tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82881832024-03-07T03:16:20.392-05:00Vowel MovementMusings on books, the near future, the process of writing, the Semantic Web, the origins of agriculture, evolutionary meme theories, the venture capital process and the occasional political rant; not necessarily in that order.
See my books at http://hyland-wood.org.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.comBlogger367125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-30160206823282895432017-06-03T01:29:00.000-04:002017-06-03T01:49:55.683-04:00Book Review: The Wealth Paradox by Frank Mols and Jolanda JettenThe Wealth Paradox: Economic Prosperity and the Hardening of Attitudes [<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34542359-the-wealth-paradox" target="_blank">Goodreads</a>] is the right book at the right time. Short, succinct, and with hard data to prove their central thesis, The Wealth Paradox is worthy of a thoughtful read by policy makers, political operatives, academics, and in these troubled times, the general public.<br />
<br />
The last few years have seen what Mols and Jetten declare in their preface to be a "perfect storm" in both Western liberal democracies and other countries that pretend to the democratic mantel. A combination of deep economic recessions and global crises have seen 21 million people earn the legal title of refugee and an estimated 65 million people forcibly displaced from their homes. A bit of political turmoil was bound to occur.<br />
<br />
Readers might immediately think of Donald Trump's populist rise in the United States in the frantic few months following the British choice to Brexit. Mols was one of very few political scientists to foresee the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. His rationale forms the central thesis of The Wealth Paradox: The rise of far-right parties and political movements are not simply attributable to the poor and dispossessed but also to middle class voters with some modest degree of wealth to protect.<br />
<br />
There are others. News watchers could not have missed the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's grab for dictatorial powers after transitioning from prime minister to president of that country. In the Philippines, strongman Rodrigo Duterte grabbed the presidency with his promises to murder drug dealers, street children, and, purely as a form of collateral damage, political opponents. Russia's Vladimir Putin, like Erdoğan a former prime minister of his country and now president, went several times better by being prime minister, then president, then prime minister, and now president again. One must give him points for consistency.<br />
<br />
All of these leaders were democratically elected. Something to notice is how close these decisions have been. Trump became the second Republican president in a row to lose the popular vote on his way to the White House. Putin won his first presidential bid in 2000 with 53% of the vote. Erdoğan won his presidential bid with in 2014 with 51.79%. Duterte won with a minority 39.1%. The referendum deciding that Britain should leave the European Union was passed with 51.89% voting to leave. In all of these cases and many more, a populist platform was adopted with nearly half of the electorates voting for the opposite.<br />
<br />
Invoking [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law" target="_blank">Godwin's Law</a>], it seems an excellent time to recall that at the time Adolph Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, he was head of a political party that had garnered a third of the seats in the German parliament by democratic means.<br />
<br />
Why should people elect leaders who so often pursue unarguably unpopular policies, or who hold unpopular ideas? Mols and Jetten argue that enough middle class voters, those with above average incomes, do so in order to protect their own narrow interests. It is this point, and the data behind it, that makes The Wealth Paradox worth reading.<br />
<br />
Recent votes in the Netherlands and France rejecting populist parties have left little time to celebrate. The combination of Byzantine political systems and continued strong showings by populist parties clearly show that history is not over. We may yet see a spread of their simplistic mixture of xenophobia and protectionism.<br />
<br />
The authors of The Wealth Paradox are not, of course, the first scholars to note the connection between the middle class and populism, nor the odd (to the settled mind) desire to rip and replace an imperfect system with a new one.<br />
<br />
The British historian George Dangerfield, writing in the 1930s about the pre-World War I actions of the Tory party then in opposition, made Mols' and Jetten's case for them. Dangerfield's crisis resulted in the partition of Ireland and the mutiny of a portion of the British Army:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Tory Rebellion was not merely a brutal attack upon an enfeebled opponent - that is to say, political; it was not merely the impassioned defence of impossible privileges - that is to say, economic; it was also, and more profoundly, the unconscious rejection of an established security. For nearly a century men had discovered in the cautious phrase, in the respectable gesture, in the considered display of reasonable emotions, a haven against those irrational storms which threatened to sweep through them, And gradually the haven lost its charms; worst still, it lost it peace. Its waters, no longer unruffled by the wind, ceased to reflect, with complacent ease, the settled skies, the untangled stars of accepted behaviour and sensible conviction; and men, with a defiance they not hope to understand, began to put forth upon little excursions into the vast, the dark, the driven seas beyond.<br />
(George Dangerfield. The Strange Death of Liberal England. Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 122-3.)</blockquote>
<br />
Dangerfield could have been writing about today's political challenges. We find ourselves coming off of an unprecedented post-war period of established security that, when buffeted by the "perfect storm", resulted in rejection. It is little wonder that his book became the archetypal modern history.<br />
<br />
Worrying, too, is the lesson learned by unrepentant socialist Christopher Hitchens. Visiting his literary superhero Jorge Luis Borges in his unhappy home in Buenos Aires, Hitchens read at Borges' request Rudyard Kipling's "Harp Song of the Dane Women" whose opening verse:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What is a woman that you forsake her<br />
And the hearth fire and the home acre<br />
To go with that old grey widow-maker?</blockquote>
<br />
so beautifully gets to the beating heart of the human male's yearning for adventure, and the the acceptance of the accompanying risk. Hitchens was dismayed that his idol "heartily preferred" the "gentlemen" of the brutal and populist regime of Juan Perón who abused both his family and himself. Borges, for all his stunning illumination of human foibles, himself fell in his old age into a sort of populist Stockholm Syndrome.<br />
<br />
Herodotus noted millennia ago how to react to those protective of their wealth. "Great wealth can make a man no happier than moderate means, unless he has the luck to continue in prosperity to the end... Now if a man thus favoured died as he has lived, he will be just the one you are looking for: the only sort of person who deserves to be called happy. But mark this: until he is dead, keep the word 'happy' in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky." Those voting for populist leaders should carefully note the warning. Pursuit of short term interests must be carefully weighed with longer term consequences.<br />
<br />
No, the The Wealth Paradox is not entirely new. It is up to date, well researched, and particularly timely.<br />
<br />
The 191 pages of main matter make The Wealth Paradox a respectable size for an audience uncomfortable with lengthy prose. Forget War and Peace: One sometimes wonders how many years will pass before the last undergraduate slogs to the end of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis at 55 pages, or the 64 pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. No time have we in these days of Internet-connected pocket supercomputers for the massive 4,736 pages of Winston Churchill's The Second World War. Even our academics must adjust to doling out words short enough to absorb during a commute or a visit to the toilet. But perhaps I simply suffer from last century's skills. As Kurt Vonnegut so ironically juxtaposed his writing with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in his geriatric romp A Man Without a Country, "I am windy".<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-81744380348307315132017-04-23T07:37:00.000-04:002017-04-23T19:22:11.272-04:00The Sorry State of Browser PrivacyEvery one of the <a href="http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm" target="_blank">estimated 3.7 billion Internet users</a> should be concerned that the vast majority of their searches, the contents of their shopping baskets both on and off line, often their location, and, by careful statistical analysis, their associates are exposed to the corporate desires of the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. This information, once collected, is available to law enforcement agencies in many international jurisdictions. Some governments additionally collect information directly to spy on their citizens. One might also consider that logs of private information are also ripe for hackers, paid by organized crime or governments, who break into notionally "secure" systems.<br />
<br />
Our mobile devices are also directly inspectable by customs agents when we cross international borders, and in some jurisdictions by police on the street.<br />
<br />
Those who say that they have no care for privacy on the Internet have seemingly no idea of the abuse to which such information may be put. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust" target="_blank">Holocaust</a> was perpetrated by a vicious regime primarily on the basis of household religious indications from a century of national census collection. No government of the past has ever had access to the amount of information available about the location and habits of individual citizens.<br />
<br />
How can we possibly protect ourselves from a technically savvy authoritarian government that is willing to abuse this treasure trove of data?<br />
<br />
Our browsers, those critical tools for our daily lives, are not currently our friends. They are the portal by which our personal information flees to corporate and government interests.<br />
<br />
There are two fundamental approaches to securing our personal information in browsers. The first and easiest is to avoid recording your history from your local device. This is the primary tool behind browsers' privacy modes such as Firefox's private mode or Safari's incognito mode. No having local data will provide some level of protection if your phone or computer is seized.<br />
<br />
Removing or avoiding local data storage does nothing to protect you from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics" target="_blank">Web analytics</a> companies who use data your browser happily sends to them during an online session. Advertising companies install trackers into their ads that are implemented in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript" target="_blank">JavaScript</a> language understood by each browser. That computer code can and does read as much information as it can find, and combine it into a full picture of your individual browser through a process known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint" target="_blank">browser fingerprinting</a>. It is this fingerprint, good perhaps to identify one person in tens of millions, that your browser happily passes back to the companies that asked for it.<br />
<br />
The <a href="https://www.eff.org/" target="_blank">Electronic Frontier Foundation</a> (EFF) has made a useful tool called <a href="https://panopticlick.eff.org/" target="_blank">Panopticlick</a> to test browsers vulnerability to online tracking. The odd but fitting name is a reference to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon" target="_blank">Panopticon</a>, a type of jail designed in 1787 by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. A single jailer could see a large number of prisoners in the Panopticon.<br />
<br />
This post reports on a series of Panopticlick tests on a variety of browsers. Desktop browsers were tested on a MacBook Pro. Mobile browsers were tested on an Apple iPhone 6 and a Sony tablet running <a href="https://www.android.com/versions/marshmallow-6-0/" target="_blank">Android Marshmallow</a>.<br />
<br />
Panopticlick asks four questions of browsers:<br />
<ul>
<li>Is your browser blocking tracking ads?</li>
<li>Is your browser blocking invisible trackers?</li>
<li>Does your browser unblock 3rd parties that promise to honor <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track" target="_blank">Do Not Track</a>?</li>
<li>Does your browser protect from fingerprinting?</li>
</ul>
A perfect browser would respond in the affirmative to each question, and a report might look like this:<br />
<br />
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>My good browser</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes
</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<br />
A browser that failed all four tests would have a negative report. The last question would be answered by noting that a unique fingerprint could be calculated:<br />
<br />
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>A terrible browser</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<br />
It is naturally possible for some browsers to provide partial implementations to block tracking ads or other trackers. Partial implementations are marked in yellow.<br />
<h2>
Desktop Browser Tests</h2>
Tests were performed on an Apple MacBook Pro, running MacOS Sierra version 10.12.4.<br />
<h3>
<a href="https://www.apple.com/safari/" target="_blank">Safari</a> version 10.1 (12603.1.30.0.34)</h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Safari (Mac, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Safari (Mac, private browsing, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Safari (Mac, private browsing, block cookies and website data)</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique
</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<h3>
<a href="https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/desktop/" target="_blank">Chrome</a> version 57.0.2987.133 (64-bit)</h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Chrome (Mac, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Chrome (Mac, EFF <a href="https://www.eff.org/privacybadger" target="_blank">Privacy Badger</a> installed)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Chrome (Mac, incognito mode, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique
</td></tr>
<tr>
<td>Chrome (Mac, incognito mode, block cookies and website data)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique
</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<br />
Blocking all sites entirely using manual control of Privacy Badger yielded the same results as having Privacy Badger installed.<br />
<br />
Safari’s incognito mode blocks plugins including Privacy Badger, so using plugins is ineffective to increase privacy on Safari.<br />
<h3>
<a href="https://firefox.com/" target="_blank">Firefox</a> version 52.0.2 </h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox (Mac, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox (Mac, EFF Privacy Badger installed)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox (Mac, NoScript installed)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes
</td></tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox (Mac, private mode, EFF Privacy Badger installed)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique
</td></tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox (Mac, private mode, <a href="https://noscript.net/" target="_blank">NoScript</a> installed)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes
</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<br />
Firefox’s private mode does not block plugins, so Privacy Badger could be used with private mode.
<br />
<br />
NB: JavaScript was disallowed for panopticlick.eff.org with NoScript; disabling JavaScript is a key way to avoid trackers. Unfortunately, it is also a key way to break modern Web pages.
<br />
<br />
NoScript maintains a white list of common sites to minimize the breakage of legitimate JavaScript functionality. It blocks all others, but gives a useful user interface to allow exceptions. As shown in Figure 1 below, most sites are analytics trackers such as <a href="https://www.google.com/analytics/#?modal_active=none" target="_blank">Google Analytics</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/" target="_blank">Facebook</a>, and <a href="https://www.doubleclickbygoogle.com/" target="_blank">Doubleclick</a>.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX_GVJLPJxrKXm02dZKjx9tErPh3FYG38Fbds0reFiLHYYyQDwFvxkdX41b11jAlKueEIr7qALjd2fMFWXa3BhTzrj59VIvOfpi49R5Rp3rYkAMIPUDc2P-QfECHJe3-6ksvp7yQ/s1600/NoScript+blocked+sites+20170423.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="376" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX_GVJLPJxrKXm02dZKjx9tErPh3FYG38Fbds0reFiLHYYyQDwFvxkdX41b11jAlKueEIr7qALjd2fMFWXa3BhTzrj59VIvOfpi49R5Rp3rYkAMIPUDc2P-QfECHJe3-6ksvp7yQ/s400/NoScript+blocked+sites+20170423.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span id="goog_1317753055"></span><span id="goog_1317753056"></span><b>Figure 1. </b>NoScript's list of recently blocked sites</div>
<br />
<h2>
Mobile Browser Tests on iOS</h2>
Tests on iOS were performed on an Apple iPhone 6, running iOS version 10.3.1.<br />
<h3>
Safari iOS version 10.3.1</h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Safari (iOS, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Safari (iOS, private browsing, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Safari (iOS, private browsing, block cookies and website data)</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Safari (iOS, <a href="https://disconnect.me/" target="_blank">Disconnect Privacy Pro</a> installed and VPN active)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<h3>
Firefox iOS version 7.1 (2565)</h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox (iOS, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox (iOS, private mode, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox (iOS, Disconnect Privacy Pro installed and VPN active)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<h3>
<a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/11/17/introducing-firefox-focus-a-free-fast-and-easy-to-use-private-browser-for-ios/" target="_blank">Firefox Focus</a> iOS version (current as of 17 April 2017)</h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox Focus (iOS, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox Focus (iOS, “Block other content trackers” option on)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox Focus (iOS, Disconnect Privacy Pro installed and VPN active)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<br />
The motto for Firefox Focus is “Browse, erase, repeat”, which shows its focus on erasing local history.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Chrome iOS version 57.0.2987.137</h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Chrome (iOS, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Chrome (iOS, incognito mode, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Chrome (iOS, Disconnect Privacy Pro installed and VPN active)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<h3>
<a href="http://www.opera.com/mobile" target="_blank">Opera Mini</a> iOS version 14.0.0.104835</h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Opera Mini (iOS, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Opera Mini (iOS, “Accept Cookies” turned off and “Block Pop-ups” turned on)</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<br />
EFF suggests rather concerningly, “switching to another browser or OS that offers better protections.”
<br />
<br />
<h2>
Mobile Browser Tests on Android</h2>
Tests on Android were performed on a Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet SGP511, Android version 6.0.1 (Marshmallow), kernel 3.4.0-perf-gc14c2d5<br />
<h3>
Chrome Android version 57.0.2987.132</h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Chrome (Android, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Chrome (Android, incognito mode, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<h3>
Firefox Android version 52.2</h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox (Android, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Firefox (Android, private mode, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<h3>
Opera Mini Android version 24.0.2254.115784</h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Opera Mini (Android, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Opera Mini (Android, private tab, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: mediumspringgreen;">yes</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<br />
NB: Opera Mini tested “no” in all categories last week, but Opera seems to be adding an effective ad blocking technology, which seems to have come to Android before iOS.
<br />
<h3>
Disconnect free edition for Android (no version number, as of 23 April 2017)</h3>
<center>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Ads</th>
<th>Trackers</th>
<th>DNT</th>
<th>Fingerprints</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Disconnect in-app browser(Android, default)</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lemonchiffon;">partial</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">no</td>
<td style="background-color: lightcoral;">unique</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</center>
<br />
NB: Disconnect Pro/Premium versions were not tested on Android because I was borrowing the device and didn't want to buy my friend a $50 subscription.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Conclusions</h2>
<div>
One clearly needs to shop around to find a browser that will protect your privacy. That is easier on a computer than on a mobile device.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The combination of Firefox and the NoScript plugin was the only way discovered to pass all EFF tests, and that combination is only available on desktop and laptop computers. That is a shame given the power performance of Safari, or the Google app integration with Chrome.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There is no apparent way to avoid browser fingerprinting on iOS or Android.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Apple users seem to have a choice between the new <a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/11/17/introducing-firefox-focus-a-free-fast-and-easy-to-use-private-browser-for-ios/" target="_blank">Firefox Focus</a> and installing (and using!) <a href="https://disconnect.me/" target="_blank">Disconnect Privacy Pro</a>. It is easy to forget to turn on Disconnect's VPN. There is a cost, of course, but that should be nothing new to Apple users. Better privacy is part of what we pay for with Apple. It is surprising that Apple hasn't done with browser privacy what they have done with server-side encryption of user data.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Android users fare reasonably well using either Firefox's private mode or (surprise!) the new Opera Mini. Both browsers have decent blockers for ad trackers and other online trackers. Unfortunately, neither option does a thing to stop browser fingerprinting. In 2017 and beyond, blocking direct tracking is just not good enough. One cannot help but wonder why one needs to use Firefox's private mode to access apparently built-in functionality.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In summary, be careful. Practice safe computing to avoid infections of one form or another. It might be wise to both use a browser with good privacy support and also to check the status of updates once in a while.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We remain with poor tradeoffs. Should we increase privacy and suffer inconvenience, or opt for convenience? Unfortunately, I am sure I know what most people will do. Browser vendors, especially the <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/" target="_blank">Mozilla Foundation</a>, should ensure that privacy protection is enabled by default. Action against browser fingerprinting is urgently needed.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Your privacy is in your hands.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-28093146186236532282015-12-28T10:58:00.000-05:002015-12-28T10:58:08.838-05:00Writers Notebook - 28 Dec 2015<h2>
Relationships with Technology</h2>
<div>
<ul>
<li>The historian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Wright" target="_blank">Ronald Wright</a> has noted, "From ancient times until today, civilized people have believed that they behave better, and <i>are</i> better, than so-called savages." But this is just not so. It is a belief that is unjustified specifically because we have the same stone age brain as those savages. Their cultures are different from our own, but we cannot be said in any meaningful way to be "better", either individually or as a group. Hunter-gatherers can be just as friendly, brutal, caring, dismissive, helpful and murderous as modern, civilized people. The difference between the two would seem to be simply a matter of technology. Use of technology certainly changes brain structures, but does not change the fundamentals of emotion, including compassion and fear.</li>
<li>The word in the Pashto language for an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47" target="_blank">AK-47</a>, the world's most ubiquitous military assault rifle is, disturbingly, "machine". The AK-47 may be the only machine rural Pashtun children ever see. Trucks are rare in their mountain villages, time is told by the sun, and plumbing is unheard of.</li>
</ul>
<h2>
Quote of the Day</h2>
</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>"The literal mind does not understand the ironic mind, and sees it always as a source of danger." -- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens" target="_blank">Christopher Hitchens</a>, in chapter 2 of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43369.God_Is_Not_Great" target="_blank">God is Not Great</a>, when discussing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie" target="_blank">Salman Rushdie</a>'s death sentence.</li>
</ul>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-83975758321697237622015-12-22T18:19:00.002-05:002015-12-22T18:20:33.198-05:00Star Wars' Dirty Little Secret: We are the Empire<br />
We all love Star Wars. For those of us old enough to remember the 1977 original <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_(film)" target="_blank">Episode IV</a>, it was a life changing event. We absorbed Star Wars memes before the rest of society, and integrated them into our lives. Atheists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians all speak of the Force without irony. Even those of us who wouldn't be caught dead <a href="http://wishtv.com/2015/12/17/costumes-and-fun-abound-at-the-opening-of-new-star-wars-movie/" target="_blank">dressing up as wookies or droids</a> feel its influence.<br />
<br />
We even love the brainchild of Jedi Master Lucas when the last word should properly spelled "wares". Lucas reportedly made the majority of his fortune selling the marketing rights to Star Wars paraphernalia until Lucasfilm's sale to Disney for more than 4 billion USD as recently as 2012.<br />
<br />
Star Wars, though, has a secret. A dirty little secret. As with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)" target="_blank">Avatar</a>, and the much older <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings" target="_blank">The Lord of the Rings</a>, the bad guys feature shiny new constructions of huge scale under some form of magical control. They are everything we wish to make in our Brave New World. Never mind the cost.<br />
<br />
We are awed by the relative size of the Imperial star cruiser in Episode IV and again by the massive Death Star. Comparisons of scale go right through to the brand-new <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Force_Awakens" target="_blank">Episode VII</a>, where we are shown how the new superweapon Starkiller Base dwarfs the original Death Star. The Empire and the First Order like things big, new, shiny, and made of metal. They are as dehumanizing as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saruman" target="_blank">Saruman</a>'s industrial mines or the mining machines of Avatar.<br />
<br />
The good guys, on the other hand, are nature-loving tree huggers. Yoda hangs out on a swampy world full of life because the Force is generated by life. Nature is Yoda's place of power. Life, big and often dangerous life, abounds in the Star Wars universe. Our heroes can't turn around without being surprised by an outsized creature, from the driest desert to an asteroid in the depths of space. Life is everywhere. In many ways, it is central player. And it contrasts completely with the modern, clean, metal world of the Empire.<br />
<br />
Star Wars rebels live in small, human-centric groups. Luke Skywalker makes his way to the Rebel Alliance on Yavin, only to find his childhood friend Biggs among the pilots. How can two friends meet at random in a galaxy teeming with life and millions of inhabited planets? Because the rebels are a tiny group. In fact, they are a tiny group of tiny groups, each the approximate size of hunter-gatherer groups.<br />
<br />
How many "snub fighters" did the "well equipped" Alliance send out against the Death Star? Thirty. That's it. Thirty just happens to be the median size of a traditional hunter-gatherer group.<br />
<br />
Everything about the Star Wars universe pits insanely big, dehumanizing, industrial, machine-dominated governmental forces against something else that we can all relate to: Tiny, ragtag groups of friends who know each other well and act as a team only because they wish to. The rebels have choices, as Han Solo's character demonstrates over and over again.<br />
<br />
Even the weapons show the contrast of scale. The Empire has the Death Star. The First Order has Starkiller Base. The rebels have one-person fighter ships and the occasional lightsaber.<br />
<br />
The rebels fight at human scale with personal weapons against a huge enemy that awes them with its size and power. And yet they win. And we cheer.<br />
<br />
There's more. Rebels have babies, real flesh-and-blood human babies. Leia and Han had a baby between Episode's VI and VII. Even Darth Vadar had a mom when he was a cute little kid. Their parents loved them even when they went horribly wrong. But those babies that are even exposed a little bit to the Dark Side start turning into machines, bit by bit. The ultimate expression of dehumanization are the storm troopers. They are clones to the last under the Empire, and orphans painfully ripped from their parents' loving arms under the First Order.<br />
<br />
Let's leave the comfortable fantasy of Star Wars for just a moment, and take a trip to Afghanistan. The incredibly brave Afghan reporter <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/person/najibullah-quraishi/" target="_blank">Najibullah Quraishi</a> <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/isis-in-afghanistan/" target="_blank">reported</a> on PBS's Frontline on the indoctrination of child soldiers in Afghanistan's Eastern provinces. Quraishi insists that we listen to an ISIS commander as he instructs nine-year-olds in the use of grenades, and AK-47 rifles.<br />
<br />
And what is the word in the Pashto language for an AK-47, the world's most ubiquitous military assault rifle? The word is, disturbingly, "machine". The AK-47 may be the only machine these children ever see. Trucks are rare in their mountain villages, time is told by the sun, and plumbing is unheard of.<br />
<br />
Machines have a similar relationship in the Star Wars universe. Droids are everywhere. Who makes them? The only droid we see being made was C-3PO, Anakin's homebrew friend. In fact, Anakin's creation of the metal man was the first indication we were given that he would turn to the dark side. We see Luke repairing C-3PO's arm in Episode IV, and charging R2-D2 in Episode V. Chewie fixes C-3PO again in VI. Others hack away on-screen and off at the Millennium Falcon and other gear. But who makes them? It must be the Empire. The rebels sure don't. The rebels are too busy running and fighting.<br />
<br />
The droids of the Alliance are machines like the Pashtuns' AK-47. Both groups of backwoods fighters are mere users of high technology. They are not the progenitors.<br />
<br />
It is time we faced facts. The terrorists and freedom fighters that we Americans purport to abhor are the prototype for the Rebel Alliance. We are the Empire, just as Iran and Hezbollah have told us we are.<br />
<br />
Star Wars shows us the central schizophrenia of modern Western society. We yearn for the tight-knit, human-scale societies of friends working for a common cause. We also want our indoor plumbing, Netflix, regular food supplies, and pornography. We drown our social discomfort with the next hit of sugar.<br />
<br />
The great irony of Star Wars is that we collectively sit in air-conditioned comfort, munching our popcorn and drinking our sugary sodas, rapt by the magic of CGI-induced scenes of stickin' it to the man. We cheer the dirty and ill-equipped heroes that tear down the great metal empire of oppression. Then we go to work the next day and keep building the Empire.<br />
<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-56014262796295391572015-07-07T11:22:00.000-04:002015-07-07T11:22:20.211-04:00Writer's Notebook - 7 July 2015<h2>
On Pandering</h2>
The 2016 US presidential campaign is seemingly in full cajole. This gem was uncovered in the Economist news magazine in the <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21654584-republican-candidates-are-dividing-between-those-who-gaze-back-and-those-who-look" target="_blank">Lexington column of their 20 June 2015 issue</a>:<br />
"Rick Perry, a former governor of Texas, rode to the barbecue on a Harley belonging to a disabled war hero, accompanied by exNavy SEALS, to raise funds for a charity that gives puppies to military veterans."<br />
<br />
Mr. Perry spent five years in the US Air Force from 1972-1977, three years of which he was a pilot of C-130 cargo planes. As the Economist journalist noted, his appearance in Iowa reached the level of performance art.<br />
<br />
My wife points out, "I would laugh at that if I read it in a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett" target="_blank">Terry Pratchett</a> book." Indeed. Perhaps my next business venture should be a family game called "Truth or Pratchett?". One would vie with peers to guess whether a ridiculous quotation actually happened, or was rebranded from a Pratchett novel.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Quotes of the Day</h2>
<div>
Both of today's quotations are from the classicist Edith Hamilton, from her masterwork <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/129494.The_Greek_Way" target="_blank">The Greek Way</a>.</div>
<br />
<ul>
<li>"The ancient priests had said, 'Thus far and no farther. We set the limits to thought.' The Greeks said, 'All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set to thought.'"</li>
<li>"Before Greece the domain of the intellect belonged to the priests. They were the intellectual class of Egypt. Their power was tremendous. Kings were subject to it. Great men must have built up that mighty organization, great minds, keen intellects, but what they learned of old truth and what they discovered of new truth was valued as it increased the prestige of the organization. And since Truth is a jealous mistress and will reveal herself not a whit to any but a disinterested seeker, as the power of the priesthood grew, and any idea that tended to weaken it met with a cold reception, the priests must fairly soon have become sorry intellectualists, guardians only of what seekers of old had found, never using their own minds with freedom."</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-69377330450147587282015-02-17T12:10:00.000-05:002015-02-17T12:10:12.058-05:00Introductory JSON-LD VideosThe prolific <a href="http://manu.sporny.org/" target="_blank">Manu Sporny</a> has created a useful series of videos explaining <a href="http://json-ld.org/" target="_blank">JSON-LD</a>, the preferred format for representing structured data on the Web. JSON-LD is a serialization of the <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-primer/" target="_blank">RDF</a> data model, which allows it to be much more than just a format.<br />
<br />
Here are Manu's videos:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x_xzT5eF5Q" target="_blank">What is Linked Data?</a> A short non-technical introduction to Linked Data, Google's Knowledge Graph, and Facebook's Open Graph Protocol.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vioCbTo3C-4" target="_blank">What is JSON-LD?</a> A short introduction to JSON-LD for Web developers, designers, and hobbyists. It covers how to express basic Linked Data in JSON.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm3fD89dqRE" target="_blank">JSON-LD: Compaction and Expansion</a> An overview of JSON-LD's compaction and expansion features and how you can use them to merge data from multiple sources.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmvWk_TQ30A" target="_blank">JSON-LD: Core Markup</a> An overview of some of the core markup features of JSON-LD including types, aliasing, nesting, and internationalization support.</li>
</ul>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-82509532780679319922015-01-19T21:01:00.001-05:002015-01-19T21:01:42.057-05:00Book Review: Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies</em> [<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20527133-superintelligence" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] by Nick Bostrom is a big idea book. The big idea is that the development of truly intelligent artificial intelligence is the most important issue that our generation will face. According to Bostrom, it may be the most important issue the human race has ever faced. This view suggests that how we approach the development and response to AI will be more important than how we respond to nuclear proliferation, climate change, continued warfare, sustainable agriculture, water management, and healthcare. That is a strong claim.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
The sale of Bostrom's book has no doubt been helped by recent public comments by super entrepreneur <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Elon Musk</a> and physicist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Stephen Hawking</a>. Musk, with conviction if not erudition, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">said</a></div>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; border-left-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px;">
<div style="box-sizing: border-box;">
With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
One almost wishes that Musk didn't live in California. He provided ten million US dollars to the <a href="http://thefutureoflife.org/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Future of Life Institute</a> to study the issue three months later. Bostrom is on the scientific advisory board of that body.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
Hawking <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence--but-are-we-taking-ai-seriously-enough-9313474.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">agrees</a> with Musk and Bostrom, although without the B movie references, saying,</div>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; border-left-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px;">
<div style="box-sizing: border-box;">
Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
Bostrom, Musk and Hawking make some interesting, and probably unfounded, presumptions. This is hardly uncommon in the current public conversation around strong AI. All seem to presume that we are building one or more intelligent machines, that these machines will probably evolve to be generally intelligent, that their own ideas for how to survive will radically differ from ours, and that <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">they will be capable of self-evolution and self-reproduction</em>. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
Jeff Hawkins provides the best answer to Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Nick Bostrom that I have read to date:</div>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; border-left-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 5px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.5px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px;">
<div style="box-sizing: border-box;">
Building intelligent machine is not the same as building self-replicating machines. There is no logical connection whatsoever between them. Neither brains nor computers can directory self-replicate, and brainlike memory systems will be no different. While one of the strengths of intelligent machines will be our ability to mass-produce them, that's a world apart from self-replication in the manner of bacteria and viruses. Self-replication does not require intelligence, and intelligence does not require self-replication. (<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">On Intelligence</em> [<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27539.On_Intelligence" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], pp. 215)</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
Should we not clearly separate our concerns before we monger fear? The hidden presumptions of self-evolution and self-reproduction seem to be entirely within our control. Bostrom makes no mention of these presumptions, nor does he address their ramifications.</div>
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At least Bostrom is careful in his preface to admit his own ignorance, like any good academic. He seems honest in his self assessment:</div>
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Many of the points made in this book are probably wrong. It is also likely that there are considerations of critical importance that I fail to take into account, thereby invalidating some or all of my conclusions.</div>
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Beautifully, a footnote at the end of the first sentence reads, "I don't know which ones." It would be nice to see Fox News adopt such a strategy.</div>
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Another unstated presumption is that we are building <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">individual</em> machines based on models of our <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">communal</em> species. Humans may think of themselves as individuals, but we could not survive without each other, nor would there be much point in doing so.</div>
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We have not even begun to think about how this presumption will affect the machines we build. It is only in aggregate that we humans make our civilization. Some people are insane, or damaged, or dysfunctional, or badly deluded. Why should we not suspect that a machine built on the human model could not, indeed, would not, run the same risk? We should admit the possibility of our creating an intelligent machine that is delusional in the same way that we should admit the mass delusions of our religious brethren.</div>
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Is my supposition too harsh? Consider the case of Ohio bartender <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/01/13/ohio-bartender-indicted-for-threatening-to-kill-boehner/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Michael Hoyt</a>. Hoyt is not known to have had any birth defects, nor to have suffered physical injury. Yet he lost his job, and was eventually arrested by the FBI, after threatening the life of Speaker of the House John Boehner. Hoyt reportedly heard voices that told him Boehner was evil, or the Devil, or both. He suspected the Boehner was responsible for the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He told police that he was Jesus Christ. Is Hoyt physically ill, or simply the victim of inappropriate associations in his cortex? We have many reasons to suspect the latter.</div>
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Bostrom originally spelled his name with an umlaut (Boström), as befits his Swedish heritage. He apparently dropped it at the same time as he started calling himself "Nick" in place of his birth name Niklas. Bostrom lives in the UK and is now a philosopher at St. Cross College, University of Oxford. Perhaps the Anglicization of his name is as much related to his physical location as the difficulty in convincing publishers and, until recently, the Internet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Domain Name System</a>, to consistently handle umlauts. His Web site at <a href="http://nickbostrom.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">nickbostrom.com</a> uses simple <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">ASCII</a> characters.</div>
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According to Bostrom, we have one advantage over the coming superintelligence. It is a bit unclear what that advantage is. The book's back jacket insists that "we get to make the first move." Bostrom's preface tells us that "we get to build the stuff." I tend to trust Bostrom's own words here over the publicist's, but think that both are valid perspectives. We have multiple advantages after all.</div>
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Another advantage is that we get to choose whether to combine the two orthogonal bits of functionality mentioned earlier, self-evolution and self-replication, with general intelligence. Just what the motivation would be for anyone to do so has yet to be explained by anyone. Bostrom makes weak noises about the defense community building robotic soldiers, or related weapons systems. He does not suggest that those goals would necessarily include self-evolution nor self-replication.</div>
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The publisher also informs us on the jacket that "the writing is so lucid that it somehow makes it all seem easy." Bostrom, again in his preface, disagrees. He says, "I have tried to make it an easy book to read, but I don't think I have quite succeeded." It is not a difficult read for a graduate in philosophy, but the general reader will occasionally wish a dictionary and Web browser close at hand. Bostrom's end notes do not include his supporting mathematics, but do helpfully point to academic journal articles that do. Of course, philosophic math is more useful to ensure that one understands an argument being made than in actually proving it.</div>
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Perhaps surprisingly, Bostrom makes scant mention of Isaac Asimov's famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Three Laws of Robotics</a>, notionally designed to protect humanity from strong AI. This is probably because professional philosophers have known for some time that they are woefully insufficient. Bostrom notes that Asimov, a biochemistry professor during his long writing career, probably "formulated the laws in the first place precisely so that they would fail in interesting ways, providing fertile plot complications for his stories." (pp. 139)</div>
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To be utterly picayune, the book includes some evidence of poor editing, such as adjoining paragraphs that begin with the same sentence, and sloppy word order. I would have expected Oxford University Press to catch a bit more than they did.</div>
