The professional historian, along with humanists of many other disciplines, is especially concerned with a thing she has invented called "methodology". Whole books of historical writing climax with vindications of their own methodology...By these lights Herodotus does not usually qualify as an historian. He is merely a "story-teller". I rather think that he is anti-methodological, and hence a kind of champion. The irony in the modern historian's verdict comes when Herodotus is treated as source material. Whenever it has been possible to corroborate elements of his narrative or description independently, almost always Herodotus has been vindicated.page 175: super-rat. In Galapagos:
Pinzón island – home to giant tortoises, lava lizards, and Darwin's finches – is suffering an infestation of biblical proportions with an estimated 180 million rats, or 10 every square metre.page 179: development of language. A striking point: there are today more languages spoken by humans -- around 7,000 -- than there are species of mammal.
Merleau-Pontyʼs thesis of perceptual reciprocity; to listen to the forest is also, primordially, to feel oneself listened to by the forest, just as to gaze at the surrounding forest is to feel oneself exposed and visible, to feel oneself watched by the forest.
Much as humans communicate not only with audible utterances but with visible movements and gestures so the land also speaks to the Koyukon [people] through visible gestures and signs. The way a raven flies in the wind, swerving or gliding upside down, may indicate success of failure in the hunt; the movement of other animals may indicate the presence of danger, or the approach of a storm, or that the spring thaw will come early this year. The assumption, common to alphabetic culture, that ʻreading omensʼ is a superstitious and utterly irrational activity, prevents us from recognizing the practical importance, for foraging peoples, of such careful attention to the behaviour or the natural surroundings. This watching of the worldʼs gestures, as if every moment bears a meaning, accords with a worldview that simply has no notion of pure meaninglessness. No event for the Koyukon is ever wholly accident or chance, but neither is any event entirely predetermined. Rather like the trickster, Raven, who first gave it its current form, the sensuous world is a spontaneous, playful and dangerous mystery in which we participate, an animate field of powers ever responsive to human actions and spoken words.page 180: Sufi brotherhood. That is, the Brethren of Purity.
Nature allows every child to play tricks with her; every fool to have judgment upon her; thousands to walk stupidly over her and see nothing; and takes her pleasure and finds her account in them all.-- Goethe
The wealth of the soul exists in images. I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.-- attributed to Jung
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| This one is real |
The principle imaginary beings in Embassy Town are the two-mouthed Hosts. Early in the book, however, the narrator refers in passing to the Hai, putative beings deep in the immer, the beyond-space that underlies or infuses the manchmal, or "this space where we live"The Mulefa in The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman:
"I've spoken to [space] captains and scientists who don't believe [the Hai] to be anything like life, only aggregates of immer, their attacks and jackknife precision just the jostles of an immer chaos in which our manchmal brains can't learn to see the deep random. Myself, I've always thought they were monsters."
These elephant-like creatures lack a central spine but instead have a diamond-framed skeleton. They have four legs, short horns, and a prehensile trunk. Signing with the trunk is an integral part of Mulefa language. Lacking two hands, it usually requires two or more Mulefa trunks working together to accomplish complex tasks like tying knots.A creature in The Road by Cormac McCarthy:
The Mulefa use large, disc-shaped seed pods from enormous trees as wheels. The pods fit neatly onto a spur on their front and rear legs They propel themselves using their two side legs, like a cyclist without pedals. Ancient lava flows solidified into smooth rivers of rock run across the land and serve as roads.
In the dream from which [the man] had wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.Wentshukumishiteu
Wentshukumishiteu is said by the Inuit to fiercely protect the young of various animal species from human hunters. It is particularly fond of otters. It can travel anywhere on or under the water, and can break through thick ice. It can also move underground through rocks.
For more than twenty-five years, scientists have known the exact wiring diagram of the three hundred and two neurons in the C. Elegans roundworm, but in at least half a dozen attempts nobody has yet succeeded in building a computer simulation that can accurately capture the complexities of the simple worm’s nervous system.-- Gary Marcus.
