nature's cathedral

I'm very skeptical about the theory of evolution as it now exists. I don't doubt that evolution occurs; that seems to be established beyond question. What I can't swallow are the explanations currently on offer for how it happens, what the process is. On the whole these strike me, so far as I'm aware of them, as being pitifully inadequate.

What provokes this spasm of skepticism? Watching my DVD lecture series from The Teaching Company called Understanding the Brain by Jeanette Norden. I've now seen 11 of the 36 half-hour lectures. With my casual but longtime interest in the brain, much of the material is review for me, but quite a lot of it is new too. The structure and function of the brain are such as to make me certain that it cannot be merely the product of random or deterministic processes, no matter how long such processes may have been operating. But for me the coup de grace for a purely random and deterministic origin for the brain came while watching the lecture on development, in which Dr. Norden described how the developing neurons of the fetus are guided precisely into place by helper cells, who in effect shepherd them long distances in order to ensure they wind up where they're supposed to, and are wired up properly with their neighbors.

Looking at my last sentence, I see that I instinctively and without hesitation used the pronoun who to refer to the helper cells, rather than which, meaning that I see them as persons rather than as things. The cells of course are living things, but in general our language is loaded with impersonal and mechanical references, to stay consistent with the prevailing idea that physical processes are necessarily mechanical at bottom. Biologists go through contortions of language to expunge any suggestion that living things, especially low-level ones such as single cells, operate through any kind of consciousness or intention. It is still as Andrew, a scientist acquaintance back in the 1980s, asserted when ruling out certain kinds of explanation: "That would be teleology."

Teleology--the explanation of events by the idea that they are guided by a goal or intentionality--is a "third rail" in biology: an idea with which no serious practitioner can appear to have any truck. It is doctrinally forbidden, for it would appear to open the door to God and "intelligent design".

I understand the resistance to "intelligent design" by biologists, insofar as it is a codeword for sneaking the Bible into school science classes--an event that would indeed signal the intellectual decadence and bankruptcy of our civilization. If "intelligent design" means teaching Genesis 1 in science class, then OK, let's find another term. But the idea of intentionality and purpose--the universal behavior of all living things--does not necessarily mean having to invoke sacred scriptures as our scientific authorities. It does mean thinking about things in a new and more expanded way.

Even back in the 1980s my response to Andrew was, "But what if the processes are teleological--in fact? Wouldn't you want to know?"

I'd want to know--and I do want to know.

I'm developing my own ideas about evolution and life (a fun hobby for me). Maybe I'll share those in due course.

But for now I just wanted to note that in watching this lecture-series on the brain I find I'm gaining access to that important emotion wonder or awe. I think about Joseph Campbell's assertion that the first function of any living mythology is to evoke a sense of wonder or awe, and an image flashed through my mind as I watched and listened: that the brain is a cathedral.

I've visited a few cathedrals, on my trip to Europe with Tim back in 1978. I recall feelings of awe at these buildings, feelings arising from some mixture of the size of the buildings, their beauty, and also an awareness of their age and purpose. They are not utilitarian unless you regard "utility" as including a relationship with the divine or invisible reality.

The brain is incomparably more complex than any cathedral, incomparably better designed and built, by very many orders of magnitude. It's one living structure among many, it's true, but as the seat of consciousness it has a special place, and a special claim to sacred status, I think.

Given that human life is supported by such an ongoing miracle of design and complexity, I inevitably think about the uses to which I'm putting that life. Am I worthy of marvels that support my existence? Or am I squandering them and taking them for granted?

Lots to think about. Luckily, I have just the organ for it.

conflicts of artistic duty

Yesterday Kimmie and Robin headed off to attend a baby shower in Coquitlam for a family member. I stayed at home, restlessly moving between activities (spent some time with my new laptop, tentatively exploring the strange world of Second Life). By reading-time I felt scattered and unsure of myself--unpleasant feelings that reminded me of times when I've been far out of my element, such as at industry cocktail parties or on certain kinds of aimless holiday when there's nothing particular to do but "have fun".

I need purpose, and my purpose must feel serious and meaningful. Yesterday I felt myself being stretched, by focus being split, tugged in different directions.

If I had to name a specific spark for these feelings, I would say it is reading Six Degrees by Mark Lynas: a description of Earth under the effects of global warming. It's already happening, of course, put in train when the Industrial Revolution started converting coal into energy for textile mills. At that moment, the human race unwittingly put a hotter planet into the mail; now we're starting to take delivery.

A warmer future, as Lynas points out, is not a cozier future. Even without global warming, the proliferation of human beings on Earth has led us into what is being called the sixth mass extinction of life--the fifth being the die-off of the dinosaurs at the transition from the Cretaceous to the Tertiary period 65 million years ago. Due to human causes--other than climate change--species are becoming extinct at 100-1,000 times the normal rate. Global warming will drastically increase that rate. In the next century, a large fraction of life-forms on Earth will disappear.

The Earth has been warmer than it is now. In the Pliocene epoch, 5-2 million years ago, the planet was 3° C warmer than it is today. The warming, it has been determined, was due to atmospheric carbon dioxide, which ranged from 360-400 parts per million (ppm) during that epoch. But wait: today's level is 382 ppm, and rising at 2 ppm a year. The inescapable inference is that we are already on track to heat to the Pliocene temperature. In the Pliocene, there were no glaciers (source of much of Earth's drinking-water for humans), and very little polar ice-cover.