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Bostrom, perhaps at the insistence of his editors, pulled many philosophical asides into clearly delineated boxes that are printed with a darker background. Light readers can easily give them a miss. Those who are comfortable with the persnickety style of the professional philosopher will find them interesting.</div>
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Bostrom does manage to pet one of my particular peeves when he suggests in one such box that, "we could write a piece of code that would function as a detector that would look at the world model in our developing AI and designate the representational elements that correspond to the presence of a superintelligence... If we could create such a detector, we could then use it to define our AI's final values." The problem is that Bostrom doesn't understand the nature of complex code in general, nor the specific forms of AI code that might lead to a general intelligence.</div>
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There are already several forms of artificial intelligence where we simply do not understand how they work. We can train a neural network, but we cannot typically deconstruct the resulting weighted algorithm to figure out how a complex recognition task is performed. So-called "deep learning", which generally just means neural networks of more than historical complexity due to the application of more computing power, just exacerbates the problem of understanding. Ask a Google engineer exactly <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">how</em> their program recognizes a face, or a road, or a cat, and they will have no idea. This is equally true in Numenta's Cortical Learning Algorithm (<a href="http://numenta.com/assets/pdf/whitepapers/Numenta%20-%20Path%20to%20Machine%20Intelligence%20White%20Paper.pdf" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">CLA</a>), and will be true of any eventual model of the human brain. Frankly, it is even true of any large software program that has entered maintenance failure, which is almost always an admission by a development team that the program has become too complex for them to reliably change. Bostrom's conception of software is at least as old as the Apple Newton. That is not a complement.</div>
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We will surely have less control over any form of future artificial intelligence than it will require to implement his proposed solution. Any solution will not be as simple as inserting a bit of code into a traditional procedural program.</div>
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Critically, Bostrom confuses the output of an AI system with its intelligence (pp. 200). This equivalence has been a persistent failure of philosophy. To quote Jeff Hawkins again, who I think sees this particularly clearly,</div>
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But intelligence is not just a matter of acting or behaving intelligently. Behavior is a manifestation of intelligence, but not the central characteristic or primary definition of being intelligent. A moment's reflection proves this: You can be intelligent just lying in the dark, thinking and understanding. Ignoring what goes on <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">in</em> your head and focusing instead on behavior has been a large impediment to understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines.</div>
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How will we know when a machine becomes intelligent? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Alan Turing</a> famously proposed the imitation game, now known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Turing test</a>, which suggested that we could only know by asking it and observing its behavior. Perhaps we can only know if it tells us without being programmed to do so. Philosophers like Bostrom will, no doubt, argue about this for a long time, in the same way they now argue whether humans are really intelligent. Whatever "really" means.</div>
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Bostrom's concluding chapter, "Crunch time", opens with a discussion of the top mathematics prize, the Fields Medal. Bostrom quotes a colleague who likes to say that a Fields Medal indicates that a recipient "was capable of accomplishing something important, and that he didn't." This trite (and insulting) conclusion is the basis for a classic philosophical ramble on whether our hypothetical mathematician actually invented something or whether he "merely" discovered something, and whether the discovery would eventually be made later by someone else. Bostrom makes an efficiency argument: A discovery speeds progress but does not define it. Why he saves this particular argument for his terminal chapter would be a mystery if he had something important to say about what we might do. Instead, he simply tells us to get on studying the problem.</div>
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I find that professional philosophers often slip in scale in this way. One moment they are discussing the capabilities and accomplishments of an individual human, generally assumed to be male, and the next they switch to a bird's eye view of our species as if the switch in perspective were justified mid-course. I find this both confusing and disingenuous. It is as if the philosopher cannot bear to view our species from the distance that might yield a more objective understanding.</div>
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The actions of individuals, both male and female, are inextricably linked to our cognitive biases. We do not make rational decisions, we make emotional ones, even when we try not to. We make decisions that keep our in-groups stable, by and large. A few, a very few, spend their days trying to think rationally, or exploring the ramifications of rational laws on our near future. A few dare to challenge conventional thinking aimed at in-group stability. Those few are not better than the rest. They are just an outward-looking minority evolved for the group's longer term survival. But the aggregate of our individual decisions looks much like a search algorithm. We explore physical spaces, new foods to eat, new places to be, new ways to raise families, new ways to defeat our enemies. Some work and some don't. Evolution is also a search algorithm, although a much slower one. Our species is where it is because our intelligence has explored more of our space faster and to greater effect. That is both our benefit and our challenge.</div>
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The strengths and weaknesses of the professional philosopher's toolbox are just not important to Bostrom's argument. <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Superintelligence</em> would have been a stronger book if he has transcended them. Instead, it is a litany of just how far philosophy alone can take us, and a definition of where it fails.</div>
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I could find no discussion of the various types of approaches to AI, nor how they might play out differently. There are at least five, mostly mutually contradictory, types of AI. They are, in rough historical order:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Logical symbol manipulation. This is the sort that has given us proof engines, and various forms of game players. It is also what traditionalists think of when they say "AI".</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Neural networks. Many problems in computer vision and other sort of pattern recognition problems have been solved this way.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Auto-associative memories. This variation on neural networks uses feedback to allow recovery of a pattern when presented with only part of the pattern as input.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Statistical, or "machine learning". These techniques use mathematical modeling to solve particular problems such as cleaning fuzzy images.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Human brain emulation. Brain emulation may be used to predict future events based on past experiences.</li>
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Of these, and the handful of other less common approaches not mentioned, only human brain emulation is currently aiming to create a general artificial intelligence. Not only that, but few AI researchers actually think we are anywhere close to that goal. The popular media has represented a level of maturity that is not currently present.</div>
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The recent successes of the artificial intelligence community are a much longer way from general intelligence than one hears from news media, or even some starry eyed AI researchers. There are also good reasons not to worry even if we do manage to create intelligent machines.</div>
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Recent news-making successes in AI have been due to the scale of available computing. Examples include the ability for a program to learn to recognize cats in pictures, or to safely drive a car. These successes are impressive, but are wholly specific solutions to very particular problems. Not one of the researchers involved believes that those approaches will lead to a generally intelligent machine. These are tools and nothing but tools. Their output makes us better in the same way that the invention of the hammer or screwdriver, or general purpose computer, made us better. They will not, cannot, take over the world.</div>
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Bostrom is, at the end, pessimistic about our chances for survival. Perhaps this is what happens when one spends a lot of time studying global catastrophic risks. Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic previously edited a book of essays exploring just such risks in 2011 [<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2659696-global-catastrophic-risks" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. More information is available on the book's <a href="http://www.global-catastrophic-risks.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Web site</a>. The first chapter is <a href="http://www.global-catastrophic-risks.com/docs/Chap01.pdf" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">available online</a>. These three paragraphs from <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Superintelligence</em> anchor his position in relation to AI:</div>
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Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound.</div>
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For a child with an undetonated bomb in its hands, a sensible thing to do would be to put it down gently, quickly back out of the room, and contact the nearest adult. Yet what we have here is not one child but many, each with access to an independent trigger mechanism. The chances that we will <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">all</em> find the sense to put down the dangerous stuff seem almost negligible. Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens.</div>
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Nor can we attain safety by running away, for the blast of an intelligence explosion would bring down the entire firmament. Nor is there a grown up in sight.</div>
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One could imagine the same pessimistic argument being made about nuclear weapons. They must be reigned in before "some little idiot" gets his hands on one. Is that not what has happened? The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons</a> has been a major force for slowing the spread of nuclear weapons in spite of the five countries that do not adhere to its principles. Separate agreements, threats, and sanctions has so far worked just well enough to plug the holes. Grown ups, from Albert Einstein to the current batch of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Arms_Limitation_Talks" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Strategic Arms Limitation Talks</a> negotiators, have come out of the woodwork when needed. Not only has no one dropped a nuclear bomb since the world came to know of their existence at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but even the superpowers have willingly returned to small, and relatively low-tech ways of war.</div>
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Bostrom urges us to spend time and effort urgently to consider our response to the coming threat. He warns that we may not have the time we think we have. Nowhere does he presume that we will not choose our own destruction. "The universe is change;" said the Roman emperor <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Marcus Aurelius Antoninus</a>, "our life is what our thoughts make it." Bostrom might learn to temper his pessimism with an understanding of how humans relate to existential threats. Only then do they seem to do the right thing. He might also observe that unexpected events should not be handled using old tools, as noted by the industrialist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Paul_Getty" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">J. Paul Getty</a> ("In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.") or management theorist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Peter Drucker</a> ("The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.") We will need new conceptual tools to handle a new intelligence.</div>
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Our erstwhile fear mongers seem also certain that any new general intelligence would, as humans are wont to do, wish to destroy a competing intelligence, us. People fear this not because this is what an artificial intelligence will necessarily be, but because that is what <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">our</em> form of intelligence is. Humans have always feared other humans and for good reason. As historian Ronald Wright noted in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">A Short History of Progress</em> [<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/331227.A_Short_History_of_Progress" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>],</div>
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"[P]rehistory, like history, teaches us that the nice folk didn't win, that we are at best the heirs of many ruthless victories and at worst the heirs of genocide."</div>
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This raises the fascinating question of how we, as a species, would react to the presence of a newly competitive intelligence on our planet. History shows that we probably killed off the Neanderthals, as earlier human species killed off <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Homo Erectus</em> and our earlier predecessors. We don't play well with others. Perhaps our own latent fears will insist on the killing off of a new, generally intelligent AI. We should consider this nasty habit of ours before we worry too much about how a hypothetical AI might feel about us. If an AI considers us a threat, should we really blame it? We probably <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">will</em> be a threat to its existence.</div>
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It is possible that a single hyper-intelligent machine might not even matter much in the wider course of human affairs. Just like the natural, generational genius does not always matter. The history of the human race seems to be more dominated by the slow, inexorable march of individual decisions than it is by the, often temporary, upheavals of the generational genius. How would human development have changed if the Persian commander <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spithridates" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Spithridates</a> had succeeded in killing Alexander the Great at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Granicus" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Battle of the Granicus</a>? He almost did. Spithridates' axe bounced off Alexander's armor. Much has been made of the details, but people would still spread through competition, and contact between East and West would still have eventually occurred. The difference between having a genius and not having a genius can be smaller than we think in the long run.</div>
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Bostrom's main point is that we should take the development of general artificial intelligence seriously and plan for its eventual regulation. That's fine, for what it is worth. It is not worth very much, really. We are much more likely to react once a threat emerges. That's what humanity does. Bostrom is at best early at delivering a warning and at worst barking up the wrong tree.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-67422597333934946162015-01-19T19:26:00.000-05:002015-01-19T19:26:08.920-05:00Writer's Notebook - 19 January 2015<h3 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 20px;">
Teaching Evolution to Martin Luther King</h3>
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On this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King%2C_Jr._Day" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Martin Luther King Day</a>, I would like to explore the differences between the way we see the world and the way it really is. Specifically, we often come to understand human behavior as if it is solely driven by culture. This is just not so.</div>
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Consider Dr. King's thoughts on why people hate:</div>
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"Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated." -- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr." style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Martin Luther King, Jr.</a></div>
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It sounds plausible. The underlying presumption is that we could stop hating if we learn to communicate. Unfortunately, this is only partially so.</div>
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Like so much of our cultural conversations, Dr. King failed to take human evolution into account. Our ancestral ground state, life in small hunter-gatherer groups, colors our relationships with other people as much as, perhaps more than, the relatively recent geographical diaspora of our species has colored our skins. We constantly define an in-group, which leaves everyone else in the out-group. To our consternation, we have learned to create multiple, confusing, and sometimes contradictory in-groups. Cubs fans, military organizations, fellow hobbyists, church goers. The list is nearly endless. Ten thousand years ago almost all of us would have lived and died in the same in-group.</div>
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My revised version of Dr. King's statement looks like this:</div>
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Humans hate outsiders because they fear outsiders. Evolution taught us to fear anyone outside of our group. This can be overridden by creating a culture, by redefining an in-group, but it cannot ever become universal without changing what we are as a species.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="Quotes_of_the_day__On_responding_to_technological_change" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca;"></a>Quotes of the day: On responding to technological change</h3>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes." -- Albert Einstein</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness." — Marshall McLuhan</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic." — Peter Drucker</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy." — J. Paul Getty</li>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-445950071558929162015-01-13T13:11:00.000-05:002015-01-13T13:11:49.722-05:00Writer's Notebook - 13 January 2015<h3 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 20px;">
Various epistemological "razors"</h3>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">(William of) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Occam's Razor</a>: Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. ("Plurality must never be posited without necessity")</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">(Christopher) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Hitchens' Razor</a>: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">(Robert J.) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Hanlon's Razor</a>: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">(David) <a href="http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/faithpathh/hume.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Hume's Razor</a>: "If the cause, assigned for any effect, be not sufficient to produce it, we must either reject that cause, or add to it such qualities as will give it a just proportion to the effect"</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">(Mike) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Alder#Newton.27s_flaming_laser_sword" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Alder's Razor</a> (AKA "Newton's flaming laser sword"): "What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating."</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">(Ayn) <a href="http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/rands_razor.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Rand's Razor</a>: "The requirements of cognition determine the objective criteria of conceptualization." (This is Occam's Razor with a corollary: Concepts are not to be multiplied beyond necessity <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">nor are they to be integrated in disregard of necessity</em>.)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">(Albert) <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#1930s" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Einstein's razor</a>: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." (possibly originally, "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.")</li>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="Quote_of_the_day" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca;"></a>Quote of the day</h3>
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"Mathematics stipulates structures by axioms: anything that satisfies the group axioms is a group, etc.. Programming takes given structures and builds new ones out of them, and the basic stock of building blocks is centrally important. Very different ways of thinking." -- <a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-wg/2011Mar/0513.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Pat Hayes</a></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-65641389586136585412015-01-11T12:37:00.000-05:002015-01-11T18:11:29.290-05:00Writer's Notebook - 11 January 2015<h3 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 20px;">
Religious Freedom in the United States</h3>
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The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Statute_for_Religious_Freedom" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom</a> was drafted 238 years ago in my town of Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was introduced to the Virginia legislature two years later and finally enacted into law in 1786. The statute formally separated church from state in Virginia and was the model for the First Amendment to the US Constitution (adopted in 1791).</div>
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Those who suggest that the principle of religious freedom allows citizens of the United States to choose a religion, but does not protect those who profess no religion whatsoever, should read the statute more carefully. The final paragraph makes clear that in the Commonwealth of Virginia, "all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion". There is no requirement to select a religion.</div>
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The statute's echo in the First Amendment is slightly less clear and has been widely debated in the last two centuries. The First Amendment states,</div>
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“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”</div>
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That short passage guarantees six rights to US citizens and is the basis for many of the "rights" so often taken for granted:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">freedom from establishment of a national religion (the "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause" target="_blank">establishment clause</a>")</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">freedom to freely exercise religious choice (the "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Exercise_Clause" target="_blank">free exercise clause</a>")</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">freedom of speech</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">freedom of the press</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">freedom to peacefully assemble</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances</li>
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The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom is celebrated annually in Fredericksburg. The Annual Fredericksburg Religious Freedom March and Celebration includes a march from the Fredericksburg train station to the statute's <a href="http://www.gotparks.com/?type=all&s=VA&f=1740112" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">monument</a> on Washington Avenue. Other events are generally held in the area. <a href="http://www.fredericksburg.com/news/local/fredericksburg/cuccinelli-will-be-keynote-speaker-at-fredericksburg-s-religious-freedom/article_9b5d1e5b-3670-5bcf-8a51-f2b0d8f42f3f.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">This year's events</a> include a presentation by <a href="http://www.umw.edu/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">University of Mary Washington</a> Professor Mary Beth Mathews, who will speak on the topic "Religious Freedom: Always Approaching, Never Reaching". There will be a presentation of awards for the three winners of the middle school <a href="http://unitedcor.org/fredericksburg/news/importance-religious-freedom-essay-contest" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Importance of Religious Freedom Essay Contest</a> that was sponsored by the University of Mary Washington and <a href="http://unitedcor.org/fredericksburg/page/home" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Fredericksburg Coalition of Reason</a>.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="Quote_of_the_Day" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca;"></a>Quote of the Day</h3>
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"Human beings are at one and the same time utterly splendid and utterly insignificant." -- James Robertson</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-12307369662943105272015-01-09T08:14:00.000-05:002015-01-09T08:14:42.180-05:00Je Suis CharlieLike so many, I am appalled at the destruction of people and property, and the suppression of ideas, that occurred at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo" target="_blank">Charlie Hebdo</a> offices in Paris on the 7th of January, 2015. Unlike so many, I cannot accept that the attacks "had nothing to do with religion", a view expressed by a French Muslim today on NPR's <a href="http://wamu.org/programs/morning_edition" target="_blank">Morning Edition</a>. The attacks were carried out by religious extremists for religious reasons. That is, of course, not to suggest that the majority of Muslims condone extremist violence, any more than the majority of Christians, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists condone violence. It is to say that religion, when believed literally, is a powerful and dangerous motivator.<br />
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Religion is only dangerous when it is believed.<br />
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I also cannot agree with the decision of many news organizations to refrain from publishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that are said to spark the violence. The cartoons are not, and never were, the issue. The issue is whether freedom of speech trumps religious sensibilities. It simply must do so.<br />
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Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of all freedoms in that it allows, and encourages, civil discourse. We accept the risk that it may sometimes cause offense because the benefits strongly outweigh the detriments. Freedom of speech is even more important than freedom of religion in that free speech allows for free expression in religious and other contexts. It is, in fact, only in a climate of free speech that religious tolerance can thrive.<br />
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Freedom of speech is more important than the fear of giving offense to others in that there is no end to what may, in some sense, cause offense. I choose not to be stifled by a few fanatics - even if they arm themselves and perpetrate violence.<br />
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For those reasons, I have decided to join a few brave (and mostly online) news organizations in republishing one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. I do not intend to cause offense. I do intend to stand for the one principle that underlies pluralistic society for the benefit of all.<br />
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The cartoon below is entitled "If Mohammed returned" and features the prophet being beheaded by a Muslim extremist. Mohammed is saying, "I am the prophet, fool!". The extremist responds, "Shut up, infidel!". I can think of no more poignant satire of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy than that.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-68026666925528748182015-01-08T19:36:00.001-05:002015-01-08T19:36:58.312-05:00Writer's Notebook - 8 January 2015<h3 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 20px;">
Notes on the Tabula Rasa</h3>
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The <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em> is the philosophic concept that the human mind at birth is blank and without form; only experience is thought by adherents of this school of thought to create a human being.</div>
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The term <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em> comes from the Latin, which literally means "scraped tablet" and is a reference to a wax tablet used for writing in Roman times. The translation "blank slate" is more commonly heard in modern English.</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Aristotle</a> recorded the first usage in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">de Anima</em> (he called it an "unscribed tablet", Book III, chapter 4).</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">ibn Sīnā</a>, known as Avicenna in the West, first used the term <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em> in his translation of and commentary to <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">de Anima</em>.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">John Locke</a> in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Essay Concerning Human Understanding</em> (he used the term "white paper" in Book II, Chap 1, Sect 2, and said that "there was in the understandings of men no innate idea of identity" in Book I, Chap 3, Sect 5, and "Whole and part, not innate ideas" in Book I, Chap 3, Sect 6), but see also his (contradictory?) idea that children may learn something in the womb (Book II, Chap 9 Sect 5).</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Jean-Jacques Rousseau</a> used the idea of the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em> to suggest that humans must learn warfare (18th century).</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Sigmund Freud</a> used the idea to suggest that personality was formed by family dynamics.</li>
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The short course is that the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em> was incredibly important to the historical development of philosophy right into the twentieth century. Unfortunately for those twenty three hundred years of history, the idea was simply wrong in its extreme form.</div>
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The philosophical schools contending over the existence and degree of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em> in the human mind are known as <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Rationalism vs. Empiricism</a>.</div>
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The current debate seems to have coalesced around an understanding that human babies are in fact born with innate cognitive biases, and this would seem to negate any idea of the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em> as the term was initially used. However, many philosophers argue (because this is what they do) that <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">of course</em> that is not what was really meant. I think it was exactly what was meant by Aristotle and ibn Sīnā. What Locke and later thinkers thought is much more up for discussion.</div>
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I am a rationalist, in that I believe that the Innate Concept Thesis is correct ("We have some of the concepts we employ in a particular subject area, S, as part of our rational nature" -- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): We are born with cognitive biases that implement those concepts, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">mirror neurons</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Theory of Mind</a>. I discussed these features in more detail in my <a href="http://prototypo.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-why-we-believe-in-gods-by-j.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">book review</a> of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Why We Believe in God(s)</em> by J. Anderson Thomson.</div>
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Modern opponents of the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em> include the linguist Noam Chomsky and the psychologist Steven Pinker. Chomsky is known for his theories of rationalist epistemology, including his theory that aspects of language are innate to a newly born child. Pinker claimed in his <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature</em> [<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5752.The_Blank_Slate" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] that the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em> was responsible for "most mistakes" in modern social science, urging his colleagues to view humanity through the lens of evolution first and forgo preconceived notions gleaned from philosophic thought alone.</div>
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The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Computational Theory of Mind</a>, the relatively recent idea that human cognition is a form of computation (although implemented in a way very different from an electronic computer), was formulated partly by the rejection of the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa.</em> The theory was developed primarily by mathematician and philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Hilary Putnam</a>, philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Fodor" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Jerry Fodor</a>, and extended in recent times by Steven Pinker.</div>
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The intellectual heritage of the Computational Theory of Mind can be summarized as follows, where red arrows indicate theories that have been replaced with new understanding and black arrows stand:</div>
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Quote of the Day</h3>
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"Pristine prose or voice or funny or a brilliant simile in the first page or a great title or a great character name or authority or what the fuck or whole new world or something intangible but moving or alarming or surprising or terrifying or consoling or titillating or suicidal." -- Betsy Lerner on what makes a "perfect" book manuscript, in an <a href="http://litstack.com/litchat-interview-betsy-lerner-dunow-carlson-lerner-literary-agency/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">interview</a> by LitStack.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-62019036808251182762015-01-06T10:54:00.000-05:002015-01-29T10:10:47.375-05:00Writer's Notebook - 6 January 2015<h3 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 20px;">
Relationship Between the Brain and the Mind</h3>
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Scientists seem to have accepted that the mind is created by the brain, e.g.:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"[O]ur brain creates the experience of our self as a model - a cohesive, integrated character - to make sense of the multitude of experiences that assault our senses throughout a lifetime and last lasting impressions in our memory." Bruce Hood, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity</em>, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. xiii [<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050103-the-self-illusion" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"Everything we think, do, and refrain from doing is determined by the brain. The construction of this fantastic machine determines our potential, our limitations, and our characters; <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">we are our brains</em>." Dick Swaab, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">We Are Our Brains: From the Womb to Alzheimer's</em>, Allen Lane, 2014, pp. 3 [<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20616861-we-are-our-brains" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>].</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"the human brain, in all its electro-chemical complexity, creates what we call our minds. The neurological functioning of the brain, like the structure and functioning of other parts of the body, is a a human universal." David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods</em>, Thames & Hudson, 2005, pp. 6 [<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/967815.Inside_the_Neolithic_Mind" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>].</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"[T]he mind is not the brain but what the brain does, and not even everything it does, such as metabolizing fat and giving off heat." Stephen Pinker, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">How the Mind Works</em>, Norton, 2009, pp. 24 [<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/835623.How_the_Mind_Works" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>].</li>
</ul>
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The idea is not new, just newly accepted:</div>
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It should be widely known that the brain, and the brain alone, is the source of our pleasures, joys, laughter, and amusement, as well as our sorrow, pain, grief, and tears. It is especially the organ we use to think and learn, see and hear, to distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, and the pleasant from the unpleasant. The brain is also the seat of madness and delirium, of the fears and terrors which assail us, often at night, but sometimes even during the day, of insomnia, sleepwalking, elusive thoughts, forgetfulness, and eccentricities. -- Hippocrates</div>
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But note how recently the scientific establishment has come to accept the thesis that the mind is what the brain does. in 1997, Pinker needed to add a huge and careful caveat to his book:</div>
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The evolutionary psychology of this book is, in one sense, a straightforward extension of biology, focusing on one organ, the mind, of one species, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Homo sapiens</em>. But in another sense it is a radical thesis that discards the way issues about the mind have been framed for almost a century.</div>
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The so-called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">mind-body problem</a> has been discussed and argued for millennia. Plato thought they were separate, Aristotle thought they were two aspects of the body. The combination of religion and respect for classical culture confused philosophers on the issue so deeply that real progress was obliged to wait for modern neuroscience in the post-computing era. Even twentieth century philosophers like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">John Searle</a> did no better than repeat Aristotle's argument of a false dichotomy.</div>
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Today we tend to think of the mind as transient, malleable software running on the brain's hardware. That is a poor analogy, but it is the analogy of our age. Earlier ages uses steam engine or clockwork analogies and no doubt future ones will choose new analogies. A better way to think about the mind is that it is an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">emergent property</a> of the brain's general ability to learn, as in Jeff Hawkins <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Cortical Learning Algorithm</a>.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="Quote_of_the_Day" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca;"></a>Quote of the Day</h3>
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"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong." -- Arthur C. Clarke</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-79454122365186993442015-01-03T13:10:00.000-05:002015-01-03T13:10:34.162-05:00Writer's Notebook - 3 January 2015<h2>
David Wheeler on Indirection</h2>
David Wheeler, the first person to receive a Ph.D. in
Computer Science, has been widely quoted on the topic of indirection.
The basic quote is "All problems in computer science can be solved by
another level of indirection", but many variations exist:<br />
<ul>
<li>
The current Wikipedia article ("All problems in computer
science can be solved by another level of indirection, except of course
for the problem of too many indirections.") quotes a non-authoritative
source: Andy Oram; Wilson, Greg; Andrew Oram (2007). <a href="http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596510046.do">
<em>Beautiful code</em>
</a>. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly. ISBN 0-596-51004-7.
</li>
<li>
The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indirection">Wikipedia page on Indirection</a>
suggests that the corollary "...except for the problem of too many
layers of indirection." was added by Kevlin Henney, not Wheeler. I tend
to believe this because I do not recall hearing this ending until after
2008.
</li>
<li>
The Wikipedia talk page contains an important variation reported by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Markus_Kuhn">Markus Kuhn</a>,
who reports speaking to Wheeler prior to his death in 2004: 'He did
however stress that he considered the inclusion of the – often omitted –
second part "But that usually creates another problem." as
significant.' This matches my memory of the original quote.
</li>
<li>
There are also variations which substitute the word
"layer" for "level", which Kuhn reports Wheeler as feeling are
insignificant.
</li>
</ul>
My preference is therefore for "Every problem in computer
science can be solved with another layer of indirection - but that will
generally create another problem." The thought is important enough to
put a stake in the ground.<br />
Note that Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stanley Gill
invented the closed subroutine as an implementation of this idea.
Compare to an open subroutine ("macro").<br />
Question: Does Wheeler's insight apply to <em>any</em> sufficiently complex system?<br />
Possible answer: Yes, maybe. It applies to software because software is abstracted from its implementation on hardware (see the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis">Church-Turing thesis</a>
for proof that software is not tied to an implementation). Is not any
complex system (e.g. modern culture) also highly abstract, and possibly
abstracted from its implementation in human beings?<br />
<h2>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="Earth_s_Biosphere"></a>Earth's Biosphere</h2>
Astrophysicist <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/author/rene-heller/">René Heller</a> suggests that Earth is nearing the end of its time as a habitable planet in an article entitled <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/planets-more-habitable-than-earth-may-be-common-in-our-galaxy/">
<em>Planets More Habitable Than Earth May Be Common in Our Galaxy</em>
</a> in Scientific American's January 2015 issue.<br />
<ul>
<li>
The Earth is 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old (see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth">Wikipedia article</a> and <a href="http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html">USGS Age of the Earth page</a>).
</li>
<li>
The earliest (scientifically) undisputed evidence for life on Earth is 3.5 billion years ago (see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis">Abiogenesis Wikipedia article</a> and bibliography).
</li>
<li>
The Sun's radiation output is increasing as it ages, thus slowly pushing the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone">Goldilocks Zone</a>, where water can exist in a liquid form, outward.
</li>
<li>
Within 500 million years, Heller calculates that multi-cellular life will not be able to sustain form.
</li>
<li>
Within 1.75 billion years, water will not be able to be in a
liquid state on the Earth's surface. This will remove the ability for
uni-cellular life to exist on the Earth's surface.
</li>
</ul>
Ronald Wright has noted, "Each time history repeats itself, the cost goes up." (<em>A Short History of Progress</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Progress-Ronald-Wright/dp/0786715472">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/331227.A_Short_History_of_Progress">Goodreads</a>]).<br />
Question: Were humanity to fail, would another intelligent species have time to evolve?<br />
Possible answer: Maybe not. Our species is only 3 million years
old since the last common ancestor with chimpanzees, but the earliest
mammalian fossils are "are dated about 167 million years ago in the
Middle Jurassic" (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal">according to Wikipedia</a>).
A new species surely could not push the 500 million year date since
environmental pressure on development would presumably be severe long
before multi-cellular life ceased to be viable. Also recall that:<br />
<ul>
<li>
There is no such thing as a "ladder" of evolution. Evolution
does not direct life toward any goal other than survival in ecological
niches. Another intelligent species is not guaranteed to evolve.
</li>
<li>
Humanity is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction">currently</a>
causing a mass extinction event. This massive reduction in biodiversity
will surely have an impact on any future evolutionary possibilities.
</li>
<li>
We are heating our planet faster than Heller's analysis
alone suggests. The human impact on climate may last for 100,000 years
even if we stopped now (which we are not). See <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Future-Next-Years-Earth/dp/B007SRWGIW/">
<em>Deep Future</em>
</a> by Curt Stager. We might cause a runaway greenhouse effect, which could significantly limit our time horizon.
