Monkey See…

May 16, 2008

  In the May 12, 2008 issue of the New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell (author of bestsellers The Tipping Point and Blink) has an interesting article about the simultaneous spontaneous generation of scientific insights.  We associate the invention of the telephone with Alexander Graham Bell and evolution with Darwin.  But an Elisha Gray filed a patent for his version of the telephone on the same day as Graham.  The two had never met.  Alfred Russel Wallace developed a theory of evolution without any knowledge of Darwin or the Beagle.  Turns out that the “phenomenon of simultaneous discovery [is] extremely common.”  The other examples he goes on to cite amaze.

  The essay reminded me of French Jesuit Philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and the monkeys.  In the 1950s scientists on the island of Koshima gave food treats to its simian inhabitants.  Treats were much appreciated, but problematic to eat because dirt would stick to them.   After a while, one monkey figured out how to rinse and clean the potato bits in water and others soon learned by observation.  Incredible thing was that after a critical mass figured out the trick, all of a sudden they all did.  All.  Even those on nearby islands.

    Teilhard believed that all things were on a path of increasing complexity and convergence. First monkeys get on the same wavelength and then cogito ergo sum.  “For the observers of the Future, the greatest event will be the sudden appearance of a collective humane conscience and a human work to make.”

  Although he got sideways with the church, Teilhard believed that the nature of our universe was characterized by orthogenesis.  That evolution and its direction are purposeful.  “Evolution is an ascent toward consciousness…evolution is nothing but matter become conscious of itself.”

  Teilhard wove together all aspects of his vast body of knowledge to describe an ever increasing interconnected universe.  “The powers that we have released, could not possibly be absorbed by the narrow system of individual or national units which the architects of human Earth have hitherto used.  The age of nations has passed.  Now unless we wish to perish we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth”.

  “… these perspectives will appear absurd to those who don’t see that life is, from its origins, groping, adventurous, and dangerous.  But these perspectives will grow, like an irresistible idea on the horizon of new generations.” 

                                 ***********

    Interesting to note that Teilhard was, at least in part, launched on his quest for understanding by the horrors of WWI: “…the war was a meeting…with the Absolute.”  (Remember the Razor’s Edge?)

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Please Don’t Let My Wife See This

May 9, 2008

  Dandelions are beautiful.  If it was only with effort that they could be seen, like edelweiss in high alpine meadows, there’d be songs about them and they’d be the national flower of someplace.

  The yellow tuft is a glorious early bit of spring and offers an earnest greeting to those receptive to it.  What kind of a black heart does not smile at the sight after a long and cold winter?

  Dense green homogeneity as the suburban standard is but the latest installment of our tribe’s misguided quest for control.  The “Enlightenment” as manifest in the gardens of Versailles has now devolved into the verdant compulsion of Middle America.

  With a lot of work and fertilizer,   bluegrass, fescue, and rye can be made to sit still and stay from May through September.  Nice carpet of green in the foreground for dogs and kids to stay off of.

  Dandelions show up on their own early and often.  They need no care and establish themselves quite tenaciously. Their taproot makes one wonder how the description “grass roots” came not to mean weak or ephemeral. The obvious part of their life cycle is compressed and its end even more bothersome to the fastidious. 

  But have you ever (since you were a kid?) closely examined one of those white spheres (“clocks”) of a mature flower head?  Then blown on one?  It’s an incredible effusion of joy.  A transmigration.  It fills me with the same sort of wonder as a gaze into the sea or a star lit night.

  Then look closely at one of the tiny fruits suspended from its parachute.  They float along swaying gently to-and-fro until their path is blocked, the fruit separates from its chute, and the whole thing begins again.  Sometimes if a dispersal is blocked before it has a chance to travel far and spread out, the parachutes are shook free of their loads and coalesce into something just this side of the emperor’s new clothes.

  Product of evolution, but a miracle all the same.

  The evolution of the name parallels the evolution of its place in our consciousness.  Early on in French it was called “dent de lion” or tooth of a lion for the shape of its leaves – which can be used in a salad or made into soup.  In modern French it is a “pissenlit” meaning, uh, urinate in bed.  This is due to the diuretic nature of the aforementioned courses of a meal. 

  That’s what we get for leaving the garden. 

  Dang it Eve – you mow.

Posted in consciousness/psychology, Evolution, Family, Lawncare | 1 Comment »

Better Take Off Your Shoes And Socks

May 2, 2008

  It has long been posited that the fabric of our universe can elegantly be described mathematically.  I’ve always sort of bought this intellectually, but without a gut level embrace because of all the, well, numbers.  All of those sliding blackboards in superposition – covered with chalk numbers, parentheses, and strange symbols – seem hopelessly unintelligible.