Rainfall in many places may increase, but in the form of frequent and powerful storms; areas of desiccated ground will expand into what are now temperate zones. We shouldn't take comfort from the fact that Earth was this warm before, because in the Pliocene there was a greater abundance of life, unstressed by human depradations, able to manage the environment; and the sun was not as hot as it is today (it grows steadily hotter as it ages).

Another problem is that this episode of warming, unlike that of the Pliocene, is happening with catastrophic suddenness in terms of geological time. The migration rates of many species are too low for them to be able to outrun the spread of hotter temperatures; they'll die off with the disappearance of their food sources or as their metabolism is pushed past its operating envelope.

All right. So what's this got to do with me? Of course it concerns me deeply as a human being; I want to do whatever I can to help prevent or mitigate the worst of these effects.

But it affects me as an artist too. Even though global warming is high on the agendas of many organizations, media outlets, and even governments (at the level of talk, anyway), it has not really sunk in as an issue with many of us. This is partly due to ignorance. But I think a bigger part has to do with imagination: by and large, people find it hard to imagine this stressed world in our imminent future.

Well, imagination is something that I can do. Contrary to my grade 1 teacher Miss Warden, I do have an imagination--a good one. I can look into that crystal ball and imagine what lies ahead. I can imagine lots of graphic, gory details. I can imagine surprises.

Is this, then, what I should be doing? Should I be helping my fellow humans face the future properly by imagining it for them? Is that not my duty?

The clock is ticking, and I feel the nagging anxiety of conflict.

the sleeping dunes

More rain after a rainy weekend. Today is the last day of Kimmie's vacation. She's cheerful about it, although admits forthrightly, "I'd rather it weren't the last day."

Yesterday afternoon we spent doing errands, driving our 2001 Toyota Corolla on the wet, overcrowded streets, experiencing the selfishness and aggression that increasingly characterize our roads, and our civilization as it sinks, led by deep ruts of habit, into the tar-pit of its doom.

Strong words? I believe them.

Yesterday, on the errand mission, while Kimmie was struggling to get 5 meters of fabric at half-price in the primitive retail environment of Fabricland at Park Royal, I strayed to the Chapters-Indigo bookstore, and, browsing, actually found four books I wanted to buy. I bought two: Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (a key inspiration to my mother as she wrestles with writing a memoir of her own), and Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, a British science writer. At reading-time I started both, and enjoyed them both very much--although my enjoyment of Six Degrees was of a different sort. The subtitle of this book is Our Future on a Hotter Planet, and in it Lynas has prepared a forecast of Earth's climate in the coming century, arranged in six chapters that explain likely events as the average global temperature notches up 1 Celsius degree at a time. I'm only in chapter 1--1° C warmer--and it's already, well, I was going to say chilling.

He chose six degrees as his range because this is the range forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as probable over the next century. His method was to survey the scientific literature over the past few years on both climatology and paleoclimatology, in which researchers have made forecasts based on computer models about future climatic events, or have described ancient climatic events from warmer periods in Earth's prehistory from study of fossils and other evidence. Lynas sorted thousands of articles according to whether their scenarios represented a warming of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 degrees. He then synthesized the scenarios and drafted his book.

As he emphasizes in his introduction, Lynas based his scenarios only on peer-reviewed scientific papers, not on the works of journalists, popularizers, or advocacy groups. It's not Hollywood, it's sober, level-headed science.

And it's pretty darned frightening. Even at 1-degree warming there is a substantial likelihood that the Western U.S. may return to conditions that have existed during great droughts of prehistory. The terrain from New Mexico to Saskatchewan consists largely of a great dune-field overlain by a thin layer of soil held in place by plants. When conditions get too dry, the plants die and the soil blows away. On a small scale, this is what happened during the Dust Bowl years of 1934-40. Yes: I said on a small scale. At that time, 85% of Oklahoma's entire population vacated the state in desperation. If warming and drying cause the topsoil east of the Rockies to lose its plant cover, a mighty sea of sand-dunes will reemerge, turning the Great West into something resembling today's Sahara Desert.

This area is not densely populated--but it is populated. Like the Okies of the 1930s, those people would likely have to migrate. Where? And that area is also now a key food-producing region for the U.S. and for planet Earth. There goes one breadbasket. Who's to pick up the slack?

In the introduction Lynas talks about giving a presentation in Britain, and overhearing one of the attendees apologizing to another one for bringing him to such a "depressing" event. Lynas was shocked, because although he too finds these images alarming, he does not see them as inevitable--it is at least partly or mostly still avoidable, he thinks. If we act now.

At this moment, I feel more like his depressed attendee. As Clive Ponting describes in his A Green History of the World, Easter Island was covered with forest and populated with wildlife when humans first made landfall there in the 5th century AD. When the Dutch Admiral Roggeveen arrived there on Easter Sunday, 1722, he found a treeless rock with "about 3,000 people living in squalid reed huts or caves, engaged in almost perpetual warfare and resorting to cannibalism in a desperate attempt to supplement the meagre food supplies available on the island." Time and again, human beings have passed environmental points of no return, felling the last tree, killing the last animal.

Heading off such a course requires vision and leadership. Where are these today? The world's most powerful people seem preoccupied with thoughts like, when it comes time to fell that last tree, they want to be the ones felling it--not someone else.

I hear the dunes waking.

seek, and ye shall find

I'll be away for the next two days. I'll probably resume posting on Monday 27 August 2007.

Yesterday I played hookey from the blog. I started reading an article on the international situation, "America on the Downward Slope" by journalist Dilip Hiro, and found myself absorbed. Blog-writing time came and went.

