[ Sunday 26 June 1983 - Saturday 2 July 1983 ]
[notebook Creation - The Metaphysics of Peace = CMP I: DB20]
[page 53]
All universal systems have elements of stability and elements of change. Without stability, there can be no development or complexification. All systems assemble in small increments, from more stable antecedents, rather as a silversmith uses the hardest solder first, so that subsequent additions will not melt existing joints.
As Newton pointed out, non-accelerated motion needs no cause or explanation. It is acceleration which needs to be explained. Einstein. Similarly when we come to speak of structural change, the repetition of old plain reproduction requires no explanation, whereas creative change does. Nothing much of interest happens in a printing machine, or a stable atom. The fun starts when the printing machine breaks down or the atom decays. In the case of printing machines, the newly discovered state is almost inevitably deleterious, although it maybe of considerable interest to designers of such machines who seek to forestall such failure modes, thereby increasing the half lives of their machines. [Those things which have determinate lifetimes probably have purpose built decay mechanisms in them.]
[page 54]
Because the assembly of a complex system takes a long time, it needs very stable components. Because human beings have such a short lifetime compared to the rate of evolution of social systems, it is necessary to make social structures in which people are replaceable - such are called social institutions. They are rather like cells etc which continuously replace degraded components in order to maintain the integrity of a whole whose lifetime is greater than that of its components.
The balance between stability and change appears to operate everywhere, not least in the field of human sanity. Each of us as a tolerance for newness. If it is exceeded, tension, neuroticism and even psychosis is the price. If, on the other hand, the rate of change is too small, boredom is the price. Each of us makes an effort to achieve some sort of balance between change and stability. Change, like sexuality, is expensive, but the payoff is the ability to more accurately track a changing environment.
A subtle interplay between entropy and order.
In other words, it is change, not stability, that stands in need of explanation. It is a fact, though, that this Universe is dynamic, that is particles in bound states have kinetic energy all the time. In more primitive states, this energy
[page 55]
can far exceed the energy of the particle itself. The potential binding energy appears as internal kinetic energy. A gravitating particle, for instance, increases its velocity as it approaches the earth, so that its orbital kinetic energy equals its lost gravitational potential at all times. What does this mean?
Only the products of intelligence [coding] are intelligible [decodable]. Therefore the process of evolution must be intelligent, or it must be guided by an intelligence which is customarily called God.
The stability of mental structures depends on the extra mental structures from which they are derived. If in fact empirical testing contradicts a mental structure, it may collapse, although the time delay involved due to slowness of communication between various particles may range from seconds to millennia.
One has tried to satisfy for years the desire to equate bits of information with mass energy via Planck's constant. Unfortunately per second comes in. Energy equates to a communication rate, which is equivalent to a certain amount of space-time definition. Something new has to happen to space-time to put all this theory on the map but I cannot quite see what it is.
[page 56]
Science, conversation, writing, sculpture, painting, all processes of slowly zeroing in on what seems to be the picture.
The important thing about time is simultaneity, as Einstein discovered. It is merely a dimension of space. Communication can happen if the messages arrive at the right time of computer clocks, frequencies in oscillations etc coupling impedence etc. Unsynchronised cannot communicate and the whole machine is ratshit. Spacetime is what we are looking at. Think Gravitation is required reading for this book. Misner, Thorne & Wheeler
One does not have to travel much or drink in may strange bars to realise the amazing diversity of people on the planet. Even of those who speak the same language, I find people who are almost unbelievable in the difference of the world view. Am I kidding myself I say, how could I pretend to be writing a book for anyone other than myself? But this fact alone goes further to proving the thesis than any other I know. It is not a matter of whether I am right or he is right, it is the quality of the fantasy that each adds to the whole that counts, for the whole is the sum of the parts and greater than the sum of the parts. The truths of science are only necessary when dealing with systems far more constrained than our own minds.
