Harmonics and Unfolding

Hellenistic philosophy spoke of a musica universalis, or universal music. This was otherwise known as the “harmony of the spheres,” describing a harmony between all things in the cosmos. Everything had a particular vibration, and the coherence of the cosmos was due to harmonic frequency. The entire universe was one grand symphony. Pythagoras theorized that that the Sun, Moon, and planets each emitted their own hum based on their orbits, and that events on Earth resonated with these frequencies. Boethius claimed that there are three kinds of music in the cosmos: the music of the universe, the music of the human body, and the music made by people. Johannes Kepler wrote about the harmony of the planets in terms of geometric intervals, consonance, and dissonance.

The idea that “everything is vibration” has a certain hippy-dippy connotation today. We talk about “vibes” that people give off, about “vibing” with someone, or about “resonating” with some idea. It’s a very intuitive concept. Rhythm is everywhere in our lives. Our bodies have circadian rhythms that regulate our sleep. Seasons have rhythms by which life grows and thrives. Our heart beats at a regular rhythm to keep our organs oxygenated. Neurons fire at varying frequencies, harmonizing with other neurons to generate brainwaves through which we experience different states of consciousness.

Modern physics seems to confirm the harmony of the spheres. Electromagnetism, identified as one of the four fundamental forces, exists on a spectrum of frequencies. Everyone knows Einstein’s famous equation E = mc², which expresses an equivalence between energy and mass, but there is also an equivalence between frequency and mass. So mass, energy, and frequency are all functions of one another. The light spectrum is a gradation of frequencies, as are sound waves. The emerging science of cymatics studies how different sounds and vibrations generate complex forms. Subatomic particles differ from one another by frequency. According to string theory, the most fundamental elements of the universe are strings vibrating at different frequencies.

Frequency spans from macrocosm to microcosm. The individual cells in my body are in harmony with the body as a whole. There is a bioelectric current running through my body keeping it coherent. Biologist Michael Levin suggests that cancer cells are essentially cells that have become detached from this current, essentially individualizing itself apart from the other cells and reproducing as its own body. He believes we may one day be able to cure cancer by interrupting this and re-harmonizing them with the other cells. To be a coherent entity is to have harmony of one’s constituent parts. Emergence occurs when a higher-level frequency unites the lower levels to work in harmony.

Embodiment

We are coupled with the objects in our environment in such a way that we can encounter and manipulate them. Psychologist J.J. Gibson spoke of “affordances” in our environment that avail themselves to our perception. We are attuned to our environment in such a way that it reveals itself to us in a particular way. Our experience of this environment resonates with other creatures like us to produce consensus reality. In this way, we are able to interact not only with other objects but also with other subjects with whom we share this reality.

Our conceptual framework is a matter of resonance. The problem of universals has plagued philosophy since the time of Plato. Plato believed that categories had their essence in some transcendental form. So there would be some ideal form of a tree, a dog, a human, and so on, and each individual articulation of that form would be a corrupted version of it. On the other side were the nominalists, best represented by the medieval scholastic William of Ockham. According to this view, universals have no objective existence, and we only construct these abstract categories in our minds. However, a third way known as “formalism” was developed by another medieval scholastic named Dun Scotus. Scotus agreed with the nominalists that universal categories existed in our minds. However, these concepts pick out some real distinction in the world. When we look at a field of roses, there is no real essence of “roseness” that exists apart from each individual rose, but neither is it something we assign to them arbitrarily. Rather, the particular rose and our idea of the rose share a common nature. This common nature does not exhaust everything about the particular rose, but it identifies some features that appear for us, by which we are able to compare one rose with another while also distinguishing them from, say, a tulip or a daffodil. It is the difference that appears for us based on the way we are coupled with our environment.

