The successful scientist thinks like a poet but works like a bookkeeper.

heh

An interesting article about the capacity of abstraction we humans have.  I do think the author is correct in saying that to understand the arts, and generally the humanities, we need to come to some better understanding of the evolutionary and cognitive forces involved in our way of  ”minding” the world.

One interesting thing about the article is what it doesn’t say, or rather the roads glimpsed but untrodden. For example, he talks a great deal about our relative sensory deprivation as a species, but doesn’t connect that to the development of arts as a way of compensation for that lack.

I do wonder why not.

love science and tech

From reality by way of abstraction to natural law, and from law back again to reality— it is over this closed path that science walks. The correctness of a theory, and indeed the correctness of the whole methodology, is thus ensured by this twofold connection with reality.

As we shall see, this insight was long in coming, and it established itself only after significant intellectual struggle. No matter how obvious we consider this method to be today, historically it was not so at all.

Heh. Still, despite the author’s faith in the sensibility of the contemporary human mind, the book is fabulous. The quotations, the illustrations, and – of course – the text are all full of delights.

Here’s another quote:

To appreciate the beauty of (a) the general theory of relativity, (b) a sculpture, or (c) a poem, one requires, in each case, a certain willingness to learn and a considerable investment of intellectual effort. Einstein’s equation, which brings together the ideas of mass and the geometry of space, yields astounding new knowledge about our entire universe.

Uhuh. The willingness to learn – to recognize an inner lack of understanding and basic knowledge – that’s the ticket. It’s also the biggest road block because many people are deeply invested in an idea of themselves as canny and essentially “in the know”. Letting go of that can prove pretty much impossible. It’s as if they think they’ll die if it gets known they don’t understand the way the world works. So even when they make a great big booboo (remember the banana as a proof of god?), do they say, oh I guess my premise was wrong?  Apparently not, instead he says the atheists took it all out of context.

Heh.

Anyway, read Simonyi. It may not make you laugh like Comfort does but at least you’ll have something beautiful in front of your face.

H0w one gets through depends on many things I suppose, but they all amount to one of two things. The first is distraction. The second is learning to bear the pain without attaching meaning to it.

For me in this particular case of grief, my distraction has come from Molecular Biology of the Gene.  As it happens the book arrived the day before my cat began her final approach to death. When I came home that night after her heart stopped, I went down into sleep and stayed there until the next day. Shock is exhausting.

Then I woke and wished I hadn’t. I got up did the things that had to be done (stepped around the cat puke on the floor and just left it) and returned to bed as soon as I could. I picked up Molecular Biology and started reading.

Science is about as perfect a world as can exist I think. There are questions. There are answers. Then there are more questions. And more answers. Hours went by without much pain. There’d be a sharp image of my cat struggling to take a breath just a minute or so before she died, but then the difficulties of the catabolite gene activator protein would save me and the horror of that image would fade again and my  mind would grapple with science that is, frankly, beyond my rather shoddy knowledge base.

Funny that I’ve been avoiding all to do with poetry.

Of course there are times when even the distractions don’t work. Those sharp needles of memory will burst through even the geometry of  the λ repressor-operator complex.  The temptation to add suffering to pain at those moments is rather strong. You know .. the why question, which is unanswerable (except in empirical terms) but always good for guilt and other self-destructive feelings. There is no why  of this except age, a failing heart, and those kinds of things. I’m glad we’re allowed to euthanize our pets when they are in extremis.  She would have died that night anyway, but this way I was able to give her some relief from the terror of not being able to breathe: oxygen therapy and then pentobarbitol and rapid cessation of any feeling at all.

What is left is my own pain. She was born into my hands. She died there too. And now all that is left of that relationship is an empty shoulder where she used to ride. But at least she isn’t sick, isn’t in pain, isn’t scared; I’ve been through this before when my son died, so I know I can manage. And I have Watson et al. So in time, I’ll know a bit more molecular biology, and the pain will back away.

For this post I just want to speak a bit about Jakob von Uexküll and some of his weird-assed ideas.

To begin, please remember that Jakob was born in 1864, Darwin’s Origin was published in 1859 and the core of classical genetics wasn’t in place until 1915.

Weird-assed idea number 1: natural selection is inadequate to explain “the orientation of present features and behaviours toward future ends–purposefulness.” (Dorion Sagan, from Unwelt After Uexküll (introduction, page 3).

Weird-assed idea number 2: “nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology worthy of the name” (same set of Sagan passages)

Weird-assed idea number 3: Meaning has priority in all living beings.

Weird-assed idea number 4: There’s a master plan somewhere outside of individual form that guides “purpose.”

Weird-assed idea number 5: All living beings are subjects, and not mere objects.

Weird-assed idea number 6: “When a dog runs, the animal moves its feet, i.e., the harmony of the footsteps is centrally controlled. But in the case of a starfish we say: ‘When a starfish moves, the legs move the animal.’ That is, the harmony of the movement is in the legs themselves. It is like an orchestra that can play without a conductor.” The starfish’s legs take the starfish along, whereas you decide where you want your feet to go.” (Dorion Sagan again)

There are other weird ideas but that’s enough to go on with.

