Adaptation plays an important role in wars, combats and team sports like football or soccer. It is a basic defense mechanism. In a combat or fight, both sides are struggling to act faster than the opponent, because this increases their chance to act against the will of the opponent. Adaptation enables reaction, which is indispensable for good defense. A lack of information can prevent a successful adaptation, and is therefore a defense risk.

• Lack of Adaptation: bad defense, unpreparedness, inability to react swiftly enough
• Good Adaptation: good defense, preparedness, ability to react swiftly enough

Intelligence agencies like the CIA orginally were founded to prevent this lack of information. The CIA itself is a legacy of the war, because it is the successor of the Office of Strategic Services formed during World War II to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for the branches of the United States military.

Warfare and Combat

Good adaptation is the best defense strategy. Armor (inkl. helmets, body armor, and armored fighting vehicles) is a adaptation to piercing ammunition fired by the enemy, bunkers are an adaptation to exploding bombs dropped from above. Trenches and walls are an adaptation to sudden assaults of ground troops. Since ancient times, fortified locations are an adaptation to increased mobility of attacking forces in general.

The best attack strategies are tactics which prevent fast adaptation. Sneak and surprise attacks are very powerful strategies, because they prevent a fast response of the enemy. Unexpected, sudden attack can generate local superiority and lead to local victory, which in turn leads to even greater local superiority. Napolean and the Germans in WWII used this kind of Blitzkrieg. It is the opposite of static warfare, which was so common in WWI.

Immune System

The task of the immune system is defense: it is responsible for the protection against invaders. It has two layers, the innate immune system provides an immediate, but non-specific response, and the adaptive immune system provides an specific response adapted to the target. Adaptation seems to be the best and last weapon of the body against dangerous invaders.

Stress is an adaptive defense mechanism of the body, too, because it is an adaptation to terror (i.e. to uncertain and disruptive environments where large peaceful periods are sometimes disrupted by extremely dangerous threats which require immediate reaction).

Games and Goals

In games and wars alike, two parties confront each other, and both parties are trying to win, which means to act against the will of the opponents and to disrupt their defense. The line of equilibrium between the two parties is the front-line, the frontier between the territories of both parties. The attacking party tries to disrupt the front-line, and the defending party tries to restore the front-line by continuous adaptation of form and position. The goal is to disrupt the front-line. High degree of adaption to the ever changing front-line is a perfect defense, because it means being prepared for any attack along the front-line.

A retracting movement is obviously an adaptation to an advancing movement of the opponent. A defensive strategy uses this method to counter attacks, defence in depth (also known as deep or elastic defence) is a military strategy as well. It is apparently an adaptation of the own territory to the advancements of a strong opponent.

The Flickr photo is from Flickr user Jon Candy

What makes a creative person like Kafka, Einstein or Mozart? Anyone can be creative. Tortured souls are said to be especially creative. Franz Kafka for example is a perfect example.

Why? Tortured souls certainly need a solution for their problem, for example to find peace in life, a solution for their troubles or a meaning for their existence. They just want to be happy, like everyone else. Well, creativity can be a way out of desolate situations. It is a pleasant process itself, intrinsically rewarding, and it even can give your life a whole new meaning.

Creativity blossoms if there is a deep need to be creative, when there is a real problem and easy solutions for the problem are not available. Of course there is no solution if there is no problem, so there is no creativity where there is no problem, no challenge and no obstacle (maybe one reason for the “dumb-blonde” stereotype). Problems and obstacles can cause creativity. We become creative by solving problems if there are obstacles in our way, and serious problems to solve. John Dewey (1859-1952) said “We only think when we are confronted with problems.”

In this sense, creativity can be seen as adaptation to a crisis and unpleasant, hard times and hardship in general. A problem requires a creative solution to solve it, an obstacle requires a creative idea to find a way around it, and a crisis in general requires creativity and hard work to get over it. Every crisis is also a chance. John F. Kennedy observed that “when written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters – one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity” (although this may be a misperception, since the second character in the Chinese word for “crisis” does not necessarily mean opportunity).

Kafka was permanent in a personal crisis, and got a frustating job in a worker’s accident insurance company. Einstein got a frustrating position at the Swiss Patent Office after graduation. Both jobs were done only to pay the bills. And both of them did their groundbreaking creative work during times of greatest frustration. Some of Mozart’s string quartets and symphonies are good examples of masterpieces are born in a crisis as well.

Marvin Minky coined the term the society of mind. The metaphor of the mind as a society of interacting and debating agents is indeed a natural one, since the mind consists of billions of neurons which interact and “debate” with each other intensively.

But what happens when agents become aware of something? Can they develop somehow a collective consciousness? If the population of agents in such a society of mind is large and complex enough, can it represent and recognize itself? Can they become aware of themselves and develop some kind of self-awareness?

Difficult and interesting questions. What we call conscious and self aware certainly exists in some form in a society, too. If the whole society is conscious of something, then it has developed some form of collective consciousness. If this something is the society itself – for instance when a complex self-similar society contains elements which are similar to the whole – it has started to develop some form of collective self-awareness.

a)  Collective consciousness is simply what the majority of agents is thinking or doing right now. Traditionally, this is shaped and formed by the mass media in normal society. Today, this is captured perfectly by Google Zeitgiest, Twitter and Facebook.

b) Collective self-awareness happens when the majority of agents is thinking or discussing about themselves, which is possible during revolutions or revolutionary changes in a society, when the society is debating and changing itself. A society of agents which becomes aware of itself is a revolutionary society which is debating itself.

more about about the topic in our wiki page about collective consciousness

What are the origins of innovation and creativity? What is the mystery behind the emergence of new companies, new theories, new species, new masterpieces of art? Is it luck, or destiny, or both? Where do the good ideas come from?

Sometimes this is hard to say. The reasons why people become creative personalities differ. Some are forced and “trained” to be creative as a child (like Mozart the child prodigy). Some discover it early as a way to cope with reality, they become creative as a child because they want to escape reality or try to compensate a terrifying loss (like Goethe, see below (*)). Some become creative because they have to make a living, especially if they have left their secure former life and must start a new one (like Einstein or Shakespeare). Some become creative simply because it is fun.

We like to learn, and we like to play. All mammals like to play, and humans, the smartest mammals, are the most playful. Humans are curious and creative from the beginning. One could say that they are build to be curious: they are creative because they enjoy insights, they like to find things out, and they love to discover new things. Gaining insights and finding things out is fun. Comedy is popular because it contains insights.

