Every day astonished-- simply to exist

I see. Why would I need dogma?

2008-06-29T23:13:19Z

This is a quote from André Comte-Sponville's The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality:

... it is probably no coincidence that mystics have so often gotten into trouble with their churches, when they had churches. Al-Hallaj was burned alive: Meister Eckehart and Fénelon were condemned by the pope.... These are not mere misunderstandings. The French Jesuit Henri-Marie Cardinal de Lubac said as much in his preface to a voluminous anthology of writings entitled The Mysticism of Mystics. A mystic, he wrote, is the very opposite of a prophet: "The prophet receives and transmits the word of God to which he adheres through faith; the mystic is sensitive to an inner light that exempts him from believing. The two are incompatible." This is because, as de Lubac said, "mysticism eats away at myth, and eventually the mystic can do without it; he tosses it away like an empty shell, while remaining indulgent toward those who still need it." What church or revealed religion could admit this?...

Far from being an oxymoron, the notion of atheistic mysticism-- or, as Father de Lubac puts it, mystical atheism-- then becomes self-evident, both as a concept and as a historically observed phenomenon, admittedly more so in the East than in the West. "In its final state of realization," our Jesuit priest went on, "natural mysticism would be naturalistic and verge opon 'pure mysticism'; no longer recognizing any object [I would say: any transcendent object], it could be described as the hypostatized mystical intuition: what appears to us as the profoundest form of atheism." Why not? Leibniz, in a letter written in 1695, had already pointed out that the writings of mystics contained "extremely bold passages..., almost verging on atheism." More radically, Alexander Kojève in his Reasoned History of Pagan Philosophy went so far as to suggest that "all authentic Mysticisms are in fact more or less atheistic." Though extreme, the express something important, namely... that religion and spirituality are two different things. Even the mystical experience, in which both can culminate, dissuades us from conflating the two.

Nietzsche summed it up famously when he wrote, "I am a mystic and believe in nothing." This is not as self-contradictory as it may seem. Mystics are defined are a certain type of experience, comprising self-evidence, plenitude, simplicity, eternity... All this leaves very little room for belief.

They see. Why would they need dogma?
Everything is present. Why would they need hope?
They live in eternity. Why would they need to wait for it?
They are already saved. Why would they need a religion?

Whether they are believers are not, mystics are those who no longer lack God. But is a God who is no longer lacking still God?

starting anew from the body

2008-05-15T09:14:16Z

I wanted to link to this essay by David Abram, Earth in Eclipse.

He criticizes the Platonic notion that reality is "elsewhere": that what we experience as the world is but a shadow of a purer form in an ideal realm.

This kind of thinking pervades, for example, monotheistic religions which teach that true existence, the eternal existence of one's soul, happens in a divine realm "elsewhere", not on earth in any case. Earth is just the placement exam.

It's kind of ironic, but material reductionists, who see themselves as the rational opposites of irrational religious types, are also led into a kind of Platonism, in which reality is "elsewhere"-- and "ultimate" explanations are to be found at the scale of invisible quarks, quanta, DNA.

Let's articulate a more holistic vision of things, in which reality is here and now, taking place at many different space-time scales. This is one of the starting points of phenomenology.

Here's one quote I liked from the post, in which Abrams describes the harmful effects of spending too much time in front of an electronic screen:

How much violence has been done, in the latter half of the twentieth century, by planting our children in front of the television! How many imaginations have been immobilized, how much sensorial curiosity and intercorporeal affinity has been stunted by our easy substitution of the television screen, with its eye-catching enticements, for the palpable presence of another person ready to accompany us on adventurous explorations of our mysterious locale? The screen of the computer, too, requires us to immobilize our gaze, and to place our other senses, along with our muscles, out of play. It isolates and engages only a narrow slice of a child's sensorium, inviting her to set aside the full-bodied world that she shares with the fiery sun and the swooping birds. We should be properly cautious, then, regarding all the new education initiatives aimed at "placing computers in every classroom." We should be profoundly skeptical about every exhortation by so-called experts to bring our children "on-line" as rapidly as possible in order to ensure their readiness and eventual competitiveness in the new "information economy." There is of course nothing wrong with the computer, nor with the astonishing realms now so rapidly being opened for us by the wondrous capability of our computers -- as long as we bring to these new realms both the curiosity and the restraint, the creativity and ethical savvy that grow out of our full-bodied encounters with others in the thick of the earthly sensuous. But if we plug our kids into the computer as soon as they are able to walk, we short-circuit the very process by which they could acquire such creativity and such restraint.

words inscribed on the flesh

2008-05-11T09:57:47Z

This week's Internet reading brings two visions of radical self-discipline.

First, Polish memory researcher Piotr Wozniak has cut himself off from almost all social interaction, to conduct a decades-long learning experiment on himself, at the heart of which is a computer flashcard program he invented called Supermemo.

By the mid-'90s, with SuperMemo growing more and more popular, Wozniak felt that his ability to rationally control his life was slipping away. "There were 80 phone calls per day to handle. There was no time for learning, no time for programming, no time for sleep," he recalls. In 1994, he disappeared for two weeks, leaving no information about where he was. The next year he was gone for 100 days. Each year, he has increased his time away. He doesn't own a phone. He ignores his email for months at a time. And though he holds a PhD and has published in academic journals, he never attends conferences or scientific meetings. Instead, Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he's working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions...

Wozniak's days are blocked into distinct periods: a creative period, a reading and studying period, an exercise period, an eating period, a resting period, and then a second creative period. He doesn't get up at a regular hour and is passionate against alarm clocks. If excitement over his research leads him to work into the night, he simply shifts to sleeping in the day. When he sits down for a session of incremental reading, he attends to whatever automatically appears on his computer screen, stopping the instant his mind begins to drift or his comprehension falls too low and then moving on to the next item in the queue. SuperMemo graphs a distribution of priorities that he can adjust as he goes. When he encounters a passage that he thinks he'll need to remember, he marks it; then it goes into a pattern of spaced repetition, and the information it contains will stay in his brain indefinitely."Once you get the snippets you need," Wozniak says, "your books disappear. They gradually evaporate. They have been translated into knowledge."

And here is an account of the work of occult/paranormal writer Charles Fort, (with thanks to Light Reading for the link) another similarly obsessed man who also gave himself over to a self-developed, idiosyncratic knowledge acquisition system.

In May 1911, the New York Public Library HAD been reopened in its new Beaux-Arts marble temple at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Now diligently working on his next project, Charles Fort walked to the library every morning, five days a week. He trudged up the flank of white polished steps, took a seat at one of the wide oak desks in the reading room beneath the gilt and coffered ceiling, removed his coat and slid it carefully over the back of his chair.
He read meteorology, natural history, shipping reports and science journals, squinting through his glasses as he turned page after page. With some regularity, he turned to the sheet of paper on the table and scratched a pencil note of some neglected phenomenon. All his notes were written on various grades of pulpy paper that were then ripped against a ruler into small rectangles. Some slips were torn from old correspondence; some were thin onion skin. Each piece was about 1½ by 2½ inches. Fort's handwriting was on a severe diagonal, lower left to upper right, tightly capturing the essence of each report with abbreviations. When he needed extra room for his pencil scrawl, a slip was torn long, then folded to match the dimensions of the other notes. An extremely elaborate note might require an entire sheet of paper, pleated and fixed with a paper clip so it ended up the same size. He managed to assemble 40,000 notes, by his own estimate, deliberately seeking information of the widest possible diversity: 'astronomy, sociology, psychology, deep-sea diving, navigation, surveying, volcanoes, religion, sexes, earthworms'.
In this way the entire world could be reduced to a row of 1½ by 2½ inch scraps, then stored away in Fort's pigeonholes that edged the walls of his apartment. After lunch, he walked home from the library and sorted his precious phenomena by date, then cross-referenced them with a second set of slips organised in broad categories. In the afternoon, he sat at the table and wrote.

Somehow, these two visions of discipline, of shutting out the world in order to give oneself over to a learning system one has devised, reminded me of the Officer in Kafka's Penal Colony, who was so proud of his sentencing machine that he straps himself into it as an act of faith. This sentencing machine works by literally inscribing words into a victim's flesh. Here is an earlier scene in the story, when the Officer is explaining the machine to the narrator of the story.