This coupling is not unique to us humans. The rose itself will experience the pollen from another rose differently than that of a tulip or daffodil. The bee or hummingbird appears differently to it than the locust or aphid. All life is selectively open to its environment, experiencing categories according to its own needs. Even an amoeba must be able to distinguish between food and poison. Moreover, different aspects of reality will be relatively more open to some lifeforms than others. The amoeba does not experience gravity in the way that you or I do. At the same time, we do not experience Brownian motion in the way that the amoeba does. That does not mean that these forces do not have some objective existence, but they “show up” differently based on the nature of one’s embodiment.

Yet we humans exist not merely in a physical environment, but a social one as well. Our categories of thought are no mere sensory distinctions, but ones made for us by the culture we inhabit. Culture provides a landscape of concepts, symbols, and values through which we encounter the world. We are born as socially oriented beings, developing our sense of selfhood in relation to others. In our process of development, our sense of selfhood develops simultaneously with our sense of society and reality. One is socialized not only into a society, but into a social class, learning one’s proper place in society and the values and mannerisms that go with it. Within a society, there may also exist several different religions and cultures, and these too shape one’s consciousness. One learns not only a set of beliefs and values but the justification for such beliefs and values.

No society is a united front. Contradictions exist within every society, and all have some degree of contact with outside cultures. People can and do adopt different views from those with which they were raised. People may convert to a different religion or abandon faith altogether. They may learn new ideas, adopt new ideologies, or change affiliations. Within a given culture, there may emerge multiple countercultures. Often new ideas are shaped as much by socialization as our old ideas. We find ourselves in a new group with its own values and beliefs, and we experience social rewards and sanctions based on how well we conform to them. Society objectifies itself through institutions. We don’t need to “believe” in institutions in order to experience their consequences. Whether or not one believes in the law, they will still feel its consequences when they run afoul of it. Institutions subsist in the roles that they create. The law loses its force without police and judges to enforce it. Similarly, religions subsist in their priesthood, governments in their ministers, banks in their lenders, and so on. Institutions enlist people to uphold them, forging identities for them within their framework. They attune us to certain ways of thinking that reinforce their internal logic. Jürgen Habermas spoke of “steering media” such as money or power that steer us away from communicative rationality toward instrumental rationality. In other words, they co-opt reason into the logic of the institution. 

Frequency

In all these ways, we are coupled with the world around us. We resonate with a particular frequency of reality, and are canalized into certain pathways of shared reality. We are each our own frequency, a unique morphogenetic system of body-mind. We embody a particular biological inheritance, personal history, and social position. We are attuned to contexts within contexts within contexts. Yet we share these contexts with others. Our individual reality is the shared individual reality of others because we share a certain common nature with others that share our reality. It is not so much a single shared reality of which our own reality is a distortion, but rather a vast overlapping of realities in which there is enough common connection to experience shared meaning.

Physicist Stephen Wolfram suggests that the observer effect, famously found in quantum mechanics, is a matter of what he calls “equivalencing.” Roughly speaking, what this means is that out of the total spectrum of reality, observers like us tune into a particular wavelength in which we are able to pick out certain objects but not others. We co-embody a common reality with a particular set of features.

This reality has a genetic structure. We share a reality with other animals, with all of life, with the common elements that make up life, with atoms and molecules, and the physical constants that make those things possible. These are all frequencies we share within our common spectrum of reality. Each emergent level articulates upon the frequencies that precede it, unfolding as a vast harmonic symphony. Our own unique reality designates a particular string of notes within this symphony. We resonate more with some notes than others, while others might be more dissonant. Other frequencies are not so much a part of our reality, just as there are sound frequencies we cannot hear and light frequencies we cannot see. Yet we may use indirect means to detect such frequencies. In this way, we share a broader reality by degrees of separation than that which we experience directly. One of the principal aims of science is to uncover those layers of reality beyond our commonsense perception. Yet science is not the only project that seeks to do this. The outward-looking eye of science is matched by the inward-looking eye of mysticism, seeking to explore the hidden dimensions of mind and the reality that gives rise to it.