I'm brimming with thoughts, with ideas and anxieties. They run in many different directions, and one of my challenges--a major challenge of my life--is to unify them, bring them into relationship with each other. My intuition is that if one's ideas and thoughts don't come into harmonious relationship with each other, one has not really found the core of one's being--one's true self. In some sense one is in a fragmented state, like somebody suffering with multiple personality disorder.

I search for causes. I look at things that interest me and ask why. In that way I am a scientist or a philosopher. But for a long time I have not been satisfied with the way scientists address problems--or perhaps I should say, have not been satisfied with the limits on the kinds of problems that scientists can address. Nor have I been satisfied with the assumptions under which scientists generally work.

For example, an obvious problem arises with the assumption that the world is made out of matter. For one thing, we have the experience of our minds, which are immaterial. And while we take it for granted in our everyday lives and in the way we run our society that we can make decisions and act on them--that is, that our minds can cause our bodies to do things--we have no scientific way of accounting for how matter can be influenced by mind. Matter requires physical energy to move it, and the mind is nonphysical. This is the classic mind-body problem, and it remains unanswered and mostly unaddressed by modern science.

This problem is considered the province of philosophy, but there has not been a good working answer in this field either. At least, not one that the practical, scientific world has been able to accept. Mainly in philosophy there have been attempts to clarify the problem, rather than solve it.

I think of this extract (compressed) from a work by John Dewey, the American educator, quoted in Campbell's Creative Mythology:

The shock and uncertainty so characteristic of the present marks the discovery that the older ideals themselves are undermined. Instead of science and technology giving us better means for bringing them to pass, they are shaking our confidence in all large and comprehensive beliefs and purposes.

It is psychologically natural that the outcome should be a collapse of faith in all fundamental organizing and directive ideas. Skepticism becomes the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. It is the more influential because it is no longer directed against this and that article of the older creeds but is rather a bias against any kind of far-reaching ideas, and a denial of systematic participation on the part of such ideas in the intelligent direction of affairs.

The popular philosophy of life is filled with desire to attain such an all-embracing unity, and formal philosophies have been devoted to an intellectual fulfillment of the desire. Consider the place occupied in popular thought by search for the meaning of life and the purpose of the universe. Men who look for a single purport and a single end either frame an idea of them according to their private desires and tradition, or else, not finding any such single unity, give up in despair and conclude that there is no genuine meaning and value of life's episodes.

The alternatives are not exhaustive, however. There is no need of deciding between no meaning at all and one single, all-embracing meaning. There are many meanings and many purposes in the situations with which we are confronted—one, so to say, for each situation.

Campbell concludes: "In sum: the individual is now on his own."

Dewey's words were published in 1931, and they still apply. When you're on your own, where do you find your answers?

Answer: wherever you can. I think about a question that has sometimes been asked me: How do you get to work in television? Or: how do you get a TV show on the air?

The truthful answer is: I don't know. I've done it myself, but there is no process, no recipe. I use the image of shipwrecked people swimming around a lifeboat that is already overcrowded. How do you get aboard? The people on board don't want you on there; they'll smash you with an oar if you try to climb in. You'll just have to think of something--or drown.

It's a joke. But like all jokes, it contains a kernel of truth. In reality I trust those spiritual teachers who say, "Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you." The real issue is not lack of answers, but lack of looking.

So I'm looking. That's my life.

looking for answers

Back to the routine of work. The B.C. Day long weekend is over, and also Kimmie's extra day off yesterday, giving us a mini-vacation in this glorious time of summer. Again, the city became deserted on the long weekend, making it all the more pleasant to remain here.

Yesterday the weather turned to overcast and cool drizzle, and we had a visit from Warren, my scriptwriting collaborator. He is en route with his family to Hong Kong, where his wife has been posted for two or three years with the British bank HSBC. It's been two years since I last saw him, and it may be two or three before I see him again. Thus does globalization reach into our mundane lives.

Since my travels are now in the mind, I'm happy to stay in one place. I've been reading in Hellenistic Religions: An Introduction by Luther H. Martin that the Hellenistic period--which is the period of my story--was a time of wandering. People traveled and drifted. A powerful new goddess, widely worshipped, with temples in many cities, was Fortune--whom we now know as Lady Luck. People saw their lives as buffeted by the unpredictable winds of luck. Like us, they saw themselves as sandwiched between chance and necessity: driven by mechanical forces beyond their control, and also subject to continual random rolls of the dice. Even the gods were seen as subject to the same forces.

We live in a similar period, with similar ideas. Our term globalization would have been familiar to Alexander the Great, and indeed this was his aim: to unite the (known) world under a single benign government, united by the universal adoption of what he regarded as the world's best culture--the Greek.

Our scientific ideas are also, again, the same. We imagine the world to be driven on the one hand by mechanical, deterministic forces (classical physics), and on the other to be the product of purely and ultimately random events (quantum physics, evolutionary theory). While our laws and societies and personal lives are built around the notion of choice, freedom, and individual responsibility, we have no scientific way of accounting for such ideas. We see ourselves as mechanical, random machines that are also, paradoxically, free and goal-oriented.

This dog's breakfast of beliefs would also have been familiar to the denizens of the Hellenistic world. It was an individualistic society, as ours is, in which people felt increasingly alienated and estranged from the centers of life. The questions were rising in the human soul: what to value, and why?

