The question was, what exactly was I going to do with myself for a month without Sadie? I sure wasn't going to stay home alone in San Francisco during what is regularly the most dead month of the visual effects project cycle. Since spouses of the HRF artists were not invited to share their living quarters during their studies, I was forced to do the next best thing- to hang out with Mom and Dad at their house, in my home town of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, a four hour drive from Hunter, New York where Sadie would be staying, driving up to visit her whenever possible.

While I missed Sadie enormously, I actually had a pretty great time in Pennsylvania. It was the longest I'd spent away from Sadie, but it was also the longest stretch I'd spent with my parents since I went to college nearly twelve years earlier. During the day I digitized family videos and met up with old friends. At night my dad and I took to watching episodes from the first season of the original Star Trek on Blu Ray. I spent several of my weekends up in New York City, hanging out with friends and drinking far too much. I also took full advantage of the top-notch East Coast cuisine I'd been missing for so many years, including Italian hoagies, cheesesteaks, pastrami sandwiches, meatball subs, scrapple, etc. I think I gained about 10 pounds.

However, among all of the socializing and gorging on fabulous foods, in the background I grasped desperately for a new path in my academic studies. At that point I was more or less completely lost. I was still recoiling from my frustrating encounters with both Quantum Mechanics and the Hard Problem of Consciousness within Philosophy of Mind. Neither had managed to satisfactorily describe my harmonic city encounters that had started over a year and a half before. So I figured the best approach from here was to cast my net wide, branching out and studying a variety of subjects simultaneously. This multi-disciplined mindset provoked the broad consumption of courses from The Teaching Company, covering the works of existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others representing the American Transcendentalist movement, a pan-historical perspective on the various types of political leadership called Power Over People, and finally a small set of lectures I bought on a whim called Understanding Complexity.

Out of the myriad of subjects I was studying, I didn't think for a second that it would be complexity that might tie into the grand scheme of things. I had meant for the course to be a fun little side-study that I snacked on while in bed every night before I went to sleep, while during the day I continued my real research within realms located squarely outside of the sciences. At only twelve lectures, each clocking in at a mere half hour in length, the series seemed less than daunting, as it was much smaller than any of the previous TTC classes I had taken. I was surprised to find not only my expectations exceeded, but also my ass thoroughly kicked. Short as they were, the complexity lectures packed the intellectual density of a granite mountain. After completing the course and repeating many of the lectures for maximum absorption, I found myself blazing a decidedly different path back into science that was completely exhilarating, infusing my efforts with a new sense of purpose and vigor.

So what exactly is complexity, and why should it matter to us in our day to day lives? To begin with, complex systems are much more common than you might imagine. The word "complexity" in the context of scientific analysis refers to the intricate configuration of different parts that serve as a functional layer within a given system. At first glance, this might seem like the most vanilla definition possible, but it makes a few very important points.

First, it states that complexity is defined by configurations of parts within a living system, rather than the nature of the parts themselves. So instead of zooming down to the microscopic level to view specific actions of component parts within a system, studies of complexity focus on the the interactions of component parts and the macroscopic properties that result. Such properties are often referred to as "emergent" phenomena, which I discussed in detail in the previous essay while describing consciousness as an emergent property of higher functions within the human brain. Therefore complexity studies of consciousness are not interested in the functions of individual neurons within the brain per-se, but the properties that arise wholesale as a result of the interactions between the neurons.

Second, the above definition also identifies complexity in terms of "layers", which is crucial to the understanding of how larger complex systems fit together. I also touched on this notion of layered systems in the previous essay when I discussed "emergent layers" within a system, and how a complex system (like a tree) could be entirely described by the functions of each of its separate layers. This is exactly the kind of thing that complexity researchers love to sink their teeth into. They endeavor to create functional computer models that simulate complex behaviors using simple mathematical rules, giving them insight into how a system's component parts interact with one another and how these interactions ultimately serve to build superseding layers of complexity. Researchers can then study the various layers hierarchically, building a more solid understanding of how the system operates as a whole.

Complexity researchers are also interested in the commonalities between vast arrays of living systems. These can range from colonies of bacteria to entire ecosystems- from the cellular functions of the human immune system to the inner workings of much larger social systems, including economies, international political systems and the internet. As researchers discover more and more underlying principles and mathematical algorithms that are held in common between these various systems, a entire new science of complexity starts to emerge. As it stands, the research of complex systems is a formidable movement that only continues to grow in relevance.

So what is it exactly that makes a system complex? Possibly the most important point to understand about complex systems is that by nature, they build themselves automatically from the bottom-up. By this I mean that each component part (or "agent") within a complex system carries within itself a set of instructions that gives it the ability to collaborate with others like itself to create discernible, entirely new structures. These novel configurations cannot be traced to the actions of a single agent; it is only through the flurry of interaction among many different agents that larger patterns emerge and a purposeful, functioning system is created.

The opposing view, that systems are "top-down", sees a system organized with a single authority at the center, which hands instructions directly down to each and every agent of the system. This basically means there is one master entity that runs the whole show, and that lesser agents of the system act as slaves to its every whim. While a top-down view of systems has been common within classical schools of thought for the last several hundred years, whether it's science, politics, or economics, this model doesn't accurately describe any system in nature.

For example, the queen in a bee colony, unlike her nominal counterparts in traditional human aristocracies, does not dictate how worker bees should interact with one other, or how they should react to threats and conditions outside of the hive. The queen's sole purpose is to reproduce en masse, providing the colony with its next generations of bees. So instead of awaiting instructions from the queen bee, worker bees communicate with one another using pheromones and body language. Through these simple chemical and bodily-linguistic interactions, the operations of the hive emerge naturally.

Say an outside force, such as a bear or a skunk, is threatening a hive. Only a few bees might initially notice the attacker and take flight, but this small action might be just enough to catalyze a formidable response. Other workers that see and receive pheromone signals from their local constituents will join in the effort to defend the hive. As more workers take flight, an ever-increasing number of their counterparts also begin to mobilize, creating a cascading response that quickly forms a swarm- a wholly new complex system, that has a much better chance of taking on the attacker than any single bee ever could. The swarm phenomenon is the result of what's called a self-reinforced positive feedback loop.

Feedback in a complex system works very similarly to audio feedback, which might remind you of a botched high school theater performance, where an actor carried his microphone a bit too close to the auditorium speakers. In this situation, the amplified voice of the performer was continually looped from the speakers back into the microphone, making the sound louder with each pass through the system and turning a single word of dialogue into giant roar-causing audience members to clap their hands over their ears in agony.

In the case of the beehive, feedback takes the form of reinforced body language and pheromone signals (as opposed to sound waves) which serve to recruit more and more bees, quickly transforming a hive's nectar-gathering operations into a furious swarm. In both the theater scenario and the beehive, a small signal becomes amplified, pushing outward and then looping back in upon itself. The signal is reinforced again and again until it reaches a massive critical state in which it is capable of causing a large shift within the system.

Another great example of a system that spontaneously emerges due to feedback can be found in sports stadiums around the world. This is the phenomenon known as The Wave. The Wave is formed when spectators spontaneously stand up in succession, section by section, forming a wave-like motion of synchronized crowd movement that ripples in a circular pattern around the the stadium. As it continues, it picks up more and more participants until it reaches a critical mass, where nearly the entire audience is involved in the effort. While they are formed for completely different purposes (entertainment vs survival), the driving principles behind both The Wave and the swarm of bees are identical. Participants in The Wave reinforce the social behavior of their fellow spectators by mimicking their movements, just as bees reinforce each others' actions in a swarm.

Feedback and cascading behavior in the case of The Wave and swarms of bees are generally favorable outcomes of a system (with the exception of some countries where The Wave is illegal). In other systems however, positive feedback loops are not quite so favorable. The word "positive" when referring to feedback within complex systems simply indicates cumulative, compounding actions. It is not necessarily expressive of an amicable outcome for any parties observing or involved. In fact, feedback responses can be downright detrimental to the system.

For instance, in economics, a stock market is created by corporations and individuals who invest in shares of various different companies. The investing entities, through incredibly simple transactions, have the ability to create and sustain the operations of the market. Like the bees in our swarm or spectators participating in The Wave, investors act as the agents within this particular type of economic system. As long as the agents continue to do their jobs (buy and sell stocks in this case) the system continues to propagate.

However, if large factions of investors change their behavior due to shaky external economic conditions and sell all of their holdings in the market, a feedback loop is thus created which could - if conditions were right - trigger a panicked cascade of sell-offs by thousands of additional investors, causing the entire market value to plunge. This is precisely the behavior that ripped through world financial markets in late 2008 and early 2009. It was certainly not a favorable outcome for most of us who were invested in the market, but it was nevertheless the inevitable result of a devastated real estate market and frivolous practices by lending institutions, combined with the natural sensitivity that comes along with every complex economic system.

