Mike Cavanagh's Blog
October 28, 2023
Dumb Animals
A while ago my wife and I came down with RSV – respiratory syncytial virus. We had never heard of it before, and quite frankly m’dear wish we never had. Avoid it like the plague, which it shares a couple of symptoms with, although the diseases are completely different in all other respects. But I’m not here to bemoan our trials to caution the unwary, although any unwary out there, please consider yourselves duly cautioned; with gusto.
This story begins on about day four of the full onset of symptoms, when I was running a temperature and with zero appetite for anything other than everyone just to ‘Leave me alone so I can die... Now, would be good.’ Having not really eaten for two days I was lying in bed in some semi-delirious state when an over-whelming desire to eat yoghurt and honey came over me. My stomach made some sort of rebellious ‘Really?’ noise but I dragged myself off my I-Wish-I-Was-Dead-Bed and staggered to the kitchen to assuage my strange but very clear urgings. I generally eat a peculiarly flavoured honey from Tasmania called Leatherwood Honey and my yoghurt of choice is coconut honey so I dolloped out about a cupful of yoghurt and mixed in a big tablespoon of Leatherwood Honey and knocked it off in about thirty seconds. Whereupon so impressed was I by the flavour I repeated same, taking about forty seconds this time. I went back to bed and managed some fitful bouts of sleep, or resting with eyes closed mainly.
Over the next three days I existed pretty much on yoghurt and honey; not because I thought this was a good thing to do, but because I was simply responding to a very clear message from my body. Well, I understood what it wanted, but I had no flaming idea why it did.
On day six I had a tele-conference with my doctor, having been told not to come in person when I explained to the receptionist that I thought I had RSV. Once in the tele-conference, when I got to the part of ‘temperature’, ‘night sweats’, and 'crazy dreams', my doctor advised that she thought I probably had a secondary respiratory infection and prescribed a dose of hefty anti-biotics.
Yes, but that’s not what this about. A week or so after all my symptoms had subsided I went into the doc’s surgery and she ordered an X-Ray, which the next day on a follow up visit she deduced and informed me that I’d had pneumonia, brought on by the RSV as a secondary infection. As I sat in the car preparing to drive home afterwards, the penny dropped. RSV is a viral infection; pneumonia is a bacterial infection. Honey, especially undiluted and untreated varieties, like my Leatherwood, has anti-bacterial properties. Yoghurts, of the live culture varieties, like my brand of coconut yoghurt, have pro-biotic properties, i.e. good bacteria. Well there you go, only took this massive, human-defining consciousness and self-awareness just under a fortnight to have its ‘Ah-ha!’ moment. My dumb animalistic, instinctive ‘hind-brain’ had identified within a day what I could do within the realm of what was in my immediate environment to fix the condition. The condition that my supreme consciousness had had no idea I/we had at that time.
In the immortal words of the wonderful Julius Sumner Miller – why is it so? Or perhaps just as appropriately, in the words of William Shatner, a.k.a. Captain Kirk, weird, or what?
Having thought about all this for a while, I came to theorise that we’re sort of kidding ourselves with our sense that our self-conscious (i.e. aware) self is the sole or even major defining aspect of who we are. Think about it. Let’s assume for argument‘s sake that animals lack this self-awareness, or at best only have a rudimentary version. Anyway, no matter how you might think about it, it seems to me that even those animals ‘highest’ on the IQ ladder don’t have this all-encompassing, self-perpetuating notion of themselves as the centre of the universe and rightly so, by Jove. Look upon my works ye mighty and despair, says the bloke or shiela standing in front of their vanity mirror. If this notion of our self-awareness and it’s (more or less) peculiar attachment to Homo is even half right, then we’ve probably only had it for say, one or two million years? Wow – long time... except life has merrily and very, very successfully bundled along on this wee blue marble for something like 3.7 billion years. My maths is horrible but that sounds like self-awareness has been around less than 0.001% of the time that life has existed.
Animals know what’s best for them most of the time; most of the time enough so that their species survives, thrives and breeds on. Of course it might have helped the dinosaurs to have been able to look up in the skies 65 million years ago and gone “Run! It’s a freakin’ asteroid!” But the vast majority of time, and the vast number of instances of life, self-awareness has been a non-requirement. In fact, given how often we humans carry on like pork chops, dis on not just our fellow humans, but animals, plants and the entire planet in fact, on the basis of our beliefs, or stuff we think of, or things we perceive, through our 'higher self-awareness', there sounds like a very strong case that life as a global whole would be a whole heap better off without it.
So, why do we have it?
I have no idea. I dare say there are a dozen or more theories that even a five-minute web trawl can come up with. It does seem however that we, and everything else on this planet, is currently paying a pretty hefty price for it. What I do know is that you can also find on the internet squillions of pages talking about Artificial Intelligence, its pros and cons, the shape of the future and whether it will be the end of humanity. Fine, so sure, debate that while the current ‘intelligence’ is doing just fine, thank you very much, in hurtling towards its own demise and that of most of its fellow travellers.
Self-aware? You’re kidding me, right? Is it really a better intelligence than the dumb animal instinct that made the amazingly unaware, self-aware me, go eat honey and yoghurt?
You see, unlike the dumb animal stuff, self-awareness doesn’t actually make you do anything, necessarily. Other than, maybe, wring your hands at the fate of the planet and turn away to dump all that self-awareness into one or other of the innumerable oblivion methods we’ve devised to... ah... be like, totally non-aware, dude.
Weird or what? No, consequential.
Why is it so? Because we make it so.
Outstanding.
Now please go help some bees survive.
This story begins on about day four of the full onset of symptoms, when I was running a temperature and with zero appetite for anything other than everyone just to ‘Leave me alone so I can die... Now, would be good.’ Having not really eaten for two days I was lying in bed in some semi-delirious state when an over-whelming desire to eat yoghurt and honey came over me. My stomach made some sort of rebellious ‘Really?’ noise but I dragged myself off my I-Wish-I-Was-Dead-Bed and staggered to the kitchen to assuage my strange but very clear urgings. I generally eat a peculiarly flavoured honey from Tasmania called Leatherwood Honey and my yoghurt of choice is coconut honey so I dolloped out about a cupful of yoghurt and mixed in a big tablespoon of Leatherwood Honey and knocked it off in about thirty seconds. Whereupon so impressed was I by the flavour I repeated same, taking about forty seconds this time. I went back to bed and managed some fitful bouts of sleep, or resting with eyes closed mainly.
Over the next three days I existed pretty much on yoghurt and honey; not because I thought this was a good thing to do, but because I was simply responding to a very clear message from my body. Well, I understood what it wanted, but I had no flaming idea why it did.
On day six I had a tele-conference with my doctor, having been told not to come in person when I explained to the receptionist that I thought I had RSV. Once in the tele-conference, when I got to the part of ‘temperature’, ‘night sweats’, and 'crazy dreams', my doctor advised that she thought I probably had a secondary respiratory infection and prescribed a dose of hefty anti-biotics.
Yes, but that’s not what this about. A week or so after all my symptoms had subsided I went into the doc’s surgery and she ordered an X-Ray, which the next day on a follow up visit she deduced and informed me that I’d had pneumonia, brought on by the RSV as a secondary infection. As I sat in the car preparing to drive home afterwards, the penny dropped. RSV is a viral infection; pneumonia is a bacterial infection. Honey, especially undiluted and untreated varieties, like my Leatherwood, has anti-bacterial properties. Yoghurts, of the live culture varieties, like my brand of coconut yoghurt, have pro-biotic properties, i.e. good bacteria. Well there you go, only took this massive, human-defining consciousness and self-awareness just under a fortnight to have its ‘Ah-ha!’ moment. My dumb animalistic, instinctive ‘hind-brain’ had identified within a day what I could do within the realm of what was in my immediate environment to fix the condition. The condition that my supreme consciousness had had no idea I/we had at that time.
In the immortal words of the wonderful Julius Sumner Miller – why is it so? Or perhaps just as appropriately, in the words of William Shatner, a.k.a. Captain Kirk, weird, or what?
Having thought about all this for a while, I came to theorise that we’re sort of kidding ourselves with our sense that our self-conscious (i.e. aware) self is the sole or even major defining aspect of who we are. Think about it. Let’s assume for argument‘s sake that animals lack this self-awareness, or at best only have a rudimentary version. Anyway, no matter how you might think about it, it seems to me that even those animals ‘highest’ on the IQ ladder don’t have this all-encompassing, self-perpetuating notion of themselves as the centre of the universe and rightly so, by Jove. Look upon my works ye mighty and despair, says the bloke or shiela standing in front of their vanity mirror. If this notion of our self-awareness and it’s (more or less) peculiar attachment to Homo is even half right, then we’ve probably only had it for say, one or two million years? Wow – long time... except life has merrily and very, very successfully bundled along on this wee blue marble for something like 3.7 billion years. My maths is horrible but that sounds like self-awareness has been around less than 0.001% of the time that life has existed.
Animals know what’s best for them most of the time; most of the time enough so that their species survives, thrives and breeds on. Of course it might have helped the dinosaurs to have been able to look up in the skies 65 million years ago and gone “Run! It’s a freakin’ asteroid!” But the vast majority of time, and the vast number of instances of life, self-awareness has been a non-requirement. In fact, given how often we humans carry on like pork chops, dis on not just our fellow humans, but animals, plants and the entire planet in fact, on the basis of our beliefs, or stuff we think of, or things we perceive, through our 'higher self-awareness', there sounds like a very strong case that life as a global whole would be a whole heap better off without it.
So, why do we have it?
