The Philosophy of Pseudoscience

In my encounters across the internet looking for interesting topics related to art, philosophy, and science, I've come to realize there's a whole bunch of pseudoscience out there, which I've decided to make the topic of this post. One of the more prevalent and interesting examples is the popularity and general interest in the metaphysical and healing properties of crystals. To be upfront, I don't subscribe to any of these types of beliefs, nor find any of them at all plausible. That being said crystalline structures and other organic gemstones are abundantly interesting as scientific and artistic objects of study (at least to me)> They're wondrous examples of the way nature self organizes out of chaos, and illustrate the intersections between physics, information theory, and theories of life. That in itself understandably seems almost supernatural. I still believe in asking big "what if's" as a means of shifting our perspective on  real world problems (Philosopher Daniel Dennett would call these “intuition pumps”), but where issues arise is when we make specific claims to reality that are not in any way measurable or testable, and try to construct a hard science based on those claims. That being said, I think crystal healing provides a good demonstration of different ways in which pseudoscience operates and proliferates alongside science.

 Most of the pseudoscientific systems that are built around crystal healing revolve around some sort of abstract notion of energy that flows through all living things. You’ll hear it referred to as the Chinese “Chi” or “Qi”, or of the Hindu “Charkras”, or the more credibly scientific “energy grid” or “life force”. In any case these terms appeal to established belief systems in both science and religion. Rhetorically, this is referred to as a “call to authority” and upon any further examination of the content of these words, we find them vague or unmeaningful.   All pseudoscience relies heavily on jargon to create false credibility and disguise otherwise empty concepts. Not wanting to be perceived as naïve or unintelligent, we simply nod our heads instead of asking for an explanation; like when a friend asks you if you’ve heard of a band you’ve never heard of, and you say yes out of fear of social ostracism. Contrary to its more esoteric uses, in physics energy is an observable and measurable force, which comes in units such as the Joule, Newton, watt, or calorie. What then is the unit of measure for life force, or chi?

A popular placebo; "binaural beats" that claim to replicate the effects of psychoactive drugs.

But what about all the folks that swear by crystal medicine? Surely they can't all be misinformed or deceived? Isn't there some tangible, measurable effect that they are all feeling independently of each other and of the rhetoric surrounding crystal healing? Yes. It's called the Placebo Effect, in which an ineffective treatment yields measurable improvement in a patient's condition simply because he or she believed that the treatment works. The placbo effect can be quite powerful, one Harvard study found that patients who were told that their medicine was ineffective still showed a measurable improvement in condition. Having felt a tangible improvement in their health seemingly as a result of magic crystals, proponents of crystal healing are led into what is known into a cognitive bias, in which one interprets reality based one’s beliefs or wishes. More specifically it’s a case of confirmation bias, in which an observer focuses myopically on evidence that supports his or her claim, while ignoring or discrediting contradictory evidence. At this point belief in crystal healing becomes a type of self-reinforcing feedback loop.

Works wonders on a hangover though.

Beside discrediting the metaphysical healing properties of crystals, I think it's valuable to consider why ideas like these become so popular in the first place. One possible explanation is societal. The alternative medicine industry has grown incredibly in recent decades, and is now valued at over 30 billion dollars annually. "Alternative Medicine" itself is an incredibly broad term that encompasses everything from health foods, vitamins and supplements, herbal medicine, yoga and exercise, homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractics, marijuana and psychedelic therapies, the list goes on. It's a cultural movement as much as a medical one. 

 That being said, against the backdrop of the immense, uncaring, and corporatized health industrial complex, alternative medicine posits itself as both humane and attractively counter-cultural. It’s this sort of institutional alienation that fraudulent science thrives on. Consider Kevin Trudeau, the infomercial king and convicted fraud who sold over five million copies of his book titled “Natural Cures “They”  Don’t Want You to Know About.” Note the vague and ubiquitous “They” in the title. Yes, it’s really in quotations.

Looks like he's the only one that can hear "them".

