Molecular Storms and the Subtleties of Matter

First, links to other New Savanna posts bearing on the relationship of mind to matter:

• Galen Strawson on consciousness: the problem we face is simple, we underestimate the subtleties of matter

• Has Dennett Undercut His Own Position on Words as Memes? – In which Dennett discovers that metabolism is real

Peter Godfrey-Smith has posted a work in progress, Mind, Matter, and Metabolism (PDF), that bears directly on the issues in play in those two posts. Strawson argues that consciousness presents a problem to materialism only if we have much too simple a view of matter. Our understanding of "brute" matter has changed a great deal since the days of Descartes and Newton. Dennett doesn't express himself in those terms, but his recent reservations about computation are similar in effect. Here PGS speaks to computation (p. 2)

...with the rise of computers and AI. This work seemed to show that some aspects of cognition are mechanizable in principle, and in a non-living system. There's no question of life being present in a classical AI system, or a familiar sort of robot, and given that there seems a real possibility that such a system might capture of all of mentality, there can't apparently be too close a link between life and mind. Computation, rather than life, became the crucial bridging concept between mental and physical.

That's what Dennett thought. But he's now, sorta, realized that we've got to have life in there. PGS on "matter at the scale of metabolism" (p. 4):

Metabolic processes in actual cells occur at a particular spatial scale, the scale measured in nanometers – millionths of a millimeter. They also take place in a particular context, surrounded by water. In that context and at that scale, matter behaves differently from how it behaves elsewhere. In a phrase due to Hoffman, what we find is a molecular storm. There is unending spontaneous motion, which does not need to be powered by anything external. Larger molecules rearrange themselves spontaneously and vibrate, and everything is bombarded by water molecules, with the larger molecules being hit by a water molecule trillions of times per second. Electical charge also plays a ubiquitous role, through ions dissolved in the water and charged regions of larger molecules. The parts of a cell that do things in the usual sense – making proteins, for example – are subject to forces that are much stronger than the forces they can exert. The way things get done is by biasing tendencies in the storm, nudging random walks in useful directions, thereby getting a consistent upshot out of vast numbers of mostly meaningless changes. Moore, though not Hoffman, thinks we should conclude from all this that "Macromolecular Devices Are Not Machines." Moore thinks that a machine is a quite definite sort of thing, where low-level interactions are predictable and parts are tightly coupled. A storm-like collection of random walks influenced by friction, charge, and thermal effects, in contrast, is non-mechanistic.

Blossoms

The New Whitney in the Meat-Packing District: Blood Guts and 21st Century Art

The building was designed by Renzo Piano, a starchitect up there with Nouvel and Gehry (Flickr album). From the NYTimes, by Michael Kimmelman:

From the west, along the Hudson River, it looks ungainly and a little odd, vaguely nautical, bulging where the shoreline jogs, a ship on blocks perhaps, alluding to one of New York’s bedrock industries from long ago. It’s a glittery emblem of new urban capital, shipping now having gone the way of so much else in the neighborhood.

Yep.

The move confirms a definitive shift in the city’s social geography, which has been decades coming.

It ratifies Chelsea and the once-funky far West Village as something closer to what the Upper East Side used to be, say, circa 1966, the year Marcel Breuer’s Whitney building opened at 75th Street. Those neighborhoods serve up the same cocktail of money, real estate, fashion and art — except that the financiers, Hollywood stars and other haute bourgeois bohemians stand in for the old Social Register crowd.

Take that, Met and MOMA! 

Continuing on:

The museum’s arrival signals another shift, too. When Breuer’s Whitney opened, New York City was a much dicier proposition. His fortress, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum several blocks north — which contrived its own enclosed, spiral version of a vertical city — reflected ambivalence about what was outside the front door.

Now New York is a safe, glamorous tourist mecca and 24-hour, family-friendly spectacle, and the new $422 million Whitney building, designed by Renzo Piano, opening May 1, lets the city pour in. Grand, columnless, rectangular galleries spill onto large, stepped terraces linked by an outdoor stairway, mimicking the neighborhood’s jumble of low- and mid-rise black-tar rooftops and aging fire escapes. The museum becomes an implicit extension of the High Line: an outdoor perch to see and be seen.

Pulp Fiction as Ring Form

I watched Tarantino's Pulp Fiction last night – streamed it on Netflix. I couldn’t help but notice that something was funky about the timing of events. I tried to sort it out in my head, but gave up and consulted the Wikipedia entry (linked above). And there I found out that it exhibited ring-composition, more or less.

