Lateral Transmissions: Steam Engenious

The Beatles got it right at the end of Sgt. Pepper, ending A Day in the Life – the contemplative fragmented waltz – with a dissonant orchestral crescendo.

I think that the next great step in pop music will be to integrate dissonance.

It’s almost ironic that The Beatles were the first – and possibly last – band to have such a famous song centered on dissonance. And even though it's only the end of the track that's notorious, the whole song really is structured around that climax.

Pop songs have clean melodic structures that are as condensed as possible. No one knew this better than The Beatles. From Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da to She’s Leaving Home, they had an uncanny ability to immerse you in a whole world in only a few minutes, catchy, compact like poetry, almost dense, like a song from a musical but better.

It’s fitting that on A Day in the Life, they went to such lengths to try to snap you out of their pristine songs, ending on a nightmarish almost unsatisfying crescendo, as surreal and dirty as their songs tend to be pleasant and sweet.

Wrote producer George Martin about that famous last chord:

What I did there was to write ... the lowest possible note for each of the instruments in the orchestra. At the end of the twenty-four bars, I wrote the highest note...near a chord of E major. Then I put a squiggly line right through the twenty-four bars, with reference points to tell them roughly what note they should have reached during each bar ... Of course, they all looked at me as though I were completely mad.

This proved to be only the start for John Lennon, who later went to absurd lengths to embody a sort of over-realism: his experiment with psychotherapeutic primal screaming – it sounds as odd as it looks on paper – and posing nude on an album cover.

Dissonance is an odd term, at once technical and completely subjective. It simply refers to a combination of notes that sounds unstable or unpleasant. You know it when you hear it, yet what is considered dissonant shifts across culture and time. Like all things when you study music, it’s about context, structure and temporal relation. When it’s employed well, it can provide a sort of driving force to music. Roger Kamien (quoted on Wikipedia) has a stimulating explanation:

An unstable tone combination is a dissonance; its tension demands an onward motion to a stable chord. Thus dissonant chords are 'active'; traditionally they have been considered harsh and have expressed pain, grief, and conflict.

You can hear dissonance here and there on the radio, but surprisingly few rock and roll bands have really integrated it into their songs. Used well and it’s as if an artist is harnessing a wild force.

Drake, Kanye West, Lil Wayne & Eminem |MTV Music

Used poorly and you have nails on a chalkboard.

Going back to Kamien’s definition, when I’m in the right mood – say, listening to the right song while driving my car at night – it seems like there’s an underlying dissonance which drives intelligence and clarity of mind. In a sense, the drive for knowledge is predicated on not being content with the current state of things. In a world of perfect contentment, there’d be no need to learn more. In this sense there’s a truth to the archetype of the happy idiot, though I’m not sure whether it says more about man or knowledge. The inability to just be content seems to have a biological correlate as well.

I just finished Robert Clark’s In Defense of Self: How the Immune System Really Works, and like the best of books it left me both satiated and thirsty for more. The first part of the book is theoretical – it lays down the general principles, introduces you to the main characters, etc. And the second, and longer, part is applied – it covers disease and immune conditions.

Naturally I assumed that the second part would build on the first, by applying the theory. On the contrary, the applied portion of the book simply went on and on like the theoretical portion. I doubt this is a shortcoming of the author, as it’s more likely a reflection of the beast itself. But I found it rather thought provoking that there should be such a sharp disconnect to begin with.

It was a bit like learning English – or what I imagine learning English must be like: There are principles, structures, and rules, but after you master them, you then spend even more time learning about nuances and exceptions.

Certainly there are theoretical principles and natural laws, but the impression that one gets is that based on some primitive defense-system, mother nature was just making shit up as it went along, constantly responding to new threats and stumbling upon new weapons, necessity giving birth some pretty wild inventions, a patchwork quilt of defense systems.

The analogy to dissonance of course is a stretch – but it’s not as much a stretch as one might think at first. Both lend creed to the a-posteri ever-changing being-at-work-staying-onself/coming-into-being approach to knowledge.

-KJ


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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)Album cover of Beatles' 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; (2)Moon up, 07/05/2009, [kane]; (3)Ralph Steadman, self-portrait.

Video: (1)Music video of the song Forever by Drake; (2)Music video, Two-Headed Baby channel, of the song Steam Engenious by Modest Mouse from their 2007 album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank; (3)Music video, cdiamond channel, of the song A Day in the Life by The Beatles from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Sphere: Related Content

Academia, of Sirens and Irrelevance

It is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields.

