I Am a Hologram, and So Can You!

Paradigm shifts are rare in science, as anyone who has read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions knows. The authorities of the scientific establishment, working within a particular frame of reference, are often reluctant to eschew the accepted scientific dogma and adopt new modes of thinking. This is not entirely a bad thing, of course, since skepticism is the basis of science; and when theories explain the majority of the evidence, they deserve to be accepted. However, when the dogma becomes so entrenched that new information not conforming to the prevailing theories is tossed out, the present schema is too rigid to account for dissenting ideas. A current trend in physical science (not all of it fringe) is the emerging concept of the universe as a hologram. Since Newton, scientific materialism has been the conceptual framework of physical science, envisioning the universe as a sort of enormous machine with interrelated parts, through which all explanations of natural phenomena can be reduced to physical laws of nature. In the observable universe, this paradigm has proved remarkably resilient in its explanatory power. But, as it turns out, at the very smallest level, this view of the universe explains essentially nothing, and quantum mechanics must be employed, to the great confusion of most scientists, since the reconciliation of these two theories is among the holy grails of particle physics. According to some scientists, it seems that the model of the universe as a hologram does in fact reconcile some of the discrepancies, not only between Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics, but also string theory, the black hole information paradox, and if the bolder assertions are true, even more extra-natural phenomena.

The universe as a hologram has recently found itself in the news because of the GEO600 gravitational wave detection experiment going on in the German countryside. The experiment was originally designed to detect the enormous gravitational waves sent out by very massive, dense bodies such as neutron stars and black holes. What they didn't expect to find were traces of background noise that may inform physicists of the fundamental limits of space-time itself - where it ceases to behave like the smooth continuum that Einstein described in his theory of relativity and dissolves into a sort of grainy picture filled with little bits of information about our universe. From the article from New Scientist:

According to Hogan, the holographic principle radically changes our picture of space-time. Theoretical physicists have long believed that quantum effects will cause space-time to convulse wildly on the tiniest scales. At this magnification, the fabric of space-time becomes grainy and is ultimately made of tiny units rather like pixels, but a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. This distance is known as the Planck length, a mere 10^-35 metres. The Planck length is far beyond the reach of any conceivable experiment, so nobody dared dream that the graininess of space-time might be discernable.

That is, not until Hogan realised that the holographic principle changes everything. If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.

The researchers at GEO600 had no idea what they were detecting had any real significance until Craig Hogan, a Fermilab physicist at Batavia, Illinois, who had previously predicted that such noise exists, informed the research team that the noise implies we are all living in a giant hologram: that our entire universe and everything in it is a 3D reflection of what is a 2D reality - just as a hologram is a 2D surface appearing to be a 3D image. I am no physicist so I won't attempt a more in depth explanation, (the article linked above provides a pretty good one) but suffice to say that if Hogan is right, all of the "information" of the universe is stored in bits bigger than the Planck length, but which represent information the size of the Planck length in our visible universe, and that the universe we inhabit every day - from atoms and molecules to stars and galaxies - is a sort of "reflection" of the 2D bits. This is useful for understanding the "wholeness" of the universe rather than simply the reductionist version of "leaves for the tree." The source of the theory actually dates further back than this experiment at GEO600 to at least the late 70s, when Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein discovered that black holes emit radiation, but convey no information about their interior. Once the black hole is gone, all of the physical information about its existence is gone with it. This breaks the physical law that physical information cannot be destroyed and is known as the black hole information paradox. According to the holographic universe theory, the information is actually contained in these bits of information on the sphere - the very noise that the GEO600 may be detecting.

The researchers are quick to point out that this is not "proof" that such a model of the universe is accurate, but that the evidence that it should be taken seriously is mounting. The implications for the scientific community are, of course, staggering, but what of the metaphysical ones? Major discoveries in science are often accompanied with major philosophical reinterpretations of the universe - heliocentricism, evolutionary theory, the modern genetic synthesis, relativity have all affected humanity's outlook on its place in the universe. What of this theory? After some research, I found it extraordinarily interesting that, even though it is only recently that evidence has begun to accumulate to support the holographic theory, the notion has been around among both scientific and philosophical minds alike for several decades now.

The holographic model of the universe gained traction in the 1970s as the University of London's David Bohm, a protege of Einstein's who also worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer in the 1940s and 50s, became frustrated by modern theoretical physics' inability to explain natural phenomena encountered in quantum physics. It was also explored around the same time by Stanford neuropsychologist Karl Pribram, who believed that the prevailing views on human consciousness could not account for certain functionalities in human perception. If the holographic paradigm of the universe ever supplants the materialist one, it will be a prime example of multiple discovery within the memetic zeitgeist of the human scientific experience if ever there was one, and perhaps even more so, since the discovery was made by two researchers working in different fields. Unless, of course, you believe some of the more outrageous claims about the theory that the mind sciences and physics are merging into one field.

