Crazy for Wagner

Georg Solti conducting, a little crazier than usual.

A Sliver of Consciousness

On Friday I attended the George Lakoff lecture at the University of Oregon.

The basic theme--cognitive schemata, frames, and metaphor theory applied to the current landscape of American politics--is the one he's devoted himself to largely supplanting his work in linguistics for the last decade. Given that, I got more from the talk than I expected.

One claim he made is not so surprising yet still provocative: that 98% of our behavior is unconscious.

If this be true (and, give or take quibbles about the exact percent, the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness, etc., it is likely to be) then what is the use? Why try to figure out the meaning of life, or the meaning of anything, if even a good answer applies to only two percent of our behavior?

The key is the role of consciousness in the formation and modification of habit. Though most of our behavior, the relatively or completely unconscious part, is habitual--William James noted the important role of consciousness in modifying our habits.

As such, that 2% comes with an important modifier effect. It can, successively over the course of time, shape a much larger amount of unconscious habit. That is the scope of our freedom, and our responsibility.

Have we given up on space?

Spaced Out - Aeon Magazine

I was more a child of the 80s than the author's 70s; but on the other hand, I was raised more on older science fiction novels than contemporary science fiction movies.

It does seem like we've largely given up the explorer's impulse--one that still seemed part of the geekier side of the culture into the 80s, or even into the 90s with the popularity of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But there's no talk now about going boldly. It almost seems...with the second space shuttle disaster, we turned out the lights and shut the door on that era.

Have we no more tolerance, let alone appetite, for risk? Then we have entered the senescence of our species.

Science, Speculative Philosophy, and the Expansion of Experience

In a previous post I noted Alfred North Whitehead's definition of speculative philosophy. In this post I ask the question: given that speculative philosophy is a creative endeavor, what is its relationship to science?

I've posed this question to somebody in a much better position to offer an insightful answer. But until he gets the chance to respond, I'll share a thought of my own.

Whitehead himself spent most of his career as a mathematical physicist, with philosophy as a side interest that he didn't write much about until fairly late in life. Pierce, responsible for his own works of speculation (though not set forth nearly so systematically as Whitehead) studied chemistry, worked in geodesy, and thought of himself primarily as a mathematician and logician. Both knew and respected science, and had a keen sense of when they were venturing beyond it.

Reprising Whitehead's quote from the previous post:

Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. (p. 3)

Science has greatly expanded the number and scope of the elements of our experience that Whitehead refers to. Observationally, we can look much farther into space with our telescopes. To smaller levels with our microscopes. To different ranges of the spectrum of light with our various detectors.

Also added to our experience are the understanding of relationships that scientists have worked out from the range of things they have seen. These days, we "see" apples falling under the influence of gravity, whereas in the past they were seen to be returning to the earth because they were also composed of earth.

While we acknowledge how incredibly expanded our experience is because of what science gives us, we shouldn't forget the narrowing it also involves. If an observation or experiment cannot be replicated, science cannot work with it. Usually this will simply mean that the observer or experimenter was mistaken, and we should accept this as the default assumption that will be correct in most cases.  But it is at least theoretically possible that it was a truly one-of-a-kind experience, never to be repeated.

Whitehead and Peirce were wise enough to recognize the possibility of such experiences. (William James went further, rushing to embrace them.)

If speculative philosophy is to answer to our experience: in the modern era, science provides most of this experience. It's possible that our current understanding of that expanded experience will undergo minor or even major revision--the history of science displays page after page of examples. So it's OK for speculative philosophy to go not just beyond but also against current science. But it must recognize that it does so on borrowed coin. The number of claims that it makes in the face of science, and the length of time it maintains those contrary claims, constitute a debt upon which interest compounds rapidly.

Does a Particle have a Personality?

(I once heard of somebody who named their two cats Article and Particle. But I digress...)

Among the many things I'm currently in the middle of reading is Lisa Randall's Warped Passages. It's a good way for a layman to learn a bit about many recent developments in theoretical physics. Even if some of her stories are a bit hokey and her name-dropping a bit grating.

