The Need for a Science of Everything--Omnology
Seeing the patterns that emerge when one views all the sciences and the arts at once read more

History of the Theory of Evolution read more

Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth, That is All We Need to Know read more

Oscillation, the Primordial Pulse read more

The Infinitely Networked Universe read more

Bacterial Empires--Far Older Than Humanity read more

Bloodbaths and Utopias read more

Lighting the Caverns of the Beast Within in Order to Reach the Soul read more

Soul, Emotion, Music, Math and Cosmos, Why Do They Relate? read more

Is This An Unjust Universe? read more

Conformists and Eccentrics-How the Two Work Hand in Hand-Insiders vs. Outriders-Homesteaders vs. Explorers--Freaks, Geeks, and Rebels: The Evolutionary Power of the Odd read more

History of Science read more

Entertainment: A Clue to Our Wiring read more

Emotional Memory and Emotional Imperviousness - How the Mass Minds of Men and Women Integrate
read more

Will The Real Scientist Please Stand Up? - Just What is a Scientist, Anyway? read more

Ten Most Important Records of the 20th Century read more

Why Do We Make War? read more

Geniuses of Evil-Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mussolini read more

Why science Must Study Religion read more

ANTS read more

Internet Subcultures, the Miracle of Trans-Geography read more

The Value of illness read more

Michael Jackson-The Story of a Saint Dragged Down to Hell read more

The Impact of 9/11 read more

The Need For a Science of Everything--Omnology

"Intellectual hedonism"--termed coined by intellectual and business networker (and author) Richard Saul Werman (spelling probably wrong)

Omnology, promiscuous research

See if you can give me advice on the following. Below is a
manifesto for a new discipline, omnology. I've already got one
student who needs to have a valid area into which he can say
his omnivorous hunger for knowledge fits. There are many others
out there. They should be encouraged by academia, not
disenfranchised by it. Hence the new discipline. How does one go
about getting a new field recognized in academe?

"Omnology"-"an academic base for the promiscuously curious, a discipline that concentrates on seeing the patterns that emerge when one views all the sciences and the arts at once."

The Omnologist Manifesto
We are blessed with a richness of specializations, but cursed with a paucity of panoptic disciplines-categories of knowledge that concentrate on seeing the pattern which emerges when one views all the sciences at once. Hence we need a field dedicated to the panoramic, an academic base for the promiscuously curious, a discipline whose mandate is best summed up in a paraphrase of the poet Andrew Marvel: "Let us roll all our strength and all Our knowledge up into one ball, And tear our visions with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life."

Omnology is a science, but one dedicated to the biggest picture conceivable by the minds of its practitioners. Omnology will use every conceptual tool available-and some not yet invented but inventible-to leapfrog over disciplinary barriers, stitching together the patchwork quilt of science and all the rest that humans can yet know. If one omnologist is able to perceive the relationship between pop songs, ancient Egyptian graffiti, Shirley MacLaine's mysticism, neurobiology, and the origins of the cosmos, so be it. If another uses mathematics to probe traffic patterns, the behavior of insect colonies, and the manner in which galaxies cluster in swarms, wonderful. And if another uses introspection to uncover hidden passions and relate them to research in chemistry, anthropology, psychology, history, and the arts, she, too, has a treasured place on the wild frontiers of scientific truth-the terra incognita in the heartland of omnology.

Let me close with the words of yet another poet, William Blake, on the ultimate goal of omnology:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Copyright 2001 Howard Bloom
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why we need omnology-
In a message dated 1/16/2003 1:43:32 PM Eastern Standard Time, MLsmolens writes: By the way, this is one of my favorite magazines hb: mine too. ms: for its wonderful variety of new technology and excellent writing. In his intro to the main feature of the magazine taking about the 10 technologies to look for it the future - he mentions ... "Our biggest challenge in stimulating a creative culture is finding ways to encourage multiple points of views. Many engineering deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers at all. This is simply because perspective is more important than IQ. hb: a superb observation. nn: The irony is that perspective will not get kids into college, nor does it help them thrive there. Academia rewards depth. Expertise is bred by experts who work with their own kind. Departments and labs focus on fields and subfields, now and then adding or subtracting a domain. Graduate degrees, not to mention tenure, depend upon tunneling into truths and illuminating ideas in narrow areas. The antidote to such canalization and compartmentalization is being interdisciplinary, a term that is at once utterly banal and, in advanced studies, describes an almost impossible goal. Interdisciplinary labs and projects emerged in the 1960s to address big problems spanning the frontiers of the physical and social sciences, engineering, and the arts. The idea was to unite complementary bodies of knowledge to address issues that transcended any one skill set. Fine. Only recently, however, have people realized that interdisciplinary approaches can bring enormous value to some very small problems and that interdisciplinary environments also stimulate creativity. In maximizing the differences in backgrounds, cultures, ages, and the like, we increase the likelihood that the results will not be what we had imagined. see full text at http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/negroponte0203.asp

The History of the Theory of Evolution

In a message dated 6/19/02 10:10:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: The word "evolution" was used first 1622 (Merriam-Webster). Does not this predate Darwin? hb: good point, Hannes. But in those days the term had a radically different meaning. Darwin's amazing campaign of self-promotion utterly altered the denotations and connotations of the word Here's what the Oxford English Dictionary says on the subject: Evolution I. The process of unrolling, opening out, or disengaging from an envelope. 1. The opening out or unfolding of what is wrapped up (e.g. a roll, a bud, etc.); fig. the spreading out before the mental vision (of a series of objects); the appearance in orderly succession of a long train of events. Also concr. 'the series of things unfolded or unrolled' (J.). 1647 H. More Poems 150 Evolution Of outward forms spread in the worlds vast spright. 1667 I Div. Dial. i. §15 The whole evolution of+ages, from everlasting to everlasting, is+represented to God at once. 1678 Cudworth Intell. Syst. 878 The Periods of Divine Providence, here in this World, are commonly Longer, and the Evolutions thereof Slower. 1742 Young Nt. Th. iv. 510 Beyond long ages, yet roll'd up in shades+What evolutions of surprising fate! 1762 I Resignation ii. xxxvi, Flowers+When ev'ning damps and shades descend, Their evolutions close. 1759 Johnson Idler No 70 311 He whose task is to reap and thresh will not be contented without examining the evolution of the seed. 1843 G. S. Faber Sacred Cal. Proph. (1844) I. p. xv, The evolution of time has served only to confirm me in+the honest

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Val--Many thanks for the kind words. Yes, Lamarck is a an extremely interesting figure. He generated so much intriguing material. It's a shame we were all raised to shun him like the plague. However Eshel's viewpoint impresses me as taking the best aspects of LaMarck and combining them with the mechanistic approach of the NeoDarwinians so we end up with a new synthesis. The cybernetic, cooperative evolutionary viewpoint, which I've also been working on for twenty years from a different data-set than Eshel's, reintroduces what Peter Corning and others have called "teleonomy"--directionality to the universe. Stephen Jay Gould would HATE it. On the other hand, my own material either supports it or it supports my own material or something. Maybe it's just synergy. Howard

P.S. Speaking of things I left out, I didn't find room to mention that Erasmus Darwin had actually come up the idea of adaptation to environmental conditions as an evolutionary driver--though Lamarck may have beaten him if he published something on the subject before the grand airing of his theories in his 1781 _Systeme des Animaux Sans Verterbres_. (Erasmus' Zoonomia had come out five years earlier.) P.P.S. the following is very neatly put <<Lamark put the multiple creation (archtypes + decay) with successive eliminations by God and re-creation on its head: species are not created and decay into greater variation, heading towards extinction, but evolve from lesser to higher complexity striving to adapt to their environments. --------------------- Subj: Re: entropy, gravity and bacteria Date: 98-03-28 20:33:02 EST From: (Valerius & Renate Geist) To:

Howard, Very beautifully explained! A masterpiece of good writing. By the way, Konrad Lorenz roared out that "life eats entropy!" Anyway, nice to know that entropy may not apply in this universe and that poor Lamark is about to return from the grave. You overdid it a bit on Erasmus Darwin, and did not note that Lamark put the multiple creation (archtypes + decay) with successive eliminations by God and re-creation on its head: species are not created and decay into greater variation, heading towards extinction, but evolve from lesser to higher complexity striving to adapt to their environments. That's why Soren Lovtrup points to Lamark as the father of evolution. What courage it took to make that pronouncement! Cheers, Val Geist
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Subj: Re: entropy, gravity and bacteria Date: 98-03-29 19:38:53 EST From: (John Wilkins) Sender:

Darwin himself announced that Lamarck was the founder of modern evolution in the "Historical Sketch" of the 4th edition and on. Darwin said that he never claimed to have come up with the idea of evolution and it is sheer revisionism and strawman construction to make out that he did. In the 1830s, as Adrian Desmond has shown, evolution was rife, especially in Edinburgh and Paris, and tied to radical social movements (eg, Chartism) (Desmond 1989)

Refs

Desmond, A 1989. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, medicine, and reform in radical London, University of Chicago Press.

Jablonka E and Lamb MJ 1995. Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: The Lamarckian Dimension, Oxford UP.

L°vtrup, S. (1987). Darwinism: the refutation of a myth. London, Croom Helm.

Nitecki M H (ed.) 1988 Evolutionary progress U Chicago P

Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth, That is All We Need to Know

the more "truth" a structure encapsulates, the greater that structure's fit with reality (meaning with future events) and the larger or more influential it will grow. hb
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"the linguist Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky showed that much of the human capacity for grammar, rather than being learned, arises from a complex inborn structure in the brain. Furthermore, that inborn "universal grammar" probably did not evolve in the usual way, the way that fins or wings did; instead, universal grammar has somehow been an intrinsic part of the structure of matter ever since the big bang, or possibly even a necessary part of the eternal Platonic world of logic and mathematics, constraining matter whenever it is configured into a mechanism capable of language." No Easy Way Out Sciences; New York; Spring 2001; Stevan Harnad; Volume: 41 Issue: 2 Start Page: 36-42
_______________________________
A few years ago, Eshel Ben-Jacob posed a question: "what is
information." Eshel felt that a new definition would provide a
new way of understanding this universe. I answered that
information is a signal passed between two objects, entities, or
beings which the receiver was able to decipher. A gravitational
cue, for example, is a signal sent by one body to another and
interpreted as an impulse to approach. Electromagnetic
charges can be interpreted by similarly charged bodies as
repulsion and by bodies with an opposite charge as repulsion.
Now Samuel Bonasso has postulated that:
"Information, at various levels of probability and quality, allows
energy to self organize and condense into its various contracted
structural forms and to separate and re-expand into the general
field."

which leads to the following thoughts: the more "truth"
encapsulated in a structure, the greater that structure's fit with
reality (meaning with future events) and the larger or more
influential it will grow. So information is not just what a sender
sends to a receiver, it is also a signal in a one-way
transmission-from the past to the future. Transmission between
two objects existing simultaneously takes place via attraction
and repulsion cues. One-way transmission from past to future
takes place between the structure that was and the new
arrangement that will be. It takes place via survival, accretion,
and dissolution. Successful structures are those which manage to
attract the greatest number of successive survival or accretion
cues. They stick around. Those which anticipate the future
poorly are dissolved by it when it arrives. Information builds up
over time. Since it is constantly chiseled by the future it must
anticipate, by hauling its past lessons from one time frame to
another, it encapsulates and anticipates an increasing number
of future possibilities. Where does a proton fit into this? Protons
manage to anticipate the future magnificently. They survive
and survive the many changes of a universe tumbling through
the evolution of new forms and functions, new ways of being and
of doing, over time.

Two corollaries of this overly abstract notion:

The universe is constantly honing its constituents via their
interactions and is constantly building more data on past and
future into its constituent entities. Billions of years of inanimat
evolution are built into an iron atom--which carries within it the
evolution of the quark, the joining of quarks into neutrons and
protons, the joining of neutrons and protons into stable foursomes,
then, 300,000 years later, the sudden ability of these quartets to
attract and hold the attention of electrons in the embrace we
call an atom. But that's not the end of it. An iron atom also
contains the aggregation of galaxies, the birth of stars, and their
death--for it is in the death of stars that iron atoms are formed.
Each of the constituents of an iron atom has been honed by
natural selection--sharpened by its need to survive changes on
vast scales of explosive energy, the expansion of space, the
contraction of gravity, the swirling of mass vortices of form, and
the planck-instant microsecond alterations of arrangement we
call time.

corolllary two--we contain within us twelve to seventeen billion
years of this cosmos' history. billlions and billions of years of stored
experience and stored prediction of possibilities. we say that
beauty is truth and truth is beauty, and that sounds like the idlest
form of poetry. but that which is not truthful to the future does
not survive. when our minds seek symmetry and other forms of
gorgeousness, are we seeking our most primal sense of what is
true and right--of a vast inner past feeling out the future
perfectly? Howard

Howard Bloom wrote:

>In a message dated 98?01?31 10:26:06 EST, Joa Sousa writes: > ><< We have the impression that our decision > was taken thanks to "free" will and we would like to believe that this is > really free, "we have decided by ourselves", but this impression is an > illusion, something comparable to a psychotic delirium or a dream. > If you ask Dennett and Dawkins they will tell you exactly the same. >> > >An interesting point of view, but it doesn't feel right intuitively, for >whatever that's worth. However though Dennett is popular and Dawkins is >utterly fascinating, the two of them have a very strong tendency to go off on >the wrong track from time to time (don't we all?). Howard

Howard, surely the key point is that it would be distinctly maladaptive if Joao's suggestion felt intuitively correct. After all, we look somewhat askance at folks who hear detached voices telling them what to do. In your other posting you supplied most of the basic data that should enable us to get an "undewy?eyed" handle on both free will and consciousness. As you made clear, it has been shown over and over again that what we call consciousness is a post hoc rationaliser, forced to come up with explanations ? not infrequently wrong ? for decisions already taken elsewhere in the brain, and always with the objective of falsely maintaining your intuitive sense that it's in charge.

As we can also have a good stab at determining where the sense of self, central to consciousness, peters out in the animal kingdom ? experiments with mirrors suggest that chimps have it whereas macaques don't ? it seems almost certain that it is no more than an essential function of a novel?problem?solving unit, at its most developed in us. It is almost certainly of very recent evolutionarily origin, and even without the clear evidence that this has not happened, it would seen highly unlikely that such a Johnny?come?lately would rapidly supplant whatever it was that so successfully managed the ancestral organisms over the preceding aeons.

Where then does this leave free?will and the questions raised by Lyle Steadman? Well, free will certainly cannot be truly free if it resides exclusively in the conscious mind. The best that can offer is a non?binding, advisory role to decision making devices located elsewhere. Does it then actually lie, cheek by jowl, with those brain centres which actually call the shots? Perhaps, but if so, there is not much comfort for those wedded to strong notions of freedom of action. The reason the true decision centres "need" consciousness is because it alone can actually manipulate information and review it from a number of perspectives. It alone has the capacity for what we would call choice. But subsequent processing, once input data has left consciousness, seems to me almost certainly to be by means of high?speed, rule?bound algorithmic devices. And it is these which actual determine what "we" do. This leads me to assume that once a given data set is feed into one of these, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

Why then can we not predict with unerring accuracy what an individual will do? Perhaps principally because we cannot predict with certainty what consciousness will feed into the decision?taking algorithms. However, according to this model, the fact that you cannot tell what I will do next, does not mean that I have free will. Sadly, I'm as much in the dark as you are!

Mike makes a very strong point here about free will. If my rough theory of consciousness is correct, consciousness is an afterthought rationalizer (Gazzaniga's concept) which then feeds back its convictions and its fancies to lower levels of the brain. Those lower levels are where decisions are really made. So conscious will deludes itself when it thinks its in charge of moment-to-moment decisions. Yet there's a reality hidden in the illusion, too. If the feedback from the conscious will is shoved downward with enough conviction and peristence, it can train the actual decision-makers to follow the guidelines will has picked. Which means free will does not exist in consciousness entirely but in the lower levels of the brain where decisions are actually made. I say "not entirely" because the consciousness DOES participate indirectly in decision making though the concepts and distillations of them into actions which it fixes on as a worldview or a sense of self or a determined commitment to values. These it sends back and implants in the non?verbal brain for use in later processing and decision making. To that extent the conscious mind IS involved in choice.

However since the instant of choice takes place in the non?verbal brain, and since this is not deterministic, then there's a good chance that even a non?verbal and non?cerebral organism like a bacterium which makes a not?totally deterministic choice may well have "free?will" too. But, again, let's distinguish between "free will"??the ability to make a non?deterministic choice through the use of whatever physical mechanism one uses to decide whether to make a right turn or a left??and what we humans call "will"??that powerful sense of conviction which can drive us in a Nietzschean manner to accomplish the impossible. Will is something we still have not located or explained.

As for Joa Sousa's arguments that everything in a physical mechanism is determined in a LaPlaceian manner, this just doesn't seem to be so. LaPlace hasn't ever been shown to work out on the level of macro, or even micro and quantum entities. Photons and electrons have this annoying ability to jump around and be in two places at once, two states at once. Or so it appears using the primitive tools of our technology and of our current concepts. Who knows what it will look like in a hundred years? Still, LaPlace's Newtonian billiard ball model has been pretty well trashed, not because it is old and out?of?fashion, but because it simply doesn't apply to very much at all in the phenomenal, the empirical, the "real" world.

In a message dated 98?02?01 10:21:46 EST,

<< it has been shown over and over again that what we call consciousness is a post hoc rationaliser, forced to come up with explanations ? not infrequently wrong ? for decisions already taken elsewhere in the brain, and always with the objective of falsely maintaining your intuitive sense that it's in charge. << As we can also have a good stab at determining where the sense of self, central to consciousness, peters out in the animal kingdom ? experiments with mirrors suggest that chimps have it whereas macaques don't ? it seems almost certain that it is no more than an essential function of a novel?problem?solving unit, at its most developed in us. It is almost certainly of very recent evolutionarily origin, and even without the clear evidence that this has not happened, it would seen highly unlikely that such a Johnny?come?lately would rapidly supplant whatever it was that so successfully managed the ancestral organisms over the preceding aeons. <<Where then does this leave free?will and the questions raised by Lyle Steadman? Well, free will certainly cannot be truly free if it resides exclusively in the conscious mind. The best that can offer is a non?binding, advisory role to decision making devices located elsewhere. Does it then actually lie, cheek by jowl, with those brain centres which actually call the shots? >>

Then Mike goes on to write:

<<The reason the true decision centres "need" consciousness is because it alone can actually manipulate information and review it from a number of perspectives. It alone has the capacity for what we would call choice. But subsequent processing, once input data has left consciousness, seems to me almost certainly to be by means of high?speed, rule?bound algorithmic devices. And it is these which actual determine what "we" do. This leads me to assume that once a given data set is feed into one of these, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

hb: this seems an interesting idea, but I do strongly suspect that there is a stochastic element, an element of unpredictability, of choice, even in the physical processing modules, whatever they may be, of bacteria when they hit critical choice points (and they frequently do??the "decision" they make may be right or wrong and their lives may depend on its accuracy in modelling future events to avoid a phagocyte or to find an opening in a cell wall that offers opportunity??sperm are up against the same problem, and very few have the right stuff, the physical makeup and the correct decision making machinery to accomplish their goal, insemination of the ovum; which means even sperm have to carry some rough future generation module within them to make their long and complex trek to the spot where an ovum awaits them, then to out?compete their fellow sperm swarming around that ovum and to do whatever it takes to seduce the ovum??which also has choice??into "deciding" that their serenade of chemicals, tactile stimuli [a "mating dance"], or whatever sperm courtship consists of??means they are "Mr. Right"). So I seem to be positing that even bacteria have a future?generation module of some kind. An internal "corollary generator," to revert to my corollary generation theory. This, it is easy to suspect, is one of the primal elements of consciousness. An infant has such future generation and decision modules as well, though they are instantiated in a rapidly developing and changing brain, an organ which the sperm or bacterium do not possess. And perhaps some of the baby's choice?making machinery, its future?generation modules, are located outside the brain??in the vagal "second brain" which exists in the solar plexus, or in the adrenal system, which feeds its guesses via roughly thirty different cortical chemicals throughout the body and targets them to the thyroid, pituitary, and pineal gland in the brain, and to other outside?brain decision centers like the thymus in the upper chest, the pancreas, the testes, and the ovaries, all of which, I suspect, must have their forms of future generators so they can make correct decisions too.

This leaves us with the radical difference between "free will," which apparently does not need consciousness to exist, and "will" of the Nietzschean variety, which involves consciousness quite heavily. Yes, Mike, I think you are right. Will and consciousness are decision refining mechanisms. Will and consciousness are future generators, corollary generators, of far greater power than those available to an infant, a bacterium, an adrenal gland, or a sperm. In fact, will and consciousness can picture futures vigorously, "believe" in them fervently, and send their conviction back to the non?verbal brain centers for participation in future non?verbal decision making. So the non?verbal brain has "free will." But only the story?telling, worldview making, vision?generating, metaphor?maninpulating consciousness can participate in "will" itself. And it does it precisely, I'd suspect, by generating complex pictures of the future based on cultural premises and "conscious" choice between differing views offered by various subcultures. Such subcultures exist even in such primitive social groups as tribes, where clans and moities insure a choice of worldviews and conscious attitudes??the stuff of which will is made. Thus will is partly a choice maker between the variety of worldviews available within a culture. It also sifts through worldviews available from outside the culture, as when Paul Okami, a Californian member of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, rejects standard western models and takes on the models offerered by the Japanese worldview of Zen. And will picks between points of view promoted by exceptional individuals, those quirky souls who generate amalgams of previous notions, corollary-mashes with new properties, emergent properties never seen before. All these interactions of the individual and society, the personal consciousness and the subcultural mix, the visionary's tendency to tap, blend and reinterpret forgotten culture models to create new visions, all are future generation mechanisms, corollary generators, with a sweep and power unavailable to a lone myxobacteria attempting to make its way through its watery world. Or even to a myxobacteria attempting to participate, as myxobacteria do, in a pack attack on a potential source of food. That individual myxobacteria, part of a larger social entity, needs to generate future possibilities and act on them in the hope of getting some of the spoils if the group manages to make its kill, or, if it is in the vanguard, to make sure the struggle against a fish that's trying to escape, a seafood platter exercising its own future?generation and decision making powers in a desperate struggle to survive attack, becomes a meal and doesn't get away. Does this seem to take us anywhere?
<<Why then can we not predict with unerring accuracy what an individual will do? Perhaps principally because we cannot predict with certainty what consciousness will feed into the decision?taking algorithms. However, according to this model, the fact that you cannot tell what I will do next, does not mean that I have free will.

hb??I think you have made a magnificent contribution with your model. And, Mike, I do think what you say means you DO have free will. Howard

Oscillation, the primordial pulse

re: sounds like habit hb: Yup, it sure does. We grasp at a novelty like roller-skating, take a few weeks to learn it, fall, make fools of ourselves, then begin to get the hang of it, rollerskate for a year or two in the local park with great gusto, then get bored and look for something new to add to our kit of habits and skills. We take up the tango and make fools of ourselves all over again, then, once we've mastered it, it eventually grow bored and look for some other novelty--white water rafting, camping in Alaska, rock-climbing, snowboarding. What do we do with the kit of skills we assemble in this way. Is all play really a form of practice for the everyday...and for emergencies too? When we enter a conference room, do we see the problems tossed our way in terms of roller-skating, tango dancing, white water rafting, or rock climbing? Once we've got a big kit of skills, do we see problems and opportunities in terms of all of these tricks we've learned to perform? Do these muscular habits give us tools of comprehension, new forms of metaphor? Boredom and the lust for novelty add to what we feel and know...but how does that show up in everyday life? Howard In a message dated 5/16/2003 9:02:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: It also sounds a lot like habit. "There is a law in this succession of ideas. We may roughly say it is the law of habit. It is the great 'Law of Association of Ideas,' the one law of all psychical action." - Charles Sanders Peirce At 12:57 AM 5/16/03 -0400, wrote: bite, chew, digest, use up, get hungry, bite, chew, digest, use up, get hungry-this is the basic oscillitory pattern of the cosmos.
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amazing, thanks. Howard In a message dated 1/3/2003 2:53:45 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes: At 1/3/2003 01:55 AM, you wrote: gb: In a linear system, these forces would be in a stable equilibrium. In a nonlinear system, ie the brain, turning up the gain might result in bistable behavior, with apparently sudden shifts between the two states. hb: after decades of building radios and operating oscilliscopes, it is time for me to finally reveal my ignorance. What does turn up the gain mean? Turn up the amplification of random bits that may make sense...or that may crash the system with their incoherence? If that were the case, turning up the gain would be exploration and novelty testing. Turning the gain down to exclude the fuzz and buzz of possible discoveries, to focus only on what's tried and true, would be the equivalent of the k phase, the conservative phase, digestion and consolidation. gb: In neural systems, gain refers to the steepness of an S-shaped input-output function. This is typically used to model neural functions in which there is a floor effect, eg once you inhibit a cell, it's pretty much quiescent and doesn't have negative firing rate, and with excitatory inputs, you eventually reach a saturation effect where no matter how much more you drive the cell it doesn't fire any faster. The gain describes how sharp the transition is between these two extremes. Increasing the gain is equivalent to increasing the signal-to-noise ratio, and in the extreme is equivalent to a thresholding function (on or off). very interesting behavior occurs when you connect two neurons like this in which they inhibit each other. If the gain (steepness) is not particularly great, then the system behaves linearly (as one goes up the other goes down). If the gain is large, however, then you observe bistable behavior, where one neuron is completely on and the other is off -- no in between. g
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Hmmm, so ants create order using lateral inhibition of precisely the same kind that sweeps the debris from between batches of matter competing to become stars. Ants use oscillation to produce the architecture of a burial place. Termites use a similar "local activation and long-range inhitition" to create the pillars, arches, walls, and architecture of their mounds. There's many a form of ebb and tide, of crest and trough, of primal wave, in the way this universe is made. Howard
Orderly Ant Corpses NYT July 23, 2002 By HENRY FOUNTAIN [What are the human analogies?] When it comes to planned communities, there is none more planned than a graveyard. To ensure that the departed truly rest in peace, many cemeteries have regulations to govern plot location and size, maintenance, placing of flowers and wreaths and even access. (In addition to being planned, most cemeteries are gated communities, too.) Some ants keep their cemeteries just as well organized. Ants will move a corpse and pile it up with others to create a tidy final resting place. There are no rules and regulations, of course, but as researchers from France, Belgium and Spain have discovered, there are some principles at work. The researchers conducted experiments on ant colonies, distributing corpses around the edge of a circular arena and then watching as worker ants tended to the dead. After six or more hours, the ants had moved the corpses into a stable pattern of piles of roughly equal size. Out of the initial chaos and without communicating, the workers had created order. Writing in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers noted that the pattern was produced by application of two simple rules. First, ants are more likely to put a corpse where there already are a bunch of corpses. Second, the growth of any one pile is slowed as the supply of nearby corpses is reduced. Fans of the mathematician Alan Turing may recognize that this is a demonstration of a process that he first described, hypothetically, in 1952 to account for patterns in nature like a zebra's stripes or a leopard's spots. The process is called local activation and long-range inhibition. In the ant experiments, pile growth involves local activation (a growing pile induces more growth of the pile) and long-range inhibition (a growing pile means that there will be fewer corpses elsewhere). The researchers, using a mathematical model, say it is one of the first demonstrations of this kind of self-organized behavior in a biological system. Signals From Cells When a single cell within an organism dies, it isn't buried or tossed on a pile. It's eaten, consumed by another type of cell called a phagocyte. But just how does a phagocyte know not to eat a healthy cell? Scientists have long thought that in apoptosis, the programmed death of cells that occurs, for instance, as an embryo develops, the dying cells produce a chemical signal that tells phagocytes that there is prey around. But a new study by scientists at two British universities shows that another pathway may be at work, one that involves the removal of an existing signal. Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers described their experiments with healthy and dying white blood cells. They found that these cells and the phagocytes that consume them both have a protein, called CD31, that binds them together. If a blood cell is healthy, the phagocyte stays bound to it only briefly, detaching after getting a "repulsion" signal through the protein. But if the cell is dying, the signal is blocked, so the phagocyte stays locked to it and does its dirty work. Exactly what the signal consists of is a subject for further research. Pterosaur's Dining Habits The fossilized skull of a new pterosaur species has been discovered in Brazil, and the finding shows that this flying reptile had an odd way of eating: it skimmed along the surface of a lake or ocean looking for food. Pterosaurs lived in the time of the dinosaurs, but little is known about them. The fossil, discovered by two scientists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History, shows that this pterosaur, at least, had long jawbones that the researchers suggest are similar to those of skimming birds. Writing in Science, the researchers say the pterosaur, with a wingspan over 12 feet, probably glided along the water and dipped its head when it ran into food. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/science/23OBSE.html?ex=1028626354&ei=1&en=a78923b45dd233e9
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even matter has a waveform. It is like a wave stuck in a repetition of just one position. Stable as it seems, it's a balancing act, a frozen struggle between attraction and repulsion-or a heap of zillions of these whimp/whomp tugs between the need to squeeze together and the need to separate. Shoot two buckyballs-each 60 atoms in size-through a slit screen and you get…interference patterns-the tell-tale stripes created by the whimps and woggles of two waves. (Formally this is known as double-slit interference experiment.) Hb (see Retrieved December 30, 2001, from the World Wide Web <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?Did=000000066652527&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=1&Sid=1&RQT=309> 100 years of quantum mysteries Scientific American; New York; Feb 2001; Max Tegmark; John Archibald Wheeler; Volume: 284 Issue: 2 Start Page: 68-75 \text\<..\teXT\phySICS> to check this out further, see <http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/index.pl>
corpse where there already are a bunch of corpses. Second, the growth of any one pile is slowed as the supply of nearby corpses is reduced. Fans of the mathematician Alan Turing may recognize that this is a demonstration of a process that he first described, hypothetically, in 1952 to account for patterns in nature like a zebra's stripes or a leopard's spots. The process is called local activation and long-range inhibition. In the ant experiments, pile growth involves local activation (a growing pile induces more growth of the pile) and long-range inhibition (a growing pile means that there will be fewer corpses elsewhere). The researchers, using a mathematical model, say it is one of the first demonstrations of this kind of self-organized behavior in a biological system. Signals From Cells When a single cell within an organism dies, it isn't buried or tossed on a pile. It's eaten, consumed by another type of cell called a phagocyte. But just how does a phagocyte know not to eat a healthy cell? Scientists have long thought that in apoptosis, the programmed death of cells that occurs, for instance, as an embryo develops, the dying cells produce a chemical signal that tells phagocytes that there is prey around. But a new study by scientists at two British universities shows that another pathway may be at work, one that involves the removal of an existing signal. Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers described their experiments with healthy and dying white blood cells. They found that these cells and the phagocytes that consume them both have a protein, called CD31, that binds them together. If a blood cell is healthy, the phagocyte stays bound to it only briefly, detaching after getting a "repulsion" signal through the protein. But if the cell is dying, the signal is blocked, so the phagocyte stays locked to it and does its dirty work. Exactly what the signal consists of is a subject for further research. Pterosaur's Dining Habits The fossilized skull of a new pterosaur species has been discovered in Brazil, and the finding shows that this flying reptile had an odd way of eating: it skimmed along the surface of a lake or ocean looking for food. Pterosaurs lived in the time of the dinosaurs, but little is known about them. The fossil, discovered by two scientists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History, shows that this pterosaur, at least, had long jawbones that the researchers suggest are similar to those of skimming birds. Writing in Science, the researchers say the pterosaur, with a wingspan over 12 feet, probably glided along the water and dipped its head when it ran into food. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/science/23OBSE.html?ex=1028626354&ei=1&en=a78923b45dd233e9
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even matter has a waveform. It is like a wave stuck in a repetition of just one position. Stable as it seems, it's a balancing act, a frozen struggle between attraction and repulsion-or a heap of zillions of these whimp/whomp tugs between the need to squeeze together and the need to separate. Shoot two buckyballs-each 60 atoms in size-through a slit screen and you get…interference patterns-the tell-tale stripes created by the whimps and woggles of two waves. (Formally this is known as double-slit interference experiment.) Hb (see Retrieved December 30, 2001, from the World Wide Web <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?Did=000000066652527&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=1&Sid=1&RQT=309> 100 years of quantum mysteries Scientific American; New York; Feb 2001; Max Tegmark; John Archibald Wheeler; Volume: 284 Issue: 2 Start Page: 68-75 \text\<..\teXT\phySICS> to check this out further, see <http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/index.pl>
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Here's a bit of maniacal thinking with consequences that could prove powerful. Take a look and see if how daft and delusional it looks to you.
Physicists believe that this cosmos is addicted to symmetries. Symmetrical obsession, in fact, is one of the reasons the human aesthetic sensibility so often comes up with fantasies that turn out later to reflect realities. Einstein and many other physicists have cooked up with abstract mathematical systems that seemed to describe the "proven facts" of their day. But there was often something wrong-a fly in the aesthetic ointment. The equations worked right but didn't FEEL right. They weren't "beautiful"-usually because they were off kilter, their symmetry wasn't perfect.
Time after time, a mathematical physicist has cheated and re-tweaked the equations to wipe out the imbalance and create a factually inaccurate, but gorgeous result. Then, voila, some years or decades down the road, the fudge factors tossed in to satisfy the physicist's artistic sense have accounted for new data pouring in from new scientific eyes and ears like the Hubble Space Telescope. The cheating turned out to be an unrecognized form of prescience. Why? Usually the answer has been symmetry.
With symmetry in mind, try this necklace of connections on for size. I've been blabbering for years about the universe's propensity to work in paradoxes, and have repeated what may be an utterly fallacious phrase of my own devising: "opposites are joined at the hip." Then there's another thought Martin Rees' book Before the Beginning and this group's five years of discussion of entropy have triggered in the last few days-the universe abhors a stasis; a sit-in-the-middle-and-do-nothing or a wandering-around-aimlessly-ness. Or, to put it differently, the universe abhors a thermodynamic equilibrium-the state of ultimate randomness toward which Second Law of Thermodynamics Fans claim we are constantly drifting.
Add in yet another thought-the notion that there's oscillation no matter where you turn in the universe--
-in the pressure waves ringing the post-Big Bang like a gong
-in the rippling waves of electromagnetic rays traveling in straight lines
-in the waveforms of electrons circling an atomic nucleus
-in the lateral inhibition that sets up crests and valleys between photoreceptors in the iris
-and in the cultural oscillations of fads, fashions, conservatisms and radical rebellions.
Sounds like an agenda of babbling topics for a convention of madmen, right? OK, now look at a key finding of the article below. What happens when you get one learning machine, one neural net, to train another? The two become alike. They meet, says the article, at a common point in their center. So far, so good. Studies done in the 1950s and 1960s of patients in therapy showed something similar. Put a patient and a psychotherapist together and the therapist will say that the patient is moving toward a cure once the patient begins talking like the therapist. Or look at the studies done by Condon and others in the Edward Hall school of anthropology-put two people in a room, let them talk, and the pair will begin to synchronize their body language and rhythms, and will enter into a non-verbal duet.
The odd thing in the piece below is the appearance of an ordinary, everyday cliché. When neural nets train each other, they become mirror images of each other-"equal but opposite." Equal but opposite? What a bizarre concept. How can two things be equal yet opposite. How can they be utterly alike AND totally opposed? The answer is symmetry.
So what does symmetry produce? Opposite ends of paradoxes joined at the hip-good and evil, day and night, boom and bust, depression and elation, convergence and dissipation, attraction and repulsion, wrong and right.
And what is oscillation? A wavering between two opposite (but equal) poles of this sort.
Symmetry=opposites=equals=paradox=oscillation. What's more, oscillation=music=math=the rules of the cosmos. And music=emotion. Which, if there's anything more than gibberish to this, might mean that there's more than meets the eye to the connection between the human emotions and the cosmos, between anthropos and the universe, and between anthropomorphism and the inanimate form of morphing we call evolution. Or, to put it differently, nature may abhor a stasis and a thermodynamic equilibrium, but she's drunk on generating opposites and symmetries, then on twisting and jumping from one end of a symmetry to the other. We call this dance craze of mother nature an oscillation, a wave form.
See, I told you it would sound crazy. Howard
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Don--Thoroughly agreed and wonderfully put. No matter how much you homogenize, hegemonize, or globalize, humans are simultaneously drawn to aggregation and separation, to intimacy and the need to avoid being smothered, and above all else to squabbling--finding minor differences and making a big deal over them. Peter Richerson would say that though we are going global, we still need to satisfy our old family and tribe instincts by congregating in small, contentious subgroups. He'd be right. So would your meme-stack predictions. No matter where you look in this cosmos, attraction and repulsion are paired and keep us literally throbbing with lateral inhibition, the constant creation of what Darwin called variation and what some call creativity. Even some of the microbits suspended in water I just wrote about to Greg Bear often pull together then push apart in a constant pulse. So do the convection cells Dorion Sagan has described so vividly.
Another note: your statement of the need for horizontal and vertical dimension viewed simultaneously is a good one. But I suspect we need to add a fifth dimension to our thinking. And here I'm speaking literally. It's late, and once again I'll have to end before I can explain exactly what I mean. Howard
We pulse upward with fracticality. That's the Spiral Dynamic theme. From the smallest hint of things come vast and strange unravellings.
In a message dated 3/28/02 9:28:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
Yes, Howard, and we are also engaged in meme swapping at a rapid rate. It should be clear, however, we are not melting into a primal soup-of-sorts that dissolve unique human differences into a glob of tasteless uniformity. Rather, the magnetic pull in our vMeme stacks provide a cohesion principle and process that maintains the real diversities in our mass mind. While we often curse clans, tribes, empires, holy orders, enterprises, communes and natural meshworks, these are the essential pillars that support and facilitate the evolution of our kind. They provide the foundation stones; the organizing principles; the developmental tracks, and the game board for your intergroup tournaments. Flatlanders can't play on these board because they lack the three dimensional depth-of-vision to enable them to play both on the horizontal and the vertical trajectories simultaneously. It takes both the horizontal and the vertical insights and actions to keep us slightly ahead in our struggle with microbes.
This is the memome's way of making the great escape.
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<http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99992067> newscientist.com Neural network 'in-jokes' could pass secrets 19:10 23 March 02 Charles Choi, New York Artificial brains could use "in-jokes" to deliver secret messages, according to computer scientists. The technique relies on neural networks, computer systems designed to mimic the brain. Just as the brain's nerve cells are wired together in a complex mesh, neural nets consist of a web of electrical switches, or a computer simulation of these connections. When neural networks tackle a problem, connections that are ultimately successful become stronger than those that give a wrong answer. The more lessons a network trains with, the better it learns which pathways to follow to find the right answers. What happens, then, when two different neural networks are used to train each other? Wolfgang Kinzel of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Wurzburg, Germany, and Ido Kanter of the Minerva Center in Ramat-Gan, Israel, tried it with old-fashioned hardware networks, and found that the two met in the middle, becoming mirror images. Equal and opposite In each lesson, the scientists asked the computers to categorise unique, random pieces of information with the aim of getting the same answer as their partner. After each round, they compared each other's results. In a surprisingly short time, the two networks became aligned so that their properties are equal and opposite at every point. Connections that flowed one way in one network went in the opposite direction in its partner. From there, it is a simple step for one of the pair to reverse all its weightings so the two networks end up identical. They would have the same weightings, without ever having told each other what they were. The researchers realised that this phenomenon could be useful in cryptography. At present, computers that need to exchange information securely use codes or "keys" based on huge numbers. But one weakness of this system is that the sender has to secretly tell the receiver what the key is before they can start exchanging messages. An eavesdropper who hears the key will be able to decode any subsequent communications. But synchronised neural networks could use their hidden weightings as the key. Jumping to conclusions Imagine two friends talking in public surrounded by eavesdroppers. If the friends share an in-joke, the spies - not having shared the same unique experiences - will have a hard time figuring out what is going on. Similarly, synchronised networks will jump to the same conclusion, given the same limited information. Immediate applications might include anything that needs to send information rapidly and securely, such as mobile phones, video conferencing and Internet communication. Kinzel even speculates that living organisms might be using the same principle to transfer information between different parts of the nervous system. The technique could be quite powerful, says computer engineer Don Wunsch at the University of Missouri in Rolla. "I could see it becoming an alternative when users need to create a cheap and fast encryption with a minimum of shared communication, when security is of moderate, but not life-and-death, concern." 19:10 23 March 02 Return to news story © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
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why do photons pulsate? Why do they grow larger, then smaller as they travel? This seems like something one would expect of organisms--which use pulsation for numerous purposes, from searching the opportunities and hazards of their environment to taking in nutrients and expelling wastes. But that a basic particle should pulsate? This means that the conjoined opposites of shrinkage and growth were operating when the first leptons made their grab for the big time--which means during roughly the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang. Interesting. So we had not just repulsion and attraction, but their cousin, oscillation, from the first instant of all that ever was in this particular universe. And it's now complexifying via iterative processes into what will come next and the nextnesses beyond imagining. Howard
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Alex Burns and hb 1130-01 >hb: I noticed that. The manifestos of goth culture and of rave and >ecstasy cultures are resurrections of what I went through in the >sixties. they appeal to me hugely. Your observation of pop culture's >fracticality is brilliant. ab: Actually, there's a key idea here, called Dark Renaissance, that Richard and I have been kicking around. The idea was first expressed on an alt.satanism group posting, so I mapped out the cultural dynamics and added a lot of depth. It might be part of a Masters/PhD proposal, if I get faculty approval. hb: sounds neat, and it also sounds isomorphic to the material in the Bloom Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe including the human soul on the fracticality and oscilatory patter of generation gaps and how those reflect more basic patterns from the big bang on up. This universe is simply nuts about oscillation--put another way, it has a jones for self-contradiction.
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Van Philpot and I were discussing the universality of liquid patterns of pulsation, turbulence, and vortex-like movement in the universe a few weeks ago on the phone. Van has developed some ideas about the connections between the patterns of those masses of membrane-bound liquids which we call our bodies and the flows of form in the cosmos. At first glance, this sounds like a very far stretch indeed. But when one examines such books as Philip Ball's The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), one realizes that there are fundamental cycles of self-organization in this cosmos which repeat on numerous levels of complexity.
Physicist Lee Smolin proposes that galaxies are very much like evolving ecosystems--interlinked meshes of entities repeating large and small scale patterns whose iteration yanks them ever-so-slowly up a ladder of complexity. Those patterns are partially governed by the same rules which shape the swirls of cream in a coffee cup. The pulsations of the sun are driven by many of the same rules--convection, for example. So when the authors of an article like the one below about new rhythmic swirls discovered in the sun's center compare solar rhythms to a heartbeat, they may be utilizing more than anthropomorphic metaphor. They may be hinting at the patterns of self organization genes must harness to create a regularly beating circulator of liquids like the heart. Or they may not. But looking for these basic patterns could be highly important to the science of the new millennium. The SCIENCE of the new millennium, not its superstitions.
This is one reason that the move of physicists like Eshel Ben-Jacob into biology may signal a turning point in the way we understand the continuities between inanimate matter and life. If we are lucky, comprehending these continuities may help us tackle an even larger mystery--the jump from that which is not alive to life, and beyond that, the leap from non-conscious life forms to those with that internal cosmos we call consciousness. Howard
P.S. Spending a month researching Pythagoras for Global Brain, it seems at first glance, may have shredded what little sanity I had left. Pythagoras saw a continuity between mathematics, music, man, and the spheres. But another ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus had an equally nutty idea--that matter was made up of invisible particles called atoms. Old ideas in the light of new findings sometimes turn out to have a validity of a sort their originators could never have imagined.
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Source: National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov) Date: Posted 3/31/2000 Solar "Heartbeat" Discovered: The Beat Goes On -- Inside The Sun Astronomers from the National Science Foundation's National Solar Observatory (NSO) have discovered a solar "heartbeat" in the motion of layers of gas circulating beneath the sun's surface. Their research shows that some layers speed up and slow down about every 16 months. This internal motion provides clues to understanding the cycle of activity observed on the surface. Understanding the solar cycle is a fundamental objective of solar astronomy. Every 11 years, the normally quiet sun exhibits a high level of activity in the form of sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections. These eruptions can affect cellular phones, power distribution systems, satellites and other sensitive technology. Rachel Howe, Frank Hill and Rudi Komm of the NSO in Tucson, Ariz., and their colleagues analyzed more than four years of observations from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG), a worldwide network of solar telescopes, to detect and model motion inside the sun. They report their results in the March 31 issue of Science. The sun is made up of layers of gas. Scientists probe these layers by using helioseismic methods to analyze sound waves traveling through the sun's interior. The techniques are similar to the seismic techniques used to study earthquakes. Howe's team examined layers extending almost halfway to the solar core and measured the speed of movement at different depths. They believe the patterns in these movements are connected to the cycle of eruptions seen on the surface. "We listen to the sun's 'heartbeat' to understand what is happening in its core," explains Hill. Unlike the earth, all points on the solar surface do not rotate at the same rate. The solar equator rotates once every 27 days, while the rotation rate at the sun's poles slows to once every 35 days. This "differential" rotation, long a mystery of solar physics, extends through the sun's turbulent convective layer, located about 210,000 kilometers below the surface -- nearly one-third of the distance to the solar core. Below this layer, the differential rotation vanishes. At the edge of the convective layer, Howe and her colleagues used GONG data to determine that the rotation rate varies periodically, completing a cycle about every 15-16 months. The team used data from the NASA and European Space Agency's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft to confirm the pattern of these variations. "At first we were skeptical of the pattern. Knowing the complexity of models used to explain the solar magnetic field and its connection to observed solar activity, we were expecting nothing, or chaos, in our observations at that location," said Howe. The GONG network (http://www.gong.noao.edu/sites/sites.html) is an international project led by the National Science Foundation. It provides continuous observations of the sun, monitoring the surface and tracking its tiny oscillations 24 hours a day. These oscillations are visual evidence of the sound waves traveling through the sun's interior. -NSF- Editors: Images and video are available at http://www.nso.noao.edu/press/tach/ Also see http://www.gong.noao.edu Editor's Note: The original news release can be found at http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/press/00/pr0015.htm Note:
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The previous rant on the relationship between viscous flows of galactic material, solar plasmas, and those which DNA orchestrates to construct and maintain an organism was inspired by the following article submitted by David Schwaderer. We now have a field called astrobiology, reports this piece. Which means that the link between life and the cosmos has been posited in one direction-that there may be life on other planets or moons. Now to see the connection pursued in the opposite directions-how do the rules which give form to the cosmos show up in the formation of life? What elemental algorithms of self-organization are choreographed to create not just the massive motet of a star but the micro-symphony of a human being? Howard
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This artist's conception shows a proposed ice-penetrating cryobot and a submersible hydrobot that could be used to explore a hidden body of Antarctic water known as Lake Vostok as well as what appears to be an ice-covered ocean on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Astrobiology: A down-to-earth view The search for life in the universe begins in your back yard By Alan Boyle MSNBC SEATTLE, March 31 - The word "astrobiology" may summon up images of boldly going in search of Vulcans or even more exotic aliens. You might think it has to do primarily with Mars, or Europa, or planets around other suns. But the fact is, Topic A in the rapidly growing field of astrobiology is good old Planet Earth. THE EMPHASIS on Earth comes through loud and clear in the agenda for NASA's Astrobiology Science Conference, scheduled April 3-5 at Ames Research Center in California. More than half of the 51 presentations on the schedule focus on life on Earth - how it arose in the distant past, how it endures in extreme environments, how it can be affected by climate and chemistry. "We define astrobiology in the broadest way as the study of life in the universe," said David Morrison, who heads Ames' astrobiology and space research directorate. And since Earth is the only place in the universe where we know life exists, "we have to start with what we know," he said. "One of the fascinating aspects of astrobiology is that it's asking the same questions that mankind has been asking for thousands of years," said Lynn Rothschild, a NASA evolutionary biologist who chairs the conference's local organizing committee. "We tend to be a very self-centered species." IN THE CLASSROOM There are many strategies in the search for extraterrestrial life. Which do you think could be the most fruitful? Looking for traces of ancient life on Mars. Exploring the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Listening for faraway radio signals. Investigating distant Earthlike planets. None of the above (discuss on Space News BBS). Vote to see results Earthly matters also figure prominently at the University of Washington's astrobiology program in Seattle, where graduate students in such fields as oceanography, atmospheric science, astronomy, geology, chemistry and mathematics pore through scientific papers and classroom seminars about life's place in the universe. It's considered the nation's first doctoral program in astrobiology, supported by a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program. Eight students were selected for this first year of the program. The topic for a recent class was the Snowball Earth theory, which proposes that our planet went through a global deep-freeze hundreds of millions of years ago. In some ways, the "ice-covered Earth was similar to an ice-free Mars," suggested University of Chicago geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert, the guest speaker for the day. The discussion ranged from the roles that clouds, volcanoes and carbon dioxide levels play in determining a planet's climate ... to different models for photosynthesis ... to plate tectonics ... to the latest findings from Mars Global Surveyor ... to the potential traces of ancient life left behind in fossil formations known as stromatolites. That kind of scientific cross-pollination may sound dizzying, but it's just what the students were looking for. "I like the way different disciplines interrelate with each other," said Craig Brown, a first-year graduate student in atmospheric sciences. The instructors like it, too. "Four years ago, you couldn't get an oceanographer to listen to you for five minutes about planets," recalled Conway Leovy, an atmospheric sciences professor who is a co-investigator in the astrobiology program. Since then, scientists have become increasingly interested in the potential parallels between the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of Earth's oceans and the conditions that may exist beneath the surface ice on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. TO BE OR NOT TO BE? Biologists have been surprised to find life enduring at the volcanic vents, within polar ice and in rock miles beneath Earth's crust. At the same time, revelations about water beyond Earth and planets beyond our solar system have led astronomers to wonder whether life might have gained similar footholds in otherworldly environments. Advertisement Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee Scientists say the quest is worth taking on, even if it turns out that life is unique to Earth. If astrobiologists find no signs of life in extraterrestrial environments that are similar to Earth's, "it's equally important for us to know ... why not?" Rothschild said. Whether or not there's life out there, it's essential to take a closer look at life down here, Morrison said. He voiced particular interest in Earth's extreme environments and the largely undiscovered world of microscopic organisms. "If you dug up a bucket of dirt in your back yard, you'd find more microbes in there than there are stars in the galaxy, and 99 percent of them are unknown," he said. That's why some of the presentations at the astrobiology conference focus on microscopic organisms found within Arctic sea ice, or within the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, or within boiling-hot sulfide chimneys on the bottom of the Pacific. Such organisms seem to be the most likely suspects in the search for life beyond Earth. Advertisement In fact, two University of Washington researchers argue that microbes might well be the only kind of life that scientists could ever expect to find out there. In the book "Rare Earth," paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee say Earth benefited from a hard-to-match combination of fortunate factors - ranging from its position in the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy to global climate changes and the timing of asteroid and comet impacts. "This may be as good as it gets in terms of diversity," Ward said. Ward and a colleague, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, are now looking into whether supernovae or other cosmic factors may have played a role in winnowing down Earth's species. "We still have a bunch of mass extinctions that have no (apparent) cause, but certainly we know that something caused them," Ward said. Some evolutionary theorists argue that the development of complex life was driven by close shaves that required organisms to adapt or die - a cosmic manifestation of the saying, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." If that's the case, then the path toward higher species traced a narrow line between the torpor of unconsciousness and the terror of extinction. Even researchers involved in the search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations acknowledge that intelligent life must be far rarer than mute microbes. Otherwise, the galaxy would be busier than the alien-filled cantina in the movie "Star Wars." But they contend that even if complex life is exceedingly rare, the vast number of stellar systems in our galaxy evens out the odds. Ward admits he's had some healthy debates with SETI researchers and calls them "first-class" scientists - who happen to hold a different point of view. "We really have to agree to disagree on some of these unknowable questions," he said.

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Steve Goldberg refers to a New York Times article on string theory and asks, "doesn't the theory strike other readers as a _tad_ ad hoc? "
Steve--I've enclosed the article you mentioned below. Why does string theory sound ad hoc? Yes, it does sound like it may be a mathematical widget of the type used by Copernicans to shore up their shredding theory of the universe back in 1500 or so. But on another level, like all mathematical systems, it's its own self-consistent universe. It may or may not resemble reality, but it has a sort of Platonic reality all its own. Or, to put it differently, it is a rigorous fantasy guided by rules based on axiomatic premises which are possible in this world of conceivable multiverses, but which may never sneak from possibility into solidity. So, yes, it does have the feel of a quick-fix patch on a leaking inner tube.
When one looks at the history of physics, one realizes how leaky that inner tube might be. It is still trying to incorporate laws derived early in the 19th century. Even the Theory of Relativity was an attempt to get these antique concepts to segue smoothly with the new observations which had accumulated since the days of Maxwell and Faraday.
In this sense, all the current efforts to find a GUT, a grand unified theory of physics, seem a bit creaky. All incorporate approaches which may have outlived their time. Physics seems to ache for a new paradigm which will remove the mess of patchwork complexities added to keep the rickety old machine operating--a paradigm which will satisfy the demands of Occam's razor and dazzle us all with its simplicity.
One thing that strikes me is the manner in which string theory and many of the other approaches of modern physics are consistently described as musical. George Johnson, in the piece below, says the string theory he describes would unify "all the forces ...into one.. -- as a kind of mathematical music played by an orchestra of tiny vibrating strings. Each note in this cosmic symphony would represent one of the many different kinds of particles that make up matter and energy."
Schrodinger's equations for quantum wave mechanics were based on mathematical descriptions of the vibration patterns of stringed instruments and drums. (Sternglass: 28-29.) This isn't surprising when one considers that sound is a pattern of waves, and music a subset of this form of oscillation.
The music of the universe--an old Pythagorean concept--comes up in astrophysics as well. One of its latest manifestations is the notion that for its first 300,000 years of existence, the universe rang like a huge gong. The plasma of proton-neutron clusters colliding at superspeed with was more like a thick, hyperactive soup than like the gaping black space with which we're familiar. Dip a spoon in a soup and you get ripples--pressure waves--yet another equivalent of the pressure waves in air which our ears decipher as sound.
Making things all the more Pythagorean is the fact that according to former head of the Apollo Lunar Station Program at Westinghouse Research Laboratories, Ernest J. Sternglass, Einstein was insistent on taming the wildly abstract quantum mechanics of his day and turning it into a visualizable, geometric system with its probabilistic uncertainties resolved into hard and fast predictabilities. Sternglass had the privilege of a bit of time with Einstein, so may know whereof he speaks.
Once you reduce the universe to music, you reduce it to oscillations and begin moving in the direction of some very strange things indeed. We can see the fractal repetition of oscillating patterns all over the place. Aside from the aforementioned first 300,000 years, when the universe chimed like a bell, the sun has a beat, a rhythmic pulse, that in many ways is like the pulse of the human heart. Then there are human things like romance, which pulse back and forth like the sun or like the masses of matter which collect in galactic whorls. Humans fall in love with someone distant whom they'd love to get close to. Once they gotten close, they panic and run. Commitment phobia hits women as well as men. So in a romance, men and women move together, then apart as regularly as the beat of the heart The music of the spheres is alive in the way we love each other.
Then there are our intellectual cycles, wavering back and forth between holism and reductionism but raising the same questions in 2000 as were raised in 1830 by the holists Goethe inspired or in 1848 by the reductionists who were rebelling against Goethe's influence. Just as the ringing of the early universe helped move it forward in degrees of complexity, our oscillations from left-brain micro-slicing to right brain piecing together of big pictures and back again produces continuous movement upward. The old questions take on new dimensions when they're asked in a medium thick with new and as-yet-incompletely digested ideas and discoveries. So we thinkers, too, oscillate like a plasma ringing with pressure waves.
It would seem that our curiosities, our passions, our music, the sun, and the Big Bang are all linked. This makes sense if one believes in a fractally unfolding universe. Fractal unfoldings oscillate back and forth between fresh wonders of intricacy and the reemergence of the old patterns on which they were initially based. We may be mere manifestations of an ancient algorithm, a basic cosmic rule. infinitely superimposed and retraced. Howard
In a message dated 4/8/00 1:04:01 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes:

The NY Times Tuesday Science Section had a lead article on string theory
(which now introduces "branes" to overcome problems of mathematics and
explanatory power).

I'm sorry T can't provide the article; I don't have a scanner (keep meaning
to get one). However, it was no doubt reprinted in other papers and is, I
imagine, available on the Times web site.

Question: I don't doubt that the theory is mathematically beautiful, even if,
to this point, entirely untested and, possibly, intestable in practice.

But doesn't the theory strike other readers as a _tad_ ad hoc?

Best,
Steve Goldberg
>>
New York Times April 4, 2000, Physicists Finally Find a Way to Test Superstring Theory By GEORGE JOHNSON For a quarter of a century, superstring theory has promised that the universe could be understood more deeply than ever before, with all the forces unified into one, if it were seen in a startling new light -- as a kind of mathematical music played by an orchestra of tiny vibrating strings. Each note in this cosmic symphony would represent one of the many different kinds of particles that make up matter and energy. But despite heroic efforts to keep this strange vision alive, with one mathematical embellishment after another, a seemingly fatal credibility problem has remained: no one has been able to figure out how to test the idea with experiments. To give the strings enough wiggle room to carry out their virtuoso performance, theorists have had to supplement the familiar three dimensions of space with six more -- curled up so tiny that they would be explorable only with absurdly high-powered particle accelerators the size of an entire galaxy. It's a fact of life on the subatomic realm that smaller and smaller distances take higher and higher energies to probe. In the last few months, however, new ideas emerging from the theoretical workshops offer some hope of connecting the airy speculations to reality. Physicists are proposing a revised view in which at least one of the extra dimensions is vastly larger -- large enough perhaps to be indirectly detected with existing accelerators. "This is a field day for the experimenters," said Dr. Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. "Now there are all these things they can look for." In fact, he ventured, it is conceivable that experimenters have already found subtle hints of other dimensions. They just have had no way of appreciating what they were seeing. Though human brains are not wired to picture a world beyond the familiar three dimensions of space, one can begin to overcome this myopia by pretending to be antlike creatures in a two-dimensional fantasy world like the one in Edwin A. Abbott's story "Flatland." Confined to the surface of a plane, the Flatlanders can move left and right or forward or backward, but the idea of up and down is inconceivable to them. Now suppose this two-dimensional world were rolled into a long tube. The Flatlanders could still move in only two directions -- along or around the outside surface of their soda straw universe. But if the diameter of the straw were made extremely tiny, this second, curled-up dimension would essentially disappear. It has long been assumed that if, as required by superstring theory, our own world is accompanied by additional dimensions, they too would have to be extremely tiny, curled up smaller than what physicists call the Planck length, which is a hundred million trillion times smaller than the width of a proton. To every point in space would be attached a vanishingly tiny six-dimensional ball. But the price for curling up the extra dimensions and tucking them out of sight has been rendering superstring theory untestable. The subatomic realm is explored by smashing together particles with powerful accelerators and then studying the debris. Peeking below the Planck scale would require collisions of unimaginable energies. "For the first 25 years, the thinking has been that superstring theory is so difficult to see experimentally that you have to figure it out by its own mathematical consistency and beauty," Dr. Lykken said. "Now that's completely changed. If this new picture is true, it makes everything we've been talking about testable." But the result is a picture of reality that is no less weird than before. Imagine again the two-dimensional realm of Flatland. Suppose now that it is surrounded by an infinitely large, three-dimensional "hyperspace." And maybe there are also other Flatlands floating around inside the third dimension -- parallel universes separated by what to these two-dimensional denizens would be an uncrossable void. Take this vision and move up an extra dimension and you arrive at the theory that is currently causing all the intellectual commotion. Dr. Lisa Randall of Princeton University and Dr. Raman Sundrum of Stanford University suggest that what we think of as The Universe may be just one of many islands -- three-dimensional versions of Flatland -- floating inside a surrounding megaverse with four spatial dimensions. Each ruled by different laws of physics, the various island universes would be inaccessible to one another. But the tantalizing prospect exists that each would be able to barely sense the other's presence through the weak tug of its gravitational pull. The idea may be easy to dismiss as absurd. But in return for a suspension of disbelief, the new theories suggest answers to some of the biggest riddles of physics. Cosmologists have inferred that as much as 90 percent of the universe must be made from invisible matter that emits or absorbs no light, that is evident only through its gravity. But what is the source of this mysterious dark matter? Maybe it is just ordinary matter trapped on another island universe, with its gravity but not its light able to cross the fourth-dimensional divide. Most significant of all, the new theory could be a step toward the goal of embracing all of physics with one grand picture -- a vision that unites the reigning theory of gravity, Einstein's general relativity, with the Standard Model, which describes electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Theorists have discovered that it is possible to bring about this merger -- on paper, anyway -- if each kind of particle making up the universe is described as a different note produced by tiny superstrings vibrating in nine-dimensional space. This picture includes matter-making particles like the proton and neutron (components of the cores of atoms) and force-carrying particles like the photon (the conveyor of light) and the graviton (the conveyor of gravity). As the unification quest has forged ahead, physicists have found it necessary to expand superstring theory to include vibrating membranes -- called branes for short. These are not just two-dimensional surfaces, like the skin of a drum or the world of the Flatlanders. Hard as it may be to picture, there can be branes with three, four, five or more dimensions. These "surfaces" can be tiny like the strings but they can also span across light-years. What this additional filigree offers is a novel way to hide extra dimensions without making them extremely small. Suppose that our entire universe is a three-dimensional brane (think of it as a bubble) floating inside the four-dimensional megaverse. The reason we cannot explore the surroundings of hyperspace or even sense its existence is that the strings that make up everything in our own world are stuck solidly to the surface of the gargantuan home brane, like ants on a sheet of paper confined to move in only a limited number of directions. We cannot peer into the extra dimension because photons, the carriers of light, are also anchored solidly to our home brane. Several people had toyed with this idea, but they kept running into an obstacle: there did not appear to be any way to get gravitons to stick to the brane. That would create a big problem: It can be shown mathematically that if gravity were allowed to roam throughout all four dimensions, it would be much stronger than the gravity experienced in this three-dimensional realm. "This would clash with everything we've observed, from the motion of the planets to that of climbers falling off cliffs," said Dr. Steve Giddings, a theorist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Randall and Dr. Sundrum's theoretical coup was to show that if the hyperspace was curved in just the right manner, the gravitons could be kept from escaping and becoming unreasonably strong. With that hole plugged, the possibility arises that there are other brane worlds floating out there too, neighboring islands separated by this higher dimensional void. And that suggests how dark matter could simply be regular matter waving to us from another brane. While its photons could move only along the surface of the foreign brane, the gravitons would not be so tightly confined. They could seep across the fourth-dimensional divide. Thus we could dimly feel the matter's gravity without being able to see its light. The theory also suggests why dark matter tends to be found in the halos around galaxies. Because of gravitational attraction, large masses on the other brane would tend to line up with large masses on our home brane. Sitting behind a galaxy in this universe, separated by the void of hyperspace, would be a dark galaxy in the other brane world. Because most of it would be occluded, its gravity would be apparent only around the edges. Conversely, luminous matter on this brane would be dark to observers in the other universe. "We'd look mutually dark to each other," Dr. Sundrum said. "We could only talk through the gravitational force." That would require signaling somehow with gravity waves. Unlike many of physics' far-out theories, the idea of a large extra dimension may be possible to test indirectly. Since gravitons are not so tightly confined as the other particles, sometimes they will stray into the surrounding hyperspace, becoming heavier than the ordinary variety. According to the theorists' calculations, it just may be possible to create momentarily these denizens of the fourth dimension using the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab, where protons are slammed into antiprotons to produce energies measured in trillions of electron-volts. Physicists would not be able to detect heavy gravitons directly -- they would immediately fly off into the higher dimension -- but their existence might be inferred. Energy going into a particle collision must equal the energy coming out. If some is missing and all other possibilities are accounted for, physicists could surmise that the energy was spirited away by the heavy gravitons, carried off into hyperspace. In fact, it might be possible to concentrate so many heavy gravitons into a tiny volume of space that they would collapse in on themselves and create miniature black holes, those cosmic sinkholes from which nothing can escape. Experiments like this will be on the agenda when the Large Hadron Collider begins operation in five or six years at the CERN accelerator center in Geneva. "These black holes should be quite safe," Dr. Giddings said, for they would rapidly evaporate. The intellectual fun may be only beginning. Combining the Randall and Sundrum theory with a conjecture made a couple of years ago by a young Argentinian physicist, Dr. Juan Maldacena, yields the latest big idea: the physics governing the particles stuck to this brane might be a kind of shadow of a more fundamental physics prevailing in the surrounding megaverse. In laser holography, a three-dimensional image is encoded onto a two-dimensional surface. Viewed at the proper angle, the third dimension seems magically to pop out. So think of each separate brane world as a hologram carrying a flattened version of the Truly Universal Laws. Each would capture the view from a slightly different perspective, resulting in different universes ruled by different laws of physics. What denizens of this universe call the Standard Model would not be standard at all, but more like a book of local traffic laws. Viewed from the fourth dimension, however, universality would prevail. If they were clever enough, scientists on each brane world could deduce the same overarching law of gravity, the lingua franca of the megaverse. As they await the data that will provide a reality check, the physicists on this brane are enjoying their new intellectual toy. "We can look at any question we were previously mystified by and get a new handle on it," Dr. Lykken said. "That doesn't mean this is right, but it makes theorists very happy." Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
**
the sun. Then MAP will settle down to capturing microwave photons that have been traveling for about 13 billion years, almost since the beginning of time. For its first 300,000 years, the universe was a hot cauldron ofprotons, electrons, and other charged particles. Light coul&t travel far in this boiling subatomic stew before it bounced off some electron, just as light inside a cloud scatters off droplets of water. The early universe would have looked rather like a thick fog bank-opaque. But after 300,000 years, it cooled off enough to undergo a profound change: Electrons settled down and combined with protons to form hydrogen, which is transparent. Once the fog dispersed, photons traveled freely throughout the universe. Those photons -light from the dawn of creation-bathe us here on Earth; about 400 of them fill every cubic centimeter. If you use an antenna for television reception instead of cable, photons from the cosmic microwave background cause some of the snow on your television screen. Lyman Page likes to call that radiation "the universe's baby picture." m" will study that image in unprecedented detail. For its Survey, COBF divided the sky into about 6,ooo patches, each about as large as 400 fiffl moons. mAp will look at more than 3 million patches, each less than a quarter the size of moon. If coBE glimpsed God, mAp will see the deity's fmg!e@- prints. Cosmologists expect many of their answers to come from an echo frozen in the microwave background. As strange as it may seem, cosmologists believe that before the primbr- dial fog cleared, before light could travel unhindered throli& space, sound waves reverberated freely throughout the universe. The sound waves may have originated in the first instant of the universe's life, when the cosmos underwent an extra- ordinary expansion. In fact, some astronomers would rather call the Big Bang the "Big Stretch." Within a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, a region of space smaller than a proton is thought to have ballooned to the size of Earth. Cosmologists refer to this extraordinary growth as inflation. No one really knows what drove it, but by stretch- ing the very fabric of space, it magnified a weird subatomic phenomenon that is today detectable only in the careful ex- periments of particle physicists: the spontaneous material- ization of particles from a complete vacuum. Vacuum-spawned particles are constantly flickering in and out of existence around us, arising from and sinking back into the void. During inflation, this process, Uc everything else in the universe, was magnified mmendously.'Me rapidly expanding early universe imparted enough energy to these particle wannabes that instead of quickly subsiding into the vacuum, they remained in the real world. The sudden influx of countless particles from the vacuum was like a stone thrown into the dense particle pond of the early universe, sending out ripples -pressure waves. And pressure waves through a gas are nothing more than sound waves. The en- Ltire universe rang like a bell. THOSE REVERBERATIONS WERE ABRUPTLY SILENCED 13 billion years ago, when the universe became transpar- ent. Once photons were traveling freely through space, there was no longer enough pressure to support the sound waves. But before fading forever, those echoes of creation had left their mark on the cosmic microwave background. When sound waves were still spreading through the uni- verse, they compressed the particle soup in some regions of the cosmos and rarefied it in others. Pressure changes cause temperature changes -increase the pressure in a gas and the temperature increases. Microwave photons com- ing from these various regions have slightly different tem- peratures. By looking at temperature patterns in the microwave background, MAP Will give researchers the in- formation needed to reconstruct the precise size and shape of the primordial sound waves. The temperature patterns show the universe just as it was when the particle fog- and the sound waves -vanished. "It's almost like you had waves propagating in a pond, and all of a sudden the pond froze and the pattern ofwaves stayed there says Hinshaw. "We're capturing that-' a snapshot of the time when the universe became transparent." The single most important thing the sound waves will re- veal is the amount of matter present in the universe. If there is a Holy Grail for cosmologists, this is it. Whether the uni- verse will expand forever, or collapse back onto itself in a fiery "Big Crunch," depends on how much matter it holds. With sufficient matter, gravity could slow down or even re- verse the expansion. With too little matter, and thus too lit- tle gravity, the expansion will never end; galaxies will gradually sputter out until the entire universe darkens. Robert Frost wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice." mAp could settle the issue. Cosmologists have struggled for decades to measure the matter in the universe. They've tried to infer it by carefully studying the motions of galaxies and calculating how much matter and gravity would be necessary to produce the ob- served movements. Their calculations show that visible mat- ter- stars and galaxies - accounts for less than zo percent of the required gravity. The rest is attributed to an unknown entity that cosmologists call dark matter. MAP will discover not only the total amount of matter but how much of it is in the form of dark matter. One of the paradoxes of the early universe,*that it is so easy to describe, says Charles Bennett. Si@@ the physics of sound waves are very well understood, cosmologists don't need much more than freshman phocs to model the phe- nomena mAp will be studying.just as a wave traveling through viscous oil will have a different size and shape than one mov- ing through water, so will the composition of the early uni- verse strictly define the size and shape of the sound waves measured by mAp. Bylooking at the shape of the waves, cos- mologists will know how much matter the universe contains, and thus its fate -fire or ice. mAp should also give cosmologists their best v@lues for a number of other quantities, including the Ifubble constant, which indicates how fast the universe is expanding. An accu- rate fix on the expansion rate will make it possible to gauge how long it took the universe to reach its present size. Know- ing the expansion rate and matter density will allow them to establish the age of the universe. Of course, there's always the possibility that mAp won@t find the evidence they expect to find of sound waves, meaning the theory cosmologists have relied on for the past few decades to explain the universe- inflation- is somehow wrong. "It may be that the universe will have the last laugh and that none of the models will come close to fitting the MAP data," says Neil Cornish, a 32-year-old cosmologist at Mon- tana State University in Bozeman. 'Then we'll be back to the drawing board." The odds, however, are better than even that mAp will detect the sound waves. In fact, Page and his colleague Aluk Devlin reported last fall that they had already found some tantalizing traces in ground-based observations. The string of MAPs potential discoveries will satisfy most cosmologists, but not a team of three astrophysicists and one mathematician. The four men, only one of whom is of- ficiaffy on the mAp team, have devised a scheme to use MAPs data to work out the overall geometric shape of the universe. ON THE DOOR OF DAVID SPERGEUS OFFICE AT PRINCETON, a cartoon clipped from The New Yorker shows a close-up of a city sidewalk, with a fire hydrant and sewer grating. The caption reads: "The MilkyWay (Detail)." Spergel, who has just returned from dropping his son off at school, is ex- plaining why he has problems with an infinite universe. "In an infinite volume, eventually I can find a patch in which the atoms are arranged just the way we see them here in my office. We could be having this conversation an infuiite num- ber of times. So a truly infinite universe is strange." The alternative is no less strange. "In a finite universe," article on Big Bang and new space probe designed to explore it DISCOVER MAY 2000 49
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Frank Fox has provided the following remarkable example of a diversity generator at work. This one, in which flashy males bunting finches elbow out their competitors-birds almost as spiffy as they are but not quite. Instead the dominant males, the ones with the most splendid feathers, make room for downright schlumpfy males as their neighbors. Then they do a bit of hanky pankying with the females of the scruffy birds next door.
Setting the sexual aspect aside, we've got a perfect example here of lateral inhibition, a phenomenon which shows up in mass behavior from the level of humans to that of populations of sensory neurons and even in the evolution of galactic and solar systems. In humans, those who go for power tend to attack most savagely their direct competitors-the folks most similar to them in style and substance. Marx levelled his most ferocious salvos against fellow socialists. Lenin was more intent on demolishing Marxists from rival groups-such as the Social Democrats-than he was on exterminating the capitalists. Stalin was the same. Trotsky was a greater threat to him than Hitler or Churchill, despite the fact that Hitler's platform promised the extirpation of socialism. Stalin also took Lenin's hatred of Marxist Social Democrats to a greater level of ferocity than even Lenin had-not an easy thing to accomplish, given Lenin's skill at mass murder. Stalin called for the utter annihilation of Social Democrats, the death of every last one. Global Brain calls this "creative bickering." It increases the number of alternative hypotheses available in the group mind.
In the inanimate world, would-be galactic masses appear to compete for the loose matter of an expanding universe. Those which seduce scraps and bits of dust and rock into joining them gain more gravitational pull and are able to scarf up yet more of the debris in their vicinity. Micro gravitational centers grow to macro size. Macro scraps like asteroids pull yet more to their bosoms and race toward larger scale. Meanwhile the competing bits clean out the spaces in between themselves, preventing their inanimate competitors from acquiring yet more. Most, however, are in turm acquired by yet more successful gravitational attractors. Those which succeed big time swirl the junk they've collected around themselves in the familiar galactic whorl. Meanwhile, lesser competitors circling in thrall to these cental masters also compete and clean out the space between them, inhibiting the further growth of those most like them and those competing in the same geographic (or is that astrographic?) territory. The central dancemasters of material substance are galactic nuclei-most of of which become black holes. Their lesser subjects ignite as suns. The next rank of winners in the gravitational game consolidate as planets. Planets like our earth continue the practice of impoverishing the space between them by scooping up loose bits of the junk-which-might-have-once-aspired to something grander. Our atmosphere absorbs meteorites from the size of a speck to that of a car on a daily basis. Lateral inhibition at work.
Sensory cells do much the same. Those which seize on a clue to the presence of the important target of the moment (a female once mating season primes the sensory system to seek sexual opportunity; a bit of food or a predator on the pounce during more normal times) hush the sensory cells around them and take over the perceptual process. To understand a self-organizing universe, it's critical to recognize its key strategies, the master algorithms whose repetition iterations at numerous levels of emergence yank new complexities, wonders, nightmares, and possibilities from what was once a rush of nothingness. Lateral inhibition appears to be one of those master patterns. Howard
Birds of bright feathers flock with dull boys
USA TODAY, DATE: 10/26/00
By Tim Friend
Scientists have discovered an unusual form of cooperation among lazuli
bunting finches that allows the most handsome and the least attractive males
to share the top neighborhoods and have the best chance of mating.
The study, in today's Nature, illustrates a rarely observed phenomenon called
''disruptive selection,'' in which nature favors extreme traits at both ends
of the spectrum at the expense of moderate ones, experts say.
Normally, the forces of natural selection and sexual selection nudge a
species' sexual attractiveness (usually in males) in a direction that
ultimately exaggerates the desirable traits. The male peacock's tail is a
classic example. The most brightly colored or ornamented males are known as
''hotshots.''
Male lazuli buntings, which vary widely in the brightness of their plumage,
ordinarily appear to follow the standard rules, at least anecdotally, when
their favored habitat of dense bushes or shrubs is plentiful. The dominant
males, which have the brightest feathers, have their pick of territories and
are most successful at attracting females, which are mostly brown.
So the researchers, led by Erick Greene from the University of Montana in
Missoula, were surprised when they discovered that the dullest males in a
lazuli population were mating successfully and living unchallenged in the
best shrubs as neighbors with the hotshots. Meanwhile, the hotshots forced
moderately colored males to settle for scrubby bushes, where they had a
tougher time attracting mates.
The reason for the disruptive selection, in which the dullest males were
sharing at least some of the successes of the dominant males, is probably
explained by a shortage of good housing, researcher Bruce Lyon says.
The area where the disruptive selection was found had a patchy habitat with
fewer available shrubs. Those conditions would intensify the competition for
habitat and females.
But why would the hotshots be so generous to their dull buddies in such
circumstances? The answer appears downright Machiavellian.
''For the dullest males, it may be a bit like making a bargain with the
devil,'' Lyon says.
Equipped with a nice shrub, the dull boys, which appear to ''suck up'' to the
dominant males by hanging out with them on branches, easily attract mates.
That means the hotshots have lots of female neighbors, which accept less
attractive mates to get a good home.
The species is socially monogamous, which means females select one nestmate,
but being socially monogamous does not equal sexual monogamy. DNA testing
found that half the eggs in the nests of the dull dads belonged to other
males. So even though the dull boys get to offer their mates good homes, the
females can't resist the hotshots next door and the chance to pass those
genes along to their offspring.
The trade-off is that the dull and subordinate males, which ordinarily have
difficulty obtaining choice territory and mates, get a nice home and a mate.
The hotshots, for their apparent generosity, fill the neighborhood with
females that find them more sexually attractive than their own mates, Lyon
says.
GNviaNewsEDGE
Copyright (c) 2000 Gannett/USA TODAY Electronic News
Received by NewsEDGE/LAN: 10/26/2000 4:15 AM
______________________________________________________________
Fractals, fractals everywhere and nary a drop to drink. Lateral inhibition is one of those basic principles of nature which shows up on so many levels that one could swear the propulsive and creative powers shoving this universe into creativity are habitual stutterers. Starting from the top and working our way down, lateral inhibition appears in the competition between large social clusters--ethnic groups, for instance. You know you've got a severe case of lateral inhibition on your hands when two almost identical gangs fight each other more viciously than they fight outsiders. Ireland's continuing war between the Protestants and the Catholics of Ulster is one example. The Palestinians' perpetual war against Israel is another. In the first case the irony is that Irishmen are creating a greater distance between themselves and other Irishmen than the two together have generated against the traditional Irish enemy, England. In the instance of the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews of Israel, each bunch is semitic, each group speaks a language far closer to that of the other than to such tongues as English, each has peoples with an unusual predominance of curly hair and oversized noses (my nose and hair fit this pattern) and both trace their mythic roots to a common ancestor, Abraham, and their religion to a common source--the word of El (Hebrew for God) or Allah (Arabic for the very same deity) as handed down to Moses and the prophets.
We'll leave the reason nearly identical groups fight each other with more ferocity than they fight predators or more obviously different and dangerous folk for another occasion. It's covered in Global Brain under the rubric of "creative bickering" and proves to have its evolutionary advantages--getting a group to diverge and seek out as many niches as is humanly (or fishily in the case of cichlids, which are adept at the trick of creative acrimony; or even anemonily in the case of sea anemone colonies, which perpetually make war with the colonies of sea anemones next door) possible. Thus does the gene team of a species manage to penetrate as many nooks and crannies as possible before the next disaster comes along.
But I digress. Lateral inhibition is critical to the operation of other sorts of groups as well--crowds of neurons for example. Neurons in the retina get the right to shoosh the neurons next door in order to get a clear bead on what seems to be an image. I suspect that lateral inhibition even plays a role in creating the large patches of empty space between galaxies. Two neighboring galaxies use their gravity to suck the space between them clean of the galactic building substance known as cosmic debris. The more loose dust and other detritus each galaxy can snatch from the potential grasp of a rival, the larger grows its collective gravity and the more powerful it can become in this competition between inanimately evolving whorls. Yes, galaxies are greedy swirls continually differentiating themselves from the gluttinous whorls next door.
Hmmm, I seem to have digressed again. But digression and redundancy--repeating the same old thing in brand new ways--is what fractal iteration is all about. Come to think of it, lateral inhibition may be one of the ways that each repetition manages to distinguish itself from its brethren. Is the differentiation between levels of emergent properties-- the generative hiccup we call a phase transition.--just another case of lateral inhibition? Is the chaos which Ilya Prigogine says separates one form of meta-order from another caused by the manner in which each form of structure hungrily hugs its elements to itself and distinguishes the principles and parts it has captured from the form they took in their highly similar predecessors? If so, how could lateral inhibition take place in time? How could the past exert a tug which counterbalances that of the future? New forms grab the fragments of the old and reknit them. But to have true lateral inhibtion, the past would have to seize hold of all it could retain or attract. Does this form of absurdity occur? Yes. Old forms vigorously grab for all they can retain or attract. When they do so, we call them regressive or conservative tendencies. Life comes from inanimate form, then sinks back into inanimate form again. From ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Animation pulls in one direction. Death and dissolution tug in the other. The boundary between life and death is sharp and absolute. Lateral inhibition. Similarly stars eventually succumb to the pull of the chaos from which they came--but make a new form of chaos in the process. From that clutter emerges a second generation star with new emergent properties. The old fights the new and the dividing line between them is absolute.
Yoiks, I've iteratively digressed again. When describing a universe which stutters and hiccups, one becomes prone to this kind of thing. My point is to reveal a bit of arcana exposed by cell biologist Gilbert Ling. There is lateral inhibition in the competition between enzymes. Yes, enzymes, the smaller members of that impressive family I like to think of as smart molecules--molecules capable of carrying out complex tasks. Dr. Ling is speaking of the action of potassium ions, busy little buggers which scoop up things in their vicinity as avidly as do galaxies. Potassium ions, however, do not use the snare of gravity but take advantage of the hooking force of electromagnetism. My suspicion is that potassium ions gather in crowds to pull off this act of electrochemical kidnapping. Dr. Ling speaks of potassiums imperialistic tendency as an act of adsorption--the attraction of atoms or molecules to the outer perimeter of the mob of molecules known as a solid or a gas. (Here's a quick and handy take on adsorption from Lycos' online version of Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia: "the taking up by the surface of a solid or liquid (adsorbent) of the atoms, ions, or molecules of a gas or other liquid {adsorbate}." http://versaware.kidsreference.lycos.com/getpage.asp?book=FWENCOnline&abspage=/articles/001000a/001000351.asp, 12/2000)
How did enzymes elbow their way into this picture? When Dr. Ling plots the activity of two competing populations of potassium on a graph, he gets a "double reciprocal plot", which he explains is "a familiar feature of _competitive inhibition_ in enzyme kinetics." Dr. Ling assumes we all know what competitive inhibition in enzyme kinetics is. Most of us don't.
However very few men on this planet have mastered chemistry, physics, and biology, much less made breakthrough theories from this mixture. Dr. Ling, in fact, may be the only one. So I hope he pardons those like me who look with wonder at his achievement but sometimes must struggle to keep up with him. If he doesn't, would that constitute another act of reciprocal inhibition--two relatively smart people getting into a fracas over something only relatively smart people could hope to comprehend, thus ignoring all the lowbrow ignoramuses who occasionally get their kicks by declaring intellectuals the scourge of the universe and attempting to eradicate everyone in sight with an IQ over 110? Howard
-------
Gilbert Ling. Life at the Cell and Below-Cell Level: The Hidden History of a Fundamental Revolution in Biology. Pacific Press--in preparation. p. 34
_______________________________
quarks cannot stand alone, neutrons, protons and electrons cannot stand alone, bacteria cannot stand alone, humans cannot stand alone, 'tis nature's way--to make us incomplete and interdependent and ever-growing in our inter-lacery. So being unable to stand alone proves that you are barking up the wrong squirrel. You've just taken another step toward proving something I've never claimed until you forced me to it--that machinery is natural!
<<or hop or skip or jump or even
bat their mechanical eyes when their batteries run down.
A magical phrase. One of the million reasons I called Michael Mendizza, the man who made two of your Krishnamurti tapes, and begged him to recruit you to write for his mini-publication Touch the Future. You'll like Michael. His real-life-in-person mentor was David Boehm.
<<heteropoiesis as opposed to autopoiesis
No time to use my dictionary. I'm a long-time believer in autopoeisis (there's a Shambala book on the subject you'd like, but I haven't got time to run to my library--which has taken over most of the house--and find its name for you). And if heteropoesis means the creation of one thing through the agency of another, I believe in that too. Lizzy, I know with 100% certainty that you are as ecumenical in your beliefs as I...perhaps even more so. Why do you insist on seeing opposites when in fact what APPEAR to be opposites are usually complimentary facets of a common whole?
Yes, we all set up strawmen. It is a useful way to prod our brains. But I so seldom find a belief in either/or to be credible. And I know you. If I take tails, you will take heads and fight like a lovely siamese to convince me that heads is IT. But if I were to take heads, you would take tails. Because the two are inseparable. This is one of the things which makes us yin yang and makes your exquisite sailing poem so resonant not only of the universe, but of you and me as Platonic lovers/siamese (not the cat in this case) twins. <<Machines do NOT self-reference or grow on trees or out of the ground or
hatch out of eggs or rub up against each other to trade DNA.
Ma chere Elisabeta, thou who wouldst starve me to death (it is now 10:10 PM). You have not been following genetic algorithms and artificial life. Steven Levy has an extremely good book out on the topic. In paperback no less. YOU MUST READ IT. With a stratospheric intellect/cum emotional sensibility (the only kind of intellect that really works) like yours, you cannot afford to get so far behind.
OK, I have not gotten even 10% of the way through your letter. But if I don't begin my half-hour pre-dinner ritual, the jig will be up with me.

