out of the window/I saw

A Long-Running Conversation

2011-11-25T09:29:00.001-05:00

. . . on-going. The cumulative result of that process is a body of work.

Art is a continuing dialogue that stretches back through thousands of years. Try not to . . .

Kit White, 101 Things to Learn in Art School

the process does not stop

2011-11-23T15:22:00.001-05:00

return to that world which precedes knowledge. [quoted by White from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception]

The process does not stop with each work completed. It is . . .

Kit White, 101 Things to Learn in Art School

Things Themselves

2011-11-23T15:15:00.001-05:00

think with our eyes.

"To return to things themselves is to . . .

Kit White, 101 Things to Learn in Art School; White included a "cover" of a Morandi drawing with this entry

visual thinking

2011-11-23T10:38:00.001-05:00

. . . a collective sense that it belongs to a category of experience we have come to know as "art."

[Drawing] teaches us how to . . .

--Kit White, 101 Things to Learn in Art School

Anything #1

2011-11-23T10:32:00.001-05:00

ART IS NOT DEFINED BY MEDIUM OR THE MEANS OF ITS PRODUCTION BUT BY . . .

--Kit White, 101 Things to Learn in Art School

Acting the Role of Someone Who's Good

2011-03-29T21:06:00.000-04:00

http://www.listal.com/viewimage/1679834

(Continued from the previous post)

I'm most comfortable in the role of someone who is nice to everyone, who doesn't commit crimes, who tries to understand the point of view of those who disagree with me, who doesn't say mean things. I like when people indicate that I'm acting this role successfully. It shows that my mask is on firmly, that my acting skills are intact. I play the role so faithfully that in fact it becomes habitual, and my somewhat good actions become habitual.

However, I have a strong sense that this goodness belongs to the character I'm playing, not to me. Or rather, that there is no me; one has to play a role, or roles. That's all there are. Now I play the role of someone who's the age I am now, and play the roles that go along with that age. In that sense my character has to change. I've done well at holding onto my role as a good, kind, gentle person. How well I know though, that there are a number of other roles I could put on throughout the day, every day, and manage, sometimes with difficulty not to; roles that I don't tell anyone about. As usual, I wonder, is this true for other people--whether they realize it or not? It's not something I can talk about easily without people thinking I'm mentally unhealthy, or perhaps too self-involved. So I don't. Except to my inner therapist, as here.

I just re-watched Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, such a rich feast of a movie! One of the main and wisest characters makes this point explicitly, that all we are roles that we play. The most evil character, who grows more complex and less evil under the strain of events, in his better mode says that he is stuck within one role, that that role is branded onto his face (something like that). He implies that he would like to get out of his sadistical, tyrannical role, but can't. Thus the movie suggests that holding on too strongly to one role can have very bad consequences, morally, spiritually, and emotionally.

Personal Models of Goodness

2011-03-29T20:49:00.001-04:00

http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/gawain.htm

My wife recently read Gawain and the Green Knight, in part because she knows it's a book that got to me, and stayed with me, in a way that not too many books have. She also says she would like to read Ursula LeGuin's Lavinia for the same reason. That book, and another by LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven, both took hold of me. Each of these three books changed the way I behaved and presented me with a character that made me strive to emulate the character--not in a conscious way, but in a way I recognized happening over time. For one thing, I find myself talking about the LeGuin books a lot to her. (Not Gawain, as I haven't read it in so long.)

In each book, the main character tries to be good all the time. Gawain is more heroically virtuous than the LeGuin characters; the LeGuin characters are more perfectly virtuous. Orr, in Lathe, and the eponymous protagonist of Lavinia never taking a wrong step. Others aren't particularly aware of just how perfect their behavior is. It's a wonder that the books are as good as they are, as books, and have so much narrative drive, and that their protagonists are as compelling as they are, given how virtuous they are. In Gawain, Gawain is famous for being perfect, not just morally, but in terms of manners; fashion; knowing how to treat women well (and in a way women really do like and are attracted to); fighting where necessary; gracefulness; and modesty. Delightfully, he slips, and loses his claim to perfection. But it's not such a big slip, and his taking in so fully and well just how he has slipped, what the implications are, and why his punishment is just is satisfying.

Gawain is a complex, rich, and amazingly graceful work of literature. The two LeGuin books are nourishing pieces of literature, and involve a lot of artistry, and care with language, but they're not like amazing, literarily speaking, as Gawain is.

As I'm now using this blog as therapist's couch, I note that I am back to my childhood, when I had aspirations to being perfectly good. Not that I now aspire to be perfectly good, or that I am more good than the average person. (Or maybe I'm a little better, or maybe I'm a little worse. I don't know. I could support an arguments for giving my self anywhere from a B+ to an F morally speaking.) The fact that I don't aspire to be particularly good--in fact, I attempt to not be attached to things, including being perfectly good--makes the continued, gentle but firm hold of these models of goodness on me surprising to me.

different eras of life and literature

2011-03-21T18:57:00.001-04:00

http://www.carus-verlag.com/index.php3?BLink=Haydn&selSprache=1

6:38 Why do I want to write words down--loneliness, or as one of the pleasing things one can do with solitude? I just read a poem I liked, by Mary Ruefle, who just won an award--I hadn't heard of her--called "The Bunny Gives Us a Lesson in Eternity":

We are a sad people, without hats.

The history of our nation is tragically benign.
We like to watch the rabbits screwing in the graveyard.
We are fond of the little bunny with the bent ear
who stands alone in the moonlight
reading what little text there is on the graves.
He looks quite desirable like that.
He looks like the center of the universe.
Look how his mouth moves mouthing the words
while the others are busy making more of him.
Soon the more will ask of him to write their love
letters and he will oblige, using the language
of our ancestors, those poor clouds in the ground,
beloved by us who have been standing here for hours,
a proud people after all.

I like how she changes the subject blithely, by means of bridges that more exciting than what they bridge from and to; how the exciting parts pop up when I'm not expecting.

When I was young I liked Romantic literature. Shelley was the first writer I liked. Keats came right after in the junior year curriculum, and I saw that he had more weight, but I was more the weightless type, like Shelley. Toward the end of college I knew I had to pick a specialty in order to get into graduate school, and I nominated Yeats, who himself had Shelley for favorite.

Now I find Shelley tiring, and his literary persona a little repellent. Yeats likewise, and his persona likewise. Sorry, O great souls, to dismiss you so unjustly, but I can't stop to be just at this moment. Keats's literary persona remains glorious in my mind, his poems likewise. But tiring. Who I want at the moment are souls from a past century that back then I found so wanting in poetry, i.e., as to be boring. Samuel Johnson, with whom I spent happy months last year, via Boswell. I'm now reading McCullough's biography of James Adams, another admirable, virtuous fellow, Christian and schooled in the classics. Yet I don't believe in Christianity and I don't have any of the heroic virtues that Johnson and Adams had. On the piano I play as best I can pieces by those seventeenth-century, types, Haydn and Mozart, and feel as if I'm in the presence of sanity.

I'm writing personally though to do so makes me feel vain. 6:50

"The cure for loneliness is solitude"

2011-03-18T10:51:00.001-04:00

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/marianne_moore/photo

"The cure for loneliness is solitude." Marianne Moore, as quoted by Joyce Carol Oates, as quoted by Julian Barnes in a review of her A Widow's Story: A Memoir, in the New York Review of Books, April 7, 2011

Such a striking idea. Those who are lonely seek out other people; is it even possible, when in a state of loneliness, to convince oneself to seek out solitude instead? Yet it surely seems that an ability to enjoy solitude is helpful, almost decisive, in learning the art of being happy.

Unending Appetite for the New

2011-03-18T10:41:00.000-04:00

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://wasatchwestpianofest.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/piano_keys_01.jpg&imgrefurl=http://wasatchwestpianofe

In order to learn a piece of music on the piano at all well, I find I have to memorize it, in order to lock in the fingering, and in order to practice it more quickly, without taking the time to follow along with the notes with my eyes. But if I take the time to memorize it, I lose interest in it. I no longer a sense of discovery. This is how I am about so many things.

On the Other Hand

2011-03-17T11:59:00.000-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Brockes-t.html

http://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Avenue-M-Breakfast-Tiffanys/dp/0061774154

I did better with Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon, a book that gives the back story of the invention of the different chemical elements. He tries a little too hard to be jaunty and funny, but lots of great information is always flowing out of him, and I find myself now wondering, "I wonder what the chemical composition of that is?" or when I'm putting cooking oil onto the surface of a glass baking pan, I think about molecules.
I definitely did better with Robert Gottlieb's Sarah, a biography of Sarah Gottlieb, who comes off as heroic, a goddess, and something of a monster, as goddesses sometimes are.

I loved reading an airy, artful confection called Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman. It was funny. It was a page-turner, despite its being non-fiction. It felt like being on the set of the movie, without the waiting around parts.

So I'm not that finicky.

A Finicky Eater

2011-03-15T12:42:00.001-04:00

http://educhoices.org/articles/Online_Libraries_-_25_Places_to_Read_Free_Books_Online.html

It’s good for me to read. However, I am finicky. I thought, “Oh, this book about Montaigne (by Sarah Bakewell)—it will help me understand the greatness of Montaigne.” I look at a sample at Amazon, and find that the prose is a little bit lumbering, and that it is too focused on the minutiae of a particular’s man’s life and thoughts. I think, his insights don’t seem so much different from those anyone else would have, even me. That’s because I don’t understand him, yes; but I’m dissuaded from ordering the book. Prus’s The Doll moves too slowly. Its progress in fact is glacial. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is crammed with suspenseful incident and written in prose as crisp as could be desired, but I find the author sadistic, and not just occasionally so. The dire humiliations he imposes on his poor protagonist are as bad as those meted out in Voltaire’s Candide, but in Candide silliness and laughter turn the violence into comedy, something not to be taken too seriously at any given reading moment. In The Thousand Autumns one is forced to experience the unpleasantness and humiliation vicariously. No wonder I’d rather read through, i.e., play, Haydn’s sonatinas. What if my students were as hard on what I assign them as I am being on these books? I’d be in trouble. And surely they are vulnerable to the criticisms of a picky reader, since how finicky one is must be a matter of attitude. Readers as good as I or better have venerated Montaigne or poured praise on the Montaigne book and The Thousand Autumns. Maybe I’m like a n old man whose appetite is such that hardly anything tempts it, and so he has to talk himself into eating anything. Yet I’m only fifty-seven years old.

I find it pleasant to chatter on in this way. What I’d most like to chatter about is other people, but I think it’s best not to talk about other people; it’s not respectful.

a "skeptical view of reality"

2011-02-02T17:01:00.001-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ThomasDiggesmap.JPG

Hawking gives a good description of how scientists come to the conclusion that something is real. We construct intellectual models that, within some range of pheomena, and to some degree of approximation, agree with observation. But he calls this 'model-dependent reality,' and suggests that this is all there is to reality.

Questions about the nature of reality have puzzled scientists and philosophers for millenia. Like most people, I think that there is something real out there, entirely independent of us and our models, as the earth is independent of our maps. But this is because I can't help believing in an objective reality, not because I have no good arguments for it. I am in no position to argue that Hawking's anti-realism is wrong. But I do insist that neither quantum mechanics or anything else in physics settles the question.

Steven Weinberg, "The Universes We Still Don't Know," NYR, 2/10/11, p. 32.

snow seems real

2011-02-02T17:00:00.002-05:00

http://www.lawnservicema.com/snow-removal.html

So much snow. I've shoveled for an hour. It's starting to get dark early because of the thick cloud cover. There's some fine sleet falling. I'm just back from the hardware store, where I bought a new snow shovel, and I listened to some snow-plough-ers compare notes. Winter makes reality seem like more than a hypothetical construct. In a good way.

Reading Three Cups of Tea

2011-01-09T12:40:00.001-05:00

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/K2_8611.jpg

K2, the mountain Mortensen didn't succeed in climbing

For a while, I’ve had a visceral negative reaction to ideas like “if you believe in yourself one hundred percent, anything is possible.” If people want to dream their dreams and believe in themselves one hundred percent, fine, in theory; it’s their lives. Maybe it’s an adaptive thing to do, given where Everything is right now. Viscerally, however, I feel myself becoming more of an Eastern religions guy every time I hear such an idea. The dreams people dream are desires, attachments to illusory things, that will just bring on more complicated suffering. Such dreams will cause the dreamer to push out of the Way, the way of sweet reality, the reality of the wooden floor beneath their feet, the person living in the house with them, the actual job that has come their way to do modestly but steadily and well.

I recently started reading Three Cups of Tea. When I read non-fiction that actually maintains my attention, a rare thing, it overwhelms my conversation fro the entire time I’m reading it, and for a few weeks afterward. As presented in the book, Greg Mortensen is enormously appealing. His father believed in himself one hundred percent, and was therefore able to fulfill his dream of building a teaching hospital in Tanzania, one that eventually would be led by Tanzanians. Greg himself sets himself dream-like goals, like hiking the high Himalayas, or making his severely ill sister’s existence meaningful and positive. He succeeds. My position as anti-dream, anti-believe in yourself one hundred percent, is called into question.

