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Archive for the ‘from the reading room’ Category

Order, chaos, or something inbetween

Posted in from the reading room, neuroscience, science, tagged on April 27, 2009| 1 Comment »

I came across an excellent article about epilepsy recently. There’s a common belief that a seizure is a kind of chaos of the brain. In fact, it’s the opposite. A seizure is where the complex patterns of electrical activity in the brain break down and are replaced temporarily with a single big co-ordinated pattern.

A normal brain is governed by chaos; neurons fire unpredictably, following laws no computer, let alone neurologist, could hope to understand, even if they can recognize it on an EEG. It is what we call consciousness, perhaps the most mathematically complex phenomenon in the universe. The definition of a seizure is the absence of chaos, supplanted by a simple rhythmic pattern that carries almost no information.

I was especially struck by that last phrase – “a simple rhythmic pattern that carries almost no information”. We have a strong tendency to think it’s the ordered, clear patterns which convey information, and that when there is no clear pattern, that there’s no clear information. Interesting how it’s the opposite!

I then came across this interesting study of the zone between order and chaos. There’s a place between order and chaos which scientists describe as “edge of chaos” (otherwise known as “far from equilibrium”). It’s a difficult place to hold, easily tipping into some form of order, or some form of chaos, but it’s found everywhere in complex systems.

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

Well it turns out this is exactly how the brain performs best – and here’s why –

Due to these characteristics, self-organized criticality is intuitively attractive as a model for brain functions such as perception and action, because it would allow us to switch quickly between mental states in order to respond to changing environmental conditions

If you are too structured, too ordered, too stuck in your ways, it’s harder to adapt when things change.

Interesting……complexity means it’s hard to predict what will happen, but this fine balance between order and chaos turns out to not only Nature’s favourite, it’s a great survival strategy. I suspect one of our biggest challenges in the world now is to learn how to be more adaptable and not so reliant on rigid structures and patterns.

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Mood and the culturally constructed self

Posted in from the reading room, psychology on April 19, 2009| 4 Comments »

Here’s an interesting piece of research.

Psychologists decided to study how mood affected a sense of identity. The first thing they did was split the volunteer subjects into two groups – European and Asian. They claim that Europeans culturally value individuality and independence most highly, whilst Asians rate community and harmony most highly. I can see where that comes from but it’s one of those rather sweeping generalisations, isn’t it? However, let’s assume they actually checked out to see if their particular volunteers rated those characteristics in those ways.

They conducted two studies. In one, each group had to first list to Mozart (described as uplifting) and then Rachmaninov (described as mood lowering) [yet another BIG generalisation, huh? Again, let’s presume they had some way of checking that out on their subjects]. In the second, they had to hold a pen in their mouth, first between their teeth (forcing a smile), and second between their lips (forcing a frown)!

The groups were then tested in a variety of ways to see how strongly they expressed either individualistic or group values.

What they found was interesting – the mood elevated groups expressed more highly divergent values, and the mood lowered groups reverted much more to cultural stereotype, as if good moods lead to a freedom to explore a wider sense of self, and low moods did the opposite.

As is often the case with these reports, I particularly liked the conclusion –

They conclude that the findings also suggest that the “self” may not be as robust and static as we like to believe and that the self may be dynamic, constructed again and again from one’s situation, heritage and mood.

It’s just that……are there still people around who think the “self” is a static entity?

Isn’t it now widely understood that the sense of self is an act of continuous creation?

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The Spirit Level. Alternative paths out of this mess we’re in

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, tagged , , , , on April 15, 2009| 2 Comments »