“Do you understand the process? The Harrow is starting to write. When it’s finished with the first part of the script on the man’s back, the layer of cotton wool rolls and turns the body slowly onto its side to give the Harrow a new area. Meanwhile those parts lacerated by the inscription are lying on the cotton wool which, because it has been specially treated, immediately stops the bleeding and prepares the script for a further deepening. Here, as the body continues to rotate, prongs on the edge of the Harrow then pull the cotton wool from the wounds, throw it into the pit, and the Harrow goes to work again. In this way it keeps making the inscription deeper for twelve hours. For the first six hours the condemned man goes on living almost as before. He suffers nothing but pain. After two hours, the felt is removed, for at that point the man has no more energy for screaming. Here at the head of the Bed warm rice pudding is put in this electrically heated bowl. From this the man, if he feels like it, can help himself to what he can lap up with his tongue. No one passes up this opportunity. I don’t know of a single one, and I have had a lot of experience. He first loses his pleasure in eating around the sixth hour. I usually kneel down at this point and observe the phenomenon. The man rarely swallows the last bit. He turns it around in his mouth and spits it into the pit. When he does that, I have to lean aside or else he’ll get me in the face. But how quiet the man becomes around the sixth hour! The most stupid of them begin to understand. It starts around the eyes and spreads out from there. A look that could tempt one to lie down under the Harrow. Nothing else happens. The man simply begins to decipher the inscription. He purses his lips, as if he is listening. You’ve seen that it’s not easy to figure out the inscription with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds. True, it takes a lot of work. It requires six hours to complete. But then the Harrow spits him right out and throws him into the pit, where he splashes down into the bloody water and cotton wool. Then the judgment is over, and we, the Soldier and I, quickly bury him.”

Now, Kafka's story can partially* be read as a metaphor for literature itself. For once you've read his stories, their images are seared into your brain forever. Who could forget Gregor Samsa, helplessly upended on his beetle-back, with his bug legs wriggling in the air? Or the sullen, emaciated hunger artist in his cage? Or the harrowing machine of the Penal Colony?

And this brings up an issue I have with the Supermemo program, as well as with Charle's Fort's pigeon-hole files. Flashcards are not the royal road to learning!

Sensuous experiences, vivid images, outlandish stories: we remember these much more readily than we do fact-fragments apportioned onto notecards. Text-based notecards don't take into account the natural dispensation of the brain to working holisticaly, with maps, narratives, and networks of relationships. There are so many things worth learning-- like violin playing or taichi-- that could never be captured in flashcards. Both Wozniak and Fort are obsessed with accumulating facts, but for me, the more important part of learning is in refining the gesture.

Also, too much isolation runs the risk of narrowing our thinking. Without the surprises and prickly challenges of collaboration and debate, most of us can't resist falling into a kind of epistemological arrogance, of seeking confirmation for our set ideas, rather than truly extending our thinking.

Finally, one of my personal heroes was also obsessed with memory, and spent years of his life making expeditions into his memory. His work, In Search of Lost Time, makes for great reading and offers an example of how the same obsession can be channeled into a radically beautiful form.

*I say partially because like all great works of art that capture the mystery of existence, Kafka's stories invite multiple readings, becoming a kind of mirror for the reader.

Let's put our heads together and come up with something brilliant

2008-05-05T10:23:37Z

The following quote is from a great article titled "In the Air" by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, drawing together diverse stories of paleontologists, scientists and inventors.

Merton’s observation about scientific geniuses is clearly not true of artistic geniuses, however. You can’t pool the talents of a dozen Salieris and get Mozart’s Requiem. You can’t put together a committee of really talented art students and get Matisse’s “La Danse.” A work of artistic genius is singular, and all the arguments over calculus, the accusations back and forth between the Bell and the Gray camps, and our persistent inability to come to terms with the existence of multiples are the result of our misplaced desire to impose the paradigm of artistic invention on a world where it doesn’t belong. Shakespeare owned Hamlet because he created him, as none other before or since could. Alexander Graham Bell owned the telephone only because his patent application landed on the examiner’s desk a few hours before Gray’s. The first kind of creation was sui generis; the second could be re-created in a warehouse outside Seattle.

Scientific knowledge is extended by people standing on the shoulders of giants.

Now, to what extent would this be true for art, or for philosophy?

I don't think any composer working today would deny the influence and inspiration of a Bach or a Beethoven. But an artist strives to develop an individual voice. For me the best art and philosophy present singular visions, a way of seeing the world, so there is that sense that each masterpiece is sui generis, standing alone slightly outside time.

As for philosophy, as Whitehead puts it, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Many philosophical books are written out as dialogs with dead philosophers. These virtual philosophical conversations are kind of like the talks we have here on LiveJournal or on other Internet forums. I know that many of the philosophical entries I've posted on this blog are notes on, or reactions to, Schopenhauer.

New tools enable us to pool together our efforts in ways not possible before. I loved this talk by Clay Shirky, in which he calculates the global cognitive surplus, the trillions of hours of leisure time freed up by the industrial revolution, which was previously spent watching television, and is increasingly spent on more interactive pursuits, like contributing to Wikipedia.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Here's a great TEDtalk by Howard Rheingold where he discusses such new models of cooperation, and proposes that we spend more time formally studying the art and science of cooperation.

handwriting, Darjeeling Limited, Skins

2008-04-29T17:29:19Z

peramble asks me, "why do you write?"

Well, writing is a bit like breathing for me. Even when I'm lying in the bath or chopping carrots for soup, I'll hear this crystalline voice in my mind, composing sentences, narrating. So the question has never been whether I'll write or not, but rather, what I will write.

While the Internet is great for writing, publishing and discussing short posts, it is, for me anyway, not a great tool for working on long forms. When I'm writing on a computer, it's just too tempting to wander off, exploring forest trails of blog posts and random articles, rather than staying in place building my little structure. So more and more I'm thinking of radically curtailing my use of the computer. If Shakespeare and Proust constructed such magnificent oeuvres with pen and paper, surely the same tools can serve my more modest project.

Also, I find that handwriting imposes a certain discipline on writing. On a computer I write in fits and starts, using the backspace button to unsay what I've just said. When I write by hand, I spend more energy thinking about what to say before saying it, so that I'm not constantly correcting myself. Because computer paragraphs are elastic, I am tempted to hover back and insert elaborations here and there. With handwriting, there is more of a forward drive; my attention is more whole, less fragmented.

And there's something beautiful about handwriting; the tidy parallel furrows on A4 paper, the the bristly lines I scrawl on index cards in the quaking metro, the underlinings in soft red pencil (I am very exigent about soft red pencils and currently use a Magenta Derwent watercolour pencil). The feeling of shuffling a deck of index cards in the hand, their edges dust-stained and shaggy.

Sometimes I think, "I'll stop blogging," so as to have more time to concentrate on long forms, but I get a lot from reading your posts, and from our dialog.

For example, catachrestic listed The Darjeeling Limited as one of his favorite films of 2007, so I went to see it last night with a friend. I think I was smiling or laughing through the entire film. Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody are so different, and yet totally convincing as brothers.

(skip these next few paragraphs if you don't want spoilers for The Darjeeling Limited)

When they first get settled in the train compartment, they each pull out some kind of pain medication (Francis has a cut and bruised face from a road accident; Peter has migraine headaches, presumably from wearing the prescription sunglasses of their deceased father; and Jack has existential angst). They each take their drug, and then, wordlessly, pass the drops and pills around, like bowls of salty snacks, so all three brothers can sample what each one is having. It's this kind of unspoken collusion, as well as the repetitive nature of their conflicts, that prove to us their personalities have been formed together.

There is so much more I could write about this film. But I'll just mention a few thoughts:

One of the running jokes of the film is that Francis always orders food for all of them, deciding what each person will eat. "Peter will have the cookies," Francis says to the waiter in the dining car. And when Peter protests, insisting on choosing his own dessert, what he ends up choosing anyway is... cookies.

At the end of their quest, when they've arrived at their mother's current humanitarian project at the foothills of the Himalayas, she gets them settled in a room, and, saying goodnight, announces to each of the brothers what he'll be having for breakfast the next day. It's a punchline moment straight out of physical comedy, because she uses exactly the same tone of voice, the same verbal formula, as Francis does each time he orders for his brothers.

That's when we understand that this habit started with her, that it was her misguided idea of mothering: making menu choices and other decisions for her sons. We can also reconstruct the past: when she went off on her humanitarian missions, the boys felt abandoned and Francis had to step into her shoes, taking up her bossy habit so they can be reminded of the motherly affection they long for. We also suddenly understand why the brothers have never learned to make their own decisions, or to be affectionate, but instead wander from one lukewarm project to the next, from one failed relationship to the next.

(end of Darjeeling spoilers, beginning of Skins spoilers)

On octoberxswimmer's recommendation, I've been watching Skins and am halfway through the second season. I've enjoyed the storytelling and the characters here as well. I don't have a receiving television, so I only watch TV series on DVD or on my computer. Often I'll watch a first season faithfully, but then become disappointed as the narrative formula shows through as the producers and writers strain to come up with a fresh episode.

I didn't want to sit through another scene, in 24, of "to hell with regulations, we have to torture this suspected terrorist now to get time-critical information"; or, in Prison Break 2, of "oh no! some random stranger has recognized the escaped convict as he is buying food or getting medical care!"

I couldn't stomach the prospect of yet another meandering Lost flashback.

I was also getting annoyed with the Desperate Housewives: the clumsy ditz, the icy perfectionist, and the self-centered sex kitten. I had the most sympathy for Lynette, the "working mother" but that wasn't enough to keep me watching.

