The Direction of Time

Physicists tell us that there is no reason in principle why time should not run backwards.  Yet they also tell us that the overall entropy of the system is destined to increase until we live in a universe of maximum disorder.  The movement towards disorder is a way that we mark the progress, forward, of time.

Like Pigpen in the "Peanuts" comic strip, I leave behind me a dense trail of dirt and dust.  In principle, my entire life history could be reconstituted from the dirt and the dust.

In principle.

 

A Classic Case of Hubris

It has been seven years now.  I thought that, using my own powers of discernment and focus, I could ride the bus towards "Big-D" disclosure of what is behind the veil.  But the veil frustrates all such attempts.  The closer one gets to it, the faster it seems to recede.

Moses did not make it to the Promised Land.  Magellan did not complete the circumnavigation.  J.D. Madden's concept of the "hyperobject" comes into play. 

Picture the monolith of Kubrick's Space Odyssey, but on a scale like that of the Great Wall of China.  The perfect blackness, the perfect flatness, do communicate something to us, but what they communicate is impenetrability.  We can touch it.  Indeed, touching it can change us, perhaps change the trajectory of humankind.  But we can't know it.

 

Flights of Fancy (Things That Is)

No one who knows me well would ever accuse me of being either nimble or physically courageous.  I did not sky dive.  I did not zipline.  Unlike some friends and classmates, I did not leap from a promontory into the still waters of the Quincy granite quarry to impress the girls.

I have been mostly inert, and downright bookish.  But from time to time, like a 17-year cicada, I have arisen from my torpor to take flights of fancy facilitated mostly by wonderfully wrought machines that I have known and loved.  And thus I have been able to live in the moment, for a moment, viz. --

• Track Day at the Mid-Ohio race course in my blue Mini Cooper S.
• Upside down in a Soviet-era Yak military trainer.
• Flying "chandelles" in a Waco open-cockpit biplane from Martha's Vineyard, with a beautiful girl behind me at the controls.
• Galloping under the Newport Bridge in Weatherly in 15 kts of wind, she who defended the America's Cup in the same waters in 1962.
• A short sprint down from Plymouth Harbor to the mouth of the Cape Cod Canal in the stately and venerable gentleman's fishing schooner known as Roseway.
• Reaching down from Portsmouth to Ipswich (are there two more resonant nautical names than those?) in my own modest sloop with a small pod of dolphins for company.
• Breaking 100 mph in Skowhegan, ME in my little 1.5 litre Honda CRX coupe, because why not?

Perhaps, when my time comes, a chevron of P-51 Mustangs will fly low over my Sandy Point grave, and one will pull up and out of the chevron to execute a final salute -- the "Missing Mensch Formation!"

 

Your Fate Is Sealed

"Ignorance of the law is no excuse."  This is not just a folk aphorism.  It is a correct statement of the common law.  If you drive to Kentucky and find yourself in a town where the speed limit is 15 mph unless otherwise posted, you can get bagged even though you think, reasonably, that the default limit must be 25 or 30 mph.

On the other hand, you cannot be convicted of a crime if the statute books don't put you on notice as to what conduct is prohibited.  If the governor of Kentucky signed a law imposing a fine of up to $5000 for behavior that is deemed to be "unseemly," any conviction under such statute would be overturned as violative of the Due Process Clause of the US Constitution.

At St. Ignatius School in Columbus in the 1960s, my cousin Angela instinctively appreciated this due process constraint even though she had never heard of it!  One day, in fifth grade, her teacher Sister Agatha was explaining, for the umpteenth time, the difference between mortal and venial sin, and the difference between the punishments inflicted for each.  She raised her hand, tentatively.  She asked the good sister to give an example of a mortal and of a venial sin, and, specifically, to pick examples that were as close as possible to each other, so that Angela could better understand exactly where that line was situated in order especially to conform her behavior to the prohibition against mortal sin.

Sister Agatha's first impulse after hearing her question was to chastise Angela in front of her friends and classmates for insolence.  But she held her breath and her tongue, reminding herself that Angela was a good and serious girl, and also noticing that the other children in the class seemed very sympathetic to the question.  She fell back instead on the line that only God, in His Perfection, could know precisely where the line was, and that it was presumptuous of us to try to know His mind in that respect or any other.  Rather, we had to trust Him completely and without question.  It was "fitting indeed and just, right and proper for salvation" so to trust Him.