This is the two-sided coin of complex systems. While a system can yield serious benefits to agents inside and outside of itself, it also has built into it the seeds of its own destruction. It is for this same reason that the cells within the human immune system can quickly change from protecting the body from pathogens, to attacking healthy cells, as is the case with autoimmune diseases like diabetes and multiple sclerosis. It is also why human beings can nationalize and choose to go to war against other nations, while under different circumstances they can choose to defect and revolt against their own governments. The stock market could just as easily have gone the other way and rallied in early 2009, were economic news astoundingly good. This is why we invest in the market at all- the possibility to grow our capital based on the success of the world economic system as a whole. It is however, always a gamble. The success or failure of a system is always subject to external conditions that can turn on a dime.

The general volatility of economic systems is an excellent illustration of the implicit sensitivity and dynamic behavior inherent within all complex systems. The tendency of a system to shift due to feedback loops and cascades, whether beneficial or detrimental to the system, is only possible with a substantial amount of flexibility built into the system, allowing it to adapt to large scale changes. Researchers describe this necessary state of complex systems as the edge of chaos. It is the state where a system is ordered enough to survive a fair amount of damage without collapsing, yet is fluid enough to adapt itself to shifting circumstances.

rival queen beesIn fact, the adaptive, decentralized nature of bottom-up complex systems is so robust that it can tolerate the removal of many agents without failing, even if that agent is one of the most critical players in the system. Let's look again into our beehive. If the queen bee is removed from the hive or is killed, worker bees immediately prepare several chambers already containing new larvae with royal jelly, effectively transforming the newborns into queens. When the multiple queens emerge from their pupal states, they fight each other to the death. The sole-surviving queen becomes the new reproductive center of the hive.

Similarly, human governments (while largely man-made structures) also have complex adaptive components that are set up in such a way that the operations of a given state can continue, even if the most powerful positions within the government are suddenly vacated. In the United States, if the president were to resign or be assassinated, there is a long line of successors set up to retain continuity of government. While shocks would inevitably ripple through the government's constituency - a socially disruptive response to such a drastic change in the nation's political power structure - the basic functions of the government would remain intact. For free democratic nations like the US, which are governed entirely by its own people, the government as a whole could technically be re-elected and re-formed overnight. The only thing that could effectively cause a democratic government to collapse would have to be a large scale popular revolution, a coup d'etat or a crushing military invasion by an external force.

And then there is the internet- a massive global network of computers and users that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If one or even several of these systems, whether home computers, mobile phones, or massive commercial servers were to go offline, chances are that barely anyone would even notice. Each machine on the net is a separate, independent entity, each generally drawing from a separate power source and many times participating from a vastly different geographical location. Only after the loss of a major web-based service or telecommunications network would users really start to notice. Because of this fact, the internet remains one of the most robust and powerful complex adaptive systems of its size and scale on the planet. It is highly decentralized, dynamic, densely interconnected, adaptable to major failures and most importantly of all, it is built on the backs of a multitude of some of the most able complex systems in existence: human beings. The internet is an immaculate expression of human cooperation and solidarity.

Human beings and most other purely natural systems arose over millions of years out of the processes of evolution and natural selection. Evolution is perhaps the clearest example of how natural systems emerge from the bottom up, and how they are able to grow in complexity over time. It is partly the layered nature of complex organisms that allows them to survive and persist through difficult times. However, the organisms who are able to persist the longest are not necessarily the most rigidly built, but are rather the most versatile. Our versatility combined with our ability to participate in and influence other complex systems leaves us with enough flexibility to constantly adapt and to deal with the inevitable change and upset that random natural events constantly provide for us. Thus the innate complexity of our organic human structure - courtesy of evolution and natural selection - is in essence, who we are. It's the reason we are here at all.

It's difficult to view the immense structural complexity of the human organism and not feel awed at its magnificence. We were all once just a few molecules, that through simple interactions managed to coordinate and gradually build ourselves into incredibly complex, self-sustained organic systems. Our bodily systems are a marvel of the complexifying processes of evolution, woven intricately together and acting with enough synchrony to keep our lungs breathing, our blood pumping, our brains thinking and our hands creating.

Yet at the same time we are a complete mess. We fight with one another, we steal, we cheat, we disrupt everything around us. In fact, we're probably the most destructive species to ever walk the face of the Earth. But this all comes with the territory. We are each our own complex adaptive system, and we walk through life on a thin line between order and chaos, constantly brushing up against and trudging directly through other complex systems. If we take any action on the planet at all, we can't help but disrupt it. And at any moment, any number of these other systems could shift drastically, leading to great fortune or an even greater catastrophe for us. Such are the complex lives we bear.

I think what struck me the most during my foray into complexity was the exposure to the idea that we live in a world of sheer dynamism- one where configurations and circumstances, as stable as they may seem, are shifting constantly. When I started my Becoming journey back in January of 2008, many monumental transformations were taking place. There was a large shift in political power occurring within the US government, fuel prices were skyrocketing due to feared supply shortages from the rapid growth of newly industrializing nations, and a massive economic crisis was just getting revved up.

So you might imagine why the rationalist philosophical ideal of a fundamental harmony within a mathematically discernible, stable universe seemed completely absurd, in light of the unpredictable morass I saw rife throughout the world around me. It wasn't until I'd studied complexity that I could effectively banish any remaining hints of the mythical notion of some kind of innate stability and equilibrium within nature from my explorations. I never expected that I could actually be comfortable, let alone be at peace with a world that was fundamentally in flux. This was most likely the reason why rationalism and scientific exactitude was so appealing to me at the beginning of my journey. But with a little help from quantum physics, philosophy of mind and complexity, I could now view the world from a wholly different and much more realistic platform.

So where to go from here? First and foremost I needed to address the implications of a reality that is ceaselessly shifting and fundamentally amorphous. Unfortunately the Ancient Greeks didn't have a whole lot to say on this type of natural configuration, save a few surviving Fragments from my old pal Heraclitus, who was abruptly sidelined early on when I decided to follow Pythagoras and the long procession of rationalists that succeeded him instead. While Heraclitus's works were vindicated by these new discoveries of mine, there wasn't enough depth within The Fragments to form any kind of coherent world view- that is, without supplementing them with a serious amount of speculation.

Luckily there was another entirely different group of philosophers who spoke authoritatively on the subject of a constantly changing, unpredictable, even paradoxical reality, just around the same time as Heraclitus, whose works - quite unlike Heraclitus's - were celebrated and revered in their time, and remain well-preserved to this day. But in order to explore such philosophies, we must leave the Greeks behind and look East- to the thinkers of Ancient China.

Bibliography:

Hofstadter, Douglas R. I Am A Strange Loop Basic Books, 2008

Miller, John H. and Scott E. Page Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life Princeton University Press, 2007

Mitchell, Melanie Complexity: A Guided Tour Oxford University Press, 2009

Simon, Herbert A "The Architecture of Complexity" from Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol 106, No. 6. (Dec 12, 1962) p. 467-482

Waldrop, M. Mitchell Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos Simon and Shuster, 1992

In the late 1920s, quantum physicist Neils Bohr, alongside some of his closest colleagues, helped to define what came to be called the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It was developed at Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, and was designed specifically to deal with the probabilistic and counterintuitive results from quantum experiments that had been performed throughout the Western world during the previous few decades. The goal of the Interpretation was to define, before the field went any further, how science was to digest such strange experimental results for the future of professional science. The Interpretation therefore dictated the removal of any and all speculation about the "reasons why" of QM, in the interest of "just getting down to the science of it." Observational data drawn from quantum experiments, however paradoxical, stood.

The methodology formulated at Copenhagen dealt the final blow to metaphysics' already weary relationship with modern science. From here on out philosophical discussions about the nature of quantum physics, outside of the principles laid out in Copenhagen, were considered a realm of trivial speculation, capable only of asking more questions and thereby suffocating any future scientific progress.

Nevertheless, many important questions remained, and needed to be answered. Though the quantum scientists at Copenhagen chose the path of "just so," such a declaration is wholly unsatisfying to the human mind. As the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle puts it, human beings "by nature" have an insatiable thirst to perceive and understand reality on a fundamental level. It's obvious if one views Aristotle's veritable library of written works, that he himself took this view very much to heart. So how can the Western world's 2300 year-old supposition that a logically discernible universe exists, hold up against a probabilistic, fundamental quantum reality?

Albert Einstein had many misgivings about the Copenhagen Interpretation, and in the interest of retaining a rational view of science, he independently continued to pursue his Theory of Everything- an ultimate set of unifying principles that could govern all matter in the universe, including quantum mechanics. In his final days, Einstein is said to have sat up all day in his hospital bed, scribbling scores of equations into notebooks. He died having left an indelible mark on the scientific world, but with his dream of a final theory left unrealized.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Einstein felt that quantum scientists must have been missing something critically important to yield such strange experimental results. As he famously put it, "God does not play dice." Furthermore, setting aside the fact that Copenhagen thoroughly accepted such probabilistic foundations, its definition of reality "as observed" by quantum experiments is even more troublesome. This view holds that the experiments alone and the observations they yield, are in themselves the true creators of reality. "If this is true," I wondered, "doesn't it completely undermine the possibility of an 'objective' reality? If reality is defined solely by user-subjective experiments and systems of measurement, doesn't it follow that the entire realm of scientific inquiry ceases to stand on solid ground?"

