Beauty and Science, part 1

July 23rd, 2010

Photo credit: Need A Haircut via Creative Commons License through Flickr. The photographer does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in this article.

Photo credit: Need A Haircut via Creative Commons License through Flickr. The photographer does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in this article.

In the current economic crisis, financial pressure has forced arts organizations to increasingly to reduce budgets, lay off workers, and in the most extreme and appalling situations, sell off their collections to the few titans of industry with no financial woes. I thought I would use this entry as an opportunity to address those that don’t see the arts as relevant as other industries and are fine to see famed institutions collapse is this depressed climate. I also thought one way to do this would be to revisit the relationship between art and science, a field that receives far less criticism. Although in The Great Improbability, author David Sayre’s focuses specifically on entropy and beauty, this generalist entry will have to suffice as a starting point.

Some of you might be familiar with Keats’s famous line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Although scholars interpret the ending of Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” in different ways, I read this and feel Keats imparting the important lesson that beauty is truth, and that is all we, as humans, need to know. But, having been involved with The Great Improbability project that deals with concepts in science and beauty. I find Keats’s phrase can also help illuminate a philosophical link between the two fields. From the arts: beauty is truth, and from the sciences: the field as a search for truth. Therefore, is the search for truth a search for beauty? In other words, is science a search for beauty?

I am not saying that science and beauty are one and the same, but their relationship is both inseparable and necessary for the forwarding of each field. As Rober Eskridge stated in his lecture Exploration and the Cosmos: The Consilience of Science and Art, “There has long been a connection between art and science, one that can be traced back to the Egyptian pyramids. History proves that the two disciplines cannot exist without each other, enduring in constantly changing and evolving relationships.”

To many, Eskridge’s claim might be difficult to accept, and they would not be alone. Author David Sayre even states this very point in The Great Improbability: “Beauty is the hardest thing for us rationalize (p. 195).” Likewise, in his essay Art and Entropy: an Essay on Order and Disorder, Rudolph Arnheim writes the, “prospect of applying information theory to the arts and thereby reducing aesthetic form to quantitative measurement has remained largely unrewarding.” I would add the caveat of “until now”.

Sayre states that just like you don’t have to be an expert in quantum theory to appreciate the elegance, significance, or power of Einstein’s theories, “You don’t have to retrace Monet’s brushstrokes or analyze Beethoven’s composition or reconstruct a blossom or describe a child’s laugh or a mocking bird’s song to experience its beauty” (196).

The beauty in science or in art does not have to be expressed in order to be experienced. In The Great Improbability, we see how art and science are not only related, but strive towards the same goal: to be human and to connect. In both instances, the experiences provided by both fields can help reduce ignorance, disorder, or confusion, all of which are at the heart of “entropy” (and my next blog entry). Some closing words, “If we think of ‘beauty’ as a mystery out of reach, we can’t see that it’s a window on life, a way to order and freedom, a way to communicate universally, a way to being whole” (197).

Do you feel the arts and sciences relate? Do you think one is more important the another? You can comment here or on Facebook here.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Entropy | No Comments »

Some more on diversity…

June 16th, 2010

Author David Sayre wrote:

“A prism breaks the sunlight into its constituent colors by discrimination among wavelengths. Thus also are the people of Earth divided. Yet the breaking is illusion: light is one, and so is life. The parts are beautiful, and individuality expresses freedom; but the boundaries in the spectrum are indistinct. Nature offers us no sharp distinctions, but insists upon continuity and connection.

Light forgives the prism and remains whole. The rainbow reminds us that life forgives our divisions and grants us each other”

In a recent Pew study, researchers found the percentage of interracial or inter-ethnic marriages is at a record high both in numbers and in support in the United States. Perhaps we are beginning to realize this very truth and break down antiquated boundaries, embracing that we are of the same light.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Entropy | No Comments »

DIVERSITY OF VIEWPOINT (in perception and civilization)

June 2nd, 2010

The diversity among observers is an essential element of perception, of seeing clearly.

We know that the more points of view we can focus on any target, the more clearly we can describe it. That is why animals evolved binary vision and binaural hearing. It is why a “phased array” of multiple antennas can resolve smaller images at greater distances. This is a general principle. A group of observers—especially if their experiences and training are diverse—perceives more than any of them alone, provided they are truthful in sharing their observations. The array of antennas must be combined in phase, the eyes and ears must work together, the observers must collaborate.

