The Body Mystique

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/01/index25article8.html

Rob and I were talking last night, and I was looking at his face in the light of a small electric candle that sits on the bedside table. It was almost as if I saw his face come swimming out of darkness into our reality, so full of life and expression, the most fantastic miracle of consciousness—a self forming itself from the universe, alive with brilliant focus—yet bound to vanish as mysteriously as it came. Like us all, I thought. For we’re caught between the triumph of our existence, and the anguish of our ignorance about what comes before or after. And if we exist forever in any moment, then why can’t we realize it?

Yet even then I realized that our determined clear physical focus is, to some extent at least, dependent upon our forgetting. How can we experience the dear privacy of the moment if we’re aware of all those other equally valid moments? And would we savor our hours in the same way or become glutted with them, drunken with excess?

And I was led to think: How valuable the physical senses are! They create the theater of perception through which we experience reality. They organize, categorize and pin down vast fields of raw data to form a three-dimensional living picture in which we are so intimately involved that we are in the picture we see, even without recognizing ourselves within it.

Our beingness is directed constantly by the senses: That much is clear. What isn’t so apparent is the fact that we experience physical reality from within (within the body, which is itself within the picture), though reality appears to be “out there” beyond the skin. We even form what reality is, even while we perceive it as something that happens outside.

The senses cleverly and beautifully create physical reality and our most meaningful experience of it, yet it seems as if reality has always been there, exteriorized, regardless of our perception of it. Sounds certainly make it seem that there are noises out there to be heard. My eyes make me certain that there is a world of objects out there to be seen.

But our being-in-the-world and our feeling of being rooted in it, secure and alive in it—all of these are dependent upon the senses within the body itself (within the body which is itself within the picture). We aren’t consciously aware of this inner relation upon which our whole experience with the world rests.

For example, our aliveness and responsiveness to the world are dependent upon feelings of inner balance that align us with “exterior” conditions, but actually this inner sensing creates those conditions. We say that a day is warm or cold, according to how the air feels as it hits our skin. But the air is neither warm nor cold on its own. Only our inner thermal senses create the sensations.

Objects seem to be all around us in the same way, because our physical perceptions organize data in certain patterns, and then we respond to the apparent reality. The body is a unique reality-forming organism; one that not only projects a three-dimensional picture outward, but is itself within the living picture of reality that it is constantly creating. The feedback is so flashing, so instantaneous that this escapes us.

The body continually creates itself from within this system of interrelatedness, throwing out from itself physical representations in three-dimensional fact which it then experiences—creating, for example, the space through which it moves, the time through which it grows and ages, and all of those exterior conditions to which it then responds.

Its corporal aliveness, of course, arises from layers beneath usual consciousness. On those layers we are constantly responding to qualities of temperature, air pressure, cosmic rays and tidal motions of which are unaware, but upon which our reality depends.

… Enjoyment of physical sensation with its natural being-with-itness is one of our greatest delights and one of the best uniting devices, bringing body and soul firmly into their rightful relatedness. Physical joy and corporal motion set things right, putting the conscious self (the focus personality) in its proper position as it feels its soul alive in flesh, securely anchored in the support of its own creativity. In this relationship, thoughts are as physical as body cells; body cells as mental as thoughts; both uniting to form corporal expression.

The senses within the body create dimensions of space through which the body can then express itself, enjoy, explore; dimensions of agility and motion with limitless possibilities for action, manipulation and performance; an equally limitless and always unique opportunity for tactile experience and expression. Besides this, there is the taken-for-granted corporal triumph of being a body three-dimensionally equipped to act within a system in which it is peculiarly suited to exist.

… This feeling of corporal creativity as happening within the body brings a sense of physical aliveness, or corporal happening and gut-level relatedness that gets lost if we overemphasize the mental aspect of thoughts. At least for now, thoughts rest on the cells’ physical life. That much should be apparent. While we have bodies, thoughts are a physical expression, growing out of our brains as flowers grow out of the earth.

— Jane Roberts,
Adventures in Consciousness:
An Introduction to Aspect Psychology,
Chapter 20 – The Focus Personality and the Senses

The Three Big Questions

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/02/index25article7.html

Suppose you are sitting at a table thinking about the contemporary political situation, about what is going on in Washington, London, and Paris. You turn your attention to this book and you read up to this point. Here I suggest that, to get a real feel for the assumptions, you try pinching your left forearm with your right hand. And suppose you do this intentionally. That is, we will suppose your intention causes the movement of your right hand to pinch your left arm. At this point you will experience a mild pain. This pain has the following more or less obvious features. It exists only insofar as it is consciously experienced, and thus it is in one sense of the words entirely “subjective” and not “objective.” Furthermore, there is a certain qualitative feel to the pain. So, the conscious pain has at least these two features: subjectivity and qualitativeness.

I want all of this to sound rather innocent, even boring. So far you have had three types of conscious experiences: thinking about something, intentionally doing something, and feeling a sensation. What is the problem? Well, now look at the objects around you, the chairs and tables, houses and trees. These objects are not in any sense “subjective.” They exist entirely independent of whether or not they are experienced. Furthermore, we know independently that they are entirely made of the particles described by atomic physics, and that there is no qualitative feel to being a physical particle, or for that matter being a table. They are parts of the world that exist apart from experiences. Now this simple contrast between our experiences and the world that exists independently of our experiences invites a characterization, and in our traditional vocabulary the most natural characterization is to say that there is a distinction between the mental, on the one hand, and the physical or material, on the other. The mental qua mental is not physical. And the physical qua physical is not mental. It is this simple picture that leads to many of the problems, and our three harmless-looking examples exemplify three of the worst problems. How can conscious experiences like your pain exist in a world that is entirely composed of physical particles and how can some physical particles, presumably in your brain, cause the mental experiences? (This is called the “mind-body problem.”) But even if we got a solution to that problem, we still would not be out of the woods because the next obvious question is, How can the subjective, insubstantial, nonphysical mental states of consciousness ever cause anything in the physical world? How can your intention, not a part of the physical world, ever cause the movement of your arm? (This is called the “problem of mental causation.”) Finally your thoughts about politics raise a third intractable problem. How can your thoughts, presumably in your head, refer to or be about distant objects and states of affairs, political events occurring in Washington, London, or Paris, for example? (This is called the “problem of intentionality,” where “intentionality” means the directedness or aboutness of the mind.)

Our innocent experiences invited a description; and our traditional vocabulary of “mental” and “physical” is hard to resist. This traditional vocabulary assumes the mutual exclusion of the mental and physical; and that assumption creates insoluble problems that have launched a thousand books.

… Most of the general introductions to the subject are just about the Big Questions. They concentrate mainly on the mind-body problem with some attention also devoted to the problem of mental causation and a lesser amount to the problem of intentionality. I do not think these are the only interesting questions in the philosophy of mind… [H]ow does it work in detail?

Specifically, it seems to me we need to investigate questions about the detailed structure of consciousness, and the significance of recent neurobiological research on this subject.

— John Searle,
Mind:
A Brief Introduction

Deep Mind

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/03/index25article6.html

What is consciousness? And where does it come from? As far as Western science is concerned, consciousness is a great enigma. That we are conscious beings is the most obvious fact of our existence. Yet there is nothing more difficult to explain. Why should the complex processing of information in the brain result in a corresponding experience? There is nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that predicts any of us should have an interior world. Paradoxically, science would be much happier if there were no such thing as consciousness—yet without consciousness there would be no science.

Today, largely as a result of a growing understanding of the human brain, a number of psychologists and philosophers are investigating the mystery of consciousness. Some believe that a deeper understanding of brain chemistry will explain how consciousness arises. Others look to quantum physics. Some explore cybernetics; others find sources of hope in chaos theory. Yet whatever idea is put forward, one thorny question remains unanswered: How can something as immaterial as consciousness ever arise from something as unconscious as matter?

… [W]e are in a situation similar to that of the medieval astronomers who tried in vain to explain the irregular motion of the planets with a complex system of circles rolling around circles. Copernicus realized that if the Earth were not the center of the universe but a planet orbiting the sun, then the wandering motion of the planets could be easily explained. But the Church did not take kindly to his ideas. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for supporting the Copernican model (and for referring to God as “she”), while Galileo was put under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

In present times we may be approaching a similar paradigm shift with regard to consciousness. Most scientists assume that consciousness emerges in some way or other from brain activity. But if this approach is getting us nowhere, perhaps we should consider an alternative worldview—one found in many metaphysical and spiritual traditions, where consciousness is held to be an essential quality of the cosmos, as fundamental as space, time, and matter.

Interestingly, expanding our worldview to include consciousness as a fundamental quality does not actually threaten any of the conclusions of modern science. Mathematics remains the same, as do physics, biology, chemistry, and all our other discoveries about the material world. What changes is our understanding of ourselves. If consciousness is indeed fundamental, then the teachings of the great sages and mystics begin to make new sense.

Those who have penetrated to the core of their minds have frequently discovered a profound connection with the ground of all being. The sense of being an individual self—that feeling of I-ness that we all know so well but find so hard to define—turns out to be not so unique after all. They claim repeatedly that the light of consciousness shining in me as my self is the same light that shines in you and in every other sentient being.

Some have expressed this realization in the statement “I am God.” To modern science, such statements are nothing more than self-delusion. Physicists have looked out into deep space to the edges of the universe, back into “deep time” to the beginning of creation, and down into “deep structure” to the fundamental constituents of matter. The majority have found not only no evidence for God, but no need for God. The Universe seems to work perfectly well without any divine assistance.

But when mystics speak of the divine, they are not speaking of some supernatural being who rules the workings of the universe; they are talking of the world within. If we want to find God, we need to look into the realm of “deep mind”—a realm that science has only begun to explore. As we learn more, we may find that we have embarked on a course that will lead not only to a much fuller understanding of ourselves, but also to that long-sought synthesis of science and spirit.

— Peter Russell,
in the introduction to
The Quiet Center,
by John C Lilly

That Special Inner Light

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/04/index25article5.html

What makes you you, and what are your boundaries? Part of the answer seems obvious — you are a centre of consciousness. But what in the world is consciousness? Consciousness is both the most obvious and the most mysterious feature of our minds. On the one hand, what could be more certain or manifest to each of us than that he or she is a subject of experience, an enjoyer of perceptions and sensations, a sufferer of pain, and entertainer of ideas, and a conscious deliberator? On the other hand, what in the world can consciousness be? How can living physical bodies in the physical world produce such a phenomenon? …

Our ordinary concept of consciousness seems to be anchored to two separable sets of considerations that can be captured roughly by the phrases “from the inside” and “from the outside.” From the inside, our own consciousness seems obvious and pervasive, we know that much goes on around us and even inside our bodies of which we are entirely unaware or unconscious, but nothing could be more intimately known to us than those things of which we are, individually, conscious. Those things of which I am conscious, and the ways in which I am conscious of them, determine what it is like to be me. I know in a way no other could know what it is like to be me. From the inside, consciousness seems to be an all-or-nothing phenomenon — an inner light that is either on or off. We grant that we are sometimes drowsy or inattentive, or asleep, and on occasion we even enjoy abnormally heightened consciousness, but when we are conscious, that we are conscious is not a fact that admits of degrees. There is a perspective, then, from which consciousness seems to be a feature that sunders the universe into two strikingly different kinds of things, those that have it and those that don’t. Those that have it are subjects, beings to whom things can be one way or another, beings it is like something to be. It is not like anything at all to be a brick or a pocket calculator or an apple. These things have insides, but not the right sort of insides — no inner life, no point of view. It is certainly like something to be me (Something I know “from the inside”) and almost certainly like something to be you (for you have told me, most convincingly, that it is the same with you), and probably like something to be a dog or a dolphin…

When one considers these others (other folk and other creatures), one considers them perforce from the outside, and then various of their observable features strike us as relevant to the question of their consciousness. Creatures react appropriately to events within the scope of their senses; they recognize things, avoid painful experiences, learn, plan, and solve problems. They exhibit intelligence. But putting matter this way might be held to prejudge the issue. Talking of their “senses” or of “painful” circumstances, for instance suggests that we have already settled the issue of consciousness — for note that had we described a robot in those terms, the polemical intent of the choice of words would have been obvious (and resisted by many). How do creatures differ from robots, real or imagined? By being organically and biologically similar to us — and we are the paradigmatic conscious creatures. This similarity admits of degrees, of course, and one’s intuitions about what sorts of similarity count are probably untrustworthy. Dolphins’ fishiness subtracts from our conviction that they are conscious like us, but no doubt should not. Were chimpanzees as dull as seaslugs, their facial similarity to us would no doubt nevertheless favour their inclusion in the charmed circle. If houseflies were about our size, or warm-blooded, we’d be much more confident that when we plucked off their wings they felt pain (our sort of pain, the kind that matters). What makes us think that some such considerations ought to count and not others?

The obvious answer is that the various “outside” indicators are more or less reliable signs or symptoms of the presence of that whatever-it-is each conscious subject knows from the inside. But how could this be confirmed? This is the notorious “problem of other minds.” In one’s own case, it seems, one can directly observe the coincidence of one’s inner life with one’s outwardly observable behaviour. But if each of us is to advance rigorously beyond solipsism, we must be able to do something apparently impossible: confirm the coincidence of inner and outer in others. Their telling us of the coincidence in their own cases will not do, officially, for that gives us just more coincidence of inner with outer; the demonstrable capacities for perception and intelligent action normally go hand-in-hand with the capacity to talk, and particularly to make “introspective” reports. If a cleverly designed robot could (seem to) tell us of its inner life, (could utter all the appropriate noises in the appropriate contexts), would we be right to admit it to the charmed circle? We might be, but how could we ever tell we were not being fooled? Here the question seems to be: is that special inner light really turned on, or is there nothing but darkness inside? And this question looks unanswerable.

— Daniel C. Dennett
in Douglas R. Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett,
The Mind’s I,
Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul

Looking at the Looker

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/05/index25article4.html

To St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226…) is attributed the remark, “What you are looking for is what is looking.” This is also a succinct statement of the intent of Self-enquiry (capitalized), which means to look for what is looking, or to watch for what is watching.

You will never be satisfied with anything in the world because everything in it changes. The only thing that will ever really satisfy you is your true Self, which transcends all changes.

Whenever you are suffering, focus the attention on what is looking by asking a question something like,

What is aware?

What is it that never changes?

What is it that cannot be affected?

and then look. Don’t conceptualize an answer! By looking, you will become disidentified from any kind of thought or image that you see. If you have the sensation that what is watching is located in the head or chest, remember again that anything that you can watch cannot be what is watching. This applies to any sense of a localized object, even to an observer. You may now have the sensation of receding away from all mental objects towards an inner You, which is prior to, or inward from, all mental objects. Stay in this state until involvement with thoughts recurs, then repeat the question and look again. This state is one of stillness, peace, and fullness in which you are disidentified from everything in manifestation.

If you still have the sense that there is an observer that is looking, ask,

What is it that is aware of this observer?

and then look. This will help you to recede even further.

With practice, you will find that you stay in this state for longer and longer periods before asking again. Eventually, you will be able to omit asking, and simply look at what is looking. You may also begin to feel the pull of the Self itself and, with more practice, the Self may pull you in and hold you with little or no effort from you. And finally, you may realize that the Self is always what you are, and is always what you have been.

Every incident of suffering is another cue to disidentify. Whatever happens or does not happen is never up to you, so the only thing that you can “do” in any situation is to disidentify from it. This will bring an immediate but profound sense of silence and peace which will be irresistible inspiration for continued disidentification.

Enquiry into the Self may be summarized by the reminder,

Go inward.

Go inward past all thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, and perceptions, as far as possible until you can see that none of the mind’s contents are You or Yours. If you are still suffering, you have not gone far enough. Go still further and see that there is nothing there. You will then see that You are not a concept or object because You are what sees them. You Yourself are nothing that You can see or conceptualize. While you are inward, You will be unmoved and untouched by anything that happens in the body-mind or the world because You will see that You are unmovable and untouchable.

Outward is emptiness, frustration, dissatisfaction, anxiety, and boredom, and nothing that you really want. Your security cannot be found in what is ever-changing. It can only be found in what is never-changing. What you are looking for is what is looking. It is the home of peace and fulfillment and everything you really want.

Do not be deceived by the apparent simplicity of this practice! It is far more powerful than the mind can ever imagine because it brings you to the real You, which transcends the mind and therefore cannot be understood by the mind.

While you are inward, the activities of the body-mind and of the rest of the world may continue but they will not affect You. The more time you spend inward, the more you will realize your true nature, and the better you will feel.

… Initially, enquiry is most easily practiced in sitting meditation with a minimum of distractions. However, its real value is realized only when you use it to remain disidentified in all forms of activity. Ultimately, Self-enquiry is transformed from an active practice into the realization that ever-present, pure witnessing is what You are. … [The Sage] Ramesh [Balsekar] says,

“Self-enquiry is a passive rather than an active process. Mind is allowed to subside into its source even while engaged in normal activity, which then becomes an undercurrent of witnessing that gradually extends throughout all waking hours and begins to pervade all one’s activities without intruding on them or interfering with them.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj was a striking example of successful enquiry. In an article in the October 1978 issue of The Mountain Path, Jean Dunn, a disciple of his, wrote that he once said,

“When I met my guru he told me, ‘You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense “I Am”, find your real Self.’ I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon! It took me only three years to realize my true nature.”

— Stanley Sobottka,
A Course in Consciousness
(http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/consciousness/), Chapter 22 – Disidentification through Enquiry

The Cognitive Revolution and Beyond

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/06/index25article3.html

Psychology was cognitive at its origins in the mid-to-late 19th century. Structuralists such as Wilhelm Wundt and E. B. Titchener attempted to decompose conscious experience into its constituent sensations, images, and feelings. On the very first page of the Principles of Psychology (1890), the discipline’s founding text, William James asserted that “the first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on,” and the functionalist tradition that he and John Dewey established sought to understand the role of thinking and other aspects of mental life in our adaptation to the environment.

In the early 20th century, however, John B. Watson attempted to remake psychology as a science of behavior rather than, as James had defined it, a science of mental life. For Watson, public observation was the key to making psychology a viable, progressive science. Because consciousness (not to mention “the unconscious”) was essentially private, Watson argued that psychology should abandon any interest in mental life and instead confine its interest to what could be publicly observed: behavior and the circumstances in which it occurred. In Watson’s view, thoughts and other mental states did not cause behavior; rather, behavior was elicited by environmental stimuli. Thus began the behaviorist program, pursued most famously by B. F. Skinner, of tracing the relations between environmental events and the organism’s response to them. Psychology, in the words of one wag, lost its mind.

The behaviorist program dominated psychology between the two world wars and well into the 1950s, as manifested especially by the field’s focus on learning in nonhuman animals, such as rats and pigeons. Gradually, however, psychologists came to realize that they could not understand behavior solely in terms of the correlation between stimulus inputs and response outputs. E. C. Tolman discovered that rats learned in the absence of reinforcement, whereas Harry Harlow discovered that monkeys acquired general “sets” through learning as well as specific responses. Noam Chomsky famously showed that Skinner’s version of behaviorism could not account for language learning or performance, completely reinventing the discipline of linguistics in the process, and George Miller applied Chomsky’s insights in psychology. Leo Kamin, Robert Rescorla, and others demonstrated that conditioned responses, even in rats, rabbits, and dogs, were mediated by expectations of predictability and controllability rather than associations based on spatiotemporal contiguity. These and other findings convinced psychologists that they could not understand the behavior of organisms without understanding the internal cognitive structures that mediated between stimulus and response.

The “cognitive revolution” in psychology, which was really more of a counterrevolution against the revolution of behaviorism, was stimulated by the introduction of the high-speed computer. With input devices analogous to sensory and perceptual mechanisms, memory structures for storing information, control processes for passing information among them, transforming it along the way, and output devices analogous to behavior, the computer provided a tangible model for human thought. Perceiving, learning, remembering, and thinking were reconstrued in terms of “human information processing,” performed by the software of the mind on the hardware of the brain. Artificial intelligence, simulated by the computer, became both a model and a challenge for human intelligence. Jerome Bruner and George Miller founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University in 1960, intending to bring the insights of information theory and the Chomskian approach to language to bear on psychology. Miller’s book, Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960; written with Karl Pribram and Eugene Galanter) replaced the reflex arc of behaviorism with the feedback loops of cybernetics. The cognitive (counter) revolution was consolidated by the publication of Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology in 1967 and the founding of a scientific journal by the same name in 1970. With the availability of a comprehensive textbook on which undergraduate courses could be based, psychology regained its mind.

… The cognitive revolution in psychology was paralleled by the development of the field of cognitive science, whose practitioners included philosophers, linguists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, behavioral biologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. In some sense, the rise of cognitive science may have been a reaction to the dominance of behaviorism within psychology: Many who wished to pursue a science of mental life may have believed that they would have to go outside psychology to do so. By the same token, it seems reasonable to hope that the combined efforts of many different disciplines are more likely to yield a better understanding of cognitive processes than any one working in isolation.

Whereas some early cognitive psychologists viewed the computer as a model of the human mind, some early cognitive scientists believed that it offered the prospect of implementing the “mechanical mind” debated by philosophers at least since the time of Descartes…

Cognitive psychology remains an important component of cognitive science. However, to the extent that it seeks to develop intelligent machines on their own terms, without reference to human intelligence, cognitive science departs from cognitive psychology.

— John F. Kihlstrom, Lillian Park,
‘Cognitive Psychology, Overview’
– An entry in
Encyclopedia of the Human Brain,
editor-in-chief V.S. Ramachandran

Conscious Robots

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/07/index25article2.html

It is unlikely, in my opinion, that anyone will ever make a robot that is conscious in just the way we human beings are. Presumably that prediction is less interesting than the reasons one might offer for it. They might be deep (conscious robots are in some way “impossible in principle”) or they might be trivial (for instance, conscious robots might simply cost too much to make). Nobody will ever synthesize a gall bladder out of atoms of the requisite elements, but I think it is uncontroversial that a gall bladder is nevertheless “just” a stupendous assembly of such atoms. Might a conscious robot be “just” a stupendous assembly of more elementary artifacts—silicon chips, wires, tiny motors and cameras—or would any such assembly, of whatever size and sophistication, have to leave out some special ingredient that is requisite for consciousness?

Let us briefly survey a nested series of reasons someone might advance for the impossibility of a conscious robot:

1. Robots are purely material things, and consciousness requires immaterial mind-stuff. (Old-fashioned dualism.)

It continues to amaze me how attractive this position still is to many people. I would have thought a historical perspective alone would make this view seem ludicrous: over the centuries, every other phenomenon of initially “supernatural” mysteriousness has succumbed to an uncontroversial explanation within the commodious folds of physical science. Thales, the pre-Socratic protoscientist, thought the loadstone had a soul, but we now know better; magnetism is one of the best understood of physical phenomena, strange though its manifestations are. The “miracles” of life itself, and of reproduction, are now analyzed into the well-known intricacies of molecular biology. Why should consciousness be any exception? Why should the brain be the only complex physical object in the universe to have an interface with another realm of being? …

2. Robots are inorganic (by definition), and consciousness can exist only in an organic brain.

… [I]t is conceivable—if unlikely—that the sheer speed and compactness of biochemically engineered processes in the brain are in fact unreproducible in other physical media. So there might be straightforward reasons of engineering that showed that any robot that could not make use of organic tissues of one sort or another within its fabric would be too ungainly to execute some task critical for consciousness…

3. Robots are artifacts, and consciousness abhors an artifact; only something natural, born not manufactured, could exhibit genuine consciousness.

… Consider the general category of creed we might call origin essentialism: only wine made under the direction of the proprietors of Chateau Plonque counts as genuine Chateau Plonque; only a canvas every blotch on which was caused by the hand of Cézanne counts as a genuine Cézanne… Let us dub origin chauvinism the category of view that holds out for some mystic difference (a difference of value, typically) due simply to such a fact about origin. Perfect imitation Chateau Plonque is exactly as good a wine as the real thing, counterfeit though it is, and the same holds for the fake Cézanne, if it is really indistinguishable by experts…

4. Robots will always just be much too simple to be conscious.

After all, a normal human being is composed of trillions of parts (if we descend to the level of the macromolecules), and many of these rival in complexity and design cunning the fanciest artifacts that have ever been created. We consist of billions of cells, and a single human cell contains within itself complex “machinery” that is still well beyond the artifactual powers of engineers. We are composed of thousands of different kinds of cells, including thousands of different species of symbiont visitors, some of whom might be as important to our consciousness as others are to our ability to digest our food! If all that complexity were needed for consciousness to exist, then the task of making a single conscious robot would dwarf the entire scientific and engineering resources of the planet for millennia. And who would pay for it?

