Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

The BioArt of Eduardo Kac (cont)

Rich — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:03:24 -0800

Clairvoyance

Odyssey

"Specimen of Secrecy about Marvelous Discoveries" is a series of works comprised of what Kac calls "biotopes", that is, living pieces that change during the exhibition in response to internal metabolism and environmental conditions. Each of Kac’s biotopes is literally a self-sustaining ecology comprised of thousands of very small living beings in a medium of earth, water, and other materials. The artist orchestrates the metabolism of these organisms in order to produce his constantly-evolving living works.

Kac's biotopes expand on ecological and evolutionary issues previously explored by the artist (for example, in his transgenic work "The Eighth Day"). At the same time, the biotopes further develop dialogical principles implemented and theorized by Kac for approximately two decades.

The biotopes are a discrete ecology because within their world the microorganisms interact with and support each other (that is, the activities of one organism enable another to grow, and vice-versa). However, they are not entirely secluded from the outside world : the aerobic organisms within the biotope absorb oxygen from outside (while the anaerobic ones comfortably migrate to regions where air cannot reach). A complex set of relationships emerge as the work unfolds, bringing together the internal dialogical interactions among the microorganisms in the biotope and the interaction of the biotope as a discrete unit with the external world. The biotope is affected by several factors, including the very presence of viewers, which can increase the temperature in the room (warm bodies) and release other microorganisms in the air (breathing, sneezing).

The biotope is what Kac calls a "nomad ecology", that is, an ecological system that interacts with its surroundings as it travels around the world. Every time a biotope migrates from one location to another, the very act of transporting it causes an unpredictable redistribution of the microorganisms inside it (due to the constant physical agitation inherent in the course of a trip). Once in place, the biotope self-regulates with internal migrations, metabolic exchanges, and material settling.....

The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski

koantum — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:54:11 -0800

The keyword of the earth’s riddle is the gradual evolution of a hidden illimitable consciousness and power out of the seemingly inert yet furiously driven force of insensible Nature. Earth-life is one self-chosen habitation of a great Divinity and his aeonic will is to change it from a blind prison into his splendid mansion and high heaven-reaching temple. (Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human, p. 161)
The scientific theory is concerned only with the outward and visible machinery and process, with the detail of Nature’s execution, with the physical development of things in Matter and the law of development of Life and Mind in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence. (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 868)
There can be hardly any doubt that the scientific account of evolution has to be considerably changed or dropped altogether. Dr. Berlinski (not a Christian, by the way) explains why.

Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman (preface)

Rich — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:00:37 -0700

Second of two articles on a new science whose principles are that of emergence rather than reduction. The idea of reinventing the sacred is an interesting one since emergence rekindles a wonder in a Mystery that is irreducible. Interesting also is the fact that even as Jaron Lanier, Staurt Kaufmann, and others concerned with the science of complexity steadfastly avoid mapping a specific metaphysical narrative on to their descriptions of reality, in the end they wind up with a view which shares much with Advaita or Buddhist constructions of the world.

Although the new science of emergence attempts to speak to human agency and the role of the observer, the phenomenological and social spheres of experience seem a bit lacking in its calculations for achieving what could be called an integral view, but the attempt is valuable nontheless rc...

Reductionism has led to very powerful science. One has only to think of Einstein’s gen- eral relativity and the current standard model in quantum physics, the twin pillars of twentieth century physics. Molecular biology is a product of reductionism, as is the Human Genome Project.

But Laplace’s particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no values, no doings. The reductionist worldview led the existentialists in the mid- twentieth century to try to find value in an absurd, meaningless universe, in our hu- man choices. But to the reductionist, the existentialists’ arguments are as void as the spacetime in which their particles move. Our human choices, made by ourselves as human agents, are still, when the full science shall have been done, mere happenings, ultimately to be explained by physics.

In this book I will demonstrate the inadequacy of reductionism. Even major physicists now doubt its full legitimacy. I shall show that biology and its evolution cannot be re- duced to physics alone but stand in their own right. Life, and with it agency, came na- turally to exist in the universe. With agency came values, meaning, and doing, all of which are as real in the universe as particles in motion. “Real” here has a particular meaning: while life, agency, value, and doing presumably have physical explanations in any specific organism, the evolutionary emergence of these cannot be derived from or reduced to physics alone. Thus, life, agency, value, and doing are real in the universe. This stance is called emergence. Weinberg notwithstanding, there are explanatory ar- rows in the universe that do not point downward. A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion. More, all this came to exist without our need to call upon a Creator God.....

'Reflections on Machine Consciousness,' by William Irwin Thompson

ronjon — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:57:32 -0700
I've taken the liberty of typing in all of Chapter 4 of my copy of this important book, because it powerfully addresses one of the main themes of SCIY, the manifold relationships between science, culture, and consciousness. (ron)

"It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the robotics scientist. ...

"Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and Hans Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human era, and that 'nanobots' are about to be embedded in our bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new silicon noosphere of networked computers. Like ancient mitochondria or chloroplasts surrounded by the gigantic eukaryotic cells, we are about to be engulfed in the next evolutionary stage. So the mechanists see noetic technologies surrounding human culture and consciousness and compressing it into an endosymbiont in a larger and swifter and more elegant evolutionary vehicle. ...

"Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe... For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a 'Celestial Intelligence' — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation. Kurzweil's vision of the world in 2030 reminds me of Borges's 'Library of Babel'. 'I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, useless, incorruptible, secret'. [2] And here we need to be sensitive to the full force of Borges's use of the word 'Babel'. ... "

Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers N. Katherine Hayles

Rich — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:40:17 -0700

I understand "human" and "posthuman" to be historically specific constructions that emerge from different configurations of embodiment, technology, and culture. A convenient point of reference for the human is the picture constructed by nineteenth-century U.S. and British anthropologists of "man" as a tool-user.(15) Using tools may shape the body (some anthropologists made this argument), but the tool nevertheless is envisioned as an object, apart from the body, that can be picked up and put down at will. When the claim could not be sustained that man's unique nature was defined by tool use (because other animals were shown also to use tools), the focus shifted during the early twentieth century to man the tool-maker. Typical is Kenneth P. Oakley's 1949 Man the Tool-Maker, a magisterial work with the authority of the British Museum behind it.(16) Oakley, in charge of the Anthropological Section of the museum's Natural History division, wrote in his introduction, "Employment of tools appears to be [man's] chief biological characteristic, for considered functionally they are detachable extensions of the forelimb" [p. 1]. The kind of tool he envisioned was mechanical rather than informational; it goes with the hand, not on the head. Significantly, he imagined the tool to be at once "detachable" and an "extension," separate from yet partaking of the hand. If the placement and kind of tool marks his affinity with the epoch of the human, its construction as a prosthesis points forward to the posthuman. Similar ambiguities informed the Macy Conference discussions taking place during the same period (1946-53), as participants wavered between a vision of man as a homeostatic self-regulating mechanism whose boundaries were clearly delineated from the environment,(17) and a more threatening, reflexive vision of a man spliced into an informational circuit that could change him in unpredictable ways. By the 1960s, the consensus within cybernetics had shifted dramatically toward reflexivity. By the 1980s, the inertial pull of homeostasis as a constitutive concept had largely given way to theories of self-organization that implied radical changes were possible within certain kinds of complex systems.(18) Through these discussions, the "posthuman" future of "humanity" began increasingly to be evoked. Examples range from Hans Moravec's invocation of a "postbiological" future in which human consciousness is downloaded into a computer, to the more sedate (and in part already realized) prospect of a symbiotic union between human and intelligent machine that Howard Rheingold calls "intelligence augmentation."(19) Although these visions differ in the degree and kind of interfaces they imagine, they concur that the posthuman implies a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which it is enmeshed. Accompanying this change, I have argued, is a corresponding shift in how signification is understood and corporeally experienced. In contrast to Lacanian psycholinguistics, derived from the generative coupling of linguistics and sexuality, flickering signification is the progeny of the fascinating and troubling coupling of language and machine.

Beyond Reductionism: by Jaron Lanier (Edge)

Rich — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 09:39:09 -0700
First of two articles on a new science whose principles are that of emergence rather than reduction. The idea of reinventing the sacred is an interesting one since emergence rekindles a wonder in an irreducible Mystery. Interesting also is the fact that even as Lanier, Kaufmann, and other complexity scientist steadfastly avoid mapping a specific metaphysical narrative on to their descriptions of reality, in the end wind up with a view which shares much with Advaita or Buddhist constructions of the world. However, although the new science of emergence attempts to speak to human agency and observation, the phenomenological and social spheres of experience seem lacking in their calculations for achieving what could be called an integral view rc...

I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet — it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System....

Future Bodies: Evolution & Progress

Rich — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:44:42 -0700

(courtesy Google Images)

This paper seeks a long overdue critical exploration of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision and how it might inform contemporary discourse on globalization and those regimes of techno-science whose productions propel its advance. That such a critical inquiry is overdue is regrettable because we live at a time in which we are undergoing what is perhaps our most rapid period of change in human history. We live in an era in which the dislocation of our physical, life and mental worlds seems to result from the pull of three strange attractors accelerating at different speeds.

Gazing out from the edge of digital culture in North America to do a critically inquiry into the future is problematic because our perspectives are already conjoined to the gaze of a culture entrained in exponential change. But what would constitute a future view? An epistemology of the Other? A discourse on the never quite? The future is that distant coordinate which is only know through its proximity to our present. So what does the present teach?

In America we are travelling so rapidly that from here we do not hear the voices of indentured knowledge workers standing in lines of up to mile, amidst the smoke and decay of south India, to compete with the multitudes of Heidegger's “standing reserve” for their conditions of economic bondages; of eight to twelve partitioned hours a day spent facilitating the global flow of virtual capital. Although the gaze from here may sense the desiring nature of the machine it lacks an epistemology for coping with its assemblages and a methodology for resisting its discipline.....

Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto (Carolyn Keen)

Rich — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:05:21 -0700

(image courtesy www.idf.net)

Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto is one of the most important text of cyber-cultural studies as well as feminist studies of the past twenty years. Her conclusion that she draws, "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess" is grounded in the following analysis of the cyborg given here by Carolyn Keen (rc):

"Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction" (150) "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family" (151).

The cyborg does not aspire to "organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (150). The cyborg "is not afraid of joint kinship with animals and machines...of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints" (154). The cyborg is the "illegitimate child" of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.

The cyborg thus evades traditional humanist concepts of women as childbearer and raiser, of individuality and individual wholeness, the heterosexual marriage-nuclear family, transcendentalism and Biblical narrative, the great chain of being (god/man/animal/etc.), fear of death, fear of automatism, insistence upon consistency and completeness. It evades the Freudian family drama, the Lacanian m/other, and "natural" affiliation and unity. It attempts to complicate binary oppositions, which have been "systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals" (177).

Haraway likens "cyborg" to the political identity of "women of color," which "marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship" (156). "Cyborg" though, is grounded in "political-scientific" analysis. This analysis takes up most of the "manifesto." (Keen) ...

Edward Lorenz: Father of Chaos Theory Dies (MIT Press)

Rich — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:32:03 -0700

A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere--or a model of the atmosphere--could trigger vast and often unsuspected results.

