The Brain is not a Digital Computer (The Muse In The Machine, Gelernter 1994)

David Gelernter. The Muse in the Machine. (1994) A strange book, which makes a number of major points or claims.

First, Gelernter posits a spectrum of attention, from the barely conscious, half-recalled dream state to the rational, hyper-focussed attention and linear thinking that we’ve learned to accept as the best kind. However, says Gelernter, creativity is highest when attention is low and the mind “wanders.” Hyper-focussed attention is on the contrary not very creative. Its main (and perhaps only) value is to bring order to the usually chaotic structures of the insights created when our attention is low.

There’s some truth to this. In fact, it’s become a pop-psych cliche. Every now and then some analogy tripped over when the mind wanders triggers an insight.  But in my experience those events are not guaranteed. In fact, they are rare enough to make them memorable. I think that pretty well everybody has worried a problem until a solution “presented itself” unexpectedly. But we know that it’s a process that we can’t control. About all we can infer is there is a lot of thinking well below the level of conscious attention, some of it surfaces, and occasionally the product is useful. We can allow this process to work by letting go of a problem and chilling. But there’s no guarantees.

A Wandering Mind?

Second, the mind is not software. I agree, in part for the reason Gelernter puts forward, which is that the analogy of  “mind” with “virtual machine” breaks down. A virtual machine is one that’s implemented in software running on another machine. Abstract the concept of “machine” to an entity that performs some task in response to some input, then any program is a virtual machine. E.g., the wordprocessor I’m using takes data from the keyboard, and transforms that into a block of data in memory. It sends copies of the data to the graphics processor, which translates them into a display on the monitor. When I hit Print, it sends data to the printer, which in turn lays microscopic dots of ink onto a sheet of paper. To my eye, it’s the text I composed.

This is not how the brain works.

The analogy is that “mind” is a massive data-processing program running on the brain. Or a mess of such programs running in parallel. Hence a virtual machine. Write the program(s) in a suitable language, and the “mind” can run on any capable “substrate.” Such is the fantasy supporting the desire to “upload” the self and live forever. Gelernter is no biologist, but he argues that his concept of an attention spectrum requires a body. IOW, a mind cannot exist apart from a body. I agree, but my reason is I think somewhat simpler. The brain’s primary function is to operate the body. Most of its energy is expended in doing just that.

(https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thinking-hard-calories/)

 “Thinking”, such as it is, takes up a very small part of the brain’s energy budget. Being “me” is what thinking is mostly about, and it’s really just an afterthought.

The last part of the book is a nicely done symbolic reading of  The Song of Solomon. Gelernter is a believing Orthodox Jew. He posits that the hyper-focussed attention that we nowadays equate with thinking is a recent development. (Schooling is intended to train us to think this way.) An unfortunate effect of high-attention rational thought is a misreading of ancient texts, which are, he says, the products or records of low-attention thinking, hence their nonlinear narratives, symbolism and metaphor, and reliance on analogy to make both narrative and thematic sense. I think this is the most valuable part of the book. But it doesn’t prove that the concept of an attention spectrum explains creativity.

A curious book, with many interesting and useful insights. Worth a read. **½

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.

Interior Monologue

I heard the phrase recently. Can’t recall exactly when. It was uttered on a radio program, but I can’t recall what the program was about. Probably literature, since interior monologue is a narrative ploy. The mention sent me off on a sidetrack. An interior monologue, in fact, in which I began to compose a note about how interior monologue has been part of my waking life for as long as I can remember.

Most of the time, it’s me talking to myself, thinking out loud internally, so to speak, testing ways of saying things so they make sense. I talk out loud like this too, some of the time, which causes problems when people assume I’m stating some kind of position or point of view. I’m not. I sometimes wonder whether so-called mansplaining is just some other guy doing the same thing.