I don’t know about you but in the middle of this “world economic crisis” I’m just not hearing what seems like a decent plan. The main so-called solutions seem to be about how to get people borrowing and spending again. But weren’t borrowing and spending actually at the heart of the problem? Wasn’t it the system which encouraged the unregulated pursuit of self-interest which produced exactly the current crisis? But tired old slanging matches between free market capitalists and state control advocates just seem like debates about who should hold the reigns of power. It feels like something more radical and new is needed. I found myself saying, don’t we need a society more based on love, than on power? (and does that mean I’ve never quite left Woodstock, flower power, and the “LA habit” behind?)
I’ve long since been impressed with the work of Richard Wilkinson and been convinced about his findings on inequality so when he commented on one of my posts recommending his latest book, The Spirit Level (ISBN 978-1-846-14039-6), I knew a trip to Amazon was imminent.
Most of The Spirit Level, which he has written with Kate Pickett, re-presents the findings and the arguments I’ve read before. If you’ve never read any of his work, then is, for sure, the best starting place. However, where it got exciting for me was at chapter 14. In fact, the last three chapters of the book were the three which gripped me most strongly.
The authors quote Thomas Hobbes who believed that there was always a danger of conflict in human societies as people competed over scarce resources, so the purpose of strong government was to keep the peace. You’ll be familiar with the Hobbes’ phrase that without such government life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Against this view they propose

“As well as the potential for conflict, human beings have a unique potential to be each other’s best source of co-operation, learning, love and assistance of every kind. While there’s not much that ostriches or otters can do far an injured member of their own species, among humans there is.”

They describe the ‘ultimate game’ where volunteers are paired randomly, one is given a sum of money and told to propose to the other a share of the money. If the ‘responder’ accepts the proposal both keep the money. If they reject it, neither keeps the money. Interestingly, what happens is that the commonest offer is 50%. This is despite the fact it’s made clear that there will be only one ‘round’ of this game and the volunteers will never meet again. ‘Responders’ reject offers less than 20% on average, so punishing greedy proposers. This shows two interesting human characteristics – co-operation and “altruistic punishment” which reinforces co-operative behaviour.
Somewhat startlingly, but undeniably, they claim that human beings have lived for 90% of our history in egalitarian societies based on co-operative, hunter-gatherer groups, and only with the invention of agriculture did dominance hierarchies develop.
Their conclusion is to call for more “affiliative strategies”

At one extreme, dominance hierarchies are about self-advancement and status competition. Individuals have to be self-reliant and other people are encountered mainly as rivals for food and mates. At the other extreme is mutual interdependence and co-operation, in which each person’s security depends on the quality of their relationships with others, and a sense of self-worth comes less from status than from the contribution made to the well-being of others. Rather than the overt pursuit of material self-interest, affiliative strategies depend on mutuality, reciprocity and the capacity for empathy and emotional bonding.

I think this hits the nail on the head. I think we need some bright minds to come up with the  detailed methods, but I do believe what we need now is a radical realignment of our energies and our structures away from the mistaken belief that competitive self-interest producing dominance hierarchies are the best model for society, back to our roots, to the 90% of our history, to

“mutuality, reciprocity and the capacity for empathy and emotional bonding”

Wilkinson and Pickett make it clear that their research has compared existing developed nations, not current models against a hypothetical utopian one. If we can reduce our enormous economic inequalities, we can look forward to less violent, more healthy societies. If you’re not convinced about that, read this book.

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Supersizing the Mind. Andy Clark

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, philosophy, science on April 10, 2009| 6 Comments »

Where does your mind exist? There’s a longstanding “common sense” view that it’s inside your skull. But, it’s becoming apparent, that is far from the whole story. Yes, of course a lot of what we call the mind is related to brain activity and the brain is indeed inside the skull, but many researchers are discovering that just as the brain does not exist in isolation, neither can cognition, behaviour, a sense of self, for example, be understood solely on the basis of brain processes. If we want to understand the mind we have to consider the body in which the brain is embedded. Phrases such as “embedded mind” and “embodied mind” capture the essence of this view, and the more you think about it, the more your realise the importance of the incredible network of connections between the brain and the rest of the body.
I get frustrated by doctors and scientists who act as if we can divide a human being into two components – a body and a mind. Especially when they then use this arbitrary and false dichotomy to actually recommend treatments for people’s illnesses. The “embodied mind” concept binds the body and the mind inextricably. That makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve never met a mind without a body, and the only bodies I’ve met without minds have been in the mortuary.
However, some thinkers, scientists and researchers have pushed the idea of “embedded minds” a stage further. (the difference being that “embodied” is exactly what it says – “in the body”; whereas “embedded” argues for a broad contextual understanding which situates the mind in it’s multiple environments). Andy Clark, who promotes the concept of the “extended mind” is one of the writers who has taken this furthest.

