Seeking compatibility

• The latest Paris Review "Art of Fiction" subject is Marilynne Robinson.

Characteristically fascinating interview with Robinson, with some interesting comments on science vs. religion, as well as the work of Richard Dawkins.

INTERVIEWER
Are religion and science simply two systems that don’t merge?

ROBINSON
The debate seems to be between a naive understanding of religion and a naive understanding of science. When people try to debunk religion, it seems to me they are referring to an eighteenth-century notion of what science is. I’m talking about Richard Dawkins here, who has a status that I can’t quite understand. He acts as if the physical world that is manifest to us describes reality exhaustively. On the other side, many of the people who articulate and form religious expression have not acted in good faith. The us-versus-them mentality is a terrible corruption of the whole culture.

INTERVIEWER
You’ve written critically about Dawkins and the other New Atheists. Is it their disdain for religion and championing of pure science that troubles you?

ROBINSON
No, I read as much pure science as I can take in. It’s a fact that their thinking does not feel scientific. The whole excitement of science is that it’s always pushing toward the discovery of something that it cannot account for or did not anticipate. The New Atheist types, like Dawkins, act as if science had revealed the world as a closed system. That simply is not what contemporary science is about. A lot of scientists are atheists, but they don’t talk about reality in the same way that Dawkins does. And they would not assume that there is a simple-as-that kind of response to everything in question. Certainly not on the grounds of anything that science has discovered in the last hundred years.
The science that I prefer tends toward cosmology, theories of quantum reality, things that are finer-textured than classical physics in terms of their powers of description. Science is amazing. On a mote of celestial dust, we have figured out how to look to the edge of our universe. I feel instructed by everything I have read. Science has a lot of the satisfactions for me that good theology has.

Upload the Tolstoy program

• Scientists are trying to figure out how to insert text directly into the brain.

There's a long way to go yet, but they're still giving it a whirl:

Jacking text into the brain requires consideration of whether to insert electrodes directly into tissue, an impediment that might make neural implants impractical for anyone but the disabled. As has been known for nearly a century, the brain’s electrical activity can be detected without cracking bone. What looks like a swimming cap studded with electrodes can transmit signals from a paralyzed patient, thereby enabling typing of letters on a screen or actual surfing of the Web. Niels Birbaumer of the University of Tübingen in Germany, a leading developer of the technology, asserts that trial-and-error stimulation of the cortex using a magnetic signal from outside the skull, along with the electrode cap to record which neurons are activated, might be able to locate the words “see” or “run.” Once mapped, these areas could be fired up again to evoke those memories—at least in theory.

Some neurotechnologists think that if particular words reside in specific spots in the brain (which is debatable), finding those spots would probably require greater precision than is afforded by a wired swim cap. One of the ongoing experiments with invasive implants could possibly lead to the needed fine-level targeting. Philip R. Kennedy of Neural Signals and his colleagues designed a device that records the output of neurons. The hookup lets a stroke victim send a signal, through thought alone, to a computer that interprets it as, say, a vowel, which can then be vocalized by a speech synthesizer, a step toward forming whole words. This type of brain-machine interface might also eventually be used for activating individual neurons.

Opposable thumbs were just a start

• Kenneth M. Heilman and Russell S. Donda examine neuroscience and fundamentalism at Tikkun.

Very interesting piece looking at the science of creativity, and the blockage that fundamentalist thinking creates.

The human capability for divergent reasoning results in a nearly limitless range of creative outcomes, from entirely personal to world changing. Surely humanity’s earliest innovations were life altering, as were the many that followed. Recall our eventual acceptance (against initially unyielding church doctrine) of Copernicus’s unfathomable idea that the Sun, and not the Earth, was at the center of our solar system, or Einstein’s affront to the known laws of physics with his concept that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. But even more mundane activities, like resolving an unacceptable marital situation by seeking conduct on the part of one of the partners that was previously not considered, discovering a treatment solution for a heretofore incurable disease,creating a work of distinctive art, finding an alternative to war in a tense geopolitical situation, a chef’s creation of a new recipe, carefully arranging flowers in vase, or making up a bedtime story, are examples of creative acts resulting from the ability to diverge from current circumstances and consider or enact new possibilities. Certainly, both convergent and divergent reasoning serve to enhance our well being. But it is an individual’s ability to diverge from what is familiar and move beyond the known into a new understanding which is the essence of creativity, and that which gives rise to advancement. In the words of Frank Zappa, “Without deviation from the norm, ‘progress’ is not possible.” Whether a person chooses to question and think on his or her own or remains unconditionally adherent to religious dogma, might relate to how specific areas of the brain are utilized—or not.

