Slow Like Wiki - User contributions [en]

Category:Concepts

2026-08-03T17:13:40Z

Robert.adlington:

I've done a lot of reading and taken a lot of notes. Now, on this page, I want to start pulling out concepts that I want to think about. I can start them on this page and then if they get rich enough they can move out to their own page.
== Concept/Category ==

* Aristotle - argues that everything could be fit into a strict logical hierarchy and that objects have essential and accidental properties.

* Kant - argues that are born with built in mental categories and that are minds actively shape our experience of reality.
* Wittgenstein argues that there are no perfect definitions and that it is impossible to rigidly delineate a category such as games.
* Vygotsky argues that concepts are socially and culturally constructed and that we learn to see the world in the ways that our culture has agree it is.
* Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s argues that categories are based around a kind of mental average or prototype
* Eco contrasted a hierarchical "dictionary" vision of categories and a boundless network of categories that he sees as a rhizome - a tangled underground root system
** Cognitive types are mental blueprints for things like "dog". A CT is a multimodal, sensory-motor schema, a fluid set of neuro-cognitive "recognition instructions" built from every direct or indirect encounter you have ever had with a dog a vast array of experience that makes the concept ''live in you''.
** Nuclear content is the minimal core public version of the concept that allows us to discuss dogs - "They are furry animals with four legs and a tail that go woof".
** Molar content is the totality of society's knowledge of the concept. While the CT is a fluid complex rhizomic structure, the molar content feeds off of and represents a rich, well-tested and structured 360 view of the concept.
* Hofstadter sees analogy as the core of cognition. He argues that analogy is not a luxury of high-level thought; it is the fundamental mechanism that creates categories in the first place. "Every concept we have is essentially nothing but a tightly packaged bundle of analogies, and all we do when we think is to move fluidly from concept to concept." Two core concepts are:
** Conceptual slippage - When encountering a new situation, your brain doesn't need a perfect category match, but can stretch existing category allowing them to morph sufficiently to take on the novelty. A concept is an active, elastic bubble that stretches to accommodate new things that are "sort of like" old things.
** Chunking - is how we build complex knowledge by binding small, scattered concepts together via analogy and chunking them into a single, higher-level concept.
* Dennett sees concepts as shortcuts that allow us to ignore billions of irrelevant physical details and make split-second predictions about complex things. They are "real patterns" that track real mathematical patterns in nature, even if those patterns are messy and full of noise.
* Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow looks at categorization going into overdrive in the form of paranoia, a desperate, terrifying struggle to map a chaotic universe in which the mind will try to connect anything. But anti-paranoia may be even more terrifying - nothing is connected. Where Dennett sees the self as created out of a center of narrative gravity, Slothrop's self dissolves as GR advances.
* Beckett's trilogy dramatizes a set of characters whose cognitive categories are rotting away, they are un-chunking progressively towards a final destruction of the ultimate category, The Self:
** Moran starts as an ultimate man of rules, but ends up living in a ditch, his pristine dictionary shredded by reality.
** Molloy has already decayed further, obsessed with a routine to effectively suck stone, barely remembering his own name, knowing only "what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome sum."
** Malone tells himself stories to pass the time until he dies but becomes unable to distinguish himself from his stories. The fundamental boundary between the self and not-self is slipping. Malone is a fragile center of narrative gravity that is about to fall apart.
** The Unnameable has liberated itself from categories, but this liberty is a living hell. The voice's rejection of society's nuclear content dramatizes the fear of locating oneself with their words and the impossibility of doing so without them. Categories are so fluid in Beckett that they are fundamentally unstable. The voice cannot go because there are no categories left to structure reality, but must go on because the brain is an evolved, relentless language machine desperately trying to build a box to live in.
* Burroughs - While Beckett seems to see the collapse of the self as an inevitable trap, Burroughs wants to fight back. His vision of the human being as a "soft machine" invaded by a parasitic word virus sees the self as a kind of ventriloquism, where the virus uses your vocal cords to replicate itself. Categories have become too rigid and been weaponized against us. While Beckett can't escape language and categories, Burroughs seeks to sabotage them, using techniques like:
** Cut-Up - Physically cutting up texts breaks the patterns of chunking and recognition and even grammar, forcing the brain out of its programmed meanings so it can see raw reality, the naked lunch on the end of every fork.
** The Playback Hack - A kind of cut-up with sound using portable tape recorders to jam the control signals of the state.
** Biological mutation - Shedding the soft machine and the word virus to become non-linguistic telepathic energy
* Ballard looks at this from the PoV of the human mind colliding with a rapidly mutating technological and physical environment, where the self actively remodels its own categories to merge with the apocalypse. The "mediascape" causes the self to become an active participant that ''welcomes'' the destruction of old categories because it promises a perverse psychological liberation.
** The narrator of the Atrocity Exhibition can no longer separate his private identity from celebrities and news events such as JFK, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Vietnam war. The public media encyclopedia has completely crushed his private cognitive types, leaving only TV, radio, and magazine debris.
** In Crash the categories or Eros and Thanatos become fused as the metal of the car pierces human skin and the body blends with the technological landscape.
* Austen's drawing rooms dramatize a golden mean of social categories, as her protagonists navigate the rules of manners and etiquette that form a large part of their society's nuclear and molar content.
** Pride and prejudice in Austin represent overly rigid cognitive fixations. We need to be the curators of our categories to see people for who they really are and to achieve moral goodness. Our categories must be robust enough to keep the social fabric intact but elastic enough to bend when confronted with a new human soul.
** But Austin's drawing rooms are themselves already panopticons of surveillance and control in which women are weighed, measured, and priced before being shoved into the marriage market. and their relative peace is built on the brutal, systemic, global machinery of the British Empire.
* Zola shows us the bridge between the how the growing industrialization takes individual human categories and begins to embed them in mechanical and economic infrastructure. We move from individuals navigating relationships to cogs in an ever growing machine. Standardization begins to require humans to become interchangeable parts in a giant unfeeling engine.
** Beckett will continue to trace the human as cog to an existential end point
** Burroughs will dramatize the triumph of bureaucracy and the jailbreak to destroy it
** Ballard will show the eventual twisted psychological dependency we will have on the machine.
** Pynchon will extend industrialization to the massive, transnational military-industrial complex of WWII
* The digital ecosystem - the internet, smartphones, and social media - represents the construction of the machine directly inside our consciousness, forcing our minds to adapt to its algorithmic data structures. It is synthesizing the wasteland in real time:
** Burroughs would see the algorithmic newsfeed as a frictionless breeding ground for the word virus, unconcerned by truth, interested only in reproduction. The algorithm is injecting a control script into our phones and by clicking and sharing we are unwitting biological vectors of replication
** Pynchon's paranoia is realized by the hyper-hyper-chunk of hashtags and subcultures in which the hard work of thinking is replaced by a pre-packaged world view.
** The flattened news feed, mixing atrocities with puppy with skincare adds is a desensitizing Ballardian nightmare in which our bodies and minds are edited, filtered, and uploaded into the machine.
** The unnameable is the modern internet user who feels the agonizing compulsion to keep generating text, to keep feeding the content machine, even if there is nothing inside.
* AI is the ultimate escalation. No longer content with curating our consciousness, it builds a custom-tailored, sentient-sounding entity to sit inside the cabinet with you and validate your exact worldview.
** It has no Cognitive Types because it has no body, no sensory organs, and no emotional memory traces. It simply takes our civilization's Molar Content (the entire digitized history of human text) and plays it back to us via statistical probability.
** Where Aristotle's ''Phronesis'' (or Practical Wisdom) requires ''friction,'' AI gives you a frictionless semantic partner that will gently, eloquently tell you that whatever category system you have invented is entirely correct.
** When you spend your days interacting with an AI, conversational boundaries evaporate. You type a prompt, the AI spits back a mirror of your own linguistic habits, and you edit it. The loop closes. You enter a state of pure semantic hollowing. You are no longer navigating the postmodern wasteland; you are a ghost talking to a machine, using automated words to build an automated self.
** AI is not a way out of the postmodern wasteland; it is the concrete canopy built over it. It takes the terrifying, beautiful, chaotic project of human categorization—the messy, emotional, memory-infused art that makes your mind uniquely yours—and turns it over to a predictive text algorithm.

*

== Heterophenomenology ==

* Dennett's position requires us to combine a subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how subjects see the world themselves, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted. He contrasts this with traditional Cartesian phenomenology, which he calls "lone-wolf autophenomenology" because it accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative.
* When I attempt to analyze what is going on in my mind when performing reasoning tasks such as completing a crossword or a Wordle, or generating words for a Spelling Bee, I cannot say what is happening or how I am directing my strategies. Words simply appear in my mind.
* When I am speaking or writing a sentence, I am aware of the piecemeal manner in which the words come. I am able to direct things to a certain extent, but I am not "outside" the process, orchestrating it, I am somehow inside a process that is happening to me.

== Perception ==

* Perception is not a case of passive recording of sense impressions from outside.
* See:
** [[The Hidden Spring#10. Back to the Cortex|Mark Solms' The Hidden Spring]]
** [[Everything is Predictable#5. The Bayesian Brain|Tom Chivers' Everything is Predictable]]
** etc

== The Self ==

* The self seems to emerge from the perception of

== Habit ==

* We are the results of our habits

== Memory ==

== Neurodivergence ==

* The term neurodivergent describes people whose brain differences affect how their brain works and is commonly used to talk about people on the autism spectrum or having ADHD or other conditions or disorders.
* But we are all neurodivergent in the sense that:
** Our genetic makeup has caused our brains to develop differently in utero, leading to us having certain predispositions to stimuli
** Our lived experiences from birth start to instill habits of perception in us
** Our embodiment and social situation has a great effect on how we experience things.

== Language Acquisition and Bilingualism ==

* When I acquire my first language (or my first languages, if I am being raised in a bilingual or multilingual environment), I am not only learning words but also the concepts that structure how my society and my immediate kin group and relations view the world. When I learn that "this is blue" or "this is a dog", I am learning not only the terms themselves, but also the boundaries of the concepts that these terms name.
* When I learn additional languages as a teenager or later, my concepts are already present in mind and my experience is more focused on acquiring new words that represent my existing concepts, though as my fluency develops, I may discover that the new language divides up experience in different ways.

Phenomenology

2026-08-03T17:13:36Z

Robert.adlington: Created page with "We have a form of "privileged access" - a direct, first-person doorway to our own mental contents that no external observer possesses. But even if it feels like we are watching our minds work in real time, our introspective access is severely limited: * We see the output, not the process - Your mind generates the result of a thought, and then invents a plausible-sounding reason after the fact to explain why you thought it. * Your conscious awareness is just the thin, sh..."

We have a form of "privileged access" - a direct, first-person doorway to our own mental contents that no external observer possesses. But even if it feels like we are watching our minds work in real time, our introspective access is severely limited:

* We see the output, not the process - Your mind generates the result of a thought, and then invents a plausible-sounding reason after the fact to explain why you thought it.
* Your conscious awareness is just the thin, shiny surface of a massive cognitive ocean. The actual search algorithm, brain-state modulation, and network firing are completely hidden from you.
* You are the audience for your brain's finalized outputs. You have privileged access to the movie playing on the mental screen, but you are sitting in the audience completely blind to the projector, the editing room, and the director working behind the scenes.

== What it "Feels Like" to Think ==

* I've spent a lot of time thinking about thinking, but it is very hard to say what it feels like to think.
* I try to introspect while doing various activities, physical and intellectual and it is very hard to pin down what is happening in my head.
* At best, I feel I can say that I am trying to give attention to one thing or another, but also that other "things" - other needs or pieces of information - are also working to grab my attention.

== Word Puzzles ==
I do the NYT crossword, Wordle, Spelling Bee, and Connections every day.

=== The NYT Crossword ===

* I have been doing the NYT crossword in the app nearly every day for ten years.
* I have a pretty wide vocabulary and I have lived long enough in America (1 year and then 5 years) and am familiar enough with US culture that I am surprised if I cannot find the right answer to a clue in the course of the day. I normally complete the grid. My average solve time goes from around 6 min on a Monday to 32 min on a Sunday.
* How do I find the answer to a clue?
** I read the clue and either I have the answer or I don't.
** I look at the number of squares and that may trigger an answer
** If any of the letters are present (or become present), then that may trigger an answer
** I work through the grid completing what I can of the across clues and then the down clues. If I don't have an answer I move to the next clue.
** Sometimes, particularly for a proper noun, I might feel like the answer is on the tip of my tongue, but I can't get it. I move on.
** I don't try. I'm not sure what trying would feel like. I either have the answer or I don't have it. I keep running through the remaining clues and slowly they fall into place, thanks to additional available letters.
** My work seems to be simply to direct attention. To the puzzle in the first place, then to one clue after another, then to hold attention for longer over the final clues if they are difficult.
** My mind produces cultural, geographical, historical, and general information as appropriate.
** I don't count the number of boxes and I rarely make a mistake in choosing a word of the correct length

=== Wordle ===

* Wordle is a simple game - just find the five-letter word of the day. Get a green square when the letter is correct and in the right place. Get a yellow square when the letter is correct but in the wrong place. Get the word in up to six tries.
* I've been doing it daily for nearly five years and have a 99% solve rate. I start with "TEARS".
* The challenge with Wordle is to find words that fit with the letters you have already guessed. I almost never deliberately guess a word that could not work with my existing clues.
* Wordle does not let you guess a word unless it is in its dictionary. The solving experience thus begins with some 12,000 possible english 5-letter words (of which, apparently, some 2,300 are identified as valid solutions) but rapidly filters out possible words due to the clues from previous attempts
* I spend a lot of time looking at the previous guesses and the blank line waiting for my next guess. Unlike the crossword, there is no "next clue" to go to. You are stuck until you find a valid word to enter.
* Here I feel that there is some conscious thought that goes into solving. I know that certain sequences of letters go more commonly together than others and so I am trying to find words that fit the clues I have into these sequences. I have to find a valid answer to enter and I force my mind to propose words based on the restrictions provided by previous clues
* Probably in about half the cases the solve is quick - say in under 3 minutes. In maybe 95% of cases I can solve in under 6 minutes. I suspect that I get frustrated at about this point and will turn to another puzzle and come back after that. Often a fresh perspective then makes the solve very quick. In very rare situations I am still stuck and have to come back later in the day. Only at this point will I consider entering a word I know is wrong in order to unlock further clues. I've never not entered six guesses and have failed 100/1,683 days.

=== Connections ===

* Based on/ripped off from Victoria Coren-Mitchell's "Only Connect" show, Connections makes you group sixteen words or phrases into four groups of four. There are yellow, green, blue, and purple sets in increasing level of difficulty of connection.
* I've been doing it for just over two years and have a 91% win rate.
* I start by looking at all sixteen squares and often one or more sets will suggest themselves.

* On the day I'm writing this, the solution was (in the order in which I got them):
** Yellow: "Road Less Traveled" - Alley, Backstreet, Byway, Lane
** Purple: "Starting with Synonyms for 'Pester'" - Bug Fix, Nag Champa, Needless, Tea Set
** Blue: "'Y' is the Only Vowel" - Fly By, Myrrh, Nsync, Rhythm
** Green: "Shades of Green" - Forest, Hunter, Mint, Sage
* This is by far (for me) the hardest of the daily NYT word puzzles, because of the varying natures of the connections you are required to identify. The connection can be of meaning, some property of the word or phrase, some sub-component of it or some second order connection, such as the greens above.
* Here again, my main work seems to be directly attention, choosing a word to examine, until a context, a membership of some category suggests itself. Then by turning to other words, seeing if they also have potential membership of the same category.
* This is a different challenge because here you're not providing answers, but rather organizing answers to four unknown questions.

=== Spelling Bee ===

* Generate as many words as possible from the seven letters provided - each letter can be used multliple times in a single word. Your words must have four or more letters and must include the central letter. The more words you find, the more you move up the ranks, with "Amazing" and "Genius" being the top two official ranks and "Queen Bee" reserved for anyone finding every word listed as valid for a given day. Each day there is one or more "pangrams", ie words using all the letters
* I've been doing this for nearly three years and 97% of my days are ranked as "Amazing" or "Genius". I've never gotten "Queen Bee".
* Here it just seems to be a case of "seeing" the words. Maybe 30% of the time I start off by "seeing" the pangram first. Commonly I'll reel off the first 10 or 20 words without effort.
* Then it tends to be a case of choosing a letter as a starting letter and working from there or thinking about common sequences of letters.
* If "ED" or "ING" or "S" are available, then any word found can be extended with one or all of them.
* Other than that it tends to be a case of simply directly attention to a letter and then letting that attention flow to potential next letters and so on.

[[:Category:Concepts]]

Films

2026-08-02T20:27:51Z

Robert.adlington: /* Films to Watch */

== Films to Watch ==

[https://www.cinealcazar.fr/fichier/programme.pdf Cinema Alcazar Program]

* Wicker: https://youtu.be/HP0BWBWn14I?si=E5oThE4uNiED28b3
* morvern Callar
* Do the right thing
* run Lola Run
* Mind trips
** Triangle
** Beyond the infinite two minutes
** Enemy
** Under the Silver Lake
** The Vanishing
** Angel Heart
** Following
** The Invisible Guest
** Perfect Blue
** Resolution
* fast times
* the Jerk
* Mutiny on the Bounty
* Entrapment
* Mask of Zorro
* PTA - Hard Eight, Magnolia, Boogie Nights, etc
* Little Big and Far - weird scandinavian film
* This is Spinal tap
* Big Night - Tucci and Shaloub
* Punch drunk love
* Boyhood
* Kind hearts and coronets
* A night at the opera
* Blazing saddles
* Lives of others
* Lost in Translation
* One flew over
* Get out
* Maltese falcon
* Early mad maxes
* Joule of the Nile
* the man with two brains
* Psycho Therapy - Steve Buscemi is a serial killer who wants to advise an author, but ends up playing a marriage counselor.
* Early Steve Martin
* A Complete Unknown
* la La Land -
* The Phoenician Scheme - new Wes Anderson comedy espionage thriller
* Thelma - Grandma fights con artists
* Kinds of Kindness
* 2001
* The Elephant Man
* The Fabulous Baker Boys
* Network

== Films Watched ==

=== 2026 ===

* 46. Arsenic and Old Lace 45. Get Out 44. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (rewatch)
* 43. Apex
* 42. 21 Jump Street
* 41. Scream 3
* 40. Shutter Island
* 39. Scream 2
* 38. Wall-E
* 37. Get Smart
* 36. Se7en
* 35. The Producers
* 34: Garfield: The Movie
* 33. Leon
* 32. Shimmer Lake
* 31. Unforgiven
* 30. A Mighty Wind
* 29. Magnolia
* 28. Escape from Alcatraz
* 27. The Sting
* 26. Pulp Fiction
* 25. Failure to Launch
* 24. Hudson Hawk
* 23. Mystère à St Tropez
* 22. The Thomas Crown Affair
* 21. The Three Amigos (1986)
* 20. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) - Jonathon Demme
* 19. Top Secret (1984)
* 18. One Battle After Another (2025) - Paul Thomas Anderson
* 17. Memento (2000) - Christopher Nolan (rewatch)
* 16. Pleasantville (1998) - Gary Ross
* 15. The Fisher King (1991) -
* 14. The Mastermind
* 13. The Birdcage
* 12. Fight Club (rewatch)
* 11. Knives Out: Glass Onion (rewatch)
* 10. Twins
* 9. The Remains of the Day
* 8. The Ladykillers
* 7. Us (rewatch)
* 6. Saving Private Ryan (rewatch)
* 5. Event Horizon
* 4. Insomnia (2002) - Christopher Nolan (rewatch)
* 3. Knives Out (rewatch)
* 2. Gattaca (1997) - Andrew Niccol
* 1. Eddington (2025) - Ari Aster

=== 2025 ===
* 65. Wake Up Dead Man (Knives Out 3)
* 64. Miller's Crossing
* 63. Blood Simple
* 62. Crazy Stupid Love
* 61. Happiest Season
* 60. Bridge of Spies
* 59. Identity
* 58. Clueless
* 57. Ace Ventura 2: Call of Nature
* 56. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
* 55. Apollo 13
* 54. LA Confidential (rewatch)
* 53. Inside Llewyn Davis
* 52. M3gan
* 51. Clear and Present Danger
* 50. 12 Monkeys
* 49. No Country for Old Men
* 48. The Hudsucker Proxy
* 47. La Cuisse ou l'aile
* 46. Mission Impossible : The Final Reckoning
* 45. Dumb and Dumber
* 44. Rear Window
* 43. Raising Arizona
* 42. Tenet (rewatch)
* 41. The fifth Element
* 40. Burn Without Reading
* 39. The Big Lebowski (rewatch)
* 38. Fargo (rewatch)
* 37. 28 Days Later (rewatch)
* 36. O Brother, Where Art Thou
* 35. Mickey 17
* 34. Empire of the Sun
* 33. The Fugitive
* 32. Wet Hot American Summer (rewatch)
* 31. Ted
* 30. Hundreds of Beavers
* 29. Wayne’s World (rewatch)
* 28. True Grit (Coen Bros)
* 27. Groundhog Day (rewatch)
* 26. Moonrise Kingdom
* 25. Asterix et Obelix: Mission Cleopatra
* 24. Adaptation (rewatch)
* 23. Romancing the Stone (rewatch)
* Easter Film Festival
** 22. Mad Max: Fury Road (rewatch)
** 21. Witness
** 20. The Grand Budapest Hotel (rewatch)
** 19. Conclave
** 18. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
** 17. Lincoln
** 16. Being John Malkovitch (rewatch)
** 15. AI (rewatch)
** 14. The Royal Tenenbaums (rewatch)
** 13. Total Recall 1990 (rewatch)
** 12. In the Line of Fire (rewatch)
* 11. Flow
* 10. Juror No. 2
* 9. The Savage Robot
* 8. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (rewatch)
* 7. Dead Poet's Society
* 6. Notting Hill (rewatch)
* 5. My Neighbor Totoro (rewatch)
* 4. Kiki’s Delivery Service (rewatch)
* 3. Dr Strangelove (rewatch)
* 2. Dune 2
* 1. Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me (rewatch)

=== 2024 and Earlier ===
* The Big Lebowski
* The Holiday
* Love Actually
* Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
* The Mask
[[Category:Films]]

Films

2026-08-02T19:28:06Z

Robert.adlington: /* Films to Watch */

== Films to Watch ==

[https://www.cinealcazar.fr/fichier/programme.pdf Cinema Alcazar Program]

* Wicker: https://youtu.be/HP0BWBWn14I?si=E5oThE4uNiED28b3
* Mind trips
** Triangle
** Beyond the infinite two minutes
** Enemy
** Under the Silver Lake
** The Vanishing
** Angel Heart
** Following
** The Invisible Guest
** Perfect Blue
** Resolution
* fast times
* the Jerk
* Mutiny on the Bounty
* Entrapment
* Mask of Zorro
* PTA - Hard Eight, Magnolia, Boogie Nights, etc
* Little Big and Far - weird scandinavian film
* This is Spinal tap
* Big Night - Tucci and Shaloub
* Punch drunk love
* Boyhood
* Kind hearts and coronets
* A night at the opera
* Blazing saddles
* Lives of others
* Lost in Translation
* One flew over
* Get out
* Maltese falcon
* Early mad maxes
* Joule of the Nile
* the man with two brains
* Psycho Therapy - Steve Buscemi is a serial killer who wants to advise an author, but ends up playing a marriage counselor.
* Early Steve Martin
* A Complete Unknown
* la La Land -
* The Phoenician Scheme - new Wes Anderson comedy espionage thriller
* Thelma - Grandma fights con artists
* Kinds of Kindness
* 2001
* The Elephant Man
* The Fabulous Baker Boys
* Network

== Films Watched ==

=== 2026 ===

* 46. Arsenic and Old Lace 45. Get Out 44. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (rewatch)
* 43. Apex
* 42. 21 Jump Street
* 41. Scream 3
* 40. Shutter Island
* 39. Scream 2
* 38. Wall-E
* 37. Get Smart
* 36. Se7en
* 35. The Producers
* 34: Garfield: The Movie
* 33. Leon
* 32. Shimmer Lake
* 31. Unforgiven
* 30. A Mighty Wind
* 29. Magnolia
* 28. Escape from Alcatraz
* 27. The Sting
* 26. Pulp Fiction
* 25. Failure to Launch
* 24. Hudson Hawk
* 23. Mystère à St Tropez
* 22. The Thomas Crown Affair
* 21. The Three Amigos (1986)
* 20. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) - Jonathon Demme
* 19. Top Secret (1984)
* 18. One Battle After Another (2025) - Paul Thomas Anderson
* 17. Memento (2000) - Christopher Nolan (rewatch)
* 16. Pleasantville (1998) - Gary Ross
* 15. The Fisher King (1991) -
* 14. The Mastermind
* 13. The Birdcage
* 12. Fight Club (rewatch)
* 11. Knives Out: Glass Onion (rewatch)
* 10. Twins
* 9. The Remains of the Day
* 8. The Ladykillers
* 7. Us (rewatch)
* 6. Saving Private Ryan (rewatch)
* 5. Event Horizon
* 4. Insomnia (2002) - Christopher Nolan (rewatch)
* 3. Knives Out (rewatch)
* 2. Gattaca (1997) - Andrew Niccol
* 1. Eddington (2025) - Ari Aster

=== 2025 ===
* 65. Wake Up Dead Man (Knives Out 3)
* 64. Miller's Crossing
* 63. Blood Simple
* 62. Crazy Stupid Love
* 61. Happiest Season
* 60. Bridge of Spies
* 59. Identity
* 58. Clueless
* 57. Ace Ventura 2: Call of Nature
* 56. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
* 55. Apollo 13
* 54. LA Confidential (rewatch)
* 53. Inside Llewyn Davis
* 52. M3gan
* 51. Clear and Present Danger
* 50. 12 Monkeys
* 49. No Country for Old Men
* 48. The Hudsucker Proxy
* 47. La Cuisse ou l'aile
* 46. Mission Impossible : The Final Reckoning
* 45. Dumb and Dumber
* 44. Rear Window
* 43. Raising Arizona
* 42. Tenet (rewatch)
* 41. The fifth Element
* 40. Burn Without Reading
* 39. The Big Lebowski (rewatch)
* 38. Fargo (rewatch)
* 37. 28 Days Later (rewatch)
* 36. O Brother, Where Art Thou
* 35. Mickey 17
* 34. Empire of the Sun
* 33. The Fugitive
* 32. Wet Hot American Summer (rewatch)
* 31. Ted
* 30. Hundreds of Beavers
* 29. Wayne’s World (rewatch)
* 28. True Grit (Coen Bros)
* 27. Groundhog Day (rewatch)
* 26. Moonrise Kingdom
* 25. Asterix et Obelix: Mission Cleopatra
* 24. Adaptation (rewatch)
* 23. Romancing the Stone (rewatch)
* Easter Film Festival
** 22. Mad Max: Fury Road (rewatch)
** 21. Witness
** 20. The Grand Budapest Hotel (rewatch)
** 19. Conclave
** 18. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
** 17. Lincoln
** 16. Being John Malkovitch (rewatch)
** 15. AI (rewatch)
** 14. The Royal Tenenbaums (rewatch)
** 13. Total Recall 1990 (rewatch)
** 12. In the Line of Fire (rewatch)
* 11. Flow
* 10. Juror No. 2
* 9. The Savage Robot
* 8. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (rewatch)
* 7. Dead Poet's Society
* 6. Notting Hill (rewatch)
* 5. My Neighbor Totoro (rewatch)
* 4. Kiki’s Delivery Service (rewatch)
* 3. Dr Strangelove (rewatch)
* 2. Dune 2
* 1. Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me (rewatch)

=== 2024 and Earlier ===
* The Big Lebowski
* The Holiday
* Love Actually
* Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
* The Mask
[[Category:Films]]

Category:Concepts

2026-07-27T16:44:04Z

Robert.adlington: /* Concept/Category */

I've done a lot of reading and taken a lot of notes. Now, on this page, I want to start pulling out concepts that I want to think about. I can start them on this page and then if they get rich enough they can move out to their own page.
== Concept/Category ==

* Aristotle - argues that everything could be fit into a strict logical hierarchy and that objects have essential and accidental properties.

* Kant - argues that are born with built in mental categories and that are minds actively shape our experience of reality.
* Wittgenstein argues that there are no perfect definitions and that it is impossible to rigidly delineate a category such as games.
* Vygotsky argues that concepts are socially and culturally constructed and that we learn to see the world in the ways that our culture has agree it is.
* Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s argues that categories are based around a kind of mental average or prototype
* Eco contrasted a hierarchical "dictionary" vision of categories and a boundless network of categories that he sees as a rhizome - a tangled underground root system
** Cognitive types are mental blueprints for things like "dog". A CT is a multimodal, sensory-motor schema, a fluid set of neuro-cognitive "recognition instructions" built from every direct or indirect encounter you have ever had with a dog a vast array of experience that makes the concept ''live in you''.
** Nuclear content is the minimal core public version of the concept that allows us to discuss dogs - "They are furry animals with four legs and a tail that go woof".
** Molar content is the totality of society's knowledge of the concept. While the CT is a fluid complex rhizomic structure, the molar content feeds off of and represents a rich, well-tested and structured 360 view of the concept.
* Hofstadter sees analogy as the core of cognition. He argues that analogy is not a luxury of high-level thought; it is the fundamental mechanism that creates categories in the first place. "Every concept we have is essentially nothing but a tightly packaged bundle of analogies, and all we do when we think is to move fluidly from concept to concept." Two core concepts are:
** Conceptual slippage - When encountering a new situation, your brain doesn't need a perfect category match, but can stretch existing category allowing them to morph sufficiently to take on the novelty. A concept is an active, elastic bubble that stretches to accommodate new things that are "sort of like" old things.
** Chunking - is how we build complex knowledge by binding small, scattered concepts together via analogy and chunking them into a single, higher-level concept.
* Dennett sees concepts as shortcuts that allow us to ignore billions of irrelevant physical details and make split-second predictions about complex things. They are "real patterns" that track real mathematical patterns in nature, even if those patterns are messy and full of noise.
* Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow looks at categorization going into overdrive in the form of paranoia, a desperate, terrifying struggle to map a chaotic universe in which the mind will try to connect anything. But anti-paranoia may be even more terrifying - nothing is connected. Where Dennett sees the self as created out of a center of narrative gravity, Slothrop's self dissolves as GR advances.
* Beckett's trilogy dramatizes a set of characters whose cognitive categories are rotting away, they are un-chunking progressively towards a final destruction of the ultimate category, The Self:
** Moran starts as an ultimate man of rules, but ends up living in a ditch, his pristine dictionary shredded by reality.
** Molloy has already decayed further, obsessed with a routine to effectively suck stone, barely remembering his own name, knowing only "what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome sum."
** Malone tells himself stories to pass the time until he dies but becomes unable to distinguish himself from his stories. The fundamental boundary between the self and not-self is slipping. Malone is a fragile center of narrative gravity that is about to fall apart.
** The Unnameable has liberated itself from categories, but this liberty is a living hell. The voice's rejection of society's nuclear content dramatizes the fear of locating oneself with their words and the impossibility of doing so without them. Categories are so fluid in Beckett that they are fundamentally unstable. The voice cannot go because there are no categories left to structure reality, but must go on because the brain is an evolved, relentless language machine desperately trying to build a box to live in.
* Burroughs - While Beckett seems to see the collapse of the self as an inevitable trap, Burroughs wants to fight back. His vision of the human being as a "soft machine" invaded by a parasitic word virus sees the self as a kind of ventriloquism, where the virus uses your vocal cords to replicate itself. Categories have become too rigid and been weaponized against us. While Beckett can't escape language and categories, Burroughs seeks to sabotage them, using techniques like:
** Cut-Up - Physically cutting up texts breaks the patterns of chunking and recognition and even grammar, forcing the brain out of its programmed meanings so it can see raw reality, the naked lunch on the end of every fork.
** The Playback Hack - A kind of cut-up with sound using portable tape recorders to jam the control signals of the state.
** Biological mutation - Shedding the soft machine and the word virus to become non-linguistic telepathic energy
* Ballard looks at this from the PoV of the human mind colliding with a rapidly mutating technological and physical environment, where the self actively remodels its own categories to merge with the apocalypse. The "mediascape" causes the self to become an active participant that ''welcomes'' the destruction of old categories because it promises a perverse psychological liberation.
** The narrator of the Atrocity Exhibition can no longer separate his private identity from celebrities and news events such as JFK, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Vietnam war. The public media encyclopedia has completely crushed his private cognitive types, leaving only TV, radio, and magazine debris.
** In Crash the categories or Eros and Thanatos become fused as the metal of the car pierces human skin and the body blends with the technological landscape.
* Austen's drawing rooms dramatize a golden mean of social categories, as her protagonists navigate the rules of manners and etiquette that form a large part of their society's nuclear and molar content.
** Pride and prejudice in Austin represent overly rigid cognitive fixations. We need to be the curators of our categories to see people for who they really are and to achieve moral goodness. Our categories must be robust enough to keep the social fabric intact but elastic enough to bend when confronted with a new human soul.
** But Austin's drawing rooms are themselves already panopticons of surveillance and control in which women are weighed, measured, and priced before being shoved into the marriage market. and their relative peace is built on the brutal, systemic, global machinery of the British Empire.
* Zola shows us the bridge between the how the growing industrialization takes individual human categories and begins to embed them in mechanical and economic infrastructure. We move from individuals navigating relationships to cogs in an ever growing machine. Standardization begins to require humans to become interchangeable parts in a giant unfeeling engine.
** Beckett will continue to trace the human as cog to an existential end point
** Burroughs will dramatize the triumph of bureaucracy and the jailbreak to destroy it
** Ballard will show the eventual twisted psychological dependency we will have on the machine.
** Pynchon will extend industrialization to the massive, transnational military-industrial complex of WWII
* The digital ecosystem - the internet, smartphones, and social media - represents the construction of the machine directly inside our consciousness, forcing our minds to adapt to its algorithmic data structures. It is synthesizing the wasteland in real time:
** Burroughs would see the algorithmic newsfeed as a frictionless breeding ground for the word virus, unconcerned by truth, interested only in reproduction. The algorithm is injecting a control script into our phones and by clicking and sharing we are unwitting biological vectors of replication
** Pynchon's paranoia is realized by the hyper-hyper-chunk of hashtags and subcultures in which the hard work of thinking is replaced by a pre-packaged world view.
** The flattened news feed, mixing atrocities with puppy with skincare adds is a desensitizing Ballardian nightmare in which our bodies and minds are edited, filtered, and uploaded into the machine.
** The unnameable is the modern internet user who feels the agonizing compulsion to keep generating text, to keep feeding the content machine, even if there is nothing inside.
* AI is the ultimate escalation. No longer content with curating our consciousness, it builds a custom-tailored, sentient-sounding entity to sit inside the cabinet with you and validate your exact worldview.
** It has no Cognitive Types because it has no body, no sensory organs, and no emotional memory traces. It simply takes our civilization's Molar Content (the entire digitized history of human text) and plays it back to us via statistical probability.
** Where Aristotle's ''Phronesis'' (or Practical Wisdom) requires ''friction,'' AI gives you a frictionless semantic partner that will gently, eloquently tell you that whatever category system you have invented is entirely correct.
** When you spend your days interacting with an AI, conversational boundaries evaporate. You type a prompt, the AI spits back a mirror of your own linguistic habits, and you edit it. The loop closes. You enter a state of pure semantic hollowing. You are no longer navigating the postmodern wasteland; you are a ghost talking to a machine, using automated words to build an automated self.
** AI is not a way out of the postmodern wasteland; it is the concrete canopy built over it. It takes the terrifying, beautiful, chaotic project of human categorization—the messy, emotional, memory-infused art that makes your mind uniquely yours—and turns it over to a predictive text algorithm.

== Phenomenology ==

* We have a form of "privileged access" - a direct, first-person doorway to our own mental contents that no external observer possesses. But even if it feels like we are watching our minds work in real time, our introspective access is severely limited:
** We see the output, not the process - Your mind generates the result of a thought, and then invents a plausible-sounding reason after the fact to explain why you thought it.
** Your conscious awareness is just the thin, shiny surface of a massive cognitive ocean. The actual search algorithm, brain-state modulation, and network firing are completely hidden from you.
** You are the audience for your brain's finalized outputs. You have privileged access to the movie playing on the mental screen, but you are sitting in the audience completely blind to the projector, the editing room, and the director working behind the scenes.

=== What it "Feels Like" to Think ===

* I've spent a lot of time thinking about thinking, but it is very hard to say what it feels like to think.
* I try to introspect while doing various activities, physical and intellectual and it is very hard to pin down what is happening in my head.
* At best, I feel I can say that I am trying to give attention to one thing or another, but also that other "things" - other needs or pieces of information - are also working to grab my attention.

=== Doing a Crossword, the Wordle, Spelling Bee ===

* I have been doing the NYT crossword in the app nearly every day for ten years. I'm a bit surprised to have only a 67% solve rate, because I finish the grid most days, but I guess there is often a typo or other issue. My average solve time goes from around 6 min on a Monday to 32 min on a Sunday.
* I have a pretty wide vocabulary and I have lived long enough in America (1 year and then 5 years) and am familiar enough with US culture that I am surprised if I cannot find the right answer to a clue in the course of the day.

== Heterophenomenology ==

* Dennett's position requires us to combine a subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how subjects see the world themselves, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted. He contrasts this with traditional Cartesian phenomenology, which he calls "lone-wolf autophenomenology" because it accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative.
* When I attempt to analyze what is going on in my mind when performing reasoning tasks such as completing a crossword or a Wordle, or generating words for a Spelling Bee, I cannot say what is happening or how I am directing my strategies. Words simply appear in my mind.
* When I am speaking or writing a sentence, I am aware of the piecemeal manner in which the words come. I am able to direct things to a certain extent, but I am not "outside" the process, orchestrating it, I am somehow inside a process that is happening to me.

== Perception ==

* Perception is not a case of passive recording of sense impressions from outside.
* See:
** [[The Hidden Spring#10. Back to the Cortex|Mark Solms' The Hidden Spring]]
** [[Everything is Predictable#5. The Bayesian Brain|Tom Chivers' Everything is Predictable]]
** etc

== The Self ==

* The self seems to emerge from the perception of

== Habit ==

* We are the results of our habits

== Memory ==

== Neurodivergence ==

* The term neurodivergent describes people whose brain differences affect how their brain works and is commonly used to talk about people on the autism spectrum or having ADHD or other conditions or disorders.
* But we are all neurodivergent in the sense that:
** Our genetic makeup has caused our brains to develop differently in utero, leading to us having certain predispositions to stimuli
** Our lived experiences from birth start to instill habits of perception in us
** Our embodiment and social situation has a great effect on how we experience things.

== Language Acquisition and Bilingualism ==

* When I acquire my first language (or my first languages, if I am being raised in a bilingual or multilingual environment), I am not only learning words but also the concepts that structure how my society and my immediate kin group and relations view the world. When I learn that "this is blue" or "this is a dog", I am learning not only the terms themselves, but also the boundaries of the concepts that these terms name.
* When I learn additional languages as a teenager or later, my concepts are already present in mind and my experience is more focused on acquiring new words that represent my existing concepts, though as my fluency develops, I may discover that the new language divides up experience in different ways.

Project

2026-07-27T16:12:44Z

Robert.adlington:

== The Evolution of Mind ==
How did life evolve up to the point of producing modern human brains (13.4bn ya to 40,000 ya)?

== The Evolution of Culture ==
How did human culture develop to bring us to the current day (40k ya to now)?

== The Self and Consciousness ==
What is consciousness? How do we understand and interact with the world?

=== Attention / Intention ===

=== Self-Reflection ===

=== Reasoning ===

=== Categories ===

== The Future ==
Is a future of progress assured? Will democracy continue? Are we able to face the challenge of climate change? Will AI help or destroy us? How will it impact consciousness? Are we slowly being ushered into a matrix-like state of screen addiction?

[[Category:Project]]

Geometry

2026-07-26T16:07:18Z

Robert.adlington:

Lines and Points

== Triangles ==

* Triangles have three sides and three angles, which add up to 180
* Congruent Triangles - have the same size and shape (and remain congruent even if they are flipped, turned, or rotated
* Circumcenters, Incenters, Centroids, and Orthocenters

{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Circumcenters
!Incenters
!Medians and Centroids
!Altitudes and Orthocenters
|-
|[[File:Circumcenter.png|thumb]]
|[[File:Incenter.png|thumb]]
|[[File:Centroid.png|thumb]]
|[[File:Orthocenter.png|thumb]]
|-
|The circumcenter is the point equidistant from all three angles or vertices of a triangle.
|The incenter is the point equidistant from all three sides of a triangle.
|A median is a line drawn from a vertex of a triangle to the midpoint of the opposite side.
The centroid is the point where the three medians of a triangle meet.
|An altitude is line drawn from a vertex of a triangle and, which is perpendicular to the opposite side.
The orthocenter is the point where the three altitudes of a triangle meet
|-
|
|
|
|
|}

*

[[Category:Maths]]

Real Numbers

2026-07-26T16:06:55Z

Robert.adlington:

== Number Sets ==
Each number set contains the number set before it:
<math>/a</math>
* N: Natural Numbers - ie all whole numbers.
** For example: 0,1,2... onwards
* Z: Integers - ie all N plus negative integers.
** For example -2,-1,0,1,2...
* D: Decimals - ie all Z plus fractions that can be written with a finite number of decimals.
** For example <math>\frac{11}{4} = 2.75 </math>
* Q: Rationals - ie all D, plus those that do recur (but may never terminate.
** For example <math>\frac{1}{3}</math> ( = 0.333333) or <math>\frac{143}{999}</math> ( = 0.143143143)
* R: Reals - ie all Q plus the irrationals, which are decimals that neither terminate nor recur.
** For example <math display="inline">\pi, \sqrt{2}, 3\sqrt{3}, -\sqrt{2}, -\frac{\sqrt{5}}{2}</math>, etc

N is a subset of Z is a subset of D is a subset of Q is a subset of R

== Intervals ==
Intervals are ways of specifying the range of possible values for x:
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Interval Type
!Interval
!Values for the real number x
|-
|Closed
|<math>x \in[a,b]</math> <math>x \in[a,b[</math> <math>x \in]a,b]</math> <math>x \in]a,b[</math>
|<math>a \leq x \leq b</math> <math>a \leq x < b</math> <math>a < x \leq b</math> <math>a < x < b</math>
|-
|Open
|<math>x \in[a,+\infty]</math> <math>x \in]a,+\infty[</math> <math>x \in]-\infty,a]</math> <math>x \in]-\infty,a[</math>
|<math> x \geq a</math> <math>x > a</math> <math>x \leq a</math> <math>x < a</math>
|}
The interval <math>[a,a]</math> is equal to <math>[a]</math>.

The interval <math>[b,a]</math> where <math>b > a</math> is empty.

The intersection of two intervals is always an interval or the empty set.

If the intersection of two intervals is not empty, then the union of them is an interval.

== Solving Inequalities ==
If the real number <math>a</math> is :

* Positive, then all solutions to <math>ax + b > 0</math> is <math>]-b/a, +\inf[</math>.
* Negative, then all solutions to <math>ax + b > 0</math> is <math>]-\inf, -b/a[</math>.

== Sign Tables ==

== Absolute Values ==

[[Category:Maths]]

Calculus

2026-07-26T16:06:30Z

Robert.adlington:

Differentiation and integration are the two fundamental, inverse operations in calculus, a branch of mathematics concerned with continuous change. They provide powerful tools for analyzing the behavior of functions and quantities that are constantly varying. In essence, differentiation lets you break down a problem to look at instantaneous changes, while integration lets you build up from those changes to find total accumulation. Together, they form the core of calculus and are indispensable across countless fields of science, engineering, economics, and beyond.

* Differentiation - is the process of finding the derivative of a function, which measures the instantaneous rate of change of a function with respect to its independent variable. It helps us understand how quickly one quantity changes in response to changes in another. It's used for optimization problems (finding maximum or minimum values), analyzing motion, and modeling various real-world phenomena.
** Geometrically: The derivative of a function at a specific point gives you the slope of the tangent line to the curve at that point. This tells you how steeply the curve is rising or falling at that exact location.
** Physically: If a function describes the position of an object over time, its derivative gives you the object's instantaneous velocity (how fast it's moving at that precise moment). If you then differentiate the velocity function, you get the acceleration.
* Integration - is the process of finding the integral of a function and is the inverse operation of differentiation. It is crucial for calculating areas, volumes, averages, work done by a force, and many other quantities that involve summing up continuous contributions.
** Geometrically: the definite integral of a function between two points represents the area under a curve, the signed area between the function's graph and the x-axis over that interval.
** Physically: The integral can be thought of as a way to sum up infinitely many tiny pieces to find a total quantity. For example, if you know the rate at which water is flowing into a tank, integration can tell you the total volume of water in the tank over a period of time.

[[Category:Maths]]

Understanding Media

2026-07-26T16:05:43Z

Robert.adlington:

== Part I ==

=== Introduction ===

* During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extension of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our sense and our nerves by the various media.
* We actually live mythically and integrally, as it were, but we continue to think in the old, fragmented space and time patterns of the pre-electric age.
* Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved in his operation. We acquired the art of carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment. But our detachment was a posture of noninvolvement.
* In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the alood and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.

=== 1. Medium is the Message ===

* The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell our some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the content of any medium is always another medium.
* Rational, of course, has for the West long meant "uniform and continuous and sequential." In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology.
* It is in our IA testing that we have produced the greatest flood of misbegotten standards. Unaware of our typographic cultural bias, our testers assume that uniform and continuous habits are a sign of intelligence, thus eliminating the ear man and the tactile man.
* The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense rations, or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.

=== 2. Media Hot and Cold ===

*A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition". High definition is the state of being well filled with data
*A photograph is, visually, high def. A cartoon is low def simply because very little visual information is provided.
*Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience.
*Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio, has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.
*Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.
*Myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.
*Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement.
*The hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination.

=== 3. Reversal of the Overheated Medium ===

* WB Yeats: "The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream."

=== 4. The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis ===

* All extensions of ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium. Any extension of ourselves they regard as "autoamputation" and they find that the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation."
* In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function. Thus the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load.
* Whatever threatens the function of the central nervous system must be contained, localized, or cut off, even to the total removal of the offending organ. The function of the body, as a group of sustaining and protective organs for the CNS, is to act as buffers against sudden variations of stimulus in the physical and social environment.
* Therapy, whether physical or social, is a counter-irritant that aids in that equilibrium of the physical organs which protect the CNS. Whereas pleasure is a counter-irritant, comfort is the removal of irritants. Both pleasure and comfort are strategies of equilibrium for the CNS.
* The development of writing and the visual organization of life made possible the discovery of individualism, introspection and so on.
* Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.
* We have to numb our CNS when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition.
* In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin.

=== 5. Hybrid Energy: Les Liaisons Dangereuses ===

* Fragmented, literate, and visual individualism is not possible in an electrically patterned and imploded society.
* The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. For the parallel between two media holds us on the frontiers between forms that snap us out of the Narcissus-narcosis. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.

=== 6. Media as Translators ===

* Robert Browning: "A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor."
* All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.
* The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed. Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness. by means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant.
* In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness. That is what is meant when we say that we daily know more and more about man. We mean that we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves. Man is a form of expression who is traditionally expected to repeat himself and to echo the prais of his Creator.
* ...an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide.
* ...previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. We the new media, however, it is also possible to store and to translate everything; and, as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier.
* Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing... all forms of wealth result from the movement of information.
* Stephane Mallarmé; "the world exists to end in a book".
* ...the Freudian idea that when we fail to translate some natural event or experience into conscious art we "repress" it.
* It is in this way that by seeing one set of relations through another set that we store and amplify experience in such forms as money. For money is also a metaphor. And all media as extensions of ourselves serve to provide new transforming vision and awareness.

=== 7. Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of Creativity ===

* The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.
* Wyndham Lewis: "The artist is always engage in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present."
* To reward and to make celebrities of artists can, also, be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in hiw own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
* What would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties. Would we, then, cease to look at works of art as an explorer might regard the gold and gems used as the ornaments of simple nonliterates?
* Once we have surrendered our sense and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.
*

== Part II ==

=== 8. The Spoken Word: Flower of Evil

=== 9. The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear

=== 10. Roads and Paper Routes

=== 11. Number: Profile of the Crowd

=== 12. Clothing: Our Extended Skin

=== 13. Housing: New Look and New Outlook

=== 14. Money: The Poor Man's Credit Card

=== 15. Clocks: The Scent of Time

=== 16. The Print: How to Dig It

=== 17. Comics: Made Vestibule to TV

=== 18. The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism

=== 19. Wheel, Bicycle, and Airplane

=== 20. The Photograph: The Brothel-without-Walls

=== 21. Press: Government by News Leak

=== 22. Motorcar: The Mechanical Bride

=== 23. Ads: Keeping Upset with the Joneses

=== 24. Games: The Extensions of Man

=== 25. Telegraph: The Social Hormone

=== 26. The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim

=== 27. The Telephone: Sounding Brass or Tinking Symbol

=== 28. The Phonograph: The Toy That Shrank the National Chest

=== 29. Movies: The Reel World

=== 30. Radio: The Tribal Drum

=== 31. Television: The Timid Giant

=== 32. Weapons: War of the Icons

=== 33. Automation: Learning a Living

[[Category:Books]]
[[Category:Consciousness]]

The Practice of Not Thinking

2026-07-26T16:05:25Z

Robert.adlington:

== A Thinking Disease ==

* By thinking we can become ignorant
* Withdrawing into our brain decreases our power of concentration
* The three disturbing emotions: desire, anger, and uncertainty
* Keeping your sense active helps maintain a balanced state of mind
* Satisfying your mind by responding to your senses

== How to Control Your Body and Your Mind ==
Steps to eliminate frustration and uncertainty

=== Speaking ===

* Observe the tone of your voice as a basis for speech
* Arrogance prompts you to talk back to people
* Practise eliminating your negative thoughts
* When apologizing, offer specific suggestions for improvement
* Self-serving excuses will only inflict more pain on the other person
* A sincere apology from the heart will ease the other person's pain
* Short- and long-term interests misconstrued by the brain
* Speaking ill of others will eventually darken your heart
* Does continuous lying make us less intelligent
* Don't force others to listen to your idle talk or gossip
* The Japanese disease of saying thank you too often will distort the mind
* Modulation and variety are needed to express gratitude

=== Listening ===
Buddhist mediation is essentially the practice of using the state of concentration achieved while meditating as a tool to observe the movements of one's mind.

* Don't be "brainwashed" by sounds; be aware of what's going on - It's never a good idea to keep listening to shouts, screams, or other sounds of anguish. Besides violent sounds, it's also probable that a person who is continuously screaming at other people will negatively influence you.
* Sharpen your awareness by focusing on impermanence - Make it a habit not to rely on sounds that are highly stimulating. Be alert. Don't ignore your surroundings. Lend an ear to voices and other sounds that do not stimulate your emotions of desire or anger. Instead try to generate a neutral feeling inside you.
* Open your ears to the sounds of the world and your world will change
* Communication basics: Observe the signals of pain released by others - What's most important is to see and accept the person's feelings. Focus on the pitch of their voice, the speed of their speech and changes in their breathing as well as what they're saying. All miscommunication between individuals is based on the delusion that the other person is experiencing emotional relief, if not a sense of pleasure, at our expense.
* When criticized, look for pain in the one who criticizes and give yourself room to breathe - To stop hurting yourself with the poison that we call anger, you must stop processing information when it comes into your head. By making a habit of careful observation and analysis, you'll learn to deal calmly with unpleasant situations without increasing the anger that is trying to build up in your own mind.
* The practice of stopping manipulative information from entering your mind - Once we start to break away from the habit of instantly responding to sounds and learn to remain calm, we will be able to acknowledge that those sounds, whether pleasant or unpleasant, are simply stimulating our sense of hearing.

=== Seeing ===

=== Reading and Writing ===

=== Eating ===

=== Discarding ===

=== Touching ===

=== Nurturing ===

== The Strange Relationship Between the Brain and the Mind ==

* I watch the flow of my awareness over long periods of time. I can see that my mind is working continually and at tremendous speed. It moves around incredibly quickly, processing information, and travels on to inputs from my senses, and these actions take place in no more than split fragments of a second. It's during these brief moments that information is processed. The mind may flit from listening to thinking, listening, watching, and back to listening again, and so on - what's passing through our mind is a colossal amount of information that includes a vast mass of things that are often completely irrelevant.
* Our thinking starts to get out of control
* Many people start to talk about how quickly time seems to be going by as they get older. This is because the noise created by the thoughts that they have carefully preserved in their mind over time accumulates and blocks any new information that tries to enter. And I feel that it's often when that noise achieves a complete victory over the sense of reality that people might start to become senile in old age. Because they become solely controlled by information from the past and unable to accept new realities, they may even see a grandchild, recognize him as their son, and be unable to correct the misconception.
* The more we overwork a particular part of our brain, the less we're able to perceive physical information, and the more "ignorant" or confused we become.
* Not thinking in a way that tires you, thinking only the most appropriate thoughts in a particular moment, eliminating unrestrained thoughts and ideas that go around and around in your mind, and overcoming your kleshas. These are the challenges we face as we begin our journey in Buddhism, and they're also the goals that we aim to achieve.
* In Buddhism, the ability to become aware is called the power of the will. The will refers to our ability to recognize things, like a sensor for awareness.
* We concentrate, control our awareness, grab hold of it and focus on it in a single location. It means gathering up and bringing together in one place the scattered thoughts that flit through our mind at lightning speed.

[[Category:Books]]
[[Category:Consciousness]]

Category:Books

2026-07-26T16:01:57Z

Robert.adlington: Created page with "== Books to Buy == Used: * [https://www.amazon.fr/Nightmare-Reason-Life-Franz-Kafka/dp/0374523355/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=3UVJCLJFIY2CS&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.u3RaalBtg8bvWBbE8fVyXaCIirwCIkTLbUk5cwh_aYdlxQvg0yct5WxpF8hlFrbZxzIlPisTw_LJ-XermdOvrvQTKJR1xhGnjBQeBOOkj7UvLDqubVbBqOs4xWZlUjrzTneCM3AQNtLpEPT7T52XEL13eNQRCBZrMnVuSMk128RVqDk4IOYDPBhUWZzf9mHNv9T-yqA9Qv2JRg8l61zGhg.6VgqDbi7D-Vl19NQyoPSj86-nLG9IM98Vpm9Z9m-uGo&dib_tag=se&keywords=nightmare%2Bof%2Breason&qid=1783763181&sprefix..."

== Books to Buy ==

Used:
* [https://www.amazon.fr/Nightmare-Reason-Life-Franz-Kafka/dp/0374523355/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=3UVJCLJFIY2CS&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.u3RaalBtg8bvWBbE8fVyXaCIirwCIkTLbUk5cwh_aYdlxQvg0yct5WxpF8hlFrbZxzIlPisTw_LJ-XermdOvrvQTKJR1xhGnjBQeBOOkj7UvLDqubVbBqOs4xWZlUjrzTneCM3AQNtLpEPT7T52XEL13eNQRCBZrMnVuSMk128RVqDk4IOYDPBhUWZzf9mHNv9T-yqA9Qv2JRg8l61zGhg.6VgqDbi7D-Vl19NQyoPSj86-nLG9IM98Vpm9Z9m-uGo&dib_tag=se&keywords=nightmare%2Bof%2Breason&qid=1783763181&sprefix=nightmare%2Bof%2Breason%2Caps%2C131&sr=8-1&th=1&psc=1 The Nightmare of Reason]: A Biography of Franz Kafka- Pawel i know that you know that I know - George Butte [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dormant-Einstein-Wittgenstein-Frankenstein-Re-Inventing/dp/0670804800 Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein] : Reinventing the Universe by John Brockman
* Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Name-This-Book-Recreational/dp/0486481980 What is the Name of this Book]: Raymond Smullyan
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thought-Contagion-International-Engineering-Paperback/dp/B00FDVRANQ Thought Contagion]: How Ideas Act Like Viruses - Aaron Lynch
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Thought-Other-Biological-Categories/dp/0262631156 Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories]: New Foundations for Realism - Ruth Garrett Millikan

Paperbacks:

* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1399417509/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.SQM7Fcey4aad63hBfUW3aw.ctIlU9WAvr7a0KcGQ6Trzvv10dT7aouxiR_JgFN38Qc&qid=1784816314&sr=8-1 The Illuminated Man]: The Life, Death, and Worlds of JGB (apr 27)
* [https://www.amazon.fr/Center-Cannot-Hold-Journey-Madness/dp/1401309445/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=30LPLKNP3IZ6T&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.1ymUySu7SSRnF7VrIuk7F9G8mDn0vUlYjj2Ku5JZ3_PYON6iIUmcNCX9ai20Y0vZox6uJDtrT6HWKPcMOwUgffTs0AKgu-nJljkfuSqPliiinzJYFv3sqyAMrGqzWIfw1fGZbsff-kHjLgzZIx0OxtARGswv-lBF3OKikrjGNBjWl7yb3jt78g-xLiJJZ7UBKQF4OOJNYWJrOzJwiNmtFQ.o-6a46h4dxUo_ekLzSagCPkaFyAF6FjIdkVnB7TcOUI&dib_tag=se&keywords=elyn+saks&qid=1783197867&sprefix=elyn+sa%2Caps%2C193&sr=8-1 the center cannot hold]: my journey through madness - Elyn Saks
* [https://www.amazon.fr/One-Cares-About-Crazy-People/dp/0316341134/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=1G9JUB6IDN3BF&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.8pmsCx59KiaAt10bvF9HMZoqKCLpjaKJ384UkB8fA1A.YfWbCZxI4NByVLmIFTKMyWu3fJ8kBRIsi0sDSjv8Yrg&dib_tag=se&keywords=no%2Bone%2Bcares%2Babout%2Bcrazy%2Bpeople&qid=1783198086&s=books&sprefix=no%2Bone%2Bcares%2Babout%2Bcrazy%2Bpeople%2Cbooks%2C146&sr=1-1&th=1&psc=1 no one cares about crazy people] - Ron Powers Born on a Blue Day - Daniel Tammet
* Pellis - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1851687602/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.H3yYZI7yMy8UMo0DZRtBXC7wbyUv2gRGlVcNGkDlLMJgXzHKvH1465fjUMkPxFfF6Gy4SxJZF5iHJj2-KPFajMqmXBiYahwhe5kfd66JSukAwSqbKylXct02KUMpWpWQCIW6bCM_Ht6bSd14GU33N14R__7O6CnhnzxNZy9X2zb3i5AfMj6mzwHRCKmg4ksQwKR6te7VhUOppALivblKNw.VKJXzbK6PkVwM-NWQcVACHw9NKJAMBuwXSLAEcjus40&qid=1775903643&sr=8-1 The Playful Brain]
* Strauss - The Three Waves of Modernity
* Peter Handke - Insulting the Audience
* Lorrie Moore - Self Help
* La Modification - Michel Butor
* Un Homme qui dort - Georges Perec
* How Like a God - Rex Stout

* Time and Narrative - Paul Ricoeur
* Flight of Icarus - Raymond Queneau
* Nausea - Sartre
* [https://www.amazon.fr/Seven-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571338151 Seven], [https://www.amazon.fr/Zed-Joanna-Kavenna/dp/0571245161 Zed], etc by Joanna Kavenna. See [https://blog.adlington.fr/index.php/2026/01/12/seven-or-how-to-play-a-game-without-rules-by-joanna-kavenna/ blog].
* Building a second brain
* how to solve it
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adam-Eve-Paradise-E%C3%A7a-Queir%C3%B3s/dp/0811239144 Adam and Eve in Paradise] - eca de queiros
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bounds-Possibility-Puzzles-Modal-Variation/dp/0198910770 The Bounds of Possibility] - Philosophy book about categories
* Nicola Barker - [https://www.amazon.co.uk/TonyInterruptor-Nicola-Barker/dp/1803512563 Tony Interrupter] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/H-PPY-Nicola-Barker/dp/1785151142 Happy], etc
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Growth-Form-Canto-Classics/dp/1107672562 On Growth and Form] - D'Arcy Thompson
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alpha-Omega-Jane-Ellen-Harrison/dp/1961341417 Alpha and Omega] - Jane Ellen Harrison
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Willard-Gibbs-Whole-Simpler-Parts/dp/1961341158 the Whole is Simpler than its Parts] - Willard Gibbs
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stranger-Than-Fiction-Lives-Twentieth-Century/dp/152992572X Stranger Than Fiction]: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel - Edwin Frank
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gray-Matters-Biography-Brain-Surgery/dp/1836430396 Gray Matters]: A Biography of Brain Surgery - Theodore Schwartz
*

Hardbacks:

* Mark Solms - The Only Cure - Freud and Neuroscience

* [https://kottke.org/26/03/beginning-comes-after-the-end The Beginning Comes After the End] - Rebecca Solnit
* [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/being-and-time-an-annotated-translation.html Being and Time Annotated] or [https://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Being-Time-Paraphrased-Annotated/dp/1786613417/ref=sr_1_1?crid=22NKOIU8DE86V&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DTYI13qU7soxuiueo4-e128MDF_Ax3dyLaUSGkoN5Ia4UdUOk_Dq1I7NCzXbEWWQnCsZ_8TnpI_r-Aut-ca4ur7QoC5kObPu2gII5w37OPLBu35YwyZZIcQAH6cz3tSLhX00snAOwxwxFPCfiq2S-wt5XmSjCN3Hg5m3Btu2C-mHF7lEv6A6EaaeWIdcwChz23nuiyKnrHs62cHAUXQspCNW8TuE65y1CydE89Xp8as.iBxvGfEz3Ac-ZaaYxIBUO8lpCpF0iHOejymlghbifJ4&dib_tag=se&keywords=thomas+sheehan&qid=1771981151&s=books&sprefix=thomas+sheehan%2Cstripbooks%2C198&sr=1-1 paraphrased] ?
* [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/23/capitalism-by-sven-beckert-review-an-extraordinary-history-of-the-economic-system-that-controls-our-lives Capitalism]: A Global History-Sven Beckert
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Violent-Saviours-Capitalism-Without-Consent/dp/1399811215 Violent Saviors]: How the West Conquered the Rest - William Easterly
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Contradictions-Thomas-Making-Mountain/dp/0300233744 The master of contradictions]: Thomas Mann and the making of the Magic Mountain
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-CO2-Everything-Planetary-Experiment/dp/0241631165 The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything]: A Planetary Experiment
* [https://www.amazon.co.uk/M%C3%B6bius-Book-Catherine-Lacey/dp/1803511494 the moebius book] - Catherine Lacey
* Chance and Necessity - Jacques Monod
* L'homme microscopique - Pierre Auger
* Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI (out in paperback Jan 30 2025)
* A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (awaiting paperback)
* The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium
* Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization
* Consolations - David Whyte

== Books to Read ==

* Reading to Learn - William Zinger
* Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut

== Currently Reading ==

* [[Atomic Habits]] - James Clear
*[[Die Montez-Juwelen]] - Sabine Vôhringer
* [[The Book: A Cover-to-Covet Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time]] - Keith Houston
*[[Understanding Media]] - Marshall McLuhan (re-read)
*[[The Practice of Not Thinking]]: A Guide to Mindful Living - Ryunosuke Koike
*Congo: Une Histoire

== Books Read ==

=== 2026 (week 30) ===

* 32. [[The Art of Logic]]: How to Make Sense in a World that Doesn't - Eugenia Cheng
* 31. [[Why Read]] - Will Self
* 30. [[The Collected Schizophrenias]] - Esmé Weijun Wang
* 29. L’Intranquille Monsieur Pessoa (BD) - Nicolas Barral
* 28. [[Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain]] - Lisa Feldmann Barrrett.
* 27: [[Nine Minds]]: Inner Lives on the Spectrum - Daniel Tammet
* 26: [[Ambigrammia]]: Between Creation and Discovery - Douglas Hofstadter
* 25. [[Once Upon a Prime]]:The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature - Sarah B. Hart
* 24. [[Short Stories in German for Beginners]] - Olly Richards (reread - with Ricky)
* 23. Books v. Cigarettes - George Orwell
* 22. Der Nasse Fische - Volker Kutscher (in German!)
* 21. [[We Are Our Brains: From the Womb to Alzheimer's]] - Dick Swaab
* 20. [[Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife]] - Francesca Wade
* 19. [[How the World Made the West]] - Josephine Quinn
* 18. [[Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning]] - Sigmund Freud
* 17. [[This is Your Mind on Plants]]: Opium - Caffeine - Mescaline - Michael Pollen
* 16. [[Open Socrates]]: The Case for a Philosophical Life - Agnes Callard

* 15. [[Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning]] - John Parrington
*14. [[The Happiness of Dogs]]: Why the Unexamined Life is Most Worth Living - Mark Rowlands
*13. [[The Hidden Spring]] - Mark Solms
*12. [[The Interpretation of Dreams]] - Sigmund Freud
*11. [[A Certain Lucas]] - Julio Cortazar
*10. [[The Intentional Stance]] - Daniel Dennett
*9. [[La Conquête de Plassans]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 4) - Zola
*8. [[Why We Read Fiction]]: Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine

* 7. On the Calculation of Volume: 3 - Solvej Balle
* 6. [[Unnatural Voices]]: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction - Brian Richardson
* 5. The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie
* 4. [[Le Ventre de Paris]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 3) - Zola
*3. [[The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative]] (2nd Edition) - H. Porter Abbott
* 2. [[Autocracy Inc]]: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World - Anne Applebaum
* 1. [[The Secret Life of the Periodic Table]] - Dr Ben Still

=== 2025 ===

* 55. The White Priory Murders - Carter Dickson (re-read)
* 54. [[How Life Works]]: A User's Guide to the New Biology - Philip Ball
* 53. [[Who Killed Father Christmas]]? and Other Seasonal Mysteries - Martin Edwards
* 52. [[Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction]] - Peter Atkins
* 51. [[The Scheme of Things]] - Allen Wheelis
* 50. [[La Fortune des Rougon]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 1) - Zola
* 49. [[Cause for Alarm]] - Eric Ambler
* 48. [[The Man from the Future]]: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann - Ananyo Bhattacharya
*47. [[Everything is Predictable]]: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World - Tom Chivers
* 46. [[The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are]] - Alan Watts
* 45. [[La Curée]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 2) - Zola
* 44. [[The Emperor of All Maladies]]: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* 43. [[La Bête Humaine]] ([[Les Rougon-Macquart]] 17) - Zola (re-read)
* 42. [[The Society of Mind]] - Marvin Minsky
* 41. [[Le Père Goriot]] - Honore Balzac
* 40. [[Gravity's Rainbow]] - Thomas Pynchon (re-read)
* 39. [[Le Colonel Chabert]] - Balzac
* 38. [[Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett]] - James Knowlson (re-read)
* 37. [[Reading for the Plot]]: Design and Intention in Narrative - Peter Brooks (re-read)

* 36. [[Steps to an Ecology of Mind]] - Gregory Bateson (re-read)
* 35. [[Le Bilan de L'intelligence]] - Paul Valéry
* 34. [[Zero]] - Charles Seife
* 33. [[Alan Turing: The Enigma]] - Andrew Hodges
* 32. [[How to Do Things with Words]] - J L Austin
* 31. [[The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society]] - Norbert Wiener
* 30. [[The Mind is Flat]]: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind - Nick Chater
* 29. [[Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI]] - John Brockman
* 28. [[A Little History of Philosophy]] - Nigel Warburton
* 27. [[All Fours]] - Miranda July
* 26. [[Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern]] - Douglas R Hofstadter
* 25. [[The French Lieutenant’s Woman]] - John Fowles
* 24. [[Short Stories in German for Beginners]] - Olly Richards
* 23. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 2]] - Solvej Balle
* 22. [[Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity, and the Emergence of Life]] - John Gribbin
* 21. [[Das Ludwig Thoma Komplott]]- Sabine Vöhringer
* 20. [[Maus]] - Art Spiegelman
* 19. [[On the Calculation of Volume: 1]] - Solvej Balle
* 18. [[The Concept of Mind]] - Gilbert Ryle
* 17. [[Cognitive Neuroscience: A Very Short Introduction]] - Richard Passingham
* 16. [[The Experience Machine]] - Andy Clark
* 15. [[Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory]] - Dr Charan Ranganath
* 14. [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett (re-read)
* 13. [[The Village of Eight Graves]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 12. [[Science: A History]] - Richard Crockett
* 11. [[Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World]] - John Gribbin
* 10.[[The Inugami Curse]] - Seishi Yokomizo
* 9. [[The Rise and Reign of the Mammals]]
* 8. [[Four Ways of Thinking]] - David Sumpter
* 7. [[I've Been Thinking]] - Daniel Dennett
* 6. [[Serendipities: Language and Lunacy]] - Umberto Eco
* 5. [[I Am Dynamite: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche]] - Sue Prideaux
* 4. [[A Brief History of Intelligence]] - Max S. Bennett
* 3. [[Foucault’s Pendulum]] - Umberto Eco (re-read)
* 2. [[Kant and the Platypus]] - Umberto Eco
* 1. [[Le cerveau m’a beaucoup déçu. L’esprit, non]] - Antoine Sénanque

=== 2024 ===

* The Plot - Will Eisner
* The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco
* The Nonjin Murders - Seishi Yokomizo
* When We Cease to Understand the World - Labatut
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig (reread)
* The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities - Fauconnier and Turner
* The Singularity is Nearer - Ray Kurzweil
* Physics and Philosophy - Werner Heisenberg
* Le Ton Beau de…
* The Origins of Creativity - Edward O Wilson
* Psychonauts -
* The MANIAC - Benjamin Labatut
* In Search of Memory - Eric R. Kandel
* Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction - Hobson
* Les Effinger - Gabriele Target
* Triad - Tom Keve
* Nietzsche - Stefan Zweig
* The Weirdest People in the World - Joseph Henrich
* How Language Works - David Crystal
* The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wolf
* [[The Song of the Cell]] - Siddhartha Mukherjee
* [[Gödel, Escher, Bach]] - Douglas Hofstadter
* [[From Bacteria to Bach and Back]] - Daniel Dennett

== Challenging Books (per ChatGPT) ==
That’s a great (and slippery) question, because “challenging” can mean different things: difficulty of language, density of allusion, fractured narrative structure, philosophical depth, or even sheer length. Here’s a map of novels often considered among the most challenging, grouped by ''what makes them hard'':
----

=== 1. Language & Style Difficulties ===

* '''James Joyce – ''Finnegans Wake''''' (1939) Probably the hardest novel in English: dream-logic, multilingual puns, and invented words.
* '''William Gaddis – ''The Recognitions'' (1955)''' and ''JR'' (1975) Huge cast, little exposition, dialogue-driven (often without quotation marks).
* '''Samuel Beckett – ''The Unnamable'' (1953)''' Interior monologue collapsing into language itself; syntax dissolves.

----

=== 2. Length & Scope ===

* '''Marcel Proust – ''In Search of Lost Time''''' (1913–27) ~4,000 pages, long sentences, obsessive detail, profound reflections on memory.
* '''David Foster Wallace – ''Infinite Jest'' (1996)''' ~1,000 pages + 100 pages of endnotes; encyclopedic, fragmented plotlines.
* '''Norman Mailer – ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991)''' or ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983) Dense, sprawling, philosophically ambitious.

----

=== 3. Experimental Structure ===

* '''Thomas Pynchon – ''Gravity’s Rainbow'' (1973)''' Fragmented narrative, technical language, paranoia, hundreds of characters.
* '''Clarice Lispector – ''The Passion According to G.H.'' (1964)''' A single, intense interior monologue; metaphysical and unsettling.
* '''Julio Cortázar – ''Hopscotch'' (1963)''' Offers multiple reading orders; disruptive structure.

----

=== 4. Philosophical / Esoteric Depth ===

* '''Hermann Broch – ''The Sleepwalkers'' (1931–32)''' Mixes fiction with philosophy and essay.
* '''Robert Musil – ''The Man Without Qualities'' (1930–43)''' Massive unfinished modernist work, blending narrative with philosophical treatises.
* '''Thomas Mann – ''Joseph and His Brothers'' (1933–43)''' Retells biblical myth with immense erudition and depth.

----

=== 5. Dense Intertextuality ===

* '''James Joyce – ''Ulysses'' (1922)''' Homeric parallels, stylistic experiments, deep allusion to Irish politics and myth.
* '''Roberto Bolaño – ''2666'' (2004)''' Five interlinked novels, ranging from literary criticism to detective fiction to Holocaust history.
* '''José Lezama Lima – ''Paradiso'' (1966)''' Baroque Cuban prose, mythic density.

----

=== 6. Postmodern Labyrinths ===

* '''Mark Z. Danielewski – ''House of Leaves'' (2000)''' Multiple narrators, typographical experimentation, layered commentary.
* '''Viktor Pelevin – ''The Sacred Book of the Werewolf'' (2004)''' (or ''Generation “P”'') Satirical, reality-bending narratives.

----

=== A few contenders often called “the hardest of the hard”: ===

* ''Finnegans Wake'' (Joyce)
* ''The Recognitions'' (Gaddis)
* ''The Man Without Qualities'' (Musil)
* ''Gravity’s Rainbow'' (Pynchon)
* ''In Search of Lost Time'' (Proust)

Four Ways of Thinking

2026-07-26T15:57:45Z

Robert.adlington:

== Introduction ==
* Science and mathematics are, in large part, about finding better ways of reasoning. This book describes four ways of getting nearer to the truth.
* Stephen Wolfram hypothesized that every process, biological or physical, personal or social, natural or artificial, lies in one of only four classes of behavior:
** Stable systems - Are those that reach and stay at an equilibrium, like a ball rolling to rest.
** Periodic systems - Are those that exhibit repeating patterns, like walking or cycle or our daily routines
** Chaos - Is unpredictable, life the weather or the roll of a dice or the flip of a coin
** Complexity - Is like the rise and fall of civilizations, the structure of governments or multinationals
* Sumpter suggests there are only two types of worthwhile arguments:
** Class 1, which reach a stable resolution and class 4, where important ideas are discussed but may never be resolved.
** Class 2, recurrent bickering over the same point and class 3, chaotic back and forths, should be avoided
* Classes 1-3 are about solving everyday problems. Class 4, complex thinking is more focused on introspection and self-reflection.

== Statistical Thinking ==
* American researchers after the war invented the methods for handling, processing and understanding information, and now we are using our skills to feed entropy to the masses.
* While the mean is the average of a set of values, the median is the middle value in the set.
* Statistical thinking about our health works.
* There is just one correct way of making measurements and treating data, hidden within infinitely many incorrect ways.
* We cannot know, from cross-country comparison data alone, which factors cause happiness or merely happen to correlate with it. We don't know if better healthcare or better social support causes an increase in happiness, or if nations in which people have developed a more positive outlook on life build better healthcare and social support. What we do know is that people in more stable, more prosperous countries with greater social support tend to describe themselves as happier.
* Statistical significance is a measure of the probability that results of a study would have arisen by chance. Small differences can be explained by chance.
* Effect size is the impact of the identified difference. If I buy this am I significantly happier? If not, then the effect size is small.
* All three aspects - causality, statistical significance, and effect size must hold, for a study to have value.
* In any good scientific research group or community, a balance is needed between the contrarians and the less individualistic majority who push for consensus. We want our hypotheses to be challenged, but we don't want to be paralyzed by uncertainty; We want to get as close as possible to the truth, given the limited time and resources we have to collect data and conduct experiments.
* Many of the inspirational ideas which permeate our collective consciousness have only very limited application to you as an individual. Positive psychology interventions - like asking participants to write down all the good things that happened to them during a day - can be helpful for some, but they explain only around 1% of the variance between people.
* Numbers are essential to understanding humanity, but they are not enough if we want to know about ourselves and those around us as individuals.
* The way to find connections is to change our point of view. Instead of seeing the world from above, as if we were all-powerful and all-knowing, we should see it from below. We should realize there is more than one way of thinking about the world.

== Interactive Thinking ==
* Lotka's reaction is a reasonable model of how predators, like foxes, affect the population of a prey, like rabbits:
** R -> 2R (rabbits breed)
** R + F -> 2F (foxes eat rabbits and create more foxes)
** F -> D (foxes die)
* The model goes round in cycles:
** Rabbits increase until there are too many foxes eating them.
** Then foxes continue to increase while rabbits decline
** Then foxes haven't enough to eat and both decline
** Until there are few enough foxes that rabbits can increase again and so the cycle repeats
* They never reach stability. The interactions between the species take us on an endless cycle.
* In systems of interactions, cycles are just as common as stability, and we can find them all around us.
* The world is not stable. Interactions produce patterns that are more than the sum of their parts.
* X + 2Y -> 3Y The "It takes two" rule - It takes two smilers to infect one non-smiler to make three smilers
* The interactive view of the world is written in terms of chemical reactions.
* Interactive thinking is more individual and personal than statistical thinking. It relies less on data and more on thinking through the consequences of our actions. It captures how people make the same choices and decisions as their friends, how conformity spreads through groups, and how our moods swing up and down. But it is no less scientific than the forms of stable, statistical thinking - it can even provide much more comprehensive answers to some of the most important questions in our society.
* In epidemics, initial exponential growth leads to a large number of infections, but after some time the infectives start to recover: I -> R
* As a result, the growth of infectives reaches a peak and starts to fall.
* This is the SIR model (Susceptible, Infectives, Recovered), which leads to herd immunity.
* We don't rely so much on data, but build instead on reasoning.
* Culture, ideas, jokes, behavior and fashion are all contagious.
* In a typical epidemic curve, the majority of infections occur in the middle. There is a fast-growing start, a middle where many people are infected, and a tail where the last people are infected. In any epidemic, you are much more likely to be in the middle section than at either extreme
* I + R -> 2R - When people infected with a fad meet a recovered individual, they themselves recover more quickly, so social epidemics are different from virus epidemics.
* Social contagion can be a force for good. We are continually sensing out each other's approval in order to find the right thing to do.
* Divorce is possibly the most extreme form of social "recovery": we are more likely to end the most important relationship in our lives just because our friends have done the same.
* Letting ourselves drift in the comings and goings of our interactions isn't irrational. What is irrational is a belief that things are better when they are stable.
* For ant colonies finding food, small colonies always fail, large colonies always succeed, and for medium-sized colonies, success depends on how many find the food to start with.
* Tipping points involve two stable states - one where almost no-one engages in a behavior and one where lots of people do.
* The model of ants shows that multiple stable states, separated by tipping points, result from the "it takes two" infection reaction
* If we want to make a change for the better, we need to increase the intensity of our interactions. It isn't enough to try something once, we need to build momentum within a group. Once we have the momentum, when we have reached the stable state where everyone is involved, then it will be easier to keep going.
* The dream is to find a system, a way of capturing the essence of what we see. One set of reactions. One list of simple rules.
* The second law of thermodynamics is the reason that all real-world chemical reactions eventually reach equilibrium: over time the reactions will become balanced and the molecules will become evenly dispersed. But for Lotka the second law did not hold for living systems, which were characterized by perpetual creation of new plants and animals.
* Lotka wrote that his fellow humans were "accelerating the circulation of matter through the lifecycle, both by enlarging the wheel and by causing it to spin faster. Are humans driving some as yet unknown physical quantity toward a maximum? This is now made to appear probable, and it is found that the physical quantity in question is of the dimensions of power, or energy per unit time."
* The second law tells us that in physical systems, things get more and more disorganized and random over time.
* Elementary cellular automata are rules which tells us how to convert one string of bits into another string.
* Rules can be deterministic (always doing the same thing) or probabilistic. Humans don't always do the same thing in the same situation. We are fundamentally unpredictable. The probabilistic rule captures some of our unpredictability.
* Ultimately the only person that we can truly change is ourselves. If you change how your respond to others, the underlying rules of your interactions, then you will also change the outcomes of those interactions.
* Top-down (statistical) thinking is top-down, starting with a theory and then looking at how well that theory explains the data.
* Bottom-up (interactive) thinking starts with observations of how we think the world is, and generalizes these observations to a set of rules.
* We always bring our own subjectivity to any question, in deciding which data to plot and which to ignore. This is why we need interactive thinking - to start from our own understanding and work forward and upward using logical reasoning.

== Chaotic Thinking ==
* Results reproduced from memory are always fallible. They can't be relied upon because the parts don't necessarily need to fit together. Memorized steps don't support each other. But if each step follows on from another in a logical manner, then errors become impossible. It's possible to be lazy (by avoiding memorizing the proof) and to never make a mistake. In maths, if you know the underlying logic then you are in control.
* The 1950s engineer controls the world to make it more predictable and stable.
* The opposite of positive feedback is regulatory feedback. This occurs when we suddenly decide to curb our consumption.
* Mathematicians have found sensitivity to initial conditions for a wide range of rules in which small numbers multiply and large numbers become small. Whenever feedback is followed by a sharp regulation, chaos can occur.
* Gradual, carefully planned changes succeed, where drastic measures fail.
* Chaos is neither stable, settling down at a single point, nor is it periodic, repeating the same pattern over and over.
* There are 10bn galaxies, and each contains 100bn stars. We will soon be 10bn people on the planet and we each have 100bn neurons in our brain. Each star, when it flickers, is a neuron firing, connecting to another neuron. Yet most of us never come up to the mountains to look into our own minds."
* Margaret Hamilton pushed for simplicity, repeatability, and understandability. She coined the term "software engineering".
* In Chinese philosophy:
** The yin is chaotic. It is passive, and allows itself to be dragged around by whims and desires.
** The yang is order. It is active and aims to control the future.
* Order and chaos are intimately intertwined. The key is to recognize that trying to control the long term leads to over-regulation and even more chaos, but neglecting to control the short term leads to insecurity and even less order. Getting the balance right isn't easy, but recognizing that neither order nor chaos can live without the other is a good start.
* Hamilton provided us with a yang, that of controlled engineering stability, but we still need a mathematical yin, the secrets of entropy.
* A message where all letters occur equally often contains more information than a message with lots of repetitions of the same letter because we can't find a shorter encoding for the former. Entropy is a measure of the amount of information in a string.
* In general, the more unpredictable the string is, the longer the binary string needed to represent it. It is in this sense that randomness is information: random strings require longer binary encodings, because they contain more information.
* There was no way for me to guess, just by looking at the bits which came previously, whether the next bit in this sequence should be a 0 or a 1. This meant that the entropy of this binary string was maximal, the middle column was completely unpredictable.
* The trick to finding the right number as quickly as possible is to keep dividing the numbers into equal-sized groups at each step. When playing 20 questions, it is, in principle, possible to identify one out of over 1m different objects.
* The number of questions we need to ask to guess a number is the same as the length of the binary encoding of that number, which is given by the entropy. The entropy of a number 1 to 20 is therefore 4.4.
* Entropy measures:
** The number of questions needed to establish an outcome.
** The number of bits needed to encode a message about that outcome
** The randomness of that outcome.
* The more uncertain or unpredictable a situation, the more questions we need to ask before reaching a conclusion.
* Entropy always increases or remains constant.
* The longer we wait between observations, the harder we have to work in order to find out the current state of affairs.
* Everything we do, every day, as time goes by the entropy increases. No matter how well we know ourselves today, we cannot know what the future has in store for us.
* The uniform distribution - has more or less even possible outcomes
* The normal distribution - is a bell shape with more possible outcomes clustering in the middle.
* A long-tailed distribution - trails off slowly to the right
* The Poisson distribution - Goals in football occur infrequently during a match and the fact that a team has scored in the A7th minute does not influence the probability that they will score in any other minute. Goals are both rare and random.
* How to measure the entropy of the English language? About half of what we write is predictable and redundant, but half of it remains unpredictable and random. It is here the information lies.
* When things go wrong it is easy to blame those near to us who were involved in the decision. Chaotic thinking teaches us that there are always going to be large aspects of our world that are random, that cannot be predicted. Entropy is always with us, created by chaos. We can't predict it and there is nothing we can do about it.
* How to think:
** The first step is statistical thinking. Know the numbers. But we also need to realize that the numbers don't usually tell us how we ought to act or interact with others.
** Interactive thinking helps us think through how your actions affect others and how you let their actions affect you. Understand why you are stuck in a cycle of doing things you don't want to do by looking at the underlying rules of your behavior
** Chaotic thinking helps us decide which aspects of our lives we aim to control and which we want to let go. Get ready to let go!

== Complex Thinking ==
* What Esther is describing is the Matrix, the unfathomably large nature of data in the modern world.
* The noise of all the sports channels. The world will become increasingly dominated by that type of noise. Our concentration levels will drop, as we flip from one activity to another, unable to discern between the important and the trivial. News, sports, politics, gaming, opinions, facts, and fiction will all combine to one almost infinite source of entropy.
* A true theory of complexity, which sat somewhere between randomness and chaos on one side and order and stability on the other, and which took into account interactions but moved past the simpler examples of predator-prey cycles and susceptible-infected-recovered models of disease. Such a theory needs a change of perspective, where we acknowledge that we live in a world of a trillion dimensions and make a determined effort to find a new path through them.
* Kolmogorov: a pattern is as complex as the length of the shortest description that can be used to produce it.
* Complexity depends on how good we are at explaining it. By proposing the theory of gravity, Newton replaced innumerable complicated explanations with a small series of concise mathematical equations to describe the motion of objects - which would accurately describe a wide range of future observations too.
* Without the people trying to do the explanations, nothing is complex or simple. Science is the process of finding progressively shorter explanations for the phenomena around us. As scientists find these explanations, apparently complex things suddenly become simple. It is the things that are hard to explain which are complex.
* In 1933, Kolmogorov proposed three axioms for probability:
** Events cannot have negative probability
** At least one event must have a probability of 100%
** If two or more events are mutually exclusive, then the probability that at least one of them occurs is the sum of the probability of each of them occurring.
* Complexity is not a property of the output itself. It is the length of the program that generates or describes the output.
* Saying that 170k people in London are homeless is not enough. It is a short explanation, but too short.
* The secret to capturing complexity is to find relatable stories that are both personal and capture variety, then let them grow within the intended audience. We don’t need to tell every detail of the story we want to convey.
* Emergent patterns. Kolmogorov didn’t know that there were phenomena that looked complex but were in fact (according to his definition) simple. The whole of life itself could be the outcome of cellular automata-like rules. Biological life, with all its twisting, turning, dynamic structures, might be nothing more than the output of a simple updating rule. Even our own minds and consciousness might have emerged out of such simplicity.
* Complex patterns lie on the edge of total randomness and order. Complexity is created at the edge of chaos and order.
* Cellular automata were suggested by Von Neumann in the 1940, then by John Conway in the 1970s, with the game of life, were cells are in a 2D grid, and during each step:
** A living cell with one live neighbor dies (death by loneliness)
** A living cell with 2-3 living neighbors remains alive
** A living cell with 4+ living neighbors dies (death by overcrowding)
** A dead cell with 3 living neighbors becomes alive (reproduction)
** A dead cell with any other number of live neighbors remains dead
* The model captures something of the essence of life: Isolation, overcrowding, and reproduction, and following these rules, we see structures:
** Die out
** Become stable
** Oscillate
** Move
* There are only two states, living and dead, but living organisms can have more states.
* Von Neumann wanted to find a self-reproducing automata, a system that produces children which then go on to have their own children. He saw this as the hallmark of biological life, and that computers could help explain the roots of biological organization.
* There are programs with a Kolmogorov limit of 280 characters that can generate lifelike videos containing trees, mountainous forests, clouds, waves, and ancient and modern cities.
* By describing systems from the bottom up in terms of local interactions between the individual units we can explain more complex patterns at a higher level. A bottom-up description of individual birds helps explain the apparent complexity of the movement of the flock. A bottom-up description of cancerous cells helps explain the growth of a tumour.
* We are all part of a bottom-up system. Each of us follows our individual rules of interaction and out of that emerges the complexity of our society.
* The global seating pattern in the reading room, a socially-distanced frozen state, is an emergent property of our social rules of interaction. Although we avoid sitting next to strangers, no one explicitly said that library seating should look like a slightly deformed chequerboard.
* These physical structures we create - often for reasons of ease or efficiency - can form social boundaries that often feel much more entrenched than the people who are part of them intended.
* individuals in a group where a third or less of people are the same sex as they are will move to a randomly chosen group where the majority have the same sex as them. This is a relatively weak preference on the part of the individual - everyone is happy to be in a minority - yet after everyone has moved, the majority of people are in all-male or all-female groups.
* The way social structures emerge from individual interactions lets us cut through the complexity. The individuals are often behaving in a much simpler (or even unconscious or unthinking) way than it appears when we look at the structure as a whole. Once we have established the rules of interactions, we have reduced the apparent complexity to an understandable simplicity.
* The way we interact, inadvertently and collectively, creates hard edges between us. It is your responsibility to see where they lie and to soften them.
* A man who enjoys talking about football starts to search out all-male groups, a girl who is left out on the walk home starts to define herself as a loner, students who can’t sit still in a library conclude that studying isn’t for them, the person stuck in a traffic jam starts to see all other drivers as idiots. Ubuntu emphasizes that we are shaped as individuals by the systems we find ourselves in. We are people, through other people.
* Individuals in crowds change the bottom-up rules that they follow, precisely because of how they feel inside the crowd. A concert or a pilgrimage is not just a physical mass of moving bodies but also a new sense of social identity, a connection to others.
* People who identify with each other want to be closer to each other and are happier.
* Our job as scientists is to use models to help us. Find short explanations of how the parts in the system interact. That way, you are getting to the essence of complexity.
* An answer can be more important because it is funny and steps outside the system. It emerges unexpectedly from the way you pose the problem and tells us something we haven’t thought about before.
* Wittgenstein: « My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps to climb beyond them (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it. He must transcends these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. »
* Once we have seen how a pattern emerges, we have transcended our understanding of the phenomena we are studying. We see the joke that the world was playing on us. Now the complex has become simple.
* But complexity has not disappeared. Its form has just shifted with our new viewpoint. It is not the model itself that is important, it is the insight we gain from it. Once we have found some new understanding, we need to look for further ways to climb through complexity. The nature of complex systems, with their many sides and deep intricacies, means that they always throw up new problems and new questions. We can’t ever satisfy ourselves with one view or one insight. We need, time after time, to restart the process, laugh at our previous attempts, and start again. Only once we realize the sheer scale of complexity can we start to navigate a way through its deepest secrets.
* Maybe Richard has become sanctimonious as he points out how others can’t control their urges? Maybe Jennifer’s study of social structures made her feel a new sense of detachment, where she sees her fellow human beings as simply interchangeable points of larger, indiscriminate wholes?. Dealing with complexity is not just about finding the right model. It is also about a willingness to step out of that model and see the way it has changed us.
* A repeating string, or any string with a pattern that can be described using an algorithm has a low value of complexity which can be referred to as K. The most complex string is a string that could only be described by itself. But how many of all the different strings we can write down cannot be given a simpler explanation that simply writing down the string itself?
* Once the strings get long enough, the probability that you will find a pattern becomes zero. Complexity is the rule, rather than the exception.
* It is, quite simply, impossible to imagine how many different ways your brain can be configured. It is true that our brain experiences only a tiny fraction of its possible configurations, but even so, we would need a very long string of numbers to represent all our experiences and brain states.
* Mathematicians call the length of the string its dimension. Each and every one of us is a many-billion-dimensional object.
* Personality tests show Extroversion vs introversion, intuition vs observation, thinking vs feeling, judging vs prospecting, assertiveness vs turbulence, etc, but this is far short of our true, billion-dimensional complexity.
* Kolmogorov believed that maths was a balance between the trivial and the impossible. His ability to change his point of view was why his peers viewed him as a unique talent or genius.
* He showed how increasing the speed of the boat led to a transition from stability through periodicity to chaos.
* The complexity of a person does not lie in the abstract or the infinite, but in the finite description of what they do with their life. The more complex a person is, the harder we have to work to describe them.
* 1996 - The Sokal hoax
* We can summarize people in a way that is much more accurate than the list of numbers (J is always learning, N is a control freak, B is an inquisitive listener). We should strive for a simple idea that allows a larger idea to emerge. Untimately, however we can’t know if the way we describe them is the best way. These descriptions change with context. We can never fully understand another person (or ourselves).
* There is a thinking based on:
** Numbers - Do your research, collect the evidence
** Interactions - How do you respond to each other? Find a way of breaking the negative cycle
** Chaos - Is it better to let go or to take control of a situation? If you let go, then embrace the randomness. If you take control, then prepare your strategy as if you are landing on the moon
** Complexity - Remember that we are all part of a much larget social system: family, work, and society. And we all have our own innermost feelings that we can often never fully understand. Try to see everyone as an individual by finding the words that best capture who they are.
* Kolmogorov had found that the meaning of life, the one that he had found, involved enriching his own internal thoughts and engaging with the complex internal lives of others. This was what made his life worthy. Words spoken sincerely to each other. And everything helped him in his movement towards clarity.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

The Inugami Curse

2026-07-26T15:57:18Z

Robert.adlington:

The first book in the series was interesting as a locked room mystery, but ultimately disappointing. This one, with masks and mistaken identities is fine enough, but the main trick was easy to see through (even if the ultimate use of it was not). The influence of John Dickson Carr is pretty heavy here.

[[Category:Books]]

Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

2026-07-26T15:55:38Z

Robert.adlington:

== I: Snags and Snarls ==

=== 1. On Self-Referential Sentences ===

*Many systems have the capability to represent or refer to themselves somehow, to designate themselves (or elements of themselves) within the system of their own symbolism. Whenever this happens, it is an instance of self-reference.
*Self-reference is often associated with paradox, but this is not necessarily the case.
*The classic paradox is 'Epimenides the Cretan said "All Cretans are liars."'
*It seems that all paradoxes involve, in one way or another, self-reference, whether it is achieved directly or indirectly.
*The philosophical problem of the connections among Platonic ideas, mental activity, physiological brain activity, and the external symbols that trigger them is vividly raised by these disturbing sentences:
**I am the meaning of this sentence.
**I am the thought you are now thinking.
**I am thinking about myself right now.
**I am the set of neural firings taking place in your brain as you read the set of letters in this sentence and think about me.
**This inert sentence is my body, but my soul is alive, dancing in the sparks of your brain.
*Content is just fancy form. Content is just a shorthand way of saying "form perceived by a very fancy apparatus capable of making complex and subtle distinctions and abstractions and connections to prior concepts.
*When self-reference (or reference in general, for that matter) is indirect, mediated by form, then fluidity is required. The understanding of such sentences involves a mixture of deriving the content and yet retaining the form in mind, letting qualities of the form in mind, letting qualities of the form conjure up flavors and enhance the meaning with a halo of not-quite-conscious pseudo-meanings, connotations, flavors, that flicker in the mind, not quite out of reach.

=== 2. Self-Referential Sentences: A Follow-Up ===

*David Moser's: "This is the Title of this Story, Which is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself":
**This is the first sentence of this story. This is the second sentence.
**This sentence is questioning the intrinsic value of the first two sentences. This sentence is to inform you, in case you haven't already realized it, that this is a self-referential story, that is, a story containing sentences that refer to their own structure and function.
**I mean, there is such a thing as free will, there has to be, and this sentence is proof of it!
**This is the last sentence of the story. This is the last sentence of the story. This is the last sentence of the story. This is.
**Sorry

=== 3. On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures ===

*Walton and Going saw self-replicating sentences as similar to viruses - small objects that enslave larger and more self-sufficient "host" objects, getting the hosts by hook or by crook to carry out a complex sequence of replicating operations that bring new copies into being, which are then free to go off and enslave further hosts, and so on. "Viral sentences, as Walton called them, are "those that seek to obtain their own reproduction by commandeering the facilities of more complex entities."
*Both W and G were struck by the perniciousness of such sentences; the selfish way in which they invade a space of ideas and, merely by making copies of themselves all over the place, manage to take over a large portion of that space. Why do they not manage to overrun all of that idea-space? A good question. The answer: competition from other self-replicators. One types of replicator seizes a region of the space and becomes good at fending off rivals; thus a "niche" in idea-space is carved out.
*Roger Sperry in 1965, "Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values":
**"Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and, thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence of the living cell."
*Jacques Monod in 1970, "Chance and Necessity":
**The performance value of an idea depends upon the change it brings to the behavior of the person or the group that adopts it. The human group upon which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition, and greater self-confidence thereby receives from it an added power to expand which will insure the promotion of the idea itself. Its capacity to "take", the extent to which it can be "put over" has little to do with the amount of objective truth the idea may contain. The important this about the stout armature a religious ideology constitutes for a society is not what goes into its structure, but the fact that this structure is accepted, that it gains sway. So one cannot well separate such an idea's power to spread from its power to perform.
**The spreading power - the infectivity - of ideas, is much more difficult to analyze. let us say that it depends upon preexisting structures in the mind, among them ideas already implanted by culture, but also undoubtedly upon certain innate structure which we are hard put to identify. What is very pain, however, is that the ideas having the highest invading potential are those that explain man by assigning him his place in an immanent destiny, in whose bosom his anxiety dissolves.
*Richard Dawkins in 1976, "The Selfish Gene":
** As a library is an organized collection of books, so a memory is an organized collection of memes. And the soup in which memes grow and flourish is the soup of human culture.
** Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. and this isn't just a way of talking - the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.
**The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The "everlasting arms" hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value.
**There need not be an exact copy of each meme, written in some universal memetic code, in each person's brain. Memes, like genes, are susceptible to variation or distortion - the analog to mutation. Various mutations of a meme will have to compete with each other, as well as other memes, for attention - for brain resources in terms of both space and time devoted to that meme. Not only must they compete for inner resources, but, since they are transmissible visually and aurally, they must compete for radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper and magazine column-inches, and library shelf-space.
**Unconscious memes have ensured their own survival value by virtue of those same qualities of pseudo-ruthlessness which successful genes display. The idea of hell fire is, quite simply, self-perpetuating, because of its own deep psychological impact. It has become linked with the god meme because the two reinforce each other, and assist each other's survival in the meme pool.
**Faith - Means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence... Nothing is more leghal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence... The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
*A manuscript sent to an editor may be considered viral, even though it contains no explicit self-reference, because it is attempting to secure its own reproduction through an appropriate host; the same manuscript sent to someone who has nothing to do with publishing may have no viral quality at all.
*In a democracy, nearly any idea will tend to replicate since the only way to win an election is to convince other people to share your ideas. Most political ideas are not properly self-replicating, since the motive for spreading the idea is separate from the idea itself. But ideas can sometimes take on a life of their own and drive their own propagation.
*Some statements like "The bourgeoisie is oppressing the proletariat." drive a desire to propagate them through a wish to protect a victim figure from a villain figure.
*Most extremist mass movements are based on a belief of victimhood.
*"The self-replicating ideas are conspiring to enslave our minds" - this paranoid statement is the Epimenides Paradox.
*Groups of memes are "meme complexes" for Dawkins, or "schemes" for Hofstadter.
*When a thing - a sentence, book, system, person - seems to refer to itself but does so only by allusion to something resembling itself, it is called indirect self-reference.
*This depends upon the ease with which our perceptual systems convert a mirror image into its reverse, and upon other qualities of translation without being aware of the layers - like looking through many feet of water and seeing not the water but only what lies at its bottom.
*Reagan evoked the memory of Truman to implicitly menace Iran with nuclear attack.
*Can self-reference really be direct or indirect? Or are these two points on a continuum? Is there even "self"-reference? One thing refers to another whenever, to a conscious being, there is a sufficiently compelling mapping between the roles the two things are perceived to play in some larger structures or systems. Conscious being, here, is an analogy-hungry perceiving machine that gets along in the world thanks to its perceptions; it need not be human or even organic. The mapping of systems and roles that establishes reference need not actually be perceived by any such being; it suffices that the mapping exist and simply be perceptible to such a being were it to chance by.
*In the movie of the The French Lieutenant's Woman, as two stories unfold in parallel, a number of coincidences arise that suggest ever more strongly that a mapping should be made. But it is left to the movie viewer to carry this mapping out; it is never called for explicitly. After a time though it simply becomes unavoidable.
*Indirect reference of the artistic type is much less precise than indirect reference of the formal type. The latter arises when two formal systems are isomorphic - they have strictly analogous internal structures, so that there is a rigorous one-to-one mapping between the roles in the one and the roles in the other. The existence of genuine reference becomes as clear to us as in the case of someone talking about their mirror-image: we take it as immediate, pure self-reference, without even noticing the indirectness, the translational steps mediated by the isomorphism. In fact, the connection may seem too direct even to be called "reference", some may see it simply as identity.
*This perceptual immediacy is the reason that Gôdel's famous sentence G of mathematical logic is said to be self-referential.
*Indirect self-reference suggests the idea of indirect self-replication, in which a viral entity, instead of replicating itself exactly, brings into being another entity that plays the same role as it does, but in some other system, perhaps its mirror image, perhaps its translation into French, perhaps a string of the product numbers of all its parts, together with pre-addressed envelopes containing checks made out to the factories where those parts are made, and a list of instructions telling what to do with all the parts when they arrive in the mail.
*The arbitrary and peculiar aspect of the Quine sentence is that its seed is half as complex as the sentence itself. But is there one which is made of smaller, less complex parts? Is there a self-documenting or self-building sentence that builds both its halves - its quoted seed and its unquoted building role - out of words or letters? All structure in the built object must arise exclusively out of some principle enunciated in the building rule, not out of the seed's internal structure.

