the discovery of a 140 year old supernova reminds me of julian barbour’s remark (can’t recall where i heard it…) concerning so-called “deep” time – the age of the earth, for example. to paraphrase he said that we know how “old” the earth is by studying rocks that exist right now.

this image, btw, is a careful composite of a 1985 radio image (blue), with a 2007 x-ray image (red) of the ‘same’ event/location.

more information

“the past isn’t even past” Faulkner

..a methodology for othering ourselves from the present?

Herb Simon, in Sciences of the Artificial, describes design as ‘concerned with how things ought to be – with devising artifacts to attain goals.’ Professionals, according to Simon, work to ‘transform an existing state of affairs, a problem, into a preferred state, a solution.’

Design, in any field, seeks to problematize a given moment by identifying a specific problem, and providing an artifact (an object) to solve that problem. Think about a button on a website, and all that goes into creating an atmosphere that leads one to click on that button, or a pill prescribed by a doctor, or any action undertaken to resolve a specific problem by taking a specific action that promises a resolution in the future.

The artifacts of design identify a specific problem by, essentially, contributing to an atmosphere for that specific problem to become prominent. The resolution of that specific problem suggested by the artifact (click the button, take the pill, etc.) seems to lead, inevitably, to another problem in another aspect of one’s experience, and so on. We seem to be temporally distending our lives into the past and future as we attempt to resolve the various problems we encounter at each moment, using the present as a weigh station.

Think about how often your sense of need is being stimulated, and how that sense of need seems to be only temporarily quelled by whatever actions to take.

In short, and for me, now, design seems to be a methodology for ‘othering’ ourselves from the present, and focusing our decisions within any moment towards a goal that exists in the future: design is based on an idea of ‘how things ought to be’, and is different from an exploration of ‘how things are’.

How things ought to be is a point of view that implies, and relies on, a temporal form composed of the past, present, and future, where the past leads to and influences the present, and where the present leads to and influences the future, exclusively.

How things ought to be requires clearly defined needs, and clearly defined goals, and seems to produce an individuated state of being.

Parenthetically, How things ought to be, as social policy, produces a group rife with frustrated members, whose attempts at resolving their needs simply produces more need, elsewhere.

How things are, on the other hand, requires close attention to the present, and a practice of integration of, and empathy for others’ experience – as others’ expression of their experience are essential aspects and observations of the shared space of now. The ‘goal’ of any methodology that explores the present is an increase in empathy first, and then an opportunity to consider the resulting integration second. As soon as one begins to judge, rather than work to integrate with, either one’s own or another’s expressions then one begins to see things within the context of how they ought to be. The practice of integration, evolving from a careful application of empathy, will inevitably produce unexpected results, but if one takes empathy as the primary method then the concrete results and goals are secondary. Think about it.

I’m reminded of a friend of mine who, in response to a dialectic argument, is fond of saying, usually at the moment of clearest polarity, “isn’t it both?”

To me, art making has the potential to be part and model of such a practice of integration (my previous post is concerned with this). In speaking with an artist friend who recently thought about switching galleries to help her sell more work, and then, after a frustrating meeting with the more ambitious gallerist, my friend realized that making work for pay wasn’t for her. She sells quite a bit of work, actually, but chooses not to aggressively market herself. I realized that when art becomes professional and its goals can be clearly defined and methodologies can be developed to produce repeatable results (tools and methodologies can be developed to produce specific results within specific timeframes, etc…) then the art has become an aspect of design. And that is fine, but, for me, the two exemplify differing and essential qualities of the human experience.

So, is it both? Yes, but I feel that many of us have tipped the balance, significantly, toward design (the presence of digital technology, with its emphasis on information and repeatability has accelerated this) and the result is a peculiar rush towards integration implied by the ideas of the www, but deployed via the methods of design – so that each gesture of integration is predicated on problemization, and each resulting connection inevitably becomes the next problem, and so on, so that here becomes an interface to elsewhere.

This reliance on the methodologies of design at this time, as we seem to be in a particularly integrative phase of cultural development, seems to be producing some odd cultural formations, as well as frustrating many integrative gestures, while slowing down our evolution towards a form that may be significantly different than our recent past. In order to bloom, this evolving form may require us to let go of the railing, surrender our dependence on clearly defined goals, and adopt a practice of empathy and integration that will permit us to move on collectively.

