You may (or may not) be aware of the discovery of many new planets outside our solar system but it has become something of a hot topic.  Universe (that cool blog that recently moved over to ScienceBlogs) had an interesting take on the idea of scale which included the discovery, and  Samuel Arbesman posted an interesting article on what he calls mesofacts that also included the discovery.  He’s right that some things change at a rate that means we just don’t notice them, even things that are important to our continued survival. I blame evolution. We are primed to notice sudden changes —  like the panther that seems suddenly really, really interested in our presence in her and her kits’ personal space. Those kinds of changes make or break our chances for immediate survival and so have taken the lead in our bodies ranking system for what is going to cause a sudden behavioural modifcation (you know like the fight or flight thingy). Often the slow changes (like in climate) do not trigger the hormonal stimulants which jump start behavioural change. After all, a bad harvest or two? We are omnivores, the barley is low? Go eat millet, or the goat, or last year’s walnuts, they last for a long time, even if bitter, and then there’s dandelion greens, it would take a pretty major cataclysm to wipe those suckers out. It is hunger, another kind of hormonal trigger, that causes us to seek out alternate food sources. What it doesn’t do is make us stop acting like giant earth-predators and unbalancing the larger biosphere. That is reason’s role, but it is a newby and apparently not up to the job yet.

As Claire Evans (the writer behind Universe) said, it really is about scale.  She thinks that we are about to experience that wrench that comes with the realization that we are not, in fact, the scale against which the universe developed. And of course what the universe’s non-human scale means is that the things that are most critical to us, the things we think matter the most, almost certainly have no corollary in the vast reaches of all-that-is.

Things like language, mind, awareness, these are human things in that they are the consequence of the evolution of our bodies and the ensuing social change the evolution of our bodies and brains has stimulated (and of course of any other group of creatures that might evolve toward the same evolutionary “goal” of a proactive intelligence capable of rapid learning as a member of a deeply social species). There are so many philosophers that have talked of our capacity for awareness as if it is an attribute worthy of universal acclaim, as if, at bottom, awareness must be a fundamental principle of the universe like mass or the speed of light. This is the power of the meso-world on us. Call it middle earth or midgaard, it is a fantasy universe where things are in fact human-sized and human oriented. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the universe, we do not actually live in middle earth.

Now’s a good time to go watch a short video called The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds.

And that’s just starting with the formation of the earth.  We barely register. In fact the only reason we do is because the creator of the video is human and probably thinks our existence matters. But to be fair I suppose we have made an impact as far as the earth is concerned. Well at least for this particular set of life forms that may well suffer extinction earlier than would have happened without our presence. But extinctions are a regular part of earth history so even this is nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Can you imagine a video “The Evolution of the Solar System in 60 Seconds“? Or “The Evolution of the Universe…”? We wouldn’t be a blip. I mean even the formation of the earth would barely register in the second imagined film.

I sometimes wonder what philosophy would be if we could get outside our middle-earth mindset. And teleology without a human orientation?  That would be fun.  Maybe the universe has been evolving all along toward the mechanisms that make a three toed sloth capable of enormous body temperature variation. Or maybe it is all about bioluminescence. Or the cephlapod ink sac. Or maybe life was just an accident on the way to limestone and the karst lands and their elemental denizens.

Wouldn’t that be fun? — to find out we do inhabit middle earth but that it was created in the image of a set of caves carved by the relationship between water, CaCO₃ and CaMg(CO₃)_2.

Personally I’d rather find out there is no meaning than find out I was an extra in someone else’s drama. That way I can make my own meaning, decide for myself what it all means, and then change my mind depending on how I feel that day. Much more fun, and in keeping with my middle-earth mind.

I mean, really, meaning?  Another of those human qualities that say nothing about the universe, whether big or small. But what else can guide us if not our quest for meaning?

Facts you say? Posh. Tish.

Found this at Deviant Art. Liked it, so I’m sharing it.

via Deviant Art

There’s just something about drawing attention to what it is to live a human life by using the house as a canvas that I find deeply evocative. Of what I am not sure, except – as I said – what it means to live a human life. Compare this to an earlier post. Which house would best represent who you are?

via Wooster Collective

Now it may just be me, but I can’t help wonder if these movie makers are Pharyngula fans.

via Bioephemera (great, great site)

And this:

How cool is this stuff!

The creator: Matthew Gordon Long, if you want to check him out. Do have a look at his new blog.

although noting what what I am not sure, but I like it, I really like it,

by an artist named Pauline Wooley.

This is from a series called “Emergence.” She focuses on the structures of things in the universe (cells and planetary surfaces, for example) and gives a view of them filtered through human experience and by virtue of that makes them meaningful to us in a way that is just at the edge of intelligibility. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.

