Death: when the wheel of life stops

The theory

Sorry for late posting (but I'm cheating, backdating for future readers) but I have an excellent excuse: I received the news that my husband died on summer solstice day. This leads me to a change on plans on the theme for the post: it just will have to be death. (If you find the subject unpleasant, I'm sorry, but it's one of those unavoidable and fundamental things, you might as well get used to thinking about it.) And I'd like to reply in this post to two questions that somebody sent me when he commented on my recent widowhood: "Do we exist beyond death? And what does 'we' mean here?"

Before going any further, I'll have to explain what is death from a systems perspective. The fundamental difference between a living body and a dead one is that the dead one isn't moving, isn't breathing, and is starting to decompose. In other words, it's a system that isn't self-sustaining or self-controlling any more. The wheel of life has literally stopped.

But the interesting thing about most self-controlling systems is that they don't exist in isolation. That's certainly true for all living creatures. We could do a journey from the smallest to the biggest scale, what's called the hierarchy of life, and I will do exactly that on my next post.

Big living systems are made up of small living systems: bodies are made up of cells; cities are made up of human beings and the things, animals and plants they bring with them; and the Earth is made up of... well, everything in the world.

Big living systems couldn't exist if there weren't small ones, but they can survive quite well the death of a single of their small elements, even the death of many of them. In fact, big living systems are completely dependant on the constant renewal of their small elements. Our skin is in constant renewal, and the surface of our skin is made of dead cells, constantly renovated with new skin (that's why peeling the very outer layer of your skin doesn't hurt at all: it's completely dead). Our society simply couldn't function if people stopped dying tomorrow. And the Earth could be in some serious trouble if any ecosystem started expanding beyond its usual boundaries... wait a moment, is that what agriculture has been doing to the planet for the last five thousand years?

So the systems answer to "Do we exist beyond death?" is something like Bill Clinton's famous quote: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." What scale of existence are we talking about? From the scale of a single cell, it isn't always straightforward to tell if the body it's in is dead or alive: hair keeps growing for a few days after death. And from the point of view of a cell - imagining such a simple living thing has something like a point of view - they live the lifetime of a cell, and many die well before the body dies. And looking at a bigger scale, anything slightly bigger than a single body - a family, even - one death is a relatively minor event: the family definitely continues existing beyond the death of one of its members.

The whole point of may religious, spiritual, and ideological traditions seems to be that focusing just on your body is the wrong way of looking at things: "This body is not your own." And they pretty strongly recommend focusing on a bigger system, at the narrowest your community, at the largest the whole Earth.

Now, nobody is going to stop you focusing on whatever you like. If you want to believe that your soul resides in your little left toe, that's up to you. You might have trouble explaining why some people seem to survive and be fundamentally the same after amputation of their little left toe, so maybe you want to choose a more vital organ. I haven't got any money to make selling any sort of heaven, so I don't really care what you want to believe. You can think that what you fundamentally are is in some tiny part of your brain or that it's spread all over your family, your country, or the whole Earth. It's all one to me.

All I'm saying is that just because the wheel of life stopped in one little living system, nothing has changed much: it's still turning in the same way in the bigger systems, all over the world, and everything is just the way it's always been. I don't know how that makes you feel, but I quite like that.

The practice

Experiment 1

Take a small pet, preferably one very lovable, and k... Ooops, I forgot a lot of the English-speaking world doesn't like black humour.

Okay, I think I'm leaving this one mostly up to you. I'm sure you've seen something living die, I just want you to ask yourself this question: how did you know that he/she/it died? What stopped happening? Would you say that the wheel of life just stopped all of a sudden, or did it turn slower and slower?

Experiment 2

As I said above, big systems are usually more resilient than small ones. On the other hand, if a big system dies, all of its parts often die as well. Taking this into account, how safe is your job (or any source of income that you have)? Consider the following:

- How important is what you do or what you are for your source of income? In other words, how likely is your source of income to survive without your help?

- How important is your source of income for society at large? In other words, how likely is society to survive without your source of income?