The patterns of life

• Margaret A. Boden reviews Douglas Hofstadter's new book I Am A Strange Loop at American Scientist Online.

I got into Hofstadter after reading his 1997 book Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, and his new one is apparently finally out, after having been delayed repeatedly from its initial release date of August 2006. Like the rest of his stuff, it certainly looks like a lot to chew on, but worth the effort.

Boden's review is mixed -- like many others in her field, she's very enamoured with Hofstadter's most famed work, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and therefore views everything that's come since as falling short of that particular benchmark. I honestly can't say whether this is a valid viewpoint or just sloppy criticism; I loved Le Ton beau de Marot, but GEB requires a pretty extensive knowledge of mathematics and cognitive science to fully appreciate, and thus I found it pretty much impenetrable.

Still, I look forward to the challenge -- and the experience of seeing Hofstadter's intimidating intelligence appearing in its full (printed) glory once again.

The core intellectual claim, then, is much the same as that of Gödel, Escher, Bach: namely, that a proper understanding of Gödel's proof helps us to see that life, mind and self are all constituted not by biochemistry but by the higher-level patterns that biochemistry makes possible. In particular, human selves are abstract self-referential (reflexively looping) patterns that arise spontaneously out of the meaningless base of neural activity.

These patterns are real, albeit abstract. And they have real causal power, even though they are epiphenomena generated by the brain. They affect other patterns within the mind-complex, and they loop back into the brain itself. Unlike the complex patterns generated when a video camera is focused on a television screen showing its own output (an analogy repeatedly used to demystify the notion of strange loops), the human-self patterns can determine changes within the system's hardware. But this mind-brain causation is nothing "spooky" or supernatural. It's an emergent consequence of the physical complexity of human brains.

Electrical signals and neurochemicals, or the porridge-like matter inside the skull, seem distinctly unpromising as origins of mind or meaning. Indeed, Hofstadter scorns John Searle's suggestion that neuroprotein constitutes "the right stuff" for intentionality and consciousness, whereas silicon or old beer cans obviously do not. What's important is not the stuff in itself, but the looping patterns of activity that emerge from it—whatever its chemistry happens to be. So whereas many philosophers despair of there being any scientific, naturalistic explanation of meaning, Hofstadter does not. But he doesn't accept the currently popular neuroscientific reductionism either. In his view, neuroscience can never capture the essence of mind. Indeed, the neuroscientific details are in an important sense irrelevant—even though they are, at base, what makes mind possible.

The taste of words

• A report on synaesthesia by the University of Edinburgh is published in Nature.

More on this intriguing condition:

When Simner and her co-author Jamie Ward showed unusual objects to the synaesthetes and asked them to name them the researchers found that the taste was triggered by the meaning of the word and not the sound.

The synaesthetes started to taste the word before they started to say it.

"You have to access the meaning of the word to have the taste triggered," Simner said.

"It is triggered by the part of the brain that encodes the meaning of words, not the part of the memory that encodes the way the word sounds."

Simner said synaesthesia is caused by parts of the brain that don't normally actively communicate with each other. The same connections exist in the brains of most people but they are inhibited so the information is not allowed to pass.

"We suspect that in synaesthesia those pathways are opened up and information can pass down them," she added.

The seduction of narrative

• Novelist Richard Powers is interviewed at Powells.com.

A great interview with a terrific writer:

Jill: What is, ultimately, so seductive about story, so primal about narrative?

Powers: It's explanatory. It's a shaping device that orders the world. For instance, they've determined that cranes and other migratory birds make these huge migrations of thousands of miles, but they do it by navigating via local landmarks. So somehow, they're able to communicate, to teach their young, on the basis of a kind of symbol-space — first this, then this, then this, how to make these necessary movements across the entire globe. And there's a lot of suggestion that syntax grows out of the machinery for spatial orientation. Left, right, above, beyond, behind — these kind of spatial orientations underpin the deep structure of language.