What made sorting things out so difficult is that the film involves three or four interlinked stories (depending on how you count them) and the episodes are not told in order. I’m not going to attempt a plot summary here; for that you should consult the Wikipedia entry. But here’s how the Wikipedia lays the story out:

1. "Prologue—The Diner" (i)

2. Prelude to "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"

3. "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"

4. Prelude to "The Gold Watch" (a—flashback, b—present)

5. "The Gold Watch"

6. "The Bonnie Situation"

7. "Epilogue—The Diner" (ii)

The film opens in a coffee shop where a young couple decides to rob the place and its customers. They begin the robbery and then that segment stops. The robbery finishes in the seventh and last segment. Similarly the 6th segment completes the story begun in the 2nd.

The 5th segment completes, shall we say, an aspect of the story that we have in the 3rd segment. In the 3rd segment Vincent Vega takes his boss’s wife to dinner, but is worried about how to treat her; he’s afraid of earning his boss’s displeasure and thereby getting killed. In the 5th segment he’s killed, though that has nothing to do with his treatment of his boss’s wife. As the Wikipedia listing makes clear, the 5th segment involves a different story line from the 3rd segment.

The 4th segment is in the middle, though its story continues into the 5th segment. The flashback sequence in “The Gold Watch” is the oldest incident in the whole film, predating all the other events (which happen in the space of a few days) but two or three decades.

Here’s the chronological order of the film segments (again from the Wikipedia):

4a, 2, 6, 1, 7, 3, 4b, 5

Wikipedia also notes: “Sequences 1 and 7 partially overlap and are presented from different points of view; the same is true of sequences 2 and 6.” Note also that the segments that frame the film, 1 and 7, are at the chronological middle.

Clever film. Interestingly enough the Wikipedia article quote Tarrantino as saying, "I wanted it to look like an epic. It's an epic in everything—in invention, in ambition, in length, in scope, in everything except the price tag." Hence the slippery ordering of things.

The Universe and Time

Some more on the recent book, Roberto Mangabeira Unger (a philosopher) and Lee Smolin (a physicist), The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal In Natural Philosophy.

Here are some passages from Massimo Pigliucci’s review, mostly of Unger’s portion of the book. Smolin and Unger think of this project as natural philosophy. Pigliucci quotes them on this:

Today, natural philosophy has not disappeared completely. It lives under disguise. Scientists write popular books, for the general educated public, professing to make their ideas about the science that they practice accessible to non-scientists. They use these books to speculate about the larger meaning of their discoveries for our understanding of the universe and of our place within it. They also have another audience, however: their colleagues in science, addressed under the disguise of popularization. (The Singular Universe, p. 82)

I’m interested in the argument about time. Here’s a passage from Pigliucci:

Time is, if I understand U&S correctly, simply the succession of causal connections between events. This succession can locally take place at a different pace, but this does not invalidate the universally true fact that certain things (like, most obviously, the Big Bang) happened before (meaning that they were causally antecedent to) others.

There are two crucial consequences of this way of looking at things: to begin with, that the laws of nature themselves can change over “time.” Indeed, they already have. U&S think that the universe has gone through at the least two phases, and possibly many more before those. One phase was the Big Bang and what happened immediately before and after. During this sequence of causal events (i.e., “time”) things were happening that did not abide to anything like the predictable regularity we see operating today, because the causal processes themselves were changing. The second phase is the one of the cooled down universe, which has gone on for billions of years now, and which can (to a good approximation, as Cartwright would say) be described as law-abiding, because the nature of the causal interactions that characterize it is either not changing or not changing appreciably. But this state of affairs may not last forever, and the universe may go through yet another period of upheaval, and so on and so forth, indefinitely.

I can go along with this. Back in my pluralist explorations I argued that the universe has evolved in several Realms of Abundance. One could see the emergence of a new Realm as requiring new “laws of nature.” I imagined three such Realms so far: Matter, Life, and Culture. As I understand Pigliucci’s exposition of U&S, those three Realms belong to their second phase, but I note that they seem to allow for “possibly many more before those.” So perhaps they could be convinced to differentiate their second into my three. In any event, I’d be inclined to add their Big Bang-centric first phase as another Realm, giving me four so far: 1) Primordial (that is, Big Bang, etc.) , 2) Matter, 3) Life, and 4) Culture. I’ve conjectured that we’re entering a fifth, which I’ve not named.

