I just finished reading Jeanette Winterson’s new sci-fi novel The Stone Gods, a profound book in many ways, dense with meaning layered via allegory and allusion.  It is set in a post-apocalyptic world we have destroyed by nuclear war, consumerism, pollution, and it’s about the longing for a “place to land,” a new beginning after the shipwreck of our birth.  At one point, the main character, Billie Crusoe (alluding to the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe), is explaining to a Robo sapiens why World War III occurred.  It’s worth quoting at length:

The theory is that this latest war was a crisis of over-emotionalism.  Fanatics do not listen to reason, and that includes the religious Right. Since the Enlightenment we have been trying to get away from emotionalism….all those so-called gut feelings that allow us to blame our aggression and intolerance on what comes naturally.

Yet the evidence suggests that rational people are no better than irrational people at controlling their aggression–rather, they are more manipulative. Think of the cool, calm boss at work who has no care for how his workers might be feeling. Think of the political gurus who organize mass migration of people and jobs, home and lives on the basis of statistics and economic growth. Think of the politicians who calmly decide that it is better to spend six hundred and fifty billion dollars on war and a fraction of that on schools and hospitals, food and clean water.

These people are very aggressive, very controlling, but they hide it behind intellectualization and hard-headed thinking.

For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion–in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence.  We are not robots…but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgment. (141-42)

Winterson echoes the findings of recent neuroscience on the centrality of emotions in thinking (think Damasio, Minsky, LeDoux).  The point she makes about educating people how to think is simple but significant.  It reminds me of a previous post about “mind control,” about learning how to control our emotions, channeling the energy flow through our brain (”psychoenergonomics”).

A recent book by Thich Nhat Hanh, titled The Art of Power, has exercises in its appendix for learning how to control intense emotions.  Perhaps we should have classes in meditative practice in public school, as the Dalai Lama suggests in Destructive Emotions.

Our “Green Sanctuary” book group at the Universalist Unitarian Church of Haverhill just finished reading and discussing Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, a book with so many ideas focused on the concept of energonomics or energy management that I could write a month of entries on just this one book. But I wanted to make sure I made mention of it at least once. I’m calling this book THE most important book on the planet, because I think it provides a blueprint for moving forward in sustainable living. The book proposes the elimination of waste–or, rather, the transformation of all waste into food (waste = food), which simply uses nature as its model:

Most packaging (which makes up about 50% of the volume of the municipal solid waste stream) can be designed as biological nutrients, what we call *products of consumption.* The idea is to compose these products of materials that can be tossed on the ground or compost heap to safely biodegrade after use–literally to be consumed. (105)

The concept of “connecting to natural energy flows” is ultimately a kind of energy management–an issue of energonomics:

In the long run, connecting to natural energy flows is a matter of reestablishing our fundamental connection to the source of all good growth on the planet: the sun, that tremendous nuclear power plant 93 million miles away (exactly where we want it). Even at such distances, the sun’s heat can be devastating, and it commands a healthy respect for the delicate orchestration of circumstances that makes natural energy flows possible. Humans thrive on the earth under such intense emanations of heat and light only because billions of years of evolutionary processes have created the atmosphere and surface that support our existence–the soil, plant life, and cloud cover that cool the planet down and distribute water around it, keeping the atmosphere within a temperate range that we can live in. So reestablishing our connection to the sun by definition includes maintaining interdependence with all the other ecological circumstances that make natural energy flows possible in the first place. (131-132)

Humans have come to rely on fossil fuels rather than “harnessing and maximizing local natural energy flows” (31):

For the majority of our simple energy needs, humans could be accruing a great deal of current solar income, of which there is plenty: thousands of times the amount of energy needed to fuel human activities hits the surface of the planet every day in the form of sunlight.” (31, 32)

I am happy that human ingenuity is beginning to turn its attention to capturing, storing, and efficiently employing energy. Perhaps it is not too late for us.

I’m cleaning my desk and found a printout of Robert William Fogel’s Nobel Prize Lecture in Economics from 1993 titled “Economic Growth, Population Theory, and Physiology: The Bearing of Long-Term Processes on the Making of Economic Policy,” in which he considers how “thermodynamic and physiological aspects of economic growth are defined and their impact on growth rates is assessed.” He wants economic policy makers to learn from economic historians about the effects of advances in medicine etc. (”the synergism between technological and physiological improvements”) on mortality rates (thus overturning the Malthusian theory of population) and so be able to account for future demands on pension policies and health care, for example.