</li>
</ul>
We might need to survive as a species, and possibly as a
civilization, long enough to get off of the planet. This might be our
only chance.<br />
<h2>
Quote of the Day</h2>
<h3>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="Quote_of_the_Day"></a></h3>
<br />
"I can explain it to you, but I cannot comprehend it for you." -- New York City Mayor (1978-1989) Ed KochAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-40531000233741777092015-01-03T08:30:00.000-05:002015-01-03T08:30:19.776-05:00Book Review: A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">A Short History of Progress</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Progress-Ronald-Wright/dp/0786715472" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/331227.A_Short_History_of_Progress" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] by Ronald Wright was published in 2004 alongside Bill Bryson's <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">A Short History of Nearly Everything</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21.A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. Wright and Bryson were hardly the first to summarize human history in a few short pages and will certainly not be the last. They do seem to have been at the forefront of an explosion of such books in the last decade. That outpouring has included such bestsellers as <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">A History of the World in 6 Glasses</em> by Tom Standage [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/History-World-6-Glasses/dp/0802715524/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1248581.A_History_of_the_World_in_Six_Glasses" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] in 2006 and <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">A History of the World in 100 Objects</em> by Neil MacGregor [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/History-World-100-Objects/dp/0670022705/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9553383-a-history-of-the-world-in-100-objects" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] in 2010. This year has brought <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">A Short History of the World</em> by Christopher Lascelles [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-World-Christopher-Lascelles/dp/1909979228/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13517908-a-short-history-of-the-world" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>].</div>
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Most of these histories simply summarize the work of many others who have painstakingly wrested our past from the ground, from oral and written traditions, and from newer techniques like genetics and linguistics. Wright actually proposes a new theory of human cultural evolution. He analyses the very nature of our cultural progress from hunter-gatherer groups to our present global monoculture and comes to the conclusion that we are vulnerable for some very understandable reasons. He introduces his concept of a progress trap, in which an invention initially provides great benefits but its use at scale results in greater risk. "[W]hen the bang we can make can blow up our world, we have made rather too much progress." His analysis is strong and, in spite of several nits that are worth picking, his conclusions stand firm.</div>
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Wright has summarized his book in a short film called <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1462014/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Surviving Progress</em> </a>, directed by Martin Scorsese, which is available on popular video sharing sites such as Netflix. Wright's Web site is at <a href="http://ronaldwright.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">http://ronaldwright.com/</a>.</div>
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Wright, like Winston Churchill ("The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see") believes that the scrutinization of our past can guide us in our future: "If we can see clearly what we are and what we have done, we can recognize human behavior that persists through many times and cultures. Knowing this can tell us what we are <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">likely</em> to do, where we are likely to go from here."</div>
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I both agree and disagree with that, Wright's central thesis. I think we can and should, indeed must, gain the insight to see clearly who we are as a species. Wright says that our cultural history to date has been like "sleepwalking" from crisis to invention to new crisis, and he is correct in that our trajectory has been more an emergent feature of many individual actions than a clear-eyed macroscopic set of policies. Even now we struggle to scale our actions to match the scope of our civilization. However, I do not believe that we dare apply our newfound knowledge to impact only culture. Our stone age brains are just not suited to solving the problems that our sleepwalking has led us to. We have been sleepwalking to the edge of a cliff and should really wake up before we step off. Says Wright,</div>
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Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world by trial and error; unlike other creatures, we have a presence that is so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown to small to afford us any big mistakes.</div>
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The problem is that, by Wright's own analysis, we are really very unlikely to operate efficiently for the first time in our history. We will need to upgrade our stone age brain for that to happen. We are now in a race to see which happens first, the end of our global culture or the application of our new-found scientific knowledge to change what we are as a species.</div>
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Let's reconsider a quote from Wright that I mentioned earlier: "[W]hen the bang we can make can blow up our world, we have made rather too much progress." That statement is true in at least two conditions. The first is when human decision making is such that someone might actually decide to blow up the world. That was the worry during the Cold War with its literally insane doctrine of mutually assured destruction (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">MAD</a>). It is a worry still that the nuclear arsenals of the Cold War not only exist but are being constantly maintained and even upgraded. The only thing that has changed is that the nuclear forces are not routinely at their highest levels of alertness. We have made too much progress when our stone age brains have not caught up with our ability to create a bigger bang. This applies to politicians as much as suicide bombers.</div>
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The second condition in which we should worry is when a big bang might go off accidentally. We often put more effort into building a big bang maker than in ensuring that it is a safe and maintainable technology. This was the case when the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia disintegrated in mid flight, and when the RMS Titanic sank beneath the frigid waters of the North Atlantic.</div>
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As far as I can tell, Wright explored neither of these two conditions. He simply noted that too much progress could be made. He didn't explain why. That would be a useful topic for a later book. I suggest that changing one or both of those conditions will require a change to the human animal.</div>
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Wright notes that our present idea of progress is tightly tied to the Industrial Revolution and its Victorian idea of a "ladder" of progress. Like the idea of a ladder of evolution, the very idea is flawed and illustrates a very basic difference between our human intuition of the world and the truth of it. We were not destined to develop in the way that we did, either culturally or as a species. Evolution may solve any given problem in a variety of ways.</div>
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The idea of progress has become a modern myth. "Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a culture's deepest values and aspirations...Myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time." This is our stone age brain at work. We have a primitive need to establish myths as a tool to establish communities, and to promulgate those communities by living by the myths. The abstraction of reality by myth may be a useful technique for a limited brain, but we will need to see reality much more clearly than we currently do to navigate our immediate future with anything less than a societal collapse coupled with further mass extinctions and catastrophic global climate change. That is, of course, if we avoid both nuclear war and a complete ecological collapse.</div>
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Is the situation really that dire? We might like to think not. We might reasonably think that we can avoid catastrophe through continued technical advancement. This is the point made by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/SuperFreakonomics-Cooling-Patriotic-Prostitutes-Insurance/dp/0060889586/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6402364-superfreakonomics" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. Levitt and Dubner open the sequel to their best-selling <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0060731338/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1202.Freakonomics" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] by reminding us of the tragic state of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. Large cities had reached a practical limit to their growth because horse excrement was created much faster than it could be removed. An amazing five million pounds of the stuff was generated by the equine bellies of New York every day. Levitt and Dubner paint a smelly picture:</div>
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In vacant lots, horse manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summertime, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people's basements. Today, when you admire old New York brownstones and their elegant stoops, rising from street level to the second-story parlor, keep in mind that this was a design necessity, allowing a home owner to rise above the sea of horse manure.</div>
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It was of course the automobile, and its distant cousin the electric streetcar, that removed the horse from the streets of New York. Levitt and Dubner trumpet our species' ability to solve every problem we face in a similar way. We can simply keep inventing. Wright, far from dismissing this idea, acknowledges it and also points to its built-in limitation: "A seductive trail of successes," says Wright, "may end in a trap." A progress trap. What will happen to our huge cities when we cannot solve the next challenge in time?</div>
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It has happened before. Ours is not the first society to face an existential crisis due to overusing resources. The others tell their stories only to archaeologists and historians. One instantly brings to mind Shelley's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Ozymandias</a>, written as an ode to the discovery in 1817 of a broken statue of Egyptian pharoah <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Ramesses II</a>:</div>
<pre style="background-color: whitesmoke; border-radius: 4px; border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: Menlo, Monaco, Consolas, 'Courier New', monospace; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.42857143; margin-bottom: 10px; overflow: auto; padding: 9.5px; white-space: pre-wrap; word-break: break-all; word-wrap: break-word;"><code class=" hljs " style="background: rgb(248, 248, 248); border-radius: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; font-family: Menlo, Monaco, Consolas, 'Courier New', monospace; font-size: inherit; padding: 0.5em;">I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.</code></pre>
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As Wright notes, "Each time history repeats itself, the cost goes up."</div>
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We sometimes extrapolate poorly because we cannot see obvious solutions to the problems we have caused. We also sometimes look to the positive when we should not. This was likely the case when a group of climate scientists <a href="http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n2/full/ngeo1358.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">reported in 2012</a> that anthropogenic climate change would delay the next ice age. Much media coverage was given to the positive aspects of climate change. "It's an interesting philosophical discussion - 'would we better off in a warm [interglacial-type] world rather than a glaciation?' and probably we would,"<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16439807" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">said one of the authors</a>, Dr. Luke Skinner of Cambridge University in a BBC interview, "But it's missing the point, because where we're going is not maintaining our currently warm climate but heating it much further, and adding CO2 to a warm climate is very different from adding it to a cold climate. The rate of change with CO2 is basically unprecedented, and there are huge consequences if we can't cope with that." Indeed.</div>
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Wright's initial and most powerful examples of progress traps are hunting ("Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 - by driving a whole herd over a cliff - had made too much.") and farming. Along the way he returns often to the one that scares him most: The prehistoric control of fire that led all the way to nuclear weapons.</div>
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He does not touch on the one that scares me the most. The so-called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Green Revolution</a> has tied the production of our food supply to non-renewable petrochemicals for fertilizer and transportation. I might temporarily look past that if the end result were not a dangerous increase in the number of babies born. Our population has spiked to match our food supply, and quite ignores other minor annoyances such as fresh water, and the limitations of fish, wild animals and non-farm plants. Feeding all the babies we can make is made obscene by the refusal of the Catholic Church to permit the distribution of birth control measures in the poorest countries. It is by the much lauded Green Revolution that we hasten our collapse.</div>
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Wright attempts to view our species from the outside, as if he were the mythical anthropologist from another planet. His objective stance shows us for the violent ape that we are, and suggests that we are likely responsible for killing off other intelligent hominids. "[P]rehistory, like history, teaches us that the nice folk didn't win, that we are at best the heirs of many ruthless victories and at worst the heirs of genocide." We are what we are, it seems, and culture can only go so far to clean us up.</div>
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Wright notes that two civilizations were quite long-lived, the ancient Maya and the ancient Egyptians. <a href="http://www.livescience.com/49255-drought-caused-maya-collapse.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Recent evidence</a> suggests that the Mayan civilization collapsed due to climate change. It would seem that their population was built, as with others, to the limit of their available resources. Climate change has also been <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ancient/climate-change-may-have-brought-ancient-egypt-to-its-knees/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">suggested</a> as a possible culprit in the demise of the Egyptian New Kingdom. These new findings support Wright's conclusions in a way that he could not have known in 2004.</div>
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Wright may or may not have been right about Neanderthal genocide. He acknowledges that he is not certain. However, his point is well taken about the Neanderthal-Cro Magnon war being "so gradual that it may have ben barely perceptible - a fitful, inconclusive war with land lost and won at the rate of a few miles in a lifetime." We no longer have the luxury of living in the nearly timeless wars of our ancestors. We are suddenly asked to adjust several times in a lifetime to complete cultural shifts - and we are ill suited for it.</div>
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Wright and I almost parted ways in regard to his description of early agriculture. The Neolithic Revolution, as the advent of farming has been known since the archaeologist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._Gordon_Childe" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Gordon Childe</a> coined the phrase, has fallen on hard times in the decade since I spent time studying it. My generation was taught in school that the revolution was a single event that occurred in Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent, and something that happened quickly, in the span of a single generation. Modern scholarship has disabused both notions.</div>
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Agriculture was indeed the single most necessary condition for the rise of civilization. Agriculture infers settlements. Our diet today consists of the same basic cereals that were farmed first. Wright uses current scholarship to point out that the Neolithic Revolution could not have been an isolated innovation, that it could not have occurred in a particular location, and that it was more likely to have been a strategy of desperation.</div>
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Our Neolithic forebears, modern humans in every sense of the word save culture, had an intimate understanding of plant life. They carefully observed the passing of the seasons. They knew when and where individual plants passed through their life cycles. There was no single moment of innovation that translated that knowledge into a decision to control the process. Scholars have agreed with this view for some years, starting with the popularization of the concept by the biologist Colin Tudge in his short masterpiece <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Neanderthals, Bandits & Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Neanderthals-Bandits-Farmers-Agriculture-Darwinism/dp/0300080247" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1007157.Neanderthals_Bandits_and_Farmers" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. They have been split until recently on whether farming started in one place and spread (the "diffusion" theory) or whether it was independently invented in multiple locations (the "parallel development" theory). I was a staunch diffusionist until reading Wright's book and following through his bibliography.</div>
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I have long held diffusionist beliefs for the simple and insufficient reason that I thought it somehow more likely that such an important invention required a sole genius. I must now admit that I was wrong. New findings in the Americas and elsewhere support Wright's contention that farming was a reaction to the end of the last ice age in many places at times that corresponded with the movement of the ice. The diffusion theory seems to have died the death that it deserved. That tells us something fundamental about human inventiveness: It strongly suggests that individual invention is not nearly as important in the course of human affairs as the environmental conditions in which a larger group of people find themselves. This is not simply "geographical determinism", but a recognition of the importance of the impact of geography on the development of societies. It also speaks to the capability of people to respond to environmental changes in the absence of a generational genius.</div>
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Diffusion wasn't necessary because hunter-gatherer groups already knew how to farm. They simply chose not to. They had intimate knowledge of plants, their timings and their ranges. They probably also understood that they could eat better by gathering plants than by growing a few. It would have been beyond obvious to them that hunting would be seriously curtailed by having a fixed settlement.</div>
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So why did agriculture come to dominate? Agriculture is a meme, in the sense proposed by the person who devised the word, Richard Dawkins. A meme is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." (<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Selfish Gene</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary----Introduction/dp/0199291152/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61535.The_Selfish_Gene" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]). Dawkins had in mind a unit of cultural transmission that was parallel to, and in some ways similar to, a gene. A successful meme spreads so well that it comes to dominate a culture.</div>
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Agriculture came to dominate for a very simple reason: Farmers do not need to practice infanticide to control their population. Hunter-gatherers and herders always do. Farming populations, no matter how sickly and limited in nutrition, have a lot of babies and keep as many as they can manage. They outbreed hunter-gatherers in a few generations.</div>
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The hunter-gatherer practice of infanticide by exposure keeps their numbers balanced with their environment. We hear echoes of infanticide by exposure and its justification as religious sacrifice in the earliest Western literature. The Pentateuch includes several (such as <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+1%3A16&version=ESV" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Exodus 1:16</a> "When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.") and the the Iliad (Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to gain favorable winds to sail to Troy!). The nomadic herders and early farmers of the Pentateuch and the Iliad had more in common with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle than with modern farmers.</div>
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Tudge has suggested another important aspect to farming. He pointed out that farming changes the very nature of the predator-prey balance in an ecology:</div>
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Today, suburban domestic cats provide the perfect model. They are sustained by Kit-e-Kat and Whiskas, and remain thick on the ground even when the local song-birds and mice decline. Hence they remain a predatory force long after the prey species have become extremely rare. For prey animals in a state of nature rarity is a refuge. But when the predator has secure, independent food base, mere scarcity is no longer protective.</div>
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It was farming that separated humans from the rest of nature. We have considered ourselves separate ever since.</div>
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Wright has leaned rather heavily on the works of Gordon Childe, especially his <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">What Happened in History</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140551573/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/961180.What_Happened_in_History" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. Childe, a lifelong atheist and dedicated Marxist, is rightly remembered for having placed archaeology on a purely materialistic basis. It was Childe's Marxism that led him to a material understanding of the past ahead of his peers. However, one might reasonably question his contention that human progress was essentially a class struggle from prehistoric times. It might have been better for Wright to have carefully read Childe's own 1951 treatise on human progress, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Man Makes Himself</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Man-Makes-Himself-Gordon-Childe/dp/0239002083/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1659138.Man_Makes_Himself" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>].</div>
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Wright might very well be wrong about "most" humans being familiar with constant struggle and starvation. That has certainly been true since agriculture began but is unlikely to have been true for hunter-gatherers and has rapidly become less true since the Green Revolution <a href="http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">according to</a> the United Nation's World Food Program. Today's population is both the largest in history by far and the best fed since agriculture began, as dire as the situation is for tens of millions of people in poor countries.</div>
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If hunter-gatherers had leisure time, we need to chip away at another long held presumption about farming's influence. Perhaps it is not so much that farming's surpluses enabled cultural specialists as it allowed them to build faster on their own inventions. Any inventor's shop is littered with earlier models. Farmers benefit from specialized tools and, critically, can afford to store them when they are not being used. Nomadic hunter-gatherers are, by every aspect of our current understanding, just as capable of invention as farmers, but eschew carrying extra tools in the same way that they eschew carrying extra babies.</div>
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"The modern human animal - our physical being - is a generalist." Wright tell us. "We have no fangs, claws, or venom built into our bodies. Instead, we've devised tools and weapons - knives, spearheads, poisoned arrows... Our specialization is the brain." This separates us from over-specialized species like the panda or the koala, both of which suffer from over-specializing on single foodstuffs. We are still not able to escape the judgement of history. Nothing does. History is not over for us. Even if we survive, we seem to be taking down most other species with us.</div>
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So among the things that we need to know about ourselves is that the Upper Paleolithic period, which may well have begun in genocide, ended with an all-you-can-kill barbecue. The <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">perfection</em> of hunting spelled the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">end</em> of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game. Most of the great human migrations across the world at this time must have been driven by want, as we bankrupted the land with our moveable feasts.</div>
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Wright's "all-you-can-eat barbecue" is known to anthropologists as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event#Hunting_hypothesis" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Pleistocene Overkill</a>.</div>
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He also does a fine job correcting the historical record where it has been munged by the xenophobes of our recent imperial past. Evidence for some small amount of continued communication between Polynesia and the Americas, for example, serves to illustrate a larger point that trade between "primitives" was often denied out of hand as impossible.</div>
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Wright makes a strong case that humans live beyond their means whenever the conditions enable them to do so. It is only when environmental conditions make human life marginal that humans are forced to live close to the Earth. Extant hunter-gatherers live that way because they are forced to. Wright uses two particular examples of this phenomenon to make his case. He analyzes the environmental degradation caused by early farming in the (previously) Fertile Crescent and the religiously driven degradation of Easter Island. </div>
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The example of Easter Island is particularly troubling because it shows that, at least in one place and time, religious beliefs encouraged a people to bring their civilization crashing down. It is amazing that any of them survived. That, at least, is a testament to the tenacity of our ability to survive if not to prosper. Wright rightly points out that, whether or not the Easter Islanders saw it coming, the person who chopped down the island's last tree certainly <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">did</em> know what he was doing. </div>
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Two other examples, not in Wright's history, serve to reinforce his point. The harbor of Athens, Piraeus, was originally an island separated from the city by a salty tidal plain. The name of the plain, Halipedon, means "salt field" - showing some societal memory of the event. Although modern classical scholars sometimes debate whether ancient Romans and Greeks understood the impact their activities were having on the environment, I cannot understand why this is so. Both Plato and Aristotle recorded complaints about harbor silt and blamed it on agricultural runoff. Perhaps the situation was more like our own in relation to anthropogenic climate change: The situation was obvious to a few educated elite, but the powers that be were inadequately motivated to change the basis of their wealth and power. The similarity with our current situation is not lost on me.</div>
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My favorite example of the degradation of farming is the desert of Libya, once known with Western Egypt as the "granary of Rome". It's fragile grasslands briefly supported bountiful grain harvests. The removal of its loosened topsoil by the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">ghibli</em> winds ended that description.</div>
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There are surely some who are working hard to balance our planet's environment. We are a distributed species, each of us taking our own actions. Some of us, for moral, ethical, philosophical, or religious reasons, would rather maintain our biosphere instead of using it up. They attempt to balance those more self-centered individuals who are out for number one. Unfortunately, the latter have wrested power since the halcyon days of Sumer. It is not by coincidence that environmental activists like Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), are considered to be radical and even dangerous by business and political leaders. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (<a href="http://ipcc.ch/index.htm" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">IPCC</a>), a UN body, was <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/01/23/leaked-un-climate-report-slammed-for-citing-wwf-greenpeace/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">blasted</a> in 2013 for using material prepared by Greenpeace and the WWF. In a fight between advocacy groups, businesses, and governments, one cannot reasonably expect advocacy groups to win.</div>
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There have been some significant environmental victories, most notably the US the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States)" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Clean Air</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Water_Act" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Clean Water</a> Acts of the 1970s. Unfortunately, there have been significant attempts to roll back that legislation by the Republican Party from 2002 to the present, including a bill <a href="http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/09/10/house-passes-bill-to-roll-back-epa-rules.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">passed</a> in the US House of Representatives recently with an impressive, and depressing, majority of 262-152. Economics, it is said, is the science of incentives. Business interests will return to dominate whenever ecology is in anything less than absolute crisis.</div>
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Wright seems to have missed mentioning, and seeing the importance of, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_effect" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Baldwin Effect</a>. Evolution, that "universal acid" as philosopher Daniel Dennett called it, is the mechanism that created us, and the Baldwin Effect is the evolutionary means by which we acquired an ability to learn. The psychologist James Baldwin proposed the effect an 1896 <a href="http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Baldwin/Baldwin_1896_h.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">paper</a>. Learning, the type of learning gifted to us by evolution, is the single most important mechanism of cultural extension to future generations. It is the Baldwin Effect that allows culture to build upon itself. Wright notes the powerful ratcheting of culture without mentioning the key aspect of evolutionary theory that predicts it. Critically, once a child is born that has an advanced ability to learn, it can learn from its parents. This one fact is sufficient, in the extreme form taken by the human race, to create progress, and Wright's progress traps.</div>
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Yuval Noah Harari, in his 2014 book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], blames our dangerous situation squarely, if indirectly, on the limitations of the Baldwin Effect. Wright, if he has read Harari, will curse the timing of his publication. "We tell each other stories", Harari said in a <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29205225" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">recent interview</a> following the book's release. "It does not matter whether they are true." Therein lies our greatest strength and our greatest failure.</div>
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Religions well illustrate how people act in the face of direction. Harari notes that Christianity became "the world's most successful religion" while being simultaneously "a complete fiction". Our ability to cooperate was greatly enhanced by the development of language, and language enabled us to pass down hard won lessons from generation to generation. Unfortunately, we cannot tell when someone is lying to us. We also have a difficult time passing down metaphor, which is often taken as literal truth by recipients and becomes religion. Our stories can thus lead us astray and become maladaptive. It is our belief in these stories, our culture, that can slow our reactions to new threats such as environmental degradation. Our stories and other aspects of group cohesion compete with our intellect to sustain a civilization. When the intellect is right and the stories wrong, we can find ourselves on the path to hell.</div>
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We really do sleepwalk through our lives. Modern neuroscience suggests that this should be no surprise, since we are not nearly as conscious as we think we are (c.f. <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity</em> by Bruce Hood [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Self-Illusion-Social-Creates-Identity/dp/0199988781/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050103-the-self-illusion" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]). We are conscious enough, though, to see that we are stepping off of a very high cliff. As Wright says, we have kicked out the rungs under us as we have climbed the ladder of progress. Our failure will kill billions. This now seems to be nearly inevitable - exactly the kind of bad news story that does not sell. Like the Sumerians, whose rulers died or moved when sediment salted their farmland, we flirt with total collapse. Like the Easter Islanders, we have nowhere left to run.</div>
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Wright correctly notes the large-scale similarities of civilizations worldwide. His depiction of the development of kingship, with its attendant supposition that some people's lives are more valuable than others, is intentionally and eerily reminiscent of extant governments, regardless of style, philosophies, or record of human rights abuses. His point that all post-agricultural societies share this concept, and all hunter-gatherer societies reject it, is well taken. It is odd, then, that he fails to contrast the daily life of a notional slave with an agricultural serf or the persistent underclasses of today's urbanity. He is too willing to suggest that legal slavery belongs to the past when recognizable forms are institutionalized in most modern states. For all of Wright's dire warnings, he is perhaps not as pessimistic as he should be.</div>
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The astronomer Carl Sagan once said, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself". He very carefully did not say <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">the</em> way. It really is up to us whether we choose to continue to sleepwalk through our daily lives while we allow vast historical cycles to knock us back to the stone age, or whether, like Hamlet, we dare take arms against the sea of our troubles. That sea is all the more deep for being buried deep within what we are as a species.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-66046947236122126592014-12-11T16:13:00.001-05:002014-12-11T16:13:03.608-05:00The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament of Gideon Mack</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143113194/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/850256.The_Testament_of_Gideon_Mack" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] by James Robertson has a single unambiguous theme: doubt. That is the only unambiguous feature of the book. Robertson manages masterfully to question every aspect of his own story until one is forced to question nearly everything. Upon finishing the book, I was almost certain that I had, in fact, read it.</div>
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The book's notional plot describes the fantastic story of the eponymous Gideon Mack, a Presbyterian minister in a small Scottish seaside village, and his encounter with the Devil. At least, it might have been the Devil. Mack thought so. Sometimes. He might have just been insane. Many of the signs were there, from the fantasies of his loveless childhood to his literal howling at the base of a standing stone that might, or might not, have been imagined. Mack wrote his testament and it supposedly made its way to a publisher who doubted whether he should publish it. The publisher's notes frame Mack's version and supply both context and, following Mack's death, a conclusion of a sort. In a nice twist in the endnotes, the supposed publisher assures us that each sale of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament of Gideon Mack</em> will benefit an aged care home in the fictional town described in the story. Robertson leaves us little choice but to doubt his word from beginning to end. This is fiction that will demand that you think.</div>
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Mack himself is a classic anti-hero, a characterization that Robertson uses in a footnote to describe another author's character. Robertson draws on many literary references. His characters read, and are influenced by, novels and histories both real and fictional. The author himself holds a Ph.D. in history from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_University" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Edinburgh University</a>; His dissertation on the works of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scott" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Sir Walter Scott</a>, a fellow Scotsman and author of such famous early nineteenth century works as <em style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhoe" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Ivanhoe</a> </em>, echoes in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em>. The women in Mack's life, Jenny the unloved and now deceased wife, Elsie the lover, and diseased Catherine the disputant, find their archetypes in nineteenth century English and French literature such as Gustave Flaubert's<em style="box-sizing: border-box;"> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Bovary" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Madame Bovary</a> </em>and Lord Byron's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Don Juan</em> </a>.</div>
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The real publisher, <a href="http://www.fivedials.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Hamish Hamilton</a> in Scotland, part of <a href="http://www.penguin.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Penguin Books</a>, assures us in a standard disclaimer, "This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental." I would personally be saddened to think that our playful Dr. Robertson did not sneak in an intentional resemblance to a living person or two, just to carry his device to its logical conclusion.</div>
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Robertson authored two novels prior to <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em> and has authored two since. Hamish Hamilton is <a href="http://fivedials.com/365/archive" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">publishing</a> a new short story by Robertson every day of 2014, each one 365 words long. None of the dozen or so I read included Robertson's broad Scottish vernacular. <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em> relies upon it. Having a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary handy is critical for American readers and others who are unfamiliar with the meanings of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">hunkers</em>, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">boaks</em>, or a <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">smirr</em> of rain. He is forced to explain commonly used words such as <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">kirk</em> (church) and <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">manse</em> (minister's house). Where the Scots Gaelic becomes too thick, Robertson helpfully supplies footnotes from his fictional publisher. The scene feels Scottish, from the persistent rain and angry young men to the shale beaches and craggy topology. The result is a novel that is fresh and genuine in its love of setting.</div>
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Robertson is also a partner in the grant-funded Scots language children's publisher <a href="http://www.itchy-coo.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Itchy Coo</a>. Itchy Coo's Web site proudly offers a <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Hame</em> page and an <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Aboot Us</em> description. A character in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em> amusingly pokes fun at authors who try to set Scots down in print. In fact, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em> fairly brims with jibes at authors. One character is a perennially unpublished novelist. Another complains that "everybody thinks they have a novel in them" before declaring that writing is "a refuge from confusion". The process of writing does facilitate a certain clarity of thought, in my experience, if only because one must decide what to say.</div>
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Robertson holds out much hope for the written word, as if warding off a merely spoken evil. Mack laments the premature telling of his story by saying, "if people could have read this full and honest account rather than heard me announce it amid the din and confusion of that day, then perhaps they might have reacted with more open minds." At least three of his characters are writers.</div>
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The core of the book, though, is our relationship to truth. What is it? Can we know it? Would we understand it if it were presented to us? Why do people believe as they do? What are the costs of their beliefs? <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em> asks the big questions, explores them from many angles, and leaves you to answer them as you see fit. Robertson explores truth from many angles, including the ability to trust "facts" as they are presented, asks what we can truly perceive, informs on the limitations of human thought, wonders about the wisdom of teaching fairy stories to children, and worries about passions left uncontrolled.</div>
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Mack's justification for writing his testament is repeatedly referred to as a drive toward truth. But the absolute truth can be amazingly harmful to a community, as Robertson explores. Mack is shunned by everyone by the end of his truncated life for his effort. Robertson's story does not lend credence to Sam Harris' more recent thesis that we should all just tell the unabashed truth at all times (in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Lying</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lying-Sam-Harris/dp/1940051002/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12379144-lying" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]).</div>
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Naturally enough for a book set in Scotland, the central pole around which the book swings in its discussion of truth is religion, and its antipode, doubt of religion. "What is religion if not a kind of madness, and what is madness without a touch of religion?" Robertson asks.</div>
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We are told, "Human beings are at one and the same time utterly splendid and utterly insignificant." Could there be a more succinct description of the confusion of our times? Our Western civilization has advanced from an ego-centrism under the sky of the only world to one in which we are simultaneously the only intelligent life form we know and yet a mere speck in the vastness of an impossibly large universe. Robertson plays on our confusion from all angles. He gives us the character of Peter Macmurray, elder of the church and Mack's institutional nemesis, who represents the authority of religious institutions, and the character of Lorna Sprott, a fellow minister who is both a true believer and a sad alcoholic crushed under the authority to which she has submitted herself.</div>
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Robertson's tight writing shines in his description of Macmurray: "By day he is an accountant and by night, as Jenny used to say, he adds the saved and subtracts the damned, and always comes out with a minus figure."</div>
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Robertson deeply questions the role of the Church of Scotland and its relationship with Scottish culture. The nasty element of control in Western religions does not escape Robertson's notice. He has Mack speak of "the overwhelming weight that bears down on most people who enter a church - the weight of years of learning not to disrupt, not to object, not to speak out against authority." At one point he declares that, "The great age of religion had passed", only to suggest that the Kirk could still have a role in society. It is this Gaelic sensitivity to culture and identity that makes <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em> a wonderfully human book. Robertson recognizes and acknowledges non-traditional roles for traditional institutions but can only hope that they will come to see the world in the doubting way that he does. To not is tantamount to denying our recently-won knowledge and risks living with a permanently entrenched cognitive dissonance. Such dissonance is clearly evident in America's science-denying evangelicalism. Robertson informs us that the same stresses exist within other societies.</div>
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Lest one consider Robertson's religious beliefs clearly defined, he dithers. His characters are true believers, agnostics, fakers, atheists, vacillators. Elsie's husband John exclaims, "There are no answers, don't you see?", but John is a troubled and desperately unhappy man. He has not replaced religion with a working philosophy that might, as Aristotle suggested, provide him a replacement comfort. Robertson subtly pokes at the religious who express belief in the Devil while steadfastly finding Mack's claims to have met him utterly ridiculous. "The whole religion thing - not being able to reject it and not being able to embrace it", as Elsie says, seems to come closest to his position.</div>
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"The present", Robertson says, "was a mere waiting room for the future." That lovely observation is the exact opposite of the mindfulness of the present encouraged by Buddhism. It is also perhaps an unintended or unwanted consequence of our society's current affair with invention and discovery. The scientist or the engineer works toward a future in which the<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Eureka</em> moment will happen. The teenager waits for the new model mobile phone. The salaryman waits for retirement. We are a society of delayed gratification. Those who defer gratification until after death are religion's real losers.</div>
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There are many minor recurring themes in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em>. Perhaps the most central to the book's exploration of truth is the tendency of people to see intelligent action where it is not. This is known to psychologists as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_detection" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">hyperactive agency detection</a>. If I suppose a tiger is responsible for the rustling of leaves I just heard and I am right, I might save my life by running away. If I am wrong, little harm is done. This instinctive survival trait causes no end of confusion for the modern person, living as we do with the distinct absence of tigers.</div>
