Evolving Systems: Home Page

See what has been keeping Mark busy

"Offending the Audience is a play.  Sort of.  It is a play about plays and playing.   It is a play about what happens to you, the audience, while you are sitting in the theater.  But then, it isn’t really “about” anything.  It is something.  Bodies in space.  Voices.  Words.  Maybe an authentic connection between performers and audience members.  And, above all, awareness.  Offending the Audience is “unmediated theater,” Handke says.  Unmediated presence.  The unmediated now."

Nicolas Wade in the NYTimes Week in Review this morning ...

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.

For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.

But the evolutionary perspective on religion does not necessarily threaten the central position of either side ...

From Kent Flannery, referred to in the Wade article ...

I got to wondering about what archeology needed the most. I decided there probably isn't an urgent need for one more young person who makes a living editing other people's original ideas. And I decided we probably didn't need a lot more of our archeological flat tires recapped as philosophers. There seems to be enough around to handle the available work.

What I don't see enough of ... is first-rate archaeology.

Now that's sad, because after all, archeology is fun. Hell, I don't break the soil periodically to 'reaffirm my status'. I do it because archeology is still the most fun you can have with your pants on.

An intriguing specific instance of our more general againstness conversations in a discussion of educational practice that Alice has orchestrated ...

"it struck me that there are very productive things that can come out of the experience of conflict ...it can be very helpful-even reassuring-for kids to talk directly about their unpleasant feelings ... Taking time to discuss childrens' feelings of anger, self-effacement, jealousy, or resentment not only legitimizes such feelings, but makes it okay for them to have those feelings and gives them the emotional space to work through them. A child's capacity to sort through his/her own feelings-and to understand the feelings of others-equips him or her to get the most out of a classroom setting and interpersonal learning environments throughout the rest of his or her life.

Maybe this isn't only the case for kids?  Or maybe we are all ...

The core group and open conversations each have their own idiosyncratic character and concerns but both seem to me to be wrestling in interestingly different ways with the common problem of how to understand and intersect the objective and the subjective, meaninglessness and meaning, the emergent and the "intentional."  Cf.  Meaning: declining the end run and offering an alternative, Clarifying intentionalities, and From ambiguity to skepticism to social conventions.   In an intriguing way, what seems to me to be evolving is a story of "objectivity," "meaning," and "intentionality" all emerging from and dependent on interpersonal reciprocity.  It may seem odd to have "objectivity" in this list, but see The objectivity/subjectivity spectrum: having one's cake and eating it too. 

Review in yesterday's NYTimes of The Nature of Technology: What it Is and How it Evolves by W. Brian Arthur. 

"Technologies evolve, Dr. Arthur writes, based on the chaotic and constant recombining of already existing technologies. In this view all technological breakthroughs emerge as novel combinations of existing technological components, which have themselves come into existence through the same process. And, he argues, both technological and scientific progress are driven by humans looking for a means to an end they have already defined."

Sounds a lot like a hybrid system:  emergence interacting with intentionality. 

Reality reconsidered, from a brain perspective ...

Reality = the way things are, for better or for worse

or, alternatively,

Reality = a combination of informed guessing and conceiving alternatives, so can always be better ("less wrong")

Thanks to Greg Davis, who wrote ...

Some members of the group might be interested in the discussion of TH Morgan, who was not only a professor here for a dozen years, as you know, but also harbored deep suspicions regarding the efficacy and adequacy of natural selection to explain evolution. I'm not sure exactly what Scott is going to talk about, but I imagine this point almost has to come up.  Here's the information on the talk:

The Bryn Mawr College Library will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his landmark book On the Origin of Species with its new exhibition, Darwin’s Ancestors: Tracing the Origins of the “Origin of Species,” which will run through February 2010 in the Class of 1912 Rare Book Room in Canaday Library.

The exhibition will open on Thursday, Oct. 22, with a lecture by Swarthmore College Professor of Biology Scott Gilbert, titled “Disagreements Among Friends: How T. H. Morgan and E. B. Wilson’s Agreeing to Disagree Helped Establish Genetics and the Modern Synthesis.” Wilson was Bryn Mawr’s first biology professor and Morgan the second, and both played prominent roles in the international debates over evolution during the first half of the 20th century. The lecture will be at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 22,  in Carpenter Library 21.