Information theory establishes “entropy” as the measure of information content in any unknown message or process; that is, the measure of our ignorance before the message is received or the process understood. Entropy also measures the unavailable energy in any system, its disorganization or degree of disintegration. (See the article on “Entropy,” especially its definition in information theory.) The local reduction of entropy—of ignorance and decay—is of course the goal of learning and organization.

The diverse cells in our bodies that coordinate their contributions to the whole, the team or the orchestra members who play their parts in synchrony, are essential to living, to success, to beauty. If all these parts were undifferentiated, we would die.

The collaboration of diverse elements is the basis of communicating, of learning and building, of healing. It makes love and beauty. We would recognize those elements of intelligent life anywhere in the universe. They are those that reduce entropy of both the thermodynamic and information kind, thus holding off disintegration and ignorance in their spheres. Their advance is the essence of our qualitative “post-Darwinian” evolution. Diversity is thus essential to our progress as a people.

-David Sayre

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Entropy | 1 Comment »

Understanding the effects of technology on human relationships

May 24th, 2010

In previous posts, the theme of technology has come up frequently. When discussing SETI, the use of technology is relegated to the role of contacting something or someone beyond ourselves. In discussing the future of electronic sensors and a universal point system, Jesse Schell talked about how technology might affect our behavior. I argued that human relationships might serve as a way to prevent complete reliance on technologically impacted behavior. The question then arises, how does technology affect our relationships to each other? On the one hand, social media has allowed people to stay in touch with those they might never have followed up with as well those who they might never have met. On the other hand, this interaction is done through a digital interface, often in blips of communication. How are we to understand these new abilities?

In an interesting discussion on the subject, the people of GOOD have generated a discussion based on that very subject.

http://www.good.is/post/good-asks-how-does-technology-affect-human-relationships/

This type of discussion is obviously incredibly poignant in our given moment. However, it proposes an interesting hitch into the discussion of “value” of these new communicative abilities. Is all this new information and these new ways of communicating advantageous or gainful, or is it just more “noise” or, as it is discussed in The Great Improbability, a rise in entropy and the science of communication in general? Not surprisingly, in addition to all the opinions on this thread there are numerous studies and scientific areas of research that address this specific issue. Much of this debate centers on an existing field of study, namely entropy. Although entropy is a large and complex science, at its simplest level, it is the measurement of the level of disorganization in any given system. In communication and information theory, entropy measures the expected value (the information) contained in a message.

Here is what author David Sayre, someone who has published in this field, has to say:

“I have to start as a nerd: We have to be a bit careful about definitions. Entropy in information theory measures the content of a message, before it is received. The more chaotic, the more noisy, the wider its bandwidth, the greater its information content. Perhaps we don’t consider all that noise useful, but it does contain information. Information theory makes no judgment about meaning or utility; it’s just mathematics. A fully organized, redundant, narrow, peaceful message contains very little information — there’s no surprise, nothing to learn. And once the message is received, its entropy collapses to zero: nothing more to learn. So it isn’t technically correct to equate entropy to the reduction of disorder; rather entropy measures the amount of disorder.

Having got that out of the way, I would say that all the social media increase the total entropy. That’s not bad, it’s just a statement of fact. Entropy is not “conserved” in our universe the way matter/energy is conserved: it keeps increasing. We can’t create or destroy energy, we can only change its form; but we can increase entropy by adding to noise or heat.

If I learn something or teach or write a book or heal or build or make a painting, I reduce entropy locally by reducing confusion; however, this is always accompanied by a global increase in entropy in the form of the heat or waste or scrap that is inevitably shed in the process.

Adding a message on Twitter increases the total entropy (information content) on Twitter, which may be a good thing. When the message is read and understood, especially if it is insightful, entropy is reduced among the readers because their ignorance is reduced. But on a global scale, entropy has to increase because of the effort expended to post and read etc. (That’s the penalty of the equivalence of informational to thermodynamic entropy.)”