I have three of Andy Clark’s books. The first one I read was “Being There” (ISBN 0-262-53156-9), which was given as a key reference in “Smart World” by Richard Ogle . That book deals with the concept of the “embodied mind”.

Might it not be more fruitful to think of brains as controllers for embodied activity? That small shift in perspective has large implications for how we construct a science of the mind. It demands, in fact, a sweeping reform in our whole way of thinking about intelligent behaviour. It requires us to abandon the idea (common since Descartes) of the mental as a realm distinct from the realm of the body; to abandon the idea of neat dividing lines between perception, cognition, and action.

Being There describes how this concept evolved and lays out the implications of the model. Six years later he published “Natural-born Cyborgs” (ISBN 0-19-517751-7). Here he challenges us to consider just how we, as human beings, extend ourselves outwith the bounds of our physical biology.

For what is special about human brains, and what best explains the distictinctive features of human intelligence, is precisely their ability to enter into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props and aids. This ability, however, does not depend on physical wire-and-implant mergers, so much as on our openness to information-processing mergers.

He tracks the evolution of these interactions

….from speech and counting, morphs first into written text and numerals, then into early printing, and on to the revolutions of moveable typefaces and the printing press, and most recently to the digital encodings that bring text, sound and image into a uniform and widely transmissible format…..they constitute, I want to say, a cascade of “mindware upgrades”
What matters most is our obsessive, endless weaving of biotechnological webs: the constant two-way traffic between biological wetware and tools, media, props, and technologies. The very best of these resources are not so much used as incorporated into the user herself. They have the power to transform our sense of self, of location, of embodiment, and our own mental capacities. They impact who, what and where we are. In embracing our hybrid natures, we give up the idea of the mind and the self as a kind of wafer-thin inner essence, the human person emerges as a shifting matrix of biological and nonbiological parts. The self, the mind, and the person are no more to be extracted from that complex matrix than the smile from the Cheshire Cat.

I particularly like this phrase from his concluding chapter in that book –

Our most significant technologies are those that allow our thoughts to go where no animal thoughts have gone before. It is our shape-shifter minds, not our space-roving bodies, that will most fully express our deep cyborg nature.

In his most recent book, “Supersizing the Mind” (ISBN 978-0-19-533321-3), he reproduces the original article which he wrote with David Chalmers, where they both laid out this concept of an “extended mind”. That article alone is worth reading, and, in fact, he recommends you read it first before reading the rest of the book. He juxtaposes the concept “BRAINBOUND” with “EXTENDED”.

According to BRAINBOUND, the (nonneural) body is just the sensor and effector system of the brain, and the rest of the world is just the arena in which adaptive problems get posed and in which the brain-body system must sense and act.
Maximally opposed to BRAINBOUND is a view according to which thinking and cognizing may (at times) depend directly and noninstrumentally upon the ongoing work of the body and/or the extraorganismic environment. Call this model EXTENDED. According to EXTENDED, the actual local operations that realise certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward, and feed-around loops; loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world. The local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct, are not all in the head. Cognition leaks out into body and world.

Why is all this important? Well, I think Andy Clark puts it well himself –

This matters because it drives home the degree to which environmental engineering is also self-engineering. In building our physical and social worlds, we build (or rather massively reconfigure) our minds and our capacities of thought and reason.

This is the why this way of thinking so exciting. How does our physical environment shape not just our patterns of thought, but our whole sense of personhood? How does it limit, or potentially expand, what we think we are and what we think we can be? Our social world is a fundamentally narrative one. So what are the stories we are told in our societies? And what stories do we choose to tell each other? How does this narratively-constructed world both shape our sense of personhood, and stimulate our imaginations to become something more than we are now?
If all this seems a little esoteric for you, read David Chalmers foreword to “Supersizing the Mind”. You’ll immediately grasp the everyday-ness of all this as he talks about how getting an iphone has changed his life, and, further, how the use of notebooks, and visual cues, can maintain independent living in patients with Alzheimer’s way beyond what would be possible were they to rely on the minds inside their skulls!