If no other reason can be found, this may do to ground your skepticism about conscious robots in your future, but one shortcoming of this last reason is that it is scientifically boring. If this is the only reason there won’t be conscious robots, then consciousness isn’t that special, after all. Another shortcoming with this reason is that it is dubious on its face. Everywhere else we have looked, we have found higher-level commonalities of function that permit us to substitute relatively simple bits for fiendishly complicated bits. Artificial heart valves work really very well, but they are orders of magnitude simpler than organic heart valves, heart valves born of woman or sow, you might say. Artificial ears and eyes that will do a serviceable (if crude) job of substituting for lost perceptual organs are visible on the horizon, and anyone who doubts they are possible in principle is simply out of touch. Nobody ever said a prosthetic eye had to see as keenly, or focus as fast, or be as sensitive to color gradations as a normal human (or other animal) eye in order to count as an eye. If an eye, why not an optic nerve (or acceptable substitute thereof), and so forth, all the way in?

— Daniel C. Dennett,
Brainchildren -
Essays on Designing Minds,
Chapter 9 – The Practical Requirements for Making a Conscious Robot

Learning and Context-Sensitivity

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/08/index25article1.html

We experience the world as a whole. Although myriad signals relentlessly bombard our senses, we somehow integrate them into unified moments of conscious experience that cohere together despite their diversity. Because of the apparent unity and coherence of our awareness, we can develop a sense of self that can gradually mature with our experiences of the world. This capacity lies at the heart of our ability to function as intelligent beings. The apparent unity and coherence of our experiences is all the more remarkable when we consider several properties of how the brain copes with the environmental events that it processes.

First and foremost, these events are highly context-sensitive. When we look at a complex picture or scene as a whole, we can often recognize its objects and its meaning at a glance, as in the picture of a familiar face. However, if we process the face piece-by-piece, as through a small aperture, then its significance may be greatly degraded. To cope with this context-sensitivity, the brain typically processes pictures and other sense data in parallel, as patterns of activation across a large number of feature-sensitive nerve cells, or neurons. The same is true for senses other than vision, such as audition. If the sound of the word GO is altered by clipping off the vowel O, then the consonant G may sound like a chirp, quite unlike its sound as part of GO.

During vision, all the signals from a scene typically reach the photosensitive retinas of the eyes at essentially the same time, so parallel processing of all the scene’s parts begins at the retina itself. During audition, each successive sound reaches the ear at a later time. Before an entire pattern of sounds, such as the word GO, can be processed as a whole, it needs to be recoded, at a later processing stage, into a simultaneously available spatial pattern of activation. Such a processing stage is often called a working memory, and the activations that it stores are often called short-term memory (STM) traces.

For example, when you hear an unfamiliar telephone number, you can temporarily store it in working memory while you walk over to the telephone and dial the number. In order to determine which of these patterns represents familiar events and which do not, the brain matches these patterns against stored representations of previous experiences that have been acquired through learning. Unlike the STM traces that are stored in a working memory, the learned experiences are stored in long-term memory (LTM) traces. One difference between STM and LTM traces concerns how they react to distractions. For example, if you are distracted by a loud noise before you dial a new telephone number, its STM representation can be rapidly reset so that you forget it. On the other hand, if you are distracted by a loud noise, you (hopefully) will not forget the LTM representation of your own name.

The problem of learning makes the unity of conscious experience particularly hard to understand, if only because we are able to rapidly learn such enormous amounts of new information, on our own, throughout life. For example, after seeing an exciting movie, we can tell our friends many details about it later on, even though the individual scenes flashed by very quickly. More generally, we can quickly learn about new environments, even if no one tells us how the rules of each environment differ. To a surprising degree, we can rapidly learn new facts without being forced to just as rapidly forget what we already know. As a result, we do not need to avoid going out into the world for fear that, in learning to recognize a new friend’s face, we will suddenly forget our parents’ faces.

I have called the problem whereby the brain learns quickly and stably without catastrophically forgetting its past knowledge the stability-plasticity dilemma. The stability-plasticity dilemma must be solved by every brain system that needs to rapidly and adaptively respond to the flood of signals that subserves even the most ordinary experiences. If the brain’s design is parsimonious, then we should expect to find similar design principles operating in all the brain systems that can stably learn an accumulating knowledge base in response to changing conditions throughout life. The discovery of such principles should clarify how the brain unifies diverse sources of information into coherent moments of conscious experience.

— Stephen Grossberg,
Brain Learning, Attention and Consciousness,
Chapter 61 in
Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness,
ed. Bernard J. Baars et al.

The Dwindling Brain

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9975/01/index24article8.html

Imagine that your brain starts to deteriorate in such a way that you are slowly going blind. Imagine that the desperate doctors, anxious to alleviate your condition, try any method to restore your vision. As a last resort, they try plugging silicon chips into your visual cortex. Imagine that to your amazement and theirs, it turns out that the silicon chips restore your vision to its normal state. Now imagine further that your brain, depressingly, continues to deteriorate and the doctors continue to implant more silicon chips. You can see where the thought experiment is going already: in the end, we imagine that your brain is entirely replaced by silicon chips; that as you shake your head, you can hear the chips rattling around inside your skull. In such a situation there would be various possibilities. One logical possibility, not to be excluded on any a priori grounds alone, is surely this: you continue to have all sorts of thoughts, experiences, memories, etc., that you had previously; the sequence of your mental life remains unaffected. In this case, we are imagining that the silicon chips have the power not only to duplicate your input-output functions, but also to duplicate the mental phenomena, conscious and otherwise, that are normally responsible for your input-output functions.

I hasten to add that I don’t for a moment think that such a thing is even remotely empirically possible. I think it is empirically absurd to suppose that we could duplicate the causal powers of neurons entirely in silicon. But that is an empirical claim on my part. It is not something that we could establish a priori. So the thought experiment remains valid as a statement of logical or conceptual possibility.

But now let us imagine some variations on the thought experiment. A second possibility, also not to be excluded on any a priori grounds, is this: as the silicon is progressively implanted into your dwindling brain, you find that the area of your conscious experience is shrinking, but that this shows no effect on your external behavior. You find, to your total amazement, that you are indeed losing control of your external behavior. You find, for example, that when the doctors test your vision, your hear them say, “We are holding up a red object in front of you; please tell us what you see.” You want to cry out, “I can’t see anything. I’m going totally blind.” But you hear your voice saying in a way that is completely out of your control, “I see a red object in front of me.” If we carry this thought experiment out to the limit, we get a much more depressing result than last time. We imagine that your conscious experience slowly shrinks to nothing, while your externally observable behavior remains the same.

… To those who are puzzled how such a thing is possible, let us simply remind them: As far as we know, the basis of consciousness is in certain specific regions of the brain, such as, perhaps, the reticular formation. And we may suppose in this case that these regions are gradually deteriorating to the point where there is no consciousness in the system. But we further suppose that the silicon chips are able to duplicate the input-output functions of the whole central nervous system, even though there is no consciousness left in the remnants of the system.

Now consider a third variation. In this case, we imagine that the progressive implantation of the silicon chips produces no change in your mental life, but you are progressively more and more unable to put your thoughts, feelings, and intentions into action. In this case, we imagine that your thoughts, feelings, experiences, memories, etc., remain intact, but your observable external behavior slowly reduces to total paralysis. Eventually you suffer from total paralysis, even though your mental life is unchanged. So in this case, you might hear the doctors saying,

The silicon chips are able to maintain heartbeat, respiration, and other vital processes, but the patient is obviously brain dead. We might as well unplug the system, because the patient has no mental life at all.

Now in this case, you would know that they are totally mistaken. That is, you want to shout out,

No, I’m still conscious! I perceive everything going on around me. It’s just that I can’t make any physical movement. I’ve become totally paralyzed.

The point of these three variations on the thought experiment is to illustrate the causal relationships between brain processes, mental processes, and external observable behavior.

… What is the philosophical significance of these three thought experiments? It seems to me there is a number of lessons to be learned. The most important is that they illustrate something about the relationship between mind and behavior. What exactly is the importance of behavior for the concept of mind? Ontologically speaking, behavior, functional role, and causal relations are irrelevant to the existence of conscious mental phenomena. Epistemically, we do learn about other people’s conscious mental states in part from their behavior. Causally, consciousness serves to mediate the causal relations between input stimuli and output behavior; and from an evolutionary point of view, the conscious mind functions causally to control behavior. But ontologically speaking, the phenomena in question can exist completely and have all of their essential properties independent of any behavioral output.

— John Searle,
The Rediscovery of the Mind,
Chapter 3 – Silicon Brains, Conscious Robots, and Other Minds

New-Born Consciousness

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9975/03/index24article6.html

From a single fertilized egg the process of cell division results first in a sort of container of ‘external cells’ surrounding a bundle of ‘internal cells’; then, by further gradual stages, in an embryo; then in a foetus which acquires more and more human features until it is ready to be born. In its early stages the embryo cannot usefully be described as a behaving system at all. Even after several weeks it still seems to be, at most, a pure reflex system. But at some stage in the transition from foetus, through birth, to an infant a few weeks old, we have an organism with the basic package. It will be useful to consider some relevant facts. Here are passages from a couple of textbooks:

— During a significant part of the fetal period (from 9 to 26 weeks), the eyes are closed, but toward the end of the fetal period, the fetus can see light and hear sound. The heartbeat is affected by the level of light or the tempo of music to which the mother is exposed.

— The sensation of taste also seems to be present in utero. Experiments in which the rate of swallowing has been measured have shown that the addition of saccharine to the amniotic fluid increases the rate of swallowing, whereas distasteful materials such as opaque media cause almost complete cessation of swallowing.

It is a sensitive question whether the foetus is perceptually conscious. Does it really see and hear and have sensations of taste? At this stage I am not considering that question, but only whether it is a decider*. The quotations show that the foetus is at least differentially sensitive to various stimuli in different sensory modalities; but that is consistent with its being a pure reflex system. More to the point is evidence that the foetus can learn and remember things. For example, newborn infants have been shown to prefer their mother’s voice to that of an unfamiliar female. To rule out the possibility that this learning was post-natal, it has further been shown that the babies studied show ‘a preference for their mother’s voice as it sounded in the womb’, rather than as it sounded after birth. There is also evidence that the foetus can learn to distinguish not just types of sound but sound-patterns. P. G. Hepper found that ‘babies, if their mothers had watched the TV soap “Neighbours” when pregnant, preferred this tune after birth to other unfamiliar tunes’.

There is similar evidence relating to other sense modalities. However, even that amount and type of learning is consistent with its being a matter of acquiring new stimuli, or at most, new triggering conditions. It doesn’t add up to a demonstration that the foetus has the basic package; the evidence is consistent with its being a triggered reflex system with acquired conditions.

… There is also some evidence against the view that the foetus is capable of learning in anything like the sense in which a decider learns. This shows up in facts about the development of the infant’s nervous system after birth. There is for example a reflex that makes the baby’s eyes follow any passing object. It takes time for the baby to become capable of overriding this reflex: that happens only with the explosion in brain growth around ten weeks. Then, by inhibiting the reflex, the baby becomes able to attend to something without being distracted. As time passes nervous connections permitting this control are strengthened. That suggests, even if it doesn’t imply, that the newborn baby lacks control over its behaviour. Now, we cannot sensibly ascribe to the foetus cognitive capacities not yet possessed by the neonate. So if the baby really can’t control its behaviour until after those post-natal developments in its nervous system, only then can it come to possess the basic package, and only then does it perceive the world in what I am calling the full sense. If that is correct, then… it is only at that stage that the infant is a candidate for genuine perceptual-phenomenal consciousness. So there is some reason to say that even the foetus ready to be born is not yet a decider.

The foetus is still picking up quantities of information—information that will make a difference to the baby’s behaviour. But that is consistent with the newborn baby’s being no more than a triggered reflex system with acquired reflexes, in which case its perception is of a low grade. What the foetus acquires is not yet information ‘for it’: or rather, it is at best information for it as it will become, not for it as it is. Watching a baby develop is an excellent way to see how the terms I am using to define the basic package (‘interpretation’, ‘assessment’, ‘decision-making’) do not pick out unitary all-or-nothing capacities, but complex clusters of capacities and skills which take time to develop. There is a time when the baby cannot sensibly be said to have any control over its behaviour—when it just seems to be a bundle of reflexes—and there is a time when it has clearly acquired at least some degree of control: some control over its voice, for example. But the interval between those times is taken up with the gradual accumulation of those capacities, whose complexity becomes obvious when you observe and reflect on their development.

— Robert Kirk,
Zombies and Consciousness,
Chapter 7 – Decision, Control and Integration

* A decider is by definition able to control its behaviour on the basis of stored and incoming information. It can also interpret information, assess its situation, and make decisions, in however rudimentary a way.

Generation of Evolutionary Variation

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Life is extraordinarily varied. The differences between a tiny archebacterium living in a superheated sulphur vent at the bottom of the ocean and a two-ton polar bear roaming the arctic circle span orders of magnitude in many dimensions. Many organisms consist of a single cell; a Sperm Whale has more than 10¹⁵ cells. Although very acidic, very alkaline or very salty environments are generally deadly, living things can be found in all of them. Hot or cold, wet or dry, oxygen-rich or anaerobic, nearly every niche on the planet has been invaded by life. The diversity of approaches to gathering nutrients, detecting danger, moving around, finding mates (or other forms of reproduction), raising offspring and dozens of other activities of living creatures is truly awesome.

Although our understanding of the molecular level of life is less detailed, it appears that this diversity is echoed there. For example, proteins with very similar shapes and identical functions can have radically different chemical compositions. And organisms that look quite similar to each other may have very different genetic blueprints. All of the genetic material in an organism is called its genome. Genetic material is discrete and hence has a particular size, although the size of the genome is not directly related to the complexity of the organism. The size of genomes varies from about 5,000 elements in a very simple organism (e.g. the viruses SV40 or φx) to more than 10¹¹ elements in some higher plants; people have about 3×10⁹ elements in their genome.

Despite this incredible diversity, nearly all of the same basic mechanisms are present in all organisms. All living things are made of cells: membrane-enclosed sacks of chemicals carrying out finely tuned sequences of reactions. The thousand or so substances that make up the basic reactions going on inside the cell (the core metabolic pathways) are remarkably similar across all living things. Every species has some variations, but the same basic materials are found from bacteria to human. The genetic material that codes for all of these substances is written in more or less the same molecular language in every organism. The developmental pathways for nearly all multicellular organisms unfold in very similar ways… It is the process of evolution that is responsible both for the diversity of living things and for their underlying similarities. The unity arises through inheritance from common ancestors; the diversity from the power of variation and selection to search a vast space of possible living forms.

… In order to get a rough idea of the degrees of relatedness among creatures, it is helpful to know the basic timeline of life on Earth. The oldest known fossils, stromalites found in Australia, indicate that life began at least 3.8 billion years ago. Geological evidence indicates that a major meteor impact about 4 billion years ago vaporized all of the oceans, effectively destroying any life that may have existed before that. In effect, life on earth began almost as soon as it could have. Early life forms probably resembled modern bacteria in some important ways. They were simple, single celled organisms, without nuclei or other organelles. Life remained like that for nearly 2 billion years. Then, about halfway through the history of life, a radical change occurred: Eucarya came into being. There is evidence that eucarya began as symbiotic collections of simpler cells which were eventually assimilated and became organelles. The advantages of these specialized cellular organelles made early eucarya very successful. Single-celled Eucarya become very complex, for example, developing mechanisms for moving around, detecting prey, paralyzing it and engulfing it.

The next major change in the history of life was the invention of sex. Evolution… is a mechanism based on the inheritance of variation. Where do these variations come from? Before the advent of sex, variations arose solely through individual, random changes in genetic material. A mutation might arise, changing one element in the genome, or a longer piece of a genome might be duplicated or moved. If the changed organism had an advantage, the change would propagate itself through the population. Most mutations are neutral or deleterious, and evolutionary change by mutation is a very slow, random search of a vast space. The ability of two successful organisms to combine bits of their genomes into an offspring produced variants with a much higher probability of success. Those moves in the search space are more likely to produce an advantageous variation than random ones. Although you wouldn’t necessarily recognize it as sex when looking under a microscope, even some Bacteria exchange genetic material. How and when sexual recombination first evolved is not clear, but it is quite ancient. Some have argued that sexual reproduction was a necessary precursor to the development of multicellular organisms with specialized cells. The advent of sex dramatically changed the course of evolution. The new mechanism for the generation of variation focused nature’s search through the space of possible genomes, leading to an increase in the proportion of advantageous variations, and an increase in the rate of evolutionary change.

— Lawrence Hunter,
Molecular Biology for Computer Scientists in
Artificial Intelligence and Molecular Biology,
ed. Lawrence Hunter

This More Versatile Machine

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9975/05/index24article4.html

Artificial Intelligence is, very crudely, the science of getting machines to perform jobs that normally require intelligence and judgment. Researchers at any number of AI labs have designed machines that prove mathematical theorems, play chess, sort mail, guide missiles, assemble auto engines, diagnose illnesses, read stories and other written texts, and converse with people in a rudimentary way. This is, we might say, intelligent behavior. But what is this “intelligence”? As a first pass, I suggest that intelligence of the sort I am talking about is a kind of flexibility, a responsiveness to contingencies. A dull or stupid machine must have just the right kind of raw materials presented to it in just the right way, or it is useless: the electric can opener must have an appropriately sized can fixed under its drive wheel just so, in order to operate at all. Humans (most of us, anyway) are not like that. We deal with the unforeseen. We take what comes and make the best of it, even though we may have had no idea what it would be. We play the ball from whatever lie we are given, and at whatever angle to the green; we read and understand texts we have never seen before; we find our way back to Chapel Hill after getting totally lost in downtown Durham (or downtown Washington D.C., or downtown Lima, Peru). Our pursuit of our goals is guided while in progress by our ongoing perception and handling of interim developments. Moreover, we can pursue any number of different goals at the same time, and balance them against each other. We are sensitive to contingencies, both external and internal, that have a very complex and unsystematic structure.

It is almost irresistible to speak of information here, even if the term were not as trendy as it is. An intelligent creature, I want to say, is an information-sensitive creature, one that not only registers information through receptors such as sense-organs but somehow stores and manages and finally uses that information. Higher animals are intelligent beings in this sense, and so are we, even though virtually nothing is known about how we organize or manage the vast, seething profusion of information that comes our way. And there is one sort of machine that is information-sensitive also: the digital computer. A computer is a machine specifically designed to be fed complexes of information, to store them, manage them, and produce appropriate theoretical or practical conclusions on demand. Thus, if artificial intelligence is what one is looking for, it is no accident that one looks to the computer.

… AI theorists , philosophers, and intelligent laymen have inevitably compared computers to human minds, but at the same time debated both technical and philosophical questions raised by this comparison. The questions break down into three main groups or types: (A) Questions of the form “Will a computer ever be able to do X?” where X is something that intelligent humans can do. (B) Questions of the form “Given that a computer can or could do X, have we any reason to think that it does X in the same way that humans do X?” (C) Questions of the form “Given that some futuristic supercomputer were able to do X, Y, Z, . . . , for some arbitrarily large range and variety of human activities, would that show that the computer had property P?” where P is some feature held to be centrally, vitally characteristic of human minds, such as thought, consciousness, feeling, sensation, emotion, creativity, or freedom of the will.

Questions of type A are empirical questions and cannot be settled without decades, perhaps centuries, of further research—compare ancient and medieval speculations on the question of whether a machine could ever fly. Questions of type B are brutely empirical too, and their answers are unavailable to AI researchers per se, lying squarely in the domain of cognitive psychology, a science or alleged science barely into its infancy. Questions of type C are philosophical and conceptual…

Let us begin by supposing that all questions of types A and B have been settled affirmatively—that one day we might be confronted by a much-improved version of Hal, the soft-spoken computer in Kubrick’s 2001 (younger readers may substitute Star Wars’ C3PO or whatever subsequent cinematic robot is the most lovable). Let us call this more versatile machine “Harry.” Harry (let us say) is humanoid in form—he is a miracle of miniaturization and has lifelike plastic skin—and he can converse intelligently on all sorts of subjects, play golf and the viola, write passable poetry, control his occasional nervousness pretty well, make love, prove mathematical theorems (of course), show envy when outdone, throw gin bottles at annoying children, etc., etc. We may suppose he fools people into thinking he is human. Now the question is, is Harry really a person? Does he have thoughts, feelings, and so on? Is he actually conscious, or is he just a mindless walking hardware store whose movements are astoundingly like those of a person?

— Willian G. Lycan,
Consciousness,
Appendix – Machine Consciousness

A Queer Sort of Phenomenon

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9975/06/index24article3.html

Recent years have seen a tremendous growth of interest in the topic of consciousness. Once considered taboo, it is now discussed even by neuroscientists. The genuineness of the problem is becoming increasingly recognised, along with its seriousness.

… Let us begin by reminding ourselves of the general nature of the material world, as it is now conceived. It consists of causally interacting objects disposed in space, each made up of material parts. These objects are subject to a number of physical forces, such as gravity and the electromagnetic force, and they behave in ways prescribed by physical laws. Before the dawn of consciousness, some time in late evolutionary history, this was all there was in the universe—inanimate, insensate matter, blindly colliding, shrinking and expanding. Basically, it was a world of whirling lumps. But now consider conscious experience: this appears to be a phenomenon of another order entirely. Subjective awareness is no part of the physical world of material clumps in space. When consciousness is added to the world we get something genuinely novel, not just a rearrangement of what we already have. Consciousness is something extra, not just the old particles in a new configuration. The theory that serves to explain the world without experience seems radically inadequate to explain the world that contains it. And there is a pressing problem about relating experience to the physical world: how do experiences of red, say, relate to what happens in my brain, which looks just like a particularly fancy rearrangement of matter?

When we reflect on consciousness in this way, noticing its discontinuity with the physical world, we are apt to be struck by the thought that it is a very peculiar thing. It cannot be seen or touched, or studied under a microscope; yet it is for each of us the most obvious reality in the world. No matter how delicately you probe the brain you will not encounter it in the crevices and corners of that greyish dumpling. Where is it? It seems a queer sort of phenomenon, an anomaly—a miracle even. It refuses to slot into our general scientific picture of the universe. How could such a unique phenomenon have arisen from matter, and what kind of entity is the brain such that it can generate it?

In response to these questions an array of answers suggest themselves. An extreme response, which has been and still is quite common, is simply to deny that consciousness exists. This doctrine is called eliminativism: it says that there literally are no thoughts and sensations and emotions. All this is prescientific nonsense, analogous to ghosts and witches and ectoplasm. There is just the material brain, with its neurons and chemicals and electrical transactions…

A second response, quite opposite in tendency, is to embrace the miracle, declaring that our current world-view is indeed grievously limited. On this view, we need to acknowledge the pervasive presence of the supernatural. Consciousness is taken to be the direct expression of God’s will, or at least a sign that there is more to reality than natural forces…

A third response rejects both of the first two and declares that consciousness is a primitive existent, but is not in any way miraculous. Just as space and time are primitive dimensions in physics, so conscious experience is a primitive feature of the universe. It is correlated with events in the brain, but nothing can be said to explain how this could be: it just is. This is a radical irreducibility thesis…

A fourth response attempts to explain consciousness in more familiar terms, claiming that it is not as queer as it at first appears. Into this category fall the various reductive proposals… [such as] materialism, behaviourism, functionalism and so on. This response sets out to domesticate the phenomenon, to provide a deflationary account of its nature. Consciousness is not as remarkable as it might at first seem; it is really something relatively mundane in disguise. I call these four types of response the DIME shape: D for deflation, I for irreducibility, M for magic, E for elimination.

