How Science Lost its Body

April 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

This paper will describe how scientific knowledge prior to the late 16th and early 17th centuries was constructed and authenticated primarily by practical experimental means, and that this practice-led knowledge gathering process led to a form of knowledge which was inherently human-centred, sensual, and embodied. In fact it could be said that up to this point in history, the project of science was the organised description of human experience. After this point it will be argued that the object of enquiry shifted away from the human being and toward a depersonalised objectivity, a shift facilitated by an increasing tendency for scientific knowledge production to become mathematised (as noted by Kline 1980). This mathematisation of science proceeding to the point where, in cases where mathematical formulation does not agree with experiment, it is considered most likely that the experimental method is at fault.

Kline, M. (1980). Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. New York, New York University Press.

Posted in Conference Abstract, Embodiment, History, Kline, Morris, Mathematics, Science | No Comments »

The Long Dream

May 31st, 2006 Fred McVittie

We are in a dream in which we are wandering through a strange land. It is beautiful and monstrous together, as if our eyes don’t speak the language. The laws are confusing here and we make stupid mistakes all the time. Everyone is a stranger. Everyone. We may think we see a familiar face and we want to run to that person, run as fast as we can, but we don’t seem to be able to get anywhere. Our legs are heavy and fastened to the ground by forces we can’t begin to understand. We are lost, abandoned, and alone.

This is the dream we have been dreaming, you and I, for the last 400 years. The good news is, it’s time to wake up.

Posted in Dream, History | No Comments »

The Changing Status of ‘Psychology’

July 14th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The history of psychology as a science is very brief. It is usually thought to have begun being considered as a body of material knowledge, apprehensible by scientific means, with the work of William James. The status of psychology as a science, whilst subject to great debate and much fluctuations in esteem, continued throughout the 20th century. Prior to its embrace by science, any consideration of those entities and processes we now think of as the subject of psychology; identity, consciousness, dreams, rapture, mental illness etc.; were part of the discourse of philosophy and/or religion. Even throughout psychology’s time in the light of science there have been elements of psychological theory and practice, the work of Wilhelm Reich for example, and some would say all of psychoanalysis, which have been distinctly non-scientific. Because of the ill-defined, and largely non-experimental nature of psychology however, these practices have never been completely excluded from discourse in the way that heretical physics or heretical chemistry would be. Instead, psychology has been a bastard science, drawing information and knowledge from where it can, even if some of these places would be off-limits to scientists following more stringent maps to knowledge. As these practices continue into the 21st century there seems to be some evidence that psychology as a term is losing some of the scientific patina of respectability that it acquired post-William James, and is rediscovering its roots in philosophy and mysticism. University college courses and institutions are finding that ‘psychology’ is not a good recruiter of those students who want to study serious science, so we see college departments sprouting schools of ‘brain science’ and quietly losing the ‘p’ word. Also, there is an increasing use of the word ‘psychology’ to be used in contexts or to refer to concepts where it would not have been used previously. The writer Ken Wilbur for example, refers to his theories as ‘integral psychology’. This work, exemplifying as it does an ambition to pull together knowledge from across the disciplines of science, religion, and philosophy (east and west), and give this bastard knowledge a good name, would in all likelihood not have been able to qualify as ‘psychology’ without the reversion in meaning that the term has had. In fact, in earlier works outlining broadly the same ideas, Wilbur tended to call these ideas ‘philosophy’ and avoided the use of the other ‘p’ word.

Posted in History, James, William, Philosophy, Psychology, Reich, Wilhelm, Wilbur, Ken | No Comments »

Universal Physics

July 17th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The development of the science of physics, particularly over the last 400 years, can be seen as the triumph of a particular approach to knowledge gathering. This approach disregards the position of the human being within the scientific process, and attempts to construct an objective position outside of incarnate humanity from which to regard the world. In order to achieve objectivity it is necessary to consciously abandon our embodiment as ‘medium sized objects moving at medium speed’ (Dawkins 2003), and embrace an organised scepticism toward the data of the senses and the common sense which these senses produce. This in turn has required an increasing reliance on the (apparently) disembodied language of mathematics . Alongside this evacuation of the human being from its privileged position at the heart of physics is the corresponding development of a set of protocols for the objective verification and falsification of knowledge, enshrined in the idealisations of the scientific method. This project, the construction of Rational Physics through mathematisation and scientification, has been astonishingly successful, and its creations and discoveries are truly awe inspiring. However, the creation of new conscious knowledge does not necessarily mean the erasure of the old, and even though the findings of physics are as close to factual as we are likely to get, they still may not get us ‘where we live’. Science may have abandoned the body at some point in the late 16th Century, but as functioning humans we still take it around with us everywhere we go. Also, whilst our consciousness may be able to engage with the mathematical abstractions of quantum theory and dark energy, our non-conscious cognition (and actually much of our conscious, in the form of covert metaphors) is still working with the tools provided by an embodied evolution.

Within the system of beliefs, biases, misconceptions, common sense, and generalisations that Brown (1991) identified as ‘Human Universals’ there are a subset which refer specifically to matter, energy, and their interactions. In any formal, rational system of knowledge constructed through the protocols of science, this subset of knowledge would be called ‘physics’. In the context of human universals, which operates without scientific protocols but only with the innate and accumulated knowledge that comes with embodiment, this subset could be referred to as ‘Universal Physics”, a set of general principles and theories about the way the world works that is held by all cultures, and that is a result of a common biology and a common evolutionary history. While Rational Physics is the physics of the disembodied universe of atoms, quarks, membranes, black holes, and quanta. Universal Physics (UP) is the physics of dreams, intuition, emotion, art, God, and human frailty.

