In a commentary that accompanies his film Powaqqatsi, Godfrey Reggio says, to paraphrase him, that the world is a unit that is held together by its web of diversity.

This is a problematic thesis for those who see the Internet (and by extension technology in general) as a unifying force and one that allows for unparalleled empathy across national, racial, and economic boundaries.

While we haven't been afraid to shine a light at the downside of technology, or its misuse, Reggio's view highlights a problem that goes deeper than technology's side effects. Technology works according to standards, and accordingly we find it standardizing ways of life around the globe. Homogeneity is a necessary part of technology's makeup.

The degree to which this is true, technology is therefore - lin ight of Reggio's comment - a threat to what makes the world the world.

Note that there are important evolutionary connotations in Reggio's claim, as well, for a lack of diversity is inherently dangerous to the survival of species and ecosystems.

A passage in the NY Times about the latest study on the Antikythera mechanism brings us back to Tarnas' discussion of the attempt to bring Romantic and scientific thought together. Tarnas notes that Goethe felt that, "the human spirit does not simply impose its order on nature, as Kant thought. Rather, nature's spirit brings forth its own order through man, who is the organ of nature's self revelation."

That view is certainly in line with the proposal that man's and nature's aspirations (whether explicitly identified or not) are shared.

What's more it helps explain the point that Dr. François Charette of the University of Munich museum in Germany made with regard to the Antikythera mechanism. Noting that the mechanism, made around 150-100 B.C., employed gears that weren't seen again for 1,000 years, Charette noted that "The gear-wheel, in this case, had to be reinvented."

Note that he said reinvented, not rediscovered. Without making this a semantic argument and instead focusing on the face value of what he said, how does man come to the same brilliant, world changing invention more than once?

Could it be evolution of wheels and gears, such that there were millions that again fell by the wayside in the 1,000 years after Antikythera? Or could it be that a geared wheel is some perfect ideal naturally affixed in our minds?

Staying with the passage in the first post of the evening, Tarnas goes on to say:

"The modern experience was still vexed by a profound incoherence, with the dichotomies of the Romantic and scientific temperaments reflecting the Western Weltanschauung's seemingly unbridgeable disjunction between human consciousness and unconscious cosmos."

He closes the section a few lines later by adding:

"Modern man was a divided animal, inexplicably self-aware in an indifferent universe."

These passages beg a few key questions:
1. Are the cosmos unconscious, or (while not self aware) do they have aspirations?
2. If the cosmos have aspirations, are they nonetheless indifferent to humanity or simply singularly focused and so far beyond the realm of our understanding?
3. If the cosmos have aspirations, are they at odds with our own?
4. Are we "inexplicably" self aware, or rather ironically, or accidentally. Does the answer put us out of sync with the aspirations of the cosmos, or somehow preclude us from being a tool in the cosmic aspiration?

In a short but interesting interview with Daniel Dennett on TheTech.org, Dennett describes natural selection as generating "exquisitely well designed materials," but adds that the process is "profligate" and "wasteful." In other words, it is a very inefficient process.

However, we are seeing increasing evidence that organisms use their genes efficiently, with different creatures putting the same genes to similar but different uses. This is another example of the power of science to explain how.

What's missing is the why. We know that the process of natural selection aids in survival, but why do the very simple organisms from which all the complexity of life originated incessantly push for change? What was wrong with the status quo? Are they always compelled by their environment?

The answer could be - in reference to the prior post - that no those organisms weren't always pushed by their environment and that instead all nature including humans has aspirations. Science seems to be taking up the gauntlet on this, and certainly that's what FC was in a way pursuing, and we more so.

In his fascinating timeline of Western thought, The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas describes the conflict between scientific thought and Romantic perspectives in a post-Kantian world. He notes on p. 377 that "both scientist and artist simultaneously experienced the breakdown and dissolution of the old categories of time, space, causality, and substance. But the deeper discontinuities between the scientific universe and human aspiration remained unresolved."

The key term here is human aspiration. When we look at the motive, spoken or unspoken, that has driven art, religion, literature, and even scientific inquiry, we have to come back again and again to human aspiration. Where there's a conflict between science and the humanities -- and in spite of some efforts by the likes of E.O. Wilson to resolve them, they've been present since Copernicus -- it can be largely pinned on the fact that science hasn't, doesn't, or can't enfold human aspirations into its explanations.

