"Why does time go forwards, not backwards?" by Martha Henriques for BBC Future

I've been meaning to share this fascinating article from BBC Future for a little while now. I am a bit of armchair physicist so this is really interesting to me. And as we have seen, modern physics also incorporates philosophy and spirituality to varying degrees, areas that I am also interested in.

Why does time go forwards, not backwards?

By Martha Henriques
3rd October 2022

The arrow of time began its journey at the Big Bang, and when the Universe eventually dies there will be no more future and no past. In the meantime, what is it that drives time ever onward?

When Isaac Newton published his famous Principia in 1687, his three elegant laws of motion solved a lot of problems. Without them, we couldn't have landed people on the Moon 282 years later. But these laws brought to physics a new problem, which wasn't fully appreciated until centuries after Newton and still nags at cosmologists today.

The issue is that Newton's laws work about twice as well as we might expect them to. They describe the world we move through every day – the world of people, the hands that move around a clock and even the apocryphal fall of certain apples – but they also account perfectly well for a world in which people walk backwards, clocks tick back afternoon to morning, and fruit soars up from the ground to its tree-branch.

"The interesting feature of Newton's laws, which wasn't appreciated till much later, is that they don't distinguish between the past and the future," says the theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll, who discusses the nature of time in his latest book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. "But the directionality to time is its most obvious feature, right? I have photographs of the past, I don't have any photographs of the future."

The problem is not confined to the centuries-old theories of Newton. Virtually all of the cornerstone theories of physics since then have worked just as well going forward in time as they do backwards, says physicist Carlo Rovelli of the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, France, and the author of books including The Order of Time.

"Starting from Newton, and then Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, then Einstein's work, and then quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity, and even quantum gravity – there is no distinction between past and future," Rovelli says. "Which came as a surprise, because the distinction is so evident to all of us. If you make a movie, it's obvious which way is the future and which one is the past."

How does a clear direction of time emerge from these descriptions of the Universe, which all lack their own arrow of time? As Marina Cortês, an astrophysicist at the University of Lisbon, puts it: "There's a lot of implications that start with taking seriously the question, 'Why does time pass?'"

Part of the answer lies at the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago. Another insight comes from the opposite extreme, in the Universe's eventual death.

But before embarking on this epic journey back and forth along the timeline of the Universe, it's worth stopping off in 1865, just as the first truly time-directional law of physics came hurtling down the tracks of the Industrial Revolution.

GATHERING STEAM

In the 19th Century, when coal was shovelled into furnaces to generate steam power, scientists and engineers hoping to develop better engines embraced a set of principles that described the relationship between heat, energy and motion. They became known as the laws of thermodynamics.

In Germany, 1865, the physicist Rudolf Clausius stated that heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one, if nothing else around them changes. Clausius came up with the concept he called "entropy" to measure this behaviour of heat – another way of saying heat never flows from a cold body to a hot one is to say "entropy only ever increases, never decreases."

As Rovelli stresses in The Order of Time, this is the only basic law of physics that can tell apart the past from the future. A ball can roll down a hill or be kicked back to its summit, but heat can't flow from cold to hot.

To illustrate, Rovelli picks up his pen and drops it from one hand to the other. "The reason this stops in my hand is that it has some energy, and then the energy is turned into heat and it warms up my hand. And the friction stops the bouncing. Otherwise, if there was no heat, this would bounce forever, and I would not distinguish the past from the future."

So far, so straightforward. That is, until you start to consider what heat is on a molecular level. The difference between hot things and cold things is how agitated their molecules are – in a hot steam engine, water molecules are very excited, careening around and colliding into each other rapidly. The very same water molecules are less agitated when they coalesce as condensation on a windowpane.

Here's the problem: when you zoom in to the level of, say, one water molecule colliding and bouncing off another, the arrow of time disappears. If you watched a microscopic video of that collision and then you rewound it, it wouldn’t be obvious which way was forwards and which backwards. At the very smallest scale, the phenomenon that produces heat – collisions of molecules – is time-symmetric.

This means that the arrow of time from past to future only emerges when you take a step back from the microscopic world to the macroscopic – something first appreciated by the Austrian physicist-philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann.

"So the direction of time comes from the fact that we look at big things, we don't look at the details," says Rovelli. "From this step, from the fundamental microscopic vision of the world to the coarse-grained, the approximate description of the macroscopic world – this is where the direction of time comes in.