In order to continue my quest to understand the world around me on a more fundamental level, and more importantly to further define my harmonic experiences within that world, I felt that I needed to have at least a rough sense of what perception and consciousness are, and how they have been seen by scientists and philosophers throughout the ages. What do we mean when we talk about consciousness? Can it be studied objectively? If so, what have we discovered about consciousness thus far, and how does it relate to our understanding of the quantum world?

Rene Descartes was one of the most prominent French philosophers of mind during the scientific Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Descartes held at the forefront of his philosophical and scientific canon something called mind-body dualism. This view assumes that human beings are made up of two different kinds of substances, one which is material- our organs, our skin, our blood and brains, and one that is immaterial and spiritual- our mind (or soul). This was not a new point of view by any means. In fact it dates back several thousand years, to Indian mythology. From India it weaved its way over to Ancient Greece, to Pythagoras and Socrates, and eventually reached Plato and Aristotle in the third century BCE, whose works lay nearly unchallenged until the European Enlightenment.

Unlike the majority of today's modern scientists, the scientists of the Enlightenment were at the time still generally religious individuals, so metaphysical discussions regarding the "souls" of men and the like were not yet off the table. To Descartes, the "mind" was a divine substance- one of pure rationality handed down to us from Above. As Descartes and many at the time saw it, the reason humans possessed their minds was simply that we were the only beings in existence deemed worthy of possessing them, and that through our minds we were directly connected to a supernatural, otherworldly realm.

Descartes expressed his first philosophy of mind in Meditations on First Philosophy, where he asked himself how he knew for sure that the day to day reality that he perceived existed at all. He mused that an evil demon could in fact be manipulating his perception, tricking him into seeing an entirely illusory reality. He found that he could in fact cast into doubt everything and everyone around him, even the existence of his own body- but because he could think and think about himself, it could not be denied that his mind, and thus his spiritual essence, existed. It was from this train of thought that the famous phrase emerged: "Cogito, ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I exist." (also "Je pense, donc je suis" in Descartes' own colloquial French)

Possibly the most important thing that Descartes accomplished was to identify the mind as synonymous with consciousness and self awareness, as well as connecting its operation to the physical brain, where he claimed the mind (or soul) was "seated". Before this, it was never considered that the mind had any relationship to the physical body, and further, that it could be studied scientifically. Despite his heavy reliance on pure rationality to develop his philosophies, spending countless hours in his bed pondering the nature of mind, he was no "armchair" philosopher. In fact he was an active empirical scientist and an adept mathematician. Herein he used his logic to expand the realms of mathematics (specifically geometry and optics), effectively becoming "the father of modern mathematics", and inspiring Sir Issac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, who among their own various Enlightenment era achievements, invented calculus.

In the course of his works however, Descartes was confronted with as many new problems as those he had figured out how to solve, philosophically speaking. Mind-body dualism since its inception has been labeled by many fellow thinkers of the Enlightenment as being logically flawed. Even if one accepts the religious origin of the mind as a soul or purely spiritual substance, there was always a question of how the mind actually connected to the body, which has come to be known as the mind-body problem.

During the span of his lifetime, Descartes was unable to answer this question satisfactorily. For example, in many of his writings, he suggested that the pineal gland, situated deep within the brain, was in fact the seat of the soul. Of course this has since been proven false from a functional perspective (the pineal gland is part of the endocrine system), but even the relatively primitive knowledge of the brain's architecture during the 17th century contradicted many of the functions of the pineal gland that Descartes described in his writings.

Despite dualism's shortcomings, Descartes had a strong following, and was a prominent figure in the budding scientific community of the Enlightenment. Naturally, it wasn't long before alternative philosophies of mind would rise up to meet him. The most prominent of these is monism, which postulates that everything in existence, whatever its role, body or mind, is made up of the same single substance. Monism was popular among the Ancient Greek Pre-Socratic philosophers, such as Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and eventually Democritus, who predicted the existence of atoms.

Monism's most popular Enlightenment-era incarnation was called materialism, harbored in the mid 17th century by Thomas Hobbes, notorious for his landmark book Leviathan (in which he declared that life was "nasty, brutish and short"). He and Descartes volleyed refutations back and forth throughout their lifetimes. Hobbes's version of materialism leaves no place for the otherworldly or supernatural. In some of the more isolated passages of his work, Hobbes went as far as to say that God was also material (or "corporeal", as he put it).

Throughout the subsequent few hundred years, the basic forms of dualism and materialism would continue to smack up against each other. Those who became less adamant about the tenets of a pure Hobbesean-materialist perspective decided instead that the study of mind per Descartes was simply irrelevant- that there was no mind-body problem at all. To them it made no sense to even speak about the nature of mind within the hard empirical sciences.

Thus materialism was split into two camps, those who dealt with a purely mechanistic- biological study of the body, and a separate group of psychologists who formed the train of thought known as behaviorism, wherein the mind was seen as a sort of "black box"- solely analyzable based on reactions to stimuli, and whose physical workings had no impact on (or were simply irrelevant to) behavioral functions. Experiments by famed psychologist BF Skinner on the reward/punishment behavior of pigeons and rats reinforced this view. Skinner argued that these principles could also be applied to humans, but behaviorism has since been widely, if not universally, discredited.

Cartesian Dualism, the idea that mind and body are two separate substances, survives today in a slightly altered concept known as property dualism. The mind from a property-dualist perspective is essentially based in the material human brain, but instead of being an ethereal substance tethered to a gland deep within the brain, the mind is considered a mere property of the physical functions of the brain.

The most popular scientific and philosophical view of the mind today is called functionalism. It is conceptually neutral between dualism and materialism. Instead of dealing with the mental as a substance, it discusses mental "states" that don't depend upon the internal constitutions of brain cells or regions, but rather on the way that each part functions- in essence the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. Mental states are therefore functional states of the entire organism. This view is along the lines of behaviorism, but unlike behaviorism it does not completely negate the importance of the physical systems underlying mental processes.

Now that the physical world is brought back into this pragmatic and materially agreeable functionalist perspective of mind, so return also the actual functions of the brain and nervous system. When the brain is analyzed closely, each of its neurons (component nerve cells) has a multitude of physical connections to one other via synapses, the structures that allow neurons to communicate with each other, electrically and chemically. During a human thought process or action these synaptic connections "fire" between neurons and form meaningful relationships. However, there are so many of these connections between the trillions of neurons in the human brain, that thought processes very quickly become too complex to follow. In fact, the number of possible neuronal connections in a single human brain comes out to something along the lines of 10 to the millionth power, outnumbering the atoms thought to exist in the known universe. So you can start to imagine how the daunting complexity of the brain might seem to a purely reductionist view of mind- an attempt to trace even the simplest of mental processes through its almost innumerable neuronal connections becomes extremely difficult.

Since the days of Ancient Greece, reductionism has been the dominant form of scientific inquiry. And understandably so- most things in nature can be better functionally understood by breaking them down and analyzing their component parts.

For instance, a tree can be better understood by dividing into its roots, its leaves, its trunk, its bark, etc. Each of these components plays a different role in the functions of a tree, all of which are indispensable to the tree's function as a whole. Organisms in general, whether they are plants or animals can be better understood by categorizing them into smaller groups, such as mammals and reptiles, grasses and trees, etc. Water can be better understood by its molecular components-chemical/electromagnetic bonds, that are reducible even further to hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

However, as I outlined in my previous post, we run into trouble when we reach the quantum (subatomic) level. Relationships between particles at this level are probabilistic and unpredictable. And while we've managed to harness a fair amount of quantum mechanics within our modern technology (and continue to do so), our understanding of it remains a relatively ineffective way to examine macroscopic natural phenomena.

Consciousness is no different in this respect. A purely reductionist view of consciousness at the outset would attempt to confine thoughts and actions to single neurons, or at least to certain parts of the brain that are designated for specific processes. However, recent experiments, involving the analysis of blood flow throughout the brain, have shown us that mental activity, even for the most mundane human tasks, tends to spread its patterned neural firings out into completely different parts of the brain, simultaneously. In light of these findings, it would be difficult to paint a picture of mind that consists of a one-action-per-brain-region, or a one-thought-per-neuron relationship. Mental processes are far too complex to isolate in such a way.

As if attempting to trace mental processes through the trillions of neurons in the brain weren't difficult enough- on the subatomic level, were we to attempt to follow such processes through dense clouds of unpredictable quantum particle strangeness, the complexity of interactions within a quantum system would become overwhelming just to think about, let alone study empirically.

