It's funny how the unique sound of a particular instrument is somehow characteristic of an age. For instance, I feel the guitar is the "voice" of this age -- both the acoustic and the electric, but to my mind, especially the acoustic.
There was a time when that instrument was the lyre. Here is a duet on the gallic lyre, and it calls to mind a haunting and bygone era.
Okay, more fun with science! We just be a-floatin' on the pond of space....with the ripples rocking the boat.....aaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnd, whoops! Out of the universe we go. That's all, folks!
A Stephen Colbert show from the fall of 2015. If you can't stand Stephen Colbert, I understand -- he's a smart-ass. However, this is a lively and entertaining show about a fun subject with special guest Brian Greene.
Another morning/sunrise song....don't ask me where he is, aside from it being somewhere in Iceland. Love the little track built in the studio for the camera.
There's a fan base for the music of the video game, "Outer Wilds." People delight in playing a wide variety of songs, either from the game itself or self-composed but inspired by musical themes from the game. Here's one example wherein the musician uses every instrument in his personal collection to build the composition of this medley.
I love the fact that people are so drawn to this music in such a simple and direct way -- that it immediately makes them want to express the themes themselves. Why is that? There's a kind of innocence and purity to this attraction that you just don't find in the world anymore. That's what I find so appealing about the phenomenon of this game and it's musical score. It seems to have genuinely touched everyone who's played it.
A few years back, I was in Graduate School in a program that went by the title, "Cosmology and Consciousness." It dealt with the ways in which science, be that interstellar physics or quantum mechanics, interacted with, gave evidence of, or otherwise intersected with versions of the term "consciousness."
Earlier today I went through all my notes from my graduate school classes, just revisiting what I'd studied and came across something brief I wrote about living systems. I'm offering it here as an example, really, of the academic mindset and how opaque, arcane, and cryptic that can be. This is the academic voice, laden with jargon. I decided this wasn't the kind of writing that I wanted to do and the reasons are probably obvious and self-evident. I'd rather involve my heart when I write and not just my head. Here's "the head" part:
"A living system is a non-summitive whole whose
properties cannot be predicted by the qualities of its constituent parts. At a higher level of organization, new
properties emerge which seem to be beyond the capacity of the individual
component parts and were not present at lower levels of organization. For instance, when hydrogen and oxygen
combine to produce the unpredictable uniqueness of water. Because of this, living systems cannot be
understood by reductive analysis.
"A living system is a description of the relational
quality of existence. Organizational
form is evidence of the functioning links and connections between systemic
elements. Living systems are adaptive;
they are open to their environment and admit matter, energy, and information
into their processes, metabolizing these for the sake of continued or evolving
existence.
"Living systems are holonic; they are embedded or
nested within larger systems. They
represent a shift from an object ontology – the idea that objects are separate,
stand alone, and are unique in themselves – to a relational mode or process
whereby patterns intersect and interact, creating relational vortices and
vortexes.
"Closed systems, on the other hand, are in theory
isolated from their environment, cannot renew or maintain themselves
indefinitely and inevitably suffer entropy, the continued and continuing loss
of energy, order, and organization. The
idea of closed systems is predicated upon the Cartesian, mechanistic model of
existence and the universe, and is presumably subject to the second law of
thermodynamics and its concomitant loss of order, energy and form.
"It can be argued that closed systems don’t really
exist within nature and are simply an example of a model, idea, or paradigm
whose reality is no longer supported by the present understanding of
physics. At one time, there was a
distinction drawn between the fields of biological science and hard physics but
the gradual acceptance of the evolutionary scheme over the course of the past
150 years has erased that distinction and apparently proven it false. All physical form is subject to some manner
of evolutionary process, it’s just that biological evolution is incredibly
accelerated in comparison to, say, geological processes. In this case,
it’s interesting to note that the information from the field of living
biological science was applied “backwards” to the hard, or physical, sciences.
"The fact that living systems respond to environmental
changes or stresses promotes the idea that they are self-transforming and
self-transcending. Paradoxically, one could also say that the whole is less
than the parts, in the sense that the constituent parts have potentialities
which are not always in evidence, or called forth, by the holon in which they
are presently functioning.
"The understanding of living systems can also be
applied to the realm of human culture and is useful in describing the internal
functioning of a living cultural milieu.
Paradigms are living systems, as are the various holons which comprise
the many aspects of culture and civilization. In effect, systems theory seems able
to describe many different and varying levels of existence, or “reality.” It is most likely a basic building block of
the nascent, new paradigm struggling to take root in the soil of the older
forms."
