Speer's Prison Years (The Secret Diaries, 1976)

 Albert Speer. Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976) The diaries were secret in that it was forbidden to send out more than one letter a month. But friendly guards helped Speer smuggle his diaries out. He selected and edited his notes, and this book is the result.

It’s surprisingly compulsive reading. The revelation of the man’s character is what kept me turning the pages. I’d recently watched The Rise of the Nazis documentary series. The historian who discussed Speer pointed out that he had carefully doctored the record of his work as war production manager for the Reich. I’m not sure to what extent these diaries continue the attempted deception. In the early years, Speer repeatedly muses about how he was enthralled by Hitler’s architectural ambitions. Later, he castigated himself for admiring what he now sees as grandiose kitsch (a word he does not use), and refers to how his responsibility for war materiel production has burdened him with guilt.

He also discusses architecture, and his hope that he could reestablish an architectural practice on release. He confesses to a taste for traditional styles, and wonders how he might fit into the modern fashions. As the years pass, the hope of early release fades in the face of Soviet intransigence, his musings about a possible professional future fade also.

The most genuine sounding passages are his sorrow that he’s missing the growth and development of his children, and the inevitable failure to establish a close parent-child bond. There aren’t enough visits and letters. It's clear that his family have made the best of their situation, and their father figures less and less in their lives.

An essential book for anyone who wants to understand the 3rd Reich. The desire to build huge monuments seems to be a universal trait of tyrants. ***

:Pictures of the Past: 1920s, 1930s, 1940s (Yapp, 1998)

 Nick Yapp. Getty Image 1920s, ... 1930s, ... 1940s (1998). Three lively collections of photographs illustrating the lives of our ancestors. The illustrated papers and magazines that provided the images tended to publish the unusual and dramatic (see the 1940s cover), so Yapp must have had a difficult time finding the ones that showed ordinary lives. The photos of political and other significant events are mostly well known. The others provide most of the charm. It’s an odd feeling to experience nostalgia for a world I didn’t actually know (the late 1940s excepted). But that’s what happened. I will likely look at these books again. ***

How the oil cartel changed global trading (Paper Money, by Adam Smith, 1981)

Adam Smith. Paper Money. (1981) A discussion of the effects of the oil crisis of the early 1970s, when Saudi Arabia and nearby countries formed OPEC. This resulted in what Smith calls “the greatest transfer of wealth” in the history of Earth. Its effect on money was to devalue the dollar, which now has about 1/10th of its former value.

In 1980 or thereabouts the second round of inflation began. Central banks everywhere raised interest rates into the double digits. Ordinary folk like us faced mortgages offered at above 20%. We paid 23% on the line of credit we used to build our house. The bank manager asked his central office to approve a mortgage in the high teens. As that rate came down year-by-year, we maintained the high mortgage payment, and so paid it off in less than half the originally calculated time.

Smith has managed to turn his tale of accounting, interest rates, monetary policy and such into a page turner. That’s the effect of both the large number of stories about his interviews with bankers, economists, money market gurus etc, and of his style. He tells the story of his investigations, which reveals the story of the two huge rounds of inflation and the restructuring of the global banking system. He writes high journalism: Factually as accurate as he can make it, larded with analysis and theory, all conveyed as his personal experience and thinking.

A side effect of reading this book is a better understanding of why Trump’s tariffs (if sustained) will lead to another round of inflation, and probably another restructuring of the global banking system. Another effect is a clearer insight into international trade: Basically, it’s bartering, with the values of the goods in the contracts and account books denominated in US dollars. A possible (and based on Smith’s explanations IMO a likely) outcome of the tariffs will be the loss of the US dollar’s status as the global currency.

Highly recommended. ****

Footnote: As of this posting, Trump has rolled back tariffs on several types of food. It seems the tariffs have begun to bite, and the voters are unhappy.

