Gestalt

Imagination does not breed insanity.  Exactly what does breed insanity is reason…Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.  The result is mental exhaustion.

The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.  Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable...  If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do… Nevertheless he is wrong.  But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed.  Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle.  A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle, but though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large.  In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.

In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health…A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent.  He can only be saved by will or faith.  The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.  Decision is the whole business here; a door must be shut for ever.

                                            G. K. Chesterton

Teleology:      1. the study of final causes

                     2. a belief that natural phenomena are determined not only by mechanical causes but by an over-all design or purpose in nature.

Gestalt:          1. pattern

                     2. a unified whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. 

                For a long time I just could not understand why so many Christians saw the theory of evolution as a threat.  At face value, evolution seems like the most teleological theory out there.  In contrast to the second law of thermal dynamics, where the universe is energetically slowing down, we’ve got this random planet where life is simply exploding.  Put Shcroederian parameters or leave evolution utterly random, the fact remains that life keeps building more and more complex patterns.  Something is driving the system.  When I began making the connections between emergence and Quality and how it flows different than a Truth dominant, transcendent God, I understood better the threat of evolution, however subconscious.

                Let’s back up to Plato.  He divided the universe into noumenon and phenomenon.  The Noumenal realm was the world of ideas and the mind.  That which could be perceived without use of the senses.  The phenomenal realm was the reality that we perceived with our senses.  The noumenal was populated by Ideas, the most famous one being that of Chairness.  We know chairs to be chairs because they participate in the idea of chairness.  This is in contrast to an emergence concept that we see enough chairs in our life that we develop and idea of the category of chair.  For Plato, there was also an Idea of the Ideas, which was the One.  There was the projection of the One called the Demiurge, and a projection of the Demiurge called the world-soul, which provided the liaison between ‘spiritual’ and corporal world as creator of phenomenon.  This is obviously a precursor to the eventual Christian trinity.  Yes, I oversimplify, but my main point is this chasm between the world of Ideas, of Mind, of Spirit, and the physical world.  It takes two beings removed from God to even interact with our world of biology, of sounds and smells.  And the flow is up/down.  What things are is determined by what exists in the upper world.  Horses exist only because they are some sort of manifestation of the Idea of Horseness in the world of the Mind.  In this scenario, mutations and changes are not beautiful, because they aren’t matching up to the ideals.  In this context evolution is synonymous with degradation. 

                One of the biggest criticism of evolution stems from the gaps in the fossil record.  Darwin’s natural selection process seems to need vast, vast amounts of time for evolution to transform species as different as fish to mammals.  The fossil record seems full of explosions in relatively short geological time.  Keep in mind a short geological explosion could be over a million years.  I’m no scientist, but it sounds plausible to me that the same mechanics of change that drive scientific theory and knowledge could be mirrored in the evolutionary process.  When Copernicus was wrestling with his new heliocentric paradigm, it was not a gradual conversion going on in the scientific community where his theory of earth revolving around the sun was simply the next step in a progressing logic at the time.  The scientific community, headed by the Christian church was not kind to those like Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler.  They were indeed, diametrically opposed.  These scientists engaging with the alternative heliocentric model had to rise above the accepted thought patterns around them in a sort of mental leap.  Not that this leap happens in a vacuum.  When one system of thought is pushed to its limits, you get to the margins where failures and discrepancies pop up.  Those in tune to the pre-intellectual Reality sense this discord and begin fishing for alternatives.  All these discrepancies act like a supersaturated solution.  The pieces have been stewing there for a while, but no one has picked out the pattern.  Some catalyst sets off someone like Copernicus and in a mental leap he has Gestalt.  He sees the whole of it and the beauty of the new model is irrefutable.  We also know that it is not just thought that leaps.  In the concept of the Quantum leap, electrons leap from different energy levels instantaneously.  So why wouldn’t this process show up in evolution?

                I don’t want this to be a defense of evolution, but I bring it up because it’s a great example of how transcendent, Platonic thinking, clashes with emergent thinking in a very culturally volatile way.  Just a reminder as much to myself as to anyone reading that these concepts are not just lofty tinkering, but affect us both on the individual level as well as a society.  I enjoy pointing out the fractal nature of these patterns, whether we recognize it in our history of science, electrons, or the grand, long-term view of evolution.

                While most people have at least heard of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, not so many are familiar with Pirsig’s sequel, Lila.  While Zen spent a great deal of time deconstructing in order to get to the source behind our thought, Lila is more about building a metaphysic, or a lens in which to view our world.  Pirsig has set up the concepts of Dynamic Quality, which drives the systems by leaps, and static quality, which provides structure to sustain these new ‘energetic levels’.  A structure that holds and is sustained is understood as a static pattern.  Pirsig sees our world divided into four grand systems or static patterns.  Inorganic patterns, biological patterns, social patterns, and intellectual patterns.  He emphatically says they are not continuous, and though the higher levels are built on the lower patterns, they are not an extension of the lower patterns.  Having jumped or leaped to the higher static pattern rather than by extension, this means that the relationship between these different levels can be complex, even adversarial at times.  Pirsig makes fantastic use of a computer metaphor.  First you have the inorganic components.  A computer is made of metals and plastics and circuits and resistors, and capacitors (I am way out of my depth here).  These components are storing either a 1 or a 0.  Above this level are the basic programs.  It struck Pirsig that programmers have no need to understand the lower level of circuits in order to write their programs.  So then you have me writing on some sort of word processing program trying to grapple with concepts of emergence and leaps and gestalts.  Look into the program or look even deeper into the 1’s and 0’s, and you won’t find what I’m communicating.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  As human beings, we encompass all these different levels, the different patterns of inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual.  And with these patterns not being extensions of each other, yet still being essential, things get very complex.  It’s worth the read to see how Pirsig fleshes his ideas out.

                Now, I believe, I can finally get back to Chesterton.  The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason… his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle.  A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle, but though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large…In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health.  I think about this often when I talk with my conservative Christian family members.  

Family says: the Bible is inspired by God and is infallible. 

I say: How do you know that’s true?

Family says: the Bible says it’s inspired by God.  That means it’s authoritative.

I say: you can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Family says: well, the Holy Spirit confirms it your heart.

I say: so, something outside the Bible authenticates it.

Family says: Absolutely not.  Peter says Paul’s writings are Scripture.

I say: who says Peter is right?

Family says: Paul tells Timothy that all Scripture is inspired, and Peter is in the Bible.

I say: Who decided which books to but in the Bible?

Family says: God inspired a group of church leaders to decide which books were inspired.

I say: But it wasn’t unanimous and not everybody was invited to the council to decide.

Family says: now you’re just being ornery.  It just makes sense that God would preserve his Word so that we would know who He is.  QED.

                You can argue until your blue in face, but even using scripture itself to show a contradiction will not get the third-class carriage out of the old, circular ruts.  The irony is that in raising Truth to the ultimate pedestal, it causes the believer’s organ of thought to become diseased.  And unless there is some remaining desire for health, some longing for Beauty, some awe for the integrity of a gestalt, then the proud reason, the staunch defense of truth will keep the individual a prisoner of her narrow, circular cage. 

                I kind of rushed this last part, (it’s late) so let me know what needs clarifying.