On Science and Religion

Study finds beliefs about all-knowing gods fosters co-operation

Feb 2016, phys.org

The research, an international collaboration among anthropologists and psychologists, looked at how religion affects humans' willingness to co-operate with those outside their social circle.

I'm a strong believer that religion serves the purpose of large-scale human population cooperation, and that despite how much people (like myself even) think it instead today acts as a thought-smothering default state in response to difficult decision-making tasks, it has been, in the early development of human civilization, totally necessary for that development to take place, and that science (a kind of anti-religion) would not exist today had it not been for religion, and that the two are part of the same continuum of cultural evolution. This piece here is a good start for a more well-articulated discussion on the matter.

The Color Revolution

ReginaLee Blaszczyk, MIT Press 2012

Book Review by Allen Barkkume

This book is part of the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation series

From the genesis of the modern color industry through the Byzantine conduits of culture, The Color Revolution presents color as a force to be reckoned with.

Wielding new powers, stunning new clientele, color undergoes a renaissance at the turn of the 20^th century. It is unleashed from its crypt by new discoveries in chemistry, then standardized, codified, coordinated, and disseminated to the public in every consumable form – clothes, cars, appliances, architecture, and of course, the public education system. This book offers a good look at how technological change ripples throughout a culture. Also, if you’ve ever had a hunch that there are such things as “color forecasters” and global color committees, you’ll now be well-informed.

Blaszczyk pulls open the first curtain on the Queen’s Lilac, the first synthetic dye color (whereas today we would consider lilac a pale purple, at this time it referred to a mauve/magenta). The Queen of England draped herself in this emblem of modernity, and changed the color preference of an entire population.

Chemist William Henry Perkin discovers the dye by mistake while trying to synthesize quinine from coal tar. Many major discoveries were made at this time, by accident, while trying to make things out of the newfound abundance of coal waste. Benzene, for example, which can be seen as the emblem of all organic chemistry, was finally synthesized by someone working with coal tar. Aniline dye, synthesized from a waste product, showed what chemistry could do for the bottom line of the fashion industry.

With the new synthetic dyes came a new taste for color, a demand for vibrancy. And with this explosion came a need for understanding. The first treatise on “the principles of color harmony” was published in 1854, breaking the chromasphere  down into Hue, Value, Chroma. The standardization of color was prepared in Germany – the epicenter of the dye market in the late 1800’s – to facilitate communication among manufacturers, buyers, and designers. Soon, “color forecasting”, “color management”, and “color engineering” became legitimate branches of this industry.

The public understanding of color came about as a competition between two color theorists. Munsell and Prang pushed their own version of color organization on the United States’ public education system, a major market promising generous and sustained monetary returns to the winner. It was at this time that the 6-part color wheel originates. All the while, as these two entrepreneurial intellects fought for supremacy over the minds of America’s young photoreceptors, the field of color psychology was emerging. Statements like “There is no color outside ourselves” (Prang), and “Color is in us – not outside” (Munsell) attempted to bridge the divide between the practical and the scientific understanding of color by way of a deeper understanding of ourselves.

Furthermore, this systematic organization of color, along with the newly created Textile Color Color Association (TCCA) of the United States, allowed unprecedented coordination between the various players in the fashion industry. During WWI, France, the Western seat of all things fashion, stopped sending their “silk cards” to the US, seriously limiting design production. This spurred the creation of the TCCA, and a new Standard Color Card of America that would provide “chromatic archetypes” for the textile mills, garment makers, retailers – all parties. This monumental coordination effort did have some bumps in the road.

Blaszczyk describes the struggle for standardization. The TCCA put a general request via the New York Herald in 1919 asking for samples of battle ship gray. Manufacturers were asked for samples of basic colors as they appear in nature, in the form of jewels, minerals, flowers, fruits and metals. Upon receiving these, the TCCA found 50 examples of navy blue. An expert committee of textile industry veterans and major department store buyers contemplated and recommended these color archetypes to the association directors, and in the end, the Standard Color Card of America gave a “common language and a universal tool” to the industry. This new common language of the Standard would go on to symbolize American efficiency, as well as its fledgling independence from French fashion.