In the moment, Angela accepted this explanation, but over time she came to see it as nonsense.

Twenty-three years later, Angela submitted her dissertation in anthropology for review at Kent State University.  It was called "Reason and Responsibility Among the Ituapu of the Peruvian Lowlands."  She had spent six months the year before embedded with the Ituapu tribe together with a close colleague, Dr. Gustavo Mendez of Peru.  Angela acquired a serviceable ability to speak the Ituapu language; Gustavo was nearly fluent in it, and to a certain extent culturally fluent as well, to a much greater extent at least than Angela was.

The primary source for Angela and Gustavo in the village where they were living was the village shaman, whose name was Tekapuro.  They asked him and others many questions designed to unearth the moral, spiritual and cultural rules governing the people of the village.  And of course as anthropologists they tried to infer such rules simply by observation of the behavior of the villagers.

Tekapuro told them that if you eat the heart of a warrior/victim, you will absorb his courage into your being.  He said that if a person wanders alone into the rain forest at night, the Spirit of the Jaguar, which rules the forest, will often steal him or her away, for good.  He said that barren women can be transformed into a certain kind of tree by the Spirits, but that there are herbal potions that can protect against that outcome.

What he did not say was how to live one's life in order to be right with the Gods.  One day, acting on impulse, Angela asked him what he thought would happen to him when he died.  At that Tekapuro broke into hysterical laughter.  He walked a few yards to a large, porous-looking mound.  He grabbed a stick and fractured the crown of the mound.  Hundreds, maybe thousands, of panicked fire ants poured out of it.  Tekapuro laughed again.

Nevertheless, Angela told me later that she had learned more about "reason and responsibility" from the Ituapu than she had from the nuns at St. Ignatius.  I asked her how so.  She said "your fate is sealed, for example, but by that I don't mean that it is predetermined and immutable, but rather that it is hidden from you and from everyone else, by design."

 

Under the Big Top

All eyes are fixed on the Big Barker as he doffs his top hat and points with his silver eagle-handled cane.  And then, as directed, they shift hard left, to an intensely spot-lit mound of sawdust that marks the portal from whence the elephants will come, if ever they should choose to come.

The skeptics demand clear visual evidence, and the people, wary of misinformation, follow them in this.  They demand radar and infrared.  They demand metallurgical analysis of the bits that have fallen from the sky.  They demand eyewitness, not second-hand, testimony, from credible witnesses.  They demand admissions from senior government officials that other senior government officials have been gaslighting them "until the memory of man knows not to the contrary."

All of these boxes have been checked.  No one gives a flying fuck.  No one has really wanted any evidence.  They just wanted the lights to go down, and the calliope to steam up, so that they could stare in peace and wonder at the sawdust.

 

The Poetic Imagination and the Brain

I want to return to an old subject, one that is a bit of a fixation for me.  It is the difficulty of reconciling a physicalist account of the mind with the power and the origin of metaphor, in poetry and in everyday life.

But we know now, you say, that computers can hold linguistic structures and connections within them that already rival our own and, it goes without saying, these are held in physical form, in complex binaries that, even if they are said to reside in the cloud, actually reside in a server somewhere.  So this physical "anchor" for such structures proves that our physical brains can do the same.

Yes, whatever resides in a computer resides there physically, but the "semantic component" of our language, as Chomsky described it, isn't really replicated in computers; rather, they use pattern recognition to mimic what the human mind has created through other means.  If, for example, you ask ChatGPT to explain the anatomical differences between a leopard and a jaguar, the program will search hundreds of millions of texts and spit back at you the consensus view that has been expressed by others, others with brains!

But, in humans, the semantic component must reside in the brain, you say.  Where else could it be?!

In examining our poetic capacities that militate against the physicalist paradigm (according to me at least), we can walk along a spectrum, from less impressive to more so.  Let's do it.

The Russian word for "work" is «работа» -- "rabota."  I would say that the two words occupy the same conceptual space; I can't think of any significant way in which the meaning of one departs from the meaning of the other.  And so, if you, an English speaker, decide to study Russian and encounter the Russian word, you can just map it onto something you already know -- "work," and the job is done.  This is easy to conceptualize in computer terms.  Whatever the meaning of "work" is, it is replicated, with a little superscript "r" attached to distinguish it as the Russian equivalent.  And so it is, you say, in our brains.