I love that Mortensen’s father built the hospital; that Greg Mortensen was so loving toward his sister; succeeded in helping her have a reasonable, if brief, life; climbed tall mountains; and eventually had a profound, positive impact on some of the most needy people in the world. I don’t care how manipulative his biographer Relin’s prose is, I am delighted to be thus manipulated. However, here’s a possible interpretation: Greg M doesn’t succeed because he believes in himself one hundred percent, or because he follows his dreams. He succeeds because . . . because . . .

Because it’s what he knows. He saw his father work hard to create a medical hospital, and he saw his mother work hard to create a school (also in Tanzania). So what does he end up doing? Creating multiple schools in places where the odds were at least as difficult. The importance of teaching, of models! Our minds need templates, and our parents and our teachers and our friends provide them. What we say doesn’t matter much. What we do, in front of an audience that finds us the best, most persistent narrative going (that’s what parents are to their children, the audience) is what matters.

I’m over-stating the case I know. And facts can be arranged to support different interpretations. I’m influenced by my own inability to pursue my dreams, so much more fragmentary than Mortensen’s, by what may be my undiagnosed ADD, but what may be a neurological tendency to get overwhelmed easily by stimuli. My father (what were his dreams, to begin with? I’ve never asked him this) figured out via a circuitous route a career in business, a somewhat boom and bust career, but one which allowed him to raise under prosperous circumstances a family of ten children, each of them attending a private college, paid for him without benefit of scholarships. Now he slides down gradually, cheerfully toward his eventual death, he being in his mid-eighties. He shows emotional strength and dignity in the way he responds to a chronic, painful condition. In other words, he did enough to support a family economically and to keep the love and loyalty of two wives and all his children. That’s it. All I’ve done so far is to support adequately my children and keep the love and loyalty of my wife and children. That’s it. I’ve followed my father’s example. The fragmentary dreams or fantasies I’ve entertained to do more or differently never took any kind of hold. I don’t mind that they haven’t. I just tell myself, this was my Taoist Way.

I don’t think my Taoist Way philosophy is any better than the Follow Your Dreams philosophy. My visceral response to that school, that the dream-your-dream talk is a drug, an illusion. It’s an illusion that gets under my skin, maybe because I’m so constitutionally unable to follow any kind of dream.

Cold-hearted and Selfish Yet Loving and Appreciative

2010-12-25T08:32:00.002-05:00

http://cahiersducinema.tumblr.com/

I just saw Bergman's beautiful Wild Strawberries, and subsequently read Bosley Crowther's review of it in the Times when it first came out. Crowther is straightforward, unpretentious, in saying it can't be understood. In fact it's he who can't understand it. I think I can. The main character is both cold and selfish AND loving and appreciative, and the movie tells of an arc in his life when he goes from more cold and selfish to more loving and appreciative. But a person can be both. I'm sure I am. I'm sure Bergman was, and is writing his own spiritual autobiography in the movie, though Bergman wasn't nearly as old as the main character in the movie was.

Art as Need for Understanding of the Subject in Question

2010-12-25T08:01:00.002-05:00

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artist/?id=4635

Hedda Sterne:

"Leonardo drew things to explain them to himself . . . . That's an essential quality of any work of art, the authenticity of the need for understanding. I once told Barney [Newman] a story he wanted to adopt as the motto for the Abstract Expressionists: A little girl is drawing and her mother asks her what are you drawing? And she says, 'I'm drawing god.' And the mother says, 'How can you draw god when you don't know what he is?' And she says, 'That's why I draw him.'" (NYR of Books 12/23/10, p. 45)

What's most important here for me is this theory that one of art's functions is to seek an understanding of its subject. I also note that this story of Sterne's (where did it come from? did she make it up?) is a helpful gloss on the work of Abstract Expressionists, the power of which can be hard to explain to people coming on it for the first time and are unfairly dismissive of it. I also am glad to learn of Hedda Sterne, and the extent to which she lacked ego while pursuing a relatively heroic kind of art, and also that she was married to Saul Steinberg.

dulce et utile

2010-12-25T07:44:00.001-05:00

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/shaw/george_bernard/

I felt compelled to make a list of my ten favorite movies. I had to ask myself, is it a list of the ten movies I find best by an objective standard, or my ten favorite movies? Also, of my ten favorite, to what extent are they movies that do the best job of telling an aspect of my own spiritual psychobiography? On reviewing my rating history on Netflix, I see that I rate movies to a degree according to an objective standard, but I thus thwart its algorithm for suggesting movies that I'll like.

Yet I do have a goal in watching Netflix movies of increasing my knowledge of the field of movies that matter, in addition to a goal of having a maximum amount of pleasure. My rating system is a hybrid of the subective and the more objective system. So it works well enough. Anyway, I can't expect the Netflix recommendations to be as useful as a guide such as the one I'm now using, the New York Times Guide to the Best 1000 Movies Ever Made.

A Monkey Writing on a Wall

2010-12-25T07:33:00.002-05:00

From a New York Times review of an exhibit ("Spiritual Seeker with a Taste for the Satirical," by Ken Johnson):

Hakuin was a master satirist too. A monkey is caught in the act of writing on a wall, “What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before the ink stone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.” The charming text quotes from an essay byYoshida Kenko, a 14th-century priest whose popular, worldly writings Hakuin considered unenlightened.

I know myself to be the monkey. Is it a bad thing to be?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/arts/design/24paintings.html?_r=1

Six Different Sergius's

2010-12-25T07:32:00.001-05:00

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/shaw/george_bernard/

What would Sergius, the hero of Slivnitza, say if he saw me now? What would Sergius, the apostle of the higher love, say if he saw me now? What would the half dozen Sergiuses who keep popping in and out of this handsome figure of mine say if they caught us here? (Letting go her hand and slipping his arm dexterously round her waist.) Do you consider my figure handsome, Louka?

from Arms and the Man by Shaw.

I'm falling into a rut of finding it too easy to see myself as six different people, or of I don't know how many different ones--my mental situation is more inchoate than Sergius's.

flow state v feeling like a ghost state

2010-12-05T04:20:00.001-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Thinking more about that I-am-a-ghost feeling, reality is feeling thin-feeling: maybe it would helpf for me to think about times when I don't feel that way, and make a habit of reproducing the conditions. I don't feel like a ghost when
I am in conversation with someone I'm at least a little in love with (defining in love in not just sexual and romantic terms; there are probably twenty or so people in this category in my life at the moment. Our cat would also fall into this category).
I am having a highly engaging aesthetic experience.
I experience a thought that subjectively speaking is interesting enough to get me to write something on this blog.

There's a concept called "flow," described in wikipedia thus:

"Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.^[1]

According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.^[2]

Colloquial terms for this or similar mental states include: to be on the ball, in the moment, present, in the zone, in the groove, or keeping your head in the game."

Sometimes I feel this way at work. I often--maybe never--feel quite comfortable, at ease, when in this state. It feels too much like being on a tight rope. There's some adrenaline involved maybe. There's too much to attend to. Its fun though.

Maybe having an in-love experience is an episode of mini-flow.

Finding myself in a state of feeling like a ghost is part of a life devoted to being in a flow state maybe. I need time away from people, books, the internet, a keyboard, I need solitude for the sake of my mental digestion, so I go for a walk. I have that ghost feeling. But the solitude was necessary.

never an adult, inside where the meanings are

2010-12-05T04:07:00.001-05:00

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html

This blog post made me nod in recognition. Even though I am an adult and have had a full-time job, without pause, for many years. Do I, I ask myself, lead a life of quiet desperation? Do I for strategic purposes maintain a front of competence and adult-ness, and act it out quite successfully, while inwardly asking myself, why don't I get a standing ovation just for making it through this week? I do, I do. Not constantly, but often enough. I've said to my daughter, grownups pretend, for their children, to have it more together than they do, because the children want them to have it together, and thinking they do makes them feel more secure and happy. But people don't really become more mature. Actually, people do gain in self-control. Maybe the two sides of their brain brow together and they make better decisions. But inside, people remain the child they were at five, the child they werre at ten, the two-sides-unconnected teenager they were at fifteen, the twenty-five year old they were, the thirty-five year old, etc.

What It's Like to Be Sleepy

2010-11-26T12:30:00.001-05:00

http://www.warriorfx.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/sleepwaves.gif

I just read Chekhov's short story "Sleepy," a crushing story of oppression and suffering, the more crushing for its deadpan, non-judgmental, just-the facts-approach and its brevity. It's about a thirteen-year-old serving girl, working for a family itself not so well off, and her masters make her stay awake all night with their infant, and make her work hard from first light until . . . they never allow her to sleep. Disaster results. The portrayal of what goes through Varka, the servant's mind--that's entirely what the story consists of--is both haunting and utterlyh persuasive as a portrayal of mental states.

We Don't Know

2010-11-26T12:23:00.001-05:00

The annual Gallup poll about education shows that Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the quality of the nation’s schools, but 77 percent of public school parents award their own child’s public school a grade of A or B, the highest level of approval since the question was first asked in 1985. Diane Ravitch, New York Review of Books, 11/11/10

Likewise Americans tend to give Congress low marks, but their own congresspeople good marks. People's perceptions of things are unreliable.

http://blogs.hopkins-interactive.com/2014/files/scarsdale-high-1-11.jpg

The public high school I attended.

On another topic, it's very reasonable for people to search for wayhs to make th education system better, but the idea that how to educate is a scientific problem to be solved is highly suspect. Education is too basic, too human, too complex a topic to be "solved." Yet the process of trying to solve it is, as human activities go, constructive.

mammals as exemplars of non-neural-typicality

2010-11-13T08:34:00.001-05:00

At a faculty meeting at school a speaker, a therapist, ran through an amusing list: cats have Asperger's, dogs have ADD (young dogs ADHD I would add), and, a new one for me, raccoons are obsessive. Ah, the richness of the non-human mammalian life all around us: however, appreciated, still so under-appreciated.

my raccoons.com

In looking for an image of a raccoon, I read on wikipedia that raccoons have been known to remember a task learned three years before. Where a lot of tasks are concerned, that's better than I would do.

Like a Planet's Atmosphere Dispersing

2010-11-13T08:26:00.002-05:00

worldofstock.com

How long it's been since I wrote anything here. I speculate: my daughter went off to college; missing her terribly, I've thrown myself into my work, especially as connecting to my students, cajoling them into eating the metaphorical food I have to offer, reminds me of being with my daughter; and I've always posted less frequently in the fall, because of the rhythms of the school year. I've also been a little adrift since figuring out for myself satisfying, if provisional, explanations for what my mind seems to do when it's in that floating, unmoored rowboat state (no need to go into that again now), and even, via The Philosophic Baby, a better idea about the origin of consciousness than I had before: that despite the illusion that my consciousness is constant and 360 degree-like, really it's a sequence of acts of attention, neurons revving up and going back down into idle. Gopnik herself didn't go that far; she said that it can be helpful to think of consciousness as acts of attention. Maybe I have another topic now: how unreal everything can seem. Here's a passage from a letter I just wrote to my daughter:

"At one point I was walking down Central Street toward the library and the way the clouds, just before sunset, hung suspended, somehow like a fluffy comforter, reflecting and refracting the sunset-light into many colors, made me feel glad and at the same time so Sunday afternoon-ish! On another walk, around Natick yesterday as I waited for the AIDS Action fundraiser to begin, I felt more distinctly than usual that reality was thin-nish, hardly real, and that I myself was hardly real, as if my consciousness were thinning-out, like the atmosphere around a planet gradually dispersing--but then I saw a van pull up to the side of the road on Bacon Street, and a Golden Retriever was let out onto the Walnut Hill soccer field, and the dog was so happy to go cannon-balling out, and to run after the tennis ball its human was knocking very far away with a tennis ball--something about the way the dog curly-cued his body around in happiness--made reality, and my consciousness, fill up again."

The sense that my consciousness is dispersing, that reality itself is thinning, as happens near the end of LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven--could it be depression? I don't think so. I'm not very sad, in general or as I have that sensation. Could it be just a relatively extreme case of the unmoored rowboat? Does anyone else experience this? My experience tells me, yes. I don't run into the experience being described, though. I can't go on a reading-program about it, being too taken up with teaching. But I wanted to write a post about it.

Letter to Someone Taking an Intro To Cognitive Science

2010-09-11T16:54:00.000-04:00

Someone dear to me is taking an Introduction to Cognitive Science class and was upset about the idea that the mind is a kind of a machine and that if you believe in a soul than you don't believe in science. I wrote her this letter:

Dear _____,

For my own benefit more than yours, I thought I would say something about why there is another option for describing our minds beyond the “our minds are like computers” model and the dualistic models, and that this other option I find far preferable.