165 years ago (Essays From The Times, 1860)

(The Times), Essays From the Times. (1860) I received this collection many decades ago while researching Swift’s literary reputation as part of my work on his satiric poems. Like most critics of his verse, the anonymous essayist reprinted in this collection fails to notice that Swift used impersonation in his verse as well as in his prose. Very few readers have believed that the supposed author of A Modest Proposal is Swift himself. The suggestion that the poor should raise their children to be tasty dishes for the rich is ascribed to the supposed author, a practical man of business suggesting a solution to poverty. But the uncritically accepted Romantic notion that a poet expresses his most authentic self in his verse prevented Victorian and later critics from realising that Swift used the same method in many of his satiric verses. The speakers of Swift's satires are not Swift, but various personages. Some are people of sense, others quite the opposite.

The Romantic poets were disingenuous in their claims. The speaker of a Wordsworth poem is an idealised version of himself. The Romantics would have you believe that this idealised version is the real thing. I don’t think so. In fact, I think all writing is a kind of impersonation.

This time round, I read all the essays. What struck me most was the writers’ blithe confidence in the correctness of their judgements and censures, especially of their subject’s morality. People of every age tend to believe that their judgements on their forebears are correct. But it seems that the Victorians were the first in many centuries to believe that their judgments were final. As such, they are a cautionary example: The current wave of belief that we have reached a pinnacle of moral and ethical righteousness is as misplaced as those of every earlier age. If anything, we repeat the errors of our ancestors, technologically enhanced. Human progress is a circle dance.

These essays are essential reading for any student of the 19th century. The essay on Swift’s life and works found its place in the bibliography of my thesis. ***

Guns, Guns, Guns: A History of Gun Violence (Lapham's Quarterly, 2018)

  Lapham’s Quarterly, A History of Gun Violence. (2018) A depressing read, with enough data to show that humans have generally expended more effort and skill on making effective weapons than any other tool. War has always been as much about the combatants’ ability to manufacture effective weaponry as about their mastery of strategy and tactics.

The perfection of the hand gun by Colt, Smith & Wesson and others has made gun violence almost as normal as bread. It has also made killing so easy that murder has become the default ingredient of many crimes that would be successful without it. The US Supreme Court’s misinterpretation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution has encouraged a sense of personal entitlement that has spread into all other aspects of communal life, so that conflict is for many people now the prime mode of relating to others.

As usual, an excellent overview of the subject, consisting mostly of firsthand accounts and analyses based on knowledge of the history. But a melancholy read. The cover is an interpretation of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Recommended. ****

Fin de siècle fiction: Daughters of Decadence (Showalter 1993)

Elaine Showalter. Daughters of Decadence (1993) Showalter has selected a representative sample of short fiction written by women around 1890. These stories were published in women’s magazines and literary journals. The writers were at least semi-professional. Like their male counterparts, they wrote to satisfy the market, which at the time wanted moody pieces that suggested sensuality and luxurious indulgence in emotions, or melodramatic examinations of moral failure and just punishment.

The pieces that Showalter chose have an edge of defiance and rebellion. These writers knew their skills were equal to those of their male competitors, and naturally they did not like the lower pay and lack of recognition. They were  part of the second wave of feminism, which among other things gained the vote.

Given the heavy political freight these stories carry, are they worth reading? Yes, but like all fin-de-siècle art, they are as interesting for what they tell us of our ancestors’ taste and sentiments as for their artistic merit. As stories, they are well constructed. They cover a wide range of genres, from naturalistic fiction to romance to fantasy. I like the satire and social critique that most bring with them. They’re generally set in the upper middle and upper classes. The dialogue is artificial, but oddly enough it gives an impression of truth. I suspect that’s because men and women of those classes were always on their guard. They could not assume the language of intimacy among equals without also suggesting a sexual intimacy that could damage their reputations.

The stories are about personal and social relationships. Most tell of the emotional costs of presenting oneself as available, or withholding oneself because of some unsuitability. Women must play their roles, and so must men. It’s all very civilised in tone and style, but often viciously mean in substance. Many of the male characters display their prejudices and misogyny unwittingly. It’s no wonder that the critics objected, especially to the stories that suggested or showed that personal happiness requires the freedom to make moral choices for oneself.