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Liv Ullman. Changing

Posted in books, from the reading room on April 7, 2009| 1 Comment »

In The Discoverer, Jan Kjaerstad mentions Liv Ullman’s “Changing”, and states that many people who read it changed their lives. Well, The Discoverer is a novel, so I wasn’t sure if such a book actually existed. A quick check on abebooks found that it did and I ordered up a copy for a few pounds. (Changing. Liv Ullman. ISBN 0297772856. Published back in 1977 and translated into English by Liv Ullman herself)

What an interesting book!

I really didn’t know anything about Liv Ullman before I read this book. I knew she was an actress and she’d starred in Ingmar Bergman movies but that was about it. This book is a kind of autobiography telling about certain parts of her life. It’s written in a mix of styles and a strange mix of first and third person sections. The third person parts strike me as most odd and feel the least natural but the first person writing (which is by far and away the greatest part of the book) reads very naturally. It’s as if she is chatting to you or sharing her thoughts with you.

What makes the book remarkable is how it shares the process of maturation and development of wisdom. Yes, wisdom. I’d go as far as to call this a wisdom book. It’s enlightening and inspiring and I say that as a man, even though much of what she writes about is sexual inequality and the struggle to be a single mother and a professional at the same time. I love her clear eyed, grounded focus on the real. There’s nothing polemic, and nothing starry eyed about this book. It’s a story of growing self-knowledge and with that self-acceptance, of the struggles with commitment and freedom, with mothering and professional development as an actress, with privilege and simplicity.

Here’s what she says about success –

The best thing that can come with success is the knowledge that it is nothing to long for.

And here’s what she says about the differences between men and women –

I try to put in words why I believe that all divisions of people into groups just increases our difficulties. Makes it harder to understand each other.

The importance of living NOW –

I think it is good to recognise what the moment is about and to accept it as a gift.

and

Why is it so frightening to reach sixty because one was once sixteen an believed that time existed in infinite supply? Why couldn’t one know that Time moves on with ever increasing speed and plays havoc with all the things we once thought we could leave for tomorrow?

But especially I like what she says about self-acceptance and finding what’s important within –

Sometimes the sense of security is within myself.

and

Pointless to seek refuge in someone else from what was my loneliness and insecurity

and

I realise I was brought up to be the person others wanted me to be, so that they would like me and not be bothered by my presence. That person was not me. When I began to be me, I felt that I had more to give. Life was richer.

and

Perhaps maturing is also to let others be. To allow myself to be what I am.

She completely grasps the dynamic of life –

Is this not where life’s possibilities lie? Not necessarily to arrive, but always to be on the way, in movement.

She says that one of the greatest compliments she ever received was a zen saying –

You have allowed the cloth to weave the cloth

I like that very much!

I don’t think reading this book changed my life but it was certainly an inspiring read.

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The Jonas Wergeland trilogy

Posted in books, from the reading room, tagged , , , on April 3, 2009| 6 Comments »