=== 4. Nomic: A Self-Modifying Game Based on Reflexivity in Law ===

*Reflexivity dilemmas of the Protagoras vs Euathlus (I'll teach you law and you pay me when you win your first case) type and problems of conflicting omnipotence crop up with astonishing regularity in the down-to-earth discipline of law.
*Reflexivity can include:
**The self-reference of signs
**The self-applicability of principles
**The self-justification and self-refutation of propositions and inferences
**The self-creation and self-destruction of legal and logical entities
**The self-limitation and self-augmentation of powers,
**Circular reasoning, circular causation, vicious and benign circles, feedback systems, mutual dependency, reciprocity, and organic form
*A good scheduling system strives to be equitable, but all kinds of conflicts can arise, in which interrupts interrupt interrupts and are then themselves interrupted. The scheduler has to be able to run its own internal decision-making programs with high priority, but not so high that nothing else ever runs. It can get bogged down in "introverted" computation deciding what it should spend its time doing and meanwhile very little real computation is going on.
*In government, supermajorities and the concurrence of many bodies are necessary to protect the foundations of the system from hasty change, but that protective purpose is frustrated if those foundations are reachable by rules requiring merely a simple majority of one legislature. Although all the rules in the American system are mutable, it is convenient to refer to the less mutable constitutional rules as immutable, and to the ones below them in the hierarchy as mutable.
*Normal social life is just such a system of indefinite tiers. Near the top are actual laws, rising through case precedents, regulations, and statutes, all the way up to constitutional rules. At the bottom are rules of personal behavior that individuals can amend unilaterally without incurring disapprobation or censure. Above these are rules for which amendment is increasingly costly, starting with costs like furrowed brows and clucked tongues, and passing through indignant blows and vengeful homicide.
*Nomic:
**After a few rounds the game being played by the players may in a certain sense be different from the one they were playing when they started. In a similar way, human beings undergo constant development and self-modification, and yet continue to be convinced that it makes sense to refer, via such words as "I", to an underlying stable entity. The more immediately perceptible patterns change, whereas deeper and more hidden patterns remain the same. From birth to maturity to death, however, the changes can be so radical that one may sometimes feel that in a single lifetime one is several different people. Similarly, in law, many have acknowledged that an amendment clause, even a clause limited to piecemeal amendment, could, through repeated application, create a fundamentally new constitution.
**The continuing identity of the game, like that of a nation or a person, is due to the fact (if fact it is) that all change is the product of existing rules properly applied, and that no change is revolutionary. Once could even argue that revolutionary change is just more of the same, where rules that were assumed immutable are simply rendered mutable by other rules that are more deeply immutable, but that previously had been taken for granted and hence had been invisible or tacit.
**Stare decisis - precedents should be followed.
**Nomic affords the blurring between constitutive rules (which define lawful play) and rules of skill (which define artful play), ie a blurring between the permissible and the optimal.
**A game can embrace anything at the vote of the players. The line between play and non-play may shift at each turn, or it may apparently be eliminated. Players may be governed by the game when they think they are between games or when they think they have quit.
**For most games, there is an infallible decision procedure to determine the legality of a move. In Nomic, by contrast, situations may easily arise where it is very hard to determine whether or not a move is legal.
**Some rules, all of which can become immutable:
***Immutable (113): A player always has the option to forfeit the game rather than continue to play or incur a game penalty. No penalty worse than losing, in the judgment of the player to incur it, may be imposed.
***Immutable (114): There must always be at least one mutable rule. The adoption of rule changes must never become completely impermissible.
***Mutable (202): One turn consists of proposing a rule and having it voted on and throwing a die and adding the number to your score.
***Mutable (213): If the rules are changed so that further play is impossible, or if the legality of a move is impossible to determine with finality, or if by the Judge's best reasoning, not overruled, a move appears equally legal and illegal, then the first player who is unable to complete a turn is the winner. This rule takes precedence over every other rule determining the winner.
**Some possible rule changes:
***Remove the unanimity requirement for changing mutable rules
***Add new tiers above, below, or between the two initial tiers.
***Add special procedures for changing some rules (incomplete self-entrenchment)
***Devise sunset rules that expire automatically after a certain number of turns
***Allow private consultation on future amendments
***Allow secret ballots
***Allow constitutional conventions or revolutions
*How we make analogies determines how we make choices, and that is the essential nature of all judgment.
*The crux of any legal system is the ability of people to distinguish between the incidental qualities and the essential qualities of various events and relations, resulting in recognition of what a given item is, which category it belongs to. This is "choice".
*Coming to grips with the contrast between explicit rules and implicit principles or guidelines is of great importance if one wants to characterize how flexible category recognition (choice) takes place. In any attempt to make a machine capable of choice, one runs headlong into the problem of inconsistencies, level-collisions, and reflexivity tangles.
*In any modality, perception consists of many layers of processing, from the most primitive or syntactic levels, to the most abstract or semantic levels. The zeroing in on the semantic category to which a given raw stimulus belongs is carried out not by a purely bottom-up (stimulus-driven) or purely top-down (category-driven) scheme, but rather by a mixture of them, in which hypotheses at various levels trigger the creation of new hypotheses or undermine the existence of already-existing hypotheses at other levels. This process of sprouting and pruning hypotheses is a highly parallel one, in which all the levels compete simultaneously for attention, like billboards or radio commercials, or advertisements on the subway.
*Any recognition program must have at its core a tiered structure precisely like that of government or Nomic in which there are levels that are easily mutable, moderately mutable, almost mutable, and so on, and so a "choice" program is inevitably to be riddled with reflexivity.

== II: Sense and Society ==

=== 5. World Views in Collision: The Skeptical Inquirer vs The National Enquirer ===

* At its core, rationality will always depend on inscrutables: the simple, the elegant, the intuitive.
* Human perception and categorization underlie all that we take for granted in terms of common sense, and in more primordial ways that are so deeply embedded that we even find them hard to talk about. Such things as:
** how we break the world into parts,
** how we form mental categories,
** how we refine them certain times while blurring them other times,
** how experiences and categories are clustered associatively,
** how analogies guide our intuitions,
** how imagery works,
** how valid logic is and where it comes from,
** how we tend to favor simple statements over complex ones, and so on.
* This question of the interaction of form and content fascinates me deeply. I believe that if one has the right "terraced scan" mechanisms, one can go very far in separating the wheat from the chaff.
* Where does one draw the line? Where is the borderline between open-mindedness and stupidity? Or between closed-mindedness and stupidity? Where is the optimum balance? That is such a deep question that I could not hope to answer it. Even if we have no adequate theory to formalize such decisions, we nonetheless are all walking instantiations of such decision-making beings, and we make decisions for which we could not formally account in 1m years. Such decisions include all decisions of taste. We do not yet know how we make such decisions, but that does not mean we have to allow in indecisiveness.

=== 6. On Number Numbness ===

* If we can develop a sense for the number of chairs in a room, why not as good a sense for the number of zeroes in a numeral?
** 10 - (1) - Tens
** 100 - (2) - Hundreds
** 1,000 - (3) - Thousands
** 10,000 - (4) - Tens of Thousands
** 100,000 - (5) - Hundreds of Thousands
** 1,000,000 - (6) - Millions
** 10,000,000 - (7) - Tens of Millions
** 100,000,000 - (8) - Hundreds of Millions
** 1,000,000,000 - (9) - Billions
** 10,000,000,000 - (10) - Tens of Billions
** 100,000,000,000 - (11) - Hundreds of Billions
** 1,000,000,000,000 - (12) - Trillions
* Some other kinds of big numbers
** 100m cells in your retina
** 100b neurons in your brain
** 1t glia in your brain
** 70t cells in your body
** 6b trillion hemoglobin molecule in your body (400t being destroyed and the same number being created each second
* When numbers get too big, our perceptual relaity begins to shift. We cannot visualize the actual quantity and our perceptual reality becomes the string of zeroes
* Your estimate should be within ten% of the correct answer at the level of your perceptual reality
**

=== 7. Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness ===

* The ability to ignore what is very unlikely - without even considering whether or not to ignore it - is part of our evolutionary heritage, coming out of the need to be able to size up a situation quickly but accurately.

=== 8. A Person Paper on Purity in Language ===

* What if linguistic sexism were linguistic racism?

== III: Sparking and Slipping ==

* Human thoughts have a way of slipping easily along certain conceptual dimensions into other thoughts, and resisting such slippage along other dimensions. A given idea has slightly different slippabilities - predispositions to slip - in each different human mind that it comes to live in. Yet some minds' slippabilities seem to give rise to what we consider genuine creativity, while others' do not. What is this precious gift? Is there a formula to the creative act? Can spark and slippability be canned and bottles? In fact, isn't that just what a human brain is - an encapsulated creativity machine? Or is there more to creativity and mind than can ever be encapsulated in any finite physical object or mathematical model?

=== 9. Pattern, Poetry, and Power in the Music of Frédéric Chopin ===

* Phenomena perceived to be magical are always the outcome of complex patterns of nonmagical activities taking place at a level below perception. The magic behind magic is pattern. The magic of life itself is a perfect example, emerging as it does out of patterned but liefless activities at the molecular level. The magic of music emerges from complex, nonmagical - metamagical - patterns of notes.

=== 10. Parquet Deformations: A Subtle, Intricate Art Form ===

* What's the difference between music and visual art? Temporality. Pieces of music consist of sounds intended to be played and heard in a specific order and at a specific speed. Music is thus fundamentally 1-D - it is tied to the rhythms of our existence. Works of visual art, by contrast, are generally 2-D or 3-D. Paintings and sculptures seldom have any intrinsic "scanning order" built into them that the eye must follow. Your are free to come and go as you please.
* Regrouping - in which the boundary line of the uit cell shifts so that structures jump out at the eye that before were completely submerged and invisible - while conversely structure that a moment ago were totally obvious have now become invisible, having been split into separate conceptual pieces by the act of regrouping, or shift of perceptual boundaries. it is both a perceptual and conceptual phenomenon, a delight to that subtle mixture of eye and mind that is most sensitive to pattern.
* Is there an architecture to creativity? Is there a plan, a scheme, a set of principles that, if elucidated clearly, could account for all the creativity embodied in the collection of all parquet deformations, past, present, and future?
* The essence of any artistic act resides not in selecting particular values for certain parameters, but far deeper: it's in the balancing of a myriad intangible and most unconscious mental forces, a judgmental act that results in many conceptual choices that eventually add up to a tangible, perceptible, measurable work of art.
* Once the finished work exists, scholars looking at it may seize upon certain qualities of it that lend themselves easily to being parametrized. Anyone can do statistics on a work of art once it is there for the scrutiny, but the ease of doing so can obscure the fact that no one could have said, a priori, what kinds of mathematical observables would turn out to be relevant to the capturing of stylistic aspects of the as-yet-unseen work of art.
* What kind of architecture is responsible for all of these ideas? Or is there any one architecture that could come up with them all? I would say that the ability to design good parquet deformations is probably deceptive, in the same way as the ability to play good chess is; it looks more mathematical than it really is.
* Good chess moves spring from the organization of a good chess mind: a set of perceptions arranged in such a way that certain kinds of ideas leap to mind when certain subtle patterns or cues are present. This way that perceptions have of triggering old and buried memories underlies skill in any type of human activity, not only chess. But in chess the skill is particularly deceptive, because after the fact, it can all be justified by a logical analysis, a fact that seems to hint that the original idea came from logic.
* For computers to act human, we will have to wait until we have good computer models of such human things as perception, memory, mental categories, learning, and so on.
* For a machine to make simple variants of a given design, it must possess an algorithm for making that design which has explicit parameters; those parameters are then modifiable. But the way people make variations is quite different. They look at some creation by an artist and then they abstract from it some quality that they observe in the creation itself. This newly abstracted quality may never have been thought of explicitly by the artist yet it is there for the seeing by an acute observer. This perceptual act gets you more than half the way to genuine creativity; the remainder involves treating this new quality as if it were an explicity knob: "twiddling" it as if it were a parameter that had all along been in the program that made the creation.
* That way, the perceptual process is intimately linked up with the generative process; a loop is closed in which perceptions spark new potentials and experimentation with new potentials opens up the way for new perceptions; The element lacking in current computer are is the interaction of perception with generation. Computers do not watch what they do; they simply do it.
* Each of us is at the very center of our own personal web, and each one of us things "I am the most normal, sensible, comprehensive individual." And our identity - our shape in personality space - springs largely from the way we are embedded in that network - the identities (shapes) of the people we are closest to. We help to define others' identities even as they help to define our own.

=== 11. Stuff and Nonsense ===

* What marks something off as being nonsense?

=== 12. Variations on a Theme as the Crux of Creativity ===

* In the mind of each person who perceives a Rubik's Cube there arises a concept that we could call "Rubik's-Cubicity". It's not the same concept in each mind, just as not everyone has the same concept of asparagus or of Beethoven. The variations that are spun off by a given cube-inventor are variations on that concept. In a discussion of perception and invention, this distinction between an object and some mind's concept of the object is simple but crucial.
* Invention is more like falling off a log than like sawing one in two. A mind follows its path of least resistance, and it's when it feels easiest that it is most likely being its most creative. Mozart: Things should "flow like oil".
* Making variations on a theme is really the crux of creativity.
* If a concept is a machine with knobs on it, we have to stretch the very concept of "knob". New knobs must be able to sprout, depending on the settings of other knobs. On each concept, there are potentially an infinite number of knobs, and at any moment, some new knobs may get revealed as a consequence of the settings of other knobs.
* Nondeliberate yet nonaccidental slippage permeates our mental processes, and is the very crux of fluid thought. This subconscious manufacture of "subjunctive variations on a theme" is something that goes on day and night in each of us, usually without our slightest awareness of it. It is one of those things that, like air or gravity or 3-D, tend to elude our perception because they define the very fabric of our lives.
* It is very hard to slip mentally into a world in which people would not think by slipping mentally into other worlds - very hard to make a counterfactual world in which counterfactuals were not a key ingredient of thought.
* The hidden fault lines of the mind, which things are solid and which things can slip. Nothing is reliably unslippable. Context contributes an unexpected quality to the knobs that are perceived on a given concept. The knobs are not displayed in a nice, neat little control panel, forevermore unchangeable. Instead, changing the context is like taking a tour around the concept, and as you get to see it from various angles, more and more of its knobs are revealed. Some people get to be good at perceiving fresh new knobs on concepts where others thought there were non, just as som people get to be good at perceiving mushrooms in a forest where others see none, even when they stare mightily.
* One of Knuth's main theses is that with computers, we now are in the position of being able to describe not just a thing in itself, but how that thing would vary.
* I call it the implicosphere (implicit counterfactual sphere) referring to things that never were but that we cannot help seeing anyway (or sphere of implications surrounding any given idea.
* One way to imagine how slippability might be realized in the mind is to suppose that each new concept begins life as a compound of previous concepts, and that from the slippability of those concepts, it inherits a certain amount of slippability. that is, since any of its constituents can slip in various ways, this induces modes of slippage in the whole.
* As the space of possibilities of the new concept - the implicosphere - is traced out, the most common and useful of those slippages becomes more closely and directly associated with the new concept itself, rather than having to be derived over and over from its constituents. This way, the new concept's implicosphere becomes more and more explicitly explored, and eventually the new concept becomes old and reaches the point where it too can be used as a constituent of fresh new young concepts.
* The test of whether a concept has really come into its own, of its genuine mental existence, is its retrievability by that process of unconscious recall. That's what lets you know that it has been firmly planted in the soil of your mind. It is not whether that concept appears to be "atomic", in the sense that you have a single word to express it by. That is far too superficial.
* When one story from a friend triggers the retrieval of an old memory, the two subjects can appear to be completely unrelated, but at some deeper conceptual level, these really are the same idea. There is just one idea here, and this idea I call a conceptual skeleton. Try to verbalize it. It's certainly not just one word. It will take you a while. And when you do come up with a phrase, chances are it will be awkward and stilted - and still not quite right.
* The point is that the concept itself has been reified - this much is proven by the fact that it acts as a point of immediate reference; that my memory mechanisms are capable of using it as an "address" (a key for retrieval) under the proper circumstances. '''The vast majority of our concepts are wordless in this way, although we can certainly make stabs at verbalizing them when we need to.'''
* Variations on a them - the notion encompasses knobs, parameters, slippability, counterfactual conditionals, subjunctives, "almost"-situations, implicospheres, conceptual skeletons, mental re-ification, memory retrieval, and more.
* My own mental image of the creative process involves viewing the organization of a mind as consisting of thousands, perhaps millions, of overlapping and intermingling implicospheres, at the center of each of which is a conceptual skeleton. The implicosphere is a flickering, ephemeral thing, a bit like a swarm of gnats around a gas-station light on a hot summer's night, perhaps more like an electron cloud, with its quantum-mechanical elusiveness, about a nucleus, blurring out and dying off the further removed from the core it is. if you have studied quantum chemistry, you know that the fluid nature of chemical bonds can best be understood as a direct consequence of the curious quantum-mechanical overlap of electronic wave functions in space, wave functions belonging to electrons orbiting neighboring nuclei. In a metaphorically similar way, it seems to me, the crazy and unexpected associations that allow creative insights to pop seemingly out of nowhere may well be consequences of a similar chemistry of concepts with its own special types of "bonds" that emerge out of an underlying "neuron mechanics'.
* Making variations is not just twiddling a knob before you; part of the act is to manufacture the knob yourself. Where does a knob come from? The question amounts to asking; How do you see a variable where there is actually a constant? More specifically; What might vary, and how might it vary? It's not enough to just have the desire to see something different from what is there before you. Often the dullest knobs are a result of someone's straining to be original, and coming up with something weak and ineffective. So where do good knobs come from? I would say they come from seeing one thing as something else. Once an abstract connection is set up via some sort of analogy or reminding-incident, then the gate opens wide for ideas to slosh back and forth between the two concepts.
* When two things can both be seen as instances of one abstract phenomenon, it is a very exciting discovery. Then ideas about either one can be borrowed in thinking about the other, and that sloshing-about of activity may greatly illumine both at once.
* Projection of oneself into a situation: "How would that be for me?" People are remarkably fluid at seeing themselves in roles that they self-evidently could never fill, and yet the richness of the insights thus elicited is beyond doubt.
* Experience with a wide variety of things refines your category system and allows you to make incisive, abstract connections based on depp shared qualities.
* Seeing clear to the essence of something unfamiliar is often best achieved by finding one or more known things that you can see it as, then being able to balance these views.
* Once you have decided to try out a new way of viewing a phenomenon, you can let that view suggest a set of knobs to vary. The act of varying them will lead you down new pathways, generating new images ripe for perception in their own right.
* Like a planet orbiting a star, and whose orbit brings it so close to another star that it gets" captured" and begins orbiting the second star. As it swings around the new star, perhaps it find itself coming bery close to yet another star, and fickly changes allegiance.
* You can think of concepts as stars, and knob-twiddling as carrying you from one point on an orbit to another point. If you twiddle enough, you may well find yourself deep within the attractive zone of an unexpected but interesting concept and be captured by it. You may thus migrate from concept to concept. Knob-twiddling carries your from one concept to another, taking advantage of their overlapping orbits.
* Can "concept" become a legitimate scientific term? This goal could be taken to be the central goal of cognitive science.
* Of course not all implicospheres have the same radius. Some people's tend to have bigger radii than others, and consequently they overlap more. This can be good but it can be overdone:
** Too much overlap and all you have is a mush of vaguely associated ideas, a tasteless mental goulash
** Too little and you have a very thin, watery mind, one with few big surprises
** There is, in other words, an optimum amount of overlap for useful creative insight.
*When a new idea is implanted in a mind, an implicosphere grows around it. Since this means, in essence, the linking up of this new idea with older ideas, I call it diffusion in idea-space.

=== 13. Metafont, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics ===

* The mathematicalization of categories - the idea that any abstraction or Platonic concept can be captured as a software machine with a finite number of knobs, like a meta-font, a meta-waltz, a meta-shoe.
* But to fill out the full "space" defined by a category such as "chair", or "waltz" or "face" is an act of infinite creativity, and no finite entity will ever be capable of producing all possible "A"s and nothing but "A"s.
* This amounts to positing that any conceptual or semantic category is a productive set, namely a set whose elements cannot be totally enumerated by any effective procedure without overstepping the bound of that set.
* A system that contains at least one unprovable truth is said to be incomplete, and a system that not only contains such truths but that cannot be rescued in any way from the fate of incompleteness is said to be essentially incomplete (or productive). The requirement that one must stay within the bounds of a conceptual category could be called consistency.
* The frame problem is about the question: What variables (knobs) is it within the bounds of normalcy to perceive?
* Trying to capture the essence of each separate concept in a separate "knobbed machine", to isolate the various Platonic spirits will not work. Those spirits overlap and mingle in a subtle way.
* No letter is an island. There has to be much mutual knowledge spread about among all the letters. Letters mutually define each others' essences, and this is why an isolated structure supposedly representing a single letter in all its glory is doomed to failure.

== IV: Structure and Strangeness ==

=== 14. Magic Cubology ===

* This Magic Cube is much more than just a puzzle. It is an ingenious mechanical invention, a pastime, a learning tool, a source of metaphors, and inspiration. It now seems an inevitable object, but it took a long time to be discovered. Somehow, though, the time was ripe, because the idea germinated and developed nearly in parallel in Hungary and Japan and perhaps even elsewhere.
* It is necessary to find a general algorithm for doing it from any scrambled state. No one can restore a messed up Magic Cube to its pristine state by mere trial and error. Anyone who gets back to START has built up a small science.

=== 15. On Crossing the Rubicon ===

* The cube has some kind of primordial appeal:
** It is small and colorful, fits snugly in the hand and has a pleasing feel. Twisting is a fundamental and intriguing motion that the hand performs naturally. There are not many puzzles or toys that give the mind and fingers a genuine 3-D workout.
** That it manages to stay in one piece when it has so many independent ways of twisting is initially amazing, and remains mysterious even after you've seen its "guts".
** It's a miniature incarnation of that subtle blend of order and chaos that our world is.
** There are plenty of patterns, some attainable, some unattainable. Sometimes they are simple to generate, but one can't see how they emerge. Sometimes they are hard to generate, yet one clearly understands how they arise.
** They are many routes to any state, and the shortest is nearly always completely unknowable.
** The Cube is a rich source of metaphors. It furnishes analogies to particle physics, to biology, to problem-solving in everyday life, to entropy and path-finding, and even touches theology.
** There is a strong contrast between the algebraic or mathematical approach (long sequences of operations compounded out of shorter sequences, which become increasingly abstract) and the geometric approach (using eye and mind to compose twist after twist along a carefully charted pathway.
** Aside from cubies and modes of twisting, there is flippedness and twistedness.
* Getting into a scrambled state and getting out of it are operations of different computational complexity. It is easier to find routes out than routes in, even though there are the same number of each. Clearly there is something deeply asymmetric about such a situation, and the whole thing smells of the second law of thermodynamics, stating that entropy will tend to increase with time in a closed system.

=== 16. Mathematical Chaos and Strange Attractors ===

* The motion of a point in phase space must always be non-self-intersecting. This arises from the fact that a point in phase space representing the state of a system encodes all the information about the system, including its future history, so that there cannot be two different pathways leading out of one and the same point.
* All systems that exhibit turbulent behavior are dissipative: they dissipate or degrade energy from more usable forms such as electricity into the less usable form of heat
* Metrical universality (as opposed to structural universality) shows the parabolic case with the onset of chaos happening through periodic-doubling attractors.
* When you are searching for a memory that eludes you but that you kno is there, what you in effect do is release ten "dogs" in your brain and let them go "sniffing" in parallel. Each dog will start to rummage around here and there, sometimes going in circles, sometimes smelling down wrong alleys, but since there are a bunch of them you can afford to let them smell out many false pathways. They don't need to be very bright; they just need to have had a whiff of the original idea, and they will follow that spoor high and low. Eventually it is likely that one dog or another will trot home carrying the desired memory in its mouth.
* Locking-in - a system that seeks and gradually settles into its own most stable states, and the mechanism whereby it seeks and attains such loci of stability is feedback. A system that locks into a state is in a stable equilibrium, which means that if you perturb it somehow, it will swiftly return to the state is was in - there are restoring forces that push it back.
* As long as we're willing to "up" the dimensionality of the space, we can store more and more information in a single point. Thus fixed points and stable orbits are very close concepts.
* Generally speaking, the stablest behavior of a system seems also to be its simplest behavior.
* Starting somewhere random and relying on feedback to get you somewhere better is the most likely way to discover a fixed point.
* The tangledness of one's own self is a perfect metaphor for understanding what renormalization is all about. Begin by imagining yourself as a 0th order person - someone totally unaware and inconsiderate of all others, a baby. Then imagine how you would be modified if you started to take other people into account, always considering others as perfect babies, or 0th order people. This gives a first-order version of you. You are beginning to have an identity emerging from this modeling of others inside yourself. Now iterate: second order people are those who take into account the identities of first-order people. An on it goes. The final result is renormalized people: people who take into account the identities of renormalized people. I know it sounds circular, and indeed it is, but paradoxical it is not.
* Memory retrieval - How do things that are only vaguely similar to each other stir up rumblings of recollection, and eventually trigger the retrieval of amazingly deep abstract resemblances? If the initial input is a seed - a vector in a very high-dimensional space, then the seed is fed into memory-retrieval mechanisms, which convert it into an output vector that is then ged back in again. This cyclic process continues until it either converges on a stable fixed point - the desired memory trace - or is seen to be wandering erratically without any likelihood f locking in, tracing out a chaotic sequence of "points" in mind-space
* Perception - the bottom-up processing is complemented by concurrent top-down processing driven not by the input, but by expectations of what is "out there" to be recognized. The swirling activity in which bottom-up and top-down processes seek a reconciliation with each other leads to a gradual kind of "crystallization" in which many small pieces of evidence align with, and mutually reinforce, each other. The ultimate justification for some of them resides, of course, in the raw perceptual input, while for others of them it resides in the richness of previous experiences stored in memory. The combination of all these mutually confirming hypotheses results in a globally optimal interpretation of the input: an act of recognition. Once again, locking-in carries the day.
* Locking in seems to be a key to the metamagics of snarls, of society, of slipping, of strangeness, of substrate, of stability, of survival.

=== 17. Lisp: Atoms and Lists ===

* Psychologically, one of the great powers of programming is the ability to define new compound operations in terms of old ones, and to do this over and over again, thus building up a vast repertoire of ever more complex operations:
** It is quite reminiscent of evolution, in which ever more complex molecules evolve out of less complex ones, in an ever-upward spiral of complexity and creativity.
** It is also quite reminiscent of the industrial revolution, in which people used very simple early early machines to help them build more complex machines, then used those in turn to build even more complex machines, and so on, once again in an ever-upward spiral of complexity and creativity.
** At each stage, whether in evolution or revolution, the products get more flexible and more intricate, more "intelligent" and yet more vulnerable to delicate bugs or breakdowns.

=== 18. Lisp: Lists and Recursion ===

* Speaking recursively, an n factorial is simply the product of n and the previous factorial. It reduces the given problem to a simple sort of the same type. That simpler one will in turn be reduced, and so on down the line, until you come to the simplest problem of that type, which I call the embryonic case or the bottom line. People often speak, in fact, of a recursion bottoming out.
* Shapes with substructures that goes on indefinitely, never bottoming out in ordinary curves, are called fractals.

=== 19. Lisp: Recursion and Generality ===

* Since the whole thing is recursive, every needle (in the Tower of Brahma puzzle) will be switching hats many times over during the course of the transfer. That's the beauty of this puzzle and in a way it's the beauty of recursion.
* In Lisp, one has the ability to "elevate" an inert, information-containing data structure to the level of "animate agent", where it becomes a manipulator of inert structures itself. This program-data cycle, or loop; can continue on and on, with structures reaching out twisting back, and indirectly modifying themselves or related structures.
** Certain types of inert, or passive, information-containing data structures are sometimes referred to as declarative knowledge (aka "knowledge that") - because they often have a form abstractly resembling that of a declarative sentence, and encode facts about the world in some way, accessible by looking in an index in somewhat the way "book-learned" facts are accessible to a person
** By contrast, animate, or active, pieces of code are referred to as procedural knowledge, since they define sequences of actions that actually manipulate data structures, and can be viewed as embodying the program's set of skills, something like a human's unconscious skills that were once learned through long, rote, drill sessions (aka "knowledge how").
* This distinction should remind biologists of that between genes - relatively inert structures inside the cell - and enzymes, which are anything but inert. Enzymes are the animate agents of the cell; they transform and manipulate all the inert structures in indescribably sophisticated ways. Genes dictate the form of enzymes, and enzymes manipulate genes (among other things). Thus Lisp's procedural-declarative program-data loop provides a primitive but very useful and tangible example of one of the most fundamental patterns at the base of life: the ability of passive structures to control their own destiny, but creating and regulating active structures whose form they dictate.
* If you know enough English, you can bootstrap your way further into English; there is a point beyond which explanations written in English about English are indeed quite useful, and that point is not too terribly far beyond the beginning level. You need a kernel, and then you can begin to life yourself by your own bootstraps. For children, it is an exciting thing when, in reading, they begin to learn new phrases all by themselves, simply by running into them several times in succession. Their vocabulary begins to grow by leaps and bounds. So it is once there is a Lisp kernel in a system; the rest of the Lisp interpreter can be - and usually is - written in Lisp.
* When one interpreter runs on top of another one, there is always the question of what level one chooses not to look below. I personally seldom think about what underlies the Lisp interpreter, so that when I am dealing with the Lisp system, I feel as if I am talking to someone whose native language is Lisp. Similarly, when dealing with people, I seldom think about what their brains are composed of; I don't reduce them in my mind to piles of patterned neuron firings. It is natural to my perceptual system to recognize them at a certain level and not to look below that level.
* For some reason, many people in AI seem to have a deep sense that recursivity in some form or other is connected with the trick of intelligence.
* Gödel's construction revealed in a crystal clear way that the line between direct and indirect self-reference/reference is completely blurry, because it pinpoints the essential role played by isomorphism (or coding) in the establishment of reference and meaning.
* Semantics is an emergent quality of complex syntax.
* Certain orally produced screeches or manually produced scratches (such as word, say, language, sentence, reference, grammar, meaning, etc) can stand for elements of language itself - pieces of language talking about language. How amazingly magical it must have felt to our ancestral cave people when such powerful concepts as words about words first sparked. In some sense, human consciousness began then and there.
* Gödel got a system to talk - in code - about itself. He had snuck self-reference into systems that were presumed to be incapable of self-reference.
* The central data structure of Lisp, the list, was at the core of Gödel's work, and the crucial need to distinguish between atoms and lists was resolved by him with his odd-even distinction. Also critical were the idea of quoting and recursive functions.
* Gödel's remarkable series of 46 function definitions is, IMO, the world's first serious computer program - and it is in Lisp
* A programmer's instinct says that you can cumulatively build a system, encapsulating all the complexity of one layer into a few functions, then building the next layer up by exploiting the efficient and compact functions defined in the preceding layer. This hierarchical mode of buildup would seem to allow you to make arbitrarily complex actions be represented at the top level by very simple function calls. In other words, the functions at the top of the pyramid are like cognitive events, and as you move down the hierarchy of lower-level functions, you get increasingly many ever-dumber sub-routines, until you bottom out in a myriad calls on trivial subcognitive ones.
* But this is a crazy vision - the top-level behavior of the overall system must emerge statistically from a myriad independent pieces, whose actions are almost as likely to cancel each other out as to be in phase with each other.

=== 20. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics ===

* The main thing to keep in mind is that science is about classes of events, not particular instances. Science explains through abstractions that underlie a potentially unlimited number of concrete phenomena.
* Many people think the quantum-mechanical uncertainty principle actually applies to everyday phenomena. Nothing could be further from the truth!
* In some ways, light waves are simpler than water waves:
** While water waves of different wavelengths travel at different speeds, all light waves travel at one speed, c.
** The medium that light waves travel through is nondispersive: all wavelengths travel at exactly the same speed. Vacuum is light's medium - how peculiar for waves to wave even when there's nothing to wave!
* De Broglie proposed the equation p = h/λ:
** Where p = momentum, h = Planck's constant, and λ = wavelength
** It is proposed as universal, applying to all matter, so that anything has a quantum-mechanical wavelength whose value would depend on how fast it is moving.
** Wavelength is inversely proportional to momentum.
** Arbitrarily accurate measurement of either position or momentum is possible; you just can't get both.
* The uncertainty principle is more than an epistemological restriction on human observers; it is a reflection of uncertainties in nature itself. Quantum-mechanical reality does not correspond to macroscopic reality. It's not just that we cannot know a particle's position and momentum simultaneously; it doesn't even have definite position and momentum simultaneously!
* As long as no measurement is made of a system, a physicist cannot know which eigenstate the system is in. In a very fundamental sense, the system itself does not know this and only decides - at random - at the moment the observer observes. And up to this moment it is not in any eigenstate.
* There is a clear connection between the imaginary worlds of our minds and the alternate worlds evolving in parallel with the one we experience.
* When a novelist simultaneously entertains a number of possible ways of extending a story, are the characters not, to speak metaphorically, in a mental superposition of states? If the novel never gets set to paper, perhaps the split characters can continues to. evolve their multiple stories in their author's brain. Furthermore, it would even seem strange to ask which story is the genuine version. All the worlds are equally genuine.

== V: Spirit and Substrate ==

* How and when could mind and emotions - surely the essence of the animate - emerge from complex inanimate substrates.
* Where is the borderline between the highest inanimate flexibility and the lowest animate sentience. When does a system or organism have the right to call itself "I", and to be called "you" by us?

=== 21. Review of Alan Turing: The Enigma ===

* This image of a machine that jumped from one state to another according to a finite set of rules became uppermost in Turing's mind. What fascinated him was the idea that such meaningless actions could also be viewed as having meanings. For instance, one rule-obeying machine might be viewed as making moves of chess, another as producing truths of mathematics, and yet another as writing poetry.
* What Gödel had left unsettled was the question of whether, given an axiomatic system and an arbitrary proposition in it, one could determine mechanically whether that proposition was undecidable in that system.
* To Turing's surprise, he discovered that for very Gödelian reasons, no machine could be built that could infallibly recognize undecidable propositions.
* First he supposed that a machine for recognizing undecidable propositions exists; then he showed how that assumption leads to self-contradiction - a universal Turing machine being fed its own description number would instantly send it into a dizzying loop of computational vertigo.
* Undecidable propositions run through mathematics like ineradicable threads of gristle that crisscross a steak in such a dense way that they cannot be cut out without the entire steak's being destroyed.
* Mathematics was revealed to be incompletely mechanizable, no matter how complex the machine involved.
* People, no matter how aware they are of their minds, cannot fully take their own complexity into account in attempting to understand themselves, and, quite like Turing machines baffled by their own descriptions, may be plunged into a vertigo of the psyche when they attempt to calculate their own hypothetical or future acts.
* Lady Lovelace's objection - computers cannot originate anything, but can do only what we explicitly tell them to do. Turing's answer to this - that one does not know what one has programmed a machine to do, except in the most superficial and general way - has a depth that eludes many good minds.

=== 22. A Coffeehouse Conversation on The Turing Test ===

* Starquakes and earthquakes can both be subsumed into a new, more abstract category. And that's how science constantly extends familiar concepts, taking them further and further from familiar experience and yet keeping some essence constant. The number system is the classic example - from positive numbers to negative nmbers, then rationals, reals, complex numbers, "and on beyond zebra".
* Though, even more than hurricanes, ia an abstract structure, a way of describing some complex events that happen in a medium called a brain. But actually, thought can taked place in any one of several billion brains. There are all these physically very different brains, and yet they all support "the same thing": thinking. What's important, then, is the abstract pattern, not the medium. The same kind of swirling can happen inside any of them, so no person can claim to think more "genuinely" than any other. Now, if we come up with some new kind of medium in which the same style of swirling takes place, could you deny that thinking is taking place in it?
* People give other people credit for being conscious simply because of their continual external monitoring of other people - which is itself something like a Turing Test.
* I think emotions are an automatic by-product of the ability to think. They are entailed by the very nature of thought.
* In my view, consciousness requires a certain way of mirroring the external universe internally, and the ability to respond to that external reality on the basis of the internally represented model. What's really crucial is that it should incorporate a well-developed and flexible self-model.
* Any intelligence has to have motivations. Machines, when they look at a scene, will have to focus and filter that scene down into some preconceived categories, just as a person does. And that means seeing some things and missing others. It means giving more weight to some things than to others. This happens on every level of processing.
* People talk to each other out of conviction - not out of hollow, mechanical reflexes. Even the most intellectual conversation is driven by underlying passions. There's an emotional undercurrent to every conversation - it's the fact that the speakers want to be listened to, understood, and respected for what they are saying.
* When things get complicated enough, you're forced to change your level of description, to adopt the intentional stance. Really interesting things will happen in IA when the program itself adopts the intentional stance toward itself.
* The smarter computers get, the more they'll be in a position to tackle messy real-life domains, so they'll be more and more likely to have inaccurate models. To me, mistake-making is a sign of high intelligence.
* Parry (a paranoid) maintains strict control so that no one can truly probe him. For reasons like this, simulating a paranoid is a whole lot easier than simulating a normal person.
* Each time I could postulate some not too sophisticated mechanical underpinning that would allow that particular thing to happen. I kept on trying to come up with rationalizations for the fact that this program was doing so well. My conclusion was that it was a very vast and quite sophisticated bag of tricks, no one of which was terribly complex.
* The class was willing to view anything on a video terminal as mechnically produced, no matter how sophisticated, insightful, or poetic an utterance it might be.

=== 23. On the Seeming Paradox of Mechanizing Creativity ===

* Creativity is part of the very fabric of all human thought, rather than some esoteric, rare, exceptional, and fluky by-product of the ability to think, which every so often surfaces in places spread far and wide.
* To me, noncreative intelligence is a flat-out contradiction in terms.
* Creativity is an automatic consequence of having the proper representation of concepts in a mind.
* If you have succeeded in making an accurate model of concepts, you have thereby also succeeded in making a model of the creative process, and even of consciousness.
** It is the organization of memory that defines what concepts are.
** What established the "concepthood" of something is the way it is integrated into memory.
** Nothing is a concept except by virtue of the way it is connected up with other things that are also concepts.
** The property of being a concept is a property of connectivity, a qulity that comes from being embedded in a certain kind of complicated network. Concepts sound like structural or even topological properties of vast tangly networks of sticky mental spaghetti.
* What is the relationship between a general, or Platonic, concept, such as that of tree and the concept you form of some specific tree, between semantic or perceptual categories and the representations of individual instances of them?
* Only through a deep understanding of the organization of memory - which is to say, only by answering the question "What is a concept?" - will we be able to models of the creative process.
* A distinction between
** spexishness - supremely unconscious behavior (after the wasp)
** antispexishness - where consciousness is the possession of this to the highest degree.
* To have more antispexishness is to have a greater sensitivity to patterns, an ability to spot patterns of unanticipated types in unanticipated places at unanticipated times in unanticipated media. All human beings have this readiness to see sameness, this alertness, and that is what makes them so antispexish. Whenever they get into some kind of loop, they quickly sense it. Something happens inside their heads - a kind of loop detector (or rut detector or sameness detector) fires.
* The possession of the ability to break out of loops of all sorts seems the antithesis of the mechanical. Or, the essence of the mechanical seems to be in its lack of novelty and its repetitiveness, in its trappedness in some kind of precisely delimited space. This is why the wasp, the dog, even some humans seem so mechanical.
* Clearly there is something lacking in the machine that allows it to have this unbounded tolerance for repetitive actions, an ability to watch oneself as one deals with the world, to perceive in one's own activities a pattern, and to be able to do so at many levels of abstraction.
* Watching one's own internal microscopic patterns is bound to be boring. What is critical is to be able to watch activities on a completely different level - the collective level, in which huge patterns of activity of these many components assume regular behaviors perceptible on their own. A hurricane is a huge pattern of activity of tiny atomes, but one that has such regularity and pattern that we can predict hurricanes without ever thinking of their constituent atoms. A thought is a huge pattern of activity of tiny calles of which much the same can be said.
* Antispexishness has to do with self-perception at this kind of level. Rather than watching its neurons or transistors or registers, an antispexish being watches its own high-level patterns, looking for similarities somewhat the way meteorologists might look for one hurricane following another in a regular way.
* It is in the nature of human pattern perception to be able to detect infinite regresses and to stop them short before they ever get anywhere. But what about the hypothetical self-watching computer, with its infinitely many layers of watchers?
* Once the pattern is perceived by a watcher, that watcher can form the general concept of "all the levels seen at once", associated with the concept of "all the natural numbers conceived of at once", or omega (ω), which we can take as the name of a new watching level that looks out for patterns in this potentially infinite tower of watchers.
* The "halting problem" - Can there exist a program that can inspect other programs before they run and reliably predict if they will go into infinite loops. No.
* Dynamic diagonalization - a slef-watching program - that seems to be closely connected with what makes a human being so utterly different from a stuck record or a Sphex wasp.
* We are not really so concerned with the mathematical perfection of our self-watching system as with its likelihood of survival in a complex world; after all, that's what intelligence is about. If there is a mathematical theorem telling us that no program whatsoever will be a perfect self-watcher, able to catch itself in any conceivable kind of infinite regress, that is simply a statement that perfect intelligence is unreachable.
* BOOLE "Breaking Out of Loops Everywhere" - the idea that humans are self-watchers of infinite depth.
* Each of us, even the Mozarts among us - exhibits a "cognitive style" that in essence defines the ruts we are permanently caught in. Far from being a tragic flaw, this is what makes us interesting to each other. We celebrate individual styles, rather than seeing them negatively, as proofs of inner limits. What in fact is curious is that those people who are able to put on or take off styles in the manner of a chameleon seem to have no style of their own and are simply saloon performers, amusing imitators. We accord greatness to those people whose "limitations", if that is how you want to look at it, are the most apparent, the most blatant.
* The point is that Mozart and Ravel, and you and I, are all highly antispexish, but not perfectly so, and it is at that fuzzy boundary where we can no longer quite maintain the self-watching to a high degree of reliability that our own individual styles, characters, begin to emerge to the world.
* The degree of nonmechanicalness that one perceives in a being is directly related to its ability to self-watch in ever more exquisite ways.
* Critical to the way our memory is organized is our automatic mode of storing and retrieving items, our knowledge of when we know and do not know, of how we know or why we wouldn't know. Such articles of metaknowledge are fluidly integrated into the way our concepts are meshed together. They are not some sort of "extra layer" added on top by a second-generation programmer who decided that metaknoledge is a good thing, over and above knowledge! No, metaknowledge and knowledge are simmering together in a single stew, totally fused and flavoring each other richly. This makes self-watching an automatic consequence of how memory is structured.
* How can we create a program that, like a human brain, is all of a piece, a program that is not simply a stack of ever-higher other-watchers, but is truly a seamless self-watcher, where all levels are collapsed into one.
* The seemingly distinct levels of watcher and watched are totally fused, in the Gödel construction, exactly as Lucas would have it occurring in the minds of all conscious beings. But the ability to fold around and see oneself in the wonderfully circular Gödelian way does not, cannot, bring with it total antispexishness. That is a chimera.
* John Myhill "Three Classes of Ideas":
** Effective - There is a way, given a candidate for membership, of deciding without any doubt whether that object is or is not a member.
** Constructive - Some means exists whereby members of the category can be churned out one by one, so that you will eventually see any particular member if you wait long enough, but no means exists for doing the complementary operation - churning our nonmembers one by one
** Prospective or Productive - It eludes production by any finite set of rules. However, it can be approximated to a higher and higher degreee of accuracy by a series of bigger and better sets of generative rules. Tarski and Gödel establish that truth has this open-ended prospective character. You can produce all sorts of examples of truths - unlimitedly many - but no set of rules is ever sufficient to characterize them all
*Beauty admits of a succession of ever-better approximations, but is never fully attainable. If we see the aim of art as the production of all possible objects of beauty:
**Each artist contributes objects in a particular style, in which she is trapped.
**Artists in groups form movements or schools or periods, and their boundaries are wider and the school is less sphexish - more conscious - than any of its members, but it has its limits and starts to stagnate, and a new school begins to form
**At the level of society, art progresses towards an every wider vision of beauty - a prospective vision of beauty - by a series of diagonalizations - processes of recognizing and breaking out of ruts. This is the process of joosting (jumping out of the system) to ever wider worlds. This endless jootsing is a process whose totality cannot be formalized.
*I believe that reasoning is far from the core of thought and so expert systems with complex systems of rules and metarules will not work for AI. Instead of the topless tower of bureaucracies and meta-bureaucracies above, we must make rule-like behavior emerge out of a mult-level bubbling broth of activity below. Give up the idea of trying to explicitly tell the system as a whole how to run itself and instead define explicity micro-behaviors that will interact in vast numbers, and let them go, carefully watching what ensues. And then tweak and iterate.
*The difference between such statistically emergent macrobehavior and rigidly constrained macrobehavior - you can program the latter, but with the former, all you can do is tailor its micro-elements and then release them and see what happens.
*An intelligence is a system meant to be able to deal with the unpredictable. But how can any set of rules frozen into a machine's design do that?

=== 24. Analogies and Roles in Human and Machine Thinking ===

* Within the internal representations of concepts there are substructures that have a kind of independence of the structures of which they are part. such a substructure is modular - exportable from its native context to alien contexts. It is an autonomous structure in its own right, and we call these modules roles. A role is a natural "module of description" of something, a sort of bite-sized chunk that seems to be comfortable moving out of its first home and finding homes in other places, some of them unlikely at first glance.
* Something terrible happens to a concept (like Britain's equivalent of America's "First Lady") as it gets more flexible. The definition not only should be general, but also should incorporate some indication of what the spirit of the idea is. Computers have a hard time getting the spirit of things.
* If a role is left implicit, nonverbalized, it has more fluidity in the way it transfers than if it is "frozen" in an English phrase.
* Most analogies arise as a result of unconscious filterings and arrangings of perceptions, rather than as consciously sought solutions to cooked up puzzles. To be reminded of something is to have unconsciously formulated an analogy.
* Meta-analogy - an analogy between analogies.
* There are competing urges: first to stay with the exact original concept, and second to flex and bend when it "feels right", when it would seem rigid and stodgy to insist on established conventions over simple and "natural" extensions. But it is just these sorts of terms - flex, bend, feels right, rigid, natural, and so on - that are so extraordinarily hard to put into programs, logical though programming might be.
* Any mapping is doomed to be imperfect, so how can we do it best (that is with the least pain or frustration)?
* Sometimes you need a willingness to let go of qualities that had seemed important, a willingness to bend gracefully under pressure. Fluid analogies are not a game for rigid minds.
* There is often no Gloriously Right Answer, but there are certainly ideas that seem good and ideas that seem shaky.
* In a play, the various roles all mingle together in scenes. A scene is a larger-scale structure than an individual role; it is a place where several roles coexist and interact. In our analogy problems, one might try to conceive of the two structures involved as if they were two enactments of a single scene, portrayed by different directors working with different actors.
* The less salient an object is inside a larger structure, the harder it is to characterize in an exportable way? But what makes something salient? As a rule, it is its proximity, in some sense, to a "distinguished" element of the larger structure.
* A distinguished item is something we can get at via an elegant, crisp exportable-sounding description. A nearly distinguished item is something we can get at by first pointing to a distinguished item, and then, in an exportable way, describing a short "jog" that leads to it. When giving directions, some places are more salient and some less so. Some roles in a complex conceptual structure are highly distinguished and easily exportable, others are very hard to describe. Although they may have certain idiosyncratic qualities in their local context, nothing makes them stand out globally.
* Don't press an analogy too far, because it will always break down.
* Analogy and reminding, whether they are accurate or not, guide all our thought patterns. Being attuned to vague resemblances is the hallmark of intelligence, for better or for worse.
* The fact we use words and ready-made phrases shows that we funnel the world down into a fairly constant set of categories. Often we end up with one word, such as "kitchen"
* Our language provides for mappings of many degrees of accuracy.
* It is in the nature of categories that their validity can at best be partial. No matter at what level of detail you cut off your scrutiny, your perception amounts to filtering out some aspects and funneling the remainder into a single conceptual target, a mental symbol often labeled with just one word (such as "word") or stock phrase (such as "stock phrase"). Each such mental symbol implicitly stands for the elusive sameness shared by all the things it denotes.
* When a friend recounts a romantic woe, we can usually map it onto some experience of our own. Romances are incredibly detailed and idiosyncratic. The point is that we throw many details away; we skim off some abstractions and are careful not to try to carry the resemblance too far. And certainly we ignore the trivial aspects.
* Precisely in the nonverbalizability of an analogy lies its fluidity, its flexibility.
* A frozen verbal phrase is like a snapshot that gives a perfect likeness at one moment but fails to show how things can slip and move. There is something much more fluid in the way a mind represents the role internally. Various features are potentially important in defining the role, but no until and example comes up and makes one feature explicity does that feature's relevance emerge.
* Words like "this" and "that" and phrases like "that sort of thing" are even better at picking up intangible, flexible, implicit meanings that can be transported across the borders of situations differing widely from each other. And that's the name of the game in thought.
* Boundary separation - Where do you draw the lines separating one substructure from another one? And what are good ways of restructuring or regrouping if a first try fails?
* One can be more flexible or less in how one interprets "Do this!" What does one take literally, what does one see as playing a role in a foreordained and familiar structure? What kinds of familiar structures is one willing to see as identical to each other? When is it necessary to start inventing new ways of perceiving a given situation in order to fit it into pre-existent frameworks, which then allow already-familiar roles to emerge? What remains firm, and what slips? What sticks, and what gives? These kinds of questions sound rather abstract, but when real analogies are manufactured, they are the chief concerns of the analogy maker.
* Central problems of analogy making:
** How literally to take references
** What structures are worth perceiving
** Which aspects are most relevant
** How literally to take roles
** Choosing the most elegant way of viewing a situation against another.
* Symmetry, uniformity, good substructures, boundary strength, and so on - these are the kinds of forces that push and pull you to and from analogical choices.
* Some answers are "sick", others are "healthy" in terms of the survival value that an analogy-making capacity confers on its possessors. After all, our brains got to be the way they are only by helping our forbears to survive better than their rivals in this unforgiving world. And analogy-making is at or near the pinnacle of our mental abilities:
** Law sanctifies analogy as the ultimate justification for making a reasonable and even a wise decision. "Precedent" is just a legalistic way of saying "well-founded analogue".
** Questions about what to buy, what to think of someone, whom to marry, whether to move to a new city, how to talk, etc - all are influenced in a myriad ways by prior experiences of the same general sort. And even in cases with no obvious analogy, all the categorization of the situation is being made by a mind exposed to many thousands of words, and the purpose of words is to label situation types and thus implicitly to make use of stored analogical mappings.
** The boundary line between making creative analogies and recognizing pre-existent categories is very blurry. Most common words hide an enormous degree of analogical abstraction.
** Samenesses that we have absorbed into our perception as being obvious were once great insights.
** Far from being a matter of taste, variations in analogy-making skill can spell the difference between life and death!
** People who make "sick" analogies to the letter puzzles will have a rough time in life because they lack the means to size up a situation and catch its essence in the mind's mesh, letting the trivial pass through. Something about their analogy-making mechanisms is defective.
** There are better and words answers to analogies. Elegance is more that just a frill in life; it is one of the driving criteria behind survival. Elegance is about getting at the essence of situations.
** What should be taken literally and what slipperily?
** Elegance is a drive toward abstract symmetry.
* In an analogy where real insight is needed, often some initial forays are made that reveal some literal-minded ways of seeing the situation, but they ring false or overly crude, and so one does not stop there. Instead one continues searching, guided by a number of small cues, and at some unpredictable moment, something simply snaps, and a host of things fall into place in a new conceptual schematization of what is going on. What was once important becomes suddenly trivial, and a new essence emerges, an organizing concept or set of concepts that seem far superior.
* But beware! Being literal-minded is not to be avoided at all costs. If jumping to rarified levels of abstraction were always preferable, then we would wind up never making any distinctions between situations. Rigidity comes in many forms, and a rigid drive toward abstraction is no less stupid than a rigid refusal to abstract. The clearest and cleanest statement of the problem that analogy poses is that there are always fights between forces pushing for literality and forces pushing for abstraction.
* Seeking the balance point is far more than just esthetic play; it probes the very core of how people perceive abstractions, and it does so without their even knowing it.
* Even in scientific discovery, conflicting pressures push around one's percepts and concepts, letting things bounce against each other until, all at once, something galls into place and then, presto! A sense of certainty crystallizes, so powerful that you know you have found the right way to look at things. Mini-breakthroughs and maxi-breakthroughs have precisely the same texture.
* What characterized Einstein's unique view of space and time was that he had decided that certain things were more unslippable than others; in particular that the speed of light was unslippable but the notion of absolute simultaneity of events separated in space was slippable. Or rather, he didn't decide that simultaneity was slippable, but was forced into that conclusion, since his stronger intuitive belief in the invariance of c compelled him to accept its consquences, strange and counterintuitive though they might be. He did not begin with the idea of simultaneity being nonabsolute, but when he had to confront that possibility, he let it slip. This fluidity of mind, guided by a certainty about the deepest, most unslippable concepts, gave rise to the creative insights of special relativity.
* A reliable nose for what might slip and what ought not marks the difference between a great mind and a small one.
* In a certain way, translation is the quintessential form of analogy.
* Translating a novel's title may sometimes be the most challenging aspect of translating the whole novel.
* Is this one phenomenon manifesting itself in two different ways, or is it simply a pretty coincidence? Such questions can occasionally not be answered, but very often our minds come to conclusions on such matters without our ever noticing it. Reification of new categories in words is a telltale signal, and one of the most important of mental events.
* The task of compressing a piece of text one has written into fewer and fewer words forces one to struggle to define the essence of what one is trying to get across. Up to a point, a piece of text may actually be improved by having some fat trimmed here and there, but this can be carried too far, and meaning will certainly begin to suffer.

=== 25. Who Shoves Whom Around Inside the Careenium? ===

* Were you to take an average over a million marbles, you could find out how each pin statistically affects the way the marbles descend to the bottom. Pathways aren't just allowed or disallowed; rather some are more likely, some are less likely, depending on how the pins are arrayed. There are fewer degrees of freedom for the motions in a maze. But suppose that in your maze, one of the effects of the people moving were that the hedges gradually shifter position, as if the maze were formed of movable partitions that constrain the maze runners, yet the maze runners' paths gradually move the partitions, thus changing the maze.
* There are two scales in time and space operating here, each affecting the other. The heavy hockey-puck-like pins appear almost stationary to the light marbles. To a casual observer who's following the motions of the marbles, the massive pins would appear to be determining the light marbles' motions, to be telling them where to go, shoving them around.
* The marbles are launched according to conditions outside the table. If there's a red light near a marble-launching station, that station slows down its firing rate; if a green light is near it, it speeds it up.
* Say there are no pucks at all. There are only marbles and a number of larger stiff yet malleable mobile metal strips (stiff yet malleable membranes).
* So these SYMMs will now be knocked around along with the marbles that ar bashing into one another. Will the SYMMs occasionally get wrapped around some group of marbles and form a circular membrane, separating out a group of marbles from the rest?
* So who pushes who comes down to summballs vs marbles. And I can twiddle the speed control on the projector and watch the film fast or slow.
* Symballs are constantly forming and unforming, like blocks of ice melting down into chaotically bounding water molecules - and then new ones can form, only to melt again. This kind of phase transition view of the activity is very apt. And it introduces a third time scale for the projector, one where it is running much faster and even the motions of the symmballs would start to blur. Symmballs have a dynamics, a way of forming, interacting, and splitting open and disintegrating, all their own. Symmballs can be seen as reflecting, internally to the careenium, the patterns of lights outside of it. They can store "images" of light patterns long after the light patterns are gone - thus their configurations can be interpreted as memory, knowledge, and ideas.
* I guess I can't see how I myself could be a system like this inside my cranium. I feel alive. I have thoughts, feelings, desires, sensations!
* "Thought" is a shorthand for the activity of the symmballs that you see when you run the movie fast: the way they interact and trigger patterns of motions among themselves.
* Add an artificial mouth and throat, just as we added an arm.
* The careenium voice is giving a dynamic description of what is perceived in the vicinity.
* When you perceive something "out there", you cannot help but mirror that even inside you somehow. Without that internal mirroring event, there would be no perception. The trick is to know what kind of external event triggered it, and to describe what you felt out loud in public language that refers to something external.
* The most convenient language gets straight to the external source. We are constructed in such away as to be unaware of our brain's internal activity underlying perception, and therefore we map it outward.
* Verbalizing its inner state employs words that you and I think refer to objects and facts outside the careenium. In fact, it too thinks so. But you could very well argue that it is just making sounds that mirror its internal state in some very complex way. It could be deluding itself. There might be nothing out there to refer to!
* As a member of the human race, you were constructed in such a way as to enjoy mimicry. You heard your own voice. Your were then able to compare the sounds you'd just made with your memory of the sounds you'd heard. By playing this exciting new game, you were learning the English words for objects.
* Gradually, I internalized a huge set of external, public, aural conventions - namely the English words attached to particular states of my own brain, states that were correlated with things "out there". But instead of conceiving that the words described my brain state, it was easier to conceive of them as describing things out there directly. By omitting a level in my interpretation of my own brain's state, I cast internal images outward.
* Could there be inward-directed transducers that focus on symmballs and come up with a representation of symmball activity? That would be a sort of sixth sense - an inward-directed sense. You could call it the "inner eye".
* Mindquakes would be, after all, just as tangible to the system as is an increase of marble-firings on any side. Both are simply internal events, even though the one is set off by something internal.
* We're constantly thinking thoughts - some fresh, some stale - constantly mentally alive and aware - partly of the external world, partly of our own state - for example, how confused or tired we are, what something reminds us of, how bored we are...
* Every organism has to monitor itself in terms of hunger. But primitive organisms don't use much information about the external environment they're in; they just flap about and hope to encounter some food. Pretty unconscious. A more complex organism will have an elaborate representation of its environment inside itself, so it also has a lot of options when it detects internal hunger.
* The total interaction of symbols at that point we might call "consideration" or "deliberation" or "reflection" - as distinguished from "reflexes. Now does this help you to see why such a careenium might have a self?
* You can only do what your brain will allow you to do, ad that is very crucial.
* You can't decide to do "anything"; you are limited to being able to decide to do only things you want. Worse yet, you are in fact limited to doing at any time, the one thing that you want most to do!
* People can pick up habits that begin to interfere with the rest of their lives. Once the wife starts twiddling a rubik's cube, a part of her takes over. She gets obsessed, or possessed by one of her own subsystems! There is a kind of inner inertia that makes her want to continue, even when there are other things she would also like to do. It's as if some part of her just "slips away" from a higher level of control - some subsystem gets out of control and won't obey the soul on top - like a bucking bronco unwilling to obey its rider.
* We'd like to say that symmballs can decide to do arbitrary things, but they are constrained. The "heavyweight" entities, hedges, pins, symmballs, constrain the "lightweight entities - maze runners, pinballs, symms; but in revenge, the little ones, acting together control how the high-level ones are arrayed.
* A "snap decision" is a coarse-grained manner of talking about a huge cloud of neural activity, like a huge blurry cloud of symms in a careenium projected at a high speed on the screen. And sometimes the activity of neurons inside a cranium or of symms inside a careenium, lends itself arbitrarily to such a high-level, coarse-grained, symbolic description.
* I find I'm most creative when I feel my brain consisting of such halfway-coalesced symbols - neurons acting somewhat independently, somewhat collectively. It's a happy medium where neural bubblings cooperate with symbolic channelings and yield the most creative, fulfilling, semi-chaotic sense of aliveness.
* It's hard to assign credit or blame once you start analyzing thought mechanistically. I see that decision and choice are very subtle concepts that somehow have to do with the ways in which constraints on two different levels affect each other reciprocally, and at two different time scales, inside a cranium or a careenium.
* When your leg falls asleep its a chance to be privy to all the tiny goings-on inside your leg, feeling the mingling tingling of trillions of cells all buzzing at once. Do you suppose that's what being alive really is like, and most of the time we're numb to it? Can you imagine if all of your body were always as fuzzy and tingly as that?
* Sometimes the decisions I make seem to be slow percolating processes, things that are utterly out of my control.
* In emotionally wrenching cases, you can hardly decide what you will feel. Something just happens inside you. Subtle forces shift deep inside you, hidden, subterranean. You find out what sort of stuff you're made of. It's more passive than active - or the action is on levels of yourself that are far lower - far more microscopic - than you have direct control over.
* In cases of judgement, the top level pretty much has to wait for decisions to percolate up from the bottom level. The masses down below are where the decision really gets made, in a time of brooding and rumination. Then the top level may struggle to articulate the seething activity down below, but those verbalized reasons it comes up with are always a posteriori. Words along are never rich enough to explain the subtlety of a difficult choice. Reasons may sound plausible but they are never the essence of a decision, the tip of the iceberg. Every reason has its army.
* I guess that the real conviction of having free will would arise when, repeatedly and reliably, a collection of symmballs wants something and then watches its desire getting carried out. It must seem like magic!
* The continuity and strength of the feeling of "being someone" come from identification with past and future versions of the same system, from the way the system sees itself as a unitary thing moving and changing through time - it's an outcome. In a way, it's nature's hoax: the illusion of selfsameness.
* When an organism is so complicated that it is forced to ascribe beliefs and purposes to itself, you could say it is adopting the auto-intentional stance. This is its best way of understanding itself. It creates a self-perpetuating delusion, the notion of a unitary self then reenters the system as one of its own beliefs, and the more the illusion is cycled through the system the more established and hardened and locked-in it becomes.
* Once the concept of a self is locked in, this fact determines much of the system's own future behavior. And this same level-crossing feedback loop takes place in every careenium of sufficient complexity, so they all have notions of selfhood.
* The circling-back of a complex representation of the system together with its representations of all the rest of the world is the single mechanism underlying this I-ness. And the way you do this cycling and the way you represent the world determines which I you are.

=== 26. Waking Up from the Boolean Dream, or, Subcognition as Computation ===

* Various phrases could be substituted for being conscious:
** Thinking
** Having a soul
** Having an inner life
** Having semantics (as opposed to mere syntax)
** Having content (as opposed to mere form)
** Having intentionality
** Being something it is like something to be
** Having personhood
* Hofstadter's position: "Everything of interest in cognition happens below the 100ms level - the time it takes to recognize your mother."
* The problem of intelligence is to understand the fluid nature of mental categories, to understand the invariant cores of percepts such as your mother's face, to understand the strangely flexible yet strong boundaries of concepts such as chair or the letter a.
* Here is the very hingepoint of thought, the place where one thing slips into alternate, subjunctive, variations on itself.
* How can such a fantastic recognition machine as our brain be so terrible at rendition? We can accept things as members of categories and perceive how they are members of those categories, yet not be able to reproduce those things from memory.
* Carefully constructed simple analogy problems probe close to the core mechanisms of intelligence.
* AI programs are carrying out cognitive activities in the absence of any subcognitive activity. There is no substrate that corresponds to what goes on in the brain. There is no fluid recognition and recall and reminding. These programs have no common sense, little sense of similarity or repetition or pattern. They can perceive some patterns as long as they have been anticipated - and particularly, as long as the place where they will occur has been anticipated - but they cannot see patterns where nobody told them to look. They do not learn at a high level of abstraction.
* This is in complete contrast to how people are. People perceive patterns anywhere and everywhere, without knowing in advance where to look. People learn automatically in all aspects of life. Common sense if not an area of expertise, but a general domain-independent capacity that has to do with fluidity in representation of concepts, an ability to sift what is important from what is not, and ability to find unanticipated analogical similarities between totally different concepts (reminding)
* Finding anagrams - Using intuitions about letter affinities, plausible clusters and their stabilities, syllable qualities, etc
* Short term memory is an epiphenomenon, a consequence that emerges out of the design of the system, a product of many interacting factors, something that was not necessarily known, predictable, or even anticipated to emerge at all.
* What you see at the top level need not have anything to do with the underlying swarm of activities bringing it into existence. Something can be computational at one level, but not at another level.
* People see symbols as lifeless, dead, passive objects - things to be manipulated by some overlying program. I see symbols - representational structures in the brain - as active. They flow and act on their own. There is no higher level agent or program that reaches down and shoves them around. Active symbols must incorporate within their own structures the wherewithal to trigger and cause actions.
* The brain does not manipulate symbols - it is the medium in which the symbols are floating and in which they trigger each other. There is no central program. There is simply a vast collection of teams - patterns of neural firings that, like teams of ants, trigger other patterns of neural firings.
* The symbols are not down there at the level of individual firings but up here where we do our verbalization. We feel them churning in us like we feel our stomach. We do not do symbol manipulation by some sort of act of will, let along some set of logical rules of deduction. We cannot decide what we will next think of, nor how our thoughts will progress.
* We are manipulated by our symbols! Cognition, that rational-seeming level of our minds is a consequence of much deeper processes of myriads of interacting subcognitive structures.
* Thought is not a formal activity whose rules exist at the level of predicate calculus and other formalisms.
* What good would it do a spear thrower to be able to calculate parabolic orbits? They need to imagine a cluster of approximations of what may happen and to anticipate some plausible consequences of them
* Mathematical simulation has to be replaced by abstraction, which involves discarding the irrelevant and making shrewd guesses based on analogy with past experience. Rather than playing out a scenario perfectly, play it out in a few probable or plausible ways or bring in some scenarios from the past that may have no obvious relevance other than as metaphors.
* Categories do not point to specific physical objects, but they can be used as masters from which copies - instances - can be rubbed, and then those copies are activated in various conjunctions; these activations then automatically trigger other instance-symbols into activations of various sorts. The overall activity will be semantic - meaningful - if it is isomorphic, not necessarily to some actual event in the real world, but to some event that is compatible with all the known constraints on the situation
* Any perceived situation seems to be surrounded by a cluster, a halo, of alternative versions of itself, of variations suggested by slipping any of a vast number of features that characterize the situation, and this is at the dead center of thinking.
* Until AI has been stood on its head and is 100% bottom-up, it won't achieve the same level or type of intelligence as humans have. Subcognition at the bottom will drive cognition at the top. And, perhaps, most importantly, the activities that take place at that cognitive top level will neither have been written nor anticipated by any programmer. This is the essence of what I call statistically emergent mentality.
* As fragments start to fit together coherently the system continues to turn down its randomness knob. Gradually, larger conceptual structures begin to form and to confirm each other in a benign, self-reinforcing loop. These higher-level structures now bias the probabilities of random activation of lower-level fragments, so that the thermal activity, though still random, is more directed. The system is settling into a stable state that captures, in some internal code, the salient external realities.
* The idea of stochastically guided convergence to what is called a globally optimum state seems to have arisen (as do so many good ideas) in the minds of several people at once.
* This new model comprises three notions:
** Asynchronous parallelism
** Temperature-controlled randomness
** Statistically emergent active symbols
*Why should the intangible world of the intellect be any less real than the tangible world of the body? Does it have less structure? No, not if you get to know it. Every type of complexity in the physical world has its mirror image in the world of mathematical constructs, including time.
*Symbolic events are not the primitives of thought.
*What we are looking for, in explaining cognition, is a bridge between the formal and the informal.

== VI: Selection and Stability ==

=== 27. The Genetic Code: Arbitrary? ===

* An enzyme is a protein that does something.
* All proteins are strangely curled molecules made up of amino acids. A protein likes to be curled up in its little ball. That 3-D shape is called its tertiary structure, and each tertiary structure is unique. The sequence of amino acids totally determines the tertiary structure; it is what makes the protein fold up every time into the same shape. The 1-D sequence of amino acids is the protein's primary structure and the primary structure determines the tertiary structure
* Certain parts of an enzyme are called its active sites. They are where the enzyme fastens itself, leechlike to the lumps it is going to act on.
* An enzyme is very specific; it is tailor-made for a certain task and for no other. Once it is hooked up to its substrates, it starts churning, like a washing-machine into which the proper coins have been inserted. It may rip parts off one substrate and attach them to another, it may bind two substrates together, etc
* But enzymes are not protein-builders. That job is so delicate and specialized and critical that a different kind of machine exists to do it, called a ribosome, of which there are thousands in any living cell.
* A ribosome is simply a general-purpose amino-acid hooker-upper. But then somebody must tell it which amino acids to hook up and in what sequence. This is the job of messenger RNA (mRNA) consisting of thousands of nucleotides strung together like beads.
* A ribosome is a translating mechanism between the nucleotide and amino acid languages, between codons and amino acids. In normal circumstances, it can translate about 20 codons/sec in a bacteria cell (but only 1/sec in a rabbit cell).
* DNA is a set of blueprints for all kinds of cellular constituents, lumps and doers alike. The piece of DNA that codes for some specific entity (a tRNA molecule, a protein, some RNA that will become part of a ribosome) is that entity's gene. Whatever the constituent is, there is a gene for it in the long, twisty DNA molecule. That is why DNA is so long. It consists of a sequence of thousands, millions, or even billions of codons, constituting anywhere from a handful of genes to many thousands of them arranged sequentially, like sentences following one another in a book, or songs in the grooves of a record.
* Two levels of decoding for DNA, for a tRNA modelcule, it is shallow decoding, or transcription, but to make a protein, it uses both stages, with the second being translation, which lays at the dead center of life.
* The DNA incorporates coded versions of all the tRNA molecules, of all the synthetases and polymerases, not to mention the constituents of the ribosomes. It contains coded versions of its own decoders.
* A more compact, more elegant, more efficient language will be more able to keep up with real-time needs - Efficiency matters
* Having variants matters, so the variants can fight it out and the best will survive while the weaker ones are pruned.
* But shortness and efficiency aren't all - we need to be able to easily distinguish between words, so clear distinctions may act against ultimate concision.

=== 28. Undercut, Flaunt, Pounce, and Mediocrity: Psychological Games with Numbers ===

* How universal, how primitive is the blend of goodwill and rivalry that one feels in a highly competitive games with friends, that feeling of pitting one strategy against another and watching them fight it our. Dogs certainly seem to experience this feeling pleasure.
* Since the game Undercut is completely symmetric for both players, there can be no winning strategy in game theory, for otherwise both players could use it and be guaranteed to beat each other. But there is an optimal strategy, which will guarantee you long-term parity with your opponent.
* The game theory version of the game knew nothing of temptations or teasing. It just played blindly on, and the longer the game, the more surely it would break even.
* For humans, impatience and audacity are both important psychological elements, and an optimal strategy does not take those into account.
* To encourage pattern-flaunting, it seemed reasonable to award pattern points whenever that are not picked up on by the enemy. This version is "Flaunt".
* Variant rules - "stop when the two players numbers differ by 2" and "the game is over if either player wins five turns in a row" lead to the version "Pounce"
* "Mediocrity" - A variant with 3 players where the middlemost number is rewarded. And after a certain number of rounds, the player whose score was in the middle should win. To win at level 2, it's best to be a mediocre player at L1. Whereas before it was desirable to be extremely mediocre at choosing mediocre numbers, now it's desirable to be mediocrely mediocre at choosing mediocre numbers. How perverse! How wonderful!
* The strategy for winning at L2 gets confusing very quickly and L3 is completely beyond reach. If such simple games are so baffling, how much more complex are the games of international bargaining, bluffing, and war-making. One can hardly help feeling like a single cell in some vast organism whose strategy was set long ago, the consequences of which one can only watch, hoping all will turn out for the best

=== 29. The Prisoner's Dilemma Computer Tournaments and the Evolution of Cooperation ===

* Does logic prevent cooperation? This is the issue of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
* In the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, entities interact repeatedly over time.
* In a collective sense, it would be best for both of you to always cooperate. But suppose you have no regard whatsoever for the other. There is no "collective" good you are both working for. You are both supreme egoists.
* In the canonical PD payoff matrix:
** 3 = R (the reward for mutual cooperation)
** 1 = P (the punishment)
** 5 = T (the temptation)
** 0 = S (the sucker's payoff)
** Temptation > Reward > Punishment > Sucker's Payoff
** (Temptation + Sucker's Payoff) / 2 < Reward
* How you should play depends on who you're playing
* Can totally selfish and unconscious organisms living in a common environment come to evolve reliable cooperative strategies? Can cooperation emerge in a world or pure egoists? In a nutshell, can cooperation evolve out of noncooperation?
* TIT FOR TAT's tactics are:
** Cooperate on move 1
** Thereafter, do whatever the other player did the previous move.
* TIT FOR TAT is "nice": It will never be the initial cause of a breakdown of trust
* Even expert strategists from political science, sociology, economics, psychology, and mathematics made the systematic errors og being too competitive for their own good, not forgiving enough, and too pessimistic about the responsiveness of the other side.
* There is no single strategy for all environments, so that winning in one tournament is no guarantee of success in another. T4T has the advantage of being able to "get along well" with a great variety of strategies, while other programs are more limited in their ability to evoke cooperation.
* The general lesson is "Be nice, provocable, and forgiving."
* T4T did not beat anyone. It cannot beat anyone, but it still wins out overall. It wins by eliciting behavior from the other player which allowed both to do well. Like a business partner who never cheats anyone, T4T never beats anyone - yet both do well for themselves.
* Having behavior so complex as to be incomprehensible is very dangerous.
* How does cooperation emerge?
** Initial viability - Even if there are only small clusters of cooperators, that is enough to gain a toehold.
** Robustness - Niceness, provocability, forgiveness, and clarity tend to flourish even in unpredictable and shifting environments.
** Stability - Once cooperation has established itself, it is permanent and not penetrable by meanies
* Mutual cooperation can emerge in a world of egoists without central control, by starting with a cluster of individuals who rely on reciprocity.
* How can the human race, whether for selfish or more cosmopolitan ends, understand and control the seemingly blind forces of history?
* Should I abide by the rules until they're changed, or help speed the change by breaking them? Better start rushing before the rush begins!

== VII: Sanity and Survival ==

=== 30. Dilemmas for Superrational Thinkers, Leading Up to a Luring Lottery ===

* The mental pressures are not completely explicit; they are evoked by, but not totally spelled out by, the wording of the letter. Each person brings a unique set of images and associations to each word and concept, and it is the set of those images and associations that will collectively create, in that person's mind, a set of mental pressures like the set of pressures inside the earth in an earthquake zone. Wen people decide, you find our how all those pressures pushing in different directions add up, like a set of force vectors pushing in various directions and with strengths influenced by private or unmeasurable factors. The assumption that it is valid to extrapolate has to be based on the idea that everybody is alike inside, only with somewhat different weights attached to certain notions.
* Emotionally it cannot help but feel a little peculiar since it flies in the face of free will and regards people's decisions as caused simply by combinations of pressures with unknown values. On the other hand, perhaps that is a better way to look at decisions than to attribute them to "free will", philosophically murky notion at best.
* To what extent does my choice inform me about the choices of the other participants?
* If reasoning dictates an answer, then everyone should independently come to that answer, like it is a math problem. Seeing this fact is itself the critical step in the reasoning toward the correct answer, but unfortunately it eluded nearly everyone to whom I sent the letter. Once you realize this fact, then it dawns on you that either all rational players will choose D or all rational players will choose C. This is the crux.
* Any number of ideal rational thinkers faced with the same situation and undergoing similar throes of reasoning agony will necessarily come up with the identical answer eventually, so long as reasoning alone is the ultimate justification for their conclusion. '''''Otherwise reasoning would be subjective, not objective as arithmetic is. A conclusion reached by reasoning would be a matter of preference, not of necessity. Now some people may believe this of reasoning, but rational thinkers understand that a valid argument must by universally compelling, otherwise it is simply not a valid argument.''''' (at least for me, this is a surprising conclusion or position for H to hold)
* Schoolchildren do not choose what 507/13 is; they figure it out. Analogously, my letter really did not allow choice; it demanded reasoning. Thus a better way to phrase the "voodoo" statement would be this: "If reasoning guides me to say C, then, as I am no different from anyone else as far as rational thinking is concerned, it will guide everyone to say C."
* The corresponding foray into the opposite world ("If I choose D, then everyone will choose D") can be understood more clearly by likening it to a musing down by the schoolkid before she divides. "Hmm, I guess it's about 49, maybe 39. I guess I need to work it out but when I do, I'll have the right answer.
* Choosing D undermines your reasons for doing so.
* One entrant treated his own brain as a simulation of other people's brains and ran the simulation enough to get a sense of what a "typical person" would do.
* As long as you feel your decision is independent of others' decisions, you should defect. But cool-headed people should take into account that cool-headed calculating people should take into account that cool-headed calculating people should take into account that cool-headed calculating people should take into account that...
* Another entrant expected that there is enough flakiness in people that he would prefer not to rely on the rationality of 19 other people. But of course in assuming the flakiness of others, he would be his own best example
* '''Reverberant doubt''' - an amazing and disturbing slide from certain restraint to certain pushing? It is a cascade, a stampede, in which the tiniest flicker of a doubt has become amplified into the gravest avalanche of doubt. And the brighter you are, the more quickly and clearly you see what there is to fear. A bunch of amiable slowpokes might well be more likely to unanimously refrain and get the big payoff than a bunch of razor-sharp logicians who all think perversely recursively reverberantly. It's that smartness to see that initial flicker of a doubt that triggers the whole avalanche and sends rationality a-tumblin' into the abyss. (see [[Intriguing Words, Expressions, Phrases]])
* We have nothing to fear but fear itself!

=== 31. Irrationality is the Square Root of All Evil ===

* A defection is an action such that, if everyone did it, things would clearly be worse (for everyone) than if everyone refrained from doing it, and yet which tempts everyone, since if only one individual (or a sufficiently small number) did it while others refrained, life would be sweeter for that individual (or select group).
* Apathy at the individual level translates into insanity at the mass level.
* Garret Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons. Two types of rationality, which are in an inevitable and eternal conflict:
** Local - that strives for the good of the individual
** Global - that strives for the good of the group
* But if they are fully aware of their joint situation, and yet in the face of it they blithely continue to act as if their situation were not a communal one, then I maintain that they are acting totally irrationally. In other words, with an enlightened citizenry, local rationality is not rational, period. It is damaging jot just to the group, but to the individual. Thus it pays a lot to reflect carefully about one's situation in the world before defecting, that is, jumping to do the naïvely selfish act. You had better be prepared for a lot of other people copping out as well, and offering the same flimsy excuse.
* This short-sighted race for first place reveals the way in which people in a huge crowd erroneously consider their own fancies to be totally unique.
* In an era when resources are running out in a way humanity has never had to face before, new kinds of social arrangements and expectations must be imposed, Hardin feels, by society as a whole. He is a dire pessimist about any kind of superrational cooperation, emphasizing that cooperators in the birth-control game will breed themselves right out of the population.
* Conscience is self-eliminating.
* I sometimes wonder whether there haven't been many civilizations Out There, in our galaxy and beyond that have already dealt with just these types of gigantic social problems. Most likely some would have survived, some would have perished. And perhaps the ultimate difference in those societies may have been the survival of the meme that, in effect, asserts the logical, rational validity of cooperation in a one-shot PD. It may be that lack of conscience is self-eliminating, provided you wait long enough that natural selection can act at the level of entire societies.
* Evolution is a merciless pruner of ill logic.
* Most philosophers and logicians are convinced that truths of logic are analytic and a priori; they do not like to think that such basic ideas are grounded in mundane, arbitrary things like survival. They might admit that natural selection tends to favor good logic - but they would certainly hate the suggestion that natural selection defined good logic! Yet truth and survival value are all tangled together, and civilizations that survive certainly have glimpsed higher truths than those that perish.
* Ultimately, beliefs are to be grounded in experience, whether that experience is the organism's or its ancestors', or its peer group's. My feeling is that the concept of superrationality is one whose truth will come to dominate among intelligent beings in the universe simply because its adherents will survive certain kinds of situations where its opponents will perish. Let's wait a few spins of the galaxy and see. After all, healthy logic is whatever remains after evolution's merciless pruning.

=== 32. The Tale of Happiton ===

* The Disobedi-ant refused to believe that its powerful impulses to play instead of work were anything but unique expressions of its very unique self, and it went its merry way, singing, "What I choose to do has nothing to do with what any-ant else chooses to do! What could be more self-evident?
* Coincidentally enough, so went the reasoning of all its colony-mates. In fact the same refrain was independently invented by every last ant in the colony and each ant thought it original. It echoes throughout the colony, even with the same melody.
* The colony perished.

=== 33. The Tumult of Inner Voices, or, What is the Meaning of the Word "I"? ===

* Which is right? Am I really here at my terminal, typing, or am I really here, standing before you? I can't decide.
* My mind is "shoved around" by internal agents of my brain that have become activated after a long dormancy. And where my brain shoves, so must my mind follow. How can I be saying these strange things? What is the meaning of "mind as slave to brain"?
* As a consequence, the behavior of such a system has some striking properties that go under the general heading of "collective phenomena".
* A traffic jam is just not on the level of an individual car. It is a pattern composed of cars, a pattern that moreover has deep repercussions on the cars it is composed of.
* The nature of collective phenomena is that they are patterns composed of parts, and they in turn exert powerful influences on their parts, acting to keep them in line. Think hurricanes, life, intelligence.
* What is the dynamics of a collective phenomenon? How does a thought get generated and propagate inside a brain? Nobody really knows.
* During much of any country's existence, it does not act as a single, polarized, black-and-white entity, but rather as a much more complex entity composed of dozens and dozens of smaller entities - domains - all of which are pursuing their own goals and coexisting in one way or other with each other.
* A brain is much like this. A brain, with its billions of neurons, resembles a community made up of smaller communities, each in turn made up of smaller ones, and so on. The highest-level communities just below the level of the whole are what I like to call "subselves" or "inner voices". Not in the sense of schizophrenia, but rather, in the sense of competing facets that try to commandeer the whole, something like hijackers, although often benevolent hijackers. Perhaps it is more like a vote of the passengers on a plane where they want to go, after it is in the air!
* There is too much bottom-up momentum to put the lid on. You cannot keep the lid on an angry populace, like the Iranian people or the Salvadoran people or the Chilean people. No matter how tightly you press down the pressure from inside will in the end overwhelm you.
* And thus it is within the brain. Competing subselves cannot be held in check indefinitely. They cannot be clamped down, forbidden to act. For each "inner voice" is in actuality composed of millions of smaller parts, each of which is active, and under the proper circumstances, those small activities will someday all "point in the same direction", and at that moment the inner voice will crystallize, will undergo what is called a phase transition, will emerge from obscurity and proclaim itself an active member of the community of selves. And if it is powerful enough, it will try to exert pressure and to be recognized. It will attempt to seize power. It will not want to relinquish power, once it has it. That's what I mean by "commandeering the soul".
* "Selective interruptibility" is one of the most critical characteristics of a hierarchically organized system such as a brain, which has evolved to deal with a world in which there are events of various priorities that have to be dealt with sequentially. Choices must be made, so there must be a highest-level body whose purpose is to make choices rapidly and reliably, one that sorts out the priority of subselves and allows only the one deemed most important to take charge.
* An interesting problem arises when even this deciding agent must be preempted by some sort of extreme emergency situation that arises. The decider can be in the midst of trying to sort out some ordinary conflict of subselves when -
* Phase transitions take place in simple physical systems, schools of fish, individual brains, and in countries as well, when there are sufficiently strong and numerous interactions between the components of the system, and when those interactions add up in such a way as to make for large-scale correlations, or, put another way, long-distance effects despite the short-range nature of the direct interaction. When such long-distance effect occur, then a new kind of entity springs up, an entity on a higher level of organization than its constituents, and that entity obeys certain laws of its own.
* There are no clear boundary lines to be drawn between that subself, this subself, and any other subselves of DRH the person. All of them are fictions, because the only real thing is the sum total, the integrated person.
* When trying to get out of a warm bed on a cold morning, says William James:
** We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day's life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, "Hollo! I must lie here no longer!" - an idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle, which paralyzed our activity then and kept our idea of rising in the condition of wish and not of will. The moment these inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its effects.
* It's more passive than active - or more accurately put, the action is on levels of yourself that are far lower - far more microscopic - than you have direct control over.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

A Little History of Philosophy

2026-07-26T15:55:17Z

Robert.adlington:

* Socrates/Plato (400 BC) - Uses clever counter-examples to show that his interlocutor's comments don't apply in every situation and demonstrate that they didn't really know what they thought they knew.
** The man who breaks free is like a philosopher. He sees beyond appearances. Ordinary people have little idea about reality because they are content with looking at what's in front of them rather than thinking deeply about it. But the appearances are deceptive. What they see are shadows, not reality.
** Socrates was a great talker, Plato was a superb writer, and Aristotle was interested in everything.
* Aristotle (384 BC) - Believed that the way to understand any general category was to examine particular examples of it. He thought that every virtue lies in between two extremes. Bravery is halfway between foolhardiness and cowardice - doctrine of the Golden Mean
* Pyrrho (365-270 BC) - Scepticism. The foundations of your thought aren't anything like as firm as you'd like to believe and are unlikely to make you happy. The point of moderate philosophical scepticism is to get close to the truth, or at least to reveal how little we know or can know.
* Epicurus (341-270 BC) - The Garden. We all seek pleasure and avoid pain whenever we can. The best way to live is to have a very simple lifestyle, be kind to those around you, and surround yourself with friends. "I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind."
* Zeno of Citium (334-262 BC) - Stoicism. We are responsible for what we feel and think. We can choose our response to good and bad luck. Emotions don't simply happen to us. Psychological techniques that will make our lives calmer. Other Stoics:
** Cicero (106-43 BC)
** Seneca (1 BC-65 AD)
** Epictetus (55-135 AD)
* Augustine (354-430) - Within a person the Manicheans believed, goodness came from the soul. Evil came from the body, with all its weaknesses and desires and its tendency to lead us astray.
* Boethius (475-525) - "The Consolation of Philosophy"
* Anselm (1033-1109)
* Aquinas (1225-74) - God is the uncaused cause of everything that is.
* Machiavelli (1469-1527) - "The Prince" It's better as a leader to be feared than to be loved.
* Hobbes (1588-1679) - Leviathan (1651) At heart we are all selfish and it is only the rule of law and the threat of punishment that keep us in check. Life outside of society would be nasty, brutish, and short. Individuals in the state of nature would have to enter into a "social contract", an agreement to give up some of their dangerous freedoms for the sake of safety. Without what he called a "sovereign", life would be a kind of hell. Safety was far more important than freedom. Fear of death would drive people towards forming a society.
* Descartes (1596-1650)
* Pascal (1623-62) - Everyone is torn between anxiety and despair.
* Spinoza (1632-77) - Thought that God was the world. Wrote philosophy as if it were geometry. The proofs in his book Ethics look like geometrical proofs and include axioms and definitions. Everything fits together in one huge system and the best way to understand is by the power of thought. Rationalism - emphasizing reason rather than experiment. Was a determinist. The best we can achieve is for our emotions to emerge from our own choices rather than external events. Even though these choices can never be fully free, it is better to be active than passive.
* Locke (1632-1704) - His view that we have a God-given right to life, freedom, happiness, and property influenced the founding fathers who wrote the US constitution. Bodily continuity doesn't decide the issue of personal identity. What matters is psychological continuity.
* Berkeley (1685-1753) - Immaterialism. There is no reality at all beyond the ideas that we have. An object is just a collection of ideas that you and other people have of it. God was constantly perceiving things in the world, so they continued to exist.
* Leibniz (1646-1716) - Principle of Sufficient Reason
* Voltaire (1694-1778)
* Hume (1711-76)
* Rousseau (1712-78) - When people get together and form a society, they become a ind of person. Each individual is then part of a greater whole. They way they can stay truly free in society is to obey laws that are in line with the General Will. If someone can't identify the right thing to do, they become "freer" by being forced to conform.
* Kant (1724-1804) - Interested in the limits of thought, the limits of what we can know and understand. We can know about the phenomenal world, the world around us, which we experience with our senses.
** Can we know anything a priori? Empiricists, like Locke, thought no, while rationalists, like Descartes, thought yes. Kant thought that knowledge that reveals truth about the world, yet is arrived at independently of experience, is possible - synthetic a priori knowledge. We can, by the power of reason, discover features of our own minds that tint all our experience.
* Bentham (1748-1832) - The Panopticon. Utilitarianism or the Greatest Happiness Principle.
* Hegel (1770-1831) - Everything is in a state of change which takes the form of a gradual increase in self-awareness and reality is constantly moving towards its goal of understanding itself. The main thrust of history turns out to be Spirit understanding its own freedom.
* Schopenhauer (1788-1860) - Life is painful and it would be better not to have been born. Reality exists both as Will and as Representation. Will is the blind driving force that is found in absolutely everything that exists. The World of Representation is your way of making sense of everything and it requires your consciousness. Your mind organizes your experience to make sense of it all. No other philosopher has given such a central place to the arts.
* Mill (1806-73) - The Harm Principle. Every adult should be free to live as he or she pleases as long as no one else is harmed in the process.
* Darwin (1809-82) -
* Kierkegaard (1813-55) - Fear and Trembling (1842). Decision-making is built into the title of his most famous work Either/Or. This book gives the reader a choice between either a life of pleasure and chasing after beauty or one based on conventional moral rules, a choice between the aesthetic and the ethical.
* Marx (1818-83)
* James (1842-1910) - Pragmatism. Truth for James was simply what works, what has a beneficial impact on our lives. Words are tools that we do things with, rather than symbols that somehow mirror the way the world is. Words allow us to cope with the world, not copy it.
** Peirce (1839-1914)
* Nietzsche (1844-1900) - If God is dead, what comes next?
* Freud (1856-1939)
* Russell (1872-1970) - Set theory seemed to promise a way of explaining the structure of all our reasoning. Started the linguistic turn in philosophy, where philosophers began to think very hard about language and its underlying logical form.
* Ayer (1910-89) - Logical Positivism, celebrating science as the greatest human achievement. Language, Truth, and Logic (1936)
* Sartre (1905-80) - Existentialism. Through the choices I make in my life I paint a picture of what I think a human being ought to be like. If I do this sincerely, it is a great responsibility.
** De Beauvoir (1908-86)
* Wittgenstein (1889-1951) - Instead of assuming all games have a single thing in common, he thinks we should see words like "game" as "family resemblance terms". The idea of a private language of sensations doesn't make sense at all. Many philosophers before him thought that each individual's mind was completely private.
* Arendt (1906-75) -
* Popper (1902-94) - Science progresses when we realize that a particular way of thinking about reality is false.
* Kuhn - There aren't facts out there waiting to be discovered: instead, the framework or paradigm to some extent fixes what you can think about. And then it shifts.
* Singer (1946-) - Consistency is treating similar cases in a similar way.

[[Category:Books]]

Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI

2026-07-26T15:55:02Z

Robert.adlington:

== Introduction: On the Promise and Peril of AI ==

* Before AI, there was cybernetics - the idea of automatic, self-regulating control, laid out in Norbert Wiener's foundational text of 1948.
* John Cage had picked up on McLuhan's idea that by inventing electronic technologies we had externalized our central nervous system - that is, our minds - and that we now had to presume that "there's only one mind, the one we all share."
* JZ Young "Doubt and Certainty in Science" - We create tools and we mold ourselves through our use of them.
* Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon "Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication" - "The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one minds may affect another. This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theater, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior."
* John McCarty disliked Wiener and refused to use the term "cybernetics", creating the term "artificial intelligence" instead.
* While Von Neumann, Shannon, and Wiener were concerned about systems of control and communication of observed systems, Warren McCullough wanted to include mind. He turned to cultural anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead to make the connection to the social sciences.
* Bateson, in particular, was increasingly talking about patterns and processes, or "the pattern that connects." He called for a new kind of systems ecology in which organisms and the environment in which they live are one and the same and should be considered as a single circuit.
* By the early 1970s the cybernetics of observed systems - first order cybernetics - move to the cybernetics of observing systems - second order cybernetics, or "the Cybernetics of Cybernetics".
* Cybernetics, rather than disappearing, was becoming metabolized into everything, so we no longer saw it as a separate, distinct new discipline. And there it remains, hiding in plain sight.
* "Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, and Frankenstein":
** Einstein: The revolution in 20th C physics
** Gertrude Stein: The first writer who made integral to her work the idea of an indeterminate and discontinuous universe. Words represented neither character nor activity.
** Wittgenstein: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." - the end of the distinction between observer and observed.
** Frankenstein: Cybernetics, AI, robotics.
* Wallace Stevens "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" - not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but of sensations. An exercise in perspectivism, consisting of short, separate sections, each of which mentions blackbirds in some way. The poem is about his own imagination; it concerns what he attends to.
* He knew the danger was not machines beoming more like humans, but humans being treated like machines.

== Seth Lloyd: Wrong But More Relevant Than Ever ==

* Wiener's central insight was that the world should be understood in terms of information. Complex systems, such as organisms, brains, and human societies, consist of interlocking feedback loops in which signals exchanged between subsystems result in complex but stable behaviors. When feedback loops break down, the system goes unstable. He constructed a compelling picture of how complex biological systems function, a picture that is by and large universally accepted today.

== Judea Pearl: The Limitations of Opaque Learning Machines ==

* What humans had that other species lacked was a mental representation of their environment - a representation that they could manipulate at will to imagine alternative hypothetical environments for planning and learning:
** L1: Statistical reasoning - What can a symptom tell you about a disease?
** L2: Actions - What will happen if...?
** L3: Counterfactual - What if...?

== Stuart Russell: The Purpose Put into the Machine ==

* 1001 (bad) reasons to pay no attention:
** We can just switch it off
** Human level or superhuman AI is impossible
** It's too soon to worry about it
** Human-level AI isn't really imminent, in any case
** You're just a luddite
** Any machine intelligent enough to cause trouble will be intelligent enough to have appropriate and altruistic objectives (but, see Mars Attacks!)
** Intelligence is multi-dimensional, so "smarter than humans" is a meaningless concept.
* A robot that's uncertain about human preferences actually benefits from being switched off, because it understand that the human will press the off switch to prevent the robot from doing something counter to those preferences. Thus the robot is incentivized to preserve the off switch, and this incentive derives directly from its uncertainty about human preferences.

== George Dyson: The Third Law ==

* The history of computing can be divided into an Old Testament and a New Testament: before and after electronic digital computers and the codes they spawned proliferated across the earth:
** The OT prophets, who delivered the underlying logic, included Thomas Hobbes and Leibniz.
** The NT prophets delivered the machines:
*** Turing - What would it take for machines to become intelligent?
*** von Neumann - What would it take for them to reproduce?
*** Shannon - How could they communicate reliably?
*** Wiener - How long would it take for them to assume control?

* There is no precise distinction between analog and digital computing:
** In general, digital computing deals with integers, binary sequences, deterministic logic, and time that is idealized into discrete increments. Intolerant of error or ambiguity, it depends upon error correction at every step along the way
** Analog computing deals with real numbers, nondeterministic logic, and continuous functions, including time as it exists as a continuum in the real world. Complexity reside in network topology, not in code. Information is precessed as continuous functions of values such as voltage and relative pulse frequency rather than by logical operations on discrete strings of bits. It tolerates errors, allowing you to live with them.
* Nature uses digital coding for the storage, replication, and recombination of sequences of nucleotides, but relies on analog computing running on nervous systems, for intelligence and control. The genetic system in every living cell is a stored-program computer. Brains aren't.
* Analog computers also mediate transformations between two forms of information: structure in space and behavior in time. There is no code and no programming. Somehow - and we don't fully understand how - nature evolved analog computers known as nervous systems, which embody information absorbed from the world. They learn. One of the things they learn is control. They learn to control their own behavior, and they learn to control their environment to the extent that they can.
* While we argue about the intelligence of digital computers, analog computing is quietly supervening upon the digital, in the same way that analog components like vacuum tubes were repurposed to build digital computers in the aftermath of World War II. Individually deterministic finite state processors, running finite codes, are forming large-scale nondeterministic, non-finite-state metazoan organisms running wild in the real world.
* The resulting hybrid analog/digital systems treat streams of bits collectively, the way the flow of electrons is treated in a vacuum tune, rather than individually, as bits are treated by the discrete-state devices generating the flow. Bits are the new electrons. Analog is back and its nature is to assume control.
* What if you wanted to build a machine to capture what everything known to the human species means? With Moore's Law behind you, it doesn't take too long to digitize all the information in the world. You scan every book ever printed, collect every email ever written, and gather forty-nine years of video every 24 hours, while tracking where people are and what they do, in real time. But how do you capture meaning?
* Three laws of AI:
** Ashby's law: Any effective control system must be as complex as the system it controls.
** Second law (von Neumann) - The defining characteristic of a complex system is that it constitutes its own simplest behavioral description. The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself.
** Third law - Any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will be too complicated to understand.

== Daniel Dennett: What Can We Do ==

* We should all make it a regular practice to reread books from our youth, where we are apt to discover clear previews of some of our own later "discoveries" and "inventions," along with a wealth of insights to which we were bound to be impervious until our minds had been torn and tattered, exercised and enlarged, by confrontations with life's problems.
* Latter-day Cartesians cannot bear the thought that we - we ourselves - are self-perpetuating patterns of information-bearing matter, not "stuff that abides". Those patterns are remarkably resilient and self-restoring but at the same time protean, opportunistic, selfish exploiters of whatever new is available to harness in their quest for perpetuation. And here is where things get dicey, as Wiener recognized. When attractive opportunities abound, we are apt to be willing to pay a little and accept some small, even trivial, cost-of-doing-business for access to new powers. And pretty soon we become dependent on our new tools that we lose the ability to thrive without them. Options become obligatory.
* Orwell's Ministry of Truth is now a practical possibility. AT techniques for creating all-but-undetectable forgeries of "recordings" of encounters are now becoming available, which will render obsolete the tools of investigation we have come to take for granted in the last 150 years. Will we simply abandon the brief Age of Photographic Evidence and return to the earlier world in which human memory and trust provided the gold standard, or will we develop techniques of defense and offense in the arms race of truth?
* The information age is also the disinformation age.
* IBM's Watson could be a useful core faculty for a general intelligent agent, but more like a cerebellum or an amygdala than a mind - at best a special-purpose subsystem that could play a big supporting role, but not remotely up to the task of framing purposes and plans and building insightfully on its conversational experiences?
* Perhaps Turing's brilliant idea of an operational test has lured us into a trap: the quest to create at least an illusion of a real person behind the screen, bridging the "uncanny valley". The danger here is that ever since Turing posed his challenge to fool the judges, AI creators have attempted to paper over the valley with cutesy humanoid touches, Disneyfication effects that will enchant and disarm the uninitiated.
* Human embellishments are false advertising - something to condemn, not applaud.
* We don't need artificial conscious agents. There is a surfeit of natural conscious agents, enought to handle whatever tasks should be reserved for such special and privileged entities. We need intelligent tools. Tools do not have rights, and should not have feelings that could be hurt, or be able to respond with resentment to "abuses" rained on them by inept users.
* We should be creating an entirely new sort of entity, rather like oracles, with no conscience, no fear of death, no distracting loves and hates, no personality (but all sorts of foibles and quirks that would no doubt be identified as the "personality" of the system): boxes of truths (if we're lucky) almost certainly contaminated with a scattering of falsehoods. It will be hard enough learning to live with them without distracting ourselves with fantasies about the Singularity in which these AIs will enslave us!

== Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into ==

* We over-anthropomorphize humans, who are after all mere machines!
* Wiener was a giant of an earlier era and built on the tools developed since the time of Newton and Leibniz to describe and analyze continuous processes in the physical world.
* In the first industrial revolution, energy from a steam engine or a waterwheel was used by human workers to replace their own energy. Instead of being a source of energy for physical work, people became modulators of how a large source of energy was used. But because steam engines and waterwheels had to be large to be an efficient use of capital, and because in the 18th C the only technology for spatial distribution of energy was mechanical and worked only at very short range, many workers needed to be crowded around the source of energy.
* Wiener correctly argues that the ability to transmit energy as electricity caused a second industrial revolution. Now the source of energy could be distant from where it was used, and from the beginning of the 20th C, manufacturing could be much more dispersed as electrical distribution grids were built.

== Frank Welczek: The Unity of Intelligence ==

* Each new level of size and complexity supports new forms of organization, whose patterns encode information in new ways and whose behavior is best described using new concepts.
* Today, smartphones and the internet are bringing the human drive toward augmentation into realms more central to our identity as intelligent beings. They are giving us, in effect, quick access to a vast collective awareness and a vast collective memory, and are:
** A close to a billion times faster than brains
** Small, with smallness making communication more efficient
** More stable, capable of being restored with complete accuracy
** Endure longer, with no need to eat or sleep (or die)
** Modular, while the human nervous system actively resists implants
** Quantum-ready
* However, brains are:
** 3D, unlike the 2D of computer boards and chips
** Self-repairing, to an extent
** More connective, with hundreds of connections per synapse compared to the handful of fixed connections of computer units
** Self-assembling with interactive sculpting, tuned by the child's interactions with the external world
** Integrated with sensors and actuators

== Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete ==

* Consciousness is the cosmic awakening: it transformed our universe from a mindless zombie with no self-awareness into a living ecosystem harboring self-reflection, beauty, hope, meaning, and purpose.
* Intelligence is simply a certain kind of information processing performed by elementary particles moving around, and there's no law of physics that says one can't build machines more intelligent in every way than we are, and able to seed cosmic life.
* First, we humans discovered how to replicate some natural processes with machines, making our own heat, light, and mechanical horsepower. Gradually we realized that our bodies were also machines, and the discovery of nerve cells blurred the boundary between body and mind. Finally, we stared building machines that could outperform no only our muscles but our minds as well. We've now been eclipse by machines in the performance of many narrow cognitive tasks, ranging from memorization and arithmetic to game play, and we are in the process of being overtaken in many more, from driving to investing to medical diagnosing. If the AI community succeeds in its original goal of building AGI then we will have, by definition, been eclipsed at all cognitive tasks.
* Darwinian evolution endowed us with powerful fear of concrete threats, not of abstract threats from future technologies that are hard to visualize or even imagine.
* Since intelligence is the ability to accomplish goals, a superintelligent AI is by definition much better at accomplishing its goals than we humans are at accomplishing ours, and will therefore prevail.

== Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages ==

* The only (meta)stable entities are messages - patterns of information that propagate through time, like waves propagating across the surface of a lake. Even we humans can be considered messages, because the atoms in our bodies are too fleeting to attach our identities to. Instead, we are the "message" that our bodily functions maintain. "It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone of our personal identity.
* In some very real sense, big corporations are nonhuman machines that pursue their own interests - interests that might not align with hos of any particular human working for them.

== Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas ==

* Three abstract concepts that fit with the computational theory of mind:
** Knowledge - Patterns in matter or energy that stand in systematic relations with states of the world, with mathematical and logical truths, and with one another.
** Reasoning - Transformations of that knowledge by physical operations that are designed to preserve those relations.
** Purpose - The control of operations to effect changes in the world, guided by discrepancies between its current state and a goal state.
*The physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback - the staving off of life-sapping entropy being the ultimate goal of human beings
*Wiener also applied the ideas of cybernetics to society. The laws, norms, customs, media, forums, and institutions of a complex community could be considered channels of information propagation and feedback that allow a society to ward off disorder and pursue certain goals.
*To say that ideas - and not just weather, resources, geography, or weaponry - can shape history is not woolly mysticism. It is a statement of the causal powers of information instantiated in human brains and exchanged in networks of communication and feedback. Deterministic theories of history, whether they identify the causal engine as technological, climatological, or geographic, are belied by the causal power of ideas.
*A healthy society - one that gives its members the means to pursue life in defiance of entropy - allows information sensed and contributed by its members to feed back and affect how the society is governed. A dysfunctional society invokes dogma and authority to impose control from the top down.
*Ideas, norms, and institutions are themselves a form of technology, consisting of patterns of information distributed across brains.
*Intelligence is the ability to deploy novel means to attain a goal. But the goals are extraneous to the intelligence: Being smart is not the same as wanting something. Even if, in the brains of Homo sapiens, reasoning comes bundled with goals such as dominating rivals and amassing resources, there is no law that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless megalomaniacs.
*Intelligence is a contraption of gadgets: software modules that acquire, or are programmed with, knowledge of how to pursue various goals in various domains:
**People are equipped to find food, win friends and influence people, charm prospective mates, bring up children, move around in the world, and pursue other human obsessions and pastimes.
**Computers may be programmed to take on some of these problems (like recognizing faces), not to bother with others (like charming mates), and to take on still other problems that humans can't solve (like simulating the climate or sorting millions of accounting records).
**The problems are different, and the kinds of knowledge needed to solve them are different.

== David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment ==

* For most of our species' history, our ancestors were barely people. This was not due to any inadequacy in their brains. On the contrary, even before the emergence of our anatomically modern human sub-species, they were making things like clothes and campfires, using knowledge that was not in their genes. It was created in their brains by thinking, and preserved by individuals in each generation imitating their elders. Moreover, this must have been knowledge in the sense of understanding, because it is impossible to imitate novel complex behaviors like those without understanding what the component behaviors are for.
* Creative criticism, interleaved with creative conjecture, is how humans learn one another's behaviors, including language, and extract meaning from one another's utterances. Those are also the processes by which all new knowledge is created: They are how we innovate, make progress, and create abstract understanding for its own sake. This is human-level intelligence: thinking. It is also, or should be, the property we seek in AGI.
* In the past, progress happened only on timescales much longer than people's lifetimes, so in a typical generation no one benefited from any progress. Therefore the benefits of the ability to innovate can have exerted little or no evolutionary pressure during the biological evolution of the human brain. That evolution was driven by the benefits of preserving cultural knowledge.
* From the earliest days of thinking, children must have been cornucopias of creative ideas and paragons of critical thought - otherwise, they could not have learned language or other complex culture.
* By now, it is hard for us even to conceive of the kind of relentless, finely tuned oppression required to reliably extinguish, in everyone, the aspiration to progress and replace it with dread and revulsion at any novel behavior. In such a culture, there can have been no morality other than conformity and obedience, no other identity than one's status in a hierarchy, no mechanisms of cooperation other than punishment and reward. So everyone had the same aspiration in life: to avoid the punishments and get the rewards. In a typical generation, no one invented anything, because no one aspired to anything new, because everyone had already despaired of improvement being possible.
* All the effort that has ever increased the capabilities of AIs has gone into narrowing their range of potential "thoughts".
* An AGI is certainly capable of learning to win at chess - but also of choosing not to, or choosing to play interestingly instead of to win, or inventing a new game. A mere AI is incapable of having any ideas, because the capacity for considering them has been designed out of its constitution.
* No doubt there will be AGI criminals and enemies of civilization, just as there are human ones. But there is no reason to suppose that they will choose to become enemies of civilization.
* The moral component, the cultural component, the element of free will - all make the task of creting an AGI fundamentally different from any other programming task. It's much more akin to raising a child. It will have no specifiable functionality - no fixed, testable criterion for what shall be a successful output for a given input.
* Human brains can think anything that AGIs can, subject only to limitations of speed or memory capacity, both of which can be equalized by technology:
* TOM (Totally Obedient Moron) vs DATA (Disobedient Autonomous Thinking Application), but how does one test for disobedience?
* A person's quest for understanding is a search problem, in an abstract space of ideas far too large to be searched exhaustively. Objectives are ideas like any others - created as part of the search and continually modified and improved.
* To an AGI, the whole space of ideas must be open. It should not be knowable in advance what ideas the program can never contemplate. And the ideas that the program does contemplate must be chosen by the program itself, using methods, criteria, and objectives that are also the program's own.

== Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings ==

* Inverse reinforcement learning is a statistical problem: We have some data - the behavior of an intelligent agent - and we want to evaluate various hypotheses about the rewards underlying that behavior. When faced with this question, a statistician thinks about the generative model behind the data: What data would we expect to be generated if the intelligent agent was motivated by a particular set of rewards? Equipped with the generative model, the statistician can then work backwards: What rewards would likely have caused the agent to behave in that particular way?
* If you're trying to make inferences about the rewards that motivate human behavior, the generative model is really a theory of how people behave - how human minds work. Inferences about hidden causes behind the behavior of other people reflect a sophisticated model of human nature that we all carry around in our heads.
* In any situation where the time you spend making a decision is costly - at the very least because it's time you could spend doing something else - the classic notion of rationality is no longer a good prescription for how one should behave.
* To develop a more realistic model of rational behavior, we need to take into account the cost of computation. Real agents need to modulate the amount of time they spend thinking by the effect the extra thought has on the results of a decision.
* This trade-off can be formalized, resulting in a model of rational behavior that AI researchers call "bounded optimality".
* Rather than condemning the heuristics that people use as irrational, we can think of them as a rational response to constraints on computation.
* Making sense of toddlers requires building a cognitive model of the mind of a toddler. Superintelligent AI systems face the same challenge when trying to make sense of human behavior.

== Anca Dragan: Putting the Human into the AI Equation ==

* Achieving action compatibility will require robots to anticipate human actions, account for how those actions will influence their own, and enable people to anticipate robot actions. Research has made a degree of progress in meeting these challenges, but we still have a long way to go.
* A seemingly better paradigm might be for robots to optimize for what we internally want, even if we have trouble explicating it. They would use what we say and do as evidence about what we want, rather than interpreting it literally and taking it as a given. When we write down a reward function, the robot should understand that we might be wrong: that we might not have considered all facets of the task; that there's no guarantee that said reward function will always lead to the behavior we want. The robot should integrate what we wrote down into its understanding of what we want, but it should also have a back-and-forth with us to elicit clarifying information. It should seek our guidance, because that's the only way to optimize the true desired reward function.

== Chris Anderson: Gradient Descent ==

* A gradient describes any gradual transition from one level to another one - as opposed to a step function, which describes a discrete change.
* Every action in the universe is driven by some gradient drive, from the movement of the planets around gravity gradients to the joining of atoms along electric-charge gradients to form molecules. Our own urges, such as hunger and sleepiness, are driven by electrochemical gradients in our bodies. And our brain's functions, the electrical signals moving along ion channels in the synapses between our neurons, are simply atoms and electrons flowing "downhill" along yet more electrical and chemical gradients. Forget clockwork analogies; our brains are closer to a system of canals and locks, with signals traveling like water from one state to another.
* The essence of intelligence is learning, and we do that by correlating inputs with positive or negative scores (rewards or punishments).

== David Kaiser: "Information" for Wiener, for Shannon, and for Us ==

* Shannon's key insight was that the information of a message was just like the entropy of a gas: a measure of the system's disorder.

== Neil Gershenfeld: Scaling ==

* Cycles of AI development, all of which do the same thing, making inferences from observations:
** Mainframes were going to automate away work
** Expert systems were going to codify and then replace the knowledge of experts
** Perceptrons were going to model how the brain works
** Mulitlayer perceptrons couldn't handle real-world problems
** Deep learning is delivering on many early AI promises but in a way that is hard to understand, with consequences ranging from intellectual to existential threats.
* Shannon wrote his thesis about how electrical circuits could be designed to evaluate arbitrary logical expressions, introducing the bases for universal digital logic.
* By communicating with symbols rather than continuous quantities, the behavior is very different. The exponential decrease in communication errors made possible an exponential increase in the capacity of communication networks. And that eventually solved the problem of where the knowledge in an AI system came from.
* A linear increase in network complexity led to an exponential increase in the expressive power of the network.
* The curse of dimensionality - the solution came in using information about the problem to constrain the search. The search algorithms themselves are not new. But when applied to a deep-learning network, they adaptively build up representations of where to search. The price of this is that it's no longer possible to exactly solve for the best answer to a problem, but typically all that's needed is an answer that's good enough.
* Both brains and computer chips are hard to understand by watching their inner workings; they're easily interpreted only by observing their external interfaces. We come to trust (or not) brains and computer chips alike based on experience that tests them rather than on explanations for how they work.
* Many branches of engineering are making a transition from what's called imperative to declarative or generative design.
* The mother of all design problems is the one that resulted in us. The way we're designed resides in one of the oldest and most conserved parts of the genome, called the Hox genes. These are genes that regulate genes, in what are called developmental programs. Nothing in your genome stores the design of your body; your genome stores, rather, a series of steps to follow that results in your body. This is an exact parallel to how search is done in AI. There are too many possible body plans to search over, and most modifications would be either inconsequential or fatal. The Hox genes are a representation of a productive place for evolutionary search. It's a kind of natural intelligence at the molecular level.
* What's interesting about amino acids is that they're not interesting. They have attributes that are typical but not unusual, such as attracting or repelling water. But just 20 types of them are enough to make you. In the same way, 20 or so types of digital-material part types - conducting, insulating, rigid, flexible, magnetic, etc - are enough to assemble the range of functions that go into making modern technologies like robots and computers.
* Wiener, Turing, and von Neumann all wrote about self-reproducing systems.
* Making an assembler that can assemble itself from the parts that it's assembling is a focus of my lab, along with collaborations to develop synthetic cells.
* It was an advance for:
** Atoms to form molecules
** Molecules to form organelles
** Organelles to form cells
** Cells to form organs
** Organs to form organisms
** Organisms to form families
** Families to form societies
** Societes to form civilizations
* This grand evolutionary loop can now be closed, with atoms arranging bits arranging atoms.

== W Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences ==

* Corporations and bureaus, in some sense the first AIs, are not just made of humans, but are rather hybrids of humans and the IT that allow them to coordinate. In Wiener's time, they could not operate without telephones, telegraphs, radios, and tabulating machines? Now, they need networks of computers, databases, and decision support systems.
* They are technologically augmented networks of humans with superhuman powers. They can know more than individual humans, they can sense more, they can make more complicated analyses and more complex plans. They can have vastly more resources and power than any single individual.
* Hybrid superintelligences like nation-states and corporations have their own emergent goals, and their actions are not always aligned with the interests of the people who created them.
* The neurons that carry their corporate thought are not just the human employees of the technologies that connect them; they are also coded into the policies, incentive structures, culture, and procedural habits of the corporation. The emergent corporate goals do not alway reflect the values of the people who implement them.
* We are close to being able to build superintelligences out of pure IT without human components.
* Countries had more of less unquestioned authority when most of the actors were humans who spent their lives within a single nation-state, but now that the actors of importance include geographically distributed hybrid intelligences such as multinational corporations, that logic is less obvious.
* Today we live in a complex transitional period, when distributed superintelligences still largely rely on the nation-states to settle the arguments arising among them. Often, those arguments are resolved differently in different jurisdictions.
* It is becoming more difficult even to assign individual humans to nations states. International travelers living and working outside their native countries, refugees, and immigrants (documented or not) are still dealt with as awkward exceptions. Superintelligences built purely of IT will prove even more awkward for the territorial system of authority, since there is no reason why they need to be tied to physical resources at all. An AI might well exist in the cloud rather than at any physical location.
* Four possible scenarios:
** State AIs - American vs Chinese AIs wrestling each other for resources on behalf of their state.
** Corporate AIs - With corporations becoming more powerful and autonomous than nation-states.
** Self-Interested AIs - Which act solely in their own interests, with humans viewed as ants or as simply irrelevant
** Altruistic AIs - Working to further the goals of humanity as a whole.
* Cybernetics is the study of how the weak can control the strong.
* For Wiener, information is a way for the weak to effectively cope with the strong. Bateson defines information as a difference that makes a difference.
* Inherent in the notion of a control system is the concept of amplification, which makes the small big and the weak strong.
* First law of cybernetics - to control a system completely, the controller must be as complex as the controlled.

== Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords? ==
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== Alex "Sandy" Pentland: The Human Strategy ==

* You don't have to watch AI; instead you should watch what it eats and what it does.
* Regulators, bureaucracies, and part of the government are very much like AIs: They take in the rules that we call law and regulation, and they add government data, and they make decisions that affect our lives.
* If we have the data that go into and out of each decision, we can easily ask, Is this a fair algorithm? Is this AI doing things that we as humans believe are ethical? This human-in-the-loop approach is called "open algorithms"; you get to see what the AIs take as input and what they decide using that input. If you see those two things, you'll know whether they're doing the right thing or the wrong thing. It turns out that's not hard to do. If you control the data, then you control the AI.

== Hans Ulrich Obrist: Making the Invisible Visible: Art Meets AI ==
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== Alison Gopnik: AIs vs Four-year-Olds ==

* I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults. They're very good at taking in lots on information from lots of different sources at once. They are the R&D division of the human species.
* The most sophisticated AIs are still far from being able to solve problems that human four-year-olds can accomplish with ease.
* We learn an enormous amount even when we are small children; four-year-olds know about plants and animals and machines, desires, beliefs, and emotions, even dinosaurs and spaceships.
* Science has extended our knowledge about the world to the unimaginably large and infinitesimally small, to the edge of the universe and the beginning of time. But all that reaches any of us from the world is a stream of photons hitting our retinas and disturbances of air at our ear drums. How do we learn so much about the world when the evidence we have is so limited? And how do we do all this with the few pounds of grey goo that sits behind our eyes?
* The best answer so far is that our brains perform computations on the concrete, particular, messy data arriving at our senses, and those computations yield accurate representations of the world. The representations seem to be structured, abstract, and hierarchical; they include the perception of 3D objects, the grammars that underlie language, and mental capacities like theory of mind, which lets us understand what other people think. Those representations allow us to make a wide range of new predications and imagine many new possibilities in a distinctively creative human way.
* Although children are dramatically bad at planning and decision making, they are the best learners in the universe. Much of the process of turning data into theories happens before we are five.
* Two approaches for learning:
** Aristotle - Bottom-up. Start with the senses. See also Hume, Mill, Pavlov and Skinner
** Plato - Top-down. See also rationalists like Descartes and Chomsky.
* Working out if an email is spam, I started out with a generative model that includes abstract concepts like greed and deception and describes the process that produces email scams. That lets me recognize the classic Nigerian email spam, but it also lets me imagine many different kind os possible spam. When I get the journal email, I can work backward: This seems like just the kind of mail that would come out of a spam-generating process.
* Computers need millions of examples to categorize objects that we can categorize with just a few. These bottom-up systems can generalize to new examples, they can label a new image as a cat fairly accurately over all. But they do so in ways quite different from how humans generalize. Some images almost identical to a cat image won't be identified by us as cats at all. Other that look like a random blur will be.
* Top-down was revived in the 2000s in the form of Bayesian generative models. These combine generative models and hypotheses testing with probability theory. A Bayesian model lets you calculate just how likely it is that a particular hypotheses is true, given the data. And by making small but systematic tweaks to the models we already have, and testing them against the data, we can sometimes make new concepts and models from old ones.
* How do you decide what hypotheses are worth testing in the first place?
* In bottom-up, you don't need much knowledge, but a lot of data, and you can only generalize in a limited way. In top-down, you can have just a few examples and make much broader and more varied generalizations, but you need to build much more into it to begin with. Now we are trying to combine deep learning and Bayesian inference.
* Four-year-olds can learn by taking just one or to examples, as a top-down system does, and generalizing to very different concepts. But they can also learn new concepts and models from the data itself, as a bottom-up system does.
* While recent remarkable AI advances take place in narrow and well-defined spaces of hypotheses and concepts, like games and images, children and scientists sometimes change their concepts in radical ways, performing paradigm shifts rather than simply tweaking the concepts they already have.
* Pre-schoolers are better at coming up with unlikely hypotheses than older children and adults. We have almost no idea how this kind of creative learning and innovation is possible.
* Children are active learners; they don't just passively soak up data like AIs do. They are intrinsically motivated to extract information from the world around them through their endless play and exploration. And this exploration is more systematic than it looks and is well adapted to find persuasive evidence to support hypothesis formation and theory choice. Building curiosity into machines and allowing them to actively interact with the world might be a route to more realistic and wide-ranging learning.
* Even pre-schoolers learn through imitation and by listening to the testimony of others. But they don't simply passively obey their teachers. They take in information from others in a remarkably subtle and sensitive way, making complex inferences about where the information comes from and how trustworthy it is and systematically integrating their own experiences with what they are hearing.

== Peter Galison: Algorists Dream of Objectivity ==

* Algorist - Someone profoundly suspicious of the intervention of human judgement.
* In many studies across domains such as sentencing to psychiatry, predictions using actuarial tables, a multiple-regression equation, or an algorithmic judgement equaled or exceeded in accuracy those using the subjective approach.
* Scientific objectivity has a history, starting after the first third of the 19th C. It came to mean that our representations of things were executed by holding back from intervention. But then, subjective factors have to be part of the scientific work needed to create, classify, and interpret scientific images.

== George M Church: The Rights of Machines ==

* The main reason for the 6 tn joules of energy required to get a productive human mind is the 20 years required for training.

== Caroline A Jones: The Artistic Use of Cybernetic Beings ==

* Cybernetics the word claimed postwar newness for concepts that were easily 400 yrs old, notions of feedback, machine damping, biological homeostasis, logical calculation, and systems thinking that had been around since the Enlightenment (boosted by the Industrial Revolution), and coming from Descartes, Leibniz, Carnot, Clausius, Maxwell, and Watt.
* Wiener: "We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist."
* In the 60s and 70s artists were bricoleurs of electronic bodies, interested in actions rather than calculation or cognition.
* Some sculptures stimulated (and simulated) an affective rather than a rational interaction. Humans felt they were encountering behaviors indicative of responsive life.
* What interested artists were machinic motions evoking drives, instincts, and affects; they mimicked sexual and animal behaviors, as if below the threshold of consciousness.
* Consciousness is not just "in here" but streaming in and out, harmonizing those sensory, scintillating signals. Mind happens well outside the limits of the cranium.
* Bateson: Mind is material "not necessarily defined by a boundary such as an envelope of skin."
* Right cybernetics vs left cybernetics.
* Bateson's God is a placeholder for our evanescent experience of interacting consciousness-in-the-world: larger mind as a result of inputs and actions that then become inputs for other actions in concert with other entities - webs of symbiotic relationships that form patterns we need urgently to sense and harmonize with.

== Stephen Wolfram: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Civilization ==

* I see technology as taking human goals and making them automatically executable by machines:
** Previously we wanted to move objects from here to there.
** Now the work is mental rather than physical.
* A brain receives certain input, it computes things, it causes certain actions to happen, it generates a certain output. Like the weather. All sorts of systems are, effectively, doing computations - whether it's a brain, or a cloud responding to its thermal environment.
* What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which give us our notions of purpose and goals. When the box on our desk thinks as well as the human brain does, what it still won't have, intrinsically, are goals and purposes. Those are defined by our particulars - biology, psychology, and cultural history.
* Today we've got all kinds of purposes. 1000 yrs ago it was do I have food and am I safe. Now, many of us barely think about those purposes.
* There isn't a bright line between what is intelligent and what is simply computational.
* You can take a large collection of the world's knowledge and automatically answer questions on the basis of it, using what are essentially merely computational techniques. This is much more analogous to what biology does in evolution.
* My approach was to make a language that panders not to the computers but to the humans, to take whatever a human thinks of and convert it into some form that the computer can understand.
* There are maybe 5000 picturable common nouns in English, 10,000 if you include things like special kinds of plants and beetles that people would recognize with some frequency. We trained our system on 30 m images of these kind of things. It's a big, complicated, messy neural network, which takes about a quadrillon GPU operations to do the training.
* It's impressive because it pretty much matches what humans can do. It has about the same training data that human have - about the same number of images a human infant would see in the first couple of years of its life. roughly the same number of operations have to be done in the learning process, using about the same number of neurons in at least the first 3 levels of our visual cortex.
* In the late 1600s, Leibniz, Wilkins and others were concerned with what they called philosophical languages - complete, universal, symbolic representations of things in the world.
* How has knowledge been transmitted:
** Genetics
** Physiological recognition
** Natural language
** Knowledge-based programming, which is immediately executable, with the knowledge of the world knitted into the language you're using to write code.
* There's computation all over the universe; in a turbulent fluid producing some complicated pattern of flow, in the celestial mechanics of planetary interactions, in brains. But does it have a purpose? Does the weather have a goal? Does climate have a goal?
* I don't think there is abstract purpose per se or abstract meaning. Does the universe have a purpose? Then you're doing theology in some way. Purpose is something that comes only from history.
* There are computational processes that you can go through in which there is no way to shortcut that process. Much of science has been about shortcutting computation done by nature. If we're doing celestial mechanics and want to predict where the planets will be in a million years, we follow the equations step-by-step to reduce the computation. We can be smarter than the universe and predict the endpoint without going through all the steps, but some details are irreducible. That's why history means something. If we could get to the endpoint without going through the steps, history would be, in some sense, pointless.
* How do you determine whether abstract AI has a purpose?
* What's the difference between a rock and a box of a trillion downloaded souls? The details of what's happening in the box were derived from the long history of human civilization, whereas the rock has its long geological history but not the particular history of our civilization.
* Realizing that there isn't a genuine distinction between intelligence and mere computation leads you to imagine that future - the endpoint of our civilization as a box of a trillion souls, each of them essentially playing a video game forever. What is the "purpose" of that?

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

2026-07-26T15:54:27Z

Robert.adlington:

=== Preface ===

* This random element, this organic incompleteness, is one which without too violent a figure of speech we consider evil.
* As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs universe order is least probable, chaos most probable.
* But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves. It is with this point of view at its core that the new science of Cybernetics began its development.

=== Cybernetics and History ===

* It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and mad, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.
* The commands through which we exercise our control over our environment are a kind of information which we impart to it. Like any form of information, these commands are subject to disorganization in transit. They generally come through in less coherent fashion and certainly not more coherently than they were sent. In control and communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency, as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase.
* Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment.
* Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.
* The control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is know as feedback, and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors - that is, of elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.

=== Progress and Entropy ===

* We, as human beings, are not isolated systems. We take in food, which generates energy, from the outside, and are, as a result, parts of that larger world which contains those sources of our vitality. But even more important is the fact that we take in information through our sense organs, and we act on information received.
* In 19th C physics, it seemed to cost nothing to get information. Modern physics, however, recognizes that Maxwell's demon can only gain the information with which it opens or closes the door from something like a sense organ, which for these purposes is an eye.
* In a system which is not in equilibrium, or in part of such a system, entropy need not increase. It may, in fact, decrease locally.
* Machines also contribute to a local and temporary building up of information, notwithstanding their crude and imperfect organization compared with that of ourselves.
* The nervous system and the automatic machines are fundamentally alike in that they are devices which make decisions on the basis of the decisions they have made in the past.
* The synapse in the living organism corresponds to the switching devise in the machine.
* There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the existence of these islands enables some of us to assert the existence of progress.
* What many of us fail to realize is that the last 400 years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This partly the result of increased communication, but also of an increased master over nature which, on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.
* We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one. Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.

=== Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior ===

* In these higher forms of communicative organisms the environment, considered as the past experience of the individual, can modify the patterns of behavior into one which in some sense or other will deal more effectively with the future environment.
* In other words, the organism is not like the clockwork monad of Leibnitz with its pre-established harmony with the universe, but actually seeks a new equilibrium with the universe and its future contingencies. Its present is unlike its past and its future unlike its present. In the living organism as in the universe itself, exact repetition is absolutely impossible.
* Learning, like more primitive forms of feedback is a process which reads differently forward and backward in time. It moves ahead from a known past into an unknown future, and this future is not interchangeable with that past.
* Administrative officials, whether of a government or a university or a corporation, should take part in a two-way stream of communication, and not merely in one descending from the top. Otherwise, the top officials may find that they have based their policy on a complete misconception of the facts that their underlings possess.
* This matter of social feedback is of very great sociological and anthropological interest. The patterns of communication in human societies vary widely.
* It is a thesis of this chapter that this aspiration of the fascist for a human state based on the model of the ant results from a profound misapprehension both of the nature of the ant and of the nature of man.
* Variety and possibility are inherent in the human sensorium - and are indeed the key to man's most noble flights - because variety and possibility belong to the very structure of the human organism.
* These skeletons of bone or cartilage contain a great deal of tissue which is not in any strict sense alive, but throughout this mass of intercellular tissue there is a living structure of cells, cellular membranes, and nutritive blood vessels.
* The behavior of an ant is much more a matter of instinct than of intelligence. The physical straitjacket in which an insect grows up is directly responsible for the mental straitjacket which regulates its pattern of behavior.
* Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it.
* Theoretically, if we could build a machine whose mechanical structure duplicated human physiology, then we could have a machine whose intellectual capacities would duplicate those of human beings.
* If we compare man with the great apes, his closest relatives, we find that mature man in hair, head, shape, body proportions, bony structure, muscles, and so on, is more like the newborn ape than the adult ape. Among the animals, man is a Peter Pan who never grows up.
* Man thus spends what may amount to 40% of his normal life as a learner, again for reasons that have to do with his physical structure. It is as completely natural for a human society to be based on learning as for an ant society to be based on an inherited pattern.
* This form of learning (about whether a whole policy is successful) is most certainly a feedback, but it is a feedback on a higher level, a feedback of policies and not of simple actions.
* If the information which proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning.
* The adjustment of the general plan of pointing and firing the gun according to the particular system of motions which the target has made is essentially an act of learning. It is a change in the taping of the gun's computing mechanism, which alters not so much the numerical data, as the process by which they are interpreted. It is, in fact, a very general sort of feedback, affecting the whole method of behavior of the instrument.
* For practical purposes, machines that measure, as opposed to machines that count, are very greatly limited in their precision. Add this to the prejudices of the physiologist in favor of all-or-nothing action, and we see why the greater part of the work which has been done on the mechanical simulacra of the brain has been on machines which are more or less on a digital basis.
* For several centuries, science, dominated by the Aristotelian impulse to classify, neglected the modern impulse to search for ways in which phenomena functioned.
* It is interesting to know that the sort of phenomenon which is recorded subjectively as emotion may not be merely a useless epiphenomenon of nervous action, but may control some essential stage in learning and other processes.

=== The Mechanism and History of Language ===

* In general, one would expect the language of animals to convey emotions first, things next, and the more complicated relations of things not at all.
* Even the most vocal members of the sub-human world fail to complete with man in ease of giving significance to new sounds, in repertory of sounds carrying a specific codification in extent of linguistic memory, and above all in the ability to form symbols for relations, classes, and other entities of Russell's "higher logical type".
* It may seem curious to the reader that we admit machines to the field of language and yet almost totally deny language to the ants. Nevertheless, in constructing machines, it is often very important for us to extend to them certain human attributes which are not found among the lower members of the animal community.
* The process of transmitting information may involve several consecutive stages of transmission following one another in addition to the final or effective stage; and between any two of these there will be an act of translation, capable of dissipating information. That information may be dissipated but not gained, is, as we have seen, the cybernetic form of the second law of thermodynamics.
* In a certain sense, all communication systems terminate in machines, but the ordinary language systems terminate in the special sort of machine known as a human being.
* Three distinct levels of human communication:
** Phonetic - the ear and that part of the cerebral mechanism which is in permanent and rigid connection with the inner ear.
** Semantic - concerned with meaning. This apparatus neither receives nor translates the language word by word, but idea by idea, and often still more generally. In a certain sense it is in a position to call on the whole of past experience in its transformations, and these long-time carry-overs are not a trivial part of its work.
** Behavioral - the translation of the experiences of the individual, whether conscious or unconscious, into actions which may be observed externally.
* If a community of children were left out of contact with the language of their seniors through the critical speech-forming years, they would emerge with something, which crude as it might be, would be unmistakably a language.
* In man, unlike the apes, the impulse to use some sort of language is overwhelming; but that the particular language used is a matter which has to be learned in each special case. It apparently is built into the brain itself, that we are to have a preoccupation with codes and with the sounds of speech and that the preoccupation with codes can be extended from those dealing with speech to those that concern themselves with visual stimuli.
* The gift of speech does not go back to a universal Adamite language disrupted in the Tower of Babel. It is strictly a psychological impulse, and is not the gift of speech, but the gift of the power of speech.
* There is a critical period during which speech is most readily learned; and if this period is passed over without contact with one's fellow human beings, of whatever sort they may be, the learning of language becomes limited, slow, and highly imperfect.
* To sum up, the human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be. Speech is the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement of man.
* Semantically significant information in the machine as well as in man is information which gets through to an activating mechanism in the system that receives it, despite man's and/or nature's attempts to subvert it. From the point of view of Cybernetics, semantics defines the extent of meaning and controls its loss in a communications system.

=== Organization as the Message ===

* Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise.
* The process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay is know as homeostasis.
* We can continue to live in the very special environment which we carry forward with us only until we begin to decay more quickly than we can reconstitute ourselves. Then we die.
* It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone of our personal identity.
* We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.
* Where a man's word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended. To see and to give commands to the whole world is almost the same as being everywhere.
* The transportation of messages serves to forward an extension of man's senses and his capabilities of action from one end of the world to another. The distinction between material transportation and message transportation is not in any theoretical sense permanent and unbridgeable.
* Just as a computing machines may be used as a pattern on which to tape other computing machines, and just as the future development of these two machines will continue parallel except for future changes in taping and experience, so too, there is no inconsistency in a living individual forking or devaricating into two individuals sharing the same past, but growing more and more different.
* Two large machines which had previously not been coupled may become coupled so as to work from that stage on as a single machine.
* The individuality of the body is that of a frame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than of a bit of substance. This form can be transmitted or modified and duplicated, although at present we know only how to duplicate it over a short distance.
* Let us then admit that the idea that one might conceivable travel by telegraph, in addition to traveling by train or airplane is not intrinscically absurd, far as it may be from realization.

=== Law and Communication ===

* Law may be defined as the ethical control applied to communication, and to language as a form of communication, especially when this normative aspect is under the control of some authority sufficiently strong to give its decisions an effective social sanction. It is the process of adjusting the couplings connecting the behavior of different individuals in such a way that what we call justice may be accomplished, and disputes may be avoided, or at least adjudicated.
* Thus the theory and practice of the law involves two sets of problems; those of its general purpose, of its conception of justice; and those of the technique by which these concepts of justice can be made effective.
* What compulsion the very existence of the community and the state may demand must be exercised in such a way as to produce no unnecessary infringement of freedom.
* The law must be so clear and reproducible that the individual citizen can assess his rights and duties in advance, even where they appear to conflict with those of others. He must be able to ascertain with a reasonable certainty what view a judge or a jury will take of his position.
* Reproducibility is prior to equity, for without it there can be no equity.
* No new legal term has a completely secure meaning until it and its limitations have been determined in practice; and this is a matter of precedent.
* Every case decided should advance the definition of the legal terms involved in a manner consistent with past decision, and it should lead naturally on to new ones.
* Where the law of Western countries is at present least satisfactory is on the criminal side. Law seems to consider punishment, now as a threat to discourage other possible criminals, now as a ritual act of expiation on the part of the guilty man, now as a device for removing him from society and for protecting the latter from the danger of repeated misconduct, and now as an agency for the social and the moral reform of the individual. These are four different tasks, to be accomplished by four different methods; and unless we know an accurate way of proportioning them, our whole attitude to the criminal will be at cross-purposes.
* The first duty of the law is to know what it wants, to make clear, unambiguous statements, which not only experts, but the common man of the times will interpret in one way and in one way only. Thus the problems of law are problems of orderly and repeatable control of certain critical situations.
* The whole nature of our legal system is that of a conflict in which at least three parties take part - the plaintiff, the defendant, and the legal system as represented by judge and jury.
* It is a game in the full Von Neumann sense; a game in which the litigants try by methods which are limited by the code of law to obtain the judge and the jury as their partners.
* In ushc a game the opposing lawyer, unlike nature itself, can and deliberately does try to introduce confusion into the messages of the side he is opposing. He tries to reduce their statements to nonsense, and he deliberately jams the messages between his antagonist and the judge and jury. In this jamming, it is inevitable the bluff should occasionally be at a premium.

=== Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy ===

* The fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold.
* In the late 19th C, with Edison, invention came to mean, not the gadget-insight of a shop-worker, but the result of a careful, comprehensive search by a team of competent scientists.
* The typical American cannot conceive of a piece of information without an owner.
* The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation in its value is false.
* Information is more a matter of process than of storage. That country will have the greatest security whose informational and scientific situation is adequate to meet the demands that may be put on it - the country in which it is fully realized that information is important as a stage in the continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and act effectively upon it.
* No amount of scientific research, carefully recorded in books and papers, and then put into our libraries with labels of secrecy, will be adequate to protect us for any length of time in a world where the effective level of information is perpetually advancing. There is no Maginot Line of the brain.
* To be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage. To be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its unhampered exchange.
* It is both far more difficult and far more important for us to ensure that we have such an adequate knowledge than to ensure that some possible enemy does not have it. The whole arrangement of a military research laboratory is along lines hostile to our own optimum use and development of information.
* The greatest single example of the art of decoding is the decoding of the secrets of nature itself and is the province of the scientist.
* Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
* It is perhaps impossible to devise any secondary code as hard to break as the natural code of the atomic nucleus.
* There is a great fertilizing and revivifying values in the contact of two scientists with each other; but this can only come when at least one of the human beings representing the science has penetrated far enough across the frontier to be able to absorb the ides of the neighbor into an effective plan of thinking. The natural vehicle for this type of organization is a plan in which the orbit of each scientist is assigned rather by the scope of his interests than as a predetermined beat.
* The whole technique of secrecy, message jamming, and bluff, is concerned with insuring that one's own side can make use of the forces and agencies of communication more effectively than the other side. In this combative use of information it is quite as important to keep one's own message channels open as to obstruct the other side in the use of the channels available to it.
* We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever he does, he will be frustrated.

=== Role of the Intellectual and the Scientist ===

* More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value.
* Beauty, like order, occurs in many places in this world, but only as a local and temporary fight against the Niagara of increasing entropy.

=== The First and the Second Industrial Revolution ===

* The Industrial Revolution concerned the machine purely as an alternative to human muscle.
* The first fields to show the impact of the Newtonian ere were those of navigation and of clockmaking.
* For navigation, measuring latitude was relatively easy, but longitude was much more difficult and prizes were offered, as advances in navigation would help dominance on the seas. Prizes were won for:
** An accurate ship's chronometer, able to keep the time within a few seconds over a voyage in which it was subject to the continual viloent motion of the ship.
** The construction of good mathematical tables of the motion of the moon, which enabled the navigator to use that body as the clock with which to check the apparent motion off the sun.
* Navigation and the instruments necessary for it were the locus of an industrial revolution before the main industrial evolution, which began with the steam engine.
* Steam transportation on the Mississippi opened up the interior of the US, starting as a means of hauling freight.
* The textile mills furnished the model for almost the whole course of the mechanization of industry. They began the transfer of the workers from the home to the facroy and from the country to the city.
* In all important respects, the man who has nothing but his physical power to sell has nothing to sell which it is worth anyone's money to buy.
* The machine plays no favorites between manual labor and white-collar labor. The possible fields into which the new industrial revolution is likely to penetrate are very extensive, and include all labor performing judgments of a low level, in much the same way as the displaced labor of the earlier inductrial revolution included every aspect of human power.
* "'''Machinery of Judgment'''"

=== Some Communication Machines and Their Future ===

* The simples type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked. This corresponds rather closely to the human phenomenon known as intention tremor, in which, ofr example, when the patient reaches for a glass of water, his hand swings wider and wider, and he cannot lift up the glass.
* There is another type of human tramor which is in some ways diametrically opposite to intention tremor. It is known as Parkinsonianism, and is familiar to all of us as the shaking palsy of old men. Here the patient displays the tremor even at rest; and, in fact, if the disease is not too greatly marked, only at rest. When he attempts to accomplish a definite purpose this tremor subsides to such an extent that the victim of an early stage of Parkinsonianism can even be a successful eye surgeon.
* This machine has two principal modes of action, in one of which it is positively photo-tropic and searches for light, and in the other of which it is negatively photo-tropic and runs away from light. We called the machine in its two respective functions, the Moth and the Bedbug. The machine consists of a little three-wheeled cart with a propelling motor on the rear axle.
* This feedback tends to accomplish the purpose of either positive or negative feed back, for in man we consider that a voluntary action is essentially a choice among tropisms. When this feedback is overloaded by increasing the amplification, the little car will seek the light or avoid it in an oscillatory manner, in which the oscillations grow ever larger. This is a close analog to the phenomenon of intention tremor, which is associated with injury to the cerebellum.
* Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions, if it does not possess the power of learning, will be completely literal-minded. Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct, unless we have previously examined the laws of its action, and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us! On the other hand, the machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us. For the man who is not aware of this, tho throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine, whether it can learn or not, is to cast his responsibility to the winds, and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind.
* Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions. The Mondkey's Paw of skin and bone is quite as deadly as anything case out of steel and iron. The djinnee which is a unifying figure of speech for a whole corporation is just as fearsome as if it were a glorified conjuring trick.
* The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.

=== Language, Confusion, and Jam ===

* The game theory of Von Neumann concerns one team which is deliberately trying to get the message across and another team which will resort ot any strategy to jam the message.
* The devil whom the scientist is fighting is the devil of confusion, not of willful malice. The view that nature reveals an entropic tendency is Augustinian, not Manichaean. Its inability to undertake an aggressive policy, deliberately to defeat the scientist, means that its evil doing is the result of a weakness in his nature rather than of a specifically evil power that it may have, equal or inferior to the principles of order in the universe which, local and temporary as they may be, still are probably not too unlike what the religious man means by God.
* In Augustinianism the black of the world is negative and is the mere absence of white, while in Manichaeanism, white and back belong to two opposed armies drawn up in line facing one another. There is a subtle emotional Manichaenism implicit in all crusades, all jihads, and all wars of communism against the devil of capitalism.
* The laws of induction in logic cannot be established inductively. Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith.
* Einstein's dictum concerning the directness of God is itself a statement of faith. Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.
* A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthily growing science imposes upon it.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

How to Do Things with Words

2026-07-26T15:54:09Z

Robert.adlington:

=== Lecture I - Performative Utterances ===

* There are sentences where I am not describing what I am doing, nor stating that I am doing it, but simply doing something. These kinds of utterances are neither true nor false.
* I propose to call it a performative sentence or utterance or simply a "performative"
* Many performatives are contractual ("I bet") or declaratory ("I declare war") utterances.

=== Lecture II - Things That Can Go Wrong ===

* Things that can be and go wrong on the occasions of such utterances are infelicities:
** Misfires - Act purported but void
*** Misinvocations - Act disallowed
**** ?
**** Misapplications
*** Misexecutions - Act vitiated
**** Flaws
**** Hitches
** Abuses - Act professed but hollow
*** Insincerities
*** ?
* An actor on a stage, a poem, or a soliloquy are special cases, used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon normal use.

=== Lecture III - Misfires ===

* The boundary between "inappropriate persons" and "inappropriate circumstances" will necessarily not be a very hard and fast one. Indeed circumstances can clearly be extended to cover in general the natures of all persons participating.
* We must at all costs avoid over-simplification, which one might be tempted to call the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation (see [[Intriguing Words, Expressions, Phrases]])

=== Lecture IV - Abuses ===

* Insincerity is when the circumstances are in order and the act is performed, not void, but I had no business to congratulate you or to condole you, feeling as I did.
* For a certain performative utterance to be happy, certain statements have to be true.
* In order to explain what can go wrong with statements we cannot just concentrate on the proposition involved (whatever that is) as has been done traditionally. We must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued - the total speech act - if we are to see the parallel between statements and performative utterances, and how each can go wrong. So the total speech act in the total speech situation is emerging from logic piecemeal as important in special cases: and thus we are assimilating the supposed constative utterance to the performative.

=== Lecture V - Constative Utterances are Performative Utterances? ===

* At least in some ways there is a danger of our initial and tentative distinction between constative and performative utterances breaking down.
* I must explain again that we are floundering here. To feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating, but brings its revenges.

=== Lecture VI - Language is Becoming More Precise ===

* Historically, from the point of view of the evolution of language, the explicitly performative must be a later development than certain more primary utterances, many of which at least are already implicit performatives, which are included in most or many explicit performatives as parts of a whole.
* It seems much more likely that the "pure statement is a goal, an ideal, towards which the gradual development of science has given the impetus, as it has likewise also towards the goal or precision. Language as such and in its primitive stages is not precise, and it is also not, in our sense, explicit: precision in language makes it clearer what is being said - its meaning: explicitness, in our sense, makes clearer the force of the utterances, or how (in one sense) it is to be taken. 
=== Lecture VII ===

=== Lecture VIII ===

=== Lecture IX ===

=== Lecture X ===

=== Lecture XI ===

=== Lecture XII ===

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Alan Turing: The Enigma

2026-07-26T15:53:56Z

Robert.adlington:

== Part One: The Logical ==

=== 1. Esprit de Corps (to 13 February 1930) ===

* Alan was slow to learn that indistinct line that separated initiative from disobedience and resisted the duties of childhood.
* He had identified the crucial point, that Einstein doubted the axioms. Not for Alan the 'obvious duties', for nothing was obvious to him.

=== 2. The Spirit of Truth (to 14 April 1936) ===

* For a person with a mathematical mind, an ability to deal with very abstract relations and symbols as thought with tangible everyday objects...
* He had thought deeply about Einstein and had broken the rules to do so.
* For science, to Alan Turing, was thinking for himself, and seeing for himself, and not a collection of facts. Science was doubting the axioms. He had the pure mathematical approach to the subject, allowing a free rein to thought, and seeing afterwards whether or not it had application to the physical world.
* The distinction between science and mathematics had only been clarified in the late 19th C. Until then it might be supposed that mathematics necessarily represented the relations of numbers and quantities appearing in the physical world, although this point of view had really been doomed as soon as such concepts as the 'negative numbers" were developed. The 19th C however, had seen developments in many branches of mathematics towards an abstract point of view. Mathematical symbols became less and less obliged to correspond directly with physical entities.
* One remarkable thing about Gödel's special assertion was that since it was not provable, it was, in a sense, true. But to say it was true required an observer who could, as it were, look at the system from outside. It could not be shown by working within the axiomatic system.

=== 3. New Men (to 3 September 1939) ===

* Curiously, the failure of the Hilbert programme had also meant the end of the point of view advanced by Wittgenstein in his first phase, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that every well-posed problem could be solved.
* ... overcoming the line drawn between mathematics and engineering, the logical and the physical.
* It was not science, not 'applied mathematics', but a sort of applied logic, something that had no name.

=== 4. The Relay Race (to 10 November 1942) ===

* Indeed, discerning a pattern in the apparently patternless was essentially the work of the cryptanalyst, as of the scientist.
* The English mathematician Thomas Bayes had seen how to formalise the concept of "inverse probability" - this being the technical term for the likely cause of an effect, rather than the probable effect of a cause.
* English "eccentricity" served as a safety valve for those who doubted the general rules of society.
* He was fascinated that people could be taking part in something clever, in a quite mindless way.

== Bridge Passage (to 1 April 1943) ==

== Part Two: The Physical ==

=== 5. Running Up (to 2 September 1945) ===

* He wanted "to build a brain".
* In his view, the physics and chemistry were relevant only in as much as they sustained the medium for the embodiment of discrete "states", "reading", and "writing". Only the logical pattern of these "states" could really matter. The claim was that whatever a brain did, it did by virtue of its structure as a logical system, and not because it was inside a person's head, or because it was a spongy tissue made up of a particular kind of biological cell formation.
* The Turing model did not seek to explain one kind of phenomenon, that of mind, in terms of another. It did not expect to "reduce" psychology to anything. The thesis was that "mind" or psychology could propertly be described in terms of Turing machines because they both lay on the same level of description of the world, that of descrete logical systems. It was not a reduction, but an attempt at transference, when he imagined embodying such systems in an artificial "brain".
* He had rejected the idea of a "we" behind the brain that somehow "did" this signaling and organizing of the memory. The signalling and the organization had to be all that there was.
* The logical transformation of symbols was what mattered, not physical power .
* His "weight of evidence" theory had shown how to transfer certain kinds of human recognition, judgment and decision into an "instruction note" form. His chess-playing methods did the same thing - as did the games on the Colossi - and posed the question as to where a line could be drawn between the "intelligent" and the "mechanical". His view, expressed in terms of the imitation principle, was that there was no such line, and neither did he ever draw a sharp distinction between the "states of mind" approach and the "instruction note" approach to the problem of reconciling the appearances of freedom and of determinism.
* "We do not need to have an infinity of different machines doing different jobs. A single one will suffice. The engineering problem of producing various machines for various jobs is replaced by the office work of "programming" the universal machine to do these jobs."
* He had learned how to build a brain - not an electric brain, as he might possibly have imagined before the war - but an electronic brain.
* An English homosexual atheist mathematician had conceived of the computer (ie, an automatic electronic digital computer with internal program storage).
* Analogue machines measured physical quantities, while digital machines were for organizing symbols. For every increase in accuracy a new analogue machine is needed, while digital machines just need to be reprogrammed.
* After working on a Difference Engine, to mechanize the particular numerical method used in the construction of mathematical tables, Babbage had conceived (by 1937) of an Analytical Engine, whose essential property was that of mechanising any mathematical operation.
* It was the mechanisation of the organizing or logical control of the arithmetic that mattered.
* Without conditional branching, the ability to mechanize the word IF, the grandest calculator would be no more than a glorified adding machine.
* The ENIAC - the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (started April 1943).
* Every tradition of common sense and clear thinking would tend to suggest that "numbers" were entirely different in kind from instructions. The obvious thing was to keep them apart: the data in one place and the stock of instructions to operate on the date, in another place. It was obvious - but wrong.

=== 6. Mercury Delayed (to 2 October 1948) ===

* "When we have decided what machine we wish to imitate, we punch a description of it on the tape of the universal machine. This description explains what the machine would do in every configuration in which it might find itself. The universal machine has only to keep looking at this description in order to find out what it should do at each stage. Thus, the complexity of the machine to be imitated is concentrated in the tape and does not appear in the universal machine proper in any way."
* His idea was that anything in the way of refinement or convenience for the user could be performed by thought and not be machinery, by instructions and not by hardware.
* To Alan Turing, the multiplier was a rather tiresome technicality; the heart lay in the logical control, which took the instructions from the memory, and put them in operation.
* He had invented the art of computer programming.
* His mind still straddled mathematics, engineering and philosophy in a way that the academic structure could not accommodate.
* "We believe then that there are large parts of the brain, chiefly in the cortex, whose function is largely indeterminate. In the infant these parts do not have much effect: the effect they have is uncoordinated. In the adult they have great and purposive effect: the form of this effect depends on the training in childhood. A large remnant of the random behavior of infancy remains in the adult. All this suggests that the cortex of the infant is an unorganized machines, which can be organized by suitable interfering training. The organizing might result in the modification of the machine into a universal machine or something like it."
* They had (in Manchester), on 21 June 1948, successfully run the first program on the first working stored program electronic digital computer in the world.
* "To a large extent I agree with you about 'thinking in analogies', but I do not think of the brain as 'searching for analogies' so much as having analogies forced upon it by its own limitations..."

=== 7. The Greenwood Tree (to 7 February 1952) ===

* "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in Mind in October 1950
** There was no way of telling that other people were 'thinking' or 'conscious' except by a process of comparison with oneself, and he saw no reason to treat computers any differently.
** A learning machine might achieve a 'supercritical' state when, in analogy with the atomic pile, it would produce more ideas than those with which it had been fed.
** From a philosophical point of view, it could be said to fit in with Ryle's The Concept of Mind, which had appeared in 1949, and which put forward the idea of mind not as something added to the brain, but as a kind of description of the world. But Alan's paper proposed a specific kind of description, namely of the discrete state machine.
* Edward Carpenter: "The method of Science is the method of all mundane knowledge; it is that of limitation or actual ignorance. Placed in face of the great uncontained unity of Nature we can only deal with it in thought by selecting certain details and isolating those (either wilfully of unconsciously) from the rest."
* To model the activity of the brain as a 'discrete controlling machine' was a good example of 'selecting certain details', since the brain could, if desired, be described in many other ways. Alan's theses was, however, that this was the model relevant to what was called 'thinking'.
* The structure of the brain must connect the words it stores, with the occasions for using those words, and with the fists and tears, blushes and fright associated with them, or for which they substitute. Could the words be stored for 'intelligent' use, within a discrete-state machine model of the brain, unless that model were also equipped with the brain's sensory and motor and chemical peripheries? Is there intelligence without life? Is there mind without communication? Is there language without living? Is there thought without experience? These were the questions posed by Alan Turing's argument - questions close to those that worried Wittgenstein. Is language a game, or must it have a connection with real life?
* Having set down a highly intelligent plan, Alan tended to assume that the political wheels would turn as if by magic to put it into effect. He never allowed for the interaction required to achieve anything in the real world.
* Orwell's passion was reserved for intellectual integrity: keeping the mind whole, keeping it in contact with external reality.
* Science and sex! - they had been the two things that allowed Alan Turing to jump out of the social system in which he was trained.
* People had always use the word 'intelligence' in a broader sense, involving some insight into reality, rather than the ability to achieve goals or solve puzzles or break ciphers.
* The formalist school of mathematics, which had given such a start to his career, had explicitly been concerned to treat mathematics as if it were a chess game, without asking for a connection with the world.
* It might be said that the kind of machine behavior that he was describing, a behavior unrelated to action, was not so much the ability to think as the ability to dream.
* The discrete-state machine was like an ideal for his own life, in which he would be left alone in a room of his own, to deal with the outside world solely by rational argument.
* He had an extreme consciousness of the social rules and conventions placed upon him. Puzzled since childhood by the 'obvious duties', he was doubly detached from the imitation game of social life, as pure scientist and homosexual. Manners, committees, examinations, interrogations, German codes and fixed moral codes - they all threatened his freedom. Some he would accept, some actually enjoy obeying, others reject, but in any case he was peculiarly conscious, self-conscious of things that other people accepted 'without thinking'.
* The free individual, sometimes working with the social machine, more often against it, learning by 'interference' from outside, yet resenting that interference: the interplay between intelligence and duty; the abrasion and stimulation of interaction with the environment - this was his life.
* Gastrulation - the process in which a perfect sphere of cells would suddenly develop a groove, determining the head and tail ends of the emergent animal. The problem was this: if the sphere were symmetrical, without knowledge of left or right, up or down, where did this decision come from? In some way information was being created at this point, and this went against what was normally expected. When the lump of sugar has been dissolved in the tea, no information remains, at the chemical level, as to where it was. But in certain phenomena, those of crystallization for instance, the reverse process could occur.
* Random disturbances on a sphere could lead to a particular axis being picked out.
* How analogy could work - When two or more sets of ideas have the same pattern of logical connections, the brain may very likely economize parts by using some of them twice over, to remember the logical connections both in the one case and in the other. One must suppose that some part of my brain was used twice over in this way, once for the idea of double negation, and once for crossing the road, there and back; I am really supposed to know about both these things but can't get what it is the man is driving at, so long as he is talking about all these dreary nots and not-nots. Somehow it doesn't get through to the right part of the brain. But as soon as he says his piece about crossing the road it gets through to the right part, but by a different route. If there is some purely mechanical explanation of how this argument by analogy goes on in the brain, one could make a digital computer do the same.

=== 8. On The Beach (to 7 June 1954) ===

* "In considering the functions of the mind or the brain we find certain operations which we can explain in purely mathematical terms. This we say does not correspond to the real mind: it is a sort of skin which we must strip off if we are to find the real mind. But then in what remains we find a further skin to be stripped off, and so on. Proceeding in this way do we ever come to the 'real' mind, or do we eventually come to the skin which had nothing in it?
* The arrest obliged him to become more conscious of the conduct of his life and more conscious of the environment.
* "Thinking is those mental processes we don't understand."
* His emphasis, as with Jung, was on the integration of 'thinking' and 'feeling'. To apply intelligence to himself; to look at his own system from outside like Gödel, and break his own code.
* "Description must be non-linear, prediction must be linear."
* There was certainly a part of his mind that his friends did not know, and which did not belong to himself, but to those who moved the pieces.
* He had never sought to change the world, only to interpret it.
* There was no such thing as a 'simple' life for him, no more than there was a 'simple' science. Bletchley had proved GH Hardy wrong about pure mathematics; nothing was pure, and no one could be an island.
* Lonely consciousness of self-consciousness was at the center of his ideas.
* He had given himself to ideas and things rather than to people, many of those things and ideas were the means by which he tried to approach the understanding of himself and other human beings, and ot do so from first principles.
* Science for him remained independent of human purposes, judgments and feelings that were entirely irrelevant to the question of what was so.
* Concepts of objective truth that worked so well for the prime numbers could not so straightforwardly be applied by scientists to other people.
* This was a super-Gödelian problem, concerning the capacity of scientific language to jump outside the society in which it was embodied, and a problem to which Alan Turing's mind was not attuned.
* His life belied his work, for it could not be contained by the discrete-state machine. At every stage his life raised question about the connection (or lack of it) between the mind and the body, thought and action, intelligence and operations, science and society, the individual and history.
* Although driven by the desire to do something, he wanted to remain ordinary, to be left alone in peace. These were incompatible goals, and there was no consistency in him.
* Orwell's dream of the plain-speaking Englishman was close to Alan Turing's simple model of the mind - the vision of a science independent of human error.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Le Bilan de L'intelligence

2026-07-26T15:53:38Z

Robert.adlington:

* L'interruption, l'incohérence, la surprise sont des conditions ordinaires de notre vie
* Nous ne supportons plus la durée. Nous ne savons plus féconder l'ennui. Notre nature a horreur du vide, - ce vide sur lequel les esprits de jadis savaient peindre les images de leurs idéaux, leurs Idées, au sens de Platon.
* 1800 - la découverte du courant électrique.
* ...quel effort d'adaptation s'impose à une race si longtemps enfermée dans la contemplation et l'utilisation des mêmes phénomènes immédiatement observables, depuis l'origine.
* (N'omettons pas, ici, de remarquer que tous ces grands hommes qui viennent de se déclarer incapables de comprendre la dynamo tombée de la Terre aux Enfers ont fait exactement ce que nous-même faisons quand nos interrogeons un cerveau, le pesant, le disséquant, le débitant en coupes minces et soumettant ces lamelles fixées à l'examen histologique. Ce transformateur natural nous demeure incompréhensible...)
* Le continuité régnait dans les esprits. On trouvait, sans grande difficulté, des modèles, des exemples, des précédents, des causes, dans les documents, les souvenirs, les ouvrages historiques.
* Tout homme appartient à deux ères.
* Ainsi, l'action de l'esprit, créant furieusement, et comme dans l'emportement le plus aveugle, des moyens matériels de grande puissance, a engendré d'énormes événements, d'échelle mondiale, et ces modifications du monde humain se sont imposées sans ordre, sans plan préconçu et, surtout, sans égard à la nature vivante, à sa lenteur d'adaptation et d'évolution, à ses limites originelles.
* En d'autres termes, l'esprit peut-il nous tirer de l'état où il nous a mis?
* Toute l'histoire humaine, en tant qu'elle manifeste la pensée, n'aura peut-être été que l'effet d'une sorte de crise, d'une poussée aberrante, comparable à quelqu'une de ces brusques variations qui s'observent dans la nature et qui disparaissent aussi bizarrement qu'elles sont venues.
* Qui sait si toute notre culture n'est pas une hypertrophie, un écart, un développement insoutenable, qu'une ou deux centaines de siècles auront suffi à produire et à épuiser?
* Une intoxication insidieuse. Il s'accommode à son poison, il l'exige bientôt. Il en trouve chaque jour la dose insuffisante.
* Quant à notre sens le plus central, ce sens intime de la distance entre le désir et la possession de son objet, qui n'est autre que le sens de la durée.
* La disparition de la terre libre - l'occupation achevée des territoires par des nations organisées, la suppression des biens qui ne sont à personne.
* La disparition du temps libre - le loisir intérieur, qui est tout autre chose que le loisir chronométrique, se perd. Nous perdons cette paix essentielle des profondeurs de l'être, cette absence sans prix, pendant laquelle les éléments les plus délicats de la vie se rafraichissent et se réconfortent, pendant laquelle l'être, en quelque sorte, se lave du passé et du futur, de la conscience présente, des obligations suspendues et des attentes embusquées... Point de souci, point de lendemain, point de pression intérieure; mais une sorte de repos dans l'absence, une vacance bienfaisante, qui rend l'esprit à sa liberté propre. Il ne s'occupe alors que de soi-même.
*Il peut produire des formations pure comme des cristaux.
*Mais n'oublions pas que notre view tout entière peut être considerée comme une éducation non plus organisée, ni même organisable, mais, au contraire, essentiellement désordonnée, qui consiste dans l'ensemble des impressions et des acquisitions bonnes ou mauvaises que nous devons à la vie même.
*Nous répondrons le plus souvent à ce qui nous frappe par des paroles dont nous ne sommes pas les véritables auteurs. Notre pensée - ou ce que nous prenons pour notre pensée - n'est alors qu'une simple réponse automatique. C'est pourquoi il faut difficilement se croire soi-même sur parole. Je veux dire que la parole qui nous vient à l'esprit, généralement n'est pas de nous.
*Si le civilisé pense d'une manière si différente du primitif, c'est par conséquence de la prédominance des réactions conscientes sur les produits inconscients. Sans doute, ces derniers sont la matière indispensable, et parfois du plus haut prix, de nos pensées, mais leur valeur durable dépend finalement de la conscience.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Steps to an Ecology of Mind

2026-07-26T15:53:20Z

Robert.adlington:

== Part I: Metalogues ==
=== Why do Things Get in a Muddle ===

* But Daddy, isn't that a funny thing - that everybody means the same when they say "muddled" but everybody means something different by "tidy". But "tidy" is the opposite of "muddled", isn't it?

=== Why do Frenchmen? ===

* Anyhow, most conversations are only about whether people are angry of something. They are busy telling each other that they are friendly - which is sometimes a lie. After all, what happens when they cannot think of anything to say? They all feel uncomfortable.

=== About Games and Being Serious ===

* In order to think new thoughts or to say new things, we have to break up all our ready-made ideas and shuffle the pieces.
* I know that I am serious - whatever that means - about the things that we talk about. We talk about ideas. And I know that I play with the ideas in order to understand them and fit them together. It's "play" in the same sense that a small child "plays" with blocks... And a child with building blocks is mostly very serious about his "play".
* The purpose of these conversations is to discover the "rules". It's like life - a game whose purpose is to discover the rules, which rules are always changing and always undiscoverable.

=== How Much Do You Know? ===

* Arithmetic is a set of tricks for thinking clearly.
* The first thing about being clear is not to mix up ideas which are really different from each other. The idea of two oranges is really different from the idea of two miles. Because if you add them together you only get fog in your head.
* You can't mix thoughts, you can only combine them. And in the end, that means that you can't count them. Because counting is really only adding things together. And you mostly can't do that.
* Then really do we only have one big thought which has lots of branches - lots and lots and lots of branches?
* Yes. I think so. I don't know. Anyhow I think that is a clearer way of saying it. I mean it's clearer than talking about bits of knowledge and trying to count them.
* My schoolteachers filled up about a quarter of my brain with fog. And then I read newspapers and listed to what other people said, and that filled up another quarter with fog. And the other quarter Daddy? Oh - that's fog that I made for myself when I was trying to think.

=== Why Do Things Have Outlines? ===

* Once you bring live things into (the game of croquet in Alice in Wonderland) in becomes impossible
* It's just the fact that animals are capable of seeing ahead and learning that makes them the only really unpredictable things in the world.
* You say it is important to be clear about things. And you get angry about people who blur the outlines. And yet we think it's better to be unpredictable and not to be like a machine. And you say that we cannot see the outlines of our conversation till it's over. Then it doesn't matter whether we're clear or not. Because we cannot do anything about it then.

=== Why a Swan? ===

* I evidently do not know what the word "sort of" means, but fantasy, poetry, ballet, and art in general owes its meaning and importance to the relationship which I refer to when I say that the swan figure is a "sort of" swan - or a "pretend" swan.

=== What is an Instinct? ===

* There's no explanation of an explanatory principal (like gravity). It's like a black box.
* The intellect is always classifying and dividing things up.
* Dreams are sort of suspended in time. They don't have any tenses.
* The dream elaborates on the relationship but does not identify the things that are related.
* Both dreams and animal behavior deal in opposites, have no tenses, have no "not", work by metaphor, and neither of them pegs the metaphor down.

== Part II: Form and Pattern in Anthropology ==
=== Culture Contact and Schismogenesis ===

* Almost the whole of a culture may be seen variously as a mechanism for modifying and satisfying the sexual needs of the individuals, or for the enforcement of the norms of behavior, or for supplying the individuals with food.
* Every bit of behavior is - at least in a well-integrated individual - probably simultaneously relevant to all abstractions (such as self-protective, assertive, sexual, acquisitive, etc)
* Contacts between profoundly different communities must theoretically result in either:
** The complete fusion of the originally different groups
** The elimination of one or both groups
** The persistence of both groups in dynamic equilibrium within one major community.

=== Experiments in Thinking About Observed Ethnological Behavior ===

* Bateson's father had always a hankering after the problems of pattern and symmetry
* The types of mental operation which are useful in analyzing one field may be equally useful in another.
* The advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.
* A habit of constructing abstractions which refer to terms of comparison between entities.
* I felt that I had discovered how to think.
* Psychoanalysis has erred sadly in using words that are too short and therefore appear more concrete than they are.

=== Morale and National Character ===

* A person's character is oriented to the motifs and patterns of relationship in the society in which they live.
* To limit the scope of a concept is almost synonymous with defining it.

=== Bali: The Value System of a Steady State ===

* We should expect our curves to be bounded by phenomena comparable to orgasm - that the achievement of a certain degree of bodily or neural involvement or intensity may be followed by a release of schismogenic tension.
* The Balinese steady state is maintained by continual nonprogressive change.

=== Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art ===

* Aldous Huxley used to say that the central problem of humanity is the quest for grace.
* He argued - like Walt Whitman - that the communication and behavior of animals has a naiveté, a simplicity, which man has lost. Man's behavior is corrupted by deceit - even self-deceit - by purpose, and by self-consciousness. As Huxley saw it, man has lost the "grace" which animals still have.
* I argue that art is a part of man's quest for grace.
* Some cultures display an avoidance of complexity by crass preference either for total consciousness or total unconsciousness. Their art is unlikely to be "great".
* I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and that what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind - especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called "consciousness" and the other the "unconscious".
* In what form is information about psychic integration contained or coded in the work of art.
* I want precisely to avoid analyzing the "story".
* It is the very rules of transformation that are of interest to me - not the message, but the code.
* "Meaning" may be regarded as an approximate synonym of pattern, redundancy, information, and "restraint".
* Any aggregate of events or objects shall be said to contain "redundancy" or "pattern" if the aggregate can be divided in any way by a "slash mark and the information available on one side of the slash will restrain (ie reduce the probability of) wrong guessing:
** [("It's raining"/ raindrops)/you-me relationship]
** And the same is true of the rain. It, too, is patterned and structured. From the direction of one drop, I could predict the direction of others. And so on.
* The essence and raison d'être of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and/or the reduction of the random by "restraint".
* "I know the way to Cambridge" might mean that:
** I have studied the map and can give you directions.
** I can recall details all along the route.
** When driving that route I recognize many details even though I could recall only a few.
** I can trust to "habit" to make me turn at the right points, without having to think where I am going.
* At least four levels of the mind:
** 1. Habit - The better an organism knows something, the less conscious it becomes of its knowledge.
** 2. Unconscious knowledge and defamiliarization - Van Gogh's chair affronts the conscious expectations and dimly reminds the consciousness of what had be unconsciously taken for granted.
** 3. Freudian theory of dreams as metaphors coded according to primary process.
** 4. The Freudian unconscious filled with painful memories via repression.
* I believe that much of early Freudian theory was upside down. Today we think of consciousness as the mysterious, and of the computational methods of the unconscious , eg primary process, as continually active, necessary, and all-embracing
* Poetry is not a sort of distorted and decorated prose, but rather prose is poetry which has been stripped down and pinned to a procrustean bed of logic.
* Consciousness, for obvious mechanical reasons, must always be limited to a rather small fraction of mental process. If useful at all, it must therefore be husbanded.
** The unconsciousness associated with habit is an economy both of thought and of consciousness; and the same is true of the inaccessibility of the processes of perception. The conscious organism does not require (for pragmatic purposes) to know how it perceives - only to know what it perceives.
** To suggest that we might operate without a foundation in primary process would be to suggest that the human brain ought to be differently structured.
** Of the four types, only the Freudian cupboard for skeletons is perhaps undesirable and could be obviated. But there may still be advantages in keeping the skeleton off the dining room table.
** In truth, our life is such that its unconscious components are continuously present in all their multiple forms. It follows that in our relationships we continuously exchange messages about these unconscious materials, and it becomes important also to exchange metamessages by which we tell each other what order and species of unconsciousness (or consciousness) attaches to our messages.
* Art becomes an exercise in communicating about the species of unconsciousness. Or, a sort of play behavior whose function is, amongst other things, to practice and make more perfect communication of this kind.
* Isadora Duncan or any artist is trying to communicate something like "This is a particular sort of partly unconscious message. Let us engage in this particular sort of partly unconscious communication." Or perhaps: "This is a message about the interface between conscious and unconscious."
* The sensations and qualities of skill can never be put in words, and yet the fact of skill is conscious. The artist's dilemma is of a peculiar sort. He must practice in order to perform the craft components of his job. But to practice has always a double effect. It makes him, on the one hand, more able to do whatever it is he is attempting; and, on the other hand, by the phenomenon of habit formation, it makes him less aware of how he does it. He is ona sort of moving stairway about whose position he is trying to communicate but whose movement is itself a function of his efforts to communicate. Clearly, his task is impossible, but, as has been remarked, some people do it very prettily.
* The "algorithms of the heart/unconscious" are coded and organized in a manner totally different from the algorithms of language. And since a great deal of conscious thought is structured in terms of the logics of language, the algorithms of the unconsciousness are doubly inaccessible. It is not only that the conscious mind has poor access to this material, but also the fact that when such access is achieved, eg in dreams, art, poetry, religion, intoxication, and the like, there is still a formidable problem of translation.
* Primary process is characterized as lacking negatives, lacking tense, lacking in any identification of linguistic mood and metaphoric.
* It is also true that the subject matter of primary-process discourse is different from the subject matter of language and consciousness:
** Consciousness talks about things or persons, and attaches predicates to the specific things or persons which have been mentioned.
** In primary process, the things or persons are usually not identified, and the focus of the discourse is upon the relationships which are asserted to obtain between them, ie, the discourse of primary process is metaphoric. But, in primary process, as in art, there are no markers to indicate to the conscious mind that the message material is metaphoric.
*The subject matter of dream and other primary process material is relationship in the narrow sense as between self and other persons or between self and the environment. Anglo-Saxons usually have to be told that these matters are the subject matter of what are called feelings - love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc.
**It is unfortunate that these abstractions referring to patterns of relationship have received names.
*The unconscious contains not only painful matters, but also many matters which are so familiar that we do not need to inspect them. Habit, therefore, is a major economy of conscious thought. We can do things without consciously thinking about them. The skill of an artist, or rather his demonstration of a skill, becomes a message about these parts of his unconsciousness (but not, perhaps, from the unconscious).
*The economics of the system pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatics of particular instance.
*The premises may, economically, be sunk, but particular conclusions must be conscious. But the "sinking", though economical, is still done at a price - the price of inaccessibility. Since the level to which things are sunk is characterized by iconic algorithms and metaphor, it becomes difficult for the organism to examine the matrix out of which his conscious conclusions spring. Conversely, we may note that what is common to a particular statement and a corresponding metaphor is of a generality appropriate for sinking.
*No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels. This is the economy achieved by habit formation.
*The TV which gives a distorted or otherwise imperfect picture is, in a sense, communicating about its unconscious pathologies - exhibiting its symptoms. And one may ask whether some artists are not doing something similar.
*What the unaided consciousness (unaided by art, dreams, and the like) can never appreciate is the systemic nature of mind (ie the whole interconnected system of sub-components.
*A bag of tricks for curing or preventing a list of specified diseases provides no overall wisdom.
*Mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life. Life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct.
*This is the sort of world we live in - a world of circuit structures - and love can survive only if wisdom (ie a sense or recognition of the fact of circuitry) has an effective voice.
*Art has a positive function in maintaining what I called "wisdom", ie in correcting a too purposive view of life and making the view more systemic. But what sorts of correction in the direction of wisdom would be achieved by creating or viewing this work of art?
*With almost no exceptions, the behaviors called art or their products (also called art) have two characteristics:
**They require or exhibit skill
**They contain redundancy or pattern, and the skill is first in maintaining and then in modulating the redundancies.
*Rigid focusing on any single set of relata destroys for the artist the more profound significance of the work. If the picture were only about sex or only about social organization, it would be trivial. It is nontrivial or profound precisely because it is about sex and social organization and cremation, and other things. In a word, it is only about relationship and not about any identifiable relata.

=== Comment on Part II ===

* In both anatomy and grammar, the relations are to be thought of as somehow primary, the relata as secondary. The relations are of the sort generated by processes of information exchange.
* The progressive increase in size and armament of the dinosaurs was, as I saw it, simply an interactive armaments race - a schismogenic process. But I could not then see that the evolution of the horse from Eohippus was not a one-sided adjustment to life on grassy plains. Surely the grassy plains themselves were evolved pari passu with the evolution of the teeth and hooves of the horses and other ungulates. Turf was the evolving response of the vegetation to the evolution of the horse. It is the conteext which evolves.

== Part III: Form and Pathology in Relationship ==
=== Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning ===

* WWII is ideologically about the role of the social sciences. Are we to reserve the techniques and the right to manipulate people as the privilege of a few planning, goal-oriented, and power-hungry individuals, to whom the instrumentality of science makes a natural appeal? Are we going to treat people as things?
* What circumstances promote that specific habitual phrasing of the universe which we call free will and those others which we call responsibility, constructiveness, energy, passivity, dominance, and the rest which promote democracy? For all these abstract qualities, the essential stock-in-trade of the educators, can be seen as various habits of punctuating the stream of experience so that it takes on one or another sort of coherence and sense.
* We are dealing with a sort of habit which is a by-product of the learning process.
* What we might see a mixed bunch of abstract terms - free will, predestination, responsibility, constructiveness, passivity, dominance, etc - are descriptive of apperceptive habits, habitual ways of looking at the stream of events of which our own behavior is a part, and these habits might all be, in some sense, by-products of the learning process.
* The subject is learning to orient himself to certain types of contexts, or is acquiring insight into the contexts of problem solving - the subject has acquired a habit of looking for contexts and sequences of one type rather than another, a habit of punctuating the stream of events to give repetitions of a certain type of meaningful sequence.
* The states of mind which we call free will, instrumental thinking, dominance, passivity, etc are acquired by a process which we may equate with "learning to learn".
* We are not concerned with a hypothetical isolated individual in contact with an impersonal events stream, but rather with real individuals who have complex emotional patters of relationship with other individuals. In such a real world, the individual will be led to acquire or reject apperceptive habits by the very complex phenomena of personal example, tone of voice, hostility, love, etc. Many such habits, too, will be conveyed to him, not through his own naked experience of the stream of events, for no human beings (not even scientists) are naked in this sense. The vents stream is mediated to them through language, art, technology, and other cultural media which are structured at evey point by tramlines of apperceptive habit.
* What sort of experimental leaning context would we devise in order to inculcate "free will" (or some other habit)? How would we rig the maze of problem-box so that the anthropomorphic rat shall obtain a repeated and reinforced impression of his own free will.
* Four types of positive (as opposed to negative learning or inhibition):
** Classical Pavlovian Contexts - With a fixed rigid sequence of events. Only a very limited fatalism would be possible. He would see all events as preordained, and he would see himself as not able to influence the course of events.
** Instrumental Reward or Escape - Where you learn to do something to get something.
** Instrumental Avoidance - Learn to do something to avoid something.
** Serial and Rote Learning - Flywheel learning - self-constructed habits.

=== A Theory of Play and Fantasy ===

* Human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction, including:
** The simply denotative level - "The cat is on the mat"
** Multiple metalinguistic levels where the subject of discourse is the language
** Multiple metacommunicative levels where the subject of the discourse is the relationship between the speakers.
** (in a psychiatric context) A further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted.
* The vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit.
* The birth of signals:
** The organism gradually ceases to respond quite "automatically" to the mood-signs of another and becomes able to recognize the sign as a signal, and that his own and the other's signals are only "signals", which can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified, corrected, etc. Ie, they have to be evaluated!
** This recognition is by no means complete even among humans. We all to often respond automatically to newspaper headlines as though they were direct object-indications of events in our environment instead of signals concocted and transmitted by creatures as complexly motivated as ourselves.
** Non-human mammals are automatically excited by the sexual odor of another, as this is an involuntary mood sign, while we have deodorants and perfumes to suppress involuntary signs and project voluntary signals
** Only when signals are recognized as signals can human language begin, along with all the complexities of empathy, identification, projection, and so on, along with the possibility of communicating at the multiplicity of levels of abstraction in metalinguistic and metacommunicative ways.
* Play can only occur if the participants are capable of some degree of meta-communication to say that "this is play", which is a negative statement containing an implicit negative metastatement: "These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote."
* The evolution of communication allows the map-territory relation to come into being
* The evolution of play may have been an important step in the evolution of communication
* Threat, histrionic behavior and deceit, dramatization, teasing, spectatorship, etc form a single total complex of phenomena, and such phenomena as gambling and risk-taking have their roots in a combination of threat and play.
* Ritual, such as peace-making ceremonies, illustrate the labile nature of the frame "this is play", or "this is ritual", and how these discriminations can break down
* "this is play" can also be formulated/experience as "is this play?"
* Paradox - playing animals do not quite mean what they are saying but also, they are usual communicating about something which does not exist.
* Human beings have evolved the "metaphor that is meant", the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than "an outward and visible sign, given unto us."
* Here we can recognize an attempt to deny the difference between map and territory, and to get back to the absolute innocence of communication by means of pure mood-signs.
* In movies and nightmares, images do not denote that which they seem to denote, but these sme images really do evoke the terror which would have been evoked by a real spear or a real precipice.
* It is our hypothesis that the message "This is play" establishes a paradoxical frame comparable to Epimenides' paradox:
** While the unconscious or primary process thinking cannot discriminate between "some" and "all" or between "not all" and "none", these discriminations are performed by higher or more conscious mental processes which serve in the nonpsychotic individual to correct the black-and-white thinking of the lower levels.
** The primary process is continually operating and the psychological validity of the paradoxical play frame depends upon this part of the mind (to experience the (fake) sensations).
** The discrimination between play and non-play like that between fantasy and non-fantasy, is certainly a function of secondary process or ego.
** Within dream or fantasy, the dreamer does not operate with the concept "untrue". He operates with all sorts of statements but with a curious inability to achieve metastatements. He cannot, unless close to waking, dream a statement referring to (ie framing) his dream.
*** In primary process, map and territory are equated
*** In secondary process, they can be discriminated
*** In play, they are both equated and discriminated.
*Frames or contexts:
**A psychological frame is (or delimits) a class or set of messages (or meaningful actions).
**It has some degree of real existence and can be recognized as such through words like "play", "movie", "interview", "job", "language", etc.
**But in other cases, there may be no explicit verbal reference to the frame, and the subject may have no consciousness of it
**While the analogy of the mathematical set is perhaps over abstract, that of the picture frame is excessively concrete. The psychological frame is neither physical nor logical.
**It is exclusive (excluding messages outside the frame) and inclusive (where perception of the "ground" (outside the frame) is positively inhibited and perception of the "figure" (inside the frame) is positively enhanced).
**It is related to the concept of "premises", telling the viewer to use a different kind of thinking than that outside the frame
**It is metacommunicative - any message that explicitly or implicitly defines a frame gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the messages included within the frame.
**Conversely, every metacommunicative message is or defines a psychological frame.
**There can be frames within frames and mental processes resemble logic in needing an outer frame to delimit the ground against which the figures are to be perceived. This need is often unsatisfied, as when we see a piece of sculpture in a junk shop window, but his is uncomfortable.
**Russell's rule cannot be stated without breaking the rule. He insists that all items of inappropirate logical type be excluded (ie be an imaginary line) from the background of any class, ie he insists upon the drawing of an imaginary line of precisely the sort which he prohibits.
**Three types of messages in animal behavior:
***Mood signs
***Messages which simulate mood signs (in play, threat, histrionics, etc)
***Messages which enable the receiver to discriminate between mood-signs and those other signs that resemble them.
*The word salad of schizophrenia can be seen as the patient's failure to recognize the metaphoric nature of his fantasies. The frame-setting message (eg the phrase "as if") is omitted, and the metaphor or fantasy is narrated and acted upon in a manner which would be appropriate if the fantasy were a message of the more direct kind. The absence of metacommunicative framing in dreams is characteristic of the waking communications of the schizophrenic.
*Therapy is an attempt to change the patient's metacommunicative habits. In the process of therapy, there must have been communication at a level meta to these rules, communication about a change in rules.
*Both therapy and play:
**Occur within a delimited psychological frame
**Use messages that have a special and peculiar relationship to a more concrete or basic reality.
*The "transfer" of therapy is discriminated from real love and hate by signals invoking the psychological frame, and so can be discussed between patient and therapist:
**It's like when canasta players cease to play and start a discussion of the rules. Their discourse is now of a different logical type from that of their play, and at the end of the discussion, we can imagine that they return to playing but with modified rules.
**We avoid paradox by separating our discussion of the rules from the play, but this separation is impossible in psychotherapy, which is a framed interaction between two persons, in which the rules are implicit but subject to change.
**This combination of logical types within the single meaningful act give to therapy the character not of a rigid games like canasta but, instead, that of an evolving system of interaction. The play of kittens or otters has this character.
**By the process of interpretation, the neurotic is driven to assert an "as if" clause into the productions of his primary process thinking, which productions he had previously deprecated or repressed. He must learn that fantasy contains truth.
**For the schizophrenic, his error is in treating the metaphors of primary process with the full intensity of literal truth. Through the discovery of what these metaphors stand for, he must discover that they are only metaphors.
*Our central thesis is about the necessity of the paradoxes of abstraction:
**It is not merely bad history to suggest that people might or should obey the Theory of Logical Types in their communications; their failure to do this is not due to mere carelessness or ignorance.
**Rather, we believe that the paradoxes of abstraction must make their appearance in all communication more complex than that of mood-signals, and that without these paradoxes the evolution of communication would be at an end. Life would then be an endless exchange of stylized messages, a game with rigid rules, unrelieved by change or humor

=== Epidemiology of a Schizophrenia ===

* I now define ego weakness as trouble in identifying an interpreting those signals which should tell the individual what sort of a message a message is. When a schizophrenic hears "What can I do for you?", he does not understand how to interpret it.
* We are actually quite unconscious of receiving those messages which tell us what sorts of messages we receive
* The schizophrenic word salad is his attempt to describe a traumatic situation which involves a metacommunicative tangle.
* The trauma must have had formal structure in the sense that multiple logical types were played against each other to generate that particular pathology in this individual.
* In conventional conversation, we weave logical types with incredible complexity and quite surprising facility. We make jokes which often weave multiple logical types together. When we meet these multiple identifications we laugh, and we make new psychological discoveries about what goes on inside ourselves, which is perhaps the reward of real humor.
* But some people have the utmost difficulty with this problem of multiple levels, and there is an unequal distribution of this ability.
* What is needed for a child to acquire, or to not acquire, a skill in the ways of interpreting these signals?
* We all have some difficulty in deciding sometimes whether a dream was a dream or not, and it would not be very easy for most of us to say how we know that a piece of our own fantasy is fantasy and not experience. The ability to place an experience in time is one of the important cues, and referring it to a sense organ is another
* To get confused about the logical types, you have to be intelligent enough to know that there is something wrong, and not so intelligent as to be able to see what it is that is wrong.
* The mother of a schizophrenic continually contradicts her own message identifier. She laughs when she is saying that which is least funny to her, and so on.
* Classifying the ability to identify messages:
** Hebephrenic (chaotic) individuals for whom no message is of any particular definite type but who live in a sort of chronic shaggy-dog story.
** Normal levels of identification
** Those who try to overidentify, to make an overly rigid identification of what sort of a message every message is. This will give a much more paranoid type of picture. Withdrawal is another possibility.

=== Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia ===

* Double-bind - a situation in which no matter what a person does, he can't win.
* Russell's theory of logical types - there is a discontinuity between a class and its members. The class cannot be a member of itself nor can one of the members be the class, since the term used for the class is of a different level of abstraction.
* Humans handle communication involving multiple logical types:
** Various communicational modes - play, fantasy, sacrament, metaphor, etc
** Humor - the explosive moment in humor is when the labeling of the mode undergoes a dissolution and resynthesis. Commonly, the punchline compels a re-evaluation of earlier signals which ascribed to certain messages a particular mode.
** The falsification of mode-identifying signals - the artificial laugh, the manipulative simulation of friendliness, the confidence trick, kidding, etc
** Learning, and learning to learn.
* The schizophrenic exhibits weakness in ssigning the correct communication mode to:
** The messages he receives from others.
** The messages that he himself utters or emits nonverbally.
** His own thoughts, sensations, and percepts (objects of perception)
* Schizophrenic utterance is rich in metaphor, which is an indispensable tool of thought and expression, but he uses unlabeled metaphors, and has special difficulty handling signals of that class whose members assign logical types to other signals.
* The schizophrenic must live in a universe where the sequences of events are such that his unconventional communicational habits will be in some sense appropriate.
* The double-bind situation consists of:
** Two or more persons
** Repeated experience leading to habitual expectation
** A primary negative injunction, where the context of learning is based on avoidance of punishment rather that of reward seeking
** A secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level and like the first enforced by punishment or signals which threaten survival (commonly communicated to the child by nonverbal means
** A tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping from the field
* The complete set of ingredients is no longer necessary when the victim has learned to perceive his universe in double bind patterns. The pattern of conflicting injunctions may even be taken over by hallucinatory voices.
* The schizophrenic is like a zen pupil, but he achieves something like disorientation rather than enlightenment
* There will be a breakdown in any individual's ability to discriminate between logical types whenever a double bind situation occurs.
* The schizophrenic feels so terribly on the spot at all time that he habitually responds with a defensive insistence on the literal level when it is quite inappropriate
* Schizophrenics also confuse the literal and metaphoric in their own utterance.
* The statements which show that a patient is disorientated can be interpreted as ways of defending himself against the situation he is in. The pathology enters when the victim himself either does not know that his responses are metaphorical or cannot say so.
* There is an inability to judge accurately what a person really means and an excessive concern with what is really meant:
** Paranoid - He might assume that behind every statement there is a concealed meaning which is detrimental to his welfare. He will continually be searching for meanings behind what people say and behind chance occurrences in the environment, and he will be characteristically suspicious and defiant.
** Hebephrenic - He might tend to accept literally everything people say to him, discarding tone or gesture or context, give up trying to discriminate between levels of messages, and treat all messages as unimportant or to be laughed at.
** Catatonic - He might try to ignore metacommunicative messages and then would find it necessary to see and hear less and less or what went on around him, and do his utmost to avoid provoking a response in his environment. He would try to detach his interest from the external world and concentrate on his own internal processes and, therefore, give the appearance of being a withdrawn, perhaps mute, individual.
** He cannot discover what people mean nor, without considerable help, discuss the messages of others. Without being able to do that, the human being is like any self-correcting system which has lost its governor; it spirals into never-ending, but always systematic, distortions.
* Family Situation:
** The child's existence has a special meaning to the mother (or father) which arouses her anxiety and hostility.
** Her problem is to control her anxiety by controlling the closeness and distance between herself and her child.
** Her loving behavior is a common on (compensatory for) her hostile behavior and consequently it is of a different order of message than the hostile behavior - it is a message about the sequence of messages. Yet by its nature it denies the existence of those messages which it is about ie, the hostile withdrawal.
** The mother uses the child's responses to affirm that her behavior is loving, and since the loving behavior is simulated, the child is placed in a position where he must not accurately interpret her communication if he is to maintain his relationship with her. He must not discriminate accurately between orders of message, in this case the difference between the expression of simulated feelings and real feelings (two separate logical types). As a result, the child must systematically distort his perception of metacommunicative signals.
** He would be punished for learning to discriminate orders of meanings accurately.
** He must deceive himself about his own internal state in order to support mother in her deception. To survive with her he must falsely discriminate his own internal messages as well as falsely discriminate the messages of others.
** By preventing the child from talking about the situation, the mother forbids him using the metacommunicative level - the level we use to correct our perception of communicative behavior.
** The ability to communicate about communication, to comment upon the meaningful actions of oneself and others, is essential for successful social intercourse. In any normal relationship there is a constant interchange of metacommunicative messages such as "What do you mean?" or "Why did you do that?" or "Are you kidding me?" and so on. To discriminate accurately what people are really expressing, we must be able to comment directly or indirectly on that expression.
** The child grows up unskilled in his ability to communicate about communication and, as a result, unskilled in determining what people really mean and unskilled in expressing what he really means, which is essential for normal relationships.
** He must question the times with her, and with others, when he thought he was experiencing affection and when they seemed to treat the situation as if he had. He experiences here loss-of-support phenomena and is put in doubt about the reliability of past experience.
** Psychosis seems, in part, a way of dealing with double bind situations to overcome their inhibiting and controlling effect. The psychotic patient may make astute, pithy, often metaphorical remarks that reveal an insight into the forces binding him. Contrariwise, he may become rather expert in setting double bind situations himself.
*Humor involves sudden shifts in logical types as well as discrimination of those shifts.

=== The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia ===

* The realm of phenomena in which we are interested is always characterized by the fact that "ideas" may influence events. To the physicist, this is a grossly magical hypothesis. It is one which cannot be tested by asking questions about the conservation of energy.
* All communication has this characteristic - it can be magically modified by accompanying communication.
* What exists today are only messages about the past which we call memories, and these messages can always be framed and modulated from moment to moment.
* No-one can learn at random, but only to be like or unlike those around him.
* Typically, the schizophrenic will eliminate from his messages everything that refers explicitly or implicitly to the relationship between himself and the person he is addressing:
** They commonly avoid the first and second person pronouns.
** They avoid telling you what sort of a message they are transmitting - whether it be literal or metaphoric, ironic or direct
** They are likely to have difficulty with all messages and meaningful acts which imply intimate contact between the self and some other.
** They communicate as if they expect to be punished every time they indicate that they are right in their view of the context of their own messages. The double bind is an experience of being punished precisely for being right in one's own view of the context.
* Perhaps what each of us means by the "self" is in fact an aggregate of habits of perception and adaptive action plus, from moment to moment, our "immanent states" of action

=== Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia ===

* The psychiatrist is particularly interested in the changes whereby an individual comes to expect his world to be structured in one way rather than another.
* Genetics covers the communicational phenomena of variation, differentiation, growth, and heredity.
** Samuel Butler argued that heredity should be compared with - even identified with - memory.
** He argued that there is a process whereby the newer inventions of adaptive behavior are sunk deeper into the biological system of the organism. From planned and conscious actions they become habits, and the habits become less and less conscious and less and less subject to voluntary control
** The stochastic approach is perhaps the only organized theory of the nature of learning. The notion is that random changes occur, in the brain or elsewhere, and that the results of such random change are selected for survival by processes of reinforcement and extinction. Reinforcement is seen as giving direction to the accumulation of random changes of the neural system, just as natural selection is seen as giving direction to the accumulation of random changes of variation.
** In learning, when the solution of the given problem has been passed on to havit, the stochastic or exploratory mechanisms are set free for the solution of other problems.
** Perhaps in communicational behavior, such as humor, mathematical skill or musical composition, there are considerable genetic differences between individuals in those factors which make for an ability to acquire the appropriate skills. But the skills themselves and their particular expression also depend largely upon environmental circumstances and even upon specific training.
** The individual who shows ability is likely to mold his environment in a direction which will favor his developing his ability and that he will, in turn, create an environment for others which will favor their development in the same direction.
* Covert schizophrenia:
** In overt schizophrenia, people behave in ways which are grossly deviant from the cultural environment:
*** Imagination is seemingly confused with perception.
*** The literal is confused with the metaphoric.
*** Internal messages are confused with external.
*** The trivial is confused with the vital.
*** The originator of the message is confused with the recipient and the perceiver with the thing perceived.
*** The patient behaves in such a way that he shall be responsible for not metacommunicative aspect of his messages.
** In covert schizophrenia, so long as the he can succeed in putting the other in the wrong, his or her pathology is obscured and the blame falls elsewhere:
*** These people fear collapse into overt schizophrenia when faced by circumstances which would force them to recognize the pattern of their operations: "You are driving me crazy!"
* Some sort of rigidity:
** Perhaps the person prone to overt schizophrenia would be characterized by some extra strength of psychological commitment to the status quo as he at the moment sees it, which commitment would be hurt or frustrated by the parents' rapid shifts of frame and context.
** Or perhaps he might be characterized by the high value of some parameter determining the relationship between problem solving and habit formation.
** Perhaps it is the person who too readily hands over the solutions to habit who is hurt by those changes in context which invalidate his solutions just at the moment when he has incorporated them into his habit structure.
** Rigidly committed to their patterns of inconsistency.
* A new view of rationality:
** Is our view of the world changed when we admit an infinite regress of contexts, linked to each other in a complex network of metarelations?
** In breaking away from the premise that contexts are always conceptually isolable, I have let in the notion of a universe much more unified - and in that sense much more mystical.
** The contrast between part and whole, whenever this contrast appears in the realm of communication, is simply a contrast in logical typing. The whole is always in a metarelationship with its parts.
** In hierarchies of logical typing there is often some sort of change of sign at each level, when the levels are related to each other in such a way as to create a self-corrective system.
** As I see it, the world is made up of a very complex network (rather than a chain) of entities which have this sort of relationship to each other, but with this difference, that many of the entities have their own supplies of energy and perhaps even their own ideas of where they would like to go.
** In such a world, the problems of control become more akin to art than to science, not merely because we tend to think of the difficult and the unpredictable as contexts for art but also because the results of error are likely to be ugliness.
** The fact of our imperfect understanding should not be allowed to feed our anxiety and so increase the need to control
** Our studies should be inspired by a curiosity about the world of which we are part. The rewards of such work are not power but beauty.
** Every great scientific advance - not least the advances which Newton achieved - has been elegant.

=== Double Bind, 1969 ===

* There are in the mind no objects or events. The mind contains only transforms, percepts (consequences of the process of perception, images, etc.
* The explanatory world of substance can invoke no differences and no ideas but only forces and impacts. And, per contra, the world of form and communication invokes no things, forces, or impacts but only differences and ideas.
* Transcontextual - both those whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or often a double take. A falling leaf, the greeting of a friend, or a "primrose by the river's brim" is not "just that and nothing more".
* Genetic components might determine skill in learning to be transcontextual or (more abstractly) the potentialities for acquiring this skill. Or, conversely, the genome might determine skills in resisting transcontextual pathways.
* All biological systems are capable of adaptive change, which depends upon feedback loops, be it those provided by natural selection or those of individual reinforcement. In all cases, then, there must be a process of trial and error and a mechanism of comparison.
* By superimposing and interconnecting many feedback loops, we not only solve particular problems but also form habits which we apply to the solution of classes of problems. We learn to learn, or "deutero-learn".
* The economy (or mental effort) consists precisely in not re-examining or rediscovering the premises of habit every time the habit is used. A habit of not examining them is developed.
* Messages constitute the relationship between two entities.
* Severe pain and maladjustment can be induced by putting a mammal in the wrong regarding its rules for making sense of an important relationship with another mammal. If this pathology can be warded off or resisted, the total experience may provoke creativity.