Chickadee eyes...perceive more colors than mine can. I view the [ground] with eyes that are equipped with three types of color receptor, giving me three primary colors and four main combinations of primary colors. Chickadees have an extra color receptor that detects ultraviolet light. This gives them four primary colors and eleven main combinations, expanding the range of color vision beyond what humans can experience or even imagine. Bird color receptors are also equipped with tinted oil droplets that act as light filters, allowing only a narrow range of colors to stimulate each receptor. This increases the precision of color vision. We lack these filters, so even with the range of light visible to humans, birds are better able to discriminate subtle differences in color. Chickadees live in a hyperreality of color that is inaccessible to our dull eyes.It may be possible one day, far in the future, to engineer something like this in humans. At present hallucinogenic drugs offer an impression or illusion that we can perceive colours far beyond the normal realm of experience. Oliver Sacks [1] reproduces this account from a young man who was a subject in an LSD study at Columbia University in the 1950s or 60s:
The room about me receded into a tunnel of oblivion as I vanished into another world...The heavens above me, a night sky spangled with eyes of flame, dissolve into the most overpowering array of colors I have ever seen or imagined, many of the colors are entirely new -- areas of the spectrum which I seem hitherto to have overlooked. The colors do not stand still, but move and flow in every direction, my field of vision a mosaic of unbelievable complexity.Sacks reports that a combination of amphetamine, LSD and cannabis allowed him to experience a pure indigo:
It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved -- never achieved, perhaps, because the colour of heaven is not to be seen on earth. But it had existed once, I thought -- it was the color of the Paleozoic sea, the color the ocean used to be. I leaned toward it in a sort of ecstasy. And then suddenly it disappeared, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness that it had been snatched away. But I consoled myself: Yes, indigo exists, and it can be conjured up by the brain.A few months later Sacks briefly experienced 'indigo' again with the aid not of drugs but the music of Monterverdi.
It makes no difference what men think of war...War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.page 160: Mao Zedong. See this review of Tombstone by Yang Jisheng and four other books.
Thinking of an [artificial general intelligence] as a machine for translating experiences, rewards and punishments into ideas (or worse, just into behaviours) is like trying to cure infectious diseases by balancing bodily humours: futile because it is rooted in an archaic and wildly mistaken world view.page 164: the now-famous 'mirror neurons' Taking a contrary view, Gregor Hickok says there are Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans. (Thanks to Roman Krznaric for drawing attention to Hickok's paper.)
...risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue. So it appeared that humans are forever conflicted by their prehistory of multilevel selection. They are suspended in unstable and constantly changing locations between the two extreme forces that created us. We are unlikely to yield completely to either force as an ideal solution to our social and political turmoil. To yield completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would dissolve society. To surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots — students of insects call them ants.See also Paul Seabright and Mark Pagel. Paul Gilbert says "the recognition that both our evolved minds and our social context shape us, and that we have less control over our minds than we think, is to me a call to compassion."
...My argument is [that] because we don't understand animal consciousness, we ought to be opening our eyes to the possibility that a great range of animals, not just mammals, not just birds, maybe invertebrates are conscious as well. It seems to me that by saying we don't understand consciousness, you're not closing off animals' consciousness. You're not denying animal consciousness altogether. You're just simply saying we don't know and therefore it might exist in a much wider range of animals...-- Marian Stamp Dawkins
Among his many skills, Chuang-tzu [or Zhuangzi], was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. "I need another five years," said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.-- quoted by Italo Calvino in Quickness, one of Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
Scientists have for the first time used DNA to encode the contents of a book. At 53,000 words, and including 11 images and a computer program, it is the largest amount of data yet stored artificially using the genetic material.An early analogy between the material (and living) world and language is found in De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, which argues that:
just as the elementa (letters of the alphabet), limited in number, are common to many different words and combine in many different orders to produce the different words included in the verses of the poem, so likewise the different kinds of atom, though limited in number, combine in different ways to produce humans, animals, plants, and all that exists.page 143: The 101834097 books in the Library of Babel. This figure is from The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch which was reviewed by Alberto Manguel here.
