Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category

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Poem: This World

Published by peter on 2011-01-10 in Poetry and Religion. 0 Comments

Today’s poem is by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), New England transcendentalist, and written about 1862.

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond –
Invisible, as Music –
But positive, as Sound –
It beckons, and it baffles –
Philosophy – don’t know –
And through a Riddle, at the last –
Sagacity, must go –
To guess it, puzzles scholars –
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown –
Faith slips – and laughs, and rallies –
Blushes, if any see –
Plucks at a twig of Evidence –
And asks a Vane, the way –
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit –
Strong Hallelujahs roll –
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul –

Reference:
Brenda Hillman (Editor) [1995]: Emily Dickinson: Poems. Boston, MA, USA: Shambhala.

On meaning

Published by peter on 2010-12-22 in Religion. 0 Comments

Over at Normblog, Norm returns to his argument against religion as a human activity that ultimately implies beliefs in the form of propositions.  I have written against this view before – here, and here, and here.  In his latest post, I think Norm makes two errors of reasoning common to western philosophy these last three centuries or so – that of conflating knowledge in general with a specific form of knowledge, namely know-what (knowledge of facts about the world), and that of conflating know-what with a particular representation of it in the form of propositions (statements about the world with truth values).
We can know how to tie our own shoe-laces, for example, and, as knowledge engineers in computer science have learnt these last 50 years, such know-how is not the same as know-what, and is also often very difficult to represent as propositions about the world.  Without explicit representation of the actions, one is forced to associate each action with the propositions that are true before its execution, and those true afterwards, ie, two states, or collections of propositions.  But doing so does not enable us to distinguish different actions having the same pre- and post-states, for example, two different procedures for tying the same shoelace knot.  One is therefore soon forced to explicitly represent actions.  But what exactly are these things, these representations of actions?  They are not statements with truth values; indeed, they are not even statements. And this is just for plain old actions, not even utterances about actions, such as promises and requests and commands, all of which may comprise part of a system of know-how (eg, knowledge of how to steer a crewed sailing ship, or knowledge of the process of launching an ICBM).
Even know-what may not be readily amenable to propositional representation, or at least not to propositions understandable by the human subject having the knowledge:  any propositional representation of the knowledge of the hundreds or thousands of scents distinguishable by an expert perfumier, for instance, would likely have to involve descriptions of chemical molecules in a style and formal language way beyond the knowledge or thinking or scent-memory of the perfumier.  The same conclusion is true with even greater force for the knowledge of non-human beings, such as the keen olfactory sense of most dogs or the navigational abilities of homing pigeons;  I’ve yet to meet a dog that understood a proposition, but dogs retain an ability to recall and distinguish scents despite this inability at propositional representation.   I have written before on different forms of knowledge here.  And if you think all knowledge of geography has to be represented as maps, you should see Rory Stewart’s example recounted here.
Norm ends with:

At bottom, the whole intellectual project founders, in my view, on this logical conundrum: if you really do evacuate religion of all its substantive beliefs, it will be left as meaningful as scraping a stick along a wall, or balancing a marble on your head, or pronouncing a slow ‘drooom’ into a mauve cup; and if religion has more significant meaning than that for its adherents, meaning which really matters to them, this must be because of things religion says about the condition of the universe and their place within it.”

Norm’s  understanding of “meaning” seems only to be know-what; a wider view of meaning throws that final “must” into serious question.  The meaning of scraping a stick along a wall may be the pleasant sound this action leads to, or the pleasure is gives your hand as the stick undulates with the surface of the wall, or the pleasure it gives you to have a hand able hold a stick, or the presence of friends and family doing the same action with you, or that doing this enables you to recall past times, when you were younger perhaps, when you enjoyed doing the same thing, or that your ancestors likely did the same as long there have been walls  and you wish to honor them by repeating the action, or the sense of bliss or ecstasy or contentedness or calm that scraping sticks along walls may induce in you.  The meaning of a stick against a wall for you may even be its complete lack of any ostensible meaning, its complete and utter time-wasting lack of utility, especially for us western moderns in a culture obsessed with achievement, success, progress, time, self-improvement, and bildung.
All of the meanings I’ve listed here apply equally well to religious activities and other rituals, both social and personal, such as prayer and meditation and attending church services.  And I find it hard to believe that someone who follows sport with enthusiasm should appear to insist that all human activities should have meanings to their adherents that entail propositions testable by external observers, as if all our actions were subject to some community test of significance of meaning.   Does the thought that cricket really matters to me necessarily occur because of things cricket says about the condition of the universe and my place within it?  This I doubt.  If it’s not true for cricket, why should it be true for religion? If Norm wants to insist on religion satisfying such a test, then this constraint says more about his paucity of understanding of religious practices and ideas than anything it might say about religion itself.

