Russia

There is no other productive way of thinking than to think of ourselves as a species, rather than as nations, corporations, individuals or political parties. We are a sick species and the only resource we have for healing ourselves is our mind. Unfortunately, our sickness is a sickness of the mind. Can a sick mind heal itself?

Beer on Transduction

 

Beer's Tribute to Laws of Form

 

The long time of emotional inertia

The feeling of a long time passing seems to be a feeling of a kind of emotional inertia: a time where there is a prolonged sense of unfulfillment, absence or expectancy. My friend Peter Rowlands says that the measurement of gravity is really the measurement of inertia. That's a profound statement: we perceive gravity by the force exerted on our head by a falling apple. In the same way we measure time by measuring space. A long time is a slow journey over a long distance. 

Emotional inertia is how we perceive "a long time". When we feel no emotional inertia, time passes very quickly. That's not to say that we can't be happy in a time of emotional inertia, but it is a different kind of feeling. 

After Trump's inauguration we are beginning "a long time". I'd rather not watch the news in that time. But I'll keep an eye on the wars...

Emotional inertia is a kind of unstable stasis - does that make sense? What is impacted is the true expression of self. The self can't express itself, but it still refers to itself. But it hasn't gone. It's just waiting. That's partly because the experience of inertia is our construction of our limited perception of the universe. The universe itself knows no inertia and no time. 

West Side Story

It's been a ridiculously busy week this week - no time to think. But I went to the Spielberg West Side Story in Wythenshawe this evening - part of an initiative to bring arts to Wythenshawe. I think Spielberg's remake is a masterpiece. I first saw it on a plane to China. Embarrassing because it made me cry - always difficult to say you want another coffee when that happens!

What's so extraordinary about this version is the sensitivity with which the love scenes are played. The timing is exquisite - Spielberg's musicality is not just in his use of the music, but in the choreography of the camera and pacing of gestures. But it just tells us how music is at the root of emotion. Everyone relates to this because everyone knows how this feels - even if not everyone actually experiences something so intense. But some people do. 

But the process of making something so sensitive is not something that is driven by feeling, but by intelligence and technique. One of the other things that has happened in the last week is a set of fascinating academic discussions about the difference between form and process, particularly with Lou Kauffman. 

The form of an experience is not the same as the process of experiencing it. The structure of the love scenes in the film is not the same as the experience of watching them. The form of a mathematical proof is not the same as the process of discovering it. The form of a piece of music is not the same as the process of hearing it, and certainly not the process of writing it. 

But form and process may be united at a deeper level. To think this is to think that there is no time. There is no moment where Maria and Tony are apart, and another moment when they are together. There is no "moment" at all, but everything is one together. To be in a deep spiritual state where we appreciate that is to have hope not just that things can get better, and that the moment of things being good and whole is ever present with the darkest of times. 

Wave Genetics, maths and Health

As is usual for this time of year, it's been hard to get motivated. I've got to the end of the week thinking that I haven't done anything, although one or two things I have done have been quite good. 

Involving Peter Rowlands in my academic department at Manchester I hope will be the most significant thing from this week. Peter and Sidney came to our departmental meeting - so what can a genius theoretical physicist contribute to our thinking about occupational health or public health? Well, one thing came up almost immediately - there is a deep interest in the University in the potential occupational hazards, and potential opportunities for improving OH in the widespread use of graphene. Any new material presents new kinds of risks, but to understand it, we need to understand what the material is.

In his book "Foundations of Physical Law", Peter made a prediction relating to graphene and the measurement of fermion velocity. Basically, one of the properties of graphene is that electrons (fermions) have no mass, and therefore can travel at speeds very close to the speed of light. Graphene presents opportunities for investigating the behaviour of electrons and quantum mechanics. One of the interesting empirical phenomena is the Quantum Hall effect, whereby the resistence of current flow can be seen to be quantized (i.e. goes in steps) in what are called Landau Levels as a magnetic field is increased. Peter's prediction is that as the magnetic field is increased, so the speed of electrons is reduced because they acquire mass. 

Might this fundamental property of the material relate in some way to the biological effects that the material might present? Or even, might the insight gained into the dynamics of quantised energy through graphene cause us to rethink the simplistic cause and effect models in occupational health or public health? I think both of these questions are very interesting. It all goes to show the power of an interdisciplinary approach to these things - particularly if we are lucky enough to get a concentration of highly original thinkers.

The second thing that happened this week was that I managed to finish a short article in response to a piece by Lou Kauffman on "naming" for the journal Constructivist Foundations. This week, Lou has also been leading a discussion on "Biologics" for the Foundations of Information Science mailing list, and gave a webinar which was attended by Peter Rowlands, Stuart Kauffman, John Torday, Plamen Simeonov, Karl Javorszky, Gordana Dodig Crnkovic and many others from FIS. There were one or two important things that came out of this which were new to me. 

Lou began with self-reference (as he did with the paper he wrote about naming), and quickly moved on to the difference between form and process. In the flow of conversation, Stu Kauffman introduced the recent idea of "constraint closure" developed by Mael Montevil and Matteo Mosseo (see Biological organisation as closure of constraints - Maël Montévil). I wish Loet Leydesdorff was still around - I think he would have been very interested in this. It also raises fundamental questions about the "self" to which a "self" refers in self-reference (which was one of the questions I raised in my response to Lou).

Then Plamen Simeonov raised the work of a Russian biologist called Peter Garyaev on what he called "wave genetics". Garyaev has an unusual take on genetics which took him to postulate mechanisms for genetic transmission far beyond conventional biology, some of which involved sound and music. This is obviously interesting to me - but it could be mad. But aren't the most interesting things like this? Wave genetics - Institute Of Lingvistiko-Wave Genetics. There may be a connection to Rudolph Steiner here - but why not!

There was a fascinating moment when John Torday tried to relate his thinking about symbiogenesis to Lou's thinking about the place of mathematics in biological systems. John's view is that maths is ontological in some way, and which is endogenised by biological systems through symbiogenesis, which provides the foundation for the cultural practices of mathematics that we know. This made Lou think and I suggested whether this idea of symbiogenesis and the embrace of evolutionary history as a dimension to the "constraint closure" might provide us with a way of uniting "form" with "process". 

A final question I asked related to what a protein perceives in another protein. Lou responded by illustrating a knot in a plastic chain (some kind of lego thing - very interesting), and saying that one could determine the topology of a chain by pulling parts of it. I think that's very interesting because the "floppyness" of the chain becomes a transmitter of information about the chain - so the inherent "disorder" of many proteins may present an invitation to be "pulled" by other proteins. 

Related to this was a comment made by Peter Rowlands about measurement earlier in the week: when we measure gravity, we are not measuring gravity but inertia. The same might be said for pulling on a protein.