Pigliucci continues:

The second crucial consequence is that physicists should take cosmology seriously as a fundamentally historical science, to be modeled after some of the “special” sciences like geology and biology, not in the increasingly singular way in which fundamental physics proceeds. Indeed, the idea that the very regularities governing the universe change with the causal conditions appears odd only in fundamental physics, because it has been so influenced by abstract (and necessarily time invariant!) mathematics.

That’s fine with me. Historicity is very important. That, in effect, is why I treat Life and Culture as Realms differentiated from Matter. They involve different orders of temporality, different kinds of causal processes.

Theorizing the Web 2015: The Web and the World-Wide Wall #TtW2015

My proposal didn't make the cut for Theorizing the Web 2015 (currently in its 2nd day), so I thought I'd post my abstract anyhow, along with a link to my posts on the subject, something I call the World-Wide Wall.

What is the World-Wide Wall?

It's all the graffiti in the world considered as a single object.

What's that have to do with the Web?

Without the Web, it wouldn't exist as a single object.

The Web and the World-Wide Wall

The ARPANET was created at roughly the same time, 1969-1970, that teenagers were spray-painting their tags on the walls of Philadelphia and New York City. Two decades later the ARPANET had matured into the public Internet while the World-Wide Web and graffiti had become a world-wide artistic phenomenon that had given birth to street art. These two phenomena came together in May 1994 when Susan Farrell began posting graffiti photographs to Art Crimes, the first graffiti site on the web, which is still live today. Many other graffiti sites have followed. Thus the web has become an integral component of graffiti culture. The object of this presentation is to explore the possibility that the web and graffiti/street art have become so intertwined that they function together as a World-Wide Wall, a massive continent-spanning quasi-living manifestation of the human drive to lay claim to the world through artistic expression.

To make the argument I will: 1) review of the role that photography has had in graffiti culture since the early 1980s and continuing on through the contemporary web, 2) consider the recent Underbelly Project, which made worldwide headlines based only on photos (the site itself is inaccessible), and 3) examine the communal nature of graffiti on its own terms and in the terms that danah boyd developed for theorizing networked public spaces in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP 2014). Drawing on the ideas of Bruno Latour I will then argue that, while it is easy enough to argue that, yes, the world-wide production of graffiti and street art does constitute a single social being, that it is not clear what kind of social being it would be unless the people who participate in it explicitly conceptualize it as a single socio-cultural entity of a new kind. If and when we start doing that, what kind of entity would THAT be, existing as it does outside any nation-state? It is not simply that the same artists work on walls on several different continents, but that much of this work is illegal, that is, it is done outside the ‘color’ of any governing body.

Friday Fotos: Natural Delicacy

Dredging up a forgotten language out of one's past

Julie Sedivy was borm in Czechoslovakia but emigrated to America as a small child. Writing at Language Log, she notes, "Like many immigrants, I’d learned my heritage language as a child within rather constrained domestic spheres and had never used it to negotiate cab fare or discuss existential concerns, let alone describe my professional activities." She goes on to assert:

As it turns out, a language is rarely truly forgotten, merely submerged.

A number of intriguing studies reveal the cognitive remnants of previously-learned languages that have fallen into disuse. “Forgotten” languages appear to make their continued presence known primarily through re-learning; even when initial testing suggests that a language has been lost, those who have been exposed to it earlier in life often show dramatically accelerated re-learning. This has been observed in the domains of grammar, vocabulary, and particularly, phonology.

The rest of the post expands on that, mostly by talking about her own experience – she's currently in Czechoslovakia on a writing project. The comments (20 of them at the moment) are interesting as well.

This is interesting in itself, but also in the context of Dan Dennett's recent realization that, in fundamental ways, human brains are not like digital computers. The phenomenon Sedivy is describing, reactivating a forgotten/unused language, is not the sort to thing that happens with digital computers.

Abandoned dolls in a puddle, with reflections of a building and trees

The strange workings of community: in the wake of Lincoln's assassination

From today's NYTimes:

To Mattie Jackson, a runaway slave, the tidings of Lincoln’s death felt like “an electric shock to my soul.” Many refused to believe it. “I still think we must be the victims of a gigantic street rumor,” a white woman confessed to her mother.

Future disastrous events would bring the disbelieving to radio, television, the telephone and social media, but in the spring of 1865, astounded Americans could confirm reports of catastrophe only by seeking out other human faces.

