On March 3, 2013
Frank wrote:
Hi Kent,
I am curious how you would characterize your interest in McGilchrist theories (a friend is reading his book now. I'll get it after and take a look).
Is it a scientific interest, experimental?
Is it a medical interest, how to care for patients?
Is it a philosophical interest? A) one that connects to your values, in that it will help you make choices, or B) theoretical, more of the 'what is' without any practical application.
Or, plain ol' right brain, you just find it interesting?
All best,
fv
Sunday, March 3, 2013
On March 2, 2013,
Kent wrote:
Here are comments directly to a couple of your comments:
"I could easily see his [McGilchrist's] position as supporting the idea that science has nothing to say about human values."
I see McGilchrist's position as this: science is the left-brain contribution into human values, which then also needs a right-brain input. Right-brain input without science negates human values just as much as (left-brain) science without a right-brain input.
"For me the idea of the separation between science and human values comes from Earnest Nagel who writes that the goal of theoretical science requires that inquiry be directed at the relations of dependence among things irrespective of their bearing upon human values."
For McGilchrist, the dichotomy is not between science and human values, but rather between scientific human values (left-brain thinking) and non-scientific human values (right-brain thinking).
I think Nagel's phrase would be better put by saying that theoretical science is an inquiry irrespective of more wholistic (right brain) values. Or another way of putting it, left-brain thinking is also part of our human value system.
Yet another way of saying it is that left-brain thinking helps us find the morsel of food--- helps us focus on a specific object--- and right-brain thinking helps us be on guard --- lets us be aware of our total environment--- so that we can find the morsel of food.
Determinism is a left-brain conundrum which melts away in a right-brain way of thinking.
Kent
Kent wrote:
Here are comments directly to a couple of your comments:
"I could easily see his [McGilchrist's] position as supporting the idea that science has nothing to say about human values."
I see McGilchrist's position as this: science is the left-brain contribution into human values, which then also needs a right-brain input. Right-brain input without science negates human values just as much as (left-brain) science without a right-brain input.
"For me the idea of the separation between science and human values comes from Earnest Nagel who writes that the goal of theoretical science requires that inquiry be directed at the relations of dependence among things irrespective of their bearing upon human values."
For McGilchrist, the dichotomy is not between science and human values, but rather between scientific human values (left-brain thinking) and non-scientific human values (right-brain thinking).
I think Nagel's phrase would be better put by saying that theoretical science is an inquiry irrespective of more wholistic (right brain) values. Or another way of putting it, left-brain thinking is also part of our human value system.
Yet another way of saying it is that left-brain thinking helps us find the morsel of food--- helps us focus on a specific object--- and right-brain thinking helps us be on guard --- lets us be aware of our total environment--- so that we can find the morsel of food.
Determinism is a left-brain conundrum which melts away in a right-brain way of thinking.
Kent
On March 1. 2013
Frank wrote:
Hi Kent, thanks for the OK on the blog. I agree, it will hardly be read. However, sometimes when I am thinking about something specific, I will read everything if it seems relevant.
Regarding science and human values. Implicit in your response was that something in McGilchrist supports the idea that 'science helps shape our human values.' I've listened to McGilchrist a few times and, thought there is nothing explicit about science vs human values, I could easily see his position as supporting the idea that science has nothing to say about human values. In Einstein's perspective of science as a 'faithful servant' and Pascal's comment that "the end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality."
For me the idea of the separation between science and human values comes from Earnest Nagel who writes that the goal of theoretical science requires that inquiry be directed at the relations of dependence among things irrespective of their bearing upon human values.
All best,
Frank wrote:
Hi Kent, thanks for the OK on the blog. I agree, it will hardly be read. However, sometimes when I am thinking about something specific, I will read everything if it seems relevant.
Regarding science and human values. Implicit in your response was that something in McGilchrist supports the idea that 'science helps shape our human values.' I've listened to McGilchrist a few times and, thought there is nothing explicit about science vs human values, I could easily see his position as supporting the idea that science has nothing to say about human values. In Einstein's perspective of science as a 'faithful servant' and Pascal's comment that "the end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality."
For me the idea of the separation between science and human values comes from Earnest Nagel who writes that the goal of theoretical science requires that inquiry be directed at the relations of dependence among things irrespective of their bearing upon human values.
All best,
On Feb 17, 2013, at 4:32 PM, Kent Barshov wrote:
I've interspersed my comments among your comments.
Kent
----- Original Message -----
From: Vitale Frank
To: Kent Barshov
Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2013 10:10 PM
Subject: Re: more re: Determinism Dilemma
Hi Kent,
Mine is a bit of a saga. I hope you find it interesting. I appreciate having someone to communicate with who understands and is interested in these ideas.
(I am beginning a new project, which is to turn my ebook into a series of videos. It ‘s a long-term project. I am currently writing the script and taking a course in After Effects to create necessary animation.)
YOUR PROJECT SEEMS REALLY INTERESTING AND I SEE HOW IT CAN PROVIDE YOU WITH COUNTLESS HOURS OF FUN, HARD WORK, AND CREATIVITY. I LIKE THE WHOLE SUBJECT OF URBAN PLANNING AND EVERYTHING IT ENTAILS. I THINK, AMONG OTHER THINGS, YOUR VIDEOS COULD HELP PEOPLE THINK ABOUT AND BE IN TOUCH WITH OUR LARGER ENVIRONMENT, WHICH IS THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT.
The following explanation is part memoir and part philosophy of science. I’ll be interested in what you think of it as a story and your evaluation of the philosophy. Again, I appreciate being able to run it by you. Parts of it I have never communicated to anyone.
In high school, I fell in love with physics. It was my greatest pleasure and I thought I could do anything with it. So, I was blind-sided when I realized the deterministic implication. At the time, I had no idea that I had encountered a long running philosophical problem, so I thought it was a problem with me, that I was not smart enough or was too twisted to come to terms with what didn’t seem to be bothering anyone else.
I CAN UNDERSTAND SOMEONE LOVING PHYSICS SINCE IT HAS THE ELEGANCE OF MATHEMATICS AND YET IS COUPLED TO THE DAY-TO-DAY WORLD WE LIVE IN, AS WELL AS GIVING US A HANDLE ON THE INFINITELY LARGE AND THE INFINITELY SMALL, AS WELL AS GIVING US A HANDLE ON THE LARGELY INVISIBLE FORCES SUCH A ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES, ETC. WHEN WE HAVE PROBLEMS OR DIFFICULTIES IN LIFE, IT'S NATURAL TO FEEL LIKE OR THINK THAT WE ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO HAVE GONE THROUGH OR ENDURED SUCH PROBLEMS, BUT OF COURSE "THERE'S NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN," AND WE CAN TAKE COMFORT IN LEARNING HOW OTHERS HAVE HANDLED THE SAME BURDENS.
I LIKE YOU HAVE LIVED A LIFE OF LOOKING FOR MEANING, BUT A LOT OF PEOPLE I COME ACROSS SEEM NOT TO BE TROUBLED OR STIRRED UP WITH LOOKING FOR BIGGER MEANINGS. IN MILTON'S "PARADISE LOST," AT ONE POINT WE CATCH OF GLIPMSE OF THE DEVILS IN THEIR LAIR IN HELL; SOME ARE JUST RAMBLING ABOUT OR TRYING TO MAKE THE BEST OF A BAD SITUATION, BUT MILTON DESCRIBES THAT OTHERS ARE LETTING THEIR THOUGHTS "WANDER THROUGH ETERNITY." IT REMINDS ME WHEN I ONCE SAW A SEMI-TRAILER TRUCK WHICH HAD OVERTURNED IN THE WIDE GRASSY MEDIAN STRIP OF AN INTERSATE THROUGHWAY. THE SEMI-TRAILER WAS HAULING LIVE PIGS--- I ASSUME TO THE SLAUGHTER HOUSE. SOME OF THE PIGS WERE MOTIONLESS ON THEIR SIDE, WITH BLOOD COMING OUT OF THEIR MOUTHS. OTHER PIGS WERE ROLLING IN THE PUDDLES OF MUD. AND YET OTHER PIGS WERE STARTING TO ROAM OFF AS THE STATE POLICE WERE ARRIVING AND TRYING TO HERD THEM BACK TOGETHER. WHEN I SAW THIS, I THOUGHT "THAT'S HOW LIFE IS." SOME OF US ARE DEAD AND DYING. OTHERS OF US ARE SIMPLY ENJOYING OURSELVES. AND OTHERS ARE OFF ON A JOURNEY LOOKING FOR SOMETHING.
So, I struggled with it for over a decade.
I THINK A DECADE OF STRUGGLE IS TIME WELL SPENT. ONE OF MY FAVORITE QUOTES IS FROM A RABBI WHO WROTE: "A FAITH LIKE JOB'S CANNOT BE SHAKEN BECAUSE IT COMES AS A RESULT OF HAVING BEEN SHAKEN."
It wasn’t until my 30s that I discovered the discipline of Philosophy of Science where I learned that determinism had been debated for a couple of centuries and was still a matter of “inconclusive controversy.”
It is odd that I could have been struggling ‘in a vacuum’ for all that time. But that is what happened and I think it shapes who I am.
YES, IT'S AN INTERESTING STORY HOW YOU WERE STRUGGLING WITH IT ALL ON YOUR OWN, SO TO SPEAK.
Of course, when I found out that determinism wasn’t just my problem but was the world’s problem, I was greatly relieved and able to move forward with my thinking.
I realized that I had been making an assumption (that many people make, even, I think, very smart ones like Richard Dawkins) that science is THE source of knowledge. And, if that is the case, free will is impossible. But, at some point, I realized that my experience of my free will is just as fundamental as scientific reasoning. That realization allowed me to lift up a corner of science and look around it.
