The Emergence of Patterns

I’m currently reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. I’ve only just covered a few chapters so far, and I’m sure there are plenty more undiscovered treasures in the pages ahead, but I’m already thrilled with what the author has shared. Read it yourself, but for now I’ll tell you that it deals with formal systems, self-reference, language and meta-language, strange loops, and amusing conversations between Achilles and a tortoise, a la Lewis Carroll. One of the themes is understanding whether any system can exist and be defined only within the system itself. In other words, whether a system can be created whose explicit definition does not rely on any information outside of the system being defined… I’m doing a terrible job at explaining this, so if you’re curious go pick up the book.

So I studied a bit of philosophy at university, and I’m very much still a novice, but one thing that I frequently considered was my recognition that although a study of philosophy yields poor career prospects, it confers some very real (albeit vague and intangible) benefits to the student. This is a point that has been made by many philosophers through history, and there are a number of well-known, succinct quotations which underscore this point. This is little consolation to practically-minded parents of college-bound teens who express an interest in a philosophy degree, however. Today I experienced something which tied together Hofstadter’s ideas in GEB and the notion that philosophy has very real value to humanity.

I am a fan of the webcomic xkcd. I have seen most of Mr. Munroe’s comics (some many times) by regularly following the comic for about 4 years, and frequently clicking the "random" button. xkcd # 903 came up today, and it features a piece of trivia: Starting from any Wikipedia article, if you click on the first link not in parenthesis or italics, you will eventually end up at the entry for Philosophy. I tried it starting from a random page, and it worked! It was fascinating watching the subjects of the links moving gradually from a very specific topic to increasingly broad subjects, and ultimately to philosophy. This gives me the impression that all of our knowledge as human beings can be carefully ordered and correlated, and the most intuitive or efficient way of doing so starts with a robust foundation in philosophy. It is the bedrock on which we build increasingly ambitious cathedrals of knowledge.

This idea relates to GEB in terms of the systems and meta-systems I mentioned. It seems to me that philosophy is the meta-language we use to understand the most basic concepts of human existence, such as the nature of knowledge, reality, ethics, etc. It’s interesting that Wikipedia has been designed (presumably coincidentally) in a parallel fashion to this idea of hierarchies of knowledge. I wonder what meta-language describes philosophy? Perhaps there is no ultimate meta-language, but the hierarchy tends toward infinity.

 

I'll mention this in the trivia section, along with the Wikipedia Game!

National Service: you're doing it wrong.

I just read this morning about the Pentagon considering whether transgender people ought to be allowed to serve openly in the military.  The following is my opinion.  To save you hate-filled, closed-minded, belligerent types some reading (God forbid!), here's the short version:

I don't know and even if I did it wouldn't matter.

Now that we have that out of the way and the nasty folks have left us in peace, we can get down to business.  First, in the interest of disclosure, I don't really understand what transgender means.  I have this compulsion to understand things, how they work, what makes them tick, etc.  I believe transgender means that a person who was born with the body of gender A feels like they are actually gender B?  That doesn't really make sense to me personally, but I'll just count myself fortunate that I don't feel conflicted about my gender.  I'm certainly not making the case that other people don't feel that way.  I only know what it's like to be one person and therefore won't conjecture what it's like to be a different person.

Instead I will talk about something which I do know a bit about: National Service.  When I was an adolescent the military appealed to me largely because of propaganda and the straight-faced proclamations by adults everywhere that members of the military are Heroes.  It seemed all too easy- get paid to be a dangerous good guy, fight bad guys, and receive universal respect for the rest of your life all in exchange for a little risk of death and dismemberment.  So I signed up.  I had the test scores to do any job in the military, but I was interested in only one thing.  Army Infantry.  This was 2004, when Saddam was still on the loose, we were still "liberating" the Iraqis from his tyranny, and the Weapons of Mass Destruction were still presumed present in Iraq.  Upon my graduation from the Infantry Training Brigade in Fort Benning, GA I received the first 3 awards that any soldier enlisting in the Army at that time received.  These were the Army Service Ribbon (granted to everyone upon graduation from Basic Training), the Global War on Terrorism medal (granted to everyone during the war on terror), and the National Defense Service Medal (granted to everyone serving during a time of conflict).

Even though these decorations were universal (not awarded to me based on my own merit) I felt immense pride in wearing them for the first time.  Maybe not as much pride as I felt for my sky-blue Infantry shoulder cord and blue-backed crossed rifles, but pride nonetheless.  I felt this pride, not because of who I was or what I'd done, but rather because they were given to me as recognition of my participation in something which (I believed) was noble, good, selfless, and worthy.  This is a unique feeling, and if you've never experienced it, you may be wise to refrain from assuming that you can imagine what it feels like.

