Caspar Henderson Dives Deep Into the World of Sound

 

A Book Of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous – Caspar Henderson (2023)

 

            Around eight years ago, I read and reviewed a very cool book titled “The Book of Barely Imagined Beings”, by Caspar Henderson.  Mr. Henderson explored the world of animals via the conceit of a bestiary where each chapter coincided with a letter of the alphabet, and an animal whose name begins with said letter.  It is an amazing book and one that opens the mind to the infinite variety found in the natural world around us.  Having dipped my toes into the mind of Caspar Henderson, I was very happy to find A Book of Noises while browsing the library shelves.  This wonderful book explores the vast landscape of sound, divided into chapters with titles such as Cosmophony: Sounds of Space, Geophony: Sounds of Earth, Biophony: Sounds of Life, ending with the chapter Anthropophony: Sounds of Humanity.  This is right up my alley!

            Caspar Henderson comes to the topic of sound and noise from the very best angle, that of wonder and awe.  The idea came to him after a visit to a nature preserve on the Norfolk coast where he witnessed tens of thousands of knots, a short stocky bird that migrates from the Arctic each year, flying overhead.  Within the cacophony Caspar could distinguish individual wing flaps.  He coined the term “Auraculous” to describe such experiences, the word meaning a marvel for the ear.  This is the true theme of this book.  Mr. Henderson explores the vast world of sound we live in and create and does so with a sense of poetry and beauty fitting to the magical world that sound provides to us.  As he puts it, “writing this book has been an attempt to listen more deeply and hold on to a sense of aliveness, in which each moment is a validation of what came before and a preparation for what comes after.”  We live out our lives ignoring most of the aural sensory input around us, much to our detriment. 

            My favorite chapter, Biophony: The Sounds of Life, explores the aural world of our plant and animal brethren.  I enjoyed reading about the various sounds plants make, many of which our modern ears just ignore.  One of the old Buddhist koans, meant to encourage introspection, famously reads, “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”  I have always found this inane.  Of course it makes a sound.  Sound exists whether anything “hears’ it.  Sound is merely the vibration of the gas, liquid, and solid matter of the world.  Sound existed on Earth far longer than life has been around and will continue to do so long after humans reach extinction.  Only the inflated egocentrism of humans (which I think is the REAL lesson behind the koan) allows us to imagine ourselves as the primal source of experience in the world.  What a disservice this is to our fellow living beings.

            Caspar Henderson uses the last chapter of this book for an exploration of the many sounds created by humanity, from onomatopoeia and musical instruments to noise pollution, and even to a rumination on silence itself.  In this chapter Mr. Henderson extrapolates the future of man-made sound, including the ability to utilize sound for healing as well as for weaponry.  As with anything in the world, whether it is used for good or evil is dependent on the human making the decision.  Sound can heal and it can harm, therefore it is up to us to determine how best to use it to improve not only humanity but the beautiful and varied world around us.  The path towards good or towards evil is one we embark on in our hearts and minds, way before any action comes.  Books such as these help us maintain our proper distance from our own ego and allow us to replace ignorance and supposition with facts and logic.  Caspar Henderson does us all a great service through his writing.  I have now read two of his works and will look forward eagerly to the next one!  To Mr. Henderson, and everyone reading this who loves to search for the Auraculous, I sign off with the rejoinder made famous on the now-defunct Sonic Youth Gossip Forum, which exhorts the recipient to live a “Sonic Life!”

 (This great book can be purchased here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo200525016.html )

Wolfram Eilenberger Explores the Lives, Times, and Work of Four Great Philosophers

 

Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy - Wolfram Eilenberger, translated by Shaun Whiteside (2020)

 

            “Philosophy…is the talk on a cereal box.  Religion…is a smile on a dog.” – Edie Brickell and New Bohemians.

            The years between the Great War and World War II were a time of intense change for everyone, and nowhere was that change more evident than in the world of philosophy, specifically academic philosophy in Germany.  During those years, the four men listed in the title of this book achieved groundbreaking and deeply original work, publishing books that changed intellectual discourse and sought to dig into the core of what philosophy is, and how it makes any sense at all.  Like some sort of philosophical Great Attractor, these four men, and their lives and work, reached a critical mass of ideas and thoughtful inquiry in Germany between wars.