It's foolish for Dennett and Dawkins and others to attack religions on rational grounds, which isn't to say that they don't deserve it. Religious people are wrong to attempt to present rational arguments for god.

But religion, when it avoids literalism, speaks a different language than science, for it isn't focused on explaining how. It is focused on being, a question science doesn't address directly. It's arguable that the entire premise of religion is to get beyond biology -- in terms of biological appetites and biological limits. Science is being applied to the same goal.

Daniel Dennett has an interesting post on Edge.org wherein among other things he "forgives" friends who prayed for him during a recent life threatening medical incident. Dennett is at the forefront of a "new atheism," as Wired recently called it, where he is joined most famously by Richard Dawkins.

Dennett's take on modern medicine is largely right in that it does undergo constant scrutiny, though his characterization of it as being imbued with "humility" is marred by a poor word choice. Doctors rarely admit their mistakes or their wrongheaded assumptions.

More interesting is that Dennett sees prayer as a waste of time. Here he is very much in league with the usually more belligerent Dawkins, who sees any reliance on faith as misguided and dangerous. Both might be right in that one day Christians, Muslims, and all other religions might one day be too embarrassed to admit to have faith in the supernatural, but at present Dennett's criticism is too narrow. He is right that there is no proof of the intercessional power of prayer, but he is wrong in assuming that that is the only value it might have -- in other words, that because prayer doesn't "work" the one doing the praying would be better off doing concrete acts of good.

What Dennett misses is that prayer, which for all we know could take nearly as many forms as there are people praying, can be good for those doing the praying. There are obvious mental benefits, which when collected on a societal scale can be good for civilization. As well, the contemplation and humility that accompanies prayer can build the strength in individuals to then go out and do charitable works. For Dennett to assume a direct exchange of prayer and intercession is to focus too much on one aspect of prayer.

One of the big problems with prayer is that it is done publicly, which at least in the Christian religion was something frowned upon by Jesus. The public displays by fundamentalists and evangelicals are symptoms of other, larger misuses of religion.

While Dennett and Dawkins have valuable practical reasons for seeking to undermine and discredit religion, their chosen routes for doing so leave many avenues areas unexamined. Both would do well to consider Camille Paglia's recent comments in a Salon.com interview. Responding to a question about the status of the Democratic parts as the "anti-religion" party she includes this assessment: "But religion is absolutely central to this country in ways that Europe's secularized intellectuals fail to understand. I'm speaking here as an atheist who studies religion and respects it enormously. In the history of mankind, the benefits that religion has brought to society in shaping behavior and moral choice are overwhelming in comparison to the negatives, which anyone can list -- like religious wars and bigotry. Without religion, we'd have anarchy."

The quote in the last post was taken from The Third Chimpanzee, a book Jared Diamond wrote before Guns, Germs, and Steel. If I find fault with his characterization of natural selection it is only as an example; it's a practice shared by many other scientists.

At the end of chapter four of The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond writes: "The goal of all human activity can't be reduced to the leaving of descendants. Once human culture was firmly in place, it acquired new goals."

Indeed we have, and there can be few examples of those goals more powerful than our art, commerce, religion, and our indulgence of excess (say in food and entertainment).

Yet Diamond rightly points out at the end of that chapter that "we evolved, like other animals, to win at the contest of leaving as many descendants as possible. Much of the legacy of that game strategy is still with us."

In fact, the drive to survive is at the base of most of our endeavors. At times it is symbolic survival (our penchant to archive photos, write books) and at others it is literal, as when we find new treatments for life-threatening diseases. The survival we're focused on now, however, is different than the survival Diamond writes about and which dominated our species for most of its existence. For one, today the survival effort encompasses both the species in general and the individual.

Second, survival is less focused on increasing descendants than on the meaningful, realistic, and conscious/unconscious effort to overcome the physical limits of biology. We are doing this via communication, science/medicine, and spiritual inquiry to name a few.

Life scientists are famous for saying things like, "some of the geographic variation in our appearance surely reflects natural selection molding us to local climate, just as weasels in areas with winter snow develop white fur in winter for better camouflage and survival."