HB e-mail 3/14/97
_______________________________
Subj: RE: the empires of the steppes Date: 8/22/01 2:02:20 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: (Richerson, Peter J) To: ('Howard Bloom') Howard, The trick, I think, is to account for the unstable outbreak dynamics of pastoral conquest. Why does it come in concentrated events and then fall apart, only to break out again centuries or millennia later? hb: excellent, excellent question. in several theories of self-organization--including mine, Ilya Prigogine's, and Koen DePryck's--forms grow until they reach a godelian point of paradox, then fragment and reform in grander, more complex ways. In material E. O. Wilson cites in his book Sociobiology implies that groups grow, suppress intragroup squabbles, become successful, master other groups, then fragment as the subgroups within the victorious superorganism compete to grab the spoils. This happened, for example, with the Mongols once their conquest was assured. They fragmented and fought for superiority within the Mongol Empire...thus cutting that empire in pieces and eventually destroying it. Adolescent langurs gather in pack, oust a head honcho from his harem, take over, then battle among themselves to see who will be the one langur to dominate. The winner takes over the harem and ousts his allies. Machiavelli outlined the same plan for coups in The Prince--gather allies, topple the top man, take over his position, then eliminate your allies. Why? Because they've been your equals and are likely to try to topple you. Another example. I was asked yesterday by the Toronto Star why Michael Jackson was ousted from his position as top dog in the music world, then, ten years later, revived as a hero again. The answer: when his solo career was starting and he was breaking down the race barriers of radio and mtv, he vicariously lived out the desires of his fans. He represented the group soul for those who loved him. He began as an underdog--shunned by white radio and tv. Many of those in the public--especially the teens who buy and embrace music--could identify. Teens, too, are underdogs about to embark on the attempt to carve out an identity in an adult culture in which they are outsiders. it is a difficult process that usually does not end until people reach roughly the age of thirty. As Michael Jackson rose in the 1980s, his fans rose with him. They rose vicariously. More important, they felt that their enthusiasm was the force that was turning him into a superstar. Their egos, their sense of power and control, were fed by his success. Why? Because they felt they had made it happen. They had felt it, not articulated it. The feeling was emotional, not verbal. But emotional feelings are the most powerful of all. Once Michael was ensconced as the king of pop, he ceased to be an underdog. He was no longer a lifter of the souls of those who loved him, but an overdog, an established aristocrat of pop. His power no longer gave his fans a sense of control. His success was self-sustaining. He didn't need his adherents anymore. In other words he was an alpha male, an oppressor. How could those who had championed him show control? Especially those who had in the press who had aided his rise? By tearing him down. And this they proceeded to do--for a decade. Today he is an underdog, and the public and press can once again demonstrate their power--their control over another's destiny, by rebuilding him. This, in fact, is what they are doing. As someone who did 20 years of fieldwork in mass culture and worked with Michael Jackson, I've been able to study this phenomenon from a privleged position--from the inside. But here's the bottom line. Oscillation underlies most things in this universe. Social organization is no exception to the rule. pr: Nomad life makes for pretty independent sorts who can move at a whim with their livestock. In East Africa, pastoralists compared to farmers tend to be low on respect for authority and low on belief in witchcraft. Farmers tend to be high on witchcraft belief, people suppose, because sedentary lifestyle leads to festering disputes with neighbors, whereas pastoralists just move away from trouble. The political problem of nomadism is that it can lead to lots of conflict at quite small scales. Remember Lawrence of Arabia's bitter speech about the Arabs being "small people" after the Bedouin character played by Omar Sherif kills his guide for trespass on his tribe's well. hb: this is excellent thinking, Pete. If you look at T.E. Lawrence's book, this killing plays an even more important role than in the film. pr: If so, pastoral life is very insecure, and the pastoralists involved are liable to be subjugated by enamoring agrarian states or even oasis city-states. However, the latent political power of pastoral nomads is enormous. Mobile, tough, experienced, fighters, they are hell on the hoof hb: brilliant phrase. pr: if put together in sufficient numbers. Eurasian pastoralists developed political institutions that generated rather highly organized tribes. They became pretty effective coalition building politicians. Tribes, tribal confederations, and alliances could presumably secure more domestic tranquility, conduct more efficient long-distance trade (another specialty of nomads), and deal from a position of some strength with other tribes, states and cities. Sometimes, such tribal leaders could make minor conquests of city states or insert themselves into the politics of agrarian states, often via service as auxiliaries in the states army. Gothic leaders came to play a big role in late Roman politics via Roman military service. Ibn Kaldun, the mediaeval Islamic geographer, has a nice model of the relationship between city-states and small states in N. Africa and Iberia and the pastoral nomads in the North African hinterland. hb: I'd love it if you could expand on your interpretation of this, I've read Ibn Khaldun, and you've seen something in him I failed to spot. Which means you saw a Richersonian meaning I'd love to know. pr: If a charismatic leader could organize a sufficiently large confederation of tribes then he could embark on major conquests. My image is that once a confederation gets so big, no coalition of other tribes can resist it. Agrarian statesmen with a nomad frontier are themselves usually pretty sophisticated players of balance-of-power politics and manage to play one pastoral polity off against the others to forestall threatening superconfederations. Once in awhile, the stars line up just right, and one escapes this control. hb: In the relations of the Chinese to their nomadic neighbors, the Chinese frequently picked an underdog, armed and trained its warriors, and used them to harrass the overdog nomads who threatened China's borderlands, and sometimes threatened to take over all of China. By arming the enemies of their enemies, they often strengthened the underdogs so substantially that the nomads they'd armed overwhelmed the old nomadic empire, then invaded and took over China itself. China tried this strategy once again in the 1980s and 90s when it worked with us to arm and train the mujahdeen fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Now those very mujahadeen--Osama bin Laden and his buddies--threaten both us and the Chinese. The growing superconfederation offers death to pastoral tribes that oppose it, but a share of the booty of conquest if they join up. Naturally, all but the pathologically intransigent join up. Then the conquest takes off, or at least becomes a real possibility. Probably a whole lot of thing have to go just right for a super-confederacy to take off, ranging from extra-ordinary political skills on the nomad side, blunders on the agrarian side, economic weakness on the agrarian side, a surplus of horses on the nomad side, etc., etc. Something, at any rate, needs to keep the triggering events fairly rare, as the outbreaks are isolated in time, tho the politics of state-nomad interaction are routinely conflictual. Likely every outbreak differs from every other in detail too. As far as I can see, the historical records are too scanty to support much besides speculation as to these details. In the aftermath of conquest, pastoral empires are unable to sustain charisma by personal means and have trouble institutionalizing it a la Max Weber. They often employ institutions modeled on those of their Roman, Chinese, etc. victims, but these are not very well suited to governing nomads. So the confederacy fragments, the states, perhaps now ruled by a nomad dynasty, return to successful balance of power politics, and the cycle is complete. (No doubt to call it a cycle oversimplifies greatly). I suppose the reason that state level institutions generally did not persist in nomad country is that nomads are more costly to supervise than peasants but are generally less productive. I read a neat analysis of the Roman conquest of Britain. The argument was that the reason the conquest couldn't be extended to Scotland (and by extrapolation Ireland, Germany, and other similar frontiers) was that the farm population and its surpluses were too small to support a network of legions and their towns sufficient to police the area. Presumably other low productivity farming areas with a history of fractious independence, such as Switzerland, Afghanistan, Caucasia, and most of sub-Sahara Africa obeyed a similar logic. Pastoral nomads are analogous to poor mountain farmers, except that in Central Eurasia taken all together there were an awful lot of them and their whole economy, not just their fighting force, is extra-ordinarily mobile.. In the early modern period, innovations in arms plus greater economic power and rising populations led the most affected states, Russia and China, to bear the cost of pacifying their neighboring nomads. One can't guarantee that we've see the last of the nomads. Russia's controls have at least temporarily lapsed, with even one mountain farming outfit, the Chechens, tying their military in knots. The Chinese are still quite firm. But the Oigur Turks are said to be restive, and certainly the Tibetans would strike for independence if they thought they could succeed. Perhaps the "cycle" will continue. Of course, if economic modernization does raise productivity on the steppes enough to support a state, then the peculiar dynamics of nomad conquest may disappear, depending as it does on relatively great military power on the part of relatively poor people. Did I recommended Anatoly Khazanov's Nomads and the Outside World (U. Wisconsin 1994) to you? He is a Russian expat specialist on nomads, with a number of keen insights. hb: this sounds extremely helpful. All thanks. Another thing--you have put together an extraordinary train of thought. Howard -----Original Message----- From: Howard Bloom [mailto:] Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 5:17 PM To: Peter Richerson; Subject: re: the empires of the steppes Peter--rereading this brought to mind one of the most successful conquests by steppe people's of all times--the Indo-European conquests of India, the Middle East, Greece, and seemingly of much of Europe in the second millennium bc. Later known as Mycenaeans, Greeks, Brahmins, Hittites, and Aryans, these folks from north of the Black Sea pulled of some rather amazing feats. What do you think accounts for the periodic coalition of steppe nomads into brilliantly organized mass cohorts? Howard In a message dated 8/14/01 4:47:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: The Ottoman Empire is only a late exemplar in an ancient string of large-scale states operated by Turkic speakers and other East and Central Asians ethnic groups. A French historian Rene Grousett wrote a thick book translated into English as The Empire of the Steppes outlining their nature. Given the rather hostile environment of the steppes, and the fractious nature of the pastoral nomads that dominated them, Turkish (and Mongol, etc.) statecraft is not to be sneezed at. Of course, the steppe people absorbed a lot from the Chinese and other agrarian states on the better-watered margins of Eurasia. They were able to maintain their independence throughout most of the historical period and of course conquered the more "advanced" agrarians from time to time. _______________________________
The following comes from Eric Shinn, entertainment reporter of the Toronto Star, to whom I forwarded our correspondence on the empires of the steppes--and michael jackson. Subj: RE: the empires of the steppes--and michael jackson Date: 8/23/01 2:13:31 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: (Shinn, Eric) To: ('Howard Bloom') Thanks for the forward, Howard! There's a really good article in the current Wired magazine about the Japanese communications company DoCoMo, which has built its business model around providing a content-neutral platform upon which independent parties can offer wireless services to cellphone clients. hb: Docomo posted good earnings today while more traditional Japanese communications companies showed downturns. You may have explained why this occurred. es: This company is doing tremendously well, and in light of your conversation with pjricherson, I think it has a lot to do with the manner in which they formalized a process in which the nomadic adaptibility of user demands fulfilled by flocking independent parties can be maintained within a larger empire run by their neutral tech. hb: this is a standard oscillatory pattern in the record and film business. The major corporations lock into a proven formula and repeat it until it bores the public silly. meanwhile small, independent production companies or record companies put out the music and films of rebels, those who dare create new formulae. Public interests shift from the films and music of the majors to the film and music of the rebellious intruders. Eventually the majors get the message and either immitate the indies or buy them out and incorporate the creatives in their stable--often keeping the indie presidents in place. What was indie eventually becomes mainstream, the public gets overdosed on the new formulae, new rebels arise on the fringes, and the process happens all over again. Film rebels I've worked with include Harvey and Bob Weinstein (Miramax), Bob Shea (New Line), and Chris Blackwell, (Island). Two out of these three were outsiders in the 1980s and are the mainstream today. The list of music outsiders I've helped bring into the mainstream--or have brought the mainstream to--is too long to mention. But helping cultural and subcultural invaders succeed--something I specialized in during my years of fieldwork--provides many insights into the intricacies of cultural evolution. es: If only DoCoMo commanded the Mongols, what would Asia look like today? Hmmmm...... So here's my current dilemma: My roommate Chris (aka DJ C-Rat) and I are both heavily into jungle music. (I know you said you're a relative techno music novice, so suffice it to say this is a style of music with the ritual and rhythm of Carribean reggae soundclash culture hybridized with european techno production aesthetic. hb: it sounds neat. es: It's quite good! I write about it for www.torontojungle.com, and if you're curious, you should check the site out!) hb: I turned off Mendelsohn (some political music of the 1800s) to pull up the site and listen. So far I've heard the sound intro, which is good, but the main screen is coming up slowly--which may be because I'm running 14 computer screens simultaneously. I'll be getting a bigger microprocessor (this one's only 450 mhz) in the next two days. es: The Toronto scene is essentially run by one particular crew, called Vinyl Syndicate. They used to be the underdog, and they're damn good, but they've become rather stagnant in their taste, and many fragmented crews have gained increasing respect around them over time. hb: aha. the typical electronic age pop cycle at work. by the way, the same pattern also operates at the level of sensors on a cell membrane. they're very much a mob with a mob "mentality." A few outsiders find something interesting, and broadcast the message to the rest of the sensor community. The other sensors take it up, it becomes all the rage, then gradually it ceases to seem shiny and new. Then, once again, unconventional sensors find some new molecule with a clever hook or twist. They broadcast its novelty, gradually win over the masses, and the outré becomes mainstream. Fractal patterns in this cosmos tend to repeat on many levels of emergence. es: Chris and I would like to figure out a way to connect the suppressed crews all over our province in such a consolidated front that Vinyl Syndicate will crumble pathetically, or realize that they must adapt to survive. Our concern is, of course, how to maintain our tribal underground functionality while essentially achieving market domination. hb: a tricky proposition. Call me some night between 7pm and 8pm when I'm free (what night that may be I don't know, since I get booked up quickly) and we'll talk about it. Howard -----Original Message-----
From: Howard Bloom [] Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 3:58 AM To: Peter Richerson; ; Eric Shinn; Aaron Hicklin; Ilya Marritz; Chris Campion; Alan Edwards Subject: re: the empires of the steppes--and michael jackson Subj: RE: the empires of the steppes Date: 8/22/01 2:02:20 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: (Richerson, Peter J) To: [email protected] ('Howard Bloom') Howard, The trick, I think, is to account for the unstable outbreak dynamics of pastoral conquest. Why does it come in concentrated events and then fall apart, only to break out again centuries or millennia later? hb: excellent, excellent question. in several theories of self-organization--including mine, Ilya Prigogine's, and Koen DePryck's--forms grow until they reach a godelian point of paradox, then fragment and reform in grander, more complex ways. In material E. O. Wilson cites in his book Sociobiology implies that groups grow, suppress intragroup squabbles, become successful, master other groups, then fragment as the subgroups within the victorious superorganism compete to grab the spoils. This happened, for example, with the Mongols once their conquest was assured. They fragmented and fought for superiority within the Mongol Empire...thus cutting that empire in pieces and eventually destroying it. Adolescent langurs gather in pack, oust a head honcho from his harem, take over, then battle among themselves to see who will be the one langur to dominate. The winner takes over the harem and ousts his allies. Machiavelli outlined the same plan for coups in The Prince--gather allies, topple the top man, take over his position, then eliminate your allies. Why? Because they've been your equals and are likely to try to topple you. Another example. I was asked yesterday by the Toronto Star why Michael Jackson was ousted from his position as top dog in the music world, then, ten years later, revived as a hero again. The answer: when his solo career was starting and he was breaking down the race barriers of radio and mtv, he vicariously lived out the desires of his fans. He represented the group soul for those who loved him. He began as an underdog--shunned by white radio and tv. Many of those in the public--especially the teens who buy and embrace music--could identify. Teens, too, are underdogs about to embark on the attempt to carve out an identity in an adult culture in which they are outsiders. it is a difficult process that usually does not end until people reach roughly the age of thirty. As Michael Jackson rose in the 1980s, his fans rose with him. They rose vicariously. More important, they felt that their enthusiasm was the force that was turning him into a superstar. Their egos, their sense of power and control, were fed by his success. Why? Because they felt they had made it happen. They had felt it, not articulated it. The feeling was emotional, not verbal. But emotional feelings are the most powerful of all. Once Michael was ensconced as the king of pop, he ceased to be an underdog. He was no longer a lifter of the souls of those who loved him, but an overdog, an established aristocrat of pop. His power no longer gave his fans a sense of control. His success was self-sustaining. He didn't need his adherents anymore. In other words he was an alpha male, an oppressor. How could those who had championed him show control? Especially those who had in the press who had aided his rise? By tearing him down. And this they proceeded to do--for a decade. Today he is an underdog, and the public and press can once again demonstrate their power--their control over another's destiny, by rebuilding him. This, in fact, is what they are doing. As someone who did 20 years of fieldwork in mass culture and worked with Michael Jackson, I've been able to study this phenomenon from a privleged position--from the inside. But here's the bottom line. Oscillation underlies most things in this universe. Social organization is no exception to the rule. pr: Nomad life makes for pretty independent sorts who can move at a whim with their livestock. In East Africa, pastoralists compared to farmers tend to be low on respect for authority and low on belief in witchcraft. Farmers tend to be high on witchcraft belief, people suppose, because sedentary lifestyle leads to festering disputes with neighbors, whereas pastoralists just move away from trouble. The political problem of nomadism is that it can lead to lots of conflict at quite small scales. Remember Lawrence of Arabia's bitter speech about the Arabs being "small people" after the Bedouin character played by Omar Sherif kills his guide for trespass on his tribe's well. hb: this is excellent thinking, Pete. If you look at T.E. Lawrence's book, this killing plays an even more important role than in the film. pr: If so, pastoral life is very insecure, and the pastoralists involved are liable to be subjugated by enamoring agrarian states or even oasis city-states. However, the latent political power of pastoral nomads is enormous. Mobile, tough, experienced, fighters, they are hell on the hoof hb: brilliant phrase. pr: if put together in sufficient numbers. Eurasian pastoralists developed political institutions that generated rather highly organized tribes. They became pretty effective coalition building politicians. Tribes, tribal confederations, and alliances could presumably secure more domestic tranquility, conduct more efficient long-distance trade (another specialty of nomads), and deal from a position of some strength with other tribes, states and cities. Sometimes, such tribal leaders could make minor conquests of city states or insert themselves into the politics of agrarian states, often via service as auxiliaries in the states army. Gothic leaders came to play a big role in late Roman politics via Roman military service. Ibn Kaldun, the mediaeval Islamic geographer, has a nice model of the relationship between city-states and small states in N. Africa and Iberia and the pastoral nomads in the North African hinterland. hb: I'd love it if you could expand on your interpretation of this, I've read Ibn Khaldun, and you've seen something in him I failed to spot. Which means you saw a Richersonian meaning I'd love to know. pr: If a charismatic leader could organize a sufficiently large confederation of tribes then he could embark on major conquests. My image is that once a confederation gets so big, no coalition of other tribes can resist it. Agrarian statesmen with a nomad frontier are themselves usually pretty sophisticated players of balance-of-power politics and manage to play one pastoral polity off against the others to forestall threatening superconfederations. Once in awhile, the stars line up just right, and one escapes this control. hb: In the relations of the Chinese to their nomadic neighbors, the Chinese frequently picked an underdog, armed and trained its warriors, and used them to harrass the overdog nomads who threatened China's borderlands, and sometimes threatened to take over all of China. By arming the enemies of their enemies, they often strengthened the underdogs so substantially that the nomads they'd armed overwhelmed the old nomadic empire, then invaded and took over China itself. China tried this strategy once again in the 1980s and 90s when it worked with us to arm and train the mujahdeen fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Now those very mujahadeen--Osama bin Laden and his buddies--threaten both us and the Chinese. The growing superconfederation offers death to pastoral tribes that oppose it, but a share of the booty of conquest if they join up. Naturally, all but the pathologically intransigent join up. Then the conquest takes off, or at least becomes a real possibility. Probably a whole lot of thing have to go just right for a super-confederacy to take off, ranging from extra-ordinary political skills on the nomad side, blunders on the agrarian side, economic weakness on the agrarian side, a surplus of horses on the nomad side, etc., etc. Something, at any rate, needs to keep the triggering events fairly rare, as the outbreaks are isolated in time, tho the politics of state-nomad interaction are routinely conflictual. Likely every outbreak differs from every other in detail too. As far as I can see, the historical records are too scanty to support much besides speculation as to these details. In the aftermath of conquest, pastoral empires are unable to sustain charisma by personal means and have trouble institutionalizing it a la Max Weber. They often employ institutions modeled on those of their Roman, Chinese, etc. victims, but these are not very well suited to governing nomads. So the confederacy fragments, the states, perhaps now ruled by a nomad dynasty, return to successful balance of power politics, and the cycle is complete. (No doubt to call it a cycle oversimplifies greatly). I suppose the reason that state level institutions generally did not persist in nomad country is that nomads are more costly to supervise than peasants but are generally less productive. I read a neat analysis of the Roman conquest of Britain. The argument was that the reason the conquest couldn't be extended to Scotland (and by extrapolation Ireland, Germany, and other similar frontiers) was that the farm population and its surpluses were too small to support a network of legions and their towns sufficient to police the area. Presumably other low productivity farming areas with a history of fractious independence, such as Switzerland, Afghanistan, Caucasia, and most of sub-Sahara Africa obeyed a similar logic. Pastoral nomads are analogous to poor mountain farmers, except that in Central Eurasia taken all together there were an awful lot of them and their whole economy, not just their fighting force, is extra-ordinarily mobile.. In the early modern period, innovations in arms plus greater economic power and rising populations led the most affected states, Russia and China, to bear the cost of pacifying their neighboring nomads. One can't guarantee that we've see the last of the nomads. Russia's controls have at least temporarily lapsed, with even one mountain farming outfit, the Chechens, tying their military in knots. The Chinese are still quite firm. But the Oigur Turks are said to be restive, and certainly the Tibetans would strike for independence if they thought they could succeed. Perhaps the "cycle" will continue. Of course, if economic modernization does raise productivity on the steppes enough to support a state, then the peculiar dynamics of nomad conquest may disappear, depending as it does on relatively great military power on the part of relatively poor people. Did I recommended Anatoly Khazanov's Nomads and the Outside World (U. Wisconsin 1994) to you? He is a Russian expat specialist on nomads, with a number of keen insights. hb: this sounds extremely helpful. All thanks. Another thing--you have put together an extraordinary train of thought. Howard -----Original Message-----
From: Howard Bloom [mailto:] Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 5:17 PM To: Peter Richerson; Subject: re: the empires of the steppes Peter--rereading this brought to mind one of the most successful conquests by steppe people's of all times--the Indo-European conquests of India, the Middle East, Greece, and seemingly of much of Europe in the second millennium bc. Later known as Mycenaeans, Greeks, Brahmins, Hittites, and Aryans, these folks from north of the Black Sea pulled of some rather amazing feats. What do you think accounts for the periodic coalition of steppe nomads into brilliantly organized mass cohorts? Howard In a message dated 8/14/01 4:47:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: The Ottoman Empire is only a late exemplar in an ancient string of large-scale states operated by Turkic speakers and other East and Central Asians ethnic groups. A French historian Rene Grousett wrote a thick book translated into English as The Empire of the Steppes outlining their nature. Given the rather hostile environment of the steppes, and the fractious nature of the pastoral nomads that dominated them, Turkish (and Mongol, etc.) statecraft is not to be sneezed at. Of course, the steppe people absorbed a lot from the Chinese and other agrarian states on the better-watered margins of Eurasia. They were able to maintain their independence throughout most of the historical period and of course conquered the more "advanced" agrarians from time to time.
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Those who can build a self-deceptive ego need the power to create their own myth--the ability to conceive an autobiography that lifts them either to greater achievement or to greater self-destruction. Self-destruction arises if one merely dreams the myth but never attempts to live it. But glorious deeds come from those who live their myth. howard
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Irving--to the best of my knowledge, both what you say and what the chaos researchers on cardiac rhythms say is true. We're talking about a continuum here. Lack of chaos, on one end of the line, is unhealthy. A certain amount of chaos, in the middle of the scale, is positive. Too much chaos (fibrillation) on the far right hand end of the scale is deadly.
I keep talking about iterative principles in nature recurring as part of the unfolding of corollaries from the handful of axioms implicit in the initial vaccum ripple which precipitated the Big Bang (or at least that's this year's theory of how things got started--it's called "inflationary theory" and comes to us courtesy of physicist Alan Guth). You've got one of these iterative algorithms by the tail. We might call it the "golden mean" principle. A jolt of noradrenaline is a very helpful thing indeed when we're in a situation which demands immediate mobilization of our cognitive and motor abilties. But a longterm dose of noradrenaline is extremely damaging to our system, ultimately crippling our perceptual and motor abilities, not to mention eating away at portions of the hippocampus. The same is true for the other stress hormones--corticosterone, cortisol, cortisone, the remaining gluco-corticoids, endogenous opiates, etc. A little is good. A chronic overdose is hideous. A radical underdose of glucocorticoids and you have Addison's disease. The Golden Mean at work once again.
I would suspect that the same principle applies to the chemical messages used to mobilize bacterial colonies, ant colonies, etc. If anyone knows, please tell me. And in a funny way you can see the same thing in the inanimate world. A pleasant dose of gravity and you have planets. A heavier dose and you have stars. An overdose and you have black holes. Or worse, you have a collapse of the entire universe. An underdose and we go directly from the Big Bang to a spray of fleeing molecules that never have the privilege of meeting each other in the form of solar systems, Irving Wolfson or even cosmic dust. Howard
[hb 12/17/01 oscillation keeps things swinging around the golden mean-seeking out what "moderation" under a new circumstance might be. With this universe, new circumstance is the name of the game. This cosmos is one giant surprise after another, changing its nature only once in a while, but then drastically. Meanwhile changing the petty details incessantly.]
In a message dated 98-01-23 15:55:30 EST, writes t hb:
<< "One of these is the heart, which degenerates in health as its rhythms become less 'chaotic' and more predictable." Actually the opposite is true. The more severe the arrhythmia, the less the heart can perform its function as measured by cardiac output. With rapid rhythms the return of blood to the heart is diminished per beat(less time for cardiac filling) and the increase in rate is inadequate to compensate for this, so that the output per minute is reduced, sometime enough to cause syncope. With irregular rhythm(atrial fibrillation) output is also reduced. And in completely chaotic rhythm(ventricular fibrillation) death of heart and the whole organism results in a few miniutes. >>
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In a message dated 3/25/2003 9:09:58 AM Eastern Standard Time, writes: At 01:54 AM 03/25/2003 -0500, wrote: Very interesting, and you're making it increasingly accessible, which is quite an achievement. I've put in a few comments way below. Howard ps by the way, it may just be my naivete, but i still wonder what a field is and why it works. Let's take gravitational force and Einstein's notion that something with gravity--a star, for example--creates a dimple in space. Roll a marble toward the dimple made by a bowling ball in a rubber sheet and the marble will be caught in in the dimple's downward dip and increase its speed. But what, aside from the oversimplifications made to satisfy relative simpletons like me, is the equivalent of the gravity that makes the rubber sheet do it's trick when dimpled by the bowling ball? Reminds me of many, many years ago... when 2 year old cousin... John O'Mara... heard I was taking classes on what the whole world is made of. "What is REALLY made of, Paul? What do they really think? Don't say 'puppy dog tails' or stuff like that for babies... what is it really?" (As best I recall, he WAS two. But maybe that part of teh memory got fuzzed.) I said" Really, really? Well... they really think it is made of numbers." "NUMBERS? Like a five over here and a four over there?" "Well, maybe like three and a half and numbers like that, but basically, yes..." We talk about "force fields," but then we say "field" when we are more precise. So in Einstein's picture, all and everything is made up of a finite number of "fields." A field is just a mathematical function defined over space-time. So for example, there may be a function phi(x,t)... a function which gives a REAL NUMBER at each point x and t. It's not that this number DESCRIBES what is real. It **IS** what is real. And a bunch of such numbers describes EVERYTHING. hb: description is representation, not reality. It is translation from one frame of reference to another, from one system to another. The fact that numerous systems can be isomorphic and reflect each other is one of the things we examine too infrequently. How does math map the cosmos? How does thought map math? How do equations on paper equate with brain processes and the processes that birthed a universe? Metaphor is one compression technique, one way of representing "reality" in a more concise manner. Math is another. Religion is yet a third. Poetry a fourth. But how do we manage to convey the essence of something in so many ways? What quality of the universe allows for this representation, this digestion down to something more compact, something usable in entirely new ways, in ways that change the cosmos as profoundly as the shift from atoms in streams of gas and dust to the formation of galaxies? Yes, by representing things in new frames of reference we piles of thinking quarks introduce new things into the stream of cosmic evolution--space travel, physics, equations, visual representations of nonlinear math, computers, cyberspace, and movies in which we share our dreams. Compression and expansion, that's how the cosmos reinvents itself. It is a cosmos whose profound fracticality explains why brains and lines of paper can model the explosions of novas deep in space. Patterns repeat on many levels because the repetition of things on new levels is how this cosmos grows new patterns, processes, and things--from singularity to a sheet of time-space expansion, from that sheet of hurried departure from less than a single point to many points, to quarks, then to nucleons, and onward 300,000 years later to atoms and straight-line-travelling photons, then, 700,000 years down the road to galaxies, the ignition of stars, and light. Now we take nearly infinitessimal streams of that light and shift if from one frame of reference to another--from the tiny light-twitches the human eye can't see to the twitching of electrons in a CCD sensor to the image made by luminescent particles on a computer monitor, to the pixels of an image, to the ink of wood pulp of a picture, to the mathematics of an astrophysicist and from there to the technical language of a journal article and the colloquial language of a press release. But that's not the end of the condensations and translations from one from of reference to another, not be any means. If the information officer in charge of the press release makes just the right a bursts of electrons and photons move on the telephone lines and rearranges the neurotransmissions in a New York Times reporter's mind, the numerous translations of the twitch of light can be reconstructed in the minds of millions as a vision of a process that once occurred on the very edges (or at the very center) of this spreading universe.

Then prophets, preachers, and politicians can use the resulting genesis tale to change the course of human history. Compression and expansion all over the place. Representation and translation. Why does it all work? Because the original ancestors of stars, of atoms, of photons, and of you and me were a handful of rules that can be expanded and compressed iteratively--folded over and under and upon themselves endlessly. Or endlessly until the positive universe meets the anti-universe and they destroy each other, releasing the energy that begins the spread of two new time-space manifolds, two blank sheets on which a new anti and a new positive universe will write themselves. At least this is the Bloomian view...the Big Bang Tango model. However I don't dare put the Big Bagel into this book. It's treading in territory I've been accustomed to since I was ten, but in which I have never undergone the proper mathematical initiation. And without knowledge of the math, I'm not allowed to be as sure as I actually am that there's a good chance my toroidal compression of the cosmos is right. pw: The modern quantum picture is not exactly the same as Einstein's picture... though I personally think they can be reconciled with each other precisely... and it is similar in flavor in any case. hb: my impression is that you've shown a mathematical connection between the two that indicates the systems are isomorphic--they are representations in different frames of reference that represent a common reality. Your math, if I understand aright, has shown that there is greater consistency between the two than the quantum phyisicists of today would ever admit. And my impression is that your math has said that the multiple outcomes of quantum dynamical math is not the simultaneous alternative realities it's been interpreted to be. Have I got it wrong? hb: Here's a simpleton's suggestion. The motive power is...gravity. Take the bagel model I keep tossing around (or loxing up). If both the anti-universe on the underside and the positive matter cosmos on the upper side share a gravitational language--if they attract--then the more an object like a sun dimples the space-time manifold on the upper side, the closer it draws to the underside. If the underside has gravity, too….the underside will attract stuff from the upper side and that attraction will grow greater as the upper and underside are brought together-whether they are brought together by dimples or by the downward slide toward each other that attracts them to meet on the bagel's outer rim. Talk about tautological, I've got gravity working because of….gravity. But my blithering doesn't remove the fact that it seems to me there's more than mathematical description needed to explain attraction at a distance. Math can map the manner in which gravity works. But does it tell us why force at a distance applies? pw: In Einstein's picture (and mine, for the next generation), it doesn't. hb: aha! a very important statement. you've just pointed to a horizon we have to go over to find what strange frontier awaits on the other side. pw: Einstein certainly talked a lot about the picture with gravity. An OBJECT at a distance can influence another object millions of miles away... BY "BENDING" the gravitational field in its OWN neighborhood, which propagates through space to the neighborhood of the other object. Local interactions produce global effects. hb: neat. any bend in the sheet alters its total topography. the topology remains the same. the sheet is still a sheet. but one topographic lump or dimple can influence all the rest? pw: If it takes objects to generate a field, and it takes an intersect of fields to generate an object, ummm, which came first, the chicken or the egg? And what is a photon-a rippled, rapidly traveling intersect of electrical and magnetic fields? pw: My opinion... is that electromagnetism is basically a collection of four numbers (a "four vector") which vary over space and time. One of the four numbers is basically just the level of "voltage" hb: voltage=a sucking from one end of the trajectory and a push from the other? If so, how does the trajectory exist before the photon has traveled it? Does this bring us back to the short-term backwards causality you've proposed? If a photon travels 13 billion miles, is there the a sucking on one end of a 13-billion mile end straw and a push that comes from the other? Doesn't that mean that future and past both influence the present big time? 13.5 billion years is the age of the cosmos. And if this is a 27-billion-light-year cosmos, as I suspect it is, and if we are at the mid point, which I suspect we are, then this means the backward influence of the future isn't short term at all. It's as long as the lifetime of the universe. We are sucked forward by our future if this view is accurate.

But two bizarre questions: 1) where is the wiggle room, the room for oddities like free will? 2) I've defied the current wisdom, which says that even if the universe is toroidal, we are very close to the beginning of things. The meeting between branes is trillions of years in the future, or so says Steinhardt. So are we being pulled by a future trillions of years down the line? 3) We are sentient beings. We saddle and ride disasters like Niagara Falls--we tame them and use their energy. Someday, if we don't incinerate ourselves, we may tame the spurts of energy that flare from black holes. And beyond that we may even tame and bend the saddle curves of time and space. We are just one of many surprises this cosmos has produced. What next? Will it have an ability to disaster-ride even greater than we do? Will it harness the wild flail of entropy and turn it into something useful, energy? Will that use reshape the cosmos? Will the fifteenth step beyond sentient life become a race of brane riders who can tell the cosmos not to end but instead can bend it up to any skyward climb they choose? pw: free-floating in space. I personally believe that there probably is no such thing as a"photon," really, as a distinct object. Rather, there are quantized emitters and absorbers of electromagnetic radiation. hb: hmmm--kurakin sees a photon as a range of possible transmissions between sender and receiver. Which receiver gets the message is determined by a process I haven't quite deciphered. Does this bring us back to mistaking the limits of our observation for the limits of reality? A photon from an early star 13.4 billion years away reaches the ccd of the Hubble, is translated to electrons and beamed down to a community of astrophysicists who decipher it--translate it into their math and into their conversations made by tongues wobbling air over lunch. They publicize it and the news gets to you, and later on to me. We are sinks and the star is source, but is there really nothing in between? And how does that photon manage its amplification--being translated into so many forms, being inserted into the minds of so many human beings? You and I are not the only humans who read the astrophysics news as it comes rolling in. The New York Times makes sure this news excites (not sinks, but synchs) many, many a mind. I'm sure there is something--call it a photon for the moment--that travels the path of the trajectory. What is it? Is it a what at all? Is it a thing or a process or both? Isn't every thing a process on a timescale too big for us to see? So what, exactly, is a thing. I know darned well that on the timescale of consciousness, it's distinctly different from a flow. I say the timescale of consciousness because there are many "human" timescales...most of them non-conscious. Right now 100 trillion cells in me are loading phosphorus atoms onto molecules of adnenosine diphoshpate, then passing the loaded molecules along to others that strip the phosphorus from the backbone of the atp and extract a snip of energy. This is happening at a speed my mere consciousness can only imagine--that is, represent in another frame of reference. It's a timescale I can only grasp thanks to the work of thousand of humans of generations that produced language, culture, and science--generations working on another timescale I can only represent but can't perceive. Are these inhuman timescales inhuman? No, they're vital parts of what makes a human being.

But still I can only comprehend them through imagination and representation, through human-invented compressions, human uses of fracticality. pw: But perhaps I might change my mind if the analysis of electroweak theory with topological solitons points in a different direction. I am just going by what I see in quantum optics. My ignorance is showing all over the place, but sometimes it's worth asking naïve questions. Occasionally we become so used to using words like "force" that we don't recognize our ignorance anymore. It's like the doctor who feels he's explained your stomach cramp when he tells you that you've got gastritis. Sorry, you knew that before you walked in to his examining room. Gastritis is Latin for irritation of the stomach. In other words, all your doctor has done is parrot your question back at you in another tongue. You asked why does my stomach ache and the doc has said because you have an ache of the stomach. Howard pw: Don't worry. We are all ignorant. The problem is to deal with the folks who don't KNOW how ignorant they are. hb: thanks, Paul. Silly as it sounds, I needed that reassurance. You decoded the signals of my insecurity very well. Limbic system shivers translated into subtext--more shifting from one frame of reference to another, one more use of fracticality. I needed your kindness. pw: which I have tried to explore. (As in arXiv.org/abs/patt-sol-9804003, hb: yikes--tried to get the paper and arXiv says it's not there. Oops. patt-sol/9804003. The archive can also be searched by author's name. hb: bear with me. I'm inserting the abstract so everyone can see it. Indeed you seem to have done it. If I read you correctly, you're saying that that a photon IS a trajectory across time and space--and that it has room for multifarcation--wiggle room. Rather an amazing proposition, Paul. The more you can put it in English, the more minds you can blow--and the more minds you can bing into thinking along new trajectories, thinking along new lines. Ladies and gentlemen, Paul's abstract: Retrieved from the World Wide WebMarch 26, 2003 http://arxiv.org/abs/patt-sol/9804003 Pattern Formation and Solitons, abstract patt-sol/9804003 From: Dr. Paul J. Werbos <> Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 21:03:16 GMT (274kb) New Approaches to Soliton Quantization and Existence for Particle Physics Authors: Paul J. Werbos Comments: 60p., no figs, 200+ eqs. Companion to "Can 'soliton' attractors exist in realistic 3+1-D Conservative Systems", Chaos Solitons and Fractals, in press Subj-class: Pattern Formation and Solitons This paper provides mathematical details related to another new paper which suggests: (1) new approaches to the analysis of soliton stability; (2) families of Lagrangian field theories where solitons might possibly exist even without topological charge; (3) alternative approaches to quantizing solitons, with testable nuclear implications. This paper evaluates the possibility of strong energy-minimizing states in four families of systems, two promising and two not promising. In these examples, it presents new methods for second-order stability analysis, and analyzes persistent multifurcation. Section 6 presents three alternative formalisms for quantizing solitons (topological or nontopological), all of which have major implications for the foundations of quantum theory: (1) the standard formalism, based on functional integration, reinterpreted as an imaginary Markhov Random Field (iMRF) across time and space, with parallels to fuzzy logic; (2) two radically conservative formalisms, consistent with the core of Einstein's vision, based on a true MRF model. Bell's Theorem, bosonization, time-symmetry and macroscopic asymmetry are discussed, along with some testable alternative possibilities and heresies, like nonDoppler redshift. Full-text: PDF only References and citations for this submission: CiteBase (autonomous citation navigation and analysis) Links to: arXiv, patt-sol, /find, /abs (-/+), /9804, ?

pw: Based on what I know, I would be VERY surprised if it weren't there. hb: it's there. not to worry. hb: I suspect Witten went into superstring theory because he saw it as one of many highways to the same place. Here's my favorite Witten quote: "String Theory, as developed by the mid-eighties, was characterized by the fact that there were five theories we knew about. And that raised a rather curious question, that was always a little bit embarrassing. If one of those theories describes our universe, then who lives in the other four universes? We've come to understand that those five theories we've been studying are all parts of a bigger picture. In the last couple of years the picture has really changed to something which is called Duality. Duality, is a relationship between two different theories which isn't obvious. If it's obvious you don't dignify it by the name duality. So, we have different pictures and it's not that one is correct and the other isn't correct; one of them is more useful for answering one set of questions, the other is more useful in other sets of questions. And the power of theory comes largely from understanding that these different points of view which sound like they're about different universes actually work together in describing one model. So, those theories turn out to all be one, so it's a big conceptual upheaval to understand that there's only one theory, which is uncanny in nature." hb: Witten is saying that you can view the cosmos through a variety of lenses. You can represent it with a variety of translations from one frame of reference or language to another. But all of these translations, these simple pictures, these condensations of cosmic complexity, echo each other in ways that are hard to grasp at first. The budding bubble of the Mandelbrot set repeats itself in ways that at first seem very different. But if you look hard enough, you'll the the ancestral patterns--the big bang or steady-state rules, axioms, or commandments--reappearing. Five theories=one reality. Am I wrong, or is this not an instance of iteration, of non-linear evolution, of deconstruction, and re-evolution. Is it not a manifestation of fracticality? pw: Here he was talking about different varieties of string or n-brane theories. But in his paper in Chodos, he was talking about a totally different TYPE of consistent theory. hb: aHA!!!! pw: Part of the problem is that people were using topological soliton models mainly as a kind'of rough-and-ready rule of thumb... in predicting practical nuclear experiments. (The sacred Standard Model mostly can't be used for that purpose, because it is too hard to use in making predictions. Thus mere experiments are studied using a totally different flavor of model. MRS discuss that.) hb: this has amazing implications. It undercuts the likelihood that Standard Theory is right. It indicates that it's at best a very, very rough approximation of particle-level reality. It's a convenient myth to see us through to the day when we can cobble together something less primitive. Today's math always reminds me of Olduwan stone tools--even if the formulae remain beyond my comprehension. The oversimplifications it forces physicists to use are frighteningly backward. And when you look at its history, it seems to have advanced very little from the math of the 19th Century. I prefer the pretty pictures of the Mandelbrot set. They resonate so much more to me. And I do demonstrations when folks come here of the way the mandelbrot set is nearly identical to the patterns seen in clusters of galaxies. I also can explain the mandelbrot set in terms of attraction and repulsion, two things we know are basic to this cosmos, two underlying fractal principles...principles that show up on the level of elementary particles and on the level of the most complex human problems--their bonding binges and battles...and their love affairs. Remember, humans are piles of quarks. It shouldn't seem outlandish that we repeat the ancient patterns of the stuff of which we're made.

pw: The idea of using them to explain why electrons exist at all may simply not have occurred to people. hb: aha--so electrons have been pulled in here. Very interesting, Paul, since electon streams are the mistaken metaphor from which the idea of source of sink, of voltage, is derived. But electrons do not travel in currents. They merely bonk each other into motion. We've agreed on that in past discussions. There is something wrong in the voltage metaphor. It doesn't describe a trajectory. It describes a social transmission of minimal motion from the electon shell of one atom to that of another. I'm an idiot about these things, You know that. But isn't this an inconsistency? Even a bit of a mystery? Let's run with it for a second. If a photon and an electron work in a similar manner, then a photon is a tiny swirl that bonks the next bit down the line into twirling too. Which brings us back to the ether, something I believe Pavel Kurakin feels we shouldn't have abandoned so hastily. Let's not call it the ether. Let's call it the space-time manifold, Steinhardt's macro-brane, or Einstein's space-time sheet. If a photon is a travelling ripple in the sheet--a bit of motion imparted from one swirl to another, what are the swirlable twitches of which time-space is made? What is the nature of time and space's weave? Let me propose something. Suppose that nothing in this cosmos actually travels in straight lines. Suppose that straight lines are an illusion, an emergent property of curves and circles. What the heck do I mean. Download Rudy Rucker's fractal program from http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/chaos.htm . Watch a Mandelbrot set unfold. The set is based on two commandments--gather around a common center, then rebel and bud. Attraction to a common center makes a circle. Repulsion sends stuff fleeing beyond the circle's perimeter. Attraction to a common center makes even the rebellious circle-breakers make new circles of their own. Watch this pattern grow for a while. You'll see it begins to make absolutely straight, straight lines. Now zoom in on those lines and you discover that straightness is a matter of translation, it's a matter of scale. On the microlevel those lines are made of fractal bubbles and their rebels, fractal circles and their buds. Take your constrained whirpool, your soliton. Let it pass its motion on. Let's imagine that space is composed of swirlable, circular units on roughly the Planck scale. A photon is a whirl around the center transmitted from one unit to another. Or it's a cascade, a parallel surge of twists passed along from one phalanx of top-like units to another. That's what an ocean wave is. A massive series of parallel cascades, circular twists passing their twirl along. Then what is the difference between a photon and an electron? Why does a photon appear to go in straight lines.

Why do electrons and nucleons have the freedom to wobble and bobble around? Or do they? Is their motion very constrained? Electrons travel in straight lines unless they're trapped in the enclosure of an atomic shell. Or, like photons, they seem to travel in straight lines. If space is a weave of twirlable bubbles, How does a sun assemble and move? A solar body works on the basis of attraction to a common point, so its roughly circular, fractally aping the atoms of which it's composed. But as it speeds around the center of another circular attraction-whirl, a galaxy, how and what is transmitted in the Planck weave of twirlable bubbles that in some way stitches, knits, and nano-swirls all things? How is a galaxy woven on the microloom? And how does it move on that fluid fabric, that nano-bubble sea? See where working with metaphor instead of math will get you? Into potential lunacy. (Thank God Einstein and Feynman worked primarily with metaphor and secondarily with math or I'd be lost in space without an oxygen tank.) hb: Paul, it sounds to me like you're probably the only human with the ability to see this intersection, this new theoretical approach, and to write it up. Which means that write it up you must. This won't be the first time you've broken new ground and done something revolutionary. For what it's worth, here's the latest email address I've got for Witten--. pw: But then I remember of the time, back around 1972, when I tried to recruit Minsky and Grossberg (and ...) to backpropagation.... pw: At some level, the duty is real and important and life-and-death. hb: yes. the first precept of science as I absorbed it at the age of ten was this: The truth at any price including the price of your life. The truth you see will someday die with you unless you write it up. By the way, the second precept of the science I imbibed was this: Look at things everyone takes for granted as if you've never seen them before, then work from the awe and the questions thatnew view rouses in you. Hence the silly questions I ask. And hence my gratitude that you let me get away with it. pw: And it is really scary to neglect something so important. hb: precisely. pw: But at another level, I DID mention some of these possible directions (among others) in quant-ph 0202138 and the longer journal paper that followed it up. That's probably not enough.. but.. I have to go with the flow of what opportunities seem most likely to materialize in a real way, hb: here's the bottom line--the one that neglects all the realities of day to day life. You have a vision of what the work you've published to date implies. No one has your unique experience and your mind. If you don't write up what you see today, it may be gone tomorrow. Insights fade and are replaced. Capturing them before they can get away is what computers and paper are for. I have the same problem. My latest solution, which isn't working yet--a tie-clip microphone I've gotten into the habit of wearing every day. The wire is under my shirt, just as it is when TV crews come in here and wire me up for sound. The wire goes to an amazingly tiny digital voice recorder clipped to my belt. Then there's the part that doesn't work--the voice recognition software that's supposed to transcribe my brainstorming sessions or private mutterings into wordprocessor form. I don't know whose language it understands, but so far it doesn't comprehend mine. Things like this seem embarrassingly egomaniacal, but they're not. Those thoughts that disappear so quickly, the insights that you have while walking from one room to another and are so ridiculously important that you know you'll never forget them,those insights melt before you can find the time a day or two later to type them up or write them down. Let's say only one out of ten of them is really meaningful, thought-changing, solid and good. That could generate two culture-rearranging thoughts a week or more. That's over a hundred minor culture-quake makers a year. And, Paul, you are literally the only person I know who started seriously in science earlier than I did, and who understands the variety of things you do. So your cultural contribution is one of the rarest kinds, those offered to humanity by only the rarest minds. pw: for the life-and-death issues which have the greatest chance of emerging. _____ Howard Bloom
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In a message dated 3/26/2003 9:13:59 AM Eastern Standard Time, writes: Is reality just numbers? We had a previous discussion: Howard replied: hb: description is representation, not reality. It is translation from one frame of reference to another, from one system to another. The fact that numerous systems can be isomorphic and reflect each other is one of the things we examine too infrequently. How does math map the cosmos? How does thought map math? How do equations on paper equate with brain processes and with the processes that birthed a universe? ================================================= Howard's reply reminds me very much of comments that Paul Prueitt has made recently, accusing many people of "confusing description with reality." The accusation seemed rather strange to me, but I realize that there are some deep cultural divisions here that all are the deeper for not being appreciated so clearly..... I strongly agree with Einstein's bottom line in the Einstein/Heisenberg debate, and in many other real-world debates they had. But as I said before... my cultural roots are really more on the Heisenberg side. So I would try to respond to your point from a philosophical starting point more like Heisenberg's. There is some real irony here. Even though I disagree with the Copenhagen view of quantum field theory (QFT), I would claim to fully understand it. Yet many of the people who believe in it do not fully understand it, in part because they do not fully understand or share the philosophical presuppositions. (It is hard for people to understand something they do not believe in. Possible but hard.) Crudely speaking, one might call this viewpoint "modern German existentialism." Or a Pythagorean stream of it. And I suddenly realize... some of the confusion in QFT today is that folks who try to practice Copenhagen get messed up by the fact that they don't understand what it really is. At some level... at the very most fundamental level.. the only REAL reality for any of us, as individuals, is the stream of our sensory experience. Some of this is brutally clear, like the pain when we stub our toe. Other inputs are subtle, and more easily ignored. But in the end, that is all that we have. EVERYTHING else is just an internal model or explanation that we use in order to predict or make sense of that experience. hb: Whole heartedly agreed. Even sense data is nowhere near as straightforward as it seems to be. If you study the system of visual perception, you'll find that the body and mind translate the photons falling on the visual receptors in the eye from one language to another many, many times just to process a quick peek from behind a bush.

Here's a description of the process from my second book, Global Brain. Note how many different levels of coding, decoding, compression, expansion, recompression, and translation the process uses. All of these mirror the many verbal, written, mathematical, metaphoric, and pictorial shorthands we conscious, culture-using humans whiffle through simply to have this conversation. And all hint to me that this cosmos is profoundly fractal--the same patterns show up on many many levels and can be forced to appear on many levels more. Without further ado, here' visual perception as a multi-layered cake of descriptions, representations, and reflections in new kinds of mirrors: The image that we see is the product of slicing, dicing, coding, compression, long-distance transmission, neural guesswork, and eventual resplicing. The cut-and-paste begins at the frontier where our senses meet the outer world--the eye, which edits and reshapes input rather than faithfully recording just the plain facts of a sight. Cells in the retina scrap 75% of the light which pours in through the lens of the eye. They diddle mercilessly with what's left, transmogrifying the photons of which light is made into pulses of electrons and bursts of unpronounceable chemicals like prelumirhodopsin. They fiddle with the contrast, tamper with the sense of space, and report not the location of what we're watching, but where the retinal cells calculate it soon will be. Though we don't notice it, the eye is constantly flicking back and forth. To pick shapes out of the resulting blur, retinal photoreceptors take enormous liberties. The ones which suspect they've got a handle on what needs to be perceived clamp a blackout on the photoreceptors around them, and keep them from reporting what they're witnessing. Then the domineering cells turn their favored spot of mishmosh into the rough outlines of what we'll eventually "see." Adding insult to injury, the eye crushes the information it's already fuddled, compacting the landslide of data from 125 million neurons down to a code able to squeeze through a cable--the optic nerve--a mere one million neurons in size. On the way to the brain, the constricted stream stops briefly in the thalamus, where it is mixed, matched and modified with flows of input from ears, muscles, fingertips, and even sensors indicating the tilt and trajectory of the head, hands, legs, and torso. The rearranged gumbo is sent off to the visual cortex, where it is divvied up again.

Some areas of the cortex pick out horizontal lines, others work on the vertical, some sort out diagonals for processing, and edge-detectors carve out silhouettes. Each resulting sliver of the visual signal is tucked into a separate storage belt responsible for gleaning a different type of meaning. If you're twirling in a swivel chair, one belt will grab the smear of color whipping past your eyes and retouch it as a freeze-frame. Meanwhile neurons nooked and crannied throughout the brain will sift the tidbits for interpretation. For instance, cells which signal if an oncoming human is friend or foe will add their best guess to the moving information flow. Finally a council of representatives from the superior colliculus, the thalamus, the locus coeruleus, the hypothalamus, and the occipital cortex pool their squabble of conclusions and cast a vote on what the twinges of light impinging on the retina might be. Not until they've agreed on an image do they send it to the left cerebral hemisphere, presenting it to the conscious mind as a panorama accompli. What we see is not the product of direct perception, but a reconstruction bordering on collage artistry.

________ notes .. E.F. MacNichol Jr. "Retinal processing of visual data." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, June 1966: 1331-44; C.R. Michael. "Retinal processing of visual images." Scientific American, May 1969: 105-14; C. Wehrhahn, D. Rapf. "ON- and OFF-pathways form separate neural substrates for motion perception: psychophysical evidence." Journal of Neuroscience, June 1992: 2247-50; S.M. Smirnakis, M.J. Berry, D.K. Warland, W. Bialek, M. Meister. "Adaptation of retinal processing to image contrast and spatial scale." Nature, March 6, 1997: 69-73; J.F. Briggs and F.D. Peat. Turbulent Mirror: An illustrated guide to chaos theory and the science of wholeness. New York: Harper & Row, 1989: 258; T.D. Shou, Y.F. Zhou. "Orientation and direction sensitivity of cells in subcortical structures of the visual system." Sheng Li Hsueh Pao, April 1996: 105-12. .. Michael J. Berry II, Iman H. Brivanlou, Thomas A. Jordan & Markus Meister. "Anticipation of moving stimuli by the retina." Nature, 25 March 1999: 334-338; Stelios M. Smirnakis, Michael J. Berry, David K. Warland, William Bialek & Markus Meister. "Adaptation of retinal processing to image contrast and spatial scale." Nature, March 6, 1997: 69-73; Sang?Hun Lee and Randolph Blake. "Visual Form Created Solely from Temporal Structure." Science, 14 May 1999: 1165?1168. .. T.N. Cornsweet. Visual Perception. New York: Academic Press, 1970. K. Boff, L. Kaufman, and J.P. Thomas; The Handbook of Perception and Human Performance, New York: Wiley, 1986. .. Dave Hubel. Eye, Brain and Vision. New York: Methuen, 1986; Jeremy Wolfe. "Hidden Visual Processes." Scientific American, February 1983: 72-85. .. S.A. Lytaev, V.I. Shostak. "The thalamic integration of afferent flows in man during image recognition." Zhurnal Vysshei Nervnoi Deiatelnosti Imeni I. P. Pavlova, January-February 1992: 12-20. .. Martin S. Banks, Krishna V. Shenoy, Richard A. Andersen, and James A. Crowell. "Visual self?motion perception during head turns." Nature Neuroscience, December 1998: 732?737. .. Before the elements of a perception can reach the thalamus, rhythmic synchronization--pulsing to a common beat--helps twine the disparate threads of a single impression together. See: Wolf Singer. "Neurobiology: Striving for coherence." Nature, 4 February 1999: 391-393; H. Wolfgang, R. Miltner, Christoph Braun, Matthias Arnold, Herbert Witte, & Edward Taub. "Coherence of gamma-band EEG activity as a basis for associative learning." Nature, 4 February 1999: 434-436; Eugenio Rodriguez, Nathalie George, Jean-Philippe Lachaux, Jacques Martinerie, Bernard Renault, & Francisco J. Varela. "Perception's shadow: long-distance synchronization of human brain activity." Nature. 4 February 1999: 430-433. .. D.H. Hubel, T.N. Wiesel. "Anatomical demonstration of columns in the monkey striate cortex." Nature, February 22, 1969: 747-50; D.H. Hubel, T.N. Wiesel. "Receptive fields and functional architecture of monkey striate cortex." Journal of Physiology, March 1968: 215-43; V. Braitenberg, C. Braitenberg. "Geometry of orientation columns in the visual cortex." Biological Cybernetics, August 1979: 179-86; D.C. Burr, M.C. Morrone, D. Spinelli. "Evidence for edge and bar detectors in human vision." Vision Research, 29:4, 1989: 419-31; Michael Schneider. Understanding the Brain--A New Look At Seeing: The Visual Cortex and Self-Organization. Projects in Scientific Computing, 1995. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, 1995 and http://www.psc.edu/science/Miikkulainen/Miikkul-vis.html, May 1999; T.D. Shou, Y.F. Zhou. "Orientation and direction sensitivity of cells in subcortical structures of the visual system." 105-12; H. Sompolinsky, R. Shapley. "New perspectives on the mechanisms for orientation selectivity." Current Opinion in Neurobiology, August 1997: 514-22; Aniruddha Das and Charles D. Gilbert. "Topography of contextual modulations mediated by short-range interactions in primary visual cortex." Nature, 17 June 1999: 655-661. .. J.J. Kulikowski, T.R. Vidyasagar. "Space and spatial frequency: analysis and representation in the macaque striate cortex." Experimental Brain Research, 64:1, 1986: 5-18. .. John McCrone. The Ape That Spoke: Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind. New York: William Morrow, 1990: 52?58. .. E. Mellet, L. Petit, B. Mazoyer, M. Denis, N. Tzourio. "Reopening the mental imagery debate: lessons from functional anatomy." Neuroimage, August 1998: 129-39. .. I. Fried, K.A. MacDonald, C.L. Wilson. "Single neuron activity in human hippocampus and amygdala during recognition of faces and objects." Neuron, May 1997: 753-65; J. Duncan. "Converging levels of analysis in the cognitive neuroscience of visual attention." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, August 29, 1998: 1307-17; K. Yamatani, T. Ono, H. Nishijo, A. Takaku. "Activity and distribution of learning-related neurons in monkey (Macaca fuscata) prefrontal cortex." Behavioral Neuroscience, August 1990: 503-31. .. For the location of the conscious "narrator" we call "self" in the left cortical hemisphere, see: M.S. Gazzaniga. "Organization of the human brain." Science, 1 September 1989: 947-52; M.S. Gazzaniga, J.C. Eliassen, L. Nisenson, C.M. Wessinger, R. Fendrich, K. Baynes. "Collaboration between the hemispheres of a callosotomy patient. Emerging right hemisphere speech and the left hemisphere interpreter." Brain, August 1996 (Part 4): 1255-62; M.S. Gazzaniga. "Brain and conscious experience." Advances in Neurology, 77 1998: 181-92; Michael S. Gazzaniga. Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, and Intelligence. New York: Basic Books, 1992: 121-137. .. David C. Bradley, Marsha Maxwell, Richard A. Andersen, Martin S. Banks, Krishna V. Shenoy. "Mechanisms of Heading Perception in Primate Visual Cortex." Science, 13 September 1996: 1544-1547; Bruce Bower. "Cloudy memories, sunny predictions." Science News, September 21, 1996: 184; Michael S. Gazzaniga. "Organization of the Human Brain." Science, 1 September 1989: 947-952; Humberto R. Maturana & Francisco J. Varela. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding: 162-163; Tim Appenzeller. "Undivided Attention." The Sciences, November/December 1990: 6-7; John R. Skoyles. "Another variety of vision." Trends in NeuroScience, 20 1997, 22?23--a version with references is at http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/tins.htm; Christian Marendaz. "Nature and Dynamics of Reference Frames in Visual Search For Orientation: Implications for Early Visual Processing." Psychological Science, January 1998: 27-32; Jeremy M. Wolfe. "What Can 1 Million Trials Tell Us About Visual Search?" Psychological Science, January 1998: 33-39; Stephen J. DeArmond, Madeline M. Fusco, Maynard M. Dewey. Structure of the Human Brain: a photographic atlas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989; S. Chenchal Rao, Gregor Rainer, Earl K. Miller. "Integration of What and Where in the Primate Prefrontal Cortex." Science, 2 May 1997: 821-824.

pw: Even our notions of good and bad ultimately depend totally on EMOTIONAL sensations or feelings which come to us directly -- hb: those emotional sensations also involve translation through many layers of representation, through many frames of reference. For example, the amygdala gives us our jolt of fear and is first to get a crack at deciphering the emotional meaning of the latest spurt from the incoming data-stream Then comes the hippocampus, which gets its own crack at translation of the incoming signal, a very different sort of interpretation. If the hippocampus' examination of the incoming stream says everything's ok, that it all checks out with what other parts of the brain (each with its own representational mechanisms) feel comfortable with, then the hippocampus sums up its verdict in yet another language, and sends a shut-up-already signal (an inhibitory signal) back to the alarm-bells of the amygdala. Even the most elemental feeling involves a whole mess of brain parts, each with it's own system of description and interpretation, moving from a hub-bub to a general vote of agreement. Here's the irony. Even consensus is a form of translation from the language of the many to the seeming language of the one. So Bloom, in his idiocy, asks why "reality" can be described, interpreted, symbolized, or encoded in so many different ways. If Bloom were a Pribram-follower, he'd say it's because of the holographic nature of things. Shatter a holograph into a thousand pieces and you can still get the whole holographic image out of each shard--though you'll pay with a bit of blurring for having broken the merchandise. But that's the backwards way of saying things. Nature starts with parts then builds up bigger or more complex structures in which the shape of the parts reappears on scale after ascending scale, over and over again. That's fracticality. Bloom, the dolt, says there's a reason you can translate a reality into so many media, so many frames of reference, so many different mixes of electrons, protons, chemicals, photons, inks, papers, neural webs, computer settings, patterns of bits and bytes, binary codes, hexadecimals, magnetic twitches of oxides, tribal tapestries of ox hides, English, French, Russian, graphs, patterns of phosphors on glass, and a good deal more.