I don’t know if cognitive scientists distinguish between the mind and consciousness, but I assume they assume that they are pretty much the same thing. I know that the philosopher John Searle (whom I first encountered in English graduate school), in discussing consciousness, takes on the computer model, and argues for its inadequacy, in articles like

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/jan/13/consciousness-what-we-still-dont-know/

in the New York Review of Books. (Unfortunately a subscription is required.)

I think that the reason cognitive scientists like the computer model is that it’s a model that suggests things to try, possible studies, things to do. People are good at thinking about computers, and Artificial Intelligence is an exciting field, one that has huge practical and economic applications and potential; so it’s handy to think of our brain as just a computer, even if a very awesome one. The idea that it’s an adequate model seems somewhat laughable to me, but there’s no doubt that it is a model, and it’s not clear that we’ve come up with any other models (except the dualistic model). Searle came up with a thought experiment called the Chinese Room experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room)

which demonstrates that no matter how complex a computer, it still is different from a mind. Obviously he didn’t win over those who strongly believe in the mind model, but I gather from Wikipedia that the Chinese Room argument has become an important part of the conversation among cognitive scientists and philosophers as to how we might think of the mind.

Then there’s my friend (not really) Alison Gopnik, who writes in The Philosophical Baby:

“Before we knew much about the brain it was possible to see consciousness as a mysterious feature of a special kind of substance—whether you call it mind or soul. But a hundred years or more of scientific study of the brain has convinced almost all philosophers that everything we experience must be connected to, or caused by, or based in the brain (the very profusion of prepositions is revealing). Still, though, the problem of

how that is possible is not much nearer a solution than it was one hundred years ago. How can the electrical activity of a few pounds of grey goo produce the blue of the sky or the song of the dove?

For most problems, including most philosophical problems, we can at least get a hint of what the possible solutions might be. The problem is to decide which solution is the right one. But consciousness is one of those really tough, frustrating problems where we don’t a have a clue about the solutions should even look like. The one thing that seems clear is that the possibilities on offer are all pretty hopeless.

[Gopnik than goes on to address the computation model and dualism, finding them both unssatisfactory. And then:]

There are two rays of hope in this otherwise dismal picture. First, we’ve been here before. For centuries, the problem of life loomed as large and seemed as intractable as the problem of con-sciousness does now. How could all the special properties of livings come from a collection of atoms and molecules that aren’t alive at all? The answer turned out to be that the question was wrong—instead of a single explanation of “life” we have lots of little explanations about how particular configurations of molecules could lead to particular properties of living things.

This example may be particularly relevant because of the other ray of hope. While we don’t know how “Capital C” Consciousness is related to the brain, we know an increasing amount about how particular features of consciousness are related to particular psychological and neural states . . . .” (107, 108)

What I take from what she’s saying is that the mind, whatever it is, is so complex and deeply mysterious that it’s like reality, or life, itself: so deeply mysterious that it can never be reduced to some simple rules. Humans know Newton’s Laws and quantum physics, but they still don’t understand the universe in an “okay, nothing more to figure out there” kind of way. I assume that the human mind, like the universe, will continue to become more mysterious the more we understand about it. We don’t have to assume that it’s separate from the brain, so dualism isn’t necessary; it’s divine in its complexity as it is—just like life, just like the universe. Just like God, if you prefer. I once read that the philosopher Spinoza argued that God isn’t the creator of a universe separate from Himself—instead, that God and the universe are the same thing. I like that formulation. Likewise I think that the physical brain and the mind are the same thing, and the fact that we can’t understand how that can be so is a reflection of the complexity of the problem.

So I have nothing against people using the model of the brain as a big computer, because it’s a helpful model. The model of the Earth being at the center of Nine Circles of Heaven was a vastly helpful model, too. But it was hardly the last word.

Thank you for listening. You can see what you said that night on the phone about your Cognitive Science class got me riled up.

Love,

The Real Realness of Toys and of Ourselves

2010-09-11T15:06:00.002-04:00

eyeris.blogspot.com

I recently watched Toy Story 2, and two things that particularly interested me: one is the way the movie uses what I think is an ancient Greek idea, that character is fate. We don't get to choose our character, and our character causes us to act in certain ways. The toys in the movie have their character dictated to them by their inventors. Buzz Lightyear can't help but be brave, focused, and loyal--he was designed to be imagined as having these qualities, so he does. When circumstances arise that test those qualities, life gets interesting. The part that this character-is-fate idea comes through most clearly is in the toy store. When they come around the corner and encounter the Barbies having a beach-party,--this coming right after encountering the officious Buzz Lightyear dolls--the effect is hilarious, as is the the Barbie tour-guide.

The other is the Toys' metaphysics: they're already perfectly "real," as real as humans, but they have an unwritten but stern code that requires them to keep hidden from human beings their realness. But they don't consider see themselves as being real. The only time they feel real, or as close to real as they will ever feel, is when a child who loves them plays with them, imagining that they are real. The Toys love this feeling of real-ness; life is not worth living without being loved by a human child. Woody has the opportunity to be put on display in a museum, thereby gaining relative immortality and the admiration or even admiration of many, many children, not just one. But he realizes that such a life would be hollow.

I think that as we go through our days and nights our sense of our own realness rises and falls, perhaps because attention and consciousness have some kind of relationship. Perhaps the intensity of our attention to something makes us feel real. Perhaps what makes us feel most real is when another human being "plays with us," imagining we are real. From this perspective, the movie becomes an allegory concerning the way our own consciousness of ourselves as real beings operates.

a wordless play by Samuel Beckett: how it is; wood s lot

2010-09-06T10:51:00.001-04:00

web.ncf.ca

http://ubu.com/film/beckett_quad.html

How's this for a portrayal of consciousness, or multiple consciousness's, or of the quest for reality so many people embark on, or reality in general? It's a video of a wordless play by Samuel Beckett, found by me via ronsillimon.blogspot.com.

In looking for an image to include with this post, I came on a blog, http://web.ncf.ca/ek867/wood_s_lot.html, that this server won't let me follow--it doesn't recognize its address. I find it a wonderful blog. It reminds me of my own blog, but its denser, more erudite, less focused on one or two things. It has the same consistent structure of image-words. Wood s lot's images though are more unusual, arresting, and wonderful than mine are. Wood s lot, you are nutty, but you are brilliant.

graphic depictions of consciousness via Daniel Dennett

2010-09-06T10:29:00.000-04:00

"Saul Steinberg's marvelous New Yorker cover from October 8, 1969 (see Figure 1), provides the best picture of human consciousness I have encountered" writes Daniel Dennett in an article called "Consciousness: More Like Fame than Television" (http://pp.kpnet.fi/seirioa/cdenn/concfame.htm#1.). Dennett is famous for portraying and collecting portrayals of consciousness, but I shy away from actually reading him because I have an idea that he portrays the mind as too literally computer-like, and because neither John Searle, whom I find so persuasive, nor Stephen Jay Gould, agree with his views. And then I believe he's argued for the validity of atheism. There's something about arguing for atheism that seems to lower atheism to the level of the religious, illusion-riddled thinking it criticizes. That's because of my sense that if a person is urgent about anything he or she has probably passed into the realm of fictionalizing without knowing that he or she is fictionalizing. I realize though that it would be much better if I read Dennett for myself. His article includes delightful, and delightfully weird, images of consciousness.

Ford's description of Chiasson's portrayals of consciousness

2010-09-06T10:07:00.001-04:00

artcritical.com

Interspersed through Ford's essays by the NYR editors are collages by John Ashbery. John Ashbery is the most prominent portrayers of consciousness in its non-linearity in my own consciousness. His poetry, and Chiasson's, and Armantrout's, do more than portray non-linear consciousness, but portrayals of consciousness are what I'm focusing on here.

Another portrayer of the idea that example that consciousness, and reality, are less cleancut and linear than it’s convenient for us to consider it as being come is the poet Dan Chiasson, according to Mark Ford in his essay, “Hide and Be Found,” in the New York Review of Books (8/19/10). Ford writes,

. . . his poems are so often pitched to reflect the on-going interplay between the conscious and the unconscious strata of the mind; though his work carefully registers objects and events, it is really concerned with their afterlives in our minds, most particularly as they filter over the shadowy border between waking thoughts and dreams.

I copied out Chiasson’s poem “Swifts” back in March or so:

http://consciousness-walk.blogspot.com/2010/03/reality-is-average-of-moods.html

“Objects and events” have “afterlives in our minds . . .”: afterlives is word or metaphor taken from science. Isotopes of elements have different afterlives, different amounts of time it takes for them to fade out of existence. Just as elements and compounds of elements co-exist with each other as nature, each clump and micro-clump of matter pulsing or spinning among its neighbor clumps and micro-clumps, so our thoughts, memories, and perceptions pulse or spin among its neighboring thoughts, memories, and perceptions (and what about our actual actions that we barely visualize as they go by, they go by so quickly). There hardly seems room for time in amongst the pulsing and spinning. Maybe a strong sense of linear time is a sibling, or an offshoot, of our consciousness taking on, for evolutionary purposes, the appearance of a linear stream sometime in fairly early childhood. Just because time, and the (related?) sense of consciousness as a linear, unitary stream, are evolutionarily advantageous doesn’t make them true.

I’ll quote “Swifts” again:

Reality isn't one point in space.

It isn't one moment in time—

look at time, a spool of twine

one minute, idle in a sewing kit,

the next minute a shooting star.

Reality is an average of moods,

strike that, a flock of birds,

strike that, a single bird

tracked through dense forest:

you can lose it for hours or days,

but it isn't lost. You tired of the metaphor.

skepticism concerning brain imaging

2010-09-03T23:47:00.000-04:00

biospacelab.com

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/st_essay_particles/

This essay by Jonah Lehrer at Wired.com, found through ideas.blogs.nytimes.com, is skeptical about brain imaging: the reality, he argues, is always more complicated. So what if more blood does flow to a certain part of the brain during a certain activity? I see his point, and it's a good one. Brain imaging only provides clues concerning the ways the brain works, not straightforward explanations. But clues are all we have to go on, so if scientists keep in mind the tentativeness of everything, and don't over-claim, fine, and if they use brain images the way a palm-reader uses palms, then they're frauds, intentional or otherwise.

"solid but untrue"

2010-09-03T23:29:00.001-04:00

www.davidzinger.com

This poem of Rilke's, from Art and Love: An Illustrated Anthology of Love Poetry, edited and "curated" by Kate Farrell, co-editor of Talking to the Sun, is what seems to me the best description of a child's consciousness I know. Or it accords with my memory of what it was like. The poem is also in the category of poems that attempt to picture consciousness, period.

You Playmates of Mine

You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the city,
small friends from childhood of long ago:
how we found and liked one another, hesitantly,
and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,

spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy
it belonged to no one: it was simply there.
And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed by
and in the fears of the endless year.

Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the carriages;
horses surrounded us, solid but untrue--and none
of them ever knew us. What in the world was real?

Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.
Not even the children . . . But sometimes one,
oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.

(In memoriam Egon von Rilke)

"Horses surrounded us, solid but untrue" is a gloss on Armantrout's "while sensation/is so evanescent/as to be always beyond/belief" and vice versa. I note also that Rilke's response to the beautiful balls and their beautiful arches is an instance of acute aesthetic response syndrome--most would see the balls and be aesthetically unmoved. To the speaker they are the most vivid things in the universe. I note also the dedication, apparently to a beloved cousin who died in childhood. The dedication is touching, and the evocation of his cousin is touchingly indirect, assuming that the vanishing child who steps under the ball is the cousin. If it is the cousin, though, it's also a statement of how the sensation of even a beloved cousin is evanescent to the point of being unreal--a thought that makes the poem more elegiac, not less.

a poet borrowing from a child's way of thinking

2010-09-03T22:56:00.001-04:00

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Federico_García_Lorca_sin_espinas.jpg

Among other things, this poem by Lorca highlights a child's way of experimenting with counterfactuals:

Silly Song

Mama,
I wish I were silver.

Son, you'd be very cold.

Mama,
I wish I were water.

Son, you'd be very cold.

Mama,
Embroider me on your pillow.

