The question concerning technology

Fantasies — or nightmares — [such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein] are just stimulants to your imagination. What we should take seriously is the idea that the next stage of history will not only include technological and organisational transformations, but also fundamental transformations in human consciousness and identity. And these could be transformations so fundamental that they will call the very term ‘human’ into question. How long do we have? No one really knows…Some say that by 2050 a few humans will already be a-mortal. Less radical forecasts speak of the next century, or the next millennium. Yet from the perspective of 70,000 years of [behaviourally modern humans] what are a few millennia?

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (2011)

Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann envisaged situations arising when thinking machines could cease to be either controllable or comprehensible by their makers. Implicitly, they recognised that machines would develop by natural selection -- process without purpose or direction.

The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray (2014)


Photo of sign at start of The Broomway by author

"Never-ending signs and portents...a great inundation of the unforeseen"

In those far-off days our gang of boys first hit on the outlandish and impossible notion of straying even farther, beyond that inn, into no-man’s- or God’s-land, of patrolling borders both neutral and disputed, where boundary lines petered out and the compass rose of winds skittered erratically under a high arching sky. There we meant to dig in, raise ramparts around us, make ourselves independent of the grown-ups, pass completely out of the realm of their authority, proclaim the Republic of the Young…It was to be a life under the aegis of poetry and adventure, never-ending signs and portents. All we need to, or so it seemed to us, was push apart the barriers and limits of convention, the old markers imprisoning the course of human affairs, for our lives to be invaded by an elemental power, a great inundation of the unforeseen, a flood of romantic adventure and fabulous happenings…The spirit of nature was by its very essence a great storyteller. Out of its core the honeyed discourse of fables and novels, romances and epics, flowed in an irresistible stream. The whole atmosphere was absolutely stuffed with stories. You only needed to lay a trap under this sky full of ghosts to catch one, set a wooden post upright in the wind for strips of narrative to be caught fluttering on its tip.

from The Republic of Dreams by Bruno Schulz (1892-1942)

Image: ukrainetrek.com

Musica universalis

The equations for atoms and light are, almost literally, the same equations that govern musical instruments and sound.

Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question (2015)

Wonder tracks

I am about to spend a few days off-grid on a small island, writing.  Here are ten pieces of human music linked to wonder [see footnote] that I could imagine taking with me:

1. Pygmy polyphony. People may have probably been singing like this for tens of thousands of years and perhaps much longer. They want the forest to be happy.

2. Shen Khar Venakhi from 11th century Georgia. The last line translates as "You yourself are the sun, shining brilliantly."

3. Miserere Nostri, Domine by Thomas Tallis. 

4. J.S. Bach — pretty much passim but let's say the Gigue from 4th Partita.

5. For a bit of OTT, the Dies Irae from Verdi's Requiem conducted by Riccardo Muti 

6. Even more OTT, Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler. Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod.   

7. The final scene of The Firebird by Igor Stravinksy.  

8. Once in a Lifetime from Remain in Light by Talking Heads. There is water at the bottom of the ocean. 

9. Become Ocean by John Luther Adams. Alex Ross has called it "the loveliest apocalypse in musical history."

10. For my family, What a wonderful world sung by Louis Armstrong.  

What would you take?


Footnote:

Any experience of wonder is, of course, historically situated and constrained in all sorts of ways. My list probably does little more than highlight my prejudice and ignorance. But all of us are, inevitably, situated — albeit in different places!  I'll go with a definition of wonder by the philosopher Martyn Evans:

an attitude of altered, compellingly-intensified attention towards something that we immediately acknowledge as somehow important – something whose appearance engages our imagination before our understanding but which we will probably want to understand more fully with time.

Tracks that didn't quite make my cut include music for Japanese flute, the fourth movement from Mozart's 41st Symphony, Artur Schnabel playing Beethoven's 24th variation on a theme by Diabelli, A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall by Bob Dylan and Um Tom by Caetano Veloso.  As a restorative after the Dies Irae, try Tutto nel mondo è burla.  My favourite Armstrong track is West End Blues (with Earl Hines), and the song my eight-year-old would like is Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

More possibilities than we imagine

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that consequently we have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (2011)

Image from Mundus Subterraneus by Athanasius Kircher (1665)

The intimate Pleiades

Imagination completed what mere sight could not achieve. Looking down, I seemed to see through a transparent planet, through heather and solid rock, through the buried graveyards of vanished species, down through the molten flow of basalt, and on into the Earth’s core of iron; then on again, still seemingly downwards, through the southern strata to the southern ocean and lands, past the roots of gum trees and the feet of the inverted antipodeans, through their blue, sun-pierced dawning of day, and out into the eternal night, where sun and stars are together. For there, dizzyingly far below me, like fishes in the depth of a lake, lay the nether constellations. The two domes of the sky were fused into one hollow sphere, star-peopled, black, even beside the blinding sun. The young moon was a curve of incandescent wire. The completed hoop of the Milky Way encircled the universe.

Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton (1937)

Image: ESA

Clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low & horridly cruel

What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature! 

Letter from Charles Darwin to Joseph Hooker , 13 July 1856

Image: Alexander Wild