Kjaerstad

It’s about four years ago now since I stumbled across Jan Kjaerstad’s The Seducer (ISBN 978-1905147014). Kjaerstad is a Norwegian author and The Seducer was the first of his great trilogy to be translated into English. It hooked me from the very start. I loved it, wallowed it, swam in it, just became totally absorbed by it. Why? Well I’m quite clear why. It’s the quality of the writing. I’m a great lover of stories and the whole trilogy is not only one great web of hundreds, if not thousands of stories, but the whole premise of the books is that we understand each other and ourselves through the stories of our lives. Now that’s a theme very close to my heart. I am convinced that we construct a narrative self. Who I think I am is the result of the ever evolving, ever developing, intricate web of stories I tell myself about my life. And the way I communicate my self, my life, even my single experiences to others, is by telling them stories. That’s my first reason for loving these books so much. The second reason is the quality of the writing. On the back of The Seducer, Kjaerstad is described as a post-modern writer. I don’t know what the word “postmodernism” does for you. I know that for many people they have almost an allergic response to it, but I have the view that it’s had a bad press. I find the fundamental insights of postmodernism appealing and I really, really enjoy good postmodernist art, and, wow, can Jan Kjaerstad write great postmodernist art! What do I mean by that? Well, he is a complete master of telling a story involving an object, an event, or a particular word, then pages later, in another totally different story that same object or word arises again but now in a different context, but because it’s already gained a certain, particular significance from the previous story, in it’s second appearance it has a different meaning from what it would have had if you hadn’t read the story where it appeared the previous time. Then, later, in yet another story, up it pops again, and again with a new significance and meaning, related to the other two, but different, so echoes and ripples of the prior meanings deeply condition the third usage. And so it goes. Again and again. I find it exciting, thrilling, breath-taking even. This is how life is. Everything we experience has a unique meaning and significance for us which comes about through the precise and particular narrative of our life. It is absolutely true that none of us experience the same song, the same madelin, the same colour or scent even, in exactly the same way. Maybe if you’re not convinced of that then this trilogy might convince you. I do think this is writing which provokes, which challenges and which enlarges and deepens how we see ourselves, how we understand ourselves and how we might engage with our lives.
So what’s the main story? The Seducer is the first title, The Conqueror (ISBN 978-1905147168) the second, and The Discoverer (978-1905147366) the third. They tell the story of Jonas Wergeland, a Norwegian TV producer who makes the greatest series ever seen in Norwegian TV, Thinking Big. The series explores the lives of famous Norwegians and challenges the average viewer to give up his or her preconceptions in order to obtain a much deeper and clearer understanding of who each of these people were, and what made them tick. He designed the series to get his fellow Norwegians to wake up, to stop being passive observers of life, to think big! Yeah, I’m sure you’ve already thought it…..to become heroes not zombies! (he doesn’t use those terms of course, but he’s definitely writing about the same issue). At the outset of the first book, Jonas returns home to find his wife lying in a pool of blood, shot dead. As he stumbles about the house trying to make sense of what’s he’s experiencing we read story after story from his life. How did this happen? Who is Jonas? Who is Margrete who lies dead on the carpet? By the end of the novel, Jonas has been charged with her murder and he’s plead guilty. But did he actually do it? We still don’t know. In the second book, The Conqueror, Jonas is in jail, and a professor with the help of a mysterious, exotic woman, are writing a biography of him to try to uncover not just the truth of what happened but to answer the question, how could this great, creative man, also be a murderer? How is that possible? The third book, The Discoverer, opens with Jonas now having served his time, and it’s in this novel that we get to hear directly from him for the first time. Some of the chapters are his writings from his own notebooks, and with this element, he suddenly becomes much more real. I had the experience of feeling that although I knew a lot about Jonas from the first two books, I still didn’t know him. Now I get to know him. It’s only about three quarters of the way through the third novel that the truth is revealed. What actually happened? How did it all come about? I won’t tell you here of course but this was the point where suddenly the book hit my heart, moving me to tears.
This is a BIG read. The Seducer is about 600 pages long, and the other two about 450 pages each. Maybe The Discoverer could stand alone and be read without the other two, but I suspect the reader would miss a lot of full significance of many of its stories. However, for me, the best was left till last. I loved them all, but The Discoverer is my clear favourite.
I could say much more about these novels, about their overall structure, about the themes that he weaves together and the echoing questions he asks which are the essential questions in all our lives, but I’ll stop now. Let me just finish by making two further points. There’s a lot of very explicit sex in these books. Especially in The Seducer, (there’s a hint in the title!) If that would disturb you don’t read these books!  Secondly, this is not the kind of novel that will appeal to everyone. It’s not a thriller. It’s not a whodunnit. It’s a massive web of interconnecting stories which explore a man’s life.
In my opinion, I’ve never read anything better. I had to wait about two years between each of the books as they were translated into English and then published and I re-read both The Seducer and The Conqueror over the last couple of months while waiting for Amazon to send me The Discoverer on publication, then dived right into The Discoverer. I am seriously tempted to start reading it again straight away, and I have a notion I’ll go back to the beginning and read The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer one after the other yet again.

(By the way, who on earth is in charge of book design at Arcadia Books? I’m sure it’s very clever how the front covers of books two and three fit together but just how does the cover of book one fit in with that design??!)

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The Wonder Room

Posted in books, creativity, from the living room, from the reading room, tagged , , on March 26, 2009| 5 Comments »

I’m reading The Discoverer, by Jan Kjaerstad (ISBN 978-1905147366) just now and a few pages back he mentioned something called a “studiolo”. This was a secret room hidden deep within a palace (usually not even on the architect’s drawings, and often windowless), in which a Prince would keep a private collection. The key to the collection was anything which induced a sense of wonder. Now, there’s a VERY appealing idea. I’ve written before about how wonder, amazement, or, “emerveillement“, can bring a very special quality to everyday life, so the idea of having a collection which would stimulate such an attitude is really very interesting. As The Discoverer is a novel, I wasn’t sure if the author had made the idea up, or if such rooms ever really existed. Well, guess what? They did!

Wikipedia has an entry about such rooms. They were also known by the German word “Wunderkammer”, or from the French “cabinet” as a “cabinet of curiosities”, or “cabinet of miracles”. Some people have misinterpreted the “cabinet” as an item of furniture, but it was actually a room. A particularly spectacular version was the Studiolo of Francesco I de Medici, in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Sadly, all the objects in that one are long since gone, but the room itself looks stunning. The contents, we are told, would be natural objects, shells, crystals, horns and so on, and art objects such as paintings and sculptures. What held the collection together was the collector. Whatever he, or she, (usually he!) found made him wonder was a worthwhile item for inclusion.

These rooms were probably precursors of museums as well as being laboratories of discovery and sources of inspiration. They were catalysts to the imagination, to creativity and to understanding.

I love this concept, and was therefore intruiged by the description of some contemporary manifestations of “cabinets of curiosity”, or “wonder rooms”.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA, uses this idea.

There’s an Italian cultural organisation dedicated to the concept.

And a quarterly Arts magazine called “Cabinet“.

Interestingly, there’s a mention in the wikipedia article of some bloggers describing their blogs as “wonder rooms”. Well, I haven’t exactly made my blog that way, but it’s not far off it, is it? Quite often, I browse through my old posts at some of the photos, references, or reviews and they stimulate my “emerveillement”. I hope browsing through them might do the same for you. But I’m inspired now. Maybe there’s a photobook project in this? Maybe there’s a website project? Maybe I could start a physical collection somewhere in my home! Does this idea inspire you? If you come across such rooms (physical or virtual) please let me know!

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The Night Train to Lisbon

Posted in books, from the reading room on February 17, 2009| 1 Comment »

I read a lot of non-fiction. Something to do with my being insatiably curious. I often post about the non-fiction books I read, both as reviews which you might like to read, and to share what I learned or what thoughts they provoked for me. But what about fiction? I’ve decided I don’t read nearly enough fiction. So, I’m not going to have any days this year without a novel, or collection of short stories, on the go. I typically read several books at the same time so this shouldn’t mean I won’t be reading any non-fiction for a while.

One of the novels I’ve just read is “The Night Train to Lisbon”, by Pascal Mercier (ISBN 978-1-84354-712-9). If you google it, you’ll find a wide range of extremely divergent reviews. Some people loved it and some found it boring. On the front cover, Isabel Allende says it’s “a treat for the mind”. I agree with her. For me, this book was a treat.

The novel tells the story of a classicist who lives in Bern and who one day encounters a Portuguese woman on a bridge. The encounter is brief but it makes a huge impression on him so when he stumbles across an old Portuguese language book in a second hand bookshop, he just has to buy it. The book he buys is by a Portuguese author named Amadeu de Prado and is a collection of his reflections on his life and his self. Gregorius, the classicist does something impulsive for the first time in his life and walks out of the lecture theatre at work and takes a train to Lisbon, determined to learn Portuguese and find out all he can about Prado.

The two intertwined themes of the book are what hooked me. The first is how we can get to know someone through their text. Throughout the novel are scattered Gregorius’ translations of passages from Prado’s book. You could just skim through the novel reading only these italicised passages and be both inspired and stimulated to reflect on your own life and on how you’ve become who you are. But the other theme is equally fascinating, and it’s how a person is revealed through the stories told by others. Although Prado himself is long since deceased, Gregorius meets up with as many of the people who knew him as he can. They all tell stories of what they remember about Prado and each story reveals something else which helps to Gregorius to understand who Prado was and how he became that person. This is such an interesting truth……how different people have different views, different insights, memories and impressions of one person….and how it’s the collection of these diverse stories which ultimately reveals the reality of that person.

