Something Must Be Going On

The heart of OCD is a feeling of "not being right" or repeating a ritual until it "feels right." A creative mathematician experiences intuition as a feeling there is "something going on here but I don't know what it is" according to William Byers in How Mathematicians Think. You were probably taught in high school that mathematics is a rigorous and logical endeavor and that for every mathematical principle there is a proof. It was implied to you that mathematicians seek out new principles by following threads of logic from an existing proof to a new proof. You were taught a myth. Most mathematical breakthroughs began with an intuition. Only later, after the instruction was explored well enough to believe it was true, to believe it was worth proving, perhaps even after it was proved to the satisfaction of the mathematician was an "official" proof created for the record. Proof comes after the fact, not before it. An interesting relationship between obsessive compulsive disorder and mathematics.

Moreover, instruction plays a vital role in creative mathematics. Just as in other creative arts, a shift of frame is required to turn the ordinary into the novel. The author relates the story of how he along with fellow mathematician John McKay noticed something curious about a single number. If you express adding one to 196884 as an equation you get 196884 = 196884 + 1. On the surface, it hardly seems worth the interest of a mathematician. You can add one to any integer on to infinity, something obvious to even non-mathematicians. What is so fascinatingly curious about this instance? As Byers writes, "...these are not just any two numbers. They are significant mathematical constants that are found in two different areas of mathematics." The relationship of the constants could not be a coincidence, thought McKay, who began a line of inquiry leading to a series of conjectures, which went under the fanciful but telling name of "monstrous moonshine." I want to linger a moment on this point. Here we have a mathematician who sees something curious, which prompts a "gut feeling" something systematic must be going on, a suggestion there may be a relationship between two systems of mathematics, who starts inquiring into the possibility, and as he finds more support for the reality of the intuition, he begins to make conjectures about how the two systems might be connected through the curiosity he discovered. At this point, we can hardly blame a mathematician for feeling he was chasing "moonshine." But that is exactly what creative people do. They chase moonshine and rainbows. Yet, somehow they end up driving the process of scientific rational, mathematical and artistic discovery. McKay's conjectures were later proved.

Byers does relate mathematical creativity to artistic creativity, observing good mathematicians (the creative ones) are very sensitive to the feeling of something going on, and ties mathematical intuition to the poet's, quoting the poet Denise Levertov saying "You can smell a poem before you see it."

This is all a blow to anyone raised on the rhetoric of rationalism. The human mind is a reasoning machine. Human beings are rational actors seeking the most efficient path. This ought to be nonsense to any carnival barker or snake oil salesman, but for most educated people it is a conceit they sustain because they enjoy the belief they are rational. Reason has become a virtue and virtues cannot be questioned.

At the bottom of human irrationality may be rational decisions, observations, the machinery of the mind is not metaphysical, but the abstract layers above the fine grain of deterministic reasoning are irrational. The mind is connected to a body. People get "gut feelings" as their mind tries to tell itself something from its emotional, pattern recognizing centers. How else could the pattern recognizing centers of the brain communicate with this supremely rational being, other than by kicking it in the gut?

I take away from this you will not be a creative scientist, mathematician or musician unless you learn to use your intuition. Exercise your curiosity. Keep a childlike sense of astonishment about the world around you or the inner worlds you explore. Experiment. Follow instruction. Don't worry about the result, the path to a Nobel prize in mathematics is not by seeking that which is likely to win a prize, but by following up an intuition, seeing where the thread will lead, without any thought to where it will go, other than to satisfy curiosity and that feeling of something must be going on.

Snowball, the Dancing Bird

A video of a dancing bird has become the latest YouTube sensation. Some people thought the bird's performance was faked, but for me, it is not surprising, given the sophisticated ability birds demonstrate for manipulating pitch and rhythm in their songs, that a bird shows the ability to keep time with music. Neuroscientists, including John Iversen of the Neurosciences Institute, have studied the dancing bird and confirm it is capable of extracting a beat from sound.



What impressed me most about Snowball's performance is when he lifts his leg and gives it a little shake before bringing it down. As the investigators mention, it may be prompted by the pace being too fast to put his foot all the way down in time with the faster beat, but it piques my curiosity further. It appears Snowball is dividing the beat when he waves his foot, into two or three little waves, which if I am seeing it correctly, suggests birds are capable of division of the beat and perceiving and manipulating a metrical framework. This is simply astonishing were it be to true, but perhaps not unexpected given the sophistication of bird vocalization and communication. It is one thing for a bird to keep time with a beat and an entirely different for a bird to exhibit division of the beat.