Skins has sexy, sympathetic characters, and is funny and moving at the same time. The producers experiment with different narrative techniques. The first season closes with a surprisingly naturalistic musical number, when the entire cast sings Cat Stevens's Wild World. There are episodes of high camp-- such as when the group goes on a study tour in an ex-soviet republic (1:6), or when they put on a student production of "Osama, the Musical" (2:2). There's a midsummer's night dream which ends with lovemaking and sunrise on a beach (2:4); and a journey of transformation that draws on Greek Myths and Jungian psychology, and features shamanic initiations and tantric sex (2:6).

It's kind of sad, in a way. I continue to read a lot of books, but very few novels. I read a great many New Yorker articles but usually skip the short stories. It seems like I'll accept fiction in film, but not as easily in text, where my reading priority is now usually nonfiction. The last novel to really shake me was Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

I've always figured my long form writing project would fall into the genre of autobiographical essay, but this is a genre that poses its own problems, more psychological than anything; I am shy about revealing many of the details of my life, or those of my friends.

I would be curious to know if any of you think about the question, "what shall I write?" and how you go about responding.

What is theology?

2008-04-28T14:36:06Z

I loved this quote from this interview of Marilynne Robinson.

It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself. Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that -- popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies -- because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

where does the mountain end and the valley begin?

2008-04-28T09:57:14Z

In our discussion on free will, prettypoet43 reminds me of a fine paradox: that there are two opposing types of freedom.

First is freedom as the freedom to self-legislate, to decide the values I will live by and the rules I will follow, instead of being a slave who blindly follows the rules set down by my state, my community, or my parents... In this case I use my freedom to control, manipulate and master. I become the architect of my future.

The second kind of freedom lies in letting things run their course, letting things flow, giving up the petty concerns of the ego to play in a larger field. We give up the pretense of total mastery, and enter into the mysterious state of creative trance. I become the vessel or channel of a force greater than myself.

The Yang, forceful, Apolloniann, left-brain freedom seeks to control and structure.

The Yin, yielding, Dionysian, right-brain freedom is one of surrender and flow.

Of course, Yin and Yang are relative terms. In Stone-Paper-Scissors, that child's metaphor for symbiotic webs, the paper is weaker than the scissors but stronger than the stone, which is itself stronger than the scissors. (it's much easier to depict this web of relationships in a diagram). So the paper is simultaneously Yin to the scissors, and Yang to the stone.

Yin and Yang are (to use igferatu's expression from the discussion) ontological-semiotic terms that can be applied to almost anything.

So why bother speaking in these terms? Because they are useful as mnemonic devices.

The conscious ego tends to look for Yang solutions and neglect the Yin, though both are essential. The open secret of mystic traditions is that Yin freedom is ultimately more powerful and far-reaching. No matter how ingenious our contraptions, all human monuments will crumble one day, but blind life will keep on going, cockroaches scurry over ruins.

bonus: why I say "blind life": here's Justin Smith quoting Hume in an essay about Darwinism.

"Now, if we survey the universe, so far as it falls under our knowledge, it bears a great resemblance to an animal or organized body, and seems actuated with a like principle of life and motion. A continual circulation of matter in it produces no disorder: a continual waste in every part is incessantly repaired: the closest sympathy is perceived throughout the entire system: and each part or member, in performing its proper offices, operates both to its own preservation and to that of the whole. The world, therefore, I infer, is an animal; and the Deity is the SOUL of the world, actuating it, and actuated by it."
One of the important implications of such a cosmological model, Philo soon realizes, is that it compels us to think of the order in the world not so much as made, but rather as generated:
"[I]n examining the ancient system of the soul of the world, there strikes me, all on a sudden, a new idea, which, if just, must go near to subvert all your reasoning, and destroy even your first inferences, on which you repose such confidence. If the universe bears a greater likeness to animal bodies and to vegetables, than to the works of human art, it is more probable that its cause resembles the cause of the former than that of the latter, and its origin ought rather to be ascribed to generation or vegetation, than to reason or design."

This post is a slowly closing door

2008-04-26T09:49:26Z

Ask me a philosophical question and I will answer.

I'll keep revising this post until I have to log off. Then this post will be closed, at least temporarily.

edit: ok, I have to log off now. Feel free to add more comments, just don't expect me to answer immediately. cheers!

Here are some questions to get things rolling:

On free will.

does free will exist?
what is free will?
if I had free will, how would I choose to spend my life, my day, this hour?

I think the first question is problematic, the second academic, and the third urgent.

to taste nirvana, turn off left brain

2008-04-02T21:49:34Z

I've just watched Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's excellent talk on "How it feels to have a stroke." (links to Youtube). It's a blow by blow account of her brain hemorrhage incident ten years ago that temporarily shut down her left brain hemisphere, which effectively plunged her into nirvana.

Here is a quote from the transcript:

When I awoke later that afternoon I was shocked to discover that I was still alive... Light burned my brain like wildfire and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise... Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Harmonic. I remember thinking there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.
But I realized "But I'm still alive! I'm still alive and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." ...
So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me.

I loved that bit I've put in bold print; its language made me think of a post I wrote in this blog three years ago which starts like this:

This moment is the full expression of the creative impulse behind the origin of the universe.

Where is my center? Under my skin and muscle I am an intricately articulated skeleton, able to move in space and time by an act of will. In the core of my bones I am marrow. But marrow is not my center.

Maybe 100 trillion living cells make up my body, each containing DNA, protein-synthesizing instructions in quaternary code. Each DNA molecule contains instructions for building 100,000 different proteins. Please don't ask me how I make my daily hemoglobin-- I'm just the spokesman for this vast enterprise.

My center is itself extruded from a place outside time and space. I am a projection from the timeless realm. And thus projected, I can shine the beam of my flashlight back into the ideal realm to contemplate mathematical truths and pure geometric forms.

edit: May 25, 2008, the New York Times has published an article about Dr. Taylor.

hard poetry, fur-less cats, and parasites

2008-03-10T10:12:20Z

Here's a quote from Sean O'Brien's article, "Read poetry: it's quite hard".

"Read poetry: it's quite hard," the poet Don Paterson crisply suggested. To do so requires us to claim that imaginative space, and to live with Keats's "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts", rather than rush to conclude and summarise. Part of what Eliot called "the shock of poetry" lies in the fact that what it offers is often both instinctively recognisable and at the same time resistant to interpretation - a three-dimensional experience for the imagination, not a mere scanning of captions. And just as poetry's subject is life in all its manifestations, so it exacts from the reader an equal attention to the human gift of language - meaning, tone, overtone, music, pattern, memorability, the power to move and delight.

I like the concepts of imaginative space, of resistance to interpretation, and experience for the imagination. These concepts resonate with me because I have arrived at them independently, through mulling over my chronic question: "what shall I write?" I'm fascinated that someone else has thought of these concepts, too, and named them. That's proof enough that critical writing is not entirely useless.

That said, as Theophile Gautier puts it, "You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet." (Gautier also said, "The cat is a dilettante in fur.")

Anyone who thinks extensively about the process of art eventually comes up with fresh, and so somewhat idiosyncratic, concepts. I'm thinking of movement educator FM Alexander's notion of primary control; or Chess and Tai-chi champion Josh Waitzkin's making smaller circles. Here is Waitzkin explaining making smaller circles in a US Chess Federation interview:

The theme I call “making smaller circles” relates to incremental refinement of a technique or idea until the external manifestation is hardly visible, but the potency is profound. In the martial arts the way this works is to take a large movement, like a boxer’s jab, and to practice it until the correct body mechanics are not consciously considered, but they have a certain feeling. Once you have that feeling you can use it as a beacon and slowly condense the distance the fist travels. In time your body mechanics will get more and more potent and so less physical movement will be necessary. Ultimately a great fighter can do things that are nearly invisible to the untrained eye. There is nothing mystical here, just incremental refinement.

Actually, I was first struck by this idea when studying the chess games of Michael Adams. I had to play him in a closed tournament in New York City, and analyzing his games I began to notice that he often seemed to pay absolutely no heed to the center. Usually the first principle a young chess player learns is “Control the center!” And here was a world class GM ignoring it altogether! After many days of studying his games I began to understand that Adams was controlling the center with complete detachment. He had made the circles so small, you couldn’t see them ... but they were there. In fact, Adams often had complete central domination while seeming to ignore it altogether.

Over the years I have also developed many private concepts, of which I'll now share three: inner north star; theme or scene?; and performing hesitation. And they link up thus: when I write, I have to have an inner north star, in the case of an essay, a theme; and in the case of a narrative, a scene. Otherwise I just end up performing hesitation.

Once I articulated this concept of performing hesitation, I began to see it everywhere, even outside the context of writing. In fact, I first derived this concept from the context of public speaking.

Here's how it happened:

I had just delivered a winning pitch (for a new animated series) to a few hundred industry professionals, and a colleague came up to congratulate me. Later, she would say, "you are so lucky to have had an American education. You were so confident up there."