The anthology apparently was assembled for use in a course on feminist literature, but the stories don’t need academic justification for reading them. If you like short stories, I think you will like these. If you also want to know something about the taste of your ancestors, I think they are good data. If you see popular literature as the mirror of the moral and ethical concerns of its times, these stories are essential reading.

Recommended. ***

Financial Shenanigans: The Roaring '80s (Smith, 1988)

Adam Smith. The Roaring ‘80s (1988) “Adam Smith” (George Goodman) was a financial adviser with a knack for story-telling.  For some time he told those stories for Esquire and other magazines. This book is one of several that collected his columns. He understands his subject, and he knows enough people in the moneysphere that he can always get the interview that will clarify the current economic crisis or hiccup. And most crises turn out to be hiccups. His style is breezy (for once the cliche fits), a mix of high, medium, and low-level explanation, and illustrative anecdotes. Lots of anecdotes. The effect is that, at least while you’re reading about it, the most abstruse economic theory seems plausible. Or not, depending on Smith’s thesis.

What Smith demonstrates most, though, is that economics isn’t just about the money, and that collectively we have at best a confused mess of notions about finance and the economy generally. At worst, we suffer from a mess of contradictory superstitions, chief of which are the ones surrounding the concept of a free market. Smith’s accounts of financial shenanigans make it quite clear that all markets are distorted by players with market clout. And that these players all eventually succumb to the temptation to use their clout to make the market work for their exclusive benefit. Financial crime may lack gore, but there's no shortage of victims.

A page turner. The time frame is the Reagan years, plus and minus, and all that’s changed since then is that the libertarians have more clout than ever. They will finish the work of economic destruction that began under Reagan. That destruction did not succeed. Smith (and his group of financial gurus) predicted the financial crisis that hit in 2008. Without government bailouts, that crisis would have destroyed the American financial industry. This time, with the government apparatus being systematically gutted, there may be nothing to save the us from the wreck.

Recommended. ****

Scams (Lapham's Quarterly 8-02, Swindle & Fraud)

Lapham’s Quarterly 8-02: Swindle & Fraud (2015). An entertaining read, and for that reason

possibly a misleading one. It’s fun to read about how swindles and frauds work, about how greedy people fall for a con, how clever the swindlers have been. It may fool one into believing that these insights will make us immune. Which is of course not so.

Every successful swindle relies on our propensity to deceive ourselves. We want something for nothing, or as close as we can get to it. We want to be insiders, a member of that exclusive group that knows better than everybody else. We believe we are smarter than the average bear and can spot opportunities for profit that escape everyone else. We are sure that we can tell the truth from falsehood, that we know enough about the real world that we can tell when someone is blowing smoke in our ears. And we are wrong on all these counts.

I hope that reading this wonderful collection will continue to remind me that I’m as likely to fall for a scam as everyone else. It just takes someone to figure out what buttons to push.

Recommended. ****

Delusions of Perfection (Lapham's Quarterly 7-02: Revolutions)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 7-02: Revolution (2014) Like the collection on States of War, this one is tough reading. People have committed more atrocities in the pursuit of an imagined perfection than for any other purpose. Religious persecution is one example. Revolution is the other. We should perhaps be thankful there is no third.

     There are many noble phrases recorded here, but they all express the same delusionary superstition that some final, permanent solution the the problems of humankind will usher in a perfect way of life. Reading them was bad for my equanimity and blood pressure.

A necessary read. Recommended. ****

Oh, To Be Young Again! (Youth, Lapham's Quarterly 7-03)

Lapham’s Quarterly 7-03: Youth (2014). “Youth’s a stuff will not endure” sang Feste the Fool in Twelfth Night. But the response to that insight is mixed. Some mourn what they recall as a time of promise and energy and sweet, sweet love of the world and the people in it. Others are glad it’s over, and they can, at last, embark on a life planned and controlled by themselves. The evidence gathered here suggests that the latter attitude is the more common one.

Me, what I recall from my childhood and youth surprises me in two ways. One, I can’t actually imagine the Me that was six or twelve years old. The photos of me, the letters that my mother kept, the oddments that I know were once precious to me, none of them translate into Oh, now I know what it was like. And two, when I think of the dumb-ass things I did as a teenager, I’m surprised I’m still here to remember them. A fraction of a second one way or the other would have meant my death.