(Note: The “Universal Physics” referred to here is in no way connected to that proposed by Ethan Skyler http://www.physicsnews1.com/ or of the ‘commonsense science’ of Barnes, Bergman, Collins and Lucas http://www.commonsensescience.org/ )

Brown, D. E. (1991). Human Universals. New York, McGraw-Hill.
Dawkins, R. and L. Menon (2003). A devil’s chaplain: selected essays. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Posted in Brown, D. E., Dawkins, Richard, Embodiment, Evolution, History, Mathematics, Metaphor, Physics, Universals | No Comments »

How Science got it Body Back

July 29th, 2006 Fred McVittie

As has been described by Kline (1980), Davies (2005), and others, the history of scientifically verified truth took a particular turn around the 16th century. The mathematization of science in which validation processes from experimental hypotheses and procedures moved from being ’self-evident’ (i.e. evidenced by the sense of the embodied self), to being validated axiomatically using the language of mathematics. The authority of this mathematical truth is owing to its being underwritten by a transcendent logic, untainted by human frailty. Maths is/was considered a purely abstract structure of thought, separate from the messy subjectivity of the body, and therefore not only exact, but also disembodied. The 20th century, however, through the work of Godel and others, saw this transcendent logic and coherence of mathematics exposed as fundamentally untrue, which discovery resulted in a ‘loss of certainty’ (Kline: 1980) in maths and a corresponding loss of certainty in the sciences which rest rest on this mythic transcendent coherent logic. This could be interpreted as a crisis for maths and science, as these activities are revealed as ultimately groundless; not based on eternal transcendental, possibly God-given laws, but at best on heuristics which are merely ‘useful’ and ‘effective’. However, recent developments in cognitive linguistics and the development of theories of ‘embodied cognition’ offer a different interpretation. These emerging disciplines suggest that our ability to conceptualise and work with even the most abstract ideas of mathematics or science is throught the use of embodied metaphors, and that even the equations of pure maths, when analysed using the tools of cognitive linguistics, reveal the use of concepts and ideas which are mapped metaphorically from simple actions and responses of the somatosensory body, (Lakoff and Nunez 2000). This implies that ultimately, what logic and coherence maths may possess which allows it to be used to validate science, is due to the logic and coherence of the metaphors used to conceptualise that maths. These metaphors, while they may inevitably be partial, contradictory, and incompatible one with another, are themselves built from the experiential realism of embodiment. The ground of thought is not in the sky, but in ourselves, and the loss of certainty in maths is the regaining of the body in science

Davies, B. (2005). “Whither Mathematics?” Notices of the AMS 52(11): 1350 - 1356.

Kline, M. (1980). Mathematics: The Decline of Certainty. New York, Oxford University Press.

Posted in Cognitive Linguistics, Embodiment, History, Kline, Morris, Mathematics, Science | No Comments »

A Natural History of Innovation

September 4th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The ability to innovate, to produce novel behaviour, is primarily a human faculty. For the most part this ability has a clear use function; when combined with good critical and evaluative faculties the ability to produce new behaviour is how we solve problems, identify more efficient ways of satisfying needs, and gain an edge on competitors. For these reasons it is likely that this ability confers upon those who possess it a distinct adaptive advantage. In terms of evolutionary history, those members of a population who are able to think ‘creatively’ are more likely to survive and reproduce than those whose behaviours are bound to habit and instinct. Adaptive traits which confer a reproductive advantage on those who have such a trait tend to be manifest in the individual as an emotional and physical response experienced as pleasure. So, for example, the adaptive trait which allowed our ancestors to identify nutritious food is experienced as the pleasurable sensation we call ‘taste’. Similarly, sexual congress, which is self-evidently adaptive in that those who engage in it are those most likely to reproduce, and those who do not are unlikely to, is also accompanied by pleasure. These pleasures are both the bait and the signal for adaptive behaviour. In terms of creativity and innovation, if such a trait is adaptive we would expect it to also be accompanied by feelings of pleasure, and this is indeed the case. Surveys of artists, scientists, inventors and all other innovators demonstrate that the act of creation has its own intrinsic satisfactions and pleasures over and above whatever functional products may result from such acts.

Given that human beings are a pack animal, the innovations produced by one individual may benefit not only that individual but also other members of the community or group (other than direct competitors). Individuals in the group who were able to recognise and exploit the creativity of others could also profit from this creativity, gaining the same adaptive advantage and increasing the likelihood of their own survival and reproductive success. This suggests that in addition to the pleasures of creation itself, it is possible that evolutionary history may have conferred upon us an ability to recognise innovation and to experience pleasure from that recognition, again over and above whatever product may result from such creativity. Not only does being creative feel good, but watching the creativity of others feels good too.

The development of the arts since the end of the 19th century has been partly characterised by an almost obsessive demand for the new. And whilst this has undoubtedly been driven partly by a rampant consumerism and an increasingly profitably art industry, it is nevertheless likely that the appeal of innovative art lies not only in the ultimate market value of that art, or the status it confers, or in the traditional sensory channels of the aesthetic response. A significant appeal lies in what might be called the ‘aesthetics of innovation’.

Posted in Aesthetics, Art, Creativity, Evolution, History | No Comments »

Paradigm Shifts and Human Nature

September 10th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The periodic large-scale changes in the structure of knowledge which have come to be referred to as ‘paradigm shifts’ undoubtedly make significant changes to the organisation of culture and power, the technical and physical resources available, the philosophies discussed and taught in Universities etc etc. Do such apparently seismic shifts have any appreciable affect on those behaviours, attitudes, and actions that might be attributed to ‘universal human nature’? It seems likely that, since much of human nature is a result of the slow accretion of adaptive behaviour, that this will have a natural damping effect on any such rapid change. It is more likely that whilst large scale ‘paradigm shifts’ in human knowledge will affect the organisation of cultures, they will not affect the overall function of those cultures, which is to provide for the human needs of their members.

Posted in Evolution, History, Paradigm, Universals | No Comments »

Everything is Illuminated

September 16th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The modern search for a state of being referred to as enlightenment is a hangover from another time. Enlightenment is more properly seen as simply another word for consciousness, the miraculous experience of being aware and awake, exactly here, precisely now. When additional enlightenment is sought, what is really being looked for, and occasionally found, is a renewed acquaintance with one’s already illuminated state.

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Why ‘Enlightenment’? Seeing the Big Picture

October 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The term ‘Enlightenment’ refers to both a particular period of European history in which rational enquiry and the concept of a human-centred approach to knowledge became privileged, and also to the individual experience of ‘awakening’ that is found in many spiritual and religious traditions including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity.

This term, Enlightenment, is part of a complex set of metaphors which structure our relationship to knowledge. In this structure, light is associated with knowing, and darkness with not-knowing, hence the period preceding the historical Enlightenment is sometimes referred to as ‘The Dark Ages’. This association of light and knowledge may be because the presence of light allows one to be able to see, and in the absence of light one is effectively blind; this then correlates with a related metaphor, KNOWING IS SEEING, in which the abstract concept of knowing is comprehended by a mapping from the visual sense. So when we wish to indicate that we understand something we say ‘I see’, and when we do not understand we say ‘I just don’t see it’. In such circumstances we may even say we are ‘in the dark’.

