Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 24

Some Fade Away

Yesterday in a telephone conversation, I heard Brigitte say: “So they were at loggerheads?” The caller, who was a younger sort, had never heard that phrase. Both of us knew it, but we didn’t know its origins. Online Etymology Dictionary to the rescue. Once long ago a “logger” meant a “heavy block of wood”—rather than “a timber man”—or, perhaps, mindful of the new correctness, a “timber person.” Joined to “head” the word signified a “stupid person.” A close relative is the “blockhead.” That was back in the sixteenth century. It took another century before the still lingering meaning of “at loggerheads” came to mean “to be in disagreement”; the phrase was first recorded in the 1670s. It is the season of peace and harmony, but some people are still at loggerheads. In this particular instance, a daughter and her mother. Well, well. Some things never change—even as old words are gradually crowded out of circulation by inundations of the new. I’m notLOL.

The Night Before the Night Before

The night before the night before ChristmasSeems already here at noon todayWhat with a vast low pressure system’s browPressed right down over rain-wet roofs on whichAn aggregate of fallen branches stirThe symmetry of shingles on our roof.
Absent all white except some litter ofS-shaped particles of foam blown from aWalmart bag. Today is trash day here andDark hulks of jumbled cans, some upside down,Mark, with green recycling boxes, that thingsAre all quite, quite, quite quotidian still.
Nevertheless, on this the day before The night before, invisibly but still thereNonetheless, we feel the season’s presence In the air—not the humid atmosphereBut instead the spirit’s breath which knows thatChrist’s birth on this our earth is very near.

Paradigm Shifts

Back around about 1966 I stumbled on Thomas Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, thus shortly after it appeared (Chicago University Press, 1962). It was on the shelf of Midwest Research Institute’s Economics Library. All work stopped as soon as I opened the book. For someone who had been brought up on the cyclic nature of culture, the book was confirmation, first of all. By “scientific revolutions” Kuhn meant “paradigm shifts,” defined as major changes not only in methods but also in the world-views of various domains of science. By then I had already absorbed the notion (by way of Carl Jung’s book, Psychology and Alchemy) that practical, physical sciences—however defective in their methods—could over time transform themselves into mystical practices, indeed also going back to the physical side centuries later. Here was a book that looked at this phenomenon in some searching detail.
The book surfaced again recently while I was re-reading Carl B. Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death (State University of New York Press, 1993), one of the best surveys of this subject I’ve ever encountered. In Chapter 5 Becker discusses “A Model of Resistance and Change in the Sciences.” He notes what no doubt people of my bent have long noted with interest—namely that a paradigm shift in physics has produced a world-view that might be named, after Werner Heisenberg’s, Uncertainty. There is no there there—only waves of probability. We’re at least one Astronomical Unit beyond classical mechanics, Einstein having changed Newton’s certainties, and Quantum Mechanics having dissolved even Relativity. Quantum physics generated String Theory—in an effort to produce a theory to unify them all. But—judging by a paper Brigitte had come across titled “Is String Theory About to Unravel” by Brian Greene, in the Smithsonian ( link )—string theory has produced so many endless (billions) of shapes Reality might actually have, with no hint at all which might be legitimate, that we seemed to have entered a genuine Cloud of Unknowing in physics. Thus Physics, as a science, is altogether compatible with Parapsychology.
But, as Becker points out, in Biology and Psychology, the old paradigm of materialism is still hanging in there fairly hard even if resistance is weakening, see for instance earlier posts this month of Wilder Penfield.
Now if a once practical chemistry—strictly this-worldly and trying to make gold out of silver, etc.—managed to transform itself in the Middle Ages into a occult mystical practice, I have the notion that Becker’s view, namely that the paranormal sciences willeventually establish their own legitimacy in due time, is probably correct. But the shift in paradigms, especially very big one, thus from material to psychic orientations—or back again—is rather slow, slow. It comes about one generation at a time. Therefore I won’t see the day arriving. But it’s moving at the rate of a large tectonic plate. And then we may know just a little more….

