The Rose Part I: The Holy Ritual of the Phoenix
The rescue of the trapped Chilean miners is at hand. From one article:
Once that operation is completed, at around 9am tomorrow, they will begin installing the complex pulley system that will help the “Phoenix” capsule lift the men, one-by-one, to the surface.
Phoenix in reference to the mythological bird, which rises from the ashes of the ruin reborn. In this case, the ashes are a hole deep underground. Holes being an important part of collective metaphor these days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzRLV8IMRjU
Though in the Chilean case, the answer is clearly NOT to stop digging.
Anyway, as I type, this story is number 1 on Google news. Its a feel good story, its got amazing engineering coupled with a rescue. But there's more to it in the collective psyche. Its a redemption story in some ways, like there's this feeling we all have in the back of our minds that we are in some kind of hole of our own creation, trapped there. But hope is coming. Rescue is coming. We see ourselves reflected in the trapped Chilean miners in some way, we are all in that hole, and we all need each other to get out.
The human mind is a product of nature, and the thing about products of nature is that they don't separate form and function. The Rose is perfect in form, but also perfect in function. Everything is there for a reason. So what of the the Phoenix? What of mythology? The brain is an information system, and good information systems reuse resources, they are not needlessly redundant. They compress in this way so that a repeating pattern can be represented in all positions by a couple bytes. The brain is the same way, it seeks to maximize efficiency by looking for efficient ways to compress what it learns about the world. It seeks to apply the same archetypal stories, such as the phoenix rising from the ashes, to numerous different events for efficient memory. This is all a matter of function. However from a subjective experiential level, it creates beautiful form: That the rescue of trapped miners can be seen in terms of this mythological event is what gives it meaning. Its this compressing quality of the brain that lets us see the profound, mythological stories being carried out all around us, lets us live the Odyssey in the banal events of single day, like Leopold Bloom.
The secret is really in the rose. When a human asks "what does that mean", the question is really "how can this be compressed, related to a structure I already know for mental storage". Yet this functional mechanistic emphasis seems to rob from the importance of form, of the experiential, the subjective. This "compression schema" is how humans create meaning, and what is life is there is no meaning of life?
The hamartia of human reasoning is this separation of form and function, values and science, meaning and mechanism. Robert Pirsig writes about it at length in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but in my view doesn't address the full depth of the issue. More compelling to me is Sam Harris, who addresses the divide as a serious contemporary issue in his latest book, The Moral Landscape. (Which I have not read yet but know his argument) Harris addresses this from an atheist perspective which I don't agree with, but I give him kudos for saying what he's saying at all: That's the divorce of scientific reasoning from values is insane. The fact is, he has a point. We are in the time of quantum computers and instant satellite communication, with the value system given to us by Hebrews from 3000 years ago. I like religion, but Jehovah never made it clear to me: Is it a sin to use a product that damages of the environment if not using the product will just cause market forces to lower its price so somebody else will use the product in my place? There are a million questions like that. We need a major update to our concept of right and wrong to deal with the kind of moral scenarios we run into in this day and age.
However this is a truly daunting task. Pirshig said one way to tackle it was transparency of function in technology, (Thus his love of Harly Davidsons with their visible engines) but the truth is that tech has gone so far almost nobody can understand it, transparent or not. We live in a huge vastly complicated world, where our actions have moral consequences we cannot possibly anticipate. And if we accept Dawkin's idea that moral action (altruism he calls it) is an evolutionary trait which emerged to facilitate the survival of groups, the fact that we have no up-to-date moral guidelines means we are in big, collective, trouble. In one hell of a deep hole, you might say.
So what's the way forward? IT may help to consider the nature of the problem. We are in a collective hole, not an individual one. The nature of a collective hole is that you can't save yourself. You can only try to save your neighbor, and hope your neighbor saves you. Its like the old Buddhist story about the chopsticks. But there are obviously a lot of problems holding us back from that...One of the largest is the myth of inequality, the wild myth of the God-man. This really deserves its own post, so it will get one. Suffice to say that in order to realize our own capacity to help each other, we need to recognize our equality with so called "great people", we need to realize that we do indeed have the capacity to help, and that those who are "beneath" us are worthy of our help too, even it means a lot of work, like those rescuers are doing in Chile.