What the light allows us to see, presumably, is ‘the big picture’; as the parable of the four blind men feeling their way around an elephant, all of whom take away different impressions, suggests, the visual sense confers a unity on experience which is absent from other senses. To ’see’ means not only to experience more but also to experience a unity.

In terms of personal Enlightenment experience, the darkness that one is assumed to be emerging from represents an inability see a unity of self and other, an inability which is resolved by the turning on of the light which allows the unity of all things to be percieved, just as one sees the unity of the world using the visual sense. The Enlightenment process allows this unity to be metaphorically ’seen’, resolving the apparent differences to produce the state of ‘non-duality’ or advaita, or divine union spoken of in scriptures.

Posted in Binding, Elephant, Enlightenment, History, Light | No Comments »

Whither Mathematics?

October 16th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Davies, B. (2005). “Whither Mathematics?” Notices of the AMS 52(11): 1350 - 1356.
Using three of the most celebrated problems in mathematics, (Godel, the Four-Colour Theorem, and the Classification of Finite Simple Groups), Davies makes the case that mathematics does not possess the transcendant truth status it has developed since the 16th century. Rather than providing a unique and totally objective window onto reality “[Mathematics] will be seen as the creation of finite human beings, liable to error in the same way as all other activities in which we indulge. Just as in engineering, mathematicians will have to declare their degree of confidence that certain results are reliable, rather than being able to declare flatly that the proofs are correct.” The article ends with the prediction that the reduction of a difference between mathematics and other disciplines the question of a special truth status awarded to mathematics will cease to be a relevant issue.

Posted in History, Mathematics | No Comments »

Lost Baby

October 27th, 2006 Fred McVittie

We are among the first, and only, cultures in history not to have a shared consistent cosmology; a big picture’ which articulates the relationship between all the parts of our experience. The worldview held by most, if not all, religions may serve some of this totalising function, but they do this at the expense of the intellectual rigour which would force them to accept the inconsistencies and contradiction between dogma and science.

Posted in Cosmology, History, Religion, Science | No Comments »

Mathematics: The Decline of Certainty.

January 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Kline, M. (1980). Mathematics: The Decline of Certainty. New York, Oxford University Press.

This book addresses the history and changing ontological status of mathematics, particularly from the time of Galileo and Newton up to the late 19th century and Poincare. Kline traces a developmental path in which mathematics increasingly becomes the only valid language through which scientific enquiry and the truth of the results of that enquiry might be expressed. This resonates with Galileo’s often quoted comment to the effect that ‘the book of the universe is written in the language of maths’. He traces the twist put on this narrative by recent 20th century developments in maths; godel etc, which undermine the transcendent truth status is has claimed. The implication of this is that a science based on an incomplete and inconsistent maths is itself necessarily incomplete and inconsistent.

Posted in History, Knowledge, Mathematics | No Comments »

Centre of the Universe

April 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Those of us who have read about ‘paradigm shifts’ or of the Copernican Revolution in astronomy will be familiar with the legend of how the model of the universe shifted sometime around the early 17th Century. Prior to that time, we are told, people believed that Earth was the centre of the universe and the planets and the Sun swung majestically around the fixed point of Terra. The publication of Galileo’s ‘On the Two World Systems’ and works by Copernicus, Bruno, Brahe etc changed all that and a ’shift’ is supposed to have occurred in our understanding, particularly our understanding of our place in the universe. The images of the universe reflecting this new understanding, the so-called Copernican universe, show the Sun as a fixed point at the centre of the map and the Earth and other bodies swinging endlessly around it. This image of ourselves, as miniscule lifeforms clinging to a flying rock three rocks out from the Sun, is supposed to be a more accurate representation of our position than the previous Earth-centred one. However, it is worth considering for a moment what these images actually mean, what function they serve, and what information they leave out as well as what they provide. Starting with the last point first, it should be noted from the outset that any image, or indeed animation, which shows any object as stationary is inevitably partial. There is no such thing as a fixed point in the universe, everything is in motion relative to everything else and the idea that the Sun (or previously the Earth) is stationary is a convenient convention used to indicate particular ideas. In the case of images of the Sun-centred universe, the point of such images is that give an accurate representation of the gravitational and centrifugal relationships between the various bodies illustrated. These images do not, and cannot, meaningfully suggest that the Sun is ‘central’, particularly since the whole system; planets, asteroids, and the Sun itself, is all hurtling at several thousand miles an hour toward Orion. The Copernican model of the Sun-centred universe is extremely useful for predicting the position of planets and the relative movement of these planets, but it’s ontology does not extend beyond these predictions and certainly does not reduce the status of the Earth as central to human experience. In an infinite (and expanding) universe, as Pascal observed, the centre is (conceptually) everywhere. From the point of view of the subjective human being, there is only one centre however, and that is wherever one happens to be standing.

Posted in Centre, Cosmology, History, Paradigm | No Comments »

Mappa Mundi

June 24th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Medieval and pre-Medieval approaches to knowledge tended to focus on the revelations provided by canonical and theologically approved texts, rather than observation or what we would now think of as scientific experiment. The writings of Aristotle, for example, were a key source of revealed truth for hundreds of years after his death, even when the ‘facts’ he related were self-evidently incorrect. Knowledge in this period was therefore detached from personal experience and existed in a kind of transcendent realm of pure ideation.

Although much has changed, it could be said that much knowledge that we routinely draw upon today is similarly detached, not because of any reliance on received wisdom, but because the knowledge itself has proceeded beyond the point where it can be accessed directly. Much contemporary knowledge, particularly in the sciences, is only able to be comprehended through conceptual tools such as mathematics and metaphor.

For a brief period between then and now however, say the period marked by the birth of Galileo and the death of Newton, knowledge came into brief contact with lived experience. In the 16th century, the burgeoning fields of science began to open up and their key model was that of the mechanism, of medium sized objects moving at medium speed. This is the model Newton refers to in his Principia, a model in which the movement of planets and apples can be described by the same laws, and before the disembodied oddities of galaxies and atoms began to be realised. This is a time before the mathematisation of science, when proof of a concept or theory was demonstrated not by reference to mathematical axioms but by experimental demonstration.

If history is a voyage of discovery, this brief period marks the crossing of an invisible, but nevertheless real, point on the globe. For that moment scientific knowledge and personal experience stood together on the deck and looked out over the waves. No longer transcendent and not yet abstract, the truth of knowledge is the truth of the body, and whilst the distant horizon may be indistinct, here at the centre of human experience all is clarity and light.