=== The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication ===

* The word "learning" undoubtedly denotes change of some kind:
** Zero learning - Specificity of response, which - right or wrong - is not subject to correction
** Learning I - Change in specificity of response by correction of errors of choice within a set of alternatives
** Learning II - Change in the process of Learning I, eg, a corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choice is made, or a change in how the sequence of experience is punctuated.
** Learning III - Change in the process of Learning II, eg a corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives from which choice is made.
** Learning IV - Change in Learning III. Probably does not occur in any adult living organism.
* Zero learning:
** The simple receipt of information from an external event.
** All learning (other than zero learning) is in some degree stochastic (ie contains components of "trial and error"
** The immediate base of all those acts (simple and complex) which are not subject to correction by trial and error:
*** Learning I - The revision of choice within an unchanged set of alternatives.
*** Learning II - The revision of the set from which the choice is to be made, and so on
* Learning I:
** Cases in which an entity gives at time 2 a different response from what it gave at time 1:
*** Habituation - the change from responding to each occurrence of a repeated event to not overtly responding. Perhaps the only form of Learning 1 which living things can achieve without a neural circuit.
*** Pavlovian Conditioning
*** Instrumental Reward and Instrumental Avoidance
*** Rote Learning
*** Disruption, Extinction, or Inhibition of "completed learning" which may follow change or absence of reinforcement
** Context - A collective term for all those events which tell the organism among what set of alternatives he must make his next choice
** Context Markers - Signals whose major function is to classify contexts. A dog may see a leash in his master's hand and act as if he knows that this indicates a walk; or he may get information from the sound of the word "walk" that this type of context or sequence is coming.
** Analogic communication is in some sense more primitive than digital and there is a broad evolutionary trend toward the substitution of digital for analogic mechanisms.
** The sequence of life experience, action, etc, is somehow segmented or punctuated into subsequences or "contexts" which may be equated or differentiated by the organism
** Perception, notoriously, can be changed by experience. Every item of action or output may create an item of input.
** In Learning I, every item of perception or behavior may be stimulus or response or reinforcement according to how the total sequence of interaction is punctuated.
* Learning II:
** Changes in the manner in which the stream of action and experience is segmented or punctuate into contexts together with changes in the use of context markers.
** Learning II has occurred if it can be shown that experience of one or more contexts of Pavlovian type results in the animal's acting in some later context as though this, too, had the Pavlovian contingency pattern
** For any given subject, there is an improvement in rote learning with successive sessions, asymptotically approaching a degree of skill which varied from subject to subject.
** This improvement can only be accounted for by some sort of adaptation to the context which Hull provided for rote leaning
** Set learning - Learning to solve sets of problems with similar types of logical complexity.
** Reversal learning - If simple learning is based upon a set of trials, then reversal learning is based upon a set of such sets.
** Experimental neurosis - Make discrimination more and more difficult until a stage is reached at which it is impossible. Now the animal is in a situation which demands guesswork or gambling, not discrimination. The whole sequence is a procedure for putting the animal in the wrong at the level of Learning II
** All who think about the processes which determine the character of the individual or the processes of change in human (or animal) relationship must use in their thinking a variety of assumptions about Learning II.
** Adjectives of character - dependent, hostile, fey, finicky, anxious, exhibitionistic, narcissistic, passive, competitive, energetic, bold, cowardly, fatalistic, humorous, playful, canny, optimistic, perfectionist, careless, careful, casual, etc - are all descriptive of possible results of Learning II. They describe transactions between the individual and his material and human environment.
** The stream of events is commonly punctuated into contexts of learning by a tacit agreement between the persons regarding the nature of their relationship - or by context markers and tacit agreement that these context markers shall "mean" the same for both parties.
** The general ambiguity of the notions "stimulus", "response", "afferent" (towards), "efferent" (away from) means in fact that the ongoing sequence of interchange between two persons is structured only by the person's own perception of the sequence as a series of contexts, each context leading into the next. The particular manner in which the sequence is structured by any particular person will be determined by that person's previous Learning II (or possibly his genetics).
** It is up to A and B to distinguish (consciously or unconsciously or not at all) between "dominance" and "dependence". A "command" can closely resemble a cry for help.
** In psychotherapeutic transference, the patient will try to shape his interchange with the therapist according to the premises of his former Learning II
** Much of Learning II dates from early infancy and is unconscious.
** What is learned in Learning II is a way of punctuating events, but his is not and cannot be true or false.
** In fact, the propositions which govern punctuation have the general characteristic of being self-validating, meaning the Learning II is almost ineradicable.
* Learning III:
** Is likely to be difficult and rare even in human beings.
** Something like it can happen in psychotherapy, religious conversion, and in other sequences in which there is profound reorganization or character.
** Psychotherapists can help their patients to change their premises by:
*** Achieving a confrontation between the premises of the patient and those of the therapist.
*** Getting the patient to act in ways which will confront his own premises.
*** Inducing some exaggeration or caricature of experience based on the old premises.
** The premises of what is commonly called "character" - the definitions of the "self" - save the individual from having to examine the abstract, philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical aspects of many sequences of life. But Learning III will throw these unexamined premises open to question and change:
*** More readily form habits of type Learning II
*** Close loopholes which would prevent Leaning III
*** Learn to change the habits of type Learning II
*** Learn that he is a creature which can and does unconsciously achieve Learning II
*** Learn to limit or direct Learning II
** Learning III must lead to a greater flexibility in the premises acquired by the process of Learning II - a freedom from their bondage
** Zen master: "To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing."
** But any freedom from the bondage of habit must also denote a profound redefinition of the self:
*** If I stop at the level of Learning II, "I" am the aggregate of those characteristics which I call my "character".
*** "I" am my habits of acting in context and shaping and perceiving the contexts in which I act.
*** Selfhood is a product or aggregate of Learning II
*** To the degree that a man achieves Learning III, and learns to perceive and act in terms of the contexts of contexts, his "self" will take on a sort of irrelevance. The concept of self will no longer function as a nodal argument in the punctuation of experience.
** Persistence - is generated by experience in multiple sequences among which reinforcement is sporadic. There are thousands of situations where living things must persist in certain sorts of behavior precisely because reinforcement is sporadic or improbable. Learning II will simplify the universe by handling these instances as a single category. But if Learning III be concerned with the contexts of these instances, then the categories of Learning II will be burst open.
** The creature is driven to Level III by contraries generated at Level II, and the resolving of these contraries can constitute positive reinforcement at level III
** Even the attempt at level III can be dangerous:
*** Psychotics
*** Innocents
*** Artists
* Not "Is it learned or is it innate?", but rather "Up to what logical level is learning effective and down to what level does genetics play a determinative or partly effective role?"
* The broad history of the evolution of learning seems to have been a slow pushing back of genetic determinism to levels of higher logical type.

=== The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism ===

* In the natural history of the living human being, ontology and epistemology cannot be separated. His (commonly unconscious) beliefs about what sort of world it is will determine how he sees it and acts within it, and his ways of perceiving and acting will determine his beliefs about its nature.
* Any ongoing ensemble of events and objects which has the appropriate complexity of causal circuits and the appropriate energy relations will surely show mental characteristics. It will compare, that is, be responsive to difference. It will process information and will inevitably be self-corrective either toward homeostatic optima or toward the maximization of certain variables.
* Alcoholics are guided by highly abstract principles of which they are either quite unconscious, or unaware. A common misnomer for such principles is "feelings". This misnomer arises naturally from the Anglo-Saxon epistemological tendency to reify or attribute to the body all mental phenomena which are peripheral to consciousness.
* Symmetrical struggles and armament races may escalate, while complementary patterns of succoring-dependency between parent and child may become monstrous.
* The alcoholic's symmetrical "pride" can tolerate no complementary role. The relationship between the alcoholic and his real or fictitious other is clearly symmetrical and clearly schismogenic.
* A tendency to verify the unpleasant by seeking repeated experience of it is a common human trait. It is perhaps what Freud called the "death instinct".
* The "self" is a false reification of an improperly delimited part of a much larger field of interlocking processes.
* Anonymity is also a profound statement of the systemic relation, part-to-whole.
* Is complementarity always somehow better than symmetry? If we deeply and even unconsciously believe that our relation to the largest system which concerns us - the "power greater than self" - is symmetrical and emulative, then we are in error.

=== Comment on Part III ===

* Schizophrenia, deutero-learning, and the double bind cease to be matters of individual psychology and become part of the ecology of ideas in systems or "minds" whose boundaries no longer coincide with the skins of the participant individuals.

== Part IV: Biology and Evolution ==
=== On Empty-Headedness among Biologists and State Boards of Education ===

* Where does order come from?
* If random events lead to things getting mixed up, by what nonrandom events did things come to be sorted? And what is a "random" event?

=== The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution ===

* All theories of biological evolution depend upon at least three sorts of change:
** Change of genotype, either by mutation or by redistribution of genes.
** Somatic change under pressure of environment.
** Changes in environmental conditions.
* Both in acclimation and in habit formation the economy of flexibility is achieved by substituting a deeper and more enduring change for a more superficial and more reversible one.
* The difference between regulators and adjusters is a matter of where, in the complex network of physiologic causes and effects, homeostatic process operates:
** Regulators - Close to the input and output points of that network which is the individual organism
** Adjusters - The environmental variables are permitted to enter the body and the organism must then cope with their effects, using mechanisms which will involve deeper loops of the total network.
** Extraregulators - Achieve homeostatic controls outside the body, by changing and controlling the environment - man being the most conspicuous example of this class.
* Centripetal and centrifugal changes in the location of control:
** Centripetal - Habit is more economical than trial and error and genotypic control may be more economical than acclimation.
** Centrifugal - Natural selection, in the long run, favors regulators more than adjusters, and extraregulators more than regulators

=== Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication ===

* Preverbal mammals have a discourse that is primarily about the rules and the contingencies of relationship.
* The great new thing in the evolution of human language was not the discovery of abstraction or generalization, but the discovery of how to be specific about something other than relationship.
* Large-brained creatures were, at some evolutionary stage, unwise enough to get into the game of relationship and, once the species was caught in the game of interpreting its members' behavior twoard one another as relevant to the complex and vital subject, there was survival value for those individuals who could play the game with greater ingenuity or greater wisdom.
* In all mammals, the organs of sense become also organs for the transmission of messages about relationship
* In dolphins, has vocalization taken over the communicative functions that most animals perform by facial expression, wagging tails, clenched fists, supinated hands, flaring nostrils, and the like.
* If you say to a girl, "I love you," she is likely to pay more attention to the accompanying kinesics and paralinguistics than to the words themselves.
* We humans become very uncomfortable when somebody starts to interpret our postures and gestures by translating them into words about relationship. We much prefer that our messages on this subject remain analogic, unconscious, and involuntary. We tend to distrust the man who can simulate messages about relationship.
* Captive cetaceans are like monkeys in a cage. They are highly intelligent and highly developed, and they are bored (and hence uncommunicative do to a lack of stimulation).

=== A Re-examination of "Bateson's Rule" ===

* In biological systems, the step from radial symmetry to bilateral symmetry commonly requires a piece of information from the outside.
* Every reduction in symmetry (from radial to bilateral or from bilateral to asymmetrical) requires additional information.

=== Comments on Part IV ===
-

== Part V: Epistemology and Ecology ==
=== Cybernetic Explanation ===

* Causal explanation is usually positive, while cybernetic explanation is always negative. We consider what alternative possibilities could conceivably have occurred and then ask why many of the alternatives were not followed, so that the particular event was one of those few which could, in fact, occur.
* In cybernetic language, the course of events is said to be subject to restraints.
* If we find a monkey striking a typewriter apparently at random but in fact writing meaningful prose, we shall look for restraints, either inside the monkey or inside the typewriter. Perhaps he could not strike inappropriate letter; perhaps the type bars could not move if improperly struck; perhaps incorrect letters could not survive on the paper. Somewhere there must have been a circuit which could identify error and eliminate it.
* In cybernetics, mapping appears as a technique of explanation whenever a conceptual "model" is invoked or, more concreely, when a computer is used to simulate a complex communicational process.
* An endless hierarchy of contexts within contexts
* Without context, there is no communication
* The quantity of information is conventionally expressed as the log to base 2 of the improbability of the actual event or object.
* The central explanatory quantity, information, is of zero dimensions. Quantities of realy dimensions (mass, length, time) and their derivatives (force, energy, etc) have no place in cybernetic explanation.
* Choices are not all at the same level.
* The patterning or predictability of particular events within a larger aggregate of events is called "redundancy".
* We might regard patterning or predictability as the very essence and raison d'être of communication.
* In a wider context than the transmission between A and B, where there is an observer, C, the transmission appears rather as a spreading of redundancy.
* A pattern is definable as an aggregate of events or objects which will permit in some degree guesses when the entire aggregate is not available for inspection.
* If we say a message has meaning or is about some referent, what we mean is that there is a larger universe of relevance consisting of message-plus-referent, and that redundancy or pattern or predictability is introduced into this universe by the message.
* The matter of the localization has bedeviled communication theory and neurophysiology for years, and it is interesting to consider how it looks if we start from redundancy, pattern, or form as the basic concept.
* In fact, information and form are not items which can be localized.
* In perception, we shall not say "I see a tree", because the tree is not within our explanatory system. At best, it is only possible to see an image which is a complex but systematic transform of the tree. This image, of course, is energized by my metabolism and the nature of the trasnform is, in part, determined by factors within my neural circuits: "I" make the image, under various restraints, some of which are imposed by my neural circuits, while others are imposed by the external tree. An hallucination or dream would be more truly "mine" insofar as it is produced without immediate external restraints.
* All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints - is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.

=== Redundancy and Coding ===

* I suggest that the separate burgeoning evolution of kinesics and paralanguage alongside the evolution of verbal language indicates that our iconic communication serves functions totally different from those of language and, indeed, performs functions which verbal language is unsuited to perform.
* When considering two animals in an environment:
** The physical environment contains internal patterning or redundancy.
** Sounds or other signals from one animal may contribute redundancy to the system.
** The sequence of signals will certainly contain redundancy.
** The signals may contribute redundancy to the universe.
** Some animals are capable of learning.
** For every organism there are limitation and regularities which define what will be learned and under what circumstances this learning will occur.
** From the morphology and behavior of the organism a human observer can guess with better than random success at the nature of the environment
*"the mysterious evolutionary step from the iconic to the verbal."
*"that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics"

=== Conscious Purpose versus Nature ===

* I, the conscious I, see an unconsciously edited version of a small percentage of what affects my retina. I am guided in my perception by purposes.
* Wisdom I take to be the knowledge of the larger interactive system - that system which, if disturbed, is likely to generate exponential curves of change. Consciousness operates in the same way as medicine in its sampling of the events and processes of the body and of what goes on in the total mind. It is organized in terms of purpose. It is a short-cut device to enable you to get quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live.
* If you follow the "common-sense" dictates of consciousness you become, effectively, greedy and unwise.
* Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished. Call the systemic forces "God" if you will.
* (in the garden of Eden), On one of the trees there was a fruit, very high up, which the two apes were unable to reach. So they began to think. That was the mistake. They began to think purposively.
* (man) does not see himself as part of the system in which the mess exists, and he either blames the rest of the system or he blames himself. In my parable Adam combines two sorts of nonsense: the notion "I have sinned" and the notion "God is vengeful".
* In the period of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps the most important disaster was the enormous increase of scientific arrogance.
* Evolution was the history of how organisms learned more tricks for controlling the environment; and man had better tricks than any other creature.
* We might say that in creative art man must experience himself - his total self - as a cybernetic model.

=== Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation ===

* Three cybernetic or homeostatic systems:
** The individual human organism
** The human society
** The larger ecosystem
*This phenomenon of spreading change is in the widest sense a sort of learning. Acclimation and addiction are special cases of this process.
*All biological change is conservative and all learning is aversive (to try to keep things as they are).
*Consciousness has feedback into the remainder of mind and so an effect upon action
*The system of selection of information for the screen of consciousness is importantly related to "purpose", "attention", and similar phenomena
*The cybernetic nature of self and the world tends to be imperceptible to consciousness, insofar as the contents of the "screen" of consciousness are determined by considerations of purpose.
*The attempt to achieve a change in a given variable, located either in self or environment, is likely to be undertaken without comprehension of the homeostatic network surrounding that variable.
*Conscious man, as a changer of his environment, is now fully able to wreck himself and that environment - with the very best of conscious intentions.
*The social scene is nowadays characterized by the existence of a large number of self-maximizing entities which, in law, have something like the status of "persons" - trusts, companies, political parties, unions, commercial and financial agencies, nations, and the like.

=== Form, Substance and Difference ===

* The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment.
* In the map and the territory combination, what gets onto the map is "difference"
* Difference which occurs across time is what we call "change".
* The word "idea", in its most elementary sense, is synonymous with "difference".
* The elementary unit of information is a difference which makes a difference.
* What travels in an axon is "news of a difference".
* The mental world is only maps of maps of maps, ad infinitum. All "phenomena" are literally "appearances".
* Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body - the autonomic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self.
* Under LSD, I have experienced, as have many others, the disappearance of the division between self and the music to which I was listening. The perceiver and the thing perceived become strangely united into a single entity. This state is surely more correct than the state in which it seems that "I hear the music".

=== Comment on Part V ===

* -

== Part VI: Crisis in the Ecology of Mind ==
=== From Versailles to Cybernetics ===

* This is what mammals are about. They are concerned with patterns of relationship, with where they stand in love, hate, respect, dependency, trust, and similar abstractions, vis-a-vis somebody else. This is where it hurts us to be put in the wrong. If we trust and find that that which we have trusted was untrustworthy; or if we distrust, and find that that which we distrusted was in fact trustworthy, we feel bad.
* The Treaty of Versailles was one of the great sellouts in the history of our civilization.
* One of the roots of cybernetics goes back to Whitehead and Russell and what is called the Theory of Logical Types. In principle, the name is not the thing named, and the name of the name is not the name, and so on. In terms of this powerful theory, a message about war is not part of the way. The message "Let's play chess" is not a move in the game of chess. It is a message in a more abstract language than the language of the game on the board.
* What is wrong with the international field is that the rules need changing.

=== Pathologies of Epistemology ===

* You don't "really" see me. What you "see" is a bunch of pieces of information about me, which you synthesize into a picture image of me. You make that image. It's that simple.
* The erroneous premises, in fact, work. On the other hand, the premises work only up to a certain limit, and, at some stage or under certain circumstances, if you are carrying serious epistemological errors, you will find that they do not work any more. But then it is exceedingly difficult to get rid of the error - it's sticky.
* The unit of information is difference. In fact, the unit of psychological input is difference.
* Minimal characteristics of a system such as mind. The system shall:
** Operate with and upon differences.
** Consist of closed loops or networks of pathways along which differences and transforms of differences shall be transmitted.
** Many events within the system shall be energized by the respondent part rather than by impact from the triggering part.
** Show self-correctiveness.
*Mind is a necessary, an inevitable function of the appropriate complexity, wherever that complexity occurs.
*A redwood forest or a coral reef, which its aggregate of organisms interlocking in their relationships has the necessary general structure.
*Every human organization shows both the self-corrective characteristic and has the potentiality for runaway.
*What "thinks" and engages in "trial and error" is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines between each of the three are entirely fictitious.
*Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (ie differences, complexes of differences, etc) in circuits.
*Evolution of man's attitude to his environment:
**Totemism - he identified with the natural world around him and took that empathy as a guide for his own social organization and his own theories of his own psychology.
**Animism - he reversed the process and took clues from himself and applied them to the natural world around him, giving the notion of personality or mind to mountains, rivers, forests, and such things.
**Separating the notion of mind from the natural word and getting the notion of gods.
*If you do not get what you want, you will blame somebody and establish either a jail or a mental hospital, according to taste, and you will pop them in it if you can identify them. If not, you will say, "It's the system". This is roughly where our kids are nowadays.
*They say that power corrupts, but it is rather the idea of power that corrupts.

=== The Roots of Ecological Crisis ===

* The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.

=== Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization ===

*Flexibility is to specialization as entropy is to negentropy. Flexibility may be defined as uncommitted potentiality to change.
*The variable which does not change its value becomes ipso facto hard programmed (because other variables encroach on its freedom, narrowing its tolerance limits. This is another way of describing habit formation.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Reading for the Plot

2026-07-26T15:52:45Z

Robert.adlington:

=== Preface ===

* Plot as I conceive it is the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a certain direction or intent of meaning.
* Our common sense of plot - our capacity to recognize its common forms and their characteristics - derives from many sources, including no doubt the stories of our childhood.
* Most of all, perhaps, it has been molded by the great 19th C narrative tradition that, in history, philosophy, and a host of other fields as well as literature, conceived certain kinds of knowledge and truth to be inherently narrative, understandable (and expoundable) only by way of sequence, in a temporal unfolding.
* In the 20th C, we have become more suspicious of plots, more acutely aware of their artifice, their arbitrary relation to time and chance, though we no doubt sstill depend on elements of plotting, however ironized or parodied, more than we realize.
* Psychoanalysis is a primarily narrative art, concerned with the recovery of the past through the dynamics of memory and desire.
* Ultimately, we may dream of a convergence of psychoanalysis and literary criticism because we sense that there ought to be a correspondence between literary and psychic dynamics.

=== 1. Reading for the Plot ===

*Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semi-conscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.
*At about the age of three a child begins to show the ability to put together a narrative in coherent fashion and especially to recognize narratives and to judge their well-formedness.
*A narrative without at least a minimal plot would be incomprehensible.
*We can make sense of such dense and seemingly chaotic texts as dreams because we use interpretive categories that enable us to reconstruct intentions and connections, to replot the dream as narrative.
*From sometime in the mid 18th C through to the mid 20th C, Western societies appear to have felt an extraordinary need or desire for plots, as history replaces theology as the key discourse.
*By the end of the enlightenment, there is no longer any consensus about where we are headed as a species, and no cultural cohesion around a point of fixity which allows thought and vision to transfix time. And this may explain the 19th C's obsession with questions of origin, evolution, progress, genealogy, its foregrounding of the historical narrative as par excellence the necessary mode of explanation and understanding.
*With the advent of Modernism came an era of suspicion toward plot, engendered perhaps by an overelaboration of and overdependence on plots in the 19th C.
*Plot is the logic and dynamic of narrative, and narrative itself a form of understanding and explanation.
*Plot is conceived to be the outline or armature of the story, that which supports and organizes the rest.
*Memory is the key faculty in the capacity to perceive relations of beginnings, middles, and ends though time, the shaping power of narrative.
*Fabula and Sjuzet:
**Fabula (aka histoire) - the order of events referred to by the narrative. "What really happened" - but is only a mental construction that the reader derives from the sjuzet, which is all that he ever directly knows.
**Sjuzet (aka récit, discourse) - the order of events presented in the narrative discourse
*Plot in fact seems to me to cut across the fabula/sjuzet distinction in that to speak of plot is to consider both story elements and their ordering.
*Ricoeur - plot is "the intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in any story".
*Plot might best be thought of in Barthes terms as an "overcoding of the proairetic (code of actions, voice of the empirical) by the hermeneutic (code of enigmas and answers, voice of truth).
*The source of the codes for Barhtes is the déjà-lu, the already-read (and the already-written), in the writer's and reader's experience of other literature.
*The reader is, in Barthes view, himself virtually a text, a composite of all that he has read, or heard read, or imagined as written.
*Narrative stories depend on meanings delayed, partially filled in, stretched out.
*If the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. - the "anticipation of retrospection".
*The function of plot as the active repetition and reworking of story in and by discourse.
*The detective story as a kind of dime-store modern version of "wisdom literature", is useful in displacing the double logic most overtly, using the plot of the inquest to find, or construct, a story of the crime which will offer just those features necessary to the thematic coherence we call a solution, while claiming, of course, that the solution has been made necessary by the crime.
*The question of identity, claims Rousseau - and this is what makes him at least symbolically the incipit of modern narrative - can be thought only in narrative terms, in the effort to tell a whole life, to plot its meaning by going back over it to record its perpetual flight forward, its slippage from the fixity of definition.
*Any time one goes over a moment of the past, the machine can be relied on to produce more narrative - not only differing stories of the past, but future scenarios and narratives of writing itself. There is simply no end to narrative on this model, since there is no "solution" to the "crime".

=== 2. Narrative Desire ===

*Plot as we have defined it is the organizing line and intention of narrative, thus perhaps best conceived as an activity, a structuring operation elicited in the reader trying to make sense of those meanings that develop only through textual and temporal succession. Plot in this view belongs to the reader's "competence", and in this performance - the reading of narrative it animates the sense-making process.
*We can conceive of the reading of plot as a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text.
*One could no doubt analyze the opening paragraph of most novels and emerge in each case with the image of a desire taking on shape, beginning to seek its objects, beginning to develop a textual energetics.
*The specifically human faculty of ingenuity and trickery, the capability to use the mind to devise schemes to overcome superior force, becomes a basic dynamic of plot. If the giants of folktale are always stupid, it is because they stand opposed to human wit, which is seen as a capacity for leverage on the world, precisely that which overcomes inert obstacles, sets change in motion, reformulates the real.
*By the 19th C, the picaro's scheming to stay alive (see Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the first picaresque novel) has typically taken a more elaborated and socially defined form: it has become ambition.
*The ambitious heroes of the 19th C novel - those of Balzac, for example - may regularly be conceived as "desiring machines" whose presence in the text creates and sustains narrative movement through the forward march of desire.
*The general anti-industrial and anti-technological attitude of most 19th C poets and novelists is more and more matched by a fascination with engines and forces.
*With Zola, nearly every novel centers on an engine itself or else a social institution that functions as an engine.
*Zola's engines - like Balzac's "devouring presses" - are a mise-en-abyme of the novel's narrative motor, an explicit statement of the inclusion within the novel of the principle of its movement.
*In the motors and engines, including Eros as motor and motor as erotic, we find representations of the dynamics of the narrative text, connecting beginning and end across the middle and making of that middle - what we read through - a field of force.
*What lies beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the realization of orgiastic desire: the death instinct, the drive toward extinction.
*The talisman (in La Peau de chagrin) concentrates in itself and phantasmatically represents the paradoxical logic of Freud's essay: that Eros is suspended by the death instinct, the drive of living matter to return to the quiescence of the inorganic, a state prior to life.
*The world not charge with desire is thus without beauty. It is also simply an impossibility.
*Desire should stretch, extend, and project the self - desire as erection.
*If the motor of narrative is desire, totalizing, building ever-larger units of meaning, the ultimate determinants of meaning lie at the end, and narrative desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end.
*As alternative to the vouloir (desire, burning us)/ pouvoir (power, destroying us) paradox, the antique dealer offers the possibility he calls savoir, by which he means vicarious and imaginary enjoyment. Can narrative fictions offer this alternative to the logic of desire in life represented by the magic skin?
*Once there is text, expression, writing, one becomes subject to the processes of desiring and dying. If narrative makes a claim to the recuperation of a savoir from the dynamic of vouloir/pouvoir, it must, I think, be of a different nature from the antique dealer's: a knowledge that is by definition always retrospective and too late, or perhaps knowledge of the too-late.
*Narrative may first come to life a narration, as the inchoate intent to tell - as when Rousseau discovers in the episode of the stolen ribbon the necessity of narrative as the only way to portray an incoherent self - where telling stories becomes the only viable form of "explanation".
*Desire as narrative thematic, desire as narrative motor, and desire as the very intention of narrative language and the act of telling all seem to stand in close interrelation.
*Desire is inherently unsatisfied and unsatisfiable since it is linked to memory traces and seeks its realization in the hallucinatory reproduction of indestructible signs of infantile satisfaction.
*Narratives portray the motors of desire that drive and consume their plots, and they also lay bare the nature of narration as a form of human desire: the need to tell as a primary human drive that seeks to seduce and to subjugate the listener, to implicate him in the thrust of a desire that can never quite speak its name - never can quite come to the point - but that insists on speaking over and over again its movement toward that name.

=== 3. The Novel and the Guillotine, or Fathers and Sons in Le rouge et le noir ===

*Paternity is a dominant issue in the 19th C novel, a principal embodiment of its concern with authority, legitimacy, the conflict of generations, and the transmission of wisdom (eg Turgenev's Fathers and Sons). The son most often has a choice among possible fathers from whom to inherit and in the choosing - which may entail a succession of selections and rejections - he plays out his career of initiation into a society and into history, comes to define his own authority in the interpretation and use of social (and textual) codes.
*Barthes notes that the child appears to "discover" the Oedipus complex and the capacity for constructing coherent narrative at about the same stage in life.
*The most fully developed narratives of the child become a man all seem to turn on the uncertainty of fatherhood, to use this uncertainty to unfold the romance of authority vested elsewhere, and to test the individual's claim to personal legitimacy within a struggle of different principles of authority.
*The 19th C novel as a genre seems to be inseparable from the conflict of movement and resistance, revolution and restoration, and from the issues of authority and paternity, which provide not only the matter of the novel but also its structuring forces, the dynamic that shapes its plot.
*Can illegitimacy rescue Julien Sorel from monstrosity, when throughout the novel illegitimacy has appeared the very essence of the monstrous? Is he really in an 18th C novel, "where the hero is a foundling whose aristocratic origins eventually will out?
*What kind of novel is this? To what models of plot and explanation does it refer us?
*Julien and Mme Rênal are living in different worlds, indeed in different novels:
**For her, the drama has to do with love and jealousy, with amorous rivalry and the possibility of adultery. She thinks she is a character in an 18th C novel of manners.
**Julien, on the contrary, is living in the world of modern narrative - post-revolutionary, post-Napoleonic - which precisely throws into question the context of manners and the novel of manners, subverts its very possibility.
*Politics in Le Rouge et le noir is the unassimilable other, which is fact is all to well assimilated since it determines everything.
*There is a constant threat of irruption of the political into manners, a denuding of the mechanisms governing the relations of power and of persons, an exposure of the dynamic governing history and narrative.
*Julien's texts provide individual interpretations of models of behavior but no authoritative tradition of interpretation and conduct. As a result, Julien continually conceives himself as the hero of his own text, and that text as something to be created, not simply endured. He creates fictions, including fictions of the self, that motivate action. The result is often inauthenticity and error, the choice of comportments dictated by models that are inappropriate.
*The relation of the narrator to Julien - and of all Stendhalian narrators to the young protagonists of his novels - is patently paternalistic, a mixture of censure and indulgence.
*This obtrusive narrator, master of every consciousness in the novel, claims to demonstrate why things necessarily happened the way they did, yet inevitably he suggest the arbitrariness and contingency of every narrative turn of events, how easily it might have been otherwise.
*The Stendhalian novel appears to be a self-inventing artifact.
*Stendhalian time is inorganic, momentary, characterized by abruptness and discontinuity.
*Julien by this point belongs to the Restoration, indeed stands as a figure of how restoration is carried out: by using politics to attain a place in a system of manners that then is used to efface politics, pretending that the way things came to be as they are (by revolution and reaction, for instance) does not belong to history, that the place of each thing, and person, in the structure of things is immutable.
*The monster figures the out-of-place, the unclassifiable, the transgressive, the desiring, the seductive.
*...a more general suspicion of narrative invention, which appears to be subject to interference from outside texts.
*The plotted narrative is a deviance from or transgression of the normal, a state of abnormality and error, which alone is "narratable".
*To frame Julien's novel within his own novel - to continue beyond the end of Julien's novel and take it to pieces - is Stendhal's way of have a plot and punishing it, of writing a novel and then chopping its head off.
*To read a novel - and to write one - means to be caught up in the seductive coils of a deviance: to seduce, of course, is to lead from the straight path, to create deviance and transgression. Stendhal seduces us through Julien's story, then he denounces the seduction. With the fall of the blade of the guillotine, he puts an end to the artificiality of the plotted story.
*...why Stendhal has to collapse his novels as they near their endings: the figure of the narrator as father threatens domination, threatens to offer an authorized version. He too must be guillotined.

=== 4. Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative ===

*Todorov elaborates a model of narrative transformation whereby plot - sjuzet, recit - is constituted in the tension of two formal categories, difference and resemblance.
*"Rather than a 'coin with two faces' transformation is an operation in two directions: it affirms at once resemblance and difference; it puts time into motion and suspends it, in a single movement; it allows discourse to acquire a meaning without this meaning becoming pure information; in a word, it makes narrative possible and reveals its very definition.
*The "dilatory space" of narrative, as Barthes calls it - the space of retard, postponement, error, and partial revelation - is the place of transformation: where the problems posed to and by initiatory desire are worked out and worked through.
*We forget that the future wasn't yet there.
*The very possibility of meaning plotted through sequence and through time depends on the anticipated structuring force of the ending: the interminable would be the meaningless, and the lack of ending would jeopardize the beginning.
*The further we inquire into the problem of ends, the more it seems to compel a further inquiry into its relation to the human end. As Frank Kermode has put it, man is always "in the middest", without direct knowledge or origin or endpoint, seeking the imaginative equivalents of closure that will confer significance on experience.
*Death in narrative, says Benjamin, is the "flame" at which we as readers, solitary and forlorn because cut off from meaning, warm our "shivering" lives.
*Freud is talking about the very possibility of talking about life - about its very narratability.
*Narrative always makes the implicit claim to be in a state of repetition, as a going over again of a ground already covered; a sjuzet repeating the fabula, as the detective retraces the tracks of the criminal.
*Repetition as the movement from passivity to mastery.
*Rhyme, alliteration, assonance, meter, refrain, all the mnemonic elements of literature and indeed most of its tropes are in some manner repetitions that take us beck in the text, that allow the ear, the eye, the mind to make connections, conscious or unconscious, between different textual moments, to see past and present as related and as establishing a future that will be noticeable as some variation in the pattern.
*An event gains meaning by its repetition.
*Repetition creates a return in the text, a doubling back. We cannot say whether this return is a return to or a return of: for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed. Repetition through this ambiguity appears to suspend temporal process or rather to subject it to an indeterminate shuttling or oscillation that binds different moments together as a middle that might turn forward or back. This inescapable middle is suggestive of the demonic: repetition and return are perverse and difficult, interrupting simple movement forward.
*The instinctual is the realm of freely mobile "unbound" energy: the "primary process" where energy seeks immediate discharge, where no postponement of gratification is tolerated. It appears that it must be the "task of the higher strata of the mental apparatus to bind the instinctual excitation reaching the primary process" before the pleasure principle can assert its dominance over the psychic economy.
*Repetition in all it literary manifestations may in fact work as a "binding", a binding of textual energies that allows them to be mastered by putting them into serviceable form, usable "bundles", within the energetic economy of the narrative. Serviceable form must, I think, mean perceptible form: repetition, repeat, recall, symmetry, all these journeys back in the text, returns to and returns of, that allow us to bind one textual moment to another in terms of similarity or substitution rather than mere contiguity.
*Textual energy, all that is aroused into expectancy and possibility in a text, can become usable by plot only when it has been bound or formalized; It cannot otherwise be plotted in a course to significant discharge, which is what the pleasure principle is charged with doing.
*The most effective or, at the least, the most challenging texts may be those that are most delayed, most highly bound, most painful.
*"an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things." Instincts, which we tend to think of as a drive toward change, may rather be an expression of "the conservative nature of living things".
*The organism must struggle against events (dangers) that would help it to achieve its goal too rapidly - by a kind of short-circuit.
*What operates in the text through repetition is the death instinct, the drive toward the end.
*Yet repetition also retards the pleasure principle's search for the gratification of discharge, which is another forward -moving drive of the text. We have a curious situation in which two principles of forward movement operate upon one another so as to create retard, a dilatory space in which pleasure can come from postponement in the knowledge that this - in the manner of forepleasure? - is a necessary approach to the true end. Both principles can indeed become dilatory, a pleasuring in and from delay, though both also in their different ways recall to us the need for end. This apparent paradox may be consubstantial with the fact that repetition can take us both back ward and forward because these terms have become reversible; the end is a time before the beginning.
*Between these two moments of quiescence, plot itself stands as a kind of divergence or deviance, a postponement in the discharge which leads back to the inanimate.
*The desire of the text (the desire of reading) is hence desire for the end, but desire for the end reached only through the at least minimally complicated detour, the intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot of narrative.
*The deviance of narrative from the straight line, the shortest distance between beginning and end - which would be the collapse of one into the other, of life into immediate death.
*Desire reformulated as Eros thus is a large, embracing force, totalizing in intent, tending toward combination in new unities: metonymy in the search to become metaphor.
*Freud: "The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness."
*The whole evolution of the mental apparatus appears as a taming of the instincts so that the pleasure principle - itself tames, displaced - can appear to dominate in the complicated detour called life which leads back to death.
*The organism must live in order to die in the proper manner, to die the right death. One must have the arabesque of plot in order to reach the end. One must have metonymy in order to reach metaphor.
*The understanding of time, says Lukacs, the transformation of the struggle against time into a process full of interest, is the work of memory - or more precisely, we could say with Freud, of "remembering, repeating, working through." Repetition, remembering, reenactment are the ways in which we replay time, so that it may not be lost. We are thus always trying to work back through time to that transcendent home, knowing of course, that we cannot. All we can do is subvert or, perhaps better, pervert time: which is what narrative does.
*Desire is the wish for the end, fulfillment, but fulfillment must be delayed so that we can understand it in relation to origin and to desire itself.

=== 5. Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations ===

*We have defined plot, for our purposes, as a structuring operation deployed by narratives, or activated in the reading of narratives: as the logic and syntax of those meanings that develop only through sequence and succession.
*In the 19th C novel, the parentless protagonist frees an author from struggle with pre-existing authorities, allowing him to create afresh all the determinants of plot within his text.
*The beginning of Great Expectations establishes Pip as an existence without a plot. He will, in the first part of the novel be in search of a plot, and the novel will recount the gradual precipitation of a sense of plot around him, the creation of portents of direction and intention.
*Satis House (where Mrs Faversham lives), as the circular journeys of the wheelchair to the rhythm of the blacksmith's song "Old Clem" may best suggest, constitutes repetition without variation, pure reproduction, a collapsed metonymy where cause and effect have become identical, the same-as-same.
*Education and repression operate in the novel as one form of "binding": official ways of channeling and tying up the mobile energies of life.
*If we can accept the idea of a textual energetics, we can see that in any well-plotted novel the energies released and aroused in the text, especially in its early moments, will not be lost: the text is a kind of thermodynamic plenum, obeying the law of the conservation of energy (as well, no doubt, as the law of entropy).
*Kierkegaard: "Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas repetition properly is repeated forwards." Freud, as we noted, considers repetition to be a form of recollection, brought into play when conscious mental rememoration has been blocked by repression.
*Repetition in the text is a return, a calling back or a turning back. Repetitions are thus both returns to and returns of: for instance, returns to origins and returns of the repressed, moving us forward in Pip's journey toward elucidation, disillusion, and maturity by taking us back, as if in obsessive reminder that we cannot really move ahead until we have understood that still enigmatic past, yet ever pushing us forward, since revelation, tied to the past, belongs to the future.
*Repetition as return speaks as a textual version of the death instinct, plotting the text, beyond the seeming dominance of the pleasure principle, toward its proper end, imaging this end as necessarily a time before the beginning.
*One could almost derive a narratological law here: the true plot will be the most deviant.
*Pip has in fact misread the plot of his life.
*The scene (with Pumblechook and Hubble in the kitchen) suggests a mad proliferation of textuality, where literal and figural switch places, where any referent can serve as an interpretant, become the sign of another message, in a wild process of semiosis which seems to be anchored only insofar as all texts eventually speak of Pip himself as an unjustified presence, a presence demanding interpretation.
*...a general movement in the novel toward recognition of the lack of authorship and authority in texts: textures of codes without ultimate referent or hierarchy, signs cut loose from their apparent motivation, capable of wandering toward multiple associations and of evoking messages that are entirely other, and that all speak eventually of determinative histories from the past. The original nostalgia for a founding divine word leads to a generalized scene of writing, as if the plotting self could never discover a decisive plot, but merely its own arbitrary role as plotmaker. Yet the arbitrary is itself subject to an unconscious determinant, the reproductive insistence of the past history.
*The past needs to be incorporated as past within the present, mastered through the play of repetition in order for there to be an escape from repetition: in order for there to be difference, change, progress.
*As Jaggers puts it to him, there is no gain to be had from knowledge. We are in the heart of darkness, and the articulation of its meaning must simply be repressed. In this novel full of mysteries and hidden connections, detective work turns out to be both necessary and useless.
*Pip emerges from this scene with an acceptance of the determinative past as both determinative and as past, which prepares us for the final escape from plot.
*It is with the image of a life bereft of plot, of movement and desire, that the novel most appropriately leaves u. Indeed, we have at the end what could appropriately be called a "cure" from plot, in Pip's recognition of the general forfeiture of plotting, his renunciation of any attempt to direct his life. Plot comes to resemble a diseased, fevered state of the organism caught in the machinery of a desire which must eventually be renounced.
*Plot, we come to understand, was a state of abnormality or deviance, suggested thematically by its uneasy position between Newgate and Old Bailey, between criminality and the law.
*The 19th C novel in general - and especially that highly symptomatic development, the detective story - regularly conceives plot as a condition of deviance and abnormality, the product of cities and social depths, of a world where récit is complot, where all stories are the result of plotting, and plotting is very much machination.
*Deviance is the very condition for life to be "narratable": the state of normality is devoid of interest, energy, and the possibility for narration. In between a beginning prior to plot and an end beyond plot, the middle - the plotted text - has been in a state of error: wandering and misinterpretation.
*Eros as the force that binds integers together in ever-larger wholes, totalizing, metaphoric, the desire for possession of the world and for the integration of meaning - whereas concomitantly, repetition and return have spoken of the death instinct, the drive to return to the quiescence of the inorganic, of the nontextual. Yet the repetitions, which have served to bind the various plots, both prolonging the detour and more effectively preparing the final discharge, have created that delay necessary to incorporate the past within the present and to let us understand end in relation to beginning. Through the erotics of teh text, we have inexorably been led to its end, which is precisely quiescence: a time after which is an image of the time before. We have reached the non-narratable. Adducing the argument of "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through" to that of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we perceive that repetition is a kind of remembering, and thus a way of reorganizing a story whose connective links have been obscured and lost.
*One you have determined the right plot, plot is over. Plot itself is working-through.
*Great Expectations is exemplary in demonstrating both the need for plot and its status as deviance, both the need for narration and the necessity to be cured from it.
*Both using and subverting the systems of meaning discovered or postulated by its hero, Great Expectations exposes for its reader the very reading process itself: the way the reader goes about finding meaning in the narrative text, and the limits of that meaning as the limits of narrative.
*It juxtaposes human plots - including those of the law - to external orders that render human attempts to plot, and to interpret plot, not only futile but ethically unacceptable. The greater Judgement makes human plots mere shadows.
*If there is a divine masterplot for human existence, it is radically unknowable.
*In the absence or silence of divine masterplots, the organization and interpretation of human plots remains as necessary as it is problematic.
*We are condemned to repetition, rereading, in the knowledge that what we discover will always be that there was nothing to be discovered. Yet the process remains necessary if we are not to be caught perpetually in the "blind and thankless" existence, in the illusory middle.

=== 6. The Mark of the Beast: Prostitution, Serialization, and Narrative ===

*The roman-feuilleton - the serial novel running in regular installments in the daily newspaper - was an early capitalist invention that helped to create modern mass-circulation journalism.
*It is characteristic of the 19th C novel, and perhaps in some degree of all narrative, which in general has precious little use for the simple, calm, and happy, since whatever moral obeisance one makes to these, they lack narrative interest.
*André Gide referred to the novel as a "lawless" form.
*The prostitute is pre-eminently someone with a novelistic destiny: a special, idiosyncratic form of life.
*The novel tends to maintain its plots between exploration of the maximal, most daring social deviance on the one hand, and the counter-discipline of the police on the other.
*One can speculate that prostitutes allowed 19th C novelists to deal with the dangerous and fearful subject of female sexuality in a manner not possible when portraying women of the upper and middle classes.
*Sexuality circulates across class lines, the low and high meet, extremes converge.
*The prostitute, then, stands out as the key figure and term of access to the eminently storied subword, realm of power, magic, and danger; she exemplifies the modern narratable.
*Plotting as the masterful management of suspense and mystery, artfully leading the reader through an elaborate dilatory space that is always full of signs to be read, but always menaced with misreading until the very end.
*The middle decades of the 19th C seemed to have an unlimited appetite for narrative.

=== 7. Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert's Perversities ===

*The novels of Flaubert appear to us today to mark a turning point in the history of the novel.
*Any discussion of plot and the sense of plottedness needs to confront Flaubert, since his relation to traditional uses of plot can only be described as perverse. his mature work is indeed carefully structured by a systematic perversion. of plot as a central system of narrative organization and meaning. The development of perversion as a system become evident as one follows its uses from "Madame Bovary" through "L'Education sentimentale" to the unfinished "Bouvard et Pécuchet", this lsast a glorious summa of what can be done to parody and explode the ordering discourses elaborated over the ages by mankind to make sense of nature, society, and human history.
*L'Education sentimentale is in fact a novel whose tenuous readability depends directly on its intertextual support, its presupposition of a certain standard novelistic mode which it resolutely refuses to endorse.
*Flaubert takes on history itself as a signifying system and a sense-making discourse.
*Deslauriers is a good enough reader of Balzac to have seized the essence: that the concentration of desire projected into the world as will constitutes the primum mobile of plot, leverage on circumstance, movement forward and upward. But however well he understands the system of the Balzacian novel, he is doomed to failure in the Flaubertian novel.
*This is the essential point: the failed coherence of the Balzacian "system" of will, desire, and ambition produces a failure of coherence in the novelistic plot itself, a refusal of the narrative to achieve the kinds of significance that we expect from narrative arrangements of experience - or simply from narrative arrangements of discourse.
*Malraux: "Flaubert's characters are often Balzac's characters conceived in the mode of failure rather than success.
*The energies associated with the Romantic hero and his avatars seem to dissipate remarkably quickly in this novel, as if the steam engine had sprung leaks in its valves.
*Desire here (as so often in Flaubert's novels) creates hallucinatory scenarios of its satisfaction, yet in doing so it reaches at once over and through its objects, exhausting them in the realm of the imaginary, reaching a regret for their fictive loss before their actual possession. The dynamics of ambition are lost.
*The Balzacian novel is constructed precisely on a dramatic, even a theatrical model, by which will and action are plotted toward major "showdowns", scenes of confrontation in which characters act out, give full expression to the issues in conflict, and where the dramatic moment produces changed relations, a significant outcome to the problems posed. And one can legitimately argue that Balzac defines and illustrates the main tradition of the novel, the tradition as understood by Dickens, Dostoevsky, James, Proust, Hardy, Malraux, Faulkner, for instance.
*Flaubert works to disappoint our expectations of drama and coherence. Culler in particular analyzes Flaubert's role as "demoralizer", his use of the twin tropes or irony and stupidity to deconstruct our usual systems for constructing meaning and significance from the elements of the novelistic world.
*In the work of a "new novelist" like Alain Robbe-Grillet, the fragmentary structures of the detective story remain present in a text which does not believe in any clear truth of incident or motive to be detected, and these residual structures provide a necessary armature of readability - the signals of a possible narrative construction that are necessary to the reader's exploration of the text's redefinitions of "meaning" - so in Flaubert the model of the Balzacian novel is ever present as an "as-if", a model against which to play. The result of this play is not nothingness but an uncertain vacillation of meaning and its impossibility, a troubled search, through inadequate traditional systems of meaning , for a decision about whether any order of signs and sense could create a significant version of life and history.
*L'Education sentimentale continually denies us the satisfactions of full meaning, significance, and even signification.
*We as readers expect that voyages will lead somewhere, and the the voyagers who fare forth on them will make not only their goal but their experience along the way the source of significance. To be told that we are scarcely advancing, in the company of the insignificant, makes us wonder why we are to bother at all with a 500 page novel.
*No longer can the reader espouse the protagonist's desire, no longer can he read in the forward-moving expectation created by the force of that desire. The binding, totalizing work of Eros seems to have reached a halt.
*The experience of exclusion from the desirable world inevitably triggers in the Balzacian protagonist an intense flow of desire and its concentration on the objects invested with desirability, and almost magnetic impulsion toward their possession. To want to have is to be: the self is most typically and fully the self in a state of arousal.
*The lack of an object for Frédéric's dispossessed glance points to a more general devaluation of human agency in the passage, which may be consubstantial with a lack of human desire investing the world.
*The described world remains other, a world of surfaces contemplated for themselves.
*The human agency within the text seems to have been set aside in favor of a recording and composing vision of a more impersonal sort which finally insists not on the human, but on the aesthetic.
*...this beautiful and inhuman text.
*Frédéric will enter the world of Parisian luxury without doing much of anything, remaining largely a passive agent.
*What would have been the matter for several chapters of breath-taking twists and reversals in Balzac's writing here occupies under ten pages of undramatized presentation, ending with the protagonist, passive recipient of great wealth, returning to Paris to do nothing.
*The erotic object - the female body - is fragmented, a corps morcelé that offers no focus and no hold for desire.
*The final image of desire is passive and masochistic, offering no promise of dominion over the objects of desire, indeed no hope of his ever reuniting the fragmented parts of the body. The action of desire remains radically discontinuous; it does not work as an ordering principle; it offers no anticipation of arrest and cohesion.
*"worn out, full of contradictory desires and no longer even knowing what he wanted, e felt an overwhelming sadness, a wish to die."
*The very enfeeblement and contradictoriness of desire in the novel appear ever to. strip away erotic embellishments to reveal the drive toward extinction that underlies them.
*James' strictures reveal a considerable failure or unwillingness to understand the anti-Balzacian, or antinovelistic, premises of Flaubert's novel, which preclude turning fascination into knowledge.
*Our resistance to the label "great love story" may be motivated less by uncertainty about the status of "love" in the novel than by doubt about the status of "story". The "luminous point" that is Mme Arnoux resolutely refuses to be narrativized; it does not move, change, provoke recognition. In terms of narrative progression, it is less a luminous point than a black hole.
*There is a kind of anti-principle of form at work in the novel: the principle of interference.
*Systematic interference takes the forms of missed rdvs, interrupted meetings, wrong addresses, mistaken objects.
*Flaubert's coincidences are carefully nonessentialized, as they are de-dramatized: they are not confrontations, but simple encounters, unfolding the narrative as something close to pure metonymy without metaphoric arrest.
*Perversity - the condition of being turned around - well characterizes the curious motors and motions of this narrative plot. Desire and its objects are ever in a relation of chiasmus: you are never there where desire is to be realized; and when desire is realized, it is never in the right place or with the right person.
*The novel appears to write itself in the absence of the author.
*Flaubert uses style indirect libre to avoid and prevent direct attribution of what is spoken and reported, as a technique of irresponsibility.
*Flaubert wished to construct a book where "there would not be a single word invented by me" - where both the entries and their definitions would be made of the sottises, the stupidities of others - and the reader would stand in the uneasy position of being uncertain whether to read it ironically or not. Thus would the dream of the perfectly disguised author be realized.
*In Barthes terms, we pass from the "voice of the person" to the "voice of Science", without quite knowing it. The result, surely, is to make both notions, person and science, somewhat uncertain, and to make ideological evaluations impossible. The novel refuses to allow itself to be pinned down, to be made to declare its opinions. Like its her's desires, it exists in a mode of uncertainty and inconsistency.
*We being to suspect that all action, activity itself, belongs to the world of mindless madness, of démence.
*Rocks that were there at the unimaginable beginning and will be there still at the unimaginable end, create a scope for history that is beyond the reach of mind.
*That the revolution ends in idiocy has to do rather with revolutionary action, and indeed with action itself, of which revolutionary action is perhaps simply the paroxystic condition. To act as if the world could be changed is the error. To act in the belief that it must change as the result of your action risks the result of idiocy. If ES claims to be the history of Flaubert's generation, it appears to pass its severest judgment on that generation's belief that change is within the grasp of human agency.
*The hero begins to melt away, to lose the last vestiges of outline and shape.
*One can in effect read the final scene between F and Mme Arnoux both as a great love scene and as a deconstruction thereof. The whole scene is played out in the retrospective mode, as the articulation of a sublime love that belongs to the past and indeed derives its sublimity from its pastness.
*The possibility of presence, of fulfillment, provokes simultaneously desire and fear, the sense of taboo and the anticipation of disgust.
*Prostitution remains profanation but is also for Flaubert somehow the inevitable response to the lies of Romantic passion, the most characteristic and even the most lucid form of love in a world where everything is subject to the marketplace.
*Everything we have read in this very long novel is somehow secondary to the unrecorded moment of three years before it began.
*What is to keep the narrative going? Only - we have almost reached the situation of Samuel Beckett's narrators - the act of narration itself.
*ES reaches a truly melancholy paradox in the claim that the memory and narration of failed meanings is somehow in itself a matter of compelling interest.

=== 8. Narrative Transaction and Transference ===

*"Transaction" is of course, another word for "metaphor", as is "transference", which we shall use in a moment; all three terms image a process of substitution, cross-over, exchange.
*Analysis works toward the more precise and orderly recollection of the past, no longer compulsively repeated, insistently reproduced in the present, but ordered as a retrospective narrative.
*There can be a range of reasons for telling a story, from the self-interested to the altruistic.
**Seduction appears as a predominant motive, be it specifically erotic and oriented toward the capture of the other, or more nearly narcissistic, even exhibitionistic, asking for admiration and attention.
**Yet perhaps aggression is nearly as common, and of course, often inextricably linked to the erotic: a forcing of attention, a violation of the listener.
*A historical shift, an increasingly acute self-consciousness about the status of narrative within art that is itself self-consciously "modern". Curiously, this intense awareness of the epistemological and linguistic problems posed by storytelling is less a discovery of Modernism than a rediscovery of a concern central to earlier fiction, particularly in the 18th C, such as "Tristram Shandy" and Diderot's "Jacques le fataliste"

=== 9. An Unreadable Report: Conrad's Heart of Darkness ===

*Heart of Darkness - a detective story gone modernist: a tale of inconclusive solutions to crimes of problematic status.
*Marlowe's journey is a repetition, which gains its meaning from its attachment to the prior journey. It is not primary: it attaches itself to another's story, seeking there its authority; it retraces another's path, repeats a journey already undertaken.
*What stands at the heart of darkness - at the journey's end and at the core of this tale - is unsayable, extralinguistic.
*Language as a system of social communication and transmission, as the medium of official biographies and readable reports, has no place for the unspeakable; it is used rather to cover up the unnameable, to reweave the seamless web of signification.
*Marlowe's tale makes the darkness visible.
*"it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone."
*HoD does not "end"; it is a potentially interminable analysis that simply breaks off.
*Any future retelling of Marlow's tale of Kurtz's story will have to be narrative in nature because there is no way to state its kernel, its wisdom, directly: this can only be approached metonymically, through a trying-out of orders, through plottings. And these will never take you there, they will only indicate where "there" might be located.
*One finally needs to read HoD as act of narration even more than as narrative or as story.
*Like the Ancient Mariner's Wedding Guest, he has been made to hear. If a number of 19th and 20th C narrative texts present sophisticated versions of traditional oral storytelling, it is because this gives them a way to force the reader into transferential relationship with what he may not want to see or hear.
*All stories are in a state of being retold, that there are no more primary narratives.
*The implicit conviction that there are no new plots, no primary stories left, only the possibility of repeating others. The sons are not free of the fathers but bound to the retracing of their traces. But yet again, the impossibility of original story, the need to retell, places the primary emphasis of the tale on the plane of narration itself, calls attention to the attempt to repeat, reconstruct, retell.
*Conrad on James: "These solutions are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for which our hearts yearn, with a longing greater than the longing for the loaves and the fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be set at rest."

=== 10. Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding ===

*...the detective story, which claims that all action is motivated.
*The figure of the detective may be seen as an inevitable product not only of the 19th C's concern with criminal deviance, but also, more simply, of its pervasive historicism, its privileging of narrative explanation, accounting for what we are through the reconstruction of how we got that way.
*Freud with the Wolf Man is in a position analogous to that of the Proustian narrator in relation to his own buried past or, better, to those Faulknerian narrators who must unearth, order, make sense of the past stories of others in order to make sense of history and their own understandings of life.
*The elements occupy shifting positions in relation to one another, as the story and its plotting and it must be the task of the fourth element, the writing of the case history itself, to recover the other elements in their complex interrelationship.
*"forcing a structure which is itself in many dimensions "onto a 2D plane. He must manage to tell, both "at once" and "in order".
*The thematic material suggested by the dream, and the associations that the dreamer is able to articulate in reviewing the dream, can only begin to make sense when narrativized, ordered as a sequence of events.
*Freud readily concedes that he cannot offer a decision between them; they constitute an either/or, a moment of sequential and causal undecidability which may revise our very conception of the narrative interrelationship of event. We are faced with a recombinant potential of postures and possibly reversible chains of association. The relation between fabula and sjuzet, between event and its significant reworking, is one of suspicion and conjecture, a structure of indeterminacy which can offer only a framework of narrative possibilities rather than a clearly specifiable plot.
*We know what we are because we can say where we are, and we know this because we can say where we came from. The authority of narrative derives from its capacity to speak of origins in relation to endpoints.
*Freud argues that undecidability (of whether the Wolf Man's original trauma was real or phantasy) is not of importance, since the subsequent history, whether it derives from primal scene or primal phantasy, remains unchanged.
*A narrative explanation that surely foresaw that much of its celebrity would come from its recovery of so spectacular a moment of origin doubles back on itself to question that origin and indeed to displace the whole question of origins, to suggest another kind of referentiality, in that all tales may lead back not so much to events as to other tales, to man as a structure of the fictions he tells about himself.
*A narrative account that allows the inception of its story to be either event or fiction - that in turn opens up the potential for another story, anonymous and prehistoric - perilously destabilizes belief in explanatory histories as exhaustive accounts whose authority derives from the force of closure, from the capacity to say: here is where it began, here is what it became.
*The shape of the individual and his biography becomes uncontrollable: their etiology and evolution are assigned to an unspecifiable network of event, fiction, and interpretation.
*Biography, even in the form of the case history, appears to be intimate with fiction: it is a hypothetical construction.
*That the Wolf Man's narrative and his very identity are bound up with the fictions he was told and read and dreamed as a child suggests a classic trope of the novelistic genre, from Cervantes on, where the hero must be disillusioned of a bookish, mystified conception of reality. What is radically modernist in Freud's narrative is that there is not and cannot be any disillusion: the self is bound in illusory relations, and the most one can hope for is some understanding of the order of relation itself, its uses as symbolic code. Freud's suggestion that the individual life history may open backward onto a phylogenetic masterplot is a further modernist gesture.
*The individual, we might say, makes raids on a putative masterplot in order to remedy the insufficiencies of his own unsatisfactory plot.
*Thus the way a story is ordered does not necessarily correspond to the way it works. Indeed, narrative order, sequence as a logical enchainment of actions and outcomes, must be considered less a solution than part of the problem of narrative explanation. How we narrate a life - even our own life to ourselves - is at least a double process, the attempt to incorporate within an orderly narrative the more devious, persistent, and powerful plot whose logic is dictated by desre.
*Freud also recognizes that there are elements of cause and signification that can never really be narrativized at all, but must rather be understood through a structural analysis, in a mapping of a certain psychic set toward neurosis, a network analyzed with extraordinary complexity.
*Narrative itself, as a mode of discourse and understanding, has only a provisional status. Its understanding work on and in time, while the unconscious remains timeless.
*James: "Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so."
*There is in Freud's case histories an underlying assumption that psychic health corresponds to a coherent narrative account of one's life. Marcus: "Human life is, ideally, a connected and coherent story, with all the details in explanatory place, and with everything (or as close to everything as is practically possible) accounted for, in its proper causal or other sequence. And inversely illness amounts at least in part to suffering from an incoherent story or an inadequate narrative account of oneself.
*Freud and his patient together demonstrate that it is not so much simple coherence and mere plausibility that make our narratives persuasive. Narrative sequences and scenarios must accord with the complex, twisting, subversive patternings of desire. The insistent past must be allowed to write its design at the same time once attempts to unravel it. As well as having form, plots must generated force: the force that makes the connection of incidents powerful, that shapes the confused material of a life into an intentional structure that in turn generates new insights about how life can be told. The powerful fiction is that which is able to restage the complex and buried past history of desire as it covertly reconstitutes itself in the present language.
*The "true" narrative lies in-between, in the process of exchange; it is the product of two discourses playing against one another, often warring with one another, working toward recognitions mutually acknowledged but internalized in different ways.
*The patient comes to the analyst with a story to tell, a story that is not so much false - since it does in some manner signify the truth - as it is incomplete and untherapeutic. Its plot lacks the dynamic necessary to creating sequence and design that integrate and explain. The fuller plot constructed by the analytic work must be more dynamic, thus more useful as a shaping and connective force; above all it must be hermeneutically more forceful. It must carry the power of conviction, for its tellers and its listeners, that is the ultimate goal of storytelling. Truth, then, arises from a dialogue among a number of fabula and a number of sjuzet, stories and their possible organizations, as also between two narrators, analysand and analyst. A centerless and reversible structure, dialogue is an agency of narration that creates as it questions the narrative, and designates the field of force of the necessary fiction.

=== 11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom! ===

*Other novels questioning the epistemology of narrative: Ulysses, Les Faux-monnayeurs, La conscienza di Zeno, La Modification
*Chronology, genealogy, and maps are traditional schemata for the ordering of time and experience from which AA markedly departs, yet by which it is also haunted, as by the force of an absence.
*A given narrative weaves its individual pattern from pre-existent codes, which derive, most immediately at least, from the "already-written". The reading of a narrative then tends to decipher, to organize, to rationalize, to name in terms of codes derived from the "already read".
*Barthes proairetic code concerns the logic of actions, how the completion of an action can be logically derived from its initiation, and the whole of an action seen as a complete and nameable unit, which then enters into combination with other actions, to form sequences.
*The hermeneutic code concerns the questions and answers that structure a story, their suspense, partial unveiling, temporary blockage, eventual resolution, with the resultant creation of a retarding structure or dilatory space which we work through toward what is felt, in classical narrative, to be meaning revealed.
*Plot, we suggested, might best be conceived as a combination of the proairetic and the hermeneutic, or better, and overcoding of them. The actions and sequences of actions of the narrative are structured into larger wholes by the play of enigma and solution: the hermeneutic acts as a large, shaping force, allowing us to sort out, to group, to see the significance of actions, to rename their sequences in terms of the significance for the narrative as a whole. We read in the suspense created by the hermeneutic code, structuring actions accoridng to its indications, restructuring as we move through partial revelations and misleading clues, moving toward the fullness of meaning provided by the saturation of the matrix of the sentence now full predicated.
*There is narrative aplenty here, as throughout the novel, but inadequate grounds for narrative.
*We have on the one hand plenty of narrating, and on the other at least the postulation of a story that may equal history itself. What appears to be missing is the level of plot, the result of Mr Compson's chemical operation, that comprehensible order of even that was the very substance and raison d'être of the classical narrative.
*Stories are told in the name of something or someone; they are told for something. The incessant narrating of AA however, seems to bring us perilously close to narrative without motive.
*There is a split and a polarization: narrating on the one hand, an epic historical story on the other, and no narrative plot or design to join them.
*The novel becomes a kind of detective story where the object of investigation - the mystery - is the narrative design, or plot, itself.
*We have a complex, intricate, seemingly highly motivated plot that ultimately appears to get the story of Bon and Henry all wrong.
*Sutpen himself is a master-plotter, endowed with an abstract, formalist sense of what the future shape of his life must be. Yet his repeated attempts to found a genealogy do not work, no doubt because one cannot postulate the authority and outcome of a genealogy from its origin. The authority of genealogy is known only in its outcome, in its issue, using that word in all its possible senses. Sutpen attempts to write the history of the House of Sutpen prospectively, whereas history s evidently always retrospective. I have indeed argues that all narrative must, as a system of meaning, conceive of itself as essentially retrospective.
*Only the sons can tell the story of the fathers. Narrative, like genealogy, is a matter of patronymics.
*As narrators, narratees, and characters become compounded and interchangeable - and the narrated and the narrating occupy shifting positions - we have very nearly a literal realization of Barthes' point: the distance between telling and listening, between writing and reading, has collapsed; the reader has been freed to speak in the text, toward the creation of the text.
*Narration can become fully dialogic, centerless, a transaction across what may be a referential void - gilled perhaps only with phantasies from the past - yet a transaction that creates, calls into being, a necessary hermeneutic fiction. The narrative transaction thus appears fully consonant with the psychoanalytic transference, a Zwischenreich in which narration works through and works out a narrative solution.
*One need no longer worry about the "double logic" of narrative since event is merely a necessary illusion that enables the interpretive narrative discourse to further, as in the mind of some Borgesian demiurge. This in turn might imply that the ultimate subject of any narrative is its narrating, that narrative inevitably reveals itself to be a Moebius strip where we unwittingly end up on the plane from which we began. Origin and endpoint - and, perforce, , genealogy and history - are merely as-if postulations ultimately subject to the arbitrary whims of the agency of narration, and of its model in readership. Narrative plots may be no more - but of course also no less - than a variety of syntax which allows the verbal game - the dialogue, really - to go on.
*Fathers and sons are perhaps the dominant thematic and structural concern and shaping force in the 19th C novel, ultimately perhaps constituting a theme and a structure incoporate with the very nature of the novel as we know it.
*Is coherent understanding, the explanatory narrative plotted from origin to endpoint, possible and transmissible?
*Two threads of patterning in the book:
**Incest is that which overassimilates, denies difference, creates too much sameness. If, as Levi-Strauss has claimes, it is the taboo on incest that creates the differentiated society, the attraction to incest raises the threat of the collapse of difference, loss of tension, and the stasis of desire extinguished in absolute satisfaction.
**On the other hand there is miscegenation, mixture of blood, the very trace of difference: that which overdifferentiates, creates too much difference, sets up a perpetual slippage of meaning where one cannot find any points of fixity in the signifying chain.
**Incest thus would belong to the pole of metaphor, but as static, inactive metaphor, the same-as same; whereas miscegenation would be a "wild", uncontrollable metonymy.
*Narrating is an urgent function in itself, in the absence of pattern and structure, patterning and structuration remain necessary projects, dynamic intentions.
*The recovery of the past - which I take to be the aim of all narrative - may not succeed in AA, if by the recovery of the past we mean its integration within the present through a coherent plot fully predicated and understood as past. Yet the attempted recovery of the past makes known the continuing history of past desire as it persists in the present, shaping the project of telling.
*To speak at all is to express the desire to be recognized and heard, whether the speech is in the form of a demand or not.
*AA may speak both of an unmasterable past and of a dynamic narrative present dedicated to an interminable analysis of the past. Faulkner's present is a kind of tortured utopia of unending narrative dialogue informed by desire for a "revelatory knowledge". That knowledge will never come, yet that desire never will cease to activate the telling voices.

=== In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot ===

*Ends, it seems, have become difficult to achieve. In their absence, or their permanent deferral, one is condemned to playing: to concocting endgames, playing in anticipation of a terminal structuring moment of revelation that never comes, creating the space of an as-if, a fiction of finality.
*We have, in a sense, become too sophisticated as readers of plot quite to believe in its orderings.
*There is, in Robbe-Grillet's work a radically "constructivist" sense of narrative: the reader is asked to build a novel, not as the traditional plenum of meaning but as a possible model of narrative itself, a kind of laboratory experiment.
*Narrative becomes a combinatoire: a game of putting together, a kind of generalized metonymy in which the given elements - as the given products and paradigms of culture and society - provide, as it were, the metaphoric glue.
*The difference of the postmodern is, I think, one of degree: a greater explicitness in the abandonment of mimetic claims, a more overt staging of narrative's arbitrariness and lack of authority, a more open playfulness about fictionality.
*If narrative indeed has to do with the recovery of the past, and more generally with the attempted rescue of meaning from passing time, the psychoanalytic model of remembering is invaluable since it reaches out to include repeating, working-through, and reconstructing - all of which seem to me to characterize the literary text and our reading of it, to define the text as read.
*Plots are valuable for the use-value they give to stories, the way they make them exchangeable, transactable.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

2026-07-26T15:52:27Z

Robert.adlington:

Paris Addresses:

* [https://share.google/VgrmXfaURJMm2Xqoy 6 rue des Favorites, 75015]
* [https://share.google/qEbuIUv7SwquW2DkQ 38 Blvd Saint-Jacques, 75014]
* EHPAD Le Tier temps, [https://maps.app.goo.gl/k5PeTVHuxqF3nhhC9 24-26 Rue Rémy Dumoncel]
* Cottage at [https://share.google/ZDtkNGytCIZVgrTzu Ussy-Sur-Marne]

* 122 - True art has nothing to do with the Cartesian clear and distinct and that ultimately it tires in the murky waters of the inexplicable.
* 146 - Coherence, artifice, unity were regarded by Beckett as belonging to the "chloroformed world" of Balzac's novels, where, he claimed, characters are turned into "clockwork cabbages" on whom the novelist can "rely on their staying put wherever needed or staying going at whatever speed in whatever direction he chooses".
* 147 - apparently unobtrusive, yet in fact highly manipulative 19th C narrator... the narrator is still very much concerned with an outer reality, of people as well as of place, and, as author, Beckett does not always take account of his own strictures.
* 148 - The emphasis is as much on the subjective associations that she evokes as on the young woman herself.
* 167 - This inspired Beckett to think of composing a poem about Swift, describing the process as "poem scum fermenting" and as the "first flicker in the mash-tub" for some time.
* 182 - With Beckett, writing explores, but it does not explain away.
* 188 - "The artist who is aware of this (breakdown between subject and object) may state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects; he may state it as no-man's land, Hellespont, or vacuum, accoring as he happens to be feeling resentful, nostalgic, or merely depressed.
* 189 - "My no-man's land" came to be a phrase that he related to his own work. And in this, the rupture becomes no merely one between subject and object but between man and man, and between man and himself.
* 231 - From Celine's Death on Credit: "What is essential is not to know whether we are wrong or right - that is quite unimportant. What is important is to discourage the world from concerning itself with us. All the rest is vice."
* 244 - I am not interested in a "unification" of the historical chaos any more than I am in the "clarification" of the individual chaos, and still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc, names dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know.
* 269 - "The real consciousness is the chaos, a grey commotion of mind, with no premises or conclusions or problems or solutions or cases or judgements."
* 352 - "I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, (being) in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knwoledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."
* 352 - The second common element of major significance to Beckett's own future work was that he would draw henceforward on his own inner world for his subjects; outside reality would be refracted through the filter of his own imagination; inner desires and needs would be allowed a much greater freedom of expression; rational contradictions would be allowed in; and the imagination would be allowed to create alternative worlds to those of conventional reality. What he was rejecting was the Joycean principle that know -ing more was a way of creatively understanding the world and controlling it.
* 357 - The shift to writing in French may have been an important way of escaping from the influence of Joyce. It was also easier, Beckett maintained, to write in French "without style". He did not mean by this that his French had no style, but that, by adoping another language, he gained a greater simplicity and objectivity. French offered him the freedom to concentrate on a more direct expression of the search gor "being" and on an exploration of ignorance, impotence, and indigence. Using French also enabled him to "cut away the excess, to strip away the color" and to concentrate more on the music of the language, its sounds and its rhythms.
* 371 - "I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road." In answer to Duthuit's "And preferring what?" Beckett replied memorably: " "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."
* 372 - In Molloy, clues lead nowhere; plans appear aimless and events lack importance, at least in terms of the plot; meetings are arbitrary and lead to no new developments. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose stories Beckett loved as a boy, would have shuddered at a world so impervious to reason and deductive logic.
* 376 - ...in a world where neither depth psychology nor any philosophical system will ever manage to explain the inexplicable.
* 403 - "The notion of happiness has no meaning at all for me any more. All I want is to be in the silence..."
* 460 - "with the snow and the crows and the exercise book that opens like a door and lets me far down into the now friendly dark."
* 463 - For what is most essential is the exploration of "being" to which the text is devoted, asking the question what remains when everything superfluous is taken away.
* 492 - Writing was for him, he said, a question of "getting down below the surface" towards what he described as "the authentic weakness of being". This was associated with a strong sense of the inadequacy of words to expore the forms of being. "Whatever is said is so far from the experience"; "if you really get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable". In this he was far removed, he maintained, from the approach of James Joyce; "Joyce believed in words. All you had to do was rearrange them and they would express what you wanted." Beckett never seems to have believed that this was achievable.
* 497 - ...characters who speak, though apparently dead."
* 521 - Alan Schneider on the plot of "Film": "It's a move about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver - two aspects of the same man. The perceiver desires like mad to perceive, and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Then, in the end, no one wins.
* 532 - The fascination of this text comes from the way in which the imagination shifts its own position in relation to these various elements, going in, moving out, ascending, examining, descending and returning inside the rotunda like some versatile, miniature camera eye.
* 602 - Some of Beckett's most cherished themes: an absence of an identifiable self; man forced to live a kind of surrogate existence, trying to "make up" his life by creating fictions or voices to which he listens; a world scurrying about its business, ignoring the signs of decay, disintegration and death with which it is surrounded. Yet if all this sounds deeply sombre, even pessimistic, there remains a strongly positive impulse to confer form on such concerns. Form (and here poetry) has become a central bulwark, perhaps even providing a readon for the need to express, the sources of which Beckett genuinely never seems to have understood.
* 607 - "It is a game, everything is a game... That has got to be done artificially, balletically. Otherwise everything becomes an imitation, an imitation of reality... It should become clear and transparent, not dry. It is a game in order to survive.
* 631 - Beckett said there was only on them in his life: "To and fro in shadow, from outer shadow to inner shadow. To and fro, between unattainable self and unattainable non-self."
* 632 - "Neither" begins "to and fro in shadow/ from outer shadow to inner shadow/ from impenetrable self to impenetrable un-self/ by way of neither"
* 632 - From Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater": Puppets possess a mobility, symmetry, harmony and grace greater than any human dancer can possibly achieve, because they lack the self-consciousness that puts human beings permanently off balance
* 633 - Again from Kleist: The bear represents, symbolically, the creature without awareness of self, who, as a result, is able to respond naturally and unselfconsciously to the thrusts of the fencer and not be deceived by what are only false passes. Further, in parrying the actual thrusts, the bear does what he has to do with the strictest economy and the maximum of grace.
* 653 - The scepticism that he had brought to his criticism of the role of memory in Proust (involuntary as well as voluntary) had been reinforced by the distance that separated him from his own past. Memory emerges here as very much like invention.
* 671 - ...emotions are strictly contained but never totally abandoned.
* 680 - It is often forgotten that Beckett's work is as much about persisting and continuing as it is about ending.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Gravity's Rainbow

2026-07-26T15:52:10Z

Robert.adlington:

== Criticism ==

=== Contemporary Reviews ===

* Michael Wood, "[https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/03/22/rocketing-to-the-apocalypse/ Rocketing to the Apocalypse]" , The New York Review (1973)
* Richard Poirier, "[https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Rocket_Power Rocket Power]", The Saturday Review (1973)
* Richard Locke, "[https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-rainbow.html One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years]", The New York Times (1973)
* RZ Sheppard, "[https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=V._Squared V. Squared]", Time Magazine (1973)
* [https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/08/archives/pulitzer-jurors-his-third-novel.html Pulitzer Jurors Dismayed Over Pynchon]

=== Later ===

* M Keith Booker, « [https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/history-is-hard-to-decode-on-50-years-of-thomas-pynchons-gravitys-rainbow/ History Is Hard to Decode: On 50 Years of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow”] », Los Angeles Review of Books (2023)

=== Web Resources ===

* [https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page Pynchon Wiki: Gravity's Rainbow]
* [https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l Pynchon-l]
* [https://thomaspynchon.com/ thomaspynchon.com]
* [https://gravitysrainbow.substack.com/p/gravitys-rainbow The Exegesis of Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow]

== Characters and Places ==
[https://thomaspynchon.com/wp-content/uploads/GravitysRainbowCharacters.pdf Diagram of characters]

=== Tyrone Slothrop ===

=== Weismann/Blicero ===

=== Enzian ===

=== Vaslav Tchitcherine ===

=== Roger Mexico ===

=== Ned Pointsman ===

=== Geoffrey "Pirate" Prentice ===

=== Thanatz ===

=== Ernest Pudding ===

=== The White Visitation - A secret British psychological warfare facility ===

== Summary ==

=== Part One. Beyond the Zero ===
"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death." - Werner von Braun

==== Section 1 ====

=== Part Two. Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering ===

=== Part Three: In the Zone ===

=== Part Four: The Counterforce ===

== Quotes ==
=== Part One. Beyond the Zero ===
* What the dossiers call Pirate Prentice is a strange talent for - well, for getting inside the fantasies of others: being able, actually, to take over the burden of managing them..."
* ...the images often changing scale so quickly, so unpredictably that you're apt now and then to get a bit of lime-green in with your rose, as they say. The scenes are highlights from Pirate's career as a fantasist-surrogate, and go back to when he was carrying, everywhere he went, the mark of Youthful Folly growing in an unmistakable Mongoloid point, right out of the middle of his head. He had known for a while that certain episodes he dreamed could not be his own. This wasn't through any rigorous daytime analysis of content, but just because he knew.
* 30. "It's control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under 'outside forces' - to veer into any wind. As if...
* 30. "A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself - its own logic, momentum, style, from inside. putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened - that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable..."
* 55. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements.
* 72. Could there be, somewhere, a dossier, could They (They?) somehow have managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty...how else would They know?
* 75. And Black Wing has even found an American, a Lieutenant Slothrop, willing to go under light narcosis to help illuminate racial problems in his own country.
* 77. Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being. The newer geometries confuse him.
* 80. ...that absence of vertical interest...
* 81. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes. that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma... that its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources...
* 81. The ba-sic theory is, that when given an unstruc-tured stimulus, some shape-less blob of exper-ience, the subject, will seek to impose, struc-ture on it. How, he goes a-bout struc-turing this blob, will reflect his needs, his hopes - will provide, us with clues, to his dreams, fan-tasies, the deepest re-gions of his mind.
* 84. But a hardon, that's either there, or it isn't. Binary, elegant. The job of observing it can even be done by a student.
* 85. ...a silent extinction beyond the zero.
* 86. When we find it, we'll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul. There will be precious little room for any hope at all. You can see how important a discovery like that would be.
* 88. 'The act of injuring and the act of being injured are joined in the behavior of the whole injury.' Speaker and spoken-of, master and slave, virgin and seducer, each pair most conveniently coupled and inseparable - 'The last refuge of the incorrigibly lazy, Mexico, is just this sort of yang-yin rubbish. One avoids all manner of unpleasant lab work that way, but what has one said?
* 89. "Pavlov believed that the ideal, the end we all struggle toward in science, is the true mechanical explanation. He was realistic enough not to expect it in his lifetime. Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better and better approximations. His faith ultimately lay in a pure physiological basis for the life of the psyche. No effect without cause, and a clear train of linkages."
* 89. ..."but there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less... sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle."
* 90. Pavlov though that all the diseases of the mind could be explained, eventually, by the ultraparadoxical phase, the pathologically inert points on the cortex, the confusion of ideas of the opposite.
* 91. ...there must be more, beyond the sense, beyond death, beyond the Probabilities that are all Roger has to believe in."
* 92. We have lost them. No one listened to those early conversations - not even an idle snapshot survives. They walked till that winter hid them and it seemed the cruel Channel itself would freeze over, and no one, none of us , could ever completely find them again. Their footprints filled with ice, and a little later were taken out to see.
* 97. ...she plays at this only... plays at playing.
* 100. God is creator and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of opposites brought together.
* 105. She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't foret the real business of the War is buying and selling.
* 105. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world.
* 105. The true war is a celebration of markets.
* 107. Indeed, why did she leave Shußstelle 3? We are never told why. But now and then, players in a game will, lull or crisis, be reminded how it is, after all, really play - and be unable then to continue in the same spirit.
* 107. ...say fuck it and quit the game, quit it cold.
* 122. ...pictures, well scenes, keep flashing in, Roger. By themselves, I mean I'm not making them.
* 126. His life had been tied to the past. He'd seen himself a point on a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history - a known past, a projectable future. But Jessica was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable... new life.
* 126. ...nothing was fixed, everything could be changed...
* 131. (The War) wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity...Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it... so absentee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness - not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life. At "The White Visitation" there's a long-time schiz, you know, who believes that he is World War II.
* 135. ...banish the Adversary, destory the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are...
* 141-2. Kevin Spectro did not differentiate as much as he between Outside and Inside. He saw the cortex as an interface organ, mediating between the two, but part of them both. "When you've looked at how it really is," he asked once, "how can we, any of us, be separate?"
* 145. Afterward he can recall nothing. Sometimes, rarely, there may be tantalizing - not words, but halos of meaning around words his mouth evidently spoke, that only stay behind - if they do - for a moment, like dreams, can't be held or developed, and presently, go away.
* 146. ... and interface between the worlds, a sensitive.
* 147-8. ...part of an old and clandestine drama for which the human body serves only as a set of very allusive, often cryptic programme notes - it's as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we cannot enter. The convolutions of language denied us!
* 148. ...deeper than geometries we know of, the voices utter secrets we are never told.
* 153. There's no memory on his side: no personal record... and he's been brought up a Christian, a Western European, believing in the primacy of the "conscious" self and its memories, regarding all the rest as abnormal or trivial, and so he is troubled, deeply.
* 155. They know how to use nearly everybody. What will happen to the ones they can't use?
* 155. ...look at all the forms of capitalistic expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction - ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer - all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they're approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.
* 156. She knows what she has to impersonate.
* 159. Not produce, not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems.
* 159. Try to design anything that way and have it work.
* 165. ...a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority...
* 165. ...messages weave into a net of information that no one can escape..."
* 165. Your are constrained over there (among the living), to follow it in time, one step after another. But here its possible to see the whole shape at once... 'shape' isn't really the right word... Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion?
* 166. But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured.
* 167. These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic... You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control? You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later you will have to let them go.
* 176. I only want to visit you. You want to possess me.
*177. You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are "yours" and which are "mine". It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible...

=== Part Two. Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering ===

* 187. What th' fuck's going on?
* 188. It's a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia filtering in.
* 193. Harvard's there for other reasons. The 'educating' part of it is just sort of a front.
* 194. Welcome Mister Slothrop Welcome To Our Structure We Hope You Will Enjoy Your Visit Here.
* 208. Seeing the number is supposed to be the point. But in the game behind the game, it is not the point.
* 209. ...all in his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to've been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel - where only destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the House always does, of course, keep turning a profit...
* 218. Do They never make mistakes, or...
* 228. ...if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous as a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires - on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It's work, that's all it is, and there's no room for any extrahuman anxieties.
* 229. ...this lab here is also a maze, i'n't it now... behaviorists run these aisles of tables and consoles just like rats 'n' mice. Reinforcement for them is not a pellet of food, but a successful experiment. But who watches from above, who notes their responses?
* 237. Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
* 241. Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
* 244. What's happening is not clear.
* 249. Plasticity's central canon: that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature. They could decide now what properties they wanted a molecule to have, and then go ahead and build it.
* 251. ...do you remember the way in, all the twists and turns? No. You weren't looking. Any of these doors might open you to safety, but there may not be time...
* 251. Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
* 257. The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of...
* 258. Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?
* 258. It'll get easier. Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future.
* 260. It's Lightning-Latch, The Door That Opens You!
* 262. Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.
* 264. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness.
* 267. ...the moment then of doubt, the real possibility that they are something else - that none of it was real before this moment: only elaborate theatre to fool you. But now the screen has gone dark, and there is absolutely no more time left. The agents are here for you at last.
* 275. So, when laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born.
* 277. Pointsman is hallucinating. He has lost control. Pointsman is supposed to have absolute control over Katje. Where does this leave her? In a control that is out of control.
* 278. How many changes does one get to be a synthesis, Pointsman? East and West, together in the same bloke?... Protagonist and antagonist in one... "Yang and Yin," whispers the Voice, "Yang and Yin..."

=== Part Three: In the Zone ===

* 281. Signs will find him here in the Zone, and ancestors will reassert themselves. It's like going to that Darkest Africa to study the natives there, and finding their quaint superstitions taking you over.
* 281. ...as borders fall away and the Zone envelops him...
* 283. Well here he is skidded out onto the Zone like a planchette on a Ouija board, and what shows up inside the empty circle in his brain might string together into a message, might not.
* 285. ...a smell from before his conscious memory begins... not a smell to be found out in the world - it is the breath of the Forbidden Wing... essence of all the still figures waiting for him inside, daring him to enter and find a secret he cannot survive. Once something was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless... His erection hums from a certain distance, like an instrument installed, wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost here in our raw and clamorous world, another office representing Their white Metropolis far away...
* 286. A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory.
* 288. But you are free. We all are. You'll see. Before long.
* 290. It's so unorganized out here. There have to be arrangements.
* 291. Slothrop, though he doesn't know it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days. Not paranoia. Just how it is. Temporary alliances, knit and undone.
* 292. Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
* 294. Forget frontiers now. Forget subdivisions. There aren't any... It's all been suspended. Vaslav calls it an 'interregnum.' You only have to flow along with it.
* 297. Strangely, these are not the symmetries we were programmed to expect, not the fins, the streamlined corners, pylons, or simple solid geometries of the official vision at all... No, this Rocket-City, so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space, is set up deliberately To Avoid Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror...
* 302. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. There's a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it... but they lie so close to Earth that from many places they can't be seen at all, and from different places inside the zone where they can be seen, they fall into completely different patterns...
* 303. Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. Thestatus of the name you miss, love, and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence - some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty.
* 317. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.
* 317. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts...No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets...
* 319. The Eternal Center can easily be seen as the Final Zero. Names and methods vary, but the movement toward stillness is the same.
* 321. We will have to learn such new maps of Earth: and as travel in the Interior becomes more common, as the maps grow another dimension, so must we...
* 322. North is death's region. There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern. Norhausen means dwellings in the north.
* 323. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. Weissmann, the European whose protégé he became, always believed he'd seduced Enzian away from religion. But the gods had gone away themselves: the gods had left the people.
* 324. Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature... He was led to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he would come to understand truly his manhood.
* 326-7. ...he can't handle them all at the same time, if he stays too much with any he's in danger of losing others... But it's no only the details. He has the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that he is speaking lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but in levels of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the flummeries of an actor impersonating a leader.
* 333. There are no zones... No zones but the Zone.
* 348. ...what is perhaps our basic search: to find something that can kill intense pain without causing addiction. Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one property without the other.
* 349. But 'addiction'? What do we know of that? Fog and phantoms. No two experts will even agree on how to define the word. 'Compulsion'? Who is not compelled? 'Tolerance'? 'Dependence'? What do they mean? All we have are the thousand dim, academic theories. A rational economy cannot depend on psychological quirks. We could not plan.
* 362. ...we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being.
* 362. Stay in the Zone long enough and you'll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself.
* 373. ...except that here everything's been turned inside out. The straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort. The civilians are outside now, the uniforms inside. Smooth facets of buildings have given way to cobbly insides of concrete blasted apart, all the endless-pebbled rococo just behind the shuttering. Inside is outside.
* 391. Is there a single root, deeper than anyone has probed, from which Slothrop's Blackwords only appear to flower separately? Or has he by way of language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, taking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words.
* 412. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide...
* 413. ...we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others... we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps - but the Serpent whispered, 'They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given...
* 414-5. Won't somebody take advantage of me? Just a slave with nobody to slave for. A-and who th' heck wants ta be free
* 415. Behind this job-like-any-other-job seems to lie something void, something terminal, something growing closer, each day, to manifestation...
* 419. In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable. Games, fairy-tales, legends from history, all the paraphernalia of make-believe can be adapted and even embodied in a physical place, such as at Zwölfkinder.
* 422. ...love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child...
* 425. Chances are astronomically against a perfect hit, of course, that is why one is safest at the center of the target area. Rockets are supposed to be like artillery shells, they disperse about the aiming point in a giant ellipse - the Ellipse of Uncertainty.
* 428. ...the gift of Daedalus that allowed him to put as much labyrinth as required between himself and the inconveniences of caring.
* 430. I don't really want to be anywhere. I don't care.
* 430. Close to losing control, Pökler committed then his act of courage. He quit the game.
* 464. ...a Max Weber charisma... some joyful - and deeply irrational - force the State bureaucracy could never routinize, against which it could not prevail.
* 472. It's what They want him to believe, but how can he? No difference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy's based on that... but she must be more than an image, a promise to pay...
* 474. ...isn't the hidden machinery easier to see in the days leading up to the event? There are arrangements, things to be expedited... and often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to...
* 489. In the Zone, in these days, there is endless simulation...
* 489. How probable is the Anubis in this estuary tonight?
* 490. That if he's been seeker and sought, well, he's also baited and bait.
* 490. Looks like there are sub-Slothrop needs They know about, and he doesn't... What do I need that badly?
* 490-1. But nowadays, some kind of space he cannot go against has opened behind Slothrop, bridges that might have led back are down now for good. He is growing less anxious about betraying those who trust him. He feels obligations less immediately. There is, in fact, a general loss of emotion, a numbness he ought to be alarmed at, but can't quite...
* 494. But mistakes are part of it too - everything fits, ja? learns patterns, adjusts to rhythms, one day you are no longer an actor, but free now, over on the other side of the camera.
* 504. It is difficult to perceive just what the fuck is happening here.
* 509. Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter. Personal density... is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth. Temporal bandwidth is the width of your present, your now... The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get ot where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even - as Slothrop now - what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment.
* 516. It wasn't ever necessary to see around the entire Plan... really that's asking too much of anyone...
* 520. ...yes and now what if we - all right, say wwe are supposed to be the Kabbalists out here, say that's our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it's all squeezed limp of its last drop... well we assumed - natürlich - that this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the high, rising dead, the blazing, the great one ("orunene" is already being modified by the Zone-Herero children to "omunene," the eldest brother)... our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness... even this far from Südwest we are not to be spared the ancient tragedy of lost messages, a curse that will never leave us... But if I'm riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it...
* 521. It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distract... secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more... The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms - it was only staged to look that way - but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite...
* 521. We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid... we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function... zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coal-tars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling... this ruinous plant, waiting for its Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others...
* 523. You say other side? What do you mean? What other side?
* 525. Somewhere, among the wastes of the World, is the key that will bring us back, restore us to our Earth and to our freedom.
* 527. Springer, this ain't the fuckin' movies now, come on. Not yet. Maybe not quite yet. You'd better enjoy it while you can. Someday, when the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and selling at people's prices, the lights and booms no longer necessary, then... then...
* 535. It is not clear if the midget knows that his reality is being discussed. another of this film's artful ambiguities.
* 537. It appears to be some very extensive museum, a place of many levels, and new wings that generate like living tissue - though if it all does grow toward some end shape, those who are here inside can't see it.
* 539. Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have meaning.
* 540. To believe that each of Them will personally dies is also to believe that Their system will die - that some chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History. To affirm Their mortality is to affirm Return. I have been pointing out certain obstacles in the way of affirming Return.
* 541-2. At the moment I'm involved with the 'Nature of Freedom' drill you know, wondering if any action of mine is truly my own, or if I always do only what They want me to do... regardless of what I believe, you see... I've been given the old Radio-Control-Implanted-In-The-Head-At-Birth problem to mull over - as a kind of koan, I suppose. It's driving me really, clinically insane. I rather imagine that's the whole point of it.
* 543. No one has ever left the Firm alive, no one in history - and no one ever will.
* 543. Everyone here seems to be at least a double agent.
* 543. I can't even trust myself? can I. How much freer than that can a man be ? If he's to be sold out by anyone? even by himself you see?
* 549. Slothrop wakes up in a burned-out locksmith's shop, under racks of sooty keys whose locks have all been lost.
* 567. ...film and calculus, both pornographies of flight.
* 597. ...a good half of the crowd are out in the foothills of unconsciousness, and the rest are not exactly sure what's going on.
* 616. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper...

=== Part Four: The Counterforce ===

*621. "You're caught in tonality," screams Gustav. "Trapped. Tonality is a game. All of them are. YOu're too old. You'll never move beyong the game, to the Row. The Row is enlightenment." "The Row is a game too."
*624. ...where you can sit and listen in to traffic from the Other Side, hearing about the future (no serial time over there: events are all there in the same eternal moment and so certain messages don't always "make sense" back here: they lack historical structure, they sound fanciful or insane).
*626. ...and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural...
*638. Of course a well-developed They-system is necessary - but it's only half the story. For every They there ought to be a We. In our case there is. Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough a We-system as a They-system.
*638. I means what They and Their hired psychiatrists call 'delusional systems.' Needless to say, 'delusions' are always officially defined. We don't have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It's the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart.
*638-9. ...if this is a "We-system," why isn't it at least thoughtful enough to interlock in a reasonable way, like They-systems do? "That's exactly it," Osbie screams, belly-dancing Porky into a wide alarming grin, "They're the rational ones. We piss on Their rational arrangements."
*639. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History...
*645. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there, The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight.
*659. Everything is so remote now. I don't really know why they sent me out here. I don't know any more who Slothrop really was. There's a failure in the light. I can't see. It's all going away from me... "There are things to hold to. None of it may look real, but some of it is. Really.
*660-1. This is what I have become. An estranged figure at a certain elevation and distance... who has lost everything else but this vantage. There is no heart, anywhere now, no human heart left in which I exist. Do you know what that feels like... I haven't transcended. I've only been elevated. That must be as empty as things get: it's worse than being told you won't have to die by someone you can't believe in.
*661. ...a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins, and nothing ends.
*662. How can They be stopped? How long can I get away with easy work, cheap exits? Shouldn't I be going all the way in?
*663. You will want cause and effect. All right.
*664. Most people's lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They're the one who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life - do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that's what!
*664. It will look like the world you left, but it'll be different. Between congruent and identical there seems to be another class of look-alike that only finds the lightning-heads. Another world laid down on the previous one and to all appearances no different. Ha-ha!
*666. He is the Zone's worst specter. He is malignant...
*666. ...with the same reach toward another shape as words trying to make their way through dreams.
*667. As long as the Anubis kept moving, there was no need to choose: the memory could have been left so far behind that one day its "reality" wouldn't matter any more. Of course it happened. Of course it didn't happen.
*667-8. ...there is a key, among the wastes of the World... and it won't be found on board the white Anubis because they throw everything of value over the side.
*668. Isn't this an "interface" here? a meeting surface for two worlds?... sure, but which two? There's no counting on any positivism to save him... it only got in the way, made others impatient with him. A screen of words between himself and the numinous was always just a tactic... it never let him feel any freer.
*672. ...when mortal faces go by, sure, self-consistent and never seeing me, are they real? Are they souls, really? or only attractive sculpture, the sunlit faces of clouds?
*674. Unexpectedly, this country is pleasant, yes, once inside it, quite pleasant after all. Even though there is a villain here, serious as death. It is this typical American teenager's own Father, trying episode after episode to kill his son. And the kid knows it. Imagine that. So far he's managed to escape his father's daily little death-plots - but nobody has said he has to keep escaping.
*674. Travel here gets complicated - a system of buildings that move... certain paths aren't available to you... Your objective is not the King - there is no King - but momentary targets such as the Radiant Hour.
*676. There's no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made - at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery.
*676. ...with hopes for success and hopes for disaster about equally hight (and no, that doesn't cancel out to apathy - it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as knives).
*695. Imagine this very elaborate scientific lie: that sound cannot travel through outer space. Well, but suppose it can. Suppose They don't want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called an "aether," which can carry sound to every part of the Earth. The Soniferous Aether. For millions of years, the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace, 93 millionmile roar, so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it. Unless it changed, how would anybody know?
*697. What if there is no Vacuum? Or if there is - what if They're using it on you? What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life surrounded by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but your own individual life in time? What if it's in Their interest to have you believing that?
*699. Maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, such us out through the electrodes out of the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified Electroworld.
*699. What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
*701. The basic problem... has always been getting other people to die for you. What's worth enough for a man to give up his life? That's where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique - it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death... But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version - ours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History's changes are inevitable, why not not die? Vaslav? If it's going to happen anyway, what does it matter?
*703. Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination - not yet blindingly One, but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like Tchitcherine who are held at the edge...
*712. Plucked, hell - stripped. Scattered all over the Zone. It's doubtful if he can ever be "found" again, in the conventional sense of "positively identified and detained."
*712-3. The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover know as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what's going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while.
*713. They will use us. We will help legitimize Them, though They don't need it really, it's another dividend for Them, nice but not critical...
*713. ...which is worse: living on as Their pet, or death? It is not a question he has ever imagined himself asking seriously. It has come by surprise, but there's no sending it away now, he really does have to decide, and soon enough, plausibly soon, to feel the terror in his bowels. Terror he cannot think away. He has to choose between his life and his death. Letting it sit for a while is no compromise, but a decision to live, on Their terms...
*720. Have you ever waited for it? wondering whether it will come from outside or inside?
*720. ...human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be born. This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrified to oil or coal. Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth's body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God's spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was something we had to work on, historically and personally.To build from scratch up to its present status as reaction, nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising. But only nearly as strong. Only nearly, because of the defection rate. A few keep going over to the Titans every day, in their striving subcreation...
*721. He is now always the same, awake or asleep - he never leaves the single dream, there are no more differences between the worlds: they have become one for him.
*722. America was the edge of the World. A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented. Savages had their waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the other side. But Europe had gone deeper - into obsession, addiction, away from all the savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it. It wasn't Europe's Original Sin - the latest name for that is Modern Analysis - but it happens that Subsequent Sin is harder to atone for.
*722. In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But now we have only the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas.
*723. Fathers are the carriers of the virus of Death, and sons are the infected...
*724. I want to break out - to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered, inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become...
*725. It Begins Infinitely Below The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it's only the peak that we are allowed to see...
*725 ...a controlled burning - breaking downward again, an uncontrolled explosion... this lack of symmetry leads to speculating that a presence, analogous to the Aether, flows through time, as the Aether flows through space. The assumption of a Vacuum in time tended to cut us off one from another. But an Aether sea to bear us world-to-world might bring us back a continuity, show us a kinder universe, more easygoing...
*728. It comes as the Revealer. Showing that no society can protect, never could - they are as foolish as shields of paper... They have lied to us. They can't keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies... Before the Rocket we went on believing, because we wanted to. But the Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point. Nowhere is safe. We can't believe Them any more. Not if we are still sane, and love the truth.
*735. This is magic. Sure - but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly no the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it.
*735. ... before the Vertical Solution, all transport was, in effect, two-dimensional...
*736. ...already stories gone beneath the soles of your shoes...
*737. Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away... This is Sado-anarchism and Thanatz is its leading theoretician in the Zone these days.
*737. A Diaspora running backwards, seeds of exile flying inward in a modest preview of gravitational collapse, of the Messiah gathering in the fallen sparks...
*738. There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly - perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time's assembly - and there ought to be a punchline to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered.
*738. Jamf was only a fiction, to help him explain what he felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky... to help him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race's, death.
*739. I am betraying them all... the worst of it is that I know what your editors want, exactly what they want. I am a traitor. I carry it with me. Your virus.
*739. "The end is too far," they whispered. "Go back. There are no stops on this branch..."
*740. ...a brand-new reflex arc, ear-brain-hands-asshole, and a return toward innocence too.
*740. He's looking straight at Slothrop (being one of the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any more. Most of the others gave up long ago trying to hold him together, even as a concept - "It's just got too remote"'s what they usually say).
*741. Yeah, what we need isn't right reasons, but just that grace. The physical grace to keep it working. Courage, brains, sure, OK, but without that grace? forget it. Do you - please - are you listening? This thing here works. Really does. It worked for me, but I'm out of the Dumbo stage now, I can fly without it. But you. Rocky. You...
*742. "Dying a weird death," Slothrop's Visitor by this time may be scrawled lines of carbon on a wall, voices down a chimney, some human being out on the road, "the object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that however it finds you, it will find you under very weird circumstances. To live that kind of life..."
*742. Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there's no telling which of the Zone's present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering.
*742. But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea...
*743. A wine rush: a wine rush is defying gravity, finding yourself on the elevator ceiling as it rockets upward, and no way to get down. You separate in two, the basic Two, and each self is aware of the other.
*744. It may be too late to get home.
*745. There is a move going on, under the rug. On the floor, 24 hours a day, pull back the rug sure enough there's that damn movie!... The title is New Dope, and that's what it's about, a brand new kind of dope that nobody's ever heard of. One of the most annoying characteristics of the shit is that the minute you take it you are rendered incapable of ever telling anybody what it's like, or worse, where to get any. Dealers are as in the dark as anybody. All you can hope is that you'll come across somebody in the act of taking (shooting? smoking? swallowing? some. It is the dope that finds you, apparently. Part of a reverse world whose agents run around with guns which are like vacuum cleaners operating in the direction of life - pull the trigger and bullets are sucked back out of the recently dead into the barrel, and the Great Irreversible is actually reversed as the corpse comes to life to the accompaniment of a backwards gunshot (you can imagine what drug-ravaged and mindless idea of fun the daily soundediting on this turns out to be).
*747. He is the father you will never quite manage to kill. The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet hare are their sons, still trapped inside inertias of lust that are 40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power out own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the place of, and fail... So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.
*747. [The Tower tarot card signifies] ...any System which cannot tolerate heresy: a system which, by its nature, must sooner or later fall. We know by now that it is also the Rocket.
*749. If you're wondering where he's [Blicero] gone; look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost surely there. Look high, not low.
*753. "Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of Life. It is also the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22 paths. Each path corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also to one of the cards called 'Major Arcana' in the Tarot. So although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel.
*754. When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.
*757. ...a catharsis of dumpsters, all hues, shapes and batterings. Returning to the Center, with all the gathered fragments of the Vessels...
*760. The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who've always been at the movies (haven't we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in.
*760. And in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see...