I think she was rueful that her schooling at the hands of Irish Catholic nuns had taught her to be be self-effacing, to speak in a non-imposing (i.e. mousy) voice, and to constantly seek permission and approval.

But I wanted to say, "are you kidding?! my heart was pounding up there, I thought I was going to faint!"

Indeed, throughout my presentation, I felt fluttery fear. But I realized I had two possibilities: I could perform this fear: stammering a hundred miles an hour in a high-strung nasal voice, which, frankly, nobody wanted to hear, or: I could slow my breathing, slow my speech, and lower my voice, which might seem insincere, a put-on and an act, but which would be more enjoyable for everyone.

So I went with option two: assuming the image of confidence, projecting the "I know what I'm doing" and "we're all loving this, aren't we?" attitude. I even made a few spontaneous quips.

And they ate it up with a spoon!

I've extended this concept, and now think of all strong emotions as something I perform, kind of like a piano sonata. In particular, in the middle of gripping spirals of negative emotion, I'll ask myself, "now, why am I performing this?"

Have you seen the animated film Howl's Moving Castle? In this scene (links to Youtube) the wizard Howl throws a fit because Sophie has gone into his filthy bathroom and put it in order and as a result, he mixes up shampoo bottles and his blond hair turns red. A petty detail, but he is so vain he spirals into despair, and as he is a powerful wizard, the walls bulge and buckle, and rivulets of green slime start oozing out of his body, threatening to drown their sustaining magic hearth-fire. I loved this scene! It is a spectacular example of performing emotion.

A few times, in response to these posts of mine, I've had people say, "you inspire me." And I shake my head and think, "if they only knew..." If you only knew to what extent I often feel aimless, lost, hesitant, regretful-- how often I lapse into my Prufrock or Scott Fitzgerald: second act mode. But nobody wants to be made to wallow in such feelings, so I sweep them aside and focus on more inspiring facets of my life. I designate my inner north star, my drishti, with care.

For Deleuze and Guattari, creating new concepts is simply what a philosopher does. They came up with provocative concepts like body-without-organs, desiring-production, and the rhizome.

What about you? If you have coined any concepts lately, please share!

Of course, concepts are not the whole deal; they repose upon-- are superimposed by imaginative projection onto-- the continuous sensuous substrate of our life. Here's one last quote from Gautier: "Critical lice are like body lice, which desert corpses to seek the living."

I'll pair this with a quote from Paul Cantor's review of the Lives of Others:

Donnersmarck develops a powerful image of the parasitism of the communist regime in East Germany. Everything that is valuable in this world, all that is vibrant and creative, all the emotional warmth and depth, is to be found in the lives of Dreyman and his artistic friends. The communist state can only sit back and passively observe all this—the lives of others. False to the core, the party officials feed like vampires on the life blood of the people under their rule.

to no longer be myself

2008-03-08T10:53:26Z

My brother got married Feb 17. I flew back to Taipei for the ceremony and the lavish dinner. It's always an amazing experience to go back and visit my parents, to be immersed in their diligent, frugal ethos, to reconnect with their spiritual values.

I took to sleeping early and rising early as they do, doing yoga in the morning, then sitting down to a breakfast of fresh fruit and wheat toast with peanut butter. They had no coffee machine, so all week I drank instant coffee, tearing open the 3-in-1 foil backs-- pre-blended with sugar and creamer-- and mixing it with water from their electric dispenser. It was cold and humid, so hot water became my default drink.

As I would be singing at the ceremony, in the days before the wedding, I'd sing every morning, going over the Fauré song (Notre Amour) phrase by phrase, recording myself on a digital camcorder, and then replaying each fragment instantly to hear my errors, and to observe and correct tensions in my neck or back that distorted my sound. It was slow and satisfying work. Over three days the song began to take form. A mere hour absorbed in this process was enough for me to realize that I was only scratching the surface of infinite possibilities, to lead me to Hippocrates's wistful conclusion, Ars longa, vita brevis.

The ceremony was beautiful, fresh roses everywhere, candles, the church choir singing in English, Mandarin and Taiwanese. It was cute: one song had as a refrain, "I kneel down before you," and they kept pronouncing the "k" and singing "Kuh-neel". Almost all of the congregation was native Chinese speaking, so I don't think many people noticed.

When the pastor asked my brother, "do you take this woman to be your wife, to have and to hold...?" and so on, he answered so emphatically, "Yuanyi!" that we all laughed. Yuanyi-- "I am willing!" The way he said it was like a game show contestant accepting a televised challenge (of the scorpion-eating, gauntlet-running kind), or a kung-fu prodigy accepting an imperial mandate.

The grand piano I played on had sat through too many humid winters and become waterlogged and half-mute; many of the keys didn't sound at all. So the iridescent harmonies of the Fauré song were cut down into something almost minimalist. Hopefully the charcoal sketch that came through-- even if wasn't the full oil painting-- was nevertheless elegant and suggestive.

After the ceremony, my focus switched. I looked up some old friends, and, over three days, made an oil painting.

One of the friends I looked up, Father Jerry, is a Jesuit Priest with whom I made an English-teaching television show many years ago. I showed up unannounced and he received me in his modest office with the small green sofa I remember from when I was a kid. For the first time we had a conversation about religion, and I told him about my theological and metaphysical inquiries of the past several years, documented in this very blog.

He was remarkably open-minded and present. He admitted that he disagreed with various Church doctrines, and spoke also about his Buddhist friends. "Many missionaries believe that conversion is the only option when faced with someone of another faith, but it has been our experience that dialog is more fruitful. Let's talk and then see what happens."

I was struck by that phrase: "It has been our experience." Our experience? I understood that he was speaking then as a representative of the Jesuit order, with its 473 years of memory; or maybe as a representative of the Catholic Church, which dates back almost 2,000 years to Peter. Or perhaps he was speaking as an agent of the eternal God, here in the temporal world. In any case, what a sense of empowerment! While I am entangled in my petty personal problems, fretting about next week's deadline or last week's slight, my friend's vision sweeps forward and back in centuries.

I had been thinking, rather sourly, of faith as a shackles, as a burden, as an impediment to authenticity, but here, I saw someone who was fully energized by faith, and not at all crimped by it. It's this same deep sense of conviction that enabled Matteo Ricci to spend decades in an utterly alien Imperial China, contributing immensely to cultural dialog by making the first Latin translation of the Confucian classics, for example, and the first Chinese translation of Euclid's Elements. (He also made the first map of the world in Chinese.)

"You could have become a Jesuit. You would have fit right in," my friend said.

"Yes, I think so too."

I saw many other friends in Taipei and Hong Kong, but this entry is already so long, I'll have to save those anecdotes for another post. I'll just mention that my friends kick ass! I saw so many amazing people...

I had lunch of fresh fig salad, braised vegetables and meat, and chocolate cake with P. the blue-eyed American who speaks fluent Chinese, is partner in a Taiwanese law firm, and runs triathalons in his spare time.

C, my globe-trotting, art-collecting high school pal who now runs her family's accessories business, had me over to her office for a five-course lunch prepared by their private chef. (crab-claws, marinated beef, braised tofu, veggies, strawberries, yum!)

With L we had a beautiful Italian dinner: fried calamari with creamy polenta, hand-cut parpadelle with veal ragu, and red wine. She told me about her annus mirabilis, in which she had her first baby, and raised a staggering billion dollars for her investment fund.

The night before I had lunch with A, my choreographer friend and long time collaborator, he'd just been honored with a prestigious achievement award from the Hong Kong government. He told me about innovative projects he's been doing, like choreographing for a blind dancer ("she puts her hands on my body to follow my movements; she has such a sensitive touch.") and doing dance therapy with psychiatric patients. My friend W, a butoh dancer, was also at lunch and we decided then and there to put on a performance in August.

I had dinner with P and walked his three dogs with him along the Hong Kong waterfront, and hung out at his place listening to Plain White T's Hey There Delilah again and again.

It was a beautiful trip. And now I'm back, sinking back into a slower rhythm. I get up and walk the dog and bake bread and play the piano.

Gaspard has been coming daily to see the dog and we cook up a storm together. I think of it as therapy for his intense angst, an indispensable complement to the pills he's been prescribed. For lunch yesterday we made grilled polenta with spicy marinara sauce, grilled zucchini and mushrooms, and a salad of rocket and toasted pine nuts. For dinner he fried sole in butter and garlic, and served it to me with grilled peppers, steamed broccoli and rice.

He'll still speak of suicide. But instead of getting hysterical and accusing him of trying to blackmail me emotionally, I take a more philosophical approach.

"To want to die, is to want to become another." I tell him.

I think he appreciates this, and he repeats this thoughtfully. "To want to die, is to want to no longer be myself."

patterns

2008-02-16T08:59:20Z

When Oliver Sacks is about to get a migraine, he hallucinates geometric patterns:

In my own migraine auras, I would sometimes see — vividly with closed eyes, more faintly and transparently if I kept my eyes open — tiny branching lines, like twigs, or geometrical structures covering the entire visual field: lattices, checkerboards, cobwebs, and honeycombs. Sometimes there were more elaborate patterns, like Turkish carpets or complex mosaics; sometimes I saw scrolls and spirals, swirls and eddies; sometimes three-dimensional shapes like tiny pine cones or sea urchins...