My next step was to do the Einstein Maneuver, as I call it. In Infeld’s book on Einstein, he describes a state of physics where experimental results were contradicting each other. Physicists kept performing experiments and kept getting contradictory results. What Einstein did was accept the experimental results “without further appeal,” and he made the contradictory results his fundamental premises, which he used to develop a new paradigm in physics.
YES, AS YOU PROBABLY ARE AWARE OF, FOR THE PAST TWO OR THREE DECADES, SCIENCE REPORTERS AND WRITERS WHO ARE POPULARIZERS OF QUANTUM PHYSICS SHOW HOW THE CUTTING EDGE OF SCIENCE IS LEADING US BACK TO A MORE MYSTICAL VIEW OF NATURE WHICH ALL CULTURES HAVE HELD IN TIMES PAST.
So, I felt that after a my decade of struggling with determinism, and after world philosophers’ centuries of struggling with it, it was time to accept both horns of the dilemma “without further appeal.”
RIGHT BRAIN THINKING IS COMFORTABLE WITH PARADOX, BUT LEFT BRAIN THINKING IS NOT.
I was gratified when I discovered in Erwin Schrodinger’s “What is Life?” a precise formulation of exactly what I was thinking:
i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.
ii) Yet, I know by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects that may be fateful and all important, in which case I feel and take all responsibility for them.
It was nice to hear from you that Rabbis say the same thing: that we are free and determined at the same time. I called the acceptance of both horns of the dilemma, the theory of incompatible, co-existent realities.
Since determinism is a direct result of science, I needed to get a better idea of what science is.
THE WORD "SCIENCE" ULTIMATELY DERIVES FROM THE INDO-EUROPEAN ROOT WORD"SKEI'" WHICH MEANS "TO CUT" OR "TO SPLIT." SCIENCE DIVIDES THINGS UP; THAT'S LEFT BRAIN THINKING AGAIN. BUT RIGHT BRAIN THINKING UNIFIES OR SEES THE BIG PICTURE--- OR PUTS THINGS BACK TOGETHER AGAIN. IF YOU HAVEN'T DONE SO ALREADY, LOOK AT THE 12-MINUTE VIDEO ON YOUTUBE ENTITLED "RSA ANIMATE-- THE DIVIDED BRAIN." WE ACTUALLY NEED BOTH RIGHT AND LEFT BRAIN THINKING TO BE HUMAN AND TO FUNCTION AS HUMANS. THERE ARE TIMES WHEN WE NEED TO DIVIDE THINGS UP AND TIMES WHEN WE NEED TO PUT THINGS BACK TOGETHER TO GET THE BIG PICTURE.
Peter Medawar in his LIMITS OF SCIENCE makes a very clear and convincing argument that science has limits. As he says, “Science is a house with empirical furniture.” Science is the authority without limit in the empirical world, but it has no sway in the world of, as he calls them, “first and last things,’’ like where we came from or where we are going.
I extend science’s limitation, that is, I think it has nothing to say about human values and all things human.
I UNDERSTAND THE POINT YOU'RE MAKING HERE, BUT I WOULD MODIFY IT BY SAYING THAT SCIENCE HELPS SHAPE OUR HUMAN VALUES, BUT IT IS NOT THE ONLY SKILL OR WAY OF THINKING WHICH SHAPES OUR VALUES.
For Einstein, his maneuver was effective because he developed a new paradigm that resolved the contradiction. When I made the same maneuver, I had no thought of a new paradigm. But, that didn’t make it any less foundational for me. Freewill and determinism are both true and it is fruitless to deny either.
I THINK SOMETIMES WE NEED TO EXERCISE OUR FREE WILL AND OTHER TIMES WE NEED TO "GO WITH THE FLOW"--- ALMOST IN A DETERMINSTIC SENSE.
Though a new paradigm is not necessary, it is desirable, and I have been thinking about the relationship between these two worlds/realities. I see the human word as everything and the science world also as everything. If they were Vin diagrams, they be two concentric circles on top of each other. Add to that, they are fundamentally contradictory.
Though I am no closer to removing the contradiction, I have developed some very speculative ideas of what science is that get closer to understanding the contradiction. I’ll save those for a later time.
I SEE OUR LIFE AS A DANCE BETWEEN DETERMINISTIC WAYS OF THINKING A "FREE WILL WAYS" OF THINKING. WE DON'T HAVE TO CHOOSE EITHER/OR BUT CAN RELISH BOTH/AND.
Once you wrote, quite rightly, that it is better to spend our time making the world a better place than speculating on whether a city is an organism or not. I couldn’t agree with you more. However some people, even some notables like Copernicus and Darwin, are consumed by asking what is, rather than what we’d like it to be.
RIGHT BRAIN THINKING IS COMFORTABLE WITH BEING WITH "WHAT IS," AND LEFT BRAIN THINKING MOVES US INTO THINKING ABOUT WHAT WE WOULD LIKE IT TO BE. I'M SORRY THAT I KEEP HARPING ON RIGHT VS. LEFT BRAIN THINKING, BUT FOR ME IT'S A FRUITFUL AREA OF EXPLAINING HOW WE GO BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN DETERMINISM AND FREE WILL. A MEDICAL SCIENTIFIC VIEW IS HOW OUR AUTOMATIC NERVOUS SYSTEM--- CALLED THE AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM--- IS BALANCED BETWEEN THE SYMPATHETIC AND PARASYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEMS. OR AN OLDER WAY OF SAYING IT IS BETWEEN YIN AND YANG, OR EVEN A RELIGIOUS WAY OF THINKING ABOUT IT, BETWEEN JUSTICE AND MERCY, MALE VS. FEMALE, EAST VS. WEST, MONISM VS. DUALISM, AND SO ON.
SINCERELY, KENT
I've interspersed my comments among your comments.
Kent
----- Original Message -----
From: Vitale Frank
To: Kent Barshov
Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2013 10:10 PM
Subject: Re: more re: Determinism Dilemma
Hi Kent,
Mine is a bit of a saga. I hope you find it interesting. I appreciate having someone to communicate with who understands and is interested in these ideas.
(I am beginning a new project, which is to turn my ebook into a series of videos. It ‘s a long-term project. I am currently writing the script and taking a course in After Effects to create necessary animation.)
YOUR PROJECT SEEMS REALLY INTERESTING AND I SEE HOW IT CAN PROVIDE YOU WITH COUNTLESS HOURS OF FUN, HARD WORK, AND CREATIVITY. I LIKE THE WHOLE SUBJECT OF URBAN PLANNING AND EVERYTHING IT ENTAILS. I THINK, AMONG OTHER THINGS, YOUR VIDEOS COULD HELP PEOPLE THINK ABOUT AND BE IN TOUCH WITH OUR LARGER ENVIRONMENT, WHICH IS THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT.
The following explanation is part memoir and part philosophy of science. I’ll be interested in what you think of it as a story and your evaluation of the philosophy. Again, I appreciate being able to run it by you. Parts of it I have never communicated to anyone.
In high school, I fell in love with physics. It was my greatest pleasure and I thought I could do anything with it. So, I was blind-sided when I realized the deterministic implication. At the time, I had no idea that I had encountered a long running philosophical problem, so I thought it was a problem with me, that I was not smart enough or was too twisted to come to terms with what didn’t seem to be bothering anyone else.
I CAN UNDERSTAND SOMEONE LOVING PHYSICS SINCE IT HAS THE ELEGANCE OF MATHEMATICS AND YET IS COUPLED TO THE DAY-TO-DAY WORLD WE LIVE IN, AS WELL AS GIVING US A HANDLE ON THE INFINITELY LARGE AND THE INFINITELY SMALL, AS WELL AS GIVING US A HANDLE ON THE LARGELY INVISIBLE FORCES SUCH A ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES, ETC. WHEN WE HAVE PROBLEMS OR DIFFICULTIES IN LIFE, IT'S NATURAL TO FEEL LIKE OR THINK THAT WE ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO HAVE GONE THROUGH OR ENDURED SUCH PROBLEMS, BUT OF COURSE "THERE'S NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN," AND WE CAN TAKE COMFORT IN LEARNING HOW OTHERS HAVE HANDLED THE SAME BURDENS.
I LIKE YOU HAVE LIVED A LIFE OF LOOKING FOR MEANING, BUT A LOT OF PEOPLE I COME ACROSS SEEM NOT TO BE TROUBLED OR STIRRED UP WITH LOOKING FOR BIGGER MEANINGS. IN MILTON'S "PARADISE LOST," AT ONE POINT WE CATCH OF GLIPMSE OF THE DEVILS IN THEIR LAIR IN HELL; SOME ARE JUST RAMBLING ABOUT OR TRYING TO MAKE THE BEST OF A BAD SITUATION, BUT MILTON DESCRIBES THAT OTHERS ARE LETTING THEIR THOUGHTS "WANDER THROUGH ETERNITY." IT REMINDS ME WHEN I ONCE SAW A SEMI-TRAILER TRUCK WHICH HAD OVERTURNED IN THE WIDE GRASSY MEDIAN STRIP OF AN INTERSATE THROUGHWAY. THE SEMI-TRAILER WAS HAULING LIVE PIGS--- I ASSUME TO THE SLAUGHTER HOUSE. SOME OF THE PIGS WERE MOTIONLESS ON THEIR SIDE, WITH BLOOD COMING OUT OF THEIR MOUTHS. OTHER PIGS WERE ROLLING IN THE PUDDLES OF MUD. AND YET OTHER PIGS WERE STARTING TO ROAM OFF AS THE STATE POLICE WERE ARRIVING AND TRYING TO HERD THEM BACK TOGETHER. WHEN I SAW THIS, I THOUGHT "THAT'S HOW LIFE IS." SOME OF US ARE DEAD AND DYING. OTHERS OF US ARE SIMPLY ENJOYING OURSELVES. AND OTHERS ARE OFF ON A JOURNEY LOOKING FOR SOMETHING.