Prior to the GEO600 experiment, the most recent synthesis of the holographic universe has been put on display in Michael Talbot's book The Holographic Universe, written in 1991. Talbot writes in the intellectual tradition of Fritjof Capra and Frank Tipler, in the sense that much of his work is characterized by an attempt to reconcile various physical phenomena with supernatural mysteries and mystical religious experiences. Capra, in his Tao of Physics, wrote of the striking similarities between what modern particle physics revealed about the nature of the cosmos and the mystical veins in Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. Tipler believes that the the Omega Point theory implying a quantum singularity at the end of the universe implies that life after death and the immortality of the conscious mind is a reality. In fact, Tipler says in the introduction to his book Physics and Immortality, that "theology is a branch of physics, that physics can infer by calculation the existence of God, and the likelihood of the resurrection of the dead at the end of time..." What all of these theories have in common, of course, is the unique human penchant for inserting ourselves into the cosmos when most of the scientific evidence points the other way: The universe is a cold, unknowing place, a place of Aristotle's unmoved mover, where physical laws operate as if the universe were a giant machine and all the particles cogs. Quantum physics shows us, though, that merely the act of observing particles can change their behavior, so removing conscious perception from equation is equally erroneous since we too are a part of the universe. So, is a middle ground possible? There is certainly a great deal of evidence not explained by the materialistic view of the universe. How can electrons thousands of light years away from each other affect one another? Alain Aspect's 1982 experiment seems to defy Einstein's theory of relativity by showing that "communication" between particles travels faster than the speed of light. From another article on the holographic principle:

Aspect's experiment is related to the EPR Experiment, a consciousness experiment which had been devised by Albert Einstein, and his colleagues, Poldlsky and Rosen, in order to disprove Quantum Mechanics on the basis of the Pauli Exclusion Principle contradicting Special Relativity.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

The article goes on to give the example, within the framework of the holographic principle, of a watching a fish swimming in a fish tank on two television screens, each showing slightly different angles. One would assume, if the screens were the only information available, that there were two separate fish, but once closer observations revealed corresponding movement, one would realize the the fish had something in common. Perhaps these corresponding electrons are not "communicating" but actually the same electron, separated by our perception of reality as three dimensional. How can human perception be reconciled with physical reality? Is there a true bridge between the mind and matter or is human consciousness some cosmic accident? According to Talbot at least, the holographic principle of the universe seems to answer, or at least answers better than other theories, many of these questions. From perusing just a few of the many articles on the web about the holographic principle, I've found an extraordinary list of phenomena it purports to explain:

- Like Fritjof Capra, this theory is one of "interconnectedness" and at its foundation, the less conservative proponents appear to believe that this will inevitably lead to a new field of science combining neurobiology, psychology, cognitive science, physics, cosmology, astronomy, and possibly even theology.

- String theory and the black hole information paradox will be reconciled and the information from the black holes will be encoded on the 2D "pixels" on the spherical universe (which apparently conforms to the number of dimensions predicted by string theory....I honestly have no idea what this means).

-Consciousness can be said to be a product of the universe that humans have somehow accessed, rather than as a material phenomenon localized entirely within the brain (going even further, this implies that the human mind can manipulate matter, opening the door for all sorts of science fictiony things like telekinesis, telepathy, etc.)

-Objective physical reality is an illusion, created by these pixels on the outside of the "surface" of the universe, conforming to the Hindu concept of reality as Maya, an illusion produced by the self.

-Synchronicity, the occurrence of meaningful coincidences (in time), could be explained as a product of the conscious mind, similar to the correspondence between subatomic particles at a various distances (in space).

OK. So all of this sounds a little ridiculous. And it sort of is. To be fair, most of the scientists currently working within the new paradigm don't subscribe to any of the outlandish claims made by some. This is simply another theory that confirms physical findings and no philosophical claims need be made until more information is available. This could merely be the most recent incarnation of scientifico-religious compromise that has been the norm for centuries, from the early Christian attempt to reconcile Biblical dogma with Neoplatonic philosophy to the medieval Scholastic attempt to maintain Church teaching while submitting to the authority of Aristotelian thinking to Capra and Tipler discovering links between particle physics and cosmology with Eastern philosophy and the Christian concept of an afterlife. It is, historically speaking, nothing new. Still, it's attractive to think of one theory with so much explanatory power. Whether it has a scientific basis or is New Age nonsense, the odd phenomenon people claim to encounter everyday do exist, even if only in our minds, and anything that provides answers to the unexplainable deserves to at least be given a once over.

Can We All Just Tone Down the Socialism Rhetoric Please?

I don't want to go into some politico-economic diatribe here, but I've honestly been getting a little disheartened at the slinging around of the words "socialist" and "socialism" in the context of the stimulus package, bail-out of Wall Street, and the Obama presidency in general. Here's the cover story from last week's Newsweek. Here's another one from yesterday on Fox News. From the usual suspects like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, to the McCain/Palin campaign trail rhetoric, to every scared ideologue of the Right, "socialism" has become the new terrorizing watchword of the young 2009. The problem I have isn't really in the political nature of the mud-slinging or the partisanship but in the basic lack of understanding in the vocabulary used to describe the situation. Ask the average American what socialism means, and you'll probably get a response something akin to "government controls the economy" or "the opposite of capitalism" or "that thing the Soviets did" and all of them would be, by and large, wrong.

