Planetology

Here is a link to my internal review video from the review on Wednesday.

Here are some images from my research:

Coral PDF

Slime Mold PDF

Lichens:

[The thing about I is, it only exists within a tenth-of-a-second of all its parts…when the neural architecture diffuses past some critical point and signals take just that much longer to pass from A to B— the system, well, decoheres…I shatters into we. It’s not just a human rule, or a mammal rule, or even an Earthly one. It’s a rule for any circuit that processes information, and it applies as much to the things we’ve yet to meet as it did to those we left behind.]

The Island, Peter Watts, page 14

Upon reading The Island by peter watts what really began to fascinate me is the idea of coherence and decoherence and the state at which one entity becomes two or vice versa. When is a complex system of parts a cohesive “I” and when it is a system of separate “I’s”?  For example, if you take a system and spread it out, when does the communication time become long enough that one becomes two and what impact does this question have on the process of form-making?

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, coherence has two distinct definitions. The first, as we normally think of coherence, is to hold together, firmly as parts of the same mass, becoming united in principles, relationships, or interests. The second definition relates to Quantum Coherence, which says that as long as all original possibilities of a system remain intact, the system is coherent, but when affected by an outside force, the system must choose which of the possibilities is true and therefore decoheres. The idea of “parts of the same mass” supports the question I brought up earlier “if you take a system and spread it out, when does the communication time become long enough that one becomes two?” but also triggered me to question what forms the cohesion in the first place, and does the amassing of parts have a limit? Can so many parts try to be of the same mass that it can no longer be one entity, but one mass that has two identities?

Focusing on the first definition, and the idea of massing and unmassing  defining the coherency of an “I”,  began to examine Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, and pulled some paragraphs for sketching ideas. The book focuses on crowds of people, but the rules and logics he pulls from the crowds of people could also apply to other material systems.

[2] “It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd too whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body.” –Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

[3] “The crowd, suddenly there where there was nothing before, is a mysterious and universal phenomenon. A few people may have been standing together-five, ten, or twelve, not more; nothing has been announced, nothing is expected. Suddenly everywhere is black with people and more come streaming from all sides as though streets had only one direction. Most of them do not know what has happened and, if questioned, have no answer; but they hurry to be there where most other people are. There is determination in their movement which is quite different from the expression of ordinary curiosity. It seems as though movement of some of them transmits itself to the others. But that is not all; they have a goal which is there before they can find words for it. The goal is the blackest spot where people are gathered.” –Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

[4] “For just as suddenly as it originates, the crowd disintegrates. In its spontaneous form is a sensitive thing. The openness which enables it to grow is, at the same time, its danger. A foreboding of threatening disintegration is always alive in the crowd. It seeks through rapid increase, to avoid this for as long as it can; it absorbs everyone, and, because it does, must ultimately fall to pieces.” –Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

[6]” Only together can men free themselves from their burdens of distance; and this, precisely, is what happens in a crowd. During the discharge distinctions are thrown off and all fell equal. In that density where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against body, each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense  feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.” –Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

The idea of the crowd in relation to architecture brings up the question of scale. I think it would be interesting to explore the idea of crowd accumulation at an architectural scale (how do many tiny pieces “crowd together” into a building?). It also brings up the idea of a larger, social/city scale, how do multiple organisms for one identity and create a city. How does this city spawn itself on a planetary scale or how does it  become so dense that it splits into multiple “I’s”?

We are living on a different planet than that of our ancestors because we are able to alter the world in more significant ways than they ever could- they re-acted to geologic events, we can enact geologic events. As is written in the beginning of Making the Geologic Now, “These [geologic] are forces to be reckoned with existentially, creatively, conceptually, and pragmatically as humans work to meet the fact that not only is our species increasingly vulnerable to the geologic, we also have become agents of planetary geologic change”. New possibilities are available, when man can grasp the geologic, but they make deeper understanding of all organisms and the networks that interconnect them even more necessary.

In the Miyazaki’s movie, the Toxic forest is an example of how human-created pollution has become a “System Event”, a  change in the way material flowed through the overall growth system on earth, at the scale of the geologic. The pollution that is stuck within the layers of earth , is absorbed by the plants that grow on earth’s outermost layer, and alters the way the plants grow so much, that when they bloom, they release toxic gases. The toxic gases spread with the spores that are released and cover the world in more toxic plants, steadily coating the world in an environment poisonous to people. Later in the movie you realize that there is a pure space underneath the Toxic forest, so that the forest is a purifying tool to cleanse the pollution left by humans.

What defines the boundary between a network of life and systems that is one organism and the greater network in which that organism lives?

In our discussion last Wednesday, it was mentioned that “I” is sort of superficial because “I” (referring to a single human body) is actually referring to a combination of systems and networks including, the digestion system, the nervous system, the circulatory system, the vascular system, and all of the tissue networks that make up those systems. So when was “I” distinguished as an organism?

In part, “I” is  classified an organism because it has a certain amount of (but far from complete)  independence. As Johnson describes in Emergence, emergent systems are not necessarily intrinsically good or intrinsically bad, but  “rely extensively on feedback, for both growth and self-regulation” The human body is able to regulate itself and adapt to dynamic conditions in the systems within which it lives based on feedback loops within the body. The other part that Separates “I” from the sea of networks inside it and surrounding it is an identity, which encompasses all of the systems inside, but not all of the networks outside.

By this logic a city could be considered an organism if it has some amount of independence from other systems outside it and an identity that encompasses all of the systems and people inside it, but not those that live elsewhere. Or any part and population of a city that has its own identity that is separate from others in the city can be its own organism. Maybe when Mumford’s said, that a city cannot grow beyond a certain size because it will loose its “vibrant public culture”, what it meant was the city-type organism cannot grow beyond a certain size before it must split into a city made of multiple organisms. At some point the organism decoheres.

[“at the onset of a process of self-organization…the mechanisms become extremely sensitive to minor fluctuations in the environment…”naturally selecting” one assembly pattern over another” -Manuel DeLanda, Nonorganic Life ]

Many of our networks can be described as “alive” because, while they are not made of biological tissue, they have become so complex, that the initial care that was needed for upkeep now emerges from the system itself. Basically, the system started as a few materials (maybe including people) that organized themselves along some kind of pattern. As the pattern repeated itself and spread through different systems it was changed based on what the system dictated most appropriate for those interactions, much like the self-organizing systems, described by DeLanda, that may have lead to life on earth. Once a certain level of complexity was achieved the human decisions that initially directed the networks almost seem decided by the systems within the networks. Humans become the worker bees building the nest according to the nest’s direction.