Alan Rayner

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The Hole Story: An Inclusional View of Space and Boundaries in Science, Art and Society

An illustrated talk by Alan Rayner

For much of my adult life, I have tried to keep my work as a professional biological scientist separate from my personal enjoyment of expressing my feelings artistically. Perhaps partly in consequence I eventually started to become disenchanted with my scientific work and its relevance to understanding real life. Then, a few years ago, I began to dream that some kind of renewal might be possible through bringing my artistic sense of kinship with the living space within and around my self into communion with my scientific knowledge. I took the opportunity to share this dream by specially preparing and presenting a painting entitled 'Fountains of the Forest' as part of my Presidential Address to the British Mycological Society, in 1998.

Slide: Fountains of the Forest. Within and upon the branching, enfolding, water-containing surfaces of forest trees and reaching out from there into air and soil are branching, enfolding, water-containing surfaces of finer scale, the mycelial networks of fungi. These networks provide a communications interface for energy transfer from neighbour to neighbour, from living to dead and from dead to living. They maintain the forest in a state of flux as they gather, conserve, explore for and recycle supplies of chemical fuel originating from photosynthesis. So, the fountains of the forest trees are connected and tapped into by the fountains of fungal networks in a moving circulation: an evolutionary spiral of differentiation and integration from past through to unpredictable future; a water delivery from the fire of the sun, through the fire of respiration, and back again to sky, contained within the contextual boundaries of a wood-wide web. (From Rayner, 1998)

At about the same time, an interview with a well-known scientist in response to growing interest in re-connecting Art and Science, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. To my dismay, the scientist pronounced that Art and Science were completely different human endeavours and should therefore keep a respectful distance from one another. I was taken aback, because the scientist seemed to be arguing that difference was a reason for staying apart, whereas I thought it was a reason for partnership, an opportunity to realize the new possibilities implicit in complementary viewpoints, as in a mutually beneficial symbiosis.

So, the difference between me and the well-known scientist seemed to lie in our attitude to difference. He wished to exclude it, for fear of the contamination, take-over and dysfunction it could bring about; I wished to include it for the new opportunities it might bring. He wanted Art and Science to agree to differ – each to adopt their own distinctive one-sided view of the world and not intrude upon one another, especially not Art into Science. I wanted them to differ to agree – to discover through their diverse perspectives a common but many-stranded reality, all views of which were necessarily partial but for that very reason also unique contributions to the overall picture, as in a hologram.

Increasingly, it seems to me that this tension, this difference in our attitude to difference, epitomized by the seeming difference between Art and Science, lies at the heart of the way we human beings relate to one another, other life forms and the living space that we all share. It persists in all kinds of adversarial debating systems, philosophical concepts and approaches to problem solving that presuppose the need to choose between one and the other. Do we try to eradicate or exclude difference in a quest for safe conformity, or do we nurture and include it as the very foundation for the rich heterogeneity and ultimate resilience and creativity of life? Do we take an antibiotic or probiotic view of those differences that can be seen both as life's problems and as life's opportunities, depending on how we interpret and respond to them?

Here, it's worth appreciating that this tension is by no means unique to human beings, but has deep biological roots, evident in the contrast between the widespread tendencies of all forms of life both to conflict bodily with and unite sexually and symbiotically with their neighbours. From molecular to global scales of organization, encounters with what may be perceived as 'other than self' bring both the risk of damage to individual identity and an opportunity for renewal and innovation. Some striking illustrations of these distinctive possibilities are provided by colonies of mycelial fungi.

Slides: Fly Agaric

Mycelium

Ukrainian Sisters

Torreyol Pairing

Hypholoma vs Coriolus

Beech Mosaic

Mycorrhizally connected seedlings

So, how can differences be reconciled, threat diminished and promise fulfilled without abandonment of individuality? To understand that, we have to appreciate the dynamic contextual origins of difference itself and realize the possibilities it gives rise to for mutual transformation as well as damage. This is the kind of understanding that I think we might have access to through examining the difference, and consequent potential for relationship, between Art and Science.