EMBO Rep. 2005 April; 6(4): 306–309. doi: 10.1038/sj.embor.7400389.

Posted in History, Horizon, Knowledge, Mathematics | No Comments »

A World Without Cycles

July 9th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Prior to the invasion of the Conquistadors into South America the local culture, although it was highly advanced in many ways, was a civilisation without the wheel. Actually this is not entirely true, apparently they did have toys which had wheels, and devices such as spinning tops which used the principle of the wheel, but they did not have wheeled vehicles. Let us pretend that they didn’t though. Nor, for the sake of argument, did they have roulette wheels, plate-spinning jugglers, rotating potter’s wheels, lathe’s, or indeed anything which involved the rotation of a circular object. In such a civilisation would it be possible for the concept of a ‘cycle’ to emerge as an organisational structure such as the ‘cycles’ we talk about when discussing history, industrial production, time, etc.? When ‘cycle’ is used in these ways it is a metaphor to indicate some phenomenon which repeats, which involves the constant return of a limited pattern of events, and which ‘comes around’ with the regularity of a turning wheel. Our conception of such phenomena depends upon our previous embodied familiarity with the wheels we come across in everyday life. Presumably without this familiarity and the Image Schema which we possess based on our interaction with the wheel, then this metaphor of the cycle would not be available to us.

Posted in Cycle, History, Metaphor, Schema | No Comments »

Old Knowing

July 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Since human conceptualisation is constructed from the abilities and limitations of embodiment, it is inevitable that all systems of thought must also reflect this embodiment. These systems and structures must be ultimately metaphorical, limited to the affordances of the body. In this sense, the capacity for generating effective models of abstract concepts is not progressive in the way that, say, post-Newtonian science is progressive. We do not need to know quantum physics in order to think, since thinking uses the physics of medium sized objects moving at medium speed. Our cognition does not contain charmed quarks and Higgs bosons: nor does it work with black holes and dark energy. The physics of thinking is largely the same as the physics of our embodiment, it is that of the wheel, the lever, the printing press, the pendulum, the spring, and the pulley.

These constraints which organise our cognition along Newtonian lines locate the discourse around cognition within the range of all cultures, not only those with advanced technical knowledge. If our minds are made of levers, wheels, and pendulums then knowledge of these devices is sufficient to build a model of that mind. This means that if we are looking for models of thought, we need not restrict ourselves to only looking at the latest findings from techno-scientific practice. Since all peoples has equivalent access to the necessary knowledge, then the ideas formulated by many people across history is equally useful.

It should be remembered of course, that this Newtonian logic only applies to the mental operations of the mind, not to the functioning of the brain, or to an articulation of the relationship between brain, mind, and world (if indeed such distinctions can be made). The physical brain undoubtedly uses processes which are far beyond the range of Newtonian or Folk science, and probably outside the current reach of the most modern scientific theories. We may think in broadly Newtonian terms, but what we think with is likely to involve extremely esoteric physical principles.

Posted in Affordance, Cognition, Embodiment, History | No Comments »

Standing in a River near Lyon

August 18th, 2007 Fred McVittie

I am imagining myself as a hunter gatherer living by my wits in a land which is now Africa, perhaps where Chad would be found today. Actually, a hunter gatherer is too evolved a person to serve the needs of this imagination, For this exercise I need less wits and more intuition: a Neanderthal living near modern day Lyon perhaps, or maybe Australopithecus sitting by a fire on the site that the Sydney Opera House now occupies. The world I am in is one punctuated and organised by rhythms of danger and safety, and the qualities of dangerousness and safeness appear in every experience I have, with every entity, action, and object having more or less of each. So important are these features to my survival, that they are the first features I notice in any encounter. Before an experience has shape or form or colour, it has the this quality first. In fact, it may never occur to me that experiences can be unwoven into such aspects as shape or colour; these tricks of reduction and analysis are ones that will only be developed by generations far downstream from where I stand in the river of life. For me here now there is only the experience and the pattern of danger and safety which give it meaning. This pattern appears in me and is the cause of my running, and shaking, and shouting. It freezes me at the sight of a leopard and propels my hand toward the sweet fruit on the low-hanging branches of the trees. Or rather, this pattern is me; it is pleasure and pain and the variegated admixtures which scatter from the mixing of these primaries. It is the source of my typing these words across the centuries

I am on the land where Lyon now stands, and am experiencing the world through the body and senses of the Neanderthal in me. All this experience, which I cannot separate but my distant descendant can, is becoming me through different routes. Different kinds of information (which is not information about experience, but is experience) seems to take different forms depending on its route. Some meaningful information comes in through my eyes (I know this because when my eyes are covered the information flow is staunched), and other information comes in through my ears. Still more information awakes in my nostrils and on my tongue, and some appears on the surface of my skin and in the movements of my limbs. All of these doors into (and out of) my experience are open to the pattern and all may be a source of joy and fear.

There is a regularity in the pattern which further organises my world, and this regularity seems to be in step with the different ways in which the information of the world becomes me: which route is taken and which ’sense’ is activated. Some sources of information are more urgent than others, proclaiming their pleasure and pain, their potential for danger and their promise of safety, in a way which is impossible to ignore.

Posted in Evolution, History, Sense | No Comments »

The Human Moment

August 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie

There was a period of time of several decades in the 17th century which were unique in history. Say between the birth of Galileo and the death of Newton, maybe with a midpoint at around 1650. This time marks a special moment in ontological history, the end of magic and the beginning of science. The certainties and firm foundations offered by scripture were being swept away by observation and method, but this method had not yet been abstracted into mathematics or extended beyond the visible and the otherwise sensory. This brief period was science’s human moment, when it’s subject was the observation, organisation, and understanding of human experience.