C.S. Peirce (1839-1914)

“..consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the objects” from C.S. Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear

“…he had in mind that a meaningful conception must have some experiential ‘cash value’, capable of being specified as some sort of collection of possible empirical observations under specifiable conditions. Peirce insisted that the entire meaning of a meaningful conception consisted in the totality of such specifications of possible observations.” R. Burch, Charles Sanders Peirce, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2001 Edition).

The following thoughts come to mind:

Evolution has certain mechanical aspects described as adaptation and change manifest, observed, and studied in the form of physical attributes of a given subject (a species is the most common, but it seems that other phenomena may also be subject to evolution: i.e., the laws of physics). It seems to me that another aspect, or index of our evolution can be understood as the work we do collectively to understand the aspects of our experience that are not visible in the same way skeletal remains are visible.

As we try to develop meaningful conceptions, or increasingly accurate models of our experience perhaps we must learn to accept intuition and instinct as valid, empirical observations (in addition to other empirical observations). Yes, they are understood as subjective, and don’t perform well in the abstract world of the lab, but the issue may be that they are in fact collective and are an index of the here and now distributed among a group that, to be understood, require a method for expression and sharing, and this method will differ from the methods of fact based inquiry, but, to me, it is essential that we integrate this aspect of our experience. Presently we seem to prefer to simply dismiss them as subjective noise at best, and, at worst, to stigmatize them.

What is needed, I think, is a practice that incorporates the unknown as unknown (the intuited, instinctual, etc. as such, as opposed to converting them to facts) into any empiric understanding – in other words every meaningful conception doesn’t have to be based entirely on fact.

All of us understand the world via some mixture of the known (fact) and the unknown (intuition). We need to work to create models of our experience that are more accurate in their modeling of our actual experience – as opposed to systems which operate on how we think things should be. It seems that for some, the unknown is something that is proportionally, and perhaps rightfully, eliminated with the advance of factual information. The unknown is somehow the enemy of the known. I don’t understand that at all.

The unknown is an aspect of the known – one doesn’t exist without the other, and when we marginalize the unknown, when we ‘other’ it from our discourse we unwittingly limit our potential for deeper, more accurate and useful knowledge. I would argue that when we claim that we’ve figured it all out we’ve probably figured out a way to more successfully narrow our focus and ignore more. Our current culture of expertism seems to have stigmatized the unknown. How often do you hear a professional in any field, while discussing some aspect within their purview, admit to not knowing something or simply being wrong? How often have you spoken to someone traumatized into a radically: narrow, conservative, and homogenous lifestyle by the specter of the eternal faux pas in the omnipresent, deeply archived, and imminently searchable www? I had a long talk with an eloquent student on the train last week who expressed such concerns, “it’s not worth the risk of doing anything that might come back to haunt you, because everything you do is recorded, literally.” Whoa!

I wonder if we haven’t ritualized our marginalization of the unknown in practices like the lottery. Some casual research on my part suggests that the results seem impervious to intuition, instinct, and hunch – and seem very much to be the product of ‘pure’ luck, or, in other words, randomness – which is to say when the machine happens to spit out the same numbers you’ve managed to spit out, you win, and often the winners admit to either using the same set of numbers repeatedly, or using the quickpick option. Trying to intuit your way to the lotto jackpot, in other words, seems to be ineffective and teaches, I think, that playing hunches is for fools – or, at least, not how the pros do it. I should add that it may be the case that on smaller wagers (sports, for example) instinct and hunch may be effective – it seems though, that at the larger, lotto/mega-millions level one’s hunch seems not to work. To me, this indicates that we have figured out a system that, at specific scales, seems essentially immune to meaningful, instinctual observation. I wrote, ‘at specific scales’ – the systems, like the lottery, can be observed meaningfully and intuitively, but we choose to prize (literally) the scale that we can’t feel.

The intuitive, unknown, element of the lottery is its’ meaning, significance, message, affect, in general – its’ overall quality, or suchness within our experience at large. The “what does it tell us about our society and each other?” question that is an ongoing impetus for interaction and discussion, and doesn’t resolve to a specific set of numbers. The lesson of the lottery, perhaps, is that hunch based conjectures don’t have cash or real value, and as such, don’t work, so let the machine do it…. At least that’s what I’m wondering about today, and with our computer mediated culture I’m concerned that we’re becoming a bunch of fast-paced bottom-liners increasingly disinterested in what can’t be clearly: defined, repeated, transmitted, and used.

But we need our instincts and intuition, they are an essential aspect of who and what we are.

As I just heard someone say over the radio earlier today in regard to the Iraq war, “anybody can understand with facts, this war was sold to us via facts that turned out to be wrong, and we all bought them. Where are the people with good instincts, and why haven’t we been listening to them lately?”

