Time in reverse

By Steve Rensberry

What a strange and disturbing world we live in.

According to the World Health Organization an estimated 1 million people or more commit suicide each year and another 10 to 20 million make the attempt. Suicide is the leading cause of death among teenagers and people age 35 and under.

Data from just five years ago shows suicide in the United States as the 11th leading cause of death, outnumbering murder by a rate of 2 to 1. More people die by suicide than from liver disease or Parkinson's. The rate has also increased worldwide, according to WHO reports, most noticeably between the years 1999 and 2005 and among persons ages 40 to 65.

In an April 18, 2009, article by Keith Hawton DSc and Kees van Heeringen, published in The Lancet, Vol. 373, Issue 9672, the authors cite the estimate of 1 million suicides each year worldwide but suggest that under-reporting likely means the actual number is much higher.

“Suicide accounts for 1.5 percent of deaths worldwide and is the tenth leading cause of death,” they write.

The authors also point to geographical differences, noting higher rates in northern European countries as compared to southern ones, and apparent differences in respect to latitude in Japan.

“More than 30 percent of suicides worldwide happen in China, where 3.6 percent of all deaths are by suicide. In developed countries, the male-to-female ratio for suicide is between two and four to one, and this seems to be increasing. Asian countries typically show much lower male-to-female ratios, but these might also be increasing; although in China more women than men die by suicide,” the authors write.

I'm raising the issue to make a point, but first let me make something clear. I am not urging people to commit suicide. I am not justifying it or saying that it is an intelligent or rational act. I am not saying that it accomplishes what those who follow through with it think it is going to accomplish. But what I do want to do is to knock some false notions out of the minds of the living about those who do choose to end their own lives, and to introduce, philosophically, a more sane and humane way of looking at it.

I have one more reason for raising the issue. Years ago I had a friend who killed himself. He was the boyfriend of my girlfriend‘s closest friend. "Everyone thinks I'm a jerk," he said in the note he left behind. Oddly enough, he was the last person I would have ever considered a jerk. Still in high school, he was amazingly talented at the guitar, had a devoted girlfriend and was just all-around cool. In the years since then, I have come across dozens more suicide cases in my line of work, each different, each a puzzle and most -- in my opinion -- grossly misunderstood and wrongly condemned by the culture at large.

No, I do not think there is a good reason to commit suicide. However, I do think there is a right way and a wrong way to think about it. If you want, call it sad. Get mad at nature and the inhumanity of life. Get mad at ignorant and callous human beings. Just don’t automatically condemn, rejoice over, ignore or devalue the life of the person who commits it. Suicide to me represents a significant, powerful act and the most blatant reminder there is of the fundamental inhumanity of our existence -- an existence which none of us has any choice but to endure within the parameters laid out for us.

The points I would like to make are this:
1. Suicide, attempted suicide and the thought of suicide is much more prevalent than people want to admit or think about.
2. Suicide is not necessarily a selfish act, the result of mental illness or an example of someone who is out of touch with reality.
3. It doesn’t help to treat suicide as taboo or too private to acknowledge.
4. Suicide is "needless" only in the sense that all death is needless.
5. Treating suicide as a crime against either man or deity is absurd.

There are certainly approaches which fall outside this framework which I admire, such as that from Australia's Wesley Mission services.

In their words:
"Dealing with the issue of suicide is both challenging and complex. Given that the nature of the topic in itself is distressing, the complex circumstances and psychological variables of people in crisis only make it more difficult . . . . Suicide is a complex issue which, while tragic, confronts families, friends and wider communities. It results most often from an accumulation of risk factors, and it intersects with problems and concerns across society: mental health, drugs and alcohol, family issues, employment, cultural identity, law enforcement and criminal justice, education and poverty."

I like their approach and this statement for what it says about the complexity of the act.

But why exactly does society seem to downplay it's prevalence? Why does murder, which occurs less requently, gets 10 times the explosure? Why do we not admit and deal with the reality of suicide, in all its implications?

I think part of the answer is because it occurs so suddenly. It's a shock to the senses. Death from old age. Death from illness. They're both gradual, expected events. Suicide, like a sudden accident, leaves us bewildered and at a loss to manage our attachments and emotions.

Calling suicide selfish or the action of someone who is mentally ill is also something which in my opinion is a profoundly ignorant and selfish act in its own right. It is blaming the victim. It is thinking so highly of oneself that anyone who who commits suicide stands guilty simply for exiting your presence. Blaming the victims allows the living to brush it off and ignore the difficult-to-swallow, existential implications of what suicide is all about. It is to create an artificial world for oneself with plastic categories and paper boxes and nicely painted little pictures that serve no other purpose than to insulate oneself from the brutality of physical reality.

Suicide is the ultimate existential act that in one singular moment places all of humanity, all of non-humanity, and every last particle of matter and energy that exists within the universe's infinite expanse -- past, present and future -- momentary under the absolute control of the person committing the act. In one irreversible instant, at one moment in time, a person is able to rise above the nature, the illusions, the unfathomable mass of self-gratifying putridness within which the great body of humanity resides, and return at last to the selfless realm from which we all came. If it is a place we are all destined to go, what is so wrong with allowing us to choose the exact time in which to make the transition? Yes it's shocking. Yes it's sudden. But is it wrong?

"Perhaps it is the rest of us who are deluded about the value of life by our evolved primate survival urges," writes Michael PJ on blog.talkingphilosophyl.com.

Another writer, Levi T, exclaims, "Well it is said that there is but one truly philosophical problem and that is suicide, judging whether life is worth living or not amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

My own opinion: Suicide has a whole lot more to do with what sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann called the social construction of reality than it does with any one individual's particular mind or psyche.