These observations ultimately led him to formulate what became known as the butterfly effect--a term that grew out of an academic paper he presented in 1972 entitled: "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

The Game of Life (review) : New Scientist

Rich — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:00:47 -0700
If complexity metaphors can be problematic when applied to social phenomena because they often reduce historic inequalities of socio-economic status to mere patterns of self-organization, metaphors of increasing complexity can be misused when combined with socially constructed ideas of progress. Stephen Jay Gould at least thought as much and this review of The Game of Life outlines some of the problems with equating increasing complexity with directional progress rc ...

4) The Anthropic Principle: Final Letters, Susskind's #3 & Smolin's #3

ronjon — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:33:01 -0700
4) Here are the final letters by Leonard Susskind' and Lee Smolin in their email debate re the Anthropic Principle.

Smolin: ... My main point is that string theory will have much more explanatory power if the dominant mode of reproduction is through black holes, as is the case in the original version of CNS. This is the key point I would hope to convince Susskind and his colleagues about, because I am sure that the case they want to make is very much weakened if they rely on the Anthropic Principle (AP) and eternal inflation. ...

Susskind: ... Finally let me quote a remark of Smolin's that I find revealing. He says "It was worry about the possibility that string theory would lead to the present situation, which Susskind has so ably described in his recent papers, that led me to invent the Cosmological Natural Selection (CNS) idea and to write my first book. My motive, then as now, is to prevent a split in the community of theoretical physicists in which different groups of smart people believe different things, with no recourse to come to consensus by rational argument from the evidence." First of all, preventing a "split in the community of theoretical physicists" is an absurdly ridiculous reason for putting forward a scientific hypothesis.

But what I find especially mystifying is Smolin's tendency to set himself up as an arbiter of good and bad science. Among the people who feel that the anthropic principle deserves to be taken seriously, are some very famous physicists and cosmologists with extraordinary histories of scientific accomplishment. They include Steven Weinberg [2], Joseph Polchinski [3], Andrei Linde [4], and Sir Martin Rees [5]. These people are not fools, nor do they need to be told what constitutes good science. ...

3) The Anthropic Principle: Leonard Susskind's #2 to Lee Smolin #2

ronjon — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:21:29 -0700
3) Here's Leonard Susskind's #2 to Lee Smolin #2:

...The issue here is not whether the usual phenomenological inflation was of the eternal kind although that is relevant. Eternal inflation taking place in any false vacuum minimum on the landscape would favor [in Smolin's sense] the maximum cosmological constant. But for the sake of argument I will agree to ignore eternal inflation as a reproduction mechanism.

The question of how many black holes are formed is somewhat ambiguous. What if two black holes coalesce to form a single one. Does that count as one black hole or two? Strictly speaking, given that black holes are defined by the global geometry, it is only one black hole. What happens if all the stars in the galaxy eventually fall into the central black hole? That severely diminishes the counting. So we better assume that the bigger the black hole, the more babies it will have. Perhaps one huge black hole spawns more offspring than 10^22 stellar black holes.

That raises the question of what exactly is a black hole? One of the deepest lessons that we have learned over the past decade is that there is no fundamental difference between elementary particles and black holes. As repeatedly emphasized by 't Hooft [10][11][12], black holes are the natural extension of the elementary particle spectrum. This is especially clear in string theory where black holes are simply highly excited string states. Does that mean that we should count every particle as a black hole? ...

2) The Anthropic Principle: Lee Smolin's #2 to Leonard Susskind #1

ronjon — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:26:16 -0800
2) And here's Lee Smolin's #2 to Leonard Susskind #1:

I am grateful to Lenny for taking the time to respond to my paper. I will be as brief as I can in replying, especially as the key points are already presented in detail in my paper hep-th/0407213 ["Scientific alternatives to the anthropic principle"] or in my book, Life of the Cosmos or previous papers on the subject. -- For clarity I had in section 5.1.6 identified two arguments in Weinberg's papers. The first is the one I criticized in the summary. Susskind reponds, reasonably, by agreeing, and then raising the second argument. This argument is also criticized in detail in my paper, and it was perhaps a mistake not to include this in the summary I sent to Susskind.

This second argument is based on a version of the AP called the "Principle of Mediocrity" by Garriga and Vilenkin, who have done the most to develop it. Their version states that, "...our civilization is typical in the ensemble of all civilizations in the universe." -- This argument is discussed in full in sections 5.1.5 and 5.1.6. There I argue that the mediocrity principle cannot yield falsifiable predictions because it depends on the definition of the ensemble within which our civilization is taken to be typical as well as on assumptions about the probability distribution. I establish this by general argument as well as by reference to specific examples including Weinberg's use of it.

Can this be right if, as Susskind claims, Weinberg's prediction was found to hold? In fact, Weinberg's prediction did not work all that well. In the form that he made it, it led to an expectation of a cosmological constant larger than the observed value. Depending on the ensemble chosen and the assumptions made about the probability distribution, the probability that Lambda be as small as observed ranges between about 10 % and a few parts in ten thousand. In fact, the less probable values are the more reasonable, as they come from an ensemble where Q, the scale of the density fluctuations, is allowed to vary. While I am not an expert here, it appears from a reading of the literature [references in the paper] that to make the probability for the present value as large as 10% one has to assume that Q is frozen and fixed by fundamental theory. It is hard to imagine a theory where the parameters vary but Q does not, as it depends on parameters in the inflation potential. ...

Blue Brain Project Moves Onto Whole Brain, Really?

ronjon — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 14:40:11 -0800
"An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone," writes today's Technology Review. "Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears (emphasis added) to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade..."