I have come to think that the most fundamental difference between Art and Science, as they are currently practised, concerns the way we perceive and relate to the concept of space. Moreover, I believe that this difference engenders enormous psychological, social and environmental damage, akin to the symbolic separation from Eden that followed Adam and Eve's abstraction of fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, egged on by serpentine curiosity. But I also believe that this same difference, seen another way, might offer a path towards deeper resolution of the conflicts that abound within and between our psyches, and so lead to some peaceful sanctuary, some sacred space, some place.

For Science and Art, as they have both lost touch with one another and reality, have abstracted Knowledge out of Context in divergent, but ultimately complementary ways. On the one hand, the fixed reference frame of rationalistic Science has tended to treat space as an insubstantial and consequently passive absence, whose dynamically transforming shape can safely be excluded from any consideration of the assertive material properties of explicit things. On the other hand, Art has increasingly excluded the explicit aspect of things in order to explore an implicit space in which anything goes, thereby revealing, as often as not, absolutely nothing! Whereas Science has left no room for imagination by getting too much of a grip on explicitly packaged bits and pieces, and so mistaken the reference frame for the whole picture, Art has loosened the frame so much that it can't keep hold of the picture.

Herein lies, for me, the tremendous prospect of bringing art into science and science into art: that we can appreciate the reciprocal interdependence and consequent inseparability of implicit contextual space and the explicit information that gives heterogeneous expression to that space in the form of features. This is the aim of the philosophy of inclusionality, currently being worked on by myself and others, whereby all things, our selves included, are viewed as dynamic contextual inclusions, no more separable from their containing space than are whirlpools from a water flow. In this view, insides are not sealed forever within the boundaries of outsides. Things are not physically discrete bodies, isolated by space, nor even are their outsides all interconnected by some explicit external web of material presence. Rather, they are embodiments of that implicit space which is not the physical absence that separates them, but rather the labyrinth of immaterial, non-resistive, inductive presence that intra-connects them by uniting their insides through gaps to their outsides. We are like leaves on a tree, distinct but not discrete, breathing the same air through pores to our outer space, drawing water from a common source through the continuity of our inner space. And the tree is that fountain, that continuity of inner pipelines and outer outline, which draws the leaves together at one and the same time that they are held distinct from one another through the shape of their outer boundaries.

To try to get some more feel for what this all means, try to imagine a world or universe with no space. Is there any possibility for movement or distinctiveness? Now try to imagine a world or universe of pure space. Is there anything there? For me, the conclusions from such imaginings are inescapable. Space is pure, implicit, insubstantial possibility, but for that possibility to be realized – expressed in distinctive, heterogeneous features – it has to be given shape, that is in formed, by something explicit. Gregory Bateson alluded to this explicit something as 'the difference that makes a difference', information. But, by the same token, this information without contextual space is meaningless, makes no difference, has no possibility for independent expression.

Explicit information and implicit space are therefore both inseparable and dynamically co-creative. They make and are shaped by the other in the same way that the water in a river system, makes, shapes and is shaped by the space through which it flows, as it erodes rock and deposits sediment. And the making of space makes possible a flow that makes more space – an 'autocatalytic flow' - as when people walking across a meadow create and consolidate an inductive path by following their leader.

Slides of river system, ant delta, wildebeest delta, Magpie Matrix

This inclusional view of information as content in relation to spatial context contrasts with the discretely packaged informational units of rationalistic, binary (either/or) logic and digital computers. Inclusional information, far from being broken up into transmissible bits and pieces of pure machine code that need to be protected from contamination by 'outside interference' or 'noise', produces vibrant, flexible language. It folds into and around the space it relates to as a dynamic matter-energy-containing boundary that nests inner spaces within outer spaces across all scales from sub-atomic to universal. This boundary is not the fixed limit of particulate things – it does not define but rather provides the mediating surface or interface through which inner and outer spaces reciprocally and simultaneously transform one another. The simple, profound reality that analytical logic tries to ignore is that one can't change without changing the other. And if we want to develop an approach that takes this reality into account, there is no better place to focus than on this informational boundary that integrates one with the other and is where their mutual transformation occurs. We can characterise this boundary in terms of its fundamental, changeable properties of deformability, permeability and continuity, and measure it in terms of its heterogeneity or fractal dimension, the degree to which it fills the space available for its occupation. From here, we can gain insights of the four fundamental processes through which life forms assimilate, conserve, explore for and recycle sources of energy.

Slides: Variable resistances

Four fundamental processes

Mandala

So, the Big Story of Life and the Universe is the 'Hole Story', not the 'Whole Story'. To be dynamic, things are necessarily incomplete: they consist of informational holes – lined spaces – not wholes and parts complete, and so static, within themselves. These holes are inductive, attractive – they have pulling power: the beauty of a Cathedral is in the space that its walls line, not in these walls alone. And the holes puncture the rationalist's box that has held us like Schrödinger's Cat in secure paradoxical bondage, longing to escape into the real world where inner space connects with outer. And, as I have hinted several times, if there is anything on earth that can find these holes and show them to us for what they are, we need not look for anything rare. We need only to regard that overlooked, taken for granted commonplace water, the dynamic contextual medium without which the genetic code of DNA could not be translated into the informational surface that co-creates the diversity of life itself.

I recently tried to express these thoughts in a painting entitled 'Future Present' and a poem-painting, 'The Hole in the Mole'.

Future Present (oil painting on canvas by Alan Rayner, 2000). The gift of life lies in the creative infancy of the present, whence its message from past to future is relayed through watery channels that spill out and recombine outside the box, re-iterating and amplifying patterns over scales from microscopic to universal.

The Hole in the Mole - an 'inclusional' poem, by Alan Rayner

I AM the hole

That lives in a mole

That induces the mole

To dig the hole

That moves the mole

Through the earth

That forms a hill

That becomes a mountain

That reaches to sky

That connects with stars

And brings the rain

That the mountain collects

Into streams and rivers

That moisten the earth

That grows the grass

That freshens the air

That condenses to rain

That carries the water

That brings the mole

To Life

 

To pursue a more inclusional approach to life, which combines artistic imagination with scientifically derived information, represents a tremendous challenge. It will test to the utmost our willingness to encompass diverse viewpoints so that they complement rather than conflict with one another, and so facilitate truly co-operative inquiry. We will also have to become wise to the shortcomings of some of our most cherished and trusted rationalistic concepts and methods of inquiry and problem solving and, where necessary, adopt new approaches. Progressing from rational to inclusional logic demands that we rethink our use of such fundamental calculational tools as binary numbers, probability theory, infinity and infinitesimality, and their application to understanding space, time, energy, matter and their evolution. It demands that we finally let go of the notion of independence and come to regard uncertainty and creativity in terms of possibility rather than probability, and evolution in terms of relational transformation and natural inclusion rather than survival of the fittest and natural selection. We will also need to develop systems of numbers that can actually relate to one another. All that's going to require a lot of co-operating and a lot of listening. If we don't manage it, the cumulative damage to our living space may become irrevocable. If we do, we may truly fulfil our potential to deserve the name of Humankind.

For myself, my Art and my Science have become assertive-inductive dancing partners, and I hope they will remain so. My Art opens possibilities that my science might never dream of, however long it may take me to realize these possibilities. My Science informs and finds expression in my Art. The two co-evolve inseparably, like content and context, each shaping and being shaped by the other's movements. In this spirit, I'd like to end with an opening, a painting I made in the last months of 1999, entitled 'Opening Endings'

"OPENING ENDINGS"

An elm tree's demise, its wing-barked boundaries opened by ravages of bark beetle and fungus, makes way for new life to fill its space. Maple leaves take over the canopy between earth and sky, but their coverage is only partial, leaving openings for arriving and departing flights of woodpeckers. Fungal decay softens the wood to allow the tunnelling of long-horn beetle larvae and probing and chiselling of beak-endings. A nest cavity provides a feeding station between egg and air.