Dyson on string theory

Published by peter on 2010-09-12 in Mathematics, Religion and Science. 0 Comments

Physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson on string theory:

But when I am at home at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, I am surrounded by string theorists, and I sometimes listen to their conversations. Occasionally I understand a little of what they are saying. Three things are clear.  First, what they are doing is first-rate mathematics. The leading pure mathematicians, people like Michael Atiyah and Isadore Singer, love it. It has opened up a whole new branch of mathematics, with new ideas and new problems. Most remarkably,  it gave the mathematicians new methods to solve old problems that were previously unsolvable.  Second, the string theorists think of themselves as physicists rather than mathematicians. They believe that their theory describes something real in the physical world. And third, there is not yet any proof that the theory is relevant to physics.  The  theory is not yet testable by experiment. The theory remains in a world of its own, detached from the rest of physics. String theorists make strenuous efforts to deduce consequences of the theory that might be testable in the real world, so far without success.
. . .
Finally, I give you my own guess for the future of string theory. My guess is probably wrong. I have no illusion that I can predict the future. I tell [page-break] you my guess, just to give you something to think about. I consider it unlikely that string theory will turn out to be either totally successful or totally useless. By totally successful I mean that it is a complete theory of physics, explaining all the details of particles and their interactions. By totally useless I mean that it remains a beautiful piece of pure mathematics. My guess is that string theory will end somewhere between complete success and failure. I guess that it will be like the theory of Lie groups, which Sophus Lie created in the nineteenth century as a mathematical framework for classical physics. So long as physics remained classical, Lie groups remained a failure. They were a solution looking for a problem. But then, fifty years later, the quantum revolution transformed physics, and Lie algebras found their proper place. They became the key to understanding the central role of symmetries in the quantum world. I expect that fifty or a hundred years from now another revolution in physics will happen, introducing new concepts of which we now have no inkling, and the new concepts will give string theory a new meaning. After that, string theory will suddenly find its proper place in the universe, making testable statements about the real world. I warn you that this guess about the future is probably wrong. It has the virtue of being falsifiable, which according to Karl Popper is the hallmark of a scientific statement. It may be demolished tomorrow by some discovery coming out of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.” (page 221-222)

POSTSCRIPT (2012-12-27):  Physicist Jim Al-Khalili interviewed in The New Statesman (21 December 2012 – 3 January 2013, page 57):

Theoretical physics in the past hundred years has sometimes bordered on metaphysics and philosophy, especially when we come up with ideas that we can’t see a way of testing experimentally.   For me, science is empirical – it is about gathering evidence.  It’s debatable whether something like superstring theory, which is at the forefront of theoretical physics, is proper science because we still haven’t designed an experiment to test it.”

The link to metaphysics should come as no surprise, since all scientific investigations eventually end there, as Boulton argued.
Reference:
Freeman Dyson [2009]:  Birds and frogs.  Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 56 (2): 212-223, February 2009.   Available here.

The world beyond our five senses

Published by peter on 2010-09-09 in Religion and Science. 0 Comments

Over at Normblog, Norm has a typically open-minded discussion about religion and its possible attractions for its adherents:

Both Howard [Jakobson] and Tim [Crane], then, neither of them speaking as a believer, sees religion as making the world, so to say, fuller for its adherents – with more of interest, of meaning, of things, even, beyond our grasp. This reminds me of the occasion I asked a religious friend about the basis of his belief and he cut the conversation short by saying simply that his life would be poorer without it.
All I can say is that this account of religion doesn’t work for me – I mean, to shift me – and for two reasons. The first is that the world seems like an intensely interesting place already, without any extra population of meanings and mysteries. Just look, read. There’s no end of it, never mind a fullness. The second is that I don’t feel free to add a further layer of things to those for which some evidence can be supplied, and if I did, I wouldn’t know where to stop. Why just those mysteries?