"It's not that the world is fundamentally oriented in space and time," Rovelli says. It's that when we look around, we see a direction in which medium-sized, everyday things have more entropy – the ripened apple fallen from the tree, the shuffled pack of cards.

While entropy does seem to be inextricably bound up with the arrow of time, it feels a bit surprising – perhaps even disconcerting – that the one law of physics that has a strong directionality of time built into it loses this directionality when you look at very small things.

"What is entropy?" Rovelli says. "Entropy is simply how much we're forgetting about the microphysics, how much we are forgetting about the molecules."

THE BEGINNING AND THE END

If there is an arrow of time, where did it come from in the first place?

"The answer is embedded in the beginning of the Universe," says Carroll. "The answer is because the Big Bang had low entropy. And still, 14 billion years later we are swimming in the aftermath of that tsunami that started near the Big Bang. That's why time has a direction for us."

The extraordinarily low entropy of the Universe at the Big Bang is both an answer and an enormous question. "The thing we understand the least about the nature of time, is why the Big Bang had low entropy, why the early Universe was like that," says Carroll. "And I think honestly, as a working cosmologist, I think that my fellow cosmologists have dropped the ball on this one. They don't really take that problem seriously enough."

Carroll published a paper in 2004 with his colleague Jennifer Chen, in which they aimed to explain why the Universe had such low entropy close to the Big Bang, rather than just assuming or accepting this was the case. "There's plenty of loopholes in the theory, plenty of aspects of it that are not completely baked – but I also think it is by far the best theory on the market," says Carroll. "It doesn't cheat."

Other cosmologists agree that it is indeed time to turn serious thought to this problem of the Universe's low entropy origins. "The likelihood of our current Universe having initial conditions of this kind, and not any other kind, is around one in 10 to the 10 to 124 (1:10^10^124)," says Cortês. (Another way of saying it is that the event had a probability of 0.00…01 – with 10^(10^124) zeroes omitted – a number so large it's awkward to express in conventional maths, Cortês notes.) "I mean I could safely say, this is the largest number in modern physics, outside of philosophy or mathematics."

Simply taking such unlikely low-entropy origins as given is a grand case of "shoving the problem under the rug", Cortês says. "If physicists keep doing this, after a while it's going to be a very big pile under the rug. It's left to us cosmologists to explain why time only moves forward."

Even if we don't yet know why, the Universe's low entropy past is a plausible source of time's arrow. Like most things that have a beginning, the arrow will also have an end. The first person to spot this was, once again, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.

"Boltzmann thought, 'ah, entropy is growing in the Universe and maybe it's going to maximum at some point'," says Rovelli. At that point, heat would be evenly distributed throughout the Universe, no longer flowing from one place to another.

There would be no energy available in a useful form for doing work – in other words, almost nothing interesting would be happening throughout the entire Universe. As astrophysicist Katie Mack describes it, "As that process continues, everything is decaying so much that all that’s left is the waste heat of everything that ever existed in the Universe." This fate is known as the thermal death of the Universe, or heat death.

"Stars will stop burning, nothing will happen anymore. There will be nothing but small thermal fluctuations," says Rovelli. "Suppose this happens – and we don't know for certain if it's going to happen, but suppose it does – should we say that there is no time direction there? Of course there's no time direction, because every phenomenon that happened one way could also go one way or the other. Nothing will distinguish the two directions of time."

This is perhaps the strangest thing about the arrow of time: "It only lasts for a little while," says Carroll.

It's very hard to picture what might happen if the arrow of time eventually vanishes. "When we think we produce heat in our neurons," says Rovelli. "Thinking is a process in which the neuron needs entropy to work. Our sense of time passing is just what entropy does to our brain."

The arrow of time that arises from entropy brings us a long way closer to understanding why time only goes forward. But there may be more arrows of time than this one – in fact there is arguably an entire volley of arrows of time pointing from the past to the future. To understand these, we have to step from physics into philosophy.

HUMAN TIME

The ways that we intuitively understand and experience time shouldn't be taken lightly, says Jenann Ismael, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, New York. If you think about your own experience of time, you may soon be able to recognise several of the psychological arrows that form a core part of human experience. One of these arrows is what Ismael terms "flow".