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Gideon Mack's life is dominated by hyperactive agency detection. Upon seeing a bee fly out of a drawer, Mack "wondered if there was a message in it; any kind of meaning at all." When confronted with the appearance of the standing stone, he noted:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"It seemed to me that the Stone had provoked this crisis, had engineered it in some way."</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"Because the Stone prevented it."</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"Perhaps the Stone was wielding some strange power over events and had brought her to my door at this moment."</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"The Stone did not want to be photographed. I no longer wished to share the Stone with anybody."</li>
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The last, of course, makes one immediately think of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">J.R.R. Tolkien</a>'s characters <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilbo_Baggins" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Bilbo</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frodo_Baggins" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Frodo</a> Baggins and the One Ring.</div>
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Later, in a museum exhibition, "I got up on the wooden step, and this seemed to trigger the tape." Mack jumps to unfounded conclusions quickly, seemingly just to avoid missing one. Robertson, whether consciously or not is impossible for me to say, seems to warn against such actions.</div>
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Failures of imagination, and another attendant willingness to jump to conclusions, similarly haunt Robertson's characters. Chance appearances of plot devices seem "incredible" to them. When faced with an experience that he cannot readily explain, Mack races to cognitive closure. He seems unwilling or incapable of keeping an open mind until additional facts are acquired. The unnamed being that he (possibly) encounters must be the Christian Devil. God must exist if the Devil does. All of this is wrapped in layers of tortured logic by means of justification. When Mack feels that he could not have reasonably survived his near death experience, he proclaims, "I was of the opinion, therefore, that I must be dead."</div>
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Robertson's characters are not an unrealistic stretch from everyday human experience. We have all met the gullible, but Robertson's exploration goes deeper than pedestrian gullibly. He probes the limits of humankind to judge likelihood. It is something that we do poorly.</div>
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<a href="http://www.radiolab.org/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Radiolab</a>, a weekly radio show syndicated across the United States by <a href="http://www.npr.org/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">National Public Radio</a>, recently illustrated our intuitive problem with comprehending statistics in an episode called <a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/91684-stochasticity/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Stochasticity</a>. Stochasticity is a florid academic word for randomness. The study of stochasticity provides techniques to understand events whose results can only be measured statistically. We cannot know whether a particular coin toss will result in a "heads" or a "tails", but we can know that, given a high number of tosses, the results should be about half of each.</div>
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My caveats (a <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">high number</em>, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">about half</em>) are important and point to our difficulties in understanding the random world. Radiolab interviewed <a href="http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~nolan/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Deborah Nolan</a>, a professor of statistics at<a href="http://www.berkeley.edu/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">UC Berkeley</a>, who demonstrated how poor we are at understanding random acts. She asked a group of students to make up a list of 100 coin tosses. Simultaneously, the Radiolab hosts were asked to toss a real coin 100 times and record the results. Nolan immediately spotted which list constituted the real coin tosses. How? By choosing the list that contained a run of seven "tails" in a row. The students felt that such a run would not appear to be random, but real random sequences include such <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">apparent</em> patterns quite often. Our misunderstanding of randomness stems from the simple fact that the human cortex is a very effective pattern recognition engine. We seek patterns for our own survival. They guide our actions. Lack of patterns, randomness, confuses us. We seek, and often find, patterns that do not exist.</div>
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The phenomenon of seeing patterns that aren't there is common enough that there is a word for it: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">apophenia</a>. Psychologists associate the onset of such persistent delusional thinking with schizophrenia - unless it is associated with an established religion.</div>
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Pascal's Wager</a> appears and reappears throughout <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em>. The French mathematician <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Blaise Pascal</a> famously argued that everyone should believe in God because "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." The problem with Pascal's Wager is that it postulates a lack of cost to belief in a god. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Pascal did not acknowledge that belief requires a separation from reality, and that bad things happen to the human brain when it is forced to close cognitive dissonance based on too few facts. Wild leaps of the imagination or other mental gymnastics are required to make sense of nonsense. Robertson compares authorial leaps of imagination, which are the very basis of creativity, to leaps of faith. But in admittedly extreme cases, leaps of faith may also lead to anything from standing on a street corner with a sign reading, "The End is Nigh" to suicide bombing to the Toronto family that <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/12/01/hamilton_family_left_corpse_upstairs_for_six_months_expecting_resurrection.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">left a corpse in their house for six months expecting resurrection</a>. We do ourselves no favors by encouraging delusion.</div>
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Or do we? We often think of evolution as a search algorithm that fits an animal to its environment. People have been around long enough to evolve to fit people-dominated environments. We have evolved to cooperate with other people. Sometimes, really quite often in fact, that means that we need to compromise our understanding of the world in order to get along with others. Robertson explores the prices of compromise and failures to compromise by presenting us with characters who span the gamut. </div>
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Both real and fictional Presbyterian ministers make their appearance in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em>. Their interests, with the single exception of the true believer Lorna, transcend those of traditional Christianity. Robertson neatly brings in the nineteenth century minister Robert Kirk and his book of folk tales, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies</em>[<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Commonwealth-Elves-Fauns-Fairies/dp/0486466116" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/572121.The_Secret_Commonwealth" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] to make this point. The book makes a variety of appearances across the generations. Robertson intertwines folk myths, mainstream religion, doubt, love, lust, friendships, vanity, and self-obsession into a tapestry that approaches the complexity of real-life thought.</div>
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It is almost not worth bothering to mention the fatherhood obsession shared by Gideon and, more subtly, his father James. It is too obvious. However, this does lead to some brilliant foreshadowing with Elsie's daughter Katie and her imaginary friend. The friend seems to be Mack's Devil, lending yet another bit of support for the reality of an illusion that one had just decided was an illusion. Similarly, Elsie's eleventh-hour admission of the length of her affair with Mack, and the depth of it, questions Mack's veracity just after others had established it. Robertson's misdirection took some careful construction.</div>
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Robertson, while pillorying religious belief, does not spare non-religious thought. The atheists in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em> are generally unhappy, and the one professed agnostic is depicted as physically crippled and verbally vitriolic. Robertson asks, but does not answer, what makes one happy to live one's life. Perhaps, being Scottish, he has no idea. More likely he simply was not aware of modern scholarship which has started to unravel this conundrum, such as <a href="http://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2013/SOC570/um/Horning_at_al_coping_in_older_agostic_atheistic_religio_TISK.pdf" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">this study</a> of coping strategies of the irreligious.</div>
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Robertson employs some beautiful metaphors throughout <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament</em>. My personal favorite is this:</div>
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"Walking through a deserted city in the hours before dawn is sobering way beyond the undoing of the effects of alcohol. Everything is familiar, and everything strange. It’s as if you are the only survivor of some mysterious calamity which has emptied the place of its population, and yet you know that behind the shuttered and curtained windows people lie sleeping in their tens of thousands, and all their joys and disasters lie sleeping too. It makes you think of your own life, usually suspended at that hour, and how you are passing through it as if in a dream. Reality seems very unreal."</div>
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Walking past the sleeping multitudes is a wonderful depiction of the atheist experience. One often feels the weight of the mass delusion that grips our world. Naturally, and very Robertson, true believers must feel the same way. One is left to make of it what one will.</div>
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My one substantial criticism stems from an experience that Robertson could presumably not personally explore. Mack's character undergoes a near death experience, but Robertson, it seems, could not pull from observation to make his description plausible. My own near drowning left me uncomfortable with Robertson's portrayal. Although I recognized Mack's reported lack of panic, I experienced no flashing of my life before me, nor a feeling that I had left too much unresolved. The immediacy of the situation dominated my mind, even as I began to think that perhaps I should try breathing water after all. Those who told me I could not could have been mistaken. I do not fault Robertson overly much for his reliance on clichés for this part of his story. I am glad for him that he has not gained the insight.</div>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Testament of Gideon Mack</em> should not have been long-listed for the 2006 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Booker_Prize" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Man Booker Prize</a>. It should have won it. Perhaps it didn't because some members of the review committee were themselves religious. The book is designed in a certain sense to offend. It would not offend a doubter, but it threatens the homey comfort of the believer. "How can it be blasphemous? It’s the truth. There isn’t a word of a lie in what you’ve heard." Gideon Mack tells his friend and fellow minister Lorna. She replies, "Of course it’s blasphemous. It goes against everything we stand for. You simply mustn’t repeat it." I urge you to ignore her advice.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-1326530052366631132014-12-05T19:57:00.000-05:002014-12-05T19:57:48.800-05:00Book Review: Can War be Eliminated? by Christopher Coker<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
In <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Can War be Eliminated?</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Can-War-Eliminated-Christopher-Coker/dp/0745679234" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18378600-can-war-be-eliminated" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], Christopher Coker takes only 108 pages to provide his answer. No, says Coker. The fault, as Shakespeare's <a href="http://shakespeare-navigators.com/JC_Navigator/JC_1_2.html#140" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Cassius told his friend Brutus</a>, is not in our stars but in ourselves.</div>
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Coker is a professor of international relations at the <a href="http://www.lse.ac.uk/home.aspx" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">London School of Economics and Political Science</a> (LSE), although he is described on the book's back cover as an "internationally known philosopher of war" - a much more fetching title to be sure. Coker's "<a href="http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/Experts/c.coker%40lse.ac.uk" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">expert's page</a>" at the LSE lists his academic publications since 2000 and prominently includes the cover image for this book. It is easier to see a list of his books on his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Christopher-Coker/e/B001H9VIK4" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon author page</a>, which stretches farther back in time.</div>
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The book is marketed using a clever summary taken from Coker's prologue: "This book challenges the view that war is an idea that we can cash in for an even better one - peace." It is perhaps more instructive to provide that quote its context:</div>
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In this brief essay, I will argue that, contrary to what many would argue, war is not pathological, any more than it is socially dysfunctional, and it most certainly is not just a bad idea that we can cash in for a better one, peace. It has played such a central role in the human story because it is embedded in our cultural evolution and, unfortunately, this is likely to remain the case for some time yet. (pp. xiv)</div>
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Coker has been recently prolific, breaking his two-decade pattern of slow and steady publication. He published <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Warrior Geeks: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Fight and Think About War</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Warrior-Geeks-Century-Technology-Changing/dp/0199327890/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15857348-warrior-geeks" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] in 2013, followed closely by <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Can War be Eliminated?</em> in early 2014 and <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Men At War: What Fiction Tells us About Conflict, From The Iliad to Catch-22</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Men-At-War-Conflict-Catch-22/dp/0199382972/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21005426-men-at-war" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] in mid 2014. Both <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Warrior Geeks</em> and <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Men at War</em> are substantially longer works.</div>
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One might wonder why he chose to highlight <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Can War be Eliminated?</em> on his LSE expert's page instead of his larger volumes that have frankly attracted better reviews. The answer may lie in the not uncommon criticisms to his books that they are laden with academic speech, relatively inaccessible by the general reader, and are heavily historical. I do not fault Coker for either of those. He is, after all, a philosopher of war. His outlook is deeply historical by design and his understanding sufficiently deep to warrant the use of a large vocabulary. His miserly social media presence (his profile on Linked In has only one connection and he does not seem to be present on others) strongly suggests that the general public is not his target audience. It would seem that he is an ivory tower academic, struggling to comprehend his subject rather than to profit by it. <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Can War be Eliminated?</em> may be more than the most recent book he placed on his LSE page. It might represent his answer to his most vexing question.</div>
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Let us examine Coker's thesis that war is neither pathological nor socially dysfunctional. War is unfortunately not pathological in its most common sense, as being associated with a disease. Our species wars by its very nature. Coker is particularly critical of the political scientist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mueller" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">John Mueller</a> who has argued that war is "just an idea" and may thus be cast aside if we choose to do so. Mueller argues that war is a cultural construct. Coker disagrees, as do I. War is, however, pathological in the sense of "behavior that is habitual, maladaptive, and compulsive" (from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition). Culture can make us more willing to war even to the point of compulsion. Coker dances around this second sense, exploring it by example more than by clear-eyed acknowledgement.</div>
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Coker's first chapter is entitled simply "Evolution", and his second simply "Culture". These two chapters hold for me the key to Coker's way of thinking. We are evolved to war and we have built cultures that universally acknowledge that central fact of our existence. How could it have been otherwise? Our ancestors, hairless, relatively weak, and fearful as predators go, had but two small advantages to allow them to live in a hostile world; the opposable thumbs that we heard so much about in school, and the social brains that developed in ratchet with them. We banded together and made tools.</div>
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It is interesting to note that in Ernest L. Schusky and T. Patrick Culburt's 1967 anthropology textbook, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Introducing Culture</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-culture-Prentice-Hall-anthropology-Schusky/dp/0134772407/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4817388-introducing-culture" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], the index entry for weapons reads: "<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">see also Tools</em>". Indeed, the words are used interchangeably in that text. Perhaps that tells us all we need to know. Our weak, vulnerable species would be in serious trouble in any jungle or forest of the world were it not for our ability to cooperate and make tools. That it is only catching up to us recently is what should amaze us.</div>
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The psychiatrist <a href="http://www.jandersonthomson.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Andy Thomson</a> has noted that "We are all trapped in a Stone Age brain." Coker agrees, commenting that "we remain linked to our prehistoric past." (pp. 108). That brain has left us with an ability to racket inventions and yet fear our own results. It is perhaps not surprising that the Christian Bible's <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/the-passages-that-readers-love/381373/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">most highlighted passage</a> on Amazon's Kindle is from <a href="http://www.ccel.org/study/Philippians_4:6-7" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Philippians 4:6-7</a>. The passage provides advice to lessen anxiety. We live, as so many have lived before us, in a time of great turmoil. Our turmoil tends to be of the kind seeking purpose rather than the existential kind our forebears so often faced. Regardless of media hype, we in the West have few truly existential threats at the moment.</div>
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We have difficulty separating real problems from relatively minor ones. It is ridiculous, for example, to characterize the Islamic State in the Levant as an existential threat to the United States. A proper existential threat occurs when one's food supply runs out or when your enemies have killed your neighbors and are on their way to kill you. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazidis" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Yazidis</a> of Eastern Kurdistan face an existential threat from the Islamic State. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munda_people" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Munda</a> tribal people of India's Jharkhand state face an existential threat as their forests are destroyed, as do the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarayaku" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Sarayaku</a> people of Ecuador. One might feel an existential threat from climate change if holding ocean front land in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiribati" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Kiribati</a>. One may not reasonably fear an existential threat if gasoline prices rise or Walmart finds it more difficult to source cheap travel mugs.</div>
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It is not even reasonable to fear an existential threat from the ebola virus, whether in the United States or even in West Africa. About 5,000 people have died from the recent ebola outbreak as I write this. Between a quarter million and a half million people die annually from influenza. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 600,000 people die annually from malaria and roughly half the world's population are at risk of contracting that disease. If we choose to fear diseases, where should our fears reasonably lie? Our stone age brain ensures that we do not always choose our fears based on reason.</div>
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We are, as a species, particularly poor at judging long term risks precisely because our brains clamor for attention when short term risks, however unlikely, present themselves. This is a legacy of our stone age brains that Coker rightfully highlights. It is also why we can so suddenly stumble into war.</div>
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That is not to say that I agree with all of Coker's evolutionary outlook. In fact, one particular sentence fussed me rather greatly. "Devoid of anti-social instincts we probably might have led a peaceful life," Coker assured, "but that is not how we are designed biologically." (pp. 5) There is much wrong with that. Firstly, it is our <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">social</em> instincts that have led to warfare. Our natural state, as Coker rightly points out, is in small hunter-gatherer tribes. Such tribes are tiny by modern standards, 25-75 people with a mean somewhere well shy of the average. Life in tribe was as simple as putting up with the oddities of your extended family group for your own protection and steadfastly defending it against anyone in other groups. Other humans, your "out group" in the phrasing of sociologists, constituted the greatest threat to your existence even in the presence of lions, tigers and bears. Oh, my.</div>
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Coker acknowledges this strong linkage between in-group bonding and out-group hostility:</div>
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Generally speaking, the more co-operative a species is within the group, the more hostility there is between groups. When there is a very variegated society, such as in New Guinea, which more than 800 languages, out-group enmity can be fierce.</div>
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It seems odd that he seemingly misses the point that our social instincts and our anti-social instincts are two sides of the same coin. We bond for survival and that causes us to fight with others. One immediately comes to think of modern religions. "Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics; And the Catholics hate the Protestants; And the Hindus hate the Moslems; And everybody hates the Jews." goes the lyrics to Tom Lehrer's satirical song <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIlJ8ZCs4jY" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">National Brotherhood Week</a>. We are simply incapable of defining an in-group without inadvertently defining an out-group. We make our brothers and sisters into perceived enemies by the very act of creating society.</div>
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Secondly, what life would we be living if our species hadn't evolved to war? It is a counterfactual thought experiment that is impossible to answer, but one strongly suspects that the entire evolution of our species would have been drastically different, so different in fact that "we" would not be here.</div>
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Lastly, we were certainly not designed at all. That might be just loose speech. The philosopher Daniel Dennett spent much time in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Intentional Stance</em> (1987) explaining why it is perfectly acceptable to view the products of evolution as if they were "good for something", an idea he reprised in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Darwin's Dangerous Idea</em> (1995). Nevertheless, given the contention in my home country related to the theory of evolution, I propose that more a careful characterization is necessary. It is only by being focused on what we are, as evolved animals, and being conscious of our own tendencies to fall into cognitive traps, that we can approach some form of objective truth.</div>
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Coker notes the opinion of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes that war is "central to the human condition". Hobbes' most famous quotation on the subject is undoubtedly from his masterwork <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Leviathan</em>, "the condition of Man... is a condition of Warre of every one against every one" and it is reasonable to presume that it was to this that Coker referred. It always seems learned to quote from ancient philosophers on the topic of your writing, but I do not believe that Coker has Hobbes rightly aligned in this particular case. The quotation comes from Chapter XIV of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Leviathan</em>, entitled "Of the First and Second Naturall Lawes and of Contracts" (sic). The context is Hobbes' discussion of liberty and natural rights and is part of his definition of what became known as social contract theory. It is from <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Leviathan</em> that we get the idea that the natural state of humanity was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" and that only the imposition of authority (government) has lifted us from that fate.</div>
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There was no room in Hobbes for the innate notions of humanity's group cohesion, or other inborn cognitive mechanisms that encourage us to foster stable social structures. Hobbes' natives are out for number one, always at each others' throats, locked a deadly competition to get ahead. We know now that hunter-gatherer tribes do not function like that at all. They are certainly not the noble savages of Hobbes' contemporary, the English poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dryden" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">John Dryden</a>, who coined the term in 1672, just 21 years after <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Leviathan</em> was published. These two competing concepts of the natural state of humanity, cruel and competitive versus noble and uncorrupted, had been strongly debated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Modern philosophies and legal systems, from Henry David Thoreau and Karl Marx to Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, still echo with the struggle to resolve these competing views. So too Jared Diamond's <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/World-Until-Yesterday-Traditional-Societies/dp/0143124404/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15766601-the-world-until-yesterday" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], a recent and brilliant description of primitive societies and our relationship to them. Coker notes that Diamond "makes short work of the idea that primitive societies are innately peaceful". (pp. 4)</div>
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My view is that the argument is purely a matter of scale. Humans do have innate cognitive biases that encourage us to form groups for survival. These traits, coupled with other cognitive features, ensure that the groups we form are rather small, most often just 25-50 close individuals with some much larger number of acquaintances. We consciously and subconsciously protect our group even at to the extreme of shunning or killing individuals who threaten group cohesion. That puts lie to Hobbes. However, we also are naturally fierce when we are both crowded and presented with an out-group that threatens our in-group. That puts the lie to the noble savage.</div>
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Onto culture. Coker's chapter romps lightly from Richard Dawkins' "selfish genes" to religion to action films to women warriors. In the middle of this scree, he has left out a few key aspects of our love affair with war. Chief among these is the culture of war production and how it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy through economic incentives. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself famously a career military man and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, <a href="http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">warned</a> against the growth of such a culture in 1960:</div>
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In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.</div>
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We now live with the consequences of ignoring Eisenhower's words. It is an almost shocking omission by Coker.</div>
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He does better when discussing what historian Ronald Wright has labeled a "progress trap" in his excellent book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">A Short History of Progress</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Progress-Ronald-Wright/dp/0786715472/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/331227.A_Short_History_of_Progress" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. Wright tells us that our pattern of overconsumption causes collapse and cycling, and that with each cycle the cost increases. To make the same point, Coker brings in Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, the military theorist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Carl von Clausewitz</a>, the political activist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Ehrenreich" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Barbara Ehrenreich</a>, the poet and soldier <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Owen" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Wilfred Owen</a>, the artist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Ono" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Yoko Ono</a> and others.</div>
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Coker slides along well-trodden paths by informing us that the Wright Brothers (inventors of the airplane) saw their invention used for war before being widely used for peaceful purposes. He adds in quotes from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Guglielmo Marconi</a> (radio) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Maxim" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Hiram Maxim</a> (the machine gun), just to make sure we got the point. Somehow he missed Alfred Nobel (the inventor of dynamite).</div>
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The book brims with quotations. They appear when randomly opening the book to almost any page, especially near the beginning. Here is a random sample:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"War is not the best way to settle differences, but it is the only way of preventing them from being settled for you." -- G.K. Chesterton</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"War: thunder against it." -- Flaubert</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"War is the art of embellishing death" -- Japanese proverb</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that some good may come of it" -- Basil Liddel-Hart</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"[War] is a protean activity... like disease, it exhibits the capacity to mutate, and it mutates fastest in the face of efforts to control or eliminate it" -- John Keegan</li>
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Sometimes Coker follows a thread of his own making long enough to drop an insight. "Technology is simply the further evolution of evolution;" we are told, "and technological evolution produces a variety of gadgets, machines, tools and techniques which help us to evolve its power to evolve." He nearly (seemingly independently) recapitulated <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Stuart Kauffman</a>'s theory of the <a href="http://www.theoryofmind.org/pieces/AAAPT.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">adjacent possible</a>. Typically, though, he fails to follow through. These insights are worth mining from the book if one is willing to piece them together oneself. Coker won't do it for you.</div>
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Coker does an excellent job summarizing the many aspects of the small-scale culture of warfare in a short space, but fails to address many large-scale cultural phenomena. The problem with using culture as the only solution to our social problems is that culture is fragile. Very fragile. It doesn't require a social collapse to decimate a culture. All it takes is parents who don't teach their children. An entire spoken language can become endangered within a single generation if it is not taught, as has been the case with many of the native languages of the Americas, from Yupik Eskimo speakers in Alaska to the Ona of Tierra del Fuego. Although a language can amazingly survive for generations with a handful of speakers (often shamans), one could hardly call such a culture healthy. In rare cases, a language and a culture can make a comeback, as with Irish since the independence of that country, but that is not the most common result. The linguist Andrew Dalby reports in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Language in Danger: How Language Loss Threatens Our Future</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Danger-Loss-Threatens-Future/dp/0713994436/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/576783.Language_in_Danger" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] that the world loses a language every two weeks.</div>
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The multi-generational linguistic research project <a href="http://www.ethnologue.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Ethnologue</a> currently estimates that there are 7,106 known living languages. At the current rate, we could reach monoculture in a mere 68 years. Let's hope that doesn't happen. I agree with Dalby that a world rich in linguistic diversity helps to make us resilient to a changing world. Unfortunately, loss of languages reduces our societal resilience much as modern warfare has become less adaptive to our long term survival.</div>
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Of course, cultures can be destroyed more quickly by the simple expediency of genocide. That ugly term is used so often in relation to Hitler's twelve million strong butcher's bill in Europe that we tend to forget that 3-4 times that many people were killed in Mao Ze-Dong's China and that Leopold II of Belgium's reign of terror in the Congo Free State has been estimated to have killed many more than Jozef Stalin's sickening but, by comparison, paltry seven million. We have a much harder time guessing the decimation of native peoples throughout the age of empire for which no good numbers exist. Hideki Tojo, prime minister of Japan during World War II, and the Cambodian communist Pol Pot don't even make the short list with their scant millions.</div>
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Having referenced Jared Diamond to good effect in his chapter on evolution, Coker fails to mention Diamond's later work such as <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Succeed-Revised-Edition/dp/0143117009" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/475.Collapse" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. That book informs us of the many reasons that societies can fail, most of which come down to overoptimism. Negative political and economic reactions to Al Gore's book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/An-Inconvenient-Truth-Al-Gore/dp/B000ICL3KG" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8714.An_Inconvenient_Truth" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] provide an example of such maladaptive optimism from our own time and place. We most often act as if we can afford to pursue short term goals at the expense of long term ones. Messengers who dare to warn of long term consequences are invariably pilloried.</div>
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That we invariably consider short term challenges to be more important than long term ones is another mammalian feature driven by evolution for our own immediate safety. Our ancestors could not afford to plan for the future when hunger and danger existed on a daily basis. Further, our brains ensure that we both overreact to any perceived immediate threat and also ascribe an intelligence to it. This is known in psychological circles as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_detection" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">hyperactive agency detection</a>. That is certainly a necessary survival skill but it works against us as societies get larger and we create long term problems for ourselves.</div>
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Criticisms of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Collapse</em>, for example, such as a <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/3555894" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">review in The Economist</a>, often take Diamond to task for not being optimistic enough. This should not be surprising. We humans are<a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090524122539.htm" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">optimistic by nature</a> and have a terrible aversion to bad news. Must all writing be formulaic such that it end on a high note? Jane Goodall's <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reason-Hope-Spiritual-Jane-Goodall/dp/0446676136/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/135484.Reason_for_Hope" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] is really quite a depressing book in spite of its title. Why should we have hope in the face of facts to the contrary? Because it sells books? Or because there is actually reason to be hopeful? Because, it seems, we need to hope in order to continue to act. Warnings like Diamond's, Gore's and Goodall's tell us in no uncertain terms that we can hope all we like, but we need to act as well. Cultural adaptations to avoid or limit warfare, such as strategic arms reduction treaties, proxy wars and the United Nations, are some of the ways that we can act. Coker does not explore these ideas nearly enough nor does he acknowledge their limitations.</div>
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It would have been useful to hear Coker's thoughts on the geopolitical analyst George Friedman's works, such as <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Next-100-Years-Forecast/dp/0767923057" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>,<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529579.The_Next_100_Years" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. There is no question in Friedman's mind that geopolitical realities will cause continued warfare. Coker does not cite him.</div>
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Where Coker focuses his prognostication on combined human-robot battlefields of the near future, Friedman is spends his time attempting to convince us that warfare will inevitably spread to space. Friedman's position is seemingly at odds with both history and international treaties. Although the United States unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union in 2002 (an event that led to the formation of the <a href="http://www.mda.mil/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">US Missile Defense Agency</a>), space-based weapons are prohibited by the older 1967<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Outer Space Treaty</a>. Most of the world's countries have signed that treaty, and over a hundred have ratified it including the United States, Russia and China. Only three attacks have been conducted in space to date: two satellites destroyed by the United States in 1985 and 2008 and one by China in 2007. All three were considered to be tests and, tellingly, all three were launches from the Earth. There is no current sign of Friedman's space-based weapons.</div>
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That may not be the end of the story. Friedman is probably correct when he worries that the military exploitation of space will not stop with communications and surveillance. All it takes to start an arms race is for one party to pursue advantage. I doubt very much that the United States would go to war with a country for withdrawing from the Outer Space Treaty. Friedman's arms race scenario would be a more natural result. It would have been useful for Coker to consider it.</div>
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Coker leaves out some surprising aspects of warfare. The nuclear powers have withheld from conducting a nuclear war since the dropping of the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy by the United States on the Empire of Japan, but few think we are completely done with nuclear weapons. Coker fails to address the world's nuclear arsenal at all. This might be due to his focus on the so-called "Western way of war", which is, in a word, limited.</div>
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Coker's book is, at its end, quite seriously dissatisfying. Although it is clearly written and well researched, it is also a collection of contradictions. In it is the fascinating and the mundane, the insightful and the obvious, the frightening and the comforting. It spans the ways people think and have thought about war from the ancient Greeks to the robotic battlefields of our near future. It leaves one with little room to doubt the negative conclusion he gives to his strawman question. The common wisdom, and that used by Coker, is that no individual society dare give up war any more than they dare give up agriculture.</div>
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Yet one is left to wonder, as Coker occasionally seems to do, how the situation might need to change anyway. For war is not the academic exercise that the book paints. War is the horrible suffering of millions so that a few in power can pursue their goals. War is death on a massive scale. War is dead sons, scarred daughters, homeless children. War is grown adults, irredeemably reduced to wounded animals, crying out shamelessly to their absent mothers. War leaves a trail of broken people, lost in alcoholism, drugs, domestic violence and private pain. It is war that teaches us the meanings of PTSD, POW, MIA, and KIA much more often than it presents us with heroes. War leaves farmland strewn with land mines and cities plagued with unexploded ordinance. These hideous presents to the future are rediscovered by livestock, children and the elderly. It is war that teaches us to hate so much that we yearn to try it again. War is a drug to which we are addicted and a high we dare not allow ourselves when we wield tools of mass destruction. </div>
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I am left dissatisfied with Coker's book for its easy answer as much as for its failings of content. There simply must be a better way to conduct our affairs than to allow war to dominate us, even if it means changing ourselves. Is it possible to give up war if other conditions apply, such as expansion into new frontiers off of our planet or by daring to make fundamental changes to the human brain? We should really think this through before we have the technologies to accomplish them. Coker does not dare to discuss any of the more radical alternatives.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-42544085501285829452014-11-26T18:01:00.001-05:002014-11-26T18:01:40.630-05:00Book Review: The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura J. Snyder<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
I wandered into <a href="http://riverbybooks.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Riverby Books</a> in downtown Fredericksburg one blustery autumn afternoon in the mood for some serendipity. Used bookstores may be going the way of the dodo (that is, headed for an early and forced extinction but destined to be brought back by some mad scientist of the near future in a slightly twisted guise), but they are the best sources of serendipity that I know. The smell of the place is distinctive but hardly uncommon. One may find it in used bookstores, libraries and scholars holes from Timbuctu to Taipei, but never in a chain bookstore. The most concentrated source of the scent of old paper and paper mold may be found in the city block of <a href="http://www.powells.com/locations/powells-city-of-books/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Powell's City of Books</a>, the Mecca of knowledge nerds. I would pay good money for iBooks or Kindle to produce such a smell.</div>
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The two glass windows flanking Riverby's wood-and-glass door invite one to stop and browse. A classic Underwood manual typewriter shows the first line from a classic novel on the top half of a sheet of US Letter. Tell the cashier who wrote it and get 10% off. A selection of banned books are proudly displayed with index cards explaining where and when they were banned. A whiteboard advertises specials, includes cute drawings and exhorts engagement. Inside, cookbooks vie with vintage comics, classic novels with the history of Rome, used philosophy books sold back by university students and a stack of restored Compact Oxford English Dictionaries in the original slipcases and including the reading glasses necessary for the tiny print. The book binder's corner is almost hidden by a display of fine bindings in leather and gold. The rare book cabinets sit just across from the constantly changing novelty shelves that stretch from floor to high ceiling, some at intentionally odd angles. There are stacks of recently acquired books on the stairs, posters and maps on the walls. Original drawings from Maurice Sendak's <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Where the Wild Things Are</em> catch my wife's eye every time we stroll by. I enter and inhale.</div>
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I walk past the novelties on my way to Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome but something catches my eye. Something almost always does. A copy of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Philosophical-Breakfast-Club-Transformed/dp/0767930495" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9138231-the-philosophical-breakfast-club" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] by Laura J. Snyder sits facing outward on an set of shelves canted sideways right into the natural traffic flow. It is shiny and new with a perfect dust jacket. The cover mirrors Riverby itself with its full height bookshelves, tabletop telescope and photographs of four of the most important scientists of the early nineteenth century, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Whewell" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">William Whewell</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Herschel" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">John Herschel</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jones_(economist)" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Richard Jones</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Charles Babbage</a>. I knew of the astronomer Herschel and of course Babbage the mathematical genius who invented the first programmable computer, friend to the first computer programmer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Augusta Ada King</a> nee Byron, Countess of Lovelace (known as Ada Lovelace). I recalled vaguely that Whewell had coined the word "scientist". Snyder would soon fill in the many missing details.</div>