The problem with this might seem like one of semantics, but it is far more than that. I'm not going to blame scientists for turning off scripture-reading literalists from the theory of evolution, but they can be faulted for these types of word choices, which can be maddening to adherents of the theory of evolution and even those sitting on the fence.

Look at the difference between saying:

- Weasels in areas with winter snow develop white fur in winter for better camouflage and survival.

Versus

- Weasels that had the ability to develop white fur in the winter have evolved as the dominant weasel species in areas with winter snow because it camouflages them and increases their survival rate.

The former, found often in biology texts, takes evolution beyond the ongoing interplay that happens between the urge of living things (say, survival) and the world. Instead, biologists phrase their examples of evolution as though within a given collection of genes there takes place purposeful strategizing to plot a course for survival for the given circumstances they face.

It's like this:

Did brown weasels start becoming white because they had to in order to survive winters? Or did those weasels who, for whatever reason, turned white in cool temperatures, simply outlast those who couldn't?

That's entirely different than saying, because there was snow weasels began to turn white in the winter.

It's clear that that isn't the message scientists want to send, but their choice of phrasing can easily lead down that path.

Outside of the language, this issue is very important for several reasons:

On a certain level, we can direct our evolution. This is true on both direct/indirect (or conscious/unconscious) levels. Take Ray Kurzweil and the idea of bio-engineering, computer-human enhancement as an example of the first; take pollution and urbanization as an example of the other.

Second, there's no doubt that humans haven't stop evolving -- we're still somewhere on the forward moving timeline that began with our walk through, and step out of, the Stone Age.

Third, we're likely the only species to recognize that we evolved and that we are evolving. But while knowing that, there's little in the way we live that suggests this knowledge is anywhere present at the forefront of our attention.

In June, New York Times technology writer David Pogue did a piece on the then recently announced decision by Bill Gates to give away most of his wealth. That decision prompted Pogue to re-tackle the contradiction of Gates the ruthless executive and Gates the philanthropist. Among other things, he ended up concluding that "Mr. Gates's entire life arc suddenly looks like a 35-year game of Robin Hood, a gigantic wealth-redistribution system on a global scale."

It is a conclusion that rings true in FC's world vision. In constructing an explanation of the world centered on humanity's drive to communicate, FC did not ignore economics and commerce. In fact, commerce was in FC's view necessary for the greater goals of humankind, with the evolution of both economies and understanding proceeding hand in hand.

While not pretending that material greed too often stood in front of our greater calling to understand and be understood (on both an individual and societal level), FC clearly considered commerce a secondary role player to the larger creative and communicative forces that move us.

Furthermore, he saw a strong link between the efficiency of our commercial systems and the progress we made toward our hope for empathy. No doubt his view will raise the ire of many, for his standard for progress in communications and understanding were largely focused on technological achievements, including the Internet. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that he considered the 20th century version of capitalism the financial form best suited to support the economics and to the provide the valuable ulterior incentives that could push our drive for empathy forward.

The Gates example is a ironic, of course. Bill Gates used the financial and commercial system beautifully to build an empire. His wealth came from providing technology instrumental to the leaps we've taken in instantaneous communication; he is now dedicating that wealth to prolonging life -- pushing medicines to limits that will let us overcome our biological weaknesses -- to get beyond biology, as it were.

In his column in the June issue of Discover, Jaron Lanier tackles the problems of taking consciousness as a matter of faith or of dismissing its existence altogether (as, he notes, Daniel Dennett does). Highlighting the impossibility of conducting proofs for the existence of consciousness and the difficulty of ignoring that there is some thing that joins subjective experiences, Lanier writes: "Consciousness is precisely the only thing that is just as real if it's an illusion."

This is an immensely important issue that runs through the realms of science, philosophy, and psychology. Consider:

- Although there's no agreement on what consciousness is, those who posit its existence invariably have it linked in some way to subjective experience. This puts it at the base of any grounds people have for understanding one another (as hinted at in the beginning of the prior post).

- Consciousness is thus inextricably entwined in the philosophical and psychological relationship between subject and object, and the ongoing debate over how those are linked.