When people sing (or compose a melody to sing) the tones are not of arbitrary duration. No one could sing a song consisting of a series of tones of arbitrary duration measured to fractions of a second. Could you imagine signing a melody: A 1000ms, F 1500ms, E 500ms, D 1000ms, A 1000ms? The human mind is not well suited for measuring duration in milliseconds on an ordinary basis (we can leave out extraordinary abilities some humans may possess or develop). What if someone asked you to pick up the pace to sign faster? Each duration would have to be recalculated down to the millisecond, in your head. For this reason, music is organized by relative measures of duration.

In reality, when people sing or play music, they use simple division of the beat to measure duration. This is usually achieved through the division of a steady beat by whole fractions, usually simple divisors, like two or three. The most basic division of the beat is by two. When a tone of shorter duration than the beat is required, the melody will use a tone one half of the beat, or one quarter or one eighth and so on, down to the ability of humans to resolve divisions of time. The other main division of the beat observed in music is by three. So for every beat you have the possibility of three tones, six tones, twelve tones and so on. The human ability for perceiving and manipulation this time structure is sophisticated. Musicians can anticipate the division of future beats, playing notes that persist across multiple divisions of the beat or create "holes" or silences for certain beats, playing with the listeners expectations (this is called syncopation). I have to wonder if the small movements he makes dividing the beat follow any ornamentation of percussion or melody in the song. In the background, another bird can be seen bobbing his head to the beat, in a clear parallel to human "head banging."

Although I would have to watch a lot more video to be sure, what I have seen suggests he may be dividing the beat and deserves further investigation. I would not be surprised to find that birds do erect a sense of metrical time in sound and can mentally divide the beat and even anticipate it, perhaps even perceive syncopation. It is fascinating to watch Snowball lose and pick up the beat again.

I did watch a couple of video clips. At about 2:00 into the following video he lifts his foot and waves time to the beat, but does not divide it.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s)


In the following video, notice how he keeps the beat when Stevie Nicks sings "ooh, ooh" on the beat? This suggests he has an expectation of the beat even when the beat is not marked by a percussive instrument. At about 1:05 he may have divided the beat with a wave. He does lose the beat more frequently when based only on Nick's vocals or less percussive sections. At 2:31 he appears to divide the beat with a wave again. And at 2:56. I'm not sure if he's just losing the beat or dividing it...but this is a seriously important question about the intelligence of birds. At 4:43 also.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYMBIGTteWA&feature=channel)

(Note: The time required for a complete cycle of A above middle C is 2.27 milliseconds and a sixteenth note at a metronomic pace of 60 clicks per second is 250 milliseconds, according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond 2009)

Graphic Recording

I didn't know it, but all my life I've engaged in "graphic recording" when it came to exploring new ideas or learning. I never went as far as the artists who made a series of recordings for the sustainable agriculture and food conference, but my subjects were technical, and I was a technical kid growing up, so my "confections," as Tufte calls them, were more mathematical, graphical and textual in nature. I used them to illustrate things to myself, like working out visually how cycles represent waveforms in musical instruments. Now, I see them as graphic recordings. I was a bit ashamed of them, since I thought it meant that I wasn't a good learner and tried to suppress or limit them. That was a mistake.

The drawings are simply wonderful and I got put onto them by Brenda Dawson who tweeted about the graphical recordings made for the March 29 2009 conference
Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability at the University of California, Davis. How much better a "presentation" these graphic recordings make than a PowerPoint presentation!

These drawings are a lot like my vision for an information system, called Strands, which would be as thick and filled with complexity as the Talmud and as visually expressive as these graphic recordings. If only the web could be like this. When I think of Twitter and Tabloo, if they could be combined, I think we'd be close. Tabloo enables users to create visual narratives (through the structure and relationship, size and aspects of images) and Twitter enables users to create conversations out of small fragments of thought flowing continually.

The Inuit Paradox

"How come the people here, who for long periods eat nothing but the meat from one type of animal, are healthier than we are?" Andreas Viestad, author of "Where Flavor Was Born," poses the nutritional question in Where Home Cooking Gets the Cold Shoulder. This is another example of how an evolved system is superior to an engineered one. It shows the connection between culture (cuisine and taste) and nutrition. A food culture that survives, survives because the people are still alive to continue eating according to their food ways. This is also another way in which folklore affects us.

The more distance you put between yourself and the nutritionists with their reductionist theories, the better your health will be.

I disagree with the statement by nutrition researcher Harriet V. Kuhnlein, who says "Every time you process or cook something -- anything -- you are likely to be losing nutrients at every step..." This is not true for cooking tomatoes, which liberates and makes certain nutrients more bioavailable. We don't know what the tradeoffs between raw and cooked are.