The interconnected and interdependent nature of things is the heart of ecology. It is also remarkably similar to the fundamental insight of Buddhism: ‘dependent co-arising’ or pratītyasamutpāda in Sanskritpage 149: Beauty [can help us] see that things exist independently of our own attachments. So, most famously, "there is grandeur in this view of life..."
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terrorpage 134: Metallogorgia looks like a delicate, pink acacia on top of an impossibly thin trunk:
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.
It seems to me that if we look back at much of what is most radical and interesting in the art of the last century, we can see that we are no longer dealing with the sublime or indeed with art as the possibility of aesthetic sublimation, but with an art of de-sublimation that attempts to adumbrate the monstrous, the uncontainable, the unreconciled, that which is unbearable in our experience of reality.page 136: in translation, the full title of Kepler's Mysterium Cosmographicum is Cosmic Mystery, or The Secret of the World. Forerunner of the Cosmological Essays, Which Contains the Secret of the Universe; on the Marvelous Proportion of the Celestial Spheres, and on the True and Particular Causes of the Number, Magnitude, and Periodic Motions of the Heavens; Established by Means of the Five Regular Geometric Solids
much (and perhaps most) of the order that we see in living nature is an expression of properties intrinsic to complex dynamic systems organized by simple rules of interaction among large numbers of elements.Compare Henry David Thoreau and William Donald Hamilton. This is from Spring in Walden (1854):
Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom.And this from Between Shoreham and Downe: Seeking the Key to Natural Beauty (1996) by W. D. Hamilton:
The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank—for the sun acts on one side first—and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me—had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype.
I remember as a startling gift of nature my first sight of how oil spreads on a pool and makes it become alive with colours; how easy it was to cause this magnificent display again with a drop from the household can. I remember as a favourite environment the bare ploughland at the foot of our garden where amid screaming lapwings I would wander hunting for colourful flint stones and fossils.. In the same field again after rain I remember how at the lower end, water coursing in the furrows laid out flat deltaic fans of pale silt beautifully marked. Firm underfoot to a first step, if trampled a little, these fans, losing their braided patterns and turning to mud would suck my bare feet down as if with a living appetite.
We can contrast two distant relatives: the intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli and its host, ourselves. We span the spectrum of complexity in living organisms: the bacterium has minimal capability for perceiving and reacting to short term changes in its environment, whereas the major portion of our body is devoted to these tasks.
E coli commit less than 5% of their molecular machinery to motion and perception, allowing the simplest responses...Our bodies, in contrast, are built for specific, directed motion under the control of detailed, reasoned perception. The bulk of our body weight is dedicated to sense, reaction and motion. Cells in our retina are filled with arrays of opsin proteins for sensing light, light that is focused by layers of eye lens cells packed full of clear crystallin proteins. Cells in our skin spin enormously long strands of keratin protein into hairs, and other cells sense their slightest movement. These and other sensory data are transmitted and processed by nerve cells that carry electrical currents propagated by proteins and insulated by concentric layers of lipid. Fine control of movement is accomplished by an enormous skeleton of mineralized bone cells, moved by muscle cells filled with proteins that do nothing but contract, all glued together by connective tissue cells that build tough layers of sugar and protein. However, the common thread of life on Earth still shows through the diversity, tying the simplicity of the bacterium to the complexity of our bodies. All of these unique molecular machines are built of the same four molecular components -- proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and polysaccharides.-- from The Machinery of Life by David S. Goodsell.
Musical performance is associated with powerful beings and is a means of communicating with them although it is not directly addressed to them...Communication may be said to occur not by singing to a powerful being but by singing it into being. Highly focussed mental images are created in the minds of the performers by means of their performance...There is a consequent merging of the self with what is sung about; just as in myth powerful beings participate in human speech, so in ritual humans participate in itseke [powerful being] musicality and thereby temporarily achieve some of their transformative power.Because music is so powerful, it can also be applied to destructive ends. So, for example, while evidence suggests it was the British government which pioneered a particularly effective combination of torture techniques (stress positions, starvation, hooding, sleep deprivation and white noise), music rather than white noise has been used by others in attempts to break down psychological integrity. Examples include this by the Nazis and this by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush.
