next topic?

Not sure who's up next, but just a reminder that we were going to try to have the topic two weeks in advance so we could all swot up or whatever...

Rebirthing the Club of Supper Club

Well, I note our first posting was in November 2008, making COSC over 18 months old. As we discussed at the most recent meeting, it is perhaps time for us to renew our charter and examine our goals and 'achievements' (I'd say they mainly consist of the consumption of a small silo of Schöfferhoffer and an equally impressive volume of highly drinkable shiraz). As part of this, we tentatively agreed on the following:

• To use this blog as our central communication channel
• To define our topics two weeks in advance and post them here
• For the topic-chooser to at least summarily 'minutise' our discussion on this blog after the meeting
• To perhaps devote more time and effort to studying our topics in advance, perhaps even going so far as to have set reading for the night.
  

Accordingly I am briefly summarising Wednesday night's discussion, which focussed on the question: what is worth living for? I introduced the topic by noting that this question was partly brought on by my own reflections on mortality, which inevitably raise questions about what the hell we're doing here. Surely there is a big difference in the way a person answers that depending on whether or not they believe in fundamental meaningless and disorder, or in some greater 'spiritual' context for life ('spiritual' being used here only in the broadest possible sense - simply the idea that that something of the person persists beyond death in some realm or other). On this fundamental question we are divided equally (in the absence of Stephen), with Pierz and Martin in the 'spiritual' camp, Greg and Paul in the 'meaningless' camp (let anyone who wishes to. dispute or refine this gross categorisation please do so in a follow-up post). I will attempt to summarise the debate in short-hand (naturally doing injustice to someone if not everyone):

Paul, defending the validity of life in a meaningless universe, argued that he can celebrate the miraculous unlikelihood of existing at all and can share joy and compassion with others receiving the same lucky break. In the event of an unlucky break, such as that of a leg on a birthday, he can respond philosophically.

Greg asserted that we have to enjoy the journey. That is more important than the goal.

Martin challenged whether enjoyment cuts the mustard as a raison d'etre given the philosophical counter example of someone living in extreme discomfort for the sake of a moral imperative (Nelson Mandela). Debate followed about whether this was some other kind of 'enjoyment' (e.g. of being a 'good' person or maintaining pride or some such), but there was some kind of agreement (at least no vocalised dissent) that a life may be lived for reasons having nothing to do with the satisfaction or otherwise of the self. If we believe in morality, then enjoyment cannot be the only reason for living. For this point Martin scored a beer from the utterly impartial judge, me.

Pierz's main point was ... fuck knows. I think I said that the reason is to engage as deeply with the questions as possible. By which I could also have said that it is to seek truth, beauty, love, knowledge and understanding, however partial. I could have said that the reason for living is the getting of wisdom. Perhaps we are all doing some kind of spiritual work, going out into the universe to gather wisdom as bees go out into the fields to gather nectar, returning in the end to some greater hive where our little individual drops of wisdom will be joined into some kind of celestial honey that will be fed to a giant egg-laying grub. And I mean a really big fucker that shits galaxies.

Whoa. I just went beyond minuting.

Did I get the gist though? Oh yes, and Greg finished by saying it didn't have to be enjoyable, but it did have to be interesting. Which is why he chose a career in database administration.

Good and Evil

What's the status of morality in these post-religious days? What is evil? Is it, like darkness or cold, an absence of something (love?), or is it a force in its own right? And how does the notion of "goodness" play out in our lives? Is being good for us these days merely a refraining from acts that we might feel guilt for? Or should it be more than that? How does it relate to happiness? What gives morality (even the word sounds outmoded, up-tight) its force in the modern spiritual vacuum - by which I mean in the absence of an essential Force for Good, a God. Not to presume that there is no God, but where does our sophisticated, quasi-Buddhist, non-fundamentalist, quantum-wave surfing God place us in relation to moral obligation? Do we still have to be good? Or is it all about "self-exploration" and "self development" and self, self, self... Is goodness a spiritual imperative? Or is it just a "healthy choice", like a low-fat TV dinner?

"Being good" has acquired overtones of weakness, inhibition, "boring" self-restraint. Yet surely to be good must have something to do with personal sacrifice. True goodness is closely bound up with courage. It is demanding. Yet everything in our culture tells us: "go for what you want", "you deserve it", "you can have it all", "look after number one" ... and so on. What can give us our moral spine now that we no longer fear hell or the wrath of God? Secular humanism? That pallid philosophy of well-meaningness that does not even acknowledge the animals?

All these questions and more will be resolved over Schöfferhoffer and olives tomorrow night...

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.