In a fascinating diversion, Blaszczyk describes the discovery of the science of camouflage. Nothing facilitates scientific discovery like the real-world laboratory of the battlefield. The advent of aerial technology and long-distance artillery changed the visual battlefield and demanded new strategies. Combined with the new discoveries of color harmony and discord in the fashion industry, war-minded individuals questioning whether this new knowledge could lead to an advantage on the field found their answer in the form of the camoufleur, a new kind of military strategist. “A camoufleur combined a painter’s command of optical illusion with a naturalist’s understanding of deceptive coloration.”

Just like many other wartime technologies, the principles and promise of camouflage followed soldiers home and found its way into the life of the general public. Theories of camouflage were used to transform the common home, and a new kind of color – “functional color” was born.

From the fashion and printing/advertising industries to other consumer products, like cars, color soon saturated the commercial landscape. This is especially relevant to that paragon of American consumer culture, the automobile. Once the automotive industry realized that using the right color-designs could substantially increase profits, they began spending more time and money researching color production and consumer color preferences. Every ten days car dealers sent sales reports to provide feedback and enhance the predictive power of “color futures”.

Nothing shows this tremendous research effort like the painting reproduced in Chapter 5 where an American Duco colorist “reproduces” the color of French silks – fresh from Paris! Although the US gained a good deal of independence from French fashion in the early 20^th century, it was still important to follow the trends. So important, in fact, that the automobile industry sends an artist to Paris to paint a selection of draped silk fabrics, and then send that painting back to the US where the “color intel” could be used to inform color choices and combinations.

The incremental distancing of American color-culture from that of Europe is galvanized in Chapter 6. Blaszczyk titles the chapter “Entente” to emphasize the partnership between both sides of the Atlantic, but does more to show-off the uniquely American aspect of modern culture.

Although Blaszczyk points out the combining of American scientific management with European tradition of craftsmanship, quality and style, it is the cultural transformation taking place in America that makes the most impact. Social psychologist mastermind Edward Bernays secretly promoted the green color of Lucky Strikes packaging to be seen as more harmonious with women’s fashion. Rayon looks better on film, and so Hollywood almost unconsciously pushes the synthetic fabric’s popularity. America becomes a distinct and formidable cultural entity, creating its own expectations and demands.

Distinctly American things revolving around the American artworld, urban renewal, and ‘functional color’ (for industrial safety and communication) are the drivers of change. In these interim chapters, Blaszczyk reaches far and beyond “the industry” to the arts, architecture, and society at large – which, after all, is the source of any revolution.

In regards to manufacturing, it’s interesting to note that colorists were required for matching all the different parts of a telephone (rubber cords, metal dials, plastic bodies), for example, because all the different materials involved take their color differently.

Of all industries most integral to the color revolution, none were so pervasive, or as quintessentially American, as that of the automobile industry. Colorists, chemists, and automotive stylists advanced companies like DuPont to create new pigments, lacquers, and enamels. In the world of Fordist production, or Levittown houses, where every unit looks the same, you sell the color of the product, not the product itself.

But as regional tastes, lingering biases, and socio-economic differences all contributed to the weakening of sales (or the inevitable inability of color forecasters to keep-up with the complexity of “culture”). In concluding, I’ll quote Blaszczyk:

“The color expansion of the postwar years was evidence of the extravagances of a growth economy and the maturation of American consumer society. […] By the last quarter of the 20^th century, more Americans than ever before had dishwashers, phones and cars, but they were available in fewer colors.

*An overarching lesson of this book is that as for the color world, it was figured out very early on, and continues to this day, that if there is an industry where women hold the most valued opinions and preferences, it is that of Big Color.

Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English

Michael D. Gordin, University of Chicago Press, 2015

 Book Review by Allen Barkkume

Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English does everything you wanted to. Michael Gordon charts the map of scientific language from consolidation of the triumvirate – English, French, German – in the 1850’s, to the forecasted future. Everywhere in between is strung together by multilingual transactions of scientists in pursuit of universal truth and entire populations at the whim of geopolitical dynamics.

Perhaps we should begin with the lamentations of the French linguist Louis Coturat, near the end of the 19^th century, as he pits the most sufficiently advanced technology against this ageless, human problem of communication:

“What is the good of telegraphing from one continent to another, or telephoning from one country to another, if the two correspondents do not have a common language in which they can converse?”