See Introduction to evolving systems: beyond emergence to agency

I'd like to preface my remarks here today (Sunday, 11 October 2009) by noting that my brain hurts today as much as it does in our actual meetings at Bryn Mawr. As Paul knows, I am constantly working in about three totally different fields at once -- philosophy, business consulting, art+design (I am teaching a grad seminar in industrial design this year... along with a course in Greek philosophy and another in Daoism... oowww, it hurts!), and so on. As I write this, I am getting ready to present some research at a conference on pre-Colombian voyages to the Americas...! So, my thoughts are a bit foggy. But Paul's presentation on "ambiguous images" is still in my mind, and actually the idea came up in today's conference, since I debating people who claim that certain rock carvings in the American southwest are Old World scripts. I say -- as Paul might put it -- that they are decoding or resolving external (visual) "noise" into something that makes sense to them, as observers. They are storytelling, too. The story that they are telling is defective, for various reasons that I won't get into here, but it fits with Paul's idea of pathology being when one's "story" is no longer working as a way of making one's way in the world...

But what I actually wanted to talk about was related more directly to our group's charge of looking at issues of "Form, Meaning, and Aesthetics". We've talked about how people see or create form and meaning out of "noise" or randomness, etc. We looked at some visual examples, talked about auditory examples, and so on. But the other day, I was re-reading some papers of a British physicist, Julian Barbour, who studies time, and believes that it does not exist. He presents an interesting model of a timeless universe, but never quite addresses the key question of why we perceive time. In short, then, I think that "time" may be another "story-telling" mechanism, but a very complex one, one even more complex than visual resolution, or auditory, or even linguistic resolution. This could lead to some interesting discussion, perhaps, in our future meetings. I will touch upon this in my "I Ching" workshop coming up...

See

• Learning to live in/as an evolving system
• Cell death, human death, and evolution
• Issues in human evolution

Interesting seminar last night, cosponsored by Physics and Philosophy.  See Multiple worlds, multiple interpretations: quantum physics and the brain for some resulting thoughts relevant to our project.

Classification: why and how? intersecting with

• Sex/gender classification
• Diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and people
• Sex/gender: turning from science to social science

Is there a distinction between art and science?

The brain and education: three loops and conflict resolution

On this anniversary of the financial collapse, mebbe we ought all to learn a little bit more about how the complex system that is the global market operates. Paul Krugman had a very-clarifying-to-me article in last week's NYTimes Magazine, "How Did the Economists Get It So Wrong?": "economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets..."
 

 1. We should visit Isaiah Zagar's "Philadelphia's Magic Gardens", the work of a dedicated outsider-artist/mosaicist. It's on South Street in Philadelphia.  www.philadelphiasmagicgardens.org/ I suggest that it is an evolving system and an evolving aesthetic and that some of the dualistic thinking that we've been occasionally engaged in becomes much more difficult to sustain in an environment in which inside/outside don't quite apply.

2. We should have filmmaker Peter Rose come and speak to us and screen some of his films. You can see some at www.peterrosepicture.com/. Rose has been engaged with issues that we're discussing for a number of years. He's an incredibly articulate person, with interests in both science and creating.

3. As an ancillary activity, I invite you to check out the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, which is happening Sept 4-19. Lots of great, paradigm challenging pieces. (I've been working with Headlong Dance Theater on MORE, but there's lots to see. www.livearts-fringe.org/)

Reviving the lost art of naming the world (NYTimes 10 August 2009)

"sorting and naming the natural world is a universal, deep-seated and fundamental human activity, one we cannot afford to lose because it is essential to understanding the living world, and our place in it.

find an organism, any organism ... and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound ... meditate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it ... To do so is to change everything, including yourself ... once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you."

Apropos of evolving systems generally as well as new forms of representation, mashing up, and the OED and textbooks,   see 24 August NYTimes

"a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable."

From Repainting the past, by Randy Cohen, NYT ethicist ....

"As an unofficial part of the worldwide festivities saluting Galileo ... I'd like to do some recanting of my own ... My insurance anaology was folly, but his cosmology was correct, as he knew and as his adversary, the church, eventually acknowledged four centuries later ...  I expect and deserve no such approbation, even 400 years from now"

The problem is that Galileo's cosmology was not provably "correct" at the time, and is provably "incorrect" now: the earth doesn't go around the sun, the earth and the sun orbit a common center of mass.  So why, in an evolving systems context, do we celebrate Galileo?  And what advice/perspective could we offer Cohen, about his own approbation or any one else's?      

Interesting challenge.  Can we redefine the role of both the OED, and TEXTBOOKS?  For more on the latter, see Textbooks and science education  and Education: between two cultures. 

Do we, should we, regard the OED as a "stunnning intelllectual accomplishment in almost every way"?  What are its limitations in an evolving systems context, and how should we make sense of/communicate/make generative use of those?