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The book promises to show how these four friends set out to revolutionize the practice of science and then, incredibly, did it. As a history, it has it all; a catchy title, a true and interesting story told like a novel, and subject matter that keeps giving and giving. Snyder proves herself a historian to watch. I would read anything she writes. Thank you Riverby. I feel guilty at the recognition that Snyder won't see any of the paltry $5.98 I hand over for the hardback. I would have paid twice that at Amazon but never would have found it on Amazon. It sold for six times that amount when it was first published in 2011. Riverby and Powell's capture my business by providing the serendipity still missing from online alternatives.</div>
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Fortunately for us all, Snyder has written more. Her <a href="http://laurajsnyder.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Web site</a> lists two more books as grand in scope as <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Philosophical Breakfast Club</em>: This year brought <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0226767337/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3671515-reforming-philosophy" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] and next promises us <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0393077462/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22253713-eye-of-the-beholder" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] about the seventeenth century developments in optics. She gave a <a href="http://laurajsnyder.com/portfolio-item/ted-global-2012/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">TED talk</a> on <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Philosophical Breakfast Club</em> in 2012 and somehow manages to find time to teach at <a href="http://www.stjohns.edu/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">St. John’s University</a> in New York. I console myself that she will see some cash from me for the new works.</div>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Philosophical Breakfast Club</em> begins with a triumphant speech by Whewell at the <a href="http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">British Association for the Advancement of Science</a> at the height of his career and soon flashes back to his childhood. Snyder's story hangs off of Whewell, who served in life as the instigator, foil and correspondent for the other three as well as a first-rate scientist in his own right. Snyder uses the the voluminous extant letters of the four men and many of their contemporaries to paint a detailed, personal account of their extraordinary lives. She seems to know as much of the four men as their wives and mothers and perhaps, with the advantage of distance, more.</div>
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William Whewell was a mathematical whiz. He was a poor boy who struggled to pay his way during his time as a student at Cambridge. His home parish raised money to get him there and he worked throughout his time there in order to stay. Before his long run as an academic was over, he would become Master of Trinity College, hold a professorship in mineralogy, write physics textbooks, revolutionize the study of the tides with one of the first worldwide data collection efforts, and write a major work of philosophy. Says Snyder,</div>
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Whewell suggested "Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene" to the geologist Charles Lyell as names for historical epochs, and in a few years he would give Michael Faraday the terms "ion, cathode, and anode" for his electrical research.</div>
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Besides "scientist", Whewell would also coin the word "physicist", both by analogy with the word artist. He was one of the most fascinating and capable characters you have probably never heard of.</div>
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The Reverend Richard Jones was a founder of modern economics. His <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and on the Sources of Taxation</em> [<a href="https://archive.org/stream/essayondistribut00jonerich/essayondistribut00jonerich_djvu.txt" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">full text</a>] in 1831 was the first major work of economics to rely on both the massive collection of real-world data and the statistical analysis thereof. He served first as a rural curate, interested mostly in gardening, and following his book, as a professor of political economy. He arguably, as Snyder argues, would not have finished the massive work except for Whewell's constant prodding. The one surviving<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jones_(economist)#mediaviewer/File:Richard_Jones00.jpg" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">photo of Jones</a> shows an unhappy man, looking downward, corpulent and clearly depressed. He is the only one of the four whose eyes do not radiate their intelligence and learning.</div>
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Sir John Hershel was not just any astronomer. He was the son of astronomer William Herschel, the discoverer of the planet Uranus, and carried on his work on cataloging double stars and nebulae in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Throughout a lifetime of science, he discovered seven planetary moons, conducted a major study in the botany of South Africa and was one of the inventors of photography.</div>
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Charles Babbage, another mathematician, has had the most lasting reputation of the four due to the influence of computing on our current age. </div>
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Snyder shows herself equally comfortable with history, science and the history of science. The dispassionate eye of the historian mixes nicely with the sympathetic observer of human nature. The only one who is treated at arm's length is perhaps Babbage. Babbage's behavior, especially in middle age, was variously described as "spiteful", "cruel", and "snide". Babbage was "never one to underestimate his own intelligence." Snyder seems to have justification for these descriptions in the letters of her protagonists as they struggled to maintain positive relations with their misanthropic friend.</div>
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Here is the voice of the professional historian, introducing the concerns of the original Luddites:</div>
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Babbage had realized that just as steam-driven mechanical looms were replacing men and women in the wool and cotton mills, so too could a machine replace the human computers. [He] seemed unconcerned that unemployed English computers would riot like the unemployed wool and cotton workers had done in Whewell's home county of Lancashire in 1813 (it helped that these were still part-time laborers; only after 1832 did computing for the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Nautical Almanac</em> become a full-time job). During these labor disturbances and others that took place between 1811 and 1816 in the manufacturing districts in the north of England, displaced workers destroyed mechanical looms and clashed with government troops. The term <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Luddite</em> was coined in this period, after Ned Ludd, an English laborer who was lionized for having destroyed two stocking frames in a factory around 1779. Babbage would have none of this Luddism. Progress in science and industry required more mechanical means of calculation, as well as mechanical means of factory manufacturing, and nothing would stand in the way of that progress. (pp. 83)</div>
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Snyder's clear prose not only introduces Babbage's immediate concerns and the environment in which he worked, but ties Whewell's personal story into the picture, explains a modern term few know the full etymology of and throws in a substantial portion of the early history of computing. All in one easily readable paragraph! She handily ties her history to our own modern day problems, which we instantly recognize in Babbage's.</div>
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Here is the science writer, not a scientist, but one who is perfectly comfortable explaining complex ideas:</div>
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Newton established that the attractive forces of the sun and moon produced a tide-generating force; but it still remained to be shown <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">how</em> the law of universal gravitation could account for particular tides. His theory as applied to the tides did correctly predict some of the observed phenomena, such as the known fact that the oceanic high tides lag roughly three hours behind the syzygies (when the sun, earth, and moon are aligned, which happens at the time of the full moon and the new moon). But Newton's analysis was inconsistent with many of the observations that did exist, indicating that the relation between the tides and the gravitation between the earth, sun and moon was still not fully understood. In particular, his theory did not provide any understanding of factors that might counteract the attractive force. (pp. 171)</div>
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A lessor writer would have dodged the word syzygies altogether, or discussed Whewell's groundbreaking work on understanding tides without bothering to describe why Newton's theory was insufficient. Perhaps she knew of syzygy's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syzygy" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">many synonyms</a> from her studies, such as the philosophic sense used to denote a close union or alternatively a union of opposites.</div>
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Of course, no one is perfect. Snyder credits Whewell for bringing about "a particular vision of what a modern scientist does", especially in his massive data collection efforts. She fails to mention Whewell's contemporary Matthew Fontaine Maury, who used identical methods on the other side of the Atlantic in the same years. There is more to that story than Snyder admits. "Where Maury mapped the oceans, Whewell mapped the coasts", <a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2012/08/matthew-maury-and-william-whewella.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">notes</a> Caren Cooper of Cornell University.</div>
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In describing the mechanism connecting the number-crunching central "mill" in Babbage's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Analytical Engine</a> to the "store" that provided memory storage, Snyder makes a point of referencing a modern expert who calls it a "memory data bus". She apparently missed that the term <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_(computing)" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">bus</a> has become the common term of art. She did recognize just how much of Babbage's architecture for his earlier <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Difference Engine</a> and later, general purpose, Analytical Engine presaged the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">von Neumann architecture</a> used in the first stored-program digital computers, although she failed to mention John von Neumann by name. Readers may be rightfully surprised to discover that Babbage not only designed the machines but peripheral devices such as graph plotters and printers.</div>
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Snyder does not address that most vexing question for large-scale mechanical computing: How did Babbage intend to overcome the large amount of friction caused by the interactions of his many gears? There is modern evidence to suggest that both friction and the inability to finely machine the parts required doomed the Difference Engine. Snyder instead blames only Babbage. "For Babbage, the enemy of the good was always the better", claimed Snyder, which, although no doubt true, misses the point somewhat. A more careful reading of modern scholarship on Babbage's engines would have uncovered his inability to overcome practical limitations. His engines worked at scale only on paper. Modern reconstructions do exist - in software where friction and machining are not limiting.</div>
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Babbage, that master of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">deductive reasoning</a>, was also the odd man out in other ways. The four friends had come together at Cambridge University and as students met regularly for the eponymous breakfast discussions. They decided at Whewell's prodding to dedicate their lives to further the ideas of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Francis Bacon</a>. Bacon was the first to codify what we now think of as the scientific method and promoted <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">inductive reasoning</a> as key to advancement in science. Induction is the collection of many specific examples of a phenomenon and then eventually theorizing a general law to fit the collected evidence; it is the philosophic opposite of deduction which proceeds directly from some principle to others by the rules of logic. Of course, scientists now use both induction and deduction to analyze nature, just as was done in the early nineteenth century. The members of the philosophical breakfast club weren't after mundane, plodding science. They wanted to uncover grand new laws of nature. For that, they needed induction. Hershel, Jones and Whewell, following Bacon to the letter, pleaded for the use of induction in their great works. It is easy, they thought, to be led astray by logically proceeding from a bogus presumption. The truth of that risk continues to dog many would-be philosophers and their followers today. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">John Dewey</a>'s presumptive twentieth century educational reforms and their aftermath are as fine an example as we could wish.</div>
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And British science in the early nineteenth century did need help. The breakfast club's contemporary Charles Dickens could have been talking about British science in his opening paragraph to <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">A Tale of Two Cities</em>:</div>
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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.</div>
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Babbage eventually broke ranks as progress on his Difference Engine broke new ground. Deduction has its place, after all. Whewell, himself a mathematician of note, felt that Babbage had betrayed the goals of the club. It is hard for a modern computer scientist to agree. The ability to compute on a massive scale, rapidly and with accuracy, has brought new abilities to pursue both pure and applied science.</div>
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Complaining about the London Statistical Society's focus on the collection of facts alone, Whewell complained that "they would go on better if they had some zealous <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">theorists</em> among them...Unconnected facts are of comparatively small value." (pp. 153) The computer scientist Jeff Hawkins noted a similar problem in late twentieth century neuroscience research when he said:</div>
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There was an unending supply of things to study and read about, but I was not gaining any clear understanding of how the whole brain actually worked or even what it did. This was because the field of neuroscience itself was awash in details. It still is. Thousands of research reports are published every year, but they tend to add to the heap rather than organize it. There's still no overall theory, no framework, explaining what your brain does and how it does it.</div>
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It is hard to remember that you came to drain the swamp, goes the joke, when you are up to your ass in alligators. It is a problem that is likely to become steadily worse as science and engineering continue to specialize. Hawkins, like a good inductionist, proceeded to put forward his theory based on the myriad of observations. Whewell, Jones and Hershel did the same thing in their time.</div>
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Any Englishman uncertain whether such philosophic differences had practical consequence would have become certain as workhouses were constructed throughout England during this period. The poorest members of society were at first encouraged and eventually forced (after 1834) to pay their debts by moving into workhouses that separated family members and reduced laborers to virtual slaves. This system was unabashedly based on the social theories of the political economists <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Thomas Malthus</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">David Ricardo</a>, and the social reformer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Chadwick" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Edwin Chadwick</a>, a protégé of the philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Jeremy Bentham</a>. Bentham founded the philosophic movement of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Utilitarianism</a>, which suggested calculation of any proposed course of action to maximize overall happiness. It may be useful to apply such a calculus to an individual, but to apply it to a society one runs the substantial risk of justifying suffering of the socially inconvenient. Philosophy mattered as much in the first half of the nineteenth century as it did in the latter half, when the application of the ideas of Darwin and Marx would instigate social change that would take more than a century to painfully play out.</div>
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Babbage's ideas about religion also rankled. All four men were religious and seemingly honestly so. Jones and Whewell were ordained ministers of the Church of England. Herschel and Babbage were wealthy enough not to need to be. Snyder does a fine job describing his house parties in which Babbage used a small Difference Engine was used to count from one to one hundred, one digit at a time. As the machine reached the one hundred mark, it would begin to count by twos.</div>
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What you just witnessed seemed almost miraculous, did it not? he asked them. It seemed like the machine would just keep counting by one for an eternity. And yet this is not what occurred. The machine suddenly changed its course and began to count by a new rule.</div>
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Is this not what we feel when we look at nature, and see wondrous and inexplicable events, such new species arising as others die off? Babbage inquired. Is this not typically explained by supposing that God, our creator, our inventor if you will, has intervened in the world causing this event, outside of the natural order of things? Is this not exactly what we call a "miracle"?</div>
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Babbage had set a feedback mechanism to change the function being computed when the value reached one hundred. He had invented the idea of God as algorithm. Personal interventions were not necessary to keep the world running, as Isaac Newton had believed. In this he was expressing, rather uncomfortably for his ordained friends, a quite <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Deist</a>viewpoint. Snyder never quite hangs the term Deist on Babbage.</div>
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Whewell, Herschel and Jones might have been equally disquieted by the comments of Henry Wilmot Buxton, who said of Babbage that he "had taught wheelwork <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">to think</em>, or at least to do the office of thought." (pp. 88) The implications of artificial intelligence have yet to be dealt with today. We have the entrepreneur billionaire Elon Musk <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/26/technology/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-demon/index.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">warning</a> in 2014 that AI is "our biggest existential threat." It is unclear whether Musk's fears have any basis in reality, but the threat to traditional religion and the concept of the soul is enough to trouble many and was certainly enough to trouble our Anglican protagonists.</div>
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Snyder reminds us that most men of science at the time thought of science, indeed - fought for science, to be seen as an equally valid avenue to approach the divine. "The idea was that nature was one of God's two books - the other, of course, being the Bible." says Snyder. She is right to remind us, "At that time, especially in Britain, science and religion were not considered enemies; on the contrary, they were seen as compatriots, both devoted to the appreciation of the Creator of the universe." Times have changed. It has been widely noted that a <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v394/n6691/full/394313a0.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">survey</a> of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reported that "72.2% did not [believe in a god] and 20.8% were agnostic or had doubts". It is no longer fashionable or required for most scientists to express faith in a national religion.</div>
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Snyder notes that Whewell closely followed the British philosopher and cleric <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Paley" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">William Paley</a> in believing that religion and science were necessarily aligned. His <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Astronomy and General Physics considered with reference to Natural Theology</em> in 1833 echoed Paley's argument that we so well fit our environment that it could not be a matter of chance. It would take Darwin to show that their argument had it exactly backward: We so well fit our environment because we evolved to fit it well, as Bertrand Russell pointed out in his 1927 essay <a href="http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;"> <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Why I Am Not A Christian</em> </a>. Paley's "divine watchmaker" has given way to Dawkins' "blind watchmaker".</div>
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It was Paley who first used the human eye as an example of something that was too complex to have occurred by chance. His lack of imagination led him to conclude that a creator must be required. This argument is still a mainstay of the argument for so-called Intelligent Design. It has been thoroughly debunked by modern science. </div>
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Intelligent Design enthusiasts say that certain biological features are far too complex to have been evolved using Darwin's algorithm. They (especially <a href="http://www.lehigh.edu/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Lehigh University</a> biochemistry professor <a href="http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/behe.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Michael Behe</a>) have claimed that since very complex structures (such as the eye) rely on the simultaneous activation of many (tens, hundreds, thousands) of genes, they could not possibly evolve by successive single mutations. This is known as "irreducible complexity", because the complex nature of the structure is not thought to be reducible into a series of single mutations. That is just not the case. A research team led by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Adami" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Chistoph Adami</a> at the <a href="http://www.kgi.edu/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Keck Graduate Institute</a> and <a href="http://www.caltech.edu/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Cal Tech</a> in 2005 used software modeling to show how complex adaptive traits such as the eye can evolve using only the Darwinian algorithm via the accumulation of mutations. This is possible because random mutations may survive temporarily even if they are not in themselves adaptive - giving other mutations the opportunity to build upon them.</div>
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It is interesting to note that the men of the philosophical breakfast club reached their respective zeniths during a period of post-Enlightenment revivalism and before Darwin injected the first serious scientific basis for doubting revelation. A young Darwin features as a bit player in Snyder's book, bringing elements of foreshadowing to her story. It is also interesting that both Babbage's deduction and Darwin's induction resulted in the understanding of powerful algorithms that would together shape our world. One cannot help but think that both camps had their legitimate points.</div>
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We stand on the shoulders of these giants, as Isaac Newton famously observed of his previously unreferenced sources. We need not overly worry that they were merely human and had their faults. As <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Arthur C. Clarke</a> observed, "If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."</div>
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Snyder ends her history with an almost paradoxical plea, that the separation of science from art - and perhaps implicitly of science from religion - be healed. The difference before and after the philosophical breakfast club was the difference before and after the industrial revolution: The age of the generalist was overtaken, rather brutally, by the age of the specialist. She makes much of Herschel's preferential views on art while noting that the members of the philosophical breakfast club began the process of separation, as science moved at their behest toward a professional discipline of specialists. It seems wistful and unrealistic to desire a return of the amateur. And yet, how many scientists, engineers, medical doctors today play a musical instrument, draw, paint, write? Many if not most in my personal experience. If anything, the results of the club's desire to see Bacon's induction at the forefront of science and Babbage's personal journey into dedicated deduction have helped usher in such a golden age of scientific discovery. It is an age when many of us have the opportunity to learn, discover, and play more than every before.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-6206295881897234252014-11-17T19:44:00.000-05:002014-11-19T19:25:10.882-05:00Book Review: Why We Believe in God(s) by J. Anderson Thomson<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
We lined up shoulder-to-shoulder with our arms around each other. We swayed back and forth as we sang. The little old lady to my left was frail and I was acutely conscious not to knock her off balance, nor to bruise her. The song, of course, was Amazing Grace. It is a beautiful and powerful song, perhaps one of the best spirituals ever written. We lifted our voices and sang. We swayed together, left and right.</div>
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Slides walked us through the lyrics, projected on a large screen at the front of the room. It seems that everyone knew the first verse, but not the others. "'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved," we sang, struggling to hit the high notes, "How precious did that grace appear, the hour I first believed!"</div>
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Not one of us believed a word. This was, after all, a meeting of the <a href="http://www.meetup.com/FredericksburgSecularHumanists/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Fredericksburg Secular Humanists</a>. We all sat down as J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD, author of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Believe-God-Concise/dp/0984493212/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10361826-why-we-believe-in-god-s" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], asked us for a show of hands. Andy is a practicing psychiatrist located near the University of Virginia and a faculty member there.</div>
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"How many of you feel more positive than you did before singing?", asked Andy. Almost every hand went up. He had us test our pain threshold by pinching the sensitive fleshy area on the back of our hands, between thumb and forefinger. It just didn't hurt as much as it did before we had sang. We had just proven by experiment his contention that ritual group behavior, what Andy calls "song, dance and trance", has a measurable positive effect on the mood and emotions of human beings.</div>
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You can do a small scale version of this experiment on yourself. Thomson tells you how on pages 99-100.</div>
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The vast majority of people believe in some form of god or another form of supernatural agency such as ghosts, a guiding hand, a purpose of some form. Many believe in reincarnation, bodily or not, and an immortal soul. Why should this be? Clearly it is not because we all, from primitive people to airplane-riding denizens of skyscrapers have the same perception of the same god. As Sir James George Frazer and Joseph Campbell showed, religions differ predictably in their fundamentals as the geography of their adherents change.</div>
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Frazer's epic study of comparative religion in the 1890's, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Bough-Religion-Abridgement-Editions/dp/0199538824/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/143313.The_Golden_Bough" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] was followed by Campbell's equally epic follow on two generations later with his Masks of God series: <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Primitive Mythology</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Masks-God-Vol-Primitive/dp/0140194436" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/589064.Primitive_Mythology" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Oriental Mythology</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Oriental-Mythology-The-Masks-God/dp/0140194428/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35520.Oriental_Mythology" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Occidental Mythology</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Occidental-Mythology-Masks-Joseph-Campbell/dp/014019441X/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>,<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/168402.Occidental_Mythology" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] and <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Creative Mythology</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Mythology-Joseph-Campbell/dp/B00E26TIEC/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/985519.Creative_Mythology" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. Thomson does not seem to be familiar with either of these studies. Of course, comparing religions was not his goal. Instead, he informs the reader that his studies were informed by the potent combination of his training as a clinical psychiatrist, including Sigmund Freud's <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Future of an Illusion</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Standard-Complete-Psychological-Sigmund/dp/0393008312/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/80458.The_Future_of_an_Illusion_The_Standard_Edition_" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], his own personal atheism and the near-death experience of his son Mathew during the horror of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">9/11 attack on New York</a>. He is interested in what is capable of turning a person from a religious believer into a suicide bomber.</div>
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<a href="http://worldreligions.psu.edu/images/artimages/maps/worldmap.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQkdC8jmp73F7nI6bSgvdkDXDvnp0liaQ680nfYlnQW-eaAKj4xdXZHQ97JONnZ_ct7Zie4KVn0lp_i5AYUjWdmUxDQOS4lnxJi9CQmVwOJIDgbDOYBPJbnMlQstaK6ZaE5UWC9w/s1600/worldmapofreligion.jpg" height="159" width="320" /></a></div>
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Distribution of dominant world religions (Click image to expand)</div>
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No, Thomson did not set out to compare religions. He set out to determine why we believe. That is a tall order and one with a storied history. Heavy thinkers for more than the last two millennia focused on explaining why we <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">should</em> believe instead of why we <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">do</em>. Aristotle, noting that all activities have cause, postulated a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">prime mover</a> (or unmoved mover) that began all events. St. Thomas Aquinas summarized five reasons (the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinque_viae" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">quinque viae</a>) to believe in the Christian god in his book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Summa Theologica</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Summa-Theologica-Thomas-Aquinas-Volumes/dp/0870610635" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25709.Summa_Theologica_5_Vols" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] in the thirteenth century. There have been so many others, from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">ontological argument</a> of René Descartes to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Pascal's Wager</a>. All of them, shows Thomson, have missed the point entirely.</div>
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I had already read <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Why We Believe in God(s)</em> when I had the opportunity to hear Andy speak at a <a href="http://www.meetup.com/FredericksburgSecularHumanists/events/209338672/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">lecture</a> in October 2014. He is personally engaging, passionate about his topic and very obviously experienced as a lecturer.</div>
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The book is wonderfully concise and has playful, almost humorous, aspects to it. Each chapter is cleverly titled using either a Biblical quotation or one from Christian culture. In spite if its brevity, it has the potential to start a long overdue, critical conversation about religious thought. Why do we believe in gods? Because, as Andy put it in his Fredericksburg lecture, "We are all trapped in a Stone Age brain."</div>
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The book is a product of <a href="http://pitchstonepublishing.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Pitchstone Publishing</a>, a pocket publisher of the "new atheist" genre located in Thomson's home town of Charlottesville, Virginia. Their Web site lists only a meager seventeen print titles. I have heard of at least one of them, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">A Manual For Creating Atheists</em> by philosopher Peter Boghossian [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Manual-Creating-Atheists-Peter-Boghossian/dp/1939578094" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17937621-a-manual-for-creating-atheists" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. It is on my reading list. Some of the other authors are psychiatrists like Thomson. The book was co-authored by Clare Aukofer, a medical writer and frequent collaborator of Thomson's.</div>
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There have been other attempts to explain why religious thought is so prevalent. Bertrand Russell's 1927 essay <a href="http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;"> <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Why I Am Not A Christian</em> </a>brilliantly and insightfully went to the heart of the matter: Addressing why arguments for the existence of god and the usefulness of the church, Russell systematically dismantled rational reasons to believe. His arguments against the design of nature were powerfully supported by Darwin's theory and pointed out that, with evidence to show that we have adapted to our environment, it was no longer sensible to argue that the environment was designed for us. Today's generation of both theists and atheists would benefit from dusting off Russell's essay.</div>
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More recently, in 2003, Christopher Hitchens took a stand against any form of revealed religion. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Hitchens' Razor</a> states, "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". Hitchens followed astrophysicist Carl Sagan in his "<a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/16/baloney-detection-kit/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">baloney detection kit</a>", introduced in his 1997 book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Demon-Haunted World</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349.The_Demon_Haunted_World" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. Their arguments echo other rational thinkers like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel Dennett. So-called "new atheists" such as Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett and their predecessors like Sagan have argued from the standpoint of logic. This is rational because science has uncovered two critical facts:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">The mechanisms of the world can be understood and explained through the scientific method, logic and mathematics.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Humans do not think logically very often or for very long.</li>
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Unfortunately, point #2 ensures that most people will never be swayed by logical arguments such as Russell's.</div>
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The journalist, author and educator Michael Shermer touched on Thomson's core argument in his 1997 book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and Other Confusions of Our Time</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudo-Science/dp/1567313590/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89281.Why_People_Believe_Weird_Things" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. Although Shermer is not a scientist and did not have the benefit of the last decade of neuroscience, he managed like Russell to close on the core problem:</div>
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In my opinion, most believers in miracles, monsters, and mysteries are not hoaxers, flimflam artists, or lunatics. Most are normal people whose normal thinking has gone wrong in some way.</div>
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Shermer proceeded to list a large number of logical fallacies where people's thinking goes wrong. He thus follows centuries of atheistic thinkers who can prove logically reasons for disbelief without being able to explain why people behave as they do. It is not uncommon for scientific explanations to proceed from facts, to knowledge, to theory, to more fully complete theory. Darwin's <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">On the Origin of Species</em>, published in 1859, did not in fact explain the origin of species, only their differentiation. Others were required to do that following the explanation of genetic coding by Darwin's contemporary Gregor Mendel and the description of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick a century later.</div>
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By contrast with these earlier authors, Thomson has effectively related the mechanisms of evolutionary psychology to the actions evinced by religious thinkers. Where Shermer was only able to list, Thomson has been able to explain. Thomson systematically describes the reasons and benefits of each cognitive feature prevalent in religious thought so that we may see how and why it has been adopted for that purpose. Religion, it turns out, has empirically come to use each aspect of our brains that enable the religion itself to be considered compelling. It is critically important for memes to be sticky; those that are attract adherents and thrive. Those that do not whither and die. A wonderful example is how the proselytizing religions such as mainstream Christianity grow while smaller factions that do not proselytize, and in fact erect a high barrier to entry such as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Shakers</a>, have disappeared entirely or have fallen to just a few members.</div>
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Thomson challenges us to think about who we really are and how we really think. Not many will welcome such introspection. Reading Why We Believe in God(s), I am reminded of that other great modern insight, that the concept of self is also an illusion. In <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity</em> by Bruce Hood [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Self-Illusion-Social-Creates-Identity/dp/0199988781/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18050103-the-self-illusion" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], we are asked to consider what that would mean:</div>
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One can imagine all sorts of scenarios in which brain structures are copied or replaced cell by cell until none of the original brain material is left and yet people maintain an intuition that the self somehow continues to exist independently of all these physical changes. If that were true, then one would have to accept a self that can exist independently of the brain. Most neuroscientists reject that idea. Rather, our brain creates the experience of our self as a model - a cohesive, integrated character - to make sense of the multitude of experiences that assault our senses throughout a lifetime and leave lasting impressions in our memory.</div>
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This exploration seems dangerous and perhaps it is. Challenging our most closely held beliefs about ourselves may be our final frontier - and maybe even a frontier where most of us dare not go.</div>
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In an attempt to summarize Thomson's long list of cognitive features that relate to religious behavior, I decided to group them by their evolutionary benefit. The first and longest list relate to group cohesiveness. Group cohesiveness is critically important to the survival of humans and our closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos. Interestingly, it seems that these features align with a category of behavior theorized by Jean Piaget's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_development" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">theory of cognitive development</a>, especially Piaget's symbolic function substage that kicks in between two and four years of age and that is characterized by the beginning of social behavior.</div>
<table border="1" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" class="table table-bordered" style="background-color: white; border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; max-width: 100%; width: 1140px;"><caption style="box-sizing: border-box;">Cognitive Features Driven By Group Cohesiveness</caption><colgroup style="box-sizing: border-box;"><col style="box-sizing: border-box;" xmlns=""></col><col style="box-sizing: border-box;" xmlns=""></col><col style="box-sizing: border-box;" xmlns=""></col></colgroup><thead style="box-sizing: border-box;">
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;"></th><th style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;">Thomson's Definition</th><th style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;">Notes</th></tr>
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<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Decoupled Cognition</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">This allows us to conduct a complex social interaction in our mind with an unseen other.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Also related to mating behavior. We choose much of our behavior after playing out various scenarios in our heads to judge which would yield results closest to the ones we want.</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Attachment</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">This most basic of human needs almost defines religion’s premise. Religion supplements or supplants family.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Also related to safety. We cling to family in times of hardship or crisis.</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Intensionality</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">This allows us to speculate about others’ thoughts about our thoughts, desires, beliefs, and intentions.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Also related to mating behavior. We take actions based on what we think others are thinking.</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Theory of Mind</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">This allows us to “read” others’ possible thoughts, desires, beliefs, and intentions.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Also related to mating behavior and closely with intensionality. Thomson: "A chimpanzee mother will never share her baby, but humans will because we can judge trust."</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Mirror Neurons</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">We literally feel each other’s pain; this is inborn, not invented by religion. We are born caring about others.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Also related to safety. Mirror neurons are also implicated in spectator sports and probably systems that inspire via grandeur (e.g. Catholicism, British Empire).</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Transference</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">We can accept religious figures as easily as we accepted the family figures we’ve known since birth. We transfer our familial thoughts to religious figures.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Who are our parental figures once our parents have died or are absent? Not everyone is comfortable becoming parents without a safety net.</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Deference to Authority</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">We are all more deferential to authority figures than we can see or want to admit to ourselves.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">See <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Stanley Milgram's experiments</a>.</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Kin Psychology</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">We are hardwired to prefer our kin over others.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">This simple survival mechanism allows us to define an "in group", which has the natural result of simultaneously defining the opposite: the out group. Those not in the in group become <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">The Other</a>.</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Reciprocal Altruism</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Probably just a human iteration of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_grooming" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">social grooming</a> in other animals.</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Moral Feeling Systems</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">These generate moral decisions. They are instinctual and automatic. Because they operate largely outside of awareness, religions can claim ownership of them and insist that we are only moral with faith.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Experiments related to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_sense_theory" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">moral sense theory</a> shows that moral feelings are innate and not a product of religion.</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Ritual behavior - song, dance and trance</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">This enhances group cohesion and tests who is committed to the group. Song and dance harness our neurochemistry that reduces pain and fear and increases trust, love, self-esteem, and cooperation.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">This was what Thomson was illustrating with the song and dance experiment discussed above.</td></tr>
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The following, plus the ones noted in the table above, all relate to safety:</div>
<table border="1" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" class="table table-bordered" style="background-color: white; border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; max-width: 100%; width: 1140px;"><caption style="box-sizing: border-box;">Cognitive Features Related to Safety</caption><colgroup style="box-sizing: border-box;"><col style="box-sizing: border-box;" xmlns=""></col><col style="box-sizing: border-box;" xmlns=""></col><col style="box-sizing: border-box;" xmlns=""></col></colgroup><thead style="box-sizing: border-box;">
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;"></th><th style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;">Thomson's Definition</th><th style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;">Notes</th></tr>
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<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Hyperactive agency detection (HADD)</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">This leads us to assume that unknown forces are human agents. It evolved to protect us. We mistake a shadow for a burglar and never mistake a burglar for a shadow. It encourages anthropomorphism.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Errors toward false positives, and a near-complete elimination of false negatives.</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Promiscuous Teleology</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">This arises from our bias to understand the world as purpose driven.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Why? What benefit do we get from that? Perhaps we benefit from the presumption that the world is understandable even though nature can be capricious. All of science presumably arises from the bias to understand the world as being understandable.</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Childhood Credulity</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">We all believe too readily, with too little evidence. Children are even more vulnerable, especially when taught by someone with a mantle of authority.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">What happens during adolescence that reduces this?</td></tr>