"If you look out at the world, you don't experience a purely static representation of the instantaneous state of the world," she says, like in a movie made up of a number of static frames every second. "We see directly that the world is changing."

This experience of the flow of time is built into our perception. "Vision isn't like a movie camera at all," says Ismael. "Actually what happens is your brain is collecting information over some temporal period. It's integrating that information so that at any given moment, what you're seeing is a computation that the brain has done. So that you not only see that things are moving, you see how fast they're moving, the direction in which they're moving. So the whole time, your brain is integrating information over temporal intervals and giving you the result. So you see time, in a way."

There's a second feature of time that Ismael distinguishes from flow, which she terms "passage".

The idea of passage is closely bound up with time-oriented experiences such as memory and anticipation. Take the example of a wedding, or any much-anticipated life event. Our experience of these moments has many layers – from the fractious planning stages, to the intensity of the day itself, to recollections that stay with us for years. There is a directionality to these different experiences: the way we anticipate an event in the future is fundamentally different from how we remember it when it's passed.

"All of that is part of what I think of as the experience of passage, this idea that we experience every event as anticipated from the past, experienced in the present, remembered in retrospect," says Ismael. "It's kind of Proustian in its density."

These aspects of the directionality of psychological time – as well as many others, like the sense of openness we have about the future but not the past – could all trace their roots back to the arrow of time born of the Industrial Revolution.

"I think it does all come back to entropy," says Ismael. "I see no reason now to think that the kinds of arrows that are involved in human psychology are anything but ultimately rooted in the entropic arrow. But it's an empirical question. This project to understand human experience in relation to the entropic arrow, I've no reason to think it's going to fail."

That project is what Carroll hopes to do, taking several features of our experience of time and relating them back to entropy. His first target is causality, another element of the arrow of time, as causes happen before their effects.

To say the least, this project is a major undertaking for all physicists and philosophers involved. And still, lurking in the shadows behind all such efforts, there remains that nagging question about why entropy was so low in the earliest Universe.

"I think we understand why we have this sense of flowing," says Rovelli. "We understand why the past seems fixed to us that the future seems open. We understand why there are irreversible phenomena, and we can reduce all that to the second law of thermodynamics, to the rise of entropy.

"It's very much related to the fact that if we trace it back, back, back, to fact that the Universe started very small, in a very peculiar situation. Then somehow, it's falling down from that peculiar situation.

"But of course there's one question open, I mean, why? Why did it start in that particular way?"

Link to original article here:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221003-why-does-time-go-forwards-not-backwards

This Solstice, Solace for the Darkness by Dennis Overbye

This Solstice, Solace for the Darkness

A rare conjunction of planets serves as a reminder that there is more to the universe than just ourselves.

by Dennis Overbye for The New York Times
Dec. 18, 2020

We have now arrived at the longest, darkest night of the longest, darkest year. And yet rarely have the heavens so proclaimed their glory.

In blithe disregard for the activities of the Electoral College and everything else that humans were engaged in, the sun and the moon last week lined up in a perfect cue-ball shot to produce a total solar eclipse. The moon’s shadow slid across Argentina and Chile, and the majestic but shy mandala known as the solar corona revealed itself to crowds who had braved rain and fog in anticipation of the sight.

Meanwhile, the Geminid meteor shower graced the Northern Hemisphere with celestial brush strokes of fire. And as always there is the brilliance of the winter Milky Way, starring Orion.

Now comes one of the grandest events of the sky: a planetary conjunction.

For the past year, Jupiter and Saturn have been dancing ever closer in the night sky. On the evening of Dec. 21, the very nadir of winter, they will be so close — one-tenth of one angular degree — that if your eyes are as bad as mine, they will appear as one blurry, bright planet. With a little optical aid you should be able to discern them as separate orbs, almost kissing, although Jupiter will be 450 million miles in front of the ringed Saturn.

Go out and look southwest in the hour after sunset. According to astronomers, the two planets have not appeared this close to each other in the sky since 1623 — but the sun’s glare then would have rendered them invisible. To find a conjunction that humans could see, you must skip all the way back to 1226, or ahead to March 15, 2080. You might wonder who will be around to witness that event.

Every 20 years, Jupiter and Saturn come into conjunction — appearing within a couple of degrees from each other, about the width of three full moons.

