I’ve just read this 7 volume graphic novel over a single weekend. I saw the anime version a few years back at a cinematic mini-festival of his work. As it turned out, it was the first of his movies I ever saw, and it’s still my favourite. Most people would declare Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke as his best works, and they’re probably right, but I liked Nausicaa because certain elements of the story resonated with my own modest fictional creation, Elvene. You can see a Japanese trailer of the anime here.
The movie was released in 1984 and the graphic novels were only translated into English in 1997. I didn’t even know they existed until I looked it up on the Internet to inform a friend. And then a graphic novelist guest at our book club (see my blog list) told me that the local library has all 7 volumes; they’re catalogued under ‘graphic novel – teenager’. Even though Miyazaki is better known for his animated movies (Studio Ghibli), the film version of Nausicaa barely scratches the surface. The graphic novels are on the scale of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Dune. Of the 7 volumes, the shortest is 120 pages and the last is over 200 pages. If Miyazaki wasn’t Japanese, I’m sure this would be a classic of the genre.
Being Japanese, they’re read from right to left, so the back cover is actually the front cover and vice versa. I thought: why didn’t they just reverse the pagination for Western readers? But, of course, the graphics have to be read right to left as well. In other words, to Westernise them they’d have to be mirror-reversed, so wisely the publishers left them alone.
On the inside back cover (front cover for us) Miyazake explains the inspiration for the character. Of course, Nausicaa was originally a character in Homer’s The Odyssey, but Miyazaki first came across her in Bernard Evslin’s Japanese translation of a dictionary of Greek mythology. Evslin apparently gave 3 pages to Nausicaa but only one page each to Zeus and Achilles, so Miyazaki was a little disappointed when he read Homer’s original and found that she played such a small yet pivotal role in Odysseus’s journey. He was also influenced by a Japanese fictional heroine in The Tales of Past and Present called “the princess who loved insects”.
Those who are familiar with Miyazaki know that all his stories have strong female roles, and, personally, I think Nausicaa is the best of them, albeit she is one of the youngest.
But this reference to Homer’s Odyssey raises a point that has long fascinated me about graphic novels (or comic books, as they were known when I was a kid). They are arguably the only literary form which echoes back to the mythical world of the ancients, where characters have god-like abilities with human attributes. Now some of you may ask what about fantasy fiction of the sword and wizard variety? King Arthur, Merlin and Gandalf surely fall into that category. Yes, they are somewhat in between, but they are not superheroes, of whom Superman is the archetype. Bryan Singer’s film version, Superman Returns, which polarised critics and audiences, makes the allusion to Christ most overtly, and I suspect, deliberately.
It’s not just the Bible that provides a literary world where humanity and Gods meet (well there are 2 God characters in the Bible, the Father and the Son, not to mention Satan). Moses talked to a burning bush, Abraham was visited by angels, and Jesus conversed with Satan, God and ordinary mortals, including prostitutes.
The Mahabharata is a classic Hindu text involving deities and warring families, and of course there’s Homer’s tales, where the Greek gods take sides in battles and make deals with mortals.
Well, Miyazake’s Nausicaa falls into this category, in my view, even though there’s not a deity in sight. Nausicaa is probably the most Christ-like character I’ve come across in contemporary fiction since Superman. However that’s a Western interpretation – I expect Miyazaki would be more influenced by the Goddess of Mercy (Guan Yin in China, Kannon in Japan).
Nausicaa is a warrior princess with prodigious fighting abilities but her greatest ability is to empathise with all living creatures and to win over people to her side through her sheer personality and integrity. This last attribute is actually the most believable part of the novel, and when she continually wins respect and trust, Miyazaki convinces us that this human aspect of her character is real. But there are supernatural qualities as well. Her heart is so pure that she is able to lead the most evil character in the story into the afterlife (reminiscent of a scene in Harry Potter with a different outcome). In the last volume there is a warrior-god intent on destruction (an artificial life-form) whom she bends to her will through her sheer compassion because he believes she is his mother.
There are numerous other characters, but Princess Kushana is probably the most complex. She is involved in a mortal struggle with her emperor father and throne-contender brothers, but the most interesting relationship she has is with her ambitious Chief of Staff, Kurotowa. Early in the story she tries to have him killed, much later she saves his life.
Like Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki’s tale is a cautionary one about how humanity is destroying the ecology of the planet. Other subplots warn against religious dogma being used as a political weapon to manipulate people into war, and petty royal rivalries decimating populations through war and creating starving refugee communities out of the survivors.
There are, of course, a small group of characters who see Nausicaa as a prophet, and even a goddess, which creates problems for her in and of itself.
This is a rich story of many layers, not just a boy’s (or girl’s) own adventure. Nausicaa is a classic of the graphic novel genre – it’s just not recognised as such because it’s not American.
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Happiness and the role of empathy
It’s been a while between posts but I’ve been busy on many fronts, including preparing Elvene for a second edition as an e-book and POD (print on demand). I’ll write a future post on that when it’s released in a couple of months. I’m also back to working full time (my real job is an engineer) so my time is spread thinner than it used to be.
I subscribe to Philosophy Now, which is an excellent magazine even if its publication is as erratic as my blog, and it always comes out with a theme. In this issue (No 80, August/September 2010) the theme, always given on the cover, is the human condition: is it really that bad? This post arose from a conflation in my mind of two of its essays. One on Compassion & Peace by Michael Allen Fox, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Canada and Adjunct Professor; School of Humanities, University of New England, Australia. (Philosophy Now is a UK publication, btw.) The other was an essay by Dr. Kathleen O’Dwyer, who describes herself as ‘a scholar, teacher and author’ (my type of academic). Her essay is titled Can we be happy? But it’s really a discussion of Bertrand Russell’s treatise, The Conquest of Happiness, with a few other references thrown in like Freud, Laing and Grayling, amongst others.
I will dive right in with a working definition that O’Dwyer provides and is hard to beat:
“…a feeling of well-being – physical, emotional, spiritual or psychological; a feeling that one’s needs are being met – or at least that one has the power to strive towards the satisfaction of the most significant of such needs; a feeling that one is being authentic in living one’s life and in one’s relations with significant others; a feeling that one is using one’s potential as far as this is possible; a feeling that one is contributing to life in some way – that one’s life is making a difference.”
As she says, it’s all about ‘feeling’, which is not only highly subjective but based on perceptions. Nevertheless, she covers most bases, and, in particular, the sense of freedom to pursue one’s dreams and the requisite need to feel belonged, though she doesn’t use either of those phrases specifically. However, I would argue that these are the 2 fundamental criteria that one can distill from her synopsis.
Her discussion of Russell leads to talk about the opposite of happiness, its apparent causes and how to overcome it. Russell, like myself, suffered from depression in his early years, and this invariably affords a degree of self-examination that can either lead to self-obsession or revelation, and, in my case, both: one came before the other; and I don’t have to tell you in what order.
But Russell expresses the release or transcendence from this ‘possession’ rather succinctly as “a diminishing preoccupation with myself”. And this is the key to happiness in a nutshell, as also expressed by psychiatrist, George Vaillant, from the Harvard Medical School and interviewed in May this year on ABC’s 7.30 Report (see embedded video below).
And this segues into empathy, which I contend is the most important word in the English language. Fox goes to some length to explain the differences between compassion, empathy, sympathy and sacrifice, which, personally, I find unnecessary. They all extend from the inherent ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes, and that is effectively what empathy is. So I put empathy at the head of all these terms and the source of altruism for most people. Studies have been done to demonstrate that reading fiction improves empathy (refer my post on Storytelling, July 2009). The psychometric test is very simple: determining the emotional content of eyes with no other available cues. As a writer, I don’t find this surprising, because, without empathy, fiction simply doesn’t work. As I mentioned in that post, the reader becomes an actor in their own mind but they’re not consciously aware of it.
But, more significantly, I would argue that all art exercises empathy, because it’s the projection of one individual’s imagination into another’s. Many artists, myself included, feel it’s their duty to put the reader or their audience in someone else’s shoes. It’s no surprise to me that art flourishes in all human societies and is often the most resilient endeavour when oppression is dominant.
But, more significant to the topic at hand, empathy and happiness are inseparable in my view. Contrary to some people’s beliefs and political ideologies, one rarely, if ever, gains happiness over another person’s suffering. Hence the message of Fox’s essay: peace and compassion go hand in hand.
The theme of Russell’s thesis (as revealed by O’Dwyer) and the message illuminated by George Vaillant below are exactly the same. We don’t find happiness in self-obsession, but in its opposite: the ability to empathise and give love to others.