I also like to restate what seem to me plausible insights in order to lead into the test of whatever comes up as the next step. I want what I think I’ve found to be plausible to lead to the next idea. Anyhow, that’s how many of my ideas happen: I go over what I think I know or understand, and something new shows up. So I turn it this way and that, I say it several different ways to myself, to see which way of saying it makes sense. Sometimes this forces me to rethink what I think I know or understand.

Sometimes a new idea just appears. Well, they’re rarely new ideas, they’re usually new ways (to me) of saying old ideas. I try them out, vary them, until I find a formulation that seems to express that idea clearly and pithily. I do this with poorly-recalled memes I’ve found elsewhere too, like this one (I can’t recall the original):

We used to think the cure for stupidity was more facts. Then we got the internet.

Alligators in the Sewer (and other Folk Tales)

Thomas J. Craughwell. Alligators in the Sewer (1999) Folk tales, or real stories that happened to a friend of a friend, or FOAF. The compiler serves up relevant research into older versions of the tales. The plot generally remains the same, only details of technology and lifestyle change with the times. A first class potato-chip book, which I will dip into repeatedly as time and occasion offer. 

Recommended, if you can find a copy.

BTW, there are no alligators in the sewers of New York or any other city.

****

Darwin Awards 3 (2003)

 Wendy Northcutt. The Darwin Awards III (2003) A Darwin Awards are given posthumously to people who have removed themselves from the gene pool by means less than wise, and have thereby presumably removed deleterious genes. The tales recounted here raise a mix of laughter, astonishment, and pity, but never in the same proportions.

An example: In Finland, in October 2001, a group of friends were stranded by the side of the freeway after running out of gas. No one stopped to help, so one of them lay down the middle of the roadway, expecting traffic to stop. It didn’t, and his unwise attempt to help caused his demise. Confirmed.

The editors are careful to distinguish between confirmed cases, probably true ones, and personal accounts. Mildly amusing illustrations add to the charm of the book. And it is oddly charming: the generally high level of confidence displayed by the award winners before physics and chemistry interfered with their aims is admirable.

Recommended if you can find a copy. ***

Depressions, demand, and money: An economic puzzle.

Some years ago, I posted the following in the Comment section of a major newspaper. I can't recall the details of the story, but there was the threat of an economic downturn.

A puzzle about Depressions keeps bothering me: In a Depression there is tremendous demand for goods, mostly consumables. There is a pool of workers willing to produce and satisfy that demand. It looks to me like a Depression violates the "law" of Supply and Demand.

So why doesn't production match demand? The culprit seems to be "debt", which must be paid at all costs. Even if it prolongs the Depression by reducing the profits needed to pay the debt.

Something is seriously wrong with an economic theory that can't explain why its founding principles don't work.

Another reader commented as follows:

@Wolf Kirchmeir 

Something is seriously wrong with your understanding of the economic dynamics of depressions. In a depression contrary to your assertion there is NOT a tremendous demand for goods. In fact, due to massive unemployment demand plummets, as does the incentive to supply that demand. The result is spiral where decreasing demand and the decrease incentive to supply feedback on one another. The dirty little secret about capitalism is that distressed markets when left to their own devices will collapse without outside i.e. government intervention in the form [of] fiscal and monetary policy and massive fiscal stimulus which creates enough demand to literally resuscitate a distressed economy until markets are able to function without that assistance.

This was my answer:

@[name] You're using classical economics, which equates "demand" with the amount of money available to spend. But demand is what I need and want. Money is merely a measure of my ability to satisfy my demand, and that's not the same thing at all.

In short, the classical explanation doesn't resolve the puzzle, it creates the puzzle.

My need and desire for stuff doesn't depend on the amount of money I have. It depends on how much food, shelter, clothing etc that I have. Demand rises and falls with that supply of needs and wants. To repeat: Money is just a measure of my ability to satisfy my demand. Not enough money means incomplete satisfaction of demand. It does not mean reduction of demand. On the contrary. The less money I have, the more demand I have. So if you use available money as a measure of "demand", that shows that there is something wrong with how money is distributed.

