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JUD EVANS:
This is something I have been trying
to do
for years. I have been attempting to
view
the things that exist, our earth, the
cosmos
as if I was an independent observer
- meaning
someone else - not me. I have been
attempting
to conceive of *things-in-themselves.*
It
is far too difficult for me to try
to describe
what I mean here, but part of it involves
looking at a tree and trying to imagine
what
it is like for the tree not to be looked
at, or - how it exists as a thing in
itself
free from sensorial human attribution
- too
see it *in the mind's eye* as it really
is
existing in the way that it exists.
I do
NOT believe that it exists in different
phenomenological
versions depending upon whether a human
or
a cow or a bird or an insect is looking
at
it and interpreting it sensorially.
GARY C. MOORE
Quickly, I can agree with all of that.
But
account should be taken of the mathematics
and geometry of an insect's point of
view
as well as the fact there are other
variables
one knows little or nothing about,
for instance,
segmented eyes. In fact, that may well
be
extremely important for this discussion.
Have there not been scientific studies
SUPPOSEDLY
showing how a fly sees things?
JUD EVANS:
There have actually. I will try to find one
on the net. It IS interesting isn't it for
extrapolating from the fact that a tree looks
like... -well hold on a minute... I will
go and look for an illustratration of how
human scientists think a n insect sees the
world. let's decide to use a fly's view for
simplicity.
GARY C. MOORE
That is much like Mariano's Jain blind
men
studying the elephant. One interprets
the
unknown by what one knows. An Eliminativist
approach would be to state the facts
as they
are without a comprehensive interpretation.
That is something not only that we
need to
get use to but actually develop a methodology,
something you are very good at, of
anticipating
results that are necessarily always
going
to be incomplete, therefore not encouraging
a comprehensive God's eye point of
view.
How does one go about describing something
when it is not a *something* is the
problem.
The God's eye point of view wants a
*thing-in-itself*.
And the real kicker is BOTH approaches
have
their correct vantage points and points
of
view if used correctly. What I am trying
to bring to the foreground is that
NONE of
this is simple and obvious.
The God's eye point of view is absolutely
essentially to both an astronomer and
an
atomic physicist because they deal
with realms
necessarily, that is, when being
*comprehensive* which translates in
practical
terms *What does it mean to us in the
world
we live in?* Nobody, including the
most detailed
and fanatical scientists, just want
bits
and particles of information and mathematical
formulas for highly delimited aspects,
they
want something to show their real bits
and
pieces which they can actually demonstrate
in one fashion or another have important
meanings for the *whole scheme of things*,
that is, and only can be, the God's
eye point
of view.
So, we know the process in the laboratory
only gives us certain particles of
information
that do not *interpret themselves for
us*.
And if we leave it at that, that is,
simply
show the real facts of the matter,
we want
to say *And so . . . ? What does this
MEAN?
Why is it IMPORTANT? What are we to
DO with
this?*
What have we done? A number of *human*
issues
have suddenly been connected to material
facts where there is no physical, material
connection, and, considering that scientific
experiments ideally are performed
not
to achieve BENEFICIAL results but are
LEGITIMATE
only if there is detached neutrality
as to
the outcome which simply wants to find
a
fact of reality no matter what it is.
BUT,
once done, THEN the God's eye point
of view
immediately and, in its own way,
legitimately
- intervenes giving the experiment
a moral
framework of purpose and comprehensive
understanding.
Now, this is in the very nature of
language
AS WE HAVE LEARNED IT FROM OUR PARENTS.
As
such, it is an inescapable fact not
to be
avoided but should be dealt with straight
forward in an honest manner. *What
should
be* always overwhelms in one fashion
or its
opposite another *what is*, that is,
the
bare facts of the matter. Therefore
abstractions
always have a theological implication
to
give them a sense of reality that they
cannot
logically and scientifically truly
possess.
Does this invalidate their use? Then
you
must cease to speak and write. OR
you
can think of it this way. The *God's
eye*
point of view gives one an IMAGINATIVE
grasp
of things one cannot possibly grasp
through
mere bits and pieces. It gives a MORAL
imperative
to see logical connections that only
the
imagination can bring together, which
then
maybe can be scientifically verified.
We not only have a comprehensive grasp
but
also a purpose and aim to our thinking
where, in material fact, none exist.
Now, in this regard, the Stoics can
be greatly
helpful because essentially what they
are
trying to do is move in the opposite
direction.
They want to LEAVE a world of overly
emotional,
traditional belief smothering aspects.
They
want to cut the theological in language
down
to the bare bone. Though there is a
necessary
and even useful theological remnant
between
their vantage point and point of view
and
our vantage point and point of view,
none
the less, the purposes and directions,
though
opposite, are true opposites, and are
as
compatible, and mutually necessary,
as the
north and south geographical and magnetic
poles. Opposites are absolutely necessary
to understand reality beyond bits and
pieces
in the hand to the overall comprehension
in the bush.