I have no idea. I dare say there are a dozen or more theories that even a five-minute web trawl can come up with. It does seem however that we, and everything else on this planet, is currently paying a pretty hefty price for it. What I do know is that you can also find on the internet squillions of pages talking about Artificial Intelligence, its pros and cons, the shape of the future and whether it will be the end of humanity. Fine, so sure, debate that while the current ‘intelligence’ is doing just fine, thank you very much, in hurtling towards its own demise and that of most of its fellow travellers.
Self-aware? You’re kidding me, right? Is it really a better intelligence than the dumb animal instinct that made the amazingly unaware, self-aware me, go eat honey and yoghurt?
You see, unlike the dumb animal stuff, self-awareness doesn’t actually make you do anything, necessarily. Other than, maybe, wring your hands at the fate of the planet and turn away to dump all that self-awareness into one or other of the innumerable oblivion methods we’ve devised to... ah... be like, totally non-aware, dude.
Weird or what? No, consequential.
Why is it so? Because we make it so.
Outstanding.
Now please go help some bees survive.
December 8, 2022
Rock-wallabies, bushfires and buttercups.
I spent a good portion of my life, some thirty years I guess, studying the distribution of rock-wallabies. Cute critters, go google them. The ones we have along the ranges (mostly) in NSW and Victoria are brush-tailed rock-wallabies. They’re the cutest, but OK, I’m biased. My studies involved information, maps and data – a lot of all of that. I was looking for reasons why they occur where they do and looking back into the past (few tens of millions of years) and into the future (considering land use changes as well as potential climate change effects).
The holy grail for any such research is cause and effect, i.e. this thing is happening/did happen (cause) and it made that other thing happen as a result (effect). I could, and did (mad man me) put all my data into a spreadsheet which resulted in some hundred odd columns and some 2,000 rows of data. So yes, that’s around 200,000 individual bits of data. I’m not even going to try to calculate how many possible inter-relationships, or correlations, that is, but I suspect it’s up there with the odds of winning lotto.
So, finding which of those correlations were ‘meaningful’ was time consuming. Trust me, I have two unfinished PhD studies to prove it. Both terminations were mutual – my problem being I couldn’t stop myself running down every rabbit hole I could find.
Anyway, “Yah me!”, because the total number of cause and effect relationships I found out of all this data and inter-relating was... zero. Yep, none, nada, zilch. Correlations though – oh my goodness, let me tell you about them... but I won’t as we both have lives to live. The really juicy ones I could even demonstrate via statistical analyses that the likelihood of those small handful of most promising correlations being random was acceptably small. In other words, these were meaningful correlations, i.e. something looks like it's going on for real here. Well, this is cause and effect, yes? No. It’s not.
OK, leaving rock-wallabies, let’s look at buttercups.
There is an old bit of trivial folklore that says that you can tell if a child likes butter by holding a buttercup under his or her chin. Oh my goodness, the stuff people believe, right?
Now, what if I tell you that I can prove with 100% accuracy that a child likes butter by doing just this, holding a buttercup under their chin? Yeah, right, pull the other one. Actually, no, what I’ve said is accurate. The trick is in the wording, and here beginneth the true lesson, one I learned through an awful lot of square eyes staring at my spreadsheet. What I didn’t say is ‘I can prove IF a child likes OR DOES NOT LIKE butter’. Give me a paddock full of kids, and if I run around with a buttercup it’s a fair bet that every little chin shines yellow. I end up with a big number of correct identifications – I mean how many kids don’t like butter – and a quite small number of incorrects. But of all those children I have identified as ‘yes, likes butter’ my mark is 100%, i.e. I didn’t miss a one who does like butter. Even if I account for those I got wrong, as the great majority of kids like butter anyway, then my ‘accuracy’ still looks good. At I guess I’d say 90% or better. Go ask a handful of kids and see how that goes.
You’d be surprised, or maybe not, how often this sort of stuff is reported as ‘recent study shows...’. Or maybe you wouldn’t. It’s actually easy to make this mistake, and that’s just humans erring, but deliberately making this sort of statement, knowing what the problem with it is, is not acceptable behaviour. Taking data like this, knowing it’s ‘falsity’ even if technically it’s correct as per the terminology used, is an example of what’s called cherry-picking. Basically you only present the information, or a particular way it can be presented, to bolster or support an argument without noting its limitations or inherent inaccuracies.
So, let's look at a 'real life' example, related to bushfires and that 2019/20 ‘Black Summer’.
A certain Australian politician appeared on an international news service during the height of that horrible bush fire season. In attempting to deflect criticism of the apparent lack of action on climate change in Australia, especially given it’s potential relevance to the then current raging bush fires, the politician said (words to the effect – as close as I can faithfully remember them) that ‘our scientists have told us that there has been no decrease in annual rainfall in Australia over the past decade'. His point being that if rainfall hadn’t decreased, how can there be a relationship to climate change (if that even exists) and to the wildfires? His view being there wasn’t one, and that the fires were the result of arsonists and not enough fuel reduction burning. Warning – here be buttercups!
What he said was true. In Australia (the whole continent) the annual rainfall had been more or less the same over the past decade prior to the 2019/20 summer. Now, given that it took me less than a minute to get to the Bureau of Meteorology site and find the annual precipitation maps, I find it hard to believe this politician, and/or his advisers, didn’t know exactly what he was doing. Yep, there are decade by decade annual rainfall data for Australia and they pretty much say just what he said; but there’s also maps. Blues of increasing darkness showed higher than average rainfall, reds in darkening shades showed lower than average rainfall. The map for the past decade, which summarised geographically the data he had been quoting, showed a continent split in half. You could pretty much take a ruler and draw a straight line from the north-east (mid-coast Queensland) to the south-west (a bit north of Perth) and you had a blue half a continent above that line and a red half below it. You could also go grab the fire spread maps from the Rural Fire Service fire mapping for the then current fires, toss it onto the decade annual rainfall map and the correlation was as clear as it was telling, i.e. to all intents of purposes the fire areas all fell within the lower than average and up to extremely lower than average rainfall areas. As far as cherry picking, or ‘buttercupping’, goes, his take on the data available was at best negligent and at worst bordering on criminal, considering the loss of properties and life that was occurring.
Back to finish on rock-wallabies, unknown numbers of which would also have been lost in those fires.
I never did establish a clear cause and effect in all that distribution data I was studying, but I did find a lot of interesting correlations; a lot more work (and I mean a LOT) may have lead to some clearer relationship of ‘this therefore that’. Perhaps though most importantly I also learned a lesson that has stood me in very good stead well beyond my studies, especially in these seemingly and increasingly conspiracy theorising times. Don’t believe anything you hear or read on face value. Go chase up the original source yourself and be brave enough to actively seek out views and information counter to what you want to hear and read. We’re all entitled to our opinions, but unless you’ve taken due diligence to prove what you’re espousing from unbiased, original sources, then that’s all they are – opinions. Not fact.
And while you’re online, for heaven’s sake do yourself a favour and go check out some rock-wallabies!
The holy grail for any such research is cause and effect, i.e. this thing is happening/did happen (cause) and it made that other thing happen as a result (effect). I could, and did (mad man me) put all my data into a spreadsheet which resulted in some hundred odd columns and some 2,000 rows of data. So yes, that’s around 200,000 individual bits of data. I’m not even going to try to calculate how many possible inter-relationships, or correlations, that is, but I suspect it’s up there with the odds of winning lotto.
So, finding which of those correlations were ‘meaningful’ was time consuming. Trust me, I have two unfinished PhD studies to prove it. Both terminations were mutual – my problem being I couldn’t stop myself running down every rabbit hole I could find.
Anyway, “Yah me!”, because the total number of cause and effect relationships I found out of all this data and inter-relating was... zero. Yep, none, nada, zilch. Correlations though – oh my goodness, let me tell you about them... but I won’t as we both have lives to live. The really juicy ones I could even demonstrate via statistical analyses that the likelihood of those small handful of most promising correlations being random was acceptably small. In other words, these were meaningful correlations, i.e. something looks like it's going on for real here. Well, this is cause and effect, yes? No. It’s not.
OK, leaving rock-wallabies, let’s look at buttercups.
There is an old bit of trivial folklore that says that you can tell if a child likes butter by holding a buttercup under his or her chin. Oh my goodness, the stuff people believe, right?
Now, what if I tell you that I can prove with 100% accuracy that a child likes butter by doing just this, holding a buttercup under their chin? Yeah, right, pull the other one. Actually, no, what I’ve said is accurate. The trick is in the wording, and here beginneth the true lesson, one I learned through an awful lot of square eyes staring at my spreadsheet. What I didn’t say is ‘I can prove IF a child likes OR DOES NOT LIKE butter’. Give me a paddock full of kids, and if I run around with a buttercup it’s a fair bet that every little chin shines yellow. I end up with a big number of correct identifications – I mean how many kids don’t like butter – and a quite small number of incorrects. But of all those children I have identified as ‘yes, likes butter’ my mark is 100%, i.e. I didn’t miss a one who does like butter. Even if I account for those I got wrong, as the great majority of kids like butter anyway, then my ‘accuracy’ still looks good. At I guess I’d say 90% or better. Go ask a handful of kids and see how that goes.
You’d be surprised, or maybe not, how often this sort of stuff is reported as ‘recent study shows...’. Or maybe you wouldn’t. It’s actually easy to make this mistake, and that’s just humans erring, but deliberately making this sort of statement, knowing what the problem with it is, is not acceptable behaviour. Taking data like this, knowing it’s ‘falsity’ even if technically it’s correct as per the terminology used, is an example of what’s called cherry-picking. Basically you only present the information, or a particular way it can be presented, to bolster or support an argument without noting its limitations or inherent inaccuracies.