Now consider the word "license."  Its primary meaning is something like "permission."  You can't fish for small-mouthed bass in Maine without permission from the authorities, without a "license to fish."  But, once having secured permission, via the local tackle shop in Grand Lake Stream, how do you ensure that you can prove that you have such permission?  The store owner gives you a piece of paper which is headed, in bold letters, "Maine License to Fish."  The piece of paper is not the permission; it is the physical proof that you have secured permission.  The first person to call this piece of paper a "license" made a conceptual jump from the abstract to the tangible (usually it seems to operate in reverse!).  But this strikes us as a minor jump and one easy to imagine somehow replicated in the brain.

"Rank and file."  The original meaning of the expression comes from a military formation that looks like a box of men, ten across, say, and ten deep.  When we view the formation from slightly above and in front of it, each horizontal line of men is a "rank," and each vertical line is a "file."  (If the command drill sergeant gives the command "Right Face!," the rank will become the file and vice versa.)  But, through someone's poetic imagination, "rank and file" came to mean the common, lowest order of things as opposed to those in charge -- "The Republican leadership may not be able to establish order among the rank and file."  This is a bigger conceptual leap.  Who was the first to make it, and how is it that he was understood?  What does it look like in the mapping of the brain?

At a critical moment in the movie "A Complete Unknown," Johnny Cash leans in to his friend Bob Dylan and says "Track some mud on the carpet Big D!"  What was this carpet, and what was this mud?  What filaments within the brains of our heroes allowed one to invent it, and the other to "grok" it?

The writer and editor David Samuels, spurred on by the same film, said this week that Dylan's music revealed "a bullet-proof intelligence that twists and turns like a fish in order to avoid being caught."  How is a wriggling fish mapped onto the concept of "intelligence?"  And yet the metaphor is a very fine one.

You may call it magical thinking, but what I might propose is the possibility that our whole conceptual structure lies outside of ourselves, with the "tapping in" facilitated by our brains.  This model looks more like the visions of Carl Jung, and it may be more compatible with various "spooky" phenomena, including the fact, or theory, that, all things being equal, people doing the New York Times crossword puzzle at 3PM do better than people who do the puzzle at 5AM (coffee or no coffee), because the first cohort will benefit somehow from the learning of everyone else in the collective unconsciousness who has already done it that day.

So I don't think that our physicalist models have really come to terms with the elasticity, the fluidity, that is inherent in our thinking.  And, by the way, how did we come to stretch the very concrete and tangible concepts represented by an "elastic" band and a molten, "fluid" metal, so far into the realm of the abstract? 

The "roar" of the Napoleons at Waterloo.  The "bleating" of the trumpet of Miles Davis.  The "murmuring" pines and the hemlocks in the forest primeval!

Metaphors are everywhere.

 

"Megalophobia"

It's a new word to me as well, new in the last few weeks.  It means "fear of large things."  Instagram illustrates the concept beautifully with a short clip of an Airbus A380 -- the largest commercial airliner now in service -- emerging out of a dense fog for a near-zero-visibility landing directly over the videographer's head.  It does indeed inspire a frisson of fear.

What historical examples can we conjure up?

• JFK and his crewmates at the moment when they realized that a Japanese destroyer was about to cut Patrol Torpedo Boat No. 109 in half.
• The denizens of Fukushima, Japan and of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, when the entire sea rose to take their towns away.
• German soldiers manning a pillbox overlooking Omaha Beach at dawn on June 6, 1944, when they first looked, with disbelief, at the scale of the armada that had been organized for their destruction.

But a prospect of imminent death is not necessary to this our new equation; it is immensity per se that instills this instinctive fear.  Thus, if we could be transported via spaceship to a spot within, say, 1000 miles of the surface of the sun, with no danger whatsoever in our secure little capsule, we would nonetheless be overcome with megalophobia without doubt.

And sometimes megalophobia can bleed into something that we might call ... what?... "nanophobia"?  That is to say, "fear of very tiny things."  A global-scale attack on our bodies by little viral squiggles might be an example, leaving us in fear of both big and small, and forced to seek shelter in media res.

My current dread of Something Big bears closest resemblance, I think, to that of the pillbox Germans, except that for me it is not the morning of June 6, but the afternoon of June 5.  The killer armada is not in sight, but its immanence can be felt in the bones.