I subscribe to Philosophy Now, which is an excellent magazine even if its publication is as erratic as my blog, and it always comes out with a theme. In this issue (No 80, August/September 2010) the theme, always given on the cover, is the human condition: is it really that bad? This post arose from a conflation in my mind of two of its essays. One on Compassion & Peace by Michael Allen Fox, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Canada and Adjunct Professor; School of Humanities, University of New England, Australia. (Philosophy Now is a UK publication, btw.) The other was an essay by Dr. Kathleen O’Dwyer, who describes herself as ‘a scholar, teacher and author’ (my type of academic). Her essay is titled Can we be happy? But it’s really a discussion of Bertrand Russell’s treatise, The Conquest of Happiness, with a few other references thrown in like Freud, Laing and Grayling, amongst others.
I will dive right in with a working definition that O’Dwyer provides and is hard to beat:
“…a feeling of well-being – physical, emotional, spiritual or psychological; a feeling that one’s needs are being met – or at least that one has the power to strive towards the satisfaction of the most significant of such needs; a feeling that one is being authentic in living one’s life and in one’s relations with significant others; a feeling that one is using one’s potential as far as this is possible; a feeling that one is contributing to life in some way – that one’s life is making a difference.”
As she says, it’s all about ‘feeling’, which is not only highly subjective but based on perceptions. Nevertheless, she covers most bases, and, in particular, the sense of freedom to pursue one’s dreams and the requisite need to feel belonged, though she doesn’t use either of those phrases specifically. However, I would argue that these are the 2 fundamental criteria that one can distill from her synopsis.
Her discussion of Russell leads to talk about the opposite of happiness, its apparent causes and how to overcome it. Russell, like myself, suffered from depression in his early years, and this invariably affords a degree of self-examination that can either lead to self-obsession or revelation, and, in my case, both: one came before the other; and I don’t have to tell you in what order.
But Russell expresses the release or transcendence from this ‘possession’ rather succinctly as “a diminishing preoccupation with myself”. And this is the key to happiness in a nutshell, as also expressed by psychiatrist, George Vaillant, from the Harvard Medical School and interviewed in May this year on ABC’s 7.30 Report (see embedded video below).
And this segues into empathy, which I contend is the most important word in the English language. Fox goes to some length to explain the differences between compassion, empathy, sympathy and sacrifice, which, personally, I find unnecessary. They all extend from the inherent ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes, and that is effectively what empathy is. So I put empathy at the head of all these terms and the source of altruism for most people. Studies have been done to demonstrate that reading fiction improves empathy (refer my post on Storytelling, July 2009). The psychometric test is very simple: determining the emotional content of eyes with no other available cues. As a writer, I don’t find this surprising, because, without empathy, fiction simply doesn’t work. As I mentioned in that post, the reader becomes an actor in their own mind but they’re not consciously aware of it.
But, more significantly, I would argue that all art exercises empathy, because it’s the projection of one individual’s imagination into another’s. Many artists, myself included, feel it’s their duty to put the reader or their audience in someone else’s shoes. It’s no surprise to me that art flourishes in all human societies and is often the most resilient endeavour when oppression is dominant.
But, more significant to the topic at hand, empathy and happiness are inseparable in my view. Contrary to some people’s beliefs and political ideologies, one rarely, if ever, gains happiness over another person’s suffering. Hence the message of Fox’s essay: peace and compassion go hand in hand.
The theme of Russell’s thesis (as revealed by O’Dwyer) and the message illuminated by George Vaillant below are exactly the same. We don’t find happiness in self-obsession, but in its opposite: the ability to empathise and give love to others.
Saturday, 14 August 2010
How to create an imaginary, believable world.
Earlier this week (last Tuesday, in fact) I was invited to take a U3A class as a 'guest speaker', with the title of this post as the topic. I was invited by Shirley Randles, whom I already knew (see below). In preparation, I wrote out the following, even though I had no intention of reading it out; just an exercise to collect my thoughts. As it turned out, Shirley wasn't able to attend due to a family illness, and the 'talk' became a free-form discussion that made the 1+3/4 hrs go very quickly. In the last 15-20 minutes, I gave them a short writing exercise, which everyone seemed to enjoy and perform admirably.
Some of you may have read a post I wrote last year on Storytelling, so there is some repetition, though a different emphasis, in this post.
Firstly, I want to thank Shirley for inviting me to come and talk. I just want to say that I’m not a bestselling author, or even a prolific writer. But I have given courses in creative writing and Shirley interviewed me a few years back and liked what I write and liked what I had to say as well.
Science fiction and fantasy are my genres, but what I have to say applies to all genres, because all fiction involves immersing your reader in an imaginary world. And if that world is not believable then you won’t engage them. We call it suspension of disbelief. It’s very similar to being in a dream, because, whilst we are in a dream, we believe it totally, even though, when we awake and analyse it, it defies our common sense view of the world. And I will come back to the dream analogy later, because I think it’s more than a coincidence; I think that stories are the language of dreams.
There are 3 components to all stories: character, plot and world. I don’t know if any of you saw the PIXAR exhibition a couple of years ago at ACMI, but it was broken down into those 3 areas, only they called plot ‘story’. Now, everyone knows about plot and character, but most people don’t pay much attention to world. It is largely seen as a sub-component of plot. But I make the distinction, if for no other reason, than they all require different skills as a writer.
But I’m going to talk about plot and character first, because the world only makes sense in the context of the other two. And also, character and plot are very important components in making a story believable.
It is through character that a reader is engaged. The character, especially the protagonist, is your window into a story. In fact, I think character is the most important component of all. When I think of an idea for a story, it always comes with the character foremost. I can’t speak for other writers, but, for me, the character invariably comes with the initial idea.
All stories are an interaction between plot and character, and I have a particular philosophical view on this. The character and plot are the inner and outer world of the story, and this has a direct parallel in real life. We all, individually, have an inner and outer world, and, in life, the outer world is fate and the inner world is free will. So, to me, fate and free will are not contradictory but complementary. Fate represents everything we have no control over and free will represents our own actions. So, in a story, the plot is synonymous to fate and character is synonymous to free will. Just like in real life, a character is challenged, shaped and changed by fate: the events that directly impact on him or her. And this is the fundamental secret to storytelling. The character in the story reacts to events, and, as a result, changes and, hopefully, grows.
Now, I’m going to take this analogy one step further, because, ideally, as a writer, I believe you should give your characters free will. As Colleen McCullough once said, you play God in that you create all the obstacles and hurdles for your characters to deal with, but, for me, the creative process only works when the characters take on a life of their own.
To explain what I mean, I will quote the famous artist, M.C. Escher: "While drawing I sometimes feel as if I were a spiritualist medium, controlled by the creatures I am conjuring up." Now, I think most artists have experienced this at some point, but especially writers. When you are in the zone (to use a sporting reference) you can feel like you are channeling a character. I call it a Zen experience. Richard Tognetti, the virtuoso violinist with the ACO (Australian Chamber Orchestra) once made the comment that it’s like ‘you’re not there’, which I thought summed it up perfectly. Strange as it may sound, the best writing you will ever do is when your ego is not involved – you are just a medium, as Escher so eloquently put it.
There is a philosophical debate amongst writers about whether to outline or not to outline. Most of the writers I’ve met, argue that you shouldn’t, whereas most books you read on the topic argue that you should. Both Peter Temple and Peter Corris argue that you shouldn’t. Stephen King is contemptuous of anyone who does an outline, whereas J.K. Rowling famously plotted out all 7 novels of Harry Potter. My advice: you have to find what works for you.
Personally, I do an outline but it’s very broad brush – it’s like scaffolding that I follow. I found this technique through trial and error, and I suggest that anyone else should do the same. It’s what works for me and you have to find what works for you.
Now, I’m finally going to talk about world. After all, it’s what this talk is meant to be about, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. To create a believable world actually starts with character in my opinion. The more real your characters are, the more likely you are to engage your readers. This is why books like Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series are so successful, even though the worlds and the plots they describe are so fantastical.
All works of fiction are a combination of reality and fantasy, and how you mix them varies according to genre. But grounding a story in a believable character is not only the easiest method, it’s also the most successful. The quickest way to break the spell in a story, for me, is to make the character do something completely out of character. So-called reversals, where the hero suddenly turns out to be the villain are the cheapest of plot devices as far as I am concerned. There are exceptions, and to give one example: Snape in Harry Potter is actually a ‘double-agent’ so his reversal is totally believable, and when we learn about it, a lot of things suddenly make sense. Also, having a character who is not what they appear to be is not what I am talking about here. Ideally, a character reveals themselves gradually over the story, and can even change and grow, as I described above, but a complete reversal is a lot harder to swallow, especially when it’s done as a final ‘twist’ to dupe the reader.