So, let's look at a 'real life' example, related to bushfires and that 2019/20 ‘Black Summer’.
A certain Australian politician appeared on an international news service during the height of that horrible bush fire season. In attempting to deflect criticism of the apparent lack of action on climate change in Australia, especially given it’s potential relevance to the then current raging bush fires, the politician said (words to the effect – as close as I can faithfully remember them) that ‘our scientists have told us that there has been no decrease in annual rainfall in Australia over the past decade'. His point being that if rainfall hadn’t decreased, how can there be a relationship to climate change (if that even exists) and to the wildfires? His view being there wasn’t one, and that the fires were the result of arsonists and not enough fuel reduction burning. Warning – here be buttercups!
What he said was true. In Australia (the whole continent) the annual rainfall had been more or less the same over the past decade prior to the 2019/20 summer. Now, given that it took me less than a minute to get to the Bureau of Meteorology site and find the annual precipitation maps, I find it hard to believe this politician, and/or his advisers, didn’t know exactly what he was doing. Yep, there are decade by decade annual rainfall data for Australia and they pretty much say just what he said; but there’s also maps. Blues of increasing darkness showed higher than average rainfall, reds in darkening shades showed lower than average rainfall. The map for the past decade, which summarised geographically the data he had been quoting, showed a continent split in half. You could pretty much take a ruler and draw a straight line from the north-east (mid-coast Queensland) to the south-west (a bit north of Perth) and you had a blue half a continent above that line and a red half below it. You could also go grab the fire spread maps from the Rural Fire Service fire mapping for the then current fires, toss it onto the decade annual rainfall map and the correlation was as clear as it was telling, i.e. to all intents of purposes the fire areas all fell within the lower than average and up to extremely lower than average rainfall areas. As far as cherry picking, or ‘buttercupping’, goes, his take on the data available was at best negligent and at worst bordering on criminal, considering the loss of properties and life that was occurring.
Back to finish on rock-wallabies, unknown numbers of which would also have been lost in those fires.
I never did establish a clear cause and effect in all that distribution data I was studying, but I did find a lot of interesting correlations; a lot more work (and I mean a LOT) may have lead to some clearer relationship of ‘this therefore that’. Perhaps though most importantly I also learned a lesson that has stood me in very good stead well beyond my studies, especially in these seemingly and increasingly conspiracy theorising times. Don’t believe anything you hear or read on face value. Go chase up the original source yourself and be brave enough to actively seek out views and information counter to what you want to hear and read. We’re all entitled to our opinions, but unless you’ve taken due diligence to prove what you’re espousing from unbiased, original sources, then that’s all they are – opinions. Not fact.
And while you’re online, for heaven’s sake do yourself a favour and go check out some rock-wallabies!
November 14, 2022
“He doesn’t row.”
Today let's tumble into the multiverse.
At the beginning of the video game, Bioshock: Infinite, our protagonist (Booker De Witt - you, the player) is rowed across to a lighthouse by a male and a female character, Robert Lutece and his sister Rosalind. The siblings converse as follows:
Robert: He doesn't row.
Rosalind: He doesn't row?
Robert: No, he doesn't row.
Rosalind: Ah, I see.
Which banal interaction is in my opinion a wonderfully adroit bit of dialogue. On the face of it the text pretty much doesn’t do other than run around in a circle. But re-written with italics to reflect the emphases – and as spoken in the game these are quite subtle emphases – it takes on further shades of meaning, even if not yet quite making sense.
Robert: He doesn't row.
Rosalind: He doesn't row?
Robert: No, he doesn't row.
Rosalind: Ah, I see.
In the game, exactly what sense it makes is not revealed until the end. As is attributed to Winston Churchill, ‘history is written by the victors’, so we’ll come back to that end shortly.
In the game there is a note you can find, but might not, written by Rosalind Lutece:
When I was a girl, I dreamt of standing in a room looking at a girl who was, and was not myself, who stood looking at another girl, who also was, and was not myself. My mother took this for a nightmare. I saw it as the beginning of my career in physics.
As an aside, this is one of the rather special things about good narrative video games. As in the real world, there are any number of things it would be worth you stumbling upon, but you don’t. Unlike real life, however, unless you adhere to Buddhist philosophies and their like, in the game world you can go back and do it all again, just to see what happens.
Which leads me both forward and sideways to a strange tale but true.
I went on a motorbike trip with a slightly crazy mate once and we stopped overnight at my parents' place. I’d showered and gone into my bedroom and my mate went into the bathroom. A few minutes later he knocked on my bedroom door then came in wearing just a bath towel around his waist. He urged me to come into the bathroom as he had discovered something that clearly he was excited about.
My parent’s bathroom had a large mirror over the vanity and a full length wall mirror on the opposite side. One of those situations where you could get the image of yourself reflected in the vanity mirror to reflect in the full length mirror behind you which then reflected both images back, and so on… you get the picture. Anyway, with the mere words of…
“Watch this!”
…my mate stood sideways, dropped his towel and swung his willy while standing between the two mirrors, now reflecting in each other the diminishing and virtually infinite number of images of him doing this. This sideshow horror from The Twilight Zone is now indelibly etched into my brain.
All of which is about context, interpretation, history and communication. Oh, and infinity.
Let’s start, and finish, with a current ‘theory of the month’: multiple universes, or multiverses.
In the concept of multiverses, there are an infinite number of universes, running in parallel. As there are an infinite number, goes the theorising, all possibilities will happen, eventually. Every possible variation of your life can, and in fact does, happen, somewhere, at some time, in one of them. Well, I’d argue not necessarily.
Existence is buffered, not random; there is nothing to stop the universe from repeating itself infinitely rather than generating infinitely randomising versions of itself. Is there a universe where I am a whale? No. There may be someplace where I am a sentient, whale-like being, but ‘whales’ and ‘me’ of this version only exist here as these versions in this universe. It’s like clones of you – exact copies, yes, but they’re not multiple ‘you’. Even were it possible to copy across all one’s memories there would still be one ‘you’ and a perfect copy ‘you’.
Multiverses are still constrained by the rules that create, and govern, universes. An infinite iteration of universes will still reside within those constraints. To believe otherwise is to take a thought experiment, such as a bouncing ball, then apply infinity to its condition. Result – infinitely bouncing ball. Not in some instance ball turns into an elephant and explodes, Douglas Adam's wonderful imagination not-with-standing. Infinite repetition does not in itself include infinite randomness. If I take a typewriter and apply some random function where one letter is typed then another and repeat for an infinite number of typewriters and over infinite time – do I get Shakespeare? Probably. If I do the same experiment but use chimpanzees do I get Shakespeare – I’d argue not.
Chimpanzees, like people, run with their own sets of rules – behaviours – which constrain the possible outcomes. I highly suspect chimpanzees will resort to smashing the typewriter or smearing it in faeces well before they get to anything even remotely like Shakespeare. But surely, allowing for infinite re-runs, it should be possible, in fact it is inevitable, that a William Chimpspeare will arrive? I’d still argue no, even allowing for an infinite number of reruns. As I said, there is no rule that states infinity is also infinitely random – it can be the infinite rerun of the same thing and even with some degree of randomness all things operate within their own contexts and ‘rules’.
Some would still argue that at any point where I make a decision I could have made another and from that point a new multiverse pops into existence. Well, that argument relies on the notion that when I, or you, make a choice, like make a cup of tea, the fact that we could have decided otherwise means that we would have decided otherwise in some other iteration. But we didn’t. Because we ‘could have’ doesn’t mean in any sense that at that split second of decision a different outcome could have happened. It didn’t. What evidence is there that if you rerun all the events of the world up to that moment and here I am, you are, and we decided instead not to make that cup of tea? If all those previous milliseconds of existence brought us to the same exact point then I'd say none.
OK, fine, but what’s all this to do with rowing a boat?
Well, you see he doesn’t row.
Bioshock: Infinite is in effect (warning: spoiler!) a story about tracking through one instance of a multiverse narrative. ‘He’ (Booker, who is you) is perfectly able to row, but in none of the instances of the story/multiverses does he row. Why? Ah, yes, indeed, and who knows why? One could argue that the game narrative constrains the possibility artificially. But does it? If all possible versions of multiverses are, well, possible, why isn’t there also a possibility that all multiverses are so constrained? It seems to me there is a logic which says that if all possibilities exist then the possibility exists that only one possibility exists. Run that through your multiverses and guess what?
He doesn’t row.
And I’m never killed by a blue whale suddenly appearing and falling out of the sky (and thank you, Douglas Adams, for that most delicious of images).
If by some quirk of this universe you want to delve more into this madness, this article should amply scratch that itch:
https://bioshockmysteries.wordpress.c...
Even if you don't now, I'm sure in some infinite number of multiverses you will. ; )
At the beginning of the video game, Bioshock: Infinite, our protagonist (Booker De Witt - you, the player) is rowed across to a lighthouse by a male and a female character, Robert Lutece and his sister Rosalind. The siblings converse as follows:
Robert: He doesn't row.
Rosalind: He doesn't row?
Robert: No, he doesn't row.
Rosalind: Ah, I see.
Which banal interaction is in my opinion a wonderfully adroit bit of dialogue. On the face of it the text pretty much doesn’t do other than run around in a circle. But re-written with italics to reflect the emphases – and as spoken in the game these are quite subtle emphases – it takes on further shades of meaning, even if not yet quite making sense.
Robert: He doesn't row.
Rosalind: He doesn't row?
Robert: No, he doesn't row.
Rosalind: Ah, I see.
In the game, exactly what sense it makes is not revealed until the end. As is attributed to Winston Churchill, ‘history is written by the victors’, so we’ll come back to that end shortly.