The cosmos began with a set of simple postulates, algorithms, rules, or commandments--call them whatever you will. It's unfolded 13.5 billion years worth of the implications hidden in those magic beans--13.5 billion years worth of axiom-referential processes and things. That's iteration, non-linear processing, fractals. And in a system of this kind, the same patterns peek out, poke out, and pongle themselves together on nearly every side. pw: those are the only real foundation we have. hb: yup, that's where we have to begin. Though not really. We begin with a roughly 35,000 year accumulation of cultural interpretations, a 3.85 billion year legacy of DNA and cell membrane accomodations to experience, and with the interactions between these two that we call "direct experience." We're already looking through a thousand-layered glass the first time we ever open our eyes and attempt to describe. pw: All the rest is deduced from there. (That's about what I concluded at age 16, independently, in adolescent rebellion against Anglo-Saxon metamathematics and logic, which had been my main culture from age 8 up until then. But Heisenberg got it from his environment, generally... though in the end, maybe he was more of a rebel in his thinking and personality than I was... As I loook back, I would throw in some caveats, based on what I have learned in the meantime about the mind, but let me put those on hold.) And so... EVERYTHING in our head is just description. That is all we are capable of. hb: in my humble opinion YOU HAVE SMACKED THE NAIL ON ITS VERY HEAD. Yes, yup, si, oui, da, ja, I agree. pw: Some descriptions fit experience better than others, but no description is the reality itself. pw: Now here is the point: **IF** the description is a good description, it is isomorphic to the reality. hb: agreed again, mein herr. pw: In that case, there is nothing really there in the reality, other than what is reflected in the description. hb: at first glance this sounds very wrong. But if you fiddle with it, it sounds a bit better. reality=what's reflected in description. Hence what's mirrored in description=reality. And since we have many descriptions and could always generate lots more, there must be a reality. So there's no real way of getting the reality out of the equation. The more descriptions the more the isomorphisms pile up. And the more strongly those isomorphisms point to a central locus, something as real as a dust cloud's center of gravity. We may not be able to see that center of gravity directly, but it is still a very compelling reality. The first of these dust cloud centers roughly half a million years after the big bang (or after one of Hoyle's leaks in space)--were potent enough that eventually entire galaxies swung into shape around them.

pw: This is the key point. This is a lesson which physics learned most clearly and most emphatically from what Einstein did to Maxwell's Laws and to the "ether." In Maxwell's laws, of course, there are only equations. And the equations predict the existence of waves. hb: very interesting. pw: (The success of this purely theoretical prediction was one of the great real-world empirical and technological successes of physics.) But many people, using old common-sense views, said: "Hey, Maxwell's Laws are just equations. Equations are just descriptions, not realities. Of course, when there is a wave, there must be a motion of something. There is not just the description, there is the thing itself which has a wave in it. Let us call this thing 'the ether.'" And maybe Maxwell himself went along, as he had to, to sell his heresy in a highly conservative world. But there is no ether. We know that. hb: Pavel says this was a hasty conclusion, and that we should step back and reexamine it. pw: But again, let me be careful. Some people still believe there MIGHT be something like an underlying fluid, solid or lattice. However, the real physicists who study this theoretical possibility have thoroughly' assimilated the modern viewpoint, which I also tend to take for granted. hb: remember, priestly cults can go way off track. First they shelter behind indecipherable languages (in this case, math). Then they develop their own self-consistent worldviews. But the more insular the groups and their worldviews become, the more they can stray from the realm of massive consensual validation that keeps us on the path we call reality. Lord Kelvin told us that the cosmos could not possibly be more than, I forget the exact figure, but it was something in the range of 100,000 years old. A leading expert on aerodynamics in the late 19th century proved conclusively that no heavier than air machine could ever fly. (He also proved conclusively that bumblebees couldn't fly either, by the way. Thank goodness the bees were never told this news or we might not have bumblebees today.) And the entire community of geologists knew with absolute certainty in roughly 1915 that the theory of plate tectonics was crazed flapdoodle. The more isolated a community of specialists becomes, the more likely it is to go offtrack. pw: The view is that a model based on an alternative lattice would be JUST ANOTHER MATHEMATICAL MODEL. In such a model, the electromagnetic waves would appear as derived or approximate or emergent phenomena, in a universe governed by yet another purely mathematical model. The model is credible as something to talk about ONLY TO THE EXTENT that it can take that viewpoint. Why? Because ONLY if it takes that viewpoint can it begin to promise different predictions of SOMETHING measurable... something which has implications for real experience. And so... talk about ethers and deeper levels is "just heuristic half-baked rhetoric" until it becomes "real" by being translated into an alternative mathematical theory. hb: Your basic point is right. In science you have to somehow go eventually from mere notions about things--like Democritus' loony notion of the atom--to predictions you can test. I'm not very good at that in physics. My expertise in prediction and validation is in the social and emotional terrain. But there's a whoops or two.

Mathocentrism rules out all the various languages your brain and body must use to do math...the translation from what Einstein called "vision" to a neuronal web-buzz that hints at an equation. The translation from that web-buzz to a set of instructions the motor neurons can get a grip on. The orders of outgoing nerve signals into which the motor neurons translate that buzz so it can travel down your arms to your fingertips. The movement of millions of muscle cells it takes to pick up a piece of chalk (assuming chalk is still being used today) and to translate hand movement into a coherent pattern that makes the chalk scrawl a bunch of Arabic numerals and Greek letters onto a blackboard. Then there's the batch of nerve signals sent down the efferent nervous system to muscles in nearly every part of your body that swivels you around to address your colleagues without tipping you over on your head. And the effort of the initial brain buzz to translate itself into yet another set of signals that can be deciphered by the motor neurons that move your mouth, your diaphragm, and tongue. These nerve signals have to coordinate muscles in many locations to produce the words that tens of thousands of years of humans have bequeathed you. With that legacy, expressed in muscular control of breath, you manage to explain what you've just done. Out of all those languages you use to do math, you've picked just one. Or is it that the tangle of many, many languages we call math has tricked us into thinking it's a single thing? Another way of taking on the question. Remember my daft big bagel theory of the cosmos? In Einsteinian terms, it needed no math to predict that past a certain point the rush of matter away from a big bang center would increase. That was implicit in the 5 dimensional picture of a torus with a Klein's bottle twist that made the edge the center. The model was posited in roughly 1959. Approximately 40 years later, surprise, surprise, the acceleration it predicted showed up in our obsvervations of novas. Math would have been helpful to predict WHERE the hump would be. But I doubt it. Look at all the guys doing math who never anticipated the downslide on the other side at all!!!!!!!!! pw: Einstein might not be happy with German existentialism (though I am not so sure).. but I am sure that he and Heisenberg would agree on this fundamental viewpoint. ====== By the way, there are some corollaries. The Copenhagen viewpoint really requires that QFT should be trying to provide a complete, well-defined, axiomatically stateable prediction of what any individual person WILL SEE. Modern QFT does not meet that standard. Most people DOING QFT do not even seem to aspire to that standard any more. It often has the methodological flavor of medieval theology more than of Heisenberg's point of reference. Let alone Einstein's. hb: good point.

pw: But... back to the task at hand. Putting the mathematical flesh (well, bones) on a more modern and more complete view of the mind. (At least in this case, there will be chapters by other people to take care of a lot of the muscles.) hb: ") Actually, my aim is to do the opposite, and you're helping me with it quite a bit. I have to go back where I began--to cosmology, astrophysics, and the arts--to write The Big Bang Tango: Quarking In the Social Cosmos--Notes Toward A Post-Newtonian Science. It's a book that links the Big Bang and the history of the cosmos to corollary generator theory (the idea that the cosmos started with a handful of axioms), fracticality, oscillation, attraction and repulsion, compression and expansion, imagination, creative inspiration, metaphor, math, and Einstein, Darwin, or T.S. Eliot's forms of secular prophecy. You've helped me resume a train of thought I abandoned at the age of sixteen when I went off on to find the dark underbelly of mass emotion, from mysticism to mass fevers and mass-perceptions. Now you're helping me explore something basic to The Big Bang Tango--how the two ends of the spectrum--mass moodswings and mass perception on the one hand and cosmology, astrobiology, and theoretical physics on the other--connect. All thanks--Howard
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Very good and very helpful thoughts, Paul.
Comments below...
Paul Werbos
In a message dated 1/19/2003 5:14:06 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:

At 12:53 AM 1/18/2003 -0500, wrote:
Paul--This is fascinating. To what extent do oscillations play a role in adaptive optimization?
pw: In a way, the theme of oscillation recurs in different ways at even more "sites" in the overall framework.
To one down in the trenches... the very first association which occurs in my mind is Fourier transforms..
but, God help us, many colleagues would say Laplace transforms.

hb: Paul--to once again reveal my ignorance, I've just looked up LaPlace and Fourier Transforms, something I should have done long ago. I understand math best when reducing it to one of its isomorphs--pictures. The pictures illustrating Fourier Transforms and LaPlace Transforms both hint that the two are both concerned with decomposing wave functions into component forms, then recomposing an approximation of the original wave.
The bottom line is this: both these mathematical systems are all about waves, which means, they are both all about oscillations. Am I anywhere near understanding the reality of Fourier and LaPlace?
pw: Any linear time-invariant dynamical system is naturally analyzed in terms of oscillations.

hb: more of my lack of knowledge. A linear time-invariant dynamical system is a system with an input and an output, right? How many sorts of things on this planet and in this cosmos can be analyzed as linear time-invariant dynamical systems? Meaning how many can be analyzed as simple input-output systems? How many types of things in this universe and on (and in) this globe can be analyzed using Fourier and LaPlace transforms--meaning how many can be analyzed as waves and superpositions of waves?
For how many of empirical things do these various mathematical forms of analysis apply--from the swing of an electron around a proton, the wave of a photon in motion, the circle of stars around a galactic heart, the cAMP pulsations of slime mold when they signal each other that food had run out, the pulsations of the slimemold amoeba when they come together and form something that looks like a crawling slug, the input and internal signals that tell that sluge when to lift its head--its fruiting body--and release its spores.
And in what cases would we be oversimplifying to the point of distortion if we were to apply these forms of mathematical analysis?
pw: ("Time-invariant" does not mean that the STATE of the system does not change -- only that laws
of the dynamics do not.)
hb: that helps, thanks. complex dynamical systems, the ones I play with, change constantly. Are there unchanging dynamic laws that rule these change? That's a question historians, cultural evolutionists, and paleopsychologists have been asking for a long, long time. Ibn Khaldun, in roughly 1350 ad, was the first mega-historian to say yes and to posit unchanging laws of social change. His laws were a delight to read, but I suspect grossly oversimplified, and wouldn't work in the world today.
However Osama bin Laden might beg to disagree. He's counting on the stability of Ibn Khaldun's laws of social change. If they're right, Osama has a good chance of doing what Allah has always willed--taking over the planet for the purity of the one true religion, its one true god, and the laws that god gave to his only unsullied prophet, Mohammed.
Am I getting of the point by hauling geopolitics and cultural evolution into a discussion of Fourier Transforms? No, not at all. Culture-change is cyclical. But each cycle changes the nature of the system. So each cycle is very much like a many of those that have proceeded it, but also very different. The system of all the societies on this globe is one that is constantly changing itself.
But is the system of all cultures on this planet changing its laws? Or is the pattern of periodical radical upgrade, invention, innovation, rearrangement, and breakthrough a product of something like a Fourier or LaPlace wave acting fractally? Is it a linear time-invariant dynamic system? Or is it a linear time-invariant dynamic system that works upon itself orthoganally? (I don't mean orthogonal in the mathematical sense, I mean it in the sense of lifting above the dimension in which the Fourier Transforms are working, what the dictionary calls, "involving right angles or perpendiculars".)
When it comes to mappings of mathematical systems onto the material I study--everything from the Big Bang and the formation of protons (nucleogenesis), atoms (nucleocosmochronology), galaxies, complex molecules, planets, life, evolution, society, the brain, culture, and the mind--Mandelbrot's equation seems to fit more than anything else I've seen.
However I am very mathematically naive.
pw: Thus almost any first-order approximation of the behavior of a
continuous system
look like oscillations. They occur at almost all levels of analysis.

hb: great. fits neatly into the work I've been doing,
pw: And, of course, in nonlinear dynamical systems, there are often limit cycles.
A major challenge in designing intelligent systems -- or even more mundane control systems --
is to prevent the kind of oscillations one does not like. Like shaky cars. Or positive feedback loops
in sound systems.

hb: having but modest goals, I'm merely looking for the oscillatory patterns that have helped build this cosmos from scratch and now manifest themselves in mass emotion, thought, social floods and maelstroms, and calms within these social-passion-and-aggression storms (all liquid turbulence metaphors, and all presumably mathematecizable).
pw: One big difference between classical control approaches and more brain-like modern approaches
is the acceptance of the fact that the best "controller" (even for such things as aircraft control)
may not be one which damps out all change or movement in the world, but rather, one which
converges to something like an optimal cycle or some other more complex pattern of dynamics.

hb: an optimal cycle wouldn't be good enough. or so I suspect. This cosmos periodically settles down and optimizes, then it gets restless and pulls itself up to a whole new level of suprise, a whole new toyland of reality, then comes the optimization again--learning to play with the brand new toys.
The mystery is in the saltation, the sudden jumps from a cosmos that has never seen a "thing"--a particle--before to one that suddenly has more than 10(89) of them; from a cosmos that has only seen particles for 100,000 years to one that suddenly sees a whole new form of social aggregation that we call the atom and the cornucopia of new opportunities that open. Among other things, this cosmos had never seen the subtle attractive force we know as gravity before atoms appeared on the scene. Then came gravity wars between aggregations and we had the first matter--dust and gas. Next cam huge gravity aggregations--dark swirls of enormous size--the first galaxies.
This not a mere process of oscillation settling into a state of optimization. There's a "wow" force periodically kicking this whole machine up to whole new planes of being, whole new ways of mix-and-match-and-socializing. Suns were a huge wow when they first appeared one million years after the big bang.
Sun deaths in Nova crashes 100,000 years later were a totally unseen catastrophe. The crunch of protons and neutrons in that fist of a dying star was another big surprise. It gradually turned three forms of nuclei into four, then five, then six, then 92.

Then came complex carbon-based molecules forming in hot interstellar clouds of gas, cold instersellar clouds, ice spicules, comets, and lord knows what all else. Then came the frothing of complex molecules on this planet, the evolution of just one life system, the system of DNA (shouldn't there have really been at least six or seven life forms duking it out?), and then came you and me.
Oscillation is everywhere in this genesis story. But what is the orthogonal flipper? What is the generator of the jumps? What is the source of wow-power?
Right now I've got my eye on fracticality. But will the math of fractals be enough to handle this cosmic creativity?
pw: Oscillation is a constant between the basic categories you outlined below--hope and fear, emotion and reason-- plus a few that are related--bulls and bears, conservatives and liberals, romanticism and classicism, war parties and peace parties, short skirts and long skirts (I'm not kidding--the anthropological literature on this mesure of mass mood is fascinating).
pw: The idea of oscillation is often used as a kind of placeholder for more complex patterns of dynamics -- just
as Wiener himself may have slightly overstressed the thermostat or regulator as a paradigm for
more complex decision and control systems. (Many followers went dangerously overboard
on that particular simplification, perhaps causing overreaction in turn.)
Some of these "oscillations" could be cartoon-portrayed more accurately as Hegel did,
as a kind of dialectic process for exploring a complex domain of ideas...

hb: A good observation. I've taken that idea and run with it quite a distance in my own work.
pw: Oscillation on some of these dimensions represents a kind of high-valence inner struggle along
a certain dimension... which is ultimately resolved best by the system identifying and paying real attention to
another dimension altogether, which relieves some of the ... systemic tension...
This has various mathematical bases. For example, there is a kind of folk-theorem I believe which says that
"there are no local minima when you allow for smooth changes in topology, for new directions..."
Also, a lot of the vacillation has to do with "local forgetting effects," which turn out to have a direct relation
to that syncretism stuff I mentioned earlier.

hb: I have vast amounts of empirical and theoretical material on these oscillations--but I'm curious about the match between social reality and the math.
Oscillation between extremes shows up as a basic component in the behavior of group-learning systems from bacterial colonies to brains (100 billion neurons competing and agreeing) and from ant colonies to chimp tribes, and to the history and mass culture of modern human beings.
pw: Again, THIS parallel has a lot to do with the power of Fourier analysis as a first approximation to almost anything.
Anything except bits.

hb: As for the question about fear, here are some excerpts from one of my books, Global Brain: The Evolution Of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century:
From Open Hand to Social Fist--The Clenched Society
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
I occasionally wonder how far the insights of Yeats or of Eliot might have gone,
really. Some of their outspoken friends were a tad amateurish in some ways, but...
well... it's a segment of history I have not tracked as much as some others.
I sometimes wonder if their female friends may have been more insightful than their male friends.
Lately I have been drawn more to curiosity about Bacon and Newton and that segment..
but not such an active pursuit... back to field operators.
Best,
Paul
P.S. Am curious about what that friend of yours has decided to do.
"Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure." Reinhold Niebuhr

Groups under threat constrict. They do it to gain leverage and force. Toss bacteria onto a surface so hard that feeding becomes almost impossible, and they'll abandon individual freedom, pull together their members, and form a tight-knit phalanx which can, according to physicist/microbiologist Eshel Ben-Jacob, carve through the obstacles around it like a blade. Human groups in times of trouble stiffen up their unity, squelch ideas, rally 'round their leaders, and spit out those who fail to ape the top dog faithfully. Group members project their own forbidden emotions onto others, and in their ferocity become enforcers for the group's norms. They spot the smallest sin among their fellows and punish it intolerantly. In biology, emergency measures like these have a tendency to cut two ways. In short jolts they produce bursts of power. But used in the long run, they destroy. The oneness whic h gives society the punch of a bayonet produces over the course of time a paralyzing rigidity. Howard Bloom
-----------
references
.. Jamie Arndt, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon. "Subliminal Exposure to Death-Related Stimuli Increases Defense of the Cultural Worldview." Psychological Science, September, 1997: 379?385; J. Krause. "Differential fitness returns in relation to spatial position in groups." Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, May 1994: 187-206. Complex dynamical systems theory and theories of self-organizing systems may shed light on why group constriction in the face of threat is so universal in biology. The Grand Dragon of self-organization, the Santa Fe Institute's Stuart Kauffman, observes that perturbed systems, systems knocked from their normal moorings and threatened with eradication, respond with their own form of reactionary conservatism: "In order to compensate and achieve coordination, such systems would be expected to shift deeper into ordered regime. There the convergence in state space is stronger, and hence provides a buf fer against exogenous noise." In other words, when a self-organizing system is in danger of being ripped apart it bunches and seeks refuge in the strategy it "knows" best. (Stuart Kauffman. "What is life: was Schrodinger Right." In What is Life? The Next Fifty Years--Speculations on the future of biology. Edited by Michael P. Murphy and Luke A.J. O'Neill. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995: 109.)
.. Eshel Ben-Jacob and Herbert Levine. "The Artistry of Microorganisms." Scientific American, October, 1998: 82-87. http://www.sciam.com/1998/1098issue/1098levine.html, November 1998 (web version); E. Ben-Jacob. "From Snowflake Formation to the Growth of Bacterial Colonies. Part II. Cooperative formation of complex colonial patterns." Contemporary Physics, 38 (1997): 205-241.
.. H.J. Rothgerber. "External intergroup threat as an antecedent to perceptions of in-group and out-group homogeneity." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. December 1997: 1206-12; W.N. Morris, S. Worchel, J.L. Bios, J.A. Pearson, C.A. Rountree, G.M. Samaha, J. Wachtler, S.L. Wright. "Collective coping with stress: group reactions to fear, anxiety, and ambiguity." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, June 1976: 674-9.
.. I.L. Janis. Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-policy Decisions and Fiascos. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1972; M.R. Callaway, R.G. Marriott, J.K. Esser. "Effects of dominance on group decision making: toward a stress-reduction explanation of groupthink." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, October 1985: 949-52.
.. S.E. Taylor, M. Lobel. "Social comparison activity under threat: downward evaluation and upward contacts." Psychological Review, October 1989: 569-75.
.. L.S. Newman, K.J. Duff, R.F. Baumeister. "A new look at defensive projection: thought suppression, accessibility, and biased person perception." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, May 1997: 980-1001; P. Laudedale, P. Smith-Cunnien, J. Parker, J. Inverarity. "External threat and the definition of deviance." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, May 1984: 1058-68; Howard Bloom. The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition into the forces of history. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995: 73-96.
.. The tendency of short (acute) bursts of energizers to produce benefits, and of those same energizers to do damage in lengthy (chronic) doses shows up particularly among stress hormones, which prime the body for reaction to a crisis but, if not packed away quickly, do enormous damage. (Neil Greenberg. "Behavioral Endocrinology of Physiological Stress in a Lizard." The Journal of Experimental Zoology Supplement. 4, 1990: 171-172; Neil Greenberg. "Ethologically informed design in husbandry and research." In Health and Welfare of Captive Reptiles, edited by Clifford Warwick, Fredric L. Frye, and James B. Murphy. London: Chapman &Hall, 1995: 253; Neil Greenberg. "Central and Endocrine Aspects of Tongue-Flicking and Exploratory Behavior in Anolis carolinensis." Brain, Behavior, and Evolution, 41, 1993: 214-216; Cliff H. Summers and Neil Greenberg. "Somatic Correlates of Adrenergic Activity during Aggression in the Lizard, Anolis carolinensis." Hormones and Behavior, 28, 1994: 29-40; Robert M. Sapolsky. "Stress in the Wild." Scientific American. January 1990: 116-123; M.R. Gunnar, K Tout, M. de Haan, S. Pierce, K. Stansbury. "Temperament, social competence, and adrenocortical activity in preschoolers." Developmental Psychobiology. July 1997: 65-85; Robert M. Sapolsky. Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers : An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping. New York: W H Freeman &Co 1998; B. Moghaddam, M.L. Bolinao, B. Stein-Behrens, R. Sapolsky. "Glucocorticoids mediate the stress-induced extracellular accumulation of glutamate." Brain Research, August 1994: 251-4.) Strategies used at one level of biology show up on numerous others. Hence it is not surprising that the tendency of instant activators to become long-term poisons appears not only within organisms, but within societies.

In a message dated 1/17/2003 11:44:48 AM Eastern Standard Time, pwerbos writes:

>
>How does cybernetics deal with this issue of fear ... in theory and,
>perhaps more importantly just now, in practice?
>
>His question could be extended to other domains saying
>How does cybernetics, systems, information, organization, science,
>management, behavioral concern,... deal with this issue of fear ... in
>theory and, perhaps more importantly just now, in practice?
This is a deep and subtle question.
I started to reply... then quit, because of lack of time... but really
should say
a LITTLE.
On one level ... the phenomenon of "fear," like "love" or "creativity" or
"escaping from
local minima" (vicious cycles)... is really a diverse family of emergent
phenomena, which
are intrinsically not reducible to a quick unitary story. But there are
some interesting pieces...
For example...
There is a kind of ladder (or lattice) of designs for true intelligent
learning systems...
>From a computational viewpoint, all such designs are alternative ways of
addressing the
general problem of how to optimize expected results over time over an
unknown environment....
All can be proven to converge, in time, to an optimal strategy of action,
if given enough time to learn....
But some are faster than others, exponentially faster when the environment
is complex...
as we rise up the ladder, the complexity of the learning system AND OF the
environments
it can cope with effectively, both rise. (This is a quickie summary of some
very complex stuff, with a huge amount of philosophical background I don't
have time to repeat just now.)
In my view, the very bottom of that ladder -- much lower than the learning
in the smallest mouse --
is class of designs I developed by 1972, which I call model-based adaptive
critic designs.
(But from an engineering viewpoint, they are a tad above the ladders they
usually teach people
about, ladders which don't quite reach all the way to basic intelligence.
The math is hard,
when one demands real convergence proofs. as in
arXiv.org/abs/adap-org/9810001. Real
cybernetics.)
The key to that kind of design is a type of neural network called a
"critic." The function of
a critic... is to learn hopes and fears.
In common English... the adaptive critic theory of intelligence is the
theory that our brain is
designed to learn hopes and fears -- more precisely, what to hope for and
what to fear -- and
to respond to such hopes and fears in practical action.
More complex intelligent systems are more complex in how this works, but
the basic principle is
retained, in my view.
Engineering systems based on this principle have recently shown superior
ability to perform some
very important real-world tasks, like reducing NOx emissions from engines
and like keeping
generators up under disturbances three times as large as what the best
conventional power control
systems allow. (See the talk by Venayagamoorthy at
ebrains.la.asu.edu/~nsfadp for the latter.)
And so.. if hope and fear are hard-wired into our brains, and essential to
their operation...
it makes no sense to think about trying to eliminate them IN GENERAL. They
are givens of life.
I once heard a mystic say: "People should not try to eliminate or repress
'negative emotions.'
Instead, they should work to channel them more constructively and
appropriately."
Thus if someone in a blue shirt or a person with black skin hurts us, we
should not give in to
the temptation to hate all people wearing blue shirts or black skin. We
should try to engage in
more accurate "credit assignment." Our emotions and our intellect need to
work together
in a more collaborative way -- the intellect providing awareness of the
real variables that cause
problems, and the emotions helping to warn the intellect when it is being
too simplistic.
Similar in some ways to the old idea of "alchemical marriage" -- similar,
but not entirely the same.
Another key dimension of fear is the kind of thing Freud talked about,
regarding traumatic experiences.
There are new mathematical designs which begin to illustrate how this kind
of thing works.
I referred briefly to "syncretism" in my paper in the 1977 General Systems
Yearbook on intelligent systems -
and only now are people beginning to implement and understand a few pieces
of that.
But I don't have time right now to do full justice to that complex subject.
In fact... I probably should have written up
a lot more than I have for English-language publication. But my time is
ever more constrained.
(Emails are a lot easier and faster than journal articles, however.)
Best,
Paul W.
_______
Retrieved January 20, 2003, from the World Wide Web <http://www.yorvic.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/fourier/ftheory.html>
Fourier Transforms in Crystallography
What is a Fourier Transform? This question is best answered with the aid of an example. A Fourier transform is a representation of some function in terms of a set of sine-waves. The set of sine-waves of different frequencies is orthogonal <http://www.yorvic.york.ac.uk/%7Ecowtan/fourier/ftortho.html>, and it can be shown that any continuous function can be represented by summing enough sine-waves of the appropriate frequency, amplitude and phase.
Let us consider an imaginary one-dimensional crystal. There are three atoms in the unit cell; two carbons and an oxygen. The electron density in the unit cell looks like this:
:

Now we will try and represent this function in terms of sine waves. The first sine wave has a frequency of 2, that is there are two repeats of the wave across the unit cell. One peak represents the oxygen, and the other the two carbons:

The second sine wave has a frequency of 3; three repeats of the wave across the unit cell. It has a different phase, in other words we start at a different place on the wave. The amplitude is also different:

Finally, we introduce a sine wave with a frequency of 5. Two of the peaks of this wave are lined up with the carbon atoms:

Now we add them all together:

Note that the sum of the three sine-waves is a good approximation to the original unit cell. Thus we can see that the unit cell can be represented quite well using only three sine-waves, given the correct choice of frequency, amplitude and phase.
Now we will look at the Fourier Transform of the same unit cell. Note that the result consists of a series of peaks, the largest of which are at 2, 3 and 5 on the x-axis. These correspond exactly to the sine-wave frequencies which we used to reconstruct the unit cell. If you look carefully you will also see that the heights of the peaks correspond to the amplitudes of the three waves:

The smaller peaks in the Fourier transform correspond to additional smaller waves which would have to be added to get a perfect fit to the original density. Thus we can see that the Fourier Transform tells us what mixture of sine-waves is required to make up any function.
Of course the sine-waves go on for ever, and so there will be lots more copies of the unit cell beyond the pictures here. Also, the Fourier Transform has some other features: it has values for both positive and negative frequency, and the values are complex and not real. These features combine to determine the phase of any particular sine-wave component.

A set of functions is orthogonal if none of the functions can be made up from linear combinations of the others. The set of sine-waves of different frequencies is orthogonal.
A good analogy is with red, green, and blue light. However you vary the quantities, you cannot make red from any mixture of green and blue. But with all three colours, you can make any colour you like.
Similarly, by mixing sine-waves of every frequency in the right proportions, we can construct any arbitrary function.

Retrieved January 20, 2003, from the World Wide Web
http://staff.aes.rmit.edu.au/peter/LAPLACE.HTML

Retrieved January 20, 2003, from the World Wide Web
http://www.efunda.com/math/laplace_transform/forward.cfm?FuncName=Graph

Encyclopædia Britannica Article - http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=48267
in mathematics, a particular integral transform. The Laplace transform f(p), also denoted by L{F(t)} or Lap F(t), is defined by the integral

Involving the exponential parameter p in the kernel K = e-pt. The linear Laplace operator L thus transforms each function F(t) of a certain set of functions into some function f(p). The inverse transform F(t) is written L-1{f(p)} or Lap-1f(p). The Laplace transform has many applications, such as in solution of linear differential equations with constant coefficients or the study of boundary value problems. These problems often arise in connection with calculations relating to physical systems. Notable early success in solving this type of problem was achieved by the 19th-20th-century British physicist-engineer Oliver Heaviside, who developed a procedure called operational calculus. See also Fourier transform; integral transform.

integral transform Encyclopædia Britannica Article - http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=43477
mathematical operator that produces a new function f(y) by integrating the product of an existing function F(x) and a so-called kernel function K(x, y) between suitable limits. The process, which is called transformation, is symbolized by the equation f(y) = ò K(x, y)F(x)dx. Several transforms are commonly named for the mathematicians who introduced them: in the Laplace transform, the kernel is exp(-xy) and the limits of integration are zero and plus infinity; in the Fourier transform, the kernel is (2 p )-1/2exp(-ixy) and the limits are minus and plus infinity. (See also Fourier transform; Laplace transform.) The value of integral transforms lies in the simplification that they bring about, most often in dealing with differential equations subject to particular boundary conditions. Proper choice of the class of transformation usually makes it possible to convert not only the derivatives in an intractable differential equation, but the boundary values, as well, into terms of an algebraic equation that can be easily solved. The solution obtained is, of course, the transform of the solution of the original differential equation, and it is necessary to invert this transform to complete the operation. For the common transformations, tables are available that list many functions and their transforms.

Retrieved January 20, 2003, from the World Wide Web
http://www.enm.bris.ac.uk/teaching/projects/2000_01/tg7360/Limit%20Cycles.htm

Fig 2.7 A Limit-Cycle graph for the inverted single pendulum, being oscillated with a/l=0.33 and w=10(g/l)1/2, obtained form an initial condition theta = Pi and angular velocity = 2.6(g/l)1/2 at t=0, note that the corresponding Phase-plot diagram is Fig 2.6


In a message dated 1/21/2003 9:32:23 AM Eastern Standard Time, pwerbos writes: By the way, I wonder what happened with your friend, Skoyles... is there something in motion, or pending, or...? hb: I wonder, too. John is a very close friend and an extraordinary scholar and thinker. But he's been depressed recently and I'm having a hard time reaching him. Since email isn't working, I'll ask my assistant to track him down by phone and see what's going on. >>To one down in the trenches... the very first association which occurs in >>my mind is Fourier transforms.. >>but, God help us, many colleagues would say Laplace transforms. > > >hb: Paul--to once again reveal my ignorance, I've just looked up LaPlace >and Fourier Transforms, something I should have done long ago. I >understand math best when reducing it to one of its >isomorphs--pictures. The pictures illustrating Fourier Transforms and >LaPlace Transforms both hint that the two are both concerned with >decomposing wave functions into component forms, then recomposing an >approximation of the original wave. > >The bottom line is this: both these mathematical systems are all about >waves, which means, they are both all about oscillations. Am I anywhere >near understanding the reality of Fourier and LaPlace? Every once in a while, I am reminded that my native language and culture -- which I take for granted on some level -- are shared by almost no one. Well... in the electrical engineering community, which I see every day here, one can take Fourier transforms for granted. But not beyond that. hb: I suspect Fourier Transforms are standard knowledge for lots of folks. Many an article I've skipped in The Sciences and The Scientific American have made it clear that they are basic to a modern scientific vocabulary. pw: For me, when I use the word "oscillation," I picture a sine wave, first of all. If it's not a sine wave, hb: me too, as on an oscilloscope. But when I picture a photon in motion, I picture a sine wave above and below the line. I wish we could draw online. My vision of a photon is of a two-dimensional blip and disappearance then blip and zip into the nothingness of the central line again. However that, too, is an artifact of the limitations of book pages. I suspect a photon really blips and zips down to nothing then blips again in three dimensions. Am I right? And if David Bohm and I are right, it also blips in five dimensions (depth, height, width, time, and some dimension above the two that accounts for non-locality). pw: I see it as a kind of dirty oscillation -- the sine wave is the pure thing, sort-of-like the Platonic ideal of what an oscillation is. hb: hmmm--you've just given me a vision. I've always wondered how you can pack the sound of the 76 instruments of an orchestra into the single electrical signal that makes the cone of a loudspeaker vibrate. A Fourier Transform--a wave made up of waves--sounds like a rough analogy. Except the Transform seems to be a way of dissecting such a wave down to its basic components then reconstructing it. pw: And Fourier transformation is... basically just the observation that ANY time-series can be analyzed as the sum of components, each of which is a pure oscillation, a sine wave, of a different frequency. hb: then if I'm reading you right, we are on the same wavelength. pw: Thus can light always be decomposed into different pure colors by a prism. Traditional linear dynamical systems (made up of integrators, differentiators, multipliers...)

hb: Paul, this could be very important to me. Remember, in my book Global Brain I've defined the complex adaptive systems we see in the mass behavior of bacterial colonies and of human civilizations as having five components--conformity enforcers, diversity generators, inner-judges, resource-shifters, and intergroup tournaments. Conformity enforcers sounds like integrators. Diversity generators sounds like differentiators. And inner-judges and resource-shifters sound like multipliers. Maybe Bloom with his thick-headed, visualizing brain and mathematicians, with their subtle understandings, have spotted parallel phenomena and have analyzed them in similar ways. To what sort of systems do integrators, differentiators, and multipliers apply? And how are those systems analogous to and different from societies of microorganisms or of human minds? pw: have the property that is formally stated: "Sine waves are the eigenfunctions of the dynamics." What that means, in common English, is that each frequency goes its way independently of all the others. You can predict the overall system by analyzing separately what happens to each frequency of oscillation. Then add up the rest. hb: this is wonderful clarity. So an eigenfunction--another term I've never taken the time to understand, much to my shame--is the uberfunction that emerges when a bunch of lesser oscillations--like the 76 instruments of an orchestra playing Beethoven--converge? And the Fourier Transform helps you reduce the eigenfunction to the multiple oscillations that go into its making? The Fourier Transforms help you pick out the fibers that make up the thread and the threads that make up the weave? pw: Electrical engineers, in particular, learn how to analyze basic circuits by analyzing what happens to each frequency.. hb: aha. what sort of basic circuits, and why do they need to analyze its waveforms? Isn't knowing the machinery enough? Or does breaking down the uber-wave into the waves that go to make it up tell you which components are in harmony and which are acting up? pw: Nonlinearity changes the story drastically. And I have spent almost all my life on nonlinear mathematics. hb: my understanding is that nonlinearity emerges when you repeat an algorithm or rule of some sort on its previous result. Which makes fractals and the fibonnaci series nonlinear. Am I wrong? Or does non-linear math have to decompose a phenomenon into numerous dimensions--as if you were performing a sort of hyperdimensional Fourier Transform? How do decomposition into 27 dimensions or more relate to the iterative properties of non-linearity? pw: Yet those who are good at nonlinear mathematics (except for digital logic, which is a different case) learn that sophisticated use of complicated linear mathematics is essential to understanding nonlinear systems as well.

And, yes, oscillation is everywhere, not because of God, but because of Fourier. hb: Fourier recognized an existent pattern. God would have created a class of patterns--and their components--from scratch. But there is no god. So how did this universe manage to evolve waves with sufficient complexity to be analyzable by Fourier Transforms? How were the first sub-oscillations birthed and how did the differentiate then weave? How did they self-create then reintegrate? And doesn't differentiation via self-creation then reweaving happen in this cosmos over and over again? Thus making this a very fractal and a very nonlinear place? If you had to tell the story of the evolution of just one phenomenon describable by a Fourier transform from the very beginning, how would the story go? pw: (By the way... instead of "sine," we usually do it as e-to-the-ivt, or exp(ivt). In most engineering or physics texts, you will see that formula pattern all over the place.) hb: my feeling is that pictures are more powerful than formula--at least for helping our intuitive powers work. Feinman and Einstein did their most creative math by picturing a formula as blobs or shafts or whatever sprung to mind--picturing them moving in three dimensions (plus time), in full color, and with muscular properties--properties they could feel in the muscles of their bodies. My feeling is that formulae are more valuable for precision, but that the mathematicians of the 19th century were fools to try to banish pictures from math and reduce everything to formulae. Fools, however, can be useful to cultural evolution. In going to extremes, they can explore fringe territories and bring us back new things. Like the rigorous formula-rization of what had previously been visual in math. Now we have more instruments than we had before the days of the 19th century formula craze. We've also got more instruments thanks to the quick and complex visualizing abilities of computer graphics hooked painting the gestation and the outcome of formulae. >>pw: Any linear time-invariant dynamical system is naturally analyzed in >>terms of oscillations. > > > >hb: more of my lack of knowledge. A linear time-invariant dynamical >system is a system with an input and an output, right? How many sorts of >things on this planet and in this cosmos can be analyzed as linear >time-invariant dynamical systems? Meaning how many can be analyzed as >simple input-output systems? How many types of things in this universe and >on (and in) this globe can be analyzed using Fourier and LaPlace >transforms--meaning how many can be analyzed as waves and superpositions >of waves? pw: An LTI system... is when ... the time-flux or rate of change of a vector x is equal to a linear function of x. The linear function can be written in principle as Ax, where A is a matrix or a linear operator. For example, the modern "Schrodinger equation" (due more to Heisenberg than to Schrodinger!) is of that form -- psi-dot = i H psi, where "psi dot" means the infinitesimal change in psi, and H is the Hamiltonian operator. But in some engineering situations, A also changes with time; systems with A(t) are not time-invariant, and may possess different eigenfunctions. Usually such time-dependent systems are really just partial windows into a larger system which IS time-invariant... or else they are better linear approximations to a nonlinear system. hb: yoiks. I'm lost. I am fascinated by our correspondence. It moves into the areas I have to cover in the book The Big Bang Tango--areas I've been working out theory on for decades.

There's math underlying the theories all over the place. But, as you can see, I do math in coloring book pictures. So having you to talk to is carrying me into a very heady and very necessary realm. You're a delight, Paul. But one result is that I generally answer you at 2 am or later, when I just can't stop because it's a Werbos email and yet my brain is a bit muddled. pw:ANYTHING at any level may be analyzed this way. It is mathematics, not physics. hb: which means it has applicability all over the place, right? In the Big Bang Tango I've worked out a theory about why this universal applicability of metaphoric systems like math and, well, ummm, metaphor, exists. I've worked out a theory of why we can use the metaphor of a wave for a ripple in a pond, a wave in the ocean, a ripple of pressure waves in the plasma just not long after the big bang, for the ripples of matter that pattern galaxies, for the ripple of we-don't-know-what (electromagnetism) in a photon. Why do the same patterns recur at each level? How is this recurrence of patterns from the micro to the macroverse reflected in aesthetics, poetry, and religion, not just science. I have an answer. Now I am learning as much as I can from you to see if it holds up. hb: >For how many of empirical things do these various mathematical forms of >analysis apply--from the swing of an electron around a proton, the wave of >a photon in motion, the circle of stars around a galactic heart, the cAMP >pulsations of slime mold when they signal each other that food had run >out, the pulsations of the slimemold amoeba when they come together and >form something that looks like a crawling slug, the input and internal >signals that tell that sluge when to lift its head--its fruiting body--and >release its spores. pw: For the first three, the application is meat-and-potatoes. For biological systems, there is a lot of effort to try to figure out how best to model the dynamics. Certainly many biologists talk to physicists, and use differential equation models; thus they end up doing either Fourier analysis (which is quite common in biology, particularly in neuroscience) or ordinary nonlinear dynamical system analysis (aka "chaos theory"). hb: it's the fractal end of non-linear math that has got me going. See www.howardbloom.net/attraction_repulsion for an example of what I mean. You won't see any math. Instead you'll see poetry. But it's scientific poetry telling the story of the cosmos in a brief amount of space using the recurrence of key patterns at different levels to tell the tale. pw: Ironically, I have argued that neuroscientists and neural modelers have overused such models in too straightforward a way. They would say "Oh in artificial systems you can get away with unnatural nonbiological things like discrete clocks.." But I think THEY have lost sight of the complexity of reality, in their simplified models borrowed from chaos theory.

hb: I agree with you heartily. in neurobiology and neuropsychology, if you try the sort of oversimplifications that are common in physics, you kill the system. You are no longer describing a living--much less an emoting and thinking--thing. pw: Neuroscientists like Llinas (NYU -- have you ever met him?) hb: I'd love to but haven't had the time to chase him down. pw: have found LOTS of centralized clock mechanisms in the brain, not so different from clocks which control CPUs!! That tends to generate some discrete-time effects.. which requires mathematics RELATED to the usual continuous-time Fourier analysis, but not precisely the same. But still... linear discrete time time-invariant systems STILL can be analyzed in terms of oscillatory components; they still have the same basic eigenvector property. hb: makes sense. In seeming contradiction to what I said above, it makes sense that the zillions of clocks in the body have to integrate with a grand controller, a great conductor, presumably the one in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and that they should produce eigenwaves, eigenfunctions, like the one that carries Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic to the magnet in my speaker via a thin twist of copper strands. pw: The release of spores gets into the realm of discrete mathematics, which is ultimately less tractable. There are certain mathematical problems which simply cannot be solved in closed form, and life becomes an exercise in finding patterns of approximations that help us make do... hb: the proposition that Eshel Ben-Jacob and I worked out four years ago or so is that there are no closed systems anywhere in this cosmos. Hence one aspect of classical dynamics--the second law of thermodynamics--doesn't work in this universe. Lee Smolin says that any particle in this cosmos could be defined by its relationship to every other particle. In fact, it could be defined as nothing but a sum of these relationships. This, too, rules out closed systems. Though Smolin doesn't say this rules out entropy. Do you know the work of Ben-Jacob? He's head of the physics department at the University of Tel-Aviv and shows up in Physica A a lot. hb: >And in what cases would we be oversimplifying to the point of distortion >if we were to apply these forms of mathematical analysis? pw: That depends very much on the specific case. And we do not yet know. Quantitative Systems Biotechnology (QSB) is at a very early stage -- though NSF certainly is funding efforts to find ways to make sense of such systems more quantittaively. (One may search on "QSB" at www.nsf.gov.)

hb: I just looked and the goals are awesome. >>pw: ("Time-invariant" does not mean that the STATE of the system does not >>change -- only that laws >>of the dynamics do not.) > > >hb: that helps, thanks. complex dynamical systems, the ones I play with, >change constantly. Are there unchanging dynamic laws that rule these >change? That's a question historians, cultural evolutionists, and >paleopsychologists have been asking for a long, long time. Ibn Khaldun, >in roughly 1350 ad, was the first mega-historian to say yes and to posit >unchanging laws of social change. His laws were a delight to read, but I >suspect grossly oversimplified, and wouldn't work in the world today. > >However Osama bin Laden might beg to disagree. He's counting on the >stability of Ibn Khaldun's laws of social change. If they're right, Osama >has a good chance of doing what Allah has always willed--taking over the >planet for the purity of the one true religion, its one true god, and the >laws that god gave to his only unsullied prophet, Mohammed. pw: Don't know. I have always assumed he is into Ragnarok or Armageddon. But... I have not done a really deep probe... not my favorite part of the mental landscape. hb: >Am I getting of the point by hauling geopolitics and cultural evolution >into a discussion of Fourier Transforms? No, not at all. Culture-change >is cyclical. But each cycle changes the nature of the system. So each >cycle is very much like a many of those that have proceeded it, but also >very different. The system of all the societies on this globe is one that >is constantly changing itself. pw: I have certainly learned a lot from Spengler, Toynbee and MacLeish and even Max Weber on such themes. But I would see the Spengler kind of vision as kind of "life cycle" oscillation, like a limit cycle of nonlinear systems dynamics more than a Fourier thing. And still as an approximation, of course. Where the ancients would see a Great Chain of Being, I would see a Great Chain (or Lattice) of Approximation. Approximations to approximations to approximations. Maybe the old Hindus would appreciate this... not exactly a chain of maya, but something a bit like that. And there are chains of illusion as well in the minds which populate this system. (Is an approximation a well-intentioned illusion?) hb: this is a heavy and a neat one. something to ponder. This was a wonderful mental workout, Paul. You are helping me get somewhere important. All my thanks--Howard P.S. Some folks would call these views "orthodox reductionism." But it's not naive reductionism -- I recognize the need to try to understand each level of analysis and experience on its own terms. But I see no reason to abandon the idea that they ultimately all fit together, that there is One Universe here... More precisely, experience has shown there is great value in trying to make sense of things in a coherent way, and I see no reason why we should abandon that quest. hb: The Big Bang Tango--like Wolfram's A New Kind of Science--says the universe is built on a few initial axioms, propositions, rules, algorythms, or whatever one wants to call them. We not only all evolve from a common single-celled ancestor, we all evolved from the magic beans of rules that can be summed up in equations, in pictures, or in words. I hope this doesn't sound like madness, but when one tells the story of the cosmos from the beginning instead of from the present, it makes a lot of sense. Enjoy--Howard
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Subj: Eshel, meet Paul and David Date: 1/23/2003 To: (Eshel Ben-Jacob) Eshel Ben-Jacob, meet Paul Werbos and David Smith. Paul is a mathematician/physicist with psychological leanings at NSF. David is head of the evolutionary psychologically oriented New England Institute. Our trialog has led us to your research. If you have the patience, follow along and you'll see where you become vital to this discussion. Howard Wow, Paul, this is a generous offer. My assistant got John on the phone for me tonight. John had just gone to sleep--at 10:15 pm London time and had very little to say. I jabbered a lot, but couldn't get a conversation started, then, after hanging up, realized that John is probably in that superisolated, no-structure state where all you want to do is sleep and any intrusion is sort-of welcome but also an interruption to the long snooze and escape. When I've gone through that having friends who called no matter what helped pull me through. So if I can find the time, I may have to call periodically to help him get a sense that there's still an outside world that wants him. Being an independent scholar--someone who wants to put together all the pieces and not just specialize--has its dangers, and structurelessness and isolation are among them. John left the British Medical Research Council so he could synthesize work from lots of disciplines, and he's superb at it. In a message dated 1/22/2003 11:59:57 AM Eastern Standard Time, writes: A >>By the way, I wonder what happened with your friend, Skoyles... is there >>something >>in motion, or pending, or...? > > > >hb: I wonder, too. John is a very close friend and an extraordinary >scholar and thinker. But he's been depressed recently and I'm having a >hard time reaching him. Since email isn't working, I'll ask my assistant >to track him down by phone and see what's going on. Hi, Howard! This is of the utmost importance. I hope he wouldn't take it the wrong way if we suggested he should feel free to discuss whatever is depressing him with this group, in confidence. I would expect that David has rigorous standards about maintaining confidences, just as we do. There is of course a lot to be depressed about in the world these days... and it is good when people can share their serious concerns. >hb: me too, as on an oscilloscope. But when I picture a photon in motion, >I picture a sine wave above and below the line. I wish we could draw >online. My vision of a photon is of a two-dimensional blip and >disappearance then blip and zip into the nothingness of the central line >again. However that, too, is an artifact of the limitations of book >pages. I suspect a photon really blips and zips down to nothing then >blips again in three dimensions. Am I right? > >And if David Bohm and I are right, it also blips in five dimensions >(depth, height, width, time, and some dimension above the two that >accounts for non-locality). The photon and the electron are two special cases I have thought about a great deal.

I am told that Willis Lamb -- a Nobel Prize winner who is more than just any old Nobel Prize winner, maybe not the VERY first (e.g. Feynman) rank, but the rank just below that -- has come out clearly on his web page with the statement "the photon does not exist. There is no photon." After much thought... and discussion with some quantum optics folks.. I agree with Lamb. I still use the word photon a lot, because it is still a useful approximate concept in some context, and it is useful as an abbreviation, in effect. But in actuality... I now believe that everything we know about light simply boils down to Maxwell's laws, and to INTERFACES between electromagnetism and other more truly quantized fields. Planck's law "governs" the emission and absorption of light -- the boundary conditions -- but in-between it's plain old Maxwell. And Maxwell's equations are classic wave equations, whose solutions are basically just sine waves in free space. hb: but, as Archimedes and Newton put it, a fluction is a motion in a soup of some kind. without ether, what is the soup? Is it simply some sort of topological wrinkle in the sheet of the space time continuum? Or is it, as I've suspected and you've hinted above, something that we understand via two metaphors, meaning our culture has not yet evolved a metaphor that can completely comprehend it? Remember, our metaphors depend on a relatively small number of observations that stick in the public mind and a relatively small number of technologies whose workings give us models of "mechanisms." We are only roughly 35,000 years into the cultural enterprise of machine, model, cliche, and metaphor-making. We're still in our Olduwan toolkit days. There's many a metaphor yet to come if we can survive and continue to reinvent ourselves and our pool of experiences and verbal, visual, and mathematical cliches. Cliche should not be a pejorative word. Cliches are our tools of understanding. Fourier transforms, for example, are cliches in engineering and physics. Cliches are useful...but we need more. Cliches are the equivalent to what economists call commodities. Goods are a luxury when they are rare and spark our sense of novelty. That sense is a set of pleasure centers in the brain that light up in the presence of risk or of something new and different. The novelty centers include as one of their most prominent members the nucleus accumbens.

A luxury is also something whose rarity and newness allows us to use it as a status symbol--as something we have but others don't and that others envy us for. When that new thing becomes readily available, those who weren't able to get it before gobble it up so they, too, can be like the elite--those who introduce novelties into the culture. Once everyone has one, the experience grows old, the goody we once salivated for is something even the lower class has, it's not hip, cool, or elite anymore. And it becomes a commodity. It may lose its ability to amaze and awe us. But we continue to use it every day. Which means a commodity is a novelty we've added to our normal toolkit. A cliche is a conceptual, verbal, or visual novelty that's grown old, stale, and often useful as all get out. The phrases "she has her hangups," "she's got issues," "he's a control freak," and "he needs his space" no longer have the gleam of inner-circle membership they had when they were new in their respective eras--the 1960s and 1970s--but they are useful as can be when we are trying to figure out why we just had a fight with our mate. Hopefully you, Luda, David and I will add cliches that are more incisive and more useful during our time on this planet. Meanwhile the photon could be, as you say, a temporary construct with which we can work until a more inclusive scientific or mass-cultural cliche comes along. I still want to know what a field is and how attraction at a distance works. I do not buy gluons. You don't answer a question about the communication and attraction between two particles--their pattern of stimulus and response--with another particle. That's like saying bacteria communicate by sending each other communicator cells. They don't. They communicate with macromolecules whose meaning is clear to every bacteria in the species. The species is built with a genome that builds in a chemical dictionary with a molecular vocabulary whose size we as yet don't know. So far all the experts in this area--like my friend Eshel Ben-Jacob--have pinpointed are attraction and repulsion cues. I suspect we are missing many macrochemical cliches in the bacterial vocabulary. What will our cliches look like 20 years down the road when we all understand that the shape of a macromolecule creates a rich statement that triggers many a social reaction between atoms and fellow macromolecules? What will our toolkit of cliches, metaphors, and mechanisms look like when we have protein-based computers that do things so radically different than what we've seen so far that the word "computer" will no longer describe them?

Gary Marcus, a friend who does computational cognitive science, grew up programming computers in Basic. So he sees the brain as a bunch of computer programs. What will his kids use as metaphors with which to explain minds and photons? And what will his grandkids use? They will grow up with something that makes Basic look primitive--just as Gary's Basic makes my Fortran (which I have now forgotten) look antique. >pw: I see it as a kind >> >>of dirty oscillation -- the sine wave is the pure thing, sort-of-like the >>Platonic ideal of what an oscillation is. > > >hb: hmmm--you've just given me a vision. I've always wondered how you can >pack the sound of the 76 instruments of an orchestra into the single >electrical signal that makes the cone of a loudspeaker vibrate. A Fourier >Transform--a wave made up of waves--sounds like a rough analogy. Except >the Transform seems to be a way of dissecting such a wave down to its >basic components then reconstructing it. Actually, the design of high quality sound cards is a big topic in electrical engineering in industry these days. In theory, one precise time-series is all you need. After all, there may be 76 instruments, but the pressure of air from microsecond to second on your eardrum is still just one number (pressure) as function of time. The TOTAL sound across all space has more information, but what one ear hears is basically just one time-series, easily representable (in theory) as a time-series. hb: but is that true? Could different parts of the ear be parsing different aspects of the sound. The hairs that analyze the vibration each pick out a different frequency. Couldn't the entire topography of the ear be used to pick up something more complex than a linear sequence? The ear, like a macromolecule, probably has evolved its strange surface structure for a reason. And that reason may have to do with non-linear complexity. Wait, that's a mathematical term. In math terms it may have to do with something BEYOND non-linear complexity. If topology is still what it was when I was a kid and first became aware of it, it deals with fairly regular shapes. But a macromolecule, a bunch of air shudders carrying the sound of 76 instruments, and the shape of an ear are highly irregular. Are Fourier transforms too two-dimensional and too simplified to cover such three and four dimensional irregularities? Even a macromolecule twists and bends to receive and send messages. It does so in highly irregular ways. Do we have forms of math that will deal with such irregularities? Will fractals do the trick when they're extended into four dimensions, as they are on my computer screen via Rudy Rucker's fractal program? No, Rudy's fractals are too regular do describe an ear or a histone bending and twisting in the genome. pw: But then with two ears, you may need two numbers, and voila, you have stereo. hb: back in the 1980s, I heard a demonstration of a 3-D, holophonic sound technology at a music industry trade convention. It worked in ways that were astonishing. You could hear the exact placement of a matchbox as it was being shaken in front of you, behind you, below your head, above your head, etc.

I've just tried to track down the person who devised it and have sent an email to the most likely culprit--HUGO ZUCCARELLI--whose webpage (http://community-2.webtv.net/zuccarellix/holophonicstmand/) says that he "invented HOLOPHONICS tm after discovering the processin which humans can localize sounds, contrary to the binaural or stereo theories" Whoops, I've just spent so much time tracking down Zuccarelli and writing to him about our speculations that it's the usual two am. Let's see if I can zip through the rest of this email. pw: And then there are debates about whether the ear really has the power to hear more than one number somehow... big debates.. and debates about how to make sound realistic throughout the room... hb: Hugo did that 20 years ago and was ignored...well, you had to wear headphones, but still, it was astonishing. pw: And then a Fourier decomposition and other forms of compression may actually allow more information per bit of computer storage... and so on. hb: a neat application. Think of a protein, a macromolecule, as a repository of crunched (compressed) data about fourteen billion years of the past that's used to help in a macrosystem that predicts the future. The result is a nano-processing device we call a cell. pw: But certainly, neuroscience treatments of the ear -- particularly the ear drum stuff -- makes very heavy use of Fourier analysis. The ear has been compared at times with a pipe organ.. hb: Hugo's website says that he has invented a new speaker system based on linear math that does remarkable things--but does not create the holophonic effects he perfected 20 years ago. Which may indicate that linear systems won't do in capturing the richness of sound...or the richness of macromolecular communication. >>pw: Thus can light always be decomposed into different pure colors by a >>prism. >> >>Traditional linear dynamical systems (made up of integrators, >>differentiators, multipliers...) > > >hb: Paul, this could be very important to me. Remember, in my book Global >Brain I've defined the complex adaptive systems we see in the mass >behavior of bacterial colonies and of human civilizations as having five >components--conformity enforcers, diversity generators, inner-judges, >resource-shifters, and intergroup tournaments. Conformity enforcers >sounds like integrators. Diversity generators sounds like >differentiators. And inner-judges and resource-shifters sound like >multipliers. pw: Am running out of time... basically, these are highly nonlinear functions. Diversity generators are like option generators in "brain-like stochastic search" as in last slides of www.iamcm.org. >Maybe Bloom with his thick-headed, visualizing brain and mathematicians, >with their subtle understandings, have spotted parallel phenomena and have >analyzed them in similar ways. To what sort of systems do integrators, >differentiators, and multipliers apply? And how are those systems >analogous to and different from societies of microorganisms or of human minds? > >pw: have the property >> >>that is formally stated: "Sine waves are the eigenfunctions of the >>dynamics." What that means, in common English, >>is that each frequency goes its way independently of all the others. You >>can predict the overall system by >>analyzing separately what happens to each frequency of oscillation. Then >>add up the rest. > > > >hb: this is wonderful clarity.

So an eigenfunction--another term I've >never taken the time to understand, much to my shame--is the uberfunction >that emerges when a bunch of lesser oscillations--like the 76 instruments >of an orchestra playing Beethoven--converge? And the Fourier Transform >helps you reduce the eigenfunction to the multiple oscillations that go >into its making? The Fourier Transforms help you pick out the fibers that >make up the thread and the threads that make up the weave? OK. I need to be more precise. Simple dynamic systems (like ODE, ordinary differential equation systems) are described in terms of a vector x(t), i.e. a set of numbers. Linear dynamical systems can be analyzed in terms of the eigenvectors of the dynamics. Eigenvectors are simply vectors which DO NOT CHANGE direction... they are the directions which are unchanged by the dynamical process. They change in MAGNITUDE, but not direction... hb: aha. all thanks. pw: More complex systems (like PDE, partial differential equations) are described in terms of fields of space. And then there are eigenfunctions of the dynamics, functions across space... which would not be changed, if the dynamics are linear, but... they get multiplied by some constant over time. And then.. forgive me... it is often convenient to apply these concepts "from above"... so that we can think of eigenfunctions of time derivatives... Anyway, given time, I could fill it all in. The key point is that eigenfunctions or eigenvectors are the elementary things, like sine waves, which more general functions can be broken down into, for purposes of analysis. Analysis of LINEAR systems. Nonlinear systems do not have eigenfunctions or eigenvectors. >>pw: Electrical engineers, in particular, learn how to analyze basic >>circuits by >>analyzing what happens to each frequency.. > > > >hb: aha. what sort of basic circuits, and why do they need to analyze its >waveforms? Isn't knowing the machinery enough? Or does breaking down the >uber-wave into the waves that go to make it up tell you which components >are in harmony and which are acting up? pw: Circuits made up of resistors, capacitors, inductors, batteries and wires. But then transistors provide the gross nonlinearity necessary to generate really interesting circuits. In linear systems analysis ... attached to each eigenvector or eigenfunction is an "eigenvalue," which tells you whether that component will grow, oscillate, or decline. hb: aha. >>pw: Nonlinearity changes the story drastically. And I have spent almost >>all my >>life on nonlinear mathematics. > > >hb: my understanding is that nonlinearity emerges when you repeat an >algorithm or rule of some sort on its previous result. Which makes >fractals and the fibonnaci series nonlinear. Am I wrong? Or does >non-linear math have to decompose a phenomenon into numerous >dimensions--as if you were performing a sort of hyperdimensional Fourier >Transform? How do decomposition into 27 dimensions or more relate to the >iterative properties of non-linearity? pw: If x(t) is a vector... then linear dynamics means that the infinitesimal change of x with respect to time equals Ax, where A is some matrix.

Sometimes people say Ax+b is still linear or "affine." Nonlinear is basically anything else ... for example, x-squared. But iteration is not nonlinearity. if z=Ay and y=Bx, then z=(AB)x, and AB is still a matrix. >hb: Fourier recognized an existent pattern. God would have created a >class of patterns--and their components--from scratch. But there is no >god. So how did this universe manage to evolve waves with sufficient >complexity to be analyzable by Fourier Transforms? How were the first >sub-oscillations birthed and how did the differentiate then weave? How >did they self-create then reintegrate? And doesn't differentiation via >self-creation then reweaving happen in this cosmos over and over >again? Thus making this a very fractal and a very nonlinear place? > >If you had to tell the story of the evolution of just one phenomenon >describable by a Fourier transform from the very beginning, how would the >story go? pw: Interesting emergent patterns require nonlinearity. I am tempted to violate someone's copyright suddenly... Vaguely, you could say things "start" as linear... just random waves through space.. and then comes interaction or reflection... and the nonlinearity creates emergent patterns... hb: neat. and very much in tune with what I've been working on--though you've put it in a whole new way. pw: different in one system from another, drastically different... some systems hardly diverge at all from the early heat chaos. Others go to "fixed points," like being frozen in ice. But between the hot chaos and the ice... some systems have the right parameters to generate interesting patterns of complexity, of fractal dimension in effect. >>pw: (By the way... instead of "sine," we usually do it as e-to-the-ivt, or >>exp(ivt). In most engineering or physics >>texts, you will see that formula pattern all over the place.) > > > >hb: my feeling is that pictures are more powerful than formula--at least >for helping our intuitive powers work. Feinman and Einstein did their >most creative math by picturing a formula as blobs or shafts or whatever >sprung to mind--picturing them moving in three dimensions (plus time), in >full color, and with muscular properties--properties they could feel in >the muscles of their bodies. My feeling is that formulae are more >valuable for precision, but that the mathematicians of the 19th century >were fools to try to banish pictures from math and reduce everything to >formulae. True. But many physicists have gone to the opposite extreme, where the hand is quicker than the eye. Lots of formulas but not such care to make sure they follow rules or that the formulas mean something. hb: but then folks like Riemann, who was following the beauty of developing an arbitrary self-consistent system, produce tools that folks like Einstein can use. Hmmm, I'm using a visual example again. Reimann's math was geometry--a very visual thing indeed. >hb: it's the fractal end of non-linear math that has got me going.

See >www.howardbloom.net/attraction_repulsion for an example of what I >mean. You won't see any math. Instead you'll see poetry. But it's >scientific poetry telling the story of the cosmos in a brief amount of >space using the recurrence of key patterns at different levels to tell the >tale. pw: In a sense... where fractals become real is when we try to grapple with strange attractors, and their more highly dimensional relatives ala Per Bak and whatnot. >hb: makes sense. In seeming contradiction to what I said above, it makes >sense that the zillions of clocks in the body have to integrate with a >grand controller, a great conductor, presumably the one in the >suprachiasmatic nucleus, and that they should produce eigenwaves, >eigenfunctions, like the one that carries Leonard Bernstein and the New >York Philharmonic to the magnet in my speaker via a thin twist of copper >strands. pw: Yes, the conductor makes sure it all hangs together, makes sense, and that the overall system does one thing at a time in some sense... >>pw: The release of spores gets into the realm of discrete mathematics, >>which is >>ultimately less >>tractable. There are certain mathematical problems which simply cannot be >>solved in closed form, and life becomes >>an exercise in finding patterns of approximations that help us make do... > > >hb: the proposition that Eshel Ben-Jacob and I worked out four years ago >or so is that there are no closed systems anywhere in this cosmos. Hence >one aspect of classical dynamics--the second law of >thermodynamics--doesn't work in this universe. Lee Smolin says that any >particle in this cosmos could be defined by its relationship to every >other particle. In fact, it could be defined as nothing but a sum of >these relationships. This, too, rules out closed systems. Though Smolin >doesn't say this rules out entropy. pw: Closed form and closed systems are different things. Closed form... it's like the old theorem that you CAN'T POSSIBLY write the value of pi exactly in terms of fractions involving whole numbers... or even square roots and such... Some numbers exist and can be given names, but cannot be written down exactly within the limits of ordinary notation. hb: aha. thank you for the explanation...and the patience it takes. >Do you know the work of Ben-Jacob? He's head of the physics department at >the University of Tel-Aviv and shows up in Physica A a lot. pw: No. If he could understand and tolerate the paper I recently had published for Chua's journal, it might be important for him and I to talk as well. I would expect him to know all the stuff in this email alreday, if so. hb: Eshel just emailed today saying that he's more available than in the past, so let me copy him on this. >hb: The Big Bang Tango--like Wolfram's A New Kind of Science--says the >universe is built on a few initial axioms, propositions, rules, >algorythms, or whatever one wants to call them. We not only all evolve >from a common single-celled ancestor, we all evolved from the magic beans >of rules that can be summed up in equations, in pictures, or in words. I >hope this doesn't sound like madness, but when one tells the story of the >cosmos from the beginning instead of from the present, it makes a lot of >sense. Enjoy--Howard pw: That's pretty much what I am working from as well. Certain underlying dynamical principles at the lower level.. hb: that's what I've partially worked out. I'd like to compare my analysis with yours and see if they give heft and depth to each other. pw: such that dynamics at higher levels are basically emergent phenomena or approximations to what the simpler stuff tells us. Though the word "dynamics" changes its meaning slightly with backwards-time stuff coming in... hb: Just how far back do you feel the backward projection goes? I know I've asked this before, so forgive me if you've already answered it and my memory has failed to retain it. With pleasure and gusto (not to mention exhaustion that's well worth it)--Howard
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Pavel--My apologies. As I just explained to Paul Werbos, I've been swamped. A group has self-assembled around my work during the last few weeks and has turned out over nine minutes of animation based on the concept at http://howardbloom.net/attraction_repulsion--something that would have been inconceivable without huge budgets when the project was conceived three years ago. The group has also committed to putting together the books waiting in the 300 Mb and 3,700 chapters of the Bloom Grand Unified Theory of Everything In the Universe Including the Human Soul. This would be astonishing if it came off...which it may well not. But so far the group's track record of astonishments is extremely good. Here are a few comments. But first, a word of qualification. I've been involved in theoretical phyics since I was a kid. I taught what little I know to myself. Which means that in many ways, I am an ignoramus on the subject. I only understand math when I can picture it. I'm blind as a bat about formulae. I've looked all over the place for some description of Maxwell's equations so I can begin to picture what you and Paul have been discussing. I've had no success. So there are extraordinarily elementary things I do not comprehend. Please explain things to me as if I were a dunce, an idiot. Now for the comments: pk: We all must accept that known wave equations hide much more than we are accustomed to think normally. hb: this sounds very, very likely to me. The reasons are too numerous to lay out right now...though I've written quite a lot about them in the past. Two are: -- the vast oversimplifications used in the mathematicization of physics -- and the tendency to mistake our current level of knowledge--and of ignorance--for external realities. The flaws often tend to be in the eye, not in that which the eye beholds. pk: These equations are hints only, vague sketches in haze rather than precise instruments like scalpel of a surgeon. hb: lovely way of putting it. pk: Standard QM fails to calculate universal constants, what complete theory should do, as Planck and Pauli insisted in. hb: an observation--when the ancients bless a criterion of validity, it doesn't mean it's right. I am very skeptical about such things as Occam's Razor and, in probability and statistics, the Bell Curve, simply because they've remained unquestioned for much too long. A question--what do universal constants mean in a case like this? Physicists like Lee Smolin talk about roughly 27 key parameters that are arbitrarily set at the birth of a cosmos. Is this what we're talking about? Stephen Wolfram's view, in A New Kind of Science, is that the standard mathematical systems we've been using--with equations that deal with smooth gradients and demand arbitrary constants--are wrong. Universes, he feels, self-construct from the bottom up, flowing from a very small number of rules. I agree with him. This view is one I've been working with for nearly 45 years. Wolfram also feels he's demonstrated that we can not use standard methods to discover the handful of initial rules. He may be right in saying that standard mathematical methods will not let us reach back into the past and find those initial cosmic seeds, those initial algorithms.

But I've been working to find those initial axioms, postulates, or algorithms anyway--using my mathematical blindness as an advantage and employing intuition and metaphor. How do universal constants fit in? pk: From CITT viewpoint a particle indeed exists in several states simultaneously, - in inner time of theory, of course. hb: here's the problem. Inner Time Theory sounds very intriguing. And this condensation, this short summary, is extremely helpful. But please, please tell us in short-form what Inner Time Theory is. pk: the first model of turbulent movement in fluid proposed by L. D. Landau [18] in 1944. hb: something that Paul Werbos said a while back made me curious. He seemed to imply that Maxwell's equations could be interpreted in terms of vortexes. Is this true or was it my mistake? Ernest J. Sternglass, a protege of Einstein's, has a vortex theory of particles. Is there anything in mainstream physics that would support this? Is there anything in field equations that would support it? (see Ernest J. Sternglass. Before the Big Bang: The Origins of the Universe. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997.) pk: That model supposed that turbulence is simply coupled oscillators, which, as we now know, is not correct, since it leads to unobservable consequences. hb: coupled oscillators are extremely important in many of the fields I study. Did Landau mean that turbulence was the interaction of oscillators operating at different speeds and sheering against each others' movement when they first meet--before they synchronize? Did he see turbulence as the interference patterns that eventually bring the oscillators into synchrony? pk: But coupled nonlinear oscillators are one of most simple nonlinear object one can imagine. hb: is there a difference between a linear and a nonlinear oscillator? Are coupled oscillators nonlinear because of their iterative qualities? Because of the repetition of two rhythms over and over again upon their joint products? If so, how do the equations take into account the fact that the rhythms of the oscillation sources themselves change as they influence each other? Onward--Howard In a message dated 4/22/2003 3:34:42 AM Eastern Daylight Time, kurakin writes: Dear Sirs! Since no one normally desires to read long manuscripts on crazy theories (http://toyphoton.narod.ru), here's the short squezzing of Concept of Inner Time of Theory. Can anyone explain in a FEW words or give a reference why inner time can be rejected in a SIMPLE way? Dr. Werbos, You are who is much interested in bacward - in - time signals possibility. So, inner time gives IT quite elegantly. What's wrong? I'll be much gratefull to Your qualified expertise. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - VIII. Conclusion 1.

