Multidimensional Man
Out of print and I don't recall the author. I read a xerox
copy. The notion is that what we perceive is a slice of what is. How to change
view by changing dimensionality of the observation. I dreamt about the concept
one night and sent an email to Bob Burchfield describing the loss
of distinction in higher order dimensions.
A Brief History of Everything
Ken Wilber
An integrated philosophy concerning man's place in the holarchy.
The evolution of the I and the we, both internally and externally. A history
of mankind's society and science. The evolution of the species and the
evolution of consciousness in man -- and the role that disruptions in
that evolution play in mental and cultural health.
"By any other name, what is that self-transcending creativity/ Spirit, yes? In a certain sense. The Big Bang has made idealist out of anybody who thinks. Foirst there was absolutely nothing, then bang! something. This is beyond weird. Out of sheerest emptiness, manifestation arises."
"...something other than chance is pushing the universe. There is a formative drive, a telos, to the Kosmos. It has a direction. It is going somewhere."
"In other words, the so-called holists who deny holarchy are really 'heapists.' They're really reductionists in drag."
"Each level transcends and includes its predecessor. Spirit transcends all, so it includes all. It is utterly beyond this world, but utterly embraces every single holon in this world. So Spirit is both the highest level in the holarchy, but its also the paper on which the entire holarchy is written. It's the highest rung in the ladder, but it's also the word out of which the entire ladder is made."
"The very Spirit in us is invited to become self-conscious, or even, as some would say, superconscious. Depth increase from subconsious to selfconscious to superconscious, on the way to its own shocking recognition, utterly one with the radiant All, and we awaken as that oneness. What do you think? Is that crazy? Are the mystics and sages insane? Because they all tell variations on this same story, don't they? The story of awakening one morning and discovering that you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion. Yes, maybe they are crazy, these divine fools. Maybe they are mumbling idiots in the face of the Abyss. Maybe they need a nice understanding therapist. Yes, I'm sure that would help.
But then I wonder... tell me: is that story, sung by mystics and sages the world over, any crazier than the scientific materialism story, which is that the entire sequence is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing? Listen very carefully -- just which of those two stories actually sounds totally insane?"
There are many ways to summarize the limitations of the representation paradigm, the idea that knowledge consists basically in making maps of the world. But the simplest way to state the problem with maps is: they leave out the mapmaker... And no matter how different the various postmodern attacks were, they were all united in an attack on the representation paradigm.
Everything is "socially constructed" -- this is the mantra of the extremist wing of postmodernisms. They think that different cultural worldviews are entirely arbitrary, anchored in nothing but power or prejudice or some "ism" or another -- sexism, racism, specieism, phallocentrism, capitalism, logocentrism, or my favortie, phallogocentrism. Wow! Does that puppy come with batteries or what?
From attunement to atonement to at-onement: we find ourselves in the overpowering embrace of a Kosmic sympathy on the very verge of Kosmic consciousness itself. But we must listen very carefully.
Once you go from interior to exterior, from mind to brain, from compassion to serotonin, you go from value to valueless, from virtue to virtueless, from worth to worthless. And if you think that the great it-domain is the only reality, then you will maintain that all values and all virtues are "merely subjective." That is, they are personal choices not anchored in any sort of substantive reality... You will not see that consciousness is intrinsic to the Kosmos.
If the self represses or disassociates aspects of itself, it will have less potential left for further evolution...
It has tasted everything that the personal realm can offer, and it's not enough. The world has started to go flat in its appeal. No experience tastes good anymore. Nothing satisfies anymore. Nothing is worth pursuing anymore. Not because one has failed to get these rewards, but precisely because one has achieved them royally, tasted it all , and found it all lacking.
'There is a subtle essence that pervades all reality,' begins one of the most famous answers to that question. 'It is the reality of all that is, and the foundation of all that is. That essence is all. That essence is the real. And thou, thou art that.'
Science became scientism. When only objective 'its' with simple location are really real... There is no real Spirit, there is no real mind, there is only empirical nature... The great Holarchy utterly collapsed like a house of cards in an afternoon gust, and in its place we find only the web of nature with its simple location. And thus, welcome to the purely Descended world. All the truth that is fit to know is the truth of 'its,' of mononature, of objective and empirical processes -- an no Ascent of any variety is required. The Descended grid of flatland, the world of all proper troglodytes, hollow to the core.
Collapsed modernity: trashy, kitschy, ironic. The most advanced, the most enlightened, the most progressive society ever -- and it spends its time rummaging in the ontological basement, a trashed out bag lady, looking for a lost god which it wouldn't accept even it it found it.
What computer technology means is that the techno-base can support a worldcentric perspectivism, a global consciousness, but it does not in any way guarantee it... When worldcentric means are presented to less than worldcentric individuals, those means are simply used (and abused) to further (their) agendas... The Nazis would have loved the Net.
Out of Control
Kevin Kelley
The biology of machines. Are we prepared to yield central autocratic control
to the swarm. Where will massive and parallel 'dumbness' accomplish more
than localized brilliance?
