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.

(Thanks Shannon for the pic.)

This seems to have come from engrish and if you have a peek over there you will find some howlers. Many of them have a sexual component almost certainly not intended by the product’s or service’s advertiser.  It makes me wonder what those fortune cookies really say. But really, isn’t that the real power of language and its relationship to meaning construction. All of a sudden what is visible are some of the deep webs which bind words together with the fine thread of categorical relationships and it makes you look around for other previously invisible things. If you think about the words “poisonous” and “rubbish” you can see how they really do fit together and if you work at it even a little you can stagger backwards into meaning-folds of the original language and take a guess at how “poisonous” is used more generally.  In other words, it gives us a glimpse of the connotations of “poisonous” in another’s context and by doing that, it makes temporarily visible our own contexts. It’s the difference, the dissonance, between the two that makes this funny.

Now that I find interesting.

To be honest it has been one long party since the opening ceremonies. I’m never downtown later than 11 so I don’t get the experience those who’ve been drinking so much that by midnight they turn into pickled pumpkins with fists but the Vancouver Police Department get to. So they tried to slow up the flow of the variously flavoured magic potions by closing liquor stores downtown at 7pm.

Here’s their second press release to announce a second night of early closures.  Bottom line:

The 7:00 p.m. closing time on Saturday night aided police efforts to curb flagrant liquor consumption and public intoxication seen in the Granville Entertainment District Friday night.

News 1130 is a local source for this kind of information, for those who don’t want to keep up with the media releases on the VPD site. However, it seems as if their editorial staff is either a little busy or someone is having a poetry moment. Here’s how News 1130 reported the above line:

They say the 7 p.m. closure on Saturday helped curb ‘fragrant liquor consumption and public intoxication’ as seen in the Granville Entertainment District, Friday night.

Please attend. In the first block quote the word is “flagrant.” In the second it is “fragant.”

Curb fragrant liquor consumption.

See what I mean. Definitely something going on there with the editor. Maybe cutting back on the booze and having a hard time of it?

(Thanks ittel for spotting this delightful lexemic confusion.)

Today in 1838: Emma Wedgwood and Charles Darwin became engaged. That’s what is at the core of November 11 for me. It’s the thing that holds all the rest of the pieces together.

I have a day off work today. Ostensibly this is to honor those that are dead in war. All week last week, and for the first part of this week, there have been old men in uniform with paper-covered cans and red plastic poppies camping in the corners of work-a-day high-rises quietly asking for money and to be remembered.

Here are some of the things I remember.
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The Daily Beast has a post of some famous authors and their self portraits.

Here’s one by Maurice Sendak.

Not too much of a surprise.

Here’s another by Jorge Luis Borges.

Now that’s interesting.

One more:
By Joan Didion

She thinks of herself as made up of words and numbers? I wonder what she thinks of Wittgenstein?

On Arts & Letters Daily I came across a link to an article titled “This Is Your Brain on Kafka.” The author summarizes the experimental data and has a concluding sentence that reads: “Man is perpetually in search of meaning, and if a Kafkaesque work of literature seems strange on the surface, our brains amp up to dig deeper and discover its underlying design.” So, yes. The absurd pushes us to think harder.

While I find that interesting, it made me think of Behaviourism, specifically schedules of reinforcement.  When chaos is introduced into the rewards given for certain behaviours (i.e. food pellets for pigeons pecking a spot on the wall or the burst of pleasure we get for “getting” the meaning of something), it makes the learned behaviour harder to destroy, makes it more resilient. You might even say it makes us learn better.  In other words, for us finding meaning is our reward just as the seed is for the bird; our learning is enhanced by a little chaos just as surely as the pigeon’s is.

That I find really, really interesting.

I have always thought that the wonderful thing about experience is that it can never be false. What I decide the experience means can be false, what actions I take based on the experience can be helpful or harmful, but experience itself simply happens. For example, it is not the experience of rage or fear that is the problem, it is what is done or not done, what meaning is attached to the experience that causes the problems. Usually, of course, ascribing meaning to experience happens before we actually think. We hear a voice in our head and assume that it is, for example, either schizophrenia or some sort of other-worldly message. Most often we simply accept the story that traditionally goes with a specific set of events. We go further. We equate the story to the event, assessing and locking reality into place in a way that affects our capacity to perceive.

Storying for humans is a feed-back loop between the outer and inner worlds of lived experience. We hear a voice in our head, and it is not just an experience that could have several different stories attached, we become, in our own mind, the story that is being told, and then we judge ourselves by its rules. We forget that it is just a story. We forget that story works more like a verb than a noun. We get caught up in the nounness of the world; we have an experience of voices, we attach to the experience what we have been told it means, we judge ourselves by the story, and in that moment we have gone from a being experiencing to either a schizophrenic or a divine messenger.

Frank Kermode in his book The Sense of an Ending suggests that we live in perpetual crisis because of the way we, in our various non-indigenous Western cultures, structure the story of what it means to be human. Simply, because of this apocalyptic story we know what our lives mean because we already know the ending. The apocalypse of the western and middle-eastern religious worlds has become, instead, the tragedy of the personal—a sense of failure, of powerlessness in the face of the inexorable—but the sense of crisis has yet to dissipate. Apocalypse and tragedy is, for us, the same story but on a more individual scale, despite all the evidence that we have that the “end” never actually arrives. “We continue to assume…that there is a tolerable degree of conformity between the disconfirmed apocalypse and a respectfully modern view of reality and the powers of the mind. In short, we retain our fictions of epoch, of decadence and renovation, and satisfy in various ways our clerkly skepticism about these and similar fictions.”

It is the fact that we have told many stories about how things were originally perfect for us, how they changed for the worse turning us into aliens in our own garden, and finally how it all gets resolved returning us forever to a state of communion, that gives us rules by which we can guide our behavior as well as the behavior of others. The story gives us the courage to face all that we don’t know, don’t understand and don’t control and because of that we refuse to remember that it is, in fact, a story.

What resists—to the death sometimes—any reasonable light is the idea of a knowable ending. If one precognition of “the end” does not come true, if instead the next day there is just the grocer and the dirty laundry and the rent due, instead of questioning whether there will in fact be a clean-cut end to all the chaos and the merely contingent, we assume we just got the date wrong. We want to know how life turns out. If we don’t know, if we can never know, then maybe all the choices we have made make no sense, have no meaning, have no purpose. “Men in the middest make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle. That is why the image of the end can never be permanently falsified.” We story away the unknown and adjust the details as things change, make “adjustments in the interest of reality as well as of control.”

The not knowing, the places that story cannot penetrate, the intellectual dark, all that we can never know, is an immane universe—and that void, those places that we can never understand, never encompass, never realize, make of both the metaphorical and physical dark a scary place.