In the game there is a note you can find, but might not, written by Rosalind Lutece:
When I was a girl, I dreamt of standing in a room looking at a girl who was, and was not myself, who stood looking at another girl, who also was, and was not myself. My mother took this for a nightmare. I saw it as the beginning of my career in physics.
As an aside, this is one of the rather special things about good narrative video games. As in the real world, there are any number of things it would be worth you stumbling upon, but you don’t. Unlike real life, however, unless you adhere to Buddhist philosophies and their like, in the game world you can go back and do it all again, just to see what happens.
Which leads me both forward and sideways to a strange tale but true.
I went on a motorbike trip with a slightly crazy mate once and we stopped overnight at my parents' place. I’d showered and gone into my bedroom and my mate went into the bathroom. A few minutes later he knocked on my bedroom door then came in wearing just a bath towel around his waist. He urged me to come into the bathroom as he had discovered something that clearly he was excited about.
My parent’s bathroom had a large mirror over the vanity and a full length wall mirror on the opposite side. One of those situations where you could get the image of yourself reflected in the vanity mirror to reflect in the full length mirror behind you which then reflected both images back, and so on… you get the picture. Anyway, with the mere words of…
“Watch this!”
…my mate stood sideways, dropped his towel and swung his willy while standing between the two mirrors, now reflecting in each other the diminishing and virtually infinite number of images of him doing this. This sideshow horror from The Twilight Zone is now indelibly etched into my brain.
All of which is about context, interpretation, history and communication. Oh, and infinity.
Let’s start, and finish, with a current ‘theory of the month’: multiple universes, or multiverses.
In the concept of multiverses, there are an infinite number of universes, running in parallel. As there are an infinite number, goes the theorising, all possibilities will happen, eventually. Every possible variation of your life can, and in fact does, happen, somewhere, at some time, in one of them. Well, I’d argue not necessarily.
Existence is buffered, not random; there is nothing to stop the universe from repeating itself infinitely rather than generating infinitely randomising versions of itself. Is there a universe where I am a whale? No. There may be someplace where I am a sentient, whale-like being, but ‘whales’ and ‘me’ of this version only exist here as these versions in this universe. It’s like clones of you – exact copies, yes, but they’re not multiple ‘you’. Even were it possible to copy across all one’s memories there would still be one ‘you’ and a perfect copy ‘you’.
Multiverses are still constrained by the rules that create, and govern, universes. An infinite iteration of universes will still reside within those constraints. To believe otherwise is to take a thought experiment, such as a bouncing ball, then apply infinity to its condition. Result – infinitely bouncing ball. Not in some instance ball turns into an elephant and explodes, Douglas Adam's wonderful imagination not-with-standing. Infinite repetition does not in itself include infinite randomness. If I take a typewriter and apply some random function where one letter is typed then another and repeat for an infinite number of typewriters and over infinite time – do I get Shakespeare? Probably. If I do the same experiment but use chimpanzees do I get Shakespeare – I’d argue not.
Chimpanzees, like people, run with their own sets of rules – behaviours – which constrain the possible outcomes. I highly suspect chimpanzees will resort to smashing the typewriter or smearing it in faeces well before they get to anything even remotely like Shakespeare. But surely, allowing for infinite re-runs, it should be possible, in fact it is inevitable, that a William Chimpspeare will arrive? I’d still argue no, even allowing for an infinite number of reruns. As I said, there is no rule that states infinity is also infinitely random – it can be the infinite rerun of the same thing and even with some degree of randomness all things operate within their own contexts and ‘rules’.
Some would still argue that at any point where I make a decision I could have made another and from that point a new multiverse pops into existence. Well, that argument relies on the notion that when I, or you, make a choice, like make a cup of tea, the fact that we could have decided otherwise means that we would have decided otherwise in some other iteration. But we didn’t. Because we ‘could have’ doesn’t mean in any sense that at that split second of decision a different outcome could have happened. It didn’t. What evidence is there that if you rerun all the events of the world up to that moment and here I am, you are, and we decided instead not to make that cup of tea? If all those previous milliseconds of existence brought us to the same exact point then I'd say none.
OK, fine, but what’s all this to do with rowing a boat?
Well, you see he doesn’t row.
Bioshock: Infinite is in effect (warning: spoiler!) a story about tracking through one instance of a multiverse narrative. ‘He’ (Booker, who is you) is perfectly able to row, but in none of the instances of the story/multiverses does he row. Why? Ah, yes, indeed, and who knows why? One could argue that the game narrative constrains the possibility artificially. But does it? If all possible versions of multiverses are, well, possible, why isn’t there also a possibility that all multiverses are so constrained? It seems to me there is a logic which says that if all possibilities exist then the possibility exists that only one possibility exists. Run that through your multiverses and guess what?
He doesn’t row.
And I’m never killed by a blue whale suddenly appearing and falling out of the sky (and thank you, Douglas Adams, for that most delicious of images).
If by some quirk of this universe you want to delve more into this madness, this article should amply scratch that itch:
https://bioshockmysteries.wordpress.c...
Even if you don't now, I'm sure in some infinite number of multiverses you will. ; )
October 7, 2021
Timeless
My darling wife, Jules, often suggests to me that I live in the past. I think she might be on to something. I do spend a lot of time in times other than the present here and the present now. Over the years I’ve come to feel like my sense of time is different to most people’s, and the apparent divisions between the past, present and imagined future are very blurry indeed. I wrote an earlier piece on the ‘present’ so I won’t revisit that. But I often wonder why one period of time is deemed more important than another simply because of where it occurs in relation to our current timeline, rather than it’s intrinsic value.
If one of the most important things we can do with our time is to experience and learn from those experiences, then does when the experience happened matter? We humans are great at thinking we know something, and we’re often right, but ‘knowing’ isn’t all there is to ‘learning’. Otherwise I’d only have to read the instructions for putting that flat pack cupboard together and Bob’s your uncle it’s up. Let me posit to you that many of life’s lessons are in fact like Ikea instructions – don’t expect to get it all down on one read through. Or two, or even three…
Life will tend to throw up repeat opportunities to learn the same lesson, hence that wonderful observation: Experience is a great teacher; it teaches you to recognise the same mistake when you make it again. Unfortunately that’s too many words to have tattooed on my arm. But while we’re waiting for life to toss us back into whatever deep end we didn’t quite learn to swim in last time, we can to some degree rewind, pause, play and glean more from the first time well after the event. In remembering some past experience we have an opportunity to relearn, consolidate what we learned at the time. It’s also likely that on some occasions in remembering we can see things from a different angle and learn something new.
Often what I get from remembering is an opportunity to re-experience the emotions I felt, and also to filter those experiences through what I’ve learned and experienced since. The other day on a trip to our local Bunnings (hardware store) I was waiting in the car for Jules to do her hardware fix thing. Long story short, COVID restrictions. Being soon bored I rifled through my wallet, as I do about twice a year, to rid it of all those dockets and reminders on paper scraps that I tend to shove in and forget. Good thing too, as I ended up with a palm full of crumpled bits of paper well past their use by dates. In the process I pulled out a very tattered piece of paper, about credit card size, that had a photo of Jules on it, one that was taken some twenty odd years ago. The first thought I had was ‘Gee, she was a good looking girl’, then it struck me that while, yes, age does leave its mark on all of us and the glow of youth fades, she was still the same woman I fell desperately in love with all those years ago. And with that thought I knew, again, that all the stupid, dumb little things that irk me, get on my goat, even anger me at times, about our day to day interactions, were really just that; stupid, dumb, and of very little consequence compared to the fact that she puts up with me every day. So yes, I teared up a bit.
I hopped out of the car when Jules returned and helped her put her armful of bits and bobs into the back of the car, then tried to explain the little revelation I’d had while waiting for her. Speaking stuff has never been my forte, so after stumbling around words that really didn’t convey what I wanted them to, I hugged her. Which, in its way, is another of life’s lessons I seem to be taking forever to learn; a hug can say a thousand words, so do that instead.
So, sure, live for today… and yesterday and tomorrow. Just remember that it’s all the same journey we’re on, all the time.
And while you’re at it, go hug someone.
If one of the most important things we can do with our time is to experience and learn from those experiences, then does when the experience happened matter? We humans are great at thinking we know something, and we’re often right, but ‘knowing’ isn’t all there is to ‘learning’. Otherwise I’d only have to read the instructions for putting that flat pack cupboard together and Bob’s your uncle it’s up. Let me posit to you that many of life’s lessons are in fact like Ikea instructions – don’t expect to get it all down on one read through. Or two, or even three…
Life will tend to throw up repeat opportunities to learn the same lesson, hence that wonderful observation: Experience is a great teacher; it teaches you to recognise the same mistake when you make it again. Unfortunately that’s too many words to have tattooed on my arm. But while we’re waiting for life to toss us back into whatever deep end we didn’t quite learn to swim in last time, we can to some degree rewind, pause, play and glean more from the first time well after the event. In remembering some past experience we have an opportunity to relearn, consolidate what we learned at the time. It’s also likely that on some occasions in remembering we can see things from a different angle and learn something new.