  Not to say that some of these practices are not valuable. I'm completely supportive of the medical benefits of diet and exercise, meditation, even the potential for psychedelics to treat PTSD, depression, and addiction. Additionally, there are broad aspects of the movement that are quite positive; the focus on the body and health as a whole, rather than as a series of isolated symptoms. Or the emphasis on diet lifestyle and exercise rather than medication or surgery. It could be appropriate in some situations that healthcare shouldn't be limited institutional medicine. I think it's plausible to have a healthcare system in which institutional and alternative medicine temper and complement each other, as is the goal of the integrative medicine movement.
A more general explanation for popularity of pseudoscience relates to science itself and the sometimes blurry boundaries of the field. To philosophers of science, this is referred to as the problem of demarcation, or the problem of distinguishing what is valid scientific reasoning and what is not. The austere position would say that verifiability, the ability to either prove or disprove a claim by observation, is the only standard of scientific practice. This was the position of the logical positivists, and of the Vienna Circle. Unfortunately, this position throws much of contemporary science out of the window. Verifiability falls short when it comes to relativistic phenomena,  as when two observers from different locations see the same event differently. Which observation is correct? Similarly, in the realm of quantum mechanics, it’s not that light is necessarily both wave and particle, but it can be described as either one or the other in a satisfactory way. So which one is it? This is referred to as a equivalence of description in which two models describe the same phenomena just as well. 

Michio Kaku, scientific entertainer par excellance. I totally understand gravity now that I've seen him ice skate.

A trickier problem is the misuse of theoretical scientific entities. This is especially true in light of the general public interest in topics from contemporary science. Recent times have seen an explosion of interest in things like black holes, string theory, and parallel universes, which have been widely incorporated into science fiction and popular science entertainment. While this is encouraging, the tendency of popular science is to focus on the entertaining and interesting aspects of these entities, and does little to elucidate them rigorously. Consequently, in this climate it is easy for charming personalities to align themselves with popular science, and draw wildly incorrect conclusions that otherwise look legitimate. To quote a New York Times Article by Massimo Pigilucci and Maarten Boudry:

"Philosophers of science have long recognized that there is nothing wrong with positing unobservable entities per-se, it's a question of what work such entities actually do within a given theoretical-empirical framework. Qi and meridians don't seem to do any, and that doesn't seem to bother supporters and practitioners of Chinese medicine. But it ought to."

The zero-point energy healing wand, an otherwise respectable sex toy masquerading as a futuristic medical device.

This is the crucial point that advocates of crystal healing and the like miss. In the end there is no sharp dividing line between valid and invalid theoretical entities, between science and pseudoscience, but this certainly any a free pass to any proposition you like. There are plenty of pseudoscientific theories, personalities, and products that take creative license with the more exotic flavors of scientific theory and run amuck with them. A perfect example are the range of "zero-point energy" devices, which claim to heal and restore the body with fields of energy discovered by quantum physics, or "Quantum Jumping" Bert Goldman's self help system with a sci-fi twist that allows one to meet and learn from alternate versions of themselves in parallel universes. Note the characteristic vagueness, jargon, and calls to scientific authority associated with both.  

You'll get the gist in a minute or two.

 Granted, pseudoscience has been around as long as science, probably longer. What seems to be a unique problem to the present is that science itself is becoming more abstract and removed from direct observation and provability, and the criteria for truth is becoming more abstract as well. In a secular, postmodern society, science (and pseudoscience) are occupying more space in our imagination traditionally held by religion and philosophy, perhaps more than it should. It is in this space that crystal healers, zero-point wands, and quantum jumping slither in alongside more meaningful attempts to explain reality. Perhaps this is symptomatic of scientific illiteracy in our culture, or our ability to teach sound reasoning in general. Or perhaps the persistence of crystal healing suggests that some of the major problems for science in the 21st century are going to be those of self definition and demarcation. In either case, philosophy of science is going to be an indispensable tool for understanding and parsing out pseudoscience.

In the meantime, hold onto your crystals, it's going to get weird.

The Paradox of Postmodernism

Human beings have always struggled to account for themselves in their explanations of how the world works. Subjectivity and knowing are perhaps the hardest things to deal with in any such system. This is precisely because we are part of what we are measuring. We are embodied, and we experience the world from within it, as part of it. In this manner the senses provide at once both an interface and a barrier to the external, what we know of the world can only be known through them, leaving room for doubt. It is up to the faculty of human reason to take raw sense data and construct a model of reality, to sort out what can be said to exist (ontology), what we know and how we know it (epistemology), and how to construct meaning from these conclusions (ethics). This interplay between sense and reason is the impetus of mathematics, science, philosophy, and art

