Reality Is Flat. (Or Is It?)

Richardpolt75-thumbStandardRichard Polt follows up on his previous essay, in the NYT's The Stone:

In a recent essay for The Stone, I claimed that humans are “something more than other animals, and essentially more than any computer.” Some readers found the claim importantly or trivially true; others found it partially or totally false; still others reacted as if I’d said that we’re not animals at all, or that there are no resemblances between our brains and computers. Some pointed out, rightly, that plenty of people do fine research in biology or computer science without reducing the human to the subhuman.

But reductionism is also afoot, often not within science itself but in the way scientific findings get interpreted. John Gray writes in his 2002 British best seller, “Straw Dogs,” “Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals.” The neurologist-philosopher Raymond Tallis lambastes such notions in his 2011 book, “Aping Mankind,” where he cites many more examples of reductionism from all corners of contemporary culture.

Now, what do I mean by reductionism, and what’s wrong with it? Every thinking person tries to reduce some things to others; if you attribute your cousin’s political outburst to his indigestion, you’ve reduced the rant to the reflux. But the reductionism that’s at stake here is a much broader habit of thinking that tries to flatten reality down and allow only certain kinds of explanations. Here I’ll provide a little historical perspective on this kind of thinking and explain why adopting it is a bad bargain: it wipes out the meaning of your own life.

Consolation from Chaos

1345264271Jeffrey Tayler on Luigi Pirandello, in The LA Review of Books:

FOR MOST PEOPLE, the lyrical, lilting surname Pirandello probably elicits only vague remembrances of absurdist things past. “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” his existential 1921 masterwork, survives mostly in the world of headline writers who play off of existing titles, probably not the fairest legacy for one of Italy’s foremost dramatists (more than 50 plays), poets, novelists, and short-story writers. Yet for his “bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art,” Luigi Pirandello, born in Sicily in 1867, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. Despite continental fame — in 1932 Metro Goldwyn Mayer adapted of one of his comedies for the screen — that lasted until his death in 1936, Pirandello, outside Italy, has lapsed into obscurity partly because of where he was from: During its calamitous stint as a colonial power, Italy never possessed the international prestige of, say, Britain or France, so Italian was never widely spoken outside Italy (and Switzerland’s southern cantons). Also, the playwright’s tempestuous flirtation with, and support from, Benito Mussolini surely did nothing to help his reputation after World War II. (Pirandello broke with the Fascists in the late 1920s.) To this day, much of his voluminous oeuvre remains untranslated into English or, if translated, out of print.

This is a shame. His prose (the subject of this essay) brims with sympathetic, contemporary-seeming characters, some struggling to live true and maintain their dignity in straitened circumstances such as those now befalling so many in the West today. Others strive to get by in a society — usually Sicilian — suffocated by religion and reactionary attitudes toward women. A few begin their lives comfortably but find their dreams dashed by events beyond their control, their situations rendered suddenly precarious. His dramatis personae are invariably common folk, men and women beset by problems that we would find familiar today. If all this doesn’t make Pirandello relevant to us now, then what would?

Pussy Riot, Modern Russian Women Trapped in Putin’s Time Machine

1345251238959.cachedMasha Gessen in The Daily Beast:

The cathedral had been virtually empty during the morning hours, and the protest lasted all of 40 seconds before the women were removed by security. But church staff members testified during the trial that they were deeply traumatized by observing the young women in brightly colored dresses and balaclavas lip-sync to a recording of what Pussy Riot calls its punk prayer: “Mother of God, cast Putin out.”

I listened to one of New York’s performance artists read a Pussy Riot manifesto sent from jail. “Patriarch Kirill [head of the Russian Orthodox Church] has repeatedly evangelized on behalf of the figure of Putin—clearly no saint—and continues to urge his parishioners not to participate in protest rallies…We respond to the political activity of the faithful, and counter the patriarch’s efforts to distort the truth on behalf of all believers. And we needed to sing it at the altar, not on the street in front of the temple—that is, in a place where women are strictly forbidden. The fact is, the church is promoting a very conservative worldview that does not fit into such values as freedom of choice, the formation of political identity, gender identity, or sexual identity, critical thinking, multiculturalism, or attention to contemporary culture. It seems to us that the Orthodox Church currently lacks all of these virtues.”