Often what I get from remembering is an opportunity to re-experience the emotions I felt, and also to filter those experiences through what I’ve learned and experienced since. The other day on a trip to our local Bunnings (hardware store) I was waiting in the car for Jules to do her hardware fix thing. Long story short, COVID restrictions. Being soon bored I rifled through my wallet, as I do about twice a year, to rid it of all those dockets and reminders on paper scraps that I tend to shove in and forget. Good thing too, as I ended up with a palm full of crumpled bits of paper well past their use by dates. In the process I pulled out a very tattered piece of paper, about credit card size, that had a photo of Jules on it, one that was taken some twenty odd years ago. The first thought I had was ‘Gee, she was a good looking girl’, then it struck me that while, yes, age does leave its mark on all of us and the glow of youth fades, she was still the same woman I fell desperately in love with all those years ago. And with that thought I knew, again, that all the stupid, dumb little things that irk me, get on my goat, even anger me at times, about our day to day interactions, were really just that; stupid, dumb, and of very little consequence compared to the fact that she puts up with me every day. So yes, I teared up a bit.
I hopped out of the car when Jules returned and helped her put her armful of bits and bobs into the back of the car, then tried to explain the little revelation I’d had while waiting for her. Speaking stuff has never been my forte, so after stumbling around words that really didn’t convey what I wanted them to, I hugged her. Which, in its way, is another of life’s lessons I seem to be taking forever to learn; a hug can say a thousand words, so do that instead.
So, sure, live for today… and yesterday and tomorrow. Just remember that it’s all the same journey we’re on, all the time.
And while you’re at it, go hug someone.
June 22, 2020
Revisitiing the past
This is a short real life story I wrote a while back for a competition. Something someone said recently brought it back to me, and re-reading it recently, all those emotions came back, and the realisations. So I'm posting it here to keep reminding myself and not lose again what was lost.
Bog Cotton.
By Mike Cavanagh
Sheep’s Head. Or Muntervary. A headland in county Cork, south-west Ireland. No place I’d ever been before, or to the best of my knowledge had any of my ancestors. But with a name like Michael Joseph Cavanagh (a ‘Micky-Jo’ as one Irishman happily exclaimed) there might be some slim chance at least someone related had been there over the past 10,000 years or so. Dunno. Genealogy is my older sister’s thing, not mine.
Cool wind in from the Atlantic, pushed up over the sea cliffs away over there somewhere as we traipse across the monotonous bog cotton fields. Spatters of raindrops nip intermittently against my face. The fluffy white heads of the tall grass jig and jag in the twirling winds. Ahead a lighthouse two hundred metres on, and, not yet visible, the renowned cliffs arching ever steeper down to the dark grey sea. Supposedly. Sky covered in an homogeneous sheeting of high, flat grey clouds. A day photo-shoped in low brightness and little contrast.
In 1993 I’d come overseas to the UK and Ireland with Katie, my partner at that time. I had no desires to search out my roots, or find long lost connections. Pretty much all that seemed like fuddy-duddy gobbledegook to me anyway. But I loved the landscapes. The variegated swatches of greens under arching steel-grey and washed-blue skies. The rains, drizzling, pouring, and anything in between. Especially the winds though, torn free from the long rolling Atlantic, stripping bare any semblance of cherished, protective warmth from the pretence of immortality. A man would die out here unprotected; quickly.
My foot squelches into an even wetter, boggier patch. The ooze slithers over my boots and insinuates itself between my flesh and now thoroughly wet socks. Excellent. These bleedin’ sea cliffs had really better be worth it. I extract my foot, and peruse the non-existent trail ahead. Katie seems to be making much easier progress. But she is a light lass; so fair play to her, as they say around here.
Two innocuous steps further on I stop, overwhelmed. An unseen tide courses, swirling through my being; physical, emotional, spiritual. Air, earth, and water sweep together, up from the landscape around me, and encompass me, draw me close, tight, warm. My lungs devoid of air do not seek to breathe. My eyes widen, seeing all yet nothing. Unbidden tears now on my cheeks. A mother’s breast, a father’s reassuring embrace, a belonging to here so all-encompassing I am lost in the complete sublimation of any thought and in a total transcendence of raw sensation. An alien yet deeply recognized sense of ‘being’.
Then it is gone. I gasp a single, wrenching breath. Shake my head free of the tears. Clear my sight, hear the wind again, the sting of the isolated driven rain drops. My skin rises in bumps, not from the cold, but from this one clear knowing: I am home.
I don’t know what to make of this. I walk on. I catch up with Katie, waving my hands about as I struggle to convey to her what has happened. Already I’m pushing the seeming truth down. Home? What stupid notion is this? Miles from bleedin’ anywhere more like it. But the emotions still linger. Raw. Real.
I determine to keep this experience to myself. Other than Katie, I will tell no-one. While still speaking to her, already I regret it. I am in truth embarrassed by this ‘event’. Clearly I’d had some mental episode that made me believe something objectively, tangibly real had occurred. Obviously poppycock. Mis-firing neurones and wacky brain biochemistry is all.
Eighteen months later. Christmas. Back at work for the Heritage Commission in Canberra, Australia. Christmas work lunch out in the rose garden outside old Parliament House. Sunny, hot, but under the shade of trees. Homemade sushi, more than a couple of bottles of champagne, good work mates and tall tales. Perfect Ozzie public servant’s Chrissy.
After much feasting and sky-larking, I’m sitting on a bench seat rolling a now third-time empty champagne glass between my palms. Sitting next to me is Charmaine, a young Aboriginal co-worker and all round good person. We’re sitting a little apart from the others. No reason, just happened. I’m talking. Startled I realise what I’m talking about. The thing I had hidden. That I would never discuss. The strange, clearly aberrant event from a world away in so many ways. I stop myself abruptly.
“Oh God, Charmaine. I’m sorry. This is all so much drivel!”
I turn to look at her, and the wry, self-deprecating smile on my face wilts. Charmaine reaches over to me and puts her arm over my shoulder. Tears welling, then trickling down her cheeks. She hugs me. Firm. Warming. She leans back, releases me, but still her hand on my shoulder, she looks into my eyes.
“Michael. You have no idea what it means to me to hear someone else say this, who understands what connection to land is like. Thank you!” Her hand moves to her heart.
Tears now in my eyes as well, we hug again. For a second time I sense it. Always known. Always felt.
Home.
A world away. And indelibly here.
* * *
Perhaps one day I will go back.
But, of course, I never really left.
Bog Cotton.
By Mike Cavanagh
Sheep’s Head. Or Muntervary. A headland in county Cork, south-west Ireland. No place I’d ever been before, or to the best of my knowledge had any of my ancestors. But with a name like Michael Joseph Cavanagh (a ‘Micky-Jo’ as one Irishman happily exclaimed) there might be some slim chance at least someone related had been there over the past 10,000 years or so. Dunno. Genealogy is my older sister’s thing, not mine.
Cool wind in from the Atlantic, pushed up over the sea cliffs away over there somewhere as we traipse across the monotonous bog cotton fields. Spatters of raindrops nip intermittently against my face. The fluffy white heads of the tall grass jig and jag in the twirling winds. Ahead a lighthouse two hundred metres on, and, not yet visible, the renowned cliffs arching ever steeper down to the dark grey sea. Supposedly. Sky covered in an homogeneous sheeting of high, flat grey clouds. A day photo-shoped in low brightness and little contrast.
In 1993 I’d come overseas to the UK and Ireland with Katie, my partner at that time. I had no desires to search out my roots, or find long lost connections. Pretty much all that seemed like fuddy-duddy gobbledegook to me anyway. But I loved the landscapes. The variegated swatches of greens under arching steel-grey and washed-blue skies. The rains, drizzling, pouring, and anything in between. Especially the winds though, torn free from the long rolling Atlantic, stripping bare any semblance of cherished, protective warmth from the pretence of immortality. A man would die out here unprotected; quickly.
My foot squelches into an even wetter, boggier patch. The ooze slithers over my boots and insinuates itself between my flesh and now thoroughly wet socks. Excellent. These bleedin’ sea cliffs had really better be worth it. I extract my foot, and peruse the non-existent trail ahead. Katie seems to be making much easier progress. But she is a light lass; so fair play to her, as they say around here.
Two innocuous steps further on I stop, overwhelmed. An unseen tide courses, swirling through my being; physical, emotional, spiritual. Air, earth, and water sweep together, up from the landscape around me, and encompass me, draw me close, tight, warm. My lungs devoid of air do not seek to breathe. My eyes widen, seeing all yet nothing. Unbidden tears now on my cheeks. A mother’s breast, a father’s reassuring embrace, a belonging to here so all-encompassing I am lost in the complete sublimation of any thought and in a total transcendence of raw sensation. An alien yet deeply recognized sense of ‘being’.
Then it is gone. I gasp a single, wrenching breath. Shake my head free of the tears. Clear my sight, hear the wind again, the sting of the isolated driven rain drops. My skin rises in bumps, not from the cold, but from this one clear knowing: I am home.
I don’t know what to make of this. I walk on. I catch up with Katie, waving my hands about as I struggle to convey to her what has happened. Already I’m pushing the seeming truth down. Home? What stupid notion is this? Miles from bleedin’ anywhere more like it. But the emotions still linger. Raw. Real.
I determine to keep this experience to myself. Other than Katie, I will tell no-one. While still speaking to her, already I regret it. I am in truth embarrassed by this ‘event’. Clearly I’d had some mental episode that made me believe something objectively, tangibly real had occurred. Obviously poppycock. Mis-firing neurones and wacky brain biochemistry is all.
Eighteen months later. Christmas. Back at work for the Heritage Commission in Canberra, Australia. Christmas work lunch out in the rose garden outside old Parliament House. Sunny, hot, but under the shade of trees. Homemade sushi, more than a couple of bottles of champagne, good work mates and tall tales. Perfect Ozzie public servant’s Chrissy.
After much feasting and sky-larking, I’m sitting on a bench seat rolling a now third-time empty champagne glass between my palms. Sitting next to me is Charmaine, a young Aboriginal co-worker and all round good person. We’re sitting a little apart from the others. No reason, just happened. I’m talking. Startled I realise what I’m talking about. The thing I had hidden. That I would never discuss. The strange, clearly aberrant event from a world away in so many ways. I stop myself abruptly.