Dictionary and encyclopedic definitions can often shed light on meaning, but even here, there is a major disconnect with what the term is supposed to mean and what it is perceived to mean: most emphasize the Marxist and Soviet varieties, which are but two out of many. Socialism, arguably, has a much broader meaning than capitalism. Capitalism at its most basic level is a system whereby all means of production (companies, land, etc.) are privately owned and operated and the investment of money into these means of production is a source of wealth itself. Socialism, however, has a larger economic meaning in the sense that the means of production are distributed to a greater variety of individuals, and could be controlled, depending on the society, by groups of individuals (co-ops or syndicates), the public at large through democratic means, or controlled by a state hierarchically from the top down. The problem with the misleading rhetoric coming out of most mainstream media is that the focus is on the latter at the expense of all other meanings. In fact, the original envisioning of socialism did not even include the statist variety - this was essentially created by Lenin and Stalin. It does not reflect well on the economic intelligence of our society as a whole that a seventeen year old blogger seems to understand this far better than the supposed experts in the field. The perception of socialism as a particularly heinous form of government control comes, I assume, from the fact that the galvanizing enemy against which the United States defined itself for 60 years was the U.S.S.R. - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, this is only one form of socialism, the statist variety, and a brief history of the movement shows that most socialists in the world today reject this variety. One could argue, in fact, that anything that is statist is, by definition, not socialism, since true socialism requires some form of cooperative ownership and control. State control of all means of production is really like having one corporation run everything.

Here's where the current situation comes in to play. What is going on now - pumping money into corporations, banks, state and local governments, and the economy at large to create jobs - is not really socialism, since the control of the capital and the means of production hasn't actually changed. A better term for this would be something like oligarchic hypercapitalism or plutocratic hypercapitalism or interventionist hypercapitalism. True socialism would involve something along the lines of firing all of the heads of the companies getting bail-outs and giving ownership equally to the workers of the companies regardless of how much money they have invested, or even whether they have money invested. Or, it would be giving all taxpayers an equal stake in the companies, with decision-making power at the ballot, with the money to be returned in kind as these companies rebuild. At least the Newsweek article gets one thing right: it points out that Republican administrations spend a great deal of money as well, and Reagan and both Bushes actually showed a net increase in spending during their terms. If the stimulus package is socialism, people on the Right should take solace in the fact that Obama has at least this one thing in common with his Republican predecessors.

Idle Thoughts

I used to write poetry. I've been writing random things for almost as long as I can remember. Little stories about aliens and dinosaurs when I was in elementary school, pretend newspaper articles, and when I was around 14 I actually completed a novel that was an absurd amalgam of basically every trope from Star Wars, Star Trek, and probably any other science fiction novel/movie/television show I had seen or read up to that point. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I feel like it took me a really long time to settle on a writing style that really fits my voice, and it was not to be found in fiction or poetry but in essays and research. But for a long time I thought I wanted to be a novelist, indeed assumed that I eventually would be, and it wasn't for lack of trying or confidence that shook this desire from me, it was my own wearied feeling that this simply wasn't for me - a hard feeling to swallow when you've been heading in a certain direction for years. Poetry came a little bit later and coincided with the time in my life that I thought my interests would be steered from the writing of literature to the study of it. This was from somewhere between late junior year in high school to around mid sophomore year in college. I don't really know why I started writing but I filled a couple of notebooks in the three or so years I wrote. Most of them, as could be expected from a 17 year old, were pretty terrible. The notebooks are probably somewhere at my parents house, I honestly don't know. However, while rifling through an old box of notes from college the other day, I happened to find a few poems that I turned in for a creative writing class I took in the summer of 2001. Usually, when I find things I wrote in years past I'm confronted with a feeling somewhere between embarrassment and pride, not in the work itself, but in how far I've come as a writer since then. However, I read this poem I wrote that summer and was actually rather impressed with what I had done. It doesn't really "mean" anything as far as I can tell, and if I can remember correctly I was just playing around with language when I wrote it. So, for all you literary critics that read this blog, don't feel like you need to look to deeply into it. I just thought I'd share since, as I said, I'm kind of surprised that I wrote this.

Idle Thoughts

1

Upwards reaching,
Inner is towards.
Many who may know me outwards
Are changing inwards.

2

Through one naked whisper
The ghostly heart is warmed--
Unaccustomed to the cold
Conversation, love is freed.

3

Returning those gray laughs
Was a subconscious eternity
Of the softest afternoons.

4

Glimpse the mastery enclosed:
Should I dare remain my
Own weakness,
Or change the mask I wear?

5

Precisely where childhood
Crossings were, punctured walls
Between fears were not.

6

"Never sigh," I thought just once,
Numbly wanting someone.
Love wasn't really found.
Never whisper what you say.

7

Love is the most covetous desire,
Erupting over mountains, but
Beginning in night's shadows.

