I've always had a fascination for the wild parts of the city, and admired those plants and creatures that make a living in spite of humans. Of course, compared to other places, the biodiversity can be rather small, but in some ways the city is the ultimate multi-ecology environment, with each garden having its own microclimate and resultant suitability for colonisation.
For a long time the dominant trend in city gardening has been micromanagement: designing and building a garden around its human occupants and creating sharp edges, very few wild parts. I think that with the current interest in matters ecological that is starting to change.
But in any case, humans are not capable of absolute control of the environment. There are always natural processes that interfere, even with the most tightly governed of environments. For example, in the Biosphere projects, where the species that were grown or lived in a sealed glass dome were carefully introduced into a formerly sterile environment, other species that had not been deliberately introduced (ants) appeared and began to strongly affect the ecology.
In the city, which somehow seems quite sterile, species find a niche that they can exploit. Bats roost in old railway tunnels (for example in Sydenham Woods). Feral pigeons, which descend from cliff-dwelling rock doves, find ideal conditions in cities, with balconies and bridge struts taking the place of natural ledges and caves. Any under-maintained area can quickly become a rich pocket of life. The rear wall of my house, where water has dripped for years, has a small collection of ferns and mosses.
Natural processes such as rainfall and wind and earthquakes also cannot be controlled, obviously. I love finding stalactites and stalagmites in the city, where rainwater has dripped through layers of concrete and dissolved calcium carbonate, which is then deposited out as the water drips off onto the ground. Under the South Bank concrete monstrosities is a good place to see this.
The rainwater flows into storm drains, which are often the only remnants of rivers that once flowed through London. I take great delight in showing people where the Fleet River used to enter the Thames. To the west of St Paul's Cathedral, it was once wide and deep enough for boats to navigate at least to Holborn Viaduct. If you walk the area (it runs roughly where the railway line goes from Blackfriars to King's Cross) you can see how the surrounding areas slope down towards the old river channel. The Fleet was gradually covered over, as were many other rivers, even in central London. It does still exist as a storm drain, coming out under the Blackfriars platforms.
Canals, man-made and often rather unsavoury-looking, are hotspots for wildlife observation. It is very helpful now that bodies like British Waterways now keenly promote the environmental impacts of the canals. I observed a cormorant taking an eel in the Regent's Canal, which runs alongside Queen Mary College. The eel was big, and the cormorant struggled to swallow it for around half an hour, dropping and recatching it several times. Eventually it flew away, but with the eel's tail still protruding from its beak.
BBC news report of a similar encounter: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8097291.stm
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Sunday, 27 September 2009
Egolessness, Evolution, Revolution
It's just a thought that occurred to me, while I was practicing meditation, as tends to happen, so I noted it down to come back to later. What I wrote was: "Interesting parallel between idea of egolessness in Buddhism and that of Natural Selection."
It is not so much about a similarity between those two things, but about the dynamics around the ideas. At the moment there is a heightened interest in Darwin and his theories, particularly his Theory of Natural Selection and species formation. His ideas were revolutionary at the time, and are still highly controversial in certain areas.I think that the Buddha's theory of Egolessness is another revolutionary idea, perhaps a contentious one, perhaps not, whose time has come.
The idea of egolessness is not a new one in certain cultures. The ideas of the Buddha spread two and a half thousand years ago in Asia. Here in the West, there have been proponents of some Buddhist ideas for around two hundred years, but in the early days the ideas were often elucidated by scholars with little feeling for or personal experience of the teachings. Only in the last fifty years or so have experienced teachers from Buddhist cultures been to the West to teach.
And what is the essence of that message? The initial and perhaps most vital teachings of the Buddha were 1) Beings suffer; 2) They suffer because they believe in ego, some ongoing, eternal part of themselves which needs constant reinforcement and protection; 3) That there is an end to that process of creating ones personal world of pain and 4) There is a particular path (the Buddhist path) that leads you to that cessation.
You could, cynically, look on it as purely a sales pitch for Buddhism. In fact it seems fairly traditional to start trying to convert someone to your religion by drawing attention to their pain and hardship and promising some relief from that if they do what you say. The key point here is that the Buddha actually gives you the answer, he doesn't say pay me some money and then you can have the answer, he gives it straight away, then says, you don't have to believe me, see for yourself.
Number 2) above is the answer. It's not entirely complete without 1, 3 and 4, but it's the essential message. Which is that however much one looks, one can never find a part of oneself that is eternal, unchanging. Existence is rather slippery, it seems, neither there nor not there.
Anyway, the purpose of this post is not philosophical musings, however important, nor to convert anyone, particularly. But more to point out that like the ideas that Darwin proposed, it's revolutionary. Likewise it is also hard to prove, except by looking and looking. There is no formula that will capture it.
