Observing the Elephant, or, WiiinWim

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The fable of The Blind Men and the Elephant teaches an important to truth – to children.  As nimble fingers explore the pachyderm those tracing the side find a wall, a tusk becomes a spear, the trunk a snake; leg, tree; ear, fan; tail, rope – until the poor beast is totally and inaccurately deconstructed.  The implicit assertion is that could we but see the entire creature we would somehow “know” what it “is.”  And that is a valuable lesson for kids – “Get all the information before reaching a conclusion.” But seen from another perspective, the fable itself becomes an illusion.  No mere observation of the elephant would reveal the matriarchal social structure, the navigational nuances, or the communicative sophistication of the species that we are only now beginning to understand and appreciate.   So the story of the elephant and the blind men leads us into a WiiinWim situation.  Ah, no, again, not a typo – just another example of my love of acronyms.  WiiinWim stands for “What It Is, Is Not What It Means.”  And I am, again, talking about the universe – this time the optometrist’s universe.

The Optometrist’s Universe is a simplistic metaphor. An optometrist provides the lenses that allow us to read.  However, the ability to make the glasses is completely separate from the ability to read and comprehend whatever text is made legible by the lenses.  The most skilled uni-lingual American optometrist can peer through her finest lenses and still find French a mystery. Seeing the text is not the same as reading the words, and neither equates to understanding the sentence, let alone the paragraph or the book.  The same, I would posit, is true about astronomers and cosmologists and the universe: seeing is not directly correlated to understanding.  WiiinWim. 

This current musing drifts from my recent reading of The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, by Richard Panek.  The book simultaneously fascinated and embarrassed me.  The fascination comes from the fact some of the smartest cosmologists, astronomers, mathematicians, and scientists somehow overlooked 96% of the universe. Even more fascinating; how easy and understandable was the error.  The embarrassment stems from the fact that these were “family” to a certain extent – members of the academic family – and much of the error was compounded because they expended incredible amounts of energy fighting over “grants and glory.”  At times the whole process wasn’t so much a “chase for the truth” as it was an effort to “affirm my version of the truth.”

But I digress, as always.  What I found most troubling about the work was the “Blind Men and the Elephant-ness” of it.  Perhaps trapped by the metaphor of his title, The Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, Panek seems to assert that once we learn to “observe” and measure the other 96 percent of the universe we will have “seen the elephant,” and that vision will put to rest pesky questions regarding the meaning of existence, the nature of love, the existence of God, and all that jazz.  I must object.

Here is my concern: the technology that reveals the extent and structure of the universe, and the individuals who operate the equipment and analyze data, do not necessarily reflect the skill sets and knowledge bases best-suited to understanding the meaning of the universe.  Now, I certainly do not wish to reduce the astronomer's role to mere lens grinder or image-maker, no, the skill involved in the conception and creation of contemporary telescopes and other sensing devices is quite incredible.  To image the various guises of the universe we can see and to even contemplate the tools necessary to perceive the other 96% that we cannot see, is a manifestation of technical and scientific skill of the first magnitude.  The astronomer's labor is worthy of daily admiration, and occasional awe.

But while those exceptional efforts bring the text into focus, they do not automatically provide insight into the meaning of the text resolved by the device.  I’m not advancing the general semanticist's old saw and simply asserting that, "the word is not the thing."  As a matter of fact, I’ve come – well, maybe not 180 degrees from that – but certainly, 155, maybe 160.  I am far more comfortable with my own perspective, drawn from my writings on Chord Theory and Universal Resonance [drop me a note, I’ll send you the links]; that while the word it is certainly an inherent part of the thing, it is just as surely not the whole thing.  To discern the symbol is not synonymous with understanding the symbol.  Were that the case, Dan Brown would be a far less wealthy man today.

Let us explore another metaphor.  Let us consider Maxfield Parrish's Sunlite Valley from 1947.