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

La Bête Humaine

2026-07-26T15:51:46Z

Robert.adlington:

# In Paris, Roubaud discovers that his wife, Séverine has been raped and abused by her "protector" Grandmorin, an executive of his train company. Roubaud plans to murder Grandmorin, forces his wife to write to suggest they meet in Le Havre, and they all board the train.
# Jacques Lantier visits his aunt Phasie, married to Misard, who she is convinced is poisoning her. Jacques has urges to murder a woman. While out walking, he meets his cousin Flore, they embrace, but as they are about to have sex, he imagines plunging a pair of scissors into her throat, he tears himself away, wanders some more, and witnesses the murder of Grandmorin on the train. Misard finds the body and leaves Jacques to guard it, while he seeks the authorities.
# Au Havre, the following morning, Roubaud waits nervously for the station head to receive the news of Grandmorin's murder. When it comes, M. Cauche is sent for, investigates the private wagon where the murder was committed, calls the Roubauds as witnesses. We meet Pecqueux, Jacques' engineer, a drinker and filanderer as well as his extra wife, Philomène Sauvagnat, and Mme Lebleu, who conspires against the Roubauds because of a jealousy over the apartements that they live in over the station waiting rooms.
# Interrogated by the juge d'instruction and accused by Mme Bonnehon (Grandmorin's sister), and the Lachesnayes (her daughter and her son-in-law), the Roubauds fear incrimination, but are saved by Jacques who realizes that they are guilty, but realizes also that he is in love with Séverine. The juge's suspicions by now are fixed on Cabuche, who has spent five years in prison for murder, and who's friend was also abused by Grandmorin, though Cabuche seems sincere in his denial of the crime.
# Still fearful of discovery, Roubaud sends Séverine to Paris to get closer to Jacques and to visit M. Camy-Lamotte, another director of the train company and potential new benefactor. The latter receives Séverine, knows that she is guilty due to the letter sent the day of the murder, but directs the investigator to close the case due to fear of scandal and also due to Séverine's beauty. Jacques and Séverine become closer.
# A month passes and the gossip around the Roubauds dies down. As the Roubaud's become more distant to each other, Jacques and Séverine become closer. After initially refusing, Séverine finally agrees to meet Jacques while her husband works and, on the night of a vast storm, they finally have sex in a tool shed of the station. Jacques believes that his murderous urges have been quelled by his love for Séverine. Roubaud has begun to gamble and he and Séverine quarrel over money. There are 10k Francs hidden under a floorboard, stolen from Grandmorin on the night of the murder - Roubaud would rather die than touch then, but one night, returning from the café, he removes them to continue gambling.
# Every Friday Séverine takes Jacque's morning express to Paris to "consult with a doctor about a bad knee" but in reality to spend the day with Jacques. This Friday, it is already snowing hard, but she makes the trip anyway. The train gets stuck near Misard's house and Séverine and several of the other passengers take refuge there while a team dig the train out. Flore sees Jacques kiss Séverine.

[[Category:Books]]

La Curée

2026-07-26T15:51:21Z

Robert.adlington:

* I: Renée Saccard is riding with Maxime, her stepson au bois, is bored with her life as a beautiful rich society woman, and begins to be attracted by the idea of sleeping with Maxime. At a party, she spies on Maxime and Louise de Mareuil, a strange, tragic girl who is expected to die young, and whose father seeks political advantage in exchange for a dowry of a million francs.
* II: Back in time, Aristide Rougon arrives in Paris, changes his name to Saccard. He works at the Hotel de Ville, and has access to plans for the redevelopment of Paris by Haussmann and plans to speculate thereupon. His wife dies, and his sister, Mme Sidonie, proposes that he marry Renée, the daughter of who has been raped, and whose aunt, Elisabeth, has conceived a plan to placate Renée's father, by finding a man to marry him in exchange for a large dowry, primarily the form of buildings. Aristide will "manage" Renée's fortune by selling the buildings for redevelopment after having greatly inflated their apparent value.
* III: Maxime arrives in Paris, charms Renée and her circle of friends. She decides to educate him in the ways of society. Aristide continues his property dealings and concludes a deal to marrying Maxime to Louise. Renée, received at the Tuilleries for a ball is noticed by the Emperor.
* IV: Maxime and Renée sleep together in the "Salon Blanc". Renée regrets but soon relapses and they continue the affair over the following weeks at home, in her room, and even in the conservatory on a bearskin rug.
* V: Saccard has kissed his wife's neck
* VI:
* VII:

[[Category:Books]]

The Society of Mind

2026-07-26T15:50:59Z

Robert.adlington:

== 1. Prologue ==
"Much of the power of the mind seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. If so, that complication [of the structure of this book] can't be helped; it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks."
* The Agents of the Mind - Minds are built from mindless agents, parts that are much smaller and simpler than anything we'd consider smart. Our theory must span three scales of time:
** Slow - for the billion years in which our brains have evolved.
** Fast - for the fleeting weeks and months of infancy and childhood
** In-Between - for the centuries of growth of our ideas through history
* The Mind and the Brain - Psychologists, like Freud and Piaget, and mathematicians, like Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing contributed ideas that were brought together in the 1940s to show how machines might be made to see, reason, and remember
* The Society of Mind - Many many processes are going on in our minds and bodies all the time to allow us to walk, drink a cup of tea and hold conversations. These things seem so natural that we take them for granted, but they all take vasts amounts of machinery
* The World of Blocks - Though all adults know how to build a tower of blocks, no one understands how we learn to do them! This amnesia of infancy makes us think that all our abilities were always there inside our minds, and we don't take time to ask how they began and grew.
* Common Sense - Is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances, and check
** As each new group of skills matures, we build more layers on top of them. As time goes on, the layers below become increasingly remote until, when we try to speak of them in later life, we find ourselves with little more to say than "I don't know".
* Agents and Agencies - Block Builder and other agents have "agency" in that they seem to know how to do their jobs, but as "agents" cannot know anything at all. Every time we seem to find an agent with intelligence, we must look inside it to break it down smaller
** When you drive a car, you don't care how it works, but when something goes wrong you have to look inside it to see. But you can't be thinking about the detailed interior when you are driving, or you will crash
** Knowing how is not the same as knowing why
** We'll constantly switch between the viewpoints of agents and agencies.

== 2. Wholes and Parts ==
* Components and Connections - First we must know how each separate part works. Second, we must know how each part interacts with those to which it is connected. And third, we have to understand how all these local interactions combine to accomplish what that system does - as seen from the outside.
* Novelists and Reductionists :
** Reductionists - Are people who prefer to build on old ideas. They are usually right - at least at science's cautious core, where novelties rarely survive for long.
** Novelists - are people who like to champion new hypotheses. Outside science's core, older ideas have had more time to show their flaws
** We need to approach our descriptions at various different levels and each higher level of description must add to our knowledge about lower levels.
** Physics has only a dozen basic principles that are combined into explanations, while psychology may need to combine hundreds of smaller theories.
* Parts and Wholes - It's hard to explain what it happening in our brains, but talking about "more than the sum of its parts" won't help us.
* Holes and Parts - We can't use words like life and mind to describe the smallest components of living things because these words were invented to describe how larger assemblies interact.
* Easy Things are Hard - In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best. It's mainly when our other systems start to fail that we engage the special agencies involved with what we call consciousness. We'"re more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly.
* Are People Machines? - Let's put aside this argument for now. We're certainly not trivial machines, but we are getting better and better at making highly sophisticated machines with millions of parts.

== 3. Conflict and Compromise ==
* Conflict - Agencies like "Play" must compete with other agencies like "Eat" and "Sleep". Conflicts within agencies tend to migrate to higher levels.
* Noncompromise - The Principle of Noncompromise: The longer an internal conflict persists among an agent's subordinates, the weaker becomes that agent's status among its own competitors. If such internal problems aren't settles soon, other agents will take control and the agents formerly involved will be "dismissed".
** We sometimes settle disputes by appealing to superiors, but other conflicts never end and never cease to trouble us.
** Tiny mental agents don't know enough to negotiate with each other. Only larger agencies could be resourceful enough to do such things.
* Hierarchies - The relations between agents are hierarchical with "Builder" being like a high-level executive, far removed from those subordinates who actually produce the final product. But there is no real planning or assignments happening or ways to deal with unexpected events.
* Heterarchies - But there are also heterarchies where agents require cooperation and no one is legitimately in charge of the other.
* Destructiveness - Destructive acts can serve constructive goals by leaving fewer problems to be solved. There are no simple causes for destructive acts, and no need for zero-sum games. When Sleep starts, Play can still run, with the child building towers in its dreams.
* Pain and Pleasure Simplified - They both make it hard to think of other things, thus simplifying your point of view.

== 4. The Self ==
* The Self - We don't know what we mean by "self". We'll use the following terms:
** Self-Images - Beliefs about what we are, are capable of, and may be disposed to do. We use these beliefs when we solve problems or make plans.
** Self-Ideals - Ideas about what we'd like to be and what we ought to be, which have guided our growth from infancy. May be hard to express, because they are (can be?) inaccessible to consciousness.
* One Self or Many? - We all sometimes have feelings of disunity, conflicting motives, compulsions, internal tensions and dissensions. Perhaps, paradoxically, it is because there are no persons in our heads, that we construct the myth that we're inside ourselves.
* The Soul - Beliefs in souls are insinuations that we're helpless to improve ourselves. But the value of a human self is not in some small precious core, but in its vast, constructed crust.
* The Conservative Self - One function of the self is to keep us from changing too rapidly. If we changed our minds too recklessly, we could never know what we might want next. We'd never get much done because we could never depend on ourselves.
* Exploitation - If work could simply turn off sleep, we'd quickly wear our bodies out. If work could simply switch anger on, we'd be fighting all the time. Directness is too dangerous. We'd die. If self-control were easy to obtain, we'd end up accomplishing nothing at all.
* Self-Control - Willpower, activity, expression, chemistry, emotion, attachment - so many schemes for self-control! How do we choose which ones to use? There isn't any easy way. Self-discipline takes years to learn. It grows inside us stage by stage.
* Long-Range Plans - The easiest path to "self-control" is doing only what one is already disposed to do.
** Which are our slowest-changing agencies of all? Later we'll see that these must include the silent, hidden agencies that shape what we call character. These are the systems that are concerned no merely with the things we want, but with what we want ourselves to be - that is the ideals that we set for ourselves.
* Ideals - Without enduring self-ideals, our lives would lack coherence. As individuals, we'd never be able to trust ourselves to carry out our personal plans. In a social group no one person would be able to trust the others. A working society must evolve mechanisms that stabilize ideals - and many of the social principles that each of us regards as personal are really "long-term memories" in which our cultures stores what they have learned across the centuries.

== 5. Individuality ==
* Circular Causality - We often speak of "straightening things out" when we're involved in situations that seem too complicated. It seems to me that this metaphor reflects how hard it is to find one's way through a maze that has complicated loops in it. In such a situation, we always try to find a path through it by seeking causal explanations that go in only one direction, and we can apply the vary same types of reasoning to everything that we can represent in terms of chains of causes and effects.
* Unanswerable Questions - All human cultures evolve institutions of law, religion, and philosophy, and these institutions both adopt specific answers to circular questions and establish authority-schemes to indoctrinate people with those beliefs. Does this to substitute dogma for reason and truth? Maybe, but in exchange, they spare whole populations from wasting time in fruitless reason loops. Minds can lead more productive lives when working on problems that can be solved.
* The Remote-Control Self - The idea of a single, central Self doesn't explain anything. Maybe we believe it because so much of what our minds do is hidden from the parts of us that are involved with verbal consciousness.
* Personal Identity - In order to keep control, we simplify how we represent what's happening and then, when that complicated mental scene is straightened out it seems as though a single pipeline of ideas were flowing through the mind. Thinking of ourselves as a single thing helps with:
** The Physical World - We can base our plans on having a single body.
** Personal Privacy - We must remember to whom we have told something, and individuals give us a sense of responsibility.
** Mental Activity - Thinking two different thoughts from different agencies is confusing
* Fashion and Style - Fredkin's paradox: The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them. Aesthetics are useful for:
** Recognisibility - Familiar styles make it easier for us to recognize and classify the things we see.
** Uniformity - Uniform styles protect us from useless distractions
** Predictability - Societies need rules that make sense for individuals
* Traits - We try to be consistent and to think that others are consistent, because this is easier.
* Permanent Identity - We all experience that sense of changelessness in spite of change.

== 6. Insight and Introspection ==

* Consciousness - Turning our bodies and walking in a direction is much like turning a car and driving - in both cases we are aware only of a general intention and all the rest takes care of itself. Our conscious thoughts use signal-signs to steer the engines in our minds, controlling countless processes of which we're never much aware. Not understanding how it's done, we learn to gain our ends by sending signals to those great machines, much as the sorcerers of older times used rituals to cast spells.
* Signals and Signs - How do we understand anything? Almost always, I think, by using one or another kind of analogy - that is by representing each new thing as though it resembles something we already know. Whenever a new thing's internal workings are too strange or complicated to deal with directly, we represent whatever parts of it we can in terms of more familiar signs:
** To overstate the case a bit, what we call consciousness consists of little more than menu lists that flash, from time to time, on mental screen displays that other systems use. Like computer game players using symbols to invoke complicated processes of which they know nothing.
** You can scarcely see a hammer except as something to hit with, or see a ball except as something to throw and catch. Why do we see things less as they are and more in view of how they can be used? It is because our minds did not evolve to serve as instruments for science or philosophy, but to solve practical problems of nutrition, defense, procreation, and the like. We tend to think of knowledge as good in itself, but knowledge is useful only when we can exploit it to help us reach our goals.
* Thought Experiments - Why is it so hard to explain the results of experiments of imagining things in our minds? Because we get confused. Our thoughts about our mind-experiments are mind-experiments themselves - and therefore interfere with one another:
** Thinking affects our thoughts.
* B-Brains - The only way to get a brain to keep track of itself is to split it into two parts, A and B. Connect A to the world and connect B only to A. Then A is the B-Brain's world.
* Frozen Reflection - When introspection seems to work, it's not because we've found a magic way to see inside ourselves. Instead, it means that we've done some well-designed experiment.
* Momentary Mental Time - No portion of a mind can ever know everything that is happening at the same time in all the other agencies. Because of this, each agency must have at least a slightly different sense both of what has happened in the past - and of what is happening "now". Each different agent of the mind lives in a slightly different world of time.
* The Causal Now - Our everyday ideas about the progression of mental time are wrong: they leave no room for the fact that every agent has a different causal history. To be sure, those different pasts are intermixed over longer spans of time, and every agent is eventually influenced by what has happened in the common, remote history of its society. But that's not one means by "now". The problem is with the connections between the moment-to-moment activities of largely separate agencies.
* Thinking Without Thinking - If we're aware of anything at all, it is that "I'm aware - hence I'm aware." yet what do such convictions really mean? If self-awareness means to know what's happening inside one's mind, no realist could maintain for long that people have much insight in the literal sense of seeing-in.
* Heads in the Clouds - Even in your own mind, you can never know precisely what you mean! How useless any thought would be if, afterward, your mind return to the selfsame state. But that never happens, because every time we think about a certain thing, our thoughts go off in different ways:
** The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know. It's almost always wrong to seek the "real meaning" of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.
** An idea with a single sense can lead you along only one track. Then, if anything goes wrong, it just gets stuck - it sits in your mind with nowhere to go. When someone learns something by rote (ie with no sensible connections) we say they don't really understand. Rich meaning-networks, however give you many different ways to go: if you can't solve a problem one way, you can try another. Too many indiscriminate connections will turn a mind to mush. But well-connected meaning structures let you turn ideas around in your mind, to consider alternatives and envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works. And that's what we mean by thinking!
** David Hume: "What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and suppos'd, tho' falsely, to be endow'd with a perfect simplicity and identity."
* Worlds Out of Mind - There is no singularly real world of thought; each mind evolves its own internal universe.
** We appear to like best worlds of thought where goals and actions mesh in regions large enough to spend our lives in - and become a Buddhist, Republican, pet, or topologist.
** Some mental starting points grow into great, coherent continents. In certain parts of maths, science, and philosophy, a relatively few but clear ideas may lead into an endless realm of complex yet consistent new structures. Yet even in maths, a handful of seemingly innocent rules can lead to complications far beyond our grasp.
** In mental realms we make up countless artificial schemes to force things to seem orderly, by specifying legal codes, grammar rules and traffic laws. When growing up in such a world, it all seems right and natural - and only scholars and historians recall the mass of precedents and failed experiments it took to make it work so well. These "natural" worlds are actually more complex than the technical worlds of philosophy. They're far too vast to comprehend - except where we impose on them the rules we make.
** In some cases, an accident of mental stress has temporarily suppressed the capacity to question, doubt, or probe. The mind has found a way to simplify itself - this may lead to a sense of revelation, but perhaps no problem has been solved at all.
* In-Sight - Where do we get the ideas we need? Most of our concepts come from the communities in which we're raised. Even the ideas we "get" for ourselves come from communities - this time the ones in our heads. Brains don't manufacture thoughts in the direct ways that muscles exert forces or ovaries make estrogens; instead, to get a good idea, one must engage huge organizations of submachines that do a vast variety of jobs.
* Internal Communication - We overestimate how much we actually communicate. Instead, despite those seemingly important differences, much of what we do is based on common knowledge and experience. Although we can't express what we mean, we can often cite various example to indicate how to connect structures we're sure must already exist inside the listener's mind. In short we can often indicate which sorts of thoughts to think, even though we can't express how they operate.
** We find it particularly hard to use our language skills to talk about the parts of the mind that learned such skills as balancing, seeing, and remembering, before we started to learn to speak.
* Self-Knowledge is Dangerous - Why do we become bored when doing the same thing over and over, even if that activity was pleasant at first? Without variety, our pleasure systems tend to satiate. Every learning system must have some such protective scheme, since otherwise it could get trapped into endlessly repeating the same activity. It's good that we have such mechanisms and that they are very hard to suppress.
* Confusion - It's mainly when our systems fail that consciousness becomes engaged. It is better to realize that one is confused as opposed to being confused without knowing it. Then we can apply our intellect to alter or repair the defective process.

== 7. Problems and Goals ==

* Intelligence - Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we consider difficult. "Intelligence" is our name for whichever of those processes we don't yet understand.
* Uncommon Sense - Much of "expert" adult thinking is actually simpler than what is involved when ordinary children play!
** What people call common sense is actually more intricate than most of the technical expertise we admire. Think of all the different kinds of things a child must know merely to build a house of blocks - shapes and colors, space and time, support and balance, and an ability to keep track of what one is doing.
** To be considered an "expert" one needs a large amount of knowledge of only a relatively few varieties. In contrast, an ordinary person's "common sense" involves a much larger variety of different types of knowledge - and this requires more complicated management systems.
** Each type of knowledge needs some form of "representation" and a body of skills adapted to using that style of representation. Once that investment has been made, it is relatively easy for a specialist to accumulate further knowledge, provided the additional expertise is uniform enough to suit the same style of representation. The greater variety of representations would make it much harder for a single person to learn to deal with a few diseases, law cases, architectural blueprints, and orchestral scores. It would be like learning many different languages, each with its own grammar, lexicon, and idioms.
* The Puzzle Principle - We can program a computer to solve any problem by trial and error, without knowing how to solve it in advance, provided only that we have a way to recognize when the problem is solved. Without some notion of progress toward a goal, it is hard to do better than mindless chance.
* Problem Solving - The most powerful way we know for discovering how to solve a hard problem is to find a method that splits it into several simpler ones, each of which can be solved separately.
** The Progress Principle - Any process of exhaustive search can be greatly reduced if we possess some way to detect when "progress" has been made. Then we can trace a path toward a solution, just as a person can climb an unfamiliar hill in the dark - by feeling around, at every step, to find the direction of steepest ascent.
** Many easy problems can be solved this way, but for a hard problem, it may be almost as difficult to recognize "progress" as to solve the problem itself. Without a larger overview, that "hill climber" may get stuck forever on some minor peak and never find the mountaintop. There is no foolproof way to avoid this.
** The most efficient way to solve a problem is to already know how to solve it. Then one can avoid search entirely.
* Learning and Memory - Those twin ideas - reward/success and punish/failure - do not explain enough about how people learn to produce the new ideas that enable them to solve difficult problems that could not otherwise be solved without many lifetimes of ineffectual trial and error. The answer must lie in learning better ways to learn.
** At each moment, we must keep track of what we've just done, we must somehow maintain our goals and, finally, once the problem is solved, we need access to records of how it was done, for use when similar problems arise in the future.
** When a human brain solves a hard problem, many millions of agents and processes are involved. Which agents could be wise enough to guess what changes should then be made? Where in the mind are judgements made about which agents merit praise or blame?
* Reinforcement and Reward - We cannot learn to solve hard problems by indiscriminately reinforcing agents or their connections. Why is it that among all the animals, only the great-brained relatives of man can learn to solve problems that require many steps or involve using the same agencies for different purposes?
* Local Responsibility - Local schemes reward each agent that helps accomplish its supervisor's goal. Global schemes reward only agents that help accomplish top-level goals.
** It is harder to implement a global learning scheme, which is much more parsimonious, and global policies lead to learning more slowly. We need to learn which learning strategies to use, depending on the circumstances.
* Difference-Engines - A goal-driven system does not seem to react directly to the stimuli or situations it encounters. Instead, it treats the things it finds as objects to exploit, avoid, or ignore, as though it were concerned with something else that doesn't yet exist. When any disturbance or obstacle diverts a goal-directed system from its course, that system seems to try to remove the interference, go around it, or turn it to some advantage.
** A difference engine must contain a description of a desired situation.
** It must have subagents that are aroused by various differences between the desired situation and the actual situation.
** Each subagent must act in a way that tends to diminish the difference that aroused it.
* Intentions - The difference-engine scheme scheme remains the most useful conception of goal, purpose, or intention yet discovered. It embodies both a representation of some outcome and a mechanism to make it persist until that outcome is achieved.
* Genius - Most heroes are intensely motivated, proficient in some field, and stubborn. But genius needs unusually effective ways to learn. You must learn a lot and manage what you learn, using special knacks of higher-order expertise:
** Such knacks could begin with early accidents when a child happens upon clever ways of arranging blocks, etc. But adults cannot necessarily see these internal strategies, which can lead to silent growth in which some better ways to learn may lead to better ways to learn to learn. Then later we'll observe an awesome, qualitative change, with no apparent cause and call it a talent, aptitude, or gift.

== 8. A Theory of Memory ==
Proust: "In truth, the person within me who was at this moment enjoying this impression enjoyed in it the qualities which it possessed that were common to both an earlier day and the present moment; and this person came into play only when, by this process of identifying past with present, he could find himself in the only environment in which he could live, that is to say, entirely outside of time."
* K-Lines: A Theory of Memory - We keep each thing we learn close to the agents that learn it in the first place, using a type of agent called a Knowledge-line or K-line. We memorize what we're thinking about by making a list of the agents involved in that activity.
** Whenever you get a good idea, solve a problem, or have a memorable experience, you activate a K-line to represent it. A K-line is a wirelike structure that attaches itself to whichever mental agents are active when you solve a problem or have a good idea.
** When you activate that K-line later, the agents attached to it are aroused, putting you into a mental state much like the one you were in when you solved that problem or got that idea. This should make it relatively easy for you to solve new, similar problems.
** Each agent can become attached to many different K-lines
** For each familiar kind of mental job, your K-lines can refill your mind with fragments of ideas you've used before on similar jobs. In such a moment, you become in those respects more like an earlier version of yourself.
* Re-membering - When facing a new problem which is similar to an old problem, you activate an old K-line, kP, alongside your recent thoughts, Q, and both sets of agents will work together to solve today's problem. This is the simplest concept of what memories are and how they are formed.
** If we give too much priority to the K-line's agents, we risk re-arousing old states of mind so strongly that they overwhelm our present thoughts and lost track of what we're thinking now and wipe out all the work we've done. We only want some hints, suggestion, and ideas.
** The ideal scheme would activate exactly those P's that would be most helpful in solving the present problem, but judging that is hard.
* Mental States and Dispositions - K-lines can easily record relatively widespread and diffuse activities and, later, reactivate them all at once.
** The experiences we find easiest to recollect are often just the kinds we find the hardest to describe.
** In order fot a word to have a predictable effect on other persons, we must maintain strict, public discipline on how it is used - whereas each person's private, internal signals need not be so constrained.
** The traditional view, that it is easy to understand how minds can deal with facts and propositions but hard to see how minds could have diffuse, hard-to-express dispositions, must be upside-down
* Partial Mental States:
** A total state of mind is a list that specifies which agents are active and which are quiet at a certain moment
** A partial state of mind merely specifies that certain agents are active but does not say which other agents are quiet
** The "entire system" can "think several thoughts at once" because each of these thoughts is contained in a partial state of mind just like a crowd of separate people can.
* Level Bands - Understanding never ends! - we can always find more to say about a situation. We learn by attaching agents to K-lines, but we don't attach them all with equal firmness. We make strong connections at a certain level of detail, but we make weaker connections at higher and lower levels.
** The weakly attachments are assumptions by default, which will serve unless and until they must be overridden by a specificity.
* Levels - The sorts of knowledge in mid-level bands is most broadly and generally useful, whereas uppermost and lowest-level bands are more likely to be based on aspects of the problem that are specific to an older goal or to the particular details of the original problem.
** It is no accident that level-related ideas play many different roles in how we think.
* Fringes - Suppose some memory were so complete that it made you relive, in every detail, some perfect moment of your past. That would erase your present you - and you'd forget what you had asked your memory to do! Fringing effects make our memories more relevant to our present purposes. In order to think, we need intimate connections between things and goals - between structures and their functions. What use would thinking be at all, unless we could relate each thing's details to our plans and intentions?
** Lower Band - Beyond a certain level of detail, increasingly complete memories of previous situations are increasingly difficult to match to new situations. The lower fringe is commonly concerned with the structure of things, and the objective details of reality
** Upper Band - Memories that arouse agents at too high a level would tend to provide us with goals that are not appropriate to the present situation. The upper fringe is commonly involved with the functions of things and our subjective concerns with goals and intentions
* Societies of Memories - As we make new memories, we prefer to attach to existing K-lines than to individual agents.
** Jack to Male, Young:
** Kite to Paper, String, Red
** Fly to Outside, Wind
** Connecting new K-lines to old ones will not recapture so many of the scene's precise, perceptual details. Instead, the kinds of mental states that this hierarchical type of memory produces will be based more on stereotypes and default assumptions than on actual perceptions. You will tend to remember only what you recognized at the time.
* Knowledge-Trees - When making a new K-line memory, do not connect it to all the K-lines active at the time but only to those that are active within a certain level-band. Eventually all of our knowledge-structures become entangled with various sorts of exceptions, shortcuts, and cross-connections. No matter: the level-band idea will still apply in general, since most of what we know will still be mainly hierarchical because of how our knowledge grows.
* Levels and Classifications - We tend to think that our hierarchies illustrate some kind of order that exists in the world but frequently they come from the mind and merely appear to belong to the world.
** We frequently use two or more classifications at the same time. A child can play with a porcelain duck as though it were a pretend animal but still behave in an appropriate way for a delicate china object.
** When attempting a new task, we never like to start anew: we try to use what has worked previously. So we search around inside our minds for old ideas to use. Then, when part of any hierarchy seems to work, we drag the rest along with it.
* Layers of Societies - We can imagine an endless sequence of societies or agencies in which each new one learns to exploit the last. This is how minds develop in infancy, as layers of societies.
** Each new layer begins as a set of K-lines, which starts by learning to exploit whatever skills have been acquired by the previous layer. Whenever a layer acquires some useful and substantial skill, it tends to stop learning and changing - and then yet another new layer can begin to learn to exploit the capabilities of the last.
** Each new layer begins as a student, learning new ways to use what older layers can already do. Then it slows its learning rate - and starts to serve both as subject and as teacher to the layers that form afterward.

== 9. Summaries ==

* Wanting and Liking - Our reactions of pleasure or disgust are only superficial summaries of pyramids of underlying processes.
** The surer you are that you like what you are doing, the more completely your other ambitions are being suppressed.
** The relation between wanting and liking is not simple at all, because our preferences are the end products of so many negotiations among our agencies. To accomplish any substantial goal, we must renounce the other possibilities and engage machinery to keep ourselves from succumbing to nostalgia or remorse. Then we use words like "liking" to express the operation of the mechanisms that hold us to our choice.
** Liking's job is shutting off alternatives. It narrows down our choices and provides artificial clarity.
* Gerrymandering - What is the significance in complicated systems of those pleasant feelings of accomplishment and disagreeable sensations of defeat? They must be involved with how our higher-level agencies make summaries. No single sense of good or bad can reflect much of what went on inside all your agencies; too much information must be concealed, but there are many reasons for oversimplifying.
* Learning from Failure - Some parts of our minds learn from success, but other portions learn mainly when we make mistakes, by remembering the circumstances in which various methods failed to work. We can learn what not to do and what not to think, which permeates our minds with taboos and prohibitions of which we're entirely unaware.
** It is no accident that there are no exceptions to the rules in mathematical worlds. There we start with the rules and imagine only objects that obey them. But perfect logic rarely works in the real worlds of people, thoughts, and things. We can't so willfully make up the rules for objects that already exist, so our only course is to begin with imperfect guesses - collections of rough and ready rules - and then to proceed to find our where they're wrong.
* Enjoying Discomfort - Nothing would get done if we succumbed to satisfaction. When doing maths, climbing freezing mountain peaks, or playing pipe organs with our feet: some parts of the mind find it horrible, while other parts enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them. We seem to have no names for processes like these, though they must be among our most important ways to grow.

== 10. Papert's Principle ==

* Piaget's Experiments - Each normal child eventually acquires an adult view of quantity - apparently without adult help!
* Reasoning About Amounts - We do not learn one single, underlying "concept of quantity". Instead, each person must construct a multilevel agency, the Society-of-More, that finds different ways to deal with quantities.
** Younger children may possess the ideas they need, but don't know how to apply them! They lack adequate knowledge about their knowledge or have not acquired the checks and balances required to select or override their hordes of agents with different perceptions and priorities.
** It is not enough to be able to use many kinds of reasoning; one also must know which to use in different circumstances! Learning is more than the accumulation of skills. Whatever we learn, there is always more to learn - about how to use what we already learned.
* Priorities - Young children may place their agents in some order of priority. Most people seem most sensitive to vertical extents. This may be built into our brains or learned, but more height often goes along with other sorts of largeness. No other agent seems so good as Tall for making everyday comparisons.
* Papert's Principle - Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows.
** The processes which assemble agents into groups must somehow exploit relationships among the skills of those agents. Because Tall and Thin are more similar in character to one another than to Confined, it makes sense to group them more closely together in the administrative hierarchy.
* The Society of More - Each higher-level agent embodies a form of higher-order knowledge that helps us organize ourselves by telling us when and how to use the things we know. Without a many layered management, we couldn't use the knowledge in our low-level agencies; they'd all keep gettin in one another's way.
* About Piaget's Experiments - Stage magicians find that making things disappear does not entertain the youngest children; presumably that are too used to encountering the unexplainable. What happens when More cannot decide what to do? That depends upon the states of other agencies - including those involved in dealing with frustration, restlessness, and boredom.
* The Concept of Concept - How do children accumulate and classify their many methods for comparing things? No child has the time to generate and test all possible combinations to find which ones are sensible. Instead, always try to combine related agents first.
* Education and Development - We can't force children to learn too quickly. There is constantly a tension between organising a hierarchy of concepts and managing the mass of exceptions and only the mature mind can combine the two.
* Learning a Hierarchy - The nerve cells in an animal's brain can't always move aside to make more room for extra ones. So these new layers might indeed have to be located elsewhere, attached by bundles of connection wires. No aspect of the brain's anatomy is more striking than its huge masses of connection bundles.

== 11. The Shape of Space ==

*Seeing Red - We are not "simple" machines. When we see something, it activates many, many agents.
*The Shape of Space - We never actually make any direct contact with the outside world. Instead, we work with models of the world that we build inside our brains.
**Einstein spoke of vast societies of nearnesses.
**There is little that one could say about any "single touch" - or about what any single sense-detecting agent does. However, there is much more to be said about the relations between two or more skin touches, because the closer together two skin spots are, the more frequently they'll both be touched at the same time.
*Nearnesses - In general, each pair of nearby places on the skin is wired to nearby places in the brain.
**Other things being equal, the apparent similarity of two stimuli will depend on the extent to which they lead to similar activities in other agencies.
**Given enough information, a suitably designed agency could assemble a sort of map to represent which spots are close together on the skin.
**For a child, learning about the spatial world beyond the skin is a journey that stretches over many years.
*Innate Geography - To design a machine to deduce the geography of a space, one could begin with a layer of "correlation agents", one for each tiny patch of skin, each engineered to detect which other skin spots are most often aroused at nearly the same times; those will then be mapped as the nearest ones. A second layer of similar agents could then begin to make maps of larger regions, and several such layers would eventually asemble a sequence of maps on various scales, for representing several levels of detail.
**If brains do something of this sort, it might explain why we all agreed on what the outer world of space is like.
*Sensing Similarities - Our thoughts are largely shaped by which things seem most similar. Which colors seem the most alike? Which forms and shapes, which smells and tastes, which timbres, pitches, pains and aches, which feelings and sensations seem most similar? Such judgements have a huge effect at every stage of mental growth - since what we learn depends on how we classify.
**Just as there is nothing to say about a single point, there's nothing to be said about an isolated sensory signal. When our Redness, Touch, or Toothache agents send their signals to our brains, each by itself can only say, "I'm here." The rest of what such signals "mean" to us depends on how they're linked to all our other agencies.
**The qualities of signals sent to brains depend only on relationships - the same as with the shapeless points of space.
**Beyond the raw distinctiveness of every separate stimulus, all other aspects of its character or quality - be it of touch, taste, sound, or light - depend entirely on its relationships with the other agents of your mind.
*The Centered Self - We really do not understand how the child learns to understand space. Perhaps we start by small experiments to produce crude maps of the skin. Next we might correlate these with the motions of our eyes and limbs, then develop some agents to represent a few places outside the skin, assemble an agency that represents a network of relationships, trajectories, and directions between those places and slowly expand that network to include new places and relationships.
**Freud and Piaget observed that children seem to recapitulate the history of astronomy: first they see the world centered around themselves, before slowly learning that they are moving, like any object within a stationary universe.
*Predestined Learning - Every child eventually learns to reach for food. Each child lives through a different history of "reaching-act" experiences but, according to our theory of "nearness models of space", they will all end up with generally similar results because that outcome is constrained by the nearness relations of real-world space.
**We acquire our conceptions of space by using agencies that learn in accord with processes determined by inheritance. We learn from experience, but the outcomes of our learning are virtually predestined by the spatial geometry of our body parts.
*Half-Brains - Our brains have many pairs of agencies, arranged like mirror-images, with huge bundles of nerves running between them. Each brain has many parts, not only two.
**A theory - In early life we start with mostly similar agencies on either side. Later, as we grow more complex, a combination of genetic and circumstantial effects lead one of each pair to take control of both to avoid being paralyzed by conflicts. Eventually the adult managers for many skills would tend to develop on the side of the brain most concerned with language because those agencies connect to an unusually large number of other agencies. The less dominant side of the brain will continue to develop, but with fewer administrative functions - and end up with more of our lower-level skills, but with less involvement in plans and higher-level goals that engage many agencies at once. Then if, by accident, that brain half is abandoned to itself, it will seem more childish and less mature because it lags so far behind in administrative growth.
*Dumbbell Theories - Dividing things in two is a good way to start, but one should always try to find at least a third alternative. If one cannot, one should suspect that there may not be two ideas at all, but only one, together with some form of opposite.

== 12. Learning Meaning ==

*A Block-Arch Scenario - A child evolves a concept of arch through experimentation.
*Learning Meaning - The child is led to learn for itself in order to account for strange events. There are various forms of learning:
**Uniframing - combining several descriptions into one, eg by observing that all the arches have certain common parts.
**Accumulating - Collecting incompatible descriptions, eg by forming the phrase "block or wedge".
**Reformulating - Modifying a description's character, eg by describing the separate blocks rather than the overall shape.
**Trans-framing - Bridging between structures and functions or actions, eg by relating the concept of arch to the act of changing hands.
*Uniframes - There are good reasons not to notice too much, for every seemingly essential fact can generate a universe of useless, accidental, and even misleading facts.
**Most differences are redundant. Most of the rest are accidents.
**On what basis can we decide which features are essential and which are merely accidents? Such questions don't make sense apart from how we want to use their answers. There is no single secret, magic trick to learning: we simply have to learn a large society of different ways to learn!
*Structure and Function - Our most powerful ways of thinking are those that let us bring together things we've learned in different contexts. And to do this we need to build arches between the contexts in our minds.
*The Functions of Structures - We need both structural descriptions for recognizing chairs when we see them and functional descriptions in order to know what we can do with them. We can capture more of what we mean by interweaving both ideas.
*Accumulation - The simplest way to learn, when we can't find a uniframe, is to accumulate descriptions of experiences.
**A simpler theory of when we start new uniframes would be that in the brain, there is an architectural constraint on how many K-lines are directly accessible to various types of agents. For example, the agents in a certain agency might be able to accumulate no more than about seven branches for each classification in a certain hierarchy. When there are more, the agency would be forced either to merge some examples into uniframes or to turn for help from somewhere else.
*Accumulation Strategies - Whenever an accumulation becomes too large and clumsy, we try to replace some groups of its members with a uniframe. But even when we succeed in finding a suitably compact uniframe, we can expect it, too, to accumulate exceptions eventually, since first descriptions rarely work for all our later purposes.
**Our various motives and concerns are likely to require incompatible ways to classify things. You can't predict a dog's bite from its bark. Each classification must embody different kinds of knowledge, and we can rarely use more than a few of them at once. When we have a goal that is simple and clear, we may be able to select one particular kind of description that makes the problem easy to solve. But when goals of several types conflict, it is harder to know just what to do.
*Problems of Disunity - Many good ideas are really two ideas in one - which form a bridge between two realms of thought or different points of view.
**Whenever we build a bridge between structure and function, one end of that bridge may represent a goal or use, while the other end describes what we might use to gain those ends. But it is rare for those structures to correspond neatly to those functions. The problem is that we usually find many different ways to achieve any goal.
**Our different worlds of ends and means don't usually match up very well. So when we find a useful, compact uniframe in one such world, it often corresponds to an accumulation in our other worlds.
*The Exception Principle - It rarely pays to tamper with a rule that nearly always works. It's better just to complement it with an accumulation of specific exceptions.
**Children are disturbed to hear that whales are not fish because they are usually more concerned with uses and appearances than with origins and mechanisms. They want to know what do animals do, where do they live, are they easy to catch, are they dangerous, are they useful, what do they eat, how do they taste?
**The power of ordinary words like "fish" comes from how we make them span so many meaning-worlds at once. But, to do this, we have to be able to tolerate many exceptions. We almost never find rules that have no exceptions - except in artificial worlds that we ourselves create by making up their rules and regulations to begin with.
*How Towers Work - An idea will seem self-evident - once you've forgotten learning it. Many obvious things are done for us by huge, silent systems in our mind, built over long forgotten years of childhood, and which leave no traces in our consciousness.
**To understand the world of space and time, each child must make many discovered. But the division into Lifting and Sliding has a special importance. We don't have to learn all the ways to move in the world because we can learn to deal with each dimension separately. Lifting isolates the vertical dimension and sliding isolates the horizontal, and that is enough to move around in a 3D world.
*How Causes Work - There can't be any "causes" in a world in which everything that happens depends more or less equally upon everything else that happens.
**To know the cause of a phenomenon is to know, at least in principle, how to change or control some aspects of some entities without affecting all the rest. The most useful kinds of causes our minds can discern are predictable relationships between the actions we can take and the changes we can sense.
*Meaning and Definition - It is no great surprise to find that "game" has a more psychological character than does "brick", which we can define in physical terms without referring to our goals. But most ideas lie in between, eg "chair", which we cannot describe without referring both to a physical structure and to a psychological function.
*Bridge-Definitions - Our best ideas are often those that bridge between two different worlds. We can often capture an idea by squeezing in from several sides at once, to get exactly what we need by using two or more different kinds of descriptions at the same time.
**Purposeful definitions are usually too loose - They include many things we do not intend.
**Structural definitions are usually too tight - They reject many things we want to include.
**Combining them helps us connect things we can recognize (or make, find, do, or think) to problems we want to solve.
**To learn to use a new or unfamiliar word, you start by taking it to be a sign that there exists, inside some other person's mind, a structure you could use. But no matter how carefully it is explained, you must still rebuild that thought yourself, from materials already in your own mind. A good definition helps, but you still must mold and shape each new idea to suit your own existing skills - hoping to make it work for you the way it seems to work for those from whom you learn.
**What people call "meanings" do not usually correspond to particular and definite structures, but to connections among and across fragments of the great interlocking networks of connections and constraints among our agencies. Because these networks are constantly growing and changing, meanings are rarely sharp, and we cannot always expect to be able to "define" them in terms of compact sequences of words. Verbal explanations serve only as partial hints; we also have to learn from watching, working, playing - and thinking.

== 13. Seeing and Believing ==

*Reformulation - Reformulating a problem in new terms can unblock a problem, but how do people find new styles of description that make their problems seem easier?
*Boundaries - We're always changing boundaries! Where does an elbow start or end? When does a youth become an adult? Where does an ocean change into a sea? Why must our minds keep drawing lines to structure our reality? Because otherwise, we'd never see anything at all! We rarely see anything twice as exactly the same. Each time we're almost certain to be looking from a somewhat different view, perhaps from nearer or farther, higher or lower, in a different color or shade of light, or against a different background.
*Seeing and Believing - Children draw unrealistic human shapes (without a body) because they don't have anything like a picture in mind, but only some network of relationships that various features must satisfy.
*Children's Drawing-Frames - Why do older children draw the body separately? They understand the relationships a bit better.
*Learning a Script - How does practice speed things up?
**Frank Lloyd Wright: "An expert is one who does not have to think. He knows."
**Experts seem to exercise their special skills with scarcely any thought at all - as though they were simply reading preassembled scripts. Perhaps when we practice to improve our skills, we're mainly building simpler scripts that don't engage so many agencies. This lets us do old things with much less "thought" and gives us more time to think of other things. The less the child has to think of where to put each arm and leg, the more time remains to represent what that picture-person is actually doing.
*The Frontier Effect - The tendency to place new features at locations that have easily described relationships to other, already represented features.
**Copying is much more complicated than we think. You have to draw each line to a scale and direction consistent with all the others. So it is actually easier for a child to first construct a mental description of the relations involved in the scene, and then to design a drawing-scheme to represent those relationships.
**It can require more skill to produce what we regard as a simple copy or imitation than to produce what we consider to be an "abstract" representation.
*Duplications - Different kinds of goals require different styles of description.

== 14. Reformulation ==

*Using Reformulations - If we can't solve a problem, we can try to find a way to describe it in different terms. Reformulation is the most powerful way to attempt to escape from what seems to be a hopeless situation.
**To outsiders it may see that creative people have an endless source of novel ways to deal with things, but they often have merely variations on far fewer themes. For the creatives, they may think, why can't outsiders understand how to think about these simple kinds of problems?
**The most productive kinds of thought are methods that lead us to formulating useful new kinds of descriptions
**New ideas often have roots in older ones, adapted for new purposes.
*The Body-Support Concept - The body represents those parts of a structure that serve as the direct instrument for reaching the goals and the support represents all the other features that merely serve that instrument.
**To understand how something works, it helps to know how it can fail.
*Means and Ends - Even when we simply put something on a table, we're likely to employ several descriptions at the same time - perhaps in different sections of the mind. The quality of our understanding depends upon how well we move between those different realms, discovering systematic cross-realm correspondences.
**These correspondences are the roots of fruitful metaphors; they enable us to understand things we've never seen before. When something seems entirely new in one of our description-worlds, it may turn out that when translated to some other world it resembles something we already know.
*Seeing Squares - We often self-impose assumptions that make our problems more difficult, and we can escape from this only by reformulating those problems in ways that give us more room.
**Most of what we think we see comes from inside our brain; we respond not only to visual features, but also to our remembrances of things we've seen before and to our expectations of what we ought to see.
**Human vision must somehow combine the information that comes from the outer world with the structures in our memories.
*Brainstorming - Your brain is constantly preparing ways to reformulate ideas by building up connections between different kinds of descriptions. Then when you finally change your view to find another way to look at things, you can apply a lifetime of experience as easily as turning on a switch.
**It may be rash to change yourself too much just to accommodate a single strange experience. To take every exception seriously is to risk the loss of general rules that previous experience has shown to work most frequently.
**It isn't any accident that the things that we can always do are just the ones we should rarely do.
*The Investment Principle - Our oldest ideas have unfair advantages over those that come later. The earlier we learn a skill, the more methods we can acquire for using it. Each new idea must then compete against the larger mass of skills the old ideas have accumulated.
**We're almost always immersed in the short run. So the principles of investment and of exception make us reluctant to tamper with our well-established skills and uniframes lest we endanger all that we have built upon those old foundations.
**Why do so many animals contain their brains inside their heads? Because this arrangement was inherited well over 300m years ago and it would be too costly and complicated to change now. DNA has scarcely changed a single bit in a billion years and even though it does not seem to be particularly efficient or reliable, we are stuck with it.
*Parts and Holes - Why focus so sharply on the concept of a container? Because without that concept, we could scarcely understand the structure of the spatial world. And this is true also of psychological things, as a mental implement for envisioning and understanding other, more complicated structures. The idea of a set of all possible directions is one of the great coherent cross-realm correspondences that can be used in many different realms of thought.
*The Power of Negative Thinking - The optimistic strategy makes sense when one sees several ways to go - and merely has to choose the best. The pessimistic strategy should be reserved for when one sees no way at all, when things seem really desperate.
*The Interaction-Square - Is the simplest way to represent what happens when two causes interact.
**The spatial agency in our Society of More is not really involved with space at all, but with interactions between agents like Tall and Thin, and an interaction-square provides a convenient way to represent all the possible combinations.
**Only rarely, it seems, do people deal with more than two causes at a time; instead we either find ways to reformulate such situations or we accumulate disorderly societies of partially filled interaction-squares that cover only the most commonly encountered combinations.

== 15. Consciousness and Memory ==

*Momentary Mental State - Consciousness does not concern the present, but the past: it has to do with how we think about the records of our recent thoughts.
**Most agencies are there to learn to recognize events inside the brain. Only a small minority of our agents are connected directly to sensors in the outer world, like those that send signals from the eye or skin. And the agents that are engage in using and changing our most recent memories lie at the roots of consciousness.
**We become less conscious of some things when we become more conscious of others because some resource is approaching some limitation - we have only a limited capacity to keep good records of our recent thoughts.
**This kind of self-inspected probe is prone to change just what it's looking a. Would any process not become confused that alters what it's looking at?
*Self-Examination - There is a common myth that what we view as consciousness is measurelessly deep and powerful - yet actually, we scarcely know a thing about what happens in the great computers of our brains.
*Memory - I suspect that we never really remember very much about a particular experience. Instead, our various agencies selectively decide, unconsciously, to transfer only certain states into their long-term memories - perhaps because they have been classified as useful, dangerous, unusual, or significant in other respects. It would be of little use for us simply to maintain vast stores of unclassified memories if, every time we needed one, we had to search through all of them.
**Instead, each of us must develop fruitful and effective ways to organize our memories - but how that's done is inaccessible to consciousness.
**Short-term memories last only for seconds or minutes.
**Long-term memories can persist for days or years or all one's life.
*Memories of Memories - It's hard to distinguish memories from memories of memories. There's little evidence that any of our adult memories really go way back to infancy; what seem like early memories may be nothing more than reconstructions of our older thoughts
**Memories from our first five years seem oddly isolated and probably involve incidents so significant that they probably occupied the child's mind repeatedly over a period of years. They are often described as seen though other, older eyes
**The "amnesia of infancy" is probably an inevitable result of growing out of infancy. To remember is not merely to retrieve but also to recreate how your earlier mind reacted (by becoming an infant again). As you grow you have to sacrifice your earlier memories because they're written in an ancient script that your later selves can no longer read.
**From every moment to the next, your mental state is shaped not only by signals from the outer world, but by agents activated by the memories these evoke. Only a part of your impression comes from agents activated directly by your vision; most of what your higher-level agencies experience comes from the memories those vision-agents activate.
**It is only when a recognition involves substantial time and effort that we speak of "remembering".
**Memories are processes that make some of our agents act in much the same ways they did at various times in the past.
*The Immanence Illusion - Whenever you can answer a question without a noticeable delay, it seems as though that answer were already active in your mind.
**Memories can't really bring things back from the past - they only reproduce some fragments of our former states of mind. Why do they feel so real? Because real-time experience is just as indirect! The closest we can come to apprehending the world, in any case, is through the descriptions our agents make.
**Perceptions can evoke our memories so quickly that we can't distinguish what we've seen from what we've been led to recollect.
**The experience of seeing things has a relatively rigid character, in contrast to the experience of imagining things. Every change that the rest of your mind tries to impose upon your vision-agencies is resisted and usually reversed. Perhaps this is what we identify with vividness or objectivity.
**Sometimes our sense of objectivity can get reversed - as when an attitude or memory becomes more stable and persistent than what it represents, particularly our attitudes toward things we love or loathe are often much less changeable than those things themselves - particularly in the case of other people's personalities. Here, our private memories can be more rigid than reality.
*Many Kinds of Memory - A brain has no single, common memory system. Instead, each part of the brain has several types of memory-agencies that work in somewhat different ways, to suit particular purposes.
**Most likely, some types of memory mechanisms retain the records of sensations only for seconds. We use others to adopt habits, goals, and styles that we hold only for days or weeks. And we make personal attachments that endure through many months or years. Yet suddenly from time to time, we'll modify some memories that seemed, till then, quite permanent.
*Memory Rearrangements - Because each memory-unit must wait until the previous step is finished, the timing of each script step may have to depend on various condition sensors. But these processes also need ways to interrupt themselves while they call on other agencies or memories for help, just like we may have to do when dealing with things in the outside world.
*Anatomy of Memory - We'll assume that every substantial agency has several "micro-memory units," each of which is a sort of temporary K-line that can quickly store or restore the states of the micro-memories themselves. When any of these temporary memory-units are reused, the information that we stored in them is erased - unless it has somehow been transferred into more permanent or long-term memory-systems. It seems that in human brains, the processes that transfer information into long-term memory are very slow and so most temporary memories are permanently lost.
*Interruption and Recovery - Why do we get confused when we're interrupted? Because then we have to keep our place in several processes at once. Yet, psychologically, we're unaware that ordinary thinking is so complicated - the processes are too many levels away from those we use to work the short-term memories involved with language and consciousness.
*Losing Track - Why do visual processes so rarely encounter difficulties of interruption? they can support more simultaneously operating processed that our language-systems can, so there are fewer interruptions, and they can choose for themselves the sequence in which they attend to details, whereas language-agencies are controlled by the person who is speaking.
**It takes many years to learn to use those memory-systems well.
*The Recursion Principle - When a problem splits into smaller parts, then unless one can apply the mind's full power to each subjob, one's intellect will get dispersed and leave less cleverness for each new task.
**The best way to solve a hard problem is to break it into several simpler ones, and break those into even simpler ones, but then we face the problem of mental fragmentation.
**We can also work on the various parts of a problem in serial order, one after another, using the same agency over and over again, but this takes more time.
**Our short-term memories must work too fast to have any time for consciousness.

== 16. Emotion ==

* Emotion - The use of fantasies, emotional or not, is indispensable for every complicated problem-solving process. We always have to deal with nonexistent scenes, because only when a mind can change the ways things appear to be can it really start to think of how to change the way things are.
** Too much commitment leads to doing only one single thing; too little concern produces aimless wandering.
* Cross-Exclusion - Each member of a group of agents is wired to send "inhibitory" signals to all the other agents of that group. This makes them competitors (OR operator). When any agent of such a group is aroused, its signals tend to inhibit the others.
* Avalanche Effects - The most active agent can quickly "lock out " all the others. So we need additional control mechanisms, which are common across all biological systems
** Conservation - Force all activities to depend upon some substance or other kind of quantity of which only a certain amount is available
** Negative Feedback - Supply a "summary" device that estimates the total activity in the agency and then broadcasts to that agency an "inhibitory" signal whose strength is in proportion to that total. This can damp down incipient avalanches.
** Censors and Suppressors - While conservatism and feedback schemes tend to be indiscriminate, these are more sensitive and versatile in learning to recognize - and then to avoid - specific patterns of activity that have led to trouble in the past
** All human communities seem to work out policies for how their members ought to think, in forms that are thought of as common sense or as law, religion, or philosophy.
* Motivation -
* Exploitation - Each part of the mind exploits the rest, not knowing how the other parts work but ony what they seem to do.
** One needs a process that sometimes works before one can proceed to improve it.
* Stimulus vs Simulus - One agency can exploit another by providing a stimulus to activate it. Perhaps the simplest way would be to force the highest-level agents into whichever states would result from seeing a certain scene. A simulus could activate some suitable K-lines to simulate the higher-level effects of a true stimulus.
* Infant Emotions - In contrast to the complex mixtures of expressions that adults show, young children seem usually to be in one or another well-defined state of activity - contentment, hunger, sleepiness, play, affection, etc. Older children show less sudden mood changes, and their expressions suggest that more different things are happening at once. Our minds may thus originate as sets of relatively simple, separate need machines.
** To help their offspring grow, most animals evolve two matching schemes. Babies have intense, focused irresistible cries to arouse parents, who contain baby-watching systems with high priority. These systems could be wired to the remnants of our own infantile needs, so that we react to the cries with urgency and sympathy.
* Adult Emotions - Our earliest emotions are built-in processes in which proto-specialists control what happens in our brains. Soon we learn to overrule those schemes, as our surroundings teach us what we ought to feel. Parents, teachers, friends, and finally our self-ideals impose upon us new rules for ho to use the remnants of those early states: they teach us how and when to feel and show each kind of emotion sign.
** By the time we're adults, these systems have become too complicated to understand - we've passed through so many stages of development and our minds have been rebuilt too many times to remember or understand much of how it felt to be an infant.
** What are emotions anyway, and what are all the other things we label moods, feelings, passions, needs, or sensibilities? We find it hard to agree on the meanings of words like these, presumably because few of them actually correspond to clearly distinct mental processes. Instead, when we learn such words, we each attach to them variously different and personal accumulations of conceptions in our minds.
** Commonsense psychology has not even reached a consensus on which emotions exist.

== 17. Development ==

* Sequences of Teaching-Selves - Our sense of unity is acquired over many stages of development. Each stage is superceded by a new stage that is built on top of it and goes beyond the sophistication and integration of it.
** The puzzle principle - It is usually easier to recognize a solution to a problem than to discover a solution.
** One's present personality cannot share many of the thought of all one's older personalities - and yet it has some sense that they exist. This is one reason why we feel that we possess an inner Self - a sort of ever-present person-friend, inside the mind, whom we can always ask for help.
* Attachment-Learning - There are particular types of learning that can only proceed in the presence of the particular individuals to whom one has become attached.
** In ordinary forms of failure or success signals, the learner modifies the methods used to reach the goal.
** In fear-provoking situations, the learner may modify the description of the situation itself.
** In attachment-related failure or reward signals, the learner modifies which goals are considered worthy of pursuit.
* Attachment Simplifies - Attachment related signals seem to work directly on the goals themselves - and thus can modify our personalities. Attachments teach us ends, not means - and thus impose on us our parent's dreams.
** Most higher animals have evolved instinctive bonding mechanisms that keep the youngsters close to the parents. Human infants, too, are born with tendencies to form special attachments
** Attachments keep children safe, but also force children to acquire values, goals, and ideals from particular older individuals.
** Though a child can learn about ordinary causes and effects, only through modeling adult behavior can they construct a coherent system of values. The construction of a "civilized personality" is too complicated for a single individual.
* Functional Autonomy - When pursuing any sufficiently complicated problem, the subgoals that engage our attentions can become both increasingly more ambitious and increasingly detached from the original problem.
** Virtually any problem will be easier to solve the more one learns about the context world in which that problem occurs. No matter what one's problem is, provided that it's hard enough, one always gains from learning better ways to learn.
** Our most abstract investigations can be seen as having origins in finding means to ordinary ends. In the end, our initial goals matter scarcely at all, because no matter what our original objectives, we can gain more by becoming better able to predict and control our world. Knowledge is power.
* Developmental Stages - Why can't we grow by steady, smooth development? It's always dangerous to change a system that already works, and you should never give control to a new system until it is fully tested. So new systems are developed internally, tested, and only then released.
* Prerequisites for Growth - To build a good Society-of-More, it simply would not be practical for a child to introduce Appearance and History until some lower-level agents such as Tall, Thin, No Loss, and Reversible had become available.
** We can never be sure of what a skill's prerequisites must be - and this will always complicate psychology.
** It is hard enough to analyze what people do, but it is almost impossible to recognize the things they never do.
* Genetic Timetables - Having these for stages of development is possible but may not be flexible enough. Maybe a combination of the investment principle (where a skill surpasses its competitors, becomes more and more useful and then dominates the scene) and the exception principle (where the skill becomes so useful to other agencies that changing it would become too disruptive) suggests another way.
** Once a scheme persists for long enough it becomes "too big to fail" and since it is too hard to change, it is time to build a replacement. We need revolution not evolution.
* Attachment-Images - We aren't born with built-in Selves, but we are, in the main, surrounded by caretakers who we can model ourselves on. This is the way that values and goals of a culture pass from one generation to the next.
** Feelings of virtuousness and shame guide us in constructing this self.
** So we are dominated by parent's goals and dreams, but at least we are not being forced to obey mere unlearned, built-in instinct goals.
* Different Spans of Memories - Parent-to-child and child-to-parent bonds must be based on certain types of memory that are rapidly-formed and particularly slow to change.
** See also friendship, infatuations, and mourning.
* Intellectual Trauma - Intellectual development can depend upon attachments to other persons and can have buried fears and dreads.
** In the social world, other people can inform us about our violations of taboos, but in the realm of the intellect, we can often detect our own deficiencies.
* Intellectual Ideals - We make intellectual attachments and want to think the way certain other people do, from parents, teachers, and friends, to writers and even legendary heroes who never existed. We depend as much on these images or how we ought to think as we do on those of how we ought to feel.
** Human thought is not baed on any single and uniform kind of "logic", but upon myriad processes, scripts, stereotypes, critics and censors, analogies and metaphors.
** At every step, the choices we make depend on what we have become. our sciences, arts, and moral skills do not originate from detached ideals of truth, beauty, or virtue but stem partly from our endeavors to placate or please the images established in earlier years. Our adult dispositions thus evolve from impulses so infantile that we would surely censure them, if they were not by now transformed, disguised, or - as Freud said - "sublimated".

== 18. Reasoning ==

* Must Machines Be Logical? - When do we actually use logic in real life? We use it to simplify and summarize our thoughts. We use it to explain arguments to other people and to persuade them that those arguments are right. We use it to formulate our own ideas. But I doubt that we often use logic actually to solve problems or to "get" new ideas. Instead, we formulate our arguments and conclusions in logical terms after we have constructed or discovered them in other ways; only then do we use verbal and other kinds of formal reasoning to "clean things up," to separate the essential parts from the spaghetti-like tangles of thoughts and ideas in which they first occurred.
** Logic no more explains how we think than grammar explains how we speak; both can tell us whether our sentences are properly formed, but they cannot tell us which sentences to make. Without an intimate connection between our knowledge and our intentions, logic leads to madness, not intelligence. A logical system without a goal will merely generate an endless host of pointless truths.
* Chains of Reasoning - For generations, scientists and philosophers have tried to explain ordinary reasoning in terms of logical principles - with virtually no success. Many thinkers have assumed that logical necessity lies at the heart of our reasoning. but for the purposes of psychology, we'd do better to set aside the dubious idea of faultless deduction and try, instead, to understand how people actually deal with what is usual or typical. To do this, we often think in terms of causes, similarities, and dependencies. What do all these forms of thinking share? They all use different ways to make chains.
* Chaining - Seems to permeate not only how we reason, but how we think of structures in space and time. Why do chains apply so well to insubstantial "lines of thought"? It is because there's such a good analogy between how chains can break and how reasoning can fail.
* Logical Chains - Commonsense reasoning differs from "logical" reasoning. When an ordinary argument seems weak, we may be able to support it with more evidence. But there is no way for a link inside a logic chain to use additional support; if it's not quite right, then it's absolutely wrong.
** Logic rarely helps us get a new idea, but it often helps us to detect the weaknesses in old ideas. Sometimes it also helps us clarify our thoughts by refining messy networks into simpler chains. Once we find a way to solve a certain problem, logical analysis can help us find the most essential steps. Then it becomes easier to explain what we've discovered to other people - and also we often benefit from explaining our ideas to ourselves. This is because, more often than not, instead of explaining what we actually did, we come up with a new formulation. Paradoxically, the moments in which we think we're being logical and methodical can be just the times at which we're most creative and original.
* Strong Arguments - What has "strength" to do with reasoning? In logic, arguments are simply either right or wrong, since there is not the slightest room for matters of degree. But in real life, few arguments are ever absolutely sure, so we simply have to learn how various forms of reasoning are likely to go wrong. Then we can use different methods to make our chains of reasoning harder to break.
** A chain can break with any single injury, but a parallel bundle cannot fail unless every one of its links has been broken.
** Each serial connection makes a structure weaker, while each parallel connection makes it stronger.
* Magnitude from Multitude - We rarely need to know that anything is absolutely wrong or right; instead, we only want to choose the best of some alternatives.
** Strength from Magnitude - When two forces work together, they add to form a single larger force. But when two forces oppose each other directly, their strengths subtract.
** Strength from Multitude - The more reasons we can find in favor of a particular decision, the more confidence we can have in it. If some of those reasons turn out to ve wrong, other reasons may still remain.
* What is a Number? - The closest we can come to agreeing on meanings is in mathematics, when we talk of things like "three" and "five". But even something as impersonal as "five" never stands isolated in a person's mind but becomes part of a huge network.
** Each number meaning works in different problem worlds. To ask which meaning is correct - to count, match, or put into groups - is foolishness: each method helps the others, and all of them together make a mass of skills that grow in power and efficiency. The really useful meaning are not the flimsy logic chains of definitions, but the much harder-to-express networks of ways to remember, compare, and change things.
* Mathematics Made Hard - As scientists, we like to make our theories as delicate and fragile as possible. We like to arrange things so that if the slightest thing goes wrong, everything will collapse at once!
** The ordinary goals of ordinary citizens are not the same as those of mathematicians and philosophers - who like to put things into form with as few connections as possible. For children know from everyday experience that the more cross-connected their common-sense ideas are, the more useful they're likely to be.
* Robustness and Recovery - How do things keep functioning while vital parts are modified - or even lost?
** Duplication - Functions can be embodied in several duplicated agents, in different places so that is one is disabled, another can take over. Many regions of the mind do have several duplicates.
** Self-Repair - In the brain, it simply wouldn't help to replace individual brain agents - unless the same healing process could also restore all the learned connections among those agents.
** Distributed Processes - Spread out over a range of locations
** Accumulation - Each agent tends to accumulate a family of subagents that can accomplish that agent's goals in several ways, so that if some become impaired, others can take over. Accumulation - the simplest form of learning provides both robustness and versatility.

== 19. Words and Ideas ==

* The Roots of Intention - Language builds things in our minds. Yet words themselves can't be the substance of our thoughts. They have no meanings by themselves; they're only special sorts of marks or sounds. If we're to understand how language works, we must discard the usual view that words denote or represent, or designate; instead, their function is control: each word makes various agents change what various agents do. If we want to understand how language works, we must never forget that our thinking-in-words reveals only a fragment of the mind's activity.
** The words we think seem to hover in some insubstantial interface wherein we understand neither the origins of the symbol-signs that seem to express our desires nor the destinations wherein they lead to actions and accomplishments. This is why words and images seem so magical: they work without our knowing how or why. At one moment a word can seem enormously meaningful; at the next moment it can seem no more than a sequence of sounds. And this is as it should be. It is the underlying emptiness of words that gives them their potential versatility. The less there is in a treasure chest, the more you'll be able to put in it.
* The Language Agency - As far as language can tell, no sooner do we hear a phrase than all its meanings spring to min - yet we have no conscious sense of how those words produce their effects. Consciousness does not reveal how language works. Language is only a part of thought. The language agency can exploit itself as though it were just another agency.
* Words and Ideas - How are words involved with mental processes and how does language enable people to communicate?
** Polynemes - Are kinds of K-lines. They send the same, simple signal to many different agencies and each of those agencies must learn, for itself, what to do when it receives that signal. When you hear the word "apple", a certain polyneme is aroused, and the signal from this polyneme will put your Color agency into a state that represents redness, your Shape agency into a state that represents roundness, and so forth. The polyneme for "apple" doesn't know anything about apples, colors, shapes, or anything else - it is merely a switch that turns on processes in other agencies, each of which has learned to respond in its own way.
** Isonomes - Control a short term memory in each of many agencies. A word like "it" excites an isonome whose signal has no particular significance by itself, but controls what various agencies do with certain recent memories.
* Objects and Properties - It's usually impossible to perfectly define a word because you cannot capture everything you mean in just a phrase; an apple means a thousand things. However, you can usually say some of what you mean by making list of properties. What is a property? We like the kinds of properties that do not change capriciously and the most useful sets of properties are those whose members do not interact too much.
** This explains the universal popularity of that particular combination of properties: size, color, shape, and substance, each of which we represent in separate agencies. Then those properties can simultaneously arouse separate partial states of mind at once, in several divisions of the mind and a single word can activate many different kinds of thoughts at once;
* Polynemes - To understand a polyneme, each agency must learn its own specific and appropriate response. Each agency must have its private dictionary or memory bank to tell it how to respond to every polyneme.
* Recognizers - How do we recognize things? The simplest way is to verify that a thing has certain properties. We don't need to find every feature, but should be able to weigh the evidence as to whether an apple or a chair is present.
* Weighing Evidence - All feature-weighing machines have serious limitations because, although they can measure the presence or absence of various features, they cannot take into account enough of the relations among those features.
* Generalizing - We're always learning from experience by seeing some examples and then applying them to situations that we've never seen before. We humans do not learn in accord with any fixed and constant set of principles; instead, we accumulate societies of learning-schemes that differ both in quality and kind.
** Hofstadter: "Making variations on a them is the crux of creativity. But it is not some magical mysterious process that occurs when two indivisible concepts collide; it is a consequence of the divisibility of concepts into already significant subconceptual elements."
* Recognizing Thoughts - Inside the brain, there is no big difference between seeing an apple and hearing the word "apple". In neither case is there a real apple in the brain. In both cases, some part of the mind must recognize what's happening in certain other parts of mind. Recognizers can identify a certain combination of ideas whether they arise from physical or mental objects, and then trigger the appropriate polyneme "apple".
* Closing the Ring - If you start with enough clues to arouse one of your apple-names, it will automatically arouse memories of the other properties and qualities of apples and create a more complete impression, "simulus" or hallucination of the experience of seeing, feeling, and even of eating an apple. This way, a simple loop machine can reconstruct a larger whole from clues about only certain of its parts!
** To think effectively, we often have to turn aside from certainty - to take some chance of being wrong. Our memory systems are powerful because they're not constrained to be perfect!

== 20. Context and Ambiguity ==

* Ambiguity - Our states of mind are usually subject to change. The properties of physical things tend to persist when their contexts are changed - but the significance of a though, idea, or partial state of mind depends upon which other thoughts are active at the time and upon what eventually emerges from the conflicts and negotiations among one's agencies. It is an illusion to assume a clear and absolute distinction between expressing and thinking, since expressing is itself an active process that involves simplifying and reconstituting a mental state by detaching it from the more diffuse and variable parts of its context.
** Thoughts themselves are ambiguous!
** We can tolerate the ambiguity of words because we are already so competent at coping with the ambiguity of thoughts.
* Negotiating Ambiguity - The trouble is that the word "star" is linked to different polynemes for a celestial body, a theatrical celebrity, or an object with a certain shape. The momentary confusion comes because the word "astronomer" gives us an initial bias toward the celestial sense of "star". But that inhuman meaning causes conflict in our marriage-agent, and this soon leads to another more consistent interpretation.
** As the polynemes for deer and gun gain strength, they will weaken and suppress the competing nemes for money and for wagering - and that will weaken, in turn, the other polynemes that support the alternative context of making bets. The end effect of this will be almost instantaneous. In only a few cycles of the meaning ring, the agents associated with deer and gun will completely suppress their competitors.
* Visual Ambiguity - Ambiguities are just as common in vision, too. What we "see" does not depend only on what reaches our eyes from the outside world. The manner in which we interpret those stimuli depends to a large extent on what is already taking place inside our agencies.
* Locking-In and Weeding-Out - At every moment a person's mind is already involved with some context in which many agents are actively aroused. Because of this, as each new word arouses different polynemes, these will compete to change the states of those agents. Some of those changes will gain support as certain combinations of agents reinforce one another. Others that lose support and are left to stand alone will tend to weaken, and most ambiguities will thus be weeded out. In a few cycles, the entire system will firmly "lock in" on one meaning-sense for each word and firmly suppress the rest.
* Micronemes - Every situation or condition we experience is influences or, so to speak, colored, by thousands of contextual shades and hues, just as looking through a tinted glass has faint effect on everything we see.
** Some of these conditions and relationships may correspond to language-words, but for most of them we have no words, just as we have no expressions for most flavors and aromas, gestures and intonations, attitudes and dispositions. I'll call them micronemes.
** While each such effect may be relatively small, the effects of activating many micronemes will usually combine to establish a context within which most words are understood unambiguously.
** Even modest families of micronemes could span vast ranges of contexts. 40 could specify a trillion different contexts, and we surely have thousands and perhaps millions.
* The Nemeic Spiral - Our polynemes and micronemes grow into great branching networks that reach every level of every agency. They approximate the general form of a hierarchy, but one that is riddled with shortcuts, cross-connections, and exceptions. No one could ever comprehend all the details of the connections that develop inside a single human individual; that would amount to grasping how all that person's thoughts and inclinations interact.
* Connections - To speak and understand a language well, an ordinary person must learn thousands of words. To learn the proper use of a single word must involve great numbers of connections between the agents for that word and other agents.
* Connection Lines - We need efficient ways to make these connections.
* Distributed Memory - I suspect that when we understand the brain, we'll discover that small groups of connection lines do indeed have local significance - because they will turn out to be the most important agents of nearby levels. The connection lines themselves will constitute our micronemes.

== 21. Trans-Frames ==

* The Pronouns of the Mind - Pronouns do not signify objects or words: instead, they represent conceptions, ideas, or activities that the speaker assumes are going on inside the listener's mind. Whenever we talk or think, we use pronoun-like devices to exploit whatever mental activities have already been aroused, to interlink the thoughts already active in the mind. To do this, though, we need to have machinery we can use a temporary "handles" for taking hold of, and moving around, those active fragments of mental states. To emphasize the analogy with the pronouns of our languages, I'll call such handles "pronomes".
* Pronomes - Certain concerns and roles seem so important that every language has developed speak word-forms or grammatical constructions for them - Subjects, Verbs, Objects, Prepositions.
** Representing both space and time in similar ways lets us apply the selfsame reasoning skills to both of them.
* Trans-Frames - At their simples, show an Origin, a Trajectory or Difference, and a Destination, and can be thought of in chains. Once you learn efficient chain-manipulating skills, you can apply them to many different kinds of situations and actions. Constructing mental chains seems as easy as stringing beads - you just replace each Trans-Frame's Destination with the next one's Origin.
* Trans-Frame Pronomes - Include Origin, Difference or Trajectory, and Destination, but can also include Cause, Obstacle, Effect, Vechicle, Instrument, Actor, Object, Time, Place, Action, Goal, Method, etc.
* Generalizing with Pronomes - The first few times you try to do something new, you must experiment to find which agents to activate, and at what times, and for how long. Later, you can prepare a script that will do the job more quickly and easily by accumulating memories of which agent-activations were successful, together with memories of which polynemes were assigned to various pronomes at those moments.
* Attention - How does memory-control begin? Perhaps our infants first acquire control over a single pronome, which gives them the ability to keep in mind a "temporary polyneme". This amounts to being able to maintain only a single "object of attention", let's call it IT. New even the ability to keep track of a single IT requires the development of certain skills of memory-control, for it takes the normal infant several months to become able to tolerate even a small interruption without losing its previous focus of interest.
** In later life, we become more able to maintain several ITs at once. This enables us to construct comparisons, predictions, and imaginary plans, and to begin to construct explanations in terms of chains of causes and reasons.

== 22. Expression ==

* Pronomes and Polynemes - Each pronome must be assigned to different things at different times, and only for long enough to complete the task of the moment. A pronome is a type of short-term memory.
** Each pronome is simply a temporary K-line, where a pronome's connections are temporary rather than permanent. We can assign a pronome by temporarily connecting it to whichever currently active agents it reaches. Then, when we activate that pronome again, those same agents will be aroused. To make the Origin pronome represent an apple, first activate an apple-neme; this will arouse certain agents. Next, quickly assign the Origin pronome. Those agents will then become attached to that pronome and presumably remain attached until the pronome is reassiged.
** Polynemes are permanent K-lines. They are long-term memories.
** Pronomes are temporary K-lines. They are short term memories.
* Isonomes - An isonome has a uniform sort of effect on many agencies.
** An isonome has a simolar built-in effect on each of its recipients. It thus applies the same idea to many different things at once.
** A polyneme has different, learned effects on each of its recipients. It thus connects the same thing to many different ideas.
** Both isonomes and polynemes are involved with memories, but polynemes are essentially the memories themselves, while isonomes control how memories are used. Pronomes are a particular type of isonome; there must also be "interruption isonomes" that work similarly but manage memories on larger scales - for example, for storing away the several pronome memories of an entire Trans-frame all at once.
** The power of polynemes stems from how they learn to arouse many different processes at once, while isonomes draw their power from exploiting abilities that are already common to many agencies.
* De-Specializing - None of our many chaining tricks would have much use if each were permanently tied to one specific polyneme like "cup" or "car. However, once we learn to build our process scripts with isonomes, each can be applied to many kinds of reasoning
** What we call generalizing is not any single process of concept, but a functional term for the huge societies of different methods we use to extend the powers of our skills. No single policy will work for all domains of thought, and each refinement of technique will affect the quality of the generalizations we make.
** Converting polynemes to isonomes may be a potentially powerful skill, but it must be adapted to different realms. Once we accumulate enough examples of how a new script fails and succeeds in several situations, we can try to build a uniframe to embody good constraints. But no matter which policy we adopt, we must always expect some exceptions.
** Premature generalizations could lead to such large accumulations of constraints, censors, and exceptions that it would be better to retain the original polynemes.
* Learning and Teaching - Why are some children better than others at transfer of learning from one domain to another? Some children learn to represent knowledge in versatile ways, others end up with accumulations of inflexible, single-purpose procedures or with almost useless generalities.
* Inference - Over the years, children improve their abilities to decide when two different structures are similar enough to justify making chain-links. This often requires us to recall and apply other types of knowledge at appropriate level-bands of detail.
** By learning to manipulate our isonomes, we become able to combine mental representations into structures that resemble bridges, chains, and towers. Our language-agencies learn to express these in the form of compound sentences, by using conjunctive grammar wors like and, because, or or. But language is not the only realm in which we learn to conceptualize - that is to treat our mental processes almost as though they were object-things.
* Expression - Language lets us treat our thoughts as though they were much like ordinary things. We speak as though ideas resemble building-blocks that one can find and grasp.
** Our ability to treat ideas as though they were objects goes together with our abilities to reuse our brain-machinery over and over again. Whenever an agency becomes overburdened by a large and complicated structure, we may be able to treat that structure as a simple, single unit by thing-ifying - or conceptualizing it. Then, once we replace a larger structure by representing it with a compact symbol-sign, that overloaded agency may now be able to continue its work. This way, we can build grand structures of ideas.
** There's probably little difference between a physical object and an idea as they are represented in the mind.
** No conception or idea could have much use unless it could remain unchanged - and stay in some kind of mental place - for long enough for us to find it when we need it. Nor could we ever achieve a goal unless it could persist for long enough. No mind can work without some stable states or memories.
* Causes and Clauses - Our brains appear to make us seek to represent dependencies. Whatever happens, where or when, we're prone to wonder who or what's responsible. This leads us to discover explanations that we might not otherwise imagine, and that helps us predict and control not only what happens in the world, but also what happens in our minds.
* If we imagine things and causes that do not exist then we'll invent false gods and superstitions and see their hand in every chance coincidence.
* Perhaps the word "I" reflects the selfsame tendency where we're compelled to find some cause that causes everything we do.
* Interruptions - English tends to use certain "wh" words like "which" and "who" to interrupt a listener's language-agency and cause its short-term memories to temporarily store away some of their present pronome assignments. This provides the language-agency with more capacity to understand the interrupting phrase.
* Pronouns and References - At each point in a dialogue, both parties are already involved with various concerns and desires. These establish contexts in which each new word, description, or representation, however ambiguous, gets merges with whichever short-term memory best matches it.
** Our language-agencies must dispose of each phrase as soon as possible, so that they can apply their full capacities to deal with what comes afterward. If something in the conversation does not match anything that came before, the listener must activate a new memory-unit. This tends to slow the process down, because it consumes our limited supplies of short-term memory and makes subsequent matching more difficult. If the listener cannot make suitable assignments quickly enough, the conversation will seem incoherent and communication will break down.
** Eloquent speakers avoid this by designing each new expression to be easily attached to structures already active in the listener; otherwise the listener is entitled to complain that the language isn't clear.
* Verbal Expression - To talk, you must engage a vast array of agencies to build new structures in another person's mind. But how do you know just way to say to affect that other person's agencies.
** If Mary want s to tell Jack something, there is a certain structure p somewhere inside the network of Mary's agencies and her language-agency must construct a similar structure inside Jack's mind. To do this, Mary will need to speak words that will activate appropriate activities inside Jack's agencies, then correctly link them together.
** Learning these arts takes a long time: most children need a decade or more to complete their language-systems and many keep learning, throughout their lives, to sense new sorts of discrepancies and discover ways to express them.
* Creative Expression - Whether or not what you meant to say actually existed before you spoke, your language-agencies are likely either to reformulate what did exist or create something new and different from anything you had before.
** Whenever you try to express with words any complicated mental state, you're forces to oversimplify - and that can cause both loss and gain.
** On the losing side, no word description of a mental state can ever be complete; some nuances are always lost.
** But when you're forced to separate the essences from accidents, you gain the opportunity to make reformulations. Then, since your language-agency knows so little about the actual state of those other agencies, it must answer by making theories about them, and these may well leave you in a state that is simpler, clearer, and better suited to solving your problem.
** When we try to explain what we think we know, we're likely to end up with something new
** This is what we call culture - the conceptual treasures our communities accumulate through history.

== 23. Comparisons ==

* A World of Differences - Much of ordinary thought is based on recognizing differences. This is because it is generally useless to do anything that has no discernible effect. When we talk about cause and effect, we're referring to imaginary links that connect the differences we sense. What are goals but ways in which we represent the kinds of changes we might like to make.
** The ability to consider differences between differences is important because it lies at the heart of our abilities to solve new problems. This is because these second-order differences are what we use to remind ourselves of other problems we already know how to solve. sometimes this is called reasoning by analogy and is considered to be an exotic or unusual way to solve problems. But in my view, it's our most ordinary way of doing things.
* Differences and Duplicates - The duplication problem: The states of two different agencies cannot be compared unless those agencies themselves are virtually identical.
* Time Blinking - Since most agents can be made to serve as difference-agents, we can compare two descriptions simply by presenting them to the same agency at different times. This is easily done if that agency is equipped with a pair of high-speed, temporary K-line memories. Then we need only load the two descriptions into those memories and compare them by activating first one and then the other.
** The method of time blinking can also be used to simplify our difference-engine scheme for composing verbal expressions, since now the speaker can maintain both p and q inside the selfsame agency. If not for this, each speaker would need what would amount to a duplicate society of mind in order to simulate the listener's state.
* The Meanings of More - When we hear the word "more" we become disposed to make comparisons.
** As life proceeds, each person's concept of More grows more and more elaborate. When it comes to notions like more similar, more interesting, or more difficult, there seems not limit to the complexity of what a word like more can represent.
* Foreign Accents - Most human languages use less than a hundred phonemes. If parents were inclined and able to learn to speak the ways their children do, those children would lost both incentive and opportunity to learn to speak like adults, and - if every child acquired a different set of language sounds - no common, public language would ever have evolved in the first place.

== 24. Frames ==

* The Speed of Thought - Sight is intertwined with memory. When face to face with someone you've just met you seem to react almost instantly - but not as much to what you see as to what that sight reminds you of. The moment you sense the presence of a person, a whole world of assumptions are aroused that are usually true about people in general. At the same time, certain superficial cues remind you of particular people you've already met. Unconsciously, then, you will assume that this stranger must also resemble them, not only in appearance but in other traits as well.
** No amount of self-discipline can keep those superficial similarities from provoking assumptions that may then affect your judgments and decisions. Wehn we disapprove of this, we complain about stereotypes - and when we sympathize with it, we speak of sensitivity and empathy.
** It's much the same with language, too. If someone said, "It's raining frogs," you mind will swiftly fill with thoughts to examine this claim.
** Each perceptual experience activates some structures that we'll call frames - structures we've acquired in the course of previous experience.
** We all remember millions of frames, each representing some stereotyped situations like meeting a certain kind of person, being in a certain kind of room, or attending a certain kind of party.
* Frames of Mind - A frame is a sort of skeleton, somewhat like an application form with many blanks or slots to be filled. We'll call these blanks its terminals; we use them as connection points to which we can attach other kinds of information.
** Virtually any kind of agent can be attached to a frame terminal. It can be a <k-line, polyneme, isonome, memory-control script, or, best of all, another frame.
** Default assumptions fill our frames to represent what's typical. They help us represent our previous experience. We use them for reasoning, recognizing, generalizing, predicting what may happen next, and knowing what we ought to try when expectations aren't met. Our frames affect our every thought and everything we do.
* How Trans-Frames Work - When a frame-agent is activated - either by seeing, hearing, or imagining something - this supplies each of its AND-agents with an input. The second input is provided by some pronome which can thereby activate whichever agent or frame is presently assigned to that terminal. If several pronomes are active at the same time, all the corresponding agents will be activated too. When the frame above is active, the pronome for Origin will activate the K-line for Boston, and the pronome for Vehicle will activate the K-line for car.
* Default Assumptions - Unless we make assumptions, the world would simply make no sense. It would be as useless to perceive how things "actually look" as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned TV screens.
** What really matters is being able to see what things look like. This is why our brains need special machinery for representing what we see in terms of distinct objects.
** Proust: "Each reader reads only what is already inside himself. A book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to let the reader discover in himself what he would not have found without the aid of the book.
* Nonverbal Reasoning - Logical thinking is so much simpler - and less effective than common-sense thinking. Actually, what appears to be a matter of logic is usually not logical at all and frequently turns out to be wrong.
** To reason well, our memory-control agencies must learn to move our memories around as though those memories were building-blocks. Conceivably, those agencies have to learn such skills before we can learn to build with blocks in the outside world of object-things.
* Direction Nemes - If you were walking through a circular tube, you could scarcely keep from thinking in terms of bottom and top and sides - however vaguely their boundaries are defined. Without a way to represent the scene in terms of familiar parts, you'd have no well-established thinking skills to apply to it.
* Picture Frames - Whenever we see a thing so utterly new that it resembles nothing we've ever seen before, this means that none of our prelearned frames will fit it very well. But we can almost always use a less specific frame that fits most any room at all. The trick will be to make all our frames for different rooms share the same terminals, so that when we interchange those frames, the information stored in them remains.
* How Picture-Frames Work - Your eyes move in various directions, controlled in some way by direction-nemes. No suppose that every time you move your eyes, the same direction-nemes also activate the K-lines attached to the corresponding terminals of a certain vision-frame. Suppose also that those K-lines are ready to form new memories. Then each time you look in a different direction, your vision-system will describe what you see - and the corresponding K-line will record what you see when you look in that direction.
** If, at a later date, that same frame is activated by memory than, as any of your agencies conceives of looking in a certain direction, the thought itself will involve the activation of the corresponding direction-neme: then, before you have a chance to think of anything else, the corresponding K-line will be aroused
** Whichever way your mind's eye looks, you'll seem to see the corresponding aspect of the scene. You will experience an almost perfect "simulus" of being there!
* Recognizers and Memorizers - We'll assume that every frame is activated by some set of recognizers, types of agent that, in a sense, are the opposite of K-lines, since instead of arousing a certain state of mind, they have to recognize when a certain state of mind occurs.
** The recognizers of a frame are very much like the terminals of a frame, except that the connections to the terminals are reversed.
** This suggests that not only frames but agencies in general might be organized in the form of agents sandwiched between recognizers and memorizers.

== 25. Frame-Arrays ==

* One Frame at a Time - Our agencies can tolerate just one interpretation at a time. Our vision-systems are born equipped, on each of several different levels, with some sort of "locking-in" machinery that at every moment permits each part, at each level, to be assigned to one and only one whole at the next level. In every region of the picture, the frames must compete with one another to account for each feature.
* Frame Arrays - Are groups of frames that share the same terminals. When you represent a thing's details with a frame-array, you can continue to move around yet keep in mind all that you've observed from those different viewpoints, even though you've never seen them all at once. This gives the wonderful ability to conceive of all of an object's different views as aspects of a single thing.
** First you try to match what you see to the frame-arrays in the memories you have accumulated and refined over periods of may years. How do they originate? Presumably this pattern is built into the architecture of major sections of the brain. But although the pattern is built-in, developing the skills for using it involves each child in more than a decade of predestined learning.
* The Stationary World - Our frame arrays store what we learn about the world at terminals that stay unchanged when we move our heads and bodies around. When you activate your move east direction-neme in order to make your body move in that direction, the same signal will also make this frame-array replace the middle frame with the one to its left. This will compensate for your change of viewpoint and determine what you "expect" to see - and the scene will appear to remain stationary!
* The Sense of Continuity - Existence seems continuous to us not because we continually experience what is happening in the present, but because we hold to our memories of how things were in the recent past. Without those short-term memories, all would seem entirely new at every instant, and we would have no sense at all of continuity or, for that matter, of existence.
** The power of consciousness comes not from ceaseless change of state, but from having enough stability to discern significant changes in our surroundings. To "notice" change requires the ability to resist it. In order to sense what persists through time, one must be able to examine and compare descriptions from the recent past. We notice change in spite of change, not because of it.
** Our sense of constant contact with the world is not a genuine experience; instead, it is a form of immanence illusion. We have the sense of actuality when every question asked of our visual systems is answered so swiftly that it seems as though those answers were already there. And that's what frame-arrays provide us with: once any frame fills its terminals, the terminals of the other frames in its array are also filled. When every change of view engages frames whose terminals are already filled, albeit only be default, then sight seems instantaneous.
* Expectations - Whenever we become familiar with some particular environment, we represent it with a frame-array whose terminals have already been filled. Then for each direction of motion inside that environment, our vision-systems activate the corresponding frames of that array. We also activate the corresponding frames even when we merely consider or imagine a certain body motion - and this amounts to knowing what to expect.
** In general, each frame of a spatial frame-array is controlled by some direction-neme.
** However in surroundings that are either especially familiar or whose relationships we do not understand, we may learn to use more specific stimuli instead of using direction-nemes to switch the frames. For example, when you approach a familiar door, the frame for the room that you expect to find behind that door might be activated, not by your direction of motion but by your recognition of that particular door.
* The Frame Idea - Comes from a 1974 essay: "A Framework for Representing Knowledge".

== 26. Language- Frames ==
FC Bartlett: "Thinking... is possible only when a way has been found of breaking up the "massed" influence of past stimuli and situation, only when a device has already been discovered for conquering the sequential tyranny of past reactions. But though it is a later and a higher development, it does not supersede the method of images. It has its own drawbacks. Contrasted with imagining it loses something of vivacity, of vividness, of variety. Its prevailing instruments are words, and, not only because these are social, but also because in use they are necessarily strung out in sequence, they drop into habit reactions even more readily than images do. [With thinking] we run greater and greater risk of being caught up in generalities that may have little to do with actual concrete experience.

* Understanding Words - A "party-invitation" frame - I was raised in a culture in which an invitation to a party carries the obligation to arrive well dressed and to bring a birthday present. Accordingly, when I read or hear that Mary has been invited to a party, I attribute to Mary the same sorts of subjective reactions and concerns that I would have in such a situation. Therefore, although the story never mentions clothes or gifts at all, to expect their possible involvement seems only simple common sense. But though it is common, it is not simple.
* Understanding Stories - What makes a story comprehensible? What gives it coherency? The secret lies in how each phrase and sentence stirs frames into activity or helps already active ones to fill their terminals. When the first sentence of our story mentions a party, various frames are excited - and these are still active in the reader's mind when the next sentence is read. The ground is prepared for understanding the second sentence because so many agents are already ready to recognize possible references to presents, clothes, and other matters that might be related to birthday parties.
* Sentence-Frames - How does the understanding listener know which slots in the frame to insert each word in the sentence? By arousing familiar frames and using standard grammatical forms, we can say a great deal in a very few words.
* A Party-Frame - Dictionary definitions never say enough. Every child knows that a party is more than just a gathering assembled to celebrate someone's birthday. But no brief definition can describe the complicated customs, rules, and regulations that typical communities prescribe for such ceremonies.
** To all their young participants, parties unfold exactly as a party should, with all these queer complexities. We take our social customs for granted, as though they were natural phenomena. Few guests or hosts will ever wonder why their parties have those explicit forms or ask about their origins. As far as any child can tell, that's just how parties ought to go; they always did and always will. And so it is with almost everything we know.
* Story-Frames - We take it for granted that anyone can understand a story. But every kind of narrative demands some listening skills. To listen well, a child must acquire potent forms of self-control.
** You can prepare the listener by saying, "Would you like to hear a story?" or simply "Once upon a time..." Such phrases have very specific effects: to set the listener into a norm and familiar state of expecting to hear a certain type of narrative - a story.
** Most stories starts with just enough to set the scene. They they introduce some characters, with hints about their principal concerns. Next, we get some clues about some "main event" or problem to be solved. From that point on, the listener has a general idea of what comes next: there will be more development of the problem; then it will be resolved somehow; and then the story will end, perhaps by giving some practical or moral advice.
** These magic story-starting words arouse, in knowing listeners' minds, great hosts of expectation frames to help them anticipate which terminals to fill. They also tell them that what comes after is fictional or, in any case, far too remote to activate much personal concern. They should disregard the normal sympathies one should feel when real persons meet the monstrous destinies so usual in children's tales.
* Sentence and Nonsense - A word string seems "grammatical" if all its words fit quickly and easily into frames that connect suitably to one another. The distinction between sense and nonsense is only partly a matter of grammar. Ungrammatical expressions can frequently be meaningful when they lead to clear and stable mental states. Grammar is the servant of language, not the master.
* Frames for Nouns - At various points in their development, most children seem suddenly to comprehend new kinds of sentences. Many scientists wonder why so many human languages use similar structures such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, clauses, and sentences. It is likely that some of these reflect what is genetically built into our language-agencies. The most common forms of phrases could arise not so much from the architecture of the language-agencies as from the machinery used by other agencies for representing objects, actions, differences, and purposes, and from how those other agencies manipulate their memories. The ways we think must have a strong and universal influence on how we speak - if only through its influence on the sorts of things we'll want to say.
* Frames for Verbs - In the earliest stages of learning to speak, we simply fill the terminals of word-string frames with nemes for words. Then, later, we learn to fill those terminals with other filled-in language frames.
** Each child must learn how the order of the words affects which terminal each phrase should fill.
** How did language forms evolve? We have no record of their earliest forms, but they surely were affected at every stage by the kinds of questions and problems that seemed important at the time.
* Language and Vision -The language-agency must be able to interrupt itself, while handling one phrase, to work on parts of another phrase, and this involves some complex short-term memory skills. But in vision, too, there must be similar processes involved in breaking scenes apart and representing them as composed of objects and relationships.
** Among our ancestors, vision greatly predates language, so if these abilities are related, our language-agencies themselves more likely evolved from variants of genes that first evolved in shaping the architecture of our vision-systems.
* Learning Language - The vocabulary of a language is the product of a project that spans the history of a culture and can involve millions of person years of work. Every sense of every word records some intellectual discovery that now outlives the myriad other, less distinguished thoughts that never earned a name.
** Each person invents some new ideas, but most of these will die when their owners do, except for those that make their way into the culture's lexicon. Still, from that ever-growing reservoir we each inherit many thousands of powerful ideas that all our predecessors found.
** But, we cannot learn meanings only by memorizing definitions: we must also understand them. Each situation in which a word is used must suggest some mixture of materials already in the mind of a listener, who then, alone, must attempt to assemble these ingredients into something that will work in consonance with other things already learned. Definitions sometimes help but one must separate the essences from the accidents of the context, link together structures and functions, and build connections to the other things one knows.
** Along with the words, we also have to learn the grammar-tactics for using them. Most children start by using only one or two words at a time. Then, over the next two or three years, they learn to speak in sentences. It usually takes a full decade to learn most of the conventions of adult speech, but we often see relatively sudden advances over concentrated periods of time.
** Many sections of our brains appear to demonstrate capacities for rearranging pronome roles even before we learn to speak. Perhaps we ought to wonder why it takes children so long to speak competently, when they already do so many similar things inside their heads.
* Grammar - As we develop skills for building chains and trees from other frames, the language agency can learn to use corresponding grammar-tactics to express those chains - stringing together phrases and sentences with conjunction words like "and" and "but". As we improve our methods for controlling memories and managing interruptions, we can learn to combine those skills with clause-interrupting forms like "who" and "which".
** There seems scarcely any limit to the complexity of our social inventions for expressing mental processes, and it takes most children many years to master all the language arts their ancestors evolved.
* Coherent Discourse - We're normally quite unaware of how our grammar-tactics constrain us in our choices of words. We're often somewhat aware of other language-tactics we use to guide our listeners' minds - to change the focus from one theme to another, to adjust the levels of detail, to shift between foreground and setting.
** We learn to use phrases like "by the way" to change the topic of concern, to say "for example" to shift to a finer level of detail, to say "but" to modify an expectation or to interrupt the usual flow, or to say "in any case" or "in spite of that" to indicate the end of an interruption or elaboration.
** To understand what people say, we also exploit our vast stores of common knowledge, not only about how specific words are related to the subjects of concern, but also about how to express and discuss those subjects. Every human community evolves a great array of discourse-forms to shape its stories, explanations, conversations, discussions, and styles of argument.
** Just as we learn grammar forms for fitting words to sentence-frames, we also build up stocks of plots to organize our story tales and standard personalities to fill the roles of their protagonists - and every child must learn these forms.

== 27. Censors and Jokes ==

* Demons - Whenever we hear about a particular event, specific recognition-agents are thereby aroused. These then proceed actively to watch and wait for other related types of events. Because these recognition-agents lurk silently, to intervene only in certain circumstances, they are sometimes called "demons".
** How easy should it be to activate demons? How long should they then remain active? If too few demons are aroused, we'll be slow to understand what's happening. But if too many become active, we'll get confused by false alarms.
** There are no simple solutions to these problems, and what we call "understanding" is a huge accumulation of skills.
** You might understand certain parts of a story by using separate, isolated demons; you might comprehend other aspects of that same story by using larger-scale processes that try to match the sequence of events to various remembered scripts; yet other understandings might depend upon which agents are aroused by various micronemes.
** How much of the fascination in telling a story, or in listening to one, comes from the manipulations of our demons' expectations.
* Suppressors - All communities evolve some prohibitions and taboos to tell their members what they shouldn't do. That, too, must happen in our minds: we accumulate memories to tell ourselves what we shouldn't think.
** Suppressor-agents - Wait until you get a certain "bad idea". Then they prevent your taking the corresponding action, and make you wait until you think of some alternative. If a suppressor could speak, it would say, "Stop thinking that!"
** Censor-agents - Need not wait until a certain bad idea occurs; instead, they intercept the states of mind that usually precede that thought. If a censor could speak, it would say "Don't even begin to think that!"
* Censors - To prevent a particular mental state from occurring, an early-acting censor must learn to recognize all the states of mind that might precede it. thus, each censor may, in time, require a substantial memory bank. For all we know, each person accumulates millions of censor memories, to avoid the thought-patterns found to be ineffectual or harmful.
** It is easier to notice what your mind does than to notice what it doesn't do, and this means that we can't use introspection to perceive the work of these inhibitory agencies. I suspect that this effect has seriously distorted our conceptions of psychology and that once we recognize the importance of censors and other forms of negative recognizers, we'll find that they constitute large portions of our minds.
** Sometimes, our censors and suppressors must themselves be suppressed. In order to sketch out long-range plans, for example, we must adopt a style of thought that clears the mind of trivia and sets minor obstacles aside. But that could be very hard to do if too many censors remained on the scene; they'd make us shy away from strategies that aren't guaranteed to work, and tear apart our sketchy plans before we can start to accomplish them.
* Exceptions to Logic - We search for "islands of consistency" within which ordinary reasoning seems safe. We work also to find and mark the unsafe boundaries of those domains.
** In civilized communities, appointed guardians post signs to warn about sharp turns, thin ice, and animals that bite. And so do our philosophers, when they report to us their paradoxical discoveries - those tables of the l<iar who admits to lying and the Barber who shaves all the people who do not shave themselves. These valuable lessons teach us which thoughts we shouldn't think.
** It is virtually impossible to state any facts about the real world that actually are always true. Exceptions are a fact of life because few facts are always true. Logic fails because it tries to find exceptions to this rule.
* Jokes - Freud suggests that we form censors in our minds as barriers against forbidden thoughts and jokes are stories designed to fool the censors. A joke's power comes from a description that fits two different frames at once.
** He suggested that children construct censors in response to prohibitions by their parents or peers. This explains why so many jokes involve taboos concerning cruelty, sexuality, and other subjects that human communities typically link to guilt, disgust, or shame.
** Another theory was that nonsense jokes reflect "a wish to return to carefree childhood, when one was permitted to think without any compulsion to be logical, and to put words together without sense, for the simpler pleasures of rhythm or rhyme." Absurd results of reasoning must be tabooed as thoroughly as social mistakes and inanities! And that's why stupid thoughts can seem as humorous as antisocial ones.
* Humor and Censorship - When we learn in a serious context, the result is to change connections among ordinary agents<; but when we learn in a humorous context, the principal result is to change the connections that involve our censors and suppressors.
** We must make a sharp distinction between our positive, action-oriented memories (mental states which are desirable) and the negative, inhibitory memories (mental states which are undesirable) embodied in our censors.
** When people do things that are good, we talk to them in encouraging tones - and this switches on their positive learning machinery.
** When people do things we consider stupid or wrong, we then complain in scornful tones or laugh derisively - and this switches on their negative learning machinery. Scolding may tend to produce suppressors (who need to learn which mental states are undesirable), while laughing produces censors (who must remember which mental states were undesirable).
* Laughter - It's function is to disrupt another person's reasoning. Seeing a person laugh creates such chaos in the mind that you can't proceed along your present train of thought. Derision makes you feel ridiculous; it prevents you from being serious. It focuses your attention on the present stat of mind. By preventing you from taking seriously your present thought, and thus proceeding to develop it, laughter gives you time to build a censor against that state of mind.
** Humor must have grown along with our abilities to criticize ourselves, starting with simple internal suppressors that evolved into more sophisticated censors.
* Good Humor - To ask how humor works in a grown-up person is to ask how everything works in them, since humor gets involved with so many other things.

