De Novo

If you vote for Obama, bad things will happen to the Jews.

Our present theories are of only limited validity, still tentative and incomplete.  But behind them now and then we catch glimpses of a final theory, one that would be of unlimited validity and entirely satisfying in its completeness and consistency.  We search for universal truths about nature, and, when we find them, we attempt to explain them by showing how they can be deduced from deeper truths.  Think of the space of scientific principles as being filled with arrows, pointing toward each principle and away from the others by which is is explained.  These arrows of explanation have already revealed a remarkable pattern:  they do not form separate disconnected clumps, representing independent sciences, and they do not wander aimlessly — rather they are all connected, and if followed backward they all seem to flow from a common starting point.  This starting point, to which all explanations may be traced, is what I mean by a final theory.

– Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg (emphasis mine), in Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution.

– Michael Behe (of the Discovery Institute), in Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, via

The philosophy Weinberg is advocating is called reductionism: We understand nature best by breaking it down into its fundamental parts and actions. Biology is chemistry, chemistry is physics, physics is elementary particle physics, and elementary particle physics is (for the time being) the bottom of the ladder….

In 1993, I wrote: “By the end of the next century we might look back on reductionist theories of physics as hopelessly naive. And if we do, we shall certainly remark upon the hubris of 20th century physicists who thought a final theory was within our grasp.”

Well, a little hubris may not be a bad thing for a scientist. Anyone who would attempt to explain the universe must possess some measure of arrogance. The important thing is to not let hubris get out of control. Here’s my scientific “religion,” which like Weinberg’s is a matter of faith: No theory conceived by the human mind will ever be final. The universe is vast, marvelous, and deep beyond our wildest imagining — its horizons will forever recede before our advance. All dreams of finality are futile. Period.

– Chet Raymo

For me, these three viewpoints represent the three ways modern Westerners react to the fundamental mystery of the universe; for brevity, let’s call that mystery a “black box”.

1. Weinberg believes that we will one day open the black box and discover a well-oiled machine that explains everything:  The human search for understanding the mechanisms of the universe will one day have a conclusive end, and this end will be a complete, consistent theory of everything.
2. Behe believes we never will (and never can) open the black box; there are some mysteries that will remain forever locked away from human understanding; there is a point beyond which we can proceed no further.  This view, apparently, is oblivious to the fact that, unlike literalist dogma, scientific knowledge has always been incomplete and has grown incrementally only by asking questions about stuff we don’t already know.  The real goal of the I.D. crowd – in method, if not in rhetoric – is to stop scientific inquiry dead in its tracks.
3. Raymo believes that we can open the box, and inside we will find, possibly nestled among further machinery, another black box, which contains another black box, and so on like so many nested Russian dolls to infinity.

Weinberg finds himself in the precise position maintained by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead nearly 100 years ago, in their monumental treatise on logic and mathematics, Principia Mathematica (PM).  Russell and Whitehead started with the assumption that all of mathematical truth might be contained within a meticulously constructed formal system starting with a handful of atomic axioms taken to be self-evident.  They believed that one might arrive at a formal system which was both consistent (never proved a falsehood) and complete (able to prove any theory expressed in that formal system in terms of its fundamental axioms).  Famously, a young upstart Austrian named Kurt Gödel shattered their dream with his famous “incompleteness theorem”, which demonstrated by means of some clever logic that, while PM was indeed consistent, it was not complete: he constructed a true theorem in the system which could not be deduced given the axioms of PM, thereby rendering PM unable to prove the veracity of this statement and incomplete.  He later demonstrated this to hold true from any similar formal system that attempts to build a complete set of true theorems from a limited number of axioms.

Gödel’s theorem is now famous, being well-documented in Douglas Hofstadter’s highly popular and accessible Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (among other places); however, its implications for the possibility of procedural science to ever have a final theory of everything that is both complete and consistent have apparently been lost on Weinberg.

I’ll let Stephen Hawking have the final word on the subject.  Apparently, it really is turtles all the way down.

On the corner of 6th & Pine in downtown Seattle stands an aging Cuban refugee named Pedro (or perhaps Juan).  (Follow those links for more detail.  I’ll be right here waiting for your return.)  An apparent schizophrenic, Pedro has created his identity around condemning the Seattle Police and “everybody in Seattle” for being “communist” and signing a petition (unanimously signed! by everybody in Seattle!) to evict him from his old home in the Frye Apartments.  He’s evidently no longer homeless; he neither asks for nor accepts donations of food or money; and he’s not interested in speaking one-on-one to individuals to sell his mission.  He’s not looking to make converts.  He’s looking to vanquish.

