From Zero

Where all coordinates are zero, there is the origin. If in the beginning, all things are zero, nothing can happen. And if nothing can happen, all remains zero.

But if something can happen, it is the splitting of zero into equal negatives and positives. It is this quantum fluctuation that the natural rationalist must have faith in, or nothing has happened, nothing happens, nothing will happen.

It is more believable, some say, that something happened with such extreme fluctuation that a universe was created. And the proof, some claim, is that the universe exists.

But this is proof of nothing. The universe exists, but we cannot know how and why by any natural means, because this is the nature of universes. We have no statistical probabilities, no learning lessons to use inductively or deductively in order to 'know' how universes are formed.

Maybe we were all born yesterday. Maybe quantum fluctuation is that cool, the fluctuation between nothing and everything. And just perhaps, some people might think that to call it quantum fluctuation, a phenomenon without mind nor directivity, is better than to think of God, a person with altogether too much mind and directivity.

Forestry

Institutions are like forests. They create darkness below while absorbing light from above. They host the bloodiest battles of nature, all the while living off the corpses of the slain. The only organisms that can thrive in them, as opposed to merely survive, are the fungi which need no light and have their own subterranean network of carrion consumption.

Unnatural Things (Part III)

It was back in January and, before that, December, that I last pondered the odd divide between what humans think of as 'natural' and 'unnatural'. This round was triggered by a brief conversation yesterday about 'organic' food.

I think humans are bonkers about food. We're the only species that routinely subjects food to unnatural thermal processing. No other animal species boils, roasts, bakes or chars their food except by accident. There must be something wrong with that. It's terribly unnatural.

The same thing goes for mechanical processing. We beat our food, churn it, mash it, blend it, slice it up with precision-designed metal tools, mix it up and stretch it out, dice and slice it, roll it up, arrange it for display.

We apply odd chemical and biological processes to our food: we salt, emulsify, combine, agglutinate, caramelize (as in subject to Maillard browning deliberately, in order to produce what some of us call carcinogens), hydrolyse, ferment. We do things of awkward and toxic nature, such as deliberately getting bacteria to infect our dairy products, and call it 'natural'.

I think that foodwise, we are the most unnatural species on the planet. And if people are talking about 'organic' food, that's seriously wrong. What foods are 'inorganic'? Only common salt, water, and other mineral substances like ferrous sulphate. What foods are natural? Maybe only stuff that grows in remote regions where human manipulation has not directly occurred.

Yes, humans are an unnatural lot, who have this daft yearning for a 'natural' that they can never possess.

Unnatural Things (Part II)

In a previous post, I talked about some ideas of 'natural' and 'unnatural'. It struck me that if you defined 'natural' as 'found in nature', it still isn't a complete definition for some purposes.

For example, if you said, "That's natural behaviour," when watching young people at play, you would actually implicitly be saying, "... for young human beings in that particular cultural context." What's natural in one context is not necessarily natural in another, because it would not normally occur in that context.

Which brings me to the next point. Should we define 'natural' as 'occurs in nature, given a specific context', or as 'is the modal occurrence for that situation', or as 'is within the normal distribution of behaviours, to n standard deviations'? Or should we use yet another definition?

The problem is that etymology's main clue constrains our choice somewhat; 'natural' comes from the Latin and implies 'inborn' — something that proceeds from the course of events in the natural world without human intelligence intervening. It is natural that some people are born with genes which predispose one towards alcoholism; it is not natural that alcoholics should exist, because it is rare to find ethanol in large quantities in nature — there is no common natural process that could create large numbers of alcoholics.

Some might argue (as I have, playfully, in the past) that mankind is a fact of nature, and that therefore everything (cable TV, skyscrapers, space telescopes, iPhones, Gucci handbags etc) that we create is part of nature. Well, in that case, we should throw out the idea of artifice, of organic growth, of natural methods of doing anything and just accept that our sad lot is to defeat the rest of nature before we get round to understanding it.

But that's just dodging the argument. Why shouldn't we think of Man as part of nature? And why shouldn't we then think that any activity we indulge in, for which a sufficiently large number of us exist, is also a natural thing? Take the relatively innocuous cultural behaviour of wearing earrings so large that they distort the earlobes. This can be found in primitive (technology-wise) tribes as well as on the streets of New York or Singapore. Is this therefore a natural thing?

Is it natural to indulge in bodily mutilation by surgical removal of unsightly body parts? We do it with nails and hair, which regenerate; we do it with skin, which sometimes doesn't quite regenerate the same way. We do it with parts that don't regenerate, sometimes out of philanthropy and sometimes as some odd aesthetic or religious practice.

Think about circumcision, for example — some people say it is a healthy thing to do, some people say not, and it's impossible to say under what circumstances it is optimally healthy. Personally, I'd have the shuddering heebie-jeebies if anyone told me they were going to chop off the tip of one of my extremities. My fingers and toes cringe, that is.

So many questions, and so many answers. Sigh.