The first thing to know about world is to understand what it is not. It is not just background or setting; it’s an interactive component of the story. One of the things that distinguishes fiction from non-fiction is the message, because the message is always emotive in fiction. You have to engage the reader emotionally and that includes the world. There are 5 narrative styles that I am aware of, though some people may contend that there are less or more. Basically, they are description, exposition, dialogue, action and introspection. By introspection I mean what’s going on inside the character’s head. Most books on writing will tell you that exposition is the most boring, but I disagree. I think that description is the most boring – it’s the part of the text that readers will skip over to get on with the story.
If you read the classics from the 19th century and even early, or not-so-early, 20th century you will find that writers would describe scenes in great detail. TV and movies changed all that, for 2 reasons. One, we became more impatient, and two, cinema and video eliminated completely the need for description. So novels started to develop a shorthand whereby scenes are more like impressionists' paintings. But what’s more important, when you set up a scene, is to create atmosphere and mood, because that’s what engages the reader emotionally.
And here I return to my earlier reference to dreams, because I believe that dreams are our primal language. The language of dreams is imagery and emotion, and that’s also the language of story. The reason I believe that written stories (as opposed to cinema) facilitate imagery in our minds is because we do it in our dreams. The medium for a novel is not the words on the page but the reader’s imagination. You have to engage the reader’s imagination, otherwise the story is lifeless, just words on a page.
One final point, which brings me back to character. If you tell the story from a character’s point of view, then you engage that character’s emotions and senses. So if you relate a scene through the character’s eyes, ears, nose and touch, then you overcome the boredom of description more readily.
Some of you may have read a post I wrote last year on Storytelling, so there is some repetition, though a different emphasis, in this post.
Firstly, I want to thank Shirley for inviting me to come and talk. I just want to say that I’m not a bestselling author, or even a prolific writer. But I have given courses in creative writing and Shirley interviewed me a few years back and liked what I write and liked what I had to say as well.
Science fiction and fantasy are my genres, but what I have to say applies to all genres, because all fiction involves immersing your reader in an imaginary world. And if that world is not believable then you won’t engage them. We call it suspension of disbelief. It’s very similar to being in a dream, because, whilst we are in a dream, we believe it totally, even though, when we awake and analyse it, it defies our common sense view of the world. And I will come back to the dream analogy later, because I think it’s more than a coincidence; I think that stories are the language of dreams.
There are 3 components to all stories: character, plot and world. I don’t know if any of you saw the PIXAR exhibition a couple of years ago at ACMI, but it was broken down into those 3 areas, only they called plot ‘story’. Now, everyone knows about plot and character, but most people don’t pay much attention to world. It is largely seen as a sub-component of plot. But I make the distinction, if for no other reason, than they all require different skills as a writer.
But I’m going to talk about plot and character first, because the world only makes sense in the context of the other two. And also, character and plot are very important components in making a story believable.
It is through character that a reader is engaged. The character, especially the protagonist, is your window into a story. In fact, I think character is the most important component of all. When I think of an idea for a story, it always comes with the character foremost. I can’t speak for other writers, but, for me, the character invariably comes with the initial idea.
All stories are an interaction between plot and character, and I have a particular philosophical view on this. The character and plot are the inner and outer world of the story, and this has a direct parallel in real life. We all, individually, have an inner and outer world, and, in life, the outer world is fate and the inner world is free will. So, to me, fate and free will are not contradictory but complementary. Fate represents everything we have no control over and free will represents our own actions. So, in a story, the plot is synonymous to fate and character is synonymous to free will. Just like in real life, a character is challenged, shaped and changed by fate: the events that directly impact on him or her. And this is the fundamental secret to storytelling. The character in the story reacts to events, and, as a result, changes and, hopefully, grows.
Now, I’m going to take this analogy one step further, because, ideally, as a writer, I believe you should give your characters free will. As Colleen McCullough once said, you play God in that you create all the obstacles and hurdles for your characters to deal with, but, for me, the creative process only works when the characters take on a life of their own.
To explain what I mean, I will quote the famous artist, M.C. Escher: "While drawing I sometimes feel as if I were a spiritualist medium, controlled by the creatures I am conjuring up." Now, I think most artists have experienced this at some point, but especially writers. When you are in the zone (to use a sporting reference) you can feel like you are channeling a character. I call it a Zen experience. Richard Tognetti, the virtuoso violinist with the ACO (Australian Chamber Orchestra) once made the comment that it’s like ‘you’re not there’, which I thought summed it up perfectly. Strange as it may sound, the best writing you will ever do is when your ego is not involved – you are just a medium, as Escher so eloquently put it.
There is a philosophical debate amongst writers about whether to outline or not to outline. Most of the writers I’ve met, argue that you shouldn’t, whereas most books you read on the topic argue that you should. Both Peter Temple and Peter Corris argue that you shouldn’t. Stephen King is contemptuous of anyone who does an outline, whereas J.K. Rowling famously plotted out all 7 novels of Harry Potter. My advice: you have to find what works for you.
Personally, I do an outline but it’s very broad brush – it’s like scaffolding that I follow. I found this technique through trial and error, and I suggest that anyone else should do the same. It’s what works for me and you have to find what works for you.
Now, I’m finally going to talk about world. After all, it’s what this talk is meant to be about, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. To create a believable world actually starts with character in my opinion. The more real your characters are, the more likely you are to engage your readers. This is why books like Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series are so successful, even though the worlds and the plots they describe are so fantastical.
All works of fiction are a combination of reality and fantasy, and how you mix them varies according to genre. But grounding a story in a believable character is not only the easiest method, it’s also the most successful. The quickest way to break the spell in a story, for me, is to make the character do something completely out of character. So-called reversals, where the hero suddenly turns out to be the villain are the cheapest of plot devices as far as I am concerned. There are exceptions, and to give one example: Snape in Harry Potter is actually a ‘double-agent’ so his reversal is totally believable, and when we learn about it, a lot of things suddenly make sense. Also, having a character who is not what they appear to be is not what I am talking about here. Ideally, a character reveals themselves gradually over the story, and can even change and grow, as I described above, but a complete reversal is a lot harder to swallow, especially when it’s done as a final ‘twist’ to dupe the reader.
The first thing to know about world is to understand what it is not. It is not just background or setting; it’s an interactive component of the story. One of the things that distinguishes fiction from non-fiction is the message, because the message is always emotive in fiction. You have to engage the reader emotionally and that includes the world. There are 5 narrative styles that I am aware of, though some people may contend that there are less or more. Basically, they are description, exposition, dialogue, action and introspection. By introspection I mean what’s going on inside the character’s head. Most books on writing will tell you that exposition is the most boring, but I disagree. I think that description is the most boring – it’s the part of the text that readers will skip over to get on with the story.
If you read the classics from the 19th century and even early, or not-so-early, 20th century you will find that writers would describe scenes in great detail. TV and movies changed all that, for 2 reasons. One, we became more impatient, and two, cinema and video eliminated completely the need for description. So novels started to develop a shorthand whereby scenes are more like impressionists' paintings. But what’s more important, when you set up a scene, is to create atmosphere and mood, because that’s what engages the reader emotionally.
And here I return to my earlier reference to dreams, because I believe that dreams are our primal language. The language of dreams is imagery and emotion, and that’s also the language of story. The reason I believe that written stories (as opposed to cinema) facilitate imagery in our minds is because we do it in our dreams. The medium for a novel is not the words on the page but the reader’s imagination. You have to engage the reader’s imagination, otherwise the story is lifeless, just words on a page.
One final point, which brings me back to character. If you tell the story from a character’s point of view, then you engage that character’s emotions and senses. So if you relate a scene through the character’s eyes, ears, nose and touch, then you overcome the boredom of description more readily.