So to be a little bolder here, what are the parallels between the two theories? (Let's call egolessness a theory.) Well, in one way they both deny the necessity of God's involvement in creating and maintaining this world we live in. Natural selection suggests a mechanism for the diversity of life on this planet, and as I've said in a previous post, there is plenty of evidence for it, and no evidence against. I realise that's a contentious point, but it seems clear to me.
Egolessness means there is no need to explain beings with some idea of 'soul' or 'ghost in the machine'. That humans are a product of many causes and conditions, ever changing in response to surroundings and their responses, rather than having some nugget of identity at the base. There's a similar mechanistic idea here to that of natural selection.
I would go so far as to say that the idea of human consciousness being an emergent property of the complexity of the brain, a current contender in rational scientific circles, does not contradict the Buddhist view. However neither does the more thoughtful idea that everything is consciousness, neither really do some kinds of creationist logics, funnily enough. The main point, that fundamentally there is no one single thing that makes me Me, is fairly robust.
My personal view? I did what the Buddha suggested and spent a lot of time looking at my own mind. By the way, I have read in books about consciousness that introspection doesn't work. I disagree, but one needs to retain an open mind, in the sense of no fixed preconceptions, and no particular goal. In any case, my experience over the last 15 years has not disagreed with the theory of egolessness. I see patterns, some deeply ingrained habitual patterns that make my life difficult at times. But I have in no way been able to pin down the Me-ness of me. It's pretty liberating.
It is not so much about a similarity between those two things, but about the dynamics around the ideas. At the moment there is a heightened interest in Darwin and his theories, particularly his Theory of Natural Selection and species formation. His ideas were revolutionary at the time, and are still highly controversial in certain areas.I think that the Buddha's theory of Egolessness is another revolutionary idea, perhaps a contentious one, perhaps not, whose time has come.
The idea of egolessness is not a new one in certain cultures. The ideas of the Buddha spread two and a half thousand years ago in Asia. Here in the West, there have been proponents of some Buddhist ideas for around two hundred years, but in the early days the ideas were often elucidated by scholars with little feeling for or personal experience of the teachings. Only in the last fifty years or so have experienced teachers from Buddhist cultures been to the West to teach.
And what is the essence of that message? The initial and perhaps most vital teachings of the Buddha were 1) Beings suffer; 2) They suffer because they believe in ego, some ongoing, eternal part of themselves which needs constant reinforcement and protection; 3) That there is an end to that process of creating ones personal world of pain and 4) There is a particular path (the Buddhist path) that leads you to that cessation.
You could, cynically, look on it as purely a sales pitch for Buddhism. In fact it seems fairly traditional to start trying to convert someone to your religion by drawing attention to their pain and hardship and promising some relief from that if they do what you say. The key point here is that the Buddha actually gives you the answer, he doesn't say pay me some money and then you can have the answer, he gives it straight away, then says, you don't have to believe me, see for yourself.
Number 2) above is the answer. It's not entirely complete without 1, 3 and 4, but it's the essential message. Which is that however much one looks, one can never find a part of oneself that is eternal, unchanging. Existence is rather slippery, it seems, neither there nor not there.
Anyway, the purpose of this post is not philosophical musings, however important, nor to convert anyone, particularly. But more to point out that like the ideas that Darwin proposed, it's revolutionary. Likewise it is also hard to prove, except by looking and looking. There is no formula that will capture it.
So to be a little bolder here, what are the parallels between the two theories? (Let's call egolessness a theory.) Well, in one way they both deny the necessity of God's involvement in creating and maintaining this world we live in. Natural selection suggests a mechanism for the diversity of life on this planet, and as I've said in a previous post, there is plenty of evidence for it, and no evidence against. I realise that's a contentious point, but it seems clear to me.
Egolessness means there is no need to explain beings with some idea of 'soul' or 'ghost in the machine'. That humans are a product of many causes and conditions, ever changing in response to surroundings and their responses, rather than having some nugget of identity at the base. There's a similar mechanistic idea here to that of natural selection.
I would go so far as to say that the idea of human consciousness being an emergent property of the complexity of the brain, a current contender in rational scientific circles, does not contradict the Buddhist view. However neither does the more thoughtful idea that everything is consciousness, neither really do some kinds of creationist logics, funnily enough. The main point, that fundamentally there is no one single thing that makes me Me, is fairly robust.