… [M]y own thoughts on the subject have changed quite fundamentally. The approach I now favour runs as follows. The nature of consciousness is a mystery in the sense that it is beyond human powers of theory construction, yet there is no sense in which it is inherently miraculous. This position depends upon a sharp separation between epistemological and ontological questions. Epistemologically, consciousness outruns what we can comprehend, given the ways our cognitive systems are structured—in rather the way that theoretical physics is beyond the intellectual capacities of the chimp. Ontologically, however, nothing can be inferred from this about the naturalness or otherwise of the object of our ignorance: what cannot be known about is not thereby supernatural in itself. So this position accepts the full reality of consciousness (unlike E), denies that it is miraculous (unlike M), insists that it has an explanation (unlike I), but disputes our ability to find this explanation (unlike D). Consciousness has an epistemologically transcendent natural essence. The picture is that an omniscient being could grasp the full naturalistic explanation of consciousness, but we are not thus omniscient. There exists some lawlike process by which matter generates experience, but the nature of this process is cognitively closed to us…

— Colin McGinn,
The Character of Mind –
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, 2nd ed., Chapter 3 – Consciousness

Embryonic Brain

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The human animal, Homo sapiens or wise man, like all other multicellular animals, propagates the next generation by sexual reproduction. In the fertilization process, whether through intercourse or through in vitro insemination, an ovum and a sperm cell become a unicelleluar organism. A unique moment of human history is represented in the single cell, the zygote.…

The number of cells making up the zygote increases exponentially. It is important to understand that all cells in each generation contain the same DNA, and thus have an equal potential to become virtually any type of specialized cell. The single factor that will determine the fate of each new healthy cell is its local external environment of chemicals and energies. This dynamic context determines the internal metabolic processes of each cell and what it will become in its mature existence.

In humans, the zygote cleaves into two daughter cells at about 30 hours after fertilization. A sphere of a dozen or more cells forms by 3 days, and by the end of week 1 there is an embryo composed of thousands of cells. In the third week of development, the embryo begins to divide into a distinctive three-layer or trilaminar structure. The three germ cell layers are called mesoderm, endoderm, and ectoderm. Cells of the mesoderm will produce connective tissues, striated muscle cells, blood vessels, blood cells, bone marrow cells, and the tissues of the excretory and reproductive organs; endoderm cells will divide and differentiate into epithelia of the respiratory system, glandular cells, and the pancreas and liver; and the ectoderm layer will produce outer epithelial tissues and the cells that make up the nervous system.

Early in the third week of human development, a thick band of cells appears along the midline of the embryo. This primitive streak begins at one end and elongates toward the other. The formation of this structure provides the landmark by which a three-dimensional (3D) morphological coordinate system for the growing embryo may be defined. The origin of this streak is at the caudal (rear or posterior) end, and its growth is toward the cranial (head or anterior) end. Thus, the right and left sides and the dorsal (top) and ventral (bottom) surfaces of the embryo may now be identified. The primitive streak is eventually replaced by a tubular column of cells called the notochord, which also migrates from the caudal region toward the expanding cranial end. The vertebral column eventually forms in the notochord region. The mesodermal cells of the notochord become the defining bony structures of the midline axis: the cranium, the vertebrae, the ribs, and the sternum.

The central nervous system, which comprises the brain and spinal chord, arises out of the neuroectoderm, also called the neural plate, a region of cells that runs parallel and dorsal to the notochord. By the end of the third week, the entire length of the neural plate has folded into the neural tube, whose ends close to form a protected space inside the larger embryo. The interior space of the neural tube becomes the fluid-filled ventricular system of the brain and spinal cord central canal. The neural crest cells, situated along the outer length of the neural tube, give rise to most of the peripheral nervous system, which extends throughout the body. All the progenitors of the cells that make up the central nervous system—the neurons and glia cells—exist in the inner walls of the neural tube, a region called the ventricular zone. Thus, nerve and glia cells are intimately related, from their origins in primordial cells of the ventricular zone to their final destinies as intertwined functional systems within the brain and spinal cord.

The developing spinal cord becomes anatomically divided into a dorsal and a ventral region, and groups of nerve and glia cells called the dorsal horn nuclear groups and the ventral horn nuclei develop in the respective regions. The dorsal region will receive sensory information from the peripheral nervous system and send it toward the brain (afferent flow), and the ventral nuclei will transmit nerve impulses from the brain to all areas of the body (efferent flow). Clusters of neural crest cells that lie alongside the spinal cord differentiate to become the spinal ganglia (dorsal root ganglia) and the ganglia of the sympathetic nervous system. It is through these peripheral systems of cells that we experience the external and internal sensory worlds, send the information to our brains, and generate our behaviors and memories. All that we are, and can be, must relate to the basic patterns of afferent and efferent activities of the nervous system.

During the fourth developmental week, three primary brain vesicles form out of the neural tube: the forebrain, the midbrain, and the hindbrain. The forebrain further divides into two distinct regions, the telencephalon and the diencephalon, and the hindbrain partly divides into the pons and the medula. Simultaneously, all other human body systems—respiratory, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, endocrine, reproductive, and so on—are developing from the mesodermal and endodermal germ cells. In just 4 weeks of development, genetic expression and epigenetic influences have shaped the protected embryo into a basic three-dimensional design that reveals its future developmental course. Through massive waves of cell division, migration, and differentiation, the embryo has developed a definite rostral-caudal organization, in addition to dorsal, ventral, and midline axial orientations.

— Richard M. Pico,
Consciousness in Four Dimensions -
Biological Relativity and the Origins of Thought, Chapter 4 – Development and Systems of Neurons

Philosophical Stances on Consciousness

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9975/08/index24article1.html

Three of the greatest perplexities are these. Why is there something rather than nothing? How did some of the stuff there is come to be alive? How did some of the living stuff come to be conscious? Alongside and intimately related to the questions of how and why matter, life, and consciousness came into being are questions about the nature of matter, life, and consciousness.

Here I take on the third perplexity and sketch a naturalistic theory of consciousness… Subjectivity has emerged so far only in certain biological systems. It makes sense, therefore, to seek a theory of consciousness with the guidance of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution and the best current brain science.

There are several main philosophical positions on the problem of consciousness. First, there is nonnaturalism, the view that consciousness is not a natural phenomenon and therefore cannot be understood in naturalistic terms. Some nonnaturalists think that consciousness can be made intelligible if it is understood as a power of a nonphysical substance or as composed of nonphysical properties (Popper and Eccles 1977). Others think that we need to invoke a supernatural cause to explain why phenomenal qualia, the sensation of red or the scent of a rose, are correlated with specific types of brain states (Adams 1987, Swinburne 1984). Still others think that consciousness is miraculous. Like transubstantiation and the Trinity, it is not for us to fathom.

Second, there is principled agnosticism (Nagel 1974, 1986). Naturalism is a position that we do not understand, because we do not understand (at least at present) how the relation of consciousness and the brain can be made intelligible in naturalistic terms. We don’t understand what it would mean to give an objective account of subjectivity. Since one should not believe a theory one does not even understand, agnosticism is the best policy.

Third, there is anticonstructive naturalism, noumenal naturalism, or the new mysterianism, as I will also call it (McGinn 1991). This is the view that naturalism is true. There are in fact properties of the brain that account naturalistically for consciousness. But we cannot grasp these properties or explain how consciousness depends on them. Consciousness is terminally mysterious to our minds but possibly not to minds of greater intelligence. It is terminally mysterious not because it is a nonnatural phenomenon, not because it is a miracle, but because an understanding of its nature is “cognitively closed” to us. The problem of consciousness is a case where we know how to ask the question but lack the mental powers to find the answer.

Fourth, there is eliminativist naturalism (P. M. Churchland 1981, P. S. Churchland 1983). According to the eliminativist, naturalism is true. The complete story of our brain will tell the complete story of our mental life. But there is a sense in which consciousness cannot be explained. Consciousness is a concept that is simultaneously too simplistic, too vague, and too historically embedded in false and confused theory to perspicuously denote a phenomenon or set of phenomena in need of explanation. Concepts like consciousness, qualia, and subjectivity are unhelpful in setting out the explanatory agenda for a naturalistic theory of mind. Whatever genuine phenomena these concepts inchoately gesture toward will be explained by the science of the mind. But the explanation will proceed best if we eliminate these concepts from the explanatory platter and seek more perspicuous and credible replacements undergirded by a rich neuroscientific theory.

Finally, there is constructive naturalism. This is the position I aim to defend. Like the anticonstructivist and the eliminativist, I think that naturalism is true. Against the anticonstructivist and principled agnostic, I maintain that there is reason for optimism about our ability to understand the relation between consciousness and the brain. We can make intelligible the existence of consciousness in the natural world. Against the eliminativist, I maintain that the concept of consciousness, despite its shortcomings, is needed, at least at the beginning of inquiry, to mark what is in need of explanation. Phenomenal, qualitative consciousness is what needs to be explained…

Even at this early stage in the development of the science of the mind, there are deep differences of opinion among naturalists about whether the mystery of consciousness can be made to yield, about whether there are such things as phenomenal consciousness and qualia in need of explanation, about the importance of consciousness in the overall economy of mind, and about what shape the theory will take and what methods will be used to construct it…

Happily, I am not alone in believing that a constructive theory is possible. Recent work by P. S. Churchland (1986), P. M. Churchland (1989), and Daniel Dennett (1991) is in the mode of constructivist naturalism. All three take conscious experience seriously as a phenomenon or set of phenomena to be explained. No one now defends the outright elimination of our common sense ways of conceiving of mind… The disagreements within constructive naturalism are plentiful. The important point is that these disagreements proceed in a context of agreement that mind in general and consciousness in particular will yield their secrets only by coordinating all our informational sources at once.

— Owen J Flanagan,
Consciousness Reconsidered

Too Near, Too Far

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9976/01/index23article8.html

Let us make no bones about it. Consciousness is puzzling. The rest of our common experience contains no obvious analog, no remotely parallel phenomenon, no clear and evocative model that promises some useful grasp of its essential nature. Consciousness thus appears unique and, to many minds, beyond scientific explanation. Or anyway, beyond purely physical explanation. Consciousness, it has been argued, is essentially a subjective phenomenon, accessible only to the creature that has it, while anything that is truly physical — one’s brain activity, for example — is doomed to be objective in nature, that is, to be accessible to many people from many points of view. Conscious phenomena, it is often concluded, can hardly be identical with mere brain phenomena; and the objective science of the latter cannot hope to explain the ineffably subjective character of the former. This view may be right, but I am inclined to the opposite opinion. Let me explain why.

We have confronted comparable mysteries before, and more than once. The historical examples are worth recalling. The first-century astronomer Ptolemy wrote off the possibility of any real scientific explanation of the nature and motions of the stars and planets on grounds that they were too remote and inaccessible to human understanding. We could aspire only to describe what little of those motions we could see. Physics, he said, would never capture their true nature or underlying heavenly causes. Those were inaccessible from our earthly perspective.

A similar idea about the heavens was urged by the mathematician, historian of science, and positivist philosopher Auguste Comte as recently as the early nineteenth century. Citing their unthinkable remoteness from us, he ruled out as impossible our ever knowing the physical constitution of the stars.

The point is not that these men were fools. Quite the contrary. Ptolemy was the greatest astronomer of antiquity, and Comte was a hard-nosed and deeply learned defender of scientific method. The point is that even a brilliant thinker can come to assume that what transcends his imagination transcends discovery by science.

By Comte’s time, of course, Sir Isaac Newton had already shown that Ptolemy’s counsel of explanatory despair was premature. The sun and planets, it turned out, were all made of matter, had mass, and moved as they did because of gravitational forces. Comte’s ideas about our cognitive limitations were likewise premature. For within twenty years of Comte’s claim, astronomers had discovered the many emission and absorption lines present in the spectrum of the light arriving from any star in the heavens, the sun included.

… In Ptolemy’s case, the inaccessible, unknowable cause of the planetary motions was in fact the very same force that held his own feet squarely against his ancient observatory floor. Ironically, as it turned out, he was in vital and intimate contact with that force every minute of his life. Naturally enough, it went utterly unrecognized by Ptolemy, for he lacked the conceptual framework that Newton would later construct. Ptolemy, learned Aristotelian that he was, thought of any object’s “gravity” as an intrinsic feature of that object, a feature like its shape or its color. As he understood things, it was not a force at all, let alone a force that emanated from the sun and every planet, a force spread throughout the heavens. Newton’s framework was therefore revolutionary, for it would have partitioned parts of Ptolemy’s neuronal activation space in a new and radically different way. Newton’s framework, in contrast to Aristotle’s, would have made it possible for Ptolemy to recognize what was endlessly tugging at his own body.

Comte’s case was comparably ironic. The information “forever inaccessible” was in fact flooding continuously into his eyes and over his body whenever he stood in direct sunlight or starlight. He was literally awash in it for most of his life. Naturally enough, that spectral information went utterly unrecognized by him, because he did not understand the structure and the sources of light; nor did he suspect the rich information that it contained. He lacked the conceptual framework necessary to appreciate what was going on. Even if someone had put starlight through a prism for him, the pattern would have meant nothing to Comte.

Like Ptolemy before him, he wasn’t lacking informational contact with the mystery at issue: he was lacking the proper concepts with which to grasp it. Perhaps we should not be too impressed, therefore, by the puzzling nature of consciousness. The appearance of unique mystery and permanent inaccessibility to standard science may reflect only our own ignorance and current conceptual poverty, rather than any special metaphysical status possessed by consciousness itself.

— Paul M. Churchland,
The Engine of the Reason, the Seat of the Soul:
A Philosophical Journey into the Brain,
Chapter 8 – The Puzzle of Consciousness

Seat of Consciousness

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9976/02/index23article7.html

Many differing views have been expressed with regard to the relation of the state of the brain to the phenomenon of consciousness. There is remarkably little consensus of opinion for a phenomenon of such obvious importance. It is clear, however, that all parts of the brain are not equally involved in its manifestation. For example… the cerebellum seems to be much more of an ‘automaton’ than the cerebrum. Actions under cerebellar control seem almost to take place ‘by themselves’ without one having to ‘think about’ them. While one may consciously decide to walk from one place to another, one does not often become aware of the elaborate plan of detailed muscle movements that would be necessary for controlled motion. The same may be said of unconscious reflex actions, such as the removal of one’s hand from a hot stove, which might be mediated not by the brain at all but by the upper part of the spinal column. From this, at least, one may be well inclined to infer that the phenomenon of consciousness is likely to have more to do with the action of the cerebrum than with the cerebellum or the spinal cord.

On the other hand, it is very far from clear that the activity of the cerebrum must itself always impinge upon our awareness. For example, as I have described above, in the normal action of walking, where one is not conscious of the detailed activity of one’s muscles and limbs the control of this activity being largely cerebellar (helped by other parts of the brain and spinal cord), primary motor regions of the cerebrum would seem also to be involved. Moreover, the same would be true of the primary sensory regions: one might not be aware, at the time, of the varying pressures on the soles of one’s feet as one walks, but the corresponding regions of the somatosensory cortex would still be continually activated.

Indeed, the distinguished US Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (who, in the 1940s and 1950s, was responsible for much of the detailed mapping of the motor and sensory regions of the human brain) has argued that one’s awareness is not associated simply with cerebral activity. He suggested, on the basis of his experiences in performing numerous brain operations on conscious subjects, that some region of what he referred to as the upper brain-stem, consisting largely of the thalamus and the midbrain, though he had mainly in mind the reticular formation, should, in a sense, be regarded as the ’seat of consciousness’. The upper brain-stem is in communication with the cerebrum, and Penfield argued that ‘conscious awareness’ or ‘consciously willed action’ would arise whenever this region of brain-stem is in direct communication with the appropriate region of the cerebral cortex, namely the particular region associated with whatever specific sensations, thoughts, memories, or actions are being consciously perceived or evoked at the time…

[Penfield’s] view was that consciousness is a manifestation of activity of the upper brain-stem… Other neuro-physiologists have also argued that, in particular, the reticular formation might be taken to be the ’seat’ of consciousness, if such a seat indeed exists. The reticular formation, after all, is responsible for the general state of alertness of the brain. If it is damaged, then unconsciousness will result. Whenever the brain is in a waking conscious state, then the reticular formation is active; when not, then it is not. There does indeed appear to be a clear association between activity of the reticular formation and that state of a person that we normally refer to as ‘conscious’. However, the matter is complicated by the fact that in the state of dreaming, where one is indeed aware in the sense of being aware of the dream itself, normally active parts of the reticular formation seem not to be active. A thing that also worries people about assigning such an honoured status to the reticular formation is that, in evolutionary terms, it is a very ancient part of the brain. If all that one needs to be conscious is an active reticular formation, then frogs, lizards, and even codfish are conscious!

… Another viewpoint seems to be that it is the action of the hippocampus that has more to do with the conscious state. … [T]he hippocampus is crucial to the laying down of long-term memories. A case can be made that the laying down of permanent memories is associated with consciousness, and if this is right, the hippocampus would indeed play a central role in the phenomenon of conscious awareness.

Others would hold that it is the cerebral cortex itself which is responsible for awareness. Since the cerebrum is man’s pride (though dolphins’ cerebrums are as big!) and since the mental activities most closely associated with intelligence appear to be carried out by the cerebrum, then surely it is here that the soul of man resides! That would presumably be the conclusion of the point of view of strong AI, for example. If awareness is merely a feature of the complexity of an algorithm or perhaps of its ‘depth’ or some ‘level of subtlety’ then, according to the strong-AI view, the complicated algorithms being carried out by the cerebral cortex would give that region the strongest claim to be that capable of manifesting consciousness.

— Roger Penrose,
The Emperor’s New Mind:
Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics,
Chapter 9 – Real Brains and Model Brains

A World of Human-like Machines

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9976/03/index23article6.html

The science of robotics, which draws on other disciplines such as artificial intelligence and micro-engineering, is generally understood to concern the design of autonomous or semi-autonomous machines, often modelled directly on human attributes and skills. The military have shown a particular interest in automated weaponry and mechanically intelligent surveillance devices, for obvious reasons, and it is certainly the case that a large proportion of current research projects are funded directly or indirectly by the US agency DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency). Manuel De Landa (1991) has effectively portrayed the historical precedents and potentially disturbing consequences of automated war in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. He argues the twentieth century saw a shift in the relation between humans and machines that may lead eventually to the emergence of a truly independent robotic life-form, a “machinic phylum” to use a phrase he borrows from Gilles Deleuze.

Meanwhile, advances in computer control through parallel processing and learning systems that produce semi-intelligent robots, or ‘knowbots’, have accelerated the integration of machines into mass production. Here productivity is increased and labour costs reduced by the automation of many processes leading to a situation where manufacturing lines are often human-free zones as many tasks that previously required great human skill and dexterity are mechanised. And while industrial robots are now relatively static and cumbersome, the aim of much current robotic research is to achieve autonomy for the machine, to free it from static sources of power and human intervention. Mobile robots, or ‘mobots’, are intended for applications in space exploration, warfare and nuclear installations but may eventually find their way into the home in domestic applications. Most robots in use today are blindly pre-programmed to do repetitive tasks, but research into machine vision, sound sensing and touch sensitivity will allow them to sense their environment and take ‘real-time’ decisions about their operation.

At the same time as investments are made in large-scale robotic projects, alternative methods are explored that distribute resources rather than concentrating them. Rodney Brooks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has proposed robots that are “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control”, consisting of millions of tiny units, each programmed to do a simple task, but not subject to any centralised control. In this sense they are like an ant colony that can build large structures through the co-operation of lots of tiny workers. Brooks suggests that such creatures could be dropped on a planet surface and work together to clear an area of rocks for a landing pad. It would not matter that many of the minibots might die or stop working, because they can easily be replaced. This is an example of human engineering trying to model technology from nature to improve efficiency. Equally interesting is the seemingly awesome power of Mark Tilden’s ‘Unibug’ made from cast-off electrical parts assembled for a couple of hundred dollars and described in Robosapiens. The Unibug, almost uniquely amongst current robots, dispenses with digital processing and uses analogue feedback circuits which allow this little ‘creature’ to move about and learn. These units are highly efficient, very cheap and more reliable than many more expensive systems.

At the other end of the complexity spectrum, Rodney Brooks has recently suggested that humans and machines will shortly reach a level of equivalent intelligence and worldly behaviour, and that we will increasingly come to see robots as companions and guides. The dream of creating intelligent mechanical objects has historically been bound up with the strong AI (artificial intelligence) goal of modelling the human brain in order to replicate the mind. However… traditionally this has tended towards a rather ‘disembodied’ understanding of the mind as a ‘brain-determined’ phenomenon. Taking their cue from the ‘situatedness’ of the embodied human brain, a new generation of researchers are building systems that more closely mimic the real behaviour of brains and bodies in the world by combining AI and robotic systems. This kind of work is being conducted using a $1 million ‘Dynamic Brain’ robot at the Japanese ATR Centre just outside Tokyo under the direction of Stephan Shaal and Mitsuo Kawato.

But despite all the excitement and the high expectations of robotics it should also be recognised that we are still coming to terms with the huge degree of complexity involved in replicating anything approaching human-like behavior (or ‘humanoid’ as the terminology has it). Even given the remarkable balance and agility of the Honda Corporation’s hugely expensive ‘Humanoid Robot’ (http://world.honda.com/robot/) and its ability to walk down stairs and kick a ball, you probably wouldn’t trust it to wash your best wine glasses. There is a danger that high-end robotic research comes to be seen as a public-relations exercise for large businesses, with few practical applications. In response, funding-hungry research is setting its sights on smaller, more achievable, areas of investigation such as ‘search and rescue’ and surgical assistance where practical benefit can more readily accrue by extending human abilities rather than replicating them. So while theorists and designers like Rodney Brooks, Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec are confidently predicting humanoid beings within the century, it is clear that the compelling vision for those leading the field is of a world co-inhabited by human-like machines.

— Robert Pepperell,
The Posthuman Condition -
Consciousness Beyond the Brain

Brain, Mind, and Intentionality

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9976/04/index23article5.html

From my monist’s perspective, the brain and the mind are inseparable events. Moreover, the mind, or mindness state, is but one of several global functional states generated by the brain. Mind or the mindness state, is that class of all functional brain states in which sensorimotor images, including self-awareness, are generated. When using the term sensorimotor image, I mean something more than visual imagery. I refer to the conjunction or binding of all relevant sensory input to produce a discrete functional state that ultimately may result in action. For instance, imagine that you have an itch on your back, at a place that you cannot see but which generates an internal “image” giving you a location within the complex geography of your body as well as an attitude to take: SCRATCH! That is a sensorimotor image. The generation of a sensorimotor image is not a simple input/output response, or a reflex, because it occurs within the context of what the animal is presently doing. For obvious reasons, a dog wouldn’t want to scratch with one leg while another one is up in the air. So, context is as important as content in the generation of sensorimotor images and premotor formulation.

There are other states that occupy the same space in the brain mass but which may not support awareness. These include being asleep, being drugged or anesthetized, or having a grand mal epileptic seizure. When one’s brain is in these states, consciousness is lost; all memories and feelings melt into nothingness; yet the brain continues to function, requiring its normal supply of oxygen and nutrients. During these states, the brain does not generate awareness of any kind, not even of one’s own existence (self-awareness). It does not generate our worries, our hopes, or our fears—all is oblivion.

By contrast, I consider the global brain state known as dreaming to be a cognitive state, but not with respect to co-existing external reality because it is not directly modulated by one’s senses. Rather, this state draws from the past experiences stored in our brain or from the intrinsic workings of the brain itself. Yet another global brain state would be that known as “lucid dreaming,” where one is actually aware that one is dreaming.

In short then, the brain is more than the one and a half liters of inert grayish matter occasionally seen pickled in a jar atop some dusty laboratory shelf. One should think of the brain as a living entity that generates well-defined electrical activity. This activity could be described perhaps as “self-controlled” electrical storms, or what Charles Sherrington, one of the pioneers of neuroscience, refers to as the “enchanted loom.” In the wider context of neuronal networks, this activity is the mind.

This mind is co-dimensional with the brain; it occupies all of the brain’s nooks and crannies. But as with an electrical storm, the mind does not represent at any given time all possible storms, only those isomorphic with (re-enacting, a transformed recreation of) the state of the local surrounding world as we observe it when we are awake. When dreaming, as we are released from the tyranny of our sensory input, the system generates intrinsic storms that create “possible” worlds—perhaps—very much as we do when we think.