I think Norm, and the accounts he cites, miss something that is often important both to religious believers and to practitioners of religious activities (two overlapping but not identical groups, as I have explained before).    What is missing is that for many people in these two groups, their interest in religious ideas and practices arises from a contact they have had, or which they perceive they have had, with entities from a non-material realm. This contact usually involves none of their so-called five senses, but is experienced deeply nonetheless.  One can know something from merely being in the presence of somebody, as may happen, for example, when we experience the strong love of another person.
Of course, it may be that people who have had such spiritual experiences are deluded in thinking they had them, or even, that they delude themselves.  Experiments exciting certain parts of the brain with small electric currents can apparently induce very similar perceptions of religious experiences in people.   Even so, such experiments do not demonstrate, or even make likely, the absence of non-material entities; in precisely the same way, patients with tinnitus do not demonstrate that all sound is generated inside our own heads and we all live in a silent universe.
So it is perfectly possible that people who perceive they have had direct contact with non-material realms may indeed have had such contact.  This possibility exists even though Richard Dawkins and many another famous person seem not to have had such experiences.  Moreover, the lack of spiritual experiences for some people also tells us nothing about the existence or non-existence of spiritual realms and beings.   Not all of us are born able to hear, for example, but the fact that some people are born deaf is also not usually taken as a sign that the universe itself is silent.  It may thus, indeed, be those who believe that they have not had contacts with a non-material realm who are deluded, or who are deluding themselves.  In a situation of such widespread ignorance, with neither replicable evidence for the existence of spiritual entities nor any evidence against their existence, it behooves no one to be arrogant about his or her position.  (For the record, I do not count Norm in this combined category of arrogant atheists and arrogant religious believers.)
And to Norm’s larger point:   If a person has had such an experience, what does she find?  First, she finds that the experience is entirely discounted by science, since it cannot be replicated via experiment.  This arrogant disdain for phenomena that it cannot yet explain has sadly been a feature of western science since its inception.   Second, she finds that she cannot talk openly about this experience, at least not in a modern western office or university.    In the supremely rationalist environment of our business and education worlds, talking about spiritual experiences among colleagues is one sure way nowadays to receive laughter, scorn and derision.   That is very different from, say, the situation in the West in the middle of the 19th century, or the situation still today in Africa or in Australian Aboriginal society, societies where spiritual experiences are widely respected.   Having lived in both the West and in Africa, I know this difference very well.   Third, she would find no explanation or meaning for her experience in any academic discipline, apart from theology and poetry, and perhaps the arts and music.    She would, however, likely find great sympathy from pure mathematicians, who grapple daily with entities which seem to have existence and properties independent of the material realm, entities which are entirely imaginary, outside the world of our five senses, and yet which seem to exist in some fashion, often sublimely connected with one another.  (The square root of minus 1, for example, is entirely imaginary, yet its properties are not random, to be invented as we might wish from whole cloth, but are decidedly what they are.)
For Norm, the material world is rich and interesting enough as it is, and needs no further explanation.   If you have ever experienced something beyond the material, then I suggest that finding an explanation or interpretation of that experience which makes some sense of it for you is not nothing, and is a quest not to be ridiculed or derided, however quixotic that quest might prove.  Personally, I cannot understand how anyone who has encountered the Euler Equation  – which links an imaginary number with two important transcendental numbers, along with the respective identities for addition and multiplication – could possibly believe that the material world is all there is.

In defence of secularism

Published by peter on 2010-09-02 in History, Politics and Religion. 0 Comments

Edmund Adamus, director of pastoral affairs at the Roman Catholic diocese of Westminster, London, is apparently upset at modern, liberal secular society, claiming (inter alia) that:

Our laws and lawmakers for over 50 years have been the most permissively anti-life and progressively anti-family and marriage, in essence one of the most anti-Catholic landscapes, culturally speaking – more than even those places where Catholics suffer open persecution.”

This is nonsense.  It was secularists – atheists, agnostics, non-believers, liberals, and anti-bigots – who led the campaign in Britain for Catholic emancipation, the right to vote, and the right to sit in Parliament, granted in 1829.   It was secularists who achieved the right for Jews to sit in Parliament from 1858 and the right to vote in 1867, something that the same political party currently ruling Britain stymied for a quarter century.  (The bill emancipating Jews passed the House of Commons in 1833, but was repeatedly blocked in the House of Lords by Conservative peers and bishops.  What reasonable person with knowledge of this history could belong to such a party?)  It was secularists, not the religious, who led the campaign which ended the deaths of women in illegal back-street abortions and gave equal rights to people regardless of their gender or colour or sexual orientation.  It was even  secularists who passed a law in 2001 – yes, 2001!  – that finally allowed Catholic priests and former priests to sit in the British Parliament.    If not for secularism and the progressive extension of political and social rights to all citizens, regardless of their religion or race or gender, Edmund Adamus would not even have the freedom of speech to voice his obnoxious opinions.
Few things make me angry.  Religious bigotry and racial prejudice are among them.  So too is this stupidity of religious conservatives, unable to see where there own self-interests lie.  Their interests are best served by a secular society and state which guarantees equal rights to all, not special rights to some on the basis of their religious beliefs or their gender or any other biological or social construct.  Britain is still not entirely there yet, with the fact of unelected, unrepresentative, and unaccountable Church of England Bishops still sitting in the House of Lords (and thus voting on legislation that impacts us all), and the country’s denial of religious freedom for the Head of State and his or her immediate family.  But the great progress in extending freedom to all that has been made these last 200 years is due to secularism and secularists, not to religious bigotry or obscurantism.

On growing up Catholic

Published by peter on 2010-08-28 in Places and Religion. 0 Comments

The Australian Labor Party split in two three times during the 20th century:  over military conscription during WW I, over economic policies during the Great Depression, and over entryism by Catholic anti-communists in 1954.   A Catholic-dominated splinter party from that last split, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), now looks likely to be represented in the Australian Federal Parliament again after 36 years absence, by winning the last Senate seat from Victoria in last week’s election.   I therefore thought it interesting to collect the views of several lapsed Catholics on their education.