In everyday practice of these fields, we find ourselves more concerned with what is apparently true, rather than actually true. One can build a perfectly functioning representation of the world using appearances and approximations, in fact we do this all the time. In every applied science and art, the numbers are rounded, some ideas are left unexplored, and some dots unconnected, all within a given tolerance. We avert our gaze from the depth of infinity, lest we be rendered paralyzed and hapless to live

Certainty, on the other hand, is a whole other ball game.  In order to know anything, you first must know everything.  Often, the first question to ask is, “How does my model of reality account for itself?” This is precisely where we run head first into a fundamental barrier, antimony, or mutual incompatibility. Like Epimenides, the wily Creten philosopher who famously proclaimed “all Cretans are liars” Antimony relies on self-reference to create paradox, keeping certainty forever out it's own grasp

However that certainly hasn’t kept us from trying. This is particularly true of the 20th century, where the very success and precision of our models brought us to the point where self-referential paradox was unavoidable. This is the story of trying to push through paradox, either to explain what we thought we already knew, or as a means of arriving at total knowledge of the world. In many respects, self-referential paradox was the fundamental problem of the 20th century; it occupied and haunted the minds of Einstein, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Duchamp, and many others

This goal of this essay is to sketch in broad terms the modern trajectories of these four fields; mathematics, science, philosophy, and art, and show how each addresses and deals with self-referential paradox as it presents itself. From there, I’ll examine how this leads to the phenomenon of postmodernism in the arts and sciences, and offer further comment on it effects in field of art, where I am most familiar. I’ll conclude by humbly offering some suggestions on a way out of this mess, or at least some strategies for circumnavigating it.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the quintessential formulation of sensual doubt in the history of Western philosophy, brought to you in the rich, buttery voice of Orson Welles.

We begin at a time which our four subjects were barely separate from each other, the world of the ancient Greeks. From that incubator of Western thought emerged was a vision of the world as static and unchanging, governed by heavenly, Platonic bodies. Whether it was Plato, Aristotle, or the Pythagoreans, (Heraclitus is an intriguing counterexample) one of the main thrusts of Greek thought was that the world presented to our senses, with its apparent change, flux, and chaos is a distortion of our human condition, and hence is untrustworthy. Thus it is through reason alone that the “real” can be separated from the unreal, and the eternal nature of things can be understood

The scientific undertaking of the western world would follow along these lines. The idea of reason as the means for understanding (rather than theology) in fact was one of the main ideological underpinnings of the scientific revolution. What Isaac Newton encapsulated in brief, elegant sets of laws was not just a tool for understanding and manipulating the world, but also belief in the fundamentally mechanical nature of the universe. Central to this conception is that his world, like the Greek’s, is perfectly knowable. If one were to calculate the position, direction, and velocity of every particle in the universe, one would attain a God’s eye view of things, the entirety of the past, present and future would be calculable and visible all at once. This would be an inconceivably ambitious undertaking, but the point was that it was fundamentally possible. One is also struck by how aesthetically pleasing and arguably spiritual this idea is. Similarly, Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph (and accomplished painter), fantasized that by accurately recording all the minute perturbations in the Earth’s atmosphere, every sound that ever occurred on the planet could be reconstructed, from the conversation at breakfast to the decrees of Caesar. Though it seems contradictory to us, to him mechanism meant that there were ghosts in the air.

The Doppler effect describes the change in pitch as a source of sound moves past at an observer, but it also describes the way light and spacetime bends in accordance to the relative velocity of two observers.

20th century science, on the other hand, is marked by a stark contrast to the mechanistic worldview. For starters, Newtonian space and time are absolute, one second and one foot hold the same value throughout the universe. On the other hand, Einstein’s theory of relativity (now 100 years old btw), describes a fabric of spacetime which can dilate, stretch, or compress according to the relative velocities of two observers, meaning they’ll have differing measures of one second and one foot.  Similarly quantum mechanics demonstrates that one can either measure the position or velocity of a particle, but not both simultaneously. Furthermore, it is the act of observation that prevents us from doing so. In other words there is no privileged, objective position from which to measure universe. Like the Greenwich observatory is to the time zones, spacetime as it occurs to us on Earth is only an arbitrary standard.

Lorenz found that no matter where he started his weather simulation from, given enough time it  will resolve to this shape when plotted graphically. This is remarkable considering that the simulation is highly unpredictable. This shape was dubbed the Lorenz Attractor, it and other "strange attractors" give us a glimpse at the  tantalizing structure underneath chaotic systems .