Much later still, when I first saw photographs of the Alhambra, with its intricate geometric mosaics, I started to wonder whether what I had taken to be a personal experience and resonance might in fact be part of a larger whole, whether certain basic forms of geometric art, going back for tens of thousands of years, might also reflect the external expression of universal experiences. Migraine-like patterns, so to speak, are seen not only in Islamic art, but in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry — in virtually every culture... Do the arabesques in our own minds, built into our own brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of geometry, of formal beauty?

Whether or not this is the case, there is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception — that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems — one may see it equally in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time, very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning, but a universal of nature itself.

I also see such patterns, and wrote in a post from 2006 (We tile the world with fractals, not pixels):

In other words, fractals are not just in the world, they are what the mind generates in its attempt to map the world. Because the mind generates patterns which it then projects onto the world, those patterns that the mind cannot generate will never be perceived in the world.

Edit: And here is Brian Boyd, writing in the American Scholar.

Humans uniquely inhabit “the cognitive niche.” We have an appetite for information, and especially for pattern, information that falls into meaningful arrays from which we can make rich inferences. We have uniquely long childhoods, and even beyond childhood we continue to play more than other species. Our predilection for the patterned cognitive play of art begins with what developmental psychologists call protoconversation, exchanges between infants and caregivers of rhythmic, responsive behavior, involving sound and movement, in playful patterns described as “more like a song than a sentence” and as “interactive multimedia performances.” Without being taught, children engage in music, dance, design, and, especially, pretend play....

Because the world swarms with patterns, animal minds evolved as pattern extractors, able to detect the information meaningful to their kind of organism in their kind of environment and therefore to predict and act accordingly. Pattern occurs at multiple levels, from the stable information of spatial conditions and physical processes to highly volatile information about individuals and their moods, actions, and intentions.

the smell of her earlobes

2008-01-10T13:14:23Z

Last Saturday I ended up at a Korean dinner party. There were about twelve of us in a warmly-lit Parisian flat with wood floors and plaster moldings. For someone who works in couture, the hostess was remarkably down-to-earth. She was calm and beautiful and wore no makeup. When she was cooking she'd put on a crisp, slate-colored cotton apron.

I sat there in amazement as more and more courses came out of her kitchen, served in flat baskets or ceramic dishes. There were maki rolls with pickled turnip, spinach and surimi; battered shrimp and tempura carrots; scrumptious fritters made with fresh-shucked oysters; braised ribs with chili and natto, which she served with steamed rice, salad greens, and white cabbage leaves; home-made kimchi; a traditional new year's soup of sliced rice cake and shredded omelet. We had plenty of Champagne and a noble bottle of Margaux, gold foil boxes of chocolates from la Maison du Chocolat and Jean-Paul Hévin. When on top of that she brought out a tray of pastries, I think there was a collective gasp or groan; none of us could eat any more.

It was the kind of dinner that takes a few days to prepare, like Babette's Feast. When I realize that I've landed in one of these dinners, I'm always amazed that anyone would be so generous with their time today.

Anyway, sitting next to me was a vivacious, rotund designer who was soon recounting her love life to me. I kept leaning in to smell her perfume, and she finally presented her earlobe for a good whiff.

"C'est quoi comme parfum?" I asked.
"Je ne sais plus... un parfum de Sisley..."

She explained that she had all three Sisley perfumes and rotated between them, so wasn't sure which one this was. She gave me a name I could try: Eau du Soir.

So yesterday when I passed by a perfume shop, I went in. I walked along the shelves of lacquer-finish cartons, until I came to the short row devoted to Sisley. I smelled the Eau du Soir, but realized immediately that, no, what she had on was rather Soir de Lune. The warmth of rose and the glow of patchouli made me think of her right away.

Here's what perfume blogger Victoria has to say about Soir de Lune in her bois de jasmin review:

Dominique Ropion who created the fragrance for Sisley worked on the classical chypre theme, setting the radiant floral heart in the voluptuous duskiness of oakmoss and patchouli. Its smouldering form is shrouded in enough floral sweetness to temper the sensuality of spicy, woody notes...

The fresh top notes spill into layers of spices, interspersed with hints of rose that grow darker and richer as the fragrance dries down. The heart shimmers with floral nuances, exhibiting the chilly crispness of iris one moment and the honeyed sweetness of mimosa the next. The transition from floral opulence to woody darkness takes place in a harmonious manner, and when one finds oneself sinking into the raw silk warmth of the base, the sensation is nothing short of captivating.

I won't pretend that I experienced all that in the perfume, but I agree: it is captivating.

Notice how her encounter with the perfume is a narrative, with beginning, middle and end. The top note gives way to the heart, which unfolds into the base. Of course, this three-part narrative is just a perfume writer's convention; in reality we encounter the whole smell at once, much in the same way that Mozart conceived the whole work in one conceptual glance:

Mozart wrote everything with such ease and speed as might at first be taken for carelessness or haste. His imagination held before him the whole work clear and lively once it was conceived. One seldom finds in his scores improved or erased passages. ~ Franz Niemetschek

I quote from the perfume review because it is mystical language. Those words work only with the addition of a skeleton key, which is the presence of the perfume itself: the juice. If you haven't actually smelled Soir de Lune yourself, the words I quote, while they make grammatical sense, are limited in their ability to evoke a response in you.

It's the same with mystical language in a spiritual context. Here is one of Naropa's songs (I've slightly reworked the translation by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche and Erik Pema Kunsang):

Seeing objects as external is a mistake;
Like a dream, they are empty of concreteness.

This mind, as well, is a mere movement of attention that has no self-nature,
a gust of wind, empty of identity, like space.

All things, like space, are equal.

'Mahamudra' is not some entity that can be shown.
the mind's suchness is itself the state of Mahamudra...

when you see and realize its nature,
All that appears and exists is Mahamudra,
The great all-encompassing Dharmakaya,
Naturally and without contriving, allowed simply to be,

This unimagined Dharmakaya,
Letting it be without seeking is the practice of meditation.

So there I was, holding this precious bottle of perfume, wondering if I should buy it. I liked the idea of possessing such an exquisite scent, but it would be a splurge, and this is a perfume meant for a woman, which I would not normally wear.

That said, I can think of one exquisite ritual in which I can incorporate this scent! ;-)

growing tentacular feelers into the hive mind of humanity

2008-01-03T13:17:11Z

A longtime LiveJournal friend, nobody_, has recently shut down her blog, archiving her old posts behind a friends-only filter.

To respect her privacy, I shall now have to refrain from quoting from her insightful past posts. I think she wouldn't mind, though, if I mentioned that one of her reasons for stopping was that she wanted a more intimate, direct and warm form of communication than blogging. I totally sympathize with that desire.

Drinking a mug of hot wine with a friend, on the wood terrace of an Alpine chalet, after a morning of skiing on fresh powder-- that was delicious, compared to my sitting here now in front of my computer!

Sometimes I think I'll stop blogging, too. The time that it takes to post and to respond to comments-- wouldn't this time be better spent writing the chapters of a book? something more cohesive and ambitious?

If I keep blogging, though, it's because I love to read others' blogs. I keep adding new feeds to my Google Reader account, and scanning down the hundred+ items daily, I feel like my brain is growing tentacular feelers into the hive mind of humanity, taking its pulse.

I feel like I should at least give a little back to this collective energy.

So, here are a few interesting items:

An article on robot love and a documentary on sex dolls (not safe for work!) lead me to think about non-reciprocal love-obsessions based on pure imaginative projection.

A video of Esther Hicks channeling a spirit, Abraham, leads me to wonder about the ontological implications. Is "Abraham" also based on imaginative projection? Note that Abraham's message, and the phenomenon of channeling itself, is consonant with Schopenhauer's ontology; we are all emanations from one source, so there is no need to commit to a belief in Abraham as an independently existing being. In any case, Hicks is definitely in a trance state here, and speaks with impressive clarity and assuredness; she improvises syntactically complex sentences, opening and closing clauses with aplomb.

Speaking of improvisations, I shed a few tears listening to Aretha Franklin singing Nessun Dorma at the 1998 Grammy Awards. She filled in for an ailing Pavarotti who bailed out at the last minute, and had only ten minutes to rehearse the piece.

And here's some cheerful advice on writing, from an article by Kirsten Ogden.