            Wolfram Eilenberger weaves an engrossing narrative out of the lives of these four philosophers.  He is masterful as he describes the early days of each man, their intellectual developments, and how they managed to elicit support, both financial and emotional, as they sought to grapple with ideas and thoughts so obscure, so esoteric, and so NEW, that they left little room for normal, human behaviors.  Each of these men sought to, in their own words and through their own original thought, not only understand the big questions in life, (Why do we exist?  What does it mean to “be?”) but also even more primal questions, such as “How are we able to discern truth?” and “How can we describe the infinite with our finite tools of language and words?”  These were heady times.

            Philosophers deal with pure thought.  Their lives are spent inside their heads, only occasionally popping up out of their studies and libraries to face other philosophers and engage in discourse about their ideas.  The life of the mind is a brutal and lonely one, especially if one is truly devoted to it.  These four philosophers and their lives shine a light on how difficult it truly is to not only achieve gainful employment as a philosopher, but to also have the time and resources needed for original, groundbreaking work.  If there is anything a philosopher despises it is a lack of originality, whether in their work or in another’s.

            One thing that struck me as I read about these four eminent thinkers, is that, no matter how orderly or precise their internal thoughts and writings present them to be, they are actually a hot mess of dysfunction, distraction, and human folly.  Several of these men sought to understand what the primal source of knowledge is, with some arguing for language, others arguing for the idea that the language represents.  In several instances, their ideological constructions come crashing down due to an aspect of life, seemingly not important to most 20^th century philosophers.  That one thing is Love.  Whether as young men or in middle age, once these philosophers discover true Love, real Love that is not tied to status, or money, or anything tangible, their lives are upended.  They did not account for the power of Love to rewrite one’s mind, to reconstitute what is important and not important, and to provide its own inherent satisfaction.  In many cases, it is enough just to be in Love.  Once this happens, their worldview begins to change.  For some, Love itself becomes the biggest mystery.

            I must heap some praise upon the translator of this work, Shaun Whiteside.  Having read many German books in their English translations, I can honestly say that Mr. Whiteside’s translation work is exquisite.  Ensuring that the information provided is correct is hard enough, but Mr. Whiteside also manages to convey the humor and wit found in German literature, which far too often is lost in the translation efforts to English.  I kind of wish he had translated Werner Herzog’s memoir.

            Either way, and I have stated this before on the Book Journey, most philosophy is a slog to read.  I find myself either agog at the obtuse mental gymnastics that much philosophical work consists of, or enraged by my inability to speak directly to the authors to point out the inconsistencies, errors, or plain delusions involved in their philosophical arguments.  Philosophy means “lover of wisdom.”  Sometimes, these philosophers act as if they were the one and only arbiters of truth and wisdom, excluding any other. They are always proved wrong.  No one has an irrefutable claim on what is Truth, Beauty, or Love, although nearly everyone who thinks themselves as smart or gifted will wish to assure you that they do in fact know what Truth, Beauty, and Love are. 

            I believe that studying philosophy is valuable, and can lead one’s mind into uncharted territories of thought.  I also believe that pure thought is just one aspect of human Truth.  Physical action also brings about Truth, Beauty, and Love, and does so without a single shred of philosophical thought, just pure human bodily experience.  Our Universe is one of constant motion and change, for, in a very real sense, we are all living within a giant, ongoing, nearly eternal (to our limited human timeframe) explosion.  To believe that, out of the myriad of possible consciousnesses arisen from within our Universe, one has reached a kernel of absolute Truth, is ego of the highest order.  Modern philosophers have a very tough road ahead, as they must contend with, and understand, all of the current scientific advancements before they can truly offer original thought.  Back in the old days, that would have meant reading 10-15 Greek classics, perhaps some Arabic masterworks, and some Latin works of literature.  Today, the world of thought is so vast, so splintered, that absolute Truth is a ridiculous concept, much less an actual possibility. 