Here is Germaine Greer, educated in Melbourne by Catholic nuns of the Presentation Order, in an essay in the collection, There’s Something About a Convent Girl (Edited by Jackie Bennet  & Rosemary Forgan.  London, UK; Virago, 1991):

I am still a Catholic, I just don’t believe in God. I am an atheist Catholic – there are a lot of them around. One thing lapsed Catholics do not do is go in for an “inferior” religion with less in the way of tradition and intellectual content.”

And Catholic-raised Terry Eagleton on reason in religious education:

[Richard] Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief.”

Catalan & American philosopher George Santayana, who ended his life, though a lapsed believer, in a convent in Rome:

Catholicism is the most human of religions, if taken humanly:  it is paganism spiritually transformed and made metaphysical. It corresponds most adequately to the various exigencies of moral life, with just the needed dose of wisdom, sublimity, and illusion.” (Persons and Places. London, UK:  Constable, 1944, p. 98)

British author David Almond, in an interview with Sarah Crown, quoted on his Catholic upbringing in Newcastle, UK:

Readers and critics have labelled Almond’s novels modern fairytales. But for Almond himself, “the pressing thing is the realism. Skellig had to be in a real garage. Kit sleeps in a real mine. The Fire-Eaters, while it has a miraculous element to it, takes place in a real coastal town, and features a real fire-eater – he was based on this character we used to see on the Quayside in Newcastle when I was a kid. Once you’ve got that solid, touchable world you can do anything. Maybe that’s something else to do with being brought up as a Catholic: you’re taught to think about the other world, but you grow up in this one, and you realise there couldn’t be anything better. So you find the miraculousness in reality.”

Hilary Mantel says something similar:

In the ideal world, all writers would have a Catholic childhood, or belong to some other religion which does the equivalent for you. Because Catholicism tells you at a very early age the world is not what you see; that beyond everything you see, and the appearance – or the accidents as they’re known – there is another reality, and it is a far more important reality. So it’s like running in the imagination. I think that this was the whole point for me – that from my earliest years I believed the world to have an overt face and a hidden face, and behind every cause another cause, and behind every explanation another explanation, which is perhaps of quite a different order. And if you cease to believe in Catholic doctrine it doesn’t mean that you lose that; you still regard the world as ineffable and mysterious and as something which perhaps in the end can’t quite be added up. It could be summed up as saying “all is not as it seems”, and of course that’s the first thing Catholicism tells you. And then it just runs through everything you write and everything you touch, really. Plus, it’s good to have something to rebel against.”

Irish writer John McGahern, in a 1993 essay, “The Church and its Spire”, on his upbringing in 1950s Eire:

I was born into Catholicism as I might have been born into Buddhism or Protestantism or any of the other isms or sects, and brought up as a Roman Catholic in the infancy of this small state when the Church had almost total power: it was the dominating force in my whole upbringing, education and early working life.
I have nothing but gratitude for the spiritual remnants of that upbringing, the sense of our origins beyond the bounds of sense, an awareness of mystery and wonderment, grace and sacrament, and the absolute equality of all women and men underneath the sun of heaven. That is all that now remains. Belief, as such, has long gone.”

Journalist Antony Funnell in an article about the violence in Australian Catholic education also says:

It was many years before I started to truly appreciate the full effect that the Catholic education system of the 1970s and early 80s had on my psyche. From the [Marist] Brothers I retain, and cherish, a sense of what’s often called “Catholic social justice”: a deeply held belief that what’s important in life is to make some form of difference to society, no matter what you do and no matter how small your contribution; that treating everyone as your equal is important; that your goals in life should rise above the simple pursuit of material wealth.
How odd then that I also learned from them how base and brutal and petty human beings can be.”

I think this sense of the absolute equality of all arises from the universalist ambitions of Catholicism (all people are called to embrace it and be saved), which it shares with Islam.  Those forms of Protestantism which focus on an elect, the people whom God has decided will be saved (even, according to believers in predestinationism, so chosen before their birth), do not share this bias for absolute equality.    Of course, within the Church itself, with its priesthood currently restricted to men, and then only some men, the tradition of equality is dishonoured more than honoured.  And the universalism of Catholicism, coupled with its global presence, mean that a welcoming community and familiar rituals can be found by adherents most anywhere they go (again like Islam).   Perhaps only participation in a global martial arts community, such as karate or aikido, offers anything similar.
And since Catholics hold that it is the-people-as-the-Church that receive grace and are saved, not people as individuals, there is a bias toward community and social cohesion that runs counter to the prevailing individualistic ethos of capitalism.
Note:  The image used to show one of the many woodcarvings in the Catholic Church at Serima Mission, near Masvingo, Zimbabwe.

What is music for?

Published by peter on 2010-08-28 in Minimalism, Music and Religion. 0 Comments

What is music for?  What purposes do its performers achieve, or intend to achieve?  What purposes do its listeners use it for?  Why do composers or song-writers write it?