I suddenly realized these texts sounded better in English than they do in Russian. It wasn’t that the translators had improved the quality of the writing: the originals, which I had read in Russian, had been clear and cogent and surprisingly erudite for three very young women—they range in ages from 22 to 30—who had been known for staging radical actions, not for writing political commentary. The problem with the writing in Russian was that the women were speaking the language of the modern world in a country that is rapidly traveling backward in time.

The “Interpreter” in Your Head Spins Stories to Make Sense of the World

Michael Gazzaniga in Discover:

SplitbrainWe humans think we make all our decisions to act consciously and willfully. We all feel we are wonderfully unified, coherent mental machines and that our underlying brain structure must reflect this overpowering sense. It doesn’t. No command center keeps all other brain systems hopping to the instructions of a five-star general. The brain has millions of local processors making important decisions. There is no one boss in the brain. You are certainly not the boss of your brain. Have you ever succeeded in telling your brain to shut up already and go to sleep? Even though we know that the organization of the brain is made up of a gazillion decision centers, that neural activities going on at one level of organization are inexplicable at another level, and that there seems to be no boss, our conviction that we have a “self” making all the decisions is not dampened. It is a powerful illusion that is almost impossible to shake. In fact, there is little or no reason to shake it, for it has served us well as a species. There is, however, a reason to try to understand how it all comes about. If we understand why we feel in charge, we will understand why and how we make errors of thought and perception.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in the desert of Southern California—out in the desert scrub and dry bunchgrass, surrounded by purple mountains, creosote bush, coyotes, and rattlesnakes. The reason I am still here today is because I have nonconscious processes that were honed by evolution. I jumped out of the way of many a rattlesnake, but that is not all. I also jumped out of the way of grass that rustled in the wind. I jumped, that is, before I was consciously aware that it was the wind that rustled the grass, rather than a rattler. If I had had only my conscious processes to depend on, I probably would have jumped less but been bitten on more than one occasion.

Conscious processes are slow, as are conscious decisions.

More here.

Sunday Poem

Straits of Malacca 24 Oct 1957

a.
Soft rain on the
gray ocean, a tern
still glides low over
whitecaps
after the ship is gone

b.
Soft rain on
……………….gray sea
.. .a tern
……….glides brushing
…………………….waves
The ship's silent
…………………wake

c. Fog of rain on
………………..water
……Tern glides
……Over waves,
………………the
……..wake

.

by Gary Snyder
from Left Out in the Rain
North Point Press, 1986

Is eating egg yolks as bad as smoking?

From CNN:

EggA new study suggests eating egg yolks can accelerate heart disease almost as much as smoking. The study published online in the journal Atherosclerosis found eating egg yolks regularly increases plaque buildup about two-thirds as much as smoking does. Specifically, patients who ate three or more yolks a week showed significantly more plaque than those who ate two or less yolks per week. It may seem harsh to compare smoking with eating egg yolks, but lead study author Dr. David Spence says researchers needed a way to put it into perspective since both eating cholesterol and smoking increase cardiovascular risks – but the general public believes smoking is far worse for your health. The issue is with the yolk, not the egg, says Spence, who is also a professor of neurology at the University of Western Ontario's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. “One jumbo chicken egg yolk has about 237 milligrams of cholesterol.” Keeping a diet low in cholesterol is key, says Spence. Even if you are young and healthy, eating egg yolks can increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases later. “Just because you are 20 doesn't mean egg yolks aren't going to cause any trouble down the line,” he says.

Study: Egg yolk nearly as bad as smoking

For those patients with increased coronary risk, such as diabetics, eating an egg yolk a day can increase coronary risk by two to five-fold, he adds. Atherosclerosis, also called coronary artery disease, occurs when plaque builds up in the blood vessels leading to the heart, specifically the inner arterial wall, and limits the amount of blood that can pass through.