Perhaps that is the brutality that confronted these four great minds, for not only was their world ending, with the imminent rise of totalitarian fascism in Europe and the terrors of WWII, but the very idea that the world is fully comprehensible purely by thought was soon to be deemed irrelevant and erroneous.  Physics soon showed how the vast microscopic structures of our Universe defy logic and human rationality.  Physics also showed how miniscule our initial ideas about our Universe were, for the Cosmos is far vaster than anyone ever dreamed it could be.  In fact, the Universe is so big that much of it is too far away for us to see, having expanded faster than light can travel.  It is facts like these, corroborated by evidence and bolstered by theory, that drive philosophers insane, for these truths are not reachable by the Mind alone.  I posit that the future of philosophy will no longer consist of individual minds, perusing the Universe and providing their ideas, but an amalgam of minds and thought, capable of including as much of the natural world as possible, and allowing for the differences in individuals.  If philosophy is a slow and steady path towards Truth, then it must include everyone and everything for it to be valid.  Let us hope humanity never runs out of lovers of wisdom.

(Thanks go to Dietmar Froehlich, Associate Dean, and Professor of Architecture with the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston for the great recommendation.)

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/576741/time-of-the-magicians-by-wolfram-eilenberger-translated-by-shaun-whiteside/ )

Hans Reichenbach Uses Math to Show Us the Direction of Time

The Direction of Time – Hans Reichenbach (1956)

            In the late part of the 18^th and the beginning of the 19^th century, many philosophers saw their world crumble when their old, long-held assumptions about reality crashed down around them, due mainly to the various advancements that occurred in physics during that time.  Einstein’s relativistic theories regarding the large-scale composition of our Universe, and quantum mechanics’ probabilistic theories regarding the small-scale composition of the fundamental particles creating our existence did not allow for the old stand-bys of philosophy.  A Priori ideas were discarded.  Previously believed truths about our reality that were simply accepted as fact because Plato said so were understood to be false.  The understanding that any philosophical theory needed to support and not contradict the verifiable, empirical facts of the world of science was required.  In this tumult, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell sough to unify the empirical results of science with the aims of philosophy, helping create what is now called “scientific philosophy.”

           Hans Reichenbach was at the forefront of this movement.  He understood early on that the world as described by the then-current physics was not one that could be easily codified into philosophical terms and concepts.  A new philosophy was needed, and Reichenbach sought to provide that for the world.  One of his final attempts at this unification came in the form of this book, The Direction of Time, which explores how science and philosophy merge to describe the way that humans experience what we call time.

            Time is a concept that many misunderstand.  People assume that time is a purely linear function, equally applicable to the entire universe as it is to an individual, while others believe that time is relativistic, that each person experiences a different flow of time from anyone else.  Reichenbach begins his discussion of time by exploring what time means and what it has meant to philosophers of the past.  He explains the basic mathematics that show how our Universe is in a constant state of becoming from the past to the present, and how these mathematics show that time is irreversible, even though our minds can imagine such time reversals.  In our reality, time moves forward in all respects, with the future defined as that which has yet to occur but is influenced by the past and present, while the past is defined as occurrences which cannot be changed once they happen, but which will influence future events indefinitely.

            In order to explain his reasoning, Reichenbach goes into levels of math that are frankly beyond my cognition.  I have to admit that I never got past Algebra II, or Pre-Calculus in school.  As a Fine Arts student I satisfied my math requirements with Logic classes.  Thankfully, those same Logic classes help me keep Reichenbach’s thought processes in clear focus, even though his mathematical specificity leaves me in the dust.  I wish I had more ability to process Logarithms!  The beauty of knowing mathematics, even on a level such as myself, is that, while I may not understand the full import of a formula, I can follow the thought processes as one formula is permutated into another, or as it is simplified by the author.  This does help a lot in understanding this book.

            Reichenbach seems to come to the conclusion that time and the measurement of time are probabilistic processes, which require the understanding of thermodynamics, entropy, and macrostatistics as they relate to microstatistics.  Probability is a lot different in the macro world of our Universe than it is in the micro world of our subatomic particles.  Yet, they both point to an inexorable direction of time.  They both show, mathematically, that time is a process that moves in only one direction.  This is far more important and valid that the old Greek assumptions that everyone took for granted as gospel truth.  While I wish I had more of a grasp on high end mathematics, I am very glad I forged on and finished this book.  I hope to return to it one day in the future once I have increased my math skills.  It is amazing to see the basis for our current scientific philosophers.