But where do good ideas come from? John Cleese says his good ideas come from Mr Ken Levinshaw who lives in Swindon. He would get his ideas from Mr Levinshaw each Monday on a postcard. Well, there you have it. Mr Ken Levinshaw in turn gets them from Mildred Spong who lives on the Isle of Wight. And Mrs Spong refuses to say where she gets them from. In short sometimes we don’t know the origins of our ideas. Or comedians won’t like to tell us. What John Cleese wants to say is perhaps: good, creative ideas do not come from a specific source or particular point. Creativity occurs rather through diversity, by the combination of various sources and connection of different points, when completely different worlds collide, for example different cultures, ideas or frames of reference.

Scientists are very accurate when it comes to determine the sources of their idea. It belongs to the scientific culture to write down your references in your publications. Yet the public used to think great ideas come from great scientists. Only the very best, the scientific geniuses make it to top, and invent the groundbreaking theories. Unfortunately, this is not always the full truth. Even good scientists can not find out something new if there is nothing to find out. One can only discover America once. It is quite difficult for many modern scientists to be innovative because so much already has been found out. To be successful, you have to cheat or you have to be very lucky, i.e. you have to be at the right place and the right time in order to connect the right dots. The driving force for scientists is not always the pure pleasure of finding things out, as noble as it may sound.

In the economy, the driving force behind the emergence of new companies is money. This is no suprise. The sources of innovation are less public, but the origin of innovation are often small, new, agile firms which have a new idea. They are supported by independent and corporate venture capital firms, who are hoping to make big money by finding the the next big thing. Unfortunatley, most startups supported by venture capital fail.

In short we like to win, we like to find things out, and we like to be successful creators. Unfortunately, to find original or novel ideas is indeed difficult, just because they are orginal or novel. Something is novel if nobody has done it before. In nature, the origin of creativity is without doubt the constant recombination which takes place in evolution. Evolution is a creative process. This indicates that the origin is combinatorial.

As Simonton argues in his books, creativity is based on an evolutionary process of recombination, variation and selection. In his major books “Scientific Genius” (1988) and “Origins of Genius” (1999) he has examined the question if creativity can be reduced to a single psychological mechanism. He has found strong evidence for a Darwinian process behind creativity. Already Leonardo da Vinci said: “Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is doing something else.”

Doing something else means to find a new idea, a new thought, or a new combination. Creativity arises in general from novel (re-)combinations. It means to take existing elements or ideas and combine them in novel ways, to realize new possibilities, and to transform the possible to the actual. The book “The Medici Effect” argues that real innovation happens when different cultures, ideas and disciplines come together to spark off new and unprecedented solutions. Interdisciplinary domains offer many possibilities for creativity and innovative ideas.

So what do you need to be creative? It is helpful to start early. Mozart, Goethe, Einstein, Shakespeare all started very young to become experts in their fields. They had a very good basic education when they were young. And they had their first big success when they were young. Goethe says himself how important it is to start early in a letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt in his last year when he was 82:

“Je früher der Mensch gewahr wird, daß es ein Handwerk, daß es eine Kunst gibt, die ihm zur geregelten Steigerung seiner natürlichen Anlagen verhelfen, desto glücklicher ist er; was er auch von außen empfange, schadet seiner eingebornen Individualität nichts. Das beste Genie ist das, welches alles in sich aufnimmt, sich alles zuzueignen weiß, ohne daß es der eigentlichen Grundbestimmung, demjenigen was man Charakter nennt, im mindesten Eintrag tue, vielmehr solches noch erst recht erhebe und durchaus nach Möglichkeit befähige. Hier treten nun die mannigfaltigen Bezüge ein zwischen dem Bewußten und Unbewußten [..] Die Organe des Menschen durch Übung, Lehre, Nachdenken, Gelingen, Mißlingen, Fördernis und Widerstand und immer wieder Nachdenken verknüpfen ohne Bewußtsein in einer freien Tätigkeit das Erworbene mit dem Angebornen, so daß es eine Einheit hervorbringt welche die Welt in Erstaunen setzt.”

J.W. v. Goethe, Aus einem Brief an Wilhelm von Humboldt (17. März 1832)

He also says that it is important to collect information without bias, for example by being passionately curious. Yet even if all preparations and conditions are right, a bit of luck is necessary. You need the right opportunities and conditions, the right motivation or drive to succeed, and finally the freedom to do it. If luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, then maybe all a creative person needs is a bit of luck.

the right opportunities / preparations / conditions

• You need luck to be at the right time and the right place, where a real innovation or very creative act is possible. As Simonton writes in his book “Greatness” (1994), already Tolstoy recognized that great men are labels for historic events: “In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.” Simonton adds further that great persons “serve only as convenient tags for big events”. This is certainly true for many great politicians, historical leaders and ingenious statesmen. Edward O. Wilson said “Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued “The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he actualises his age” (in “Philosophy of Right”, p.295, English Translation from 1942). The ability of a person to have great influence depends on the right place and time, if he wants to represent a revolution and unleash pent-up forces or avalanches of new ideas. The world must be in some form of critical state with pent-up energy. It must be near a revolution or breakthrough, where large avalanches and cascades of consequences are possible.
• You need experience , which means hours and years or learning, training, practice and skill acquisition in your domain. Only when you are adapted to a domain you have access to the right raw material or the right skills. Subjective experience and creativity are two sides of a coin.
• Sources of inspiration are important. The conditions to be creative are especially good at the intersection of disciplines, fields, communities and cultures. Children require a father and a mother, original or novel ideas require more than one source. New possibilities arise for example in “melting pots”, if different cultures and cultural realms meet. Therefore you need distraction from time to time to view the world from a different point of view. Your melding pot must be filled with ideas. You need to be connected to make connections.
• You need to be able to ‘think out of the box’, which requires a little madness, insanity or simply unlimited curiosity

the right motivation / the drive to succeed

• You need motivation to do it. A threat to lose (in a competition) or a threat to existence are a strong motivation. Shakespeare and Mozart wrote their works to make a living. Tortured souls threatened by extinction and people in a crisis are said to be exceptionally creative. Somestimes the real masterpieces are born in a crisis. The best motivation is to have a passion for what you are doing. Mozart the musician, Goethe the poet, Einstein the scientist, Shakespeare the playwright, they all loved what they were doing: playing/composing (Mozart), writing/imagining (Goethe), calculating/studying (Einstein), play writing/acting (Shakespeare). They were passionate about their work, Mozart loved music and was very playful, Goethe loved poetry and was very imaginative, Einstein loved science, and Shakespeare loved the theater.
• You need courage and perseverance to do it. The courage to go further than anyone else before. You will probably meet obstacles, difficulties and hostility on the way. Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) said “Damit das Mögliche entsteht, muss immer wieder das Unmögliche versucht werden.” (“To realize the possible, we must try the impossible”). Sometimes you need to create whole new worlds to be innovative, which other people probably view as stupid in the beginning. Other people may consider you as weird, mad, stupid or insane. According to Ben Horowitz, Innovation is almost insane by definition: most people view any truly innovative idea as stupid, because if it was a good idea, somebodywould have already done it. So, the innovator is guaranteed to have more natural initial detractors than followers.
• You need concentration to formulate the new idea, to write it down, to work it out. You need to be isolated.