END PART I
Once that operation is completed, at around 9am tomorrow, they will begin installing the complex pulley system that will help the “Phoenix” capsule lift the men, one-by-one, to the surface.
Phoenix in reference to the mythological bird, which rises from the ashes of the ruin reborn. In this case, the ashes are a hole deep underground. Holes being an important part of collective metaphor these days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzRLV8IMRjU
Though in the Chilean case, the answer is clearly NOT to stop digging.
Anyway, as I type, this story is number 1 on Google news. Its a feel good story, its got amazing engineering coupled with a rescue. But there's more to it in the collective psyche. Its a redemption story in some ways, like there's this feeling we all have in the back of our minds that we are in some kind of hole of our own creation, trapped there. But hope is coming. Rescue is coming. We see ourselves reflected in the trapped Chilean miners in some way, we are all in that hole, and we all need each other to get out.
The human mind is a product of nature, and the thing about products of nature is that they don't separate form and function. The Rose is perfect in form, but also perfect in function. Everything is there for a reason. So what of the the Phoenix? What of mythology? The brain is an information system, and good information systems reuse resources, they are not needlessly redundant. They compress in this way so that a repeating pattern can be represented in all positions by a couple bytes. The brain is the same way, it seeks to maximize efficiency by looking for efficient ways to compress what it learns about the world. It seeks to apply the same archetypal stories, such as the phoenix rising from the ashes, to numerous different events for efficient memory. This is all a matter of function. However from a subjective experiential level, it creates beautiful form: That the rescue of trapped miners can be seen in terms of this mythological event is what gives it meaning. Its this compressing quality of the brain that lets us see the profound, mythological stories being carried out all around us, lets us live the Odyssey in the banal events of single day, like Leopold Bloom.
The hamartia of human reasoning is this separation of form and function, values and science, meaning and mechanism. Robert Pirsig writes about it at length in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but in my view doesn't address the full depth of the issue. More compelling to me is Sam Harris, who addresses the divide as a serious contemporary issue in his latest book, The Moral Landscape. (Which I have not read yet but know his argument) Harris addresses this from an atheist perspective which I don't agree with, but I give him kudos for saying what he's saying at all: That's the divorce of scientific reasoning from values is insane. The fact is, he has a point. We are in the time of quantum computers and instant satellite communication, with the value system given to us by Hebrews from 3000 years ago. I like religion, but Jehovah never made it clear to me: Is it a sin to use a product that damages of the environment if not using the product will just cause market forces to lower its price so somebody else will use the product in my place? There are a million questions like that. We need a major update to our concept of right and wrong to deal with the kind of moral scenarios we run into in this day and age.
However this is a truly daunting task. Pirshig said one way to tackle it was transparency of function in technology, (Thus his love of Harly Davidsons with their visible engines) but the truth is that tech has gone so far almost nobody can understand it, transparent or not. We live in a huge vastly complicated world, where our actions have moral consequences we cannot possibly anticipate. And if we accept Dawkin's idea that moral action (altruism he calls it) is an evolutionary trait which emerged to facilitate the survival of groups, the fact that we have no up-to-date moral guidelines means we are in big, collective, trouble. In one hell of a deep hole, you might say.
So what's the way forward? IT may help to consider the nature of the problem. We are in a collective hole, not an individual one. The nature of a collective hole is that you can't save yourself. You can only try to save your neighbor, and hope your neighbor saves you. Its like the old Buddhist story about the chopsticks. But there are obviously a lot of problems holding us back from that...One of the largest is the myth of inequality, the wild myth of the God-man. This really deserves its own post, so it will get one. Suffice to say that in order to realize our own capacity to help each other, we need to recognize our equality with so called "great people", we need to realize that we do indeed have the capacity to help, and that those who are "beneath" us are worthy of our help too, even it means a lot of work, like those rescuers are doing in Chile.
END PART I
posted by tridentblue | 1:13 PM
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