Nevertheless, reading other people’s thoughts and reminiscences does trigger a hint of a feeling of what childhood and youth was like. The imagination supplies what memory cannot.

Recommended ****

Medicine (Lapham's Quarterly 2-04, 2009)

 Lapham's’s Quarterly 2-04: Medicine (2009) Some random thoughts in response to this collection:

Archeologists and paleontologists have found evidence of care for the sick dating back millennia before the earliest medical texts. That care, and the signs of intentional burial, were both at one time believed to be species-specific behaviour. Observation of chimpanzees and elephants have blurred that picture, but there’s no doubt that humans have taken medicine very seriously. Every known society gives medical practitioners a special role and responsibility. The roles of physician and the priest are often combined. Cures are often understood as miracles: It’s not surprising that many of Jesus’s miracles were cures.

Through most of our history, what made us sick and what kept us well was summed up in precepts based on random observation. The history of medicine as a science is a nice example of how we humans strive to make sense of inadequate and often unreliable data. The first attempts to create a theoretical framework, the four humours, that might guide the practitioner to diagnose and treat unknown conditions we now know got it wrong. But based on the available data, it was reasonable. After all, whatever insight is claimed in one domain must match or at least not clash with whatever insights are claimed in another. The four humours of Greco-Roman medicine made sense, given what engineers and carpenters and farmers knew about how the material world worked, and what philosophers said about the four elements tied it all together..

Through most of history, medical practice dealt mostly with ameliorating symptoms. Sickness would strike without warning, and pandemics were common. I think it’s difficult for us to imagine the terror that sudden illness would provoke. The reactions to covid-19 show that nowadays we suffer not from the superstitious fear of plagues, but from the superstitious confidence that they won’t kill us.

Quacks have been with us from the beginning. Nowadays, many of them wear the mantel of wellness. I think quackery succeeds because science doesn’t provide the certainty people want from theories of Life, the Universe and Everything (TLUEs). The life sciences are especially prone to revise theories and replace them with more complicated ones. Quacks promise simplicity and certainty wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon designed to create the illusion that here, at last, we have the Truth. “Natural” figures prominently in their claims. I guess most people just don’t know that the most lethal substances known are all natural. Mother Nature wins again. She always does.

Another wonderfully diverse collection. **** 

States of War (Lapham's Quarterly 01-1, 2008)

Lapham’s Quarterly 01-1. States of War. (2008) (A re-read) The first issue of LQ, and an excellent collection of texts and images about war. But depressing.

     Part 1, “Calls to Arms”, shows that war has almost always been justified as a struggle against evil personified in the enemy, who worship different gods, and are therefore obviously the servants of whatever Satan the warmonger imagines. Looting and other entertainments may be offered as enticements, but the warmongers rarely acknowledge them as the prime goals of invading one’s neighbours.
     Part 2, “Rules of Engagement”, deals with lessons in strategy and tactics, based on experience. There’s advice about how to prepare for war, and advice about how to wage it. The recognition that ultimately all armed conflict tends towards total war comes early in history.
     Part 3, “Field Reports”, shows us the brutalities of war, both on the battlefield and off it. From the beginning, non-combatants have suffered as much as or more than the fighters. Prisoners were taken only if they had some value, such as possible ransoms for the self-styled nobles who led the slaughter, and sometimes as hostage status for other ranks, but usually as slaves, if they weren’t too badly damaged. Slavery was the usual fate of any surviving defeated civilians.
     The last section, “Postmortems”, offers some hope, if only in the reactions of the surviving conscripts who wanted nothing more to do with war. But as often, the survivors saw the peace as  merely a pause on the fighting, good for regrouping and preparation for the next engagement with the enemy.