These questions are still with us, of course. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said that life does not provide us with answers; life asks the questions, and we provide the answers. It doesn't make finding them any easier, but I suppose it changes the direction of the search. We can wander the earth, but we need to look within.

reflections on the immune response

Another weekend goes by--very pleasantly, in the main, although both Kimmie and I are fighting off simultaneous headcolds. Dosing ourselves with tincture of echinacea, we're holding the virus at bay thus far, having both started to feel symptoms on Friday night. We reckon we must have caught it together from the same source, but aren't sure where. Two possibilities: one of Kimmie's family members was a vector when three of them came over for lunch a week ago Sunday--giving a long-sounding incubation period of five days; or we picked it up when we had lunch together on Thursday at The Burgoo restaurant near her work. Neither of our waitresses appeared to be infected, but who knows what goes on in restaurant kitchens? I picture some cold-ridden cook sniffling his way through soup- and stew-preparation.

"Another reason to eat at home," said Kimmie last night, while we speculated on the source of our infection.

But in fact we don't know. Viruses arrive, board our cells like pirates, and then must be dealt with.

I used to think of viruses as more intimidating than, say, bacteria, just because they are not treatable with antibiotics, and their method of attack always involves a direct invasion of our cells and subversion of the cells' own reproductive process--creepy. Viruses are much, much smaller than cells and do not eat, breathe, or indeed metabolize in any way. They have no propulsion system of their own but move passively wherever they're driven. How can the body deal with such an invader?

I was heartened by reading the book Microbiology the Easy Way last year (I wrote a review of the book on Amazon.com, if you're interested). Our immune systems are wondrous and complex things, and include powerful antiviral weapons. One of these is a class of proteins called interferons. When a cell is invaded by a virus, the virus's commandeering of the cellular reproductive system causes the cell to produce interferons. Although an infected cell is generally doomed, it releases these interferons which are picked up by neighboring cells. The interferons cause these other cells to switch on genes for producing special proteins that can block viral reproduction. So when the viruses arrive in these cells, the cells are ready: before the viruses can invade the cell nucleus and subvert its DNA-processing, they are stuck with proteins that prevent them from functioning or can dissolve the viral nucleic acid. The viruses or their dissolved parts can then be broken down by the cell like regular cellular waste. Amazing!

I don't know whether this is how the body deals with the virus for the common cold, but if it does, I imagine the virus landing, possibly riding on water droplets that we inhale or smeared on our membranes if we touch our mouth, nose, or eyes with unclean hands, and invading the cells of our mucous membranes. The death of cells and their released products would trigger an immune response, which we experience as the symptoms of our cold. Neighboring cells arm themselves against the virus, which, multiplying furiously as it kills infected cells, leapfrogs over them to other cells that aren't warned yet. The cold spreads from throat to nose to lungs as the virus looks for pristine defenseless cells to invade. Eventually all the cells susceptible to the virus have been warned and are no longer vulnerable. The invaders are immobilized, dismantled, and flushed into the body's wasted system. The dead cells are replaced by reproduction among the survivors. By the end of the cold the body has probably produced antibodies to the virus--special molecules that fit the virus's exterior chemicals like a key in a lock, enabling the body's white blood cells to recognize them as invaders and vacuum them up before they can enter cells. The next time that type of virus invades, it finds the body much better prepared to take it out of circulation.

I bought the book on microbiology in December 2005 as part of my inquiry into the mystery of identity--for our immune system is a vigorous and complex assertion of our physical identity. It is the border patrol and immigration office of our body, getting rid of everything that is not "us". Our immune system knows what "we" are--but do we know what "we" are?

It's a mystery. Right now I'm grateful that my immune system seems to be strong and on full alert. Go, team, go.

the tree of ideas

This morning, as we lay in bed in the dark in post-alarm recovery, we heard this weather forecast: "Heavy rain today, tomorrow, all through the weekend, and for the rest of our lives." That put a smile on my face and energized me to get up and meet my day.

I want to say more about ideas--my favorite subject. I've been toying with the notion of what it would be like to develop a cladogram of the history of ideas. If you're not familiar with the word cladogram, I'm sure you're not alone. You can click the preceding link, or accept my quick definition: an organizational chart of living organisms arranged by their order of appearance in evolutionary history. When all organisms are included in such a chart, it is sometimes called a "tree of life"--a powerful mythological image. The word itself comes from the Greek klados, "branch". The discipline called cladistics is the taxonomic philosophy of classifying organisms in this way, by genetic propinquity, rather than by the more traditional method of grouping them by morphological similarity.

I first heard the term, and had it explained to me, in about 1985 at La Bodega, the West End tapas bar where I used to meet my friends once a week. At that time it was a new idea, dating back only to 1979. My biologist friend Brad and an associate of his, Andrew, sketched out a basic cladogram on a paper napkin. (Brad was headed for a career in tropical ecology; Andrew was branching into herpetology.) I didn't really grasp what was supposed to be special about a cladogram, since to me it just seemed to be a basic org chart. The key point, as I now understand it, is that two dissimilar-looking organisms might might be more closely related genetically than two similar-looking organisms, and would therefore appear closer together in a cladogram than they would in the old-time Linnaean classification system. A detailed knowledge of genetics, and of the genomes of organisms, makes a full, precise cladogram possible.

No such scientific precision could ever be achieved with a cladogram of ideas, but nonetheless I find the concept exciting. What are the most basic ideas we have, and how have they branched out, differentiated, combined, in human history?

Last year I couldn't resist buying the book Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson. This 822-page tome (very good too--I'm 262 pages though it so far) is a step in the direction I'm thinking of. Watson recognizes technological innovations as the manifestation of new ideas--although these are not the only manifestations of new ideas. But all new ideas are inventions: they are intended to solve a problem. ("Necessity is the mother of invention"--this phrase, I've just learned, is from Plato's Republic.) An innovation is a response to a perceived problem.

