Review by Ted Lumley of The Formation and Transformation of Anti-culture: from survival of the fittest to thrival of the fitting
Alan Rayner’s essay - The Formation and Transformation of Anti-culture: from survival of the fittest to thrival of the fitting explores the historical development of our western culture’s addiction to mechanistic ‘certainty’ and ‘determinism’ and our culture’s corresponding ‘tuning out’ of the informationally deeper counterparts of ‘possibility’ and ‘emergence’.
As Alan points out, even in modern physics, ‘sides have been taken’ on the issue of ‘taking sides’; i.e. on the issue of whether things are ‘one way or the other’, as embodied in Einstein’s "God does not play at dice with the Universe" - a declaration that seems to equate divinity with certainty and omniscience, …. and Neils Bohr’s retort to Einstein; "Quit telling God what to do.", … Bohr, who, when knighted by the King of Sweden for his achievements in science, chose the yin/yang symbol for his coat-of-arms symbolizing the inclusion of the inner in the outer and the outer in the inner, … ‘quantum entanglement’, … or, in terms of the natural primacy of space-over-matter, … the interpermeability of space.
In Alan’s biological world of forest, funghi and aquatic sentience, … the explicit certainty of mathematical physics buffered by the abstract notions of ‘randomness’ and ‘probability’ is hopelessly inadequate for a comprehensive modeling of the nonlinear dynamics of these complex constituent-collective systems. As Henri Poincaré also noted; …les naturalistes sont obligés de recourir á d’autres modes de generalization [i.e.naturalists are obliged to turn to methods of generalization other than la physique mathématique ].
While Einstein resisted the way that uncertainty crops up in quantum mechanics, he nevertheless observed, in words that recall those of Johannes Kepler in ‘Harmonies of the World’, that the ‘Essential Divine’ seems to associate with the spontaneous emergence of harmony in the dynamic of the collective rather than with assertive determinism executed lego-like through the actions and transactions of the ‘material agents’ of nature. In this regard, Einstein’s declaration; "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings." is a rejection of God seen as the Great Determinator or ‘Great Causal Agent’ in some hidden anteroom in a beyond-Nature Sky, the holy office of ‘where the buck stops’ in taking deterministic responsibility for the actions and transactions of the constituents of Nature. Instead of being a personal God in the image of the Highest Deterministic Authority in a mineral-to-mortal-to-angelic-to-divine hierarchy of ‘Causal Agents’ Who achieves ‘bottom-up’ deterministic goals along the linear progressive axis of ‘time’ through the capacities of HIS ‘assertive agents’, the God implied by Einstein (and Kepler), like the God of the Native American, the Celt and many aboriginal people, is immanent in the emergent harmonious order in Nature. SHE/HE, or rather ‘she/he’, is an inductive-assertive God who continuously induces the diversity of asserting constituents to flow in together towards a mutual phase-coupling, … a resonant ‘assertor-receptor’ hermaphroditic complementarity wherein constituents co-creatively sustain balanced ‘possibility’ for each other conducive to the authentic becoming of a co-evolving diversity. This is the implicit geometrical-dynamical imagery which permeates Alan’s ‘inclusional’ writing. It is imagery in which the ‘self-other’ relationship, far from being competitive and ‘anti-culture’, is ‘inner-outer’, ‘constituent-collective’, ‘resonance-seeking’.
Alan’s theme of ‘anti-culture’ follows naturally from the implication of the absolutist abstraction of the behavioural ‘independence’ of the constituents of nature, an abstraction which explicitly and discretely detaches the constituent from its enveloping otherness; i.e. in Alan’s terms;
"[Anti-culture is] a paradoxical organization … founded on the alienation and consequent denial of the creative togetherness of ‘self’ and ‘other’.
As Alan makes clear in his essay, the emergent behaviour of the ‘fluid’ dynamical boundaries that emerge in the inclusional, interpermeable space of biology are what we must focus on to get to the deeper understanding of the complex nonlinear dynamics of Nature, rather than letting ourselves be mesmerized by the abstract, explicit certainty of the discrete actions and transactions of the material constituents. In fact the material constituents are continuously evolving constituents that have no fixed in-their-own-right identity (and are thus innately incapable of producing discrete actions and transactions since who ‘they are’ is an innately ambiguous ‘moving target’; i.e. the ‘identity of the agent is transformed simultaneous with and in interdependent relation with its assertive action’).
In the section RATIONALITY AND THE FORMATION OF ANTI-CULTURE, Alan makes the connection between the historical philosophical development in the west and the rise of ‘anti-culture’;
"Rationalistic logic in western cultures surfaced in the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Parmenides, culminated in the ‘Enlightenment’ of Bacon and Descartes, and became enshrined in the ‘clockwork universe’ of Newtonian mechanics. It is founded primarily on the notion of the separateness and/or separability of things as discrete ‘objects’ isolated from one another by the ‘nothingness’ of ‘space’. Correspondingly, it severs any connection there might be between what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’ a thing, hence treating the boundaries of things as fixed limits, and things themselves as independent ‘free agents’ or Newtonian ‘bodies’. This rationalistic severance of one from other has permeated not only western culture, but, increasingly, world-wide, contributing to a deep-seated sense of discontent and conflict. It affects not only our mathematical and scientific world-views, but also our whole way of relating to one another and other life forms in our common living space, in an enormous variety of ways".
While Heraclitus was into ‘inclusionality’ and emergence via ‘hidden attunement’ (harmony/resonance), … the attractor of ‘certainty’ as advocated by Parmenides won out as the foundation of choice based on the argument that the logic of the Gods could never be ambiguous. As Kirk, Raven et al observe in ‘The Presocratic Philosophers’;
"Parmenides claims that in any inquiry there are two and only two logically coherent possibilities, which are exclusive --- that the subject of the enquiry exists or that it does not exist. On epistemological grounds he rules out the second alternative as unintelligible. He then turns to abuse of ordinary mortals for showing by their beliefs that they never make the choice between the two ways 'is' and 'is not', but follow *both* without discrimination. In the final section of this first part [of his hexameter poem] he explores the one secure path, 'is', and proves in an astonishing deductive *tour de force* that if something exists, it cannot come to be or perish, change or move, nor be subject to any imperfection. Parmenides arguments and his paradoxical conclusions had an enormous impact on later Greek philosophy; his method and his impact alike have rightly been compared to those of Descartes' *cogito*."
Of course, the appeal of ‘assertive certainty’ is but one side of the bipolar Janus face of space-matter dynamics, the other side of which is ‘co-creative emergence’. Had Heraclitus been around to hear Parmenides pronouncements, he might have commented as Neils Bohr did to Einstein on the issue of uncertainty, … and said; ‘Parmenides, quit telling the Gods what their preferences are.’. That is, when one invokes the principle of the relativity of all motion, it becomes apparent that ‘certainty’ (‘patched’ where needed by ‘probability’), which pertains to the assertive dynamics of the material constituents, … is a shallower one-sided view of the world dynamic and that ‘possibility’, the dynamical geometry of possibility-to-assert as embodied in the continuously transforming form of the potential energy field, is the two-sided ‘mother’ of the emergent ‘pattern’ of assertive dynamics of the constituents, … a harmonious and aesthetic pattern characterizing natural dynamics that manifest time and again in the biological world as Alan discusses in his ‘anti-culture’ essay, an aesthetic that is notable missing, as Poincaré observed, when one employs the absolutist generalizations of traditional mathematical physics.
There is a high coherency relative to our experience, in the intraconnecting suite of ideas and hypotheses of the Anti-Culture essay. Our experience informs us that when we relax our absolute rationalist private agendas, even in traversing a crowded piazza, we have the sentient capacities (or ‘somatic awareness’) to put our actions relative to one another in the service of emergent community harmony itself, the immanent dynamical ordering tendency in Nature. This mode of ‘authentic becoming’ where ‘order’ is induced by an immanent tendency (far more powerful and over-riding than the constructive assertings coming from the individual constituents) towards community-constituent-codynamical resonance, transcends the ‘deterministic’ mode wherein the world dynamic is seen as being determined purely by the assertive actions and transactions of ‘independent’ material constituents, each one seen as ‘coming from their own independent ‘private agendas’ and competing against enveloping others in a win/lose manner rather than relaxing their private agendas so as to open up to the co-creation of collective harmony.
Alan also brings into connection the influence of communications; i.e. the manner in which the inclusionary communications theory of Gabor contrasts with the exclusionary communications theory of Shannon/Wiener and how the latter complements the Anti-culture mode. That is, our experience informs us that we are each uniquely situated within the geometrical dynamics of ‘possibility space’ and that the way possibility opens up for us (or closes down) as an emergent result of how we and our enveloping others move relative to one another, is an over-riding influence on our assertive behaviours. Not only is this unique-to-the-individual dynamical geometry of possibility unavailable to rational dynamical descriptions based purely on the assertive actions and transactions of ‘independent’ material agents, it is unavailable to communications schemas such as that of Shannon/Wiener where messages seen as ‘information-in-its-own-right’ are passed from constituent to constituent in a transactional (time-dependent) manner, … a situation that inevitably leads to the selective and continual refinement of the ‘signal’ and the continual elimination of ‘noise’. For example, the elimination and/or ignoring of information coming from the disopportunized relative to the closing down of their possibility space and how such non-listening induces ‘noisy’ behaviour on the part of the disopportunized leads to effort on the part of the ‘oppportunized’ to eliminate the ‘noisy behaviour’ rather than to reconsider the judgement made as to what is signal and what is ‘noise’.
The communications theory of Gabor, as the Anti-culture essay brings out, does not depend on making judgements as to ‘what is signal’ versus ‘what is noise’, but instead includes everything as ‘signal’ and uses ‘coherency’ to extract meaning from the inclusionary signal. In Gabor’s communications theory, instead of ‘elemental information’ being seen as something that ‘exists-in-its-own-right’, … the elemental informational signal is ‘relative’, being constituted by the phase coupling of the inner (outgoing signal) with the outer (incoming signal). Thus the information theory of Shannon/Wiener is ‘anti-informational’ (i.e. one must judge and specify what is ‘desired signal’ and communicating this signal is then a matter of having it compete against the ‘other information’ that has been declared ‘noise’). Unlike the Gabor theory where ‘the truth’ is indicated by the coherency of statements relative to our common experience, … the information theory of Shannon/Wiener sees ‘the truth’ as being the ‘desired signal’ that is uncontaminated by noise. Of course, someone must ‘judge’ and ‘specify’ ‘desired signal’ in an absolute sense (which in turn judges and specifies what is ‘noise’) and this is an Achilles heel exposure in this anti-informational approach, as Alan indicates.
"The Formation and Transformation of ‘Anti-culture’: from ‘survival of the fittest’ to ‘thrival of the fitting’" exposes how the synthetic detachment of ‘self’ from ‘other’, via the traditional tools of mathematical physics in particular, sets the stage for ‘anti-culture’ and ‘anti-information’, a ‘brain-draw’ that has us turn our backs on our natural ability to relax our private agendas and co-create balanced possibility space to accommodate each other’s authentic becoming. The essay suggests how we might restore ‘inclusionality’ to its natural primacy and subsume the dysfunctional addiction to ‘anti-culture’.