So, I struggled with it for over a decade.
I THINK A DECADE OF STRUGGLE IS TIME WELL SPENT. ONE OF MY FAVORITE QUOTES IS FROM A RABBI WHO WROTE: "A FAITH LIKE JOB'S CANNOT BE SHAKEN BECAUSE IT COMES AS A RESULT OF HAVING BEEN SHAKEN."
It wasn’t until my 30s that I discovered the discipline of Philosophy of Science where I learned that determinism had been debated for a couple of centuries and was still a matter of “inconclusive controversy.”
It is odd that I could have been struggling ‘in a vacuum’ for all that time. But that is what happened and I think it shapes who I am.
YES, IT'S AN INTERESTING STORY HOW YOU WERE STRUGGLING WITH IT ALL ON YOUR OWN, SO TO SPEAK.
Of course, when I found out that determinism wasn’t just my problem but was the world’s problem, I was greatly relieved and able to move forward with my thinking.
I realized that I had been making an assumption (that many people make, even, I think, very smart ones like Richard Dawkins) that science is THE source of knowledge. And, if that is the case, free will is impossible. But, at some point, I realized that my experience of my free will is just as fundamental as scientific reasoning. That realization allowed me to lift up a corner of science and look around it.
My next step was to do the Einstein Maneuver, as I call it. In Infeld’s book on Einstein, he describes a state of physics where experimental results were contradicting each other. Physicists kept performing experiments and kept getting contradictory results. What Einstein did was accept the experimental results “without further appeal,” and he made the contradictory results his fundamental premises, which he used to develop a new paradigm in physics.
YES, AS YOU PROBABLY ARE AWARE OF, FOR THE PAST TWO OR THREE DECADES, SCIENCE REPORTERS AND WRITERS WHO ARE POPULARIZERS OF QUANTUM PHYSICS SHOW HOW THE CUTTING EDGE OF SCIENCE IS LEADING US BACK TO A MORE MYSTICAL VIEW OF NATURE WHICH ALL CULTURES HAVE HELD IN TIMES PAST.
So, I felt that after a my decade of struggling with determinism, and after world philosophers’ centuries of struggling with it, it was time to accept both horns of the dilemma “without further appeal.”
RIGHT BRAIN THINKING IS COMFORTABLE WITH PARADOX, BUT LEFT BRAIN THINKING IS NOT.
I was gratified when I discovered in Erwin Schrodinger’s “What is Life?” a precise formulation of exactly what I was thinking:
i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.
ii) Yet, I know by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects that may be fateful and all important, in which case I feel and take all responsibility for them.
It was nice to hear from you that Rabbis say the same thing: that we are free and determined at the same time. I called the acceptance of both horns of the dilemma, the theory of incompatible, co-existent realities.
Since determinism is a direct result of science, I needed to get a better idea of what science is.
THE WORD "SCIENCE" ULTIMATELY DERIVES FROM THE INDO-EUROPEAN ROOT WORD"SKEI'" WHICH MEANS "TO CUT" OR "TO SPLIT." SCIENCE DIVIDES THINGS UP; THAT'S LEFT BRAIN THINKING AGAIN. BUT RIGHT BRAIN THINKING UNIFIES OR SEES THE BIG PICTURE--- OR PUTS THINGS BACK TOGETHER AGAIN. IF YOU HAVEN'T DONE SO ALREADY, LOOK AT THE 12-MINUTE VIDEO ON YOUTUBE ENTITLED "RSA ANIMATE-- THE DIVIDED BRAIN." WE ACTUALLY NEED BOTH RIGHT AND LEFT BRAIN THINKING TO BE HUMAN AND TO FUNCTION AS HUMANS. THERE ARE TIMES WHEN WE NEED TO DIVIDE THINGS UP AND TIMES WHEN WE NEED TO PUT THINGS BACK TOGETHER TO GET THE BIG PICTURE.
Peter Medawar in his LIMITS OF SCIENCE makes a very clear and convincing argument that science has limits. As he says, “Science is a house with empirical furniture.” Science is the authority without limit in the empirical world, but it has no sway in the world of, as he calls them, “first and last things,’’ like where we came from or where we are going.
I extend science’s limitation, that is, I think it has nothing to say about human values and all things human.
I UNDERSTAND THE POINT YOU'RE MAKING HERE, BUT I WOULD MODIFY IT BY SAYING THAT SCIENCE HELPS SHAPE OUR HUMAN VALUES, BUT IT IS NOT THE ONLY SKILL OR WAY OF THINKING WHICH SHAPES OUR VALUES.
For Einstein, his maneuver was effective because he developed a new paradigm that resolved the contradiction. When I made the same maneuver, I had no thought of a new paradigm. But, that didn’t make it any less foundational for me. Freewill and determinism are both true and it is fruitless to deny either.
I THINK SOMETIMES WE NEED TO EXERCISE OUR FREE WILL AND OTHER TIMES WE NEED TO "GO WITH THE FLOW"--- ALMOST IN A DETERMINSTIC SENSE.
Though a new paradigm is not necessary, it is desirable, and I have been thinking about the relationship between these two worlds/realities. I see the human word as everything and the science world also as everything. If they were Vin diagrams, they be two concentric circles on top of each other. Add to that, they are fundamentally contradictory.
Though I am no closer to removing the contradiction, I have developed some very speculative ideas of what science is that get closer to understanding the contradiction. I’ll save those for a later time.
I SEE OUR LIFE AS A DANCE BETWEEN DETERMINISTIC WAYS OF THINKING A "FREE WILL WAYS" OF THINKING. WE DON'T HAVE TO CHOOSE EITHER/OR BUT CAN RELISH BOTH/AND.
Once you wrote, quite rightly, that it is better to spend our time making the world a better place than speculating on whether a city is an organism or not. I couldn’t agree with you more. However some people, even some notables like Copernicus and Darwin, are consumed by asking what is, rather than what we’d like it to be.
RIGHT BRAIN THINKING IS COMFORTABLE WITH BEING WITH "WHAT IS," AND LEFT BRAIN THINKING MOVES US INTO THINKING ABOUT WHAT WE WOULD LIKE IT TO BE. I'M SORRY THAT I KEEP HARPING ON RIGHT VS. LEFT BRAIN THINKING, BUT FOR ME IT'S A FRUITFUL AREA OF EXPLAINING HOW WE GO BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN DETERMINISM AND FREE WILL. A MEDICAL SCIENTIFIC VIEW IS HOW OUR AUTOMATIC NERVOUS SYSTEM--- CALLED THE AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM--- IS BALANCED BETWEEN THE SYMPATHETIC AND PARASYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEMS. OR AN OLDER WAY OF SAYING IT IS BETWEEN YIN AND YANG, OR EVEN A RELIGIOUS WAY OF THINKING ABOUT IT, BETWEEN JUSTICE AND MERCY, MALE VS. FEMALE, EAST VS. WEST, MONISM VS. DUALISM, AND SO ON.
SINCERELY, KENT
February 17, 2013
Frank wrote:
Hi Kent,
Mine is a bit of a saga. I hope you find it interesting. I appreciate having someone to communicate with who understands and is interested in these ideas.
(I am beginning a new project, which is to turn my ebook into a series of videos. It ‘s a long-term project. I am currently writing the script and taking a course in After Effects to create necessary animation.)
The following explanation is part memoir and part philosophy of science. I’ll be interested in what you think of it as a story and your evaluation of the philosophy. Again, I appreciate being able to run it by you. Parts of it I have never communicated to anyone.
In high school, I fell in love with physics. It was my greatest pleasure and I thought I could do anything with it. So, I was blind-sided when I realized the deterministic implication. At the time, I had no idea that I had encountered a long running philosophical problem, so I thought it was a problem with me, that I was not smart enough or was too twisted to come to terms with what didn’t seem to be bothering anyone else.
So, I struggled with it for over a decade.
It wasn’t until my 30s that I discovered the discipline of Philosophy of Science where I learned that determinism had been debated for a couple of centuries and was still a matter of “inconclusive controversy.”
It is odd that I could have been struggling ‘in a vacuum’ for all that time. But that is what happened and I think it shapes who I am.
Of course, when I found out that determinism wasn’t just my problem but was the world’s problem, I was greatly relieved and able to move forward with my thinking.
I realized that I had been making an assumption (that many people make, even, I think, very smart ones like Richard Dawkins) that science is THE source of knowledge. And, if that is the case, free will is impossible. But, at some point, I realized that my experience of my free will is just as fundamental as scientific reasoning. That realization allowed me to lift up a corner of science and look around it.
My next step was to do the Einstein Maneuver, as I call it. In Infeld’s book on Einstein, he describes a state of physics where experimental results were contradicting each other. Physicists kept performing experiments and kept getting contradictory results. What Einstein did was accept the experimental results “without further appeal,” and he made the contradictory results his fundamental premises, which he used to develop a new paradigm in physics.
So, I felt that after a my decade of struggling with determinism, and after world philosophers’ centuries of struggling with it, it was time to accept both horns of the dilemma “without further appeal.”
I was gratified when I discovered in Erwin Schrodinger’s “What is Life?” a precise formulation of exactly what I was thinking:
i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.
ii) Yet, I know by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects that may be fateful and all important, in which case I feel and take all responsibility for them.
It was nice to hear from you that Rebbi say the same thing: that we are free and determined at the same time. I called the acceptance of both horns of the dilemma, the theory of incompatible, co-existent realities.