Human beings, like no other animal, have culture, we can exert some control over nature, and we’ve made life-changing inventions. We’ve built cities, nation states, governments, we’ve created language, we’ve invented the alphabet and other forms of written symbol and produced art and literature. We can diagnose illnesses and cure them, we have a sense of right and wrong and we have a sense of where we want to take society. Animals don’t have any of those things.The Earth systems scientists Tim Lenton and Andrew Watson think human language (which, of course, enables arts, institutions, and science) is one of eight major revolutions in the history of life. (See page 167 and their book Revolutions that Made the Earth.) More than a few philosophers (among them Mark Rowlands) and primatologists (among them Frans de Waal) would disagree with Guldberg's claim that a sense of right and wrong is unique to humans. There is good evidence, too, for culture in (among others) chimpanzees and dolphins, albeit vastly more limited than in humans.
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| Mars analemma |
There is another you, sitting on an identical Earth, about 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 120 light years away. Other pocket universes will contain entities of almost limitless power and intelligence. If it is allowed by the basic physical laws (which, in this scenario, will be constant across all universes), it must happen. Thus there are unicorns, and thus there are godlike beings. Thus there is a place where your evil twin lives. In an interview I asked Greene if this means there are Narnias out there, Star Trek universes, places where Elvis got a personal trainer and lived to his 90s... Places where every conscious being is in perpetual torment. Heavens and hells. Yes, it does, it seems. And does he find this troubling? ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘Exciting. Well, that’s what I say in this universe, at least.’-- from World Next Door by Michael Hanlon. The Leatherback chapter of my book concludes:
Watching the baby Leatherbacks going like the blazes for the black waters where the majority of them would be eaten by other animals before they grew any bigger than a child’s fist, and where most of the survivors would probably be chewed up in the meat grinder of human civilization, it was nevertheless possible to feel that Schopenhauer’s vision of the world as a place of endless pain and suffering was mistaken. Some small proportion of these young turtles might just survive and return as adults and haul the heavy rock of their own being, now two thousand times as heavy as when they left, once more up the beach. As the stalwart atheist Albert Camus put it, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. And it seemed possible that somewhere, in the innumerable universes, the gods were smiling.
In the fourth century BC, Zhuanzi wrote of an old man tossed in the tumult at the base of a tall waterfall. Terrified onlookers rushed to his aid, but the man emerged unharmed and calm. When asked how he could survive this ordeal he replied, "acquiescence...I accommodate myself to the water, not the water to me." Lichens found this wisdom four hundred million years before the Taoists. The true masters of victory through submission in Zhuangzi's allegory were the lichens clinging to the rock walls around the waterfall.-- from The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell.
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| Lichen on rowan tree in Llyfnant valley |
I stood on the grass with lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance...I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.page 113 technological stomatopod. John Grotzinger, the project scientist for Mars Science Laboratory mission, i.e. Curiosity, writes “several of our 17 cameras watched [the stone rounded by stream abrasion] disappear over the horizon.” Grozinger sounds like a whole human being:
in my mind’s eye I can picture the different scenarios that could bring that little stone into existence. And to a planetary geologist, each and every one of them has its own inner and outer beauty.
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| Curiosity: self-portrait |
The Dead
Our business is with fruit and leaf and bloom.
Though they speak with more than just the season's tongue –
the colours that they blaze from the dark loam
all have something of a jealous tang
of the dead about them. What do we know of their part
in this, those secret brothers of the harrow,
invigorating the soil – oiling the dirt
so liberally with their essence, their black marrow?
But here's the question: are the flower and fruit
held out to us in love, or merely thrust
up at us, their masters, like a fist?
Or are they lords, asleep among the roots,
granting to us in their great largesse
this hybrid thing – part brute force, part mute kiss?
I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives. Every glistening egg is a memento mori.page 93: an attitude vaguely adequate in the face of [death]. Michel de Montaigne wrote:
To philosophize is to learn how to die: Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die, has unlearned to serve.In The Hit, a 1984 gangster film, Willie Parker (played by Terrence Stamp) seems to be living with this attitude (see this clip) but looses it in the end (see this clip).
