TIMEFULNESS: A GEOLOGIST'S STORY. INTERVIEW WITH MARCIA BJORNERUD

Geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s latest book, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, can easily capture your inner philosopher, scientist, activist, and writer. When I received this book from Princeton University Press, I was immediately intrigued by the book’s cover. I’ve always been fascinated by ideas that necessarily mix up life’s ingredients into creative nature stories, and this book does just that. The choice of title and cover design (with its elegant series of mineralogy lithographs) offers clues to the layered Earth-story within: unwrapping the scientific ways of knowing our home’s deep planetary history; how we humans have come to discover these stories; how knowing them can re-educate us and thus drive us to become better citizens as part of the whole community of life

Bjornerud’s title, Timefulness, intrigued me as a grander understanding of our current temporal limitations. The subtitle, “Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World,” shares how looking into the deep time of Earth’s rocks breaks open an opportunity for us to become more aware of the damage we have done while concurrently offering hope. Bjornerud offers tips on re-imagining how we can comprehend our humanness on this planet by coming to re-know ourselves as Earthlings. Marcia Bjornerud’s Earth story elaborates this interweaving of a deep past with a deeper future and explores how we might expand our human sense of temporal directions in order to arrive at some meaningful place of resilience.

Anja Claus (AC): In Timefulness, you breathed great life into this magical story of rocks; that’s a big feat in our flashy, fast-paced, capitalist culture.

Marcia Bjornerud (MB): In most people’s minds rocks are dumb, mute, and dull perhaps. So I tried to bring them back to life and share the stories that they have to tell us.

AC: In a way, your book is a storytelling of Earth—Earth’s past but also its now. You say in your book, “The dramatic narratives of the geologic past are perfectly suited to the human appetite for storytelling.” Why do you think that? What is it that makes for such good storytelling?

MB: I’m positioning the idea of storytelling in contrast to the physical, pure sciences of physics and chemistry, which are of course important fields—and I am partly trained myself as a physicist. But what’s lacking in them is this sense of narrative arc. The triumph of physics is that it has distilled out these universal, timeless laws and rules. But if something is timeless, there’s no story to really tell. There’s no character development.

Earth as a whole system has had a very interesting series of personalities, in a sense. It’s had a childhood, an adolescence, a middle-age. It’s seen cataclysm and wonderful, bountiful times as well. So that’s what I mean. That there are stories in the natural world, and they match our appetite for seeing how things unfold. I think that’s the way to draw people in: Tell these Earth stories, develop some kind of relationship with the protagonist, and they’re hooked.  

https://www.humansandnature.org/timefulness-interview-with-marcia-bjornerud

Is Our Universe a Fake?

By Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Is Our Universe a Fake?

The science of the inconceivable

A different kind of logic

by Philip Ball

Late last year, an experiment carried out by scientists at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands appeared to demonstrate that one object can affect another from afar without any physical interaction between the two. The finding confirmed an idea so extraordinary that, nearly a century ago, Albert Einstein had rejected it with the dismissive phrase “spooky action at a distance.” In quantum theory this phenomenon is known as “entanglement,” and many physicists now regard it as the most profound and important characteristic of the physical world at the smallest scales, which quantum theory describes.

Quantum entanglement is a deeply counterintuitive idea, which seems to contradict human experience of the physical world at the most essential level. In the everyday (“classical”) physical realm, objects affect one another via some kind of contact. The tennis ball flies from the racquet when struck, and when it hits the window the glass will smash. Sure, “invisible forces” seem to act across space—magnetic and electrical attraction and repulsion, say. But in quantum theory these interactions arise from the passage of a particle—a photon of light—between the two interacting bodies. Meanwhile, Einstein showed that the Sun’s gravity corresponds to a distortion of space, to which distant objects such as Earth respond. It’s generally believed that in a quantum theory of gravity (which doesn’t yet exist), this picture will prove to be equivalent to the exchange of “gravity particles” or gravitons between the Sun and Earth.
But quantum entanglement bothered Einstein because it suggested that one particle could affect another even when there was no conceivable physical interaction between them. It didn’t matter if those particles were light years apart—measuring a property of one particle would, according to quantum theory, instantly affect the properties of the other. How could that be?

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/the-science-of-the-inconceivable

Response to R. Scott Bakker on transcendental phenomenology and BBT

There is nothing “outside” the natural order. In this sense, I am opposed to the transcendentalist’s move to remove Reason or the reflective understanding from physical reality. There is indeed a supernaturalist residue in much transcendental and phenomenological philosophy. This is why my project has always been to theorize “the natural order” as itself always already creative, aesthetic, interpretational, experiential (mine is a naturalized transcendental (Schelling’s “Nature is a priori”)). There is no “other” world from which the causal efficacy of our world derives. With our universe, the cause is internal to the effect, which is another way of saying our universe is primarily organic (with mechanism as a secondary appearance). This is why I follow Whitehead in the endeavor to construct an ontology of organism, wherein: 1) Physics is the study of the evolutionary development of particles, stars, galaxies, and other micro- and macro- organisms-in-ecologies; 2) Biology is the study of the evolutionary development of single cells, plants, and animals in their meso-cosmic ecologies; 3) Philosophy, anthropology, and theology are different aspects of the study of the evolutionary development of languages, myths, and ideas in their noetic ecologies. The organism-environment field becomes the metaphysical metaphor guiding our theorizing, rather than the machine.

Now, when I say “my project has always been to theorize…”, I should qualify that “theory” in the context of an open-ended, evolving cosmos such as ours can never pretend to certainty or finality. Theory is not the construction of a disinterested, reflective ego (at least, no valuable theory is). Theory always remains dependent on the speculative leap of some metaphor or another. Theory is imaginative construction requiring equal doses of aesthetic taste and logical clarity. Our theories are always as much science fiction as they are science fact.