I’m Culturally Parochial

Thus the shortest day for me is certainly on the 21st of December—because my parish lies in the Northern Hemisphere. Parish is the root of that word, parochial, from late Latin parochia, a parish, dated to 600 A.D., thus with Christendom having learned to walk. But even back then—reassuringly in this age of excessive change—this day was also the shortest. Some things remain reliably the same, and clinging to certainties, I rarely fail to note this day, parochially, because in the regions below (another parochial designation) the Equator, today is the Summer Solstice. And that’s something my viscera can’t quite believe. The night tomorrow will be just as short, subjectively, as tonight, but there is the knowledge, anyway, that light will grow until June 21st of 2015—when another period of mourning will begin. Right now we celebrate the Light’s Return.

The Died Again

When a member of the Grateful Dead passes, it would seem appropriate to speak of the Died Again. Rock Scully, who was the band’s manager, died last week (December 16) at the age of 73. Rest in peace. Scully does not appear on any lists of the performing members of this band, but he did write a book, with David Dalton (founder of Rolling Stone magazine) entitled Living with the Dead.

Even the Internet (Almost) Forgets

When I joined Midwest Research Institute in the long ago, its Economics division was housed in a building we called Barstow. It had been built as a school for girls. In our day the top floor was used only for storage, but there a old blackboard remained in one of the rooms—and the departing girls had written on it in white chalk, “Good-bye old Barstow, Good-bye.” That was circa 1955. The school itself moved elsewhere, became coeducational, and finally ended up way to the south where it still operates and all is well. But neither The Barstow School itself nor MRI (since the renamed MRI Global) acknowledges the existence of that building. In 1995 MRI undertook some major additions, but not enough detail is given to indicate whether or not “old Barstow” had been demolished. I’ve spent far too much time trying to find it—whereas, some five six years ago, I could still manage to do so. Well, even the Internet forgets. Almost.
My last resort was to see if Google Maps might help me. With some strenuous mouse movements, and using Google’s Street View facility, I managed to place myself near the building and then, with persistence, I finally got myself a view of old Barstow at last. Yes, it still exists. I show the picture here. The building is visible in the lower left hand corner. It has been shorn of its surrounding trees—and a smaller, adjacent gym-building (where we used to play volley ball twice weekly after work.) But the building still stands although MRI Global (emphasis mine) is now institutionally unable to remember that once it was (and may still be) using it. What MRI never forgets—which is not surprising given the publicity- and mnemonic value of the fact, is that, early in its history, the Institute was instrumental in formulating the hard sugar-cover that surrounds the chocolate inside M&Ms....
The background here: I recalled in another context entirely that once I had just chanced across Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—what with my office facing right into the Economics Library that served our division. I wanted to write about that—but what with a morning wasted discovering whether or not that building still stood, that project will be taken up tomorrow. The Internet is capable of forgetting—if the cells that make it live forget. And Barstow will be entirely forgotten, I wager, after I too pass on.

Remembering Batista

Back in 1959, the year of the Cuban Revolution, I was a mere 23—and a soldier in the U.S. Army. It was my early experience of adulthood. I was a keen reader of Time magazine and proud to be a subscriber. And here came that revolution. What caused that revolution? Well, it was the dictatorship of one Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar; by happenstance, having just looked up again how Spanish names are formed, I know that Zaldívar was Batista’s mother’s maiden name.
He came from a humble background. As Wikipedia’s article on him puts it, “he earned a living as a laborer in the cane fields, docks, and railroads. He was a tailor, mechanic, charcoal vendor and fruit peddler.” His army career had parallels to mine. He learned shorthand and later taught it—and it was as a sergeant-stenographer (I was one of those too) that he lead a revolution in 1933 (the Revolt of the Sergeants). It overthrew Gerardo Machado, an authoritarian ruler and a general in the Cuban War of Independence.
Though from humble background, once turned dictator of Cuba, Batista favored moneyed interests. To quote from Wikipedia again, Batista…
…suspended the 1940 Constitution and revoked most political liberties, including the right to strike. He then aligned with the wealthiest landowners who owned the largest sugar plantations, and presided over a stagnating economy that widened the gap between rich and poor Cubans. Batista's increasingly corrupt and repressive government then began to systematically profit from the exploitation of Cuba's commercial interests, by negotiating lucrative relationships with the American mafia, who controlled the drug, gambling, and prostitution businesses in Havana, and with large multinational American corporations that had invested considerable amounts of money in Cuba.    Wikipedia ( link ).
The man who overcame Batista was himself the child of a wealthy sugar plantation owner, became a lawyer and, as a dictator, favored the lower classes against the powers of commercial wealth.
I feel a certain commonality with Fidel Castro too—namely an inherent dislike of what is called “freedom” nowadays. Nothing wrong with freedom understood in a basic sense. But when it means the unchecked power of a Free Market Oligopoly, my sympathies go to the Castros of the world. And in that context I foresee bad times coming to Cuba if the wheel turns again and the Machados and Batistas once more rise and Cuba undergoes a change back to its pre-Castro ways.