[page 57]
There are many moral and behavioural consequences of this hypothesis. One is that creation goes on irresistibly, as one can see on the struggles of populations and individuals for freedom to be and change. So we find that it is not retrospective. Taking what is as given, it goes ahead to solve the next problem. If that forms the foundation for a particular new development is in some way unsatisfactory, it will be found out in the end. Thus science proceeds. Work is done and published, and serves as the basis for the next work. Very few experiments are repeated verbatim, so to speak, unless in the light of later developments their arises a question of error or fraud. We are often seduced by the non-creative mentality of bankers, generals or mass producers into the view that if a job is worth doing it is worth doing properly. The creative alternative is that if a solution seems realisable, it should be done with whatever is at hand, without searching too exhaustively for the ideal method and in a sense rewriting history to conform with how it should have been. This is a characteristic of fascist societies.
. . .
[page 58]
Does speculative philosophy go too far? Is it a branch of science fiction? Whatever it is, it is part of the Universe, and therefore a phenomenon like any other. The phenomena of mind and the phenomena of the world are no different from the point of view of intelligibility. They simply share a different substrate, a different relationship to the markers which bear their essential structure.
One may generally divide philosophies, theologies and cultures which believe that the Universe is being created right here now from absolute non-being and those who see it simply as a copy of some pre-existing plan living in another mind of some sort, perhaps called god or the angels or the life force or the morphogenetic field. (if it is considered to preexist all its products). We might then ask how this pre-existing structure came to exist, and must eventually postulate something that has always been or something that grows in time. The notion that time is all one to God is a central part of the idea despite its apparent impossibility in the Universe we see. This is central to the notion of God.
Do you believe that human beings are designed to be high one some sort of drug at all times?
[page 59]
Alfred North Whitehead (Popper II, page 247) says "We can say why modern physics is better than the physics of the nineteenth century. Modern physics stands up to a great number of practical tests which utterly defeat the older systems." Popper
A speculative philosophical theory, perhaps a metaphysics, is an attempt to characterise the broad general lines of reality on the strength of the evidence we have so far. That it has not yet reached the ultimate formulation and is constantly being revised by new human experience and new evidence is something it has in common with all the sciences. It is of the essence of such a system that it can be presented not just as an isolated paper in a well defined Universe of discourse, but as a monograph, since such generalised theories, based as they are on a knowledge of knowledge as well as knowledge of the known, can have very little in common that can be called a well defined Universe of discourse, except the tendency to step outside all established well defined Universes of discourse.
The Universe unfolds, I claim, not as a child grows physically according to a prearranged plan, but as a child grows mentally, by a continual process of creative discovery [or both].
[page 60]
We are continually provoking one another to creative activity of one sort or another. This is why I write this book, to turn a few people on, to have a say and to get a response. Watch your children. They continually ignite one another to activity. Sometimes we call it play, sometimes we call it fighting. Often we try to damp the interaction down, as in a schoolroom or at bedtime. Sometimes this maybe justified. Often it is just adults seeking a quiet life. Again the continual dialogue between change and stasis reveals its ubiquitous head. Quieten down, I'm old. We want to play, we're young. The balance between quiet and play changes with age, society, culture, but it is always there, under the control of the broader evolutionary paradigm.
What is metaphysics? Give an interpretation of Creation, Metaphysics and Peace.
Fighters. There are people who love risk, and there are the people who can't bear it, and there are the bulk of us who by and large would like to enjoy it vicariously by following the adventures of James Bond or Modesty Blaise or some daring rails bookmaker whose life story is featured in the Saturday papers. It is people like this who keep the society bubbling along. Riefenstahl
[page 61]
Stabilities within stabilities, like eddies. More primitive structures are formed at higher energies, lower entropies, and no longer encounter conditions suitable to pull them apart. Fire disrupts protein, but not harder molecules, except it be very hot. Higher and higher energies pull things apart to more primitive entities and allow us to focus on spatially smaller and temporally shorter phenomena. This generalisation must mean something. High energy = simple = high definition = stable at lower energies = lower entropy. Evolution moves toward higher entropy, lower energy more complex structures. In effect more creative use of effective markers with lower redundancy. Energy in the physical sense = redundant in the informational sense. High spatial definition is sacrificed to high intelligibility.