Understanding how the information generated by new forms of social media and other technologies is functioning is helpful in grasping how technology affects our relationships. However it does not address all the other aspects that this debate generates. For example: What actually constitutes human relations? Is a relationship founded on simply knowing facts like someone’s favorite movie, where they went to school, and what they look like? Or does it require shared experience? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Entropy | No Comments »

Mechanization of the Mind

May 11th, 2010

In my previous entry, I looked the necessity of people connecting to continue to evolve qualitatively as well as quantitatively, to quote David Sayre “to survive much further [humans] will have to embrace more collaboration than competition. That is the post-Darwinian, qualitative evolutionary path.” However, throughout this process lies several underlying assumptions about “being human” and what that entails, such as sharing some elemental components such as feelings, emotions, morals and so on. However, in this recent NPR story (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125304448), scientists argued for a reduced gap between the mind, the subjective human element, and the brain, its mechanical underpinnings. By using transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, to temporarily decrease activity in an area of the brain called the right temporoparietal junction, the scientists observed that when presented with certain situations, adult subjects returned to a morality level of a three or four year old child.

A Harvard Psychologist, Joshua Greene, believed this result indicated that morality, often considered an abstract and subjective human principle, may in fact just be the result of a neurologically mechanical process, and concludes, “If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul.” In other words, if morality is just a mechanical process, so might be love, happiness, etc. A very bleak outlook.

In response to this story, Author David Sayre had the following to say:

“I’ve seen this and similar research. Not at all surprising. You can produce the same result with alcohol. This got more press than most because people are more interested in “magnetic” phenomona. But I can produce the same result with electrical, chemical, mechanical, and even psychological interventions.

Moreover, our moral judgments change with time, illness, intoxication, education, fatigue, and age as well — and simply with the mood we’re in. The brain is an organic part of the human body, evolving over eons and still evolving. We can’t expect any one of us to be constant under all conditions, and too often we revert to “animal” or childish decisions, whether under external duress or not. We’ll some day make robots and program all their emotions and reactions.

So each of us strives to be faithful “in all seasons,” but none of us can look back and see admirable behavior in every event.

The constant is our ability to make commitments to do our best in whatever situation we encounter, under whatever external influence. And we have the shared capacity to “become” as a people, to get better; and our inclusion –however flawed and inconstant–in the Whole of Intelligence.”

There is another side to this argument that was not addressed directly by either Sayre or Greene: that of the external influence. If either Greene or Sayre is correct, how the neurological or cognitive pathways are formed is most likely influenced by some external input. But as technology advances, the future of this “nurture” component of our development, especially in this Post-Darwinian age, comes into question. For example, see:

http://quietbabylon.com/2010/points-for-everything/

In this presentation, Jesse Schell uses the popularity and financial success of simple online gaming to predict a somewhat plausible if not a little scary future. These games run on the premise of amassing points through actions and surprisingly, people started paying lots of money to get more points. Schell goes on to argue (and for this I recommend watching the video as he does it much more in depth than I will) that with the availability of cheap new technology, everything we do in life, from the cereal we eat, to how long we brush our teeth, to the tattoos we have could all contribute to a universal point system. And, like the popularity of the online games that shocked the gaming world (more people play Farmville than have twitter accounts), this too could become very popular. QuietBabylon author Tim Maly makes some very good comments and critiques of this presentation at the end of his blog, which I encourage you to read. But, as far as evolution goes, how would a completely mechanized system of instruction affect how we develop, especially with regard to morals? How would his vision of a future completely, one integrated with a technology that regulates (and he admits perhaps corrupts) every action in the exact same way, effect how we develop as individuals?

However, within this hypothetical and completely mechanized environment, the saving grace is going to again be interaction. To refer back to my first entry about the Bridgewater State Hospital, Author Sayre points to how prisoners who volunteered there felt that government institutions had stripped them of their identity and individuality, and by this interaction with others, the were able to regain who they are.

These issues are addressed in The Great Improbability at great length and in great detail. I think the characters of Ami, David and Thomas Brigham all use the redemptive power of human-to-human interaction.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Entropy | No Comments »

Stephen Hawking: Out of place

May 6th, 2010

Since its inception in the 1990s, the SETI Project has become a common feature throughout many households, perhaps due in large part to the SETI@home, a program that connects the computers of thousands of users to help analyze radio signals searching for extra terrestrial intelligence. Despite its longevity, there has been a recent resurgence in its purpose as famed Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking recently made some comments regarding the search for intelligent life, perhaps most notably:

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

On account of his reputation, Hawking’s comments have generated a sizable buzz surrounding the question of alternate intelligent life forms, there relationship to us, and what we should be doing, if anything, to contact them (For an interesting discussion, look here

In his writings on intelligent life, Author David Sayre has made his own conclusions, and had this to say about Hawking’s remarks:

The news headlines on Hawking’s interview encourage the wrong conclusion, for two reasons: (1) they are taken out of context, as usual, by a sound-bite-fed media e.g. “Don’t talk to aliens, Hawking says” (For a more complete set of comments, click here; and (2) they assume Hawking is an expert on the evolution of life, which is not his field. Listen to a real expert on life, like Lewis Thomas for example. Here is something I wrote (“Something There Is,” pp. 69-70) about one of his beautiful essays:

Are we “becoming,” in fact, as a people, as our strength and understanding grow? How might we respond, for example, should alien beings invade the earth? The very words betray our orientation: what is alien? what is an invasion? Could we open ourselves to new possibilities? Could it be that we have no evidence of other life because we are not yet mature enough to perceive and accept it? Lewis Thomas, reflecting on the quarantine that astronauts undergo upon returning to earth, observes that many of our illnesses result not from an attack by our guests but from the inhospitality of their host; so it may be of the illness of our society:

“If there should be life on the moon, we must begin by fearing it. We must guard against it, lest we catch something.

It might be a microbe, a strand of lost nucleic acid, a molecule of enzyme, or a nameless hairless little being with sharp gray eyes. Whatever, once we have imagined it, foreign and therefore hostile, it is not to be petted. It must be locked up. I imagine the debate would turn on how best to kill it.

… It says something about our century, our attitude toward life, our obsession with disease and death, our human chauvinism.

There are pieces of evidence that we have had it the wrong way round. Most of the associations between the living things we know about are essentially cooperative ones, symbiotic in one degree or another; when they have the look of adversaries, it is usually a standoff relation, with one party issuing signals, warnings, flagging the other off. It takes long intimacy, long and familiar interliving, before one kind of creature can cause illness in another….We do not have solitary beings. Every creature is, in some sense, connected to and dependent on the rest. [4]”

Thomas’s insight reminds us that the process of connecting is necessarily reciprocal: I must be understood myself, by those with whom I would connect. To be understood, I must be truthful. I must show my real self. Thus I need self-understanding to be in good connection with others: first to learn what it is I seek, and second to show what it is they seek. The shared enterprise – the common undertaking, which can do so much more than individual efforts – requires mutual understanding to work. Truth is its fuel and lubricant.

We continuously receive signals from a very short range. At our most primitive, they are all we comprehend and we respond only to them. Their volume is increased by pain of all sorts. As we advance, signals from a greater distance may be heard. Those who raised the ground on which we stand bought us the freedom to listen. We are better receivers together than apart. Like a phased-array antenna, a whole people can resolve a smaller signal at a greater distance, and presents a wider aperture to its message. We listen with different ears, from different places, perceptive at different moments, tuned to different resonances. When we combine our hearings, a finer grain of truth may be discerned and a farther horizon scanned. That is the genius of diversity: a heterogeneous community is a healthy community, combining a broader range of perception and experience, thus enhancing access to more of reality.

In other words, our great hope is that this People will continue to evolve qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Homo Sapiens has a poor record of enlightened self-interest, but to survive much further it will have to embrace more collaboration than competition. That is the post-Darwinian, qualitative evolutionary path. I believe no species that does not follow it would survive long enough to be able to get very far off their planet for very long. “Relation is the end toward which we strive. Our means to this end would be the prophecy of Entropy.”

I’d be very curious to here what other people have to say on this issue. For more on Sayre’s thoughts on SETI, the search and meaning of Intelligent life, and Entropy, I recommend reading his chapter “Hawikkuh” in his latest work, The Great Improbability. Here is an appropriate excerpt:

“The sudden change in what constitutes evolutionary fitness can be traced roughly to the middle of the nineteenth century, a generation after the Pollards, a century after Darwin’s papers. It is a good thing. Our healing power and our burst of communicative capability have probably weakened our gene pool, but they have bought us the time and comfort to work on our qualitative growth. These great inventions in communicating and traveling and healing have a common quality: They are integrative. In our nerd language, they reduce entropy. They let us be closer.

We’d better get to it, however.

…

I remember trying to train myself to look at faces. This was hard for me. Growing up, I had learned to defend my private space: When confronted by a new person or a nonmechanical question, I looked down or to the side, not focusing. I wriggled my toes inside my shoes, counting the wriggles–one and two and three–a ritual and a comfort, learned as a small boy, a quiet place, a sanctuary. Sometimes people would shake me–Look at me!–but that of course made it worse. Eventually I realized that only I could force myself out of the sanctuary. Ami gave me the peace I needed. Slowly I learned to look up, to emerge, to engage.