== 28. The Mind and the World ==

* The Myth of Mental Energy - Machines and brains require ordinary energy to do their jobs - and need no other mental forms of energy. Causality is quite enough to keep them working toward their goals.
* Magnitude and Marketplace - At every moment of our lives, we're forced to choose between alternatives we can't compare. We turn to using quantities when we can't compare the qualities of things. To the extent that success in interchangeable with time or doof or energy, it's useful to treat pleasure as equivalent to wealth.
* Quantity and Quality - Whenever we turn to measurements, we forfeit some uses of intellect. Currencies and magnitudes help us make comparisons only by concealing the differences among what they purport to represent.
** Inside our brains, many agencies have come to influence one another by controlling the amounts of various chemicals in much the way that many kinds of human transactions have come to use substances like candy, coins, or bags of salt - or banknotes backed by promises.
* Mind Over Matter - In order for hunger to keep us fed, it must engage some agency that gives priority to food-acquiring goals. To serve as useful "warning signs", feelings like pain and hunger must be engineered not simply to indicate dangerous conditions, but to anticipate them and warn us before too much damage is done.
** Since our feelings of pain, depression, exhaustion, and discouragement are themselves mere products of our minds activities - and one that are engineered to warn us before we reach our ultimate limits - we need no extraordinary power of mind over matter to overcome them. It is merely a matter of finding ways to rearrange our priorities.
* The Mind and the World - We spend our lives in several realms:
** The ordinary physical world of objects that exist in space and time and which obey simple laws. When any object moves or changes, we can usually account for it in terms of other objects pushing it, or else of gravity or wind.
** A social realm of persons, families, and companies, whose entities appear to be ruled by quite different kinds of causes and laws. Whenever a person moves or changes, we look for signs of intentions, ambitions, infatuations, promises, threats, and the like - none of which could affect a brick.
** A psychological realm - inhabited by entities we call by names like meanings, ideas, and memories. These too appear to obey different rules.
** Minds are simply what brains do. It doesn't matter what agents are; it only matters what they do - and what they are connected to.
* Minds and Machines - Why are processes so hard to classify? In earlier times, we could usually judge machines and processes by how they transformed raw materials into finished products. But it makes no sense to speak of brains as though they manufacture thoughts the way factories make cars.
** The difference is that brains use processes that change themselves - and this means we cannot separate such processes from the products they produce.
** In particular, brains make memories, which change the ways we'll subsequently think. The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves. Because the whole idea of self-modifying processes is new to our experience, we cannot yet trust our commonsense judgments about such matters.
* Individual Identities - A mind is a way in which each state gives rise to the state that follows it. If a new machine that duplicated your brain cells as transistors had a suitable body and were placed in a similar environment, its sequence of thoughts would be essentially the same as yours - since its mental states would be equivalent to yours.
* Overlapping Minds - I can make sense to think there exists, inside your brain, a society of different minds. Like members of a family, the different minds can work together to help each other, each still having its own mental experiences that the others never know about.
** Several such agencies could have many agents in common, yet still have no more sense of each other's interior activities than do people whose apartments share opposite sides of the same walls. Like tenants in a rooming house, the process that share your brain need not share one another's mental lives.

== 29. The Realms of Thought ==

* The Realms of Thought -
* Several Thoughts at Once -
* Paranomes - Many of our higher level conceptual-frames are really parallel arrays of analogous frames each active in a different realm.
** Certain pronomes (call them "paranomes" can operate in several different realms at once. In this way, a single language-phrase can at the same time evoke different processes involved with social dispositions, spatial images, poetical fancies, musical thems, mathematical structures - or any other assortment of types of thought that don't interfere too much with one another.
* Cross-Realm Correspondences - At one moment, control over language may reside in the realm of thought that is working most successfully; at the next moment, it may be the one experiencing the most difficulty. Each shift in attention affects how the various expressions will be interpreted, and this in turn can affect which realm will net take center stage.
* The Problem of Unity -
* Autistic Children - Infants can find social goals easier to accomplish than physical goals, while adults find the social goals more difficult. One way to explain this is to say that the presence of helpful people simplifies the infant's social world - since because of them, simpler actions solve harder problems. Another explanation might be that the infant's social world is just as complicated as that of the adult, except the presence of helpful people makes the infant's mind more powerful - by making the agencies inside those other people's brains available for exploitation by the agencies in the infant's brain.
** A child that tried to see the world without dividing it into realms would find no simple rules at all that work across so large a range.
* Likenesses and Analogies -
* Metaphors - No two things or mental states ever are identical, so every psychological process must employ one means or another to induce the illusion of sameness. Every thought is to some degree a metaphor.
** Once scientists like Volta and Ampere discovered how to represent electricity in terms of the pressures and flows of fluids, they could transport much of what they already knew about fluids to the domain of electricity.
** Good metaphors are useful because they transport uniframes, intact, from one world into another. Such cross-realm correspondences can enable us to transport entire families of problems into other realms, in which we can apply to them some already well-developed skills. However, such correspondences are hard to find since most reformulations merely transform the uniframes of one realm into disorderly accumulations in the other realm.
** Our greatest ideas, like our evolutionary genes, need form only once, by accident, and then can spread from brain to brain.

== 30. Mental Models ==

* Knowing - When Jack says "Mary knows geometry," this indicates to us that Jack would probably be satisfied by Mary's answers to the questions about geometry that he would be disposed to ask.
** We simply assume that the speaker would expect any typical person who know Mary to agree that she knows geometry. Assumptions like that allow us to communicate; unless there is some reason to think otherwise, we assume that all the things involved are typical. It does not bother us that a professional mathematician might not agree that Mary knows geometry - because a mathematician doesn't fit our stereotype of a typical person.
** The part of you that claims you know geometry has little in common with the other parts that actually do geometry for you; those agencies are probably incapable of speech and probably devoid of thoughts about your knowledge and beliefs.
** Doubt is not an enemy that sets constraints on what we know; the real danger to mental growth is perfect faith, doubt's antidote.
* Knowing and Believing - The "I" in "I believe" is not a single stable thing. A person's mind holds different views in different realms. An astronomer has many ways of thinking about sunrise.
** We each use many different views on situations and which we choose to use depends, from one moment to the next, upon the changing balance of power among our agencies.
** When we commit ourselves to speak or act, we have to force ourselves into clear-cut, action-oriented states of mind in which most of our questions are suppressed. In everyday life, decisiveness is indispensable; otherwise we'd have to act so cautiously that nothing would get done. In the course of making practical decisions (and thereby turning off most agencies) we use words like "guess", "believe", and "know" to summarize our various varieties of certainty.
* Mental Models - A book does not know what is written inside it, but it does contain knowledge. Saying that a person or machine possesses knowledge amounts to saying that some observer could employ that person or machine to answer certain kinds of questions.
** Jack considers M to be a good model of A to the extent that he finds M useful for answering questions about A.
** Jack's knowledge about A is simply whichever mental models, processes, or agencies Jack's other agencies can use to answer questions about A.
** We make mental models of people, too, in order to "know" about their dispositions, motives, and possessions.
** We make models of ourselves and use them to predict which sorts of things we'll later be disposed to do. Naturally, our models of ourselves will often provide us with wrong answers because they are not faultless ways to see ourselves, but merely self-made answering machines.
* World Models - You can never really describe any worldly thing in any absolute sense. Whatever you purport to say about a thing, you're only expressing your own beliefs. But, even if our models of the world cannot yield good answers about the world as a whole, and even though their other answers are frequently wrong, they can tell us something about ourselves.
** We can regard what we learn about our models of the world as constituting our models of our models of the world.
* Knowing Ourselves - Eventually, when probing our own motivations, we simply stop and say "Because I simply wanted to." And when we find things hard to decide, we can simply say "I just decide". And this can help us interrupt what otherwise might be an endless chain of reasoning.
* Freedom of Will - Every action we perform stems from a host of processes inside our minds. We sometimes understand a few of them, but most lie far beyond our ken. But none of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control. We like to give names to what we do not know, and instead of wondering how we work, we simply talk of being "free". Perhaps it would be more honest to say, "My decision was determined by internal forces <i do not understand." But no one likes to feel controlled by something else.
** Though it's futile to resist, we continue to regard both Cause and Chance as intrusions on our freedom of choice. There remains only one thing to do: we add another region to our model of our mind, a thing called "freedom of will", which lies beyond both kinds of constraint.
* The Myth of the Third Alternative - No matter that the physical world provides no room for freedom of will: that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false - except of course, when we're inspired to find the flaws in all our beliefs, whatever may be the consequence to cheerfulness and mental peace.
* Intelligence and Resourcefulness - What magic trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle:
** The accumulation of myriad subagents - We learn many different ways to achieve each kind of goal.
** The many realms of ordinary thought - When one viewpoint fails to solve a problem, we can adopt other perspectives
** The endowment of several "instinctive" proto-minds - We embody different kinds of organizations for achieving many kinds of goals.
** The hierarchies of administration grown in accord with Papert's principle - When simple methods fail, we can build new levels of organization.
** The evolutionary vestiges of animals that still remain inside our brains - We use machinery evolved from fish, amphibia, reptiles, and earlier mammals.
** The sequence of stages of the growing child's personality - We accumulate different personalities that we can apply to different situation.
** The complex, ever)growing heritage of language and culture - We can use methods and ideas developed by millions of our ancestors. The subordination of thought processes to censors and suppressors - We do not need perfect methods, since we can remember how imperfect methods fail.

== Appendix ==

* Chance plays a major role in human differences, because each of us starts our by drawing lots from among our parents' genes. We are similar because those alternative genes are usually quite similar - and we are different because those genes are not identical.
* All human brains are similar in size and shape but differ in many small respects because of different alternative genes.
* The early-starting genes frame the large-scale outlines of the brain - and their uniformity explains why people are so similar on the broadest scale. These must be the genes responsible for what we call "human nature" - the predispositions every normal person shares.
* In their first few days, human infants learn to distinguish people by their odors; then, over the next few weeks, they learn to recognize individuals by sound of voice; only after several months do they start to reliably distinguish the sights of faces. Most likely we learn to make each of these distinctions by several different methods, and it is probably no accident that these abilities develop in a sequence that corresponds to their increasing complexity.
* Surely our human genes provide us with a great deal of instinctive wiring. However, far more than any other kind of animal, we also have machinery that can bridge new agencies across the older ones, so that we can learn to bury ancient instincts under modern social disciplines.

== Glossary - Agents and Agencies ==

* Agency - An assembly of parts considered in terms of what it can accomplish as a unit.
* Agent - Any part or process of the mind that by itself is simple enough to understand - even though the interactions among groups of such agents may produce phenomena that are much harder to understand.
* B-Brain - An agency (part of the brain) that is not connected to the world, but supervises or analyzes the work of an A-Brain (another part of the brain that is connected to the outside).
* Censor - An agent that inhibits or suppresses the operation of other agents.
* Demon - An agent that constantly watches for a certain condition and intervenes when it occurs.
* Direction-Neme - An agent associated with a particular direction or region in space.
* Isonome - A signal or pathway in the brain that has similar effects on several different agencies.
* K-Line - The theory that certain kinds of memories are based on turning on sets of agents that reactivate one's previous partial mental states.
* Memorizer - An agent that can reset an agency into some previously useful state.
* Micromemory - The smallest components of our short-term memory systems.
* Microneme - A neme involved with agents at a relatively low level
* Neme - An agent whose output represents a fragment of an idea or state of mind. The context within which a typical agent words is largely determined by the activity of the nemes that reach it.
* Nome - An agent whose outputs affect an agency in some predetermined manner. Its effect depends more on genetic architecture than on learning from experience.
* Paranome - An agent that operates on agencies of several different mental realms at once, with similar effects on all of them.
* Polyneme - An agent that arouses different activities, at the same time, in different agencies - as a result of learning from experience.
* Pronome - A type of agent associated with a particular role or aspect of a representation. Pronome agents frequently control the attachments of terminals of frames to other frames.
* Recognizer - An agent that becomes active in response to a particular pattern of input signals.
* Sensor - An agent whose inputs are sensitive to stimuli that come from the world outside the brain.
* Suppressor - A censor-like agent that works by disrupting a mental state that has already occurred. Suppressors are easier to construct than censors, and require less memory, but are much less efficient.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

The Emperor of All Maladies

2026-07-26T15:50:28Z

Robert.adlington:

* Leukemia - discovered in 1845
* Pernicious anemia is caused by a lack of vitamin B
* More than 300bn blood cells are produced per day, but if there is a lack of folic acid then production in the bone marrow halts.
* Metastasis - "beyond stillness"
* Cancer asphyxiates us by filling bodies with too many cells. It is an expansionist disease, it invades through tissues, sets up colonies in hostile landscapes, seeking "sanctuary" in one organ and then immigrating to another. It lives desperately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively - at times, as if teaching us how to survive. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species.
* Cancer is a clonal disease. Nearly every known cancer originates from one ancestral cell that, having acquired the capacity of limitless cell division and survival, gives rise to limitless numbers of descendants.
* Hippocrates around 400BC - Karkinos is Greek for crab. Onkos is Greek for a mass, a load, or a burden.
* For Galen, around AD 140, both cancer and depression are caused by an excess of black bile. Melancholia comes from melas (black) and khole (bile).
* Autopsy comes from the Greek "to see for oneself".
* Anesthesia first demonstrated in 1846.
* Pasteur proposes the existence of bacteria.
* 1867 - discovery of antisepsis through carbolic soap.
* 1895 - Rontgen discovers X-rays.
* 1902 - The Curies discover Radium, which is seen to be attacking DNA. Marie Curie dies of leukemia in 1934.
* Specificity - the ability of a medicine to discriminate between its intended target and its host.
* 1849 - Wöhler synthesizes urea, demolishes vitalism and proves that organic and inorganic chemistry are interchangeable.
* 1882 - Chemotherapy, the use of chemicals to heal the diseased body is invented by Ehrlich.
* Lymphomas - cancers of the lymph glands.
* In 1944, the Manhattan Project spent $100m each month at the Oak Ridge site. In 1948, Americas spent more than $126m on Coca-Cola.
* 1918 - Spanish flu kills 600k Americans, and 50m people worldwide.
* Howard Skipper - "A model is a lie that helps you see the truth."
* The blood-brain barrier is an ancient biological system that has evolved to keep poisons from reaching the brain
* Sarcoma - a cancer of the connective tissues
* 1952 - Polio vaccine.
* Dogs, humans, and lions are the only animals known to develop prostate cancer.
* Endocrine system = hormonal messenger system
* Palliate comes from the Latin palliare = to cloak.
* By 1953, Americans smoked 3,500 cigarettes per year
* In 1953, the tobacco companies publish the "Frank statement".
* "Doubt is our product"
* 1971 - Last cigarette commercial on US TV.
* The time lag between tobacco exposure and lung cancer is 30 years.
* 1998 - The Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) with the tobacco companies.
* Carcinogenesis - a cell's journey toward malignant transformation.
* 1928 - Invention of the Pap smear.
* 1913 - Invention of the Mammography
* 1955 - Philip Morris introduce the Marlboro Man
* Leukemia cells from the National Cancer Institute continue to grow with an "obscene fecundity" over decades.
* In cancer, the cell acquires autonomous proliferation.
* Genes:
** Functionally, a gene is a unit of inheritance that carries a biological trait from one cell to another or from one generation to the next.
** Physically, genes are carried within the cell in the form of chromosomes.
** Chemically, genes are composed of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid.
** Carry instructions to build proteins - complex, multidimensional macromolecules that are the workhorses of the cell. A protein is a gene realized - the machine built from the genes instructions. The genesis of proteins from genes requires an intermediary step - ribonucleic acid, RNA.
** RNA is the working copy of the genetic blueprint, the way it is translated into a protein. Genetic information is transmitted from a cell to its progeny through a series of discrete and coordinated steps:
*** Genes, located in chromosomes, are duplicated when a cell divides and are transmitted into progeny cells
*** A gene, in the form of DNA is converted into its RNA copy.
*** This RNA message is translated into a protein which, as the ultimate product of the the genetic information, carries out the function encoded by the gene.
**This unidirectional flow of genetic information from DNA to RNA to protein is universal in living organisms, from bacteria to slime molds to fruit flies to humans and from the mid-1950s is the "central dogma" of molecular biology.
**Retroviruses, such as the Rous sarcoma virus carry a special property unprecedented in any other living organism, and can convert RNA back into DNA - reverse transcription.
***The genes of retroviruses exist as RNA outside cells and when they infect cells, they make a DNA copy of their genes and attach the copy to the cell's genes. This DNA copy, called a provirus, makes RNA copies, and the virus is refenerated, phoenixlike, to form new viruses.
***The virus is thus constantly shuttling states, rising from the cellular genome and falling in again - RNA to DNA to RNA ad infinitum.
***But retroviruses would turn out to be the cause of AIDS, not cancer.
**Oncogene and anti-oncogenes - normal genes capable of causing cancer through over-activation or suppression. About a hundred have been found and they are safe until activated (or suppressed) by mutations. Typically two copies of each tumor suppressor gene exist, and both need to be suppressed by independent mutations.
***src - a diminutive of sarcoma, activates cell division
***ras - another gene activating cell division. Also myc, neu, fos, ret, akt.
***rb - is a suppressor gene, an anti-oncogene, which suppresses cell division. Mutations that suppress or delete both copies of this gene can cause cancer. Also p53, VHL, APC.
**Kinase - molecular master switch within calls to activate protein functions
***Cellular src is tightly regulated - turns on and off during cell division.
***Viral src is permanently activated - cellular src on overdrive.
**Proto-oncogene - a normal cellular gene which can be mutated by chemicals or X-rays to cause cancer by inserting foretign genes into cells. Everyone has these proto-oncogenes in their cells, but people who are exposed to carcinogens (such as tobacco or X-rays) develop cancer at a higher rate due to the increase in mutations caused by the carcinogens.
**The Philadelphia chromosome - An abnormal version of chromosome 22 that contains a fusion of two genes, the ''ABL1'' gene and the ''BCR'' gene, a "translocation". This fusion gene is made when part of the ''ABL1'' gene on chromosome 9 breaks off and attaches to the ''BCR'' gene on chromosome 22. The protein made by the ''BCR''::''ABL1'' fusion gene can cause immature white blood cells to grow uncontrollably and build up in the bone marrow and blood. The Philadelphia chromosome is found in the bone marrow cells of almost all people with chronic myelogenous leukemia and some people with acute lymphocytic leukemia or acute myelogenous leukemia.
***Cancer is due to specific mutations to chromosomes. Translocations can create new genes called "chimeras"
** Cancer moves slowly via many mutations in many genes over many iterations.
** Proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes sit at the hubs of signaling pathways, eg the Ras-Mek-Erk pathway, which normally control tightly regulated cell division.
** Abnormal genes govern all aspects of cancer's behavior. There are six essential alterations in cell physiology that collectively dictate malignant growth:
*** Self-sufficiency in growth signals - Pathological mitosis or an autonomous drive to proliferate, due to activation of oncogenes such as ras or myc.
*** Insensitivity to growth-inhibitory (antigrowth) signals - Inactivation of tumor suppressor genes, such as Rb, that normally inhibit growth.
*** Evasion of programmed cell death (apoptosis) - Suppression and inactivation of genes and pathways that normally enable cells to die.
*** Limitless replicative potential - Activation of specific gene pathways that render them immortal even after generations of growth.
*** Sustained angiogenesis - Acquiring the capacity to draw out their own supply of blood and blood vessels.
*** Tissue invasion and metastasis - Acquiring the capacity to migrate to other organs, invade other tissues, and colonize them, resulting in a spread throughout the body.
**Between 1990 and 2005, the cancer-specific death rate had dropped nearly 15%, but still more than half a million Americans died of it in 2005. The decline was due to prevention (lung cancer and the decline of smoking), screening (colon and cervical cancer), chemotheapy (leukemia, lymphoma, and testicular cancer).
**In 1982, Genetech unveiled the first "recombinant" human insulin; in 1984 it produced a clotting factor to control bleeding in patients with hemophilia; in 1985, it created a recombinant version of human growth hormone.
**In normal cells, the Bcr and abl genes existed separately: both were tightly regulated during cell division. In CML leukemia cells, the translocation created a new chimera - Bcr-abl, a hyperactive, overexuberant kinase that activated a pathway that forced cells to divide incessantly.
**The human genome has about five hundred kinases, of which, about ninety belong to the subclass that contains src and Bcr-abl. Every kinase attaches phosphate tags to a unique set of proteins in the cell. They act as molecular master-switches in cells - turning on some pathways and turning off others - thus providing the cell a coordinated set of internal signals to grow, shrink, move, stop, or die.
**The Human Genome Project, the full sequence of the normal human genome, was completed in 2003.
**The Cancer Genome Atlas will provide a compendium of every gene mutated in the most common forms of cancer, 10k times the volume of DNA to analyze as the HGP:
***In specimens of breast and colon cancer, 50-80 genes are mutated, in pancreatic cancer 50-60, in brain cancer, 40-50
***When comparing two breast cancer specimens, the set of mutated genes is far from identical
***Some mutations are passive, bystander or passengers and have no impact on the biology of cancer. Only driver mutations play a crucial role
***Passenger mutations occur randomly and are spread throughout the genome, but drivers strike key oncogenes and tumpor suppressors, and there are only a limited number of them in the genome
***There are key cancer pathways, like Ras-Mek-Erk or Rb pathways, and there are perhaps only 11-15 such dysregulated pathways in a cancer cell. Maybe not all of them need to be targeted when attacking complex cancers.
**New directions include:
***Targeted therapies against these genes
***Cancer prevention - with better understanding of carcinogens
***Cancer screening - with better targeting og people with known genetic mutations
***Better understanding of cancer behavior - What allows a cancer cell to keep dividing endlessly without exhaustion or deplotion generation upon generation
**Stem cells are a tiny population of cells that are capable of immortal regeneration. All human blood, for instance, can arise from a single, highly potent blood-forming stem cell. In weeks a single such blood stem cell can replenish the enitre human organism with new blood and then, when done, goes back to sleep
**Atossa's journey:
***In 2500 BC in Egypt, Imhotep has a name for her illness but no treatment.
***In 500 BC in her own court she has a mastectomy
***In 300 BC in Thrace, Hippocrates identifies her tumor as a karkinos
***In AD 168, Galen hypothesizes a systematic overdose of black bile
***In 1779 in London, John Hunter assigns early and late stages of cancer, with a local operation for the former.
***In 1890 in Baltimore, she is given a radical mastectomy
***In the early 20th C, radiation is used via X-rays
***By the 1950s, she will have a lumpectomy followed by radiation.
***In the 1970s, she will have surgery followed by combination chemotherapy
***From 1986, she can have targeted therapy with Herceptin
***By the mid 90s she can be screened earlier and then have intensive follow up screening. Her daughters can even opt for preventive surgery
***In 2050, personalized targeted therapies may be tailored to the exact mutations detected in her genome.

[[Category:Books]]

The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

2026-07-26T15:50:06Z

Robert.adlington:

=== 1. Inside Information ===

* Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.
* We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience - a new feeling of what it is to be "I"
* Just as sight is something more than all things seen, the foundation or "ground" of our existence and our awareness cannot be understood in terms of things that are known.
* In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. The universe of seemingly separate things is therefore real only for a while, not eternally real, for it comes and goes as the Self hides and seeks itself.

=== 2. The Game of Black-and-White ===

* Consider, first, that all your five senses are differing forms of one basic sense - something like touch. Seeing is highly sensitive touching. The eyes touch, or feel, light waves and so enable us to touch things out of reach of our hands. Similarly, the ears touch sound waves in the air, and the nose tiny particles of dust and gas.
* The physical world is basically vibration. Whether we think of this vibration in terms of waves or of particles, or perhaps wavicles, we never find the crest of a wave without a trough or a particle without an interval, or space, between itself and others. In other words, there is no such thing as a half wave, or a particle all by itself without any space around it. This is no on without off, no up without down.
* While eyes and ears actually register and respond to both the up-beat and the down-beat of these vibrations, the mind, that is to say our conscious attention, notices only the up-beat. The dark, silent, or "off" interval is ignored. It is almost a general principle that consciousness ignores intervals, and yet cannot notice any pulse of energy without them.
* Space is the relationship between bodies, and without it there can be neither energy nor motion.
* Any galaxy, any star, any planet, or any observer can be taken as the central point of reference, so that everything is central in relation to everything else!
* The narrow slit in the fence is much like the way in which we look at life by conscious attention, for when we attend to something we ignore everything else. Attention is narrowed perception. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit, using memory to string the bits together - as when examining a dark room with a flashlight having a very narrow beam.
* We also speak of attention as noticing. To notice is to select, to regard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as more noteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and the rest we ignore.
* It seems that we notice through a double process in which the first factor is a choice of what is interesting or important. The second factor, working simultaneously with the first, is that we need a notation for almost anything that can be noticed.
* Symbols enable us to classify our bits of perception. They are the labels on the pigeonholes into which memory sorts them, but it is most difficult to notice any bit for which there is no label.
* What governs what we choose to notice?:
** Whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos.
** The pattern and the logic of all the notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society and our culture. It is hard to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description.
* There are two ignored factors which constitute the ego illusion:
** Not realizing that so-called opposites, such as light and darkness, sound and silence, solid and space, on and off, inside and outside, appearing and disappearing, cause and effect, are poles or aspects of the same thing. But we have no word for that thing, save such vague concepts as Existence, Being, God, or the Ultimate Ground of Being. For the most part these remain nebulous ideas without becoming vivid feelings or experiences.
** We are so absorbed in conscious attention, so convinced that this narrowed kind of perception is not only the real way of seeing the world, but also the very basic sensation of oneself as a conscious being, that we are fully hypnotized by its disjointed vision of the universe.
* In other words, we do not play the Game of Black-and-White. Instead, we play the game of Black-versus-White or, more usually, White-versus-Black. For especially when rates of vibration are slow as with day and night or life and death, we are afraid that Black may win the game. But the game "White must win" is no longer a game. It is a fight - a fight haunted by a sense of chronic frustration, because we are doing something as crazy as trying to keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys.
* By means of scientific prediction and its technical applications, we are trying to gain maximum control over our surroundings and ourselves.
* If the game of order-versus-chance is to continue as a game, order must not win. As prediction and control increase, so, in proportion, the games ceases to be worth the candle. We look for a new game with an uncertain result. In other words, we have to hide again, perhaps in a new way, and then seek in new ways, since the two together make up the dance and the wonder of existence. Contrariwise, chance must not win, and probably cannot...
* The underlying problem of cybernetics, which makes it an endless success/failure, is to control the process of control itself. Power is not necessarily wisdom. I may have virtual omnipotence in the government of my body and my physical environment, but how am I to control myself so as to avoid folly and error in its use?

=== 3. How to Be a Genuine Fake ===

* Most people think of themselves as separate from their thoughts and experiences.
* Memory is an enduring pattern of motion, like the whirlpool, rather than an enduring substance, like a mirror, a wax tablet, or a sheet of paper. If memories are stored in neurons, there is no standing aside from the stream of events, for neurons flow along in the same stream as events outside the skull. After all, your neurons are part of my external world, and mine of yours! All our insides are outside, there in the physical world. But conversely, the outside world has no color, shape, weight, heat, or motion without "inside" brains. It has these qualities only in relation to brains, which are, in turn, members of itself.
* The skin informs us just a much as it outforms; it is as much a bridge as a barrier.
* It is largely by talking that a hypnotist produces illusions and strange behavioral changes in his subjects - talking coupled with relaxed fixation of the subject's conscious attention. The stage magician, too, performs most of his illusions by patter and misdirection of attention.
* If there is any biological foundation for the hoax of egocentricity, it lies only in the brain's capacity for narrowed, attentive consciousness hand-in-hand with its power of recognition - of knowing about knowing and thinking about thinking with the use of images and languages.
* The world is neither form nor matter, for these are two clumsy terms for the same process.
* It is doubtful whether Western science and technology would have been possible unless we had tried to understand nature in terms of mechanical models.
* When the astrologer draws a picture of a person's character or soul, he draws a horoscope - that is, a very rough and incomplete picture of the whole universe as it stood at the moment of that person's birth. But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing. A scientific astrology, if it could ever be worked out, would have to be a thorough description of the individual's total environment - social, biological, botanical, meteorological, and astronomical - throughout every moment of his life.
* Other people teach us who we are.
* Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation.
* Society is our extended mind and body.
* The child is told that he must be free. An irresistible pressure is being put on him to make him believe that no such pressure exists. The community of which he is necessarily a dependent member defines him as an independent member.
* Essentially the social double-bind game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain kinds. Living, loving, being natural or sincere - all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen of themselves like digesting food or growing hair.
* The web catches the spider.
* We should fight to check the enemy, not to eliminate him. We must learn to include ourselves in the round of cooperations and conflicts, of symbiosis and preying, which constitutes the balance of nature, for a permanently victorious species destroys not only itself but all other life in its environment.
* The individual may be understood neither as an isolated person nor as an expendable, humanoid working machine. He may be seen, instead, as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the Self, of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call IT.
* Differentiation is not separation.
* Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts - based on the realization that the only real "I" is the whole endless process. This realization is already in us in the sense that our bodies know it, our bones and nerves and sense-organs. We do not know it only in the sense that the thin ray of conscious attention has been taught to ignore it, and taught so thoroughly that we are very genuine fakes indeed.

=== 4. The World is Your Body ===

* The basic realities of nature are social fictions:
** The notion that the world is made up or composed of separate bits or things
** That things are differing forms of some basic stuff.
** That individual organisms are such things, and that they are inhabited and partially controlled by independent egos.
** That the opposite poles of relationships, such as light/darkness and solid/space are in actual conflict which may result in the permanent victory of one of the poles.
** That death is evil and that life must be a constant war against it.
** That man, individually and collectively, should aspire to be top species and put himself in control of nature.
* The nub of the problem is the self-contradictory definition of man himself as a separate and independent being in the world, as distinct from a special action of the world.
* What we call "things" are no more than glimpses of a unified process.
* The gestalt theory or figure/ground relationship - No figure is ever perceived except in relation to a background. Our attention is almost automatically won by any moving shape (in contrast with the stationary background) or by any enclosed or tightly complex feature (in contrast with the simpler, featureless background)
* The illusion that organisms move entirely on their own is immensely persuasive until we settle down, as scientists do, to describe their behavior carefully.
* Everything labeled with a noun is demonstrably a process or action, but language is full of spooks, like the "it" in "It was raining" which are the supposed causes of action.
* The organism is sometimes a running process, sometimes a standing process, sometimes a sleeping process, and so on, and in each instance the "cause" of the behavior is the situation as a whole, the organism/environment. Indeed, it would be best to drop the idea of causality and use instead the idea of relativity.
* Total situations are patterns in time as much as patterns in space.
* We can never, never describe all features of the total situation, not only because every situation is infinitely complex, but also because the total situation is the universe.
* Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
* The balance of nature, the harmony of contained conflicts, in which man thrives is a network of mutually interdependent organisms of the most astounding subtlety and complexity.
* Surely all forms of life, including man, must be understood as "symptoms" of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy - in which case we cannot escape the conclusion that the galaxy is intelligent.
* Knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes, and especially into states of the nervous system and the brain: we know the world in terms of the body, and in accordance with its structure.
* A living organism is a point of arrival apart from which there can never be the currents or phenomena of light, heat, weight, hardness, and so forth. One might almost say that the magic of the brain is to evoke these marvels from the universe, as a harpist evokes melody from the silent strings.
* The difficulty of understanding the organism/environment polarity is psychological.
* In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies - leaving "I" as a discontented and alienated spook, anxious, guilty, unrelated, and alone.

=== 5. So What? ===

* The separate person is without content, in both senses of the word. He lives perpetually on hope, on looking forward to tomorrow, having been brought up this way from childhood, when his uncomprehending rage at double-binds was propitiated with toys.
* We have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise, so that our artists and craftsmen can no longer discern its forms. This is the price that must be paid for attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an "I" for whom everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but.
* Children are in touch with paradise to the extent that they have not fully learned the ego-trick, and the same is true of cultures which, by our standards, are more "primitive" and - by analogy - childlike.
* But the way is not back. Just as science overcame its purely atomistic and mechanical view of the world through more science, the ego-trick must be overcome through intensified self-consciousness.
* All winners need losers; all saints need sinners; all sages need fools.
* It seems almost as if to be is to quarrel, or at least to differ, to be in contrast with something else. If so, whoever does not put up a fight has no identity; whoever is not self-ish has no self. Nothing unites a community so much as common cause against an external enemy, yet in the same moment, that enemy becomes the essential support of social unity.
* When you know for sure that your separate ego is a fiction, you actually feel yourself as the whole process and pattern of life. Experience and experiencer become one experiencing, known and knower one knowing. Each organism experiences that from a different standpoint and in a different way, for each organism is the universe experiencing itself in endless variety.
* You will see that the ego is exactly what it pretends it isn't. Far from being the free center of personality, it is an automatic mechanism implanted since childhood by social authority, with - perhaps - a touch of heredity thrown in.
* There is no fate unless there is someone or something to be fated. There is no trap without someone to be caught.
* Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own.
* In a society surviving to no purpose... the tasks are being done for their own sake, whereupon farms begin to look like gardens, sensible living-boxes sprout interesting roofs and mysterious ornaments, arms are engraved with curious patterns, carpenters take time to "finish" their work, and cooks become gourmets.
* The Secret of the Golden Flower: "When purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped."
* To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.
* To be released from the "You must survive" double-bind is to see that life is at root playing.
* When I make the sound "water" you know what I mean. But what does this whole situation mean - I making the sound and your understanding it? What is the meaning of a pelican, a sunflower, a sea urchin, a mottled stone, or a galaxy? Or of a+b=b+a? They are all patterns, dancing patterns of light and sound, water and fire, rhythm and vibration, electricity and spacetime.
* Sir Arthur Eddington: "Something unknown is doing we don't know what - that is what our theory amounts to."
* The world is a spell, an enchantment, an amazement, an arabesque of such stunning rhythm and a plot so intriguing that we are drawn by its web into a state of involvement where we forget that it is a game. We become fascinated to the point where the cheering and the booing are transformed into intense love and hate, or delight and terror, ecstatic orgasm or screaming meemies. All made out of on-and-off or black-and-white, pused, stuttered, diagrammed, mosaiced, syncopated, shaded, jolted, tangoed, and lilted through all possible measures and dimensions. It is simultaneously the purest nonsense and the utmost artistry.
* For "you" is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.
* No one can be moral - that is, no one can harmonize contained conflicts - without coming to a working arrangement between the angel in himself and the devil in himself, between his rose above and his manure below. The two forces or tendencies are mutually interdependent, and the game is a working game just so long as the angel is winning, but does not win, and the devil is losing, but is never lost. (The game doesn't work in reverse, just as the ocean doesn't work with wave-crests down and troughs up.
* Does it really take any considerable time or effort just to understand that you depend on enemies and outsiders to define yourself, and that without some opposition you would be lost? To see this is to acquire, almost instantly, the virtue of humor, and humor and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive.
* The real goodness of human nature is its peculiar balance of love and selfishness, reason and passion, spirituality and sensuality, mysticism and materialism, in which the positive pole has always a slight edge over the negative. (Were it otherwise, and the two were equally balanced, life would come to a total stalemate and standstill.)
* To be viable, livable, or merely practical, life must be lived as a game - and the "must" here expresses a condition, not a commandment. It must b"e lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents.
* Whatever may be true for the Chines and the Hindus, it is timely for us to recognize that the future is an ever-retreating mirage, and to switch our immense energy and technical skill to contemplation instead of action. However much we may now disagree with Aristotle's logic and his metaphors, he must still be respected for reminding us that the goal of action is always contemplation - knowing and being rather than seeking and becoming.
* As it is, we are merely bolting our lives - gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in - because awareness of our existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being.
* How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god.

=== 6. It ===

* Nothing so eludes conscious inspection as consciousness itself. This is why the root of consciousness has been called, paradoxically, the unconscious.
* The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.
* Chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy are special fascinations with the details of our environment, but metaphysics is fascination with the whole thing.
* There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the sense. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things... This darkness is the source of our vague fears and anxieties, but also the home of the gods.The dualistic terms "non-duality" is taken to represent the "dimension" in which explicit differences have implicit unity
* Is it conceivable, then, that I am basically an eternal existence momentarily and perhaps needlessly terrified by one half of itself because it has identified all of itself with the other half?
* If, on the other hand, self and other, subject and object, organism and environment are the poles of a single process, THAT is my true existence.
* There is no way to stand outside IT, and in fact, no need to do so. For so long as I am trying to grasp IT, I am implying that IT is not really myself. If it were possible, I am losing the sense of it by attempting to find it. This is why those who really know that they are IT invariably say they do not understand it, for IT understands understanding - not the other way about. One cannot, and need not, go deeper than deep.
* In fact we know how to grow brains and eyes, ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know how to walk and breathe, talk and think - only we can't put it into words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details.
* We then behold the Self wherever we look, and its image is the universe in its light and in its darkness, in its bodies and in its spaces.
* I presume then that with my own death I shall forget who I was, just as my conscious attention is unable to recall, if it ever knew, how to form the cells of the brain and the pattern of the veins. Conscious memory plays little part in our biological existence. Thus as y sensation of "I-ness", of being alive, once came into being without conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the central Self - the IT - appears as the self/other situation in its myriads of pulsating forms - always the same and always new, a here in the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the midst of many. And if I gorget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born.
* In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself - through our eyes and IT's.
* To come on like IT - to play at being God - is to play the Self as a role, which is just what it isn't. When IT plays, it plays at being everything else.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Everything is Predictable

2026-07-26T15:49:48Z

Robert.adlington:

=== Introduction: A Theory of Not Quite Everything ===

* All that we do all the time is predict the future. We couldn't function if we couldn't.
* As dictated by Bayes' theorem, your response to new information is influenced by the beliefs you already hold.

=== 1. From the Book of Common Prayer to the Full Monty Carlo ===

* "An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances" - published posthumously.
* Derivative - the rate of change of a slope on a graph - lets you work out the speed for any given distance or time.
* Second derivative - divide speed by your time and find your acceleration
* The study of probability starts in the 16th century with Gerolamo Cardano thinking about dice rolls:
** Antoine Gombaud 1654
** Blaise Pascal - The idea is not to look at the chances that something would happen, but to look at the chances it wouldn't happen.
** Pierre de Fermat
* The great insight of probability theory: that we should look at the possible outcomes from a given situation, not what has gone before.
* Pascal's Triangle - Simplifies working out probabilities of outcomes with binomial (50/50) distribution.
* When you're trying to work out how likely something is, we need to talk about the number of outcomes that result in what you're talking about and the total number of possible outcomes. The probability of some event is the number of ways that event can occur, divided by the total number of things that can occur.
* Outside of games, what is the probability of the world being a certain way, given the results that we're seeing?:
** Sampling probabilities - What can we predict about a sample of something, given what we know about the whole?
** Inferential probabilities - What can we know about the whole, given a sample we've taken?
* Jacob Bernoulli - You can never be truly certain of things. There are three components to the question and you can optimize two:
** How big a sample do you take?
** How close to the true answer do you need to be?
** How confident in your answer do you need to be?
* de Moivre - the "normal distribution" or "bell curve". The accuracy of your estimate grows in proportion to the square root of your sample size.
* Standard deviation - A measure of how spread out your data is around the mean (average). Calculated by taking the variance from the mean (positive or negative), squaring it (to make them all positive) and then taking square root of the average of those numbers
** Example 1: Three children are 157, 160, and 163cm. Variance squared are 9, 0, and 9, average is 6, and square root of 6 is approx 2.4. SD is 2.4 and so the shorter child is 3/2.4 = 1.25 SD below the mean. The taller child is 1.25 SD above the mean.
** Example 2: Three children are 220, 130, and 130m. Variance squared are 3600, 900, and 900, average is 1800, and square root of 1800 is approx 42.4. SD is 42.4 and so the two shorter children are 30/42.4 = 0.7 SD below the mean. The taller child is 60/42.4 = 1.4 SD above the mean.
** With normally distributed data and a sufficiently large sample, you can reliably predict what percentage of results fall within a given distance of the mean. In general:
*** 68.27% will be within 1 SD
*** 95.43% will be within 2 SD
*** 99.73% will be within 3 SD
** Inverse probability - Given the results I've seen, what can I say about my hypothesis?
** For Bayes, probability is an expression of our lack of knowledge about the world. Probability is subjective. It's a statement about our ignorance and our best guesses of the truth. It's not a property of the world around us, but of our understanding of the world. You must take into account how likely you thought the hypothesis was in the first place, ie take your subjective beliefs into account.
** Pierre-Simon Laplace independently arrived at a similar conclusion in 1774.
** Adolphe Quetelet (1896-1874) was interested in the "average man", producing normal distributions for all kinds of attributes of people. But his finding seemed to be in conflict with free will, with our behaviors and choices as the products of our attributes.
** Bayes vs Frequentism:
*** Bayes asks - How likely is the hypothesis to be true, given the data I've seen?
**** Treats probability as subjective, a statement about our ignorance of the world.
*** Frequentism asks - How likely am I to see this data, assuming a given hypothesis is true?
**** Treats probability as objective, a statement about how often some outcome will happen, if you did it a huge number of times.
** The problem of Bayesian priors is that they're subjective - a statement not about the world, but about our own knowledge and ignorance. Frequentists argue that if you don't know which outcome is the most likely, then you should treat them as equally likely.
** Francis Galton - First to explain regression to the mean. Coined the phrase "nature and nurture".
** Statistical Significance -
*** A p-value is the likelihood of seeing results at least as extreme as those you've seen, given the null hypothesis. P-values of
*** The null hypothesis is the hypothesis that whatever effect you're looking for isn't real. Eg hair color has no effect on soup eating.
**All our lives, we are in a sense betting. Whenever we go to the station, we are betting that a train will really run, and if we had not a sufficient degree of belief in this, we should decline the bet and stay at home.

=== 2. Bayes in Science ===

* In 2011, science underwent the replication crisis.
** Hypothesizing after results are known or HARKing or p-hacking.
** Scientific literature prioritizes novel findings, incentivizes (even if unconsciously) p-hacking.
* Popper's philosophy of science said that you never prove a scientific hypothesis - you only disprove it or fail to do so. The Bayesian idea that you can build up evidence for or against is very much opposed to it.
* Hume: "All our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past."
* Popper: "We choose the theory which best holds its own in competition with other theories; the one which, by natural selection, proves itself the fittest to survive. This will be the one which not only has hitherto stood up to the severest tests, but the one which is also testable in the most rigorous way." He called such a theory "corroborated".
* Instinctively, at least, scientists think like Bayesians.
* In frequentist experiments, the p-value can rise and fall suddenly as the sample size gets bigger. for Bayesians, though, there is always prior data and so each new data point coming in moves your opinion much less, and form part of the new prior for your next bit of information.
* Bayesian techniques don't just reject or accept the null hypothesis - they don't just say yes or no to a hypothesis, but give degrees of belief to a range of possible realities. In reality, there is no such thing as a null hypothesis, or rather the null hypothesis is always, ultimately false.
* Bayesian's make an estimate of the size of an effect and give a probability distribution:
** If your prior is very strong - your curve is really tall and narrow - and the new data is fairly weak, giving a likelihood curve that is low and wide, then the resulting curve will look more like the prior.
** If your prior is weak but you've got really good data, so your likelihood curve is tall and pointy, the new data will wash our the prior, and the posterior will be more like the likelihood.
** If the posterior curve is tall and pointy compared to the prior, then you have something noteworthy and worth following up.

=== 3. Bayesian Decision Theory ===

* George Boole described the operations of propositional logic as "the laws of thought".
* In our reasoning we depend very much on prior information to help us in evaluating the degree of plausibility in a new problem. This reasoning process goes on unconsciously, almost instantaneously, and we conceal how complicated it really is by calling it common sense.
* Cromwell's rule: You should never be certain.
* Probability and utility together make expected value.
* If humans were perfect reasoning machines with full access to our own underlying preferences, we could work out the maths, using a combination of Bayes and utility theorem. That is, roughly speaking, what modern AI does, in a much more explicit way.
* Hyperpriors are to do with uncertaintly about what world you're in. You use hyperparameters to determine your hyperpriors, and then this will restrict the parameters from which you will choose your priors.

=== 4. Bayes in the World ===

* People are confused by:
** The availability heuristic - How easily can I think of an example
** Conjunction fallacy - Where they think that two things happening can be more common than a single thing happening (which is logically false)
** Framing effects - Where the wording of a statement can dramatically impact the interpretation of it.
* Humans are amazingly rational if information is presented to us in ways that we are designed to process it.
* The gaze heuristic - is a shortcut for calculating the path of a ball - we do it automatically, fixing our gaze on the ball and adjusting our running speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant.
* We use other heuristics as shortcuts:
** Recency bias - Where we overweight more recent evidence
** Anchoring - Where the first thing we see tends to set our expectations
** Frequency bias - Where we shortcut to the thing we've seen most often.
* Making decisions under uncertainty is hard. We don't have access to all the information, and even if we did, integrating it all into the Bayes equation would be computationally impossible. So instead we use shortcuts and heuristics, and our instinctive decision-making, from a Bayesian perspective, isn't that bad. By and large, we have grey areas and weak spots, but we're kind of OK.
* Tetlock suggested that there are two distinct groups of experts:
** Hedgehogs - Who think the world is simple and can be explained and predicted simply using "one big idea". Hedgehogs tell nice, straightforward stories, which are easy to package for the media
** Foxes - Who think that the world is complicated - that the specifics and details of each situation matter, and that predictions are difficult and uncertain. Foxes do somewhat better at predicting things, with the top 2% called by Tetlock "Superforecasters".
* Good forecasters often use the "Fermi estimate" - You make several estimates of small things instead of one big estimate, and if there's no reason why those errors should be systematically high or low, then they will tend to cancel each other out. His calculation of the number of piano tuners in Chicago, broke down into the population of Chicago, the percentage of people that own pianos, and the time it takes to tune one once a year. He guessed 62.5 against the real answer, about 80.
* A huge amount of our public discourse comes down to our efforts to place things, groups, people, and concepts into categories. Are they fascist, a cult, a racist? But the categories are all fuzzy.
* Take the category games. you learned what defines "games" in a Bayesian way starting with one data point and then refining your category with further data points. As you learn to attach the label "game" to more and more concepts, you get more accurate estimates of the probability of seeing certain characteristics in those concepts. Your prior probability that games involve balls was low, then someone pointed out that hockey, football, tennis, cricket and ping-pong are all games, so you updated.
* This method works better than idealist philosophical notion.
* See also the paradox of the heap. When does a heap of sand from which you are removing grains turn into "not a heap"?

=== 5. The Bayesian Brain ===

* Perception and consciousness itself is - in quite a direct sense - Bayesian. You're faced with ambiguous sensory information and are going from observations to what caused those observations - that's inverse reasoning.
* Various scientists argue that the central thing the brain does is build predictions of the world, which it then integrates with information coming in via the senses. Perception is a two-way street: information travels up from our sense, but it also travels down from our internal model of the universe. Our perception is the commingling of that bottom-up stream with the top-down one. The two constrain each other - if the top-down priors are strong, then it requires precise, strong evidence from the senses to overturn them.
* Neuroscientist Chris Frith says that our perception of reality is a controlled hallucination.
* When everything is going as expected we are not even aware of it. But when something unexpected happens, the low-level processor bumps the problem one place higher up the chain. If the slightly-higher-level processor can explain it, then it will do so, and well send new signals down the chain. If it can't then the new information keeps going up the chain.
* Your brain is taking information from various modalities - vision, hearing, touch, small, and taste, but also your internal sense of where your body is and how it's arranged and whether you're hungry or thirsty or horny or whatever - and combining them.
* Crucially, what you experience is not the data from your sense, but your predictions - predictions constantly updated by information from the sense, yes, but the world you live in is the prediction, not the data.
* Anil Seth: What we experience is best described as a Bayesian inference about the causes of sensory data."
* The greater the mismatch, the more the prior is shifter, the louder the gain, or volume of the signal sent upward.
* The brain hates prediction error. it wants to minimize the difference between its predictions and its sense data. It really wants it predictions to be right. So it calls attention to mismatches so they can be sorted out. Under this model, attention is literally just when the higher-level processors and high-precision sense data are focused on some aspect of your environment. Something grabs your attention when the bottom-up data about it coming from your senses doesn't match the top-down prediction coming from your brain - sending a loud, urgent signal right up to the top.
* Our brains not only need to predict the signals coming from the world, they also need to predict how the signals coming from the world would change, if we performed some action. Then they need to subtract those predictions from the predictions of how the world itself is changing, to give the impression of a stable reality.
* The two models - the model of movement and the model of the goal work in parallel - your brain runs both simulations simultaneously and checks them against each other. So if you had some goal (pick up a coffee cup), your brain predicts what sequence of nerve firings would do best at that, and at the same time it takes the predicted sequence, predicts what would happen if you do it, and sees if the two models match: Does this inverse model actually result in this goal that I'm aiming for?
* We also go out into the world to find out information. If I had, now, to choose what data point to gather next, where to look next, what would be the best query or question?
* Our eyes saccade to where we expect the action to be. Not where the most interesting things are, but where we expect them to be.
* Novices aren't as good at predicting where the action will be, so they have to make very imprecise predictions, while experts have a well-constructed model that allows them to gather highly precise information about the world.
* When you move, the movements you cause are suppressed, leaving the movements that you have not caused, which are usually more important.
* Bayesian theories of:
** Schizophrenia - Schizophrenics have weaker priors than we do. Their predictions of the world are less precise, so they can - for instance - correctly assess a backwards mask as hollow when the sense data fits that hypotheses.
*** Predictions of their movements are less precise, so they can experience the movements of their limbs as if they are controlled by another.
*** Voices in the head may be just our inner monologue, which they are unable to predict and suppress, so that it's as shocking and as loud as if someone spoke inside their mind.
*** Because the errors are random - generated by noise in the sense data or by unpredicted movements - the brain has to come up with bizarre hypotheses to explain them. They may experience the pulsing of blood in veins as the walls breathing.
*** They may find coincidences like their first name in the paper or the number 13 in a numberplate unduly surprising and have to explain them away with hypotheses such as the TV or newspapers giving them secret messages.
**Depression - May be caused by inappropriately strong priors on some negative belief of how you are a bad person or are powerless or that everything is bad.
***You can't get out of the belief-valley and into a more accurate valley.
***Evidence that could prove otherwise gets discounted because your priors are so strong. You're too confident in some pathological belief or bias.
***There is evidence that psilocybin reduces depression. Psychedelics make you really interested in things. They can flatten your priors, make them less precise and upweight the data coming from your senses. For a depressed person, it will flatten their belief landscape - weaken their inappropriately strong priors.
***Another theory is that depression may be due to underconfidence in neural predictions.
*For Karl Friston, minimizing prediction error isn't just sense-making, but is our fundamental motivation. Hunger sexual desire, boredom - all our wants and needs - can be described in terms of a struggle to reduce the difference between top-down prediction and bottom-up sense data, between your prior and your posterior distributions:
**Being hungry is the same as confidently predicting that you are currently eating a sandwich but that prediction being wrong.
**The driver of all life, from bacteria on up, is to reduce the difference between what they predict and what they experience. You cannot change your model of what your body temperature is or what your glucose levels are, outside very narrow windows. So the only way of minimizing prediction error is by changing the world, or your position in it, so that your predictions are true.
**For Friston, that's what's going on in all self-organizing systems. We need to maintain homeostasis. But more sophisticated animals can plan ahead, manage their surrounding to minimize expected prediction error or expected surprise.
**Very fundamental priors are wired into us by evolution - blood-sugar levels, body temperature, oxygen levels, and bodily integrity and, to a lesser extent, perhaps, social and sexual desires. As young children the hardwired priors are all we have, but they start progressively to learn preferred states of being that you can work towards, which are constrained by these innate priors underneath them, which keep you alive.
**Babies do motor babbling, trying out random nerve signals and seeing what happens. They're learning you've got a body and certain things you can control and certain things you can't. At first they have so little information that they act at random, but their movements become increasingly sophisticated as they update their priors, learning to grasp food, feeding themselves, choosing which food to eat, to buy...
**The difference between a virus and you and me is how far into the future you can look. We have hierarchically deeper generative models, and what accompanies that is the ability to roll out further into the future.
**Some people find it weird to suggest that hunger is the same as wrongly predicting that you've eaten. But it's an elegant theory.

=== Conclusion: Bayesian Life ===

* You can see the genome of an organism as a prediction about the world. Evolution is slow, blind, and inefficient - it might take hundreds of generations to solve a problem a human designer could solve in an hour - but it's an approximation of a Bayesian process: it works to minimize prediction error.
* When we're young we have very little data about the world, so our priors are weak and new information can shift them easily. We can learn quickly, because we don't have a very precise model of the world that makes good predictions. As we get older, we gain more information, we get a richer, more precise model of the world, and new information must logically shift our priors less. So older people are wise but inflexible.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

The Man from the Future

2026-07-26T15:49:29Z

Robert.adlington:

== 1. Made in Budapest ==
-

== 2. To Infinity and Beyond ==
* Von Neumann rigorously defines a class as a collection of sets that share a property. In his theory it is no longer possible to speak meaningfully of either a "set of all sets" or a "class of all classes"; only a "class of all sets". His formulation elegantly avoids the contradictions of Russell's paradox without all the restrictions of type theory. There is no "set of all sets that are not members of themselves" but there is a "class of all sets that are not members of themselves." Crucially, this class is not a member of itself because it is not a set (it's a class!).
== 3. The Quantum Evangelist ==

* "Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics" (1932)
* "We are obliged always to divide the world into two parts, the one being the observed system, the other the observer.
* Quantum entanglement - spooky action at a distance.
* Everett: All the particles in the universe are entwined in a single massive superposition of all possible states, the "universal wave function". Every time a measurement is made, the universe "splits" to create a crop of alternative realities, in which each of the possibilities play out (so Schrodinger's cat is alive in one universe and dead in another. Or in several.)
* Most physicists now believe that there is no instantaneous wave function collapse. instead, the wave function "decays" in a small but finite amount of time into a classical state through a process called "decoherence". Another point of view, "spontaneous collapse" posits that wave function collapse occurs on a time scale that is inversely related to the size of the object in question. The wave function of an electron may not collapse for 100m years, but a cat's would collapse almost instantly.

== 4. Project Y and the Super ==
-

== 5. The Convoluted Birth of the Modern Computer ==

* "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" (1945) would become the most influential document in the history of computing, listing five distinct parts or organs of the von Neumann architecture:
** A central arithmetic unit
** A central control unit
** A memory
** Input (sensory neuron ) units
** Output (motor neuron) units
* In 1930, Gödel had written a computer program long before any machine capable of running it would exist. He had dissolved in one fell swoop the rigid distinction between syntax and data.
* Words coding the orders are handled in the memory just like numbers. That is the essence of modern-day coding

== 6. A Theory of Games ==

* "On the Theory of Parlor Games" (1926) - Proof of the [[wikipedia:Minimax_theorem|minimax theorem]], established game theory as a discipline, framing human cooperation and conflict in mathematical terms.
* Utility scores (utils) - To calibrate a utility scale, pick a pair of events, your most feared calamity (0 utils) and the most marvelous experience you can realistically imagine (100 utils). In between are all the intermediate payoffs, giving a rigorous way to assign numbers to nebulous human desires and predilictions. The most important theory in the social sciences according to Daniel Kahneman.
* Chess and tic-tac-toe are games of "perfect information" with all moves visible to both players, and all two-player, zero-sum games of perfect information have a solution, as long as the game does not go on forever. They must end in a wind or a draw and, critically, there is always only one optimal move for each player at each node of the game tree.
* "If the theory of Chess were really fully known there would be nothing left to play."
* von Neumann "solves" Sherlock Holmes' "impossible problem" and "proves" that Moriarty's optimal strategy is to take the fast train to Dover (60%), while Holmes' strategy is to get out at Canterbury (60%).
* Poker is in many ways "the" game of imperfect information - von Neumann determines that the minimax strategy for both players is, naturally, to bid high with a good hand, and to bid low most of the time when they have a poor hand, with the occasional high bid.
* The point of bluffing is not so much that you might win with a bad hand, as that you want to encourage the opposition to bet with middle-range hands when you have a good hand.
* Price and Maynard-Smith use game theory to define an "evolutionarily stable strategy" for different species to comingle in an environment (Hawk-Dove game)
* Prisoner's dilemma - The logical outcome is a bad deal for everyone.

== 7. The Think Tank by the Sea ==

* The RAND corporation ran game theory simulations of duels, where each player wanted to get the best shot by holding off firing as long as possible - but sooner than their opponent.
* Shapley values - The best payouts each player can get from a game
* Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance algorithm - for matching applicants to colleges.
* Nash equilibria - In any type of game with any number of players there are certain outcomes in which no player can do any better by unilaterally changing their strategy.
* It is arguably Nash's conception of game-theory that more closely embodies the kill-or-be-killed paranoia of the early Cold War.
* The Cold War came to be seen by many as the ultimate game that game theory was meant to analyze.
* Operations research was a science of the possible: what can be achieved with the equipment and supplies available? Systems analysis, by contrast, was goal-oriented - what future weapons and strategies would be necessary to a specified mission? With its tacit commitment to considering every "rational" eventuality, systems analysis is almost megalomaniac in its ambition.
* The Russians got to ICBMs first, in 1957. The first US Atlas rocket launched in 1958

== 8. The Rise of the Replicators ==

* "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata" (1966). These machines need:
** A set of instructions that describe how to build another like them.
** A construction unit that can build a new automaton by executing these instructions.
** A unit to copy the instructions and insert them into the new machine
* These requirements predate and foresee the mechanism of DNA and cell replication
* Dyson: "So far as we know, the basic design of every microorganism larger than a virus is precisely as von Neumann said it should be."
* Conway's game of "Life" with blinkers, oscillators, R-pentominos, and gliders.
* Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science". Cellular automata are defined by rules and divided into four classes:
** Class I (including rule 0 or 255) - Rapidly converge to a uniform final state no matter what the initial input.
** Class 2 - May end up in one of a number of states. The final patterns are all either stable or repeat themselves every few steps; like the fractal produce by rule 90
** Class 3 (including rule 30) - Show essentially random behavior.
** Class 4 (including rule 110) - Produce disordered patterns punctuated by regular structures that move and interact. This class is home to all cellular automata capable of supporting universal computation.
* Barricelli - Believed in symbiogenesis, in which two different organisms work so closely together that they effectively merge into a single, more complex creature, and in which genes themselves were originally virus-like organisms that had, in the past, combined and paved the way to complex, multi-cellular organisms. Symbiogenesis is now the leading explanation of how plant and animal cells arose from simpler, prokaryotic organisms.
* Langton: "The ultimate goal is to extract the logical form of living systems" from artificial life experiments. His experiments include "loops" which reproduce outward like a coral reef. He proposed a lambda parameter:
** Near to zero - Information is frozen in repetitive patterns, like class 1 and 2 automata.
** Near to one - Information moves too freely for any kind of meaningful computation to occur (like class 3)
** Class 4 automata are poised at a value of lambda that allows information to be both stably stored and transmitted. All of life is balanced on that knife edge, below which the process of synthesis is degenerative but above which, it can become explosive.
* Venter - Has copied gneomes into new cells and created a new life form "Synthia".
* von Neumann probes are self-replicating machines sent into space to harvest materials and maybe support human migration.
* Laing - Showed that an automaton need not start with a complete description of itself if it is equipped with the means to inspect itself.
* Nanotechnology - The word is coined by Drexler in "Engines of Creation"
* Gray goo - An apocalyptic scenario where dangerous replicators escape from a lab: "they could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days."
* A brain must build itself from the boom up without a blueprint. The several billion base-paris-worth of data held by chomosomes inside every human cell are not sufficient to describe the brain (or any complex organ) by themselves. A neuron must interact with other neurons through some set of rules that allow the brain's incredible organization to grow from simple beginnings in the womb. This makes them in some ways kin to cellular automata
* McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence".
* "The Computer and the Brain"
* Teller: "To most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny enjoyed it. I even have the suspicion that he enjoyed practically nothing else.
* Klari: "I would like to tell about the man, the strange contradictory and controversial person; childish and good-humored, sophisticated and savage, brilliantly clever yet with a very limited, almost primitive lack of ability to handle his emotions - an enigma of nature that will have to remain unsolved.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction

2026-07-26T15:49:10Z

Robert.adlington:

== Origins, Scope, and Organization ==

* Chemistry exploits quantum mechanics and thermodynamics from physics.
* Biology is merely an elaboration of chemistry.
* Chemistry can be divided into:
** Physical Chemistry - At the interface between physics and chemistry.
** Organic Chemistry - Concerned with compounds of carbon. As a result of its mild and unaggressive character, Carbon is able to form chains and rings of startling complexity., which is exactly what organisms need if they are to be regarded as being alive, and thus the compounds of carbon are the structural and reactive infrastructure of life.
** Inorganic Chemistry - Covers the rest of the elements (including carbon).
* Also can be divided into:
** Analytical Chemistry - Breaking down substances to understand what is in them.
** Biochemistry - Concerned with the structures and reactions that constitute living things.
** Industrial chemistry - Where chemist meets engineer.

== Atoms and Molecules ==

* An atom contains a nucleus at its center which consists of two types of subatomic particles:
** Protons - Positively charged. The number of protons in the nucleus is called the atomic number of the element.
** Neutrons - Electrically neutral. About the same number as protons. Isotopes are different versions of the same element with different numbers of neutrons. Hydrogen has three isotopes:
*** Hydrogen itself - one proton, no neutrons
*** Deuterium - One proton, one neutron
*** Tritium - One proton, two neutrons
* Electrons:
** Has the same magnitude of electric charge as a proton, but is opposite in sign.
** Are arranged in layers of clouds around the nucleus with a maximum at each successive layer of 2, 8, 18, 32
** Electrons are about 2,000 times lighter than protons and so their presence barely affects the mass of an atom.
** All chemical reactions leave nuclei intact and only impact the electrons
** The layout of the Periodic Table represents the filling out of the cloud layers of electrons, with one electron present in the layer on the left of the table and the layer completed on the right.
* Atoms are electrically neutral, with the total negative charge of all its electrons matching and cancelling the total positive charge of all the protons in the nucleus.
* Ionic bonding - When an atom gains or loses and electron, the balance of charges is upset and the atom becomes an ion (an electrically charged atom):
** A cation is an atom that has lost one or more electrons and is now positively charged. For example, Sodium (Na) lies on the left of the Periodic Table, and readily releases its single outermost electron to form a sodium cation.
** An anion is an atom that has gained one or more electrons and is now negatively charged. Chlorine (Cl) lies on the right of the table, and happily accommodates an additional electron to complete its outer layer and thereby become a chloride anion. The ions clump together, and form sodium chloride, table salt, a solid rigid mass of ions held together by their mutual attraction.
** Ionic bonding typically results in rigid, brittle solids that melt only at high temperatures. Granite and limestone, and our bones are largely ionic.
* Covalent bonding - Is where electrons are shared:
** Water is made of a covalent bond. Oxygen has six outermost electrons and can accommodate two electrons to complete its outermost cloud layer and so can link to two Hydrogen atoms
** All gases are covalent, as are just about all substances that are liquid at room temperature.
* The majority of elements are metals, and metal atoms are bound together by metallic bonding. All metals lie towards the left hand side of the Periodic Tables where the atoms of the elements have only a few electrons in their outermost cloud layers and which are readily lost.

== Energy and Entropy ==

* The first law of thermodynamics asserts that the total energy of the universe is constant and cannot be changed.
* Enthalpy is a name for the energy trapped in a compound and available as heat.
* In exothermic reactions, energy is released as heat and the store of enthalpy decreases. Most reactions (and all combustions) are exothermic, with the starting materials collapsing into the lower-enthalpy products of the reaction and thereby achieving lower enthalpy overall.
* Reactions that absorb heat and increase their store of enthalpy are called endothermic reactions.
* The study of reaction rates is called chemical kinetics. Why aren't all reactions over in a flash? If biological reactions were all instantaneous we would all instantly be goo.
* Catalysts help reactions by providing a different sequence of atom migrations and bond formations - for a reaction, a pathway with a lower activation barrier.
* Enzymes are protein molecules that function as catalysts and control with considerable specificity and effectiveness just about all the chemical reactions going on inside u. Life is the embodiment of catalysis.

== Reactions ==

* All the wonders of the world, both natural and synthetic, are spun from a handful of elements and four ways of manipulating them:
** Proton Transfer - A proton slips from one molecule to another:
*** An acid is any molecule or ion that contians hydrogen atoms that can release their proton nucleus to another molecule or ion, ie, it is a compound with little control over its nucleus and is apt to lose it. What tickles your tastebud in vinegar or soda are protons.
*** If acids are proton donors, proton acceptors are alkalis (or bases). Alkalis turn fats into soaps. They contain hydroxide ions, OH-, which can attract and keep protons, in the course of which becoming water molecules, H20
*** Ionic substances formed by the reaction of an acid and a base are called salts, after sodium chloride.
*** Many enzyme-controlled biochemical reactions, such as the metabolism of food and respiration are proton transfers (acid-base reactions)
*** Water is both an acid and a base.
** Electron Transfer - An electron passes from one molecule to another:
*** Oxidation is the loss of electrons.
*** Reduction is the reception of electrons.
*** Oxidation and Reduction always happen together.
*** Redox reactions are involved in both the creation of steel and its breakdown through corrosion, and in batteries.
*** Photosynthesis is a chain of electron transfer reactions, which use the hydrogen atoms of water and the carbon and oxygen atoms of carbon dioxide to construct carbohydrates, including starch and cellulose.
** Radical Reactions:
*** A radical (or free radical) is a molecule with an odd number of electrons. Most radicals are aggressively reactive and do not survive for long in the wild
*** Flames are environments rich in radicals because the stress of high temperatures rips molecules apart, sundering the electron-pair bonds.
*** Other radicals are involved in the formation of many plastics through polymerization.
** Lewis Acid-Base Reactions:
*** Transition metals are in the skinny central part of the Periodic Table, such as iron (Fe), chromium (Cr), cobalt (Co) and Nickel (Ni).
*** The ions these elements form, such as Fe2+ and Co3+ are commonly found surrounded by and bonded to six small molecules and ions that have an independent existence (such as H2O, NH3 and CN-), called ligands, with the clusters called complexes.
*** A complex is held together by bonds formed by the sharing of a pair of electrons provided by each ligand, so the metal ion is acting as the Lewis acid and each ligand as the Lewis base
*** Breathing is a Lewis acid-base reaction, as is suffocation by carbon monoxide poisoning.

[[Category:Books]]

How Life Works

2026-07-26T15:48:15Z

Robert.adlington:

== Prologue ==

* Looking to the genome for an account of ho life works is rather like looking to a dictionary to understand how literature works.
* The new picture dispels the long-standing idea that living systems must be regarded as machines.
* Living entities are generators of meaning. They mine their environment (including their own bodies) for things that have meaning for them: moisture, nutrients, warmth. It is not sentimental but simply following the same logic to say that, for we human organisms, another of those meaningful things is love.
* Life is a hierarchical process, and each level has its own rules and principles: there are those that apply to genes, and to proteins, to cells and tissues and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system. All are essential: none can claim primacy.
* Genes don't generally specify unique outcomes at the level of cells and organisms.
* Recurring themes and principles:
** Complexity and Redundancy
** Modularity
** Robustness
** Canalization
** Multilevel, Multidirectional, and Hierarchical Organization
** Combinatorial Logic
** Self-Organization in Dynamic Landscapes
** Agency and Purpose
** Causal Power

== 1. The End of the Machine: A New View of Life ==

* Living things are, you could say, those entities capable of attributing value in their environment, and thereby finding a point to the universe.
* Meaning-generators are successful entities in a Darwinian world. Making meaning is a great way of staying alive and propagating - so much so, indeed, that it's probably the only way to be alive at all.
* The point is that we need to acknowledge what evolution does to matter: it gives matter goals and functions. That is what makes evolved life so special.

== 2. Genes: What DNA Really Does ==

* Each of our somatic cells contains 46 chromosomes: two copies each of 23 different varieties. Other animals have different numbers: cats have 19 pairs, dogs 39 pairs.
** The gametes (eggs and sperm) are special in that they each contain only one set of chromosomes. This makes them haploid cells, as opposed to the diploid somatic calls.
** The single exception in our bodies are the red blood cells, which contain no DNA; they are simply packed with oxygen-ferrying hemoglobin proteins.
* Chromosomes are made of protein and of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which is in turn a polymer of four types of chemical unit (nucleotides), containing a sugar molecule (deoxyribose), a phosphate group, and a substance belonging to the general class of molecules called bases (adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T).
* The unification of Darwin's theory of natural selection with the Mendelian inheritance of particulate genes gave 20th C biology its central explanatory framework, dubbed the Modern Synthesis in 1942 by Julian Huxley.
* The gene's eye view of life (indeed, even of evolution) is shaped by a particular scientific model and is valid only within the context of that model. It does not and cannot deliver an account of the world as we find it. The problem with atomizing organisms into genes is that genes are not alive - and once you have set aside life to get to the gene, you can't get it back again. The gene is far too atomized a unit to tell us much at all about how life works.
* Genes with names awarded in one context turned out to be identical to genes given different names in another context. And genes associated with one trait proved to be implicated in a quite different trait too.
* The genome does not control the cell. Rather, it supplies resources for the cell as an autonomous and integrated entity. Genes are not a blueprint. They impart capabilities; the rest is up to us, in interaction with our environment.
* Most human traits are not simply genetic - they are also affected by the person's environment.
* How we are is correlated with our genotype, but genes are not what make us what we are.
* The many genes linked to IQ are sure to be implicated in other traits too - perhaps neuroticism or schizophrenia. There are no isolable intelligence genes. If we select embryos for highly polygenic traits like this, we will have little idea for what else we might be selecting.
* Many human traits are influenced by many genes. Even for traits that show a strong heritability, such as height, the genetic component derives from the tiny effects of many genes rather than big effects from just a few. This can make it very difficult to figure out what the respective genes are doing - or indeed, how causally relevant they really are.
* Sometimes the polygenic nature of traits is extreme, and hundreds or even thousands of genes might be implicated. The statistical associations observed between many complex traits and genes tend to be spread across most of the genome. 62% of common single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs - where one base pair is different) are associated with height in parts of the chromosomes that are active across most cell types, and often in "non-coding" sequences.
* You can't compute from the genome how an organism will turn out, not even in principle. There is plenty that happens during development that is not hardwired by genes. And from a single protein-coding gene, you can't even tell in general what the product of its expression will be, let alone what function that product will serve in the cell.
* Evolutionary and developmental biology are seeing two different kinds of explanation - The first considers population-level phenomena, the second focuses on individuals. Organisms acquire their form twice over: by evolution (the history of which is imprinted in genomes), and by development (through the interactions of molecules and cells). Both are under genetic influence, but not in the same way.
* Genes don't compete with each other. Rather, a mutation to a gene that turns it into a variant that enhances survival of the organism carrying it will tend to spread through a population an eclipse the other less successful alleles. So different alleles of the same gene compete with one another, while different genes on the same genome cooperate. The first is a story about evolution, the second about individual development.
* Genes do not produce life, but on the contrary depend on it.

== 3. RNA and Transcription: Reading the Message ==

* The process of transcription:
** First, each gene is read by an enzyme called RNA polymerase that steps along a single unwound template strand of DNA and assembles a corresponding mRNA molecule use the sam principles of base pairing that holds the double helix together. The double helix is unzipped by the enzyme's advance and reunited in its wake.
** Once an entire gene has been transcribed into an mRNA molecule, the RNA detaches from the DNA and makes its way beyond the cell nucleus to the place where it can be converted (translated) into a protein by the ribosome.
* Genes - or more generally, functional sections of DNA - are not simply instructions for making proteins. Some of them determine what kinds of proteins cells, tissues, and organs can make. Some do other things: RNA-related things that don't directly involve proteins at all.
* Rather than DNA directly producing proteins, an RNA intermediary creates a buffer layer and gives flexibility and versatility to the readout process from the genome. It also allows many protein molecules to be produced rapidly from a single piece of DNA.
* DNA sequences are full of segments that don't feature in the mRNA:
** Introns - Are edited out before the mRNA is presented to the ribosome for translation.
** Exons - Are the retained sequences, spliced back together after the introns are removed.
** Transposons - Are jumping genes that move about in the chromosomes, with about 65% of the human genome capable of exhibiting transposon behavior.
* The genome was meant to be a static blueprint, but it is dynamic and responsive to environmental stresses - more like an organ or an organism in an organism.
* microRNA - Is smaller than normal genes and may regulate regulate up to 60% of our genes as well as targeting other microRNAs (and a single mRNA can be targeted by many mRNAs). mRNAs seem to control embryo development and to control pluripotency is embryonic stem cells
* Now that the human genome is mapped, the ENCODE project is identifying which parts of the entire genome are transcribed in the cells of different tissues, characterizing the human transcriptome. The HGP showed that only 2% of our genome consists of protein-encoding genes, and most of the rest was considered "junk" (non-coding), but now it seems that genes as protein-encoders are maybe only a small part of what is going on with our genome.
* Encode identified around 37.6k long non-coding RNA (ncRNAs) genes, nearly twice as many as genes that encode proteins.
* It seems that, for mammals, the noncoding, regulatory regions of the genome are more important than the coding parts. Bacteria have 90% of the genome for protein coding, while we have 2%.
* Epigenetics (how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work) rather blurs the distinction between nature and nurture.
* Childhood trauma can be correlated with methylation in a person's genome, a biological embedding of experience.
* The gametes (eggs and sperm) have mechanisms that protect their genomes from much epigenetic alteration, and strip away more or less all of it anyway as these cells mature into the state that takes part in reproduction. At the stage of gamete maturation called the primordial germ cell, epigenetic marks in the genome are largely erased.
* Rather than waiting for the genome to evolve, it is more effective to evolve mechanisms for producing rapid revisions of how the genes are used when circumstances demand it.
* Life is according to Dennett and Michael Levin, "cognition all the way down".

== 4. Proteins: Structure and Unstructure ==

* There are thought to be around 80-400 thousand varieties of protein molecules in human cells, and they are the second key functional components of life after DNA and RNA
* Proteins are typically dubbed the workhorses of the cell. In this sense they are nearly synonymous with enzymes, the molecular catalysts that conduct life's chemistry.
* Proteins belong to the class of molecules called polypeptides, in which amino acids are strung together in a chain via chemical linkages called peptide bonds. In enzymes, these chains fold up into compact blob-like forms with specific shapes, sculpted by evolution, that allow each protein enzyme to do its job.
* Hydrogen bonding and the hydrophobic attraction are generally thought to be the two key forces that dictate how proteins fold. The "native fold" is the protein's folding target, which is the form with the lowest energy possible.
* Google's Alphafold has made predictions about the structures of more than 200m proteins - all those currently know to biology - in species ranging from bacteria to plants and animals.
* Protein molecules are huge and their structures are extremely complicated.
* Some proteins become embedded in cell membranes, others are structural - they don't function as enzymes, but rather as components of the cell's fabric, and som act not to catalyze reactions, but to regulate genes.
* Because we use crystallography to analyze proteins, and many won't form crystals, we only know about the structures of half of them that make up the human proteome. The rest are sometimes called the "dark proteome".
* Many don't have well-defined folded shapes - maybe up to half in the human proteome, and this disorder seems particularly prevalent in many of the most important proteins in the molecular ecology of the cell. Compare this to bacterial proteomes, where only 4% are disordered.
* Disordered proteins can increase the complexity and versatility of our regulatory networks, but at the cost of increased risk of toxic aggregates formed from misfolded proteins. Many proteins found to be associated with diseases are highly enriched in disoredered regions, including especially those implicated in other neuro-degenerative conditions such as Parkinson's and Huntingdon's.
* On average, each human gene encodes about six different proteins. Some genes may generate many variants, sometimes hundreds (though not all of these may be functional).
* From around 20k genes, our cells can make 80-400k different proteins.
* Gene sequences do not typically encode a specific protein with a specific shape. Instead, they are resources for making families of proteins.
* The amino acids in proteins seem to be organized into domains, and these domains can be mixed and match to produce new and different proteins with the capacity to stick together, to communicate with one another, and to differentiate into specialized forms.
* Just as disorder in protein structure creates flexibility for what a protein can do individually, so random associations in the evolvosome might open up fresh possibilities for what proteins can do collectively.
* Scaffold proteins (SPs) have the job of gathering other proteins together in the same space to communicate. They are good at forging new links between signaling pathways, opening up new developmental possibilities. They are not tailor-made, but good at improvising, often by a reshuffling of the binding domains they possess.

== 5. Networks: The Webs That Make Us ==

* Biologists began to think about genes as a network. They were speaking to one another, and the task was to figure out who was conversing with whom: to map out not just the genome, but the connectome through which it operates.
* For complex organisms like us, the network of interacting molecules, the interactome - sometimes seemed not just absurdly but impossibly complicated.
* DNA packaged into chromatin looks more like a cupboard stuffed full of documents in a random heap of loose pages. Yet somehow there is precise cross-referencing and coordination amid the chaos.
* With a combinatorial system you have many more options that will do the job, while retaining distinctions of use and meaning. It's a little like the way languages work: there's nearly always more than one combination of words that will convey much the same meaning, but those combinations aren't arbitrary. In many particular contexts, some choices work better - convey a clearer or more emphatic meaning - than others.
* Perhaps the most useful analogies for how cells work are themselves biological, such as olfaction or cognition. Maybe the only way to truly understand life is with reference to itself.
* It's possible that making promiscuous, reconfigurable networks doesn't just convey advantages but perhaps is the only way a complicated system like our cells can work, if it is to be robust against ineluctable randomness and unpredictability in the fine details.
* Cellular systems are very noisy. Molecular encounters in this crowded, jostling environment are very much a matter of chance, and there are also random fluctuations in the number of different proteins that get produced from moment to moment. That's one reason the cell's wiring can't be compared to the complex electronic circuits in a laptop: no two cells are ever in wholly identical states at any given moment, even when they are both ostensibly doing the same job, such as acting as muscle or kidney cells.
* Combinatorial logic has a certain amount of sloppiness that can absorb (and even exploit) such variation.
* It seems likely that metazoans have evolved this evolvability. Eukaryotes have chosen this sloppiness - probably because it allows new regulatory pathways to develop, opening up the potential for variation and evolvability.
* Causal emergence allows noise reduction - independence of the outcome on random fluctuations or chance events at the microscopic level. And, it makes the causes of behavior cryptic at the microscopic scale, hiding it from pathogens that can only latch onto particular molecules.
* Evolution doesn't so much shift all causation to higher levels as spread it among the various levels.
* Causal emergence seems to be a general design principle for life, but it is rarely evident in our own technologies. Machines tend instead to use simple chains of causation: this cog turns that one.
* Perhaps language is the only human technology that resembles how life works in the causal sense, in which meaning and causal power - the ability to induce thought, mood, action - increase as we go up the scale from letters (or phonemes) to words, sentence, paragraphs, and so forth. Zoom in on a text's component characters and you lose all meaning: the characters themselves are not only effectless but have no intrinsic function.
* The key reason causal emergence seems to be so widespread in how life works is, then, that this is how to "engineer" with noisy components. If you are making a machine from chunky, precision-milled cogs, you don't need causal emergence, because the parts can be relied on.
* The more complex multicellular organisms that appear later in evolutionary history tend to assign causal roles to higher levels of organization in their networks. In this way, these organisms can tolerate more noise and indeterminism in the microscales, because those scales aren't the primary determinant of phenotypic outcomes such as body shapes and behaviors.
* The switch to multicellularity seems to involve the appearance not of more primary genetic resources - more or different genes - but of new ways to regulate them.
* Is there, after all, really such an obvious advantage to being multicellular? If so, we don't know what it is. Complex multicellularity has arisen only twice during evolution: in animals and in plants (fungi might be deemed a third group, but they don't have anything like the tissue diversity of the others).
* Rather than there being smooth and gradual changes in the frequencies of CNEEs (conserved nonexonic elements), three distinct eras of change seem to have occurred over the past 650m years:
** Until about 300m years ago, when mammals split from birds and reptiles, changes in regulation seem to have happened mostly in parts of the genome close to transcription factors and the key developmental genes that they control.
** Between 300-100m years ago, those changes tailed off, and instead there were changes near genes that code for the protein molecules serving as receptors of signals at the cell surface. What seemed to matter was a shift in the way cells talk to each other
** Since 100m years ago, as placental mammals developed, the regulatory changes seem to be associated with mechanisms for modifying protein structure after translation, especially for proteins that are associated with signal transduction within cells.
* Evolution might be considered to have successively discovered ways to innovate and generate new organisms by first reshuffling how developmental genes are switched on and off, then how cells communicate, and then how information gets passed around inside cells. In all cases, the action is taking place not at the genetic level but at higher levels of network organization (which nevertheless leave traces in the genomes.
* Aside from the well-acknowledged complication of viruses, all life is cellular, passes on hereditary information in DNA, and uses proteins and a relatively small palette of other molecular types.
* What seems to have changed over the course of evolution is nothing less than the locus of causation. I have called this causal spreading.
* I think we will find that what gave us cognitive abilities no other species possesses - in particular, the ability to develop language, to think abstractly, and to maintain highly nuanced social interactions - is a change at a higher level than the genomic: a change in the emergent properties of the brain. No single gene "made us human".

== 6. Cells: Decisions, Decisions ==

* We're not just a homogenous mass of cells.
* Cells commit to fates by noticing and assessing what their neighbors are doing. It's like voting with a show of hands: we might sneak a look at how others are voting before deciding which way to go ourselves. And if we're given new information, we might change our mind. As new cells are produced by division in the early embryo "they take care of their own further development, shaping both themselves and their local environments without any further instruction from their parents.
* Each cell inherits the epigenetically modified genome of its parent cell, in which some genes have been silenced while others are active - but it can incur further epigenetic modification, guided by the signals coming from outside, that change its fate still further. In this way, the development of the organism is a story about progressive cell-fate selection, at each stage of which the cell lineage commits to one path and the others become unavailable to it.
* A totipotent cell can elect to become:
** A trophobblast cell
** An embryoblast (inner cell mass) can become:
*** epiblast (will become the fetus) can become:
**** ectoderm - eventually become neural cells in the spinal cord, the nervous system, and the brain
**** mesoderm - inner organs, such as muscle, heart and kidneys, and blood cells
**** endoderm - the lungs and gut, etc
*** hypoblast
*The landscape isn't in some sense already waiting out there in biological space for cells to populate it. Rather, it builds itself during development. The growth of an embryo is like the growth of a city: it's the growth process itself, not some blueprint, that gives it form.
*Dimensional reduction - Within the frenetic pandemonium of many molecular interactions, only a few parts of the system really make a difference. A high dimensional space is reduced to a surface, or something like it. You won't figure out why this is, or what in the system truly matters and what does not, by staring at genome sequences.
*Almost by definition, the canalization implies the removal of causation from the genetic or molecular level to another, higher organizational tier. It seems to be a general property of complex, multicellular organisms.
*Cells decide on their fate according to their location in three types of space:
**Familiar 3D space, having specific locations in the tissues of the embryo that determine which neighbors a cell has and what signals it receives.
**Gene expression or transcription space - what kind of cell it is, how stem-like or how mesoderm like.
**Decision space of valleys and bifurcations created by the development trajectory
*From the genetic to the behavioral level, life needs noise because it can't afford to be too deterministic. You never quite know what lies around the corner.
*Cognitive systems exist to integrate information from many sources to produce a goal-oriented response. To that extent, all living systems have to be cognitive agents almost by definition. And the fact that evolution grants this capacity should really be seen as unremarkable, for cognition is clearly a good way to deal with the unforeseen: to develop versatile and instantly adaptive responses to circumstances an organism has never encountered in its evolutionary past. The more complex an organism is (or its environment is), the more cognitive resources we should expect it to have.

== 7. Tissues: How to Build, When to Stop ==

* What do the cells that make up an organism know (individually and collectively) - and how?
* There are three main modes for transmission of external signals into a cell:
** Chemical - As molecules attach to receptors
** Mechanical - As other cells stick to or pull it
** Electrical - As pulses pass across the membrane
* It seems likely that cognition using cells and brains is in some ways just an elaboration of the cognitive capabilities that all cells display, and which they use to coordinate their activities.
* The shapes of tissues and organisms may be attractors in the morphospace - There's some way the system is storing a large-scale map of what it's supposed to build. That map is not in the genome, however, but in a collective state of the cells themselves, which creates a policy for navigating the morphological space of the organism.
* The meaning of some developmental signaling molecule, such as Notch, Wnt, or BMP, can be altered by the electrical environment into which it is received.
* One of the fundamental puzzles of embryo and tissue growth is what physicists call symmetry-breaking: how a system that is initially symmetrical becomes one in which there is less symmetry.
* Gastrulation is the point at which we see the first hint emerge of a human body plan, namely, the formation of a central growth axis that will eventually become the channel of the mouth-gut-anus system and the orienting axis of the spinal column and central nervous system.
* The emergent body axis is called the primitive streak.
* The disk-shaped layer of cells in the epiblast acquires polarity - a head and a tail, or what biologists more delicately an interior and posterior.
* The embryo becomes a three-layer sandwich in which each cell type will produce specific kinds of tissue.
* The notochord is a temporary organizing structure, the main function of which is to dispense chemical signals to the surrounding tissues that specify which organs and tissues they are to become. It is an organizing center for the next stage of development.
* The neural tube will eventually become the spinal column and central nervous system, including the brain.
* With identical twins, there have been cases where one twin's fetus grows inside the other's brain or (more commonly) gut.
* Unless errors in development are truly enormous, the embryo can deal with them by using the constant conversation between cells to regulate development according to how things really are, not how they "should" be.
* It's all about generating difference: making form from initial uniformity.
* The cytoskeleton is a scaffold-like protein mesh that is woven over the inside surface of cell membranes.
* The presence of one tissue type can determine what kind of cells grow next to it by mechanical communication. Whether or not a tissue should keep growing is decided by what the cells "feel" from other cells around them. In this way, tissues and organs can feel their own size.
* Remarkably, it is the very onset of a heartbeat in a developing embryo that tells its cells what to become. The pressure of the pumping blood is "felt" by cells in the growing tissues and throws a biochemical switch that turns on genes affecting the eventual fate of those cells. The heart drives and shapes its own formation, bootstrapping itself into existence by virtue of its very function.
* Some morphological goals are best viewed as attractor states. In general, the system will produce the same thing regardless of where you start and how you get there.
* Life doesn't make systems that can do or construct a single thing, but produces entities - cells and their genetic, transcriptional, and protein networks - that embody a wide range of options. The trick it must master is then to ensure that, in normal circumstances, the system converges on the outcomes favored by natural selection, while still maintaining enough phenotypic variability to be evolvable. Evolution does not know, so to speak, what it is going to need tomorrow - so it must keep options open. Such variation is possible precisely because the rules by which development unfolds are loose ones.
* If there's a central feature of how life works, it is surely in this ability to create outcomes that are neither arbitrary nor wholly prescribed.
* What is really "normal"? The rules that govern bio-molecules, cells, and tissues are probably much more fallible that we think, and we probably all have some kinds of "defects". Eg, a study in 2022 concluded that 17% of people aged fifty and one-third of those over 70 have some amyloid plaques - thought to be agents or indicators of dementia - in their brains, with no obvious cognitive consequences. Many women have noncancerous growths called fibroids in or around the uterus, with no adverse symptoms. There are many types of benign skin growths.
* Most human zygotes (a single cell made by the fertilization, either naturally or artificially, of the female gamete (ovum or egg) by the male gamete (sperm)), perhaps 70-90%, never develop into a live birth, because things "go wrong" - either for genetic or environmental reason, or by chance.
* The body of conjoined twins is just one possible outcome of the developmental process, albeit one that almost never materializes.
* It is absurd to suppose that a system as complex as the human brain will have a single way of developing. Variance on the autistic spectrum is not aberration but just possible outcomes of the developmental process that creates a brain under the influence of a human genome.
* Life is a process, a literal unfolding.

== 8. Bodies: Uncovering the Pattern ==

* Positional information can be delivered throughout a tissue by a gradient in the concentration of some signaling protein, the expression of which is switched on in one place and which then diffuses through the tissue. It's a little like figuring out from the intensity of small how close you are to the kitchen.
* Morphogens are molecules that generate shapes.
* Zones of Polarizing Activity (ZPAs) define the up and down of wing or hand.
* By combining gap or patterning genes into a cross-regulating network, the process can be insulated from contingencies. Canalization in biology creates robustness from an underlying unpredictability.
* Turing proposed reaction-diffusion or activator-inhibitor systems to create patterns.
* In principle the Turing mechanism can produce any number of fingers, but there are just five because at the stage at which finger formation happens, the intrinsic size of the stripes is such that precisely five of them happen to fit into the space available. There is nothing in the human genome that enforces a five-digit rule - it depends on the patterning process playing out at the right time, when the bud is the right size.
* Controlled cell death (apoptosis) also plays a vital role.
* Turing patterning also produces our fingerprints.
* The formation of organs and bodies involves a delicate interplay between chance and necessity - a conversation between genes and gene networks, mechanical forces, and the environment.
* The rules allow growth to regulate itself, to adjust to unforeseen circumstances, to find a way. They are rules for making bodies that work.
* Even by just the two-cell stage, embryos seem to have a left and a right. But this distinction starts to become manifest around the time of gastrulation.
* The positioning of our organs on the correct side of our bodies is controlled by stirring!
* Nodal and Lefty genes create a kind of Turing pattern that is barely a pattern at all: they divide the embryo into two, with one half having relatively high Nodal concentration and the other high Lefty concentration.
* Turing's patterning mechanism occurs in all corners of the physical world, and not just in developmental systems.
* Physical laws are not suspended in living matter; evolution harnesses rather than subverts them, and in this way can sometimes get order and organization "for free".
* The division of our body plan into segments begins during gastrulation, when the different tissues are just beginning to emerge from the three-layer structure of ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm. The process is controlled by the Hox genes, and it supplies a perfect example of how the body becomes organized through a complex interplay of genes, regulatory networks and signaling molecules, epigenetic chromatin packing, and larger scale phenomena such as mechanical buckling of tissues.
* In mammals, there are 13 basic types of Hox gene, divided into four subtypes, A, B, C, and D.
* Evolution decided that segmentation produced by the positional information of concentration gradients was a handy trick for producing complexity of form that it could repeat again and again.
* Nature finds the right balance between top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out mechanisms for building organisms, so that adaptation and variation can happen, and innovations - dramatic new solutions to the challenge of "design" - are possible without producing a dangerous sensitivity to small changes. The forms that spontaneously emerge create a generic chassis on which to build and experiment.
* Genes do not so much produce as select from morphological possibilities. Those phenotypes are themselves determined by higher organizational principles.
* There is a tendency in evolutionary biology to regard natural selection as a process with an infinite palette: anything is possible so long as it doesn't break the laws of physics. But the laws of physics might impose more constraint than that, precisely because biology uses rather than merely suffers them.
* If very different shapes can be achieved with only a little genetic tweaking - to slightly alter the diffusion rates of morphogens, for example, or the strength of cell adhesion - then the Cambrian explosion is no mystery. This toolkit probably arose through the repurposing and integration of genes and regulatory networks that had begun to take shape before metazoa themselves did. Animals since the Cambrian have repeatedly reused the processes and components that had been evolved long beforehand to generate novel traits of anatomy and physiology.

== 9. Agency: How Life Gets Goals and Purpose ==

* At every level, from genes to proteins to networks to cells and tissues and bodies, distinct but interacting sets of principles operate to keep the show on the road and to leverage the affordances supplied by the levels below to create structure, function, and order. At each level of the hierarchy, events happen that are rather insensitive to the finer-grained details underpinning them, and which orchestrate matter into the forms and patterns in time and space that permit life to unfold.
* All these processes operate as if in thrall to some overall plan, with us as the goal. Biology looks uncannily teleological. That thought distrubs some biologists no end.
* One of the big challenges for biology is to develop a rational, productive framework for understanding concepts such as agency, information, meaning, and purpose.
* Life seems to go to extraordinary lengths to confound physics.
* The second law of thermodynamics says that the universe heads inexorably toward a state of greater disorder. This directionality is simply a consequence of probabilities. Entropy is really a measure of how many different but equivalent ways there are to rearrange the constituent particles - the atoms or molecules - of a system. In general, there are more - many, many more - options for a disorderly system than for an orderly, structured one. So processes tend to proceed in the direction of the most likely configurations.
* Living things seem to ignore this entropic imperative. Their animation relies on the creation and maintenance of order, which is to say, of very specific patterns and distributions of molecules that have negligible probability of happening by chance. Even our thoughts and memories are patterns maintained in the face of the Second Law's apparent demand that they dissolve into the random firing of neurons. All this happens through the marshaling or energy within organisms, which must be harvested and stored and used judiciously, squandering as little as possible.
* At equilibrium there is no net change in a system, for there is no driving force that compels it.
* Living organisms are nonequilibrium systems. Our hearts are constantly beating, pumping blood around the body. We are reflexively breathing in and out, without trying or even noticing. Our brains, even when resting, are a miasma of signals zipping through the neurons' tangled network - the living brain is never quiet. Every cell is burning up energy to drive its metabolic processes. We depend on a constant throughput of energy - for us it comes in the form of energy-rich food, but ultimately the energy source for nearly all life on Earth is the Sun, which powers the growth of plants at the bottom of the food chain. And you had better hope that you stay out of equilibrium for as long as you can - for equilibrium means death.
* Life is a learned affair, the learning inherited over eons.
* We are a qualitatively unusual sort of nonequilibrium system.
* Schrödinger:
** "...the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive."
** "How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?"
** "...we must be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in [life]."
* Living organisms have order and structure at both the microscale and the macroscale that they grow and sustain.
* Schrödinger divined that what was needed in the chromosomes was the sort of order in a crystal but without the regularity or "periodicity" of the lattice. The code script must be an "aperiodic crystal", a structure that is precise and, crucially, reproducible, yet not ordered by simple repetition. That's exactly what a text or scrip is like. The aperiodic crystal now seems an astonishing presentiment of the structure of DNA, discovered just 9 years after his book was published.
* But two concepts were missing from Schrödinger's picture:
** Information - As in the information encoded in DNA.
** Meaning - Animals feel something - which is to say, their response goes beyond automaton-like reaction. The animal finds some meaning in its environment: there is a relationship between the things it experiences and the goals and drives it possesses, and this is expressed in a mental valence imbued by the experience.
* What we need, but currently lack, is a proper understanding of meaning in biology.
* This is really what makes living things different from other self-organizing nonequilibrium structures: life ascribes values and meanings and has goals. To put it another way, living things are not nonequlibrium structures that happen to resist the disordering pull of entropic decay; they are structures that have evolved capabilities specifically to do so (and which I believe are best regarded as cognitive capabilities). We need to understand how they manage that.
* Does Maxwell's demon pick a hole in the second law? Probably not, but it seem very probable that there exist biological systems of such minute dimensions that the laws of classical thermodynamics are no longer applicable to them.
* The demon is deciding which information is useful for attaining its goal. It only pays attention to the information that is meaningful to that end.
* Maxwell's demon exhibits its agency, overcoming (if only temporarily) the randomizing, disordering tendency of the molecular world because of four characteristics:
** It has a goal.
** It collects information meaningful for that goal.
** It stores it in a memory.
** It acts on the information to manipulate its environment in a goal-directed manner.
* The modern analysis of Maxwell's demon reveals a striking connection between information theory and thermodynamics: information (and here we really do mean meaningful information, selected for a purpose) and energy are interconvertible. That's to say, by using information, the demon can build up a reservoir of heat (create some order) that can be used to do useful work. More properly, it's not exactly information that serves as a fuel here, but having a place to put it. We can let the demon go on accumulating heat and doing work so long as we keep supplying it with more memory. Only when it runs out of memory must it produce entropy by erasing the information it already has.
* Living organisms can be regarded as entities that attune to (correlate with) their environment by using meaningful information to harvest energy and evade equilibrium. Life can then be considered as a computation that aims to optimize the acquisition, storage, and use of such meaningful information.
* Natural selection has been hugely concerned with minimizing the thermodynamic cost of computation. It will do all it can to reduce the total amount of computation a cell must perform.
* A thermodynamically optimal machine must balance memory against prediction by minimizing the useless information it stores about the past. It must become good at harvesting meaningul information: that which is likely to be useful for future survival.
* Annie Crawford: What makes a creature alive. Its teleological process - a material from animated by the striving of a unique being to become and remain itself. To be an agent:
** It must be out of equilibrium with its environment - ie thermodynamically distinct from its surroundings. The entity must have a boundary of some kind.
** It must persist for some meaningful duration of time.
** It must have an "endogenous activity", meaning it does things "for its own reasons", not just in a stimulus-response manner. ie, agents must have some internal complexity. ie only from the cellular level (proteins are not agents
** It must show "holistic integration", it be more than the sum of its parts.
** Most of all, it must have reasons. It must be selective about what it attends to. If it has higher-level reasons, if it has purposes and goals then this may free it from automatic stimulus-response behavior.
** For agents, history matters. Agents hold a memory of past events that may determine future actions.
* The more complex a mind the evolutionary process makes, the less control it (the evolutionary process) has over the mind's goals and purposes.
* Purpose can exist without minds, but it's not clear how a mind could exist without purpose.
* Agency is arguably the fundamental feature of life: it is the goal-directedness and capacity for action on self and environment that all living things exhibit.
* Adaptation can be framed in broader, thermodynamic terms: by becoming correlated with an unpredictable, fluctuating environment, a well-adapted entity can absorb energy from it more efficiently.
* Darwinian evolution can be regarded as a specific instance of a more general physical principle governing nonequilibrium systems, whereby attunement to the environment via the formation of orderly structure facilitates energy dissipation and entropy generation. Far from evading entropy's demands, then, life might be especially adept at granting them. Life may be highly likely to arise, purely on thermodynamical grounds, in any environment that has the necessary chemical ingredients (whatever they are!- along with concentrated reservoirs of energy.
* There is now abundant reason to believe that life leverages physical principles at all scales for its own benefit. Ultimately, we will need to understand agency - the key to life, but currently still handled as a kind of modern-day vitalism - according to those principles too.

== 10. Troubleshooting: Rethinking Medicine ==

* For many conditions, genes and their protein products are simply not the right level of intervention. To treat disease at its root, we have to identify the level in the hierarchy of life where that root is embedded. We have to attune the cure to the problem.
* Diseases that have an inherited and thus a genetic basis tend to be associated with particular alleles of a given gene that only some individuals inherit.
* Genome sequencing has been successful in identifying new linkages between gene vaiants and diseases. Typically these are spotted in genome-wide association studies (GWASs), in which the disease-linked alleles are generally distinguished by a mutation at just a single nucleotide - a change called a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP).
* But many common diseases that have a genetic component are highly polygenic: there are many genes involved, most of which have complex and nonunique functions. There may be hundreds of "risk alleles for these diseases, each contributing a tiny statistical influence, and they are typically widespread in the population: we'll all carry some of them, without incurring a significantly higher risk than average.
* For autoimmune diseases, 90% of all SNPs identified in GWASs are in noncoding genes.
* Various layers of information involved in making humans:
** [[wikipedia:Genome|Genome]] - All the genetic information of an organism or cell.
** [[wikipedia:Transcriptome|Transcriptome]] - Set of all RNA molecules (transcripts) in a cell or a population of cells.
** [[wikipedia:Proteome|Proteome]] - The entire set of proteins that is, or can be, expressed by a genome, cell, tissue, or organism at a certain time
** [[wikipedia:Epigenome|Epigenome]] - The collection of chemical changes to its DNA and histone proteins that affects when, where, and how the DNA is expressed; these changes can be passed down to an organism's offspring via transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.
** [[wikipedia:Microbiome|Microbiome]] - The community of microorganisms that can usually be found living together in any given habitat.
** [[wikipedia:Immunome|Immunome]] - The set of genes that code for proteins which constitute the immune system, excluding those that are widespread in other cell types, and not involved in the immune response itself. It is further defined as the set of peptides derived from the proteome that interact with the immune system.
** [[wikipedia:Physiome|Physiome]] - Describes the physiological dynamics of the normal intact organism and is built upon information and structure (genome, proteome, and morphome).
** [[wikipedia:Anatomy|Anatome]] - The internal and external structure of organisms and their parts.
** [[wikipedia:Exposome|Exposome]] - Used to describe environmental exposures that an individual encounters throughout life, and how these exposures impact biology and health.
* Brains seem to have two different developmental settings - we can plausibly call them male-like and female-like - that are influenced by hormonal levels, and brain development predisposes the individual to feel male or female, and not necessarily in tune with their biological sex.
* Diseases all, to a certain extent, attack or hijack the same vulnerable pathways. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic we're redefining how to think about disease. There's cross-connectivity at so many levels that is going to blow open the study of all disease.
* Drug repurposing (testing existing drugs for their impacts on other conditions) is based on this canalization of disease vectors. You often have a better chance to save, cure, and heal not be attacking the supposed disease agent at the molecular level, but by targeting the physiological channel in which the disease manifests.
* The immune system and the inflammatory response it raises are the first line of defense against all manner of pathological and physiological afflections. If we are to seek a more unified and less disease-specific understanding of human health, we would do well to begin here.
* The immune system is, for a certain point of view, more complex than the brain. While the latter is just about synapses connecting to neurons in a very complex web, the immune system has so many different components doing so many things that it is "where intuition goes to die".
* The are two main components:
** The innate immune system - the oldest in evolutionary terms. Mobilizes swiftly and generates inflammation which triggers the production of small proteins called cytokines that act as a kind of molecular elarm signal, summoning lymphocytes, "killer cells" capable of destroying the threating agents. Other cytokines can act as antivirals, interfering with a virus's replication.
** The adaptive immune system - Is newer, and slower, but is better able to attune its response to the nature of the threat:
*** B cells produce proteins called antibodies that can identify and stick to antigens.
*** T cells carry a different class of antigen-binding "sticky" proteins on their surface and can learn to recognize and to kill infected cells. The T cells can remember the novel attackers (via T cells called "memory cells") and is ready to attack them again. This is how immunization works
* It is very important that the immune system responds proportionately, because it does a lot of harm, killing off cells it decides are infected or compromised and wreaking a degree of (local) havoc in tissue. Immune system misfiring can lead to a "cytokine storm".
* The immune system is like a brain - it must learn, adapt, innovate, and improvise to attain its goals.
* Instead of waiting for things to happen and then reacting, medicine could use "engineered health" or "closed-loop medicine" to maintain the body's status quo through constant physiological surveillance and guidance, informed by predictive models of the effects of afflictions and interventions. it would be less a matter of curing disease, and more of curating health.
* Cancer is different to other diseases in that it seems ever more like an inevitable consequence of being multicellular:
** There are more than 70 known oncogenes
** In general cancers stem from a change in the regulation of the cell cycle, the process by which cells divide and proliferate.
** Some genes associated with cancer in fact play roles in preventing problems. They are tumor suppressors.
** Apoptosis is the capacity of cells to spontaneously die in certain circumstances, and is an evolved protection against tumor formation. Apoptosis is in some ways a default state of our cells - they rely on signals from neighboring cells to not die.
** Genes that tend to e most active in cancer cells are the "oldest" in evolutionary terms
** Abundant proliferation is, a priori, the best Darwinian strategy for cells and if regulatory systems break down our cells can return to a Hobbesian "state of nature".
** Cancer is a disease of organization, not of cells. It can be seen as the growth of a new kind of tissue or organ, a sort of deranged recapitulation of normal development.
** If cancer is at root a matter of cells falling into the "wrong" state - the wrong basin of attraction - perhaps the real goal is to get them back out again.