An alternative to the reductionist method of understanding consciousness is to flip the switch the other way. The "emergent" view of consciousness, examines the patterns that emerge from component interactions instead of the properties of the components on their own. These dynamical patterns of interaction give way to entirely new, novel mental properties. Within the context of the brain these are known as emergent properties of higher brain functions. Consciousness can be seen as such a property, as it emerges fully-formed from the neural activity in the brain.

Proponents of the emergent view of consciousness tend to hold in common a "layered" conception of nature. On a base fundamental level they see the world as physical, followed by chemical, biological, and eventually psychological and social. This means that though human beings are essentially a pile of atoms, they are also a swathe of chemicals, as well as a barrage of biological fluids and organs, eventually "emerging" as a human being. If this concept is taken further, it can be used to compose even higher layers (or levels) of complexity, analyzing a human being's self-consciousness and its relationships with others like itself. All of these various layers are a valid view of what a person is, but the layer upon which she is understood plays into how we interact with her and how she interacts with the world.

This understanding can be effectively applied to any complex system. Going back to our previous analogy, a tree is a great big pile of atoms, but it is also a collection of chemicals, wood and water, branches, bark and leaves, all of which eventually emerge as a tree, a forest, etc. Systems emerge from one another, creating new overarching layers of complexity. The most important difference here is that emergentism is interested in the interactive relationships between the different layers of complexity and the dynamical patterns that result, not simply that they "make up" each superseding layer.

This vision of reality firmly separates the emergent view from the reductive materialist view. Emergence is a study of relationships, whereas reductive materialism is a study of mechanics. This disagreement in method is why the pure material sciences have traditionally split off from studies of human consciousness- a division that had been rationalized by the scientific community because reductive materialism offers no effective means to understand such a complex phenomenon. Instead, studies of consciousness are generally thrown into the "less serious" realms of psychological and philosophical speculation.

As I came to more fully understand the historical banishment of consciousness studies from hard empirical science, I couldn't help but find it ironic. If our conscious minds are the most important component in the quantum experimental loop, why then do we know next to nothing about it? We generally know how to use it in terms of a quantum experiment, as defined by the Copenhagen Interpretation, and perhaps that's enough. But it's not very encouraging to conceive of the fact that, despite our exhaustive studies of celestial orbits throughout history, our creation of new chemical compounds, our classification of organisms and the studies of their behaviors- that we still have yet to understand the most basic, everyday workings in the universe- not only on the paradoxical, counter-intuitive subatomic level, but also how any part of the universe (on its various levels) is perceived- through our conscious interaction with it.

By the end of May 2009, though I had barely scratched the surface of the vast and varied landscape of the Philosophy of Mind, I still had managed to grasp its lengthy historical development- from its earliest ancient conceptions, to its modern interpretations. Along the way, I'd witnessed from a brand new perspective, the beginnings of science's formal break from metaphysics during the Enlightenment, to the final showdown during the quantum revolution. Perhaps most importantly I came to understand the abject failure of a purely reductive materialist mindset to describe the most important component of the quantum process: human consciousness.

At first I felt my journey had reached a dead end- that even a scant explanation of my harmonic experience seemed far out of reach. But eventually I began to see the true value of this part of the journey. My further studies of emergent phenomena heralded my inexorable return to the science of complexity. 

When I brushed up against complexity before, it was while I was studying chaos theory back in October of 2008, but at that point I'd viewed it as a mere withered extension of an idea that could only ever amount to a very limited description of reality. It seemed a halfhearted philosophy, designed to over-simplify what should be seen as a completely humbling, massively complex universe. As it turned out, I was completely wrong. The science of complex systems is in fact a burgeoning field, with growing popularity and relevance, and as I came to realize, clearly deserved a thorough second look...

Bibliography:

Bedau, Mark "Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence" from Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, MIT Press, 2008

Chalmers, David "Strong vs. Weak Emergence" Paper online at author's own Consc.net

Hofstadter, Douglas R. "I Am A Strange Loop" Basic Books, 2008

McLaughlin, Brian "The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism"

Rosenblum, Bruce and Fred Kuttner "The Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness", Oxford University Press 2008

Searle, John "Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness" from Chapter 5 of The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press 1992

From The Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Robinson, H "Dualism"

    Smith, Kurt "Descartes Life and Works"

O'Connor, Timothy and Wong, Hong Yu "Emergent Properties"

I pushed away thoughts of anything "divine" and purely speculative philosophy, and instead focused on modern science, and its studies of time and space. Admittedly I was inspired by the new season of the tv show Lost, and their new plot trajectory, which featured certain members of the cast jumping back and forth through time. The show over the last several seasons had persistent references to Stephen Hawking and his book A Brief History of Time, so I felt it was a good time investigate him further.

It wasn't long after reading bits and pieces of Hawking's A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell, as well as watching/listening to several interviews with Brian Greene (author of The Elegant Universe), that I encountered String Theory full-force. String Theory attempts to bridge the gap between Quantum Mechanics and Albert Einstein's Theories of Special and General Relativity, which in turn fulfills the ultimate dream of Einstein himself: to formulate a theory that explains all matter that exists in the universe. This is commonly referred to as the Theory of Everything (TOE). The TOE remains the veritable holy grail of the physics community.

String Theory hypothesizes that the fundamental building blocks of matter are tiny vibrating strings of energy, which could explain the strange behaviors behind quantum particles. Fresh off of my Music Listening course, my interest was sparked by string theory's concept that perhaps the universe could be understood through what is essentially "music", created by these theoretical strings vibrating at different frequencies.

But before I could understand string theory fully, and staying loyal to my normal disposition to make things as difficult as possible on myself, I needed to know more about both Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, the aforementioned two disciplines within physics that string theory attempts to combine. Luckily the Teaching Company once again had just what I needed: a twenty-four lecture audio course on just those two subjects. 

After about a month of Relativity/Quantum Mechanics lectures, I was already sufficiently fried by Einstein's extreme and historic break away from classical physics as defined by Issac Newton (and all prior assumptions about gravity and the nature of space and time), when the quantum world had swooped in immediately thereafter and pulverized any remaining semblance of the universe as a harmonious or rational/logical place.

Quantum Mechanics attempts to describe the behavior of subatomic particles. The types of subatomic particles that make up the quantum landscape are so numerous, some refer to it as the quantum particle "zoo".

I'm sure you've heard the terms protons, neutrons, and electrons from your basic science classes in junior high school. You may have even heard of Quarks before (a name derived from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake). Quarks are particles that combine with each other to make up protons and neutrons, the two types of particles that in turn make up the nucleus of the atom. There are not one, but SIX different kinds of Quarks, that are named based on their propensity to behave in certain ways. They are (get ready): Up and Down, Top and Bottom, Charmed and Strange Quarks. Weird names, right? Others you may not have heard about (but do most certainly exist) are Mesons, Leptons, Gluons, Neutrinos, Tau-Neutrinos, Muons, Electron-Neutrinos and on and on. 

The erratic behaviors of this "zoo" of subatomic particles, over the last hundred years or so have been proven by scientists to define most of what are considered to be the fundamental forces in the universe. These include electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear force, and gravity. Gravity is the least understood of the forces on a subatomic level, hence the problem of resolving Einstein's theory of General Relativity with Quantum Theory. If Gravity could be defined by a Quantum particle, it would be called a Graviton, but as of yet, no Gravitons have been discovered. The Higgs-Boson, the so-called "master" or "God Particle" (the search for which is one of the key endeavors of CERN, the multi billion physics facility in Switzerland), is supposedly responsible for determining the masses of all other particles, per what is called the Standard Model of particle physics.

Beyond the comical and sometimes confusing naming conventions of quantum particles, there are certain behaviors that each of these particles perform, that are not only odd, but are so outlandish, even to the point of being paradoxical, and defy our very sense of logical reality. Quantum behavior is so unpredictable it can never be measured with any level of precision.

Normally if you want to measure something's position and velocity, you use a classical Newtonian view of the human-level physical world. The particles in this sense are like billiard balls, bouncing off of each other as well the walls of a billiard table. Their position and velocity are predictable, because the initial energy put into them (say a person hitting the cue ball with a cue) stays constant.

However at the quantum level, these "classical" rules break down. The movement of quantum particles is only probabilistic, meaning their position and velocity are not simultaneously measurable. The more you focused on measuring its position, the less the accurate your measurement would be for its velocity.

Worse, the behavior of particles in quantum mechanics can be paradoxically defined in two different ways, as either a discrete stream of particles or as a wave. Rigorous experiments have proven that our observation of quantum particle behavior, in itself defines whether the behavior is particle-like or a wave-like. Left unobserved, the resulting quantum behavior is wave-like, and observed, it is particle-like, as if somehow it knows we are watching it. Like I said before- rational explanations must be completely thrown out to understand the quantum world.