Such conjunctions of planets are fraught with psychic meaning to astrologers. And some astronomers have speculated that a conjunction involving Jupiter, Venus and the star Regulus in the years 2-3 B.C. might have inspired the stories of the star of Bethlehem

The universe is big enough that you can find almost any omen you want there. Yesterday more than 3,500 Americans died of Covid-19. As many may die today, and again tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Two of the titles on The New York Times Book Review’s list of notable books in 2020 concerned the long-term fate of life and the cosmos: “Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe,” by Brian Greene, and “The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking),” by Katie Mack. Both paint the same basic picture, which is either dreary or inspiring, depending on your point of view and psychology.

In the grand scheme of things, the universe is young. It was born in an eruption of energy 13.8 billion years ago. Its future, as far as we know, is endless, but everything interesting that will ever happen is happening now. This is the era of light, stars and galaxies; of creatures crawling around on dust motes, constructing telescopes and other intellectual pyramids, driven at least in part by wonder at the surroundings.

But in a few billion years the sun will engulf and destroy us. If the universe doesn’t collapse in a Big Crunch and disappear, dark energy could blow what remains permanently beyond the event horizon. The universe will become too cold and dead even for thought, let alone life. None of us will be remembered.

Should we curse our fate, or be grateful we were here for the party?

Lately a barred owl has come to live in my Manhattan neighborhood. Nicknamed Barnard after the college a block away, it has become a local celebrity. I saw it most recently in an old knotted elm on the edge of Riverside Park, surrounded by admiring humans with smartphones and telephoto lenses. A flock of crows kept trying to chase it away. For me, Barnard has become an omen, a harbinger of the essential generosity of nature in the low, slanting light of winter, a reminder that there is more going on in this world than just us. Even if the crows or the worsening weather causes Barnard to depart, I will feel blessed to have seen it.

On Dec. 3 astronomers from the European Gaia spacecraft, which has been mapping and measuring more than a billion stars in the Milky Way, released a video showing the projected motions of some 40,000 stars over the next 400,000 years. They looked like bugs swimming in a petri dish, twigs circling in the eddy of a stream, dust motes in a sunbeam.

Wherever those cosmic dust motes are headed, they will go regardless of whether we are here to watch, measure, map or wonder about them. Jupiter and Saturn will continue their dance; the sun and moon will play tag with each other’s shadows.

Odds are, whoever or whatever lives out there will never know that we were here at all, nor will we know them. But we know who we are. We know that we are alive now. We know whom we loved and whom we lost. Maybe that’s enough to ask of any universe. 

Saturn and Jupiter have been inching closer to each other all year and on December 21st, 2020,
will be close enough to appear as one. Photo: Ted S. Warren/Associated Press

Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/science/christmas-star-jupiter-saturn-conjunction.html

Universal Perspective

And now, for some universal perspective...

Pale Blue Dot

As we enter this new year, I feel a great need for us--as a species--to reflect on the classic words of the great Carl Sagan in his sobering "Pale Blue Dot" passage from his book of the same name...these important words are more relevant now than ever.

http://carlsagan.com/

The Holy Circle

The circle is the first, original shape, the primary form, the sound of the universe...

"The circle (or sphere) is a symbol of the Self. It expresses the totality of the psyche in all its aspects, including the relationship between man and the whole of nature. Whether the symbol of the circle appears in primitive sun worship or modern religion, in myths or dreams, in the mandalas drawn by Tibetan monks, in the ground plans of cities, or in the spherical concepts of early astronomers, it always points to the single most vital aspect of life – its ultimate wholeness." Aniela Jaffé, in "Symbolism in the Visual Arts" from MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS by Carl Jung

The Japanese word ensō may mean "circle" but the Zen Buddhist concept it represents is far larger than a single word. It contains the ideas of enlightenment, cycles, unity, time, nature, the void, infinity, and the totality of the universe itself.

Everything makes a circle.

Imagine for a moment that you are man primeval, on a plane, looking out around you, with little or no linguistic skills, and certainly no scientific or objective knowledge of what you are seeing. Above you is a flaming circle, giving light and warmth. When that goes away, quite regularly as it turns out, it is replaced by a great white, glowing circle that inflates and deflates over a short period of time. The two of these things chase each other in a circle as they go from side to side in the sky. At night, the sky is peppered with tiny twinkling circles. On the plane around you, berries and fruits and flowers are circular. You turn in a circle, surveying the reality around you, as your body describes the shape of a circle, and you stand as the still point, the center of this circular universe. You are in the center of the circle. The still point of the circle is where ever you are. Plants grow, are harvested, it grows colder, tiny white cold circles fall from the sky, and then soon, the warmth comes back and the plants once again begin to grow. The circle of time. And reality is an endless circle which allows that to happen.