Sometimes I've seen puzzlement expressed that so many tens or hundreds of thousands of years went by in human prehistory with no significant changes to our primitive stone toolkit of flaked hand-choppers. I have to believe that no necessity for a change was perceived. There was no culture of innovation. It did not occur to people to respond to problems by inventing new tools. This itself is an idea: that problems can be met with a deliberate effort to try something new. (By the way, in astrological terms, I would say this is one of the core ideas of the sign Aquarius.) That idea had to be discovered, and also added to the culture--the heritage of ideas that is passed down to succeeding generations. (My thought is that ideas are what a culture is made of. Our culture is exactly the collection or set of ideas that we collectively hold.)

These are just a few semi-random thoughts. I wanted to give a glimpse into the world of my thinking: what kinds of things I've been thinking about. If I were an academic, I think this might be the area of study I would be drawn to.

Now: on with my day of heavy rain (the weatherman is right so far).

rating: "mathematically mature"

I'm trying something different: squeezing a post, or part of one, in my morning routine, before I see Kimmie off to work and get on with my breakfast and writing. Blog-posts have gotten lost in the shuffle as I have adjusted my lifestyle around power-walking in the afternoons, causing untold suffering and anxiety to my loyal readers, who find themselves suddenly in cold-turkey withdrawal. Take heart! I do want to write my posts like a good chap.

Last night I finished reading Meta Math! by Gregory Chaitin. In some places this small book was beyond me. Or at the very least, I did not have the passion or perseverance to attempt some of the exercises he eagerly suggests, such as coming up with my own proofs for certain things to do with real numbers or Diophantine equations (really, Gregory!). My sense with the book is that Chaitin doesn't realize how hard some of the ideas in it are, and he spends more time explaining relatively simple things (like how DNA is based on four bases) than he does on certain very (to me) difficult things. The image that came to my mind was of wading through a lake where the bottom is very uneven: shallow in places, and in others dotted with deep holes down which one might disappear at any moment.

The book is aimed at the "mathematically mature". (This expression stuck in my mind from my days as a janitor at Vancouver General Hospital. One summer, one of the vacation-relief workers was a math student, and had brought a textbook to read on his breaks. One of the other guys, an artist named Doug, was flipping through it as we sat at a table at coffee-break. Looking on, I could see that it was an advanced textbook on topology, with many arcane equations and references to things called "sheafs" and "manifolds". Doug asked the student, "Do you think I could read this book?" The student, choosing his words, said thoughtfully, "You would need to be mathematically mature to read this book." His choice of words stuck with me. I was, I'm sure, one of the few janitors at VGH who had a topology text of his own at home: a book called Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, the seminal work of a mathematical field called catastrophe theory by the French mathematician Rene Thom. I'd bought it as a research book for a would-be novel, but could barely make head or tail of any of it. If you'd like to read a truly hard book, I suggest giving that one a try.) But its main argument can still be grasped clearly by the mathematically less educated, as long as you have the interest.

And I do have the interest. Chaitin's book is essentially a description of the discovery and significance of a certain real number that Chaitin found, which he dubbed Omega. (The symbol, uppercase omega, I noted, is the same as that used for Absolute Infinity, which I read about in Rudy Rucker's Infinity and the Mind.) So-called real numbers, by definition, have infinite decimal expansions. An example is pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. The digits of its decimal expansion go on and on, never repeating, forever, the digits tumbling on in no predictable order. No one can tell you what the trillionth decimal of pi is, or the quadrillionth, or the quintillionth. They could be 4, 9, and 2 respectively--or any other digits.

But they could be worked out from a formula to calculate pi. That formula is relatively simple. Finding the trillionth digit simply means going though a lot of repetitive but well-defined steps. In Chaitin's terms, that means that pi is very compressible: the infinite series of digits can be worked out from a relatively simple formula. The formula functions as a simple program to generate the digits. Even though we can't predict pi's digits at a glance, pi is in no sense a random number, because we can so precisely calculate it from a small program.

Chaitin's number Omega is the antithesis of pi: it is a truly random real number. It is devised so that its sequence of digits is finitely inexpressible; it cannot be compressed; no program can be created to generate its digits that is any smaller than Omega itself. He has found something that is truly and fundamentally random.

What's the significance of it? It actually says something about how knowable the universe is. All scientific inquiry is a search for laws, which are simple ways of accounting for complex phenomena. The existence of Omega proves that there are specific objects, at least in mathematics, that cannot be compressed--cannot be derived from a simpler formula or law. As I understand it, he's found a specific thing that is fundamentally indescribable and unknowable. That means it's at least possible that the universe shares those properties, and can never be completely understood in a scientific sense, even in principle.

Needless to say, there's a great deal more to this topic. I've been fascinated by it ever since reading Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter back in 1981. This nexus of ideas, in my opinion, is the most important of the 20th century, and I have enormous admiration for the few brilliant minds who have been able to peer into this mysterious void and descry the outlines of order.

But I'm on the outside looking in on the mathematically mature.

becoming a citizen again

The sky had filled with cloud again by sunrise, as though some great pale-plumaged dove had sat on the city. With a forecast of more snow by afternoon, I hustled out in the morning to get filtered water (the "boil water" advisory for Vancouver is now gone, and people are not jamming the stores for water) and groceries. I wanted to start up the car in any case, to keep it ready to go in the freezing weather. Sure enough: tiny flakes fall quickly and vertically out my office window right now.

Stepping out the door into subzero air is evocative of other times and places: I have flashes of being at Gampo Abbey, or in Switzerland. Even with the heat turned up, the house is cold. My hands are cold as I type (mind you, I just had a lie-down in the bedroom where the thermostat is turned down to 10°).