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Some of these features date to the far evolutionary past of our species, so far in fact that we could reasonably suppose that other animals share them. Others seem to be related to "higher" thought. There is almost surely a continuum between humans and other animals in this regard. Darwin was the first to intuit (or at least to have the guts to express, however lately and reluctantly) that the theory of evolution applied to humans as well as any other animal. Thomson quotes Darwin at the beginning of his seventh chapter, "Such social qualities, the paramount importance of which to the lower animals is disputed by no one, were no doubt acquired by the progenitors of man in a similar manner, namely, through natural selection, aided by inherited habit."</div>
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As we approach a complete theory of how cognition operates, we must accept that Darwin was right. Many animals empirically show elements of familiar cognition, although certainly to a lessor degree. The primatology studies of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Goodall" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Jane Goodall</a>, which showed that chimps had individual personalities, and the ever-evolving recitation of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">tool usage by animals</a>, have begun to break down the religiously circumscribed belief that humans are somehow separate from the rest of nature. Thomson was right to highlight what he called the "lovely phrase" of William Allman, "We are risen apes, not fallen angels." The quote is from Allman's book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Stone Age Present: How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Life - From Sex, Violence and Language to Emotions, Morals and Communities</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stone-Age-Present-Evolution-Communities/dp/0684804557" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/699946.Stone_Age_Present" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>].</div>
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The many dog cognition studies referenced in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Genius-Dogs-Smarter-Think/dp/0142180467" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15721051-the-genius-of-dogs" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods seem to lead to conclusion that dogs do "think" using much of the same physical properties of brain that humans have. Hare and Woods illustrate the special relationship which dogs have with people, not just socially (or culturally) created, but as a product of a sort of evolutionary co-dependance. Similarly, studies of dolphin cognition show that they, too, are a species with strong social ties. We have no reason to believe that the underlying mechanisms are completely different. To make matters worse for those who would deny that evolved brains produce complex social behavior, the book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Animal Architects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Architects-Building-Evolution-Intelligence/dp/0465028381/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/576516.Animal_Architects" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] by James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould should give any reader pause.</div>
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So we are left with a question for Thomson's remaining cognitive features: Do dogs or dolphins also have these features, much less monkeys?</div>
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We might think that they do. Wolfgang Köhler's primatology studies from the 1970s reported the dancing of a group of chimpanzees around a central pole. This probably relates more to group dynamics than religion per se, but it provides an interesting continuity of behavior from our closest extant ancestors and the earliest human religions, regardless of the human justifications for the action. The observation is in Köhler's 1976 classic <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Mentality of Apes</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mentality-Apes-W-Kohler/dp/B000NGVB54/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3360828-the-mentality-of-apes" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>].</div>
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A useful discussion on the study and its wider context is to be found in the first volume of Joseph Campbell's <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Masks of God</em> series, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Primitive Mythology</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Masks-God-Vol-Primitive/dp/0140194436" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/589064.Primitive_Mythology" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">(</em>pp. 358-359): It seems to me extraordinary,” Köhler concludes, “that there should arise quite spontaneously, among chimpanzees, anything that so strongly suggests the dancing of some primitive tribes." and on the same page Campbell says:</div>
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We note, furthermore, the surprising detail of the central pole, which in the higher mythologies becomes interpreted as the world-uniting and supporting Cosmic Tree, World Mountain, axis mundi, or sacred sanctuary, to which both the social order and the meditations of the individual are to be directed. And finally, we have that wonderful sense of play, without which no mythological or ritual game of “make believe” whatsoever could ever have come into being.</div>
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<table border="1" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" class="table table-bordered" style="background-color: white; border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; max-width: 100%; width: 1140px;"><caption style="box-sizing: border-box;">Other Cognitive Features Implicated in Religious Expression</caption><colgroup style="box-sizing: border-box;"><col style="box-sizing: border-box;" xmlns=""></col><col style="box-sizing: border-box;" xmlns=""></col><col style="box-sizing: border-box;" xmlns=""></col><col style="box-sizing: border-box;" xmlns=""></col></colgroup><thead style="box-sizing: border-box;">
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;"></th><th style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;">Thomson's Definition</th><th style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;">Evolutionary Benefit</th><th style="border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-left-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-right-style: solid; border-width: 0px 1px 2px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: bottom;">Notes</th></tr>
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<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Minimally Counterintuitive Worlds (MCIs)</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">This allows belief in the supernatural, as long as it’s not too “super” and does not violate too many basic tenets of humanness.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Possibly cognitive closure, which is presumed necessary for understanding the world.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Could this be related to intuitive reasoning in that one is perhaps a mechanism of cognitive closure and the other (MCI) a minimization of the effort involved?</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Intuitive Reasoning</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">This helps us “fill in the blanks” of logic.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Possibly cognitive closure, which is presumed necessary for understanding the world.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Could this be a (the?) mechanism of cognitive closure? If we are presented with multiple disconnected facts and need to cognitively close the world, we must do it somehow.</td></tr>
<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Person Permanence</th><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">(Discussed in Thomson's slides, but not his book)</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Object permanence is necessary for object tracking and recognition, especially in noisy environments. Person permanence probably builds on the same mechanisms.</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(221, 221, 221); box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857143; padding: 8px; vertical-align: top;">Also called object-person permanence.</td></tr>
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Thomson also lists "Hard to Fake, Costly Honest Signals of Commitment" as an important cognitive feature that is used by religious belief. An example of a costly signal is the giving of an expensive gift to a friend, a potential mate, or in the case of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">potlatch</a>, to an entire community. Costly signals do not seem to fit with an evolutionary argument but with a cultural one. Thomson suggests that costly signals help a person to determine when someone is lying to them (pp. 80-81) and thus associates them with safety. Of course, we cannot perfectly detect lies. Just as shiny hair, full lips or clear skin are often taken as signals for robust health and hence indicate good mating potential, they can also be faked. Faking them is in fact big business. A 2012 study by Michelle Yeomans for Market Research Firm <a href="http://www.lucintel.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Lucintel</a>, forecasted that the global beauty care products industry will grow to approximately $265 billion annually by 2017. (See <a href="http://www.cosmeticsdesign.com/Market-Trends/Global-beauty-market-to-reach-265-billion-in-2017-due-to-an-increase-in-GDP?utm_source=copyright&utm_medium=OnSite&utm_campaign=copyright" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Global beauty market to reach $265 billion in 2017 due to an increase in GDP</em> </a>). Similarly, costly signals can lead us to believe the sincerity of someone like a religious leader even when the long term impact of that belief might not be good for us. Thomson naturally uses as examples the mass murder/suicide at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Jonestown</a> and Islamist suicide bombers. One is left to wonder just how detrimental mainstream religious belief might be to the interests of believers. There has been wide consensus among literati for millennia that religion helps keep the powerful powerful. "Religion is regarded by the common people as true," said <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Seneca the Younger</a> in the first century CE, "by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." Readers of Alexandre Dumas' <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Three Musketeers</em> would recognize the truth of that statement in the character of Cardinal Richelieu. The relationship between the established religions and politics seem to be in the headlines of international newspapers on a daily basis.</div>
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One of the few criticisms I will make of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Why We Believe in God(s)</em> is that the book is in desperate need of an index. The publisher really should have seen to that. Thomson asks in his preface that we take four actions: "Finish the book. Refer to it often. Give it to a friend. Donate it to a library or school." It is in fact rather difficult to refer to specific sections of it quickly in the absence of an index. A good index provides a complement to a table of contents as the other side of the same coin. Readers might approach a table of contents as a map to give them an overview and an index as a key to specific content.</div>
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Andy has collected a very large (250MB) number of slides and has been incredibly generous in allowing their public distribution. I have placed his entire slide deck online for <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/f0omp6z4wta77bg/Why_We_Believe.ppt?dl=0" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">download here</a> with Andy's permission. Please note that the collection has been modified for various talks over time and does contain some significant duplication. There are no speakers notes in the slides. However, the book's <a href="http://www.whywebelieveingods.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Web site</a> contains an hour-long <a href="http://www.whywebelieveingods.com/?page_id=2" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">video</a> of Dr. Thomson lecturing on the topic using the slides.</div>
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I highly recommend <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Why We Believe in God(s)</em>. Perhaps only by understanding why we believe can we begin to consciously decide what we should believe.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="An_Abbreviated_Literature_Survey" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca;"></a>An Abbreviated Literature Survey</h2>
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Andy recommends a number of studies during his lectures. Here is a short list of them for your further enjoyment with notes regarding their applicability:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Asp E, Ramchandran K, Tranel D. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22612576" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, and the Human Prefrontal Cortex</a>, Neuropsychology. 2012 Jul;26(4):414-21. doi: 10.1037/a0028526. Epub 2012 May 21.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Born to Believe: God, Science, and the Origin of Ordinary and Extraordinary Beliefs</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Born-Believe-Science-Ordinary-Extraordinary/dp/0743274989" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567315.Born_to_Believe" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">The first human religion:<ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Nicholas Wade, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Faith-Instinct-Religion-Evolved/dp/0143118196" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6402547-the-faith-instinct" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]</li>
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</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">We attribute to the dead mental states that we cannot shut off, so we think of them still being somewhere. Those raised in religious schools or families lose this tendency later than those raised in secular schools or families:<ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Jesse Bering, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Belief-Instinct-Psychology-Destiny/dp/0393341267" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8018107-the-belief-instinct" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Robert Karen, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1990/02/becoming-attached/308966/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Becoming Attached</a>, Atlantic Monthly, Feb 1990</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Paul Bloom, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Just-Babies-Origins-Good-Evil/dp/0307886840" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17380034-just-babies" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Matthew D. Lieberman, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect </em>[<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Social-Why-Brains-Wired-Connect/dp/0307889106/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17237217-social" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Morality is innate and not attributable to religion:<ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Steven Pinker, <a href="http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/The%20Moral%20Instinct%20-%20New%20York%20Times.htm" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">The Moral Instinct</a>, The New York Times Magazine, January 13, 2008</li>
</ul>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Autistic people "simply cannot be religious", as in the case of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Temple Grandin</a>:<ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Simon Baron-Cohen, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Difference-Female-Brains/dp/046500556X" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23970.The_Essential_Difference" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Neuroimaging evidence that religious experience occurs in Theory of Mind networks:<ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Sua, Giovanna Zambonia, Frank Kruegera and Jordan Grafmana. <a href="http://cognitive%20and%20neural%20foundations%20of%20religious%20belief/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief</a>, PNAS, 106/12, 4876–4881, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0811717106</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Neuroimaging evidence that belief in self and god overlap; belief in others resides in a different part of the brain:<ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Nicholas Epleya,1, Benjamin A. Conversea, Alexa Delboscb, George A. Monteleonec and John T. Cacioppoc. <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21533.full" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs</a>, 106/51, 21533–21538, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0908374106</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">The origin of religion is based on kin group selection, as driven by oxytocin release:<ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Bernard Crespi and Kyle Summers. <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347214000980" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Inclusive fitness theory for the evolution of religion</a>, Animal Behaviour, v92, June 2014, Pages 313–323, doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.02.013</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Rowers moving in synchrony had higher pain thresholds than those rowing alone:<ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Emma E. A. Cohen, Robin Ejsmond-Frey, Nicola Knight and R. I. M. Dunbar. <a href="http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/1/106.short" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Rowers' high: behavioural synchrony is correlated with elevated pain thresholds</a>, Biol. Lett. 23 February 2010 vol. 6 no. 1 106-108, doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.0670</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Neuroimaging differences between believers' and nonbelievers' brains:<ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Sam Harris, Jonas T. Kaplan, Ashley Curiel, Susan Y. Bookheimer, Marco Iacoboni, Mark S. Cohen. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2748718/pdf/pone.0007272.pdf" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief</a>, PLoS ONE, Oct 2009, vol 4, issue 10</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-32062514783911134372014-11-11T16:09:00.000-05:002014-11-11T16:11:13.464-05:00Book Review: How We Think by John Dewey<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
Our culture is built on ideas from the past. They don't always make sense when laid alongside our rapidly changing understanding of the natural world. Should our political conversations in an urban and post-industrial economy include presumptions of rugged individualism formed in the wilderness of a continent mostly depopulated by horrific diseases brought from Europe? Should our children be taught revelations passed down from the Bronze Age via millennia of interpretations and translations? Should we celebrate holidays whose origins and purposes we do not rationally discuss? Whether we should or should not, we do. We can't help but build in our short lives on the bits and pieces left to us from earlier ages.</div>
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My father, a career professional educator, died last year. I found a copy of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">How We Think</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Think-John-Dewey/dp/1607961377/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/631985.How_We_Think" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] by John Dewey on his bookshelf. Dewey was a leading philosopher and educational theorist of the early twentieth century. His ideas have shaped a century of educational thought. To this day, reviews of his work by teachers rave breathlessly about his prescience, his clear thinking and his relevance to modern education. They have used this book and some of his others in university classes and relate to Dewey as a forefather of their teaching philosophy.</div>
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Amazon boasts a whopping seventy editions and formats of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">How We Think</em>. The book is still in print by several publishers since its original copyright protection has expired. The book was originally written in 1909 and published the following year. I reviewed the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Think-John-Dewey/dp/0486298957/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">1997 paperback edition</a> published by Dover Publications.</div>
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Dewey has that most rare of Wikipedia street cred, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey_bibliography" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">bibliography page</a> that is separate from his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">biographical page</a>. The bibliography page lists 29 books authored by him, an impressive achievement for anyone, academic or not. His biographical page mentions several of his notable ideas and includes his founding of the American Association of University Professors (<a href="http://aaup.org/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">AAUP</a>) and, right up top, his concept of "reflexive thinking". The latter found its initial expression in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">How We Think</em>.</div>
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Having built Dewey up to the apex of his pedestal I will attempt to rip him down from it as if he were a Saddam Hussein impersonator at an Iraqi War veterans reunion. Dewey's ideas are badly dated and, especially in light of his continued prominence among teachers and school administrators, dangerous to our best current concepts of education.</div>
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Dewey's intellectual lineage traced from Aristotle to Aristotle's primary medieval interpreter ibn Sīnā, the Enlightment philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Peirce (pronounced "purse"), a founder of the Pragmatism school of philosophy to which Dewey would ascribe and extend. Some would say that he favored Plato more than Aristotle, and this may be so, but I list Aristotle for two very good reasons. His philosophy relies on both Aristotle's passé conception of the infant mind as a blank slate, or <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em>, and on a "scientific" worldview that was inadequately inductive even for his time. These failings conspire to make questionable his conclusions.</div>
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It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Locke in Dewey's thinking. Dewey didn't make much more progress in figuring out why some people are educable and others less so. He merely categorized them following Locke's approach. These days we might suggest that people who cannot be educated have a natural variation in neurotransmitters that suppress neural plasticity, much as some people make good guitar players or athletes partially due to a superior ability to learn "muscle memory".</div>
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John Locke was the philosopher behind the modern conception of the self. Locke believed in the human mind as a blank slate at birth, a <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em>, which to my mind has been thoroughly debunked even though you will find some adherents still desperately clinging even as they are tossed on the high seas of our age. Locke was clearly an Aristotelian in that he picked up the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em> from Ibn-Sīnā and the cosmological argument directly from Aristotle. He was thus a man of his time. However, his conception of the self appears to have been new and his "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associationism" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Associationism</a>", the idea that the associations formed in the mind of youth are critical for the formation of all later thought, has become the foundation of later attempts at educational reform, including Dewey's.</div>
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One area of philosophy modernized by Dewey's time was the recognitions that the mind exists in the brain and the brain is inarguably part of the body. Those who believed that the mind was of different stuff than the body ("dualists") lost ground to modern science. Those who recognized the common elements of brain and body and the mind as an emergent property of the brain are known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism" target="_blank">monists</a>. Locke, notionally a dualist, seems to have acknowledged a hint of monism in his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;"> <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">An Essay Concerning Human Understanding</em> </a>when he said that "the body too goes to the making the man." Maybe Dewey, apparently a monist, picked it up from him.</div>
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Dewey begins his book by thinking about thinking. He rightly discusses the four major approaches to his subject. His language makes it clear where he stands.</div>
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In the first place <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">thought</em> is used broadly, not to say loosely. Everything that comes to mind, the "goes through our heads," is called a thought. To think of a thing is just to be conscious of it in any way whatsoever. Second, the term is restricted by excluding whatever is directly presented; we think (or think of) only such things as we do not directly see, hear, smell, or taste.</div>
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One might reasonably suppose that he would also exclude touch, if asked.</div>
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Then, third, the meaning is further limited to beliefs that rest upon some kind of evidence or testimony. Of this third type, two kinds - or, rather, two degrees - must be discriminated. In some cases, a belief is accepted with slight or almost no attempt to state the grounds that support it. In other cases, the ground or basis for a belief is deliberately sought and its adequacy to support the belief examined. This process is called reflexive though; it alone is truly educative in value, and it forms, accordingly, the principle subject of this volume.</div>
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These definitions certainly sound reasonable, even learned, but they are the very source of my objection to Dewey's philosophy and everything that springs from it. They are anti-science in their way. They were based on no observation, no inductive analysis of many facts leading to generalizations when and only when patterns have been naturally found to emerge. They are as scientific as Aristotle's suppositions that thinking occurred around the heart, that the brain was a mere "cooling organ" as evidenced by the running of classical noses, or his idea that women are cooler than men (they are slightly warmer). As Hawkins noted in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">On Intelligence</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27539.On_Intelligence" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] (pp. 32), "looking across the history of science, we see our intuition is often the biggest obstacle to discovering the truth." Dewey's axioms of thinking are simply philosophic, in the navel-gazing sense of the term. We can now do better.</div>
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The pioneering neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/mindful-brain" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">noted</a> in 1978 that the human neocortex consists of the same basic structure throughout, from the parts that process vision to the parts that process hearing to the parts that recognize a friend to the parts that predict the weather from the color, shape and distribution of the clouds overhead. Jeff Hawkins has called Mountcastle's paper the "Rosetta stone of neuroscience". Everywhere are the same vertical columns, always six identifiable sections deep, all consisting of the same types of cells in the same distribution. Only the pliable, changeable connections between them are different and those connections can change with experience and with injury. Indeed, a person blinded does not lose the use of that portion of the cortex that used to process vision. Instead, those areas are coopted to process other sensory inputs and they often do so as completely as if they were originally part of that structure that we have come to call the somatosensory cortex. Even the horrific injury sustained by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Phineas Gage</a> healed sufficiently to leave him functional after some time, although we now recognize how fortunate he was not to have damaged other specific areas of his brain. This analysis leaves little room for Dewey's assertion that we may somehow separate "mere" consciousness from those cognitive activities based on processing sensory input. The cortex processes both in areas that are seemingly interchangeable.</div>
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Dewey's two-part third category of thought is in no better shape. On what basis might we suppose that fantasy or fictional thought may be separated from some form of rational thought that demands evidence? "Reflection," says Dewey, "involves not simply a sequence of ideas, but a <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">con</em>sequence - a consecutive ordering in such a way that each determines the next as its proper outcome, which each in turn leans back on its predecessors." There is little doubt here that Dewey relates reflexive thought to deductive reasoning, as in a mathematical proof. This would certainly fit with his stated goal to make scientific the process of education. There are at least two problems with this line of thinking.</div>
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Firstly, fictional and fact-oriented thought are processed by the same part of the brain, in the same way. Associations between concepts seem to be the cortex's currency, not some (to the brain) arbitrarily factual grounding. What about novels, plays or poems that reflect life so sublimely that they inspire or teach us something about ourselves? The playwright Ayad Akhtar <a href="http://observer.com/2014/10/muslims-on-barbarism/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">has said</a>, "An artist’s job is to tease and poke and question the larger racial, ethnic, religious and social conscience and in the process to provoke questions that lead to new practices and new way of seeing." Akhtar neatly shows the fallacy of Dewey's argument for a separation of thought based on some form of intent. This was well known to the ancient Greeks so I'm not sure what led Dewey astray. It was however philosophic reductionism run amok.</div>
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There are also solid evolutionary reasons for the human brain not to separate fact from fiction. We rely on our ability to consider various scenarios before we act. Those scenarios are fictional, surely, and yet by playing them through in our heads we can decide which are most likely to lead to outcomes we prefer. "Imagine that the only way you could think about what might be going on in another person's mind was for that person to be sitting in front of you." suggested Andy Thomson in his impressive little book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Believe-God-Concise/dp/0984493212/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10361826-why-we-believe-in-god-s" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. "Human relationships as we know them would be impossible." Indeed. "We need to evaluate the likely thoughts and feelings of others, even when those others are nowhere to be seen." Are these evaluations not fictional? We might ask whether a boss will think badly of us if we are late one more time, or whether a parent will punish us if we don't clean our room, or what it will take for that cute girl to agree to a date. These fictions are the very key to navigating our real-world life. They allow us to determine our eventual behavior. Without our fictional thoughts we would all be sociopaths.</div>
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Secondly, Dewey's mathematical analogy doesn't hold up. Mathematical deduction itself proceeds from some axioms that are presumed to be self evident. The classic axioms of Euclid's geometry, for example, are these (translated by Thomas Heath [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Books-Elements-Vol-1-2/dp/0486600882/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214442.The_Thirteen_Books_of_the_Elements_Vol_1" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] with contemporary comments by me in parentheses):</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"To draw a straight line from any point to any point." (A straight line is drawn between any two points)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"To produce [extend] a finite straight line continuously in a straight line." (A straight line extends forever in both direction)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"To describe a circle with any centre and distance [radius]." (A circle can be drawn from a center point and any fixed radius)</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"That all right angles are equal to one another."</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">"That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles."</li>
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Most school children are introduced to Euclid's axioms, although they might be given in more modern language. Geometry on a flat surface ("plane" geometry) as laid down by Euclid stood unchallenged for more than two millennia. There was only one problem: The fifth axiom (the so-called parallel postulate) is both unprovable and unneeded. It got in the way of Einstein's Theory of Relativity and he needed to jettison it in order to make progress. Jason Socrates Bardi did a fine job tracing the painful history of the thing in his book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Fifth Postulate: How Unraveling A Two Thousand Year Old Mystery Unraveled the Universe</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Postulate-Unraveling-Thousand-Unraveled/dp/0470149094/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4631060-the-fifth-postulate" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>].</div>
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Euclid's failure, only recognized in modern times, well illustrates the dangers of proceeding in a "scientific" manner from questionable presumptions. The resulting edifice might be useful in a given context but taking it as written can and probably will slow future progress. Dewey's theory was only right, or useful, in the cultural context of the West.</div>
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Dewey proves that he is operating within the strict cultural context of the Western world when he states that the thesis of his book is to teach children to "convey knowledge and assist thought." And later, "to direct pupils' oral and written speech, used primarily for practical and social ends, so that gradually it shall become a conscious tool of conveying knowledge and assisting thought" (pp. 179). Those goals, however laudable they may be in our current society, are so very different from the immediate survival skills necessary in a hunter-gatherer society, a herding culture or a civilization mired in warfare. They are the goals of a well-fed and generally secure post-agricultural civilization with a lot of time on their hands.</div>
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Dewey is hardly the only philosopher in history to overgeneralize in a cultural context. Aristotle's most famous errors, from his diminution of the brain to his many fallacious statements about women, proceeded from presumptions that were founded upon cultural preconceptions, not truth. This way lies the definition of paradigms that must be, painfully, overthrown in time as Thomas Kuhn famously described in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-Anniversary/dp/0226458121/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61539.The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. Kuhn was on to something in spite of the half-century of criticisms around his central idea.</div>
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Dewey next pulls an academic sleight-of-hand to justify his "scientific" approach: He redefines the word "logic" to suit his thesis. Redefinition, or at least careful definition, of terms is a sharp tool in the academic toolbox. Often it fosters a more precise understanding when the primary mode of communication, language, is inherently too imprecise for the purpose at hand. Judge, though, Dewey's usage:</div>
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In its broadest sense, any thinking that ends in a conclusion is logical - whether the conclusion reached be justified or fallacious; that is, the term <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">logical</em> covers both the logically good and and the illogical or the logically bad. In its narrowest sense, the term <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">logical</em> refers only to what is demonstrated to follow necessarily from premises that are definite in meaning and that are either self-evidently true, or that have been previously proved to be true. Stringency of proof is here the equivalent of the logical. In this sense mathematics and formal logic (perhaps as a branch of mathematics) alone are strictly logical. Logical, however, is used in a third sense, which is at once more vital and more practical; to denote, namely, the systematic care, negative and positive, taken to safeguard reflection so that it may yield the best results under the given conditions. [...] <strong role="strong" style="box-sizing: border-box;">In this sense, the word logical is synonymous with wide-awake, thorough, and careful reflection - thought in its best sense.</strong> (pp. 56, my emphasis of the last sentence)</div>
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Dewey's idea, clearly expressed here, is that only when we are wide awake and spend time carefully reflecting (that is, working through the logical conclusions of our ideas, structuring them and relating them to proven facts) can we be considered to be thinking "in its best sense". One wonders at the temerity of that statement. There is no doubt that such thinking has led our current Western civilization to construct complex and occasionally complete theories of the natural world, invent new materials, machinery and social structures, and to provide unprecedented billions with more food and physical safety than in all previous generations combined. And, as Carl Sagan correctly <a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/c/carlsagan141359.html#twIQfp4ShlGJAske.99" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">said</a>, "Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense." But best? How then to account for the human animal's ability to have successfully spread to every continent save Antartica before the agricultural revolution, much less the industrial one? Our hunter-gatherer ancestors certainly did not think in Dewey's best sense. Yet they did survive rather well and did not create nuclear weapons, biochemical warfare, land mines, nor burn or spill oil on industrial scales.</div>
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I do not yearn for some idealized past full of noble savages, nor do I believe that humans have fundamentally changed much in short millennia since cultural advances created civilization. But I do believe that "best" is a relative term which one should certainly apply with care. To apply it to one's place and time smacks of, at best, parochialism and, at worst, nationalism or racism.</div>
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Taking all together, the book would better have been titled <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">How We Should Think</em> or <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">How I Think We Should Think</em>. The way that Dewey postulates thought is more about how we learn and even then does not match our best current understanding.</div>
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John Dewey, like all the members of his intellectual lineage, was brilliantly wrong. His well thought out and finely honed educational theories rest upon a foundation of sand. It is high time that his theories are reviewed and revised for a more monist age. The scientific community now generally accepts the non-theist (if not always atheist) proposition that the mind is housed in the brain and that the brain is made out of the same materials and using the same processes as the rest of the human body. A mind is as much a product of evolution as a heart or toes. Few people could say with a straight face that the scientific consensus is that the mind is a separate creation. Of course, that is not so for the general population.</div>
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Not that Dewey was a theist. He was a brilliant iterator of the Pragmatist school of philosophy and apparently an atheist. His conception of education was to maximize the capabilities of the individual in his industrial age. "If these pages assist any to appreciate this kinship" between childish thought and scientific thought "and to consider seriously how its recognition in educational practice would <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste</em>, the book will amply have served its purpose." said Dewey in his preface (pp. vii, my emphasis). His Pragmatic philosophy seems to have been an American iteration on the British Utilitarian school started the century before by Jeremy Bentham. </div>
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The problem with Dewey's poor foundation for reflexive thought is how influential he has been regarding the American educational system. Perhaps this is one reason for America's poor standing in education as judged on a worldwide basis. It is high time that Dewey's contribution to the guiding principles of American education were reexamined. His late contemporary Maria Montessori disagreed fundamentally with him in that she did not think that a teacher must feel their tasks "made heavier in that they have come to deal with pupils individually and not merely in mass." (pp. vii) Contrarily, Montessori <a href="http://www.dailymontessori.com/maria-montessori-quotes/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">argued</a> that "Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes" when educating a child and guiding them to make good choices was a necessary process. "To let the child do as he likes when he has not yet developed any powers of control", Montessori said, "is to betray the idea of freedom." Alas, Dr. Montessori's ideas have never found full expression in the United States in spite of her superior research. This has been due in equal measure to the radical nature of her changes, the necessity for significant education of teachers and her unfortunate citizenship in the defeated Italian fascist state under Benito Mussolini.</div>
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Dewey's understanding of human consciousness has also not stood the test of time. We have come a long, long way toward an understanding of consciousness in spite of loudly repeated claims to the contrary. The common philosophical refrain of linguists, philosophers and many psychologists is that the key tool of consciousness is the creation, storage and manipulation of symbols is emblematic of the very progress that they deny. Take, for example, these statements by Dewey in 1910 (pp. 170-171):</div>
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Three typical views have been maintained regarding the relation of thought and language : first, that they are identical ; second that words are the garb or clothing of thought, necessary not for thought but only for conveying it ; and third (the view that we shall here maintain) that while language is not thought it is necessary for thinking as well as for its communication. When it is said, however, that thinking is impossible without language, we must recall that language includes much more than oral and written speech. Gestures, pictures, monuments, visual images, finger movements - anything consciously employed as a <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">sign</em> is, logically, language. To say that language is necessary for thinking is to say that signs are necessary. Thought deals not with bare things, but with their <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">meanings</em>, their suggestions ; and meanings, in order to be apprehended, must be embodied in sensible and particular existences. Without meaning, things are nothing but blind stimuli or chance sources of pleasure and pain ; and since meanings are not themselves tangible things, they must be anchored by attachment to some physical existence.</div>
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Dewey's expansive definition of language allows for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Helen Keller</a>'s intelligence which would otherwise have been excluded. Such an exclusion would have rendered the neat little theory without meaning in the face of evidence to the contrary.</div>
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It is worth comparing Dewey's thesis with Hawkins. Dewey takes quite a behavioralist approach; behavior, in this case language, equals intelligence. Hawkins disagrees:</div>
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But intelligence is not just a matter of acting or behaving intelligently. Behavior is a manifestation of intelligence, but not the central characteristic or primary definition of being intelligent. A moment's reflection proves this: You can be intelligent just lying in the dark, thinking and understanding. Ignoring what goes on <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">in</em> your head and focusing instead on behavior has been a large impediment to understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines. (pp. 29)</div>
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It is interesting to note that Hawkins so completely refutes Dewey's understanding of the importance of behavior while using the term "reflection" to do it.</div>
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The idea of the mental "sign" is finally being overcome. Mountcastle, Hawkins and those neuroscientists who have uncovered the way ideas both concrete and abstract are laid down in the tangled interconnections of the cortex have shown us that the "sign" is merely a collection of activation patterns of neuronal columns that itself adapts to new input. We are close to understanding the algorithm of thought. Indeed, the implementation of Hawkins' admittedly experimental and approximate "cortical learning algorithm" does in fact make solid predictions from streams of input data in a way that is both reminiscent of the way humans predict and different from all other existing forms of artificial intelligence.</div>
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And yet, persistent ideas die slowly. Philosophers have argued for many years whether the mind is of a different nature from the brain, and some still do although their voices are less loud. Similarly, philosophers have argued (this is what they do) whether some human thought processes are innate, like instincts, or whether we learn absolutely everything. The view that we do have some innate thought patterns has been well proven to my mind, such as facial recognition or the strong tendency to assign an intelligent purpose to rapid movement in our peripheral vision. These instincts help to keep us alive, safe and social.</div>
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The understanding that we have some innate thoughts is known as nativism and comes in two important kinds. The linguist Noam Chomsky has championed the idea of a "Universal Grammar", structures or modules in the brain that are responsible for a child's ability to rapidly learn languages. Others have suggested that the brain is a form of computer, not in its architecture but in its ability to compute. That is, the brain can and does perform computations and it is made of modules that provide computational functions.</div>