Along with relativistic phenomena, the mechanistic worldview was broken by the introduction of complexity into science. Complexity describes the behavior of deterministic, yet dynamic systems that show an extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Complexity manifests itself everywhere in the natural world, from biology to meteorology, cosmology, chemistry, geology, and in countless other places. Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist, discovered this phenomenon in the context of modelling weather systems on a computer. He noted that no matter how accurately he input the starting conditions of his weather simulation, he could not do so completely, and the small differences would snowball into drastically different results over time. Despite the fact that the rules of his simulation were straightforward, the outcome could never be predicted very far into future. Determinism does not equal predictability.

Fractals are graphs of chaotic systems, resulting from complexity that Lorenz described.

James Clerk Maxwell devised a thought experiment that beautifully demonstrates this. In it, there is a tank of gas containing two chambers, separated by a small aperture, which is controlled by a malign “demon”. The demon, unscrupulous as he is, only allows high energy particles through to one side, and low energy particles to the other, thus separating them and decreasing the entropy of the tank. Where Newton’s second law of thermodynamics would only guarantee statistically, not certainly, that the particles would mix and reach a state of equilibrium, Maxwell’s demon shows us that the average state of the particles is fundamentally different from their individual states. In an amusingly poetic metaphor, the demon breaks the gears of Newton’s heavenly mechanical universe, using only the wrench of minutia. The devil, so to speak, is in the details.

This douchebag has nothing better to do than drink Coors Light, listen to Florida Georgia Line, and fuck up my thermodynamic equilibriums.

So where does this leave science after losing the mechanistic worldview? One of the major shifts  has been a change in the emphasis and methods of science from objective truth seeking to system building and interpretation. One of the key points is that science no longer focuses on the observational, but also the theoretical. The deeper one goes into microscopic and macroscopic phenomena, the more one encounters non-testable, non-falsifiable entities and systems in the current body of work. This was the critique of Richard Feynman, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, against string theory, that it has no connection to observational reality, allowing scientists to make it up as they go along. Regardless, it is an example of the increasingly blurring boundary between science and pseudoscience. One of major scientific problems facing the 21st century may very well be “What is science?

The story of modern mathematics is almost entirely a story of self-referential paradox. After a long period of outward expansion beginning with Newtown and Leibnitz, mathematicians in the 19th century turned their focus inward to the foundations of the subject, looking for rigorous definition of the most basic concepts of number, provability, and truth. Their response was to treat mathematics as logic, boiling all proof down to axioms (fundamental theorems that do not need to be proven) and rules of inference, which can be applied to the axioms to produce new theorems, and theorems from those theorems, and so on. Many of the brilliant modern mathematicians, Cantor, Dedekind, Hilbert, Peano, (and many others left out by my ignorance) were involved in this project in one way or another. Notable to our narrative is Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician and philosopher who at the turn of the century had developed a system of formal logic that he believed provided a rigorous foundation for mathematics. However, a young Bertrand Russell found a fatal flaw in Frege’s system, specifically that of self-reference. Frege’s logic dealt with objects, and collections of objects called sets. Sets can also be empty (null set) or contain other sets. Russell noticed that a problem arises when one considers a set of all sets that do not contain themselves. As a metaphor consider a town in which every man either shaves himself, or is shaven by the town barber. Russell’s Paradox is analogous to asking “Then who shaves the barber?”
 

Illustration of Russell's Paradox, brought to you by the guys that draw IKEA manuals. 

Undaunted, Russell along with Alfred North Whitehead composed the Principia Mathematica, a monolithic and jarringly technical logical treatise devoted entirely to removing self reference from logic. Once complete, Principia promised an exhaustively purified foundation for mathematics, achieving what Frege had set out to do. But it was not to be. Like the Frege system before them, it was proven to be flawed. This time it was by Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, in a paper entitled, On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related systems. From this paper came Gödel’s First and Second Incompleteness Theorems, which prove that any formal axiomatic system of sufficient strength will contain propositions that are true, but unprovable. He did this with a clever trick called Gödel numbering, in which he coded statements made in the system of Principia into corresponding “Gödel Numbers,” which had equivalent, or isomorphic meaning. In this manner, statements can then be fed back into Principia notation, allowing the self reference that Russell and Whitehead worked so tortuously to prevent. It’s a very technical proof, but essentially Gödel is saying that for any formal system T, there is a statement G, such that G is unprovable in T. This is roughly equivalent to the Epimenides, or liar paradox, “This sentence is a lie.”