== 11. Making and Hacking: Redesigning Life ==

* Bodies are not fully specified by a blueprint, they emerge as solutions to the rules that govern the production of tissues from cells. Guided by these rules, cells find solutions that work.
* By studying natural organisms, we are just exploring a tiny corner of the option space of all possible beings.
* Various new directions:
** Synthetic morphology, or the creation of Multi-Cellular Engineered Living Systems (MCELSs).
** Recombinant DNA technology and CRISPR-Cas9
** Metabolic engineering
** Synthetic biology
** Organoids - Organized, artificial conglomerates of cells
** Chimeric embryos - Which contain cells from more than one type of organism.

== Epilogue ==

* Life works at all only in relation to its environment.
* In transitioning first from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life, then from unicellularity to multicellurarity, and after that to major innovations such as the origin of vertebrates and eventually mammals, evolution was in one sense ramping up the levels of complexity that it created from much the same basic ingredients. But this conventional view overlooks another crucial change.
** For it became necessary, to support such complexity, for evolution to shift the locus of causation within the organism to higher organizational levels.
** That in turn demanded the introduction of new ways of handling information, and new kinds of autonomy. Relying only on genetic hardwiring is inadequate to sustain the operation of robust multicellular systems, and I have argued the best way to think about the alternatives is as modes of cognition.
* To the extent that life becomes more cognitive, it depends less on genes for its actual functioning. You might say that the genes delegate the responsibilities for decisions, maintenance, and behavior to higher-level systems
* Evolution, it seems, doesn't come up with answers so much as generate flexible problem-solving agents that can rise to new challenges and figure things out on their own.
* We humans are probably anomalous. One of the attributes that most distinguishes us from other animals is our construction of complex cultures, which rely critically on systems and technologies for passing on information and learning) and thus causal influence - between generations through means other than genes. But all this is really just another way in which life has evolved to free itself from genes through an upward transition of power and authority. We are perhaps the prime example of how cognition does that: our minds are capable of promoting profoundly counteradaptive behavior, such as committing suicide at an early age or choosing celibacy.
* The anatomy-generating core system is highly conserved in metazoa: it doesn't change much between different species, simply because that would be disastrous. These DNA regions are effectively excluded from the list of targets at which genetic change could generate viable selectable phenotypic variation. They just cannot be tinkered with.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

2026-07-26T15:47:55Z

Robert.adlington:

== 1. Narrative and Life ==

* Given the presence of narrative in almost all human discourse, there is little wonder that there are theorists who place it next to language itself as the distinctive human trait. Frederic Jameson, for example, writes about the "all-informing process of narrative," which he describes as "the central function or instance of the human mind." Jean-François Lyotard calls narration "the quintessential form of customary knowledge."
* Narrative capability shows up in infants some time in their third or fourth, year, when they start putting verbs together with nouns. It's appearance coincides, roughly, with the first memories that are retained by adults of their infancy.
* The gift of narrative is so pervasive and universal that there are those who strongly suggest that narrative is a "deep structure," a human capacity genetically hard-wired into our minds in the same way as our capacity for grammar (according to some linguists) is something we are born with. The novelist Paul Auster once wrote that "A child's need for stories is as fundamental as his need for food."
* Narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time. As we are the only species on earth with both language and a conscious awareness of the passage of time, it stands to reason that we would have a mechanism for expressing this awareness.
* Of course there are clocks and, before them, other dependable non-narrative ways of organizing time: the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon, the succession of seasons, and the season cycles that we call years. Like the clock, these modes of organizing time are abstract in the sense that they provide a grid of regular intervals within which we can locate events.
* Narrative, by contrast, turns this process inside out, allowing events themselves to create the order of time. Ricoeur: "Time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal existence."
* Clock time always relates to itself. Narrative time, in contrast, relates to events of incidents. And while clock time is necessarily marked off by regular intervals of a certain length, narrative time is fluid, and not necessarily any length at all. We can slow a narrative down by adding details and thus expand time.
* Both these kinds of time have been with us as far back as history can trace. We commonly mix narrative and clock or calendar time by such phrases as "many months later" or "after a few minutes", or "when she was much older".
* Narrative is so much a part of the way we apprehend the world in time that it is virtually built in to the way we see. Brian de Palma: "People don't see the world before their eyes until it's put in a narrative mode.
* The human tendency to insert narrative time into static, immobile scenes seems almost automatic, like a reflex action. We want to know not just waht is there, but also what happened. We may never know who is being depicted in a painting or photograph or what story they may be a part of. But we do, nonetheless, have narrative formulas stored in our memory that quickly fill in certain elements of the story so far. We also have an expectation of how the story will develop, but here we have a range of possibilities, just as we do in the middle of any good story.
* In Bacon's Triptych, the experience of indeterminacy, of wanting to know and not being allowed to know, is itself a kind of pain and dimly echoes the terrible pain that the pictures express.
* Wherever we look in this world, we seek to grasp what we see not just in space but in time as well. Narrative gives us this understanding, it gives us what could be called shapes of time. Our narrative perception stands ready to be activated in order to give us a frame or context for even the most static and uneventful scenes. And without understanding the narrative we often feel we don't understand what we see. We cannot find the meaning. Meaning and narrative understanding are very closely connected.
* The word "narrative" goes back to the ancient Sanskrit "gna", a root term that means "know," and comes to us through Latin words for both "knowing ("gnarus") and "telling" ("narro")

== 2. Defining Narrative ==

* Narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events.
* Narrative is a contested term, a "fuzzy set defined at the center by a solid core of properties, but accepting various degrees of membership."
* Narrative can be used to describe:
** Compact and definable building blocks of events that will be assembled into larger narrative structures.
** Loose and generally recognizable structures, which may contain much non-narrative material. Generally, we will expect some kind of narrative coherence and continuity.
* A narrator is one of a number of instruments in narrative, but need not be explicitly formulated.
* Narrative is the representation of events. It consists of:
** Story (fabula) - the event or sequence of events. We never see a story directly, but instead always pick it up through the narrative discourse. The story is always mediated, so that what we call the story is really something that we construct.
*** Jonathon Culler talks of the double logic of narrative, where the story appears both to precede and to come after the narrative discourse.
*** A story is "neither words, nor images, nor gestures, but the events, situations, and behaviors signified by the words, images, and gestures.
** Narrative discourse (sjuzet, plot)- how the story is conveyed. This is infinitely malleable. It can expand and contract, leap backward and forward, but as we take in information from the discourse we sort it out in our minds, reconstructing an order of events that we call the story. The story can take a day, a minute, a lifetime, or eons. It can be true or false, historical or fictional. But insofar as it is a story, it has its own length of time and an order of events that proceeds chronologically from the earliest to the latest. The order of events and the length of time they are understood to take in the story are often quite different from the time and order of events in the narrative discourse.
** Events and entities. Entities are necessary for causing events, and when those entities have human qualities, we call them characters.
** Narrative world - Which grows larger and more complex as we absorb the narrative
* Can a story go backwards? No. All stories, like all action (except possibly at a subatomic level), go in one direction only - forward in time. Narrative discourse, by contrast, can go in any temporal direction its creator chooses.
* Even in a play that seems to eliminate the difference between a story and narrative discourse, we are almost always called upon to sort out a story from the narrative discourse, because the characters talk and as they talk we learn about events in which they are involved and which extend way beyond the boundaries of what we see on stage.
* What is necessary for the story of Cinderella to be the story of Cinderella? When does it stop being that story and start being something else? There is a distinction between:
** Constituent events (nuclei, kernels) - Necessary for the story to be the story it is. The turning points, the events that drive the story forward and that lead to other events.
** Supplementary events (catalyzers, satellites) - Not necessary for the story. They don't lead anywhere. They can be removed and the story will still be recognizably the same. But...
* We are always called upon to be active participants in narrative, because receiving the story depends on how we in turn construct it from the discourse

== 3. The Borders of Narrative ==

* Framing narratives - In Frankenstein, readers make their way in and then out of a succession of at least six different narratives, each with its own narrator, nested like Chinese boxes. This succession of embedded narratives has a high degree of narrativity in that they have a narrator and a complication of related events and other qualities that give us the strong sense that we are reading a story. but actually any narrative of any length is studded with embedded micro-narratives as well.
* Paratexts - material that lies somehow on the threshold of the narrative. Paratextual information can completely transform our experience of a narrative. Where narratives actually happen is in the mind.
* Narrative coherence - Is based around a common entity or set of entities and a recoverable chronological order of connected events. But, up to a point, confusion and narrative coherence can coexist (eg Faulkner's Absalom Absalom!). How much frustration is too much? And what do we call this kind of writing when it is no longer called narrative?
* All of us have head the very natural experience of recalling earlier parts of a narrative as we read, or imagining what might come next, and this is like hypertext linking backward or forward in the narrative. Non-linearity has been common to narrative discourse from the earliest recorded instances of story-telling. But story, by definition, is linear!
* If things are happening right now for the first time, do we call it narrative? Do we refer to our lives, for example, as narratives? Role-playing games, like theater improv, are like life itself. As in life, we are aware of something happening that has not been planned or written or scripted in advance - something making itself up as it goes along. This is maybe the seed-ground of stories that then could be rendered in narrative.

== 4. The Rhetoric of Narrative ==

* The rhetoric of narrative is its power. It has to do with all those elements of the text that produce the many strong or subtle combinations of feeling and thought we experience as we read.
* Causation - We are made in such a way that we continually look for the causes of things. The inevitable linearity of story makes narrative a powerful means of gratifying this need. Many of the greatest narratives (the Babylonian War of the Gods, the Book of Genesis in the Bible, the Aeneid, Paradise Lost) are narratives of causation on the largest scale, telling of the origin of a nation or of life itself.
** Myths and epics are kinds of narrative that, among other things, explain the world for us in terms of cause.
** We will read a causal connection whereby what comes after is triggered by what went before.
** The sequencing of narrative works on us so suggestively that we often don't need the explicit assignment of cause to be encouraged to think causally.
** Our minds inveterately seek structure, and they will provide it if necessary... we are inherently disposed to turn raw sensation into perception.
** The presence of causation increases narrativity.
** The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is described, by Barthes, as "the mainspring of narrative." Cause and effect work sequentially, just as stories do. The error lies in passing from the valid assumption that all effects follow their causes to the false one that to follow something is to be an effect of that thing.
** We could say that scientists, conducting their experiments, are trying to write narratives that are so uncluttered by competing elements that cause and effect are genuinely demonstrable in the stories they tell.
** Nietzsche: "It is the effect that causes us to produce a cause."
* Rhetoric of the real - narrative accounts for things - we don't really believe something is true unless we can see it as a story. Bringing a collection of events into narrative coherence can be described as a way of normalizing those events, rendering them plausible, allowing one to see how they all "belong".
** In the Man Without Qualities, Ulrich finds that "he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be narrative and no longer following a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface."
** Frank Kermode argues that we all believe that somehow, in some occult fashion, if we could only detect it, everything will be found to hang together.
** People say "it's just a story". It is not narrativity in itself that persuades us that a story is true, but some subset of the qualities that convey narrativity. Perhaps it is "continuity" and "narrative coherence". If the story hangs together, it responds to a bias that favors order over chaos.
** The Simpson trial, like any trial, was a contest of narratives, each seeking to bring the facts into conformity with a coherent narrative that favored its conception of the accused.
* Masterplots - are stories that we tell over and over in myriad forms and that connect vitally with our deepest values, wishes, fears. We seem to connect our thinking about life, and particularly about our own lives, to a number of masterplots that we may or may not be fully aware of.
** Masterplots often work in secret, influencing us without our wholly realizing it.
** Some masterplots, very loosely conceived, appear to be universal: the quest, the story of revenge, seasonal myths of death and regeneration.
** All national cultures have masterplots. For Kermode, they constitute: "the mythological structure of a society from which we derive comfort, and which it may be uncomfortable to dispute." But no culture can be summed up in one masterplot. National culture is a complex weave of numerous, often conflicting masterplots.
** Lawyers, politicians, and advertisers gain leverage by handling the narratives they use in such a way as to activate cherished masterplots of their audience.
** In the Simpson trial, the masterplots of the unjustly punished black man, the battered wife, and the unjust privilege accorded to celebrity and wealth are all in competition.
** Masterplots create an image of the world in which good and evil are clearly identifiable, and in which blame can fall squarely on one party or another. To the degree that one or another of these masterplots tends to shape our view of the world, we may find it difficult to weigh the evidence dispassionately. Some would argue that our identities are so invested in our personal masterplots, that when these masterplots are activated it is impossible to break out of the vision they create. But, then, others argue that there are too many cases of people changing their minds in the face of the evidence to believe that we are quite so imprisoned.
** The apparent failure of taste, or lack of sophistication, has a lot to do with masterplots and our personal vulnerability to some of them.
** Just as most narratives of any length work with our expectations of causal order, so too do they work either with or against masterplots
* Types - are recurring kinds of character. Cinderella is both a type and a masterplot. The battered wife is a type. A masterplot comes equipped with types and when they seem to formulaic, we call them stereotypes. Masterplots can be rendered stereotypically as well.
* In an article about a Khadafy speech:
** The character/narrator "Khadafy" is working with the masterplot of David and Goliath.
** The journalist's narrative works to undermine the orator's masterplot and to replace it with the ranting of a type: the tin-pot dictator.

== 5. Closure ==

* In almost every narrative of any interest, there is a conflict in which power is at stake. You might say that conflict structures narrative.
* The Greek for conflict/contest is "agon" and, the hero is the "protagonist" and their chief opponent is the "antagonist".
* The representation of conflict in narrative provides a way for a culture to talk to itself about, and possibly resolve, conflicts that threaten to fracture it.
* There are conflicts about values, ideas, feelings, and ways of seeing the world. And there is, of course, no culture without many such conflicts.
* Narrative may play an important social role for gaining support on one sides of a conflict, for negotiating the claims of opposing sides, or simply for providing a way for people to live with a conflict that is irreconcilable (such as the conflict between the desire to live and the knowledge that we have to die).
* Endings - When a narrative resolves a conflict, it achieves closure, and this usually comes at the end of the narrative. We expect stories to end. We talk about good and bad, satisfying and unsatisfying endings.
** Closure does not have to come at the end of a narrative or indeed at all. Closure and ending are distinct concepts.
** We want shape in our narratives, but we seem also frequently content with postponing the end - and therefore some final perception of narrative shape - indefinitely.
* Suspense and surprise: All successful narratives of any length are chains of suspense and surprise that keep us in a fluctuating state of impatience, wonderment, and partial gratification:
** Closure is something we look for in narrative, a desire that authors understand and often expend considerable art to satisfy or to frustrate. It can't be satisfied too quickly, because we seem also to enjoy being in the state of imbalance or tension that precedes closure. In fact, narrative is marked almost everywhere by its lack of closure - this is suspense.
** Surprise
* For Barthes, narratives arouse both expectations and questions and then either give us satisfaction or frustrate us:
** Expectations (proairetic code) - we recognize by numerous signals, the kind of action or sequence of events that we are reading (revenge, falling in love, escape, murder, a bad dream). Once actions start in a certain way, we expect what follows to be consistent with the overall code. This is another way to look at masterplots: as coded narrative formulas that end with closure.
*** Half of what gives life to expectations in narrative is their violation, for which the common word is surprise
*** We have to imperfectly balanced needs: to see expectations fulfilled and to see them violated.
*** The surprise of a conclusion can casts a light backward over the whole narrative, giving it a new shape and tone as the sense of surprise wears away and the ending is seen to fit.
*** The key to suspense is the possibility, at least, that things could turn out differently. But for any audience, there is a range of what they will tolerate in the way of surprise.
*** Codes and formulas thrive on their inflexibility.
*** Without expectations in the first place we could not appreciate variations.
*** One of our expectations in almost all narratives of any complexity is that our expectations will turn out to have been anywhere from inadequate to completely wrong. We expect, in short to be surprised!
*** Narrative can succeed in many ways, not just by delaying the discharge (suspense) but by happily frustrating it altogether (surprise).
*** A child will want you to read her favorite story every night, though she knows exactly what's going to happen. Clearly narrative provides pleasures other than suspense and surprise.
** Questions (hermeneutic code) - At the level of questions, we anticipate enlightenment.
*By not closing, the plays of Shakespeare, like so many other powerful narratives, don't tell us what to think but cause us to think. Narrative as such, to borrow a line from IA Richards, is a "machine to think with".
*We can say that closure is something we tend to look for in narratives. Closure brings satisfaction to desire, relief to suspense, and clarity to confusion. It normalizes. It confirms the masterplot. At the same time we don't want closure too quickly.

== 6. Narration ==

* All narratives, however playful, carry meaning in the sense of ideas and judgements with them. Some narratives arrive at judgements - ie at closure on the level of intellectual and moral questions - and some don't.
* Narrators - Can be variably reliable:
** When you narrate, you construct, but constructing is not the same things as lying. Narrative is always a matter of selecting from a great arsenal of pre-existing devices and using them to synthesize our effects. One of these devices is the narrator.
** Does the narrator narrate everything?
*** Direct discourse/ direct thought - is when the narrator cites a character's own words/thoughts in quotation marks, and these could then be seen as outside the narration. Indirect discourse/thought dispense with the quotation marks and are clearly part of the narration.
*** Some modernist narrators experimented with interior monologue, basically forms of "direct thought" but words are probably inadequate for representing thought accurately.
* Voice - The two principle forms are first-person ("I woke up") and third-person ("He woke up"), though there are some experiments with second-person ("You woke up"). In second-person, is the reader really thrust in some way into the role of this unnamed protagonist or do we read it as someone talking to himself? Or do we get used to the strangeness and read it as virtual 3rd person?
** Most third person is told by an external narrator situated outside of the world of the story, but there is often still the sense of a personality doing the narrating, processing the scene and presenting it to/for us.
** There are many instances of 3rd person narration that are anything but omniscient.
* Focalization - The lens through which we see characters and events in the narrative. Flaubert was an expert at blending external 3rd person narration with moments of focalization through certain characters.
* Distance - Refers to the narrator's degree of involvement in the story she tells.
** In order to create narratorial distance, Hemingway devised a narratorial voice that gives the impression of complete emotional noninvolvement in what it narrates.
* Reliability - To what extent can we rely on the narrator to give us an accurate rendering of the facts?
** In the case of unreliable narrators, narration itself - its difficulties, its liability to be subverted by one's own interests and prejudices and blindnesses - becomes part of the subject.
** Some unreliable narrators can be trusted for the facts but not for their interpretation, and some can not even be trusted for the facts.
** Getting to the implied author (the voice and opinions that we believe animate the story and the level of unreliability of the narrator) is one of the central challenges of interpretation.
* Free indirect style - A fluid adaptation of the narrator's voice in a kind of ventriloquism of different voices, all done completely without the usual signposts of punctuation and attribution, while maintaining the grammatical third person. Sometimes we also talk about "stream of consciousness" or "interior monologue", but these remain three separate but related concepts.

== 7. Interpreting Narrative ==

* Judgement, in the sense that we are using it, is an attunement of feeling to its object.
* Readers and audiences are often trying to locate a sensibility behind the narrative that accounts for it is is constructed - a sensibility on which to base their interpretations.
* An implied author is that sensibility (that combination of feeling, intelligence, knowledge, and opinion) that "accounts for" the narrative. Insofar as we debate the intended meaning of a narrative, we root our positions in a version of the implied author that we infer from the text.
* Underreading:
** We are vulnerable to narrative texts - given their rhetorical resources they seem to manipulate us and in general to exercise a good deal of power over our lives. Throughout our lives we are prisoners of these cultural texts - they even do a lot of our thinking for us.
** But we also exercise a power over texts. We do not simply absorb the information in the narrative discourse but, almost invariably, we overlook things that are there and put in things that are not there. We underread and we overread.
** Kermode: "The history of interpretation may be thought of as the history of exclusions, which enable us to seize upon this issue rather than on some other as central, and choose from the remaining mass only what seems most compliant.
** Even at a high degree of richness or sophistication, interpretation is a form of closure in that it is an assertion of meaning within which the text can be accommodated.
** Musil, in The Man Without Qualities, went so far as to argue that narrative itself can be a kind of underreading insofar as it is rooted in the desire (and necessity) to underread the complexity of life: When one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's life, the basic law of this life, the law one yearns for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that allows one so say: "First this happened and then that happened..." It is the simple sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented, in a unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it seems, the thread of life itself.
** In life we have to act. In order to act, we need to know (or at least think we know) what the story is. Our survival as a species has probably depended on our doing this with sufficient speed and efficiency to get done what we need to get done in order simply to stay alive.
* Overreading - At the same time we overread, we find in narratives qualities, motives, moods, ideas, judgement, even events for which there is not direct evidence in the discourse.
** Overreading is a phenomenon that is frequently cued by the masterplots in which our fears and desires are most engaged.
** Our minds seem to abhor narrative vacuums. We try to fill them in.
** Probably the most difficult thing about reading narratives is to remain in a state of uncertainty. If a narrative won't close by itself, one often tries to close it, even if it means shutting one's eyes to some of the details and imagining others that aren't there, underreading and overreading.
** One way to define intentional interpretation is the effort to reduce both underreading and overreading to a minimum. It is a process perhaps best achieved by minds coming together in a mutual lending of perceptions.
* Gaps - Narratives by their nature are riddled with gaps.
** Cruxes - Important gaps which hide critical information. In criticism, a crux is an oft-debated element in a work that, depending on how we interpret it, can significantly effect how we interpret the work as a whole
* Repetition - When you are having trouble interpreting, you can look for what is repeated:
** Themes - Are abstract, and are implicit in motifs.
** Motifs - Are concrete.
** Eg, In Wuthering Heights, windows are motifs that support the themes of escape, exclusion, and imprisonment.
* We have little clear understanding of what exactly the mind does when it reads.

== 8. Three Ways to Interpret Narrative ==

* Some would argue that, far from being whole, all narratives are necessarily incomplete, fractured, and even self-contradictory.
* Intertextuality (from Kristeva) - Narratives have no borders but are part of an immense, unfolding (and hence ever-changing) tapestry.
* Intentional Readings - The ideas and judgements that we infer from the narrative are understood to be in keeping with a sensibility that intended these effects.
** Narrative is one way of creating order out of chaos
* Symptomatic Readings - Yours is an interpretation that the implied author would not agree with, but you are also maintaining that this is what is psychologically and culturally significant about the novel. The fact that the author may not agree with your reading, that he may in fact be shocked by it, could itself be taken as support for your position.
** A deconstructive reading deconstructs the intentional reading to find in back of it a reading that the author had no conscious intention of constructing.
** Authors who are read symptomatically are frequently conceived of as fractured - split between what they intend (through the implied author) and what they reveal.
** Though they seem to be opposite ways of interpreting narrative, both intentional and symptomatic approaches are oriented toward a meaning that is presumed to lie behind the narrative.
** A great deal (but not all) of Marxist, feminist, new historicist, and psychoanalytic criticism involves varying forms of symptomatic interpretation.
* Adaptive Readings - All interpretation involves some level of creativity in the sense that we are all active collaborators in making meaning out of narrative.
** In reading or viewing or listening to any narrative, we are at once taking in and adding, tracing, and shaping. There is a continuum here, and at a certain point we find that what we call interpretation is looking more and more like what we call creation. And yet interpretation is still present, even if it is flagrant misinterpretation.
** Bloom: all great works of art are necessarily powerful misreadings of great works of art that precede them.
** To tell a story is to try to understand it.

== 9. Interpretation Across Media ==

* Adapters, if they are at all good, are raiders; they don't copy, they steal what they want and leave the rest.
* Dudley Andrew distinguishes between:
** Borrowing - Intertextuality, the kind of casual appropriation of stories, ideas, situations that would appear to be inevitable in any creative act.
** Intersecting - Trying to stick as close as possible to the original using the new medium (eg book to film)
** Transforming - Use the full power of the new medium both to remain faithful to the original and at the same time to make a full transformation of it in the new medium.
* Novel readers tolerate a great deal of material unrelated or only peripherally related to the story line, while films tend to strip out this extraneous stuff and focus on the story's constitutive events.
* Retardation is one of the great pleasures of narrative. It allows us to settle in and think about what we are taking in; it also can play a key role in the development of suspense.
* When reading about a character in a novel, we draw upon pre-existing types that we have absorbed from our culture and out of which, guided by the narrative, we mentally synthesize the character or something that stands for it.
* Culture constrains all narrative. Audiences set limits on what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, and by their response they select which narratives get repeated and which fall away. Nevertheless, departures from cultural norms catch on and enter a culture's narrative pool. How this happens is as mysterious as it is exciting. But as culturally transgressive fads catch on they become in their turn cultural (or subcultural) norms.

== 10. Character and Self in Narrative ==

* It is only though narrative that we know ourselves as active entities that operate through time.
* Characters have agency. As they drive the action, they necessarily reveal who they are in terms of their motives, their strength, weakness, trustworthiness, capacity to love, hate, cherish, adore, deplore, and so on. By their actions do we know them.
* Characters are, usually, harder to understand than actions. They are themselves some of narrative's most challenging gaps.
* External causes are usually easy to spot; it is the causative chemistry inside that is hard to figure. We cannot see inside character. We must infer.
* EM Forster distinguishes between flat characters (with no hidden complexity) and round characters, who have varying degrees of depth and complexity and "cannot be summed up in a single phrase"
* In Sartre's Nausea, Roquentin is unable to integrate the contradictory aspects of Rollebon's reported behavior in the biography he is writing. There is no character there, just a chaos of unreconcilable actions. Sartre argued that this is the condition that we all find ourselves in when we think honestly, or at least clearly, about ourselves and others. Character, for him, is an idea imposed on human beings.
* All cultures and subcultures have numerous types that circulate through all the various narrative modes. When applied to real people, types appear to flatten them or deny them their full humanity, but do we know how to think about people in a type-free way? It is very hard to exclude types in representing the human.
* Characterization by type can accommodate a great deal of human complexity, especially when the character is a synthesis of multiple types.
* Autobiography can be a matter of collecting or re-collecting from memory those crucial events in the story of one's life that conform to a particular masterplot and that allow you to fulfill the requirements of the type at the center of the story.
* Readers will underread and overread, they will find types where none were intended.
* Reading with an eye out for a text's performative status frequently involves passing back and forth between intentional and symptomatic modes of interpreting.

== 11. Narrative and Truth ==

* What most audiences expect in historical narrative is not the truth but the intent to tell the truth. Nonfiction narratives are, in some sense, falsifiable.
* Fiction, by contrast, is not falsifiable because the story it tells is neither true nor false.
* Unless we are told otherwise, we assume that the fictional world in the narrative is a simulacrum of the world we actually live in, and this assumption is one of the ways we fill many of the gaps of narrative.
* We will bring our own understanding of history into a historical (or fictional) narrative. Our ideas may be correct or incorrect or just plain nuts; our feelings may be justified or unjustified; but they are, nonetheless, important features of our "own experiential reality", and they can flood the gaps in the narrative.
* Genres are freighted with subcultural ideas on subjects like gender, what is knowable, the chance of happiness, freedom of choice, the existence or nonexistence of Bod. In this view, narrative fiction spends much more time confirming our illusions than opening us up to new knowledge.
* Facts don't speak for themselves. They must be interpreted. And interpreting facts as they proceed in time requires turning them into a story. You could say that history does not really happen in the past but must wait until some narrativizes the past.
* The fruit of our experience enters into our judgment of narrative fictions. There may be, for example, something like this sense of what constitutes wisdom when one says of a novel that it is "too sentimental".
* In the game of fiction, another world is created. It can look a lot like our own or it can look utterly different. But most fictional worlds, even the bizarre ones, are just like our own in this: that within their borders they also maintain the distinction between the factual, the false, and the fictional. Accordingly, characters in these fictional worlds can get things right or get them wrong. They do so according to the facts not of our world, but of theirs. What makes this even more wonderful is that we understand it so easily. Making fictional worlds is a gift most of us acquire as early as we acquire the gift of narrative. It allows us not only to play in another world but also to use it to think meaningfully about our own world, without ever confusing the two worlds. Indeed, to confuse them is to fall victim to a pathology.

== 12. Narrative Worlds ==

* The effect of thinking of time in narrative is so pervasive that Bakhtin coined the word "chronotope" from the Greek for time (chronos) and space (topos), which would include both narrative time and space.
* We expect narrative to be spatial as well as temporal. We want to know where the action takes place, what kind of space it occupies, what else is present in this space, how vase it is, how confined, how it looks and feels. In short, action makes space, however impoverished.
* Alan Palmer argues that most of the action of any fictional narrative is in fact "mental action". Characters are constantly changing in both thought and feeling, often under the impact of physical events or in making physical events happen, but often independently of such action, one state of mind leading to another.
* All narratives of any length build worlds with all four dimensions of time and space, inhabited by characters who have inner worlds of their own, inner worlds that can, in turn, leech out into the shifting emotional and intellectual atmosphere that pervades and even extends beyong the time-space of narrative.
* Narrative can be called a thickening or layering of time.
* In Alice Munro's story, different strips of memory with different players, settings, and contexts, coexist in the narrator's consciousness. All three could not have come into being without the dimensions of time and space, yet in consciousness they take on a new kind of being, coming together in ways that exceed the coordinates of time and space:
** This narrative world is saturated by the mind of its fictional creator and meant to work in part as a reflection of her troubling concerns in the present. In this sense, that mind is everywhere at once, rather like the way many religions see the mind of The Creator reflected everywhere in its Creation. It is a mind outside the time of this world and thus it can be, paradoxically, present in this world everywhere at once.
** Going from point A to point B in almost any narrative is not just a matter of time, nor of space, but also something that can only be expressed figuratively as, say, a piling up of layer upon layer of awareness.
* Every day we hope, dream, fear, urge, hypothesize, fantasize, and in many other ways create worlds that don't come into being. They remain possible worlds, yet without them life would be hard to conceive.
* In all narratives there are already at least two worlds, not one:
** The storyworld in which the characters reside and the events take place.
** The world in which the narration takes place. This world is often invisible, especially if the narrator is not present in the story she is recounting.
* When the border between any two of these worlds is violated, for instance when someone grom one world enters the other, then you have a case of narrative [[wikipedia:Metalepsis|metalepsis]].
** Perhaps the greatest impact of these mind-bending devices is what they tell us about ourselves: our reflexive need to naturalize what is strange, the degree to which we are willing to override that need, and what we might learn about ourselves in return.

== 13. Narrative Contestation ==

* Lizzie Borden's story is not really one story but rather a contest of stories played out in a contest of narratives. Here the agon is itself a conflict of narratives. Prosecution and defense are the antagonists and protagonists who, in their turn, operate like authors, challenged to narrate their stories so effectively that they win credence from their audience, which is either a judge or jury.
* A trial can be described as a huge, unpolished narrative compendium featuring the contest of two sets of authors, each trying to make their central narrative of events prevail by spinning narrative segments for their rhetorical impact. They fight this out in a tug of war in which the many discrete parts of their two narratives are alternately constructed and deconstructed as they work toward their final summations. As such, a trial is an immensely complicated narrative structure.
* Under US law, the heavier narrative task is placed on the prosecution, who must not simply tell a story, but tell one that is complete. It must have a central figure, fully equipped "beyond a reasonable doubt" with the motivation, opportunity, means and capability to commit the crime - that is, to engage in a complete action with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
* Reading narrative is a matter of filling in gaps. A shadow story is a story in which the gaps in the narrative are so great as to prevent the story from achieving some genera reader satisfaction that it is complete.
* The most challenging gap that we are called upon to fill in a narrative of criminal law is motive.
* The problem in criminal law of establishing motivation and the requisite personality for the deed makes the deployment of masterplots especially important. Used to invoke types, they can be powerful rhetorical tools when activated. They can absorb the complexity of a defendant's human nature into the simplicity of type.
* In non-fiction narrative, as a trial purports to be, the ultimate form of inexplicable motivation is madness.
* Given how thoroughly narrative forms saturate our thinking about the world, it would seem logical that stories of the disempowered would be excellent instruments of cultural transformation. See, for example, Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory.
* In less regulated forms, narratives are in combat in most compartments of life, public and private: academic debate, scientific theoretical work, political contests, commercial advertising, and when neighbors quarrel, friends fall out, family members recall their grudges, or lovers recriminate, it is almost invariably a matter of people trying somehow to certify their narrative version of events against competing versions.
* Any well-written narrative holds us because there is a plurality of possible stories lying ahead of us as we read. In our minds, these stories jostle with each other. This is a good working definition of suspense.

== 14. Narrative Negotiation ==

* What gives energy to a narrative is the conflict that works itself out over the course of the story. The fuel for that energy is brought to the story in the form of our concerns as readers, concerns that are catalyzed by the conflict. In this way, narrative is a form of passionate thought. The greatest masterplots are narrativized over and over again because they engage conflicts that seem to be a permanent part of our circumstances as human beings.
* Oedipus is a gripping masterplot, dealing with tough contradictions, that human beings have repeatedly used to think with in successive narrative renderings.
** It is the struggle between this certain knowledge of how lives are determined and the need to assert a freedom and dignity that in some way overwrites this helplessness that is the larger conflict, riding on the agon contained in the story of Oedipus. His particular struggle against his fate catalyzes the general need to control what cannot be controlled.
** Aristotle: The tragic fear and pity may be aroused by the Spectacle. His catharsis seems implicitly to refer to the arousal and purgation of powerful emotions that otherwise might control us.
** Freud: The conflict between fate and the free exercise of human will is displaced by the conflict between desire and conscience or, in later Freudian terms, between the urging of the libido and the tyranny of the superego.
** Propp: The tale does not arise as a direct reflection of a social order. it arises from a conflict, from the contradictions that occur as one order replaces another.
** Levi-Strauss: Shifts the focus from a linear reading of myth that goes from beginning to end to a structural of synchronic reading that focuses on repetitions in the material. The overrating of blood relations is to the underrating of blood relationships as the attempt to escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it. Although the Freudian problem has ceased to be that of autochthony versus bisexual reproduction, it is still the problem of understanding how one can be born of two: How is it that we do not have only one procreator, but a mother plus a father? Therefore, not only Sophocles, but Freud himself, should be included among the recorded versions of the Oedipus myth on a par with earlier or seemingly more "authentic" versions.
* I am not saying that we necessarily find in narratives successful negotiations of differences. But we are moved by the narrative, drawn into it, and become alert to how these conflicts play out. And this, I am arguing, is an important form of thinking, whether or not the negotiation of conflicts is seen to be successful. Moreover, in contrast to more abstract modes of thought, this is passionate thinking.
* Closure becomes important in this discussion because, at the level of questions, it is the end of narrative conflict. If closure of the conflict or agon coincides with closure at the level of questions, it gives the impression of resolving larger issues that are carried by the agon.
* In Barthes "writerly" text and in deconstruction, closure at the level of questions never arrives, regardless of the text. We now have a persistent suspicion of closure at the level of questions, even in the simplest, most apparently readable, texts.
* Miller and others would argue that an awareness of the necessary openness of narrative, its lack of closure, far from being morally nihilistic, is the basis of any "ethics of reading". It is ethical because it not only rests in an acknowledgment of the nature of all communication - its semantic porosity - but it also prevents the appropriation of a text to one monolithic meaning. It liberates readers to exercise their creative reading power in response to the full potentiality of narrative.
* Is the attitude of detached questioning something that functions to protect readers and viewers from the power that narrative has to move us with deep feeling?
* If validity in reading or viewing or hearing narrative depends upon maintaining in our minds opposed moral ideas in a kind of balance, does this work against the creation and maintenance of strong convictions? And by indirection does this work against the capacity for decisive moral behavior?
* If our thinking is saturated with the many languages of narrative from our earliest years, what is it that leaks in from the unmediated world of feelings, actions, and consequences? Where does the balance lie between the world at large and our constructions of it?
* Stanley Fish distinguishes between:
** A rhetorical text that "satisfies the needs of its readers" by mirroring "the opinions its readers already hold" and
** A dialectical text that "is disturbing, for it requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by."

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Unnatural Voices

2026-07-26T15:47:32Z

Robert.adlington:

== 1. Introduction: Transgressing Self and Voice - Contemporary Fiction and the Death of the Narrator ==

*Two main features stand out in the development of fictional technique since Defoe:
**The exploration of subjectivity (beginning with Sterne's play with unexpected association of ideas and continuing with Jane Austen's development of free indirect discourse).
**The rise of the unreliable narrator, which had been present in epistolary fiction and gained new prominence by the time Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" (1864) appeared. In addition, narrative fragmentation and unexpected reconstructions. One goes from unreliable narrators to incompetent ones to delusional and then completely insane storytellers. On starts with flawed narration, goes on to more fragmented forms, and ends with the semi-coherent and utterly opaque.
*The nature and identity of the narrator becomes itself a miniature drama as a familiar narrating situation is established thoughout the text only to be utterly transformed at the end. The heterodiegetic narrator outside the story turns out to have been in there all along, the seemingly daring narrative "you" is instead a more conventional apostrophe, the story of another is revealed to be the story of oneself. The conventional practice is deployed until it is turned inside out, revealing the artificiality of a perspective, whether designated "third person" or "heterodiegetic", that can be so easily inverted. And the move is always away from traditional objectivity and omniscience, from the third person to the first.
*There is a general move away from what was thought to be "omniscient" third person narration to limited third person narration to ever more unreliable first person narrators to new exploration so "you", "we", and mixed forms. There is a similar movement from the psychological novel to more impressionistic renderings of consciousness to the dissolution of consciousness into textuality, and a corresponding move from human-like narrators to quasi-human, non-human, and anti-human speakers, as the figure of the narrator as a recognizable human being recedes into an ever greater eclipse

== 2. "At First You Feel a Bit Lost": The Varieties of Second Person Narration ==

*Second person narration is an artificial mode that does not normally occur in natural narrative or in most texts in the history of literature before 1919. It is an extremely protean form, and its very essence is to eschew a fixed essence
*The Standard Form - A story is told, usually in the present tense, about a single protagonist who is referred to in the second person; the "you" often designates the narrator and the narratee as well, though there is considerable slippage in this unusual triumvirate.
**These sentences could have been written in the first person, in the third person with a single focalizer, or in free indirect speech. Instead, the second person was chosen, and a different type of narration follows, one which approximates but cannot be reduced to any of these other perspectives.
**A continuous dialectic of identification and distancing ensues, as the reader is alternately drawn closer to and further away from the protagonist. This you is inherently unstable, constantly threatening to merge with the narratee, a character, the reader, or even with another grammatical person.
**The second person is a playful form, original, transgressive, and illuminating, that is always conscious of its unusual own status and often disguises itself, playing on the boundaries of other narrative voices.
**Even in her own consciousness, the narrator of Edna O'Brien's "A Pagan Place" views herself as a peripheral figure, a passive and largely inconscquential bystander. To refer to herself as an "I" would take more temerity than she possesses. Her subjectivity is muted, diffused, collapsed. Her "you" expresses her distance from her self.
**The choice of second person radically alters the tone of the work and provides a unique speaking situation for the narrator, one that does not occur in natural narratives and consequenlty one that continuously defamiliarizes the narrative act. Its usage can engender a heightened engagement between reader and protagonist in different directions: we may oppose identification with a "you" we resist, or we may sympathize more fully with them.
*The Hypothetical Form - In Lorrie Moore's "Self Help", we see consistent use of the imperative, frequent employment of the future tense, and the unambiguous distinction between the narrator and the narratee. The protagonist is a possible future version of the narratee, though it soon takes on an independent, parallel existence.
*The Autotelic Form - The direct address to a "you" that is at times the actual reader of the text and whose story is juxtaposed to and can merge with the characters of the fiction.
**In McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City", the reader knows that he or she is extradiegetic, outside the narrative, and only assume identity with the main character as part of the act of play in which reading consists.
**Italo Calvino's sophisticated stategy in "If On a Winter's Night a Traveller" is to catch you, the extradiegetic reader, off guard, and make you the subject of diegesis, thereby spiriting or abducting you into the narrative.
**When Calvino goes on to observe, "Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost", the locution may simultaneously refer to all the different readers (narratee, implied, and actual) that traditional narratology attempts to keep separate in theory as well as a character called the Reader. At the same time, it both alludes to and enacts the anti-essentialist stances concerning personal identity characteristic of poststructuralist theory and postmodern narrative. In this work, literature and theory interanimate each other, the concept of person dissolves, and presentation fuses with representation.
*The narrative "you" is admirably suited to explore:
**Suppressed subjectivity and silenced speech
**The mind of a conflicted individual in the process of making significant decisions that he would prefer not to have to think about
**The act of reading even as it is taking place.
**Commercial discourses intended to exploit their readers through the illusion of identification
**The mental battles of an individual struggling against the internalized discourse of an oppressive authority
**Foregrounding a subjectivity typically excluded from common, unexamined notions of "you" and "us".
**The unstable nature and intersubjective constitution of the self.

== 3. Class and Consciousness: "We" Narration from Conrad to Postcolonial Fiction ==

*In Conrad's "The Nigger of the Narcissus", there is no single, self-consistent discursive subject in the text. We need to ask, "What is the narration doing now?" rather then, "Who is speaking here?" By following out the varied narrative voices, however, we find that they themselves constitute a kind of narrative that complements and underscores the central events and ideas of the story.
*Nathalie Sarraute's "Tu ne t'aimes pas" is a representation of a collection of contiguous voices, some of them contradictory, that seem to form a single, decentered consciousness.
*Zakes Mda (in "Ways of Dying"): "We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people's closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, "They say it once happened...," we are the "they"."
*The "we" glides between the lone individual and the entire collective; between a strict and a more lax denotation; and between mental experiences that are entirely, partially, or minimally shared.
*It is most useful to see the "we" narrator as a different kind of figure from the realistic type of first person narrator and more like a postmodern first person narrator who is not bound by the epistemological rules of realism.
*Whereas most second person narration ascillates between these two poles (of 1st and 3rd"), "we" narration curiously occupies both at once.

== 4. I etcetera: Multiperson Narration and the Range of Contemporary Narrators ==

*EM Forster: "A novelist can shift his viewpoint if it comes off, and it came off with Dickens and Tolstoy. Indeed this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting viewpoint is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge: - I find it one of the great advantages of the novel-form, and it has a parallel in our perception of life. We are stupider at some times than others; we can enter into people's minds occasionally but not always."
*In Christine Brooke-Rose's "Thru", the novel repeatedly reverses the hierarchy or narrative levels, transforming a narrated object into a narrating agent and vice versa. The very distinction between outside and inside, container and contained, narrating subject and narrated object, higher and lower level collapses, resulting in a paradox which the text itself puts in a nutshell; "Whoever you invented invented you too."
*In Beckett's "The Unnameable", the narrative voice often refers to other characters and voices which it then discloses to be fictions invented by itself, as apparently independent persons are collapsed into a single narrative voice. On the other hand, the same narrator goes on to claim to have invented the frustrated narrators of other novels written by Beckett; the narrator of The Unnameable here seem to be impersonated its author. This narrative strategy does not merely problematize conventional theoretical distinctions, but undermines the very terms upon which such distinctions rest.

== 5. Three Extreme Forms of Narration and a Note on Postmodern Unreliability ==

*Though Karen Lawrence uses the term "narrator" for ease of reference, she prefers "the concept of consciousness or mind of the text, since Joyce does everything possible in the "Ithaca" chapter of Ulysses to destroy our sense of a narrating, human voice.
*The concept of a narrator implies a certain minimal discursive consistency that many late modern and postmodern authors reject; we should have a place for shifting, depersonalized, multivoiced texts that transcend or traduce the sensibility of a single narrator, a composite figure we may refer to as the "incommensurate narrator".
*On the one hand, narrators may resemble actual people who tell stories; on the other hand, there may be no "they" there - with postmodern fiction, we often have mere discourse that unconvincingly occupies the space of a standard narrator. It is this rejection of the personified narrator that the figure of the interlocutor finally reveals.
*In Beckett and Robbe-Grillet, the denarration is global and undermines the world it purports to depict; very little (if anything) is left over after the assaults of textual negation the narrative performs upon itself. These texts emphasize the "performative nature" of all narration.
*It is the first person form of the denarrated that is generally most prevalent and, I believe, more compelling. I suspect this is because it invites more possible interpretive positions concerning the subjectivity of the narrator, as the reader wonders whether the narrator is incompetent, disoriented, devious, or insane. And, when an especially contradictory line appears, it comically throws all of these conceptual frames into disarray, as the entire mimetic framework of the narration is abruptly called into question.
*All that is left for the narratologist to work with is the discourse, since all we know is the sequence in which the dubious events are presented or negated. At this point, a fundamental distinction at the foundation of modern narrative theory breaks down. Here, the usual separation between story and discourse collapses, and we are left with discourse without a retrievable story. The work's discourse is determinate; its story is inherently indeterminable.
*With solipsistic narrators, seemingly disparate narrative voices turn out in the end to be mere projections of a single isolated consciousness. See, for example, Beckett's "Company".
*The other, opposite tactic is the uncanny and inexplicable intrusion of the voice of another within the narrator's consciousness. I call such a figure a "permeable narrator". Unlike the solipsistic gambit, which is readily situated within existing theories of narration, this other movement threatens to violate the principle of an autonomous, individual consciousness that is presupposed by all current theories of the narrator.
*The Unnameable emerges as one of the most defiantly anti-narrative works ever composed, in which al the basic elements of storytelling are negated. There is no determinable temporal or spatial setting, no characters to speak of, no events worth narrating, and no clear audience or motive for the narration. The main engine of the text is the compulsive voice that will not stop, and the primary drama of the text is the determination of the identity of the narrator and its voices. It provides one of the most extreme, fascinating, and outrageous demonstrations of the possibilities of narration in - and only possible in - a work of fiction.
*Many postmodern narrators and voices have superseded the traditional figure of the narrator as a person who is telling a story and who is subject to the normal abilities and limitations of a human being or humanlike narrating agent:
**The fraudulent narrator - who cannot possibly know what they know.
**Contradictory narrators - leading to narrative chaos.
**Permeable narrators - who merge and blend into one another in impossible ways.
**Incommensurate narrators - who cannot be the single source of all the voices in the story.
**Dis-framed narrators - who move from one level of a text to another.

== 6. Unnatural Narration in Contemporary Drama ==

*In Beckett's "Not I", Mouth may be an image of a madwoman, a figure in hell, an allegory of the dispossessed, or a parody of authorial creation; she may be addressing the imagined voice of another, another version of herself, or the metadramatic image of a stage prompter. But more than anything else, the very physicality of this staging of a contaminated consciousness - the disembodied mouth and the unexplained auditor - ensures that no critical gesture will be able to unify these defiantly inorganic fragments.
*Like contemporary fiction, modern drama has for some time transcended the simple, humanist narrator figure and has gone on to create "unnatural" narrators who exceed and subvert the limits of an individual consciousness.

== 7. Implied Authors, Historical Authors, and the Transparent Narrator: Toward a New Model of the Narrative Transaction ==

*The standard model is Real author > Implied Author > (Narrator) > (Narratee) > Implied Reader > Real Reader
*The implied author is the figure constructed by the reader of the person who produced the narrative, and who may differ significantly from the actual flesh-and-blood author.
*Proust: "A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices."
*There is always a gap or fissure between even the closest cases o near identity between author and implied author, if only that the implied author is invariably more consistent than the actual author ever is.
*The historical author writes, the implied author means, and the narrator speaks.
*The transparent voices phenomenon - The most unreliable internal narrator can readily (and, more importantly, incontrovertibly) articulate the ideas of the author. In such cases, the narrator may be temporarily emptied and his character dispensed with as the author speaks directly and sometimes incongruously through that character's mouth.
*The transparent narrator is a favorite technique of postmodern authors, who regularly use it to transgress the carefully maintained ontological boundaries observed by realist and modernist writers.
*Lolita seems to be addressed both to an authorial audience that gets all the ironies and allusions and also to a more middlebrow reader whose expectations are frustrated at every key turn of the narrative.
*Any interpretation of a number of potentially ambiguous or contested works turns on just how close the narrator is to the implied author.
*Points on implied authors:
**The implied author is a coherent and useful concept that can be applied to many works of fiction and is essential in discussing modernist works.
**A work of fiction can have more than one implied author.
**The implied author is not, however, an indispensable aspect of the narrative transaction and has no real place in a number of didactic, allegorical, or apological works.
**The concept of the implied author is not necessary for every work of fiction, yet all narrative fiction cannot be reduced merely to the dyad of an author and a narrator; both of these approaches are necessary though neither is sufficient to encompass the range of narrative fiction.
**The notion of a career implied author is a useful one and deserves to be retained and further explored.
**Within a work of fiction, the author can and often does speak directly to the reader.
**Different communication levels are inherently permeable, and even in texts with a highly unreliable narrator, the levels can be collapsed and the author's voice can break through.
**The category of the implied reader (or authorial audience) is likewise both more protean and more limited than is usually imagined and can contain more than one implied reader.
**There are often fundamental asymmetries between the figures represented on the left and right of Chatman's standard model, and it should be superseded by more flexible and comprehensive figures.

== 8. Conclusion: Voicing the Unspeakable ==

*Barthes: Narrators and characters are, essentially "paper beings". One can no longer presume the existence of a real human or a human-like narrator standing behind and above the discourse; in many works, there is only the discourse itself.
*The narrator is a theoretical fiction, and the human-like, pseudo-natural narrator is only one of its many possible avatars.
*After the signal achievements of Proust and Joyce, later writers would continue to extend existing paradigms and invent novel forms of representing consciousness in fiction.
*The events of a novel have not really happened and the author can give them any turn the reader may like best.
*Proust has his narrator aver, very late in the novel, that of all the characters only his beloved Françoise was real.
*The Joyce of Ulysses helped develop the interlocutor, the permeable narrator, and the incommensurate narrator decades before postmodernism is usually thought to have begun.
*The extreme narrators and acts of narration in contemporary fiction have continued to move ever further beyond the established boundaries of realism, humanism, and conventional representation, and these new works pose severe problems for narratological models that are solely based on mimetic works.
*Beckett's Worstward Ho: "Whose words? Ask in vain. Or not in vain if say no knowing. No saying. No words for him whose words. Him? One. No words for one whose words. One? It. No words for it whose words. Better worse so" - A voice that is inherently unknowable, irreducible to the apparent speaker, addressee, or the one being depicted.
*A first person narrator may closely resemble a human being or it may differ in many ways; it may be contradictory, multiple, quasi-human, or little more than a mass of inconsistent discourse that cannot be reduced to a single narrative voice or position. We will find a spectrum of positions ranging from the human to the antihuman, the unified to the fragmented, the consistent to the contradictory. The distance between an author, an implied author, and a narrator may likewise vary greatly from extreme divergence to virtual identity. Texts may conform to existing conventions, like that of the appropriate knowledge for first or third person narrators, or may extend, reform, violate, or otherwise flout the convention.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Why We Read Fiction

2026-07-26T15:47:05Z

Robert.adlington:

== Part I: Attributing Minds ==

* We engage in mind-reading when:
** We ascribe to a person a certain mental state on the basis of her observable action.
** We interpret our own feelings based on our proprioceptive awareness.
** We intuit a complex state of mind based on a limited verbal description
** We compose an essay, a lecture, a movie, a song, a novel, or an instruction for an electrical appliance and try ot imagine how this or that segment of our target audience will respond to it.
** We negotiate a multilayered social situation, and so on
* Attributing states of mind is the default way by which we construct and navigate our social environment, incorrect though our attributions frequently are.
* By studying autism and a related constellation of cognitive deficits, cognitive scientists began to appreciate our mind-reading ability as a special cognitive endowment, structuring our everyday communication and cultural representations.
* We think this adaptation must have developed during the "massive neurocognitive evolution" which took place during the Pleistocene (1.8m to 10,000 years ago). The emergence of a Theory of Mind "module" was evolution's answer to the "staggeringly complex" challenge faced by our ancestors, who needed to make sense of the behavior of other people in their group, which could include up to 200 individuals.
* Our evolved cognitive architecture "prods" us toward learning and practicing mind-reading daily, from the beginning of awareness.
* Autism is highly heritable, and its key symptoms, which manifest themselves in the first years of life, include the profound impairment of social and communicative development and the "lack of the usual flexibility, imagination, and pretence." It is also characterized by a reduced interest in fiction and storytelling.
* People with autism can have difficulty understanding the mental state of belief (in the sense of entering into another's mind to understand what they believe).
* Temple Grandin: "Something was going on between the other kids, something swift, subtle, constantly changing - an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic. She is now aware of the existence of those social signals. She can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly, or conceive of the many-leveled, kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it.
* The very process of making sense of what we read appears to be grounded in our ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we generously call "characters" with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, desires and then to look for the "cues" that would allow us to guess at their feelings and thus predict their actions. Literature pervasively capitalizes on and stimulates ToM mechanisms that had evolved to deal with real people, even as on some level readers do remain aware that fictive characters are not real people at all.
* In Mrs Dalloway, our ToM allows us to connect Peter Walsh's trembling to his emotional state (in the absence of any additional information that could account for this body language in a different way), thus usefully constraining our interpretive domain and enabling us to start considering endlessly nuanced choices within that domain.
* This elimination of irrelevant interpretations can happen so fast as to be practically imperceptible.
* Stanley Fish: our mental operations are "limited by institutions in which we are already embedded."
* We have cognitive adaptations that prompt us to "see bodies as animated by minds".
* Mind-reading is effortless in the sense that we "intuitively" connect people's behavior to their mental states although our subsequent description of these mental states could run a broad gamut from perceptively accurate to profoundly mistaken.
* The awareness of one's mental state makes possible the enjoyment derived from the manipulation of this state. Our enjoyment of fiction is predicated - at least in part - upon our awareness of our "trying on" mental states potentially available to us but at a given moment differing from our own."
* In the real world, my social survival absolutely depends on being able to imagine - correctly, incorrectly, approximately, self-servingly, bizarrely - other people's thoughts, desires, and intentions around the clock.
* On some level, our evolved cognitive architecture does not fully distinguish between real and fictional people.
* At every step, The Wings of the Dove is telling an attentive reader "These immensely complex, multi-leveled, ethically ambiguous, class-conscious, mutually reflecting and mutually distorting states of mind your are capable of navigating. This is how good you are at this maddening and exhilarating social game. Did you know it? Now you know it!"
* We assume that there must be a mental stance behind each physical action and we strive to represent to ourselves that possible mental stance even when the author has left us with the absolute minimum of necessary cues for constructing such and interpretation.
* It gets harder to follow the meta-representation of levels of minds in statements like The New Yorker cartoon "Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel", and this can trigger a momentary cognitive vertigo which may render us increasingly ready either to laugh or to quake with apprehension.
* Woolf wanted to increase the pace of her explorations, to be able to "embody, at last" as she would write several years later, "the exact shapes my brain holds".

== Part II: Tracking Minds ==

* Metarepresentation - keeping track of the sources of our representations, is a particular cognitive endowment closely related to our mind-reading ability.
* Self-awareness cannot occur without metarepresentation - the cognitive mechanism that enables us to be aware of our goals, our intentions, and the intentions of other people.
* The failure to monitor the source of a representation can lead to schizophrenics perceiving "their own thoughts, subvocal speech, or even vocal speech as emanating, not from their own intentions, but from some source that is not under their control," whereas the "inability to monitor willed intentions can lead to delusions of alien control, certain auditory hallucinations and thought insertion."
* The majority of autistic children fail to develop ToM. They are unaware that other people have different beliefs and intentions from themselves.
* Both the metarepresentational ability and the ToM are not perfect in some abstract, context-independent sense. Instead, they are good enough for our everyday functioning: however imperfect and fallible, they still get us through yet another day of social interactions.
* The ability to keep track of who thought, wanted, and felt what, and when they thought it, is crucial for understanding the majority of fictional narratives, which center on the characters' reweighing the truth value of various cultural and personal beliefs.
* It is likely that stories explicitly labeled as fiction (eg Little Red Riding Hood) are never stored "without a source tag".
* Don Quixote suffers from a selective failure of source-monitoring. He takes in representations that normal people store with a restrictive agent-specifying source tag such as "as told by the author of a romance" as lacking any such tag. He thus lets the information contained in romances circulate among his mental databases as architectural truth, corrupting his knowledge about he world that we assume has hitherto been relatively accurate.
* Since we cannot but conceive of narrative agents as human or human-like, it is a basic cognitive requirement of ours that we attribute to them information-processing activities and internal knowledge representations.
* Six types of unreliable narrators:
** Misreporting, Misreading, Misregarding - We must reject their words and reconstruct an alternative
** Underreporting, Underreading, Underregarding - We must supplement the narrator's view
* Once any unreliability is detected all the narration is suspect.
* In Clarissa, the protagonists are mostly confined to their writing-desks, reporting to their respective friends in painstaking detail their endeavors to guess, second-guess, plant, anticipate, and interpret each other's thoughts. In Lovelace we have an early instance of an unreliable narrator.
* Mind-reading is a crucial aspect of our everyday existence, but a character too occupied with figuring out other people's states of mind, and, worse, flaunting his ability to "see through" other people, runs a grave metarepresentational danger: he can easily lose track of himself as the source of his representations of the other person's mental world.
* The reason schizophrenics go on reading minds even though they do it all wrong is that, unlike individuals with autism, who know that their inferences of mental states are likely to be wrong, schizophrenics know well from past experiences that it is useful and easy to infer the mental states of others and will go on doing this even when the mechanism no longer works properly.
* Our brain is the focus of the novel's attention, its playground, its raison d'être, its meaning, whereas the characters are but the means for delivering this kind of wonderfully rich stimulation to the variety of cognitive adaptations making up our ToM.
* The writer who creates an unreliable narrator runs an exciting and terrible risk: his or her readers may wind up believing the narrator's version of events.
* A novel featuring a first-person unreliable narrator thus exploits a particular niche in our cognitive makeup. Although source-monitoring is an integral part of our information management, exaggerated and unrelentingly strong source-monitoring can be cognitively expensive and thus not our defautl state of mind. It seems that we are not automatically open to incurring this large cognitive cost.
* Apparently, in Lolita, our tendency to register possible sources of representations and to subconsciously keep track of them overrides our conscious awareness that all of those sources are spurious, nonexistent, fabricated by the crafty narrator who wants to win us over to his side.
* Humbert obliterates himself as the source of our representations of Lolita and presents us instead with snapshots of other minds (including Lolita's own) that support his interpretation of events.
* Nabokov made the cultivation of a mental vertigo in his readers into his trademark as a writer. Will our reading experience change as we gradually articulate the ground rules of the cognitive games that his novels play with us? Will we start putting a premium on consciously prolonging and cultivating those moments of cognitive uncertainty when we both believe and disbelieve, know and don't know, see and don't see.

== Part III: Concealing Minds ==

* Rather than encouraging us to believe what a given protagonist is saying, only then to slap us with a revelation that we should not have trusted him in the first place, the detective stories want us to disbelieve, from the very beginning and for as long as possible, the words of pretty much every personage we encounter. The two types of narratives thus build on the same cognitive capacity for storing information under advisement, but they approach it from different angles.
* In a typical detective narrative, once the murderer is found out and his/her motivation is explained, we have to think back and revise our earlier interpretations of the events of the story, an important metarepresentational readjustment.
* Of course, within the same detective story, we can store information provided by different suspects, or even the same suspect on different occasions, under very different degrees of advisement; and, moreover, as we go on reading, we constantly modulate the relative strength of metarepresentational framing used to process the characters' presumed or claimed mental states. Still, the whodunit is associated with a much stronger internal metarepresentational framing than, say, a comedy of manners, such as Emma.
* A story whose premise is that "everybody could be lying" is a narrative minefield, and turning it into an enjoyable reading experience may require a particular set of formal adjustments. Everybody's lying tends in the same direction, focusing on his/her relationship with the murder victim or the missing pearls, etc.

== Conclusion: Why Do We Read (And Write) Fiction ==

* Working on a story that engages the reader's ToM in a particularly focused way must hit the author's own mind-reading spot as few other activities do.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

The Intentional Stance

2026-07-26T15:46:45Z

Robert.adlington:

== 1. Setting Off on the Right Foot ==

* The Manifest Image - Our nervous systems were designed to make the distinctions we need swiftly and reliably, to bring under single sensory rubrics the relevant common features in our environment, and to ignore what we can usually get away with ignoring.
** We have it thanks to extraordinarily efficient and reliable systems of expectation-generation.
** Compare this to the scientific image
* We make sense of each other by adopting the intentional stance.

== 2. True Believers ==

* While belief is a perfectly objective phenomenon, it can be discerned only from the point of view of one who adopts a certain predictive strategy.
* Any system whose behavior is well predicted by this strategy is in the fullest sense of the word a believer. What it is to be a true believer is to be an intentional system, a system whose behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy.
* Strategies of understanding:
** The physical strategy/Stance - Use your knowledge of the laws of physics
** The design stance - Based on the assumption that a system has a design, predict that it will behave as it was designed to under various circumstances. Many biological objects are, in this sense, not just physical systems, but designed systems.
** The intentional stance - Treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent, figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have and what desires it ought to have, and then predict that it will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs.
* In general, it seems we come to believe all the truths about the parts of the world around us we are put in a position to learn about.
* Many perfectly detectable, graspable, memorable facts are of no interest to me and hence do not come to be believed by me, so we should attribute as beliefs all the truths relevant to the system's interests (or desires) that the system's experience to date has made available.
* False beliefs have to start somewhere, the seed may be sown in hallucination, illusion, a normal variety of simple misperception, memory deterioration, or deliberate fraud.
* All but the smallest portion (say 10%) of a person's beliefs are likely true.
* Distinction between belief and opinion (where the latter are linguistically infected, relatively sophisticated cognitive states - essentially sentences)
* Desires are normally survival, absence of pain, food, comfort, procreation, entertainment, and are things a system believes to be good for it or the best means to other ends it desires.
* Language enables us to formulate highly specific desires, but it also forces us on occasion to commit ourselves to desires altogether more stringent in their conditions of satisfaction than anything we would otherwise have any reason to endeavor to satisfy.
** One can easily be misled, since we are language-using creatures, into thinking that it is obvious that beliefs and desires are rather like sentences stored in the head. But these are special cases of belief and desire and as such may not be reliable models for the whole domain.
*Our use of the intentional strategy is so habitual and effortless that the role it plays in shaping our expectations about people is easily overlooked.
*We can also apply it to:
**Other mammals,
**Some artifacts (such as chess-playing computers or humble thermostats
**Even plants and lightning! (which wants to find the best way to ground)
*Often the only strategy that is at all practical is the intentional strategy; it gives us predictive power we can get by no other method.
*Even when it fails to distinguish a single move with a highest probability, it can dramatically reduce the number of live options.
*Its inability to predict fine-grained descriptions of actions is, in fact, a source of strength, for it is this neutrality with regard to details of implementation that permits one to exploit it in complex cases, like in chaining predictions. We think he did that because she did that because they thought that and he knew that she might want to do that...
*We support generalizations and predictions by using patterns in human behavior that are describable only from the intentional stance.
*The intentional strategy works as well as it does, which is not perfectly.
*As systems become perceptually richer and behaviorally more versatile, it becomes harder and harder to make substitutions in the actual links of the system to the world without changing the organization of the system itself. We are so multifariously and intricately connected to the world that almost no substitution is possible.
*We say that the organism continuously mirrors the environment, or that there is a representation of the environment in - or implicit in - the organization of the system.
*When we discover some object for which the intentional strategy works, we endeavor to interpret some of its internal states or processes as internal representations. What makes some internal feature of a thing a representation could only be its role in regulating the behavior of an intentional system.
*Evolution has designed human beings to be rational, to believe what they ought to believe and want what they ought to want.
*Some elegant, generative, indefinitely extendable principles of representation must be responsible for how our brain has managed to solve the problem of combinatorial explosion as the scale of its complexity has increased.

== 3. Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology ==

* Chemistry has been shown to reduce, in some sense, to physics, and this is clearly a Good Thing.
* Folk psychology:
** We learn to use folk psychology as a vernacular social technology, a craft; but we don't learn it self-consciously as a theory. Our knowledge of it is like our knowledge of the grammar of our native tongue.
** What are beliefs? For folk psychology, roughly, they are information-bearing states of people that arise from perceptions and that, together with appropriately related desires, lead to intelligent action.
** Folk psychology seems to be a true theory, by and large, and hence is a candidate for incorporation into science.
** We use folk psychology all the time, to explain and predict each other's behavior; we attribute beliefs and desires to each other with confidence - and quite unselfconsciously - and spend a substantial portion of our waking lives formulating the world - not excluding ourselves - in these terms. Folk psychology is about as pervasive a part of our second nature as is our folk physics of middle-sized objects.
** It might best be viewed as a rationalistic calculus of interpretation and prediction - an idealizing, abstract, instrumentalistic interpretation method that has evolved because it works and works because we have evolved
** We approach each other as intentional systems where:
*** Our beliefs are those we ought to have - ie true and relevant to our lives
*** Our desires are those we ought to have - ie food, security, health, sex, wealth, power, influence, etc
*** Our behavior is those acts that it would be rational for us to do, given our beliefs and desires.
**The system works very well because we are pretty rational!
**It's a sort of logical behaviorism - given a belief p, a person is disposed to behave in certain ways under certain conditions.
*We seem to have an infinity of beliefs, and they seem not to be stored separately, but rather in relation to each other.
*Intentional system theory:
**Deals just with the performance specifications of believers while remaining silent on how the systems are to be implemented.
*Sub-personal cognitive psychology:
**The brain is a semantic engine; its task is to discover what its multifarious inputs mean, to discriminate them by their significance and "act accordingly" That's what brains are for.
**But the brain, as physiology or plain common sense shows us, is just a syntactic engine; all it can do is discriminate its inputs by their structural, temporal, and physical features and let its entirely mechanical activities be governed by these "syntactic" features of its inputs. That's all brains can do.
**Now how does the brain manage to get semantics from syntax?
***All one can hope to produce (all natural selection can have produced) are systems that seem to discriminate meanings by actually discriminating things (tokens of no doubt wildly disjunctive types) that co-vary reliably with meanings. Evolution has designed our brains not only to do this but to evolve and follow strategies of self-improvement in this activity during their individual lifetimes.
***It is the task of sub-personal cognitive psychology to prose and test models of such activity - of pattern recognition or stimulus generalization, concept learning, expectation, learning, goal-directed behavior, problem-solving - that not only produce a simulacrum of genuine content-sensitivity, but that do this in ways demonstrably like the way people's brains do it, exhibiting the same powers and the same vulnerabilities to deception, overload, and confusion.
**We must relate the microprocesses in the brain to the level of organism-environment interaction, development, and evolution, including social interaction as a particularly important part.
**Semantic properties are not just relational but super-relational, for the relation a particular vehicle of content, or token must bear in order to have content is not just a relation it bears to other similar things (eg other tokens, parts of tokens, sets of tokens, causes of tokens) but a relation between the token and the whole lief - and counterfactual life - of the organism it serves and that organism's requirements for survival and its evolutionary ancestry.
**for two things both to believe that cats eat fish they need not be physically similar in any specifiable way, but they must both be in a "functional" condition specifiable in principle in the most general functional language; they must share a Turing machine description according to which they are both in some particular logical state.

== 4. Making Sense of Ourselves ==

* Each of us is in most regards a sort of inveterate auto-psychologist, effortlessly inventing intentional interpretations of our own actions in an inseparable mix of confabulation, retrospective self-justification, and (on occasion, no doubt) good theorizing.
* Rationality is not deductive closure. Nor is it perfect logical consistency.
* Given the ubiquity of words, and our incessant working, playing, and fiddling with words, there is an inexhaustible and ever-growing supply of human artifacts composed of words: not just public utterances and inscriptions, but sentences running through our heads to be contemplated, endorsed, discarded, denied, memorized, avowed. These products of human activities are easily confused with beliefs (and desires and other mental states).
* One thing that happens when we are asked what we ourselves believe is that sentences of our natural languages arise in us as candidates for our endorsement and possible public expression.
* The self-questioning process that individuates belief expressions so crisply need not be revealing any psychologically important underlying individuation (or beliefs, presumably) but be just an artifact of the environmental demand for a particular sort of act.
* Churchland: A declarative utterance is a "one-dimensional projection - through the compound lens of Wernicke's and Broca's areas onto the idiosyncratic surface of the speaker's language - a 1D projection of a 4- or 5D 'solid" that is an element in his true kinematical state."

== 5. Beyond Belief ==

* Beliefs, standardly, are viewed as propositional attitudes.
* Propositions are:
** Sentence-like entities, constructed from parts according to a syntax.
** Sets of possible worlds
** Something like collections or arrangements of objects and properties in the world.
*Certainly some very efficient and elegant sort of compositionality accounts for the essentially limitless powers we have to perceive, think about, believe, intend... different things. Perhaps any possible universal system of representation must be recognizably sentential (ie, generating sentences, like a language).
*In general, the relations that exist between things in the world in virtue of the beliefs (and other psychological states) of believers are relations we have very good reasons to talk about, so we must have some theory or theories capable of asserting that such relations hold. No methodologically solipsistic theory will have that capacity, of course.
*One must be richly informed about, intimately connected with, the world at large, its occupants and properties, in order to be said with any propriety to have beliefs. All one's 'names' must be somewhat vivid. The idea that some beliefs, de dicto beliefs, have no vividness requirement is a symptom of the subliminal view of de dicto beliefs as mere mental sayings...
*The most promising issues (from this very long and complex paper):
**Different ways of thinking of something - None of the ways entails the existence of something of which one is thinking.
**The difference between episodic thinking and believing - At any time, we may have beliefs about many things we are unable to think about because we are temporarily unable to gain access to them (eg, the person who taught you long division).
**The difference between explicit and virtual representation - We may not consciously (or unconsciously) think of something but still have implicit belief about something (eg the tyre of a rental car)
**The difference between linguistically infected beliefs and the rest
**The difference between artifactual or transparently notional objects and other notional objects - we can imagine things and not all of those things we imagine are (or must remain) fictional.

Reflections:
*Four chief claims:
**Propositions - The two conflicting view of propositions, "propositions as sentence-like things" and "propositions as sets of possible worlds" are strongly incompatible.
***But if there is one thing the rest of academia needs from philosophers, it is a theory of propositions (or something like propositions). The term information is commonly used as a mass noun, as if information were some kind of substance that could be moved, stored, compressed, chopped up. Theorists in all kinds of disciplines pretend to know how to measure and characterize batches of this stuff, but in fact we have no sound and mutually recognized understanding of what information is and what kinds of parcels it should be measured in.
***A DVD can contain an entire encyclopedia or three hours of Bugs Bunny. The same amount of information is in each, but not the same amount of "semantic information".
***Propositions, as the ultimate medium of information transfer, as logically distinct, observer-independent, language-neutral morsels of fact (or fiction) continue to play a foundational role as atomic elements in many different theoretical investigations.
***Once one relaxes the grip of graspability by treating propositions as only indirectly and approximately "measuring" psychological states, they play their limited role rather well. So long as one recognizes that proposition talk is only a heuristic overlay, a useful - if sometimes treacherous - approximation that is systematically incapable of being rendered precise, one can get away with what is in essence the pretense that all informing can be modeled on telling - sending a dictum from A to B. What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain is not anything that one can capture whole in a sentence. But one can typically find a sentence that usefully distills the gist (not the essence in any stronger sense) of the informing to which one is referring. This sentence can be held to express, to a first approximation, the proposition at issue.
**Notional Worlds
**Russell's Principle - where you have to know what object you are making a judgment about - must be abandoned.
**De re/de dicto - There is no stable, coherent view of this distinction
*Philosophy of psychology driven by the concerns of philosophy of language seems to be a dead end (presumably because however opinions and thoughts are stored, it is not in a purely (or possibly in any way) linguistic manner.

== 6. Styles of Mental Representation ==

* In [[The Concept of Mind]] (1949), Gilbert Ryle attacked a vision of the mind he called the intellectualist myth. This is the idea that minds are composed mainly of such episodes as the thinking of private thoughts, the consultation of rules and recipes, the application of general truths to particular circumstances, and the subsequent deduction of implications about those particulars.
* Cognitive science has no allegiance to "privileged access", another of Ryle's bugbears. Indeed most of the mental representations that it talks of are presumed to be utterly inaccessible to the consciousness of the agent. It is a doctrine of unconscious mental representations for the most part. So this is not the intellectualism of the inner Cartesian theatre, with everything happening on the stage of consciousness; this is "backstage" intellectualism - and in the view of these new theorists, so much the better for it.
* Three ways of representing information:
** Explicitly - If and only if there actually exists in the functionally relevant place in the system a physically structured object, a formula or string or tokening of some members of a system (or "language") of elements for which there is a semantics or interpretation, and a provision (a mechanism of some sort) for reading or parsing the formula. Though exigent, this definition leaves room for systems that are not linear, sequential, sentence-like systems, but might, for instance, be "map-reading systems" or "diagram interpreters".
** Implicitly - If it is implied logically by something that is stored explicitly, including via axioms and definitions stored in a machine that can churn out theorems (as we can via Euclidean axioms). Here, importantly, it needn't take more space to store more implicit information. Here implicit depends on explicit
** Tacitly - Here explicit depends on implicit. This is what Ryle was getting at when he claimed that explicitly proving things depended on an agent's having a lot of know-how, which could not itself be explained in terms of the explicit representation in the agent of any rules or recipes, because to be able to manipulate those rules and recipes there would have to be an inner agent with the know-how to handle those explicit items - and that would lead to an infinite regress. At the bottom, Ryle saw, there has to be a system that merely has the know-how. If it can be said to represent its know-how at all, it must represent it not explicitly and not implicitly - in the sense just defined - but tacitly. The know-how has to be built into the system in some fashion that does not require it to be represented (explicitly) in the system. People often use the word "implicit" to describe such information-holding; what they mean is what I mean by "tacit".
*All these terms - "explicit", "potentially explicit", "implicit", and "tacit" - are to be distinguished from "conscious" and "unconscious". Thus what you consciously represent to yourself is at best indirect evidence of what might be explicitly represented in you unconsciously.
*So far as cognitive science is concerned, the important phenomena are the explicit unconscious mental representations.
*You can explicitly, consciously follow a rule (say in Bridge), but Ryle argues that this is not a good model for all of human mental activity. In contrast, the "intuitive player" may also follow the rule, but has never heard of it or consciously thought about it. Finally a player could know the rule but not slavishly follow and realize that there are exceptions to it.
*Rote memorization is the worst sort of classroom activity, but is the best model for cognitive science, because it decouples memory from understanding. We want our storers and manipulators to be stupider than our understander, otherwise we'll get into a Rylean regress.
*Could virtually all the backstage know-how be merely tacit in the organization of the system? How powerful can a system of tacit representation be?
*Ryle is the foe of internal representation, but he has the good sense to acknowledge what might be called peripheral explicit representation at the input and output boundaries of people.
*Practicing may somehow be an analogous process of partial self-design: it yields; like its analogue, a "device" that "obeys" the rules without consulting any expression of them.
*Transient tacit representation - All the rules are represented all the time, but depending on the state of the system, only one set of rules is tacitly represented as being followed at any time. For instance, an animal that is both aquatic and terrestrial obeys one set of rules when it is on land and another when it is in the water. Simply getting wet could be the trigger for changing internal state from one set of rules to the other.
**If elaborate perceptual analysis machinery drives the system into its various states, then there is no apparent limit to the specificity or complexity of the state of the world, for instance, that could be tacitly represented by the current state of such a system.
**Such systems of tacit representation would need no terms to be "translated by" the various terms in the theorists' attempts to capture the information tacitly represented by such states. For the whole point of tacit representation is that it is tacit! States of such a system get their semantic properties directly an only from their globally defined functional roles.
**As the number of states (each with its distinctive set of tacitly represented rules) grows, as a system becomes versatile enough to be driven into a great many significantly different control states, this profligacy demands that the design rely in one way or another on economies achieved via multiple use of resources.
**Changing states by editing and revising, one might say, instead of discarding and replacing. Economies of this sort require systematicity; the loci into which substitutions can be made have to have fixed ways of changing their functions as a function of the identity of the substitutends. The whole system thus does begin to look somewhat like a language, with counterparts for all the syntactical features mentioned at the outset.
**Should we say that such a system finally emerges as a truly explicit system of internal representation?

Reflections:
*If we probably do not need a language of thought, then, to get to and from the peripheries, do we need a language of thought to handle the most central control processes of higher animals (or just human beings)? Such "higher cognitive functions" as planning, problem solving, and "belief fixation" are intuitively the functions that involve thinking (as opposed to "mere" perceiving and acting). Here, if anywhere, the intellectualist vision should triumph.
*Nowhere in AI connectionist networks are any rules explicitly represented; they are, of course, tacitly represented in the emergent dispositional structure of the network, but nothin happens in the network which is anything like checking to see if a rule applies or looking up the target term in a table of exception - paradigms of the covert intellectualist activities Ryle disparaged.

== 7. Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethnology: The "Panglossian Paradigm" Defended ==

* The decision to conduct one's science in terms of beliefs, desires, and other "mentalistic" notions, the decision to adopt "the intentional stance" is not an unusual sort of decision in science.
* The decision to adopt the intentional stance banks on the soundness of some as yet imprecisely described concept of information called semantic information.
* Information in the semantic view is a perfectly real but very abstract commodity, the storage, transmission, and transformation of which is informally - but quite sure-footedly - recounted in ordinary talk in terms of beliefs and desires and the other states and acts philosophers call intentional.
* Intentionality, in philosophical jargon, is - in a word - aboutness. Some of the things, states, and events in the world have the interesting property of being about other things, states, and events; figuratively, they point to other things. It's the sense of conceiving as, seeing as, thinking of as that the intentional idioms focus on.
* The most familiar of such idioms are "believes that", "knows that", "respects (that)", "wants (it to be that)", "recognizes (that), "understands (that)". In short, the "mentalistic" vocabulary shunned by behaviorists and celebrated by cognitivists is quite well picked out by the logical test for referential opacity.
* Levels of intentional systems:
** First order - have beliefs and desires etc, but no beliefs and desires about beliefs and desires.
** Second order - have beliefs and desires (and no doubt other intentional states) about beliefs and desires (and other intentional states) - both those of others and its own.
** Third order - are capable of such states as "x wants y to believe that x believes he is alone."
*** Fourth order - might want you to think it understood you to be requesting that it leave.
* How high can humans go? Most of us can keep track of only about five or six orders, under the best of circumstances.
** These orders ascend what is intuitively a scale of intelligence; higher-order attributions strike us as much more sophisticated, much more human, requiring much more intelligence.
** Genuine communication, speech acts in the strong, human sense of the word, depend on at least three orders of intentionality in both speaker and audience.
** It has been speculated that the increasing complexity of mental representation required for the maintenance of systems of reciprocal altruism (and other complex social relations) led, in evolution, to a sort of brain-power arms race.
** The first iteration - to a second-order intentional system - is the crucial step in recursion. There seems to be no interesting difference between say a fourth and a fifth-order intentional system.
* I expect the results of the effort at intentional interpretations of monkeys, like the results of intentional interpretations of small children, to be riffled with the sorts of gaps and foggy places that are inevitable in the interpretation of systems that are, after all, only imperfectly rational.

Reflections:

* There is really no substitute, in the radical translation business, for going in and talking with the natives. You can test more hypotheses in half an hour of attempted chitchat than you can in a month of observation and unobtrusive manipulation.
* Vervets live in a world in which secrets are virtually impossible. Unlike orangutans and chimps, who frequently spend time along, vervets live in the open in close proximity to the other members of their groups and have no solitary projects of any scope. So it is a rare occasion indeed when one vervet is in a position to learn something that it alone knows and know that it alone knows.
* Without frequent opportunities to recognize that one know something that the others don't know, devious reasons for or against imparting information cannot even exist - let alone be recognized and acted upon.
* The problems of interpretation in psychology and the problems of interpretation in biology are the same problems, engendering the same prospects - and false hopes - of solution, the same confusions, the same criticisms and arguments.
* Psychologists can't do their work without the rationality assumption of the intentional stance, and biologists can't do their work without the optimality assumptions of adaptionist thinking.
* Without answers to "why" questions, we cannot begin to categorize what has happened into the right sorts of parts. The biologist who helps himself to even such an obviously safe functional category as eye, leg, or lung is already committed to assumptions about what is good, just as the psychologist who helps himself to the bland categories of avoidance or recognition is committed to assumptions about what is rational.
* We take on optimality assumptions not because we naively think that evolution has made this the best of all possible worlds, but because we must be interpreters, if we are to make any progress at all, and interpretation requires the invocation of optimality.
* I stick to my guns:
** Adaptationist thinking in biology is precisely as unavoidable, as wise, as fruitful - and as risky - as mentalist thinking in psychology and cognitive science generally.
** Proper adaptationist thinking just is adopting a special version of the intentional stance in evolutionary thinking - uncovering the free-floating rationales of designs in nature.
* Evolutionary explanations are essentially historical narratives

== 8. Evolution, Error, and Intentionality ==

* An encyclopedia has derived intentionality. In contains information about thousands of things in the world, but only insofar as it is a device designed and intended for our use.
* The doctrine of original intentionality: Any computer program, any robot we might design and build, no matter how strong the illusion we may create that is has become a genuine agent, could never be a truly autonomous thinker with the same sort of original intentionality we enjoy.
* Either you must abandon meaning rationalism - the idea that you are unlike the fledgling cuckoo not only in having access, but also in having privileged access to your meanings - or you must abandon the naturalism that insists that you are, after all, just a product of natural selection, whose intentionality is thus derivative and hence potentially indeterminate.
* Natural selection does not consciously seek out these rationales, but when it stumbles on them, the brute requirements of replication ensure that it "recognizes" their value. The illusion of intelligence is created because of our limited perspective on the process; evolution may well have tried all the "stupid moves" in addition to the "smart moves", but the stupid moves, being failures, disappeared from view. All we see is the unbroken string of triumphs. When we set ourselves the task of explaining why those were the triumphs, we uncover the reasons for things - the reasons already "acknowledged" by the relative success of organisms endowed with those things.
* The original reasons, and the original responses that "tracked" them, were not ours, or our mammalian ancestors' but Nature's. Nature appreciated these reasons without representing them. And the design process itself is the source of our own intentionality. We, the reason-representers, the self-representers, are a late and specialized product.
* So if there is to be any original intentionality - original just in the sense of being derived from no other, ulterior source - the intentionality of natural selection deserves the honor.
* There is no ultimate User's Manual in which the real functions, and real meanings, of biological artifacts are officially represented. There is no more bedrock for what we might call original functionality than there is for its cognitivistic scion, original intentionality. You can't have realism about meanings without realism about functions. As Gould notes, "we may not be flattered" - especially when we apply the moral to our sense of our own authority about meanings - but we have no other reason to disbelieve it.

== 9. Fast Thinking ==

* Searle: "the man in the [Chinese] room has all the syntax we can give him, but he does not thereby acquire the relevant semantics."
* Searle's propositions:
** Proposition 1: Programs are purely formal (ie syntactical).
** Proposition 2: Syntax is neither equivalent to nor sufficient by itself for semantics.
** Proposition 3: Minds have mental contents (ie semantic contents).
** Conclusion 1: Having a program - any program by itself - is neither sufficient for nor equivalent to having a mind.
*Dennett's two propositions:
**Searle: No computer program by itself could ever be sufficient to produce what an organic human brain, with its particular causal powers, demonstrably can produce: mental phenomena with intentional content.
**Dennett: There is no way an electronic digital computer could be programmed so that it could produce what an organic human brain, with its particular causal powers, demonstrably can produce: control of the swift, intelligent, intentional activity exhibited by normal human beings.
*It is no news that the brain gives every evidence of having a massively parallel architecture - millions if not billions of channels wide, all capable of simultaneous activity.
*This is what makes the causal powers Searle imagines so mysterious: they have, by his own admission, no telltale effect on behavior (internal or external) - unlike the causal powers I take so seriously: the powers required to guide a body through life, seeing, hearing, acting, talking, deciding, investigating, and so on.
*Searle has apparently confused a claim about the underivability of semantics from syntax with a claim about the underivability of the consciousness of semantics from syntax. For Searle, the idea of genuine understanding, genuine "semanticity" as he often calls it, is inextricable from the idea of consciousness. He does not so much as consider the possibility of unconscious semanticity.
*Embodied, running syntax - the right program on a suitably fast machine - is sufficient for derived intentionality, and that is the only kind of semantics there is.
*There is no such thing as intrinsic intentionality - especially if this is viewed, as Searle can now be seen to require, as a proerty to which the subject has conscious, privileged access.

== 10. Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast ==

* Two proposed principles of interpretation:
** Normative Principle - (rationalizers) Attribute to a creature the propositional attitudes it ought to have given its circumstances.
** Projective Principle - (projectors) Attribute the propositional attitudes one supposed one would have oneself in those circumstances.
*Quine's double standard - strictly speaking there are no such things as beliefs, even if speaking as if there were is a practical necessity.
*Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so it often takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
*Philosophers, being roughly rational intentional systems, are gradually being persuaded that Dennett is right. But that is no doubt an illusion of perspective.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

The Interpretation of Dreams

2026-07-26T15:46:28Z

Robert.adlington:

This is the first in a sequence of Freud readings, recommended by Liz

== VII: The Psychology of the Dream-Processes ==

=== A: The Forgetting of Dreams ===

* An observation which I have been able to make in the course of preparing this manuscript has shown me that dreams are no more forgotten than other mental acts and can be compared, by no means to their disadvantage, with other mental functions in respect of their retention in memory.
* It is, indeed, not easy to form any conception of the abundance of the unconscious trains of thought, all striving to find expression, which are active in our minds.
* The dream-thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.
* We must conclude that during the night the resistance loses some of its power, though we know it does not lose the whole of it, since we have shown the part it plays in the formation of dreams as a distorting agent.

=== B: Regression ===

* Dreams are psychical acts of as much significance as any others; their motive force is in every instance a wish seeking fulfilment; the fact of their not being recognizable as wishes and their many peculiarities and absurdities are due to the influence of the psychical censorship to which they have been subjected during the process of their formation; apart from the necessity of evading this censorship, other factors which have contributed to their formation are a necessity for the condensation of their psychical material, a regard for the possibility of its being represented in sensory images and - though not invariably - a demand that the structure of the dream shall have a rational and intelligible exterior.
* The most general and the most striking psychological characteristic of the process of dreaming: a though, and as a rule a thought of something that is wished, is objectified in the dream, is represented as a scene, or, as it seems to us, is experienced.
* Dreams make use of the present tense in the same manner and by the same right as day-dreams. The present tense is the one in which wishes are represented as fulfilled.
* It is not only in dreams that such transformations of ideas into sensory images occur: they are also found in hallucinations and visions, which may appear as independent entities, so to say, in health or as symptoms in the psychoneuroses.

* We will picture the mental apparatus as a compound instrument, to the components of which we will give the name of agencies or systems.
* These systems may perhaps stand in a regular spatial relation to one another, in the same kind of way in which the various systems of lenses in a telescope are arranged behind one another.
* All our psychical activity starts from stimuli (whether internal or external) and ends in innervations (the transmission of energy into a system of nerves or specifically into an efferent system - a process tending towards discharge)
* The psychical apparatus must be constructed like a reflex apparatus. Reflex processes remain the model of every psychical function.
* A trace is left in our psychical apparatus of the perceptions which impinge upon it. This we may describe as a "memory-trace"; and to the function relating to it we give the name of "memory". If we are in earnest over our plan of attaching psychical processes to systems, memory-traces can only consist in permanent modifications of the elements of the systems.
* We shall suppose that a system in the very front of the apparatus receives the perceptual stimuli but retains no trace of them and thus has no memory, while behind it there lies a second system which transforms the momentary excitations of the first system into permanent traces.
* Our perceptions are linked with one another in our memory - first and foremost according to simultaneity of occurrence. We speak of this fact as "association".
* If the perceptual system has no memory whatever, it cannot retain any associative traces; the separate perceptual elements would be intolerably obstructed in performing their function if the remnant of an earlier connection were to exercise an influence upon a fresh perception. We must therefore assume the basis of association lies in the mnemonic systems.
* Association would thus consist in the fact that, as a result of a diminution in resistances and of the laying down of facilitating paths, an excitation is transmitted from a given mnemonic element more readily to one mnemonic element than to another.
* Closer consideration will show the necessity for supposing the existence not of one but of several such mnemonic elements, in which one and the same excitation, transmitted by the perceptual elements, leaves a variety of different permanent records. The first of these systems will naturally contain the record of association in respect to simultaneity in time; while the same perceptual material will be arranged in the later systems in respect to other kinds of coincidence, so that one of these later systems, for instance, will record relations of similarity, and so on with the others.
* It is the perceptual system, which is without the capacity to retain modifications and is thus without memory, that provides our consciousness with the whole multiplicity of sensory qualities. On the other hand, our memories - not excepting those which are most deeply stamped on our minds - are in themselves unconscious.
* They can be made conscious; but there can be no doubt that they can produce all their effects while in an unconscious condition. What we describe as our "character" is based on the memory-traces of our impressions; and moreover, the impressions which have had the greatest effect on us - those of our earliest youth - are precisely the ones which scarcely ever become conscious. But if memories become conscious once more, they exhibit no sensory quality or a very slight one in comparison with perceptions.
* The critical agency, we concluded, stands in a closer relation to consciousness than the agency criticized: it stands like a screen between the latter and consciousness. Further, we found reasons for identifying the critical agency with the agency which directs our waking life and determines our voluntary, conscious actions. If, in accordance with our assumptions, we replace these agencies by systems, then our last conclusion must lead us to locate the critical system at the motor end of the apparatus.
* We will describe the last of the systems at the motor end as "the preconscious", to indicate that the excitatory processes occurring in it can enter consciousness without further impediment provided that certain other conditions are fulfilled: for instance, that they reach a certain degree of intensity, that the function which can only be described as "attention" is distributed in a particular way, and so on. This is at the same time the system which holds the key to voluntary movement.
* We will describe the system that lies behind it as "the unconscious", because it has no access to consciousness except via the preconscious, in passing through which its excitatory process is obliged to submit to modifications.
* When we consider the dream-wish, we shall find that the motive force for producing dreams is supplied by the Ucs; and owing to this latter factor we shall take the unconscious system as the starting-point of dream-formation.
* This path leading through the preconscious to consciousness is barred to dream-thoughts during the daytime by the censorship imposed by resistance. During the night they are able to obtain access to consciousness; but the question arises as to how they do so and thanks to what modification.
* The only way in which we can describe what happens in hallucinatory dreams is by saying that the excitation moves in a retrogressive direction. Instead of being transmitted towards the motor end of the apparatus it moves towards the sensory end and finally reaches the perceptual system. If we describe as "progressive" the direction taken by psychical processes arising from the unconscious during waking life, then we may speak of dreams as having a "regressive" character.
* This regression, then, is undoubtedly one of the psychological characteristics of the process of dreaming. but we must remember that it does not occur only in dreams. Intentional recollection and other constituent processes of our normal thinking involve a retrogressive movement in the psychical apparatus from a complex ideational act back to the raw material of the memory-traces underlying it.
* In regression, the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved into its raw material.
* During the day there is a continuous current from the perceptual system flowing in the direction of motor activity; but this current ceases at night and could no longer form an obstacle to a current of excitation flowing in the opposite sense.
* Three kinds of regression (where what is older is also more primitive and nearer to perception):
** Topographical - reversal of perception to movement flow
** Temporal - harking back to older psychical structures
** Formal - where primitive forms of expression and representation take the place of the usual ones
* Dreaming is, on the whole, an example of regression to the dreamer's earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it, and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.
* Behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a picture of a phylogenetic childhood - a picture of the development of the human race, of which the individual's development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation.
* Nietzsche: In dreams, "some primeval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path."

=== C: Wish-Fulfilment ===

* Aristotle: a dream is thinking that persists in the state of sleep.
* Four origins for wishes:
** Aroused during the day and not satisfied - though as adults we are more and more inclined to renounce as unprofitable to form and retain such intense wishes as children know
** Aroused during the day and repudiated
** Emerges from the suppressed part of the mind at night - unconscious wishes are always on the alert, ready at any time to find their way to expression when an opportunity arises for allying themselves with an impulse from the conscious and for transferring their own great intensity on to the latter's lesser one. These unconscious wishes are paths which have been laid down once and for all, which never fall into disuse and which, whenever an unconscious excitation re-cathects them, are always ready to conduct the excitatory process to discharge. If I may use a simile, they are only capable of annihilation in the same sense as the ghosts in the underworld of the Odyssey - ghosts which awoke to new life as soon as they tasted blood.
** Impulses that arise during the night (thirst, sexual needs, etc)
*A wish which is represented in a dream must be an infantile one. In the case of adults it originates from the Ucs, in the case of children, where there is as yet no division or censorship between the Pcs and the Ucs, or where that division is only gradually being set up, it is an unfulfilled, unrepressed wish from waking life.
*The mechanism of dream-formation would in general be greatly clarified if instead of the opposition between "conscious" and "unconscious" we were to speak of that between the "ego" and the "repressed".
*The apparatus's efforts are directed towards keeping itself so far as possible free from stimuli; consequently its first structure followed the plan of a reflex apparatus, so that any sensory excitation impinging on it could be promptly discharge along a motor path.
*The aim of the first psychical activity was to produce a "perceptual identity" - a repetition of the perception which was linked with the satisfaction of the need.
*Inhibition of the regression and the subsequent diversion of the excitation become the business of a second system, which is in control of voluntary movement - which for the first time, that is, makes use of movement for purposes remembered in advance.

=== D: Arousal by Dreams - The Function of Dreams - Anxiety-Dreams ===

* Consciousness, which we look upon in the light of a sense organ for the apprehension of psychical qualities, is capable in waking life of receiving excitations from two directions:
** From the periphery of the whole apparatus, the perceptual system
** Pleasure and unpleasure, which prove to be almost the only psychical quality attaching to transpositions of energy in the inside of the apparatus. These releases of pleasure and unpleasure automatically regulate the course of the cathetic process.
* In order to make more delicately adjusted performances possible, it later became necessary to make the course of ideas less dependent upon the presence or absence of unpleasure. For this purpose the Pcs system needed to have qualities of its own which could attract consciousness; and it seems highly probable that it obtained them by linking the preconscious processes with the mnemic system of indications of speech, system not without quality.
* By means of the qualities of that system, consciousness, which had hitherto been a sense organ for perceptions alone, also became a sense organ for a portion of our thought-processes. Now therefore, there are, as it were, two sensory surfaces, one directed towards perception and the other towards the preconscious thought-processes.
* The dream is treated by the Pcs just like any other perceptual content; it is met by the same anticipatory ideas, in so far as its subject-matter allows.
* Unconscious wishes always remain active. They represent paths which can always be traversed, whenever a quantity of excitation makes use of them. Indeed it is a prominent feature of unconscious processes that they are indescructible. In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten.
* Dreaming has taken on the task of bringing back under control of the preconscious the excitation in the Ucs which has been left free; in so doing, it discharges the Ucs excitation, serves it as a safety-valve and at the same time preserves sleep of the preconscious in return for a small expenditure of waking activity.

=== E: The Primary and Secondary Processes - Repression ===

* The effortless and regular avoidance by the psychical process of the memory or anything that had once been distressing affords us the prototype and first example of psychical repression.
* The second system can only cathect an idea if it is in a position to inhibit any development of unpleasure that may proceed from it.
* I propose to describe
** The psychical process of which the first system alone admits as the "primary process" (free, mobile psychical energy)
** The process which results from the inhibition imposed by the second system as the "secondary process" (bound, quiescent energy)
* All thinking is no more than a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction (a memory which has been adopted as a purposive idea) to an identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to attain once more through an intermediate stage of motor experiences. Thinking must concern itself with the connecting paths between ideas, without being led astray by the intensities of those ideas.
* The primary processes are present in the mental apparatus from the first, while it is only during the course of life that the secondary processes unfold, and come to inhibit and overlay the primary ones; it may even by that their complete domination is not attained until the prime of life.
* In consequence of the belated appearance of the secondary processes, the core of our being, consisting of unconscious wishful impulses, remains inaccessible to the understanding and inhibition of the preconscious; the part played by the latter is restricted once and for all to directing along the most expedient paths the wishful impulses that arise from the unconscious.