It is worth noting the author's book is concerns flavor. Because taste is an important determinant in the choices a food culture makes. We suspect that in pre-scientific socities people somehow discovered what foods, what parts of the animal, were the most nutritious and the higher status or wealthier people (quite the opposite in the West, where eventually wealth meant less nutritious foods) ate the best parts. It turns out the best parts provide critical nutrients not found in other parts of the animal.

Traditional cultures cannot afford to waste any part of the animal and therefore generally eat liver, brains, etc. that are undesirable to most Americans or modern Westerners. These parts have gradually disappeared from the Western diet because they are "yucky" to think about. These parts can be an acquired taste. So it leaves open the question, were these pre-scientific people guided by taste or by observing people were healthier when they ate these parts? Maybe it is simple as a large number of groups eating different diets, the ones with a better diet survived, and their choices became a food tradition.

Even Things Happen

I think we are at a moment like the discovery of irrational numbers, which were rejected by the Greeks as incomprehensible. It seemed crazy to believe in negative or irrational numbers, but once mathematics was past this reluctance, these kinds of numbers were accepted into the concept of number.

It is important to note the Greeks had an idea of number, which did not admit such things as negative or irrational numbers. Yet, in time, these concepts of number would come to be accepted by mathematicians and taught in modern elementary schools.

We are at the moment in science, where it is difficult to see the forest for the trees. We are so close to science as a reductionist process we fail to recognize there are other processes that can lead to scientific understanding. To most people, reductionism is science.

But we are beginning to discover another approach to understanding complex systems in the natural world, which goes beyond reductionism. Science is starting to recognize the reductionist approach fails to explain all aspects of reality. This new science of the "irrational" and complex, recognizes that things are much more occurrences than they are things. An occurrence is something that happens over time.

Even a stone plucked form a stream, held in the palm of the hand, science tells us is less solid than it appears. At the smallest levels a stone is nothing more than infinitesimally small particles, flitting in and out of existence from the "vacuum state." Even a stone is a kind of occurrence.

Science has been like the glass half full. With the discovery of the physics of chaotic systems and complexity theory, it can be a full glass. Equipped with the new science of the complex we can see nature is not a clockwork, that things are ephemeral an connected, but not just interconnected like the parts of a machine, but intertwined paradoxically, in feedback loops, or parts that are wholes and wholes that are parts.

We like to think of as things as things we can take apart, but they are actually occurrences. It will take a while for people to get used to this idea, just as it took a very long time for new concepts of number to become the stuff of elementary school mathematics.

If you find it difficult to see things as occurrences, think of how a food can be more than the sum of its parts, because the sum of its parts consists of its interactions with other parts and wholes in its environment, which means that a food is more an occurrence than a thing.

We must recognize the physical thing we study is inseparable from an occurrence, that even things happen.

The Growing Importance of Folklore

With publication of Pollan's In Defense of Food, I think we are seeing the emergence of folklore into the mainstream. Most people think folklore is something they have very little in common with. It is old fashioned music or people dancing around in costumes they wore hundreds of years ago. People feel it has very little relation to their lives. They also believe that we live in a scientific, rational world and somehow folklore does not belong. There is also an association between myth, legend and folklore as meaning fraudulent, fantasy, lies. This is a problem of perception and mis-perception, which is not new. Shortly after becoming literate, the Greeks abandoned and ridiculed their own folklore, the "myths" we read about today.

For a new perspective on what I call "folk knowledge" or what might be categorized as "folk culture" instead of folklore, since it is more correct and encompassing, we need only look to authors like Adrienne Mayor. Through long, independent research, she discovered that the ancient Greek myths about monsters were actually stories about people finding beds of fossilized bones of ancient creatures. These "geomyths" as they are called convey, real, true, factual information and represent a kind of scientific method even preliterate people engaged in, despite conveying them in a dramatic way.

In Pollan's book, food culture or food ways, as a folklorist would call them, represents knowledge that the best scientific nutritionists failed to see, take advantage of and learn from. The nutritional systems which evolved out of thousands of years of trial and error passed down by mothers through the generations, amounted to a better set of food choices than did a hundred years of scientific rational nutritionism.

In books like Blink, Albion's Seed and Stuff of Thought, we are beginning to see how our unconscious knowledge and folk knowledge shapes our decisions and opinions, sometimes without our knowledge, absorbed by osmosis through our culture. Frequently, this knowledge proves more accurate and useful than scientific rational knowledge, especially when the science is new, incomplete and arrogant, such as nutritional science.

