saturn return to sender

[originally written July 26, 2009 … updated and posted today]

I fancy that sitting—a la meditation—is kind of like music for me. I’ve studied some theory and have some talent, but I never practice. Coloring in chords on paper isn’t at all like touring with a band, and reading about, say, Rinzai and Soto isn’t at all like sesshin. I mean: I assume. Having never done that.

But, I found a nice little rock off the path with a view and a slanted face and it was actually pretty comfortable. I zoned out, zoned out of zoning out (aka, zoned back in), tried to allow the thoughts to arise and fade, noted the immediacy of the wind’s action on the flowers nearby, tasted the weird almost panic-inducing intimacy of what I fancy to be less-mediated experience.

Soon, I felt sadness, and I recognized it as the sadness that I carry with me everywhere. I furrowed my brow at it. I tried not to suppress it. What the fuck is this thing anyway? What the fuck is it? So strange. As strange as the beauty of the scene, the beauty of the people I know. I felt alone, with the wind and the mountains which refused to either validate or damn my presence. Fucking silent mountains.

But then I started breathing consciously. Then, in the breathing, I felt that I was … participating in the scene: the wind, the rock, the mountains, the creatures living on the tundra. I was not so separate from all of that, because everything there was breathing. Some words came forth to describe the experience and they sort of echoed in my head, as the sadness expanded, and before too long I was crying. The words were “breathing is to participate in the divine. breathing is to participate in the divine …”

I clung to the repeating words like they were a rocking-back-and-forth hug I was giving to myself, but they were not much solace. Participation isn’t solace, it’s just I suppose that participating is less absurd than not participating. I suppose it’s also nice to have company.

I decided then that the world seems mostly to be beautiful, and mostly to be sad. This is my view, my predilection, I think. By and large, beauty unfolds from hardship, and heartbreak is the inevitable end of beauty. The things living in the tundra turn the mountain tops all green and lush in spite of the unforgiving climate. People give to each other and work for what’s right despite their own suffering and damage, and despite the astounding injustice of human stupidity.

Beauty and Heartbreak: those are my current favorite names for the demon and angel lovers who dance the world into being. They’re fucking nuts, but somehow it seems like the only sane choice is to join in…

I can’t explain it, but some specimens of the Star Trek TNG photoshop meme are unbearably hilarious to me. Especially when they involve silly hats.

If you haven’t seen it, the new trailer for J. J. Abrams’ Trek has been out for about a week. Looks action-packed for sure, and I’m glad the franchise is getting a facelift and some fresh blood. But I can’t shake the sense that they’ve given the bridge of the Enterprise to a boy band. Kirk and Spock look like they’re in high school. Maybe I’m just getting old.

My reading of the Wikipedia entry (and with Karl Urban’s McCoy completely missing from this poster) suggests that the traditional tripod of character dynamic among Kirk, Spock, and Bones will be reduced to two: Kirk’s and Spock’s fragmented personalities. (This along with with the boyish casting will undoubtedly get the K/S culture all atwitter … er … FYI, that link is safe for work, but potentially unsafe for your world view.) So that’s something of a departure from the standard Trek framework …

Also I have wondered if Abrams’ Trek won’t be so bleak as to violate the spirit of hope that was so important to creator Roddenberry. Based on Cloverfield and Lost, Abrams’ work—to me—reads dark and fatalist. But, according to Wikipedia, “[Abrams] does like Star Trek’s optimism though, being an optimist himself, and [he] felt the film would be a refreshing antidote to films like The Dark Knight.” So that’s good, I guess.

Anyway. Here’s my contribution to the meme. Not so funny, but oh well.

I wrote another too-long response to a BA blog post. I’ve been complaining about this for years, too:

Which leaves me to say the thing I have said so many times, but which so many people don’t seem to want to understand: there is no such thing as the supernatural. If something exists, then it is real, and it is natural.

But I shoot for the middle path:

Whole-heartedly agreed that the word ’supernatural’ is meaningless. I cry a little inside whenever I see the word used by supposedly intelligent publications or people as if it has a referent.

But with respect to the whole discussion, I wanted to suggest a fundamental (ontological? epistemological?) difference between experience and representation of experience, and the consequences for science.