- The form and function of consciousness are thus central to any possibility for empathy, with an understanding the former a likely prerequisite for measuring the presence of the latter.

- Because consciousness is generally regarded as one of the things that distinguishes us from the rest of the natural world (or at least provides a basis for other distinguishers like language and art), its existence also can be viewed as an example that we have already moved beyond (the rest of) biology. How and to what degree are therefore questions that should offer clues about why we have that drive and where it is directed.

Assuming that we can communicate well enough to be assured that what you mean by joy, for instance, is the same as what I mean, then we can say that empathy -- the state of witnessing from two or more perspectives simultaneously -- is real. We feel it. But is it real in only a psychological sense?

Ontologically, is it possible for us to hold side by side and at once both our being as subject and object? Psychologically, it feels like we can, and once doing so we find it relatively easy to incorporate other subjects. But metaphysically how do we posit perceiving both at once without an eternal regressing to a subject doing the observing?

Pursuing this question can induce the above-mentioned state, though not often can it entirely escape the peril of subject/object, as Sartre and others have testified to. This doesn't lead the pursuit of empathy to ruin but only to incompleteness. And importantly there are still grounds along both existential and Christian lines that suggest we can avoid, or need not fall into, an eternal regressing.

An area where FC runs into problems, however, is in proposing the consequences of empathy. Holding multiple subjects in simultaneity should induce understanding, and ultimately peace and harmony. None are in great evidence.

Perhaps we're being too hard on FC. The path to transcendence and understanding is never an easy one to embark upon willingly, and even when the means for forward progress are fully disclosed, using them takes a strong effort that nonetheless leaves most us fragile and easily distracted from the goal. Just as Christians are easily pulled from their path, so too do those who would use communication to reach a new level of understanding readily go adrift. FC was aware of this.

What's more, central to his thought was that this move to know and be known is evolutionary. Over time the building blocks of our civilization -- economics, politics, technology -- should all support improved means to increase the frequency and duration of empathy, precisely because in part we pursue those improvements so that we can know and be known.

But if this drive is so central to the nature of change, why aren't the positive consequences more manifest? That's an especially important question today, when our technological advances seem so well suited for a proliferation of empathy. We can't ignore the possibility of a lull and/or digression in our evolution. But it is still difficult to overlook the fact that our tech tools are more often being used for voyeurism and to objectify.

There are other aspects to FC's work that shine an intensely bright light on our understanding of what propels civilization, if not forward at least into an unyielding state of change. But before highlighting those, his idea of empathy, a pillar of his thought, deserves further attention.

He didn't regard empathy as a sociobiological tool or offshoot that aids in our preservation. His empathy had a teleological core. If not the end purpose of the biology of consciousness, then it was an elemental interim stage in its development beyond which none of us could see.

As noted, his definition of empathy had specific references to time and space. It was an experience, understood by reason but only ever achieved as the flux of psychological states would allow. Here, he argued that empathy was in no way materially distinguishable from the transcendence attained via religious contemplation or philosophical inquiry. That's a point theologians and many philosophers would deny, but FC nonetheless felt himself very much in league with them. Whether incited by passion, an ontological expedition, or a belief that we have a communion with God, empathy to FC was a union of neurobiology, physics, evolution, emotion, and an indivisible spiritual/biological drive.

It's interesting then that where his definition of empathy tripped up was, one, in what he posited would be the consequence of it spreading -- in other words its the ground for it as a guiding force; and two, on the question of whether philosophically empathy was attainable.

In his review of the 2002 Paul Schrader film Auto Focus, Roger Ebert noted that "From its earliest days, home video has had an intimate buried relationship with sex." This comes up because the film is about Bob Crane, the star of Hogan's Heroes who became infamous for his recorded sexual exploits. It is also an acute point of departure for a dissection of a key problem that FC faced while arguing for the unifying power of the Internet.

For all the online meetings of strangers that turned into marriages and for all the ways in which the Internet took people sitting in their offices to foreign lands, FC knew full well the shortcomings of communications technology. He had no illusions about the difficulty of overcoming a central characteristic of all media, and he continually wondered if empathy would be achievable. Today, in spite of the appearance of virtual worlds like Second Life, I'm sure he would continue to question.