If you don't think you participate in folklore or that it has a place in the modern world, take a look at Sadobabies, a film about urban homeless kids. Or Music District, a film about urban music. Everyone creates folklore, everyone lives in a folk culture, in reality, many folk cultures, for each folk way is a folk culture, you probably practice a food way, a work way, a everything way. You also build new ways out of old ones, from both things learned from your parents and neighbors and scraps of commercial culture. Rap is a folk culture. Commercial rap feeds into rap, and the folk culture cycle goes on. At work, if you are a programmer, you probably learned many things that are not in books on coding. This is "programmer lore" and is a folk culture and represents folk culture, which shapes the software we use in daily life, that controls elevators and space shuttles. If you don't think folklore affects your life, think again the next time you're riding an elevator.

Reading In Defense of Food

I am reading Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food. I had just reached the end of his forward when I was struck by one of the closing paragraphs, which says that eaters have real choices now thanks to the revival of local farms and farmer’s markets, which make practical the availability of whole foods. I had to stop, the words echoing in my mind, because they were incredibly resonant with what myself and Tom Davenport are doing at farmfoody.org, reminding us that our health, the health of the land, the health of our food culture are inextricably linked.

I continued my reading and came to the point where Pollan relates the story of dentist and amateur scientist Weston Price, who abandoned his practice to study the food culture and nutrition of various aboriginal peoples around the world, untouched by the Western diet. Price concluded the common denominator of health among these peoples was, as Pollan says “to eat a traditional diet consisting of fresh foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients.”

Tom and me believe that the survival of small, independent farms is dependent on leveraging their local characteristics, just as wine makers leverage terroir as as an argument for the uniqueness of their wines. It is not a stretch to believe, as Pollan does, that the richness of the soil has an influence on the nutritional richness of food. Price’s description mirrors that of the small, independent farm supplying the local area with food, which was common before the second world war.

Moreover, Pollan writes that Price believed that “by breaking the links among local soils, local foods, and local peoples, the industrial food system disrupted the circular flow of nutrients through the food chain.” I am not sure about the disruption of nutrients, but it is those broken links we wish to restore by making some new links of our own, linking local soils, local foods and local peoples together again through social networking.

As I turned the pages, I discovered another passage that resonated with our intuitions about linking together the land, food and people though locality, food and culture using the technology of the 21st century. In the latter half of In Defense of Food the author lays out rules of thumb for escaping the Western Diet, but before doing so, he observes that food does not consist of nutrients alone, but “comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.” Our hope this is exactly what our website will do, create a web of social relationships reaching back to the land and to other people, through the farms and foodies, sharing their pictures and their recipes, a little bit of who they are with each other.

That is as far as I’ve got, but with farmfoody.org, Tom and me want to enable people to create, sustain and nurture change in our food culture, because we believe that a healthy society and a healthy people is a product of nurturing a set of relationships with food, the natural world and people.

Becoming one with a rock

I've been reading Haiku Handbook, by Higginson, published in 1985. This is a truly wonderful book, which does much to dispel the nonsense taught about the nature of haiku in Western schools. It explains the purpose of haiku is the recording of experience in a way that makes it possible to recreate the experience when shared with others. I believe this is why I am attracted to haiku, since photography is a significant part of who I am, and imagery is central to both haiku and photography. I am particularly fascinated by the teaching of the haiku poet Basho, who once said a unity between poet and subject is necessary to haiku writing.

When we say something like the Zen master can achieve oneness with with world around him, that the separation between objects and his self break down, as if he is "one with the universe" that there is no boundary between the objects and the self, this sounds like unscientific nonsense, it sounds crazy. It is either metaphysical or bullshit. When Basho talks of unity with the subject being perceived as necessary for poetry, we can think once again, this is more Asian mysticism, a kind of bullshit designed to make the simple complex and mysterious. A rational materialist would look at his poetry for formal, structural, concrete elements that explain his poetry and his creative method. Not so fast rationalist.

I believe that what sounds like Asian mysticism is just the recognition of perceptual phenomena. For some reason, Asians have been more attuned to accepting the reality of certain non-rational phenomena arising from psychology and the workings of the mind. They were willing to recognize it and try to put it into language, however vague and strange sounding, they were trying to explain phenomena the West has trouble accepting and explaining.

New science suggests that the experience of becoming "one with the universe" may have its roots in the individual entering an altered mental state in which activity in the part of the brain responsible for the sense of self independent of other things is suppressed. We know that Zen practitioners can slow their heart rate, endure pain, and manipulate the mind and body through these controlled exercises, so it is not surprising they might be able to induce a state of mind that suppresses mental activity in one area.