(This book can be purchased here: Dover Books )

Speculative Fiction from 1920 Still Kicking Ass

A Voyage to Arcturus – David Lindsay (1920)

            As a life-long fan of speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy), I always have my ears out for any mention of the seminal writers in these genres.  These are authors that wrote their stories and books before the idea of science fiction had actually coalesced.  Early influencers like H.G. Wells, Alfred Bester, or Mary Shelley wrote amazing stories, each full of such imaginative ideas that they helped shape and guide speculative fiction all the way to the modern day.  In reading about the writers that influenced J.R.R. Tolkien, I came across mention of David Lindsay and his novel from 1920, A Voyage to Arcturus, which the article claimed Tolkien used as a source material for the narrative structure of The Hobbit.  While this was evident as I read A Voyage to Arcturus, what became clearer to me was the ways that this novel differed from The Hobbit, or the other Tolkien works.  A Voyage to Arcturus explores the nature of being and existence in ways that Tolkien did not.

            As with many stories from the era involving the supernatural or otherworldly, the story here begins when a group of well-heeled guests arrive at a posh, yet, spooky home for a Spiritualist séance.  Spiritualism began in earnest in the northeast United States around 1880, and by the time of the publication of this novel, was at the forefront of public consciousness.  It was all a massive crock of shit, but humans are easily fooled into believing something unnatural has occurred.  They truly believed that a con-artist would be able to draw a dead spirit from the netherworld to speak to them at a party, as if the dead soul had nothing else better to do.  The protagonist in this tale, Mr. Maskull attends the séance, and along with everyone else, is shocked when a spirit appears.  What happens next is the prelude to the true journey in this story.  Maskull travels to the other side of the Universe, to a planet called Arcturus.

            When Maskull arrives, he is all alone.  He encounters various people as he makes his way through the unknown land where two separate suns shine.  These people tell him contradictory things, yet they seem to enlighten Maskull and propel him forward in his journey.  Throughout his travels the author describes a world so alien, yet composed of similar forms to the world we know.  The physical laws of this world are not what they are on Earth.  Lifeforms appear, change, die, and are re-absorbed.  Humanoid beings of various types are met, some claiming to know Maskull, and some who want something from him.  As Maskull travels through Arcturus, he begins to peel back the layers of understanding, until he is no longer aware of what the real truth of his life is.  It parallels Gulliver’s Travels in many ways, although the people that Maskull meets are not as archetypically delineated as those that Gulliver meets on his travels.

            Each person gives Maskull their explanation for why they exist, why the world is what it is, who created it, and how it came into being.  Some of these are contradictory to each other, and serve to show the reader how much of our existence is purely based on the narrow scope by which most of us view the world.  Maskull grows and changes, but never seems to find his place, until he is shown why.  I wish I could expand more on this all, but I do not want to spoil what is a very cool and intriguing novel.

            Tolkien may have used A Voyage to Arcturus to help frame his first novel’s narrative structure, that of a quest taking the protagonist through various locales that are actually metaphors for the world around us.  In every other way, this novel is much more concerned with the esoteric, the ineffable, and the ephemeral.  It is these aspects of consciousness that David Lindsay sough to explore in this book, and which make it so enjoyable to read.  So many 100-year-old stories suffer from their dated tropes, but the early speculative writers were working on a blank canvas, with no rules, and they were able to craft some of the most interesting stories because of this.  I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys The Hobbit, Gulliver’s Travels, or any other such fish-out-of-water speculative fiction.


(This book can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg )

Violence, like everything else, is relative

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined – Steven Pinker (2011)

      Living in our world today presents a duality that we all must cope with.  Firstly, we now live in a time where fewer people are living in extreme poverty than ever before in our collective history.  Humans are living to older ages than ever before.  Humans have managed to engage in worldwide trade and diplomacy, and do so with the minimum of force or violence.  Secondly, we now have the ability to be informed about every single horror that occurs anywhere on our planet within seconds of its happening.  We have the ability to detect more and more varieties of cancer and disease.  We also have a never-ending news cycle that will repeat ghastly news over and over again, giving the impression that everything is chaos and horror.  These two sides of our world fight for our collective consciousness. 