That, yes!
Right away!

from Talking to the Sun. Of course this view is reductive; the poem is more than an example of a child's way of experimenting with counter-factuals. For one, it's a about the speaker's interest in converting that way of thinking into an open-ended meaning-making machine of words.

sensation as beyond belief

2010-09-03T22:47:00.001-04:00

writing.upenn.edu

http://books.google.com/books?id=q-sJSDvR-UYC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=rae+armantrout+outer&source=bl&ots=jmW3s2dPZw&sig=jQP-b8cDQXR3saw

Rae Armantrout's "Outer," encountered via ronsilliman.blogspot.com. It goes for the idea that everyday reality is much less clean-cut and linear than most of us think of it as being (for convenience' sake, and because maybe it was helpful evolutionarily to think so). I wish I had the patience to copy it out here. School year beginning! Time short! Here's part:

Carried by light
images remain

while sensation
is so evanescent

as to be always beyond
belief

This part is the "straight," prosy part of the poem; the rest consists of image-full, funny examples.

oneness through mutual gaze at an aesthetic object

2010-08-25T16:04:00.002-04:00

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/a/susan-s-adler/samantha-learns-lesson.htm

My daughter and I were remembering my reading to her when she was very young, in particular the books series that were (and are) part of the American Girl franchise. The books are what they are, but at the age I read them to her, she was ready to absorb them with utter attention, and the feeling of oneness with her as I read and we imagined the story together is one of my most precious and best. She also had me read her Berenstain Bears books to her--she loved them--and while I liked reading those to her too, I couldn't lose myself in that same sense of oneness, the Berenstain Bears books being a little too silly, or too simple. Sometimes she and I (and very occasionally other people I've known and I) have been able to achieve a sense of mental oneness, as we feel we're imagining the very same thing, in the very same way, with a feeling of love and wonder that we could have such a oneness. But I wonder what percentage of these instances involved our taking in an aesthetic object at the same time, so that in effect there were three parties--my daughter, the book, and me; or my college roommate, that side of the LP from the boxed set of Brahms's piano music, and me. What other examples? No, these three-ways have also been rare.
When the third party--the perceived object--isn't as complexly rewarding, there's still a oneness, a profound gift, but more of an everyday kind. For example, yesterday my daughter told me to come very quietly into the living room so as to see our cat's absurd pose without disturbing the cat into changing it's pose. It was the funniest pose, involving one paw poking straight up into the air. It wasn't a Brahms intermezzo, but it was still a gift.

Negative Capability Equals Lantern Consciousness

2010-08-25T15:52:00.001-04:00

pearsonwholesale.com

I'm about to start teaching again, so my independent course of reading slows way down. However, in preparing, I was rereading a few letters of Keats's, and came across the locus classicus, the most sacred of texts, you might say, that serve as an example for what Gopnik calls lantern consciousness, that is, consciousness that does not bother with purpose, direction, executive control, instead staying wide open to whatever can be learned in the moment:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

How can we perceive "a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery" unless we have set mental executive control aside? And isn't this the state artists spend quite a bit of time in, in order to gain material and inspiration? Not that artists don't spend time actively researching, in their own way, and Keats himself spent enough time reading. I notice Keats's identification of "reaching after fact and reason"--ratiocination--with irritation. He so loves his lantern consciousness. The idea of lantern consciousness seems a better interpretation of what Keats is talking about than any explanation I've tried to make in the past. From a letter written a month earlier:

You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out, - you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away - I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness - I look for it if it be not in the present hour, - nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.

As I/we imagine Keats seeing a sparrow come before his window, picking about the gravel, and taking part in its existence, we can become part of Keats's existence as he does so, especially if we've got our lantern, as opposed to our flashlight, turned on.

Not that flashlight consciousness--purposive ratiocination--isn't a good thing.

list of conspiracy theories

2010-08-23T17:54:00.001-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Darwin's_finches.jpeg

Natural selection: not a conspiracy theory.

I feel a bit the way a conspiracy theorist might feel: I know that The Enlightened Bracketologist is a work of genius--why can't the rest of the world get it? The question pertinent to this blog is why humans can go so wrong when it comes to avocational scholarship, and why humans become more and more strident, insistent, and crazy the more outlandish their theory is? Actually those questions might not be hard to answer. Harder to answer might be why some theories--say Darwin's concerning natural selection--are credible, while others are so not credible? The line between the credible theory and the incredible theory is unfortunately thin. Kurt Anderson's entry in Bracketologist is a brief but informative and entertaining essay on conspiracy theories in which the following theories are at least mentioned. There have been people who have gotten worked up about each one:
*The lunar landings were faked.
*JFK/RFK killed Marilyn Monroe.
Felix Rohatyn and Lynne Cheney are leaders of a crypto-Nazi "Synarchist" plan to control the world.
Jet contrails are U.S. government-produced efforts to seed the atmosphere with particular chemicals, the purpose of which is mysterious (e.g. to counteract global warming; to kill people).
*Freemasons/illuminati control the world.
An omnipotent God created and controls the universe.
*FDR was complicit in the Pearl Harbor attack.
The UN and WHO seek to criminalize health supplements.
The Bilderberg Group controls the world.
The U.S. shot down TWA flight 800.
*The U.S. hides the truth about extraterrestrials.
*Teletubbies and Spongebob are gay propaganda.
*HIV/AIDS a genocidal U.S. plot.
*Princess Diana was murdered.
*Reptilian humanoids seek to control the world.
*Diebold Inc. rigs voting machines for the Republican Party.
*The Jews control the world vis media, finance, etc.
*Fluoride in drinking water is a Soviet plot.
*The CIA is behind the crack cocaine trade.
*The Vatican suppresses facts about early Christianity.
*U.S. officials were complicit in the JFK assassination.
The Pentagon's Alaskan HAARP facility is a doomsday and/or mind-control machine.
The Hearst/Mellon cartel criminalized hemp.
The Oklahoma City bomb was a government plot.
*9/11 was a U.S./Enron/Saudi/Israeli inside job.
*Extraterrestrials abduct earthlings.
*The Trilateral Commission controls the world.
*The Council on Foreign Relations controls the world.
*Saddam Hussein was complicit in 9/11.
Skull and Bones controls the world.
*Waco actually was a UN/U.S. mass murder.
*Avian flue was a government hoax.

*I had heard of these theories.

What a copious list. The final four were those concerning an omnipotent God, the U.S. hiding ET's, the Jews controlling the world, and 9/11's being a U.S. plot. My favorite was the idea that the belief in an omnipotent God could be seen as a conspiracy theory. As Anderson writes, "An all-powerful, all-knowing, infinite, and immortal being who conjured existence and has a regiment of Men in Black (angels, prophets, whatever) to enforce his will on earth--the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories, and one in which many, many hundreds of millions passionately believe." I question "many, many hundreds of millions passionately believe" because of the words "many, many" and "passionately," but the number of people who sincerely, unquestionably believe in the theory no doubt is probably ten or twenty hundred million (one or two billion), and that doesn't count all those who have died who have believed in it. But is it a conspiracy theory that the belief in an omnipotent God is a conspiracy theory?

Advanced Case of AARS/Lantern Consciousness: Frank O'Hara

2010-08-22T20:34:00.000-04:00

http://www.dylanscandybar.com

(jujubes)

Frank O'Hara is often high on the particulars of life, and when he is everything has an aesthetic glow (AARS stands for Acute Aesthetic Response Syndrome, my coinage; "lantern consciousness" is a term from Gopnik's The Philosophical Baby). Here is "Poem:"

O sole mio, hot diggety, nix "I wather think I can"
come to see Go into Your Dance on TV--HELEN MORGAN!? GLENDA FARRELL!? 1935!?
   it reminds me of my first haircut, or an elm tree or something!
or did I fall off my bicycle when my grandmother came back from Florida?
   you see I have always wanted things to be beautiful
   and now, for a change, they are!

Here the most random memories, the most random little snips thrown up by his drunken-monkey consciousness, are wondrously beautiful for the speaker. Another example of AAARS (even more Acute AARS):

Today

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

The reasons for the "even more Acute" designation: random, multiple things set off the condition; the perceived/imagined/remembered things don't just pulse with beauty, they're instead seen as having a magical, almost metaphysical, extra-real dimension ("They're as strong as rocks"). They don't really have that dimension, it's a delusion fueled by aesthetic intoxication. O'Hara knows this. We want things to be beautiful and most of the time they aren't, as the former poem hints.
Both poems from a book that causes me to have AARS, Talking to the Sun, an anthology edited by poets Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell.

Sensory Deprivation and Courage

2010-08-21T21:40:00.000-04:00

http://www.hmdb.org/Marker.asp?Marker=459

http://kenyonreview.org/blog/?p=10399
At the above address, Kenyon Review blogger Nancy Jooyoun Kim writes about an encounter with a woman who is deaf-blind. What would life as a deaf-blind person be like? Would it take as much courage as it seems to me it would? The loss of one of the sense seems, from the outside of such an experience, as if it would be manageable. But eyes and ears both. I think it would have to take almost an inconceivable amount of courage. Kim's approach of being very honest and humble about her experience I find very compelling. How often do humility and clear, specific writing go together?

are we vexed if we still can eat and sleep?

2010-08-16T20:58:00.000-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Samuel_Johnson_by_Joshua_Reynolds.jpg

Boswell. "I wish much to be in Parliament, Sir." Johnson. "Why, Sir, unless you come resolved to support any administration, you would be the worse for being in Parliament, because you would be obliged to live more expensively." — Boswell. "Perhaps, Sir, I should be the less happy for being in Parliament. I never would sell my vote, and I should be vexed if things went wrong." Johnson. "That's cant, Sir. It would not vex you more in the house than in the gallery: publick affairs vex no man." Boswell. "Have not they vexed yourself a little, Sir? Have not you been vexed by all the turbulence of this reign, and by that absurd vote of the House of Commons, 'That the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished?'" Johnson. "Sir, I have never slept an hour less, nor eat an ounce less meat. I would have knocked the factious dogs on the head, to be sure; but I was not vexed."Boswell. "I declare, Sir, upon my honour, I did imagine I was vexed, and took a pride in it; but it was, perhaps, cant; for I own I neither eat less, nor slept less." Johnson. "My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, 'Sir, I am your most humble servant.' You are not his most humble servant. You may say, 'These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved at such times.' You don't mind the times. You tell a man, 'I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.' You don't care six-pence whether he is wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don't think foolishly." Boswell's Life of Johnson, Aetat. 74

"Public affairs vex no man"! Yet perhaps, as so often, Johnson is right--it's the bearing on one's personal life that causes any vexing. I suppose during wartime, though, this must not be the case? There Kennedy is, contemplating the nuclear missiles on the way to Cuba--is he vexed for non-personal reasons?
I'm pretty sure that some people feel vexed concerning, say, another's suffering, and are still able to sleep and drink. But is this a case of my mind's not being clear of cant? Sometimes I think I'm something of a monster, just because the sufferings of others very rarely costs me my appetite or my sleep (though my own occasional mental or emotional suffering does). Johnson makes me feel better. I do think some people are more sympathetic than I am, and I regret it. I also have an idea that I'm so unintentionally and unconsciously empathetic that I can't bear to be with people with various kinds of unhappy mindsets because it's as if I'm having that mindset and I can't bear it, so I avoid such people, thus proving myself not very compassionate. I also have an idea that it's not just me who is this way. More mental cant?

sleep's goodness

2010-08-16T20:38:00.000-04:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

By way of www.evolvehappy.com:

Contact: Kat Snodgrass
ksnodgrass@sfn.org
202-962-4090
Society for Neuroscience

He's looking at brain cells under that microscope.

Brain's energy restored during sleep, suggests animal study

Cellular energy levels surge in some brain regions in early hours of sleep



		IMAGE: Levels of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of cells, in rats increased in four key brain regions normally active during wakefulness. Shown here is the energy surge measured in... Click here for more information.

Washington, DC — In the initial stages of sleep, energy levels increase dramatically in brain regions found to be active during waking hours, according to new research in the June 30 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. These results suggest that a surge of cellular energy may replenish brain processes needed to function normally while awake.

A good night's rest has clear restorative benefits, but evidence of the actual biological processes that occur during sleep has been elusive. Radhika Basheer, PhD, and Robert McCarley, MD, of Boston V.A. Healthcare System and Harvard Medical School, proposed that brain energy levels are key to nightly restoration.

"Our finding bears on one of the perennial conundrums in biology: the function of sleep," Basheer said. "Somewhat surprisingly, there have been no modern-era studies of brain energy using the most sensitive measurements."

The authors measured levels of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of cells, in rats. They found that ATP levels in four key brain regions normally active during wakefulness increased when the rats were in non-REM sleep, but were accompanied by an overall decrease in brain activity. When the animals were awake, ATP levels were steady. When the rats were gently nudged to stay awake three or six hours past their normal sleep times, there was no increase in ATP.

The authors conclude that sleep is necessary for this ATP energy surge, as keeping the rats awake prevented the surge. The energy increase may then power restorative processes absent during wakefulness, because brain cells consume large amounts of energy just performing daily waking functions.

"This research provides intriguing evidence that a sleep-dependent energy surge is needed to facilitate the restorative biosynthetic processes," said Robert Greene, MD, PhD, of the University of Texas Southwestern, a sleep expert who was unaffiliated with the study. He observed that questions arise from the findings, such as the specific cause of the ATP surge. "The authors propose that the surge is related to decreases in brain cell activity during sleep, but it may be due to many other factors as well, including cellular signaling in the brain," he said.

consciousness not a single unitary phenomenon

2010-08-14T08:17:00.000-04:00

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_searle2.jpg

John Searle, a philosopher of consciousness who doesn't believe consciousness is an illusion.

Gopnik so persuasively provides an answer, however provisional and incomplete, to the grand question of where consciousness comes from.