So how does this tie in to the subject of transgender servicepeople?  The ongoing conversations about homosexuality in the military and women in combat roles have revolved mainly around two points: civil rights and competence.  The prevailing argument has gone something like this:

"I have the right to be free from discrimination based on (sexual orientation/gender), and I can do the job as well as anyone else.  So let me in."

I could talk about these two issues at length, but that would derail me from making a point that I feel is more important.  The reason that national service has been venerated in our society, the reason that I felt proud of those silly bits of colored fabric on my chest, is because it has always been associated with the willing sacrifices, made by citizen soldiers, of their own personal interests in favor of the best interests of something else.  Those courageous few who have had the occasion and the fortitude to sacrifice their lives that their comrades-in-arms might live have often been honored with our most esteemed decorations, for the spirit of their sacrifice is the spirit of service.

In civilian America, where we have grown fat, litigious, thin-skinned, and entitled, a very different spirit presides.  This is the spirit of self-veneration.  Many of us have come to believe that we are so precious and the world is so filled with threats to our self-evident value that we have a Moral Obligation to fight against these threats.  This spirit gives rise to proclamations of "I".  "I am a Homosexual, and I will not be quiet!".  "I am a Woman and I deserve the right to fight the enemies of my country in ground combat!".  Now, I don't disagree with these proclamations on their own merits.  They are perfectly reasonable assertions in the society of the "I".  I merely submit that they are irrelevant in the spirit of National Service.

National service (in the military specifically) asks that we provide the finest soldiers we are able, as they will have to compete in the most violent possible contests with the finest soldiers of other nations, often with the very highest stakes.  And national service expects those soldiers to do what is best for a squad, or a company, or an army, or a nation rather than for the self.  In fact, in the spirit of national service the interests of the self are often relegated to the very bottom of the hierarchy of interests served.  It is this quality that builds the unassailable fortress of esprit de corps, the unbreakable bond of brothers-in-arms, and the willingness to march forward toward death and destruction which is so foreign to the spirit of the "I".

The personnel needs of the military are constantly in flux, as they mirror the real and perceived threats present in the world.  In peacetime or a "small war" the military may turn away a would-be recruit for insufficient civilian education (as one example), while in a crisis they may levy conscription without regard for educational attainment.  Frankly, if you are blind, have missing limbs, oppressive illnesses, or an irreconcilable psychological profile, the military probably doesn't have any use for you.  You may still be a wonderful, beautiful creature, and hopefully you may achieve actualization in the world ruled by the "I", but you would not be competitive enough in the contest of War.  If you are inhabited by the spirit of service, then you accept this and hold no ill will.

It is my opinion that the recent conversations about homosexuality, women, and transgender people in the military have all been driven by the spirit of "I".  The proponents of reform all seek to break the military to their vision of the future, their code of morality, and their desire to enfranchise a new group of "I's".  Whether or not this is best for the military has been subordinated to whether or not this is best for the people whom the military has historically had no use for.  If the Pentagon was shown demonstrable proof that transgender people make the finest shock infantry on the planet, then I suspect the Pentagon would actively recruit transgender people for its ground combat forces.  Likewise, if (and this is a hypothetical, not an assertion) the Pentagon believes that an all-male infantry unit is more capable than a mixed-gender unit, or an all-female unit, then we ought to leave that decision to them.

It is my opinion that if we continue to subordinate national service to the spirit of "I", then our military will be weakened.  I think we ought to try to avoid this.  Not at any cost, but certainly at the cost of some hurt feelings and temper tantrums.  Consider, in closing, the apex predator of the society of "I".  S/he is a highly paid corporate executive, constantly evaluating her/his own wealth and how best to increase it.  S/he will abandon any post at the drop of a hat and cross the street to work for a competitor if s/he judges that to be in her/his best interests.  Is this a model we wish to impose on our military leaders?

I am at peace with our differences.

I want to talk about reality tunnels. I’ll start with an example which collapses one spatial dimension in order to make the visualization simpler. Imagine a tunnel bored into a mountain. It may twist and turn, rise and descend, and the cross section may be wider or narrower at different points. But it is, by its nature, a contiguous void through a medium, in this case earth and rock. If we were to slice this tunnel into an infinitude of cross sections along the z-axis, we would have a set of two-dimensional shapes in the coordinate plane. Specifically, if our tunnel was perfectly cylindrical with a radius of 1 meter, our cross-sectional shapes would be unit circles. Practically, however, the walls of our tunnel would be rough and irregular and so our cross-sections will also be irregular.