Many people claim that humanity has degraded over the eons, beginning in a pastoral and peaceful existence, and ending in our constant competition for resources, bringing wars, violence, and terror to the people.  What Steven Pinker has done in this amazing book is gather up the data available to show that, as a whole, and throughout all of humankind, our collective violence has actually decreased due to the evolution of our collective humanity. 

Pinker explores the many methods by which violence is categorized and quantified, and proceeds to regale the reader with 8 chapters of the most brutal history of human violence upon ourselves, animals, and the world around us.  He details everything from state sponsored war, to individual acts of murder and violence.  In each instance, these violent acts have drastically decreased throughout the world.  Even in the most remote and government-less parts of Earth, violence has decreased. 

It is hard for a modern human to consider how horrible it was to exist a thousand years ago, with our knowledge of world wars, genocide, and other horrors fresh in our collective minds.  Pinker describes exactly how dangerous it was to be a human being at various points in our past, both distant and recent.  In fact, up until very recently indeed, most humans died before the age of 30, and a person reaching 50 years of age was considered ancient!  These days, we all expect to live to 80 and worry a ton about “premature” death, as if death was something we all have on a schedule like lunch or nap-time.  This bias comes specifically from how safe and non-violent our day-to-day world is. 

One of the most important conclusions from this research is that, as the world becomes less religious, it becomes less violent.  In previous eras, when religion was state-sanctioned, and belonging to a different religion regularly meant death, or at best, banishment, the ease by which humans saw other humans as NON-humans is evident.  Religion also taught men to subjugate women, and to approve of using “lesser humans” as slaves, for their god told them it was A-OK.  The worst were states where the religion controlled the politics.  These provided humanity with extreme cases of genocide, mass-murder, and the infestation of violence.

Violence was so pervasive in our past that people writing contemporaneously did not seem too bothered by public torture, public executions, and the display of endless gore and violence.  Every ancient culture had blood-sports, from the Romans and their gladiators, to the British and their bear-baiting. (Bear baiting is when a bear is chained up and then feral wolves or dogs are dispatched to attack the bear, and everyone had a blast watching dogs and bears get ripped to shreds in horrible ordeals of pain and gore.  The British LOVED this, and they were all very religious!)

What Steven Pinker has done here is provide factual, well-researched data to help spread the enlightenment and humanist ideas that have managed to make our current time the least violent of all.  It is a heavy book, and quite depressing at times, but the knowledge that we humans seem to be heading towards a less violent and more constructive existence is something that lifts my spirits.

(This book is available for purchase here: THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE  )

Is Mind inherent in all of Existence? How can it not be?

Panpsychism in the West – David Skrbina (2017 Revised Edition)

      It has been almost 4 years since I first began posting reviews of the books I read on this blog, RXTT’s Book Journey.  One of the most gratifying and unexpected outcomes of this project has been the ability to correspond with some of the authors of the books I read.  It always thrills me when they reply to my communications.  One of the many who I have had a chance to correspond with has been mathematician, educator, and cyberpunk O.G. Rudy Rucker.  I always make sure to ask these authors if they can suggest any reading recommendations, and Rudy Rucker told me that this book, Panpsychism in the West, was one to check out, as he had recently enjoyed it very much.  The name David Skrbina was familiar to me based on various references to him and his writing in other books I read.  It was awesome to have such a great recommendation, and greatly appreciated.

      This book details the development, discussion, history, and possibilities of the philosophical idea called Panpsychism.  This idea suggests that the entity we call Mind is inherent in all of existence, and that this should affect everything about how we see ourselves, life, and the whole of existence.  Many of the Greek philosophers, who first pondered the reality of the world around us, our bodies, and our minds, came to the conclusion that Mind, consciousness itself, was an underlying part of everything that exists.  One of the arguments for this was that human beings feel they have a mind separate from the nuts-and-bolts physicality of their brain.  However, Humans are created from the very same stuff as everything else, and because of this our “Minds” cannot be a special occurrence.  Some form of “Mind” must exist in any and all life, and possibly into inanimate matter we deem to be not alive, perhaps even to the basic building blocks of matter.  They saw the human body as an aggregate of its many parts, and because of this, the parts themselves must have had some sort of “Mind”, just as the bigger systems around us, the atmosphere, the water cycle, the Earth itself, must also have a “Mind” constituent. 

      Later Greek philosophers would turn from this idea and head towards a mechanistic and non-spiritual perception of the Universe around us.  These ideas led to the Materialist universe in which modern humans exist.  We are told that the Mind is either purely a god-given trait solely found in Humans, or that the Mind sprang up only in Humans because we were the only ones to have a  complex enough nervous structure and brain to achieve this.  These human-centered objections to panpsychism have been put forth by philosophers and scientists throughout human history.  They only serve to point out the inherent bias among thinkers who ascribe all experience value based on their personal state, that of being a human on Earth.  They demean the experiences of animals, plants, and even rocks as purely mechanistic, even as they aggrandize the human experience.  This seems a contradiction to me. 

      Once the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton and classical physics began to influence the world, philosophers sought to discredit the idea of panpsychism by exclaiming that it was unscientific, in that there was no empirical way to test whether a rock or a tree has a Mind.  The blind-spot in their arguments is that, as of today, there is no way to empirically prove that a human has a Mind!  If it cannot be proven to exist in us, how can they be so sure it does not exist in the world around us?  Too many people run with this argument and fail to understand that panpsychism is not a scientific idea, but a philosophical one.  Empirical science can analyze a brain, the neurons and axions that make up the physical brain, and the various blood vessels that nourish and clean the brain, but they cannot in any way analyze the Mind.  Psychologists have tried, with varying degrees of failure, to analyze Mind as separate from the physical brain.  Psychiatrists try to utilize medicines and chemicals to force the physical brain into adjusting the process of the non-physical Mind.  It is a very confusing state of affairs.

      David Skrbina has done a great job of compiling not only the various supporting ideas and players throughout human western culture to discuss panpsychism, but also of the many philosophers and scientists who sought to deny panpsychism.  He explains how they came to their negations, and the ways in which they misunderstood the basic concept of panpsychism.  Many philosophers would push these ideas only to negate them later on in life.  Yet others, people who decried the possibility of panpsychism, came around in their later years and admitted that there is no way to discount the idea.  How their ideas went on to influence those that followed, and how the possibilities inherent in panpsychism would change the entire world-view of the whole of humanity is a focus of the later part of this book.

Philosophy as a field of study for me is very frustrating.  I find it hard to read the conclusions and assertions of philosophers whose base assumptions are inherently opposed to how I see the world around me.  It is very hard to argue with a dead philosopher!  I love to know the history of human thought and the development of our ideas on ourselves, but so much of it is purely fantasy, conceptualized reactions to embedded presumptions.  I feel that, as a basis of thoughtful exploration, it is much more valuable and realistic to assume that, just as we are part of the Universe, and have a level of awareness we call Mind, that every other constituent part of the Universe, both smaller and bigger than the cellular aggregate we call a human being also shares in this noetic quality.  It is impossible to draw a line of demarcation where Mind exists and then where it does not.  For example, we can say humans have Minds.  Many of us feel that our pet dogs and cats have their own Minds and personalities, independent of their physical being.  Is that the end?  Why wouldn’t smaller animals, such as mice or beetles or even amoebas, also share in this feature of existence we label a Mind?  If a one-celled organism can have a Mind, what about the single-cells that make up all living beings’ body structures?  If a cell can have a sliver of consciousness then what about the component parts of that cell?  Digging lower, what about the individual molecules and atoms?  What about the constituents of atoms?  No one can provide a definitive answer to where the line should be drawn.  Going bigger than humans, are larger aggregates like cities, mountains, oceans, planets, galaxies all possessed of a higher level of mind that we humans just cannot comprehend?  This book has given me quite a lot to think about.  It is highly recommended.

(The 2017 Revised edition of this book is available for purchase here: PANPSYCHISM IN THE WEST  )