The article goes onto to share the response of Christof Koch from Caltech who calls the 10 year target of modeling the human brain "ridiculous." Despite the fantastic progress to date I agree with Christof on this. ...

'The Fundamental Paradox of Late Twentieth-Century Thought,' by Janet Knedlik

ronjon — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 02:00:00 -0700
I just came across this rather remarkably blog - while doing a Google search for "Higgs Boson /Frank Tippler" (go figure). Enjoy ...

Before I leave the sphere of Language entirely for today, our first day in “History of Literary Theory,” however, I’m going to ask you to focus with me in a very simple way on something I’ve been touching on repeatedly. It’s the way that human beings, even as newborn babies, possess something that I’m going to call “a set toward systemicity.” Newborns orient themselves to the faces of their birth mothers in the first minutes after birth in extraordinarily detailed ways. This has been closely documented. As soon as babies can focus their eyes (two weeks), they try to follow the trajectories of objects passing through their visual range.

If you think about the explosion of sensory inputs the baby must be experiencing when it emerges from the womb into this external world of light and sound and color and touch…. yet in the midst of this assault of chaotic sensory impressions, the baby already has seems to have an orientation toward “concerted” or “constituted” phenomena, toward “stuff that moves in concert” as distinct from “background.” They also know a lot about language structure and distinguish familiar voices. And the baby is already attending to these things months before it has learned the boundaries of its own body and distinguished where they leave off and the rest of the world begins, a process of separation, by the way, that happens through language, because it is through language that they emerging psychologically as a human “self ” that possesses an “I” capable of “knowing.” [Boy oh boy, do I have something to say about the convergence of Douglas Hofstdler’s work and poststructuralism!]

So the human mind is not stocked from birth with Innate Ideas, nor is it a tabula rasa, a “blank slate.” Plato was closer than John Locke, though, because human consciousness does innately set itself toward certain systematicities and orients itself to relevant coherencies, as though this chaotic and changeable world of physical sensations were lit up for us by flashes of white lightning, telling us what to pay attention to. As we notice patternings and fluid or dynamical “moving in concert,” that concertedness is of course not something apparent or apprehendable at any one instant in time. Already we are selecting and comparing and combining sensory impressions across time – whatever time may be – so that “time” is woven in some fashion into all of human “knowing,” from the outset. Language is acquired by human beings only because of this innate genius for orienting our awareness to dynamic coherences and patterns that are both temporal and formal in their constitution.

Furthermore, of course, this means human consciousness has some kind of profound entanglement with time: it is a “time-consciousness.” Time is for human beings always in some sense psychological time (as Augustine knew) – and this statement has nothing to do with it being “subjective” as opposed to “objective” and “external.” (Dated categories, unless they should be redefined and renewed.) Einstein introduced the human observer into physics in a much deeper sense than that; he showed that what we know through physics is always-already what we can know according to our attempts to make measurements, and he realized that this cut the link between genuine human knowing and any claims to an all-inclusive or universal knowing. ...

“We are in a race to save humanity,” by Ervin Laszlo

ronjon — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 22:34:01 -0700
"...Today, we are facing two crises, one in the biosphere and the other in human consciousness. If we are going to cope with the challenges facing the biosphere, there must be a new human consciousness. It must recognize we are as much part of this planet as the birds and trees, and evolve in response to that. Once we feel this, we will automatically try to preserve our planet.

Another way to reach this is that we must sense our unity, we must feel connected, both to each other and to the biosphere. ... To my mind, there is an almost miraculous acceleration of this new consciousness, which I sometimes refer to as planetary consciousness. Even in biological terms, I’m sure that the genetic code of the children born today is different from ours. As living systems are open, as there is always an energy interchange between them and their environment, the new generation’s DNA must have been modified by the crisis we are living through, perhaps making them more able to adapt and survive. ...

But still we need to buy time; to delay the coming of the ‘chaos point’ regarding the biosphere until this new consciousness has fully established itself. If the crisis happened today, we would be as unprepared for it as we were for the tsunami. -- This is where places like Auroville can play a vital role. For as this new consciousness spreads by what the scientists term ‘adaptive resonance, wherever you have a higher concentration of people who sense and act upon their unity, it can be picked up by receptive people anywhere. This is why those who are engaged in living and developing this planetary consciousness bear a tremendous responsibility for the evolution of all humanity. ...

The Club of Rome, System Dynamics & Limits to Growth

ronjon — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:31:40 -0700
Part of my grad school study was with the System Dynamics computer simulation group under Prof. Jay W. Forrester at MIT. Working with the Club of Rome sponsored "Limits to Growth" global modeling project awakened me to the complex "world problematique" rushing tsunami-like out of humanity's future. This realization led to my ongoing concern with sustainability issues, which in turn was part of my motivation for co-founding SCIY. -- I'm happy to see that the Club of Rome continues with its important work. ~ ron

The Club of Rome’s mission is to act as a global catalyst of change that is free of any political, ideological or business interest.

The Club of Rome contributes to the solution of what it calls the world problematique, the complex set of the most crucial problems – political, social, economic, technological, environmental, psychological and cultural - facing humanity.

It does so taking a global, long term and interdisciplinary perspective aware of the increasing interdependence of nations and the globalisation of problems that pose predicaments beyond the capacity of individual countries. ...

