Making words translucent

Normally a blog about Jan Cox would not quote from someone not him, and partly because fresh phrasing goes along with fresh thinking. (Though fresh thinking is so much an understatement as to be very misleading). But, today we are quoting a newsletter by Anu Garg, about words, and today's word was:

limn -- verb tr.:
1. To portray in words.
2. To draw or paint, especially in outline. 

ETYMOLOGY:
Via French, from Latin luminare (to illuminate), from lumen (light). Ultimately from the Indo-European root leuk- (light), which is also the source of words such as lunar, lunatic, light, lightning, lucid, illuminate, illustrate, translucent, lux, lynx, and lucubrate. Earliest documented use: 1440. 

And I quote the above because the word reminded me of Jan Cox: it was a word he used to describe what he was doing on stage, thousands of nights, to enable others to see in the direction he could. A task he shouldered knowing it was inherently contradictory---using words to point beyond words.  

Jan said once, that if you don't know the origins of a word you cannot use it correctly. His example that night was 'cakewalk.'  If you can wad up lightning, lynx, lunatic and translucent, in one instant, you might also get a glimpse of what he was pointing to.

Two Seas in a Pod part -- whatever

The juxtaposition of the enterprises of science and modern religion (that part of religion which scientists think is the core of religious thinking---creationism, more about that curious confusion later perhaps) was, in a recent post, meant to highlight the similarity of science and creationism. Creationists cling to a narrative of cause and effect, while scientists build on an unacknowledged faith in free will. The similarity being in their common ignorance of their own realities. Science and ordinary religion are together, like those silhouettes that shift shape when you peer at them. Shape shifting as shadows do, using the oldest metaphor I am aware of, Plato's (Socrates') story of shadows on a cave wall--shadows cast by real objects, only already, 2500 years ago, man was confusing the shape and the substance. Or, in a better known picture by Jan Cox, the map of the picnic table, and the food thereon. Most ants ate the map. Every day now, there is more map to eat. 

Facebookless

Zuckerberg's goal has been described as to change the world, to make it more social. Who can appreciate that this is an unwitting part of the mechanical machinery of life. Who can glimpse that the founder of facebook is talking about MORE words (making our reality more verbal) , that words----obscure, words obscure that which the real thinker strives to see, and given the always brief, (brief and unearned) sight, strives to remember, the verb of wordlessness. 

Two Seas in a Pod

A real thinker, a figure such as Jan Cox in the 20th century, finds scientists and creationists alike, similar to the way the two halves of a walnut in a shell are the same. The religionists for all their talk about god creating things, they still rely on a cause and effect narrative. So-and-so created the earth on a particular day....If there is some guy with a Santa Claus beard, out beyond the universe, winking at particular people, then, what can it mean to treat narrative order as of significance?? Why not create animals before you create the planets? It is because a standard narrative of cause and effect undergirds their thinking, regardless of what they say about the powers of a deity.

About scientists, I should point out first, Jan Cox and his students treated their work as the closest you could come to real facts, in a physical and verbalizable world.  His analysis of scientists themselves are included in his talk about intellectuals, and that is not my point now.  A real thinker though will empirically and rigorously pursue an analysis of the world without preconceptions. The scientists for instance, cling to a religious structure of the world. If you doubt this, pray point out a molecule of free will.  Yet most would faint before letting that illusion go, and all forget the significance of scientific data on the subject of man's free will, just as soon as the flashbulbs stop popping in their minds. The faith of scientists in free will is touching, and very instructive. A real thinker follows the evidence regardless of its cost.

About the similarity of scientists and creationists, in a way it's an easy shot, they are both unsuspecting believers in the power of words. And they put their faith in the possibility of periods. Their hissing at each other is is the mechanical whirring of machines, who have no idea what is really going on. 

Some will find strength in their quest to figure out what is really going on, by recalling that such men as those I label now, 'real thinkers' did persevere.

Odds and odds

Some topics I may expand on, or not, this new year:

Why are Kings and Queens known just by their first names. Oh I know everybody (in the western world anyway) did without surnames til  sometime around 1200.  But that is never the whole story. Jan Cox pointed to the fact, that cause and effect are not even separable. There are always lots of perfectly good explanations for anything. Perhaps we need to shave the ideas of those scientists who refuse to even envisage this latter point.

Did Jane Austen save the world from Naziism. My point here, was, besides being cute, that there does seem to be a qualitative difference between French and English literature. What about German literature, apart from the fact I know nothing about German literature? But the English and French if you compare DIckens and Balzac, as representative of a national identity----have this difference, Dickens wants to sway your heart. Balzac wants to stab you with his pen. His deadly ACCURATE delineations would seem to leave no place for community. Then of course we need to connect Austen and Dickens, learn something more about German literature since it is perhaps too cheap to get the French in by pointing out how quickly they capitulated. My point being of course that these figures are representative. Need some work here.

Poor Jean Toomer. I was just reading that Henry Louis Gates is sorry for him because he (Toomer) passed for white. Toomer was a student of Gurdjieffs. Putting yourself in new situations and "acting" is a way to learn about yourself.  Gates is way off here.

Anti-intellectualism. Is it more than the sleeping common condition of humanity? It seems like a particularly modern form of ugliness. Which since the mind has assumed to certain distinct ascendency in modern times, might be a factor.

Words---should do an essay on how they have a persuasiveness that is not noticed. Just by being spoken, words have a compelling quality. They for a brief second have their own validity just by being spoken.