These seem to me fundamental questions in any discussion about (say) the public funding of music performances and music education, or (say) the apparent lack of knowledge that some people in Britain have about some types of music, or (say) how to increase audiences for particular types of music.   But no-one seems to debate these questions, or even to raise them.  As a result, there seems to be little awareness that aims and purposes may vary, both across cultures, and over time.   (I am reminded of Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art which understands art as the creation of objects liable to be perceived by their audience as objects with intentionality, that is, objects carrying some purpose.)

The philosopher John Austin once said that every science begins with a classification.  In that spirit, I have tried to list some purposes and functions which I have understood to be intended for music by composers, performers and/or listeners (in no particular order):
  • To entertain, to give pleasure. The pleasure may arise from the sounds themselves (eg, elements such as the sound qualities, the melodies, the harmonies, the overtones, the timbres, the beat, the rhythms, the combinations or interplay of the various elements), or the performance of the music (the skills of the performers may provide pleasure), or the construction of the music (eg, repetition or novelty, contrapuntalism or other structural features, the composition or improvisation techniques evident to a listener), or allusions to other sounds and music.
  • To express some emotion or mood in the composer/writer, or in the performer.  Indeed, music may be a form of encrypted communication, with messages able to be understood by the target audience but not by any others who hear it.   According to Larry Todd, Fanny Mendelssohn wrote lieder (art-songs) to communicate to Wilhelm Hensel her feelings about him; he was later to become her husband, but at this time her parents had forbidden them to meet or to write to one another, even on occasion intercepting a letter he had had written against this order.
  • To evoke some emotion or mood in the listener.  The sturm-und-drang movement in the mid-18th century, for example, led symphony writers to imitate thunderstorms and other effects, often seeking to frighten or surprise listeners. Bach expert, Peter Williams, for example, wrote that Bach’s sacred choral music (his Cantatas, Passions, and Masses)

    were conceived to instruct, affect, alert, startle and entrance the listener, originally doing so mostly in church services but today anywhere;” (Williams 2016, page ix).

    Or, as Rachmaninov said of his Preludes:

    “If we must have the psychology of the Prelude, let it be understood that its function is not to express a mood, but to induce it.”

  • For listeners to become aware of their own feelings in reaction to music they hear. The pianist Roberto Prosseda has argued that one function of music is to help listeners to become aware of their own internal emotions that arise in response to the music.

    One of the most significant “side-effects” of making music at an in-depth level is surely the fact of becoming aware of one’s interiority, knowing how to listen: this doesn’t just involve a more acute sense of hearing, but above all the capacity to be able to look inside oneself in order to recognize and experience one’s emotions with awareness.”

    I have met quite a few otherwise-intelligent people who are, manifestly, not always aware of their own emotional reactions to events taking place outside themselves. For such people, practice in listening may be a very important function of music.

  • To express solidarity and communality, whether by performers or by listeners. See, for instance, Mark Evan Bonds’ great book on how Beethoven’s symphonies were perceived by their audience as expressions of and occasions for communality. Singing of national anthems and songs by football crowds is an everyday example of expressions of communality. John Miller Chernoff’s observation that African people express their opinion of a musical performance by joining in (themselves performing, singing, beating time, or dancing) is an example of this particular aesthetic of music.  Other examples include the playing of the US national anthem at the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, London, on 13 September 2001, and the programming of music by American composers for the Last Night of the Proms in London that same week, both acts of solidarity with the USA after the 9/11 attacks.  Given the fact that the US had to fight a war against the British crown to achieve Independence, and indeed had fought a subsequent war with Britain, these were very strong statements of solidarity.
  • To inspire listeners to action, as, for example, with the music of the 19th century nationalists such as Verdi, Chopin, Dvorak, Smetana, Sibelius, Hill, etc.   Such nationalist aesthetics may be very powerful:  The white minority regime in South Africa, for example, banned the singing of the hymn, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (“God Bless Africa”), because of its association with the movement for majority rule. (The hymn is now the national anthem of South Africa.)   Similarly, although Japan’s illegal military occupation of Korea ended in 1945 and both countries are now democracies, Japanese pop music was still banned in the ROK (South Korea) as late as 1992.
  • To induce altered mental states in performers or listeners, for example, as an aid to entering a trance or to prepare them for some other spiritual experience. In words of Indian musician Gita Sarabhai (1922-2011) that influenced John Cage, for example, music’s function is “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.”

    The Russian-Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg, after performing all five Beethoven Piano Concertos with the Brussels Philharmonic (under Thierry Fischer) across three evenings in February 2020, wrote (on 18 February 2020):

    The high point for me was No. 4, during which I experienced something which until now I’ve only felt while playing Russian music: a kind of floating, when your brain disengages or splits in two. One (small) part is alert and following the performance, and perhaps directs the musical flow a little bit, the other (much larger) part is completely sunk into the music, experiencing it in a kind of visceral, instinctive way which precludes logical thinking and seems wired directly to your deepest feelings, without any buffers or defenses. After that concerto I was drained, bewildered, exhilarated – a complete mess. But what an unforgettable night.”