When one equates many words, one is trying to indicate that one's theory applies to many entities that were once thought to have little in common. Thus it took the discovery of energy to reveal an underlying unity in sound, light, heat, motion etc. So now we find creation underlying evolution, intelligence, play, science, art and all these things which people like to see as different activities of the mind., Work, play, music, writing etc.
Inverse square low: both energy and definition decrease with increasing size.
[page 62]
The wholeness and health of the mind depends on internal communication or lack of it. The interaction of some modules might be so intense that they are deliberately kept apart, jut as one would shrink from introducing anti-matter into a normal matter biological system. The result would be destruction. Part of the structure of the Universe depends upon non-communication. To form a structure, one needs at least two distinct populations of markers. The more distinct the markers, the more error free the structure. Indistinct markers, like badly attenuated radio signals with much noise can lead to error and collapse of a structure. Our mental health depends upon an operating system which adjusts the level of external stimulus (both flows of information) to levels that can be processed adequately with acceptable levels of error.
What we seek is a metaphysics which is open to and expresses the true grandeur of the Universe. Theological and economic analyses tend to place restrictive assumptions like God and pure rational static competition on the attempt to delineate how much freedom we need. We have to go all the way to non-being, chaos and beyond to capture what we are looking for. The less constraints on the canvas, the more degrees of freedom in the art, and
[page 63]
eventually, the more wonderful the work which will evolve. Music, for instance, and light, seem to have so many unexplored modalities left.
There comes a time, in any successful quest, when things start falling into place and the original questions appear to be answered. But the result, if death does not intervene, is inevitably more questions, and more answers opening up the possibility of still greater vistas. There does not seem to be a valid theoretical way to place a limit on this line of development
Though the speed of individual processes is slowing down when measured in bits per second, as for instance in the communication between two humans, each bit has a far higher quality, in that it refers to all the substructures within itself that make its existence possible. A human word guides a whole human system,. A single photon merely serves to carry a message between two charged particles.
Laws have little or nothing to say. The real information and intelligibility lies in the boundary conditions. All electrons obey QED, but those in my brain are doing something special, as are they all.
[page 64]
The mind is as much a phenomenon as any other. We have as great or as little change of understanding our mental contents and processes as the contents and processes of the rest of the Universe. The methods by which minds and emotions are studied, interpreted and cured must be made the subject of science in he same way as the rest of the Universe. Those who claim to know all about it (the mind) are probably charlatans.
The intensity of the sexual encounter is in some way related to the length of the preliminaries ranging from seconds to years. This has something to do with the breadth and intensity of the information collected. In some ways it is analogous to wider or less wide and powerful theory. Height is analogous to breadth.
We tend to appreciate and bow to experts. An inherent appreciation of the Lamarkian nature of cultural creation and inheritance.
Intelligence can very easily deal with isolated cases. The physical sciences deal with simple law, low variety entities which are available in multiple copies through space and time. Thus the traditional 'Popperian' scientific method can be applied. As systems become more complex, their frequency decreases, so the likelihood of finding two or more the same, necessary for good traditional experimental design, falls sharply and one
[page 65]
is left in the incredibly interesting but incorrigibly muddy waters of human phenomena, which are as intelligible as anything else, even more so in fact for being more complex, but a lot harder to understand and verify.
The real complexity of human discourse and interaction can only be comprehended in a story, a long story whose twists and turns and winds and allusions gradually improve the focus of the teller and the listener on the point to be made. For human space has a large number of degrees of freedom, and so a very large number of constraints, all orthogonal, as it were, are necessary to eventually define a particular state. The advantage of a 'Universe of discourse' is that the common aspects of the states under discussion can all be assumed, leaving only the speciation to be done.
It is regularly objected by empiricists that only what can be experienced and repeated is the stuff of science. Yet internal human states can be experienced, and can be repeated, at least to some degree of definition. No experiment can, or even need be, repeated exactly.
Experience with computers has taught us much about the abilities of machine and brought our own talents into
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sharper focus.
Sacred beauty . . .
Now that we are at last beginning to explore the fringes of information technology, we can see how far we have to go to imitate nature. While we were concerned with energy, it was easy to congratulate ourselves on having made steam turbines ten million times as powerful as any human. But as yet the information processing power of our biggest computers is trivial compared to the simplest cell and we are hardly at the beginning of miniaturisation in biological terms.
