All the strangers look like family
All the family looks so strange
The only constant I am sure of
Is this accelerating rate of change
— Peter Gabriel, Downside-Up, from the Ovo Album
Creek Running North has a delightful rumination on the lack of a balance of nature, in which he notes that
The sheer fecundity of the world conceals its vulnerability to change.
and
There is no balance of nature. Or if there is, it is the balance of a teetering rock on a pedestal stable enough to hold it for the moment.
This instability of the world bothers many people, or they ignore it and hold fast to the belief that the world really is, despite all evidence to the contrary, stable. Global Warming? A mere blip, it will pass. Denudation of top soils in an arid land? No problem, just keep grazing, plowing and it'll all balance out in the end. And so on.
This belief is based on our shortsightedness. Humans evolved to deal with the environment they grew up with, not the global or the long term. We do not have the native capacity to think beyond this year's crop, hunt or election cycle. It takes effort to do this. And to do this, we need science.
Intuitive objections to evolutionary thinking rely on this. Even many of those who do think things evolve want there to be a static ladder of progress that things have to climb. But the world defeats our hopes and intuitions. It's simply not true that things will evolve at a constant rate, or in a constant manner or direction. Even rates of change are not constant, despite the esteemed Mr Gabriel's lyric. We have first order change, second order change and third order change, and it's not easy to visualise this, even if you did differential calculus at school.
The problem of change goes back a long, long, way. Heraclitus, one of the earliest of the Greek philosophers, famously discussed it, concluding that the only constant is fire, a kind of dynamic empiricist view. Plato reacted by decrying the reality of the sensible world, preferring instead that the true reality are the ideai, or the Forms, and indeed until the end of the medieval period, "realism" meant the reality of ideas, not things that can be sensed. Plato thought that the only empirical things that approached reality were the heavens, which were stable in their motions (and the eternity of the heavens found its way into Ptolemaic cosmology via Aristotle's working up of the two-sphere universe).
The fear of impermanence (note the description of this blog) is deep in the western world view. Those who thought that things had to have an underlying stable essence in matters ranging from personal identity through to the permanence of the universe or the biological world, tended to lay this on the mind, acts or words of a deity. Those who denied that these things were permanent were decried as atheists, even if, like Epicurus, they weren't. The conflict between these views informs the entirety of western religion, philosophy and science. Change is, in fact, the oldest battleground between those who hold some kind of a priori essentialism, and those who take an empirical, a posteriori view of knowledge.
We do not realise how deeply this has hold of us. It informs our behaviour, our policies, our beliefs and our morality, but again, reality itself is not cognisant of what we want to be true. Things change. Call it "evolution" if you like, as many do well beyond the biological realm, but stars, galaxies, superclusters and so on all change, just as they do in more mundane contexts like ecology, biology and society.
One of the major theoretical revolutions in western thought was, indeed, Newton's and Leibniz's invention of the calculus. The notion that the "essence" (the what-it-is-to-be) of changing things lay in their rates of change was crucial for the scientific revolution. Evolutionary biology itself, not to mention, as my friend and colleague Mark Colyvan has argued with his coauthor Lev Ginsburg, ecology, tries to identify the regularities not in the change itself, but in the rates of change and the rates of the rates of change, in the "orbits" as they call it. Understand how things change is crucial to understanding what we are doing to our world, and how it reacts to us, let alone understanding it in its own terms.
Changes in complex systems can occur rapidly, because the rates of the rates of change, the second order change, can cause radical shifts in the zeroeth order phenomena. There need not be a smooth transition. Sometimes we call these "tipping points", as Creek Running North does, but this merely means that the second order change, constant enough in itself, reaches a point where things turn around in ways that are obvious to us.
So my meditation for this Sunday is on change. It is happening even when it looks like it isn't.
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Change can also bring opportunity, so needn't be bad.
After all without a few catastrophes in the long ago we might not be here.
Oh yes "Rule No.8: Keep a count of your change"
"The fear of impermanence (note the description of this blog) is deep in the western world view.
An interesting contrast here is with the old Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi: wikipedia says: "Richard R. Powell summarizes by saying "It (wabi-sabi) nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.""
See also the ideas behind much modern environmental art, for example Andy Goldsworthy's work . . .
Umm, I think that is _Creek North Running_, or _North Running Creek_, or even possibly _Creek Running North_. Always an interesting read.
North Running Creek
North Creek Running
Creek North Running
Creek Running North <--
Running North Creek
Running Creek North
Some provocative observations on my post, John. Thanks.
um, that was supposed to have an arrow pointing at Creek Running North, but I guess I didn't quite get the space in that kept it from being a comment. Ah well.
[John's comment: I fixed it]
Consider this an official "D'oh!"