    Actors have told me of achieving a similar, but infrequent, transcendence in performance, when they feel the character they are playing is a real person, whose mind they are inside, instead of being in their own body and mind performing the character.

  • To facilitate some other activity, such as dancing, singing or the recital of poetry, or the ready memorizing of secret espionage codes.
  • To think. Contrapuntal music, in the North German tradition that reached its peak in the middle of the 18th century, used fugal writing as a way of articulating the possible mathematical manipulations (eg, overlay, delay, inversion, reversion) of the theme.  These manipulations may be viewed mathematically as group actions on a musical space. Similarly, the tradition of western art music from the mid 18th century through to the present day has focused on the articulation of the musical consequences of a theme or motif. Beethoven, who was never very good at melody-making, was perhaps the best composer ever at development, with Mendelssohn a very close second. Chopin, by contrast, was good with melodies, but not at complex development.

    The development of musical material during improvised performances of modern jazz, of Indian ragas, or of Balinese gamelan scales are further examples. See, for instance, Paul Berliner’s account of his learning to improvise in jazz.
    Likewise, much minimalist music forces performer and listener to pay careful mental attention to aspects of music, such as rhythm and metre, ignored in the dominant uptown tradition, and how these vary, concatenate and interleave with one another. Similarly, the focus, particularly by composers in the American experimental tradition this last 100 years (eg, Cowell, Varese, Cage), on the materiality of sounds and their making is another form of thinking; it is the intelligent exploration of the features of sounds and sound-generating mechanisms, and of the consequences of these features.

  • To facilitate thinking. I have a computer scientist friend whose attempts to prove mathematical theorems is greatly enhanced if he listens to Bach fugues while doing so. Likewise, many large corporations transmit low-decibel, high-frequency white noise through their office speaker systems to facilitate work in open-plan offices.
  • To effect some change in the listener. Bianca Bosker, writing about visual art in her book Get the Picture, has said (page 273), “Art knocks us off our well-worn pathways. Other things can do that too, but art . . . is arguably designed specifically for that purpose.” This goal of a composer and/or a performer overlaps with others in this list. I think immediately of Pekka Kuusisto’s wonderful recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which is decidedly not twee or smug, as performances of this work can be, but deliberately abrasive.
  • To come to know oneself.   Using music (or any form of human expression) as a form of thinking, one learns about oneself: how one thinks, about what one is thinking or obsessing, and what one perceives. Many visual artists draw or paint to know themselves better, with the resulting drawing or art-work a mere by-product of the process. The same is true of musicians and composers and listeners, and it is why people may be drawn to life as a musician (or artist) despite the many negative consequences. (I am grateful to conversations with Patricia Cain for this insight.)
  • To enable one to seek mastery of the skills and arts involved in composing, performing and/or listening, to train oneself in these arts, to undertake a practice (in the Zen sense of that word). The Australian composer, James Penberthy, in his late memoir, spoke of his need to spend several hours each day composing, in order to achieve mental balance, something he only fully realized in his later life.

    Over years, with persistence and dedication, the physical skills involved in a daily musical (or other) practice can cease to require the full attention of our conscious minds, and thereby allow the mind to float above the actual musical activity: we may “enter the zone”, a transcendent flow state. After years of playing the piano, I can usually and consistently reach this state on the piano within minutes. After years of playing the violin, I have yet to reach it on the violin even once.

  • To pray. Much western religious music is expressed in a form of supplication or worship to a deity. Composing, performing or listening to music may also be understood as acts of piety in themselves, akin to the copying out of sacred texts which some religions, for example, Nichiren Shu Buddhism, consider to be pious actions.
  • To channel messages from the spirit world, as Zimbabwean mbira players are aiming to do when playing.   Jazz pianist Craig Taborn has said that he believes “creative endeavours are informed by the interaction with metaphysical forces” and that “Music functions as a means to ‘call down’ those spirits [the spirits of the black improvisational music tradition], so in a very real sense I am not doing anything when the music is truly being made.  It isn’t really me doing it.”
  • To communicate with non-material (ie, spirit) realms. Much prayer, indeed, perhaps the overwhelming majority, is primarily intended neither as entreaty nor worship of a deity, but instead communion with spiritual entities. Music can be a form of such communion.
  • To provide soteriological guidance to performers or listeners. Composing, playing, or listening may help one achieve or progress towards salvation. Jazz pianist Craig Taborn again: “All the things people say when they talk about music have to do with entertainment, or some kind of aesthetic advancement.  Yet when they talk  about how music moves them, they talk about other  things:  feelings, times of life, etc.  So I  suppose that for me, music is one of the things we use to get ourselves through life.”
  • To provide an unobtrusive background to other events, as Muzak seeks to do, and as much film music appears to be seeking to do.
  • To pass the time.  It is true that time would have passed anyway, but one’s perception of the duration and speed of its passage may be altered.