 I choose it because it is not Rembrandt or Van Gogh.  It isn't even J.M.W. Turner or Thomas Cole. It is an unabashedly romantic landscape, which if painted today might be accused of some photoshopping - a little heavy on the saturation, a bit defuse on the sky - but I like it. It is sort of painting “comfort food.”  The point is this: you could take the physical elements used to construct the painting and put them in a room.  The tubes of paint, or perhaps the pigments and binders used to make the paint, the canvas, the brushes, the stretchers for the frame, the varnishes.  Throw in the wood for an easel. Maybe add some lights.  Everything. Dump it there, in the room.  Let all those elements stand for everything that makes up the universe or the multiverses or whatever.

When the astronomers and astrophysicists finally manage to define all of those elements for us, then they will have cataloged the materials in the room, they will have marked the paint in Parrish's studio.  When they isolate the forces that pull elemental particles into larger clusters and reveal the actions and reactions that suture up the galaxies and the unimaginably immense super strings of galaxies, then they will have discerned what holds the paint together, what allows it to cling to the brush and adhere to the canvas.  They may have even have glimpsed the nature of Maxfield's technique, his brushstrokes, and his preferences for hue and texture.  But unanswered still is the question of why the artist chose to paint that particular scene and for what purpose? What, if any, was the intelligence that stretched from conception to execution?

And that, of course, brings us back to WiiinWim - what it is, is not what it means.  If you have followed these posts for long you know that they stem from my own efforts to merge the physics with the philosophy.  And those efforts have led me to a number of assertions about "what it means."  I wait, with not much patience, to learn the nature of that 96% of the universe that remains cloaked.  I am curious to see if it seems to “confirm or deny” my guesses about “what it means.” If you have forgotten the nature of those guesses, you can download the long version The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart, [200 – 300 pages depending on font size] for free here:

http://www.feedbooks.com/userbook/624/the-god-chord-string-theory-in-the-landscape-of-the-heart

But, in short, the work concludes with this thesis: Foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm: these are not the only truths, but without them all others come undone.

It is an assertion regarding appropriate human attitude and behavior that is drawn from what physics reveals about the nature of reality. You see, the recurring theme is that each time the best and brightest observers of the universe assert the primacy of chaos and the eventual demise of existence - those lynchpins of nihilism - newer evidence, better data, and a broader view reveals transcendent harmony and order. I continue to scour the emerging literature from the LHC, Hubble, et. al.  To date, the dominant chord still echoes harmonics.  And in that echo sounds the human mandate: Foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm.
 
The God Chord has been downloaded some 16,000 times, and is, I assume, also occasionally read :-)   So the foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm message is inching along through cyberspace. But my wife, Christine, requested a shorter version a couple of years ago, “You know, one regular people might actually enjoy reading.” 

Let me close with the 700 words that were the result of that request as they sum up my take on Wim "What it means":

Distillations: An Acknowledgement of Universal Resonance

by

RL Schrag

September, 2009

Being a tiny little book that attempts to present Universal Resonance, the worldview formerly know as Chord Theory in a more accessible form.

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Distillations

“Even small works can be beautiful if they point the way.”

Foster harmony, enable beauty, oppose harm: these are not the only truths, but without them all others come undone.

The object of this work is to distill universal resonance to its most parsimonious essence.  The guiding principles will be brevity and clarity, the objective, a work you can hold in the palm of your hand.
 

Universal Resonance

From the string theory of physics I accept the assertion that at the irreducible core of all things rests the string.  Unimaginably tiny, it vibrates.  Its existence mandates that the universe be defined by resonance; that we are made - as is every other thing in the universe, no matter how great or small - of music.

Existence, therefore, is best understood in terms of harmony and discord with no artificial distinction drawn between physics and metaphysics.

Universal resonance sees the division between physics and metaphysics as an intellectual artifice, a relic of wars between dueling arrogances:  Metaphysics asserts that truth is beyond measurement, while Physics fails to imagine the instruments equal to the task.

Universal resonance anticipates a world in which the unimaginable will become measurable, and the unbelievable is rationally explained.  It has happened so often in the past, it seems foolhardy to assert the contrary.

Foster Harmony

This guides all our behavior. It shapes what we do and what we should refrain from doing: We seek harmony.

Implicit in the exhortation to foster harmony is the realization that we cannot choose for others. The only chord you can tune is your own.

Harmony rarely frowns. She is not selfish, arrogant or disdainful.  Harmony could be rather tedious were she not so willing to laugh at herself.

