Retrospective 2024-25

This is a retrospective of week 25, 2024 (2024-06-17–2024-06-23).

This week finished read Bridging Science and Spirit: The Genius of William A. Tiller’s Physics and the Promise of Information Medicine by Nisha J. Manek. Manek views the book as “a work in progress” and describes the “uneasiness” with writing it as follows:

Any writer will tell you: You expose yourself through words. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, one bleeds at the keyboard. When it came right down to it, I was uneasy about writing this bridge-book because of one simple reason: my lack of formal education in physics. …
A second reason for my uneasiness was it’s not easy to write about the life of Tiller and his contributions to scientific evolution and human thought in the short span of a book like this. …
Day after day,…I discovered, tossed out, and rejected ideas, only to rediscover them and understand how they helped build my bridge. …
For my bridge engineering, I had to dive into many concepts… What’s more, I had to link them in one long structure. …
I consider this book as a work in progress, akin to a status report, of where we are in intention research and Information Medicine. Some will complain about my choice for the ideas (the fifty-two “bricks”) and how I approached my engineering goals for this book. I make no apology for this. … The writing itself was like building a bridge. It was a continual search for the word that would fit in my mind, in the ideas, on the page. … So I looked at my pile of bricks, of ideas, picked the one that looked like it would fit the best, and put it in.

—Nisha Manek, Bridging Science and Spirit: The Genius of William A. Tiller’s Physics and the Promise of Information Medicine

Two bricks that are crucial for the bridge-building are “information” and “causality”. Manek writes (my emphasis in italics):

… Life is inherently an out-of-equilibrium phenomenon, but then so is an explosion. Something other than nonequilibrium thermodynamics is needed to explain why life and explosions are fundamentally different.
… We are, at the molecular level, the most information-dense structures around, squirming with information at every covalent bond, surpassing by magnitudes the best that computer engineers can design. Information is a crucial brick for the bridge.

—Nisha Manek, Bridging Science and Spirit: The Genius of William A. Tiller’s Physics and the Promise of Information Medicine

…take a seed that you plant: You water it, and allow it plenty of sunshine, and the potential in the seed is actualized… You cannot force the seed to sprout… Your actions of planting a seed seem to reduce causality to an expression of human agency. Yet, millions of variables interact…
The idea of a “this causing that” is built so deeply into our pattern of thinking that we can’t just step outside of it and consider a universe without it. The question of why the universe appears causal is very difficult to discuss, not to mention answer satisfactorily. But this is a crucial brick in the bridge. This idea that nothing is causing anything gets us to the other side of the bridge faster.

—Nisha Manek, Bridging Science and Spirit: The Genius of William A. Tiller’s Physics and the Promise of Information Medicine

I will look more into William Tiller’s physics next week.

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This week I’ve also listened to Ecologies of the Self: Transformational Practices with John Vervaeke and Bonnitta Roy. This is, to John Vervaeke’s credit, an unusual honest summary:

One of my besetting sins is that I often prefer to spin through theory space a little too much…

—John Vervaeke https://youtu.be/NBafKC5NqNI?t=4073

To which Bonnitta Roy replies:

We tend to just start playing different language games… It’s very hard to bridge that I would say.

—Bonnitta Roy https://youtu.be/NBafKC5NqNI?t=4136

As mentioned last week, it is important not to be blinded by language games and sophisticated language.