Evolution and accident

The program of evolutionary science is to ‘explain’ how the diversity of life on earth came to be.  Many, if not most evolutionary biologists take this to an extreme, and portray the main outlines of the story as inevitable.  (Darwin began this tradition, by emphasizing that all you need to create an evolving system was (1) reproduction with (2) variation and (3) differential reproductive success that results.)

But it may be that the whole story is far more contingent and random than we suppose.  Here is the story of a scientist who sought to dismantle and recreate the simple ecosystem in a garden pond.  Each time he repeated the experiment, the results came out differently.  The order in which he added different species to the mix had a determinative effect on the final result.

Let’s guard against the very human propensity to regard historical accident as though it were the inevitable result of universal laws.

Science Magazine

What to remember when waking

In that first hardly noticed moment to which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth; you are not an accident amidst other accidents;
You were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything that can be, what urgency calls you to your one love?

What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea? In the trees beyond the house? In the life you can imagine for yourself? In the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk?

~ David Whyte (from The House of Belonging)

Absence of mind

This declension, from the ethereality of the mind/soul as spirit to the reality of the mind/brain as a lump of meat, is dependent, conceptually and for its effects, on precisely the antique dualism these writers who claim to speak for science believe they reject and refute. If complex life is the marvel we all say it is, quite possibly unique to this planet, then meat is, so to speak, that marvel in its incarnate form. It was dualism that pitted the spirit against the flesh, investing spirit with all that is lofty at the expense of flesh, which is by contrast understood as coarse and base. It only perpetuates dualist thinking to treat the physical as if it were in any way sufficiently described in disparaging terms. If the mind is the activity of the brain, this means only that the brain is capable of such lofty and astonishing things that their expression has been given the names mind, and soul, and spirit. Complex life may well be the wonder of the universe, and if it is, its status is not diminished by the fact that we can indeed bisect it, that we kill it routinely.

...What grounds can there be for doubting that a sufficient biological account of the brain would yield the complex phenomenon we know and experience as the mind? It is only the pertinacity of the mind/body dichotomy that sustains the notion that a sufficient biological account of the brain would be reductionist in the negative sense. Such thinking is starkly at odds with our awareness of the utter brilliance of the physical body.

— Marilynne Robinson, writing in The Guardian

Schumann

Robert Schumann was a generous soul, tortured early in life by a piano teacher and father-in-law who was determined to separate him from his one true love and, later in life, by his own schizophrenia.  Schumann loved children and wrote simple, beautiful piano music for their instruction.  He leveraged his success to promote other young musicians, and wrote passionately of a new, populist romanticism embracing European culture.

Listen to the finale from Konzertstuck for four horns and orchestra
Listen to his love letter to Clara, Andante cantabile from his Piano Quartet
Ten-year-old Rachel plays the Arabesque for piano on Youtube

‘Licht senden in die Tiefen des menschlichen Herzens ist des Künstlers Beru.’
To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts — such is the duty of the artist.
— Robert Schumann is 200 years old today.

No time

Time is not an objective reality, but a construction of our consciousnesses.  Isaac Newton codified our intuitive idea of time as a universal, invariant flow within which all changes can be described.  Einstein did away with that, but still left a time that each observer experienced, and a relationship between time measured by different observers that was flexible within limits.  Quantum mechanics is more radical yet.  It seems natural in QM to regard all possibilities as simultaneously existing.  Julian Barbour has written a book eliciting the message that time is something we impose on our experience, not a property of the world.

John Archibald Wheeler was one of the deepest physical thinkers of the 20th century.  The Wheeler-DeWitt equation describes the entire universe, without reference to time. 

Youtube Video (from Dutch Public TV) on Barbour’s ideas
Barbour’s book on Google Books

Personally, I find that meditation on a view of events from outside of time, in which the entire history of past and future is laid out before me, is a reliable way to induce an experience of mystery. —JJM

Little Summer Poem Touching the Subject of Faith

Every summer I listen and look under the sun’s brass and even into the moonlight, but I can’t hear anything, I can’t see anything — not the pale roots digging down, nor the green stalks muscling up, nor the leaves deepening their damp pleats, nor the tassels making, nor the shucks, nor the cobs.

And still, every day, the leafy fields grow taller and thicker — green gowns lofting up in the night, showered with silk.

And so, every summer, I fail as a witness, seeing nothing — I am deaf too to the tick of the leaves, the tapping of downwardness from the banyan feet — all of it happening beyond any seeable proof, or hearable hum.

And, therefore, let the immeasurable come. Let the unknowable touch the buckle of my spine. Let the wind turn in the trees, and the mystery hidden in the dirt swing through the air. How could I look at anything in this world and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart? What should I fear? One morning in the leafy green ocean the honeycomb of the corn’s beautiful body is sure to be there.

— Mary Oliver

Explaining God as a brain disorder

It has been known for a long time that some patients with seizures originating in the temporal lobes have intense religious auras, intense experiences of  God visiting them.  Sometimes it’s a personal God, sometimes it’s a more diffuse feeling of being one with the cosmos.  Everything seems suffused with meaning.  The patient will say, “Finally, I see what it’s all about, Doctor.  I really understand God.”
— V. S. Ramachandran, from a YouTube video

To me, the most remarkable thing about this phenomenon is that, for people whose view of the world is purely material it seems to be absolute proof that God is an illusion, while for people whose view of the world is more mystical, it is an incidental fact, at most a particularly impractical path to the direct experience of religious truths.