Enable Beauty

This tenet mandates our active participation in making the world more beautiful. A broad conception of beauty is implied, one that transcends culture, market and current taste.

The route to beauty winds through throngs and past lonely places.  Where and how we choose to follow is unimportant.  That we do follow is imperative.
 

Oppose Harm

Harm is anything that compromises harmony and beauty. Sometimes active opposition, though seemingly discordant, is the necessary path to harmony. But, whenever possible, opposition should be graceful, gentle, even beautiful.

Remember, opposition forced into the public sphere usually indicates a failure to blunt harm in a more private and graceful manner.

The Self

The self is the symphony we compose with the choices of our life.  Inclined by biology, we take from our DNA the realization that we are utterly unique.  Each breath we draw, each hope we cherish, our fears, the thoughts we think, all trigger cascades of discernible physical reactions that strum the very strings of our self, creating and recreating us anew each moment.

Though buffeted by both choice and chance, we are the composers of our life’s symphony.  It is a role we are powerless to relinquish.

The Soul

The entity that most religions call the soul is recognized in universal resonance to be a physical reality; a cluster of those unimaginably tiny strings that uniquely encodes our deepest beliefs, feelings and insights. It is a minute morsel of matter whose size and resonance allows it, on the occasion of the demise of its current body, to migrate among the multiple dimensions demanded by the math of string theory, thereby actualizing immortality.

The Universe

Is the encompassing resonant harmonic entity of which we, as individuals, are and will always remain, a unique, sentient part.

The universe expands beyond the multi-verse of our theorizing, and yet is reflected in the infinitesimal perfection of the soul.

Our knowledge of the universe is evolutionary.  We are disabled by the belief that we can imagine the horizon of understanding.  Our belief in complexity blinds us to the insight suggested by simplicity.

Wisdom

We gain wisdom as we explore the three truths.  It is an exploration that is ambiguously poised between the private and the public.

We are unique entities suspended amidst unimaginable billions – unlike any other, yet in evolving concert with all.

Perhaps wisdom is best seen as unfolding harmony, comprised of works accomplished, commentaries on those works and the thoughtful anticipation of works yet to be.
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It's Not You, It's Me!

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It is an awkward situation.  A graduate student asks me to serve on their graduate committee, and I must refuse.  The refusal is awkward because the request is a compliment.  Something in your interaction had struck a chord with the student and they are asking you to become, at least, a semi-mentor.

My reasons for refusing - and I almost always do so - are complicated.  First, I am deeply immersed in undergraduate teaching, and find that quite rewarding. So, my reasons for saying no to graduate students are not always selfish reasons.  As a matter-of-fact the primary reason is usually in the student’s best interest: I simply do not possess the information necessary to the task.  The next reason, though, is selfish:  I have no interest in obtaining that missing information.  Both reasons deserve further explication.

Communication is a discipline in continual evolution.  I teach a course in communication technology, and on the first day of class I announce, “In this course, you will wake up everyday out of date; that is both inevitable and OK.”  It doesn’t take profound insight to grasp that concept.  “Tech Stuff changes, everyday.”  Best Buy is running a series of ads right now pushing their “BuyBack Policy.”  When your old gizmo gets outdated, they will buy it back so you can get the new one.

What is less obvious is that the intellectual underpinnings of the discipline are driven by those same winds of change.  The Economist reports that 64,000 PhDs were awarded in the US last year – a few thousand of those were in communication.  Here’s the tricky part.  To get a Ph.D. you are required to make an original contribution to the field, you are required to “change” the discipline somehow.  To continue to advance in your career you do research and publish – and again an important criterion is presenting something new, continuing the cycle of change.  This is, for the most part, a good thing.  I cannot think of an instance when it has been a good idea to draw a line in the sand of human curiosity and say: “Go no further!  This way be dragons!”  Were there such a line, graduate students and young faculty would be required to cross that line, to seek out the dragons and tame them in service to the discipline.  Change is mandatory.