Now I realize the world is just like that, struggling to look up, its mechanics springing way ahead of its relations. This people we belong to, this Homo sapiens, so recently crawled out of the mud, still looks down and wriggles its toes. It has become a powerful builder and defender but lags far behind in connection. When we wrote our grant application to the NSF, we recognized the world’s need and our own, but we hadn’t really connected them. My childish scribble is actually a plot of human development. Its widening gap is the threat to our being. Ami and I need relation to be real. The world needs relation to survive.

Relation is the end toward which we strive. Our means to this end would be the prophecy of Entropy.”

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Entropy | 1 Comment »

Where truth and fiction meet…

April 8th, 2010

Although throughout the novel The Great Improbability author David Sayre has David, Ami and us as readers looking into space for answers to what it means to exist as intelligent life, much of the story is actually derived from the incredible life of the author himself. One point of particular interest is one of the subplots that connects inmates with the severely handicapped of the mental ward at the Bridgewater State hospital

In an interview Sayre reveals the truth about how this story of the program came to be.

When I had five little children, we lived a mile from a large maximum-security prison. I had been asked to be president of the local Council of Churches, and was looking for an inspiring project they might sponsor. I asked the Chaplain and a mental health counselor if I could bring in volunteers to their weekly Discussion Group. Very few men and no women had ever been “inside.” We quickly learned that there was no real preparation for those being released, and a high recidivism rate, so we set up a series of activities and recruited volunteers. The discussion groups turned into “shared leadership” exercises, then gradually more practical interventions. I raised various foundation and U.S. Justice Department grants to support classrooms, preparing for the GED, a laboratory for training electronic technicians and welders, and pre-release job interviews.

After a year or two, I decided to work full-time on the growing programs, and set up a nonprofit company to focus on post-release as well as inside projects. We hired psychologists, social workers, and young graduates eager to make a difference. We also hired ex-cons, who proved to be excellent counselors of young people in trouble. Then we started “spinning off” other companies to specialize in services that ex-cons could be trained to deliver: lead paint removal, repairing the State’s vehicle fleet, cleaning services, a prison art project with the Museum of Fine Arts, etc. ….

Probably the best successes were a pre-trial diversion program for first-offenders, in which we got judges to “release without a finding” the accused into our care, and a pre-release program at the state institution for severely retarded adults, where our inmates got the residents cleaned up and outside for the first time since their early commitment. We went on to job creation and neighborhood economic development and eventually energy conservation companies, where society’s rejects could go through a “supported work” experience and turn into taxpayers.

Thus from these simple human interactions, tremendous growth occurred. People once rejected by society and seemingly destined to fall into chaos, were able to pull themselves out of their downward trajectory. Although the necessity of relationships appears as one of the key themes within the author’s literature and a common element of how we exist now that evolution is beyond the reach of Darwin’s theories, these programs also depict entropy at work. Sayre told me:

We made a lot of mistakes and suffered a lot of failures. We were reprimanded for bringing certain tools into our prison training rooms. Some of our graduates stole tools, one burned down a building we were supposed to clean, a lot got back into alcohol and drugs. But I have never felt safer than during my time with our clients.

Sayre later wrote me in an email that “A key lesson was the nature of identity. It is stripped away in our old institutions, and has to be rebuilt gradually. We found that it isn’t based on credentials or appearance or inheritance, but on commitment, transparency, and relation. These can be nurtured and learned.”

Therefore Sayre’s work with the inmate directly challenges this form of identity crisis. It is only fitting, that in his epilogue he writes: “The gift of the Whole to each are truth and life, with all their vast potential. What each makes of that potential is of course the reciprocal gift we can make to the Whole. In such a gift… we participate in the ‘creative advance of the world.” (p. 363).

What about your -as readers- experiences with identity? Have you dealt with people or situations where you felt you had to rebuild your identity, after an accident, a traumatic event, or involvement with a government agency? What did it feel like to lose it? Or to get it back? Who were the people that helped you and how? We welcome all comments as Sayre points out, communication is essential to our lives.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Entropy | No Comments »

Welcome!

December 3rd, 2009

We welcome your comments and inquiries regarding The Great Improbability book.

Posted in Entropy, Illustrations | No Comments »