The reference to the "dirty little secret of capitalism" I think reinforces that point, if I understand it correctly. Government's injection of money doesn't "create demand", it just reduces the mismatch between demand and money.

The puzzle remains, because it's about  psychology, not about finance.

Language: What exactly do we communicate?

    We use language to fix memories, to construct our pasts, to invent a future. This thought came to me while reading, in a story by Malcolm Lowry, the description of a landscape I had never seen: Italy. The words Lowry used named familiar objects and experiences: tunnels, hawks, sunlit green valleys, trains, white oxen. Did, then, these words enable me to see what Lowry saw? No, they did not. For they recalled images from my memory, not his. Then I knew that if I described a train journey from my childhood, I would find myself selecting language that recalled to mind what I remembered. If the language-born image differed from memory, I would select new words, new phrases; and when I had finished my description, I should delude myself into thinking another would know what I meant by it.

     Thinking this (which took less time and language than it took to write it), I realized that we talk to ourselves. I describe my experience so that I will remember it. And because my language can arouse your memories, I can communicate an idea of a notion of an apprehension of what I experienced. (January 1976)

 (See also Steiner’s After Babel, which supplied ideas that made this thinking possible.)

Follow-up 2024: Whatever memories my words call up in my reader, they are accompanied by feelings and thoughts. We remember how we felt perhaps more strongly than the event itself. We also modify our memories every time we reconstruct them, so my words may change what the reader recalls. Our memories must pass the strictest test of all: they must be plausible, and our sense of what's plausible changes with experience and with remembering. It seems to me that the the sanest stance towards our own memories is This is how I think it happened, but I can't be sure.

Whoever reads this will agree or disagree depending on their experience of remembering, or of reading, of having their understanding or imagination altered by what they read, or what they heard someone say. That we are able to communicate well enough to work together, to continue to love each other, to agree on some notions of how the world works, all this and more seems to me an amazing accomplishment when I consider the certainty that what I intend to communicate and what is actually communicated are never the same.

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. ****

Is the Self Real? (Hood, The Self Illusion, 2012)

 Bruce Hood. The Self Illusion. (2012) An excellent overview of the implications of neurological research on questions of awareness, both of the external world and of the self. Hood’s reporting of the research is IMO fair, based on my (gappy) knowledge derived from reading several dozen miscellaneous sources.

I think that the term “illusion” is unfortunate, since it suggests that the Self is not real. It is as real as all the other simulations generated by the brain. I note that the Self is centred on the body, and that my sensations of my body’s shape and colour etc are the same kind as my sensations of the shapes and colours of other bodies and objects in the world around me. So I conclude that these sensations are simulations, not illusions. As simulations, they must match reality well enough that I can do whatever it takes to survive and procreate. Evolution rewards mechanisms that enable those processes, so I conclude that the simulation my brain creates is good enough for those purposes.

Study of other organisms has revealed that their senses are not exactly the same as ours, so presumably their simulations of reality are different. This stance suggests that the famous conundrum about what it’s like to be a bat can be reframed as not knowing what a bat’s simulation of reality is like. But then we can’t know exactly what another human’s simulation is like either. A favourite question of my students was “How do we know that we see red the same way?” The answer is, we don’t. But we can tell whether we see the same differences between red and green. If we don’t, the we agree that one of us is red-green colour-blind.

This principle of comparing perceptions underlies all scientific research. Science has expanded from describing and classifying perceptions to recording measurements and devising mathematical models that predict the measurements. If we record the same measurements, then presumably we have stumbled on some constant in the simulations, and may infer that this implies some constant aspect of reality.

Hood spends some time discussing free will, and concludes that free will is also an illusion. There is no free will because all decisions are determined by a multiplicity of factors, starting with how our genes and environments interact to produce our individual brains. He reports cases of how brain tumours have changed people’s personalities and perceptions, and how removing the tumours has changed people more or less to back to what they were. It’s clear that if perceptions and attitudes change when the brain is damaged in some way then the notion of free-willed choice becomes questionable at least. That’s important because of our assignment of moral and hence sometimes of criminal guilt.