Let us look at Feynman - Wheeler - Cramer ideas of time - backwards spreading of waves from a little wider, than their creators, viewpoint. Not so far physicists from Omsk State University have got some very interesting results [15 - 17]. They have found massless solutions for Dirac equation. Mass is zero, while current of solution is not zeroing. Authors interpret these solutions as Deutsch "shadow" electrons, which govern interference effects. J. Cramer also says that any relativistic equations, not Maxwell's only, allow backwards - time solutions. These are Klein - Gordon equation, Dirac equation and some others. But Prof. Cramer looks only at possibility for equation to have backward in time solutions. Physicists from Omsk have shown that not only time sign is interesting as parameter for solution to be "physical" or "non - physical". Sign of inertial mass also can. These results can, on our opinion, eliminate prejudices of physicists about what is really "physical" and what is not. We all must accept that known wave equations hide much more than we are accustomed to think normally. These equations are hints only, vague sketches in haze rather than precise instruments like scalpel of a surgeon. We should not delude ourselves by great results achieved in physics till now - simple known equations still hide much greater than what we got up to now. So we think that our search signals (and query signals as well) for single photon are described by usual Maxwell equations. 2. "And what is all this stuff needed for?" - asks a quantum mechanical orthodox theoretician. In response we repeat as strict and clear as possible: § Standard QM postulates that particle is complex - valued vector in Hilbert space. Notions of superposition of states and reduction of state vector are based upon this primary postulate. It's time to stop to call this stating of experimental facts as theory. There's no any theory to explain this fascinating theory, and it must be constructed. § Standard QM fails to calculate universal constants, what complete theory should do, as Planck and Pauli insisted in. So what we have now is intermediate theory. Complete is still to emerge. 3. If we leave philosophic talks for philosophers and just roll our sleeves up to solve these two problems, we should look over all possible schemes. As far as we know, our scheme with inner time is the first practical step in this direction. Concept of inner time of theory (CITT) is very simple in its essence and, as we think, directly shows a way to solve formulated problems: § From CITT viewpoint a particle indeed exists in several states simultaneously, - in inner time of theory, of course. § CITT shows (very naively, for the first step), how exactly "electrons" (scattering centers) act, which allows to penetrate in their intrinsic nature. This is a first step to calculate real electron's charge. Further. If CITT is not correct way to go, it's very important to understand why. To explain let us recall the first model of turbulent movement in fluid proposed by L. D. Landau [18] in 1944. That model supposed that turbulence is simply coupled oscillators, which, as we now know, is not correct, since it leads to unobservable consequences. But coupled nonlinear oscillators are one of most simple nonlinear object one can imagine. This is exactly why the way with coupled oscillators was extremely important to be done - just to convince physicists that it's wrong. Wrong but simple ways must be checked anyway! "Inner time of theory" is, on our opinion, also the simplest way to solve key puzzles of quantum world. If this way is wrong, we must explicitly understand why it is so. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "Our line is right. The victory will be ours". (c) I. V. Stalin, 1941. kurakin

The infnitely networked universe

Paul Werbos 2/25/2003 Paul--re "I do not believe in DIRECT action at a distance, like the Bohmians, but I do believe in INDIRECT effects like this. You might call them nonlocal emergent effects." Hb: First off, we're in a universe whose every cubic centimeter seems to be flooded with photons, neutrinos, and particles that range from the background radiation spewed by the Big Bang (assuming there was one) 13.5 billion years ago to high-speed particles and photons flung from star births, star deaths, and even black holes up to 12 billion years old and 12 billion light years away. That means that every nit and bit of time and space is zipped and zapped by a bombardment that links it to events far, far from it in time and space. The only thing that's unlikely is gravitational influence from galaxies ten billion light years apart. But even that is not an impossibility. Galaxies gather in galactic clusters. Galactic clusters gather in superclusters. And the form and unity of the galaxies, clusters, and superclusters seems to be evolving over time. Which means that galaxies far apart from each other create a gratitational web that gradually draws them together around a common center. To influence a distant galaxy with your gravity, you have to exert that force at a distance over every bit of matter in that galaxy's space. Every square centimeter of the cosmos is a nexus of influences. It is pervaded by information and causation from nearly everything else in this cosmos. This implies that one of the differences between one cubic centimeter and the next is the sum total of a cosmos-full of influences, influences which shift over every blip of space and over every unit of Planck time. The web of the cosmos is enormous, ubiquitous, and interactive beyond anything we imagine when contemplating two photons travelling from a laser to a target three feet away. Look at how many cubic Planck units those photons traverse. Imagine how many currents of influence they navigate. Aside from gravity and cosmic rays, they have to cross many a loop of magnetism--magnetic fields from this planet, from the sun, and lord knows from what other cosmic whorls and teams. This relates to a wonderful observation made by Eshel Ben-Jacob, head of the Department of Physics at The University of Tel Aviv, several years ago. This is a universe in which entropy can't exist. Entroy, he said, is based on the notion of closed systems. And there are no closed systems in this universe.

No photon is an island. Physics will probably remain primitive so long as it's forced by the limitations of current math to grossly oversimplify. Which implies that physics may be one of the most inexact sciences we currently possess. And it implies what you and I and Kurakin have already said. That the probabilistic equations of quantum physics are fuzzy not because the universe is muzzy, but because our vision is. Howard PS re: "I do not believe in DIRECT action at a distance, like the Bohmians, but I do believe in INDIRECT effects like this. You might call them nonlocal emergent effects." Paul, this sounds interesting. Can you give us an example or two of nonlocal emergent effects? And just how the heck does action at a distance work, anyway? Another ancillary question. What does it mean to ask how something works? What mechanism of understanding are we attempting to tap when we ask how something works? My guess is metaphor based on something whose workings we know well--whose workings we can not only visualize, but we can feel in our motor neurons, whose workings we can feel in a muscular way. In a message dated 2/25/2003 1:02:47 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes: At 08:06 PM 02/25/2003 +0300, you wrote: >Dear Dr. Werbos! > >I'm sorry, but this Your student (me) is not only thick as a brick >(germans say 'betonkopf', as I know), >but also obstinate ("And that's why I'm interesting", as Sergey >Yesenin said). > >WDPJ> The fact is that you can turn on a laser, and SOMETIMES pick up a >photon at >WDPJ> one place >WDPJ> and sometimes pick up a photon at another. But it is NOT a "fact" >that there >WDPJ> are two photons co-existing in different states at the intermediate >time, which >WDPJ> you do not observe. If you do not observe it, it is not a fact; it >is a theory. > >I give up. This is a language problem - I accept. >So I suppose another formulation. Please, check it. Actually, an idea does occur to me. Maybe this is crazy... but... perhaps Ludmilla might be willing to explain some of this in Russian. >The fact ALSO is - Wether photon emerges here or there, depends (to >some degree of strictness) on ALL the surrounding space, maybe all the >Universe, not only small >vicinity of starting point or final point. Am I right? In some sense, I think so. For most experiments, most people would say it is enough to know your local inputs (like laser and crystal for Clauser-Theorem experiments) and the local measurement devices -- like counters and polarizers. Only these. Yet I believe that the larger thermodynamic environment is also relevant, because it affects probabilities of states both on input and on output. I do not believe in DIRECT action at a distance, like the Bohmians, but I do believe in INDIRECT effects like this You might call them nonlocal emergent effects. >You may tune complicated interferometer (like Mach-Zander's) here or >there and get different outputs. > >I don't wanna say that the photon 'actually' checks all the ways - save me the >God. But the output - do we like it or not - IS such, AS IF the photon >DID this. > In my view, the "photon" itself is only just light, governed just by Maxwell's Laws, nothing more mysterious. (Well... there is one caveat: it is actually the electroweak generalization of Maxwell's Laws.) It ONLY responds to ITS OWN boundary conditions, from the place where it is emitted to the place where it is absorbed. "Quantization" is just a byproduct of meeting the boundary conditions at both times. HOWEVER -- those boundary conditions for the photon depend on the state of complicated big objects, which is related in turn to more distant boundary conditions. Between the boundary conditions, the photon is never in a mixed state, in reality, in my view. WE are uncertain about its state, and WE must rely on probability distributions and wave functions, because WE do not know what the exact boundary conditions are that the photon faces in any given experiment, in reality. It is a situation of uncertainty, BUT NOT a situation of indeterminism, in my interpretation.

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In a message dated 99-10-25 13:05:46 EDT, writes:

Geissler claimed a time quantum of 4.5 ms and supported that claim by findings agreeing with that duration or multiples thereof. >>

Hannes--thanks to your leads, I found the following two abstracts on Medline. They may, indeed, indicate a quantum-like unit of perceptual time. However I strongly suspect that there are many assemblies in the body which utilize different rhythms. The enteric brain probably operates at a different speed than that which regulates the Krebbs cycle within cells, for example. Whether the jumble of very fast and very slow times in the human body (or in the bodies of clams, whose daily, monthly, and yearly internal clocks have been studied diligently since the mid-sixties) are synched to a common rhythm is something I wonder about.

Here's what really has me pondering. Anyone who's been patient enough to read my postings over the last few years knows I'm working on a theory of the universe and most of what's in it (well, actually, all that's in it) which starts with roughly three axioms, algorithms, principles, or whatever you want to call them, and generates a self-consistent system of tremendous complexity by doubling, trebling, quntupling, and google-plexing its modest initial dicta back upon themselves until the results are dizzying. Such processes are easily modeled using several metaphorical marvels which spell out the corollaries implicit in a handful of axioms. One of these systems is geometry--such as the Riemannian geometry Einstein used to build his model of the time-space manifold. Another is non-linear mathematics. And a third is the use of cellular automata--which are built with a set of extremely simple rules and proceed to produce pulsating whorls and dances of complex form through nothing but sheer repetition. The universe, according to this view, is a set of wheels within wheels within wheels. All hark back to a common ancestral seed. Actually, that seed contained roughly a trio of principles. Attraction, repulsion, and time are the three rules of etiquette which I suspect are at the bottom of all which has spilled from the pinprick cornucopia of the Big Bang.

If this sounds fanciful, take a look at the following words from Lee Smolin, considered one of the greatest minds in physics today:

To understand a galaxy, he says, "one must think of ten thousand years as if they were a second.... The time scale of the life of a massive star...is ten million years from formation to supernova. Then, to understand the whole system, we will have to see the life of that star as a day in the life of a galaxy that lives at least ten billion years and rotates once every few hundred million years. (p. 123)... Gerola, Shulman, and Seiden invented a delightful game that models the star-forming process with a few simple rules. The did this by making a few changes in the rules of a game that already existed, which is called the game of life. Invented by John Conway, a mathematician, this game is played on a simple chessboard, each square of which can be thought of as living or dead... There are some steps by which this is determined. A square will be alive on the next step if it has next to it some, but not too many, squares that are now alive. ...with a few simple rules, a large variety of beautiful structures are produced which continually appear and disssolve in a kind of a dance. (p. 134) ...The fact that the new model [of the formation and maintenance of galactic systems) is based on an analogy to biological phenomenon is not fortuitous. ...The key to both biology and computer games is that the right set of simple rules, repeated over and over again, can lead to the formation of enormously complex patterns and structures that reproduce themselves continually over time.... They are well described by the newer mathematical games that are described in terms of algorithm systems such as the cellular automata that define the game of life ...the same logic is governing both the spread of a star formation through the disk of a galaxy...[and] biology and ecology." (pp. 136-137)

We live on a planet whose time is measured in days and years. In our guts and pores are colonies of bacterial relatives who operate on a vastly different time frame than do we. For them, a generation is 20 minutes. The cells within us operate in some cases in lifetimes of a day or two For the grand assembly we call our "selves," a lifetime is roughly 70 years. For our species, a goodly run under our planet's sun may be as many as 100 million years or as few as the four million we have reached so far. For our sun a lifetime is perhaps six billion years. And for our galaxy, life stretches on so long that it encompasses nearly the entire existence of this, the only cosmos that we know.

A galaxy's quantal tick of time is a species' eternity. A human day of work and sleep is 1,400 years on the bacterial calendar. And our 24 hours spell the knell of death for a trillion of our own blood cells. Do atoms tick to yet another quantal beat? I do not know. But protons are forever. They outlast us all. -------------- Lee Smolin. The Life of the Cosmos. NY: Oxford University Press. 1997. ------------------- for more on quanail units of perceptual time, see:

Ultra-precise quantal timing: evidence from simultaneity thresholds in long-range apparent movement. Geissler HG, Schebera FU, Kompass R Percept Psychophys 1999 May 61:4 707-26

Abstract Conditions for the disappearance of long-range apparent movement were investigated. In an experiment on beta motion, critical interstimulus intervals (ISIs) of downward simultaneity thresholds for stimuli presented in continuous alternation were determined for exposure durations (EDs) varying from 3 to 160 msec. Each subject performed each test twice. Data were collected in three sessions, each for one of three angular separations (3 degrees, 6 degrees, and 12 degrees) and the full set of EDs. The distribution of critical ISIs collapsed across subjects, EDs, and angular separations shows sharp maxima at regular distances within a range of 0-110 msec ISI. Significant or near-significant peaks were found at ISIs of 5, 9, 22, 27, 43, 55, and 107 msec. Although mean critical ISIs shifted with spatial separation, no essential shift of the main maxima occurred. Evidence of a periodic modulation with a period duration of 4.5 msec was obtained from the distributions of differences between critical ISIs of the first tests and their replications, which exhibit extremely low standard deviations (< 10 msec). These results agree well with previous analyses (Geissler, 1987, 1992) that led to a taxonomic model of quantal timing, briefly summarized in this paper. Further consequences are discussed and related to earlier developments (Geissler, 1991, 1992, 1997).

MeSH Adult, Analysis of Variance, Chi-Square Distribution, Female, Human, Male, Models, Neurological, Models, Psychological, Motion Perception, Periodicity, Signal Detection (Psychology), Support, Non-U.S. Gov't, Time Perception

Author Address Institut f_r Allgemeine Psychologie UniversitÓt Leipzig, Germany.

[Temporal code constants--a link between psychology and physiology in research of cognitive processes? Hypotheses and considerations of quantum structures in alpha activity of the brain] Geissler HG Z Psychol Z Angew Psychol 1991 199:2 121-43

Abstract Temporal code invariants as possible links between psychological and physiological characteristics of cognition: a tentative time quantum approach. Relationships between alpha activity and short-term memory performance are discussed referring to an approach suggested by Lebedev and Lutzky (1973). These authors suggest a secondary relationship in considering processing as well as storing of information as a result of the superposition of oscillatory processes which differ from one another an elementary period (relative refractoriness) specific to individuals. Some specifications of scan rate and STM span suggested by the authors seem to be untenable for empirical and logical reasons. Alternative explanations are proposed referring to the time quantum model (TQM) by Geissler (1985, 1987, 1990, 1991). Straight forward expansions of this model lead to the hypothesis of an ''alpha band'' consisting of 9 discrete frequencies. Predictions on scanning rhythms can be derived from this via the assumption that these represent segmentations caused by pairwise resonance. A modification of the Lebedev-Lutzky assumption on spans is proposed assuming an optimum code for stored information.
MeSH Alpha Rhythm, Brain, Electroencephalography, English Abstract, Human, Memory, Short-Term, Psychophysiology, Reaction Time

Author Address Sektion Psychologie der UniversitÓt Leipzig.
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This seems an extremely important point. It relates to epistasis, the manner in which sets of genes are bound in an interdependent web, and which one web may have dominance over another, meaning that even the "separate" webs are tied together. It's very reminiscent of Stuart Kauffman's image of a hundred buttons which we connect with long, loose, random stitches. As the number of connecting threads grow, one finally reaches the point at which by picking up one button, one picks up all 100. What Kauffman doesn't say is that the button one chooses to lift will determine which way the skein hangs, and each dangling form will be different.

The image applies on innumerable levels. No atom, molecule, gene, organism, human, intellect, personal emotion, percept, family, clique, ethnic group, subculture, nation, or species is an island. All are threaded together. Since humans are made of interthreaded atoms, molecules, genes, organs, intellects, emotions, and percepts, and since we are each a part of interthreaded families, cliques, ethnic groups, nations, and species, pick one of us up, and the rest come trailing along. In fact, pick up one element of the universe--any one at all--and somehow you manage to lift them all. So William Blake knew more than your average scientist when he wrote

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Howard

On 10/30/98 MJVelardo writes:

the most overused and misunderstood model in biology today, the so called "knock out mice". By deleting a gene in the embryo, a mouse is obtained that theoretically is missing just one gene. THe idea is that one then infers the function of that gene by looking at the defects/effects in the mice. THis is as much of a misleading method as that favorite pastime of neuroscientists...lesioning parts of the brain and then trying to discern function. Everyone gets enamored of it because the idea is so simple. However both models are fraught with false assumptions. In the case of knock out mice...when the first knock outs of really important genes failed to show the expected defects/effects the explanation became "oh yeah well nature in her infinite wisdom has supplied "redundancy"" so that no one gene failure can kill the organism or cause it to seriously malfunction. Then voila! came two back to back papers in Science no less that did the obvious experiment and knocked out the same gene, but in four genetically different mouse strains. And what surprise...the genetic background of the mouse had a huge impact on the effect of the gene knock out (deletion).
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In a message dated 98-11-17 08:20:03 EST, writes:

Subj: Re: Musafer Sherif and Uexkull Date: 98-11-17 08:20:03 EST From: (John Fentress) Sender:

Howard, I think you have the key. Its BALANCE between cooperation - isolation - competition (I'd make it a three part story). The balance is also dynamic and multilayered, as we have said in the past. I look forward to reading chapter 18, but might skip a footnote or two.

hb: given the fact that isolation and integration are interlaced, that isolation is a matter of pulling the drawstrings taut and stretching the system out as one pushes away from its periphery, but that isolation never allows one to escape interconnection, how does isolation fit? By the way, this principle of isolation as a stretch in the bonds of integration goes straight back to the very bottom level of being. From the first instant of the big bang, elements were precipitating, separating, setting up boundaries which gave them identity. Yet all were laced together in spite of their insistence on separation. When the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force failed to hold them, there was always gravity. The forces are more intricate in complex social systems, but the principle is the same: you can run but you can never get away. You can put distance between yourself and the center of the system, but the tendrils of connection will never entirely break.

jf: I still go for the image of systems that both interact and self-organize.
hb: the self organization is in the interaction. the more elements interact, the more they tangle the skein. from the tangles are born new forms, new ways to be.

jf: The interaction part can be cooperative (synergistic) or competitive (antagonistic). The cascade of consequences can flip pluses into minuses into pluses, and so on.

hb: yup, except competition is one form of synergy, and cooperation is another. yeesh, I *hate* sounding like a zen monk, but this universe is ridiculously zenish, so I'm stuck with it.

jf: Its the orchestration of these events that carries the tune.

hb: ah :) (that's a smile)
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In a message dated 98-11-17 09:05:31 EST, writes:

Subj: Re: Musafer Sherif and Uexkull Date: 98-11-17 09:05:31 EST From: (Don Beck) Sender: To:

May I add the context, the life conditions, the problems of existence to the formula. Diversity generation and conformity enforcement phase in and out based on the dynamics of the situation, rather than a predetermined cycle. In some cases, both will be going full blast because there are segments in a complex context that require them. Same goes for the patterns and sequence of cooperation and competition. Complex Adaptive Systems cannot be seen outside of the Complex Dynamic Context(s).

Don Beck

hb: Don--Agreed most heartily. if antogonism is a form of synergy, and if it is a form which expands the search web, and if, indeed, we are all part of a web searching possibility space, then we are constantly shaped by that which we search. What are we searching? Each other, our possible modes of interaction (including antagonistic interaction), and the realms of what isn't which, with effort or sufficient undirected thrashing, we can bring to be. In other words, conditions are as important as that which acts within them. Figure and gound are equally formful. Conditions are ground, or so they seem to us. Cheers--Howard
At 09:21 AM 11/17/98 +0000, you wrote: >Howard, >I think you have the key. Its BALANCE between cooperation - >isolation - competition (I'd make it a three part story). The >balance is also dynamic and multilayered, as we have said in the >past. I look forward to reading chapter 18, but might skip a >footnote or two. > >I still go for the image of systems that both interact and> self-organize. The interaction part can be cooperative (synergistic) >or competitive (antagonistic). The cascade of consequences can flip >pluses into minuses into pluses, and so on. > >Its the orchestration of these events that carries the tune. > > >Cheers, >j. > > >> John--well, according to the complex adaptive system model put forth in a >> bunch of my published stuff, and in the ideas of innumerable thinkers of >> grander reputation, without a balance between cooperation and competition and >> a corresponding balance between diversity generation and conformity >> enforcement, any system will seize up and croak. in chapter 18 of global >> brain, i'm using the usual scads of material (125 footnotes with lord knows >> how many citations each) to show what happens when a system tilts toward >> conformity in order to confront crisis, then stays there. it isn't pretty. >> the conformity enforcers i'm looking at are fundamentalisms, fascisms, and >> other authoritarianisms. the time frame is from now until well into the 21st >> century. everything from historic precedent to neural net modeling says that >> if these groups continue to gain influence, the mass mind faces a lobotomy. >> Howard

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On 8/23/99 David Smillie writes in response to Howard Bloom:

>hb: A species is a large backbone of genetic vertebrae, an >integrated squadron of genes, spreading tendrils in all >directions, adding refinements, upgrades and attachments >to its exterior, accesorizing profligately in the effort >to take advantage of as many niches as possible before >the next act of nature or, far worse, glaciation, or, >even more powerful a scourer of insufficiently adaptive >gene platoons, a mass extinction, a sudden-death play >off for the gene-teams of species which have evolved >since the last calamity of this kind washed clean the >rigid failures from the earth.ds: What you say here applies to sexual taxa, which we have often taken to be the basis of all evolutionary change of living entities. It is clear, however, that asexual taxa, including clonal taxa and also bacteria (Eubacteria, Archaebacteria) require different definitions of species, since they don't have a systematic way of sharing genes and establishing genetic isolation between one species and the next.
hb: very true. The global brain says that this has made the bacterial global brain far more agile and adaptive than that of eukaryotes. We have our genes locked up tight in the security vault of a nucleus, which means our changes had to take place very slowly in the days when all multi-generational learning was genetic. Only with the introduction of memes in approximately 300 million b.c. did we invent a form of information transmission which overcame this problem. And even now, with words and all our multimedia, we still have a hard time keeping up with the microbial brain as it learns to totally undo the wonder drugs we've only had since roughly 1942. We can't get cocky yet. Being locked into eukaryotic multicellularity is a severe disability, a trade off in exchange for new capacities. We can be big and have all kinds of tissue working within us cooperatively. But even our societies are nothings compared to those erected by bacteria. By the way, one thing to be aware of--in a bacterial colony, many arms radiate from the center. Each of those arms is as genetically distinct as an ethic group like the Jews or gypsies among human beings. Though all the cells in the colony started from the same genetic Eve, each is a descendent only of its predecessors in the thin snakey line within which it lives out its days. The more generations over which the snaking contimues, the further the genes in each line grow apart. This means that the conventional way of looking at bacteria as all extensions of one gene is as utterly false (or true, in Smillie terms) as saying that African pygmies carry a genetic legacy identical to that of blond Norwegians who are 6'3". Only the if the selfish genes regards Norwegians and pygmies as virtual twins is it possible to say that all bacteria in a colony are vehicles for the same gene teams. Turn that upside down and it says that the theory of the selfish gene equals a theory for a selfish genome, and that by consequence, all members of a species are identical vehicles for the selfish genome of their kind. Though there is competition between individuals and groups within a species, they take place to tighten and improve the underlying gene team. This not only supports your argument but that of the global brain, which says that all humans are part of competing organs within a larger trans human mind and that that mega-inteliigence includes every living speices, every living kind. ds: How should one characterize the process of speciation in organisms without meiotic sexuality? That's a question that badly needs answering but which has seldom been posed as an issue. I, certainly, don't have an adequate answer although I sometimes suspect that there is selection relative to the social surround which means for any one organism all the others that surround it. Thus the establishment of stromatolites, complex social arrangements 3 1/2 billion years ago, persisting into the present. Thus the importance of symbiosis, stressed by your friend Lynn Margulis. I know that you tend to reject a Darwinian view of selection, as does Lynn, but it seems to me that there are all kinds of virtues in the view that our conceptions of causality are limited by our insistence that they follow our own experience of cause and effect - Newton's falling apple. Indeed it seems to me that your 'corollary generator theory' which integrates changes in living forms into a broad understanding of the changes in the Universe, can best be phrased in terms of the selection of those arrangements that work,

hb: absolutely and totally agreed. I've stolen the term Evolutionary Stable Strategies and have applied it to enduring forms of all kinds, from stars and planets to the 109 different varieties of atoms (a very small number in a universe which allegedly is subject to randomness at every turn). Each of these has had to undergo the natural selection involved in proving its ability to fit its environment. This includes not just the environment of the raw vacuum of space, with its underlying rules determining what coheres and what gets torn apart, but its fit to a *social* environment. What do I mean by social in the context of inanimate matter? The most basic rules filling the seeming emptiness of space are those pertaining to the four forces--the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. Each of these is a social rule, a rule regulating the manner in which two or more objects will interrelate. And inter relate each thing in this universe does. Even the few floating in the vast loneliness between galaxies (it's been proven that there are such things) are pushed, pulled and influenced by the gravity and electromagnetic transmissions of the galactic clusters throug which they thread their way. A galaxy is a massive society. Its choreography is as social and as filled with formalities as any structure maintained by Robert's Rules of Order or Emily Post's Advice for Every Dining Occasion. Those forms which evolve to hold the wrong fork on the wrong occasion will have to be very hearty in maintaining their non-conformity or they will be torn apart by the forces of the very society in which they live and from which they rebel. I'm talking about the social rules which dictate that all stars shall take one of five distinct forms and shall go through a similar series of evolutionary phases. Miss Manners could not be more strict than is the galactic and intergalactic environment, or, as its known to astrophysists, the stellar set of sub populations (there are five types even of these populations). The word evolution, as I've mentioned on other occasions, is one which the biologists we know would claim has no business being applied to objects without life, but astrophysicists would disagree strongly, since it is the term they use to discuss the phases of development common to all stars of a given type. So even stars, planets, and clouds of interstellar dust must successfully fit into niches to survive. And those niches fit the frame of an environment which is social to its very core--the five forces of attraction and repulsion. After all, aren't attraction and repulsion the basic forces not only regulating the relationships of quarks, electrons, protons, and planetessimals, but also those of bacteria, fighting fish, chipanzees, and human beings? ds: that are able to persist through time, in contrast to the idea that we must seek out an underlying cause that accounts for it all.> >What follows is a bit of information which blows giant >holes in the current notions of what genes and species >are and how they evolve. The indication from the >article I'm about to give you bits of, Virginia Morell's >"Ecology Returns to Speciation Studies." Science, 25 >June 1999: 2106-2080, is that environmental pressures do >far more to shape the genetic structure and overall >engineering features of an animal than genes alone.Strohman (Nature Biotechnology, March 1997) speaks of a coming Kuhnian revolution in biology where we get rid of the idea that all 'causes' in living systems can be reduced to genetics.

hb: funny but Strohman was a member of our group as long as I hand picked items for him to read. When the time for such sorting departed, I was forced to stop corresponding with him, alas.

He is dealing primarily with epigenesis, the events which shape an organism from its beginnings as a single cell to it's adulthood. That domain is useful since essentially the same genes are operative throughout the developmental process but what emerges is clearly not simply the reading of genes as governing the whole process. I think you are familiar with Strohman and his argument. I would only add that your own account fits right into this picture. Morell speaks about 'big genes' being selected rather than 'small genes' but that seems to me insensitive to the complex processes involved.

hb: good point. Again, there's a complex social interaction here, and when such interactions exist, they lead to emergent properties which dance above the heads of their participants but are as real as the elements from which they have emerged. The spiral arms of a galaxy are one example, the multi-continental nouvel cuisine fad is another.

Seehausen et al. show that when Lake Victoria in Africa becomes cloudy there is a loss of the complex speciation process and a merging of differences. She ignores this, despite the fact that it was published in Science! hb: interesting point. Could you explain more of it to me?>Similar circumstances seem to prod the billion-year-old >genetic backbone which underlies the hereditary pattern >of every animal on earth to go through the same tricks, >even if those tricks are performed thousands of miles >apart.I would say 'NOT every animal on earth' nor even every living being (plants, fungi, protists, Eubacteria, Archaebacteria) as well.
hb: hmmm, can you describe in vivid detail a few of the exceptions? In fact, so powerful are the commands with which >circumstance orders genes to perform preordained flips >and twists that species evolving thousands of miles >apart are still able to mate with each other PROVIDING >they have evolved in similar ecological niches. If they >haven't, and their niches are radically different, they >may not be able to mate even if they share a common >ancestor and live within a few miles or less of each >other. How could the shape of an ecological niche have >such amazing powers?There are several different definitions of niche. Odum says "Ecologists use the term...ecological niche to mean the role that the organism plays in the ecosystem". Morell certainly is right to stress the importance of this role, but it requires that we have a better sense of how sexual species play that role. One element is that sexual selection operates to bring about a new role in a new ecosystem. hb: however bacteria manage to evolve rapidly to turn what looked like barren wastelands into a new and fruitful niche. In other words I'm making two points at once. First, that a niche is in the eye of the beholder. A new species invents a niche by seeing the opportunity in it--even if it manages its scanning act via random mutation. Eshel Ben Jacob has set us all the basic proposition that information is one of the most basic of basics in this universe and has asked us for a better definition than that provided by Claude Shannon. I've answered that information is in the eye of the beholder. To the extent that an up quark is able to decipher the come hither of a down quark, that come hither is information. To a neutrino which couldn't care less, the same transmission is not information but noise. So as with most things (like attraction and repulsion, for example), you can see the same basic rules at work, the same etiquette, in a niche being in the eye of a beholder and information being in the eye of the beholder. Quarks and the rapidly speciating fish of Lake Nyas or Lake Victoria are subject to a similar basic algorithm. And what is an algorithm other than a way of doing things? A table manner which applies to both the walrus and the oyster, to both the baryon and to those who dine on carrion? Give me a book of algorithms at work from top to bottom in this universe and I wll have Miss Manners rewrite it in English for you. Help, David, it's nearly five AM and my prose is running away (or amok) with me.>Corollary generator theory says that if you start a >universe off with a handful of axioms, toss in an >"operator" like, say, the forward surge of time, and use >that operator to derive corollaries from the initial >axioms, the universe you end up with will be forced to >do a not-exactly-random stagger down a set of >predetermined paths. Corollary generator theory further >says that there will be many choice points >(bifurcations) along the route, points at which the >system could travel the path of several lemmas--equally >acceptable outbranchings of the increasingly intricate >corollary map. So there's a lot of room for "free will" >and its inanimate equivalent, chance in a corollary- >generating universe. However the branching paths are >constrained by the fact that each must be consistent >with the original handful of axioms.I've already expressed my admiration for your broad theory and the comments above are not meant to modify that, just to give you my own version. > >In other words, the path an atom, molecule, sun, planet, >galaxy, or species takes is constrained like that of a >pinball rolling on one predetermined plane in a >predetermined direction (down) through a series of set >pins and robotically rigid flippers. Since genes are an >expression of the Big Bang's original two or three >axioms, they can only branch in so many directions, just >as self-assembling atoms can be inventive as all get >out, but can only travel 109 paths. You might call >those 109 paths--the number of shapes atoms are able to >assume--the only evolutionarily stable strategies >available to combinations of subatomic particles. > >Genes seem similarly constrained by their roots in the >interaction between adenine, guanine, thymine, and >cytosine. Environment seems one of the major >constrainers, and, in its turn environment is limited in >its number of forms. Why? Environment springs from the >same set of cosmic axioms from which life comes. It, >too, has its constraints, its limited number of choice >points. Hence the similarity between planets and stars. >For all their difference they are matter fallen into >recognizably constrained forms. As Carl Sagan used to >love to tell us, there are billions and billions of >things out there beyond our atmosphere whose similarity >is so species-specific that we can clearly tell a star >from a planet, a planet from a moon, and a galaxy from >a relatively empty hole in space. > >The universe's initial axioms are much like the fates of >Greek mythology, "Clotho, who spun the web of life; >Lachesis, who measured its length; and Atropos, who cut >it." (Description courtesy of the Columbia Desk >Encyclopedia.) By the way, what those axioms may be is >still a matter for metaphysical guesswork. However I'm >putting my money on attraction, repulsion, and time-- >three magic beans from which all else has sprung. >Anybody have other guesses?Does 'interaction' fit in as an addition? I haven't thought through the issues the way you have.

hb: absolutely. Attraction, repulsion, and time are all synonyms for interaction. Repulsion means two or more entities interact by parting. Attraction means they interact by coming together. And time even time is defined by interaction--the amount of time it takes for a pendulum to swing back and forth for example. A penudulum swings back and forth with respect to its pivot point, to the ground below, to the graviaional object whose field influences its movement, to the gears which record its movement, and to quite a few other things with which it dances, coverses, and exchanges near-meetings and repeated greetings. Howard ------------------------------
David Smillies' concept of a species as a long genetic backbone accessorizing in every way it can to fit as many niches as possible continues to unfold with new possibilties. Way back when this means that humans and the living environments in which they reside had common ancestors--so the "enviroment" with which we battle and cooperate, the ecosystem from which we draw resources and with which we fight, are in reality our relatives--they are us. We are both carrying a dna backbone which has branched out to become the tangled underbrush through which we hack our way, the worms which make soil in productive farmland, the bacteria which aid and attack us, etc. We all carry a common legacy of dna-and-nucleic-acid-based mechanisms which hold the files on our creation, growth, and maintenance. We're all probing fingers of a common lifeform which has stretched its tendrils over the surface of the planet in as many forms as possible. Howard
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Subj: speciation and snowball earth Date: 10/29/99
A while back David Smillie sent a paper which indicated that a species is an enduring genetic chain of substantial complexity which dresses itself in genetic acessories to fill as many niches as possible before the next major despeciation, the next major life-destroying catastrophe. One catastrophe has dwarfed all others in the public imagination over the last decade--the destruction of the dinosaurs as the result of a comet splash down. Stephen Jay Gould went out of his way ten years ago to publicize another mass despeciation--the Cambrian extinction--for which he gave no cause. Now the snowball earth theories which first appeared roughly a year ago are putting definite dates to eath's life extinguishing episodes, those which some species managed to accessorize sufficiently to survive while others less clever in their genetic adaptations died. Specifically, the data suggests that the pre-Cambrian extinction occurred courtesy of a deep freeze and the lack of greenhouse gases which may have triggered it. In fact, the data suggests that one of these cataclysms hit in roughly 700,000 bp, just before the rise of the first Ediacarans and the first clams, and another freeze-over coated the earth with ice around 600,000 bp, probably triggering the pre-Cambrian die off which did the Ediacarans in and opened the door for virtually all of today's major multicellular animal and plant families. Hoefully we, too, will ornament ourselves with sufficient gadgetry to endure the next disaster, whether it be by over greenhousing ourselves, tossing ourselves into the cooler, or irradiating the planet in a manor that only bacteria such as Deinococcus radiodurans could enjoy. My vote for a species adornment of adaptive value is the space ship. Which may give Mike Waller inspiration for yet another poem. Meanwhile, here's the news on snowball earth and the dates of its reoccurances. Howard Source: Penn State (http://www.psu.edu/)Date: Posted 10/29/99 Oxygen May Be Cause Of First Snowball Earth Denver, Colo. -- Increasing amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere could have triggered the first of three past episodes when the Earth became a giant snowball, covered from pole to pole by ice and frozen oceans, according to a Penn State researcher. "We have convincing evidence that at least six of the seven continents were once glaciated, and we also have evidence that some of these continents were near the equator when they were covered with ice," says Dr. James F.Kasting, professor of geosciences and meteorology. "Two of these global glaciations occurred at 600 and 750 million years ago, but the earliest occurred at 2.3 billion years ago. "According to Kasting, if it is assumed that the magnetic evidence for glaciation at the equator is correct, then only two possible explanations for equatorial glaciation exist.One is that the Earth's tilt, which is now at 23.5 degrees from vertical, was higher than about 54 degrees from vertical. This would have positioned Earth so that the poles received the most solar energy and the equator would receive the least, creating a glacier around the middle but still leaving the poles unfrozen. The other possibility, which is the one that Kasting leans toward now, is that the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere fell low enough so that over millions of years, glaciers gradually encroached from the poles to 30 degrees from the equator. Then, in about 1,000 years, the remainder of the Earth rapidly froze due to the great reflectivity of the already ice-covered areas and their inability to capture heat from the sun.

The entire Earth became a snowball with oceans frozen to more than a half mile deep."For the latest two glaciations, carbon dioxide levels fell low enough to beginthe glaciation process. However, for the earliest glaciation, the key may havebeen methane," Kasting told attendees at the annual meeting of the GeologicalSociety of America today (Oct. 27) in Denver. "The earliest known snowballEarth occurred around the time that oxygen levels in the atmosphere began torise," says Kasting, who is a member of the Penn State Astrobiology Center."Before then, methane was a major greenhouse gas in the atmosphere inaddition to carbon dioxide and water vapor."As oxygen levels increased, methane levels decreased dramatically andcarbon dioxide levels had not built up enough to compensate, allowing theEarth to cool. Oxygen levels need only reach a hundredth of a percent ofpresent-day oxygen levels to convert the methane atmosphere completely.Once the Earth is snow covered, it takes 5 to 10 million years for the naturalactivity of volcanos to increase carbon dioxide enough to melt the glaciers.Regardless of the greenhouse gas involved, the pattern of freezing anddefrosting would be the same. Because the sun has been constantly increasingin brightness, it would take more greenhouse gas in the past to compensate forthe fainter sun. For the glaciations at 600 and 750 million years ago, estimatesare that carbon dioxide levels equal to recent pre-industrial levels or up tothree times pre-industrial levels would have been sufficient for snowball Earthto occur.Because many continents existed in the warm equatorial areas during the mostrecent glaciations, Kasting believes that rapid weathering of calcium andmagnesium silicate rocks, which consumes carbon dioxide, lowered levelssufficient to cool things."It would have taken nearly 300 times present levels of carbon dioxide tobring the Earth out of its ice cover," says Kasting. "Then, once the highreflectivity ice was gone, the carbon dioxide would have overcompensatedand the Earth would become very warm until rapid weathering would removecarbon dioxide from the atmosphere."One reason that many scientists initially rejected the snowball Earth theorywas that biological evidence does not suggest that the various forms of life onEarth branched out from the latest total glaciation. A variety of life forms hadto survive from before the glaciation, which is difficult to imagine on anice-covered world. Perhaps the ancestors of life today survived in refuges likehot springs or near undersea thermal vents."The biological puzzle of snowball Earth is very interesting," says Kasting."Events suggest that life was more robust than we thought and that the Earth'sclimate was much less stable than we assumed."Editor's Note: The original news release can be found athttp://www.psu.edu/ur/NEWS/news/snowballearth.htmlNote: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Penn State forjournalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of thisstory, please credit Penn State as the original source. You may also wish to includethe following link in any citation:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/10/991029071 656.htm</
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In a message dated 1/29/00 11:58:09 AM Eastern Standard Time, (Van Philpot) writes: vp: I am writing a book entitled"The Philosophy of Rheology"which was inspired by research I did in the department of psychiatry at Tulane about 18 years ago showing that the blood of schizophrenic patients had an abnormally high viscosity and when they were effectively treated and began to communicate with others, the blood viscosity went in the direction of normal. vp: These findings were published in Biological Psychiatry in 1984. From these studies, I have concluded that the flow of body fluids and the flow of communication beteen humans and their environment are intertwined. vp: that time itself began with the BIG BANG when particles of matter began to move and mental function is intertwined with that movement from the molecular to the celestial level. vp: As you have already suggested, there is a greater mind which is the accumulated knowledge of mankind and an individual mind that connects with the greater mind like a telephone connected to Ma Bell. From a medical point of view, heath is dependent on the integrity of the flow of natural phenomena, body fluids, the mind and the spirit.
hb: now I am becoming more anxious than ever to email you the latest Global Brain ms. Can you receive large files and print them out? My approach to what you and I have both focused on is very down-to-earth and materialistic. However dances of incedible divinity can arise from those concentrations of infinity we know as quarks and leptons, atoms and molecules, galaxies, black holes, stars, suns and the captured spin of sun stuff we call human beings._______________________________
Subj: Husserl Date: 4/10/01 4:09:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time From: Starproxy To: Howl Bloom A brief paper --more interesting parts are in bigger font-- 25. Relations of coincidence among the contents of intimation and naming Statements about desire, questions, imperatives and other statements informed by the speaker's past experience relate to both the speaker's mental state and to the objects to which s/he refers. But existential statements independent of the speaker refer only to immutables external to the speaker. hb: are there any such things? Liebnitz and Lee Smolin say that all things can be defined by their relationship to all other things in the universe. the view of truth, beauty, and inanimate evolution I've just been laying out imply that all things can be defined by their current, past, and future relationships to all others in the universe. Is subjectivity absent from even that most unchangable of things--a proton? It's motion position relative to others, and the various gravitational, solar radiating, or organic bodies in which it participates makes it unique and gives it a subjectivity without consciousness. jpm: Examples of statements that relate to the speaker's subjectivity: The desire, "I should like a glass of water," refers to the speaker's past and present thirstiness. hb: and to future intentions--to will and to the future movement of a liquid into the digestive tract. jpm: The question, "Where is a glass of water?" refers to the object's location and relies on speaker's ignorance of its location. hb: however it asks for an answer in a frame of reference that would allow the speaker to find it in the future. once again, it is a question related to motion, to action, and to what lays ahead of the speaker. jpm: Similarly, the imperative, "Give me a glass of water!" must include the speaker's feeling about a glass to be imperative. But s/he makes no existential statement about water. hb: hmmmm, there's a heck of a lot of knowledge implied in this statement. knowledge of water's function with relation to the speaker--of its use as a beverage, a solvent, a necessity for washing ,etc. it also implies knowledge of a glass and by implication the vast social structure that makes the manufacture and retailing of the glass possible. Then there are the molecules in the glass, the fact that they will remain in the glass thanks to the gravity of an entire planet, the fact that, if tipped, they will tumble out, etc. In a Smolinesque manner, six words are slowly hooking us into economic units, production, consumpmption, emotion, and the past and present of the cosmos. jpm: Statements of desire, questions and imperatives combine the speaker's relationship to the statement and the direct object. In, "I should like a glass of water," the direct object, "a glass of water," relies of the speaker's desire designated by, "I should like." Husserl points out that when a speaker expresses his desire for a glass of water his desire, the subject ("I want") sentence's grammatical direct object/predicate ("a glass of water") are the semantic objects of the sentence. Generally, when we talk about subject/object division in sentences we divide subject and object to isolate each term, forgetting that each term's subjectivity relies on it's relation to the other.

hb: you hit it on the nose. The meaning of, "I want a glass of water," arises from the relationship between, "I want," and, "a glass of water." Therefore, in Husserl's formulation, both the subject, "I want," and predicate, "a glass of water," are semantic objects of the sentence. This way of thinking about sentences puts the speaker back into the sentence and emphasizes the speaker as architect of meaning in sentences about desire, questions and imperatives. The speaker occupies space in the sentence designated by "I" and uses "I" to refer to himself. Husserl draws attention to the speaker as a subject that cannot literally speak from within the sentence because emanates from him and refers to him. The sentence divides the speaker between the speech act and "I." Here, the speaker is sum object of the sentence. The sentence speaks for the speaker but the speaker gets to be "speaker" because of the sentence. Therefore, the speaker and sentence are objects of each other. On the other hand, existential statements do not rely on the speaker at all. For instance, "Water is H20," is a fact independent of the speaker's the speaker's state of mind. hb: without a community of minds--one that extends quite a distance back in time--there would be no word "water," no sentence structure making an "is" possible, and none of those millennia of speculation about the nature of matter which led to the formulation of water as "H20." An existential statement is a statement about existing things of all kinds--of inanimate matter, with its 14 billion years or so of history--and of mass and individual minds. jpm: So it does not matter if the speaker says, "I judge that water is H20," because water's chemical composition does not rely on the speaker. The speaker could say, "I judge that CO2 is water," and he would be wrong. hb: ummmmm, the notion that water is h20 is a hypothesis that we consider well proven. but later generations often manage to make monkeys of us and show us newer and truer ways of seeing things. so to a scientist who realizes that eternal skepticism is his primary mandate, even the statement that water is H20 is provisional and up for eventual challenge. jpm: Though Husserl recognizes the speaker's object importance to sentences directly informed by the speaker's experience (i.e. statements of desire, questions, imperatives, etc.) he maintains that mathematical relationships exist independently of the speaker. Simply, the desire, "I want a glass of water," implies a "someone," but, "2 x 2 =4," in Husserl's way of thinking does not. In defining "intimation" Husserl stresses the speaker must refer to something that relies on his subjectivity, not a general state of affairs. A statement's meaning lies in the object referred to and in the mental state the speaker communicates about himself except for existentials, which are themselves, true or not-true. hb: a wonderful workout for the mind. all thanks, jp--howard

Bacterial Empires--Far Older Than Humanity

In a message dated 99-01-26 10:48:03 EST, Mike writes:

A number of avian species, having produce "the heir and a spare" are so programmed as to have the heir eat the spare once it becomes clear that this is the best (= probablistically most likely to be in the interests of the defining genes) use that can be made of available resources. Similarly, genetically related ants are highly likely to fight each other because they have identical resource demands. Above all else, such battles ensure that the aggression genes are always present in the genomes of the breeding lines most likely to win out. Again, when Gallic brother fought Gallic brother, the context was winner takes all. To the possibly identical aggression genes carried by both, it matters not one jot who wins, just so long as one or other gets the outstanding reproductive opportunities likely to go along with the top job, and the message is given to all other rivals "this guy will brook NO rivals". >>

Mike--these are excellent examples but they have a double edge. Most aggression is directed against conspecifics. Needing to retain aggression is a mark of the need of one group as a collectivity to fight off other bands which would exterminate the men and seize the women, n'est-ce-pas? This can be seen as either competition between clusters of genes OR competition between groups. Until it gets to higher level, more complex societies. Then the genetic factor falls away and leaves the group selection aspect naked and alone. Mass societies grow increasingly polyglot as they expand in size. They becoe genetic tossed salad. Especially once they reach the empire level.
James A. Shapiro has shown that there is considerable genetic mixture in even bacterial empires, which dwarf ours. One colony can consist of trillions of individuals, per some calculations Eshel Ben Jacob has done. Shapiro shows how, as the colony expands, each outward-reaching tendril acqures more and more genetic alterations which distiniguish it from others expanding from a central core. The bacteria in one outreach-branch are not related to those in other tendrils branching from the central colony. They are descended from millions of generations of those behind them in the thin finger of group movement. They have accumulated group-engineered genomic differences and mutations, per Shapiro. All of humanity has had less time to differentiate genetically than the bacteia in, say, a cyanobacterially-based stromatolite. As one moves from a small tribe to a bacterial empire the common descent gets lost in the productive differentiation--a division of responsibility--which unfolds from genetic diversity. This diversity makes the collective intelligence of the colony more nimble, gives it more options, makes the group more survivable in the long haul.

Same with humanity--mere snips in the bud compared to the generational age of a cyanobacterial stromatolite. The selfish gene hyptothesis assumes that we humans have now accumulated sufficient genetic diversity to cause considerable interhuman competition. We as a species are still only 5,000 generations old. That's 70 days in bacterial time. Some stomatolite colonies lasted from 3.5 billion years ago unitl about 1.2 million years ago.
See James A. Shapiro. "Bacteria as Multicellular Organisms." Scientific American. June 1988: 82-89. An utterly incredible article. Howard

Bloodbaths and Utopias

Hitler and Yurok both were obsessed with purification. In Hitler's case, it involved killing off subcultures.

Lenny Rifenstall's film of Hitler's utopian vision. all would be sunny, perfect, ruled by reason Hitler's "prescription for the achievement of that vision" kill the impure, take away their shops, their paintings??the witch hunt by removing the pollutants in society, we'll heal our society "How many of the visions that have galvanized entire societies into motion are simply visions based on that simple idea of genocide?" the sociobiologica logic behind this??over the horizon are humans who've found resources. If we exterminate them and take what they've got, there will be twice as much for each of us. *"that is precisely the paradise into which murder catapulted the Arabs of the seventh and eighth centuries" murder gave them gardens, concubines, palaces, and overflowing treasure houses 10a "Moses apparently offered the promised land to the Hebrews under the same conditions Hitler postulated (?) for the achievement of utopia." Americans also gained their land of wide open spaces by slaughtering the original inhabitants, who had been slaughtering each other in the name of greater glory before the white man came "in the case of the Crow or the Sioux, being the heroic status conferred on he who was able to kill the greatest number of enemy, steal the greatest number of enemy horses, cart home the greatest number of enemy goods and women." "Christians, Nazis and I'm sure if we look hard enough, even saints have managed to see the extermination of other human beings as an appendage of all that is noble and holy." eg Peter the Hermit and the Crusades "Allah dictated to them through Mohammed that warfare to the death was the noblest aspiration of the truly devout." 10a

*much later, the English were appalled that the Englishmen who'd been given chunks of Irish land began dressing in Irish fashion and Irishised their names. blurring the lines between us and them. Irish were still keeping track of their genes rather than their memes. people were in love with tales that related to their geneologies.

Irish still lived in quickly dissassembled huts that bore the stamp of their Celtic ancestors who's roamed Europe long before Christ. wolf population was growing. there were no roads large enough for a coach. [it was a complex of memes the English brought to Ireland]

[in his own way, Cromwell sensed his actions as a part of a complex dynamical system, a system in which competing forces battle to impose their form of organization on the world of men and matter] *he saw strife as "part of an inevitable, deeply disturbing, deeply exciting process, by which the way of the lord had to be fought out in order to be discovered" god's favor would be found in the cannon's mouth. the outcome of battle would reveal god's attitude toward each side. [God, in this case, is the invisible hand of the complex dynamical system, pitting memes against each other, awarding resources to the winners] *God speaks through carnage, the collective consciousness making up its mind. winners win the right to shape society's consciousness, its collective hypotheses English civil war pitted two forms of organization, two memes, against each other??monarchy and its rigid, authoritarian society; and Puritanism, which gave men the power to act as independent individuals, their own authorities. when Cromwell won, society changed its mind and adopted the Puritan views. God, the collective consciousness, had shifted thoughts through butchery

[Scots shared the same view] when they lost to Cromwell in 1649 [or 50], they switched to k response. felt it was God's judgement on their hidden sins. fasted and underwent humiliations. felt god must disagree with their attempt to establish Presbyterian faith throughout Scotland and England.

TE Lawrence reports on one French military philosopher who described "modern war, absolute war"??a state where two societies with incompatible ideas would put them to the test by bloodshed. [the memes doing battle] 22a

[even]Cromwell's wife acknowledged her role as a part of a larger superorganism. She said she had to submit herself to the "larger providence" that took her husband away on military campaigns.

Cromwell=Antonia Fraser

"religious fanaticism is associated with reapportioning power, prestige and goods in society"...[it is society's equivalent to adrenaline: the chemical that courses through the bloodstream preparing the system for a fight. In this case the fight is for one simple purpose??to claw to a higher place in the pecking order of groups.] the primary aim of Mossedegh's nationalist movement in Iran in the early 50's was the nationalization of oil. that oil had been controlled by the British. both the Americans and the Russians had been hoping to get their hands on it.

three feminists on Donahue breathed hatred against "the system" for creating something they saw as an artificial imposition on human nature: the fact that people strive for power over others, and some in the competition are humiliated by losing. the system, of course, was built by men. if women took over, all striving for power, all humiliation, would disappear [contrast with the behavior of female baboons outlined in Science 86??they compete brutally and humiliate each other constantly] *the feminists were using this myth, ironically, to compete for power with men??to hopefully strip men of power and humiliate . *the classic ideological device for taking things from someone is to claim he's abused you. to use blame. to find a scapegoat for whatever makes you uncomfortable.=classic device for beating someone else down on the hierarchical ladder. if the feminists are right, some clever group of male chimps must have sat around contriving "a system" to trap and humiliate females. For chimps compete and humiliate each other, jump up and down on each other, pick another up and splatter it against a wall. *but chimps, fortunately, lack the weapon of ideology, the weapon of blame. ideology=a tool for racheting your way up the hierarchical ladder.

Lighting the caverns of the beast within in order to reach the soul

Isaac Newton three hundred years ago: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
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I suspect that evolution of the arts and other forms of expression, including science, involve a process of ongoing brain integration. Each insight in science, poetry, or any other field shifts our neural balance, alters the manner in which we tap both our endocrine systems and our cerebral modules, and, in the case of those advances which expand enlightenment (many cultural movements shut it down), provide us with conceptual access to areas of emotional experience previously unexpressed. In other words, they integrate the frontal cortex and left and right frontal and temporal areas with deep brain structures whose "points of view" have long been active within us, but haven't previously been brought to the "light of consciousness." hb to Skoyles
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In a message dated 7/10/00 2:14:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: << "When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature." --Sigmund Freud >> A wonderful quote. "The heart has reasons reason never knows." Pascal And "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask." Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Herman Melville The project of culture and civilization has taken us only a few feet into the darkness of the labyrinth of consciousness and self. But the cultural process is still in its infancy. It is a mere 35,000 years young, a blip, a snip in cosmic time. Give us another 30,000 years or less and we can reach down through the miles of caverns and begin to see the outlines of the soul.

Alexithymia is "An affective disorder characterized by inability to recognize or express emotions." Or so says the OED. Ralph D. Ellis, in "The Dance Form of the Eyes," says it's an inability to find an image to express an emotion that's got the body in its throes. This would make Alexithymia a part of the normal human state--a condition we fight best not as individuals, but as contributors to the slow accretion of civilization. Culture is a collective enterprise. It grows as we work together with the output of our contemporaries and with the legacy of our ancestors to create ways to dispel the darkness that must have resided within us before brains could share words and metaphors, before there were pictures, speeches, and poetry. The human cultural project has been working for between 35,000 and two million years now to give names to emotional subtleties. It has been laboring generation after generation to produce phrases that light up our emotional caverns and pry feelings from their hiding place. Culture is the struggle against a form of mass alexithymia--an inability to put feelings into words--that afflicts all humankind. Howard
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Journal of Consciousness Studies Controversies in Science and the Humanities Volume 6, No.6/7, (June/July 1999) The Dance Form of the Eyes: What Cognitive Science Can Learn From Art Ralph D. Ellis, Clark Atlanta University, Art perception offers action affordances for the self-generated movement of the eyes, the mind, and the emotions; thus some scenes are 'easy to look at', and evoke different kinds of moods depending on what kind of affordances they present for the eyes, the brain, and the action schemas that further the dynamical self-organizing patterns of activity toward which the organism tends, as reflected in its ongoing emotional life. Art can do this only because perception is active rather than passive, and begins with efferent activity in emotional brain areas (e.g. hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus and anterior cingulate) which then motivates afferent processing (parietal imaging activity which finally, after a 1/3-second motivational/selective process is complete, resonates with occipital patterns, resulting in perceptual consciousness). The limbic system 'categories' that motivate the 'looking-for' of selective attention are categories of utility, to be understood in terms of emotional affordances and whole-organism affective meanings. Art plays with this looking-for, using it to make us engage in different afforded actions that relate to different limbic (emotional) categories. The drawings of children and of the artistically untutored reveal this structure when we fail to 'draw what we see', drawing instead what we conceptualize that we ought to be seeing. Art teaches us to get beyond this almost complete dominance of habitual categories, and to see things more freshly - both in the perceptual and in the emotive sphere. Rather than reinforcing our preconceptions, it forces us to see how they affect our view of reality. Because neither perceptions nor emotional responses are really passive 'responses' at all, art does not cause us to feel a certain way. Instead, we 'use' art for the purpose of symbolizing our emotions. Our most important feelings are not directly 'about' the perceptual objects that trigger them. The object in conscious attention during the feeling of an emotion is normally not the intentional object of the emotion, i.e., it is not the object in relation to which our actions could serve the purpose of the emotion. Emotions are not even triggered by simple 'stimuli', but rather by the meaning for us of a stimulus in a total context determined by ongoing and dynamical organismic purposes. Emotions arise from the total life process, which is a dynamical system - not as an isolated chemical event or a causal result of a simple stimulus. For this reason, emotions call not just for satiation or pleasure, but for explication; this is why art is different from entertainment or pretty decoration. Visual art affords not only a meaningful, self-directed dance of the eyes, but also a meaningful dance of this emotional explicating process. Special Feature on Art and the Brain Edited by Joseph A. Goguen Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego

The Universe is a Computer-Wolfram, etc.

Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science-what is it good for? A great many unkind things have been said about this book. The word that stands out in my mind from postings on various Internet groups comes from a self-professed Wolfram fan who blesses the heavens for Wolfram's invention of the widely used computer tool Mathematica. This Wolfram well-wisher went through A New Kind of Science and pronounced it "silly." Dorion Sagan wrote a brilliant satire of Wolfram's "my, my, my, my, me" style of writing for the International Paleopsychology Project. Evaluations and debates have popped up everywhere. The New York Times alone published six articles on Wolfram before I stopped counting. One of the first Times pieces praised A New Kind of Science for its "readability." Which either means the reviewer had a far greater ability to glide through difficult prose than I do (and most folks with a reasonable intelligence do) or that he simply skimmed the first 30 or 40 pages of the book.

There has been so much buzz about this book in part because there is a full-time, in house publicist at Wolfram HQ-- Wolfram Research, Inc. in Champaign, Illinois. And he's not just any publicist, he's a PhD-David Reiss, PhD to be specific. Having a publicist, however, is not an unscientific thing. Newton might have been a nothing without his savage dedication to self-promotion. Darwin wrote out a list of those he needed to win over to make his ideas stick and had his bulldog-Huxley-execute the pr plan. Every academic researcher whose work shows up in the mass media owes his or her visibility in part to a university communications director…or to a full-time wizard of scientific promotion like scientific literary agent John Brockman. I suspect that many an important scientific idea has been lost for lack of promotional machinery. Science needs more idea-promoters, not less.

So what's the real deal? Is Wolfram's book simply this year's Brief History of Time? Is it going through printing after printing only because it's a status symbol one MUST display on one's coffee table? Are any of the reviewers reading it all the way through to the end that lies way, way down the line-on page 1197? More important, what of value can be gleaned from A New Kind of Science?

Quite a bit, I think. I am not one of the reviewers who has read the book all the way through. I'm only up to page 850. But here's what the book says so far. You can start with a very simple set of rules and extract from them a very complex system. Despite the simplicity of the initial rules, the system you extract, evolve, or calculate from them can be so complex that it looks absolutely random. And that randomness can fool you into thinking that there's no comprehensible rule or law at work behind it. So beware. There may well be simple rules at work literally everywhere.

Wolfram has also shown that in a universe based on simple rules, some things are unpredictable.
Or, to put it differently, fizzy, frothy, quirky, and chaotic looking events can easily take place in a cosmos built on two or three simplicities. There's even room for that philosophically-tough loose cannon called "free will."

Wolfram argues that the complexity of a system that starts with simple rules can be enormous. So enormous that a mathematical theory constructed to predict the system's next step might have to prove itself the really hard way--by starting from the simple rules and spelling out their consequences step by step. For example, if this universe had begun from a set of simple rules and step-by-stepped its way fourteen billion years through the necessary consequences, the most efficient mathematical theory one could devise to sum the universe up in a nutshell might take fourteen billion years-or more!--of running time to arrive at this moment in time and prove that its predictions were accurate. A theory of the universe might take fourteen billion years to validate itself. By which time this moment would be 14 billion years in the past; now would be fourteen billion years in the future; and we still wouldn't know if our theory predicted all the latest happenings produced by fourteen billion years of more cosmic blunders and fecundity.

Comprehension is a form of crunching, and there are some things that prove uncrunchable. Wolfram certainly doesn't use such simple words, but that's the meaning of two terms on which he spends at least 134 pages--Computational Irreducibility and Computational Equivalency.

Wolfram also implies that it's time to change our traditional, mathematical approach to scientific understanding. Galileo reduced the acceleration of a falling object to a mathematical formula-32 feet per second per second. Newton built on Galileo's approach and worked out a math that predicted the manner in which an idealized planet would revolve around an idealized sun. Then Newton promoted his work like crazy. In fact, he overhyped it. He Wolframmed it. He gave the impression that he'd found the mathematical key that unlocked all the secrets to the heavens and the earth. The result? Scientists have been aping Newton for the last 300 years. Everyone wants a formula! Even folks in the psychological sciences are often formula-obsessed. And some actually find formulae that work. Without highly accurate mathematical formulae, we couldn't lob satellites into orbit and send land rovers off to Mars.

But there was a bug in Newton's number-crunching. His math could predict the movement of one oversimplified planet around a sun, but not two. Why? The extra wobble created by the gravitational attraction between the two planets and the tugs on the sun produced by the pair of planets' constantly shifting center of gravity-it was all far more than the equations could account for.

Math, Wolfram implies, works backwards. It works on the constraints, the outer boundaries, and envelopes. Math works on what's restraining things. It doesn't start from the bottom up, trying to comprehend how things self-construct, how they self-generate.
Wolfram's system does go from the bottom up. It starts from initial rules of very simple kinds, then runs their implications or instructions forward-often for tens of thousands of times. Wolfram doesn't work from math, he works from cellular automata. Cellular automata are like checkerboards in a computer. Each square can be black or white (though Wolfram tosses in grays and colors, too). Whether you-a square-are black or white depends on simple rules. The best known cellular automaton is the Game of Life. Imagine you are one square on a checkerboard. If you're white you're dead. If you're black, you're alive. The same thing applies to the eight squares around you-the four squares just touching your corners and the four flanking your sides. White means they're dead. Black means they're alive. Got it?

OK, here's the basic rule. If you have no living neighbors, the isolation kills you. You go white. If you have just enough neighbors to keep you happy, you come to life-you turn black. If you're overcrowded by living neighbors, you are lost in the crowd. You go dead. You turn white. That's it-if you have company you thrive, if you have too little or too much you die. Now step out of the computer and grab your mouse. On your screen is a white checkerboard-like grid. Everything is dead. Indicate your starting conditions. Move your cursor to the squares on the screen you want to fill in with black and give them a click. Then hit the run button. The computer will calculate frame after frame what happens on the screen once the first players-the first living squares-interact step by step, repeating the rules. The results are pretty complex. New squares come to life. Old living squares die. The computer repeats the old rules on the new board-pattern, and once again the pattern of black and white cells changes. Self-assembling shapes like flying wings will scud across the screen. Insect-like L-shapes will skitter. Crosses with an empty cell where their horizontal and vertical arms meet will stabilize and sit still, unchanging through frame after frame of the game. Sometimes, if the initial conditions didn't prefigure enough sociality, all the living squares on the board will eventually blank out and you'll have an empty cosmos on your hands.

(To play the game of life, see http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html or download the game for your own computer from the bottom of the page at http://cgi.student.nada.kth.se/cgi-bin/d95-aeh/get/lifeeng#what)

Among the wonders of the game of life is the fact that self-maintaining shapes can skedaddle around the board as if they had a life-and a coherence-of their own. In fact, they don't. Underlying cells are living and dying to give a flying wing its motion. It's like a whorl in a river that maintains its shape even though the water molecules that make it up are flowing downstream and being replaced by new ones from upstream. The whorl is a constant that shouldn't be-one made of the power of constant change.

Cellular automata are bottom-up devices. They're start-with-a-rule-and-live-out-the-consequences machines. Wolfram's contribution is that he's run thousands-perhaps tens of thousands--of different cellular automata. He's tried a wide variety of simple and very tricky rules. He's run some of his cellular automata programs for excruciating lengths of time. He's applied himself to devising new programs and studying the results for ten years. He's pored over vast scrolled printouts of the resultant patterns, printouts that must rival the Bayeux Tapestry in length. He's analyzed pattern and lack of pattern with the care of a taxonomist sorting through the species from a vast new continent with whole new forms of life. He's given names and numbers to categories, classes, species, and subspecies of cellular automata. And what are his conclusions?

Basically, they're the few I've mentioned above. You can start from simple rules and get complexity. You can start from simple rules and get what seems like randomness, like sloppy chance, like patternless scatter, like incomprehensibility.

Which means that underneath every random thing we see, there may well be simple rules. Beneath the many things that math can't grasp, there may be simple rules at work…or play.

As of page 850, Wolfram has not yet tried to retro-engineer his cellular automata. He hasn't tried to find a way to look at 100 or 1000 runs of a pattern and to detect the initial rules that started the thing. In many cases, he implies, this would be impossible.

Is Wolfram's work really A New Kind of Science? When Wolfram refers over and over again to "the great discovery I made" while laboring on his cellular automata, has he really discovered something great? In a sense, yes, he has. He's presented a new method, a new way of doing science. He's said implicitly, let's stop trying to find the outer boundaries, the restraints, of things, and look at their generative principles. Let's stop defining order as an absence of disorder and look at the way that order self-evolves.

Let's look for the simple rules on which this universe may be based. Let's respect the power of simplicity to generate whirlwinds, voices, behemoths, and leviathans. Let's use new metaphors to grasp the ungraspable. Math has limitations. Now that we have computers, let's build more bottom-up systems to see how close we can come to comprehending the way in which this cosmos self-generates.

Wolfram has presented one such metaphor. Others have used it before. Cellular automata are one of the many bottom-up approaches that have been proposed since those days in the early 1980s when it became possible for any grad student with a vivid imagination to come up with a bottom-up invention, a simple simulation like Tom Ray's self-evolving computer world Tierra. I've used the example of cellular automata in the corollary generator theory I've been developing for 30 years and will present in my next book, The Big Bang Tango. The Big Bang Tango, in fact, is based entirely on the implications of a cosmos generated from a handful of axioms, of magic beans. But they're very different implications than those Wolfram arrives at. And Ed Fredkin, who was chronicled in Robert Wright's first book, Three Scientists And Their Gods, has proposed that the universe is a computer working out a problem step by step. Each step is another tick of time.
But no one but Wolfram has explored the implications of the cellular automata metaphor so thoroughly. No one but Wolfram has absolutely proven the manner in which simple rules can produce the random and the seemingly formless. No one has promoted the metaphor so resoundingly or visualized it in illustration after illustration so incessantly. More important, no one has demonstrated how difficult it may be for we mere human beings-with our perceptual limitations-to dig back a zillion Plank units in time and find the initial Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots that may have given this cosmos its first kick. So, yes, we do owe Wolfram thanks, not just for his book and the insights in it, but for shoving it down our throats so effectively. He has done us a great favor. Howard
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Hb & Paul Werbos 5/24/2003 Good stuff, Paul. Many thanks for this explanation. It helps give me some clarity. Fractals, iterative systems, and cellular automata make more sense to me as the basis for building a universe. Deriving self-consistent systems from simple rules--call them axioms, postulates, algorithms, or even commandments--the names don't matter, but this makes sense to me too. I suspect that Wolfram is right. When we try to start in the middle of things with simplistic systems we get muddled and lost--everything beyond the simplicities of planets and atoms--everything beyond objects that follow nice semi-circular patterns and have convenient smooth gradients of force--looks like randomness and white noise. We end up with a cosmos in which solar systems are possible but biology is not. We end up with a system in which the math of uncertainty--probability--does not mean that we are uncertain and have cataracts on our corneas, but that particles are the ones with the cataracts, not us. We end up with systems of social interaction based on game theory and other mathematical formulations that utterly distort reality--we end up with optimization systems in our economics and in our evolutionary psychology. These are systems that just don't cut it. They don't belong where they're being used. In fact, when we use the math of optimization truth and the facts are utterly abused. If I understand the LaGrangian world you've portrayed below, it seems too unlike the cosmos I know and love. LaGrangian systems are neat and are probably good for a variety of things, but not the big picture. You put your finger on the problem when you said they help you find the peaks, but don't help you find the jumping point to peaks that may be higher. This is a jumping universe, a universe that takes big, big leaps. I hate to keep repeating the same litany, but look at cosmic history: **The cosmos jumped from a nothing to a something in the Big Bang. Or it jumps from nothing to something in the creases where steady state production occurs. **the cosmos leapt from energy to matter when it precitated quarks **the cosmos leapt from individuality to sociality and a whole lot more when those quarks got together in groups of three, and, along with leptons precipitated as roughly sixteen different particles. We'll skip the huge surprise--the unbelievable peak to peak leap of being able to precitate zillions of identical quarks and particles simultaneously. I'll grant you this. An optimization equation might prove handy for describing the precipitation of a quark from the slashingly fast expansion of time space. And optimization equations might explain the identicality. ***the cosmos took another giant jump 380,000 years later when it slowed down and hit us with the shock of the attraction between electrons and protons, the resulting properties of atoms, the emergence of gravity, and the competition between gravitational cluster that led to cosmic dust and whisps of gas. ***then came another huge leap--the jump from mist of gas and dust to galaxies. ***then a pole vault to another stunner--the ignition of stars. And so on and so forth....right on into a future, which we stupidly imagine will have no new surprises, but will mosey along as if the cosmos has run out of the pogo sticks with which she leaps so easily from peak to peak.

