Sidebar to Well Log: Integral
For the past several months I have been drafting a longer companion piece to my original
Well Log: Integral entry and began examining the phenomenon from a slightly different perspective this morning when I came up with a Process Theory of Integral which is a little different than Alfred North Whitehead?s Process Theory (of everything) in that he was a god fearing man who took these kinds of things seriously while I?m not and I don?t. This is a short, sort of beside-the-Integral-point, but still integral to some ideas on Integral piece so I am putting it into a side bar. (Look for Well Log II, soon to be featured in your favorite forum.)
Many perspectives within the variety of Integral philosophies and jargon games lean heavily on developmental theories. I find a sort of primary school
arri?re-go?t about such speculations; they seem not only humorless, fusty and over-precious but partial to the point of trifling?I wonder why as much effort hasn?t been put into Degeneration Studies and Theory, Death Studies and Theory, Decomposition Studies and Theory, or Dissipation Studies and Theory; thus:
A Process (Dissipation) Theory of Integral
About 30 years ago two men boarded a plane in Washington, D. C. Each was unknown to the other at departure, but they had two things in common beside their destination: 1) Knowledge of which row of seats in a 727 had the most leg room, and 2) A close acquaintance with a physicist named
Dr. Charles Hyder, a crusading environmentalist and conservationist who was then in the middle of a 217-day public fast in an alley off Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. He was calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide. The first of the two men?s commonalities put them in the last row of seats on the plane?s left side and the second sparked the conversation that is the basis of this post.
I was one of the two, a young radical investigative journalist working out of Albuquerque, NM, USA, and D.C. The other was
Dr. Stirling Colgate, an internationally known nuclear physicist, astrophysicist and later one of the several co-founders of
The Santa Fe Institute. It was not long into the flight before we learned that Hyder was a mutual acquaintance, and on that point Colgate began a disquisition. He told me that he and Hyder had discussed Hyder?s environmental/conservational missions at great length and Colgate had given up on the man who would not be convinced that his scientifically based crusades to preserve the planet were not only bad science, but flew in the face of natural law, in fact one of the few natural laws on which every scientist in the world could hang their hat:
The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
I never had much interest in science, I generally found it boring and void of good stories, but Colgate gave thermodynamics a compelling narrative spin. What he laid out was essentially Erwin Schr?dinger?s 1944
?What is Life?? lecture series and book which coupled the Second Law with evolution by proposing that open, self-organizing, ordered systems (including living ones) created gradient equilibrium, not by falling into disorder themselves (as would be the case in a closed system like a steam engine) but by generating disorder (entropy) through feeding off the negative entropy (free energy) available in their environments. (In this study Schr?dinger also proposed the existence of a living complex cell with a genetic code for replication, a proposal that inspired the research that led to the discovery of DNA.)
Based on that background, Colgate stated his argument against Hyder?s position: Every since it came into existence the Earth, everything on it, and its every process from its core to the outer edge of the atmosphere has been undergoing a metabolic dissolution in the flow of energy from the sun?s heat to the chill of deep space, a dissolution absolutely enhanced with the inception and advance of ever increasingly complex forms of life. He said that from the replication of the first living cell to the highest levels of humanity?s technology and culture one thing about evolution has remained constant: with each higher level of evolved complexity there has been a concomitant increase in the earth?s overall efficiency in generating entropy. In fact it is the only constant activity observable not only in the local solar system, but the entire known universe. Or, in other words, everything in the Kosmos is working to burn itself out. It is the only Universal consistency from the smallest known, shortest lived particle to the largest ongoing process. (Colgate was in a position to know because his proposal to the U.S. State Department (circa 1960) to monitor the ban on nuclear tests in space through the use of gamma ray detecting spy satellites led to his pioneering research into the mechanisms of supernovas and hypernova phenomena.)
Point: The supreme function of nature is nihilistic and all its life, all of Earth?s living systems, all of our humanity, every breath we take, is an integral part of that function.
The essence of Colgate?s argument to Hyder was that any well organized effort to save the planet would be accompanied by an equally efficient degradation of energy feeding the organization. Hyder?s public fast proved a micro-case in point. During the 217 days, he degraded away over half of the 300 plus pounds he weighed going into the fast. Additionally he caught the attention of thousands of people around the globe (the fewest of whom were in the USA) who sent him hundreds of pounds of mail which came into existence and organization through the degradation of energy from the fuel for chain saws, logging trucks, pulp mills; diesel, gasoline and jet fueled transports, electrical lighting systems, printing presses, broadcast facilities, not to mention the nutritional energy spent by the manpower that went into making all those things work. It was all an equation that equals the nihilistic irony of the Universe. If one wanted to ascribe consciousness to the Kosmos one could imagine that it had structurally guided Hyder into his fast not to end nuclear proliferation (which his fast failed to do) but to speed the rate of its own degeneration?which it did.
