Process and Magnitude

This spring I took a Cognitive Psychology class entitled 'Cognition in the Wild', which dealt with human attitudes of the wilderness and how perception changes when placed in the wild. A large focus of the class was on Southern Utah and the Anasazi peoples. It encompassed a wide variety of topics like anthropology, ecology, evolutionary biology, geology, politics, and art. But no psychology, which initially bothered me. Whether by coincidence or purpose, the cognitive processes elicited by the class were as informative and influential as any discussion could have been - and it was one of the better classes I have taken during my University career.

Earlier in the year I had taken a class on Systems Theory entitled 'Chaos and Change', which primed my mind for the experiences and changes I have encountered in the past 6 months. I've always felt that everything is interconnected if one looks hard enough, but a rigorous scientific viewpoint has always forced me to view the causal schemata of life without teasing out the relationships. The two operative words I gained from this class are, as the title suggests, Process and Magnitude.

Life rarely is in stasis, and if it is, it usually is dead or inert. It is not dynamic. Science for the most part takes slices of living, such as the model cell or the Bohr model of the atom, and presents them as life itself. Certainly these models provide a framework for how life operates in simple, generalized terms. But no cell has perfectly shaped mitochondria with evenly spaced cristae, no atom has little red electrons with minus signs whizzing around the nucleus in perfect orbits. These are symbols of structure, static images of ideal existence. The reality however, is that all structures in life, from the quark to the galaxy filament, are interconnected through a web of relationships, a multitude of dynamic systems.

Southern Utah demonstrates the ideas of process and magnitude in a beautiful and elegant way that no other place or subject can. This past weekend, I had the opportunity to share a couple of my favourite places in the San Rafael Swell with Lauryn.

We went to Horseshoe Canyon, which houses the Great Gallery, a collection of Anasazi and Fremont rock art (both petroglyphs and petrographs) adorning the canyon walls. The tall, oblong figures are the product of a lost and unknown people who managed to create a grand civilization in the middle of a harsh and unforgiving land. Horseshoe Canyon itself is beautiful, with the tangible feeling that you are in the midst of watching geological processes unfold. The multihued banded rocks give me the feeling of looking at the swirling gasses of distant planets, the organic shapes carved into rock by the ebb of water and wind over eons playfully tantalize my imagination. Everywhere around is manifest of organic process.

This greeted us as we descended into the canyon.

There was this old pipe in the ground in the middle of the desert. Where did it lead to and why was it there?

One of my favourite places in Horseshoe Canyon, an enormous cavernous opening with a red rock beach, made better by one of my favourite people, Lauryn. We enjoyed the mesmerizing dance of a dust devil as we ate our lunch, then lay on our backs looking at the fractal tendrils of the clouds creep over the lip of the canyon.

A section of the Great Gallery panel. The guy at the left leaning over seems like he would be fun at a party.

One of the most well known sections of the Great Gallery, the middle figure maybe has a big beard or has a skull for a head?

At the end of the hike. Triumph!

The next day we hiked Little Wild Horse Canyon, a slot canyon with really narrow walls.

The most wonderful thing about science, in my opinion, is it allows us to expand our experience of magnitude. Imagine, for a second, the biggest thing that you can concretely picture in your mind. On good days, I can realistically imagine the space of the solar system, maybe just past the Oort Cloud. That's fucking huge - 1 light year. Almost 10^16 metres. Now imagine the smallest thing you can think of. For me it's a nucleotide, maybe I can imagine some of the electron clouds of the atoms in the nucleotide interacting. But that's on the scale of 10^-8 metres. Daily human experience, on the other hand, is about on the range of 10^-3 meters (a millimetre) to 10^3 metres (a kilometer). Huge range of magnitudes.

The problem that science currently faces, in my opinion, is helping to establish and understand the relationships between levels of magnitude, giving it meaning and connection, showing the process. Personally, I hate the way molecular and cellular biology shows only diagrams, little loops of molecules in a neat cycle, dead organelles and macromolecules locked in a deathly stasis for our perverse voyeuristic pursuits. The higher up I get into biology, the more it starts to make sense in a dynamic way, I can see the parts interacting, and maybe that is the well kept secret that is bequeathed to you in grad school.

Side Note: I also got to ride on a giant gila monster - giddyup!