In case anyone noticed, at the end of the video regarding glaciation, the speaker rattled on for several minutes about dark energy, a topic apparently covered in earlier Space Time videos. I was listening with half an ear and even less of my brain when I heard the phrase, "...the universe behaves mechanistically..." and I immediately thought, "Oh, come on, who still thinks of the universe in that way?" Scientists, it seems.
It's an issue for me not because I'm anti-science -- I'm not -- but the hidden assumptions in the philosophical underpinnings of the development of science in the West are another matter entirely. Someone could write a book about that called, "Where The West Went Wrong." The whole Cartesian/Newtonian mechanistic view of the universe may have given us a host of practical applications, but it's come at the expense of the rest of life. At the very least, it's a foray into the heaping sands of intellectual aridity. I cast my vote with Thomas Berry, who said the Universe is not a collection of objects so much as it's a communion of subjects. But more on Berry's perspective of the Universe later. I'm not ready to delve that deeply into that subject matter just yet.
Suffice it to say, for me the Universe is a vibrant, living Reality in which we participate, and I'd rather we participate consciously and conscientiously than stoop to seeing objective reality as nothing more than an intellectual plaything, or the Earth as just a set of utilitarian resources to exploit, with life and existence further debased into mere commodities to sell.
My hope is that science becomes a yoga for the West; in other words, that it continue to delve as deeply into the mysteries of existence as is humanly possible, and becomes a medium for the discovery of the deepest truths we are capable of fathoming. Anything less is beneath us.
The sound of the Siberian forest in the studio at KEXP, Seattle. Mesmerizing. Our collective shamanic origins.
An interesting little video that explains in fairly simple terms the many factors that produce glaciation and thus interglacials as well.
A cover of a composition by Robin Bullock. I don't know the performer's full name; under this video she simply goes by her first name of Rebecca. I actually prefer her version of this song to Bullock's original -- I feel the more relaxed tempo in which she plays better suits it.
She's just playing quietly in an unassuming manner at home, and it's the perfect song to listen to while spending a quiet Saturday afternoon at home myself.
For a couple million years the earth has been alternating between long ice ages, often tens of thousands of years long, if not longer, and shorter interglacials, periods where the earth warmed considerably. We live in such an interglacial. Somewhere between 11,500 and 13,000 years ago, the earth entered the current interglacial cycle known as the Holocene. All of human history is presumably contained within this period. Doesn't that seem like a bit of hubris? Are modern humans really so unique -- so special? Are we really the end-all and be-all of all human development on earth?
Some years ago I read a book by a paleoclimatologist. Much of it was directed at the contemporary issue of carbon in the atmosphere and how long it might stay there. The climatologist wasn't terribly concerned and stated that he and his like had a longer view on things. He thought we might miss the next ice age, which he surmised was due in about 30,000 years. However, during this discussion of carbon and global warming, the climatologist mentioned that the earth was actually -- if memory serves me -- 4 degrees warmer during the last interglacial, which was from around 130,000 years ago to 117,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years.
When I read that, what first struck me was that this is almost the exact length of our contemporary interglacial. You know, the one which supposedly contains all of human history. So I found myself wondering -- did humanity advance into forms of organized civilization during the previous interglacial? Probably any archeologist would dismiss that idea out of hand. "Where's the evidence?" they might say.
But the subsequent 100,000 years of ice scouring the planet might have dispensed with much of the evidence. Even so, a few ideas have popped up which don't support this hypothesis so much as raise other questions. For instance, there was a dig along a highway in southern California in 1992 which produced a mastodon skeleton whose bones, which were situated in what had been river silt, appeared to have been smashed by boulders which were small enough to have been hand-held, and which otherwise wouldn't have been deposited in river silt by ordinary geological processes, and there were smaller, sharpened rocks which seemed to match sharp broken edges of other mastodon bones on the site. The skeleton was dated at 130,000 years.
All of that is to say, it suggests a human presence in America roughly 100,000 years earlier than any archeologist would even remotely countenance, and -- the salient point -- would have occurred during the last interglacial period.
All of this, of course, is simply the view of science based upon European perpectives. North American native, indigenous, or First Peoples state matter-of-factly that their own oral histories say nothing of crossing a land bridge across the Bering Strait. Their own oral histories state that they've always been here.
I'm not going anywhere else with this idea today, but I find it poses much food for thought about human origins upon the northern American continent, or the development of human organization, if not civilization, on other parts of the globe during the last interglacial. I'm just always keeping my eyes and ears open for more information upon these topics. This is what I refer to as "recreational thinking." It's just for fun.