'In Our Own Image: Humanity's Quest for Divinity via Technology,' by Debashis Chowdhury

ronjon — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 13:43:28 -0700
This looks like an interesting book. ~ ron

Once in a few billion years, the conditions are right for life to transcend itself into a higher level of existence. Having spent more than a billion years in the form of single walled bacteria-like (Prokaryotic) cells, a happy set of circumstances happened about 1.5 Billion years ago that gave rise to Eukaryotic cells with a well defined cell nucleus. Those were heady times, and the Eukaryotic cells then went on to create all multi-cellular creatures, including plants and animals including humans. The experience of what it meant to live life changed completely!...

The exciting times are back again! In this very century, mankind will invent the technologies that will give us capabilities we have thus far associated only with Divinity. What is lacking now is a level of wisdom, and unity of purpose amongst us humans. If we can develop this transcendental wisdom, and inculcate a joint sense of identity and purpose as humanity, ours is the opportunity to transform our collective existence into a vastly more powerful presence. ...

Dream Farm 2 - Story So Far: Its conceptual underpinnings and update with a potential site in mind

ronjon — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:47:40 -0700
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho: "Many people have asked what exactly is Dream Farm 2. There are several answers. First of all, Dream Farm 2 is a model of an integrated, ‘zero-emission’, ‘zero-waste’ highly productive farm that maximises the use of renewable energies and turns ‘wastes’ into food and energy resources, thereby completely obviating the need for fossil fuels. It is our answer to the energy crisis and climate change, and more. It is a microcosm of a different way of being and becoming in the world, and in that respect, nothing short of a social revolution.

In a way, I have dedicated the past 20 years to developing the idea, and trying to live up to it. -- The challenge now is to make Dream Farm 2 a reality, to put flesh on the bare bones of the diagram, so we can start building the best when the site is agreed. Watch this space. ..."

Quantum Jazz: “The meaning of life, the universe and everything,” by Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

ronjon — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:24:45 -0700
Quantum jazz is the music of the organism dancing life into being, from the top of her head to her toes and fingertips, every single cell, molecule and atom taking part in a remarkable ensemble that spins and sways to rhythms from pico (10-12) seconds to minutes, hours, a day, a month, a year and longer, emitting light and sound waves from atomic dimensions of nanometres up to metres, spanning a musical range of 70 octaves (for that is the range of living activities). And each and every player, the tinniest molecule not withstanding, is improvising spontaneously and freely, yet keeping in tune and in step with the whole.

There is no conductor, no choreographer, the organism is creating and recreating herself afresh with each passing moment. Quantum coherent action is effortless action, effortless creation, the Taoist ideal of art and poetry, of life itself...

It’s about the physics of organisms in place of the physics of dead matter in mainstream biology and the world at large. It is why we are stuck in debates about the hazards of mobile phones and genetic engineering, or the benefits of complimentary medicine. There is nothing in mainstream biology that deals with wholeness or coherence, nothing that tells you how, because the whole body is interconnected, even very weak electromagnetic fields could be harmful or, if appropriately applied, beneficial. And because we fail to see nature as an interconnected whole, life appears entirely as a struggle for survival of the fittest, one against all and all against nature. We wage wars and exploit our planet to death. ...

'The Real Bioinformatics Revolution,' by Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

ronjon — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:09:30 -0700
The idea of molecules communicating and exchanging energy by electromagnetic resonance fits in with accumulating evidence that cells and organisms are liquid crystalline, that all the molecules, including especially the 70 percent or water, are aligned and working coherently together [9, 12]. There is little or no free diffusion in such a system, as Fröhlich [14, 15] had pointed out earlier, and before that, cell physiologist Gilbert Ling [24, 25] ( Strong Medicine for Cell Biology , SiS 24) and biochemist/historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham [26]. Instead, energy transfer - by molecular resonance or coherent excitations – probably has to occur through large distances, activating entire populations of similar molecules that are in different parts of the cell or different parts of the body, so long-range coordinating of function can happen instantaneously...

What is clearly emerging is the predominant electronic nature of the living matrix and living activities, which will require a complete rewrite of biochemistry and cell biology, if not also physiology and medicine. ...

Mathematicians Team Up with Supercomputer to Crack 248-Dimensional Object

ronjon — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:33:54 -0700
A monstrous computer-based calculation has rekindled researchers' hopes of solving a longstanding problem in mathematics. In a style of collaboration more commonly associated with sequencing genomes, a team of 18 mathematicians and computer scientists has mapped an extremely complex object known as the E8 group.

The calculation is only a stepping stone, but an important one, researchers say, in a larger project to uncover subtle ways in which different equations or geometric shapes can be seen as facets of the same underlying thing—an insight that has led to some of the century's biggest discoveries in particle physics and may play a role in future theories. The result also highlights the growing trend of using computers to crack tough math problems. ...

2007 TED Conference: Report #2

ronjon — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 13:40:24 -0800
...The first prize winner for 2007 is James Nachtwey, a remarkable war photographer who’s been described as a “one man human rights watch”. He’s been extensively honored for his work, winning numerous prizes for his work covering some of the most difficult images in the world.

He apologizes for using notes - “after spending an entire career trying to be invisible” speaking before a group is an “out of body” experience. The truth is, his images are so powerful and moving, I found it very hard to even follow his voice for much of his talk. As he said, “I have been a witness - these pictures are my testimony.” ...

2007 TED Conference now underway: Report #1

ronjon — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 13:27:04 -0800
The annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, & Design) conference in Monterey, CA, USA, brings together more than 1000 thought-leaders, movers and shakers for four days of learning, laughter and inspiration. -- The first TED in 1984 included the public unveiling of the Macintosh computer and the Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind. Several influential members of the burgeoning 'digerati' community were also there, including Nicholas Negroponte and Stewart Brand.