Below is an excerpt from the film What the Bleep do We Know? However cheese-ball the film's execution might have been, it's a great explanation of the famous two-slit experiment and the resultant mysterious quantum particle/wave conundrum.

If you'd like a better illustration of the quantum paradox on a somewhat more human level, one needs to look no further than the amusing thought experiment known as Schröedinger's Cat, originally devised by Nobel Prize-winning Quantum Physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1933.

As you can see, quantum mechanics doesn't make sense in the face of a logical, causal world we believe ourselves to be in. On the quantum level, all logic breaks down. It is erratic, non-deterministic, and just downright strange.

Just a few years prior to the mainstream study of quantum mechanics, Einstein had defined his theories of Relativity and was already an established legend within the scientific community. He had an extremely difficult time believing the results of quantum experiments, and stated several times that there must be an error in the form of measurement that scientists were using, to produce such absurd and seemingly counter- intuitive results.

Another fascinating quantum behavior is called Quantum Entanglement. With Entanglement, two particles in completely different places, react in the same exact way to modification. So if a scientist were to affect some kind of change on one particle, another "entangled" particle would react as if it were directly influenced, even though it was never technically "touched". Here's another clip from What the Bleep that can further explain this.

Einstein was extremely put off by the experimental data that revealed Quantum Entanglement behavior. He referred to Entanglement as "Spooky action at at distance". To him there was no way that two particles could ever interact with each other without a visible transfer of energy between the two. The explanation would have to be supernatural, if not mystical. Therefore Einstein considered it to be scientifically invalid.

Despite Einstein's gripes, the results stood. Entanglement and other quantum behaviors are some of the most rigorously tested in all of the history of science. Einstein admitted at one point that was had spent approximately 600 times longer trying to resolve quantum theory than time he spent formulating Relativity.

After digesting these lectures (and repeating several of them) I shared Einstein's skepticism. When learning about Relativity Theory, there's a learning curve to be sure, but it was still based on LOGIC. The quantum world as a whole just didn't make any sense in comparison. No matter how many times it was explained to me, I continued to wonder how reality could on a subatomic level be so illogical? It was in complete opposition to everything I'd ever known about science.

In the interest of retaining the momentum of my studies, I decided to brush myself off and push ahead towards string theory, as I had planned before I was assaulted by The Quantum. I was extremely disappointed to discover how simplistic string theory now seemed in its relation to the quantum world. I couldn't help but see the parallels between this situation and how the Rational thinkers of antiquity first looked in the face of Chaos. I felt string theory's attempt to define the behavior of quantum particles with such radical mathematical concepts, using multiple virtual dimensions that rely on undetectable particle partners proved it far too insubstantial to ever be a contender for the Theory of Everything. Useful mathematics to be sure- but incomplete. Too many missing pieces, and too much abstraction. I felt like string theorists had gotten lost in their own equations.

In sum, 2009 began with another swift kick to the gut. Everything I had studied and invested myself in the previous year in an attempt to reinforce the idea that we live in a harmonious or even logical universe, was annihilated in twenty-four, half-hour lectures. I couldn't lie to myself. The game had changed, and needed to be reassessed. But instead of sitting down and writing a thoughtful essay or blog post to more deeply explore these ideas, integrating into the paradigm- I chose to fight against it. There had to be a more meaningful existence than modern science was able to offer us- a complete, logical explanation for the fundamental operations of the universe, as opposed to the random bumping around of oddly-named particles of energy. Or waves. (!)

What I realized is that in the expulsion of metaphysics from my studies and my pursuit of quantum mechanics and string theory at the furthest reaches of modern science, I again found myself in the midst of disciplines that required philosophy to come to terms with them. Not only philosophy, but philosophy completely different than I had yet encountered, with twice as many new questions as the ones I had originally sought to answer, such as: 

• Can something really exist in two places at once?
• Can something behave differently, depending purely on the observation of it?
• Does the question "What is the Theory of Everything?" even make sense???
• Is the world presented by quantum physics the most "fundamental", or is there something different, like string theory, that lies yet beneath?

I was getting nowhere, digging into this seemingly infinite regress of reductionist science. If quantum mechanics is defined by the perception and observation of the human mind- then what exactly is the human "mind" that is so powerful as to define reality itself? For that matter, what is consciousness? Where does it come from? Is it just small bits of electricity surging through a hunk of meat in our heads, or is it something more, something truly "divine" as the Rationalists declared? There was only one place to go from here...

Maybe it was Mozart's Requiem blaring in my headphones, or maybe I was in a particularly placid mood that day, but as I walked on the street, it felt like time had slowed down just slightly. There was a light wind in the air and as I walked with my fellow downtown commuters around me, I started to feel this overwhelming peace come over me. I felt like I was part of this great organism that was San Francisco, floating along like a gentle stream. The light was beautiful. The cold air coming into my lungs felt somehow nourishing. I felt like I belonged there, and my whole existence harmonized with the city. It was as if I could feel myself moving through time.

When I got to work I immediately pounded out a quick email to myself describing my experience. I wrote things like "I walked in the sunshine, on stars, in harmony with the city." It was as close as I've ever been to what I guess you could call a "mystical" experience. And it wasn't just once- it started to happen more and more often. I decided to dig deeper.

My first instinct was to do internet searches, typing in things like "city harmony", "universal harmony" and "city symphony". Of course what I found were the usual suspects of bad Youtube video projects as well as squishy new-age message boards, boasting conversations about star constellation alignments and crystal energies, that as a rational person I couldn't bring myself to believe. Nothing I found satisfied me. Fearing that bringing it up in normal conversation would have the same airy backlash as my internet searches, I decided to keep my experiences a secret, and just enjoy them for what they were.

In January of 2008 I stumbled upon my first audio course from The Teaching Company, Intro to Greek Philosophy at the SF Public library. The lectures were fantastic, and totally eye opening for me. The philosophies that stuck out the most were those of Heraclitus of Epheseus, and Pythagoras of Samos, both of whom were philosophers before the time of Socrates, now commonly known as the Presocratics. The basic writings of the two philosophers were the closest I'd heard that could verbally explain the harmony I experienced while walking through the city.

Heraclitus, as I've mentioned many times in past blog posts, believed the fundamental nature of the universe was flux, ever changing and flowing like a river, which reminded me of the liquid-like sensation of my experience. Pythagoras on the other hand talked about something that was even more intriguing to me at the time, what he called "Music of the Spheres". He believed that the stars, the planets (the spheres), and everything on earth was "made of number," meaning the entire universe could be expressed most fundamentally in the language of mathematics, which to him was synonymous with the language of music.

I started checking out library books like "The Pythagorean Sourcebook", "The Music of Pythagoras", and "The Art and Thought of Heraclitus". While all of them were interesting, Pythagoras's studies of music and his experimentation with musical scales was more thoroughly engaging of the two. Most importantly, instead of off-handed metaphysical statements about the nature of the universe, Pythagoras's philosophies figured in directly with modern mathematics and music theory, fields that had developed over the last 2500 years, and were still heavily relevant in our culture and academia.

As the year wore on I started getting up an hour early to listen to the lectures and take notes. Eventually the lectures became a part of my daily morning routine, as regular as my cup of tea or my walk down from Powell Street Station into SoMa. I borrowed more and more from the library; classes on science, ancient history, and music. I eventually ended up exhausting the SF Public Library as a resource and instead had to resort to browsing The Teaching Company's website, and buying the classes directly from them, to quench my ever-growing thirst for knowledge.

As I progressed through the History of Science classes in particular, Pythagoras's ideas about the fundamental mathematical harmony of the universe came up again and again. As I learned, the idea was heavily influential to the philosophies of Plato around 350 BCE, rode the sharp upward and downward trajectories of the Roman Empire through the earliest parts of the 1st Millenium C.E, survived through the Dark Ages, was re-kindled during the Renaissance, and eventually became Rationalism, the base philosophies of Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant in the 17th and 18th centuries.

I ate all of this up, seeing it as the most logical explanation of the experience I'd had. And not only was this idea common- it was a major historical, philosophical, and scientific movement. Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Liebniz and Kant joined Pythagoras as my new league of patron saints. I read everything by them I could find, and even if I had NO IDEA what they were talking about, I was elated to read through and try to decipher them.

In the Fall of 2008, a full year after my first harmonic experience, my renewed interest in popular science led me to WNYC's Radiolab, a science-centric public radio show that "isn't afraid to ask the big questions". I downloaded podcasts about Time, Sleep, Music, Memory, Laughter, and Stress. But the one that really stood out from the rest was one called "Emergence". I'd never heard the term before used to describe a scientific phenomena, but the implications of Emergence really knocked my socks off. The first part of the episode was interview with a man named Steve Strogatz, a mathematics professor from Cornell University, who discussed how fireflies in certain parts of the world were able to somehow blink in synchrony, rather than the random on and off patterns those of us who have seen fireflies in North America are used to.