the right authorization / freedom

• You must be authorized to do it, that means you must have the freedom to do it. The right preparation and the right motivation are useless if it is not allowed to create something new. Existing systems and institutions may try to prevent new ideas. You need freedom to explore every possible connection and to draw novel conclusions.
• You need to be in the right mood or mode to do it. According to John Cleese, creativity is based on the ability to play freely with ideas. He distinguishes between two modes of operating for the mind: an open and a closed mode. In the open mode we are curious, spontaneous, and playful. In the closed mode, for example at work under pressure, we are serious, earnest, nervous, and anxious of making mistakes. He argues we can only be creative, i.e. turn problems into opportunities, in the open mode. We need to have enough freedom to be in the open mode when pondering on a problem.

Free markets encourage creativity, because they offer the right conditions for creative individuals: they offer a lot of opportunities and niches to be successful, they have usually high competition which leads to high motivation, and they grant the freedom to be creative.

In short, you need distraction (for the inspiration and accumulation phase) *and* concentration (for the incubation phase). You need to be connected (to fill the melting pot) *and* isolated (to cook with the melting pot). And most of all you neet the drive to succeed. If all conditions are fulfilled, you need still need the drive to be creative and innovative. And sometimes you just need a bit luck – or a letter from Mr Ken Levinshaw who lives in Swindon.
_____________________________________________

(*) for Goethe, creativity was a means to cope with problems in his personal life. He lost all six of his younger siblings when he was young, only his sister Cornelia and he survived. This was a terrifying experience for the familiy and the young poet. Creativity allowed him to compensate the loss by creating s.th. new. His early literary and poetic experiments were an attempt to escape in the world of fiction and fantasy, and he tried to create s.th. for the parents and his remaining sister to compensate the loss of his siblings, see
“Leidenschaft, Goethes Weg zur Kreativität”, Rainer M. Holm-Hadulla, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2009

more links, literature and further reading:
- “Strange Brains and Genius – The secret lives of eccentric scientists and madmen”, Clifford A. Pickover, Penum Press, 1998.
- “Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness”, by David Joseph Weeks et al., Kodansha International, 1996.
- “Genius and the Mind”, Edited by Andrew Steptoe, Oxford University Press, 1998.
- “Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius”, Robert W. Weisberg, W.H. Freeman and Company, 1993
- “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, HarperCollins Publishers, 1996
- “Scientific genius: A psychology of science”, Dean Keith Simonton, Cambridge University Press, 1988
- “Greatness: Who makes history and why”, Dean Keith Simonton, The Guilford Press, 1994
- “Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity”, Dean Keith Simonton, Oxford University Press, 1999
- “The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures”, Frans Johansson, Harvard Business School Press, 2004

(Flickr Photo is from Flick User adebond1)

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imagin-ings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.” – Chapter 3, The Night Shadows of a “Tale of Two Cities” from Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)

Already Charles Dickens pointed out in his “Tale of Two Cities” that human beings are a mystery to each other. Like every house which encloses a secret, every person “encloses” a secret: the personal universe of phenomenal consciousness and subjective experience. The hard problem of consciousness and self-awareness, which philosophers find difficult to explain, is similar to the problem that ordinary people face if they try to explain themselves and their conscious experience. In his book “The Conscious Mind”, David Chalmers calls the problem of subjective experience the hard problem, contrary to the easy problems which can be solved by standard methods of cognitive science. How can we bridge the gap between objective, physical reality and subjective experience? The philosophers ask how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. During “that’s me?” moments of self-awareness, people ask how a physical entity (that objective thing in the environment) can be identified with themselves (their entire subjective world of thoughts, emotions and feelings). In his book “The mystery of consciousness”, John Searle gives the following formulation of the problem:

“How is it possible for physical, objective, quantitatively describable neuron firings to cause qualitative, private, subjective experiences?”

The problem of phenomenal consciousness is not new, it has been discussed nearly a 100 years ago, and there are still written books about it today. Even poets write about it, in the poem “The Great Lover” Rupert Brooke says

“These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such”

All these things are certainly hard to explain, because they have a strong physical component. If someone wants to know what it is is like to touch a fur, he can try it himself. The answer why subjective experience is different to each of us is perhaps more interesting. It lies in the environment and the individual relationships in the society of mind. Each of us has a slightly different network of friends. Similarly, the agents in the society of mind for each person have slighty different friends, which depend on the particular encounters a person has made during the course of life. These friendship relations are different for each person. A thought is always associated with other thoughts, which are often related to things we have experienced at the same time or place in the past. If we want to understand the behavior and personality of a person, we must take a look at the curriculum vitae and the individual history of the person, i.e. we must consider the specific contexts and the various environments which lead to specific brain structures by continuous adaptation.

The question how subjective experiences arise from objective brain processes alone is wrong, because brain processes are not objective. Brain processes and neural connections are always unique, personal and individual, they are slightly different for each person. There are no two persons who have exactly the same neural connections or brain processes. Everyone has a uniqe “society of mind”. Someone who lives in Europe will have a brain that’s wired up differently from somebody who lives in Asia or America. Each of us has different roots, has learnt different languages, has seen different places, has travelled along different paths, and has done different things. Because already Aristotle knew that we are what we repeatedly do, we are all a bit different, because we have all done things which are a little bit different and result in different memories. If all members of a species would be identical in genotype and phenotype, they would experience things in the same way. If our reactions would be hard-wired, then our behavior and our reactions would be similar, and we would feel in the same way, depending only on the physical constraints (for example that colors and tones correspond to different wavelenghts, an “A” has 440 Hz, the color blue has 480 nm, etc.). But we are not hard-wired. Someone in China may associate the color red with good fortune, luck or joy (or simply with his country and his home). Someone in America may associate the color red with Heinz Ketchup and evil communists. Our behavior is based on a long process of socialization, assimilation, and adaptation. Adaptation is the answer how physical items can turn into subjective objects. Each of us is adapted to a slightly different world (or different “slice” of the same world, as Nicholas Thompson called it in a recent FRIAM discussion).