Making lists: sorting out eggs in different baskets

The theory

A commenter on the popular post on feelings was quite pleased with the classification of feelings, and other readers seem quite fond of my habit of classifying and sorting things into lists (for other recent examples, see What's in a link? and the terribly listy Different kinds of motives ). And some have asked: "How do you do it?"

The easy answer is: a lot of the time, I don't do it. Please don't think that the content of this blog is all original material! It's a mixture of things I've read elsewhere and my own musings. I should probably link to the sites where I get my ideas from, except that a lot of the time I don't remember. And I often bolt together the ideas of several different people with my own, and post the Frankenstein monster. I don't know what is the politically correct way of presenting that, so I just don't bother.

Still, I sometimes come up with my own classification of something or other (none of the examples above, I'm afraid). Sorting things is a very powerful way of thinking and I'm surprised that how to do it isn't usually taught at schools.

You can classify anything in three easy steps:

1. Write down all the types of that thing you can think about. Let's say you want to classify eggs. You could write down something like: big eggs, small eggs, brown eggs, white eggs, chicken eggs, duck eggs. Most people leave it at this step, and that's why they aren't very good at sorting things out.

2. Ask yourself: Are the categories overlapping? Are some categories included in others? In the eggs example, you could think: "Well, duck eggs are always bigger than chicken eggs. Do I care about the size more or less than I care about the bird? Hmmm, I think what I really care about is the bird. Maybe I shouldn't be talking about big and small eggs at all, and just classify depending on bird." Then you could look at the white and brown eggs and think: "Hmmm, both ducks and hens can have eggs of different colours. Do I care about the colour more or less than I care about the bird? Do I care about the colour at all? Hey, I think I do care about the colour, but I care about the bird more." After you've thought this, you will have a nested list like this:

a. Chicken eggs

a1. Brown chicken eggs

a2. White chicken eggs

b. Duck eggs

b1. Blue duck eggs

b2. White duck eggs

If you do this, you will have a decent classification, but it will leave things out, and that's why you need the next step.

3. Ask yourself: Have I covered all the possibilities? In the eggs example, when you ask yourself that question you'll realise you've opened a whole can of worms! How many different birds are there? At this point, you'll probably want to find some way of restricting the possibilities. Do you care about all eggs of all birds, or just the ones that you have seen sold in the market? Do you care about any possible colour an egg can be, or just the ones you've seen? To make the example easier, let's say you only care about eggs that you've seen sold in the market. Your market may look different to mine, but here is my classification:

a. Chicken eggs

a1. Brown chicken eggs

a2. White chicken eggs

a3. Spotted chicken eggs

b. Duck eggs

a1. Blue duck eggs

a2. White duck eggs

c. Quail eggs - spotted

Classifying gives you the key to solve many problems, that's why so many people love it! But, like any way of thinking, it gives you something but it also takes something away from you. Once you have all your eggs sorted in baskets, you'll find it hard to think about them in any different way.

There's a story about classifying that I love: An anthropologist went to a tribe to do tests on how "primitive thinking" is different from "civilized thinking". He showed the elders of the tribe a heap of several types of their common food and several tools they used to grow food, and he asked them to put them in groups. The elders put each food next to the tool used to grow it. The anthropologist very happily started making notes on how primitive thinking couldn't separate tools from food. Then one of the elders explained: "This is how a wise man would group them." The anthropologist, with a twinge of suspicion, asked: "How would a fool group them?" The elders promptly put all the food on one side, all the tools on the other.

The practice

Experiment 1

Go to the nearest patch of wildlife to your home and start classifying wild flowers. The result of this experiment is more interesting the less you actually know about different types of flowers. Never mind if you don't know the names for all the flowers, invent names for the ones you don't know.

Once you've done this, get a book on wild flowers, identify the flowers you didn't know before, and compare your classification with the one in the book. Which one do you think is better? (Hint: if you think yours is better than the one that generations of experts have found, your ego may need a bit of resizing. Then, you might have found a particularly bad book.) What does the book take into account that you didn't?

