855 - Open Sesame

E and I spent a happy Good Friday mooching around our old university. I took, and thoroughly enjoyed, English and Related Literature, from 1989 to 1992. Here are the doors to my old department, where we found them on Friday, enticingly parked against a nondescript wall. Ah well. The doors, if not the future, were bright... ;)

856 - Easter Early

In case I don't blog over the weekend, I'm wondering if I can give you an Easter gift early.

And this is good: from Susan Blackmore's new book Ten Zen Questions (Oneworld, Oxford, 2009), which - to my great joy - has been classified by the publishers, on the ISBN info-panel on the jacket, as "Gift/ Zen/ Popular Science", in that order -

This brings us to a modern version of the mind-body problem, called the 'Hard Problem' of consciousness: that is, how can objective, physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience? Neuroscientists are making tremendous progress in understanding the objective brain processes; with brain scans, implanted electrodes, computer models, and all sorts of other ways of investigating how the brain works. We can measure the electrical firing of neurons, the chemical behaviour in synapses, the processing of information, and the mechanisms of vision, hearing, and memory. We can see how information flows in through the senses, and how responses are coordinated and actions carried out.

But what about me and my conscious experiences? Where do I fit into this integrated system of inputs, outputs and multiple parallel processing systems? The strange thing is that I feel as if I am in the middle of all this activity, experiencing what comes in through the senses, and deciding what to do in response, when in fact the brain seems to have no need of me. There is no central place or process where I could be, and the brain seems capable of doing everything it does without any supervisor, decider or inner experience. Indeed, the more we learn about how the brain works the more it seems that something is left out - that very thing we care about most of all - 'consciousness itself'.

(pp. 25-6)

In other words, the Good Friday question: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). Why am I just flesh and blood? Where is the transcendence? Where is the poetry? How can I fail to die? What guarantees me? Where is Your place in the world, if we are just neurons and synapses and information transactions?

To which, the Christian I was would have said, "Wait until Easter: that's the point - He rose again. He thought He was abandoned by God, but He wasn't."

And the librarian I became would have said, "That's just a story: one among many. It's a category error to apply the dynamics of the Easter story to hard science. But don't worry. Science, and Easter, say that when I die, the library remains."

(And probably Christianity is just a story, and we are an illusion spun out of molecules. Probably there is no absolute reason why, having defined each other as bundles of interacting neurons, we should not proceed as a society to marshall each other efficiently and unpoetically, like books on a shelf, to the convenience of the greatest number and the shallowest thinking. Perhaps scare stories about challenges by the State to our fundamental identity are alarmist nonsense - they must be if our identity doesn't exist.)

But the artist I am says, "The greatest miracle is that story and science combine at Easter to create something new. And consciousness is neither a spirit, nor a synapse: it is a season. What we choose to do in that season is limited only by our imagination."

857 - Sticks and Stones

In the struggle to achieve full civil rights of identity, the lead-up to the death of Ian Tomlinson is worth taking note of.

It occurs to me that in the tradition of the civil rights movement, the next civil rights battle to be won can always be predicted by analysing the identity of those who the public notices are deemed by the police to be acceptable collateral damage in their mission to maintain perceived public order.

This for two reasons. First, in terms of policing, a target group for a given operation is defined apart from the general public, but the definition will have always have blurred edges. In the protests last week, the protesters were the targets. What defined them as separate from the non-protester Ian Tomlinson? This was not an issue of colour, gender or behaviour - all visible signifiers. In terms of the police operation, a white, middle-aged, male, retreating non-protester was deemed worthy by white, middle-aged, male, police, using proportionate force, of beating and shoving to the ground, and seemingly, of obfuscating about afterwards. No doubt, the degree of obfuscation is also an indicator of the sensitivity of the act.

Second, perhaps more importantly, the act of noticing is itself one of consciousness-raising. The very fact that the death of Ian Tomlinson is being analysed publicly indicates that, in the eyes of the public, something noteworthy has occurred.

It wasn't until violence against blacks was scrutinised that you could be sure that the struggle for racial equality was making headway. It wasn't until violence against women was taken seriously that sexual equality was on the agenda. More to the point, perhaps, it wasn't until it became clear that violence was perpetrated not just against suffragette or abolitionist protesters, but against those caught up in the figurative, or actual, melee, who happened to share a common identity with the protesters, that change had arrived. And the 'becoming clear' is what I'm interested in, not, in this instance, the righteousness of the cause.

Now that violence against Mr, Mrs, Ms and Miss Majority Britain is news, perhaps Majority Britain is waking up to the fact that it doesn't matter what colour, gender, creed, class you are, it is possible for you to be deprived of your rights by an arm of the state in the name of order.

Good news. Because traditionally this is the harbinger of success in the non-violent fight for greater freedom.