More here.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s Concluding Statement

Over at Business Insider, a video and partial transcript of the closing statement from one of the defendants in the Pussy Riot blasphemy trial [h/t: Justin Smith]:

On 30th July, the first day of the trial, we presented our response to the accusations. Prior to that we were in prison, in confinement. We can’t do anything there. We can’t make statements. We can’t make films. We don’t have the internet in there. We can’t even give our lawyer a bit of paper because that’s banned too. Our first chance to speak came on 30th July. The document we’d written was read out by defence lawyer Volkov because the court refused outright to let the defendants speak. We called for contact and dialogue rather than conflict and opposition. We reached out a hand to those who, for some reason, assume we are their enemies. In response they laughed at us and spat in our outstretched hands. “You’re disingenuous,” they told us. But they needn’t have bothered. Don’t judge others by your own standards. We were always sincere in what we said, saying exactly what we thought, out of childish naïvety, sure, but we don’t regret anything we said, even on that day. We are reviled but we do not intend to speak evil in return. We are in desperate straits but do not despair. We are persecuted but not forsaken. It’s easy to humiliate and crush people who are open, but when I am weak, then I am strong.

Listen to us rather than to Arkady Mamontov talking about us. Don’t twist and distort everything we say. Let us enter into dialogue and contact with the country, which is ours too, not just Putin’s and the Patriarch’s. Like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that in the end, words will crush concrete. Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the word is more sincere than concrete, so words are not trifles. Once noble people mobilize, their words will crush concrete.”

revealing our simian history

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Although our brains have ballooned over the past million years or so, we still struggle to understand ourselves. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the study of our origins. That we evolved is considered by the scientific community to be established beyond reasonable doubt, yet at the same time there remain enormous gaps in our knowledge of how it happened. Some of the most fundamental details of our development – why our ancestors became bipedal, or why their brains tripled in size – remain unexplained. In different ways, all three of the books under consideration here wrestle with this problem. Taken together, they give a good overview of what we really know about our primate past and what we don’t. The gaps in our knowledge make life uncomfortable for those who are struggling to defend evolutionary theory against the dogma of creationism.

more from Stephen Cave at the FT here.

the way the world works

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Baker, to be sure, has long practiced the art of indirection. His first novel, “The Mezzanine,” tells of a man buying shoelaces on his lunch break — although really, it’s about much more than that. “U and I” meditates on his fascination with John Updike by relying less on research than on memory: What, Baker asks, did Updike mean to him? Perhaps my favorite of his books, 2010’s “The Anthologist,” offers an extended monologue by a poet with writer’s block that becomes the very piece its narrator is unable to write. What these works share is a sense that how we think, our idiosyncratic dance with both experience and memory, defines who we are. This is a key to “The Way the World Works” as well.

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

disciplined down to his mismatched socks

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Unlike Warhol, whom he befriended early on, Hockney openly explored the nature of gay love in his work and declined to hide behind a stockade of soup cans. Yet his assaults on convention always seemed free of provocation or menace. With his mop of bleached hair and large, goggle-like glasses, he has cultivated a personal style that might suit the host of a children’s television show. Now 75 and residing in his native Yorkshire, Hockney is still inclined to appear in public in mismatched socks, bright red ties and stripes that go in every direction. Well read, gregarious and intensely inquisitive, he has the sort of innate cheerfulness that is widely regarded as a professional liability if not a disqualification for a major career in art. His childhood, as portrayed by Sykes, was a spartan working-class affair overshadowed by war and shortages and his family’s eccentric politics. Sykes opens his book in August 1940, when 3-year-old David huddles with his parents beneath a staircase in their home as sirens blare and German bombs whistle through the night.

more from Deborah Solomon at the NY Times here.

A new form of encryption allows you to compute with data you cannot read

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Alice hands bob a locked suitcase and asks him to count the money inside. “Sure,” Bob
says. “Give me the key.” Alice shakes her head; she has known Bob for many years, but she’s just not a trusting person. Bob lifts the suitcase to judge its weight, rocks it ScreenHunter_34 Aug. 18 15.05back and forth and listens as the contents shift inside; but all this reveals very little. “It can’t be done,” he says. “I can’t count what I can’t see.”

Alice and Bob, fondly known as the first couple of cryptography, are really more interested in computational suitcases than physical ones. Suppose Alice gives Bob a securely encrypted computer file and asks him to sum a list of numbers she has put inside. Without the decryption key, this task also seems impossible. The encrypted file is just as opaque and impenetrable as the locked suitcase. “Can’t be done,” Bob concludes again.