Both Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius
constantly
hammer at the point *What do you TRULY
possess?*
which translates *What do you really
control?*
which translates into OUR bugbear *How
are
you Free?* - NOT does free will exist,
but,
coming from the opposite direction
where
everything and anything is consideblack
in
the power of human free will including
the
powers and purpose of nature and the
wills
of the various gods, those two savagely
cut
your existence down to a bear sliver
of self-
responsibility, that is, *Do you assent
to
your sense impressions?* Mere assent.
Absolutely
nothing else. No changing of any external
reality TO THAT ASSENT. And that *assent*
means ONLY do you give that sense impression
*importance*? All moral and theological
importance ALL OF IT, TOTALLY
hangs
on that one threadbare point and
it CANNOT
be expanded into anything more that
that
because both Stoics rub your face repeatedly
in the fact the real object that caused
that
sense impression is COMPLETELY OUTSIDE
YOUR
CONTROL, YOUR *FREE WILL*, as a material
fact even if it may be your wife and
children.
You cannot make a material exception
for
them. They fall into the same material
status
as physical objects as any other physical
objects. If they are important to you,
and
they compel you to do certain things,
then
you are enslaved by them. You have
given
them your assent to be your masters.
A harsh
realization, but an undeniable one.
Guess
where God has a place in this? God
is Nature,
and what happens is natural, and as
natural
is good because it is rational and
it has
to be that way and no other.
And now you have been introduced to
the heart
of Stoic physics and logic. They are
disciplined
to approach their wife knowingly in
the same
way they would approach a scientific
experiment.
I said *APPROACH*, no more. The Stoic
acknowledges
you will have feelings, but that is
exactly
and only how THEY should be approached,
as
*sense impressions*, *Do you give assent
and to what degree?* As Epictetus says,
It
is foolish to say you will not love
your
children, but even more foolish to
IGNORE
the ever-present fact they will die.
Kiss
them, he says, with the thought in
your mind,
*Tomorrow morning you could be dead.*
In other words, THE ONLY THING YOU
OWN is
what you assent to. Period. Sum total
of
your life. In fact, even your life,
your
body, is totally at the use and abuse
of
anyone who chooses to do something
with it.
That too is part of reality as Nature.
What
happens, really happens, and since
it does
happen, grieving over it in a magical
incantation
of emotion as if that would change
reality
makes things much, much worse, not
better,
despite the fact that is what the bystanders
around you expect from you. That is
all that
they can be in such a situation, bystanders.
They are people of absolutely no importance.
So, your assignment, Jud, should you
assent
to pursue it, is to approach imaginative
comprehension and scientific particulars
in a Stoic fashion, always knowing
the facts
of the matter are absolutely beyond
your
control or *free will*, that what
happens
happens, that you and I are specks
of absolutely
no importance from the *God's eye*
view of
the Goddess Nature maybe from here
we can
find out the insect's view of things,
that
is, if we are not stepped on first
and
things go on without us as if we had
never
lived.
Now, a normal person would cry out
*That
is an absolutely horrible thing to
say!*
But a Stoic would say, *It makes you
free.*
By Robert Sanders BERKELEY -- Flies
are among
the most visual of insects as they
barnstorm
through the air and engage one another
in
aerial dogfights.
So what better way to study their quick
maneuvering
than to stick them in a "virtual
reality"
chamber and record how they bank and
roll
in response to changing images.
Using just such a virtual reality chamber,
Michael Dickinson and his UC Berkeley
colleagues
have solved a long-standing puzzle
about
how flies fly. For being such a visual
creature,
no one could find a direct connection
between
the fly's visual system and the muscles
that
control their single set of wings.
In this week's issue of Science (April
10,
vol. 280), Dickinson, an assistant
professor
of integrative biology at UC Berkeley,
reports
that information from the eyes feeds
instead
to vestigial organs called halteres
- the
evolutionary remnants of a second set
of
wings - which act as the fly's gyroscope.
The halteres then relay signals to
the wing
muscles to alter their stroke or angle
of
attack.
This seemingly illogical system, relaying
visual information through a muscle-bound
organ, nevertheless is extremely fast.
House
flies can change course in response
to visual
images within an amazingly short 30
milliseconds.
"We knew behaviorally that a lot
of
flight is under the voluntary control
of
vision, but we've had difficulty identifying
functional connections - wing steering
muscles
don't respond to changing visual images,"
says Dickinson, a neuroethologist.
"But
when we looked at the steering muscles
of
the halteres and presented the animal
with
a visual pattern, we got robust activation
of the muscles."
"One possibility is that visual
control
in the fly works by fooling its gyroscope,"
he adds.
The discovery is important not only
for what
it tells us about how flies fly and
how they
evolved, but also for the novel tip
it gives
designers on how to stabilize small,
insect-
like robots during flight.
