Evolving Systems: Home Page

I don't know if this could be a future focus for our project (can you say more what that might look like??), but I do think that we considered the notion that our lives "exceed the moment, however wrecking it is" when we tried, last fall, to think with Arlo about the implications of deep time:  "On this time scale, nothing I do matters." In a tectonic, or even an evolutionary, framework, "nothing I do has an effect." Alternatively, might such an understanding give us a distanced perspective, make us less angry, more indifferent to petty human concerns, even bring us to ecstasy?"

I've been working w/ these ideas lately in the class on evolving systems that Paul and I are co-teaching for first-semester students, who offer both responses: feeling alternatively diminished and enlarged by a sense of the world beyond --way, way, WAY beyond!--themselves.

I appreciate Anne's posting up that link to the article on "emergent gravity". As Grobstein knows, and others in the group may have gathered, I am very interested in physics -- although I know nothing about it. Anyway, the article on gravity was quite interesting. It fits with some similar ideas that have been floating around for a while, i.e., that things like gravity, time, even inertia, are (what I call) "epiphenomena" of some much more fundamental physical properties or structures. It's something I am intrigued by because it shows that everything we thought was "final" or "fundamental" may not be -- we are as arrogant as the late 19th-century physicists who felt that they had discovered most of what there was to discover. In fact, they were only looking at the surface. As we are, too, it seems... My own belief is more complicated (and it is no more than a belief, since I am not a physicist, or, I would say, even an intellectual!): I think that the physical phenomena we observe are epiphenomena of our own consciousness, without any actual existence at all in the sense that we typically talk about it...

Anne, a very interesting post on the talk. I had a somewhat different reaction. I thought that the way she highlighted some similarities between art and science helped bring out how both are part of the overall endeavor of expanding and creating human understanding. As she said in response to the student’s comment you mention, I don’t think she meant to say that art is good because it is like science. Rather, I think what she is saying is that art and science have some similarities which help highlight how understanding in a more general way functions. I doubt she thinks of either art or science as in any way privileged, or that they are not different in many ways. This also doesn’t mean that she thinks that there is one way some uber thing called understanding works. Understanding can be taken as getting things a little less wrong.

You say that “works of art actually seek not to align themselves with what has been done, but rather to diverge from past works, to be unique, and original.” This seems right to me. But I don’t think there is a difference here with science. If a scientist is working within a paradigm, does that mean that she accepts the basic scientific theory (past works) and is not trying to be unique or original? Certainly a scientist could be like that, just as an artist could be broadly conforming to a paradigm. But it doesn’t mean that the scientist has to be like that. Rather, the scientist could be seeking to be unique and original as well and to rethink fundamental assumptions. I think to deny this is to hold too strongly to the distinction between normal science and revolutionary science. I would say that there is no sharp distinction between the two, and that good science, like good thinking, is trying not just to discover new facts but new modes of understanding. Here I think there is quite a bit of convergence between Elgin’s view and Paul’s (and perhaps yours, as I understand it so far from discussions).

The same point can also be put this way. Does every work of art seek to not align itself with what has gone on before? Could any work of art do that? I would be suspicious of the master genius creation from nothing picture of an artist’s motivation or working process. And I would be also doubtful of the idea that an artist necessarily seeks to be different from everyone. How then could we make sense of the miniature artists in the Islamic tradition who sought to recapture the definitive depiction mastered by the past artists? Or even of movements such as impressionism or realism or cubism, etc? True, an artist might never be really satisfied long enough with even her own creation such that she would fully identify with some framework. Perhaps good artists keep transcending or trying to transcend their own creations. But here too I see no difference from good scientists.

I think “the arts function cognitively” is similar to “science is a story”. I take it that in the latter “story” is being used more broadly than we normally use it. One might say that science isn’t a story because it doesn’t characters, it is objective, it builds on the past, etc. But that doesn’t take away from the main point of the claim, which might be that science is perspectival just as all understanding is perspectival, and that science is not a locus of universal truths simply being handed over. Similarly, I think Elgin is using “cognitive” and “understanding” in a broad sense to mean human self-conceptualizations which are constantly being amended and transformed and created anew, all against a background which is taken for granted at certain moments but might be called into question at other moments. Understanding here is not the brute depiction of facts, but the general human encounter with the world in an attempt to make sense of it.

This point especially resonated with me in terms of the Jane Austen example and the idea that a novel can be seen as a thought experiment. Austen said, “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” What does this mean? Elgin’s interpretation is that this gives the author enough diversity to play with without making it unmanageable. It helps bring out how ten or fifteen people interact with each other in five or ten contexts, and to thereby see how people with certain backgrounds will interact with other people with other backgrounds in certain contexts. It is a way of isolating things so as to understand them a little better. In this way, it is similar to how one might isolate some cells to understand their interactions. But there is more. The novelist isn’t simply bringing out these situations to just depict facts. Often the novelist (and the really good artists) put the thought experiment together in such a way that it enables the audience to see certain patterns in the artistic work, patterns which the audience isn’t normally attuned to and which through the reading they can thereby see in the world itself.