Demythologizing Lincoln and Darwin: A Very Short Historiography

Today marks the 200th birthdays of two of the 19th century's, and probably any century's, greatest figures - Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Rather than going into some detailed rambling of the historical importance of these two men as is usually my wont, I'd like to discuss the mythologizing of historical figures and the damage that can often occur when we replace the complexity of a person's character with the stagnant archetypes of our own era's perceptions. To foist upon any historical person traits that are not theirs but ours is, to paraphrase Orson Scott Card, "to kill them all over again." It is not uncommon, of course, for someone's persona to take on a life of its own following his death, especially when the life was so full and the deeds so grand. This disservice begins, I believe, when a person's life can be boiled down to one moment or one act or one thought, and Lincoln's and Darwin's are often described this way: Lincoln freed the slaves; Darwin discovered evolution. End of story. This distillation obscures the complexities of these men's lives and allows, in mythological fashion, for the blanks to be filled in as we will, and depending on our perspectives, allows us to deify or demonize at will. Lincoln was the "Great Emancipator"; Lincoln was a "war-criminal." Darwin was a brilliant naturalist; Darwin was an anti-Christian demagogue. These definitive labels do an injustice not only to the men themselves but to the historical record of which they are a part.

Lincoln scholarship has gone through numerous phases, but the best interpretations have been the ones that ignore the current trends and attempt to get to the heart of the man himself, recognizing the strengths and weaknesses, the flaws and the personal growth that arises from confronting them. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of Harvard University's W.E.B. DuBois Center for African and African-American Research, has described the writings and historical scholarship related to Lincoln as similar to that of Christ, in the sense that he has been "all things to all people," and Gates is quick to point out that next to Christ, more books have been written about Lincoln than any other figure in history (his count is over 15,000). How can we siphon through all of these to dig out the "true Lincoln" or is such a feat even possible? The short answer, I think, is that it is not. History is a selective narrative of past events and every historian will inevitably emphasize that which they believe is most important for understanding the person and the times. The problem is when we leave out important aspects of a person's character because they don't "fit" with our preconceived notions of who they were. Christopher Columbus is an extraordinary example of selective scholarship that has obscured basic facts about a man. Sure, he was a master sailor, a cunning businessman, and a daring adventurer, and he has been mythologized to the point that we have named cities, built statues, and granted a holiday after the man; but he was also so intent on the acquisition of gold and the conversion of indigenous peoples to Christianity, that his actions in the New World can be described as nothing short of genocidal. Lincoln's actions, similarly, cannot be boiled down to "he freed the slaves" because this ignores realities that were characteristic not just of Lincoln but of most white men and women of mid-19th century America. Lincoln, while he disagreed with the institution of slavery, did not believe that blacks should be given full citizenship in the U.S., which included voting rights, the right to marry whites, the right to sit on juries, and so on. And while the Emancipation Proclamation is undoubtedly one of the most significant documents in American history, we must not overlook the political calculus in its inception. Some modern scholars have admirably demonstrated that the legal rationale behind the document lay in the war powers granted to the president during the Civil War, and that as enemy combatants, southern slave owners' property was considered the property of the United States because of their state of rebellion. Therefore, all slaves in states that had seceded became property of the U.S., and their freedom was granted at the will of the new property owners. This, of course, did not include slaves in the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, or Maryland, since the citizens there were not in a state of rebellion and thus the U.S. had no property rights over them.

The misunderstandings of Darwin are equally as multitudinous and this often has more to do with a misunderstanding of evolution than with the man himself. Perhaps the greatest general myth about Darwin is that he "discovered" evolution. Evolutionary theory had been around for centuries, being discussed in primitive fashion in the Classical Age of Greece and Rome as well as in the Middle Ages and Early Modern times. What Darwin did was provide a mechanism by which it occurred - the theory of natural selection. The prevailing notions of life in Darwin's era were dominated by essentialism and uniformitarianism, though the evolutionary theory that did hold sway among some naturalists was the Lamarckian version which said that changes acquired during an organism's lifetime were then passed on to its offspring. Darwin, informed by the thinking of Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, corrected this view by describing change as occurring within a population, rather than an individual, and that only inherited traits that allowed a population to survive would be passed on. One standard example given to explain the difference between Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution is that of a giraffe's neck: it's not the case that a giraffe's neck gets a little longer in a single giraffe's lifetime, whose offspring's neck gets a little longer, and so on until the neck is as long as it is now. The case is that, in a given population of giraffes, the organisms with the longer necks are better suited to survive and thus pass along their traits while those short necked giraffes do not pass on their traits and die out. Darwin himself admittedly did not know what was being passed on, and it was over half a century before the discovery of DNA and the field of genetics would give evolution its modern synthesis. But what about the man Darwin? For one thing, he is associated with atheism, not just by fundamentalist Christians out to vilify him, but among atheists themselves who wish to claim him as some sort of patron saint. Darwin began his life on the track to becoming a country clergyman in the Anglican Church as his father wanted, but his restless spirit tended to set him on the wandering path, and this in part led him to the circumnavigational voyage in the Beagle. While he later called himself an agnostic, he never was quite able to completely relinquish the idea of God, and attended Church with his family well after his formulation of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Perhaps more mythologizing than this, is the oversimplified account of his arrival at the theory of evolution. Most have heard the story of Darwin's examination of the variety of finches on the Galapagos Islands and how he wondered how the wild differences in the size, shape, and function of their beaks arose, epiphanously coming to the conclusion that descent with appropriate modifications must account for these anomalies. However, as science writer David Quamman pointed out in this month's National Geographic, his greater clues came three years before in 1832 in Argentina while viewing the assortment of fossils in Patagonia. The diversity and differentiation based on geographic and geological distribution in the fossil record were his first clues. It is also important to note that Darwin is not even the only contemporary figure to come to conclusions regarding evolution, as Alfred Russel Wallace, halfway around the world in Indonesia and Malaysia, came to very similar conclusions after noting the differences in bio-geography between the "Asian" animals West of the Macassar Straight and the "Australian" animals East of it.