These goals may overlap.  For instance, music may entertain by providing an opportunity for musical thinking.  For musics such as modern jazz improv or classical Indian ragas, the composers, performers or listeners may gain considerable pleasure from the thinking they undertake in order to write, to perform, or to listen to the music.  A listener to music may gain intellectual pleasure by discerning and re-creating the thinking that the composer undertook when writing a piece, or that was undertaken by a performer engaged in an improvisation.  Such pleasure at thinking, in my experience, is similar to the pleasures which people gain by doing crosswords or doing Sudoku puzzles; it may also be a form of mathmind.   This is (writing, performing or hearing) music as thinking, in exactly the same way that drawing is a form of thinking.   As with drawing, the cognitive abilities required to think via music, especially on the fly, should not be underestimated.

References:
Paul F. Berliner [1994]: Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago, IL, USA:  Chicago University Press.
Mark Evan Bonds [2006]:  Music as Thought:  Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
John Miller Chernoff [1979]:  African Rhythm and African Sensibility:  Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. Chicago, IL, USA:  University of Chicago Press.
Allen Forte [1977]:  The Structure of Atonal Music.  New Haven, CT, USA:  Yale University Press.
Kyle Gann [2006]: Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice.  University of California Press.
Alfred Gell [1998]: Art and Agency:  An Anthropological Theory.  Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
Peter Williams [2016]: Bach: A Musical Biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

In defence of futures thinking

Published by peter on 2010-08-18 in Argumentation, Computer Science, Decision theory, Forecasting, Marketing strategy, Planning, Prophecy, Religion and Uncertainty. 0 Comments

Norm at Normblog has a post defending theology as a legitimate area of academic inquiry, after an attack on theology by Oliver Kamm.  (Since OK’s post is behind a paywall, I have not read it, so my comments here may be awry with respect to that post.)  Norm argues, very correctly, that it is legitimate for theology, considered as a branch of philosophy to, inter alia, reflect on the properties of entities whose existence has not yet been proven.  In strong support of Norm, let me add:  Not just in philosophy!
In business strategy, good decision-making requires consideration of the consequences of potential actions, which in turn requires the consideration of the potential actions of other actors and stakeholders in response to the first set of actions.  These actors may include entities whose existence is not yet known or even suspected, for example, future competitors to a product whose launch creates a new product category.   Why, there’s even a whole branch of strategy analysis, devoted to scenario planning, a discipline that began in the military analysis of alternative post-nuclear worlds, and whose very essence involves the creation of imagined futures (for forecasting and prognosis) and/or imagined pasts (for diagnosis and analysis).   Every good air-crash investigation, medical diagnosis, and police homicide investigation, for instance, involves the creation of imagined alternative pasts, and often the creation of imaginary entities in those imagined pasts, whose fictional attributes we may explore at length.   Arguably, in one widespread view of the philosophy of mathematics, pure mathematicians do nothing but explore the attributes of entities without material existence.
And not just in business, medicine, the military, and the professions.   In computer software engineering, no new software system development is complete without due and rigorous consideration of the likely actions of users or other actors with and on the system, for example.   Users and actors here include those who are the intended target users of the system, as well as malevolent or whimsical or poorly-behaved or bug-ridden others, both human and virtual, not all of whom may even exist when the system is first developed or put into production.      If creative articulation and manipulation of imaginary futures (possible or impossible) is to be outlawed, not only would we have no literary fiction or much poetry, we’d also have few working software systems either.

Need God be complex?

Published by peter on 2010-08-14 in Computer Science and Religion. 0 Comments


Philosopher Gary Gutting attacks the logic of the argument of Richard Dawkins for atheism, here.   Gutting formulates Dawkins’ main argument for atheism as the following chain of reasoning:

1. There is need for an explanation of the apparent design of the universe.
2. The universe is highly complex.
3. An intelligent designer of the universe would be even more highly complex.
4. A complex designer would itself require an explanation.
5. Therefore, an intelligent designer will not provide an explanation of the universe’s complexity.
6. On the other hand, the (individually) simple processes of natural selection can explain the apparent design of the universe.
7. Therefore, an intelligent designer (God) almost certainly does not exist.”