The Mind of the Ant

I shall conclude this long account of the leaf cutting ants with an instance of their reasoning powers. A nest was made near one of our tramways, and to get to the trees the ants had to cross the rails over which the wagons were continually passing and repassing. Every time they came along, a number of ants were crushed to death. They persevered in crossing for several days, but at last set to work and tunneled under each rail. One day when the wagons were not running, I stopped up the tunnels with stones; but although great numbers carrying leaves were thus cut off from the nest, they would not cross the rails but set to work making fresh tunnels underneath them.     [Thomas Belt, The Naturalist in Nicaragua, 1874]
Thomas Belt (1832-1878) was an English naturalist who spent much of his life in mining enterprises in Australia, Nova Scotia, and in Nicaragua. The tramways referred to were carrying ore.
I found this fascinating passage in Wilder Penfield’s The Mystery of the Mind, quoted by Sir Charles Symonds (1890-1978), an English neurologist, in a commentary chapter in Penfield’s book called “Reflections.” Symonds included this quote in a context of in which he argues that what looks like the mind is anchored even in such lowly creatures as the ant. Symonds goes on to quote W.H. Thorpe (1902-1986), an English zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist:
If we can see purposive behavior in animals or man, we have provisional grounds for believing that there is within the organism some sort of expectancy of the future, which entails or implies a capacity for ideation, an integration of ideas about past and future, and a temporal organization of ideas.     [W.H. Thorpe, in Brain and Conscious Experience, J.C. Eccles, editor.]
To this Symonds adds: “I know nothing about the nervous system of the ant, but it would seem that it contains a prototype of the anatomical substrata of mind.”
Penfield himself, then, in the last chapter of The Mystery of the Mind, comments on these quotes as follows:
The beautiful story of Belt’s leaf-cutting ants that you [Symonds] have retold seems, to me, to show clearly that there is self-awareness in the ant. The ant who carries his leaf to the rail and stops, finding the hole closed underneath the rail, must be aware of himself and his predicament if he begins to make a new hole.     [Penfield, p. 105-106]
This sort of an exchange tells me that science, through some minority of its representatives, is on the edges of a recognition of something against which all manner of orthodoxies, ancient as well as new, strain in horror. Conscious man is bad enough. Conscious animals? Please, please…

When that Drawing Board First Surfaced: 1941

I learned that the phrase I used yesterday, “back to the drawing board,” was originally “back to the old drawing board.” It originated March 1, 1941 in a New Yorker cartoon by Peter Arno. Here is the cartoon: link . This courtesy of Wiktionary ( here ).

Pascal’s Wager Secularized

A variant to Pascal’s Wager occurred to me while re-reading Wilder Penfield’s book, The Mystery of Mind. Suppose the wager concerns what death holds in store for us. Let’s call Red survival and Black destruction. Betting on red we are betting on an afterlife; on black, we’re betting on an absolute cessation of all awareness forever.
The peculiarity of this wager is that only one of the two options is actually knowable. By definition of the cases. If Black is right, neither he nor Red will ever know the truth. Only Red holds an answer. Red will know that he was right, Black that he was wrong. Both ought to be happy although, for Black, it’ll be back to the drawing board…