This is in agreement with what Sociologists and Psychologists say. For the sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982) the processes that cause subjective experience were clear, they were social, and they were associated with the own identity. Ego-identity is for Goffman “the subjective sense of his own situation and his own continuity and character that an individual comes to obtain as a result of his various social experience” (a quote from his book “Stigma”).

One of the latest book on the subject, “Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness” from Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey follows a similar line of thought. Phenomenal consciousness and personal, subjective experience is not something which only humans have. Every animal has a special subjective experience. Especially rich is the experience of course for intelligent and playful mammals like dolphins and the great apes. The subjective present of humans is particularly rich and deep, as Nicholas Humphrey argues in his book “Soul dust”. It is full of colors and flavors, but each people sees different colors and feels different flavours. For a cognitive animal, every mental representation of the current situation has a personal dimension, it is colored with particular emotions and linked to personal memories. The “colors” represent if the degree to which the events are perceived as pleasant and good or unpleasant and bad.

This solution to the hard question has already been found or anticipated by William James and his scholar Edwin Holt. William James argues his text “Does ’Consciousness’ Exist?” that subjectivity arises from the different contexts in which we experience things. The pure subjective experience of items in the present depends on the mixed experiences with these items in the past, which in turn depend on the various contexts in which the objects and items appeared. These different contexts shape the relations between the individual experiences for each person. He says about the problem:

“subjectivity and objectivity are [..] realized only when the experience is ‘taken,’ i. e., talked-of twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication forms the fresh content. The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience.[...] The peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known, which their ’conscious’ quality is invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations – these relations themselves being experiences – to one another.”

His scholar Edwin Holt goes one step further and shows us where these particular relations come from. For Edwin B. Holt, consciousness or mind is “a cross-section of the universe, selected by the nervous system”. Edwin B. Holt (1873-1946) was a professor of philosophy and psychology at Harvard and Princeton. Together with Ralph Perry he belonged to the New Realists, a group of William James’ students and associates.

The New Realists were Edwin B. Holt (Harvard University), Walter T. Marvin (Rutgers College), William Pepperell Montague (Columbia University), Ralph Barton Perry (Harvard), Walter B. Pitkin (Columbia) and Edward Gleason Spaulding (Princeton University). Together they wrote a book named “The new realism” nearly 100 years ago in 1912. In this book from Edwin B. Holt et al. (see cover picture, which shows a version published in 1925 found in the University Library of the Humboldt Universität in Berlin), Holt says about the cross-section:

“It must not be forgotten that while the object itself, if a physical thing, is far from simple, we are always perceiving it in a complicated setting of (spatial, temporal, and logical) relations, which is a still more complicated thing. But the conscious cross-section is always a group of the integral (neutral) components of the object and of its innumerable relations. [..] it is seldom possible to say just where the object itself terminates and its relations to other entities commences”

He defined a cross-section in general as a definable part of a larger collection or manifold. Each of us experiences a specific cross-section during the course of life. In his book “Concept of Consciousness”, Edwin B. Holt says about this cross-section (on page 171)

“The sum total of all the whales living in certain given waters is a cross-section of the sea that is significant for the whalers who are trying to locate and gather them in. The various shafts and levels of a mine are a cross-section of the mountain, and of import to the shareholders: and it is the business of the engineer so to direkt the workings that this cross-section shall coincide with taht other cross-section that is made by the vein of ore.”

“Once again, a navigator exploring his course at night with the help of a searchlight, illuminates a considerable expanse of wave and cloud, occasionally the bow and forward mast of his ship, and the hither side of other ships and of buoys, lighthouses, and other objects that lie above the horizon. Now the sum total of all surfaces thus illuminated in the course, say, of an entire night, is a cross-section of the region in question that has rather interesting characteristics”

Similarly, the mind selects all “elements or parts of the universe” which “matter”, which are interesting or arise emotions, which cause the system to make a specific response. The mind is made up of all experiences the person has made during the course or path of his life. The experiences which form the mind are path-dependent. Positive experiences with a subject reinforce other positive experiences in the future. If we like someone or something then we may get rewards in form of positive feelings from it, and the more good feelings we have in turn about something, the more we like it. A positive feedback loop arises, which amplifies slight differences into large variations. Each mind corresponds to a specific, individual slice of the same world. It is this cross-section which defines our subjective experience and makes our experiences individual.

If we really want to understand subjective experience, we must examine the past of a person. Maybe one could call it “mind archaeology” – digging through the layers which record the past of the individual. Of course this is not new at all, it would be very similar to psychoanalysis. Already Freud’s patients lay on the couch during psychoanalysis, and told him their stories and dreams.

The idea that the mind is composed of layers which recorded the past of the individual goes back to the 19th century. Julian Jaynes observed in his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” that the metaphors used to understand consciousness changed over time, because they followed current trends in science. Today in the age of web 2.0 and social media, we tend to use social metaphors like the “society of mind” or the “social network of the mind”. In the 19th century, physical sciences like geology were very popular. Jaynes says in “The Origin of Consciousness”:

“The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers of the earth’s crust. And this led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as the being in layers which recorded the past of the individual, there being deeper and deeper layers until the record could no longer be read”

Although all this explains the subjectivity of our experiences, or at least the origin of the subjectivity, it does not take away the perplexity and confusion during “That’s me” moments of self-awareness, when the internal first person point of view collides with the external third person point of view. The feeling of self-awareness will remain mysterious. In his book “The Problem of Consciousness” Colin McGinn says “there is something terminal about our perplexity”. During our development, the web of beliefs (or words) becomes so detailed and fine that we can recognize ourselves in it. Yet this insight will always be accompanied by confusion: if the brain could comprehend itself directly, wouldn’t it be like a fishing net which is somehow identified with one of the fishes it catches? Gilbert Ryle argues in “The concept of mind”:

“Should I, or should I not, put my knowing self down on my list of the sorts of things that I can have knowledge of? If I say ‘no’, it seems to reduce my knowing self to a theoretically infertile mystery, yet if I say ‘yes’, it seems to reduce the fishing-net to one of the fishes which it itself catches”