The metaphysical language is merely the best explanation the practitioners could come up with. They did not know about centers of the brain or areas of the mind that give rise to a sense of individuality, or that breaking down that sense by suppression of activity in a brain center might be responsible for the effect they were experiencing. I can well imagine that it must be a strange feeling should the sense of separation between my body and other objects in the room, my clock, the lamp, books on the shelf, etc. be felt or perceived as part of me. It would be much stronger in the ancient world when most of the objects around a person were simple and natural, the trees, grass, flowers, sky or the temple, lamps, clothing.

Although science recognizes sinesthesia, feeling one sense when another is stimulated, such as hearing colors or seeing sounds, it has always been treated with some trepidation and distance in the West. It is a subject science has up until recently, with the emergence of brain science, been silently ignored. I believe the reason was that it borders on the mysterious and metaphysical, although one can approach it through psychology or perhaps intuit there exists some "cross talk" in the sense perception mechanism, until the emergence of brain science, there was always a hint of the metaphysical to this phenomena.

We know now that experiences like the extending of the sense of self to everything around you and the mixing up of senses are explained as mental phenomena. We know that certain people are born susceptible to these phenomena and that some people are able with practice to induce the phenomena.

I suppose what is interesting is that when a rationalist looks at a phrase like "one with the universe" obviously that sounds crazy since it is physically impossible for a person to merge with objects, but when you try not to take it so literally, you understand what is truly meant, that it _feels_ like you are one with the universe. Moreover, the human perception of the universe, how we perceive and experience the universe, is always colored by our emotions, our thoughts, our memories. The human mind overlays upon the perceived universe a model of it, which is always present and we cannot see the world around us without this model overlaid upon it. When we look at a rock or a tree, there is the physical perception of the rock or tree, the _sensing_ of it, the texture, the dimensions, a kind of sensitometric or photographic recording of the object, as if a robot were looking at it without seeing it. But human beings do not just look, the also see, and seeing involves the overly of this map we construct, a kind of virtual reality analog of the world that includes our thoughts, memories, feelings, associations with other people and society. The rock has properties that we overlay upon it in this virtual world, the rock evokes memories of childhood spent sitting on it on a cool summer night, that the girl you used to sit on with it is now married with children and a corporate executive who does not have time for old friends, that her social standing is great in society, that you think the rock has a beautiful natural shape, that it has been moved in the last ten years by a farmer who thought it got in the way of his plowing.

This rock has an existence that extends into the social world erected collectively by human beings, it has an existence in the emotional world of the individual, it has an existence that extends in all directions into this virtual world erected by human psychology and social connections, which although are not physically a part of the rock, are just as real in their consequences. So it is possible for a person to merge with a rock. It is possible for Basho to experience what they rock experiences as if he was the rock or that the rock might speak to him of its experiences. Since his feelings are somewhat merged with the rock through an interaction with this virtual "map in mind" (extending a concept from psychology of geo-spatial perception). We perceive the rock as a rock, and it physically is separate and insensate, has no feelings or memories or membership in human society, but like the Heisenberg Effect, our perceiving it produces changes in our model of the rock in our map, which causes feedback changes throughout the map in complex ways, which changes the rock (at least as it exists in our mental map which we overlay upon it). I believe this goes a long way to explain how a poet like Basho could be so affected by objects around him, partly through an innate sensitivity (sinethesia possibly) and partly through a practiced way of experiencing the subject, intentionally breaking down the sense of self and separation in service of poetry.

The existence of such a map and the complex feedback loops that occur between the object, perceptions and the mapped object mean that human perception is a complex phenomena, like the weather, which is not likely to be explained by reductionist means, by taking it apart to see what the functions and relationships of the parts are. This has important implications for robotic design and artificial intelligence, since it means that at least psychologically, elements of the physical world become mapped in our minds and we can actually effect changes in those elements as mapped. I am not saying we possess "mind over matter" I am saying, if you read the above, that our comprehension of an object is not pure, but it is mixed, that when we come to know a rock or a tree, that it is impossible to separate the actual qualities of the rock or tree, from the psychological qualities we overlay on it. We look at the rock differently depending on our emotions, memories and social condition, which makes the rock different each time in our minds, but we are barely conscious of this, and to us they are qualities of the rock. The poetry of Basho operates on this fault line between the real and the perceived.

The separations of science and Western rationalism are false, mind and object, person and object, philosophy, mind, mental model and reality, reductionist model and reality, these all come together in a mixed way to create the reality we experience. It may be a convenience to create scientific models that simplify systems so we may take them apart and understand how they work, but we never completely understand them until we recognize their mixed nature, the hallmark of any complex, organic system. As I've said before, science will and is accommodating itself to the new reality by developing branches like chaos physics and mathematics, complexity theory and studying evolutionary systems, such as human evolutionary psychology. So it comes full circle.

