Absence

One of the important concepts which remains with me from Roy Bhaskar's philosophy is that of absence, and that "absence is causal". Perhaps it's not a surprise: who 'isn't there' is something that we tend to dwell on. I find myself dwelling on absent sleep these days too... The dwelling on things in itself is also interesting. Isn't it a form of redundancy? A repetition, a representation of the same thing in multiple ways. Every experience carries an echo of what is missing. 

It's difficult to talk about this because it means that you have to talk about "nothing". My book "Uncertain education" (which I must revise and publish properly!) was originally intended as a book about absence in education. It was too hard to write a book about nothing, so I ended up doing it in a different way. A friend of mine is also writing a book about nothing, and it has been a never-ending saga. We're always missing something, you see...

Absence can be quite practical. The gas bill that doesn't get paid is like this. But it can also be metaphorical - like the dead body of the wife's lover that gets ever larger in Ionesco's play "Medée" until it pushes everything else out of the apartment. Ionesco's joke is really expressing a deep truth about absence. But it is absence that drives the drama. Everything in this way is about nothing. The drama has to unfold to acknowledge the absence at its heart. Just as music has to unfold to acknowledge the silence from which it came and to which it will end. And life itself is an unfolding from one zygote until the next. It's all about missing something...

Structure

The one central idea which has dominated my thinking recently, concerns the relationship between time and structure. In posher academese, it's "diachronic" (time) and "synchronic" (structure). But even that is problematic. There are really no words, because words themselves exist in time, and there's little one can do to express timelessness in time. Except perhaps in music, we might get a passing glimpse. Even when one wishes for something or expects something to happen, one knows that the anticipated event lies latent in the origin of things. That ought to give us hope - which itself is a surrender to the unity of things. 

First there were bacteria, now there's Manchester... In what way was Manchester in the bacteria? In some way it was, alongside all the other places, events, minds, and lives. Just as the ending of Beethoven 9 is in the first note. Why do we have to wait an hour and a bit to get to the end? Because the music must unfold and enfold. Why does it have to unfold and enfold if it's all one? Because we cannot perceive the higher order of  structure within which everything is one. We have to invent the unfolding of time to apprehend oneness. 

History is unfolding in the same way. Events are strategies invented by thought for dealing with the imbalance between thought and nature. All our unfolding is about the next strategy - the next move in an unfolded field. The journey of unfolding - the dynamics - is about resolving the unfolding process to nothing. At the end of an hour, we get the final chord. 

Perhaps I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't think there was a practical and empirical way of demonstrating it. But I suspect there now is. It's not that the AI nonsense is going to revolutionise the world in the ways the zealots claim (it will probably make things worse), but its structural principles are a mystery, and may well provide an alternative glimpse on the oneness of everything. After all,  Manchester may be in the bacterium, but War and Peace is in an AI model. We haven't got there yet, but we may be moving towards a correction to our perceptual apparatus which helps us to see the deeper order in the structure of nature. 

Anarchy of Love

The word "anarchy" means "without a head or ruler" - for which, one might read "self-organised", or "decentralised". Although the opposite is "hierarchy", perhaps the most interesting contrast to "anarchy" is with "heterarchy", where control is imagined to be distributed. Warren McCulloch considered the brain to be a heterarchy. The internet (stemming from McCulloch's work) was envisaged to be one - although as time has gone on, it has become increasingly hierarchical - or rather, it has been used to reinforce existing social hierarchies. Here's an interview with McCulloch (there's a hilarious comment in YouTube "in my day, scientists wore clothes!")

His question "What is a number that a man might know it? And what is man that he might know a number?" is one of the great questions of cybernetics. He says he'd sorted the first part, but had no idea about the second.

Anarchy is not is "disorder". All these words are descriptions of different kinds of order. But order of what? One can get from anarchy to heterarchy by simply defining different kinds of self-organising units. This is particularly so if one considers relations as the fundamental building blocks of order, not entities.

So what if the unit is a couple? Maybe lovers or friends... It is a relationship. There can still be anarchy and organisation together. Is it a heterarchy? Well, it could be, but one wouldn't necessarily need to determine control in a couple. It's just a couple, by which each component knows the inner workings of the other. At least if it's well organised. 

Some couples however have imposed control by one party. But then it isn't really a couple - it is two units with a power relation between them. It's not anarchy but a kind of hierarchy. 

Which is more stable? The anarchic couple of course! 

There's a political point to make here. Ecological approaches to society and politics cannot be hierarchical. We cannot have a political system which is unlike the natural system it seeks a healthier relationship towards. This is fundamentally the problem with Green politics. Marxist politics is hierarchical and statist. Maybe only an anarchy of love could deliver a true ecological society. But how to do it?

Jeux

Debussy's Jeux fascinated me when I was younger. I even wrote a piano piece inspired by his bricolage technique - blocks of sound and gestures woven together in a tapestry which gradually builds up to a sensual climax. The blocks of sound are pretty obvious from looking at the score - which you can see here: 

One of the most impressive things about the piece is that once it is in flow, the sense of time passing is very fluid. It is a classic example of "moving through a sculpture": the sculpture is fixed; we create the movement and tell ourselves a story of how time passes, how something "grows". 

John Torday has repeatedly said "evolution is homeostasis". How can that be? How can something which "obviously" seems to get more complex (once there were bacteria, now there is New York), actually be simply maintaining stability? Was New York "in" the bacteria? Is it so crazy to think that it might be?

I had an interesting discussion with colleagues at work today about DMT and the geometric hallucinations it induces. 

What does that tell us? Is that "reality"? The philosophical position that this invites is determinism - but actually it might not be. Determinism itself is based on successionism - on one thing happening after another. But how can we talk about that if everything is there all the time in some kind of structure?

Debussy might have written one thing after another (we don't know how he did it), but ultimately his judgement is about the whole, which somehow was revealed to him. So Stravinsky saying the Rite of Spring appeared in a dream is perhaps not so ridiculous. 

The really profound thing is that this doesn't just apply to music. It applies to life, to events, etc. All is a structure. 

In my talk to the Metaphorum group I said that a distinction is a point, a line, a boundary and a space all at once. We can't perceive that kind of simultaneity. That's why we need to make up time in order to process the complexity. It's also why AI may be a very powerful scientific instrument which itself embodies a geometric structure of simultaneity, and which unfolds in its emerging patterns of utterances which appear like our own. 

I think there is an epistemological revolution coming. I was hinting at it in my talk (https://Metaphorum.org) last week:

 

Life on Venus

... Would be hot!

But does that preclude life? Could a planetary dynamic at 464°C still have the fundamental topological properties of a living system? Even if our living system did not have the perceptual apparatus to recognise it?

Paranoia

Getting involved in the commercial world can be a bit of an eye-opener. One of the real issues concerns transparency and trust. Once trust breaks down, there's really not much point in going on. Before embarking on any venture, it's not unreasonable to ask "is it a trap?", "is it a ruse which serves others' interests rather better than my own?". The signs of things going wrong are the same as the signs of any relationship going wrong - attenuation of communication, double-binds, and an overwhelming failure of imagination. We get an early warning in our guts. Always worth listening to.

So for any new venture, the only way to proceed is with a combination of enthusiasm and caution. I'll need eyes in the back of my head, and the ones at the front of my head increasingly don't work properly either! So caution will have to be the driver - and that is likely to upset people. But paranoia can be a good defence mechanism...