When it comes to generating empathy, the problem with all media is that they turn subjects into objects. Different media provide different leverage for artists and writers to exploit in an attempt to generate empathy (if that's their aim) - or something like it. Their success depends on the artist (such as Werner Herzog) and the disposition of the consumer of that story, photograph, or film.

But photographs first and films later have proved especially potent at objectifying. The proliferation of pornography is the paramount example of this. And what is particularly interesting is that both film and photographs have enabled subjects to objectify themselves. Bob Crane not only filmed his sex life but was also known to watch his own home movies, turning an experienced life into an observed one.

And so we come back to Ebert's point about the connection between film technology and sex. There is a fundamental relationship between them, demonstrated not only by Bob Crane but the huge numbers of amateur porn sites now populating the Web, including home movies. Part of the world of sex is about submitting to instincts (which itself presents a problem to the idea that we might be driven to go beyond biology) but part of it is related to this allure of objectifying the subject, of turning people into objects.

Porn is built to a degree on the need to be lusted for, and new technologies have enabled that at a once unimaginable scale. But while amateurs, for instance, who submit their own photographs to sites find satisfaction in the knowledge they're being seen, on some basic level their satisfaction also comes from seeing themselves. Porn, with this marriage of sex and technology, has enabled us to turn ourselves into objects. This wasn't something easily done before film and especially before the Internet. Without a drive to do that, to objectify the self, there would be no one submitting their favorite shots.

The same holds true for sites that are not pornographic. FC would learn with little surprise that some of the most popular sites on the Web today are Youtube.com and MySpace.com. While these are forms of communication that don't have that strong bond of sex/objectification/technology, they are notably focused mainly on film (as opposed to text) and they are based on users submitting their own material, often of themselves. They are, in addition to sites for drawing attention to ourselves and meeting strangers, platforms for objectifying ourselves. It's no accident that they've become tremendously successful.

This underscores the primary weakness in FC's theory that the Internet is a crucial means for us to realize our primal drive to understand and be understood. Why? Because it is questionable if either can be attained - if the subject/object problem can be overcome - online.

The central power of Herzog's picture came from the fact that Treadwell hadn't had the opportunity to yet edit his film, something he so cleverly did when given the chance. A clearer picture of his conflicts and his person was left revealed.

That immediacy that technology allows for (though isn't always utilized) is part of what FC saw as so unifying about it. Obviously that characteristic runs through the Internet as well.

There's no little irony in the fact that Treadwell's story has spread thanks to technology like this; no little irony that while editing prevails, blogs are a perfect example of how technology is an enabler that tends toward (un)intentional confessional -- just as in Treadwell's snippets of film; and no little irony that the same questions that arise from his use of the technology arise here too, question each blogger's motivation.

The great Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man on many levels illustrates the drives that FC was compelled to talk about and theorize on. The movie's subject, Tim Treadwell, found a way to battle and defeat his own demons and habits by finding communion with grizzly bears. He adopted a mission to protect them. It was a mission he stayed true to, and while his vision of what he needed to accomplish and the forces he had to battle along the way might have been distorted he also found in that mission something that satisfied his selfish needs.

The movie is comprised largely of Tim's own footage, which was shot over several years in wild Alaska. Parts are educational, as he intended, but because he was often there alone, they also are confessional and filled with moments of dialogue, drama, and showmanship that emerge out of loneliness, boredom, and great reflection. In every confession there are moments of self deception that are as telling as those feelings revealed honestly. In his camera, Tim gave us those, and the reward is remarkable.

Tim was a troubled man, and his solution for dealing with his problems were radical, some would say insane. There are also grounds to suggest that his tactics were harmful to the bears he came to know. He is, therefore, a person man people will find hard to empathize with; indeed, we're as likely to find as many people who came to dislike him as a result of this portrait as those who even came to sympathize with him. But like him or not, he accomplished several brilliant things in his life and his footage.

To start, his films and photos are incredibly beautiful.

Second, he captured on film life's swirl of psychological forces. Tim had an addictive personality, and somehow -- with great strength -- he directed those forces within him to a dedication to living in the jungle among bears. This was a man who was born on Long Island. How could he get from there to Alaska? The strife of that life would have been so easy to abandon. In his films he captured some hint of what took him (and kept him in) that space in the world and in his own soul.