So writes Louis Menand of the academic institution. He continues

Since it is the system that ratifies the product…the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system.

Academia is a bittersweet institution. The cliché of the Ivory Tower pays testament to the pursuit of knowledge over superstition, dogma, and tradition, while at the same time being marred by the very same dogma it sought to remove. Nietzsche would have smirked.

Thomas Jefferson obsessed about creating a meritocracy. The backward aristocracy of Europe drove English colonists away, and despite our Anglo similarities with Europe, it still defines the primary difference between America and Europe.

The Economist drew out a practical example contrasting European aristocracy and American meritocracy. They write that Buffett’s inheritance wishes – after his death, he wants his money to be donated away from the family – would be illegal throughout most of Europe. These wishes by Buffett are completely American, intuitive, and they’re almost non-newsworthy; but as the Economist argues, they remain extreme when compared to the rest of the world, even Europe.



Academia is stuck between a few contrasting extremes. It’s attacked for its aristocratic structure – often by its very inhabitants – and yet it’s as American as baseball. The students being pummeled through it grow in number and yet tuition is constantly on the rise. It is oriented towards specialization and detailed knowledge, but it’s slow to adapt to real-time developments.

Imperfect it may be in many ways, however, history has borne out that one of America’s best strengths - like the marketplace – is its ability to self-correct its wrongs, no matter how extreme they may be. US historian Paul Johnson admires how time and again – from the Salem witch trials to the Red Scare – such ugly crises are marked not by the extreme and shameful actions that took place, but by the widespread guilt felt for years afterward.

Lingering examples of this are political debates over affirmative action; the heat of these debates makes it easy to overlook how uniquely American they are in the first place. In some cases, as in the Salem witch trial, those who carried out the heinous actions were the first to express their guilt; in others, like affirmative action, the guilt and reaction were much more insidious, extreme and long-lasting. In all, however, the underlying principle is a desire to right wrong.

Not to liken those events to academia, but the point is that its warts are correctable.

Oddly enough bits and pieces of it become more relevant. The speed of change in today’s economy – manifested by the accelerating frequency of personal career change – increases the import of basic knowledge, analytic skills, and a flexible mind. Euphemized as economic friction, these changes are the result of an odd marriage between technological improvement and material improvement, both constantly moving upward and one-uping the other.

My life often seems like a mixed bag of challenges and experiences. I sometimes try to make sense of their order, but whenever I do this it feels like I’m stringing together random beads, only to make sense of them later, so I can think they look nice and orderly. I imagine this is how Odysseus felt being thrown from one island and conquest to another.

I never enjoyed reading Homer that much, but I have to admire the historical progression from Iliad to Odyssey. The former is a primitive linear war tale, while the latter is a loose combination of fairy tale strands, one which – upon closer inspection – seems ready to unravel.

More and more this progression, from the former set of tales to the latter, seems like a parable for modern life, where academia is one of multiple strands vying for relevance. Multifaceted as its virtue and output may be, its future success – in way or another – will result from their merit, or lack thereof.

-KJ
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Thanks to Michael White at Scientific Blogging for turning me onto the topic here.

Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1)The Great Hall -Christ Church, Oxford, 09/14/2009, Lyon; (2)Terry MacMullan Classroom10, 03/06/2009, EWU; (3)Kaleidascope of Minnows, 10/26/2009, hadartist;(4)Head of Odysseus.

Video: (1)Moby - Porcelain, 07/03/2009, video, by LTUcronus, of the song "Porcelain" from Moby's 1999 album, Play. Sphere: Related Content

Lateral Transmissions: Creationism & The Scientific Tower of Babel

A few days ago I ran into the grocery store just to pick up some milk. I realized I could also use cereal, and juice, and a few other items. Since I hadn't picked up a bin, I stood at the checkout line straining to carry each individual item, looking like a buffoon. If I'd have just picked up a bin, it all would've been much easier to carry. It would’ve saved me so much energy. And you know, I do this all the time, which merely doubled my feeling of buffoonery.

On the ride back, I was chewing on a creationist argument (that an anonymous had posted here at Scientific Blogging) linking God’s creation of the world to the laws of thermodynamics. The argument seemed to rest on a loose and anthropomorphic interpretation of “energy” as something more akin to “life-energy”.

