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E.O. Wilson 

Last summer, eminent sociobiologist E.O. Wilson published an article in Harvard Magazine:

On the Origins of the Arts 

….By using this power in addition to examine human history, we can gain insights into the origin and nature of aesthetic judgment. For example, neurobiological monitoring, in particular measurements of the damping of alpha waves during perceptions of abstract designs, have shown that the brain is most aroused by patterns in which there is about a 20 percent redundancy of elements or, put roughly, the amount of complexity found in a simple maze, or two turns of a logarithmic spiral, or an asymmetric cross. It may be coincidence (although I think not) that about the same degree of complexity is shared by a great deal of the art in friezes, grillwork, colophons, logographs, and flag designs. It crops up again in the glyphs of the ancient Middle East and Mesoamerica, as well in the pictographs and letters of modern Asian languages. The same level of complexity characterizes part of what is considered attractive in primitive art and modern abstract art and design. The source of the principle may be that this amount of complexity is the most that the brain can process in a single glance, in the same way that seven is the highest number of objects that can be counted at a single glance. When a picture is more complex, the eye grasps its content by the eye’s saccade or consciously reflective travel from one sector to the next. A quality of great art is its ability to guide attention from one of its parts to another in a manner that pleases, informs, and provokes

This is fascinating.  My first question would be how we could determine if the pattern of degree of complexity is the result of cognitive structural limits (a cap on our thinking) or if it represents a sufficient visual sensory catalyst in terms of numbers of elements to cause an excitory response (neurons firing, release of dopamine, acetylcholine etc. ) and a subsequent feedback loop. Great art, or just sometimes interesting designs exhibiting novelty can hold us with a mysterious, absorbing fascination

Later, Wilson writes:

….If ever there was a reason for bringing the humanities and science closer together, it is the need to understand the true nature of the human sensory world, as contrasted with that seen by the rest of life. But there is another, even more important reason to move toward consilience among the great branches of learning. Substantial evidence now exists that human social behavior arose genetically by multilevel evolution. If this interpretation is correct, and a growing number of evolutionary biologists and anthropologists believe it is, we can expect a continuing conflict between components of behavior favored by individual selection and those favored by group selection. Selection at the individual level tends to create competitiveness and selfish behavior among group members—in status, mating, and the securing of resources. In opposition, selection between groups tends to create selfless behavior, expressed in
greater generosity and altruism, which in turn promote stronger cohesion and strength of the group as a whole 

Very interesting.

First, while I am in no way qualified to argue evolution with E.O. Wilson, I am dimly aware that some biological scientists might be apt to take issue with Wilson’s primacy of multilevel evolution. As a matter of common sense, it seems likely to me that biological systems might have a point where they experience emergent evolutionary effects – the system itself has to be able to adapt to the larger environmental context – how do we know what level of “multilevel” will be the significant driver of natural selection and under what conditions? Or does one level have a rough sort of “hegemony” over the evolutionary process with the rest as “tweaking” influences? Or is there more randomness here than process?

That part is way beyond my ken and readers are welcome to weigh in here.

The second part, given Wilson’s assumptions are more graspable. Creativity often is a matter of individual insights becoming elaborated and exploited, but also has strong collaborative and social aspects. That kind of cooperation may not even be purposeful or ends-driven by both parties, it may simply be behaviors that incidentally  help create an environment or social space where creative innovation becomes more likely to flourish – such as the advent of writing and the spread of literacy giving birth to a literary cultural explosion of ideas and invention – and battles over credit and more tangible rewards.

Need to ponder this some more.

Out of our Minds: Learning to be Creative by Sir Ken Robinson 

Wild Bill Donovan by Douglas Waller  

I am about half finished with the first book by creativity in education guru Sir Ken Robinson, who also has a new book out called, The Element. Technically, I have been reading a large volume of books, articles and research regarding creativity and creative thinking lately for a project, but most of those are academic in nature while Robinson is writing for mainstream audiences. I may or may not review it here, but it is clearly argued and Robinson is an effective popularizer.