Pick them apart. To say “meaning has priority in all living beings” implies that context and environment takes priority because meaning is only found in the relationship between one form and another. That’s actually quite a radical suggestion even today, but to understand what the author was really doing one has to understand, or at least be familiar with, the fight over the concept of life form as subject or object, the fight over the concept of bio-mechanism.

Animals are mere machines: If you could go back in time would you kill Descartes?

I get the concern to pull back from any idea that the non-human living world is mechanistic in the same way my blender is mechanistic but a basic grounding in science today should have already blown that idea apart. But remember Jakob isn’t today’s scientist. He’s still immersed in the idea of vitalism.

Here’s how Jakob shows that particular fight: “We ask a simple question: Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject?”

And there you go: down the rabbit hole of assumed shit.

In today’s parlance the machine and the operator are one.  To separate them is to miss the point of the wonders of complex chemical signalling and information processing that occur in the inanimate world, and of which the animate (living) world make use.

So here’s the thing…can we still make use of the weird-assed ideas given vitalism’s influence in Jakob’s work?

Oh yes, I think so. In fact it’s a good thing to do so because we get more practice in pulling apart insight and interpretation. The idea that purpose is a hall-mark of life forms is an insight. Attributing that fact to some “master-plan” is interpretation.

Once purpose is divorced from teleology one can generate new interpretations based on the wealth of fact we’ve gained in recent decades.

And then in a few more decades we’ll do the same with today’s interpretations.

And so science, and thinking, proceed.

The material order is limitless in every respect, rendering the concepts of “nothingness” or “nonbeing” meaningless There can be no “nothingness” or “nonbeing” in the plenitude of being postulated by materialism, only varieties of material being. This plenitude of being has no gaps, breaks, or noncontinuities. There is no immaterial or supernatural region zoned off from it or from which it is zoned off. The notion of such a zoning is both logically incoherent and inconsistent with everything known about the material order.

This was the second paragraph I read in the book. It’s the summary definition at the end, and once completed, I returned to the actual beginning of the book assured that here was something I wanted to grasp in as much detail of which I am capable. Of course, I know nothing about his developed argument yet, nor do I know anything about the author, so my “love” may well modify over the coming chapters, but at the moment, to have a book that begins with the assumption of a material universe, and appears about to proceed with a definition of matter, well, like I said, I think I’m in love.

Partly this visceral response is because the central question for me has never been “if not materialism then what”. Materialism is the only viable option. The question has always been how to define “matter” correctly.  No hard little bits of atom-balls here. No passive, inert prima materia. Matter is something else entirely.

He goes on to summarize our current conception of “matter”. Here is a piece.

The essential component of the material order is a substance whose nature is not yet and may never be fully known or understood. Current theory suggests that the substance reflects the symmetries of time, change, and parity, which are found only in concentrations of mass-energy exceeding the limits of the known laws of physics. At such levels of concentration, mass, energy, time, and space are perhaps either indistinguishable parts of a metacosmic force field or one-dimensional strings of energy whose shape and tension determine everything else in the cosmos.

I mean! How wonderful a beginning! I am soooooooo happy!

In addition to aesthetics, McCarthy noted a deeper link between great science and great writing. “Both involve curiosity, taking risks, thinking in an adventurous manner, and being willing to say something 9/10ths of people will say is wrong.”

Here’s another bit:

Rebecca Saxe, a neuropsychologist at MIT, sat down next to Shepard and the two began discussing how the media often creates a misleading impression of scientists and artists. “The point of science journalism is an answer. But science is fundamentally human in that it involves not understanding things. We actually spend a lot of time in pursuit of the questions,” she said. Just as science journalism tends to emphasize only results, interviews with authors often seek a simplistic summation of an entire work. “I can never answer the question ‘What’s it about?’” Shepard said. “Some people approach artists as if they have a secret. And if only they’d give it up then we could stop thinking about them.”

And that’s it I think_the desire for closure, for an answer, when it is stronger than the capacity to remain open to alternatives, to the questions which lurk in places our eyes cannot see. Such a desire for a narrative with an assured ending is both fundamentally unscientific and fundamentally inartistic.

I do not want to transmit the perception that organic metaphors are more truthful, useful, or beautiful than the mechanistic ones. Mechanistic metaphors seem more objective than organic ones, but I believe comparing the brain to a computer has the same heuristic value as comparing the brain to a cauliflower. Depending on where you put the focus of your analysis, you will highlight or hide some important characteristics about the brain. Both systems of metaphors give us opposite, but complementary intellectual models, and both have their own esthetic beauty. For instance, it is interesting to note that the telegraph-nervous system model rejected by Cajal to explain the plasticity of the cerebral cortex was useful for Hodgkin and Huxley (1952) in their Nobel Prize-winning studies of nerve action potential generation and propagation. They used the differential equation that describes coaxial cable transmission (the spatiotemporal “Telegrapher’s equation,” which had been developed to model signal propagation for the design of the transatlantic undersea cable) (Daugman, 2001). Reciprocally, the use of brain’s computer analogies has been very useful for the development of new technologies and important scientific fields like cybernetics and artificial intelligence (AI) research. These new technologies have also enhanced the development of neuroscience.