Let’s place our point of view inside the tunnel, and define it such that on our 2-D coordinate plane sections our POV is at the origin. Therefore the shape on each section may be irregular, but it will necessarily enclose a region of the plane containing the origin (otherwise we would be outside the tunnel, embedded in the mountain). Now as we move back and forth on the z-axis we are viewing discrete portions of the tunnel. But if we stipulate that we are only capable of moving forward along the z-axis, and at a constant rate, then we have an analogy for the temporal dimension. So we start at the mouth of the tunnel and are drawn forward along the arrow of time, seeing each section of the tunnel for the first and last time as we go deeper and deeper.

One flaw with this model is that if we have defined the z-axis as the dimension of time, then our POV is incapable of perception in the direction of the arrow of time. We can’t see the future or the past, in other words. You could argue that we can perceive the past (backward along the arrow of time, or the negative z-axis) by remembering, but if you’ve read my other posts than you know I don’t consider memory to be reliable. So in this model at any given moment our perception is limited to a two-dimensional surface around us (eerily it has the dimensions of length and depth from our POV, not the length and breadth that we typically imagine when we think of a 2-D surface). I admit that this is hard to visualize, but set that aside, we’ll flesh it out shortly.

Now to turn this regular tunnel into a reality tunnel, two things are necessary. The first is that we replace the medium (the mountain) with the entire universe. Every location, every atom, every person and experience which exists is now the medium for our tunnel. The boring of our reality tunnel is accomplished by our experience of reality as we move along the direction of the arrow of time. Our perceptions and thoughts and emotions make up the drill bit, and the walls of the tunnel are the portions of reality which are revealed to us. So in one sense, a reality tunnel is like a super-detailed timeline of your life.

The second thing which is necessary is to boot our model from three dimensions out into the full four (x, y, and z spatial axes and the arrow of time). At any given instant we are experiencing reality in three dimensions, not two. I can’t quite visualize a 4-D tunnel, but the visualization is not necessary for conceptual understanding. Now is when things get a little wacky. Our perception of reality is informed and interpreted according to our experiences and preconceptions, so at every moment our reality is at least partially defined by our past reality. This is clearly a candidate for one of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s "strange loops".

As one simple illustration, consider a man who has become paranoid of his government. Suppose as a young man he was subject to experiences which instilled in him a fear and mistrust of powerful people and organizations. As he aged, he carried with him suspicion and presumptions of the abusiveness and corruption of government. The more he feared injustice, the more he looked for it, and the more he found it, which reinforced his presumptions. Another strange loop? The point here is that this man’s reality truly is populated by experiences of government misbehavior. So you may call him paranoid, because in your reality tunnel there have been few experiences which lead you to mistrust the government, but if you shared his reality tunnel you may well share his views. So even though there is (presumably) only one object reality which you both inhabit, its vastness and variety coupled with our meager perceptual abilities mean that we may experience wildly different realities without either of us necessarily being wrong.

I find this concept reassuring when I witness human behavior which seems incomprehensible to me, or when I wonder why I am so different from the people around me. Each of us has a reality tunnel which is infinitely complex and therefore infinitely unique. We may share similar formative experiences (i.e. sections of our tunnels may be superficially similar) such as a near-death experience, an abusive parent, the untimely death of a loved one, etc. But here’s what I find truly beautiful:

Our reality tunnels exist in actual 4-D space-time. That means, if one was to chart their own tunnel from start to present, it would track all over the Earth (or for a very select few as far as the Moon) as our location in space is inextricable from our reality. So even though our reality tunnels are infinitely more unique to us than even our fingerprints, our tunnels are constantly intersecting slightly with those of the people around us. If you and I are complete strangers eating a meal on opposite sides of a restaurant at the same time, there is a very slight overlap of reality. If we have the same waitress, I imagine her reality tunnel oscillates between ours, occasionally overlapping with both of ours, like some acid-trip Venn diagram. Now suppose we’re both strangers in a movie theater, completely engrossed in a nearly identical experience for two hours. No, make that fifty strangers sharing an experience. If it is a good movie and we’re absorbed in it, then our strange loops are suppressed and our tunnels are likely as similar as they could ever possibly be.

The thought of all of humanity constantly boring reality tunnels through space-time, and the interplay between tunnels, the coming together and falling away… we must make beautiful patterns. Commuters who take the same route to and from work at the same times every day provide repeating structural patterns while our sort of random, spur-of-the-moment impulses inject the random variability into the system. An artistic depiction that always comes to mind when I think about how these tunnels should "look" is the supernatural vector that emerges from Donnie Darko’s chest and leads him around his house in the movie (Donnie Darko, of course).