Life in four dimensions

By Steve Rensberry

Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman's proof of the famous Poincare conjecture in 2002-03 and the subsequent confirmation in 2006 of his efforts drew an enormous amount of interest - and rightly so considering that it has been an entire century since Henri Poincare first made his famous conjecture.

In simple terms the conjecture asserts that spherical objects defined in terms of three dimensional Euclidian space have the same type of surface connectivity as do spherical objects defined in terms of four dimensional Euclidian space.

Stephen Ornes in the Aug. 26, 2006 edition of Seed Magazine referred to it as something which "gives mathematicians a short and easy way to identify a deformed blob as a sphere in disguise."

I was among those intrigued by it, but what I found hard to get my head around beyond just the terminology and concepts was envisioning precisely what kind of shape a three-dimensional sphere would have in four dimensions, or what anything in four dimensions would look like for that matter. We're talking about dimensions in Euclidian space mind you and not that dealing with space-time construction, or Minkowski space.

But visualizing things in four dimensions is a nearly impossible feat. Even in our familiar three-dimensional way of looking at things we don't really see things in three dimensions. We don't see both sides, the inside and every angle of an object all at the same time. What we see is the two-dimensional surfaces of three-dimensional objects.

In three dimensions things are defined using three pairs of cardinal directions, represented by altitude, latitude and longitude. In four dimensions there is an addition set of cardinal directions which are orthogonal (at right angles) to each of the others.

Furthermore, in Euclidian geometry a two-dimensional sphere is defined by a set of three different points in three-dimensional space and referred to as a 2-sphere or 2-manifold. A three-dimensional sphere is defined by a set of four different points in four-dimensional space and referred to as a 3-sphere or 3-manifold.

As Ornes explains: "When most people think of a sphere, they generally consider the space that a sphere occupies—a ping-pong ball, for example. When topologists talk about a sphere, they are talking exclusively about its surface."

What Poincare suggested and Perelman proved was that all three-dimensional, finite, simply-connected manifolds which do not have holes are spheres.

A coffee cup with a handle is not a sphere, neither is a doughnut, a car tire or a pair of pants. A flattened saucer? A dinner plate? A square box which doubles as a coffee table? Well, those indeed are spheres for the simple reason that their surface, in what form it can be transformed into without ripping it apart, is a closed, simply connected, three-dimensional manifold.

Perelman's solution involved performing a type of mathematical surgery on the singularities or sections of a three-dimensional sphere which are malformed or crinkled, essentially creating two separate, topologically identical spheres - and lending another proof of William Thurston's geometrization conjecture in the meantime. It was a solution to the problematic areas in manipulated three-manifolds that no one had thought of before.

As with a lot of things, the importance of the conjecture isn't so much the idea that it would help us understand the universe itself - which some believe may be a 3-sphere - but the simple way in which Perelman arrived at his solution.

As Dennis Overbye of the New York Times wrote in an Aug. 18, 2006 article: "Everybody agrees that it is no surprise that the conjecture is true. What is surprising is the way it was proved, using mathematics far removed from traditional topology, establishing links no one had suspected between disparate fields and techniques.

Hmmmm. Isn't that the way it always is?

Order and chaos

By Steve Rensberry

We humans, like most all other biological organisms on this planet, have a beginning, middle and an end. And what an end it is. We're born. We live our lives. Then we die - our bodies transformed into what we can see with our own eyes is but the earth from which we came. That much is indisputable. But then here we have this magnificent thing called the human mind, or brain if you will, and the source of nearly endless dispute.

I don't much like it - the conflict that is - for over the past few thousand years it has produced a pool of blood about the size of Lake Michigan. But strange as it is I find comfort in a little known theory involving "edge-of-chaos" systems.

What it suggests is that the most interesting and complex aspects of existence are found within a constricted realm lying midway between order from chaos. Physicists have identified it. Organizational experts have studied it. Mathematicians and social scientists have made note of it.

In short, the assumption is that complexity, and by inference potential, within this unique point of tension is maximized. Examples can be seen in the structure of living organisms, in crystals and gases and in many other areas.

The idea is not without its critics, but its relevancy remains whether you consider it a rule, a pattern or simply a tendency.

An article by Dr. Cameron Freeman entitled "Creative Tension at the Edge-of-Chaos: Toward an Evolutionary Christology" raises some interesting points.

"This edge-of-chaos dynamic can also be traced through the historical development of the human species," he says. "Human history has been shaped by a number of painful and messy sociocultural upheavals and critical periods of 'disruption and novelty' where the dominant regime reaches a point of chaotic instability and gives way to a new more organized sociocultural structure."

Freeman discusses this same pattern in the interplay between the divine and mortal, as well as in the evidence calling into question the incrementalism associated with Darwinian evolution, in particular based on the work of Niles Eldredge and Jay Gould suggesting that evolutionary change has occurred in sudden leaps and bounds as opposed to a process of slow, gradual transformation.

Either way, the pattern is one of complexity arising out of chaos, whether on the biological, chemical, molecular or sociological level.

"Given the persistent tendency of evolution to constantly go beyond what went before, it seems likely that we are part and parcel of a universal story that is unfinished and still evolving - and that there are higher stages of evolution to be attained in the collective future of the human species," he writes.

Freeman's article can be found at http://www.metanexus.net/Magazine/tabid/68/id/10712/Default.aspx

What I like about the concept is the relationship it has to the notions of balance and dynamic interdependence.

People often become like those they hate. The more of a hurry you're in the slower everyone around you seems to go. Certainty performs a balancing act with risk and hope shakes hands with despair, then voila! Progress at last.

Perhaps it is not so much the Twilight Zone where anything and everything can happen, but that strange thin line separating order from chaos where it all comes down.