And on the plight of the scientist? “To keep themselves acquainted with the special scientific work and studies which interested them, all savants would have to be polyglots; but to become polyglots they would have to abandon every other study, and therefore they would be almost destitute of knowledge of their special subjects.” (p107).

Science must have a means of transporting itself from one scientist to another, and with this, Gordon defines the vehicular language, or the auxiliary language. In opposition, people – both ordinary people and scientists alike – best express their own thoughts in a way that is comfortable and meaningful to them, a natural language. One is for the mind, and the other for the heart (p113). These are the forces that push language-choice throughout history. From Latin roots to warring 20th century fragments, the chosen language of science has shifted dramatically over this time. In the final chapter and conclusion, Gordin explains this trend toward Global English and questions its implications.

Language is a very fluid thing, and to tell the history of language requires tremendous orchestration of not only dates, events, and people, but knowledge from other subjects as well. In this book, that subject is Science itself. The body of scientific knowledge is immense, to say the least, but this story centers mostly on Chemistry as the discipline of study. During the most critical period of the monolingual formation that took place within the 20th century, organic chemistry was full-steam-ahead the most popular branch of science at the time. But furthermore, “Chemistry is the science of description, taxonomy, and nomenclature as much as it is about test tubes, pipettes, and Bunsen Burners.” (21).

Chemistry was the most dominant branch of study at the time when the triumvirate of German-English-French was the most common language choice. In fact, Gordin begins his story by retelling the standardization of the Periodic Table of Elements as a nationalist competition between Germany and Russia, with a little bit of translator’s error thrown in. (Gordin later reminds us, via H. Beam Piper’s 1957 sci-fi story Omnilingual – That’s the Periodic Table; It’s the only one there is.)

Russian and Japanese became very important during the second half of the century, and so the subject moves to mathematics and nuclear physics. But by then, machine translation enters the scene and redistributes the priorities of all players. By the 21st century, the global language for scientific communication is Global English.

Not only is the study of language a meta-logic activity in that the language is just as much about speakers and subject matter as it is about the words themselves, but the language of Science?... double meta-(!). Gordin reminds us that "scientific utterances are a kind of ‘meta-language’ that are only partially expressed in any individual tongue but are equally true in all of them." (p11). And Science, as it is presented here, is seen in its true light: A thing that ought to be very clear and forthright is instead obfuscated by the floating lexicon of a multilingual system of communication.

In the search for a universal language of communication to match the universal truth of science, one should immediately ask – why not Latin? And with good reason; Latin was, until Global English, the most universal language in the Western world. Perhaps the most mnemonically useful bit used by Gordin to explain why not Latin is this: “Classical Latin has no present or past participle of the verb ‘to be’, which makes rendering medieval metaphysics rather dicey.” (p34). It seems somewhat counterintuitive, as one scientist notes, since Latin was already dead and no longer subject to change. Nonetheless, Latin was simply no longer usable as an auxiliary language because it was so far removed from living speakers' natural tongues.

The language problem in science has always existed, but it was not until the Chemical Revolution of the mid 1800’s that it became a huge obstacle in the pursuit of knowledge. The introduction of the aromatic ring-structure theory of organic chemistry brought thousands of new compounds. The subsequent fledgling industries of pharmaceuticals and artificial dyestuffs required a consistent nomenclature for these new chemicals. Furthermore, the language of chemistry is a language of formulas, and as such, translation is difficult.

For the duration of the 20th century, Science sought a balance between a language that everyone could both agree upon and understand. Considering the tumult of 20th century geopolitics, consensus in this area was not easily obtained. Language is a symbol of a people, a nation, a way of life. At a time when such things were threatened in their very existence, one can imagine the embedded contention when deciding which language would win.

As a side note, because this isn't expounded too much in the book, Gordin does point out that Chemical nomenclature, despite its multi-lingual origins, did tend towards a convergence of syntax. The lexicon may have differed, but the linguistic formula of science rose above semantics. This is one of the points that makes this book so interesting – science really is a language to itself.