Spring brings birds. Listening and watching a cardinal while waiting for a train I thought about how we (ok, I…) easily understand the song as the result of a decision the bird made to sing, an intentional act on the part of the bird that amounts to projecting sound out into the environment. The sound is an index of the bird’s will; the environment is an audience.

It occurred to me that the song of the bird could just as readily be understood as an action of the environment where its’ will is expressed by sound emitted from the bird – as if the environment elicits the song to satisfy some need of its’ own.

Maybe it’s both. Perhaps will is distributed between participant and environment, and expression is a connective gesture that we have learned to describe and understand as an event which breaks the environment into discriminate parts (imagine a bolt of lightning, an action, and an observer).

I think we tend to see expression, essentially, within a broadcast paradigm where the individual trumps and dominates an otherwise passive environment, where, in truth, the expression is a collaborative effort whose qualities (how we experience them) can be understood to reveal aspects of the persistent interrelations of elements comprising any given moment and place.

When we choose to ‘audience’ ourselves we are limiting our engagement with the present and quite probably slowing our evolving understanding of our experience and our world. When we ritualize the practice of ‘audience’ we are institutionalizing this slowing of knowledge, and quite probably becoming a collective drag on the other elements within our environment, but that may be a topic for another post.

Saw this message on my way to work and it reminded me of something Allison Okamura – a mechanical engineer and computer scientist with a focus on Haptics at Johns Hopkins, told me concerning the physiology of grasping and holding.

Upon taking something in hand an interesting pattern of clenching, relaxing, sensing the object slipping (via the ridges/folds on the walls of an organ called rugae, in this case the organ is our skin, the specific location the fingers and hands), then clenching and relaxing, sensing the slippage, repeat, until we no longer wish to hold on to the object any longer.

It occurs to me that much of our nervous system functions along the same line – we respond to changes in state, and if there are either no observable changes in state, or if the changes in state become either noise or a drone (a pattern of change that doesn’t vary) then we don’t notice them.

So, “it” whatever “it” is, is “there” (experienced), because it “bothers” (or calls attention to) us.

So, “it” is an experience of change, and depending on other variables “it” can be: time, love, hunger, art. “it” is a quality of change, and our bodies are dynamically and persistently linked, and a participant in, these fluctuations.

I remember reading something by Dr. John C. Lilly where he mentioned that after prolonged time in a sensory deprivation chamber subjects would emerge without a sense of their name, age, where they lived, etc., and it was only after about thirty minutes out of the tank that this information returned to them.

To me, this indicates that who and what we are is the result of a persistent coupling, a pinging, of the environment that occurs, metaphorically, with each heartbeat – as if “we” are periodically dissipated and reassembled, and the resulting self is always dependant on the fluctuations of whatever we share our space with. The probability that the majority of the dissipation/reassemblage cycles among all of the elements within our environment will have a consistent quality that we experience and express as: time, history, identity, etc… persistence = resonance, in other words, and resonance has specific qualities that we term: time, history, identity, art, love, etc. Perhaps…

The point is that some graffiti I saw on my way to work made me think that we live in a dynamic environment comprised of degrees of change whose forms and experiences seem may be based on probability and a resulting resonance.

Julian Barbour, in his book the end of time, refers to our environment as configuration space.

A friend of mine’s brother, Tim, has some phobias.  One of them is about stairs and escalators.  When anxious he refuses to use them.  My friend (Bea) often asks her brother to let her know if he’s feeling uncomfortable. He seems more willing to express his phobia verbally, and in advance of encountering stairs/escalators, when they are alone together.  Surrounded by strangers, like at a mall, he seems unwilling to tell her he’s feeling anxious, choosing instead to wrestle the anxiety on his own.  He often loses these contests, and an awkward, public moment of ‘aberrant’ behavior ensues.

 This has happened enough so that Bea has been able to observe and note both Tim’s behavior/response and the public’s behavior/response.  She characterizes both as ‘crude’ and ‘awkward’.  Tim suddenly stops or pulls away from the stairs or takes a few steps and then retreats, won’t look at anyone directly (even her), and then refuses to talk about what is going on. The public, by and large, do nothing, or simply get pissed-off, scowl, occasionally mutter some things to themselves, and also avoid any conversation or dialogue (like, “are you ok?”).  Both parties seem to want to just get past the awkwardness as soon as possible while acknowledging that the experience was not acceptable, and have nothing further to do with each other.