LaGrangian peaks are puny compared to the impish ingenuity of this creative process. Even the gradualism of Darwin's original conception, the gradualism of fractals, the gradualism of Wolfram's cellular automata, the gradualism of iterative math--like non-linear dynamics--and even the gradualism of my corollary extraction from axioms--my corollary genertor theory--doesn't seem to cut it. But these its from bits approaches (do I understand the concept of its from bits correctly?) come a lot closer to what we see. Fractals were the first form of math that allowed computer animators to actually use equations to model a leaf, a coastline or a tree. That's progress--but does it produce systems that can make megajumps based on their previous properties? Watching a Mandelbrot pattern unfold can get very dull. Yes, you get surprises when you cruise the pattern three-dimensionally--when you dive in and find what look like very new properties. But they are not surprises on a par with what the cosmos generates. Would they produce creative flights that would floor us if the number of iterations we allowed them to run went at Planck speed? I doubt that all of Wolfram's computer runs put together have yet reached the number of clicks of Planck time in a single second. And we've had 13.5 billion years of Planck clicks. So my sketicism about simple iterative systems may simply be a lack of vision. I suspect that Mandelbrot equations and other simple iterative systems WOULD produce big surprises if their products were allowed to interact socially. Imagine that the buds of a mandelbrot circle separated from their mother circle and interelated. Imagine that their extensions overlapped and created interference patterns--the equivalent of the coupled oscillations you and Pavel have discussed. Imagine that those interference patterns periodically separated, interacted, competed or cooperated, and generated additional interference patterns that then went off on their own and had to dominate, cooperate, subordinate, or die (my thanks to Michael Waller for the phrase). Imagine that all individual units had to exist within the total gel, the total background weave created by all the patterns summed together and all of them taken individually. And imagine that the iterations repeated almost endlessly. Allow individuality, sociality, cooperation, competition, group formation, synergies, and battles to develop in your system--as simple programs like Tierra do--and you might just have a brew that can explode with concussive bursts of the radically new. But this is based on iterative math, not the math of smooth and simple surfaces, not the math of gradients that produce dips and peaks. On the up side, this sounds intriguing: " But... most high-power mainstream physicists would say the search for the "theory of everything" is essentially the search for the true Lagrangian of the universe.)" What do you imagine a true Lagrangian of the universe would look like? This is also intriguing: "a 'saddle point,' which looks like a mximum in some directions and a minimum in others." Howard In a message dated 5/23/2003 7:49:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: Hi, Howard! hb: Paul, it's good to have you back. pw: The original Lagrange and Hamiltonian formalisms were like strict gradient-based local optima. Therte is some analogy between the new FIQFT extensions and the simulated annelaing kind of mathematics people use to try to overcome local minima... which is basically the foundation of creativity in intelligent systems. hb: Paul, this sounds fascinating can you explain it to me? What's FIQT? What's annelaing mathematics? What would be the opposite of a gradient-based optima--aside from a gradient-based minima. Can you tell me in word pictures? .howardbloom.net/reinventing_capitalism.pdf

Sorry to have taken so long to reply. My first impression was that I needed to write something in English, pedagogical, to elaborate on what a Lagrangian and Hamiltonian are. They have been fundamental to almost all basic physics for some time. (Kurakin and Wolfram are exceptions. SOME its-from-bits modelers would start out by trying to avoid the usual reliance on Lagrangians. But... most high-power mainstream physicists would say the search for the "theory of everything" is essentially the search for the true Lagrangian of the universe.) But... looking at your questions, maybe you did already did get the basic idea... When I talked about a "gradient-based maximum" of a function f(x) -- I am thinking of a function f whose value is always a real number, and a VECTOR x taken from an N-dimensional vector space -- I am thinking about a "local maximum of f." We could say that f has a local maximum at point x if there exists some finite number u >0, such that f(x) is greater than f(y) for ALL vectors y "close enough to x". "Close enough" is defined to mean |x-y|<u. In fact, there is a huge literature out there in applied mathematics on how to find minima and maxima of a function f. One of the oldest methods is the "method of steepest descent." In that method, you start out with a GUESS x0. Then you calculate the gradient of f at x0. The "gradient" is just a vector which points uphill... it points in the direction where f increases most rapidly. You move uphill as far as you can, generarte a new x, and keep repeating the process. This kind of gradient-based optimization will take you reliably to a LOCAL maximum or minimum of f. But when you get to the top of a foothill, it will not tell you how to jump off that foothill to a bigger mountain nearby. The gradient doesn't tell you where the mountain is. This is a practical issue of pervasive relevance in engineering and in physics, and even in evolutionary theory. In my view, it is of pervasive importance to understanding why humans often seem highly irrational; many cases of human irrationality are really just cases of lack of creativity -- lack of ability to think or work one's way out of a kind of local optimum in behavior. Notice that I am talking about a function f(x) which is "deterministic" -- no white noise in the discussion so far. Classical physics used Lagrangians and Hamiltonians in a deterministic way. Thus even in Lagrange's version, when he thought the universe was maximizing something, he was really just using the assumption that the universe finds a local maximum. But in the theories we have used for a long time, it is not even a local maximum or minimum but a kind of "saddle point," which looks like a mximum in some directions and a minimum in others. --- Then add noise. Simulated annealing is one of many methods now used to look for a true global optimum -- the peak of the highest mountain -- for a function f which may have many local optima. It is like a gradient serach but with white noise deliberately added, in order to encourage a certain amount of exploration. (Many believe that "novelty seeking" in humans is likewise a kind of genetically-programmed tilt towards a kind of exploration...) Functional INtegral Quantum Field Thoery (FIQFT) looks a lot like classical Lagrangian field theory, BUT WITH white noise added!! As if the universe were maximizing BUT doing some simulated annealing! The simulated anneating would allow it to "tunnel" from one local maximum to another. But.. it's not so simple. It's LIKE what I just said, but factors of "i" thrown in in ways that make it incompatible with any notion of reality (or even with axiomatic mathematics, last I heard). FIQFT is basically today's most orthodox modern latest formulation of quantum mechanics, the "language" in which the theory of everything is assumed to be written. The mainstream idea today is that the theory of everything equals FIQFT plus the choice of the appropriate Lagrangian. But I myself am not entirely mainstream. I suspect that we can do a bit better than today's FIQFT, particularly in how we explain the process of quantum measurement and the role of time. Best, Paul
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Eshel--this is extraordinary. Yes, paradox is key to understanding. When you find the larger structure from which the apparent opposites protrude, you are onto something--you are Godelian-Paradox-jumping. Yes, yes to simultaneous top-down, bottom up, and diagonal and horizontal, multi-threaded causality. But possibly the most important statement in your email is this: "even the free electron is coupled to the electromagnetic backgraund and to the gravitational field." You've put electrons in a cosmic context. You've also supplied a medium in which they can oscillate, in which they can wave. Archimedes, who developed the math of "fluctions," a math that helped lay the base for Newton's calculus, said that a fluction (a curve, a ripple, a wave) must take place in a medium. What did he know? He'd only seen puddles, ponds, and the Mediterranean Sea. Archimedes had never glimpsed outer space or atoms imaged by a scan-tunneling microsocope. But I strongly suspect that Archimedes was right. I also strongly suspect that we've let the question of what a force field--a gravitational or a magnetic field--really is and how it operates dangle for much too long. Describing a field with equations helps make predictions, but doesn't explain it. It's merely one form of translation from one frame of reference to another. If you ask me why the sky is blue, and I answer that it's because it is cerulean in character, all I've done is tell you the name for blue in Latin (cereuleus is blue). Math, language, and metaphor are isomorphic symbol sets. Translating from one to the other does amazing things for our understanding. But there's a difference between translation and explanation. Alas, I'm not quite sure what it is. Remember the two core rules of science-- The truth at any price, including the price of your life And look at things others take for granted as if you've never seen them before, then ask the questions your new view unleashes from your mind. We've taken the exertion of force at a distance for granted for much too long. And we've viewed things like particles and minds in isolation far too long as well. Howard In a message dated 5/26/2003 4:11:25 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: Taiking the riske of beeing unfair as I dont have time to elaborate on my following claims I would like to emphesize that "lagrangians" alone CAN NOT !! explain the emergence of complexity they even cant explain the second law of isolated systems in equilibrium. All great descoveries in the past followed a realization of the existance of a paradox waves-particles quantum-special relativity. For some reasone ( for Haward to figure out) currently the main centeral paradoxes are percived as technical difficulties general-relativity-quantum second law - complexity the evolution of complexity and even the emergence of cognition With many taking the belife that digital computers can assume cognetive capabilis. They can not. Niether is the second law can explain complexity nore can Walfram explain nature just how clever Walfram is. Look at nature or go back 2000 years to Greec. The secret is hybredization of digital and analoge ( atomistic and continuum) Or go back to Libnitz with his dificulties and the need to intreduce the notion of "monades" Look at bacterial self organization ( I try to clarify in my paper in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London appeared on the web this may) iT IS NOT A TOP LEVEL EMERGENCE but rather CO EMERGENCE ON ALL LEVELS during self organization the individual bacteria change themselves and assume new properties DOWN TO THE GENE LEVEL which never can be observed or realized by the studies of individual solitary bacteria. In this respect the whole is not greater than the some of its parts but the sum of its parts in the solitary state. Does it imply to the abiotic world ? I belive it does. Unlike the Aplaton picture which is useful for computation in reality there is no free electron ( taking it to the extreem) even the free electron is coupled to the electromagnetic backgraund and to the gravitational field which can not IN PRINCIPLE be screened. If we dont accept the principle that the units must change during self organization having internal degrees of state which also can change until at the very low scale we coupled back to the macro ( general relativity is most relevant on the Quarks scale and on the Cosmological one) I belive we will never be able to explain the emergence of cognition without running into paradoxes. Dont try these arguments on physicists right now they will tell you ( and most likely be correct) that you dont understand well enough general relativity well no body does. I had the luck to conduct a dialoge with Feymann 20 year ago on these issues. Never let it known until I will not have to use his name to convice people. But that some other time, Sorry it turned so long,Eshel Eshel Ben-Jacob Prof. of Physics The Maguy-Glass Chair in Physics of Complex Systems President of the Israeli Physical Society School of Physics and Astronomy Tel Aviv University 69978 Tel Aviv http://star.tau.ac.il/
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Paul--First off, I thanks for your patience with me. I've been very cranky about math's shortcomings recently...to the point of rudeness. I also commented on one of your recent postings, then realized after the email was sent that I'd missed a big chunk of your email. Second, please continue to be patient with my ignorance. I'm learning as we go along. For example, I just got an inkling today of how much data the equations of a waveform compress or contain. I've been using the concept of the waveform for decades, thinking I knew what it was. What I didn't know is its mathematical shape, its mathematical intricacies. More comments below-- In a message dated 5/26/2003 12:44:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: I think I may have some difficulty in translating/understanding/parsing exatly what you are saying here. ----- Original Message ----- From: Good stuff, Paul. Many thanks for this explanation. It helps give me some clarity. Fractals, iterative systems, and cellular automata make more sense to me as the basis for building a universe. Deriving self-consistent systems from simple rules--call them axioms, postulates, algorithms, or even commandments--the names don't matter, but this makes sense to me too. --------------------------- pw: Are you saying "cellular automata make more sense apriori than Lagrangian field theory, classical or quantum"? But Lagrangian field theory really is a way of deriving a complex self-consistent system from a very simple set of axioms. hb: then this is up my alley. My way of understanding all this is based on eight months spent deriving the natural number system from Peano's postulates. It was an amazing experience. But it was a step-by-step experience. It was a stairway to heaven, not a ramp. It was closer to the step-by-step approaches that Kurakin and I have been discussing when talking about the cracks between Planck units of time or that your backward causation across short stretches of time implies. I do not understand Lagrangians and am still trying to get to know them. They can be viewed geometrically or topographically. This is very helpful to me. I can't calculate, but I can see. They can produce "an embedded torus". Why only an embedded torus? Why not a self-standing torus. You know my toroidal cosmos obsession. This sounds promising to me. But the torus can not be knotted. Worse, it can't be turned into a Klein's bottle. Any kid raised on Flatland and Einstein knows how deep the need is to see the extra dimensions our sensory systems may be blind to. Wolfram, who understands math, feels that smooth field equations, equations with smooth variants, will never describe the cosmos. He feels the cosmos moves ahead one step at a time. He feels you have to begin from simple rules and scroll the cosmos out one row at a time. His reasoning makes sense to me. It squares with my Corollary Generator Theory--which is based on the Peano Postulate experience. Planck has always made sense to me too. And his view is step-by-step, quantum unit by quantum unit. The moves an electron makes in an atomic shell are disconstinuous steps. They are jumps and hops, saltations. When I look at the universe from a panoramic view, I see incredible saltations. These two clues hint strongly that this may be a hopping cosmos, not one that smoothly skis along. The big picture view of cosmic history also implies that the theory of entropy is wrong. The cosmos does not ski downhill. It places its skis side by side perpendicular to the direction of the hill, moves its right ski up a Planck unit, then lifts its left ski up to the new Planck level as well. It climbs. Climbing is cumbersome. It is ragged and fractal (breakable into tiny, repeating bits).

Climb one mountain and you discover not that you've reached the peak, but that you've reached the bottom foothill of the next. This implies a leap beyond optimization theory. It LITERALLY implies a leap. Perhaps it's time for a theory of metaoptimization. A theory in which peaks optimize within their local circumstances until a completed landscape is formed, one in which the peaks are stuck and stable, no matter how dysfunctional to the entire system of energy transmogrification their completed upstretch seems. Then the entire landscape, is multiplied a millionfold or more. Each completed landscape becomes a micro-unit in the newly-starting megalandscape on the step above. Run the megalandscape until it reaches its peak. Then make a milion copies and use them like carpet squares to start a new megalandscape off from scratch. Each stage of completion is the seed of a beginning for the next step up the chain. This idea is so obvious that it's probably been tried a hundred times. Or am I wrong? Given the way that fractals work, I'd suspect that the big jumps mirror the patterns of the little ones. I'd suspect that the Planck moves have many of the same properties as the great form-and-process saltations that gave us particles from energy, atoms from particles, galaxies from atoms, stars from galactic gatherings, new atoms from star deaths, complex molecules from the new atoms (a critical jump that's too much overlooked), polypeptides from complex molecules, self-reproducing weaves of membrane from polypeptides, cells from membranes, and consciousness, art, science, and emotion from massive piles of cells. But I am very, very curious to know how one extracts a Lagrangian system from axioms. All tools are useful. Lagrangians may or may not be the answer to wondermaking in this cosmos. But if I understood them better, I suspect they'd open hefty new ranges of insight. Meanwhile a postscript. I was entranced by Planck's ideas when I was a kid. And I've been fascinated by one of Bohr's ideas as an adult: "The opposite of a profound truth may very well be another profound truth." But Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics has always screamed out in my brain that it was wrong as wrong can be. (The following has been my most useful source on Lagrangians tonight: Lagrangian Embeddings and Symplectic Field Theory Klaus Mohnke Retrieved from the World Wide WebMay 28, 2003 http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~klaus/research/researchplan_new/researchplan_new.html) pw: The quantum version we have today doesn't meet that standard, I would agree. We need a lot of more creative work to clean up the mess we have inherited. And it is partly the rube goldbergs of science management and incentives and institutions which have stopped us from cleaning up the rube goldberg formulations of quantum theory, in my view. hb: sounds like a good insight, one I'd like to know more about. Understanding the sociology of science may help those of us in science--even outsiders like me--get beyond bureaucratic obstacles and chimpanzee politics. pw: Strictly a personal view, based in part on personal frustration with not being able to find the time and energy myself to do some of what could be done... hb: you've seen the bowels of the beast from the inside in ways few of us ever achieve. --------------------------- hb: I suspect that Wolfram is right. When we try to start in the middle of things with simplistic systems we get muddled and lost--everything beyond the simplicities of planets and atoms--everything beyond objects that follow nice semi-circular patterns and have convenient smooth gradients of force--looks like randomness and white noise. pw: Have not read Wolfram's book. But he did give a talk locally last Thursday. He said many different things, which need to be treated distinctly. In modeling the universe... he was reasonably close to the core physics methodology the way trained physicists (in this case even including many heretics like me) see it. He didn't say anything about Bell's Theorems and whatnot... just said "read the book." He did say he could find very simple Network Automata rule systems (NOT cellular automata!!) which "reproduce general relativity." And I have to admit he would have an interesting Occam's Razor argument there. Einstein's R=T equation seems simple, in a way, but I can understand people arguing that a seven-rule system of simple discrete network substitutions may be "simpler" from some viewpoints. HOWEVER: he then went on to say that this is only "near flat space general relativity," which may be cheating; I'd have to read the book to see.

hb: Frankly, though I read the book in its entirety, his arguments on these issues didn't get through to me. As I understood it, he was saying what I've repeated endlessly--smooth gradient form of math won't cut it in this cosmos. Starting out from the middle, where we are today, and trying to build backwards mathematically won't work. If there are simple rules at work, we may well be in a phase of the expansion of a simple-rule-based system in which the simplicity has generated an illusion of randomness, an illusion of white noise. Wolfram implies that we can not look backward from a blizzard of apparent randomness and find the simple pattern that produced it. I think a more accurate statement would be that Wolfram has not been able to find a math that will march backward and uncover the simplicity at the cosmos' core. But Wolfram has unwittingly laid down a challenge--to find a way to go backwards in his system, a way to dig down to the base of simple rules that started the whole thing. Whether that can be done in standard mathematical ways--through theorems, proofs, and equations, remains to be seen. Math, as I've said before, is probably in its very early phase. It has many steps, and many quantum leaps, to go. pw: And his effort to get beyond general relativity is still in its early stages; he is thinking about something like the discrete-network VERSION of topological solitons. hb: sounds like an interesting connection. He has a conference on what his publicists call NKS (A New Kind of Science) coming up and would, I'm certain, more than welcome a paper from you. This is a slick PR move to aggrandize himself. But most of the great scientists of history have been adept at self-aggrandizement. Newton smashed many another's career so he could claim credit for the lifetime work of others. This was inexcusable. But without an ethical pr sense, Galileo, Maxwell, Planck, and Bohr couldn't have left us their contributions, their legacies. pw: Would have tried to discuss this more with him, except that he was then mobbed by constructivist deconstructivist antireductionist postmodernist enthusaists and antediluvian metaphysical grumps, both lost in the realm of hermeneutics. C'est la vie. hb: my lord!!!! hb: If I understand the LaGrangian world you've portrayed below, it seems too unlike the cosmos I know and love. LaGrangian systems are neat and are probably good for a variety of things, but not the big picture. You put your finger on the problem when you said they help you find the peaks, but don't help you find the jumping point to peaks that may be higher. ----------------------------------------------------- pw: yes and no. Not quite so simple. The quantum guys would say... indeed, the classical stuff doesn't tunnel, but the quantized Lagrangians do, so the established FIQFT meets all tests... But in fact, that's an oversimplification too. The simple dynamical laws which emerge even from gradient-based local "optimization" of a Lagrangian... simple as they are, are quite powerful enough to allow highly complex emergent behavior. They are not impoverished systems. hb: the embedded torus mentioned above reminds me of string theory. Can a Lagrangian landscape produce vast masses of embedded topological shapes? We need a theory that will to account for the numbers of identical quarks and leptons that came pouring from the rushing firmament in the first seconds of this cosmos' birth. (I owe the word "firmament" to Eshel Ben-Jacob, who feels that partitioning, separation, membrane making, and the generation of closed systems are keys to the cosmos' evolutionary track.) pw: Even Poincare's old example of classical chaos in planetary motion all emerged from classical Lagrangian systems! The key point in "emergence" is that the underlying AXIOMS don't have to be so complex.

hb: agreed heartily. ------------------------------------------------------ pw: By the way, Wolfram's story... is that basically, the laws of the universe need to have merely a certain very basic level of complexity -- a kind of "Turing capability" -- in order to be able to emulate ANY level or type of greater structural complexity one might ask for, through emergent behavior. That's an interesting thought, maybe the most interesting in his talk. hb: wait. Bear with me, Paul. The laws of the universe don't emulate anything, do they? If so what? It's an intriguing proposition and one whose answer could prove very useful. But so far as we know right now, it's our systems that attempt to emulate the universe, not the other way around. The universe spilled from we-know-not-what. But it didn't emerge from Wolfram's computer. What emerged was an attempt at metaphor. Isn't it cheating to continue imagining that Turing machines--mythical all-purpose computers based on logical rules of computation but in imagination capable of anything--can be the building blocks of a cosmos? What's the difference between a Turing machine and god? A Turing machine is all-capable, unless my understanding is off base. All-capable means omnipotent. The one thing a Turing machine can't do is solve Godelian paradoxes. One thing this universe does very well is solving Godelian paradox. On the positive side, a Turing machine runs step by step. Which should make Pavel and me very happy. But it doesn't make me smile. Why? A Turing machine is linear. From the beginning, this cosmos has been not just fractal, but has operated via meshwork, an incredible weave of simultaneous interconnects... more interconnects, by my usually erroneous calculations, than the number of all the particles in this cosmos squared. A networked, parallel-distributed processing cosmos may be an enormous weave of communicating Turing Machines. But Turing's imaginary machines are not really "built" for communication, they are built for computation. Only when they've completed the process do the leak out the result. They're not built for mass communion, they're not built to consult input from a zillion sources before they compute each move. The its and bits of this cosmos communicate constantly. They do it using the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. They do it by turning these forces into a complex code once they reach the level of complex molecularity. We call the sending, receiving, and acting-upon this code "chemistry." hb: What do you imagine a true Lagrangian of the universe would look like? pw: I actually have some words about that in arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0202138. hb: This is a paper I've admired you for since we met. I've downloaded it, have translated it from .pdf to .doc, have filed it, and, from a quick perusal at 4:30, get the impression that I will have a tough time understanding it. Is there any way you can paint it in word-pictures? pw: It is rational for us to expect many generations of possible future improved physics. At one generation, I would envision a generation in which the Lagrangian of the present standard model is reinterpreted as a classical Lagrangian, in which "Skyrme" and topology-enforcing terms are added, and it's all reconciled with general relativity simply by inserting appropriate metric terms in exactly the same way that Wheeler did to Maxwell's Laws for his "already unified field theory" (50's, which got him the Nobel Prize). This is right-wing heresy, of course. hb: sounds intriguing as all get-out to me.

I anticipate quintupling our brain capacity with technologies that are near-arrival today...and doing what Einstein told us to do: simplifying what's arcane so folks with just one brain can understand it. I've probably paraphrased this a thousand times, but Einstein said a genius is not a person who can come up with a theory only seven people in the world can understand, it's someone who can come up with a theory only seven on this planet can understand and who can then express it so clearly and deliciously that anyone with a reasonable intelligence can understand it. Paul, you are a genuine genius. Einstein says that's a big responsibility. It's through shifts from one system of representation to another--translations from greek letters into vivid, visualizable and feelable insights--that Feynman and Einstein derived their breakthroughs. Now we need to shift your breakthroughs from sentences with ten greek letters to something a math moron like me can understand. I think you are onto amazing things. I wish I could more easily comprehend them. pw: The Lagrangian of the electroweak half of the standard model is written out completely (as I recall) in Taylor's classic book, Gauge Theories of Weak Interactions. Maybe the whole standard model has been written out on one page somewhere else... but I am sorry that I don't know where offhand. Most texts build up to it piece by piece. Einstein's thoery of general relativity can be written in just one equation, but it takes awhile to learn what "R" and "T" are in that equation. hb: This is also intriguing: "a 'saddle point,' which looks like a mximum in some directions and a minimum in others." pw: The "saddle point" is really a piece of basic calculus -- a point where the gradient is zero, but the surface curves up in some directions and down in others. hb: this sounds like saddleback geometry, a term Google says does not exist but that was drifting around in my youth. Several geometries were postulated for the cosmos--one was saddle shaped. What happened to the term? And am I anywhere near first base? pw: And indeed, the Lagrangians I have seen in serious classical field theory or quantum field theory over Minkowski space... are not positive-definite or negative-definite... and so we are always in saddle points. hb: yikes, Paul, this looks as if it may play into the hands of big bagel theory. A maxima in the ordinary universe is a minima in the anti-matter universe and vice versa. Or something of the sort. Since the two universes are separated by a kind of doubled parabolic arc of gravity (think wok with a lid on), and since the two universes are traveling in opposite directions in time, it's hard to see how things could manifest in the two dimensions simultaneously.

I don't buy Wheeler's quantum notion that particles are seething into and out of existence in deep space. However this kind of cosmic plankton, this form of cosmic froth, could, over a handful of Planck units, be manifested in both cosmoses simultaneously. Maybe. It still doesn't feel right to me. pw: Not a maximiztaion, and not a minimization, but a kind of "min max." "Min max" solutions do occur in the theory of games. hb: wow. where? pw: So in a sense... the patterns we see do NOT look as if "God is mazimizing L" or "God is minimizing L" but more like "the God of space is doing what it can to minimize L, but the God of time is trying to maximize L, and what we see is the outcome of their struggle." hb: L=the length we see of something moving outside our stationary frame? The more time I gain by speeding up the more space I lose in my length as seen by some schlubb who is sitting still? Not to mention the way he looks distorted to me, in what I think is my stationary frame of reference. pw: But I have never actually tried to make a model of that. Nor has anyone else hat I have heard of. hb: it might be interesting. Most wild stabs prove useful in the end, even if their utility isn't seen for a generation or two (or three). pw: It is funny to speculate... since stochastic things do emerge from zerosum games, could a game-based model actually replicate..? hb: this sounds intriguing too. But game models are very simplistic--much more so than even the psyches and social systems the allegedly model these days. Games are played by huge social groups against and with each other--in competition and cooperation, in vast networks of alliances and alliance clashes and of overlapping sets that twist each node of the net in tons of directions simultaneously. You sit down for a game of prisoners' dilemma or a zero-sum game with robert wright. It's your 100 trillion cells versus his--a major contest between alliances. It's seven or eight or seventeen squabbling intelligences in your brain and body against the seven or eight or seventeen in his. It's his Princeton loyalties versus your Harvard loyalties. It's the mindtribe that succored him when he first got into science against yours--Hoyle and a mob of others in your case and despite knowing Bob I-don't-know-whom in his. It's Bob's immersion in the intersect between two massive communities--that of science and that of religion--versus your feel for the relationship of your core scientists to your guiding star religions, positive and negative. It's the two of you seeing the game board thanks to streams of photons coming from the sun. It's a meeting of your two teams of internal clocks (cellular clocks, organ clocks, multi-organ clocks, circadian clocks, diurnal clocks, etc) set to many cosmic rhythms, the hour, the day, the month, the year, the lifespan, and to your different senses of the longterm past and future of humanity and the planet. We won't go into what happens as the sun goes down, the stars come up, and electrons reverberate or stream though lightbulbs giving you the kind of photons you need to see. We won't go into the convergence of Democritus, William Gilbert, Ben Franklin, Maxwell, Faraday, Mesmer, Edison, and all the rest who made that light available and changed the nature of your life and Bob's. The connections are unending. That's why every move one of us makes is the result and the next cause of a four dimensional weave that may include the entire universe. Perhaps it's even a five-dimensional weave, if we toss in the curve that gravity bends in space. pw: Who knows. I don't have enough time even for the most promising strands these days... hb: many thanks for taking the time for such an extensive dialog. It is now nearly 6 am. I must eat dinner and go to bed. I'm glad that we're both sufficiently fascinated to keep each other up at such weird hours of the day and night. Cheers--Howard
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In a message dated 5/29/2003 11:22:06 AM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: At 05:52 AM 05/28/2003 -0400, wrote: Paul--First off, I thanks for your patience with me. I've been very cranky about math's shortcomings recently...to the point of rudeness. I also commented on one of your recent postings, then realized after the email was sent that I'd missed a big chunk of your email. Second, please continue to be patient with my ignorance. I'm learning as we go along. For example, I just got an inkling today of how much data the equations of a waveform compress or contain. I've been using the concept of the waveform for decades, thinking I knew what it was. What I didn't know is its mathematical shape, its mathematical intricacies. Don't worry -- but still thanks for calming down. We are all ignorant. The real problem is with the folks who are but don't know it. As has been said before. And I know about my communication limits. A truly severe problem. I try to contribute what I can, and hope better communicators will somehow, someday fill in at least some of the gaps. But there are so MANY gaps... Are you saying "cellular automata make more sense apriori than Lagrangian field theory, classical or quantum"? But Lagrangian field theory really is a way of deriving a complex self-consistent system from a very simple set of axioms. hb: then this is up my alley. My way of understanding all this is based on eight months spent deriving the natural number system from Peano's postulates. It was an amazing experience. But it was a step-by-step experience. It was a stairway to heaven, not a ramp. It was closer to the step-by-step approaches that Kurakin and I have been discussing when talking about the cracks between Planck units of time or that your backward causation across short stretches of time implies. I do not understand Lagrangians and am still trying to get to know them. They can be viewed geometrically or topographically. This is very helpful to me. I can't calculate, but I can see. Lagrangians are EXTREMELY fundamental to almost all of physics, and many related fields. (Like a lot of engineering. Like really advanced neural networks.) hb: how do Lagrangians enter neural nets? I was first introduced to neural nets in 1986, and have been using their model ever since. One thing puzzled me--if most of our pictures of what neural nets do are not derived from real neural nets but are taken from emulations of neural nets run in normal, serial-processing computers, how can we say anything we know about neural nets is true? It takes an actual neural net to see what the properties of a real neural net can be. It may also take a neural net whose interconnects are of many kinds-- **synaptic transmissions in which numerous kinds of chemical messages, nay, entire orchestral chords of chemicals, can be sent simultaneously **synaptic transmissions retuned by the fact that the net of receptors on the synaptic receiving end are changing constantly--with old macromolecular sensors being retired, new ones coming into play, receptors for different neurotransmitters and forms of those neurotransmitters popping up or going away, and with receptors set up in a mesh whose shape and weave changes instant by instant **electrical signals traveling in multiplexed ways--with different electric signals riding on each others backs--down axons and dendrites **patterns of dendritic webs that shift from minute to minute. To get an idea of how complex these webs can be, think of the fact that just one Purkinje cell can have 200,000 synaptic connections to other cells **chemical signals that bypass synaptic channels and wave their magic wands in entirely different ways--by changing large-scale patterns, mesoscopic patterns, like moods. Moods change the way we see, think, and feel. They change the way which sensory signals we bother to interpret, how we interpret them, how we interpret the signals going from one part of the brain to another and from one ganglionic bunch to another, then change the way that we behave. **over all circadian and metabolic energy levels. These can take our brain from perky to, "I'm too tired to even care about the blade hanging by a thread over my head right now". It's been a long time since I last corresponded with John Hopfield, a top neural net researcher of the 1980s, on this topic. How far from digital emulation of neural nets have we come in the last decade or so? And how far into neural nets with real properties of the sort I've outlined above have we gone? To which kinds of neural nets are Lagrangians pertinent?

pw: But Lagrangian and Hamiltonian theory are SO general that they allow for a huge variety of systems that they can describe. Basically -- it seems they can describe any system that moves forward in continuous time, in which there is some kind of conserved "energy," hb: which leads back to one of yesterday's questions--how is the law of conservation of energy effected by black holes? And how would it be effected by a Hoylesian steady-state production of new matter and energy? Is this a leaky cosmos? If the second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems, and if this cosmos is leaky, what does this say about the applicability of the second law of thermodynamics in universes like this one? pw: a quantity which is mainly a continuous function of the state of the system. (And they can be sued on static systems as well, and one can "fake" a time dimension on systems with multiple time dimension and so on.) Classical Field Theory (CFT), ala Einstein... focuses on the particular case where the STATE of the universe at any time is defined by a set of continuous functions or "fields" over space. An example of such a field is "voltage" in space. Every point in our universe has a "voltage," a value of a variable physicists now call A-sub-zero. Knowing the voltage at every point in space specifies the state of the electric field. Add in the knowledge of a few other numbers, and you have everything. According to CFT. Quantum field theory (QFT) is somewhat similar, but there are at least 5 major variations of it lately. Conservatively. When you have a filed theory in which the fields are all "independent" real numbers... a set of N fields, each a number, each allowed to be anything between minus infinity and plus infinity without regard to what the others are.. that is called a "topologically trivial" field theory. hb: Paul, you're trying to explain difficult stuff to us...and in English, no less. I appreciate the effort, sluggish though my brain may be. See if I've got you right. If five variables or fields were interdendent, their relationship could be expressed as a form with a surface that could be stretched or bent. Why? Because in a set of intersecting values that influence each other, raise one to a peak and another will crease in a valley. Am I anywhere near the idea? pw: Unfortunately, if you think **I** have done a bad job in popularizing this, you should see the other guys. hb: you've been trying...and trying hard. few make the effort at all. pw: You really should. I basically learned the material up here from a book called The Skyrme Model, by Makhankov, Rybakov and Sanyuk (Springer). Remember the spooky story of the young mathematician who got hospitalized after reading it? But if indecipherable cabbalistic books with true hidden secrets buried in them do not drive you crazy... you might want it on your shelf. Somewhat more readable (but less reliable, I think)... is an equally important book called Solitons and Instantons by Rajaraman, easily found in paperback on amazon. (It has many things that MRS do not, as well.) In any case, for topologically trivial field theory -- like the standard model, I believe, taken as a CFT -- the geometric picture of "saddle points" is more or less valid.

Though bear in mind that the possible states of a field form an infinite dimensional space. Even in CFT, it's a "saddle" ... in a high-dimensional space. hb: an infinite dimensional space? The number of relevant variables is infinite? pw: But not a bagel. hb: so a bagel is not something that Lagrangians can handle. Does what you've said above indicate that Classical Field Theory and Quantum Field Theory can't handle bagels either? Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has made headlines several times over the last few months with his toroidal, doughnut vision of the cosmos. He's apparently won attention for his doughnut not just in the press, but in the astrophysical community. I wonder what Tegmark's using. ====================================================== pk: Where I **do** see things vaguely like bagels in space ... is in the topologically INTERESTING field theories. More precisely -- for the next generation of physics, I believe we need to start modeling elementary particles (like electrons, not photons) as "topological solitons." I believe we have not even begun to see how much power is there in that approach. Now... some topological solitons really could be described as "little bagels" or "knots" in space. The MRS book has lots of pictures. I have even shown them to my kids. "I think the universe is made of squirmy squirming skyrmions" (and fields). MRS and Rajaraman actually write out the Lagrangians for some CFT systems which are "topologically interesting" and support "topological solitons." Coleman once referred to certain topological solitons simply as "lumps." hb: see yesterday's ramble on photons as lumps and semi-solitons staying in place but passing their motion on. pw: It goes on and on. They can produce "an embedded torus". Why only an embedded torus? Why not a self-standing torus. You know my toroidal cosmos obsession. This sounds promising to me. pw: Maybe someone else said this. IN any case, the topological solitons or skyrmions are basically localized... embedded within a larger universe. They are patterns WITHIN an assumed set of topologically interesting fields. old hb: But the torus can not be knotted. Worse, it can't be turned into a Klein's bottle. Any kid raised on Flatland and Einstein knows how deep the need is to see the extra dimensions our sensory systems may be blind to. pw: Patterns of force in a topologically interesting CFT certainly can be knotted. "Knotted" in a NONMETAPHORIC way... people have worked out the topological groups, the "knotting groups, winding numbers... hb: knotting is a property strands of dna make great use of, by the way. pw: But I didn't need to know a real amount of topology to understand MRS or Rajaraman. old hb: Wolfram, who understands math, feels that smooth field equations, equations with smooth variants, will never describe the cosmos. He feels the cosmos moves ahead one step at a time. He feels you have to begin from simple rules and scroll the cosmos out one row at a time. His reasoning makes sense to me. It squares with my Corollary Generator Theory--which is based on the Peano Postulate experience. pw: He was not so dogmatic here. He argued that he could provide a SIMPLER description than Einstein of the same macroscopic dynamics.

He used Occam's Razor to justify his approach. Occam's Razor allows for some variation in taste. (There are theorems about that!) I am not so convinced that I agree his taste here. But clearly it is a reasonable sort of argument and approach -- if he gets somewhere. Until I read the book, I will not know how far he has gotten. When he spoke, I actually fantasized the possibility of taking a sabbatical, and seeing what could be done... hb: then he was quite convincing. you'd see things in the book that I failed to perceive...and presumable vice versa...so I'd like to get your take on its useful points. pw: No one knows what the step-after-next may be. I still think that the continuous approach is far more promising for the very next step ahead. (Hmm. Different pictures at different levels here..) old hb: Planck has always made sense to me too. And his view is step-by-step, quantum unit by quantum unit. pw: Just replied to that on your different strand. hb: Perhaps it's time for a theory of metaoptimization. A theory in which peaks optimize within their local circumstances until a completed landscape is formed, one in which the peaks are stuck and stable, no matter how dysfunctional to the entire system of energy transmogrification their completed upstretch seems. Then the entire landscape, is multiplied a millionfold or more. Each completed landscape becomes a micro-unit in the newly-starting megalandscape on the step above. Run the megalandscape until it reaches its peak. Then make a milion copies and use them like carpet squares to start a new megalandscape off from scratch. Each stage of completion is the seed of a beginning for the next step up the chain. This idea is so obvious that it's probably been tried a hundred times. Or am I wrong? pw: Familiar in computer science, but not in that form in physics that I know of. Again, I don't yet see a need for the extra complexity, but who knows? hb: I see repeat upon repeat upon repeat--old surprises become the building blocks of the new. The new gets old and is subsumed in some new building process. Every level of saltation produces huge surprises--wacky and uminaginable new properties. But every new level has all the old levels scrunched into itself as components, as building blocks, as ladders stacked on ladders but in quantities of ladder-stacks that are astonishing. And, here's the weird part. It's like an Alfred Hitchcock film where Hitchcock always hides himself somewhere in a scene. Or perhaps it's more like Yogi Berra's deja vue all over again. The old patterns, the old rules, show up in new forms on whatever level you mount. In each new context they seem different. Yet in each new context, they seem eerily the same. old hb: Given the way that fractals work, I'd suspect that the big jumps mirror the patterns of the little ones. I'd suspect that the Planck moves have many of the same properties as the great form-and-process saltations that gave us particles from energy, atoms from particles, galaxies from atoms, stars from galactic gatherings, new atoms from star deaths, complex molecules from the new atoms (a critical jump that's too much overlooked), polypeptides from complex molecules, self-reproducing weaves of membrane from polypeptides, cells from membranes, and consciousness, art, science, and emotion from massive piles of cells.

pk: IN an ironic way, maybe I agree. Maybe the photoelectric effect really is an emergent phenomenon like the others. hb: it has to be. The electromagnetic effect doesn't manifest itself until there are particles that can be attracted to each other...and until they have the freedom to approach each other at a lazy speed and discover their photoelectric properties. Do electrons absorb and emit photons in a plasma? That's all there was in the first 300,000 years or so, plasma, plasma, everywhere no matter where you chose to go. Where there photoelectric effects in that plasma? Or did they, like electromagnetism, emerge only after things slowed and cleared...and only after there were atoms ready to jump from shell to shell? To what extent is the revelation, the reification or instantiation of a new possibility implicit in what has been...to what extent is this transubstantiation an emergent property? It's what emergent properties are--the turn of an ancient implication into hard and fast reality. The strange thing is that each new saltative level of giant surprise seems to reveal new natural properties we take for granted as having existed from time immemorial. But properties like electromagnetic attraction didn't show up until 300,000 to 380,000 years abb (after the big bang). Gravity probably didn't reveal itself until roughly 500,000 years abb. Fusion didn't show up on the scene until after roughly one million years abb. Space spirals (advanced galaxies) didn't show up until lord knows when. Black holes were beyond improbablity until perhaps a billion years abb. Yet electromagnetism, gravity, fusion, and gravity spirals in space had been implicit all along. pw: That's heresy, but I believe it is rational heresy. hb: it is an EXTRAORDINARILY intriguing heresy. Please, please explain more of your inklings on this when you get a chance. pw: I have yet to write up those details. One more task I am behind on. hb: it's nice to know that we're floating in the same overload-boat. But there's a reason this conversation is addictive. It is about very, very important things. old hb: But I am very, very curious to know how one extracts a Lagrangian system from axioms. All tools are useful. Lagrangians may or may not be the answer to wondermaking in this cosmos. But if I understood them better, I suspect they'd open hefty new ranges of insight. pw: Well.. what is an axiom? One of a relatively small set of propositions, from which one can deduce... a lot. hb: yes. a small set of rules, or constraints. an emily post etiquette book for a cosmos. in other words, a set of social rules--of whom thought shall be allowed to love and whom though shalt be allowed to hate, whom though shalt be allowed to mate and whom though shalt be impelled to escape. Escape--repulsion--is the rule that asserts itself in the the big bang's burst. What rule forces that sheet of expansion to precipitate in quarks? From that point on, attraction and repulsion are rules that repeat on level after level, with new forces of attraction and repulsion appearing as the cosmos, like an onion, grows. What other rules are needed to make a cosmos? This cosmos.

What other postulates are necessary to get it going in the way it goes? pw: The dynamics of the entire universe, which in turn generate all the emergent phenomena (when combined with boundary conditions). hb: see if this simplification fits. dynamics=motion=repulsion=rules of flight. Boundary conditions=constraints=rules=attraction? It doesn't quite work, does it? What would set it straight? pw: In CFT, the dynamics of the universe all follow from the assumptions one chooses to make about the following two items: (1) WHAT are the fields -- e.g. "171 real numbers" or "375 angle variables" or "224 vectors with 3 components each"; and (2) what is THE LAGRANGIAN, the algebraic expression which tells us what the real number "L" hb: for the purposes of my understanding, L=the kinetic energy minus the potential energy of any point in a system obeying the rules of the conservation of energy. Which leads back to last night s question. Is there absolute conservation of energy in a cosmos punctured by black holes? Is there absolute conservation of energy in a cosmos that starts from the a nothing that's equivalent to a black hole, a singularity? Is a singularity real or a figment of the limits of our current math? A singularity is a criss cross of infinities. Is infinity a way of saying "beyond this limit, our mathematical system does not allow us to count. So we shall designate all that goes beyond this number as a symbol, a figure eight on its side, infinity." pw: is at any point in space-time, as a function of the values of the fields. Answer those two questions, and you have "a universe" -- a particular classical field theory. hb: you implied the other day that within this view, a cosmos that starts with field theory rules and a formula for measuring kinetic energy minus potential energy at any location in that space, and a cosmos that obeys the conservation of energy, you could derive the precipitation of particles. You've hinted that they are solitons--stationary vibrations, waves that do not travel, waves standing as small, identical peaks in the field-sheet. Can you explain how you derive these particles from an intersect of fields plus an energy calculation? It's a challenge, I know, but please do try. pw: In CFT, one ALWAYS makes the additional assumption... which may be called the "Lagrange assumption"... that the dynamics of the universe may be WORKED OUT by substituting the Lagrangian you just chose into some universal equations called the LAGRANGE-EULER equations. In essence, in QFT, one does the same thing, but then "quantizes" the theory according one of five or more recipes... One of the recipes is modern "functional integral QFT," which Rajaraman makes some effort to try to explain from scratch.

pw: The quantum version we have today doesn't meet that standard, I would agree. We need a lot of more creative work to clean up the mess we have inherited. And it is partly the rube goldbergs of science management and incentives and institutions which have stopped us from cleaning up the rube goldberg formulations of quantum theory, in my view. hb: sounds like a good insight, one I'd like to know more about. Understanding the sociology of science may help those of us in science--even outsiders like me--get beyond bureaucratic obstacles and chimpanzee politics. pw: A very important area, but I am already exceeding what I have a right to do this morning here... hb: understood. Aloha, Paul. Have a good morning and a good day--Howard ... Isn't it cheating to continue imagining that Turing machines--mythical all-purpose computers based on logical rules of computation but in imagination capable of anything--can be the building blocks of a cosmos? What's the difference between a Turing machine and god? A Turing machine is all-capable, unless my understanding is off base. All-capable means omnipotent. The one thing a Turing machine can't do is solve Godelian paradoxes. One thing this universe does very well is solving Godelian paradox. On the positive side, a Turing machine runs step by step. Which should make Pavel and me very happy. But it doesn't make me smile. Why? A Turing machine is linear. From the beginning, this cosmos has been not just fractal, but has operated via meshwork, an incredible weave of simultaneous interconnects... more interconnects, by my usually erroneous calculations, than the number of all the particles in this cosmos squared. On these points, I would defer to Wolfram. His book probably epxlains it better than I could. hb: What do you imagine a true Lagrangian of the universe would look like? pw: I actually have some words about that in arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0202138. hb: This is a paper I've admired you for since we met. I've downloaded it, have translated it from .pdf to .doc, have filed it, and, from a quick perusal at 4:30, get the impression that I will have a tough time understanding it. Is there any way you can paint it in word-pictures? Well... it's hard. In the present electroweak theory... replace the "HIggs field" with the kind of three-dimensional angular field Skyrme talked about. (Then MRS and Rajaraman.) And tie a knot to get an electron, with the other fields radiating out from the knots in a relatively passive way. At this stage, I would guess we should treat neutrinos like light, with no knots or mass needed. But maybe that should be reconsidered very carefully, even at this stage. And there are several ways to introduce angle variables.. I am characterizing the new Lagrangian, but not specifying it. I have actually tried to go out and fund someone with the right credentials to work on the specification, but it's just a tad too far off the present gravy train, and "too trivial." --- By the way, you asked about bosonization somewhere. MRS and Rajaraman give a part of the story. But... no time for details...

Soul, Emotion, Music, Math and Cosmos, Why Do They Relate?

Music, math, physics, and emotions collide. Music can be mapped out mathematically because of its basic physical properties, which follow mathematical patterns. Yet music roils the soul--it makes emotions rock and roll.

So let's follow some logic from Aristotle. If a=b, and b=c, then a=c. Music =math. Math=the cosmos. Music=emotions. So emotions=the cosmos. And emotions=math. But how? That's the puzzle.

Does the fact that we, planets, stars, and galaxies are all piles of quarks have something to do with it? Probably?

Does the fact that humans, asteroids, and waves in the sea are all children of the same Big Bang explain a bit of these equations too? I suspect that the answer is yes.

physics is the simplest and most primitive of the sciences. It studies the simplest things. Studying the birth of an embryo or the way a human works--from the level of his/her mitochondria to his/her emotions, imagination, culture, and mind--that's where the rubber meets the road and where science hits the really hard stuff.

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I've been collecting a file on music for the last 20 years that indicates music and the beat is more primal than we think. The cosmos literally rang like a bell during the big bang. this strange notion has picked up more and more validation each month as new data pours in from the various telescopes--in the visual range, the x-ray range, the infrared, etc-that NASA and others have lofted into an arc above the atmosphere. Slime mold send out pulsations of cyclic AMP to signal a lack of food and to unify their population of free-wheeling amoeba into a synchronized clump that crawls along like a multi-cellular beast, lifting a stalk into the air and letting its spore take off to find a new and better home. Pulsing to the beat turns individuals into part of a larger beast. Cells in the brain apparently coordinate by synchronizing to a common rhythm, thus telling each other that they're cooperating in pasting together a perceptual puzzle for presentation as the "instantaneous" sight of a red ball rolling on the floor toward the cat or of a leaf swaying in a tree. Get with it, man, this music is hip--or so the the neurons seem to think. Whales, dolphins, and elephants all sing--suggesting that their common ancestors some 60 million years back may have hummed to each other as well. The sound brings them together or coordinates them over vast distances. The melody tells members which larger social body is theirs and which fellow creatures are members of another pack. Birds sing, and they separated from our common ancestor at least 120 million years ago. Perhaps therapsids, the tiny insect eaters that turned into mammals and eventually you and me, sang ultrasonically, as rats and mice do today. And they may have done so a good 286 million years ago. So music, it seems, goes way, way back. Did trilobytes pulse and make the barks, coos, and growls most vertebrates make when it came time to flock and mate? Did they coordinate with rough song and prosody? I've been asked what the resonant frequency of a bacterium is. I sure as heck don't know. But could it be true that bacteria resonate--that they, too, musicate? It wouldn't suprise me. If the big bang can ring like a cymbal and percussate, if suns, too, can knell and tintinnabulate, we echo the history of a cosmos pulsing in our atoms when we sing. Howard hb; all this implies that music is a fractally repeated pattern, a recurring chorus in the symphony of an evolving universe, a chorus sung on innumerable levels of complexity.

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Sounds like they focused on firms like Rogers & Cowan, folks who thought you achieve stardom by slapping an artificial mask--an "image"--on to each musical artist. Few in the music business seem to realize that they are dealing in a semi-mystical product through which one soul offers its passions up to others.
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Van, this is gorgeous. Poetry like this is the first step in grabbing hold of something which we need to get to know scientifically. With metaphor it reaches into the darkness of the soul and pulls emotions from their hidden shadows to the light. The next step is that form of rigorous metaphor which leads to scientific insight. Here you're raising the mystery which Ted Coons has been pursuing--why the correspondence between music and mathematics, between a symphony and the blind man's cane of formulae with which we feel the contours of the cosmos out? And why the link in the opposite direction, between music and our passions? If emotion's tides are linked to music, if music is linked to math, and math is linked to every aspect of this universe from the pulsations of electrons as they move in waves around an atomic nucleus to the rotation of stars around the black-hole nucleus of a galaxy, then we have an Aristotelian relationship. If a=b, and b=c, then a=c. The "a" of this case is emotion. The c is the world which physics limns. Why do the two relate? Is it because this fractal universe repeats old patterns in new ways as it stretches to achieve new levels of complexity? An atom is one spinning form, a galaxy another. Both share the rhythms of that nebula of neurons which we call a soul, a mind, a brain. Are the turbulence of stars, of subatomic plasmas, clustering receptors, soul and mind and feeling very much the same?

(for more on the flow of receptors in neurons, see the clipping appended below Van's posting)
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In a message dated 3/29/00 1:33:14 PM Eastern Standard Time, Van Philpot writes:

Johannes Brahms is the biologist of music. His symphony #1 portrays the full dimensions of the life cycle with its majesty and minute perfection. Like the intertwining of molecules from air and soil into living cells-moving, breathing, reproducing, the symphony rolls gently and powerfully to intertwine itself with the melody, harmony and rythm of the biological world. The pounding of tympani in the first movement takes one to the grandeur of nature seen from the top of a mountain. The soft strains of the second movement takes one to a moss covered glen in a wooded area where each molecule of chlorophyl is acted upon by a photon of light to catalyze the inorganic to the organic. The famous melody of the fourth movement portrays a scene by the brookside with its algae. one celled organisms, fish, snakes fuse to become a single gently fowing organism. When science and music are blended by the immaterial component of the human mind, one has a vision of God. Van Philpot
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Source: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (http://www.cshl.org/) Date: Posted 3/28/2000 New Link Uncovered In Nerve Cell Mechanism Thought To Power Learning And Memory Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have uncovered a significant new link in the molecular chain of events thought to underlie learning and memory. By using a novel electrophysiological method for measuring synaptic activity, Roberto Malinow and his colleagues have demonstrated that strengthening of nerve cell connections in the brain -- believed to occur during learning and memory consolidation -- can be largely explained by the movement of proteins called AMPA receptors into synapses. The scientists describe the role of two other proteins, one (a protein kinase) known previously to be critical to AMPA receptor-mediated synaptic strengthening, and another (the new link) whose existence is strongly implicated by the recent findings. The study is reported in the March 23 issue of Science. One seat of learning and memory in the brain is a region deep within the cortex called the hippocampus. Malinow and his colleagues study how neurons in the hippocampus of rats respond to electrical stimulation like that which occurs during learning. In particular, they explore the mechanisms involved in long-term potentiation (LTP ), the synaptic strengthening believed to power learning and memory consolidation. In one of two studies they published in Science last year, Malinow and his colleagues reported how the distribution of AMPA receptors within dendrites changes upon induction of LTP (dendrites are the branch-like arms of neurons that receive synaptic inputs.) This study demonstrated that during LTP induction, some AMPA receptors move rapidly from interior locations within dendrites into regions that contain synapses called dendritic spines. The increased presence of AMPA receptors on the cell surface at synapses enables neurons to respond more strongly to the key neurotransmitter glutamate. Thus, the scientists concluded that the movement of AMPA receptors into spines could be an important mechanism that contributes to the synaptic strengthening believed to underlie learning and memory. But additional evidence to support this view was needed. "What we really wanted to know next was whether the AMPA receptors we observed moving into spines are actually incorporated into synapses and participate in synaptic transmission," says Malinow. "And we wanted to learn more about the mechanism that mediates this trafficking of AMPA receptors within dendrites." The new study provides these answers. Malinow and his colleagues took advantage of the fact that most of the neurons they study contain AMPA receptors with both "GluR1" and "GluR2" subunits. Receptors with these subunits allow sodium (Na+) ions to flow into cells and potassium (K+) ions to flow out of cells.

To follow with precision the fate of AMPA receptor subunits, the scientists overexpressed just the GluR1 subunit. AMPA receptors that contain GluR1 but lack GluR2 only allow the inward flow of sodium ions. This property provided Malinow and his colleagues the sensitive electrophysiological assay they needed to determine whether GluR1 AMPA receptor subunits are newly-incorporated into synapses following LTP induction, and if so, whether they are functional (i.e. able to increase synaptic transmission.) The answer on both scores was yes. In these experiments, LTP was mimicked by co-expressing with GluR1 a constitutively active form of a protein kinase (CaMKII) known to be sufficient to elicit the synaptic strengthening that is the hallmark of LTP. To investigate the mechanistic relationship between AMPA receptors and CaMKII, Malinow and his colleagues mutated a site within GluR1 that had been shown by others to be phosphorylated by CaMKII during LTP. This mutation did not appear to affect the regulated delivery of GluR1 to synapses. Instead, Malinow and his colleagues identified a different site within GluR1 that they believe is required for the CaMKII-mediated delivery of GluR1 to synapses during LTP. This site attracted the attention of the scientists because it resembles motifs found in other membrane proteins that control where those proteins are localized within cells. The motif enables those membrane proteins to bind to a class of so-called PDZ proteins which act to target the membrane proteins to the correct location in the cell. Malinow and his colleagues showed that mutations within the putative PDZ-interaction motif of GluR1 blocked its delivery to synapses following LTP induction. Therefore, a PDZ protein is likely to represent a new link in the regulated delivery of functional AMPA receptors to synapses during learning and memory consolidation. The study was carried out at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory by Yasunori Hayashi, Song-Hai Shi, José A. Esteban, Antonella Piccini, Jean-Christophe Poncer (currently at the Pasteur Institute, Paris), and Malinow. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is a private, non-profit basic research and educational institution with programs focusing on cancer, neuroscience, and plant biology. Its other areas of research expertise include molecular and cellular biology, genetics, structural biology, and bioinformatics. Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of this story, please credit Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as the original source.

Is This An Unjust Universe?

Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence? Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War. They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. What kind of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated. But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured. Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags. Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move His family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward. Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton. At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson Jr, noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire.

The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt. Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed His wife, and she died within a few months. John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. A few weeks later he died from exhaustion and a broken heart. Norris and Livingston suffered similar fates. Such were the stories and sacrifices of the American Revolution. These were not wild-eyed, rabble-rousing ruffians. They were soft-spoken men of means and education. They had security, but they valued liberty more. Standing tall, straight, and unwavering, they pledged: "For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." They gave you and me a free and independent America. The history books never told you a lot about what happened in the Revolutionary War. We didn't fight just the British. We were British subjects at that time and we fought our own government! Some of us take these liberties so much for granted, but we shouldn't. So, take a few minutes while enjoying your 4th of July holiday and silently thank these patriots. It's not much to ask for the price they paid. Remember: freedom is never free! I hope you will show your support by please sending this to as many people as you can. It's time we get the word out that patriotism is NOT a sin, and the Fourth of July has more to it than beer, picnics, and baseball games. Colonel (Dr) Jim Hayes, USAF ret

Why Emotions Are Contagious

an ant moving through the corridors has to be careful not to rush too fast or it could trigger a panic. when ants see signs of excitement, they rush over to see what's going on??one sign of excitement is quick movement social psychology shows the tendency to rubberneck around an accident or a fight is as strong in humans an ant rushing in a panic means an attack or disaster. 34b

one animal "in the bush" by himself has only two eyes to watch a predator. a herd has hundreds. the animals on the periphery give an alarm. perceiving danger as a group seems built into us. " If we're in a room with 15 people and there's a little bit of smoke coming out of a vent, and 14 people respond as if there's nothing wrong, we tend to sit there as if there's nothing wrong." If one shouts fire, there'll be panic. 12b

among monkeys, says Hall, some object every beast despised can suddenly become popular. if "one animal suddenly shows an CR interest in the despised thing", its friends are likely to get interested as well. "monkey see, monkey do." (Primates, p. 387) 70a

"monkey see, monkey do" can be highly adaptive. *two patas monkeys in an experiment were highly intrigued by a box. *their mother lifted the lid and saw a snake inside. *the youngsters picked up on her emotional reaction instantly and promptly lost all interest in their plaything. *her disturbance was contagious. (Primates, p. 392) 70a

the experiment with a box, a snake, and a mother monkey shows that emotions are catching. repeat a message that some group of people or form of expression should be greeted with horror often enough, and you'll get that horror going. it's one of the primary tricks underlying propaganda. (Primates, p. 392) 70b

[helping the contagion of emotion is the fact that] we even have a hard time deciphering our own internal states without external help. subjects were played a tape?recorded heartbeat and told it was the sound of their own heart. when the heart sped up, the subjects became anxious. (Selye's Guide to Stress Research, p. 35) 45b

"two groups of students were given a warning about the dangers of mumps" and told they could get a vaccination at the university clinic. one group was played a hearbeat, supposedly their own. as the warning was read, the heart rate leaped. the other group heard no such phony heartbeat. the group with the falsified heart rate showed high levels of fear and anxiety. in fact, the group was so frightened that most of its members steered clear of the clinic and the innoculation that could have protected them. fear threw them in a counterproductive direction. (Selye's Guide to Stress Research, p. 37) 45b

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In a message dated 99?10?26 11:55:32 EDT, Skoyles writes:

Subj: Placebos: a new theory Date: 99?10?26 11:55:32 EDT From: (Dr. John R. Skoyles) To: Common?sense suggests that a wide range of physiological (blood pressure, body temperature) and related parameters (pain, fatigue) should be set like a central heating by low level thermometer?like aided routines. There should be a little biochemical æroutineÆ by which bacteria cell coverings cause biochemically an immune response which sends chemokines to the neurons in the hypothalamus and up regulates body temperature. Pain should be determine by peripheral injury that activates C fibres that activate spinal neurons. But we find that taking a substance believed to reduce body temperature or pain can block them û and the discovery that they are merely inert can reinstate them. The placebo effrect. Why this top down control by beliefs of basic physiological and related phenomena? hb: lemme take a stab at this. First off, it's an extremely good question. Second, it lends itself to a model which says (hang on to your hat, I'm going to repeat myself) that an individual is a node in a learning machine??a cell in the larger body of society. The flip side of the placebo phenomenon is the bush doctor or witch doctor phenom. In numerous hunter?gatherer tribes, the witch doctor comes to heal you when you're ill. In addition to a lot of mumbo jumbo, the witch doctor, according to Laura Bohannon, checks out your social connections. Are you having difficulties with your wives, your brothers in law, your tribal chief, or the tribal thief? Why this focus on social connections? Because the breakage of social connections lowers immune system response and invites illness. The reconnection of social ties heals. The mumbo jumbo reconnects you to society's conceptual grid. When an American or British doctor tells you that your pain in the stomach is nothing to worry about, it's simply gastritis, you feel relieved. The strangeness of the pain and the lack of control it demonstrated had confused and frightened you. Admit it, you were afraid it was cancer??something society says is an automatic killer. The words the doctor uttered which made you feel rooted and safe were a Latin incantation with no content. Gastritis simply means "pain in the stomach." The doctor repeated what you told him in a foreign language. A language which indicated that he had control over that which you could not master on your own. He put you in a comfortable social grid. If he'd gone further??as the bush doctor does??he'd probably have discovered that your pains began when you started having early morning fights over the same issue over and over again with your wife. Her family, whose respect for you you valued, were lined up on her side. So was one of your kids, who was away at college and whose presence you sorely missed. The bush doctor would have brought your wife, your in?laws, and your son into the healing process and used it as an opportunity to knit you not only into society's conceptual grid but into the intimate grid of personal relations. Witch doctors have a pretty good record of healing using these two forms of social stitching. Our doctors might do better if they used them both as well.

Meanwhile, what does this have to do with the individual as a cell in the society, or as a node in a learning machine? A cell, when it's given the signal that it's not needed, goes through programmed cell death??apoptosis. It kills itself from the inside out??allowing a genetic chain reaction to set in which opens its boundaries, its cell wall, and lets its innards leak away. A node in a neural net which throws itself into a grid that takes the wrong road to solving a problem at hand has its power and its connections to other nodes in the system shut down. The witch doctor takes an individual who is receiving self?destruct signals from a social group which no longer seems to need him and reverses the signals. He knits frayed relationships and makes an individual who was becoming an unwanted outsider into a needed insider again. He makes the patient "a useful and productive member of society." Reassured of this role, the individual's internal self?assessment devices??his inner?judges, to use the language of Global Brain, or his comparator mechanisms, to use the term coined by Michael Waller??give him the thumbs up instead of the thumbs down. As a consequence, his immune system is juiced up again and his psyche is no longer focussed on making the minor pains we experience all the time into major preoccupations. Voila, quite often the patent is healed. See my nurse on the way out. She will give you the standard bill for a consultation with me. It will cost you $120. Next patient please!

Another problem: most physiological properties û body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, pain threshold, tiredness, sense of wellness, fatigue are represented at the highest level in the brain û in the cerebral cortex. Surely they should be set automatically by purely subcortical and biochemical circuitry processes. Again, why? hb: because the cerebral cortex is primarily a device for social connection. For example, the left frontal lobe, according to Gazzaniga, maintains that device which we call the "self." The self is almost entirely a mechanism for social interconnection. It brushes up what we say and do to make us presentable to those around us.

js: What is there to be gained by allowing physiological parameters to be adjusted? û and what to be gained by them being modulated in a top down way by the cerebral cortex and the higher cognitive faculties that underlie æbeliefÆ?hb: the society becomes a coordinated organism capable of achieving things no individual can achieve on his or her own. For example it faces down threats like those from China or from the Islamic rebels attempting to snatch central asia from two imperial powers, the Russians and (in the case of the Xinjiang province) the Chinese. Try doing that as an isolated individual and you won't get very far at all. Even the Chinese dissidents who appear periodically on tv depend on a vast network of humans and machines to get attention for their points of view. That network is the large and lumbering social beast we call "the media."
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In a message dated 99?10?28 13:22:04 EDT,Howard, thanks for the lemma. My suggestion is that physiological processes<BR> are not encapsulated but open to cognitive modulation so that the most<BR> efficient response is made to any circumstance.hb: John??we agree on the notion that pain and health are determined in part by social input. However in many cases what's good for the social group is not so hot for the individual. Nonetheless, those who believe they're cursed by juju, voodoo, or by an unwanted personality will be more likely to shrivel up and die??not as a survival mechanism for themselves, but as a contribution to the group's collective adaptive powers??its superorganismic intelligence. These is neither noble nor just, but it is evolutionarily sound. Which means that we who have a sense of justice have to find ways around such evolutionary curses. Witch doctoring is one of those avenues around the pain of depression, illness, and death. Western medicine is another, but, alas, it ignores the importance of social input and relies instead on pills.js: I have pointed out that this makes sense of their representation on the cerebral cortex ?? and theexistence of placebos. But I have overlooked another piece of evidence that they are not encapsulated ?? the physiological regulation that happens in attachments ??the social side you articulated. It could be that placebos and attachments play upon a common openness. Indeed, that the best placebos are those in which arise from health expectations created in the context of an attachment. hb: studies show that attachment in itself does as much as placeboes. However the authority which the giver of a placebo appears to wield also makes a large difference in the sugar pill's effectiveness. Why should authority be so important? Mary Douglas, the British anthropologist, distinguishes between two forms of social connection??grid and group. I've twisted her ideas a bit to fit the data I've been pecking away at for the last few decades. Here's how the concepts emerge after a bit of nipping and tucking. Group relationships are cozy, warm, and intimate??relationships with children, wives, husbands, lovers, close cousins, brothers, sisters, etc. In other words, group relationships are the sort which Carol Gilligan feels women are particularly good at nurturing.

Grid relationships are those which involve a more abstract social hierarchy??the vast and invisible conceptual framework which knits together a large scale society. Gilligan feels that men are particularly good and architecting these more impersonal relationships. Here's an illustrative bit on the notion from something I wrote a while back: In the iliad, achilles had strong group bonds with his<BR> lover, patroclus. However he also lived for his grid<BR> coordinates, those which would give him immortality as<BR> a hero. Heroism was defined as a hierarchical position<BR> attained in an abstract coordinate system. Achieving<BR> the highest position in that coordinate system, he felt,<BR> would guarantee that he be remembered many generations<BR> down the line. Meaning that most of the significant<BR> others for whom he was performing, most of the members<BR> of his introjected audience, had not yet been born. <BR> However his strategy of heroic achievement worked. We<BR> remember the guy over 3,000 years later. He is a part<BR> of our mental geographya landmark against which<BR> alexander the great, caesar, napoleon, and to some<BR> extent you and i, measure our identity. Why the<BR> longlived nature of the coordinate system within which<BR> achilles was attempting to fix himself? I record things<BR> permamently in computer formats which then turn out to<BR> be totally unpermanent and unreadable five years later. <BR> That was not true for achilles hierarchical grid. We<BR> can still read it vividly. In other words, humans have evolved vast skeins of ideas, worldviews which network men and women into organizational grids far vaster than the tribes of 50 to 150 which Robin Dunbar feels are the theoretical maximum for creatures with a cortex of our size. These grids of ideas pull together humans over vast spans of distance AND vast spans of time. They are the glial tissue in the mass mind, the group brain. The authority of a doctor's degree, his white coat, and, especially his air of assurance, all hint that with this pill he confers all the approval a society of priestly researchers and adepts of medical mystery have invented to lever a suffering mortal from his or her position of affliction, doubt, and loss of connection. js: As for the evidence that attachment offers for the nonencapsulated of<BR> physiological functions consider the work of Hofer who has shown that all<BR> social mammals from their earliest hours require their mother (or another<BR> carer) to physiologically function properly.

Young brains, for instance,<BR> need to coexist in a dynamic relationship that aids regulate their<BR> sleep?wake cycles, their activity levels, their temperature, immune system,<BR> hunger and toilet functions, oxygen consumption, certain neurochemicals and<BR> heart rate. hb: heartily agreed. I can give you the bibliographic references to the role of social connection (group) and authority (grid) in the efficacy of placeboes if you need them.<BR> <BR> Hofer, M. A. (1984). Relationships as regulators: A psychobiologic<BR> perspective on bereavement. Psychosomatic Medicine, 46, 183?196.<BR> Hofer, M. A. (1987). Early social relationships: A psychobiologist's view.<BR> Child Development, 58, 633?647.<BR> Hofer, M. A. (1996). On the nature and consequences of early loss.<BR> Psychosomatic Medicine, 58, 570?581.<BR> <BR> Having basic physiological systems regulated as part of a dynamic system<BR> with another seems basic for their proper functioning. hb: yes, but not for the functioning of the individual as a self?survival device. the input which impacts on health and illness is a set of signals from society which indicate whether that individual is needed or superfluous to the larger system. Nodes in a neural net which contribute to counterproductive strategies for solving an problem are deprived of power and influence. The equivalent in humans is wealth, attention, and...health. We are turned on and off according to our utility as modules in a larger learning machine, a living neural net. js: For instance, people<BR> without relationships ?? compared to those in them ?? have disordered<BR> immune systems and consequently many more colds. Cacioppo, J. T. (1994). Social neuroscience: Autonomic, neuroendocrine, and<BR> immune responses to stress. Psychophysiology, 31, 113?128. Nearly nine in ten university students who described their parents as<BR> unloving and uncaring suffered ill?health by their mid?50s (heart disease,<BR> high blood pressure, stomach ulcers and alcoholism); in contrast only one<BR> in four of those students that had two caring and loving parents suffered<BR> such things. Russek, L. G. & Schwartz, G. A. (1997).

Perceptions of parental caring<BR> predict health status in midlife: A 35?year follow?up of Harvard Mastery of<BR> Stress study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 59, 144?149.<BR> <BR> And, of course, living alone rather than with partner doubles the risk of<BR> dying ?? as a paper in Science pointed out it has about the same risk as a packet of cigarettes a day. House, J. S., Landis, K. R. & Umberson, D. (1988). Social relationships and health. Science, 241, 540?545. Likewise, heart attacks: have one and live alone and six months later you<BR> have a one in six chance of another; live with someone and the odds are reduced to one in just over eleven. Case, R. B., Moss, A. J., Case, N., McDermott, M. & Eberly, S. (1992). Living alone after myocardial infarction. JAMA, 267, 515?519. hb: excellent references. All thanks, John. You'll find complementary citations in The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. [These notes by the way come from a chapter in the same book that discussed embodiment and consciousness]. Why should physiological systems that could perfectly well regulate themselves open themselves up in this way? What is the counterbalencing advantage for putting your life at risk if you live alone? One idea is that relationships help create a kind of double safety lock to stop the brain self?simulating itself physiologically. The brain needs to regulate its physiology but not regulate it such that this regulation turns into subversion. One way to create the required chinese wall is to make the biological equivalent of a second signature: thus a person must believe something AND have a physiology already open to be regulated by another person that believes the same thing. hb: here we come back into agreement. The love of a good parent is positive group input. The affirmation that belief is shared with another is positive grid input.

When a doctor gives you a wonder drug??even if there's nothing more wondrouss in it than candy??he is affirning that your belief is shared by several thousand leading experts sequestered everywhere from the Federal Drug Administration to the Swiss and American labs of the drug company and the worldwide readership of The Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association. That little pill carries an enormous load of social connectivity. js: This does not quite explain placebos: most patients do not have an attachment with their doctors ?? at least attachment as we might imagine with our parents or partners. But physiological regulation does curiously exist. hb: the doctor/patient relationship is one first and foremost of grid??of the authority which insures that the doctor is part of a vast network of experts. However as Osler pointed out over 100 years ago, the warmth and intimacy??the group input??the doctor provides is as important as any medicament in his black bag. js: If an ordinary stranger said you looked ill, the comment would not<BR> effect you, but that stranger was a 'doctor' ?? the chances are you would. We have a capacity to designate certain individuals as privileged knowers<BR> of our selves such that what they say about us is more real than even our own opinions. hb: which is presumably one of the reasons those who've been notified that they are on the hit list of an eminent practitioner of black magic in Africa so frequently die. The notification usually comes in the form of a bit of ash or an amulet laid out in a symbolic manner on the victim's car seat or in the bed of his hut. I'm afraid I've lost the book on which I relied for much of my information on juju (the African ancestor of voodoo). It was part of a research project I was carrying out in roughly 1970. However well after that book appeared in print, Dian Fossey reported on her astonisment at the manner in which the silliness of juju managed to kill off members of her staff in Rwanda. Belief is what we have that other primates lack. And, as I've said, this system of potent abstractions is what allows us to put together societies of billions sprawling across the face of entire continents. Apes, ants, termites, and bacteria, despite social skills which enable the insects to unite in societies of tens of millions and the microorganisms to mesh in societies of trillions, can't quite pull of the kind of vast social network which comes to us in part courtesy of our belief in such invisibilities as atoms, molecules, medicines, science, celebrity, specialized expertise, gods, states, and international agencies. js: Doctors whether they like it or not are treated as superhumans: we believe them as having a superior insight into our well being. People readily develop emotional dependency upon them. So while we might not be attachment to them, our physiology has a privileged relationship with them. They thus can provide the extra 'signature' neededto regulate our physiology and so provide the placebo effect. We are wired up physiologically together. hb: a good formulation??"we are wired up physiologically together."[This physiological trust with doctors might explain the chemotherapy effect by which patients readily transfer the experience of sickness linked to their drug to the doctors that give them ?? people report instantly feeling sick for instance when they meet their chemotherapy doctors by accident in the supermarket. I would suggest that the trust people have in doctors has primed them to link the effects of their drugs with them ?? the reverse placebo effect.

In a message dated 10/31/99 1:44:19 PM Eastern Standard Time, Skoyles writes: << Subj: Re: Placebos: a new theory Date: 10/31/99 1:44:19 PM Eastern Standard Time From: (Dr. John R. Skoyles) Sender: owner-To: CC: Authority is clearly linked to placebo power: the king's touch made many a commoner better; the jews lacking a monarch used literally the word of god -- a text from the Torah would be written and then its ink washed off and drunk. Doubtless others can think of different examples. But authority is one way placebo become powerful. hb: the research bears this point out mightily. But think for a second. What is an authority? An individual to whom all eyes turn, an individual who embodies the group, its attention, and its approval. Hence even by trusting in authority, one puts oneself at the center of a social web. Patrick Walls gives the series of increasing power as small white pills, small white tablets, large white tablets, colored large tablets. Injections, intravenous injections. Surgery. One doctor he notes always added placebo power to his tablets by using tweezers to hand them to the patient -- tweezers because they were too powerful to touch by hand. hb: very interesting.

Snotpanda: Howard,

I'm going to bed now, but thought I'd say a quick "hello" first
Howl Bloom: hey chris
Howl Bloom: how's it going with lib?
Howl Bloom: and the magazine idea?
Snotpanda: I was just about to ask you about Lor
Snotpanda: they're okay I guess
Howl Bloom: not good
Howl Bloom: with Lor
Snotpanda: the magazine's better than Lib
Snotpanda: it's progress, I mean
Howl Bloom: I've also hit a glitch in the infrastructure
Howl Bloom: good, tell me
Snotpanda: yikes, how so?
Howl Bloom: Derek Sutton, a dear friend and splendid manager
Howl Bloom: who was taking me on--and me includes in the long run any x-men who need him
Howl Bloom: had a personal crisis yesterday
Howl Bloom: and had to bow out
Snotpanda: I had dinner and some drinks with a friend from high school, then stopped by Lib's, where she had a guest from her writers' group hanging out, so now I'm home. What kind of personal crisis?
Howl Bloom: Kenny Laguna, my east coast manager, was here tonight with, of all things, an internationally famous skeptic
Snotpanda: I thought he was bringing a psychic
Howl Bloom: it involves his kids and some very serious trouble
Howl Bloom: sorry
Snotpanda: yikes, that's awful
Howl Bloom: psychic
Snotpanda: oh, so I was right?
Snotpanda: what'd he have to say
Howl Bloom: the psychic encournter was intriguing
Snotpanda: how so?
Howl Bloom: who, umm, right about which?
Snotpanda: the psychic
Howl Bloom: well, it was my second battle of the gurus in the week
Howl Bloom: wierd, I never planned it that way
Snotpanda: a good battle, then?
Howl Bloom: but this guy claims to have powers
Howl Bloom: I now know that I can help him more than he can help me
Howl Bloom: I have more power than he does
Howl Bloom: wierd stuff, huh?