Friday, 23 July 2010
The enigma we call time
The June 2010 edition of Scientific American had an article called Is Time an Illusion? The article was written by Craig Callendar, who is a ‘philosophy professor at the University of California, San Diego’, and explains how 20th Century physics has all but explained time away. In fact, according to him, some scientists believe it has. It reminds me of how many scientists believe that free will and consciousness have been explained away as well, or, if not, then the terms have passed their use-by-date. I once had a brief correspondence with Peter Watson who wrote A Terrible Beauty, an extraordinarily well-researched and well-written book that attempts to cover the great minds and great ideas of the 20th Century, mostly in art and science, rather than politics and history. He contended that words like imagination and mind were no longer meaningful because they referred to an inner state of which we have no real understanding. He effectively argued that everything we contemplate as ‘internal’ is really dependent on our ‘external’ world, including the language we used to express it. But I’m getting off the track before I’ve even started. My point is that time, like consciousness and free will, and even imagination, are all experiences that we all have, which makes them as real as any empirically derived quantity that we know.
But isn’t time an empirically derived quantity as well? Well, that’s effectively the subject of Callendar’s essay. Attempts to rewrite Einstein’s theory of general relativity (gravity) in the same form as electromagnetism, as John Wheeler and Bryce De-Witt did in the late 1960s, resulted in an equation where time (denoted as t) simply disappeared. As Callendar explains, time is the real stumbling block to any attempt at a theory for quantum gravity, which attempts to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general relativity. According to the theory of relativity, time is completely dependent on the observer, where the perceived sequence of events can differ from one observer to another depending on their relative positions and velocities, though causality is always conserved. On the other hand, quantum mechanics, through entanglement, can defy Einstein’s equations altogether (see my post on Entanglement, Jan 2010).
But let’s start with our experience of time, since it entails our entire life, from the moment we start storing memories up to our death. And this storing of memories is a crucial point, otherwise we’d have no sense of time at all, no sense of past or future, just a continuous present. Oliver Sacks, in his book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, tells the story of a man who suffered retrograde amnesia (The lost mariner) through excessive alcoholism, and in the 1970s when Sacks met him, still thought he was living in 1949 or thereabouts when he left the navy after WW2. The man was unable to create new memories so that he was effectively stuck in time, at least psychologically.
Kant famously argued in his Critique of Pure Reason, that both time and space were projections of the human mind. Personally, I always had a problem with Kant’s thesis on this subject, because I contend that both time and space exist independently of the human mind. In fact, they are the very fabric of the universe, but I’m getting ahead of myself again.
Without memory we would have no sense of the past and without imagination, no sense of the future. Brian Boyd, in his book The Origin of Stories (see my review called Storytelling, July 2009) referenced neurological evidence to explain how we use the same parts of the brain when we envisage the past as we do when we envisage the future. In both cases, we create the scenario in our mind, so how do we tell the difference?
Raymond Tallis, who writes a regular column in Philosophy Now (Tallis in Wonderland), wrote a very insightful essay in the April/May 2010 edition (the Is God really Dead? issue) ‘on the true mystery of memory’, where he explains the fundamental difference between memory in humans and memory in computers. It is impossible for me to do justice to such a brilliant essay, but effectively he questions how does the neuron or neurons, that supposedly store the memory, know or tell us when the memory was made in a temporal sense, even though it is something that we all intuitively sense. On the other hand, memory in a computer simply has a date and time stamp on it, a label in effect, but is otherwise physically identical to when it was created.
In the case of the brain, it’s in the hippocampus, where long term memories are generated, new neurons are created when something eventful happens which ties events together. Long term memory is facilitated by association, and so is learning, which is why analogies and metaphors are so useful for comprehending new knowledge, but I’m getting off the track again.
The human brain, and any other brain, one expects, recreates the memory in our imagination so that it’s not always accurate and certainly lacks photographic detail, but somehow conjures up a sense of past, even distance in time. Why are we able to distinguish this from an imaginary scenario that has never actually happened? Of course we can’t always, and false memories have been clinically demonstrated to occur.
Have you ever noticed that in dreams (see previous post), we experience a continuous present? Our dreams never have a history and never a future, they just happen, and often morph into a new scenario in such a way that any dislocation in time is not even registered, except when we wake up and try to recall them. Sometimes in a dream, I have a sense of memory attached to it, like I’ve had the dream before, yet when I wake up that sense is immediately lost. I wonder if this is what happens when people experience déjà vu (when they’re awake of course). I’ve had episodes of TGA (Transient Global Amnesia) where one’s thoughts seem to go in loops. It’s very disorienting, even scary, and the first time I experienced this, I described it to my GP as being like ‘memories from the future’, which made him seriously consider referring me to a psychiatrist.
So time, as we experience it, is intrinsically related to memory, yet there is another way we experience time, all the time, at least while we are conscious. And it is this ‘other way’ that made me challenge Kant’s thesis, when I first read it and was asked to write an essay on it. All animals, with sight, experience time through their eyes, because our eyes record the world quite literally as it passes us by, in so many frames a second. In the case of humans it’s twenty something. Movies and television need to have a higher frequency (24 from memory) in order for us to see movement fluidly. But many birds have a higher rate than us, so they would see a TV as jerky. When we see small birds flick their heads about in quick movement, they would see the same movement as fluid, which is why they can catch insects in mid-flight and we haven’t got Buckley’s. The point is that we literally see time, but different species see time at different rates.
We all know that our very existence in this world, on a cosmic scale, is just a blink, and a subliminal blink at that. On the scale of the universe at large, we barely register. Yet think upon this: without consciousness, time might as well not exist, because without consciousness the idea of a past or future is irrelevant, arguably non-existent. In this sense, Kant was right. It is only consciousness that has a sense of past and future; certainly nothing inanimate has a sense of past and future, even if it exists in a causal relationship with something else.
But of course, we believe that time does exist without consciousness, because we believe the universe had a cosmic history long before consciousness even evolved and will continue to exist long after the planet, upon which we are dependent for our very existence, and the sun, upon which we are dependent for all our needs, both cease to exist.
There has been one term that keeps cropping up in this dissertation, which has time written all over it, and it’s called causality. Causality is totally independent of the human mind or any other mind (I’m not going to argue about the ‘mind of God’). Causality, which we not only witness every day, but is intrinsic to all physical phenomena, is the greatest evidence we have that time is real. Even Einstein’s theories of relativity, which, as Callendar argues, effectively dismisses the idea of a universal time (or absolute time) still allow for causality.
David Hume famously challenged our common sense view of causality, arguing that it can never be proven; only that one event has followed another. John Searle gives the best counter-argument I’ve read, in his book, Mind, but I won’t digress as both of their arguments are outside the scope of this topic. However, every animal that pursues its own food believes in causality, even if they don’t think about it the way philosophers do. Causality only makes sense if time exists, so if causality is a real phenomenon then so is time. I might add that causality is also a lynch pin of physics, otherwise conservation of momentum suddenly becomes a non sequitur.
My knowledge of relativity theory and quantum mechanics is very rudimentary, to say the least, nevertheless I believe I know enough to explain a few basic principles. In a way, light replaces time in relativity theory; that’s because, for a ray of light, time really does not exist. For a photon, time is always zero – it only becomes a temporal entity for an observer who either receives it or transmits it. That is why light is always the shortest distance between 2 events, whether you want to travel between them or send a message. Einstein’s great revelation was to appreciate that this effectively turned time into a dimension that was commensurate with a spatial dimension. Equations for space-time include a term that is the speed of light multiplied by time, which effectively gives another dimension in addition to the other 3 dimensions of space that we are familiar with. You can literally see this dimension of time when you look at a night sky or peer through an astronomical telescope, because the stars you are observing are not only separated from us by space but also by time – thousands of years in fact.
But quantum mechanics is even more bizarre and difficult to reconcile with our common-or-garden view of the world. A lot of quantum weirdness stems from the fact that under certain conditions, like quantum tunneling and entanglement, time and space seem to become irrelevant. Entanglement implies that instantaneous connections are possible, across any distance, completely contrary to the restraints of relativity that I described above (see addendum below). And quantum tunneling also disregards relativity theory, where time can literally disappear, albeit temporarily and within energy constraints (refer my post, Oct.09).
But relativity and quantum mechanics are not the end of the story of time in physics; there is another aspect, which is perhaps even more intriguing, because it gives us the well-known arrow of time. Last year I wrote a review of Erwin Schrodinger’s book, What is Life? (Nov.09), a recommended read to anyone with an interest in philosophy or science. In it, Schrodinger reveals that one of his heroes was Ludwig Boltzmann, and it was Boltzmann, who elucidated for us, the second law of thermodynamics, otherwise known as entropy. It is entropy that apparently drives the arrow of time, as Penrose, Feynman and Schrodinger have all pointed out in various books aimed at laypeople, like myself. But it was Penrose who first explained it to me (in The Emperor’s New Mind) that whilst both relativity theory and quantum mechanics allow for time reversal, entropy does not.