I was also hooked by more personal issues and memories. Like Prado, I’m a doctor who thinks and who writes about his thoughts. Like Gregorius I’m fascinated by books, by language and by stories. I’ve only visited Lisbon a few times but one afternoon particularly stands out in my memory. My trips to Lisbon were to participate in teaching sessions for Portuguese doctors, and on one visit I had a free afternoon while one of my colleagues took the class. An old professor of archeology looked after me for the afternoon. He took me wandering around Lisbon’s old town showing me how the history of the city was revealed in its architecture and its archeological uncoverings. I spoke no Portuguese and he spoke no English. Like all Portuguese of his generation, his second language was French (just as Gregorius discovers in the novel), and my second language too (poor as it is!) is French. So we spent the whole afternoon together, a Portuguese man and a Scot, exploring Lisbon in French! The novel brought those memories flooding back.

The most enjoyable books are like that I think. There is something about them which can be appreciated by many readers and there’s something about them which resonates personally, or connects with the reader’s own experience or memories.

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Reinventing the sacred

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science, tagged on February 8, 2009| 1 Comment »

That reductionism is limited, however, does not mean it is not powerful, amazingly productive, and tremendously useful scientifically. We simply need to understand its place, and recognise that we live in a very different universe from that painted by reductionism alone.

So writes Stuart Kauffman in “Reinventing the Sacred” (ISBN 978-0-465-00300-6). I agree with that. As a medical doctor who practices in a field of medicine which values an understanding of patients from a holistic perspective, seeking to know, not just the diseases they might have, but to know the individuals who have those diseases, I find reductionist approaches both useful and insufficient. As Mary Midgley says in “Wisdom, Information and Wonder”,

One cannot claim to know somebody merely because one has collected a pile of printed information about them.

The key point Kauffman seeks to make in his book (he is a complexity scientist) is how our relatively new exploration of complex systems in non-reductionist ways has revealed characteristics which fundamentally change the way we understand reality. The central characteristic is, he feels, “emergence”.

…while life, agency, value, and doing presumably have physical explanations in any specific organism, the evolutionary emergence of these cannot be derived from or reduced to physics alone. Thus, life, agency, value and doing are real in the universe. This stance is called emergence……….Emergence is therefore a major part of the new scientific worldview. Emergence says that, while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are also real, not reducible to physics nor explicable from it, and are central to our lives. Emergence, already both contentious and transformative, is but one part of the new scientific worldview I shall discuss.

The other major characteristic he describes is how Nature does not conform to “natural laws”, and so the world is not nearly as predictable nor controllable as we have believed (well you only need to read about this year’s economic crises to see that’s true, don’t you!)

Kauffman explains how emergence is a quality of unceasing creativity, and he explains how unpredictability challenges the supremacy of reason as a guide to life. When you first encounter them, these are radical ideas for a scientist, but the more you learn about complexity as a way of understanding reality, the more you realise how reductionism does not equal science. Science is a greater way of thinking than that, and its the modern concepts and methodologies which are expanding science beyond its limited and reductionist constraints. He shows how “ceaseless creativity in the evolution of the biosphere” undermines the Newtonian concept of “natural laws”.

We will soon find its analogues in economic and cultural evolution, which, like the biosphere, are self-consistently self-constructing but evolving wholes whose constituents are partially lawless.

(This book was published in January 2008, and therefore written well before the economic crises of the last year)

This is a radically different scientific worldview than we have known. I believe this new scientific worldview breaks the Galilean spell of the sufficiency of natural law. In its place is a freedom we do not yet understand, but ceaseless creativity in the universe, biosphere, and human life are its talismans. I believe this creativity suffices to allow us to reinvent the sacred as the stunning reality we live in. But even more is at stake……We must come to see reason as part of a still mysterious entirety of our lives, when we often radically cannot know what will occur but must act anyway. We do, in fact, live forward into mystery.