When you think about the function of language to create a syntactical, meaningful sentence, to order elements in such a way as to suggest some kind of whole coherent thing, coherent in time or coherent in logic or coherent in some other kind of arrangement of data, to think that it's spatial is very revealing, isn't it? That narrative is somehow a spatial arrangement of all our observations about the world.

Encouraging doubt

• Jerry A. Coyne reviews Frederick Crews' Follies of the Wise in The Times Literary Supplement.

Choice tidbits from a review of Crews' latest collection of essays:

The quality of Crews’s prose is particularly evident in his two chapters on evolution versus creationism. In the first, he takes on creationists in their new guise as intelligent-design advocates, chastising them for pushing not only bad science, but contorted faith:

“Intelligent design awkwardly embraces two clashing deities – one a glutton for praise and a dispenser of wrath, absolution, and grace, the other a curiously inept cobbler of species that need to be periodically revised and that keep getting snuffed out by the very conditions he provided for them. Why, we must wonder, would the shaper of the universe have frittered away some fourteen billion years, turning out quadrillions of useless stars, before getting around to the one thing he really cared about, seeing to it that a minuscule minority of earthling vertebrates are washed clean of sin and guaranteed an eternal place in his company?”

But after demolishing creationists, Crews gives peacemaking scientists their own hiding, reproving them for trying to show that there is no contradiction between science and theology. Regardless of what they say to placate the faithful, most scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world. Supernatural forces and events, essential aspects of most religions, play no role in science, not because we exclude them deliberately, but because they have never been a useful way to understand nature. Scientific “truths” are empirically supported observations agreed on by different observers. Religious “truths,” on the other hand, are personal, unverifiable and contested by those of different faiths. Science is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not blow each other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it.

Comprehension is not a requisite of compliance

• K. C. Cole surveys the challenge of being a science editor at The Columbia Journalism Review.

Editors have an awfully tough job, which is why it seems like there are so few worthy ones out there. You're basically asked to be a polymath, to have a grasp on anything and everything so you can help the writer critique and shape their piece to the best of their abilities. Cole gets into the unique difficulty of editing writing that deals with subjects that might be beyond your grasp:

Editors, however, seem to absorb difficulty differently. If they don’t understand something, they often think it can’t be right — or that it’s not worth writing about. Either the writers aren’t being clear (which, of course, may be the case), or the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about (in some cases, a given).

Why the difference? My theory is that editors of newspapers and other major periodicals are not just ordinary folk. They tend to be very accomplished people. They’re used to being the smartest guys in the room. So science makes them squirm. And because they can’t bear to feel dumb, science coverage suffers.

Breaking the spell

• Reviews of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon are rolling in.

I find it interesting that these reviews are only now starting to appear in the usual publications, especially since it was published back in February. I read the majority of this book a few months back (delighting as I did so in the irony that I'd checked it out from a public library in the buckle of the Bible Belt), so take my comments with the appropriate grain(s) of salt.

Both of the heavy-hitter-type reviews I've come across tend to have the greatest amount of criticism for Dennett's method, as opposed to his message. First up is Freeman Dyson's review in The New York Review of Books:

I see no way to draw up a balance sheet, to weigh the good done by religion against the evil and decide which is greater by some impartial process. My own prejudice, looking at religion from the inside, leads me to conclude that the good vastly outweighs the evil. In many places in the United States, with widening gaps between rich and poor, churches and synagogues are almost the only institutions that bind people together into communities. In church or in synagogue, people from different walks of life work together in youth groups or adult education groups, making music or teaching children, collecting money for charitable causes, and taking care of each other when sickness or disaster strikes. Without religion, the life of the country would be greatly impoverished. I know nothing at first hand about Islam, but by all accounts the mosques in Islamic countries, and to some extent in America too, play a similar role in holding communities together and taking care of widows and orphans.

Dennett, looking at religion from the outside, comes to the opposite conclusion. He sees the extreme religious sects that are breeding grounds for gangs of young terrorists and murderers, with the mass of ordinary believers giving them moral support by failing to turn them in to the police. He sees religion as an attractive nuisance in the legal sense, meaning a structure that attracts children and young people and exposes them to dangerous ideas and criminal temptations, like an unfenced swimming pool or an unlocked gun room. My view of religion and Dennett's are equally true and equally prejudiced. I see religion as a precious and ancient part of our human heritage. Dennett sees it as a load of superfluous mental baggage which we should be glad to discard.