Back to the core of the story. As the standardized International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) eventually makes clear, Chemical nomenclatures are ultimately artificial. That is to say, they do not grow organically from the mouths of entire populations over generations, but instead flow from the minds of a concentrated few, and from painstakingly organized conferences. And with this, it seems less surprising that whole languages had been constructed from scratch to facilitate communication amongst all parties. Esperanto is the most well known of these constructed languages but it's not the only one, and its life is not as simple nor as ill-fated as one might expect. (There still exist today native speakers of Esperanto.)

As Gordin explains, an entirely artificial language is not as outlandish as it first seems. In fact, he reminds us that “scientific languages have to be quite consciously constructed [because] modern science focuses upon novelty: new objects in the world, new ideas, new theories.” (p81). The discovery of a never-before-known chemical element needs to be named, and anew.

Again, writing a book about the “language” of an ostensible meta-language (Science) is not without its self-reflective humor. This book is laden with correspondence between scientists, and it shouldn't be lost on the reader that so much of this correspondence is itself prefaced by the reasons for the writer’s use of the chosen language of correspondence – “I wanted to write you in Russian, however...,” or concluded with apologies for fumbling with an unfamiliar tongue (p88).

Take also the vociferous and intricate debates over the grammar and lexicon of artificially-created languages, all undertaken itself in a bevy of languages. It's enough to make your head spin, so if that's what you expected when you saw this title, you'll be satisfied.

The story marches onward, although with the advent of computerized machine translation, one would assume the problem solved. However due to the “hype cycle” of new technologies, the promises of mind-machine melding did not fully deliver. That, combined with the debilitating paranoia of the Cold War, forced the dream of computerized super-lingual omniscience to get a reality-check.

Gordin also details the effects of the sheer volume of writing. By the mid 1900’s the scientific publishing industry resorted to compiling “abstract journals” where “each month a hefty tome would arrive at an office in the US, be ripped apart, distributed, translated, edited, stitched back together, and printed, all within 6 months – and this was done for dozens of journals, every month, for decades.” (p258). In the end, Global English didn’t win because it was the best-suited to scientific inquiry and discourse; it just happened to be the natural language of the largest publishing and distribution infrastructure on the planet.

Low and behold, we find ourselves in a new century, and with a new solution to the ageless problem. The last chapter and the conclusion, “Anglophonia” and “Babel Beyond,” can stand by themselves. Granted, the corpus of research planted before this gives the authority under which it is read, but honestly, I would have paid the price of the book for these two chapters, and since I already am, I’ll continue in a rambling fashion.

Why English? Besides the emergent behavior of the scientific publishing industry, Gordin reminds us that “the perception of neutrality has been the engine enabling English omnipresence in international science” (p295). On a side note, he questions why the inconsistency in English spelling isn’t brought up more often as a problem in scientific English – and finishes the thought by suggesting “probably because the lexicon is so circumscribed for each sub-discipline.” (p296). He reminds us that even as late as 1947, there were people anticipating the continuation of the triumvirate. He throws this one at you – “There are more words in English dedicated to the various sciences than for any other function… There are also more scientific words in English that have at least partly Ancient Greek roots than there are words in Ancient Greek.” (p299). And then he sums it up:

English has attained its current position owing to a series of historical transformations that it also in turn shaped, exploiting a perception of neutrality that it gained through being distinctly non-neutral in either its British or American guise. p315

Then he really lets loose. In “Babel Beyond,” he drops an entire short sci-fi story, and then goes on to explain how SETI is an extension of this line of thought resounding in the book – it’s a decision about language (albeit alien language). And in case you were wondering – the language of interstellar discourse? Mathematics, obviously.

This book is a well-documented body of research, but the way it’s been assembled, and the underlying theme are intriguing, stimulating, and current. Science is like humans – messy. It takes a good writer to clean it up just enough to be presentable, but not enough that it’s no longer exciting. Michael Gordin has done just that.