Since determinism is a direct result of science, I needed to get a better idea of what science is.
Peter Medawar in his LIMITS OF SCIENCE makes a very clear and convincing argument that science has limits. As he says, “Science is a house with empirical furniture.” Science is the authority without limit in the empirical world, but it has no sway in the world of, as he calls them, “first and last things,’’ like where we came from or where we are going.
I extend science’s limitation, that is, I think it has nothing to say about human values and all things human.
For Einstein, his maneuver was effective because he developed a new paradigm that resolved the contradiction. When I made the same maneuver, I had no thought of a new paradigm. But, that didn’t make it any less foundational for me. Freewill and determinism are both true and it is fruitless to deny either.
Though a new paradigm is not necessary, it is desirable, and I have been thinking about the relationship between these two worlds/realities. I see the human word as everything and the science world also as everything. If they were Vin diagrams, they be two concentric circles on top of each other. Add to that, they are fundamentally contradictory.
Though I am no closer to removing the contradiction, I have developed some very speculative ideas of what science is that get closer to understanding the contradiction. I’ll save those for a later time.
Once you wrote, quite rightly, that it is better to spend our time making the world a better place than speculating on whether a city is an organism or not. I couldn’t agree with you more. However some people, some notables like Copernicus and Darwin, are consumed by asking what is, rather than what we’d like it to be.
END OF EMAIL SENT TO KENT ON 2/17 – BELOW IS SPECULATION ON SCIENCE, MAYBE TO SEND ON LATER DATE
I’d like to run some speculative ideas past you.
The first is that there is a human world and a science world. Each is everything and yet they are contradictory and non-overlapping. Science can tell us nothing about the human world, that is, the world of human values and of all things that make us human; similarly, human values, etc. have nothing to say about the empirical science world. One is the world of things, the other is the world of humanity. Determinism is in the domain of things, free will is in the domain of what it is to be human. This makes sense as we are both things and human.
Next, I want to draw a distinction between simultaneous and synonymous. Here is an illustrative scenario: A man is walking down the street. He is in a hurry. He sees an old woman who is having trouble. In his mind he debates if he should hurry on and let someone else help the woman, or help her and be late for the appointment. He is experiencing a conflict of values.
Physics and chemistry can, in theory, give a complete description of the scenario using descriptions of matter – forces, location, time, etc. Even biology can, theoretically, give a complete description of the scenario in terms of organs and their reaction to stimuli. But none of these descriptions can say a single thing about the man’s moral dilemma, about his values. Science is ‘blind’ to values.
Separating my human mind and my science mind has made it much easier of me to deal with both, and made it easier for me to live in the world. But I still struggle with how these contradictory worlds can exist and how my will can influence the behavior of matter. (hubris to think I shouldn’t be still struggling with that.) But there are a couple of even more speculative ideas that I am thinking about.
One is that science is nature. When an amoeba is on the quest for food, and it encounters an obstacle, it needs to decide whether to go left or right around the obstacle. In this case the amoeba is practicing science in the same way humans and machines do when building a bridge across a river. The amoeba’s behavior is both nature and science.
Another idea is of human thinging. That is when a human behaves as a thing. From the Metropolis Organism perspective, a human is always thinging. Down here on our level, our bodies are always thinging. And certain activities, for example eating or having sex, can be seen as thinging. The question is, can we talk about our higher-level activities like making moral decisions as thinging? If we could, then they would fall under the egis of science and determinism. However, if that were the case, where does freewill fit in?
I hope this has not been too tedious for you. Once you wrote, quite rightly, that it is better to spend our time making the world a better place than speculating on whether a city is an organism or not. I couldn’t agree with you more. However some people, some notables like Copernicus and Darwin, are consumed by asking what is, rather than what we’d like it to be.
All best,
fv
Frank wrote:
Hi Kent,
Mine is a bit of a saga. I hope you find it interesting. I appreciate having someone to communicate with who understands and is interested in these ideas.
(I am beginning a new project, which is to turn my ebook into a series of videos. It ‘s a long-term project. I am currently writing the script and taking a course in After Effects to create necessary animation.)
The following explanation is part memoir and part philosophy of science. I’ll be interested in what you think of it as a story and your evaluation of the philosophy. Again, I appreciate being able to run it by you. Parts of it I have never communicated to anyone.
In high school, I fell in love with physics. It was my greatest pleasure and I thought I could do anything with it. So, I was blind-sided when I realized the deterministic implication. At the time, I had no idea that I had encountered a long running philosophical problem, so I thought it was a problem with me, that I was not smart enough or was too twisted to come to terms with what didn’t seem to be bothering anyone else.
So, I struggled with it for over a decade.
It wasn’t until my 30s that I discovered the discipline of Philosophy of Science where I learned that determinism had been debated for a couple of centuries and was still a matter of “inconclusive controversy.”
It is odd that I could have been struggling ‘in a vacuum’ for all that time. But that is what happened and I think it shapes who I am.
Of course, when I found out that determinism wasn’t just my problem but was the world’s problem, I was greatly relieved and able to move forward with my thinking.
I realized that I had been making an assumption (that many people make, even, I think, very smart ones like Richard Dawkins) that science is THE source of knowledge. And, if that is the case, free will is impossible. But, at some point, I realized that my experience of my free will is just as fundamental as scientific reasoning. That realization allowed me to lift up a corner of science and look around it.
My next step was to do the Einstein Maneuver, as I call it. In Infeld’s book on Einstein, he describes a state of physics where experimental results were contradicting each other. Physicists kept performing experiments and kept getting contradictory results. What Einstein did was accept the experimental results “without further appeal,” and he made the contradictory results his fundamental premises, which he used to develop a new paradigm in physics.
So, I felt that after a my decade of struggling with determinism, and after world philosophers’ centuries of struggling with it, it was time to accept both horns of the dilemma “without further appeal.”
I was gratified when I discovered in Erwin Schrodinger’s “What is Life?” a precise formulation of exactly what I was thinking:
i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.
ii) Yet, I know by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects that may be fateful and all important, in which case I feel and take all responsibility for them.
It was nice to hear from you that Rebbi say the same thing: that we are free and determined at the same time. I called the acceptance of both horns of the dilemma, the theory of incompatible, co-existent realities.
Since determinism is a direct result of science, I needed to get a better idea of what science is.
Peter Medawar in his LIMITS OF SCIENCE makes a very clear and convincing argument that science has limits. As he says, “Science is a house with empirical furniture.” Science is the authority without limit in the empirical world, but it has no sway in the world of, as he calls them, “first and last things,’’ like where we came from or where we are going.
I extend science’s limitation, that is, I think it has nothing to say about human values and all things human.
For Einstein, his maneuver was effective because he developed a new paradigm that resolved the contradiction. When I made the same maneuver, I had no thought of a new paradigm. But, that didn’t make it any less foundational for me. Freewill and determinism are both true and it is fruitless to deny either.
Though a new paradigm is not necessary, it is desirable, and I have been thinking about the relationship between these two worlds/realities. I see the human word as everything and the science world also as everything. If they were Vin diagrams, they be two concentric circles on top of each other. Add to that, they are fundamentally contradictory.
Though I am no closer to removing the contradiction, I have developed some very speculative ideas of what science is that get closer to understanding the contradiction. I’ll save those for a later time.
Once you wrote, quite rightly, that it is better to spend our time making the world a better place than speculating on whether a city is an organism or not. I couldn’t agree with you more. However some people, some notables like Copernicus and Darwin, are consumed by asking what is, rather than what we’d like it to be.
END OF EMAIL SENT TO KENT ON 2/17 – BELOW IS SPECULATION ON SCIENCE, MAYBE TO SEND ON LATER DATE
I’d like to run some speculative ideas past you.
The first is that there is a human world and a science world. Each is everything and yet they are contradictory and non-overlapping. Science can tell us nothing about the human world, that is, the world of human values and of all things that make us human; similarly, human values, etc. have nothing to say about the empirical science world. One is the world of things, the other is the world of humanity. Determinism is in the domain of things, free will is in the domain of what it is to be human. This makes sense as we are both things and human.
Next, I want to draw a distinction between simultaneous and synonymous. Here is an illustrative scenario: A man is walking down the street. He is in a hurry. He sees an old woman who is having trouble. In his mind he debates if he should hurry on and let someone else help the woman, or help her and be late for the appointment. He is experiencing a conflict of values.
Physics and chemistry can, in theory, give a complete description of the scenario using descriptions of matter – forces, location, time, etc. Even biology can, theoretically, give a complete description of the scenario in terms of organs and their reaction to stimuli. But none of these descriptions can say a single thing about the man’s moral dilemma, about his values. Science is ‘blind’ to values.
Separating my human mind and my science mind has made it much easier of me to deal with both, and made it easier for me to live in the world. But I still struggle with how these contradictory worlds can exist and how my will can influence the behavior of matter. (hubris to think I shouldn’t be still struggling with that.) But there are a couple of even more speculative ideas that I am thinking about.
One is that science is nature. When an amoeba is on the quest for food, and it encounters an obstacle, it needs to decide whether to go left or right around the obstacle. In this case the amoeba is practicing science in the same way humans and machines do when building a bridge across a river. The amoeba’s behavior is both nature and science.
Another idea is of human thinging. That is when a human behaves as a thing. From the Metropolis Organism perspective, a human is always thinging. Down here on our level, our bodies are always thinging. And certain activities, for example eating or having sex, can be seen as thinging. The question is, can we talk about our higher-level activities like making moral decisions as thinging? If we could, then they would fall under the egis of science and determinism. However, if that were the case, where does freewill fit in?
I hope this has not been too tedious for you. Once you wrote, quite rightly, that it is better to spend our time making the world a better place than speculating on whether a city is an organism or not. I couldn’t agree with you more. However some people, some notables like Copernicus and Darwin, are consumed by asking what is, rather than what we’d like it to be.
All best,
fv
February 4, 2013,
Frank wrote:
Thanks, Kent.
If you are saying that our thoughts are biologically determined, is there any room for free will in that perspective?
btw, I have been getting to know Steve Barshov, an NYC lawyer who moved up here recently and is helping with that complex of which I am a board member. He said he is related to most Barshov's he meets, but he doesn't know you. Where are you from in the US?
All best,
fv
Frank wrote:
Thanks, Kent.
If you are saying that our thoughts are biologically determined, is there any room for free will in that perspective?
btw, I have been getting to know Steve Barshov, an NYC lawyer who moved up here recently and is helping with that complex of which I am a board member. He said he is related to most Barshov's he meets, but he doesn't know you. Where are you from in the US?
All best,
fv
On Feb 3, 2013, at 3:30 PM, Kent Barshov wrote:
Hi Frank,
I'm only just now getting around to responding to your last email in this "slow motion" email correspondence.
The question/comment in your last email centered around the brain and whether and how it limits what we can think about.
I take it a simple given. For example, the electromagnetic spectrum runs from infrared waves (and even "lower") up to x-ray and beyond. We see with our eyes only a relatively limited segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. If we had eyes with a different capacity, we could see the x-ray beam hitting us when an x-ray is taken, or we could have night-vision sight without having to look through night-vision viewers. Certain birds and insects, for example, can see in the ultraviolet spectrum, which makes the colors of the plumage of other birds and various flowers really stunning. We, on the other hand, can look at the same birds or flowers and see relatively few colors.
It is said that before the invention of writing, people had to think memorable thoughts, otherwise there would be little culture available to passed on to the next generation. In a similar vein, we can say that we can think only "thinkable" thoughts. The structure of our brains, no matter how complex, is still rather limiting.
This has just been some thoughts regarding your most recent email.
Kent
Hi Frank,
I'm only just now getting around to responding to your last email in this "slow motion" email correspondence.
The question/comment in your last email centered around the brain and whether and how it limits what we can think about.
I take it a simple given. For example, the electromagnetic spectrum runs from infrared waves (and even "lower") up to x-ray and beyond. We see with our eyes only a relatively limited segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. If we had eyes with a different capacity, we could see the x-ray beam hitting us when an x-ray is taken, or we could have night-vision sight without having to look through night-vision viewers. Certain birds and insects, for example, can see in the ultraviolet spectrum, which makes the colors of the plumage of other birds and various flowers really stunning. We, on the other hand, can look at the same birds or flowers and see relatively few colors.
It is said that before the invention of writing, people had to think memorable thoughts, otherwise there would be little culture available to passed on to the next generation. In a similar vein, we can say that we can think only "thinkable" thoughts. The structure of our brains, no matter how complex, is still rather limiting.
This has just been some thoughts regarding your most recent email.
Kent
On December 8, 2012
Frank wrote:
Thanks for getting back to me, Kent. I read a little about Schiffer and looked at the McGilcrist video. I found it interesting the way they illustrated his talk. It gave me some ideas about how to illustrate a video I am working on. It is on a "transdisciplinary" research project that the March of Dimes is funding at Stanford University.
Do you think there is a connection between the co-eixting but non-overlapping thought systems that Gould is talking about (which is philosophical) and Schiffer & McGilchrist's work which seems more psychological or physiological?
fv
Frank wrote:
Thanks for getting back to me, Kent. I read a little about Schiffer and looked at the McGilcrist video. I found it interesting the way they illustrated his talk. It gave me some ideas about how to illustrate a video I am working on. It is on a "transdisciplinary" research project that the March of Dimes is funding at Stanford University.
Do you think there is a connection between the co-eixting but non-overlapping thought systems that Gould is talking about (which is philosophical) and Schiffer & McGilchrist's work which seems more psychological or physiological?
fv
On Dec 10, 2012, at 1:49 PM, Kent Barshov wrote:
Hi Frank
Nice to receive an email from you.
The idea of co-existing but non-overlapping though systems is something I've been thinking a lot about, after reading a couple books over the past year: "Of Two Minds" by the American psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Schiffer and "The Master and His Emissary" by the British psychiatrist Dr. Iain McGilchrist. Both of them have informative websites.
Here's the link for a 12-minute video presentation on YouTube about the "Divided Brain" which summarizes the work of Dr. McGilchrist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI
Here are some more thoughts regarding the organic-like nature of cities. It seems that real life, as commonly accepted and interpreted by culture and science, is a prerequisite for life-like or organic-like cities---meaning whether it's an ant colony or a human city, it takes life forms to first be present prior to the colony or city organizing itself and functioning in life-like ways. E.g. there's nothing on the moon or on the planet Mars which resembles a city organism, since there's no known life on either the moon or Mars.
As we had communicated rather a long while ago now, I think rather than trying to get people to accept that a city organism is actually alive, it's more fruitful to set aside whether it's alive or not, and to think about how the organic-like structure of cities can make us appreciate cities more, and to generate ways to improve city life.
Happy holidays,
Kent
Hi Frank
Nice to receive an email from you.
The idea of co-existing but non-overlapping though systems is something I've been thinking a lot about, after reading a couple books over the past year: "Of Two Minds" by the American psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Schiffer and "The Master and His Emissary" by the British psychiatrist Dr. Iain McGilchrist. Both of them have informative websites.
Here's the link for a 12-minute video presentation on YouTube about the "Divided Brain" which summarizes the work of Dr. McGilchrist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI
Here are some more thoughts regarding the organic-like nature of cities. It seems that real life, as commonly accepted and interpreted by culture and science, is a prerequisite for life-like or organic-like cities---meaning whether it's an ant colony or a human city, it takes life forms to first be present prior to the colony or city organizing itself and functioning in life-like ways. E.g. there's nothing on the moon or on the planet Mars which resembles a city organism, since there's no known life on either the moon or Mars.
As we had communicated rather a long while ago now, I think rather than trying to get people to accept that a city organism is actually alive, it's more fruitful to set aside whether it's alive or not, and to think about how the organic-like structure of cities can make us appreciate cities more, and to generate ways to improve city life.
Happy holidays,
Kent
December 8, 2012
Frank wrote:
Hi Kent, I hope this finds you and that it finds you well.
I read a couple of books recently that made me think of you. The first was Richard Dawkins' THE GOD DELUSION. I didn't read it because I thought I'd learn some wisdom about the nature of God and science, quite the opposite. I have been giving a few talks lately about my book and I use THE GOD DELUSION as an illustration of a mistaken mixing of spirituality and science. When I read Dawkins' book, I was even more convinced and became perplexed that a man who developed a brilliant interpretation of Evolution (THE SELFISH GENE) could be so obtuse.
However, I did learn something very interesting. Dawkins wrote a few pages on Stephen Gould's ROCK OF AGES: SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN THE FULLNESS OF LIFE. Dawkins spent a few pages lambasting Gould's concept that science and religion are "non-overlaping magesteria." ie non-overlaping fields. I read ROCK OF AGES and found great wisdom. In it Gould defines wisdom as understanding that science and religion co-exist (Dawkins can't seem to get his head around that), but that they are non-overlapping. Gould's wisdom reminded me of something that you wrote once. It was an explanation that one of your mentors gave to the way we have to deal with the domains of science and humanity.
What particularly attracts me to Gould is the "non-overlaping magesteria" part. That is what I was trying to communicate with you. That from the perspective of science, humans are 'things' and cities are organisms. But, from another perspective we are human, not things. Like Gould, I see these perspectives as non-overlapping.
Does that make any sense to you?
Frank wrote:
Hi Kent, I hope this finds you and that it finds you well.
I read a couple of books recently that made me think of you. The first was Richard Dawkins' THE GOD DELUSION. I didn't read it because I thought I'd learn some wisdom about the nature of God and science, quite the opposite. I have been giving a few talks lately about my book and I use THE GOD DELUSION as an illustration of a mistaken mixing of spirituality and science. When I read Dawkins' book, I was even more convinced and became perplexed that a man who developed a brilliant interpretation of Evolution (THE SELFISH GENE) could be so obtuse.
However, I did learn something very interesting. Dawkins wrote a few pages on Stephen Gould's ROCK OF AGES: SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN THE FULLNESS OF LIFE. Dawkins spent a few pages lambasting Gould's concept that science and religion are "non-overlaping magesteria." ie non-overlaping fields. I read ROCK OF AGES and found great wisdom. In it Gould defines wisdom as understanding that science and religion co-exist (Dawkins can't seem to get his head around that), but that they are non-overlapping. Gould's wisdom reminded me of something that you wrote once. It was an explanation that one of your mentors gave to the way we have to deal with the domains of science and humanity.
What particularly attracts me to Gould is the "non-overlaping magesteria" part. That is what I was trying to communicate with you. That from the perspective of science, humans are 'things' and cities are organisms. But, from another perspective we are human, not things. Like Gould, I see these perspectives as non-overlapping.
Does that make any sense to you?
On Feb 1, 2012, at 1:14 PM, Kent Barshov wrote:
Prospect
How Slums Can Save the Planet
by Steward Brand
27 January, 2010
Dharavi, Mumbai, where population density reaches 1m people per square mile
In 1983, architect Peter Calthorpe gave up on San Francisco, where he had tried and failed to organise neighbourhood communities, and moved to a houseboat in Sausalito, a town on the San Francisco Bay. He ended up on South 40 Dock, where I also live, part of a community of 400 houseboats and a place with the densest housing in California. Without trying, it was an intense, proud community, in which no one locked their doors. Calthorpe looked for the element of design magic that made it work, and concluded it was the dock itself and the density. Everyone who lived in the houseboats on South 40 Dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. All the residents knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.