A much less well-reasoned stance comes from Jack Miles in The Washington Post:

"Breaking the Spell" puts this reader in mind of a night at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles when, it is said, somebody slipped the drummer Joe La Barbara a note saying that the famous British jazz critic Leonard Feather had arrived. "Oh, goood," La Barbara said. "Now we can begin." Daniel Dennett is to the scientific study of religion what Leonard Feather was to that night at the Bakery: He has a great deal to say, and his opinions are always worth hearing, but the band has been smokin' longer than he seems to realize.

Let's get this out of the way: I am not, and have never been, a spiritual person. I'm a thick-skulled literalist in that respect. The idea of getting to go to Disneyland and hang out with Voltaire and Hemingway once I die is a nice one, but come now, let's be adults here. Deciding whether or not the role of religion in others' everyday lives is or is not a good thing requires a level of intelligence and knowledge that I simply do not possess; I don't have the answers.

I tended to agree with Dennett's main points in Breaking the Spell, and I agree also with Dyson and, to a lesser extent, Miles' points about the flaws in Dennett's approach. Miles, in particular, seems to be most put off by Dennett's at-times-combative approach. I would argue, however, that with the prevalence of religiously-inspired violence not just in today's world but throughout history, a bit of combativeness on the part of the opposition is as valid a weapon as any. (Miles even goes so far as to position, in all apparent seriousness, Howard Stern as "America's most influential single atheist," an assertion so laughably ludicrous in the context of his argument that it makes the rest of his essay almost unreadable.)

Many people who share a more atheistic mindset are fond of repeating the observation that more people have died in the name of their god or religion than for any other reason. This is true, but you might also consider that when you get down to it, there's no real demarcation between religion, politics and philosophy. They're all systems of thought, designed by men, in the altruistic hope that if everything was done this way, and not that way, then everything that happens tomorrow will be better than what happened yesterday. Either way you slice it, it all comes down to which ideas you're willing to ignore, and which ones you're ready to die for. Belief in a god is much the same thing as faith in a political leader, or reliance upon the speeches and/or writings of a great thinker; you're looking to someone else for guidance.

It seemed to me that the main thrust of Dennett's argument was that religion has always been a man-made coping mechanism, one that evolves out of different cultures and mutates accordingly into many different forms. The notion that religion is man-made is, of course, threatening to those that grow up with the belief that there are beings greater than us, beyond the scope of our understanding. Scientists and atheists who attack the notions of religion are often ridiculed for being "cold" to the possibilities of spirituality, by opponents who turn a deaf ear to the logic and rationality of hard science. If nothing matters, if we all are just random specks floatin' about in a big void, then what's the point? It's far more comforting to think that you're working towards some sort of greater good than to consider the alternative.

Like I said, I don't have the answers, and this topic is far bigger and more complex than a mere blog entry could ever encapsulate. But Dennett's book is at least getting people talking, and with the dominance of religiously-motivated leaders of governments around the globe (including our own), this is a discussion that should stay at the forefront.

Closing thought:

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states this has already happened." - Douglas Adams

Technicolor dreamers

• A Telegraph article on a Wassily Kandinsky exhibition discusses his synaesthetic touch.

An engaging article on Kandinsky that includes fun footnotes on similarly-gifted writers:

Charles Baudelaire
The influential French poet and chronicler of modern life displayed synaesthetic sensibilities in his 1857 sonnet "Correspondances": "Perfumes, sounds and colours answer each other." In addition to his frequent writings on Richard Wagner's music, Baudelaire was intrigued by sensuous experiences, especially of the body within the city. He also experimented with hashish in order to enhance the intermingling of the senses. Baudelaire's countryman and fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud had synaesthesia, too.

Vladimir Nabokov
The Russian author famed for his English novel of 1955 Lolita, developed his "freakish gift" of synaesthesia during childhood when he complained to his mother that the colours on his wooden alphabet blocks were "all wrong". Synaesthesia is now recognised as a genetically inherited trait, and the Nabokov family was full of synaesthetes; his mother, wife and son Dimitri all had the condition. "The confessions of a synaesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings," wrote Nabokov.

See also: Choosing the right words.