But Bob is wrong. Because Alice has chosen a very special encryption scheme, Bob can carry out her request. He can compute with data he can’t inspect. The numbers in the file remain encrypted at all times, so Bob cannot learn anything about them. Nevertheless, he can run computer programs on the encrypted data, performing operations such as summation. The output of the programs is also encrypted; Bob can’t read it. But when he gives the results back to Alice, she can extract the answer with her decryption key.

The technique that makes this magic trick possible is called fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE. It’s not exactly a new idea, but for many years it was viewed as a fantasy that would never come true. That changed in 2009, with a breakthrough discovery by Craig Gentry, who was then a graduate student at Stanford University.

More here.

Confessions of a Ramadan Rookie

Rollo Romig in The New Yorker:

RamadanThe reason I haven’t been eating lunch is that I’m fasting for Ramadan, which is what you’re supposed to do when you’re a Muslim, which I became nearly four years ago, not long before I was married. It’s true that I likely never would have converted if my wife wasn’t Muslim, but that doesn’t mean that my conversion was merely symbolic. I wanted to join her life and her family, and since being Muslim is so central to who they are, that meant joining Islam. Over the previous decade, my own, vaguely Irish-American family had gradually drifted from being very Catholic to not being Catholic at all, so I had nothing to turn away from. I was open to wherever love took me.

Technically, becoming a Muslim takes about as long as ordering a Swiss-cheese sandwich. All that’s required is to recite the brief Islamic creed—there is no god but God, and Muhammad is His prophet—with genuine intention. But adopting a new religion doesn’t happen in a moment. I figured I’d start by focussing on practice. You’ve heard people describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. For me, it’s the opposite: I’ve never felt even a twinge of the supernatural, but I like many of the rituals and traditions of religions. In Islam, there’s lots to do—scripture to memorize, prayers to perform, charity to disburse, a pilgrimage to take—and, during Ramadan especially, lots not to do. I would begin by quite literally going through the motions, and in going through them find out what they meant to me.

More here.

First evidence for photosynthesis in insects

Kathryn Lougheed in Nature:

ScreenHunter_33 Aug. 18 14.11The biology of aphids is bizarre: they can be born pregnant and males sometimes lack mouths, causing them to die not long after mating. In an addition to their list of anomalies, work published this week indicates that they may also capture sunlight and use the energy for metabolic purposes.

Aphids are unique among animals in their ability to synthesize pigments called carotenoids. Many creatures rely on these pigments for a variety of functions, such as maintaining a healthy immune system and making certain vitamins, but all other animals must obtain them through their diet. Entomologist Alain Robichon at the SophiaAgrobiotech Institute in Sophia Antipolis, France,and his colleagues suggest that, in aphids, these pigments can absorb energy from the Sun and transfer it to the cellular machinery involved in energy production1.

Although unprecedented in animals, this capability is common in other kingdoms. Plants and algae, as well as certain fungi and bacteria, also synthesize carotenoids, and in all of these organisms the pigments form part of the photosynthetic machinery.

More here.

Hemingway, Urdu, Doughnuts

From The Paris Review:

  • Ernest Hemingway’s World War II spying career was less than illustrious. In fact, when it came to one ill-fated Cuban operation, Papa was downright bumbling.
  • The-MusalmanMeet The Musalman, a handwritten Urdu daily that has been published continuously since 1927 in Chennai, India.
  • “It hurts to be rejected, and it hurts even more when you walk into a real bookstore, one with chirpy sales clerks and splashy book covers, and see truly godawful books by authors represented by some of these very same agents.” Michael Borne on how to weather the agent-finding process.
  • Generation Y (those born between 1979 and 1989) outspent Boomers in books for the first time last year.
  • Check out Electric Literature’s Single Sentence Animations—in which an artist animates a favorite sentence from a writer’s story—here.
  • Dough Country for Old Men (subtitle: “As I Lay Frying”) is a blog that juxtaposes literary quotes against images of doughnuts.

