A Place in Space: April 2008 Archives

Ok, so our plan to merge bilingual pedagogy, math and group relations took a bath but it dried out well enough to still be legible.

I'm proud to rub shoulders with one of this year's Distinguished Teachers: Shabnam Beheshti.

Imagine the Angels of Bread




Change is always resisted. At the cellular level patterns of survival screech to continue unaltered. It is we, the thinking aggregate of living cells composed into consciousnesses with conscience who must impose a break with violence and the talk that spurs it on.

One of the points raised by an audience member during the talk on Pain and Embodiment last Friday was to replace the term essence [of pain] with the neuroscientific phrase describing the mechanism of pain perception in the body. With the following quote, I am not making the point that "essence" and some chain reaction of proprioceptors (or whatever words describe the actual biochemical mechanism) are somehow equivalent to the substitution of 'value' for 'cause,' but I am in agreement that the phrases we use - while they do not change the fact, do enable conversation and may, on that basis, lead to new conceptions.

"To say that 'A causes B' or to say that 'B values preconditions A' is to say the same thing. The difference is one of words only. Instead of saying, 'A magnet causes iron filings to move toward it,' you can say, 'Iron filings value movement toward a magnet.' Scientifically speaking neither statement is more true than the other. It may sound a little awkward, but that's a matter of linguistic custom, not science. The language used to describe the data is changed but the scientific data itself is unchanged. The same is true in every other scientific observation...you can always substitute 'B values precondition A' for 'A causes B' without changing any facts of science at all. . . .

"The only difference between causation and value is that the word 'cause' implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of 'value' is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that 'cause' is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles 'prefer' to do what they do. an individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences." ( p 119)

...

"The greatest benefit of this substitution of 'value' for 'causation' and 'substance' is that it allows an integration of physical science with other areas of experience that have been traditionally considered outside the scope of scientific thought." (p. 121)

My smart friends are posting wicked cool stuff:

Flaws of Gravity, a review by Christopher Hitchens of a new biography of Isaac Newton.

and

Critical Art on Trial, about a group of tactical media practitioners doing digital disobedience (among other fusions of art, pedagogy, radical political action). Their activist work includes an installation that "encourage[s] citizens to make informed decisions about the biological and chemical substances which have become such a part of everyday life." They've gotten into some trouble for this, leaving them (and us) to wonder "precisely what kinds of communities—real or virtual—we will be able to make" - ever.

In the review cited above, Hitchens quotes Sir Leslie Stephen, who "claimed genius was 'the capacity for taking trouble.'" Taking, you notice, not necessarily (or only) making. Intriguing.

Relating to a lively discussion (currently in a bit of hiatus) via email with some friends, Hitchens also writes this:

the day is not far off when we will be able to contemplate physics as another department—perhaps the most dynamic department—of the humanities. I would never have believed this when I first despairingly tried to lap the water of Cambridge, but that was before Carl Sagan and Lawrence Krauss and Steven Weinberg and Stephen Hawking fused language and science (and humor) and clambered up to stand, as Newton himself once phrased it, “on the shoulders of giants.”