The Don Quixote example was an excellent example of this. Cervantes created in the story an archetype which we could understand and identify with given the context of the story. But the archetype is so powerful for us that we then take that archetype out of the context of the story, and start using it to make sense of the world around us; we start seeing some people as quixotic. The novel has thereby enhanced our perceptions of the world. The same it seems to me is true of Hamlet, Lear, the Godfather, Beethoven’s fifth symphony, one's favorite songs and many other works of art. In these cases the characters or the experiences LEAP OUT, as it were, out of the context of the novel or the movie or music and we carry it around with us in categorizing and making sense of the people and events around us. It is in this broad sense of cognitive that arts are cognitive. They can function like lenses through which we categorize and make sense of the world. And in this they are no different from other categories we might pick up in science textbooks, philosophy essays or through learning new languages.

Re: the objectivity/subjectivity spectrum, is it possible that having a conversation with the widest possible number of people isn't always a primary standard?  Is it equally possible that people could develop an ability to speak in chords, if you will, that combine subjective sources with more transpersonal linkages of ideas?  To me, this circles back to the question of specificity/uniqueness in interpersonal reciprocity.  I guess I'm just wondering if, as bodies in the body of the world, it makes more sense for us to double our voices towards both the particular and the general.  Could this be more inclusive?  More fostering of trust and common ground in which to be joyfully different?

Grobstein's discussion of technology's evolving is very interesting to me, trained in the history and philosophy of science and technology. Certainly, technology is often simply the recombination of existing elements -- in fact, the same can be said for much of visual art, and musical composition, too, for that matter. As for progress being the result of humans "looking for a means to an end that they have already defined", that seems a bit too simple to me. Often the technology may be designed for a certain end but yields quite different ends -- no one suspected that the Victrola would re-shape our whole approach to music, for example. Rarely is an end well-defined: I doubt that Edison devised the light bulb as a direct solution to a problem -- people had lived with gas-lighting for quite a while, and probably could have done so for another hundred years. Even now, there are problems that have direct solutions, but technologies have not appeared to address them. Technological innovation is a much more chaotic process than most people realize, and its driven mostly by irrational factors: desire for profit, personal egos, the vagaries of the market, and so on. Why does the Windows system -- a dreadful bit of backwards technology -- continue to thrive? Primarily because of its hold on the market, NOT because it provides an optimal solution to the need for personal computing (a need which was fabricated out of thin air anyway!).

Now, onto a totally different subject -- problems in emergence. In mind, Grobstein and I are still locked in battle: I don't see how order and pattern and so on can emerge from nothing. I know that's simplifying Grobstein's positions, but still... The other day, I taught some of the ideas of Empedocles and Anaxagoras to my class. The former took the four Greek material causes (the four elements) and added two efficient causes. The latter put forward the idea of nous ("Mind") as the efficient cause. In both cases, these thinkers were not content with the idea that material itself could lead to order. That is, they didn't believe that systems could spontaneously arise and be self-organizing. They posited outside organizing forces that took matter and shaped it.

This seems to be a bit lame (to use philosophical jargon) to me, of course, and leads to the question of where those efficient causes are from -- an eternal regression. But one is interesting is that philosophically, we are all still stuck in this frame of thinking. We think that there is either some fundamental organizing principle "behind" all matter (the "God equation", Wolfram's algorithms, etc.), or that matter arises with all its properties ready to go, allowing it to combine, interact, etc., giving rise to complex systems. Neither solution works for me. I am tending to think now that either, as Grobstein knows from our conversations, we give rise to ourselves (more on that another time), or that (a topic for our group's discussion perhaps??) the whole concept of "something emerging" is flawed. Perhaps the idea of "process" is wrong!

 First glances:

1. Culture (and everything else, if there is anything that isn't "culture" has a relationship to the past, but it surely isn't always "building on". Sometimes it is rewriting, sometimes desecrating, sometimes ignoring, sometimes adoring.

2. The past has no motive and I wonder that we would ascribe it one. The past has no desire. WE may feel anxious about our relationship to the past and may attempt to assuage our inevitable transfer to the dustbin of history by trying to control/prevent the future.

3. Each of us will always be free in every moment but, I note in middle age, it is true that the number of moments in which one can exercise one's freedom does seem to dwindle.

4. What if "free" and "societies" can't really co-exist? If one of these terms is always encroaching on the other then...a game of who gets to hide the ashes is really just taking attention from an even more basic, dynamic contradiction.... Looking forward to the afternoon.