Perhaps the mythologizing of historical figures is not all bad. Lincoln has become such an iconic figure of what it means to be a good president, that he has set a standard by which all other presidents are judged. Lincoln should also be a paragon for personal growth and change, as he softened many of his views on the relationship between blacks and whites by the end of his life. In fact, the last public speech he made in his life detailed his plan to grant full citizenship to black veterans of the Civil War and upstanding black men such as his friend Frederick Douglass. One person in the crowd at this speech, John Wilkes Boothe, found this personal growth to go to far. We should be wary though of anything that shrinks the life of any one man or woman to a monolithic action or thought because this removes from them everything that makes them human: flaws, idiosyncrasies of personality, internal conflicts, and the agony of personal decisions which will have consequences for all.

The Probability of the Improbable

"It is likely that unlikely things will happen."
-Aristotle

A recurrent conversation I seem to have with people is on the balance between analysis and intuition in daily life. I consider myself an incredibly analytical person, always taking in every scrap of information about something and viewing a problem from all angles before I arrive at a decision or a solution. Still, even though I find it difficult not to rationally observe all the information at my disposal, I actually have a rather embarrassing habit of impulsively choosing things on occasion. And it's not dependent on the size of the decision either: sometimes I agonize for several minutes in the morning over what pair of pants to wear, but have made decisions about trips to take and major purchases because they "felt" right. If this sounds ridiculous, it is; but I find it interesting that many, if not most people, make decisions this way. Perhaps even more interestingly is how good the record for making decisions this way is. Given this interpretation of human behavior, one thing that's especially humorous to me, is when something is especially counterintuitive. So, here's a little anecdote I ran across while recently perusing the book How to Think about Weird Things, which illustrates how intuition can sometimes be way off:

When we try to judge the probabilities involved in events, we're often wrong. Sometimes we're really wrong because the true probabilities are completely counter to our intuitive "feel" for the odds. Mathematician John Allen Paulos offers this surprising example of a counterintuitive probability:

"First, take a deep breath. Assume Shakespeare's account is accurate and Julius Caesar gasped 'You too, Brutus' before breathing his last. What are the chances that you just inhaled a molecule which Caesar exhaled in his dying breath? The surprising answer is that, with a probability better than 99 percent, you just did inhale such a molecule. For those who don't believe me: I am assuming that after more than two thousand years the exhaled molecules are uniformly spread about the world, and the vast majority are still free in the atmosphere. Given these reasonably valid assumptions, the problem of determining the relevant probability is straightforward. If there are N molecules of air in the world and Caesar exhaled A of them, then the probability that any given molecule you inhale is from Caesar is A/N. The probability that any given molecule you inhale is not from Caesar is thus 1 - A/N. By the multiplication principle, if you inhale three molecules, the probability that none of these three is from Caesar is [1 - A/N]³. Similarly, if you inhale B molecules, the probability that none of them is from Caesar is approximately [1- A/N]^B. Hence, the probability of the complementary event, of your inhaling at least one of his exhaled molecules, is 1 - [1 - A/N]^B. A, B (each about 1/30th of a liter, or 2.2 x 10²²), and N (about 10⁴⁴ molecules) are such that this probability is more than .99. It is intriguing that we're all, at least in this minimal sense, eventually part of one another."

I'd want to see a study on how long it takes molecules contained in 1/30th of a liter to diffuse into a body of gases the volume of the Earth's atmosphere as well as the likely amount of molecules that are not free in the atmosphere to be sure this is accurate. I guess that's just my analytical nature. However, I'm willing to give the study the benefit of the doubt. I guess that's just my intuitive nature.