The biography of Wild Bill Donovan is timely. If the idiosyncratic and at times improvisational OSS, staffed by gifted amateurs, eccentric adventurers and white-shoe, unapologetically elite WASPS, was something that would be impossible to exist in today’s rancid political climate, there are elements in that legacy that are in short supply in today’s modern and highly technological IC.

Ironically, many of the pioneers in creativity research that developed that field within cognitve psychology in America were themselves disproportionately veterans of the OSS.

The Violent Image by Neville Bolt 

Columbia University Press just sent me a review copy of The Violent Image, by Dr. Neville Bolt of King’s College vaunted War Studies Department.  Initially, I was amused by the colorful book jacket, but flipping through, it belies a very weighty, heavily footnoted, academic exploration of the iterative relationship between propagandistic imagery and insurgency. Even a casual perusal indicates that The Violent Image is a book many readers of ZP will  like to  get their hands on.

From the jacket:

….Neville Bolt investigates how today’s revolutionaries have rejuvenated the nineteenth century “ptopaganda of the deed” so that terrorism no longer simply goads states into overreacting, thereby losing legitimacy. Instead the deed has become a tool to highlight the underlying grievances of communities

A small sampling of some of the section titles:

Strategic Communications:the State
Strategic Communications: the Insurgent
Networks in Real and Virtual Worlds
Images as Weapons
POTD as Insurgent Concept of Operations
Anonymity and Leaderless Revolutions
The Arab Uprisings and Liberation Technology
POTD as Metaphor

Endnotes run slightly over 90 pages and the bibliography tips the scales at 50, for those interested in such things.

Looking forward to reading this and seeing how Bolt presents his case.

[ by Charles Cameron -- a follow up to my previous post -- and it's not religion that's the alternate reality this time, but games ]
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I just posted a long and potentially contentious post about what I called a person / position paradox: that of the member of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and chairman of the US House Science Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, Rep. Paul Broun MD (R-GA), who said recently:

that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell…

And he meant it.

**

Well, while I was writing that post, this little gem (above) crossed my bows (ht Paxsims) — so perhaps you’ll permit me to poke a little fun at a member of the other US political party.

It seems that Colleen Lachowicz, Democratic candidate for the Maine State Semnate, is also Santiaga, Orc Assassination Rogue in the game-world, World of Warcraft.

Questions arising:

Does that make her more representative or less?
what about the fact that she plays at level 68?
is that a representative level to play at?
and an Orc Assassination Rogue? really?
or is she just a candidate who happens to be a gamer?

The image above comes from the Maine GOP, btw.

**

To look at this minor contretemps from another angle: how far are we from religion, here in the land of Orcs?

The great literary critic Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism writes of:

great art using popular forms, as Shakespeare does in his last period, or as the Bible does when it ends with a fairy tale about a damsel in distress, a hero killing dragons, a wicked witch, and a wonderful city glittering with jewels.

Frye is not knocking Revelation here, though one might at first think he is: he’s assigning it to a literary genre, as one might assign the Psalms to poetry, Kings and Chronicles to history, or the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles to biography. The Epistles, after all, are already classified as epistolary works. And — give the man a break — he’s also placing it in the same realm of great art as Shakespeare.

How far, then, do you suppose CS Lewis‘ Narnia – or Tolkien‘s Middle Earth, with its Elven folk Firstborn of the Children of Ilúvatar — might be from the World where Colleen is an Orc?

**

How much room can we concede to imagination in our “real world”?

And Dante‘s voyage took him through the three realms of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, didn’t it, and according to the Apostles Creed, Christ’s Harrowing of Hell took place between his death and resurrection.

So my next question would be:

When will we build and play the games of Paradise?