My personal view? I did what the Buddha suggested and spent a lot of time looking at my own mind. By the way, I have read in books about consciousness that introspection doesn't work. I disagree, but one needs to retain an open mind, in the sense of no fixed preconceptions, and no particular goal. In any case, my experience over the last 15 years has not disagreed with the theory of egolessness. I see patterns, some deeply ingrained habitual patterns that make my life difficult at times. But I have in no way been able to pin down the Me-ness of me. It's pretty liberating.
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
The Sad History of London's telephone area code
If you ask a Londoner what their telephone number is, there is a good chance that they won't know. I'm not talking here about the fact that we tend to move around a lot, or that people often get new mobile numbers, and don't know them for a while. I'm talking about landlines, and that when people even think they know their number, they often don't.To give an example, you ask for a telephone number, and the reply is "oh two oh seven [pause] seven three one, five four one four". The pause here indicates the break between the area code and the number within that area. You will also see numbers written like this, for example 0208 6445667. But in fact the area code is 020 for London, followed by eight digits. So if someone within London asks your telephone number, the correct way to answer is "seven seven three one, five four one four," giving just the number, the area code being redundant. (According to research by regulator Ofcom in February 2005, only 13% of respondents identified the code for London correctly without prompting: 59% incorrectly identified it as "0207" or "0208".)
This may seem a trivial, nit-picking example, but there is more to it than that. The number following the area code does not have to be a seven or an eight, so many people are not in either of these fantasy area codes 0207 or 0208. There are already people with a three prefix after the area code, like 020 34567890, and the other prefixes are waiting in the wings. There are 10 million of the threes to be allocated, so they should last a little while. The implication of course, is that there are around 20 million existing London telephone connections!
So how did this bizarre situation arise? When I was young, the area code for London was 01, and an individual number had seven digits. In other words, there were approaching 10 million numbers. This wasn't enough, so British Telecom divided London into two areas, inner London having code 071 and outer having 081. This was shortsighted in two ways.
- It only doubled the number of numbers
- It did not consider that people may not want an outer London phone number
Finally the new system came into place where again there was a single code for London and an eight digit number. If your number used to start with the area code 0171, your new eight digit phone number would begin with a seven, likewise 0181 to eight.
So the end result? We have several results. In terms of numbers, we have added one meaningful digit and one redundant digit. For the area code, which is now 020, instead of 01, we are saying the same thing but using one more digit. For the phone number itself, we have multiplied the number of available numbers by a factor of ten, from ten million to one hundred million.
Another effect is that the geographic information which arose from dividing into sevens and eights has now been lost. You may have a number beginning with seven and live in an eight or a three area.
The effect on people, unfortunately, is that as I mentioned, many people no longer understand what their telephone numbers mean. When I tell people my phone number in the correct form, they often do not understand. Being me, I then try to educate them, ("a London number has eight digits, not eleven, etc.") rather than just say it incorrectly. It makes me wonder how much time is wasted telling each other phone numbers with those three extra digits, and the confusion they bring...sigh.
For a more thorough explanation, including the confusion within other British cities, see the article below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_telephone_code_misconceptions
Footnote: numbers used to be specified by the local exchange (where someone would sit plugging in wires to make your call) followed by a short number. My grandparents used to answer their telephone by saying "Matching 367," even in the 1980s.
Thursday, 17 September 2009
The trouble with Science
Sorry to revisit old themes, but if I can't explore the thoughts that bother me, fluttering around my head in a disturbing manner, then what's the point of having a blog? (Don't answer that, please.)
Science seems to be the religion of this era. When in doubt, we consult 'experts' or 'scientists', which are synonymous terms, it seems. And science has all kinds of good qualities, at least in theory. Precision, robustness, thoroughness, some kind of objectivity.
But many things cannot be measured by science, in any meaningful way. How, for example, do you measure love? Or any other feeling, for that matter? Is it possible to simply 'know' something, in an intuitive way? It often feels as though it is. Ironically, many scientific advances have come about through intuitive leaps: "I just knew that I should leave the calcium out of the experiment, this time." Can intuition be said to have any meaning, from a scientific point of view?
In fact many of the things that define us as humans are quite meaningless from a 'scientific' point of view, where we interpret science as rational and materialist. Social sciences attempt to measure such things as one's personal sense of worth and other nebulous qualities, but in fact are stymied by the personal nature of one's experience.
More fundamentally, being itself is a term whose meaning begins to fall apart when we question it. Being is experiential, rather than measurable. Consciousness is what they call the 'Hard Problem' in cognitive fields; there is no easy way even to define it clearly, let alone explain where it comes from. Materialistic thinking tends to regard it as an 'emergent' property of the complexity of living beings, though this creates an uncomfortable dichotomy between living and consciousness. In other words, you have to assert that there are living beings which are not conscious, but that at some level of complexity, consciousness arises.