As soon as Lucy Hedge saw the headlines, she dressed and left her New England home to walk through the streets, where, she wrote later, “gloom and dismay were pictured upon every countenance.” In Louisville, Ky., “distress was visible in every colored person’s face,” said one observer, while in New York, a weeping white man made his way to Wall Street to join “the crowd with sad and horror-stricken faces.”

With so many mourners looking into one another’s eyes, Lincoln’s opponents had to be on guard, for no exhibition of glee among defeated Confederates would be tolerated. In Richmond, Va., the captured Confederate capital that Lincoln had visited a little over a week earlier, “Each man looked sharp at those who passed him,” a Northern missionary wrote to his father.

This is about the transformation of shared information into mutual information. All those people who read about Lincoln's assassination in the newspaper shared that information in common. But they didn't know that each other knew. That only happened when they went out into the street and looked at one another. Then the knowledge of Lincoln's assassination became mutual.

Spring

Art online

Sylvain Levy at AsiaPacific Magazine:

Yet most private collections are still in the “Digital Stone Age”; according to the website Larry’s List, in 2014 only 12 percent of collectors around the world were found to have an online presence....

Showing art virtually is not a new concept. Our vision for Dslcollection is greatly inspired by the late French novelist André Malraux, whose concept of musée imaginaire (“the museum without walls”) advocates presenting art outside the traditional confines of a museum setting. The same can be said of the Google Art Project, an online platform where users can access high-resolution images of artworks from partnering museums and institutions. The world’s art is literally at one’s fingertips.

Collections have come to be seen more as vehicles for intellectual, cultural and social exchange than as mere assemblages of objects. Therefore, in their presentation, one must go beyond the traditional white cube. Working online offers opportunities to tailor projects to specific audiences and create content with widespread appeal and accessibility.

Branding is crucial:

We believe that the digital world provides the opportunity to create a “cultural institution without walls” as well as build a sustainable brand identity. The necessity for private collections and cultural institutions to have a branding strategy perfectly highlights the change that is overtaking the art industry today. Branding is a significant step that one must take in order to stand out, make a difference and speak with a unique voice that represents one’s personality and values.

Sylvain and his wife, Dominique, have put (part of) their own collection online as the DSL Collection (though it seems to be down for construction at the moment). There's also a Facebook page.

H/t 3QD.

Bird and shadow

Glossary of Terms for Cultural Evolution

This is a short list of terms that I have come to treat as terms of art in thinking about cultural evolution. I have no idea how stable these terms and definition will prove to be. I am posting them to a page at New Savanna so that they can be readily referenced. Most of these terms are relatively recent, but my thinking about cultural evolution is broadly scattered aross many posts and working papers and a handfull of formal articles).

Coordinator: The genetic element in cultural processes. Coordinators are physical traits of objects or processes. The emic/etic distinction in linguistics is a useful reference point. Phonetics is the study of language sounds. Phonemics is the study of those sound features, phonemes, that are active in a language.

The notion of a coordinator is, in effect, a generalization of the phoneme. A coordinator is a physical trait that is psychologically active/salient in cultural processes.

If you want to think in terms of computation, observe that computers, both abstract and real, operate on data. Some bits of data are special in that they directly influence processing by supplying the values of operating parameters. Coordinators are data of that type. Coordinators supply the values to parameters of mental “software.”

Note that coordinators are not, in this sense, Dawkinsian replicators. Nor is it obvious to me that they form lineages. Finally, where the genetic material of biology exists everywhere in the same substrate – DNA molecules – coordinators can exist on any publically accessible substrate, with most of them being either visible or audible.

Coupler: A kind of coordinator through which the temporal activities of two or more nervous systems are synchronized. When soldiers march in step the rate and length of their strides couple their motions together into a coherent ensemble. The conventions of the blues, or of a particular raga, are more complex couplers. Conversational turn taking is a coupling function too.

Cover (paint): Objects, artifacts, actions and processes, that is, actors in the mesh, are said to be covered or to be painted with coordinators.

Cultural Being: A package or envelope of coordinators along with its trajectory in the minds of all who use it. As such, cultural beings are the object on which cultural selection operates. They are thus the phenotypic entities of culture. If participating in a cultural being was pleasant, then one would be motivated to do so again. Otherwise not.

The consequences of this definition are not obvious and will require careful consideration. I’ll give an example from music to give a sense of what I’ve got in mind.

Friday Fotos: Chicago's Millennium Park

I bought my first camera about a decade ago to take photos of Chicago's Millennium Park the summer it opened. Here are some of those photos.