Let’s say we have the technology to hook someone to a machine that precisely constructs descriptions of her emotions in real time. We have a great deal of faith (ehem) that our model of the brain can convert electrical/chemical activity into these perfect descriptions. I’m not sure what such a description would be. Maybe it’s uncannily well-written, evocative prose. Or maybe a vector in some multi-dimensional emotional space that we know (somehow) is complete across the gamut of possible human emotion.

The person has experience, the machine constructs representations of that experience.

Now, if you could only pick one of those two things to have on a desert island, which would you pick? The exhaustive representation? Or the experience? Which is the more “valid” aspect of existence?

Neither; both. The two—a 1st person experience and a 3rd person representation of experience—are fundamentally separate yet equally valid aspects of existence. Science, no matter how perfect its models of the world are, will never be able to do more than generate representations. Experience can never be more than a private affair. Never the twain shall meet. (Except indirectly through the artifacts of reason and language and art and music and poetry and …)

So what’s the problem? you ask. Well, this places a real limitation on what science, as a method of investigation, is able to do, and raises questions about what “truth” and “validity” mean. Giving it short shrift, does a scientific account of an event always beat out a personal experience account of the same event in the battle for validity? If so, is that assertion “provable”?

The answer is of course, no, it’s not provable. Any claim science makes on validity depends on being able to represent the object of investigation.

So? What’s the problem? Two difficulties spring to mind:

1 – The practical impossibility of a complete model of the universe. Granted, this has little bearing on the everyday, whether your microwave works or not, but if we suppose that the project of science can be “completed,” then there is the problem of the amount of information and computation required to model the entire universe, if we suppose that, for any event, tendrils of causative dependency creep out into the entire universe (or at least to the information horizon of the speed of light), which, for completeness‘ sake, we must suppose.

But okay, forget the universe, how about modeling an afternoon thunderstorm? How about modeling a cup of tea? Completely? Without simplification? I don’t know, perhaps it will be possible some day. Maybe quantum computing will even be able to model the apparently probabilistic nature of the very small.

But, more relevant to the example above, how about modeling human emotion? Can we be sure that the multi-dimensional emotional space we made for our machine truly exhausts the gamut of human emotion? Can we prove it?*

Which brings us to …

2 – Representations must exist in some language, and science’s claims of validity in particular rely upon mathematics. I am no expert by any means, but one interpretation of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems is that “truth is a stronger notion than proof”. “Proof” exists only in the idealized, internal world of perfect spheres and such. “Truth” is something else. The philosophical implications for science are that “truth” is (provably!) slippery and the notion that science “explains” things, full stop, a bit naïve.

In fact, as should be well-known (but apparently isn’t), nothing is ever “proven” in empirical science. (I cry at the abuse of that word, too.) What we have in empirical science is a general consensus among experts, and faith, yes faith, that mathematical language maps well enough onto experience to trust the scientific models built from it. The models, the language, and the notion of proof are forever hermetically sealed away from the actual, 1st person experience of the world.

And that’s the part we care about, right? Our experience? Science is cool because it gives us microwave ovens.

So experience and 3rd-person representations of experience are (ontologically? epistemologically?) separate, but valid, aspects of existence. To compare the validity claims of science to the validity claims of personal experience is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Ken Wilber would call each “true but partial.” It’s best, perhaps, to take each on its own terms.

Reuben Hersh calls mathematics a social activity, and if that’s true for math it’s got be even moreso true for science. Science is a collective representation of the world based on a very mature and useful method of inquiry. It is not, however, the holy grail or the end-all and be-all. I’ll take its results as wonderful things, and will often, but not always, defer to them in the face of a conflicting account of “truth” from my own 1st person experience of the world. Did I see a ghost? Probably not.

But, that’s a matter of judgement, not of mathematical necessity.

This past week, in response to Bad Astronomy Blog commentary on a news item about a transcendental meditation group in Iowa, I wrote the following, and then failed to post it as a comment, but eventually posted a shorter version. I am not an expert on the subject but make myself sound like one, and the comment was way too long, and jumping into internet conversations among strangers sometimes feels like jumping into a pool of angry fish with creepy translucent little teeth.

Um. Anyway. I spent so long writing it, and this blog has been so mundane lately, that I figured I’d post it here.

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