Building on that insight, Calthorpe became one of the founders of the new urbanism, along with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and others. In 1985 he introduced the concept of walkability in “Redefining Cities,” an article in the Whole Earth Review, an American counterculture magazine that focused on technology, community building and the environment. Since then, new urbanism has become the dominant force in city planning, promoting high density, mixed use, walkability, mass transit, eclectic design and regionalism. It drew one of its main ideas from the houseboat community.
There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.”
The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”
The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.
Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” There’s even a book on the subject: The World’s Scavengers (2007) by Martin Medina. Lagos, Nigeria, widely considered the world’s most chaotic city, has an environment day on the last Saturday of every month. From 7am to 10am nobody drives, and the city tidies itself up.
In his 1985 article, Calthorpe made a statement that still jars with most people: “The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.” “Green Manhattan” was the inflammatory title of a 2004 New Yorker article by David Owen. “By the most significant measures,” he wrote, “New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world…The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than 800 times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful.” He went on to note that this very compactness forces people to live in the world’s most energy-efficient apartment buildings.
The idea of measuring environmental impact in notional acres was first introduced by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees in Our Ecological Footprint (1996) as a way to estimate the resource efficiency of cities and to condemn suburban sprawl. The concept has been very useful in shaming cities into better environmental behaviour, but comparable studies have yet to be made of rural populations, whose environmental impact per person is much higher than city dwellers. Nor has footprint analysis yet been properly applied to urban squatters and slum dwellers, which score as the greenest of all.
Urban density allows half of humanity to live on 2.8 per cent of the land. Demographers expect developing countries to stabilise at 80 per cent urban, as nearly all developed countries have. On that basis, 80 per cent of humanity may live on 3 per cent of the land by 2050. Consider just the infrastructure efficiencies. According to a 2004 UN report: “The concentration of population and enterprises in urban areas greatly reduces the unit cost of piped water, sewers, drains, roads, electricity, garbage collection, transport, health care, and schools.” In the developed world, cities are green because they cut energy use; in the developing world, their greenness lies in how they take the pressure off rural waste.
The Last Forest (2007), a book by Mark London and Brian Kelly on the crisis in the Amazon rainforest, suggests that the nationally subsidised city of Manaus in northern Brazil “answers the question” of how to stop deforestation: give people decent jobs. Then they can afford houses, and gain security. One hundred thousand people who would otherwise be deforesting the jungle around Manaus are now prospering in town making such things as mobile phones and televisions.
The point is clear: environmentalists have yet to seize the opportunity offered by urbanisation. Two major campaigns should be mounted: one to protect the newly-emptied countryside, the other to green the hell out of the growing cities.
***
More than any other political entity, cities learn from each other. News of best practices spreads fast. Mayors travel, cruising for ideas in the cities deemed the world’s greenest—from Reykjavik to Portland, Oregon, and my hometown of San Francisco. But what we need is a new profession of active urban ecology, which figures out how to fix the problems of urban living (cockroach predation, waste from markets or sanitation, a persistent cause of disease in slums) and helps cities engage natural infrastructure (rivers and coastlines play a role similar to highways and sewer lines) with the same level of sophistication brought to built infrastructure.
One idea that could be transferred from squatter cities is urban farming. An article by Gretchen Vogel in Science in 2008 enthused: “In a high-tech answer to the ‘local food’ movement, some experts want to transport the whole farm shoots, roots, and all to the city. They predict that future cities could grow most of their food inside city limits, in ultraefficient greenhouses… A farm on one city block could feed 50,000 people with vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. Upper floors would grow hydroponic crops; lower floors would house chickens and fish that consume plant waste.”
Urban roofs offer no end of opportunities for energy saving and “reconciliation ecology.” Planting a green roof with its own ecological community is well-established. For food, add an “ultraefficient greenhouse”; for extra power, add solar collectors. And the most dramatic gains can come from simply making everything white. According to a 2008 study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, if the world’s 100 largest cities replaced their dark roofs in this way, it could offset 44 metric gigatonnes of greenhouse gases.
Some environmentalists already are proponents of urban compactness. New zoning rules can be used to allow people to live and work closer together. Taxes can cut car use. Child-friendly policies and subsidised housing could bring down the high cost of city centre living, which drives families to the suburbs (and good schools follow them).
Finally, it is better infrastructure that makes cities possible—so what would infrastructure rethought in green terms look like? Some of it will surely look like the new mass transit systems being built in China, or the high-speed rail that is finally coming to the US. And all of this should be powered by smart and micro grids—allowing local generation and the distribution of electricity. The new generation of small, modular nuclear reactors being developed in the US and elsewhere, which provide less than 125 megawatts and are built offsite, could have an important role.
Of course, fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, disease and injustice as much as business, innovation, education and entertainment. The recent earthquake in Haiti demonstrates the danger of slum buildings. But if they are overall a net good for those who move there, it is because cities offer more than just jobs. They are transformative: in the slums, as well as the office towers and leafy suburbs, the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan, and with it everything the dictionary says that cosmopolitan means: multicultural, multiracial, global, worldly-wise, well travelled, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated, suave, urbane.
And just as this was true during the industrial revolution, so the take-off of cities will be the dominant economic event of the first half of this century too. It will involve huge infrastructural stresses on energy and food supply. Vast numbers of people will begin climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then to 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder, from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat and soy to meat—and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of it will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince them to stay in their villages. Peasant life is over, unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. For humanity, the green city is our future.
LIFE IN THE WORLD’S SLUMS
In Bangkok’s slums, most homes have a colour television—the average number is 1.6 per household. Almost all have fridges, and two-thirds have a CD player, washing machine and a mobile phone. Half of them have a home telephone, video player and motorcycle. (From research for UN report The Challenge of Slums.)
Residents of Rio’s favelas are more likely to have computers and microwaves than the city’s middle classes (Janice Perlman, author of The Myth of Marginality.)
In the slums of Medellín, Colombia, people raise pigs on the third-floor roofs and grow vegetables in used bleach bottles hung from windowsills. (Ethan Zuckerman, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.)
The 4bn people at the base of the economic pyramid—all those with [annual] incomes below $3,000 in local purchasing power—live in relative poverty. Their incomes… are less than $3.35 a day in Brazil, $2.11 in China, $1.89 in Ghana, and $1.56 in India. Yet they have substantial purchasing power… [and] constitute a $5 trillion global consumer market.
(The Next 4 Billion, Allen L Hammond et al.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: STEWART BRAND
Stewart Brand is one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—environmentalists. After graduating in biology from Stanford University, California, in 1960, he became involved with the hippy movement and writer Ken Kesey’s “merry pranksters,” who were the subject of Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test. Brand’s hugely influential Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture guide to self-sustainable, communal living, was published between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter until 1998.
Co-founder of The Long Now Foundation and the Global Business Network, Brand lives on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay.
His new book, Whole Earth Discipline (Atlantic Books), challenges many of the long-held opinions of the environmental movement.
Prospect
How Slums Can Save the Planet
by Steward Brand
27 January, 2010
Dharavi, Mumbai, where population density reaches 1m people per square mile
In 1983, architect Peter Calthorpe gave up on San Francisco, where he had tried and failed to organise neighbourhood communities, and moved to a houseboat in Sausalito, a town on the San Francisco Bay. He ended up on South 40 Dock, where I also live, part of a community of 400 houseboats and a place with the densest housing in California. Without trying, it was an intense, proud community, in which no one locked their doors. Calthorpe looked for the element of design magic that made it work, and concluded it was the dock itself and the density. Everyone who lived in the houseboats on South 40 Dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. All the residents knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.
Building on that insight, Calthorpe became one of the founders of the new urbanism, along with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and others. In 1985 he introduced the concept of walkability in “Redefining Cities,” an article in the Whole Earth Review, an American counterculture magazine that focused on technology, community building and the environment. Since then, new urbanism has become the dominant force in city planning, promoting high density, mixed use, walkability, mass transit, eclectic design and regionalism. It drew one of its main ideas from the houseboat community.
There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.”
The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”
The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.
Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” There’s even a book on the subject: The World’s Scavengers (2007) by Martin Medina. Lagos, Nigeria, widely considered the world’s most chaotic city, has an environment day on the last Saturday of every month. From 7am to 10am nobody drives, and the city tidies itself up.
In his 1985 article, Calthorpe made a statement that still jars with most people: “The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.” “Green Manhattan” was the inflammatory title of a 2004 New Yorker article by David Owen. “By the most significant measures,” he wrote, “New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world…The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than 800 times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful.” He went on to note that this very compactness forces people to live in the world’s most energy-efficient apartment buildings.
The idea of measuring environmental impact in notional acres was first introduced by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees in Our Ecological Footprint (1996) as a way to estimate the resource efficiency of cities and to condemn suburban sprawl. The concept has been very useful in shaming cities into better environmental behaviour, but comparable studies have yet to be made of rural populations, whose environmental impact per person is much higher than city dwellers. Nor has footprint analysis yet been properly applied to urban squatters and slum dwellers, which score as the greenest of all.
Urban density allows half of humanity to live on 2.8 per cent of the land. Demographers expect developing countries to stabilise at 80 per cent urban, as nearly all developed countries have. On that basis, 80 per cent of humanity may live on 3 per cent of the land by 2050. Consider just the infrastructure efficiencies. According to a 2004 UN report: “The concentration of population and enterprises in urban areas greatly reduces the unit cost of piped water, sewers, drains, roads, electricity, garbage collection, transport, health care, and schools.” In the developed world, cities are green because they cut energy use; in the developing world, their greenness lies in how they take the pressure off rural waste.