Those who have spoken at TED include Bill Gates, Frank Gehry, Jane Goodall, Billy Graham, Herbie Hancock, Murray Gell-Mann, Larry Ellison. Yet often the real stars have been the unexpected: Li Lu, a key organizer of the Tiananmen Square student protest, Aimee Mullins, a Paralympics competitor who tried out a new pair of artificial legs on-stage, or Nathan Myrrhvold speaking not about Microsoft platforms, but about dinosaur sex. ...

Foreword to James Gardner's "The Intelligent Universe," by Ray Kurzweil

ronjon — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 14:26:01 -0800
Ray Kurzweil wrote this article as the introduction to James Gardner's new book, "The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos." It's a good summary of Ray's latest thinking. Though its very techno-optimistic view is contrary to the post-modern skeptical flavor often presented on SCIY, I've been following Ray's thinking for years and continue to be impressed with his erudite scholarship. -- In any case, I believe it's an important function of SCIY to present viewpoints that are contrary to our own; to be skeptical of our own skepticism.

... It is remarkable to me that almost all of the discussions of cosmology fail to mention the role of intelligence. In the common cosmological view, intelligence is just a bit of froth, something interesting that happens on the sidelines of the great cosmic story. But in the standard view, whether the universe winds up or down, ends up in fire (a great crunch and new Big Bang), or ice (an ever-expanding and ultimately dead universe), or something in-between, depends only on measures of dark matter, dark energy, and other parameters we have yet to discover. That the story of the universe is a story yet to be written by the intelligence it will spawn is almost never mentioned. This book will help to change the common "unintelligent" view.

So what will we do when our intelligence is in the range of a google (10^100) cps? One thing we may do is to engineer new universes. Similarly, our universe may be the creation of some superintelligences in another universe. In this case, there was an intelligent designer of our universe--that designer would be the evolved intelligence of some other universe that created ours. Perhaps our universe is a science fair experiment of a student in another universe. (Reading the news of the day, you might get the impression that this erstwhile adolescent superintelligence who designed our universe is not going to get a very good grade on his or her project.)

But the evolution of intelligence here on Earth is actually going very well. All of the vagaries (and tragedies) of human history, such as two world wars, the cold war, the great depression, and other notable events, did not make even the slightest dent in the ongoing exponential progressions I previously mentioned. ...

Nonalgorithmic Economics: The Evolution of Future Wealth, by Stuart A. Kaufmann

ronjon — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:09:06 -0800
...We do not yet know what makes some systems more adaptable than others, but research on complexity has yielded some clues. Some of my own work on physical systems called spin glasses suggests that the level of central control over subsidiary parts of a system is an important consideration. Too much control freezes the system into limited configurations; too little causes it to wander aimlessly. Only systems that hover on the border between order and chaos exhibit the needed general stability and capacity to explore the universe of possible solutions to challenges.

The path to maximum prosperity will depend on finding ways to build economic systems in which new niches will generate spontaneously and abundantly. Such an approach to economics is indeed radical. It is based on the emergent behavior of systems rather than on the reductive study of them. It defies conventional mathematical treatments because it is not prestatable and is nonalgorithmic. Not surprisingly, most economists have so far resisted these ideas. Yet there can be little doubt that learning to apply these lessons from biology to technology will usher in a remarkable era of innovation and growth. ...

Ocean "Freak Waves" - A Quantum Schrodinger Explanation

ronjon — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:14:26 -0800
The world's oceans claim on average one ship a week, often in mysterious circumstances. With little evidence to go on, investigators usually point at human error or poor maintenance but an alarming series of disappearances and near-sinkings, including world-class vessels with unblemished track records, has prompted the search for a more sinister cause and renewed belief in a maritime myth: the wall of water. Waves the height of an office block. Waves twice as large as any that ships are designed to ride over...

...No current could have created such huge waves. There is none in that part of the Atlantic. Clearly, there was another effect investigators needed to find. Except someone already had: it existed (on paper at least) in the world of quantum physics. Al Osborne is a wave mathematician with 30 years experience devising equations to describe open ocean wave patterns. Quantum physics has at its heart a concept called the Schrodinger Equation, a way of expressing the probability of something happening that is far more complex than the simple linear model. Al's theory is based on the notion that in certain unstable conditions, waves can steal energy from their neighbours. Adjacent waves shrink while the one at the focus can grow to an enormous size. His modified Schrodinger Equation had been rejected in the past as implausible, but with research attention centred on analysing these rogue waves - including global satellite radar surveillance by the new European Remote Sensing Satellite - data began to emerge backing his case. ...

'Rationale for an Integral Theory of Everything,' by Ervin Laszlo (Integral Review)

ronjon — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:19:32 -0800
There are many ways of comprehending the world: through personal insight, mystical intuition, art, and poetry, as well as the belief systems of the world's religions. Of the many ways available to us, there is one that is particularly deserving of attention, for it is based on repeatable experience, follows a rigorous method, and is subject to ongoing criticism and assessment. It is the way of science. ...

An integral TOE identifies the constituents of "every-thing" and states the rules by which the constituents relate to each other so as to form ever more complex things. It identifies the most basic kind of things that exists; the things that generate other things without being generated by them. Then it states the simplest possible set of rules — algorithms — that explain the emergence of the kind of things we have reason to believe exist. If it succeeds, it will be capable of explaining the origins of every-thing in the real world, together with the kind of relations that prevail among them. By extrapolating into the future, it will also be able to explain the kind of developments that are likely to occur: how the existing things transform their relations to each other in time, and transform themselves in the process. ...