Although from a pragmatic point of view, the mechanistic metaphors can be more useful for scientists to continue their research about the brain, I find them negative as neurocultural products because they help to create a mechanical, deterministic, and reductionist vision of the human being. They hide some essential characteristics about the brain (natural origin, plasticity, self-organization, self-consciousness, emotional behavior, etc.). The vision of the nervous system that neuroculture creates is essential to envisioning ourselves and developing our life projects. From an educational perspective, I found more value to turn to another famous art-related metaphor of Cajal (1901) that envisions us as self-builders of our projects:

“Every man if he so desires becomes sculptor of his own brain.”

That idea, that we are our own creators is delightfully reflexive – like that drawing of the two hands simultaneously creating each other. And as he points out in the article, metaphors like this can be useful as a way of releasing creativity in our experience of and thinking about our selves and our world. Metaphors, whether mechanical or organic, are also dangerous. If we begin to think “this is the real solution” we lose the power of the metaphor, lose our creative push, and just become dogma.

Given the vital importance science plays in all the foundational aspects of our society, I am glad there are artists working this way, just as I am glad that there are scientists are exploring what it means to do art.

Do an experiment for me. Because science involves getting your hands dirty (sometimes literally). Go for a walk outside and clear your mind. Don’t think about work or school or whatever your friends are doing. Just clear it out so you have room to appreciate what you’re seeing. Look at trees, clouds, shadows. Animals if there are any around. Flowers. Take a close look at plants and try to find insects on them. Look at lamp posts, at fences, at cracked bits of paving, at bicycles. Go up close and have a good look at peeling paint, spots of rust, chips, and cracks. Look at dirt. Look at water.

Think a little bit about how each of these things came to be there, how it works, what makes it look the way it does. In some cases you might know. Think about metal and its interaction with oxygen in the air, the exchange of electrons that leads to chemical bonding, and how that forms spots of rust. In some cases you might not know. But have a think anyway – wonder why the shadows of things close to the ground have sharp edges, while the shadows of things further away are softer and blurry. And if you find something that you don’t understand deeply, remember it when you go back inside and look it up and try to find out why.

Now when you look at the world in this way, don’t you find it more amazing and interesting and wonderful than when you wander around in a daze thinking about work or school or not missing your bus or whatever?

Cathy sent me a link to this article on Irregular Webcomic!. It’s essentially an explanation of why knowing science adds to your sense of awe and wonder with the world instead of detracting from it as (apparently) so many claim and/or fear.

The key sentence:

Understanding leads to appreciation.

Yes it does.

But it also requires a certain level of comfort with change because new understanding also leads to new ways of thinking. And that can be scary.

But there’s another critical thing here. People often seem to assume that feelings are irretrievably linked to a specific narrative. So if you’ve found or created a life narrative (an explanation that explains your situation to yourself – that makes sense of it and thereby gives you some little sense of control) that provides moments of hope, or awe, or wonder, the threat in losing that narrative (of having it proved wrong, for example) is that we will simultaneously lose those precious feelings. And sometimes it is only that hope that we will, in some future moment, feel that awe or wonder that keeps us going.

Feel lousy this morning? You can get up and move through the morning work routine because your story tells you that there will be a payoff at some point in the future. In times like those it’s really hard to give up the story – even when the narrative is itself the reason you feel so frakkin lousy (which btw is often the case).

That’s really the point underneath the article. And it is important.

Our feelings are a critical point in any narrative, but the narrative is an ephemera compared to the feeling set. No matter how awful things get, we as a species still have the same set of feelings. We do hope and awe and wonder if we are slaves or if we are masters. It doesn’t matter what narrative we construct, those same feelings will find a home within the story.

So if feelings are not a useful criteria for choosing which narrative to live by, what criteria are appropriate?

Aha! Now that’s the question.

What’s your answer? (Mine was decided many decades ago, but I really do want your answers before I reveal mine. Post them to comments here or email me mary (at) tailfeather (dot) ca

Post post addition:

I wondered more about the idea of Feynman saying something silly, and so I went looking for it. It wasn’t hard to find.

So what happened to the old theory that I fell in love with as a youth? Well, I would say it’s become an old lady, that has very little attractive left in her and the young today will not have their hearts pound anymore when they look at her. But, we can say the best we can for any old woman, that she has been a very good mother and she has given birth to some very good children. And, I thank the Swedish Academy of Sciences for complimenting one of them. Thank you.

Has this silliness changed my mind about Feynman’s fine mind? Not at all. Would I have wanted to know him? Depends on what he would have done when I called him an idiot for using such a mean-spirited metaphor. Everything depends on what he did with the new data that an old woman has something of value that has nothing to do with what his dick responds to.  Anyone know if he was ever called on it?