     “Further Remarks” presents four essays about wars past, present, and probable future. They didn’t do much to improve my mood.
     Is war inevitable? Many people think it’s species-specific behaviour, part of our territoriality, which is also expressed in our tribalism. In evolutionary terms, war has weeded out the more pacific strains of our species, leaving the ones that are willing to use violence in control. In the short term, the quarter–million years of our species’s existence, that’s made for survival. But our technical ingenuity, and our inability to act collectively except when threatened by another collective, plus our unwillingness (or inability, you choose) to give up immediate reward for long-term survival, these traits taken together suggest that evolution has tossed up a species that is likely to destroy the ecosystem that sustains it. We may turn out to be one of Mother Nature’s failed experiments.
     Depressing. But recommended. ****

We All Live In A Bubble (The Reality Bubble, Tong, 2019)

 Ziya Tong. The Reality Bubble (2019) We all live in a bubble created by our brains. The bubble includes the simulation of physical reality and the social and psychological realities we’ve learned to think of as just the way things are. But these realities have blind spots. Tong begins with the visual blind spot and spends a good deal of time describing what we can’t or don’t see because of our limited sensory and cognitive equipment. Science provides methods for filling in the blind spots, but it’s limited by the social and conceptual environment of its time, and its results are always tentative and incomplete. But it’s the best tool we have.
     Tong builds on this insight to describe the blind spots that make the bubbles dangerously comfortable places to live. The most serious blind spots are in our images of our relation to the non-human world. We see ourselves as different and separate from our environment. But that environment is our life support system. Misconceiving that fact will destroy human life as we know it. It’s already destroyed huge swaths of non-human life: in the last century, about 90% of wildlife has disappeared, partly because we’ve hunted it, but mostly because we’ve converted their habitats into agricultural land.
      Tong’s facts and insights range from exhilarating to depressing. Her final explicit message is that we must see what the blind spots hide from us, else we will continue to make suicidal choices. I don’t see good odds of that change happening. Policy makers are abysmally ignorant of the most basic science, and the rest of us are not much better. Economics is fatally flawed. The Friedmanites believe that efficiency means converting as many costs as possible into externalities, which don’t show up in profit-and-loss statements. So-called capitalism assumes that profit is the sole purpose of business. Very few economists show any kind of awareness of science and technology other than as a means of increasing profits. The natural world is perceived as a bundle of resources to be converted into cash as efficiently as possible. Not doing so is considered wasteful.
     In general, people believe that a rising GDP and increased productivity are signs of economic health. GDP merely tracks the money, not what it buys. Increasing productivity requires increasing consumption, not to mention that much of what’s produced satisfies mere whim. We believe that having more stuff means a better standard of living. Etc. And ever and again we are told that we must balance economic values against environmental costs, as if the economy were independent of the environment. That particular delusion amounts to insanity.
    Buy or borrow the book and read it. ****

How Money Began... (Whitehead and Baskerville, Money, 1975)

 

     Geoffrey Whitehead & Patricia Baskerville. Money (1975). Subtitled How Money Began and How it Works, which is a nice summary of the book’s intentions. Apparently aimed at the curious middle-schooler, it succeeds. At the time it was written, very little was known about the origins of money, and despite a few lucky finds since then, we still don’t know much. By the time Middle Eastern city states codified law, money was already in use, and the laws designed to promote fair and honest trading were brutal. It seems that the propensity for cheating is somewhat stronger in us than for fair and honest dealing.
     Within its modest aims, the book is a success. I learned a few new details about coinage and paper money. The book is strongest dealing in physical money, and weakest in its explanations of how money works, skimming over the psychology (as economic theories generally do). The authors make a distinction between wealth and money early on, but don’t mention that the money-is-wealth superstition was a factor in the inflation caused by Spain’s importation of huge amounts of gold and silver in the 15/1600s. The Spanish did not grasp that these "precious" metals were only as valuable as what they could buy, which was less and less as the supply of silver and gold increased.
     The authors mention the usual concepts of money as a medium of trade and store of value, and talk about money as measuring prices. The printing is excellent. Recommended if you can find a copy. This one will be donated to the library’s book sale. **½

Death (Lapham's Quarterly 06-4, 2013)