Remembering Ashoka: Confronting Suffering, Desire, and Progress in History

I recently listened to a story on the radio show Speaking of Faith from NPR. It was an interview with Pankaj Mishra (right), an Indian novelist, essayist, and journalist. Mishra's newest book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, details his travels through southern Asia and his own spiritual journey of self-reform and self-discovery from a Buddhist perspective through a collage of commentary on politics, religion, and history, both ancient and modern. The interview was interesting not so much for Mishra's own views on the state of affairs in south Asia or even his own perspective on the Buddha, but for his rather erudite distillation of how religion shapes politics, especially at the local and personal level. What most fascinated me was his brief discussion of Ashoka, the 3rd century BCE emperor of the Mauryan Empire, and how Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism led to sweeping reform throughout the Indian subcontinent.

Without going into too much detail, and at risk of over-simplification, Ashoka (below) was the emperor of the sprawling Mauryan Empire which in the 3rd century BCE covered most of India and Pakistan as well as parts of Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Known as a ruthless conqueror with a will towards domination, Ashoka invaded neighboring kingdoms one by one until most of the Indian subcontinent and much of South Asia came under his domination. The final military conquest came in the mid-260s BCE with the utter destruction of the country of Kalinga in east-central India, the pretext of which was Kalinga's supposed granting of asylum to the relative of one of Ashoka's enemies, though modern scholars have suggested that it was access to the Ganges that enticed Ashoka. Whatever the reason, Kalinga was subdued with particular brutality, and the result was the wholesale slaughter of its people, totaling by some estimates over 100,000. Following this event, according to the legendary interpretation of Ashoka, the emperor was eager to survey his new domain, but instead, seeing only burning villages and scattered corpses, was reduced to horror at what he had done. In an Augustine-like sudden conversion, Ashoka adopted Buddhism, then only around 150 years old, and became one of the first major Asian rulers to do so. In keeping with Buddhist teachings, Ashoka made non-violence a state policy that included leniency in the punishment of crimes and prison sentences, the banning of any warfare not necessary for self-defense, the outlawing of harm to animals in any way other than provision of sustenance and a promotion of vegetarianism, among many other changes. For the rest of his more than thirty year reign, Ashoka went from being hated and feared to being revered as one of the greatest rulers the subcontinent had ever seen.

Mishra's point in discussing Ashoka for several minutes in the midst of his lecture on Buddhism and its modern bearings on politics seems to be that Ashoka, though he is a well-known historical figure in India, is not as well-known or well-regarded in global history or in world history as has been manifest in the Western curriculum. Mishra compares Ashoka to his near-contemprary Alexander the Great (Ashoka's grandfather Chandragupta Maurya overthrew Alexander's successors in Central Asia), and asks why he is not given the same scholarly interest of the admittedly greater conqueror. Both men conquered wide swaths of land and presided over enormous empires made of myriad diverse peoples. The major difference, as Mishra points out, is that Ashoka finally quit, whereas Alexander's desire to continue over the horizon was so great, that only the near mutiny of his generals convinced him to turn back. It was the self-control through Ashoka's new-found Buddhism that reigned in his hostility. Mishra blames the 19th century "great men" historiographical theory for promoting the study of figures such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon Bonaparte over figures such as Ashoka. In fact, Napoleon, and later Hitler, studied Alexander intently. It seems the amount of land one conquers is directly proportional to one's later historical relevance, provided that the conquests remain edifying accomplishments following one's death.


It is perhaps odd that the 19th century saw such an interest in the study of these "great men," for although these figures represented to the colonial and imperialist powers who promoted their study a counterpart to the spirit of progress the age embodied, the major intellectual figures of the day were in many ways more concomitant with Buddhist thought than with the modern Western trends, at least according to Mishra. He calls the Buddha a "kindred spirit" with a surprising array of intellectuals ranging from David Hume (left) to Adam Smith. Hume, who like the Buddha, considered the self "ever changing and relative," came to the conclusion that "we are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity... The mind is a kind of theater where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations...." Permanence is an illusion; change, the only constant. Smith, the founder of modern capitalist theory, meditated heavily on the Buddhist concept that desire is the origin of suffering, and wondered publicly if an economic system based on the desire of the individual could be sustained. He optimistically concluded that educated men would be able to deduce the difference between wants and needs, though practically he realized that the system would fail without self-control (Do you hear that Wall Street?).

Buddhism, as Ashoka realized, could be envisioned as a reformist movement within oneself. In the 19th century context, this presents a paradox of thought. On the one hand, the perceived greatness of the Western world was built on desire in the form of progress -- scientific, political, religious, philosophical -- and the rest of the world was being pulled up by it bootstraps as, to paraphrase Kipling, the white man endured this burden. The history of the West from the Crusades through the Age of Imperialism, according to Mishra, may be viewed as a result of this desire in the communal, civilizational, and cultural sense, and the resulting suffering that comes from uncontrolled desire demonstrated itself in the destructive power of World Wars I and II. Scientific and social progress is a "good" thing, which can go very badly when used for misanthropic purposes. On the other hand, Buddhism necessitates only a reform of the self, as opposed to the major collectivist Utopian movements in the West, from Fascism and Marxism to even capitalism and democracy. All ostensibly require control not over the self but over the other.