Points of contrast between energy and information. The story of a vehicle climbing a hill.
Popper predictably puts the tribe down. Creative but slow. Consciousness makes every individual a tribe.
[page 67]
There is a tragedy happening all around us, and it has happened for centuries - the drive toward diversity reduction. Can anyone read the Love Songs of Arnhem Land, or the culture of another people, and not regret that it has been replaced by the sterile standardisation of the mission. Can one look at a rainforest and compare it to the pasture which has replaced it in the interests of agriculture and human food and not feel that something has been lost. Berndt and Berndt
The pen is mightier than the sword and the political significance of a single written word can be greater than the defence budget of a good sized nation. Any fan of Karl Marx and most of his enemies would have to admit this, whatever they feel about the intrinsic worth of his writings. So one who feels that his words may do something good in the realms of life must feel compelled to write. If the book saves more trees than were needed to make the paper for its printing it must be worthwhile.
Probably a sufficient justification for such a book as this is aesthetic, and all the knockers who say metaphysics is getting nowhere can be dismissed as incorrigibly reductionist. The point is that people are born to mythologise. The mental force seeks above all a rounded coherent explanation
[page 68]
of the whole system. A picture which includes everything which we subdivide under the headings of science, history, art, human relationships. war, sex, music, gastronomic arts, eroticism etc etc. The list of our disparate categories could go on, and each has its little coteries and its literatures. Each devotes a certain amount of time to badmouthing all the others. As we never tire of pointing out to ourselves, we live in a fragmented culture. Not fragmented because we choose it, but because the rate of information input is so great that it is impossible to keep it all together. Thus the thinkers have a cultural tendency to drop out of the mainstream and hole up in a backwater while they try to make sense of it all. I am such a one, and I here present the results of my sojourn in the scrub.
True strong feeling speaks to everyone. We spend so much time learning to avoid it, fearing the socially destructive polarisations that it may bring. Societies that give vent to their feelings are violent societies but they are also interesting and possibly creative societies.
[page 69]
Have I detected a sinuous fluid continuity in the apparently discontinuous vortices of life?
Breaking with real things is nothing, but with memories . . The heart is broken by separation from dreams, so little reality is there in man.
Popper looks for rationalism in Marx and Toynbee. He is right in the long run. But events, even books, have their beginning in the process of creative insight. Few of us live long enough, or even have the inclination to hold back from publishing long enough to become completely calm and cool and rational about our work. Instead we publish in the relative heat of the moment, pretty sure we are right but expecting criticism. Prophylactic words like 'An introduction to . . . . ' Evidence for . . . ' 'Preliminary results . . .", 'Prologomena . . .' abound in earlier works. These days everyone knows that all results are preliminary. Fifty years on, when the dust has
[page 70]
died down and our vision is much broader, we are in a position to make rational criticism of our fathers. By that time, thought, their bad work is forgotten and their good work woven imperceptibly throughout the fabric of culture. Can you think of anything in the day to day world which has not been influenced by the work of Marx or Einstein?
Something amazing happened to the Greek world in Athens in about 600 bc. The most tangible evidence of this event is the introduction of democracy to Athens.
X suicide. See B&B 30/6/83.Wilson criticizes Sartre but maybe he has failed to realise that his criticism in effect makes Sartre's point possible, in that the criticism he makes implies the reflective self consciousness and objectivity that he denies to Sartre. The power of the human system is quite amazing. In fact, for us, there is nothing more amazing than ourselves. Lift your right leg and yell yahoo if you're dead. The whole stuff of Goedel, Escher, Bach is the conundrums the reflective self consciousness reveals in the world.