  Lapham’s Quarterly 06-4: Death (2013) The many ways people have died and been done to death, musings about death, religious warnings and promises about life after death, the decay of the body and the waning of memories, the consolations and pain of grief.... Death is a large subject.
     Much of what we do is an attempt to either thwart death or to ignore it. A few minutes ago, I read an article reporting that cancer deaths in Canada are down overall while some cancers are increasing. More screening is one reason. The tone of the report suggests that somehow the defeat of cancer will prevent death. But of course it won’t. The odds of dying from cancer are about 1 in 7 or 14%, but the odds of dying from any one of the myriad causes are 1 in 1, or 100%.
     Meanwhile, we plan our lives as if they will continue at least until the next scheduled event. Life must go on.
     An excellent collection, as usual. ***

Fake News (Lapham's Quarterly special issue, 2018)

Lapham’s Quarterly: A History of Fake News (2018) As far back as we have writing, there’s been fake news. I suspect there was fake news well before any was recorded in writing. There’s also been pushback. Much of ancient fake news was merely exaggeration of the sponsor’s importance. Near eastern relics show that as often as not the new regime defaced their predecessor’s fake news and replaced it with their own.  Some of has this leaked into sacred texts: Ancient Israel was not as significant politically or economically as the Old Testament suggests.
     Quite early on, fake news has been both deliberate, and a mere side effect of more important objectives, such as attracting readers and advertisers in order to increase cash flow. The Hearst chain was notorious for starting the Spanish-American War for just this purpose. Electronic media have merely magnified these tendencies, as they have magnified all communications and accelerated their effects. This collection gives us mostly insider reports on how fake news was generated, with occasional confessions of unease or shame. It’s both entertaining and appalling. Like the news itself. ****

Math History: The Secret Lives of Numbers (Kitagawa & Revell)

Kate Kitagawa & Timothy Revell. The Secret Lives of Numbers (2003) A history of mathematics taking all currently known mathematical texts into account. The Eurocentric view of mathematical development is shown to be egregiously wrong-headed. Miscellaneous theorems (and some proofs) were discovered or invented in many different places at many different times well before Euclid’s demonstration of the logical coherence of all mathematics. Algorithms for solving trade and other complicated problems ditto. The notation that freed European mathematicians to discover number theory was invented in India, and brought to Europe by Arabs. The need to plan planting and seed-time prompted the study of astronomy, which was perhaps the first science to be mathematised. Either it, or geometry, needed for land surveys. Formal mathematics is at least as old as writing.
     The history of mathematics is not even a winding road; it’s a maze of paths leading in all directions with surprising shortcuts, connections in unexpected places, and backtracking. What’s constant is that whenever possible mathematicians exchanged ideas and knowledge. Powerful rulers recognised the value of mathematics and other knowledge, and sponsored the collection of texts, and their study and collation by the best minds they could attract. And ever and again, barbarians with limited insight into anything beyond their immediate goals of getting treasure and women destroyed those collections. We owe a great debt to the scholars who preserved what knowledge they could and taught their students to do likewise.
     I think that Kitagawa and Revell deprecate Euclid’s achievement. True, pretty well every theorem he proved in his books, and many of the proofs themselves, were known before him. Compilations of all known mathematics were made centuries before him. But he seems to have been the first one to organise all known mathematics into a logical system, in which rules of inference applied to a handful of axioms, carefully defined, would connect all theorems. It is the critique and emulation of his methods that has led to new mathematics.
     I also think that Kitagawa and Revell don’t examine the source of mathematics in ordinary language. As far as I know, it’s possible to express distance, time, size, weight, quantity, similarity and difference, direction, etc, in all human languages. The only variation seems to be in emphasis and detail. Mathematics is the more or less systematic formalisation of these concepts when people found it necessary to do so for some practical purposes involving trade and taxes. (Aside: Where I grew up, distance was expressed as time. A certain relative lived one hour away, for example. That’s an hour’s walk. This may be one reason why I find it easy to accept Einstein’s proposal of a space-time continuum, even though I can’t do the relevant math.)
     A keeper, worth an occasional reread. Breezy style, often cliched, which makes it seem easier to understand the math than it really is. The title is a teaser, possibly intended to attract the unnerdy.***