So, what can we learn from Ashoka? Mishra centralizes him in the context of politico-religious history and asks what it means to be on the "winning" side of history. Surely, Ashoka would be considered a "winner," but is he more valued historically because of his conquests or because of his self-reform? The wielding of power has gotten us far, if progress is indeed the propeller of history, but violence always begets more violence. If desire is necessary for progress, Mishra's argument seems to imply that suffering is also an inevitable by-product. In studying history for nearly a decade, I've grown particularly wary of any generalizations, but one thing I've found that is difficult to argue against is that there is rarely a war that does not lead to more violence, and non-violent movements, when they are not violently crushed in their infancy, often achieve political and social goals if given the chance. And Mishra reminds us that the disposition towards violence exists or has existed in all cultures and that treating one form of violoence as endemic to one particular culture or ideology (Islamic terrorism, Western militarism, authoritarian despotism) misses the point in that it views violence from the perspective of the perpetrators and not the victims. The lesson to be gleaned from the life of Ashoka is that true reform, what has often been attempted from the top down in the form of communism and fascism, must proceed from the bottom up to be truly effective. Non-violent movements, organized civil disobedience, democracy itself is a process that works best when it develops locally, and it must be localized in the individual before it may spread. Unlike other systems of government, democracy cannot be imposed -- we must learn this before we attempt to introduce much of the world to its ideals. Reinhold Niebuhr, (above) whom our current president counts as an intellectual influence and who is perhaps among Mishra's "kindred spirits" with the Buddha, was an early recognizer that the ills of the world cannot be solved simply by "converting" the world to democracy and capitalism, that this was a failure of imagination, and that political and economic proselytization was not the answer. It is no surprise that 19th century historians an politicians looked to figures like Alexander the Great as models because they represented the great progress that Western leaders of the period wished to emulate. Let is return to the implication that desire is necessary for progress. If desire truly is the beginning of suffering, must progress always be coupled with it? Because suffering is a reality, it is one thing, regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof ,that we must confront in this world. I want to end with an extended quote from Mishra's work, during his visitation of a madrassa in Pakistan, that in part illustrates the difficulties in interpreting suffering in the world: where it comes from, how we might deal with it, and why violence as a solution will only create more problems if we allow it to become our primary weapon of change. Progress, in the sense of self-reform as a Ashoka so championed, seems to be a viable option for our uncertain future.

I hadn't expected to be moved by the casual sight in one madrassa of six young men sleeping on tattered sheets on the floor. I hadn't thought I would be saddened at the human waste they represented--the young men whose ancestors built one of the greatest civilizations in the world, and who now lived in dysfunctional societies under governments beholden to, or in fear of, America, and who had nothing to look forward to except possibly the short career of suicide bomber. The other kind of future once laid out for them had failed. This was the future in which everyone in the world would wear a tie, work in an office or factory, drive a car, practise birth control, raise a nuclear family, and pay taxes. There were not nearly enough secular schools to educate these young men in the ways of the modern world--and few jobs awaited those who had been educated.... But the fantasy of modernity, held up by their state, and supported by the international political and economic system, had been powerful enough to expel and uproot them from their native villages. This had also been the fate of their fathers and countless others like [them]. But the journey from the old to the new world had become harder over the years for most people. Now, this journey seemed never-ending, and it seemed to consume more and more people as it lengthened: hundreds of millions of stupefied and powerless individuals, lured by the promise of equality and justice into a world they had no means of understanding, whose already strained and partially available resources they were expected to exploit in order to hoist themselves to the level of affluence enjoyed by a small minority of middle-class people around the world.... Having lost the protection of the old moral order, their particular bonds and forms of authority, they hoped to stave off chaos and degeneration by joining such authoritarian movements as Hindu nationalism and radical Islam, by surrendering their dreams to demagogues like Bin Laden.

An Historical Perspective on Torture

On January 22, in only his second full day in office, President Obama signed into law an executive order forbidding the use of torture in government interrogations. More than a repudiation of the policies of the Bush administration, the order is nothing short of a statement recommitting America to the Constitutional principles on which it was founded--equality under the law and the right to a fair trial. Certainly, introducing these prisoners into the justice system, where the innocent can be set free and the guilty sent to jail where they belong, will strengthen our resolve and make the US a safer, not more dangerous, place. If the goal of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden was "to destroy America's way of life," then didn't the Bush administration play right into their hands with its flaunting of these supposedly hallowed principles? By sanctifying the use of torture, we said to our enemies not that they should fear us, but that we would inadvertently bow to their wishes by condoning that which we supposedly stand so stridently against. By way of life, bin Laden likely referred more to our economic and foreign policies, but if the foundations of these crumble, the house cannot be far behind. And, if America is truly weakening as a nation relative to China and the European Union, our reassertion as a moral leader in a dangerous world can only bolsters our credentials on the world stage. This is desperately needed in the aftermath of Iraq. The moral argument against torture seems apparent enough, and the point, at least for the meantime, is hopefully moot, but I'd like to point out how it has failed pragmatically as well. So, for the moral relativists, a practical argument against torture:

Many historical societies, at some time or another, have used torture either as a way to extract confessions among the accused or as a form of punishment, usually as a prelude to execution. In some societies it may have been a continuation of religious human sacrifice; in others, born out of the militaristic nature of the culture. Roman torture first took the form of military-style punishment and was later utilized privately as the aristocracy employed it as a fear-inducing weapon designed to keep the lower-classes and slaves in their socio-economic places. Some of the most historically memorable instances of Roman torture in the first few centuries of the common era were a point of entertainment for the masses--gladiatorial games, the participants of which were almost always either prisoners or slaves. And of course, as anyone who has studied early Christianity knows, the brutality of the first and second century Romans against the first Christian martyrs was legion (no pun intended).