I'm writing to add to our mix of possibilities for discussion a 1 1/2-hour YouTube video called "RiP! A Remix Manifesto," which uses re-mixes, mash-ups, and other forms of "culture jamming" and (so-called) "piracy" to challenge what Mark long ago called the "oxymoron of intellectual property"; the documentary argues that copyright is an historical anomaly, particular to the 20th century's peculiar ways of making money.

I found it a little slow to start (probably because the culture referents belong to the next generation!), but I think the story it tells is compelling, and very relevant to (@ least one of our) topics, that of emergent aesthetics (3 sound bites: "the music industry refused to evolve, so we evolved for them";  "the rules of this game are up to you"; "mixture is the future of the human race"). The documentary analogizes the work of music "sampling" to reading journals and taking notes, to writing articles and citing others, and argues in general that patenting ideas holds back knowledge exchange and development.

I'd be very interested to hear what you (and your students!) think of the argument developed here (and of course of the form it takes, which is itself a mash-up). Here's "The Remix Manifesto" in outline form:

1. Culture always builds on the past.
2. The past tries to control the future.
3. Our future is becoming less free.
4. To build free societies you must limit the control of the past.

I'm lost right now in a wierd strange novel, Mark Danielewski's 2000 House of Leaves...and making note of that here because this novel (or others "like it") might be good texts to read as we think about "new ways" of writing/picturing/representing "new ways of thinking": not "against," but....?

"Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured"  .... Zhuangzi

"Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field.
I'll meet you there." ... Jelaluddin Rumi

See Order from randomness, from ourselves, or both?

Here's a little more guidance (and a challenge?) from my friend-of-the-month, William James. His proposal below (imagined as an invitatation from God to humanity) sounds parallel to what I think we are (trying to?) set up in this group.  Particularly curious and troubling to me (and perhaps something we could discuss further, given esp. Bharath's background in Hinduism and Hank's specialization in Japanese religious culture) is James's characterization of Hindus and Buddhists not as being more aware (than Christians?) of the uncertainty of life circumstances, but rather as fearful withdrawings from the challenge offered by a pragmantist engagement in the world:

"Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: "I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a  world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?

"Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough?...It would be just like the world we practically live in....Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our fiat to the fiat of the creator. Yet perhaps some would not….to them the prospect of a universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no appeal….We mistrust the chances of things….the peace and rest, the security desiderated....is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures….The hindoo and the buddhist for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life" (127-128).

This coming year, I'm teaching a course on the James family, so am spending some time this summer reading the (voluminous) work of Alice, Henry and William. Have just finished William James' lectures on Pragmatism, and want to suggest that we might add them to our reading list on evolving systems. Here's a taste/tease/invitation to more:

“The most fateful point of difference between being a rationalist and being a pragmatist is now fully in sight. Experience is in mutation, and our psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation…Reality stands complete and ready-made from all eternity, rationalism insists…their truth has nothing to do with our experiences. It adds nothing to the content of experience. It makes no difference to reality itself; it is supervenient, inert, static, a reflexion merely….rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity…(99).

For rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, ….On the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures….The alternative between pragmatism and rationalism...is no longer a question in the theory of knowledge, it concerns the structure of the universe itself.  On the pragmatist side we have only one edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are @ work" (113).

From a review by Robert Sullivan of Robert Wright's recent "The Evolution of God"

"Through science and travel, conversation and scholarship, interpretation and mysticism — our faiths have adapted throughout history, like finches on Darwin’s islands.

Wright’s core and vital point is that this is not a descent into total relativism or randomness. It is propelled by reason interacting with revelation, coupled with sporadic outbreaks of religious doubt and sheer curiosity. The Evolution of God is best understood as the evolution of human understanding of truth — even to the edge of our knowledge where mystery and meditation take over.

.... the challenge of our time is neither the arrogant dismissal of religious life and heritage, nor the rigid insistence that all metaphysical questions are already answered or unaskable, but a humble openness to history and science and revelation in the journey of faith."

Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music

35,000 years ago in Germany, when sapiens probably co-existed there with neanderthal.  I wonder what neanderthal was doing at the time?  What other hominids elsewhere were doing then?

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/mentalhealth/workinggroups09/june15#comment-106526

Also related to some of our conversations, some students' thoughts about "emergent pedagogy," and associated on-line discussion. 

A relevant recent student paper - Neuroesthetics: An Exploration of Aesthetic Appraisal in the Human Brain - and associated on-line discussion of the Doors of Perception.