I agree with Bakker than cognition of the real just isn’t possible. But we must distinguish between cognition on the one hand, and sensation, feeling, and intuition on the other. If an intuition of the real is our goal, using the reflective instrument is like shining a flashlight in search of darkness. Reflective cognition is like King Midas, turning everything it touches into noetic gold. It transforms everything not-I into food for itself, digesting the world and defecating whatever it can’t assimilate as waste. It does’t seem to me much of a stretch to say that modernity’s exclusive reliance on reflective cognition is one of the main factors leading to the ecological crisis.

Let me be clear that, while I defend transcendental phenomenology from Bakker’s eliminativist meta-critique, my own philosophical home base is process-relational ontology. I have major issues with transcendental phenomenology as a philosophical resting place. It remains too anthropocentric, too concerned with issues of human access and not attentive enough to solar nucleosynthesis, cellular mitosis, and atmospheric levels of CH4. But still, I just don’t understand how, having grasped the power of transcendental critique–as critique–one could fail to see eliminativist arguments like BBT as anything but dogmatic materialism (materialism has today become the new School Philosophy, though it pretends to be the ultimate critic of all metaphysics). Where I leave transcendentalism behind is in my pursuit of a constructive, cosmologically-rooted philosophy, something the phenomenological approach just cannot provide.

It is clear Bakker has done his philosophical homework. I don’t think it is fair of him to lump everyone into the same transcendentalist clown car, though. Phenomenology was born out of the intense debates between Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all of whom accused Kant of not having cleared his vision of dogmatist residues. They all recognized the possibility and the fact of neglect, and even of the neglect of neglect. But for these post-Kantians (with the possible exception of Hegel), the transcendental project was an infinite one by definition, meaning there would never be a point when the a priori structures were finally reached and could be clearly and distinctly spelled out once and for all. Fichte grounded the transcendental historically in the ethical development of humankind, describing philosophy as an attempt to asymptotically approach absolute metacognition as an ideal while never in fact being able to reach it. Schelling went further and grounded the transcendental in the creative developmental arc of the cosmos itself. For Schelling (and here he converges with Whitehead), not even God knows the a priori conditions of experiential reality: the divine is just as caught in the chaotic turmoil of historical becoming as any creature is. None of these thinkers, with the possible exception of Fichte when he is sloppy, thought that impersonal natural systems could be cognized in terms of their own 1st person experience.

Here is Schelling mulling over this exact problem, for ex.:

“I could conceive of that being perhaps as something that, initially blind, struggles through every level of becoming toward consciousness, and humanity would then arise precisely at that moment, at that point in which the previously blind nature would reach self-consciousness. But this cannot be, since our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of that nature that permeates everything: it is just *our* consciousness and hardly encompasses within itself a science of becoming applicable to all things. This universal becoming remains just as foreign and opaque to us as if it had never had a bearing on us at all. Therefore, if this becoming has achieved any kind of purpose it is achieved only through humanity, but not for humanity; for the consciousness of humanity does not = equal the consciousness of nature” (The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, 1841).

In other words, 1st person reflective ego consciousness is largely a sham. It can tell us little if anything about the unconscious natural ground from which it emerges. Of course, Schelling (like Whitehead) argued that the field of experience extends beyond mere 1st person ego consciousness. My argument with Bakker has always been: why reduce the experiential field that is open to us to 1st person ego consciousness? Most of our daily and nightly experience is not egoic! Most of the time we are flowing through other experiential states more akin to animals, plants, and even minerals. So in a sense mine is also a post-human manifesto. We have never been human, if you want.

Text by Matthew David Segall

http://footnotes2plato.com

What Little Remains of Life

Life is a non-equilibrium process involving a series of biochemical reactions that use external energy to build the cellular structure and the complexity of the organism. Humans strive for the continuation of their existence. This can be based on an illusory afterlife according to religion or on practical efforts through technology. But the temporality of individual lives is inevitable. Death in the universe, governed by the law of entropy, is unavoidable. Thus, as all traces of human existence fade away, what is most important in life is what one thinks and does at the present moment, when one is fully aware of life. Capturing each moment and filling it with some meaning is the only consolation in life. 

By Ben G.Yacobi

Journal of Philosophy of Life Vol.4, No.1 (January 2014):38-47 
http://www.philosophyoflife.org/jpl201403.pdf

Pair Production

Using Efstathiou’s wall piece Cloud Chamber as a starting point, this two-person exhibition and short residency at New Court Gallery has been informed by aesthetic qualities extracted by a scattered Physics glossary and the co-habitation of two differentiated art practices. Under the conditions of the ‘isolated’ environment of the empty exhibition-studio space reminiscent of a cloud chamber as ‘a sealed environment where charged particles may leave ionized tracks distinctive in various shapes indicating different types of collisions’, Maria Efstathiou and Margarita Myrogianni have merged their artistic practices by coming up with mixed-media explorations through aesthetic interpretations inspired by such scientific terminology. Annihilation, energized particles, matter and anti-matter, growth formation, suspension of phenomena, have been phrases used during the artists’ stay whilst working on new and existing work brought in from their Athens studios. The outcome of this endeavor has involved exposing their methodologies by focusing on the preparatory stages and seeing the process as the end product via a metaphorical take on the term pair production as ‘a direct conversion of radiant energy to matter’. Text by Maria Georgoula

New Court Gallery, Repton, Derbyshire, Feb.2015

http://www.repton.org.uk/Pair-Production-Maria-Efstathiou-Margarita-Myrogianni-at-New-Court-Gallery-Feb-2015