Old Book: Intro
"Everything's wrong at the same time it's right.
The truth has no patterns for me tonight"
Captain Beefheart
I just like cool ideas is all. Especially ones that are a little different. Especially ones I thought of myself. I can't seem to stop my mind from generating philosophical theories -- which is too bad, since I oppose that sort of thing on philosophical grounds. As someone once told me, it's generally false that generalities are true ... and vice versa.
If I'm anti-theory, I'm pro insight -- peeking behind the maps at the territory itself, if that's possible. It's all about taking those insights and developing metaphors that you can think with rather than drawing big conclusions. Or is it the other way around, the metaphor generating the insights. Both probably. The further our ratiocinations move away from our original insights toward abstraction, the more you lose (duh) concreteness. The AND rule of high school math shows that as one strings together premises of limited applicability, those limitations get amplified multiplicatively, and abstraction amounts precisely to such stringing together. While I may therefore be against the big conclusion, I'm keen on the big conjecture, the cool idea. What makes them cool? It's obviously a matter of taste. Whatever gets the gears turning.
Remember geometry class? I'm talking old-school geometry not far from Euclid himself, where we used the axioms and the given and the theorems we'd already proven to prove further theorems. New theorems built on old theorems, slowing erecting a magnificent edifice of unassailable mathematical truth. For two thousand years this structure was the ideal of rationality in many parts of the world. And it suggested a model for ending all debate in every sphere of knowledge that was the wet dream of the Enlightenment. Wouldn't it be great, the thinking went, if our senators could all agree on a handful of true statements and derive (or better yet calculate) the correct answer to any policy question we might pose. Well, how is that working out so far? Where did it all go wrong? The problem isn't with deriving theorems. Even today, few people doubt the power of deduction to produce truly certain conclusions. No, the problem is with agreeing on premises and on coming up with enough solid premises to answer the really important questions. Not to mention accepting inconvenient deductions.
War and Peace
When I was a kid, I passed many hours playing the card game war. You may remember the game. Two players divvy up the whole deck, placing the hands face down in two piles. The players flip over cards from the top of their piles and match them against each other. The player with the high card takes the two cards and puts them at the bottom of her or his pile. The exciting part occurs when the two cards have the same value—both are jacks, for example. Then the players call out, "War!" and each deals out three more cards face down and flips a fourth card to compare against the opponent's as before. High card takes all. You might guess that the essential randomness of the cards would keep both piles about even, but, because of the wars—double and even triple wars are not uncommon—a kind of momentum can be achieved and just as quickly lost. It is not unusual for a player to be down to only five or six cards and then come roaring back. This potential for see-sawing adds to the drama and the competitive frenzy. Inevitably, however, despite the difficulty of taking away the opponents aces and of winning with the 2's and 3's just taken, perhaps after an hour or so, one player will accumulate all the cards and the game is over.
Anyone who plays much realizes that this is hardly a game at all. There's no strategy or novelty. Play takes place mechanically, and the entire outcome is determined by the deal of the cards.
At some point I noticed that we were actually playing two different games at the same time. Owing to the fact that War is completely mechanical and there is absolutely no thought, skill, or choice involved in the playing of the game—a state of affairs, by the way, which does not diminish the fun of playing or one's sense of competition—it is possible to decide that the object of the game is to get rid of all your cards, like in Crazy Eights, another of my early favorites. Let's call this new interpretation Peace. For any deal of the cards, the actual playing of Peace, apart from the reactions of the players, follows exactly the same trajectory as the corresponding game of War, but at the end, the other player would have won. That is, there is no built-in orientation to one's experience of the game. It is indifferent to our interpretation of events.
The game of Peace is a simple version of what I will call a complementary description. By reversing our assumptions, in this case about the object of the game, the identical events can be interpreted very differently. You might think that reversing assumptions necessarily reverses conclusions, but we will see that this needn't be the case. Reality doesn't have rules, at least not such simple ones like War or Peace, but I think the world is equally neutral to our interpretations of it. The world is very open to alternatives.
People, by and large, are not particularly open to alternatives. We live in a time of increasing division, of seemingly irreconcilable and unyielding disagreement about a vast spectrum of issues—everything from the role of government and abortion rights to the possibility of artificial intelligence, the existence of God, and the legitimacy of the DH rule. Taking sides seems to have become a world-wide obsession. Is it a mistake to think that the fragmentation is continually on the increase? Perhaps just a natural change in perspective as we grow older? I don't think so. I believe the increase derives from a weird pathology of an increasingly prevailing mindset -- on both sides of every divide. (This is leaving aside the disingenuous political arguments of many people and of the reality of dis- and mis-information muddying the waters.)
One political position holds that the just society is the one that maximizes individual freedoms. Another says it is the one that assures collective rights. One theory of mind says that consciousness is an inherent quality of wholes. Another tries to construct consciousness from the interactions of particles or computer programs. We, as participants in these arguments, often become frustrated with the apparent stupidity of the opposition.