  Fortunately (for my daydreaming), recent research in neuroscience has provided another point of entry.  In the March 3, 2008 issue of the New Yorker, Jim Holt wrote about “Numbers Guy” Stanislas Dehaene. 

  “Over the decades, evidence concerning cognitive deficits in brain damaged patients has accumulated, and researchers have concluded that we have a sense of number that is independent of language, memory, and reasoning in general… In Dehaene’s view, we are all born with an evolutionarily ancient mathematical instinct… [and so are salamanders, pigeons, raccoons, dolphins, parrots, and monkeys] The number area lies deep within a fold in the parietal lobe called the intraparietal sulcus.”*

  “Our number sense endows us with a crude feel for addition … But multiplication is another matter.  It is an ‘unnatural practice’… Give a calculator to a five-year-old, and you will teach him how to make friends with numbers instead of despising them…”  Tell me if this last bit doesn’t ring true.

  OK, if time-space is the macro and one’s brain micro what are examples in between? Or is there a disconnect like between quantum physics and the theory of relativity? One occurred to me while reading about a concept known as the Golden Section.  It is the proportion resulting from the division of a straight line into two parts so that the ratio of the whole to the larger is the same as that of the larger to the smaller: 1: (√5+1)2. 

  Gwyn Headley writes: “The inexplicably satisfying proportions of the Golden Section have been appreciated since before Euclid”.   Google the term and you will find it neatly describing stuff ranging from the Pyramids at Giza to the Parthenon to Leonardo’s Annunciation in the Uffizi, to an endless array of elements of modern design.

  Furthermore, the closely related Fibonacci sequence can be used to describe such disparate things as the elegant spiral of the shell of the Nautilus to a smooth golf swing.

  The more this connectedness sinks in, the more I’m nearly overtaken by, well, The Marvelous.

  Holy dogs, if I had been on this scent earlier I would have made Mr. Gates wish he’d finished Harvard.  But shoot, now I know my attention will soon drift. 

*  Interesting thing here is that Holt goes on to say that “Brain imaging, for all the sophistication of its technology, yields a fairly crude picture of what’s going on inside the skull, and the same spot in the brain might light up for two tasks even though different neurons are involved. Quoting Dehaene: Some people believe that psychology is just being replaced by brain imaging, but I don’t think that’s the case at all”. 

  There are physicists and other thinkers who use this fact to hold that while consciousness may be present in a brain, it is not a product of it.  See, I’m getting off track.  More later.

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Everybody’s Gonna Go Sometime

April 19, 2008

At that last moment

Her eyes were blue as the sky

As deep as the sea

Posted in Family, Poetry | 2 Comments »

Nirvana

April 10, 2008

  Ok, Julie Andrews is out with a new autobiography.  Sounds like her whole life was not just one big supercalifragilisticum.  Imagine that.  But, still, I’ll wager that the image of her resting in most minds is the one of her wonderful pirouette in that alpine meadow above Salzburg.  Only the blackhearts among us are not moved by the recollection. 

  News here is that there is scientific rationale behind her exuberance.  Know how your brain is but a bit more than a sodium ion pump?  (Oh, maybe a bit more…) 

  Well, “increasing negative ionization of the air (the kind of ‘charged’ air found on mountaintops, near waterfalls, or at the sea) produces changes in brain growth… The ions can also change the chemical composition of the neurotransmitters, and can elevate or suppress mood, something almost everyone knows (except couch potatoes) who has noted the exhilaration of the mountains, or the depression with a Santa Ana wind.”  – Robert Ornstein 

  Shunryu Suzuki takes the longer view:  “It takes time, you know, a long time, for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall.  And it seems to me that our human life may be like this.  We have many difficult experiences in our life.  But at the same time… the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river.  When you do not realize that you are one with the river, one with the universe, you have fear.  When you realize this fact…You will find the true meaning of life, and even though you have difficulty falling upright from the top of the waterfall to the bottom of the mountain, you will enjoy your life.”

 Ya.

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Spiritual Fecundity in Chicago

April 4, 2008

  Be interesting to know what were like the childhoods of architect Tadao Ando and ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu.  The installation of a selection from the oeuvre of the latter in a gallery designed by the former together create an experience far beyond corporeal beauty. 

  If there can be a soul of a building, one such numinous sanctuary is Ando’s space in Chicago’s Art Institute. Commissioned in 1989 to exhibit from the Institute’s Japanese screens, the small room is unforgettable.