Another book has just arrived: it's still cold from lying in its box out on the front porch. The book is Nuclear Renaissance by W. J. Nuttall, an examination of the technologies and policy issues around nuclear power. It is recommended by James Lovelock in his The Revenge of Gaia. It's an expensive hardback, but I was able to get a lower-priced new copy from A-1 Books in New Jersey via Abebooks.com.

I wanted to look into the question of nuclear power more closely, since Lovelock believes strongly that we--all of us humans on Earth--need to throw as much effort as possible, as soon as possible, into converting to nuclear energy, the only source that is technologically ready to wean us off carbon in the short term. Since, like most environmentalists, I have had a long-standing aversion to nuclear power, this is a change of direction. Lovelock's arguments in favor of it are strong and rational. He believes that the arguments against nuclear power are mainly irrational, and play upon our fear (in the West) of cancer--a disease that 1/3 of us will die of in any case, regardless of what we do, eat, or breathe.

So it's part of my effort to become educated about the things that matter in the world--the most important political and social topics that I can focus on. I have long held that environmental issues are at or near the top of the list of priorities for humans worldwide, but Lovelock's book has given that feeling a new fillip. Even though I've long been keen on science, I have never been very interested in nuclear technology, mainly because I disapproved of it and wanted it gone. Now I have a reason to learn more, and have the scientific aptitude to be able to read and understand this type of material.

Two other--used--books arrived in the mail two days ago. These also were recommendations of Lovelock's: The Self-Organizing Universe by Erich Jantsch, and The Earth System by Kump, Kasting, and Crane. The former is a 1980 text on the new science of self-organizing systems (including living systems, such as us); the latter is a textbook on the emerging field of "earth systems science"--the way earth, atmosphere, water, and living things interact. (I understand I was lucky to find the Jantsch book for only about $16. It is an out-of-print book that apparently many people want to get their hands on. The next-cheapest copy at Abebooks.com was about $68, as I recall. I think my seller in Port Townsend, Washington, didn't realize what he had. But he offered and I accepted.) These too are part of my current push to become better informed about a topic that will quickly, I believe, start to dominate all levels of political discussion.

So: the writer is starting to think of himself as a citizen once again--a world citizen, a concerned citizen, nay, a worried citizen.

New Age thinking

The weather continues sunny, clear, and crisp. I keyed some notes from The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami, a book I bought in 1996 and was excited about at the time, but which I have not read since. Now my restless philosophical researches have led me back to it, and I am excited again to be reading it.

Goswami, a physicist, was unhappy about aspects of his work. From his preface (compressed):

Objects found in our everyday experience do not seem to behave in the strange ways common to quantum mechanics. Thus it is easy for us to be lulled into thinking that macroscopic matter is different from microscopic particles. Many physicists stop puzzling over the paradoxes of quantum physics and succumb to this solution. They divide the world into quantum and classical objects.

To forge a successful career in physics, you cannot worry too much about such recalcitrant questions as the quantum puzzles. The pragmatic way of doing quantum physics, I was told, is to learn to calculate.

I realized that there must be a joyful way of approaching the subject, but I needed to restore my spirit of inquiry into the meaning of the universe and to abandon the mental compromises I had made for career motives.

Goswami, son of a Brahmin guru in India, argues that the apparent conflicts and paradoxes between so-called classical (Newtonian) physics and quantum physics disappear once one abandons the assumption of material realism--the belief that the ultimate reality is matter moving in empty space, and that this matter is fundamentally separate from the consciousness that perceives it. Instead, he proposes adopting the viewpoint of monistic idealism--the view that consciousness is the ultimate reality, and that what we call matter (and energy) is not separate from consciousness but a derivative or form of it, of one nature with the mind that perceives it. If we see things in this way, the apparent contradictions and paradoxes disappear. Not only that, but the viewpoint of science would then be in accord with the viewpoint of spiritual traditions and mystics since ancient times.

As Goswami points out, the idea that consciousness (mind) is the ultimate reality is not new. This philosophical outlook is held by some schools of Buddhist philosophy, such as the one called Cittamatra (pronounced "chitta-matra"), or the "mind-only" school. The first stage of learning to see things in this way is to experiment with loosening our grip on the conviction that there is a real, solid world out there independent of our experience of it. One of the proofs used in this is to point out that there is no absolute distinction between what we call dream experience and waking experience: if one does not assume in advance that there is a "real" external material world, it is impossible to prove at any time that we are not dreaming, or that there is any fundamental difference between waking and dreaming. What matter are dream-objects made of?

In Goswami's view, the quantum paradoxes (action at a distance, the quantum leap, wave-particle duality, and so on) are symptoms of our disconnection from this more unitary and accurate way of viewing the world. When Descartes created his famous dualism, declaring matter and mind to be of separate orders, matter being the province of science and the mind the province of religion, he was making a statement that (it seems to me) was as much political as it was philosophical, in that he was drawing a border between science and the church, mainly so that science could progress without molestation by priests.

Cartesian dualism is still our everyday philosophical outlook today. Our philosophical materialism, according to Goswami, is responsible for our economic materialism, and all the resultant ills of spiritual ennui and environmental degradation. A return to a more ancient and mystical viewpoint would not imply any repudiation of science, but would on the contrary allow it to progress without being mired in contradiction and in seeming conflict with our inmost values and feelings. Science would be harnessed to the universal human striving to find meaning and fulfillment in life, instead of taking the absence of such meaning for granted as one of its working assumptions.