( The Flickr photo is from Flickr user bikehikedive )

Books mentioned:
* David Chalmer, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford University Press, 1996
* John R. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, New York Review Books; 1997
* Edwin B. Holt et al., The new realism, The Macmillan Company 1925
* Edwin B. Holt, Concept of Consciousness, George Allen edition, 1914
* Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, University Of Chicago Press, 1949
* Julian Jayne, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976
* Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness, Blackwell, 1990
* Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness, Princeton University Press, 2011
* Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Prentice-Hall, 1963

Car companies and aircraft manufacturers produce cars and planes which pollute the environment with lots of toxic and carcinogenic substances like benzene, a natural constituent of crude oil. People get sick and the climate begins to change. Instead of producing cars and planes with zero emissions, the pharmaceutical industry produces drugs which treat the symptoms, for instance very expensive cancer drugs. And instead of tackling the root of climate change, scientists seriously try to develop technologies which block sunlight by polluting the atmosphere with dust. No kidding! This is just wrong. In the former case, you counter the effects of toxic substances by producing even more toxins (many cancer drugs are cytotoxins), and in the latter case you counter the effects of pollution by producing even more pollution.

The food industry produces stuff which tastes good and sells well, but which is not very healthy. Agriculture uses pesticides to increase production, and the food processing industry cares more about the sales volume than about the health of the customers. It is well-known that people get sick from fast food. A recent study found out again that sugary drinks increase the risk of diabetes dramatically. Advertising suggests that you will be surrounded by good looking healthy people if you drink Coca Cola, but it is more likely that these people have bad teeth, too much weight and type 2 diabetes.. If you consume Starbucks Coffee or Coca Cola regurlarly, you may be well on your way to diabetes, obesity, or both. If people realize it and consume less, companies will spend more for marketing to increase consumation again. And instead of producing healthy food, the industry finds out ways out to make money out of the sick people. The pharmaceutical industry produces drugs and devices that are used to treat the symptoms, for instance type 2 diabetes.

When it comes to social issues and the protection of the weak or to environmental issues and the protection of the environment, markets fail, and the intervention of governments is needed. Companies will exploit natural resources totally until they are completed depleted if they can make money out of it. And they don’t care about people if they can not make money out of them. Germany has a social market economy which tries to protect the citizens from market failure, but even here the power of large international corporations is too large to do anything about the points mentioned above.

(The traffic jam photo of the 405 in LA is from Flickr User Atwater Village)

Do “cultural stem cells” exist?

Lewis Thomas made this observation in his book The Lives of a Cell:

“Maybe the thoughts we generate today and flick around from mind to mind…are the primitive precursors of more complicated, polymerized structures that will come later, analogous to the prokaryotic cells that drifted through shallow pools in the early days of biological evolution. Later, when the time is right, there may be fusion and symbiosis among the bits, and then we will see eukaryotic thought, metazoans of thought, huge interliving coral shoals of thought.”

If we can compare genes with memes and cells with thoughts, are there any “cultural stem cells”? Undifferentiated self-replicating entities based on abstract ideas? Stem cells are cells found in all multi-cellular organisms. They are characterized by the ability to renew and replicate themselves, they also can differentiate themselves into a diverse range of specialized cell type. Stem cells are the base of life, they can found at the beginning of every multi-cellular organism, but they are also very dangerous and can be a source of cancer. The cancer stem cell hypothesis says that cancer may be caused by stem cells gone bad. If “cultural stem cells” exist, then they could be source of cultural cancer, too.

Families and Dynasties

Now, is there such a thing as a cultural or social stem cell? A stem cell is an entity which can replicate itself. Therefore a cultural stem cell is a social group with certain ideas, beliefs and traditions which replicates itself. Is it the family which give rise to clans, tribes and dynasties or is it the small circle or group that meets regularly in a certain room or place, which leads to religions, ideologies and social movements? Well, both.

Families are the basic unit of all societies, modern and ancient ones. A family is a group of people which shares common genes. The purpose of a family is to replicate, maintain, and sustain itself. It is the family which give rise to clans, tribes and dynasties, examples are the tribes in Afghanistan or Scottish clans. These clans and tribes existed before any ancient culture. Families are the founders of corporations in economic systems, for instance the Porsche family – Ferdinand Porsche and its descendants – founded the Porsche automobile corporation. Since the dawn of culture, families are also the founders of royal dynasties, for instance the royal houses of Europe, the House of Windsor, the House of Hohenzollern, etc., or the “Kennedy Dynasty” in America (see “The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster”, John H. Davis, McGraw-Hill, 1984). Descendants of a family tend to glorify their ancestors, because it increases their own legitimation to rule.

In general, there is also a group of people which shares common memes. This can be small group of thoughtful, committed people which follow a certain ideology or try to achieve a common goal. As Margaret Mead said, a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can act like a stem cell for a political party, a large organization or a social movement. Both attributes seem to be critical, “thoughtful” means the group has some common idea or ideology (such as “Shawarma for everybody”, “A man should have a mustache”, ..), and “committed” means it follows it against all odds. A typical meeting place would be a temple, church or meeting room, where all members of the group meet regularly to realize their culture.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead

Culture and Social attrators

Culture here means a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. Cultural entities are always based on social systems, where ideas can manifest themselves, where they affect the behaviors of the members, and where they can be transmitted from one member to another. Religions and ideologies belong to the most fundamental ideas of social systems. According to David Sloan Wilson (and his book “Darwin’s cathedral”), religious groups are adaptive units subject to group selection. The most fundamental social entity is the small group.

Religious systems are long-lasting social movements, they act as a social attractor which is able to hold a group together: the ritual assemblies attract the members regularly to a certain location. A small social movement can turn into a huge religion if the society evolves toward a stable state, where all members of society share certain desired properties: freedom/justice/work/peace/love/happiness/etc. A group where all members act selfless and altruistic is certainly more stable than a group where members are selfish and egoistic.

Sometimes it is quite simple to start a social movement, as this video shows (see also here). A leader needs the courage to stand alone and look ridiculous. What he is doing and teaching is so simple, that it is easy to follow him. The first follower makes a leader out of the lunatic. If a few more followers join the group, then we already have a very simple social movement which follows some idea or ideology.