Marijuana, Aliens, and Alzheimer’s

From Contention to Ubiquity

Charlie Behrens –  short film –  Algorithmic Architecture

THE DIALOGUE PROPER

Start with Marijuana, and that’s Marijuana the idea, not marijuana the substance. It’s been illegal in the United States for a long time. It made its popular culture breakthrough in the 1960’s and was immediately followed by the Reefer Madness campaign, which caused just about every self-respecting parent to steer their kids away from it until about 1990. By this time, a generation passes, and with it the Reefer Madness. Note also that by this time the anti-marijuana campaign has been absorbed by the larger, all-purpose, Anti-Drug campaign where it is grouped together with more dangerous drugs such as cocaine and heroin. In these hospitable conditions, the Legalize It front comes on strong. Yet, it takes more than twenty years for marijuana to begin its descent from criminal-maker to decriminalized.

As we look around, in this year 2013, we see that although the Legalize It force seems to grow stronger, its entire context has shifted. Not only has the timespan of a generation wiped out the memory of Reefer Madness, but in other ways, practically unpredictable in the 1990’s, a resonating reconfiguration of the cultural matrix makes Legalize It almost obsolete.

The first of these coincidences relates to the Back-to-Nature movement (the one responsible for beards, backyard chickens and a resurgence in taxidermy). Part New Age, part WebMD and part Healthcare Reform, people are ready, willing, and able to use natural drugs to cure their ailments. It is readily apparent that the Legalize It dialog has changed drastically, yet somehow imperceptibly according to a general publicpoint-of-view. The dialog is no longer legal-illegal, but recreational-medicinal. The resolution, the conclusion of the Marijuana Dialog Proper is foregone, and in its place a less contentious polarization. Contentious enough, however, to maintain public interest, and related enough to still be identified as part of the Marijuana Dialog.

The outcome of the dialog will take one of two positions: 1. It will become legal for medical use, which isn’t exactly “legal” by definition of the dialog proper, or 2. It will become fully legal, although it will not be called such, because in order to denote legal status within the new context, it must be disambiguated, or referred to instead as ‘legal for recreational use’.

This is not, though it may seem, a semantics game, but an investigation of ideas, and one can’t think about ideas unless they have names, i.e. semantic identities. Over time, however, it seems that either ideas disown their identification, or they never existed in the first place. There are more subtle adjustments in the way an idea, or a debate play out over time. These could be called exogenous because they come from a space close-to but outside-of the dialog proper. They have an effect nonetheless on how we engage in the debate, and it is because of their exogenous quality that we often neglect their impact.

Google Earth Glitch Art, via Vice

Enter, separately, Prescription Drugs and Synthetic Drugs. Today, doctors are being investigated for writing painkiller prescriptions illegally – behaving as drug dealers essentially. All this in light of a statewide drug investigation in New Jersey, due to a marked increase in drug use – prescription drugs, that is, especially the ones analogous to heroin, since that makes it part of the larger drug culture as it is understood. Compared to this portent of pharmaceutical remedies and abuses (what could be considered part of the separate Big Pharma Dialog), marijuana seems benign.

Synthetic THC was sort-of legal for about one year, and not because law enforcement was unaware of it, but because the substance didn't fit under the law – it’s not THC, but the law says “THC”, not “THC-like”, not even one that is so -like that it has only one molecule out of place. Yet, this substance, which was legal by default was sending kids to the hospital, or at least into temporary psychosis, something real, regular THC is not likely to do. If our law can’t keep up with the synthetic drugs, and they are much more damaging than their natural illegal counterparts, why not just make it legal. At this point, another thread of the dialog proper has been frayed and twisted away.

Debates such as this are never fully resolved; they are instead absorbed into the larger cultural matrix, rendered asunder, and redistributed until they can barely be recognized. I do not mean to discount human agency, but to change the way in which we engage with the Dialog, and more importantly, with how we think about the Dialog. At least we must question whether or not we are wasting time and energy articulating dialogs which no longer exist with us.

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

Moving on, to higher ground: Aliens

The Aliens Dialog seems fairly simple – do they exist, or do they not. The very concept as we know it today comes from (believe it or not) turn-of-the-century science fiction, which by the 1930’s evolved into the little green men of Welles’ Wells’ War of the Worlds. Ever since, Aliens have been a convenient answer to many of the world’s unsolved mysteries, as well as a source of highly imaginative fantasy. Anyone with an active imagination speculates on the day when we have some in-your-face evidence on the existence of aliens. But, as it turns out, our imagination is apparently no match for the possible expressions of the Aliens Dialog that science has been throwing our way.