Snotpanda: but that's not what it's all about, mister
Howl Bloom: straight out of Star Wars
Howl Bloom: ummm, how so?
Snotpanda: well, if you can help each other at all, that's good enough
Howl Bloom: believe me, I very much appreciate what he was doing for me
Snotpanda: no need to have a wizard magic fight over it
Howl Bloom: or trying to do
Howl Bloom: he gave me a bunch of crystals and rocks
Howl Bloom: with alleged powers
Snotpanda: and what sort of psychic info did he give you? anyu predictions?
Howl Bloom: it doesn't matter if there's not a single psychic power in them
Snotpanda: did he "read" you?
Howl Bloom: there's the power of his intentions
Snotpanda: true
Howl Bloom: not really, I read a bit of him, I learned a lot
Snotpanda: then what did he do to assert his psychicness?
Howl Bloom: honest, chris, I am keeping those pebbles next to my head here in the bed
Snotpanda: what are they to do for you, cure the CFS?
Howl Bloom: he cupped his hands around these gorgeous rocks and crystals
Howl Bloom: then he had me put my hand over them
Howl Bloom: I was supposed to feel the heat
Howl Bloom: no heat, but he has incredibly hot hands
Howl Bloom: he weighs about 300 lbs
Snotpanda: how can you feel it in that freezing room of yours anyway?
Howl Bloom: you could see sweat on his face
Howl Bloom: that's the interesting part
Howl Bloom: when Peter Giblin did Reiki on me
Howl Bloom: I could tell that his passing his hands over my body was nothing spiritual or magic
Howl Bloom: he'd been trained to sense the body heat
Howl Bloom: in each part of my anatomy, a neat way to read people
Howl Bloom: so tonight I learned the temperature thing
Snotpanda: hmmm, sounds interesting
Howl Bloom: how to read the temperature of the psychic's hand versus that of Kenny Laguna
Howl Bloom: whose hand was a much lower temperature
Howl Bloom: I have yet to figure out how to interpret it
Snotpanda: right
Howl Bloom: but it's gotta be another language for reading people
Howl Bloom: meanwhile I realized that when I gave him the guru eye
Howl Bloom: I could read the muscles of his face
Snotpanda: I'm sure...we probably give off all kinds of signals we don't know anything about...that's why I don't write these guys off completely to begin with
Howl Bloom: which without his being here I'd never have realized
Howl Bloom: and I love uncovering the hidden languages
Howl Bloom: so a great deal of that went on tonight, learning
Snotpanda: yep
Howl Bloom: I also took a good look at his hands, mine and Kenny's
Howl Bloom: and noticed differences I hadn't noticed before
Howl Bloom: so it was instructive, and I know I can help this guy
Snotpanda: god, it sounds like you all did acid or something
Howl Bloom: as you know, whenever you help somebody
Howl Bloom: it helps you more than it helps them, even though it can help them tremendously
Howl Bloom: so even though there is a bit of a power struggle involved
Snotpanda: yup
Howl Bloom: hang on, you made me realize something
Howl Bloom: Chris the power thing is very important
Howl Bloom: it's his ability to convince me of his power that makes me feel good and helps warm me
Howl Bloom: it's his belief in my power that allows me to make him feel like he's got a new guardian angel in his life
Howl Bloom: make any sense?
Howl Bloom: there's a heap of research on the subject
Snotpanda: sure
Howl Bloom: how authority and belief make placebos work
Snotpanda: absolutely
Howl Bloom: and they DO work
Snotpanda: that's why it's sometimes not so good to know everything
Snotpanda: to have peeled back all the layers and masks
Howl Bloom: ah, I see
Howl Bloom: hang on, see if this makes sense
Snotpanda: it destroys your sense of wonder and your faith in just about everything
Howl Bloom: one of my x-men missions in life is to help us understand things
Howl Bloom: in a way that makes them MORE powerful
Howl Bloom: not less
Howl Bloom: to hook the rational brain up to the intuitive and emotional brain
Snotpanda: It seems to happen in cycles--you go through life testing and debunking things to the point that every few years you get disillusioned until the next conundrum or ray of hope shows up
Howl Bloom: and move into a realm of empowerment beyond what we're accustomed to
Howl Bloom: not necessarily
Howl Bloom: I learned this lesson from William James'
Howl Bloom: Varieties of the Religious Experience
Howl Bloom: when I was a kid
Howl Bloom: he wrote a scientific book about mysticism which didn't debunk mysticism
Howl Bloom: it carried you further into the experience
Howl Bloom: I imprinted on that
Howl Bloom: it's now 90 years past James
Howl Bloom: and with the new knowledge in science it should be possible to take people FURTHER
Howl Bloom: into the mysteries of the emotional self
Snotpanda: hmm...I'll have to check him out some time
Howl Bloom: make any sense?
Snotpanda: sure
Howl Bloom: it's one of my life missions so I'm very committed to it
Howl Bloom: it's what the New Paradigm Book Series is all about
Howl Bloom: so now I have to fill the management gap
Howl Bloom: there's a lot of work to be done
Howl Bloom: and I need to put the team in place to do it
Snotpanda: ha ha ...when isn't there?
Howl Bloom: LOL
Howl Bloom: every day Sisyphus rolls the stone to the top of the mountain
Howl Bloom: and as he reaches the peak he loses his grip for just a second
Howl Bloom: and it rolls down to the bottom again
Howl Bloom: Sisyphus is miserable until he realizes
Howl Bloom: that the pleasure is not in placing the rock
Snotpanda: yeah, but with the rest of us it's a new stone everyday, or a new hill
Howl Bloom: on the mountain peak
Howl Bloom: but the joy of rolling it up the hill and playing a game with gravity
Howl Bloom: and winning
Howl Bloom: isn't there some old saying that it's not the destination that delights
Howl Bloom: it's the road?
Snotpanda: I don't remember the story going like that...I remember it being more like a living hell
Snotpanda: or "the journey is the destination"
Howl Bloom: yup
Howl Bloom: actually this is the Camus Sisyphus as interpreted by a very smart French woman
Snotpanda: which was the title of the wonderful book I gave to that horrible ballerina
Howl Bloom: who was kind enough totake me in
Snotpanda: yeah, I know
Howl Bloom: ahhhhhhh
Howl Bloom: her interpretation is a gift
Howl Bloom: so on the magazine and lib thing
Snotpanda: ?
Howl Bloom: how has the mag progressed?
Howl Bloom: I love it, by the way
Snotpanda: in no other ways than through constant thought in my head
Howl Bloom: well, that's where things begin
Snotpanda: though Lib claims there's an appropriate writer in her group
Snotpanda: rather, her friend did
Howl Bloom: hmmmmm
Howl Bloom: sounds good
Snotpanda: and my high school friend could be useful
Howl Bloom: how is Lib's writing?
Snotpanda: dunno
Howl Bloom: where's the high school friend?
Snotpanda: it's certainly not appropriate
Snotpanda: he's a couple of blocks away
Howl Bloom: neat
Howl Bloom: a start
Snotpanda: perhaps
Howl Bloom: so you are the Doug Kenny
Howl Bloom: in search of his Henry Beard
Howl Bloom: and a pool of talent
Snotpanda: I'm also waiting for my web designer friends to get back from vacation
Howl Bloom: ahhhh
Howl Bloom: gotta have you meet Diane Becker
Snotpanda: not to mention Ben
Howl Bloom: and I have to get out some sort of notice of this party on the 12th for the x-men or it won't happen
Howl Bloom: when does Ben return from Peru?
Snotpanda: Oh crap...I'm getting IMed by a friend in Amsterdam so I'd better take it. No he hasn't
Howl Bloom: ok, see ya soon amigo :)
Snotpanda: okay, good night

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In a message dated 10/29/99 4:12:46 AM EST, writes: will reply about placebos after the weekend I'll be curious to see what you make of that rat Bloom weaving your placebo thread into his universe?encompassing theoretical nest. I've got to explain to you how galaxies have joined the weave as well...though I suspect the Lee Smolin quotes posted the other day give it all away. A galaxy is a complex adaptive system. which adjusts to a seemingly unchanging but actually plastic environment??the ever stretching space time manifold. Life forms and their social groups are also complex adaptive systems whose adaptive functions have moved up several quantum jumps in flexibility. Genetic life speeds up the pace to a rate galaxies would never recognize. The augmentation of genetic memory with neuronal memory??mindstuff??notches us up to yet another quantum pitch, a timeframe which to eukaryotic genes would seem an unrecognizable blur, but to the world of prokaryotes would seem slow indeed. Hence our discussions of the quanta of time relate directly to the Big Bang's very fast clock (doubling in size every 10[?32] of a second, the slower clock of atoms (which emerged only after a full million years had passed since the Big Belch) and molecules, the even slower clock of galaxies (among which tens of millions of years are but one twist around the axis), and the reprise of quicker paces among microbes (which can work genomic reengineering miracles in 48 hours), then crustaceans (beasts able to learn through imitation, to organize in hierarchies, and alter mood dramatically in response to social success or failure), reptiles (foremothers of the reptile in our limbic system), mammals, hominids, and us pondering, plagiarizing, aha?making human beings. Howard
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[the outside helper we rely on to tell us how we feel is the herd] psychologists injected one group with adrenalin, another with placebo. Told some injected with adrenalin they'd feel excited. administered a questionaire with insulting questions. A confederate in the room, when the questionaire reached "how many men did your mother sleep with," stood up and angrily declared he wouldn't take any more. People told they'd get excited because of the adrenalin didn't get angry. People not told impact of adrenalin did get angry. People on placebo also got angry. Emotions are socially determined. determined with the same kind of cues that get all the buffalo in a herd to swing to the right when the herd swings to the right. the group told their arousal would be caused by a drug, not by the outside world, didn't feel the outside world was upsetting them. they followed the lead of the experimenter. the others followed the lead of the confederate. *"everybody's been in situations where you go through the physiological signs of an emotion and you don't know what to make of it." out in the wind, as tears trickle from your eyes, you wonder whether your eyes are watering because of the weather or because you're depressed. If you're watching Terms of Endearment and the sobs are mounting around you as the daughter dies of cancer, you have no such confusion. That's why laugh tracks are used in comedies??to tell you the state the script has gotten you into is humorous. "if there's some poor person, walking through the deserts of the Kalahari (?) feeling one of these strange states that makes us all wonder what in the world is going on, his culture tells him how to interpret it." if someone's stepped across his path, it tells him whether to feel vengeful or say excuse me and feel embrassed. "Why does culture have to play that role? Because if culture didn't," we'd all be moving in different directions at different times and wouldn't move with the swift cohesion of a pack of beasts. the body politic, the social organism, would fail to adapt. in war, enough of us are moved to anger that we're able to confront our opponents. The mass of Americans interpret a weekend of drinking as the height of pleasure. I view it as the height of misery. *One reason people may be tempted to see a shrink: they're filled with the physiological states accompanying emotion, but have no social circumstance to help them figure out whether they should be joyful, angry. the state can be bottled up with no socially accepted channel out. You want to go the zoo, but your boyfriend wants to go to a bar. You don't want to fight and spoil your sunday. You smile and make the best of it. But, like the rat blocked on his path to the cheese, your body is boiling with anger. You're uncomfortable all afternoon. The surroundings at the bar say you should be having a good time. but your body is saying something else. Scientologists would say the problem is a little spot from which all negative emotions flow. But that's not the problem. Your social cues are in conflict with your body. 12b

"We often have a hard time figuring out what our body is trying to tell us. We need help in interpreting the simple cues that we receive from this foreign lump of tissue we live within." subjects were shown photos of Playboy bunnies and played the supposedly amplified sound of their own heart. *when they were asked which pictures they liked the most, they picked the ones the bogus heart rate had sped up for. their minds were clearly confused and indecisive prisoners in a body from whom they hoped to pick up some cues. another group of subjects was seated by a meter that supposedly measured their level of arousal, then shown a pesticide lecture. the subjects who had seen the phony meter jump while the lecture was taking place were far more persuaded of the lecture's frightening points. (Social Psychology, p. 193 or 4) 46a

fear and other moods are contagious. "Hall points out that the transmission of CR moods through the social group is one of the most important Cr mechanisms for adaption." (Primates, p. 392) 70a

see "[the chemicals of resignation are catching." medieval.cnt and "some mites? exude a pheremone that hastens females to "sexual maturity"" witch.cnt

baboons avoid nasty situations by pretending not to see them. (Almost Human, p. 59) 44b [humans do the same. but when do we drop this process of perceptual denial? when the herd tells us to.]

an experimenter pumped dangerous looking smoke into a "waiting room" through the ventilation ducts. if a subject was sitting in the room by himself, he got out fairly quickly. but if there were two other people in the room who acted as if nothing was happening, the subject sat glued to his seat trying to look calm. (Social Psychology, p. 332) 46b

"Cialdini says that an emergency is most likely to be over looked, when there's a group of strangers. A group of people who know each other are likely, in an emergency, to do something about it." **Corporate meetings' members are afraid to propose what would be ridiculed. are likely to march down the road together to disaster. Jacksons agree without discussion, through unspoken communication. Like the herd, they can probably more readily spot disaster coming. 12b

Conformists and Eccentrics-How the Two Work Hand in Hand-Insiders vs. Outriders-Homesteaders vs. Explorers--Freaks, Geeks, and Rebels: The Evolutionary Power of the Odd

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly. -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
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Time, writes: as i remember, timothy leary suggested that contrarianism and rebelliousness is a genetic trait meant to enhance the evolution of the species. just like bees have workers and soldiers and so on, he postulated that approx 8% of the human gene pool was actively employing critical discernment and looking for more sensible or functional behavioral models, and the other 92% were noncommital or were opposing this bunch of rebels....the idea being, i think, that the 8% were doing a favor for the species as a whole, and that the resistance of the mainstream functioned to weed out and sharpen the new ideas coming from the 8%.
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Darwin thought he'd found a wide variety of unrelated birds in the Galapagos. when he consulted with the leading English orithologoist, John Gould, he discovered to his surprise that the birds were of the same family--finches. Darwin gradully drew conclusions about how the birds must have evolved. But Gould stuck with his rigid creationism. According to MIT birth order researcher Frank Sulloway, "I suddenly realized that the man who knew more, Gould, saw less, and the man who knew less, Darwin, somehow saw more." (Discover Magazine tv show, on Discovery Channel--episode on sibling rivalry.)
_________
This is an amazing piece of thinking and information stitching, Martha. It demonstrates, among other things, what radical alterations can be achieved by simple variations on a theme--a cell without a propulsion whip--a flagella--is handicapped by the lack of the flagella's siamese twin--the fragile spherical framework that guides the chromosomes in cell division--the centriole. Because the cell without a flagella lacks a centriole, it's an evolutionary slowpoke...as you said, an evolutionary conservative. But it's part of the system that evolutionary explorers, sprinters, and innovators depend on for the basics. The fungi, if I read you right, take the bodies of the more advanced species apart when their lives are over and make the corpses of such things as trees into the food that younger bodies need. They help feed the sprinters' next experiment, the next generation of seeds. When disaster comes, as it does every few hundred million years or less--and all the species on the planet are tested to the max--oldsters, stick-in-the-muds, keepers of old ways of doing things may outperform their more advanced team-mates and relatives. Culture needs those who conserve its roots too. The diehards give explorers the freedom of taking for granted what were once new innovations. They give the explorers the leeway to probe, to test, to imagine, to rebel, and to invent. They give the restless the ability to build upon the ancient breakthroughs, creating new frontiers. Then there are less positive conservers of old ways--the violent, the criminals, the folks we call uncivilized. But In a breakdown of society, the violent may be better equipped to grab what food and shelter they need. Howard In a message dated 11/19/2002 1:23:36 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes: It occurs to me that my quasi-philosophical speculations on fungal genetics may be of use to you in the formulation of your own evolutionary philosophy. What follows is a very rough outline. The largest and most successful group of organisms commonly known as fungi - the Amastigomycota (comprising the Zygomycetes, Basidiomycetes, and Ascomycetes) are unusual among eukaryotes in lacking not only flagellated stages in their life cycles, but any indication at the cellular level that their ancestors possessed flagella. This is significant, because in most eukaryotes the flagellar bases become the centrioles, generating the microfibrils which separate chromosomes during mitosis and meiosis. In the Amastigomycota this process is mediated by the nuclear membrane. In other respects, at the ultrastructural and molecular level, the Amastigomycota fall on that branch of the tree of life which includes all the organisms with paired, similarly constructed flagella (or traces thereof), including humans, most multicellular animals, green algae, and higher plants. Another major branch comprises those organisms with paired but dissimilar flagella, including the brown algae (e.g.Sargassum) and one group of aquatic fungi. The lack of centrioles in the Amastigomycota appears to impose limits on the size of the fungal genome. The number and size of the chromosomes in these fungi is small compared to other Eukaryotes, and this must translate into less duplication of the genetic material. All of these fungi are haploid - have only one set of chromosomes in the somatic cells, the only diploid cell being the zygote which immediately undergoes meiosis. Consequently there is no possibility for having recessive genes. Many Basidiomycetes, including the familiar mushrooms, get around this handicap by having vegetative cells which are regularly binucleate, with one cell from each parent; the nuclei divide in tandem as the fungus grows. Nonetheless, this is a large and successful group of organisms which appears to be very much at a disadvantage from an evolutionary standpoint, since every innovation in the genome is under immediate selection pressure, without the possibility of being carried from generation to generation as either a recessive gene or an inactive alternate gene (this latter is not absolute, but one presumes that the smaller the genome, the less latitude for experimentation there is). One would predict that rates of evolutionary change would be slow in fungi, and that as a group they are biological conservatives.

The limited fossil evidence supports this contention - what has been recovered from the Devonian, 400 million years ago, appears to belong to modern genera. From a philosophical standpoint, one thing which interests me is how biological conservatives can coevolve with biological innovators, which they clearly have. A single species of woody Angiosperms, of indubitably recent derivation, may be host to a hundred different species of symbiotic, parasitic, and host-specialized saprophytic fungi. There is only a weak correlation between the lineages of the hosts and the lineages of the parasites. How can one explain a group like the Clavicipitaceae ( a source, incidentally, of many pharmaceutically active compounds), a very well-defined family which includes obligate, exquisitely well-adapted parasites of insects and other arthropods, grasses, and other fungi. How does an obligate parasite evolve a complex life cycle which involves adapting to the biology of two very different hosts? A number of rust fungi alternate between gymnosperms and angiosperms, for example. Complex life cycles and alternating hosts also characterize some protozoa and parasitic worms which attack animals. Is this a tortoise and hare situation? Does the innovator obtain a temporary advantage, but in the process spin off many evolutionary dead ends, while the conservative plods along, sticking with a design with a proven, if unspectacular track record? Then, when the unanticipated and unprecedented disaster hits, are there not one but two pools of survivors from which to reconstruct the biota: the innovators which were, perhaps, not particularly well adapted to the pre-disaster environment, but either occupied niches where competition was low, or carried the innovations in a masked form and appeared more conformist than they really were, and the conservatives which had already persisted through more than one round of analogous disaster. It seems to me the innovators need the conservatives. Could, for example, the explosion of angiosperm diversity, and of the diversity of animals which exploit angiosperms, which occurred following the extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous, have taken place if their principal decomposers and commensals, the fungi, had been drastically reduced in their genetic diversity? Analogies with human social evolution will doubtless occur to you. I don't know what the exact historical equivalent of a lack of centrioles would be, but in modern times, the absence of fossil fuels in a nation, or poverty in general, would make the costs of innovation relatively higher while at the same time encouraging efficiency which ought to translate into durability if some general disaster forces nations to suddenly economize or collapse. Martha Sherwood
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In a message dated 7/19/02 10:08:06 AM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: HBES 4. "Wadya mean, "If Darwin had been a woman"? So asked a vivacious grad student at the HBES poster session at Rutgers this past June. It's fairly simple. The distinguished neurophysiologist, John Morgan Allman, noted that neurons and stockbrokers do similar things: they compress wide arrays of information into a binary decision. hb: this is brilliant. but strike the word binary. neurons have numerous neurochemicals with which to communicate, and may well use their electrical properties to mulitplex additional signals. Neurons and stockbrokers do similar things: they compress wide arrays of information into a decision. jb: Gerhart and Kirshner make the same observation in their startling evo-devo text, Cells, Embryos, and Evolution. They also note that Purkinje cells have the same structure as a train of ants: (1) a diffuse receptive front that searches and (2) a train of followers. SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) telescopes have the same arrangement. hb: the symbiotic relationship between explorers and homesteaders, eccentists and conformists, maintenance and dispersal phenotypes. It's an evolutionarily stable strategy--one that shows up on numerous levels of emergence. Perhaps we should call it a factally stable strategy. It's one that not only manages to avoid the pitfalls and grab the opportunities this constantly-changing cosmos throws its way, but repeats a basic pattern implicit in this universe's initial rules, its starting principles, axioms, or algorithms. It obeys the primal imperatives with which this universe big-banged. jb: There are good reasons for it, I go through them in the discussion section of my paper. It struck me several years ago that human couples approximate the functions of a neuron. Females generally tend to have "gatherer" traits: a wide range of sensitivity to information about resources and relationships. We non-academician males tend to be all-or-none reactors. hb: The binary thing is a glitch. Females tend to be the homesteaders, the maintenance phenotypes, the defenders of conformity. Males tend to be the explorers, the outriders, the eccentrics, the adventurers, the antennae, the risk-takers, the dispersal phenotypes. But many a female can be an adventurer and many a male can be a stick-in-the-mud. What's important is that we have both the adventurers and the home-fire tenders. Without that mix we lose our group's adaptive flexibility. jb: Evolutionary theory abounds with explanations for what environment did, the externalist approach, but with scant attention to emergent phenomena. We, however, are not merely hammered by environment, we swing our own hammer and make our own designs. hb: hear, hear. A wonderful statement, heartily agreed. jb: We, typical metazoans, not only became more adaptable with time, we became better at adapting other things. hb: we invent our own opportunities by seeing how garbage and debris can be transformed into new wonders, new empowerers, new inventions, new techniques, glittering new possibilities. jb: Charles might have been surprised by some of these things; Emma might not have been. After all, she watched their 10 children emerge both as individuals and as a network. A feminized Darwin might be more alert to receptor phenomena, self-organization, and emergent order in communication networks such as young children, species, genes, cells, and neural assemblies. hb: or maybe not. Emma, as I understand it, tried to make the family attend church regularly, sit still in their pews, and behave like a "respectable," "normal" family. She regimented the family to perform small rituals of civil disobedience in church--turning their backs when a mention of the trinity she disapproved of was uttered from the pulpit-- but she worried perpetually that her husband's soul would go to hell.
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Val Geist In a message dated 7/18/02 1:17:14 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: Built into the ontogeny of humans are very late brain maturation processes, the beginnings of which signal "teenagehood". and that is a time when parenting is greatly needed. We raised three, and yes there were some ups and downs, no doubt, as they matured, but these ages were still great times in which I did a lot more with the children than before - and it is remembered to this day, decades later! hb: very intriguing. The adolescence of my first step-child was a nightmare. The adolescence of my second is about to begin. So far he shows signs of turning into a pleasure rather than a demon. Only time will tell. But why these two adolescent morphs--the sons and daughters of what look to parents like Satan and their counterparts who turn into interesting, wonderful, glowing, cooperative human beings? Why do some rebel and some enjoy the home in which they're raised? Why the two morphs--the usual ones--the angry explorers and the peaceful homesteaders, the maintenance and dispersal modes? Are those who rebel the children who feel in inward vacuum of attention. Do they rebel to rivet a parent's gaze, even if it is riveted by outrage? Attention is the oxygen of human life. With it we live and without it we die. My 11 year old son right now is doing his arithmetic homework spread at right angles to my legs on the bed. Two hours ago my absorption with my email finally got to him and he began to act up. He's a very good, very bright kid, but he went through pseudo tantrums, pseudo regressions to infantilism, and pseudo losses of willpower and emotional connection in an effort to literally get me to swivel my eyes and pin my gaze on him, not on my computer screen. His mom, my wife, occasionally starts a fight when that's the only way she can get my undivided attention.

And I probably do similar obnoxious things without realizing it--all for a scrap of that oxygen of life, the riveted stare of a pupil that cares, even if it stares in anger. vg: Do not forget that teenagers turn into adults and re-join you, and chances are that they become delightful adults, making family live very much worth living. hb: hmmm, you seem right on target, Val. My 43 year old stepdaughter just tried to reconnect a few months ago after decades of not allowing me to phone her. vg: Human ontogeny is slow followed by a slow decline in which older individuals served originally increasingly as the memory bank, college and entertainment center of the group, precious attributes in a hunter gatherer society struck with dealing with climatic cycles and uncertain resource availability. hb: agreed. vg: Libraries replaced that - and old people. hb: it still takes humans to read the books and translate their mesages into ________ good thinking and well put, lor. but this kid is very different from the first. yes, more of my attention is available to him, but I still have a huge agenda of goals i haven't reached. i'm still the same obsessed workaholic i was with child number one. but this child has a mother who spends huge amounts of time with him...and always has. my first step-daughter was the result of a desperately unwanted, humiliating, life-destroying pregnancy. a pregnancy out of wedlock in the 1950s, when such a thing made you the Hester Prynn of your town, the subject of gossip and derision, a paragon of sin. my first wife had to work and couldn't spend the days with her daughter. when she worked half-time deliberately to be with her daughter in the afternoons after school, she bought a bottle of vodka on the way home and had passed out from its effects by the time my daughter reached home...if she bothered to come home at all. Did this turn my daughter into a scorching rebel bent on raising as much hell as she could in the emotional systems of her parents? Or was she turned demonic by her genes. Bizarre as it sounds, the genetic thing is a possibility. My step-daughter's mother, my first wife, was spanked many times a day when she was a child. In her opinion it was not because her father was brutal, it was because, for reasons she never knew and that confused her, even at the age of six she did half a dozen forbidden and outrageous things a day. The imp in her was powerful. Was my first step-daughter very much like her mother because of circumstance or genes?

Howard In a message dated 7/20/02 12:41:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Euterpe L writes: Subj:Re: the purpose of childhood Date:7/20/02 12:41:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time From:Euterpe L To:Howl Bloom, CC: Built into the ontogeny of humans are very late brain maturation processes, the beginnings of which signal "teenagehood". and that is a time when parenting is greatly needed. We raised three, and yes there were some ups and downs, no doubt, as they matured, but these ages were still great times in which I did a lot more with the children than before - and it is remembered to this day, decades later! hb: very intriguing. The adolescence of my first step-child was a nightmare. The adolescence of my second is about to begin. So far he shows signs of turning into a pleasure rather than a demon. Only time will tell. But why these two adolescent morphs--the sons and daughters of what look to parents like Satan and their counterparts who turn into interesting, wonderful, glowing, cooperative human beings? Why do some rebel and some enjoy the home in which they're raised? Why the two morphs--the usual ones--the angry explorers and the peaceful homesteaders, the maintenance and dispersal modes? Are those who rebel the children who feel in inward vacuum of attention. Do they rebel to rivet a parent's gaze, even if it is riveted by outrage? Attention is the oxygen of human life. With it we live and without! it we die. My 11 year old son right now is doing his arithmetic homework spread at right angles to my legs on the bed. Two hours ago my absorption with my email finally got to him and he began to act up. He's a very good, very bright kid, but he went through pseudo tantrums, pseudo regressions to infantilism, and pseudo losses of willpower and emotional connection in an effort to literally get me to swivel my eyes and pin my gaze on him, not on my computer screen. I think pseudo is the wrong word. They are deliberate acts made to get your attention. One of the reasons you have different experiences with different children is that YOU have become a different person. As a 23 year old raising someone else's daughter, you had a specific agenda that included your ambitions for your own life as well as hers. As a 59 year old raising someone else's son, you have a lifetime of experiences behind you, an attainment of personal goals, and a desire to get it right this time, if only for personal satisfaction. We all seem to gain a greater insight, maturity, and a rich spiritual awakening as we get older (which we'd gladly trade for money or sex any day).

Is it only because of the absence of the responsibility of raising children that we have a better relationship with our grandchildren? And then there is their genetic behavioral characteristics. As the explorations of this possibility prove the association, we will begin to see the strong tendencies that direct our behavior and that need to be either encouraged or ameliorated. (See Time, Love and Memory by Weiner, or Stranger in the Nest by Cohen) His mom, my wife, occasionally starts a fight when that's the only way she can get my undivided attention. And I probably Probably? LOL do similar obnoxious things without realizing it--all for a scrap of that oxygen of life, the riveted stare of a pupil that cares, even if it stares in anger. vg: Do not forget that teenagers turn into adults and re-join you, and chances are that they become delightful adults, making family live very much worth living. hb: hmmm, you seem right on target, Val. My 43 year old stepdaughter just tried to reconnect a few months ago after decades of not allowing me to phone her. vg: Human ontogeny is slow followed by a slow decline in which older individuals served originally increasingly as the memory bank, college and entertainment center of the group, precious attributes in a hunter gatherer society struck with dealing with climatic cycles and uncertain resource availability. This is wonderful verification for the storyteller, which I believe is the domain of the natural liar. In order for one to be listened to, one has to be entertaining. Lor hb: agreed. vg: Libraries replaced that - and old people. hb: it still takes humans to read the books and translate their mesages into action. Good stuff, Val. Howard

--------------- From: To: Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 12:03 AM Subject: Re: the purpose of childhood In a message dated 7/17/02 6:39:13 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Dpincus216 writes: Hi Howard. The problem I have with these 'insights' by many who look back into the past is cause is attributed through reconstructed results, much like the analyst who reduces the current phenomena into a historical causality of the past. Maybe its right, maybe not. One needs more data. hb: ideas raise questions. new questions lead to new data. new data brings up more wild ideas. which leads to more questions. which leads to new data. One emergent property produced by these iterations is culture. Another is science. And the spandrels of these two are all over the place. Or are new ideas and new investigations spandrels of such basic things as restlessness and the need for novelty, the need for new narratives, new just-so stories, the need for new tales? Stephen Jay Gould was right about spandrels--the numerous evolutionary offshoots of a single evolutionary development. I call it the Swiss Army Knife Effect. Every evolutionarily preserved ability develops seven other uses. Which is the central "purpose" for which the new ability was evolved and which are the spandrels? Is the new ability itself, as Gould suggested, merely an offshoot of a gene that twisted itself into a new shape and popped out another property, tightening the genetic knot that produced the new thumb, the new bit of brain, or the new form of eye, tweaking a new property into being by accident? Who knows. But Gould was wrong about the value of just-so stories. He failed to see their spandrels, their emergent properties. Howard Second, this ev psych view of things ignores spandrel like emergence....no? Best, David Pincus
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Old hb: good thinking and well put, lor. but this kid is very different from the first. yes, more of my attention is available to him, but I still have a huge agenda of goals i haven't reached. i'm still the same obsessed workaholic i was with child number one. but this child has a mother who spends huge amounts of time with him...and always has. my first step-daughter was the result of a desperately unwanted, humiliating, life-destroying pregnancy. a pregnancy out of wedlock in the 1950s, when such a thing made you the Hester Prynn of your town, the subject of gossip and derision, a paragon of sin. my first wife had to work and couldn't spend the days with her daughter. when she worked half-time deliberately to be with her daughter in the afternoons after school, she bought a bottle of vodka on the way home and had passed out from its effects by the time my daughter reached home...if she bothered to come home at all. Did this turn my daughter into a scorching rebel bent on raising as much hell as she could in the emotional systems of her parents? Or was she turned demonic by her genes. Bizarre as it sounds, the genetic thing is a possibility.
Lorraine Rice 7/22/02 Yes, I believe this is very possible. First the behavioral characteristics are there in the child, and secondly we as human beings respond to those characteristics. If the child is sweet, inquisitive, and intelligent, we repond with lots of loving attention. This is sooo easy. If the child is demonic as you characterize her, our reponse is rejection in all its forms. When my last daughter was born, she cried 18 hours a day for six months. It would have been really easy to throw her out a window, or lock her in a room and let her cry, but I was older and wiser with child number 4. I had learned patience and self-control from the other three. So instead of pushing her away, I embraced her and her behavior and she became the ideal loving toddler and child. She was a delight. I also wanted to be a better mother than I was with the other three. It was an ego thing. You are probably feeling the same. But what if this step-child were a terror? What if the little temper tantrums grew to shoplifting, stealing money from you, drugs, or something you would consider unforgiveable? Where will he learn the social skills necessary to us all? How will he be able to face peers and fit in and be able to say, "no, I don't want to do that." What will happen when that becomes necessary? The butterfly is in the glass cage you put it in, but some day, it will have to fly free. No amount of parental love or attention prepares it for that, especially when it has never interacted with another butterfly.
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Hb to mdm 0526-02
How are you?

On the subject of poststructuralist and deconstructionist approaches: I've just given a live telephone lecture to an international convention in Texas (and I do mean just...it concluded less than an hour ago). I was, in essence, opposing the postmodern skepticism that undermines all wonder and conviction and that subverts the passion to create a new world by implicitly proposing that the best we can do is to destroy the old. It's time for big-time dreaming of new futures, then working to make them into realities. That, in essence, is the obligation of us oddballs and eccentrics.

Have you seen this:
Retrieved May 26, 2002, from the World Wide Web http://www.fortune.com/indext.jhtml?channel=print_article.jhtml&doc_id=207665 HEALTH Overcoming Dyslexia FORTUNE examines business leaders and artists who have gone beyond the limitations of dyslexia. FORTUNE Monday, May 13, 2002 By Betsy Morris Consider the following four dead-end kids. One was spanked by his teachers for bad grades and a poor attitude. He dropped out of school at 16. Another failed remedial English and came perilously close to flunking out of college. The third feared he'd never make it through school--and might not have without a tutor. The last finally learned to read in third grade, devouring Marvel comics, whose pictures provided clues to help him untangle the words. These four losers are, respectively, Richard Branson, Charles Schwab, John Chambers, and David Boies. Billionaire Branson developed one of Britain's top brands with Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic Airways. Schwab virtually created the discount brokerage business. Chambers is CEO of Cisco. Boies is a celebrated trial attorney, best known as the guy who beat Microsoft. In one of the stranger bits of business trivia, they have something in common: They are all dyslexic. So is billionaire Craig McCaw, who pioneered the cellular industry; John Reed, who led Citibank to the top of banking; Donald Winkler, who until recently headed Ford Financial; Gaston Caperton, former governor of West Virginia and now head of the College Board; Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko's; Diane Swonk, chief economist of Bank One. The list goes on (see table, Dyslexic Achievers). Many of these adults seemed pretty hopeless as kids. All have been wildly successful in business. Most have now begun to talk about their dyslexia as a way to help children and parents cope with a condition that is still widely misunderstood. "This is very painful to talk about, even today," says Chambers. "The only reason I am talking about it is 100% for the kids and their parents." What exactly is dyslexia? The Everyman definition calls it a reading disorder in which people jumble letters, confusing dog with god, say, or box with pox. The exact cause is unclear; scientists believe it has to do with the way a developing brain is wired. Difficulty reading, spelling, and writing are typical symptoms. But dyslexia often comes with one or more other learning problems as well, including trouble with math, auditory processing, organizational skills, and memory. No two dyslexics are alike--each has his own set of weaknesses and strengths. About 5% to 6% of American public school children have been diagnosed with a learning disability; 80% of the diagnoses are dyslexia-related. But some studies indicate that up to 20% of the population may have some degree of dyslexia (see How to Help). A generation ago this was a problem with no name.

Boies, Schwab, and Bill Samuels Jr., the president of Maker's Mark, did not realize they were dyslexic until some of their own children were diagnosed with the disorder, which is often inherited. Samuels says he was sitting in a school office, listening to a description of his son's problems, when it dawned on him: "Oh, shit. That's me." Most of the adults Fortune talked to had diagnosed themselves. Says Branson: "At some point, I think I decided that being dyslexic was better than being stupid." Stupid. Dumb. Retard. Dyslexic kids have heard it all. According to a March 2000 Roper poll, almost two-thirds of Americans still associate learning disabilities with mental retardation. That's probably because dyslexics find it so difficult to learn through conventional methods. "It is a disability in learning," says Boies. "It is not an intelligence disability. It doesn't mean you can't think." He's right. Dyslexia has nothing to do with IQ; many smart, accomplished people have it, or are thought to have had it, including Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. Sally Shaywitz, a leading dyslexia neuroscientist at Yale, believes the disorder can carry surprising talents along with its well-known disadvantages. "Dyslexics are overrepresented in the top ranks of people who are unusually insightful, who bring a new perspective, who think out of the box," says Shaywitz. She is co-director of the Center for Learning and Attention at Yale, along with her husband, Dr. Bennett Shaywitz, a professor of pediatrics and neurology. Dyslexics don't outgrow their problems--reading and writing usually remain hard work for life--but with patient teaching and deft tutoring, they do learn to manage. Absent that, dyslexia can snuff out dreams at an early age, as children lose their way in school, then lose their self-esteem and drive. "The prisons are filled with kids who can't read," says Caperton. "I suspect a lot of them have learning disabilities." Dyslexia is a crucible, particularly in a high-pressure society that allows so little room for late bloomers. "People are either defeated by it or they become much more tenacious," says McCaw. Don Winkler, a top financial services executive at Bank One and then at Ford Motor, remembers coming home from school bloodied by fights he'd had with kids who called him dumb. Kinko's founder, Paul Orfalea, failed second grade and spent part of third in a class of mentally retarded children. He could not learn to read, despite the best efforts of parents who took him to testers, tutors, therapists, special reading groups, and eye doctors. As young classmates read aloud, Orfalea says it was as if "angels whispered words in their ears." In his unpublished autobiography, Orfalea says that to a dyslexic, a sentence is worse than Egyptian hieroglyphics. "It's more like a road map with mouse holes or coffee stains in critical places.

You're always turning into blind alleys and ending up on the wrong side of town." He finally graduated, but not before being "invited to leave ... practically every high school in Los Angeles." One principal counseled his mother to enroll him in trade school, suggesting that Orfalea could become a carpet layer. His mother went home and tearfully told her husband, "I just know he can do more than lay carpet." Charles Schwab was very strong in math, science, and sports (especially golf), which helped him get into Stanford. But anything involving English "was a disconnect." He couldn't write quickly enough to capture his thoughts. He couldn't listen to a lecture and take legible notes. He couldn't memorize four words in a row. He doesn't think he ever read a novel all the way through in high school. He was within one unit of flunking out of Stanford his freshman year. "God, I must just be really dumb in this stuff," he used to tell himself. "It was horrible, a real drag on me." So horrible that Schwab and his wife, Helen, created a foundation to help parents of children with learning disorders. It was as if Schwab and the others were wearing a scarlet letter: D for dumb. Until about five years ago Chambers kept his dyslexia a secret. As CEO, he says, "you don't want people to see your weaknesses." One day a little girl at Cisco's Bring Your Children to Work Day forced him out of the closet. Chambers had called on her, and she was trying to ask a question before a crowd of 500 kids and parents. But she couldn't get the words out. "I have a learning disability," she said tearfully. Chambers cannot tell this story without choking up himself. "You could immediately identify with what that was like," he says. "You know that pain. She started to leave, and you knew how hurt she was in front of the group and her parents." Chambers threw her a lifeline. "I have a learning disability too," he said. In front of the crowd, he began talking to her as if they were the only two people in the room. "You've just got to learn your way through it," Chambers told her. "Because there are some things you can do that others cannot, and there are some things others can do you're just not going to be able to do, ever. Now my experience has been that what works is to go a little bit slower...." It was the kind of coaching that proved crucial to nearly everybody we talked to: mentors who took a genuine interest, parents who refused to give up, tutors who didn't even know what dyslexia was. Winkler recalls that his parents refused to let their fear of electrocution stand in the way of his fixing every iron and toaster in the neighborhood.

"I wired every teacher's house," he says. "I got shocked all the time." His parents owned a mom-and-pop shop in Phillipsburg, N.J. His mother cleaned houses to pay for his tutoring. Chambers, who read right to left and up and down the page, says his parents, both doctors, claim they never once doubted his abilities, even though "I absolutely did." His parents' faith was important to him. So was his tutor, Mrs. Anderson. Even today Chambers remembers tutoring as excruciating: "It might have been once or twice a week," he says, "but it felt like every day." Nonetheless, he adds, "Mrs. Anderson had an influence on my life far bigger than she might have ever realized." If you could survive childhood, dyslexia was a pretty good business boot camp. It fostered risk taking, problem solving, resilience. School was a chess game that required tactical brilliance. Schwab sat mostly in the back of the room. But he was conscientious and charming, and gutsy enough to ask for extra help. Boies took a minimum of math and avoided foreign languages and anything involving spatial skills. Orfalea worked out a symbiotic relationship with classmates on a group project at USC's Marshall Business School; they did the writing, he did the photocopying (and got the germ of the idea that led to Kinko's). At Vanderbilt Law School, Samuels spent a lot of time in study-group discussions. "That's how I learned the cases," he says. His friends helped with the reading; he paid for the beer. Better than most people, dyslexics learn humility and how to get along with others. It's probably no accident that Kinko's, Cisco, and Schwab have all been on Fortune's list of the best places to work. "I never put people down, because I know what that feels like," says Branson, who seldom asks for a resume either, "because I haven't got one myself." By the time these guys got into business, they had picked themselves up so many times that risk taking was second nature. "We're always expecting a curve ball," says Samuels. Schwab remembers how hard it was to watch his friends receive awards and become "General Motors Scholars, Merit Scholars, Baker Scholars. I was so jealous," he says. Later on, though, some of the prizewinners had trouble dealing with adversity. If, as kids, the dyslexic executives had learned the downside of their disorder inside out, as adults they began to see its upside: a distinctly different way of processing information that gave them an edge in a volatile, fast-moving world. Bill Dreyer, an inventor and a biologist at Caltech, recalls a dinner-party conversation years ago in which he told a colleague how his dyslexic brain works: "I think in 3-D Technicolor pictures instead of words." "You what?" replied the incredulous colleague. The two argued the rest of the night about how that was possible.

Dreyer believes that thinking in pictures enabled him to develop groundbreaking theories about how antibodies are made, and then to invent one of the first protein-sequencing machines, which helped to launch the human genome revolution. "I was able to see the machine in my head and rotate valves and actually see the instrumentation," he says. "I don't think of dyslexia as a deficiency. It's like having CAD [computer-aided design] in your brain. I bet these other guys see business in 3-D too. I bet they see graphs and charts of how trends will unfold." In his office, Chambers goes from wounded to animated as he heads to the dry-erase board to show that's exactly what he does. "I can't explain why, but I just approach problems differently," he says. "It's very easy for me to jump conceptually from A to Z. I picture a chess game on a multiple-layer dimensional cycle and almost play it out in my mind. But it's not a chess game. It's business. I don't make moves one at a time. I can usually anticipate the potential outcome and where the Y's in the road will occur." As he's talking, he's scrawling a grid depicting how Cisco diversified into switches, fiber optics, and wireless by acquisition, internal development, or partnering. It was a picture he used to explain his vision to the board of directors back in 1993, when he was an executive vice president and Cisco was a one-product company. It became a road map. "All we did was fill in the chart," he says. Barely pausing, he's drawing again, this time a picture showing the evolution of networking, including the commoditization of telephone services. He first drew this picture in 1995. "I'm not always right," he says. He did not foresee the extent of last year's economic downturn or the subsequent collapse in demand. "But we knew there would be industry consolidation and a chance for us to break away." Like Chambers, Schwab fast-forwards past the smaller, logical steps of sequential thinkers. "Many times I can see a solution to something and synthesize things differently and quicker than other people," he says. In meetings, "I would see the end zone and say, 'This is where we need to go.' " This annoys sequential thinkers, he says, because it shortcuts their "rigorous step-by-step process." Diane Swonk's former boss and mentor at Bank One always thought Swonk had a "third eye."

Swonk, an economist, says it's dyslexia. Although she has worked in the same building for 16 years, she still has a hard time figuring out which track her commuter train is on and which way to turn when she leaves the office elevator. She can't dial telephone numbers. She has a hard time with arithmetic, reversing and transposing numbers. But she revels in higher-level math concepts, and in January 1999, when almost everyone was bemoaning the global financial crisis and fretting about the stock market--then trading at around 9300--she told the Executives Club of Chicago that the Dow would break 11,000 by year-end. The prediction seemed so surprising that the moderator made her repeat it. She was right then and right again last year, when she insisted--even after Sept. 11--that the economic downturn would not be as bad as feared. Why not? Because consumers would keep spending. Which they did. "I'm not in the consensus a lot," says Swonk. "In fact, being in the consensus makes me really uncomfortable." Sometimes dyslexics are utterly incapable of seeing things the way others do. Craig McCaw could not understand conventional wisdom that said cellphones would never amount to much. "To me it just seemed completely obvious that if you could find a way not to be tethered to a six-foot cord in a five-by-nine office, you'd take it. Maybe if your mind isn't cluttered with too much information, some things are obvious." McCaw built the first almost-nationwide cellular company, which he sold to AT&T in 1994 for $11.5 billion. Now he's trying to build a global satellite system to make the Internet as pervasive and portable as cellphones--another seemingly impossible feat. Bill Samuels Jr. couldn't see the improbability of turning tiny Maker's Mark into a national brand in 1975, even though bourbon sales were in a decade-long slump. "I can't write," says Samuels, "but I can organize old information into a different pattern easily." The old pattern was to advertise to the trade. The new one: to bypass both the trade and Madison Avenue with homespun ads to consumers that Samuels wrote himself. Within ten years Maker's Mark had become "perhaps the most fervently sought bourbon in the U.S.," according to Ad Age. "Many times in business, different is better than better," says Samuels. "And we dyslexics do different without blinking an eye." David Boies turned dyslexic deficits into advantages. Because of his difficulty reading from a script, he makes an outline of his basic points and commits it to memory. Then, unlike trial lawyers who work from a script, he is free to improvise.

That enables him to be more dramatic, more flexible. He can break the cardinal rule of cross-examination, which is never to ask a question if you don't know the answer (it messes up the script). He can wander around themes, trap witnesses. "It cuts down on the time the witness has to think and predict where you're going," says Boies. On a recent trip to Boston, Richard Branson arrives in a spray of champagne to open a Virgin Megastore. He is a true business celebrity, having come straight from hosting a party in London celebrating the honorary knighthood of Rudy Giuliani (Sir Richard, too, is a knight) and going later that evening to address the blue-blood Chief Executives' Club of Boston. Branson's success and his dyslexia seem like such a disconnect. He never made it through high school. He has a wickedly unreliable memory; because his mind goes blank at the most inopportune times, he writes important things--like names--in black ink on the back of his hand. He won't use a computer. He's terrible at math. Until recently, he confesses, he was still confusing gross profit with net. He'd been faking it, but not too well. One of his board members finally pulled him aside to give him a mnemonic, or memory aid, which often comes in handy for dyslexics. Pretend you're fishing, the board member said. Net is all the fish in your net at the end of the year. Gross is that plus everything that got away. Branson approaches business completely differently from most. "I never, ever thought of myself as a businessman," he tells the Boston CEOs. "I was interested in creating things I would be proud of." He started Virgin Atlantic because flying other airlines was so dreadful. He knew he could provide better service. There's an irony here, says Branson: "Look, if I'd been good at math, I probably never would have started an airline." Branson is not the only dyslexic CEO who has tried to bluff his way through problems. For years, Orfalea says, "I was a closet bad reader ... I never showed anybody my handwriting until I was in my 40s." He cultivated a casual, can't-be-bothered-with-it management style that allowed him to avoid the written word. If he received a long letter, for instance, "I'd just hand it to somebody else and say, 'Here, read it.' " He mostly avoided the corporate office and instead went from Kinko's to Kinko's, observing, talking to customers, making changes. He wasn't goofing off; he was vacuuming up information in his own way--orally, visually, multisensorily. For most dyslexic business leaders, reading is still not easy. They tend to like newspapers, short magazine articles, summaries.

Says Chambers: "Short reading is fine. But long reading I just really labor over." His staff knows to deliver summaries in three pages or less, the major points highlighted in yellow. McCaw says he can read and write. "But to do either requires a lot of energy and concentration." He and the others are information grazers. "You learn for self-preservation to grasp the maximum amount of meaning out of the minimal amount of context," says McCaw, describing his reading like this: "You don't really view the piece of paper. You scan. You may pull something out of it," all the while alternating between "apparent disinterest and maniacal focus." Once McCaw makes short work of the short stack of papers in his in-box, they disappear. When government investigators asked to see his files during a routine antitrust inquiry in 1985, there were none. "Craig and a piece of paper do not remain together for very long," his COO told the investigators. Boies calls dyslexia "primarily an input problem." He is highly selective about the information he takes in and constantly makes judgments about what's most important: the five or ten most relevant cases, the key points in those cases. Always, always, Boies says, he's looking at the big picture, at how the story will end. "You are always trying to figure out where something's going--to put it in context," he says. "It's harder to just read it straight." Seeing the big picture early on may be the dyslexic's best shortcut: If you know where you're going, you can figure out how to get there. "One of the things dyslexics do is learn to get the big picture, to grasp things very quickly rather than seeing the itty-bitty part," says Shaywitz. "They have no choice. It's a survival skill. But I've been struck by the perceptions and relationships they're able to see." Dyslexics learn to soak up information in other ways than print. "When you're not focusing, you're grabbing at the abstract information in the atmosphere," says McCaw. "You don't even know where it comes from. But the receptors are highly reactive because they're trying to overcome what we'll call the lack of reading input." Schwab learned the plots and characters of Moby-Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, and other great books by reading Classic comics, which told the stories in pictures. Chambers prefers voicemail to e-mail because "it's so much easier for me to understand and visualize by hearing." Boies flourished in law school (Yale, magna cum laude) in part because he could learn by listening. "We all associate reading with knowledge and wisdom," he says. "But the Socratic Dialogues are dialogues. Teaching tools.

There is a difference between knowledge and the means of acquiring knowledge." Managing dyslexia is a lifelong effort. Winkler, who now teaches a leadership course at the University of Michigan Business School, starts his day with brain exercises he calls Wink's Warm-Ups. Sometimes he uses multiplication and division flash cards. Other mornings he practices "trigger" words, like "won't" or "didn't," that confuse him. The College Board's Caperton says he almost always has to redial phone numbers, often more than once. Swonk rechecks her calculations five times. Chambers relies on his wife, Elaine, to help him navigate a phone book. He's terrible with written directions. He'll never forget the wild ride he gave Tom Ridge one night. Ridge, then governor of Pennsylvania, had come to Silicon Valley on an economic development mission. After the event, he asked Chambers for a ride to the restaurant where they were to have dinner. "I thought, 'Oh, no!' " says Chambers. He knew immediately that he would get lost. Sure enough, he led Ridge and an entourage of police escorts on a wild goose chase, crossing lanes and stopping at not one but two gas stations for directions. The next day he bought a GPS. "I can laugh about it now," says Chambers. The Cisco CEO does something else every successful business leader should do, but often doesn't: He builds a team to shore up his weaknesses. "I will not spend as much time on individual details," Chambers says, so he hires detail people "who are able to go A to B, B to C, and to take the components apart." McCaw says dyslexics need a translator "who can take that conceptual or intuitive idea and get it into a form that's usable." Because he's more conceptual than analytical, he needs someone who can communicate with people who are the opposite. "One on one, you just drive them crazy," he says. "You come up with a pronouncement, and you have no facts to back it up. It just irritates the daylights out of them. You really need a translator with a foot in both camps." At Maker's Mark, Samuels surrounds himself with "very verbal people who like to communicate what they're doing." Even his production vice president and his CFO--positions that don't normally attract chatty types--are that way because, he says, "I knew I'd have to find people who would tolerate my need to be talked to a lot." Orfalea recalls that his mother used to console him by saying that when everybody grows up, "the A students work for the B students. The C students run the businesses. And the D students dedicate the buildings." Possible clues to the differences between A students and dyslexics can be seen under a microscope at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Some of the most interesting research on the disorder occurs here and at the Shaywitzes' Yale center. In Glen Rosen's Harvard lab, a slide shows how dark clouds of neurons have strayed from their normal path, probably during fetal development, and ended up in tiny clumps called ectopias (ectopia is Greek for "out of place").

Rosen, an associate professor of neurology, theorizes that the wandering neurons cause a "cascade of connectional differences" in brain wiring. Because the ectopias prevent some nerve fibers from going where they should, they migrate at random, wiring regions of the brain not normally connected. Scientists believe this might explain why no two dyslexics are alike and why one, like Branson, might be terrible at math but a good writer, and why another, like Schwab, might be quite the opposite. Researchers used to think that many more boys than girls were dyslexic. (Schools were identifying four times as many boys as girls a decade ago.) But an ongoing study at Yale of 400 Connecticut children indicates that the numbers are about equal. The Shaywitzes believe that most discrepancies in diagnosis are social: Dyslexic girls tend to behave better and work harder than dyslexic boys, and therefore often escape detection. Magnetic-resonance imaging at the Yale lab has shed new light on how the brain works, bolstering the belief that dyslexics have difficulty decoding the smallest meaningful segments of language, called phonemes. (The word "cat" has three phonemes: kuh, aah, and tuh.) When dyslexic subjects are asked to sound out words, MRI technology, by measuring blood flow, shows relatively less activity in the back of the brain and more activity in the front. In good readers, most of the activity occurs in the back of the brain. Despite all the unknowns, dyslexia is clearly better understood and treated today than it was a generation ago. Yet in a high-pressure society where straight A's and high test scores count for so much, the disorder still carries a heavy penalty. Boies says nothing has been harder for him than watching the struggles of two of his own children who are dyslexic. "It is awful. Awful. The most difficult thing I've ever done," he says. One of the boys is in high school. The other graduated from Hamilton College summa cum laude and from Yale Law School--despite childhood testing, recalls Boies, that "was not very optimistic in terms of what he would be able to accomplish." Boies wishes that society allowed more room and more time for late bloomers. "In this environment," he says, "you get children who think they are masters of the universe, and children who think they are failures, when they're 10 years old. They're both wrong. And neither is well served by that misconception." Where would we be, after all, if the bar had been set so high that none of these guys--not Schwab, not Chambers, not Boies, not Branson, not Dreyer, not McCaw--could have cleared it?© Copyright 2002 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy Terms of Use Disclaimer Contact Fortune
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According to the following article from Frank Forman, Athanasius Kircher was an antenna of his society. His search for wonders, oddities, the mind's delusions, and technological possibilities weren't acts of postmodernist denial, they were exploratory lunges beyond the periphery of conventional knowledge. They were acts of supreme curiosity, the hunts for novelty and incongruity that make some humans explorers who enter the wastelands and bring back the new puzzles that trigger growth in massmind of society. Howard

A Postmodernist of the 1600's Is Back in Fashion NYT May 25, 2002 By SARAH BOXER A puckish question was raised on Thursday night at New York University: "Was Athanasius Kircher the coolest guy ever, or what?" For those who have no idea who Kircher was, let's begin with the "or what." The German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), a rough contemporary of Descartes and Galileo, was no ordinary man. He studied Egyptian hieroglyphs and helped Bernini with his fountain in the Piazza Navona. He made vomiting machines and eavesdropping statues. He transcribed bird song and wrote a book about musicology (still used today). He taught Nicolas Poussin perspective and made a chamber of mirrors to drive cats crazy. He invented the first slide projector and had himself lowered into the mouth of Mount Vesuvius just as it was supposed to erupt. He proved the impossibility of the Tower of Babel and made a model of how the animals were arranged in Noah's Ark. And he collected the objects that filled the Museo Kircheriano, Rome's first wunderkammer or collection of curiosities. Kircher's body is buried in Rome. His heart is buried three hours away, at a shrine for St. Eustace (which he founded). And his star is on the rise. There have been recent conferences on Kircher at Stanford University, the University of Chicago and in Rome. There was an exhibition of Kircheriana, put on by David Wilson at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. On Thursday, the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University threw a symposium for Kircher's 400th birthday. Why the revival? Lawrence Weschler, the head of the institute and the author of "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders" (a book about the Museum of Jurassic Technology), thinks it is because Kircher is the premodern root of postmodern thinking. With his labyrinthine mind, he was Jorge Luis Borges before Borges. In the years before Kircher's death and for 300 years afterward, he was derided as a dilettante and crackpot. The rationalism and specialization of Descartes had taken over. But now Kircher's taste for trivia, deception and wonder is back. Wonder cabinets have become trendy. The J. Paul Getty Museum recently had a show about wonder cabinets called "Devices of Wonder" and the New York Public Library is opening "A Cabinet of Curiosities" in two weeks.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is itself a modern-day wunderkammer that includes replicas of Kircher's inventions, now has a small but fervent following. At Thursday's symposium, Kircher's postmodern qualities were evoked: his subversiveness, his celebrity, his technomania and his bizarre eclecticism. "In an age of polymaths," said Anthony Grafton, a professor at Princeton University, "Kircher was perhaps the most polymathic of them all." Like other Jesuits, Kircher was a religious man and a world scholar trying to prove that Aristotle and the Bible were right. He knew Hebrew, Aramaic Coptic, Persian, Latin and Greek. But Kircher was also "a wild man," Mr. Grafton argued. He got away with all-out heresy. One of Kircher's most daring acts was to write out a long list of Egyptian kings, proving that Egypt existed long before the world was even supposed to have been created. In a dry and sneaky way, Kircher planted the idea that the Bible was wrong. "Kircher found himself imagining deep time," Mr. Grafton said. And that was just the kind of thing that Giordano Bruno, the dogma-hating metaphysician, was executed for. Somehow Kircher not only survived but continued to tweak authority in the open air of Rome during the Counter-Reformation. He made translations of Egyptian hieroglyphs (later discovered to be completely fanciful). He guided Bernini in erecting an Egyptian obelisk at the Piazza Navona and may even have helped him with the hydraulics for his fountain, which alluded subversively to Kircher's own ideas about the earth's underground rivers. All that may not sound so radical, but in 17th-century Rome it was an "in your face" thing to do, Mr. Grafton said. "I used to think he was a fool," he added. "And then I stood in the Piazza Navona." The folks in Rome weren't the only ones Kircher's magic worked on. He had readers all over the world. Paula Findlen, a professor at Stanford University, says Kircher was a celebrity in his own time, with a crazy fan club that extended all the way to the Americas. Kircher wrote some 60 volumes on astronomy, geology, magnetism, music and philology, in which he cited himself over and over again. Kircher's books were the first "great coffee-table books," she said. People bought them to prove they were learned, to show that they were part of the international network of reading and writing. They didn't read so much as look at the pictures. One fan cut Kircher's picture out of a book and meditated on it to calm himself. Another fan kept sending Kircher chocolate in order to remain friends with him. Kircher's most ardent fan, a nun in Mexico City, decided to try to make herself over in the mold of Kircher's favorite goddess, Isis, the mother of gods, the ruler of heaven and earth. She also transformed Kircher's name into a verb. Kircherizing, she declared, is making connections among things. Could such an astonishing man really have existed?

D. Graham Burnett of Princeton University demanded to know why no one in the audience was asking whether Athanasius Kircher, a master of deception, theatrics and play, was himself a fantasy. He got an answer. Kircher would be nearly impossible to create, said Michael John Gorman, who is making an Internet archive of Kircher's correspondence at Stanford University. If you wanted to make up Kircher's correspondence out of thin air, he suggested, you would have to write thousands of letters on 17th-century paper in suitable inks. The letters would be from 800 correspondents around the world writing in 30 different languages, including the universal language invented by Kircher himself. And who else, Mr. Gorman asked, would think up such crazy machines as an organ driven by a drum that reproduces bird song, a fountain that lifts up a genie, a vomiting lobster, and a statue that pronounces Delphic oracles? What do these puzzling inventions have in common? Mr. Gorman says Kircher used them to explore and explode boundaries. Take Kircher's talking statue, which is even trickier than it seems. It has a hidden intercom system. By standing in another room and speaking through a tube connected to the statue, you can make it appear to speak. Or by putting your ear to the tube, you can overhear what the people in the other room with the statue are saying. Kircher, Mr. Gorman said, was playing with "deception and demonology," which was "no laughing matter in the 17th century." Kircher also played on the boundary of decency. He made a magnetic Jesus that would walk on water and embrace an image of Peter. And a startling number of his machines do nothing but wretch and vomit. Kircher was not beyond tormenting animals either. He planned a cat piano. If you struck a single key on this piano, a sharp spike would be driven into a cat's tail, causing it to yowl. By arranging many cats according to the pitch of their yowls, Kircher could make music. He produced a donkey choir on similar principles. One of Kircher's most cunning inventions was a catoptric box or chamber of mirrors, which could be used in a number of ways. If you put a coin in, you could watch people grab for the illusionary riches. Or if you put a cat in, you could watch it chase the many reflections of itself until it would finally give up in a state of rage and indignation. Kircher, Mr. Gorman said, "made a spectacle of incivility," hoping that "this theater of passions would reveal true natures." The last speaker of the evening was Mr. Wilson, the founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. He credited Kircher with inspiring a new kind of museum, one that evokes both wonder and skepticism. But isn't it possible that the ghost of Kircher has seeped out of the museum's walls? Mr. Burnett says Kircher did nothing less than set the terms for a new theory of knowledge, an epistemology based on deception and play. Imagine that kind of approach to science. It is, Mr. Burnett said, "a liberating way of thinking." Or as the postmodern Kirchenistas might put it, "cool." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/25/arts/25KIRC.html?ex=1023326049&ei=1&en=57fcb03f8a80f899
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Subj: Re: The nature of intelligence - across species. Date: 97-05-08 18:01:53 EDT From: David- I enjoyed your comments on the intelligence debate. I agree with Howard and Ben Jacob that some kind of remarkable creative process is going on in bacterial colonies, and I defer to them on the conceptualization of that process. My interests and competencies revolve around human intelligence, and most experts agree that the explosion of neocortical tissue in erectus and sapiens was in response to social pressures in the environment (employing deception, detecting deception, the attention structure, and so forth). I would agree with Michael Gazzaniga that the human brain is basically a "social brain." The Wechsler scales and other IQ tests only measure social factors to a small degree and the prepondence of variance is accounted for by "g." Following Terman, I prefer to call the highly technical intelligence assessed on IQ tests "abstract intelligence." It is that form of intelligence that earns Nobel prizes, wins master chess matches, and made Einstein, von Braun, and Kasparov the cultural heroes that they are. Westerners literally worship that kind of intelligence and seem not to care one whit about "adaptive capacity" or even "sociality" or social skill. Certainly most employers do not care how pretty your babies are nor how inclusively fit your family array may be. Listen to Bill Gates speak of the kinds of people whom he hires to develop new programs at Microsoft- they must be "smart"- not sociable (certainly in the case of Gates himself), not "adaptable" in the evolutionary sense, but simply smart. In selecting next years class of psychology students, we know exactly what "smart" means. This suggests that modern day smarts in technological and abstract areas are really re-tooled, exapted (Gould's term), and extended manifestations of our natural hominid and evolved human social intelligence. This explains why most kids are discipline problems in the classroom (that is, they behave like perfectly normal pig-tail grabbing Homo sapiens), whereas only a small minority of the class inhibits this natural output long enough to work though a really tough geometry problem. The pigtail-grabbing is natural whereas performing (much less enjoying) the geometry problem is the most deviant and unnatural of acts.

Thus, as Geary (1995) points out in his evolutionary analysis of mathematical thinking (American Psychologist), society must expend far more of its resources in teaching higher level and unnatural math skills, than in encouraging the simpler more natural ones (e. g., simple counting.) In my scenario, all of us humans have inherited wonderfully complex social brains, but only a precious few can wring enough re-tooled abtract intelligence out of it to score 130 on the WAIR-R (about 1%). My argument tells us little or nothing about the creative web that Howard and Eshel address in bacteria. This is an intriguing phenomenon and I am anxious to learn more about it. Whether or not there is any degree of phylogenetic continuity proceeding from bacterial "sociality" to human "sociality" or social intelligence is an open question. I like to think that maybe there is some continuity there. Human abstract intelligence is something quite different and- since it is not natural- I argue that it cannot exist on any natural continuum leading up to it. It is erected on the natural, but it is not itself natural I would suggest. ------------------------------ Kent and Albert--Please stop me if you think I'm wrong, but it seems that what Kent has said presents the framework with which to turn a debate into a possible scientific advance. Each one of the three of us has our strengths. Albert's specialization gives him detailed knowledge filled with nuance I am unlikely to possess. Kent's multi-disciplinary creation of paleopsychology also gives him fine-grained knowledge. I concentrate on broad sweeps, a multi-disciplinary overviews--stretching from cosmology and phsyics to biology, anthropology, political science and my home-base, Here is what I propose. Kent, your supposition that most pre-human intelligence is stamped in chromosomes and does not show rapid strategic calculation until comparatively recent times has been challenged by research you have probably not seen. Not your fault, believe me. All of it has been published in the pages of <I>Physica A, Contemporary Physics, Phys. Rev. Let.,</I> etc. 'Tis the work of my colleague Eshel Ben Jacob, whose research has demonstrated quite persuasively that bacterial colonies, acting as what he calls "creative webs," can form a group mind of remarkable adaptability and demonstrate a collective "intelligence" not frozen in slowly changing strings of genes, but altered quickly through data sharing, "quorum sensing," and a multi-participant of "genomic engineering" which generates new solutions to previously unencountered problems.

Bacterial colonies have been shown to accomplish these inventive phase shifts in periods of time far shorter than those it takes a group of human scientists to adopt new Eshel has not adminstered the Stanford-Binet to his microbial subjects. But he HAS invented tests of creativity--intelligence tests suited to the organisms with which he deals. And the results have been I, in turn, have applied Ben Jacob's findings to 3.5 billion year old stromatolites, fossilized remains of bacterial mega colonies. The conclusion: that in the first 350 million years of life, this form of creativity was already at work. I am not speaking, nor is Eshel, of fitness-targeted sets of behavioral systems--mere instincts. Those are involved, just as they are in human beings. But as with humans, bacterial collective brains confronted with a novel challenge are able to generate solutions new to their species in blinks of time that might amaze you. I've also uncovered significant evidence that flexible group adaptation (collective intelligence) was at work in spiny lobsters 260 mya. Today I am working on the birds and dinosaurs of 120 mya ago to ascertain their degree of group adaptability. Adaptability dependent on invention, accident, learning, and data transmission, all beyond the mere repetitive procedures built into behavioral This is the challenge I'd like to propose, one which would result in a genuine scientific breakthrough. Read Eshel's work. Read the summary of it in mine. Read the papers in which I attempt to demonstrate the role of imitative learning and massed intelligence far before the birth of hominids. (I can e-mail you all of these materials.) Then, knowing what you know of "g" from the Stanford Binet and Wechsler tests, see what you can devise to ascertain "g" in collectivities of corvus corax (the raven), in individual octopi (considered among the brainiest beasts on this earth), and most important, in bacterial colonies. I must warn you, Eshel Ben Jacob's tests have been very clever, you may have a hard time outdoing But I suspect that by pooling our areas of strength, we may make a lasting contribution.

None of us has extra time, but does the challenge intrigue Howard (member: New York Academy of Scie Kent Bailey: " I agree with Howard and Ben Jacob that some kind of remarkable creative process is going on in bacterial colonies, and I defer to them on the conceptualization that process." Kent Bailey, head of the Across Species Comparison and Psychopathology Association (and the original coiner of the term "paleopsychology"), Everything you've said about the bacterial colony as superorganism is true. Both Ben Jacob and Shapiro, the two leading researchers on the subject, have mentioned it. And to humans communality, like that promoted in Singapore or Japan, may seem its dominant force. But nature is paradoxical. Every force seems to depend for its operation on its opposite. Dichotomies don't work because of this. Without individuation, segmentation, the march of rebel cells, the movements of the restless, the explorations of the non-conformists, no superorganism can exist. A colony of bees or ants depends for its existence on both its multitude of followers and the handful of mavericks who insist on improvising their own ways--the explorers who break with the pack and make new finds without which the colony cannot survive. This is true of colonies of bacteria too. Without the individualist, the superorganism will cease to exist. Both submerging in the multitude and breaking from it serve the greater good. Neither can survive without the other. It may seem paradoxical, but this is the engine of a complex adaptive system, which is what a bacterial colony, a hive of bees, the bodies of both you and me, are at heart. Howard Bloom
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Strangely, the following intellectual "phenotypes" parallel the morphologically distinct categories of individuals (all clones) which differentiate within a bacterial colony and serve specialized functions within the social structure, or within what Eshel Ben Jacob calls, in his bacterial work, "creative webs." This differentiation also corresponds with my complex adaptive system pentagram/collective intelligence model, and with Val Geist's concepts of maintenance and dispersal phenotypes. Within the following typology, the "academic" and "disciplinary" learners would be maintenance phenotypes. The "natural learners" would be dispersal phenotypes. As parts of a "group brain," the "natural learners" would perform the task alotted to those 5% to 20% of non-conformist bees who hunt new patches of resources for the colony. They are products of the diversity generator, whose activity in a beehive increases when familiar resources are running out and decreases when resources are rich and predictable. The "academic" and "disciplinary" types would be the mass of conformity-enforced individuals who perform the tasks of mining the resources currently known and of handling what Mike Waller would refer to as "bureaucratic" functions necessary to maintain the internal operations of the colony. Another parallel: I'd guess that the disciplinarians would tend to be reductionists, the natural learners holists, and the academic learners simply willing to go along with whichever voices have commanded the group attention structure (Michael Chance's concept--one very useful in working out the details of collective inteilligence). My own belief, expressed so many times it's gonna put you to sleep, is that holists can't operate without reductionists and vice versa. Nor can exploratory phenotypes survive without the efforts of maintenance phenotypes, and vice versa. All are part of what Peter Corning would call a "synergistic system" and are analogous to parts in Bill Benzon's auto engine model of consciousness. Howard

E. Ben-Jacob, H. Shmueli, O. Shochet, A. Tenenbaum,
"Adaptive self-organization during growth of bacterial colonies,"
Physica A, 187 (1992) 37.

Michael Chance. "Attention Structure as the Basis of Primate Rank
Orders". J.R.A.I. 2 (4), 1967: 503-518.

M.J.C. Waller. "Organization Theory and the Origins of
Consciousness." Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 19(1):
1730.

Howard Bloom. "GROUP SELECTION AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: a new
evolutionary synthesis," European Sociobiological Society Annual
Meeting, 1996.

Howard Bloom and Mike Waller. "THE GROUP MIND: GROUPS AS COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS." Human Behavior and Evolution Society Annual
Meeting, 1996.

Howard Bloom. _The Prehistory of the Global Brain: from the Big
Bang to 5,000 B.C._. Hamburg: Bollmann Verlag, 1998. Ten chapters available at <A HREF="http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/glob/default.html">Telepolis Global Brain--9/22/97</A>
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In a message dated 98-02-11 00:57:17 EST, writes:

Hello,

Richard Gardner, in "Multiple Intelligences" and distinguished "natural learners," "academic learners" and "disciplinary experts." NLs know it all before hitting 1st grade with regard to a naive physics, biology, and psychology and revert to those habits on graduation from high school. ALs please the teacher, take notes, and pass exams but cannot apply the material outside of class, whether in highschool or MIT. DEs know more than the teacher by third grade but about a specific topic. Throw DEs lots of books and experiments, let them shine, adapt other course requirements to their skill areas and stand back. Forgive my simplification. Gardner's speculative but fun text is published by Basic Books and is available in paper for about $15. Rich is a bit of a salesman, be careful but enjoy him!

Jim

History of Science

In a message dated 99?10?13 20:25:52 EDT, a questioner from the peanut gallery writes:

Newton laid the foundations of physics as a modern discipline. Does that mean he invented physics?

hb: Galileo had also been involved in physics 100 years earlier. The ancient Greeks??Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Aristotle, and Archimedes--worked hard at it. Islamic scholars like the Persian Avicenna (c. 1300 a.d.) elaborated Aristotelian views during Europe's dark ages. When Galileo moved the discipline from the use of words to the use of mathematics, he did so in an attempt to emulate the methods which Archimedes had pioneered on the Greek island?state of Syracuse in roughly 200 b.c.

When physics was distinguished from natural history or philosophy is an interesting question. The word physics is derived from the Greek physika??which meant nature??and the Latin physica, which meant natural science. However The WWWebster dictionary gives the date of the use of the term physics for the science of matter and energy as 1715. This means that indeed, physics was given its name and set apart as a science distinct from the muddled mash of natural philosophy during the heyday of Newton's fame??when the august eminence was 73 years old (he lived to the age of 85).