[page 71]
A role for intoxication is obviously to reduce the dominance of the more deterministic processes of mind over the indeterministic. This may be a line of escape, in that it prevents the logical consequences of an oppressive state from becoming so obvious. This is a way to deal with grief, failure in business, in love and many of the other disasters for which there is no immediate solution. It may be also a course toward greater creativity, intellectually, socially, emotionally etc, and is thus a state of mind sought by people who wish to renew themselves in a creative way. In this way, intoxicants can be used to change the order/chaos ratio in human systems. Such intoxicants are not limited to drugs, but may be music, dance, love, exhaustion, starvation etc. One can also envisage means to go the other way, reducing chaos in favour of order. Stable societies tend to do this through their religions and schools, laws, factories and other institutions that emphasise reproducibility of behaviour ('quality control') over newness of behaviour. Individuals seeking more control may turn to meditation, monasteries etc, seek stable jobs, stable marital relationships and so on. Each individual and each society seeks a dynamic equilibrium on this spectrum, although they may deviate to the high or the low side at different times, and the deviation may become so large as to be self-destructive.
This is the sort of thing that Wilson talks about with his limbic system etc, but we are collectively able to make adjustments for our various mental states and, through the public dialogues of science and the arts arrive at a meta-emotional view of the nature of the Universe and of our own minds, based on the operational criterion - does it work? Wilson.
Bateson's point about human being communicating in stories is well taken, and has a lot to do with love and relationships. One computer can talk to another if they obey the same protocols. Otherwise they don't exchange any information. The same seems to hold for the interaction of atomic particles, through the quantisation of energies. Systems with very high Q are driven to very high amplitude by tuned vibrations. We can apply the communication analogy to human love, etc. People may talk and very little come across, or they may experience a flood of communication. The latter case depends on some similarities in the communicational coding and decoding process. Some readers, of these words, for instance, may see just jargon or garbage, but others may see in it gems of insight which they have already found for themselves or for which they were searching to fit into certain patterns of their own.
[page 73]
Four of my friends, all very close, have died in the last nine months. . . . These disasters seem to have depressed me, beaten me into a sort of state of submission in which I am very receptive to new ideas. I am getting to the point where I will spare nothing to get to understand more and will read and write and think twenty four hours a day to get closer to an understanding of myself and my Universe.
The old doctrines which put creation apart from the gods and spirits, thereby deprived it of all magic, making it mere material reality, shadows, like Plato. Popper (contrary to his own intention, it seems later in volume II) was able to excuse Plato on the strength of his being a son of kings and stability and having to come to a philosophical position which would enable him to cope with the new democratic changes all round him. Philosophies, I am sure, depend heavily on circumstances. What we have been left with by Plato, the Catholic Church, the Industrial Revolution and, to some extent by our interpretation of many eastern religions is a dead lifeless Universe of inert matter in which all good things such as life, love, spirit, intellect, soul virtue etc etc are attributed to benevolent outside forces such as god, while all the bad things come from the Universe, and the object of human life is to
[page 74]
escape from the evils of the Universe into some state which transcends it. That is, I think, a false view and is the reason for the basically atheistic stand of this book. The Universe stands by itself and creates itself, and all that we see and are is part of it.
. . .
It has long been held that one cannot compare the functioning of the mind to the functioning of the atom.
Some principles: constancy requires carrier but no signal. Change requires information transfer, that is modulation.
. . .
Arsan pushes the view that eroticism will transform humanity. A bit wet, but suggestive. Communication certainly will, and eroticism and sensuality are certainly aids and
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incentives to human communication. Arsan
Scientific laws, when we consider them one by one, tend to make things look simple. But we must remember that they all operate simultaneously. Within the living cell, all the laws of physics and chemistry and biology are acting together within a unique set of boundary conditions to give us a system which is beyond our comprehension or modelling power at this time. The strength of our intellect and the means by which we make such little progress as we do is abstraction. Our ability to subdivide big questions into smaller ones until we arrive at something which is in fact answerable, and then concentrating all the powers of science on this little front, thereby making another almost imperceptible advance on the whole. It is only piecemeal that we can come at such a task with any hope of success.
The basic human skill is to be able to lead people to one's own point of view, ie to communicate effectively. No easy. A gift. A dangerous gift. Adolf had it.