That’s an understandable mistake. “Energy” can be ambiguous. We have a subjective sense of energy, but then there’s the more objective scientific construct. In the grander scheme of things, picking up a bin in the grocery store wouldn’t have created new energy in the world. But by allowing me to optimize my muscles in accordance with the laws of physics, I would've saved energy; and for all practical purposes, I would've created it too, at least for myself, because then my muscles would've been less tired. I might’ve used the energy for some other purpose.

The flaws in creationist arguments lie in this type of confusion between subjectivity and objectivity. We’re all grateful for human life. This is a subjective feeling, though it's present almost universally. But there’s a desire to then frame the origins of life in a manner that’s as magnanimous as our gratefulness for it. Science, on the other hand, is explicitly built upon a strict separation of subject and object.

Creationism's objective/subjective mistake is understandable. The desire to commit it is as tangible as my feeling of “creating energy” had I simply grabbed a bin ahead of time at the grocery store. Afterall, to me that energy is quite real, and I could’ve spent it any number of more productive ways. But the act of picking up a bin is in no way magnanimous, or of a degree of grandeur proportionate to its subjective value to me. In this sense, the creation of life may be as "arbitrary" as the action of shifting multiple grocery items into a bag.

Beyond Creationism

The paragraphs above account for creationism's starting points or axioms, which almost always stem from man’s subjective amazement of being alive, sometimes explicitly sometimes implicitly. The rest of the creationist account can be summarized in the words, “From this, it follows”.

Herein lies the deeper mistake, which is significant because it’s shared by science as well. Godel’s refutation of logic set the most important tenant for contemporary philosophy. He proved that any completely logical system is inherently either non-complete or self-contradictory. “From this” it rarely does follow, but even if it did follow, and completely logically at that, then we still have little assurance that the account is correct.

Volumes of theology are filled with the rigid application of logic on top of these sorts of religious axioms. Parallel to this in Western intellectual history is the confusion of rhetoric for logic. Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates commonly refuted his peers by asking questions like, “What are your definitions? And how does your argument follow from them?” He would then poke dialectical holes either in those definitions, or in the inferences that were made atop them.

This sort of debate appeared so solid that it stuck for centuries. The enlightenment championed the use of reason over all else. And logic, it was assumed, was an integral part of reason.



Ever since Godel’s theorem, logic has quietly slipped out of mainstream thought, leaving a void that has yet to be adequately filled. This is partly responsible for the rise of empiricism and the need for researchers to dirty themselves with collecting data – which is likely a step in the right direction, but these data are still analyzed using similar logical systems that aren’t immune to Godel’s diagnosis. Results to empirical studies are often given an undeserved air of objectivity, as if they were irrefutable. But fundamental errors are still often made, and they can be drastic. I elaborated more on some of these concrete errors in this comment (at the Chatterbox), and in a previous post.


All of which is to say that science starts with more objective and thought-out axioms than religion, but its flaws in logical deduction might make it just as - or only a little less - wrong in the end.

The Scientific Tower of Babel

Look at history from the rule of the Church to communism. The former rule was based God, the latter based on carefully thought-out central planning. The Soviets went so far as to embrace a scientific precision in their flavor of communism, individually setting prices for up to 24 million different items. Communism was worked to almost an exact science, and it all worked in theory – and beautifully in theory some said - not unlike some of the scientific theories we have to today. Its axioms vastly differed from religion’s, as did its glorified intentions. But both failed – and drastically, and with blood on their hands – for similar reasons.

The stakes in science today are certainly milder, but each year science plays a larger role in society and policy. The difficulty in modern day science is that there’s no funding for dissenters, which leads to a lack of proper reflection. Much of science is marred by confirmation-bias, often unchecked by the peer-review process, which has just as many holes as science itself. Without the restraints that other business endeavors have, accountability is quite difficult, and experts simply argue that the scientific results justify themselves. The picture is eerily similar to that of creationism, especially when you look at basic science, which is less chained to real world results. The more I look at it, the more I've come to question its correctness. For now it certainly seems like the most logical method to advance mankind's knowledge. But I can't shake the suspension that - similar to pedestals formerly held by religion and logic - a large portion of the scientific endeavor might prove to be an understandable mistake.

Arguments from both sides of the creation/science debate – and when you look at the rhetoric used, it really is creationism vs. science – are partisan and acidic, with each side claiming higher ground. I’ve come to the point where I unquestionably side with evolution and science.