Experiment 2

This is quite a useful thing to do with any problem you have, when you can think of many (more than three) possible solutions and you can't make up your mind which one is the best one. Classify the solutions! Classifying solutions can make decisions a lot easier, because one or several of these things may happen:

• You realise that several of the possible solutions are actually quite similar, and you don't need to decide straight away which of them to choose, you can pick this path and make the final decision later.
• You realise there is an overlap between some of the solutions, and you can pick two of the solutions at once.
• You realise you haven't considered all the possibilities, and one of the possibilities you didn't think of before is in fact what you'd prefer.

Give it a try the next time you have one of those problems!

Working at different scales: from small to big

The theory

My post on feelings started some interesting email conversations, and one of them ended up talking about roles in Greek tragedies. I find this an interesting digression, because roles are something that happens in groups, and it's high time to start talking about what happens in groups.

We think about groups of anything - people, animals or rocks - because it's an easy mental shortcut. Imagine that you were looking at a field with sheep and you saw each sheep individually - you'd soon be overwhelmed by trying to think about so many sheep. Instead, we look at a field with sheep and what we see is a flock of sheep. We can think of all those sheep as a single entity. Makes life a lot easier. As long as all the elements in a group are similar enough and behave similarly, it works quite well.

But this leads to a very common mistake, which is thinking about groups as if they were the same thing as one of the elements of the group. For example, when talking about international politics, people often say things like: "The States want this and France wants that and Greece wants this other thing." The truth is, even Greece is a country with millions of people who want all sorts of things, and I'm sure there are precious few things that all of them want (I can only think of oxygen). Even if you are saying "Greece" as a shortcut for "the Greek government", it's still a lot of people we are talking about, who presumably have a number of disagreements.

You may be thinking that you can tell what a group of people collectively want if they put their disagreements to a vote. But it's a bit more complicated than that. Groups just aren't the same thing as an element, no matter how easy your life would be if it worked like that. For example, people normally have clearly ordered preferences. Give anyone a list of possible things to do, and a bit of time to sort out their thoughts, and they'll be able to order it from most to least desirable. Groups just don't have that. A simple example with three friends: Alice would prefer to go to an art exhibition, next to the beach, and last to the cinema. Bob would prefer to go to the beach, next to the cinema, last to an art exhibition. Charlie would prefer to go to the cinema, next to an art exhibition, last to the beach. You get the idea. The group, collectively, can't order their preferences.

To make things even worse, small groups aren't the same beasts as big groups. A small clump of trees isn't the same thing as a large forest. (You won't find deer in an isolated clump of trees usually.) A town isn't the same thing as a city. (Try walking down the street dressed in bright green and orange in a small town and in a big city if you don't get my meaning.)

This means that things that worked at small scales often stop working when they grow to bigger scales. Or things that work at large scales may not work at all at a small scale. Growing is a very tricky business indeed, as any child could tell you. You can't grow every bit at the same pace and in the same proportion. (Ever wondered why all infant animals are chubbier than adults? Because if they had exactly the same proportions as adults, they'd be terribly cold. Even physical laws make growth complicated.)

In future posts, I'll get into more details of how different scales require different approaches, but for the moment, I'd like to leave you thinking about it.

The practice

Experiment 1

Look for bodies of water in your area of different sizes: a puddle, a pond, a lake or river if there is one near you, the sea if you live near the coast. They are all in the same area, so they should be very similar, but as you probably have noticed already, they are very different. What animal and plant life can you see in each of them? In what ways are they different? Can you find out why are they different? (For example: Why does the sea have waves? Why is it salty?)

Experiment 2

Think of all the groups of people you belong to, and order them from smallest to biggest. The first one should be only you, the next should be you and your partner if you have one, the next your family. Include anything you can think of: your circle of closest friends, the organization you work in, the team of people you work with, any association you belong to, your neighbourhood, the location you live in, your country. Can you notice things in common in the smallest groups? Can you notice things in common in the biggest groups? In what way are small groups different from big groups?

Think

The theory


Looking back on old emails, I've noticed again one that I haven't really posted anything about. My reader asked what were my thoughts on "rational" vs "irrational" thinking. My understanding is that when people say "rational" they mean that somebody is making a decision based fundamentally on their thoughts, ignoring their feelings, and if they are making the decision based on their emotions, ignoring their thoughts, they are "irrational".