 Bea tells me that she’d like to try to anticipate these episodes but feels like she needs more information in order to do so.

 To me, this is an side-effect of decorum (appropriate behavior) and illustrates how rules governing proper behavior have the effect of arresting our own potentials for more detailed understanding of experience.

 Tim is responding to and expressing aspects of the agora.  His actions and experience have just as much to do with him and with everyone around him, as they do with the design of the spaces where these events occur.  There is, potentially, a wealth of understandings waiting to be explored in regard to behavior and environment that might benefit a significant group of people.  Instead, we end up with seemingly pat, clumsy, and hopeless responses.  When neither Tim nor anyone else will spend any time exploring those awkward moments in situ, the events remain vaguely defined (and experienced) by grunts and grimaces, instead of understood, described and explored by nuanced language.  Language is, obviously, a major tool for sharing and learning.  When we lack the words to express ourselves accurately we tend to become individuated from the collective – segregated by our inability to share our experience and thusly disconnected from others.

 It has been said that metaphors are the tools of knowledge.  Think about how many metaphors you have at your disposal for so many aspects of your experience and how using those metaphors allows you to broaden your understanding and experience of countless aspects of your life.  Think about how your ability to express your experience is related to your ability to engage with, and connect to others; an essential aspect of the human experience.  When experience can be accurately represented it can be shared and can be a basis for mutual understanding and integration.

 Choosing to divide aspects of experience into acceptable and unacceptable (whatever that means) is one thing.   Not participating in the exploration of experience – direct, ‘real’, ‘first-hand’, experience like the episode described above, whether acceptable or not, is akin to arresting one’s (and one’s culture’s) own capability for intellectual growth and understanding.  Choosing a grunt or a scowl (or a ‘nothing’) in response to a complex public event involving another person in apparent trouble implies subservience to rules and regs over innate human empathy and curiosity.  Projecting this model forward, what sort of future do you imagine?

 We need better metaphors, and must work on developing nuanced expressions providing more accurate understandings of events and experiences we participate in to facilitate interaction with others. Such interaction inevitably fosters greater understanding and empathy, and often implies evolution and change.  The alternative is a developmental path (things change persistently, and our participation in this change has a palpable effect on the quality of our lives and on the forms our culture takes) of diminishing returns as we narrow our point of view and individuate from each other into a mash-up of misunderstood factions.

 Artists, Scientists, everyone thinks and models (as in builds things that embody key aspects of experience for the purpose of sharing and exploring them with others), and these models become discussion points that bring us closer as I, for example, find an aspect of what you’ve chosen to describe resonates with something true within me, that I haven’t been able to express, until now.

 I think about the areas of experience that I can readily discuss, and about the real but ill-defined aspects that I look forward to figuring out with you.  I imagine that if I accept whatever you express with empathy first, and judgment, if at all, later, we’re off to a decent start.

 Or maybe Tim could just medicate himself; apply a pharmaceutical on/off switch to any unacceptable behavior and smooth those rough patches, keeping us moving comfortably within a clear set of immutable parameters.

In a previous post I wrote about a few php scripts connected to an SQL database that produced a Class Tag Cloud where members of my class can anonymously contribute words or phrases while we dialogue, and the words/phrases they contribute end up projected on a screen for all to see. Words may be sent via phone or PC. The font size of the words/phrases are proportional to the prominence in the database, so, if someone contributes something to the class tag cloud and you want to emphasize the thought you would then submit the same word/phrase and that word/phrase would literally become larger on the screen.

Here’s a recent pic of the display:

I’m writing about this again because I’ve put it into practice lately and can report that it has been a valuable aspect of my classroom work, permitting the expression of notions, associations, and other ideations that tend not to bloom under the protocols of traditional classroom decorum – i.e., speak in turn, raise your hand, contribute proper sentences, etc.
While contributions to the class tag cloud do not have one specific, individual author associated with them I can’t call them strictly anonymous as sometimes it becomes clear who submitted them, and they have a agency within the group that, like their authorship, is shared. My experience tells me that this is understood by the class.

As an addition to the class tag cloud (which I do a screen capture of at the end of each class), last week I used Twitter and found it to be another valuable addition. The way we did it was that each class member signed up for the service and we all then took the time to issue the “follow_ x_ “ command for each classmate. At various times during our work the room fell silent as we were all focused on the sms flow around the group, then, one by one, the group became more vocal, and less twittered, and the form became more about speaking and tag clouding, and so on. It was, I think for many of us, a fine in-class experience.