Looking at children tells us that consciousness is not a single unitary phenomenon with special features. Our vivid awareness of the external world may be different from our sense of an executive "I," which may be different from the capacity to fantasize or to recapture past events. Children are conscious but their consciousness seems very different from ours. PB 162

Consciousness isn't a transparent and lucid Cartesian stream. Instead it's a turbulent, muddy mess. Philosophers may have to resign themselves to just playing in the mud for a while yet. At least children can tell us it might be fun. PB 163

She doesn't argue that consciousness is an illusion, but rather that it is more than one thing. For example, it's cholergenic brain chemicals that focus attention, and inhibiting brain chemicals that cause us to go from lantern mode to flashlight mode. It's the modes listed in the first passage above. It's other modes and phenomena still to be identified. The human desire for a clear answer has caused us to want big, over-simple answers, when the reality is more complex. In a sense, the reality is always more complex.
I had no expectation that Gopnik would provide a coherent take on the grand question of the nature of consciousness. How satisfying.

The benefit of teaching children to think about the future

2010-08-14T07:43:00.000-04:00

http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/society_culture/virtue_of_virtue.htm

Hercules chooses between virtue and pleasure: Veronese

Some psychologist have even suggested that teenagers who literally don't feel that they have a future are most likely to behave self-destructively. Michael Chandler looked at teenagers in aboriginal communities in Canada. These teenagers are notoriously a risk for suicide, as well as less drastically self-destructive actions. Chandler found that adolescents at risk for suicide had a less coherent sense of themselves. They were less likely to connect their current, past, and especially future selves than children who were less at risk. PB 159-160

This seems so important, such a potentially helpful idea, because I'm sure young people engaged in self-destructive behaviors could be taught to think about and imagine their possible futures, with good effect. I think of a period in my adolescent life when I engaged in self-destructive behaviors, and it does seem true to me that the future looked like a foggy blank to me then. It didn't occur to any adults in my life to get me think or imagine about it. In fact, it was my first major girlfriend who would bring up the subject of my future, and in helpful, imaginative, non-hectoring ways. And come to think of it, my being with her coincided with my leaving self-destructive behaviors behind.
Of course parents can be bullies about imposing their worries and hopes concerning their children's futures on their children. Far more common in my experience though is for parents to pay inadequate attention to the subject of their children's futures, maybe out of a belief that it's wrong to be controlling where such a topic is concerned. How well have I done with my own children?

one reason consciousness changes: language; and my problem with plotting

2010-08-14T07:04:00.003-04:00

http://www.logoi.com/pastimages/king_arthur.html

I also found stories of King Arthur and his knights mesmerizing.

Language certainly plays a role in our adult consciousness. That inner voice nags and urges and instructs and persuades us. . . . We all seem to have these inner voices. But for children that voice at least seems less hectoring. After all, they have the real voice of their parents to direct them and restrict them and generally keep them on target and out of trouble. PB 157

I've thought (glancingly) about my inability to come up with much by way of complex counterfactuals; I can come up with beginnings of fictions, and goodness knows I can fantasize, but constructing complex plots, or staying interested in constructing plots, is very difficult for me, perhaps impossible. I could let go of the idea of doing so, but plot causes such pleasure, and I spend so much time observing plots constructed by others, that I always feel, "that looks so much fun, let me try." But I fail.
Many parents have mentioned to me often that I didn't speak a word of real language, although I spoke plenty of gibberish, until I was more over three years old, an age late enough to cause parents less relaxed than mine were to panic a bit. Lantern consciousness is perhaps fundamentally a non-linguistic mode, whereas plot-making may be a particularly linguistic activity.
Gopnik observed earlier that some children are more likely to have imaginary companions than others--I don't think I had them. Older and only children were more likely to have them--I was an in-the-middle child. Children who watched a lot of television were less like to have them, and so were children who read a lot of books--"children who were immersed in someone else's imaginary world seemed less likely to create such a world themselves." (PB 52) I don't know whether my early TV watching would constitute a lof of television; I don't think so. I read pretty much until I was a certain age, maybe fifth grade. It does occur to me that I went to a Catholic school, and the Catholicism poured relentless into me was reinforced at home by my mother's positive attitudes toward Catholicism and reinforcing behaviors, and I found my mother a very compelling example. I remember reading carefully through a Lives of the Saints. Probably Catholicism was such an all-embracing counterfactual--taught relentlessly to me as it was--that there wasn't much room left in my mind for my own complex counterfactuals (I fantasized, but fantasies almost by definition don't involve complex plotting, in my experience).

cultivating the habit of lantern consciousness

2010-08-14T06:43:00.000-04:00

http://www.riverhunt.org/an-exploration-of-identity-through-art/

In these experiences [free association psychoanalysis, hypnogogic thought, insight meditation] we either deliberately or accidentally give up control of our thoughts--we intentionally turn off autobiographical memory and executive control, or we simply lose them as we doze off. BP 155

The idea that we can intentionally turn off our mind's executive control feature, or can cultivate the habit of doiing so, seems important. I wish Gopnik had explored this phenomenon more--the deliberate cultivation of lantern consciousness, especially among artists.

Hypnogogic imagery

2010-08-14T06:28:00.000-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RobertFuddBewusstsein17Jh.png

We may be able to get a glimpse of babies' inner consciousness through adult experiences like the "free association" of psychoanalysis, or the kind of "hypnogogic" thought we experience as we fall asleep. Before we lose consciousness altogether a stream of images, thoughts, and feelings flows through our minds. (As an incorrigible insomniac I've sometimes had the experience of briefly pulling out of the hypnogogic state and thinking, 'Wait a minute, that last thought made absolutely no sense, thank God, I must be falling asleep'--that last gasp of that persistent inner observer holding on to consciousness when she really wants to release it.) Some types of in 'insight' meditation intentionally cultivate a similar state. PB 155

While not an insomniac, I've had just that experience of thinking, "wait a minute, that last series of thoughts were so dreamy and disconnected, I must be falling asleep." How jolly it is to encounter a writer who is interested in just such phenomena, and able to write about them so well.

Late-Middle-Aged Consciousness and Children's Consciousness Alike?

2010-08-14T06:13:00.000-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neural_Correlates_Of_Consciousness.jpg

Just as attention in children is more like a lantern, their inner consciousness may be more like wandering than voyaging--a journey of exploration rather than conquest. They paddle int he pond of consciousness instead of coursing down that rushing stream. Safe int he protected compass of immaturity, they can go anywhere they want. PB 154

This passage made me think of my rowboat drifting around a pond metaphor. For "the protected compass of immaturity, I might say "the protected compass of no longer having to work out basic questions of who one will be with for life, or what one will do for a career, or even how well one will do in one's career."

Caffeine and uninhibited ("Lantern") consciousness

2010-08-11T19:59:00.005-04:00

http://www.overstockdrugstore.com

Meditators also imbibe notoriously large quantities of caffeine. Indeed, tea was originally cultivated by monks in China who had discovered how helpful a little neuro-transmitter modification was for maintaining attention.

Hence my sense that caffeine is a wonder-drug, a love-drug. Because I need it to reliably deal with headaches (in the form of Excedrin), I have to avoid caffeine otherwise, otherwise caffeine loses its curative potency. No wonder I almost look forward to feeling a headache coming on.

Again, I suspected a connection between AARS, caffeine, and euphoria; the answer seems to be Lantern consciousness, or perhaps my having (and I know I'm the opposite of unique in this) cultivated in myself the ability to uninhibit attention. Maybe the only remaining particular mystery for me is why I get the feeling that I love everyone and everything; this seems slightly different from "splendor in the grass," though I think I get that too.

I sound grandiose to myself, saying I experience "splendor in the grass," and I don't mean to. I'm sure it's a fairly common effect/syndrome/cultivated-habitual-mindset. I do give myself credit for insisting to myself that there was probably a rational, scientific explanation, and for sniffing out that The Philosphical Baby might provide it.

Notice how funny and good a writer Gopnik can be: note the comic juxtaposition of monks and "neuro-transmitter modification," and the comic modifier "a little."

Also: in looking for an image of Excedrin, I immediately came across an enthusiastic, hyperbolic encomium of my own wonder-drug, Excedrin. I wonder how many more there are on the Web. The particular encomium I found was on a very un-respectable website, but it was clearly sincere.

Lantern Consciousness and literature (AARS); Beginner's Mind

2010-08-11T19:49:00.001-04:00

quotationsofwisdom.com

Lantern consciousness is invoked by writers like Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson and artists like Henri Cartier-Bresson. It is William Blake's world in a grain of sand, William Wordsworth's splendour in the grass.

. . . .The Zen master Shunryu Suzuki callit it 'beginner's mind, the mind as it is uncontaminated by expertise....Wordsworth . . . made something of a specialty of invoking this sort of experience,explicitly identifying it with childhood. PB 130

Good for Gopnik for knowing so much about literature in addition to developmental psychology, and lucky for me that she does.

lantern consciousness and exultation

2010-08-11T19:43:00.002-04:00

Image by Wonderlane via Flickr

I've hit the jackpot: here is a coherent explanation for the sense of exultation I sometimes feel, that often has an aesthetic quality, when I'm traveling by myself, or caffeinated, or experiencing "minor Stendhal Syndrome, or Acute Aesthetic Response Syndrome:

[Re meditation] Suddenly, as your attention to specific external events and internal plans diminished you become vividly aware of everything around you at once. The texture of the floor, the delicate movement of light on the walls, the sound of the birds and passing cars, even your aching knees, all seem to be illuminated simultaneously, with little distinction between the trivial and important, or the internal and the external . . . .

It's like the lantern consciousness of childhood as opposed to the spotlight consciousness of ordinary adult attention. . . . There is a kind of exaltation and a peculiar kind of happiness that goes with these experiences too.

Lantern consciousness--that vivid panoramic illumination of the everyday--is often one part of some kinds of relligious or aesthetic experiences. Lantern consciousness also seems to accompany other kinds of activities, such as falling in love, hunting, or even mania.

. . . almost the opposite of the distinctive adult happiness that comes with what psychologists call 'flow' . . . . PB 128-129

how they make those images of the brain in action

2010-08-11T19:28:00.001-04:00

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com

"Malach and his colleagues put people in a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine. These machines track how much blood goes to different parts of your brain as you solve some problem or do some task, and that in turn tracks how that task activates different parts of your brain. You can use those pictures of brains"lighting up" that you see all the time in Scientific American." PB 121

Lack of inhibitory transmittors = less purpose, more learning

2010-08-11T19:17:00.002-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

"So rather than determining what to look at in the world, babies seem to let the world determine what they look at. And rather than deciding where to focus attention and where to inhibit distractions, babies seem to be conscious of much more of the world at once. . . .This capacity for very general attention makes babies such terrific learners. . . . Neuroscience studies also seem to mirror this picture. Infant brains have abundant cholergenic transmitters but the inhibitory transmitters only develop later." PB 119

forms of unconsciousness

2010-08-11T19:07:00.001-04:00

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/Yonelinas/Research_neural_substrates.html

"When events or activities become familiar, well understood, and highly practiced they also become, as we say, automatic--less conscious than they were before. Similarly, when we focus our attention on one event we become less conscious of other unattended events." PB 116

Caffeine, Nicotine, and Consciousness/Attention

2010-08-11T19:05:00.001-04:00

http://www.liveinternet.ru/showjournal.php?journalid=1499804&keywordid=411520

"When we attend to something our brain releases a particular kind of chemical, called a cholergenic transmitter. This chemical . . . makes [neurons] conduct information better. The nicotine in cigarettes mimics these transmitters and literally makes your more attentive, just as opium mimics the natural transmitters that kill pain. When we pay attention our brains release these transmitters quite selectively, just to the particular parts of the brain that are processing information about the event we attend to. At the same time our brains also release inhibitory transmitters and activate inhibitory neurons that have just the opposite effect on other parts of the brain. (Coffee also makes us alert but it seems to do so by inhibiting some of those inhibitors--coffee opens up our attention and cigarettes let it narrow in on a particular target. It's no wonder they're the preferred drugs of journalists, who have to take in all the information about a breaking story and then summarize it in 250 words by a deadline.)" PB 113-114

consciousness probably isn't . . .

2010-08-11T18:49:00.000-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Al-jazari_robots.jpg

automata allegedly inventd by Al Jazari in the twelfth century

"...Consciousness doesn't seem to be just the result of having a brain that produces certain behaviors or performs particular computations. . . . It even seems possible that robots could produce those behaviors or perform those computations without any awareness at all." The Philosophical Baby, 107

"Another possibility, dualism, the idea that there is some separate spooky substance responsible for consciousness, just doesn't fit with everything we know about science . . . . PB 108

"While we don't know how 'Capital C' consciousness is related to the brain, we know an increasing amount about how particular features of consciousness are related to particular psychological and neural states." PB 108

Divagation in Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry

2010-08-11T07:40:00.001-04:00

At http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/, there is an audiophile of Elizabeth Bishop reading her book Geography III, a sainted book by a sainted poet. In "The Moose," there is an example of the way consciousness makes makes its wandering connections as the narrator rides a bus through the night:

The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination....

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
—not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents’ voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

“Yes ...” that peculiar
affirmative. “Yes ...”
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means “Life’s like that.
We know it (also death).”

Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it’s all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
—Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.

The poem continues there, and the moose's uncanniness and benignity somehow conveys a faith that things will be all right, despite the madnesses and deaths experience provides. The combination of technical grace (along with the casual, matter-of-fact tone), sharp observation, and deep, balanced perspective make the poem unusual intensely lovable. But the part about consciousness: it starts with the "divagation,"the "creakings and noises" from the back of the bus, and the anonymous murmurings become, in the speaker's mind, the voice of the grandparents who raised her, whose in-bed conversation late at night, which they presumed was unheard by their granddaughter. Thus she learned more about life's difficulties, not that hse hadn't already, at a young age, learned much about them. But her grandparents were loving, and their lovingness pulled her through at that time. Now their voices seem to proceed from "Eternity," not their bedroom, or the back of the bus. She feels it is all right to go to sleep now; and then Bam, there's the moose. The artful capturing of a divagation, that's what I'm trying to record.

the anxieties of the creative process

2010-08-08T19:35:00.002-04:00

On the subject of the artist and his or her particular plight as to status anxiety, and also the subject of modelling, see a larger version of this eloquent graphic depiction of the creative process:
http://www.viruscomix.com/page523.html

happiness and money

2010-08-08T12:07:00.001-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:55-aspetti_di_vita_quotidiana,_gioia,Taccuino_Sanitatis,_Cas.jpg

A helpful summary of recent findings about the relationship between money and happiness:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/business/08consume.html?pagewanted=4&ref=homepage&src=me

boring or tiring?

2010-08-08T06:03:00.000-04:00

http://www.more.com/2053/12019-the-top-100-books-every#1

"Life, friends, is boring," says Henry, the hero of Berryman's Dream Songs, and Elisa Gabbert agrees:

Is poetry boring?
Recently I've heard a few people who used to write and enjoy poetry say that they now find poetry terribly boring and whenever they try to read it, they feel as though "life is passing them by." (You know who you are.)

I find this strange -- not because I don't think poetry is boring, but because I'm surprised they didn't think it was boring before. Is poetry boring? Yes, of course it is. Life is boring. Writing of all kinds (novels, movie reviews, the news) is boring, museums are boring, TV and movies and the Internet are mostly boring, exercise is boring, work is boring, school is boring, even sex can be boring. Most of modern life is an elaborate exercise in killing time, since there is little doubt we'll all live into our nineties, if not eternally. Anything novel is a temporary cure for boredom (a new hobby, being pregnant for the first time, drugs) but things become boring again eventually (even money).

I like the subhead of Kathy Rooney's latest column for theSouthtown Star: "Why poetry doesn't matter now any less than it ever has." It doesn't insist that poetry matters, whatever that means, just that it didn't use to matter more.

Most poetry readings are indeed terribly boring. I can't be bothered to finish most poems I start to read, much less most books. Most food is not worth eating (unless you're starving), I prefer silence to most music most of the time, given anything else to do, I'd rather languish with my own thoughts than watch most TV, etc. Poetry is boring, except when it isn't.

http://thefrenchexit.blogspot.com/2010/07/is-poetry-boring.html, find via ronsilliman.blogspot.com.

I can't agree that life is boring. I think it's that our brains tire, and what was exciting for a few moments is no longer exciting. That's not quite the same as boring. Someone going on too long about a dream they've had--that's boring in some objective sense. However, this blog post of Gabbett's gives pleasure; her use of the word boring as a club is funny, and gets us to see all the things she refers to in a fresh way; and her implied point about the non-importance of poetry not being important seems is valid and important.

Microdots and Reframing as Character Adjustment

2010-08-08T04:39:00.000-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Freud_Sofa.JPG

The couch Freud's patients used

From "My Life in Therapy," an article by Daphne Merkin in the magazine section of the New York Times:

All those years, all that money, all that unrequited love. It began way back when I was a child, an anxiety-riddled 10-year-old who didn’t want to go to school in the morning and had difficulty falling asleepat night. Even in a family like mine, where there were many siblings (six in all) and little attention paid to dispositional differences, I stood out as a neurotic specimen. And so I was sent to what would prove to be the first of many psychiatrists in the four and a half decades to follow — indeed, I could be said to be a one-person boon to the therapeutic establishment — and was initiated into the curious and slippery business of self-disclosure. I learned, that is, to construct an ongoing narrative of the self, composed of what the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller calls “microdots” (“the consciously experienced moments selected from the whole and arranged to present a point of view”), one that might have been more or less cohesive than my actual self but that at any rate was supposed to illuminate puzzling behavior and onerous symptoms — my behavior and my symptoms.
To this day, I’m not sure that I am in possession of substantially greater self-knowledge than someone who has never been inside a therapist’s office. What I do know, aside from the fact that the unconscious plays strange tricks and that the past stalks the present in ways we can’t begin to imagine, is a certain language, a certain style of thinking that, in its capacity for reframing your life story, becomes — how should I put this? — addictive. Projection. Repression. Acting out. Defenses. Secondary compensation. Transference. Even in these quick-fix, medicated times, when people are more likely to look to Wellbutrin and life coaches than to the mystique-surrounded, intangible promise of psychoanalysis, these words speak to me with all the charged power of poetry, scattering light into opaque depths, interpreting that which lies beneath awareness. Whether they do so rightly or wrongly is almost beside the point.

The addictive-seeming nature of "reframing your life story" bears on my, and other diarists', desire to "adjust their character" (Boswell) by keeping a journal. The term "microdots" as defined here bears on the idea that we construct narratives concerning our lives the pertinence to an objective reality is a question, the question which in a central way animates this entire blog of mine (or so I would like to think). Or perhaps there is a duo of animating forces: the addictive re-framing idea may be the other central animating force at work. Another way of putting it: I want to know myself, and never can, quite, but can't resist trying to. Trying to scratch the itch of desire to know one's self is something that only some are afflicted with, I suppose, and I can only hope that it's not the same as narcissism. I don't think it is, even if it can look like it.

why do we love models?

2010-08-07T13:33:00.001-04:00

and this one:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-billion-dollar-o-gram-2009/

Each rectangle represents a quantity of billions of dollars. For example, the big purple box in the top-right corner is estimated amount the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars will end up costing (three trillion). The big pink/tan box at the bottom is the cost of the financial crisis, 11.9 trillion.The statistics and box labels, and the source of the estimates, are provided via links at informationisbeautiful.net. The pertinence of these graphic models to this blog is simply to note with wonder at the pleasure and excitement that comes from models, and in particular, graphic models.

TV v. wikipedia-creation

2010-08-07T13:23:00.001-04:00

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

Also via informationisbeautiful.net are beautiful, eloquent visualazations of statistics that have a mind-reeling quality. For example, this one, showing graphically how much time adult humans spend watching television in one year, and how much time has been devoted to the creation of wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia ever devised by human beings, and undoubtedly the most consulted encyclopedia on a daily basis, and therefore unquestionably a profoundly useful thing. Once again, Samuel Johnson's observation that no one works a very high proportion of the time he or she might be working comes to mind. I don't think it's a bad thing that we can't work more efficiently. There are probably larger efficiencies we don't grasp in twhay nature has designed us.

angels on the head of a pin syndrome

2010-08-07T12:59:00.000-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_(slang)

non-human phenomena are sometimes given an anthropomorphized "moe" symbol in Japan, I learn. This is the symbol for wikipedia itself.

The website gizmodo has a feature from informationisbeautiful.net that cites the number of comments were posted concerning various angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin that have come up at Wikipedia. Given that wikipedia is trying to be as authoritative a source of information, it can and should engage in such disputes all it wants. What is it, though, about human beings, that they send over three thousand messages to discuss whether it should be yogurt or yoghurt; over three thousand commenters discussed whether a hurricane that started in 2005 and ended in 2006 should be considered part of the 2005 season or the 2006 season; and over seventeen thousand people discussed what order the Beatles should be listed in and/or whether it's The Beatles or the Beatles? What a chatty species we are.

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/08/wikipedia-edit-wars.png

Samuel Johnson was there before Egginton

2010-08-04T20:02:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

"All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience, for it." Samuel Johnson, Aetat. 69 (I think; I can't locate it.)

model based on skill and challenge level

2010-08-04T19:48:00.001-04:00

http://www.ideafit.com/fitness-library/its-simple-flow-to-health-and-happiness

Models give me pleasure, or is it happiness. The moral of this one might be: develop skills. Developing skills as a path to happiness supports the idea that happiness is an activity, not a state unto itself; a verb, not a noun. It also supports the idea that happiness can't easily be pursued for its own sake, that it's more of a desirable side effect of activity aimed at something other than happiness. Some Buddhists might say that happiness is the absence of suffering, and that one can pursue the diminution of suffering. The Buddhists' ideas seem plausible, but not enough, for some reason, to get me meditating.

continuous happiness scientifically attainable?

2010-08-04T19:34:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

David Pearce argues in his treatise The Hedonistic Imperative that humans might be able to use genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and neuroscience to eliminate suffering in all sentient life.

Constant, continuous, incessant, perpetual happiness: what if it were available? Would I want it? It would feel as if I were cheating--and that would make me less than happy. Except that, if I were engineered otherwise, I wouldn't feel guilty.

But would I still have time to think, for the pleasures of thought? (But if I were engineered . . .)

from wikipedia's article on happiness

2010-08-04T19:27:00.001-04:00

http://www.squidoo.com/motivationalinspirations

three kinds of happiness: pleasure, engagement, and meaning.

proximity to other happy people

living a good life, or flourishing, rather than simply as an emotion

Happiness economics suggests that measures of public happiness should be used to supplement more traditional economic measures when evaluating the success of public policy.

50% of one's happiness depends on one's genes, based on studying identical twins, whose happiness is 50% correlated even when growing up in different houses.[5] About 10% to 15% is a result of various measurable life circumstances variables, such as socioeconomic status, marital status, health, income, sex[6] and others. The remaining 40% is a combination of unknown factors and the results of actions that individuals deliberately engage in to become happier.

Oxford Happiness Questionnaire[7] as a broad measure of psychological well-being.

sense of purpose, social interest and kindness, sense of humor and aesthetic appreciation.[8]

happiness in social networks may spread from person to person. Researchers followed nearly 5000 individuals for 20 years in the long-standing Framingham Heart Study and found clusters of happiness and unhappiness that spread up to 3 degrees of separation on average.

Envy is believed to produce unhappiness.

the majority of well-conducted studies found that higher levels of religious involvement are positively associated with indicators of psychological well-being

Nirvana

felicity (Latin equivalent to the Greek eudaimonia), or "blessed happiness", described by the thirteenth-century philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas as a Beatific Vision of God's essence in the next life.

the only thing that humans desire for its own sake, unlike riches, honor, health or friendship.

See also

art: supply v. demand

2010-08-03T19:43:00.000-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Valmiki_Ramayana.jpg

I think this attention-seeking condition is endemic to the whole American poetry culture now, and at root the issue is the surplus of supply (of poems, of opinions) compared to the demand. It is with poets as it is with aspiring Hollywood starlets: there are a multitude of them on the scene, hoping to be noticed, and few stunts are too low for someone to stoop down to them. I haven’t seen any poets doing the “exposing underwear while getting out of a limo” trick, but I’m sure it can’t be too far off — I just pray it isn’t Silliman who goes there . .

--Robert Archambeau in his blog Samizdat, quoted in the Harriet blog at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/08.

Archambeau is right that the supply of poetry and of would-be movie stars far exceeds the demand. What does this imbalance mean? That, biologically speaking, we're like the birds sitting on their branches, singing "bethou me" because nature has programmed us to do so? And many are educated enough to say "bethou me" through art, as opposed, say, to impromptu monologues or routines at the local pub or around the dinner table?

Status Anxiety and the Artist

2010-08-03T19:05:00.000-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ascending_and_Descending.jpg

Status anxiety plays a greater role in our lives than most people seem aware of. Artist's court status-anxiety provoking situations in a more deliberate, direct way than most other people if they put perform it in front of or share it with a public audience. In a business setting, there's plenty of opportunities for status-feelings to arise, but they play out in front of an audience limited to those affected by whatever happened. Artists say, "here's my work, world! You're allowed to think that I suck or that I'm great! I'll be depressed or anxious if the former, euphoric if the latter."

Happiness: evolutionarily positive or negative?