Unnatural Things (Part I)

Sometimes when you look at the news or read the latest polemics, you hear people talking about things as 'natural' or 'unnatural'. This is something interesting to me. What constitutes 'natural' or 'unnatural'?

To me, 'natural' connotes lack of human artifice. Human technology is somehow less natural than, say, termite archaeology or the coconut tool use of certain octopi. We make tools not only by directed physical action, but by directed chemical action 'with malice aforethought', so to speak.

But there's another way of looking at things that I find fascinating. This is the statistically natural approach — somewhat akin to the rule of the majority or the rule of large numbers. By this approach, if something is a) found to occur in real life, b) found to occur in real life in large numbers (relatively speaking) or c) found to occur in real life in a majority of cases, then that something is considered natural. It's like the way some people look at giraffe behaviour.

For example, male giraffes are known to indulge in blatant, common, and majority homosexual behaviour. This is a point in favour, some say, of such things being natural. Well, they also sleep an average of 1.9 hours a day, have very long necks, and use their heads as flails. Are some behaviours natural and the others not?

The answer is an obvious one. All are natural for giraffes but not necessarily at all for humans. In fact, I suspect none of these things is natural for humans except under unnatural (perhaps giraffe-like?) conditions.

So what is 'natural'? Yes, I'll handle that soon...

Out Of Mind

The beautiful articulation of my mind enables me to move, to flex, to wrap myself around ideas and pour myself over them. My mind gives me the ability to change the direction of an impulse, to shift my perspective, to display a kind of heterodoxy of thought. My brain is a defining factor, pyscho over physio, mobile over static, higher animal over barnacle or tree.

And on a cold wet morning, sometimes I'd rather be a tree. I have just come to realise that the bearings of my mind are not forever. The knowledge has always been there, especially since the time I went crazy and decided to do a PhD. But realisation, the event of something becoming real, is a different matter. I ache on such mornings. My mind is the main culprit. And being articulate is sometimes more of a curse than one might ever have imagined.

Wait. This reminds me of something I posted not too long ago.

Out Of Joint

The beautiful articulation of my bones enables me to move, to flex, to wrap myself around terrain and pour myself over it. My joints give me the ability to change the direction of an impulse, to shift my mass, to display a kind of heterodoxy of movement. My skeleton is a defining factor, endo over exo, mobile over static, higher animal over barnacle or tree.

And on a cold wet morning, sometimes I'd rather be a tree. I have just come to realise that the bearings of my joints are not forever. The knowledge has always been there, especially since the time I tore the ligaments in my shoulder. But realisation, the event of something becoming real, is a different matter. I ache on such mornings. My joints are the main culprits. And being articulate is sometimes more of a curse than one might ever have imagined.

Temperament

By nature, as often confessed before, I am a creature of wrath and pride. Not anger or arrogance, those more human shades of infamy, but ira and superbia, as the ancients used to call them – two of the seven deadly sins. By faith, as I have made thanksgiving for many times as well, I am a creature in whom these natural urges are balanced by the temperance of patience and humility, sometimes bitterly imposed upon this mortal soul. The ancients would have called me a creature of bile, both choleric and melancholy; but as we know, all this classification is twaddle – after all, the two are opposed, so how should it be so?

And yet, when faced with students who prefer not to learn their lessons, one is tempted again. It is a mortification to my flesh, the returning realisation that one is not immune to sin, although one may have been justified by faith. The instinct to wrath is the worst in my family; the men all have it to a large extent. The instinct to pride is a bad complement to it: in wrath, one is oft tempted to use one's intellect as a bludgeon rather than a rapier, but in pride, one is tempted to use it both ways, to pierce and wound as well as to bruise. The phrases, 'a sound thumping' and 'a good thrashing' come to mind, with attendant shudders and a sense of sadness that one should think of them in the first place.

And so, one smiles a lot, and trusts by faith in one's calling and the One calling. But on some days it is very hard. Very hard, dolorous almost, painful, and wrenching to the soul. The natural self is quite a beast to ride. Sigh. But otherwise, how could one be tempered? Certainly not by losing one's temper through distemper or intemperance. Certainly not by taking apart the works of other men in order to establish one's own. And certainly not by allowing the spleen to override the brain.

Ring Around The Sun

Today, the Tailor came running into the office. "Look! Up in the sky!" And he ran out again. Suddenly, infused with the spirit of the Beatles (as seen in A Hard Day's Night), I felt moved to get up and run out as well. Several others followed.

Behold, there was a ring of rainbow light, a halo around the sun. Of course the Tailor, as a physicist, knew what caused it. But although we knew why it appeared that way, we were all engulfed in the wonder, the splendour, the glorious beauty of it all. Yes, the upper air was filled with tiny ice crystals. Yes, refraction does occur and its effects are seen as a circular locus visually centred around the sun (which approximates a uniform source at that distance). But physics aside, this was pure poetry.

I've seen haloes around the moon before, but seldom in broad daylight and hardly ever at noonday. This was a particular, spectacular moment of meteorological grace.