Living brains and their electrical storms are descriptors for different aspects of the same thing, namely neuronal function. These days, one hears metaphors for central nervous system function that are derived from the world of computers, such as “the brain is hardware and the mind, software.” I think this type of language usage is totally misleading. In the working brain, the “hardware” and the “software” are intertwined in the functional units, the neurons themselves. Neurons are both “the early bird” and “the worm,” because mindness coincides with functional brain states.

Before returning to our discussion of mindness, think about the itch on your back again, and in particular the moment of the sensorimotor image—before you put into action the motor event of scratching the itch. Can you recognize the sense of future inherent to sensorimotor images, the pulling toward the action to be performed? This is very important, and a very old part of mindness. From the earliest dawning of biological evolution it was this governing, this leading, this pulling by predictive drive, intention, that brought sensorimotor images—indeed, the mind itself—to us in the first place.

Let us shore up the discussion with a bit more precision. I propose that this mindness state, which may or may not represent external reality (the latter as with imagining or dreaming), has evolved as a goal-oriented device that implements predictive/intentional interactions between a living organism and its environment. Such transactions, to be successful, require an inherited, prewired instrument that generates an internal image of the external world that can then be compared with sensory-transduced information from the external environment. All of this must be supported in real time. The functional comparison of internally generated sensorimotor images with real-time sensory information from an organism’s immediate environment is known as perception. Underlying the workings of perception is prediction, that is, the useful expectation of events yet to come. Prediction, with its goal-oriented essence, so very different from reflex, is the very core of brain function.

— Rudolfo R. Llinás,
I of the Vortex -
From Neurons to Self

The Robot Challenge

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9976/05/index23article4.html

Why are there so many robots in fiction, but none in real life? I would pay a lot for a robot that could put away the dishes or run simple errands. But I will not have the opportunity in this century, and probably not in the next one either. There are, of course, robots that weld or spray-paint on assembly lines and that roll through laboratory hallways; my question is about the machines that walk, talk, see, and think, often better than their human masters. Since 1920, when Karel Čapek coined the word robot in his play R.U.R., dramatists have freely conjured them up: Speedy, Cutie, and Dave in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, Robbie in Forbidden Planet, the flailing canister in Lost in Space, the daleks in Dr. Who, Rosie the Maid in The Jetsons, Nomad in Star Trek, Hymie in Get Smart, the vacant butlers and bickering haberdashers in Sleeper, R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars, the Terminator in The Terminator, Lieutenant Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the wisecracking film critics in Mystery Science Theater 3000.

… [T]he gap between robots in imagination and in reality… shows the first step we must take in knowing Ourselves: appreciating the fantastically complex design behind feats of mental life we take for granted. The reason there are no humanlike robots is not that the very idea of a mechanical mind is misguided. It is that the engineering problems that we humans solve as we see and walk and plan and make it through the day are far more challenging than landing on the moon or sequencing the human genome. Nature, once again, has found ingenious solutions that human engineers cannot yet duplicate. When Hamlet says, “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!” we should direct our awe not at Shakespeare or Mozart or Einstein or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar but at a four-year old carrying out a request to put a toy on a shelf.

In a well-designed system, the components are black boxes that perform their functions as if by magic. That is no less true of the mind. The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or our other faculties to see what makes them tick. That makes us the victims of an illusion: that our own psychology comes from some divine force or mysterious essence or almighty principle. In the Jewish legend of the Golem, a clay figure was animated when it was fed an inscription of the name of God. The archetype is echoed in many robot stories. The statue of Galatea was brought to life by Venus’ answer to Pygmalion’s prayers; Pinocchio was vivified by the Blue Fairy. Modern versions of the Golem archetype appear in some of the less fanciful stories of science. All of human psychology is said to be explained by a single, omnipotent cause: a large brain, culture, language, socialization, learning, complexity, self-organization, neural-network dynamics.

I want to convince you that our minds are not animated, by some godly vapor or single wonder principle. The mind, like the Apollo spacecraft, is designed to solve many engineering problems, and thus is packed with high-tech systems each contrived to overcome its own obstacles. … I believe that the discovery by cognitive science and artificial intelligence of the technical challenges overcome by our mundane mental activity is one of the great revelations of science, an awakening of the imagination comparable to learning that the universe is made up of billions of galaxies or that a drop of pond water teems with microscopic life.

What does it take to build a robot? Let’s put aside superhuman abilities like calculating planetary orbits and begin with the simple human ones: seeing, walking, grasping, thinking about objects and people, and planning how to act…

Robot design is a kind of consciousness-raising. We tend to be blasé about our mental lives. We open our eyes, familiar articles present themselves; we will our limbs to move, and objects and bodies float into place; we awaken from a dream, and return to a comfortingly predictable world… But think of what it takes for a hunk of matter to accomplish these improbable outcomes, and you begin to see through the illusion. Sight and action and common sense and violence and morality and love are no accident, no inextricable ingredients of an intelligent essence, no inevitability of information processing. Each is a tour de force, wrought by a high level of targeted design. Hidden behind the panels of consciousness must lie fantastically complex machinery—optical analyzers, motion guidance systems, simulations of the world, databases on people and things, goalschedulers, conflict-resolvers, and many others. Any explanation of how the mind works that alludes hopefully to some single master force or mind-bestowing elixir like “culture,” “learning,” or “self-organization” begins to sound hollow, just not up to the demands of the pitiless universe we negotiate so successfully.

The robot challenge hints at a mind loaded with original equipment, but it still may strike you as an argument from the armchair. Do we actually find signs of this intricacy when we look directly at the machinery of the mind and at the blueprints for assembling it? I believe we do, and what we see is as mind-expanding as the robot challenge itself.

— Steven Pinker,
How the Mind Works

Studying Animal Intelligence

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9976/06/index23article3.html

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution based on natural selection challenged [the] classical dichotomy between “man and beast.” In the controversies that erupted, anecdotal examples of animal intelligence were used by Darwin and his followers to question the discontinuity between humans and other species….

Psychologists too were influenced by Darwin and espoused, in an even more radical form, the idea that fundamentally there is no difference between the psychology of humans and that of other animals. Drawing in particular on the work of Edward Thorndike and Ivan Pavlov on conditioning, behaviorists developed the view that a single set of laws govern learning in all animals. Whereas naturalists insisted that animal psychology was richer and more human-like than was generally recognized, behaviorist psychologists insisted that human psychology was poorer and much more animal-like than we would like to believe. In this perspective, the psychology of cats, rats, and pigeons was worth studying in order, not to understand better these individual species, but to discover universal psychological laws that apply to humans as well, in particular laws of learning. Comparative psychology developed in this behavioristic tradition. It made significant contributions to the methodology of the experimental study of animal behavior, but it has come under heavy criticism for its neglect of what is now called ecological validity and for its narrow focus on quantitative rather than qualitative differences in performance across species. This lack of interest in natural ecologies or species-specific psychological adaptations, in fact, is profoundly anti-Darwinian.

For behaviorists, behavior is very much under the control of forces acting on the organism from without, such as external stimulations, as opposed to internal forces such as instincts. After 1940, biologically inspired students of animal behavior, under the influence of Konrad Lorenz, Karl von Frisch, and Niko Tinbergen, and under the label of ethology, drew attention to the importance of instincts and species-specific “fixed action patterns.” In the ongoing debate on innate versus acquired components of behavior, they stressed the innate side in a way that stirred much controversy, especially when Lorenz, in his book On Aggression (1966), argued that humans have strong innate dispositions to aggressive behavior. More innovatively, ethologists made clear that instinct and learning are not to be thought of as antithetic forces: various learning processes (such as “imprinting” or birds’ learning of songs) are guided by an instinct to seek specific information in order to develop specific competencies.

By stressing the importance of species-specific psychological mechanisms, ethologists have shown every species (not just humans) to be, to some interesting extent, psychologically unique. This does not address the commonsense and philosophical interest (linked to the issue of the rights of animals) in the commonalties between human and other animals’ psyche. Do other animals think? How intelligent are they? Do they have conscious experiences? Under the influence of Donald Griffin, researchers in cognitive ethology have tried to answer these questions (typically in the positive) by studying animals, preferably in their natural environment, through observation complemented by experimentation. This has meant accepting some of what more laboratory-oriented psychologists disparagingly call “anecdotal evidence” and has led to methodological controversies.

Work on primate cognition has been of special importance for obvious reasons: nonhuman primates are humans’ closest relatives. The search for similarities between humans and other animals begins, quite appropriately, with apes and monkeys. Moreover, because these similarities are then linked to close phylogenetic relationships, they help situate human cognition in its evolutionary context. This phylogenetic approach has been popularized in works such as Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape…

Different species rely to different degrees and in diverse ways on their psychological capacities. Some types of behavior provide immediate evidence of highly specialized cognitive and motor abilities. Echolocotaion found in bats and in marine mammals is a striking example. A whole range of other examples of behavior based on specialized abilities is provided by various forms of animal communication.

Communicating animals use a great variety of behaviors (e.g., vocal sounds, electric discharges, “dances,” facial expressions) that rely on diverse sensory modalities, as signals conveying some informational content. These signals can be used altruistically to inform, or selfishly to manipulate. Emitting, receiving, and interpreting these signals rely on species-specific abilities. Only in the human case has it been suggested—in keeping with the notion of a radical dichotomy between humans and other animals—that the species’ general intelligence provides all the cognitive capacities needed for verbal communication. This view of human linguistic competence has been strongly challenged, under the influence of Noam Chomsky, by modern approaches to language acquisition.

Important aspects of animal psychology are manifested in social behavior. In many mammals and birds, for instance, animals recognize one another individually and have different types of interactions with different members of their group. These relationships are determined not only by the memory of past interactions, but also by kinship relations and hierarchical relationships within the group. All this presupposes the ability to discriminate individuals and, more abstractly, types of social relationships. In the case of primates, it has been hypothesized that their sophisticated cognitive processes are adaptations to their social rather than their natural environment. The Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis, so christened by Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten (1988), offers an explanation not only of primate intelligence, but also of their ability to enter into strategic interactions with one another, an ability hyperdeveloped in humans, of course.

— Dan Sperber, Lawrence Hirschfeld,
Culture, Cognition, and Evolution in
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences,
Ed. Robert A. Wilson, Frank C. Keil

The Experiencer

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9976/07/index23article2.html

Consciousness is the biggest mystery. It is probably the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe. The science of physics is not yet complete, but it is well-understood. The science of biology has explained away many of the mysteries surrounding the nature of life. There are many gaps in our understanding of these fields, but they do not seem intractable. We have some idea of what a solution that would fill these gaps might look like; it is just a matter of coming up with a theory that gets the details right.

Even in the science of the mind, much progress has been made. Recent work in cognitive science and neuroscience is leading us to a better understanding of human behavior and of the processes that drive it. We do not have many detailed theories of cognition, to be sure, but there are few problems of principle; the details cannot be too far off. But consciousness is as perplexing as it ever was. It still seems utterly mysterious that the causation of behavior should be accompanied by conscious experience. We do not just lack a detailed theory; we are in the dark about what a theory of consciousness would even look like.

We have good reason to believe that consciousness arises from physical systems such as brains, but we have little idea how it so arises, or why it exists at all. How could a physical system such as a brain also be an experiencer? Why should there be something it is like to be such a system? Currently, we do not know how to answer these questions. Present-day scientific theories hardly touch the really difficult questions about consciousness. In the farreaching explanatory structure that connects physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and higher-level phenomena, consciousness sticks out like a sore thumb by its absence.

All this means that the study of consciousness is difficult, but it also makes it exciting. In other domains, the shape of our worldview is becoming fixed. While we can expect minor revolutions in our understanding of physics, biology, and psychology, we may at least have got the basics right. With consciousness, we do not even have the basics down. We are entirely in the dark about how it fits into the natural order. This means that a correct theory of consciousness is likely to affect our conception of the universe more profoundly than any other new scientific development. Consciousness is both fundamental and unexplained; this makes for a potent cocktail.

Quite a bit of work on consciousness has appeared in the last few years, and one might think that we are making progress. But on a closer look, most of this work leaves the hardest problems about consciousness untouched. Often, this work addresses what might be called the “easy” problems of consciousness: how does the brain process environmental stimulation? how does it integrate information? how do we produce reports on internal states? These are important questions, but to answer them is not to solve the hard problem: why is all this processing accompanied by an experienced inner life? Sometimes this question is ignored entirely; sometimes it is put off until another day; and sometimes, it is simply declared that the question has been answered. But in each case, one is left with the feeling that the central problem remains as puzzling as ever.

I am an optimist about consciousness, not a pessimist: I think that we might eventually have a theory of it… But we cannot expect finding a theory of consciousness to be easy. Consciousness is not just business as usual: if we are to take consciousness seriously, the first thing we must do is face up to the things that make the problem so difficult…

Some say that consciousness is an “illusion”, but I have little idea what this could even mean. It seems to me that we are surer of the existence of conscious experience than we are of anything else in the world. I have tried hard at times to convince myself that there is really nothing there, that conscious experience is empty, an illusion. There is something seductive about this notion, which philosophers throughout the ages have exploited, but in the end it is utterly unsatisfying. I find myself absorbed in an orange sensation, and something is going on. There is something that needs explaining, even after we have explained the process of discrimination and action: there is the experience.

… The problem of consciousness lies uneasily at the border of science and philosophy. I would say that it is properly a scientific subject matter: it is a natural phenomenon like motion, life, and cognition, and calls out for explanation in the way that these do. But it is not open to investigation by the usual scientific methods. Everyday scientific methodology has trouble getting a grip on the problem, not least because of the difficulties in observing the phenomenon. Outside the first-person case, data are hard to come by. This is not to say that no external data can be relevant, but we first have to arrive at a coherent philosophical understanding before we can justify the data’s relevance. So the problem of consciousness may be a scientific problem that requires philosophical methods of understanding before we can get off the ground.

— David J. Chalmers,
The Conscious Mind –
In Search of a Theory of Conscious Experience (1996)

Science and Philosophy of Mind

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For most of human history, researchers did not draw a sharp distinction between philosophy and science. Indeed, until this century, many sciences were thought of as simply branches of philosophy. (To this day, a senior professorship in physics at the University of Cambridge is called the Chair of Natural Philosophy). Then about one hundred years ago philosophers started to think that what they did was very different from any science.

Once this split settled in, philosophers started to talk about seeking a kind of knowledge quite different from what scientists seek and using very different methods and kinds of analysis to do so. As has often been noted, philosophers do not need laboratories to carry out their investigations. This by itself seemed enough to make philosophy quite different from most, if not all, sciences. (Partitioning philosophy off from the natural sciences in this way conveniently overlooks the fact that mathematics, linguistics, theoretical physics, archeology, evolutionary theory, and parts of other disciplines such as economics do not use laboratories for their research, either.)

In addition, many philosophers believed that science, whatever its power elsewhere, offered little to their enterprise. Philosophy might have something to offer the sciences, ran this line of thinking; in particular, philosophy can help science to get its concepts and the general nature of the scientific enterprise clearer. But the sciences have little to offer philosophy. From the other side and contrary to what the philosophers may have thought, many scientists doubted that philosophy had much to offer science. (This was true in particular of experimental psychology. Philosophical analysis of issues about mind and knowledge… played little role in their thinking.)

These two notions—that sciences such as psychology have little to contribute to our understanding of traditional philosophical issues such as knowledge and mind and that philosophy of knowledge and mind has little to contribute to the science of these topics—are really bizarre when you think about them for a minute. Philosophy of mind and psychology are both concerned with perception, belief, memory, reasoning, representation, the relation of cognition to the brain, and so on. Philosophy of language and linguistics are both concerned with knowledge of language and the nature of meaning. How could such central parts of our intellectual tradition as psychology and linguistics have little or nothing to contribute to a philosophical understanding of knowledge and mind? And how could philosophy of knowledge and mind, with its 2,500-year heritage of study of these topics, have little or nothing to contribute to psychology and linguistics?

Well, these carefully constructed walls of mutual indifference were bound to collapse, and, we are happy to report, they have. A sense that most of the wide variety of approaches to cognition should work together to enrich one another began to grow about forty years ago. It came together in a very concrete way in the 1970s in the form of a new field of study, cognitive science. Cognitive science is based on the idea that individual approaches to cognition have to influence and be influenced by the widest variety of other approaches if we are ever to develop a deep, comprehensive understanding of human cognition.

Just to fill this exciting new idea of combining all the approaches to cognition into a single, unified research program out a little, notice how diverse the initiating influences were. One major force behind the creation of cognitive science was the development of the computer. The first programmable computers were built in England during World War II to assist in breaking German military codes. For hundreds of years, philosophers and mathematicians have speculated that the mind might be something like a vast adding machine, a vast computer, but the invention of the computer gave this speculation some substance for the first time. In the early 1970s computers first became fast, powerful, and convenient enough to offer hope of actually seeing these speculations come true. The second major influence could not have been more different. It was Noam Chomsky’s discoveries about the deep, complex structures that underlay language. Nowadays, cognitive science combines artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience and other disciplines and is beginning to unite these diverse activities into a single, comprehensive understanding of knowledge and mind.

— Andrew Brook, Robert J. Stainton,
Knowledge and Mind –
A Philosophical Introduction,
Chapter 8 – A New Approach to Knowledge and Mind

Science That Isn’t Science

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9977/01/index22article8.html

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas—which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked—or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOs, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I’m overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it’s a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn’t realize how much there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky shore below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn’t seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, “Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?”

I’m trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, “I’m, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?”

“Sure,” she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.

I think to myself, “What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!” He starts to rub her big toe. “I think I feel it,” he says. “I feel a kind of dent—is that the pituitary?”

I blurt out, “You’re a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!”

They looked at me, horrified—I had blown my cover—and said, “It’s reflexology!”

I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

That’s just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn’t do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.

But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up… There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

… So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.

— Richard P. Feynman,
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(Adventures of a Curious Character)
Part 5 – The World of One Physicist

Let Newton Be

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It’s easy to forget that before Newton, the motion of objects on Earth and in the heavens was almost totally unexplained, with many believing that our fates were determined by the malevolent designs of spirits and demons. Witchcraft, sorcery, and superstition were heatedly debated even at the most learned centers of learning in Europe. Science as we know it did not exist.

Greek philosophers and Christian theologians, in particular, wrote that objects moved because they acted out of human-like desires and emotions. To the followers of Aristotle, objects in motion eventually slowed down because they got “tired.” Objects fell to the floor because they “longed” to be united with the earth, they wrote.

… In 1666, when Newton was twenty-three years old, he banished the spirits that haunted the Aristotelian world by introducing a new mechanics based on forces. Newton proposed three laws of motion in which objects moved because they were being pushed or pulled by forces that could be accurately measured and expressed by simple equations. Instead of speculating on the desires of objects as they moved, Newton could compute the trajectory of everything from falling leaves, soaring rockets, cannonballs, and clouds by adding up the forces acting on them. This was not merely an academic question, because it helped to lay the foundation for the Industrial Revolution, where the power of steam engines driving huge locomotives and ships created new empires. Bridges, dams, and towering skyscrapers could now be built with great confidence, since the stresses on every brick or beam could be computed. So great was the victory of Newton’s theory of forces that he was justly lionized during his lifetime, prompting Alexander Pope to acclaim:

Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night,

God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

Newton applied his theory of forces to the universe itself by proposing a new theory of gravity. He liked to tell the story of how he returned to the family estate of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire after the black plague forced the closing of Cambridge University. One day, as he saw an apple fall off a tree on his estate, he asked himself the fateful question: if an apple falls, then does the moon also fall? Can the gravitational force acting on an apple on Earth be the same force that guides the motion of heavenly bodies? This was heresy, since the planets were supposed to lie on fixed spheres that obeyed perfect, celestial laws, in contrast to the laws of sin and redemption that governed the wicked ways of humanity.

In a flash of insight, Newton realized he could unify both earthly and heavenly physics into one picture. The force that pulled an apple to the ground must be the same force that reached out to the moon and guided its path. He stumbled upon a new vision of gravity. He imagined himself sitting on a mountaintop throwing a rock. By throwing the rock faster and faster, he realized that he could throw it farther and farther. But then he made the fateful leap: what happens if you throw the rock so fast that it never returns? He realized that a rock, falling continually under gravity, would not hit the earth but would circle around it, eventually returning to its owner and hitting him on the back of his head. In this new view, he replaced the rock with the moon, which was constantly falling but never hit the ground because, like the rock, it moved completely around the earth in a circular orbit. The moon was not resting on a celestial sphere, as the church thought, but was continually in free fall like a rock or apple, guided by the force of gravity. This was the first explanation of the motion of the solar system.

Two decades later, in 1682, all of London was terrified and amazed by a brilliant comet that was lighting up the night sky. Newton carefully tracked the motion of the comet with a reflecting telescope (one of his inventions) and found that its motion fit his equations perfectly if it was assumed to be in free fall and acted on by gravity. With the amateur astronomer Edmund Halley, he could predict precisely when the comet (later known as Halley’s comet) would return, the first prediction made on the motion of comets. The laws of gravity that Newton used to calculate the motion of Halley’s comet and the moon are the same ones NASA uses today to guide its space probes with breathtaking accuracy past Uranus and Neptune.

— Michio Kaku,
Einstein’s Cosmos:
How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (Great Discoveries)

Spinoza and the Natural Law

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In August 1663 Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, and one of the closest observers of British and European science of the age, wrote to Spinoza*, urging that he and Robert Boyle (1627-91), then the leading figure in English science, should join forces: ‘unite your abilities in striving to advance a genuine and firmly based philosophy’—that is, an account of the universe: ‘may I urge you especially, by the acuteness of your mathematical mind, to continue to establish basic principles, just as I ceaselessly try to coax my noble friend Boyle to confirm and illustrate them by experiments and observations frequently and accurately made.’ Spinoza’s notable absence, or marginality, in most histories and lexicons of science might make this seem a bizarre proposal on Oldenburg’s part. Far more usual is the claim that ‘as far as the natural sciences and mathematics are concerned… though Spinoza was thoroughly competent and acquainted with some of the best work of his time, he contributed little of importance to research and theory.’ Yet there are grounds for arguing, as Oldenburg implied, that Spinoza does in fact have a special place in the history of scientific thought.

An accomplished practitioner of science himself, being a leading contributor to the development of the microscope before Leeuwenhoek, Spinoza’s general philosophy was profoundly influenced by this conception of science and scientific method. Indeed, he would undoubtedly have been horrified by any suggestion that he and his philosophy are remote from modern science, not just because he spent much time experimenting, studying experiments, and discussing experimental results with scientists, as well as assembling microscopes and telescopes, but still more, because it was basic to his conception of his philosophy that his thought should be firmly anchored in the rules and procedures of mathematics and science. For Spinoza, as a thinker, claims to be seeking ‘true ideas’ about nature and how nature operates, conceived in terms of mathematically verifiable cause and effect. This led him to adopt a uniquely exacting and comprehensive notion of scientific rationality, driving him to reject, unremittingly and often scornfully, arguments, beliefs, and traditions which conflict with the laws of nature expressed in mechanistic, mathematically verifiable terms. Being more extreme, more of a maximalist, in this respect than any other scientific thinker before La Mettrie and Diderot—and considerably more so than Boyle or Newton—this in itself makes him an exceptional and noteworthy figure in the history of modernity and scientific thought.

Cartesians postulated a dichotomy of substance, conceiving reality to operate within two totally separate spheres or sets of rules governing reality, only one of which was mechanistic and subject to the laws of physical cause and effect. Boyle, Newton, and other English empiricists insisted that only what is proven to operate mechanistically, by experiment, is definitely known to be subject to cause and effect, leaving much else beyond what is humanly knowable. Hence, only Spinoza and his adherents claim that the mechanistic concepts yielded by the scientific advances of the seventeenth century are universally applicable, so that everything which exists obeys the same set of rules with no other reality, or mode of being, possible beyond or outside the laws of motion governing Nature. ‘Nothing, then,’ concludes Spinoza, ‘can happen in Nature to contravene her own universal laws, nor anything that is not in agreement with these laws or that does not follow from them.’…

The discussion of ‘miracles’ in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus vividly illustrates the centrality of scientific criteria and modes of explanation in the overall structure of Spinoza’s system. He rebukes critics of ‘those who cultivate the natural sciences’, who prefer to remain ignorant of natural causes, because to close one’s mind to science is to shut oneself off from the only certain and reliable criterion of truth we possess. Nothing happens or exists beyond Nature’s laws and hence there can be no miracles; and those that are believed, or alleged, to have occurred, in fact had natural causes which at the time men were unable to grasp.

… At the core of Spinoza’s philosophy, then, stands the contention that ‘nothing happens in Nature that does not follow from her laws, that her laws cover everything that is conceived even by the divine intellect, and that Nature observes a fixed and immutable order,’ that is, that the same laws of motion, and laws of cause and effect, apply in all contexts and everywhere.

— Jonathan I. Israel,

Radical Enlightenment:

Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750,

Chapter 14 – Spinoza, Science, and the Scientists

* Baruch Spinoza, 1632 – 1677, Netherlands: One of the most important philosophers — and certainly the most radical — of the early modern period.

Science in a Broader Context

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The nature of science has been the subject of vigorous debate for centuries—a debate conducted by scientists, philosophers, historians, and other interested parties. Although no general consensus has emerged, several conceptions of science have attracted powerful support. (1) One view holds science to be the pattern of behavior by which humans have gained control over their environment. Science is thus associated with craft traditions and technology, and prehistoric people are regarded as having contributed to the growth of science when they learned how to work metals or engage in successful agriculture. (2) An alternative opinion distinguishes between science and technology, viewing science as a body of theoretical knowledge, technology as the application of theoretical knowledge to the solution of practical problems. On this view, the technology of automobile design and construction is to be distinguished from theoretical mechanics, aerodynamics, and the other theoretical disciplines that guide it; and only the theoretical disciplines are to count as “sciences.”

Those who adopt this second approach, viewing science as theoretical knowledge, do not generally wish to concede that all theories (regardless of their character or content) are scientific; and for such people the task of definition has just begun. If they wish to exclude certain kinds of theories, they must propose criteria by which to judge one theory scientific and another unscientific. (3) It has become quite popular, therefore, to define science by the form of its statements—universal law-like statements, preferably expressed in the language of mathematics. Thus Boyle’s law (formulated by Robert Boyle in the seventeenth century) states that the pressure in a gas is inversely proportional to its volume if everything else remains constant. (4) If this seems too restrictive a criterion, science can be defined instead by its methodology. Science is thus associated with a particular set of procedures, usually experimental, for exploring nature’s secrets and confirming or disconfirming theories about her behavior. A claim is therefore scientific if and only if it has an experimental foundation. (5) Such a definition, in turn, yields easily to attempts to define science by its epistemological status (that is, the kind of warrant its claims are held to possess) or even the tenacity with which its practitioners hold its doctrines. Thus Bertrand Russell has argued that “it is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.” Science on this view is a privileged way of knowing and justifying one’s knowledge.

(6) In many contexts science is defined not by its methodology or epistemological status, but by its content. Science is thus a particular set of beliefs about nature—more or less the current teachings of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and the like. By this test, belief in alchemy, astrology, and parapsychology is unscientific. (7) The terms “science” and “scientific” are often applied to any procedure or belief characterized by rigor, precision, or objectivity. Sherlock Holmes, according to this usage, adopted a scientific approach to the investigation of crime. (8) And finally, “science” and “scientific” are often simply employed as general terms of approval—epithets that we attach to whatever we wish to applaud.

What this brief and incomplete survey demonstrates is something that should perhaps have been obvious from the beginning—namely, that many words (including most of the interesting ones) have multiple meanings, varying with the particular context of usage. These meanings are sometimes mutually compatible and complementary, sometimes not. Moreover, it seems futile to attempt to eliminate diversity of usage. After all, language is not a set of rules grounded in the nature of the universe, but a set of conventions adopted by a group of people and every meaning of the term “science” discussed above is a convention accepted by a sizeable community, which is unlikely to relinquish its favored usage without a fight. Or to put the point in a slightly different way, lexicography must be pursued as a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive, art. We must acknowledge, therefore, the term “science” has diverse meanings, each of them legitimate.

Even if we could find a definition of modern science that would satisfy everybody, the historian would still face a difficult problem. If the historian of science were to investigate past practices and beliefs only insofar as those practices and beliefs resemble modern science, the result would be a distorted picture. Distortion would be inevitable because science has changed in content, form, method, and function; and therefore the historian would not be responding to the past as it existed, but looking at the past through a grid that does not exactly fit. If we wish to do justice to the historical enterprise, we must take the past for what it was. And that means that we must resist the temptation to scour the past for examples or precursors of modern science. We must respect the way earlier generations approached nature, acknowledging that although it may differ from the modern way, it is nonetheless of interest because it is part of our intellectual ancestry. This is the only suitable way of understanding how we became what we are.

— David C. Lindberg,
The Beginnings of Western Science:
The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450

Shattered World Views

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Before Galileo used a telescope to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, cosmologists “knew” that Earth was at the center of the universe. Before Darwin’s theory of evolution, naturalists “knew” that all species had been created unchangeably by God at The Beginning. Before Pasteur discovered germs, doctors “knew” that disease was caused by a kind of invisible miasma in the air. What people “knew” conditioned everything they did and everything they thought about the world around them. And after their knowledge changed, the world they lived in was no longer the same.

History is full of such pivotal moments, when our perceptions are altered by new data. We move from version to version, confident that the latest is the most complete and accurate description of the world so far. This in itself is the expression of a new attitude. It did not exist before the late nineteenth century, when change in one limited area of knowledge altered our view of everything. When Darwin published his epoch-making Origin of Species, advancing the theory of evolution, the concept of progression was born and with it the view that history is a process of change for the better.

Only a few years later, in the early years of the twentieth century, Einstein’s theory of relativity cut the ground from under that view and replaced it with an attitude whose relative nature found formidable support in the 1920s from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, in which he showed how all that could be known about the most fundamental elements of existence would be the product of the artifacts used to examine them. Subatomic particles could have either position or velocity, depending on how they were examined, but never both at once. The universe was what we said it was.

The state of knowledge at any time has profound and wide-ranging effects on the contemporary culture. The Aristotelian view of the universe, which held sway up until the time when Copernicus and Galileo modified it, described a cosmos with Earth at the center, surrounded by the sun, moon, planets, and stars all mounted on rotating, concentric spheres of invisible unearthly matter. This view of the universe supported the Christian concept of humankind at the center of everything, the special creation of God.

In this scheme of things, God’s church had supreme authority, and since Aristotle’s cosmos was also fixed and unchanging (with everything established by God at Creation), there was a proper place for everything and everything was in its proper place. This meant that society too, was rigid and its hierarchy the reflection of God’s plan. Princes in such a scheme ruled, unquestioned, by Divine Right and through the authority of the Church. But when the great comet of 1577 showed by its trajectory that there were no fixed spheres in the sky (or it would have been crashing through them) and that the heavens were, after all, liable to change, the event triggered a new approach to the investigation that would question all traditional authority and turn the fixed order of Aristotle’s world upside down.

Changes in knowledge also take effect in ways that change what things mean. Before the advent of nineteenth-century medical technology and the discovery of bacteria, a doctor was a servant like an interior decorator or a barber. Since then, the investigation of disease and the discovery of techniques to control it have given doctors power equaled in the past by only priests and shamans. This, in turn, has changed the way society defines behavior. What was once criminal activity is now described in clinical terminology such as “aberrant,” “sick,” or “psychotic.”

New knowledge often causes so much social damage that it can sometimes bring an entirely new view of knowledge itself. The discovery of America by Columbus weakened the European authority systems of the time because the existence of the new continent made nonsense of the knowledge on which their power rested. Maple syrup, pineapples, tapirs, and chocolate were novelties that had not formed part of the classical corpus of natural history. There were also rainforests in the South, where it had always been thought only hot deserts could be. Above all, the Bible had not even mentioned America.

The widespread panic that followed Columbus’s discovery gave rise to demands for a system of knowledge that would prove more reliable. The direct result was the work of Bacon and Descartes, the rise of reductionism and methodical doubt, and the emergence of what we call science, whose single aim is to find security in knowledge by dedicating all its time to disprove theories.

Ever since Bacon and Descartes, we live with the expectation that knowledge will continue to change and with it the beliefs and the values by which we live.

… Change is now the only constant and, as was said after the publication of the Copernican view of the solar system, “the new philosophy calls all in doubt.” … If all knowledge is relative, constrained by its contemporary circumstance, to be negated by the next development, then is there any truth to seek? Or is it we who, in manufacturing knowledge, make the universe what it is, each time?

— James Burke,
The Day the Universe Changed:
How Galileo’s Telescope Changed The Truth and Other Events in History That Dramatically Altered Our Understanding of the World

Consolidation of World View

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The most cherished goal in physics, as in bad romance novels, is unification. To bring together two things previously understood as different and recognize them as aspects of a single entity — when we can do it — is the biggest thrill in science.

The only sane response to a proposed unification is surprise. The sun is just another star — and the stars are just suns that happen to be very far away! Imagine the reaction of a late-sixteenth-century blacksmith or actor on hearing this wild idea of Giordano Bruno’s. What could be more absurd than to unify the sun with the stars? People had been taught that the sun was a great fire created by God to warm the earth, while the stars were pinholes in the celestial sphere that let in the light of heaven. Unification instantly turns your world upside down. What you used to believe becomes impossible. If the stars are suns, the universe is vastly bigger than we thought! Heaven cannot be just overhead!

Even more important, a new proposal for unification brings with it previously unimagined hypotheses. If the stars are other suns, there must be planets around them, on which other people live! The implications often extend beyond science. If there are other planets with other people on them, then either Jesus came to all of them, in which case his coming to Man was not a unique event, or all those people lose the possibility of salvation! No wonder the Catholic Church burned Bruno alive.

Great unifications become the founding ideas on which whole new sciences are erected. Sometimes the consequences so threaten our worldview that surprise is quickly followed by disbelief. Before Darwin, each species was in its own eternal category. Each had been made, individually, by God. But evolution by natural selection means that all species have a common ancestor. They are unified into one great family. Biology before Darwin and biology afterward are hardly the same science.

Such powerful new insights lead quickly to new discoveries. If all living things have a common ancestor, they must be similarly made! Indeed, we are made of the same stuff, because all life turns out to be composed of cells. Plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria seem very different from one another, but they are all just groups of cells arranged in different ways. The chemical processes that construct and power these cells are the same, across the whole empire of life.

… As you might imagine, not all proposals for unification turn out to be true. At one time, chemists proposed that heat was a substance, like matter. It was called phlogiston. This concept unified heat and matter. But it was wrong. The right proposal for the unification of heat and matter is that heat is the energy in random motion of atoms. But although atomism had been proposed by ancient Indian and Greek philosophers, it took until the late nineteenth century before the theory of heat as random motion of atoms was properly developed.

In the history of physics, there have been many proposals for unified theories that turned out to be wrong. A famous one was the idea that light and sound were essentially the same thing: They were both thought to be vibrations in matter. Since sound is vibrations in air, light was proposed to be vibrations in a new kind of matter called the aether. Just as the space around us is filled with air, the universe is filled with aether. Einstein killed this particular idea with his own proposal of unification.

All the important ideas that theorists have studied in the last thirty years — such as string theory, supersymmetry, higher dimensions, loops, and others — are proposals for unification. How do we tell which are right and which are not?

— Lee Smolin,
The Trouble With Physics:
The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next,
Chapter 2 – The Beauty Myth

The Will to Live

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9977/07/index22article2.html

In the winter of 1930, physicist Arthur Eddington, along with much of Britain’s reading public, was captivated by a startlingly original work of fiction. It was a short novel with the peculiar title Last and First Men, and its commercial success was unexpected, among other reasons because it had no central character, and in fact very few individual characters at all. Given the novel’s scale, such omissions were understandable. Last and First Men was the imagined chronicle of the next two billion years of human—and posthuman—history. It was also, quite probably, the first instance of an author using known science to imagine in detail something like… a “suitably advanced civilization.”

The creator of this curious work was an equally curious man, a forty-four-year-old scholar named W. Olaf Stapledon. Stapledon held no academic post, and his formal training was in philosophy. Yet he was a regular reader of the journal Nature, and his attentiveness to developments in astronomy and evolutionary biology allowed him to imagine in detail a span of time in which not mere civilizations, but whole species calling themselves human, arise—in the process adapting to enormous changes in their environment—and fall.

By the book’s final chapter the Sun has grown so hot that the inner Solar System is uninhabitable, and the eighteenth human species (which Stapledon terms the “Eighteenth Men”) have colonized the planet Neptune. But before long this haven too comes under threat. Astronomers have learned that the swollen Sun will soon erupt with a violent storm that will sweep through the entire Solar System. From such calamity they have no means of escape; their “ether ships” are incapable of interstellar voyages. So it is proposed that biologists engineer a miniaturized human seed, to be cast into space from strategic points in Neptune’s orbit and allowed to be carried outward by the solar wind. Some of this seed, they hope, may one day find hospitable ground on a distant planet, and so accord their species a modest sort of survival.

This plan, however, also meets with difficulties. The prospect of their own demise has instilled a specieswide despair, and the Eighteenth Men cannot summon the will to complete the work. So they undertake a second project—one that will call upon a feature in their rather highly evolved neurophysiology. The Eighteenth Men can intuit spacetime directly. Moreover, by what Stapledon terms “a partial awakening, as it were, into eternity,” they have taught themselves to influence past minds in such a way that they can, to some degree, direct their own history. Now, however, they hope only to inhabit those minds long enough to regain their ancestors’ passion for life and thereby be invigorated to complete work on the seeding project. It is on this poignant and uncertain note that the novel ends.

Stapledon’s vision of a long-lived humanity, appearing at a time when fascism was spreading across Europe, served as a kind of spiritual tonic. Several of Stapledon’s contemporaries, inspired by utopian impulses, also attempted to envision a far future. In 1923 the geneticist J.B.S Haldane produced a paper called Daedalus: or, Science and the Future; and in 1929, John Desmond Bernal published a monograph called The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Also about this time, Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was developing his own account of the long unfolding of the material cosmos, an unscientific (albeit quite poetic) description of the long ascendancy of life.

The first half of the twentieth century had seen predictions of the future of humanity; the second half had seen—in a 1977 piece by physicist Jamal Islam—a prediction of the future of the physical universe. It was for a physicist with a philosophical bent to pull these strands together. In 1979, Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study, published “Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe.” It proposed a means by which intelligent life might survive not for a mere two billion years, but for a literal eternity.

… “No matter how far we go into the future,” [Dyson] wrote, “there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness and memory.”

— David Toomey,
The New Time Travelers:
A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics,
Chapter 12 – Time Machines at the Ends of Time

The Cosmic Evolutionary Landscape

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9977/08/index22article1.html

No doubt we’ll never know the name of the first cosmologist to look to the sky and ask, “What is all this? How did it get here? What am I doing here?” What we do know is that it occurred deep in the prehistoric past, probably in Africa. The first cosmologies, creation myths, were nothing like today’s scientific cosmology, but they were born of the same human curiosity. Not surprisingly these myths were about earth, water, sky, and living creatures. And of course they featured the supernatural creator: how else to explain the existence of such complex and intricate creatures as humans, not to mention rain, sun, edible plants that seemed to be placed on earth just for our benefit?

The idea that precise laws of nature govern both the celestial and terrestrial world dates back to Isaac Newton. Before Newton, there was no concept of universal laws that applied both to astronomical objects like planets and to ordinary earthly objects like falling rain and flying arrows. Newton’s laws of motion were the first example of such universal laws. But even for the mighty Sir Isaac, it was far too much of a stretch to suppose that the same laws led to the creation of human beings: he spent more time on theology than physics.

I’m not a historian, but I’ll venture an opinion: modern cosmology really began with Darwin and Wallace. Unlike anyone before them, they provided explanations of our existence that completely rejected supernatural agents. Two natural laws underlie Darwinian evolution. The first is that copying information is never perfect. Even the best reproduction mechanisms from time to time make small errors. DNA replication is no exception. Although it would take a century for Crick and Watson to uncover the double helix, Darwin intuitively understood that accumulated random mutations constitute the engine that drives evolution. Most mutations are bad, but Darwin understood enough about probability to know that every now and then, by pure chance, a beneficial mutation occurs.

The second pillar of Darwin’s intuitive theory was a principle of competition: the winner gets to reproduce. Better genes prosper; inferior genes come to a dead end. These two simple ideas explained how complex and even intelligent life could form without any supernatural intervention. In today’s world of computer viruses and Internet worms, it’s easy to imagine similar principles applying to completely inanimate objects. Once the magic was removed from the origin of living creatures, the way lay open to a purely scientific explanation of creation.

Darwin and Wallace set a standard not only for the life sciences but for cosmology as well. The laws that govern the birth and evolution of the universe must be the same laws that govern the falling of stones, the chemistry and nuclear physics of the elements and the physics of elementary particles. They freed us from the supernatural by showing that complex and even intelligent life could arise from chance, competition, and natural causes. Cosmologists would have to do as well: the basis for cosmology would have to be impersonal rules that are the same throughout the universe and whose origin has nothing to do with our own existence. The only god permitted to cosmologists would be Richard Dawkins’s “blind watchmaker.”

… As the new century dawns, we are finding ourselves at a watershed that is likely to permanently change our understanding of the universe. Something is happening that is much more than the discovery of new facts or new equations. Our entire outlook and framework for thinking, the whole epistemology of physics and cosmology, are undergoing upheaval. The narrow twentieth-century paradigm of a single universe about ten billion years old and ten billion light-years across with a unique set of physical laws is giving way to something much bigger and pregnant with new possibilities. Gradually cosmologists and physicists like myself are coming to see our ten billion light-years as an infinitesimal pocket of a stupendous megaverse. At the same time, theoretical physicists are proposing theories that demote our ordinary laws of nature to a tiny corner of a gigantic Landscape of mathematical possibilities.

The word Landscape, in the present context, is fewer than three years old, but since I introduced it in 2003, it has become part of the cosmologist’s vocabulary. It denotes a mathematical space representing all of the possible environments that theory allows. Each possible environment has its own Laws of Physics, its own elementary particles, and its own constants of nature. Some environments are similar to our own but slightly different. For example, they may have electrons, quarks, and all the usual particles but with gravity a billion times stronger than ours. Others have gravity like ours but contain electrons that are heavier than atomic nuclei. Still others may resemble our world except for a violent repulsive force (called the cosmological constant) that rips apart galaxies, molecules, and even atoms. Not even the three dimensions of space are sacred; regions of the Landscape describe worlds of four, five, six, and even more dimensions…

— Leonard Susskind,
The Cosmic Landscape:
String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design

Many Stories, Many Worlds

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9978/01/index21article8.html

[W]hen I began to study the great mythologies of the world, I learned that there were two types of cosmologies in religion, the first based on a single moment when God created the universe, the second based on the idea that the universe always was and always will be.

They couldn’t both be right, I thought.

Later, I began to find that these common themes cut across many other cultures. In Chinese mythology, for example, in the beginning there was the cosmic egg. The infant god P’an Ku resided for almost an eternity inside the egg, which floated on a formless sea of Chaos. When it finally hatched, P’an Ku grew enormously, over ten feet per day, so the top half of the eggshell became the sky and the bottom half the earth. After 18,000 years, he died to give birth to our world: his blood became the rivers, his eyes the sun and moon, and his voice the thunder.

In many ways, the P’an Ku myth mirrors a theme found in many other religions and ancient mythologies, that the universe sprang into existence creatio ex nihilo (created from nothing). In Greek mythology, the universe started off in a state of Chaos (in fact, the word “chaos” comes form the Greek word meaning “abyss”). This featureless void is often described as an ocean, as in Babylonian and Japanese mythology. This theme is found in ancient Egyptian mythology, where the sun god Ra emerged from a floating egg. In Polynesian mythology, the cosmic egg is replaced by a coconut shell. The Mayans believed in a variation of this story, in which the universe is born but eventually dies after five thousand years, only to be resurrected again and again to repeat the unending cycle of birth and destruction.

These creatio ex nihilo myths stand in marked contrast to the cosmology according to Buddhism and certain forms of Hinduism. In these mythologies, the universe is timeless, with no beginning or end. There are many levels of existence, but the highest is Nirvana, which is eternal and can be attained only by the purest meditation. In the Hindu Mahapurana, it is written, “If God created the world, where was He before Creation? … Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end.”

These mythologies stand in marked contradiction to each other, with no apparent resolution between them. They are mutually exclusive: either the universe had a beginning or it didn’t. There is, apparently, no middle ground.

Today, however, a resolution seems to be emerging from an entirely new direction—the world of science—as the result of a new generation of powerful scientific instruments soaring through outer space. Ancient mythology relied upon the wisdom of storytellers to expound on the origins of our world. Today, scientists are unleashing a battery of space satellites, lasers, gravity wave detectors, interferometers, high-speed supercomputers, and the Internet, in the process revolutionizing our understanding of the universe, and giving us the most compelling description yet of its creation.

What is gradually emerging from the data is a grand synthesis of these two opposing mythologies. Perhaps, scientists speculate, Genesis occurs repeatedly in a timeless ocean of Nirvana. In this new picture, our universe may be compared to a bubble floating in a much larger “ocean,” with new bubbles forming all the time. According to this theory, universes, like bubbles forming in boiling water, are in continual creation, floating in a much larger arena, the Nirvana of eleven-dimensional hyperspace. A growing number of physicists suggest that our universe did indeed spring forth from a fiery cataclysm, the big bang, but that it also coexists in an eternal ocean of other universes. If we are right, big bangs are taking place even as you read this sentence.

Physicists and astronomers around the world are now speculating about what these parallel worlds may look like, what laws they may obey, how they are born, and how they may eventually die. Perhaps these parallel worlds are barren, without the basic ingredients of life. Or perhaps they look just like our universe, separated by a single quantum event that made these universes diverge from ours. And a few physicists are speculating that perhaps one day, if life becomes untenable in our present universe as it ages and grows cold, we may be forced to leave it and escape to another universe.

— Michio Kaku,
Parallel Worlds:
A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos

Discovery of Galactic Proportions

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9978/02/index21article7.html

Astronomers have long been acquainted with certain rather peculiar-looking celestial objects which had come to be called “spiral nebulae.” In contrast to other known nebulosities, which usually have irregular shapes and look more or less like clouds in the sky, spiral nebulae always have well-developed structures, consisting of a lenticular central body with a pair of spiral arms winding around it. Until about a quarter of a century ago, the spiral nebulae were more or less generally believed to be located among the stars of our Milky Way system and were thought to be possible example of stars giving birth to their own planetary systems according to the classical picture of Kant and Laplace.

However, in 1925, all these views were completely overthrown by a great discovery made by Edwin P. Hubble, an astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory. Studying the Great Spiral Nebula of Andromeda, which is visually the largest of them all and therefore the most accessible to observation, he noticed that its spiral arms contain a number of extremely faint stars whose brightness changes periodically, following a simple sine law. Such stars, called “Cepheid variables” (after Delta Cephei, the first star in which such variability was noticed), are well known in our Milky Way system, and their periodic changes in luminosity are explained as the result of periodic pulsations of their giant bodies. A simple correlation exists between the period of these pulsations and the absolute luminosity of the star in question: the brighter the star the longer the period of pulsation. This so-called “period-luminosity relation” established by the Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley is a powerful tool for measuring the distances of pulsating stars which are too far away to show a parallax displacement. By measuring directly the pulsation period of a given star, we can arrive at a definite conclusion about its absolute brightness. This, in combination with the visual brightness, tells us the actual distance of the star.

The observed pulsation periods of the Cepheids found by Hubble in the spiral arms of the Andromeda nebula indicated that they must possess very high absolute luminosities. On the other hand, they are so faint visually as to be at the limit of visibility. The inevitable conclusion was that they—and also the nebula itself—must be extremely far away. The distance worked out to almost 1 million light-years, that is, about a hundred times the diameter of the entire Milky Way system! Other spiral nebulae, which are visually smaller and fainter than the one in Andromeda, must be farther away. If the spiral nebulae are really that far off, they must also be much larger than originally suspected; in fact they must be about as large as the Milky Way system itself!