If I were to invent a religion, its symbol would be a circle.

R.I.P. Stephen Hawking

We lost one of the most brilliant minds in history. He died on pi Day...seems fitting.

Patiently Waiting...

Delightful hand lettered illustration by Mary Kate McDevitt
http://marykatemcdevitt.com/

Dreams Are The Heart Of The Universe

"Long years ago I gave pain by saying, with the arrogance of boyhood, that it was foolish to tell one’s dreams. I have done penance for that remark since. . . . I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the universe."
— Havelock Ellis

“Myths are public dreams. Dreams are private myths.”
— Joseph Campbell

“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.”
— Haruki Murakami

Laniakea

This is amazing scientific news. In a recent study for Nature, scientists R. Brent Tully, Hélène Courtois, Yehuda Hoffman, and Daniel Pomarède at the University of Hawaii mapped thousands of galaxies in the immediate vicinity of our own Milky Way, and discovered that we are part of a truly massive "supercluster" of galaxies that they named Laniakea (which means "immeasurable heavens" in Hawaiian).

They also mapped galaxies expanding outward and galaxies which are being pulled toward each other. After mapping their trajectories, they discovered these galaxies, including our own, are being pulled toward a mysterious, super-dense area called "The Great Attractor."

And in another mind-boggling leap, our supercluster structure Laniakea borders another supercluster structure called Perseus-Pisces! I think it is astounding how the structures almost mirror each other, as though a supercluster of galaxies naturally take a certain shape...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7516/full/nature13674.html#videos

Ecstatic Motion

Evolution Really Happened

I am currently watching the new "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" with astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson on the National Geographic Channel, a follow up to the original "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage" with Carl Sagan. This new version is produced by Seth MacFarlane and Ann Druyan who is Sagan's widow.
Such a worthy show... both of them.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/cosmos-a-spacetime-odyssey/
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/

Older and Slower! Now With More Dark Matter!

(CNN) -- How cute was our universe as a baby? We now know better than ever: The picture of our early universe just got sharper and tells scientists with greater precision many important facts about how the universe evolved.

This new photogenic moment, released Thursday, comes courtesy of the European Space Agency's Planck space telescope, which detects cosmic microwave background radiation -- the light left over from the Big Bang. Scientists used data from Planck to create an artificially colored map of temperature variations across the sky in the early universe, in more detail than ever before.

"It's a big deal," said Charles Lawrence, Planck project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a news briefing. He added, "We can tie together a whole range of phenomena that couldn't be tied together so well before, and the sum total of that, the impact, is felt in many, many ways."

The light is technically from 380,000 years after the Big Bang, but that's still infancy when you consider that, according to the new data, the age of the universe is about 13.8 billion years.

"By the matching observations from Planck to predictions from models, we can assemble a surprisingly detailed picture of the universe as it was one nano-nano-nano-nanosecond after the Big Bang," said Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy at John Hopkins University.

Kamionkowski compared the Planck map to the Human Genome Project in terms of its importance for cosmology.

After analyzing the new data, scientists now believe that the universe is about 100 million years older than they thought.

The universe's light started out as a white hot glow and would have been blindingly bright if anyone had been around to see it, Lawrence said.

But since the Big Bang, that hot light has cooled significantly, and the universe itself has expanded by a factor of 1,100. The light has cooled so much that we can't see it, but Planck can detect subtle variations in temperature, which give scientists a wealth of information. By subtle, we mean about one-hundred-millionth of a degree.

The colors in the temperature map image that scientists released Thursday were arbitrarily chosen to show these intensity variations, Lawrence said. Red means a little bit warmer than average, blue means cooler than average, and white is average.

Planck data also suggest that our universe has more dark matter than previously thought. A full 26.8% appears to be dark matter, an invisible phenomenon that scientists have only been able to detect indirectly; experiments both in space and at the Large Hadron Collider are hoping to pin it down.