It seems to me that this approach to the free will problem misses the point. As framed, there is no way to distinguish between a freely willed and a determined choice. Both ways of choosing finally depend on preferences. Reasoning cannot choose, it can only present options. Whether our brain simulates a free choice, or we actually perform one, the result is the same. For free choice will act on options exactly like determined choice. Basically, we choose. Hood argues that insight into factors that influence or determine choice, and the extent to which the chooser cannot control them, should guide our notions of guilt and responsibility. I think he’s right.

All in all, a book well worth reading. ****

Time (Lapham's Quarterly 7:04)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 7:04: Time (2014) How do you think about time? Is it a river that carries us along? Is it some abstract something that passes? Is it something that one spends, and once spent, is gone forever?

These metaphors and more are the ways we conceive of Time. Physicists point out that time is a conundrum. On the one hand all closed systems tend towards disorder. Open systems can scavenge energy that drives transformations that maintain or increase order. When that external energy input stops, the system decays into increasing disorder. Thus the forward direction of the Arrow of Time, which we experience as the flow or passing of time.

Expressions and musings about that experience form the bulk of this collection. Any reader will recognise their own experience and thoughts represented here. But there’s almost nothing about time as an aspect of reality.

Albert Einstein’s theories play a cameo role. More recent (and current) problems with time as a physical fact, or an aspect of reality, don’t show up at all. So let me offer a few musings of my own.

For us humans, the central fact of time is that for each of us it will end. For some that end

comes before the body disintegrates, when dementia destroys memories, and in doing so destroys the self. Knowing that this could happen to me creates a dread that I hurriedly push down below the tissue-thin surface of mind that I experience as my self. Time is the essence of what the brain constructs as my experience of reality. Consciousness exists only while it’s happening. That means my self, me, I exist only while I’m happening. Maybe that’s why the Christian creed asserts a belief in the resurrection of the body.

When I was growing up, the usual measure of distance was time. The next village was a half-hour away. Gruber’s farmstead was 3/4 hour away. The post office was 5 minutes away. And so on. So Einstein’s space-time to me seemed fairly obvious when I first read about it. Of course, I didn’t know the math that combines these aspects of reality. But I knew that moving through space always took time. Einstein’s space-time clarifies this: To move through space requires movement through time.

So what happens when we are standing still? Why do we still move through time? Well, we stand still within our frame of reference. But that frame of reference is moving with respect to every other frame of reference you care to specify. Which means we are not standing still. Which also means that time transcends frames of reference. Or that a frame of reference is specifiable only as moving through time. Which makes time, not space, the fundamental “whatever-it-is” of reality.

Maybe.

To exist means moving through time. When an entity ceases to exist, it disappears. But nothing disappears. So to cease to exist means to change into something else. 

Consciousness exists only while it’s happening. Anesthesia interrupts consciousness. Sleep is a different form of consciousness. When you “wake up from” from anesthesia, there is no sense that time has passed. Well, that’s my experience. But when I wake up from sleep, I know that time has passed, because I have memories of dreaming. I don’t know about comas, but descriptions of the experience suggest that comas are interruptions of consciousness like anesthesia.

Since consciousness exists only while it’s happening, time is of the essence of consciousness.

“Exist” implies time. Hence the question “Does God exist?” is a non-question, since by definition God is not in time but beyond it. (That phrasing shows that we can draw logical conclusions from statements that refer to things we cannot imagine.)

Time is a puzzle.

As always, this collection is an excellent overview and sampling of what humans have thought and imagined and reported about its topic. 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 ****

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. ****

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. ***

Visual and other illusions

 

 Visual illusions vary. Some can be controlled. For example, I find that once I’ve seen both images in a dual-image illusion, I can see either one at will. The two faces vs vase is an example. Of course, I can’t see both images at once: The brain computes the image either as a white one on a black ground, or a black one on a white ground. Hence the illusion.