Posted in Embodiment, History, Science | No Comments »

Defending Descartes

September 7th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The philosopher Descartes is credited (or blamed) for introducing the concept of dualism to mainstream Western thought. His identification of the Res Cogitans and the Res Extensa, usually thought of as Mind and Body, is often considered to be one of the big mistakes in the history of ideas. This division, it is held, creates an artificial division in our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the environment. Descartes ‘artificial’ cleaving of soma from psyche apparently allowed for the development of other dualities, which were given an organisational logic by association with one or the other of this binary pair. A small selection of these might include:

It is passingly interesting to note that these binaries have been revisited more recently by feminist writer Helene Cixous, with the top terms of Body and Mind being replaced by Male and Female. She claims that the various divisions which we construct to divide experience in two are always associated, often unconsciously, with one or the other gender. So far, so stereotypically sexist, but Cixous goes on to note that the gender binary, like Cartesian dualism, is not neutral, and that invariably one side of the divide is awarded positive value and the other negative. In the gender binary the male side is good and the female side is bad. It has been argued that Cartesian dualism, at least as it has been used in the West, regards Mind as the positive term and Body as negative. An alternative take on the creation of difference produced by dualist logic is that one of the two terms comes to be regarded as the norm, and virtually invisible, and the other terms is seen as aberrant and is visibly ‘marked’ by this difference. So, for example, we hear about the achievement of artists and of female artists, the fact that we need to state the gender of the female artist indicates that we regard the norm as male. In this case, the male term in the binary is ‘unmarked’ and the female is ‘marked’.

This dualism, for which Descartes is somewhat unfairly blamed, is held by many as not only incorrect, but also destructive. Such division causes rifts in the smooth surface of an otherwise holistic universe, and whilst it may have the intention of explaining the ontology of being, it actually has the effect of rending the fabric of being beyond repair. If only Descartes had not invented dualism, we might cry in a wail of oversimplification, the world would be a much better place. Such is the accusation laid at the door of dualism, and particularly at the porte of Descartes.

Of course this is a gross injustice, and poor Descartes cannot be blamed for what might have been done in his name. If men have oppressed women, or ‘civilised’ societies have trod roughshod over ‘primitive’ societies, and if arguments which make appeals to the mind have won out over those which engage the body, then responsibility for any damage done lies with the actors in these two-handed dramas, not with some French guy who’s been dead for four hundred years.

It is also more realistic to regards Descartes, not as the creator of dualism, but rather as the first to give it clear shape, to hold up to the light the duality which was always there. It is evident from the most cursory glance over the history of philosophy (East and West) that the notion of dividing experience into two parts was around long before the act of naming which Descartes took on. In fact, so prevalent is this basic act of subdividing the One into the Two is that it may be a universal human tendency. Experiments carried out on children support this notion, and this seems to be the case regardless of their cultural background or age (so no possibility of evil Western reductionist brainwashing). The ubiquity and the acultural nature of dualist thinking also gains some neuroscientific support in the work of Newberg and D’Aquili, who propose the existence of a ‘binary operator’ in the brain: a mechanism instantiated in neurons which carries out such elementary division as part of the routine cognitive processes of conscious and unconscious thought. As Paul Bloom puts it in ‘Descartes Baby’, part of the human condition is to be a ‘natural born dualist’, and in light of this dualistic inevitability, perhaps a better interpretation to give to the Cartesian project is not as the building of a wall across the world, but as the identification of (part of) the taxonomy of being. Whether we like it or not, the world really does fall apart before our eyes (although this need not mean that the centre cannot hold, or that mere chaos is loosed upon the world).

Posted in Dualism, Embodiment, History | No Comments »

Biting the Big One (part One)

September 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

To the medieval mind, the universe consisted of a relatively simple set of components: the Earth, the various crystal spheres supporting the starts and planets, and the divine illumination beyond the outermost sphere. The revolutions of Copernicus and the extensions to that universe contributed by Brahe, Bruno, Hoyle, Hubbard, Einstein and the rest may, on the face of it, seem to have multiplied the number of parts beyond number, and it is true that the number of basic elements has increased from four (or five) to over a hundred, and it is certainly true that the estimated number of miles between one end of it and the other has been upped, along with the number of years it has been in existence. The low number of parts apparently possessed by the universe that Newton and Copernicus inherited pales into insignificance compared to the immensity of that described by the science of today. Yet modern science has one simplicity than that of Ptolemy et al lacked, and that is in the number of boundaries between the universe and ‘not-the-universe’. The Medieval cosmos, simple though it may seem, has a fracture line around it separating the ’sub-lunary’ sphere from the transcendence beyond. Outside of this boundary is the something else of God, presumably accompanied by hosts of angels, archangels, and the rest of heavenly society. The existence of this boundary, the difference that makes a difference, multiplies the thingness of the universe by two; there is an above and a below, a realm of men and a realm of God, a Heaven and an Earth. What’s more, this division is absolute and there can be no singular embracing of the above and the below in a single totality. No word existed which encompasses The Whole Thing.

Today’s universe is big in number of components only. In terms of conceptual unity it has the snow globe universe of the first millennium mystics beaten hands down. The modern mind has the incredible power, (rarely used unfortunately) to spread its wings throughout this immensity and imagine it as one thing, large and puffy, but easily countable on the thumbs of one hand.

Imagine the biggest thing you can fit into your mind, a mountain say. Then imagine something outside of this entity, a cloud shrouding the peak of the mountain. The duality of peak and mountain is easily dissolved by extending one’s imagination outward to include both elements within a single scene. The eagle flying high above the clouds may temporarily reinstate the dualism you have banished but this can be easily addressed by the simple expedient of moving the line around your mind out and capturing the eagle in these new outer limits. Of course, something else will emerge, a fleck of light reflected off the lake, the Sun going down over the ocean, an island on the other side of that ocean, a tell-tale footprint on the beach of that island which indicates the presence of another human being, but with each addition to the inventory of your mind you only need to loosen the lariat that you are throwing over these entities to catch them all, all at once. The moon rising, the rain falling, a star exploding into supernova, all of these things are contained in the one thought you have, call it ‘everything’ if you like. Nor need the embrace of the all stop at the merely physical; inside the atoms of all the planets are forces that you may have heard of but neither you, your anyone else has seen, and there is no good reason not to include them in the single catalogue of stuff.

You may be thinking around this time, if for no other reason than I am going to remind you of the thought, that the universe is so big that it exists not at a single moment of time, but across the reaches of all the time there ever was and ever will be. The now recorded by a clock on the Sun is nine minutes ahead of now here on Earth (or nine minutes behind depending on which of those two bodies you are standing). The time at the other side of the universe is almost incomprehensibly removed from Earth time and, from our perspective, most of those light burnt out in a remote past that will only become present to this region of space when the Earth itself is a cinder. Does this not mean that the unity that we seek breaks apart across the back of time, and that therefore the centuries are irreparably broken? I don’t think so. I see no reason why we need let time come between us when, with Einstein, we can simply let it be another kind of space, another extension to the mansion of mind, a useful dimension that we can use to measure the shear scale of the One Single Thing. Time is not on the other side of the universe; time, like everything else, is on our side.