[ by Charles Cameron -- Corbin on Queen Bilqis, Qur'an and hadith regarding jinn, Pew statistics on belief in jinn -- with some earlier Natsec implications & a non-serious suggestion from contemporary physics ]
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La Jinn the Mystical Genie of the Lamp
from the Yu-Gi-Oh card game

I’ve been “fond” of the jinn (djenoun) since first encountering them in the brilliant short stories of Paul Bowles, and notably his A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard.

But that’s a literary fondness, neither science nor belief-based on my part. In my view, that’s only right and proper, since djenoun belong in the realm of imagination — or better said, the Imaginal, as Henry Corbin terms it — see note 16, p, 326. of his Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, where he speaks of the Sheikh’s Bilqis Queen of Saba in his poetry as a being “born from a jinn and a woman” — it’s a fascinating passage, connecting Bilqis with Jesus in terms of the (unorthodox) angelology that Corbin envisioned uniting the Abrahamic faiths at a visionary level.

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Here are two of the mentions of jinn in the Qur’an:

And the Jinn race We had created before from the fire of a scorching wind. [Sura 15, 27]

Say: It has been revealed to me that a company of Jinns listened (to the Qur’an). They say ‘We have really heard a wonderful Recital! It gives guidance to the Right and we have believed therein: We shall not join (in worship) any (gods) with our Lord. And exalted is the Majesty of our Lord: He has taken neither a wife nor a son.’ [Sura 72, 1-3]

And here is a tale of the Prophet and a jinn, as narrated by the Companion Malik ibn Anas:

The Prophet said to the jinni: “This is the stride of a jinni, as well as the tone of his voice!” The jinni replied: “My name is Hamah ibn Laqqis ibn Iblis.” The Prophet said: “Only two generations seperate you from him [Iblis].” He replied: “True.” The Prophet asked: “How long have you lived?” The jinni replied: “Almost all of time. I was a small boy when Abel was killed. I believed in Noah and repented at his hands after I stubbornly refused to submit to his call, until he wept and wept. I am indeed a repentant — God keep me from being among the ignorant! I met the prophet Hud and believed in his call. I met Abraham, and I was with him when he was thrown in the fire. I was with Joseph, too, when his brothers hurled him into the well—I preceded him to its bottom. I met the prophet Shu’ayb, and Moses and Jesus the son of Mary, who told me: ‘If you meet Muhammad, tell him Jesus salutes thee!’ Now I’ve delivered his message to you, and I believe in you.” The Prophet said: “What is your desire, 0 Hamah?” He said: “Moses taught me the Torah, Jesus the Gospels, can you teach me the Qur’an?” So the Prophet taught him the Qur’an.

The Tasneem Project

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Literal vs metaphorical, let alone imaginal belief is not something the interviewers who conducted the Pew poll had the leisure to distinguish — but for the record, here are their findings as to the Muslim belief in jinns:

According to the Quran, God created jinn as well as angels and humans. Belief in jinn is relatively widespread – in 13 of 23 countries where the question was asked, more than half of Muslims believe in these supernatural beings.

In the South Asian countries surveyed, at least seven-in-ten Muslims affirm that jinn exist, including 84% in Bangladesh. In Southeast Asia, a similar proportion of Malaysian Muslims (77%) believe in jinn, while fewer in Indonesia (53%) and Thailand (47%) share this belief.

Across the Middle Eastern and North African nations surveyed, belief in jinn ranges from 86% in Morocco to 55% in Iraq.

Overall, Muslims in Central Asia and across Southern and Eastern Europe (Russia and the Balkans) are least likely to say that jinn are real. In Central Asia, Turkey is the only country where a majority (63%) of Muslims believe in jinn. Elsewhere in Central Asia, about a fifth or fewer Muslims accept the existence of jinn. In Southern and Eastern Europe, fewer than four-in-ten in any country surveyed believe in these supernatural beings.

In general, Muslims who pray several times a day are more likely to believe in jinn. For example, in Russia, 62% of those who pray more than once a day say that jinn exist, compared with 24% of those who pray less often. A similar gap also appears in Lebanon (+25 percentage points), Malaysia (+24) and Afghanistan (+21).