Others are a trickier, for example the Necker cube illusion. I can trigger the flip, but not entirely at will. I have to blink, so that the brain sees a new input, which will usually be computed the way I want it.

Others are impossible avoid, for example the staggered tiles illusion. The only way to see the horizontal lines as truly horizontal is to cover all except the top row of tiles. There is no way to control this illusion.

Many more visual illusions have been discovered in the last 50 years or so, when neurologists began to wonder why and how they happened. One of the most startling is that colour is always perceived as an illusion. The range of colours in a scene, the distribution of light and shadow, the colours in the light source, the colours of neighbouring regions, all these determine what the brain will compute as the “real” colours.

It’s now known that we suffer illusions in all our senses. The general principle is that the brain computes our perceptions from the filtered, hence limited, data provided by our sensory systems. Some of these computations produce illusions: false or mistaken perceptions. We cannot escape them. At best we can question them. By comparing the inputs from different senses, we can usually recognise hallucinations. Memories can also help do this, but are less reliable. 

Knowledge (gleaned from observation and experiment critiqued and organised with reason) can reveal the reality that the brain miscalculates or fails to perceive at all. But this process is not easy, and above all, it’s slow. It takes patience, experience, and understanding of sometimes opaque methodologies to apprehend the reality beyond the illusion. That reality cannot be perceived, but usually there are procedures to calculate perceivable effects. When these are confirmed by observation, we say that we are now a step closer to the “underlying reality.” The name for the knowledge thus generated is “theories”. 

What’s true of the senses is also true of conceptualisation. A concept is a pattern. We suffer from conceptual illusions just as we suffer visual ones. I think the most pervasive one is that these abstract patterns we call theories are closer to the “underlying reality” that our senses so inconveniently misrepresent or hide from us.

Unusual Brains: Thomson's Unthinkable (2018)

 Helen Thomson. Unthinkable. (2018) Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat showed that suitably edited case histories could help people understand the effects of stroke and other insults to the brain. His sensitive descriptions, his reports of interviews, his attempts to translate his patients’ accounts into accessible narratives, these and more have inspired generations of readers. One of them was Helen Thomson, who cherishes her interview with him a couple of years or so before he died. This book is in part a result of her admiration for Sacks, coupled with a wide-ranging curiosity, and enough neuroscience background (she has a B.Sc) to make sense of the topic of this book: how people with unusual brains manage to survive and thrive.
     Thomson tells the stories of nine people with congenital or acquired brain oddities. There’s Bob, who never forgets a moment. Or Tommy, whose personality changed utterly when he suffered an aneurysm. Or Sharon, whose sense of location is so bad that she has trouble navigating around her house. Thomson interviewed them all, as well as similar ones that she found along the way, and the scientists and psychiatrists who worked with these extraordinary outliers. The result is a reminder that we are our brains. When our brains don’t function as expected, we become different people. That’s the reason we are afraid of dementia, I think. Dementia shows us that what we think of as the most reliable component of our experience, our sense of self, is in fact the most fragile.
     The book confirms my belief that the brain constructs a simulation of reality with the Self, the “I”, not only at its centre but as the essential component, the part that holds it all together. Our “I” knows itself to be “here”, at the centre (the pathological version of this knowledge we call narcissism). If the connection between Self and some component of the simulation is broken or compromised, then not only the awareness of what’s “out there” is altered, but so is the Self.
     I believe that all brains, human and animal, construct such simulations, every one of them good enough to ensure that most members of a species will live long enough to produce offspring. But all of them incomplete and distorted in some way. The outliers that Thomson describes show the common features of the human simulation of reality. They also show how far from the norm any given simulation can be and still function as a human Self. So in the limited sense of the stable Self thereby implied, the Self is what makes each of us a person.
     Footnote: The Christian creeds assert the “resurrection of the body”, which suggests that one of the innovations of the Christian faith was the insight that a Self without a body is impossible. The Incarnation may be understood as another version of this insight. This insight has been slighted or ignored ever since the notion of a disembodied soul was introduced by Augustine and others..
     Recommended. ****

