THIS WAS WRITTEN A LONG TIME AGO, IN THE YEAR 2001
This is primarily a spiritual and social community, but I figure some of you might be interested in a few spiritual experiences reached through the intellectual route. If any of you resonate with this way of knowing and have experiences to share, I'd be happy to hear from you.
1. Most humans have a population of forehead mites (tiny bugs) that live primarily in skin pores on our foreheads. They cause us no harm but are exploiting an ecological niche we don't think about much. This is part of the web of life! The source is not the (other) web, but a published nonfiction book -- maybe the Red Queen, I'm not sure.
2. There are many people in this world who have a passionate commitment to becoming amputees -- they feel some (healthy) limb or limbs just aren't part of them (Atlantic Monthly, December 2000). Many who achieve their goals report being happier now. This stretches my notion of the imagination needed for understanding the human condition.
3. Physicists who study such things say our universe looks like a set-up for producing complexity. There are various physical constants and if many of them had values even slightly different from what they are, there might be no long carbon chains that produce life, or even no stars. Many think this coincidence is too suspicious to be chance alone. Some say this shows evidence of a Creator. There is another line of thought that looks for Darwinian evolution somehow operating on a different scale and with different mechanisms. One hypothesis is that the matter that goes into black holes shows up as Big Bangs that start other universes. Each new such universe has physical constants that may vary slightly from those of the parent universe (heritability). Natural selection operates in favor of those universes which can reproduce by giving rise to black holes, and the complexity needed to produce black holes has as an offshoot the complexity that produces life. The universe we happen to be in is the product of along line of evolved universes. What an interesting hypothesis! The specifics might all be wrong, but you can imagine a family of related hypotheses with the same properties...
4. This sentence (from Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, also the source of the previous point): "A prosthetically enhanced imagination is still liable to failure, especially if it is not used with sufficient rigor." This refers to how easy access to computer simulation tends to make people think less deeply about the problems they are simulating.
Long live life!
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4 comments:
1.
Are forehead mites a separate species, distinct from, say, temple mites or scalp mites or armpit or toe mites? If so, what are the conditions that keep each type out of the others' environments? If not, is calling them specifically forehead mites simply a manifestation of the writer's* predilection for the intellectual?
Or perhaps are our temples, scalps, armpits and toes a barren waste from the mite perspective, with only the forehead offering a survivable environment? If that's the case, does it perhaps hint at some prejudice toward mentation -- or, more likely, some equivalent of standing in the bows of a sailing ship -- on the part of nature itself? And if a mite raised this issue with other mites, would the others scoff at the first mite's grandiose notions of greater reality?
You did say that your source was nonfiction, I know, but I seem to have escaped the confines of that category.
* (Bart or the original author?)
2.
I not only find this credible, I find it difficult to spend much thought on; I greet the notion as unfamiliar, recognize how it fits, and am then casting about for whatever is next. Sort of an idiosyncratic instance of a larger issue exemplified by #4.
3.
I recollect working my way through a long and somewhat uncomfortable sequence of reasoning about complexity, and its implications for our relationship with the divine. That was more than twenty years ago, and many of the details escape me now...which only reinforces the bit I do remember: that our pattern of simplifying what we are aware of, whether it's a divine mercy, a divine joke, an evolutionary inevitability, or an improbable happenstance, is important to our survival, let alone our effectiveness beyond survival.
4.
The ability to do anything tends to atrophy to a certain point when doing the something gets easier. But so long as doing it stays that easy, that's not a problem; it can even be seen as efficient conservation of the effort involved in maintaining the ability. Ubiquitous arithmetic calculators are a notorious case in point: in the US, at least, people over a certain age are notoriously more likely to be capable of arithmetic without one, but how much does that matter?
Now, with something like disciplined imagination, there is always better worth doing. But that in itself militates against identifying a threshold of sufficiency. It would be great if everyone had a mighty and highly disciplined imagination; but the question is not only, what conditions would foster that state of affairs, but also, would existing in those conditions be worth it overall?
"Are forehead mites a separate species, distinct from, say, temple mites or scalp mites or armpit or toe mites? If so, what are the conditions that keep each type out of the others' environments? If not, is calling them specifically forehead mites simply a manifestation of the writer's* predilection for the intellectual?"
I don't know whether they are a separate species -- couldn't easily find that. Perhaps experiments with crossbreeding would be needed to determine that and maybe no one has done them. It wouldn't surprise me if they are a separate species, however. A forehead might be a sufficiently specific environment that some mite could thrive only there, or perhaps some other form of life outcompetes them elsewhere. Don't know! The link below indicates a few more of the highly specific adaptations of life.
http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~rbell/DiversityOfLife.html.gz
"It would be great if everyone had a mighty and highly disciplined imagination; but the question is not only, what conditions would foster that state of affairs, but also, would existing in those conditions be worth it overall?"
At the risk of showing insufficient imagination, I think the author's point can be confined to whatever class of people used to devise interesting theories. He suggested that before they used their imagination, and now they have moved towards a state of relying on the computer simulations too much.
Mm-hmm.
True enough, computer simulations do for us things that we used to need certain strengths of imagination for - and, for that matter, more things along the same lines, for which all the imaginative strength we could bring to bear was insufficient.
I've heard a similar alarmed complaint about movies. You know the one: 'Alas for the generation which is spoon-fed all the sounds and sights of a tale on the screen! The ability to imagine a scene from the printed page has atrophied. Parents no longer read cherished stories to their children, but simply take them to the movies. Soon very few will know the great inner wealth which their elders took for granted. Without that crucial nourishment for the strength of character which lies at the foundation of our social virtues, our very civilization is beginning to crumble; we are sinking toward an ugly, brutal, animalistic existence.'
Here's another, in this case a melancholy retrospective: "The common residual intelligence...we leave behind us the world of historical ironmasters and banker historians, geological divines and scholar tobacconists, with its genial watchword: to know something of everything and everything of something: and...we go out into the Waste Land of Experts, each knowing so much about so little that he neither can be contradicted nor is worth contradicting." - Victorian England by G. M. Young, (c)1936
Mightn't it be that the advent of this or that tool of the mind has always seemed doomed to result in the demise of valuable creativity? Having read Mary Renault's The Praise Singer, I would guess that the invention of writing was one such occasion. I can imagine the outcry: 'Words, the very stuff of thought, frozen in place! The power of conversation and discussion is doomed. This new-fangled technique will delude us into believing that we need only write a thing down and it is finished - we need never really THINK about it again!' One could compose a similar threnody mourning the invention of the wheel or the discovery of controllable fire.
No, none of these have heralded the demise of vigorous and disciplined imagination. How many people have ever really exercised that anyway? I'm inclined to suspect that it's always been a statistically insignificant proportion of the human race.
One mind can come up with a good idea in a single moment. Mostly we don't; but sometimes we do. On the other hand, it does seem to take a lot of work, and a LOT of luck, for a good idea to become anything more than a fleeting thought. And meanwhile all sorts of useless or even bad ideas keep using up the resources and opportunities, and coming to fruition while good ideas die on the vine. That's where I would choose to try to improve the odds (not that I know how!), if I were looking for ways to support the patterns that begin with a good idea and end with its realization. It doesn't seem likely that the bottleneck lies in how muscular our imagination is.
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