Mind is built on resonance. Cells and biological systems have a range of frequencies that enable a wide range of forms and abilities, yet the human brain expands this ability by several orders of magnitude. Our brain works by the firing of neurons, in which they expel bioelectric signals to other neurons. An individual neuron can be in one of two states: it can be in a state of firing or not firing. Yet multiple neurons firing can form a pattern. This pattern is not merely the sum total of neurons firing, but the order and frequency in which they fire. In this way, the digital nature of the neuron gives way to an analog range of patterns.

When we recall a memory, we reconstruct the pattern of the original thought. Our reconstruction is never quite the same as the original, hence the notorious unreliability of memory. Yet there is a strange circularity in this reconstruction, because the brain has to somehow remember what memory it is reconstructing. We get an infinite regress of remembering where to retrieve the memory. For this reason, philosopher Henri Bergson emphasized the spontaneity of memory. Memory is a kind of field of past experiences we tune into. Cues from our environment can trigger a chain of memories in which one frequency modulates into another. We are engaged in a circuit between past and present, tuning into our memories and bringing them to bear on our present perception. Our ability to perceive a changing reality at all presupposes memory.

If we had no memory, time would not exist for us. Every organism shows some form of memory. Even slime molds have demonstrated an ability to learn. To live is to inhabit a temporal as well as spatial environment. Prior to memory, there is habit. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce suggested that the regularities of nature should be thought of not as laws but as habits. The repetition of patterns creates redundancies that lead to the law-like regularity we observe in nature. We are tuned into an ordered cosmic symphony built up by all that preceded us. A pattern, once established, becomes an attractor for future iterations of that same pattern. This is the nature of habit. That which we do repeatedly becomes second nature. The same applies to first nature, which we call natural phenomena. Habit is not simply about repetition of the same, but establishing a foundation for further elaboration. Structures such as genes or neurons expand the range of patterns that can be imprinted in this way. One can think of language as an analogy. A given set of phonemes makes possible an indefinite set of words. A set of grammatical rules allow these words to be combined to permit limitless possible meanings. New ideas can then be formulated from the foundations of these previous meanings. There is an unfolding of meanings through endless iteration. The philosopher Jacques Derrida suggested that this linguistic property of iterability means that meaning is always deferred, since the context in which it is articulated is always changing. In this way, reality is always producing what Stuart Kauffman called the “adjacent possible.”

Manifold

A neural pattern may tune into some frequency while elaborating upon it in this way. This is why memories are always reconstructed, and never pure reproductions. Every memory, every habit, is always an articulation of its predecessor, combining the new with the old. In this way, the cosmos itself is structured so as to produce complexity from simplicity. Theoretical physicist David Bohm described the world as having two orders: the implicate and explicate, or enfolded and unfolded. According to this theory, the ordinary sensory world of discrete objects separated by space and time is a kind of holographic projection from an underlying order in which all things are enfolded. Underlying the flux of the sensory world is a deeper holomovement, a holistic movement of the implicate order.

This theory resonates with mystical philosophies such as Advaita Vedanta, which asserts that behind all of reality lies a transcendental unity called Brahman. According to this school, the sense of separate and discrete things is an illusion, called Maya, disguising the irreducible underlying unity of all things. There is only one true self, and it is the universal self. Yet Advaita is but one school of Vedanta, and later scholars proposed alternative views. Opposite the non-dual philosophy of Advaita was the dualist school of Dvaita. Where the Advaita school emphasized the unity of Atman (self) with Brahman (transcendent reality or Godhead), Dvaita emphasized five eternal distinctions: between individual souls (jivatman) and God, between matter and God, between individual souls, between matter and jivatman, and between various types of matter. Between these extremes were Vishistadvaita (qualified non-dualism) and Dvaitadvaita (dualism within non-dualism).