Social Science and Folklore

The kind of social science work exemplified by Albion's Seed and the kind of work done by folklorists demonstrates the value of vernacular material, the potential usefulness of photographs of ordinary people and places. The scholarship of Albion is based upon two pillars, the first is social statistics and the second is anecdotal. The latter is used to confirm and explore the culture as it existed, such as Byrd's secret diary. The former is used to verify anecdotal and cultural evidence (from the diaries and art of the time). In the eighteenth century photography had yet to be invented. This means that now is the first time we are beginning to use photographic evidence, the documentary tradition, as scholars have used written documents, letters and journals.

The photograph, and recorded visual imagery in general, which includes photography, video and any new technologies in the future, such as 3d visualization, present us with both a documentary record useful collectively to social science and an individual record similar to the anecdotal one of journals. Photographs are both evidence and require interpretation. What is in a photograph we can measure and aggregate into social statistics, what is happening in a photograph is open to interpretation. This is where context becomes important, since we must rely upon the anecdotal written record, upon stories and recounting of events to understand the image. If we fail to record the social context of the photograph or reconstruct it through providing context, we fail to understand the image.

In any event, there is a connection and relationship between social science and folklore, the aggregate and the particular, the evidentiary and the anecdotal that are required and mix together to create a more accurate picture of the past.

The mind as storyteller

Jennifer Armstrong (author, The American Story) said in a talk (BookTv 1/29/07) at the Blue Willow Bookshop, "consciousness moves backwards and forwards in time." I stopped working as my mind dropped into gear and listened as she continued to talk about story telling and history. She had struck a chord in my mind with this observation. I thought how strange it is a thing to say. It seems obvious of course, since we all can move our minds back and forth over the events of our life, consider the future and reflect on the past. But it still struck me as strange.

She followed up her remark with a disclaimer reminding us that at the quantum level time is not very orderly or linear, a thought that occurred to me almost simultaneously with her first remark, a little voice rising against the implied linearity of time. However, the distinction between the mind's comprehension of time and natural time was made clear as was the capacity for the mind to create this construct of linear time in our heads out of the occurrence of events. It is a kind of tape recording of natural time in which we can move time back and forward at will. What gave rise to the strangeness is recognizing the linear conception of time and the ability to move forward and backward in it is a complete fabrication of the mind. We all think of time as obviously linear and fool ourselves into thinking that the time we move our minds back and forth over is the same as the time that exists in the natural world, but the time that exists in our mind is in reality a kind of narrative. I realized there exists a relationship between the mind's ability to move freely backwards and forwards through memory (within essentially a model of natural time) and narrative.

Although I am aware of the debate over the nature of time and that there is an argument that the mind orders time and creates it and that time may not be a physical reality, that what we know of as time is created by the persistence of memory just as a moving picture is created by the persistence of vision, the idea the consciousness moving within time was still striking. Science suggests there may be no "proper order" to the natural world and the linear way in which we perceive events may be an imposition of the mind. It suddenly seemed more important to understand this human view of time than to answer the question what time is in the physical universe, which seemed like a lesser question.

I was struck by the novelty of this idea of the consciousness moving backwards and forwards in time independent of actual time, knowing that one cannot actually move backwards and forwards in time, but the mind can, that it has the power to anticipate and reflect on time. That this storing of natural time as a mental narrative through memory, this ordering of events to comprehend them, is the basis of anecdote (the retelling of a series of events), which is the basis of storytelling. That memory ties in with narrative and natural time.

This reaffirms my belief that stories are the way the mind makes sense of the world, which consists entirely of chaotic sense perceptions. Narrative becomes the basic unit of thought. I believe stories are the way the human mind comprehends and make sense the events and phenomena of the surrounding natural world that come to it through sense perception. I believe storytelling evolved as a way for social animals to explain the world in the only terms they knew, social ones where natural events are caused by willful acts, just as in the social world all occurrences are willful acts of individuals. Storytelling is the most immediate and effective way of ordering and explaining social events. As our consciousness grew more powerful, this mechanism was adapted and extended to explain events of the nature world as willful acts powerful spirits and later people began to separate the events of nature from the supernatural actors, science slowly began to take over the job of telling the story of nature.