Staying in Alaska was a battle to be sure. He celebrated the danger of it, and it sounds that in some ways he was addicted to the danger. But as he was alone for months on end we know there were moments when this must have been unbearably difficult. In snippets of those moments, we are rewarded with his views presented from one other special part of his soul.

Herzog said that his one hope for the film is that illuminates some part of our human condition. That, of course, is the purpose of all art; and in this respect the film succeeds. What Tim managed in using his camera as he did was a document of living with an honesty that was, and at times was not, intended. We're not invited into Tim's life to judge it but to be touched by it. Many forums (paintings, photographs, text) will allow for the same depth of feeling, but what is special about film is the immediacy of each event; the spontaneity of each take (and the intended and unintended impressions captured in each); and the context that the visuals give to Tim's thoughts and disposition at that time.

Falling in line with FC's view, Tim demonstrates an unyielding need to communicate with himself and someone/something much larger. It is not surprising that Tim's friends later said that he would have been very pleased with the film, in part because it finally makes him the rockstar he always wanted to be. This goes to FC's idea that a part of our nature is to push for understanding and to be understood, in part at least for selfish reasons.

Inherent in FC's view of the world is a battle of our nature with itself. Our drive, FC said, is to communicate. It is a compulsion of our nature to in a way overcome nature at large, not accidentally through the use of technology. In this respect, the film is very much a testament to our uneasy relationship with nature. We are inextricably a part of it, yet divided from much of it by our technological contrivances -- contrivances that Tim very much came to hate. Our use of technology is a significant component of what separates us from the rest of nature. Where Tim saw beauty in the order of the natural world, society at large tries to impose order and safety on the chaos of nature through the use of technology.

Finally, while Tim sought unity with the natural world, he was forever separated from full communion with bears because he sought it and because of the way he sought it -- that is, through film. It is amazing that only through technology was Tim able to share the magic that he had sought and mostly found in the Alaskan woods.

While clearly not what FC in mind when his thoughts crystallized around the idea and progress of the Web, he would certainly be intrigued by a recent NY Times article about a teenage boy who used (and was used by) webcams to create a porn kingdom. Perversions have a way of pushing people to make the most of what's available, and that was clearly the case there. The boy developed an audience of men from around the world, eventually making a great deal of money trying to satisfy the unsatisfiable -- and not surprisingly at a great cost to himself.

Clearly, in those relationships there was nothing empathetic. Those were wolves feeding off prey that at times did take advantage right back at them. There was no sympathy even, or understanding. It was all about taking.

But as disappointing as these kinds of developments are -- they are not only destructive in what they are, but they magnify the loss of what could have been -- they are not sufficient to remove the validity and beauty of FC's vision. He didn't once expect that the emergence of the Internet would overnight bring a culmination of humankind's centuries of work. The Internet is an important, ongoing evolution. And throughout it there were (and are) bound to be malignancies.

While FC rightly pointed out that selfishness plays a strong role in humankind's drive to know and be known, the goal that he saw drawing all this effort out of people was far more admirable. He envisioned that what people have only ever been after is empathy.

It is not an easily maintained vision, especially when you consider that so many people are eager to not know and to not understand; when you consider how many people are afraid of seeing truth and experiencing perspective. There is also the difficulty in admitting that the motives among those who do seek empathy could be tinged with selfishness.

But FC's ideas were formed in the crucible of the Internet. Looking at and experiencing that world-transforming development, he came to a new understanding of how the past had come to be and what the future would hold, in some form. In rapidly advancing and converging communications technologies, FC saw the opportunity not only to know, but to know instantly.

From there, his next proposition was a short but keenly deciphered step forward. If a person can know another person's thoughts instantly, then we are only a matter of degrees not paradigms from the opportunity to know all people's thoughts instantly. Our conception of time is changed. And if those people are located around the world, then space too is altered. As he put it:

"The eternal experience eliminates past and future, eliminating time. The universal experience in simultaneity destroys distance and at once possesses all space, thereby eliminating space.

For each man to experience all men in simultaneity is to be all time, to be all space. “That art thou.” It is nature knowing itself. It is the life living.

This is universal empathy."