It seems that this scenario tends to create certain levels of depression and resistance throughout the citizenry. Inspired from Schr?dinger?s seminal lectures, far more people have taken up careers in genetics than in biochemical thermodynamics. Research funding has followed the same trend. There is only one generally available book semi-geared to the layman on the thermodynamic side of the coin:
Into the Cool by Schneider and Segan (Schneider?s wife a.k.a. ?Ode to Joy? was a member of Integral Naked for a short time in ?05.) and one fairly comprehensive web site published by
Rod Swenson. Evidently people don?t like to be reminded of death and decomposition on such a macroscopic scale, so I will try not to dwell on it further, besides, the end result?total entropic stasis and the literal Death of Time?is not so much the subject of this post as the getting there, the process.
Nietzsche wrote that everything started with perspective and there is a great deal of agreement on the point. In an article
?here?a writer for
Integral Journal out of an organization known as
ARINA proposed a process theory for integral which if it had any solid human relevance or at least a good story might be worth recounting at length, but I failed to find either one. However, the article does start off more or less on the right foot:
?I hope to tease you, the reader, into a pure process orientation. This requires adopting a certain attitude?allowing one?s mental framework to release its grip on thinking in terms of things, and following me into a world of process or flow in a field of dynamic forces. It requires you to suspend structurally based perceptions to allow for new ways of orienting perceptions.? What the author should have pointed out was that perceptions are perspective dependent and that a process perspective is almost impossible from a habitual middle class, well educated, post 1945, American point of view in as much as most of the pilgrims stumbling through that category (those who will be reading works of this nature) are not used to observing a great deal of energetic and creative movement over a long period of time, or being in highly energized environments. These aspects of existence have to a large degree been mediated for the sake of comfort out of their lives?theirs is not a world of flow, but of static structures they seemingly cannot, or are unwilling to, change. But I will give a few pointers toward getting to the ?orienting? perceptions.
A few months ago there was a commercial for Subaru Automobiles choreographed to the old folk-rock song ?Dust in the Wind.? One sequence showed a semi-truck load of competitor cars literally decomposing and evaporating into the trailing draft; the air pressure gradient field created by the motion and heat of the carrier. That is the perceptual analogy and the perspective is The Universe itself. Got it? Yes, there go our planet, the Sun, the system, and the galactic mass itself, dissolving into the mega-gradients of temperature, gravity, velocity and who knows what other forces. And there are no celestial Subaru plants out there minting new alternatives. Things will never be the same again.
An optional perspective is from the audience point of view on a sci-fi clich? confection wherein the curse of immortality is lifted from the support cast starlet who transmutes (transcends?) through the miracle of time lapse mediation from maid to middle age to crone to corpse to skeleton to calcium lace to dust to dust in the gradient draft. And like the well-deserved release of that fictional form we, everything within us, everything around us is on the move, flowing outward, changing, disappearing. Everything is in the flux, even the illusion of structure. Everything is caught within a gradient, all the mythical turtles that go down, go up or go across flow in the currents. All the holons that the Holonic Nothing Butters say the Kosmos is nothing but are to open system gradients what
Fun with Dick and Jane is to
Of Time and the River.
Time, from the perspectives where the sense of process rules, is the mirage created by joining the perception of movement with a supporting, secondary, open system process called memory. If one can imagine doing away with memory then coherence is totally lost. Expand it though from zero to 0.5 seconds and coherence can be regained. (This is a meditation. Try it. It?s a kick) The sense of a moment is total and the perception of process is phenomenally acute. All is born, becomes integral to the perspective, the perception, the perceiver and passes into oblivion in 0.5 seconds. It is the integral moment: it is the omni-dimensional and all but dimensionless point where fuel integrates into fire, all the available and integrated potential degrades to waste, the universal razor thin rubber hits the universal, razor thin road, and the perceiver is riding on and integral to the absolute front edge of their life.
Who can ask anything else of integral? Anything else soon has to start incorporating into the Whole dissipative and disintegrating scraps, dregs and feces; litter, weight and inertia. It might be entertaining but it isn?t actual. It is media, integral media that can be trade marked and sold by the byte-size.
Such a moment is not for those who need much control over, or security from, the occasionally furious wash of ravaging integration around them. But if the perceiver knows that inner security and control are the only kind there are, who knows that external coherence and integration are probably best seen as projections from within, then such a moment is the perspective of choice; one is reconciled to the ride, comfortable in the heat, set for any event, and could give a rat?s ass if anything different is taught in the schools.
Yours in the Spirit of Heraclitus
Steven
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