The Last Forest (2007), a book by Mark London and Brian Kelly on the crisis in the Amazon rainforest, suggests that the nationally subsidised city of Manaus in northern Brazil “answers the question” of how to stop deforestation: give people decent jobs. Then they can afford houses, and gain security. One hundred thousand people who would otherwise be deforesting the jungle around Manaus are now prospering in town making such things as mobile phones and televisions.
The point is clear: environmentalists have yet to seize the opportunity offered by urbanisation. Two major campaigns should be mounted: one to protect the newly-emptied countryside, the other to green the hell out of the growing cities.
***
More than any other political entity, cities learn from each other. News of best practices spreads fast. Mayors travel, cruising for ideas in the cities deemed the world’s greenest—from Reykjavik to Portland, Oregon, and my hometown of San Francisco. But what we need is a new profession of active urban ecology, which figures out how to fix the problems of urban living (cockroach predation, waste from markets or sanitation, a persistent cause of disease in slums) and helps cities engage natural infrastructure (rivers and coastlines play a role similar to highways and sewer lines) with the same level of sophistication brought to built infrastructure.
One idea that could be transferred from squatter cities is urban farming. An article by Gretchen Vogel in Science in 2008 enthused: “In a high-tech answer to the ‘local food’ movement, some experts want to transport the whole farm shoots, roots, and all to the city. They predict that future cities could grow most of their food inside city limits, in ultraefficient greenhouses… A farm on one city block could feed 50,000 people with vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. Upper floors would grow hydroponic crops; lower floors would house chickens and fish that consume plant waste.”
Urban roofs offer no end of opportunities for energy saving and “reconciliation ecology.” Planting a green roof with its own ecological community is well-established. For food, add an “ultraefficient greenhouse”; for extra power, add solar collectors. And the most dramatic gains can come from simply making everything white. According to a 2008 study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, if the world’s 100 largest cities replaced their dark roofs in this way, it could offset 44 metric gigatonnes of greenhouse gases.
Some environmentalists already are proponents of urban compactness. New zoning rules can be used to allow people to live and work closer together. Taxes can cut car use. Child-friendly policies and subsidised housing could bring down the high cost of city centre living, which drives families to the suburbs (and good schools follow them).
Finally, it is better infrastructure that makes cities possible—so what would infrastructure rethought in green terms look like? Some of it will surely look like the new mass transit systems being built in China, or the high-speed rail that is finally coming to the US. And all of this should be powered by smart and micro grids—allowing local generation and the distribution of electricity. The new generation of small, modular nuclear reactors being developed in the US and elsewhere, which provide less than 125 megawatts and are built offsite, could have an important role.
Of course, fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, disease and injustice as much as business, innovation, education and entertainment. The recent earthquake in Haiti demonstrates the danger of slum buildings. But if they are overall a net good for those who move there, it is because cities offer more than just jobs. They are transformative: in the slums, as well as the office towers and leafy suburbs, the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan, and with it everything the dictionary says that cosmopolitan means: multicultural, multiracial, global, worldly-wise, well travelled, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated, suave, urbane.
And just as this was true during the industrial revolution, so the take-off of cities will be the dominant economic event of the first half of this century too. It will involve huge infrastructural stresses on energy and food supply. Vast numbers of people will begin climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then to 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder, from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat and soy to meat—and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of it will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince them to stay in their villages. Peasant life is over, unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. For humanity, the green city is our future.
LIFE IN THE WORLD’S SLUMS
In Bangkok’s slums, most homes have a colour television—the average number is 1.6 per household. Almost all have fridges, and two-thirds have a CD player, washing machine and a mobile phone. Half of them have a home telephone, video player and motorcycle. (From research for UN report The Challenge of Slums.)
Residents of Rio’s favelas are more likely to have computers and microwaves than the city’s middle classes (Janice Perlman, author of The Myth of Marginality.)
In the slums of Medellín, Colombia, people raise pigs on the third-floor roofs and grow vegetables in used bleach bottles hung from windowsills. (Ethan Zuckerman, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.)
The 4bn people at the base of the economic pyramid—all those with [annual] incomes below $3,000 in local purchasing power—live in relative poverty. Their incomes… are less than $3.35 a day in Brazil, $2.11 in China, $1.89 in Ghana, and $1.56 in India. Yet they have substantial purchasing power… [and] constitute a $5 trillion global consumer market.
(The Next 4 Billion, Allen L Hammond et al.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: STEWART BRAND
Stewart Brand is one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—environmentalists. After graduating in biology from Stanford University, California, in 1960, he became involved with the hippy movement and writer Ken Kesey’s “merry pranksters,” who were the subject of Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test. Brand’s hugely influential Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture guide to self-sustainable, communal living, was published between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter until 1998.
Co-founder of The Long Now Foundation and the Global Business Network, Brand lives on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay.
His new book, Whole Earth Discipline (Atlantic Books), challenges many of the long-held opinions of the environmental movement.
On Jan 22, 2012, at 3:38 PM, Kent Barshov wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: McLuhan Galaxy
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 6:15 AM
Subject: [New post] The Global Village, Circa 2012
New post on McLuhan Galaxy
The Global Village, Circa 2012
by Alex Kuskis
Paulo, Palo Alto – these were the loci of global change (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Anouk Dey | January 17, 2012
2011 marked the 50thanniversary of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and Marshall McLuhan’s centennial. It was also the year in which the city eclipsed the state as the unit of international relations. Tahrir Square, Tunis, Hong Kong, Sau Paulo, Palo Alto – these were the loci of global change.
Though one was an urbanist and the other a philosopher, Jacobs and McLuhan both predicted this shift. Jacobs’ urban writings and grassroots activism on behalf of the city are well documented, but McLuhan, too, took a deep interest in cities – and not just in an indirect “global village” type-of-way. McLuhan commented on the “rich community effects” caused “simply by locating dwellings in non-linear patterns” and drew parallels between a suburb killing an old city and a new medium killing an old one. In fact, Jacobs and McLuhan served together on the Stop Spadina, Save Our City Coordinating Committee and produced a short film in support of their cause (Jacobs was apparently amazed that McLuhan’s unsystematic narrative produced such a compelling visual tale).
Jane Jacobs (1916-2006)
As we reflect on 2011, and move forward into an increasingly city-dominated world (in 2007, for first the first time, the world’s population became more urban than rural, and this trend continues), it is worth considering what these two Canadians – or, more appropriately, Torontonians – taught us about global politics.
Globalization is upon us, but everyone is saying “no,” Anouk Dey writes.
Taylor Owen’s four ways to adjust the Canadian foreign policy debate to the digital age.
The first lesson they taught us is that national borders are quickly disappearing. In the “age of the information explosion,” as McLuhan put it, walls between nations and economies will blow out. And what will be left amid the rubble? Dense communities of individuals who have, in McLuhan’s words, “adjusted to the new proximity.” The city will become the lifeblood of the state. Canada will be nothing without Toronto (or Vancouver, or Montreal, or Calgary), the U.S. nothing without New York, and Japan nothing without Tokyo. More importantly, Haerbin, Shantou, Guiyang, and the other cities McKinsey names in its report on global cities of the future will wield far more power than many states.
In this scenario, David Cameron’s decision to place the concerns of “the City” above those of the rest of England in opting out of the Brussels Treaty seems less political, and more prescient. So, too, do the efforts of the C40, a group of cities working to solve climate change, and trade deals between Hamburg and Dubai, and Abu Dhabi and Singapore. Less so are treaties signed between nations – and not cities – such as the Kyoto Protocol, the perimeter border deal, and countless Free Trade Agreements.
The second lesson is that, without the proper governance structures, this environment of close proximity will be a scary place. Yes, “the medium is the message” – but how? McLuhan argued that the shift in how we communicate would change us neurologically – and not into David Brooks-imagined “social animals” excelling at everything in a peaceful world. Rather, we would regress to primal tendencies, devolving into bicameral humans who operate unconsciously and automatically.
When the world is a hockey rink and its inhabitants David Steckels (and not Sidney Crosbys), global governance systems are crucial. With the exception of the intervention in Libya, 2011 proved another year in the United Nations’ slide toward irrelevance. As Parag Khanna argues, we need global institutions built on “cities and their economies rather than nations and their armies.” Jane Jacobs recognized this a long time ago when she observed that democratization is no longer the purview of states, and proceeded to develop the concept of “localism.” Next week, we will have the opportunity to evaluate how a new form of global diplomacy might work when diplomats of the digital age – prime and finance ministers, but also mayors, academics, and Bono – come together at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Finally, McLuhan and Jacobs taught us to plan our cities with global visions. As Jacobs described them, cities are active urban organisms that require the proper nourishment to flourish. This may not come in the form of a gravy train, but it does require a certain amount of funding. As the Toronto City Council prepares to cut TTC services and close shelters, pools, and city programming, we should think about what this means, not just for Toronto, but for Canada’s place in the world. http://tinyurl.com/7ef7sev
September 15, 2011
Hi Kent,
I have been slow to get back to you but have been thinking about you often. Life has been very busy. We spent two delicious weeks at our family cottage in Canada. I came back to serious Hurricane Irene Devastation to an art/industrial complex that I support. It is a beautiful 16 acre complex with 35 pre-Civil War buildings. The damage was horrible, the worst was that a wall of the main gallery collapsed. And then there is getting back to a very busy work load.
Regarding your last post, I have a question. You say that you believe humans transcend biology. My question is, what scientific support can you bring to that? Is there any scientific logic or knowledge that supports the statement/idea that humans transcend biology?
