The science wars

I think it’s safe to say that last session brought a fundamental philosophical division in our group to light. It’s funny that I have found myself warring for the scientists with Greg and Paul, when in any other company I’d be fighting the good fight for mysticism and imagination. In my astrologer days I even published articles on this, decrying the sterile reductionism of our empirical epistemology and arguing for the ontological validity of qualities: astrology is a perfect example of a discipline outside of the scientific paradigm, one that is founded on a notion of qualities inhabiting the world. In fact, wasn’t my topic on exactly this? So, why am I not simply in furious agreement with Martin? The ghost of my physicist ancestor perhaps? I too reject the apparent project of science to reduce all phenomena to their measurable, quantifiable correlates. Where did this assumption arise that measurable=real? I don’t think that Newton for one believed this. He was an alchemist and a devout Christian. It’s something that has crept up on us as science has grown in prestige and influence. This is the reification of scientific models, and the beginning of the cult of scientism, a type of religion.

But for measurement, in that quantitative domain, science is the go. Measurement is science’s thing. It’s what it is for. Measurement, prediction, quantification. I disagree with Martin that science is indistinguishable from religion because I believe that science is about quantification, while religion is about meaning. Science wouldn’t work if its equations and formulae weren’t accurate, i.e., effectively predictive of real world phenomena. I believe those equations, while they may be superseded by equations that are more general and encompassing,  are damn good approximations, and I don’t think there are an infinite range of other equations that would serve just as well. The danger, the impoverishment only occurs when we take those quantitative abstractions for reality, when we allow the models to destroy our imagination for what is possible. I always hold to the Hamlet’s sentiment that “there are more things in heaven and earth…”

I’d be disappointed by two possible outcomes for our group: either that all interesting scientific angles were suppressed, or that we became restricted to the empirically knowable. Not that I think that the latter seems likely! I think most of us agree that narrow scientism has harmed us philosophically and spiritually. We wouldn’t be participating in this group if we were convinced positivists.  But neither can I shake my personal fascination for the mysterious reality suggested by modern quantum science. If science is no more arbitrary that religious dogma, how come it has uncovered such an extraordinary and fantastical matrix underpinning the blockish mechanics of ‘inanimate’ matter? Shouldn’t it merely revolve within its own sterile assumptions? (And yes, OK, it does that too, but that does not negate the real revolutions that violated all expectations.) Science should be another ingredient thrown into the imaginative soup of our explorations, and not be decried merely because it is aligned with the Powers That Be and is the weapon of choice of the bigots of reductionism. It was Einstein who said, “Imagination is greater than knowledge.”

I recommend this movie as the starting point for a discussion if you haven't seen it already: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/

The next discussion

I have struggled long over this post. I have been puzzling, maybe not daily, but at least ever few days, how I could lead the next conversation.

I have been thinking about my dreams. I have been puzzling if there is any hidden meaning in them. Wondering if maybe some strange thing that has been dredged up from my subconscious has some meaning. Is it telling me the future? Is it rehashing something from the past? Is it something that I'm current worried about? And I have been trying to put it in the context of our meetings... but nothing. I just haven't been able to grasp at a meaning.

Now obviously my short span of concentration hasn't been enough to totally dissuade me from imaging that there is something there, but as yet, it just hasn't bitten me.

So, given my predicament, I have chosen a more basic subject for focus of our next discussion, something more primeval, something that can be grasped and held onto. Fear.

In my imagination, this is coming from a similar place to dreams. It is something which drives us, which shapes our world. What we are willing to put ourselves up against. What we are unwilling to embark on. It must, must, come from that imaginative part of our brain. The part that remembers as a child hiding behind the couch when something unimaginable(/imaginable) was happening on the television. The lying in bed with the dread that something/someone was hiding in the wardrobe ready to pounce when the eyelids shut. The scary future, the worry that the familiar world will skip a track and suddenly be playing a different tune.

So, I don't give have a strong topic to lead, rather just a starting point for a discussion. Hopefully we can tie in to some of the earlier topics, and maybe just add a little more background to them to further discussions.

time and processing speed

I can't help myself. The compulsive blogger strikes again. Last night's group was as interesting as ever. Pity Greg wasn't there at the end to participate in the discussion about practical experiments in weirdness. There was, I think, a half-baked agreement to record dreams. Perhaps this shoud be be narrowed down a bit, since recording dreams every morning sounds a bit like a new year's resolution to quit smoking and be more involved in social activism. Can I suggest this: we all  focus an intention on having a dream for the group, and record anything that seems like it might be significant. 