Hold that thought; do we have a problem at the mention of the word ‘mind’? We may have if we choose to stop our thinking at cogito ergo sum and rebuild the wall around the world along a line that divides Res Cogitans from Res Extensa. Descartes’ famous formulation of the nature of being as consisting of two non-overlapping ontological magisteria presents a division between mind and body reflecting (probably not accidentally) that between God and man, the snowglobe and the hand of the snowglobe-shaker. And while Descartes may have speculated half-heartedly about the intersection of these two incommissable substances, (something about the pineal gland), he could not find a way, in his philosophy, to include both Res’s in a single unified Res Universalis. But that was then and this is now and no such division exists today. Even though the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and consciousness studies are riven with conflicting theories and rival opinion, one thing is sure, that whatever mind is, it exists in the same universe as everything else. Some may regard it as the routine product of the symbolic processing of input by a meat computer, others may regards it as a fundamental property of spacetime itself which just happens to congeal inside the folds of human brains. Either way, however difficult the hard problems of the mind might be to think about, let alone solve, there is no suggestion that this difficulty places them, or the mind itself, beyond the universe. When we throw open our arms to grasp the world in its totality, we hold mind in the single circle of that embrace, yours, mine, and ours.

Thanks to this radical and fundamental re-unifying of the universe, we are now able to conceive of space, time, mind, and all the entities, real and imagined, as simultaneously contained within a single term and a single concept. We might call it ‘the universe’, (although this runs the risk of someone inventing neologisms like ‘multiverse’, or we might call it ‘everything’, (recognising that some wag will point to something that is not a ‘thing’ and claim it evades capture in our descriptive net. It would probable be simplest to simply refer to it as One, and begin our counting from there.

We hold these truths to be self evident.

That these totality of all entities can be contained within the single category of the One.
That the One breaks apart into the various phenomena of the universe according to consistent laws.

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Beside a River near Lyon

October 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

You are standing beside a river in what is now Lyon, on ground which is now part of a country called France. But this is not now, this is then. You are a tottering biped doing what you can to get along, but without anything we would remotely think of as consciousness, or at least not human consciousness.

There is something slightly odd about you that distinguishes you from the rest of your band, not a radical mutation, no massively rewritten central nervous system, just a slightly different emphasis to the way you react to your environment. If the other members of your band were capable of language, which of course they are not, and if they referred to each other by nicknames, which of course they don’t, they would call you by a name that meant ‘that nervous guy who makes mistakes all the time.’ And this description would appear, on the face of it, to be accurate. When you walk through the forest and the wind blows a branch above your head, just for a moment you don’t see it as a branch but as a predator steadying itself for the attack. And when the light dapples through the trees in the early evening those two gaps in the leaves look to you, for a split second, not like innocent sunlight, but the eyes of a vicious big cat reflecting the last gleams of the dying day. The sound of the grass crackling as it cools in the night sound too much like the snuffling of animals, or the hissing of enemies outside your hut to let you rest until you have checked again that everything is safe.

If these were the only mistakes you made, the others might have called you by a name that means ‘the paranoid one’, but your confusions travel in other directions also. The red wing of a bird in a branch momentarily fills you with hope as you mistake it for a ripe pomegranate. A moment of lust accompanies your apprehension of a gazelle for the brief second that you mistake it for a beautiful and graceful female of your own species. Yes, you are undoubtedly ‘the guy who makes mistakes all the time’.

Strangely enough, despite the fact that you make more errors than any other creature around, you are also oldest the member of your band, so these mistakes cannot be fatal. And since you have many females and many many offspring your constant errors have not prevented you from spreading your seed. In fact, although the young you have sired seem to be similarly afflicted by this odd trait of mistaking one thing for another, few of them have died so far. It is almost as if, by seeing opportunities and threats where none exist, you have improved their chances of survival. It is almost as if seeing one thing as something else has given your offspring an evolutionary advantage over the others.

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A Handful of Metaphors

October 4th, 2007 Fred McVittie

“It may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors”. (Borges. 1964. p.224)

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Knowledge, Proximity, Imagination

November 6th, 2007 Fred McVittie

‘Imagination is our capacity to organise mental representations (especially percepts, images, and image schemata) into meaningful coherent unities.’ (Johnson. 1987: p.140)

In ‘The Body in the Mind’ Johnson reminds us of the Platonic categorisation of modes of cognition, in which the validity of knowledge is seen to vary according to how one approaches its collection. Most valued is knowledge acquired by intellection (noesis), in which the unchanging ‘essence’ of the knowledge is grasped. At the bottom of the scale of knowing is imagination (eikasia) in which only ‘images, shadows, reflections’ (p.142) are apprehended, not the essential knowledge itself.

This structure of distinction, it can be noted, also arranges knowledge across the spectra of proximity and the senses, locating the essence of knowing close to the body where it can be ‘grasped’, and the less secure knowing offered by the Platonic imagination placed at some remove where only its surface appearance, or even only traces of that appearance such as a shadow, can be apprehended. Interestingly, there is no suggestion within this scheme of the later association of closeness/’feltness’ with subjectivity, or of distance/visibility with objectivity. In our current understanding,as revealed through the metaphors we use, we give a great deal of credence to objective knowledge described in visual terms and located figuratively at a distance in interpersonal space. We correspondingly give less credence to subjective knowledge described in tactile terms and located up close and personal (even though we may intuitively ‘feel’ this subjective knowledge as more ‘real’ than the objective knowledge of intersubjectively validated visual knowing). This modern value distinction between the subjective and the objective does not appear in Plato’s categorisation.

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Soul of an Atheist - Past of the Self

November 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie

When we are invited to look into the past, to consider who we are in relation to who we were, in which direction do we look? When we usually look back in time we look… back. We tend to consider time as a kind of river that is bearing us forward, or as a road that we have traveled, with the events of the past littering that road like the cast-off skins of a snake, or like flotsam bobbing in a boat’s wake and receding behind us as we proceed toward the distant shores of the future. There is the school we went to, and there are our parents. And the further back in time we look the more distant are the objects and events we look to. Last year is close on our heels, our memory of reading that newspaper item about a bombing and the death of some people we will never know, or the article about that celebrity coming our of rehab. Beyond these recent landmarks, and perhaps diminished by distance, we might see that same celebrity going into rehab, and the atrocity which provoked the planting of that bomb. These remote incidents may be harder to make out, blurring into the haze of hundreds of others, or they may be occluded by those events which followed them, and which now follow us. Here is the past as a journey that we are taking, and a country that we are constantly emigrating from..