In short, I would describe The Self-Aware Universe as a New Age book--a topic on which I have much more to say, for increasingly I feel myself becoming identified with the New Age, at least, in the sense in which I understand it. My own definition of New Age would be something like: "the era characterized by an attitude of applying an openminded, objective--that is, scientific--outlook to matters of the spirit".

At least in the West, science no longer needs to worry so much about interference from the Church (whichever church that might be), and so the firewall erected by Descartes is obsolete. My own work, such as this project The Age of Pisces, is really aimed at the New Age, and I am at heart a New Age thinker and writer.

searching and not finding

Brilliant sunny day with a cloudless sky. I went running again before lunch (cheddar-cheese-and-tomato sandwich, apple).

Before that, of course, I had to face the headwinds of my project. Again I could not make myself get back on-task. Instead I opened up my document on identity, and found myself reading my notes there with much interest, and wanting to do more. I went with it. This topic is calling me, magnetizing me--I don't know why, or to what end, but I trust that it is what I need to focus on now.

Over morning coffee I keyed notes from The Ghost in the Machine; The Inner Ocean; and Comparative Politics. I'm groping, groping. For what? Where do I hope to land?

One of my issues is that after a lifetime of reading, study, and thinking, I often feel I haven't arrived anywhere. Yes, I know things, I've learned things, but in the sense of having some key insights or ideas on which I could anchor further thoughts--these I feel I don't have. All is shifting sand. As you look more closely at anything, it dissolves in vapor, in unresolved questions.

This is the fate of all thinkers to some extent. Mature philosophers look on the ancient questions with a wry nod, an ironic canniness. Certainty is generally not to be had, except in mathematics, and sometimes it too frustrates the efforts of even the most gifted. Mathematicians in history have driven themselves nearly to madness, certainly to despair, over their inability to crack stubborn problems. The most brilliant, such as Kurt Gödel, come up with things that seem to break the system. His incompleteness theorems (the most important published in 1931, when he was 25) demonstrated that in any powerful-enough mathematical system there are true statements that cannot be proven within the system. In short: every logical mathematical system, no matter how complete it "thinks" it is, is incomplete. Or more briefly: truth is a more powerful concept than provability. Truth is stronger than proof; there are more things that are true than can be proved. (And to think--Gödel proved this!)

So maybe I shouldn't be too distressed at the elusiveness of knowledge. If I wanted "certainty", I would've stuck with Buddhist philosophy, which would eventually have led me there (in some lifetime or other). But I became wary of even that premise, for a couple of reasons. One was that there is controversy even within Buddhism. Even at the deepest, subtlest levels of philosophy, the masters disagree. What then is the truth?

Another reason is that for any spiritual or mythological tradition to be transplanted to new soil, to a new culture, it must be transformed; it cannot survive in its original form. The images, language, and concepts of the system, which worked their magic on one people, cannot work the same magic on another people who have no familiarity with them, no history with them. The Buddha himself did not invent any new ideas or images with which to spread his teaching; he took things from existing Indian tradition. He made use of what was around him. But the images of ancient India can't speak to 21st-century North America--certainly not in the same way.

Having ventured forth from the Buddhist fold, I feel lonely and isolated, but also excited. The feeling reminds me of certain feelings I have as I read articles on the recent explorations of Mars by the remote rovers. Astronomy magazine's Collector's Edition of Mars has lots of surface-level views of desert regolith, all colored like tomato soup, and lonely enough, I'm sure, to make a robot cry. It is solitary, frightening, new, and amazing. There are wonders yet to be discovered. Will I discover some of my own?

identity, infinity, etc.

Dang. I just lost this post after writing about three paragraphs. I zipped over to look something up on Wikipedia, and got the dreaded "fatal error" message box: Firefox had made a fatal error. I was forced to close Firefox and lose my post. I had not copied each paragraph and pasted it in Word, as I used to with Netscape because of its proneness to crashing in this way. So I am disappointed with my new browser.

I was saying something like this. I woke up with a desire to resume the chase for the meaning of identity. I believe in following my mind where it wants to go: it's good to follow your passion, moment to moment, if possible. I started by keying some material from Communitarianism and Individualism, the fourth essay entitled "Membership" by Michael Walzer (excellent, as were the previous three; the book so far is first-rate). Countries, like clubs, have admission policies: rules for admitting new members. These rules reflect the members' idea of who they are, their identity.

This got me thinking about the mathematics of set theory. I prowled the livingroom bookshelf to find Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker, a worn mass-market paperback that I bought in 1984. In it he quotes a definition of set made by the main inventor of set theory, Georg Cantor:

A set is a Many which allows itself to be thought of as a One.

Hm, I thought, what is this but a description of Arthur Koestler's holon from The Ghost in the Machine? Here is an extract:

A "part" generally means something fragmentary and incomplete, which by itself would have no legitimate existence. On the other hand, a "whole" is considered as complete in itself. But "wholes" and "parts" in this absolute sense just do not exist anywhere. What we find are intermediary structures on a series of levels in an ascending order of complexity: subwholes which display, according to the way you look at them, some of the characteristics commonly attributed to wholes and some of the characteristics commonly attributed to parts.

The term I propose is "holon," from the Greek holos = whole, with the suffix on which, as in proton or neutron, suggests a particle or part.

I had fetched down The Ghost in the Machine from the coffeetable to set up a document for it in Word.

Rucker started his discussion of sets with a reference to the ancient problem of the One and the Many: Is the world fundamentally One, or Many? Is it made out of one basic thing or substance, or a plurality of these? Plato spent much of his career pondering this topic, without a conclusive result. His final writing on it was a wry observation that the topic was one that young thinkers liked to believe they had understood, and liked furthermore to talk endlessly about. Rucker himself admits he does not have the answer--only his own (very penetrating and persuasive) ideas on the topic.