“Oh God, Charmaine. I’m sorry. This is all so much drivel!”
I turn to look at her, and the wry, self-deprecating smile on my face wilts. Charmaine reaches over to me and puts her arm over my shoulder. Tears welling, then trickling down her cheeks. She hugs me. Firm. Warming. She leans back, releases me, but still her hand on my shoulder, she looks into my eyes.
“Michael. You have no idea what it means to me to hear someone else say this, who understands what connection to land is like. Thank you!” Her hand moves to her heart.
Tears now in my eyes as well, we hug again. For a second time I sense it. Always known. Always felt.
Home.
A world away. And indelibly here.
* * *
Perhaps one day I will go back.
But, of course, I never really left.
December 7, 2017
If I Had A Hammer...
In the midst of writing a further memoir, more stuff about my past, I came to ask myself: “What is the present?” And the answer is… I don’t know.
We’ve all heard it said ‘Live in the present’ or some variation of same. The meaning most often is applied to someone who is seen to be either ‘living in’ the past or the future, and the advice basically means stop worrying about yesterday and/or tomorrow and just concentrate on today. In itself this seems good advice and most often probably is on a personal level. But as with most sayings, truisms or proverbs, there are assumptions within the concepts that can greatly alter the meaning of the phrase and therefore both the applicability and use of the words.
So, exactly what time frame gets me out of living in the past or the future and into living in the present?
Let’s start with you: What is your sense of ‘the present’? This exact moment? This morning? Today? This week, month, year, decade? I suspect like most things in life, while we feel that we share the same notion of the concept, when we come down to pin point what that notion actually is, it turns out to be rather hard to define, and far more varied between us than we had first imagined. Like ‘time’ itself; we all know what it means, but what is it, exactly?
For me, sometimes the ‘present’ seems to be thinner than a cigarette paper, constantly passing along between the future and the past; in effect, it doesn’t exist. If I try to grab at the exact ‘now’ it’s gone merely in the act of trying to grasp it. No matter how quickly I say ‘Now!’ it’s passed, and will be no matter how impossibly fast I or some super quantum computer can utter or formulate the word. This notion of an exact now, an exact present is illusory. Other times I wonder if my whole life isn’t my present? Sounds a bit like a fool and his semantics? Well yes, and no.
So what if my or your sense of the present, of what is immediately relevant to your life now, varies greatly? On one hand, is it possible to conceive of a present that encompasses our whole lives? On the other, in the sense of geological, universal time, our whole lives are less than fractions of fractions of the blink of an eye. OK, again so what you ask? Fair enough, probably hardly matters in most situations, but … and there is a ‘but’.
To take one example, compare the notion of place in time and space (location) between two different cultures. In Australian Aboriginal culture, the ‘Dreamtime’ links all of life as it is today into ‘one vast unchanging network of relationships which can be traced to the great spirit ancestors of the Dreamtime’, which ‘continues as the "Dreaming" in the spiritual lives of aboriginal people today.’ (text within quotations marks from http://www.aboriginalart.com.au/cultu...). Powerful stuff, and something that clearly carries a deep and true sense that the ‘present’ is the same story as the ‘past’, and the future – one story, ongoing. Independent of whether you believe in this specific ‘Dreamtime’, the notion is cogent, real and as defensible as any other notion of our sense of time.
Then link this notion to that of land in the same cultural context: ‘We don't own the land, the land owns us' and 'Land is the starting point to where it all began. It is like picking up a piece of dirt and saying this is where I started and this is where I will go' (quoted text from same source as above). So in a very real sense, both place in time and place in space are relevant at every point, not just here, not just now.
Those of us who live in the techno-land of rapid changes and affluent, benign neglect (yep, that’s me) appear to be focused so sharply on the right here and the right now that our sense of the present (and the ‘here’) borders on the myopic. ‘Live in the present’ in this context is perhaps exactly what we shouldn’t be doing. Or at least, our sense of the present should include all our connections, all our influences, at all times… which seems to me to resonate more with the underlying philosophy and world view of the Indigenous ‘Dreamtime’ and ‘sense of place’ than it does to Twitter, Facebook, Snap Chat and Instagram.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any tools we fashion and use, but it would do us well, I believe, to remember another saying: ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.
Just saying. : )
We’ve all heard it said ‘Live in the present’ or some variation of same. The meaning most often is applied to someone who is seen to be either ‘living in’ the past or the future, and the advice basically means stop worrying about yesterday and/or tomorrow and just concentrate on today. In itself this seems good advice and most often probably is on a personal level. But as with most sayings, truisms or proverbs, there are assumptions within the concepts that can greatly alter the meaning of the phrase and therefore both the applicability and use of the words.
So, exactly what time frame gets me out of living in the past or the future and into living in the present?
Let’s start with you: What is your sense of ‘the present’? This exact moment? This morning? Today? This week, month, year, decade? I suspect like most things in life, while we feel that we share the same notion of the concept, when we come down to pin point what that notion actually is, it turns out to be rather hard to define, and far more varied between us than we had first imagined. Like ‘time’ itself; we all know what it means, but what is it, exactly?
For me, sometimes the ‘present’ seems to be thinner than a cigarette paper, constantly passing along between the future and the past; in effect, it doesn’t exist. If I try to grab at the exact ‘now’ it’s gone merely in the act of trying to grasp it. No matter how quickly I say ‘Now!’ it’s passed, and will be no matter how impossibly fast I or some super quantum computer can utter or formulate the word. This notion of an exact now, an exact present is illusory. Other times I wonder if my whole life isn’t my present? Sounds a bit like a fool and his semantics? Well yes, and no.
So what if my or your sense of the present, of what is immediately relevant to your life now, varies greatly? On one hand, is it possible to conceive of a present that encompasses our whole lives? On the other, in the sense of geological, universal time, our whole lives are less than fractions of fractions of the blink of an eye. OK, again so what you ask? Fair enough, probably hardly matters in most situations, but … and there is a ‘but’.
To take one example, compare the notion of place in time and space (location) between two different cultures. In Australian Aboriginal culture, the ‘Dreamtime’ links all of life as it is today into ‘one vast unchanging network of relationships which can be traced to the great spirit ancestors of the Dreamtime’, which ‘continues as the "Dreaming" in the spiritual lives of aboriginal people today.’ (text within quotations marks from http://www.aboriginalart.com.au/cultu...). Powerful stuff, and something that clearly carries a deep and true sense that the ‘present’ is the same story as the ‘past’, and the future – one story, ongoing. Independent of whether you believe in this specific ‘Dreamtime’, the notion is cogent, real and as defensible as any other notion of our sense of time.
Then link this notion to that of land in the same cultural context: ‘We don't own the land, the land owns us' and 'Land is the starting point to where it all began. It is like picking up a piece of dirt and saying this is where I started and this is where I will go' (quoted text from same source as above). So in a very real sense, both place in time and place in space are relevant at every point, not just here, not just now.
Those of us who live in the techno-land of rapid changes and affluent, benign neglect (yep, that’s me) appear to be focused so sharply on the right here and the right now that our sense of the present (and the ‘here’) borders on the myopic. ‘Live in the present’ in this context is perhaps exactly what we shouldn’t be doing. Or at least, our sense of the present should include all our connections, all our influences, at all times… which seems to me to resonate more with the underlying philosophy and world view of the Indigenous ‘Dreamtime’ and ‘sense of place’ than it does to Twitter, Facebook, Snap Chat and Instagram.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any tools we fashion and use, but it would do us well, I believe, to remember another saying: ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.
Just saying. : )
September 25, 2016
A Story in Stone
I recently visited an historical cemetery at Running Stream, north of Lithgow in central New South Wales. I was there with a group of my wife's relations as part of their family reunion. While there was a group of twenty or so of us there, I found myself a quiet moment alone, contemplating the inscription on a large gravestone in the top corner of the small cemetery.
The cemetery sits on a small, grassy knoll, about 50 metres behind the old church, and as most old cemeteries are, is overgrown (though selectively cleared for our visit) and slowly being gathered back again into the earth. I find comfort in this slow recycling of souls and stones alike; a reclamation of what we borrow for a time and soon give back. The small stream running at the far end of the paddock and the nearby woodland of red gum, box and callitris stood testimony to both the constancy and the ever-changing nature of time, in which our lives are the briefest of flowerings, in the briefest of seasons.
The headstone I pondered on had no flowery, reverential or religious text, merely a parsimonious record of who and when. In totality the headstones recorded:
Sacred to the memory of William Walton, who departed this life March 27 1859, aged 39 years.
Under a single slim line was then recorded:
Also Sarah Walton, who died March 10 1862, aged 2 years and 6 mos.
There was another slim line under this, but the remaining third of the headstone was blank under it.
William died three years before his daughter who died two and a half years old those three years later. So, it would seem, William's wife was three months pregnant with Sarah when her husband died. Her memorial in flesh and bone, her daughter, didn't even make it to her third birthday. Losing children early was far too common in these hard times, but this seemed a cruel blow even so.
I surmised that the remaining area of the headstone was reserved for either William's wife or their other children, if there were any; yet it remains blank. Did his wife leave the area, distraught at the loss of both her husband and daughter? Did she find love, marriage, family and happiness again later in life, elsewhere? I don't know, there are no other headstones concerning this family to be discerned in the cemetery.
I found this headstone deeply moving, both for the story written upon it, and for all the things it didn't record: the hardship, the deep pain, the on-going struggle for this family.