Callendar, very early in his Scientific American article, posits the idea that time may be an emergent property of the universe, and entropy seems to fit that role. Entropy is why you can’t reconstitute an egg into its original form after you’ve dropped it on the floor, broken its shell and spilled all its contents into the carpet. You can run a film backwards showing a broken egg coming back together and rising from the floor with no trace of a stain on the carpet, but we immediately know it’s false. And that’s exactly what you would expect to see if time ran backwards, even though it never does. The two perceptions are related: entropy says that the egg can’t be recovered from its fall and so does the arrow of time; they are the same thing.
But Penrose, in his exposition, goes further, and explains that the entire cosmos follows this law, from the moment of the Big Bang until the death throes of the universe – it’s a universal law.
But this in itself begs another question: if a photon experiences zero time and the early universe (as well as its death) was just entirely radiation, where then is time? And without time, how did the universe evolve into a realm that is not entirely radiation. Well, there is a clue in the radiation itself, because all radiation has a frequency and from the frequency it has an energy, defined by Planck’s famous equation: E = hf. Where f is frequency and h is Planck’s constant. So the very equation, that gives us the energy of the universe, also entails time, because frequency is meaningless without time. But if photons have zero time, how is this possible? Also, if any particle approaches the same velocity as the photon, so does its time approach zero. And this happens when something falls into a black hole, so it becomes frozen in time to an external observer. Perhaps there is more than one type of time. A relativistic time that varies from one observer to another (this is a known fact, because the accuracy of GPS signals transmitted from satellites are dependent on it) and an entropic time that drives the entire universe and stops time from running backwards, thus ensuring causality is never violated. And what of time in quantum mechanics? Well, quantum mechanics hints that there is something about our universe that we still don’t know or understand, and to (mis)quote Wittgenstein: Of that which one does not know, one should not speak.
Addendum: Timmo, who is a real physicist, has pointed out that my comment on entanglement could be misconstrued. Specifically, entanglement does not allow faster-than-light communication. For a more comprehensive discussion on entanglement, I refer you to an earlier post.
Addendum 2: I revisited this topic in Oct. 2011 with a post, Where does time go? (in quantum mechanics).
But isn’t time an empirically derived quantity as well? Well, that’s effectively the subject of Callendar’s essay. Attempts to rewrite Einstein’s theory of general relativity (gravity) in the same form as electromagnetism, as John Wheeler and Bryce De-Witt did in the late 1960s, resulted in an equation where time (denoted as t) simply disappeared. As Callendar explains, time is the real stumbling block to any attempt at a theory for quantum gravity, which attempts to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general relativity. According to the theory of relativity, time is completely dependent on the observer, where the perceived sequence of events can differ from one observer to another depending on their relative positions and velocities, though causality is always conserved. On the other hand, quantum mechanics, through entanglement, can defy Einstein’s equations altogether (see my post on Entanglement, Jan 2010).
But let’s start with our experience of time, since it entails our entire life, from the moment we start storing memories up to our death. And this storing of memories is a crucial point, otherwise we’d have no sense of time at all, no sense of past or future, just a continuous present. Oliver Sacks, in his book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, tells the story of a man who suffered retrograde amnesia (The lost mariner) through excessive alcoholism, and in the 1970s when Sacks met him, still thought he was living in 1949 or thereabouts when he left the navy after WW2. The man was unable to create new memories so that he was effectively stuck in time, at least psychologically.
Kant famously argued in his Critique of Pure Reason, that both time and space were projections of the human mind. Personally, I always had a problem with Kant’s thesis on this subject, because I contend that both time and space exist independently of the human mind. In fact, they are the very fabric of the universe, but I’m getting ahead of myself again.
Without memory we would have no sense of the past and without imagination, no sense of the future. Brian Boyd, in his book The Origin of Stories (see my review called Storytelling, July 2009) referenced neurological evidence to explain how we use the same parts of the brain when we envisage the past as we do when we envisage the future. In both cases, we create the scenario in our mind, so how do we tell the difference?
Raymond Tallis, who writes a regular column in Philosophy Now (Tallis in Wonderland), wrote a very insightful essay in the April/May 2010 edition (the Is God really Dead? issue) ‘on the true mystery of memory’, where he explains the fundamental difference between memory in humans and memory in computers. It is impossible for me to do justice to such a brilliant essay, but effectively he questions how does the neuron or neurons, that supposedly store the memory, know or tell us when the memory was made in a temporal sense, even though it is something that we all intuitively sense. On the other hand, memory in a computer simply has a date and time stamp on it, a label in effect, but is otherwise physically identical to when it was created.
In the case of the brain, it’s in the hippocampus, where long term memories are generated, new neurons are created when something eventful happens which ties events together. Long term memory is facilitated by association, and so is learning, which is why analogies and metaphors are so useful for comprehending new knowledge, but I’m getting off the track again.
The human brain, and any other brain, one expects, recreates the memory in our imagination so that it’s not always accurate and certainly lacks photographic detail, but somehow conjures up a sense of past, even distance in time. Why are we able to distinguish this from an imaginary scenario that has never actually happened? Of course we can’t always, and false memories have been clinically demonstrated to occur.
Have you ever noticed that in dreams (see previous post), we experience a continuous present? Our dreams never have a history and never a future, they just happen, and often morph into a new scenario in such a way that any dislocation in time is not even registered, except when we wake up and try to recall them. Sometimes in a dream, I have a sense of memory attached to it, like I’ve had the dream before, yet when I wake up that sense is immediately lost. I wonder if this is what happens when people experience déjà vu (when they’re awake of course). I’ve had episodes of TGA (Transient Global Amnesia) where one’s thoughts seem to go in loops. It’s very disorienting, even scary, and the first time I experienced this, I described it to my GP as being like ‘memories from the future’, which made him seriously consider referring me to a psychiatrist.
So time, as we experience it, is intrinsically related to memory, yet there is another way we experience time, all the time, at least while we are conscious. And it is this ‘other way’ that made me challenge Kant’s thesis, when I first read it and was asked to write an essay on it. All animals, with sight, experience time through their eyes, because our eyes record the world quite literally as it passes us by, in so many frames a second. In the case of humans it’s twenty something. Movies and television need to have a higher frequency (24 from memory) in order for us to see movement fluidly. But many birds have a higher rate than us, so they would see a TV as jerky. When we see small birds flick their heads about in quick movement, they would see the same movement as fluid, which is why they can catch insects in mid-flight and we haven’t got Buckley’s. The point is that we literally see time, but different species see time at different rates.
We all know that our very existence in this world, on a cosmic scale, is just a blink, and a subliminal blink at that. On the scale of the universe at large, we barely register. Yet think upon this: without consciousness, time might as well not exist, because without consciousness the idea of a past or future is irrelevant, arguably non-existent. In this sense, Kant was right. It is only consciousness that has a sense of past and future; certainly nothing inanimate has a sense of past and future, even if it exists in a causal relationship with something else.
But of course, we believe that time does exist without consciousness, because we believe the universe had a cosmic history long before consciousness even evolved and will continue to exist long after the planet, upon which we are dependent for our very existence, and the sun, upon which we are dependent for all our needs, both cease to exist.
There has been one term that keeps cropping up in this dissertation, which has time written all over it, and it’s called causality. Causality is totally independent of the human mind or any other mind (I’m not going to argue about the ‘mind of God’). Causality, which we not only witness every day, but is intrinsic to all physical phenomena, is the greatest evidence we have that time is real. Even Einstein’s theories of relativity, which, as Callendar argues, effectively dismisses the idea of a universal time (or absolute time) still allow for causality.
David Hume famously challenged our common sense view of causality, arguing that it can never be proven; only that one event has followed another. John Searle gives the best counter-argument I’ve read, in his book, Mind, but I won’t digress as both of their arguments are outside the scope of this topic. However, every animal that pursues its own food believes in causality, even if they don’t think about it the way philosophers do. Causality only makes sense if time exists, so if causality is a real phenomenon then so is time. I might add that causality is also a lynch pin of physics, otherwise conservation of momentum suddenly becomes a non sequitur.