For every formal axiomatic system T, one can construct a Gödel statement G that lies outside the bounds of provability in T.

The significance of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems is that it not only proves the system Principia Mathematica to be incomplete, but any possible formal system that can be constructed. You could revise your system T to include T2, which allows G to be proven, but then T2 would itself be susceptible to its own G2, and so on to infinity. In a sense, this seems entirely reasonable, just as in physics there can be no perpetual motion machines, in logic there can be no complete, self-contained formal axiomatic system, there must a “push” from the outside. In a fell swoop, Gödel had demolished the great project of the 19th century. Mathematics, it seems, cannot account for mathematics

Philosophy, by extension, is concerned with many of these same problems (as many mathematicians were involved in both fields). Where epistemology had been the central focus of Western philosophy since Descartes, logic and meaning became the axis of philosophy in the 20th century. Along with this program came an intense self-awareness and scrutiny of language and other systems of meaning. Essentially, the question of philosophy shifted from “What do we mean?” to “How do we mean?”. Quintessential to this line of philosophy is Ludwig Wittgenstein, a pupil of Bertrand Russell, who also came from a background in mathematics and engineering. Wittgenstein’s project was the analysis of language and meaning, about which he developed two different, conflicting theories throughout his life. First, he developed a “picture” theory of meaning, in which words are seen as depicting objects in the world, with language as a whole creating a picture of reality. He later abandoned this idea for a theory of meaning as use, by which he meant that words themselves are arbitrary, and in order to understand what a word means, one must look at how it is used, and how it fits into the total background of culture. “A language is a way of life”, by which he meant that two speakers of a language are able to communicate because the speaker and the listener both share a similar mapping of words to concepts dictated to them by the culture at large. Every word has meaning by virtue of the meaning of every other word, hence language as a whole is not a picture that stands for reality, but a system of agreed upon symbols that stands in for reality. Hence his famous aphorism “The meaning is the use”

Meanwhile, the world of art was dealing with these problems in its own way. In many respects, the project of modernism in art is analogous to the project of mathematics, in that both are methods of modelling reality that were struggling with the question of how to model themselves. Clement Greenberg, one of the standard chroniclers of modernism, devised a narrative of the progression of modern painting as the incremental flattening of the canvas, of art becoming more aware of itself, shifting its goals from creating an illusion of space as the Renaissance masters did, to exploring painting as an object in its own right, without the need to depict anything. Central to this narrative of modernism is the dialectic. Owing its origins to Plato, and its formalization to Hegel, the dialectic is a method for arriving at knowledge of the world via a series of dialogues, in which one party posits a point, then another posits a counterpoint, addressing the weaknesses of the former, and from the interaction of these two comes a synthesis, which in turn becomes a new point, and the cycle continues. It is by this method that we successively hone in on truth, dispelling our misconceptions and illusions about the world with each pass. This was the modus operandi of modernism in art, each successive school was responding to the statements of the previous, incrementally extricating itself from renaissance illusionism, further abstracting and purifying itself, and becoming the ground for the schools to follow.

One of the implicit assumptions of Modernist dialects is that there is and "end" to art. Kazimir Malevich, White on White, 1918.  With this piece, Malevich famously declared that he had finally culminated the history of art and achieved pure abstraction, and that art was over.

Alfred H Barr's 1936 poster for a MOMA exhibition, detailing the progression of Modern Art

What we have here is what in mathematics would be called a recursive algorithm. We take one movement as an input, create a counter-movement, synthesize these two, and feed the result back into the equation. Now there’s no need to take this literally, there’s plenty of room to argue which movement begat which other movements, and it’s perfectly acceptable to say that a particular movement was responding to more than two precursors, or was the impetus for multiple responses, or was a dead end. The important underlying conceptual point about modernism is that there is a general progressive trend in art that flows in one direction, forward. Following this line of thought, we could say that there is a linear, hereditary relationship between all of the schools of modernism. One could trace the progression of 1960’s minimalism backwards to 1870’s impression in a finite succession of steps

The dialectic trend continues more or less until the 1960's, where for multiple reasons it begins to break down. This is the birth of post-modernism, an account of art, culture, and society that rejects the dialectic narrative of modernism. The program of post modernism was one of deconstructing the narratives, beliefs, and assumptions of modernism, rejecting the notion of progress in art, and highlighting the role of galleries, museums, universities, and other art institutions in providing context definition for art. It is here we see artists taking interest in ideas from philosophy, particularly those of Wittgenstein.