There is another problem with science that I have mentioned before - see 'String Theory' entry. Clearly, there is a boundary between the categories of 'explained by science' and 'not explained by science', which, as science progresses, is enlarging, from one point of view. As we learn more about the world, that boundary increases in area, and thus what is just on the other side of that boundary is enlarged too. In other words, as we learn more, we see more that we don't know. Many learners will have had this experience personally, and it applies to the human race as a whole, too.
One interesting question is whether knowledge is finite in any way. As far as I know, nobody has ever found 'the end' of a branch of knowledge; there is always more complexity, more details, more questions that arise. The implication of that is that knowledge is infinite; that however much humans find out about their universe, there will always be an infinite amount more to know.
I suppose it is the arrogance of a science which supposes it has all the answers that is my motivation here: I would like to suggest that in fact we could say it has very few of the answers. In fact comparing the sum of human knowledge with all that we don't know, we could legitimately say that we know almost nothing, at least in a conventional 'scientific' sense. So in consulting our 'experts', we should bear in mind that their expertise could be within a rather limited sphere.
This brings me back to the validity of intuition in a decision-making process. Knowing so little, can we assume that we don't know things intuitively? Of course, that is no reason to assume that intuition is always correct, either. That seems to be an impossible to illuminate clearly. When we think about 'intuition', we might think of dramatic stories, like deciding not to go out, and then a chimney pot falls down where you would have been. Coincidence? Intuition?
But intuition is a more intrinsic process than that, something which is bubbling along the whole time sub or semi-consciously. Or is part of something that is, the awareness that governs everything we do or think. I'll have to come back to this last musing, as I haven't thought it through yet.
Science seems to be the religion of this era. When in doubt, we consult 'experts' or 'scientists', which are synonymous terms, it seems. And science has all kinds of good qualities, at least in theory. Precision, robustness, thoroughness, some kind of objectivity.
But many things cannot be measured by science, in any meaningful way. How, for example, do you measure love? Or any other feeling, for that matter? Is it possible to simply 'know' something, in an intuitive way? It often feels as though it is. Ironically, many scientific advances have come about through intuitive leaps: "I just knew that I should leave the calcium out of the experiment, this time." Can intuition be said to have any meaning, from a scientific point of view?
In fact many of the things that define us as humans are quite meaningless from a 'scientific' point of view, where we interpret science as rational and materialist. Social sciences attempt to measure such things as one's personal sense of worth and other nebulous qualities, but in fact are stymied by the personal nature of one's experience.
More fundamentally, being itself is a term whose meaning begins to fall apart when we question it. Being is experiential, rather than measurable. Consciousness is what they call the 'Hard Problem' in cognitive fields; there is no easy way even to define it clearly, let alone explain where it comes from. Materialistic thinking tends to regard it as an 'emergent' property of the complexity of living beings, though this creates an uncomfortable dichotomy between living and consciousness. In other words, you have to assert that there are living beings which are not conscious, but that at some level of complexity, consciousness arises.
There is another problem with science that I have mentioned before - see 'String Theory' entry. Clearly, there is a boundary between the categories of 'explained by science' and 'not explained by science', which, as science progresses, is enlarging, from one point of view. As we learn more about the world, that boundary increases in area, and thus what is just on the other side of that boundary is enlarged too. In other words, as we learn more, we see more that we don't know. Many learners will have had this experience personally, and it applies to the human race as a whole, too.
One interesting question is whether knowledge is finite in any way. As far as I know, nobody has ever found 'the end' of a branch of knowledge; there is always more complexity, more details, more questions that arise. The implication of that is that knowledge is infinite; that however much humans find out about their universe, there will always be an infinite amount more to know.
I suppose it is the arrogance of a science which supposes it has all the answers that is my motivation here: I would like to suggest that in fact we could say it has very few of the answers. In fact comparing the sum of human knowledge with all that we don't know, we could legitimately say that we know almost nothing, at least in a conventional 'scientific' sense. So in consulting our 'experts', we should bear in mind that their expertise could be within a rather limited sphere.
This brings me back to the validity of intuition in a decision-making process. Knowing so little, can we assume that we don't know things intuitively? Of course, that is no reason to assume that intuition is always correct, either. That seems to be an impossible to illuminate clearly. When we think about 'intuition', we might think of dramatic stories, like deciding not to go out, and then a chimney pot falls down where you would have been. Coincidence? Intuition?
But intuition is a more intrinsic process than that, something which is bubbling along the whole time sub or semi-consciously. Or is part of something that is, the awareness that governs everything we do or think. I'll have to come back to this last musing, as I haven't thought it through yet.
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