It appears that ordinary matter -- all of the stuff that we can see, such as planets and stars -- makes up only 4.9% of all the universe.

The rest of the universe is an even more mysterious phenomenon called dark energy, which has also never been detected and appears to be in less abundance than researchers thought.

Scientists said the rate at which the universe is expanding, based on these observations, is 67.15 kilometers per second per megaparsec, a unit of vast distance in space (1 megaparsec = 3.3 million light years). That's significantly less than what had been calculated previously (73.8 km/sec/Mpc). This number, known as the Hubble constant, describes the acceleration of the stretching of spacetime.

The discrepancy between these Hubble constants will likely attract a lot of attention in the scientific community and is one of the most exciting parts of the new data, said Martin White, a scientist with the Planck mission based at the University of California, Berkeley.

"The hope would be that this is actually pointing toward some deficiency in the models, or some extra physics that we're not aware of, and maybe spark a whole new research direction," White said.

One theory that could be explored is that the nature of dark energy, which scientists think is causing the accelerated expansion of the universe, is different from the simplest human-calculated models. Is dark energy increasing with time over some volume of space? That's a radical theory, though, White said, and there are other possibilities.

Another anomaly of these results is that temperature fluctuations are not uniform across the sky map. There are more variations in one direction than in another.

"Perhaps we could say that our universe has thrown us a curve ball, and it rarely fails to surprise us," said Krzysztof Gorski, Planck scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Scientists ran 10 million computer simulations and chose from among them the best match to the new data, White said. Out of those, they found a good match describing important statistics about the universe.

The Planck telescope is aboard a spacecraft that launched in May 2009. It is not circling the Earth but orbits a point in the Sun-Earth system called the second Lagrange point.

The Planck mission helps to nail down many of the parameters that other experiments must know to explore aspects of the universe, such as its expansion history, White said.

New analyses are based on the first 15.5 months of data from this mission, which is run principally by the European Space Agency. NASA is a partner of the project.

Planck represents the third generation of attempts to map the cosmic microwave background. The first was COBE, launched in 1989, followed by WMAP, launched in 2001. Comparing the resulting maps shows just how much better the maps have gotten with each successive satellite.

"This is a beautiful illustration of how science works," Lawrence said. "Make a measurement, learn from it, make a better measurement, learn from it."

By Elizabeth Landau
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/21/tech/innovation/universe-planck-map/index.html?hpt=hp_c3

BEAUTY: Sculpture--Mihoko Ogaki

Japanese conceptual artist Mihoko Ogaki's series "Milky Ways--Breath" features fibre-reinforced plastic figures of dying or dead people with entire galaxies or even universes inside them. Small holes in the surface of the figure allow star maps to be projected onto the surrounding walls. This simple yet profound image is breathtaking in its scope of meaning. The pieces are rife with the ideas of cycles, transformation, transmogrification, macro and micro, and our connection and place in the reality around us.

http://www.mihoko-ogaki.com/index.html

I am sure I have posted these images before, but here they are again because they are so relevant to the art of Ogaki.

Ideas, Awe, and Euphoria

By Jason Silva for CNN

Can ideas get you high?

My approach to creating content is focused on pulling people out of their intellectual comfort zones. I'm interested in presenting ideas in unique ways that challenge people to question their assumptions.

My mode of presentation is short-form video -- basically I create fast cut, impassioned "idea explainers" that explode with enthusiasm and intensity as they distill how technology is expanding our sphere of possibility.

I want big ideas to have aesthetic relevance. I want to tickle people's intellectual sensibilities and instill a sense of wonder. I think big ideas should get people high!

My short videos, which I call shots of philosophical espresso, are trailers for these ideas. They are not a substitute for a book or academic paper -- they are instigators. My work is simply another way for wider audiences to engage with these ideas.

My goal is for those who might not be inclined toward heady discourse to find a way still to connect to these ideas.

Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey coined the term "the biological advantage of being awestruck" to describe his theory on why our unique ability to be enthralled was, somehow, biologically selected for in a Darwinian sense. He believes this quirk of our consciousness imbues our lives with a sense of cosmic significance that over the course of history has resulted in a species that works harder not just to survive but to flourish and thrive. To "awe" gives us a "raison d'etre." A reason for being. You can learn more about Humphrey's idea in my video "A Movie Trailer for Awe."

