be read as "halfheartedness." Rather, it denotes, for me,

• radical love, acceptance, and respect for all our fellow creatures regardless of their religious faith or lack thereof
• the practice of gratitude, humility, and celebration in the face of the Ultimate and Absolute Mystery

Raymo continues to demonstrate wonderfully that he joins a great many of us people of faith in striving to practice gratitude, humility, and celebration. The outward forms that our gratitude, humility, and celebration take may look different. But that's hardly important.

Intricate beauty born out of chaos

Karmen, at Chaotic Utopia, has posted one of her best-ever "Friday Fractals," an Earth-like planet she has formed by plugging a just-right seed number into a fractal formula. She writes:

As I toyed with the different settings, I couldn’t help notice how such intricate beauty was born out of chaos. Now, I could be speaking of the fractal, or of our planet. I’ll let you decide.

(Please check out the video she has posted, of the fractal Earth being formed.)

So do we think in pentametric lines?

I've often heard, and repeated, the assertion that Shakespeare's use of iambic pentameter--indeed any poet's use of iambic pentameter--somehow captures, and elevates, the normal rhythms of English speech. So I'm fascinated by a posting this week by Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars.

Rosenbaum quotes one of his readers, an Allan Henderson, who notes that the three seconds taken by a typical spoken iambic pentameter line may be related to the approximately three-second duration of our experience of the present. He credits Stephen Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought, for pointing our that "the human experience of the present moment is not a continuous flow,  but a roughly 3-second interval."

Henderson, citing Pinker (and I'm sorry that my attributions get so many layers deep here), writes:

Steven Pinker’s observation about the 3-second present comes from Ernst Poppel, a brain researcher at the University of Munich. Dubbed Poppel’s Law it says that “We take life three seconds at a time.” Poppel illustrates his law by pointing out that a handshake lasts about three seconds. So does the preparation for a golf swing, short-term memory, a phrase in spontaneous speech, the pause when channel surfing for a television program to watch, and  line of poetry. Pinker talks about this on page 189 of his new book THE STUFF OF THOUGHT, where he says “our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an instantaneous instant. Instead, it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous ‘now’ but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future.”

Rosenbaum and his commentators also continue a discussion, begun in The Shakespeare Wars, on the wisdom of including a slight break at the end of each spoken iambic pentameter line.

(Thanks to ShakespeareGeek for the reference.)

Bucky's knot

In the early 1970s, in Ann Arbor, I had the delight of attending a lecture by R. Buckminster Fuller. He planted himself "down center," on the edge of the stage's apron, and talked to us, rapidly, without moving, for (I think) two hours. The experience was intoxicating.

I can still see the rope he displayed, made from many different materials spliced together in a line. He tied a knot at one end, then moved the knot along the length of the rope, demonstrating that as the material making up the knot changed, its pattern remained. We are like the rope, he said, changing our molecules over and over again but maintaining the pattern that is us.

He didn't actually have a rope. He pantomimed it as he spoke. But I saw, and can see, it. And the very same knot is now composed not of cotton or nylon or hemp, but of thought and memory.

I was reminded of "Bucky" Fuller by a profile by Stephanie Smith in the September/October 2007 issue of Good magazine, and in an abridged version online.

For those who aren't familiar with Fuller, he was the creator of the now-ubiquitous geodesic dome, as well as hundreds of other things and ideas. Marshall McLuhan, another big-picture thinker of the mid 20th century, called Fuller "the Leonardo da Vinci of our time." Leonardo should be flattered by the comparison.

Skyhooks and cranes

In a review of David Dennett's Consciousness Explained, Chet Raymo employs two brilliant metaphors for two ways of looking at purpose in the universe:

The big question is how we got here. Was our existence foreordained, drawn up as by a skyhook from the dreary world of matter into the realm of angels? Or are we the unforeseen accumulation of blind, chance mutations selected by interaction with the environment, matter lifting itself into ever greater domains of complexity, eventually into consciousness, as if by those cranes used by builders of skyscrapers that ratchet upward as the buildings rise?

After a thoughtful look at both world views, Raymo concludes:

This humble reader is not convinced that we yet know enough about life or mind to commit ourselves solely to cranes or skyhooks. No one who is remotely knowledgeable about science doubts that life and consciousness evolved over billions of years; what is still at issue is how complexity and consciousness arise. Is natural selection enough to drive evolution toward ever more sophisticated systems? Or is there a natural tendency toward complexity and consciousness built into creation from the very beginning, a lawful natural skyhook of sorts that might be accessible to scientific description?  In my mind, the issue is undecided.