But I admit unease, however, when I turn back to look at modern-day science in and of itself. It’s not that it’s “just a bunch of theories”; it’s our awkward pursuit of science; the basic assumptions that are often left unquestioned; the centrally dispersed funding (which artificially steers science in this or that direction); the non-role of dissenters (and the lack of meaningful dialogue that it creates); and in some cases, I guess it is just a bunch of theories. In compiling all these factors, I worry that we maybe building our own scientific tower of babel. And while I in no way presume to have the solution, a suitable place to start might lie in an attitude of humility, not unlike the sort characteristic of the pious Christian.


-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photos: (1) 2005_062_17, 01/16/2006, by chuckp; (2) thε allεgory oƒ Camεra & Obscura . . , 09/23/2007, by Jef Safi; (3) Portrait of Godel, 1906-1978; (4) 2009/365/4 Non-Euclidian Geometry Snow Paths, 01/04/2009, by cogdogblog; (5) I had to stop and look up..., 11/27/2006, by Jasmic; (6) cheese making, 11/25/2008, by cdine; (7) The Tower of Babel, 1563, by Peter Brueghel the Elder.

Video: (1) Music video, 08/24/2007, by steffi51, music by the band Godspeed You Black Emperor from the song "Terrible Canyons of Static" on their 2000 album, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. Sphere: Related Content

Lateral Transmissions

Dog-breeding, the colors of pigeons, beaver dams, and beehives. These were culled from the wide array of examples Darwin uses to propose evolution by means of natural selection. Typical of former renaissance writers, Darwin wrote with long sentences and erred on the side verbosity. In order to get into his work, you have to slow your mind and get it into a certain flow. Similar to many great writers, his volumes of work now might seem to the modern reader overbearing and archaic, overweighed by infinite trivial examples. But on the contrary, his examples demonstrate how evolution is all around us, in the everyday and in the mundane. And furthermore, where was Darwin supposed to start?

You see, since reading Robert Pirsig, I’ve become absolutely hung up on this notion of lateral truths. We often try to construct our lives in order to move straight forward, but Pirsig argued that there’s more to be gained from lateral movement. The movement straightforward, he argues, simply produces more and more things – be it facts or products – atop a weak edifice of previous things. Whereas lateral movement seeks to strengthen such edifices before going forward. I think that’s why I’ve been hesitant to write about the same topics both across blog posts and within them. Unfortunately I often stop and stutter in my writing, both in the typing and in my thoughts, going back and forth and checking my ideas in various ways. I apologize for any inconvenience, as it's anything but convenient for myself. But the point is that it’s not about adding on top, it’s about consolidating seemingly disconnected pieces across a wide array of phenomena. That’s where my mind seems to be gravitating so that's where I'll go.

Darwin began his scientific career as a barnacle expert, supposedly based on the advice that in order make any scientific contribution to the world you have to narrow your focus. He was heavily influenced by geologist Charles Lyell, who set forth similar principles as Darwin’s in his study of rock-formations across the world. On Darwin's formative Voyage of the Beagle, he inspected various islands and peninsulas. Supposedly Darwin brought 3 books on the trip: Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the bible. In piecing together The Origin of Species, he also met with dog breeders and a London-based pigeon-watching society.

When you look at all the separate pieces of evidence that yielded Darwin’s conception of evolution – of which the above are a small sample – you have to ask yourself where you don’t see evolution. It’s uncannily similar to religious arguments for the existence of God – just look around you, can’t you see that there's evidence of Him everywhere?

Darwin’s theory of evolution – and maybe even people's belief in God – both serve to consolidate seemingly disparate things. It’s atop these edifices that we’re then genuinely able to move forward for some time.

Adam Smith also had an uncanny ability to construct theory atop the seemingly mundane. In a stroke of literary genius, he began his multi-volume work by discussing pin-manufacturing in Europe. This topic would certainly seem pointless to most people, particularly ivory tower theorists, but that was exactly the point - that even in such a small everyday example, you can see the workings of the division of labor. Shakespeare achieved a similar feat of specificity in his line:

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child (King Lear, Act I, Scene IV)

As a professor once told me, consider how that line would've fallen apart if you replaced "teeth" for "tooth". But if Smith's pin-making example was merely a rhetorical gimmick or a literary hook, then he would have dived straight into abstract theory with little or no return to the real world. Instead, Smith constantly goes back to the real world to support and test his developing ideas. And this gets at the heart of the study of economics, which is to pinpoint the wide-ranging and long-term effects of policy decisions on areas as specific as pin-making. (Pun intended, but it's not really a pun due to the shared meanings of 2 words).