If you look again at the wheel of life, you'll notice that there is an arrow from Think to Feel, and an arrow back from Feel to Think. That's because our thoughts affect our feelings, but our feelings affect our thoughts as well. If you are in a forest and you think there are wolves around, you will be afraid. But if you go into a forest and you are already scared (maybe because you were running away from your angry uncle), you are much more likely to think that that strange noise could be... a pack of wolves!

That's why most of the time, we find it very difficult to disentangle our thoughts and our feelings. I read once that making a difficult decision is like trying to weigh a litter of kittens when the kittens are jumping from one plate of the scales to the other constantly. There is a lot of truth in this: for difficult decisions, our mind constantly jumps from juggling up a lot of thoughts and possibilities to focusing on a lot of stomach-churning, mixed feelings. It's no surprise it's hard to make up your mind!

There are two easy, but not very good, solutions to this problem. One is not even trying. People who don't even try are often labeled "irrational" by people who make an effort to disentangle thoughts and feelings. This isn't very fair, because everybody thinks. The other solution is suppressing your feelings. This isn't a great idea either, as I said on the post about feelings.

The best solution, as Greek philosophers discovered 2,500 years ago, is to disentangle them, look at them separately, and make your decisions after you are quite clear which things you are thinking and which things you are feeling. This is what their courts of law did, and what they still do nowadays. The jury is asked to do the thinking: Do you think, beyond reasonable doubt, that this person did this and that? Then the judge is the one who decides on the sentence: what does he or she feel is the right punishment for those actions?

If your thoughts and feelings don't seem to be entirely consistent with each other, ask yourself why until you feel confident that you understand the situation well enough to make a decision. This method allows you to double-check: when your thoughts and feelings are in line, you can be pretty sure that you are in the right track; if not, it gives you the space to try and figure out what is really going on there before you make a choice.

To disentangle your thoughts from your feelings, what you need to do is focus on the facts of the matter. What do you think are the facts, whether you like them or not? And how certain are you of them? You can be 100% certain of things you have watched yourself. You can't be 100% certain of things you've been told, you'll have to estimate the uncertainty: How much do you trust this person? What reasons do you know they might have to lie or hide facts? Then there are things you think about it, what you deduce of things you've seen and you've been told. Again, how certain are you of your deductions? It may be useful to ask yourself the questions that are asked in courts of law about probabilities: which facts do you think are most likely true on the balance or probabilities? And which facts do you think are almost certainly true, beyond reasonable doubt?

Only after you've thought about the facts, you can go back to your feelings. How do you feel about each of these facts? How do you feel about the facts that you believe are true but aren't certain? How would you feel if you were wrong about those facts and you made a choice assuming you were right?

After you've done this, what is the picture that emerges? Do you have a clearer idea of what your goals are? (you should, really, or you haven't done your homework properly). Do you have some idea on how to deal with the obstacles? Have you made up your mind on what to do? Have you changed your mind on what to do? Do you still want to do anything at all? Would it be better to wait for something? Or does the issue look more urgent than before? And the most important question: what are your options, realistically?

If you've gone through all this, chances are that by now you are quite sure about which way to choose. If not, future posts may be able to help.

The practice

Experiment 1

There is little doubt that humans are the best thinkers of all animals. In fact, some of our problems probably come from humans becoming so good at thinking in so little evolutionary time - nature hasn't ironed out all the wrinkles yet for making a really good thinker. Unfortunately, this leads to two common, but wrong, attitudes from humans to animals: One is believing that humans are so superior they can do anything they like to animals, they're not much better than plants. The other is believing that animals are almost like humans, just with different bodies. Truth is, animals think a lot more and better than plants, but not quite as well as humans.

The best way of finding what is the right attitude towards animals is simply watching, playing and experimenting with them. If you have a pet, set some simple problems to them and see if they can figure out the answer. "Simple" may mean really, really simple. Apparently earthworms can learn a simple T-shaped maze, and eventually know that nice compost is always found on the right side.

Experiment 2

Pick any issue that has been bothering you, the kind that feels like kittens are jumping from one plate of the scales to the other constanty. Go through the questions in the theory section above. After thinking all this, does it appear any clearer?