  Upon entering, through the center of the short end of the dimly lit rectangular room, one looks through four rows of one foot square oak columns.  The vitrine is arranged along the long wall on the right and continues across the back wall straight ahead.  It is illuminated.  The view through the oak and cast shadows is to be as if, upon the porch of a traditional Japanese house, one looks inside.

  Ando says: “Not everything can be accounted for reasonably…there are things in society that cannot be explained just in functional terms. I have provided functionless columns and walls…I feel this irrational quality is important. The modernism of the past became insipid because it rejected such irrationalism”.

  Takaezu’s pots draw from the range of her career and are interspersed with several from important mentors and contemporaries.  Well represented in the twenty or so are examples of her vertical closed vessels.  She says of these: “The most important part of a piece is the dark, black air space that you can’t see.  Just as what’s inside each person is also the key to humanity”.

  Some of her pieces are indeed human scale and elsewhere stand outside in fields or gardens.  Some, holding small ceramic balls, sound when gently shaken.  Visitors here might be disappointed at their inability to move around and touch her work.

  Like a compassionate abbess, Takaezu must be fine with it.  “When I was a small girl in Hawaii, I was fascinated by my shadow because it was taller than I.”  Here her pots are stroked by even taller shadows.  Her fertile dark spaces are clearly manifest behind the glass, but reserved.

  She knows that if, on the opposite benches perhaps, you linger long enough with an open heart, with her invitation, and with Ando’s generosity, you just might get a glimpse inside.

  An audience with the screens too is very fine, but different – for the historicity.  Come back in a few months and see them if you have yet not.  But don’t miss this.     

  At the Art Institute of Chicago through June 8, 2008.

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Spare The Rod!

March 28, 2008

    Researchers once took newborn monkeys from their mothers and raised them to maturity – away from other members of their species.  These distant cousins of ours went stark, raving, mad.  Upon rejoining their troop, they would fight, bite, and couldn’t even copulate normally. 

  Only humans could dream up this sort of experiment and what’s worse – visit equal cruelty upon their own children.  Child psychologist Alice Miller has written much about early injury and its ramifications and repercussions.    

  Miller holds that neglect and abuse were at the core of Hitler’s psyche. (He among countless other monsters large and small) Crucially though, she also says that a child needs only to connect solidly with one healthy adult to avoid horror.  Might not make it to Disneyland, but neither to the bunker at Berchtesgaden.

  Perhaps the evolution of consciousness has thus far been skewed or uneven.  The brain is one high powered organ out of the control of most owners. Lots of spare capacity. Lots of shooting stars bound to constellate.  Painful episodes in early childhood might not easily be brought to later awareness, but will, at a minimum, inflect all succeeding years.

  Likewise compassion.  In The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness, Edward Hallowell MD writes: “There’s a lot you can do to promote happiness, and there’s a lot you can do to retard it as well…  Unconditional love is the best inoculation you will ever get, and what does it inoculate against – despair”.

  Either way, remember, it gets hardwired in courtesy of neuronal selection.  And just like any other wire bundle, it is so much sweeter to get it right on the first go.

  Pop Quiz: What does “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child” mean to you?

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Raise Your Hand If You Like To be Told That You’re Stupid

March 21, 2008

   A study published in 1993 questioned why some gifted children nurture their talent all through their teenage years while many let it whither.  The insights hold meaning for all.   Researchers had teachers in a highly regarded suburban high school identify freshman students with high degrees of natural talent in one or more of the following areas: math, science, music, athletics, and art. 

   Those selected who then agreed to participate were followed throughout their high school career by means of the “beeper method”.  They’d carry a beeper and whenever it was activated by a researcher would complete a questionnaire asking about time, place, activity, mood, feelings, environment, level of satisfaction, etc.  After graduation, their records of achievement were evaluated and conclusions drawn.

   Several factors were found to be associated with the successful development of talent. First, children must simply be recognized as talented.  Talented kids can concentrate, but also are open to new experiences.  They are less inclined to just socialize than pursue some sort of meaningful activity; they spent more time alone.  They are sexually conservative. 

  Their families provide both support and challenge.  They like best teachers who were “supportive and modeled enjoyment”.  They found both expressive and instrumental rewards in their activities; that is they enjoyed creative opportunities while tracking future goals.  Talent will be developed if it provides “optimal experiences – flow” ie if it occasions the sorts of experiences in which one loses track of time.