Evolution and capitalism are unfortunately often discussed in platitudes as ideologies. But what I love about Darwin and Smith is that in their writings you can see their theories organically growing out of their observations of the world. Not that this makes their theories automatically correct, but it reveals an honesty that’s too often missing in intellectual discussion.

A lot of writing these days is reactionary and steeped in hatred – this is particularly the case in Karl Marx, whose writings have succeeded more as a polemic against the upper-class than an applicable economic system. Whenever I detect too much spite in a book or an editorial I get a sense that it has little to teach me. All that Darwin and Smith were reacting to was nature right in front them; Thomas Sowell has a similar honesty in his writings as well.

In a few passages in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig will be talking to someone who disagrees with him, and the 1st thought that will come to my mind will be, “Oh that other person is so wrong.” This is because Pirsig builds his case so well in the book. But Pirsig will go on to say, “And in a way they were completely correct.” It’s not just another rhetoric gimmick, because in time you come to see how in that way they were completely correct. When you can see how everyone is correct in their own sense, then you can really get to the bottom of things. It harks back to using Aristotles' law of non-contradiction to your advantage. The law states: "It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect". What you have to realize, however, is that one person's opinion in favor of something is not the opposite as someone else's opinion against it: They're both true in their own sense, what differs is that sense. And it's that sense that you have to drag your mind to.

What I love about all these authors is that they’re not writing with an axe to grind. The benefit of reading such original sources like Darwin and Smith isn’t that they presented the perfect the version of their theories, it's that they truly saw their theory manifested throughout nature over and over and over again. They were thinking in the right sense. And in doing so, they consolidated phenomena, made the world simpler not more complex, and laid the groundwork for others to build upon. They weren’t moving up, they were trying to get to the bottom of things. There's an aesthetic appreciation for this as well; it's why repetition, used correctly, can be so powerful. Consider the role of repetition in learning or in music. Choruses in songs aren't just effective because they're good in and of themselves, they're effective because when you return to them your mind is slightly different from when it last experienced it.



This is what I’ve been trying to do recently. It recently struck me that the solution to most problems in life – be them intellectual or personal – is to stop and think to yourself, “What’s really going on here? What’s underlying the manifestation I’m seeing in front of me?” It’s a sort of analysis, or a division of labor in the mind so to speak. In my day-to-day life, when I face personal problems, I realize that my mind goes off and I forget to analyze, or I’m not analyzing correctly. Maybe I’m just over-thinking things. But it seems like the world's problems are all just due to a lack of clarity.

Ironically I realize that the last sentence may be vague, unclear. Pirsig expresses a similar sentiment when he describes an instructional manual he's saved over the years. The manual begins, "Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind." Pirsig describes this instruction as both the best and the worst instruction he's ever seen: It contains nothing specific to putting together the bike, but it's a great, perhaps even essential, piece of advice for piecing together the bike, and in that sense, it has everything to do with putting together the bike. Pirsig goes on:

Peace of mind isn't at all superficial, really...It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself.

So it’s not just analysis in the classical sense. Sometimes you have to ask yourself about general impressions that you get, make deductions based on them, and then follow those paths down to analysis. Like impressionistic art, you’re feeling a feeling, looking at a whole, and then diving down and asking yourself about versions of meaning. Which is why there's little to gain when at the bottom of things is an emotion like hatred, spite, or an attempt to maintain one's opinion rather than to learn about the real world, the latter of which should always be the focus. I’m sure that Darwin thought of evolution before he actively sought many of the examples in his book; it’s just that after he thought of his theory, he still kept his feet firmly planted on the ground.

-KJ

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Media (in order of appearance)

Photo: (1) Dauschund evolution, 01/03/2006, Colin Purrington; (2) Paloma, 06/30/2008, by Jaoa da Luna; (4) Barnacles, 01/27/2007, by Alanna@VanIsle; (5) lateral pass in football; (6) Shark tooth fossil, 08/27/2007, howzey; (7) Impression, soleil levant, 1872, by Claude Monet; (8) water lilly pads, 11/25/2005, Sarah Macmillan.

Video: Music video, 09/18/2007, gatojph4, of the song "Somthing" by The Beatles from the 1969 album Abbey Road. Sphere: Related Content