My knowledge of relativity theory and quantum mechanics is very rudimentary, to say the least, nevertheless I believe I know enough to explain a few basic principles. In a way, light replaces time in relativity theory; that’s because, for a ray of light, time really does not exist. For a photon, time is always zero – it only becomes a temporal entity for an observer who either receives it or transmits it. That is why light is always the shortest distance between 2 events, whether you want to travel between them or send a message. Einstein’s great revelation was to appreciate that this effectively turned time into a dimension that was commensurate with a spatial dimension. Equations for space-time include a term that is the speed of light multiplied by time, which effectively gives another dimension in addition to the other 3 dimensions of space that we are familiar with. You can literally see this dimension of time when you look at a night sky or peer through an astronomical telescope, because the stars you are observing are not only separated from us by space but also by time – thousands of years in fact.
But quantum mechanics is even more bizarre and difficult to reconcile with our common-or-garden view of the world. A lot of quantum weirdness stems from the fact that under certain conditions, like quantum tunneling and entanglement, time and space seem to become irrelevant. Entanglement implies that instantaneous connections are possible, across any distance, completely contrary to the restraints of relativity that I described above (see addendum below). And quantum tunneling also disregards relativity theory, where time can literally disappear, albeit temporarily and within energy constraints (refer my post, Oct.09).
But relativity and quantum mechanics are not the end of the story of time in physics; there is another aspect, which is perhaps even more intriguing, because it gives us the well-known arrow of time. Last year I wrote a review of Erwin Schrodinger’s book, What is Life? (Nov.09), a recommended read to anyone with an interest in philosophy or science. In it, Schrodinger reveals that one of his heroes was Ludwig Boltzmann, and it was Boltzmann, who elucidated for us, the second law of thermodynamics, otherwise known as entropy. It is entropy that apparently drives the arrow of time, as Penrose, Feynman and Schrodinger have all pointed out in various books aimed at laypeople, like myself. But it was Penrose who first explained it to me (in The Emperor’s New Mind) that whilst both relativity theory and quantum mechanics allow for time reversal, entropy does not.
Callendar, very early in his Scientific American article, posits the idea that time may be an emergent property of the universe, and entropy seems to fit that role. Entropy is why you can’t reconstitute an egg into its original form after you’ve dropped it on the floor, broken its shell and spilled all its contents into the carpet. You can run a film backwards showing a broken egg coming back together and rising from the floor with no trace of a stain on the carpet, but we immediately know it’s false. And that’s exactly what you would expect to see if time ran backwards, even though it never does. The two perceptions are related: entropy says that the egg can’t be recovered from its fall and so does the arrow of time; they are the same thing.
But Penrose, in his exposition, goes further, and explains that the entire cosmos follows this law, from the moment of the Big Bang until the death throes of the universe – it’s a universal law.
But this in itself begs another question: if a photon experiences zero time and the early universe (as well as its death) was just entirely radiation, where then is time? And without time, how did the universe evolve into a realm that is not entirely radiation. Well, there is a clue in the radiation itself, because all radiation has a frequency and from the frequency it has an energy, defined by Planck’s famous equation: E = hf. Where f is frequency and h is Planck’s constant. So the very equation, that gives us the energy of the universe, also entails time, because frequency is meaningless without time. But if photons have zero time, how is this possible? Also, if any particle approaches the same velocity as the photon, so does its time approach zero. And this happens when something falls into a black hole, so it becomes frozen in time to an external observer. Perhaps there is more than one type of time. A relativistic time that varies from one observer to another (this is a known fact, because the accuracy of GPS signals transmitted from satellites are dependent on it) and an entropic time that drives the entire universe and stops time from running backwards, thus ensuring causality is never violated. And what of time in quantum mechanics? Well, quantum mechanics hints that there is something about our universe that we still don’t know or understand, and to (mis)quote Wittgenstein: Of that which one does not know, one should not speak.
Addendum: Timmo, who is a real physicist, has pointed out that my comment on entanglement could be misconstrued. Specifically, entanglement does not allow faster-than-light communication. For a more comprehensive discussion on entanglement, I refer you to an earlier post.
Addendum 2: I revisited this topic in Oct. 2011 with a post, Where does time go? (in quantum mechanics).
Sunday, 20 June 2010
What dreams are made of
Last week’s New Scientist (12 June 2010) had a very interesting article on dreams, in particular ‘lucid dreaming’, by Jessica Hamzelou. She references numerous people: Ursula Voss (University of Franfurt), Patrick McNamara (Boston University), Allan Hobson (Harvard Medical School), Eric Nofzinger (University of Pittsburgh) Victor Spoormaker (Utrecht University) and Michael Czisch (Max Planck Institute); so it’s a serious topic all over the world.
Ursula Voss argues that there are 2 states of consciousness, which she calls primary and secondary. ‘Primary’ being what most animals perceive: raw sensations and emotions; whereas ‘secondary’ is unique to humans, according to Voss, because only humans are “aware of being aware”. This in itself is an interesting premise.
I don’t agree with the well-known supposition that most animals don’t have a sense of ‘self’ because they don’t recognise themselves in a mirror. Even New Scientist reported on challenges to this view many years ago (before I started blogging). The lack of recognition of one’s own reflection is obviously a cognitive misperception, but it doesn’t axiomatically mean that the animal doesn’t have a sense of its own individuality relative to other members of its own species, which is how I would define a sense of self. In other words, a sense of self is the ability to differentiate one’s self from others. The fact that it mistakenly perceives its own reflection as an ‘other’, doesn’t imply the converse: that it can’t distinguish its self from a genuine other – in fact, if anything, it confirms that cognitive ability, albeit erroneously.
That’s a slight detour to the main topic, nevertheless it’s relevant, because I believe it’s not what Voss is referring to, which is our ability ‘to reflect upon ourselves and our feelings’. It’s hard to imagine that any animal can contemplate upon its own thoughts the way we do. What makes us unique, cognitively, is our ability to create concepts within concepts ad infinitum, which is why I can write an essay like this, but no other primate can. I always thought this was my own personal philosophical insight until I read Godel Escher Bach and realised that Douglas Hofstadter had reached it many years before. And, as Hofstadter would point out, it’s this very ability which allows us to look at ourselves almost objectively, just as we do others, that we call self-contemplation. If this is what Voss is referring to, when she talks about ‘secondary consciousness’, then I would probably agree with her premise.
So what has this to do with dreams? Well, one of the aspects of dreams, that distinguishes them from reality, is that they defy rational expectations, yet we seem totally acceptant of this. Voss contends that it’s because we lose our ‘secondary’ consciousness during dreaming that we lose our rational radar, so to speak (my turn of phrase, not hers).
The article argues that with lucid dreaming we can get our secondary consciousness back, and there is some neurological evidence to support this conjecture, but I’m getting ahead of myself. For those who haven’t come across the term before, lucid dreaming is the ability to take conscious control of one’s dream. In effect, one becomes aware that one is dreaming. Hamzelou even provides a 5-step procedure to induce lucid dreams.
Now, from personal experience, any time I’ve realised I’m dreaming, it immediately pops me out of the dream. Nevertheless, I believe I’ve experienced lucid dreaming, or at least, a form of it. According to Patrick McNamara (Boston University), our dream life goes down hill as we age, especially once we’ve passed adolescence. Well, I have a very rich dream life, virtually every night, but then I’ve learnt, from anecdotal evidence at least, that storytellers seem to dream more or recall them more than other people do. I’d be interested if there was any hard evidence to support this.
Certainly, storytellers understand the connection between story and dreaming, because, like stories, dreams put us in situations that we don’t face everyday. In fact, it has been argued that dreams evolutionary purpose was to remind us that the world can be a dangerous place. But I’m getting off the track again, because, as a storyteller, I believe that my stories come from the same place that my dreams do. In other words, in my dreams I meet all sorts of characters that I would never meet in real life, and have experiences that I would never have in real life. But I’ve long been aware that there are 2 parts to my dream: one part being generated by some unknown source and the other part being my subjective experience of it. In the dream, I behave as a conscious being, just as I would in the real world, and I wonder if this is what is meant by lucid dreaming. Likewise, when one is writing a story, there is often a sense that it comes from an unknown source, and you consciously inhabit the character who is experiencing it. Which is exactly what actors do, by the way, only the dream they are inhabiting is a movie set or a stage.
Neurological studies have shown that there is one area of the brain that shuts down during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep which is the signature behavioural symptom of dreaming. The ‘dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was remarkably subdued during REM sleep, compared with during wakefulness.’ Allan Hobson (Harvard) believes that this is our rationality filter (again, my term, not his) because its inactivity correlates with our acceptance of completely irrational and dislocated events. Neurological studies of lucid dreams have been difficult to capture, but one intriguing finding has been an increase in a specific brainwave at 40 hertz in the frontal regions. In fact, the neurological studies done so far, point to brain activity being somewhere in between normal REM sleep and full wakefulness. The studies aren’t sensitive enough to determine if the DLFPC plays a role in lucid dreams or not, but the 40 hertz brainwave is certainly more characteristic of wakefulness.