All best,
fv
Hi Kent,
I have been slow to get back to you but have been thinking about you often. Life has been very busy. We spent two delicious weeks at our family cottage in Canada. I came back to serious Hurricane Irene Devastation to an art/industrial complex that I support. It is a beautiful 16 acre complex with 35 pre-Civil War buildings. The damage was horrible, the worst was that a wall of the main gallery collapsed. And then there is getting back to a very busy work load.
Regarding your last post, I have a question. You say that you believe humans transcend biology. My question is, what scientific support can you bring to that? Is there any scientific logic or knowledge that supports the statement/idea that humans transcend biology?
All best,
fv
On Aug 16, 2011, at 8:33 AM, Kent Barshov wrote:
Hi Frank,
I think you've touched on the weakest point in the argument which opposes a city being a literal organism. Atoms and molecules are not felt to be alive, and yet when assembled into a cell these same molecules suddenly are felt to be alive. It doesn't seem logically consistent to deny life when assembled one way and to acknowledge life when assembled another way.
So likewise, the argument could go, which is the way I see you arguing, why couldn't the same thing apply to cities. Yes, the individual components of a city, such as roads, buildings, etc. are not alive, yet when assembled together are alive.
We all recognize life when we see it, but it's hard to come up with a definition which includes all forms considered to be alive and excludes all forms not considered to be life.
Here's part of the write-up in the Wikipedia article on "life." I'm including this in order to try to come up with common ground about the definition of life.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Definitions
It is still a challenge for scientists and philosophers to define life in unequivocal terms.[12][13][14] Defining life is difficult-in part-because life is a process, not a pure substance.[15] Any definition must be sufficiently broad to encompass all life with which we are familiar, and it should be sufficiently general that, with it, scientists would not miss life that may be fundamentally different from life on Earth.[16]
Biology
Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, the current understanding is descriptive, where life is a characteristic of organisms that exhibit all or most of the following phenomena:[15][17]
1.. Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, electrolyte concentration or sweating to reduce temperature.
2.. Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life.
3.. Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
4.. Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
5.. Adaptation: The ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as well as the composition of metabolized substances, and external factors present.
6.. Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion, for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism) and by chemotaxis.
7.. Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.
Proposed
To reflect the minimum phenomena required, some have proposed other biological definitions of life:
a.. Living things are systems that tend to respond to changes in their environment, and inside themselves, in such a way as to promote their own continuation.[citation needed]
b.. A network of inferior negative feedbacks (regulatory mechanisms) subordinated to a superior positive feedback (potential of expansion, reproduction).[18]
c.. A systemic definition of life is that living things are self-organizing and autopoietic (self-producing). Variations of this definition include Stuart Kauffman's definition as an autonomous agent or a multi-agent system capable of reproducing itself or themselves, and of completing at least one thermodynamic work cycle.[19]
d.. Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.[20]
e.. Things with the capacity for metabolism and motion.[15]
f.. Life is a delay of the spontaneous diffusion or dispersion of the internal energy of the biomolecules towards more potential microstates.[21]
g.. Living beings are thermodynamic systems that have an organized molecular structure.[21]
_______________________________________________________________________________
From the discussion at Wikipedia, the two areas where I see a metropolis as an organism failing to meet the criteria of life is that a city is not literally composed of cells (as brought out in point #2 in the section about organization), and that if "life is a sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution," which is brought out in the section under proposed guidelines of a definition of life, then a metropolis organism would not meet that criterion either.
To go back to your original comments in the email about whether I see humans somehow transcending biology, I would be inclined to say "yes," but I would have a hard time proving that humans transcend biology.
But I find such a line of reasoning also undercuts a metropolis as being an organism as well. I would argue that humans do indeed somehow transcend biology, and it seems you would argue that a metropolis also somehow transcends biology for it to be alive as well. Or another way of putting it, I see that a human is not part of a larger organism, and I think you would move that boundary in order to consider cities not being part of a larger organism.
To be consistently logical, it would seem that we would need to say that there is no life whatsoever, and thus only recognize that everything in the universe is deterministic atoms and energy particles bumping around, or the reverse; we would have to say that if humans and cities are organisms, and that even the building blocks of life, which are atoms, must also be alive.
Historically it seems that mankind has looked at all of existence as being alive--- meaning the rocks and waves as well as people are alive, and that only in modern times have we split off most matter as not being alive. Humanity has basically had an animistic or polytheistic viewpoint that even a rock has a rudimentary spirit or life-force. For example, until only about 150 years ago the concept of vitalism taught that through spontaneous generation that a rotting corpse could spontaneously generate flies--- meaning something dead generating something alive.
But as I've been writing in these emails, it seems that the old idea of humans or other animals as not being part of any higher or greater collective system of life is giving way to your idea about cities literally being alive--- meaning that we appear to be moving towards transhumanism which is radically altering how we perceive and define what life is--- as machines are being melded with humans and other life forms. When a robot will be able to do everything a human can do, it will be hard to deny that the robot is alive.
I would be pleased to see the film by one of your students which you mentioned. I look forward to receiving the link when it is posted.
I think being involved in film like you are is a very creative and rewarding life.
I occasionally tell my artist or musician friends that I heal people only one person at a time, but people like yourself can heal a whole group of people all at once when a whole room full of people can watch an uplifting film or listen to a health-giving piece of music.
Sincerely, Kent
Hi Frank,
I think you've touched on the weakest point in the argument which opposes a city being a literal organism. Atoms and molecules are not felt to be alive, and yet when assembled into a cell these same molecules suddenly are felt to be alive. It doesn't seem logically consistent to deny life when assembled one way and to acknowledge life when assembled another way.
So likewise, the argument could go, which is the way I see you arguing, why couldn't the same thing apply to cities. Yes, the individual components of a city, such as roads, buildings, etc. are not alive, yet when assembled together are alive.
We all recognize life when we see it, but it's hard to come up with a definition which includes all forms considered to be alive and excludes all forms not considered to be life.
Here's part of the write-up in the Wikipedia article on "life." I'm including this in order to try to come up with common ground about the definition of life.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Definitions
It is still a challenge for scientists and philosophers to define life in unequivocal terms.[12][13][14] Defining life is difficult-in part-because life is a process, not a pure substance.[15] Any definition must be sufficiently broad to encompass all life with which we are familiar, and it should be sufficiently general that, with it, scientists would not miss life that may be fundamentally different from life on Earth.[16]
Biology
Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, the current understanding is descriptive, where life is a characteristic of organisms that exhibit all or most of the following phenomena:[15][17]
1.. Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, electrolyte concentration or sweating to reduce temperature.
2.. Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life.
3.. Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
4.. Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
5.. Adaptation: The ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as well as the composition of metabolized substances, and external factors present.
6.. Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion, for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism) and by chemotaxis.
7.. Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms.
Proposed
To reflect the minimum phenomena required, some have proposed other biological definitions of life:
a.. Living things are systems that tend to respond to changes in their environment, and inside themselves, in such a way as to promote their own continuation.[citation needed]
b.. A network of inferior negative feedbacks (regulatory mechanisms) subordinated to a superior positive feedback (potential of expansion, reproduction).[18]
c.. A systemic definition of life is that living things are self-organizing and autopoietic (self-producing). Variations of this definition include Stuart Kauffman's definition as an autonomous agent or a multi-agent system capable of reproducing itself or themselves, and of completing at least one thermodynamic work cycle.[19]
d.. Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.[20]
e.. Things with the capacity for metabolism and motion.[15]
f.. Life is a delay of the spontaneous diffusion or dispersion of the internal energy of the biomolecules towards more potential microstates.[21]
g.. Living beings are thermodynamic systems that have an organized molecular structure.[21]
_______________________________________________________________________________
From the discussion at Wikipedia, the two areas where I see a metropolis as an organism failing to meet the criteria of life is that a city is not literally composed of cells (as brought out in point #2 in the section about organization), and that if "life is a sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution," which is brought out in the section under proposed guidelines of a definition of life, then a metropolis organism would not meet that criterion either.
To go back to your original comments in the email about whether I see humans somehow transcending biology, I would be inclined to say "yes," but I would have a hard time proving that humans transcend biology.
But I find such a line of reasoning also undercuts a metropolis as being an organism as well. I would argue that humans do indeed somehow transcend biology, and it seems you would argue that a metropolis also somehow transcends biology for it to be alive as well. Or another way of putting it, I see that a human is not part of a larger organism, and I think you would move that boundary in order to consider cities not being part of a larger organism.
To be consistently logical, it would seem that we would need to say that there is no life whatsoever, and thus only recognize that everything in the universe is deterministic atoms and energy particles bumping around, or the reverse; we would have to say that if humans and cities are organisms, and that even the building blocks of life, which are atoms, must also be alive.
Historically it seems that mankind has looked at all of existence as being alive--- meaning the rocks and waves as well as people are alive, and that only in modern times have we split off most matter as not being alive. Humanity has basically had an animistic or polytheistic viewpoint that even a rock has a rudimentary spirit or life-force. For example, until only about 150 years ago the concept of vitalism taught that through spontaneous generation that a rotting corpse could spontaneously generate flies--- meaning something dead generating something alive.
But as I've been writing in these emails, it seems that the old idea of humans or other animals as not being part of any higher or greater collective system of life is giving way to your idea about cities literally being alive--- meaning that we appear to be moving towards transhumanism which is radically altering how we perceive and define what life is--- as machines are being melded with humans and other life forms. When a robot will be able to do everything a human can do, it will be hard to deny that the robot is alive.
I would be pleased to see the film by one of your students which you mentioned. I look forward to receiving the link when it is posted.
I think being involved in film like you are is a very creative and rewarding life.
I occasionally tell my artist or musician friends that I heal people only one person at a time, but people like yourself can heal a whole group of people all at once when a whole room full of people can watch an uplifting film or listen to a health-giving piece of music.
Sincerely, Kent
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