Integrity, one way or t’other

«Il faut vivre comme on pense, sinon tôt ou tard on finit par penser comme on a vécu.»

‘It is necessary to live according to one’s thoughts; if not, we end up thinking the way we have lived.’

— Paul Bourget, born this day in 1852

Irrational fears and their antidote

“If as a citizen you would like to form well-considered views on a culturally divisive risk issue — for example, global warming, or gun control — find a knowledgeable person who shares your general cultural outlook but who disagrees with you.  You are like to give this person’s arguments a sympathetic hearing, which will help offset the natural disposition we all have to dismiss as unreliable and biased the arguments of persons whose basic outlooks are different from our own.”

— Dan Kahan

Spore

The project of evolutionary biology is to understand the development of life based on the simple principles of random variation and natural selection.  Only in the last 12 years has some small segment of the scientific community focused on the question of evolvability - the realization that special rules are required in order for evolution to work at all.  One big requirement: the way in which genetic changes translate into changes in the organism’s metabolism (‘phenotype’) must have a special character.

Meanwhile, the community of Artificial Life scientists have been trying to create something like biological evolution inside a computer.  Their program is to create systems of evolutionary rules that lead to an open-ended progression of ever more complex structures, in ever more intricate relationships.  This project has proven to be more difficult than pioneers in the field 20 years ago had anticipated.  There are lots of computer-based evolutionary systems.  There are whole ecosystems realized as computer programs.  But the results all seem trivial and disappointing compared to the rich variety of unexpected phenomena that we find in even the simplest biological systems.

This weekend, Electronic Arts is releasing its own toy ecosystem, a computer-based evolution program for popular entertainment.  Unconstrained by the rigors of science, the programers of this game didn’t mind putting the rabbit in the hat, to make sure evolution has a fighting chance.  NYTimes Entertainment Review  and   Another, more scientific.

Rachmaninoff’s Psychiatrist

I’m listening to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which he dedicated to Dr. Dahl, the psychiatrist who guided him through the straits of fever, not long after Sergei had heard his own first symphony played.  Horrified by its many defects which seemed a sewage of noise, he had fled the hall, ashamed, a quagmire of self-doubt.

We cannot know all the sounds Dahl and he exchanged, but rubbing one word against another, Dahl gradually restored Sergei’s confidence. History tells that Dahl used affirmations and auto-suggestion: “You will compose again.” “You will write a piano concerto.” You will write with great facility.” Repeated until the words saturated his gift from head to fingers.

In truth, nothing can kill a gift, but it may become anemic from great shock or stress – a sprain of the emotions will do, or a traffic accident of the heart, or a failure dire as a clanging bell.

For two years, Dahl worked on Sergei’s shattered will. At last he collected up his senses in a burst of blood fury and composed his triumphant 2nd Piano Concerto, full of tenderness and yearning, beguiling melodies, raging passion, and long sensuous preludes to explosive climaxes, frenzy followed by strains of mysticism and trance.

Loaded with starry melodies, it was a map of his sensi ility, and a wilderness rarely known – the intense life of an artist seen in miniature, with rapture expressed as all-embracing sound.

Will you tell me if you know, how Dahl might have received such a gift?  I cannot imagine it.   With hugs and shared enthusiasm?  With an austere thank you?  In his private moments, did he weep at the privilege allowed him? For a time he held the exposed heart of a great artist, cupped his hands around it like a flame, blew gently, patiently, until it flared again.

For that, he earned the blessings of history, and soothed millions of hungry souls he would never meet. Listening to Rachmaninoff’s concerto today, intoxicated by its fever, I want to kiss the hands of Dahl, but he is beyond my touch or game.  Allow me to thank you in his name.

— Diane Ackerman

(In case you haven’t heard it lately, you can listen to this concerto at my favorite free classical music site, where 5+ sumptuous versions are available.  I recommend the last one, by Yuri Rozum.)

Falling off the wagon of empiricism

“Beware of the idols of the mind, the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall. They are the real distorting prisms of human nature. Among them, idols of the tribe assume more order than exists in chaotic nature.”
– Francis Bacon

“A few observation and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth.”
– Alexis Carrel

Bacon hedged his empiricism with an absolute faith in Biblical revelation.  Carrel grew cell cultures in a test-tube continuously for 34 years, fudging the data to deceive himself and the scientific world into believing that individual cells don’t suffer aging.