Drunk or High? (Lapham's Quarterly 06-1, Intoxication)

 LQ 06-1: Intoxication (2013) Not only about alcohol and drugs (though they figure prominently) but also about poisons. For all of our known history, we humans have taken (usually mild) poisons in small doses because they messed up our brains, thus creating an “altered state of consciousness.”  We aren’t the only animals that seek this experience: not only mammals but insects and birds have been observed slurping fermented fruit.
     A wide-ranging selection of first-person reports on the joys of getting drunk or high, praises of the grape and other intoxicants, scoldings for over-indulgence, severe frowning on any kind of intoxicant, etc. But the one question that I would like to see some answer to is hardly touched on: Why do we do it? The evidence suggests that we mostly seek the pleasure drugs provide, and some seek what they believe are transcendental visions of ultimate reality. The hangover or withdrawal are accepted as a (relatively) small price to pay for these treasures.
     Intoxication I think touches on the question of consciousness. The drugs’ effects show that our experience of reality is constructed by the brain. Deflect the brain from normal functioning, and that experience changes. Drugs and alcohol aren’t the only means of doing this, but they are the most reliable. That’s why we seek them out. That’s also why moralists of all stripes condemn them: the easy alteration of the brain’s function shows that the sense of self, the “I”, is a construction of the brain. That implies no independent Self or Soul to transcend this mortal life. It also makes nonsense of the belief that the Self can be somehow “uploaded” into an abiological, possibly electronic, but potentially immortal body (as envisioned by Ray Kurzweil among others).
     The Matrix is real: it resides in three pounds of jelly encased in a bony shell that protects it, mostly. We can mess with the program, and we like doing that. That’s what this collection demonstrates. I’ve been drunk twice in my life, and don’t want to repeat the experience. It’s enough to get a mild buzz, which I can also get without ingesting chemicals. Knowing that my experience of the world around me is not an exact replica is strangely comforting.
     Recommended. ****

Existential Physics (Hossenfelder 2022)

     Sabine Hossenfelder. Existential Physics (2022) Hossenfelder has made a YouTube reputation as a disturber and explainer. Search for her videos; they’re fun and enlightening. She believes that modern physics is in crisis because it claims more insight and understanding than is warranted by experiment and observation, especially when it comes to dark matter and energy. The theories, the sets of interlocking equations, describe what’s measured, but for consistency’s sake, theorists have added entities that haven’t been observed to interact with the entities that we know about. In her Warning (Foreword), she says, “Science has limits, and yet humanity has always sought meaning beyond those limits.” Quite so.
     Then Hossenfelder goes on to show how science can inform some of the answers to the questions that exceed the limits of science. Science can clarify and disambiguate some of those questions. For example, do we have free will? The scientific answer (summarised) is: “No, if by free will you mean the ability to choose without being subject to the laws of physics.”