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Very similar views to Dewey's regarding "signs" in the mind have been expressed in recent times by Chomsky and philosopher Jerry Fodor. Fodor's book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Mind Doesn't Work That Way [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Doesnt-Work-That-Computational/dp/0262561468" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/377578.The_Mind_Doesn_t_Work_That_Way" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]</em> was a direct criticism and response to Steven Pinker's book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">How the Mind Works</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Mind-Works-Steven-Pinker/dp/0393334775/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/835623.How_the_Mind_Works" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] and although I have criticized Pinker in some regards I am much more in his camp than Fodor's. Fodor is a fun read, though. The man is a hoot. But his insistence on the wobbly cairn of mental signs is both dated and increasingly rather silly in the face of new neuroscience. "I think some version of Chomskian nativism will probably turn out to be true and that the current version of New Synthesis nativism probably won't." says Fodor.</div>
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Fodor, an MIT professor, is intellectually honest enough to admit that he might be wrong. He states at the opening to his fourth chapter that if cognition is in fact all or mostly modular, as Pinker, Mountcastle and Hawkins say that it is, then "Pinker and Plotkin are probably right about the prospects for New Synthesis Psychology being very good, and I have been wasting your time. (Mine too, come to think of it.)" Fodor might be that rare man who can adapt to yet another revolution in his old age.</div>
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Dewey did not have Mountcastle to tell him that the modular components of the human cortex were practically structurally identical throughout, nor Hawkins to prove that prediction could be implemented by emulating that structure. Without proof for those modules, he fell in line with his lineage and attempted to take it one step farther. His reliance on undefined "signs" and "symbols" in the brain to somehow explain thought looks more like mumbo jumbo than science. "Learning," Dewey insists, "in the proper sense, is not learning things, but the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">meanings</em> of things, and this process involves the use of signs, or language in its generic sense." (pp. 176). He goes on to warn that educational reformers who reject such analysis risk "the destruction of the intellectual life", a serious charge if it had any basis. We are now rather sure that the human cortex has no inherent separation between things and their meanings. It is the associations between similar structures that matter, not some hardwired categorization in our mental hardware.</div>
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Were we to jettison this loose and empirical mumbo jumbo with the concrete description of the operation of the human neocortex by Hawkins, something amazing pops out: strong support for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Computational Theory of Mind</a>. The CTM postulates that the brain is fundamentally an information processing system, both enabled and constrained by the same mathematical limits of any computation. Importantly, the CTM implies that we can eventually understand the brain's operations. That is not to say in any way that the brain is a "computer" as the term is currently used. The brain certainly does not implement the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">von Neumann architecture</a> used by artificial computers of our age.</div>
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Neuroscientists call high-level concepts in the brain "invariant representations". Invariant representations ensure that an object in motion is still thought of as the same object, even if it is changing position, moves in or out of shadows, if you can only see part of it at any one time, etc. Invariant representations are created automatically by the cortex, says Hawkins, using exactly the same cortical structures that are used elsewhere. Invariant representations are both the result of senses and memory and used by them to understand the world around us. It is my understanding that we could justifiably replace the "signs" and "symbols" of linguistic theory with the invariant representations of modern neuroscience and lose exactly nothing in translation. I think that we could begin to have a serious scientific conversation about the biology of language.</div>
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Of course, Dewey was a certifiable genius and he was not all wrong. Far from it. There is much in his work left to admire if one takes into account the bits that have been surpassed by further research.</div>
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To his credit, Dewey seems to be an early adopter of the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">embodied cognition</a> school which embraced the idea that the mind is of the body. It is unclear whether he was influenced primarily by a close reading of Locke as I suggested earlier or whether he was motivated by his generation's raucous wrestling with Darwin's theory of evolution. Given Dewey's progressive stance on religion (he didn't seem to have one), it is not unreasonable to think that both may have been so.</div>
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Dewey suggested that "enlargement of vocabulary" was the key to creating an educated person. He was undoubtedly right about that because associating many words results in more and stronger neural connections between cortical regions. There are other techniques that have such result, and they should be given equal air time in any theory of education. Learning to play the piano is a commonly used technique. Performing research using the scientific method is another. Dewey was barking up a legitimate tree in a forest full of the same species.</div>
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Dewey's statement that, "Looseness of thinking accompanies a limited vocabulary" (pp. 181) strikes me as a restatement of the <a href="http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis</a>. Most scholars studying how language intersects with thought have generally accepted that it does have <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">some</em> effect for the last twenty years. Current research focuses on how and how much.</div>
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Dewey also recognized, possibly through his own experience, the tendency of students to prefer material novel to them than to focus on details of the familiar (pp. 221-222). Pat Conroy agreed in his fascinating memoir of teaching poor children on a South Carolina island, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Water is Wide</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Water-Wide-Pat-Conroy/dp/1469245213" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/129947.The_Water_Is_Wide" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. Conroy introduced classical music to children who had little interest in classical education and used the stories behind the songs to introduce geography, history, biography. It was a neat trick and an excellent application of Dewey's approach. Children and adults become rapt by the unexpected or unfamiliar because our evolution ensures that we pay attention to changing circumstances. Neuroscience agrees. Unexpected experiences cause a cascade neuronal of activity throughout the cortex which updates old conceptions of normality.</div>
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Thomson has illustrated that we as a species can often be tricked into believing something factually nonsensical. One of the ways that religion becomes embedded in our consciousness is by being introduced to so-called "minimally counterintuitive worlds". In line with Dewey and Conroy, he notes that such stories are "an optimal compromise between the interesting and the expected". They allow us to accept new ideas from others readily precisely because they mix what we already know and can verify with something just a bit novel and therefore interesting.</div>
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Given this rare alignment between Dewey's theories, teacher experience and neuroscience, it might reasonably seem amazing that the current US trend is to teach students material in relation to their home town. We have every reason to believe that this works against the process of education. Dewey's advice, gleaned from the Associationist concept he picked up from Locke, was to specifically avoid experiences that would form negative associations. Fostering a love of learning is much more important than forcing the bulk memorization of facts.</div>
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Dewey railed against the 'Fallacy of making "facts" an end in themselves' (pp. 188). One can almost hear the frustration of students exposed the "ten thousand facts" aproach to learning, then and now. Our most recent foray into educational reform, the so-called No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, ensured that schools would teach to the many standardized tests and thus run, not walk, away from Dewey's ideas. It is little wonder that teachers trained in Dewey object.</div>
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The guise of education that teaches only facts relies on an individual having their own insightful moment that connects the facts together into some consistent whole. Such teachers create cognitive dissonance and hope that students will close it for them. Naturally many students will not intuit useful connections themselves.</div>
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Toward the end of his long career, Dewey did accept significant criticism of his theories and refined them accordingly. However, he never gave up on reflexive thought, probably because few dared challenge him on that topic prior to the last decade's worth of neuroscience research. His 1938 book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Experience and Education</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Experience-And-Education-John-Dewey/dp/0684838281/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/739202.Experience_and_Education" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] redefines his ideas toward the end of his working life.</div>
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In that volume, the older Dewey echoes Michel de Montaigne in his concern for the ultimate result of education:</div>
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What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?</div>
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Montaigne said something very similar around 1580 in his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essays_(Montaigne)" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;"> <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Essays</em> </a> when he asked, "What good can we suppose it did Varro and Aristotle to know so many things? Did it exempt them from human discomforts? Were they freed from the accidents that oppress a porter? Did they derive from logic some consolation for the gout?" It is a question that all philosophers must ask as they develop their art. We are all mortal and there will come a time when the carefully constructed neuronal connections in our heads becomes literally fertilizer for new generations. We can but take solace in the fact that those ideas that are written, passed down, discussed, and argued over define not only our culture but have a chance to influence the culture of our descendants. We are still reading Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne and, yes, Dewey. "We are all worms," noted Winston Churchill, "But I believe I am a glow-worm." So was Dewey.</div>
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There is of course another way to answer Montaigne's question. Montaigne and Dewey both look at the value of education from the perspective of the individual. But humans are a social species. Society has certainly benefited from the studies of those many unsung heroes through the ages. Many of us currently <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">do</em> escape the pain of illnesses, recover from accidents and even some of the ravages of age. Our lives are both longer and more pleasant than of those who came before us. We owe a mountain of debt to all people who struggle to understand and pass their lessons down. They are the giants on whose shoulders we wobble, squat and sometimes stand.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-50965966987117676742014-10-24T20:19:00.000-04:002014-10-24T20:19:35.641-04:00Afternoon with a Rabbi<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
My friend Marsha and I were discussing anti-Semitism. Well, I was discussing anti-Semitism and pulled Marsha into it because she is both Jewish and unlikely to be offended when I start asking questions. I asked Marsha to introduce me to a local rabbi and she suggested that I speak with Neumiro daSilva. We met in a Panera as he ate lunch.</div>
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Neumiro is both a rabbi and a Class A general contractor. His rabbinical duties include officiating at weddings and funerals, Bar & Bat Mitzvah tutoring, Shabbat & holiday service music (he plays guitar), teaching the Torah, consoling the sick, dying and bereaved and general counseling. As a builder, he focuses on home improvements such as custom decks, porches, fences, kitchens, bathrooms and such. I suppose he is building something either way.</div>
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Neumiro opens strongly, jumping into theology immediately after looking clearly and openly into my eyes, studying me. He throws out the word spirituality and then notes that it contains the word ritual: "Judaism is ritual". That is a good mneumonic, but not linguistically accurate. The English word comes from the Latin <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">spiritualis</em>, from <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">spiritus</em> "of breathing". Ritual, on the other hand, shares the same root as the English word rite. Both stem from the Latin <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">ritualis</em> from <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">ritus</em>, suggesting a usage of something, particularly in a religious context. The linguistic sleight of hand makes me wary. Was it intentional, meant to be just a useful way to think about Judaism or was he repeating something that he had heard without checking his sources? I may never know. As Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman and author, so keenly observed, "Nothing so baffles the scientific approach to human nature as the vital role words play in human affairs."</div>
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Neumiro's point is that one may be Jewish without believing in God. Ritual is the thing. He does believe in God.. It doesn't bother him if others don't. "God believes in you", he says. I have heard that before and am not offended.</div>
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Neumiro was raised Catholic in Brazil. His mother converted to Seventh Day Adventism when he was a child. She simply came home one day and announced that the family was now all Seventh Day. Neumiro was confused by that. At 25 years old, Neumiro met a young woman who claimed to be of the Seventh Day faith. She was 20. He brought her home. "Hey, Mom! I met this wonderful girl and she's Seventh Day!" Only later did he discover that she was from a Jewish family. Fern was also American and the happily married young couple moved to the United States. He converted to Judaism eleven years later and eventually became a rabbi.</div>
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Neumiro's English is heavily accented in the way that an Iberian language filtered through dense jungle can be. He says the word "Judaism" almost continuously but pronounces it "Judaísmo" as in his native language.</div>
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His rabbinical training was taken in New York but required him to travel to Israel to walk the land of the Torah. He was fascinated to discover a "garden of death" perched against the city walls of Jerusalem. The garden was dedicated to a God that occasionally asked for the sacrifice of children. That got him thinking about the story of Abraham's intended sacrifice of his son, Isaac. "Was God testing Abraham or was Abraham testing God?", he asked. I said that I am very comfortable with the idea that Abraham was testing God. Many people, including atheists, test God. We watch people every day ask, "Is God there?" This fits in easily with an atheist perspective. I have never experienced God testing anyone. Neumiro also thinks that Abraham was testing God, which is why he brought it up.</div>
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On evolution: Most Jews accept evolution. Neumiro notes that the Catholic Church accepts evolution, but most Catholics and Protestants he knows (and that I know) do not. This is especially true in the United States, but also in South America.</div>
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On Genesis: Neumiro notes that woman was God's <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">second</em> act of creation in relation to humans. His point was lost in translation. I sincerely hope that he doesn't infer something along the lines of the New Testament's <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Timothy+2%3A12" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">1 Timothy 2:12</a>, where Paul puts women in their supposed place, but I'm not sure.</div>
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The God of Judaísmo, says Neumiro, is not a loving God. "He is in a bad mood all the time. I like that." If the God of the Torah wants people to move to a land, or an enemy to be destroyed, the people have to do it for Him. "God asks us to do his dirty work." Hah! That's a nice metaphor. Nobody is going to do anything for you. You will need to get out and do it for yourself. It reminds me of Mahatma Ghandi's famous quote, "Be the change you want to see in the world." I tell this to Neumiro and he responds, "Martin Luther King, too. 'I have a dream' and all that. <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">You</em> must do it."</div>
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"Elohim is God", Neumiro says into the natural pause, "which in Hebrew starts with an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">aleph</a>. The aleph in Hebrew is sometimes silent when a vowel is not present. You must seek. That is, you must add a vowel yourself to make a sound in order for God to speak to you." That is a beautiful metaphor but my atheist mind wants to say something along of lines of, "If you need to do all the work yourself and make the sounds yourself for God to speak, what purpose exactly does God serve?". But I don't. To do that would be to fall into the same trap of literalism that I rail against. Be happy with the beautiful metaphor, I think.</div>
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How can God be everywhere? Neumiro answers his own question with an analogy. No matter where you stand on Earth, he says, you look up and you can see the sun. I don't mention nighttime. That would be rude and really quite unproductive. If you are somewhere else, anywhere else, in the world, you can look up and see the same sun. That's how God can be everywhere. I'm not sure how to take this one. Were I only a few stars away, or even between here and, say, our nearest neighboring star, our sun wouldn't look like anything special. From the Andromeda galaxy, it would effectively have ceased to exist. And Andromeda is close, astronomically speaking. This story reminds me of how effective analogy can be when restricted to a purely human scale. It would have worked wonders during the Bronze Age, I see that. My modern, educated mind jumps to poke holes in it in terms of scale, and in terms of movement. I know that I am not stationary. The sun is big only from my puny perspective.</div>
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Neumiro moves on to the story of Babel. It doesn't matter how it happened, he thinks. <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Something</em> happened. The story recorded <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">what</em> more than <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">how</em>. It is a perspective that I appreciate. He is trying to find middle ground with me and he succeeded. He probably thought he lost me with God being everywhere.</div>
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The story of Cain and his younger brother Abel comes up next. How could it not? We are on a stroll through the twisted paths of the Torah, as if the pages had been flung far into the air and we were coming upon one random one and then another. Judaísmo requires that a witness be produced or a crime cannot be punished. There was no witness to Cain's murdering of Abel, says Neumiro, and so Cain could not be punished. There is the lesson - it is a recording of an aspect of Jewish law.</div>
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Was Cain not punished? The Christians and Muslims seem to think so. My Revised Standard Version of the Bible, hardly a canonical reference, states that Cain was "cursed from the ground" and he "shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth." Yet it also says that God marked him to protect him from harm by others (What others? Who are these others that are not Adam and Eve's children - we are not told - another indication that the earliest biblical stories are the folk tales of a tribe), and that he goes to the land of Nod and builds a city. The Islamic version seems on the surface to agree that Cain was a murderer and punished, but its location (in Book 5, section 5, entitled "Cain and Abel - murderous plots against the Prophet") have lead some scholars to suggest that the reference is more to the otherwise well-known story of Cain and Abel and not a retelling. A contemporary allegory may have been the thing.</div>
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The mythologist Joseph Campbell hinges his reading on the fact that Cain was a farmer and Abel a herder. God liked the offering of Abel better, which caused the fight in the first place. Campbell dissects the myth in relation to the murder motifs of many early planting myths of tropical societies and comes to the conclusion that the myth is in many ways backward from its peers. "Here the murder motif does not precede, but follows, the end of the mythological age, in contrast to the sequence in all the primitive myths. Moreover, it has been transformed to render a duplication of the Fall motif. The ground no longer bears to Cain its strength and he is to wander on the face of the earth - which is, of course, just the opposite result to that which the ritual murder of the agricultural myth produced." (Occidental Mythology, Arkana Penguin, 1964, pp. 105.) I note that Campbell was also referencing a Revised Standard Version of the Christian Bible.</div>
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With due respect to the scholarship of others, I wonder, as I so often do, if the point of the story isn't easier than all that. The story of Cain and Abel undoubtedly was recorded by early Hebrews in a desert climate. Campbell himself notes later (pp. 106) the existence of a Sumerian cuneiform text of c. 2050 BCE in which a goddess prefers a farmer over a herder. "One millennium later", says Campbell, "the patriarchal desert nomads arrived, and all judgements were reversed in heaven, as on earth." One immediately notes the similarity to the Chinese concept of actions on earth mirroring actions in heaven. Perhaps climate change, locally caused by over-farming or irrigation as in so much of the ancient Mediterranean, from the silting of the harbor of Athens to the "granary of Rome" that was once Libya, was to blame for the Sumerian withdrawal and the ascendance of the nomadic herders. But times changed again. The ancestral memory of God might have preferred herders by the time of the recording of Genesis, but Cain was the farmer (again) who lived, albeit in a different land "far to the East". Farmers do not eat as well (they are "cursed from the ground"), and are therefore not as healthy as their herding cousins, but their settled ways allow them to feed more children. Farmers, unlike herders, do not traditionally practice infanticide. Populations rise (Cain founded his city) and eventually the unhappy farmer takes over, much to the herding God's chagrin.</div>
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At any event, one must be careful when playing a game of telephone over three millennia. I try this on Neumiro. He is unimpressed.</div>
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Why do educated people so often fail to follow up on new perspectives or respond to newly available knowledge? One reason often discussed in the media is that new perspectives can threaten outlooks that are based upon so-called revealed knowledge. Another and possibly better reason have been known to psychologists since the 1940s: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstellung_effect" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">The Einstellung Effect</a>. The Einstellung Effect is a natural consequence of the way your brain functions that literally (yes, literally) blinds you to new experiences and better judgements, descriptions or solutions when the one you have settled on is already "good enough". In other words, if your brain is not forced into cognitive dissonance then you don't feel the need for cognitive closure. You just won't revisit the issue. A recent <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-your-first-idea-can-blind-you-to-better-idea/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">study</a> reported in Scientific American provides more detail on the causes and mechanisms of the effect.</div>
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The Einsteillung Effect alone is not sufficient to explain all of cultural history. There are other factors. Another important one may be the cycles in larger society. There would seem to be several of these cycles of longer and shorter time scales. The fascinating 2009 book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Secular Cycles</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Secular-Cycles-Peter-Turchin/dp/0691136963" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8778747-secular-cycles" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] by Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov describes some of economic and especially population-driven cycles without particular reference to religion. Alternatively, the anthropologist Marvin Harris, writing in the 1970s, described a longer religious thought cycle that he dubbed the messiah/witch cycle. In his fun little book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cows-Pigs-Wars-Witches-Riddles/dp/0679724680/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60653.Cows_Pigs_Wars_and_Witches" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] Harris traces the rise of "messiah" cultures, where the idea of a "a final and decisive struggle" is promised to "achieve redemption and salvation on a cosmic scale", and "witch" cultures, where (I dare not say "in which") the dominant idea is "a lifestyle dreamwork whose social function is to dissolve and fragment the energies of dissent." Put another way, the messiah/witch cycle takes us from <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">everyone joining</em> to <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">everyone doing their own thing</em> and back again. Monotheistic Judaism and more literalist progeny Christianity and Islam are stalwarts of the messiah archetype. They fight against the witch wherever it arises, be that in post-medieval Europe or in the mid-twentieth century "counterculture".</div>
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Do we have any hope of escaping such cycles? Nobody is certain how our unprecedented scientific explorations and creation of technology will impact them. Harris suggested:</div>
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I make no claim for the millenarian splendors that will come from a better understanding of the causes of lifestyle phenomena. Yet there is a sound basis for assuming that by struggling to demystify our ordinary consciousness we shall improve the prospects for peace and economic and political justice. If this potential change of odds in our favor be ever so slight, I think, we must regard the expansion of scientific objectivity into the domain of lifestyle riddles as a moral imperative. It's the only thing that's never been tried.</div>
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All of this flashes through my mind as Neumiro takes me on a tour of Bronze Age thought. It works. Humans, after all, haven't changed much if at all. Our only real change has been cultural. Our culture is currently more amorphous, more under stress, from the process of globalization as we are forced against our will to recognize that other humans with other ideas are as human as we are. It makes people uncomfortable. Those Bronze Age ways of defining an in-group and, unavoidably, the out-group serve to bind people into a covenant of comfort in a changing and dangerous world.</div>
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Neumiro returns to the story of Cain and Abel. "God asks for a sacrifice and then changes His mind. That reminds us that we can also change our minds." Does he mean that God changed his mind because he didn't accept Cain's sacrifice? "Yes." That may be so. It is certainly a plausible reading and, like so much of what Neumiro has said, it is a nice metaphor. The entire conversation reminds me why I get along better with more Jews than Christians. I can appreciate the metaphors while still rejecting their god. They don't generally seem to be upset about that. Christians uncomfortably insist on proselytizing. No doubt that is why there are more Christians than Jews. I still find it annoying.</div>
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"You don't need to go to the synagogue to pray.", Neumiro continues. "Life is about feelings." The synagogue is a tool to help you reach those feelings that make you feel in touch with the rest of the world. Fair enough.</div>
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"Judaism, reform, orthodox, conservative, changes constantly. They do not believe what they did even ten years ago." I wonder about the rise of fundamentalist Islam and Christianity. Evangelical Christians have certainly changed their thinking dramatically in my lifetime, at least in the US. They are, as a group, much more vocal in politics and thus more insistent upon having their views reflected in the laws of the land. I'm not certain about radical Islam. The radical fringes of both religions claim to be returning to the basics of their religion. I know for a fact that they are doing no such thing in Christianity. But Islam? I suspect that Islam is suffering from its incredibly detailed early literature and history. Islam simply got started late and is better documented than either Judaism or Christianity. Perhaps that gets in the way of people changing their thoughts to match new situations. We have never in the history of the world encountered such a radical global change as we have now, especially in the pace of scientific and thus technological advancement. Those unable to close their cognitive dissonance in a flexible way are naturally stuck. It is easier to burn down the house than map its rapidly changing rooms.</div>
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This ability to adapt and change seems to be central to the Jewish experience. They are so few, surrounded by so many, and scattered literally over the face of the Earth. I know several Jews who know of no other Jews in their town. Lucky are those who live near a synagogue. The ability to adapt their religion to their immediate needs has no doubt been both a source of strength and a guarantee of a sort that their is a community out there somewhere to which they belong. Christians and Muslims, each strong majorities in many countries, do not face the world's uncertainties with such resolve. The senseless persecution of members of those religions causes large-scale outcry. The Jews are, outside of Israel, left to adapt.</div>
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It is always easier to take the side of a minority. I get along with US-based Muslims better than I do with US-based evangelical Christians and with Indian Christians better than Indonesian Muslims. Certainly US Christians were more careful in their public views during their fractious minority in the Enlightenment than they are currently in their majority. I commented upon this in more depth in my <a href="http://prototypo.blogspot.com/2014/10/book-review-freethinkers-history-of.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">review</a> of Susan Jacoby's <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Freethinkers-A-History-American-Secularism/dp/0805077766/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/463263.Freethinkers" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>].</div>
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It may in fact be time for Islam to revive its "lost tradition of independent thinking", know as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ijtihad" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">ijtihad</a>, as Irshad Manji suggested in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Trouble with Islam Today</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Trouble-Islam-Today-Muslims/dp/0312327005" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/107702.The_Trouble_With_Islam_Today" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]. That would certainly help moderate Muslims combat the growing fundamentalism in their own communities. Harking back to Islam's intellectual golden age of roughly 900-1200 CE instead of ancient tribal rivalries also wouldn't hurt. I have no idea what the Christians could do. Protestant Christianity shows no sign of returning to the authoritarian fold of Catholicism and in its insistence that each individual can reach God directly promotes a sort of democratic acceptance of ignorance that sits poorly with the new science. Protestantism is in fact a form of Harris' witch culture in spite of its messianistic promises.</div>
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"That's why I don't like the Talmud!", declares Neumiro. I think back. The Talmud contains a record of generations of rabbinical thinking. It records interpretations of the Torah and how challenges to Jewish life have been met for generations. It is roughly equivalent to Islam's Hadith. I do not know of a similar concept in Christianity. "The rules are so strict! Think about a traffic light. It can be red, yellow or green. Do you speed through a red or yellow light if you have someone behind you who will rear-end you if you stop? The Orthodox say no! You will break a commandment!" He is excited at this point. "The Talmud says 'no'. I say 'of course!'"</div>
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I am reminded of my wife's thought that you can make heaven or hell for yourself right here, right now. By stopping at the light, you will make hell not only for yourself, but for the people behind you. You will cause them to repair their car at a minimum. Someone might even be hurt or killed. My atheistic, at least partially Utilitarian, philosophy appreciates Neumiro's position.</div>
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The mention of my wife brings Neumiro to his. He is honest about both the joys and frustrations of marriage. He congratulates me with a hearty "Mazel tov!" when I mention that we just celebrated our twentieth anniversary. "We are at thirty", he says. "Do you know that some Jews like to break the glass at weddings? It is not about throwing something away. I tell people that they need to pick up the pieces every day, try to put it back together again." It is yet another living metaphor. This is a fun conversation.</div>
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"What does it mean to you that we are created in God's image?", I ask. Neumiro thinks for a moment. "There is a kid's song." He hums for a few seconds. "I don't know how to sing it in English. It says, 'my spirit and my soul'. What is the difference between a spirit and a soul? When you sleep, your soul wanders." Suddenly, we are back to the Bronze Age. Does he mean that it literally wanders or is this another metaphor for dreaming and free association during memory formation? It is hard to tell. I recall a conversation with a Methodist minister in Northern Virginia where I tried to pin him down on Biblical literalism. He squirmed out of it every time like some kind of ecclesiastical snake, not of course in a Garden of Eden way. His genius is to avoid traps from people like me. He let his partitioners believe in a literal Jesus if they wanted to. He challenged no one.</div>
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"The spirit is your breathing. God gave Adam life by breathing it into him." I am reminded of the Sanskrit word prana, which means both "life force" and "breath". The concepts are conflated in yoga practice, in many martial arts and apparently in Judaism.</div>
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Neumiro is uncomfortable being Jewish in the US. "Christians say that we are going to hell. Jews don't believe in hell." He mentions the 2012 bombings of synagogues in Newark, New Jersey. He says that Jews regularly receive notes from the FBI telling them to "be alert". One gets the idea that Neumiro is alert. "It is more dangerous in Brazil, though, or Europe." He is right. The rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Kantor-Amid-increasing-anti-Semitism-normative-Jewish-life-in-Europe-is-unsustainable-350545" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">stated</a> in April 2014, is such that "Normative Jewish life in Europe is unsustainable." A late 2013 survey found that almost a third of Europe's Jews were considering emigration as a response to rising anti-Semitism.</div>
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The amazingly erudite Christopher Hitchens wrote in his introduction to the 2007 Penguin edition of Rebecca West’s classic but controversial pre-WWII book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Black Lamb and Grey Falcon</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Black-Lamb-Falcon-Penguin-Classics/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12880.Black_Lamb_and_Grey_Falcon" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>]:</div>
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West reflects on the virus of anti-Semitism, shrewdly locating one of its causes in the fact that “many primitive peoples must receive their first intimation of the toxic quality of thought from Jews. They know only the fortifying idea of religion; they see in Jews the effect of the tormenting and disintegrating ideas of skepticism.”</div>
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I found that particularly interesting when laid alongside the recent Pew survey <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2014/07/16/how-americans-feel-about-religious-groups/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">How Americans Feel About Religious Groups</a> that demonstrated widespread uneasiness regarding atheists. Of course, the Pew survey reflects current US values, not historical ones nor those in other countries. It would seem that there is a strong similarity between those who introduce, intentionally or not, doubt into religious convictions. They, we, are naturally vilified. The underlying evolutionary mechanism is probably human group dynamics, especially the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_cohesiveness" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">cohesiveness</a> so necessary to the formation of stable tribes.</div>
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In spite of some press reports to the contrary, examples of atheist bashing in the US are not uncommon. Research by Margaret Downey (<a href="http://secularhumanism.org/library/fi/downey_24_4.htm" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Discrimination Against Atheists: The Facts</a>) shows that atheists are "losing their jobs, facing abusive family situations, being subjected to organized shunning campaigns in their communities, receiving death threats, and the like." This should not be a surprise. Just like domestic violence, rape, and other socially stigmatizing crimes, it is under reported. I suspect the same is true for anti-Semitism.</div>
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We were interrupted by a woman sitting at the next table. "I'm sorry to interrupt your conversation", she says, "but I just wanted to say that I just love the Jewish people." She was concerned that the US "stand by Israel". I wondered whether she was going to inform us that Jesus had been a Jew and indeed she did. "Israel's boundaries were established Biblically", she informed us, no doubt parrotting her Christian minister. It didn't sound like something she had thought of herself. Her name was Sarah. She was sweet in a rather innocent way. "A few of my friends feel the same way." Neumiro was later to pick up on the word "few". "Not many or most", he said. Neumiro gave Sarah a business card. She thanked him. I hesitated, frankly afraid of being too open with a person didn't know and didn't particularly trust.</div>
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"Thank you for interrupting", I tried. "It is not often that a Christian, a Jew and an atheist can have a peaceful conversation."</div>
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She made pleasant sounds but returned immediately reassure Neumiro that Jews were fine with her. She was not interested in me. I breathed a sigh of relief. They share a god, I thought. At least they have that in common.</div>
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I turned back to Neumiro when Sarah left. "I fear the combination of nationalism and fundamental Christianity. It would seem to be an explosive mix. The combination of national socialism and blaming others didn't work out so well. This could turn the same way if we let it."</div>
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"God told Abraham to go to a place", Neumiro replied. "He never gave him a destination. Each step Abraham asks where and God says, 'keep going'. The journey is the thing."</div>
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We shook hands and parted friends.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-85885101191785261242014-10-19T17:56:00.001-04:002014-10-19T17:57:14.907-04:00Book Review: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">On Intelligence</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27539.On_Intelligence" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] purports to explain human intelligence and point the way to a new approach toward artificial intelligence. It partially succeeds on the former and knocks it out of the park on the latter.</div>
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This is only book that Jeff Hawkins has written. Silicon Valley insiders may remember Hawkins as the creator of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">PalmPilot</a> back in the 1990s and, when the owners restricted his vision, he left to create <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handspring_(company)" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Handspring</a>. Both companies made a lot of money, which is all that matters on the Sand Hill Road side of Silicon Valley. The tech side of the Valley cares more about the fact that Hawkins succeeded in the handheld computing market where the legendary Steve Jobs had failed (with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Newton</a>).</div>
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Hawkins' journalist co-author Sandra Blakeslee, on the other hand, has an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sandra-Blakeslee/e/B001ILMBW0/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon author page</a> that scrolls and scrolls. She has co-authored ten books, several of which have related to the mind, consciousness and intelligence. Her most recent book, <a href="http://www.sleightsofmind.com/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions</a>, was published as recently as 2011 with neuroscientists Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde and was an international best seller. She has seemingly made a career out of helping scientists effectively communicate thought-provoking ideas.</div>
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Hawkins focuses all of his attention on uncovering the algorithm implemented by the human neocortex. Where that is impossible due to lack of agreement or basic science, he makes some (hopefully) reasonable assumptions and proceeds without slowing down. That will strike most neuroscientists as inexcusable. It makes perfect sense to an engineer.</div>
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Albert Einstein once said, "Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been." Or, to quote myself, scientists look at the world and ask, "How does this work?". Engineers look at the world and say, "This sucks! How can we make it better?" There is a fundamental difference in philosophy required of scientists and engineers. Hawkins proved himself to be an engineer through and through even when he bends over backward when attempting to do some science.</div>
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There is a particularly <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/654485924?book_show_action=true&page=1" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">useful review</a> on Goodreads that drives a crowbar though the core of the book as if it were the left frontal lobe of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Phineas Gage</a>. The reviewer who goes solely by the name of Chrissy rightly points out Hawkins' overfocus on the neocortex.</div>
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<q style="box-sizing: border-box;">It became clear that Hawkins was so fixated on the neocortex that he was willing to push aside contradictory evidence from subcortical structures to make his theory fit. I've seen this before, from neuroscientists who fall in love with a given brain region and begin seeing it as the root of all behaviour, increasingly neglecting the quite patent reality of an immensely distributed system.</q></div>
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Chrissy is correct. Hawkins' work is nevertheless critically important. Although the cortex is without doubt only part of the brain and only part of the "seat" of consciousness, his work to define a working theory of the "cortical learning algorithm" has lead directly to a new branch of machine learning. It is one that has borne substantial fruit since the book's 2004 debut.</div>
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It shouldn't surprise anyone that Hawkins' reviewers confuse science and engineering. Professionals are often confused on the separation themselves. Any such categorization is arbitrary and people have the flexibility to change their perspective, and thus their intent, on demand. To make matters worse, computer science is neither about computers nor science. It is the Holy Roman Empire of the engineering professions. Computer science involves the creation and implementation of highly and increasingly abstract algorithms to solve highly and increasingly abstract problems of information manipulation. It is certainly different from computer engineering, which actually does involve building computers, and it is also generally different from its subfield software engineering. Of course reporters and even scientists get confused.</div>
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Writing <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">On Intelligence</em> has not made Hawkins into a neuroscientist. That does not seem to have been his goal. Hawkins goal was to build a <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">more intelligent computer program</em> - one that "thinks" more like a human thinks. His explorations of the human brain have had that goal constantly in mind.</div>
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Hawkins himself states his goal differently, but I stand by my interpretation. Why? Consider what he says (pp. 90):</div>
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What has been lacking is putting these disparate bits and pieces into a coherent theoretical framework. This, I argue, has not been done before, and it is the goal of this book.</div>
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That makes him sound like a scientist. But he went on to do exactly what I claim. He described a framework and then implemented it as a computer program. That's engineering.</div>
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It seems almost strange that it took fully five years from the book's publication for Hawkins' group at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (now called the <a href="http://redwood.berkeley.edu/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience</a> at UC Berkeley) to publish a more technical <a href="http://numenta.org/cla-white-paper.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">white paper</a> detailing the so-called cortical learning algorithm (CLA) described in the book. The white paper provides sufficient detail to create a computer program that works the way that Hawkins understands the human neocortex to work. Again surprisingly, another four years passed before an implementation of that algorithm became available for download by anyone interested. The Internet generally works faster than that when a good idea comes along. The only reasonable explanation is that a fairly small team has been working on it.</div>
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You can, since early 2013, download an implementation of the CLA yourself and run it on your own computer to solve problems that you give it. Programmers normally love this sort of thing. It is interesting to note that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Google self-driving car</a> uses exactly the traditional artificial intelligence techniques that Hawkins denigrates in his first chapter. Hawkins may have come too late for easy acceptance of his ideas. There are entrenched interests in AI research and Moore's Law ensures that they can still find success with their existing approaches. A specialist might note that the machine learning algorithms in the Google car have stretched traditional neural networking well beyond its initial boundaries and toward many of the aspects described by Hawkins, without ever quite buying into his approach.</div>