Thus Hubble’s discovery removed the spiral nebulae from their former humble position as common members of our galaxy and enthroned them as independent galaxies in their own right, scattered through the vast expanse of the universe. It became clear that these objects have nothing to do with ordinary nebulae (like the one in Orion), which are really only large clouds of dust floating in interstellar space. The spiral nebulae are formed by many billions of individual stars which blur together into one faintly luminous mass only because of their exceedingly great distance from the observer. More recently this conclusion was proved directly by another Mount Wilson astronomer, Walter Baade, who was able to resolve photographically the central body of the Andromeda nebula and those of its two companions into myriads of tiny luminous dots representing the individual stars from which these distant systems are built. It seems advisable to change the old terminology, and instead of talking about spiral nebulae to talk about spiral galaxies.

Hubble’s discovery proved to be the germ of still more remarkable progress in our knowledge about the nature of the universe. It had been known for some time that spectral lines in the light emitted by spiral nebulae show a shift toward the red end of the spectrum. Interpreted in terms of ordinary Doppler effect, this meant that these objects were moving away from the observer. As long as these objects were believed to be members of our stellar system, one had to conclude that they had some peculiar motion among the stars, being driven from the central regions of the Milky Way toward its periphery. With the new broadening of horizons a completely new picture emerged: the entire space of the universe, populated by billions of galaxies, is in a state of rapid expansion, with all its members flying away from one another at high speed.

— George Gamow,
The Creation of the Universe
(1952),
Chapter 2 – The Great Expansion

From Myth to Math

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9978/03/index21article6.html

Throughout the world, every culture has developed its own myths about the origin of the universe and how it was shaped. These creation myths differ magnificently, each reflecting the environment and society from which it originated. In Iceland, it is the volcanic and meteorological forces that form the backdrop to the birth of Imit, but according to the Yoruba of West Africa it is the familiar hen and pigeon that give rise to solid land. Nevertheless, all these unique creation myths have some features in common. Whether it is the big, blue, bruised Wulbari or the dying giant of China, these myths inevitably invoke at least one supernatural being to play a crucial role in explaining the creation of the universe. Also, every myth represents the absolute truth within its society. The word ‘myth’ is derived from the Greek word mythos, which can mean ’story’ but also means ‘word’ in the sense of ‘the final word’. Indeed, anybody who dared to question these explanations would have laid themselves open to accusations of heresy.

Nothing much changed until the sixth century BC, when there was a sudden outbreak of tolerance among the intelligentsia. For the very first time, philosophers were free to abandon accepted mythological explanations of the universe and develop their own theories. For example, Anaximander of Miletus argued that the Sun was a hole in a fire-filled ring that encircled the Earth and revolved around it. Similarly, he believed that the Moon and stars were nothing more than holes in the firmament, revealing otherwise hidden fires. Alternatively, Xenophanes of Colophon believed that the Earth exuded combustible gases that accumulated at night until they reached a critical mass and ignited, thereby creating the Sun. Night fell again when the ball of gas had burned out, leaving behind just the few sparks that we call stars. He explained the Moon in a similar way, with gases developing and burning over a twenty-eight-day cycle.

The fact that Xenophanes and Anaximander were not very close to the truth is unimportant, because the real point is that they were developing theories that explained the natural world without resorting to supernatural devices or deities. Theories that say that the Sun is a celestial fire seen through a hole in a firmament or a ball of burning gas are qualitatively different from the Greek myth that explained the Sun by invoking a fiery chariot driven across the sky by the god Helios. This is not to say that the new wave of philosophers necessarily wanted to deny the existence of the gods, rather that they merely refused to believe that it was the divine meddling that was responsible for natural phenomena.

These philosophers were the first cosmologists, inasmuch as they were interested in the scientific study of the physical universe and its origins. The word ‘cosmology’ is derived from the ancient Greek word kosmeo, which means ‘to order’ or ‘to organise’ reflecting the belief that the universe could be understood and is worthy of analytical study. The cosmos had patterns, and it was the ambition of the Greeks to recognise these patterns, to scrutinise them and to understand what was behind them.

… Pythagoras of Samos helped to reinforce the foundations of this new rationalist movement from around 540 BC. As part of his philosophy, he developed a passion for mathematics and demonstrated how numbers and equations could be used to help formulate scientific theories. One of his first breakthroughs was to explain the harmony of music via the harmony of numbers. The most important instrument of music in early Hellenic music was the tetrachord, or four-stringed lyre, but Pythagoras developed his theory by experimenting with the single-stringed monochord. The string was kept under a fixed tension, but the length of the string could be altered. Plucking a particular length of string generated a particular note, and Pythagoras realised that halving the length of the same string created a note that was one octave higher and in harmony with the note from the plucking of the original string. In fact, changing the string’s length by any simple fraction or ratio would create a note harmonious with the first (e.g. a ratio of 3:2, now called a musical fifth), but changing the length by an awkward ration (e.g. 15:37) would lead to discord.

Once Pythagoras had shown that mathematics could be used to help explain and describe music, subsequent generations of scientists used numbers to explore everything from the trajectory of a cannonball to chaotic weather patterns. Wilhelm Roentgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895, was a firm believer in the Pythagorean philosophy of mathematical science, and once pointed out: ‘The physicist in preparing for his work needs three things: mathematics, mathematics and mathematics’.

… Pythagoras’ successors built on his ideas and improved on his methodology. Science gradually became an increasingly sophisticated and powerful discipline, capable of staggering achievements such as measuring the actual diameters of the Sun, Moon and Earth, and the distances between them. These measurements were milestones in the history of astronomy, representing as they do the first tentative steps on the road to understanding the entire universe.

— Simon Singh,
Big Bang:
The Origin of the Universe

High Technology

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9978/04/index21article5.html

Molecular nanotechnology: Thorough, inexpensive control of the structure of matter based on molecule-by-molecule control of products and byproducts; the products and processes of molecular manufacturing.

Technology-as-we-know-it is a product of industry, of manufacturing and chemical engineering. Industry-as-we-know-it takes things from nature—ore from mountains, trees from forests—and coerces them into forms that someone considers useful. Trees become lumber, then houses. Mountains become rubble, then molten iron, then steel, then cars. Sand becomes a purified gas, then silicon, then chips. And so it goes. Each process is crude, based on cutting, stirring, baking, spraying, etching, grinding, and the like.

Trees, though, are not crude: To make wood and leaves, they neither cut, grind, stir, bake, spray, etch, nor grind. Instead, they gather solar energy using molecular electronic devices, the photosynthetic reaction centers of chloroplasts. They use that energy to drive molecular machines—active devices with moving parts of precise, molecular structure—which process carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and molecular building blocks. They use other molecular machines to join these molecular building blocks to form roots, trunks, branches, twigs, solar collectors, and more molecular machinery. Every tree makes leaves, and each leaf is more sophisticated than a spacecraft, more finely patterned than the latest chip from Silicon Valley. They do all this without noise, heat, toxic fumes, or human labor, and they consume pollutants as they go. Viewed this way, trees are high technology. Chips and rockets aren’t.

Trees give a hint of what molecular nanotechnology will be like, but nanotechnology won’t be biotechnology because it won’t rely on altering life. Biotechnology is a further stage in the domestication of living things. Like selective breeding, it reshapes the genetic heritage of a species to produce varieties more useful to people. Unlike selective breeding, it inserts new genes. Like biotechnology—or ordinary trees—molecular nanotechnology will use molecular machinery, but unlike biotechnology, it will not rely on genetic meddling. It will be not an extension of biotechnology, but an alternative or a replacement.

Molecular nanotechnology could have been conceived and analyzed—though not built—based on scientific knowledge available forty years ago. Even today, as development accelerates, understanding grows slowly because molecular nanotechnology merges fields that have been strangers: the molecular sciences, working at the threshold of the quantum realm, and mechanical engineering, still mired in the grease and crudity of conventional technology.

Nanotechnology will be a technology of new molecular machines, of gears and shafts and bearings that move and work with parts shaped in accord with the wave equations at the foundations of natural law. Mechanical engineers don’t design molecules. Molecular scientists seldom design machines. Yet a new field will grow—is growing today—in the gap between. That field will replace both chemistry as we know it and mechanical engineering as we know it. And what is manufacturing today, or modern technology itself, but a patchwork of crude chemistry and crude machines?

… Picture an automated factory, full of conveyor belts, computers, rollers, stampers, and swinging robot arms. Now imagine something like that factory, but a million times smaller and working a million times faster, with parts and workpieces of molecular size. In this factory, a “pollutant” would be a loose molecule, like a ricocheting bolt or washer, and loose molecules aren’t tolerated. In many ways, the factory is utterly unlike a living cell: not fluid, flexible, adaptable, and fertile, but rigid, preprogrammed and specialized. And yet for all of that, this microscopic molecular factory emulates life in its clean, precise molecular construction.

Advanced molecular manufacturing will be able to make almost anything. Unlike crude mechanical and chemical technologies, molecular manufacturing will work from the bottom up, assembling intricate products from the molecular building blocks that underlie everything in the physical world.

Nanotechnology will bring new capabilities, giving us new ways to make things, heal our bodies, and care for the environment. It will also bring unwelcome advances in weaponry and give us yet more ways to foul up the world on an enormous scale. It won’t automatically solve our problems: even powerful technologies merely give us more power. As usual, we have a lot of work ahead of us and a lot of hard decisions to make if we hope to harness new developments to good ends. The main reason to pay attention to nanotechnology now, before it exists, is to get a head start on understanding it and what to do about it.

… Molecular nanotechnology will bring thorough and inexpensive control of the structure of matter. We need to understand molecular nanotechnology in order to understand the future capabilities of the human race. This will help us see the challenges ahead, and help us plan how best to conserve values, traditions, and ecosystems through effective policies and institutions. Likewise, it can help us see what today’s events mean, including business opportunities and possibilities for action. We need a vision of where technology is leading because technology is a part of what human beings are, and will affect what we and our societies can become.

— Eric Drexler, Chris Peterson, Gayle Pergamit,
Unbounding the Future:
The Nanotechnology Revolution

Bang Comes the Universe

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9978/05/index21article4.html

10^-43 Seconds ≤ t ≤ 1 Second

During this period the universe expanded and the matter density dropped from about 10⁹² times the density of water (!) to about 500,000 times the density of water. During the early part of this period, the matter in the universe consisted primarily of very high energy elementary particles in thermal equilibrium. Although we can be reasonably confident that general relativity provides a correct description of the universe in this and all later epochs, we can only speculate on the physics of the high-energy elementary particle interactions needed to give us a detailed description of what occurred during this period. Nevertheless, some of the most interesting recent ideas in cosmological theory concern phenomena which may have occurred at extremely early times (in most models, typically at t~10^-35 seconds).

One such idea is that the universe may have undergone an “inflationary era” at this time—that is, a period of extremely large expansion—due to the possibility that the energy density of the universe at this time may have been dominated by the potential energy of one of the fields present… Such an inflationary era, if it occurred, might help account for why the present universe is so homogeneous and isotropic and also could explain why the time scale associated with the dynamics of our universe (i.e., the total lifetime of the universe in the case of a closed universe) is so much larger than time scales appearing in the fundamental laws of physics.

A second phenomenon which may have occurred in the very early universe is that an excess of baryons (i.e., protons, neutrons, and other heavy particles of a similar nature) over antibaryons may have been manufactured by elementary particle interactions. This could account for why there is an abundance of protons and neutrons in the present universe but apparently an almost total absence of their antiparticles.

A third interesting phenomenon may have occurred during this early epoch if one postulates the existence of a field with potential energy of a certain form. When the universe has cooled sufficiently, the potential energy of such a field may become trapped in linelike structures known as cosmic strings. Such cosmic strings would then evolve in a complicated way, with, for example, new “loops of string” frequently formed by the self-intersection of a cosmic string. The loops of string would then decay by emission of gravitational radiation. Cosmic strings (or similar structures) formed in this epoch have been proposed as possible “seed perturbations” for the formation of galaxies and clusters of galaxies observed in the present universe.

By t~1 second, the temperature of the matter cooled to about 10 billion degrees centigrade (!) and all the exotic elementary particles decayed. The matter in the universe by the end of this period consisted of a “soup” predominantly composed of photons (quanta of electromagnetic radiation), neutrinos (elementary particles which interact weakly with matter and which—like the photon—have no rest mass and travel at the speed of light), electrons and their antiparticles (positrons), protons, and neutrons. The presence of protons is favored over the presence of neutrons because protons are slightly less massive; at the end of the period there were about five times as many protons as neutrons.

1 Second ≤ t ≤ 1000 Seconds

The universe continued to expand; the density of the soup dropped from about 500,000 times the density of water to about half the density of water; the temperature dropped from about 10 billion degrees to about 1 billion degrees. Early in this epoch, the positrons combined with electrons, converting their mass energy to photons. But the most dramatic thing that took place during this period was nucleosynthesis: the protons and neutrons underwent nuclear reactions and formed elements. Prior to this period the temperature of the matter was too high and any elements which might have been formed would have been dissociated immediately. After this period, the temperature and density of the matter were too low to permit these nuclear reactions to take place. Only during this period lasting about 15 minutes were conditions right for nucleosynthesis. Most of the neutrons present at the beginning of this period combined with the protons to form helium nuclei. (The neutrons which did not react decayed into protons and electrons either during this period or very shortly thereafter.) A very small amount of deuterium (that is, “heavy hydrogen,” a proton and a neutron bound together) was synthesized and trace amounts of a few other light elements also were produced, but essentially no other element formation occurred. Thus at the end of this process, about 25% by mass of the original protons and neutrons was converted into helium, while essentially all the rest was left in the form of hydrogen (that is, protons).

1,000 Seconds ≤ t ≤ 100,000 Years

The universe continued to expand rapidly and to cool, but otherwise this was a relatively dull period. The important constituents of the “soup” of matter and radiation filling the universe during this period were photons, protons, helium nuclei, and free electrons.

— Robert M. Wald,
Space, Time, and Gravity:
The Theory of the Big Bang and Black Holes,
Chapter 5 – The Evolution of Our Universe

The Search for Unity Continues

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9978/06/index21article3.html

To find unity in the dazzling multiplicity of things, to forge a common framework of understanding, is an ancient quest not just confined to science. It seems to run in our blood. But in physics, more than any other field, that quest has been a driving force behind new discoveries and an overarching goal for the future. Thales of Miletus was early on the unification scene when, in the sixth century B.C., he argued that water lies at the basis of everything…

Anaximenes of Lampsacus, also in the sixth century, took up the theme of unification. For him, though, the primordial essence wasn’t water but air. After all, air is what we breathe, what sustains us throughout life. His contemporary, Heraclitus of Ephesus, plumped for the element fire because “all things are exchanged against fire, and fire against all things.” But Anaximander, a pupil of Thales, disagreed with these views. He didn’t think that any known substance could be the basal stuff of the cosmos. There was no way, he argued, that fire could form from water, or vice versa, because every observation showed the two to be incompatible. So, for him, the cosmic commonality must be something else—an infinite, eternal substance that embraced the world in its entirety. This ethereal substrate Anaximender called apeiron, which means, simply, “boundless.”

Pythagoras and his slightly crazy band of followers were also early on the TOE [Theory of Everything] trail, insisting that mathematics—numbers, especially—underpins the kaleidoscope of physical phenomena. And Aristotle, too, played his part in the business of unification by formulating principles (albeit flawed) for all motion on Earth.

But the first great cosmic synthesis in the modern sense would have to wait another twenty centuries for Isaac Newton, who built on the work of Kepler and Galileo (not to mention Hooke, Boyle, and others). In Newton’s hands the whole Aristotelian concept of movement was shattered. As the historian Richard Westfall has pointed out, “To Aristotle, to move was to be moved. The motion of any body required a moving agent.” Newton brought to center stage the notion of inertia, which allowed motion without cause. Galileo had already laid siege to Aristotle’s distinction between “natural” and “violent” motion; Newton completed the demolition. And just as he unified all types of terrestrial movement, so he showed that there aren’t different rules for Earth and what lies beyond it; the law of gravitation is truly democratic.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the marriage of electricity and magnetism, officiated by Maxwell, took place. Subsequently, the Scotsman brought together electromagnetism and optics by showing that light is just a form of electromagnetic radiation. Never before had so many phenomena owed so much to so few laws, summarized in just four relatively simple equations. And if electricity and magnetism—two seemingly disparate forces—could be amalgamated, then why not also gravity?

… For the last thirty years of his life… Einstein struggled to combine electromagnetism and general relativity into what he called a unified field theory. His only reward for this lengthy, quixotic venture was disappointment; his effort ended in failure and his sad isolation from the mainstream physics. “I have become a lonely old chap,” he wrote to a friend in the early 1940s, “who is mainly known because he doesn’t wear socks and who is exhibited as a curiosity on special occasions.” Others were, understandably far more excited by the possibilities of quantum theory, the central premises of which Einstein utterly rejected, though, ironically, he had been a quantum pioneer and had won his Nobel Prize for this work, not for relativity.

As more became known about the goings-on inside the nuclei of atoms and of the way subatomic particles interacted and changed from one form into another, it became clear that there were two other fundamental forces at work in nature besides gravity and electromagnetism. They are known as the strong and weak forces—everyday names for effects that are remarkably well hidden from everyday view. Both are important only over tiny distances, such as those found within atomic nuclei. That there must be another force, more powerful than electromagnetism, was recognized in 1921 by the Englishman James Chadwick (discoverer of the neutron in 1932) and the Swiss physicist Etienne Bieler. This strong force had to be able to bind together the contents of the nucleus in spite of the determined attempts of the positively charged protons to hurl themselves apart. The Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi first recognized the weak force in the 1930s; among other things Fermi realized, it is responsible for radioactive decay.

While Einstein had spurned anything to do with quantum tomfoolery in his efforts to unify gravity and electromagnetism, physicists at large strove to bring the weak and strong forces under the same umbrella as electromagnetism by making full use of the science of the ultrasmall. Quantum physics—quantum mechanics as it’s generally known (to contrast it with the Newtonian variety)—is all about dealing with energy transactions in the form of minuscule bits called quanta. Scratch beneath the surface and it’s a very weird subject indeed, full of counterintuitive ideas that Einstein found completely unbelievable. Yet most scientists managed to turn a blind eye to its more bizarre implications and simply continued to use the equations that governed the play of matter at the quantum level.

— David Darling,
Gravity’s Arc:
The Story of Gravity from Aristotle to Einstein and Beyond,
Chapter 12 – All Together Now

Gravity, Gravity, Everywhere

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9978/07/index21article2.html

Gravity, the oldest force known to mankind, is in many ways also the youngest. It is understood well enough to explain stars, black holes and the Big Bang, and yet in some ways it is not understood at all. Explaining gravity required the two greatest scientific minds of modern history, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein; and now hundreds of the brightest theoretical physicists are working to invent it once again. Each time gravity has been re-invented, it has sparked a revolution. Newton’s theory of gravity stimulated huge advances in mathematics and astronomy; indeed, it was the beginning of modern theoretical physics. Einstein’s theory of gravity, which he called general relativity, opened up completely unexpected phenomena to investigation: black holes, gravitational waves, the Big Bang. When, sometime in the future, gravity changes into quantum gravity, possibly becoming just one of many faces of a unified theory of all the physical forces, the ensuing revolution may be even more far-reaching.

… Gravity is everywhere. No matter where you go, you can’t seem to escape it. Pick up a stone and feel its weight. Then carry it inside a building and feel its weight again: there won’t be any difference. Take the stone into a car and speed along at 100 miles per hour on a smooth road: again there won’t be any noticeable change in the stone’s weight. Take the stone into the gondola of a hot-air balloon that is hovering above the Earth. The balloon may be lighter than air, but the stone weighs just as much as before.

This inescapability of gravity makes it different from all other forces of nature. Try taking a portable radio into a metal enclosure, like a car, and see what happens to its ability to pick up radio stations: it gets seriously worse. Radio waves are one aspect of the electromagnetic force, which in other guises gives us static electricity and magnetic fields. This force does not penetrate everywhere. It can be excluded from regions if we choose the right material for the walls. Not so for gravity. We could build a room with walls as thick as an Egyptian pyramid and made of any exotic material we choose, and yet the Earth’s gravity would be right there inside, as strong as ever. Gravity acts on everything the same way.

Every body falls toward the ground, regardless of its composition. We know of no substance that accelerates upwards because of Earth’s gravity. Again this distinguishes gravity from all the other fundamental forces of Nature. Electric charges come in two different signs, the “+” and “-” signs on a battery. A negative electron attracts a positive proton but repels other electrons.

The existence of two signs of electric charge is responsible for the shape of our everyday world. For example, the balance between attraction and repulsion among the different charges that make up, say, a piece of wood gives it rigidity: try to stretch it and the electrons resist being pulled away from the protons; try to compress it and the electrons resist squashed up against other electrons. Gravity allows no such fine balances… this means that bodies in which gravity plays a dominant role cannot be rigid. Instead of achieving equilibrium, they have a strong tendency to collapse, sometimes even to black holes.

These two facts about gravity, that it is ever-present and always attractive, might make it easy to take it for granted. It seems to be just part of the background, a constant and rather boring feature of our world. But nothing could be further from the truth. Precisely because it penetrates everywhere and cannot be cancelled out, it is the engine of the universe. All the unexpected and exciting discoveries of modern astronomy — quasars, pulsars, neutron stars, black holes — owe their existence to gravity. It binds together gases of a star, the stars of a galaxy, and even galaxies into galaxy clusters. It has governed the formation of stars and it regulates the way stars create chemical elements of which we are made. On a grand scale, it controls the expansion of the Universe. Nearer to home, it holds planets in orbit about the Sun and satellites about the Earth.

The study of gravity, therefore, is in a very real sense the study of practically everything from the surface of the Earth out to the edge of the Universe. But it is even more: it is the study of our own history and evolution right back to the Big Bang.

— Bernard Schutz,
Gravity from the Ground Up:
An Introductory Guide to Gravity and General Relativity

Conception of Space and the Universe

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9978/08/index21article1.html

We humans are the species that makes things. So when we find something that appears to be beautifully and intricately structured, our almost instinctive response is to ask, ‘Who made that?’ The most important lesson to be learned if we are to prepare ourselves to approach the universe scientifically is that this is not the right question to ask. It is true that the universe is as beautiful as it is intricately structured. But it cannot have been made by anything that exists outside it, for by definition the universe is all there is, and there can be nothing outside it. And, by definition, neither can there have been anything before the universe that caused it, for if anything existed it must have been part of the universe. So the first principle of cosmology must be ‘There is nothing outside the universe’.

This is not to exclude religion or mysticism, for there is always room for those sources of inspiration for those who seek them. But if it is knowledge we desire, if we wish to understand what the universe is and how it came to be that way, we need to seek answers to questions about the things we see when we look around us. And the answers can involve only things that exist in the universe.

This first principle means that we take the universe to be, by definition, a closed system. It means that the explanation for anything in the universe can involve only things that also exist in the universe. This has very important consequences… One of the most important is that the definition or description of any entity inside the universe can refer only to other things in the universe. If something has a position, that position can be defined only with respect to the other things in the universe. If it has motion, that motion can be discerned only by looking for changes in its position with respect to other things in the universe.

So, there is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things in the world. Space is not a stage, which might be either empty or full, onto which things come and go. Space is nothing apart from the things that exist; it is only an aspect of the relationships that hold between things. Space, then, is something like a sentence. It is absurd to talk of a sentence with no words in it. Each sentence has a grammatical structure that is defined by relationships that hold between the words in it, relationships like subject-object or adjective-noun. If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing. Moreover, there are many different grammatical structures, catering for different arrangements of words and the various relationships between them. There is no such thing as an absolute sentence structure that holds for all sentences independent of their particular words and meanings.

The geometry of a universe is very like the grammatical structure of a sentence. Just as a sentence has no structure and no existence apart from the relationships between the words, space has no existence apart from the relationships that hold between the things in the universe. If you change a sentence by taking some words out, or changing their order, its grammatical structure changes. Similarly, the geometry of space changes when the things in the universe change their relationships to one another.

As we understand it now, it is simply absurd to speak of a universe with nothing in it. That is as absurd as a sentence with no words. It is even absurd to speak of a space with only one thing in it, for then there would be no relationships to define where that one thing is. (Here the analogy breaks down because there do exist sentences of one word only. However, they usually get their meanings from their relationships with adjacent sentences.)