  Finally, the researchers emphasized their observation that “psychological complexity (is) the organizing principle”.  The opposing forces at work within and among the factors listed above create the cohering whole.

  Read the book. Even though written fifteen years ago, it’s still enlightening.  Brains haven’t changed.  Talented Teenagers, Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, Whalen, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Postscript: To the surprise of the researchers, the “Talented Teens” did spend a modest amount of time in front of the tube.  Decompression, relaxation perhaps.  Clearly, they  used it instead of it using them – a practice which alone would yield quite a bit more than a head start.

PPS.  Read other books by Mr. Csikszentmihalyi.  His studies of optimal experiences are absolutely fascinating.

Posted in Cosmology, Family | 1 Comment »

The Marvelous

March 13, 2008

   But, shoot, look where Galileo got us: “There is a straight line from the physics of Bacon and Galileo to the atom bomb” (German physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizacker).  Funny thing about science – just like religion – it’s yielded some really bad shit.

  Several interesting books (the exhortatory End of Religion by Sam Hamill and God Is Not Great, How Religion Spoils Everything by Christopher Hitchens) have been published recently about the terrors of religion.  Gotta remember that there is also the continuing tragic paradox of the Enlightenment.  Without the miracles of modern technology, the nuts and crackpots and despots about would be little more than babbling idiots – you know, sans WMD.

  Several years ago author Michael Frayn wrote a play called Copenhagen. It centered on his fictional account of the wartime discussions between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr which may or may not have helped stop a Nazi bomb.  The morality of any atomic research in all of its historical permutations is the larger background issue.

  During a discussion of the play on NPR, a physicist savored the “sweet technological problems” that were and are attendant to nuclear weapon research. He even giggled in so doing.  Later, on the same program, Werner von Braun was quoted: “we were only charged with getting the rockets up in the air…”  

  Here though, is what went through Robert Oppenheimer’s mind while watching the first mushroom cloud at Los Alamos:

       I am become death, the shatterer of worlds;
      Waiting that hour that ripens to their doom. – Bhagavad-Gita     

  Nothing like a slap in the face, eh?

  Frayn ends his play talking about “that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things”. Can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but can Pascal* leave his room without sowing seeds of destruction?

  Perhaps best after first having found a way to be comfortable there.

  Here’s the koan, courtesy of Seamus Heaney:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air. 
                                                                                       
The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
                                                                                
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it.  But in vain.
“This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,”
                                                                                               
The abbot said, “unless we help him.” So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvelous as he had known it.

*”All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone”  Blaise Pascal 1623-1662

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Posted in Poetry, Religion, Science | 2 Comments »

Ockham’s Razor Is Also Sharp

March 4, 2008

 There is a definite downside to adventure.  Several in fact.  And by adventure remember, I’m not talking about sitting against a tree by the river, eyes shut, bobber in the water, string tied to your toe, waiting for a tug.     

  I am talking about the sort of endeavor for which the south end of the learning curve yields lacerations, contusions, and confusion.  With progress, scrapes and dunkings etc get fewer and farther between and thought processes more subtle.  With time and prowess come economy of movement and cessation of thought.  And ever more dangerous situation.

  The obvious potential drawbacks are such things as death and/or dismemberment.  Gravity sucks as is said.  So does hitting a fixed object at a high rate of speed, or freezing to death, or dying of thirst, or hunger, or lack of oxygen.       

  Failing those, problems arise with a first hiatus.  Sooner or later, depending upon the nature of the interruption, experiential desire will return.  In the words of British alpinist Mo Antoine, “The rat will be fed”.  Yup, the rat can be drugged or boozed or beaten into submission, but not forever.  The sooner one makes an offering, the more the attraction of traps and poison is attenuated.       

  The most troubling problems though come with offspring.  Folks whose ideas of fun raise the hair on the necks of friends and neighbors, shouldn’t be surprised when their kids call repeatedly from the ER, or after an attack by a puma in Bolivia, or from the local pokey after a night on the town. If both parents have contributed high pain thresholds, well, hold on tight.       

  Dang.  What’s wrong with staying home?  Couch potatoes don’t get stitches.  Everything can now be undertaken virtually.  Aristotle, for one, found field work unnecessary.  He figured that everything could be worked out in one’s head.       

  No truth in virtual.  Ask Galileo.  Or climber Barry Blanchard who wrote of setting off on an adventure:  “I felt as though I was pushing at the door of a dangerous radiant, cathedral”.  That’s where will be found the metaphysics of light.       

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Posted in climbing, consciousness/psychology, Family | 2 Comments »

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