Humphrey says being enchanted by the magic of experience, rather than being just an aid to survival, provides an essential incentive to survive.

"We relish just being here," he says. "We feel the yen to confirm and renew, in small ways or large, our own occupancy of the present moment, to go deeper, to extend it, to revel in being there, and when we have the skill, to celebrate it in words. ..."

As pop philosopher Alain De Botton wrote in "The Art of Travel," "There is an urge to say: I was here, I felt this, and it matters!"

And this sense of cosmic awe continues to manifest itself in the age of technology, as Erik Davis wrote in his book "TechGnosis":

"Collectively, Human societies can no more dodge sublime imaginings or spiritual yearnings than they can transcend the tidal pulls of Eros. ...

"We are beset with a thirst for meaning and connection that centuries of skeptical philosophy, hardheaded materialism cannot eliminate. ... Today we turn to the cosmic awe conjured by science fiction, or the outer-space snapshots of the Hubble telescope as it calls forth our ever-deeper, ever-brighter possible selves."

Terence McKenna, in his book "Food of the Gods," wrote about the origins of human language: this unique, often ecstatic expression of consciousness that bursts forth as morsels of meaning encoded as vocal patterns.

He believes the origins of language stem from our early use of psychedelic compounds, which caused a sort of "ontological awakening" of our species and thus acted as an early catalyst for religion, cosmic feelings of awe and a desire for transcendent experiences.

These experiences, to borrow the words of Tim Doody, re-contextualize oneself as a marvelous conduit in a timeless whole, through which molecules and meaning flow, from nebulae to neurons and back again. Early shamans, Davis wrote in "TechGnosis," became ecstatic technicians of the sacred.

Regardless of whether you buy McKenna's theory, he does provide a compelling case for the relationship between "cosmic, out-of-body euphoria" and the cognitive leaps to which it can give rise.

Some of our greatest poets, scientists and other thinkers have attributed some of their greatest inspiration to the use of these psychedelic chemicals and their resulting out-of-context perspectives.

But it's not necessarily the chemicals themselves I'm interested in, but rather what they do to our sense of perspective and our reference points. My focus is the subjective experiences they seem "to occasion."

Tom Robbins explains:

"The plant genies don't manufacture imagination, nor do they market wonder and beauty -- but they force us out of context so dramatically and so meditatively that we gawk in amazement at the ubiquitous everyday wonders that we are culturally disposed to overlook, and they teach us invaluable lessons about fluidity, relativity, flexibility and paradox. Such an increase in awareness, if skillfully applied, can lift a disciplined, adventurous artist permanently out of reach of the faded jaws of mediocrity."

In my mind the key idea here is that of being forced out of context. We don't necessarily require psychedelics for this, although they might offer a shortcut.

What we require is a bold new attitude and a sense of humility that accepts the ambiguity of many of our so-called truths, habitual thought patterns and cultural reality tunnels. By accepting the need to constantly de-condition our thinking to approach the world with new eyes, we can reconnect with our sense of awe and wonder.

As Michael Pollan wrote, "In order to see things as if for the first time, we must remember to forget." Bucky Fuller used to say "dare to be naive." Oftentimes, our sense of what we think we know is precisely what prevents us from approaching situations free of prejudice.

"Banality is a defense against being overwhelmed," Pollan wrote in his book "The Botany of Desire."

This makes perfect sense to me: In a world where disruption is the new normal, and technological change is happening at an exponential rate; a world where we are bombarded with media messages, and where "attention" is the new limited resource, it seems easier to recoil away from all the mindblowingness going on, and instead look for reasons to be bored. The mundane can be quite comforting for those terrified of leaving their comfort zone.

And this where I think my work serves the purpose of infecting people with wonderment. My short videos are "digital psychedelics" meant to "de-center" the self, dwindle the broadcast of the ego and provide people with a long view, "big picture" perspective on humanity, technology and how their symbiosis might make a dent in the cosmos.

As Alan Harrington wrote in "The Immortalist": "We must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries."

Original article on CNN.com here.
http://thisisjasonsilva.com/



Do yourself a favor and watch these very short, very inspirational films. Silva talks fast, but stay with him... or just let it wash over you and feel it. His excitement is contagious.

Happy Birthday, Carl!

Today would have been Carl Sagan's 78th birthday.

Happy birthday, Carl. Thank you for your mind, your work, and your legacy.