Mark Saltzman wrote a gem of a novella on this subject, capturing both views very convincingly.  His fiction was inspired by an essay of Oliver Sacks, speculating on the Renaissance mystic poet-musician, Hildegard von Bingen.

...a physiolological event, banal, hateful, or meaningless to the vast majority of people, can become, in a privileged consciousness, the substrate of a supreme ecstatic inspiration.

Sacks goes on to quote Dostoyevsky:

“There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony...a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you.  If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear.  During those five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly.”

PUBLIC NOTICE

FOR PROMISES made by my spouse,
who’s tricked so many with his sweet
colors and fragrances and sounds —
dogs barking, guitars in the streets —
into believing that they still
might conquer loneliness and fright,
I cannot be responsible.
~ Mr. Day’s widow, Mrs. Night.

— Wislawa Szymborska
(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

For this and so many Daily Inspirations, I happily credit Joe Riley and his Panhala page.

Experiments that bear on theology

The biggest philosophical question is whether we are essentially material beings which have evolved a fascinating appendage to our biological calculation engines, that which we experience as consciousness? Or are we essentially spiritual beings who, in our eternal occupation with play, have cobbled together a physical form in order to have an entertaining sojourn on planet earth?

Many “enlightened” people in today’s world believe that the former is correct, and that physics provides the proof. But, as I have said often on these pages, deeper familiarity with physics – quantum physics in particular – casts a shadow over any such proof.

I think it may be impossible to construct a proof for either proposition, because consciousness is something that we know from direct experience, while neuroscience is studied through observations outside ourselves. But it may be possible to disprove one or the other. And I believe, ironic as it seems, that science may be within range of disproving the first – the materialist picture of consciousness.

There are intriguing and credible scientific claims for paranormal phenomena, persisting over at least 100 years. Telepathy, precognition, near-death experiences, and memories of past incarnations have all been claimed by credible people with scientific credentials. Scientific convention has been to dismiss all such claims categorically, to push discussions of the paranormal outside the framework of scientific discourse. Whether or not these claims are ultimately borne out, this has been a huge mistake, a scar on the face of science.

If it can be shown that any of these phenomena are real, the most natural implication is that there is an aspect of the mind separate from the brain.  A yet more radical possibility would be that the brain receives information in ways that are not mediated by known physics.

Peer-reviewed, controlled and statistically extensive scientific searches for telepathy would be the most interesting experiments that science could endeavor on a downsized budget. Many such experiments have been done already, and with positive, though inconsistent results. What would be new is for the scientific community to be actively engaged in debate, rather than contemptuous and dismissive. 

— JJM

Agenda for a New Economy

Consumed by the details and challenges of our daily engagements, we may easily lose sight of the big picture of the powerful social dynamic to which our work is contributing.

Step back from time to time; take a breath, look out beyond the immediate horizon to bring that big picture back into perspective. Reflect in awe and wonder at the power of the larger social dynamic to which your work contributes.

In my career in international development, I saw, time and again, that the most successful projects were not the largest or the most carefully, centrally planned; they were the ones that arose from the bottom up. Likewise, successful social movements are emergent, evolving, radically self-organizing, and involve the dedicated efforts of many people, each finding the role that best uses his or her gifts and passions. Their scope and their success may not, at first, be readily apparent. Social movements grow and evolve around framing ideas and mutually supportive relationships instead of through top-down direction...

The organism, not the machine, provides the appropriate metaphor...

— David Korten

On Hearing of a Death

We lack all knowledge of this parting. Death
does not deal with us. We have no reason
to show death admiration, love or hate;
his mask of feigned tragic lament gives us

a false impression. The world’s stage is still
filled with roles which we play. While we worry
that our performances may not please,
death also performs, although to no applause.

But as you left us, there broke upon this stage
a glimpse of reality, shown through the slight
opening through which you dissapeared: green,
evergreen, bathed in sunlight, actual woods.

We keep on playing, still anxious, our difficult roles
declaiming, accompanied by matching gestures
as required. But your presence so suddenly
removed from our midst and from our play, at times

overcomes us like a sense of that other
reality: yours, that we are so overwhelmed
and play our actual lives instead of the performance,
forgetting altogether the applause.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, tr Albert Ernest Flemming

Embody your vision

Recent strains of activism proceed on the realization that victory is not some absolute state far away but the achieving of it, not the moon landing but the flight.  A number of ideas and practices have emerged that realize this.  The term politics of prefiguration has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded.  That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed.  Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs—even if it’s a temporary and local place, this paradise of participating, this vale where souls get made.

— Rebecca Solnit, from Hope in the Dark

Be the change we want to see in the world.
—Gandhi

Musical joke

This is the music I’m working with this week.  It's the last movement of a Dohnanyi sextet.  Listen for the clarinet laughing at the beginning.  Later the theme keeps being interrupted, changing to a waltz for a few measures, switching abruptly into one key and another and another.  In the end, a theme arrives in the horn, sailing over the top, borrowed from the first movement of this piece.

The ending of the piece is a huge, overblown cadence on C#.  Then in the last bar, he says ‘just kidding’, and offers a final 5-1 in C.

— JJM