To me, dreams are what-if scenarios, and are opportunities to gain self-knowledge. I’ve long believed that one can learn from one’s dreams, not in a Jungian or Freudian sense, but more pragmatically. I’ve always believed that the way I behave in a dream simulates the way I would behave in real life. If I behave in a way that I’m not comfortable with, it makes me contemplate ways of self-improvement. Dreams allow us to face situations that we might not want to confront in reality. It’s our ability for self-reflection, that Voss calls secondary consciousness, that makes dreams valuable tools for self-knowledge. Stories often serve the same purpose. A story that really impacts on us, is usually one that confronts issues relevant to our lives, or makes us aware of issues we prefer to ignore. In this sense, both dreams and stories can be a good antidote for denial.
Ursula Voss argues that there are 2 states of consciousness, which she calls primary and secondary. ‘Primary’ being what most animals perceive: raw sensations and emotions; whereas ‘secondary’ is unique to humans, according to Voss, because only humans are “aware of being aware”. This in itself is an interesting premise.
I don’t agree with the well-known supposition that most animals don’t have a sense of ‘self’ because they don’t recognise themselves in a mirror. Even New Scientist reported on challenges to this view many years ago (before I started blogging). The lack of recognition of one’s own reflection is obviously a cognitive misperception, but it doesn’t axiomatically mean that the animal doesn’t have a sense of its own individuality relative to other members of its own species, which is how I would define a sense of self. In other words, a sense of self is the ability to differentiate one’s self from others. The fact that it mistakenly perceives its own reflection as an ‘other’, doesn’t imply the converse: that it can’t distinguish its self from a genuine other – in fact, if anything, it confirms that cognitive ability, albeit erroneously.
That’s a slight detour to the main topic, nevertheless it’s relevant, because I believe it’s not what Voss is referring to, which is our ability ‘to reflect upon ourselves and our feelings’. It’s hard to imagine that any animal can contemplate upon its own thoughts the way we do. What makes us unique, cognitively, is our ability to create concepts within concepts ad infinitum, which is why I can write an essay like this, but no other primate can. I always thought this was my own personal philosophical insight until I read Godel Escher Bach and realised that Douglas Hofstadter had reached it many years before. And, as Hofstadter would point out, it’s this very ability which allows us to look at ourselves almost objectively, just as we do others, that we call self-contemplation. If this is what Voss is referring to, when she talks about ‘secondary consciousness’, then I would probably agree with her premise.
So what has this to do with dreams? Well, one of the aspects of dreams, that distinguishes them from reality, is that they defy rational expectations, yet we seem totally acceptant of this. Voss contends that it’s because we lose our ‘secondary’ consciousness during dreaming that we lose our rational radar, so to speak (my turn of phrase, not hers).
The article argues that with lucid dreaming we can get our secondary consciousness back, and there is some neurological evidence to support this conjecture, but I’m getting ahead of myself. For those who haven’t come across the term before, lucid dreaming is the ability to take conscious control of one’s dream. In effect, one becomes aware that one is dreaming. Hamzelou even provides a 5-step procedure to induce lucid dreams.
Now, from personal experience, any time I’ve realised I’m dreaming, it immediately pops me out of the dream. Nevertheless, I believe I’ve experienced lucid dreaming, or at least, a form of it. According to Patrick McNamara (Boston University), our dream life goes down hill as we age, especially once we’ve passed adolescence. Well, I have a very rich dream life, virtually every night, but then I’ve learnt, from anecdotal evidence at least, that storytellers seem to dream more or recall them more than other people do. I’d be interested if there was any hard evidence to support this.
Certainly, storytellers understand the connection between story and dreaming, because, like stories, dreams put us in situations that we don’t face everyday. In fact, it has been argued that dreams evolutionary purpose was to remind us that the world can be a dangerous place. But I’m getting off the track again, because, as a storyteller, I believe that my stories come from the same place that my dreams do. In other words, in my dreams I meet all sorts of characters that I would never meet in real life, and have experiences that I would never have in real life. But I’ve long been aware that there are 2 parts to my dream: one part being generated by some unknown source and the other part being my subjective experience of it. In the dream, I behave as a conscious being, just as I would in the real world, and I wonder if this is what is meant by lucid dreaming. Likewise, when one is writing a story, there is often a sense that it comes from an unknown source, and you consciously inhabit the character who is experiencing it. Which is exactly what actors do, by the way, only the dream they are inhabiting is a movie set or a stage.
Neurological studies have shown that there is one area of the brain that shuts down during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep which is the signature behavioural symptom of dreaming. The ‘dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was remarkably subdued during REM sleep, compared with during wakefulness.’ Allan Hobson (Harvard) believes that this is our rationality filter (again, my term, not his) because its inactivity correlates with our acceptance of completely irrational and dislocated events. Neurological studies of lucid dreams have been difficult to capture, but one intriguing finding has been an increase in a specific brainwave at 40 hertz in the frontal regions. In fact, the neurological studies done so far, point to brain activity being somewhere in between normal REM sleep and full wakefulness. The studies aren’t sensitive enough to determine if the DLFPC plays a role in lucid dreams or not, but the 40 hertz brainwave is certainly more characteristic of wakefulness.
To me, dreams are what-if scenarios, and are opportunities to gain self-knowledge. I’ve long believed that one can learn from one’s dreams, not in a Jungian or Freudian sense, but more pragmatically. I’ve always believed that the way I behave in a dream simulates the way I would behave in real life. If I behave in a way that I’m not comfortable with, it makes me contemplate ways of self-improvement. Dreams allow us to face situations that we might not want to confront in reality. It’s our ability for self-reflection, that Voss calls secondary consciousness, that makes dreams valuable tools for self-knowledge. Stories often serve the same purpose. A story that really impacts on us, is usually one that confronts issues relevant to our lives, or makes us aware of issues we prefer to ignore. In this sense, both dreams and stories can be a good antidote for denial.
Sunday, 23 May 2010
Why religion is not the root of all evil
I heard an interview with William Dalrymple last week (19 May 2010, Sydney time) who is currently attending the Sydney Writers’ Festival. The interview centred around his latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.
Dalrymple was born in Edinburgh but has traveled widely in India and the book apparently examines the lives of nine religious followers in India. I haven’t read the book myself, but, following the interview, I’m tempted to seek it out.
As the title of his book suggests, Dalrymple appears fascinated with the religious in general, although he gave no indication in the interview what his own beliefs may be. His knowledge of India’s religions seems extensive and there are a couple of points he raised which I found relevant to the West’s perspective on Eastern religions and the current antagonistic attitudes towards religious issues: Islam, in particular.
As I say, I haven’t read the book, but the gist of it, according to the interview, is that he interviewed nine people, who lead distinctly different cultural lives in India, and wrote a chapter on each one. One of the points he raised, which I found relevant to my own viewpoint, is the idea that God exists inside us and not out there. This is something that I’ve discussed before and I don’t wish to dwell on here, but he inferred that the idea can be found in Sufism as well as Hinduism. It should be pointed out, by the way, that there is not one Hindu religion, and, in fact, Hinduism is really a collection of religions, that the West tend to put all in one conceptual basket. Dalrymple remarked on the similarity between Islamic Sufism and some types of Hinduism, which have flourished in India. In particular, he pointed out that the Sufis are the strongest opponents of Wahhabi-style Islam in Pakistan, which is very similar to the fundamentalism of the Taliban. I raise this point, because many people are unaware that there is huge diversity in Islam, with liberal attitudes pitted against conservative attitudes, the same as we find in any society worldwide, secular or otherwise.
This contradicts the view expressed by Hitchens and Harris (Dawkins has never expressed it, as far as I’m aware, but I’m sure he would concur) that people with moderate religious views somehow give succour to the fundamentalists and extremists in the world. This is a view, which is not just counter-productive, it’s divisive, simplistic, falsely based and deeply prejudicial. And it makes me bloody angry.
These are very intelligent, very knowledgeable and very articulate men, but this stance is an intellectualisation of a deeply held prejudice against religion in general. Because they are atheists, they believe it gives them a special position – they see themselves as being outside the equation – because they have no religious belief, they are objective, which gives them a special status. My point is that they can hardly ask for people with religious views to show tolerance towards each other if they can intellectualise their own intolerance towards all religions. By expressing the view, no matter how obtuse, that any religious tolerance somehow creates a shelter or cover for extremists, they are fomenting intolerance towards those who are actually practicing tolerance.