Metaphysical implications of the quantum 'Zero Point Field'

ronjon — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 14:38:19 -0800
This is Part 1 of a series of quoted passages from the book The Field: the Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, by science journalist Lynn McTaggart. It’s an excellent non-technical explanation about the metaphysical implications of modern quantum theory, especially what’s called the ‘Zero Point Field.’ I hope this can provide a useful vocabulary for our ongoing dialogues re possible relationships between science and spirituality. I’ll say more in future comments to these articles. ~ ron

...The notion of an electromagnetic field is simply a convenient abstraction invented by scientists (and represented by lines of 'force', indicated by direction and shape) to try to make sense of the seemingly remarkable actions of electricity and magnetism and their ability to influence objects at a distance — and, technically, into infinity — with no detectable substance or matter in between. Simply put, a field is a region of influence. As one pair of researchers aptly described it: 'Every time you use your toaster, the fields around it perturb charged particles in the farthest galaxies ever so slightly.' ... In the quantum world, quantum fields are not mediated by forces but by exchange of energy, which is constantly redistributed in a dynamic pattern. This constant exchange is an intrinsic property of particles, so that even 'real' particles are nothing more than a little knot of energy which briefly emerges and disappears back into the underlying field. According to quantum field theory, the individual entity is transient and insubstantial. Particles cannot be separated from the empty space around them. Einstein himself recognized that matter itself was 'extremely intense' — a disturbance, in a sense, of perfect randomness — and that the only fundamental reality was the underlying entity — the field itself. ...

The Zero Point Field is a repository of all fields and all ground energy states and all virtual particles — a field of fields. ...

The existence of the Zero Point Field implied that all matter in the universe was interconnected by waves, which are spread out through time and space and can carry on to infinity, tying one part of the universe to every other part. The idea of the Zero Point Field might just offer a scientific explanation for many metaphysical notions, such as the Chinese belief in the life force, or qi, described in ancient texts as something akin to an energy field. It even echoed the Old Testament's account of God's first dictum: 'Let there be light', out of which matter was created. ... If all subatomic matter in the world is interacting constantly with this ambient ground-state energy field, the subatomic waves of the Zero Point Field are constantly imprinting a record of the shape of everything. As the harbinger and imprinter of all wavelengths and all frequencies, the Zero Point Field is a kind of shadow of the universe for all time, a mirror image and record of everything that ever was. In a sense, the vacuum is the beginning and the end of everything in the universe. ... If that were true, it meant every part of the universe could be in touch with every other part instantaneously. ...

... If matter wasn't stable, but an essential element in an underlying ambient, random sea of energy ... then it should be possible to use this as a blank matrix on which coherent patterns could be written, particularly as the Zero Point Field had imprinted everything that ever happened in the world through wave interference encoding. This kind of information might account for coherent particle and field structures. But there might also be an ascending ladder of other possible information structures, perhaps coherent fields around living organisms, or maybe this acts a a non-biochemical 'memory' in the universe. It might even be possible to organize these fluctuations somehow through an act of will. ... this represented nothing less than a unifying concept of the universe, which showed that everything was in some sort of connection and balance with the rest of the cosmos. The universe's very currency might be learned information, as imprinted upon this fluid, mutable field of information. The Zero Point Field demonstrated that the real currency of the universe — the very reason for its stability — is an exchange of energy. If we were all connected through the Zero Point Field, then it just might be possible to tap into this vast reservoir of energy information and extract information from it. With such a vast energy bank to be harnessed, virtually anything was possible — that is, if human beings had some sort of quantum structure allowing them access to it. But there was the stumbling block. That would require that our bodies operated according to the laws of the quantum world. ...

The human role in climate change (Boston Review)

ronjon — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 23:50:01 -0800
This is one of the best summaries of the science of climate change and global warming forecasting I've seen. It's by Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT, who was recognized in 2006 by Time magazine as "one of the world’s 100 most influential people." Highly recommended.

...The evolution of the scientific debate about anthropogenic climate change illustrates both the value of skepticism and the pitfalls of partisanship... general awareness of the issue dates to a National Academy of Sciences report in 1979 that warned that doubling CO2 content might lead to a three-to-eight-degree increase in global average temperature. Then, in 1988, James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, set off a firestorm of controversy by testifying before Congress that he was virtually certain that a global-warming signal had emerged from the background climate variability... Most scientists were deeply skeptical of Hansen’s claims; I certainly was...

At roughly this time, radical environmental groups and a handful of scientists influenced by them leapt into the fray with rather obvious ulterior motives. This jump-started the politicization of the issue, and conservative groups, financed by auto makers and big oil, responded with counterattacks... A very small number of climate scientists adopted dogmatic positions and in so doing lost credibility among the vast majority who remained committed to an unbiased search for answers... On the right, the search began for negative feedbacks that would counter increasing greenhouse gases: imaginative ideas emerged, but they have largely failed the acid test of comparison to observations. But as the dogmatists grew increasingly alienated from the scientific mainstream, they were embraced by political groups and journalists, who thrust them into the limelight. This produced a gross distortion in the public perception of the scientific debate. Ever eager for the drama of competing dogmas, the media largely ignored mainstream scientists whose hesitations did not make good copy. As the global-warming signal continues to emerge, this soap opera is kept alive by a dwindling number of deniers constantly tapped for interviews by journalists who pretend to look for balance...

Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

ronjon — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 16:48:01 -0800
... Finally, the content of any science is profoundly constrained by the language within which its discourses are formulated; and mainstream Western physical science has, since Galileo, been formulated in the language of mathematics. But whose mathematics? The question is a fundamental one, for, as Aronowitz has observed, ``neither logic nor mathematics escapes the `contamination' of the social.'' And as feminist thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, in the present culture this contamination is overwhelmingly capitalist, patriarchal and militaristic:...