With so much against us, we writers need routine to stay grounded. This sentiment is echoed in almost every book I’ve read on writing–and is echoed in every conversation with writers I admire. They get up. They sit in the chair. They write. They do it again. And again. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
Even though I should’ve internalized this knowledge long ago, I was giddy when I came across This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley. Perhaps it was the title–yes! This is the year! Perhaps it was the day. Yes! It’s New Year’s Eve! I mean, I don’t even have an idea for a novel. Well, I do, but those are just ideas. Make those ideas into a novel, in a year? Wow! I’ll buy some of that! Even though I’d read it all before, I was genuinely invigorated reading the book with my cup of coffee outside the Coffee Bean; especially section one of the book, titled The general disciplines that every writer needs;” the first of which was to write every day. His reason for this rule: “getting the work done and reconnecting with your unconscious mind.” Yes. This is vital.

death drive

2007-12-24T13:28:58Z

Several people I know have suicide scars, or wear thick superfluous bunches of bracelets which I assume are hiding scars. I once met a man with what seemed like a hundred razor scars all over the arms and chest, each one neat and evenly spaced.

When I was younger, I had this holier-than-thou attitude where I thought only sick and deranged people would have self-destructive impulses. Freud posited a universal death drive, and where before I would think, "yes, I see how other people are like that, but that couldn't possibly apply to me," now I see that, yes, I have them too. Indeed I was doing myself a disservice by not acknowledging the darker parts of my psyche.

Being human, we each have the full range of impulses and emotions, from creative and loving ones to hateful and destructive ones.

We don't control these thoughts so shouldn't feel guilty about having them.

Where we do have some control is over our actions; we can choose to express our impulses in an ethical way.

Unpleasant emotions mask a deeper desire.

For example, let's say that anger arises when I feel someone else has transgressed my boundaries. So, understanding this, I can now take every swell of rage as an opportunity for self-inquiry: "what invisible boundary of mine has this person just gone over?" I learn something about myself in the process, and can now take effective measures-- either to relax my own sense of territoriality, or to assert this boundary to the other person, who may after all have transgressed innocently, by accident.

Since my anger will find expression one way or another, I can at least to choose to express it-- and all other emotions pleasant or unpleasant-- in a constructive way.

So, getting back to the death drive... it might rear up when I'm crossing a footbridge. I'll idly wonder, "what would happen if I were to jump off?" I imagine my body plunging tight as a cramp into the icy water, passersby telephoning for a rescue squad. Being rushed to a hospital wrapped in thermal foil, the whole nine yards.

Then I think, "nah, I don't want to die." Instead of jumping in myself, I sacrifice just a part of myself-- a bad habit, for example-- to the water, throwing it over like unwanted ballast, like a lizard giving up its tail.

The me that wants to jump, suicidal me?-- I let it jump. It detaches from me, a dense, murky body, and drops straight as a stone, still as a shadow, into the river below.

And the life-affirming me?-- I stay right on that bridge waving, "ciao! bye-bye!"

artful truth

2007-12-24T00:10:03Z

I am transcribing this quote from a Philoctetes Center discussion on the limits of explanation. (links to YouTube)

Francisca Cho, a religion scholar and a translator of the Korean Buddhist poet Manhae, says about 24 minutes into the video:

When you look at Buddhist philosophy... it has its entirely alternative take on the notion of explanation, which kind of pulls the rug out from the whole debate that's going on in the contemporary West about the nature of knowledge.

The Buddhist understanding is that all explanations, all categorizations, classifications, conceptual categories are artistic conventions, and that you couldn't possibly have anything besides that.

So, you make that concession from the beginning, you give up that pursuit of knowledge in any ultimate sense.

It's a form of skepticism that says, basically, we only work with our linguistic-cultural structures.

And once you make that admission up front, the whole debate about what constitutes a valid explanation goes away. Instead the litmus test becomes what constitutes an effective explanation

This reminds me of my discussion on truth with anosognosia. I wonder how the Buddhist form of skepticism compares with catachrestic's skepticism ( "I have no beliefs").

She says "so, you make that concession from the beginning..." but in Tantric terms it would be, "so, you accept that empowerment from the beginning." Because the ability to create meaning is a kind of superpower, isn't it?

Here is Jonah Lehrer reviewing Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought in the Washington Post.

Language comes so naturally to us that it's easy to believe there's some sort of intrinsic logic connecting the thing and its name, the signifier and the signified. In one of Plato's dialogues, a character named Cratylus argues that "a power more than human gave things their first names."
But Cratylus was wrong. Human language is an emanation of the human mind. A thing doesn't care what we call it. Words and their rules don't tell us about the world; they tell us about ourselves.
That's the simple premise behind Steven Pinker's latest work of popular science . According to the Harvard psychologist, people are "verbivores, a species that lives on words." If you want to understand how the brain works, how it thinks about space and causation and time, how it processes emotions and engages in social interactions, then you need to plunge "down the rabbit hole" of language. The quirks of our sentences are merely a portal to the mind.

beautiful accidents

2007-12-13T12:14:38Z

Here is a great talk by Murray Gell-Mann on the importance of beauty and elegance in scientific theory. ("beauty is a very successful criterion for choosing the right theory.")

One of the interesting things he says is that a unified force theory will never be a "theory of everything" because it would be quantum mechanical. It would predict probabilities for future events based on past ones, so that any explanation of the universe would have to include not just the fundamental law, but also the long chain of accidents leading up to now.

Here is a lecture by Nassim Taleb (audio only), whose recent book, Black Swan is expressly about "the impact of the highly improbable."

fossilized viruses suspended in code

2007-12-05T08:46:09Z

Did you know that you and I are carrying around fossils of extinct organisms, only, instead of insects suspended in amber, these are fragments of retroviruses suspended right inside our genetic code?

Fascinating.

Here is a quote from the New Yorker article: Darwin's Surprise.

A retrovirus stores its genetic information in a single-stranded molecule of RNA, instead of the more common double-stranded DNA. When it infects a cell, the virus deploys a special enzyme, called reverse transcriptase, that enables it to copy itself and then paste its own genes into the new cell’s DNA. It then becomes part of that cell forever; when the cell divides, the virus goes with it. Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

When the sequence of the human genome was fully mapped, in 2003, researchers also discovered something they had not anticipated: our bodies are littered with the shards of such retroviruses, fragments of the chemical code from which all genetic material is made. It takes less than two per cent of our genome to create all the proteins necessary for us to live. Eight per cent, however, is composed of broken and disabled retroviruses, which, millions of years ago, managed to embed themselves in the DNA of our ancestors. They are called endogenous retroviruses, because once they infect the DNA of a species they become part of that species. One by one, though, after molecular battles that raged for thousands of generations, they have been defeated by evolution. Like dinosaur bones, these viral fragments are fossils. Instead of having been buried in sand, they reside within each of us, carrying a record that goes back millions of years.

And here is another article, on how there are more bacterial cells in our bodies than human ones.

the man who would not be seen (cinematic epistemology case study #2 )

2007-12-01T22:24:49Z

Spoiler Alert!

Do not read this if you don't want to have important plot points of Danny Boyle's Sunshine revealed to you.

So, there's this scene from Sunshine, when the astronauts are exploring the tomb-like vessel from their predecessors' inexplicably aborted mission. The bay where they enter is dark, so they wave their flashlights back and forth to sound out the space, and we see that the space is filled with thick motes of pale dust, suspended inert in zero gravity. An ominous sign.

Then, something very strange happens: each time one of their flashlights shines straight into our eyes, we, sitting in our cinema chair, see, in the brief flash, an image of supersaturated colors, as if it were some kind of retinal artifact.

It's so fleeting that we almost have no time to discern and interpret it, but as the flashlights wave about randomly, crossing our gaze a few more times, we get a few more half-second glimpses, and it eventually dawns on us, though we are still not quite sure-- that what we are seeing is a photograph of a group of smiling people, from an altogether different context.

This is all very disconcerting. We know that vision doesn't work like that; that while we are being blinded by the glare of a flashlight we can't simultaneously be seeing an entirely different and meaningful image. So it's as if we are hallucinating, since, up to this point, the film has been utterly sincere in its portrayal of reality.

I know other films have played tricks with our senses-- in films about the sixties, the psychedelic episode is a regular cinematic cliché: when the protagonists drop acid, suddenly we see the landscape in blazing acidulous candy colors, too, even though we haven't taken any drugs ourself. We are, of course, to understand that we are seeing the world through their drug-addled eyes.

But Sunshine takes this to a different level. The cinema spectator experiences an impossible visual event while the characters on screen are presumably still stuck in their mundane visual system.

Not long after in the film, a villain emerges, a crazed man with supernatural strength who also disconcertingly defies our visual system-- "the man who can't be clearly seen".

Most movie monsters can't be seen because they lurk in the shadows or they move so quickly, or they are perfectly transparent and hence we see right through them. But this villain is very different; our visual system simply cannot resolve his image!

He could be standing inches away from us, and we'd begin to see him, but as our eyes make their reflexive sweeping saccades to resolve his image, he vibrates back and forth too, so all we end up getting is a visual jumble of outlines and jigsaw glimpses. Again, this is very disconcerting. (Only this time, I think the protagonists are having the same visual frustration.)

If you have seen the film, I think you would understand what I am referring to here. If not, I wonder what you make of all this prose.