The survey also asked if respondents had ever seen jinn. In 21 of the 23 countries where the question was asked, fewer than one-in-ten report having seen jinn, while the proportion is 12% in Bangladesh and 10% in Lebanon.

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Two markers concerning National Security concerns regarding Pakistan, nuclear weapons and those who believe (literally, energetically) in jinns — from the early 2000s, but dating back by implication to the era of Zia ul-Haq:

Just after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S., Pakistan’s intelligence service detained two retired nuclear scientists who had met with senior members of al Qaeda, including Mr. bin Laden, during charity work in Afghanistan. One, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, was a former director at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and a controversial Islamic scholar who had postulated that energy could be harnessed from fiery spirits called djinns.

WSJ, Inside Pakistan’s Drive To Guard Its A-Bombs

But as a subscriber to a brand of what is known to practitioners as “Islamic science,” which holds that the Koran is a fount of scientific knowledge, Mr. Bashiruddin Mahmood has published papers concerning djinni, which are described in the Koran as beings made of fire. He has proposed that these entities could be tapped to solve the energy crisis, and he has written on how to understand the mechanics of life after death.

NY Times, Pakistani Atomic Expert, Arrested Last Week, Had Strong Pro-Taliban Views

– together with a Pakistani critique:

If a scientist is European or Hindu he will be restricted in his vision by reason. A Muslim scientist has unlimited scope; he will relate his science to miracles, mostly performed by himself. Sultan Bashiruddin, our top enrichment expert, believed he could draw electricity from a captured jinn. (For Pakistan’s needs just one jinn would suffice.)

Khaled Ahmed, Scientists, our kind

There are times when beliefs have, or might just have, consequences.

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Jinn are significant not only for their own sakes, so to speak, but also for their etymological implications. To quote again from the Tasneem Project:

One saying of the Prophet (aws) mentions that, “God divided the jinn and the humans into ten parts. One part makes up the human race, and the other nine parts is made up of the jinn.” The invisible is everywhere. The Arabic language itself bears witness to how the invisible realm insinuates itself on everyday life. In Arabic, each time the two letters jeem and nun occur together, as in jinn, they convey the meaning of invisible or hidden. Thus, paradise is jannah because paradise is hidden from the human sight; janin is the foetus in the womb; the expression ajannahu al-layl means the night covered him.

The jinn, like paradise itself, are among the hidden secrets…

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And how large is the universe, that it might encompass the angels and jinn? Hugh Everett III quite brilliantly argued for what has come to be known as the “many worlds” hypothesis in quantum measurement while still a grad student:

Hugh Everett III was a student in his mid-twenties in 1957 when he presented his revolutionary formulation of quantum mechanics in his PhD thesis. Everett himself called his theory variously; pure wave mechanics, the relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics, and the theory of the universal wave function. His theory, however, came to be popularly known as the many-worlds interpretation, because it predicts that everything that might happen, does in fact happen. As the physicist Bryce DeWitt later described it, Everett’s theory predicts that our universe is composed of countless parallel universes that are each constantly splitting into yet further copies, and in the process, creating copies of each observer, each of which subsequently observes a different quantum universe and splits into further copies.

While a science fiction fan might embrace such a theory simply by dint of how cool it would be if something like that were true, one might naturally wonder what good scientific reason one might have for believing that our universe is in fact composed of countless parallel splitting universes.

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The whole article from which that quote was taken, The Quantum Measurement Problem and the Everett Interpretation, is indeed worth reading. But whereas physicists and (most) science fiction writers might confine their “many worlds” to physical, “materialist” universes, students of the imaginal are under no such restriction, as the same Tasneem Project article suggests:

The Muslim universe has always been made up of multiple worlds – the Qur’an itself refers to “universes” in the plural, in its open chapter al-fatihah. According to prophetic tradition, the cosmos consists of 18000 universes. …

So the jinn when summoned might come — somewhat unexpectedly — from one of Everett’s more hidden “many worlds”, perhaps?