Unlike most flying insects, flies have
a
single pair of wings. The hindwings
have
diminished in size to millimeter long,
lollipop-like
organs called halteres that beat like
a normal
wing during flight but play an entirely
different
role. They essentially act as gyroscopes,
telling the fly how its body is rotating
and sending signals to the wing muscles
to
correct its orientation. They are analogous
to the human inner ear, which is critical
to maintaining equilibrium.
The halteres, beating out of sync with
the
forewings, are the key to the fly's
aerodynamic
prowess.
"Flies are the most accomplished
fliers
on the planet in terms of aerodynamics,"
Dickinson says. "They can do things
no other animal can, like land on ceilings
or inclined surfaces. And they are
especially
deft at takeoffs and landings -- their
skill
far exceeds that of any other insect
or bird."
Dickinson has been studying how the
sensory
cells at the base of the haltere detect
changes
in the haltere's position resulting
from
forces exerted during flight. The major
factor
is the Coriolis force, which pushes
things
sideways as they move on a rotating
body.
This force, which causes winds on the
spinning
Earth to curl into eddies and cyclones,
pushes
the beating haltere to the side when
the
fly's body rotates. The sensory cells,
called
campaniform sensilla, then send signals
to
the steering neurons of the wing to
alter
the reflex beating to stabilize flight
or
change direction.
Remove a fly's halteres and it becomes
unstable
and quickly crashes to the ground,
he says.
The key to Dickinson's new finding
was discovering
a 1948 paper in which P. F. Bonhag
of Cornell
University reported his dissection
of a set
of tiny muscles attached to the halteres
in the horse fly. Long since forgotten,
these
muscles appear to be vestiges of muscles
used to steer the hindwing before it
became
specialized into the sensory structures
we
recognize as halteres.
Though these steering muscles - 11
of them
in the house fly, analogous to the
17 steering
muscles attached to the fly's forewing
-
evidently are no longer important in
generating
aerodynamic forces, Dickinson had a
hunch
they might be the missing connection
between
the visual system and the flight muscles.
Looking instead at blowflies, Calliphora
vicina, he and postdoctoral researchers
Wai
Pang Chan and Flackerick Prete stuck
glass
recording electrodes into several of
the
11 minuscule steering muscles of the
haltere
and measublack their activity when
the fly
was presented with various moving images
in the virtual reality chamber.
"Lo and behold, the steering muscles
were strongly activated," Dickinson says. Different muscles contracted
depending upon whether the pattern
of dark
lines moved up, down, across or diagonally.
He suspects that these contracting
muscles
tweak the halteres, which in turn relay
the
effect to the wing muscles to control
flight.
Dickinson plans further studies to
determine
exactly how the steering muscles affect
the
halteres.
"Flies use visual information combined
with mechanosensory information to fool the
halteres, probably changing the way the halteres
beat or the sensitivity of its receptors," Dickinson says. "That information is then sent forward
to the wing muscles."
Contrary to expectations, channeling
visual
information through the halteres is
probably
a more stable way to achieve visual
control
of flight, he says. Rather than turning
off
or overriding the gyroscopes - the
halteres
- it is more effective to fool them.
By connecting to the haltere steering
muscles,
the fly also is taking advantage of
an already
existing fast, reflexive control system.
The halteres, just one nerve cell away
from
the motor neurons of the wing, are
designed
to react quickly - reflexively - to
yaw,
pitch and roll in the fly. This allows,
for
example, a male fly to rapidly change
course
when pursuing a female.
Moreover, it seems certain now that
the halteres
derived from an earlier set of hindwings,
and that flies adapted the hindwings'
steering
muscles to a different purpose. In
other
insects, such as locusts, the hindwings
beat
out of phase with the forewings - just
like
the halteres - but probably are not
able
to affect equilibrium, he notes.
"In many insects the forewing
follows
what the hindwing is doing, and this
is still
going on in flies," Dickinson
says.
"The same basic circuitry is there
in
the fly, the hindwing entrains the
forewing,
they've just reused the muscles and
sensors
on the hindwing in a very clever way."
The virtual reality chambers Dickinson
uses
in his laboratory are cylinders lined
with
about 2,000 green diodes that present
black
stripes moving at various angles, and
at
a speed between 3,000 and 4,000 frames
per
second. Flies are tetheblack to a post
in
the center of the cylinder.
The high-speed images are necessary
because
fly's eyes can see movement 10 times
faster
than the human eye. In other words,
while
humans see a constant image when it
flickers
on and off more than 30 times per second,
flies do not see a continuous fused
image
until the flicker rate reaches 300
times
per second.
Their compound eyes, on the other hand,
contain
between 550 and 600 individual ommatidia
(in the fruit fly) that see very little
detail.
"Flies have poor spatial resolution
but spectacular temporal resolution,"
Dickinson says. "Their eyes are
built
for speed."
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the David
and Lucile Packard Foundation.
 GARY. C. MOORE:
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