"Computers -- the gizmos themselves -- have far
less to do with techie enthusiasm than som half-understood resonance to The
Great Work: hardwiring collective consciousness, creating Planetary Mind.
Telhard de Chardin wrote about this enterprise many years ago and would be appalled
by the prosaic nature of the tools we will use to bring it about. But
I think there is something sweetly ironic that the ladder of his Omega
Point might be built by engineers and not mystics."
- John Perry Barlow (consultant, lyricist); e-mail to Kevin Kelly -
"To
be a god, at least to be a creative one, one must relinquish control and embrace
uncertainty. Absolute control is
absolutely boring. To birth the
new, the unexpected, the truly novel - that is, to be genuinely surprised -
one must surrender the seat of power to the mob below.
The great irony of god games is that letting go is the only way to win."
(see end of this section for more complete context
of above quote)
"That leads us to wonder what else is packed into the bee that we haven't
seen yet? Or what else is packed into the hive that has not yet appeared
because there haven't been enough honeybee hives in a row all at once?
And for that matter, what is contained in a human that will not emerge until
we are all interconnected by wires and politics? The most unexpected things
will brew in this bionic hivelike supermind."
"Mideval life was remarkably unnarcissistic. Common folk had only vague notions of their own image in the broad sense. On the other hand, the modern world is being paved with mirrors."
"Perhaps the most useful lesson of coevolution for "wann-a-be" gods is that in coevolutionary worlds control and secrecy are counterproductive. In this era, openness wins, central control is lost, and stability is a state of perpetual almost falling insured by constant error."
"What little time left in this century is rehearsal time for the chief psychological chore of the 21st century -- letting go; with dignity."
********************
Kevin
Kelly, Out of Control, pg. 256
As
Moses tells the story, on the sixth day of creation, that is at the eleventh
hour of a particularly frantic creative bout, the god kneaded some clayey earth
and in an almost playful gesture, crafted a tiny model to dwell in his new world.
This god, Yahweh, was an unspeakably mighty inventor who built his universe
merely by thinking aloud. He had
been able to do the rest of his creation in his head, but this part required
some fiddling. The final handtuned
model -- a blinking, dazed thing, a "man" as Yahweh called him - was
to be a bit more than the other creatures the almighty made that week.
This
one was to be a model in imitation of the great Yahweh himself.
In some cybernetic way the man was to be a simulacra of Yahweh.
As
Yahweh was a creator, this model would also create in simulation of Yahweh's
creativity. As Yahweh had free
will and loved, this model was to have free will and love in reflection of Yahweh.
So Yahweh endowed the model the same type of true creativity he himself
possessed.
Free
will and creativity meant an open-ended world with no limits.
Anything could be imagined, anything could be done.
This meant that the man-thing could be creatively hateful as well as
creatively loving (although Yahweh attempted to encode heuristics in the model
to help it decide).
Now
Yahweh himself was outside of time, beyond space and form, and unlimited in
scope - ultimate software. So making
a model of himself that could operate in bounded material, limited in scale,
and constrained by time was not a cinch.
By definition, the model wasn't perfect.
To
continue where Moses left off, Yahweh's man-thing has been around in creation
for millennia, long enough to pick up the patterns of birth, being, and becoming.
A few bold man -things have had a recurring dream: to do as Yahweh did
and make a model of themselves -a simulacra that will spring from their own
hands and in its turn create novelty freely as Yahweh and man-things can.
So
by now some of Yahweh's creatures have begun to gather minerals from the earth
to build their own model creatures. Like
Yahweh, they have given their created model a name. But in the cursed Babel of man-things, it has many designations:
automata, robot, golem, droid, homunculus, simulacra.
The
simulacra they have built so far vary.
Some species, such as computer viruses, are more spirit than flesh.
Others species of simulacra exist on another plane of being - virtual
space. And some simulacra, like
the kind marching forward in SIMNET, are terrifying hybrids between the real
and the hyperreal.
The
rest of the man-things are perplexed by the dream of the model builders.
Some of the curious bystanders cheer:
how wonderful to reenact Yahweh's incomparable creation!
Others are worried; there goes our humanity.
It's a good question. Will
creating our own simulacra complete Yahweh's genesis in an act of true flattery?
Or does it commence mankind's demise in the most foolish audacity?
Is
the work of the model-making-its-own-model a sacrament or a blasphemy?
One
thing the man-creature knows for sure:
making models of themselves is no cinch.
The
other thing the man-things should know is that their models won't be perfect,
either. Nor will these imperfect
creations be under godly control. To
succeed at all in creating a creative creature, the creators have to turn over
control to the created, just as Yahweh relinquished control to them.
To
be a god, at least to be a creative one, one must relinquish control and embrace
uncertainty. Absolute control is
absolutely boring. To birth the
new, the unexpected, the truly novel - that is, to be genuinely surprised -
one must surrender the seat of power to the mob below.
The
great irony of god games is that letting go is the only way to win.