Blueprints for a soul

They are many ideologies and belief systems. Can they be considered as a blueprint? Can we construct minds from different parts or pieces ? Is there a blueprint for a soul? Everyone is born into a certain cultural context, a kid in Germany will learn German and German culture, and a kid in America will learn American and American lifestyle. A christian scholar will become a Christian, and an scholar of Buddhism will become a Buddhist. Yet in principle each of us has the freedom to choose his own blueprint. Someone who creates and invents his own blueprint is often a leader or a prophet. If the life of a leader or history of a nation is written down, it may become a blueprint for the minds of future generations. “Holy books” are often autobiographies of famous prophets or contain the history of the own country and culture. “Holy books” and belief systems in general which specify the right kind of behavior can be considered as “memetic blueprints” to build souls and social systems, because they specify the glue that keeps societies together. They are the scripts which contain the rules that direct our plays. They are taught in schools and temples.

Temples and Ideologies

Besides the house of the family, where the family meets regularly, temples and meeting rooms for small groups where simple and primitive ideologies are preached are perhaps the closest things to cultural stem cells, especially if the ideologies or religions which are taught have a strong missionary aspect. Ideologies are undifferentiated self-replicating entities based on abstract ideas: consistent bundles or “shoals” of thoughts. They can be applied to many areas, and taught in many buildings. A temple can be a palace for king, a school for a culture, a university for a science, a town hall for citizens, a meeting hall for a political party or a building for a company. In short it can be a house for a small group of people, which organizes themselves in many ways. Like cells which can appear in different cell types, social (sub-)systems can appear in different types, namely

• Cultural systems: Humans / Language
• Religious systems: Priests / Belief-System
• Scientific systems: Scientists / Science
• Military systems: Armies / Military
• Economic and banking systems: Companies / Economy
• Political systems: Parties / Ideology

At the beginning all cells are equal in the body of multicellular eukaryotes. There are only a few which replicate themselves rapidly. During the course of time, different types of cells develop and take over certain functions. For social systems it is similar, in the beginning there were only a few, and they were all similar. During the course of time, many different types of systems emerged. Let us take a short look at the history of these systems.

Cultural systems: since 10.000 BC

Language is the foundation of every culture. Without language, no sharing of knowledge would be possible. The first languages appeared together with the first humans around 100.000 BC, probably earlier, at least they were present when the Neolithic Revolution took place 10.000 BC, where gatherers became farmers and hunters cattle breeders. Cultural systems alone are mostly harmless, they become dangerous if religious or military aspects come into play, for example if other cultures are condemned or combated, or if the culture tries to replicate itself actively. Most religions involve some kind of missionary aspect, where members are forced to convert others to the religion, thereby spreading the religion.

Religious systems: since 3.000 BC

Ancient Egypt, Bronze Age: Religious systems are stem cells of culture. As the ancestors of political, systems, and economic systems they are the oldest and most ancient social systems. They are undifferentiated and have very different functions, they contain laws to regulate behavior and provide a framework for a legal system. They are at the same time a political system with a single party which offers an ideology or vision and is symbolized by certain signs. They are scientific systems which explain the world. They are cultural systems with a certain language and particular customs, which is determined by the holy book. They are biological and ethnic systems, if the religious leaders belong to a single family or dynasty. The earliest and most ancient cultures are a mixture of religious, political and cultural system: they were religious palace enonomies (without coined money). The king was the religious, political, military, economic and cultural leader, all at the same time. The palaces of the Minoan civilization were not only royal residences, they were religious, political, military, economic and cultural centers, similar to some ancient Egyptian temples, which were shrines, centers of government, administrative offices, and storage spaces, too. In the book “An Introduction to the Ancient World” from Lukas De Blois and R.J. van der Spek the authors argue that

“Throughout the whole history of the ancient Near East, agriculture formed the basis of the economy. [..] In the ancient Near East the temple and the palace were the chief landowners [..] The palace and the temple were never entirely independent of one another”

Scientific systems: since 800 BC

Ancient Greece, Bronze Age: Science at the beginning meant Philosophy, the most basic science besides Physics. In Ancient Egypt, science and religion was inseparable, the gods were also used as an explanation how the world works. The first independent scientific system appeared in Greece, together with the first Philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc. The Greek started to realize that religious stories often crystallize hard-won wisdom about human nature – but some also thought that the stories are too limited to embrace what we now comprehend about the cosmos. Later in the Middle Ages, the first scientists were Philosophers, too, and they belonged to the Christian church, for example Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas. Early previews of other systems appeared for the first time, too, for example organized sports in form of the Olympic Games, and precursors of modern politics (democracy is Greek, demokratia means rule/kratos of the people/demos).

Military systems: 1st century

Ancient Rome, Iron Age: The first independent military system appeared perhaps in ancient Rome. Even in Ancient Rome there the political and the military system were still tightly coupled, and the social standing of a person impacted both his political and military roles. Humans have always been fighting wars, as long as they exist. It is hard to say where the first independent armies emerged, where the general is no longer the king, the president, or the chancellor. Even in the USA the president is still the commander-in-chief. The Roman army marks the transition between the conscription-based armies of the early states and the mainly volunteer, professional standing forces of the later eras.

Economic and banking systems: 14th century

Europe, Middle Ages: The slaves in Greece and Rome where precursors of modern workers, since no independent economy existed. Really independent economic systems appeared for the first time in the Middle Ages (at the time of the House of Hohenstaufen) together with the first banking dynasties. The first banking dynasties emerged in the 14th and 15th century: the Medici in Italy and the Fuggers in Germany. The first modern stock corporations appeared in medieval Europe, too.

Political systems: 18th century

The first precursors of independent political systems appeared in ancient forms in Greece and Rome, but in full form including political parties, political ideologies and voting systems after the French Revolution in the 18th century. Although finally all the systems mentioned above have appeared in independent forms, it took still two centuries and many wars (including two world wars) until they reached independence in most of the countries.

Fascism, Communism and Terrorism

During WWII, fascism and fanaticism spread like a cancer throughout the world. After WWII, communism began to dominate more and more countries. The corresponding ideologies affected all areas of culture and led to a system of poor differentiation (where religious, political, military and economic sub-systems were more or less equalized) and high aggression, just as it can be found in some malicious tumors. And they were all a failure. History has shown that such classless societies do not work. Marx argued that differentiation into different systems and classes is bad. The theories from Marx and Communism in general aim for a classless society without division. But equalizing revolutions lead to stagnation, deterioration and corruption of society.