Torture has been variously outlawed in the past and the Geneva Convention is by no means new in its interpretation and moral outrage against the practice. In the late 6th century, Pope Gregory I famously declared all confessions extracted during torture to be inadmissible in courts, but this proclamation was not far reaching, applying only to those courts under the jurisdiction of the Church, and torture continued to be used for the purposes of punishment, as well as in the recently converted Germanic peoples. In the case of this culture, which had yet to be fully synthesized with the Romano-Judeo-Christian one, the use of compurgations or ordeals, from which we get our modern word, was commonplace to determine the innocence or guilt of convicted persons. The process usually involved enduring some sort of physical pain, after which one would be judged on that endurance. One process involved grasping a hot iron or dunking one's hand into a pot of boiling water. The wound would be bandaged and if it healed quickly, innocence was presumed, whereas a lengthy recovery or the development of a particularly nasty scar would result in a conviction. Gregory the Great's proclamation did not touch this practice and ordeals were commonplace until at least the early 13th century. Still, torture, in its modern definition, was a feature of Roman rather than Germanic law. In the year 1215, Pope Innocent III forbade the use of ordeals at the Lateran IV Council (Canon 18) and negated their efficacy in courts. The implementation of this rule was, however, not out of compassion, but an attempt to diminish the significance of "planned miracles" because the standard belief of the Church was that miracles should be spontaneous and should not be expected to prove the worth of common people. Around the same time, the polymath emperor of the sprawling central European Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II, also outlawed ordeals for a more practical reason, stating that they would only determine who was stronger, not who was morally right.

This legal standard was not to last though, and the use of torture as a weapon of the powerful would return with legal sanction as the Inquisition came into the fore. Less than forty years after Lateran IV outlawed ordeals, Innocent IV's papal bull Ad Extirpanda (1252) authorized papal inquisitors to confiscate property, imprison, torture, and execute suspected heretics. Two centuries later, as the specific category of witchcraft (maleficarum) evolved, first the use of ordeals began to resurface and then the use of torture in extrication of confession reemerged as a serious practice in Western Europe. Scholars such as Norman Cohn have pointed to the example Rome set for the medieval world and argues that the same techniques used by the Church to deal with heretics had precedent among, ironically, the Roman persecution of Christians. More to the point, he argues that, while "financial greed and conscious sadism" were certainly aspects of these torturous trials, the real motivation was religious zeal, and that torture as a practice was not only legitimate but a necessity, because it was required to extricate the devils from the perpetrators. The practical implications here are the most suspect, but unfortunately, the historical record of common people from pre-modern times is usually scant. There do exist, however, some telling examples of the futility of torture as a reliable tool for information gathering. One occurs in 1587, when the mid-wife and widow Walpurgia confessed, under considerable duress to copulating with the devil, denying the name of Christ, terminating pregnancies with a magical ointment, and a number of other fantastical crimes that she certainly did not commit. Her case is representative of a great many witchcraft trials from the late 16th and early 17th centuries: a woman, usually older, sometimes illiterate and oftentimes a widow or mid-wife, is accused by men of the same socio-economic class, authorities (usually secular in England and religious on the Continent) are called, and under torture, patently false accusations are confessed to after which the persecuted person is put to death (usually by hanging in England and by burning at the stake on the Continent). From the hand of Junius, a male accused of witchcraft in 1628, we have an actual letter written to his daughter and smuggled out of his prison detailing the torture he endured: "Innocent have I come to prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent I must die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must...be tortured until he invents something out of his head. When I was the first time put to the torture...I said 'I am no witch, I have a pure conscience on the matter; if there are a thousand witnesses, I am not anxious.' And then came also--God in highest heaven have mercy--the executioner, and put the thumb-screws on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from the writing.... Thereafter they stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up in the [strappado]. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony.... And so I made my confession...but it was all a lie."


The methods have little changed over the years, and neither have the results.

The righteous rise
With burning eyes
Of hatred and ill-will
Madmen fed on fear and lies
To beat and burn and kill

They say there are strangers who threaten us
In our immigrants and infidels
They say there is strangeness too dangerous
In our theaters and bookstore shelves
That those who know what's best for us
Must rise and save us from ourselves

Quick to judge
Quick to anger
Slow to understand
Ignorance and prejudice
And fear walk hand in hand...

-Rush, "Witch Hunt"