Thirty-one words on a gravestone, too few words to be all that record these lives. Yet I'm hopeful that someday William and his wife's real legacy have and will revisit this quiet, grassy cemetery and stand testament in themselves to all the unwritten words for William, his wife and Sarah.
The cemetery sits on a small, grassy knoll, about 50 metres behind the old church, and as most old cemeteries are, is overgrown (though selectively cleared for our visit) and slowly being gathered back again into the earth. I find comfort in this slow recycling of souls and stones alike; a reclamation of what we borrow for a time and soon give back. The small stream running at the far end of the paddock and the nearby woodland of red gum, box and callitris stood testimony to both the constancy and the ever-changing nature of time, in which our lives are the briefest of flowerings, in the briefest of seasons.
The headstone I pondered on had no flowery, reverential or religious text, merely a parsimonious record of who and when. In totality the headstones recorded:
Sacred to the memory of William Walton, who departed this life March 27 1859, aged 39 years.
Under a single slim line was then recorded:
Also Sarah Walton, who died March 10 1862, aged 2 years and 6 mos.
There was another slim line under this, but the remaining third of the headstone was blank under it.
William died three years before his daughter who died two and a half years old those three years later. So, it would seem, William's wife was three months pregnant with Sarah when her husband died. Her memorial in flesh and bone, her daughter, didn't even make it to her third birthday. Losing children early was far too common in these hard times, but this seemed a cruel blow even so.
I surmised that the remaining area of the headstone was reserved for either William's wife or their other children, if there were any; yet it remains blank. Did his wife leave the area, distraught at the loss of both her husband and daughter? Did she find love, marriage, family and happiness again later in life, elsewhere? I don't know, there are no other headstones concerning this family to be discerned in the cemetery.
I found this headstone deeply moving, both for the story written upon it, and for all the things it didn't record: the hardship, the deep pain, the on-going struggle for this family.
Thirty-one words on a gravestone, too few words to be all that record these lives. Yet I'm hopeful that someday William and his wife's real legacy have and will revisit this quiet, grassy cemetery and stand testament in themselves to all the unwritten words for William, his wife and Sarah.
September 17, 2016
Beauty and the Beholder.
It’s an oft used phrase: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Mostly we trot it out when we are confounded by someone’s choice or preference in art, interior decor or sexual partner. At this vernacular level all well and good, but if you think about the phrase as it stands it does lead to some interesting ponderings.
Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Let’s go sideways first. Another saying: ‘if a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?’ Not if there’s no-one to hear it, but it still makes a noise, and having heard large trees fall I know you’d have to be quite some distance away not to hear it fall. In this example, the perception (hear) is easily discernible from the causative agent (tree falls). But ‘beauty’? Can something be beautiful even if there is no-one to see, hear, smell or in any other way perceive it?
One take on this is that we can each define what we think is beautiful, for example particular hues and textures in a sky at sunset that make a ‘beautiful’ sunset. Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean a lone albatross soars across such a vermillion and mauve cloud rent sky, not giving a single thought to it (probably), but intent on where the next school of fish are likely to be in the dark, choppy waters below. As described in this way, this scene and this sky to me sound like things of beauty. But out there, none of ‘us’ who define beauty as we understand it, are around to see it. Is it still a thing of beauty?
To remove all sense of ‘us-ness’, imagine a sunset of green-blue skies on some methane-rich world light years from our solar system. Beautiful?
What it comes down to, I believe, is whether or not we believe things can be, and are, ‘beautiful’ even if we don’t perceive them, even if we never will, never can. We can extrapolate on our ideals of beauty and say ‘where-ever these aspects occur, beauty exists’. Yet beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what if ‘we’ aren’t the beholders? If other sentient species exist in the universe their sense of beauty is bound to differ from our own. But we don’t need to go so far from home. The great apes, and chimpanzees, do they perceive ‘beauty’? Monkeys? Cats and dogs? Even if animals don’t conceive ideas as we do, I certainly believe animals with higher perceptive and cognitive abilities ‘get’ beauty, even though not understood or perceived as we do.
Is there a fixed viewpoint for beauty, or is it in fact where-ever we perceive it, which has to do with our perception, not its presence or absence? In which case, isn’t beauty everywhere, in everything?
What a thing to believe.
Have a beautiful day.
Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Let’s go sideways first. Another saying: ‘if a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?’ Not if there’s no-one to hear it, but it still makes a noise, and having heard large trees fall I know you’d have to be quite some distance away not to hear it fall. In this example, the perception (hear) is easily discernible from the causative agent (tree falls). But ‘beauty’? Can something be beautiful even if there is no-one to see, hear, smell or in any other way perceive it?
One take on this is that we can each define what we think is beautiful, for example particular hues and textures in a sky at sunset that make a ‘beautiful’ sunset. Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean a lone albatross soars across such a vermillion and mauve cloud rent sky, not giving a single thought to it (probably), but intent on where the next school of fish are likely to be in the dark, choppy waters below. As described in this way, this scene and this sky to me sound like things of beauty. But out there, none of ‘us’ who define beauty as we understand it, are around to see it. Is it still a thing of beauty?
To remove all sense of ‘us-ness’, imagine a sunset of green-blue skies on some methane-rich world light years from our solar system. Beautiful?
What it comes down to, I believe, is whether or not we believe things can be, and are, ‘beautiful’ even if we don’t perceive them, even if we never will, never can. We can extrapolate on our ideals of beauty and say ‘where-ever these aspects occur, beauty exists’. Yet beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what if ‘we’ aren’t the beholders? If other sentient species exist in the universe their sense of beauty is bound to differ from our own. But we don’t need to go so far from home. The great apes, and chimpanzees, do they perceive ‘beauty’? Monkeys? Cats and dogs? Even if animals don’t conceive ideas as we do, I certainly believe animals with higher perceptive and cognitive abilities ‘get’ beauty, even though not understood or perceived as we do.
Is there a fixed viewpoint for beauty, or is it in fact where-ever we perceive it, which has to do with our perception, not its presence or absence? In which case, isn’t beauty everywhere, in everything?
What a thing to believe.
Have a beautiful day.
September 8, 2016
The English World Order of Words.
OK, someone sent me a link to an online article that I found more than a little interesting. I'm also willing to argue against it until the cows come home! (Which probably shows that the link provider knows me rather well.) Here's the link (right mouse click to open in another tab or page):
Crazy English Grammar Rule
The 'green great dragon' reference is to a letter J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to W.H. Auden, dated 7 June 1955. In this letter, Tolkien wrote: 'I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do.'
When I first read this comment, my immediate reaction was a mild 'Eureka!' I was relieved that someone else at least gets the point about the order of adjectives. The good J.R.R. had no more to say on this point, so allow me to extend the thought and link to the online article referred above. I'll do this by way of an example.
I have two line-ups of dragons; probably because they've committed some petty crime like eaten someone's cows, burnt their house down, trivial stuff like that. One line up is of big dragons all of the one size. Each however is a different colour, so I walk up to identify the culprit, point my finger and say "The green great dragon!" All well and good. Now say the lineup is of dragons of varying sizes, but all of them are green. Then I walk up to the line-up, point to the largest one and say "The great green dragon!"
Yes, silly example but I hope you get my drift. Order of the adjectives can, and I'd argue should, reflect the most discerning of the terms, with the first term being the most defining of the general type, or commonality of feature. Tolkien's 'green great dragon' is perfectly fine in my book when used in a circumstance to discriminate a dragon by colour amongst a group with commonality in size. The online article serves to illustrate a useful guide, but should not be seen as an invariable rule.
I recently had some friendly online banter with someone who does not speak English as their first language; she does speaks it very well however, as well as a number of other languages. Her initial point was that English pronunciations (and the language in general) are difficult, i.e. inconsistent. It's true there are many homographs (same spelling, different sound and meaning), and homophones (same sound, different spelling and meaning) in the English language. There are clear and logical arguments as to why these should be simplified. But I personally would not support such moves.
Language is a product of history, human movement, conquests and discoveries. Like wine it becomes richer and more complex as it ages, which for those who savour it can greatly add to it's enjoyment. English really is a mongrel language, with words taken from almost all over the globe and over long periods of time. Understanding words can help you understand the history of the people who spoke them. This is, of course, the root of J.R.R. Tolkien's created worlds: the words and their history created middle-earth, not the other way around.
Yes, this makes it a more challenging language to learn and use well. But it also provides a rich vein of meaning, interpretation, and nuance that lies deep within our literature, songs and poetry. A depth that would be disconnected, smudged over forever were we to go down the route of simplification of English; a 'chateau cardboard' variety that would be a far poorer wellspring of creativity for our writers to drink from.
English isn't an easy language to learn or to master. But it is an incomparable servant in the right hands.
Crazy English Grammar Rule
The 'green great dragon' reference is to a letter J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to W.H. Auden, dated 7 June 1955. In this letter, Tolkien wrote: 'I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do.'
When I first read this comment, my immediate reaction was a mild 'Eureka!' I was relieved that someone else at least gets the point about the order of adjectives. The good J.R.R. had no more to say on this point, so allow me to extend the thought and link to the online article referred above. I'll do this by way of an example.
I have two line-ups of dragons; probably because they've committed some petty crime like eaten someone's cows, burnt their house down, trivial stuff like that. One line up is of big dragons all of the one size. Each however is a different colour, so I walk up to identify the culprit, point my finger and say "The green great dragon!" All well and good. Now say the lineup is of dragons of varying sizes, but all of them are green. Then I walk up to the line-up, point to the largest one and say "The great green dragon!"