I'm intrigued by set theory and what is called transfinite mathematics--the mathematics of infinity (for which set theory is the strongest mathematical toolkit). I suspect that transfinite mathematics is the mathematical branch of theology, for if the Absolute Infinite (symbolized in mathematics by uppercase omega) is in any way existent, it would have to be what we refer to as God. The study of the lesser infinities below the Absolute Infinite (and there are, well, infinitely many of those) would be a kind of theological undertaking.

But the Many and the One flagged something else: de Santillana's The Origins of Scientific Thought, in which he examines how early Greek thinking led toward what we now call science. The problem of the Many and the One was a scientific question, with responses that included the atomism of Democritus--the atomism with which we "moderns" still view the world today. For the idea of little indivisible bits of blind matter flying through the vacuum of space, interacting, was due to Democritus, hundreds of years before Christ.

This merely sketches some of my thoughts from this morning. Kimmie and I went downtown to buy fabric at the store Dressew on Hastings--a lovely old-time store, crammed with excellent things. A good time. I'm late for tea!

the mystery of identity

Earplugs deployed, I was oblivious to the midnight yelling, pot-banging, and horn-blowing (Kimmie woke up for it, of course). I woke a couple of times in the night, and finally at about 6:45 got up. I made coffee and served Kimmie in bed, using her tall "snowman" mug for the last time this season (she put away all her indoor decorations as soon as she got up).

I returned to my notes on identity. Why do I feel such a strong urge to delve into this question? I offer that question rhetorically, since it doesn't really matter whether I understand the urge or not. I follow my quest for knowledge wherever it takes me, trusting that it is pointing me where I need to go.

Today it was leading me toward the psychological aspect of the question. I wound up keying notes from the book Abnormal Psychology by Timothy and Joseph Costello; they provide a good overview of the history of psychological theory and practice. I also keyed notes from a book I bought a couple of days ago at Indigo Books: Microbiology the Easy Way by Rene Fester Kratz, a textbook designed to help microbiology students improve their grades (I've never taken microbiology). Why? I was nudged that way by my reading of Acquiring Genomes by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, in which the authors brush aside Richard Dawkins's concept of the "selfish gene":

Selfish genes, since they are not "selves" in any coherent sense, may be taken as figments of an overactive, primarily English-speaking imagination. The living cell is the true self, an entity that cannot help creating more copies of itself. The engine of evolution is driven by tiny selves of which we are only half conscious.... A gene alone is only a piece of DNA long enough to have a function. There is no life in a gene. A gene never fits the minimal criterion of self, of a living system....

And what about viruses? Here is what they say:

Some present viruses as the smallest forms of life. But viruses are not alive and indeed they are even, in principle, too small to be units of life. They lack the means of producing their own genes and proteins.

According to Margulis and Sagan, the cell is the unit of life--the smallest living thing. It would then also be, presumably, the smallest potential bearer of an identity. This thought led me to buy the microbiology text.

Not that I regard Margulis and Sagan's opinion in this as anything more than that--an opinion. Saying, for instance, that viruses are too small to be alive begs the question, in my view. They are robust, carry around their own genetic material, and are vigorous "survivors" in nature. It's true they don't eat--they don't need to. For me the more telling question would be: do they have an experience? Are they sentient? We can't know this directly, but their behavior is just like that of other, larger, more complex parasites. They look and act like mosquitoes, ticks, lice, and other such things that also require "hosts" to survive and propagate. Or this: if they are not sentient, how would they behave differently if they were sentient? I suspect a sentient virus would behave exactly the way these supposedly nonsentient ones do.

Last night in the microbiology text I was reading about how bacteria, so-called prokaryotic (non-nucleated) cells, are able to propel themselves by means of whiplike appendages called flagella. Flagella rotate, pushing the bacterium forward as a propeller pushes a boat. Bacteria move toward things that are beneficial to them, such as food. When faced with something harmful, a bacterium can reverse the direction of rotation of its flagellum, which causes the bacterium to rotate in place or "tumble". When it is pointed in some new direction, it goes into forward gear again and resumes forward motion.

If I were a bacterium, and sentient, equipped in that way, that's exactly what I would do.

Some bacteria have a further amazing capability: when environmental conditions become harsh (too cold, hot, or food-deficient), they form "spores", which are simply copies of their single chromosome encased in a tough shell of protein. The spore is released from the cell, able to survive for thousands of years or 20 hours' exposure to boiling water. (Indeed, some believe that spores could survive the cold and vacuum of interplanetary space, allowing life to be propagated between planets.)

Is a spore alive? Only in the way a seed is alive. A bacterium is alive, though: it metabolizes, it reproduces. It moves toward food and away from danger. It is a tiny pocket of metabolizing chemicals contained in an envelope called a plasma membrane; it has an inside and an outside. It is indeed a little self--a little identity.

The thesis of Margulis and Sagan's book is that speciation--the creation of new species--occurs mainly through the acquisition of whole genomes by a species. That is, a creature that was prey, or a symbiont--something that lived on or in one's body--now becomes incorporated in one's body so that the two form a new, more complex organism. The mitochondria that provide the energy for our bodies' cells were at one time, in the distant past, free-living creatures in their own right. They became incorporated in a cell at some point in history, and the result of the merger became a viable, indeed more viable, new organism.

What happened to the selfhood of the component creatures? Does each of my cells have a sense of its own individual existence? What does that mean in terms of identity--theirs and mine?

It's a mystery, and it is absorbing me.