Research: Current

I tend to work on several different research projects in parallel, as I find there is often “cross-pollination” from one pursuit to the next. Here are some descriptions of some of my current research pursuits…

Art-Making and the Rise of Consciousness

For some time now, I have been involved in research concerning art-making, industrial design (e.g., tool-making), and the rise of consciousness in Homo sapiens, as well as the transition of humans to Homo faber and Homo techne. What was human thinking like before there was visual art and design? Moreover, did such art and the practice of design arise as a particular tool for human beings to use — not to communicate with each other, but rather for individual human beings to communicate with themselves?

My other recent research has looked at indigenous systems of mapping and transmission of knowledge in early societies. These studies have shown that early humans used complex systems of visual art, storytelling, performance, and later, writing, to "encode" and transmit knowledge. But as I did this research, I was led to wonder about the time before the rise of all this externalized creative activity. Why was there such a marked change in human beings — that is, the sudden appearance of cave painting (some 65,000 years ago, by current estimates), with both realistic and abstract renderings?

I developed a conjecture that art and design arose as a new and increasingly essential mode of externalizing and then re-absorbing thoughts. That is, human beings had developed a need to process information through creating objects outside of themselves and then observing them and "putting them back into" their own consciousness. This new tool, of course, was very powerful, but I also considered it as very problematic — it essentially split human consciousness in two, a kind of hypertrophied form of Julian Jayne's "bicameral mind".One could argue, further, that the practice of art and design,and the aforementioned mode of externalizing and then re-absorbing thoughts, represents a loss of a more holistic relationship between humans and the natural world. All art, design, and even language, after all, reflect the human desire to reunite with Nature — a desire described in every human philosophy from the narrative of Adam and Eve to the Daoist text known as Zhuangzi.

In fact, since I was teaching philosophy as well as history at the time that I began this research, I came to realize that a number of Daoist and Buddhist works, as well as Classical texts from the Western tradition (such as Plato's Republic) actually contain evidence of trace cultural memories of a "pre-art" or "pre-split" mode of human existence. The intense focus in early philosophical traditions on resolving or eliminating the dual — the subject/object dichotomy — in human beings, indicated to me that there was an early awareness in both East and West that human beings had somehow profoundly changed over the preceding millennia. In short, even in the ancient world, there were already serious considerations, even concerns, as to what prehistoric human beings had been like, living in a more holistic state, and what contemporary humans had lost in terms of holism and harmony. Of course, these considerations continue today, with lessons now concerning our marked split from the natural environment, our suffering from mental health crises, and our contradictory teleological beliefs (e.g., "sustainable growth").

In this project, I hope to put together a systematic study of early works that show this awareness of the "split", such as in the Daoist "Discussion on Making All Things Equal" (齊物論) in the Zhuangzi, and in the text entitled On Non-Existence by the Greek Sophist philosopher Gorgias. I would like to create a conjectural model connecting those ancient discussions with a study of certain aspects of early visual art, in areas such as Buddhist mandalas and Plato's concept of mimesis.

Modes of Knowledge Transmission in Indigenous/Traditional Cultures

This is a continuing work on modes of knowledge transmission in indigenous/traditional cultures, with a focus on mapping, cartography, and visual and psychological models of the landscape. I have written about this topic, discussing how the modern conception of a map and the cartographic process is at several removes from how an indigenous cultural might engage with the landscape, and why it is important to understand what might be “lost” in the modern methodology. That initial study appeared in an article entitled, “Indigenous Mapping: Cultural and Psychological Sources“, in The Portolan: Journal of the Washington Map Society. I also presented two lectures on these concepts, to the Washington Map Society, as well as to an audience at Williams College.

My hope is to build a more general model of these “modes of knowledge transmission”, especially as I find that the topic comes up repeatedly, in everything from the history of dance in the Classical world (dance as encoding of fundamental human knowledge) to the sociology of technology. In the latter topic, it was my research for my book, Lost Knowledge: The Concept of Vanished Technologies and Other Human Histories that led me to find that there indeed were indigenous, non-modern systems of transmitting all kinds of highly technical knowledge and ideas.

While there has been excellent research in many areas of indigenous knowledge, such as in traditional medicine, there is still much to be done in terms of a deep study of the methodological aspects of this type of transmission of knowledge. That is, the goal may be a vast classification system looking at the many and fascinating modes of how cultures preserve and transmit their knowledge about the world.

Models and Empirical Methods in Studying the Nature of Time

This research concerns models of spacetime. In particular, I am working on assembling two distinct models to describe spacetime in a way that could yield new insights into both the nature of time and temporality. In terms of the nature of time, my focus is on the experimentally-verifiable aspects of time, notably the results of Special Relativity. In terms of temporality, I am interested in why we perceive time as a series of events and how this can be connected more directly to the actual nature of time itself. The first model is one that I label "Time as 'Events'". For this model, I draw from the work of the physicist Julian Barbour. In his book The End of Time, Barbour argues that time as we perceive it — as a flow, or in a linear passage — is an illusion. He argues that there are, rather, distinct sets of moments, which he calls "Nows". These are fixed events, and Barbour further argues that in fact there is no such thing as motion or change. Barbour has also published a selection of academic papers outlining various aspects of this model. While this concept of a timeless universe is problematic, it is a very useful starting point in a new discussion of time and temporality.

In particular — although Barbour's work does not make this direct implication — his concept spatializes time in a particularly firm way, so that time as a geometrical identity can take full form, and be explored (in mathematical and physical terms) much in the same way as space. Barbour alludes to this in his characterization of Leibniz's model of motion as simply relational locations. This is Barbour's idea of independent events or moments — the "snapshots". They become ordered through what Barbour calls "the presumed continuity of the changes of the relative configurations" that allows, "a unique ordering of the sequence". Interestingly, Barbour does not use this depiction to provide a model of temporality, but it is possible. In my study, I hope to investigate the related concept of mathematical ordering as a possible origin for our sense of "time's passage", or temporality.

The work of Tim Maudlin, a philosopher of science at New York University, includes an approach to time that can be connected to Barbour's concepts. Although Maudlin's areas of specialty are metaphysics and quantum theory, he has also written on the nature of time. In his 2012 book, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time, Maudlin uses a geometrical approach to explain Special Relativity, in contrast to the usual methods of coordinate systems or "reference frames". In my model of time as a set of "events", I hope to synthesize Barbour's general conception with the more specific geometrical structures of Maudlin to create a way of talking about Special Relativity in terms of a complete temporal setup. In this new model, I will articulate temporality as resulting from perspectival perceptions of events in four-dimensional structure, alluding to the potential role of a kind of parallax phenomenon in creating apparent passage of time.

The second model of time that I am researching is completely digital: in such a model, time is no more than a dataset. That dataset is a fixed compilation of encoded information that is structured in way comparable to the data in a storage medium such as a computer hard-drive. The information therein not only contains the coded "events" in time, but also contains the subcodes that dictate how the data should be accessed and read. This model provides a clear way of understanding how temporal events are read by, for example, human consciousness in a particular manner and in a particular order. Temporality in this model, then, is the reading of digital data through the form of an interface. This model, too, will be examined in terms of how it handles the results of Special Relativity, particularly time dilation.

However, the ultimate question remains: Why is time as the object of scientific study so problematic? As noted, above, there are models of time and temporality, but how can these be connected in a productive way with empirical findings? In turn, the following question must be asked, a critically important one: “is there a way to generate more empirical findings concerning time?"