Gutting argues that Claim #7 does not following from Propositions #1 through #6.  But this stated chain of reasoning falls well before reaching claim #7.  Claim #3 does not follow from Claims #1 and #2.    Complex phenomena may emerge from simpler components, as is seen (for example) in the apparently-coordinated, but actually-uncoordinated, behaviours of insects and (simple-rule-following, non-communicating) swarm robots, or in the patterns that emerge in some cellular automata, as in John Conway’s Game of Life.  One could easily imagine a creator who established some simple ground-rules (eg, the laws of thermodynamics and the rules of biological evolution) and a starting position for the universe (eg, the Big Bang), and just let the process evolve or adapt over the course of time, without further divine intervention, subject only to the given rules.  Such a creator need not, Him-, Her- or It-self, be very complex at all, and certainly could be less complex than the universe that resulted in the fullness of time.
This phenomenon is known to most software engineers working on large systems, writing software that exhibits behaviours more complex than they are able to explain or understand subsequently, and even more complex than they intended to create.  The recent Flash Crash of stock prices on 6 May 2010 may be the result of such emergent complexity, unintended (and as yet unexplained) by the system designers, programmers and financial market regulators who operate the world’s stock markets.   Even common computer operating systems are beyond the ability of one person to entirely comprehend, let alone design:  Windows XP has an estimated 40 million source lines of code (SLOC), for example, while Debian 4.0 has an estimated 283 million SLOC.   These are among the most complex human artefacts yet created.  Indeed, the phenomenon is so prevalent in software development that the British Government sponsored research into the topic (see, for example, Bullock and Cliff  2004).
It also seems to me that Claim #4 needs some justification, since it is not obviously true.   Most scientists, for instance, seem perfectly happy accepting certain claims as not requiring any explanation or even any inquiry.  These claims differ from one discipline to another, and typically change over time.  Moreover, uncontested claims in one discipline often form the basis, when contested, of another discipline:  marketing, for example, starts from the contestation of  the foundational notions of commodities, of perfect competition, and of infinite consumer mental processing capabilities that remain uncontested (at least until recently) in mainstream economics; computer science, in another example, contests the assumption of the existence of non-constructive entities taken for granted in mainstream (non-intuitionistic) pure mathematics; parts of the study of uncertainty in artificial intelligence contest the Law of Excluded Middle taken for granted in probability theory and in mathematical statistics.
Gutting also criticises Dawkins for the lack of sophistication of his philosophical arguments:

Religious believers often accuse argumentative atheists such as Dawkins of being excessively rationalistic, demanding standards of logical and evidential rigor that aren’t appropriate in matters of faith. My criticism is just the opposite. Dawkins does not meet the standards of rationality that a topic as important as religion requires.
The basic problem is that meeting such standards requires coming to terms with the best available analyses and arguments. This need not mean being capable of contributing to the cutting-edge discussions of contemporary philosophers, but it does require following these discussions and applying them to one’s own intellectual problems. Dawkins simply does not do this. He rightly criticizes religious critics of evolution for not being adequately informed about the science they are calling into question. But the same criticism applies to his own treatment of philosophical issues.”

I am reminded of Terry Eagleton’s criticism that Dawkins had read insufficient theology, in this spirited review of Dawkins’ book.  Eagleton begins:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Finally, Gutting repeats something mentioned before on this blog:

There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being . . “

If we broadened this group of people to “sensible people who report some kind of direct awareness of non-material realms and divine entities”, then, inter alia, the majority of African, Indian and Chinese people and the first peoples of North America and Australia would fall in this category.
References:
Seth Bullock and Dave Cliff [2004]: Complexity and Emergent Behaviour in Information and Communications Systems.  Report for the UK Foresight Programme on Intelligent Infrastructure Systems, Office of Science and Technology, Government of the UK.  Available here.   Programme Information here.
Richard Dawkins [2006]: The God Delusion.  Bantam Press.
Terry Eagleton [2006]: Lunging, flailing, mispunching.   London Review of Books, 28 (20):  32-34.  2006-10-19.
Gary Gutting [2010]:  On Dawkins’s atheism:  a response.  New York Times, 2010-08-11.

 

Beliefs and actions redux (& redux & redux . . .)

Published by peter on 2010-05-13 in Anthropology and Religion. 0 Comments

Over at Normblog, Norm begins a post with the words:

Here’s another in that series: religious beliefs vindicated by being redefined to mean something different from what people used to think they meant. We’ve had religion not being about beliefs so much as about practices;  . . .”

Well, actually, not quite.   Nothing has been redefined, and most people did not previously think the way asserted here.  Unless, of course, by “people” Norm means merely, “educated Westerners since the Enlightenment”.   But that group constitutes a small (and often blinkered) minority of the world’s human population.  For  most of the world’s people,  for most of human history, religion has indeed been mostly about practices and not about beliefs.   I am thinking of Taoism, Buddhism (particularly Zen), large parts of Hinduism, and the mystical strands of Judaism (eg, the Kabbala), of Christianity (eg, the Name-Worshipping of Russian Orthodox believers), and of Islam (eg, Sufism).  

In the tradition of The People of The Book (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), one hears and accepts The Good News and then engages in religious actions such as worship, prayer, and meditation.  In the Eastern tradition, by contrast, it is the repeated doing of certain religious actions (Yoga, Zen sesshin) which may lead the practitioner to Enlightenment, not the other way around.   I have argued this before, for example here and here.

That beliefs should or do always precede actions is a peculiarly western and peculiarly modern notion, part of the prevailing paradigm of post-Reformation Western thought.    That this fact is hard for many modern westerners to grasp is evidence of the strength of the prevailing paradigm on our thought.  However, the strength of a paradigm on the minds of our best and brightest is not itself evidence of the paradigm’s necessity, nor its uniqueness, nor its truth, nor even its comparative usefulness.