As the show progressed, the hosts described more and more examples group behaviors within nature that seemed to "emerge" spontaneously from the bottom up, rather than being commanded by some top-down over arching authority. They were like armies without generals. This podcast so profoundly interested me, it diverted me from my other studies of science and philosophy I had going on at the time. Eventually I discovered that Professor Strogatz had not only written an entire book on this spontaneous synchrony, but he had also just released a Teaching Company class on a field that tied in closely to emergent phenomena: Chaos Theory. (for more on my experience with Chaos and Emergence, please refer to my Chaos blog post)

I immediately bought the lectures on Chaos and completed the whole course in only two and a half weeks time. What I derived most from the course was a thorough analysis of various complex phenomena in our ever-noisy world, and the sense that within this seemingly chaotic behavior, discernible patterns tended to emerge. However, in chaos math, as the numbers of variables that describe this behavior increases, the system quickly becomes too complex to follow.

I slowly came to the realization that the natural world in general was far more complex that I had imagined, and that even our most advanced mathematics seemed impotent in the face of such complexity. The champions of Rationalism believed that the universe was built out of more simple things than our senses allowed us to see, and only through the divine language of mathematics could we rationally discover the more essential world that was beyond our perception.

Over the previous months, having closely followed the history of science throughout the ages, and learned of the multiple failures of mathematics to describe the natural world, it became obvious to me that the rational and idealistic philosophies that I was using to support my "harmonic city" theory had quite a few nasty holes in them. Was the experience I'd had the result of inherent mathematical harmony in the universe, or was it something completely different and unrelated? I was leaning more towards the latter, but either way, Pythagoras didn't seem like as sage-like as I had originally believed he was. Whatever my experience was, if mathematics weren't the answer, I still felt strongly that it had something to do with music.

So I rounded out 2008 with a 48-lecture series by the zany Robert Greenberg of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music called "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music." Oddly enough, in the first lecture of the class, Professor Greenberg clearly made his opinion known, that music and mathematics were unresolvable. To him mathematics was mathematics, and music was music. They were very separate things that took place in different realms, and never the twain shall meet.

This dealt the final blow to Rationalism for me, at least in reference to my experience. I decided to set aside my metaphysical inquiries and just enjoy the class. It was nice to kick back and end the year with such a rewarding introduction to great musical composers like Liszt, Haydn, Brahms, Mahler and Verdi.

As 2008 drew to a close, I was disappointed that I hadn't found my answers, but in the process I had been armed with enough general philosophical and scientific knowledge to continue the journey in the coming year. I felt like any future explorations would be a decidedly more rigorous and educated confrontation of this complex world we live in. But nothing I had learned in the entire previous year could have prepared me for what came next...

Parmenides' view of Being posited that everything is static; a single, permanent, unchanging, fundamental reality. Being was later favored by Socrates, followed by Plato and then Aristotle, and by way of Aristotle it was disseminated throughout the ages. The concept of Being has been pondered, debated, challenged, and reaffirmed in its various forms by scientists, philosophers, linguists, and religious thinkers alike. Ultimately, Being is the most common Western (and for a substantial portion, Eastern) view of reality. For example, the statement "The world IS" is a statement of the world as a being or thing, as are the statements "I AM," "The chair IS," and so on.

Heraclitus held the completely opposite philosophical view, Becoming, or what is more modernly referred to as Process Philosophy. As Heraclitus saw it, everything in the universe was in an indeterminate state of flux - always changing - and that this change was inevitable and the only real constant. While Being saw reality as a series of objects and substances, goals and destinations, Becoming saw reality as dynamic, impermanent, chaotic, and ceaseless.

Becoming weaved its way throughout the next two millenia within the Western intellectual canon, in direct parallel with Being, always in the shadows. It eventually became a favored philosophy of such figures as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead. Throughout each of these philosophers' respective bodies of work, many of them refer back to Heraclitus as their primary influence for this idea, especially Nietzsche.

Over the last two years, having come across this philosophy again and again in the various academic courses I've taken, or books that I've delved into, I've been made aware of my own process of Becoming. To ask the question "Becoming WHAT?" is to miss the point, and simply exposes our cultural, psychological, possibly even religious marriage to the concept of Being. Nietzsche built upon Heraclitus's assertion of Becoming, saying that we should view this inherent change throughout our lives, not as a difficulty to struggle against, or something that has set out to weaken us, but something we should embrace and use as a means to become more powerful individuals. Each subsequent change is therefore not a detriment, but is rather a meaningful progression of who we are.

So here I will recount for you, in several installments, what has become my great philosophical, scientific, and spiritual journey of the last two years. What started out as a few simple questions of how to better explain my day-to-day human experiences in more meaningful terms, quickly snowballed into a series of profound encounters, all of which have completely changed the way that I look at the world and my life.

Welcome to Becoming. I hope you enjoy!

Leonardo was a polymath, or what came to be known as a "Renaissance Man". In fact, his legacy defined the word- if you go to Wikipedia, his famous self portrait (pictured above) adorns the top of the page. Being a polymath is less an aspiration or a mode of operation- it's more like a psychological condition, bordering on obsession. But unlike many obsessions, instead of fixating on one specific thing, the affected mind goes in a million different directions at once, almost to a detriment (oil became Leonardo's preferred painting medium because it was the only medium that could stay wet long enough to tolerate all of his long-term noodling) Fortunately, Leonardo had wealthy and powerful clients during his career as a painter- religious, political, even the royal elite- who would provide him with money, workspace, and resources to freely pursue his varied passions. He had an entourage that followed him everywhere he went, and a constant team of assistants, so that he could maximize the breadth of his activities.

Leonardo's approach to knowledge in general was a classical Aristotilean, empirical style- an exhaustive examination and documentation of natural phenomena. His experimentation within the widely varied disciplines of painting, architecture, engineering, mathematics, and the various sciences are evident to us through the detailed and comprehensive 6000 surviving pages of his original Notebooks. Sadly, an estimated 7000 additional pages have been lost. In the Notebooks, he muses, sketches, and intuits the science, above and beyond the age of the Enlightenment, at least a hundred years before René Descartes, Sir Issac Newton, and their contemporaries had stepped foot on the planet.

Capra writes regarding Leonardo's tutoring of King François I of France:

"He never tired of hearing Leonardo explain to him the subtleties of his science of living forms- the complexities of turbulent water and air, the formation of rocks and the origin of fossils, the intricacies of human movement and the flight of birds, the nature of light and perspective, the canons of beauty and proportion, the pathways of the senses and the vital spirits that sustain our life, and the origin of human will and power in the seat of the soul." (Capra, p. 127)

Just in this small cross section we can clearly identify Leonardo's knowledge in fields we would call (respectively) Fluid and Aerodynamics, Geology, Paleontology, Biomechanics, Optics, Aesthetics, Anatomy and Psychology. Keep in mind all of these studies subsisted with only the simplest of technology, without the tools that were available when they were popularly developed. The analysis of Fluid Dynamics was especially difficult without advanced equipment, but it was of such acute interest to Leonardo that it yielded an abundance of pages in the Notebooks. It wasn't seriously pursued by the greater scientific community until the 19th century. 

Leonardo is of course best known for his artistic endeavors, including several pioneering master paintings (The Last Supper, John The Baptist, and Mona Lisa), as well as the detailed drawings that can be found throughout his notebooks. He discovered that a more pleasing and striking image could be composed using harmonic proportion and perspective, rather than idealizing human and natural forms. So the endless hours he spent studying the underlying structure of these forms were inordinately beneficial to his artwork, whether they were rocks, streams of running water, or systems of muscles and organs throughout the human body. He felt if an artist didn't have a thorough enough understanding of natural forms, there was no way he could make a true and accurate rendering of them. Dedication to this principle set Leonardo apart from the other artists of his day, and galvanized (while it was actually a revival of ancient techniques) a revolution in the naturalism of painting. Many of the drawings in his Notebooks are still considered impressively accurate portrayals of human anatomy.

So why wasn't he received as successfully in the scientific community as he was in the art world? As Capra explains it, Leonardo never had a formal education, and though he did eventually teach himself Latin, the text in his Notebooks were written in common Italian, making him unable to garner much respect from many of the academic communities of the time. Additionally, his Notebooks weren't properly published until hundreds of years after his death. At that point, the modern scientific method as we know it had been established. The purely reductionist science that emerged from the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries analyzed organisms and natural phenomena by deferring their causes to the activities of lower level, component parts (molecules, atoms, particles, etc).

This was much different than Leonardo's methods, which were more holistic. Holistic examination to Leonardo was to observe a subject as it existed in context, emphasizing the connectedness of each part to its fellow component parts. Those collections would interact and form a system- a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. For example, it wouldn't make sense to analyze a single muscle in the upper arm of a human subject; you would have to see how it fit in context with all of the other muscles surrounding it, as well as the tendons that connected them to the bones of the elbow and shoulder and made the arm operational. His drawing Vitruvian Man celebrates the symmetry, proportion, and beauty of the human body as a whole.

