The never-ending questions

The running theme in this blog, perhaps in my entire life, has been on reality, or what we think may be reality. What is reality?  Is that a valid question?

As author, literary agent, and 'thinker' John Brockman once proclaimed, he has had a lifelong obsession with asking questions, especially "the" question: "What is the last question?". 

Brockman's first book on pondering questions was By The Late John Brockman, published in 1969. In his own words, it was "about the idea of interrogating reality". Most would respond by declaring this is useless philosophy, thereby concluding it all meaningless. Yet each and every one of us plays apart in it, and without it. (As suggested in the movie, "The Matrix") Most of us just aren't aware of it. 

"Reality as a whole is unmeasurable except through effect. The unity is in the methodology, in the writing, reading, in the navigation. This system cannot provide us with ultimate answers, nor does it present the ultimate questions. There are none."*

This also precipitated his vision of the 'Third culture' consisting of "those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are." 

In 1988 Brockman and others created The Edge Foundation, an association of science and technology intellectuals. It was also an outgrowth of The Reality Club, a gathering (historically called a 'salon') of intellectuals based in NYC and held by a host. From 1981 through 1996 many well known scientists, authors, artists, technologists, and entrepreneurs met for presentations, 'round-table' discussions, seminars, etc. It retired to a virtual  presence on The Edge website in 1996. (A link on the sidebar has been posted when I created this blog in 2005.)

Despite frequently following the website after I first discovered The Edge (~1998), life became complicated and I lost track of it. An academic career sometimes consume the only existence in one's life, especially in LAC (Life After Children). I was busy "interrogating" small subsets of reality. 

It was with sadness (on my part) that Brockman ran out of questions and announced in 2018 the finale to The Edge project with the question, "WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION?". 

"Ask 'The Last Question,' your last question, the question for which you will be remembered."

Possibly the best tribute to The Edge was in a ''moratorium'' by lecturer and writer Kenan Malik in The Guardian. The excerpt below gave me some private satisfaction in that I have always relayed similarly to students, children, colleagues, lab members, friends, relatives, and, many times, here on this blog: ask questions. (despite the frustrations of many).

"Asking questions is relatively easy. Asking good questions is surprisingly difficult. A bad question searches for an answer that confirms what we already know. A good question helps to reset our intellectual horizons. It has an answer that we can reach, yet unsettles what we already know."

 One response on the webpage, which may not really qualify as an answer for some, is one of my favorites. As we often say in the scientific fields, answers to a question may only be more questions.

"The final elegance: assuming, asking the question. No answers. No explanations. Why do you demand explanations? If they are given, you will once more be facing a terminus. They cannot get you any further than you are at present. The solution: not an explanation: a description and knowing how to consider it."**

Many people are unsettled by that, but it is the reality. Perhaps it is a very simple single question with no explanation. Just like reality.

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 * John Brockman, By The Late John Brockman, 1969, Macmillon. The Kindle format can be accessed on Amazon.com. Hard copies are >$70.

** Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E.

Borders and grids are Us

 With a long interest in how we as humans perceive our environment, I found this quote to be quite adequate:

"....the imposition of the gridded survey defines the lands as a uniform and monotonous mathematical space turns the lands into a trackless expanse viewed from above."

In many ways we see land as two-dimensional and existing with geometrical shapes. Look at any map, look down from a plane, and you will see this. In a recent issue of Nature NAS scientist John Holmes reviews a new book, "Liberty's Grid", by historian of science and mathematics Amir Alexander.

Alexander relates how the "rectilinear grid was imposed and how it has fed into the US consciousness."

"In Alexander’s telling, the grid is grand, ambitious and uniquely American. It is not only a blank, boundless canvas, but also a causal factor of different aspects of the United States’s trajectory and character."

A interesting book, but as Holmes rightly criticizes, Alexander often confuses cause and effect. Alexander tends to blame many events in our American history on the gridded map and ignore other elements at play in our American culture.

"Fly over the United States or walk its city streets and you can’t help but notice the country’s seemingly endless patchwork of rectangular blocks of land. The origins of this ‘grid’ lie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the early US early leaders sent surveyors out to carve up vast tracts of land acquired under treaties and to expand settlement westwards to the Pacific coast."

In other words, dividing up this country was a rushed job without real thought to the landforms. Not that they mattered anyway, except as resources to exploit. Ask the Native Americans about that.

Good points here:

"“Written not on parchment but into the mountains, valleys, and plains of North America, the Great American Grid embodies an ideal of America as a land of unconstrained freedom and infinite opportunity,” Alexander writes. His central thesis is that, although dividing up much of the United States into a geometric grid might seem like a convenient solution to a difficult problem, when viewed from a historian’s perspective it becomes an expression of American exceptionalism and a means to fulfil the idea of the country as an “empire of liberty”."

It is in the last explanation of criticism by Holmes that I agree. Simply because Alexander either ignores or circumvents the psychology and sociology of creating borders, visible and invisible. In basic philosophical perspective, it's creating and outlining territories, just as wild cats and canids do by urinating on the edges of their territories. And those borders are dynamic, not static. This has been a main foundation of human war since civilization. Except for traditionally nomadic peoples, where land borders are blurred or don't exist.

We could hypothesize that borders are a human construct, but other species prove otherwise. The real mystery is how we add layers of human culture and society on and in those human-drawn lines. Or perhaps that is our default subconscious way of looking at reality. What is the global traditional shape of most structures? Walls with straight lines and 45 degree corners.