Choosing the right words

• A new study suggests letters evolved as a reflection of natural shapes.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have hit on something intriguing:

Remarkably, the study has concluded that the letters we use can be viewed as a mirror of the features of the natural world, from trees and mountains to meandering streams and urban cityscapes.

The shapes of letters are not dictated by the ease of writing them, economy of pen strokes and so on, but their underlying familiarity and the ease of recognising them. We use certain letters because our brains are particularly good at seeing them, even if our hands find it hard to write them down. In turn, we are good at seeing certain shapes because they reflect common facets of the natural world.

A fascinating notion, that the symbols used as letters as a way to visualize language have a strong basis in the natural world. Oftentimes there are names of people -- either fictional or not -- which seem, well, just right; they couldn't describe anyone else as perfectly. It's interesting to think that the phonetic sound of spoken language and the visual shape of letters sometimes correspond with incredible synchronicity. Many times I've stumbled when trying to come up with something as simple as a name for a character; it's more of a challenge, sometimes, than you might think. The trick is coming up with something that sounds right and feels right and looks right, and getting those three criteria to match up is one of writing's big hurdles. Some can do it without even thinking, whereas others seem to struggle with it endlessly.

As an aside, there's a real-life neurological condition called synaesthesia which bears mentioning in this context. Basically, it's the bleeding of one sense into another; people with it can hear colors, feel shapes, et cet. I've always been fascinated by this condition and have sometimes experienced sensations that correspond to it (although not to a particularly extreme degree). Many people with the condition tend to have creative and/or artistic bents, particularly musicians; the Wikipedia entry mentions, among others, Jimi Hendrix and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, as well as classical composers Alexander Scriabin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Jean Sibelus and Gyorgy Ligeti. Bob Dylan is another likely candidate. It's intriguing to me that for whatever reason, wires get crossed and sensory inputs can be put to different uses than they're intended for; I'd even go so far as to wager that many great thinkers in our history likely experienced these sensations. How else do you learn to think outside of the box?

After 2005, the only way to go is up

• Archaeologists have discovered the earliest known form of Mayan writing.

Too bad “the writing is mostly indecipherable.” But it does make you wonder what strange, wonderful combination of circumstances compelled humans to start writing. Some strange new desire to create, to make your mark... that, or to scrawl angrily, “For a good time, stop by Kukulcan’s tent.”

• Chapters from 1970s-era novels are rejected by 21st century publishers.

This is just hilarious:

Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."

Like I always say, the only constant in the world is change, but there’s still no accounting for taste. Book buyers aren’t looking for, you know, writing; they’re looking for a multimillion-dollar cash cow they can turn into a movie, a record album and a theme park.

• Lit-crit is turning to science for new ideas.

An interesting read, from a different perspective. Author Nick Gillespie’s most intriguing point follows:

Both cognitive and evolutionary approaches to lit-crit have been gaining recognition and adherents over the past decade or so. Cognitive critics are less interested in recurring plots or specific themes in literature, but they share with the Darwinists an interest in using scientific advances to help explore the universally observed human tendency toward creative expression, or what the fascinating anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake called in Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, “making special.” This unironic -- though hardly uncritical -- interest in science represents a clear break with much of what might be called the postmodern orthodoxy, which views science less as a pure source of knowledge and more as a means of controlling and regulating discourse and power. The postmodern view has contributed to a keener appreciation of how appeals to science are often self-interested and obfuscating.

Criticism being the exploration of a personal reaction, it follows that the self-examination that it entails would lead some down a more scientific path, ostensibly to find data with the cold hardness of fact to support their own feelings and interpretations. But it figures just as much that those very “facts” are actually quite specious -- any statistician will tell you that you can find any amount of data to “prove” your “theory,” no matter how insane. Simple old willpower can bring any nutty notion to light but the ideas that strike a deeper, more logical and rational chord within us -- theories like evolution, for example -- tend to take on lives of their own, far beyond what their discoverer ever intended or even understood themselves. I remember a bit from Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy where he talked about how a philosopher in ancient Greece -- Anaxagoras, I believe -- came up with a version of heliocentrism, long before 17th-century scientists like Copernicus and Kepler proved it so; the point being, sometimes the answer sits right in front of people for a long time before anyone notices. Lit-crit might come up with some fancy new terms but unless they’re really, really challenging the status quo, it’s just gonna be old wine, new bottle.