In the process of making his argument, he looks at the work of agricultural historians who consider average daily caloric consumption rates of European farmers in the 18th century in a way that made me think of my concept of energonomics (i.e. the management of energy), or the economics of energy flow. He notes the implication of their findings: “mature adults of the late eighteenth century must have been very small by current standards. Today the typical American male in his early thirties is about 69.7 inches tall and weighs 172 lbs. Such a male requires daily about 1,794 kcal required for basal metabolism (the energy required to keep the body functioning while at rest) and a total of 2,279 kcal for baseline maintenance (the 1,794 kal required for basal metabolism plus 485 kcal for digestion of food and vital hygiene). If either the British or the French had been that large during the eighteenth century, virtually all of the energy produced by their food supplies would have been required for maintenance and hardly any would have been available to sustain work. To have the energy necessary to produce the national products of these two countries c.1700, the typical adult male must have been quite short and very light” (76).

This also reminds me of articles published in the last few years about the “height gap” between Europeans (the Dutch in particular) and Americans–how they are growing taller, implying that the socialized health care they receive implies a higher overall standard of living, as indicated by caloric intake reflected in their greater average heights.

I found Clay Shirky’s address at the Web2.0 Expo today and found an intriguing argument for Web2.0 technologies (there’s an edited transcript version of it too).  It’s similar to what I’ve said about my haphazard and occasional attempts over the years to write novels:  “It’s better than watching TV.”  Shirky suggests that, even if kids are playing World of Warcraft or some other silly video game, they are at least not passively consuming the shows that he and I consumed as kids (for him–”Gilligan’s Island”, and I did watch my fair share of that as well!).  He suggests that it takes a while to figure out what to do with the “cognitive surplus” that results from economic changes that leave people with leisure time, and until we do, we waste our time getting drunk or watching mindless television (his blog post is titled “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”):

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

I mentioned in a previous post the work of positive psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, who speaks of those historical moments when “surplus attention” (a different way of conceiving “cognitive surplus”) allowed for explosive creativity in the culture (5th century Greece, 15th century Florence, 19th century Paris).  Fusing Shirky and Mihaly with my concept of energonomics, we see the way that this excess psychic energy is being channeled now into experimental communicative practices of collective intelligence.

Just a note about how I came upon the Shirky speech:  I “twitter” now and follow a number of educational technologists.  One of them mentioned this speech in a “tweet” and so I pursued the link.  In my presentation on “mnemonomics,” I suggest that by connecting in this way to other people via social networking I have linked to their minds which have become an extension of my own:  “social networking as collective intelligence.”

In reading Deleuzian Interrogations I was happy to see an acknowledgment of how difficult Deleuze’s writing is. DeLanda writes/says the following:

I think the main obstacle to engaging with Deleuze directly is the style. He writes as if he deliberately wanted to be misunderstood, or at least that’s the way it impacts someone who, like me, is trained mostly in Anglo-American analytical philosophy. (I suppose that if one is used to struggle with Continental authors one may get a different impression). He changes terminology in every book (so that the virtual dimension becomes a ‘plane of consistency’ in one, a ‘body without organs’ in another, a ‘machinic phylum’ in another and so on) and never ever gives explicit definitions (or hides them well). I suppose that was an attempt on his part of preventing a given terminology to solidify too soon, to keep things fluid and heterogeneous. Fine. But I cannot deal with that and hardly expect complexity theorists to put up with it either. (19-20)

Wow! DeLanda can’t deal with it. I don’t feel so alone anymore! I always found it difficult but never wrote him off as so many others do (as they do with Lacan and Derrida as well). After struggling for 15 years or so with all of these difficult, shifting concepts, I have had the benefit of recent books that help a great deal with putting Deleuze into plain English: Peter Hallward’s Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, Todd May’s Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, and everything by DeLanda has been incredibly helpful, and I highly recommend these to those struggling with the primary texts of Deleuze.

In the same interview, Protevi also comments:

Once you get past their style (and yes, it is less daunting for someone like me who came up through the ranks reading Heidegger and Derrida, but the ontological shift, from post-phenomenology to materialism, is wrenching!), there are indeed lots of reasons why the Deleuze and complexity theory connection is so interesting. (21)

I have had the same experience as he has, having cracked my theoretical teeth on deconstruction as presented through many of the professors I had while working toward my M.A. & Ph.D. degrees at the University of Florida from 1986-1994 (including one of Derrida’s translators, John Leavey)–though I have to say that some of Deleuze’s work is the most challenging reading I’ve ever done. Even Derrida strives to make sense–and does most of the time, despite his resorting to “puncepts.” One thing is for sure: it makes reading anything else a piece of cake…

I have also experienced this “wrenching ontological shift” that Protevi speaks of as well, and didn’t realize it until I read some of the explanatory works listed above.

I was reading Deleuzian Interrogations: A Conversation with Manuel DeLanda, John Protevi, and Torkild Thanem and bumped into this interesting quote:

Delanda:  “I cannot imagine a materialist philosophy which is not also realist. On the other hand, someone who believes that god and the devil exist independently of our minds is also a realist but clearly not a materialist. The only problem with the term ‘materialism’ is that not only matter but also energy and physical information are needed to account for self-organizing phenomena and the processes which fabricate physical entities” (3).

This reminded me of a book I read titled The Bit and the Pendulum: From Quantum Computing to M Theory–The New Physics of Information which left me with the same impression that DeLanda emphasizes here. As author Tom Siegfried writes, “Many scientists now conceive of information as something real, as real as space, time, energy, and matter” (7).    Siegfried speaks of how the study of biology benefits from this perspective as one example of how this new field is changing the sciences:

Information’s reality has reshaped the way biologists study and understand cells, the brain, and the mind. Cells are not merely vats of chemicals that turn food into energy, but sophisticated computers, translating messages from the outside world into the proper biological responses. True, the brain runs on currents of electrical energy through circuits of cellular wires. But the messages in those currents can be appreciated only by understanding the information they represent” (9)

This notion that “information is the foundation of reality” (59) made me consider creating a new neologism to capture this new sense of reality:  “infonomics” — the “management of information.”  Whatever word we use–whether it’s infonomics or energonomics–this book suggests that information must become part of what we consider when we speak of managing energy.

DeLanda points to how the term “materialism” falls short of capturing all that comes into play in the triad of energy-matter-information flows.  He draws attention to this phenomenon in his own book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History when he concludes that

the flows of materials whose history we described involved more than just matter-energy. They also included *information*, understood not in static terms as mere physical patterns (measured in bits) but in dynamic terms, as patterns capable of self-replication and catalysis (259-60).

See this “Quote of the Day: New Knowledge” from Will Richardson’s blog for an interesting reference to a 600 pg. report on “Collective Intelligence.” This meme is getting legs.

I have mentioned the idea of “Collective Intelligence” in two previous posts (”Memory in the Age of Electracy” and “The Civilization of Illiteracy“) and will now add it as a tag/category.  It seems to be a meme that is catching on, as I just encountered it again in the “Horizon Project 2008” wikispace, wherein classrooms are connecting to enact some of the concepts in the book Wikinomics and The World is Flat (the Horizon Project being a sister project to the “Flat Classroom Project“).  The Horizon 2008 Report offers a timeline and suggests that in 4-5 years collective intelligence and “social operating systems” will be adopted.  Pretty radical!

While developing a presentation for a group of librarians about social bookmarking as public memory, this neologism “mnemonomics” occurred to me as a way to organize my presentation.  What I have been trying to do with bloglines and del.icio.us is to “manage my mnemonic prosthetics”:  if we think of technology as a prosthesis or extension of our memories, then scanning headlines from the WALL STREET JOURNAL, NEW YORK TIMES, NPR, etc. and adding ones I want to keep into my delicious account become a way of laying down my cyborg memories.

Mnemonomics:  a fusion of mneme (”memory”) and nomos (”management”).  A bit tricky on the tongue, however.  Try saying mnemonomician, for example!

Read Montague’s 5th chapter of Why Choose This Book? is about “The Value Machine” and discusses the brain as a system that assigns value.  For Montague, “Once life has started, valuation mechanisms were an inevitable consequence. . .” and every decision becomes an economic decision.  He traces such valuation even back to E. coli, which he uses as a simplified example of the human capacity to care.

Even single-celled E. coli are capitalists; they follow the money.  They follow the asparate, a source of energy and raw materials. . . .E coli has committed a large number of its internal resources to build, value, and respond to a model of the “aspartate world” around it. (120-21)

He then posits a hypothetical dumber version of E. coli (playfully called D. coli) that just consumes aspartate whenever it comes upon it.  Which would survive?

If aspartate were always available in excess, D. coli might well be more adaptive than E. coli, since it doesn’t waste energy trying to build “aspartate models” and control its behavior to run toward gradients of this energy source. However, D. coli is “dumb” because the real world is simply not that accommodating. External energy sources aren’t uniformly distributed, nor are they always plentiful. E. coli’s energetic investment into model-building is sensible, and amounts to splitting the net energy from each aspartate molecule consumed into two separate streams:  one for fuel and one for information to be used to build a better model of its “aspartate world”–a modeling stream. (121-22)

Now if a little single-celled creature is doing all that, imagine the energy that big-brained humans are expending!  In fact, I recall reading that the complexity of human brains emerged as a result of the complexity of surviving among a social species.

The challenge in studying human decision-making is in understanding how the economic decisions we make “follow the energy” in the same way that E. coli does.  A further challenge–the ultimate challenge?–is in getting people to make the right decisions, ones that lead to optimal physical and mental health.  An article in today’s Boston Globe addresses this challenge among the poor.