It might be said that the mind creates time by ordering events. I would go further than that, that not only does the mind create the ordering of events we know of as time, but that it creates "willful spirits" whose actions explain the events, which become a story. In ancient times, a willful spirit might have been a supernatural being where today the willful spirit may be a conspiracy or some other thing that may rationally be thought to exist. Since we no longer believe in capricious supernatural beings causing natural events, we choose our willful spirits carefully to accord with science and reason. Our mind still looks for the same explanations, we just sugar coat them so they acceptable to a rational society. It is interesting to note that this ability of the consciousness to move backwards and forwards in time arose, science tells us, approximately 50,000 years ago in a small group of humans who began to realize that if they found the tracks of an animal, that it had recently passed and might still be nearby. They could look forward into the future and know that if they followed the tracks they might come across the animal and make it their dinner. We take this ability so much for granted that we do not realize how significant a change this is. It is hardly imaginable, something akin to one of these experiments in simulating disability as part of making the healthy understand disability, what it must be like to not be able to perceive and manipulate time in this way. This underscores how much a part of our mind ordered time and narrative are.

In Haiku, the tree and the person, are not very separated

I was talking with filmmaker Tom Davenport today and the discussion turned to my observations of a tree outside the window of my apartment, which over many years I have observed to display fascinating changes and cycles in response to climate. The conversation turned to haiku as he likened my noticing a leaf falling outside my window on a quiet day to haiku. I was startled when he said "in haiku, the tree and the person are not very separated."

This is an idea very close to Zen. I won't go into the details of Zen belief here, but one idea of Zen is that individuals can reach a state where they feel as if there is no separation between the self and the things making up the world around them. Scientists and Zen masters may debate exactly how and why this feeling arises in the human mind, but what is interesting is the possibility haiku may represent a kind of expression or record of this kind of merging of the individual with things. I found myself agreeing with his observation. He helped me see where the haiku does in a way bring the haiku writer and the tree very nearly together.

The haiku represents the tree very differently than a Western poem might. A poet might say "I sat under a beautiful tree one day..." but a haiku might say "golden tree; a leaf falls; I hear." The haiku tends to describe the subject and the perceptions of the haiku writer, and in so doing the tree becomes less separated from the person and the person a little less separated from the tree. The example is sketchy, but I think it gets to the heart of the difference between the haiku tradition and what is commonly thought of as poetry.

The poem uses the tree as a symbol. The haiku does two very strange things in comparison to the typical poem. It takes a photograph of the tree...in that it describes the tree instead of using an adjective like "beautiful." By describing and naming what is beautiful about the tree, all readers of the haiku can reconstruct the experience of the haiku writer in the same way a photograph reconstructs the scene for which we were not present. The other thing the haiku does is tell use what feeling was evoked by perceiving the tree. In haiku, words represent the tree as itself. Natural events are represented as they happen, and does not try to tell a story. Haiku avoids telling a story.

When it succeeds, poetry is said to communicate what it is like to be alive in the world. In the Western tradition, it achieves this only while sustaining a great deal of separation between the poet and the subject of the poem (the poem tends to deconstruct the tree more than reconstruct it, in that it does not leave the tree alone, but must apply adjectives to it). In the haiku, the writer and the natural phenomena are joined in the act of happening and perceiving, brought together and recorded as if by a camera. The haiku becomes a kind of photographic record of this merging of perceiver and the perceived.

I remembered reading some years ago to avoid adverbs and adjectives in haiku, because they lead to opinions placing things in context, so that by avoiding them "the haiku is left with images of things just as they are." (http://www.ahapoetry.com/haiku.htm 2005) A strong similarity to photography exists in the haiku. I am left to wonder if the photographer and subject are not very much separated once entangled in a photograph, perhaps they do steal men's souls after all.

Racing Games Encourage Risky Driving?

By now, many have heard about a study making claims that exposure to "driving games" encourage risky behavior on the road. I can see where the effect may be real, just as the effect of violence in video games may be real, but most of these studies forget that violence itself is neutral, it is the purpose and context for violence that may be troubling. They also never seem to separate games from simulation.

As others have pointed out, there is a vast difference between a simulation and a game. I fly flight simulators (Microsoft Flight Sim, Flight Gear and X-Plane) and have done so for about ten years. You can learn a lot about flight procedures, navigation and many other elements of flight, which are modeled to a good degree of realism. You obviously can't feel the effects of turbulence. You are not likely to feel your stomach in your throat from clear air turbulence. You are not likely to feel disorientation. But the rest you can learn a lot from. I'm fairly new to racing games or simulators, but the same rule applies to racing "games" that take a simulation approach.

The object of racing is to win. You win by following The Line, or ideal course through the given track that optimizes the efficiency of running the track in order to reduce the total lap time to a minimum. To follow the line, you do not just go as fast as possible through corners, but take advantage of physics. You actually run a faster time by going slower. I've always read that in racing books, but now I know it is real. My first runs through the game/simulator were slower than than my later runs when I calmed down, tried to follow the line, braked into corners, tried to hit the apex of the curve and position myself for as early an acceleration out of the corner at the highest exit speed possible. I'm still not very good at it, but my lap times dropped considerably the better I drove.

I believe racing or driving simulators teach people how to drive well and avoid taking risks, so let's not conflate simulation and racing. You ought to get real world pilot license credit for simulation practice and I've read many reports of pilots being more quick to learn at pilot school because of their simulation experience. Real sports car enthusiasts who run the Neurburing in Germany recommend taking a few laps in the PS2 game Gran Turismo before coming to the real track. The model is pretty faithful and at least you can memorize the names, directions and characteristics of the turns. Memorizing the course is essential to racing.

The bottom line is that racing simulations require you to follow the line to achieve anything. If they model damage, they punish bad driving severely. If they model tire wear and other mechanical elements the punish hard driving.

It reminds me of A-10 Tank Killer, a game I played many years ago on the PC. While not a flight simulator, the game offered realistic military scenarios, frequently without any good solution and failure to carry out the mission or causing friendly fire (and in some occasions there was no choice) resulted in being chewed out by the commander. The game offered dilemmas such as choosing to fly to rescue a downed pilot or take out the target or both. Hard decisions have to be made in war and this game taught those lessons very well. I would _want_ my children (if I had any) to play this game. They might learn something about life. That the enemy can come out of nowhere to rip your wings off in a second from a hidden truck mounted anti-aircraft gun; that war is chaotic, that it is difficult to tell who is friend and foe, that you must make life and death decisions and no matter what you decide you may be wrong. We need more "games" like that, we need young people to play them. One rarely hears in the media how science has found evidence that games can help, such as showing that surgeons who play video games show improved dexterity. Or that medical simulation helps surgeons to practice without endangering patients. I believe from personal experience that first person shooter games can improve soldiers performance on the battlefield, that people who have never been exposed to warfare can probably pick up a lot about tactics and warfare from playing them, perhaps too much, but that is something for society to worry about, the game is not the problem. They are not "murder simulators" by any means...they may mean raw recruits who have played them come with a few qualities helpful to the soldier, such as the understanding that in warfare one must move forward into the face of fire, use cover, organize into fireteams, etc. Games are a powerful way human beings can learn, give us new ways to play, relieve stress, compete, keep our minds sharp and simulators are their older, wiser brothers who can help us to learn to avoid mistakes by allowing us to fail at tasks that are deadly when mistakes are made.

Driving games like Burnout, I tend to take a different view of, they are intended to be absurd fun, like many good games, they allow you to do crazy-fun things that are enjoyable, such as the wild drives in Halo's Warthog I've done or blowing yourself into the sky on a pile of grenades. Does that make me want to drive off a cliff or sit on a pile of grenades in real life? No, I can't believe any sensible person would take such games any differently. I think if people can keep perspective, we also need games like these to maintain a sense of the absurd and to do those things we know we'd never do in real life. One would have to be malicious or delusional to take these activities into real life.

When They Severed Earth From Sky

I also read When They Severed Earth From Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber last summer. This is another book in the gathering storm against rational purism. It also suggests an intriguing possibility, that when a society becomes literate that it loses certain capacities for understanding intuitive knowledge of the kind carried in myth.

The authors propose that myths function like delivery systems for messages, with an interesting story acting as an envelope for the myth, keeping ordinary people interested enough to pass the myth down generations, the useful information contained within the envelope. When at some future time, trouble erupts (literally, such as a volcano), the payload is delivered and people can be warned about a future event or danger. What literate people seem to unlearn when they make the transition from a pre-literate culture, is that the myth has a payload. They concentrate on the story, gods and their daughters fighting, etc. and miss the message encoded in the myth. The story is merely a "soap opera" designed to ensure the story with its payload intact is delivered down the halls of time, ready to deploy when the right circumstances arise.

This book relates directly to another book with similar themes: The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor, which discusses the resistance by ancient natural philosophers to include the fossilized remains of ancient creatures in their Linnean systems for categorizing biology. Yet, the myth makers and the followers of phenomenology interpreted these remains more accurately than nineteenth century science. This says much about creativity and science, about as Huxley once said, that that science advances by the investigation of anomalies, or in Mayor's terms, an interest in phenomenology, a curiosity about the strange and paradoxical, which science could well do with a dose of today. The intuitive and phenomenological may be vital to creativity in science and mathematics, if one looks honestly at the history of those fields.

If science had known about emergence then, how different the Greek philosophers systems for classifying creatures might have been. The possible bird like origin of the dinosaurs might have been recognize two thousand years ago.