Thus, a liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of the canon of mathematics. As yet no such emancipatory mathematics exists, and we can only speculate upon its eventual content. We can see hints of it in the multidimensional and nonlinear logic of fuzzy systems theory; but this approach is still heavily marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production relations. Catastrophe theory, with its dialectical emphases on smoothness/discontinuity and metamorphosis/unfolding, will indubitably play a major role in the future mathematics; but much theoretical work remains to be done before this approach can become a concrete tool of progressive political praxis. Finally, chaos theory -- which provides our deepest insights into the ubiquitous yet mysterious phenomenon of nonlinearity -- will be central to all future mathematics. And yet, these images of the future mathematics must remain but the haziest glimmer: for, alongside these three young branches in the tree of science, there will arise new trunks and branches -- entire new theoretical frameworks -- of which we, with our present ideological blinders, cannot yet even conceive. ...

The Rhythm of the Cosmos, by Eric Chaisson (Tufts Univ.)

ronjon — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 17:26:23 -0800
...The word "evolution" need not be the exclusive purview of biologists. In fact, Darwin never did use that word as a noun--and only once as a verb, in the very last sentence of his 1859 classic, "On the Origin of Species." Biological evolution is merely a subset, albeit an important one, of a much grander evolutionary scheme stretching across all of space and time. For the more we examine Nature, the more everything seems related to everything else. Indeed, the concept of evolution, broadly considered, has become a powerful unifying factor in all of science, underlying the rise of complexity everywhere...

There is no question that biological evolution (neo-Darwinism) is much richer than any kind of physical evolution among inanimate objects. No one is saying otherwise. There is real added value to the genetic information stored in living systems, and that's partly--along with enhanced energy flows noted above--what makes us more complex. Likewise, cultural evolution (mostly Lamarckism) is richer still, capable of producing cities, states and empires that are so socially complex as to play havoc with our very well-being as a civilization.

These are heady issues, vital issues, indeed, deep intellectual issues that ought to be raised more often in university settings. Humankind is now moving toward a time, possibly as soon as within a generation or two, when we shall no longer be able to expect Nature spontaneously to provide for us the environmental conditions needed for survival. Rather, society itself will have to create artificially the very conditions of our own ecological existence. From the two, society and the biosphere, will likely emerge a socially controlled bioculture. Here the components become ideas, artifacts, technology and humans, among other living organisms and machines on Earth--the epitome (thus far) of complexity in Nature. ...

"One Cosmos," Robert Godwin's Blog

ronjon — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 15:26:21 -0800
This is the personal blog of Robert Godwin, the author of "One Cosmos under God," which he discussed in the WIE interview in my previous SCIY posting. Godwin describes his book as: "the fruit of a lifetime of thought attempting to synthesize material from a number of diverse domains, including cosmology, theoretical biology, quantum physics, developmental psychoanalysis, attachment theory, anthropology, history, mysticism and theology, into a coherent, self-consistent, non-reductionistic whole." — In "One Cosmos," Dr. Godwin reveals a humorous alter-ego whom he calls: 'Gagdad Bob.' His posting for today begins as follows:

Now, I'm not an anthropopogist. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn, and I do know a thing or two about a thing or three. And one of the things I know is that pre-human hominids only became human because of the specifically trinitarian nature of the human developmental situation: mother-father-helpless baby. This, by the way, is one of the many reasons I do not believe intellignt life will ever be found on other planets, because genes and natural selection are only the necessary but not sufficient cause of our humanness.
In other words, even supposing that life arose elsewhere and began evolving large brains, a large brain would never be sufficient to allow for humanness. Rather, the key to the entire enterprise -- the missing link, so to speak -- is the extremely unlikely invention of the helpless and neurologically incomplete infant who must be born approximately 12 months "premature" so that his brain can be assembled at the same time it is being mothered. If we had come out of the womb neurologically complete, then there would be no "space" for humanness to emerge or take root. We would be Neanderthals. Literally. ...

The Cafe at the Begining of the Universe, by Howard Bloom

ronjon — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 15:24:32 -0800
...What I've basically been saying is, right now we carry a fourteen-billion-year history within us, a fourteen-billion-year history of surprises. You are a lump of quarks. So am I. Those quarks are joined in atoms. Those atoms are joined in something very complex called molecules. But we also carry fourteen billion years or more of another kind of time within us—future. The future's as real within us as the universe was real in those first tiny axioms of the Big Bang. I'm not predicting that you and I will be around to see that future. But in one form or another, our basic ingredients sure as heck will be.
And we have a unique responsibility. We're among the first batch of quarks we know trying out this new surprise called consciousness. Every new surprise—every new upgrade—is tested. Protons, for example, were tested to the nth degree. They've gone through every kind of catastrophe you can possibly imagine. They've gone through the bashing of the initial high-speed plasma soup. They've gone through the crunch and shattering of dying stars. And they've pulled through it all. Right? They're the ultimate survivors in this universe. But we'll see whether consciousness is able to survive. We will see. ...

More evidence that the basic "laws of physics" favor evolution of life?

ronjon — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:41:04 -0800
More evidence that the basic "laws of physics" favor evolution of life? (ron)

Nanoscale ice formations resembling the double helices of DNA will form when water molecules are frozen inside carbon nanotubes, detailed computer simulations suggest.
Researchers at the University of Nebraska, US, used a supercomputer to run detailed mathematical models of the behaviour of water molecules. In their simulations, they inserted the molecules into carbon nanotubes under high pressure, before cooling them to -23°C.
The scientists were surprised to see the molecules organise themselves into "spiral staircase" arrangements similar to those of a DNA helix. "It was very unexpected," Xiao Cheng Zeng, the computational nanotechnology expert who led the research told New Scientist. ...