Let's take a moment's to ponder the value judgements used in that phrase "the muddled mash of natural philosophy." The sciences have both gained and suffered from the intense specialization which has overwhelmed scientific practitioners, setting them apart from each other with distinct social institutions and vocabularies. The language of each discipline has become so incomprehensible to outsiders that the ability of the sciences to cross?pollinate has become exceedingly difficult. In reality, each science is looking at a different aspect of the same bundle of natural phenomena. Each is using a different methodology. Each has its own theoretical system??its own theology. So who will put the whole back together now that it has been pulled apart so thoroughly? Who will unite the dissected parts and bring them back to life again? A few brave scientists have attempted to do this, but they are very few indeed. To comprehend reality, a view of the totality is what we sorely need. Perhaps "natural philosophy" is sometimes less a muddle than a necessity. Howard

Entertainment: a clue to our wiring

[But why do humans insist on killing each other?] "forms of insanity and forms of entertainment ...provide a...clue to our built in behavioral wiring" "forms of exercise for the brain... dreaming... play... entertainment... provide... clues to the nature of the prewired circuitry" 2a

hormones trigger behavioral patterns like electrical currents shifting "electricity from one printed circuit board to another" "a male bird... thinking of... food" "sees a female bird and a hormone kicks into motion" hormones shift from courtship to copulation to parenting we also shift from itching to a fight to sluggishly wishing for peace 8a

"Our sense that 'oh wow, this is delicious stuff' is what moves us toward" what's generally good for us "If we were some other kind of machine, we might do a quick chemical analysis of potential food like chocolate chip cookies, discover that it's filled with glucose and a little screen might light up saying; 'glucose, highly concentrated energy source, consume as much as possible as rapidly as possible in order to store as much fuel, in case we run into a future shortage.' our equivalent is "oh, yum" "sexual attraction is one of these prime, built in motivational mechanisms" *imagine that we're machines who need another machine like us to construct our replacement. We'd analyze every potential partner that passes, assessing its value as a co?worker on the replacement process 9b

*"every behavioral mechanism...prewired into the human brain needs...exercise" diving ducks and ocelots why 17th century critics defined entertainment as pity and terror why humans watch horror films. horror is prewired. pity is a social response the screaming monkey infant is eaten. We only pity when we identify with someone as part of our group. pity achieved in a plot by getting us to identify with the person "If you analyzed the standard elements of plot as defined by Aristotle, you can find a separate exercise, or an exercise for a separate behavioral circuit in each of the elements." identification and bonding with good guy bad guy doesn't look or act like us revenge circuit is tweaked into overdrive crisis raises fear, puzzle solving pity knits a social group together in the face of danger violence courtship a good cry *the tale of the rats clearing land as an Aristotelian plot "financially successful...know how to exercise the emotions the most" Spielberg and E.T. "He's as good at working out the emotions as Jane Fonda is at showing you how to work out the body, so the man's films, by 1982, had grossed 250 million dollars." 4a

*"revenge is one of those little motivations that's built so deeply into us that it comes welling out of us, no matter how much that we think that it's undignified, inhuman, uncivilized." Why? we don't admit it when someone drives across our path and we feel like tearing him limb from limb. other cultures aren't so reticent. The Montagues and Capulets, the Agamemnon trilogy are testaments to revenge that leapfrogged down the generations. among the Bedouins, your manliness depends on revenge. what's the logic? *there's a good chance you'll end up dead in the process. you're not going to undo the damage done against you. but think of our cats, tiny things easily crushed by the dogs, who spit and claw to keep the dogs from trampling them. But the cats seldom actually draw blood. [see the story of the snake and the swami in Carol Tavris' Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion] revenge doesn't protect the individual who goes out and risks death. it protects the social group. people get into a vengeful mood when somebody close to them is hurt. *Speilberg gives Luke Skywalker motivation by having his family killed. That justifies mass killing. revenge is like the poison in plants. It doesn't save the individual who's eaten, but it saves the other plants in the bunch, for it teaches the hungry creature who ate the first one not to touch a plant like that again. If you let a sleight go by, you're marked as an easy target. If three members of the clan go out to seek vengeance, it protects the other 47. a Bedouin saying??"He who is not willing to defend his home with extreme violence has no right to a home." [genes vs. ideas] 15a revenge is part of the machinery that makes us disposable parts of a larger group

the more a Yanomamo tribe can establish "a reputation for" ferocity and swift retaliation, the safer it is from attack. (Science 2/26/88 p. 986) 53a

"Plot construction, seems designed to exercise a primitive circuit designed for vengeance." beginning establishes a villain??he does something dastardly, an attack on a character we identify with. eg Star Wars, villains kill hero's family??>we are boiling for revenge, and we get it. Porkies, bad guy takes the heroes' money, humiliates them and beats one of them up several times. 17b

Emotional memory and emotional imperviousness-how the mass minds of men and women integrate

The following story hints that the collective memory pool provided by women is different than that provided by men. How do the male and female collective memory pools synergize? How do they make a whole that's larger than its parts? How do they aid in the production of that overarching structure we call a society?

One clue-women retain a memory of things that horrify. Men forget atrocities. Women are the keepers of home base, the keepers of caution. Men are emotionally callous-preconfigured for adventure. A woman's world is hedged in by fears. Men forget their fears, go out and roam, and should they find something of interest at a distance, they bring it back home.

This goes with the usual proviso that some women are just as masculine as men and some women are just as feminine as women. It's the mix of masculine and feminine traits in a mass mind that counts, not the gender of the individuals who have homesteading or adventuring emotional brains. Howard

Retrieved July 22, 2002, from the World Wide Web http://www.newscientist.com/news/print.jsp?id=ns99992576 Women's better emotional recall explained 22:00 22 July 02 Alison Motluk Men and women's brains use different strategies to remember highly emotional images, according to a new brain imaging study. The discovery helps explain how women manage to remember emotional events better than men, something psychologists have known for years. "It's hard evidence that there are differences in the brains of men and women," says Stephen Maren, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, commenting on the research. He thinks that evolution may explain the differences. Women tend to be caregivers, more empathetic and more verbal: "Those traits are reflected in brain mechanisms." In the study, Turhan Canli, at the State University of New York at Stony brook, and his colleagues asked 12 women and 12 men to view a selection of images while their brains were being scanned by functional MRI. Some were neutral pictures of things such as fire hydrants and bookshelves. But others were disturbing - of mutilated bodies and autopsies. Volunteers had to rate each image on a four-point scale for emotional intensity. Without warning Three weeks later, without warning, the volunteers were shown all the images again, plus 48 previously unseen images. They were asked to say whether they remembered the images clearly, only vaguely, or not at all. One hypothesis for why women remember emotional events better than men is that they experience it more deeply - that is, they have the same brain activation but it is stronger. Another theory is that men and women experience and encode emotional memories in completely different ways. The researchers found that even when both sexes rated an image as "highly emotionally intense", women were better at remembering it three weeks later. They also discovered that men and women really do recruit different parts of their brains during emotional experiences. Women had more activation in their left brains, and men in their right. More importantly, for women the experiencing and the encoding used many of the same brain regions; in men it did not. "For whatever reason, it seems that integration of emotional experiences and encoding to memory is much tighter in women than in men," says Canli. "But it's unclear what could produce this phenomenon." Maren also wonders if men and women just find different things arousing. This study used "disgust" to arouse emotions -- but what if they had used rage or aggression or pornography? "Are men worse across the board, or just in this type of arousing images?" he asks. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.162356599) 22:00 22 July 02

Will The Real Scientist Please Stand Up?-Just What is a Scientist, Anyway?

hb to sharon begley, wall street journal, 5/3/2003-You utterly redefined my sense of the subconscious with your piece relating the work of Tim Wilson to the work of Damasio and Bechara. Sharon, to me a scientist is a person who sees relationship between ideas--relationships others haven't perceived. You did that in putting Damasio's work on intuition together with Tim Wilson's expansion of the concept of the unconscious. That makes you a scientist. So when Adam Fisher, my editor at Wired, came over last week with his girlfriend, it was your insight on the adaptive unconscious I explained to him, not just Wilson's and Damasio's. And yours was the only name I tossed at him...explaining that an idea-splice deserves as much credit as the disparate batches of research from which it was derived. Think of it this way. Albert Einstein never did an experiment when he came up with the theory of relativity. All he did was splice together roughly seven strands of thought whose relationship no one else perceived--Riemann's curved geometry, Lorenz-Fitzgerald contractions, the Michaelson-Morley experiment, Ernst Mach's philosophical concept called "relativity", Maxwell's field equations, and several other strands that escape my memory. Yesterday, when I sent Wired a chapter from one of my three upcoming books--Passion Points: A Scientific Journey Into the Mists of Self and Soul--a big chunk was derived from your vision.

Ten most important records of the 20th century

Enrico Caruso. Red Seal Records--1902--the first record to sell over a million copies. In fact, it sold five million. Irving Berlin's "Alexander's Ragtime Band" 1911--the first record by a white composer to popularize a black music form and turn it into a rage. Original Dixieland Band. 1917--took the style developed by black musicians in the red-light district of New Orleans and injected into the popular culture. Paul Whiteman. 1920--introduced the form of blander jazz to which debutantes and others would dance, much to their parents' disapproval, thus turning the twenties into what F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed "The Jazz Age." Whiteman had the sagacity to hire black arrangers, among them: Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong's Hot Five 1925--established the musical vocabulary of the Dixieland soloist. Armstrong then went on to become one of the first black superstars. George Gershwin. "Rhapsody In Blue." 1924. Paul Whiteman, now known as "the King of Jazz," commissioned Gershwin to write a jazz composition in a classical style. The resulting masterpiece was debuted by Whiteman's band at New York's Aeolian Concert Hall, thus giving respectability to a music whose name had originally referred to a liquid which flowed in copious amounts at the whorehouses where geniuses like Jellyroll Morton, the pianist, played. The liquid in question was semen--Jiss, in the lingo of the time. By the way, Morton's name, Jellyroll, also spoke sweetly of the trade which payed him for his artistry. Jellyroll was slang the female labia and vagina, preferably served al dente. Laura--original soundtrack recording. 1944. This was one of many films whose soundtracks were serious pieces of music, and whose recordings stood on their own. Though the original soundtrack by David Raskin had no lyrics, the main theme was turned into a hit single with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. My father hummed this tune whenever he drove my mother, brother, and I on trips from Buffalo, New York, to St. Petersberg, Florida, to the Grand Canyon, the the Canadian Rockies, or to Mexico in our rocket-ship-designe blue Fraser automobile. And my father had damned good taste in music. The Encyclopedia of Jazz--RCA Records (12 album set). In my early teens I'd stack six of these records at a time on the spindle of my turntable and play them day and night, even listening to them while I slept. The whispered of freedom, the freedom to take flight from mundanity and to improvise with joy and creativity in the very act of life. Elvis Presley. "Heartbreak Hotel." RCA Records. 1954. Ok, let's get this straight. I HATED this record. All the guys in black leather jackets with slicked back ducktails who loved it loathed me and occasionally demonstrated that fact with fist-power. The two girls who had seemed interested in me went into a sudden swoon of fandom and found their Elvis Presley lunchpails an attraction so irresistable that I became the invisible man in their lives. "So much for romance, so much for love" as the Everly Brothers would later put it. Elvis had totally hound-dogged me. But he put a new kind of oomph into music which I hope will never die. He put the rock in rock and roll. The Beatles. The White Album. 1968. "I Wannna Hold Your Hand" had been a bubblegum promise of something new to come, something that would give our generation, the generation of the sixties, an identity. But the White Album was so rich, so full of poetry, so full of the bizarre turned to mystery and delight, that it validated the madness in our souls and helped each of us blaze in his or her own sweet, delicious, or painful way. There are lots more--albums from Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson("Beat It"), The Eagles("Hotel California"), The Rolling Stones (Let It Bleed), Joan Jett, Prince ("Purple Rain"), and tons of others. Most important, this was the first full decade which has left its music, in the voices of those who performed and often of those who composed it, in a form other generations will be able to hear. This was the onramp to the musical recordings--or whatever they may be technologically--of a millenium whose ancesters can sing and dance for them on video or cd whenever they call us forth to energize them, educate them, or give them something to absorb, reinvent, and spit back in our face in that form of creativity rock and roll once epitomized, rebellion of the richest and most inventive kind

I do love good rock and roll.
hb: moi aussi, cit. Bob Seger, the Eagles, Aerosmith, AC/DC. strange tastes, eh? I do love Beethoven hb: me too. what a stormily emotional bastard he was, what a gloriously angry crank. the fury in his music is divine. that anger is what you'll hear in the voices of all the rock and rollers I've just mentioned. in the voice of billy joel too when he was writing his best songs, his songs of anger at his wife, Elizabeth. (yes, I worked with bily and had breakfast with him the morning after he met a woman who changed his whole notion of womanhood. he couldn't wait to explain it. it confused and awed him--that a woman could be not just a chick but a human with an intelligence as rich as his own. he showed me the notebook full of lyrics he'd written between the time he'd said good night to her--2 am--and the time he said hello to me--10:30. they were the worst lyrics he'd ever penned. the album he put them on sold 4 milion copies. the woman? he married her. Christy Brinkley.

Hb: to Marcel Roele 6/14/01 Marcel--I can definitely get Joan Jett to show up in this bedroom for a brainstorming session in front of your cameras if we can fit it into her tour schedule. Joan is like family. Her manager, Kenny Laguna (my manager now as well) worked side by side to build Joan's career from rejection by 23 record companies up to double platinum. Her rise was important for more than just show business reasons. Joan was a powerful, self-motivated, independent woman in the late 70s, a time when the number of working mothers was shifting from a minority to a majority in the US. I suspect the same demographic shift was occurring in Europe as well. Until then, girls had grown up with housewives in frilly skirts as mothers and role models. Only their fathers put on pants in the morning and went to the office. Now, suddenly, both mom and dad were putting on trousers or pants suits and going off to work. Young girls were left in confusion about their own roles. They had no media models who reflected the new, masculinized reality of female life. Joan was that role model incarnate, and I deliberately focused on that in her public identity as well. The morning I sat with Joan in her room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and explained to her what she was accomplishing for millions of others simply by being herself was an extraordinary occasion. Sociology and rock music met the Global Brain--and changed its mind a bit. Is Joan sufficiently well-known in Holland to get our point across? Howard --

Marcel Roele 6/15/01<<Would it be convenient if we'd visit you from August 3 to 7? We're flexible, but let us know. hb: I've just blocked out those dates in the calendar, setting them aside for you. mr: I was a boy in high school when Joan Jett became famous in the Netherlands and must admit that I was very shallow at that time - Joan didn't strike me as an icon of working mumhood, but rather as dead sexy hb: when I was the one who chose photos, there was a simple rule of thumb. each picture had to be something a boy between the age of 12 and 19 could masturbate to. it may sound crude, but it's true. and it contributes more than we generally confess to the lives of adolescent boys. the icons you imprint on sexually become a permanent part of your emotional makeup. they retain a power--for good, for bad, or merely for pleasure and pain--over the adults of an entire generation. mr: (but that's also a manifestation of the global brain - if you prefer a female living thousands of miles away over girls next door). hb: good point. mr: I can assure you that both Jett and Mellencamp are household names in the Netherlands at least for people of my generation and/or ten years older/younger.

the publicist in Spinal Tap is based on the publicist for Spinal Tap--Bobby Cowan, an old friend who acted as my LA arm during the time the movie was being made. (I later established my own LA office.) The musical consultant on the film was Derek Sutton, on whose exploits many an episode was based. Derek and I first got to know each other when Derek was managing Jethro Tull, Robin Trower, and Procol Harum and I was covering those bands for the rock magazine I edited, Circus. Bobby was Derek's publicist at the time. Derek remains one of my closest friends to this very day. Meanwhile the film was made by National Lampoon people. My art studio--Cloud Studio--art directed the first seven issues of the National Lampoon. All these crossed connections are beginning to make me feel like the Forest Gump of the 70s and 80s.

Oh, by the way, I've only seen Spinal Tap twice. Which is way below the national average.
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that fumbling beast with 88 teeth (the phrase Billy Joel used when complaining about how painful songwriting is for him...did I tell you about the morning we were having brunch and he needed ever so badly to talk about this woman he'd met the night before, a woman who defied all his stereotypes of what women are [his stereotypes were EXTRAORDINARILY narrow]. he shoved a student notebook across the table to show me that for the first ime in his life, instead of agonizing over each song for months, he'd written an entire lp worth of lyrics in two hours. the album was the worst he ever made, but it sold four million. the woman was Christie Brinkley.)

In a message dated 8/6/01 9:34:20 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: Howard: did you see press coverage of MTV's 20th birthday party last week? It featured Joan Jett and Billy Idol. Further proof that your fear of the music industry passing you by are not so :) Joan (Jett) was here on the Bloom bed taping the tv special based on Global Brain with me the day after the 20th birthday bash and told me a bit about it. but i didn't realize that Billy was part of it too. Lord, Alex, I wonder how his drug problems are. I actually recruited his parents to fight them with me for a year. I suspect this was one battle I lost. His parents wanted me to manage billy and he was into it too, but I didn't feel it was something I had the time and inclination to do. I was approaching the time for writing up my own theories and couldn't put in the 17-hours-a-day of focus on billy's career and his humanity that would have been required. The managers who grabbed Billy felt that cocaine was ok as a recreational drug and didn't mind seeing a bit of it around. my impression was that with young William Broad, there would probably never be such a thing as "just a bit" of "recreational" cocaine. Howard
ps I told joan about the year Warners decided to do some sort of music video cable channel and hired someone who took me out to lunch every tuesday to brainstorm ideas for the upcoming enterprise. I also confessed with some dismay that I didn't think any of my ideas had proven useful. Joan said "wrong," and pointed out that her video was one of the first eight used to launch the resulting product. Said Kenny Laguna, Joan's manager and mine, Joan became MTV's female Elvis Presley. Whether I had anything to do with that is very hard to say.
Did you have anything to do with the Aerosmith/Run DMC collaboration? :) hb: yes. and I could have made sure that INXS tour strategy took them straight to the top. tour strategy was at the very heart of what I did to build billy idol, joan jett, and john mellencamp. since managers were supposed to know tour strategy but didn't, i handled that for them, even convincing the bands to tour when it was necessary but when no one else on the team--including the manager--could persuade the artists to abandon their living rooms and go out on the road.
See the \newpara\joan jett* file

Alex burns & hb 0810-01 > hb: yes. ironically, my friend and antagonist John Mellencamp, the > jacksons, and, in all probability, Prince. maybe kristin scott thomas, > > too--at least i hope. surely there must be others!!!???? AB: Well, I would have guessed Mellencamp. Prince's output is amazing: he averages a new song everyday, and the rumors are that he has thousands of session hours and unreleased material in the Paisley Park archives. hb: yup, he and Elton John suffer from hyper creativity. They produce so much music it would glut the public and drag their fame into the dust. So they have to be sneaky. In Prince's case, he used to hide it behind the bands he created. They were Trojan horses for his music. The Time, one of the first of his attempts at this, disappointed him. It turned out they were arch music makers themselves and didn't need to play his stuff. That must have been a bitter pill to swallow. I suspect Prince aches with his musical pregnancy and needs the release of birth. The release of recording and performance. ab: I've heard stories that when he tours, it's not uncommon for him and his band entourage to go to a club afterwards and play for another 3 hours. hb: music is literally Prince's language, his way of communicating to his fellow human beings. Notes pour out of him the way words pour out of me. Our similarities, strange as it sounds, is what gave us a nearly psychic alchemy. ab: With that kind of "work ethic", I'm not surprised he ended up working with you :) hb: I think you've just perceived a great deal more than I've seen until now. ab: Speaking of Spinal Tap, the English team behind "The Young Ones" (an early 1980s series) once put out an hilarious album as "Bad News", a fake heavy metal band (their songs skewered Queen, Led Zeppelin and Status Quo), complete with "in-studio" dialogue and guitar solos by Queen's Brian May. hb: did you know that before joining Queen, Brian May got his degree in astronomy and did his thesis on intergalactic dust clouds. so you can probably guess which was my favorite member of the band when we worked together. Howard Very, very funny: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000032RP/ hb: amazing. and it's selling well to this very day!!!!! oh, by the way, I just bought a four-cd boxed set of all Tom Lehrer's work to play to Di. Do you know his stuff? it's hilarious too.
(A sample song lyric: "'Once they go up
Who cares where they come down
That's not my department,'
Says Werner Von Braun.")
Alex Burns and hb 8/10/01 > hb: music is literally Prince's language, his way of communicating to > his fellow human beings. Notes pour out of him the way words pour out > of me. Our similarities, strange as it sounds, are what gave us a > nearly psychic alchemy. AB: So you established enough rapport to communicate across music/word boundaries? hb: it was beyond belief. his managers literally suspected I was a psychic. They used me over and over again to read Prince's mind. I'm not kidding. But it was a matter of highly-tuned empathy and a lot of study, not anything supernatural. > ab: With that kind of "work ethic", I'm not > surprised he ended up working with you :) > > hb: I think you've just perceived a great deal more than I've seen > until now. AB: Hmm, intriguing. You're definately working in the _Daimonic_ tradition (Carl Jung, James Hillman, Thomas Moore, Raghavan Iyer: the subjective approach to the Subjective Universe, which you then interlink with your scientific research). hb: some amazing insights into why I had "visions," "channeling," "mind-reading," and other psychic-style abilities came a few days ago from the work I did with the Dutch tv folks on the special for Global Brain. They wanted me to give examples from the sports world of how parts of the brain that consciousness never knows carry out lightning calculations of the most astonishing sort in the minds of championship athletes. Marco Van Basten, the Dutch soccer star, was able to calculate in a microsecond the trajectory of the ball, the position of all the players on the field, the position of the goalie, and what each twist of the goalie's face and muscles revealed about what spots in the goal he'd be unable to defend. At the same instant Van Basten's non-verbal brain was able to handle terrabits of coordination between the millions of cells of muscle and nerve needed to kick the ball in a strategically perfect manner. That much the Dutch had figured out for themselves.

The point I tried to make was that it had taken decades of conscious application of will to get Van Basten's muscles and brain so precisely practiced that these macrocalculations could take place in a flash. Then it hit me. The answer to a mystery. I'd never been able to figure out how, when Joan Jett's manager, Kenny Laguna, had visited my office, my brain had coughed up an instant vision of how to take her to the top. She'd been turned down by 23 record companies and Kenny had no management experience at all. So theoretically she should have been an unlikely candidate for stardom. But, Alex, I could see her as a star, predict the timeframe--2 years--and had a feel for every step she'd have to take along the way. You know the story. I sat Kenny down, gave him a two-hour lecture on the obstacles he'd encounter along the way--humongous and dastardly hazards--then told him that if he worked 17 hour days seven days a week and did everything I told him to do I'd deliver him a star in two years. My calculation was a tad inaccurate. Joan was number one on the record charts with a double-platinum album in eighteen months. But the whole vision had flared up in a microsecond. So had other strategic "visions" that were used to create longterm strategies and guide us through daily twists and turns while building the careers of Billy Idol, John Mellencamp, and a bunch of others. Then there was the weird ability to read Prince's mind from a distance of 1,500 miles after not seeing him for six months. How does one account for that? Here's the insight that came from working with Fons de Poel and Marcel Roele last week. These "supernormal" skills were Marco-van-Basten-style insta-maneuvers based on huge amounts of study. I'd spent years taking rock careers apart, applying correlational studies to extract the secrets of success, learning to predict four months in advance what albums would be on top of the charts, then finding out why the albums showed the patterns of sales I'd absorbed, and finally befriending booking agents, taking those with the most eager minds out to dinner so we could analyze the strategic errors of rockers who were almost-making-it-but-not-quite and so we could reverse engineer the tricks that had taken other artists to greatness. On top of that, I learned lessons on touring strategy from managers who were wizards at it.

By the time Joan walked into my office, I was ripe, trained, practiced, and pre-rehearsed for an instant vision. As for the alleged mind reading--I'd been studying my own emotions and those of others since the age of thirteen, had begun to take courses in psychology at sixteen, had learned a lot of practical lessons in human nuance from the seven therapists who'd tried to help me out, had turned down four fellowships in clinical psych, had spent my hitchhiking-and-riding-the-rails years learning to extract the life story from every driver who picked me up and every hobo I met, then had honed the skill of life-story grabbing and of applying empathy to fill in the blanks during years as a journalist. When I sat down with Kenny Loggins at his home in Santa Barbara and told him he was terrified of a woman and wanted to rocket away from her at 200 miles an hour, preferably in a Lamborghini, he was startled as hell and blurted, "Who told you about the problems I'm having with my wife." But it wasn't telepathy. It came from applying a great deal of training--including empathetic calisthenics--to his body of work. It came from a month of studying his lyrics, being utterly baffled by them, returning to them over and over again, then finally rearranging the stanzas like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Feeling out the things that Maurice White, founder of Earth, Wind, & Fire, never told his managers was a matter of reading the meaning of the graphics on his album covers. Getting what Styx' vocalist and songwriter Dennis de Young was really trying to say in his albums also involved a month of puzzling out the lyrics and the album graphics...then interviewing him for three days straight. By the way, I was not able to read Prince's mind in a vacuum. His managers would usually send (in great secrecy) a sheet of his upcoming lyrics, or let me visit the set where Purple Rain was being made (a trip on which I never got to talk to Prince--but the details were all there to read), or even to see a semi-finished video of Under The Cherry Moon before I'd give them the Swami act. I'm posting this to paleopsych because our ability to tune ourselves to the frequencies of others has a lot of scientific meanings. It's an example of the way we integrate socially. It's the equivalent of the electrons I was talking about last night--electrons that probably participate in a wave by simply ooching back and forth a tiny bit and passing their movement on to the unstable electrons circling atoms adjacent to them. We do that as humans. Watching news reports last night on the violence in Israel and Macedonia it became obvious that we humans easily pass anger to one another--the sort of righteous anger over martyred fellow-members of our group that leads to mass violence and a breakdown of society. We do it in ways that very much mirror the passage of a sea wave's motion from one gently rolling molecule to the next one down the line. We can easily ignite with a shared rage because we have common instincts, common brains, common genes, common emotional capacities, and we resonate easily to our neighbors' frequencies. Music synchronizes us. So do rituals, propaganda, and news reports. A deep empathic core causes us to congeal, to come together in large scale social enterprises as automatically as termites do when building a mound of enormous size and complexity. When you tap that core consciously, what you achieve can look like outright telepathy.
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Why did you and prince "split up" - or did the relationship just end when you left the business?

He had a fear of men, which he overcame enough to allow me into his life for roughly five years. then it closed in again, and though I continued to be his interpreter, he retreated within his shell and we lost contact. prince can relate to women, but men frighten him. in 1987 he changed direction, dove into christianity, and began severing relationships to those outside the tiny community of chosen people he led in Minneapolis. I was one of those severed. One result was a plunge in his popularity and in the accessibility (and success) of his music. love--Howard
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Subj: RE: the empires of the steppes Date: 8/22/01 2:02:20 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: Howard, The trick, I think, is to account for the unstable outbreak dynamics of pastoral conquest. Why does it come in concentrated events and then fall apart, only to break out again centuries or millennia later? hb: excellent, excellent question. in several theories of self-organization--including mine, Ilya Prigogine's, and Koen DePryck's--forms grow until they reach a godelian point of paradox, then fragment and reform in grander, more complex ways. In material E. O. Wilson cites in his book Sociobiology implies that groups grow, suppress intragroup squabbles, become successful, master other groups, then fragment as the subgroups within the victorious superorganism compete to grab the spoils. This happened, for example, with the Mongols once their conquest was assured. They fragmented and fought for superiority within the Mongol Empire...thus cutting that empire in pieces and eventually destroying it. Adolescent langurs gather in pack, oust a head honcho from his harem, take over, then battle among themselves to see who will be the one langur to dominate. The winner takes over the harem and ousts his allies. Machiavelli outlined the same plan for coups in The Prince--gather allies, topple the top man, take over his position, then eliminate your allies. Why? Because they've been your equals and are likely to try to topple you. Another example. I was asked yesterday by the Toronto Star why Michael Jackson was ousted from his position as top dog in the music world, then, ten years later, revived as a hero again. The answer: when his solo career was starting and he was breaking down the race barriers of radio and mtv, he vicariously lived out the desires of his fans. He represented the group soul for those who loved him. He began as an underdog--shunned by white radio and tv. Many of those in the public--especially the teens who buy and embrace music--could identify.

Teens, too, are underdogs about to embark on the attempt to carve out an identity in an adult culture in which they are outsiders. it is a difficult process that usually does not end until people reach roughly the age of thirty. As Michael Jackson rose in the 1980s, his fans rose with him. They rose vicariously. More important, they felt that their enthusiasm was the force that was turning him into a superstar. Their egos, their sense of power and control, were fed by his success. Why? Because they felt they had made it happen. They had felt it, not articulated it. The feeling was emotional, not verbal. But emotional feelings are the most powerful of all. Once Michael was ensconced as the king of pop, he ceased to be an underdog. He was no longer a lifter of the souls of those who loved him, but an overdog, an established aristocrat of pop. His power no longer gave his fans a sense of control. His success was self-sustaining. He didn't need his adherents anymore. In other words he was an alpha male, an oppressor. How could those who had championed him show control? Especially those who had in the press who had aided his rise? By tearing him down. And this they proceeded to do--for a decade. Today he is an underdog, and the public and press can once again demonstrate their power--their control over another's destiny, by rebuilding him. This, in fact, is what they are doing. As someone who did 20 years of fieldwork in mass culture and worked with Michael Jackson, I've been able to study this phenomenon from a privleged position--from the inside. But here's the bottom line. Oscillation underlies most things in this universe. Social organization is no exception to the rule. pr: Nomad life makes for pretty independent sorts who can move at a whim with their livestock. In East Africa, pastoralists compared to farmers tend to be low on respect for authority and low on belief in witchcraft. Farmers tend to be high on witchcraft belief, people suppose, because sedentary lifestyle leads to festering disputes with neighbors, whereas pastoralists just move away from trouble.

The political problem of nomadism is that it can lead to lots of conflict at quite small scales. Remember Lawrence of Arabia's bitter speech about the Arabs being "small people" after the Bedouin character played by Omar Sherif kills his guide for trespass on his tribe's well. hb: this is excellent thinking, Pete. If you look at T.E. Lawrence's book, this killing plays an even more important role than in the film. pr: If so, pastoral life is very insecure, and the pastoralists involved are liable to be subjugated by enamoring agrarian states or even oasis city-states. However, the latent political power of pastoral nomads is enormous. Mobile, tough, experienced, fighters, they are hell on the hoof hb: brilliant phrase. pr: if put together in sufficient numbers. Eurasian pastoralists developed political institutions that generated rather highly organized tribes. They became pretty effective coalition building politicians. Tribes, tribal confederations, and alliances could presumably secure more domestic tranquility, conduct more efficient long-distance trade (another specialty of nomads), and deal from a position of some strength with other tribes, states and cities. Sometimes, such tribal leaders could make minor conquests of city states or insert themselves into the politics of agrarian states, often via service as auxiliaries in the states army. Gothic leaders came to play a big role in late Roman politics via Roman military service. Ibn Kaldun, the mediaeval Islamic geographer, has a nice model of the relationship between city-states and small states in N. Africa and Iberia and the pastoral nomads in the North African hinterland. hb: I'd love it if you could expand on your interpretation of this, I've read Ibn Khaldun, and you've seen something in him I failed to spot. Which means you saw a Richersonian meaning I'd love to know. pr: If a charismatic leader could organize a sufficiently large confederation of tribes then he could embark on major conquests. My image is that once a confederation gets so big, no coalition of other tribes can resist it. Agrarian statesmen with a nomad frontier are themselves usually pretty sophisticated players of balance-of-power politics and manage to play one pastoral polity off against the others to forestall threatening superconfederations.

Once in awhile, the stars line up just right, and one escapes this control. hb: In the relations of the Chinese to their nomadic neighbors, the Chinese frequently picked an underdog, armed and trained its warriors, and used them to harrass the overdog nomads who threatened China's borderlands, and sometimes threatened to take over all of China. By arming the enemies of their enemies, they often strengthened the underdogs so substantially that the nomads they'd armed overwhelmed the old nomadic empire, then invaded and took over China itself. China tried this strategy once again in the 1980s and 90s when it worked with us to arm and train the mujahdeen fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Now those very mujahadeen--Osama bin Laden and his buddies--threaten both us and the Chinese. The growing superconfederation offers death to pastoral tribes that oppose it, but a share of the booty of conquest if they join up. Naturally, all but the pathologically intransigent join up. Then the conquest takes off, or at least becomes a real possibility. Probably a whole lot of thing have to go just right for a super-confederacy to take off, ranging from extra-ordinary political skills on the nomad side, blunders on the agrarian side, economic weakness on the agrarian side, a surplus of horses on the nomad side, etc., etc. Something, at any rate, needs to keep the triggering events fairly rare, as the outbreaks are isolated in time, tho the politics of state-nomad interaction are routinely conflictual. Likely every outbreak differs from every other in detail too. As far as I can see, the historical records are too scanty to support much besides speculation as to these details. In the aftermath of conquest, pastoral empires are unable to sustain charisma by personal means and have trouble institutionalizing it a la Max Weber. They often employ institutions modeled on those of their Roman, Chinese, etc. victims, but these are not very well suited to governing nomads. So the confederacy fragments, the states, perhaps now ruled by a nomad dynasty, return to successful balance of power politics, and the cycle is complete. (No doubt to call it a cycle oversimplifies greatly). I suppose the reason that state level institutions generally did not persist in nomad country is that nomads are more costly to supervise than peasants but are generally less productive.

I read a neat analysis of the Roman conquest of Britain. The argument was that the reason the conquest couldn't be extended to Scotland (and by extrapolation Ireland, Germany, and other similar frontiers) was that the farm population and its surpluses were too small to support a network of legions and their towns sufficient to police the area. Presumably other low productivity farming areas with a history of fractious independence, such as Switzerland, Afghanistan, Caucasia, and most of sub-Sahara Africa obeyed a similar logic. Pastoral nomads are analogous to poor mountain farmers, except that in Central Eurasia taken all together there were an awful lot of them and their whole economy, not just their fighting force, is extra-ordinarily mobile.. In the early modern period, innovations in arms plus greater economic power and rising populations led the most affected states, Russia and China, to bear the cost of pacifying their neighboring nomads. One can't guarantee that we've see the last of the nomads. Russia's controls have at least temporarily lapsed, with even one mountain farming outfit, the Chechens, tying their military in knots. The Chinese are still quite firm. But the Oigur Turks are said to be restive, and certainly the Tibetans would strike for independence if they thought they could succeed. Perhaps the "cycle" will continue. Of course, if economic modernization does raise productivity on the steppes enough to support a state, then the peculiar dynamics of nomad conquest may disappear, depending as it does on relatively great military power on the part of relatively poor people. Did I recommended Anatoly Khazanov's Nomads and the Outside World (U. Wisconsin 1994) to you? He is a Russian expat specialist on nomads, with a number of keen insights. hb: this sounds extremely helpful. All thanks. Another thing--you have put together an extraordinary train of thought. Howard

-----Original Message----- From: Howard Bloom [mailto:] Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 5:17 PM To: Peter Richerson; Subject: re: the empires of the steppes Peter--rereading this brought to mind one of the most successful conquests by steppe people's of all times--the Indo-European conquests of India, the Middle East, Greece, and seemingly of much of Europe in the second millennium bc. Later known as Mycenaeans, Greeks, Brahmins, Hittites, and Aryans, these folks from north of the Black Sea pulled of some rather amazing feats. What do you think accounts for the periodic coalition of steppe nomads into brilliantly organized mass cohorts? Howard In a message dated 8/14/01 4:47:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: The Ottoman Empire is only a late exemplar in an ancient string of large-scale states operated by Turkic speakers and other East and Central Asians ethnic groups. A French historian Rene Grousett wrote a thick book translated into English as The Empire of the Steppes outlining their nature. Given the rather hostile environment of the steppes, and the fractious nature of the pastoral nomads that dominated them, Turkish (and Mongol, etc.) statecraft is not to be sneezed at. Of course, the steppe people absorbed a lot from the Chinese and other agrarian states on the better-watered margins of Eurasia. They were able to maintain their independence throughout most of the historical period and of course conquered the more "advanced" agrarians from time to time.
The following comes from Eric Shinn, entertainment reporter of the Toronto Star, to whom I forwarded our correspondence on the empires of the steppes--and michael jackson. Subj: RE: the empires of the steppes--and michael jackson Date: 8/23/01 2:13:31 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: (Shinn, Eric) To: ('Howard Bloom') Thanks for the forward, Howard! There's a really good article in the current Wired magazine about the Japanese communications company DoCoMo, which has built its business model around providing a content-neutral platform upon which independent parties can offer wireless services to cellphone clients. hb: Docomo posted good earnings today while more traditional Japanese communications companies showed downturns. You may have explained why this occurred. es: This company is doing tremendously well, and in light of your conversation with pjricherson, I think it has a lot to do with the manner in which they formalized a process in which the nomadic adaptibility of user demands fulfilled by flocking independent parties can be maintained within a larger empire run by their neutral tech. hb: this is a standard oscillatory pattern in the record and film business. The major corporations lock into a proven formula and repeat it until it bores the public silly. meanwhile small, independent production companies or record companies put out the music and films of rebels, those who dare create new formulae. Public interests shift from the films and music of the majors to the film and music of the rebellious intruders. Eventually the majors get the message and either immitate the indies or buy them out and incorporate the creatives in their stable--often keeping the indie presidents in place. What was indie eventually becomes mainstream, the public gets overdosed on the new formulae, new rebels arise on the fringes, and the process happens all over again. Film rebels I've worked with include Harvey and Bob Weinstein (Miramax), Bob Shea (New Line), and Chris Blackwell, (Island). Two out of these three were outsiders in the 1980s and are the mainstream today.

The list of music outsiders I've helped bring into the mainstream--or have brought the mainstream to--is too long to mention. But helping cultural and subcultural invaders succeed--something I specialized in during my years of fieldwork--provides many insights into the intricacies of cultural evolution. es: If only DoCoMo commanded the Mongols, what would Asia look like today? Hmmmm...... So here's my current dilemma: My roommate Chris (aka DJ C-Rat) and I are both heavily into jungle music. (I know you said you're a relative techno music novice, so suffice it to say this is a style of music with the ritual and rhythm of Carribean reggae soundclash culture hybridized with european techno production aesthetic. hb: it sounds neat. es: It's quite good! I write about it for www.torontojungle.com, and if you're curious, you should check the site out!) hb: I turned off Mendelsohn (some political music of the 1800s) to pull up the site and listen. So far I've heard the sound intro, which is good, but the main screen is coming up slowly--which may be because I'm running 14 computer screens simultaneously. I'll be getting a bigger microprocessor (this one's only 450 mhz) in the next two days. es: The Toronto scene is essentially run by one particular crew, called Vinyl Syndicate. They used to be the underdog, and they're damn good, but they've become rather stagnant in their taste, and many fragmented crews have gained increasing respect around them over time. hb: aha. the typical electronic age pop cycle at work. by the way, the same pattern also operates at the level of sensors on a cell membrane. they're very much a mob with a mob "mentality." A few outsiders find something interesting, and broadcast the message to the rest of the sensor community. The other sensors take it up, it becomes all the rage, then gradually it ceases to seem shiny and new. Then, once again, unconventional sensors find some new molecule with a clever hook or twist. They broadcast its novelty, gradually win over the masses, and the outré becomes mainstream. Fractal patterns in this cosmos tend to repeat on many levels of emergence. es: Chris and I would like to figure out a way to connect the suppressed crews all over our province in such a consolidated front that Vinyl Syndicate will crumble pathetically, or realize that they must adapt to survive. Our concern is, of course, how to maintain our tribal underground functionality while essentially achieving market domination. hb: a tricky proposition. Call me some night between 7pm and 8pm when I'm free (what night that may be I don't know, since I get booked up quickly) and we'll talk about it. Howard

-----Original Message----- From: Howard Bloom [mailto:] Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2001 3:58 AM To: Peter Richerson; ; Eric Shinn; Aaron Hicklin; Ilya Marritz; Chris Campion; Alan Edwards Subject: re: the empires of the steppes--and michael jackson Subj: RE: the empires of the steppes Date: 8/22/01 2:02:20 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: (Richerson, Peter J) To: ('Howard Bloom') Howard, The trick, I think, is to account for the unstable outbreak dynamics of pastoral conquest. Why does it come in concentrated events and then fall apart, only to break out again centuries or millennia later? hb: excellent, excellent question. in several theories of self-organization--including mine, Ilya Prigogine's, and Koen DePryck's--forms grow until they reach a godelian point of paradox, then fragment and reform in grander, more complex ways. In material E. O. Wilson cites in his book Sociobiology implies that groups grow, suppress intragroup squabbles, become successful, master other groups, then fragment as the subgroups within the victorious superorganism compete to grab the spoils. This happened, for example, with the Mongols once their conquest was assured. They fragmented and fought for superiority within the Mongol Empire...thus cutting that empire in pieces and eventually destroying it. Adolescent langurs gather in pack, oust a head honcho from his harem, take over, then battle among themselves to see who will be the one langur to dominate. The winner takes over the harem and ousts his allies. Machiavelli outlined the same plan for coups in The Prince--gather allies, topple the top man, take over his position, then eliminate your allies. Why? Because they've been your equals and are likely to try to topple you. Another example. I was asked yesterday by the Toronto Star why Michael Jackson was ousted from his position as top dog in the music world, then, ten years later, revived as a hero again. The answer: when his solo career was starting and he was breaking down the race barriers of radio and mtv, he vicariously lived out the desires of his fans. He represented the group soul for those who loved him. He began as an underdog--shunned by white radio and tv. Many of those in the public--especially the teens who buy and embrace music--could identify. Teens, too, are underdogs about to embark on the attempt to carve out an identity in an adult culture in which they are outsiders. it is a difficult process that usually does not end until people reach roughly the age of thirty. As Michael Jackson rose in the 1980s, his fans rose with him.

They rose vicariously. More important, they felt that their enthusiasm was the force that was turning him into a superstar. Their egos, their sense of power and control, were fed by his success. Why? Because they felt they had made it happen. They had felt it, not articulated it. The feeling was emotional, not verbal. But emotional feelings are the most powerful of all. Once Michael was ensconced as the king of pop, he ceased to be an underdog. He was no longer a lifter of the souls of those who loved him, but an overdog, an established aristocrat of pop. His power no longer gave his fans a sense of control. His success was self-sustaining. He didn't need his adherents anymore. In other words he was an alpha male, an oppressor. How could those who had championed him show control? Especially those who had in the press who had aided his rise? By tearing him down. And this they proceeded to do--for a decade. Today he is an underdog, and the public and press can once again demonstrate their power--their control over another's destiny, by rebuilding him. This, in fact, is what they are doing. As someone who did 20 years of fieldwork in mass culture and worked with Michael Jackson, I've been able to study this phenomenon from a privleged position--from the inside. But here's the bottom line. Oscillation underlies most things in this universe. Social organization is no exception to the rule. pr: Nomad life makes for pretty independent sorts who can move at a whim with their livestock. In East Africa, pastoralists compared to farmers tend to be low on respect for authority and low on belief in witchcraft. Farmers tend to be high on witchcraft belief, people suppose, because sedentary lifestyle leads to festering disputes with neighbors, whereas pastoralists just move away from trouble. The political problem of nomadism is that it can lead to lots of conflict at quite small scales. Remember Lawrence of Arabia's bitter speech about the Arabs being "small people" after the Bedouin character played by Omar Sherif kills his guide for trespass on his tribe's well. hb: this is excellent thinking,

Pete. If you look at T.E. Lawrence's book, this killing plays an even more important role than in the film. pr: If so, pastoral life is very insecure, and the pastoralists involved are liable to be subjugated by enamoring agrarian states or even oasis city-states. However, the latent political power of pastoral nomads is enormous. Mobile, tough, experienced, fighters, they are hell on the hoof hb: brilliant phrase. pr: if put together in sufficient numbers. Eurasian pastoralists developed political institutions that generated rather highly organized tribes. They became pretty effective coalition building politicians. Tribes, tribal confederations, and alliances could presumably secure more domestic tranquility, conduct more efficient long-distance trade (another specialty of nomads), and deal from a position of some strength with other tribes, states and cities. Sometimes, such tribal leaders could make minor conquests of city states or insert themselves into the politics of agrarian states, often via service as auxiliaries in the states army. Gothic leaders came to play a big role in late Roman politics via Roman military service. Ibn Kaldun, the mediaeval Islamic geographer, has a nice model of the relationship between city-states and small states in N. Africa and Iberia and the pastoral nomads in the North African hinterland. hb: I'd love it if you could expand on your interpretation of this, I've read Ibn Khaldun, and you've seen something in him I failed to spot. Which means you saw a Richersonian meaning I'd love to know. pr: If a charismatic leader could organize a sufficiently large confederation of tribes then he could embark on major conquests. My image is that once a confederation gets so big, no coalition of other tribes can resist it. Agrarian statesmen with a nomad frontier are themselves usually pretty sophisticated players of balance-of-power politics and manage to play one pastoral polity off against the others to forestall threatening superconfederations. Once in awhile, the stars line up just right, and one escapes this control. hb: In the relations of the Chinese to their nomadic neighbors, the Chinese frequently picked an underdog, armed and trained its warriors, and used them to harrass the overdog nomads who threatened China's borderlands, and sometimes threatened to take over all of China. By arming the enemies of their enemies, they often strengthened the underdogs so substantially that the nomads they'd armed overwhelmed the old nomadic empire, then invaded and took over China itself.

China tried this strategy once again in the 1980s and 90s when it worked with us to arm and train the mujahdeen fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Now those very mujahadeen--Osama bin Laden and his buddies--threaten both us and the Chinese. The growing superconfederation offers death to pastoral tribes that oppose it, but a share of the booty of conquest if they join up. Naturally, all but the pathologically intransigent join up. Then the conquest takes off, or at least becomes a real possibility. Probably a whole lot of thing have to go just right for a super-confederacy to take off, ranging from extra-ordinary political skills on the nomad side, blunders on the agrarian side, economic weakness on the agrarian side, a surplus of horses on the nomad side, etc., etc. Something, at any rate, needs to keep the triggering events fairly rare, as the outbreaks are isolated in time, tho the politics of state-nomad interaction are routinely conflictual. Likely every outbreak differs from every other in detail too. As far as I can see, the historical records are too scanty to support much besides speculation as to these details. In the aftermath of conquest, pastoral empires are unable to sustain charisma by personal means and have trouble institutionalizing it a la Max Weber. They often employ institutions modeled on those of their Roman, Chinese, etc. victims, but these are not very well suited to governing nomads. So the confederacy fragments, the states, perhaps now ruled by a nomad dynasty, return to successful balance of power politics, and the cycle is complete. (No doubt to call it a cycle oversimplifies greatly). I suppose the reason that state level institutions generally did not persist in nomad country is that nomads are more costly to supervise than peasants but are generally less productive. I read a neat analysis of the Roman conquest of Britain. The argument was that the reason the conquest couldn't be extended to Scotland (and by extrapolation Ireland, Germany, and other similar frontiers) was that the farm population and its surpluses were too small to support a network of legions and their towns sufficient to police the area.

Presumably other low productivity farming areas with a history of fractious independence, such as Switzerland, Afghanistan, Caucasia, and most of sub-Sahara Africa obeyed a similar logic. Pastoral nomads are analogous to poor mountain farmers, except that in Central Eurasia taken all together there were an awful lot of them and their whole economy, not just their fighting force, is extra-ordinarily mobile.. In the early modern period, innovations in arms plus greater economic power and rising populations led the most affected states, Russia and China, to bear the cost of pacifying their neighboring nomads. One can't guarantee that we've see the last of the nomads. Russia's controls have at least temporarily lapsed, with even one mountain farming outfit, the Chechens, tying their military in knots. The Chinese are still quite firm. But the Oigur Turks are said to be restive, and certainly the Tibetans would strike for independence if they thought they could succeed. Perhaps the "cycle" will continue. Of course, if economic modernization does raise productivity on the steppes enough to support a state, then the peculiar dynamics of nomad conquest may disappear, depending as it does on relatively great military power on the part of relatively poor people. Did I recommended Anatoly Khazanov's Nomads and the Outside World (U. Wisconsin 1994) to you? He is a Russian expat specialist on nomads, with a number of keen insights. hb: this sounds extremely helpful. All thanks. Another thing--you have put together an extraordinary train of thought. Howard

-----Original Message----- From: Howard Bloom [mailto:] Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 5:17 PM To: Peter Richerson; Subject: re: the empires of the steppes Peter--rereading this brought to mind one of the most successful conquests by steppe people's of all times--the Indo-European conquests of India, the Middle East, Greece, and seemingly of much of Europe in the second millennium bc. Later known as Mycenaeans, Greeks, Brahmins, Hittites, and Aryans, these folks from north of the Black Sea pulled of some rather amazing feats. What do you think accounts for the periodic coalition of steppe nomads into brilliantly organized mass cohorts? Howard In a message dated 8/14/01 4:47:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time, writes: The Ottoman Empire is only a late exemplar in an ancient string of large-scale states operated by Turkic speakers and other East and Central Asians ethnic groups. A French historian Rene Grousett wrote a thick book translated into English as The Empire of the Steppes outlining their nature. Given the rather hostile environment of the steppes, and the fractious nature of the pastoral nomads that dominated them, Turkish (and Mongol, etc.) statecraft is not to be sneezed at. Of course, the steppe people absorbed a lot from the Chinese and other agrarian states on the better-watered margins of Eurasia. They were able to maintain their independence throughout most of the historical period and of course conquered the more "advanced" agrarians from time to time.
________
Hb: In 1619, Descartes would have been 23 years old. Meaning in all probability that he fixated on a passion point-had an imprinting moment-a moment that sealed itself permanently into his neuronal makeup-as a young soldier, but didn't have the chance to get back to the question that had burned itself into his synaptic lattice until he was roughly 40 years old.

The idea of passion points--imprinting moments in childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood--comes from my work with rock stars. Musical artists easily fall into the one-hit wonder pattern. They put out a song that soars on the charts, release, perhaps, one more, then they disappear forever from the public eye, never to be seen--or heard--again.

My goal was to give rock and r&b artists an enduring career. The first task was to do a four-hour session--or several--in which we went through the artist's life story from the very beginning on up to the present, searching for what I thought of in those days as the artist's soul--the source of personal passion, of the unseen self--that roared and danced in her music, her lyrics, and her stage performance. The performing and creating personality is often one the self of daily life doesn't know. The everyday self is the one that goes through the automatic rituals of "hello, how are you?" "fine, thank you, and how are you?" It has a full arsenal of clichés with which to deal with most situations that involve what TS Eliot calls preparing "a face to meet the faces that we meet." (Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959, covers this aspect of self pretty thoroughly.)

But another self reveals its existence in lyrics, music, and performance. It is often a separate personality, an interior god of sorts, a self that reveals its form only in ecstatic moments--when a piece of music "writes itself" or when in the throes of a stage performance the singer "loses himself" and is caught up in a transcendent experience.

I went through the story of an artist's life with him hunting for the moments in childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood that had sealed themselves into the web of emotion that made the hidden god of creativity and of ecstasy. If I could find the passion points, I could find the hidden self. I then introduced that self of ecstasy to the everyday self, the self of hellos and how are yous. From the moment of discovery on, I did everything in my power to keep that artist in touch with the hidden self. I also told him or her that he owed his audience not just his songs and his performances, but his life. By revealing his life and articulating his passions he could reveal others to themselves, he could validate them in their moments of madness or confusion, he could bring order and out of the chaos of his listeners' emotions.

Give your audience just a glimpse of your emotional self, and you become a one hit wonder. Come to know that self and reveal it to your audience year after year-through its changes and growth--and you become an icon, a figure who helps interpret others to themselves, takes others out of themselves, and validates feelings multitudes have had but have been afraid are insane.

What is insane? Feelings that have no social acceptance, no words to describe them, no validation of an other, no mirror of recognition in others' eyes or words. If an artist gives this validation and transcendence to others, he saves their souls. He makes what seemed lunatic sane. He yanks others out of their moments of trouble and gives them instants of joy.

Give your emotional self to others and they will hold you in their heart for a lifetime.

Al Cheyne suggests a relationship between Descartes' living out of his passionate self--the self of an imprinting moment--and the revelations of saints. I agree with him. The inner gods are easily described in secular terms. They can be described and explained via psychology, evolutionary theory, sociology, and the other tools with which we work in science. They can also be described in the parallel languages-the isomorphic metaphors--of poetry and religion.

But the trick is more than just understanding where the inner gods come from (passion points), it is to invoke them. The real goal is to make those gods come alive, to make them thrive, and to help others achieve their own revelations and mystic ecstasies.

However one must do this while suppressing one of the most potent inner gods of all-the god of violence, hatred, and war. One must unleash the gods of wonder, of light in darkness, and of creativity. Howard

Why Do We Make War?

"According to Wilson, when a population over populates the territory, groups within the population compete for territories and those that win, in the hierarchical struggles, possess the territory" [like Gombe chimps warring, witch hunts] rimbum warriors losing and living with in?laws also applies to wandering Jews and displaced Palestinians 8a {{subculture}}

Says geopolitical analyst Halford John MacKinder, "the great wars of history... are the outcome...of the unequal growth of nations." (yen, p. 268) 64b

Peace among capuchin monkey sub?groups depends on "a balance of terror" *when one group senses weakness in another, it attacks...violently *and when a subgroup has finally come out on top, its members begin to fight with each other. (Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 268) 73a [power vacuums lead to war]

"Why people go to war" scarcity discovery of a new resource "19th century" America, the railroad turned wilderness into inexhaustible resources makes people feel more vigorous, sperm count goes up, they swagger *god is with them Manifest Destiny British conquering the world for Christ and civilization brought to those heights by sailing ships, trade, banking, steam engine "under Hitler, Germany began to prosper" "when a society is suffering from scarcity...it becomes cowed and passive" [use the conservation of resources by the Arizona toad to show why] The Basques abandoned their territory the Irish under "potato famine" did the same when the Vikings invented their boats, they opened a tremendous resource fish *started to swagger and felt manifest destiny Mongols developed long?bow the force that opens new resources is a new technology 4b

A careful psychological study of the writings, speeches, and other materials by and about George Bush and Saddam Hussein showed that when they were optimistic about themselves, they were the most aggressive in their international stance. (Military Aggression and Risk Predicted by Explanatory Style by Jason M. Satterfield and Martin Seligman, p. 77-82, Psychological Science, March 1994) On the other hand when the two were the most personally pessimistic, they were the least aggressive and the least warlike. 93a

"Fredrick Turner's Frontier hypothesis" when society senses a fresh horizon, the be fruitful and conquer mentality is at work exuberance, imagination when it feels frontier is gone, it adopts the k strategy??self denial *repressive, "leaves no room for teeming imaginations...[or] abundant fantasies of new utopias" *spaceship earth and small is beautiful=the latest manifestation outer space the answer 8a

**"War and intolerance seem to go together, probably not because one causes the other, but because they're both the result of the same cause." that cause: "the threatened or actual redistribution of wealth or shake?up in the hierarchy of groups." "The dominant class ends up with losing it's dominance, a dominant nation ends up with losing it's dominance. A subordinate class or nation sees the opportunity to climb the ladder to the top through some accident which has increased it's ability to corner wealth and power." Crusades??Christian Europe saw the opportunity to coalesce and seize a higher position vis a vis the forces of Islam. 17a

what conditions lead a society to have "deep dreams of peace?" what conditions lead other societies to excited dreams of pillage and war? "when a society is on top of the hierarchical ladder it dreams of peace, it goes soft, it seeks to preserve a nonviolent status quo and when a society is on the bottom but sees a chance to move up, it begins to dream of the glories of conquest?" the fantasy of conquest provides an outlet for the powerful fantasies of destruction that frustration triggers in the human brain. in New Guinea when crowding gets bad and wives begin to carp, frustration begins to build??>war. Chinese in the 15th century had grown so complacent they were willing to buy peace at almost any price, and gave away almost half their country to the Kin. like the mood in America for the last 30 or 40 years.as we see ourselves sinking we move toward reactionary religious fervor and possibly the selfrighteous zeal for bloodshed that often goes with it. 17b

do people go to war when they find new resources, as the Americans did when manifest destiny reflected their zeal for conquest at the turn of the century? or when frustration reaches a peak, as in the case of the rimbum tree. or both? 17b c [whiff of riches]

the higher the murder rate in a city, the lower the suicide rate. and the lower the murder rate, the more people kill themselves. in prosperous times, suicides go down and murders go up. in depressions, suicide becomes more popular than murder. *supports the notion that when a society is feeling boisterous, it becomes more aggressive, more willing to beat the pants off its neighbors when their fates are declining, the self?destruct mechanism takes over. suicide was more common than murder in higher socio?economic groups. study concluded that homicide rose in lower classes in prosperous times because frustration rose. and suicides went up among upper classes during economic declines because of frustration. so much for notion that elimination poverty will reduce demand for revolution 23b [see conservatives and withchunt]

As state of economy improved, murder rate among blacks went up and among whites went down. 23b

[opportunity wakes us up] *put a male in with a female rat and at first he'll hump her for all he's worth *later, he'll get bored and lose interest in sex. give him a NEW female...his testosterone level climbs all over again. *Coolidge effect among guinea pigs it's what humans go through when there's a new girl in the office. *the sahara toad principle again: a new girl represents a fresh opportunity for your genes to corner resources. you spring from relative dormancy into interest and action. 23a

"the impulse toward war is triggered, not by having a lot, but by a rapid increase in the amount one has, even if one starts from a very low level. This could also explain why the impulse toward revolution is inflamed instead of stilled by increasing the standard of living of people in poverty." an increase in standard of living wakes the poor up, makes them hunger for more. visions of more, if you're on the bottom, mean taking over what those on top possess. already HAVING a lot doesn't make one warlike, it makes one lazy, complacent, desirous of maintaining the status quo. And having very little makes one listless, weak, ripe for conquest or genocide. [these principles need some strong, anecdotal examples] 17b

[nature's strategy is simple. when there's little to be gained, she slows an organism down. when opportunity arrives, she speeds it up] why do we sleep? clue comes from squirrels, who're awake 3 mos and sleep 9. awake the mos when food is out. asleep when food is scarce. sleep makes cost?effective use of time [like the toads who hibernate until the rain comes??see above] being awake in winter would burn more fuel than they could find. 19a

melatonin keeps the body in tune with its daily cycles by plugging into receptors "in the hypothalamus" (Science, v. 242, p. 78) 55a [the hypothalamus also just happens to handle aggression]

prolonged stress depresses "melatonin secretion" (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, p. 100) 72a

were the Arabs in the time of Mohammed, the Macedonians in the time of Alexander, the Germans under Hitler, experiencing the first whiff of a new prosperity? were the Romans in the early days of their expansion? 17b

"according to Caesar, when one tribe managed to win a victory against Rome, it inspired other tribes to join in a general rebellion. As soon as there was defeat, tribes began to desert." 17b

New Guinea, the Rimbum warriors who take a batch of new territory go through a boom. the pigs who'd been eating the gardens have been killed, so the yams grow plentifully. There's plenty of extra land. Presumably, the winners go into an R phase. meanwhile the pigs are procreating, and the wives are having babies. while things were good, it was easy to rise in society. it was easy to accumulate status symbols. but now it's getting more difficult to make ends meet. there are fewer yams and more mouths to feed. the wife starts complaining. frustration mounts.??> war *In modern society, we have similar cycles. the roaring 60s with prosperity and sexual revolution. Arab oil embargo in 73, things got harder each year. upward mobility was replaced by downward mobility. sexual repression began to dominate the headlines??"The Sexual Revolution Is Over" said the cover of Time in a time of scarcity, men become frightened of demon spirits, impurities, displeasing god. they want to sacrifice. Mayans going through cycles because of soil nutrients wanted to sacrifice to gods Why does this lead to war? a leader comes who says he knows the cause of our troubles, the impurities we're allowing among us??> withchunts 12a

each insect colony claims a group of plants as its own, and defends it against other social insects. some colonies even post sentries on the spot who stand guard for days before returning home on furlough. (Insect Societies, p. 447) 42b

the most aggressive ants are those who cling to a rigidly fixed territory, says Wilson. (Insect Societies, p. 247?8) 42b

among insects, war is "held to a minimum in temperate zones." *but in the tropics, violence is a permissible luxury. (Insect Societies, p. 451) *humans seem less fettered by the weather. Europeans happily butchered each other for centuries. they simply stopped for a rest when the snow came. 42b

Geniuses of Evil-Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mussolini

Howl Bloom: hmmmm, my typing seems a bit amiss
Howl Bloom: Corvus, what is your name?
Blessed Corvus: =) A rhetorical question, that, eh?
Howl Bloom: no
Howl Bloom: a corvid is a raven or crow
Blessed Corvus: Mmhmm. It more accurately reflects me then my name. But.. Call me Diana if you must.
Howl Bloom: so that's the root of your cybername, I'd guess
Howl Bloom: Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt
Howl Bloom: a wonder with an arrow and bow
Blessed Corvus: Indeed. Both.
Howl Bloom: unafraid of killing game
Howl Bloom: beautiful but unapproachable
Blessed Corvus: Let me buddylist you..
Howl Bloom: so your parents did you well
Blessed Corvus: I like the name Diana.
Blessed Corvus: Now, how is that, Howl..
Howl Bloom: it's a good one
Blessed Corvus: That those who get power are oftentimes not too bright.
Howl Bloom: they are bright at social things, but not necessarily at concepts, words, or governing
Howl Bloom: Geogre dim bulb Bush, whom you like and I loathe and for whose campaign I was asked to consult
Howl Bloom: he has family connections and a father who's superb at social networking
Howl Bloom: I suspect his dad is a smart man
Blessed Corvus: Be that as it may
Howl Bloom: George isn't, but Dad got him a present--the presidency
Howl Bloom: but most, dim or bright, have to get such a thing on their own
Blessed Corvus: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini..
Howl Bloom: which is where the organizational and social skills come in
Howl Bloom: Lenin had a lot of help from the Germans
Blessed Corvus: Germans?
Howl Bloom: then proved ruthless, deplorable, despicable and brilliant
Howl Bloom: he should have been shot in his cradle
Blessed Corvus: Seems like power comes to those who're socially adept and cool-minded?
Howl Bloom: Hitler made it on his own, a brilliant artist of the public mind and, again, a man who should have been shot at birth, a tragedy
Howl Bloom: what gifts he had, amazing, Diane, he was awesome
Howl Bloom: yes
Howl Bloom: I must return to work
Howl Bloom: you could keep me here all day
Howl Bloom: you ask good questions
Howl Bloom: and you can see I love answering
Blessed Corvus: You give interesting answers.
Blessed Corvus: Be my teacher; one of them.
Blessed Corvus: For now.

Why science must study religion

Hb 2/6/2003 I seriously doubt that there is any way in which science can prove religion to be mumbo jumbo. My own sense is that religion presents a challenge to science. It serves basic functions our current science is too narrow to see. Its universality suggests that its foundations may be built into the brain. So do the results of transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is able to produce religious experiences in hardened atheists if applied to the proper areas of the brain. Religion is also a challenge to our understanding of evolution. How did it evolve? And did it truly toss new wrinkles into the expanding human brain? What does it do for us emotionally and socially? Why is it still able to achieve things we scientists cannot offer and do not comprehend?
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In a message dated 97-12-01 15:36:05 EST, Anonymous writes: << Subj: Re: is religion a legitimate subject of science? To: (Howl Bloom) Hi! TO ><< Science cannot handle all forms of knowledge, and offers no insights > into the gods or into the divine. >> YOU SAID: >Hmmm. I believe it can. Neither gods nor the divine are supernatural, in my >opinion, but elements within our own mind... Does your mind have spatial limits? Mine doesn't. Therefore it extends throughout the universe and whatever is in my mind is in the universe, as whatever is in the universe is in my mind WE AGREE, THOUGH WE HAVE DIFFERENT WORLDVIEWS ON THE SUBJECT (MINE IS MY GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE INCLUDING THE WASHER IN THE KITCHEN SINK). (tho I screen most of it out of attention most of the time to avoid going nuts). >In fact, I suspect religion is, in many cases, a symbol set isomorphic to >otherwise unexpressed realities of the human psyche. As such, it is our duty >to translate it into science, where we can make it part of our system of >prediction and control. Lotsa luck! Can you do that with dreams, too? Would you WANT to? SURE WOULD, HON. What is this desire for prediction and control, anyway??? I didn't read you as that kind of mechanist. Honestly, How, don't you think we need a far broader worldview/ framework for science than reductionism? YES, WHO EVER SAID I WAS A REDUCTIONIST? I BELIEVE IN MELDING THE ENTIRE MIND, EMOTIONAL, "SPIRITUAL," MYSTIC, RATIONAL. IT'S BEEN A LIFE GOAL SINCE I WAS THIRTEEN. AND SINCE THAT AGE I'VE BEEN ON A CRUSADE TO BRING ALL OF THAT INTO SCIENCE. DOES THAT MAKE ME A CONTROL FREAK? IF SO WHY DO I LOVE ADVENTURES--SITUATIONS WHICH I CANNOT CONTROL AND WHICH BEAR THE RISK OF HURTING ME BUT WHICH CAN LEAD TO BREATHTAKING DISCOVERIES, USUALLY INVOLVING THE UNFOLDING OF ENTIRE PARTS OF ME I NEVER KNEW WHICH RESPOND TO SUDDENLY GRASPED OR EXPERIENCED EXTERNAL REALITIES. I've got to agree with Stef on the following she sent some time ago: "However, it becomes uncomfortable to discover that most people on this list (who knows about those who don't respond) genuinely believe that a large part of the mental function that allows me to do what I do when I write fiction or when I meditate, and a large part of my own mental (and spiritual) experience, is a function of "regression" or in some way related to "lower" or "earlier" or "animal" brain.

SORRY, LISH, BUT THIS IS UTTERLY FALSE. IT IS NOT WHAT I OR MANY OTHER PEOPLE ON THIS LIST BELIEVE AT ALL. I FIND STEF INVALUABLE, BUT SHE SEIZED ON A SMALL PART AND FAILED TO SEE THE WHOLE. PERHAPS THAT MAKES HER A REDUCTIONIST. BUT EVERYONE IS ALLOWED MOMENTS OF BLINDNESS. I ADMIRE STEPHANIE'S MIND TREMENDOUSLY, THOUGH I OFTEN DISAGREE WITH HER. Either that or indicates pathology! I certainly don't think my frequent mode of intuitive processing is *better* than linear, logical, cognitive processing, since I do that, too, and value it very highly -- but I don't see a way to have useful conversations with those who see it as having been superceded evolutionarily by the cognitive. It is my very strong opinion that we need *more* of it, not less, if we are to survive as a species! And we need to value it and learn everything we can learn about it!" I believe, Howie, that you are closer to people such as Stef and myself (both of whom had to unlist) STEF DIDN'T UNLIST. I BEGGED HER TO STAY. THIS GROUP WOULD NOT BE PROPERLY BALANCED WITHOUT HER. AND, YES, MY SWEET, I AM VERY CLOSE TO STEP AND TO YOU AND AT THE SAME TIME VERY FAR. GOES TO A NEW EPIGRAM I COMPOSED TODAY, ONE WHOSE ESSENCE YOU'VE HEARD MANY TIMES FROM ME: "DICHOTOMIES ARE OFTEN THE RESULT OF FAULTY UNDERSTANDING. USUALLY OPPOSITES ARE PARTS OF A MORE INCLUSIVE REALITY, AND BOTH ARE EQUALLY NECESSARY AND EQUALLY TRUE." than you say, for fear of that loss of scientific credibility. She and I cannot deny what we have lived; neither can you. Do you really think your OOBE could be controled in a lab? NO, BUT I SURE AS HELL WOULD LIKE TO UNDERSTAND IT IN MATERIALISTIC AS WELL AS MYSTIC TERMS. I'M GREEDY, LISH, I WANT BOTH SIMULTANEOUSLY--THE EXPERIENCE IN ALL OF ITS OVERWHELMING NON-VERBAL POWER *AND* THE UNDERSTANDING. Don't you see that current science will look as Medieval in a few decades as we now see its past? YES, AND I WROTE PRECISELY THAT A FEW MINUTES AGO AND POSTED IT ON THE LIST. I got BORED with endless nitpicking reductionism in the group. Don't you? YES, BUT I SEE HOW IT CAN BE MADE TO LEAD TO SYNTHESIS, AND THAT SYNTHESIS FREQUENTLY ARRIVES, PART OF THE MAGIC, THE SYNERGY, THE IPP HAS DEVELOPED SINCE (ALAS) YOU LEFT. Love, E ___________________________________________________
'Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards'. -- Kierkegaard NEAT EPIGRAPH LISHALOVE--how Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D. Evolution Biologist / Author/Speaker / Business Consultant www.ratical.com/lifeweb
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Religion, poetry, and science, in my opinion, can sometimes be synonymous systems of metaphor, skeins of though with which we grasp the ineffable. I've spent my life in pursuit of mystic phenomenon, but determined to find a way of using transcendent experience to expand the peripheries of science. Until we can account for the gods and angels that come pouring from our emotions and experiences, we will have a partially blind science. And science--knowledge, the understanding of the previously incomprehensible--is my personal religion. Howard
_______________________________
letter hb wrote for Munawar Anees 1/12/01
There is a vital need today for a periodical that does what may have seemed heretical back in the 1950s, when I began my pursuit of scientific truth. Whether it be a publication whose presence is felt in print or online, it is essential that we have a forum in which scientists, philosophers, and even religionists can discuss the numerous intersections between science and religion.

The need for scientific study of religion and for religious incorporation of the themes of science has become apparent in a variety of guises. The Epic of Evolution Society, of which I am a co-founder, has discovered a demand for an evolutionary narrative that churches and synagogues can use in their services-updating the creation myths of old while slaking the human hunger for knowledge of how we got here, answers on what our future is likely to be, and solutions to the puzzle of what role we should play in the shaping of our fate. Science-one of the two leading publications in the scientific community-has broken its normal rule of avoiding the subjective aspects of experience and has printed 38 articles on the conflicts, common elements, and crossing-of-paths between science and religion in just the last five years. Numerous scientists of faith have asked what role religion should play in their professional life. Many religionists have challenged the wall that excludes them from shaping or controlling scientific narratives. One article in Science, a review of three books on the religion/science interface, summed up several of the current approaches to the uneasy-but-growing marriage between spirit and intellect by highlighting:

three divergent perspectives on the relationship between science and religion. [Stephen Jay] Gould] argues that their domains are separate and non-overlapping. [Steven] Goldberg highlights the disadvantages that have followed from religions speaking in the language of science. And [Ursula] Goodenough prefers a religious naturalism; she holds that an understanding of life can generate religious feelings in the absence of organized faiths. (Science And Religion:
Two Realms and Their Relationships. A review by Craig B. Anderson. Science, Volume 286, Number 5441, Issue of 29 Oct 1999, pp. 907-908. Craig B. Anderson, significantly enough, was president of the National Council of Churches when he wrote this piece.)

William James, in 1902, recognized that religion is one of man's most powerful and pervasive experiences. Religion is as distinctly human as the compound tool, the syntax of language, or the opposable thumb. Religious ideation has shaped societies and has been a primary force propelling the tides of history. In the life of the individual, faith-whether in the form of standard religion, agnosticism, or atheism-is indispensable. All men and women need goals, meaning, and the framework of a worldview. Many need more. They need the mystic fires and the sensations of transport, transcendence, and support religion brings. Passions like these may sound far removed from science. But William James knew they were not. He treasured the mystic experience as the ultimate challenge of psychology. James tried to pry with secular eyes into the vault of soul where religion hides. Other scientists lacked James' courage. Most in the fields of psychology and sociology dropped the Jamesian quest. Now the time has come to take that challenge up again.

We will not understand human nature until we understand religion. We will not understand our selves, our motivations, our patterns of social group formation, or even our geopolitics. With little understanding of areas so fundamental, how can we say our science is what it purports to be-man's most sophisticated system yet for the understanding of his mind, of his environment, and of the manner in which the two relate.
_______________________________

(In response to a comment about science not being able to handle all forms of knowledge, and offers no insights into the divine.)

Hmmm. I believe it can. Neither gods nor the divine are supernatural, in my opinion. They are elements within our own mind, elements normally suppressed in daily experience or virtually unknown because, perhaps, sensing them in more than the usual depth involves strengthening connections between non-verbal and verbal parts of the brain. What Bill Benzon describes in his agnostic and ungarnished descriptions of musical experiences of "transcendence" are typical of such phenomena, and could easily be viewed as manifestations of "the divine," especially if the "divine" is a term for the set of experiences we may have when we merge the now-evolutionarily-altered "animals in the brain" (the human limbic system, etc.) with the "conscious" capabilities of the neocortex. This is not to say that when Feynman or Einstein have an insight beyond conscious control, one that seems to descend from they-know-not-where, it is a phantasm. It may very well offer an insight into a heavily-pondered "reality." It may burp a metaphor or metaphor-complex isomorphic to "reality" from the cerebrum.

In fact, I suspect religion is, in many cases, a symbol set isomorphic to otherwise unexpressed realities of the human psyche. As such, it is our duty to translate it into science, where we can make it part of our system of prediction and control. And more important where we can make subjective experiences present presumably since at least the first palettes of ochre were gathered for alleged "ritual purposes" roughly 90 kya part of what we recognize as an explainable "normal" (as opposed to paranormal) reality. Howard

ANTS (some symbols in the contents below need to be modified)

Hmmm, so ants create order using lateral inhibition of precisely the same kind that sweeps the debris from between batches of matter competing to become stars. Ants use oscillation to produce the architecture of a burial place. Termites use a similar "local activation and long-range inhitition" to create the pillars, arches, walls, and architecture of their mounds. There's many a form of ebb and tide, of crest and trough, of primal wave, in the way this universe is made. Howard

Orderly Ant Corpses NYT July 23, 2002 By HENRY FOUNTAIN [What are the human analogies?] When it comes to planned communities, there is none more planned than a graveyard. To ensure that the departed truly rest in peace, many cemeteries have regulations to govern plot location and size, maintenance, placing of flowers and wreaths and even access. (In addition to being planned, most cemeteries are gated communities, too.) Some ants keep their cemeteries just as well organized. Ants will move a corpse and pile it up with others to create a tidy final resting place. There are no rules and regulations, of course, but as researchers from France, Belgium and Spain have discovered, there are some principles at work. The researchers conducted experiments on ant colonies, distributing corpses around the edge of a circular arena and then watching as worker ants tended to the dead. After six or more hours, the ants had moved the corpses into a stable pattern of piles of roughly equal size. Out of the initial chaos and without communicating, the workers had created order. Writing in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers noted that the pattern was produced by application of two simple rules. First, ants are more likely to put a corpse where there already are a bunch of corpses. Second, the growth of any one pile is slowed as the supply of nearby corpses is reduced. Fans of the mathematician Alan Turing may recognize that this is a demonstration of a process that he first described, hypothetically, in 1952 to account for patterns in nature like a zebra's stripes or a leopard's spots. The process is called local activation and long-range inhibition. In the ant experiments, pile growth involves local activation (a growing pile induces more growth of the pile) and long-range inhibition (a growing pile means that there will be fewer corpses elsewhere). The researchers, using a mathematical model, say it is one of the first demonstrations of this kind of self-organized behavior in a biological system. Signals From Cells When a single cell within an organism dies, it isn't buried or tossed on a pile. It's eaten, consumed by another type of cell called a phagocyte.