What is this; life has been found in a lake, timecapsuled under four miles of ice, experiencing pressures and temperatures that are more Europa-like than Earth. What say you now, Aliens? And this; molecules capable of creating life-building amino acids can themselves be created in a comet in outer-space-like conditions. Or this; exoplanets by the week. Or this; by reverse engineering the rate of acceleration of genetic complexification, the zero-point of origin comes out at 9 billion years, five more than Earth’s existence. And let’s not forget synthetic life. And finally, in developing biosignatures for use in space exploration, some things are forcing us to seriously rethink what life is: Apparently, all that is needed to be called “life” is a particular frequency distribution of essential amino acids. Unless, of course, you would rather import the topics of artificial intelligence and algorithmic automation into the debate, in which case you would be forced to consider their processes of competition, cooperation and evolution that seem to emulate what we might call life.

At this point, the Aliens Dialog has become so faceted and nuanced that by the time we can answer the yes-no question, it won’t even exist with us. All of the above examples are exogenous in that they have come not from within the Aliens Dialog, but from completely unsolicited, relatively unrelated dialogs of their own. The search for exoplanets isn’t looking for aliens, per se, but only Earth-like places in our galaxy. Biosignatures are not to help us discover aliens, but only to expand our definition of what life is, so that we can refine our technical recourse. None of these things help or hinder the resolution of the Aliens debate. What they certainly do, is to distort, to obfuscate the dialog until it settles into a cold, moot state in the memories of a generation that once cared about its outcome. There is no outcome.

 

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

Finally, closer to home: The Body Dialog

It’s really not a dialog as of yet, except for hardcore cyberpunk enthusiasts, blue sky research groups, and anyone working with neural interface systems. But it’s coming, inevitably, and here we will, despite its mind-bogglingly ostentatious preposterousness, attempt to predict its eventual disappearance into ubiquity.

The Body dialog, being that it isn’t fully formed yet, goes something like this: Your body determines who you are to the extent that it has a physical existence which can be located and analyzed objectively, that is to say, consensually. But you are more than just your body; this “more” is your mind. The Mind is non-physical, which makes it harder for people to agree on what it is, where it is, etc. Because we can’t objectively observe, via the hard sciences, the nature of the Mind, any theory of self which incorporates the mind becomes non-falsifiable. This disrupts the intuitive notion that self should be determined by the body at all. Hence, the Body Dialog: Can we continue to exist as individuals without a body to serve as locus for the self?

Advances in neural interfaces, in all manner of prostheses, in any cognitive studies, in machine learning, and in neuroscience in general; are amassing into this meme-set we call here the Body Dialog (conditioned by the more public discourse on virtual identity and digital existence).

To what extent is our self determined by our body, and to what extent can we remove our selves form our bodies while still remaining ourself? It sounds preposterous, as it tends to be at first. Then comes the contentious phase. We are slowly entering that now, in 2013, and will be in full swing within the decade’s end. By 2050, the Body Dialog will no longer exist, and yet some chimerical form of it will keep the illusion continuous for some time after.

We can see its bifurcation from the dialog proper, because it’s already among us: Alzheimer’s is sad, there is no doubt. It dismantles your brain, module by module, if you will, until it becomes questionable as to whether you are still you. The wave of psychological disorders which is slated for the coming generation of aging Americans announces the beginning of a shift in the entire context of the Body Dialog. As a generation interacts with the mental deterioration of their elderly, the concept of self, in relation to the body, becomes so fuzzy that the envelope we use to separate life from death becomes less rigid, and as the means to manipulate it become more accessible, so grows our willingness to use it.

-A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

-Max Plank, Scientific Autobiography, p151

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

RATIONALE

Ideas change over time, making it difficult to maintain meaningful dialog about popular issues. This disguised metamorphosis, an ontological distortion, seems to happen to the idea itself, but it is better understood as a massive reconfiguration of the entire idea-space.