I was led to the following thought:

Generally a mathematical abstraction is just that, an abstraction of certain aspects of objects (or situations or experiences or whatever). They gather together what entities have in common, explicitly leaving aside what makes them individuals, unique. Uniquenesses do not mathematical relations make.

When statisticians count "households" in a demographic, there's no concern for who is arguing with whom under any particular roof. We count nine planets (wait...eight...damn you Neil DeGrasse Tyson...) without in counting distinguishing that Saturn has rings and Mercury does not.

But particles are represented differently, as nothing beyond pure abstraction. There is nothing that makes them individuals. A photon is a photon is a photon. Same with electrons, etc. Any can be replaced with another of its own kind, and this replacement makes not the slightest bit of difference.

But...can this be right? Does a particle's individual history not matter at all, not serve to distinguish it from others of its kind? Does photon #17483 have no individual quirks and eccentricities that serve to distinguish it from photon #334981?

For nothing at scales above simple molecules is this true. Unicellular organisms are (barely) distinguishable individuals. Galaxies and galactic clusters are unique. Potentially, so are universes, with separate sets of physical laws (or at least separate constants and parameters of those laws) and different, quite complex histories.

Is there a scale of sizes of things such that, when we get small enough, we suddenly (or is it gradually) transition from the incorrigibly unique to the thoroughly interchangeable?

An Atheist Search for God

From Salon.

From this article, I'm quite interested to read the rest of Nancy Ellen Abrams' book.

What she describes is much along the lines of the sort of spirituality I look for, and try at times to articulate. I hesitate to bring in the words "religion" and "God" for the result. I find those terms so tied to, and evocative of, anthropocentric monotheism and its history that I despair of re-purposing them for something so different, so much more honest and better. (Whereas some people find the word "spirituality" irredeemably cheapened by kitsch, New Age uses.)

Others (besides Abrams) disagree with me.  Alfred North Whitehead held on to it, for instance, while dismissing the Abrahamic religions (and others) as "the last refuge of human savagery".  He speaks in Religion in the Making about the religion and the gods we've had so far as being humanity's savage prehistory of the real religion to come. (I'd have to read back through the work to find the exact quote.)  Sadly, those who appropriate Whitehead have not learned from him and have used him as "inspiration" for a lot of Protestant treacle.

There is a lot of very substantial beauty that comes as an somewhat incidental by-product of traditional religion. Sacred music and church architecture, for two examples. But the aesthetic appeal of the beliefs, and the texts in which they are expressed, are surpassed by innumerable orders of magnitude by the beauties of the natural world, on this earth and in the wider cosmos. Do not worship and obey. Instead, wonder and learn.

Nietzsche's Individualism

When a traveler who had seen many lands and national and several continents was asked what characteristic he discovered to be common to all of humanity, he replied: "They have a tendency toward laziness." To many it will seem that his reply would have been more accurate and valid if he had said: "They are all fearful. They hide behind customs and opinions." At bottom, every human being knows perfectly well that he lives in the world just once, as a unicum, and that no coincidence, regardless how strange, will ever for a second time concoct out of this amazingly variegated diversity the unity that he is. He knows this, but he conceals it like a bad conscience. Why? Out of fear of his neighbor who demands convention and who cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a part of a herd instead of taking pleasure in being himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare instances. In most instances it is convenience, indolence--in short, that tendency toward laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: human beings are lazier than they are fearful, and what they fear most are those hardships that unconditional honesty and nakedness would foist upon them. Artists alone despise this lethargic promenading draped in borrowed manners and appropriated opinions, and they expose the hidden secret, everyone's bad conscience, the principle that every human being is a one-of-a-kind miracle. They dare to show us how every human being, down to each movement of his muscles, is himself and himself alone; moreover, they show us that in the strict consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worthy of contemplation, as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and anything but boring. When the great thinker disdains human beings, it is their laziness he disdains, for it is laziness that makes them appear to be mass-produced commodities, to be indifferent, unworthy of human interchange and instruction. The human being who does not want to be a part of the masses need only to cease to go easy on himself; let him follow his conscience, which cries out to him: "Be yourself! You are none of those things that you now do, think, and desire."

(from "Schopenhauer as Educator" in Unfashionable Observations, p. 171-172)

Or in contemporary slang: do you.