Fascism is even more equalizing than communism. Are fascism and certain forms of religious fanaticism a kind of cultural cancer which can emerge from cultural stem cells? They emerge from small groups where an ideology is preached, i.e. they go all the way back to religious systems. The Nazi party began somewhere in Munich in a beer cellar (Hofbräukeller), where a radical form of fascism and antisemitism was preached in the meetings of the German Workers’ Party. The leading members of the later Nazi Party including Adolf Hitler, attended and met one another here. The beer cellar acted a bit like a cultural stem cell.

Consider another example, the Al-Quds Mosque Hamburg, a mosque in Hamburg, Germany, that preached a radical form of Sunni Islam. Al-Quds is where some of the September 11 attackers including Mohamed Atta, attended and met one another, forming the Hamburg cell. This little Mosque where a radical form of Islam was preached acted indeed a bit like a malicious stem cell. It produced more terror cells around the world. And it was located right within western culture, just like cancer cells originate within the body. The 9/11 attackers of the Hamburg cell were educated partly at German universities and flight schools in the USA. The planes they hijacked were American planes. In cancer it is similar: the cells which attack the body originate in the own body, probably in malicious stem cells.

For stem cells, the cellular environments are important. “Good” cells can turn “bad” in a bad neighborhood – leading to cancer. For cultural stem cells, the context and the environment are important too. They can prosper if the right idea is proposed at the right place and the right time. The Al-Quds Mosque was active at a time when Osama bin Laden was desperately looking for suitable suicide attackers to take revenge on the USA. In the beer cellar 1920 in Munich, Adolf Hitler found the right words at the right place and the right time to trigger a mass movement, which lead to the cancer of fascism, a crude mixture of militarism and imperialism. The old system was weak and broken, there were hostile tendencies in the society towards certain privileged groups, civil war or terror groups were a constant threat. Under these circumstances, cultural stem cells are especially dangerous and can have severe consequences.

Conclusion

There are two basic objects which can be considered as a cultural stem cell: the small group with common genes – the family – and the small group with common memes in general, i.e. the small group of thoughtful, committed people. Both are the basic unit of all societies, modern and ancient ones. They are powerful and dangerous, because they can be used to maintain, regenerate and recreate a society, but also to destroy it.

It looks like fascism and certain forms of religious fanaticism act indeed a bit like a kind of cultural cancer which emerges from cultural stem cells. Temples, mosques and meeting rooms for small groups where simple and primitive ideologies are preached are perhaps the closest things to cultural stem cells. They are simple and fundamental. Like religions and ideologies, they accompany humans since the dawn of history. And if we do not pay attention, they will remain a threat.

(Thanks to Robert Critchlow who pointed me to the quote of Margaret Mead).

Did you notice that most authors write more or less about themselves, even the giants of Russian literature, the Russian novelists Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky? Anton Chekhov was a physician and wrote many short stories about doctors and patients, Tolstoy was a soldier and wrote about “War and Piece”, Dostoevsky was an outsider and wrote about outsiders, for example people with epilepsy (“The Idiot”) or prisoners sentenced to death. He experienced both itself.

The classic German authors like Goethe are not much better, Goethe’s Faust contains his own quest for knowledge and beauty in form of beautiful young women. Shakespeare wrote about himself, too, not only in Hamlet. Modern authors are not different, take for instance the American authors Herman Melville or Michael Crichton. Their bestsellers mirror their experiences on their extended travels around the world (Michael Crichton documented his journeys around the world in a book named Travels).

Why is this so? Why do authors write about themselves over and over again? Is their imagination so limited? Yes, it is indeed hard to invent completely new worlds. It is hard to imagine something which you have never seen or experienced before. Anyone can create new words or stories which make no sense. It is much harder to find some who is able to invent new stories which are conceivable and consistent, new and logical.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
- George Bernard Shaw (Irish literary Critic, Playwright and Essayist 1856-1950)

But there is another reason, people are also selfish and egoistic, and, like everyone else, authors spend a lot of time thinking about themselves. The own life is the thing which we know best. Personal experience is the best source of inspiration. People who have experienced strange or wonderful things can create a similar subjective experience in others simply by describing what they have seen accurately. Authors must describe the inner life of their actors, their motives, motions and emotions. And the best way to know how something feels like is to experience it yourself.

Before we create worlds, we experience worlds. Before we can connect the dots, we must collect some. Leonardo da Vinci said “All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions” and “Wisdom is the daughter of experience”. Experience and creativity belong together. Subjective experience is private, creativity is public. As Franz Kafka said, even if we stand in front of each other, we can not imagine what the other experiences:

Wenn Du vor mir stehst und mich ansiehst, was weißt Du von den Schmerzen, die in mir sind und was weiß ich von den Deinen. Und wenn ich mich vor Dir niederwerfen würde und weinen und erzählen, was wüsstest Du von mir mehr als von der Hölle, wenn Dir jemand erzählt, sie ist heiß und fürchterlich.

When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?
- Franz Kafka (Czech writer and German language author 1883 – 1924)

Creativity is a process where we turn private experiences into public objects. A creative process often involves merging different threads, ideas, systems or even complete worlds. Before we can merge them, we must split, isolate and understand them. We take worlds apart, throw away the uninteresting parts and reuse the rest by emphasizing certain features from this world and certain features from others. We must acquire worlds first to recombine them later. We must be adapted to the specific domain of the creative process, in the best case we are adapted to more than one domain. You must be immersed in a field, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi said in his book Creativity. When we create possible, conceivable worlds, we use and combine the impressions we have previously experienced. It is often hard to find a new combination which makes sense. The creative process itself is often a process of trial and error, of collecting and dropping ideas, of designing and abandoning objects.

The German singer and songwriter Herbert Grönemeyer combined in this video a
classical ballet dancer with modern music. It shows Polina Semionova, Prima ballerina at the “Berliner Staatsballett” in Berlin. Creativity does not mean that some kind of Muse comes along like a ballet dancer to give you the spark of inspiration. It means that you connect different dots and combine different worlds.

• a poet, author or a scientist reads a whole library to make one new book
• a composer or DJ listens to countless pieces of music to make one new composition
• an artist watches many paintings and landscapes before he paints a masterpiece

Thus when we are creative, we turn the objects of our subjective experience – the former objects of perception – in an active process into objective reality. Creativity turns subjective experience into objective reality. In a way, creativity is the counterpart and opposite of personal perception. Perception turns objective reality into subjective experience, while creativity turns subjective experience into objective reality. Description and combination of subjective experience leads to the creation and construction of stories, works of art, and virtual worlds.