858 - Niche Construction and Storymaking

Building on the ideas sketched out here, where what defines us is described as a continuous process of niche construction operating at genetic, ontogenetic (developmental) and cultural levels, and where spiritual communities are defined as groupings where such niche construction is undertaken more or less consciously, it should be possible to link the concepts of niche construction and storymaking in the following way.

With respect to any given individual, the three levels of niche construction operate effectively as separate, but interacting dimensions.

Genetics, in the wider environment, is a landscape one finds oneself in: it is about the interplay of organic and inorganic chemicals, which follow physical laws. At any given moment these may be being defined by, or defining, the environment around or within them.

Ontogenetics introduces a temporal dimension to proceedings. Ontogenetics is about bodily change over time: an immunity developed, a neural pathway altered and a new skill learned (or lost). Depending on one's age in developmental terms, one's internal landscape will behave differently, and the landscape that interacts with it will also have changed. Genes will have been switched on or off; outside influences removed or encountered for the first time. Moving in two dimensions, one is able to place oneself in the way of, or at a distance from the direct physical influence of aspects of the chemical world.

Culture introduces the element of interpretation. Chemical landscapes can be analysed according to different criteria; bodily changes monitored and explained in multiple ways; the results can be communicated through external and internal means, across genes and taking account of different developmental states. Information can be released or withheld, wholly or partially, dependant on one's sense of time and of the landscape about one. One may choose to restrict the learning of a skill, internally by removing oneself from one's learning environment, externally (in relation, perhaps, to others' learning) by disrupting a lesson. In the process new lessons become available to be taught and learnt. Other developmental processes are disrupted, proceed unaffected, or become stimulated. Moving in three dimensions, one is able to select one's life story, and other stories occurring about one, and in which one is involved. One is able to acknowledge the possibility of other stories, other options, and to take the time to communicate them.

As a chemical landscape predicts but cannot explain development, and as development predicts but cannot explain culture, so culture predicts, but cannot explain the real presence at one and the same time of conflicting stories about the same cultural states. Stories where time's arrow is reversed at the same time as it travels forward; where not just photons but bodies and whole worlds exist in two or more places at once. Stories where one is applauded for seducing the villain, who gives birth to a mantlepiece and ends twice at once, and is still in the middle of their story, and already at its start, when one pops one's clogs. Perhaps these do not exist, or perhaps they anticipate a God's eye view of the cosmos, one that only in moments out of time and space and worldview we can share. Ecstatic moments. Dreams.

If we have home, or origin of some kind, in such a perspective, then our only guarantee that it is a kind space is the nature of God. I'm not even sure conventional definitions of Love, or life after death, do it full justice. Such a home is known in one's innermost being, maybe.

859 - Fundamentals

To add to the right to tell stories,
The right to disbelieve them;
The right to doubt one's disbelief;
The right to be wrong in one's doubt;
The right to believe a story,
Knowing it to be untrue.

The right to disbelieve,
To take joy in a fantasy for the sake of its fantasy:
If listener and teller do not share a common disbelief,
If all ghosts rise somewhere,
Who'd listen to, who'd really tell
Of a new thing?

The right to doubt one's disbelief,
To find the frisson of a story in its possibility,
Not because it has been pinned true in the past
But because other tales like it have been told,
And once told, tasted - the taste,
If not the telling, true.

The right to be wrong in one's doubt,
For either the story is true, or it is false:
The doubter is always wrong. But
To make that doubt bright and new,
Though it is wrong, the truest of gifts,
And brightest hope, and forever, and so -

The right to believe a story, knowing it
To be untrue: to disbelieve a story,
To doubt one's disbelief, to be wrong in one's
Doubt, and believe, and not - to
Stand with science, hold court with
the Gods - a right and a blessing, bounden
duty, horizon, forever, forged, found

860 - Scratching A Niche

Niche construction is the way an animal will create a home for itself within a given environment. A cell builds a protective shell; a beaver builds a dam; we build societies, and so on. Where science has held that one can understand evolution solely in terms of the degree of success with which genes are able to perpetuate themselves, advocates of niche construction argue that the ways in which an animal affects its environment can also impact on the success with which it reproduces.

Here's a good summary from "Niche construction, human behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology", by Kevin N. Laland, in The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (p.37, OUP, 2007, eds. R.I.M. Dunbar and Louise Barrett):

Organisms gain information that guides their niche construction through processes operating at at least three different levels, including population genetic, ontogenetic and cultural. Niche construction is influenced by all such information stores - not just genes - and all feed back to influence selection.The niche construction of every species is informed by naturally selected genes; for many species it is also informed by complex, information-acquiring ontogenetic processes such as learning or the immune system, whereas human niche construction, and perhaps that of a few other species, is also informed by cultural processes. Genetic processes, ontogenetic processes and cultural processes operate at distinct but interconnected levels (Odling-Smee et al., 2003). Each level interacts with, but is not completely determined by, the others: that is, learning is informed, but only loosely, by genetic information, and cultural transmission may be informed, but not completely specified, by both genetic and developmental processes. Genes may affect information gain at the ontogenetic level, which in turn influences information acquisition at the cultural level. In addition, ontogenetic processes, particularly learning, may be affected by cultural processes, while population genetic processes may be affected by both ontogenetic processes and cultural processes when humans modify their selection pressures.
Ref. - Odling-Smee, F.J., Laland, K.N. and Feldman, M.W. (2003) Niche Construction: the Neglected Process in Evolution. Monographs in Population Biology 37, Princeton University Press.