Thinking about the past of our own self, our own most personal sense of being, is somewhat different however. Whilst the events, places, and people of the past are left behind in our life journey, our past self is not so easily abandoned by the roadside. Think back to your tenth birthday, maybe you had a party, maybe someone gave you a microscope, or a Hot Wheels set, or a book about trains. Or maybe your party was cancelled because you had a fever and had to spend the day in bed. Maybe you remember that day very well or maybe you hardly recall it at all. If you can revisit that day you may find yourself looking out briefly through the eyes of your newly ten-year-old self and maybe even feeling the stirrings of those smaller bones and muscles within your own. You may find yourself drawn to stand how you stood when you took the present from your Mother’s arms, or hold your hands in the way you held them as you adjusted the focus on that microscope for the first time, squinting down through the eyepiece at the gigantic wing of a housefly.

Here the past is not behind you, lost along the road or adrift in ancient seas, the past of your self is lurking inside, just beneath the skin of the present. The skin of this snake is not sloughed off, abandoned, and left for dead, but is grown over with its circulation and its senses intact. Your ten-year-old self is not doomed to wander lost through 1970’s supermarkets or wait to be picked up by school gates that no longer exist, its home is secured in the body of the here and now.

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Soul of an Atheist - Past of the Self 2

November 13th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The past of our self is not behind us and we seem not to be able to put the history of our being down and walk away from it. Even when we look back and feel ourselves in those alien situations, doing things we could not dream of doing now, and which are out of what we now think of as our character, we cannot completely divorce our now selves from our then selves, our new selves from our old selves. The circumstances may have altered, everyone we ever knew and every place we ever went may have disappeared, every priority in our lives may have changed, every cell in our body may have changed, we may have ‘moved on’, but that person we were is not some distant memory occluded by more recent and proximal images of bombings and celebrities, but is alive and awake within our bodies and minds, nestling like a Russian Matryoshka doll.

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Adaptive Consciousness and Evolutionary Lag

December 1st, 2007 Fred McVittie

It is a tenet of evolutionary psychology, and indeed of evolutionary processes more generally, that organisms acquire what characteristics they have through the slow machinations of natural selection. The form of an animal, mind and body, today is the result of the challenges its ancestors faced yesterday. Inevitably there will always be something of a lag in this process, evolution is slow and the relatively rapid changes which can take place in the environment can easily outstrip the rate of modification in the genome which equips organisms for success in that environment. Also, even if the rate of change within the environment was relatively slow it would always be the case that organisms were, in general, somewhat behind that rate of change. Evolutionary adaptation is inherently a conservative, parsimonious process, and adaptive pressure will not be exerted unless there is a compelling need since a perfect degree of fit between organism and environment is not necessary. Provided an organism is well-enough adapted such that it will outperform its competitors then it will survive. This is reminiscent of the old joke;

Two trappers are camping in the forest of the Canadian wilderness when suddenly they see a huge grizzly bear charging across the clearing toward them. One immediately gets up and starts to run; the other stoops down and puts on his trainers. “Don’t waste time putting your trainers on”, the first one shouts, “we’ll probably not outrun it anyway”. “I don’t have to outrun the bear”, the second one replies, “I just have to outrun you.”

This ‘good enough’ criteria which marks adaptive evolution is also demonstrated by the existence of physical and cognitive features which, whilst they may have served some useful function in the past, no longer do so. The human appendix, for example, or human toes, or the dewclaw of a dog, or the vestigial eyes of some cave-dwelling fish which live in the total absence of light. The parsimony of evolution means that such relics tend to persist despite their apparent uselessness simply because, since their continued existence does not decrease the organisms chances of survival, there is no adaptive pressure forcing their removal from the genome. Cognitive features which may parallel these (and the behaviour which stems from these features) include: the ‘lethal raid’, promiscuity amongst males, fear of snakes and spiders, and hostility to out-group individuals. Like the appendix or the toes, these instincts and behaviours likely served our ancestors well in the past, and aided in their chances of survival in the environmental conditions occupied by those ancestors (including the social and inter-species environment). In the modern world however, these traits, whilst rarely self-destructive, usually serve no useful function, and it is only evolutionary inertia and parsimony which allows them to persist at all.

The evolutionary lag which marks the passage of the genome through its changing embodiment in a changing environment, means that the body/mind is always one step behind the world in which it is embedded, and in all likelihood always has been. As we have the brains and bodies of stone-age hunter-gatherers, so presumably did our hominid ancestors live with the handicaps of pre-hominid brains, bodies, and behaviours. Our Neanderthal cousins had the body hair and sloping brow of their tree-dwelling forefathers, who in turn may have had some of the cold-blooded instincts passed down unwanted but uneradicated from their own reptilian kin.

It may even be the case that these traces of adaptive history persist beyond the range of such convenient paleontological divisions. This history may be more like a script which exists not in neat, hermetic chapters, but as a holistic narrative which is simultaneously active in the present. Or alternatively, we might regard this history as the laying down of innumerable layers of physical and cognitive organisation, all of which comprise our current sense of being, not only the last 100,000 years or so. The occasional claims of evolutionary psychology that our present behaviour, our sociobiology, is explainable in terms of stone-age beings in an information-age world, ignores the fact that we have been many other things before we were hunter-gatherers in the Great Rift Valley of present day Africa. Isolating that moment of our evolutionary history is certainly revealing and has useful explanatory power, but it also misses the bigger picture.

Also missing from this picture is any suggestion of ‘what next?’ Of course it is unscientific to speculate beyond the data and we cannot guess what the future holds with any degree of certainty. The future is, as Steven Vizinczey put it in The Rules of Chaos, ‘a blinding mirage’. Nevertheless, if we can at least tentatively accept that whatever our mind is like now it is probably slightly out of step with how it would be if it were somehow ideally wedded to the social and physical environment of today, then we should be able to consider what kind of mind we should have. Furthermore, to the extent that we are able to control our minds, if only to the minimal extent of deciding what to consciously put in through reading and other experiences, then we should be able to modify our consciousness to correspond better to the world around us.

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Dread Cthulhu Waits

December 10th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The organism called life exists in all dimensions. It’s heart is at the centre of the universe and has a single beat; the pulsating bang from which all emerged. It is tentacled and octopus-like, extending its arms through the bodies of all organisms, rising and falling, living and dying, disposable cellular conduits through which Cthulhu manifests. Here is the being out of Eden, rampaging through the circuits of space and time; an alchemical marriage of DNA and geometry.