I had this dream last night. Nothing precognitory in this one, but worth mentioning since it was about the group. I was telling something to the group, something painful and sad that had happened to me, and I notice that there are tears in everyone's eyes, and I also see (in a mirror?) that there are tears in mine. I'm surprised and moved at everyone's compassion and readiness to show emotion. Reminded of the surprise I had seeing tears in Matthew Hayden's eyes at his retirement press conference - what, Matthew Hayden, the macho man, crying? I think it relates in some way to the discussion last night in which Stephen talked about baring our emotional souls, and Paul talked about his fear of insanity. Though we are hardly a bunch of Matthew Haydens, we're still a group of men, with the associated cultural baggage about showing emotion. Interestingly, in terms of going beyond the intellectual into the experiential, in my experience it's often when strong emotional intensity is present, when there is some kind of seismic psychologial shift, that 'paranormal' experiences happen. I'm not advocating we become a psychotherapy group or even worse a 'men's group', but I thought I'd share the dream and its associations.

An idea that occurred to me after the strange dream I mentioned in the group: is dream logic to day logic as quantum logic is to Newtonian logic? I.e., in dreams, many contradictory things can be simultaneously true, past, present and future blur in indeterministic fashion, and the whole thing makes perfect sense until you wake up, and waking consciousness collapses the wave function, forces a singular, unitary logic on everything. Is the quantum world the dreaming substrate of everyday reality?

Finally, to Paul's suggestion about the speed of time and processing speed. I like the idea, but the more I think about it, the less convincing it becomes. Here's why:

• As I said to Paul last night, this idea would not predict time stopping at the speed of light or inside a black hole singularity. Time should simply get slower and slower in proportion to the amount of matter or speed present. The 'processor' should not crash!
• Although the information processing model of physical reality  is getting very popular, isn't the idea of processing speed restrictions applying to physical systems taking the computer metaphor too far? You'd have to propose some kind of hidden CPU, like in The Matrix or something, churning away behind the scenes and getting bottle-necked when things get too fast. Where is the evidence for such a clunky arrangement? Basically, it turns the universe into a simulation, which seems to me to be topsy-turvy.
• Remember that slowing of time in a relativistic system is only one phenomena of several that apply. Others include shortening in the direction of travel and increasing mass. It's hard at first glance to see how these could be related to processing speed problems.
• Why should travelling at high speed mean more processing requirements? If an object is moving at high velocity through deep space, far from other objects and interactions, shouldn't time slow down less in this situation? And, in a simulation, high speed is not more complex to process than low speed. position+=1 is as easy to calculate as position+=1000000 (well, arguable, but the point is still clear). At any rate, there shouldn't be any particular ceiling to achievable speed, since processing requirements will rise linearly with velocity, if at all.

To me, those thoughts kill the theory, sorry. But I'm open to debate on the subject... :)

Finally, I'd be  interested in exploring the ideas about a 'right brain ontology' further, i.e., the problem of subjectivity and perception. Although qualities are much harder to agree on or communicate about than quantities, this doesn't invalidate them as genuine 'emergent properties'. If we didn't have a whole lot of common ground in the area of qualitiative perception, we would have no great artists, no art at all, since we would only ever be able to do what Martin says we should  be doing as artists, i.e., communicating with ourselves. (Synchronicity or coincidence that I forgot to mention: before coming to last night's group, I was reading that JD Salinger only ever wrote for his own pleasure, and in the end eschewed publication as an "invasion of privacy"! Martin, your literary kindred spirit!)

OK enough already.

Imagination and the world

Some final thoughts before tomorrow night, to prompt further musings (and where are the rest of you on this blog, huh? Cowards! Pikers! Miscreants and bludgers!)...

There is almost incontrovertible evidence (personal, if not meeting the standards of scientific empiricial proof, but that's another argument) that it is, on occasion, possible to see future events. I have experienced absolutely compelling examples, and they are not at all uncommon. That such a thing could occur seems entirely at odds with the notion of a world of random particular motion, still our scientific in-theory. Instead it suggests that the world is comprised of meaningful forms in wholistic motion and change. It suggests that stories, images, human events, have their own existence not merely derived from simpler, lower level parts.

This suggests to me the idea of the world as an 'imagined' place, in which its moods, colours, joys, horrors, meanings, are intrinsic to it, not 'epiphenomena', not secondary, not illusory.

Another related thought: have we literally privileged one side of the brain in our scientific ontology? (Note to Zaf: not egotism to use this word, it's essential.) What I mean is, the left side of our brain perceives structure, logical relationships, linearity, causality, parts. The right side perceives form, similarity, quality, the whole. Doesn't it seem strange that only one side of the brain perceives 'reality'? We have a left brain ontology, or theory of being. It privileges structure and causation as 'real', derides right brain impressions as fluff and illusion.

What would a right-brain ontology look like?

This all being a left-brain analysis, of course, which is why I encourage some right-brain responses tomorrow night, even if we are more awkward in this territory.