2010-08-02T19:22:00.000-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_happiness.png

I learn also from Dirda's discussion of Generosity (see previous post) that the novel takes on the question of happiness in an unusually direct way: an unusually happy person is a main character, and people try to benefit from it, by bringing her on a talk show, by studying her genome. As another character asks, though, "Why is the 'optimal' [optimally happy] configuration so damn rare? What doesn't natural selection like about it? Why should perfect bliss be hundreds of times less common than cystic fibrosis?" Also, writes Powers, joy "does little to increase one's judgment. Happiness is not the condition you want to be in when you need to be at your most competent."

the novel as the supreme explorer of human experience

2010-08-02T18:54:00.001-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WakeUp.jpg

"The novel for Kurton [a character in Richard Powers's Generosity] is nothing but 'a scattershot mood-regulating concoction[.]' This seems true of only the most commercial publishing projects. By contrast, in a 1998 interview, Powers described the novel as 'a supreme connection machine--the most complex artifact of networking that we've ever developed.' When written by Dostoevsky, dickens, or Richard Powers at his best, one may feel that it can contain every facet of the world, not only the personal but also the social, political, and scientific."--Michael Dirda, "Wake Up and Dream," a discussion of Generosity, NY Review of Books, 1/14/10

I was interested in that idea of a novel's being a scattershot mood-regulating concoction, and think it more generally true than Dirda does. But I want to think that Powers is right, and that the novel "can contain every facet of the world" in a way that nothing else can. I'm minded of Gopnik in The Philosophical Baby:

"Adult fiction sits between the wildly uninhibited counterfactuals of childhood and the sternly practical ones of adulthood....Fiction writers combine the cognitive freedom of childhood [a freedom that allows children "to learn more than adults can"] with the discipline of adulthood." (73)

Note that movies, which might be to the twentieth century what novels were to the nineteenth, by at least one measure don't begin to be as powerfully comprehensive as novels; movie versions of novels always cut out vast amounts of the novel.
As for science--as Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, asks "Why is it that a professional psychologist like me feels that I've learned more about human personality and social life from Jane Austen than from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology?

Journal as Mirror

2010-08-01T20:37:00.007-04:00

http://www.imu.as/colours/part_a2.htm

Johnson: Nay, it is an honest picture of human nature. How often are the primary motives of our greatest actions as small as Sibbald’s, for his re-conversion. [Sibbald had re-converted from Roman Catholicism back to what he had been before because he cound the fasting in Lent too rigorous for him.]

Mrs. Thrale. But may they not as well be forgotten?

Johnson. No, Madam, a man loves to review his own mind. That is the use of a diary, or journal.

Lord Trimlestown. True , Sir. As the ladies love to see themselves in a glass; so a man lkes to see himself in his journal.

Boswell. A very pretty allusion.

Johnson: Yes, indeed.

Boswell. And as a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal.

So that’s what I’m doing here—adjusting my character.

Assuming the analogy is accurate, how ought we to feel about journal-writing? Certainly characters are in need of adjusting, and one's character is more important than one's appearance, so adjusting would seem to be called for all the more.
How much time should one spend in front of the metaphorical mirror?
A young friend points out that blogs are supposed to be recreational, and this one is, so one needn't worry perhaps about such matters. But when one is the business of adjusting one's character, one might ask, how much time ought one to spend doing so?

And then, Dr. Johnson urged Boswell to keep a journal, and following Johnson's advice, except where class and religion are concerned, is almost always is a good idea.

Free will pulls into the lead

2010-07-27T09:31:00.001-04:00

http://www.med.umich.edu/alzheimers/research/brain.htm

Here's the last paragraph from another essay concerning free will and determinism from the Times's feature, The Stone:

"As much as we owe the nature of our current existence to the evolutionary forces Darwin first discovered, or to the cultures we grow up in, or to the chemical states affecting our brain processes at any given moment, none of this impacts on our freedom. I am free because neither science nor religion can ever tell me, with certainty, what my future will be and what I should do about it. The dictum from Sartre that Strawson quoted thus gets it exactly right: I am condemned to freedom. I am not free because I can make choices, but because I must make them, all the time, even when I think I have no choice to make."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/the-end-of-knowing/?src=me&ref=homepage

I've been thinking that we can't really be free because we don't know enough about the forces, biological and neurobiological, that might be influencing our "deciding" to know why we decide what we do. This author's idea is that we will never know, and therefore we will never have the experience of not having to decide. He enlists an argument of Kant's to support his idea: we can perceive things about something, but that doesn't mean we re really understand that something. Such micro-agnosticism--suggesting that we don't know much about our individual experiences--seems right to me. I found this essay persuasive.

I'm also reminded of a philosophy class in college in which we read a book by a logical positivist named Ayre in which he argued that the debate concerning free will v. determinism could never be settled because it wasn't a real conflict, or a real issue; our linguistic structures had betrayed us into the illusion that it was a real issue. I sense that advances in neurobiology have reanimated the issue, because neurobiology, as in the experiment on monkeys described in the essay, presents us with at least potentially pertinent data.

metaphorical portmanteaux

2010-07-26T16:06:00.002-04:00

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/bour-j02.shtml

Another amazing post at The Blue Lantern: http://thebluelantern.blogspot.com/2010/07/remembering-louise-bourgeois.html
Informative, gently political, visually irresistible, succinct. I mention it here because of the content, the images of women merged/mashed up with images of houses; instead of word portmanteaux (cf. Lewis Carroll), image portmanteaux; akin to ancient Greek mythology's beasts, like the sphynx, who were combinations of real beasts. Such metaphorical portmanteaux, or mash-ups, seem a particular category of counterfactual.

the satisfactions of slow motion

2010-07-26T15:52:00.001-04:00

http://www.thecabg.net/decals-and-techniques-f10/gimp-photoshop-thread-t4350-255.htm

I encountered a video of a lightning bolt flashing with the action slowed down by a factor of three hundred. How satisfying. How many phenomena in the world I would like to see in slow motion. How satisfying to gain a new, tiny piece of language this way. Because of Gopnik, I think: and not just satisfying because humans have evolved to cherish information because it's adaptive to do so; satisfying because this bit of knowledge becomes grist for my imagination's counterfactual-mill. The video is here:

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/07/the-birth-of-a-lightning-bolt/#more-408542

I haven't figured out how to insert videos yet.

as snow to Lapps: different kinds of blogs

2010-07-26T15:33:00.002-04:00

http://blog.loaz.com/timwang/a-good-day.php

Timothy Gray at Variety has an article of interest to bloggers: "It's time to clear the blog fog". Some excerpts:

The Lapps have at least 50 words for snow. Yet we have only one word for bloggers. Clearly, we are doing something wrong.

"Blogger" encompasses myriad online writers. There is the guy in his pajamas pounding out personal thoughts from his basement; a person who has created his or her own website to report on events; a one-person diary; sites where a group of people weigh in; and a person writing for an established news organization.
It makes no sense for them to be lumped into one word.

from http://www.gointothestory.com/2010/07/not-all-online-writers-are-same.html

The post goes on to quote Gray's recommendations for names for kinds of blogs. Gray is witty and funny, but I also am interested in his point. If there's a good anatomy of blogdom, I haven't heard of it.

particularly child-like genres?

2010-07-26T15:09:00.004-04:00

I just noted on my movie-scrapbook blog that the genre of portals-between-realities and that of the romance quest will never grow old, as long as they are done well, as they are in the case of the movie Coraline. This might be because these genres mirror something important about the way our minds work, especially in childhood. I note that I wouldn't have had this thought if I hadn't been reading The Philosophical Baby.

some specific conspiracy theories

2010-07-26T14:21:00.000-04:00

http://artsonearth.com/2009/01/7-craziest-conspiracy-theories.html

This link has a list of hilarious conspiracy theories--I believe, but I'm not sure, that people really have believed these theories; they're not made-up by the authors in an Onion-like way:
http://artsonearth.com/2009/01/7-craziest-conspiracy-theories.html
A book I love, The Enlightened Bracketologist--drat, I've left it at work--lists thirty-two conspiracy theories, listing them in order of how many people have believed in them. I will update.

conspiracy theorists and me

2010-07-26T14:11:00.002-04:00

In looking for a picture of Stalin to accompany my recent post concerning "soul engineering," I found myself at the website of someone who, as I interpret it, urgently wants people to realize that world socialism is a dire, lethal threat, and he finds evidence of this idea everywhere: for example, he believes that the American Pledge of Allegiance and the U.S. military's salute both have demonstrable links to the Nazi salute, and these links are evidence of the threat of world socialism.
The author of this site seems to me a conspiracy theorist, a crank. How does he differ from me, though, as I pursue my aim here, whatever that aim is?
My collection of pertinent data is open-ended; I don't know what I'll discover, and that's a big part of the fun. Alas, I may not even be capable of discovering much.
In my posts, I don't seek to change anyone's behavior, and I don't think I want very much to engineer anyone's soul. I might want people to love me or admire me, but that's such a basic soul-engineering attempt that it barely needs mentioning. I have a desire to make something, a desire I probably won't fulfill (beyond the making of this blog).
Okay, phew, I'm not as mentally ill as the fellow (I assume the author of the anti-socialism blog is male) I just virtually ran into.
PS. Political conspiracy theories seem to be the product of those on the far right and far left, not those in the middle. An implication might be that being on the far right or far left might be a form of mental illness, even of mild schizophrenia. Other kinds of conspiracy theories--such as the idea that there's a God who controls everything--seem less the product of mental extremity, and less mentally ill.

Like an amateur, individual investor in the stock market

2010-07-26T13:43:00.001-04:00

http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/rust/message/221366

I, executing this blog, am like an amateur, individual investor in the stock market, keeping my eye out for developments in the intellectual stock market, particularly developments within the type of stocks I favor, and when I make an entry, it's because I've been inspired to buy or sell. All researchers could thus be likened to such investors, perhaps. Thinking of research brings it under the head of the importance of irregular, intermittent reinforcement, said reinforcement's being one of the prime mover in human affairs, a hobby-horse of mine.

We are would-be engineers of others' sense of reality

2010-07-26T13:31:00.001-04:00

http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com/category/germany/

Stalin as a young man

"Lady Murasaki tells us something new about the possible ways to love, as Proust tells us about snobbery, or Homer tells us about heroism. The writer Joseph Skvorecky, quoting Josef Stalin, of all people, said that novelists were the engineers of human souls--and this may quite literally be true." Gopnik 69

And likewise we all engineer the souls, or sense of reality, of other people by presenting them with or imposing on them our structures and interpretations and stories. Parents thus engineering the souls of their children most obviously.

Generally, people try to assert power over others' sense of reality--this is a desire that runs deep and can be so terribly destructive. Stalin was in a sense and engineer-of-souls-in-chief, though he wasn't a novelist. The ease with which such a desire can result in evil is an argument for Buddhism's eschewal of desire, period. But of course when it's Jane Austen or George Eliot gently, gracefully, graciously, and relatively-unintentionally engineering my soul, it's a positive thing, to put it mildly.

Could "one's particular sense of reality" be synonymous with the word "soul" which, as I take it, is always metaphorical, not literal (i.e. I can't see that the soul can be an actual "thing)?.

having imaginary friends or not; paracosms

2010-07-26T13:06:00.002-04:00

http://folk.uio.no/solveii/kart.html

More likely to have imaginary friends (between the ages of two and six): older and only children; outgoing children. Less likely: shy children, children who watched a lot of TV, children who read a lot of books (or had books read to them?) (Gopnik 52)
I was glad to learn of the word paracosm, "imaginary societies," such as the Brontes' Angria, or the city or town my old friend John drew on his wall, and I like Gopnik's idea that books like the Narnia series and the Harry Potter series, and games like Dungeons and Dragons, are, in effect, paracosms. Is every novel a paracosm? Every short story as well? (Gopnik 53-54)
pp. 63-73 all address the issue of that particularly interesting category of counterfactual, literary fiction.

Crucial Link Between Knowledge and Imagination

2010-07-26T12:42:00.000-04:00

http://www.koellerer.de/rembrandt.html

"Often, people treat knowledge and imagination as if they were different, even as if they were necessarily opposed to each other, but the new work on causal maps suggests just the opposite. Understanding the the causal structure of the world and generating counterfactuals go hand in hand. In fact, knowledge is actually what gives imagination its power, what makes creativity possible. It's because we know something about how events are connected in the world that we can imagine altering these connections and creating new ones. It's because we know about this world that we can create possible worlds."--The Philosophical Baby, 46

This connection between knowledge and imagination seems important; an ignorance of the connection may account for some significant wasted time on my own part. It reminds me of Samuel Johnson's idea that to write a book, one must read an entire library (paraphrasing here). Gopnik briefly discusses the case of the autistic child, who characteristically cannot engage in counter-factuals of the psychological kind, but who can be expert in the world of pure knowledge, e.g., he might memorize train schedules.
As always, these statements by Gopnik wouldn't be worth much without the experimental data she cites, and the endnotes that go with them, but she does provide the data and the endnotes.

Is the soul its own reward?

2010-07-25T01:01:00.001-04:00

http://www.fulltable.com/vts/s/sim.htm

James Baldwin’s insight . . . [:] “people pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”
quoted from http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bookclub/2010/05/ariel-levy-selects-where-the-god-of-love-hangs-out.html#ixzz0ufO4WXRH

I hadn't encountered this quotation from Baldwin. It's a clarifying gloss on Yeats's phrase--he might have been quoting Jacob Boehme or someone--, "the soul is its own reward." But is this idea true? I've pondered this question over the years. I think probably not, although it would satisfy one's sense of justice if it were.

what would my inner plight be?

