deCarlo Works the Master System
I went over my impressions a few days ago of the award-winning lecture by philosopher Christopher diCarlo podcast by
This surely multiplies the distractions in a classroom!
Hard as it is to concentrate to begin with, what must it be like to look down from the face of the speaker and witness an endless sea of screens? Before, a harsh teacher could open the year by saying, "Look to your left. Look to your right. One of these two faces will be gone by the end of the month." Now you look to the left and all you see a figure hunched over a game of Quake. You look to the right and see hard-core porn. Never mind the end of the month, these faces are gone already.
Be that as it may, in his lecture diCarlo said some things that intrigued me. In spite of his being a committed humanist and atheist, his most important ideas are very close to Baha'i ideals. I did a little research on him. I found that he made up his own tee-shirt with the caption, "We are all African." As he says in the lecture,
"We are all African. Our DNA is a time machine that geneticists have traced to
On one of deCarlo's websites he tells an anecdote on how he took his "We are all African" teeshirt to a conference in
It offended the deepest convictions of one of his students who was not what you would expect, a spoiled whitey, but rather a native Indian. He so affronted this aboriginal that she withdrew from his course and put in a discrimination complaint with the school administration. How could anybody object to the idea that we are all one in origin? As a humanist, deCarlo is clearly not arguing from religion but from scientific evidence. Then I remembered the myth that Native elders so often repeat, that the Creator made four races, the white, the black, the yellow and the red. It sounds so benign and innocuous coming from one of the world's most oppressed people! But there can be no doubt, to say that we come out of four races rather than one is essentially racist. This was a pernicious thing to believe, for this student at least.
deCarlo centers his entire message on system theory. To be epistemically responsible, we have to take in many levels of knowledge, not just one. Buckminster Fuller would be delighted.
"We need to see as broadly as possible in order to appreciate how incredibly immense the complexity of interacting causation is behind the appearances we see on all levels in the universe."
During the lecture he keeps on display a second video screen showing the various levels of causation, from the subatomic level to galactic clusters. He even had this display made into a plastic-laminated table mat, so that students would learn even while eating to think about interacting systems on as broad a scale as possible. Another project he initiated is a project among several
<http://www.relationsofnaturalsystems.com/>
deCarlo believes that it is our fundamental epistemic duty to grasp systemic balance, to appreciate the one in many and many in one, to understand how systems of all kinds fall out of balance or hit an equilibrium. Here are some more notes I made from his lecture:
"Look to the left. Look to the right. You are looking at a system. (Okay, sorry, he did not say that, but he should have.) Your body has many varied systems in balance. There are the skeletal system, the venous, muscular, digestive, cardio-pulmonary systems. Health is defined as the condition where all systems are working in equilibrium. This varies as we grow and develop. A toddler's equilibrium is different from an adult's. In the same way, the balance of a species varies over long ages and stages of evolution.
"There are microbial ecosystems. The human body constitutes a microbial ecosystem in itself; over 95 percent of the DNA in our body is foreign. One person coughs, a germ is left on a handle when you touch it. Somebody else touches it and gets sick too. We are in a constant arms race against pathogens and parasites. Do not use anti-bacterial soap, it hands weapons over to the enemy. Germs have been here a billion years before we came along and they will endure a billion years after; they always win in the end.
"Systems can be in equilibrium or go out of whack. We must appreciate that all interconnect. For example, the new science of epigenetics is taking our understanding of causation to another level. Systems interact. What makes you sick may be rooted in what your grandmother ate or did not eat at a certain time of her life.
"There are systems operative at every level, up the scale from the micro to the meso to the macro. Systems work inside and outside the body, changing it constantly. Many are artificially created. There are buildings, neighborhoods, cities, regions, nations and continents. Each is a system on its own, and interacts dynamically with other systems around it. Our transportation system connects us too. Locally we use our legs and bicycles. For wider trips we used cars and trains, and to go longer distances we use air travel and rockets.
"In nature there are inorganic systems on all scales, from the subatomic, to the molecular. There are orbiting planets in a solar system and beyond there is the galactic system, and systems of millions of galactic clusters that operate in space-time. There are ecological systems, the air circulates and the water cycle circulates and recycles rain. It is important to remember that we all try to manipulate the system. Organisms work the system they are in. If they succeed they survive and get to reproduce.
"In society there are financial, cultural, linguistic, educational, employment and economic systems. A teacher operates in the educational system by evaluating the performance of students, if they get enough positive marks over a certain period, they go out with a piece of paper that allows them into the employment system. Whether they cheat or not, all students are still manipulators of the system.
"deCarlo offers several conclusions. Always remember: every atom in your body was once inside a star; as the song says, `We are all stardust.' And never forget: 99 percent of all species that have ever lived on this planet are extinct. We may be next, if we are not careful. We have to be clear about the physical reality before we jump to moral judgments. For example, Adhd and homosexuality are known to be factors of biology, not life choice. Homosexuality exists in at least 1200 other species. It is therefore wrong to make moral condemnations about what hyperactive or gay people did not choose themselves. It is just the nature of their system."
What deCarlo says here about systems is very close to what Abdu'l-Baha said. Most Baha'is will recognize that. For example, in the Tablet to Dr. Forel, He says,
"By nature is meant those inherent properties and necessary relations derived from the realities of things. And these realities of things, though in the utmost diversity, are yet intimately connected one with the other." (Abdu'l-Baha, Tablet to August Forel, 12)
But there is a crucial difference. Although deCarlo takes us up and down the scale of systems and emphasizes that they act on one another, he barely recognizes that one system can be designed to regulate another system. They interact but never rule over one another; none is better or more endowed than another. For example, he might say that the voluntary nervous system in the body influences the skeletal system, but that is different from saying that it rules its every motion. For Abdu'l-Baha, the interaction of systems is positive proof of the necessity of God.
"For these diverse realities an all-unifying agency is needed that shall link them all one to the other. For instance, the various organs and members, the parts and elements, that constitute the body of man, though at variance, are yet all connected one with the other by that all-unifying agency known as the human soul, that causeth them to function in perfect harmony and with absolute regularity, thus making the continuation of life possible. The human body, however, is utterly unconscious of that all-unifying agency, and yet acteth with regularity and dischargeth its functions according to its will."
For deCarlo and most scientists will is removed from consideration. As soon as you open a door to freewill, God might walk through. As soon as you recognize that one thing is superior to another, you might start thinking that there is an Almighty. As a result they do not see it, however striking it is to the naive viewer. The Master points out what should be obvious: that the plant system has qualities that are not in the mineral, and that the animal has powers and faculties that plants do not.
"In the vegetable world, too, there is the power of growth, and that power of growth is the spirit. In the animal world there is the sense of feeling, but in the human world there is an all-embracing power. In all the preceding stages the power of reason is absent, but the soul existeth and revealeth itself. The sense of feeling understandeth not the soul, whereas the reasoning power of the mind proveth the existence thereof." (p. 9)
Because the atheist denies that we are distinct, much less superior to nature, they cannot bolster pride. That is why, in spite of the power of science to change outward conditions, they fail to make progress in what inspires our esteem and self image. That is why we need the Master's insights as well as the scientist's.
"In like manner the mind proveth the existence of an unseen Reality that embraceth all beings, and that existeth and revealeth itself in all stages, the essence whereof is beyond the grasp of the mind. Thus the mineral world understandeth neither the nature nor the perfections of the vegetable world; the vegetable world understandeth not the nature of the animal world, neither the animal world the nature of the reality of man that discovereth and embraceth all things." (9)
No comments:
Post a Comment