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. ****

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. ****

Work: Love it or hate it, you need it. (Lapham's Quarterly 04-2, Spring 2011)

 LQ 04-2: Lines of Work. (2011) “Work fascinates me. I could watch it for hours.” That’s one of the quotes scattered through this collection. It expresses one end of the range of attitudes to work, adumbrated in the curse laid on Adam after the Fall: In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread. At the other end we find St Benedict’s Ora et Labora, “Work and pray”, often rendered as Laborare est orare, “To work is to pray.”
     We humans need purpose and structure in our lives, and work provides that. The lucky ones have work that satisfies. Most have work that earns enough to survive, while providing much of the social life without which we cannot thrive. The unlucky ones toil at soul-crushing labour, which as often as not is neither valued nor rewarded as the necessary effort that enables our survival and keeps the rest of us in relative comfort.
     William Morris (not included, an instructive omission, I think) was one of many starry-eyed reformers who recognised the inhumane aspects of industrialised work, and wanted a return to what he believed was the golden age of craft. He thought of craft as work that not only earned a living but engaged the worker’s skill and imagination. Morris failed to see that even craft relies on the toil of labourers that relieves the crafter of the necessity of spending time in the work that sustains their life.
     There are many descriptions of actual work in this collection, most by people who found a way out of the labour that they describe. One is by Orwell. His account of how the workers at the grand hotels of Paris discharged their duties would have convinced me never to stay at anything above a one or two star establishment. Maybe things have changed since the 1930s. I would have included an excerpt from Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
     The other pieces describe or discuss the context of work, or of the relations that working with others makes possible. Work makes up the single largest part of our lives. Irksome or satisfying, necessary or optional, we can’t escape it. It’s the necessity that irks. When we choose how to occupy ourselves, that freedom erases the negatives.
     Most of my jobs have been more or less interesting, at least until I mastered the requisite skills. But usually, my co-workers were more important than the work. I worked most of my life as a teacher, work that was sometimes frustrating enough that I wondered whether I could continue. I did, and now I miss the classroom and the staff room.
     As always, recommended. ****

Celebrities: A culural constant (LQ 04-1)

LQ 04-1: Celebrity (2011) There are times when our worship of celebrities seems like a

peculiarly 21st century aberration. This collection may cause a revision of that opinion, and perhaps a more sanguine attitude. It had that effect on me, and prompted a number of reflections. Herewith a small sampling.
     True, there are now probably more people famous for being famous than ever before, but such people have always existed, and humans have always paid them more attention than they merited. True, much celebrity is founded on genuine achievement, but even more genuine achievement has gone uncelebrated. Our century may be unusual only in the intensity of celebrity worship. But every historical era is an outlier in some aspect of human possibility; that’s how and why we mark them. Cultural expression varies over time and place, but the range of cultural options is remarkably small. One of them is celebrity, labelled fame in earlier times.
     The desire for fame was often considered a virtuous ambition, especially by the Greeks and Romans, for it prompted striving for excellence. The desire for notoriety has been seen as the corresponding vice. While the great religions have praised the one and condemned the other, they have also expressed some ambivalence. For glorying in fame, even that earned by virtue or excellence, is too close to pride, especially its pathetic variant, vanity.
     Celebrity belongs to the suite of social dimensions labelled “reputation.” Our public persona is our reputation. We know ourselves in the tension and contrast between that public persona and our self-perception. That makes reputation important: We want outer and inner self to be as closely aligned as possible. It may be that our focus on celebrity is in part an attempt to learn how to create a reputation that meets our expectations or fantasies about ourselves.
     There’s a lot to chew on in this collection. One is P T Barnum’s discussion of how to make celebrity pay: Manufacture it. Reading his comments, one sees that marketing is the commodification of celebrity, which in turn explains phenomena such as the Kardashians. That’s progress of a sort, perhaps.
    Recommended. ****