Yet, there is a difference between intellectual curiosity and mandated change.  In my world that difference is more complex than it appears at first blush.  No one enters the academy without intellectual curiosity – it is a fundamental prerequisite.  I’m sure there are exceptions, just as there are probably linemen in the NFL who weigh less than 280 lbs., but they would be both uncommon and disadvantaged.  The curious come to the academy because they are accepted, understood and advantaged.  To a point.  Most often intellectual curiosity, the advancement of knowledge, and the evolution of the discipline go hand-in-hand.  I would go so far as to say that, as broad social variables, intellectual curiosity and the advancement of knowledge always go hand-in-hand, just as the laws of classical physics are always adequate to describe to world outside our window.

But when we observe intellectual curiosity on an individual level, it shows an increasingly common tendency to diverge from the prescribed course of mandated change.  Physics found quantum mechanics to describe this fascinating world that operates beneath the radar of ordinary reality. Perhaps we need a quantum mechanics of the mind, if you will, for the academy to recognize and benefit from the individualized curiosity that percolates, largely invisible, beneath the unified surface of discipline-mandated change.

And that is my next reason for saying no to graduate students.  My individualized curiosity has led me away from the “hot ticket items” of the discipline where graduate students must focus their efforts.  Hence, in my own mind, I become a bad choice to teach the novitiates this particular catechism.  The other reason, the fact that I no longer find the center of my discipline’s intellectual life interesting, requires a deeper dip into the quantum mechanics of the mind – both metaphorically and literally.

Change is both a physical and existential mandate.  To live is to change.  To steal a notion from Heraclitus, you cannot draw breath twice in the same universe.  First because you are different with every breath you take, molecules rush about, cells die and are born, electric impulses drive thoughts and movement.  We are constructed by change.  Secondly, the universe is in continuous flux around us.  Galaxies, solar systems, stars and planets shift as swiftly as the change within us.  The edge of the universe recedes with incomprehensible rapidity.  The only constant in existence is change.  I change, therefore I exist.  That being said, not all change is worthy of our consideration, and thankfully so, as we are often hard pressed to consider the change that is worthy of our attention.

So now let us consider change within an academic discipline.  There is a light side and a dark side.  On the dark side, the path of change is mandatory, even coerced.  This path is informed by my world’s harshest possible perspective: what you think in the academy is unimportant, all that matters is that your work is published and your research is funded.  If on this path, the canny graduate student or junior faculty member links his/her wagon to an established or a rising star, a publishing or grant getting machine, and hangs on for dear life.  Individual curiosity be damned, direct your attention to whatever game is currently in vogue, for that way lies tenure.

On the light side, the academy in its most flattering aspect, academic change occurs quite differently.  One assumes that there is a liked-minded cohort out there in the academy to encourage and support any intellectual bent.  The wise novitiates read whatever fascinates him or her, and eventually they find a caring sympathetic mentor who helps them answer the questions that most fascinate them within a department that welcomes them. Both extremes exist, but the norm lies somewhere in between.

While my first four or five years in the academy were spent in places more intellectually dark than light, my professional life has been spent largely in that middle ground; often encouraged, almost always tolerated.  It is therefore somewhat droll that during my “senior” years in the academy I find myself increasingly tepid as to the burning issues of the discipline.  Today’s young communication scholars are often focused on issues about which I simply cannot summon the energy to care.  So, does that mean I am no longer curious?  No, quite the contrary as a matter of fact.  I am far more curious than ever before.  But my intellectual path has pulled me off the roads being explored by my colleagues.  Let me share the basics with you.

Somewhere in the middle of my career I encountered – firmly in the middle of the discipline – narrative analysis.  This approach to the world asserts that human beings construct stories that both contain and manifest the beliefs, attitudes and values that, for us, define reality.  There’s a lot more to it than that – but that covers the main points.  I wrote and published about the various aspects of that perspective for a number of years.  But, like all academic tides, this one began to wane, and the change demanded by all those still unwritten Ph.D. dissertations swept on to new stories about the nature of reality in the discipline.  And that was fine by me.  By that time I was a full professor with tenure, able to withstand even those few bad years when the dark knights ruled my little corner of Camelot.

But I remained fascinated with the stories that we tell ourselves about the nature of truth and reality.  You see, I have lived my entire academic career outside the sciences, over in the worlds constructed by story.  In communication or philosophy or literature, there is no “proof” there is only “interpretation” and “belief.”  Throughout most of human history the great events and precious personal moments have centered on belief.  Wars are fought, empires rise and fall, lives are bound together and split asunder all on the basis of belief.  Where are the data that define love?  Show me the evidence for god.  There is none – yet the belief endures.  Fascinating.