I do resonate with these ideas. Emergence is a fascinating concept. To connect it to the concept of ceaseless creativity and beyond that to the notion of God as Creator is an interesting step. Somehow, though, it doesn’t quite work. I am with him in the awe-inspiring inspiration of ceaseless creativity. I think human beings, other creatures, Nature itself are endlessly fascinating and can, in fact, never be wholly known. But to use “God” symbolically to represent this phenomenon doesn’t work for me. I do like how contemplation of emergence, however, can help us to put reductionism in its place. In fact, reductionism can be more, not less, useful, if instead of trying to understand absolutely everything from that single standpoint, we use it in appropriate contexts and never consider that it gives us the whole “Truth”.

I also resonate with the idea that the acceptance of the inevitabilty of uncertainty makes us aware of the ineffable. In so doing, it makes both the mysterious more real, and reality more mysterious.

I wanted to like this book. I wanted it to be a great book. But that’s not where I’ve ended up. I’m grateful to Stuart Kauffman for this work though, and coming from the perspective of a scientist gives his ideas a particular and a unique value. But in terms of “reinventing the sacred”, I think poetry, art, photography, music, and stories do all that so much better. Take a look at the photos of the frozen Scottish countryside I posted earlier, read “Anam Cara” by John O’Donohue, or “The Little Prince” by Saint Exupery, get in touch with what the French call “emerviellement” in your daily life (in the “quotidien“) and tell me if you agree. Yes, the new science of complexity can make us a bit more humble again, has a good chance of firing up our sense of awe, but I think it takes both Art and Philosophy to really put us in touch with the sacred again.

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The “butterfly effect” in real lives

Posted in from the reading room, personal growth, science on January 28, 2009| 5 Comments »

Maybe you remember the story from last year about the Spanish woman whose trachea (windpipe) had been destroyed by TB, and how a team of doctors in Bristol grew her a new one from her own stem cells? Well, it was a pretty remarkable story, but here’s an interestingly different angle on that story.

Prof Anthony Hollander was responsible for developing the technique of using stem cells in this way and in producing this particular patient’s windpipe.

He recalls this event from his childhood –

One day in 1973 Anthony – a “sickly child” – was off school and at home with his mother, when he found a fatally injured bird in the paved area of their garden in north London. “It was in some distress,” he recalls today. “My mum was too squeamish to deal with it, so I put it out of its misery. For a nine-year-old it was hard to have to do that.” As he remembers it he got to thinking, about death, and about how he might be able to keep people alive. “So I did what all sensible children do when in need of practical help with an idea. I wrote to Blue Peter,” he said. “I can vaguely remember I was thinking about re-routing the blood out of the heart and recirculating it. Then they could fix up the heart and it would be alright again. I just didn’t want that death stuff to happen.”

Blue Peter is a long-running childrens’ programme on the BBC which encouraged interaction with its viewers from the outset. In his letter he described his “strange belief” that he “knew how to make people or animals  alive” and asked for help – including a “model of a heart split in half” and “tools for cutting people open”. Well, the Blue Peter programme editor replied to the letter, as she and her team did to every one of the thousands of letters received every week. She encouraged him to seek information for his idea from the family doctor.

Listen to what he says about receiving the encouraging reply –

“If her letter had shown any hint of ridicule or disbelief I might perhaps never have trained to become a medical scientist or been driven to achieve the impossible dream, and really make a difference to a human being’s life,” …….. ” If you had failed to reply, or had treated my letter as a joke (as perhaps others might have done) it could well have altered the course of my life……..”I remember being thrilled at the time to have been taken seriously. Actually, even nowadays I am thrilled when people take my ideas seriously. I know that might sound strange to you. But my way of doing science is to think up a hundred theories, however mad, and work through them until I find one that fits the data.”

Isn’t that an amazing story? Just to make it all the more amazing, it’s emerged now as a story because Prof Hollander recently wrote to Biddy Baxter, the Blue Peter editor, to tell her how important her letter had been to him and discovered that she was in the process of compiling a book of the childrens’ letters and had already picked his out as one of the letters to include. Coincidence?

I’ll finish this little tale with another quote from Anthony Hollander which, I believe, completely hits the spot –

“As adults we can tend to lose the capacity to dream and think big. Children will dream unselfconsciously. I still do that – I still go around telling people ‘these are the things I want to do’. I don’t have time for any kind of scepticism.”

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