Two or three times a week, my morning bus gets stopped at the stoplight where Pedro stands, 8 to 5 every day, brandishing a wooden sign covered in masking tape and painted with a pseudoreligious rant, in pidgin English:

Pedro with an older version of his sign

A more recent picture of Pedro, sign not yet embellished

In his hand, he carries a scepter fashioned of numerous stickers and model paint with a miniature plastic figure of the Archangel Michael.  The photo above is quite old; his current sign contains less Jesus, and more stickers of Michael:

 St Michael slays the Devil (based on Guido Reini)

St Michael is interspersed with images of Superman:

Clearly, Pedro sees his fight aligned with the Good and Holy fight personified by these two Apollonic gods.  St Michael – a warrior incarnation of Christ – has long personified the triumph of Good over Evil.  And there’s clearly nothing morally ambiguous about Superman.  But what about the Dragon?

In the Biblical context, Michael’s enemy is quite clearly a dragon:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon;
and the dragon fought and his angels and prevailed not;
neither was their place found any more in heaven.
And the great dragon was cast out,
that old serpent,
called the Devil, and Satan.

– Revelation 12:7-9

Because the Serpent symbol is possibly one of the most ancient, universal, and complex of symbols in mythology, here (in the context of the second century), it represents the old pagan system.  Michael is the warrior of a new, bright, sky-based religion vanquishing a earth-based one that crawled on its belly in the dirt and in the water.  This is the archetypal triumph of good over evil, the Final Battle.

Albrecht Dürer: St Michael’s Fight Against the Dragon (1498)

In modern-day post-protestant Christian thought (oh how crucial those qualifications are!), the finality of this battle is taken for granted.  Satan is defeated once and for all, and God’s people enter heaven to reside there eternally, free from the evil forces of the Dragon.

Heaven (the Sky-Realm) is the home of clarity and light, Hell (the Earth-Realm) a place of confusion, temptation, suffering and desire.  To defeat the Dragon is to defeat whatever holds us from attaining that realm of light and purity. In another sense, it’s the triumph of mind over matter.  It is the central archetypal image of the Western mind, and in the same way that we identify with Superman through his mild-mannered alter-ego, Clark Kent, we would have St Michael as our avatar.

Though couched in the symbols of Christianity, Pedro doesn’t have a coherent Christian message; his use of Michael is to represent himself and his struggle on cosmic terms.  For Pedro, the “communist” Seattle police are the cosmic Dragon, the evil force.  For American Christian fundamentalists, the Dragon is the force of secular humanism.  For eco-conscious liberals, it’s the global corporations and the greed and selfish power they represent.  For Richard Dawkins, the Dragon is religion itself.  (Perhaps for me, it’s Richard Dawkins?)  In each case, the Dragon represents not merely the Evil, but also the Lower, a force which, at one time, dominated, but whose vanquishing is the herald of a new era, a greater, brighter time untroubled by the struggles of the past.

Yet Pedro’s greater struggle is clearly not with some outside enemy.  The dragon that presents the greater challenge to him – if only he could perceive it – is his own mind.  He has projected his own greatest fears and anxieties (that the Seattle Police have allied with Fidel Castro to evict him, throw him into exile) on an external enemy, but the real enemy and obstacle is within.  Likewise, we tend to see our large, impersonal external foes with the greatest disdain because we’re really looking at our own worst nature reflected back at ourselves. Defeating this dragon is only achieved once that internal struggle is accomplished.

Take it away, Joseph Campbell.

After a typical First Thursday artwalk in Pioneer Square, I was waiting for the bus at a notoriously seedy intersection in downtown Seattle, when approached by a young black man.  My first reaction was, I’m afraid, “Go away, I don’t have any change”.  But the young man replied, “May I read you this poem?”  And he produced a quite large (25″ x 40″) piece of beat-up mat board, on which he’d written a youthful poem.

Of main interest to me, however, was the image he’d drawn.  Sharpie pen on mat board, with blue ballpoint-pen highlights.

“I had a dream about a bird emerging from my head, and a ship sailing into the distance.”  And before I could ask him further about the details, my bus arrived.  He introduced himself as Vladimir, and I gave him the $20 he asked for his drawing and left.

The drawing features a young man’s face.  On his forehead is a Third Eye, a wound or vaginal opening; a bird’s head emerges from the crown of his head, as if taking flight.  The bird’s ribbed beak is producing a thunderbolt – or a crack in space – which strikes the top of a lighthouse.  At the foot of the lighthouse, people come and go, entering and leaving.  The lighthouse stands above a sea, upon which sails a large ship withthe caption “The Crystal Ship of the Black Pearl, Mind of the Santa Maria”.  The ship’s portholes look like keyholes. In the sea below the lighthouse is a woman’s face, with a third eye similar to the man’s.  The sea merges into the man’s shoulders; his goatee flows into a woman’s hair and face, which in turn seems to emerge from the smoke from a burning, winged, bleeding Sacred Heart. On the left side of the image is a sphynx-like head with a halo; above the head is a tiny Star of David, and above the star is a hand which seems to be firing a gun (?) toward the moon.