Concurrently Leonardo was one of the first figures of history who believed that the types of natural phenomena seen everywhere on Earth extended throughout the cosmos, and that the planets outside the bounds of Earth were just as imperfect, noisy and complex as the nature that surrounded us. This stood in stark contrast to the widely accepted, even religiously mandated Aristotelian vision, which professed that the celestial bodies were constructed from the flawless, idealized, and mathematically perfect geometric forms of his teacher, Plato. Leonardo went further to postulate that the human body, the planet Earth, and the cosmos as a whole were macro/microcosms of each other, meaning that each was its own complex natural organism that reflected the other. Had Leonardo access to a powerful microscope at that point and observed the various discrete cellular systems within the human body, he might have gone further to recognize them as the next step down in his picture of reality. His vision offers not only a more expansive view of reductionist science, but goes further to exemplify nonlinear, fractal-like geometry in self-similar complex systems. This type of research didn't become popular until the late 20th century, a full 500 years after Leonardo had passed away. In fact, this division of his studies could also easily be compared to systems biology, complexity, and cognitive science- some of the most cutting-edge fields of research today.

Leonardo's scientific endeavors were a product of his own vigorous, private self-education. However, exercising his polymathic sensibilities, he was able to meld art and science together as one, and include scientific inquiry as a fundamental part of the art-making process. That way he was never forced into a situation where the scientific work had to be separately approved, funded, or even known about by anyone but his closest associates. Without economic, social, or religious interests directly tied to it, Leonardo seized the opportunity to explore interests for their own sake, rather than having to cater to the desires of any particular patron. Most research scientists today have to constantly deal with these obstacles and keep the interests of their funders (drug companies, national defense departments, academic institutions) in mind at all times as they perform their experiments.

Of course Leonardo had a relatively stable, well-paying career, with a solid base of political and religious clients who happily praised and generously supported his artistry, allowing him the time and flexibility to employ such a thorough methodology. He never had to worry about having food to eat or a place to live. But while few of us in the modern day can revel in the types of luxuries he enjoyed, we can still view, understand and appreciate the value of independent scientific research and studying the wonders of the natural world, on our own, for it's own sake, the discoveries themselves becoming their own rewards.

Imagine what our world could have been like had Leonardo's Notebooks been the cornerstone of the Enlightenment. How would the world be different? What if we all stopped whatever we were doing every day, just to watch the sunset? What if everyone learned a musical instrument, and set aside time to play every day, just for themselves? What if we all spoke ten languages? What if every city building had a rooftop garden, that the residents of the building personally cared for and took pride in? What if math class was absolutely fascinating, because we actually understood the context of it and how it fit into our daily lives instead of being presented with steady streams of abstract concepts? What if each and every one of us was in constant awe and wonder at the simple idea of being alive?

If we followed a path inspired by Leonardo the Scientist, the Naturalist, the Polymath, the Self-Educated, tireless Seeker of Knowledge- the Visionary- all of these things might be possible. If we could only view the natural world through his eyes, with as much appreciation and sense of awe as he had for the sheer complexity of it all... we certainly wouldn't ever have to think twice about saving it.

Now that I've spent a lot of time with the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, I realize that it is possible to inquire on all things, and though it may be hard to stomach, there might not be an actual answer to said inquiry. For every "concrete" view, there is one that's set to the polar opposite, for a reason that could very well be more astounding than the first. Instead of painting the world with a black and white, good and evil, "with us or against us" brush, it's instead composed in shades of gray and uncertainty. The truth is therefore defined by the argument itself, in the absence of an actual conclusion. According to Plato, this kind of result, while wholly unsatisfying, works just fine.

Aristotle, the star pupil of Plato, felt this methodology was a cop out, and that it was his duty to put a cap on these types of inquiries, in order to make any kind of progress in what was then called "natural philosophy." Every question you could pose had an answer- you just had to go out into the world, study natural phenomena, and arrive at that answer, empirically as it were. Though you can look back and chuckle at what may seem like naive and voluminous writings on the nature of politics, ethics, the cosmos, biology, poetry, etc, Aristotle's method of inquiry for the most part remains the same accepted method that the scientific community uses today. Theories of hard science can't be proven through reason and discussion alone. Someone can't just publish a scientific paper in a major journal with no data to back up their claim. For example, someone could rationalize that clouds exist because little invisible gnomes with paint brushes shuttle across the sky and create them. If you were to claim something like this, contrary to every notion we accept about meteorology, you had better damn well have some strong empirical/collected data that proves such a claim. And even then, it's still just a "theory," right?

It's well substantiated throughout history that even a proven theory may well be refuted just because it isn't supported within the ideology of the common culture. Take heliocentrism, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than vice-versa, or atomic theory, postulating that all things in existence can be broken down into more basic, tiny components. Both were out and out rejected in their own times, over and over again, simply because the culture of the day refused to accept it. Even today's debates about evolution vs. intelligent design fall solidly into this category, though it's pretty obvious that the evolutionists have largely been accepted as the "winner" in this "contest". Through the mountains of data Charles Darwin and innumerable other scientists have collected, evolution is the accepted nature of existence of humankind- it's the ANSWER. Thus Aristotle lives on.

So what happens if the "answer" is eventually proven wrong? What about travesties of the the past like Witch Trials, where suspected citizens were subjected to the full gambit of "scientific tests" before they were convicted and burned alive? What about blood-letting as a method for suppressing disease or haphazard brain surgery in an attempt to cure mental disorders? How can we know that the things we hold as truths one moment won't vaporize in the next?

The truth: we can't. We can't account for the horrible things we've done in the past in the name of science. Technology only improves with time, and while one day we can't analyze a drop of blood at a murder scene, the next we have DNA testing, sending a convicted murderer with a 30 year prison sentence home after having been wrongly imprisoned for 13 years- for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Like it or not, this is just the nature of science in our world. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our lives, to become more efficient, to live longer, and to feel better- by fumbling through the darkness to find a more harmonious explanation for the things around us. We try to cobble these ideas and data together, and continually pretend that we can somehow grab nature by the horns using these flawed Aristotelian endeavors.

So why do we continue to rely on a 2300 year old method that's inherently riddled with error? Because the benefits of doing so largely outweigh the detriments. Through science, we can propose and live by these fake, temporary "universal truths" quite well, even if they turn out to cause major catastrophes later on. As my Superstring Theory professor said- "science is always right - until it's wrong."

Interestingly enough, the overarching method of battling scientific ideas returns to the form of a perpetual dialectic; an argument or conversation that goes back and forth endlessly, refining our body of scientific knowledge again and again. I can't help but see the irony of this- that the format is a lot like- a Platonic dialogue. So really our methods of scientific inquiry are a hybrid of the philosophies both of Plato AND Aristotle. Neither is mutually exclusive. Perhaps this is why in Rafael's painting, The School of Athens, standing in the center of of a collection of ancient Western philosophical figureheads, is both Plato and Aristotle, their respective doctrines tucked under one arm, while gesturing with the other their opposing viewpoints. Plato points up to the heavens, to indicate the source of universal truth, as if to say "Only God knows," while Aristotle holds his hand out in front of him, as if to say "Everything we can know is right here in front of us." I don't know about you, but I find it thoroughly amusing that the foundations of Western culture seem to rest entirely on these base opposing principles. Instead of agreeing completely with one or another viewpoint, we create harmony out of conflict, rather than out of equilibrium.

It doesn't seem quite right at face value, does it? Yet somehow it works. Maybe the philosopher Diogenes, who lived at the time of Plato and Aristotle, and who was a champion of the writings of my old pal Heraclitus, said it best:

"All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream."

The world and all that we know is just a river of chaos. Hope you wore your life vest.

Though very few of his works have survived, the works of Heraclitus have made a significant impact on our culture. He saw the world as made out of fire- always constantly changing. One of his most famous fragments, with its varying translations, goes something like this:

"No man can ever step into the same river twice, for it's not the same river, and he's not the same man."

While this may sound like a poetic and overly romantic notion to some, it's actually one of the few ancient philosophies that translates into our modern world scientifically. While in no way do I believe Heraclitus knew about or had the capacity to analyze our biology on a cellular level 2500 years ago, I see it as a striking coincidence that the cells in our bodies are dying and being remade constantly; so much so that in (on average) about seven years, none of our biological cells are the same as they were in the seven years previous. So we could not possibly be the same EXACT humans we were even a day before, possibly even hours or minutes before, because biologically we AREN'T the same self-aware collection of cells. It blows my mind to think that I am technically the fourth full version of myself, even though I can remember quite clearly large chunks of the lives of the first three.

The "river" part of the "same river twice" statement is a bit more obvious, and is reflected in other fragments of his texts, such as "all is flux." Liquid by nature flows constantly (unless it is frozen, of course), and this effect is amplified by the mechanics of a river, flowing from one large body of water to another. The smallest parts of the river, whatever units they chose to divide it up into during the time of Heraclitus, ceaselessly reconfigure themselves, so much so that, like the undulating cells of our bodies, it would never be the same river at any point you would analyze it. I find it quite amazing that something like Chaos or Complexity theory, scientific fields only a few hundred years old, can find their patron saint in an ancient Greek philosopher that lived a few THOUSAND years ago.