The view of space as something that exists independent of any relationships is called the absolute view. It was Newton’s view, but it has been definitively repudiated by the experiments that have verified Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This has radical implications, which take a lot of thinking to get used to.

— Lee Smolin,
Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

Biodiversity: Utilitarian Value and Beyond

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9979/01/index20article8.html

Many plant and animal species provide material benefits to people in the form of food, medicine, clothing, tools, and other products. Most people recognize this dependence in nonindustrial societies, particularly among preliterate tribal hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and others. Yet many developing nations still derive most of their output from extracting and exploiting wild living resources. Even industrially advanced countries such as Japan secure much of their food from exploiting wild fish stocks, and nearly 5 percent of the American economy has been found to derive from utilizing wild living species.

Recent years have seen an expanded appreciation of the utilitarian value of nature and living diversity—particularly the future benefits that might be obtained from exploiting the genetic, biochemical, and physical properties of plant and animal species, many of them still insufficiently studied. We are beginning to recognize, too, the undiscovered significance of various obscure and unknown species. Only a small fraction of the many plants containing alkaloids, for example, an organic compound possessing anticancer properties, have been tested for their possible medicinal use. It has been estimated that some 25 to 40 percent of the world’s current pharmaceutical products originated in a wild plant or animal species, and much of today’s agricultural production depends on genetic improvement by a dwindling reservoir of wild plants.

Take, for example, two recent illustrations of this medical and agricultural dependence on wild living diversity: drugs derived from a single tropical plant, the rosy periwinkle, used to treat blood-related cancers, and a wild corn important in developing a new strain of domestic corn resistant to blight. Both the wild relative of agricultural corn and the rosy periwinkle nearly became extinct due to deforestation in, respectively, Mexico and Madagascar. These species represent but a small fraction of the many actual and potential medical, agricultural, industrial, and other products people obtain from wild living resources—and rapid advances in molecular biology, genetics, and bioengineering make this exploitation increasingly possible. This expanded utilitarian value of biological diversity suggests the folly of exterminating species just to satisfy short-term and unsustainable demands for timber, wildlife, minerals, and other products.

Beyond these benefits to society at large, people often obtain a great satisfaction from their personal utilitarian experience of nature and living diversity. There is obvious benefit in picking berries, chopping firewood, harvesting wild animals, training dogs, and so on. But an intrinsic pleasure can also be derived from this participation in the movement of energy and material through varying cycles of life. No matter how mechanized and removed industrial society becomes from natural processes, there remains for many people a compelling need to feel connected to the practical utilization of nature and living diversity.

The naturalistic value emphasizes the many satisfactions people obtain from the direct experience of nature and wildlife. This value reflects the pleasure we get from exploring and discovering nature’s complexity and variety. Indeed, the satisfactions people derive from contact with living diversity may be among the most ancient pleasures obtained from interacting with the natural world—particularly the more vivid plants and animals.

Today the naturalistic experience often takes expression through formally organized recreation: birding, fishing, hunting, whalewatching, wildlife tourism, visiting zoos, and the like. People also derive naturalistic satisfaction from wandering the various woods, prairies, beaches, wetlands, and other natural areas. Living diversity is still an unrivaled context for engaging the human spirit of curiosity, exploration, and discovery, in an almost childlike manner, independent of age. A sense of permanence, simplicity, and pleasure often stems from experiencing unspoiled nature, directly observing wildlife, and participating in ancient rhythms.

Various studies have documented the many rewards of the naturalistic experience, among them relaxation, calm, and peace of mind. Additional benefits may include enhanced intellectual growth, creativity, and imagination. As Seilstad suggests: “The surest way to enrich the knowledge pool that will keep the flywheel of cultural evolution turning is to nourish the human spirit of curiosity.” Certainly immersion in nature can heighten a sense of vividness and widen the opportunity of discovery. These physical, emotional, and intellectual benefits have been revealed in studies of the outdoor recreation experience… Summarizing this research, Roger Ulrich concludes: “A consistent finding in well over 100 studies of recreation experiences in wilderness and urban nature areas has been that stress mitigation is one of the most important verbally expressed and perceived benefits.”

The naturalistic experience can also sharpen one’s sensitivity to detail as the senses become more attuned to the moment—instilling a sense of living in time rather than passing through it. Moreover, a sharpened vitality and awareness can derive from a profound involvement in nature. Intellectual stimulation, physical fitness, enhanced creativity—all may result from these encounters with the natural world.

— Stephen R. Kellert,
The Value of Life:
Biological Diversity And Human Society,
Chapter 2 – Values

Exploring the Terascale

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9979/02/index20article7.html

The field of elementary particle physics is entering an era of unprecedented potential. New experimental facilities, including accelerators, space-based experiments, underground laboratories, and critical precision measurements of various kinds, offer a variety of ways to explore the hidden nature of matter, energy, space, and time. The availability of technologies that can explore directly an energy regime known as Terascale is especially exciting. The direct exploration of the Terascale could be the next important step toward resolving questions that human beings have asked for millennia: What are the origins of mass? Can the basic forces of nature be unified? How did the universe begin? How will it evolve in the future? Moreover at Terascale energies, formerly separate questions in cosmology and particle physics become connected, bridging the sciences of the very large and the very small.

… One of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century was the development of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics, which describes the relationships among the known elementary particles and the characteristics of three of the four forces that act on those particles—electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force (but not gravity). However, in the energy regions that physicists are just now become able to access experimentally, the incompleteness of the Standard Model becomes apparent. It is unable to reconcile the twin pillars of 20th century physics, Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. In addition, recent astronomical observations indicate that everyday matter accounts for just 4 percent of the total substance in the universe. The rest of the universe consists of hypothesized entities called dark matter and dark energy that are not described by the Standard Model. Other challenges to the Standard Model are posed by the predominance of matter over antimatter in the universe, the early evolution of the universe, and the discovery that the elusive particles known as neutrinos have a tiny but nonzero mass. Thus, despite the extraordinary success of the Standard Model, it seems likely that a much deeper understanding of nature will be achieved as physicists continue to study the fundamental constituents of the universe.

…Elementary particle physicists use a wide variety of natural phenomena to investigate the properties and interactions of particles. They gather data from cosmic rays and solar neutrinos, astronomical observations, precision measurements of single particles, and monitoring of large masses of everyday matter. In addition, crucial advances historically have come from particle accelerators and the complex detectors used to study particle collisions in controlled environments. Today the most powerful accelerator in the world is the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, which is scheduled to be shut down by the end of the decade. A more powerful accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, is scheduled to begin colliding protons in 2007. Both theoretical and experimental evidence suggests that revolutionary new physics will emerge at the energies accessible with the LHC.

Beyond the LHC, physicists around the world are designing a new accelerator known as the International Linear Collider (ILC), which would use two linear accelerators to collide beams of electrons and positrons. Together, the LHC and an ILC will enable physicists to explore the unification of the fundamental forces, probe the origins of mass, uncover the dynamic nature of the “vacuum” of space, deepen the understanding of stellar and nuclear processes, and investigate the nature of dark matter. These tasks cannot be accomplished with the LHC alone…. Elementary particle physics has been a centerpiece of the physical sciences throughout the 20th century. It has inspired generations of young people to become members of the strongest scientific workforce in the world. It also has attracted outstanding scientists from abroad to come to the United States and contribute to the nation’s intellectual and economic vitality.

In addition, particle physics has generated waves of technological innovations that have found applications throughout the sciences and society. The protocols that underlie the World Wide Web are developed at CERN, and the two-way interactions between particle physics and high-performance computing and communications have continued to blossom. Particle physics has generated critical technologies in such areas as materials analysis, medical treatment, and imaging.

… The demonstration that neutrinos have nonzero masses may be one of the first signals of the new physics expected in the years ahead, since the observed masses are in the range predicted by theoretical ideas that unify the forces of nature. In the future, neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments could demonstrate that the neutrino is its own antiparticle, which would greatly strengthen the case for interpreting neutrino masses in terms of unified theories of the fundamental forces. Furthermore, proton decay experiments might show that the proton is unstable, which would confirm one of the most basic predictions of unified theories.

… With experimental access to the Terascale at the LHC and the proposed ILC, the particle physics community is poised for discoveries that could revolutionize how we view our world and the universe.

— Committee on Elementary Particle Physics in the 21st Century,

National Research Council,

Revealing the Hidden Nature of Space and Time:

Charting the Course for Elementary Particle Physics

Ecology: Stressed to the Limits

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9979/03/index20article6.html

In a world fixated on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on a thousand other issues of varying consequence, we are losing sight of another enemy that is now in the advanced stage of mobilizing for a devastating assault on human societies.

The enemy is ecological decline. This enemy has given the world ample evidence of its lurking intent, but the scale of the threat it poses for economic and social security has yet to permeate the public consciousness.

… The enemy is not nature: it is the erosion of ecosystem functionality. Humans, as a species, are part of nature. However, especially since the advent of agricultural communities, human societies have been created. They draw from ecological systems for everything they require in order to survive, to meet consumption requirements, to create wealth, to support economic growth, and to break down and absorb their increasingly diverse waste products. Human societies are of nature but are no longer part of natural systems.

When stress on ecological systems reaches the point where it constrains the ability to access or draw down the environmental goods and services required to provision societies — goods and services that are essential for all gains in human well-being — ecological decline becomes the enemy of all people.

The world is now in just such a position. As presently organized and using currently available technologies, human societies are drawing more from nature than ecological systems can provide: every major ecosystem in the world is now in some stage of human-induced decline. The peoples of the world have less than twenty-five years to find and implement new ways of organizing to vastly increase their ability to provision their growing populations and economies. And they must do so without further impairing ecosystem viability, lest they risk making the worst Malthusian nightmares a reality.

We have all heard the tales of woe… :

— Over half of all the freshwater lakes in the world are now polluted.

— Most parts of the world are facing challenges associated with water availability and quality.

— Enormous groundwater reservoirs that support vast areas of high-yield agricultural production, as well as urban and industrial needs, are being drawn down well in excess of replenishment rates.

— The human-induced loss of biological diversity is reaching epic proportions — fully half of the species of large mammals in the world are threatened with extinction; there may soon be little viable forest, coral reef, and other protective habitat left; and up to half the world’s plant species are in danger of disappearing forever.

— The global catch of fish from the wild peaked in 1989 and has been in decline ever since; fish farming is now in direct competition with other forms of agricultural production for access to land and other land-based productive resources.

—Almost all of the world’s agricultural land is now in use, productivity growth is leveling off, soil quality is declining, and there are no signs of new ‘Green Revolution’ taking root.

—Awareness of the insidious, adverse effects on health of long-term exposure to low levels of toxics is growing.

—Human societies are now drawing on the outer reaches of the biosphere to absorb and break down human wastes.

The list goes on endlessly, with the most pressing issue being climate change: there is little prospect of preventing a rapid doubling of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from human activity. This will only accelerate the relentless increase in global warming, which is already showing signs of bringing about great human tragedy.

The problem is more complicated than suggested by the simple compilation of long lists of independent examples of ecological stress. Many changes already underway in the operation of ecosystems are probably irreversible, and societies will have to meet their future needs in conditions of ecological uncertainty and instability. Moreover, because the world is operating at the margins of ecological supply capacity, every new source of environmental trauma ripples across and between ecosystems and around the world. Everything is now connected. Feedback is immediate. The potential for environmental ‘flips’ to seriously impair the capacity to provision human societies with essential ecological goods and services is everywhere stronger than before.

From this already tenuous base, the global community will somehow have to find ways to address the vast incremental needs for ecological goods and services — needs that will all come to a head by 2025.

— Roy Woodbridge,
The Next World War:
Tribes, Cities, Nations, and Ecological Decline

Position of Disparity

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9979/04/index20article5.html

We may all be riding on “spaceship Earth,” but as German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger pointed out decades ago, some of us ride first class and some in steerage. Traditional realists see this as a fact of life, and even extol the virtues of poverty. In the business section of the daily newspaper, if not on the editorial page, unemployment is necessary, for it keeps inflation down and bond prices up, just as low environmental and labor standards in the Third World keep prices down. As American policy analyst George Kennan explained back in 1948, in days less sensitive to the demands of liberal rhetoric, “Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.”

Such postures have lost any claim to the name of realism. Not all future Third World regimes, Robert Heilbroner has noted, will “view the vast difference between first class and cattle class with the forgiving eyes of their predecessors”… Moreover, since weapons proliferation is at all levels unimpeded by any serious efforts at control, we must assume that the poor of the future will be armed to the teeth. They will be bound to the rich by the global economy and by planetary TV, but it will be a loose and unstable coupling. Barring new departures, competition and violence will only increase, as the ecological plunder will continue.

… Worldwatch’s Lester Brown says that we must either “turn things around quickly or the self-reinforcing internal dynamic of the deterioration-and-decline scenario will take over,” and then argues for an “Environmental Revolution” as the best hope. His strategy is to say much that is chilling and yet remain upbeat and, when it comes to politics, abstract. We have “underestimated what it will take” to reverse the trends now threatening to overcome us, and “can no longer separate the future habitability of the planet from the current international distribution of wealth.” Large statements, both of these, but they are left to float in warm generality. “Stabilizing the climate” will require “restructuring the world’s economy to phase out fossil fuels,” but when it comes to how this can be done, there is only anticlimax: vague talk of gradually shifting investments, reforming technologies, and changing values.

Here, too, there is implicit a political theory — large change will come exclusively by small degrees. No need to solve problems like regulating the planetary corporations, halting the spread of nuclear arms, or substantially redistributing land and wealth. We will wake one day to find that incremental reforms have made all the difference. Brown first tells us the environmental revolution is not political, but rather a cousin to the industrial and agricultural revolutions. He then explains that we do not have the kind of time that they required, but even this does not inspire him to discomforting conclusions. If there must be changes that will not come politely, they are best left unremarked.

There is a method here. Worldwatch regales us with fact-laden overviews of ecological deterioration, then leavens its message with a large measure of bright possibilities, from green taxes to windmills. It makes good reading, for it balances pessimism with optimism, and there is nothing to offend. Change makes good rational sense, and change is necessary, so change will come. Even land reform, which once rang throughout the world in calls for “land and liberty” and heroic, bloody peasant uprisings will come perhaps easily.

… Meaningful land reform will not come easily. Elites have long used anticommunist ideology as an excuse to oppose the redistribution of land, and now they must do without it. But they will find new excuses easily enough. In both the United States and Mexico, “efficiency” is the favorite justification for the destruction of both peasant and family farming.

… There are good reasons to believe that change is possible, reasons that range from the green movement itself, to the technological and economic reforms we hear so much about from policy activists, to the obvious fact that greens are hardly alone in seeing the state of the world as intolerable. To see hope in concrete form, one need only pick a subject, from water pollution to family planning to democracy. A few hours of research will generally reveal excellent ideas in profusion, and demonstrate that it is politics, and not any lack of technological or policy alternatives, that holds us in this stasis.

The strongest grounds for hope is this—that time and resources both remain. If fifty years, hence, our children find themselves so in thrall to necessity that they cannot even imagine a better world, it will not be because they met their inexorable fate, but because we failed now, when the broad shape of the future is still open to dispute.

— Tom Athanasiou,
Divided Planet:
The Ecology of Rich and Poor,
Chapter 6 – Realism

Population Explosion

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9979/05/index20article4.html

The demographic force can be described in one short sentence: we will go from an already overstretched planet of 5 billion people in 1990 and 6 billion people today to about 8 billion by 2020-2025—in less than one generation.

The good news is that after that, the planet’s population will either stagnate or, even if it grows some more, reach a plateau at around 9-10 billion in the second part of this century, after which it may even decline. About fifteen years ago, forecasters fretted about much more worrisome scenarios. Happily, they were wrong. Some experts may therefore feel that I am overdoing it a bit when I talk about an explosion.

But consider the bad news: like a locomotive, global population growth requires a long braking period before it comes to a halt. In other words, there’s nothing one can do about this increase to 8 billion. The people who will have these children are, for the most part, already or about to be born. And this figure does reflect the recent and ongoing decline in birth rates in much of the developing world. At any rate, this increase of about 2 billion over today’s population, coming to a planet that is already overstretched, will act and feel like an explosion sending ripples into various directions.

Some readers may still resent my use of the term “demographic explosion,” which has become politically incorrect. To those I would respond that I am not a Cassandra or even a Malthusian, but that the resources and living space of the planet will be far more stretched with 8 billion people a few short decades from now than with 5 billion in 1990, let alone 3 billion in 1960. Just consider the following… implications.

More than 95 percent of the 2 billion people to be added over the next two decades or so will live in developing countries. Most will keep flocking to the cities, producing in 2020 a world where more than one person in two lives in a city. There will be some sixty cities with more than 5 million inhabitants (almost double their number in 1990), and perhaps twenty-five huge agglomerations of 10 million and more people (up from fewer than ten in 1990).

Karachi, Sao Paulo, and Dhaka will hover at around 20 million. Asian-style urban overcrowding and congestion will become a regular feature across the globe, with many negative consequences for poverty, health, and social stresses. Imagine the challenges of traffic, housing, waste management, sewage, and water supply in these sprawling cities. Even Africa will face ever-increasing urbanization rates, averaging 50 percent by 2020, double the level of a generation ago.

With this population increase and with higher living standards in developing countries, the world’s food production will have to increase by 40 percent over the next twenty years. Cereal consumption may rise by 30 percent, and meat consumption by 60 percent. Some people even forecast higher increases. In any case, even if most people agree that there’s no risk that the world won’t be able to feed itself overall, getting there will be a tall order. It’s becoming very hard to expand arable land, and the growth of crop yields will slow—in part because soils are rapidly becoming eroded or ruined by salt deposits. In many places, the limits of ever more intensive agriculture have become ominously clear. Declining underground water levels and nitrate pollution by fertilizers are just two frequent symptoms, in rich and poor countries alike.

Similarly, energy consumption will rise to the point where, in 2020, the developing world may be close to overtaking the rich countries in total carbon emissions from burning oil, gas, coal, and wood. Overall energy consumption will be close to double what it is now, even triple in many developing countries. In some, power production could rise fivefold.

While there’s not the slightest risk that the world will run out of energy by then, many global, regional, and local problems are connected with rising energy use. Global warming, for one, will be one of the big worries of the decades to come. But there will also be many regional and local stresses. China will need one new 1,000-megawatt power plant every month. If all those new plants are based on coal, and with India also needing to expand power supplies at considerable rate, acid rain could build up to a sizeable problem in Asia by 2020. For instance, acid rain could have a dramatic impact on Japan and its forests, just as it badly damaged spruce trees in the Adirondacks and red maples in Pennsylvania over the last decades.

In Nepal and other poor areas in the Himalayas, increasing fuel-wood collection under pressure from rural population growth has contributed to the near-irreversible disappearance of the forest cover—with many negative consequences, including flooding in low-lying areas such as Bangladesh. And with a mix of deforestation and drought, people in some parts of Africa, such as Mauritania, see the desert advance 10 kilometers a year.

The list of stresses that will come with the population increase goes on—infectious diseases, loss of tropical forests, fisheries depletion, biodiversity losses, pollution of the seas, and increasing water scarcity, to name a few. Like global warming, these problems are all urgent global issues.

— J.F. Rischard,
High Noon:
Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them

Stuck at the Bottom

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9979/06/index20article3.html

The third world has shrunk. For forty years the development challenge has been a rich world of one billion people facing a poor world of five billion people. The Millennium Development Goals established by the United Nations, which are designed to track development progress through 2015, encapsulate this thinking. By 2015, however, it will be apparent that this way of conceptualizing development has become outdated. Most of the five billion, about 80 percent, live in countries that are indeed developing often at amazing speed. The real challenge of development is that there is a group of countries at the bottom that are falling behind, and often falling apart.

The countries at the bottom coexist with the twenty-first century, but their reality is the fourteenth century: civil war, plague, ignorance. They are concentrated in Africa and Central Asia, with a scattering elsewhere. Even during the 1990s, in retrospect the golden decade between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, incomes in this group declined by 5 percent. We must learn to turn the familiar numbers upside down: a total of five billion who are already prosperous, or at least on the track to be so, and one billion who are stuck at the bottom.

This problem matters, and not just to the billion people who are living and dying in fourteenth-century conditions. It matters to us. The twenty-first-century world of material comfort, global travel, and economic interdependence will become increasingly vulnerable to these large islands of chaos. And it matters now. As the bottom billion diverges from an increasingly sophisticated world economy, integration will become harder, not easier.

And yet it is a problem denied, both by development biz and by development buzz. Development biz is run by the aid agencies and the companies that get the contracts for their projects. They will fight this thesis with tenacity of bureaucracies endangered, because they like things the way they are. A definition of development that encompasses five billion people gives them license to be everywhere, or more honestly, everywhere but the bottom billion. At the bottom, conditions are rather rough. Every development agency has difficulty getting its staff to serve in Chad and Laos; the glamour postings are for countries such as Brazil and China. The World Bank has large offices in every major middle income country but not a single person resident in the Central African Republic. So don’t expect the development biz to refocus voluntarily.

Development buzz is generated by rock stars, celebrities and NGOs. To its credit, it does focus on the plight of the bottom billion. It is thanks to development buzz that Africa gets on the agenda of the G8. But inevitably, development buzz has to keep its message simple, driven by the need for slogans, images, and anger. Unfortunately, although the plight of the bottom billion lends itself to simple moralizing, the answers do not. It is a problem that needs to be hit with several policies at the same time, some of them counterintuitive. Don’t look to development buzz to formulate such an agenda: it is at times a headless heart.

What of governments of the countries at the bottom? The prevailing conditions bring out extremes. Leaders are sometimes psychopaths who have shot their way to power, sometimes crooks who have bought it, and sometimes brave people who, against the odds, are trying to build a better future. Even the appearance of modern government in these states is sometimes a façade, as if the leaders are reading from a script. They sit at the international negotiating tables, such as the World Trade Organization, but they have nothing to negotiate. The seats stay occupied even in the face of meltdown in their societies: the government of Somalia continued to be officially “represented” in the international arena for years after Somalia ceased to have a functioning government in the country itself. So don’t expect the governments of the bottom billion to unite in formulating a practical agenda: they are fractured between villains and heroes, and some of them are barely there. For our future world to be livable the heroes must win their struggle. But the villains have the guns and the money, and to date they have usually prevailed. That will continue unless we radically change our approach.

All societies used to be poor. Most are now lifting out of it; why are others stuck? The answer is traps. Poverty is not intrinsically a trap, otherwise we would all still be poor. Think, for a moment, of development as chutes and ladders. In the modern world of globalization there are some fabulous ladders; most societies are using them. But there are also some chutes, and some societies have hit them. The countries at the bottom are an unlucky minority, but they are stuck.

— Paul Collier,
The Bottom Billion:
Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

Poverty and Capitalism

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9979/07/index20article2.html

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, free markets have swept the globe. Free-market economics has taken root in China, Southeast Asia, much of South America, Eastern Europe, and even the former Soviet Union. There are many things that free markets do extraordinarily well. When we look at countries with long histories under capitalist systems—in Western Europe and North America—we see evidence of great wealth. We also see remarkable technological innovation, scientific discovery, and educational and social progress. The emergence of modern capitalism three hundred years ago made possible material progress of a kind never before seen. Today, however—almost a generation after the Soviet Union fell—a sense of disillusionment is setting in.

To be sure, capitalism is thriving. Businesses continue to grow, global trade is booming, multinational corporations are spreading into markets in the developing world and the former Soviet bloc, and technological advancements continue to multiply. But not everyone is benefitting. Global income distribution tells the story: Ninety-four percent of world income goes to 40 percent of the people, while the other 60 percent must live on only 6 percent of world income. Half of the world lives on two dollars a day or less, while almost a billion people live on less than one dollar a day.

Poverty is not distributed evenly around the world; specific regions suffer its worst effects. In sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, hundreds of millions of poor people struggle for survival. Periodic disasters, such as the 2004 tsunami that devastated regions on Indian Ocean, continue to kill hundreds of thousands of poor and vulnerable people. The divide between the global North and South—between the world’s richest and the rest—has widened.

… What is wrong? In a world where the ideology of free enterprise has no real challenger, why have free markets failed so many people? As some nations march toward ever greater prosperity, why has so much of the world been left behind?

The reason is simple. Unfettered markets in their current form are not meant to solve social problems and instead may actually exacerbate poverty, disease, pollution, corruption, crime and inequality.