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The implementation is called the <a href="http://numenta.org/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing</a> (NuPIC). It is dual licensed under a commercial license and the <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">GNU GPL v3</a> Open Source license. That means that you can use it for free or they will help you if you want to pay. You can choose.</div>
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Hawkins lists and briefs brief critiques for the major branches of artificial intelligence, specifically expert systems, neural networks, auto-associative memories and Bayesian networks. He is right to criticize all of them for not having looked more carefully at the brain's physical structure before jumping to simple algorithmic approaches. The closest of the lot is perhaps neural networks, which is notionally based on composing collections of software-implemented "neurons". These artificial neurons are rather gross simplifications of biological neurons and the networks, with their three-tier structure, are poor substitutes for the complex relationships known to exist in the brain of even the most primitive animals. Still, the timing of Hawkins book was unfortunate in that its publication occurred at the beginning of our current golden age of neuroscience. AI is back and AI research is suddenly well funded again. So-called deep learning networks currently contain many more than the three traditional layers, up to eight or even more. IBM has recently moved neural networks to hardware with their announcement of their <a href="http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/44529.wss" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">SyNAPSE chip</a> that "has one million neurons and 256 million synapses" implemented in silicon. All approaches are currently blooming for AI and are being applied to everything from voice and facial recognition to automatically filling spreadsheet cells to autonomous robots. There is currently less reason for the AI community to investigate, or lobby for hardware implementing, a brand new general approach. None of that makes Hawkins wrong. The human brain is still the only conscious system we know of and neuroscience is still doing a bad job of looking at its structures from the top down.</div>
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The largest single criticism of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">On Intelligence</em> from me is that the cortex Hawkins describes is a blank slate, also called a <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em>. We know that the human brain is not. The idea that a mind is empty until filled solely by experience dates back at least to Aristotle. The Persian philosopher Ibn-Sīnā, popularly called Avicenna in Europe - a name still taught in Western universities, coined the term <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">tabula rasa</em> a thousand years ago as he interpreted and translated Aristotle's <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">de Anima</em>. We have known for decades that we are born with a number of innate functions, such as facial perception, so the brain is not a blank slate. Other animals have their own innate behavior such as the fear that many bird species have for the shape of a hawk. Hawkins does address the changing nature of brain function during life but does not even peripherally describe how innate functions fit into his theory.</div>
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Hawkins is often criticized for failing to provide a collated list of his assumptions. They are indeed buried in the prose. Hawkins comes right after the book's last chapter by providing an appendix that lists eleven predictions. They are all testable given the right science. Scientists are explicitly asked to validate or repudiate those predictions. A decade later, I am not aware of a comprehensive attempt to do so.</div>
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I have attempted to find all of Hawkins presumptions and have listed them here in the hope that they will both help other reviewers and neuroscientists who might pick away at them. All page numbers are from the 2004 St. Martin's Griffen paperback edition. All indications of emphasis are in the original text unless otherwise marked. The assumptions generally flow from the highest level of abstraction to the lowest, as Hawkins mostly does.</div>
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1. "We can assume that the human neocortex has a similar hierarchy [to a monkey cortex]" pp. 45. This one not only seems reasonable but is an assumption held by many scientists. It is in line with the many independent threads of evidence from evolutionary theory. Hawkins was intentionally careful when he used the word "similar".</div>
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2. "We don't even have to assume the cortex knows the difference between sensation and behavior, to the cortex they are both just patterns." pp. 100. This is actually a negative assumption in that he is <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">not</em> making one. This kind of thinking, determining what assumptions are necessary to a system, is in keeping with Hawkins' coding background. It is an engineering necessity.</div>
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3. "Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">primary function</em> of the neocortex, and the foundation of intelligence." pp. 89. This is Hawkins' central idea and the one that informs not only the book and the implementation of NuPIC but the philosophic approach to his understanding of the brain and its functions. Hawkins relates the traditional AI approach of artificial auto-associative memories and declares, "We call this chain of memories thought, and although its path is not deterministic, we are not fully in control of it either." pp. 75. He proposes that "the brain uses circuits similar to an auto-associative memory to [recall memories]" pp. 31.</div>
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Here is also where Hawkins is forced to leave the cortex and venture into its relationships with another area of the brain. He notes the large number of connections between the cortex and the thalamus and the delay inherent in passing signals that way. He declares that the cortex-thalamus circuit is "exactly like the delayed feedback that lets auto-associative memory models learn sequences." pp. 146. He is onto something here, but one must question his oversimplification. The thalamus is also known to be involved in the regulation of sleep and thus almost assuredly implements more than just a delayed communication loop with the cortex.</div>
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Eventually he is able to bring his prediction model into sharp focus: "If the cortex saw your arm moving without the corresponding motor command, you would be surprised. The simplest way to interpret this would be to assume your brain first moves the arm and then predicts what it will see. I believe this is wrong. Instead I believe the cortex predicts seeing the arm, and this prediction is what causes the motor commands to make the prediction come true. You think first, which causes you to act to make your thoughts come true." pp. 102. This focus on the predictive nature of the neocortex is key to Hawkins understanding. Either the neocortex implements an algorithm really quite similar to the CLA as described by Hawkins and is therefore a "memory-prediction framework" or he has got it wrong. The predictive abilities of NuPIC suggest that he is on the right track in spite of his many assumptions.</div>
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4. Hawkins makes two interesting and useful assumptions for the purposes of developing a top down theory: "For now, let’s assume that a typical cortical area is the size of a small coin" pp. 138 (he does acknowledge there is substantial variation), and "I believe that a column is the basic unit of prediction" pp. 141. Why does it matter to Hawkins how large a cortical area is, much less a typical one? It shouldn't matter to a typical neuroscientist. They take the anatomy the way they find it. Remember though that Hawkins' purpose is to build a more intelligent computer program. He betrays his intent in making assumptions that all cortical regions have fundamentally the same structure (in spite of minor variations that he readily admits are in the literature) and in setting a typical size for an area of cortex. These assumptions will help him to design a computer program that learns in a new way. He is on better footing with the purpose of a cortical column. Cortical columns are indeed very regular in their construction and distribution, a fact that Hawkins dug out of 1970s research and relies upon heavily. It is striking and probably key to any successful high-level theory.</div>
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From this point forward Hawkins' assumptions get progressively more technical as he moves toward something that he can implement using existing technology. This may be the most important criticism of On Intelligence even though I personally find it perfectly excusable. Those seeking new neuroscience will be disappointed. Those seeking new and more general ways to approach artificial intelligence will be rapt.</div>
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Any review attempting to list Hawkins' more technical assumptions will need to pause to introduce new vocabulary for the general reader. A cortex, animal or human, is the outer layer of the brain. It consists of valleys and folds in order to increase its surface area in the small space afforded it in the skull. Its basic structure is a "cortical column" of six layers. The human brain has "<a href="http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/cms/lang/en/pid/56882" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">some 100,000 neurons to a single cortical column and perhaps as many as 2 million columns.</a>" The <a href="http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Blue Brain Project</a> of the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland is currently attempting to model a complete brain, or at least the cortex. They have already succeeded in modeling a rat's cortical column. This is much more than Hawkins attempted, but a top-level theory of cortical function has yet to emerge from the project.</div>
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The six layers of a cortical column have many connections to other layers, other columns, other regions of the cortex and other areas of the brain. It is a complex network. Each layer consists of differently shaped cells. Hawkins collected the many, many neurons in a cortical column into functions at each layer. That alone may be a very valuable contribution if it is shown that level of abstraction can be made without sacrificing higher level function.</div>
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It will be useful and fascinating to see what emerges from a study of the Blue Brain Project's cortical column models. In the meantime, Hawkins has provided us with a roadmap of questions to ask.</div>
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5. Noting the obvious disparity between streams of sensory inputs and highly abstract thought, Hawkins illustrates how a hierarchical set of relationships between cortical areas could produce abstractions ("invariant representations") at the higher levels. "The transformation—from fast changing to slow changing and from spatially specific to spatially invariant—is well documented for vision. And although there is a smaller body of evidence to prove it, many neuroscientists believe you’d find the same thing happening in all the sensory areas of your cortex, not just in vision." pp. 114. Hawkins goes on to take this as written, which is just what he needs to do in the absence of established science in order to build a system.</div>
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6. Continuing with the vision system, possibly the best studied areas of the brain to date, Hawkins discusses some of the key regions called by neuroscientists V1, V2 and so on. He says, "I have come to believe that V1, V2, and V4 should not be viewed as single cortical regions. Rather, each is a collection of many smaller subregions." pp. 122. Hawkins is making a rather classic reductionist argument here. The question is not how arbitrary regions are defined or what they are called. The problem in front of our engineer is how they are connected. He needs that information to make reasonable (not necessarily physiologically accurate) assumptions if he is to uncover the mechanisms of the brain's learning system.</div>
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7. A region of cortex, says Hawkins, "has classified its input as activity in a set of columns." pp. 148. It is hard to argue with this suggestion given the success of Hawkins' artificial CLA in making predictions without the traditional training necessary to other forms of AI. Further, the cortex gets around limits on variation handling found in early artificial auto-associative memories, "partly by stacking auto-associative memories in a hierarchy and partly by using a sophisticated columnar architecture." pp. 164.</div>
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8. There are several assumptions about the detailed workings of a cortical column. "Let's also assume that one class of cells, called layer 2 cells, learns to stay on during learning sequences", says Hawkins (pp. 152). He makes no judgement whether that "learning" is innate or actively learned during life. He doesn't even know that it is really there. Something like it must be in order to make his theory work. That is no criticism! It is instead a testable hypothesis and thus the very model of scientific advancement. It also allows him to build something.</div>
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"Next, let’s assume there is another class of cells, layer 3b cells, which don’t fire when our column successfully predicts its input but do fire when it doesn’t predict its activity. A layer 3b cell represents an unexpected pattern. It fires when a column becomes active unexpectedly. It will fire every time a column becomes active prior to any learning. But as a column learns to predict its activity, the layer 3b cell becomes quiet." pp. 152. This might seem unjustified. What would make Hawkins jump to a conclusion in the apparently complete absence of supportive science. The answer is that the engineer clearly sees the necessity of feedback when it is presented to him. There simply must be a mechanism that fills the role or no learning could occur. Hawkins merely suggests a reasonable place for it and encourages the neuroscience community to look for it.</div>
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As for the lowest level, layer 6: "cells in layer 6 are where precise prediction occurs." pp. 201.</div>
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9. Finally, Hawkins rightly notes some differences between biological neurons and the artificial neurons used in neural networking models. It makes one wonder what IBM implemented on their SyNAPSE chip. How biologically correct were they? Hawkins says, "neurons behave differently from the way they do in the classic model. In fact, in recent years there has been a growing group of scientists who have proposed that synapses on distant, thin dendrites can play an active and highly specific role in cell firing. In these models, these distant synapses behave differently from synapses on thicker dendrites near the cell body. For example, if there were two synapses very close to each other on a thin dendrite, they would act as a 'coincidence detector.' That is, if both synapses received an input spike within a small window of time, they could exert a large effect on the cell even though they are far from the cell body. They could cause the cell body to generate a spike." pp. 163. This is exactly the sort of thing that can have great biologic effect and cause great trouble for overly simplistic implementors. It would seem that Hawkins was careful to avoid this over simplification even while embracing others.</div>
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Hawkins has also uncovered something really quite important and almost painfully subtle. Philosophers of mind, psychologists and priests have for centuries argued that the mind is fundamentally different from the body. We moderns have become comfortable with considering huge swaths of the body as mechanistic in nature. We can replace an arm, a leg, a kidney, even a heart for a while. We can insert a pacemaker, or a hearing aide. Surgery can cut, sew and sometimes almost magically repair, replace or augment much of our bodily infrastructure. We tend to view the body as a mechanism, however complicated, as a natural result. The brain, though, the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">mind</em>, is a different matter. All the neuroscience conducted to date fails to convince most of us that the brain implements an algorithm. We cannot, so it is said, be reduced to an algorithm because that would imply that we could - one day - make a machine with all the abilities of people. Perhaps it would need to have all the rights, too. That scares people badly.</div>
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Parts of the brain have come to be accepted as algorithmic. Are you aware that a <a href="http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/233924/scitech/cyborg-rat-s-computer-brain-offers-hope-for-stroke-victims" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">computerized cerebellum</a> has been created for a rat? That was in 2011. Scientists and engineers are starting to soberly discuss creating such a device for paralyzed human beings.</div>
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The slow, painfully slow, admission that the body is a series of devices each of which chemically implement algorithms has been a long time coming. Parts of the brain have now unarguably fallen to the algorithmic worldview. First the ears, the eyes, the entire vision system. The cerebellum. The pineal gland. Hormonal balances. Most of the pons. Hawkins takes on the neocortex and, in spite of Chrissy's complaint, he did find it necessary to include the thalamus in his model. The bottom line is that the cortical learning algorithm is an <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">algorithm</em>. Philosophers of mind fear such a finding.</div>
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The idea that thinking is a form of computation dates from 1961 when Hilary Putnam first expressed it publicly. It has become known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Computational Theory of Mind</a> or CTM. Although CTM has its detractors (especially John Searle's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Chinese Room</a>, although that has been debunked to my personal satisfaction) it has become the basis for current thinking in evolutionary and cognitive psychology. The so called new synthesis of CTM is roughly a combination of the ideas of Charles Darwin's evolution, mathematician Alan Turing's universal computation and limits to computability proofs and linguist Noam Chomsky's rationalist epistemology. The basic idea is still the same, that human thought in human brains are algorithms even if they are quite complex ones that we haven't fully deconstructed. The new synthesis is about proving that theory.</div>
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"The dissociation between mind and matter in men and machines is very striking", observed David Berlinski in his book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Advent of the Algorithm</em>[<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Advent-Algorithm-300-Year-Computer/dp/0156013916" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/393171.The_Advent_of_the_Algorithm" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], "it suggests that almost any stable and reliable organization of material objects can execute an algorithm and so come to command some form of intelligence."</div>
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We know what to do with algorithms. We implement them. It doesn't really matter how. We can implement algorithms in computer software or by creating DNA from a vat of chemicals or by lining up sticks and stones in clever ways. The only difference is the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">efficiency</em> of the implemented algorithm. Electronic computers give us a way to perform calculations - implement algorithms - blindingly fast but they aren't the fastest way to implement all algorithms. Optical computers can do some things faster. Bodily chemistry, too. Or quantum computing. Each is just another way to implement algorithms be they designed by people or discovered by the search algorithm that we call evolution.</div>
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Discovering that the brain is algorithmic is arguably the most important realization of this or any other century. It means we can make more by any means we choose. That will shatter many world views even if Hawkins only got us part way there.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-27135886873809389582014-10-14T21:24:00.001-04:002014-10-14T21:25:12.229-04:00Book Review: Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Freethinkers-A-History-American-Secularism/dp/0805077766/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/463263.Freethinkers" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] is exactly what it claims to be: A major piece of the missing history of secular thought heretofor diligently and thankfully incompletely surpressed. Jacoby has joined Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Doubt-Doubters-Innovation-Jefferson-Dickinson/dp/0060097957" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/80226.Doubt" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], and Christopher Hitchens, author of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Portable-Atheist-Essential-Nonbeliever/dp/0306816083" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1566053.The_Portable_Atheist" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>], as one of the preeminent historians of nonbelieving.</div>
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Negative reviews of Freethinkers invariably say that the book is "a slog", "packed with too much information" or describe Jacoby's writing style as "condescending". They are not completely without basis. Later chapters veer from the impassioned and erudite opening in which Jacoby, at her best, quotes the prominant nineteenth century orator Robert Ingersoll as saying, "We have retired the gods from politics" and immediately contrasting that sentiment strongly with President George W. Bush's post-911 sermon thunderingly delivered from the pulpit of the National Cathedral.</div>
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As Jacoby sings the praises of the secular founding of the United States, she fails to follow up on the irony of the National Cathedral itself. Why does a secular government have a National Cathedral? The answer goes back almost to the where Jacoby's history starts: 1792. That is when the architect of Washington, D.C., Pierre L'Enfant, set aside a place for a central church, prominantly on the National Mall between the Congress and White House. Congress itself chartered the building of the cathedral in the late nineteenth century and has designated the building as the "National House of Prayer". The Congressional mandate was made in spite of the operating of the building by the Episcopal Church or the ownership by the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation. Our nationwide conversation regarding the separation of church and state has never been fully resolved.</div>
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How many of the positive reviews of Freethinkers (sample: "A must-read for freethinkers!!") are due to the nearly complete removal of freethinking from history books adopted as texts in US schools? Perhaps many atheists, agnostics and freethinkers have been simply stunned to discover that their thoughts should not make them lonely. I certainly have been.</div>
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Stealing history from a subculture does not make them love you. Yet it doesn't keep rulers from trying. Other modern examples of minority cultures losing their history include Australia's shameful <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Stolen Generations</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_children_by_Nazi_Germany" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">kidnapping of children by Nazi Germany</a> for the purpose of "Germanification", stories of European Jews hiding their heritage from their children (who sometimes <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/09/23/poland.jewish/index.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">regained it</a>). Earlier examples abound, especially in areas once controlled by native Americans, conquered in war or folded into empires. The hiding of American secularism from new generations hardly reaches near to these extremes. Nevertheless, a shock of recognition is bound to occur when the light is eventually allowed to shine.</div>
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Jacoby sometimes gets so close to her subject that she forgets that the rest of us do not command her source material as well as she. She refers to a petition signed by 'four hundred Quakers, wittingly signed "your real Friends".' The joke may well be lost on those coastal Americans unfamiliar with the <a href="http://quaker.org/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Religious Society of Friends</a>, who are only colloquially called Quakers for their founder's admonition to "tremble at the word of the Lord".</div>
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I am nearly forced at this point to interlude long enough for the only Quaker joke that I know (perhaps because it is one of very few):</div>
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A Quaker farmer is milking his cow. The cow had been walking through brambles and has a tail full of burrs. The cow whacks the farmer across the face with her tail. The farmer shakes his head and continues to milk. The half-ton cow then steps on the farmer's foot. The farmer puts his shoulder into the cow, pushes and extracts his foot. When the milking is finished, the farmer stands up. The cow kicks over the bucket of milk.</div>
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The farmer looks at the spilled milk and then walks around to look at the cow in her eye. "Thee knows," says the farmer, "that I may not strike thee. And thee knows that I may not curse thee. But what thee does not know is that I may sell thee to a Methodist."</div>
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It may be difficult for us moderns to comprehend the subtly and difficulties inherent in that recitation. What was it like in Western Europe or the fledgling United States at a time when Catholics and Jews were considered as heathan alongside the Deists, so prevalent in the countryside, scores of minor Protestant sects, outright atheists and the smattering of Asian faiths seeping in during the imperial precursor to globalization? So many sects abounded in the early US that it was in almost everyone's best interest to keep the others from gaining too much power. Our situation today is so different partly due to the widespread majority of Protestant Christianity of the evangelical nature. Evangelicals have forgotten, as Jacoby points out, that they were the natural political allies of atheists during the contentious negotiations leading to the Constitution. More to the point, they have fallen into the desire to wield their powerful majority when they have it. John Adams coined the phrase "tyranny of the majority" in 1788 and he knew exactly what he was talking about.</div>
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Those interested in learning more about Jacoby's star of the show, Robert Ingersoll, will be interested to learn that Jacoby recently reprised her biosketch in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Freethinkers</em> with a complete biography. <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300137257/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13593960-the-great-agnostic" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] has garnered the same high marks as its predecessor. Jacoby could not have initially benefited from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tim Page's distillation of Ingersoll's work in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">What's God Got to Do with It?: Robert Ingersoll on Free Thought, Honest Talk and the Separation of Church and State</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1586420968/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>,<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/849130.What_s_God_Got_to_Do_with_it_Robert_Ingersoll_on_Free_Thought_Honest_Talk_the_Separation_of_Church_State" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] since it was published the year following Freethinkers.</div>
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Jacoby has many successes in this book and I do not wish to diminish them. There is one aspect of the book that did not stand up to the rest. She seems to have entirely missed the European atheistic influence on her American heroes.</div>
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Ingersoll seems to have been a staunch <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Utilitarian</a> in his philosophy. Utilitarianism judges each course of action on its effects, positive or negative, to the greatest number of people. This ever-so-practical philosophy was pioneered by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Jeremy Bentham</a> in his 1789 book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation</em> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/An-Introduction-Principles-Morals-Legislation/dp/1612030300" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Amazon</a>, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19528984-an-introduction-to-the-principles-of-morals-and-legislation-2" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Goodreads</a>] and was intended to form the underpinnings of an atheistic moral philosophy to replace the prevailing Judeo-Christian and Deistic philosophies of his day. Amazingly, and to Jacoby's theme, the word "atheist" does not currently appear on Jeremy Bentham's Wikipedia entry.</div>
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Ingersoll's following quotation is wholly in line with Bentham's "<a href="http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Greatest_happiness_principle" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">greatest happiness principle</a>" and with the philosophy espoused by his British contemporary John Stuart Mill:</div>
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Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.</div>
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Bentham went on to have great influence on the founding of University College London, the first university in Britain to allow for the tertiary education of atheists, Jews, Hindus and members of other religious minorities. The leading universities of the time, Oxford and Cambridge, required membership in the Church of England. He was also the first person to donate his body to science. Prior to Bentham, anatomists acquired their corpses from graveyards with or without the permission of the law or by receiving the bodies of executed criminals. Bentham's body was publicly dissected in UCL's medical theatre by his friend Dr. George Fordyce, the remains later preserved, dressed in his own clothes and placed on permanent display in UCL's South Cloisters. His so-called "<a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/who/autoicon" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">auto-icon</a>" may still be seen there today. All of this was in accordance with Bentham's atheism, his Utilitarianism and his last will and testament.</div>
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Can we be certain that Betham influenced Ingersoll? Yes. Project Gutenberg contains a freely available copy of <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38106/38106-h/38106-h.htm" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Ingersollia</em> </a>, or "Gems of thought from the lectures, speeches, and conversations of Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, representative of his opinions and beliefs". In that useful collection we find this particular gem: 'The glory of Bentham is, that he gave the true basis of morals, and furnished the statesmen with the star and compass of this sentence: "The greatest happiness of the greatest number."' Ingersoll himself admits the influence and yet Jacoby seems to have either missed it or ignored it. Interestingly, Hecht too seems to have missed the connection although she focuses more of her considerable attention on Bentham than on Ingersoll. To miss this connection is to suggest an Americanism to Ingersoll that belies its European inheritance.</div>
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Together Bentham, Mill, Ingersoll and other Utilitarians created the atheistic golden age in the nineteenth century. Jacoby's American-centric history inexplicably leaves out this European connection to Ingersoll's life and times.</div>
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Jacoby also failed to mention alongside the women's suffrage movement and that of civil rights that the expansion of voting rights has corresponded directly with the simplification of political speech. George Washington's <a href="http://allspeeches.com/speech/george-washington-first-inaugural-address/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">first inaugural address</a> is full of big juicy words as little understood by the common people of his time as by the uneducated of ours: "Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the fourteenth day of the present month." Can one imagine Barak Obama or George W. Bush using a word like vicissitudes and getting away with it? Actually, Obama tried early in the 2007 campaign season and was castigated as being "professorial" as a result. There is little doubt in my mind that the democratic expansion of suffrage brought along the religious concerns of the masses.</div>
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The state of atheism and agnosticism in the US today is, as it always been, complicated. I agree with Jacoby that it is difficult in the extreme for an openly atheistic person to be elected to national office. Indeed, the Huffington Post <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/22/atheist-congress-members_n_5701377.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">reported</a> earlier this year that 24 US congressmen reported being "privately" nonbelievers but would not say so publicly. American atheists and agnostics are, as a group, mostly in the closet. This is slightly contrasted by the widely-reported 1997 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences. The original article in <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v394/n6691/full/394313a0.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">Nature</a> requires a subscription to access, but a <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20140301051125/http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">summary</a> is available via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. 93% of our nation's best scientists reported being either atheist or agnostic (72.2% atheists, 20.8% agnostics). A 2009 <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">survey</a> by the Pew Research Center confirmed a much higher secularism in all scientists compared to the general public. The sense of tension reported by Jacoby between theists and atheists, with agnostics sometimes caught in the middle, has survived intact through to the modern day, with the vastly increased pace of scientific discovery bringing the conversation to an uncomfortable head.</div>
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Jacoby's litany of examples from modern America, from Justice Antonin Scalia to President G.W. Bush to Al Gore, in her final chapter is well titled as Reason Embattled. It certainly feels that way. Scalia's repetitive quotations from St. Paul should make any of us wonder how he thinks about the New Testament's <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Timothy+2%3A12" style="background: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #428bca; text-decoration: none;">1 Timothy 2:12</a>. However, the First Amendment is still in force even in a period where the Fourth is held to be first among equals. We have not lost yet. Jacoby's call to arms to regain the pride of place for American secularism should be heeded or it is our fault indeed.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-77286793436654464552014-10-03T15:55:00.000-04:002014-10-03T15:55:06.789-04:00Rewriting the US Pledge of Allegiance<a href="http://thehumanist.com/" target="_blank">The Humanist</a>, a publication of the <a href="http://americanhumanist.org/" target="_blank">American Humanist Association</a>, is having a <a href="http://thehumanist.com/arts_entertainment/games/contest-how-would-you-rewrite-the-pledge-of-allegiance" target="_blank">contest</a> to rewrite the US pledge of allegiance.<br />
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I have never, and I mean never, been a fan of the pledge. I first encountered the pledge in kindergarten where, along with all the other five-year-olds I was informed that I would stand every morning, face the flag in the corner of the room and recite:<br />
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I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.</blockquote>
The phrase "under God" sits poorly with most non-theists. I also never understood the point of pledging allegiance to a flag <i>per se</i>.<br />
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The pledge itself contains a respectable amount of baggage for such a short sentence. "one Nation" and "indivisible" are clear reflections of their time. The pledge was written to coincide with the quadcentennial of Columbus' initial landing in New World on an unknown island in The Bahamas. America in 1892 was still reeling from the society-wide shock of the Civil War, the economic rebuilding of the American South and the migration of both native Americans and former slaves into some semblance of citizenship. Although the direct memories of the war were fading from living memory and US patriotism was rising to the crescendo that would culminate in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War" target="_blank">Spanish-American War</a>, no educated person of the time could have mistaken the words "one Nation" and "indivisible" as meaning anything other than "Let us never again fight a civil war".<br />
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The contentious phrase "under God" was snuck into the pledge in 1954 after six years of agitation from various groups of religious bent including both the Sons and the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Knights of Columbus and the organizers of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Prayer_Breakfast" target="_blank">National Prayer Breakfast</a>.<br />
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Arguably (because I will argue it) the best words in the pledge are "with liberty and justice for all". These simple words betray a social commitment that was extreme from the day they were written. Socialist, Baptist minister and pledge creator Francis Bellamy originally wanted to include the words "equality" and "fraternity" in the pledge. They must remind one of the Enlightenment-era motto of the French Revolution (and the current national motto of both France and the Republic of Haiti): <i>Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité</i>. Fear of extending the franchise to women, African Americans and other marginalized people would have kept the pledge from wide adoption had those words been included. Bellamy successfully conned his ship of patriotism past the shoals of overt prejudice.<br />
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The America of today may not be less prejudiced but it is certainly more multicultural. Most of the adults of the country's roughly 12% African American and 16% Hispanic or Latino population have the ability to vote, as do most of the 5% of adults of Asian decent. The total population is also more than five times the size of the country in the 1890s.<br />
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How can we repair the current pledge? I doubt we can. The fractious nature of the US Congress, especially the House of Representatives, and the vocalism of our religious fellow citizens make any agreement to change the pledge elusive. Some have argued that we should not pledge at all, to a country or to a god. That need not stop a reasonable discourse. It is just likely to stop an official agreement.<br />
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My own suggestion is to get back to basics. The <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/I_pledge_allegiance.html?id=zUEaAAAAYAAJ" target="_blank">original purpose</a> of the pledge was to "instill into the minds of our American youth a love for their country and the principles on which it was founded". This is social engineering if I have ever heard it. Call it instilling patriotism in the new generation or mindwashing or anything else, it is absolutely an explicit form of cultural transmission. So what form of cultural transmission should we wish for?<br />
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I would love to get any idea of someone else's god out of the picture. Religion is best when it is silent in public. Nationalism, too, does not tend to serve us well as it leads us into wars that may not need to be fought.<br />
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The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preamble_to_the_United_States_Constitution" target="_blank">Preamble to the US Constitution</a> is, for me, one of the cleanest statements of the goals of a secular society in which citizens have liberty to pursue their own interests as long as the general welfare is not infringed. My right to swing my arm, as my father would say, ends at the tip of your nose.<br />
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I therefore propose the following restatement of the US pledge of allegiance:<br />
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I pledge to work for a more perfect union, the establishment of justice, the insurance of domestic tranquility, the provision for common defense and the promotion of general welfare in order to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.</blockquote>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16377117761292204691noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288183.post-20568408815933384632014-09-15T16:24:00.000-04:002014-10-14T21:25:27.559-04:00Book Review: Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country<u><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Without_a_Country" target="_blank">A Man Without a Country</a></u> [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Man-Without-Country-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/081297736X" target="_blank">Amazon</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4979.A_Man_Without_a_Country" target="_blank">Goodreads</a>] is a short little book and the last of Vonnegut's all too short life. The simple fact that he wrote it at eighty two years of age should alone make it worth reading. So few authors, great or not, continue to write into their eighties. Vonnegut himself must have thought his age important since he informs us on two of the book's 160 pages and again in the table of contents.<br />
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Vonnegut calls his own work "windy" in comparison to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and similarly lauds other tight poetry. His signature style, though, is still obvious. His zingy one-liners abound. "The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes", he says of a retail clerk in New York. "Now isn't that worth the trip?"<br />
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It would be unreasonable to expect an octogenarian not to sound like an old man. Vonnegut doesn't disappoint. He is tired, he says, grouchy, and plainly wishes the human race were something other than he has observed it to be. Those familiar with his more famous works, particularly Slaughterhouse 5, will be familiar with his reasoning. His horrific experiences during the firebombing of Dresden informed not only that great work but this lesser one. His distrust of authority, and the rewriting of history, are well earned. No doubt his natural tendency to aged crankiness coupled too tightly with his antiestablishment bent. They left him, as he says, unable to joke. His lifelong defensive mechanism finally gave way to despair.<br />
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Perhaps surprisingly, Vonnegut did not in the end commit suicide. Other famous American writers have, such as Ernest Hemingway, Hunter Thompson and, more recently, David Foster Wallace. He dances around the idea of it, though. The use of the word "suicide" appears more than the word "depression", including a quote by Albert Camus ("There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide"). Vonnegut plummeted down a flight of stairs at his home in New York City on April 11, 2007, just three months after the paperback release of this book, and died instantly from the fall.<br />
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Vonnegut had despaired not just of life but of all of humankind by the time of his death. He informs us that his "distinct betters" Albert Einstein and Mark Twain had done the same. Twain, of course, had insisted that his famous <i>War Prayer</i> stay unpublished until after his death. And no wonder. Can you imagine the public reaction to these words in US evangelical churches during the last invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan?<br />
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O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.</blockquote>
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Twain's family waited an additional thirteen years before allowing the <i>War Prayer</i> to be published, buried in an anthology.<br />
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No stranger to despair was Twain when he looked upon the human race at the end of his life. Vonnegut's rants are not much different in spirit but certainly lesser in both scope and bite. "If you are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, D.C.", we are informed. "But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell." Vonnegut was surely lonesome as hell.<br />
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Vonnegut's observations that "Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power" or "Only nut cases want to be president" set the political tone for the book. There is nothing fundamentally new or even particularly striking about his hatred of the Bush administration nor in his repulsion of the American culture of war. We are left with a feeling that he gave up trying to be insightful at the same time that he gave up on people. This is a mistake, however. A close read of <u>A Man Without a Country</u> will yield plenty of worthy Vonnegutisms. He notes the relative disparity between evangelical Christians' quoting of the Ten Commandments versus the Beatitudes, for example. His characterizations of those "guessers" who seek power without first acquiring understanding in Chapter 8 is brilliantly conceived and executed. This hit-or-miss peculiarity is endemic to any book of collected essays.<br />
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Vonnegut's claim that Einstein similarly "gave up on people" is harder to verify or even to comprehend. There is no sense that Vonnegut was joking, nor subtly misdirecting. I suspect he was simply mistaken. Einstein did, in fact, sign the Russell–Einstein Manifesto decrying the stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons just days before he died. However, this was clearly taken as an act of hope. The eleven luminaries whose signatures appear were calling for a way forward, not a giving up. Indeed, the famous phrase "Remember your humanity, and forget the rest" taken from the manifesto itself infers an understanding of "humanity" different than Twain's or Vonnegut's.<br />
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Vonnegut takes more from Twain than his attitude. He borrows liberally from his style. Vonnegut's description of sealing a manila envelope ("First I lick the mucilage - it's kind of sexy") is as tight a piece of American writing as anything produced by his hero. The mixture of pedestrian vulgarity and erudite vocabulary would be as comfortable in Twain's Following the Equator if not in Huckleberry Finn.<br />
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To the end, Vonnegut loved learning and the experience that comes with it. But he sometimes recoiled from its effects. He was desperately uncomfortable with artists' inability to affect political policy. Therein lies his reason for giving up on us. He might have held onto his impact on MIT's Sherry Turkle, the preeminent sociologist of Internet relationships, the writers Douglas Adams and Bill Bryson and even The Grateful Dead. The creation of art and science has driven our civilization at least as much as the warfare that he so despised.<br />
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Kurt Vonnegut may have been surprised, as we learn in the final chapter, to have become a writer, but we should all be glad that he did. His voice has transcended generations of American fads while being unabashedly unique the entire time. We can and should forgive his old man's rantings if the end result is just to make us wait a bit longer for his next bullseye.<br />
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