Yes, silly example but I hope you get my drift. Order of the adjectives can, and I'd argue should, reflect the most discerning of the terms, with the first term being the most defining of the general type, or commonality of feature. Tolkien's 'green great dragon' is perfectly fine in my book when used in a circumstance to discriminate a dragon by colour amongst a group with commonality in size. The online article serves to illustrate a useful guide, but should not be seen as an invariable rule.
I recently had some friendly online banter with someone who does not speak English as their first language; she does speaks it very well however, as well as a number of other languages. Her initial point was that English pronunciations (and the language in general) are difficult, i.e. inconsistent. It's true there are many homographs (same spelling, different sound and meaning), and homophones (same sound, different spelling and meaning) in the English language. There are clear and logical arguments as to why these should be simplified. But I personally would not support such moves.
Language is a product of history, human movement, conquests and discoveries. Like wine it becomes richer and more complex as it ages, which for those who savour it can greatly add to it's enjoyment. English really is a mongrel language, with words taken from almost all over the globe and over long periods of time. Understanding words can help you understand the history of the people who spoke them. This is, of course, the root of J.R.R. Tolkien's created worlds: the words and their history created middle-earth, not the other way around.
Yes, this makes it a more challenging language to learn and use well. But it also provides a rich vein of meaning, interpretation, and nuance that lies deep within our literature, songs and poetry. A depth that would be disconnected, smudged over forever were we to go down the route of simplification of English; a 'chateau cardboard' variety that would be a far poorer wellspring of creativity for our writers to drink from.
English isn't an easy language to learn or to master. But it is an incomparable servant in the right hands.
September 4, 2016
The Binding and Unbinding of Worldviews
A long post today, but the subject I trust you'll find worthy of your time.
In 1972 I was in the throes of my second year at university and my first year away from home. Having achieved my major purpose in taking up a tertiary education, that being to leave home with my parents’ blessings, I was struggling with finding a purpose for what I was doing. One of the subjects I was required to undertake was ‘The History and Philosophy of Science’. As soon as I knew this was a mandatory subject I thought: ‘Gee, this will be fascinating...’ with all the whiplash, privileged-young-man sneering irony I could muster.
The subject was, more or less, much as I had anticipated. I struggled with it throughout that semester but eventually did achieve a pass, ‘minima cum laude’. Thus would well and truly have endeth my lesson were it not for being introduced to one man: Johann Kepler. Well not personally introduced as he's been dead for almost 400 years.
But before proceeding with the good Johann, a brief digression on ‘worldviews’.
We all have a worldview. One definition of ‘worldview’ from the online ‘Free Dictionary’ (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/worl...) provides two variations that mean more or less the same thing but in two contexts:
‘1. The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world.
2. A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group. In both senses also called Weltanschauung.’
Look up that German term if you like circular arguments.
OK, worldview, fair enough, but where’s the rub? Well, I like this take on it from Foster Gamble (http://www.thrivemovement.com/what-wo...
‘The key is that our belief system determines what we think is possible, and what we think is possible influences the results we create or allow in life. The interactions of all our individual worldviews shapes the condition of humanity and therefore, given our technologies, of planet Earth.’
A pretty fundamental aspect of individual lives and a potentially earth shaping thing then.
So, let’s go back to Johann Kepler.
Kepler was born on the feast day of St. John the Evangelist, December 27th, in 1571. He grew to be a deeply religious man, who all his life held dear to his Christian faith. He was also a scientist and in particular an astronomer. Most likely from when he was at university in 1590, Kepler saw the solar system as a construct of his much loved God, and sought to find ways to reconcile the operations of the solar system with the inherent Godly organised patterning of the physical world. His major work supporting this view, Kepler’s worldview if you will, was the Mysterium Cosmographicam that he published in 1596.
In this great work, Kepler fitted the orbits of the solar system to a set of known shapes, the Platonic solids or polyhedra – basically three dimensional geometric shapes, of which a cube is one example. Kepler believed he had revealed God's ordained geometrical plan for the universe; his worldview made manifest.
Kepler continued to work on refining his work, but to his undoubted growing consternation began to find that the more and better quality information he obtained, the less well the planets’ orbits fit his God-supporting world view. For fifteen years Kepler strained to fit the increasingly obstinate data to his published and fundamental world view. Kepler was an astronomer, so this was his living, seven days a week. In a world where burning the candle at both ends bore a far more literal interpretation, it’s staggering to think of how many eye straining hours this constituted of Kepler’s life.
In 1602 Kepler reformulated his approach on the motion of the planets and set about trying to calculate the orbit of the planet Mars, the most recalcitrant of the then known planets. Over the next three years, Kepler failed forty times. The amount of work and dedication Kepler exhibited amazes me. Working for weeks on end by daylight and candlelight on one formulation only for it fail, then pick up his traces and start again takes tenacity and straight up ‘guts’.
Finally, in early 1605 he got it right, realising that the planets orbited in ellipses. To get there Kepler displayed not only enormous dedication and a meticulous approach to his work, but he’d also had to forgo his published beliefs, those that so beautifully ascribed God within the solar system. Instead he allowed the data, the actual facts, to drive how he interpreted the world, not the other way around.
I am to this day in awe of this man, this dedicated seeker of truth, this dedicated man of God. Johann Kepler was a deeply committed Christian, yet he could have been a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew or of any other religious denomination, for in the end it seems to me that Kepler understood that while God is fundamental to the world, our view of both is no more than that: our view, a changeable thing ever moving towards ‘truth’ but in no way a fundamental, immutable, irrefutable statement on the world; or God.
Over 400 years ago, one man seems to have found a deep truth that could, and should, still be held in great esteem today by people of all faiths and nationalities. My view is that the world would be a fundamentally better place if it were so.
God bless you, Johann, where-ever you are.
In 1972 I was in the throes of my second year at university and my first year away from home. Having achieved my major purpose in taking up a tertiary education, that being to leave home with my parents’ blessings, I was struggling with finding a purpose for what I was doing. One of the subjects I was required to undertake was ‘The History and Philosophy of Science’. As soon as I knew this was a mandatory subject I thought: ‘Gee, this will be fascinating...’ with all the whiplash, privileged-young-man sneering irony I could muster.
The subject was, more or less, much as I had anticipated. I struggled with it throughout that semester but eventually did achieve a pass, ‘minima cum laude’. Thus would well and truly have endeth my lesson were it not for being introduced to one man: Johann Kepler. Well not personally introduced as he's been dead for almost 400 years.
But before proceeding with the good Johann, a brief digression on ‘worldviews’.
We all have a worldview. One definition of ‘worldview’ from the online ‘Free Dictionary’ (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/worl...) provides two variations that mean more or less the same thing but in two contexts:
‘1. The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world.
2. A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group. In both senses also called Weltanschauung.’
Look up that German term if you like circular arguments.
OK, worldview, fair enough, but where’s the rub? Well, I like this take on it from Foster Gamble (http://www.thrivemovement.com/what-wo...
‘The key is that our belief system determines what we think is possible, and what we think is possible influences the results we create or allow in life. The interactions of all our individual worldviews shapes the condition of humanity and therefore, given our technologies, of planet Earth.’
A pretty fundamental aspect of individual lives and a potentially earth shaping thing then.
So, let’s go back to Johann Kepler.
Kepler was born on the feast day of St. John the Evangelist, December 27th, in 1571. He grew to be a deeply religious man, who all his life held dear to his Christian faith. He was also a scientist and in particular an astronomer. Most likely from when he was at university in 1590, Kepler saw the solar system as a construct of his much loved God, and sought to find ways to reconcile the operations of the solar system with the inherent Godly organised patterning of the physical world. His major work supporting this view, Kepler’s worldview if you will, was the Mysterium Cosmographicam that he published in 1596.
In this great work, Kepler fitted the orbits of the solar system to a set of known shapes, the Platonic solids or polyhedra – basically three dimensional geometric shapes, of which a cube is one example. Kepler believed he had revealed God's ordained geometrical plan for the universe; his worldview made manifest.
Kepler continued to work on refining his work, but to his undoubted growing consternation began to find that the more and better quality information he obtained, the less well the planets’ orbits fit his God-supporting world view. For fifteen years Kepler strained to fit the increasingly obstinate data to his published and fundamental world view. Kepler was an astronomer, so this was his living, seven days a week. In a world where burning the candle at both ends bore a far more literal interpretation, it’s staggering to think of how many eye straining hours this constituted of Kepler’s life.
In 1602 Kepler reformulated his approach on the motion of the planets and set about trying to calculate the orbit of the planet Mars, the most recalcitrant of the then known planets. Over the next three years, Kepler failed forty times. The amount of work and dedication Kepler exhibited amazes me. Working for weeks on end by daylight and candlelight on one formulation only for it fail, then pick up his traces and start again takes tenacity and straight up ‘guts’.
Finally, in early 1605 he got it right, realising that the planets orbited in ellipses. To get there Kepler displayed not only enormous dedication and a meticulous approach to his work, but he’d also had to forgo his published beliefs, those that so beautifully ascribed God within the solar system. Instead he allowed the data, the actual facts, to drive how he interpreted the world, not the other way around.
I am to this day in awe of this man, this dedicated seeker of truth, this dedicated man of God. Johann Kepler was a deeply committed Christian, yet he could have been a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew or of any other religious denomination, for in the end it seems to me that Kepler understood that while God is fundamental to the world, our view of both is no more than that: our view, a changeable thing ever moving towards ‘truth’ but in no way a fundamental, immutable, irrefutable statement on the world; or God.
Over 400 years ago, one man seems to have found a deep truth that could, and should, still be held in great esteem today by people of all faiths and nationalities. My view is that the world would be a fundamentally better place if it were so.
God bless you, Johann, where-ever you are.