But just how does a phagocyte know not to eat a healthy cell? Scientists have long thought that in apoptosis, the programmed death of cells that occurs, for instance, as an embryo develops, the dying cells produce a chemical signal that tells phagocytes that there is prey around. But a new study by scientists at two British universities shows that another pathway may be at work, one that involves the removal of an existing signal. Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers described their experiments with healthy and dying white blood cells. They found that these cells and the phagocytes that consume them both have a protein, called CD31, that binds them together. If a blood cell is healthy, the phagocyte stays bound to it only briefly, detaching after getting a "repulsion" signal through the protein. But if the cell is dying, the signal is blocked, so the phagocyte stays locked to it and does its dirty work. Exactly what the signal consists of is a subject for further research. Pterosaur's Dining Habits The fossilized skull of a new pterosaur species has been discovered in Brazil, and the finding shows that this flying reptile had an odd way of eating: it skimmed along the surface of a lake or ocean looking for food. Pterosaurs lived in the time of the dinosaurs, but little is known about them. The fossil, discovered by two scientists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History, shows that this pterosaur, at least, had long jawbones that the researchers suggest are similar to those of skimming birds. Writing in Science, the researchers say the pterosaur, with a wingspan over 12 feet, probably glided along the water and dipped its head when it ran into food. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/science/23OBSE.html?ex=1028626354&ei=1&en=a78923b45dd233e9
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THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD SATURDAY, DECEMBER 26, 1998: Anything resembling cognition in ants must rest on a tiny neuro-anatomy. There are 10,000 million neurones in the human cerebral cortex; the equivalent part of an ant's brain contains a mere 250,000 neurones. But Edward Wilson, the world's leading scholar on ants, reminds us that a colony of 40,000 is, in effect, a "superorganism" with a total of about 10,000 million neurones supporting its co-ordinated actions. In other words, it is possible to regard the actions of an entire colony as similar to the neurochemical co-ordinations of tissues and organs that support the goal-seeking behaviour of a single vertebrate animal.
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Pavel Kurakin 7/1/2003
Hi Howard!

Through scientific Inet searchers You kindly pointed
to me I found this (enclosed).

It's brilliant. It is what I dream to see at quanta. It is also in the
field of Your question, I escaped for so long: what attracts a
particle to its final position? You said once that it couldn't be
mysterious |psi|**2.

Yes. When I introduced a competition of detectors with their chances
proportional to |psi|**2, I meant that there must be SOMETHING like
this, but I didn't give any clear scheme of this competition. I also
meant that we must get old kind |psi|**2 ANYWAY, to show physicists
that we reach the same rseult, but by other way.

What ants do gives an EXPLICIT way of competition of competing paths.
Ants system is autocatalitic and it obeys the Bloom - Brian Arthur
principle (Christ's in origin) :

"THAT WHO HATH TO THAT IT SHALL BE GIVEN".

I think this autocatalitic mechanism must be MOST fundamental in
Universe (or may ONE of a few ones). Quantum probabilities just ought
to be explained throug an autocatalitic processes like in Ants
Systems.
--

"Intellectuals are the most ignorant part of society" (c) Mao.
"Our line is right. The victory will be ours". (c) I. V. Stalin, 1941.
"Of course, he is son of a beach, but he is OURS son of a beach". (C) Theodor Roosevelt, about Samosa

Pavel--I think you're on to something extremely important and extremely basic.

Can you give me a bit of help?

I've given a quick commentary on the article below based on bee and ant behavior. I'm having trouble fitting the article entirely into my standard scheme--to he who that it shall be given, from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away.

The "Ant System" article adds a feedback component to "to he who hath." And looking over ant-and-bee behavior, I see feedback components at two ends of the system--plus a bunch of feedback components in between. The components in between are all emotional--or so similar to emotional that we could call them proto-emotional.

There's also something involved I've been thinking-out-loud for the last few days during interviews, which are handy prods to thinking out old information in new contexts. The new tweak is an emotionally-based system I've been calling social calculus. Social calculus describes most of what goes on in the "buzzing, blooming confusion" of emotional consciousness. But more on that some other time.

Here's where the need for help comes in. Can you map out the application of the ant example to the decision-making process of a particle? It sounds like a dynamite insight, and you have me drooling. But remember, when it comes to math, I'm a dunderhead and only understand pictures--or word-pictures.

In the process of explaining, I suspect that you'll produce a clearer vision of what stochastic combinatorial optimization tries to grasp. And you'll probably make a whole bunch of other mysteries clearer to me.

Now for your message, my quick thoughts on the article, and as much of the article as I can fit into an email...

Hb: Pavel Kurakin has found in intriguing paper whose authors propose "a new computational paradigm, which we call Ant System."
In essence, the paper, "The Ant System: Optimization by a colony of cooperating agents," suggests that ant colonies perform a complex form of mathematics called "stochastic combinatorial optimization"-but that ants probably do a better job of it than mathematicians armed with today's latest formulae.

Ants are influenced by the crowd-power and, more specifically, by a popularity meter. They go with the trend of the moment-following the paths with the greatest number of votes from others--votes left in the form of scent trails. That's where "to he who hath it shall be given; from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away" comes in.

There's feedback from the environment-from the real world--to this popularity-powered ant mass-mind, too.

It shows up when there's no cake left. The ant that follows the scent trail and arrives at a nothing goes back discouraged. She leaves no scent trail. Other ants that travel a long way only to find that the cake is gone leave the same sign of disappointment-no scent signal, no attraction cue. Gradually the old scent left by early ant enthusiasts fades away. The popularity meter goes from 100 to zero.

I suspect there are other social factors at work in the ants' collective calculation. In bee colonies, there's a form of payoff bigger than a crumb of cake-the enthusiastic greeting of others-the hymenopteran equivalent of a gleam of admiration in the eye of others. At the lip of a beehive are the unloaders, the contact points between the inside and the outside of the hive. If the inside ants need water and a water-carrying forager arrives, the unloaders greet it with enthusiasm. If the inside ants have all the water they need and a water-carrying bee shows up with H2O basketed in her hindquarter hairs, the unloaders ignore her.

Incoming bees welcomed with glee pep up and go back for more of what they've just brought home. Incoming bees who get the cold shoulder also get the message. They grow discouraged, wander around aimlessly, watch the street dancers in the hive advertising other alleged motherlodes, and finally go along with crowd power and the popularity meter. They follow the small swell of semi-adventurous others who check out the bonanzas being advertised by the dancing bees and who agree that one of them is, indeed, a find. Normal bees, timid bees, go with the swarm and travel out to mine the hot new thing-pollen or nectar-that the hive now needs.

So there's feedback to the popularity system of bees at two ends

**the flower patch filled with pollen and nectar or the pond of water is end number one. Let's call it the supply.

**there's feedback at the center of the hive--feedback that comes in the form of the enthusiastic attention of others. Let's call that demand.

Value seems to be calculated by individual and mass moodswings, pooled swings of proto-emotion.

Do ants have this two-ended social feedback system-the supply end and the demand end? At the center of the colony of ants are its bureaucrats, those that judge whether something brought in from outdoors is food or garbage, building material or trash. There's literally a trash pile to which a line of garbage-handling ants take things that don't fit the needs of the moment.

Are there unloaders at the opening of the ant nest? Is there an audience whose attention forager ants need to attract and whose enthusiasm forager ants need to feel? Or do foragers take their cargo straight inside to the center of the hive-to the sorting room where the bureaucrats work?

One way or the other-whether they bring back their finds to cargo unloaders or to bureaucrats-do ants get their social feedback at two ends-from scent trails on the outside and from receivers on the inside?

Does the social system in ants and bees have genuine proto-emotional components? Are the following anthropomorphisms or evolutionary ancestors or cousins of human feelings?

**attention and the enthusiasm it engenders
**no attention at all and the confusion and depressing that being ignored instills

Do ants get buoyed up by joining the fads of the moment, knowing that they're going with the flow of popularity? Do they become confused when they feel left out and alone?

There are powerful hints that these-proto-emotions are at work in beehives. They're outlined in Thomas Seeley's books and articles on honeybee colonies…though Seeley obeys the obligatory taboos of science and never mentions that horribly anthropomorphic word "emotion" once.

In humans, chemical cues-pheromones-go hand in hand with those resettings of the system we call moods, feelings, and emotions. I'd strongly suspect that we'd find proto-emotions powering the mass mind of the ant colony, too. I suspect that the ability of real ants to do a semblance of "stochastic combinatorial optimization" comes from the intricacies of interconnected emotion in an ant colony. I suspect it comes from the compulsion of individual ants and most other social lifeforms-from bacteria to humans-to carry out a complex social calculus, one aimed at the solution to two problems:

**which move is likely to provide me with emotion's food-the eager attention of others and the comfort of being safely embraced by the crowd.
**and which move is likely to provide emotion's poison-exclusion, isolation, and, worst of all no attention at all…the bitter brew of being utterly ignored.
Howard

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-Part B, Vol.26, No.1, 1996, pp.1-13 1

Internet subcultures, the miracle of trans-geography

Anthropologists at the end of the 20th century feared that as tribal cultures withered, anthropology would dry up. There'd simply be no truly bizarre cultures left to infiltrate. But in the global era, there are more weird cultures than ever before. They're growing like kudzu, fed by the mists of the internet. Howard
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hb: it would be a dream come true. actually the google search engine is >closer to providing cyber wish-fulfillment than the engines of just two years >ago, so things are moving fast. Absolutely right about google.com. It does miracles. Far more important than Harnad's cogprints. hb: aha. what interesting stuff has Harnad been up to since I last visited his website several years ago? what are cogprints? Several times I have typed in names and got to people's homepages and their publications. Puts Yahoo, Excite et al to shame. > The problem with the internet is that who wants to read comments > posted by anyone -- electronic graffiti? Few. But who has the time to edit > it so that only quality and interesting comments get posted? In comes > automated moderation. Software by which comments upon comments upon > comments can be weeded through like Wimbledon seedings so that is > communitywise seen as rubbish and gems get stared as such. It turns a game > screaming loudest on the net into a game of reputation by which people > write what they are prepared to be judged and damned upon if empty, flame, > badly written or nonsense. Write more on this if interested. > >hb: John, this could become a one-size-fits-all star system as restrictive as >today's peer process review system, which I consider a nightmare which, to >use Einstein's words "crushes creativity." No. The beauty of the system is that comments could be ranked upon different kinds of reputation. It would let you weed out those that are unorthodox but fair and those that are boring and standard. The problem with comments on the internet is flaming, poor writing and mere social hellos. If people could comment upon them, they could be filtered out leaving the really interesting stuff to stand out. [Of course, such comments might be used to eliminate these as well but since software will be looking for patterns it will remove not only those that flame etc, but those that misleadingly comment that others flame]. hb: I'm a veteran victim of the comment system. amazon.com uses it.

Since Islamic pressure groups have targeted me and attempted quite literally to end my publishing career since 1991, I've seen how a pressure group can organize a blizzard of allegedly independent and personal comments which are designed to discredit a book. Take a look at www.amazon.com's website for The Lucifer Principle, read the comments, and you'll see what I mean. Here is a posting that Steven Harnad did not allow. uTOK is a program that enables a person to post and read the virtual equivalent of Post-it® notes at any Internet location. Any uTOK user browsing the pages will be able read what others have had to say [URL for details below]. hb: sounds intriguing. Obviously, few of us would want to read Post-it® notes of cranks, bores, and verbose pontificators. uTOK ensures we do not -- it has an inbuilt software moderating system. Each note and note maker gets rated by other note makers and readers. Smart algorithms then extract from these ratings, a smart rating that sorts out the good raters from the bad. hb: is there an algorithm which can foil a well organized campaign for or against a website, book, etc.? People that write notes that get rated highly get their new ones rated highly. And the system digs deeper: people's rating of other ratings will depend upon how they are rated. Of course, uTOK has no independent criteria other than the hidden internal consistency with which raters rate other raters and their comments. But science does. And this makes uTOK a very interesting development if applied to papers in an open archive. hb: I'd still prefer a ranking by a personal Darwinian algorithm that reads my tastes and fetches the unconventional material I like. Imagine a science archive where people leave commentary notes on new papers - papers that have yet to receive an objective ISI citation impact ranking -- and guess what that will be. As time passes, impact values will become available and can in turn be used to rate commentators into the insightful and not.

Another objective rating could come from status of university affiliation, society membership and established ISI paper citation. This will not necessarily disadvantage those without such objective measures of reputation due to the value raters change the weight given to other raters. A young Einstein that picks a dozen papers as central to the future of their subject and turns out right by their future citation rating gets their reputation rewarded. Likewise, a young Einstein that makes comments that interest FRS and Noble laureates. Without a human moderate, a new level of science commentary literature would emerge as the thousands of ratings create a self-quality control process. hb: again, sounds intriguing. Two points: (1) would a scientific uTOK emerge, and (2) how would it feedback upon the papers archived and the scientific quality control process. (1) Before we read a paper we know that it is limited - even the best paper can be improved -- they are written, after all, by humans. We want to know how well to trust what we have read: have the authors ignored important ideas, experimental problems, references etc? Have more important findings emerged since it was written? Hence, the success not only of commentary journals like Current Anthropology, Brain and Behaviour Sciences and Psycoloquy but the frequency use of commentary special issues in many journals. Moreover, with papers we judge important, we would like to contact people similarly impressed with them - scientific communication is about forming 'invisible colleges'. hb: darned good point. in fact, www sites like AOL are very much facilitators which allow the formation of new transnational and transcontinental subcultures based on common interests more precisely attuned to their members' needs than old style in-person mixing and matching make possible. The web makes it possible for social groups to take a giant leap forward in transcending geography. Transnational subcultures began in Greece in the sixth century BC, enabled by regular shipping connections between the Greek colonies spread from Spain and Italy in the west to the Black Sea coasts of Southern Russia in the east. They took another great leap forward in the age of St. Paul via the ease of sending letters--which is why St. Paul was able to quickly internationalize Christianity via his epistles.

Then transnational subcultures slipped backward when the Roman Empire fell and the old sea lanes and land highways were cut by wandering tribes of barbarians. The transnational subculture took off again in roughly 1500 when the rudimentary postal system of the day allowed Erasmus Desiderius to pull together an international community of humanists. The Web has somehow given these transnational subcultures a vitality, a heartbeat, a warmth and immediacy which those of old never could achieve. Just think of all the people who make love online. This is a radical step forward in trans-geographic intimacy. js: Many scientists are isolated and at present have to attend conferences to form the required contacts. A strong motivation exists therefore for people to leave commentaries, and an equally one to read them. Such commentaries moreover would be worth reading: since the smart and self-generating rating system would reward only those that wrote readable, relevant and pertinent opinions, people would be strongly motivated to write just such contributions. (2). Such commentaries, of course, would not only be rated but so would the archived papers themselves. In turn this could feed upon prepublication referees and the prepublication quality control process. Suppose every published paper were tagged with markers as to who refereed them that enabled software access to their original rating of the paper. A smart rating system that could read their identities and prepublication scorings could retrospectively rate referee competence. Referees that at the prepublication stage that rated papers highly that later became highly rated, and vice versa, rated lowly those that later become poorly rated would acquire a good referee reputation, those that did not, a bad one. This would provide editors with an objective source of information as to who was and was not a good potential referee. Of course, no one knows how science communication will evolve. Maybe future communication will look much as it does today and uTOK like programs will have little relevance to science as present day newsgroups; but we should be aware that open archiving might go in directions presently unforeseen by its creators. hb: one of the very things which make the system intriguing--the unexpected directions could take. uTOK is based in Tel Aviv. It has 15+ employees. http://www.utok.com/docs/company/ http://www.utok.com/ hb: John, I'm downloading it now and will soon know what it does. thanks. Howard

from John Skoyles 4/12/00
I absolutely agree. Geography has changed in the last two years more than it has in the last two thousand. The only equivalent revolution to the internet is the 'city'. That was revolutionary because it allowed people to come together with people of their choice rather than physical proximity. It allowed for clubs and associations of like minded folk and the phenomena of strangers [people that lived near-by but which shared no interests with you]. In a rural and farming area there are no strangers and as importantly you are not a stranger to anyone else. But the city required you live near people; the internet puts us together whereever we are on the globe. The problem is getting like minded folk together. The city solved this with the coffee house, the gentlemen's club, this and that society and association. The internet is still evolving from its newsgroup stage to egoups to who knows what might evolve out of uTOK stage.

The value of illness

Bill tillier and hb 4/19/01. 1). My biopsy - they fucked it up!!! hb: well, misery loves company, so let me welcome you, on behalf of thousands of high-intellect, driven citizens, to the world of do-it-yourself doctoring. we cfs folks have to do this all the time. are there any online support groups for your illness? they can come in handy. fellow sufferers can often point you to symptomatic treatments doctors don't know a thing about. bt: I went in and asked 10 questions the guy (that would be the head of the neuromuscular clinic), couldn't answer - how much amyloid was on the sample? Can't say - didn't test for it. Tau protein? Didn't test etc etc. So, in the end he said "at some point you have to have confidence in us" hb: sure. and the check is in the mail... So, I got a second opinion and he said - there are NO repeat NO inclusion bodies in my biopsy at all. Lots of inflammation. So, he examined me and said well, you are undiagnosed and we need to run protein studies of the biopsy to see what it is - likely is a limb girdle MD. SO, I am dammed glad I didn't go on Imuran and I am dammed glad I researched it and knew what to ask. The story continues.
hb: good, good, good. well done, bill. illness has its positive sides--one of them is the sheer intellectual challenge. another is that every form of suffering is a tour through a form of human experience we'd never get to comprehend otherwise.
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part of the problem may be too much dependence on website information. I KNOW. JANE, THIS IS ONE OF THE DAMNABLE LIMITATIONS OF BEING HOUSEBOUND FOR TEN YEARS BY ILLNESS. I HAVE A CD-ROM LIBRARY WITH OVER 4,000 VOLUMES, A GOOD HOME LIBRARY WITH A VERY FINE PERIODICALS COLLECTION, BUT CANNOT GET TO A *REAL* LIBRARY. NORMALLY I FEEL THAT DESPITE THE MINOR INCONVENIENCE OF INVALID STATUS, I CAN (SOUNDS ARROGANT, BUT IN THE FACE OF LIMITATIONS ARROGANCE IS USEFUL) SPAN INFINITIES. BUT NOT BEING ABLE TO GO TO THE SUPERB LIBRARY A FEW BLOCKS FROM MY HOME MAKES ME GNASH MY TEETH. hb to Jane Gray, paleobiologist 2/10/98

Michael Jackson-the story of a saint dragged down to hell

HB:People just don't get Michael. It's so easy to crucify someone remarkable, but so hard to move to the level from which you can comprehend what he's trying to say.
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Michael was kidnapped in 1986 by advisors who are the only truly evil people I ever encountered in the entertainment industry. I fought to save him--at his brothers' request--and couldn't. He is incredibly bad in his choice of people, and the guys who got him are geniuses, master-strategists, but destructive to the core. They started the negative press in 1985 so they could send an emissary to Michael and say, "there's only one person who can save you from this press catastrophe." Michael went to that master of salvation, the very man who had undone him. So far as I can see, he's been in the hands of this brilliant but malevolent team (the Darth Vader of the record industry) ever since. Look, no matter how low they sink him, he's still worth a fortune in both money, power, and name value. So they can continue to milk him no matter what form of torment and degradation he goes through. I know the positive part of Michael's obsession with children--it's an obsession to feed them the kind of wonder he experiences minute by minute, nearly every day. It's an obsession to repay what he sees as the gift god has given him. I admire him tremendously--more than any person I ever have had the privilege to meet. He's given me a tremendous example, a role model, that's helped me be me. Not through his music, but through being with him privately and seeing the world through his astonishing heart and eyes. I know nothing about his sexuality, nothing at all. but I love him and will not give up on that devotion. Howard
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Hb: fascinating stuff. I've copied it to paleopsych. Michael is a very good person who has been in the hands of very bad people since at least 1986. He chooses wonderful creative collaborators and ghastly business team members. They're some of the wiliest and leas principled, but most intelligent and, well, evil, people I've ever met. They make sure that the only reality Michael ever sees is the one they've erected to decieve him and to maintain their power over him. This is not some paranoid fantasy. I've seen it happen several times in the music industry.
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I know what michael means and it's nothing but good. I worked with him and this is a part of his mind I know. others don't understand him because they have never come up to his level of care for other human beings. Michael is not talking about sex, he is talking about caring. He is talking about finding ways to comfort kids who are dying. He is being crucified. Send this to everyone and anyone you can think of. Killing a person filled with good is the ultimate sin. And right now the entire pop-minded public is in for the kill. If there is a hell we will all be singed by it. Hb 2/5/2003
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As I said, his brothers hired me to save him..and them. I was going to turn them down as clients. Big stars didn't need what I did. Potential stars needed it to get to the top. Then I sat in a big room at the Helmsley Palace with the Jackson brothers in the meeting at which I was going to say no and realized that a bunch of very decent people were the subject of an attack they didn't understand. The first step of the bad guys--the Darth Vader and his allies--was to alienate Michael from me by feeding Michael a steady diet of fantasies dressed up as truth--they fed him stories of the sort of deeds that outraged his religious sensibilities. I actually gave them one of those weapons. I arranged two events with the NAACP--Michael's appearance at a conference with the then NAACP director Benjamin Hooks, and the permission for the NAACP's voter drive to set up voter registration booths at Jackson concerts. Voting is against Michael's religion. But the group needed to show that it had not abandoned its roots in the Black community. That's also why I had Al Sharpton paid off to stay quiet and babysat him for six months to make sure he didn't pull any of his PR stunts and make the Jacksons look bad. Don King was one of the bad guys, but shutting him up was relatively easy--it only took three months to get a gag order on him. But these guys--Sharpton and King--were masks, decoys to hide the real criminal behind the scenes. He was brilliant at hiding what he was doing and cloking his identity. I am fairly sure I know who it was and how he did what he did--basically tearing Michael down in order to control him. But since I have no proof and his identity remains a hypothesis, I prefer not to toss the name of the chief suspect around.

However he is one of the few truly brilliant men I've ever encountered in the record industry. Do you know the Herman Hesse book Magister Ludens? It is Latin for Master of Games. The Darth Vader I have in mind was the greatest Magister Ludens I've ever encountered. I like figuring out the strategies of masters and beating them. But this one I lost, and it was probably the biggest and most culturally damaging loss I could possibly have had. hb: You hit it. I think of him as the only true saint I have ever met. But he does live in a world very different from that of other people. He does not know public standards. What he does know is wonder and the human heart. I understand completely what he means about the comfort kids get from physical closeness. I got married 18 months ago. My wife had a ten year old son when I first met her. He is now twelve going on thirteen. I filed for divorce last Friday--and you know I am a very-long-term commitment, one-woman, monogamous male. So it took a lot to drive me to this point. I love this kid, I love him so much you wouldn't believe it. He slept at the foot of my bed while I worked until 4am last week. His head was against my ankles. God what a gift that was--a gift to him and me. Now I make darned sure I hug him two or three times a day. No, it's not normal social behavior. A man hugging a gangling kid who seems to grow another two inches in height every single day--it sounds weird and perverse by some social standards. But before the divorce gets wicked, before he is forced to leave with his mother, before he loses the only family he's ever had, a family he did all in his power to make work, I want him to know I love him, I want him to know I'm his dad, I want him to know he's the only kid I've ever raised who really wanted me, and I want him to know that, though it will take a lot of will on hipart and mine, he will never lose me.

That's the kind of basic emotion Michael understands. rm: I wish he hadn't had such an awful childhood, hb: His dad is the only man I've ever met who has hell fire in the pupils of his eyes. I am not kidding. No there's nothing painted in his irises, but when you look directly into his face up close and he trains his gaze on you, you see the devil incarnate--another thing I've never experienced with any other human in my life. On the up side, Michael had magic--moments like one of his key imprinting points, at the age of five--watching from the wings of the Apollo Theater as James Brown danced his ass off--then carrying that image as an aspiration and a challenge for the rest of his life. Using it as a base for studying Fred Astaire and others and inventing new forms of dance that for the very first time asserted the authority of blacks, black dignitas, the right to be powerful and say so in a peaceful, creative, entertaining and artistic way. In the 1930s and 1940s when black tap dancers were first allowed into white films, they danced with their hands limp-wristed and flopping down--a submission gesture, a way of saying "I know I'm black and you're white, but I'm not threatening you. I'm a subordinate to you and I know it." Fred Astaire picked up the black technique. Watch one of his movies with Ginger Rogers. They're delighful. But Astaire always looks too thin and wispy to be a romantic idol. He looks that way when he dances, but you don't notice it. Look carefully at his hands. He apes the blacks from whom he learned tap dance. He lets his wrists go limp and makes the same appeasement gesture. Michael did the opposite. He used gestures of absolute, unequivical power, gestures of dominance. Not gestures of defiance and rage. Gestures of sheer superhuman mastery. His wrists are nothing like limp at all. He points with his fingers and commands that your attention be riveted to him--that you follow the emotional cues he's gving you. He is all-powerful onstage.

He is saying you have powers you haven't tapped. And I have powers like you wouldn't believe. But you can aspire to have them too. It doesn't matter that I'm black. I will be a hero for you. What an incredible breakthrough. You don't know how hard people like Bob Cavallo and I worked to break down the color barriers within record companies. I started fighting those barriers in 1975 at ABC Records, where the white staff looked down on anything black as unclean and unhip. They wouldn't touch it. There was only one black man in the company who handled and signed all of our black acts. Until I came along, he never, ever had an alley. No one supported him but Jay Lasker, our president (bless Jay, he was a remarkable man). But I took an anonymous group--Rufus. I convinced their manager to let me focus press attention on the female lead singer for the next year or so. The group considered itself democratic, so I told the manager I'd give him a star if he'd cover my ass and protect me from the group's flack. He did and we made Chaka Khan (whose name I never spell right) a national star. It was a lonely job (I like lonely jobs). But we did it. The internal racial barriers we had to fight at Columbia and at Warners were even tougher to penetrate. But we did. And Prince and Michael Jackson were the ones who helped us finally break through. We got Prince crossed over from the black staff to the white at WB. Then we worked Jeff Ayeroff, another person with an independent mind, to slam Prince through the race barriers at MTV. I believe that Michael Jackson benefitted from that campaign and was then able to slide onto MTV almost effortlessly. I may be wrong. Michael may have gotten on MTV first. My memory is a sieve. I'd better stop. I have many emails to do, a TV Series to nurse, a new book to write, a social movement to save the soul of Western Civilization in the works, and a divorce on my hands. but I needed to write these stories, these truths, down. So thanks for bearing with me and giving me the chance. (See: Phil Spector) hb: your compassion for Phil is literally softening something deep and emotionally important in my chest. I hadn't thought of him this way and should have. Thank you. hb: I am so glad he said what he said on TV. I understand it. I needed that clarification. As you can see, Michael is terribly important to me. I agree with one of the commentators whose words you sent me. He wouldn't have said them if he were a pederast. Or at least I hope that interpretation is true. But if I had to hear Michael explain his emotion on TV instead of in person, so be it. I am now attached to him more than ever before. I wish I could clone myself and be his publicist, find the truth, and get people to see it. What Michael has is so important, and it is so important that others see it. If they do they will have the chance to perceive their world through different eyes, just as you made me reperceive Phil Spector's situation a minute ago. hb: it's more than someone I admire, it's someone I love. I carry the traces of the ways in which being with him remade me. Love--Howard
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Thanks,It only reminds me of how much I love this person and of how much--without even knowing it--he gave me. Warmly--Howard ps I filed for divorce last Friday, so my moods should theoretically be a bit wacky, but I see the Jackson thing as clear as clear can be. I wish the public could comprehend him emotionally. If they did, we'd have a major jump up the evolutionary ladder, the ladder of compassion, empathy, and emotional expansion.
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2/7/2003 You are so incisive and so insightful that it amazes me. Yes, let's hope for the best for Walter, for Michael Jackson, and for all the people who are losing something far more potent than what they got from someone who gave us a lot--Princess Di. They're missing it because it's Michael's gift and I suspect that no one else in our generation has it the way he does. No one else can convey it--the sense of wonder, the sense of amazement, the sense of dazzled awe--the sense of whole universes jumping into sight where others would see only a battered, slightly opened door and a narrow, dusty ray of light. Love--Howard

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IT was the topic that dominated the nation's conversation last night - the bizarre world of Michael Jackson. In the most extraordinary TV interview of the year, Jacko made a series of startling revelations. He admitted sharing his bedroom with young boys, was seen feeding his baby son through a veil and denied having plastic surgery - other than two nose jobs. The weird and, at times deeply sad, star has divided opinions. Here a selection of Daily Mirror writers and experts say why they think he is mad, bad or very sad. SUE CARROLL Mirror columnist WHILE under police investigation Matthew Kelly has been absent from our television screens. TV presenter John Leslie, facing unproven allegations, is also deemed unsuitable for the public. And yet millions sat glued to the box while a 44-year-old man, looking like a street corner strumpet, held hands with a 12-year-old boy and confessed they sometimes shared a bedroom. The general consensus seems to be that Michael Jackson is mad. The fact he's in denial, or a serial liar, is as plain as the nose on his face. But let's be honest here. It's we, the public, who have just voted with our handsets to secure a faded pop idol publicity record companies can only dream of. Branded the longest suicide note in history, a US network has paid £3.5million to screen it. There's nothing like a public execution for putting bums on seats. VERDICT: BAD TREVOR NELSON Radio One DJ I'M still in shock from seeing the documentary - it was unbelievable. Michael is deluded, but I do not think he would be on TV, holding the hand of a child, admitting to the world that kids need to be loved, if he had something to hide. But the terrible message given out to children is that it's fine to sleep with, or kiss a strange adult, if they show you love. One of the most powerful pieces of the documentary was Michael watching himself on stage as a little boy. It was fascinating, and I noticed he didn't smile. You got the impression he was abused by his dad.

It's the cause of a catalogue of terrible things in his life. He's a very sad man. I idolised him when I was a kid. But as a black person, I wanted him to admit to his surgery and the reasons behind it. But he didn't. He lost a lot of integrity. The show will not help his waning career - it will bury him. VERDICT: SAD ROSIE BOYCOTT Journalist and broadcaster I HAVE watched, with awed fascination, Jackson's attempts to reconcile his flawed and troubled personality with his stardom. After seeing the programme, I believe he never abused any children, and his love of them comes from his own childlike mind. They are the only people he feels safe and comfortable with. It is almost heartbreaking to see a superstar of his magnitude go on TV and say he enjoys giving them milk at bed time. Conceiving children through surrogacy - a way of avoiding adult commitment - and believing he is Peter Pan are all indications he has never left that world of childhood behind. Like an idiot savant he bestrides his empire - while not having the courage to admit his face lifts - revealing the eternally unhappy and petulant child inside living in his own Never-Never-Land of tigers and merry-go-rounds. VERDICT: SAD BRIAN READE Mirror columnist HE's madder than Keith Moon, sadder than Liberace but not as bad as Gary Glitter. The main problem in assessing this chronically-disturbed man is inability to sort fact from fiction. When someone has a face like an unfinished jigsaw, yet tells you he's only had a small nasal job, how can you believe him? Yet that doesn't make Jackson a paedophile. If those kids are in danger of anything it is catching the same mental illness Jackson suffers - a desire to live out a permanent adolescence to replace the one that was stolen from him.

And this is where Jacko ceases to be merely a cuddly eccentric. He is abusing children by peddling this weird view of the world. Which is why every parent who leaves their kid alone with him should be cautioned by police, and why social services should step in and take his three children and hand them back to their mothers. VERDICT: SAD ROS WYNNE-JONES Mirror writer THE angular and deformed face looks as if blocks of bone have been chipped off it. And watching him on TV, you realised that along with his face, his childish goodness has been butchered too - leaving a ghoul from Thriller in its place. I loved Michael Jackson when I was young. I practised moonwalking in my bedroom. I learned to play Thriller on the piano. But yesterday, I realised listening to him would never be the same again - like finding a Gary Glitter record on a jukebox. Now his frightened eyes, staring out from behind the mask of his horrific surgery, were the only bit of the real Michael Jackson left. He wasn't Peter Pan after all, but one of the Lost Boys. Evil is too trite a term for the deluded, damaged Jackson. He is suffering the sins of his father. But it is unforgivable to make other children suffer in turn. VERDICT: SAD JOHN STALKER Ex Asst Chief Constable DEATH and disaster do not make me squirm, but Jacko did. If, as a detective, I had been confronted with the relationships seen in the show, I would have called in child protection agencies. Everything about him shrieked paedophilia - although there's no direct evidence of it. The excuses, rationalisations, the pleas of innocent child worship - even his suggestion children respond to his child-like love in a way adults cannot understand - are a master-class in delusion. Strip away the tacky glamour, celebrity and wealth, and transfer the story to a British housing estate, and it is easy to see how worrying it all is. As I watched, I imagined the thousands of active paedophiles also watching - and enjoying it. The bootleg video of last night's programme will be around for years among those whose sexual kicks involve kids. VERDICT: BAD MAX CLIFFORD PR guru THERE wasn't a lot in the documentary that shocked me.

Michael was the person I always believed him to be. I was with EMI when we launched Motown and the Jackson Five were one of the original acts. Michael was a sweet nine- year-old boy, bubbly and polite. But he was only ever a product, and partly the reason why he is what he is today is that he was never a child. The Jackson Five boys didn't play, they rehearsed. Michael craves the childhood he never had and has recreated a place where he can be a child for the rest of his life. His children are his toys - there to fulfil his desire to be a child again. From a PR perspective the documentary was a mistake. If this was meant to reassure people what he does with children is one child playing with another I don't think it was successful. Michael seems mentally sick and very sad. VERDICT: MAD KEVIN O'SULLIVAN Mirror columnist HE's certainly sad. One of the saddest saddoes it has ever been my misfortune to be aware of. But let us be in no doubt - the man is BAD. Forget the streetwise term of admiration used as the title of his third album. I mean "bad" in the traditional sense. But Michael Jackson is not mad. Oh no. Martin Bashir's documentary exposed him as an egocentric megalomaniac who rules his own disturbing world with a rod of iron. Question Jackson's sickening penchant for sleeping with young boys and it's clear you won't be working for him for very long. I know I wasn't alone as I squirmed while witnessing Jackson's deeply unnatural relationship with that poor Gavin kid. I found myself shouting: "He's only 12... leave him alone." If his obsession with children is such a normal thing, how come his teeny chums are NEVER girls? VERDICT: BAD MARY MARSH Head of the NSPCC HIS claim that he has shared his bed with many children who are not his own, and it is "what the whole world should do" sends out totally the wrong message to those whose intentions are anything but innocent. His behaviour could easily be misinterpreted or used as justification by people who want to harm or sexually abuse children. He must be criticised for either ignorance or naivety.

He speaks movingly about his sad and difficult life as a young person. His has been a world that few of us could remotely imagine. He sees himself as a Peter Pan figure who never wants to grow up. But at 44 he must realise that as a global role model his activities affect people's judgements. He says his intentions towards children are innocent - but as adults we must make sure only appropriate affection between adults and children is allowed. VERDICT SAD MIRIAM STOPPARD Mirror columnist WATCHING him burn more than £3million in one shopping spree made me realise he lives permanently in a part of the brain where you and I only allow ourselves to go occasionally. He lives in the "pleasure centre" which serves up dopamine - our own internal love-drug - which makes us feel we deserve rewards. It's the sanctuary of the insecure who, once having gone there, have no means of restraining their desire to reward themselves. Most of us indulge our pleasure centre now and then. But as we mature, we learn to ration ourselves. Michael Jackson has never learned to do that. He looks for his high in adolescent boys and babies, whom he treats as accessories, conduits for a few seconds pleasure. Like a drug addict he can't give them up. He's a dangerously abnormal human, and labelling him wacko shouldn't be allowed to shield him. VERDICT: SAD NICKI CHAPMAN Pop Idol judge I WAS appalled when he said: "I sleep with children." You can't make comments like that. However innocent he maintains that statement is, and I think it probably is, you can't say things like that and think people won'`t be offended. Jackson did the documentary as a PR exercise and he probably was being honest. But he is so misguided if he thinks people will accept him while making those comments. In certain shots he came across as endearing, for example when he ran up the tree. But then the cynic in me noticed that there was a camera already up the tree, so those shots were well planned. He's a sad guy, who's wrapped up in his childhood and has surrounded himself with people who can't tell him the truth. People are bored with his weird behaviour. And this documentary won't get him any more fans.

VERDICT: SAD ALEX KARIDIS Cosmetic surgeon THE show gave the rare opportunity to see Michael's face from different angles and in close up. His whittled down nose looks astounding. He claims it helps him hit the high notes but if that's true I'm Tinkerbell. He may not be lying to deceive, he may truly believe he hasn't had plastic surgery. He probably believes he has had one or two operations and has wiped the rest from his memory. Every aspect of his face has changed. He looks like he has had surgery everywhere: eyes, cheeks, mouth, nose, chin, jawline. He obviously wanted to get away from his younger image. I don't know how he was abused, but he seems to want to escape that area of his memory and he does much to make sure he cannot see the same person he was 30 years ago. Successful plastic surgery is in the eye of the person who has it. But the last thing I would want is him as an advert for my work. VERDICT: SAD OLIVER JAMES Psychologist AS a shrink, I was looking for evidence of whether Michael Jackson is just disturbed or actually bonkers. Two telling moments suggest that he has not quite stepped over the borderline between sanity and madness. When Jackson was asked if he wanted to be buried in a copy of Tutankhamen's coffin - which he had bought - he looked upset, and said: "I wouldn't like to buried. I would like to live forever." There is still enough sanity to say "would like to", not that it will happen. Likewise, when he said "Peter Pan represents youth, never growing up. I am Peter Pan"`, Bashir queried this, probably hoping he would claim to be the character. But Jackson qualified it with "I am Peter Pan in my heart" - he knows he is not Peter Pan literally. He is neither normal nor insane.

He is emotionally disturbed. VERDICT: SAD JUDI JAMES Body language expert WHEN Michael sat with Gavin, the boy suffering from cancer, he appeared unthreatening. He hunched into the chair, making himself look small. The image he put across was one of powerlessness, that the child was more adult than he is. Michael clearly believes he is a child. He didn't display any guilt when Bashir questioned him about sleeping with boys. There were no evasive gestures. It was in marked contrast to when he talked about plastic surgery. His blink rate quickened, he licked his lips and his eyes darted, a key sign when someone wants to get away. His behaviour with children made my skin crawl, but there was not any overt sexuality. It could be a convincing act. Because of his cosmetic surgery, we are probably not getting the full picture. It's possible his features have created a mask. VERDICT: SAD URI GELLER Close friend of Jackson MICHAEL was brutally honest, direct and he never flinched from the most difficult questions. I was so saddened at the story that came out so innocently about his childhood about the way he was beaten and tortured. All the media seem to show of Michael is his face and fabricated stories about child molesting. I would not hesitate in sending my children to him. Michael would not hurt a fly. He is a shy, humble, gentle man. He is a musical genius but everyone is pre-occupied with his face. He is lonely like many celebrities. The programme still failed to show him going to hospitals or countries like Africa where he sends cheques for millions. Michael is the most magnificent human being who helps others all the time. Here is a man who faced the cameras, answered all the questions. You could see it in his face that he was totally innocent. VERDICT: NONE.. HE'S A SHY GENTLE MAN http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12606678&method=full&siteid=50143
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February 04, 2003 Jackson faces ruin after admitting: I sleep with boys By Adam Sherwin, Media Reporter MICHAEL JACKSON'S career lay in ruins last night after he admitted in a television documentary that he coaxed young boys into sleeping in his bed. The star, who was accused of molesting a boy ten years ago, said that he recently encouraged a 12-year-old cancer sufferer to sleep in his bedroom. He also claimed to have slept in the same bed alongside several other young boys. "It's what the whole world should do," he told the interviewer, Martin Bashir, when questioned about the incident during the Granada television programme, Living With Michael Jackson. The 44-year-old singer and the boy insisted that no sexual contact took place during the sleepovers at Jackson's Neverland ranch in California. However, the revelations are likely to cause irreparable damage to a performer already tarnished by sexual scandal. In 1993 Jackson was accused by the parents of 13-year-old Jordan Chandler of sexually molesting their son during sleepovers at his 3,000- acre ranch. The family dropped the case after reaching an £18.5 million financial settlement with Jackson. No charges were brought. Jackson's career has never recovered and the interview granted to Bashir, famed for his interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, was intended to begin the billionaire performer's rehabilitation. Jackson's friend, Uri Geller, persuaded him to allow Bashir to become part of his entourage for eight months. But the resulting film, which has been bought by the US broadcaster ABC for £3.5 million, could lead to police action against the fallen star. One executive described it as the "longest suicide note in history". Tom Sneddon, the District Attorney behind the Chandler investigation, is expected to look at the new allegations after the programme is screened in the US this Friday. A spokesman from his office said: "We will be watching the programme with interest."

Last November Jackson provoked outrage when he dangled his baby son, Prince Michael II, over the balcony of a Berlin hotel and appeared briefly to lose control. As a result of that incident officials in Santa Barbara County are already considering the launch of a formal investigation into the father of three's fitness to be a parent. Bashir said he found living in Jackson's world "disturbing" and expressed his concern for the wellbeing of his young children. "I had assumed that now he would be more cautious," Bashir said. "But to my utter astonishment, I discovered that children were still sleeping over." Jackson defended his desire to sleep in close proximity with young boys, under persistent questioning from Bashir. He described the practice as "very charming, very sweet" and recommended that Bashir sleep in the same bed as friends of his own children. He also claimed that children like to be touched and said he would kill himself if he could not be close to them. Gavin, the 12-year-old boy at the centre of the fresh "sleepover" claims, said he met Jackson two years ago, after cancer was diagnosed. He began sleeping overnight at the 44-year-old singer's Neverland ranch with his brother and sister. On one occasion, the boy asked to sleep in Jackson's bedroom: "I was like 'Michael, you can sleep in the bed', and he was like 'no, no, you sleep on the bed', and I was like 'no, no, no, you sleep on the bed' and then he said 'look if you love me you'll sleep in the bed'. I was like 'Oh man'. So I finally slept on the bed. But it was fun that night." Jackson said he slept on the floor and did not touch the boy. Jackson's children, Prince Michael I, 6, and Paris, 4, are only allowed out in public wearing carnival masks to disguise their faces. In one of the most disturbing scenes in last night's programme, a shaking Jackson bottle-fed Prince Michael II, who was covered from head-to-toe in a silk veil. The baby "enjoyed" being dangled over the Berlin hotel balcony, the singer claimed. Jackson's career is locked into a downward spiral. His last album sold only two million copies in the US, even though it took him six years to write and cost £16 million to make. His former business manager Myung Ho Lee has claimed that the singer was actually £125 million in debt as a result of his lavish spending. He is being sued for failing to perform at concerts and has fallen out with his career-long record company Sony, accusing its chairman of racism. Granada has made more than £3.5 million from international sales of the film, part of the Tonight With Trevor McDonald series, with screenings in Australia and New Zealand to follow this week. The company hopes to recoup a further £2 million from video and DVD sales, which may feature additional material cut from the film. Jackson was not paid to participate in the project, Granada said. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-565675,00.html
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Michael explained this to me as we were in the back of the van heading for the NAACP appearance I'd hooked up. "See all those crowds of kids out there. They love me and I love them. But if it step into that crowd without my security people, each one will want just on small touch, just one small part of me. What they don't realize is that a human body is as fragile as an overcooked noodle. All they'll mean to do is get a touch or grab one piece of hair. But they will tear me apart." Obviously this is a bloom paraphrase. But I learned how true his observations on the weakness of the body was several years ago when I went through an extraordinary medical incident and found that the body isn't even strong enough to hold in your blood unless it can keep shifting the blood around. Think of it, how much blood does a human have--three or four pounds at most? And the body's not really strong enough to hold it? If your muscles cease to move for three days, as mine did, if there's not even a tiny twitch, if your circulatory system doesn't get help from the huge engines of the muscles, your blood comes straight through the walls of your veins, straight through the muscle and skin, and makes holes through which it pours. The Catholics call them stigmata. I've got two of them. Michael knows the crowds far better than I do. If memory isn't decieving me, both I and the writer from People Magazine whom I often carted around with me (he was my only ally in the press) occasionally felt a shiver of fright when the vans we were in with a Jackson--even Tito--was mobbed. hb: and who has been isolated from friends for the past sixteen years--or that's my guess. The Darth Vader I referred to uses isolation as a tool to control the reality Michael perceives and hence to control every key decision Michael makes. Dee Anthony used that trick on Peter Frampton. Frampton explained it to me. Then I saw it happening to Michael. Dianna Ross told me she felt Michael was her kid and was always there to help take care of him. But Diana Ross was a self-absorbed bitch--so getting mental health from her would be like getting blood transfusions from a demon. I hope, though, that she's stayed in touch with him. Ditto for Liz Taylor, but I've seen her so zonked out on chemicals that she had no contact with reality either. Yikes, two of Michael's closest friends and they are both space cadets, one a malevolent space debris and the other simply very screwed up. If I were the Darth Vader, I'd be glad those were his friends. They'd only help me enormously in achieving my goals, my ends.hb: it looks to me as if Michael, Latoya, and Janet all had the same nose jobs.
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Re: Telegraph | Opinion | Of course Jackson's odd - but his genius is what m...
In a message dated 2/22/2003 9:19:10 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes: You often notice, when a singer is bopping along with a dance-troupe, that the professional dancers perform their steps much better than the singer. But when Jackson is on stage, the opposite is true. This is not because he employs second-rate dancers - on the contrary, he hires the very best that his millions can buy. It is simply because he is the best, the most electrifying mover in the business. To see him dance, and hear him sing, is one of the most exciting experiences that Western show business has to offer. Hb: Thank god someone noticed. And it's true. Michael wanted to postpone the 1986 Victory Tour because his brother Jackie got a bone chip in his knee. Jackie was the group's choreographer, but more important to Michael, he was the best dancer Michael knew, and Michael didn't want to deprive his kids, his audience, by putting on a second-rate show.

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In a message dated 2/24/2003 9:09:09 AM Eastern Standard Time, writes: Did you happen to read the rest of the article, Howard? It was a response to the recent "Wacko Jacko" interview. The guy in effect said: "Look, we all know Jackson's crazy. But so what? What's really important about him is that he's one of the great performers of our era. So why not interview him about that, about his art?" Why not indeed. I don't think anyone ever interviewed Sinatra about his art, certainly not in depth. It needs to be done. You have a good point. Where can I find the article you've mentioned? Howard ps Michael is one of the most extraordinary examples of transcendent experience I've ever known. He has transcendent aesthetic experiences, epiphanies, over things others would take for granted as nothings. He is awed, overwhelmed, and brought to art-orgasm by the smallest acts of creativity of his fellow human beings. And though he's alone in these experiences and no one seems to understand their

importance, they are social. Michael carries his audience around in his chest. When he is awed by something, he shares it instantly, even if the mass of millions of kids he's sharing it with reside between his ribs and in his brain.
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I was cut off from Michael in roughly September of 1986. His brothers had hired me to protect Michael and themselves from some trouble they knew was happening but didn't understand. When I tracked the trouble down to its source--someone who was moving in on Michael to milk him at no matter what cost--I became dangerous and had to sliced out of Michael's life. The manipulator behind this has, I think, been using Michael for his own ends ever since. And it isn't just Michael who's paid the price. It's all of us who have lost what he has to offer.
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In a message dated 2/25/2003 7:05:53 AM Eastern Standard Time, writes: So, by making an inferential leap or two I conclude that "Wacko Jacko" is, in some measure, the deliberate creation of self-serving manipulative slimeballs and Jackson's lousy PR is deliberate. Yes and a bit of no. I suspect that Michael began to manipulate his image to surprise his audience quite a long time ago--hence stories like the one that he had the bones of the elephant man. But there was a deliberate and methodical attempt in 1986 to turn his publicity into a nightmare...it was the first step in a human equivalent of a hostile takeover. But the person who pulled it off worked in such secrecy that Michael never saw what was happening to him and why. Michael is hampered by the fact that he makes great choices in artists whose work will enhance his own but makes TERRIBLE choices when it comes to business people--managers and such. Hence the bozos with which he surrounds himself can be used or circumvented easily by someone with brains, greed, and no ethical compass. Howard

The impact of 9/11

Post 9/11-- The world trade center no longer appears on the Manhattan landscape I see through my window. The flatness is ominous. It makes me fear that we'll coccoon ourselves in the past and fail to reach forward to pull audacious futures from fantasy to actuality. Hb 11/07/01
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ginny mileto 2/4/02
Gm: we just burnt a huge burn pile in the yard...it was a combination of all the trees and shrubs we have cut down and pulled up from both yards............oh GOD Howard !!!!!!! lt was huge !!!!!!!!! You couldnt even get more than 10 feet near it, that is how incredibly hot it was...............then l thought of those poor people that jumped from the towers that horrible day in sept.......why do l constantly think of them ?

Hb: my lord, ginny.

Gm: l didnt pesonally know anymoe who died............l dream about it and want to go into the city so badly and see ground zero before it gets cleared away.....l need closure..
Hb; for all my bumblings around and deliberate explorations in the world of emotion, this is a feeling I've never had. What is it like?
Gm: ..l dont know why..........maybe its a morbid thing ?
Hb: something's broken in your life? Something in the outside loops that make you whole? You have to reknit a loop that's been broken? You have to see what's not there to knit the frayed ends together and be able to sense the new reality-to see it so that hole in the ground is not strange territory to you. There's a hole in the map of reality in your mind-an emotional map-and you need to fill it by seeing the current state of a territory you knew and took for granted, a territory that's changed in a major way, filled with horror, death, and screams. Now, more than ever, the world trade center is alive in your mind as a building of 3,200 people, not as a building of concrete, glass, and steel. This is just guessing.
Gm: l couldnt help but look at the fire we had going in the back and thinking of those people.....what is wrong with me ?
Hb: as always, nothing. This is normal. Gin, you are one of the most insightful people I know when it comes to emotions. Other folks would have these feelings, get very upset by them, and not be able to put them in words. You have a gift…and you give me a gift because of it. Many gifts.
Gm: Bill had a meeting at the tour office that he does those tours for in DC last weekend and l went with him. We pasted by the Pentagon, but it is almost all fixed.......it was strange to see it though...............

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Holly Green and hb 11/07/01hg: I finally went down to Ground Zero when Bill was in town last week and although I understand the tourists taking pictures with the rubble in the background, it was eerily disconcerting.

hb: so is the flatness of the Manhattan skyline outside my window.

hg: I sometimes fear that we will too soon forget how tall and wide these buildings once stood.

hb: hmmmmm, the flatness of the landscape also makes me fear that we'll coccoon ourselves in the past and fail to reach forward to pull audacious possibilites from the fantasy to actuality.

hg: It unfortunately makes me reflect on the group of people who claim that the Holocaust never happened. I'm sure that will not be the case,

hb: its equivalence has already appeared. many critics are blaming the attack against the US on American policy instead of focusing on the enemy--militant Islam. Those critics would be the first to die in a jihad mounted by Moslem extremeists already living in the US. Islam does not allow the sort of self-critical dialog we engage in in our society.
Howard
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"apathy, boredom, utopian idealism, melancholy, inaction, and excessive reflection are the correlates of class-wide powerlessness and the failure of purposeful efforts."
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On 4/29/98 John Edser writes to HB:

I bring this up because four authors, De Landa, Kennedy, McNeill, and Diamond, have all given the same explanation for the triumph of the west over Islam and China during the last few hundred years. China and Islam, they say, were too centralized, too homogenized by imperial bureaucracy. Both, in other words, were in a maintenance mode and stayed that way, despite the fact that their environment was changing. Maintenance modes deal poorly with change. JE:- These maintenance modes are not dealing with the massive expansion of the population, that the industrial revolution produced, in the west, via individual freedom and its resultant increase in world trade. With such continuous expanding populations, the west is forced into "dispersal mode" most of the time during its history. AN INTERESTING POSSIBILITY. LET'S RUN IT THROUGH THE SIEVE OF HISTORICAL DATA AND SEE IF IT HOLDS UP. I THINK OF THE CHRISTIAN WORLD FROM 350 A.D. TO ROUGHLY 1100 A.D. AS IN A FASTING MODE, WHICH IS HIGH MAINTENANCE, HIGH CONSERVATION OF RESOURCES, AND DEFINITELY NOT INTO DISPERSAL. HOWEVER I MAY BE OVERLOOKING THE INCREDIBLE EXPANSIONISM OF CHRISTIANITY ITSELF, WHICH CONQUERED WITHOUT ARMIES BUT WITH MEME-POWER. AS FOR THE GOTHS, VISIGOTHS, SAXONS, JUTES, DANES AND OTHER FOLKS IN A DISPERSAL MODE, VERY FEW OF THESE WERE CHRISTIANIZED OR HAD PARTICIPATED IN THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. IT WAS THE POPULATION WHICH HAD UNDERGONE THE INCREDIBLE DOWNHILL PLUNGE FOLLOWING ROME'S FALL WHICH WENT INTO A SHRINKAGE AND CONSOLIDATION PATTERN--THE FEASTING/MAINTENANCE MODE. EVEN THE CHRISTIANIZED GAULS, SOME OF THEM CALLED BRITONS, WENT INTO A FASTING/SHRINKAGE STAGE. THINK OF THE CHRISTIANIZED GAULS HELD UP IN STRONGHOLDS LIKE THE MONASTERY AT LINDISFARNE AND SIMILAR MONASTIC HIDEY HOLES IN IRELAND. THESE PEOPLE WERE HUNKERING DOWN FOR THE STORM, NOT SETTING OUT FOR EXPLORATION OR CONQUEST. Howard

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the "mood swings of society, the shift from r to k, the switch from CR romanticism to classicism, from liberalism to conservatism" are tied to the shifting balance between subcultures. and those subcultures are tied to differences of personality built into us even before birth. Harvard professor Jerome Kagan says scientists have spotted "two temperamental dispositions, one related to restraint and the other to spontaneity" (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 13) 66b are the personalities of children shaped by biology or by the way their parents treat them? biology plays a greater role than current fashion--with its books on toxic parents--would acknowledge. in studies of japanese and american newborns, some took the removal of the nipple from their mouth calmly, while others went into emotional fits. *the babies as yet have had no opportunity to learn these reactions from their parents, these are tendencies they've brought with them from the isolation of the womb. *and the tendencies persist. At fourteen months, the babies who were easily upset at birth are still more likely to break out crying when a stranger steps into the room. (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 84) on another test, babies who respond excitedly at birth to being switched suddenly from water to a sugar solution have a harder time tolerating separation from their mothers at the age of one or two than babies who took the change in beverage in stride. (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 84) and a study of 113 children showed that "those who had a hard time handling the unexpected when they were one year old" were shy and withdrawn by the time they reached six. (p. 85) 66b an experiment on babies as young as "three days CR old" showed some cried when their mothers left the room, some did not. those who cried had more activity in the right front portion of the brain, a territory associated with fear and negative emotions.

Iinhibited three year olds also turned out to have high activity in the same fearful portion of the brain. (NYT, C-1, 14, 6/6/89) 68a "some subcultures and their philosophies are built on CR restraint. others are built on spontaneity." in a random group of 2-3 year olds, 10-15%% will be restrained, another 10-15% will be wild and spontaneous. (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 13) 66b environment, says Kagan, cannot be the sole "puppetmaster" for humans. (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 13?) why? people of different temperaments will interpret the same circumstances in different ways and react differently. 66b Says Jerome Kagan, "Human infants react differently to the same potentially stressful events." (Unstable Ideas, Jerome Kagan, p. 173) 67a what a parent does is not the ultimate in child-raising. according to Jerome Kagan, an inhibited baby establishes a different kind of relationship with its parents than an uninhibited infant. (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 126) 66b at two months some babies will lay relatively quietly showing a calm interest in a mobile others will squirm frantically. these are not just "momentary moods." at nine-months, the hyper excitable babies are still showing the same tendency, and so are their most h)" 0*0*0* placid counterparts. some two month olds tend to smile and babble, while others tend to cry (p. 171) these are personality traits revealing themselves, "different ways of reacting to CR the world." (Unstable Ideas, Jerome Kagan, p. 170-171) 67a Jung originated "the idea of extroverts and introverts" (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 134) 66b "Jung" actually believed that introverts and extroverts had slightly different brain structures, and hence saw the same events in very different ways. (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 119) 66b babies who start out irritable but end up introverted once they enter school have a far more sensitive limbic system, according to Kagan. (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 18) *It takes far less to overload their emotions. 66b introverts do "have brains a little different from the norm." certain areas of the brain (the limbic and sympathetic nervous systems, and the hypothalamic, pituitary, adrenal axis) become excited rapidly over relatively trivial events, and stay excited longer than the norm. extroverts' brains rouse more slowly to events in the outside world. (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 128, 135, 145) 66b the production of one key manufacturing "enzyme" for norepinephrine is controlled by a single gene locus, making norepenephrine level highly heritable. (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 167-8) high norepenephrine levels are found in timid children, who, in carefully controlled studies, pick up on slight changes in tones or brightness of light that other children miss. in other words, these children literally see and hear their world differently. (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 168) 66b norepenephrine arouses the sensitivity of the amygdala, which is involved in emotional reactions, including fear and avoidance of novelty. (Unstable Ideas, Jerome Kagan, p. 170) 67a Norepinephrine shows up very early in the development of the embryo. (Unstable Ideas, p 170) 67a norepenephrine makes the hippocampus more sensitive to unfamiliar events (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 169?) 66b

John Skoyles. _Odyssey_. Brain scanners show subtle but strong differences between the two hemispheres. The right one is strongly involved in face recognition, voice identification, emotions, spatial-visual skills and skills with a `broad' focus. The left one is strongly involved in speech, verbal reasoning, synthesising fragments together, and skills with a `narrow' focus. When the left cerebral cortex is temporarily in command after the right one is suppressed after electroconvulsive therapy, people reason in a theoretical, decontextualised and deductive way. When the right is in command, people reason quite differently refusing to make decontextualised deductions and approaching problems in an `empirical way'. In memory the right prefrontal cortex retrieves and checks the validity of memories while the left one encodes them for storage. Activation of the right prefrontal cortex links with depressed immune responses and the left with stronger ones. Studies in rats suggest left prefrontal activation links with short term responses to controllable stress, while the right one links with longer term ones to uncontrollable responses of helplessness. According to V. S. Ramachandran, when the brain is faced with discrepancies, the left side of the brain tries to impose consistency upon them to preserve the status quo, while the right side acts as a `devil's advocate', shifting perspective when doing this creates too many anomalies.
The two sides link to different aspects of being with others. The right prefrontal cortex is activated by novel situations and interruptions while in the left this happens by continuous active engagement. The right hemisphere is concerned with the nonverbal and `negative' side of emotions -- withdrawal, disgust, fear and distress, while the left is concerned with positive, environment-engaging emotions such as joy and interest. Depressed adults show reduced left prefrontal activity. Ten month old infants with greater right prefrontal activity cry more when separated from their mothers than those who do not. Those who look on the positive side of things rather than ruminating on failures show not only high self-esteem but have more left prefrontal side activity. But not all positive emotions are left-sided: in men (women were not studied) while the rest of the cortex shows reduced blood flow, the right prefrontal cortex lights up at sexual orgasm. It is also activated by the pleasures of drink and possibly sensory deprivation in flotation tanks. There are also hints that the right side of the brain is linked (though not yet by scanners) to hypnosis and hypnotizability.
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Different styles of reasoning after electroconvulsive treatment: (Deglin & Kinsbourne, 1996).
Lateralisation of memory retrieval and encoding: (Shallice, Fletcher, Frith, Grasby, Frackowiak & Dolan, 1994; Tulving et al, 1994; 1995).
Immune function and right and left prefrontal cortex: (Kang, et al, 1991; see also for similar difference when the two sides of the brain are externally activated: (Amassian, Henry et al, 1994).
Left and right prefrontal responses in rats to stress: (Carlson, Fitzgerald, Keller & Glick, 1991; Sullivan & Szechtman, 1995).
Ramachandran, left consistency, right devil's advocate: (Ramachandran, 1996).
Two sides of the prefrontal cortex and different emotions:: (Grafman et al, 1986; Tomarken, Davidson, Wheeler & Doss, 1992: Davidson, 1992).
Right prefrontal negative withdraw and left prefrontal positive approach emotions: (Davidson, 1992; Tomarken, Davidson, Wheeler & Doss, 1992).
Right prefrontal activation in infants and separation: (Davidson & Fox, 1989; Fox, Bell & Jones. 1992).
Left prefrontal side of the brain and looking on the positive side of things: (Tomarken & Davidson, 1994).
Right prefrontal cortex and orgasm: (Tiihonen, Kuikka et al, 1994). Note they found Brodmann area 10 became activated which is usually taken to be part of the `nonemotional' prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex and pleasures of alcohol: (Tiihonen, Kuikka et al, 1994).
Right hemisphere activation in flotation: (Raab & Gruzelier, 1994).
Hypnosis, hypnotizability and right side activation: (Gruzelier et al, 1984; Gruzelier & Warren, 1993; MacLeod-Morgan & Lack, 1982; Spiegel, 1992).
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People trapped in their fears tend to ward off outside intrusions of the unfamiliar on two levels: they shun new ideas, and their bodies put up an exaggerated and selfdestructive struggle against foreign substances. Fearful Children and Their Relatives Are More Likely To Suffer From Allergies. Both allergy and fear involve an oversensitivity to the difference between self and nonself, between the accustomed and the unaccustomed. (The Neurobiology of Fear by Ned H. Kalin, pps. 94101, Scientific American May 1993.). 92a

The Christian strategy of conservation via the fasting mode worked. It cut down on reproduction and saved resources. The rate of population increase in Europe before the Industrial Revolution was notably slower than in rival civilizations like China and Islam, which were wealthier and able to stay in a feasting or conquering mode.
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Scott Antes bit of news below is more material for _The Return of the Middle Ages_, one of whose premises is that America, no longer number one (we're kidding ourselves this month to think we are), is reacting to a withdrawal of resources (for example, our huge balance of payment deficits and the explosion in low pay, low skill jobs recently documented by economists) by going into the fasting mode, which involves self-denial of sexuality, consumption (admittedly this form of self-denial hasn't hit us yet), and "rational," left-brain, outer-world-controlling knowledge. In other words, the fasting mode carries its victims back to the endorphin dreamworld associated with the "k" mode. And going anti-knowledge, anti-sexual, and gung ho religious works at conserving resources. Dominated by the self-denying sexual practices of Christianity (breached a zillion times but honored by some, apparently) Europe had a lower birth rate than China and Islam until the Industrial Revolution. China and Islam, by the way, were doing quite well during the period from roughly 650 AD until 1700, far better than was the Christian world. So those two civilizations could afford a heck of a lot more feeding, questing and conquering--all "r" modes. Howard ----------------------- John Skoyles. _Odyssey_. to-be-published book manuscript on neurobiology. The Neurobiology of Fear by Ned H. Kalin, pps. 94-101, Scientific American May 1993. Jerome Kagan. Unstable Ideas: Temperament, Cognition and Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Emotions in Health And Illness: Theoretical and Research Foundations, edited by Lydia Temoshok, Craig Van Dyke, Leonard S. Zegans, 137151. Orlando: Grune & Stratton, Inc., 1983. D. Crews. "Species Diversity and the Evolution of Behavioral Controlling Mechanisms." In The Integrative Neurobiology of Affiliation, edited by C. Sue Carter, I. Izja Lederhendler, and Brian Kirkpatrick, New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1997: 121.

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Subj: "Evolution" No More Date: 98-05-01 20:11:08 EDT From: (Scott E. Antes) Reply-to:Scott. To:

At a faculty meeting this afternoon I was informed that the State of Arizona has forbidden the word "evolution" to be used in Arizona public schools, grades K-12. Teaching at the university level, it hasn't affected me, but I'm hoping that someone is better informed about this than I am, and can give the *basic* details. Anyone in another state or country run into a similar decree?

Scott Antes

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Subj: Re: "Evolution" No More Date: 98-05-02 01:51:54 EDT From: (Albert Himoe) To: At 04:57 PM 5/1/98 -0700, Scott E. Antes wrote: Anyone in another state or country run into a similar decree? [Forbidding the word "evolution" in the public schools] Scott Antes Not quite. However, in Illinois the state "standards" recently adopted did in fact avoid the word "evolution", opting for an ambiguous wording concerning how living thing change over time. Evolution was deemed too "controversial" to be included in the standards.

Albert Himoe (Urbana, IL)
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:

<< Subj: evolution Date: 98-05-03 06:26:54 EDT From: (Ellery Lanier) To: RE: Scott Antes question on evolution. Not too many years ago when I did my practice teaching (In Texas) my supervisor walked into the classroom- looked at my large printing of the word evolution on the chalkboard- and informed me that Evolution was against the law. I countered by telling her that there many books in the school library with that title. She was shocked. I nee4ed my licence so I agreed not to use the illegal word. I got my license. The principal of my first school told me, "If the Bible tells me six days were enough for creation, that's good enough for me." So I taught the bad word anyway, and no one complained. My rabbi told me that when Darwin's work was first published a conference of top rabbis declared that Evolution showed that God was even greater than we thought He was. Evolution was God's miracle! Ellery Lanier
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In a message dated 98-06-03 00:00:08 EDT, Reed Konsler writes:

What sort of research do you imagine doing in a biology department, anyway, gregorian chant? That's in ethnomusicology...it's just down the hall.

I shouldn't be laughing, since I'm supposed to keep ad hominems and other things of that sort to a minimum, but this is hilarious. Martha does have a point, however. Should she come up with a research proposal which aims in some way to demonstrate that there may be validity of creationism, she'd be out on her earlobe.

quoting Martha--on original thinkers now than they were in Copernicus' day.

That's hard to judge. Copernicus did his work funded by the Pope (as good as an NSF grant). The goal was to come up with a better way of calculating the arrival of Easter. However he seems to have realized that his results would not be found readily acceptable, since he delayed publishing his findings until his death. That's pretty harsh, Martha.

you cannot seriously advocate that we return to the mindset of the Middle Ages? It's been seriously advocated many a time--for example by the post Rafaelites under Byrne Jones and several small, talented groups of 20th century Christian intellectuals including the klatch around C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, and, I believe, the Nazi-sympathizing clicque which included T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Not to meniton old Adolph himself, who had himself painted in armor as a Teuronic knight for a rather impressive postage stamp.
more from Martha: the process of becoming a professor requires 5-7 years of graduate school, in which one's opinions are rigorously monitored for their orthodoxy, and another seven years of untenured teaching after which one's continuance in the job depends on how well one has conformed to the expectations of those established in the profession.

This seems dead on target to me.
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authoritarianism is linked to the biological mechanisms for dominance hierarchies, per The Sociobiology of Democracy--Darwinism, Dominance and Democracy: The Biological Bases of Authoritarianism by Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson. Praeger Publishers--see \text\authortr.ian
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Alex--Let me see if I can give you a bit more about the theory of authoritatianism you've asked for. Some of this appears in the Lucifer Principle. Lack of control has a strange effect on the neurology and the endocrinology of us creatures--be we rabbits, rats, or rocket scientists. Put a dog on an electrified floor with no exit, and at first it will make frantic efforts to escape the shock to its paws. It will jump, run around the area, and will make every effort to find a way out. Eventually its attempts to dodge the pain will be exhausted. Finally it will settle into a resigned state and lay there, simply taking the jolts. Now open a door which clearly shows a way out. The dog will have so given himself up to helplessness that he will not notice the open door or make a move to escape through it.

Internally, the dog is initially charged with stress hormones--epinephrine, norepenephrine, and corticosteroids-- in response to its punishment. Stress hormones activate an animal, liberating its energy for action and turning off such things as the immune system, energy drainers whose fuel is needed for an effort to get away from the clear and present danger. At least this is what stress hormones do in short bursts. In long bursts--unending doses--stress hormones turn from activators to deactivators. In fact, they are poisons. They demotivate. They destroy brain tissue. And they turn off the ability to perceive and to make innovative connections.

In response to pain or to the really rough, the body also produces endorphin. Endorphin in short bursts gives pleasure. In unending doses, it, too, is a deactivator, but one of a strange kind. Endorphin's name is a contraction of "endogenous morphine." In other words, endorphin acts like heroin or other morphne derivatives. It detaches the person whose system is flooded with it from external reality, blinds him to the unpleasantness around him, and takes him into a dream world. It also blinds the individual to opportunity--which is why the dog doped up on endogenous morphine (endogenous means produced naturally by the body) doesn't notice the open door which would lead to a painless freedom.

Individuals are not the only ones to find themselves without control--trapped in seemingly helpless situations. Societies can also find that they are caught in the ringer. They, too, flail around in a frantic attempt to find solutions. But should all atempts at solution fail, they too will dive into an endorphin state of resignation. Why? Because they are composed of individuals. And as the group's situation grows more desperate, an increasing number of its members will find themselves in painful deadend states. As a result, an overwhelming balance of the population will be supercharged with stress hormones and endogenous morphine.

We don't know the nature of the dreamworld to which a dog retreats when it lays on an electrified floor and gives in to agony. We do, however, have some cues to the nature of the fantasy world into which humans retreat when they withdraw from reality. As a simple example, when Rome was on top of the world, it stressed the cursus honororum--the series of outer world achievements with which an individual was expected to demonstrate his worth if he wanted to climb the ladder of power and prestige. The system motivated men like Julius Caeser to great deeds which benefitted the entire society. Three hundred years later Rome was in a very different state. Attacked by barbarians for generation after generation, overtaxed to the hilt, and frozen in a life of downward mobility, many Romans no longer sought the impossibility of achievement in the outside world. Instead, they hunted for an inner escape from a pain which no amount of outward effort would allow them to elude. They hit the endoprhin state--the state of needing a morphine dream.

Christianity offered just such a thing. It said that if one denied one's outer-world-oriented desires and subjugated oneself entirely to belief in an invisible savior, one would win eternal bliss in an invisible location--the kingdom of god, heaven. Invisible saviors, unseeable heavens, forms of salvation which could be achieved by giving up--all this smacks of the hormonally induced resignation of the dog who has exhausted his efforts at escape and withdrawn into a hallucinagenic dreamworld.

At the end of the 80s, when Russia was slipping into its current morass, it turned from science to psychics and flying saucer fantasies. America, hit with the confusion of a world in which it seemed on top but was virtually helpless to accomplish anything of significance, went from science to spiritualism (the number of books about angels or spiritual succor in the top ten on the bestseller lists skyrocketed early in the 80s) and to the X-files--not to mention far more heavily than usual into fundamentalist Christianity.

Individuals who have lost control and feel under threat also huddle tightly together in a group, and, as the chapter I sent indicates, become intolerant of dissent. Those who feel in control of things and are rip-roaring with newfound riches dive headily into novelty. But those who feel their power slipping see novelty as a danger. Ambiguity threatens them. They need things spelled out in black and white. A leader who will preach dream utopias and a value system where the blacks and whites are clearly separated is what folks in this endorphin state crave.

What's more, a leader of this sort can reempower his followers in a simple manner. Rather than forcing them to face the difficult--if not impossible--challenges defeating them, he can turn their attention to some group sufficiently helpless that battering it comes easily. In other words, he can give the powerless a feeling of power by turning their frustration-born hatreds against a scapegoat group. In the Rome of the fifth century, Christian leaders ignored the Goths, Alars, Huns, and other groups raping and pillaging first in their outward provinces, then in Rome itself. Instead Church leaders like St. Augustine turned the rage of their followers on heretics--minorities too small to defend themselves.

There's a great deal more to this theory--complete with tons of biological data, historical material, etc. However, as I said, it's at least a full chapter. In fact, it's a book full. The book is called _The Return of the Middle Ages: sexual terror and the fear of knowledge_. It's been on the drawing boards since 1983, and the notes for it are voluminous. Most of its predictions have come true. But one can only write so many books at a time.

Despite the sketchiness of this, I hope it helps a bit. Cheers--Howard