As I type these words, it looks as though the wheels are coming off the global economy. Greece and Puerto Rico have both suspended payments on their debts, and China’s stock market, which spent the last year in a classic speculative bubble, is now in the middle of a classic speculative bust. Those of my readers who’ve read John Kenneth Galbraith’s lively history
The Great Crash 1929 already know all about the Chinese situation, including the outcome—and since vast amounts of money from all over the world went into Chinese stocks, and most of that money is in the process of turning into twinkle dust, the impact of the crash will inevitably proliferate through the global economy.
So, in all probability, will the Greek and Puerto Rican defaults. In today’s bizarre financial world, the kind of bad debts that used to send investors backing away in a hurry attract speculators in droves, and so it turns out that some big New York hedge funds are in trouble as a result of the Greek default, and some of the same firms that got into trouble with mortgage-backed securities in the recent housing bubble are in the same kind of trouble over Puerto Rico’s unpayable debts. How far will the contagion spread? It’s anybody’s guess.
Oh, and on another front, nearly half a million acres of Alaska burned up in a single day last week—yes, the fires are still going—while ice sheets in Greenland are collapsing so frequently and forcefully that the resulting earthquakes are rattling seismographs thousands of miles away. These and other signals of a biosphere in crisis make good reminders of the fact that the current economic mess isn’t happening in a vacuum. As Ugo Bardi pointed out in a thoughtful blog post, finance is the flotsam on the surface of the ocean of real exchanges of real goods and services, and the current drumbeat of financial crises are symptomatic of the real crisis—the arrival of the limits to growth that so many people have been discussing, and so many more have been trying to ignore, for the last half century or so.
A great many people in the doomward end of the blogosphere are talking about what’s going on in the global economy and what’s likely to blow up next. Around the time the next round of financial explosions start shaking the world’s windows, a great many of those same people will likely be talking about what to do about it all. I don’t plan on joining them in that discussion. As blog posts here have pointed out more than once, time has to be considered when getting ready for a crisis. The industrial world would have had to start backpedaling away from the abyss decades ago in order to forestall the crisis we’re now in, and the same principle applies to individuals. The slogan “collapse now and avoid the rush!” loses most of its point, after all, when the rush is already under way.
Any of my readers who are still pinning their hopes on survival ecovillages and rural doomsteads they haven’t gotten around to buying or building yet, in other words, are very likely out of luck. They, like the rest of us, will be meeting this where they are, with what they have right now. This is ironic, in that ideas that might have been worth adopting three or four years ago are just starting to get traction now. I’m thinking here particularly of a recent article on how to use permaculture to prepare for a difficult future, which describes the difficult future in terms that will be highly familiar to readers of this blog. More broadly, there’s a remarkable amount of common ground between that article and the themes of my book Green Wizardry. The awkward fact remains that when the global banking industry shows every sign of freezing up the way it did in 2008, putting credit for land purchases out of reach of most people for years to come, the article’s advice may have come rather too late.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that my readers ought to crawl under their beds and wait for death. What we’re facing, after all, isn’t the end of the world—though it may feel like that for those who are too deeply invested, in any sense of that last word you care to use, in the existing order of industrial society. As Visigothic mommas used to remind their impatient sons, Rome wasn’t sacked in a day. The crisis ahead of us marks the end of what I’ve called abundance industrialism and the transition to scarcity industrialism, as well as the end of America’s global hegemony and the emergence of a new international order whose main beneficiary hasn’t been settled yet. Those paired transformations will most likely unfold across several decades of economic chaos, political turmoil, environmental disasters, and widespread warfare. Plenty of people got through the equivalent cataclysms of the first half of the twentieth century with their skins intact, even if the crisis caught them unawares, and no doubt plenty of people will get through the mess that’s approaching us in much the same condition.
Thus I don’t have any additional practical advice, beyond what I’ve already covered in my books and blog posts, to offer my readers just now. Those who’ve already collapsed and gotten ahead of the rush can break out the popcorn and watch what promises to be a truly colorful show. Those who didn’t—well, you might as well get some popcorn going and try to enjoy the show anyway. If you come out the other side of it all, schoolchildren who aren’t even born yet may eventually come around to ask you awed questions about what happened when the markets crashed in ‘15.
In the meantime, while the popcorn is popping and the sidewalks of Wall Street await their traditional tithe of plummeting stockbrokers, I’d like to return to the theme of last week’s post and talk about the way that the myth of the machine—if you prefer, the widespread mental habit of thinking about the world in mechanistic terms—pervades and cripples the modern mind.
Of all the responses that last week’s post fielded, those I found most amusing, and also most revealing, were those that insisted that of course the universe is a machine, so is everything and everybody in it, and that’s that. That’s amusing because most of the authors of these comments made it very clear that they embraced the sort of scientific-materialist atheism that rejects any suggestion that the universe has a creator or a purpose. A machine, though, is by definition a purposive artifact—that is, it’s made by someone to do something. If the universe is a machine, then, it has a creator and a purpose, and if it doesn’t have a creator and a purpose, logically speaking, it can’t be a machine.
That sort of unintentional comedy inevitably pops up whenever people don’t think through the implications of their favorite metaphors. Still, chase that habit further along its giddy path and you’ll find a deeper absurdity at work. When people say “the universe is a machine,” unless they mean that statement as a poetic simile, they’re engaging in a very dubious sort of logic. As Alfred Korzybski pointed out a good many years ago, pretty much any time you say “this is that,” unless you implicitly or explicitly qualify what you mean in very careful terms, you’ve just babbled nonsense.
The difficulty lies in that seemingly innocuous word “is.” What Korzybski called the “is of identity”—the use of the word “is” to represent =, the sign of equality—makes sense only in a very narrow range of uses.
You can use the “is of identity” with good results in categorical definitions; when I commented above that a machine is a purposive artifact, that’s what I was doing. Here is a concept, “machine;” here are two other concepts, “purposive” and “artifact;” the concept “machine” logically includes the concepts “purposive” and “artifact,” so anything that can be described by the words “a machine” can also be described as “purposive” and “an artifact.” That’s how categorical definitions work.
Let’s consider a second example, though: “a machine is a purple dinosaur.” That utterance uses the same structure as the one we’ve just considered. I hope I don’t have to prove to my readers, though, that the concept “machine” doesn’t include the concepts “purple” and “dinosaur” in any but the most whimsical of senses. There are plenty of things that can be described by the label “machine,” in other words, that can’t be described by the labels “purple” or “dinosaur.” The fact that some machines—say, electronic Barney dolls—can in fact be described as purple dinosaurs doesn’t make the definition any less silly; it simply means that the statement “no machine is a purple dinosaur” can’t be justified either.
With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the statement “the universe is a machine.” As pointed out earlier, the concept “machine” implies the concepts “purposive” and “artifact,” so if the universe is a machine, somebody made it to carry out some purpose. Those of my readers who happen to belong to Christianity, Islam, or another religion that envisions the universe as the creation of one or more deities—not all religions make this claim, by the way—will find this conclusion wholly unproblematic. My atheist readers will disagree, of course, and their reaction is the one I want to discuss here. (Notice how “is” functions in the sentence just uttered: “the reaction of the atheists” equals “the reaction I want to discuss.” This is one of the few other uses of “is” that doesn’t tend to generate nonsense.)
In my experience, at least, atheists faced with the argument about the meaning of the word “machine” I’ve presented here pretty reliably respond with something like “It’s not a machine in that sense.” That response takes us straight to the heart of the logical problems with the “is of identity.” In what sense is the universe a machine? Pursue the argument far enough, and unless the atheist storms off in a huff—which admittedly tends to happen more often than not—what you’ll get amounts to “the universe and a machine share certain characteristics in common.” Go further still—and at this point the atheist will almost certainly storm off in a huff—and you’ll discover that the characteristics that the universe is supposed to share with a machine are all things we can’t actually prove one way or another about the universe, such as whether it has a creator or a purpose.
The statement “the universe is a machine,” in other words, doesn’t do what it appears to do. It appears to state a categorical identity; it actually states an unsupported generalization in absolute terms. It takes a mental model abstracted from one corner of human experience and applies it to something unrelated. In this case, for polemic reasons, it does so in a predictably one-sided way: deductions approved by the person making the statement (“the universe is a machine, therefore it lacks life and consciousness”) are acceptable, while deductions the person making the statement doesn’t like (“the universe is a machine, therefore it was made by someone for some purpose”) get the dismissive response noted above.
This sort of doublethink appears all through the landscape of contemporary nonconversation and nondebate, to be sure, but the problems with the “is of identity” don’t stop with its polemic abuse. Any time you say “this is that,” and mean something other than “this has some features in common with that,” you’ve just fallen into one of the corel boobytraps hardwired into the structure of human thought.
Human beings think in categories. That’s what made ancient Greek logic, which takes categories as its basic element, so massive a revolution in the history of human thinking: by watching the way that one category includes or excludes another, which is what the Greek logicians did, you can squelch a very large fraction of human stupidities before they get a foothold. What Alfred Korzybski pointed out, in effect, is that there’s a metalogic that the ancient Greeks didn’t get to, and logical theorists since their time haven’t really tackled either: the extremely murky relationship between the categories we think with and the things we experience, which don’t come with category labels spraypainted on them.
Here is a green plant with a woody stem. Is it a tree or a shrub? That depends on exactly where you draw the line between those two categories, and as any botanist can tell you, that’s neither an easy nor an obvious thing. As long as you remember that categories exist within the human mind as convenient handles for us to think with, you can navigate around the difficulties, but when you slip into thinking that the categories are more real than the things they describe, you’re in deep, deep trouble.
It’s not at all surprising that human thought should have such problems built into it. If, as I do, you accept the Darwinian thesis that human beings evolved out of prehuman primates by the normal workings of the laws of evolution, it follows logically that our nervous systems and cognitive structures didn’t evolve for the purpose of understanding the truth about the cosmos; they evolved to assist us in getting food, attracting mates, fending off predators, and a range of similar, intellectually undemanding tasks. If, as many of my theist readers do, you believe that human beings were created by a deity, the yawning chasm between creator and created, between an infinite and a finite intelligence, stands in the way of any claim that human beings can know the unvarnished truth about the cosmos. Neither viewpoint supports the claim that a category created by the human mind is anything but a convenience that helps our very modest mental powers grapple with an ultimately incomprehensible cosmos.
Any time human beings try to make sense of the universe or any part of it, in turn, they have to choose from among the available categories in an attempt to make the object of inquiry fit the capacities of their minds. That’s what the founders of the scientific revolution did in the seventeenth century, by taking the category of “machine” and applying it to the universe to see how well it would fit. That was a perfectly rational choice from within their cultural and intellectual standpoint. The founders of the scientific revolution were Christians to a man, and some of them (for example, Isaac Newton) were devout even by the standards of the time; the idea that the universe had been made by someone for some purpose, after all, wasn’t problematic in the least to people who took it as given that the universe was made by God for the purpose of human salvation. It was also a useful choice in practical terms, because it allowed certain features of the universe—specifically, the behavior of masses in motion—to be accounted for and modeled with a clarity that previous categories hadn’t managed to achieve.
The fact that one narrowly defined aspect of the universe seems to behave like a machine, though, does not prove that the universe is a machine, any more than the fact that one machine happens to look like a purple dinosaur proves that all machines are purple dinosaurs. The success of mechanistic models in explaining the behavior of masses in motion proved that mechanical metaphors are good at fitting some of the observed phenomena of physics into a shape that’s simple enough for human cognition to grasp, and that’s all it proved. To go from that modest fact to the claim that the universe and everything in it are machines involves an intellectual leap of pretty spectacular scale. Part of the reason that leap was taken in the seventeenth century was the religious frame of scientific inquiry at that time, as already mentioned, but there was another factor, too.
It’s a curious fact that mechanistic models of the universe appeared in western European cultures, and become wildly popular there, well before the machines did. In the early seventeenth century, machines played a very modest role in the life of most Europeans; most tasks were done using hand tools powered by human and animal muscle, the way they had been done since the dawn of the agricultural revolution eight millennia or so before. The most complex devices available at the time were pendulum clocks, printing presses, handlooms, and the like—you know, the sort of thing that people these days use instead of machines when they want to get away from technology.
For reasons that historians of ideas are still trying to puzzle out, though, western European thinkers during these same years were obsessed with machines, and with mechanical explanations for the universe. Those latter ranged from the plausible to the frankly preposterous—René
Descartes, for example, proposed a theory of gravity in which little corkscrew-shaped particles went zooming up from the earth to screw themselves into pieces of matter and yank them down. Until Isaac Newton, furthermore, theories of nature based on mechanical models didn’t actually explain that much, and until the cascade of inventive adaptations of steam power that ended with James Watt’s epochal steam engine nearly a century after Newton, the idea that machines could elbow aside craftspeople using hand tools and animals pulling carts was an unproven hypothesis. Yet a great many people in western Europe believed in the power of the machine as devoutly as their ancestors had believed in the power of the bones of the local saints.
A habit of thought very widespread in today’s culture assumes that technological change happens first and the world of ideas changes in response to it. The facts simply won’t support that claim, though. As the history of mechanistic ideas in science shows clearly, the ideas come first and the technologies follow—and there’s good reason why this should be so. Technologies don’t invent themselves, after all. Somebody has to put in the work to invent them, and then other people have to invest the resources to take them out of the laboratory and give them a role in everyday life. The decisions that drive invention and investment, in turn, are powerfully shaped by cultural forces, and these in turn are by no means as rational as the people influenced by them generally like to think.
227 comments:
Yep, the wheels are coming off this wagon suficient to induce flashbacks of wagon scenes in old episodes of F Troop.
7/1/15, 5:35 PM
Angus Wallace said...
I think of it as intellectual sloppiness instead of inherent contradiction. Similar to the way Copernicus said (words to the effect that) "of course the Earth is at the centre of creation, but the maths is much simpler if we pretend that the sun is at the centre", scientific materialists will say "let's treat the universe as a machine -- it's been helpful in the past and likely will be in the future". You're right that some of these materialists are also atheists who then get carried away with their metaphors...
I guess it's a bit like the painting: "c'est n'est pas un pipe" -- it's always important to remember that a representation (or perception!) of a thing is not the thing!
Cheers, Angus
7/1/15, 5:38 PM
Derv said...
It's a bit surreal to see Greece actually, finally ending the game. It's been going for so many years, and with some new (and inevitably pointless) can kicking at every turn, that the end of it all seems bizarre. It almost felt like it would never really happen to me, even though I knew it would, and so I can understand a little bit the shock that the financiers must be feeling right now. It's just over. Perhaps all of Europe (and maybe even the rest of the world too) may be about to face reality. And I can't help but think that a hundred new tricks will be thrown out by the central banks of the world to try and close pandora's box; who knows if it'll be successful this time?
As for me and my own, we now live in a house with a cistern, near a river, railroad tracks, and a grain elevator. My wife has a few good years of real gardening under her belt, and I have a job that we can rely on for at least a while longer. Once I can secure some minor power generation, we should be well set, thanks in no little part to you. So thank you for that. If this is finally the Big One, I can at least hope to weather the storm better than most.
And as for the mechanical universe, the more I've learned about the reality of our scientific knowledge base, the more shocking becomes the hubris of those who have unshakable faith in it. We know so much less than is generally believed. This is still a world of mystery, and will remain so until kingdom come.
7/1/15, 5:39 PM
Tim Horan said...
I should not have been drinking my coffee over the keyboard while reading The Archdruid Report this morning. Mr. Greer, if you need to supplement your work of Archdruid and writer as the The Long Descent unfolds, you could do a lot worse than stand up comedy.
On another note, I just finished reading The Great Crash 1929 and now feel vaccinated against the irrational exuberance that is underway in the Sydney, Australia property market (where I reside).
7/1/15, 5:41 PM
Jay Meltesen said...
7/1/15, 5:49 PM
James M. Jensen II (badocelot/shiningwhiffle) said...
You've also got me thinking now about the difference between arguments for the existence of a creator and arguments for the existence of a ground of being from which everything else emanated. Get past superficial similarities and there's a difference between saying that the world exists because of a primal being's choice — whether the choice was to make a machine, as in ID, or an organism, as in Thomism — and the world existing as a consequence of something more basic existing.
The latter would seem to imply that, true to its name, Nature as a whole is truly something born, not a machine made by anything else.
7/1/15, 5:57 PM
Quos Ego said...
I can honestly say you are the only writer of the collapse sphere I still read these days, having lost interest in the increasingly shrill discourse about sudden collapse that seems to be prevalent. I took a peak at Ron Patterson's blog the other day and saw insults, plenty of insults, being hurled across keyboards full of deplorable spite and pride.
I feel the insanity has reached even those people I once considered the sanest.
So, in these difficult times, thanks again for keeping this place civil and level-headed. Even though I'm not entirely convinced the wheels will come off the economy this year (I'm with Jeremy Grantham on this, and I bet on 2016), there's an odd feeling in the air.
7/1/15, 5:58 PM
fudoshindotcom said...
While reading your post it occurred to me that people sometimes apply the same thinking in reverse. Rather than attribute mechanistic behaviors to natural phenomenon, they credit machines with behavior similar to natural phenomenon.
The example that came to mind were those securities traders who utilize the Fibonacci sequence as a method for charting market fluctuations.
As far as I've read this hasn't proven particularly successful. The failure seems the inevitable result of applying a pattern (of numbers or percentages) observed to repeat in Nature to mechanistic market behavior.
In other words, "This is not that."
7/1/15, 5:58 PM
donalfagan said...
There was a tv show, How William Shatner Changed the World, which was precisely about how young people saw communicators and tricorders on Star Trek, then grew up and invented cell phones and other analogous technology.
7/1/15, 6:02 PM
Ray Wharton said...
I hope this wakes up some of my friends a little bit, I fear some will by despair be consumed when they can no longer consume. I am thinking of some lovely folks, but careless from prosperity, a kind of carelessness that wounds me. We are not islands, each one of us need human relationships to thrive. Must vividly for the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual stimulation, but also for help in the practical matter. I am a bit fried today from working in the sun, my best buddy lay in the shade the whole time, he wasn't counting his beers the night before; the sun and weeds were less sympathetic than I was, so the gardening still needed to happen, one man or two. I prepared well enough to be secure for my self, but it has cost so much of myself trying to work with others to be prepared together. Good people I emphasize, but they have no experience to ground their ideology to "do this now, for winter is long and beans get boring." with out experience of something toughening the finest souls are not fully manifest enough to stoutly hold a line. Eh, I will feel better as the evening cools.
I should sit down and list some of the little chores it will take to batten down the hatches.
7/1/15, 6:09 PM
MayHawk said...
Your "Dream of the Machine" is right to the point. First we dream of the machine and then we create it. I think it is time to start a different Dream.
I am looking forward to next weeks post as it may give me some clue as to where and what to do with all those bits of paper and ink stuffed into my safety deposit box.
I've missed reading your responses to the many thoughtful comments to your recent post. I suspect that as things come apart at the seams you have ever more demands on your attention. As Jesse Stone says "You can only do what you can do". (Actually I can't imagine how you do all that you do.)
7/1/15, 6:14 PM
John Roth said...
There’s another way in which “is” works well: the “is of state.” Consider the sentence “The grass is green.” Clearly grass is not identical with the sensory category of “green,” but the statement is perfectly understandable and uncontroversial. Grass has a series of states, from seed, to seedling, to growing, to dead and decaying. “The grass is green,” picks out one of those states. This is the failure of classical logic: in its simplest form it does not handle state transitions very well.
Rev. Dodson (better known as Lewis Carroll) was working on this problem in volume 2 of his work “Symbolic Logic,” which was still unpublished at his death. It was resurrected and published several decades ago. From that volume we have a syllogism called Raw Meat.
Major premise: What I buy in the market I eat that night.
Minor premise: I bought raw meat in the market.
Conclusion: I ate raw meet tonight.
Clearly there’s something wrong with this. What’s wrong is that there’s an implicit state model behind it that doesn’t show up in the syllogism.
Isaac Newton is sometimes called the last magician; one of the major impediments to having his ideas accepted was that he didn’t have a mechanical model of how gravity worked. The intellectual climate of the time did not really accept the idea of action at a distance, which is where the “magician” came from.
As a student of the Michael Teaching, the answer to the perplex you pose is fairly clear: the exploration of how to work with the physical universe was intended, culminating in the Industrial Revolution. As part of that, most of the people who incarnated to work on it accepted a set of blinders that prevented them from seeing the wider picture.
7/1/15, 6:15 PM
MayHawk said...
7/1/15, 6:19 PM
Five8Charlie said...
7/1/15, 6:25 PM
RPC said...
7/1/15, 6:27 PM
Ray Wharton said...
I remember blog posts here about progress being a secularized version of salvation. Also about the Angry Atheists and the Fundamentalists being both subclasses of 'true believers'. Hmm and hmm, its starting too look like the Machine Universe is Creation emptied of living will, emptied of a spiritual living principle. In fact the Machine Universe is very very VERY similar to the Universe as prescripted by God, that whole idea of God as all knowing. Its not even like the idea of God is not implicit, as you point out the vestigial throne in your post, it is more like he is dead. The thrown is still there, waiting for the Overman to take it; grabbing the control board of this great Machine. Universe reduced from God's just kingdom to God's nice car left with the key's in the ignition waiting for humanities legs to grow long enough to, ha, reach the gas. It really seems like the biggest difference in the idea that humans can wield the Machine; while the Kingdom of God's Creation is too full of life and richness to ever be mastered.
"The Universe is a Machine, therefore it lacks life and consciousness" is the key point because this is the move that differentualtes the Machine universe from Divine creation. "Creation" has life and consciousness. One is tempted to ask, of course, if the universe (that is to say aproximently "all that is") lacks life and consciousness, then how could those words mean anything and how could you mean anything by making that claim? If the universe lacks those things completely they are with out referent or example. Why the denial of Life, and the denial of Consciousness (that most critical aspect of freedom)? I think that this could be the spiritual exhaustion said to be common of late peoples. That spiritual exhaustion coinciding with the flourishing of these mental technologies risen out of a thousand years of diligent refinement of mental technologies reappropriated from the Classical civilization, it leaves the mental technology ungoverned. Extrahuman forces such as the lust for air felt by the long buried dead, never let to recycle into lives cycle, likely turned this cultures quirk into the rather staggering frack job we are left with today. With out that we might have had a civilization of whimsical clockwork gadgets, and even then perhaps humans toward the end wound up like spring loaded trinkets by the end, but not the staggering difference in economic magnitude.
7/1/15, 6:56 PM
NickelthroweR said...
I've been reading your blog now for about a month and I find it to be insightful and relevant. With that said, I would like to comment on the atheism and the nature of the Universe. Atheists tend to pride themselves on rational thinking but the micro/macro physics and construction of the Universe, at least with regards to how modern science define them, leave us with a bit of cognitive dissonance.
I'm convinced that the Universe is an electrical device. After all, atoms are clearly electrical devices held together with magnetism. Frankly, they are more of an idea than an actually physical structure. If that is the basic building block of the macro Universe then the Universe, itself, must be an electrical device.
Well, devices do not create themselves - as an inventor, I know this first-hand. What I can not do is connect that knowledge to any of the 1000 or more deities that mankind has invented to explain creation. That makes me an atheist.
The Apollo rocket was not created by a single person but by over 400,000 people, most of whom had no contact with any of the other 400,000 people toiling towards the same goal yet create it they did. Perhaps our Universe was created the same way.
I look forward to your next post.
7/1/15, 6:57 PM
Bruno B. L. said...
7/1/15, 6:57 PM
AA said...
I'm not sure that's accurate. That dream -- if existed -- was a popular and debased idea of what working scientists such as Newton, Leibniz, Lagrange, and Hamilton were doing at the time. The idea behind classical mechanics is that given a set of initial conditions -- say position and momentum -- it's possible to work out the subsequent trajectory in simple cases. For example, if I throw something into the air with a certain initial velocity, I can predict how high it will go, how far it will go horizintally, and how long it will take. The same with respect to the orbits of planets around the sun. In this sense classical mechanics was a huge success. In the decades and centuries to come the math that made classical mechanics possible -- ordinary and then partial differential equations -- shed light on aspects of the physical universe (electrodynamics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, quantum theory, relativity) But I doubt that Newton -- a working alchemist -- would see the world as an inanimate mechanism.
7/1/15, 7:11 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Angus, I encourage you to get into a debate with a bunch of internet atheist trolls sometime. Before you know it, they'll be insisting at the top of their lungs that it is too a pipe!
Derv, oh, I know. That's the thing about this sort of crisis; what exactly will come of it is anyone's guess.
Tim, just one of the services I offer. ;-)
Jay, of course -- but you'll note that the Romans didn't make machines central to their image of the universe.
James, good. An astonishing number of people don't seem to get that distinction.
Quos Ego, you're welcome and thank you. I have zero interest in the kind of online forums where everything dissolves into lowest-common-denominator insult slinging, so decided to try something different here. As for when the wheels will come off, well, remember that it has a lot of wheels -- we may both be right.
Fudoshin, oh, granted. Human beings basically aren't very smart, and so tend to use simplistic categories for thinking because that's all they can manage. For beings of such limited intellectual capacities, all things considered, I think we've done pretty well, but still...
Donalfagan, that'll be happening to a lot of people; I hope you're practically as well as mentally prepared.
Ray, no question, it's going to be rough. I hope your friends can get a clue in time.
MayHawk, I try to respond to the first few days of comments, but can't always do more than that just now -- I've got two large writing projects to get done in a hurry.
John, I'll have to remember the raw meat syllogism -- that's good. As for Isaac Newton, the only people who think he was the last magician are those who haven't noticed that magicians are still very much around!
MayHawk, well, I did say I thought that was imminent!
Charlie, thanks for the recommendation!
RPC, nah, this is just applause. The real fireworks are set to go off in the global economy and the biosphere.
7/1/15, 7:16 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
"René Descartes, for example, proposed a theory of gravity in which little corkscrew-shaped particles went zooming up from the earth to screw themselves into pieces of matter and yank them down."
I find that hysterically funny, not only for the inherent ludicrousness, but also because it ties into a conversation over at your other blog that you imported into your previous post here about the troubles of String Theory. That's one form of unified theory of everything in physics that postulates that gravity is like all the other three fundamental forces of the universe that physicists recognize, which means it's mediated by particles. Now I can't get that image of how gravitons might behave out of my head.
"People in western Europe and a few of its colonies dreamed of machines, and then created them. They dreamed of a universe reduced to the status of a machine, a universe made totally transparent to the human mind and totally subservient to the human will, and then set out to create it."
That also ties together this blog with your others. You define magic as a change in consciousness caused by will. In this case, the change of consciousness came first, and then it was made manifest in the world by science and technology. So the change we need to survive in the world to come will be another act of magic, whether the people doing the conjuring realize it or not.
The idea of magic expressed through religion seems to be a subject even the science fiction on television is exploring. Two shows I follow, Defiance and Falling Skies, both looked at the power of religion to control people through changing their consciousness. Both also compared it to the power of totalitarian ideology and tactics and found religion to be more effective. Must be something in the ether.
7/1/15, 7:19 PM
Grebulocities said...
Take, for instance, the fracking bubble. It's obviously a bubble of the same sort that was chronicled in Zweig's fantastic book Belly Up: The Collapse of the Penn Square Bank, but on a much grander scale. Yet despite an oil price collapse seven months ago, it has still yet to unravel or even result in decreasing oil production, at least as of yet. The main difference I'm seeing is the radically different interest rate situation; in the early 1980s the Volcker Shock pushed interest rates to nearly 20%, whereas we've been at zero for nearly seven years now. The resulting bubble in nearly everything (fracking being just one example) has been quite long-lived, and it's not impossible it could keep going a while longer.
Greece is another interesting case. I predict it will cave quickly and accept austerity conditions, either by a 'yes' vote in the upcoming referendum or by Tsipras accepting the deal with a few minor changes, which he's already trying to do despite the referendum. That doesn't change the fact that it's completely insolvent and has to be bailed out in order to pay back its loans from the previous bailout, but the Greeks seem to have been scared enough by the default, bank holiday, and capital controls that they'll probably go back despite the fact that their creditors were forcing them into an economic depression rivaling the Great Depression.
I'm not claiming that this time really is different in any meaningful way. At the end of the day, the world economic system is a house of cards, and sooner or later something will send it back to earth. But I bet if you polled the denizens of, say, The Oil Drum in late 2009 and asked how long they thought the "recovery" charade could be kept up, very few would have guessed it would still be going. And it just might keep on rolling...
7/1/15, 7:26 PM
Moshe Braner said...
Even the most devoutly religious still rely on such determinism in everyday material life. The remaining arguments include:
* To what extent can deterministic phenomena be UNpredictable? That's where "chaos theory" comes in. Some very simple deterministic rules, let alone real-world systems such as weather, can indeed produce behavior which cannot be usefully predicted for very long into the future.
* To what extent do we understand the mechanisms (not machines!) of the universe. Those with enough hubris think that more technology will solve the problems created by some technology. Others think we should be more cautious - but that does not imply a belief in a non-mechanistic universe.
* Are there things in the universe that are NOT deterministic? This is where the atheists split from others. They say: we havn't seen anything that is convincingly exempt from deterministic behavior. Yes there is a large fraction of humans who say that they've had religious experiences, but that is no enough to convince those who have not had such experiences, or who attribute those experiences to the chaotic behaviors of a deterministic brain.
Note that we do not have to fully "understand" everything about the universe to notice that it, or at least much of it, behaves mechanistically. Just like Newton stumbled upon the simple mathematical rule that the motion of massive bodies in empty space follows, even though he did not have an explanation for WHY or HOW this "gravity" force operates, especially at a distance. And guess what: we STILL don't have a good explanation for it, even though by now we've refined those rules of motion to include relativity etc. Because we are willing to accept the mechanistic behavior without, er, a mechanism to explain it, it is natural for us to assume that everything else in the universe has similarly deterministic behavior, even if we havn't yet even observed it. This assumption is unproven, but, from my perspective, neither is any competing assumption.
7/1/15, 7:42 PM
Nick A said...
I agree with JMG's premise that people 2, 5, 10, 100 years from now will view the last 6 months of 2015 and the first 6 months of 2016 as a turning point (it seems like nothing ever happens in the summer). Barring a bunch of serious black swans that cause a massive global supply chain shutdown, I also am mostly confident that 2015 and 2016 will be more serious repeats of 2008 and 2009 - we will not be murdering each other with sporting equipment for the last cans of spam.
I also agree with JMG's premise that we can't really know what exactly the next 20-40 years of scarcity industrialism will look like. Complex systems do not change without external stressors. Sometimes they change for the better. I think there is tremendous spare capacity to adapt to what is coming, and I think that the seriousness of peak oil and climate change being popularly acknowledged will unleash serious changes. I think the final years of the internet as we know it will be its finest hour, the dissemination of information on a global scale will be very useful in distributing mostly-lost skills.
7/1/15, 7:54 PM
onething said...
7/1/15, 8:02 PM
Carolyn said...
7/1/15, 8:21 PM
John D. Wheeler said...
And regarding trees versus bushes, the simplest distinction I've heard is that a tree is tall with a single trunk whereas a bush is short with multiple stems. Then you have something like mesquite, which if you cut down the tall, single trunk, will regrow as something short with multiple stems.
7/1/15, 8:24 PM
fudoshindotcom said...
I hadn't meant that as generalized commentary on human intellectual capacity, but to illustrate a specific instance in which a perceived, yet non-existent, correlation led to an illogical expectation.
My personal belief is that humans are intelligent enough, but that we don't employ our intelligence correctly in attempting to overcome our difficulties.
I'm also of the opinion that we have an unproductive tendency to "overthink" things and that a liberal application of Occam's razor would clear away some needless complexity.
7/1/15, 8:32 PM
Unknown said...
I had to laugh. I have friends who flint knap and make atlatls to "get away from technology". More like "gimme that ol'time technology".
Between the limitations of our primate sensorium and the limitations of our primate cognition, we really know very little about the world around us... too bad we don't act like it.
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so"
7/1/15, 8:53 PM
Mark Rice said...
"for it is written that All is Machine, from atom to Galaxy, and the machine is one and eternal, and thou shalt have no other things before thee."
But does the mechanism need to have an intended purpose in order to be a machine. The sun is a mechanism to produce light using an ongoing fusion reaction and gravity to contain the reaction. The sun is what it is regardless of the intent of a creator. Though I guess that depends on what your definition of is is.
On a more serious note though -- back in the day when I was an athiest, I had the belief that my mind could understand everything. I also prided myself on being a realist. When I finally accepted my finiteness I had the thought that maybe my brain just isn't wired to understand everything. I got to the point where I realised me understanding God is like my dog understanding space travel.
7/1/15, 10:02 PM
Myosotis said...
7/1/15, 10:08 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Nickelthrower, you've already admitted that an electron is more an idea than an electrical object. Why not take the next step and consider the possibility that the universe is a structure of ideas rather than a machine, electrical or otherwise? As for gods, your Apollo metaphor would make perfect sense to a polytheist, you know.
Bruno, the difficulty there is that energy is only one of the things we're running out of in a hurry, and unless this new form of energy you're postulating is capable of limitless expansion -- which is true of no form of energy in the cosmos, for reasons ultimately linked to the laws of conservation -- we'd be back in the same fix we're in now, and in fairly short order, exponential growth being what it is.
AA, you've missed my point, which is that the dream of a mechanical universe -- however popular and debased it might have been -- was on the scene before Newton et al., and arguably inspired and guided both their researches and the enthusiasm with which their conclusions were adopted by Western societies.
Pinku-sensei, very good indeed; that gets you tonight's gold star. Exactly; change in consciousness comes first, and leads to changes in technologies and the like -- and that, of course, is precisely what I've been trying to kickstart into motion on this blog and elsewhere for the last nine years.
Grebulocities, it's possible, but at this point so many things are coming apart so enthusiastically that I think we've passed a boundary of sorts. Stil, we'll see.
Moshe, from my perspective, you're starting from the claim that a few things in the universe are deterministic, and making a wild leap of fantasy to get to the claim that the whole universe is deterministic. Since "deterministic" in this sense means no more than "our quantitative models can reliably predict things in certain cases" -- we don't actually know if those models correspond to "laws of nature," of course -- that seems to me like an astonishingly vast claim to make on astonishingly little evidence.
Nick, nicely summarized. I hope you're right about the internet.
Onething, that's because they were sufficiently belligerent that I deleted them, of course.
Carolyn, I don't recommend trying to talk about the end of the industrial age with people who still believe in the religion of progress; they won't, and indeed can't hear what you're saying. I wish I had another answer, but that's what I've seen, over and over again.
7/1/15, 10:23 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Fudoshin, granted, but I consider the specific instance an example of a much broader phenomenon.
Unknown, and of course the thing is, your friends have a point. If they're like most people into retro tech, they want to use technologies simple and concrete enough that they make some kind of sense on the human scale -- and that's a very reasonable choice just now.
Mark, of course the sun is what it is; I simply question that the category "machine" makes any sort of sense of what it is. A better case could be made, I think, that it's a very simple organism that metabolizes hydrogen and excretes electromagnetic radiation! As for your dog and space travel, though, very good indeed; to my mind the flaw with atheism is precisely that it presumes to know something that is arguably beyond humanity's capacity for knowledge.
Myosotis, you're far better prepared than a great many others!
7/1/15, 10:30 PM
Scotlyn said...
This is how the Creed describes the relation of Christ, the Son, to God the Father. But these words have been resonating for a year or more as a way to reach the third path leading away from the binary that is creationism v "mechanistic-ism" - as those two sets of ideologues grapple over whether a "made" universe has a "maker" I've been considering the implications of being part of a universe which is "begotten" and NOT "made" - no maker, no making, but an organic unfolding, of the kind life displays.
7/2/15, 12:47 AM
Chloe said...
But this is not what atheism means. At its core, atheism says nothing about *knowing* whether there are gods or forces beyond our ken. That falls to agnosticism - the assertion that we cannot know the answer to a question. Atheism simply refers to a lack of *belief*. I've seen nothing to convince me of the existence of anything beyond the physical world, but I don't presume to *know* (as any science undergrad worth their salt could tell you: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence), so I would describe myself as both - agnostic, and atheist.
Those who say "the universe is a machine" have simply fallen prey to a lack of rigour in their use of English language. They haven't considered or recognised at any point that a machine must have purpose; the contradiction is therefore inherent in the language but not necessarily in the thinking. "Mechanistic" or "deterministic" are better terms. Whether or not the principle is right - again, I've never seen anything to contradict it; every new insight in the sciences (from the basic principles of chemistry to research in modern meteorology and neuroscience) finds that its subject matter follows basic principles or rules and improves our ability to predict its behaviour. Just as natural selection can be accepted without producing evidence of its workings in every single organism, so the principle of determinism can be taken as a working hypothesis until something comes along to suggest otherwise, without needing to apply it to every single bit of the universe. This doesn't mean it's "proven", and it never will be, regardless of the fact that science does not deal in self-reflection (i.e. scientific principles cannot be used to determine whether science is applicable). Nothing is ever proven.
Whether or not the principle is right also, in one sense, doesn't matter. The complexity of the universe is such that we can never hope to understand more than a fraction of its workings. Some (often the "rationalists" again) hold that we can break down the universe into its constituent parts and so understand it, but the task is ultimately futile and perhaps self-defeating even if it were not. On a sub-atomic level, perhaps we have deterministic brains, but on a human level, we are people. Personally, I'd rather keep being a person – so I'm not going to start bleating about our lack of free will, regardless of the intellectual arguments. On the other hand, while there’s a logical jump in the argument that “universe functioning according to natural laws with no conscious creator or purpose = universe humans can control”, we must be careful not to make the same jump backwards: the truth of one says nothing about the truth of the other.
Gods and the supernatural fall beyond our comprehension, yes, and unlike some who call themselves atheists I’m not going to claim to *know* anything in that regard. However, it must be remembered that the potential for such things to exist does not mean they actually do.
As for intellect: our brains evolved to find mates, navigate complex social systems, extract resources and develop technology in ways that are highly intellectually demanding by the usual standards of primates, though admittedly not philosophy or quantum physics.
Stars do have many of the properties of living organisms, though they’re missing one critical aspect of life as usually defined, which is that they don’t actively reproduce themselves. At least, as far as we know. But then, we don’t know anything, do we?
7/2/15, 1:20 AM
Caryn said...
"...in Spanish, they have two forms of the verb, one for temporary conditions, the other for permanent ones; so, for example, you would say "The corn is-now ripe" but "Corn is-always a member of the grass family"."
It's similar in Cantonese, two completely different verbs, (characters -conjugations). What I find most interesting about studying another language is how it subtly shows a very different thought process to our own, even in something so fundamental like "being", "is".
Unknown,
I also caught that: "The most complex devices available at the time were pendulum clocks, printing presses, handlooms, and the like—you know, the sort of thing that people these days use instead of machines when they want to get away from technology."
But I was thinking "Too right! I don't WANT to give up on the good things we've gotten from mod-cons / mechanicals, (Ya know how many hours of work are saved by a loom or a sewing machine!?) - just looking for something sustainable when the electricity is cut off for good. If oldy-Timey steampunk mechanisms fit the bill, then, for as long as they last, I'm all for them!
Carolyn - Many congratulations on your impending nuptials and baby!
And JGM: Thank You for your answer to Carolyn, as I was pondering the exact same thing, (what to say to BAU friends and family without sounding like a crazy-zombie-apocalypes-prepper?). Although, having said that, I do find there seems to be something in the air; an unease, a mistrust, a feeling that things are about to change drastically. Having spent much of my adult career in costume and fashion design, being well acquainted with clothing history, I can say with certainty that there is always a REASON when ideas are 'trending'. Without calling it 'Green Wizardry', all manner of Green Wizardry, (gardening, crafting, herbal remedies, etc.) is definitely trending now.
Just made my first successful batch of soap, shampoo and laundry soap and I'm feeling a little less crazy every day.
7/2/15, 2:25 AM
Caryn said...
Have you updated your security here or are the Google-Gods messin' with me? Is this machine I'm working with, (I call her Pinky) having a jolly running me all over the internet to try and post? Very temperamental this thing. ;)
7/2/15, 2:30 AM
das monde said...
There is also some incongruity in basically viewing rationalists, atheists as predictable, usable for fun machines :-) By the way, how mechanical (or not) is the expectation of a civilization collapse or a definite decline?
7/2/15, 2:49 AM
Denys said...
A professor from UNC was being interviewed about her studies in people's ability to change their minds after they heard a persuasive narrative that impacted them. Study after study the researchers found that once the story is implanted, nothing they could say or do could change the effect of the story. Even when the narrative was false and they told the subjects that the story they were going to be told was false, people still believed it because of its emotional impact on them. Hearing about this research was confirmation of the power of the media over people, and even the power of the stories we tell ourselves about our personal histories.
It sounds like from that research there is no way to free someone's mind by another person, unless I guess another more emotionally powerful narrative would cover up the old narrative. I suppose too there are those that free themselves. For myself, I still feel the tug of certain narratives about our culture and country and have to pause to reset my brain.
Thank you JMG for providing a different narrative of events that I can use to better prepare and plan for the future. And to throw an "is" statement in for fun - "knowledge is power".
7/2/15, 4:16 AM
Justin W. McCarthy said...
ha, my "place" has been a life of constant travel and moving around since childhood. Hope I can keep it rolling!
Great post, JMG. Thanks!
Another data point, there have been no less than 7 shark attacks in the past three weeks in the beaches of North Carolina, where my stone is currently rolling. For context, US gets about 15 on average per year. Why are the sharks so hungry to be attacking people? Thing is, its all different kinds of sharks, so its not like one or two man eaters.
7/2/15, 4:56 AM
Lawfish1964 said...
Since that time, I have pondered the existence of "God." Years of soul-searching and scientific study have caused me to conclude that people trying to explain God is like dogs trying to explain algebra. The concept of the creator of the universe, its purpose in creating, and our purpose for existing are simply beyond the grasp of the human mind.
I do not attend church and do not belong to any organized religion, so to most of my Christian friends, I am considered an atheist. Since I long ago eschewed discussing religion, I simply let them think what they will. But if they ever eat dinner at my house, they will experience the thanks we acknowledge to the creator for the fact that an animal had to die so that we could eat. Life is not possible without death, a fact that so many people, even those of a religious bent, seem to gloss over. I see God as nature, so I suppose I am somewhat along the lines of a druid, although I know nothing of druidry, other than what I have read here. But because it seems to fit so well with my line of thinking, I will keep returning to learn more.
Looking forward to next week's post!
7/2/15, 5:11 AM
Odin's Raven said...
King's Quest depicts a future where a tool of consciousness is more sought and better understood than a mechanical prosthesis.
New Yorkers is a short humorous view of a future where archaeology may still be puzzled by the relics of a misunderstood past and where unconventional views continue to be popular.
7/2/15, 5:16 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Computer gremlins took me off the Internet air today - completely. What a time eater and now it is almost bedtime...
Problems aside (and I have to make this very brief rather than my usual long winded but hopefully interesting comments. hehe! ;-)!), I've been meditating on your reply from last week: "what thou doest to the least of these, thou doest unto Me."
One interpretation leapt to the forefront of my mind today and that is that the reply and original source comment suggests an alternative perspective which is that perhaps the universe is indeed one aspect of the creator or God or whatever you want to call it? Dunno, but I've been pondering the connectedness of things recently and it seems that if magic is a part of nature then why not nature being a part of the creator (or whatever you want to call such a thing). What an awesome thought as the universe really could be a huge organism like thing.
Creationists and atheists have such a human centric point of view that they leave me feeling cold - the universe can be so much bigger and full of total awesomeness!
PS: All that physics talk in the comments does my head in…
Cheers
Chris
PS: I'd like to add a quick link to this week’s blog titled: How to dig a hole. The blog is actually about digging holes for the super strong steel chicken fortress which is currently under construction. It is good stuff and it will be a pleasant and stimulating place for the chickens. Also for those interested in what life looks like when all you have to rely on is the sun for electricity and it’s the depths of winter - then take a peek (don't be scared – it won’t bite because it doesn’t have enough energy too!). Also lots of house construction stuff and cool photos.
7/2/15, 5:28 AM
Graeme Bushell said...
(sorry if this is a dumplicate)
Example of something that isn't deterministic? Quantum events, ie the stuff that everything else is built from. The most common interpretation of the mathematics is that its really fundamentally not deterministic. At least, that's my understanding of it. There are some pretty interesting consequences, regardless of which interpretation you take. Some random ramblings about this at my rather uninteresting blog.
Cheers,
Graeme
7/2/15, 5:31 AM
William Meisheid said...
This is the most significant thing of your I have read (at least from my perspective). We live in an era of oxymoronic thinking.
Blessings.
7/2/15, 5:33 AM
Andy Brown said...
I agree that the obsession with a mechanistic orientation – and the apparent effort to edit out or eliminate the role of other minds in the equation - which you’ve been diagnosing in the past two essays, does have to do with confusing these two approaches, but I wouldn’t put it down to the machine-implies-a-maker point.
I would say that what we are seeing is the culmination of a long process of moving more and more human relationships from the social-psychological model to the mechanistic model. Long ago analysts noted that bureaucratization and urban living involved interacting with people not as full, fellow human beings, but as simplified, roll-specific mechanoids. You can hand over the change to the clerk the same as you would a vending machine.
As long as we had rich social lives – as long as our personal economic and social positions relied on our ability to manage social relationships and understand the psychological states of the people around us – the fiction that the clerk was a vending machine didn’t really do most of us any harm. But do we still have those rich social lives? Does it really matter to the corporate drone what his supervisor is thinking and whether or not she likes him or not? The philosophies that guide (and reward) elite thinking – like economics and management – are entirely devoted to making the case that humans are best understood and manipulated in mechanistic terms.
So we have a kind of cultural insanity, and it is intensified among the most powerful among us. And it is an approach that is turning out to be entirely ineffectual when it comes to managing human and other complex systems – which respond as though they have agendas of their own.
7/2/15, 5:43 AM
Rashakor said...
Mental models are useful to understand our surroundings but it is of primordial importance to keep in mind (pun intended!) that they are just that; mental constructs.
Regarding languages: these are also powerful mental contructs that shape thoughts more reliably that many other factors in education. English is a language that offers concise, action-oriented grammatical structures much more so than french or spanish. More and more I can glimpse the magick differences that exists between the 3 and how you can arrive at different conclusions just by phrasing the same sentence in all 3 languages... Lost in translation is more than just a catchy phrase. It can modify the map inside our brain more reliably than many things...
7/2/15, 5:48 AM
Ed Ryan, CPA said...
7/2/15, 5:52 AM
RPC said...
7/2/15, 5:59 AM
Nick A said...
JMG, I think you're correct that it's unlikely to be feasible for the vast majority of people to prepare for collapse to the extent of moving to some sort of doomstead or ecovillage if they have not already done so. Land, resources and the money to obtain them are a significant constraint for most.
I'm 26, dependent-free and am an engineer at a defense contractor, which is hopefully a secure position for a few more years - probably longer, war is almost certainly going to be a growth industry. I realize that most people can't do this, but my preference is to stay mobile. I generally subscribe to the Club of Rome view that developed countries will gradually start to look more like third world countries - vast slums and no opportunity for most, with the remaining wealthy in gated communities. My goal is not really to get myself a spot in one of those islands of wealth and privilege, but rather to maximize my opportunities in as many different futures as possible. My main priorities are physical fitness and skill development, I do not think that settling down is a good move if you have a somewhat secure place in the money economy. Knowledge and skills cannot be taken away from you or destroyed by climate change, the government or criminals. But maybe I'll be proven wrong, and die as a result, but that's basically the normal state of human existence, so it really shouldn't bother me.
Regarding the Internet, I generally agree with the premise that there will be some form of the Internet in 2065, but probably not generally accessible and used by governments, militaries and those few corporations still engaged in international trade. However, in the short term, meaning the next decade, I would imagine that the Internet will continue to exist more or less as it does today, just likely with more balkanization and censorship.
I think that one of the NSA and allied-alphabet-soup-agencies purposes will be to create an imperceptible soft censorship of the Internet, where "this page is blocked" will be a fairly rare sight, but control of what people see on the various online fora that suck up so much of our time is subtly shaped to attempt to mold people's perceptions of reality in a way that those throwing the switches want, which relates to your idea about a mechanistic view of the universe. After all, if you can model human activity in an accurate enough way, and then control the input to the human machines, you can control the output if your model was accurate enough. Or so the theory goes. So I think for a lot of reasons, maintenance of something very like the Internet of today as well as the manufacturing and distribution of devices to access it will have a lot of our dwindling resources allocated to it. I remain hopeful that there will still be room for realistic discussion of the present situation on the Internet, which is why I am optimistic that the Internet will drive a lot of positive change, because I think that the project of soft censorship won't actually block dissenting thought on the internet, it will just keep it hard-to-see on social media.
7/2/15, 6:04 AM
Brian said...
This is why I believe no completely "logical" language can ever be created that is capable of expressing all human communication and thought, despite the efforts of so many (Lojban, Esperanto, Ido, etc.). Because human beings, while capable of logic (with great effort) are not inherently logical beings. Logic is not a natural way of thinking; actually, "thinking," in the sense we're using here, isn't all that natural either. Most human action is dictated by habit, reaction, and emotion. We presume we're thinking, but it's just words running emptily and repetitiously through our skulls. That's why logic wasn't invented as a discipline until quite recently, and why we all putter along doing what we've always done, even though we "know" that what we're doing is likely to lead to real discomfort at some point.
Thanks for the link to the article on Greenland glacial earthquakes. I hadn't seen that, though I should have expected it. Imagine what will happen when all that earth starts rebounding as the glacial weight goes!
7/2/15, 6:16 AM
Bruce E said...
Bottom line is that, at least since Descartes, conscious control of the "self" has been grossly overestimated and irrational/unconscious/uncontrolled actions have been equally underestimated. It is more accurate, in my experience, to say that tech invents itself -- inventors are taken along for the ride.
7/2/15, 6:28 AM
sgage said...
"John, oh, no question, English is an incredibly clumsy language to think in, and it's almost impossible to avoid the "is of identity" when using it. I hope our descendants work out something better to speak and think with."
Well, there's always E-prime - there's a good entry in Wikipedia about it:
"E-Prime (short for English-Prime, sometimes denoted É or E′), a prescriptive version of the English language, excludes all forms of the verb to be. E-Prime does not allow the conjugations of to be—be, am, is, are, was, were, been, being—the archaic forms of to be (e.g. art, wast, wert), or the contractions of to be—'m, 's, 're (e.g. I'm, he's, she's, they're).
Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing.[1] For example, the sentence "the film was good" could not be expressed under the rules of E-Prime, and the speaker might instead say "I liked the film" or "the film made me laugh". The E-Prime versions communicate the speaker's experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact.
Kellogg and Bourland use the term "Deity mode of speech" to refer to misuse of the verb to be, which "allows even the most ignorant to transform their opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things".[2]
"
7/2/15, 6:38 AM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
Leaving aside, of course, the use of "is" (actual or implied), when constructing simile or metaphor, for in those two uses, the likeness is more associative than categorical (and correlative rather than causative, c.f. Keats' objective correlative). Out of metaphor arises a larger understanding of meaning, a different project entirely than categorical definition. (As a side note, I think that is part of the argument between those that take the bible literally and those that interpret it philosophically or literarily, which doesn't diminish its value, of course, contrary to fundamentalist thought. In my opinion.)
To me, poetry and botany (and study of ecosystems generally: ecology?) have more in common than one might think, and less in common with a mechanistic view. Botanical categories are more like collections of shared tendencies than mathematical or logical categories, I find, and fuzzy at best. I have heard two ecologists discuss whether a particular landmark oak is a bur oak or white oak based on perceived characteristics. If you ask anyone dealing with plants, whether gardener, botanist or ecologist a question, often the answer begins with "It depends..."
Which leads one over time to holistic or systems thinking as a habit and a very different view of how the world and universe function. And then when dealing with living beings, whether plant, animal or viral, consciousness, will and volition begin to occur, along with communication (plants communicate chemically, it is beginning to be discovered): well, time for some new models, is all I have to say.
Speaking of which: what models are we entertaining now that will be born out in the future? That are already changing our culture, our entire frame of reference? What are we dreaming of that we perhaps don't perhaps yet realize we are dreaming?
I only just learned that one reason agriculture has been so successful in the Central Valley is that it can be managed as a factory is managed: completely predictable weather, and with irrigation and synthetic inputs, completely predictable crops. Of course, now that there's a water problem...
OK, I'm rambling. Best wishes to all.
7/2/15, 7:06 AM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
James said, "Get past superficial similarities and there's a difference between saying that the world exists because of a primal being's choice — whether the choice was to make a machine, as in ID, or an organism, as in Thomism — and the world existing as a consequence of something more basic existing.
The latter would seem to imply that, true to its name, Nature as a whole is truly something born, not a machine made by anything else."
So Nature had a momma? ;-)
7/2/15, 7:13 AM
redoak said...
7/2/15, 7:15 AM
Cathy McGuire said...
I've also been reading Jacob Riis' "How the Other Half Lives" (with photos), which gives a shocking reminder of how bad it could get (how bad it's been) in the US when social safety nets don't exist.
I've also been watching as some poorer neighbors go "under water" economically, and have been helping some with systems paperwork (my social services background helps here) - the wheels have already come off for many, many people and the overturned cart is an ugly, ugly sight. The worst is the frantic confusion as they try to grasp the new reality with media-conditioned perceptions: "they can't do that to us, can they? We're Americans!"
7/2/15, 7:19 AM
Nathan Donaldson said...
It's now time to leave to somewhere safer if you can.
On the the subject of the Machine, I think the best example of this mind set going horribly wrong in the real world has been the transition from Agriculture to Agribusiness. Most fruits and vegetables are now grown in deserts in the US because the variables can be easily controlled there, that is until the water runs out completely. And the way livestock is raised industrially is a disgrace to life itself.
7/2/15, 7:22 AM
Yupped said...
Goodness knows there are enough crisis triggers in play now - fracking bubble bursting, QE fading, Greece flailing, California drying up, Alaska burning, etc, etc. But my guess is that the story that "all is well" will hold until next year when the political revolving doors start to spin with the election cycle and the narrative falters. And then we'll have another bunch of political hope-and-change-jockeys telling us that all will be fixed if certain buttons are pressed and levers are pulled. So, yes, 2015 is where it really gets going, but 2016 will be where it all gets acknowledged and 2017 will be where it bottoms out and gets explained.
But, we'll see. Meanwhile life is lived every day and the popcorn is always at the ready. I'm also half-way through reading "After Progress" which my dear wife bought for my 54th birthday. The fact that this is now considered perfectly normal gifting and reading material in our household is some indication of how far we've come!
7/2/15, 7:26 AM
Michael Stephenson said...
Looks like with all this financial mayhem going on at the moment the scenario laid out in "How it could happen", could happen, a lot sooner than anticipated in your essay.
It all certainly seems to be coming to a head.
7/2/15, 7:33 AM
Jeanette DeMain said...
Fezziwig: "It's not just for money alone that one spends a lifetime building up a business, Mr. Jorkin. . . . It's to preserve a way of life that one knew and loved. No, I can't see my way to selling out to the new vested interests, Mr. Jorkin. I'll have to be loyal to the old ways and die out with them if needs must."
Scrooge: "I think I know what Mr. Fezziwig means, sir."
Jorkin: "Oh, you hate progress and money, too, do you?"
Scrooge: "I don't hate them, sir, but perhaps the machines aren't such a good thing for mankind, after all."
7/2/15, 7:38 AM
one gun said...
As usual you took the concept of a machine in a totally different direction as I expected. I love it.
Your introduction of the machine last week, combined with many of your commenters apparent depression got me thinking about how we hold onto labels and how we shed them.
With the Catholic Church trying to position itself to catch those persons ready for a resurgence of religion and our continued downward arch I could see not only a return of the middle ages but a return of the Church in charge of the leftovers again.
Perhaps at this late date a simple suggestion of resilience could go farther than buying a house in the woods? Being mentally flexible in our internal dialog will be quite necessary to not only survive but to thrive as citizens of the poor world and not as citizens of Rome, I mean the States.
7/2/15, 7:51 AM
Michael said...
7/2/15, 7:57 AM
shhh said...
I happened to meet a woman with a mind as lovely as her face who has been graciously enlightening my perspective. First, with an introduction to Qaballah as an alternate model of manifestation, and continuously with careful exploration of the flawed "logic" that underpins the religion of science.
Fortunately I've always been a skeptic of "science" as some sort of accepted wisdom meted out to good capitalist as they ingest ever more pharmacopeia, rather than as simply a method of inquiry. I still love to break the balls of the legions of science acolytes who petulantly insist that is it explains anything. (I'll leave alone the fatal constraint inherent in the reductionist bias of scientific inquiry). This is not to dismiss the obvious, prolific and often delightful and amazing feats clever hominids can achieve through the magic of mathematics. One should not conflate those tricks with either meaning or insight into the "meaning of life, the universe and everything." I submit that if there is a unified theory of everything, "god" is just as good a term for it as "string theory" or Taoism.
Anyway, it's great to hear discussion on this level because it is of the utmost importance to recognize that belief constitutes the greater portion of reality. Choose wisely - if that's even possible for the meat suit to do...it is after all a fairly limited machine.
7/2/15, 8:13 AM
Robo said...
Just as most organisms apparently survive just fine without much self-awareness, so does the universe go about its normal business with little regard for whether or not the conscious brain cells are completely in agreement. Humans in particular must be the parts of the whole that have evolved specifically to generate nonsensical, amusing and puzzling mental games for the universal One to contemplate.
7/2/15, 8:18 AM
over the hill and down the other side said...
Determinism seems natural to this separation. Active subject, passive object.
Here I confess that mechanistic explanations have always bored me--I cannot get excited by knowing that I can tell the depth of the well water by some calculation…I can't understand others' enthusiasm around such calculations. Surely, there are many ways to find the depth of the well water…and why is the depth of the well water important?
7/2/15, 8:20 AM
heather said...
Now, to me the model of the universe as a machine which meets this definition 1. is incredibly limited and misses the entire experience of existence, and 2. does not exclude a creator, or many creators, or some indescribable force of creation. However, if we are using this limited definition, I can accept the argument that the universe is in some sense a machine which dissipates concentrated energy, and that this definition does not require a creator. I don’t share the view of materialist atheists who use this metaphor/model “the universe is a machine” to describe their whole understanding of the universe, but I also don’t think it necessarily self-contradicts their understanding. What you mean by “machine” matters just as much as your definition of “is”. It’s a wonder humans can ever communicate about anything!
--Heather in CA
7/2/15, 8:30 AM
team10tim said...
"English is an incredibly clumsy language to thing in... I hope our descendants work out something better to speak and think with."
Better at what? You can optimize for somethings, but at the expense of others. The narrower your focus is the bigger your blinders are. English is ideal for some things and fracking horrible for others. What is the target functionality of a 'good' language?
Thanks,
Tim
7/2/15, 9:02 AM
winingwizzard said...
I think things will decline in fits and starts - because of sheer inertia and the size of BAU and because many people have no alternative, so they will do anything to avoid change. The issues right in front of us are mostly financial tomfoolery amongst the big boys, not hard assets. Contrary to popular law, corporations are not people - they can die and the people move on. Commerce will continue to try to drag globalism forward in spite of whatever happens in the finance sector, because the local isn't there to take up the slack (yet).
Yes, it COULD all melt down in a year. But looking at Rome, it wasn't so, and we are sort of a hypercomplex Rome. Many of us have been aware of this for decades, hoping for an opportunity change as a nation - didn't happen and wasn't really expectation - just hope. Many, simultaneously, decided to collapse - in older parlance, drop out - and find alternative means. I make a decent living, yet by .gov I am counted as long term unemployed because I have no "tax-type-form" filed, not in 10 years.
I think your sense of "something wicked this way comes" is accurate - astrology-wise there are portents, and things are lining up for some fireworks in many areas. But I don't think it will all happen in a rush - inertia is sort of 'there' no matter the field of study, right? I think whatever it is, it is "slouching towards" our Gomorrah - and slouching isn't very speedy. It will be seen as rapid, because BAU has been pervasive for such a long time.
It isn't too late to collapse or as I prefer, drop out. It just means you do with less and have to adapt more. But ahead, everybody will be tested in their coping and adaptive abilities...
7/2/15, 9:05 AM
Daergi said...
The order in which we experience things seems to matter. We see many sunsets. Then we see the painter's painting, trying to communicate an idea about a common experience through the canvas. Or. We grow up in a city where the horizon is obscured and sunsets happen on TV. On a school trip, one time, we see a canvas that captures our attention for a moment and it becomes memorable. Years later, we are reminded of that school trip by a random place.
In one instance the original event is the anchor. The canvas takes a person back to it. In the other, the canvas representation is the original event. The actual sunset takes a person back in memory to a day once spent in a museum located in a bustling city.
In a National Geographic special a tribal woman is tossing foraged grain into the air from a hand carved bowl. The chaff and dust blow away in the breeze. The grain is then poured onto a flat rock and is ground by rubbing a rounded stone repeatedly over the kernels. The flour to make a flat bread is created by the grinding action of the two rocks. If, on another day, this woman were a guest in another's house and she were offered bread it would remind her of her own experiences of gathering grain and processing it into a meal.
Later, wind or water turns a wheel and grain is ground between two large stones that are parts of the machine that is the mill. The farmer takes his harvest by cart to the mill and enough flour to last months is ground in just a few hours. His bread reminds him of long hours planting and tending and harvesting.
Later still, we go to the supermarket and buy a loaf of bread or a bag of bleached, fortified flour and it stirs nothing in us in terms of its origin, or the machinery used to make it, unless, perhaps, we've been to a pioneer museum. In which case, a particularly nice loaf of bread might make us remember a day we spent in a museum in a small rural town where we learned that flour used to be ground at a mill by a creek nearby.
Machines arise out of our interaction with the world. Early devices to keep track of time mimicked observations of the movement of the planets. Those people knew the sky and when they looked at their devices for keeping time (the rotation of the earth, the seasonal journey around the sun...) those devices reminded them of the original. A digital watch today reminds us of?
When many people experience nature today those experiences are processed by minds whose first experiences are of machines. Nature is interpreted to fit into that known world; the world of machines, concrete, steel and food from a can or a box. The harm done to nature is largely unobserved. If it is, in any event, what is happening in nature is only relevant in its relation to people's primary experiences nested in the modern. How do you get someone to see that life isn't imitating art? After all, everything seems to be zipping along all tickity-boo in the machine world of the cities; barring a few, negligible hiccups.
7/2/15, 9:11 AM
anton mett said...
Most of our own country has fallen into the same type of class worship and this makes it difficult to pay attention to "free" or "cheap" things like nature. I believe you've made note of this when you point out that much of the "green revolution" happens to focus on the most expensive hi-tech (high brow?) merchandise rather than low-tech (low class?) methods that we know work.
7/2/15, 9:14 AM
Unknown said...
7/2/15, 9:30 AM
Dammerung said...
Another thing that kills me is that logical positivism is still the main approach to metaphysics in mainstream academic and social philosophy, when it didn't even manage to get out of the gate before tripping over its own primeval axiom, that is, nothing is true unless empirically verifiable as true. Okay, prove it.
The power of these erroneous metaphysics and ontologies to go on, long after they've been discredited by any serious examination, never ceases to astound me. And of course even the Christian fundamentalists, the self-proclaimed vanguard against scientism run amok, accepts the limitless power of logical analysis with the same fervor as their supposed opponents.
One imagines a god of irony with a perverse grin on his face.
7/2/15, 9:30 AM
Foo Bar said...
Everyone is so infatuated with the dust that they always forget that if you can exchange the dust for anything else, then who cares about the dust?
7/2/15, 9:57 AM
Seaweed Shark said...
"Error is created. Truth is eternal. Error, or Creation, will be Burned up, & then, & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. 'What,' it will be Question'd, 'When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?' O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, 'Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.' I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative eye any more than I would Question a window concerning a Sight. I look through it & not with it."
7/2/15, 10:14 AM
Coboarts said...
7/2/15, 10:34 AM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Hastily,
Toomas (Tom) Karmo
(Catholic hermit-wannabe (lay hermit, NOT under Canon 603) near Toronto)
www dot metascientia dot com
PS: I'd like to thank also you and others for various further things. (1) JMG, it was good that you mentioned a few weeks ago, when you wrote on Napoleon and FDR, and I queried about Theodoric, that Theodoric was just one of a sequence of Napoleon-or-FDR figures in Roman history, each of them (in your analysis) releasing some temporary institutional vigour by reorganizing their enfeebled society. I will have to think more about this. Questions like the following suggest themselves: Compare and contrast with FDR, (a) Constantine, and (b) Diocletian. (2) Cathy McGuire: Thanks so much for sending me papermail this spring, as you assembled papermail contacts for ADR readers by way of a precaution against possible eventual loss of the Internet. (3) Thanks, JMG and Derv, for interesting thoughts on machines last week. Noteworthy were not only JMG's initial thoughts on machines, but Derv's response regarding the decay of decision-making elites. As JMG pointed out a bit before last week, the British political elite of the 1920s and 1930s seem to have taken better decisions than the USA political elite of the post-2001 era. The British were soaked in a machine culture in the 1920s and 1930s, just as contemporary Americans are, so why the difference? One might suggest here that our contemporary machines are opaque to inspection, being magical or slave-like (as a genie-from-a-bottle is a slave): you click on the icon, and some nice thing happens, for reasons you cannot explain unless you are a computer hardware architect, versed both in software and in the physics of semiconductors. In the 1920s and 1930s, a machine was something whose inner workings you as a non-specialist had some hope of inspecting and comprehending - as with the case of the slide rule, to which JMG has now and again referred. - Of course one MIGHT also make the more banal suggestion that elites emerge from elitist educational systems, and that the old British system, with its stress on rigorous studies of classics for members of the ruling class, was superior to what we have now. - Or one might darkly suggest (I myself make much of this) that the root cause for the difference between Britain then and the USA now is a spiritual decline - already underway in the 1920s and 1930s, and yet now reaching a more advanced and debilitating state. (4) JMG, thanks for mentioning the new encyclical last week. I would urge people to read it - there is a lot there, and not just about climate change. (Francis for instance stresses the need for intergenerational solidarity, in the teeth of the current temptation to burden our successors with environmental degradation or financial debt. He also stresses the need to develop a notion of ecology-of-human-socities, intertwined with the more familiar notion of ecology-of-biotopes.)
7/2/15, 11:04 AM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
A further addendum (this time to some of the "PS" material in posting from a few minutes ago): The thesis that a cause for the difference between interwar Britain and the contemporary USA is a spiritual decline perhaps gets some corroboration from the more happy example of Judaism. That the Jewish nation has clung to spiritual disciplines from the Babylonian exile onward has meant that it has kept its culture alive in a way not achieved by Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, etc. I would indeed suggest that if Jewish spiritual disciplines stay in place, we will see the menorah and the prayer shawl and fresh Hebrew-language literary production surviving somewhere centuries from now - even though, admittedly, the Jewish state, as a sovereign political entity wedged between Lebanon and Egypt, may in the coming centuries be obliterated.
Toomas (Tom) Karmo
www dot metascientia dot com
7/2/15, 11:14 AM
Ursachi Alexandru said...
7/2/15, 11:22 AM
Grey said...
I think that deterministicly our global civilization should have already "collapsed" as so many 'doomers' predict.
But the mathematical chaos in the determination of the collapse of global civilization is a human one, people in general, and especially people in charge and manipulating the written rules and paper resources, do not want to see a collapse yet.
Sure it is growing harder and harder for T.P.T.B. to keep everything running right, but they are keeping everything (mostly) running with increasing determination and inventiveness.
I think the collapse could accelerate to 'doomer' prediction levels almost instantly if they (those people running things), or enough of the rest of the population, decide a collapse would be more profitable or pleasant for them than our current situation.
I also think the recent growth in dystopian and apocalyptic fictions in our society shows an ongoing culture wide thought experiment down those lines.
But until it happens that profit or enjoyment (even if just 'schadenfreude' (sp?)) can be felt I feel that things will continue their slow but increasing crumble and patch situation.
So no, if people move promptly they are not necessarily stuck where they are with what they have, but yes it WILL come that they eventually will be, and until then every day it will get a little harder and a little more expensive in time energy and money to get to a desired stable sustainable situation.
7/2/15, 11:43 AM
Pantagruel7 said...
7/2/15, 11:50 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
As for the English language being awkward for use in real thinking, you guys have no idea how lucky you are. You ought to try a Scandinavian language. The dysfunctional belief systems we're so eagerly taking apart here are so built into the very structure of Scandinavian composition that it's hardly possible to express disidentification with them through the use of language at all...
7/2/15, 12:10 PM
Ed-M said...
Yes, it does look like the wheels are coming off the Global Economy bus. The first collapse of the Long Descent that I've been waiting for ever since I listened to Matt Savinar as a guest on the Art Bell program back in 2003.
And this morning I saw a leftover copy of Tuesday's edition of USA Today with the banner headline, "Greece jars global markets; Dow drop worst in 2 years", and I was like, cool!
7/2/15, 12:23 PM
Odin's Raven said...
China to take US land That may give them an opportunity to speak a language other than English or Spanish.
7/2/15, 12:31 PM
Rumighoul said...
Regarding your "collapsed or not" question, surely there must be plenty of us who feel that we are in-between, or with a foot going in each direction. Perhaps I'm taking your phrasing too literally, but following your Druidic interrogation of binaries, there's got to be a spectrum of preparedness between and on either side of the two "states", and one's place on it is determined by so many factors.
OK I'm surely stating the obvious and taking things too literally...but I gotta admit I'm just made anxious by the starkness of your phrasing. You've done so much in your blogs and books to make "Green Wizardry" clear in all it's multi-facetedness and variable applicability, so when you then hit us with "collapsed or not collapsed" I feel I don't really know where to place myself and family other than "not nearly collapsed enough, I think", hence the anxiety...
I've a job and a very young family; Green Wizardry-wise I've been devoting as much free time as I could the last year and a half to learning to grow food on our allotment (we're in the UK), and besides that my partner and I are by nature very frugal, good at saving money/food, and are increasingly attempting to learn to make our own stuff and buy less. I would say she is far more naturally in tune with the LESS strategy, but I am the one who reads the Archdruid. Earning a living is the definite weak point for us...if you ask me will I have my job in 6 months time, I just can't answer, and what specifically will I do if it goes away suddenly...I don't know. So are we collapsed? I suppose not...but I feel, my pride feels, that it surely could be worse.
7/2/15, 1:10 PM
Myriad said...
My understanding (which may be wrong) of European thinkers at the time in question is that they were not necessarily trying to reduce the universe to the status of a machine. I doubt that many of them could have conceived, for example, that the remarkable properties of living tissue (sensing, healing, moving on mental command) could possibly be accounted for by any kind of machinery. Isn't that why Victorian ghosts were shaped like the outlines of people, because in the living, the spirit had to be coextensive with the body, in order to sense, heal, and push the limbs around when the will or soul commanded?
I think instead that what they were trying to do was understand the mechanical well enough to establish the limits on what part of nature is machinery, because once that's accomplished, what remains falls undeniably into the realm of the spiritual. The shape of the "ground" of the spiritual would be revealed by the outlines or voids of the "figure" of the mechanical. It was not unreasonable to anticipate, for instance, that mechanistic reasons for the sun remaining hot or embryos growing into their form in the womb might not only not be found but be ruled out, resulting in objective proof (and eventually, greater understanding) of the miraculous; that is, the ongoing actions of God or other spiritual forces active in the world.
Nature eventually threw them (and us) a curve, by appearing mechanistic if not "all the way down" then at least as far down as we can comprehend so far. In life sciences, metabolism, sensation, locomotion, disease processes, inheritance, growth and development, all in their turn exhibited mechanistic explanations; currently, the frontier of that still-ongoing process is in cognitive neuroscience. That doesn't prove that the universe is entirely materialistic or deterministic, but it does mean that the endeavor to understand the spiritual as the gaps of the mechanistic has been unsuccessful. This could be because the universe is mechanical after all, but I think it's because the dichotomy between the materialistic "figure" and the spiritual "ground" has been a false one from the outset.
That would make those European thinkers' error not that the universe is mechanical a priori, but that the divine can be isolated or circumscribed.
I guess we'll see, as this series continues, whether or not this represents a substantial disagreement with your views.
7/2/15, 1:19 PM
Myriad said...
The repetition is eerie.
We know what proverbially happens to those who don't learn from history. Now I also know what happens to those who do: they get nervous!
7/2/15, 1:20 PM
RPC said...
c=a+b;
(which we could read as "c is a plus b") replaces whatever value c had before with the result of adding a and b. So when your proverbial mechanistic atheist says "The universe is a machine" he may be attempting to overwrite the previous value of the term "universe" with the value of the term "machine."
7/2/15, 1:35 PM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
Yes, I agree, there is a mechanistic view of nature management that prevails in certain disciplines.
Very interesting about water and sediment. Yes, so many engineers view water as a transport problem, as in transporting it "away." I recently heard someone from the Illinois DNR say that grant applicants that approach water issues in that way will not receive awards from her office, since they've missed the larger point of whole systems water management. Why we have sediment: exactly!javascript:void(0)
On the other hand new Illinois guidelines for farmers with regard to hydrology and nutrient flow incorporate multi-species cover crops, native species buffers, and wetlands, amazingly enough.
7/2/15, 2:08 PM
Andropos Nebulus said...
Thinking more as I've gotten older, I've come to see a specific block in current thought about the history of science: more general historians tend to be ignorant (and apathetic) of the science, and historians of science tend to be ignorant of all other history, and view development of thought as completely independent of all else: for them science just develops, and social conditions come in only insofar as authorities of orthodoxy periodically step in to squash its nobility, which, triumphantly, they always fail to do.
As a result, we the (reasonably informed) public tend to have two histories in our heads, which we almost never connect with one another: historical events like wars, revolutions, etc on the one hand, and development of thought (Aristotle, Galileo, Kant, etc) on the other. In what JMG is bring to our attention, very few seem to consider there may have been a broader social-historical reasons people fled from animistic or divine theories of the world into the prosaics of grinding gears, hydraulics, and mechanical functioning of dead matter.
As examples, I've been shocked by how few people know Copernicus was a monk, or that his book was read widely even in Church circles and wasn't considered particularly troublesome until decades after his death.
How many people know the terrible social backdrop of Descartes' time (toward the end of ~100 years of warfare and social disintegration)? That he was an artillery officer and military engineer with the Catholic League in the 30 Years War? That many of his mathematical achievements (the Cartesian plane) came partly out of his more practical work computing trajectories of cannonade fire?
How many know Isaac Newton was raised during and in the aftermath of the English Civil War? That he survived the Great Plague of London as a young man? Or what a bitter, friendless adult he became? That he considered his greatest works to be on eschatology and alchemy? How many realize Einstein, a professor in Germany, developed and published the Field Equations (100 years ago, in 1915) surrounded by the tumult and privation of WWI?
There are many such examples. I do actually have some views on *why* the mechanical narrative may have came to the fore---maybe worth something, maybe not. You all, and JMG, can let me know. (View described it second part.... sorry for length.... hope this gets through anyway.)
7/2/15, 2:10 PM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
I am sorry to hear about your bad experiences as a child. It is odd (at the least) that so many religious denominations based on the teachings of someone who embodied love at the heart of things/nature have managed to so twist his message in their practice.
Re druidry, our host's book The Druidry Handbook:Spiritual Practice Rooted in the Living Earth is a good place to start.
@Cherokee Organics,
Re the universe, to my way of thinking, you've hit on a wonderful possibility.
Since others are mentioning their relevant blog posts, here is mine, somewhat relevant:
Earthcare, Literally Speaking
It's also at Resilience.org.
7/2/15, 2:39 PM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
The Sun is sort of the Huge Ringing Thing, humming in decorous polyphony in the company of its many colleagues in our galactic arm.
Although the picture of the heavens as mechanical, with the Sun as a rather inert orrery globe, was natural in the paucity of Newton-era observational astronomy, it is not the picture which would now first suggest itself to the lively naive child. A lively five-year-old, seeing spots in solar projection, and being shown some films of the conjectured underlying bulk-matter movements, and hearing a short account of temperature distributions and sound waves, might be instead inclined to reach for biological similes and metaphors.
Equally, or even more, unsatisfactory is mechanical language when we turn from the sun to the wider vistas of stellar and galactic astronomy, and cosmology.
One has some sympathy for the ancient Finns, according to whom the universe hatched (the Kalevala apparently talks about "monat", "eggs" - "munad" in Estonian; I don't really speak Finnish).
Mechanical language somehow deadens things, emptying them of their truth.
Tom
www dot metascientia dot com
7/2/15, 2:42 PM
Andropos Nebulus said...
The revolution in thought JMG brings up was roughly during and just after the very peak of warfare, witch/heretic burnings, and political chaos of the Wars of Religion and the 30 Years War.
I see three things bringing about the thought-change: the previously un-heard of power and material devastation of roughly 100 years of warfare, which including depopulation of central Europe by a third to a half. By proportionality to population levels, etc, this period was far worse than WWI and WWII combined, and left Europe shell-shocked and deeply awed by the power of material reality---an awe that in previous ages was given to the divine....or the demonic.
Second, the revolution in politics, and the definitive subordination of religion to secular power, slammed face-first into the prior worldview where that subordination was reversed.
Third, the deep rending of almost all old moral certainties, including the irreparable destruction of the (perceived) unity of Christendom that came with the Reformation. Also came the marriage (or maybe exploitation) of Christian ideals with material power and the devastation warfare, which left many people not just apathetic to, but disgusted with anything smacking of high ideals or even a divine presence in the world.
A few lines of evidence: Read the letters of Galileo. They are dripping with disgust for everything around him, most particularly purveyors of any kind of political or religious authority. In my reading, immersing himself in the simple, predictable workings of non-human things (like the moons of Jupiter) appeared to be about his only joy.
Or look at the art of Rembrandt (roughly contemporaneous with Descartes, Galileo, Kepler). In contrast to the older Renaissance Jesus----high in the clouds, majestically clothed, with a perfect body----Rembrandt's Jesus is a simple man. The expression is of deep troubles, or deep compassion, or maybe deep love, and he appears to be a man of passivity. The color tone is dark, and the point of view is head on, not looking up. This is a Jesus of the common world, not a Jesus of divine mystery.
And then think of the presentation of the scientific works. The original engraving on Copernicus' de Revolutionabus (several generations earlier) had both scientific and religious imagery, depicted so to clearly show the proper place of science within the world system, which is organized on a divine principle. So, eg, the tools of the scientist (ruler, sextant, etc) are somewhat lower and to the left of the symbols of divinity (cross, bible, etc), and all underneath the brilliant sun (divinity itself).
Then look at Kepler's Astronomia Nova, about a century later, in the time period we're discussing. Strikingly, the image engravings are PURELY SECULAR. No sun, no tiara, no cross, no bible. Just math and science symbols.
Yeah. So something big happened to the social mood in the century between Copernicus and Kepler. I believe it was the traumatic (not to mention physically violent) rending of the western mind from religion, and a consequent reaction of disgust, that caused a sizeable fraction of the intelligentia to cling tightly, tightly, tightly to a purely material, mechanistic worldview.
This worldview had the advantage of being apolitical and areligious, so had the chance to separate individuals from the social realities of power, politics, and religion------burnings, executions, emerging new orders of politics/religion, social chaos, and the dizzying, wrenching removal of old moral certainties.
7/2/15, 3:20 PM
Dale said...
" What I find most interesting about studying another language is how it subtly shows a very different thought process to our own, even in something so fundamental like "being", "is"."
Something else interesting is that many languages do not have the verb to be, also know as a copula. Their way of thinking and their world view is almost alien to Indo-European based speakers. The lack of "is" makes for a very fluid view of the world, dare I say magical?
7/2/15, 3:22 PM
Ares Olympus said...
Or as another great author once said "Knowing many stories is wisdom. Knowing no stories is ignorance. Knowing only one story is death." The Category of the Machine might imply the existence of something that isn't a machine, except for that pesty "is" that overgeneralizes.
But back to Schumacher, its a useful idea to wonder if "free will" only exists for humanity in our highest level of self-awareness, where consciousness coils back on itself into something that self-consumes. So we might try "The Universe is a self-consuming machine", so again as some reflective metaphor, although you might still take it literally and not go too far off.
--------
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opinion/sunday/face-it-your-brain-is-a-computer.html
Bill Clinton was right - "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
Schumacher expresses the idea of levels of being, and what's unclear is whether the higher levels are built on the lower as evolution might propose, or if there is a hidden structure of higher than prods matter and life towards itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed
Schumacher points out that there are a number of progressions that take place between the levels. The most striking he believes is the movement from passivity to activity, there is a change in the origination of movement between each level:
* Cause (Mineral kingdom)
* Stimulus (Plant kingdom)
* Motive (Animal kingdom)
* Will (Man)
One consequence of this progression is that each level of being becomes increasingly unpredictable, and it is in this sense that man can be said to have free will.
7/2/15, 5:44 PM
casamurphy said...
Question: Where was the universe before God created it?
Answer: It "existed" as a potential of God.
Question: When God destroys the universe does he also destroy time?
Answer: Of course -- without subject object relationships time cannot exist.
Question: Is God eternal?
Answer: Yes, by definition.
Question: Does God's potential to create the universe also eternally exist within God?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Then doesn't it logically follow that the "moment" God destroys the universe that he must also re-create it (since in the "interim" time does not exist)?
Answer: Yes, I suppose so...but what are you getting at...?
Question: Wouldn't also you agree then that from the perspective of man's view of time, the universe is eternal?
Answer: Well, if you put it that way...I suppose so...
Question: And that God could therefore be interpreted as an unchanging eternal law regulating all the change around us?
Answer: Yes...
Question: And that you are a manifestation of that law?
Answer: You could say that.
Question: As a manifestation of this law, then, could you accept that maybe the most responsible and direct way for you to know God would be to, as the ancient philosopher said,” Know Thyself!" ?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Then would a practice which does not personify God, but which does hold remarkable promise in terms of knowing thyself be considered a path to know God?
Answer: Theist--Well...yes and no...as a Theist I have to balk...how can one find God and deny God at the same time?...hmmmm.
Atheist--Well...yes and no...as an Atheist, how can you deny God and yet find something one interprets as God at the same time?...hmmmm.
Question: Can we at least agree that the issue of creation doesn't really matter either way?
Answer: Well from the perspective of God's eternal nature and man's total powerlessness to define what God may and may not do, then yes, we can agree.
Conclusion: Good, then lets pursue the scientific truth the best we can...trying not to allowing any philosophical or religious bias to skew our results.
7/2/15, 6:06 PM
D.M. said...
7/2/15, 7:40 PM
Moshe Braner said...
It also brings up the question of the connection of abstract math, and logic in general, to "the real world" - why is human logic applicable to nature? On that, my guess is that our brains and their built-in logic evolved to make sense of the phenomena around us. Thus it is not surprising that in realms that are far from the human scale, either very small (sub-atomic level), or very large (astronomical), the needed math or logic gets farther and farther from what our brains consider reasonable. Thus the role of probability in quantum mechanics, relativity with its curved space and flexible time, and so forth.
7/2/15, 7:59 PM
Jason Fligger said...
7/2/15, 9:35 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Chloe, hostility? Not at all; wry amusement. By the way, the notion that atheism can be described as simply an abstract attitude toward claims about the existence of one or more deities is generally called "dictionary atheism," and the vast differences between it and atheism as actually practiced in the Anglo-American world -- European atheism is a rather different kettle of fish -- has been the subject of lively discussion for several years now.
Caryn, congrats on the soap et al.! You're not the only one who's mentioned a feeling of unease in the air; we'll see if it leads anywhere. The Google devils (I refuse to grant them the dignity of gods) must be messing with you -- I haven't changed the security here.
Das Monde, good heavens, no -- what's the point of teasing a machine? As for the decline of civilizations, no, that's a biological thing; machines run until they break down, while living things, civilizations among them, go through predictable life cycles.
Denys, exactly. The only way to replace a dysfunctional narrative in somebody's mind is to present a functional narrative that's more appealing. That's one of the basic skills of magic, by the way.
Justin, I've been wondering about those sharks myself. It's really rather odd.
Lawfish, you might be a Druid -- or you might be something else; there are, thank the gods, many more options besides Southern Baptist and atheist, after all!
Raven, got 'em, and you're in the contest. I probably should post a reminder to everyone: you've got two months to go to get your stories finished and submitted; the deadline, and it's a firm one, is August 30.
Cherokee, a lot of mystics have experienced the universe as a single vast organism, so you're following a well-trodden path there!
William, I'm not sure if today's thinking is oxymoronic or the regular unoxygenated kind, but either way, it amounts to the same thing. ;-) Glad you liked that bit.
Andy, human beings have created dozens of different ways of dealing with the world. One of the reasons we're so clumsy at dealing with the world in the modern US is that we've limited ourselves to just the two ways you've described.
Rashakor, oh, I know! I'm currently working with a co-translator on a new translation of Eliphas Levi's Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, and the challenges of getting his ideas from French to English intact are not small.
7/2/15, 10:29 PM
John Michael Greer said...
RPC, excellent! In point of fact, once quantum indeterminacy was proved, the entire philosophy of determinism crashed to the ground. I should probably do a post on that one of these days; it's highly relevant.
Nick, given your situation, that seems entirely reasonable.
Brian, good. If a perfectly logical language could be created, it would by definition be very poorly suited to express most human thoughts and experiences, since logic embraces so very small a fraction of the whole range of human existence.
Bruce, interesting. I haven't taken part in the invention of any technologies, and my background as a writer leads me to see the creative process as one in which the author does have a very active role, though it's often as much a matter of discovery of possibilities as it is one of creating things from scratch.
Sgage, I rather like "deity mode of speech" -- in Hebrew, as I recall from such Cabala as I absorbed, the true name of the Deity is a form of the verb "to be." A case might be made that only deities have the right to use that verb!
Adrian, I have some very specific models in mind for the future, as I'm sure you'll have noticed! As for nature's momma, well, yes -- most religions assign nature a mother, though the Abrahamic ones tend to fall short there.
Redoak, that's an excellent point. I probably need to read up on current scholarship on the spread of Machiavelli's ideas in early modern Europe. I recall that Elizabethan English authors used to like to write his name Machevil, which has its own charms.
Cathy, the confusion is difficult but it's essential. It's when people grasp that it doesn't matter that they're Americans, all those things are still being done to them anyway, that a potential window for change opens. (Of course what climbs through the window could be somebody in jackboots and an armband -- that's one of the risks of times like these.)
Nathan, no, actually, we don't agree. I think it's considerably more likely that the federal government will be no more competent at exerting force here in the US than it was in Iraq, and a repeat of the same modes of failure here will more than likely bring the whole structure crashing down. We live in a prerevolutionary society. Nor is anywhere else noticeably safer, especially for American expats.
Yupped, well, we'll see! Happy birthday, btw -- I hope you enjoy the book.
Michael, no question there. One Chinese news source is claiming that the PLA might be deployed against Islamic State -- not impossible, if the PLA wants to get some live combat experience, and is interested in squashing any attempt to get a similar insurgency going in Chinese Turkestan.
Jeannette, fascinating. No, it's not in the book, and it's fascinating to see so forthright a challenge to the "you must hate progress" thoughtstopper. Many thanks for sharing it.
One Gun, true enough; any of my readers who haven't yet gotten the idea that flexibility, resilience, and a willingness to be poor are good ideas, though, are probably beyond my help at this point.
7/2/15, 11:28 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Shhh, you're a very fortunate man. I think the incarnate human -- I prefer that phrasing to "meat suit" since there's far more than meat going into the whole system of the bodymind -- is capable of making, if not wise, then at least wiser judgments; certainly it's capable of making stupider ones!
Robo, that's one viewpoint, but from my perspective it's rather too anthropocentric -- as though the dust mites on your skin were to consider themselves crucial to the well-being of your body. I'm with H.P. Lovecraft on this one: "We live on a placid isle of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
Over the Hill, true enough -- Barfield's got a crucial point there. The act of observation always presupposes a given sensorium, nervous system, and cultural and personal patterns of configuring raw sensation into meaningful patterns, and so the scientific notion of the passive observer seeing "what's there" is quite simply nonsense from start to finish.
Heather, oh, granted! And we could have just as much fun taking apart the concept of "universe," which is far from simple, and has plenty of implicit presuppositions hardwired into it as well.
Tim, I'll consider a post on the vices of English one of these days; it would take that to show why I think English is more problematic than most other languages, and why the things it does well probably shouldn't be done at all.
Wizzard, er, where did you get the idea that I think it's all going to melt down in a year? My first book, remember, wasn't called The Short Descent.
Daergi, true enough, and the points you've made all feed into the machine-mindedness of the modern world. What a digital watch makes me think of is how much less annoying it would be if crunched underneath a bootheel, but then I suppose I'm just crabby. ;-)
Anton, er, we're not talking about the Victorian age; we're talking about a good two centuries earlier, when the rich showed their status by how many servants they had and mechanical toys were associated with people who had to work with their hands. Please check your facts!
Unknown, now if they'd just said "a river is a flow of sediment as well as flow of water," and avoided the unjustified teleology embodied in the label "machine," they'd have had something useful to say!
Dammerung, very good indeed. You get tonight's gold star for pointing and laughing at one of the least attractive unclothed emperors in the palace of contemporary thought. I have no idea why anyone takes logical positivism seriously; as you point out, its own basic axioms fail the test they themselves impose.
Foo Bar, and when the market sneezes and a lot of dust goes away in a hurry, you discover the other reason why the value of twinkle dust is less than meets the eye...
7/2/15, 11:50 PM
Chloe said...
I'm not certain what part of the divide between "Anglo-American" and "European" you mean to place Britain on (though I might guess the former) but I certainly know a lot of people whose attitudes to religion in practice are far closer to "dictionary atheism" than the pseudo-religious, belligerent atheism of people like Richard Dawkins. I'm sure they exist across the pond too, only they tend to get drowned out. (I just looked up the term. It was... not pretty. Or polite. Or *right*.)
7/2/15, 11:52 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Coboarts, the Gnostics were there two thousand years ago.
Toomas, I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to argue that the sun is actually an organism -- the is of identity has its problems there too -- but it does seem to have many more things in common with organisms than with machines.
Ursachi, oh, granted. Anglo-American atheism is by and large a very different thing from the European version -- it tends to be much angrier, more dogmatic, and more intolerant -- and even so, I've encountered plenty of pleasant, thoughtful atheists in the US and Britain who aren't obsessed with the idea that it's their duty to destroy religion once and for all.
Grey, as noted earlier, living things are far more predictable in certain ways than machines are; you don't know when a machine is going to break down, but you can figure out fairly well when the different stages of a life cycle are going to come into play. "Mechanistic" and "chaotic" aren't the only two options, you know!
Pantagruel, not a single favorite, but a handful. Of my novels, Star's Reach; of my occult books, Inside a Magical Lodge, with The Celtic Golden Dawn a close runner-up; of my collapse-related books, After Progress.
Sven, fascinating. I've never studied any of the Scandinavian languages, so wasn't aware of that.
Ed-M, with me, it's been more like "Okay, here we go..."
Raven, given the source, I suspect it's propaganda rather than news -- but as propaganda, it's interesting.
Rumighoul, of course there's a spectrum of collapsed-ness. There are people who are living off grid, outside the money economy, who are much further along than I am, for example. Still, the point I wanted to make is that the closer we get to the oncoming crises, the less room there'll be for the more grandiose (and more expensive) options, which so many people tend to treat as the only game in town.
Myriad, actually, the idea that the properties of living tissue were strictly mechanical was in circulation in the seventeenth century; some of the major figures of the scientific revolution of that era, Descartes among them, proclaimed that as necessary truth, even though it took medical science centuries to catch up. Thus I have to disagree with your argument: the founders of the scientific revolution started with an image of the universe as a machine of dead matter in which God and human souls were the ghosts in the machine, and proceeded to build their sciences on that presupposition.
As for shark attacks and church fires -- hmm. That's fascinating.
7/3/15, 12:07 AM
John Michael Greer said...
Andropos, excellent. Exactly; the tendency to rip the history of ideas, and especially of science and technology, out of its proper context in the history of everything else is a huge barrier to understanding. I don't see that as an accident; unless you do that, the whole mythology of progress falls apart and you're left with just a story of how people in one set of societies chose to think about, and act on, the universe.
Toomas, thank you for this! Clearly it's been too long since I've read up on the solar sciences.
Andropos, I think that was a very large part of it. At the same time, there are important continuities between the religious currents of the centuries before the scientific revolution and the revolution itself -- the devaluing of concrete experience, dating back to the Greek philosophers, the rise of Nominalism, and so on. It's a complex picture.
Ares, funny you should mention that last point. I field a couple of comments a week insisting, usually in the language of dogmatism, that free will doesn't exist and that the idea of free will has to be expunged. That's amusingly contradictory as it stands -- if free will doesn't exist, people who believe in free will have no choice but to do so, and so there's no point trying to change their minds -- but it seems to me that there's something profoundly poisonous underlying the entire crusade against free will, and I always delete such comments out of hand. After all, if they're right, I can't choose otherwise, and so they have no cause for complaint! ;-)
Casamurphy, good heavens. I had no idea that seminary students these days were so poorly trained in the philosophical underpinnings of their faith that they can't tell the difference between a personal Creator and an impersonal law!
DM, I'm sorry to hear that.
Jason, plenty of mystics would agree with you.
7/3/15, 12:33 AM
John Michael Greer said...
7/3/15, 12:41 AM
Andropos Nebulus said...
He was definitely a "canon," which could mean a kind of non-ordained sub-cleric, but could also mean a full priest or monk. But most circumstantial evidence points to his never being fully ordained. Still, he was a man of faith, and during certain stretches of his life being a "canon" actually appears to have been his full-time job. It appears he was once considered for a bishopric, which certainly would have required an ordination. But that never materialized.
His "de Revolutionibus" was reasonably well read in the highest intellectual circuits. We have pamphlets both praising and condemning it, and records of its being taught in universities, all dating to the decades after its 1543 publication. At first the most strident faith-based condemnations came from protestant areas---though of course those tended to be the most violent and troubled areas just then.
Some of the early criticisms actually seem very rational! Eg. Copernicus couldn't actually get his mathematical model to work in any usefully predictive way, and he used a variety of ad hoc fixes, including heavy borrowing from Ptolemaic mathematical models. This lead some to say it wasn't even a coherent system, and so should be abandoned. Honestly, if I were there, that may have sounded reasonable.
The Catholic Church's banning was in 1616, during the first Galileo affair, 73 years after its publication.
7/3/15, 12:58 AM
James M. Jensen II (badocelot/shiningwhiffle) said...
http://www.gocomics.com/garfield/2002/11/07
In it, Garfield is outside in the sun, then he gets caught in a storm, and in the final panel he's dripping wet and scowling at Jon, thinking, "Did you forget to pay the nature bill?"
7/3/15, 1:38 AM
Michael Stephenson said...
You hear no end of how much technological progress was made during WW2, yet I can't really think of a truly useful technology to come out of it, perhaps rocketry is the best example, but largely space travel is all speculative bubble nonsense that can only survive by being a subsidy dumptser.
Yet I do predict before long we will start hearing people talking up how a bit of WW3 blood letting might bring about fusion reactors after it's glorious conclusion.
7/3/15, 2:58 AM
Phil Harris said...
I will add a footnote both to Dammerung and JMG’s reply concerning Logical Positivism. I was for a while in a position to witness good minds (and I mean that) wrestling with Risk Assessments on questions of regulatory policy regarding genetic engineering. Irrespective of wider views, it was very difficult for scientists to do risk assessment. They could always ‘prove’ that they did not know enough. I put it down perhaps wrongly to their having been brought up in contagion with LP. Nearer the frontline where some were peering with intense interest into what they did not know, risky or not, the assessments seemed to get easier.
But L’d help us (emphasis); if we took a walk in the forest with our ancestors we would have been instructed in every glimpse or rumour of risk as a matter of course. And, in retrospect, whoever got married and could claim they knew enough about themselves or one another?
Back to the theme and making shift in what we dream up in the coming time, I guess some of us get a glimpse of ‘truth’ and it holds true for a lifetime and further; otherwise it is not ill spent to study among the moons of Jupiter.
“Awake music, for a last joke,
If there is to be an end for a long story
Then like a small bird’s song
Claim for audience the Universe
And hear applauding hands beat on invisible shores.”
best
Phil H
7/3/15, 3:29 AM
Brian Kaller said...
I’ve been mulling over this thesis, that the dream came first and then the machines, and I’d have quite a few questions about it. For one thing, didn’t Greeks and Romans like Democritus or Lucretius reduce the world to a set of physical pieces that ran together along rules, in a machine-like fashion? They created the first machines as well, like the first steam engine (by Hero of Alexandra). What was different about what Enlightenment-era scholars were doing?
Also, you began by proposing that global superpowers were behaving a certain way because they were treating the world like a machine; do you think machine-thinkers have always been doing this? Foolishness seems to me as old as the hills, and the specific foolishness you cite seem very recent; neither seems to date to the Enlightenment. Do you think it’s an over-abundance of machines in our lives that causes this phenomenon, or the absence of anything more organic? Let me know if I’m misunderstanding your thesis.
A related question: What is the difference between scientific thinking and machine thinking? This is rather important to me, for I've always found science in its many senses (the pursuit of knowledge, the logical system of investigation, and the wonders we’ve discovered) to bring out the best in humanity. I never saw it as a threat to my religion, as fundamentalist Christians do, nor as a religion itself, as fundamentalist atheists do, but as a vital part of intellectual life and a complement to spiritual enlightenment.
I hope you don’t mind my piling on arguments and questions – I know you like food for thought. Apologies, also, if you've answered this above and I missed it. I’m not expecting a comprehensive answer to all these in your next comment. :-)
7/3/15, 3:30 AM
Ursachi Alexandru said...
7/3/15, 4:15 AM
Tyler August said...
This sentence is problematic, I think, if not taken in jest:
"The most complex devices available at the time were pendulum clocks, printing presses, handlooms, and the like—you know, the sort of thing that people these days use instead of machines when they want to get away from technology. "
The clock is the prototypical technology, archetype for all that came after. It is self-regulating, self-operating, and self-contained (beyond, of course, the inputs of winding and ensuring it is set). It premiered, not in the Early Modern 17th century, but the Medieval 13th.
Newton and his contemporaries did not, to my knowledge, write about a 'machine universe' or a 'mechanistic universe' -- their metaphor (and I do take it as metaphor) was a 'clockwork universe'. The humble clock, centuries old, was their model. Not an abstract 'machine'.
Now, perhaps you want to say that the idea of the machine was needed for the invention of the clock, and that thinking in Faustian Civilization was mechanistic back into the 13th century. I am not sure I'd argue that point; Princess Anna Komnene, if I recall, certainly found 11th century Franks gadget-obsessed during the First Crusade.
If we're tracing the roots of this mode of thinking, though, I do think we need to go much, much further back than Sir Issac and his Principia Mathematica, and from the comments I'm not sure that's fully appreciated by all here.
@Toomas,
Brilliant imagery, thank you! Your description of the sun god reminded me of some of the wonder that sent me to get an astronomy degree in the first place. Pity my career collapsed before the rush...
7/3/15, 5:07 AM
Nathan Donaldson said...
I've been traveling the US extensively the past couple years and some places have got to be better bets than others. I should have been more clear on the word "escape." Areas that have high real estate prices now, such as the Bay Area, are to be avoided at all cost. Leaving the country makes sense only if it's to a friendly rural place, not another city like Sydney Australia.
7/3/15, 5:09 AM
Yupped said...
7/3/15, 6:15 AM
barthys said...
Of course, they seldom quite realize the irony of trying to blame someone else (or a group of "someone elses") for their problems, when that someone else they are blaming is, according to the predestination theory, equally as helpless with regards to [i]their[/i] "own" actions.
7/3/15, 6:24 AM
August Johnson said...
I suspect that you'd find that the average atheist remains unseen to most, you'd never have a clue about their views unless you specifically got into a discussion about the subject and then it would just be an interesting discussion, not a source of conflict.
"I don't hear people on your side of the atheist spectrum criticizing them all that often."
Wow, this brings to mind the demands from the far right that every Muslim vociferously condemn every act of terrorism perpetrated by every militant Islamic Terrorist. Maybe not as extreme, but in the same vein. Why aren't all the inoffensive Christians criticizing their fundamentalists counterparts all that often? Maybe it's that they are so far apart that they don't even consider themselves to be distantly related? Could it be the same with atheists?
7/3/15, 6:27 AM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
Re models, oh yes, I have noticed some of what you have in mind, I think. I wonder, were the ideas about inanimate, mechanistic universe at large in the culture and picked up on by thinkers and natural philosophers, or first circulated among the natural philosophers and thinkers and then, once created, did they move among other parts of society? Or was it more pervasive process, so you couldn't say which parts of the culture they arose from first?
And so the models you are thinking of--are they becoming evident? Where? What will be the tipping points?
Thus, today, say the new model underpinning the culture emerging through collapse is universe as evolving, conscious organism, with plenty of room for or embodying the divine in various manifestations--what revolutions will that bring about?
You don't have to try to give a short answer; I'm not expecting answers, really, just thinking, pondering "aloud."
7/3/15, 6:36 AM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
Thanks for writing about the sun. I had no idea, and am so happy to hear it "sings." The music of the spheres...
7/3/15, 6:39 AM
Doctor Westchester said...
Could the ancestors of those wealthy Victorians that Anton Mett speaks of be the grubby men playing with their mechanical toys two centuries back? That could help explain how these ideas (literally) took over in our culture.
7/3/15, 6:55 AM
D.M. said...
7/3/15, 6:57 AM
Bill Blondeau said...
Nicole Foss, of the Automatic Earth, describes the EU destruction of Greece as symptomatic of the kind of imperial collapse that you have delineated many times, and then clinches matters by meaningfully using the term "catabolic collapse".
I can't help but feel that this is fairly hopeful. Perhaps even a harbinger of a "change in consciousness" working its way through the more clueful regions of the blogosphere.
7/3/15, 7:43 AM
Phil Harris said...
Machine Creator
Another William (W Paley, 1802) famously compared seeing a stone on his walk and then finding a pocket watch. The latter he would assume had "artificers" and had been dropped by the owner. The stone could have been there forever. Apparently the example of the watch (the machine) as an analogy with intricate creatures and plants had been well used before he published his argument. Not surprisingly, as we know, Dawkins took up the argument in his 'Blind Watchmaker' and tries to make the most of the analogy for his purpose.
This is all history, and a fair bit of it is documented as JMG makes us aware. And the idea of 'the Creator' had been around for much longer of course than science or the dominant machines of our invention. I suppose hypothetically it was easier historically to get the idea of one Creator rather than lots of candidate or contending ones. But I guess many (most?) cultures did not think about existence in this way; that is in terms of Genesis? Thus, the whole tradition formed round conjecturing the 'mind' of a Creator is very much 'our' legacy? I would be interested to know whether the Hebrew were first into the field.
Incidentally, the logic of 'creation' has a certain potency to this day; we are still not clear whether there has been parallel life creation here or elsewhere. Earth life is all very closely related and looks like one spreading lineage, despite the diversity.
If none of the disembodied entitities - in the case that any culture sees and acknowledges them as such - are Creators, then we don't see a 'Machine'? Query? It feels to me that in modern times knowledge of what looks like our single biological lineage (Life-singular, and the reasonable guesses as to the date of conception), sends us back to old contentions and modes of thought from our cultural legacy. And the disembodied entities aren't telling, and probably do not understand the question? Smile.
best
Phil H
7/3/15, 7:59 AM
Myriad said...
Okay, fair enough. But as long as the ghosts in the machine are believed to act upon the machine as was generally accepted and that Descartes didn't deny (e.g. that free will exists and God acts), the universe cannot be entirely mechanical. Odd that they would miss that. Unless by universe they meant the universe apart from human beings and God.
If so, that's a more fundamental problem. The ineffable aside, "the universe apart from human beings" is hardly a coherent concept, as humans and the world interact constantly and shape one another deeply. (This remains true even if by humans one means immaterial human souls, as long as self-evident free will resides therein.) That strikes me as the point I made in comments last week—that the most likely blind spot in ones systems thinking is oneself—writ very large.
@Chloe: There is evidence that stars do "reproduce," in a sense, sometimes. (Lots of qualifiers there but still...) Shock fronts from supernovas can apparently trigger star formation in nearby gas clouds. Here's one paper: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1983A&A...128..411K
7/3/15, 9:05 AM
The other Tom said...
(JMG and commentators, you are all amazing. I always learn so much from you.)
Any activity that is quiet, rhythmic, moderately physical but not too strenuous seems best for ruminating. As our economy unravels I guess one advantage will be that more of us will do the quiet, physical work and fewer will do the multitasking, distracted work. It will be a more fertile ground for thinking.
Words, metaphors, maps are not the thing itself, but useful in pointing the way, to communicate and remember what we know through the senses. Everyone at ADR already understands this.
I think our cultural psychosis comes from not making our own stories; we consume someone else's stories whether or not they have anything to do with us. This is very recent, at least to the extent that it includes almost everyone in the West except those on the fringes. I have been in so many conversations when an interesting topic comes up and then somebody diverts the conversation to a TV show they think is relevant. This drives me up the wall. I eagerly anticipated someone's real experiences, and then I all I get is a TV show! As Denys commented: "once the story is implanted, nothing they could say or do could change the effect of the story."
Another comment that really struck me from Daergi: "The order in which we experience things seems to matter."
I grew up with TV and it's frightening to think that my worldview was originally framed by 60s sitcoms before I actually got out in the world.
I'm not saying that all mass marketed stories are wretched drivel. There are movies and novels that speak to my experience and expand it. But we live in a culture that discourages people from making their own stories. When we are convinced that this is a waste of time, that we should be too busy for this, we all go crazy.
We go crazy because of an unmet, primeval need to directly know the world. Wherever people are together without distraction, once they relax, the stories begin. "Shooting the bull" is absolutely not a waste of time. One can imagine the previous 150,000 years around the campfire. Before language or cave art, we knew things through the senses alone. Our economic decline gives us a chance to reconnect with the other 99% of our collective experience.
The wind in the trees, the crisp smell of autumn leaves, the soft crepuscular light of a forest, these are things I "know." A destiny in the stars, or the Singularity, or some other nonsense provides no context for us, nothing to be lived. These are empty abstractions.
I always liked Jack Kerouac's definition of literature: That which is written for no other reason than companionship. "
7/3/15, 10:01 AM
MawKernewek said...
Stars are often anthropomorphised in explanations of astrophysics. The life and death of a very massive star, which lives fast and dies young, involves it fusing progressively less productive fuels that keep the core going for shorter and shorter periods of time, until it reaches iron, beyond which fusion actually loses energy. At this point it suffers a core collapse and a Type II supernova.
To what extent does language shape thought, or does it go the other way with the grammatical structure of language changing as a result of the changes to thought?
7/3/15, 11:20 AM
Ruben said...
Seriously now JMG, this has left me giggling with joy.
I have been pretty busy around the urban farm this week, so it took me unusually long to read this week's post. The first part seemed like you were phoning it in so you could knock off early for a beer by the old millpond. And then you kicked out the blocks for a tour de force regarding the verb tense "is" and the whole thing unfolded like a lotus. Absolutely one of my favourites.
The quote I am going to wear into the ground: "As the Visigoths said, Rome wasn't sacked in a day."
Phew. Scorched earth over here. What grows well in ashes?
7/3/15, 11:33 AM
avalterra said...
7/3/15, 12:07 PM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Hastily,
finding both the JMG and the commentariat postings gripping,
Tom
7/3/15, 1:51 PM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Andropos, any views?
Tom
7/3/15, 1:53 PM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_Kepler
seems her genius son then got her off...
Tom
(thinking of Crowbar Hotel in that remote era; wonder what the food was like)
7/3/15, 1:56 PM
Steve from Lakewood said...
There are well known "self organizing systems" today, and it is an active area of scientific research. I doubt if you could rebut an atheist assertion that the universe is a self organizing system whose evolution is indistinguishable from the evolution of a machine. I believe the resolution to this is to understand that there is a formal logical structure in quantum mechanics, for instance, which we may take as the foundation of science for the sake of argument. One form of this logical structure is found in causality, the notion that causes must precede effects, as an illustration. This would correspond to only one of the 5 bases of knowledge in the classification popular in ancient Greece. Magic and miracles would fall under pistis, one of the other classes of knowledge. Certainly it is not fashionable to talk about knowledge based on well reasoned analysis of experience--after all the medieval scholastics would have probably burned at the stake had they talked about alternatives to knowing God outside the auspices of the Medieval Church. My point is that any formal logical understanding of any Deity/deities is simply not possible, and your knowledge of the same must come from other sources, with all the pitfalls that entails. For instance, to subject the Judeo-Christian God to the limits of ordinary causality would reduce him to the status of simply a technologically advanced ET, something that would not fly well at the local church or synagogue! If quantum mechanics describes nature, then magic and miracles must be called supernatural (or your deities are reduced to the equivalent of little green men in flying saucers from Zeta Reticuli.)
If your life experiences and thinking them over lead you to draw conclusions that there are things outside of time (i.e., acausal, outside ordinary limits of causality), then you are dealing with the supernatural, something that transcends the ordinary laws of nature.
7/3/15, 2:53 PM
Candace said...
RE: Atheism -- there have been several discussions about this topic in the comments in the past. It would be helpsul if the current crop of new readers would go check those out rather than rehashing the same old discussion. There was a spike in rather vituperative atheist sentiment around the time JMG started publishing his other blog, the Well of Galabies.
7/3/15, 3:23 PM
Florifulgurator said...
A Buddhist nun tells the devil: "Just as there is the word 'chariot' for a set of parts, so when the skandhas exist, there is the convention 'a living being'." (Samyutta Nikaya 5.10)
7/3/15, 3:53 PM
heather said...
--Heather in CA
7/3/15, 4:06 PM
onething said...
Actually, I did know some of those things about the scientists, but not about the historical context. But wasn't it true that Copernicus only allowed his book to be published upon his death?
How could that period of warfare have equaled the world wars, without bombs, planes, chemicals?
In your narrative, you gloss over the transition from religious to secular power. How do you think it happened? Did it have anything to do with the way the church in the west became so powerful that kings were afraid of it? This might sound silly, but I think that the current baiting and encircling of Russia as well as the several past such attempts in history by European nations has a lot to do with religion, the way that the Eastern Orthodox countries (but the small ones are less offensive) are quietly Christian but outside the fray, just saying "no thanks." I can't help but note that you said the perceived unity of Christendom ended with the Reformation. But there was unity from around the time of Constantine until 1054, when the churches of the east separated themselves from the papacy. It's not like they are small. Numerically, they comprise the second largest Christian denomination after the Roman. And interestingly, of the 5 original "Holy Sees" of the ancient world, 4 are still Eastern Orthodox. The one which is not, of course, is Rome. Somehow, the very existence of the Orthodox east is almost erased or forgotten. And perhaps that is to be expected, since they had so few wars and no reformation or Inquisitions or witch burnings. What's to write about?
+Toomas - what's this about the sun making music/sound? I suppose it must, if you could only get close enough...tell me more!
+JMG - what do you mean about the devaluing of concrete experience?
+Sven - My daughter moved to Sweden several years ago and speaks fluently. I'll have to ask her her impression about that.
7/3/15, 5:40 PM
winingwizzard said...
I haven't read your books. It was just the phraseology or word order when I read it. Maybe something about popcorn? I am tired from finishing a huge tin roof @ farm today. Glad it was my reading take and not what you meant.
But I do disagree that time is too short to collapse intentionally. Collapsing in a controlled fashion can be done relatively quickly - everyone will do it if the situational bits align so that it just happens. Having lived through several home/personally destructive hurricanes and floods - collapse can happen real quick. Adapting is forced, and most people either bend or break, the majority adapting and bending as required. Most importantly, people usually band together, unless they are terribly rich.
I hope everyone enjoys the holiday - I am off to make 50 gallons of Faerie Tea wine tomorrow!
7/3/15, 7:56 PM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
It does have to be added that the sounds propagating in the Sun are not necessarily of frequencies familiar from terrestrial music. We can hear down to 50 Hz or 20 Hz or 15 Hz, as the organist presses the absolute lowest keys when accompanying that "sparkling basso profundo from Novosibirsk". I think sound in the Sun is of FAR lower frequencies (not 15 Hz, i.e., 15 cycles-per-second, but maybe just a few cycles per hour). Admittedly, I don't have the number for a typical solar note. This lowness of note, as Bertrand Russell remarked in some different context, is a mere medical matter, devoid of conceptual import.
One further surprising fact might be noted. Solar matter is in an exotic way dense as you go down deep - far denser than water, and in fact some many tens or low hundreds of times denser than lead or tungsten. (Maw Kerniak, maybe you can give us some numbers??) And yet - this is the surprising fact - even at these exotic densities, we do **NOT** get an exotic state of matter: the Sun obeys the Ideal Gas Law, Pv = nRT, all the way down, just as the column of air in the humble high school Boyle-demonstration manometer does.
Finally, I note that a hasty Google on
sound waves in the sun
brings results. Two Web pages that upon a brief glance look promising are
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/singing/
and
http://www.cora.nwra.com/~werne/eos/text/solar_waves_main.html
Molto allegro,
Tom www dot metascientia dot com
7/3/15, 7:58 PM
Glenn said...
Not sure about this particular summer, but some general patterns. Sharks, like humans and Orcas are fairly cosmopolitan, and found world wide in all latitudes and climates. The largest I've seen was a Great White in Cold Bay, Alaska which took a Sea Otter between our ship and our RHIB; it was longer than the boat, which was 20 ft (6M) long. But people only tend to swim in warm water, so tropical and sub-tropical regions report the most attacks. I'd guess, without other information, that this year's hot summer has more people in the water in the U.S. southeast.
Locally, we've been swimming in Mystery Bay (latitude 48 degrees 3 minutes 30 seconds North Latitude) a month earlier than usual. A few days ago, an all time heat record of 120 degrees F was reported in Eastern Washington.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
7/3/15, 8:04 PM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Typical is a period of around 300 seconds, corresponding to a frequency of
(1/300) Hz, or around 0.003 Hz. Middle C is around 256 Hz. Every time you halve
that frequency you go down one octave. Since 1 Hz is (256 Hz)(1/2)(1/2)(1/2)(1/2)(1/2)(1/2)(1/2)(1/2), i.e., is 256 Hz halved 8 times, 1 Hz is 8 octaves below Middle C. (Even Boris Shtokolov could not reach THAT note. But apparently if you put a human in the vicinity of a hi-fi woofer, or some similar gear, sounding that dismally low note, the human will not hear anything, and yet will feel strangely uneasy, as a marked emotional reaction occurs for some neurological reason: thus we might be able to fool the credulous into thinking that our living room is haunted by "numinous presences from Beyond", as we charge big bucks for our seance.) Well, in pondering the Sun we have to reach not even 1 Hz, i.e., one oscillation per second, but 0.003 Hz, i.e., one oscillation per 300 seconds. This is easily computed - 0.003 Hz is approx equal to 1 Hz halved a further eight or nine times. So a typical solar note is 8+8 or 8+9 or so octaves below Middle C, i.e., is 16 or 17 octaves below Middle C.
For Boris Shtokolov, cf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43EWbWDxA5Q, video by
khankonchak uploaded 2008-01-20. Shtokolov here sings of "evening bells" - I conjecture
as heard from the fields outside a monastery, in whatever would be the Eastern
equivalent of Vespers sung near sunset in Western monasticism.
Tom
7/3/15, 9:03 PM
John Michael Greer said...
James, funny.
Michael, I wouldn't be the least surprised. My guess is that people will chase every imaginable excuse to avoid giving up on the myth of progress.
Phil, scientists aren't trained to think in terms of having to make a decision; quite the contrary, their training leads them to put off a final call whenever they're not confident -- which is good in research, and unworkable when it comes down to having to say whether a technology is safe to deploy or not.
Brian, good! All those are solid questions, and each one of them would probably require a post of its own to answer adequately. I'll see what I can do.
Ursachi, fair enough!
Tyler, good. Notice, however, that the idea that the universe could be a gigantic clock didn't catch the European imagination until the 17th century. Until then, the clock was simply one clever device produced by a culture that was no better at clever devices than, say, China, even if it was better at them than Byzantium. Clearly, as the intellectual history of the Middle Ages shows, you can have clocks without thinking of the universe as a clock -- just as you can have windmills without thinking of the universe as a windmill. It might have been interesting if that, rather than the clock, had been the technology that gave the founders of the scientific revolution their model for the cosmos!
Nathan, but I don't expect empty shelves and the rest of it, for reasons I've discussed here many times. I think the model you're using is far too simplistic, and doesn't take into account the abundant evidence from history of how these things unfold -- and if you say "but it's different this time!" I'm going to laugh myself into hiccups. I'd encourage you to have a look at this post to get a clearer sense of the sort of future I expect.
Yupped, interesting. That may be why I shied away from computers early and often, and adopted them only as a necessity of the way I earn my living; control doesn't interest me.
Barthys, that's an interesting speculation. I fielded another small flurry of anti-free will screeds today; the funniest of them insisted that people have to admit that free will doesn't exist, because otherwise big corporations will keep on manipulating them. I'm honestly not sure the person who wrote that has any real idea what the words "free will" actually mean; he may be trying to say that human thinking can be manipulated -- which I think everyone else already knows -- and just not have an adequate vocabulary or something.
7/3/15, 10:15 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Adrian, those are fascinating questions, to which I don't yet have answers.
Doctor W., that would be a perfectly fascinating subject for a doctoral dissertation, but as far as I know nobody has written it yet.
DM, well, that's something.
Bill, thanks for the heads up! No, I hadn't seen that; I'm glad to see those concepts getting some traction.
Phil, well, you'll have to ask them, of course!
Myriad, excellent. Of course that was always the fly in the ointment; imagining the universe as though human consciousness didn't exist, and then pursuing a method of investigation that attempted to eliminate all subjective factors, was guaranteed from the beginning to produce a model of the universe that never quite worked, like a sandwich with no bread.
Other Tom, hmm! I could see that -- the inner crisis of our time as the result of our surrendering our ability to make our own stories. I'll have to think about that.
Ruben, funny. I may have to do a grammar class one of these days. BTW, when I say that any attempt to bring up a topic will be deleted out of hand, I do mean that, you know.
Avalterra, the thing is, I agree heartily with Lovecraft's facts but I don't share any of his values. Is the cosmos utterly indifferent to humanity's existence, much less its self-important fantasies? Sure. Is the fact that we're not the darlings of the cosmos a reason to hide under the bed in gibbering terror? Not to me; to me it feels like being set free from a preposterous burden of delusion and megalomania, so we can remember what we are -- just one more species of social primates -- and enjoy the time we've got on this small, fragile, and beautiful planet.
Steve, sure, that's the popular view of those questions just now, and so long as you don't ask any inconvenient questions about the assumptions and presuppositions that underlie it, it seems to make sense.
Candace, I've long since given up expecting people to go back and read the archives, or even search them with a one-word search string like "atheism." I appreciate the few who've done so anyway!
Florifulgurator, was mechanical thinking as central to medieval Hindu thought as it is to, say. modern American thought? That's central to my point, you know.
7/3/15, 10:43 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Onething, it was a central theme of Greek philosophy, and has been very common (though not universal) in western thought since then, to see actual existing things -- say, the mug full of tea on my desk right now -- as somehow less real than the more abstract realities that supposedly underlay those things. To Plato, the idea of the cup was more real than the cup; to a modern scientist, the quantum particles that have been invented as theoretical constructs to explain the behavior of the matter forming the cup are more real than the cup. One of the major points of William James and his fellow Pragmatists, among other modern philosophers, was to point out that the cup is all we've got and everything else is an abstraction from it -- but that's still not a popular viewpoint.
Wizzard, oh, I think it might be possible for some people to scramble to get ahead of the rush even now. Once again, it's the overelaborate fantasies of doomsteads and survival ecovillages I meant to critique.
Glenn, thanks for the shark details. I don't think I'd be enthusiastic about ocean swimming just now, for whatever that's worth...
7/3/15, 10:49 PM
nuku said...
Re other people’s stories: I would add the insane cult of the “celebrity” in which ordinary people seem to live their lives through “social” media, following and identifying with every move and inane thought of people they have never met.
Of course this kind of “hero worship” behavior has always been with us, but methinks not in such pervasive form.
7/3/15, 11:41 PM
KL Cooke said...
7/4/15, 12:45 AM
KL Cooke said...
As a former corporate drone, I can tell you that what your supervisor thinks definitely does matter. If he or she is thinking unpleasant thoughts about you, there's a good chance you'll be gone.
7/4/15, 1:06 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Good to hear! It is nice to wander on a well trod path as the trail blazer is often consumed by the odd lion or three! Hehe! I have a candid dialogue with you and these are the thoughts that pop unbidden into my head as they occur.
By the way, I had to look up the definition of the meaning of the word "mystic" because I wasn't actually sure what you meant by that word. And after a bit of reading, I'm still unsure of what a mystic actually is. The Greek origin of the word appears to mean: "To conceal" and I'm unsure whether I'm actually comfortable with that concept as it is counter to my day to day existence. The word appears to have many current definitions or interpretations too, so I'm merely confused.
On an interesting and perhaps related side note, I've always noted that there is a Theosophical bookshop in the big smoke, but it has always for some strange reason looked a little bit sad and unloved for me to venture into.
Best wishes for both you and your readers over in the US for the 4th of July celebrations!
Cheers
Chris
7/4/15, 3:12 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Yes, the sharks - and it is various species too - are attacking surfers down under with alarming regularity. If I had to posit a theory on the matter, I would point to over fishing and that surfers often look remarkably like seals. Just sayin.
It is quite sad that a surf culture that likes to pretend that it gets up close and personal and also communes with the mother ocean, doesn't seem to understand that plenty of sharks swim in that mother ocean too and they are hungry.
When I have to move a log or fallen tree, I have to worry about whether there is a snake residing under there - and they only happen to be the second deadliest in the world - and that is a real risk.
No need to reply to this point of view.
Cheers
Chris
7/4/15, 3:54 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Many thanks for both your comment and the link to your wonderful blog.
PS: Excuse my ignorance, but what is resilience.org all about?
Cheers
Chris
7/4/15, 4:08 AM
Caryn said...
People's Liberation Army tasked with protecting 'overseas interests' under new China security law
Looks like with all this financial mayhem going on at the moment the scenario laid out in "How it could happen", could happen, a lot sooner than anticipated in your essay.
It all certainly seems to be coming to a head.
Michael: The PLA have already deployed some 7,000 troops to the Sudan and various parts of unstable African countries where China has not only oil and mining, concerns, but Chinese citizens, expat workers living there.
http://theweek.com/articles/544974/china-getting-ready-surge-troops-into-africa
Am I dreaming? Or did I get this link from here at ADR?
They're not ready to invade California just yet.
Although they do seem to be bound and determined to make every single e-ff-up of 'Empire' and hegemony the US and Western countries have done before them in record time for their brief moment in the sun.
With the right hand sending in PLA troops to protect Chinese workers and assets from war and strife, the left hand is selling small arms, (handguns and rifles) to the local Govt.s and police which inevitably ends up in the hands of bandits and rebels and perpetuates the war and strife, necessitating more PLA troops.
China stocks continue fall despite Beijing easing efforts ...
www.scmp.com/.../markets/.../chinese-shares-rebound-market-rout-after-..
Sorry, I can't log onto SCMP again to link for you, until I clean my cache. The thing that stuck out to me was that this relaxing of regulation would ease the pain now, but pretty much guarantee far worse pain down the road, as, well, it's a bubble.
Yeah, Collapse will be happening on this side of the world too, probably a lot sooner than I'd anticipated. :(
7/4/15, 4:52 AM
Denys said...
I was thinking it would make a great meet-up too. My permaculture design course was 8 months long meeting once a month, and the herbal medicine courses I did were 9 months long. That length of course allowed me time to work the material and use it. That length of course also provided me very personalized instruction by the end; inevitably 3/4 of the class would drop out along the way claiming to be "too busy". The remaining people in the course became good friends of mine.
Would you mind if I ran it as a meet-up? I have no idea if it would fly here or how many I would get. I might call the meet-up something along "permaculture meets homesteading". I would have people buy your book. It's on Amazon so very easy to get for now.
Thoughts?
7/4/15, 5:18 AM
donalfagan said...
Anecdotal, but we vacationed on a Carolina beach last summer and the summer before. The beach seemed dirtier in only one year. In the low tide surf there was a lot of trash and what appeared to be clear, decomposed plastic foam. We didn’t see any live crabs in the surf. And the local seafood outlet had a lot less of a selection.
So I've been wondering whether maybe the sharks are a bit desperate for food.
7/4/15, 5:45 AM
Caryn said...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-olander/china-military-push-africa_b_7708368.html?utm_hp_ref=world
7/4/15, 6:03 AM
jean-vivien said...
06:35 AM EDT
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSKCN0PE0CO20150704?irpc=932
Funny, that article on the Onion... oh wait it is making the headlines on Reuters instead ?
7/4/15, 6:10 AM
winingwizzard said...
In this country, there is a certain area or two (a wide strip from VA to NY comes to mind) where everything is illusory. I mean most everything is truly illusory and people have little direct contact with each other even living next door. Outside of that zone, things are better, but still the metropolitan areas across the country are replicas of this 'zone of illusion'. The remaining areas are much less illusory, where people interact personally day to day, know things about what is happening in the neighborhood and enjoy life at a slower pace. We don't worry about things like Smartmeters, because there is no pervasive wifi or even cable television.
Funny, the world was great when I was in my 30's, and internet was text only, cell phones were in a bag and not ubiquitous, and cars got 30 MPG or close to it. My 1984 Accord got 45 MPG with all amenities - so no progress there, even with digital assistance. Collapse and less tech is not only survivable but more enjoyable and likely safer overall. The entire digital scramble is not even 40 years old - it's delicacy and complexity is showing.
My kids turned on the attic fan this morning in the 2-story we have been building. They were shocked that it was very comfortable and even chilly near the windows inside, when the temp outside was almost 90 degrees and humidity 90%... Southerners lived down here for a long time before there was air conditioning - collapse is quite a ways off when viewing just this one instance of current tech versus older tech.
A combo of ancient, older and new tech will work out pretty well as things ratchet down, and just by reducing the "instant gratification" thing and letting things take more time, the 'frantic factor' will slowly recede, I hope.
7/4/15, 6:51 AM
PRiZM said...
American stories, specifically the tall tales, have definitely expressed on a level the conquering of nature. I am thinking of how Paul Bunyan and Babe wrestling resulted in the formation of the Great Lakes, how Paul Bunyan dragging his axe created a large river or two, Pecos Bill lassoing a tornado, and Paul Henry played a huge role in developing the Transcontinental railroad.
But I think these stories also showed the depth and determination of the human spirit and body. All of these stories represented men who used their physical strength, (using axe and ox lumberjacking, using the entire body horse riding, and driving stakes) along with a bit of wit, to overcome their obstacles. Paul Henry's challenge in particular was against a machine.
These stories were real important for me growing up. I think they help to represent, and probably developed to some extent, the American psyche.
Does anyone think it is possible to rework the stories now to help inspire the American people to overcome, and perhaps even enjoy the hardships? I know JMG will suggest I can do it ... If I were to tackle such a task though, I would like to get others input.
7/4/15, 8:10 AM
Dagnarus said...
The second would be that whether or not the universe is or is not of the machine family, it can be extremely difficult to reason about machines. For example when given a model representing a set of machines working together it can be extremely difficult to determine whether or not the rules which you use to govern there behavior will ensure that they will never smash into each other or get into a situation where they all block each others progress, this is before you take into account all the real world things which you never knew about or otherwise abstracted from the model. To drone on a bit, this problem turns out to be NP-Hard. It should also be pointed out that generally human machines are designed in a modular way which makes reasoning about them easier. Anyway my point would be that even if the Universe were taken to be one big machine that wouldn't necessarily mean that the Universe could be fully understood. No I do not believe that the Universe is a machine.
Thirdly, not directly referenced in your post. My suspicion is that as far as intelligence (if not wisdom) possessed by a singular centralized physical being goes, humans likely are in the upper ranges of what is practical there. My suspicion is that higher levels of intelligence require decentralization. I base this upon the fact that most of the better algorithms for dealing with complex problems are based upon simulating multiple agents acting independently, but with limited communication between the agents in order to enable collaboration, an example of this would be evolutionary algorithms.
Also I'm not certain whether this is relevant or not but are you aware of the case described in this article http://archive.bcs.org/bulletin/jan98/leading.htm, in which an intelligent designer used evolution in order to create a logic circuit he himself did not understand how worked.
7/4/15, 8:34 AM
William Zeitler said...
This is part of the history you describe: the Enlightenment started out with relatively simple cognitive machines -- Newton's physics, even with calculus, is within the reach of high school students; Einstein's general relativity not at all, and quantum physics is vastly worse.
So we have our wonderful machines (cognitive and physical) -- the economy, medicine (the body is just a machine), Gaia is just a machine -- and now we're at the point between choosing between machines we can understand but they don't work because they're too simplistic, or machines that work better but we no longer understand them (or at least their implications!).
Hubris is a fundamental problem of our age. We think we're smart enough to construct these enormous cognitive machines that will work, and we're not. And we all know what happens to folks with Hubris in the ancient Greek plays -- Zeus zaps 'em with lightning bolts.
BTW, I'm minded of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem (1931 – a landmark proof of the 20th century with quite a story behind it): that given any non-trivial formal system (e.g. 'machine') there will be states/statements that can neither be demonstrated true/possible nor false/impossible – thus every formal system/machine is 'incomplete'. Its corollary is that no such system can demonstrate its own self-consistency -- indeed Gödel shows that if a system asserts that, that is prima facie evidence that it is INconsistent! The point is that even given a pure 'machine' like mathematics (unbounded by any practical considerations) and unbounded intelligence to contemplate it, there will ever be unknowable realms. So if the dream of the machine is not even possible in the realm of the Ideal, then how much less so when we try to construct them in our 'real' world. (BTW, one of the main reasons Einstein chose to go to the Institute of Advanced Studies was because Gödel was there. They went on daily walks together. The mind boggles at what those conversations must have been like.)
So Humility in general when facing the World is profoundly needed. I'm afraid as a species we're in for a well-deserved whupping. (The "Dream of the Machine" is turning into a nightmare!)
One last thought: one of Einstein's great insights is that even though we have two different words 'space' and 'time', he realized that they were really two different sides of the same coin and coined the term 'space-time'. Having separate words for things doesn't necessarily mean they are separate. I was recently reading some Robert Sardello, and he proposed the term 'human-world' for the same reason. It is a profound error of our age that humans and the natural world are two 'separate' things – when we aren’t.
Nature always has the last word -- she has billions of years at her disposal and we humans don't.
7/4/15, 8:44 AM
عبد المنعم المشايخي said...
7/4/15, 12:53 PM
J Thomas said...
There is no personal solution. If you find a way to make a living for yourself in the midst of the catastrophe, somebody stronger will take it away from you.
To succeed, you must look too insignificant to bother to rob. And that's pretty insignificant!
7/4/15, 2:05 PM
August Johnson said...
7/4/15, 2:28 PM
onething said...
"Does anyone think it is possible to rework the stories now to help inspire the American people to overcome, and perhaps even enjoy the hardships? I know JMG will suggest I can do it ... If I were to tackle such a task though, I would like to get others input."
I am instantaneously struck with the rightness of this idea.
+William Z--
You seem to be calling pretty much every system a machine, which begins to lose any meaning, for me.
It seems to me that just because a system may have machine-like properties, taken as a whole, it is not a machine. Certainly the body has a stunning array of algorithmic processes; maintaining bodily pH and its options for trying to return to homeostasis in the event there is a problem, for one small example among, no doubt, hundreds of thousands. But I have two, perhaps related, points. First, because what goes into the successful running of a human body is vast beyond our comprehension, it is probably premature and hubristic to be labeling what it is. It may very well be that something like the subconscious mind is required to run a body.
Second, we are looking at processes of life such as the body or Gaia, and we see that they are alive (jury being still out on Gaia) and we see that they have many fairly determined and chemically dependent processes, and conclude that life works like a machine. But life, a consciousness, can inhabit a suitable body yet it is not the body. I am not my body, or I am not me solely because of my body, although it has a fair amount to do with who I am. Or even, regardless to what extent one considers the mind/body to be a unity, it is still my point that it is not the atoms and molecules and the algorithms by which they run that make up the criterion by which we determine if I am a machine.
Well, I am the owner of several machines, by which I mean a human-designed artifact which does a task for me, and in some ways my body, my heart beat, is like that, but because there is a mind, a consciousness within it, it cannot be considered a machine.
It's not just complexity. Which is why I am skeptical any machine we design could become conscious. The only way it could is if a disembodied entity found it suitable and moved in and who knows if that is even possible. In biology as we know it, life comes from prior life, always.
It seems to me that in asking whether the body, planet or universe is a machine, we are basically asking whether life is real. Spirit.
+ JMG-
Speaking of real, I must confess to being a bit of a Platonist. But I dislike exclusionary thinking. Nirvana is samsara and the other way around. Of course the cup is real and also the most accessible aspect we can work with, at least in ordinary states of consciousness. In my worldview, material things are less real in that they are more contingent and dissolve more readily than ideas or pure consciousness. That is, its current form is less stable, further down the chain of being.
7/4/15, 3:41 PM
John Roth said...
@onething
Most stars vibrate to some extent. This isn’t just the Sun, it’s been measured in a fair number of nearer and brighter stars. The extreme case is the periodic variables, such as the Cephid variables. To call this “sound” is rather poetic.
7/4/15, 6:04 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Cherokee, by "mystic" I mean a person who seeks direct personal experience of spiritual realities. Some of them do get devoured by lions, though it rarely takes three of the big cats to do it.
Caryn, you and my other readers in and around China -- if you haven't done so already -- need to get copies of Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929 and read that puppy immediately, if not sooner. The Chinese stock market is doing an absolutely classic 1929 bubble-and-bust, and the government is sticking precisely to Herbert Hoover's script as well.
Denys, I wouldn't mind at all -- quite the contrary, I'd be delighted. The whole point of writing that book was to encourage people to do things with it.
Jean-Vivien, just wait for Putin to start talking about Hope and Change...
Wizzard, equally, the world was great when the internet hadn't been invented in the first place. Technology doesn't actually make that much difference in how great the world is.
Prizm, yes, I think it would be a great idea, and I'm glad to hear that you'll be getting to work on it at once. ;-)
Dagnarus, that's fascinating. Do you realize that you may have just come up with a really original argument in favor of polytheism as opposed to monotheism? It's hard to think of a better example of decentralized divinity than a good old-fashioned polytheist pantheon, after all, with different aspects of existence assigned to different gods. Also, "the universe is in the set of machines" is a far clearer and more meaningful statement than "the universe is a machine" -- equally incorrect, but much clearer.
Wiliam, that's equally fascinating. What you seem to be suggesting -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- is that those who say "the universe is a machine" have a false idea of what machines are like, and are actually saying "the universe is like my mistaken notion of a machine: simple, predictable, subject to rigid laws, etc." That definitely deserves thought.
(Name I can't read), I suppose that's one way to look at it. From my perspective, belief is only one of many possible activities of the human mind, and no more important than the others.
J Thomas, I read about a bunch of people who figured out that World War II was coming. They sold all their possessions, left their homelands and moved to a distant country. They were European Jews, and they moved to the United States; as a result, they didn't get shipped to concentration camps, and their descendants are around today. Sometimes there is indeed a personal solution.
August, yes, there's a real difference between those who don't happen to believe in any gods, and those who fervently, passionately, devoutly believe that no gods exist and are offended by the fact that people disagree with that claim. It's unfortunate that the same moniker gets applied to both. If you'd like to meet atheists who are just as abusive, self-righteous, and dogmatic as any religious fundamentalist, I encourage you to try being the public head of a Druid order sometime; I can assure you that you'll get quite the show.
Onething, yes, I'd figured you were a bit of a Platonist; most Western mystics are. Nearly all my training as an occultist and mage had Neoplatonist ideas all through it, and I'm doing a lot of floundering just now as I try to make sense of things from what I suppose you'd have to call a post-Platonist worldview.
7/4/15, 6:42 PM
WW said...
While it's ostensibly science fiction and not a scholarly study, let me be the first to commend to you Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao. I can never pass up an opportunity to recommend Jack Vance, and it's also on point.
7/4/15, 9:25 PM
Peter said...
But the Universe itself is different. Trying to understand the universe ends up in you asking things like, "where did the laws of nature come from?" And we can talk about it being mechanistic here and there, but that does not mean it is a machine. A game board is mechanistic due to its rules but we don't say that the Universe is a game. The Universe has some features of a machine, then so does my hand, but living systems are vastly more complicated. The Universe itself is likely vastly more complicated than the mechanistic method of logical inference we can apply to it. The problem with assuming a mechanistic solution is that the real world is more subtle and we will be excluding whole categories of behaviour because it does not match our view. So, a civilisation is collapsing ... like a building, no it can be in stages, or have reversals, or have surprising communal resurgences, then arrive gently or abruptly at a new level, then forget its past so it can reinvent itself. Or all of the above.
7/4/15, 10:32 PM
James M. Jensen II (badocelot/shiningwhiffle) said...
May I ask what inspired this change of view?
My own intellectual journey has been largely non-Platonic. I started out Mormon (which is pretty far on the non-Platonic end of Christianity) and have spent the most time afterward as either a Rorty-esque pragmatist or a neo-Aristotelian. Ironically it was your book Monsters that started me thinking about more neo-Platonic lines in the last couple of years since Aristotle's system has difficulties accommodating non-physical beings — Thomas Aquinas has it that angels and disembodied human souls exist only by direct intervention by God.
7/5/15, 3:54 AM
Ivan Lukic said...
When I was young I learned in school about Hinduism and about ancient epics Ramayana and Bhagavadgita. I paid little attention to it because India is so far from Serbia. But it suddenly came to me the other day that default is some kind of Kalkin Avatar. In Bhagavadgita Lord Krishna tells Arjuna: "Whenever there is a decline of righteousness and rise of unrighteousness then I send forth Myself. For the protection of the good, for the destruction of the wicked, and for the establishment of righteousness, I come into being from age to age." This is better approximation of reality than offered by the Christian religion. In Christianity the restoration of order is delayed for some unspecified date in the future – The Judgement Day (Armagedon). In Hinduism the order is restored in continuity over and over again.
7/5/15, 4:09 AM
Denys said...
"The big one" hits Southern California and most of the area is in ruins. Millions die because the earthquake repsonse by the federal government is so weak because it has no money to respond. The Chinese offer to help and move in hundreds of thousands of workers to provide medical assistance, clear he rubble and rebuild. The Chinese never leave. And just like that a third of California is essentially China.
A people can be more effectively subdued with kindness than guns; they will rarely turn on the hand that feeds them. i thought this was common knowledge of those in power, but U.S. Foreign policy shows its not.
7/5/15, 4:44 AM
Phil Harris said...
JMG
The cases where I was close to the discussion were for the deployment of genetically engineered organisms when the explicit default position was that deployment of the organism could proceed unless we could discern any ‘good reason’ why not. The ‘precautionary principle’ was in effect ‘disallowed’. (OK; that’s all in the interest of facilitating ‘trade’ and ‘Progress’ i.e. ‘benefit’.) In the case of work where deployment was not expected – genetically engineered viruses for example – the risk assessment was on the likely effectiveness of ‘containment’, where the ‘precautionary principle’ tended to be assumed.
I take it that Logical Positivism, (or nowadays post-LP thinking?) if we can cut it down to a sentence, is about not accepting conjectures (figurations) of the world as ‘real’ unless they have been shown to be ‘real’ by inspection of evidence measured in line with standards of logical proof. In the case of genetically engineered crops, the assumption was that deployment was expected unless there was ‘knowledge’ that would restrict deployment. Thus any merely ‘plausible’ reason for disallowing deployment was not good enough.
Take another example of some LP in action (in admittedly a perhaps less stringent post-LP world), that is applied to decision-taking. Most modern medical guidance documents on assessment of risks from a disease condition itself on the one hand, and of efficacy of treatments on the other (for instance in cardiovascular disease), commonly stratify recommendations according to the ‘quality of evidence’ – the balance of contradictory evidence and so on, and ‘net-benefit’. This is always uncomfortable for an individual patient on the receiving end of Applied Statistics obtained from observing populations. Sub-dividing populations on the basis of ‘likeness’ always runs into ‘limits’ because the smaller the study population, the less sufficiently ‘powered’ it is to discriminate a ‘causal’ relationship. (Prof TC Campbell attempts an accessible explanation of this and related conundrums in his book ‘Whole’.)
There is a case IMHO that in Applied Science we run into limits of diminishing relevance. “The more you know, the less you understand” and such like jokes?
best
Phil H
7/5/15, 4:58 AM
Ivan Lukic said...
There are two ways we could gain knowledge.
1. Traditional way is to follow the line of causalities, like in Western science, using mathematical models. This is EXTREMELY inefficient way.
2. The other way is what Carl Japsers called desultory thinking. We „jump“ from the question directly to answer – this is mystical knowledge.
Mystical knowledge is when, under some special circumstances, we can have a glimpse into the hologram and directly approach solution to some question. (That’s how Nikola Tesla’s inventions came into being – he saw completed machines in his mind). In order to be able to see specific solution we are interested in, our consciousness must be altered either by some psychoactive substance, or by some unusual experience or by some serious life threatening illness (like our host JMG experienced in his youth). We (humans) are able to sustain our presence in the hologram for only a moment, but that is enough to gain mystical knowledge! (Orthodox Christian monks at Mount Athos are trying to see „Tavor light“ for just a moment – that’s isychasm).
Prof. Dejan Rakovich, from Belgrade University, claims that ancient Hindu chakras in our bodies are antenna system for connection to hologram that we do not know how to use.
7/5/15, 5:31 AM
Iuval Clejan said...
There are quite a few Neo-Platonists in physics today such as me, Penrose and Ellis, but I think Penrose and Ellis might be dubious of free will and still see the universe as a partially non-material machine. I've toyed around with the idea that if the basic equations of physics (such as the Schrodinger or Dirac equations) were non linear in the time derivative they would have multiple solutions and determinism (even quantum probabilistic determinism) would be undermined. Another possible way to undermine determinism is to postulate (and experimentally find!) places where time ceases to exist or where spacetime has certain singularities so that all equations break down. Two such candidates are centers of black holes and signature changing surfaces (the latter might be quite common around some brains).
7/5/15, 9:02 AM
The other Tom said...
"To succeed, you must look too insignificant to bother to rob. And that's pretty insignificant."
Unless your plan is to hoard supplies or ammunition, I would respectfully disagree. If your wealth is in knowledge, skills and good health, your wealth cannot be stolen. In fact, it may protect you from some people by making you too useful to kill.
Many years ago I met a German guy who had been a young man in WW2. He survived because he was an excellent mechanic, too useful to be sacrificed at the front.
7/5/15, 10:14 AM
Andropos Nebulus said...
Ok, I did a little checking and here's some background. With the insurrection of Bohemia in 1618, the religious divisions in the Baden-Wurttemburg area became political, with loyalist Catholics choosing union, and anti-Emperor protestants selecting for themselves a rival leader. With the very Elector of Palatine being chosen as head of the Protestant Union in 1619, this part of the country (the whole Wurttemburg area) came directly into the bulls-eye of the larger powers.
It looks like Kepler's mom was tried for sorcery in 1616, certainly before things got really out of hand. But she got away for some reason (it looks like she was found innocent! (chuckles)) and fled with her son. But then she apparently chose to return Wurttemberg and was imprisoned again in 1620. This was the same year Wurttemburg was invaded by the powerful Spanish army, which lived off the land and won the region siege-by-siege. Clearly both the leadership and the population were under considerable stress.
With a backdrop of this level of chaos and insecurity, I can only guess at the specific motivations of the people involved. But I'll say that witch-burnings, reaching a crescendo in Europe just then, was both a popular madness (fear reaction) and a tool of political terror.
One can surmise that Kepler himself would have had a powerful emotional reaction to the whole affair. But, alas, I'm not familiar with the specifics.
By the way, I really enjoyed your description of the sun! I haven't been keeping up with solar science lately, but I'll surely be doing some reading about it now. Thanks!
7/5/15, 3:35 PM
Andropos Nebulus said...
As for how things could be as bad as WWI + WWII, well certainly this can be debated, but let me try to make my case. For a first approximation I would measure it by raw depopulation. In about 100 years of religious/political warfare, central Europe was depopulated by a third to a half or more (look this up for yourself!). Obviously not all of that was direct murder or war casualties; a lot of it would have been indirect effects of huge armies destroying cities and towns, living off the land (in those days, think of what that meant!), as well as trade disruptions of all sorts: trade centers were destroyed, farmers would withhold crops not even knowing who to sell crops to, or if they sold them to the wrong people whether they'd be killed or not, etc etc. Just think for yourself what a 16th c. refugee crisis would look like, as an army (which were getting much bigger by then) cut a swathe through the land, stealing, eating or burning everything that couldn't be taken away.
In WWI + WWII, of course the total number of deaths was much higher, but remember I said "proportional to population levels, etc". In the worst-hit areas in WWII, anywhere from 8-15% of the population was killed. That is horrible, but it is not the 30-50% of 1618-1648.
As for primitive warfare not achieving devastation like modern warfare.... I would agree it is harder for pikes, arquebuses, and canon to wreak the destruction of phosgene gas, machine guns, and incendiaries, but regardless of tools, I would say there is basically no upper limit to human destructiveness given sufficient commitment on the part of the perpetrators. Look at the Rwandan genocide: using mostly machetes and with a dysfunctional, inept leadership, they achieved an efficiency of ethnic slaughter roughly on par with the Nazis.
Not to mention other examples. Read about what Hulagu did in Mesopotamia in 1258. Or what Genghis did at Zhongdu in 1215, when this advanced city and its suburbs had a million people.
As to your third (I think?) point, indeed I said "perceived" for some of the very reasons you state. Of course I was talking specifically about the cultural background of the Kepler, Galileo, etc. Keep in mind that the world was far, far bigger in those days, and, for the most part, the belief systems present in Byzantium or among the Rus might have been on the moon as far north-west Europe was concerned.
I would agree that Church involvement in power politics was a huge factor, but also keep in mind that the Popes, though they tried, controlled much of European religion but never fully controlled European politics. It looks to me that the proximate causes of the Reformation can be traced to the Avignon Papacy, where a broad perception grew that the Pope was serving the French crown instead of God and the people. This lead the ideologically devastating Great Schism (starting 1378). With Popes excommunicating Popes and European powers choosing sides, the Pope literally became a joke throughout Europe and the Church's prestige was damaged and never repaired.
Almost immediately after this came the Renaissance Popes. I am not Catholic, but a Catholic priest once told me that just about the best argument for the divinity of the Catholic Church that it wasn't completely destroyed by the Renaissance Popes. I thought that was interesting.
7/5/15, 4:47 PM
Andropos Nebulus said...
I've heard two basic narratives concerning Copernicus' publication choices. The first (and seemingly dominant right now) is that he kept his ideas secret for many years out of fear of persecution, and had to smuggle a manuscript out of Catholic Poland to get it secretly published in protestant northern Germany, because Catholic authorities would outright prohibit it, and likely punish---or kill!---Copernicus himself.
The second narrative is that Copernicus, a scholar and expert in the highly mathematical Ptolemaic theory and much else besides, was certainly aware of (with most of the intelligentia of Europe) the Heliocentric model, which had existed since antiquity.
As a full-time canon and part-time scientist----and not particularly being in a rush until he found out that certain rivals were also developing heliocentric mathematical models----it simply took a long time to develop his theory, especially since he tried (and failed) many times to get the very sophisticated mathematics to work out. He looked around for a publisher in Poland, but couldn't find a satisfactory arrangement---the printing press being just a few decades old by then, quality was low and costs were high. When some students returned from a trip to Germany with books from German publication houses, he was very impressed with the quality, and decided to publish there instead of in Poland. Being quite old (almost 70!) and not being able/willing to leave his other duties and personally travel to Germany, he sent the manuscript with some of his students to Germany to get it published.
Perhaps tellingly, the famous unauthorized "preface" that some use to argue that religious censorship occurred, was written by a protestant, not by any Catholic authority figure.
Also, it would be quite reasonable to be impressed with German printing. We have Gutenberg bibles that are in good shape and can be leafed through even today---whereas I have books from my undergraduate days that have brittle pages and instantly-cracking bindings.
So I'm not going to tell you I know the truth for sure, but I'll say this. As a college student in a scientific field, I was raised with (indoctrinated into?) the first narrative. Later I read more on my own, and I've come think the second narrative makes a lot more sense, even though it certainly still leaves me with some questions. Of course my little narratives here are bare-boned sketches, so please look into it for yourself and make up your own mind!
7/5/15, 5:27 PM
olivier64 said...
I think this is hitting the nail on the head. Modern science (from Newton onwards) is not concerned with mechanistic explanations: on the contrary Newton disparaged Descartes' mechanistic pictures as a bunch of just-so stories and cast them out of the scientific realm on the ground that they could not be used to predict anything. It is true (which confuses many laymen) that scientists sometimes resort to mechanistic descriptions to help themselves formulate their theories, as Maxwell famously did when he envisioned an ether full of wires and pulleys, but this is merely a scaffolding, discarded as soon as it has played its role, i.e., as soon as it has suggested equations. Hence Newton's famous "hypotheses non fingo". Absolutely nobody today thinks of the vacuum in the way Maxwell did yet his equations endure: they, not his mechanical just-so stories, are his contribution to science.
The essence of modern science is the ability to compute and make quantitative predictions, not to describe, and it takes the form of equations: those are your "structure of ideas". A computable universe must be subject to immutable rules but whether it is a machine is neither here nor there. Thus I don't buy your argument that science is just a manifestation of the mechanistic outlook that gripped Europe from the XVIIth century onwards. As the Maywell example shows, the two can sit comnfortably together but are nonetheless distinct: the equations of Maxwell in and of themselves do not presuppose or describe any machine while conversely the little machines of Descartes were not science as we (since Newton and Leibniz) understand it.
7/5/15, 5:31 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Thanks for the explanation and that makes sense. Incidentally, I approve of a "hands on" approach to events and circumstances!
Back to the topic of machines though, I listened recently to a podcast of yourself and Chris Martenson (of the Peak Prosperity website) and wanted to thank both of you for taking the time to have those sorts of discussions and then also make them available.
There was an interesting discussion in the podcast though surrounding the "iphone" moment which was a stumbling block for Chris in his discussions with groups surrounding the issues of technology, energy and progress.
Now in and of itself, that is hardly a surprising stumbling block (as a disclaimer I do have and use a mobile phone as no landline is available here and it is also a "dumb" flip phone used to make phone calls). As I was listening to that discussion, which I had to then go back and carefully listen to again, I was mildly astounded because I had a mental image of Denethor, the Ruling Steward of Gondor from the Lord of the Rings trilogy grasping tightly to the Palantir (or seeing stone) whilst he lay upon his pre-emptive funeral pyre. The interesting thing for me in that memory was that Denethor was not being directly manipulated by Sauron, but the inference in the book was that Sauron was carefully and subtly mediating the images that Denethor could see in the stone and the ultimate outcome from those images was a sort of hopeless despair for the situation which finally cost him his life.
I reckon that there is a good metaphor in there about technology and machines. It is also useful to remember the words of Gandalf relating to Saruman's use of the Palantir (seeing stones): "But alone it could do nothing but see small images of things far off and days remote. Very useful, no doubt, that was to Saruman; yet it seems that he was not content. Further and further abroad he gazed, until he cast his gaze upon Barad-dûr. Then he was caught!"
It makes you wonder how could Tolkien have known that that would be the outcome given the years and technology that the book was written? Very prescient.
Cheers
Chris
7/5/15, 6:22 PM
winingwizzard said...
7/5/15, 7:25 PM
heather said...
--Heather in CA
7/5/15, 10:21 PM
Ray Wharton said...
I think that the most important thing, and the thing that has frustrated me most often, is humility. Be humble and ready to learn, even (especially) from people that barely can keep their stuff together and seem wrong headed or ignorant of important matters. This is something that with years of intentional cultivation still does not come easy to me, for I can tend to be a ornery smarty pants, and have several times this year planned based on an inflated idea of my own capacity. Looking back my greatest triumphs are, almost always, associated with times of humility and my failures have every one been fertilized with pride. Being humble does not require beating oneself up, but that can also be a natural part of the process of humiliation. Accept humiliation as an opportunity to learn. I have trouble imagining a humble person who is earnest in their good will who would not encounter many folks eager to work with them in a normal day, making a connection is another thing, but I have no clear words on what might guide that.
Also important is to not give into depression. I have had hard times collapsing and being accidentally and intentionally homeless and such. None of the worst have been physical shortages. Those are very often not deadly, and almost as often make for great stories eventually! Depression is the hard thing, it makes one vulnerable to many other dangers, especially addiction, which goes far beyond drugs, it has many forms. I do not know the answer to this one and get depressed from time to time, but here are some thoughts. When I NOTICE my self being depressed I try to do something productive, in my experience work that requires tenderness has been the most beneficial. Tenderly caring is extremely powerful, the tenderness I want to emphasize. Do not look for relief from inaction or distraction, though rest and recreation can be helpful and are often free or cheap. The other thing that tends to best prevent depression is gratitude, because we are alive and that is wondrous there is always much to be grateful for, but I have lost that shield to resentment from contemplating the unjust too often, for this reason I try to find the examples of people doing good things for the good of it when I feel my gratitude choked.
The advice I have given has been the best I have been able to learn in the last three years, but I have only learned it well by ignoring it so often, even many times over after having been persuaded of it.
If the wheels are coming off the cart remember that there will be alot of people having a rough time, each person has a remarkable amount of power through tenderness and gratitude to make it less bad in the circle which they stride that it would otherwise have to be, if they choose to use that power.
Learning to choose is the most worthy thing to try learning. That plus worm castings, sewing, mycology, gardening, bike repair, and jankey solar thermal. This reminds me of the last big thing I have noticed, in pride I have tried learning too many things at once, I am now saying this to myself as much as to the blog, it is better to focus more narrowly on something to try mastering, if trying to master too many things there will be too little room for spontaneity which teaches too well to dare ignore.
7/5/15, 10:26 PM
Dagnarus said...
Second, too follow up on the polytheism argument. First I would point out that as far as I can tell, if monotheism means that there is only one god/spiritual entity, I don't think that there are any monotheistic religions. Most of them have a Satan figure, Angels, Saints, So on so forth. Unless I am mistaken if such entities were considered from a polytheistic frame, they themselves would be considered as being gods in there own right, correct? Based upon this I have come to the conclusion that what distinguishes a monotheistic system from a polytheistic one is not the existence of only a single deity, but rather the existence of, for want of a better term, one single truth which all right thinking being must follow. For example in most of mainstream Christianity there is a trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Some people look at this and say this smacks of "Polytheism" ha ha. But I would say this misses the point, that regardless of whether these are individual gods or not, biblical doctrine makes clear that they all have the basically the same will, where they all agree with each other, and they all work together for there own collective Goal, which is the only correct Goal. Furthermore all the angels are either evil rebellious louts, or they are perfectly obedient to this one correct divine will. Again unless I am mistaken this is different to Polytheism where, at least based upon Greek myth there are multiple gods, which while there might be a head God Zeus, nonetheless each individual god has their own will, which might run counter to Zeus's, and they very well might act upon it. Furthermore just because one individual spiritual entity doesn't follow Zeus to the letter, that does not mean that the entity is the fount of all evil. Or to put it another way there are multiple ways of looking at the world all of which might come into conflict with each other, but that doesn't mean that any of them are necessarily all right, or all wrong. You are doubtless much more knowledgeable about these issues than I am, so I stand to be corrected. Anyway now that that is out of the way, it seems quite conceivable to me that a world could exist in which is ruled over by a distributed God entity, made up of multiple smaller component entities, let's say angels, have a degree of autonomy in carrying out overall reasoning duties, all the entities are locked together in by one single will. Lets call this the ant colony God. I would consider such a God to be while to some degree decentralized still in the balance one single God.
Following on from that I would also like to point if it were the case that the universe is filled with multiple gods, all of which seek for universal truths individually yet are also influenced by the search of others, it probably would not be a good idea to single out one of these entities and saying "This is the one true god, he has the one truth, and all other other gods/truths are inferior/evil". It might be that taking such a stance would lead to a somewhat insular worldview that when confronted by new circumstances which that god isn't fully equipped to handle, then that god might end up failing where a more humble god would be capable of examining/asking for help from other gods which have certain tools which might help.
7/5/15, 11:41 PM
KL Cooke said...
"you don't know when a machine is going to break down"
These days it's usually shortly after the warrant expires. In a couple of my recent experiences, it was the day after.
7/6/15, 12:09 AM
Wizard of Tas said...
They may be viewed as polytheist by a polytheist, but since they don't share divinity with other spiritual beings, they get to view themselves as monotheist.
As a polytheist-animist, i view them as islands of monotheism in a very populated polytheist ocean.
7/6/15, 12:21 AM
Unknown said...
Regarding the European wars of the seventeenth century, I remember a reproduction of a painting by a northern European of the period, I think Pieter Breughel. It is a vast landscape littered with corpses, some executed and some lying on the ground, and various groups of Spanish soldiers committing atrocities in the foreground and the middle distance. All of this is painted in perspective, and near the top of the painting, against the horizon, is a far away detail, three crosses with bodies hanging from them. The crucifixion of Christ, a barely noticeable event on a bad day. I don't know why this painting isn't as famous as Picasso's Guernica; maybe because what it says is more complicated.
7/6/15, 2:14 AM
Phil Harris said...
http://www.voxeu.org/article/meaning-referendum-austerity-and-sovereignty
best
Phil H
7/6/15, 3:15 AM
Denys said...
Nothing to see here people! Keep thinking about yourself and your self-interests!
7/6/15, 4:48 AM
Caryn said...
Thanks for sharing that. It was beautifully written and very helpful to remember.
7/6/15, 5:52 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
That thought changed, forever, the way I have dealt with being down, and for the better. One can always neaten a ledge, patch the crazy quilt, make a pot of vegetable soup, etc, and when you're done, at least you have that - and for me, the labor also broke up the dank cloud of helplessness and hopelessness at the time. And has ever since. Or at least lightened it.
Amusingly enough, this was about the period that there was a popular song "Sisters Are Doing it For Themselves." Not to mention Queen's "We Are the Champions," which my track-running daughter took as her anthem. Though to release anger, there is nothing like a good mental soundtrack of Civil War songs. The militant ones, like "Marching Through Georgia."
Just my $0.02 and hope this helps.,
Pat
7/6/15, 6:38 AM
The other Tom said...
You are an unusually honest, introspective writer. Thank you.
Depression seems like an appropriate issue for any discussion of collapse. I'm seeing a lot of people afflicted with a kind paralysis or sadness due to economic insecurity. Maybe they suspect it's not just a cycle this time.
I experienced depression only once in my life. Strangely enough, it seemed to inoculate me from a recurrence. I remember the sensation of falling into a black hole as distinctly as a muscle memory that once learned, gives me the balance to stay out of that hole. Several years ago I got some terrible news and the following week it was my experience that kept me out of the muck of inactivity. I don't know if this works for anyone else or if it even makes sense. Also, it seems obvious that meditation and/or activities that allow introspection help in observing one's toxic thoughts before it's too late.
Avoiding depression seems like a skill everyone will need in an era of diminished resources.
Do any health care people have a take on this?
7/6/15, 11:07 AM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
Hi Chris,
FYI, Resilience.org used to be Energy Bulletin, somewhat more narrowly focused on peak oil and other energy issues, but always with room for articles about what we should do to weather the coming collapse. I first read our host's blog posts there. It is under the auspices of the Post Carbon Institute. A few years ago they changed to a more colorful format and broadened the scope, but it still serves as a portal for news and opinion regarding many of the topics discussed in this forum. It's always been a mix of articles from a wide variety of writers, both professional and amateur. When they changed over, some long-time readers complained about losing the earlier format, but they did attract a lot of new readership.
Also, thanks very much for visiting my blog. I enjoy yours as well.
7/6/15, 12:40 PM
Iuval Clejan said...
7/6/15, 12:45 PM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
Nearly all my training as an occultist and mage had Neoplatonist ideas all through it, and I'm doing a lot of floundering just now as I try to make sense of things from what I suppose you'd have to call a post-Platonist worldview.
That is surprising to hear, in that I imagine a huge shift, or maybe deconstructing and re-assembling going on at a very deep level, both personal and intellectual. And in terms of your magic and understanding thereof, among other things. And druidry? For me, a shift of this nature would require a reorientation to pretty much everything--I say this from my own experience.
Of course it could be nothing of the sort, could be more easy and gentle with an "oh of course" sort of feel to it, or even a "glad I'm done with all that" sigh of relief. It will be interesting to read what constitutes a post-Platonist worldview, should you come to write about it.
For some reason I'm reminded of Dabrosky's theory of positive disintegration, but don't wish to press that too hard.
7/6/15, 1:00 PM
Vic Postnikov said...
It’s been a real pleasure to read your latest posts.
(Couldn’t withstand not to translate them into Russian).
Again, you have come up with a topic that has always been painfully vital for me. My gradual alienation from science and technology has begun many years ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union that I relate to ecological disasters and catastrophes (Chernobyl, etc). The obsession with machines has not been the sole privilege of the west. The Soviet Union borrowed that logic from Marx, I presume, and then Lenin, who were very fond of machinistic means of production. But the rub is that the Russians, in contrast to, say, Germans, are not so disciplined and diligent people (Marx suspected this). The floppiness that flowered under Socialism eventually brought down the System.
I think the same could be said about the Greece. I mean, the southern Europeans are not very keen on technological advances. Theyre ok with their natural resources. Therefore their economies can’t be likened to those of northern countries (where technology does matter).
Just a few thoughts.
Sometimes I don’t know whether I should translate yours or write mine instead. ;-)
Thanks again, and I'm looking forward to your posts.
V.P.
7/6/15, 1:10 PM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
I've been thinking of you the last few days, because I have started mentoring a young urban sustainable ag student. The first lesson: Get yourself a hat and this is how to use a hoe to chop weeds. The second, today: this is how to tell a tomato plant from Peruvian daisy--and in this case, it's easier and safer (for the tomatoes) to pull the Peruvian daisies, not hoe.
I really appreciate what you wrote about work that requires tenderness as a help for depression. It seems like the tenderness part is key, and to me relates directly to humility, since you can't be tender or do work requiring tenderness when in a state of pride or arrogance. Tenderness implies care taking. IMHO.
7/6/15, 2:18 PM
brian lloyd said...
In that spirit, let’s begin with an ecological rather than a mechanistic metaphor - “the universe is a tree” – and see where that takes us. Those who want to draw out this comparison will not start talking about creators, origins, and purposes but rather about biotic relationships - how one thing fits into a larger community of things. The meaning of a tree is not exhausted by what humans might say about it. A tree is also a being for beetles and squirrels and lichens. A full understanding of a tree could only come from making whatever inferences might follow from consideration of its interactions with every being in the neighborhood. Should we want to address the tree’s origins and purposes, our account of them will be identical to the one we would give about ourselves and, indeed, every other living entity in the universe - it evolved from something else over a long stretch of time and strives to live well and long and leave others of its kind behind. Any further investigation of that process will proceed most fruitfully if it stays in the ecological, rather than the mechanistic, realm.
Humans might still want to measure a tree, delineate its chemical properties, and calculate the velocity of whatever might fall out of it, but notice that those ways of engaging with the tree only become important if you want to subordinate it to human purposes - convert it into lumber, paper, or a food producer. That kind of knowledge is helpful to have, but it has been a mistake - a huge one, it turns out, and one that we continue to make on a massive scale - to treat it as if it is the only valuable or reliable information that our encounter with a tree might generate. We made that mistake as beings who decided - arrogantly, foolishly, and usually while in the thrall of one vision of progress or another - that our purposes alone mattered in the world. Had we cherished as we should have the smell or feel of a tree, had we ever climbed to the top on one and swayed with it in the midst of a rain storm (John Muir did this), had we not disregarded what it was to beetles, squirrels, and lichens - then we would not have found it so easy either to destroy whole communities of them or to remain so blissfully ignorant of the perils that we now face for having done so.
For a tree to serve as a metaphor for the universe, it will have to be the poet’s tree. The scientist’s tree is machine-ready - it has no value outside the process that kills it, saws it up, and puts a price tag on it. Individual botanists might entertain other kinds of feelings about trees, but those feelings are on a par with moral strictures like “thou shalt not kill” - noble sentiments with no purchase in a world run by real estate developers and four-star generals. The universe appears machine-like because we have made it so. If we are to make it more tree-like, we will do so as poets and ecologists.
Brian Lloyd
[email protected]
7/6/15, 2:32 PM
Adam A Thompson said...
Thanks,
Adam
7/6/15, 3:11 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Yeah, as a useful suggestion, drop the smarty pants act. I met someone on Saturday at a farmers market that knew me however distantly - I saw the recognition in them. And then they proceeded to put on the smarty pants act, until they started to seek confirmation of the genius of their humour. At that point I told them that I just chose to ignore it. Seriously, it leaves a poor impression. As you say, humility is a much wiser approach and I applaud your efforts in that direction. Intellectual prowess is a crutch that many people use to feel better about their situation - whatever that situation may be, but in and of itself it should be remembered that it does not put food on the table.
No matter where you go in life, there will always be people who are smarter, faster, stronger, wealthier, better looking etc. That's life. Your best bet is to work on yourself and your acknowledgement of the necessity for humility is a great step in that direction.
Cheers
Chris
7/6/15, 3:18 PM
Unknown said...
@Patricia Mathews--In honor of Independence Day, I give you the third verse of the Star-Spangled Banner, scoring at least an eight on the militant war song meter.
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Like the first verse, it starts with a question, but it doesn't end with one.
Given our current dependence on mercenaries and drone strikes, it's probably just as well that the service academies don't sing this verse any more.
7/6/15, 4:05 PM
Ray Wharton said...
Thanks for that, intelligence is a great thing, and in truth I am proud of what kinds of thinking I can do well, because I worked hard to develop those skills also I am always eager to use those skills; but mental skills are not intrinsically better than other skills. It is frustrating that intelligence was so strangely over valued, mis valued, it casts a antagonism over thinking and reasoning together with people.
7/6/15, 8:15 PM
John Michael Greer said...
James, it's been a long road. The first major turning point involved my decision to change the focus of my spiritual life from Golden Dawn Hermeticism to Druidry, which was guided by intuitive and emotional issues rather than rational ones; later, a prolonged period of wrestling with Nietzsche, then with Spengler, then with Nietzsche again, made it impossible for me to keep thinking about abstractions as anything more than the ordinary simplifications of a certain primate species' cognitive toolkit; more recently that intersected with systems theory and ecology, and with Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science," to bring the entire issue of representations and realities into tight focus -- oh, and there's some Schopenhauer in there, too. The irony is that I'm currently doing a lot of work with what might best be described as a Druid-ized version of the Golden Dawn, while standing the whole Platonic focus of the GD tradition on its head by seeing the abstract ideas as aspects of the perceiving subject rather than of the perceived universe.
Ivan, hmm! I like that -- default as Kalki, on the white horse of bankruptcy.
Denys, it does seem plausible, doesn't it?
Phil, that is to say, ordinary scientific reasoning was hijacked by the desire of a big corporation to get a return on its investment. Gotcha.
Ivan, Professor Rakovich may not know how to use them, but there are plenty of other people who do!
Iuval, correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't it been shown that the decay of indiidual atoms of radioactive isotopes is random in the full sense of the word, i.e., not just governed by unknown or unknowable variables, but actually undetermined in anything but a probabilistic sense? If that's so -- and that's certainly what I've read in books by quantum physicists -- then determinism goes right out the window; even with a perfect data set and limitless computing power, given the state of the universe at time X, you can't accurately compute its state at time X + N if N is more than a negligible interval.
Olivier64, and when science is practiced in that spirit -- as the construction of mathematical models that enable accurate predictions to be made, without the claim that the model is identical to the universe -- it's one of the truly great creations of the human mind. It's when we start insisting that the universe is the same as our model of it that science becomes just one more source of fatuous dogmas.
Cherokee, excellent! My guess is that Tolkien, who was a keen and acerbic observer of the technological scene, considered telephones, radio, and cinema, and triangulated from them to a technology that would exploit all the same weaknesses in a more concentrated form. Yes, it's a very crisp metaphor.
Wizzard, agreed, but I have my doubts that that'll be an option.
7/6/15, 10:16 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Ray, I'd like to encourage you, as time permits, to write either a long essay or a book on the lessons of your experience. I mean that quite seriously; you're a capable writer and have a lot to say that I think people would benefit from hearing.
Dagnarus, okay, to begin with, equating "god" and "spiritual entity" is exactly what monotheism rejects. The basic monotheist claim is that out of the set of spiritual entities, one and only one is a god, i.e., a being worthy of human worship; all others are either servants of that one god, or his enemies, and in either case you don't worship them. That aside, the rest of your argument corresponds closely to the standard logic of polytheism, which generally rejects the idea that gods are omnipotent and omniscient, and very often the idea that the universe was created by one or more gods as well. Greek Pagan thought is a good example; in Hesiod, the gods don't create the cosmos, rather, the cosmos gives birth to the gods. Nor, as you've noted, is any one god in a polytheist system the sole source and judge of truth, or what have you; rather, there are many overlapping truths, and the truths you follow determine the deities you revere.
KL, funny. I admit I wonder how they time that.
Wizard, one of the things that interests me is the way that monotheisms obsess about such details, while polytheisms consider them interesting but not that big a deal.
Unknown Deborah, probably because Guernica happened much more recently. Brueghel was a major presence in his own time, as I recall.
Phil, thanks for the link! Yes, it's the same process, and can be described in both those ways.
Denys, thanks for the data point. Yep, it's a big deal.
Adrian, oh, I'll write about it; I generally think things through by writing about them. Druidry was a natural jumping-off point for the transition, since a lot of what happened had to do with coming to grips with the difference between the world we experience and the models we make of that world.
Vic, I'd like to see you write your own posts, in English as well as Russian!
Brian, it actually depends on the scientist. I've known quite a few ecologists, for example, whose understanding of the tree and its value had nothing to do with its economic role and everything to do with the parts it plays in the dance of the living ecosystem.
Adam, no, I haven't. (BTW, yes, there's at least one typo in every post here; consider that a deliberate attempt to refute any claims of infallibility on my part!)
7/6/15, 10:39 PM
Vic Postnikov said...
7/7/15, 12:39 AM
Seb Ze Frog said...
Ray, may I second John Michael here ? I think that you have walked some alleys that would be worth a story or two... Or at the least, a story or two that I would find much worth reading.
On an unrelated note, our esteemed Archdruid host again proves that his unconventional hat doesn't necessarily imply a tangled understanding of science, regardless of the labels it tends to attract in certain scientifically inclined circles. Einstein indeed proposed an experiment that was carried on later which proves that the randomness of quantum mechanics doesn't work as if based on a hidden variable, but instead displays all the characteristics of pure statistical randomness.
Have a good day
Seb
7/7/15, 12:57 AM
nuku said...
Re Typos/mistakes/imperfections: As a craftsman who made replica harpsichords for several years, I was aware of a tradition among those guild members to leave at least one (small) intentional imperfection in the finished instrument because “only God was capable of complete perfection.” It was a way of avoiding hubris.
Several years ago I bought from a local shop a hand drum made in Bali of solid wood. I picked it out of 5 almost identical drums as the one with the best sound, and I talked the shop keeper down about $15 on the $100 asking price. When I got it home, closer examination revealed a 6” narrow split in the side, and being by nature a “perfectionist” I decided to return it and ask for my money back (cheeky bastard that I am). In the car, halfway back to the store the thought suddenly came to me: what if the split, the perceived imperfection, is actually what makes that drum superior in sound to the other four? I sat there for quite a long time while the thought percolated through a lot of my deeply held assumptions about the nature of reality, then turned around and drove home a wiser man. I’ve still got the drum and its a reminder that perfection doesn’t always have to be a positive value or goal for me.
Mistakes, imperfection, indeterminacy, unknown unknowns, black swans are part of the fabric of reality in the universe I live in. The attempt to banish them from human experience will always come round to bite us in the backside.
7/7/15, 3:16 AM
onething said...
I have the impression, though, that those Greek thinkers were of the opinion that matter, or the cosmos, were simply "there." to me, this begs the question of how it got there, and what is it, that it can create gods? And this view has a lot in common with scientific materialism. All you have to do is drop the gods.
I note that it has become popular to refer to "Source" rather than God in some circles, largely because they think the word God has baggage and assumptions built into it, but also as a way of deanthropomorphising God and stating that the ultimate point of interest is the source of all existence.
7/7/15, 7:29 AM
RPC said...
7/7/15, 8:33 AM
kittenlopez said...
from erika to Denys, PriZm, and Ray--
Denys, i wish i lived next to you. you're FUN. how cool to go to regular classes with you and stumble through the initial painful embarrassments at being a perpetual Beginner again and again! It's so hard to "NOT KNOW ANYTHING" publicly so you're perfect for forgetting to be uptight and full of it.
and i love how solid you are in your passions. you're not fleeting or fickle. your LOVE runs hard and solid, yet fluid and accepting (obvious in your rage at the "educational"/prison systems that kill our humanity and ideas).
---
PriZm AND Ray--
as i see it, you've both just been annointed with more of Your Purpose.
Yeah, with capital letters. I felt it; OTHERS felt it. I smiled.
When I get one of those... edicts... i sigh heavily and put down all my fancy "plans" because they become riff raff in the back of the bus suddenly. I know it's gonna be work, but it's bigger than You.
Ray, i copied your post and put it a draft email where i put Denys' compliment to me so i could re-read it over and over in private to remember i'm not farting alone in a closet over here (which is what it's getting to feel like just merely BEING in the BAY AREA with a heartbeat still).
So yeah, you're one of those medicine men who's gonna be ferrying others to the Other Side of The Illusion. I'm not telling you anything you--and others here--don't already know.
This is what i mean when i foist the terms "paternal"/"great fatherly loving" onto our generous host, John Michael Greer, here.
Check out Lawfish's posts (i think that's him) about saving a few acres of land aside for HIS OWN KIDS. that's a sweet fatherliness but it's for HIS own kids. that's great. but a lot of us are bedraggled, skittish and confused about ANY father's love now that everything's bull.
so we NEED some serious EPIC forms of archetypal paternal fatherly loves now. the kind that spread fast hard and wide. i hate the words i'm using. they all suck. but you'll have to get from what i write, what it means for YOU. i can only go so far here.
we've no time for "aw shucks" kind of humility. we need superheroes to DARE. dare to love. that's what i'm doing. daring to not hate tech people or rich folks who drive down our streets and give us the finger.
so step up your own game. when you start saying to yourself, "who do i think i am? dare i interrupt that lone person over there? what do i know?" BUT if you feel that tingle of excitement and a little nausea of terror, KEEP GOING. even if you mess up and are presumptuous, at least you DARED to connect.
but you already know this. i'm writing this more for ...
(continued)
--
7/7/15, 9:44 AM
kittenlopez said...
to Prizm/Denys/Ray, continued...
PRIZM--
this is why artists/poets/teachers/thinkers are killed right after the revolutions they often helped to instigate with their VISIONS.
it's the Vision thang people fear.
and why i realized artists ARE important.
this is all related because despair is a lot about death of a vision or many visions.
like now.
however, as an artist who's become "obsolete" in this culture (a Twilight Zone reference as Rod Serling was MY Walter Cronkite back in the day), and now that EVERYONE is going around snapping photos and reliving the same few bracketed moments over and over, i felt like i was only adding to the piles of bull after awhile.
james was saying to me that the artist NOW would just enjoy the moment
the writer would have conversations
the poet would LISTEN
the photographer would just LOOK
i'm saying this to ENCOURAGE you to trust your own new direction/path. yes. we need new VISIONS. that's a lot of what this site and John Michael Greer's work is ALL about.
james hates the cuteness of the eistein quote about an inability to solve problems with the same consciousness that caused them, but it's TRUTH to me (him, too). and the earlier consciousness must die out...
what comes next?
that's why these comments sections to archdruid report are better than art school days when we'd drink pitchers of cheap axx yeungling porter and talk about taking on the world. we were BABIES. dancing in tutus.
this is the good stuff here.
so it follows that you'd wake up to your own gifts and visions and have the audacity AND humility (!!!) to SHARE them.
i learn a lot from how John Michael Greer "is" here. it's beautiful because it's very LIFE GIVING in an EPIC PATERNAL way. (smile)
i didn't have children, either. so now ALL are my children. all the odd ones who dare to look me straight in the eye. i give them all i can in the few seconds or what little time i have.
but the moment you take off the tutu and get off the coffee table, THAT's when all hell breaks loose. in your own psyche, as well as how others TREAT you. when you don't wanna dance anymore...
THAT's when things get scary and anything could happen, like finding yourself having out of body experiences and doing epic things like standing in front of an armored vehicle in tienamen square.
erika
7/7/15, 9:45 AM
Dagnarus said...
7/7/15, 10:11 AM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...
To add to what you are saying, re trees and mechanistic thought: to some extent the measuring and use of the tree for human purposes is necessary. You could say a tree sacrifices itself so humans might have warmth, tools, furniture, paper and shelter. Sacrifice and death enable life, on this planet at least. So to me, part of the process of thinking "mechanistically" (though not necessarily scientifically) is disavowing not only the responsibility for caring for other living things, but also one's role and responsibility for causing the death of other living things, whether at the individual or ecosystem level, and refusal to honor those lives and to be thankful for the sacrifices they have made. And perhaps that leads to taking too much.
7/7/15, 4:17 PM
John Roth said...
Yes, I’ve heard the standard lies about Copernicus not publishing until his deathbed because of fear of religious persecution. They are exactly that, lies. Somewhere I’ve got a note about who originally propagated them, but it’s missing at the moment.
The facts as I know them are that he was well known to be working on it; there was some amount of interest. There’s supposed to be a letter from him describing an early version that had 35 cycles and epicycles. The published version had 42, two more than the then-current Ptolomaic version. (It was not, in other words, simpler.)
His latest version was published at the urging of Georg Joachim Rheticus, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wittenberg. Erasmus Reinhold, a fellow professor of mathematics in Wittenberg, reduced the system to a set of Tables, called the Prutenic Tables, that could be used to calculate the ephemerides used by astrologers, farmers, navigators, cartographers, astronomers and numerous others. In the event, it was no better than the existing Alfonsine Tables.
A number of things happened afterwards, including Tycho Brahe’s inability to measure the parallax of the fixed stars, which he interpreted to mean that the Earth didn’t go around the Sun. Copernicus work would have landed in the compost pile of history except that a Jesuit, Christoph Clavius, included it in his textbook on the mathematics of astronomy that became the standard text well into the 17th century.
The only time De Revolutionus came under Church fire was as fallout from the Letter to Christina affair (1616), when it was banned “until corrected.” The corrections involved blanking out a few paragraphs and rewriting several sentences. Gallileo’s copy contains these “corrections.”
You can find more than you probably wanted to know here: https://thonyc.wordpress.com/the-transition-to-heliocentricity-the-rough-guides/
7/7/15, 5:39 PM
latheChuck said...
7/7/15, 5:58 PM
Flagg707 said...
What's more important - this person didn't just bloviate on facebook about how bad everything was, instead he implemented the key secret of the Illuminati, he took action.
7/7/15, 6:11 PM
Mark Sebela said...
Outlaw motorcycle groups' efforts to recruit military troops is worrisome, officials say
http://www.stripes.com/news/us/outlaw-motorcycle-groups-efforts-to-recruit-military-troops-is-worrisome-officials-say-1.356600
7/7/15, 9:19 PM
Vic Postnikov said...
now I'm looking forward to your new take on "The Death of the Machine".
For inspiration, let me suggest a poem (that I particularly love):
DH Lawrence
The Triumph of the Machine
They talk of the triumph of the machine,
but the machine will never triumph.
Out of the thousands and thousands of centuries of man
the unrolling of ferns, white tongues of the acanthus lapping at the sun,
for one sad century
machines have triumphed, rolled us hither and thither,
shaking the lark's nest till the eggs have broken.
Shaken the marshes till the geese have gone
and the wild swans flown away singing the swan-song of us.
Hard, hard on the earth the machines are rolling,
but through some hearts they will never roll.
The lark nests in his heart
and the white swan swims in the marshes of his loins,
and through the wide prairies of his breast a young bull
herds his cows,
lambs frisk among the daisies of his brain.
And at last
all these creatures that cannot die, driven back
into the uttermost corners of the soul,
will send up the wild cry of despair.
The trilling lark in a wild despair will trill down arrows
from the sky,
the swan will beat the waters in rage, white rage
of an enraged swan,
even the lambs will stretch their necks like serpents,
like snakes of hate, against man in the machine:
even the shaking white poplar will dazzle like splinters of
glass againsts him.
And against this inward revolt of the native creatures of
the soul
mechanical man, in triumph seated upon the seat of his
machine
will be powerless, for no engine can reach into the marshes
and depths of a man.
So mechanical man in triumpgh seated upon the seat of his
machine
will be driven mad within himself, and sightless, and
on that day
the machines will turn to run into one another
traffic will tangle up in a long-drawn-out crash of collision
and engines will rush at the solid houses, the edifice of our
life
will rock in the shock of the mad machine, and the house
will come down.
Then, far beyond the ruin, in the far, in the ultimate,
remote places
the swan will lift up again his flattened, smitten head
and look round, and rise, and on the great vaults of his
wings
will sweep round and up to greet the sun with a silky
glitter of a new day
and the lark will follow trilling, angerless again,
and the lambs will bite off the heads of the daisies for very
friskiness.
But over the middle of the earth will be the smoky ruin of
iron
the triumph of the machine.
7/8/15, 2:35 AM
Gunnar Rundgren said...
http://www.insiteproject.org/book/the-myth-of-the-machine-alf-hornborg/
or my own blog post: http://gardenearth.blogspot.se/2011/04/business-plan-of-factory-is-to-produce.html that put his thoughts into my perspectives.
7/8/15, 5:10 AM
SacredEater1 said...
-- for the short story contest. I can send you additional details (full name, email) in a PM
7/8/15, 7:59 AM
brian lloyd said...
Makes sense to me. Now, how do the poets, ecologists, and warm-hearted scientists who would treat Nature with appropriate respect, who are attuned to the elegant dance of life, death, and sacrifice ... how do we get those kind of people in a position to make decisions about how the land and the water and the soil are to be used? How do we get decision-making power out of the hands of those who seem dead-set on squandering what is left of the basics of life? Talking together, blogging together - these are a critical first step. Taking it allows like-minded souls to find one another and develop and clarify their thinking. But what is the next step? Talking and thinking are not enough - and this is true whether you are still plugged in to the system as a job-holder and a consumer or whether you have collapsed voluntarily and dug in to a local subsistence economy. Do we not owe it to the trees and the frogs and the rivers and to ourselves as kin to all those things to act in ways that give an ecological perspective some chance of prospering in the world beyond the blog? There's the rub, no??
Brian Lloyd
[email protected]
7/8/15, 10:35 AM
1ab9a86a-8991-11e3-899b-000bcdcb8a73 said...
Quantum mechanics is a mathematical framework where a basic construct is a wave-function, which unlike a sound wave, is a little difficult to interpret physically because the quantum wave contains both "real" and "imaginary" functions, where the latter are simply real functions multiplied by the square-root-of-minus-1. Since that square-root isn't an ordinary number, mathematicians call it "i", the unit of "imaginary numbers". So to get a physical result from something containing an "imaginary" part, the wave function is multiplied with a "conjugate" of itself, resulting in a purely real function that is interpreted as a probability distribution. For example the probability distribution for where an election might be in relation to the atom it is bound to.
So this mathematical framework is a "machine" that works exceptionally well in describing all sorts of microscopic phenomena, including the apparently random decay of radioactive atoms.
I say "apparently random" because:
1. even if atomic decays happen at perfectly random times, resulting in "pure noise" in a perfect decay-detector, no such detector exists. All real detectors inject highly imperfect noise at a certain level. So any imperfection in the randomness of atomic decay might be too weak to observe
2. Your computer can be programmed to produce a pseudo-random signal using a very simple deterministic rule. For example the Wolfram Rule 30. Anyone looking for regularity in such signals will almost certainly fail unless they happen to know the rule, which allows them to "unlock" the regularity hidden in the pseudo-random noise. Modern pseudo-random generators have evolved to the point where they defeat any statistical analysis searching for regularities (correlations) unless the rule is known.
Einstein and others objected to the interpretation of the machinery, regardless of how well it worked, because while it is easy to test the accuracy of the machine, testing the interpretation is a much more vexed issue.
To put it in your language, Einstein accepted that the quantum probability-distributions are a very accurate mathematical model, but he objected to the bald assertion that the Universe actually *is* a machine generating perfectly random samples from a probability distribution.
I have yet to hear of a physicist willing to claim that these questions have been resolved. Quantum mechanics is a unique physical theory in that none of its practitioners really think it makes any sense. It works, sure, but that's another thing.
7/8/15, 1:42 PM
Caryn said...
As an art teacher, I'm often confronted with a child who wants to erase their whole drawing/painting if it has an imperfection. They can become very frustrated and upset with themselves, until they feel like giving up altogether. I have found useful to tell them of the Navajo blankets. The Navajo weavers also insisted on one flaw in each beautifully crafted blanket to remind them of the imperfections of life. If a flaw crept in, they'd keep it, if no flaws crept in before they were almost finished, they'd put one in. Nice to know that such a great idea popped up elsewhere, (as Nuku says with harpsichord crafters). I've found this works with my little artists well, as it gives them permission to create more freely, unafraid of mistakes. Sometimes the warts themselves are what make something beautiful.
@KittenLopez: Ha! You sound like such a sweetie, I love your posts. In trying to figure all of this out, I hope you are finding time to just shut out the world, put your head down, nose to the grindstone, as they say, and focus on your art and where it takes you. I find that is also a great antidote to the madness of the world.
Thank You again this week to all commenters and our gracious host - for one of the few places I have to read, re-read and actually think about the concepts being discussed.
Not going to be online as much for the next few weeks as we are back in our US home base in WY. Can't start planting or most collapse activities for this house, because- as far as we know, it' still only a vacation/retirement home for the time being. We're scheduled to go back to HK in 1 month, (and it's raining for the next 2 weeks); but still loads to do in prep and maintenance for "if and when". Still, it's so nice to be home.
BTW: I've heard you can eat thistle, which seems to be our #1 crop right now. Any favorite recipes? :)
7/8/15, 4:46 PM
sgage said...
"BTW: I've heard you can eat thistle, which seems to be our #1 crop right now. Any favorite recipes? :) "
There are a million kinds of thistle, and I imagine it makes a difference in their edibilty. Did you know that artichokes are just the flower bud of a kind of thistle?
7/8/15, 6:17 PM
Graeme Bushell said...
Cheers,
Graeme
7/8/15, 10:18 PM
Caryn said...
Interesting note that I've also just read: The Medieval Scotts surrounded their castles with fields of thistle as a protection. Their enemies could not make it all the way through a field of that dastardly stuff in any kind of leg armor or greaves. So, it may prove to have a few uses, come the collapse!
7/9/15, 8:44 PM
rapier said...
For entertainment purposes only and we all need to be entertained. Especially entertaining is the discussion of former 'value czar's' William Bennett (who reportedly lost $3 million dollars playing video poker games) waxing poetic about the Donner Party. No sense getting caught up the half baked ideologies of the day.
http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html
7/10/15, 5:37 PM
Unknown said...
The other event is the collapse of the biosphere aka the Sixth Great Extinction which is well underway, driven by anthropogenic global warming, and the fouling of our common nest in uncommon ways. Within the doomer world view, there are a range of possible scenarios, some leaving a remnant of human beings around after the apocalypse, others not. All are possible; none certain.
If it is the collapse of civilization that prevails, there's plenty of room for a (relatively) soft landing for many people. You won't like what that soft landing looks like, for sure. Imagine (for example) a world with no modern medicine - where people have 10 children in the hope that one or two survive to adulthood. That's going to feel different than not having your iPhone handy. But societies live through such hardships, adapting and sometimes even thriving in response.
On the other hand, if we're talking about total collapse of the biosphere, unless you've figured out how to perform the magick of Gregor Samsa, there will be no future at all for you, or for any of us. Yes, the cockroaches and the jellyfish will do just fine, thank you - and so will the interesting creatures that live at the bottom of the ocean, no doubt. But for surface dwellers like us, there will simply be nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide.
We are certainly living in interesting times.
7/11/15, 6:15 PM
Bill Man said...
The fact that humans tend to think of the universe in Newtonian terms is a relic of the adaptive traits of humans gaining knowledge necessary for survival at a narrow band of size and energy scales in which we can manipulate our environment in order to procreate. The vast majority of the universe exists at size and energy scales other than what humans can manipulate.
The universe operates in a quantum mechanical and relativistic way. There is no such thing as a single truth, because every truth is relative to the way it was measured. The universe has at its core a property of simply existing as exchanges of information. What we think of as stuff is purely information, and the fundamental property of that information is probalistic and relative, there is no universal answer for any question, because the answer depends on how something is measured and seeming randomness.
A great example of this paradoxical aspect of reality can be explained by the quantum Zeno Effect. A radioactive particle exists in a superposition of both a decayed and non-decayed state at the same time. Radioactive particles are perceived to decay when the decayed portion interacts with another particle. The strange thing about radioactive decay revolves around probabilities, with the probability of a radioactive decay being detected increasing with time. However, if an observer checks to see if a particle has decayed while the probability is low, and keeps checking it at the same time interval the particle will appear to never decay, because each time the particle is observed, the probability is reset.
This indicates that observation has an effect on a measurement outcome, and this outcome is relative to the way in which it was measured. This Quantum Zeno Effect denies the existence of a machinistic universe in the Newtonian sense and replaces it with a more subtle, and much more complex and counter-intuitive paradigm.
Other weird quantum effects are equally counter-intuitive, and by rewiring our understanding to accept these weird effects, we might be able to change our world view, and expand creativity while reducing homocentric biases.
7/17/15, 6:52 PM