“Der Künstler steht da zwischen dem Endlichen und Unendlichen; wo beide aneinanderstoßen, fängt er den Blick des Gewitters auf, hält ihn fest und gibt ihm ewige Dauer.”
Jacob Grimm, (1785-1863), deutscher Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftler

The translation of this quote is roughly “the artist stands where the finite meets the infinite, where both collide, he catches the view of the storm, holds it and gives it eternal duration.” In this quote, the German linguist Jacob Grimm says that the creative process involves a transition or transformation between one world and another (in one world the phenomenon may be occasional and non-permanent, in the other it may be lasting and permanent). The artists is the connection between both worlds, he is at the place where the finite meets the infinite, and the incidental the eternal.

One can distinguish between between mere perception of well-known ideas, i.e. “re”-cognition and remembrance, and perception of new ideas while we understand and comprehend new things. During the former cognitive process, external events are just turned into their neural correlates, an activation of some internal memories.

This is the opposite of acting, during acting and rehearsal, where internal memories are turned into external events. For creative processes, one can also distinguish between production and mere reproduction or restoration. Creation is the antithesis of restoration: a creative process needs novelty, new combinations, whereas a restorative process needs conservation, preservation of old combinations.

“For all their seeming kinship, a restorer is the antithesis of a painter: he is a conserver, not a creator. Like a mimic, he assumes another person’s style, at the expense of his own identity. He must resist any urge to improve, to experiment, to show off; otherwise, he becomes a forger. Yet, unlike a great actor, he receives no glory for his feats of mimicry. If he has succeeded, he has burnished another artist’s reputation, and vanished without the world ever knowing who he is, or what he has accomplished. The art historian Max J. Friedländer called the business of the restorer “the most thankless one imaginable.”
from a story of “The New Yorker”

Anton Chekhov also valued creation more than mere action, although he also observed that both are indistinguishable for the audience, while the actor is much more popular because he arises strong emotions. In his short story “A Dreary Story” he writes about actors:

“To my mind, if a play is good there is no need to trouble the actors in order that it may make the right impression; it is enough to read it. If the play is poor, no acting will make it good. [...] No art nor science was capable of producing so strong and so certain an effect on the soul of man as the stage, and it was with good reason that an actor of medium quality enjoys greater popularity than the greatest savant or artist.”
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), “A Dreary Story”

It is always amazing to see the earth from space. To see sunset and sunrise from a space station is spectacular. It is even more spectacular to watch earthrise from a larger distance. Last year was the 40th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing. The crew members of Apollo 8 were the first humans to witness the Earth rising over the Moon’s horizon. Later Apollo missions also witnessed this fascinating event. The Astronauts from Apollo 11, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins (the first men who landed on the moon), brought back this nice sequence of pictures showing how the earth emerges and rises over the lunar horizon:

Back these days there were no digital cameras. They used analog cameras and brought back the film manually. Today we have all kind of digital devices and cameras. The best cameras are built by the Japanese. Therefore it is not surprising that the first lunar orbiter that has captured how planet earth appears over the lunar horizon in HD is from..

..JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)

Yet it seems that we have made little progress over the last four decades. Yes, our computers and cameras have become much better, and we have color TV in HD, McDonald’s and billions of mobile phones, but we have also exploited nearly all easily accessible oil resources and polluted the last corner of our precious planet. The global population and the amount of waste (atomic or otherwise) is much too high. Look how small and fragile our small blue planet looks from a distance. It is all we got. There is nowhere else to go. Space is a vast, empty, lonely, and desolate place. If we could see the world from that distance, as those astronauts did, would we behave more responsible? Would be stop fighting each other, stop burning the rain forests, stop wasting energy and stop exploiting natural resources?

Probably not. Although Buzz Aldrin saw all the “magnificent desolation” of earth in space with his own eyes, he got problems with depression and alcohol after his moon flight. “Magnificent desolation” were the words used by Aldrin on the moon to describe the situation. Armstrong said: “Isn’t that something! Magnificent sight out here.” and Aldrin responded “magnificent desolation”. On the moon and other planets of our solar systems there is only magnificent desolation. Here on earth we have magnificent complexity. If the astronauts don’t recognize how precious our planet is, will we ever do? This is somewhat depressing. Probably nothing will fundamentally change until a really large catastrophe happens.

(all pictures are from NASA and can be found at the Project Apollo Archive)

Richard Feynman said that science does not take away the beauty of nature, whether you consider stars..

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere”. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part… What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it.

..or flowers:

I have a friend who’s an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don’t agree with. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. But then he’ll say, “I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.” I think he’s kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

I think he is right, although you might never again see things in quite the same way. For example once you understand how fractals work, you start to see fractal patterns everywhere. On the Abstruse Goose blog, one can find a nice picture how a scientist sees the world:

On the top left one we see Maxwell equations and the laws of gravity, in the trees the chemical equation for Photosynthesis is visible, Schrödinger equation can be seen at the horizon, in the river Navier–Stokes equations appear, and on the bottom right there is a IFS for a fractal “fern”.

If we look behind the scenes, there are many fascinating structures and processes which we can not see. The world of (Bio-)Chemistry for example contains countless complex objects, which we are only beginning to understand. While you are reading this, you might drink a cup of coffee which contains Caffeine. Did you know that Caffeine is in fact a small molecule which has a complex structure? The chemical name is trimethylxanthine. In your brain it functions as a adenosine impersonator. Chlorophyll, the green pigment found in all plants and algae which makes Photosynthesis possible, is even more complex and resembles Hemoglobin, the oxygen-transport protein in red blood cells (although it contains iron instead of magnesium ions). These complex structures are completely invisible to us, we can only recognize the effects.

The world of (Particle-) Physics contains many complex objects, too. The Standard Model of Particle Physics says that the worlds consists of many types of fermions, bosons, quarks and leptons which interact in complex ways. The following impressive chart of the CPEP describes the standard model of the fundamental particles and interactions. It is hard to believe that all these interactions and processes between tiny particles really go on behind the scenes. Science says they do..

If you think about it, it is just incredible what is going on in a single moment at a single place. On a higher level, these subatomic particles form whole galaxies of particles, the atoms themselves, which obey the Schrödinger equation and the laws of Quantum Mechanics. They also form the electromagnetic waves which are described by Maxwell equations. It is marvelous what is going on if we just say “Hello” in our mobile phone..