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The Space Between the Stars

December 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie

There is an interesting tendency within evolutionary psychology to treat the human condition as partly determined by the fact that our embodied self seems to be straddling two distinct phases in history. We have the brains and bodies of pre-industrial, illiterate, stateless, stone-age hunter-gatherers, but these bodies are embedded in an industrial, literate, society with well developed state institutions. The apparent disparity or mismatch between these two phases is held to account for some of the anachronistic feelings and behaviours that we indulge in today including religion, tribalism, and racism. These phenomena are seen as either appropriate survival techniques for pre-industrial social animals, or as early attempts to respond to the uncertainties of existence when life was, as Hobbes described it, ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. This disparity between our stone-age psychobiology and our information-age environment is also used to explain the difficulties we have in accepting newer ideas such as quantum theory, evolution, and relativity. These theories, since they would have served no useful purpose to our pre-industrial ancestors, do not figure in the structure of our consciousness and are therefore not intuitively obvious or ‘graspable’. It is only through the often deeply counter-intuitive tools and procedures of scientific enquiry that such concepts are able to be generated or discovered. It may be that our attempts to explain the complexities of nature using the rough and ready tools of intuitive commonsense has been a contributor to the construction of false beliefs and myths. The universe, as JBS Haldane put it, may be ‘queerer than we can suppose’, and our tendency to operate within the limits of our suppositions causes us to make errors when dealing with phenomena beyond human scale.

Whilst it is undoubtedly correct that such a gap exists between the mechanisms of mind and the phenomena that we try to investigate with those mechanisms, this simple division into two phases, then and now, pre-industrial and post-industrial, may be just too simple. Unless we strongly favour a model of evolution which is punctuated to an extraordinarily high degree, with long periods during which very little change took place, allowing time for a relatively distinct psychobiology to form, then we have to acknowledge that our ancestry contains more than hunter-gatherers. We would have to recognise that our history also contains traces of earlier lifeforms, and that the shadow of these ancestors also falls across today’s world. In addition to a phylogeny associated with tribal hunter-gatherers we also have, in the symphony of our thoughts and actions, echoes of apes which foraged in small family groups, solitary tree-dwelling marsupials, amphibians, aquatic ocean-dwellers, bottom-feeders, nematodes, slime moulds, unicellular bacteria, free-floating chemical soups, clay crystals, chemical compounds, elements, atoms, stardust, and the space between the stars.

Posted in Evolution, History, Life, Space, Time | No Comments »

Before and After the Book

April 29th, 2008 Fred McVittie

There is a book on the table in front of me right now (The Craft of Thought by Mary Carruthers) and it seems to be a solid object. I know it is mostly composed of space, but that isn’t really important since it doesn’t change my experience of it. The knowledge that the book ‘contains’ is something different though.

There must have been a time when knowledge didn’t live inside books, but inside the fragile containers of human bodies. If you wanted to know something you would travel to the point in space where that human body was located and if you were lucky they would convey the knowledge that they contained to you somehow. It would be important, needless to say, to travel to that point in space during the short window of time that the person was alive, awake, conscious, and compos mentis.

Sometime after that time someone must have got the idea of recording the knowledge that they had in some way; maybe by carving it on a stone or writing in on a scroll of some sort. If you wanted access to the knowledge then you would still have to travel to the point in space where the scroll was but the window of time would be potentially larger. In some ways though, the scroll would have to be given the same special treatment as a human possessor of knowledge; it would have to be protected from harm, safeguarded against fire and the ravages of time etc. It would be a pretty special kind of object.

Maybe then someone got the idea of making copies of the scroll so that the knowledge could exist in more than one place at the same time. That would be quite a leap forward. The same knowledge would now exist in more than one point in space, and the destruction of one of these instantiations would not mean the total loss of knowledge from the world.

Print publication would extend this process even further, such that every time knowledge is put into book form it would, to all intents and purposes, become immortal. All publications (with ISBN numbers) are archived in the British Library, with the security which that implies, as well as appearing in book shops and the shelves of readers. The immortality of the knowledge is ensured partly by the treatment accorded to individual copies of the book but more significantly by its distribution. When knowledge is repeated across thousands of instantiations across the world it is extremely difficult to destroy.

It has been said (although I don’t know by whom, or whether it is true), that if you are in a city you are probably no further than eight feet away from a rat at all times. In a book culture it is likely that you are similarly no further than, say, thirty feet away from some books. Not all books obviously, but I would be surprised if there was not a bible within that kind of radius most of the time, and possibly a dictionary or other reference book of some kind. Some knowledge, even though it appears in books, seems to exist almost as a field, distributed across populated space, with the individual books that instantiate it being simply temporary devices which allow it to appear. When one book, or a thousand books, fall apart or are destroyed, the knowledge is still instantly accessible through the medium of all the other books which contain it.

Thanks to Project Gutenberg and similar endeavours it is now possible to access almost the entire history of the world’s writing through screens. Knowledge that lived in books, and across the field of books, now exists across the field of space and ubiquity is almost total. As I sit here typing I am within inches of all the knowledge that has been inscribed and digitised and can access it instantly. Truly ubiquitous, this knowledge is everywhere available. In fact, I am not even inches away from that knowledge; the wireless network that links this laptop to the access point on the wall is radiating that knowledge through space and through me as I type these words. When I summon up a page of the Gutenberg Bible, that information is in the room and is inside my body and the walls of the room and in my coffee cup and everywhere within the 20feet radius covered by my local network.

Changes in technology, social organisation, and epistemology itself mean that knowledge has changed its spots. Whereas once it was uniquely located at a particularly point in space for a very limited period of time, now it is everywhere and forever. From being identifiable as a distinct and temporal object is has transformed into a distributed and atemporal field. Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten, nothing is burnt, silenced, made mute by dementia or death. The evolution of publication is almost complete and the pages of the book spread holographically across the space between atoms and stars. This blog is more permanent and more ubiquitous than any work of print.

This does not mean that the book itself ceases to be important as an idea; it still carries the symbolic significance it inherited from its history in the individual scroll, and ultimately the individual body of fragile human beings. This symbolic significance is evidenced by the continued popularity of book-burning; no knowledge has ever been lost by the burning of a book, but since as an action it represents the destruction of a speaking position and a human speaker, the symbolic value of the action is maintained.

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