More here. (Note: Urdu lovers, take a few minutes to watch the accompanying evocative video about The Musalman)

Imran Khan Must Be Doing Something Right

Pankaj Mishra in The New York Times:

KhanOn a cool evening in March, Imran Khan, followed by his dogs, walked around the extensive lawns of his estate, sniffling with an incipient cold. “My ex-wife, Jemima, designed the house — it is really paradise for me,” Khan said of the villa, which sprawls on a ridge overlooking Himalayan foothills and Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. “My greatest regret is that she is not here to enjoy it,” he added, unexpectedly poignantly. We walked through the living room and then sat in his dimly lighted bedroom, the voices of servants echoing in the empty house, the mournful azans drifting up from multiple mosques in the city below. Khan, once Pakistan’s greatest sportsman and now its most popular politician since Benazir Bhutto, exuded an Olympian solitude that evening; it had been a long day, he explained, of meetings with his party’s senior leaders. The previous two months, he said, had been the most difficult in his life. His party was expanding amazingly fast and attracting “electables” — experienced men from the governing and main opposition parties. But the young people who constituted his base wanted change; they did not want to see old political faces. “I was being pulled apart in different directions,” Khan said. “I thought I was going mad.” Khan’s granitic handsomeness, which first glamorized international cricket and has sustained the British media’s long fascination with his public and private lives, is now, as he nears 60, a bit craggy. There are lines and dark patches around his eyes. The stylishly barbered hair, thinning at the top, is flecked with gray, and his unmodulated baritone, ubiquitous across Pakistan’s TV channels, can sound irritably didactic. “The public contact is never easy for me,” he said. “I am basically a private person.” The moment of melancholy confession passed. Leaning forward in the dark, his hands chopping the air for emphasis, Khan unleashed a flood of strong, often angrily righteous, opinions about secularism, Islam, women’s rights and Salman Rushdie.

That month he had canceled his participation at a conference in New Delhi where Rushdie was expected, citing the offense caused by “The Satanic Verses” to Muslims worldwide. Rushdie, in turn, suggested Khan was a “dictator in waiting,” comparing his looks with those of Libya’s former dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. “What is he talking about? What is he talking about?” Khan started, “I always hated his writing. He always sees the ugly side of things. He is — what is the word Jews use? — a ‘self-hating’ Muslim. “Why can’t the West understand? When I first went to England, I was shocked to see the depiction of Christianity in Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian.’ This is their way. But for us Muslims, the holy Koran and the prophet, peace be upon him, are sacred. Why can’t the West accept that we have different ways of looking at our religions? “Anyway,” Khan said in a calmer voice, “I am called an Islamic fundamentalist by Rushdie. My critics in Pakistan say I am a Zionist agent. I must be doing something right.”

More here.

Saturday Poem

A Matter of Some Regret

No, I’m not so depressed
As to stay
Under the duvet
All day
That would be an exaggeration

It’s just that
My eye
Gladdened at the sight of you,
Stranger,
Left behind
Last night

And this morning
There’s a taste of stout
And regret
In my mouth.
.

by Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh
from Péacadh
publisher: Coiscéim, Dublin, 2008
translation: 2008, Gabriel Rosenstock

Gaza: Life Under Lockdown

Jamal Mahjoub in Guernica:

ScreenHunter_31 Aug. 17 17.36On each occasion when I have travelled to Palestine, an element of uncertainty has hung over the whole venture. As we travel on towards Gaza City, night falls over a landscape that appears eerily normal. And why shouldn’t it? We had crossed a line in the sand. The scruffy mix of fields and gray block houses could be located anywhere in Egypt. The occasional row of date palms or narrow grove of olive trees hint at the rural idyll that foundered in the not-too-distant past. The first reminder that we are not in Egypt comes with the gas stations that are flagged early by queues of vehicles tailing back along the road, three cars wide. Since 2008 there has been an almost complete ban on fuel imports. Sporadic and unpredictable supplies explain the queues and the power cuts, some of which last up to twelve hours.

What is striking about the Gaza Strip is the lack of a visible military presence. In the West Bank at checkpoints and crossings, Israeli Defense Force soldiers in green fatigues strut about with their automatic rifles at the ready. They are young, some of them in their teens, and they sling their weapons over their shoulders like guitars as they demand papers and issue orders.

More here.