Contemplating one's own inevitable impermanence is unsettling, to put it mildly. The Bible notwithstanding, we have no evidence of anyone returning from the dead. On the other hand, the physical concept of 'timescape' or 'block time' seems to suggest otherwise. Are we impermanent or are we, in some way. permanent? For myself, I will take whatever permanence I can get. I am sure many people feel the same, hence religion, although personally I might draw the line at abasing myself before a particularly capricious and vengeful god. I say "might" because, until the time comes, you never know how what was previously unacceptable may suddenly become quite acceptable...
A movement is accomplished in six stages
And the seventh brings return
Seven is the number of the young light
It moves when darkness is increased by one
Change, return, success
Coming and going without error
Action brings good fortune
Sunrise, sunset.
CHAPTER 24 Syd Barrett.
I haven't read basic ecology lately. I wonder how the concepts of "Climax" ecosystem and successional ecotones is viewed these days. The idea used to be that a given climatic situation would lead to a climax ecosystem. That if the situation were young, or had been disrupted, there would be a predictable series of successional changes over time to restore the climax. One could picture unstable systems where climax would never be reached, a disclimax, where the area would shuttle around among successonal stages according to circumstances. A river valley with flooding and channel movement going on, for example.
The idea was that successional species chnged the area such that they could no longer live there, but members of the next successional stage could. An example being cottownwood trees which have tiny wind-blown seeds which must be on bare ground in full sun to germinate and grow successfully. Can't do it in the leaf litter and shade of a cottonwood grove.
The idea included r-selected species: short lived, prolific, small dispersive offspring, energy use for growth and reproduction, and invasive K-selected species: long lived, large, few large well cared for poorly dispersing offspring, energy used for maintainence more than growth, not invasive. r and K from the logistic growth curve; r being intrinsic rate of growth, and K being carrying capacity.
If two atoms collide, it creates an event in time. The result is that there are two directions of time. The physical reality of the atoms is going from one event to the next. On the other hand, the event goes from being in the future to being in the past. A larger example is that the rotation of the earth relative to the position of the sun creates these events called days. So while the earth's rotation proceeds through these series of events, any particular day goes from being in the future to being in the past.
What is happening is that specific physical activities are creating information. The rotation of the earth creates days, not the other way around. Days do not cause the rotation of the earth. This relationship defines our existence. The material of this physical planet and the conscious virus of biology it carries have been going through a very long process of activity and information creation. A long time ago the biological component of this material was recording information called dinosaurs and that called the human species was far in the future. Now it is manifesting as humanity and dinosaurs are past. Individual lives are the same. First they are in the future and then in the past, meanwhile the process goes on to the next generation, like the hand of the clock goes onto the next hour. The relationship is the same as the atoms though. It is the specific activity which causes the information, not the other way around. This seems logical enough, but it is apparent there is some feedback mechanism in which this information does affect activity. Actually it is there from the beginning. The event of two atoms colliding affects their future course and subsequent actions and events.
This relationship defines our thinking as well. Our minds are constantly consuming input in the form of energy which is defining information. Because it is far more and coming at speeds far faster(much at the speed of light), then we can use, our minds are like little factories, manufacturing conceptual units called thoughts. The problem is that our minds are material, but these thoughts are information, so while our minds are constantly moving toward the future, consuming input, the thoughts they create are rapidly receding into the past and by the time they cause a reaction, the situation has changed. That is why people who depend on the speed of their reactions, such as athletes, learn not to think, but to process the input as seamlessly as possible. Rather then the information being absorbed by the brain, their awareness has been pushed out to the thinest membrane on the edge of their consciousness. In essence it has been reduced to how an insect might react to stimuli. To a very real extent, this is what life is, that thinnest of membranes that is the present, moving at the speed of light. The most simple and elemental of awareness. Our complex human thought processes then take this essence and feed it into an internal feedback loop of processing information and reacting to it. A large part of this reaction is maintaining the connection between the information we continue to receive and the evolved structure of our thought processes. There is often a tradeoff between remaining current and maintaining our sense of identity. This explains the evolution of societies as well as individuals, as we try holding on to older forms that lose their effectiveness, but are the foundations of identity. Not only is someone like Jesus an important social and cultural artifact, as well as moral example, but the calendar would be meaningless without a starting date. It's like the grain of sand around which the oyster forms a pearl. Eventually though, either the structure isn't strong enough to support the entity built on it and it collapses, radiating away the energy, or it is too rigid for continued growth and there becomes a rupture between the structure and the vital processes it supported. Either way, the energy goes on to the future and the information recedes into the past.
While this may seem simple and obvious on the surface, it stirs up a good deal of controversy among scientists, because it describes time as a function of motion, similar to temperature, rather then a basis for it, like space.
Change is a biological fact but in the history of mankind many times human beings repeat the same facts and behaviours as wars,muders,and racism with genocid.Where is the change in this issues?