Examples of Wittgensteinian Art. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Renee Magritte, The Human Condition 1933. Joseph Kosuth, A Four Color Sentence 1945, and One And Three Chairs 1965. All of these works deal with the tautological nature of art and meaning. Kosuth even wrote a manifesto in in 1969 entitled Art After Philosophy, which details how art is to respond to the questions rraised by Wittgenstein's philosophy.

However, the interesting thing about post-modernism is that it can be viewed as a meta-dialectic response to modernism itself. Just as revising your formal system from T to T2 removes paradox G and replaces it with G2, post-modernism only kicks the problems of modernism one level up. This is because postmodernism is attempting to overthrow dialectal modernism by using dialectics. The name “post-modernism” itself signifies a dialectic response to modernism. We could attempt to resolve the situation by constructing a post-post-modernism, but we would face the same difficulty again, and so on to infinity. This is Russell’s Paradox in dialectic form. In other words Postmodernism is a paradox. Like Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems were to mathematics, post-modernism dismantled the progressive narrative of modernism and demonstrates that any such program of art, including itself, is equally doomed.

The "Ouroboros" of Post-Modernism

Here we find math, science, philosophy, and art converging on the same dead end. The thematic thread that runs between all of them is the loss of the objective world. All four fields, as a result of an earnest attempt to explain themselves, no longer depict an external, Platonic world, but a reality constructed by observers, with particular attention paid to the language and systems we use to construct meaning. Where we previously turned to theology and myth as a brute stopping point for these difficulties, we now have no such luxury.

 Post-modernism has run its course. What started as a project of liberation from our own illusions about the world gives us no ground to construct a new one. What we are left with is nihilism, cynicism, and the great edifice of our times, irony. Irony is the symptom of post-modernism gone wrong. It has become the default attitude towards the world. Irony absolves us from responsibility for our thoughts and beliefs. It is the appearance of protest, and the pretense of a solution. As David Foster Wallace once said, “Irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage.

Nowhere is this more evident than in contemporary art. Anyone who is acquainted with it is well familiar with the concept of art about art. The art world today is marked by passive self-critique, relentless self-reference and self-canonization, and endless re-evaluation and re-contextualization of itself. This is apparent in the increasingly specialized education required to view and understand art, the abundant jargon and terms that art now hangs on like crutch rather than uses as a tool. The concept of the “art world” itself connotes art as an isolated sphere of human activity, where art becomes a series of references to itself that are meant to be understood by an inside crowd, presumably with a lot of money. 

Kazuhiro Tsuji, Andy Warhol, 2014 Fabienne Leclerc Mind Games 2007. Instead of engaging in dialogue with itself and with philosophy, contemporary art only references it. The more gimmicky, the better.

This is exactly where post-modernism is detrimental to art. The lack of underlying narrative or direction leaves art vulnerable to overcapitalization. If a work of art has no reason to exist other than to make money, then it is best done establishing itself within the canon of art history, hence the self-reference described earlier. This also gives rise to the phenomenon of the curator, the high priest of the art world, interpreting and preaching the gospel of contemporary art to the initiated. What started as a logistical role of storing, transporting, and displaying objects became one of advocating artists, and encouraging meaningful artistic dialogue. In many respects this has deluged into to that of a glorified tastemaker, directing and predicting market trends, and using celebrity to draw attention to exhibitions, museums, and galleries (Pharrell Williams, James Franco, Madonna, Katy Perry and many others are great examples of the celebrity curator). Curating is also ubiquitous in the world of marketing today, from fine art to “curated shopping experiences” that are the current buzzword in retail and online shopping. 

Dude needs curate himself a new hat.

So what is to be done about the self-defeating zeitgeist of our times? It is obvious to me that the current response, irony, sarcasm, and nihilistic self-indulgence, are only a holding pattern, not a way out. But how do you play a game in which every move is rigged? The flaw is in the assumption that there is a move to be made, and in the neglect of the fact that is simply a game. Modernism, Postmodernism, mathematics, science, philosophy, and art, these only models of reality, not reality itself, and as such they have no bearing on how the world actually works.