Even when we don't find ourselves taking sides on these issues, we often operate with the assumption that one or the other side would turn out to be right if we could only advance our knowledge sufficiently. It never occurs to us there is any kind of middle ground or any essential legitimacy to opposing points of view. For brief moments, perhaps when we are tired and not caught up in a partisan spirit, we may begin to understand what our adversaries see in their positions, not in a merely intellectual way but from the heart. What dyed-in-the-wool liberal, for example, has never been appalled by the wastefulness of government bureaucracy or income redistribution? What atheist has never experienced a religious sentiment? And at very rare moments we may briefly go one step further and sense that neither side is right in any absolute way. Both sides are only maps to a transcendent territory. What is simply is. But bound as we seem to be to take sides, we soon have to dismiss these moments as damaging to society or unimportant, illusory, or motivated by some unconscious self-interest. Opposite perspectives are mutually exclusive, we reason; they can't both be valid.
One result of our one-way approach to truth is a strange form of schizophrenia in our society that leads to an unnecessary fragmentation and separation between individuals, between groups, and between realms of knowledge. Physicists can't talk to sociologists, let alone Democrats to Republicans, because each group is committed to a wholly different one-way truth. And if each group has identified what the one true path is, then all that is left for our various seekers of truth is to pursue this right course to its conclusion. We end up with our current society of expertise where growing bodies of received knowledge stand in subtle contradiction to ones in other areas.
Our experts always seem to speak and act as if they are 90% of the way toward answering the important questions in their field, as if we are about to arrive at an ending Omega Point of history. And yet somehow 90% of what we knew to be the case a hundred years ago is no longer considered fully valid. There have been major reversals, for example, in judgments about things as settled as plate tectonics or human equality or even appropriate nutrition, but that has done little to soften the tone of expert pronouncements about our current state of knowledge. "We now know that a low fat diet extends life." It may be hard for lowly me to imagine how the current statistics about fat consumption and so on will find different interpretations in the future, but I'm willing to bet they will. We have to remind ourselves, along with Thomas Kuhn, that even gravity ain't what it used to be: Einstein's and Newton's versions are utterly different theories.
The unbelievably short-sighted and self-serving racial attitudes prevalent among the leading geneticists and most educated white men as recently as 100 years ago may fill us with horror and contempt nowadays, but might not this history lesson also spur us to think about the currently respectable attitudes that will be equally spurious and objectionable to future generations? There absolutely must be some. It may be meat-eating or, more likely, something we are not as yet equipped to see.
What I am trying to offer in these essays is nothing more than a prescription for a particular brand of open-mindedness that addresses some of the shortcomings of a one-way approach by recognizing the qualities of reality that make room for complementary descriptions. There is nothing new in suggesting that what is wrong with our society is its rigidity, people's intolerance and lack of imagination, but I think my take on this situation is rather novel. While I will spend more time discussing atomic particles than cultural institutions, more mathematics than morality, in my way, I hope to provide ammunition for those who seek change. If, at the end of the book, you also have firmer abdominal muscles, so much the better.
For reasons that I will discuss shortly, our whole intellectual basis for any rational understanding of the world, let alone an understanding in terms of one era's cherished assumptions and theories, is as much a devout wish as an established fact. It may well be a necessity for us to believe in some set of assumptions and theories at any given moment in order to make the choices we are faced with every day, but history tells us that, over the course of time, those assumptions and theories will radically change. It is an especially egregious mistake to really believe, rather than provisionally believe, that the current thinking is the right thinking.
"The world," as J.B.S. Haldane said, "is not only queerer than we imagine but queerer than we can imagine." This doesn't mean, as many believe, that we aren't smart enough yet to understand this queerness. Rather, the queerness is inherent -- it's about the impossibility of ultimate explanations. And that is no less true of nutrition and politics than it is of quantum mechanics. The evidence of this strangeness is all around us, and intellectual honesty demands that we make some effort to incorporate it into the way we frame the world, rather than acknowledge it and then move on. The minority of working scientists and other experts who do acknowledge the deep shortcomings of our conventional mechanistic or one-way approaches to the way the world "works" are stymied by the paucity of reasonable sounding alternatives, ones that do not upset our cherished assumptions too greatly. These scientists and experts are apt to admit when pressed to a kind of mysticism, but it is one whose implications are generally ill-suited to scientific investigation. This mysticism is more of an abdication of understanding than a belief in some particular thing. Somehow it has little effect on the way they think and operate.
One of the great and irreconcilable rifts of philosophy is that between reductionism on the one hand and holism on the other. If I may reduce reductionism to a simple formula, it says that the whole exactly equals the sum of its parts. To understand the world, we must analyze it into the most fundamental units of which it is made. Then we can reconstruct reality and carry all the truths of analysis forward. Reductionism has faith in the comprehensibility of these parts. Holism has no such faith. New qualities of wholes emerge at each level of description. There is no easy way for these points of view to peacefully coexist, and yet both perspectives have been successful in explaining aspects of the world. I have always been intrigued with the idea of reconciling oppositions, especially this one about parts and wholes, finding a way to validate the essential insights that inspire such strong beliefs on both sides, having my cake and eating it too. Mark Twain is supposed to have once said that there are two types of people in the world—those who divide people into two types and those who don't. I am in the former group but seek to arrive in the latter by creating a tent big enough for all of us.
My writing is partly an attempt at this reconciliation. It is also about the value of creativity, of multiplying alternatives and thinking laterally. By gosh, it's all about cool ideas! To describe a world that really is "queerer than we can imagine," we have to be willing to try out some very peculiar thoughts.
The umbrella title for these essays, "Anti-Jump Muscles Relaxed" come from an old B. Kliban cartoon. The image is meant to playfully remind us that sometimes all we need is a change of perspective to liberate a creative leap. What holds us back is not so much an insufficiency of effort or resolve but a mere refusal to let go of the ways of seeing that hold us firmly to the ground. At the risk of sounding like a ersatz New Age guru, it is true that sometimes trying really boils down to not trying. Despite the enormous effort sometimes involved in holding to our one-way ideas, we insist on flexing those anti-jump muscles. Just standing there or simply being, says the image, is no less of an exertion than jumping. Personal consistency, self-maintenance, and just holding it all together are hard work.
Throughout these essays I will be interested in this reciprocal relationship between causing and allowing, between pushing and letting go, between happening and being, as ways to release us from one-way thinking. Ugh, very Taoist stuff! These are the very issues raised in the example of War and Peace. Is it more natural or more desirable to accumulate than to be rid of? The simple fact that game of Peace has not caught on seems to imply that we humans are predisposed to certain orientations in this regard, but we need not be enslaved by these orientations.
The guiding principle of my work has been to find a systematic way to generate hypotheses that are the flip-side of our usual approaches. My results in this quest up to this point have admittedly been a mixed bag. I think some of the individual insights are really interesting, but success filling in the big picture grades out at maybe a C+. I want to paint a picture of an Anti-jump World that exists side-by-side with the usual Just-Standing-There World, where events are not so much physically caused as allowed to spontaneously leak out of the infinite possibility of reality, but my antijump muscles are, in the end, still just as flexed as yours.
I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher by training. What piddling credentials I possess are in mathematics. There are, of course, certain advantages to this state of affairs from my point of view. I have no good reputation or funding to protect, and I am somewhat less indoctrinated into the orthodoxies of these fields. (How's that for putting a positive spin on my ignorance!) However, by giving myself free rein in areas in which I am not a credentialed expert and where my learning is very limited, I risk being labeled a crank. And the risk runs deeper than it otherwise might since I do hold some rather crazy-sounding opinions. I will claim, for example, that there is no such thing as nothingness (duh!), that "empty" space is a plenum, that the future has an effect on the present, and that everything is trying to happen at once! I will also suggest that there is a sense in which the universe is a process of self-description. What could that even mean, for Godsake?! Up to now I have kept most of these late-night thoughts to myself, knowing that most of the people I really wanted to convince were going to think I was nuts. I kept holding out hope that my point of view would crystallize and the knockout arguments would come. I finally realized I had to give up that hope and take the flying leap off the short pier.
As we try to see the phenomena of the world afresh, the weight of the past can crush our creativity, but, like martial artists, we can also use that weight against itself. I am trying to think and write as if the accumulation of knowledge, scientific and otherwise, is not a constraint against but an inspiration for completely novel approaches. Those who cannot tolerate vague, incomplete thoughts in pursuit of such novelty may find it rough going.
The really lucid arguments, of course, belong to the partisans, those whose faith in the correctness of their basic world view never wavers. For some reason, the engines of persuasive discourse are fueled by such faith. (Hence the political world as we know it. The pragmatists may be the ones who get things done, but it is the idealists who provide the arguments.) My world view, on the other hand, practically consists in its waverings, so my arguments may be patchy and unconvincing at times. I hope not.
This is not a book of science or even the philosophy of science per se, but it often uses scientific metaphors and mathematical ideas as jumping off points for far-flung intellectual excursions. It views science as part of a general process that extends into all areas of thought and into every corner of our minds. Various phenomena that we conceive of as chemical, psychological, or biological are instead here seen as ontological—that is to say they are in the very nature of being. It is almost as if physics and metaphysics are the same thing. By that I do not mean that the full panoply of human meaning reduces to physical laws. On the contrary, I think that all reality is of a piece and thus through investigations in any one area we may get deep insights into everything else. That is, I want to elevate and integrate the various aspects of nature—atoms and ourselves—rather than debase humanity, spirituality or physics by equating them in some meaningless way.
Cheers!