Advaita can be roughly thought of pantheistic, Dvaita as theistic, and Vishistadvaita and Dvaitadvaita as panentheistic. For Advaita, God (Ishvara) is simply the personal aspect of the monistic reality of Brahman. While traditional devotions are still performed, its focus is less on worship and more on contemplation, seeking to realize one’s primordial unity with this divine reality. The other schools, particularly Vishistadvaita, are more associated with Bhakti, or devotion. If there is no distinction between self and Brahman, such devotion is essentially directed at oneself. Yet if the divine is a distinct indwelling presence in all things, then worship properly belongs to it. In this view, the divine truly is personal in a way that the God of Advaita cannot be. All beings are manifestations of this divine reality, substantiated by it and made distinct. Through the act of devotion, one faces away from the realm of separation and seeks to merge with the divine.

Going back to the Bohmian distinction between implicate and explicate order, we can see the implicate order as fractally present within all things. There is an implicate order to me, to you, to the trees and rocks and animals and stars and planets. We are all folds of the cosmic fabric, with an enfolded nature within us that unfolds in our relations with others. We are interference patterns selectively open to our surroundings based on the particular way that we are embodied. We are not independent substances existing apart from the cosmos, but neither are we mere nominalist abstractions of an undifferentiated whole. We are real beings unto ourselves who express a universal Being which we share with all things.

This distinction between the simple and the manifold extends across scales. Internal coherence can be found at every level of emergence, from particles and atoms to cells and organisms like us. Writer and philosopher Arthur Koestler coined the term “holon” to describe something that is both a whole unto itself and part of a greater whole. A nested hierarchy of holons is called a holarchy. Each emergent level is to an extent epistemically closed from its adjacent levels. One can, for example, look at chemical reactions without having to account for particle physics. The phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” was first coined by Aristotle. For him, the combination of matter and form constituted a substance. Substance for him is not something primary, but rather a special case of a more general duality of potency and act. Every substance is an accident of another substance, until we finally get to the divine source of all Being. Substance enfolds its relations, taking them into itself as identity. From this identity, it then unfolds into its relations. Within this dialectic of identity and relation, new relations and new substances are formed. The cosmos is continually diversifying into a plenum of iterations.

Unfolding

David Bohm was a consummate advocate for wholeness as essential to the universe, but his focus was on the whole, while less attentive to the whole-making process of the cosmos. Each part contains the whole just as the whole contains the part, but also, each part is a whole. It’s implicate and explicate order all the way down. The holomovement of the cosmos is realized precisely in its unfolding into new wholes which enfold their relations and unfold as new wholes yet again. We must not take holism to mean that the world of particulars is false, but rather see those particulars as avatars of greater wholes.

Architecture theorist Christopher Alexander noted that there are certain properties of organic unfolding. He noted that organic processes unfold through a series of structure-preserving transformations, in which centers are strengthened through the production of other centers. There is scalar coherence, or repetition of patterns across different scales. There are local symmetries, boundaries, echoes, contrasts, and deep interlock. There is a roughness, an element of irregularity that is not imperfection but all the more perfect precisely because it responds to the demands and constraints of nearby centers. There is simplicity and inner calm found with a lack of excess. There is a non-separateness, in which centers do not separate but deeply connect with their surroundings. Above all else, there is a sense in which each step is not merely additive, but is an articulation of the whole.

Alexander was describing these properties as those which make crafts and architecture more vibrant and alive, but he insisted that the reason for this lay in the fact that precisely these qualities were to be found in nature. Nature unfolds where our mechanistic way of thinking imposes and controls. Where vitalists have tended to draw hard lines between organic and artificial processes, what Alexander shows us is that artifice can be made in accordance with the organic. We who are natural beings have produced a second nature in our creations, and when we create in accordance with the principles of unfolding, there is harmony with first nature. In modern industrial society, the logic of the machine has taken over and replaced organic unfolding with hierarchical domination.

This unfolding process was noted by Jane Jacobs in her study of cities. She noted how modern urbanism tends to suffer from a technocratic attitude characterized by grand designs. Entire neighborhoods are leveled to make room for new planned developments. A healthy community, she said, will have a mix of new and old residents, as well as new and old buildings. There is a metabolism to them, through which the new emerges by contributing to the whole, rather than replacing it. It is, in other words, a kind of iteration, a whole-making process. She saw this same process at work in the economy of cities as well, observing that they build up their economy through a process of import substitution, in which a city would import goods before developing its own industry for those goods, and then exporting to other cities which in turn would develop their own industries, and so on, along a chain of development. This process is interrupted by the nation-state, which artificially unites these cities under a single national economy with its own set of trade policies, which will inevitably benefit some regions at the expense of others.

We see, then, that the unfolding process is a pluralistic one, in which organic wholes unfold into a plenitude of new articulations, distinct in themselves yet expressing a greater whole. The hubris of our mechanistic, dominating drive is to flatten these differences in our grand schemes to make them “legible” to power, as anthropologist James C. Scott describes it. This flattening tendency of power mechanizes human life, creating what Lewis Mumford called the “megamachine.” The megamachine is far older than our current industrial civilization. It was invented with the rise of ancient empires, when the masses were disciplined under the power of the sovereign to produce great wonders such as the pyramids and ziggurats, each worker made into a moving part for the construction of these great monuments. This system imposed on farmers a system of grain monoculture which allowed for easy taxation. It created a trained military of soldiers drilled into units capable of acting in unison.

The modern megamachine differs from the ancient one in that in the ancient world, power emanated from the sovereign. Under the modern megamachine, there is no one seat of power, but a competitive market for power. Power becomes quantified as capital, and each capitalist competes with other capitalists to control as much of this quantified power as possible. Capitalism is a machine by which every aspect of human life is objectified, quantified, commoditized, and finally capitalized as a means for obtaining more power through profit. All aspects of life, including even state power itself, are subsumed under the quantitative technocratic logic of the market.

Humans and nature alike are exploited and consumed by this machine that is driven toward limitless growth. The result is a society that is out of balance with itself and with its natural environment. The ecological crisis exists alongside social crises such as poverty, crime, and exploitation as a single polycrisis, all deriving from this mechanizing, dominating tendency. This mechanizing tendency is not a final state of affairs, but an ongoing project. There are always aspects of human life that escape the grasp of the megamachine. Its attempt to simplify and rationalize human life can never be complete, because we are not ourselves products of the megamachine, but of nature’s process of organic unfolding. We bear within ourselves the enfolded signature of the whole. To overcome the megamachine, we must learn to cooperate with the holomovement unfolding within us and through one another.

This requires a kind of self-emptying on our part. Through a praxis of kenosis, we seek not power-over, but power-with. This spirit of cooperation is exemplified in Bohmian dialogue, in which free-flowing conversation aims at common understanding. This process of communicative action lies at the heart of deliberative democracy, in which deliberation takes the place of competition, and the collective intelligence of the group emerges as greater than the sum of its parts. By cooperating with each other in this manner, we cooperate with the unfolding of the Logos from which we all come. We liberate ourselves from the machine by becoming handmaids of this Logos and carriers of this holomovement.

The music of the cosmos produces a symphony of ceaseless creativity. The whole continually produces more wholes. A process of harmonic attunement between entities creates the world they inhabit. The mind is a harmonic entity, tuning itself to the environment, both external and internal. Subject and environment co-construct one another, tuning into a common frequency. All things are connected, but not always directly. There are equivalence networks between entities, creating different intersecting and overlapping worlds. The holomovement of the cosmos thus produces not only new wholes, but new worlds. Each whole becomes an attractor for new wholes, creating new spaces of possibility. What Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible” opens up with each iteration of the whole. We are all creatures of this unfolding process, but our society has developed a dissonant countervailing tendency of mechanization and domination that has subsumed us under its logic. This civilizational crisis threatens the very survival of our species. To avoid it, we must learn to create in accordance with the Logos. We must seek a spirit of dialogue and collaboration, of kenosis, or self-emptying, and participate in the unfolding of the cosmos.