If your children think they’re smarter than you are, maybe it’s because...

Average IQ scores are rising at about 3 points per decade.  People 100 years ago scored 30 points lower compared to people taking the same tests today, and the progress continues.

‘Attempted explanations have included improved nutrition, a trend towards smaller families, better education, greater environmental complexity, and heterosis. Another proposition is greater familiarity with multiple-choice questions and experience with brain-teaser IQ problems.’  [Wikipedia article: the Flynn Effect]

(Heterosis is another name for ‘hybrid vigor’, and refers to the idea that the world’s populations are mixing and cross-breeding, resulting in new combinations of genes which usually produce advantages over inbred populations.)

How little we really know

“I am a skeptic. I accept only what I am forced to accept by reasonably reliable evidence and keep that acceptance tentative, pending the arrival of further evidence. That doesn’t make us popular.
...
“Where is the world in which people don’t prefer a comfortable, warm and well-worn belief, however illogical, to the chilly winds of uncertainty.”

— Golan Trevize, brought to life by Isaac Asimov in Foundation

Engagement

“You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you.  All men have claims on man, and to the man with special talents, this is a very special claim.  It is required that a man take part in the actions and clashes of his time that the peril of being judged not to have lived at all.”

– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr

Knock on a million doors

The reason early humans first began organizing into groups was to raid neighbor groups’ food stores, and to resist such raids from other groups.  Ever since that time, leaders have been promoting warfare for their own aggrandizement, and it has fallen to the people to resist the call to war.

In more recent history, leaders have also used war as an excuse to quell political dissent, to justify extraordinary central powers, and to cloak their various misdeeds in secrecy.

Peace has been a multi-millennium effort of resistance by ordinary citizens.  We are winning.  The world is far less violent and more democratic than it was just 20 years ago, and immeasurable more peaceful than it was during the 19th and 20th centuries.  Read the evidence.

This time, we see through the government’s transparent propaganda campaign to scare us into war.  Today, neighbors are sharing their knowledge with other neighbors, consolidating our stories and our resolve.  We are knocking on a million doors, discussing the false threats that have been used to justify war, and organizing from the ground up to assert our democratic right to peace.

Call to revolution

“We have today the technical and material resources to meet man’s animal needs. We have not developed the cultural and moral resources or the democratic forms of social organization that make possible the humane and rational use of our material wealth and power. Conceivably, the classical liberal ideals as expressed and developed in their libertarian-socialist form are achievable. But if so, only by a popular revolutionary movement, rooted in wide strata of the population and committed to the elimination of repressive and authoritarian institutions, state and private. To create such a movement is a challenge we face and must meet if there is to be an escape from contemporary barbarism.”

— Noam Chomsky

From ‘deeply connected’ to ‘structurally inseparable’

Feeling excluded and isolated is my chronic emotional issue. To uproot this pattern, I have used a mantra, incorporated into my meditation over many years:

“I am whole, and full in myself, and deeply connected to others.”

It has served me long and consistently, but most especially at times when I’ve played the role of the spurned lover.

It occurs to me this morning that as a statement of the human condition, this mantra is a big step up from the posture of lonely victim to which I am disposed; and yet it goes only part of the way from there toward a radical truth.

Today I am searching for images that convey essential inseparability. The model with which I am working is individual minds as different modes of vibration on a violin string. The truth is that there is no meaning to ‘me’ apart from ‘you’. Our separateness exists in the realm of mathematical abstraction, in which one may speak of fundamentals and overtones, of nodes and partials; but the larger truth is that there is but one string.

Tomorrow I will have a new mantra.

— Josh Mitteldorf

Exuberance

Listen to Scherzo from the Brahms Horn Trio,
performed by Daniel Phillips, Richard Goode and William Purvis

A cleric who did not bow to authority

“May slavery be banished forever together with the distinction between castes, all remaining equal, so Americans may only be distinguished by vice or virtue... In the new laws, may torture be ended once and forever.”

“Que la esclavitud se proscriba para siempre y lo mismo la distinción de castas, quedando todos iguales, y sólo distinguirá a un americano de otro el vicio y la virtud…Que en la nueva legislación no se admita la tortura.”

— Jose Maria Morelos y Pavón, born this day in 1765, was a Mexican Roman Catholic priest and revolutionary rebel leader who led the Mexican War of Independence movement, assuming its leadership after the execution of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in 1811.