However, the fact that Heraclitus's philosophies are scientifically provable wouldn't have been much of a consolation to him. It would simply confirm what he feared- that solidity was impossible, even nonexistent. That we as humans base our way of life on false security, false stability. As much as we try to predict, we can't reliably know the outcome of anything of detrimental importance, or at least things that would effect us in the long term, in a world that is in constant flux. Our lives are built on a reality of liquid fire.

Heraclitus was known as "the weeping philosopher." and is depicted as such in paintings of him by Johannes Moreelse and Hendrik ter Brugghen circa the year 1600. Given his philosophies, pondering the nature of change, one can agree that his perpetually melancholy state of mind held no mystery as to the cause.

Chaos Theory, like most mainstream science, started at the fringe, with a man named Henri Poincare, who discovered unpredictable results while trying to solve the "three body problem", or the gravitational relationship between three celestial bodies (such as the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth), in the late 1800s. This discovery, which went largely underground until the 1960s, was not popular with the scientists of the time, who favored instead the restrictive but reliable results derived from differential calculus- mathematics that had been in play since the time of the great Sir Isaac Newton. In the 1960's, while running some experimental calculations for predicting weather, mathematician and meteorologist Ed Lorenz stumbled across what was later to be known as The Butterfly Effect. Drastic and unpredictable results spawned from small amounts of truncated calculations (dropping decimal places). As the old expression goes, "the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas."

It was becoming increasingly clear that Newton's laws had found their limits- all of the "noise" and "aberrations" that scientists had been ignoring for years came back to bite them in the ass, and as a result, their methods failed more extreme calculations. Thus modern Chaos Theory was born.

So why is this so interesting to me beyond a 10 minute conversation segue over coffee or a glass of wine? Well, the thing that held my attention in was the inherent ability of chaos to create order within itself, also known as self-symmetry. Remember all of those tie-dye shirts that the Hippies wore? Those images are known as Fractals, first defined in mathematical models by a man named Benoit Mandelbrot. The famous Mandelbrot Set is a computer image system that you can zoom in on many thousands of times to find that it repeats itself over and over again. The same structure can also be found in nature and biology, though in reality it stops after a certain number of repetitions (branches into leaves, blood vessels into capillaries, etc).

This is where I started to notice the limitations of Chaos Theory and Fractals, and what I was referring to earlier as "chewing gum-filled potholes." Chaos can only be reproduced in highly isolated mathematical models, created in what's called state space, to control variable influence. Only one variable influence on a system can be changed at a time to be able to observe and repeat behaviors. With more than one influence, outside of state space, it goes from Deterministic Chaos to something called Complexity Theory. Complexity Theory seems to me to be a catch-all definition for everything we don't understand about how different systems in nature work scientifically. The stock market, the weather, wars and social relationships between countries- none of this is calculable because of the complex nature of the system, the untold variable influences, and the inability to create an accurate portrayal of the system's "initial state." So Chaos Theory, while it tells us how on a base level how systems behave deterministically, barely scratches the surface of how these systems actually work, and is utterly simplistic compared to what we don't know.

While Complexity Theory continues on its own path of scientific research, not to mention fills out a whole mountain of books on the subject, this is where I divert my attention instead to the science of Emergence. Emergence is kind of the cousin of modern Chaos and Complexity Theory. It's more of a philosophy really- it takes into account the behavior of systems as a whole, how independently weak components of those systems relate to each other and "synchronize" to create something greater as a group than they could accomplish individually. For example a swarm of bees or a flock of birds, or even neurons in your brain, firing in unison to form a thought.

My academic foray into Chaos Theory in general came about after I'd heard an episode of WNYC's Radio Lab (partnered with NPR) that was specifically about Emergence. If you haven't heard Radio Lab and you have at least some interest in popular science, I can't recommend it highly enough. It's easy to understand and completely fascinating, with two exuberant hosts that make an extremely fun listen.

The first part of the Emergence episode featured a Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics professor from Cornell named Steven Strogatz, who describes how Malaysian fireflies are somehow able to synchronize their flashes- thousands and thousands of fireflies blinking in unison. I almost didn't believe it, but then I saw this video:

"Whoa!" I thought. I was hooked. The show proceeded to explain how this type of phenomena occurs in many places - behavior in ant colonies - in our brains - in crowds of people - in cities as a whole. The fundamental rule of an Emergent System is what's called "bottom-up organization", as opposed to the top-down systems we've relied on for so long, and do still throughout the world today. A group of alike entities self-organize through their relationships to each other, rather than having them defined by central leadership. Take the Queen in an ant colony for instance. Though she is called the "Queen", she serves the colony solely for reproductive purposes, and the population is overwhelmingly composed of sterile female workers. The Queen, unlike in the traditional Monarchical sense, does not hand down orders or help to organize the colony in any way. The worker ants use pheromones to communicate with each other, to warn against danger, to find food, etc.

Perhaps the most obvious example of Emergence in human culture is the World Wide Web itself- a decentralized, self-organizing network of websites and physical computer systems. This is why movies and television shows that talk about "Internet terrorist attacks" or "shutting down The Internet" like it's some server buried deep in the Pentagon are completely clueless. The Internet is just a term we use to describe the interconnectedness of alike entities, in this case, websites that are linked to one another. The Internet "emerges" from its own self-organized network.

If you dig a little deeper, in the age of the internet and a global economy, this phenomenon makes us fundamentally question the way we live our lives. Our systems of law, our education, Aristotle's Hierarchy of Being- even electing a President to "head" our country, begins to seem almost absurd. If you watch HBO's John Adams Miniseries (assuming it's historically accurate), it was the people of the American Colonies who cried out for a leader, resulting in George Washington's election to head of state. But for what, to fill the vacuum left by a British King??? Don't worry everybody- I still plan to vote in the November election. Still, it brings up a lot of very interesting questions...

So yeah, nine weeks. I've got some time to kill. Of course, being me, I can't just sit and stare at the ceiling- I have to be occupied with work or a major project pretty much all of the time to stay sane, so I've been doing exactly that. What have I been up to then? Well, beyond a MOUNTAIN of house organization and maintenance... quite a lot actually. Let me elaborate.

Over the past few months I've, in my own way, gone back to school. I kind of invented my own grad school curriculum that I lovingly call "NVU". This past January, I came to the conclusion that I spent far too much money in 2007 on Amazon books (most of which I didn't read), so I decided to check out what the local San Francisco Public Library had to offer. I was pleasantly surprised at the great selection of books and online resources, with the ability to link it all together via their website. Best of all... it's all FREE! On one of my first visits to the new Mission Bay branch, I stumbled upon the Great Courses series, which are extremely high quality and in-depth audio classes on widely varying subjects. I decided to get my feet wet with a little Intro to Greek Philosophy, and it immediately just blew my mind wide open.

I couldn't believe for the last 29 years I'd been largely unaware of a whole universe of such interesting characters, like Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle... most of which are more or less the staple philosophical figures of history, science, and mathematics. But I'd neverstudied any of them in depth, beyond perhaps Plato's Cave metaphor or the Pythagorean theorem from my loathed 9th grade Geometry class. Nor did I ever learn about them in the context of their ancient time period, and how greatly they've influenced virtually all of Western thought- and if not, were at least cursed at by subsequent philosophers for being so foolish. Regardless, it's undeniable that many of the early philosophies, especially those of Plato and Aristotle, still hold pertinence in our lives today- concepts that were defined over 2300 years ago, are still talked about and studied heavily in academia and remain extremely important to almost every aspect of math and science, and beyond.

I quickly blazed through those 24 amazing lectures and ran immediately back to the library for more. I have since completed classes on Existentialism and The History of Science from Antiquity to 1700 (fascinating). I am currently in the middle of four additional classes- The History of Science 1700 to 1900, Power over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory, The Joy of Science, and The Joy of Mathematics.

On top of the audio classes, I've been teaching myself how to program in Python, the logical next step in my career as a visual effects artist and programmer. Next week I will also start a crash course in basic French for my three week Paris jaunt with Sadie in May. That's not to mention all of the different books I've been chewing into. I'm currently reading "Time: A Traveller's Guide" by Clifford Pickover, "The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library", Benazir Bhutto's "Reconciliation" (autobiography), and Plato's Republic.

So yeah, even with such a vast amount of time off, l'm not bored, to say the least. I'm really excited to learn new things and feel creative simultaneously. I feel like it's important to balance input and output- you can't make art in a vacuum, but you also can't exactly favor concept over execution, either. It is a balance I will have to struggle to maintain, but a struggle most enjoyed. Another one of those "good" problems I suppose. :-)