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive teased us on a different level. It refused to resolve on a narrative level. You just couldn't come up with a satisfying explanation for how the two parts fit together. Whenever you thought you'd succeeded in putting together the puzzle, you'd suddenly notice one leftover piece with nowhere to go.

But where Mulholland Drive's incoherence is literary, the incoherence in Sunshine is, I would say, epistemologically even more primal, because it makes us doubt our very visual system.

If you are interested: case study #1 in cinematic epistemology was on Robocop and the Terminator.

Soup Ceremony

2007-11-30T14:18:20Z

Since one of us parked a bicycle on the cable modem, I haven't had Internet access and so was logging on sporadically, either for fifteen minutes grazes at the Internet café, or longer stretches on that one afternoon a week when I bike out to the American Library.

Today a replacement modem was delivered to the door, so I can finally update my journal.

Not having Internet access was actually great, though. I had more time for more sensuous activities.

For example, yesterday I practiced Brahms's third piano quartet and Schumann's Quintet.

Reading Norman Doidge's book on neuroplasticity, The Brain that Changes Itself, I realized that I could use visualization to improve my piano playing. So I spent a night visualizing melodies being played on a keyboard. By "spent a night" I meant that as I was sleeping, whenever I drifted back into consciousness, I would remember to visualize a musical phrase. It was a nice alternative to the usual kaleidoscope of neurotic and erotic thoughts my insomniac mind otherwise produces. As an added side benefit I had very intense and memorable dreams that night. The downside is that I needed much more sleep than usual, and I had tired, sore eyes the next morning. I'll have to learn to visualize without soliciting my ocular muscles quite as intensely.

In any case, the experiment was a success. Indeed, just after this one session I felt more at ease at the piano, with difficult passages suddenly more accessible.

I then spent about an hour and a half doing yoga.

I have the idealist's tendency to want to think my way to success, to design a failsafe solution-- and an assured victory-- before embarking on a project. Which means that I end up embarking on very few projects. My irresistible desire for certainty has me spending months-- years!-- tinkering to make the perfect plan, rather than tinkering on the tangible work itself. ("I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.")

My antidote is to work more on feeling, groping, cobbling, and improvising my way forward: the way of the bricoleur. Yoga is good practice for this, because I have to accept my wobbles, my loss of balance. The more my ego tries to control and eliminate my wobbling by decree or by artifice, the worse that wobbling gets. Instead, I have get out of the way and let my body re-right itself.

Indeed, wobbles are my friend, because they create a symphony of kinesthetic sensations, in the way that, in music, a dissonance paves the way for a harmonious resolution to come into play.

Here is an excellent relevant quote, from Claire Colebrook's Routledge Guide to Gilles Deleuze:

According to Nietzsche, nihilism is the logical end-point of Western philosophy. Philosophy begins with a life project of asceticism: renouncing desires for the sake of some higher or better world (such as the world of truth). We imagine a truer and better world beyond appearances. When we fail to grasp that true world we fall into despair or nihilism, for we have lost that higher world that we never had. The consequence is ressentiment. We still feel the loss of some higher or better world, and so we imagine ourselves to be guilty, punished or outcast. This reaches its pitch in Christianity where we are permanently guilty in an irredeemably fallen world. For Nietzsche, the proper response to to this fall into nihilism, decadence and ressentiment is not to find another basis of truth but to abandon our enslavement to truth. We need to have the force and courage to live with this world here and now.

The linking idea is the idea of accepting imperfection, accepting having only partial control and partial knowledge, working with the messiness of the here and now, instead of insisting that the situation first conform to our established concepts.

Then Gaspard and I did our soup ceremony. I charge up the CD player with Bach and Vivaldi: the Art of Fugue, lute music and arias.

We work side by side, each with his own chopping board, vegetable peeler and knife.

I fry up some garlic, leeks and mushrooms in a pot, then add hot water, salt, pepper, a sprig of thyme and three bay leaves. This is the base of our soup, to which we add various vegetables as we chop them: carrot, turnip, green beans, white beans, and pumpkin, peeled and cored tomatoes. I drop in two heaping spoonfuls of rice, which cook up fluffy and tender, and fresh parsley and basil.

I am still in the calm and alert aura opened up by the yoga session, so I notice every slight tension in my body when I cook, and can will my blocked muscles to release. The movements of cooking become more flowing and effortless.

Then we sit down at our round wood table lit with candles, and have the soup with home-made bread: a fig and walnut loaf made with some grated carrot (for fiber and sweetness) and olive oil (it makes the bread moist and delicious). I pour some red wine into our glasses and carry out a brief, informal communion. We feel like monks. Timeo-- the white dog-- sits by the table waiting for his soup too, which is already doled out in a plastic bowl but is piping hot and needs to cool for fifteen minutes.

I am intrigued by this quote attributed to Wittgenstein:

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari has been helpful to me in this respect. Like the excellent Nassim Taleb and other anti-Platonists, they see philosophy not as a search for the certainty of a "correct view", but as acts of bravura, flying leaps into novel worldviews.

Think more; read less; eat fruit not jam.

2007-07-31T09:48:22Z

Paul Graham:

I realize this dependence on books is not entirely good-- that what I need them for is distraction. The books I bring on trips are often quite virtuous, the sort of stuff that might be assigned reading in a college class. But I know my motives aren't virtuous. I bring books because if the world gets boring I need to be able to slip into another distilled by some writer. It's like eating jam when you know you should be eating fruit.

There is a point where I'll do without books. I was walking in some steep mountains once, and decided I'd rather just think, if I was bored, rather than carry a single unnecessary ounce. It wasn't so bad. I found I could entertain myself by having ideas instead of reading other people's. If you stop eating jam, fruit starts to taste better.

Marcel Proust, from Swann's Way:

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it-- oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascale's Pensées?

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation vol 2, p 78:

...while the correct apprehension of the world of perception has impressed the stamp of insight and wisdom on the brow of many an unlearned man, the face of many a scholar bears no other traces of his many studies than those of exhaustion and weariness through excessive and forced straining of the memory for the unnatural accumulation of dead concepts. Such a man frequently looks so simple, silly and sheepish, that is must be supposed that the excessive strain of the indirect faculty of knowledge, applied to the abstract, produces a direct weakening of the immediate knowledge of perception, and that the natural and correct view is dazzled more and more by the light of books. The constant influx of other people's ideas must certainly stop and stifle our own, and indeed, in the long run, paralyse the power of thought, unless it has a high degree of elasticity able to withstand the unnatural flow. Therefore incessant reading and study positively ruin the mind; this, moreover, is caused by the fact that the system of our own ideas and knowledge loses its completeness and uninterrupted continuity, when we arbitrarily upset this so often in order to gain room for an entirely foreign range of ideas. To banish my thoughts in order to make room for those of a book would seem to me to be just what Shakespeare censures in the travellers of his time, that they sell their own land in order to see those of others. However, the mania of most scholars for reading is a kind of fuga vacui from the lack of ideas in their own heads, which forcibly draws in the ideas of others... Reading no longer merely anticipates thinking, but entirely takes it place.

grace, tact, and slow dancing

2007-07-17T09:02:53Z

I've written several times about yoga as phenomenological experiment.

For a sense of what one feels during yoga, you can take a look at this hyper-slow video of a dancer doing a spin. (Don't forget to push the little play button at the bottom of the video frame).

From this excellent essay by Paul Graham, in which he criticizes the American high school system, I get this quote:

Like many nerds, probably, it was years after high school before I could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then. And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.

The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.

Yoga is about cultivating such a deft touch, using all your senses to palpate the world.

For me, being tactful involves actually practicing yoga, rather than just theorizing about it; I have a tendency to be more theoretical than practical, to want to explore the world with "pure" thought rather than with my full embodied consciousness. Here is a quote from Schopenhauer, (The World as Will and Represensation I, p 368)

For virtue does indeed result from knowledge, but not from abstract knowledge communicable through words. If this were so, virtue could be taught, and by expressing here in the abstract its real nature and the knowledge at its foundation, we should have ethically improved everyone who comprehended this. But this is by no means the case. On the contrary, we are as little able to produce a virtuous person by ethical discourse or sermons as all the systems of aesthetics from Aristotle's downwards have ever been able to produce a poet. For the concept is unfruitful for the real inner nature of virtue, just as it is for art; and only in a wholly subordinate position can it serve as an elaborating and preserving what has been ascertained and inferred in other ways. Velle non discitur. ["the will cannot be taught"] In fact, abstract dogmas are without influence on virtue, i.e. on goodness of disposition; false dogmas do not disturb it, and true ones hardly [strengthen] it.

software, steel statues, jet planes

2007-07-08T09:55:11Z

Some of the geeky things I've done in my life include learning to program in LISP, which allowed me to viscerally understand recursion; and learning to cut and weld steel.

In metalworking factory I once made a statue of a female figure. My parents still have it at their home. It's a slightly inconvenient gift-- a heavy, clunky thing that leaves rust stains wherever they put it. So, even though it was fun to make, I decided with all the moving around I do, painting in oils would be a more manageable passion than sculpting metal.

We are adding words to English all the time, distending it to the breaking point. When will today's English become the equivalent of Beowulf, too archaic to be understood by laymen? Some time in the future, when few will understand the words of this post, chances are they will still recognize that female form I cut and welded from steel.

Software linked via the Internet is allowing us to develop swarm intelligence, but we are still working out the common language. Software versions are coming out at even more dizzying speeds. It's like, "last year we spoke Latin, but this year, we are upgrading to French!"

Airbus lost six billion dollars because it used two incompatible versions of the same 3D design program. The German branch used version 4, the French version 5.

"Airbus made the decision not to migrate Germany to Catia V5 because it would have meant a complete retraining," says Geoff Haines, managing director of Cenit Ltd. in Oxford, England. "They decided not to do it for budgetary reasons."
So great is the chasm between the two versions that someone schooled in Catia V4 trying to get up on V5 is similar to a motorist learning to fly an airplane. It takes six months to a year before they become fully proficient, Haines says. "It would be like starting from scratch," he adds.
Those unfamiliar with CAD software may be wondering just how two versions of the same software package could be incompatible, or for that matter, require such extensive retraining. The reason is the two software editions differ in their basic treatment of drawings, so the way digital models are created is different.
Both systems are able to represent objects in 3D, but that's where the similarities end. Engineers using Catia V4 must use a manual process to create the geometry of a model. To create a hole inside an object, for example, the system requires them to subtract a cylinder from the space to define where the hole should exist. By contrast, the product designer using Catia V5 simply feeds in a set of engineering instructions—in effect, describing the location and dimensions of the hole—and the geometry is automatically created. "V5 is higher-level, more intuitive," says Doug Cheney, product manager for CAD interoperability quality at ITI TranscenData, a developer of CAD translation software. "With the older system, the engineer figures out the geometry; with the new one, the system finds the best geometric solution."

Two ways to solve the same problem. Two ways to describe the same airplane. Not to mention versions 1, 2 and 3. They all worked fine-- fine: in the sense that perfectly functional airplanes were built using each version. But trying to get the different versions to work together is difficult.

This reminds me of how Philosophy is so open-ended and inconclusive.

Do you want to say it in French or in Chinese? Both will work but not at the same time. Do you want to use Platonic terms or Spinozist terms? Kabbalah or Dzogchen? In the end, the practical concern of, say, constructing an airplane that will fly, will guide your choice of physical and mental tools.

Edward de Bono made a lot of money devising and selling thought tools. They are almost cute: "six thinking hats", "six action shoes"... and so on. I admire how he doesn't get embroiled in metaphysical questions as I do. All his thinking is problem-oriented. And maybe that's why he can buy himself private jets and islands, while I make do with a bicycle and a futon bed.

summer sonatas, pad thai, raining spiders, nerd heaven

2007-06-12T21:09:03Z

Paris has entered its summer glory. I ride my bicycle along in the shade of trees so dense their leafy tops have melded into a canopy. This morning I bought ripe cherries and melons, discounted at the grocers.

I practice piano with the windows open onto the courtyard. At the windowsill the lemon tree is studded with incipient fruit, and there are flourishing pots of basil, coriander and mint.

Saturday Thibault came over and we played Brahm's second violin sonata. My love affair with Brahms continues. It is so gratifying to practice this densely structured music. The left hand makes these faint but deep pulses, like a heartbeat, and the right is independent, launching and wrapping up melodic phrases often on the off-beat.The two hands of the piano are already in intense dialog with each other, and when the violin adds its voice, the tension is so thick and massive. There are always several temporal layers flowing together; usually the deeper layers are slow moving, and the top voices quicksilver, but sometimes this inverses and we get melodies floating on an undertow of roiling arpeggios.

Brahms only wrote three violin sonata so we have to ration our pleasure, spend a lot of time with each sonata.

We finished the music session by sight-reading some Mozart sonatas, and then sharing a joint at the round wooden dinner table.

"Should I cook up some pasta?" I asked.
"I've got a party I'm supposed to go to," said Thibault, and I felt a bit jealous of the other people who would get Thib's luminous company for the rest of the evening. I contained my curiosity and refrained from asking him "whose party?".

After Thibault left, Gaspard and I did some yoga. It took me about seventy minutes to cycle through my yoga kata. It's like a musical score I've memorized and play through every time I practice yoga-- kind of like the Bach Prelude and Fugues; you spend a lifetime playing them and they become inner landscape. My yoga kata is a slow choreography whose every posture incites a symphony of kinesthetic sensations and thoughts. After this epistemological exercise, I felt expanded, loose.

Afterwards, it was so late, both of us were feeling too lazy to cook. As it had been Gaspard's birthday recently, I wanted to invite him to a restaurant.

"but I have no clean shirts," he protested. He was in a black tee shirt covered with Timeo's fine white dog-hairs.

"you can wear my Agnes B shirt," I said, and proceeded to unfold the ironing board and iron a cotton shirt for him.

We found a free sidewalk table at my favorite Thai restaurant and ordered two glasses of champagne, which the waiter poured for us at our tableside. The bottle of thick glass had a paper label edged with gold. We ate curry puffs, salmon tartare with lemongrass, fresh scallops stir-fried with baby corn, and pad thai.

"I've decided to stop smoking," he announced, in good spirits. "This will be my last pack."

I only half believed him.
"You know, the best way to stop something, is to start something else." I said.

That was another standard lecture of mine, that saying "no" to something was a bit self-defeating, since it is tantamount to fixing one's attention on it. Instead of obsessing over quitting smoking, better to obsess about something altogether different-- swimming daily, for example-- since any time spent swimming, or just thinking about swimming, would be time not spent thinking about cigarettes.

But this exchange of ours-- his announcement of a resolution, and my guru-like response-- was old-hat, so familiar it was reassuring.

The next day we bought sandwiches and sodas at the bakery, and took Timeo on the commuter train, out to the woods for a picnic. We spread our clothes under a towering oak. Stray insects fell on us from the thick branches above-- sometimes the green sliver of a baby caterpillar, or a flake-like spider. But once a huge spider, the size of a spoon-head, with wispy articulated legs agitating wildly, fell on his jeans leg. He leaped back with a cry.

"hahaha," I teased him, "you screamed like a girl" and he blushed in embarrassment and shrugged it off.

Timeo gamboled through the tall grass and came back with a bit of wood for us to throw.

We ate our sandwiches, peeling back the foil, and drank our sodas. We also had a paper bag of coin-sized macarons, and for desert we tasted our way through their pastel palette: chocolate, coffee, raspberry, lemon, pistachio and grapefruit, each a drop of condensed taste. I took a tiny bite of each, and offered him the half that remained. Instead of taking the morsel with his hand, he opened his mouth and I had to tuck each one into his mouth like communion host.

We were lying on our backs looking up into the tree and I said:

"do you see how the branches are splayed out in space just like a bolt of lightning? How the branches go off the main trunk and end up spreading out to occupy space evenly?

Well, that's because the leaves need to arrange themselves evenly through space for each to get maximum sun... just like how the electrons in a lightning bolt spread out-- to bridge the potential in a maximally efficient way."

As we were pondering this, another one of those giant spiders fell on him. Without even thinking, he flicked it off with a shudder, and it landed square on my chest!

Now it was my turn to scream like a girl.

In the agitation somehow the spider ended up crushed in a corner of the cloth. I'd later sneak a finger under the cloth and with a ping send the spider corpse trampolining back into the grass.

As he laughed, I said sternly, "this incident will remain strictly between you and me!"

Foldings and unfoldings

2007-03-10T00:04:57Z

When you fold a piece of origami paper into an origami sawyer beetle, you don't add anything to the paper; the folds are each made up entirely of the paper itself, and yet, there is a huge difference between an uncreased piece of paper and that sawyer beetle. Similarly, there is a huge difference between a long strand of yarn, and a crocheted Lorenz Manifold. The beetle and the Lorenz Manifold are still paper and yarn, but in a different form. Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order evokes for me the idea that life is ultimately enlivened space. Take the uncreased fabric of space and fold it a certain way; it becomes matter. Fold it some more, and it becomes life. Fold it still some more, and it becomes conscious. I say "fold it some more", but what's mind-boggling is that emptiness folds of its own accord toward sentience.

David Bohm might prefer to speak of an un-folding, as the implicate order works itself out into manifest reality, as the infinite universe is rendered from a finite but hidden seed program.

Our common-sense understanding of reality (as being material objects arranged in three-dimensional space and forward-flowing time) is mandated by our biological apparatus, but faulty. As soon as we probe a bit, we find out that the universe is not really set up like that, that distant particles remain entangled, for instance. This is why Robert Lanza suggests that a theory of everything would be found in biology not physics, and particularly in the epistemology of spacetime.

edit: (March 2, 2008) I've found an article about a natural philosopher who studies folds, drapes, crotchets in nature.