The niche I'm scratching at is, perhaps not surprisingly given Posts 903, 902, 900, and 862, the Church.

I want to be able to say that the niche the Church occupies should be defined in terms of the love that we grasp at across cultures, a heart, a single core value, which somehow lives itself out in all cultures, all things. That's what I mean when I suggest that love is the greatest abstraction - not so much an abstraction as an intraction.

It becomes plain when a man or woman who should not die does die, but the Love he or she stands for is found to live on. It blows the value of any given culture, national or religious, out of the water, and at the same time affirms it as a way, but not necessarily the only way, of being.

Particular spiritual communities (even communities of one) become exercises in conscious niche construction, the love that motivates the people in them finding expression in the interaction of cultural, developmental and even genetic processes, as stated in the quote. It sounds scary, and indeed the only guard against abuse is, should be, can be, the nature of Love itself never to abuse.

For those with a mind to build new kinds of communities and community, besides remembering that the whole thing is natural, it is probably worth exploring what niche construction says about the way such gatherings operate.

861 - Flob Mash

Here's the text of the email I sent to Keith Barrett last night, stepping back from my undertaking to organise a flash mob for the pre-World Ocean Day weekend celebrations in Whitley Bay. It's meant in the spirit of 'I'm not sure if I'm right or wrong about this one, but if I step back, then at least we know where we stand'. On reflection, I sound a bit full of myself at times, don't I? Sorry.

Dear Keith,

Thank you for a really good meeting last night.

First of all I want to apologise for the lateness of the hour at which I'm writing. Do please feel free to challenge me about this email come daylight! - though I often get my clearest thinking at this time, which is why I'm writing as I do. And second, to clarify a little, I ought to say that though I often come across as an enthusiastic naif, I'm actually pretty canny - my forays into art, as into the rest of my career, come second to a deeper commitment to people: I self-define as a post-establishment, post-religious vicar (which is, admittedly, a lot of 'posts').

I've been giving some thought to the 'flash mob' idea, and more particularly the commitment I made to you and the others to lead in its organisation. The truth is, on reflection I don't think I am able to, reasons to follow.

Most importantly, I am not able to square the 'bottom-up' - or better, non-hierarchical - nature of a flash mob, with the need to fit it under a North Tyneside umbrella. When the council arts officer - as was entirely proper, I know, given her role - spoke about the need to pass plans before the council for a health and safety assessment, I cringed. You were quite right to point out that what we would be talking about wouldn't exactly be a flash mob. And I think this gives rise to two issues.

First, it's important for me, personally, to maintain objectivity in the distinction between top-down and bottom-up activities, otherwise I cannot support people in both camps as I would like. To be calling something a flash mob when it isn't wouldn't be helpful, either to the council, who would be open to the accusation of bandwagon jumping (as T-Mobile, because of their ad, is), or to genuine flash mobbers, who would find the prophetic edge of their action blunted. I'm pretty sure, one day soon, that that won't be a problem, but I do think at the moment it is.

Second, more pragmatically, if North Tyneside does pass some kind of mass improvisational activity, it's worth asking whether, if the 'flash mob' title were adopted, people who used the name in its pure sense might not organise their own action and overshadow the official version. Better, I think, for the organisers to be up-front from the start, and call the activity 'Improv Street Performance' or something. In that case, I have to be honest, I would not be the best person to organise it: someone schooled in drama, professionally or ad hoc, would.

So on two counts I've ruled myself out. Clay Shirky, in 'Here Comes Everybody', is good on the nature of flash mobs, and I'm also going by the reading I've done around wild and (non-violent) anarchist philosophy - by people like Hugh Brody and Jay Griffiths. Ultimately, because these form the political principals I wish to be defined by, and as I believe they underpin current political structures, but that these structures need periodically to be deconstructed, and now is probably such a time, I wish to continue to work outside the box, meaning that I forego some great opportunities, like the current one.

Therefore, once again, my apologies. I'm sorry to have made my commitment before I backed out of it, but hope that by being clear, as early as possible in the day thereafter, I've not caused you too much trouble, and that if you do see a way to proceed with the flash mob idea, it is carried off with great success.

(I also think there's mileage, one year, if not this one, in the 'Free Seas Freeze' idea.)

I look forward to meeting you again soon,

With all good wishes,

Steve