April 2018 – Harmonia Philosophica

Chirality. Pasteur. Art, intuition and science…

Louis Pasteur, the 19th-century French chemist and biologist, prevented diseases, developing a process — widely known as pasteurization — for killing microbes in milk and wine. He also created vaccines for rabies and anthrax. And his ideas led to the acceptance of germ theory, the notion that tiny organisms caused diseases like cholera. Pasteur even helped us brew better beer.

“He’s considered the benefactor of mankind”, said Joseph Gal, a chemist and professor emeritus at the University of Colorado.

But before all that, Pasteur was an artist. And without his early creative explorations, he may not have made one of his most monumental, but least talked about, discoveries in science, one with far-reaching implications.

In a paper published in Nature Chemistry, Dr. Gal explains how a young Pasteur fought against the odds to articulate the existence of chirality, or the way that some molecules exist in mirror-image forms capable of producing very different effects. Today we see chirality’s effects in light, in chemistry and in the body — even in the drugs we take. And it seems that Pasteur probably conceived the chirality of specific molecules not because of his scientific knowledge but only due to his artistic experience. (1)

Discoveries in science are not based on… science.

If they were, they would be nothing more that tautologies developed inside an already developed system of knowledge. Nothing new can be developed from the old. Progress of science needs breakthroughs. And these can only come through the destruction of what we know. Instinct and non-conformity to the already given knowledge is the key to all great scientific ideas. And this can only stem from irrationality.

Look at a painting.

Do not try to “understand” it.

It is not a painting.

It is a window to the other side. To all these things you knew there are there but cannot prove it. To all these things you know before knowing them. It is the realm of your irrationality, the reflection of your Dasein. A mirror to everything you have in your mind, a reflection of everything there Is.

Nothing new can be developed from the old.

Unless the old already contains it…

Look at your hands.

They are not just your hands…

Lying. Me? Or you? Feeling unique. [How people distance themselves – or the cosmos – from their lies]

Professor Paul Taylor of Lancaster University in the UK said: “Science has long known that people’s use of language changes when they lie. Our research shows that prevalent beliefs about what those changes look like are not true for all cultures”.

The researchers asked participants of Black African, South Asian, White European and White British ethnicity to complete a Catch-the-Liar task in which they provided genuine and false statements.

They found the statements of Western liars tend to include fewer first-person “I” pronouns than the statements of truth-tellers. This is a common finding and believed to be due to the liar trying to distance themselves from the lie.

However, they did not find this difference when examining the lies of Black African and South Asian participants. Instead, these participants increased their use of first person pronoun and decreased their third person “he/she” pronouns – they sought to distance their social group rather than them self from the lie. (1)

Believe that you are unique.

And you will try to protect yourself.

Believe that you are part of something unique.

And you will try to protect the cosmos.

But you are unique. Only because you are the cosmos itself.

Only if you stop feeling unique will you will understand that…

Start feeling small, in order to start growing.

Optimizing farming. Fractals and global optimums. Balance. Letting go.

Bali’s famous rice terraces, when seen from above, look like colorful mosaics because some farmers plant synchronously, while others plant at different times. The resulting fractal patterns are rare for human-made systems and lead to optimal harvests without global planning.

To understand how Balinese rice farmers make their decisions for planting, a team of scientists led by Stephen Lansing (Nanyang Technological University) and Stefan Thurner (Medical University of Vienna, Complexity Science Hub Vienna, IIASA, SFI), both external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, modeled two variables: water availability and pest damage. Farmers that live upstream have the advantage of always having water; while those downstream have to adapt their planning on the schedules of the upstream farmers.

Here, pests enter the scene. When farmers are planting at different times, pests can move from one field to another, but when farmers plant in synchrony, pests drown and the pest load is reduced. So upstream farmers have an incentive to share water so that synchronous planting can happen. However, water resources are limited and there is not enough water for everybody to plant at the same time. As a result of this constraint, fractal planting patterns emerge, which yield close to maximal harvests.

“The remarkable finding is that this optimal situation arises without central planners or coordination. Farmers interact locally and take local individual free decisions, which they believe will optimize their own harvest. And yet the global system works optimally,” says Lansing. “What is exciting scientifically is that this is in contrast to the tragedy of the commons, where the global optimum is not reached because everyone is maximizing his individual profit. This is what we are experiencing typically when egoistic people are using a limited resource on the planet, everyone optimizes the individual payoff and never reach an optimum for all,” he says.