We do not judge evolution. We do not say the crabs would have done better to develop an endoskeleton and become more intelligent, because we know that a crab was as adapted to its
[page 76]
environment as it could be and has in fact quite successfully occupied its niche until now. We tend, though, to judge human history and to say that A or B could have done differently and acted better. But is this really the case? Are we to assume that everybody does not do his or her best to adapt to their internal and external states? In fact, if the stress related diseases, physical and psychological, suffered by rulers throughout history are any indication, the average historical personage has been almost neurotically concerned with overwork and excessive effort to achieve what he set out to do. The historian who does not work eighteen hours a day and conduct difficult and dangerous military campaigns at the risk of his life has no more ground to criticise the doctrines of Plato or the Ayatollah Khoimeini than he has to criticise a crab. Hear this Popper.
Each person is intimately involved in self creation an self emancipation. No one can make another person. No one can liberate another person. We must make and liberate ourselves because our internal functions exist in relation to one another, put together by functions such as growth and insight. This is not to say that those of us who feel we have something to give cannot give, but we can only give by taking away constraints,
[page 77]
by removing the physical poverty which prevents cultural development, by removing those exploitations that we ourselves benefit by. Does the cheap Chinese clothing you buy for yourself and your children establish any relationship between you and its maker? Yes, it is intelligible and therefore it exists. If it exists, a true science will recognise its existence and take it into his theoretical and practical actions.
The doctrine that what exists is what is intelligible is far more liberating than the doctrine that what exists is what can be touched or tasted. Our senses reveal to us certain basic facts in relation to ourselves. These facts are the materials from which we can understand the relationships between other things. We have, as yet, little need to postulate magical means of knowledge and communication. A telephone line is a perfectly practical and real means of extra sensory perception , psychokinesis and the like. What we need is not to wait for the mysteries to reveal themselves, but to get on with the construction of the electrical communication links which make it possible for all people to be one.
Every science is a collection of facts and thus subject to the collector's point of view. What I have chosen to explain is not all there is to explain. It seems that the mind
[page 78]
has a tendency to carefully ignore what it does not want to see. The beauty of having knowledge in the public domain is that other will see what I do not see. If you feel that my theory helps you to explain your collection of facts, then you might feel that I am on the right track. If you feel that your facts contradict my theory, you will be tempted to modify or discard it. In attempting to put forward a metaphysics, an explanation of everything, one seeks a paradigm which will embrace everything. When people once said that the study of being as being, not as differentiated into detail was the study of essences, or existents, or god or ideas or forms, I am saying it is the study of communication, particularly noisy or imperfect communication which allows for creativity. That I take to be the basis of the creation and maintenance of beings which are the object of our intellect, itself a being capable of creative change while maintaining its identity.
The process of intelligence is to find out how to put perceived elements of the Universe together into stable structures that mimic in all aspects the stable structures which are already existence in the Universe, and which we enter into scientific relationships with.
[page 79]
Every theory helps us to select and order facts. The beauty of theory is that it leads us to new facts and interpretations of the world. The trouble with theory is that it blinds us to other facts and interpretations. Just like a government which is democratically elected on the basis an hypothesis on what to do about management, as well as be democratically removed to make way for another government.
Popper: "Any particular historical description of facts will be simply true or false, however difficult it might be to decide upon its truth or falsity" II, p 226. Is this really so? Is there not radical uncertainty in the world as well as in models of it. This is the true significance of the uncertainty principle.
Eg a road accident: there is always inherent uncertainty in a driver's judgment of his car's speed, road conditions, performance etc. There are simple physical uncertainties of wheel tracking, tyre adhesion, etc etc, These are real uncertainties which contribute to the accident, as weather, disease etc etc all contribute to the outcome of historical events.
An important corollary of the evolutionary point of view is that the present contains and is a result of the past. I sit here writing, an intelligent animal born on planet earth 20 billion years (perhaps) after the formation of the Universe. So much
[page 80]
has happened during that 20 billion years that was prerequisite to my present existence. The formation of subatomic particles, of atoms and molecules and stars, of a planet we call earth with its rocks and soils, seas and atmosphere. The evolution of life gradually ascending in complexity toward my own species, which through myriad vicissitudes in time and space developed the culture into which I was born, the language and the patterns of though which I have inherited. All these things and many more are in me now, finding some sort of expression in these words as I write them.