For me, though, the magic occurred once class had ‘stopped’ and I continued to receive messages via Twitter from classmates throughout the week. The messages had a random quality but, as we’ve been discussing bohm style dialog and collective intelligence lately, the challenge of associating these messages as aspects of our respective and collective ‘here’ opened our work and class out in a way that I found beautiful. Twitter also provided the possibility and architecture for meetings (online and/or offline) to occur at any time, allowing the class to take a variety of forms throughout the week. Twitter also provides a method for students to let everyone know if they are running late, sick, near a store that has supplies that others may need, etc.

This experience with Twitter gave me the image of taking our Class Tag Cloud out for a walk – allowing us to know each other better, while exploring the relationship of environment to idea. I strongly recommend these tools and welcome your feedback.

Below are the scripts with instructions for the class tag cloud, they require the creation of a simple database table (in the examples below called ‘cloud’) comprised of two fields: ID (int, auto-increment, primary key), and Words (var chars, at least 25 characters long).

Here is how to make your own class (y) tag cloud.

1. Create a database table (use PHP ADMIN or MYSQL wrapped in PHP, for example) called cloud with two columns: ID and words. Make ID your primary key, and make it an int, that auto-increments. Make words a varchars with a length of at least 25 chars.
2. Create (or download below) a script called code.php. You’ll need to replace the ‘database_name’ in the scripts below with your database name (database name is not the same thing as the table name), along with your username, and password. If you make other changes (name of mysql table and/or columns for example, or if you change the names of the scripts below you will have to make changes within the body of the scripts to reflect those changes!!! Use search and replace to make things easier!
3. When you first launch tag_cloud_input.php (input) you will see some errors because there is nothing in the table. Enter a word and the errors will disappear. To view the tag cloud open tag_cloud_display.php. tag_cloud_input.php is formatted to work on cell phones as well as a desktop.
4. NOTE: the scripts below all work. I have commented out a lot of added functionality (principally a way to keep track of the most recent six words – on the input page I’ve boiled it down to the most recent three words, with the most recent in black, then gray, then white.) I’ve left the scripts as is, with the comments, in the event that you’d like to explore this history on your own.

Scripts for INPUT/DISPLAY>> You’ll need these two scripts (code.php and tag_cloud_input.php) to input words into the tag cloud, you’ll need the tag_cloud_display.php to display the tag cloud. When you first launch the input script you will see some error messages followed by a text input box and a submit button. This is normal as there is nothing in the database yet. Once you place a word in the database the errors will dissapear.

 A few weeks ago I was in Crete (ok, I was actually in rural Virginia but I found the above photo and…) wandering around.  I noticed how the silhouette of most of the trees I saw seemed analogous to the movement of the sun across the sky: a curve.  At first I thought that the trees seemed to be a memory of that movement, but when I heard an approaching flock of geese and looked up to see the undulating curve of their collective movement I realized that the trees I was looking at were all alive, and their silhouettes were developing as were the flock of geese overhead, in concert with the movements of the sun (along with many other dynamic sub-systems).  At that moment I realized that the sun was literally a part of the tree, and that my understanding of them as being separate but related was flawed.

 It occurred to me that in an environment comprised of relationships any truly useful description of form must account for all of the physical aspects of a given object (or, more accurately, focal point within an environment), which must include each formative connection without which the object would not exist.

 Extrapolating this understanding of form into my own experience of the tree I realized that my experience of the object(s), how it appears to me, is more than my ability to identify it (tautology), and inspect it visually. Specifically, the affect associated with my moment in the mix of elements was equally an inextricable element of that form, without which “it” would not be.  Affect is physical.  Affect is complex.  Affect may be analogous to the relationship of the sun to the silhouette of the tree in that the timeframe of the relationship may not be easily observable as a linear, cause and effect sequence, but the relationship is essential, and, as such, must be accounted for.

 It seems strange to break fields of relationships, of which our mind and experience are physical components, into arrangements of discriminate parts/things, of which our experience is clearly an aspect but seems somehow limited to “simply” identifying an object as a discriminate component within a set of discriminate components – something I referred to in a previous post as “first-order”, or “target-level” sensing – a useful aspect of what we are but, perhaps, the cornerstone of an interpretive system that produces a grossly oversimplified model of the world that reduces complex relationships within which we are deeply engaged, to clumsy, yet “workable”, and certainly repeatable, tautologies that give our lives the quality and agency of spectators at every level.  I think its time to let ourselves off the leash.