The scientists find that under these assumptions, the planting patterns become fractal, which is indeed the case as they confirm with satellite imagery. “The system becomes remarkably stable, again without any planning — stability is the outcome of a remarkably simple but efficient self-organized process” Thurner says. (1)

We believe that everything needs planning. We believe that we need to analyze things, to reach logical conclusions, to plan and then to re-plan in order to reach an optimum effect.

But these farmers did not plan anything and yet it seems that they managed to reach to a state where crops grew in an optimum way. (Unless of course you name the “I want to plant now in my field” as “planning”. The choice of words is always important for our civilization and it seems that we tend to name everything based on our view of the cosmos) But looking more closely, we will see that they did not actually manage anything. The system simply evolved as it is meant to evolve. Planning too much simply disrupts this natural evolution of things. Fractals emerge only to show the obvious; everything is the same everywhere. It is just your distinct perspective that creates the illusion of difference (and change).

All systems have the natural tendency to reach a balance.

And humans have the tendency to always be impressed by that simple fact.

But what we fail to see is that all processes at the end reach that balance.

Because the cosmos is not under our control.

We are under the control of the cosmos.

Let go¹. Grow the crops without planning.

And it will seem² like you have planned everything.

Harmonia Philosophical Explanatory Notes

¹ “Let go” not in the sense of “Be lazy and do nothing because the crops will grow on their own” but in the sense of “Accept the nature’s cycles and trust the cosmos. Plan only when and at the extent required. Try not to change and control the cosmos”…

² It seems cynical, but isn’t that what it is all about after all? At least for the western civilization? Appearances? We all care so much about the phenomena, that we have forgotten the simple fact that phenomena are a cloak which conceals the truth, even though nature continuously reminds us of our illusion. On the other hand, when something looks as if it is planned (even though it is not), wouldn’t that mean that is simply… is? A weird place the cosmos is. (and philosophy is actually a much weirder place)

Meditation going wrong? Watch out what you look for…

Meditation is increasingly being marketed as a treatment for conditions such as pain, depression, stress and addiction, and while many people achieve therapeutic goals, other meditators encounter a much broader range of experiences – sometimes distressing and even impairing ones – along the way.

Meditators reported multiple unexpected experiences from across the seven domains of experience. For example, a commonly reported challenging experience in the perceptual domain was hypersensitivity to light or sound, while somatic changes such as insomnia or involuntary body movements were also reported. Challenging emotional experiences could include fear, anxiety, panic or a loss of emotions altogether. (1)

As any powerful tool, meditation can also turn against its practitioner.

Any knowledge comes with personal pain.

Remember what happened in the forest with Midas.

The abyss is not for everyone to look at.

Not just because it may stare back.

But because you might realize that you are (creating) the abyss.

Every fear, every emotion, every pain is yours. Every experience which you have lived or which you will is yours. Every life and death in this world is yours. You are the creator of life. You are the destroyer of the worlds.

Do you like you?

Neuron connections… Not so important?

Neurons are connected to each other to form networks that underlie behaviors. Drs. Akira Sakurai and Paul Katz of Georgia State’s Neuroscience Institute study the brains of sea slugs, more specifically nudibranchs, which have large neurons that form simple circuits and produce simple behaviors. In this study, they examined how the brains of these sea creatures produce swimming behaviors. They found that even though the brains of two species – the giant nudibranch and the hooded nudibranch – had the same neurons, and even though the behaviors were the same, the wiring was different.

The researchers blocked some of the connections in the giant nudibranch using curare, a paralyzing poison used on blow darts by indigenous South Americans. This prevented the brain of the giant nudibranch from producing the pattern of impulses that would normally cause the animal to swim. Then, they inserted electrodes into the neurons to create artificial connections between the brain cells that were based on connections from the hooded nudibranch. The brain was able to produce rhythmic, alternating activity that would underlie the swimming behavior, showing these two species produce their swimming behavior using very different brain mechanisms.

The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.

“Behaviors that are homologous and similar in form would naturally be assumed to be produced by similar neural mechanisms,” said Katz, co-author of the study and a Regent’s Professor in the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State. “This and previous studies show that connectivity of the neural circuits of two different species of sea slugs differ substantially from each other despite the presence of homologous neurons and behaviors. Thus, the evolution of microcircuitry could play a role in the evolution of behavior”. (1)

Change the brain and you will still have a being which swims.

Change the brain and you will still have a being that thinks.

Change the brain and you will still have a human who is self-conscious.

Your brain changes all the time and yet you are still “you”.

The cosmos changes all the time and yet the laws governing it are the same.

The universe changes all the time and yet it is eternal.

Everything seem different and yet similar patterns arise everywhere.

Time seems to pass and yet you can always remember.

People die only to show that they are still alive.

Things change only to prove that they do not…

Go swimming.

We all do.