2010-07-24T23:46:00.001-04:00

http://wochica.tripod.com/lostjournals/id11.html

Viola in Twelfth Night, by Rockwell Kent

A discussion by Colm Toibin of E.M. Forster's life in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/books/review/Toibin-t.html?pagewanted=1&hpw) includes the following:

"Forster believed that his own life as a novelist had been stunted by his inability to make fiction out of his sexual desires. This was how he explained his silence as a novelist after “A Passage to India.” While this seems to make sense, it is perhaps too easy, and perhaps even untrue. It may be more true to say that Forster wrote the five books on which his reputation rests because he desperately needed to create characters and situations that would expose his own plight in ways that were subtle and dramatic without being obvious or explicit."

I wonder if anything of an extended kind that a person writes, including non-fiction, might be seen as a reflection of the writer's inner conflicts. This blog, for example. "How would this fadge?" as Viola asks in Twelfth Night. It's beyond this blog's purview to say, and it might not repay thinking about--maybe it doesn't represent anything in the way that Forster's books represent his personal plight.

a dream about me

2010-07-24T23:33:00.001-04:00

http://www.washington-heights.us/yabbse/index.php?topic=2012.0

A young man who works at the same summer program as I do was walking beside me and he told me that he had dreamed the night before that I told him (as I had one time several years ago) that he couldn't write about not having something to write (for the camp newspaper). In the dream, he racked his brains, and came up with this one phrase: "The Unicorn." He won a big award for the article, and it appeared somewhere in gold, standing out from the writing around it. (The young man did a model job of telling a dream: he told it efficiently and quickly, and to a person who had some reason to be interested in its content.)

Why do so many people watch such videos?

2010-07-24T23:26:00.001-04:00

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1118608/The-cat-rat-struck-unlikely-romance.html

A funny feature from the New York Times about youtube videos of cats and dogs (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/arts/television/24dogs.html?ref=television) includes this passage:

"To calculate the damage this is doing, all we need to do is look at “Surprised Kitty,” a YouTube video that went up only last October but has already been viewed more than 28,500,000 times. The video features an unseen woman tickling a kitten’s stomach. When the woman pulls her hand back, the kitten spreads its paws as if in surprise. That’s it.

“Surprised Kitty” is 17 seconds long. That means humans have wasted roughly 484,500,000 seconds watching this thing. That’s more than 15 years. It took just over a year to build the Empire State Building; about four years to construct the Golden Gate Bridge; eight to land a man on the moon. In the time that we collectively were watching “Surprised Kitty,” we collectively could instead have done all those things and still had a year to sit back and admire our work. And that’s not to mention the more than 31,000 comments people have taken the time to type under the video (“SoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo CUTE!!!!!!!!!!”), or the video response someone has posted, “Surprised Dog,” in which a dog gets the same sort of tickling and shows no reaction at all (another 17 seconds; about 1.3 million views so far).

There are, of course, hundreds of similar videos on YouTube and other outlets, and they add up to a lost generation. “Golden Retriever Puppy Falling Asleep”? Seventy-five seconds, more than 4,343,000 views, 10 years of human time; a Manhattan Project plus one-and-a-half George Washington Bridges. “Iggy” — a cat — “Investigates an iPad”? One hundred thirty-nine seconds, 6,130,000 views (in three months!), 26-plus years; a Mount Rushmore and two Chunnels. It really does sound as if “Husky Dog Talking” is saying “I love you,” but I’m guessing that if you played that clip backward, the dog would be saying, “Another 29 human years neutralized in our quest for world domination.”

I'm reminded of Samuel Johnson's point that none of us work more than a small percentage of the time when in theory we're working--at least this seems to be, or might be, true of people who work at desk jobs. Manual laborers probably work a low percentage of the time in some cases, a higher percentage at others. Slaves probably had to/have to work pretty hard. The plight of slaves is more important than the concerns of this blog, but nevertheless, I take note that humans' devotion to dog and cat videos is a function of the human mind's being a drunken monkey. If there's another explanation for their watching such videos so much, I can't think of it right now.

The Id, the Artist, and James Boswell

2010-07-24T08:28:00.001-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Boswell

I started reading the introduction to my edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson. I'm glad I've read most of the biography before reading about Boswell himself in wikipedia and is this introduction. That way I got to hear from Boswell himself without being prejudiced. In the biography, he main note is generous-mindedness, and/or generous-heartedness, and he also has a sense of fun. Both wikipedia and the introduction make him out to be a scapegrace, especially in his unwillingness or inability to get down to work or to succeed professionally (despite his father and grandfather's being powerful lawyers), for his amorous affairs (despite his being married), and his pushing himself onto celebrities like Voltaire and Rousseau. I take issue. I think Boswell intuited his greatness as a writer (his Life of Johnson seems to me grievously underrated, despite its fame; its fame comes from it's being an unusual, tour de force example of a not extremely literary genre, the biography) and arranged his life accordingly. His wastrel ways were his way of keeping himself untrammeled so he could continue to research the question of what his subjects should be, continue to keep his journal, continue to research his subjects, continue to write. Pushing himself onto Voltaire and Rousseau? They should have been so lucky, to have Boswell be for them what he was for Johnson. As for the affairs--I don't feel myself inclined to judge. It's not that artists should be allowed to do whatever they want just for the sake of their art. But I do wonder whether leading an id-driven life--living like a young child in that respect--helps given an artist access to the imaginative connectivity, uninhibited by artistically crippling concerns, that early childhood may in fact involve, if Gopnik's argument in The Philosophic Baby is right.

Free will doesn't make logical sense but we're still responsible

2010-07-24T08:15:00.001-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_McEwan

Ian McEwan, who posits an explanation

Helpful, clear discussion of free will, its logical impossibility, and its mysterious claim on our belief, at
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/your-move-the-maze-of-free-will/?src=me&ref=general.
Unfortunately, it didn't treat the question of how biological reality affects the issue, at least not directly, nor did it explore the question of why we so naturally feel we do have free will. But for logic to be discussed so accessibly is a gift. The series from which it comes, called The Stone, a recent feature of the New York Times, is delightful.

does imagination change the world?

2010-07-22T16:54:00.002-04:00

http://www.freshpromotions.com.au/hospitality/ceramic-mugs/ceramic-mug-with-white-inner.html

The uber-argument of at least the beginning of The Philosophic Baby is that the imagination changes the world and the fact that the imagination develops in childhood means that children's imaginations change the world. It's a big claim, and it sounds a little inflated. Here is one of Gopnik's explanations:

"If I look around at the ordinary things in front of me as I write this--the electric lamp, the right-angle-constructed table, the brightly glazed symmetrical ceramic cup, the glowing computer screen--almost nothing resembles anything Iwould have seen in the Pleistocene. All of these objects were once imaginary--they are things that human beings themselves have created. And I myself, a woman cognitive scientist writing about the philosophy of children, could not have existed in the Pleistocene either. I am also a creation of the human imagination, and so are you." (9)

In other words, human imagination is the engine of technological progress. That seems right.

"Things are symbols of themselves"

2010-07-22T16:40:00.001-04:00

http://ginavivinetto.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/allen-ginsbergs-words-of-wisdom/

"'Things are symbols of themselves,' said Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche." New York City August 18, 1984

from a book of photographs by Allen Ginsberg, including his caption:

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/ginsberg/

Sometimes I feel this way. It's an aspect of AARS.

R and D v Production and Marketing

2010-07-22T07:58:00.001-04:00

http://www.ncct.uottawa.ca/

"Children are the R & D department of the human species--the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. They make the discoveries, we implement them. They think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the three or four good ones and make them real." The Philosophic Baby, 11.

The power of a metaphor to persuade, to place an image in our minds that stays there: artists, as Shelley said, in a sense really are the legislators of the world, and they are so most especially in their creation of metaphors, acutely if unconsciously designed to cause our minds to organize themselves around. It must be that contemplation of images (metaphors I believe always feature them) helped humans survive as we were evolving.

Neural pathways: from little streets to boulevards

2010-07-22T07:49:00.001-04:00

http://www.cottagehomemaine.com/oldworldmaps.html

"If you looked at a map of the baby's brain it would look like old Paris, with lots of winding, interconnected little streets. In the adult brain those little streets have been replaced by fewer but more efficient neural boulevards, capable of much more traffic." The Philosophic Baby, p. 11-12

What a compelling metaphor-smith Gopnik is.
I was in a car with people driving from our town to someone's house a couple of towns. Which route should we take? It was a question we all took a fairly strong interest in, pretty strong feelings about. Adults I know, who live in the suburbs where driving in a car is a huge part of life, where there are multiple routes everywhere, where traffic must be negotiated, and where time usually seems scarce, the best way to go somewhere comes to matter. For children, however, who don't drive, it isn't an issue. This phenomenon seems an illustration of how the little-streets-to-boulevards evolution manifests itself.
I note with delight that Gopnick gives a specific scholarly reference for the paragraph from which the above passage comes, and for many other paragraphs.

Metamorphosis v Simple Growth

2010-07-22T07:38:00.001-04:00

http://www.nassmc.org/images.html

"Human development is more like metamorphosis, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, than like simple growth--though it may seem that children are the vibrant, wandering butterflies who transform into caterpillars inching along the grown-up path." The Philosophic Baby, 9-10.

I find myself drawn to Gopnick's metaphors.
Isn't it the case that people retain some of their butterfly-ness as adults?
To what extent are artists people who keep their butterfly-ness in a central way?
Gopnick's book seems a resurrection of the Romantic idea of the child as a kind of ideal being, except the theory in her case has a Darwinian frame, and there are references and footnotes concerning scientific ideas concerning, for example, neural pathways.

Bechdel Rule Update

2010-07-21T07:29:00.001-04:00

More movies I've seen recently that meet Bechdel's requirements for being a watchable movie (at least two female characters, these characters ahve to talk to each other, and about some other than a male character):

The Princess and the Frog
She's Gotta Have It
Wives and Daughters
Sliding Doors (the letter, not the spirit)
Three Kings (the letter, not the spirit)
A Streetcar Named Desire
Nights of Cabiria
Orlando
Coraline
Enchanted
The King and I

a very high rate relatively speaking: eleven (or nine if Sliding Doors and Three Kings are removed from the list) out of something like twenty-six.

out of the window/I saw

A Long-Running Conversation

the process does not stop

Things Themselves

visual thinking

Anything #1

Acting the Role of Someone Who's Good

Personal Models of Goodness

different eras of life and literature

"The cure for loneliness is solitude"

Unending Appetite for the New

On the Other Hand

A Finicky Eater

a "skeptical view of reality"

snow seems real

Reading Three Cups of Tea

Cold-hearted and Selfish Yet Loving and Appreciative

Art as Need for Understanding of the Subject in Question

dulce et utile

A Monkey Writing on a Wall

Six Different Sergius's

flow state v feeling like a ghost state

never an adult, inside where the meanings are

What It's Like to Be Sleepy

We Don't Know

mammals as exemplars of non-neural-typicality

Like a Planet's Atmosphere Dispersing

Letter to Someone Taking an Intro To Cognitive Science

The Real Realness of Toys and of Ourselves

a wordless play by Samuel Beckett: how it is; wood s lot

graphic depictions of consciousness via Daniel Dennett

Ford's description of Chiasson's portrayals of consciousness

skepticism concerning brain imaging

"solid but untrue"

a poet borrowing from a child's way of thinking

sensation as beyond belief

oneness through mutual gaze at an aesthetic object

Negative Capability Equals Lantern Consciousness

list of conspiracy theories

Advanced Case of AARS/Lantern Consciousness: Frank O'Hara

Sensory Deprivation and Courage

are we vexed if we still can eat and sleep?

sleep's goodness

Brain's energy restored during sleep, suggests animal study

Cellular energy levels surge in some brain regions in early hours of sleep

consciousness not a single unitary phenomenon

The benefit of teaching children to think about the future

one reason consciousness changes: language; and my problem with plotting

cultivating the habit of lantern consciousness

Hypnogogic imagery

Late-Middle-Aged Consciousness and Children's Consciousness Alike?

Caffeine and uninhibited ("Lantern") consciousness

Lantern Consciousness and literature (AARS); Beginner's Mind

lantern consciousness and exultation

how they make those images of the brain in action

Lack of inhibitory transmittors = less purpose, more learning

forms of unconsciousness

Caffeine, Nicotine, and Consciousness/Attention

consciousness probably isn't . . .

Divagation in Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry

the anxieties of the creative process

happiness and money

boring or tiring?

Is poetry boring?

Microdots and Reframing as Character Adjustment

why do we love models?

TV v. wikipedia-creation

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angels on the head of a pin syndrome

Samuel Johnson was there before Egginton

model based on skill and challenge level

continuous happiness scientifically attainable?

from wikipedia's article on happiness

art: supply v. demand

Status Anxiety and the Artist

Happiness: evolutionarily positive or negative?

the novel as the supreme explorer of human experience

Journal as Mirror

Free will pulls into the lead

metaphorical portmanteaux