Dawkins was in Australia for an international Atheist convention in Melbourne, earlier this year. Religion is not a hot topic in this country, but, of course, it becomes a hot topic while he’s visiting, which makes me really glad that he doesn’t live here full time. On a TV panel show, he made the provocative inference that no evil has ever come from atheism. So atheists are not only intellectually superior to everyone else but they are also morally superior. What he said and what he meant, is that no atheist has ever attempted genocide on a religious group because of his or her atheism (therefore religious belief) but lots of political groups have, which may or may not be atheistic. In other words, when it comes to practicing genocide, whether the identification of the outgroup is religious or political becomes irrelevant. We don’t need religion to create politically unstable groups, they can be created by atheists as easily as they can by religious zealots. Dawkins, of course, chooses his words carefully, to give the impression that no atheist would ever indulge in an act of genocide, be it psychological or physical, but we all know that political ideology is no less dangerous than religious ideology.
One of Dawkins’ favourite utterances is: “There is no such thing as a Muslim child.” If one takes that statement to its logical conclusion, he’s advocating that all children should be disassociated from their cultural heritage. Is he aware of how totalitarian that idea is? He wants to live in a mono-culture, where everyone gets the correct education that axiomatically will ensure they will never believe in the delusion of God. Well, I don’t want to live in that world, so, frankly, he can have it.
People like to point to all the conflicts in the world of the last half century, from Ireland to the Balkans to the Middle East as examples of how religion creates conflicts. The unstated corollary is that if we could rid the world of religion we would rid it of its main source of conflict. This is not just naïve, it’s blatantly wrong. All these conflicts are about the haves and have-nots. Almost all conflicts, including the most recent one in Thailand are about one group having economical control over another. That’s what happened in Ireland, in former Yugoslavia, and, most significantly, in Palestine. In many parts of the world, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan being typical examples, religion and politics are inseparable. It’s naïve in the extreme to believe, from the vantage of a secular society, that if you rid a society of its religious beliefs you will somehow rid it of its politics, or make the politics more stable. You make the politics more stable by getting rid of nepotism and corruption. In Afghanistan, the religious fundamentalists have persuasion and political credibility because the current alternative solution is corrupt and financially self-serving.
It should be obvious for anyone who follows my blog that I’m not anti-atheist. In fact, I’ve done my best to stay out of this debate. But, to be honest, I refuse to take sides in the way some commentators infer we should. I don’t see it as an US and THEM debate, because I don’t live in a country where people with religious agendas are trying to take control of the parliament. We have self-confessed creationists in our political system, but, as was demonstrated on the same panel that Dawkins was on, they are reluctant to express that view in public, and they have no agenda, hidden or otherwise, for changing the school curricula. I live in a country where you can have a religious point of view and you won’t be hung up and scrutinised by every political commentator in the land.
Religion has a bad rap, not helped by the Catholic Church’s ‘above the law’ attitude towards sexual abuse scandals, but religious belief per se should never be the litmus test for someone’s intelligence, moral integrity or strength of character, either way.
Dalrymple was born in Edinburgh but has traveled widely in India and the book apparently examines the lives of nine religious followers in India. I haven’t read the book myself, but, following the interview, I’m tempted to seek it out.
As the title of his book suggests, Dalrymple appears fascinated with the religious in general, although he gave no indication in the interview what his own beliefs may be. His knowledge of India’s religions seems extensive and there are a couple of points he raised which I found relevant to the West’s perspective on Eastern religions and the current antagonistic attitudes towards religious issues: Islam, in particular.
As I say, I haven’t read the book, but the gist of it, according to the interview, is that he interviewed nine people, who lead distinctly different cultural lives in India, and wrote a chapter on each one. One of the points he raised, which I found relevant to my own viewpoint, is the idea that God exists inside us and not out there. This is something that I’ve discussed before and I don’t wish to dwell on here, but he inferred that the idea can be found in Sufism as well as Hinduism. It should be pointed out, by the way, that there is not one Hindu religion, and, in fact, Hinduism is really a collection of religions, that the West tend to put all in one conceptual basket. Dalrymple remarked on the similarity between Islamic Sufism and some types of Hinduism, which have flourished in India. In particular, he pointed out that the Sufis are the strongest opponents of Wahhabi-style Islam in Pakistan, which is very similar to the fundamentalism of the Taliban. I raise this point, because many people are unaware that there is huge diversity in Islam, with liberal attitudes pitted against conservative attitudes, the same as we find in any society worldwide, secular or otherwise.
This contradicts the view expressed by Hitchens and Harris (Dawkins has never expressed it, as far as I’m aware, but I’m sure he would concur) that people with moderate religious views somehow give succour to the fundamentalists and extremists in the world. This is a view, which is not just counter-productive, it’s divisive, simplistic, falsely based and deeply prejudicial. And it makes me bloody angry.
These are very intelligent, very knowledgeable and very articulate men, but this stance is an intellectualisation of a deeply held prejudice against religion in general. Because they are atheists, they believe it gives them a special position – they see themselves as being outside the equation – because they have no religious belief, they are objective, which gives them a special status. My point is that they can hardly ask for people with religious views to show tolerance towards each other if they can intellectualise their own intolerance towards all religions. By expressing the view, no matter how obtuse, that any religious tolerance somehow creates a shelter or cover for extremists, they are fomenting intolerance towards those who are actually practicing tolerance.
Dawkins was in Australia for an international Atheist convention in Melbourne, earlier this year. Religion is not a hot topic in this country, but, of course, it becomes a hot topic while he’s visiting, which makes me really glad that he doesn’t live here full time. On a TV panel show, he made the provocative inference that no evil has ever come from atheism. So atheists are not only intellectually superior to everyone else but they are also morally superior. What he said and what he meant, is that no atheist has ever attempted genocide on a religious group because of his or her atheism (therefore religious belief) but lots of political groups have, which may or may not be atheistic. In other words, when it comes to practicing genocide, whether the identification of the outgroup is religious or political becomes irrelevant. We don’t need religion to create politically unstable groups, they can be created by atheists as easily as they can by religious zealots. Dawkins, of course, chooses his words carefully, to give the impression that no atheist would ever indulge in an act of genocide, be it psychological or physical, but we all know that political ideology is no less dangerous than religious ideology.
One of Dawkins’ favourite utterances is: “There is no such thing as a Muslim child.” If one takes that statement to its logical conclusion, he’s advocating that all children should be disassociated from their cultural heritage. Is he aware of how totalitarian that idea is? He wants to live in a mono-culture, where everyone gets the correct education that axiomatically will ensure they will never believe in the delusion of God. Well, I don’t want to live in that world, so, frankly, he can have it.
People like to point to all the conflicts in the world of the last half century, from Ireland to the Balkans to the Middle East as examples of how religion creates conflicts. The unstated corollary is that if we could rid the world of religion we would rid it of its main source of conflict. This is not just naïve, it’s blatantly wrong. All these conflicts are about the haves and have-nots. Almost all conflicts, including the most recent one in Thailand are about one group having economical control over another. That’s what happened in Ireland, in former Yugoslavia, and, most significantly, in Palestine. In many parts of the world, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan being typical examples, religion and politics are inseparable. It’s naïve in the extreme to believe, from the vantage of a secular society, that if you rid a society of its religious beliefs you will somehow rid it of its politics, or make the politics more stable. You make the politics more stable by getting rid of nepotism and corruption. In Afghanistan, the religious fundamentalists have persuasion and political credibility because the current alternative solution is corrupt and financially self-serving.
It should be obvious for anyone who follows my blog that I’m not anti-atheist. In fact, I’ve done my best to stay out of this debate. But, to be honest, I refuse to take sides in the way some commentators infer we should. I don’t see it as an US and THEM debate, because I don’t live in a country where people with religious agendas are trying to take control of the parliament. We have self-confessed creationists in our political system, but, as was demonstrated on the same panel that Dawkins was on, they are reluctant to express that view in public, and they have no agenda, hidden or otherwise, for changing the school curricula. I live in a country where you can have a religious point of view and you won’t be hung up and scrutinised by every political commentator in the land.
Religion has a bad rap, not helped by the Catholic Church’s ‘above the law’ attitude towards sexual abuse scandals, but religious belief per se should never be the litmus test for someone’s intelligence, moral integrity or strength of character, either way.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)