Fear and Loathing at UCSD

This is the story of later in the summer of 2008, the last week of July I believe. I had come down to Southern California for the ComiCon with Max, and Lauryn gave us a ride down to San Diego. We all decided to start our morning with some LSD and wanderings around UCSD (University of San Diego) because of the cool architecture and lots of eucalyptus trees. Max likes to chip eucalyptus bark in his hands when he is tripping.

Max and Lauryn, at the beginning of our journey.

I can't believe my hair was that long. It really blows my mind. I had gotten a horrible sunburn on my face thanks to the Day Star - my nose was leaking gross goop. I also lost a lot of weight doing a lot of psychedelics and as such my pants didn't fit too well, so I constantly had to hike them back up, completing the whole ponce look I have going on here.

This is the Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss!) Library, which looks like a crazy spaceship from a bad sci-fi movie. We spent a good amount of time in there, being noisy and looking at old books. We found an archived collection of Popular Mechanics magazines from the 80's that cracked us up.

We left the library and came across a map of UCSD which was water damaged and really hard to read. I told Lauryn and Max that I couldn't read the map, to which Lauryn replied 'Why? Are you so stupid you can't read?' On acid, you lose track of the magnitude of things, especially with sounds, so I yelled at Lauryn 'YOU KNOW, READING IS REALLY HARD FOR ME RIGHT NOW OK YOU DUMB BITCH!' Which caused a group tour nearby to immediately go silent and watch Lauryn and I glare at each other for what seemed like ages until we realized what we had just done.

There was this crazy looking tree that was dripping a deep red sap, we thought the tree was bleeding profusely.

Making our way back to the exterior of the library Max saw the moon, which he called. It's his so no one else can have it. Looking around for something equally awesome, I saw the Cognitive Sciences building and called that. It's mine. Lauryn didn't want to call anything so we gave her the West Coast, which is full of brazen hussies. This turned into the adventures of the Moon Ambassador, the Cognitive Sciences Robot, and Western Hussydom playing around on the exterior of the library to escape the Day Star, which we were all allied against due to it's face wrecking capabilities.

The ground outside the library looked like the surface of the moon, which I excitedly told Max about. Glaring at me, and in the sternest tone I have ever heard him talk to me in, he said, "You wouldn't know The Moon's maiden beauty." and smacked the camera out of my hands.

There was some general wandering around, watching the gentle coastal winds ripple through the trees, appreciating the architecture of UCSD, and idle conversation. We went to the cafeteria shortly thereafter to get something to eat.

Eating while tripping is always really hard. First, you lose perception of time, which messes up the internal dietary clock immensely. Secondly, you lose your appetite. Third, nothing looks appealing. Case in point, we went to the Subway in the cafeteria for lunch. Standing in line, we had another magnitude problem. There was a guy eating a sandwich at a table, but his sandwich looked huge compared to him. We couldn't decide whether the sandwich was enormous or the man was really small, so Lauryn went and stood next to him for comparison. Unfortunately that didn't help. To this day it still really bothers us that a midget might have been eating a giant sandwich.

I looked at the sandwich fixings through the glass, and everything looked like insects or organs to me - I couldn't take it; the bright lights, the noise of people eating, the prospect of eating a sandwich full of tapeworms and grubs. I stuffed a wad of bills (it turned out to be like $60) in Max's hand and ran to what I thought was outside. Turned out to be a breezeway, which I stood in the middle of trying to clear my mind as people navigated around me.

Max and Lauryn somehow made it through the ordeal of ordering food and came out bearing sandwiches, proceeding to tell me the horror stories of dealing with the Subway employees. I couldn't handle hearing it, their descriptions filled me with anxiety and fear. The fear of people, noise, and connection started to bother me, and as I looked at Lauryn and Max, two of my best friends, I began to feel extremely distanced from them.

After lunch we all needed to cool down and the acid had switched into the cerebral phase. We sat on the grass and contemplated silently in our own heads. I remember thinking that I had no future compared to Max and Lauryn, seeing the life and environment of UCSD only amplified that feeling. I had earlier that month had an experience which helped me decide I wanted to pursue science over art, but what would I do? I was just a long haired drugged out depressed cosmonaut, drifting through the empty space of my life.

A lack of connectedness and purpose. That's what gives me the Fear. No matter how much I try I still come up short. That's what causes my Loathing.