How to explain in abstract scientific terms that you will never explain consciousness in words, because consciousness IS words, and to glimpse consciousness you need to get above it.

Scale and scales

There is a story from Oriental religion that is widely repeated in the western world: a teacher points at the moon and what his students see is just his fingernail.  This story is assumed to be about the gap between words and what the words signify. But a different interpretation would not invalidate the standard meaning. Here is what occurred to me.  Perhaps this teacher MEANT his students to see his fingernail AND the moon. Maybe his story was about the gap in size between the sliver of nail at the end of a finger and the size of the crescent in the sky.  The gap between what man thinks he knows and what is to be known, or even, between what a man doesn't know, and what there is actually in terms of the unknown.

Winking at Complexity

This link is to an interesting article by a theoretical biologist, at Scipps Oceanogrphy Institute. He talks about what large changes in various systems have in common. He is attempting to link the financial collapse, the climate change evidence, and other similar events. He talks about synchronization between parts of a system, about a slowness just before the collapse, and the kind of generalization. The guy is on the verge of seeing something real. I would recommend anyone to read this article. Let me just quote a couple of parts here.

...Examples of catastrophic and systemic changes have been gathering in a variety of fields, typically in specialized contexts with little cross-connection. Only recently have we begun to look for generic patterns in the web of linked causes and effects that puts disparate events into a common framework—a framework that operates on a sufficiently high level to include geologic climate shifts, epileptic seizures, market and fishery crashes, ....

The main themes of this framework are twofold: First, they are all complex systems of interconnected and interdependent parts. Second, they are nonlinear, non-equilibrium systems that can undergo rapid and drastic state changes.

... there is emerging agreement that ignoring the seemingly incomprehensible meshing of counterparty obligations and mutual interdependencies (an accountant’s nightmare, more recursive than Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on first?”) prevented real pricing of risk premiums, which helped to propagate the current crisis.
A parallel situation exists in fisheries, where stocks are traditionally managed one species at a time. Alarm over collapsing fish stocks, however, is helping to create the current push for ecosystem-based ocean management. ... Though the geological record tells us that global temperatures can change very quickly, the models consistently underestimate that possibility. This is related to the next property, the nonlinear, non-equilibrium nature of systems.

Most engineered devices, consisting of mechanical springs, transistors, and the like, are built to be stable. That is, if stressed from rest, or equilibrium, they spring back. Many simple ecological models, physiological models, and even climate and economic models are built by assuming the same principle: a globally stable equilibrium. A related simplification is to see the world as consisting of separate parts that can be studied in a linear way, one piece at a time. These pieces can then be summed independently to make the whole. Researchers have developed a very large tool kit of analytical methods and statistics based on this linear idea, and it has proven invaluable for studying simple engineered devices. But even when many of the complex systems that interest us are not linear, we persist with these tools and models. It is a case of looking under the lamppost because the light is better even though we know the lost keys are in the shadows. Linear systems produce nice stationary statistics—constant risk metrics, for example. Because they assume that a process does not vary through time, one can subsample it to get an idea of what the larger universe of possibilities looks like. This characteristic of linear systems appeals to our normal heuristic thinking.

Nonlinear systems, however, are not so well behaved. They can appear stationary for a long while, then without anything changing, they exhibit jumps in variability—so-called “heteroscedasticity.” For example, if one looks at the range of economic variables over the past decade (daily market movements, GDP changes, etc.), one might guess that variability and the universe of possibilities are very modest. This was the modus operandi of normal risk management. As a consequence, the likelihood of some of the large moves we saw in 2008, which happened over so many consecutive days, should have been less than once in the age of the universe.

Our problem is that the scientific desire to simplify has taken over, something that Einstein warned against when he paraphrased Occam: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Thinking of natural and economic systems as essentially stable and decomposable into parts is a good initial hypothesis, current observations and measurements do not support that hypothesis—hence our continual surprise. Just as we like the idea of constancy, we are stubborn to change. The 19th century American humorist Josh Billings, perhaps, put it best: “It ain’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that just ain’t so.”

So how do we proceed? There are a number of ways to approach this tactically, including new data-intensive techniques that model each system uniquely but look for common characteristics. However, a more strategic approach is to study these systems at their most generic level, to identify universal principles that are independent of the specific details that distinguish each system. This is the domain of complexity theory.

Among these principles is the idea that there might be universal early warning signs for critical transitions, diagnostic signals that appear near unstable tipping points of rapid change. The recent argument for early warning signs is based on the following: 1) that both simple and more realistic, complex nonlinear models show these behaviors, and 2) that there is a growing weight of empirical evidence for these common precursors in varied systems.

A key phenomenon known for decades is so-called “critical slowing” as a threshold approaches. That is, a system’s dynamic response to external perturbations becomes more sluggish near tipping points. ... Another related early signaling behavior is an increase in “spatial resonance”: Pulses occurring in neighboring parts of the web become synchronized. Nearby brain cells fire in unison minutes to hours prior to an epileptic seizure, for example, and global financial markets pulse together. ...

My point in the above excerpts was not to convey the cogency of his arguments, just give a sense of his approach, so click on the hyperlink above and read the whole article.

What you will not find in the article (though he verges on it at moments) is how gravely he UNDERESTIMATES the complexity of what he is trying to analyze. Notice some of those big words, he may be waving them around like a torch in a tribal dance. But for cutting edge science this thinker (George Sugihara, a  theoretical biologist is the McQuown Chair in Natural Science  at Scripps) has done an outstanding job.