-The paradigm shift does not change the world …it changes the scientist. (Thomas Kuhn, 1962, p121)

In some instances it becomes readily apparent that it is not the idea itself that remains constant. The idea only exists as a product of the network in which it is embedded. Its entire identification is an illusion, required by consciousness: for how could we debate and discuss, support and deny, prove and disprove an idea throughout time if we didn’t give it a sturdy, solid form?

-Just because it did not involve the introduction of additional objects or concepts, the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian mechanics illustrates with particular clarity, the scientific revolution as a displacement of the conceptual network through which scientists view the world. (p102)

Newsworthy topics of our time can serve as an example. When we talk about a popular subject, such as marijuana use, we address it as a dialog. In the beginning, when the dialog is “hot”, it polarizes, or in a more imaginative way, it superimposes on two possible expressions. But as the dialog cools down, it bifurcates, seeking out slightly less contentious alternatives for expression.

-Problems are anticipated well in advance, so they come as less of a surprise, until they start to come from everywhere; then you have a crisis, and then paradigm shift, and it doesn’t happen until it has to. (~p75)

The Dialog, clear and guttural at first, becomes nothing but a thousand whispers. At this point, though the Dialog is still unresolved in the explicit sense, its superpositions have all collapsed unnoticeably into benign ubiquity; homeostasis.

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

But there is more to the story than thermal equilibrium analogies. Enter the illusion of memetic transmutation. In these so-called Dialogs, two opposing memetic configurations use the same meme-sets but articulate them differently, thus altering their meaning. Both sides of the Marijuana Dialog Proper, for example, use the same memotypes of the mental world, of self-control (or lack thereof), of exploration (and its dangers) but they impart different ~emotional values to each, in a collaboration that makes both sides distinct.

-Since new paradigms are born from old ones, they ordinarily incorporate much of the vocabulary and apparatus…. …Within the new paradigm, old terms, concepts, and experiments fall into new relationships one with the other.” (p149)

Over time, it is not the dialog that changes, per se, it is the opposing configurations that create its distinct expressions, for they become mixed and mangled so thoroughly with outside memes, side conversations and surprises, that even the means by which we might address them will have vanished.

-Although the strategies and techniques may remain the same, it is the world itself which has changed. (p111)

The opposing sides of the dialog are reconfigured to be accessible to the largest number of belief constructs available. Different configurations will be more easily accepted by different people, who all use different belief constructs to filter, organize and engage with the dialog.

It is in these kinds of value modifiers within the different configurations, or narrative cues as we might call them, where the interest lies. The two opposing views on marijuana use may be using the same meme-sets to an extent. But each view has a subset of modifiers whose job it is not to inform content, but to adjust emotional response.

In time, as the Dialog cools down, these seemingly unimportant value modifiers are exposed and become quasi expressions of the Dialog Proper, a distraction, an obfuscation. When enough value modifiers are exploited, the Dialog Proper ceases to exist with us.

-There is never any single argument that can or should persuade them all. Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances. (p158)

Yet , we may continue to engage in the Dialog, not fully realizing its absorption into the cultural vortex; that which feeds on our contentious debates today, and tomorrow spits out predictive discoveries, benign policy stipulations, and pop-music lyrics.

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

AN AFTERWORD

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote Structures of Scientific Revolution, wherein he surveyed the paradigm shifts that occur in the scientific discipline: A complex process, no doubt. Though Kuhn’s Structures deals specifically with Science, there are to be found in his work prescient thoughts as they relate to the coding, transmission and distortion of ideas by the general public. The same expressions, explanations, descriptions and observations presented by Kuhn in the arena of Science, remain useful still in the greater mess of the public psyche.

-Thomas S. Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962.

second edition 1970, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, volume 2, number2

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

POST SCRIPT

Our Blue Marble 3-2013

Google Earth Glitch Art Gallery

Semantics Lugubrious

Cultivorous exploitation of low-density, value modifying narrative agents in the “distortion” of meme-set reconfiguration [via the cultural vortex]

Art

Google Earth Glitch Art, via Vice

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/glitches-in-ios-maps

Charlie Behrens –  short film –  Algorithmic Architecture

http://www.charliebehrens.com/Algorithmic-Architecture-Film

updates:
Deep sea 'mushroom' may be new branch of life - BBC News - Sep 2014