What does Popper mean, history has no meaning?
For so long we have conceived of the Universe as a dumb, unintelligent object, subject to our prying gaze , but something which we are in some way above and outside and apart from. No longer can we take that point of view. We are in it, up to and beyond our necks, totally. Our consciousness is as much part of the system of the Universe as the crystalline structure of ice. Our consciousness is as much a product of evolution as a gum tree. And just as the fungi or bacteria or fishes or primates did not exhaust the creative power of the Universe, neither do we. In
[page 81]
another five billion years there may well be creatures as amazingly different and advanced from us as we are from the most primitive bacteria on the planet.
We have to look at science through the eyes of complexity theory. All electrons are in the abstract of equal complexity, and undertanding them all adds nothing to understanding one. In other words, from the point of view of remembering the whereabouts of all electrons we have only to know what is common to them all. To know them as individuals, we must know their relationship to the rest of the system, to other electrons in their atom, molecule, cell etc. In other words to know any part thoroughly, there is no choice but to learn to understand the whole.
Generalisation is an aide-memoire, nothing else, The search for universals is platonic bullshit, nothing else.
"There is no one man more important than any other." Popper II: 270. Maybe we could extend this to everything.
So far, in the Portrait of an Abstract Man, I have it upside down. Nations fight because they are organisms, hierarchically ordered structures of person, modelled after the tribe, who act as one and who (the nations) are prepared to sacrifice large quantities of people to achieve a national goal,
[page 82]
in the same way as an organism is prepared to lose a few thousand cells in order to win a feed, a fight or a fuck. Human beings, conscious ones, cannot be parts of such an organism. Their organisation cannot be hierarchical, but democratic. They are all equal because they can deal in pure information. The business of survival has become in some way secondary. Our social organisations bear some organismic traits, but they cater to the unconscious animal in us. The reflective, conscious part of ourselves demands something else. Just what is the subject of this book, and the scientific community is the model. Decentralised nodes in an intelligent network which is capable of radically changing its own nature all the time. There is now no longer a case for nations as such. Human reality transcends food, though it is a prerequisite. We want to know, to communicate with every-one and every-thing else.
This book was written rather like a film. Small snippets developed and written out, and then rearranged into a coherent continuous narrative whole.
. . .
[page 83]
Nature red in tooth and claw? A creative system continually seeks non-violent ways to solve conflicts, by, for instance, speciation, thereby in some sense controlling competition for a niche.
This philosophical exercise reminds me of my experiences as a child becoming totally captivated by an idea and then finding it gradually wearing out and losing its charm as the difficulties of implementation, counter examples etc made themselves obvious.
The task of a novelist includes reinterring generalisations in the flesh in a manner which will make them easier for the reader to see than had he encountered them in real life. In Lonergan's terms, he needs not only the direct insight, but the inverse as well. . . .
The metaphysical investigation is parallel to and prior to the novel. When I have got this together, then I can get on with the story, though I dont think Portrait of an Abstract Man need include much beyond this point. . . .
[page 84]
Should we attempt to prove the Christian precept do unto others. We might surmise that people only respect others as truly as they respect themselves. Those who have no self-respect are the ones who suffer, mentally and physically. It is of the nature of the sort of communication network we envisage that all nodes are equal and equally important. That node which cuts itself off the the others thereby belittles itself by failing to receive the information which they generate. Very much like the nose that would declare itself superior to the face and decide to go it alone. No good. To help oneself is to help others. To help others is to help oneself. We are inexorably linked together. This is christianity which, of course, has nothing to do with god. That is a later Platonic interpolation derived partly from the Pauline and Hebrew traditions. Jesus maybe preached a bit of this as a cover story. More likely he emphasised his atheist position by declaring himself to be god. On this theory, his message was not so much reactionary as radical., though the reactionaries have managed to neutralise him by taking him into their camp.
Popper seeks a sober combination of individualism and altruism.
[page 85]
Now that we have come to the point where we begin to understand our own intelligence, we become aware of the possibility of much greater intelligences.