SFN is almost here! Where did the time go? I was working on my poster while I was at home the past few days. Quite strange. I have a general idea of what to expect, but I gather the size of the conference will surprise me the most. Hopefully people will actually pay attention to my poster. Aghhhh! So much to get ready! At least I can go to Boston afterwards.
Peace and grease.
“Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.
While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren’t.
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.”
- Sam Harris
Excerpt from Monday’s LA Times
Marvin Minsky’s new book, ‘The Emotion Machine’, is available in draft format from his homepage.
Sections 1-9: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
From Publishers Weekly
Twenty years after The Society of Mind, where he introduced the concept that “minds are what brains do,” Minsky probes deeper into the question of natural intelligence. Don’t look for simple explanations: he believes “we need to find more complicated ways to explain our most familiar mental events”; we need to break our thought processes down into the most precise steps possible. In fact, in order to truly understand the human mind, Minsky suggests, we’ll probably need to reverse-engineer a machine that can replicate those functions so we can study it. Thus, he rejects the idea of consciousness as a unitary “Self” in favor of “a decentralized cloud” of more than 20 distinct mental processes. In this view, emotional states like love and shame are not the opposite of rational cogitation; both, Minsky says, are ways of thinking. This is not a book to be read casually; Minsky builds his argument with constant reference to earlier and later sections, imagining objections from a variety of philosophical positions and refuting them. A steady stream of diagrams helps clarify matters, but readers will be forced to dig for the “aha!” moments: they’re worth the effort. 100 b&w illus. (Nov. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Frequently asked questions of the Dawk.
And infrequent, like this one:
Q: Tell me about a banana.
A: A banana is one of the wonders of the world. You could say that of any living object, and I could stop there. But I won’t. A banana is a fruit, shaped by natural selection to be palatable, hence eaten and its seeds dispersed. But the bananas we eat are seedless. Artificial breeding has enhanced nature’s means (palatability) while eliminating nature’s end (seed dispersal). It’s a metaphor for much that is special about humans.
Why don’t you quote this Dennett? Please!
Lest we forget.
And yes, dear Canadian Action Party, you may well ‘rather be Canadian’ but we’re in the global village these days. Please refrain from calling September 11th a scare tactic of the U.S. government while employing the same tactic in your conspiracy theory orgy, err, political party. One need only have sat in on Constance Fogal’s talk/rant at the University of Winnipeg to hear words bemoaning that we may all die if we do not stand up to the deception of September 11.
Well, look here first.
My Dear Wormwood,
I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.
Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy’s!) you don’t realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew were I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defense by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said ‘Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning’, the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added ‘Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind’, he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of ‘real life’ (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all ‘that sort of thing’ just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about ‘that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic’. He is now safe in Our Father’s house.
You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don’t let him get away from that invaluable ‘real life’. But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is ‘the results of modern investigation’. Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!
Your affectionate uncle
Screwtape
Origins of musicianship or music appreciation may dictate why and how our feet tap and our heads bob. But do they dictate musical taste? Why some can’t stand Tom Waits and others can’t get enough of The Velvet Underground and still others prefer Bach? Can evolution explain an ingenious composition and the significance of what that piece stands for?
From The Boston Globe:
There is suggestive research linking music and sociability. Daniel Levitin, for instance, points to the difference between two mental disorders, Williams syndrome and autism. People with Williams are mentally retarded, but at the same time, as Levitin puts it, “highly social, highly verbal, and highly musical.” Autism, on the other hand, while it also often causes mental impairment, tends to make people both less social and less musical.
To Steven Pinker, though, none of this adds up to a convincing case for music’s evolutionary purpose. Pinker is not shy about seeing the traces of evolution in modern man-in “How the Mind Works” he devoted a chapter to arguing that emotions were adaptations-but he stands by his “auditory cheesecake” description.
“They’re completely bogus explanations, because they assume what they set out to prove: that hearing plinking sounds brings the group together, or that music relieves tension,” he says.
“But they don’t explain why. They assume as big a mystery as they solve.” Music may well be innate, he argues, but that could just as easily mean it evolved as a useless byproduct of language, which he sees as an actual adaptation.
And Pinker isn’t the only skeptic. Back in April, as part of an experiment led by Levitin to compare the physiological response of performers and listeners, Boston Pops maestro Keith Lockhart conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra while he, a few musicians, and a portion of the audience were wired with monitors that tracked their heart rate, muscle tension, respiration, and other bodily signals of emotion.
Yet though Lockhart was happy to make himself Levitin’s guinea pig, he confesses to be ultimately uninterested in the origins of music.
“It’s enough for me to know that music does have a distinct emotional reaction in almost everybody that no other art form can boast of,” he says. “I’ve never particularly wanted to know why that happens.”
The past weekend has been overly draining and excessively stressful. Thank goodness things have lightened up at job no. 2 of 3 and I have time to surf. I was most excited to discover Google Books today and my stress levels have gone down appreciably since I’ve started to read William James’ Principles of Psychology.
Quite shocking to think where this could lead. I appreciate catching wind of the latest neuro research online as much as the next nerd, but to think that books, real books, are being scanned! And searchable! I can only shudder at the hippy googling ‘brain’ and making loose conjectures between Penfield, James, and hasheesh. Or the somber, pretentious post-modernist writing a treatise on the hegemony of 19th century frog experiments and the resultant marginalization of the toad/other by simply clicking ’search’. But, the future, the ability to compare translations, to thoughtfully rediscover past conjectures, this is quite exciting. Makes one wonder what is happening at Google behind the scenes. Murmurings from the CBC and the like already point to difficulties: lawsuits on copyright, decisions made dictating which books will be scanned, access to books in different countries. It’s brave new world out there. Cowboy up.
Without further ado, The Bookshelf. Gems located inside.