     For choosing is a brain-function, and brains function according the laws of physics. This fact has funked recent philosophers, who see no way out of the answer. But there is one: when we deliberately choose we figure alternatives, and weigh their desirability. We may choose differently than we chose in the past or will choose in the future. We will often choose differently than others choose. Thus, while our choices may not be freely willed, neither are they automatic. We aren’t automatons; we are agents. But we can’t choose without preferring one alternative to the others. Since our preferences are shaped by our genetics and our experience, in that sense, the choice is not “free”. However, we can choose to change our preferences. Odd, that. Is the choice to change our preference free or not? At the neurological level, I think no. At the psychological level, I think yes. And then there's  the spoiler question: How would you distinguish between free and determined choice? To choose is to exercise preferences and desires. Even if those preferences and desires are determined, the choice could still be free. You just can't tell.
     Hossenfelder does fall into what I think is the common philosophical error of physicists: She believes that physics reveals reality as it really is. Or at least that it is closer to doing so than the messier, less abstract sciences such as chemistry, biology, psychology, and so on. She reminds us that every "emergent property" that biology describes can be explained by chemistry and physics, and that everything that chemistry describes can be explained by physics. Neurology is solving some of the puzzles of psychology by showing how brain function varies with different behaviours, and emotions. Or at least suggesting how to reframe the puzzles.
     In short, she says, no so-called “emergent” phenomenon has (so far) been found to be inexplicable by the lower level from it which supposedly emerged. AFAIK, she’s right. But since the more abstract theories are derived from and explain the less abstract ones, that’s not, I think, a surprise. Logically, the more abstract explanation is equivalent to the less abstract one, just simpler.
     As I see it, physics describes the structure of reality. Einstein’s space-time makes this absolutely clear: What we observe depends on where in space-time we are and how we are moving relative to other entities. Special relativity describes how one observer’s worldview (measurements) is precisely transformable into another observer’s worldview: a clock runs fast from one POV, runs slow from another, and we can calculate exactly how much the measurements differ. (These calculations are necessary for GPS systems to function.) General relativity (GR) describes the geometry of space-time, within which we entities live and move and have our being - and observe each other within the constraints descibed by special relativity.
     Quantum mechanics (QM) shows that what we observe depends on the event’s context: Electrons behave like particles in some contexts, and like waves in others. Or better, wave equations describe some electron behaviours, and particle equations describe others. None describe electrons. And those equations are the best descriptions we have, so far. There are probably better ones “out there”, and maybe they’ll be discovered. But not in my lifetime, I think. Bummer.

     The fact that GR and QM cannot (at present) be reconciled should not surprise us either, I think. Both are highly abstract descriptions of what’s common and different in our perceptions of reality. Our experience of reality is a simulation created by our brains. We can compare each other’s perceptions, and note whether we perceive the same differences and similarities. That’s the beginning of science, and it’s already one level of abstraction away from the simulation which is our experience of the world around us. But that simulation is itself an abstraction, constructed (computed?) by our brains from the sense data delivered  to it, data that already processed by the sensors. The simulation is sufficiently accurate that we can navigate the world, get our food, find our mates, etc. It must be structurally similar to reality, else we could not survive. It may make sense to say that the topology of our experience (the simulation) must be similar enough to the topology of reality to enable our survival. I don’t know enough about topology or brain function to be able to say. I also haven’t a clue how the brain’s simulation becomes what “I” experience. I suspect it’s because “I” is part of the simulation, probably the essential part, but how would one test that notion?
     I enjoyed this book, because (as the above may show) it prompted rethinking many of my ideas. I will read it again. Hossenfelder is an excellent explainer.
     Recommended. ****

Magic Shows (Lapham's Quartely 05-3 2012)

 LQ 05-3: Magic Shows (2012) Magicians take advantage of the way the brain constructs a simulation of reality. The brain does a good enough job that most of us survive long enough to succeed at whatever ambitions we may have. But the simulation is flawed in fundamental ways, and the magicians know how to exploit those errors to make us believe we see what doesn’t happen while we miss what actually happens.
     There have always been people who believe that magic is real, that the illusions crafted by the magicians aren’t illusions at all. Some scallywags have exploited this desire to believe in mastery of supernatural powers, which has always damaged people’s wallets, and too often their health as well.
     Of course, “magic” has many senses. The common core means something like “actually or apparently breaking the laws that govern reality as we know it.” There’s always the whiff of the supernatural about magic. At one extreme, people may believe that evil entities use magic to mislead or harm. At the other extreme, all apparently inexplicable phenomena are dismissed as fraud or delusion. Superstition and cynicism are close cousins.
     Me, I enjoy a good magic show. I also have more or less serious doubts about the claims for sightings of the Loch Ness monster, or abductions by aliens arriving on Earth in flying saucers. As for spoon bending, while I don’t know how to do this trick, other people do, and psychic energy isn’t part of it.
     Magic is designed to elicit wonder, which makes it close cousin to science and art. It requires skills useful in both. As entertainment, it satisfies. As a reminder that the universe is largely inexplicable, it may rekindle wonder and gratitude at the gift of life, and a brain able to both explain the mystery at the heart of reality, and know where that explanation shades into confabulation.
     Recommended. ****