There’s much to admire about abstract art and occasionally it is truly evocative and deeply emotional, but there is something about the direct representation of the actual world that reaches me in ways I don’t seem to be able to match with non-representative art. And there’s a special class, with special powers, for organic subjects.

I found the work of Caren Hein recently. She attends to this special class in the form of architectural drawing and plants.  There is something Victorian about her work — in the deep love of her subject, the intense devotion she has to light, form and detail. It’s not just a photographic record (no slight to the art of photography meant), but an attempt to render the luminosity of life, the thing that breathes through all beauty, that makes us beautiful along with the rest of the world, a beauty of resplendent order and deeply moving pattern. Her paintings are like reading John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. Or maybe, even better, a cross between Ruskin and Beatrix Potter. Illumination and care in one package.

I’m no expert on photography but it seems to me that photographs exist in some uneasy place between what we know as the mutable ways of memory and the desire for an absolute record of what was. So you get all those memento mori photographs of dead children from the early days of photography, the visual ethnographies of “vanishing” civilizations, the records of “pristine” landscapes prior to the influx of settlers. You also get the shots of a curve, of shadows, of drapery that alternatively masks and reveals the human shape — these shots that begin the tale of perceptual shift, of the essential fluidity of the world in which we live. I tend to gravitate toward the second type simply because I tend toward relativity rather than absolutism.

Given the nature of photography and the eye, pictures often speak with a spatial grammar that takes for granted the standard 3-dimensional spatial reality we perceptually inhabit. Within that basic world the artist often plays with light and shadow, shape and texture, all things which make explicit reference to that 3-D reality. The techniques make us aware of the possibilities of space in new ways. But there are other ways of seeing, of organizing and referencing perception, and one of them is the time dimension. I haven’t seen that many photographers that play with time but today, when I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery, I saw an exhibition of the photographs of Scott McFarland. My.

Much of his work stood out for me. It was  a bit overwhelming to tell the truth so after I saw these two pictures below, I just couldn’t take any more in and I left. I work just down the street and plan to go back after work tomorrow but in the meantime I’ll have to think about my reactions. What he does with time in these two pieces seems to me quite important for a number of reasons. Of course there is deconstructing the idea of photography as some sort of direct link between our visual sense and some idea of objective truth, but that seems to me far less important than what he seems to be saying about time and its relationship with the specific disposition of the world of objects.  If you look at the two photos, you will see that several different times of the year are represented in each photo and then presented to our eye as if they were one unified time. I have to say that does all kinds of weird things to my head. I suppose that is because my experience of time is strongly cyclic, with each season, interpenetrating the next for sure, but still, resolutely coming one after the other after the other. What the photographs do is blow that up and say, nope, it is really this way. I like that, even if it is discombobulating.

From the Wooster Collective

There is something about this. To some degree it reminds me of Arthur, you know The Tick’s sidekick. But not really. And of course there’s Where the Wild Things Are. Closer.

There’s something about the ears, the wonderful colours and the facial expression. Together they are haunting. The paint cans on the right of the picture add to whatever sense it is this bit of art is evoking. A sense of self-referentiality? The moment of the birth of awareness? The simultaneous perception, proprioception and the understanding that all of the various layers of awareness are all really awareness of the same thing? A feeling of self-creation, and being-created-by and, nevertheless, the intense feeling of unification?

The poet Robinson Jeffers developed a concept called inhumanism. The idea is to shift the metaphorical center of the universe away from what it is to be human to the larger non-human world — in other words, to be able to appreciate the startling beauty of existence human beings need to be able to recognize our limited role, and therefore, our actual place in the greater organization of all-that-is.

That’s all good as far as I am concerned. The problem is that in much of Jeffers’ work there is still that moral stain of “what should be.” Morality, a human invention to meet our evolutionary needs, is not inhuman.  Judging our place in all-that-is through the lens of what-should-be falls short of the idea of booting us out of the center of the universe.
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Tabitha Vevers is an artist. She has a number of series of paintings, and this one where she depicts dreams that she has collected from people. She painted them over a period of 4 years. The ways she depicts the dreams is rather literal.  That is she presents the dream world experienced by the dreamers as a real world with empirical validity and narrative coherence.  In her words: “I have tried to depict the scenes as actual events in keeping with the spirit of the dreams rather than trying to interpret them or fabricate a dream-like pastiche.”

This, it seems to me, is an important component of her “vision,” that is, of her assumptions about the nature of the world. It assumes that the world of  subjective feeling is as coherent and as real as the world of shared objectivity that we call being awake. It does not assume that the two worlds are the same but that that we live in both simultaneously. Vevers work doesn’t seem to suggest that she has a problem with that. I really like that about her work. In a way these paintings are like Tarot cards; they suggest a direct correspondence between the phenomenal and shared worlds that can be read and understood as a kind of narrative.

Anyway, these are my favourite three: