DISCLAIMER:
This is not a transcript of an actual conversation. This dialogue is one of a series composed from conversations I have had with people through the course of this research. It represents my reading of what was said, and also reflects questions I pose to myself, playing the devil’s advocate. Writing these dialogues has helped me think through some issues raised by skeptics of my work. This has been helpful to the progress of the project, and to those involved I am most grateful.
See also (in Comments): McLuhan, Poe, Monkey body image research
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Me:
What is the difference between love and bliss?
She:
One has four letters, the other has five.
Me:
No, I mean are they they same feeling?
She:
How would we know?
What you feel and what I feel
are different because we are different.
It’s impossible to translate feelings
into words.
Me:
But still we try.
How does connectivity feel?
Or can we simply say it’s a fact
that every thing’s connected?
Then there would be no poetry.
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Camille Flammarion, the astronomer…belonged to that secret guild, the collectors of coincidences. Some addicts keep personal logs enriched by newspaper cuttings to prove their point that coincidences ‘have a meaning’; others regard collecting as a vice in which they indulge with guilty knowledge of sinning against the laws of rationality. Kammerer was a collector belonging to the first category; so was C.G. Jung. ‘I have often come up against the phenomena in question’, he wrote, ‘and could convince myself how much these inner experiences meant to my patient. In most cases they were things people do not talk about for fear of exposing themselves to thoughtless ridicule. I was amazed to see how many people have had experiences of this kind and how carefully the secret was guarded.’
The title that Kammerer chose for his book, Dea Gesetz der Serie, is in German almost a cliché – the equivalent of ‘it never rains but it pours’. He defines his key concept as follows: ‘A Series manifests itself as a lawful recurrence of the same or similar things and events – a recurrence, or clustering, in time or space whereby the individual members in the sequence – as far as can be assertained by carefull analysis – are not connected by the same active cause…
…this first attempt at a systematic classification of a-causal serial events may perhaps at some future date find unexpected applications.
Reference: Appendix #1 from the book: ‘The Case of the Midwife Toad’
of the late Arthur Koestler – 1971 (Vintage books): The Law of Seriality, Rick wellens, Editor
Jung dubbed Kammerer’s concept ‘synchronicity’.
Network science has evolved.
I am in Melbourne for the next week, staying with my old friend JK.
Last night we watched the documentary, How Kevin Bacon cured cancer, about network science.
Based on the idea of six degrees of separation existing between all people, network science has itself evolved from a network of people – scientists who had been working independently on the same problem: Do patterns exist in network systems?
Points in network systems include: airports connecting flights of planes, people transmitting diseases, cells transmitting diseases in bodies and plants, military personnel conveying information, atoms connecting with other atoms we have introduced into the environment that are causing global warming, you and I as we send messages to each other via the Internet.
Network scientists discovered that the passage of data and matter between network points is not random. Hubs have been identified in every network system – a few points through which data and material are more frequently and voluminously passed than through any other point. As the strongest points within any system, data or material passing through just one hub is transmitted rapidly to every other point in the system. Conversely, if a hub is destroyed, the whole system can collapse.
Network scientists can map systems to predict future scenarios.
JK observed the similarities between network science, chaos theory and the uncertainly principle. remarking how different these are from early science, which looked more at static, material things, rather than interconnecting systems.
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Arriving this morning at the Toorak Op shop, we were able to identify this as a Hub where material is transmitted (in the form of second hand clothes) from big spenders to small spenders.
We also participated in a meeting that demonstrated the 6 degree principle, through a serendipitous meeting with Melbourne philosopher, Rob Siedle. JK is a member of Rob’s philosophy club. I have read and am impressed by Rob’s book, “Philosophy you can use”, but we had not met.
When JK introduced me to Rob as a research student, he shook my hand, and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was exploring ways that animation could be used to connect objective observations of Antarctica with subjective responses to it. He said simply “We only see the world one way, according to how we are constituted”.
Pointing to a tree on the other side of the road, he remarked on its slender form. He said that what we observe is not identical to the tree we are observing. It has its own existence beyond our experience of it.
This would be so of everything in the material world.
Rob mentioned some work relating to our discussion that has been done by Stephen Hawkins. But we had to move on and go Op-shopping, and Rob had to get going too. Besides, standing by the side of a narrow road, we were obstructing the flow of Toorak’s traffic network.
Desire and natural classification, I find on Google, is the title of a Hawkins book that could describe the points we were discussing.
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Is even talking about the objective observation possible?
JK and I moved on and suggested we look at what Rob said about Derrida. We find:
In my animations, I am aiming to connect pragmatic descriptions of Antarctica with aesthetic responses made by some from their experience.
I am drawing connections between different ways of knowing the world, reason and sensory experience.
Derrida’s most famous idea is that the world is itself a text, a linguistic construction.
This reminds me of the Catholic idea, of the world as the Word of God.
Marshall McLuhan talked about this in the documentary, McLuhan’s wake (2002).
Pantheistic philosophy proposes God is everywhere and every thing, that the natural world is itself an expression of God inspired the Romantic arts towards the notion of the the Sublime.
Sublimely is how early European explorers experienced Antarctica.
Today we know about Antarctica in many ways, through the eyes of those who go there, who see what they look for through their different lenses: scientists and their support personnel, artists and other tourists.
What we know about what they find is published in a range of texts, from the scientific journal to the picture post card.
We also transmit what is known in Antarctica via the Internet.
Whilst it is true that we can only see the world in one way, knowing how others perceive is important to understand conflicts of interest.
However, we would not function in the world if we could see from every one’s points of view simultaneously. There is only so much information one can deal with at a time.
As an extreme example, autistic people focus on doing one thing at a time because they perceive more through their senses than their minds can comfortably accommodate.
And for reasons of survival, we only attend to what we perceive to be our immediate needs. Our needs are driven by sex or aggression.
Developmental psychology explains how we each come to know the world in one way. Our way of knowing is determined by early experiences and training.
Part of achieving a sense of identity involves knowing what we value.
It is easy to be drawn into how others perceive the world if we lack confidence in our own values.
Mass media undermines the value of individuality by promoting conformity to fashions – fashions in how we think that determine how we consume.
Marshall McLuhan argued that electronic media numbs our minds from thinking. He also argued that it numbs our sense of connection with the natural world.
The world of nature is a natural network of which we are a part. We have wrapped around our bodies an electronic network.
A moving image from Edgar Allen Poe’s story, The Maelstrom, provides a potent metaphor in McLuhan’s book, The mechanical bride. In order to survive, we need to detach our selves from the situations that threaten us, and figure out how they work.
We need to understand that mass media is telling us to consume more and more, without care for our environment, and that this message is threatening our survival as a future species.
Are humans capable of thinking beyond our immediate needs?
In the documentary, McLuhan’s Wake, McLuhan argued that we have wrapped around our bodies an electronic network, and that this network separates us from our natural place in the networks of the natural world.
Recent experiments with monkeys suggest that humans can incorporate the tools we use into our body image – that the use of tools changes the electrical activity of neurons in our brains so that the tools we use are sensed as physical extensions to our bodies.
Atsuch Iriki, head of Symbolic Cognitive Development at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan is researching behaviour of macaque monkeys to investigate the emergence of human intelligence.
During training a macaque to use a rake, Iriki recorded
Ref. Article, Tools maketh the monkey
Laura Spinney
New Scientist
11 October 2008
p. 42-45
I consider the calligrapher, Vikki Quill.
Charging her brush with ink, she engages through all her senses with an idea. This could be ‘tree’, or ‘sun’, or ‘river’. As her tool, the brush extends her moving self image into that object, connecting her with the world beyond her self.
What about mass media?
There is too much sensory stimulation. We can be swept along, mindlessly, or switch off completely. Either way, we are not attending to the natural world.