So throw your hands up, and walk away. Let it all burn to the ground, and from the ashes start anew. Do not try to defend certainty, and do not rebel against it, as both lead to paradox (in the case of the latter, consider the paradoxical argument “the only truth is that there is no truth”). As Rajneesh would say, “do not be for, do not be against, simply be.” Rather than engaging in fruitless dialogues about the world, pick them up and put them down as you find useful, and instead focus on what you, personally, find interesting about the world.
On that note, I’d like to bring up what is often overlooked by postmodernism, especially in art, namely aesthetics. Beauty is considered naïve in the postmodern world. It is suspicious of it, and for good reason. Often when we encounter something beautiful it is in the context of an advertisement, or a consumer product. The movie resolves to a contrived ending with no loose ends, the pop song always goes to the minor chord at exactly the right moment, the woman in the magazine has inhumanly perfect skin. These objects are trivially beautiful, their focus is on pleasure rather than understanding. Real beauty is something akin to the sublime of the Romantics, a combination of ecstasy and terror that reminds us simultaneously of how unique and insignificant we are

We can try to dispel aesthetics as a social construction. We can say that our notions of beauty and ugliness are taught to us by culture, but we cannot explain where these feelings come from. It doesn’t matter that a person prefers a cheeseburger to salad, or that a culture prefers lighter skin to darker skin, the question is why anyone prefers anything to anything. Beauty is an impulse, not a property. It is the expression of our embodiment, of a will towards the world, as a result of desires. Most importantly, our experience of beauty is primary, it comes to us before we analyze and try to define it within a given system. We cannot understand anything without first understanding it aesthetically

While aesthetics may not have much to do with empirical truth, it certainly plays a role in our perceptions about what is valuable and worth pursuing. In many cases aesthetic considerations precede and motivate empirical research. Remember in the beginning where I mentioned aesthetics and elegance influencing Newtonian physics? Even today you hear cutting edge scientists talking about an “elegant” unified theory of everything, as if beauty were a necessary property of scientific truth. Why is this so? Can the truth not be ugly, or complicated, or obscure in some fashion?  Is this a reflection of the Platonic conflation of “the good,” as everything that is true and beautiful? I don’t have the answers, but I’ll admit that my first impulse is to say that the truth is beautiful, but always in ways that are unexpected. Regardless, I think science and mathematics have a lot to learn from aesthetics, at the very least in regards to the analysis of their own motivations.

Stephen Hawking retired his search for a "Theory of Everything" in consideration of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.

Albert Einstein famously remarked, "the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious." The fact of the matter is that there are limitations to what we can know. That doesn’t make what we’ve accomplished any less valuable, it doesn’t mean that we should give up on our endeavors, and it doesn’t give license to intellectual anarchy. It simply means that while there’s an infinitude of things yet undiscovered, things that we don’t even know that we don’t know, we should also learn to live with uncertainty, as it is bound to follow us wherever we go. This world is and will forever remain a mysterious place. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN MYSELF...

Welcome to the inaugural post of DODECAHEDRON, home of things about art, science, math, philosophy, and culture. Sounds vague and slightly pretentious, right? Let me diffuse that with an explanation and self-depricating humor.

Why am I doing this? Because I firmly believe that what I'm thinking about  is extremely important, and that it's even more extremely important that people know what I'm thinking about. So, I figured that best solution was to start a blog, and here we are.

Now, honestly I don't know yet what this site will wind up being, which to a certain extent is intentional, but what I can say is this. I am an omnivorous follower of all things art, philosophy, mathematics, religion, and mythology. In the end I think these areas are all different aspects of the same thing, namely humans trying to describe and make meaning of this reality we find ourselves in. This blog is an attempt to pull the various threads of these subjects together and weave  something vaguely resembling the immaculate, rich tapestry of human thought and endeavor.

I swear I don't smoke as much pot as you think I do right now. I just fucking love rich tapestry metaphors.

What this really means is that I'll be writing about and following up on things I've read, heard, or seen. Probably profiling some of my favorite intellectual and artistic crushes. Maybe trying to piece together a few feeble ideas of my own. Doubtfully making people laugh. And hopefully, creating a space for dialogue and collaboration on subjects that don't get talked about enough in this world.

And what's with the name? The dodecahedron is comprised of 12 regular pentagons, making it a regular solid. Regular solids are referred to as the Platonic Solids, which many of the ancient Greek mathematicians considered to have a deep connection to the elements of the universe; fire, water, earth, and wind. The dodecahedron is the highest of this order, associated with the cosmos and totality of being. It sounded appropriately profound. 

I'll let sweet Carl Sagan explain the rest (skip to 36:00):