Quarks, Chaos and Christianity
John Polkinghorne
A view of God and science as seen through the eyes of a physicist and Anglican
priest. Commendable for its good sense, its balanced acceptance of truth
from both quarters and its lack of paranoia about science's threat to religion.
Polkinghorne acknowledges the schism between fundamental religious beliefs and
scientific theories but surprisingly lays a great deal of the fault at the feet
of theologians who have fallen prey to "the God of the gaps."
This longheld practice of relegating God to the domain of the "unexplained"
has necessitated His diminishing role as scientific theories advance.
First, gravity replaced the God that pushed the stars and planets about the
heavens, then evolution, in spite of its numerous faults, went a long way to
explaining the diversity and harmony in nature, and today we find life itself
on the verge of being prepared in the laboratory. Polkinghorne wisely
teaches that through the scientific advances of the past and all those yet to
come, God will remain "where he was all along;" he never was nor ever
will be the 'God of the gaps.' (or "the incredible shrinking God"
as a friend refers to this faulted concept of God.)
"I hardly need to labour the moral of this for theology. If the unpicturable world of electrons gives us some surprises, we shouldn't be too amazed if the unpicturable Gad has some surprises in store for us also…We cannot decide beforehand what the nature of reality (whether God or the physical world) is going to turn out to be. This can only be discovered by submitting ourselves to actual experience." p. 17.
"The trouble with the old arguments was that they were trying to give theological answers to what were actually scientific questions. We've learned that these scientific questions can be expected to receive scientific answers. Science can get on with its own task without needing a kind of spurious help from religion. To claim otherwise would be to make the mistake of the god of the gaps, where he popped up as the "explanation" of what was currently scientifically unknown. The trouble with that, like the Cheshire Cat, he tended to fade away." The God of the gaps was a theological mistake. If god's the Creator, he's somehow connected with the whole show, not just the difficult or murky bits of what's going on." p. 22.
"Steve Hawking in a famous passage in his book A Brief History of Time (Bantam Press 1988) writes, "If the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end; it would simply be. What place then for a creator?" Actually, it would be theologically naïve not to answer, Every place, as the Ordainer and Sustainer of all that is going on. God is not a God of the edges, with a vested interest in beginnings. He is the God of the whole show." p. 38.
"A fertile world must be neither too rigid, nor too loose. It needs both chance and necessity. Chance is the engine of novelty. Necessity is the preserver of fruitfulness." p.40. "What science tells us about the world and its history constrains what we may go on to believe about questions of deeper meaning and purpose, but it does not, by itself, determine what the answers to these questions should be." p.41.
"Monod and Dawkins like to apply to chance the adjective 'blind,' suggestive of purposelessness and meaninglessness, but we do not need to be beguiled by their tendentious choice of words."
Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges
After this, maybe you'd like to curl up with some fiction. For that I'd
recommend Borges' Labyrinths. This is a collection of exemplary essays
by the Argentinian author. Each has an almost mathematical structure.
Though this anthology consists of 23 short stories, 10 essays and 8 parables,
I shall quote from only three.
"The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlon's conjectural Ursprache..."
"...skillfully he begins by stressing the superfluity of Judas' act... Ergo, Judas' betrayal was not accidental; it was a preordained fact which has its mysterious place in the economy of redemption... The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, vilifies and mortifies his flesh; Judas did the same with his spirit. With terrible lucidity he premeditated his sins. He acted with enormous humility, he believed himself unworthy of being good."
"They knew that in an infinite period of time, all things happen to all men... every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, or the faithful presage of others that in the future will repeat it to a vertiginous degree. There is nothing that is not as if lost in a maze of indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can happen only once, nothing is preciously precarious. The elegiacal, the serious, the ceremonial, do not hold for the Immortals. Homer and I separated at the gates of Tangier; I think we did not even say goodbye."
"This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself. "
"In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englismen. "
"I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man -- even a single man, tens of centuries ago -- has perused and read this book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification. "
"In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing. "
Flatland
Edwin Abbott
Published in the 1800s. Something is going on here. Through the
reader's visits to the two dimensional world of Flatland one sees clearly the
foolishness and limitations of their worldview. This is made more acute
when one of these beings dreams of visiting a king "trapped" and "doomed,"
in spite of his lofty station, in the one-dimensional world of Lineland.
Of course one is left to wonder how much 'depth' we pathetic three dimensional
creatures are neglecting.
e: The Story
of a Number
Eli Maor, A very good
book. More number theory than history. Curious constructs of e and it's family
(i.e., i^e or e^e). For example, x^x^x^x… converges when x lies between 1/(e^e)
and e^(1/e). Cool! Succinct summary of the rules for differentiation.
Contains a well-described derivation of Euler's formula, e^pi*i + 1 = 0. "If remarkable is the appropriate description of equations 8 and 9, then one must search for an adequate word to describe the equation 11; it must surely rank among the most beautiful formulas in all of mathematics. Indeed, by rewriting it as e^(pi*I) + 1 = 0, we obtain a formula that connects the five most important constants of mathematics (and also the three most important operations - addition, multiplication and exponentiation.)"