That's it.

Post, you bastards, post!

Notes to self...

(April 2008 I think)
"There is energy in things, their inertness purely illusion. E=mc², a power station in a tram ticket, the roiling fury of an a-bomb locked up in a pebble, a useless key, a discarded bottle. In bodies too. In lives. They have their inert surfaces. They too are dull and cool to the touch, but hold inside them energies vast and unglimpsed. Seen only in pain, perhaps - when the feelingless body is split open and pain pours out like atomic brilliance, incendiary, terrible, a reminder of the unimaginable forces bound up in the knots of quiet that are our holding together."

I get you Martin, but question whether any of the writers you mention didn't edit and refine for publication. The stuff you write for yourself (like the paragraph above) is to me the raw ore which you can then work into something else. It's the difference between a gold nugget and wrought jewellery. Although it wasn't explicitly on my mind, the thought behind that short passage was there when I wrote that paragraph in "Suburban Mystery" about the mystery locked away in the silent brick boxes, like the energy in plutonium. Maybe you prefer the original, I don't know.

Anyway.

All a side issue, really. Your remarks did not offend me deeply or anything. Exasperated slightly, because they expressed to me a sort of vestal purism - as if anything that has to be altered for the sake of the world is sullying itself. I don't believe that. I think it makes you more honest...

This is turning into a whole philosophical sideshow of its own. I'll drop it for now.

When's the next date?


(PS: Just found this note to self in my journal, to prove (I think) that we are actually about the same thing here: "Seems to me writing is, like meditation, a reawakening to the world. A challenge to slough off the lethargy of habitual perception and touch the world afresh. To write is to reach out and touch the world again through its recreation..." OK, now I am really and truly going to shut up.)

The wrap

I just took the liberty of adding everyone to an email list to receive new blog posts as soon as they are posted. Anyone who's rather not receive them can opt out themselves via the settings page. I haven't made the blog public yet, as I think that definitely requires consensus, which I'm not sure we really attained, and Greg was not present. My naive argument in favour is that we will enrich the world with our wisdom! Or to put it less facetiously, hopefully our discussion will manifest some of the attributes we value: complexity and imagination, and whether or not the world is listening, whether or not any of this is even intelligible to an outsider, we should be feeding into the general complexity pool.

There's a French term 'esprit d'escalier' translating as 'staircase wit', which is the comeback you only think of once you're on the stairs leaving. I am a chronic sufferer, and these sessions provoke a closely related malady, not sure of the French for it, but it's the decisive argument thought of in the car on the way home. 'l'argument d'auto' maybe? This is why I blog. Anyway, to Martin on the subject of the terrible sell-out of writing for publication, I have two points to make, apart from the obvious point that writing is communication not (or not only) meditation. Firstly, I write literary fiction, not poetry or philosophy. Nobody writes fiction for themselves. Secondly, I'm not writing for the money or the fame, or I'd be trying to write blockbusters. I write for literary journals and anthologies, in my experience generally run by intelligent, discerning, creative people, and when I write for them I don't distort myself, I just try to write the best damn thing I can. Although quality can go unrecognised, taste and understanding always being a factor, generally I believe that it's the good stuff I've written that's gotten published, not the stuff that's been bent and compromised and dulled into palatable form for mass consumption.

In terms of the reward, it's something like this that makes me feel it's worth it - blowing someone's mind and making them want to write.

Anyway, side isssue, but I did feel the need to man the defences of my literary endeavours against the corrupting tide of Martin's ever so subtle deprecation...

So now, to next meeting's topic. The theme is "The world as imagined landscape". Not a question to be answered, a puzzle to be riddled out, or even a Hegelian dialectic, but a theme to riff upon however you see fit. Some reading that you may or may not choose to consider: James Hillman (if you dare), Robert Sardello, Thomas Moore.

What is the relationship between the world and the imagination? Is the world a dream, an essentially imaginal construct? ("imaginal" being Hillman's word for the space that is neither physical nor purely "imaginary", something like a primordial imagination that exists in or under the world.)

Our current science (even our hip new quantum science I believe) would reduce the world to its quantifiable structure, but what of its qualities? Is the whole, in its expressive elegance, reducible? Not just reducible to its parts, but reducible in any way at all. The world's face is highly expressive, it suggests some animating spirit. Is it pure naivete to believe in that spirit?

You don't have to follow any of these riffs yourself. You can bring a poem (your own, someone else's). Or, why not, a fucking stone or a flower or some other expressive object. I don't care. I'm responding to Martin's charge that we weren't dealing with the subject of imagination imaginatively enough. Martin, why don't you bring a mushroom? :)

OK I'm done.

(Sorry Greg, you can see we need the weight of your influence to stabilise the mix, or next thing we'll be prancing like pixies through the tulips.)