I don’t know anything about Vladimir, except that his manner was sensitive and introverted; wearing a ragged black trenchcoat, I couldn’t tell what his situation was, but he had a wild unkempt goatee and a bruise on his cheek.  So far as I could tell, he was certainly encumbered by neither college art school education nor the attendant inflated ego.  What his drawing lacks in refinement it more than exceeds in raw talent and vision.

Text of the poem after the jump.

(more…)

This is the blogpost I never got to write.  Nearly five months late.  Calling myself out on my own procrastination.

I attended the Stockhausen Courses Kuerten in 2000, the first two weeks of my college year abroad.  I was 21.  I flew from Louisville, Kentucky via Detroit to Amsterdam, from there to Cologne, and took the train from the airport to downtown, then took a commuter train out to the end of the line, from which point I hopped on a bus, a year’s luggage in tow, and was dropped off on a muddy roadside in the tiny town dominated by an otherworldly ego.  I met my hosts, who took me back to my room in the countryside for a quick shower, then took me back to town for a bite to eat.

Then they left.

I had no idea how to find my way back home.

I spent the night wandering the streets of the hillside town, finally curling up under a vinyl tablecloth on a picnic table in the courtyard of the elementary school where the courses would be held.  In the morning I was greeted by students arriving for Markus Stockhausen‘s 7 am yoga class, and met with the festival organizers, who reconnected me with my host family.

My first night became an initiation ritual for me.  I had spent a night homeless on the streets in a foreign city where (at the time) I barely knew the language and knew nobody.  The next day, I attended rehearsals of the festival’s flagship piece, Sirius.

Markus Stockhausen as Aries in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Sirius

More than anything else, Stockhausen’s (often misunderstood) worldview, from his orphaned childhood to his youthful postwar travels with a magic sideshow to his early pseudo-serialist days in the Darmstadt camp (…how time passes…) to his meteoric stardom of the 60′s to his personal crisis after the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970 to his subsequent mythical re-formulation of himself, every action and every work explored with increasing depth and detail the concept of Time, and humanity’s relationship with it.

In Stockhausen’s lectures that I attended in that late July of 2000, he imparted as fundamental the axiom that musical education is the ultimate meditative, transcendental human (and indeed universal) activity.   As the center for his unfolding of time, he used 71 bpm, the average heart rate of a human being at rest.  From this axis mundi, he proceeded to further create subdivisions of time toward the infinitesimal, and cyclic compounds of time toward the eternal, much like the Hindu Yugas.  He believed that with adequate practice and discipline, a musician might train herself to perceive with absolute accuracy and without subdivision arbitrarily long intervals of time.  (Musicians are typically trained to accurately subdivide time intervals longer than a second into sub-second countable units.)  The last thirty years of his work have been focused on demarcating “natural” time intervals: LICHT is the seven days, KLANG the 24 hours, SIRIUS the twelve months.

Stockhausen claimed – sincerely or otherwise – to be a spiritual child of the star system of Sirius.  He claimed he knew he would live to be 100 years old, then die suddenly and be reborn on Sirius.

Sirius, an 8-channel work in the round, begins with a recording of an ascending, partially filtered noise from a rotating speaker.  This was to be the descent of the four celestial beings from Sirius (the performers of the piece), come from the stars to impart heavenly wisdom of the meaning of the seasons and the stars on mankind.  They took the form of the cardinal points of our zodiac: Capricorn (a bass), Aries (a trumpet), Cancer (a soprano), and Libra (a basset horn).  The piece proceeds to begin with the sign of the current season (in our case, Cancer), and work its way around the cycle of the four seasons, exploring the interactions between the archetypes as the year continues.

For me, the connection between myth, music, and experience was relevatory.   As a professing Atheist still struggling out from under an oppressive fundamentalist, literalist Christianity, the ramifications of this unity of spirit and matter have become the subject of my inner life ever since.

Stockhausen remains a controversial figure.  Deluded? Certainly.  Egomaniacal? Perhaps.  Flawed? Absolutely.  Visionary? Undoubtedly.  His body has returned to the elements, but his vision for humanity continues to take hold.

Karlheinz Stockhausen died on December 5, 2007 at his home in Kuerten.  He was 79.