The physicists on the other hand have been poking around for what they modestly called “the theory of everything.”  Thanks to some wonderful writers and editors who could translate theoretical physics for “mathaphobics” like me, I began to read about these “theories of everything” and was soon delightfully enthralled with string theory and super symmetry, black holes and branes.  I rambled there for a few years until I began to seriously build bridges between those two broad narratives: a world defined by belief and a universe revealed by data.  I wrote, and published on the internet, the book that defines my conception of how those two narratives come together: The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart.  The point of this essay is not to hawk that particular worldview.  Rather, it is to point out that there is no home in the academy for the work.  It is simply “not of interest” for formal physicists and communication scholars alike.  It lacks an intellectual lineage in both disciplines.  And that, of course, is the final reason I say no to graduate students.  They must focus within boundaries that bore me.

From a broader perspective, I am concerned that the academy has built an efficient knowledge creation engine with tracks too rigid to accommodate at least one natural extension of an intellectual life.  And when I say “one natural extension” I do not mean my personal intellectual wandering.  Rather, I mean “folks like me.”  I have met a cluster of them over the last few years, academics who view their lifelong disciplinary homes with ennui.  We seem to share a variety of characteristics.  We are usually in our late 50s through our 60s.  We are established in our careers. We seem not, or no longer, tied to administrative responsibilities.  And our curiosity has led us beyond the ordinary boundaries of our discipline.  And, most importantly, we are thinking about strange and interesting things.  It is in many ways a lovely life.  Yet, somehow sad in that we are often lonely among our colleagues.
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Distillations Part 6

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The Soul

The entity that most religions call the soul is recognized, in universal resonance, to be a physical reality; a cluster of those unimaginably tiny strings that uniquely encodes our deepest beliefs, feelings and insights. It is a minute morsel of matter whose size and resonance allows it, on the occasion of the demise of its current body, to migrate among the multiple dimensions demanded by the math of string theory, thereby actualizing immortality.

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The Early Multiverse

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RL Schrag 2009

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Distillations Part 5

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The Self

The self is the symphony we compose with the choices of our life.  Inclined by biology, we take from our DNA the realization that we are utterly unique.  Each breath we draw, each hope we cherish, our fears, the thoughts we think, all trigger cascades of discernible physical reactions that strum the very strings of our self, creating and recreating us anew each moment.

Though buffeted by both choice and chance, we are the composers of our life’s symphony.  It is a role we are powerless to relinquish.
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Self Portrait

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RL Schrag 2003

Distillations Part 4

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Oppose Harm

Harm is anything that compromises harmony and beauty. Sometimes active opposition, though seemingly discordant, is the necessary path to harmony. But, whenever possible, opposition should be graceful, gentle, even beautiful.

Remember, opposition forced into the public sphere usually indicates a failure to blunt harm in a more private and graceful manner.

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The Musician

RL Schrag 2001

Distillations Part 2

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Foster Harmony

This guides all our behavior. It shapes what we do and what we should refrain from doing: We seek harmony.

Implicit in the exhortation to foster harmony is the realization that we cannot choose for others. The only chord you can tune is your own.

Harmony rarely frowns. She is not selfish, arrogant or disdainful. Harmony could be rather tedious were she not so willing to laugh at herself.

Distillations Part 1

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 Those of you who have been around for the past eight years know that The Wall grew out of notes that I would actually stick on "the wall" above my desk at home.  Those notes grew into the book The God Chord that some of you have had the persistence to read.  I thank you for that effort.


My wife Christine, coming from the marketing side of life, has often opined that if I really wanted peole to read the work, I should consider the reader staring at those 240 plus pages that meander through physics, philosophy, art, occasional comedy and unintended tragedy.  Jeez.  Everybody is an editor.  I have however taken her advice and distilled 246 pages down to 719 words.


I am still quite fond of the 246 pages, but I am going to share the 719 words here on this blog.  Not all at once, of course, but chapter by chapter:


Here is the first: