‘Abdu'l-Bahá and Black Elk

On this day, Bahá'ís around the world commemorate the Ascension of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, the head of the Bahá'í faith from the passing of his father Bahá'u'lláh in 1892 until his own death in 1921. Throughout his life he was most commonly known as ‘The Master’, but the name he chose for himself means ‘servant of Baha’. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá was an examplar of servant leadership long before Robert Greenleaf coined the term.

‘Abdu'l-Bahá was the author of many prayers, and one of the most typical begins like this:

He is the All-Glorious!
O God, my God! Lowly and tearful, I raise my suppliant hands to Thee and cover my face in the dust of that Threshold of Thine, exalted above the knowledge of the learned, and the praise of all that glorify Thee.

Tears come naturally to a servant leader, especially when he contemplates the state of the world and the condition to which so many of its people are reduced because of human ignorance and error. I see another example in the Ogalala Sioux visionary Black Elk — especially in the ‘Dog Vision’ chapter of Black Elk Speaks. At the age of 18 he was acutely aware that his visionary power had been given to be used in service to his people, but also that he didn't yet know how to render that service.

I had made a good start to fulfill my duty to the Grandfathers, but I had much more to do; and so the winter was like a long night of waiting for the daybreak.

When the grasses began to show their faces again, I was happy, for I could hear the thunder beings coming in the earth and I could hear them saying: ‘It is time to do the work of your Grandfathers.’

After the long winter of waiting, it was my first duty to go out lamenting. So after the first rain storm I began to get ready.

When going out to lament it is necessary to choose a wise old medicine man, who is quiet and generous, to help.

Black Elk chose a medicine man named Few Tails to guide him through the long and arduous preparation for ‘lamenting’.

Few Tails now told me what I was to do so that the spirits would hear me and make clear my next duty. I was to stand in the middle, crying and praying for understanding. Then I was to advance from the center to the quarter of the west and mourn there awhile. Then I was to back up to the center, and from there approach the quarter of the north, wailing and praying there, and so on all around the circle. This I had to do all night long.

Black Elk's prayer was essentially the same as ‘Abdu'l-Bahá's — despite many obvious differences — and motivated by the same spirit of servant leadership. And for me there is a special poignancy in this passage from that same chapter in Black Elk's story:

And now when I look about me upon my people in despair, I feel like crying and I wish and wish my vision could have been given to a man more worthy. I wonder why it came to me, a pitiful old man who can do nothing. Men and women and children I have cured of sickness with the power the vision gave me; but my nation I could not help. If a man or woman or child dies, it does not matter long, for the nation lives on. It was the nation that was dying, and the vision was for the nation; but I have done nothing with it.

A century and a half later, the same forces of greed and ignorance which nearly destroyed the Sioux nation are still at work, only on a much bigger scale — the entire planetary ecosystem is at risk, and the suffering people of far outnumber the entire human population of the earth in Black Elk's time. I certainly feel like crying when i think about it, and even more so when i think of how little i have done to help — for i haven't even healed a single person, as Black Elk did many times. Yet i see that Black Elk's vision lives on through the story told in Black Elk Speaks, and may yet make a difference — perhaps even because this blog post has directed your attention to it!

I am neither a visionary like Black Elk nor a servant leader like ‘Abdu'l-Bahá; neither my work in progress nor this blog can begin to compare with what they accomplished. Yet i confess to a faint flickering hope that my work may serve some purpose, especially in its blending of spiritual and scientific visions. ‘Abdu'l-Bahá said that ‘religion and science are the two wings upon which man's intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress.’ And i'm encouraged that at least one precursor along this double path — C.S. Peirce — did his best work in his mid-60s. That's why i haven't succumbed entirely to despair …

Symbolic and other inheritance systems

Can we guide our own evolution?

Yes, because changing our own habits changes the context in which natural selection operates.

No, because we don't control the effects of what we do. Some of those effects are always unanticipated, and you don't control what you can't anticipate.

Eva Jablonka has identified four different ‘inheritance systems’ which have roles in evolution: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic. For the full story see Jablonka and Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005). Since the discovery of DNA and its structure, the genetic inheritance system has dominated evolutionary theory, but the other three are finally being recognized as sources of variation on which natural selection can operate.

Of course language — the primary symbolic system — has long been recognized as a source of variation on which conscious selection can operate. Biosemiotics, based on the pioneering work of Peirce, is beginning to bridge the gap between natural and conscious selection as factors in evolution — just as Jablonka has done, except that semiotics begins with the symbolic (linguistic) level and works downwards while Jablonka and colleagues are working upwards from the genetic.

My blog post yesterday commented on some similarities between the genetic and symbolic inheritance systems (GIS and SIS) which are not shared by the other two: both are modular and combinatorial. This allows them both to encode information, a vitally important function in the evolutionary process, as Jablonka points out:

Because of the ability to encode information, both the GIS and SIS transmit a lot of unexpressed information. Nonfunctional genes are transmitted, as also are nonimplemented ideas. This provides a huge reservoir of variation, which may become useful in new conditions. I believe that this ever-present potential gives these systems a particularly important role in long-term evolution. However, no inheritance system acts in isolation: inheritance systems interact both directly and indirectly. For example, the social animal, with its behavioral information systems, determines the selective regime in which genes are ultimately selected.

— Jablonka (Oyama, Griffiths and Gray 2001, 112)

This implies that in a time of crisis like the one we are now living through, we can affect the course of our own evolution by consciously changing our actual habits to realize ideas which have already been ‘transmitted’ but not yet implemented. That may sound obvious, but i wonder whether the possibility has really ‘sunk in’ to our awareness. Maybe it can help to place it on a scientific basis, as Jablonka does, and as Peirce did a century ago.

Popper and Peirce on science vs. certainty

Karl Popper, in his Logic of Scientific Discovery (originally published 1934; p. 93-4) used the metaphor of building on a swamp to emphasize that science and absolute certainty don't mix:

The empirical basis of objective science has nothing ‘absolute’ about it. Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.

Popper was at that time unaware that C. S. Peirce, in his Cambridge Lectures of 1898, had used the same metaphor to make the same point, though expressed with a more religious feeling for the scientific enterprise:

The only end of science, as such, is to learn the lesson that the universe has to teach it. In Induction it simply surrenders itself to the force of facts. But it finds, at once—I am partially inverting the historical order, in order to state the process in its logical order—it finds I say that this is not enough. It is driven in desperation to call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale. But in so far as it does this, the solid ground of fact fails it. It feels from that moment that its position is only provisional. It must then find confirmations or else shift its footing. Even if it does find confirmations, they are only partial. It still is not standing upon the bedrock of fact. It is walking upon a bog, and can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay till it begins to give way. Moreover, in all its progress, science vaguely feels that it is only learning a lesson. The value of Facts to it, lies only in this, that they belong to Nature; and Nature is something great, and beautiful, and sacred, and eternal, and real—the object of its worship and its aspiration.

— (CP 5.589)

Biosemiotics and symbols

It's been quiet in this space for awhile but this rather long and complex post should make up for that! Here goes:

Biosemiotically speaking, sense perception is a fundamental form of semiosis. But if a sense experience is a sign of some external object, what kind of sign is it—icon, index or symbol? It seems obvious, at first, that a visual image is an icon of its object. But if we take a closer look, especially at a perceptual process which is not visual, it becomes clear that the relation between sign (as sense image) and object (as external reality) is not that simple.

It makes intuitive sense that the perception of high-frequency sound requires receptors that convert sound waves into neural energy. These are the hair cells of the auditory apparatus, which respond to high-frequency sound with a correspondingly high rate of firing. Similarly, hair cells respond with a low rate of firing when presented with low-frequency sound.

— Llinás (2001, 219)

The hair cells code sound waves iconically. But as the coded message is transmitted through various stages to the auditory cortex, with one burst of neural activity triggering the next at every stage, it loses in translation its iconic relation to the initial ‘stimulus’.

This tells us something very important: it is not the code or message coming from the outside world that is being transmitted, but rather it is the neuronal element that responds to the message from the outside that is itself the message!

— Llinás (same page)

In other words, the neural activity as interpretant of external events impinging on the senses is now a sign which in turn determines further interpretation. As the semiotic sequence becomes less iconic with respect to the external events, it becomes more relevant to the system's habits, and thus more symbolic. By the time it contributes to a conscious experience, the signal has become a symbol filling a niche in meaning space.

Habits linking neural signals with responses are symbolic, incorporating both iconic and indexical signs into self-organizing systems guided by the mapping of internal models onto pragmatic situations into which behavioral patterns are interwoven. Since this mapping is an outgrowth of intentionality, it is habitual and symbolic: for symbols ‘represent their objects, independently alike of any resemblance or any real connection, because dispositions or factitious habits of their interpreters insure their being so understood’ (Peirce, EP2:460-461, 1909). Though the indexical component of perception is necessary to the system's structural coupling with the external world, the symbolic component is essential to the system's autonomy—that is, to its being a system in the first place.

The main difference between human minds and those of other animals is the extent to which humans make deliberate use of symbols—which we can do because our symbol use can be decoupled from immediate situations. However, this does not mean that symbol use is restricted to humans; the semiotic continuity between human and other lives is unbroken. Indeed the genetic code itself is symbolic. For Baldwin's Dictionary, Peirce wrote that a symbol ‘is constituted a sign merely or mainly by the fact that it is used and understood as such, whether the habit is natural or conventional, and without regard to the motives which originally governed its selection.’ The genome is a sign of the genotype because it is interpreted as such by the system incorporating it.

It seems to follow from this that habits of symbol use can be established by natural selection, given a regular system of sign production, interpretation and replication. Such a system is incorporated in every organism, and in every cell of multicellular organisms. The facts that the genome can be modified by natural selection, and that its expression changes with circumstances in ways that usually turn out to be appropriate, show that it is symbolic, ‘constituted a sign mainly by the fact that it is used as such’ in the course of development. Learning is a similar process within the nervous system, parallel to the evolutionary process (as Bateson pointed out) but at a much faster time scale.

This interpretation of ‘symbolic’ seems at first incompatible with views which take symbol use to be the exclusive province of humans—for instance, Deacon (1997) and Jablonka and Lamb (2005). But this may be due to the habit of taking all symbols to be conventional, whereas for Peirce this was not the case. In a 1904 letter to Welby, he wrote:

I define a Symbol as a sign which is determined by its dynamic object only in the sense that it will be so interpreted. It thus depends either upon a convention, a habit, or a natural disposition of its interpretant, or of the field of its interpretant (that of which the interpretant is a determination).

— PW, 33 (1904)

The ‘field’ here could be taken as a domain or ‘space’ such as a lexicon, and ‘determination’ as selecting or locating an item in that domain. In perception, any given object is perceived to the extent that it determines selection of some pattern from the experiential repertoire of the perceiver (i.e. her Umwelt). Neurodynamically, the pattern can be represented as an attractor in the space of brain activity. These patterns no doubt overlap, accompany or associate with each other in much the same way as the common words in a lexicon. The analogy between the genetic code and language is even more obvious; researchers in genetics are constantly speaking of ‘transcription’, ‘translation’, ‘reading’ and so on, without thinking of their usage as metaphorical. From this it seems clear enough that symbols pervade not only human life but all forms of life which employ the genetic code.

Burrowing light

However immense our science may become, we are only burrowing light into an infinitude of darkness. Once an infinitude, always an infinitude.

— C. S. Peirce, 1859 (W1:8)

Even though you have exhausted the abstruse doctrines, it is like placing a hair in vast space. Even though you have learned all the secrets of the world, it is like letting a single drop of water fall into an enormous valley.

— Te-shan (Wumenkuan, Case 28; Aitken 1991, 177)

Te-shan said this just before he burned all his notes and commentaries on the Diamond Sutra. This was the turning point in his life, from scriptural scholar to the Zen patriarch he later became. Or perhaps the turning point came a little earlier, when he was about to depart into the darkness after a long talk with Lung-tan—who handed him a candle, but then as he was taking it, suddenly blew it out.

In any case, whether you burn your notes or write a book is not important. Special transmission, inside or outside the scriptures, is nothing but burrowing into the darkness, which is undiminished thereby. All that grows is your sense of its vastness, which thus affords a way to be that burrowing.

I can't borrow your light and you can't borrow mine. And yet there is only one light: what does it now illuminate?

Poet, prophet, reader, scientist

Here's a bit of deep dialogue from William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd, I saw no God nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then persuaded, & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.
Then I asked: does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?
He replied, All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of any thing.

The poet and the prophet speak with utter conviction: if they didn't, they simply wouldn't be poets or prophets. They don't care about consequences or complications. Their task is to make their infinite visions clearly visible to others.

But what about the philosopher and the scientist? Do they believe that a ‘firm persuasion’ of anything makes it true? And how about you, dear reader?

Science, being a way of inquiry, can only begin where the poet leaves off, with a hypothesis to be tested. But a fresh hypothesis can only come in a flash of insight, like the poet's or prophet's vision. The source of this creative insight is what Blake calls the ‘poetic Genius’, and what the prophets call ‘God’. The flash is so bright for the poet, the need to write it down so compelling, that it blinds her to everything else, including the possible consequences of her utterance.

The honest reader's need, though, is to carry those consequences forward. First the flash of insight must illuminate his own experience, and then its truth becomes testable. The very possibility that the poet has expressed a deep truth or wisdom compels the reader to try it out by thinking and living it through. Will it really move mountains? He can only find out by interpreting it in some way that will make a difference to the conduct of life.

In the case of a scripture such as the Bible, the honest reader is well aware of the possibility (nay, the history!) of misinterpretation—which entails a need for reinterpretation. And that is exactly what Blake is doing here, as both poet and reader, in his dialogue with the prophets who went before. He knows very well that their writings, or some readings of them, have indeed been ‘the cause of imposition’. His own ‘honest indignation’ lies behind this inquiry, and leads to his own reinterpretation, not only of those writings, but of prophecy itself.

Poetry and philosophy, prophecy and science, writing and reading, each has its role to play in the semiotic cycle. And now it is your turn to test the wisdom at which Blake's inquiry arrives. What difference will it make to the way you read, think, write and live?

From cellular to social intimologies

It's now the middle of winter, but the buds are already there which will start to grow in the spring. How do they know when to start growing? All multicellular organisms grow until they reach maturity: how do their cells know when to stop reproducing?

This is the kind of question addressed by Werner R. Loewenstein in The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication and the Foundations of Life. It's a cause for celebration when a specialist like Loewenstein can present the gist of a lifetime's research to a general audience as he does here. I've been taking it in small doses (a few pages per day), and i don't expect to retain many of the details—and anyway, in a field moving as fast as this one, the details are subject to change. But some central principles persist, and some of those coincide with basic themes of my work in progress, Turning Words.

Turning Words is about guidance systems, and Loewenstein's book reaffirms that living beings are self-guiding systems, perfused at every level with what he calls cybernetic loops. These loops are the keys to self-organizing and self-regulating processes, and Loewenstein shows in some detail how they work at the cellular level. I think it's worthwhile to investigate whether they also work at higher levels, in the psychological and social domains.

Cell populations, or (on a larger scale) organs of a body, do not regulate themselves by electing a legislature, still less by recognizing the authority of a monarch. They don't obey any central command hierarchy; instead, they self-regulate by means of cybernetic loops. The signals meaningful to them arise among themselves, almost anywhere, and propagate by intercellular communication.

Here's where the coincidence comes in: i'm also reading presently Paul Hawken's recent book, Blessed Unrest. Hawken describes the rise of a new kind of social ‘movement’, one which promotes social and environmental justice without relying on charismatic leadership, central command structures or ideological consensus. This movement is totally decentralized, and yet can act with great singleness of purpose and power when circumstances make this possible, because each ‘cell’ in the movement is organically in touch with many others.

A sure sign of maturity in any organism is that it stops growing. The growth process is self-regulating; the breakdown of growth control is the disease we call cancer. The corporate structures which currently dominate the political economy of our planet are addicted to ‘growth’ as measured by the movement of money and assets. In organic terms, they are dedicated to prolonging the stage of immaturity, and that is why they afflict the planetary ecosystem just as cancer afflicts an individual body. (The corporate connection with cancer is not only analogical but causal as well, by the way: most of the known carcinogens in the environment are of corporate origin.)

All of this suggests that what humanity needs in order to wake from the long corporate-industrial-consumer trance is a decentralized communication network, which will clue us in to our common interests in the same way that a body knows that it's time to stop growing. This way the human race might just have a chance to reach maturity.

Why logic? Why intimologies?

The other day i came across this quote from one of the wittiest scientists of the past century, Richard P. Feynman:

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

This is a clever way of saying that a scientist doesn't need to think about what he's doing, any more than a blue jay needs to study the Blue Jay Way. And this is quite true, as long as the scientist isn't looking to break new ground in science, but is content to work on the usual problems in the usual ways. C. S. Peirce explains:

The theory of any act in no wise aids the doing of it, so long as what is to be done is of a narrow description, so that it can be governed by the unconscious part of our organism. For such purposes, rules of thumb or no rules at all are the best. You cannot play billiards by analytical mechanics nor keep shop by political economy. But when new paths have to be struck out, a spinal cord is not enough; a brain is needed, and that brain an organ of mind, and that mind perfected by a liberal education. And a liberal education—so far as its relation to the understanding goes—means logic. That is indispensable to it, and no other one thing is.

Logic here ‘is the art of devising methods of research,—the method of methods’; it is also a ‘normative science’, a method of evaluating methods. Peirce made these remarks in 1882, introducing the course in logic which he taught at Johns Hopkins University. If he seems to use the word more broadly than we typically use it today, perhaps it's a sign that we have still not taken the path of ‘liberal education’ to which he pointed so long ago.

Peirce also identified logic with semiotic(s), the study of how signs of all kinds operate. My gnoxic inquiry likewise delves into the roots of significance. I am always asking, How do you mean?. Now, you don't need to answer that question—in other words, you don't need a theory of meaning—in order to commit an act of meaning. You do it all the time, without knowing how. But what if you're aiming to boldly mean what no one has meant before? Then you might need to think about how you can do it. And that's what intimologies are all about.

It's true that a specialist (like Feynman) doesn't need philosophy of science, any more than a bird brain needs philosophy. But the most illuminating discoveries tend to be made by those who cross the old specialist boundaries. I will leave the last word on this to Peirce, continuing from the quote above:

I do not need to be told that science consists of specialties. I know all that, for I belong to the guild of science, have learned one of its trades and am saturated with its current notions. But in my judgment there are scientific men, all whose training has only served to belittle them, and I do not see that a mere scientific specialist stands intellectually much higher than an artisan. I am quite sure that a young man who spends his time exclusively in the laboratory of physics or chemistry or biology, is in danger of profiting but little more from his work than if he were an apprentice in a machine shop.

The scientific specialists—pendulum swingers and the like—are doing a great and useful work; each one very little, but altogether something vast. But the higher places in science in the coming years are for those who succeed in adapting the methods of one science to the investigation of another.…

Now although a man needs not the theory of a method in order to apply it as it has been applied already, yet in order to adapt to his own science the method of another with which he is less familiar, and to properly modify it so as to suit it to its new use, an acquaintance with the principles upon which it depends will be of the greatest benefit. For that sort of work a man needs to be more than a mere specialist; he needs such a general training of his mind, and such knowledge as shall show him how to make his powers most effective in a new direction. That knowledge is logic.

— Peirce (EP1, 212-13)

(By the way, Peirce himself was a ‘pendulum swinger’ in the employ of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and made specialist contributions to several fields; but his first and lasting love was logic and philosophy.)