I support the idea of globalization—that free markets should expand beyond national borders, allowing trade among nations and a continuing flow of capital, and with governments wooing international companies by offering them business facilities, operating conveniences, and tax and regulatory advantages. Globalization, as a general business principle, can bring more benefits to the poor than any alternative. But without proper oversight and guidelines, globalization has the potential to be highly destructive.

Global trade is like a hundred-lane highway crisscrossing the world. If it is a free-for-all highway, with no stoplights, speed limits, size restrictions, or even lane markers, its surface will be taken over by the giant trucks from the world’s most powerful economies. Small vehicles—a farmer’s pickup truck or Bangladesh’s bullock carts and human-powered rickshaws—will be forced off the highway.

In order to have win-win globalization, we must have fair traffic laws, traffic signals, and traffic police. The rule of “the strongest takes all” must be replaced by rules that ensure that the poorest have a place on the highway. Otherwise the global free market falls under the control of financial imperialism.

In the same way, local, regional, and national markets need reasonable rules and controls to protect the interests of the poor. Without such controls, the rich can easily bend conditions to their own benefit. The negative impact of unlimited single-track capitalism is visible every day—in global corporations that locate factories in the world’s poorest countries, where cheap labor (including children) can be freely exploited to increase profits; in companies that pollute the air, water, and soil to save money on equipment and processes that protect the environment; in deceptive marketing and advertising campaigns that promote harmful and unnecessary products.

Above all, we see it in entire sectors of the economy that ignore the poor, writing off half the world’s population. Instead, businesses in these sectors focus on selling luxury items to people who don’t need them, because that is where the biggest profits are.

I believe in free markets as sources of inspiration and freedom for all, not as architects of decadence for a small elite. The world’s richest countries, in North America, Europe, and parts of Asia, have benefited enormously from the creative energies, efficiencies, and dynamism that free markets produce. I have devoted my life to bringing those same benefits to the world’s most neglected people—the very poor, who are not factored in when economists and business people speak about the market. My experience has shown me that the free market—powerful and useful as it is—could address problems like global poverty and environmental degradation, but not if it must cater solely and relentlessly to the financial goals of its richest shareholders.

— Muhammad Yunus,
Creating a World Without Poverty:
Social Business and the Future of Capitalism

The Beginnings of Industrialization

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9979/08/index20article1.html

The Industrial Revolution had its roots in the scientific progress of the Renaissance (from the 1300s to the 1500s). Leonardo da Vinci sketched the precursors to the machines that would later be invented during the Industrial Revolution. Factories in Sweden were using waterpower as early as the 1720s. Gunsmiths in France were then developing their own factory system. But it was in Britain that all the changes came together in the middle of the 1700s.

Feudalism began to break down after the Renaissance. The self-sufficient manorial village with its lords and peasants gradually gave way to commercial farming where farmers took their products to markets to trade for cash. Market considerations replaced traditional practices and things got more efficient.

… The agricultural revolution set the stage for the industrial one to follow.

The rise of free market trade happened in Britain much more rapidly than it did on the continent. The British nobility was hooked on trade. Britain had lots of rivers and seaports and an overseas empire with plenty of raw materials. Merchants, landowners, and ship captains were out hustling, investing, and doing deals. Improvements in sanitation, health care, and agriculture helped the population expand. Europe had money to burn from the gold and silver it had stolen from the newly conquered Native Americans. British merchants looked at each other and said, we’ve got to have ourselves a sale.

To have a sale, however, the British had to have something to sell. Textiles must have certainly come to mind. The British were famous for it. But making cloth and clothing was such a slow process. There are a number of tedious steps that go into producing a piece of cloth. The fibers must be combed until they are parallel. They need to be spun or twisted to make yarn or thread. After which you had to get your loom and hand-make some cloth.

People had been trying for centuries to mechanize these processes. Lewis Paul invented a spinning machine in 1738 that could mechanically shape fibers and spin thread. Edmund Cartwright patented a crude power loom in 1785. The handloom operators burned down one of the first factories, but that didn’t stop progress. By 1813, there were about 3,000 power looms in operation in Britain; 20 years later there were 100,000.

It was the steam engine that really fueled the Industrial Revolution. By the early 1700s there were already a number of crude steam-powered machines for pumping water out of the mines. (Mines flood when they go deeper than the water table.) But these early devices used massive amounts of coal and were only practical at mine pits where coal was cheap. James Watt (1736-1819), a Scottish engineer, was called to fix one of these big guys in the 1760s and he started thinking about ways to make it better. With the old engine, the cylinder had to be heated up and then cooled down to bring about condensation. Watt devised a separate condenser attached to the cylinder. He made the engine reciprocating, by letting steam into one end of the cylinder and then into the other end, adapting this power to produce rotary motion. In other words, it could turn a wheel.

More that that, by converting the steam power into rotary power it could turn mills and operate machinery that had previously been powered by water wheels. Plus, the machine could be taken anywhere you wanted and you didn’t have to rely on the local creek to keep going.

… In the nineteenth century, Britain was still the center of the mechanized miracle. At first it only exported products of the Industrial Revolution. It was the proverbial merchant with lots of goods to offer, but little information on how it developed those products. However, it was a secret too lucrative to be kept. Soon the revolution spread to Europe and North America. Then it spread to Japan, China, and India.

Pollution followed the spread. Visible smoke and the noxious fumes of sulfur dioxide (SO₂), a byproduct of the burning of coal, followed wherever industrialization went. London fogs, a mixture of fog and pollution, were at time so thick that they required street lamps to be turned on in the middle of the day. Dickens called these fogs “London Particular.” As pollution spread, so did the resistance to it. Laws on air quality were adopted as early as 1815 in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cincinnati.

… [T]he citizens of London had banded together to protest the increasing problem. But the cries of those complaining were drowned out by those who’d tasted the fruits of industrialization and wanted more. And the same story repeated itself in Europe and the United States. Industrialization moved forward.

— Michael Tennesen,
Complete Idiot’s Guide to Global Warming,
Chapter 8 – The Dawn of the Industrial Age

Dry Spell

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9980/01/index19article8.html

What would happen if the melting Greenland ice sheet partially shut down the Gulf Stream? Would Europe be plunged into a near-Ice Age, as indeed happened some twelve thousand years ago during the climatic episode known as the Younger Dryas, named after a polar flower?

What would happen to the Low Countries and to some Pacific atolls if sea levels rose as much as a foot (0.3 meters) or more by century’s end as a result of partially melted ice sheets?

These are perfectly legitimate concerns, which will require concerted political will to solve in coming generations. But our preoccupation with heat and rising sea levels ignores an even greater threat: drought. Why this surprising neglect? Undoubtedly the devastation of the Southeast Asian tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina the following year reinforced fears about extreme weather events and flooding in particular. But these two events, coming in two of the warmest years since the Ice Age, seem to have delivered a message that warmer centuries mean more rain, not less. Then there’s another reality: most, though not all, of the people likely to be affected by severe drought in the future live in the developing world, and we in the United States are still much preoccupied with the flooding brought by Katrina.

… Evidence is mounting that drought is the silent and insidious killer associated with global warming. The casualty figures are mind numbing. About 11 million people between Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea were in serious danger of starvation as a result of multiyear droughts in 2006. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria estimates that by 2010 around 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, nearly a third of the population, will suffer from malnutrition because of intensifying droughts. (Relatively few people die of hunger during a drought. They perish from epidemics of dysentery and other diseases spread by poor living conditions. For instance, 1.6 million children a year die today because of a lack of access to good sanitation and clean drinking water.)

The long-term future is even more alarming. A study by Britain’s authoritative Hadley Centre for Climate Change documents a 25 percent increase in global drought during the 1990s, which produced well-documented population losses. The Hadley’s computer models of future aridity resulting from the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions are truly frightening. At present, extreme drought affects 3 percent of the earth’s surface. The figure could rise as high as 30 percent if warming continues, with 40 percent suffering from severe droughts, up from the current figure of 8 percent. Fifty percent of the world’s land would experience moderate drought, up from the present 25 percent. Then the center ran the model without factoring in the impact of greenhouse gases, which they assumed were the temperature change villains. The results implied that future changes in drought without anthropogenic warming would be very small indeed.

In human terms, the United Nations Environment Program reports that 450 million people in twenty-nine countries currently suffer from water shortages. By 2025, an estimated 2.8 billion of us will live in areas with increasingly scarce water resources. Twenty percent of the world’s population currently lacks access to safe, clean drinking water. Contaminated water supplies are a worse killer than AIDS in tropical Africa. If the projected drought conditions transpire, future casualties will rise dramatically. The greatest impact of intensifying drought would be on people already living in arid and semiarid lands—about a billion of us in more than 110 countries around the world. And those who would be hit hardest are subsistence farmers, especially in tropical Africa. Seventy percent of all employment in Africa is in small-scale farming, and completely dependent on rainfall.

The number of food emergencies in Africa each year has already tripled since the 1980s, with one in three people across sub-Saharan Africa being malnourished. The Nigerian institute’s projection for 2010 is just the beginning. Future drought-related catastrophes will make these preliminaries seem trivial and could affect more than half of tropical Africa’s population.

… It’s been easy for us to forget that millions of people still live at the subsistence level and use basically medieval technologies to wrest a living from the soil. We can no longer afford benign ignorance, for the long-term perils of chronic drought connect all humankind in ways that we are only just beginning to understand.

— Brian Fagan,
The Great Warming:
Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations,
Chapter 13 – The Silent Elephant

Oil Dependency

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9980/02/index19article7.html

Our policies on the climate crisis and our overdependence on fossil fuels—especially foreign oil—illustrate what can happen to a great nation when reason is replaced by the influence of wealth and power…

The energy crisis and the climate crisis are inextricably linked—both in their causes and in their solutions. In order to deal with the planetary emergency caused by the rapid accumulation of man-made carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the earth’s atmosphere, we must quickly address its principal cause—which is, of course, our civilization’s tragic overdependence on burning massive quantities of carbon-based fuels.

There are, in fact, multiple reasons why the United States should undertake a massive strategic effort to solve the climate crisis and the fossil fuel dependency crisis simultaneously. They are the same crisis. And the fact that we still have our heads in the sand is perhaps the single best example of how the decline of reason in our national discourse blinds us to our own self-interest.

Coal and oil are especially harmful on the earth’s climate because of high carbon content relative to each unit of energy derived from them. The CO₂ produced as waste in the burning of fossil fuels—seventy million tons of it every day—traps part of the infrared energy reradiated by the earth into space.

And coal is much worse than oil. Moreover, the other dirty carbon-based fuels found in large quantities in North America—tar sands and oil shale—are the worst of all. Any significant use of these CO₂-laden deposits would make the climate crisis infinitely more difficult to solve…

In the case of oil, the concentration of the largest source of cheaply recoverable reserves in what is arguably the least stable region of the world—the Persian Gulf—has led a growing number of Americans to the conclusion that renewable sources of energy should be developed quickly in order to avoid the disruptive consequences of suddenly losing access to affordable oil supplies.

Actually, the largest supplier of oil to the United States is now Canada, and our second largest supplier is Mexico. Saudi Arabia is only our third largest supplier. (The fourth largest is Venezuela.) But the Persian Gulf still dominates the top of the list of world suppliers—and since the market for oil is largely integrated globally, any disruption of oil supplies or prices originating in the Persian Gulf would quickly have a cascading impact on the world market for oil—and on the U.S. economy.

By keeping world oil prices high, our steadily increasing consumption of oil also ensures the continued flow of petrodollars into the coffers of states like Iran, which are hostile to our interests, and Saudi Arabia, where significant sums have apparently been diverted to train and support terrorists.

Our current excessive dependence on oil endangers not only our national security and the earth’s environment, but also our economic security. Anyone who believes that the international market for oil is a “free market” is seriously deluded. It does have many characteristics of a free market, but it is also subject to periodic manipulation by the group of nations controlling the largest recoverable reserves (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC) —sometimes in concert with the small group of companies that dominate the global production, refining, and distribution network.

It is extremely important for us to be clear among ourselves that these episodic manipulations have not one objective, but two. First of all, these producing nations naturally seek to maximize profits. But more significant, they also seek to manipulate our political will. And for the last thirty years, they have paid careful attention to the need for price reductions every time the West comes close to recognizing the wisdom of developing adequate supplies of our own independent sources of renewable fuels.

We need to face the fact that our dangerous and unsustainable consumption of oil from a highly unstable part of the world is similar in its consequences to other forms of self-destructive behavior. The longer it continues, the greater the harm and the more serious the risk.

— Al Gore,
The Assault on Reason,
Chapter 7 – The Carbon Crisis

The Beat Goes On… Or Does It?

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9980/03/index19article6.html

“World resources running out”

“World braces itself for energy shortages”

“Energy producers struggle to keep up with demand”

Does this sound like today’s news? Actually newspapers ran headlines like these over 100 years ago!

Only back then, people were worried about running out of wood, not gas or coal. They fretted about forests being cut down and predicted that we would run out of wood to use for heating. In fact, in 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt claimed that a timber famine was inevitable.

Wood was not only the main source of heat for millions of people in the United States and worldwide, but it was also used to build homes, fences, railroad tracks, and bridges. Many forests were cleared so farmers could grow crops. The fear of a timber shortage was very real. And yet, one hundred years later, we still have plenty of wood. So what happened?

As wood became less available and more expensive, smart people all over the world started looking for an alternative and found coal. Beginning in the 1900s, coal began to replace wood as a fuel source.

… As people began switching from wood to coal, that’s when things got really exciting. Because coal provided more energy at less cost, it brought energy to more people. In the past energy was very expensive. Outside of big cities, many people could not afford to light their homes. There were few electric appliances or conveniences.

That’s why the discovery of coal as an energy source was revolutionary! Once there was a cheap, powerful, plentiful source of energy, electrification spread like wildfire. With this powerful new energy source, scientists, engineers, and inventors created more powerful engines, which in turn powered the creation of the greatest economy the world has ever known.

Today, coal is the major energy source in the United States. In fact, coal has become such an important source of energy that people are concerned that we might run out of it too! But we haven’t and we won’t.

Innovation and technology brought us oil and gas, which quickly replaced coal for some uses. And, of course, we soon found even more exciting ways to use these new sources of energy. No government regulation or restrictions powered the shift from wood to coal, or coal to oil and gas.

It was rising prices coupled with human creativity. Once the cost of coal approached that of wood, people switched.

The same thing happened with oil and gas as coal became more expensive. Meanwhile, seeing the opportunity to make a profit, people produced more of these new forms of energy, bringing the price down even further. In the process, millions of lives have been improved and enriched.

And that beat goes on! As fossil fuels become more expensive both in dollar and environmental costs, we’re starting the shift towards newer and cleaner technologies. And again, the government doesn’t need to force or regulate this shift. Once new technologies emerge at competitive prices, consumers make the shift themselves.

— Holly Fretwell,
The Sky’s Not Falling!:
Why It’s Ok to Chill About Global Warming,
Chapter 5 – New Ideas to Rock Your World

The World Food Situation

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9980/04/index19article5.html

Contrary to the prediction of many environmentalist ideologues, world food supplies have more than tripled in the past 30 years, staying well ahead of world population growth. Global food supplies, if equitably distributed, could provide an adequate diet for 700 million more people than there are living in the world today…

I am now in my 58th year of continuous involvement in food production programs in developing nations. During this period, I have seen much progress in increasing the yields and production of various crops, especially the cereals, in many food-deficit countries. Clearly, the research that backstopped this progress has produced huge returns. Yet despite a more than tripling in the world food supply during the past three decades, the so-called Green Revolution in cereal production has not solved the problem of chronic undernutrition for hundreds of millions of poverty-stricken people around the world, who are unable to purchase the food they need, despite abundance in world markets, due to unemployment or underemployment. Still, the world’s food situation has improved markedly.

Thirty years ago there were many who claimed that global famine was unavoidable. For example, in 1968 biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted in The Population Bomb, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any programs embarked upon now.” In 1967, Lester Brown, who later founded the environmentalist think tank the Worldwatch Institute, declared, “The trend in grain stocks indicates clearly that 1961 marked a worldwide turning point… food consumption moved ahead of food production.” Brown, too, saw famine looming. But fortunately they were wrong. They merely extrapolated trends without taking into account how the hard work of farmers, combined with breakthroughs developed by researchers, would dramatically boost world food supplies.

Sometime during the 21st century, world population will reach—and hopefully stabilize at—9 to 10 billion people. This event is likely to occur sometime around 2050. To give you some idea of the population increase that the world experienced during the 20th century, when I was born in 1914, there were only about 1.6 billion mouths to feed; in 2002 we will number some 6.1 billion. While global population growth rates have slowed over the past 20 years—and are actually negative in some industrialized countries—absolute population increases are still on the order of 75 to 80 million per year.

It must be acknowledged that in many of the more productive areas—especially the irrigated areas located in warm climates—there are problems of soil erosion and declining water quality, which if left unchecked can lead to the permanent loss of prime agricultural land. In most cases… the root cause of this environmental degradation has been mistaken economic policy—such as mistaken pricing policies and poor engineering design—not modern, science-based technology.

The invention of agriculture, some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, heralded the dawn of civilization. It began with rainfed, hand-hoed agriculture, which evolved into an animal-powered, scratch-tooled agriculture, and finally into an irrigated agriculture along the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, that for the first time allowed humans to produce food surpluses. This permitted the establishment of permanent settlements and urban societies, which, in turn, engendered culture, science, and technology. The rise and fall of ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mesoamerica were directly tied to agricultural successes and failures, and it behooves us to remember that this axiom remains valid today.

Poets—and city folk—love to romanticize agriculture, portraying it as some sort of idyllic state of harmony between humankind and nature. How far this is from the truth! Ever since Neolithic man—or more probably woman—domesticated the major crop and animal species some 10 to 12 millennia ago, agriculture has been a struggle between the forces of natural biodiversity and the need to produce food using increasingly intensive production systems. Thanks to advances in science during the past century, food production has kept ahead of population growth and, in general, has become more reliable. But with global population likely to continue substantially over the next 50 years, meeting future food demand will be a challenging task.

— Norman E. Borlang,
Feeding a World of 10 Billion People
: The Miracle Ahead,
in Global Warming and Other Eco Myths:
How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death,
ed. Ronald Bailey

Gardens into Deserts

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9980/05/index19article4.html

Boulder, [Colorado,] was a good spot for the conference on “Causes of Climate Change” that convened there in August 1965. The meeting was scarcely noticed by most scientists at the time, but in retrospect it was a turning point.

The organizers had deliberately brought together experts in everything from volcanoes to sunspots, presided over by the oceanographer Roger Revelle. Lectures and roundtable discussions were full of spirited debate as rival theories clashed, and Revelle needed all his exceptional leadership skills to keep meeting on track. The conference was convened mainly to discuss the many rival explanations of the ice ages in the comfortable traditional mode. Instead, it exploded with new ideas that pointed to a novel and foreboding way of looking at the future of climate. The planet’s climate, the scientists agreed, could not be treated in the old fashion like some simple mechanism that kept itself stable. It was a complex system, precariously balanced. The system showed a dangerous potential for dramatic change, on its own or under human technological intervention, and quicker than anyone had supposed.

At the Boulder meeting not only the climate, but ways of studying it, appeared in a new light. The familiar unchanging climatology of statistical compilations held no appeal for these scientists. They were trying to build up their knowledge from solid mathematics and physics, aided by new techniques drawing on fields from microbiology to nuclear chemistry. But science alone could not explain the deep shift in views about one of the fundamental components of human experience. Events had been altering the thinking of everyone in modern society.

Is human technology a force of geophysical scope, capable of affecting the entire globe? Surely it is not, thought most people in 1940. Surely it is, thought most in 1965. The reversal was not because of any changes in what scientists knew about global warming. The public’s rising concern for human impacts came from more visible connections between technology and atmosphere. One of these was a growing awareness of the dangers of atmospheric pollution. In the 1930s, citizens had been happy to see smoke rising from factories: dirty skies meant jobs. But in the 1950s, as the economy soared and life expectancy lengthened in industrialized countries, a historic shift began, from worries about poverty to worries about chronic health conditions. Doctors were learning that air pollution was mortally dangerous for some people. Meanwhile, in addition to smoke from coal-burning factories came exhaust from the rapidly proliferating automobiles. A “killer smog” that smothered London in 1953 demonstrated that the stuff we put into the air could actually slay several thousand people in a few days.

The public’s attention was also drawn to the air by the news of attempts to make rain by “seeding” clouds. Scientists openly speculated about the technical tricks, such as spreading a cloud of particles at a selected level in the atmosphere to interfere with solar radiation. Journalists and science-fiction writers suggested that with such techniques, the Russians might someday inflict deadly blizzards on the United States. It had become plausible that by putting materials into the air humans could alter climate on the largest scale, perhaps not for the better.

The biggest stimulus to changes in thinking was the astonishing advent of nuclear energy. Suddenly nothing seemed beyond human power. To many people the news of a limitless energy source was hopeful, even utopian. Among many other wonders, experts speculated about salvoes of atomic bombs to control weather patterns, bringing rain exactly where it was needed. At the same time, scientists warned that a nuclear war could destroy civilization. Widely seen movies and novels pictured the extinction of all life by radioactive fallout, carried around the world on the winds after a nuclear war.

By the late 1950s utopian hopes about technology began to dissolve as the nuclear arms race accelerated. Rising fears found a voice in shrill public debates and mass demonstrations against nuclear weapons tests. Exquisitely sensitive instruments could detect radioactive fallout from test explosions half a world away—the first recognized form of global atmospheric pollution. Then in 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, warning that pesticides such as DDT and other chemical pollution, drifting around the world much like fallout, could endanger living creatures not just in the neighborhood of the polluter, but everywhere. Feelings of dread multiplied: whether or not technology would turn deserts into gardens, it could demonstrably turn gardens into deserts!

… The new threats awoke images and feelings that most people had scarcely experienced outside their dreams and nightmares. Humans were introducing unnatural technologies, meddling with the very winds and rain, spreading pollution everywhere.

… Revelle took the lead in suggesting that trouble might lie ahead. As soon as he calculated that a rise in the CO₂ level was likely, Revelle took pains to talk about global warming with science journalists and government officials. Noting that climate had changed abruptly in the past, perhaps bringing the downfall of entire civilizations in the ancient world, he warned that the CO₂ greenhouse effect might turn Southern California and Texas into “real deserts.” Testifying to Congress in 1956 and 1957, he was one of the first to use a new and potent metaphor: “The Earth itself is a spaceship,” he said. We had better keep an eye on its air control system.

— Spencer R. Weart,
The Discovery of Global Warming
(New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine),
Chapter 3 – A Delicate System

Al Gore’s Call to Action

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9980/06/index19article3.html

Modern industrial civilization, as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet’s ecological system. The ferocity of its assault on the earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences are occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize them, comprehend their global implications, and organize an appropriate and timely response. Isolated pockets of resistance fighters who have experienced this juggernaut at first hand have begun to fight back in inspiring but, in the final analysis, woefully inadequate ways. It is not that they lack courage, imagination, or skill; it is simply that what they are up against is nothing less than the current logic of world civilization. As long as civilization as a whole, with its vast technological power, continues to follow a pattern of thinking that encourages the domination and exploitation of the natural world for short-term gains, this juggernaut will continue to devastate the earth no matter what any of us does.

I have come to believe that we must take bold and unequivocal action: we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization. Whether we realize it or not, we are now engaged in an epic battle to right the balance of our earth, and the tide of this battle will turn only when the majority of people in the world become sufficiently aroused by a shared sense of urgent danger to join an all-out effort.

… We now confront a set of choices as difficult as any in human history. The art of politics must be brought to bear in defining these choices, raising public awareness of the imminent danger facing us, and catalyzing decisions in favor of a collective course of action that has a reasonable chance of success.

There is no doubt that with sufficient agreement of our goals, we can achieve the victory we are seeking. Although very difficult changes in established patterns of thought and action will be required, the task of restoring the natural balance of the earth’s ecological system is both within our capacity and desirable for other reasons — including our interest in social justice, democratic government, and free market economics. Ultimately, a commitment to healing the environment represents a renewed dedication to what Jefferson believed were not merely American but universal inalienable rights: life, liberty, and t