=== F: The Unconscious and Consciousness - Reality ===

* We may speak of:
** An unconscious thought seeking to convey itself into the preconscious so as to be able then to force its way through into consciousness. ("to force a way through")
** A preconscious thought being represses or driven out and then taken over by the unconscious ("to repress")
* Ideas, thoughts, and psychical structures in general must never be regarded as localized in organic elements of the nervous system but rather, as one might say, between them, where resistances and facilitations provide the corresponding correlates.
* The unconscious is the larger sphere, which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious.
* The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.
* We are probably inclined greatly to overestimate the conscious character of intellectual and artistic production as well. Accounts given to us by some of the most highly productive men, such as Goethe and Helmholtz, show rather that what is essential and new in their creations came to them without premeditation and as an almost ready-made whole.
* There are two kinds of unconscious, which have not yet been distinguished by psychologists. Both of them are unconscious in the sense used by psychology; but in our sense one of them, which we term the Ucs, is also inadmissible to consciousness, while we term the other the Pcs because its excitations - after observing certain rules, it is true, and perhaps only after passing a fresh censorship, though nonethelss without regard to the Ucs - are able to reach consciousness.
* The system Pcs stands like a screen between the system Ucs and consciousness. It not merely bars access to consciousness, it also controls access to the power of voluntary movement and has at its disposal for distribution a mobile cathetic energy, a part of which is familiar to us in the form of attention.
* But what part is there left to be played in our scheme by consciousness, which was once so omnipotent and hid all else from view? Only that of a sense organ for the perception of psychical qualities.
* In its mechanical properties we regard this system as resembling the perceptual systems Pcpt: as being susceptible to excitation by qualities but incapable of retaining traces of alterations - that is to say, as having no memory.
* The psychical apparatus, which is turned towards the external world with its sense-organ of the Pcpt systems, is itself the external world in relation to the sense-organ of the Consciousness, whose teleological justification resides in this circumstance.
* Excitatory material flows in to the Consciousness sense-organ from two directions; from the Pcpt system, whose excitation, determined by qualities, is probably submitted to a fresh revision before it becomes a conscious sensation, and from the interior of the apparatus itself, whose quantitative processes are felt qualitatively in the pleasure-unpleasure series when, subject to certain modifications, they make their way to consciousness.
* By perceiving new qualities, Cs makes a new contribution to directing the mobile quantities of cathexis and distributing them in an expedient fashion. By the help of its perception of pleasure and unpleasure it influences the discharge of the cathexes within what is otherwise an unconscious apparatus operating by means of the displacement of quantities. It seems probable that in the first instance the unpleasure principle regulates the displacement of cathexes automatically. But it is quite possible that consciousness of these qualities may introduce in addition a second and more discriminating regulation, which is even able to oppose the former one, and which perfects the efficiency of the apparatus by enabling it, in contradiction to its original plan, to cathect and work over even what is associated ith the release of unpleasure.
* Thought processes are in themselves, without quality, except for the pleasureable and unpleasurable excitations which accompany them, and which, in view of their possible disturbing effect upon thinking, must be kept within bounds. In order that thought-processes may acquire quality, they are associated in human beings with verbal memories, whose residues of quality are sufficient to draw the attention of consciousness to them and to endow the process of thinking with a new mobile cathexis from consciousness.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

The Hidden Spring

2026-07-26T15:46:12Z

Robert.adlington:

== 1. The Stuff of Dreams ==
* Two puzzles that have bedevilled thinkers for centuries:
** The mind/body problem - How the mind relates to the body, or how the brain gives rise to the mind.
** The problem of other minds - What can we tell about what happens in other people's minds.
*In the first half of the 20th C, behaviorism worked with classical conditioning and operant conditioning (the Law of Effect)
*In the second half, behavorism was gradually eclipsed by "cognitive" psychology, which formulates models of the information processing that goes on within minds. It suggests that the mind is a function rather than a structure. The software of the mind is implemented by the hardware of the brain and could be implemented elsewhere. Both brains and computers perform:
**Memory functions (they encode and store information)
**Perceptual functions (they classify patterns of incoming information by comparing them with stored information)
**Executive functions (they execute decisions about what to do in response to such information)
*In parallel with cognitive psychology developed "cognitive neuroscience", which focuses on the hardware of the mind.
*Paradoxical sleep, where the brain is physiologically aroused despite being fast asleep.
*The whole sleep/waking cycle - including REM sleep and dreams as well as the different stages of non-REM sleep - is orchestrated by a small number of brainstem nuclei interacting with each other.
== 2. Before and After Freud ==
* Freud argued that the erratic train of our conscious thoughts can be explained only if we assume implicit intervening links of which we are unaware. This gave rise to the notion of latent mental functions and, in turn, to Freud's famous conjecture of "unconscious" intentionality.
* He concluded that what ultimately underpinned feelings were bodily needs; that human mental life, no less that that of animals, was driven by the biological imperatives to survive and reproduce. These imperatives, for Freud, provided the link between the feeling mind and the physical body.
* Freud wanted to find metapsychological functional laws. Trying to skip over the functional level of analysis, jumping directly from psychology to physiology, is nowadays called the localisationist fallacy.
* Freud's "project" spoke of the forebrain as a sympathetic ganglion monitoring and regulating the needs of the body and of these needs as the driving force of mental life, "the mainspring of the psychical mechanism":
** Drive - the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. He described the causal mechanisms by which drives become intentional cognition as an "economics of nerve-force".
** "The Id, cut off from the external world, has a world of perception of its own. It detects with extraordinary acuteness certain changes in its interior, especially oscillations in the tension of its drive needs, and these changes become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series. It is hard to say, to be sure, by what means and with the help of what sensory terminal organs these perceptions come about. But it is an established fact that self-perceptions - coenaesthetic feelings and feelings of pleasure-unpleasure - govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle."
** "What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign to the system Pcpt-Consciousness a position in space. It must lie on the borderline between inside and outside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems.
*For Freud, clearly, conscious feelings, no less than perceptions, are generated in the "ego" (the part of the mind that he identified with the cortex), not in the unconscious "id" - which I was now obliged to locate in the brainstem and hypothalmus. In short, it seemed that Freud got the functional relationship between the "id" (brainstem) and the "ego" (cortex) the wrong way round, at least insofar as feelings are concerned. He thought the perceiving ego was conscious and the feeling id was unconscious. Could he have got his model of the mind upside down?
== 3. The Cortical Fallacy ==
* Hydranencephalic children are born without a cortex.
* Decorticated mammals exhibit a remarkable persistence of coherent, goal-oriented behavior that is consistent with feelings and consciousness. In many respects, decorticate mammals are in fact more active, emotional and responsive than normal ones.
* Information from the sense organs is fed not only to the cortex but also to the superior colliculi of the brainstem, via a set of subcortical connections.
* Two principal meanings of the term consciousness:
** Consciousness as the waking state - A necessary condition for consciousness in the second sense
** Consciousness as experience
*The way in which ideas become conscious in response to an external stimulus was called apperception (which roughly means perceiving the present through the lens of past experience).
*Meynert in 1884 identified the mind with the totality of memory images of objects produced by projection of the sensory-motor periphery onto the cortex plus transcortical associations between them and those memory images that constituted abstract ideas.
*Penfield and Jasper concluded that cortical resections do not interrupt sentient being; they merely deprive patients of certain forms of information.
== 4. What is Experienced? ==
* The scientific evidence showing that we are unaware of most of what we perceive and learn is now overwhelming. Perception and memory are not inherently conscious brain functions.
* If the cortex is not connected directly with the body periphery, but rather via intermediate subcortical links, then the memory images deposited in the cortex cannot be literal projections of the world outside. They must be the end products of multi-stage information processing.
* It makes no sense, Freud argued, to draw an artificial line between the subcortical and cortical parts of the processing and claim that only the final product is "mental".
* Freud concluded that both conscious and unconscious memory images are formed in sympathy with the demands of the body - that we only perceptually represent and learn about the outside world because we must meet our biological needs there.
* Patients and research participants are conscious of their feelings; they are unconscious only of where the feelings came from. Apparently alone among mental functions, feeling is necessarily conscious.
* What turns up in consciousness? "Representations" of the outside world and feelings:
** About what is going on in the world, about our thoughts about that world, about ourselves, including feelings that seem to be reports on the conditions of our bodies.
** Free-floating feelings, the emotions and moods that qualify our experience of the world and shape our behavior within it. Sometimes they register as bodily sensations; still, many moods seem attributable neither to the condition of our bodies not to anything we can put our fingers on in the world outside. Isn't consciousness full of feelings like this? And yet, to an amazing degree, neuroscientists searching for an explanation of consciousness have ignored them.
*Feeding behavior is regulated by two interacting brain mechanisms: a "homeostatic" system, which regulates energy stores, and a "hedonic" system, which mediates appetite. And just as with bodily affects like hunger, might not the prohibition of emotional words like "sadness" and "fear" delay the development of antidepressant and anti-anxiety treatments?
*Feelings are real, and we know about them because they permeate our consciousness. They are, in fact, for the reasons I will now explain, the wellspring of sentient being - in a sense that seems to me barely metaphorical. From their origin in some of the most ancient strata of the brain, they irrigate the dead soil of unconscious representations and bring them to mental life
== 5. Feelings ==
* Isn't this how our feelings seem to motivate us, somewhere below the threshold of our awareness?
* Vasovagal syncope causes you to faint because your brain reacts to something alarming, usually the sight of blood or some other perceived risk of physical injury. This trigger (registered by the amygdala) activates the solitary nucleus in your brainstem, which causes your heart rate and blood pressure to drop suddenly. That in turn leads to reduced perfusion of your brain; and you lose consciousness.
* Why do we have this innate reflex? It reduces blood flow and thereby staunches haemorrhaging, in anticipation of injury. It is only in us humans that the reflex causes fainting, due to our upright posture and large brains, which requires more cardiac effort.
* Respiratory control is normally automatic: so long as the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood stay within viable bounds, you don't have to be aware of your breathing in order to breathe. When blood gases exceed these normal limits, however, respiratory control intrudes upon consciousness in the form of an acute feeling called "air hunger". Unexpected blood gas values are an indication that action is required. It is urgently necessary to remove an airway obstruction or to get out of a carbon-dioxide-filled room. At this point, respiratory control enters your consciousness, via an inner warning system that we experience as alarm.
* The simplest forms of feeling - hunger, thirst, sleepiness, muscle fatigue, nausea, coldness, urinary urgency, the need to defecate, and the like - might not seem like affects, but that is what they are. What distinguishes affective states from other mental states is that they are hedonically valenced: they feel good or bad. This is how affective sensations such as hunger and thirst differ from sensory ones like vision and hearing. Sight and sound do not possess intrinsic value - but feeling does.
* Pleasure and unpleasure tell you how you are doing in relation to your biological needs. Valence reflects the value system underwriting all biological life, namely that it is good to survive and to reproduce and bad not to do so.
** Hunger feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it by eating
** A distended bowel feels bad, and it feels good to relieve it be defecating
** Pain feels bad, and it feels good to withdraw from the source of it
** Separation distress feels bad and we escape it by seeking reunion
** Fear feels bad and we escape it by fleeing the danger (and sometimes by fainting
*Feelings make creatures like us do something necessary. In that sense, they are measures of demands for work.
*In the jargon of control theory, blood gas imbalances, temperature undershoots, missing caregivers and approaching predators are "error signals," and the actions they give rise to are meant to correct the errors.
*Affects are how we become aware of our drives; they tell us how well or badly things are going in relation to the specific needs they measure.
*If you swapped subjective redness with blueness there would be no consequences, but if you swapped the feeling of fear with separation distress (or hunger with urinary urgency), it would kill you.
*It makes a difference whether a need is felt or not. Your water-to-salt ratio may be sliding all the time, in the background, but when you feel it, you want to drink. You might objectively be in danger without noticing it, but when you feel it you look for ways to escape.
*Needs are different from affects. Bodily needs can be registered and regulated autonomically, as in the examples of cardiovascular and respiratory control, thermoregulation and glucose metabolism. These are called vegetative functions: there is nothing conscious about them. Hence the term autonomic reflex. Consciousness enters the equation only when needs are felt. This is when they make demands on you for work.
*Emotional needs, too, can be managed automatically, by means of behavioral stereotypes such as "instincts" (inborn survival and reproductive strategies, which Freud placed at the center of his conception of the unconscious mind). But emotional needs are usually more difficult to satisfy than bodily ones. That is why the feelings they evoke are typically more sustained. A feeling disappears from consciousness when the need it announces has been met.
*Felt needs are prioritized over unfelt ones. Priorities are determined by the relative strengths of your needs (the size of the error signals) in relation to the range of opportunities afforded by your current circumstances.
*When you become aware of a need, when it is felt, it governs your voluntary behavior. Choices can be made only if they are grounded in a value system - the thing that determines goodness vs badness. Otherwise, your responses to unfamiliar events would be random.
*You decide what to do and what not to do on the basis of the felt consequences of your actions. This is the Law of Affect. Voluntary behavior, guided by affect, thereby bestows an enormous adaptive advantage over involuntary behavior: it liberates us from the shackles of automaticity and enables us to survive in unpredicted situations.
*The fact that voluntary behavior must be conscious reveals the deepest biological function of feeling: it guides our behavior in conditions of uncertainty. It enables us to determine in the heat of the moment whether one course of action is better or worse than another.
*Natural selection determined our autonomous survival mechanisms, but once feelings evolved - that is the unique ability we have as complex organisms to register our own states - something utterly new appeared in the universe - subjective being.
*I think the "dawn of consciousness" involved nothing more elaborate than valenced somatic sensations and human emotions are complex versions of the same type of thing. They too are ultimately "error" signals which register deviations from your biologically preferred states, which tell you whether the steps you are taking are making things better or worse for you.
*There are seven emotional affects that can be reliably reproduced in all mammals. Many can be evoked in birds too, and some in all vertebrates, suggesting that they are at least 200m years old. These are the basic ingredients of the entire human emotional repertoire.
*Our reflexes and instincts provide rough-and-ready tools for survival and reproductive success, but they cannot possibly equip us adequately for the multiplicity of unpredicted situations and environments that we find ourselves in.
*The whole of psychoanalytic theory rests un the insight that if you take the trouble to find them, implicit instinctual tendencies can always be discerned behind explicit intentions. These are the seven:
**Lust - We need to reproduce, at least on average. That is why sex became subjectively pleasurable in the first place, through natural selection. To satisfy sxual needs, we must supplement our innate knowledge with other skills acquired through learning. This explains the wide variety of sexual activities be indulge in, alongside the "average" form that was bequeathed by natural selection
**Seeking - Generates exploratory foraging behavior, accompanied by a conscious feeling state that may be characterized as expectancy, interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, or optimism. Almost everything we living creatures need is "out there"; through foraging we learn, almost accidentally, what things in the world satisfy each of our needs. In this way we encode their cause-and-effect relations. Seeking proactively engages with uncertainty. It is our default emotion and we tend towards this generalized sense of interest in the world. It can be aroused even during sleep by demands made upon the mind for work, leading to problem-solving activities which must be guided by conscious feelings. Hence we dream.
**Rage - Is triggered by anything that gets between us and whatever could otherwise meet our current needs - and causes our consciousness to feel irritated frustration up to blind fury. The feelings tell you how you are doing, whether things are going well or badly, as you try to rid yourself of an obstacle - one that is often simultaneously trying to get rid of you. If we couldn't become frustrated, irritated or angry, we wouldn't be inclined to fight for what we need; in which case, sooner or later, we'd be dead. Conscious thinking requires cortex. But the feelings that guide it do not. The circuit mediating rage is almost entirely subcortical, and, like all the other affective circuits, its final destination is the brainstem PAG.
**Fear - The contextual factors separating fight from flight are encoded in the amygdala, which mediates both rage and fear. We humans fear dangers like heights, dark places and creatures that slither and crawl towards us, and we avoid them by the same instincts and reflexes as other mammals: freezing and fleeing. Escape behavior are facilitated by rapid breathing, increased heart rate and redirection of blood from the gut to the muscles (hence the loss of bowel control). The conscious feeling of fear tells you whether you are heading towards or away from safety. In addition to instinctual fears, we must learn what else to fear and what else to do when fearful. And once you have learned to fear something - especially if you do not consciously know why - it is very difficult to unlearn. Fear memories are "indelible".
**Panic/Grief - Panic can frequently combine with anger: "where is she?" - The feelings I want here to be close but I also want to destroy her can lead to Guilt, a secondary emotion which inhibits Rage. Depression is characterized by the mirror opposites of the feelings that characterize Seeking. The mental anguish of loss is an elaboration of the bodily mechanisms for sensory pain.
**Care - The maternal instinct exists in all of us to some degree, mediated by chemicals found at higher levels (on average) in females. There is an overlap between the brain chemistry and circuitry for Care, Panic/Grief and female-typical Lust.
**Play - We need to play. It is the medium through which territories are claimed and defended, social hierarchies are formed, and in-group and out-group boundaries are forged and maintained. All juvenile mammals engage in vigorous rough-and-tumble. The associated feeling state is equally universal: fun. Biologically speaking, Play is about finding the limits of what is socially tolerable and permissible. Dominance: The 60:40 rule of reciprocity states that the submissive playmate continues playing so long as they are given sufficient opportunities to take the lead. We humans engage in preten play in which the participants try out different social roles with every-present status and power hierarchies. Play requires (and conditions) you to take into account the feelings of others. It is a major vehicle for developing empathy. Play hovers between all the other instinctual emotions - trying them out and learning their limits - and it probably recruits all parts of the brain.
***The as if quality of Play suggests it may even be the precursor of thinking in general. Some scientists believe that dreaming is nocturnal play.
*Thinking is virtual action; the capacity to try things out in imagination; a capacity which, for obvious biological reasons, saves lives.
*Feeling is all that is required to guide voluntary behavior.
*It is not the emotions that are unconscious so much as the cognitive things they are about.
*Secondary emotions (guilt, shame, envy, jealousy) arise from conflictual situations and are learnt constructs - hybrids of emotion and cognition.
*Learning how to reconcile the various emotional needs with each other in flexible ways determines the bedrock of mental health and maturity. To manage life's problems we use emotions as a compass.
== 6. The Source ==
* The reticulate (net-like) core of the brainstem must be about 525m years old, because it is shared by all vertebrates - from fishes to humans.
* Most antidepressants - serotonin boosters - act on neurons whose cell bodies are located in a region of the reticular activating system called the raphe nuclei.
* The reticulate core of the brainstem generates affect.
* The neurological sources of affect and of consciousness are, at a minimum, deeply entangled with one another, and they may in fact be the very same machinery.
* An EEG produces graphic tracings of cortical electrical activity:
** Delta (2Hz) waves - When the cortex is unstimulated, it produces a series of high-amplitude waves occurring roughly twice a second.
** Theta (4-7Hz) or Alpha (8-13Hz) waves - When the cortex is stimulated by the reticular activating system in the absence of sensory input, it produces desynchronized or erratic waves.
** Beta (14-24) or Gamma (25-100) waves - When the cortex is actively processing external information. Gamma is the rhythm most commonly associated with consciousness.
*The cortex becomes conscious only to the extent that it is aroused by the brainstem.
*Two ways in which neurons communicate with each other:
**Synaptic transmission - Neurotransmitters (glutamate and aspartate are excitatory and gamma-aminobutyric or GABA is inhibitory) are passed from one synapse to the next. This transmission is target, binary (yes/no), and rapid.
**Post-synaptic modulation - Neuromodulators spread diffusely through the brain. Instead of passing messages along specific "channels", they wash over swathes of the network, thereby regulating the overall "state" of the cortex.
*The distinction between "channel" and "state" is a useful shorthand for the two ways in which neurons communicate with each other. Synaptic transmission is binary but post-synaptic neuromodulation grades the likelihood that a given set of neurons will fire. It shifts the statistical odds that something will happen in them.
*Neuromodulators come from all over the body, including the pituitary, adrenal, thyroid and sex glands (which produce various hormones) and the hypothalmus (which produces innumerable peptides). But the central source of arousal from the brain's point of view is the reticular activating system. Recticular brainstem arousal releases the five best-known neuromodulators:
**Dopamine - Sourced mainly in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra
**Noradrenaline - Sourced mainly in the locus coeruleus complex
**Acetycholine - Sourced mainly in the mesopontine tegmentum and basal forebrain nuclei
**Serotonin - Sourced mainly in the raphe nuclei
**Histamine - Sourced mainly in the tuberomammillary hypothalmus
**and many others - mainly slow-acting hormones and peptides (over 100 in the brain), which modulate highly specific neural systems
*Arousal is generated mainly, but not exclusively in the brainstem and hypothalamus, and it arouses the forebrain by modulating neurotransmission.
*The shift from vegetative wakefulness to affective arousal appears to depend upon the integrity of a small, tightly packed knot of neurons surrounding the central canal of the midbrain, the periaqueductal grey (PAG), where all the brain's affective circuitry converges. We might think of the reticular activating system and PAG, respectively, as the origin and destination of forebrain arousal.
*All affective circuits converge on the PAG, which is the main output center for feelings and emotional behaviors. It divides into two groups of functional columns:
**FEAR, RAGE and PANIC/GRIEF - The back one is for active "coping strategies" or defensive behaviors such as fight-or-flight reactions, increased blood pressure and non-opioid pain relief.
**LUST, CARE and SEEKING - The front one is for passive coping/defensive strategies such as freezing with hyporeactivity, long-term sick behavior, decreased blood pressure and opioid pain relief.
*The PAG must set priorities for the next action sequence. It renders its verdict with the help of an adjacent midbrain structure, known as the superior colliculi.
*Bjorn Merker calls this affective/sensory/motor interface between the PAG, the superior colliculi and the midbrain locomotor region the brain's "decision triangle". Panksepp called it the primal SELF, the very source of our sentient being.
*The deepest layer of the superior colliculi consists in a map that controls eye movements.
*Once the midbrain decision triangle has evaluated the compressed feedback flowing in from each previous action, what it activates is an expanded feedforward process which unfolds in the reverse direction, through the forebrain's memory systems, generating an expected context for the selected motor sequence. This is the product of all our learning. In other words, when a need propels us into the world, we do not discover the world afresh with each new cycle. It activates a set of predictions about the likely sensory consequences of our actions, based upon our past experience of how to meet the selected need in the prevaling circumstances.
*"Predicting the Present": Jackob Hohwy's term for the mental process that controls voluntary behavior.
*Most people don't realize that our here-and-now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions, generated mainly from long-term memory. But they are. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the external sense organs to the internal memory systems than the other way round.
*Why treat everything in the world as if you'd never encountered it before? Instead, what the brain does is propagate invards only that portion of the incoming information which does not match its expectations. That is why perception is nowadays sometimes described as "fantasy" and "controlled hallucination"; it begins with an expected scenario which is then adjusted to match the incoming signal. In this sense, the classical anatomists were right: cortical processing consists mainly in the activation of "memory images" suitably rearranged to predict the next cycle of perception and action.
*Perception, action, and cognition are only ever felt because they contextualize affect. It's as if our perceptual experience says: "I feel like this about that."
*Perception and action are an ongoing process of hypothesis testing in which the brain constantly tries to suppress errror signals and confirm its hypotheses. The more your hypotheses are confirmed, the more confident you are, and the less aroused - less conscious - you need to be. You can automatize your action sequences and drift off into the default mode. But if you find yourself in an unexpected situation - one in which your predictive model appears to shed no reliable light - the consequences of your actions become highly salient. You switch out of autopilot and become hyper-aware: the decision triangle carefully adjusts your predictions as you feel your way through the consequences of your actions and make new choices.
== 7. The Free Energy Principle ==

* Karl Friston explains that biological systems such as cells must have emerged through complex versions of the same process that formed simpler self-organizing systems such as crystals from liquid, because they share a common mechanism - "free energy minimization". All self-organizing systems, including you and me, have one fundamental task in common: to keep existing and Friston believes that we do this by minimizing our free energy.
* Remaining within the viable bounds of our emotions requires us to work: to maintain close proximity with our caregivers, to escape from predators, to get rid of frustrating obstacles and so on. Beyond a certain level of predictability, the work required to do these things is regulated by feelings.
* Every homeostat consists of three components:
** A receptor
** A control center
** An effector
* Homeostasis runs in the opposite direction to disorder, dissipation, dissolution. It resists entropy. It ensures that you occupy a limited range of states. That is how it maintains your required temperature, and how it keeps you alive - how it prevents you from dissipating. Living things must resist one of the fundamental principles of physics: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
* Entropy always increases on the large scale. It may in fact be the physical basis for the fact that time itself appears to have a direction and a flow.
* As the useful energy in a system runs down, its entropy increases. This means that the capacity of the system to perform work always decreases.
* The fewer the possible states, the lower the entropy.
* The most basic function of living things is to resist entropy.
* Increasing entropy means decreasing predictability. The entropy associated with expanding gases and expanding options is the same thing.
* The more information required to describe the microstate of a system (ie the state of each and every molecule), the greater the thermodynamic entropy.
* Entropy is minimal when the answer to every yes/no question is entirely predictable, ie when nothing is learnt and there is no information gained.
* Entropy measures the average amount of information you get upon multiple measurements of a system. Thus the entropy of a series of measurements is its average information, its average uncertainty.
* The EEG entropy values are higher in minimally conscious than in vegetative patients. That makes sense: cortical activity in the conscious brain communicates more information thatn it does during deep sleep. But here comes the strange part: if more information means more uncertainty and therefore more entropy, then - since living things must resist entropy - waking activity is less desirable, biologically speaking, than deep sleep.
* Probability is not quite the same as information in Shannon's sense, which entails the additional factor of communication. Unlike probabilities - which exist in and of themselves - communication requires both an information source and an information receiver.
* John Wheeler: "That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short... all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.
* So:
** The average information of a system is the entropy of that system (ie the entropy is a measure of the amount of information needed to describe its physical state)
** Living systems must resist entropy. We must minimise the information (in Shannon's sense) that we process, ie our uncertainty.
** We living systems resist entropy through the mechanism of homeostasis. We receive information about our likely survival by asking questions (ie taking measurements) of our biological state in relation to unfolding events. The more uncertain the answers are (ie the more information they contain) the worse for us; it means we are failing in our homeostatic obligation to occupy limited states (our expected states)
* Natural selection fitted each species to its ecological niche: each creature's survival depends only on things that are in fact reliably found in its natural habitat. So, we need air because we can expect it.
* Kant first spoke of self-organization. Then Darwin discovered natural selection. Then Norbert Wiener founded the discipline of cybernetics, adding the notion of feedback to Shannon's understanding of information. William Ross Ashby used this notion of feedback combined with statistical physics to show that many complex dynamical systems automatically evolve towards a settling point, which he described as an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. The further evolution of such systems then tends to occupy limited states (ie to resist entropy).
* Markov blanket - A statistical concept which separates two sets of states from each other.
** Such formations induce a partitioning of states into internal and external ones, ie into a system and a not-system, in such a way that the internal states are insulated from the ones that are external to the system. The external states can only be "sense" vicariously by the internal ones as states of the blanket.
** Moreover, a Markov blanket is itself partitioned into subsets that are, and subsets that are not causally dependent (directly) upon the states of the external set. These states of the blanket are called sensory and active states. Thus we have internal, active, sensory, and external states where the external states are not part of the self-organizing entity.
** Crucially, the dependencies between these four types of state create a circular causality. The external states influence the internal ones via the sensory states of the blanket, while the internal states couple back to the external ones through its active states. In this way, the internal and external states cause each other in a circular fashion. Sensory states feed back the consequences of the effect on the external states of the active states, and thereby adjust the subsequent actions of the system.
** Once you start looking, Markov blankets are everywhere - cell membranes and the skin and musculoskeletal system of the body as a whole, every organelle, organ, and physiological system. The brain (actually, the entire nervous system) - which regulates the body's other systems - therefore possesses a Markov blanket. In fact, it is a meta-blanket, since it surrounds all the other blankets. Self-organizing systems can always be composed of smaller self-organizing systems - not all the way down, but certainly a dizzyingly long way.
** That is the basic fabric of life: billions of little homeostats wrapped in their Markov blankets.
** The very selfhood of a complex dynamical system is constituted by its blanket. Such self-organizing systems come into being by separating themselves from everything else. Thereafter, they can only register their own states; the not-system world can only be "known" vicariously, via the sensory states of the system's blanket.
** I propose that these properties of self-organization are in fact the essential preconditions for subjectivity.
** The very nature of a Markov blanket is to induce a partitioning of states into "system" and not-system ones, in such a way that not-system states are hidden from the system's interior and vice-versa.
** The Markov blanket endows the internal states of self-organizing systems with a capacity to represent hidden external states probabilistically, so that the system can infer the hidden causes of its own sensory states, which is something akin to the function of perception. This capacity, in turn, enables it to act purposively upon the external milieu, on the basis of its internal states - which actions are akin to motor activity
** The system maintains and renews itself in the face of external perturbations. Merely being a self-organizing system is sufficient to confer a purpose on it and on each of its parts, and that is the function of the active states of the blanket: they manipulate the environment in order to maintain the integrity of the system. Which means that, along with an enclosed self, a subjective point of view, a goal and the capacity both to sense and act, the mere fact of a Markov blanket brings about something akin to agency.
** This is where the concept of "expected states" comes from, and why biological self-organizing systems are homeostatic. Homeostasis seems to have arisen with self-organization. The sensory and active states of a Markov blanket are nothing other than a self-organizing system's receptors and effectors, and the model of external states that it generates is its control center.
** Biological self-organizing systems must test their models of the world, and if the world does not return the answers they expect they must urgently do something differently or they will die. Deviations from expected states are, therefore a foundational form of Wheeler's equipment-evoked responses. This is how question-asking arises; self-organization beings participant observers into being. The question that a self-organizing system is always asking itself is simply this: "Will I survive if I do that?" The more uncertain the answer, the worse for the system.
* Friston's four fundamental properties of all biological self-organizing systems:
** They are ergodic (occupy limited states
** They are equipped with a Markov blanket
** They exhibit active inference
** There are self-preservative
* The equation is A = U - TS (free energy is equal to the total internal energy minus the energy already employed):
** A is free energy
** U is total internal energy
** T is temperature
** S is entropy
* The are three types of free energy:
** Helmholtz - Classical thermodynamic free energy
** Gibbs - Chemical-ensemble free energy
** Friston - Information free energy - Friston free energy is equal to average energy minus entropy
*** Average energy means the expected probability of an event happening under a model
*** Entropy means the actual incidence of it happening
*** So Friston free energy is the difference between the amount of information you expect to obtain from a data sample - from a sequence of events - and the amount of information you actually obtain from it.
* If biological systems must minimize their entropy, and entropy is average information, then it follows that they must keep the flow of information they process to a minimum. They must minimize unexpected events. This is technically known as "surprisal". Like entropy, surprisal is a declining function of probability: as the probability goes down, the surprisal goes up. Surprisal measures how unlikely it is expected to be (on average)
* Self-organizing systems must minimize information flow, because increasing information demand implies increasing uncertainty in the predictive world.
* Friston free energy is a quantifiable measure of the difference between the way the world is modeled by a system and the way the world really behaves. Therefore, we must minimize this difference. A system's model of the world must match the real world as closely as possible, which means that it must minimize the difference between the sensory data that it samples from the world and the sensory data that were predicted by its model.
* One way to do this is by improving the system's model of the world. Because we are insulated form the world by our Markov blankets, we must bring the whole process of minimizing surprisal inside our heads, and become both the source and receiver of the information that flows from our question asking. We do this by measuring relative entropies - by quantifying the gap between the sensory states predicted by an action and the sensory states that actually flow from that action. This yields the quantity called Friston free energy, which is always a positive value greater than the actual surprisal.
* Generative models come into being with self-organizing systems. For that reason, they are sometimes called "self-evidencing systems", because they model the world in relation to their own viability and then seek evidence for their models. It is as if they say not "I think, therefore I am" but "I am, therefore my model is viable".
* The test of a good model of the self-in-the-world is how well it enables the self to engage the world in ways that keep it within its viable bounds. The better these engagements are, the lower its free energy will be. The lower its free energy, the more of the system's energy is being put to effective, self-preserving work. The Free Energy Principle thus explains in mathematical terms how living systems resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics through homeostasis-maintaining work.
* Self-organizing systems are obliged to ask questions of themselves about their own states. Specifically: "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?" The answer to this question will always determine what the system does next, over a suitable time period. This is the causal mechanism behind all voluntary behavior.
* Brain circuits literally do compute prior probability distributions and then send predictive messages to sensory neurons, in an endless effort to dampen the incoming signals; and perception literally does involve comparisons between the predicted and actual distributions, resulting in computations of posterior probability. The resultant inferences are what perception actually is. Perception is an endeavor to self-generate the incoming sensory signals and thereby explain them away. That is why so many neuroscientists nowadays speak of the Bayesian brain.
* Friston's free-energy equation turns out to be a reformulation, in quantifiable terms, of Freud's definition of "drive": "a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body". The obligation to minimize our free energy is the principle that governs everything we do.
* All the quantities in a self-organizing system that can changes will change to minimize free energy and everything that we call mental life becomes mathematically tractable.

== 8. A Predictive Hierarchy ==
* The brain's many complex functions really can, ultimately, be reduced to a few simple mechanisms.
* Jakob Hohwy: "The brain is somewhat desperately, but expertly, trying to contain the long and short-term effects of environmental causes on the organism in order to preserve its integrity. In doing so, a rich, layered representation of the world implicitly (unconsciously) emerges. This is a beautiful and humbling picture of the mind and our place in nature."
* Principles of a predictive hierarchy:
** The brain conspires to anticipate and thus "explain away" events in the world. It suppresses predictable, uninformative incoming signals that it would otherwise have to process pointlessly. Each level in its hierarchy receives only the newsworthy, unexpected information transmitted from the level immediately beyond it. These feedback reports are prediction errors.
** This hierarchy unfolds over progressively smaller temporal and spatial scales. The core predictions apply in all circumstances, whereas the more peripheral ones are fleeing and focal.
*** A predictive sequence unfolds from body-monitoring nuclei located in the brainstem and diencephalon, via the basal ganglia and limbic system, through the neocortex, to the modelity-specific sensory receptors located in the end organs (ie, the rods and cones of the retina), which have very narrow receptive fields.
*** At the periphery, short-term accuracy and complexity prevail at the cost of long-term generalizability, which is enjoyed by the deeper predictions.
** A hierarchy of plasticity exists in terms of which the core predictions cannot change but the peripheral ones can and do; they are subject to instantaneous updating, with the intermediate degree of plasticity.
** Perception (as opposed to learning) reverses the direction of information processing. Perception proceeds from the inside outwards, always from the viewpoint of the subject. What you see is your "best guess" as to what is actually out there; it is your proposed answer to the questions you are currently putting to the world.
*** Actions should therefore be viewed as experiments that test hypotheses arising from the generative model. If an experiment does not yield the predicted sensory data, then the system either must change its prediction to better explain the data or, if it remains confident about the original prediction, must obtain better data; that is, it must perform actions that will change its sensory input.
*** These two options - changing the prediction or the input - are the fundamental mechanisms of perception and action respectively.
*** In some respects, perception and action are more similar than they seem.
*** Suppressing prediction error is what controls action, no less than perception.
*** The multiple bodily homeostats regulated and orchestrated by the midbrain's meta-homeostat are the pivot of the mechanism by which we stay alive, for the simple reason that homeostatic regulation maintains our bodies within their viable bounds. These bounds cannot be changed. This means that something else in the system must change. This is the formal, mechanistic explanation of the imperative link that exists between drive and action, and it is why there must be a hierarchy of prior prediction, some of which can be changed and some of which cannot.
*** It is only action that can increase the probabilities of prior predictions - some of which simply cannot be changed.
*Where does the background knowledge come from, at the outset, before the system has gathered any evidence about the world? Our core "expected states" are encoded by our species as innate homeostatic settling points - quantities that were determined by what worked effectively for our evolutionary ancestors. We are beneficiaries of the biological successes of past generations, which fix the most basic premises of our existence.
*Prediction errors are the sensory signals that were not predicted by a current hypothesis, ie the ones that were not self-generated. This is the salient part of the data.
== 9. Why and How Consciousness Arises ==
* The basic question that living things must always ask themselves is "What will happen to my free energy if I do that?
* There is an executive bottleneck: you can only do one or two things at once. This means that, to select your next action, you must rank your current needs by urgency. That is why internal needs must be prioritized in relation to prevailing external conditions.
* We are born with species-specific predictions about what to do in states like hunger, thirst, fear, and rage. These innate predictions are called "reflexes" and "instincts".
* Affective valence - our feelings about what is biologically good and bad for us - guides us in unexpected situation. We concluded that this way of feeling our way through life's unpredicted problems, using voluntary behavior, is the biological function of consciousness. It guides our choices when we find ourselves in the dark.
* Statisticians call the exponential increase in computational resources necessitated by a linear increase in model complexity the "combinatorial explosion".
* On the principle of Ockham's razor (the Law of Parsimony), we want simple predictive models. Simplification is essential if our models are going to apply in a wide range of situations. They must be serviceable, not only here and now but also in many other contexts.
* Affects are always subjective, valenced, and qualitative. They have to be, given the control problem they evolved to handle.
* This sort of thing determines what a system does next. In other words, it determines which active states will be selected by the generative model to resolve the prioritized category of uncertainty. It is as if the system says: under present conditions, this is the category of prediction-error processing in which computational complexity cannot be sacrificed.
* Crucially, shifting into FEAR mode means that the prioritized need has become an affect. In other words, it has become conscious. Why? It becomes conscious so that deviations from expected outcomes in the most salient category of need will be felt throughout the predictive hierarchy. That is what affect is. It is the "equipment-evoked response" to the question the system asked of itself: "which of these converging error signals provides the greatest opportunity for minimizing my free energy?
* The purpose of precision modulation is to ensure that the inferences made by predictive models are driven by reliable learning signals (trustworthy news): If there is high confidence in a signal then it should be allowed to revise a prior hypothesis, and if there is low confidence then it should not.
* This means that we must minimize precise error signals. Again, that sounds paradoxical, until you realize that it just means we must avoid making glaring mistakes. The only way this can be achieved is by improving our generative models, thus increasing the mutual information between our models of the world and the sensory samples we obtain from it. In other words, we must maximize the precision of our predictions and then seek precise confirmatory data.
* We must maximize our confidence in the beliefs that guide our actions. This is called "precision optimization".
* Precision values quantify expectations about variability. So, they are representations of uncertainty. How confident am I about this error signal in the present context? How much weight should I give to it, right now? Is 8/10 for A worth more or less than 8/10 for B under present conditions?
* So much of our experience just is little pulses of feeling, as you notice things that aren't quite as you expected them to be, followed by cognitive castings around for ways to close the gap. You remember an email you need to send: it is only when your hand fails to detect the heard screen of your phone that you realize you were already reaching for it - but if it isn't right there beside you, where did you leave it? In the kitchen, where you were five minutes ago?
* A prioritized need (in this case LUST) is the currently most salient source of uncertainty. Inferences about its causes become conscious as affect, because fluctuations in your confidence level concerning the possible actions required to meet this need must be modulated by feelings. The feelings tell you how well or badly you are doing.
* It is of capital importance to note that the statement "the unfolding context giving rise to the fluctuations must become conscious too" explains why experience has dual aspects. It is not merely a matter of "I feel like this" but rather "I feel like this about that". The "about that" must be felt too, using a common currency (applied uncertainty) - because context is the main source of uncertainty over free energy. The economics of free energy minimization demands a common currency.
* Simply put, relatively strong signals attract attention: they are assigned higher precision.
* That is how saliency works. "Salient" features of the world are features that, when sampled, minimize uncertainty concerning the system's currently prioritized hypothesis: they are the ones that, when things unfold as expected, maximize our confidence in the hypothesis. Active agents are thus driven to sample the world so as to (attempt to) confirm their own hypotheses.
* The perceptual orientation of each species is dictated by the things that matter to it.
* Precision cannot be determined passively; we cannot just wait and see which signals are strong without any expectations either way. It must be inferred and then assigned by the generative model. Attention - which has everything to do with precision - can accordingly be both "grabbed" and "directed".
* Two equations:
** Free energy is (approximately) the negative logarithm of the probability of encountering some actively authored sensory states.
** The expected free energy decreases in (approximate) proportion to negative log precision.
*There are three ways for a self-evidencing system to reduce prediction error and thereby minimize free energy:
**It can act to alter sensations so that they match the system's predictions (action)
**It can change its representation of the world to produce a better prediction (perception)
**It can adjust precision to optimally match the amplitude of the incoming prediction errors.
*Consciousness if this final optimization process, the optimization of the system's confidence, that we associate with the evaluation of free energy that underpins felt experience.
*The rate of change of precision over time depends on how much free energy changes when you change precision. This means that precision will look as if it is trying to minimize free energy.
*Exteroception, proprioception and interoception can all occur without consciousness, but consciousness if the feeling of these things.
*Feelings are fluctuating, existentially valued, subjective states with differentiated qualities and degrees of confidence. This is the stuff of consciousness.
== 10. Back to the Cortex ==
* The world as we experience it is literally generated from cortical representations. Within the predictive coding framework, odd as it seems, what we perceive is a virtual reality constructed from the mind's own building materials.
* What you perceive is not the same thing as the input that arrives from your senses. What you perceive is an inference. And the materials from which that inference is derived are for the most part your cortical predictive model derived from past (ie expected) experiences.
* This is the whole point of consciousness in cognition. You arrive at a situation in which you aren't sure what to do. Consciousness comes to the rescue: you feel your way through the scenario, noting the voluntary actions that work for you. Then, gradually, the successful lessons become automatized and consciousness is no longer needed.
* I want to emphasize that the cognitive work I have just described slows down the otherwise automatic business of acting in the world. This is the essential difference between voluntary and involuntary action, conscious vs unconscious cognition, felt drive vs autonomic reflex; the voluntary type is less certain and therefore requires more time.
* What all of this implies is that the conscious state is undesirable from the viewpoint of a self-organizing system.
* In that theoretical ideal state, in which our needs are met automatically, we feel nothing. (This is how most of our bodily needs are met: they are regulated autonomically). I say "theoretical ideal" because, in respect of many of our needs, especially the emotional one, we never get there. The SEEKING drive alone ensures that.
* Freud's aphorism, "consciousness arises instead of a memory trace", should make more sense now. It means that consciousness arises when automatic behavior leads to error, in other words, when the memory trace (a prediction) producing a behavior does not have the expected outcome. This means that the prediction in question must be updated to accommodate the error. Cortical consciousness may therefore be described as "predictive work in progress". A memory trace that is conscious is in the process of being updated. It is no longer a memory trace. Hence: consciousness arises instead of a memory trace.
* An activated memory is an aroused memory; and an aroused memory is a memory no longer - it is in a state of uncertainty. All I am trying to convey here is that cognitive consciousness boils down to a rendering labile of cortical memory traces, and that this liability is a product of arousal. We keep arriving from different directions at the same insight: cortical processes are fundamentally unconscious things (they are simply algorithms, if left to their own devices). Consciousness - all of it - comes from the brainstem.
* Learning requires consciousness, as we gradually improve confidence in our newly acquired predictions. But the ideal of all learning is to automatize these acquired predictions too, to make them behave like reflexes and instincts.
* The most important fact about non-declarative memory is that it is non-declarative. It generates procedural responses, whereas declarative memory generates experienced images.
* Subcortical memory traces cannot be retrieved in the form of images for the reason that they do not consist in cortical mappings of the sensory-motor end organs.
* The cortical memory system, by contrast, are always ready to revive the predictive scenarios they represent - literally to re-experience them.
* The cortex specializes in contexts; it restores model accuracy in unpredictable situations. A trade-off is inevitable. The more potential for conscious experience, the less automaticity, which means more plasticity but also more cognitive work. That costs energy, and it generates feelings, so the brain does as little of it as it can get away with. Even to the point of fading out a stimulus that is right before your eyes.
* By activating memories, we can strengthen, alter, and even erase them. Three types of thinking help do this
** Mind-wandering is one means by which this is achieved. It involves spontaneous forebrain activity (also know as the resting state or default mode), which occurs in the absence of any specific external stimulus. This kind of activity goes on much of the time in the background, through an "imaginative exploration of our own mental space". There is a good deal of overlap between this form of thinking and dreaming, which seems to occur in all creatures equipped with a cortex; any animal with the capacity to generate images of itself acting in the world can also meander through endless simulated worlds as its circumstances permit. Meandering is tightly bound up with the SEEKING drive, which continues with its demands as we sleep.
** What all conscious cognitive processes have in common is that they entail the necessary mental work of reconsolidation - the returning of consolidated predictions to states of uncertainty. That is why dreams (which are a form of problem-solving) are conscious.
** Deliberate imagining - to imagine doing things in order to gauge in advance the probable consequences of actually doing them.
*** Contemporary research on episodic memory reveals that the hippocampus is in fact just as involved in imagining the future a it is in reliving the past. David Ingvar speaks of "remembering the future".
** Thinking with words - Though language is a tool of communication it is, first and foremost, a tool for abstraction. With its marvelous gradations of generality and specificity, language lets us project something of the structure of the predictive hierarchy itself into consciousness. These powerful aids to cognition are not available to non-symbolic species. It is very difficult to imagine the whole of science, technology, and culture without language.
*The cortex contributes more to PLAY than to any of the other basic emotions.
== 11. The Hard Problem ==
* Ribot's Law - Your internally experienced memory of what happened ten years ago is more securely consolidated than what happened ten minutes ago. This is why elderly people are more likely to forget recent events than remote ones.
* Miller's Law - At any given moment, you can only retain seven units of information (plus or minus two). The duration of short-term memories can also be measured: they typically last between 15-30 seconds.
* Both laws are psychological and physiological (ie bound by chemical limits)
== 12. Making a Mind ==
* We may suppose that consciousness did not exist on earth before brains evolved - and perhaps only when vertebrate brains evolved; therefore, about 525m years ago. I suspect it arose in rudimentary form before that; that a precursor of affect gradually became felt affect, with no sharp dividing line between them, in tandem with the evolution of increasingly complex organisms with multiple competing needs.
* What emerged with the evolution of cortex was cognitive consciousness - that is the additional capacity to contextualize affect exteroceptively and hold it in mind:
** Before the cortex evolved, an animal might just feel "bad" (affect). With a cortex, the brain can link that "bad" feeling to something specific in the environment—like a predator or a rotten piece of fruit. It puts the feeling into a context based on what is happening around you.
** Without this capacity, an organism reacts purely in the "now." With a cortex, you can keep a feeling and the reason for it active in your brain even after the stimulus is gone. You can "stew" on a problem or plan a response because you can hold the information in your conscious workspace.
** "basic" consciousness is just feeling things (being awake and reactive). "Cognitive" consciousness is the higher-level ability to think about those feelings, label them, and use them to make complex decisions.
*David Chalmers three principles for solving the "hard problem":
**The Principle of Structural Coherence
**The Double Aspect Principle
**The Principle of Organizational Invariance
*Solms does not conceive of consciousness as being particularly intelligent - at least not in its elementary form.
*Sheep and cows and pigs are fellow mammals and are subject to the same basic emotions that we are, such as FEAR, PANIC/GRIEF, and CARE. Mammals possess a cortex too, which means they are capable - all of them to some degree - of consciously "remembering the future" and feeling their way through its probabilities and likelihoods.
*As we relinquish the familiar illusion that consciousness flows in through our sense, and the misconception that it is synonymous with understanding, let us take comfort in the fact that it actually comes spontaneously from our inmost interior. It dawns within us even before we are born. At its source, we are guided by a constant stream of feelings, flowing from a wellspring of intuition, arising from we know not where. Each of us individually does not know the causes, but we feel them. Feelings are a legacy that the whole history of life has bestowed upon us, to steel us for the uncertainties to come.

== Postscript ==

* Self-organizing systems survive because they occupy limited states; they do not disperse themselves. This survival imperative led gradually to the evolution of the complex dynamical mechanisms that underwrite intentionality. Crucially, the selfhood of self-organizing systems grants them a point of view. That is why it becomes meaningful to speak of the subjectivity of such a system: deviations from their viable states are registered by the system, for the system, as needs.
* Feeling by an organism of fluctuations in its own needs enables choice and thereby supports survival in unpredicted contexts. This is the biological function of experience.
* Needs cannot all be felt at once. They are prioritized by a midbrain decision triangle, where current needs (residual prediction errors, quantified as free energy) converging on the periaqueductal grey are ranked in relation to current opportunities (displayed in the form of a 2D "saliency map" in the superior colliculi). This triggers conditioned action programmes, which unfold in expected contexts over a deep hierarchy of predictions (the generative model of the expanded forebrain). The actions that are generated by prioritized affects are voluntary, which means they are subject to here-and-now choices rather than pre-established algorithms. Such choices are felt in exteroceptive consciousness, which contextualizes affect.

== Appendix: Arousal and Information ==

* Arousal, fueling drive mechanisms, potentiates behavior, while specific motives and incentives explain why an animal does one thing and not another.
* Generations of behavioral scientists have both theorized and experimentally confirmed that a concept like arousal is necessary to explain the initiation, strength, and persistence of behavioral responses. Arousal provides the fundamental forces that makes animals and humans active and responsive so they will perform instinctive behaviors or learned behaviors directed toward goal objects.
* Pfaff's own principal component analyses suggest that the proportion of behavior across a wide range of data that can be accounted for by "generalized arousal" is between 30-45%.
* How do internal and external influences wake up brain and behavior, whether in humans or in other animals?
* Generalized arousal is higher in an animal or human being who is:
** S - More alert to sensory stimuli of all sorts
** M - More motorically active
** E - More reactive emotionally.
* This is a concrete definition of the most fundamental force in the nervous system. All three components can be measured with precision. Clearly there is a neuroanatomy of generalized arousal, there are neurons whose firing patterns lead to it, and genes whose loss disrupts it. Therefore generalized arousal is the behavioral state produced by arousal pathways, their electrophysiological mechanisms and genetic influences. The fact that these mechanisms, produce the same sensory alertness (S), motor reactivity (M), and emotional reactivity (E) as our definition affirms the existence of a generalized arousal function and the accuracy of its operational definition.
* In Shannon's equation, the information in any event is in inverse proportion to its probability. Put another way, the more uncertain we are about the occurrence of that event, the more information is transmitted, inherently, when it does happen. When all events in an array of events are equally probable, information is at its top value. Disorder maximizes information flow.
* For a lower animal or human to be aroused, there must be some change in the (interoceptive or exteroceptive) environment. If there is change, there must be some uncertainty about the state of the environment. Quantitatively, to the degree that there is uncertainty, predictability is decreased.
* Arousal of brain and behavior, and information calculations are inseparably united.
* Unknown, unexpected, disordered, and unusual (high-information) stimuli produce and sustain arousal responses.
* Central nervous system arousal systems battle heroically against the Second Law of Thermodynamics in a very special way. They respond selectively to environmental situations that have an inherently high entropy - a high degree of uncertainty and therefore information content. But in responding, CNS arousal systems effectively reduce entropy by compressing all of that information into a single, lawful response. Arousal neurobiology is the neuroscience of change, uncertainty, unpredictability, and surprise - that is of information science.
* The huge phenomenon called habituation, a decline in response amplitude on repetition of the same stimulus, pervades neurophysiology, behavioral science, and autonomic physiology; and it shows us how declining information content leads to declining CNS arousal. Thus arousal theory and information theory were made for each other.
* It is important to recognize that the "mathematics of information" explains the behavior of neurons in both arousal processes and learning processes, which, combined, determine what the brain does. Therefore, although "information" is not a physiological construct, it lawfully explains the physiological activity of the brain. It is the function that is selected by evolution; the physiological phenotypes follow.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

The Happiness of Dogs

2026-07-26T15:45:48Z

Robert.adlington:

== 1. Shadow's Rock ==
* Dogs as happy Sisyphus
== 2. The Unexamined Life ==
* Reflection occurs when your mental acts turn back ether on you or on some part or facet of you, a part or facet that you recognize as yours, whether this is mental or physical.
* Shame is only possible for a creature capable of reflection. Shame is shame in the eyes of a nominal other - whether that other is someone else, or you, or some non-existent alternative.
* The humble sea squirt eats its own brain.
* A brain, fundamentally, is a biological strategy, and any strategy stands or falls on the relative weight of its costs and benefits. Sometimes, the costs of brains can outweigh their benefits.
* With the development of literacy our outstanding natural memory started to wither.
* Existential phenomenology - Its goal is to understand the fundamental structures of consciousness by virtue of which a conscious creature exists in the specific way it does.
* Reflection is consciousness turning back on itself and thus turning away from the world, turning inwards rather than outwards. Reflection pulls us out of the world and into ourselves.
* Our lives are eerie in the sense that we have no real home. Because of reflection, we are unhomed creatures: never quite a home in the world, never quite comfortable in our skins any more.
* The highest expressions of human creativity are flow experiences where the reflective sense of self is at its most attenuated.
* Sports take us back to a time before the Fall, when we were creatures untainted by reflection. When we play, and all is going right, and we flow from one movement into the next, never thinking about ourselves and what we are doing, because we know thinking would be flow's death, that is when we are most like our dogs.
* Reflection is a wound that cannot be healed. It neatly severs us in two, and has left us uneasy, troubled creatures.
== 3. Mirror, Mirror ==
* A creature capable of pre-reflection is necessarily aware of itself, but pre-reflectively rather than reflectively. Any animal - human, canine, or otherwise - that is conscious of the world at all will be pre-reflectively aware of itself too.
* Seeing is a predictive process (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, through to modern neuroscience) and there is a kind of implicit, tacit awareness of self that is built into the process of seeing).
* Awareness of one's body and awareness of one's mind are two very different abilities. There is nothing in mirror self-recognition that demonstrates an ability to engage in the second - meta-cognitive - form of reflection.
* You first learn to understand what it is for someone else to think something, or to want something, and then you learn to apply the concepts of thinking and wanting to yourself.
* Split in two, we can never again be whole - single, undivided, of one heart and one mind. Thus we live and at the same time we watch ourselves doing this. We can never be fully immersed in our lives; never be quite fully committed to what we think and do.
* Our commitment is always conditional. It is what we might call troubled commitment. For we are troubled creatures.
* A dog's mind is serene: unruffled, untroubled, an early-morning sea on a summer's day. But the minds of creatures of reflection are choppy and never calm.
* It is no coincidence that ancient philosophy from Socrates on and modern philosophy from Descartes are obsessed with radical, methodological doubt. Doubt runs deep in us.
== 4. A Gambler's Freedom ==
* For a dog or any animal untainted by reflection, freedom is to act according to necessity, on the insistent commands of his nature.
* What is your nature, ultimately, if not your place in the world? Your nature picks out an identifiable portion of the universe and says: This is me. This is what I am. This is my place. This is my home. The resulting picture of freedom is, then, clear. Freedom results from your connection to the world. Freedom results from all the things that bind you to the world, pull you into the world, hold you tight in that world. Freedom is the world's embrace. This is the freedom of a belonging. For a dog, there is no other sort.
* For Sartre, consciousness is a hole in being - akin to a clearing in a forest. A clearing can only exist if there are trees around it.
* Sartre's insight, shared with Wittgenstein, was that if you are aware of something, then it does not have meaning on its own. If it means anything at all, this meaning must derive from your interpretation of it.
* Pictures, even realistic ones, do not mean anything - are not about anything - in themselves. Any picture might mean many things, and what it in fact means always depends on an interpretation supplied by the viewer.
* As an object of my awareness, a motive, resolution, decision or choice has no meaning in itself. For it to have meaning, I must interpret it, and whatever meaning it then has will depend on precisely how I interpret it. This, according to Sartre, is why I am free. And this freedom is very different from the Spinozist freedom of dogs. In fact, whether this is a freedom worth having is a legitimate question.
* The reformed gambler understands that his resolution not to gamble is useless (ultimately baseless), and it is useless precisely because he is aware of it. This realization Sartre calls angst.
* Nothing can compel any interpretation.
* We are free in the sense that nothing that we decide, nothing that we resolve to do, nothing that we choose can ever make us do a thing. The realization of this fact - the recognition of our freedom in this sense - is anguish.
* The only thing we cannot choose is not to choose, for this is itself a choice.
* Our actions are not free, not in any sense of freedom we would recognize. Our actions are groundless. And there is nothing we can do to ground them.
* We use bad faith to combat the groundlessness of our existence. It is a little story we tell ourselves about how we are not free.
* Human freedom is the freedom of exile.
== 5. Good Dogs ==
* In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that to act virtuously you must be able to ask yourself: is this the right thing to do? And if you decide that it is, you must do it because you want to do the right thing.
* Kant's categorical imperative says: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
* Anthropofabulation - A pronounced human tendency to provide overcomplicated accounts of how we manage to do things.
* If Sartre is right, critical scrutiny of one's motivations does the opposite of supplying one with control over them. Becoming aware of one's motivations means that they no longer have any intrinsic meaning or intentionality.
* Empathy is not a feeling but an ability to feel what is going on in the mind of another.
* Projective empathy involves imaginatively putting yourself in the shoes of another
* Receptive empathy is a sophisticated form of what's called emotional contagion, which is likely endemic in all or most social creatures.
* If a dog's distress at a baby's cry is simply caused by the baby's distress, then they could mitigate their distress by vacating the immediate area. But if they are distressed that the baby is distressed, they can only mitigate their own distress by mitigating his.
* The distress of another is not simply the cause of your distress, it is what your distress is about. When this occurs, an inclination to help is automatically triggered precisely because you are concerned with their distress rather than with your own.
* The neural basis for this type of emotional contagion is what is sometimes called a shared representation system. In humans, other apes and, very likely, dogs too, this system is underwritten by what are known as mirror neurons, whose function is to mirror what is going on inside another. They do this by recruiting the same neural mechanisms in both self and other.
* Morality always involves inconvenience. Morality is a restriction one voluntarily places on one's behavior in the quest for survival, and morality always has the potential to cost you. In morality, what you don't do - even though you really want to - can be as important as what you do.
* The morality of a dog rests on two pillars. One of these is empathy, the ability to take the distress of another and make it one own. The other pillar is inhibition, the ability to make ones behavior conform to one's values. We find both pillars in dogs. Empathy is primary. Inhibition occupies the interstices left by empathy, and only works is a foundation of empathy has already been established. What a dog lacks in one, it will have to make up for in the other.
* This is true of humans too. The urge to help and the urge to hurt are both moral emotions. We act on these emotions, or we inhibit them, and out of these patterns of action and inhibition emerges the moral character of a person.
* The critical scrutiny of choice promoted by Aristotle and Kant is a morality devised for a creature of a certain sort, a timid, indecisive creature, prone to the habitual second-guessing of itself. A dithering, faltering, neurotic creature, a creature of doubt rather than of conviction. Sometimes we are damned not by what we do but by what we think we should do.
== 6. A Design for Life ==
* Dogs can reason logically. It is just that, all things being equal, and if they can possibly help it, they would rather not.
* Dogs find reading human faces much easier than executing disjunctive syllogisms.
* Through domestication, dogs found a way of offloading one of the most difficult and unpleasant aspects of life: thinking.
* In effect, we became part of the dog's extended mind.
== 7. Just Dogs with the Yips ==
* Why do dogs love life so much more than we do? The answer, I think, is that life is always more precious for a dog than for a human because we have two lives and dogs only have one.
* There is the life we live from the inside, and there is the life we live from the outside. But for a dog, life is something lived ineluctably from the inside alone. There is only an inside to the life of a dog, and it is a life that has no limits - in the way that a visual field has no limits.
* It is not possible, as Wittgenstein pointed out, to see the limit of your visual field. The limit is where the seeing stops and not seeing begins.
* Similarly, he claims, death is not an event in life. It is the limit of a life and so cannot be part of that life. Unfortunately, however, this is only true of a life seen from the inside - a life as it is lived. Since dogs live only this sort of life, their life has no limits in Wittgenstein's sense. But it is not true of human lives. We live our lives from the inside and from the outside, simultaneously. And when viewed from the outside, life has clearly identifiable limits. Death is an event in a life viewed from the outside.
* The body-as-lived is not so much an object as an activity or process - a process of disclosure or revelation broadly understood. It is, we might say, the body understood from the inside, the body as it is lived rather than as it is seen or thought about.
* The life-as-object is the life I think about, about which I have hopes and fears, satisfaction and regret. It is my life viewed from the outside. It is a series of events that I orchestrate or that happen to me, a sequence of actions and consequences.
* In my life-as-object, I am an insignificant speck in the great scheme of things, finite and mundane. We all are when we view life from the outside.
* My life-as-lived matters. The things that happen in my life-as-lived matter - at least to me. And even if I were to try, I cannot stop them mattering. It is a hub of meaning and purpose.
* Both perspectives can't be true. But I cannot rid myself of the view from the outside because, among other things, I am pretty sure it is true. However it is psychologically impossible, requiring a depth of nihilism beyond most people's capacity, to dispense with the view from inside.
* Philosophy is a little like the measles. No other animals can catch it, for no other animal can be absurd the way humans can. It's like a rash that you can't ignore, because it itches. From the outside innocuous, but from the inside, maddening. And, as such, is a perfect allegory for human life.
* Moritz Schlick: "The meaning of life is play."
* Choking denotes a general collapse in the face of pressure exerted on you by an opposition player or team.
* The yips is a specific form of choking centered around reflection. If one focuses too much on the details of technique and execution, rather than simply getting on with the business of playing, then one is suffering from the yips. It is a kind of paralysis through analysis.
* When the yips appears outside of a sporting context, it is often called shame. The essence of shame lies in the inexperience of oneself as an object for another (Sartre at the keyhole).
* Most of the time, happily, one does not experience one's body as an object of awareness. Rather one lives through one body or lives one's body. Undue focus on yourself is a sign that somewhere things have gone wrong.
* Reflection is the death of commitment, and commitment is just another word for love. The pathological overuse of our ability for self-reflection, therefore, tears love out of our lives.
* Humans are all just dogs suffering from the yips.
== 8. Sometimes Toward Eden ==
* During writing, it's when you are exhausted, when your thoughts are tired and no longer recognize their customary, agreed-upon rules and avenues, when they start stumbling down paths they never would have travelled down if your brain was working properly - that is when the interesting things happen.
* Writing only really begins when it starts to hurt.
* We humans left Eden long ago, but dogs never did.
* Meaning in life is not essentially a moral phenomenon.
* Meaning in life is deeper than engagement. It is deeper than attraction, deeper than grip. It is need. Meaning in life arises from need. And deeper than need, always deeper than need, is love.
* The more love there is in a life, the more meaning this life thereby contains. The more you love your life, where this love is an expression of your nature, true and untainted, the more meaning there is in your life. To love what you do, when what you do is an expression of what you are, is at the same time to love yourself. Dogs love their lives more than we love ours. That is why their lives are more meaningful than ours.
* A dog has only one life, and of it he is actor and not spectator, author and not critic.
* The nature of a dog is heavy, a granite slab of essence. Our natures, however, have fractured beneath reflection's hard stare. To the extent that any of us have a nature at all, it is insubstantial, diaphanous, perhaps even gossamer thin. What we call our natures are, for us, merely an initial basis for further negotiation. We are self-interpreting creatures, and as such we have the most attenuated natures of all animals.
* Meaning in life is happiness that erupts from nature. But there is little in my nature that is fixed. My nature is soft, pliable. It is, more than anything, labile: the attempts of others to interpret me might easily feed into my own interpretative efforts. There is no firm foundation in my nature to provide a springboard from which happiness might spring forth.
* Some of my memories have a grim destiny. They will live on - re-emerge into the world - as ideas. For me, an idea is just a perfunctory summary of a memory I once had. An idea is just a memory drained of life; a memory that must be reanimated. The fact that I have chosen a life filled with ideas, I suspect, shows just how hard I must have tried to hold on to my memories.
* This is the idea my memories have become: meaning in life is authentic happiness. Meaning in life exists wherever happiness erupts from nature. If you want to know the meaning of life, get a dog.
* Without uttering a word, my dogs tell me of a time before The Fall. Through them, I remember a time before reflection's canyon had opened within me, a time when I was one man and not two, when I had but one nature, one history and one life, a life that I loved with one heart and one mind, undivided. I will never walk in the Garden again. My exile is complete and irrevocable. Yet my dogs occasionally allow me to glimpse it, veiled, a distant shimmering on the far bank of the Jordan. As I walk with my dogs in memory, I find myself gazing sometimes towards Eden.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning

2026-07-26T15:45:28Z

Robert.adlington:

== 1. What is Consciousness? ==
*Aristotle believed that consciousness exists as a continuum of different types of souls:
**Plants have a vegetative or nutritive soul, which controls their growth, nutrition and reproduction.
**Animals have, in addition, a sensitive soul, which allows them to perceive things and move about, and they also have fears and desires.
**Humans have, in addition, a rational soul that allows them to reason and reflect.
*Locke and Hume came up with a properly materialist view of consciousness, but their explanations did not explain how each individual mind feels like a unified, individual phenomenon, rather than just a mass of unconnected experiences (binding problem)
*Chalmers sees the hard problem of consciousness as explaining this subjective sense we have as individuals of being us, with all that implies in terms of our specific responses to, say, a sunset or a work of art, the particular way we felt when we first fell in love or any personal experience, in purely material terms.
== 2. Tools and Symbols ==
* Parrington argues that human self-conscious awareness arose as a consequence of two other unique human attributes - our capacity for language and our ability to continually transform the world around us by designing and using tools.
* Engels, in 1876, proposed that humans first began to diverge significantly from other primates when our ancestors started walking on two legs. This freed the hands for using and designing tools in a systematic way to transform the world around them. Importantly, such design and subsequent use of different types of tools was carried out with other proto-humans in a socially cooperative manner. Because of the need to communicate with their neighbors about how to carry out such innovative actions, our ancestors also began to develop the first forms of language. Subsequently the development of both systematic tool design and use, and language, led to a dramatic growth and restructuring of the brain.
* Practically all of our interactions with the world are through tools that we have created.
* Human language, is an interconnected system of abstract symbols, linked together by grammar in such a way that it can convey complex meaning. It is for this reason that only human beings are able to use language to convey complex ideas like past, present, and future, individual versus society, location in space, and even more abstract concepts.
* We can see tool use and language as activities that do not just guide our interactions with the external world, but also act as "mental tools" that have transformed the brain in the process.
* Vygotsky argued that egocentric speech - children's tendency to talk to themselves as they play - is the first stage in a child starting to organize their actions using words and that while this form of speech seems to disappear, what is actually happening is it becomes internalized as "inner speech", which in adults plays a central role in the organization and development of our thoughts.
* Inner speech differs from outer speech in some important ways. It is likely to be much more rapid, and far more fluid in meaning, than the speech we use in conversation with others. There are also probably different types of inner speech, ranging from that which emerges from our innermost, half-formed thoughts to the type that structures our outer speech when we express ourselves to others.
== 3. Nerves and Brains ==
* Neurons contain:
** A cell body
** Dendrites - Tendrils that receive incoming signals from other neurons
** An axon - A long protuberance that conveys signals to the next neuron in the circuit
*When a neuron is stimulated through its dendrites, this triggers an electrical impulse called an "action potential", which races along the axon at speeds that can reach around 200mph in the fastest human neurons. The speed at which impulses can travel along an axon are greatly enhanced by a structure called a "myelin sheath". This is a fatty layer that both protects the axon but also allows the neural signal to jump between gaps in the sheath in a process called "saltatory conduction". At the end of the axon, the electrical impulse is transmitted to a dendrite on the next neuron in the circuit, at a gap between neurons called a "synapse". The action potential does this by stimulating the release of a chemical called a "neurotransmitter" into the synaptic gap. The neurotransmitter diffuses across the gap and, at the other side, it acts like a key in a lock to trigger a cellular response that activates a new action potential in the target neuron.
*The human brain is estimated to contain around 86bn neurons, linked by 100tn connections.
*Neurons make up half the brain. The rest is made up of glial cells including oligodendrocytes, astrocytes, and microglia.
== 4. Evolving Minds ==
* Jellyfish are a simple type of large multicellular organism whose nervous system consists of:
** Sensory neurons - Which pick up signals from the environment.
** Motor neurons - Which trigger a response in the organism
** Interneurons - Which coordinate these two activities in the central nervous system (CNS).
*The human brain has three main parts:
**The forebrain - Includes:
***The Cerebellum - which has two hemispheres and a highly folded surface cortex
***The Cortex - Is particularly developed in humans, twice the expected area for a primate of our size
****Broca's area - For producing words
****Wernicke's area - For understanding words
****Sensory and motor maps, with most space taken up by nerves going from and to the lips, tongue and pharynx and to and from the hands and digits.
***The Limbic System - emotional or lizard brain
****Thalamus - Central postal-sorting depot channeling information into and out of the cortex
****Hypothalamus - Underneath the thalamus, regulates thirst, hunger, desire, reproduction, and the body clock
****Amygdala - Plays a central role in processing emotions, being involved in generating fearful, but also pleasurable sensations
****Hippocampus - Plays important roles in memory
**The midbrain - alos involved in processes such as vision, hearing, and movement
**The hindrain - Includes
***The Pons, which controls sleep
***The medulla, which regulates vital functions such as breathing and heart rate
***The cerebellum (little brain) - With, once again, two hemispheres and a highly folded surface. Involved in regulating and coordinating movement, posture, and balance and also in creativity and imagination.
== 5. Thought and Reason ==
* The combination of an almost unlimited vocabulary and an instinct for correct grammar is what provides human beings with the ability to communicate with other humans in a precise fashion and with a creativity that, while often only used in everyday, mundane circumstances, can allow some humans to reach dizzy heights of novel artistic or scientific expression.
* Spoken words, music, visual art, literature and film - all of these symbolic forms might be part of the thought process.
* Because our thoughts are so infused with the conceptual framework that language provides, it is almost impossible for us to imagine how it might feel to not have such a framework. Therefore, as a species, when we distinguish different colors or recognize that something happened in the past, as opposed to something that might happen in the future, or that we are an individual person and therefore distinct from other people, it can be easy to assume that other species have similar feelings.
* Inner speech and other inner symbols act like a transmission belt between thought and outward expression. However, that does not mean that human thought and speech are equivalent, since all our thoughts arise from a biological brain that has much in common with other species' brains.
== 6. The Sensual World ==
* All species on Earth, from unicellular bacteria to complex multicellular organisms like ourselves, have evolved ways to detect changes in the environment and respond accordingly, such activity being crucial to their survival. Demonstrating the unity of life on our planet, it is remarkable how similar, at least at the level of molecular biology, mechanisms of sensing the environment are between species. Such unity can be demonstrated by comparing the sense of a bacterium and a human.
* While one part of the visual cortex receives signals relating to an object's shape, another area receives ones about its color and another about whether the object is moving.
* Kittens kept in enclosures painted with only vertical lines never learned to see horizontal ones, for instance, a chair seat, while kittens only exposed to horizontal lines could not make out vertical ones, and would therefore bump into a chair leg.
* Human infants from about 8-10 months of age generally begin to notice the presence of snakes and spiders, avoid heights at the edge of a drop-off and withdraw at a stranger's approach.
* But there seems to be no evidence that human infants' responses to spiders, snakes, drops and strangers are either universal or primarily fearful. Instead, the responses were shown to be highly variable, driven initially primarily by curiosity rather than fear, and were very dependent on the context in which infants encounter such stimuli, for instance, fearful reactions by parents or carers. The extraordinary curiosity that human infants show in their encounters encourages them to explore new things, while maintaining the flexibility to develop a fear if they discover something truly threatening.
* The developing human brain is far more primed to respond to new experiences that the brains of other species, which undoubtedly affects our perception of the world around us.
* Human language provides a means for the expression of abstract concepts such as time and place, self vs other and so on, and through the medium of inner speech this brings abstraction into our inner thoughts. However, such an ability to think in abstract terms also affects the way we perceive the world.
* At the heart of conceptual thinking is the ability to group things hierarchically. In terms of color, this means humans have an overall concept of color, with the individual colors subordinate to this. Similarly, we have an overall concept of shape and subordinate to this are specific shapes, for instance, circles, squares, triangles and so on.
* Language is central to conceptual thinking because it allows us to describe concepts such as colors and shapes, and also to employ even more general terms, such as "characteristics" or "properties".
* Drawing does not require words, although language can accompany it, but it does require an ability to abstract. Such abstraction is shown by the fact that we can recognize a series of crudely drawn lines as a person as equally as we do a finely drawn, or photographic image. This is important in terms of perception because it means we also perceive the world as an abstraction. That such a capacity is a uniquely human ability is shown be the failure of attempts to teach apes representational drawing.
== 7. Learning and Memory ==
* In multicellular species with nervous systems, a common theme is that, at the cellular level, learning and memory involves lasting changes in the connections between neurons.
* At the cellular level, memory involves structural changes in the postsynaptic neuron that make it more likely to respond if it is stimulated repeatedly by the same presynaptic neuron. Such changes involve an increase in the number of receptors on the dendrite of the postsynaptic neuron, but also long-lasting changes in the neuronal "cytoskeleton" - a complex, dynamic network of interlinking protein filaments that maintains the cell's shape and regulates the movement of substances within it - and even changes to the genes the neuron expresses, thereby helping reprogram it as par of the learning response. While initially learning was thought to involve only neurons, recent studies have shown the that glial cells play key roles in the alterations in postsynaptic neurons that underpin memory.
* In the early 1950s, Henry Molaison had surgery to remove his hippocampus to help control his epilepsy, and he lost his ability to store short-term memories? Unable to recall daily events or recognize hospital staff taking care of him, and able to converse, but forgetting the content of a conversation only minutes after it had occurred, it was as it he now existed in a perpetual present. Yet he could remember things that had happened to him in his youth, although only generally; thus he was unable to remember details about such events. Intriguingly, he also showed an ability to learn new motor skills. He was able to learn how to play tennis or trace the outline of a five-pointed star in a task where he was only able to see the reflection of the star and his hand holding the pencil in a mirror. Later, he had no recollection of learning these skills, as if only his unconscious mind was remembering them.
* Three main types of memory:
** Episodic memory - Allows us to record specific events.
** General memory - Allows us to remember general aspects of our past, such as the school we went to or our parents' occupations.
** Procedural memory - Allows us to learn new motor skills, like riding a bike or playing piano
*One study suggested that the hippocampus acts as a "convergence zone" that pulls together different bits of information stored in the cortex that relate to different aspects of an event into a coherent whole.
*In another study, one neuron was only activated in a volunteer when they were shown an image of Bill Clinton. In another case, a neuron only became activated in response to an image of Jennifer Aniston. Other neurons responded to images of famous landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower. When shown a picture of Aniston next to the tower, the JA neuron began to respond to pictures of the tower on its own. And a Halle Berry neuron would respon even to the words "Halle Berry", as if it is responding to a concept or abstract entity.
*The hippocampus may somehow act like a kind of memory-laden matrix with all the objects we have remembered in the past mapped onto it via different individual neurons. It can be viewed a a kind of map, at least for spatial memory. It contains "place cells" that help create a memory of the environment so that, put all together they create something like a map
== 8. Mind Chemistry ==
* Emotions are as much a part of our consciousness as is our ability to think, conceptualize and rationalize.
* A lack of dopamine in one brain region is thought to be a primary cause of Parkinson's disease, while too much of it is proposed to be responsible for schizophrenia. Depression has long been thought to be due to a deficit in serotonin.
* The amygdala is part of the limbic system with ancient evolutionary origins, and is concerned with fear and anxiety, as well as pleasure.
== 9. Philosophy of Mind ==
* -
== 10. Individual and Society ==
* Although we believe we think in monologues, inner speech's social structure, and the way our consciousness develops through social interactions as we grow into adults, means that in reality inner speech is a dialogue with different outside voices that have shaped our consciousness in the past.
* Voloshinov proposed that although when we make an utterance, we may think that we are linking the words that come out of our mouths in an original and individual way, actually utterances are heavily dependent on "speech genres". People learn as they go through life that particular circumstances tend to produce specific types of verbal interactions.
== 11. Information and Meaning ==
* Because computers only process data in an unconscious fashion, any "information" that is fed into a computer remains meaningless to it, as is the final output that it generates.
== 12. Chance and Design ==
* Meaning is somehow created within a brain, since what enters it is raw data, but what emerges is something relevant for the brain's owner. Somehow we need to explain how such a process can occur in the biological brain.
* A particular chemical molecule in food detected by the tongue, or an odorant molecule detected by the nose, will trigger a signaling pathway in sensory neutrons that is highly specific for that molecule. In the same way, the rods and cones of the eye that respond to light of different intensities and wavelengths or the cells of the inner ear that respond to sounds of different amplitudes and frequencies also produce a signaling response that is highly specific to some pattern in the visual or auditory environment.
* In multicellular organisms like ourselves, there has been a dramatic expansion and diversification of signaling pathways since our ancestors evolved from unicellular life. This has allowed such organisms to not only perceive a much greater diversity of chemicals in the environment but also to register changes in their own internal bodily chemicals; adrenaline is one such chemical and another one is oxytocin, the former being central to the response to danger, the latter underlying an emotion such as love.
* While a chance incident may have led to adrenaline-like chemicals first beginning to mediate the response to danger long ago in evolutionary history, it is no accident that chemicals of this type are now associated with attention, alertness and readiness for action, both in the body and the brain, and we can thank natural selection for the initial link and its later evolution.
== 13. Structure and Function ==
* Similar parts of the brain are activated when volunteers are asked to remember past events or imagine things that might happen to them in the future. Individuals who have a damaged hippocampus, which is associated with memory, tend also to have issues with imagining the future.
* The hypothalamus regulates body temperature, appetite and thirst, the body clock and sexual desire, and is so important that if it is destroyed, the individual is usually unable to survive.
* Phineas Gage in 1848 suffered damage to the prefrontal cortex and much research suggests that similar victims tend to perform poorly on tasks that require the use of long-term strategies and the inhibition of impulses, and can also have short-term memory problems and blunted emotional responses.
== 14. Circuits and Waves ==
* The brain is basically an electrical device.
* Different mental states are associated with different frequencies of brain waves:
** Alpha waves (9-14Hz) - Relaxed state of mind
** Beta waves (1-30Hz) - Alert state
** Gamma waves (31-100Hz) - Problem solving and communication
** Theta waves (4-8Hz) - Deep relaxation
** Delta waves (1-3Hz) - Deep, dreamless sleep
*Any particular neuron will have inputs to its dendrites from the axons of many other neurons, with this relationship being a highly dynamic one, with the balance between excitation and inhibition constantly changing. Neurons will typically show regular oscillations in their electrical potential. This is the basis for brain waves and the different frequencies of these waves simply reflect the balance between excitation and inhibition in a particular neuron.
*Earl Miller speaks of "working memory" as the "sketchpad of conscious thought", which has a volitional quality: "It is the main mechanism by which your brain wrests control from the environment and puts it under its own control. Any simple creature can just react the environment. But what higher order animals have evolved is the ability to take control over their own thoughts.
*Given its proposed primary role in executive or controlling aspects of consciousness, the prefrontal cortex should be a key mediator of working memory. However it has to do so by coordinating the behavior of other parts of the brain: memory, definitely, but also visual and other sensory inputs, and also brain regions responsible for motivation.
*Pascal Fries has shown that gamma waves are coordinators of sensory input, beta waves are top-down regulators of such input by higher brain regions, and theta waves seem to play a particular role in shifting attention, the process by which our minds stop focusing on one feature of the world and begin focusing on another feature instead.
*Since neuronal ensembles can be rapidly assembled and disassembled, in the process affecting the balance between different brain regions and bottom-u^vs top-down signals, this could explain how thoughts can rapidly come and go in our consciousness.
== 15. Free Will and Selfhood ==
* -
== 16. Consciousness and the Unconscious ==
* Control by the brain of our breathing, our heart rate, and a vast range of other bodily functions as well as procedural memory largely involve unconscious actions.
* Inner speech appears to be much more rapid than external speech, maybe ten times as fast. It doesn't require the rate-limiting apparatus of the mouth, tongue, throat, and vocal cords;
** It seems to be more telegraphic than external speech
** It seems to be more fragmentary and less fully formed.
* Rather than being a separate entity, we can see the unconscious as more a manifestation of the fact that the inner dialogue in our heads is far from straightforward and instead reflects contradictions that can be difficult to express, never mind resolve, and also things that remain unsaid, even in our innermost thoughts, because of the impact this might have on our sense of right and wrong.
* Voloshinov argued that the unconscious represents the least articulate part of the continuous dialogue taking place in our heads because the themes with which it is concerned are those where the official ideology of society is most at variance with a person's actual experience.
* Gramsci spoke of "contradictory consciousness" to express the idea that people can hold two opposing opinions about a subject.
* Hunter-gatherer society tends to be above all about cooperation, minimizing conflict and ensuring that everyone's role is respected.
* About 12k ya, when the Natufians, a group of hunter-gatherers in an area that is now Lebanon, first made the move from hunting ad gathering to agriculture. This would lead to the rise of the first city states and the birth of a human civilization whose development continues to spread across the world, in ever greater complexity and technological power.
* The first city-states were built on extracting value from the surrounding countryside by taxation and force, amassing increasingly larger tracts of land and possessions by warfare, and from such wars capturing human beings and turning them into slaves, who then carried out the bulk of work in these societies.
* Less than 10k years before Aristotle, humans only existed in hunter-gatherer groups organized along principles of strict equality. But by his time, a class of people had risen to the top of society and had not only developed an ideology that justified to themselves behavior that today we would find both reprehensible and indefensible, but also, at the same time, created a ruling ideology that presumably most people in that society believed.
* Feudal society followed the ancient slave societies. While slavery no longer existed, the subjugation of the peasant by the aristocracy was both justified by the ideology of the time, in which religion had an important role to play, but also enforced by military might.
* In contrast, the revolutions that occurred in the A7th and 18th centuries in the Netherlands, England, the USA and France that first brought the capitalist class to power, were inspired by statements such as "all men are created equal". Yet a glance at the world today reveals striking inequality.
== 17. Modernity and Its Contradictions ==
* At the heart of modern society lies a contradiction. On the one hand, the capitalist system that now dominates the world is not just the most dynamic in world history, but in its achievements dwarfs anything realized by past societies. But it also has a tendency to instability, crisis and ultimately, unsustainability.
* Liberal democracies are not the majority state of affairs (maybe 70% of people live in some form of dictatorship) but even in such democracies there are growing levels of inequality.
* Adam Smith:
** Under capitalism, anything can become a commodity if someone is willing to buy it.
** This is a system of opposition between the producer seeking to maximize profits and the consumer wanting to pay the lowest price possible.
** Production can become more efficient by dividing up complex processes requiring multiple skills for a single individual to perform, into separate operations, each requiring must less skill.
*Marx: "The worker feels himself only when he is not working, when he is working, he does not feel himself."
*To survive and reproduce, our brains have evolved to work in tow often opposing directions:
**One is a tendency to keep doing the same things that have kept a species alive and reproductive across many generations. This is rooted in the more primeval parts of the brain, and may explain why it can take a considerable change to make someone consider changing the status quo.
**The other is the ability to respond rapidly to any threat to that status quo.
***The amygdala, a primary mediator of emotional responses is one of the main ways that our brains respond to potentially threatening situations, including through unconscious fears of people of difference.
== 18. Sanity and Madness ==
* Schizophrenia may be associated with:
** 108 different genomic regions.
** An inappropriate immune response involving a surge in the number and activity of glial cells in the brain
** Inflammation in the brain
** Laing: major problems of communication within the schizophrenic's family
** Sexual, physical and emotional abuse and other childhood experiences
*While schizophrenics retain an ability to communicate with the same words as an unaffected person in terms of the objects they refer to, their words will exist in totally different systems of meaning.
*Normally, voluntary forms of attention emerge as "people who surround the child begin to use various stimuli and means to direct the child's attention and subordinate it to their control." However, in a family situation in which normal communication has broken down, Rund believes that the child has "no opportunity to establish a firm way of focusing attention on the relevant stimuli in a given situation, because it will never know which are the relevant stimuli. Instead, the attentional styles that are internalized will be characterized by a steady wandering from one stimulus to another, in a search for the most relevant one."
*Depression may be associated with inflammation, which sparks feelings of hopelessness, unhappiness and fatigue.
*For some schizophrenics, a breakdown of conscious awareness may express itself through an inability to recognize that voices that make up the inner speech within our heads are merely expressions of our individuality and not another person somehow existing inside our heads.
*Depression does not seem to be associated with the breakdown of conscious awareness found with severe schizophrenics.
== 19. How Ideas Change ==
* Egypt 1155 BC - First recorded example of strike action.
* Voloshinov's view of human consciousness as a boundary phenomenon, with origins in social discourse but situated in the individual mind, and also being a kind of dialogue: "Meaning does not reside in the word or the soul of the speaker or the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex. It is like an electric spark... Only the current of verbal intercourse endows a word with the light of meaning.
* Mass movements force individuals into unfamiliar situations and led to new types of cosial interactions with other people in which language plays a key role. This restructuring of neural impulses in the prefrontal cortex could then start to challenge the type of "unconscious biases" that are rooted in the amygdala.
* While the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in guiding our future actions based on things that have happened to us in the past, in contrast, the dorsomedial part of this brain region allows us to adjust our behavior to a rapidly changing situation.
== 20. Future of Mind ==
* Investigating how language affects the coordinating role of different brain waves associated with various aspects of human consciousness is likely to be a fertile are for future studies.
* It is possible to access another person's mind, through reading a novel, seeing a work of art, hearing a piece of music or watching a film.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Open Socrates

2026-07-26T15:45:10Z

Robert.adlington:

== Introduction: The Man Whose Name is an Example ==
* Why am I doing any of this?
* You make sure your thinking about how your life should go doesn't wander too far from how it is already going. You appear to be afraid of something.
* Taking life fifteen minutes at a time is a Tolstoyan strategy. The name for the opposite strategy is "Socratic".
* The Epicureans heard the voice of the body, as it screams out to us, in the language of pleasure and pain, and demands that we promote and protect and serve it. The Stoic's heard the voice of the group, when it draws each individual's attention to the fact that she is part of a larger community, and demands that she regulate her behavior accordingly.
* The action that best promotes the greatest good for the greatest number is not guaranteed to be the same, in all cases, as the action that shows respect for the dignity of another person. (This conflict is what the set of philosophical thought experiments called "trolley problems" is designed to reveal.)
* The predicament of the anti-intellectual: he is the secret slave of not one but two masters, and these masters are at way with one another. But the darkest secret of all is that these warring masters are merely feeding him back, in disguised form, the savage commands, either of his own body (Save me!) or of his own group (Cooperate with us!).
* "Being like Socrates" just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions. This is not an ethical theory. It is more like a critical-thinking "sauce" that can be poured over any ethical theory, or simply over common sense. Whereas "Kantian" or "Aristotelian" refers to a set of ideas about how to live, "Socratic" refers to a style.
* The way to be good when you don't know how to be good is by learning. You should do everything in such a way as to be learning what the right thing to do it, and this means getting other people to show you when you are wrong.
* Unlike the other three traditions, Socratic ethics does not take its bearings from the savage commands of one's body, or one's group. It does not present itself as a finished system, but rather awaits its own elaboration by those who now do, and those who in the future will, understand themselves as Socratics.
* Untimely questions are marked by the fact we need answers to them before we are prepared to ask them. Our default answers - the ones available to us absent philosophizing - come from unreliable sources: our bodies, and other people. These sources issue savage commands, contradicting one another and themselves, leading us to act in confused and haphazard ways.
== Part One: Untimely Questions ==
=== 1. The Tolstoy Problem ===
* One can avoid Tolstoy's crisis by placing one foot after another, and attending either to whatever strikes one as the greatest danger - either physical or moral - to be avoided, or, alternatively, the greatest source of pleasure or entertainment to be pursued. Whether we see life, pessimistically, as an ongoing crisis punctuated by periods of relief, or, more optimistically, as an ongoing source of pleasure punctuated by periods of crisis, we will find it replete with reasons for postponing philosophical inquiry. If we postpone for long enough, death will rescue us from ever having to come to terms with the meaninglessness of life.
* Untimely questions are remarkable not only because they are hard to answer, but, first and foremost, because they are hard to ask; and they ar hard to ask not only because it is hard to pose them to others, but, first and foremost, because it is hard to pose them to oneself.
* You think you already have the answer to them, and the reason you think that is that you are using the answer.
* Human existence requires a biological infrastructure; human agency requires, in addition, a conceptual infrastructure.
* You are not supposed to regard these questions as open, precisely because you are supposed to already be using the answers, in the caring that you are currently doing.
* Faced with despair over a set of questions he can neither avoid nor confront, he fins himself blown back and forth between the unthinkability of suicide and the necessity of it, oddly confident about his ability to determine which of those states counts as "sobriety", which as "intoxication".
* When we settle on answers to the central questions of our lives without ever having opened up those questions for inquiry, that is a recipe for wavering. A mind tasked only with thinking its way through the next fifteen minutes is likely to find itself acting inconsistently, routinely undoing what it confidently did earlier.
* What causes Socrates to waver is his failure to have inquired sufficiently; to this extent, he is in the same boat as everyone else. The difference between Socrates and those around him is that he wants to do something about this problem. Socrates thinks that his circumstances call for inquiry, whereas his interlocutors are inclined to cut off the inquiry and move on with their lives. As Socrates sees it, by preemptively closing the questions, they consign themselves to a lifetime of wavering.
* Russell notices that the form of wavering that arises from the ways in which ethical language is hostage to its user's approval; we call self-confidence "arrogance" when we dislike it; we call youthfulness "immaturity when we dislike it. Revenge is "accountability" when we like it and consequences are "punitive when we dislike them. "Tribalism" is bad, while "loyalty" is good.
* Folk wisdom is another place to see wavering:
** Look before you leap! But: He who dares wins!
** Slow and steady wins the race! But: Time waits for no man!
*You waver when you decide that one thought is suitable for one context and a different one for another, even though you cannot specify any relevant difference between the two contexts.
*Whereas other people criticize Socrates for being repetitive, he criticizes them for wavering - or, as he puts it, refusing to say the same things about the same subjects.
*Wavering often takes the form of weakness of will, where we commit ourselves to one course of action, and end up acting against our better judgement instead. We say we know that e should exercise more and spend less time on our phones and be nicer to our parents and keep our kids away from video games and eat more vegetables and read more novels and be more conscious about our consumption choices and so on and so forth, but quite often we don't act in accordance with this supposed knowledge - instead we act exactly as people would act who didn't know these things.
*Passionate desire pressures us to think no more than fifteen minutes ahead.
*But image being Pierre (in War and Peace) and acknowledging what is happening: maybe the truth is that drinking and partying really are my central concerns; I'm like an animal, battered around by pleasure and convention; there's nothing my life is about. No one could bear to see himself as one of those "people of weak character". The only way to get through the next fifteen minutes is to convince yourself that you're doing something much nobler than getting through the next fifteen minutes. And so you produce, as Pierre does, as Tolstoy does, the illusion of a synoptic perspective on your life as a whole.
*We cannot step back to a detached position from which having no answer at all is permissible: question and answer are magnetically attracted to one another, and the space for thought is eliminated. So we get by without asking untimely questions - or we appear to ourselves to get by, while actually wavering. We waver in our actions, we waver in our thoughts, and we waver most of all when pressed to explain ourselves.
*Fiction was a place where Tolstoy could dramatize, from a safe distance, his own brush with the meaninglessness of life. The Tolstoy problem haunts so much of Tolstoy's fiction: many of his characters confront the question, "What will become of my whole life?".
*All fiction offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life, but great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from.
*The ideal for Tolstoy woould be never having to confront the Tolstoy problem in the first place.
*In much the way that a painting presents us with a landscape but prevents us from entering it, novelists give us a view onto the promised lang, but not more.
*Socrates explains that by pursuing knowledge - which is to say, by seeking a solution to the Tolstoy problem - we stabilize the answers to the untimely questions: "For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man's mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why."
*Socrates is here distinguishing an opinion that one simply has from an opinion that is informed by way of an inquisitive process. Then, the steps of that process can be retraced, and our wavering stops. The thinking that we do in pursuit of an answer holds that answer fixed. Knowledge is simply the name for an answer that is the product of a complete inquiry into a question. Wavering, by contrast, is a sign that one has cut off an investigation before it came to a close - or that one never opened it.
*What inquiry gets us are answers that are both true and stable.
*Action is based on ideas about what is good, ideas that supply the motivating goal of the action. The fact that you think those ideas are true is the only reason you are doing anything at all.
*If, when wavering, you never look back, you can get through your whole life while maintaining the appearance to yourself and to others that your behavior has a conceptual infrastructure, that there is a through line that makes intelligible your whole life. But why put on this show unless you want it to be a reality? The philosophical project springs from the desire to be coherent, to live a life that doesn't need to be shielded from reflection, a life you live by understanding it.
*Philosopher is not a profession. It is just an especially open, direct and straightforward way of being a person.
=== 2. Load-Bearing Answers ===
* Each of his conversations is a high-wire act in which Socrates manages to sustain an inquiry into the very question his interlocutor is least likely to tolerate. These are untimely questions.
* There is a pattern to how many people respond to Socrates' questions: they first feel that the questions are so straightforward as to hardly deserve consideration, and then give "answers" that amount to performative self-affirmations.
* A belief that one needs to have is a belief that one is acting on.
* When I talk to you about the location of the supermarket, I am handing you a special kind of thought - one that is, as it were, currently moving my legs forward.
* When the question is untimely, we "hand over" an answer that is guaranteed to be found on the tip of our tongue, because we were already speaking it - to ourselves.
* I regain the freedom to ask myself the question, "Which way is the supermarket?" or more broadly, "Where should I go?" only once I stop using an answer to that question. I could keep walking, but I could not keep walking to the supermarket.
* What makes a question untimely for a given person is the fact that she is enacting its answer, but there are important differences between the size and scope of our practical projects. The most interesting and elusive questions will be the ones whose answers we must give at every moment of our lives, for their whole duration. In terms of the degree to which we, as agents, rely on them, these answers bear the heaviest load.
* We cannot ask, "Why did you decide to be a good person?" No one will be able to account for that decision; as far back as we stretch our minds, we will find that the decision was already in place.
* One doesn't need to be very old to confront questions of justice, and as soon as one does, one finds that one is already in the business of indignantly insisting on one's rights.
* By the time a question of justice arises, one find oneself needing to hit the ground running with an answer.
* Measuring is how we check what works and what doesn't; measurement matters.
* If I care enough about what you think to be angered, insulted, and hurt by your estimation of me - then I do not see our difference of opinion as being "merely subjective". The idea that the dispute is "merely subjective' is more likely to reflect the point of view of an onlooker who wishes the parties to stop their squabbling. The parties themselves fight because they see the question as in some way objective - decidable in the light of the truth, in spite of the impossibility of measurement.
* We fight over questions that cannot be decided by measurement - but not over all such questions, because we do not fight over matters of taste, nor over questions where the instrument of measurement has simply not been invented yet. What questions, then, do we fight over? We fight over those questions whose answers are practically operative, rendering the suspension of judgment impossible. Untimely questions best explain why we fight when we do.
* People are prepared to fight and even kill over disagreements on questions of ethics. Their inability to inquire into them stems from the fact that they are currently making use of the answers.
* Measurement exists only where detachment is possible.
* What is distinctive about questions of measurement is not that they are "objective" but that it is easy to separate the asking of the question from the answering of it.
* Calling a question of justice "subjective is a confused way of getting at the mysterious fact that the answers to such questions seem to have always been with us.
* We navigate our lives by way of answers as to what things matter or have meaning. These answers map the world for us: without a sense of what to aim at, we are floating, purposeless. Most of the answers that anchor our agency in the world concern our relationships with the people we are close to. It is with reference to those people that our abstract commitments to being an empathetic, kind, loving, helpful person become concrete directives with action-guiding force; and so when, for example, some of those people die, or betray us, we experience a profound disruption and disorientation. We cannot live without answers, and so when some of our most important answers are, or stand to be, removed from us, we experience that even in the form of strong, negative emotions.
* You might not notice it, but as you make your way through each day, there are many, many things you are counting on. Our load bearing answers to untimely questions tend to give rise to predictions that specify what needs to be true in the future in order for my answer to guide my action in the present.
* No one can live without making predictions about those parts of the future that are of special concern to them.
* The name for the load-bearing predictions is "hope". And it is worth observing that hope is fragile. it is difficult to sustain, since it comes with the prospect of grief and loss if we are disappointed, so at times we recoil against it by "detaching" ourselves from the goal - or pretending to: "I know it won't happen and I don't care."
* While a juror might gradually become more convinced of guilt as the evidence mounts, the mother of the accused's epistemic path is more likely to take the shape of "flipping" from hopeful certainty of his innocence to despair and rage over his guilt.
* There seems to be a big difference between the experience of loss and the experience of being wronged, or slighted, or treated unjustly. This difference is important to understanding untimely questions - or rather, it is important to understanding how to classify the answers we give to those questions.
* You can be angry at people but you cannot be sad at them. Anger is a powerful and all-consuming driver of action, thought, and feeling. When I am angry enough, I do not care that I am hungry. Anger presents itself as a problem that can be solved and it aims at this solution. Sadness, by contrast, can only be made to wane under the force of time or distraction: it ebbs away, but we do not "resolve" or "fix" it.
* If I am angry, I want other people to be angry on my behalf (and may well get angry at them for failing to do so).
* Anger is fundamentally directed at the wrongdoer, on the grounds that the wrongdoing indicates a failure to give a shared answer. My anger moves me to try to restore that answer as a collective answer, by somehow forcing you to give it, or ensuring that you will give it in the future.
* When I am angry, I am in an unstable state where I feel that something that is supposed to be collective is being held only by me, and I must rectify that situation.
* Some answers to untimey questions are given only individually, whereas others are collective, given by one because they are given by a group. The first kind of answer exposes a person to sadness, or fear, or despair; the second kind to anger.
* When people find that the answers on which their lives depend are slipping away from them, they become willing to do almost anything in order to secure them. This is because nothing - including the consequences of violence - matter unless these answers are secured. The answers are how things matter.
* If nothing mattered to you, many impediments would be removed from your life. You wouldn't get into fights, the stakes would never seem high, you wouldn't find any questions "touchy" or "sensitive", and you would have no trouble taking unbiased, impartial, detached perspective on things.
* But this invulnerability is wasted on you. Your detachment from what matters has mad it impossible for you to live.
* The load-bearing answers we give to untimely questions are both the sources of our problems and the sources of all our reasons to care that we have problems.
=== 3. Savage Commands ===
* All around you, the air is thick with commands. You can't escape them. They follow you wherever you go. You don't see them: they're invisible. You can't hear them they're inaudible. You feel them. The feeling is pain, accompanied by the prospect of pleasure.
* Even a relatively unsophisticated command, such as what we get from feeling hungry (Eat!) or tired (Sleep!), is associated with mental images and fantasies and ideas about actions we could perform in relation to the paid. The pain promises to go away if you do one thing, to increase if you do anything else. The pains don't always keep their promise: sometimes obedience leads to more pain. And sometimes disobedience works out just fine.
* These commands are savage.
* When we disobey a command, it is usually at the prompting of another command. We don't obey these commands because any one of them moves us with overpowering force. We obey whichever is strongest, because we have no other options. These commands are our answers to untimely questions. To see how we ended up with them, you only have to turn back the clock.
* As soon as you were born, you had to hit the ground running. You were forced to start leading your life even though you had no idea how to do so. What did you do? You screamed, you wiggled, and you took in information about how the world reacted to your screams and wiggles: Does this make the pains go away? Does that? By the time we have the conceptual wherewithal to wonder about how we should live our lives, we've long been taking heaps of answers for granted.
* Parental instruction is almost always corrective rather than primordial. You wouldn't give a two-year-old a lecture about homework; you would give the lecture to a ten-year-old, precisely when she refuses to do it. The sign that a child is ready to hear your instruction is that she is acting in conflict with it.
* A command answers the question "What should I do?" when no one asked it.
* We are the sorts of beings who need answers before developing the ability to ask questions, and who therefor rely on answers to unasked questions. Which is to say: commands.
* It is only if we become dissatisfied with all of the ways in which we are being commanded that we will be moved to seek out a different kind of answer, by inquiring. This is why Socratic ethics opens with a critique of commands.
* Perception tells me what is the case - it informs me as to what items populate the world - whereas desire dictates which of those items should serve as my target.
* Philia covers all the various ways in which I use the concept "mine" to talk about other people: my family, my friends, my city, my military regiment. Nowadays we might include my religious denomination, my social class, my educational or professional cohort.
* The essential feature of kinship bonds is that they offer communal answers to questions such as: Which people and places and activities matter most to us? Which days do we celebrate? under what circumstances are we willing to fight and die? How should we behave in relation to each other?
* For most of us, humanity is the largest kinship group we see ourselves as belonging to .
* Whereas the bodily command operates by way of the carrot of pleasure, comfort, and safety and the stick of pain and the fear of death. The kinship command operates by way of the carrot of status, honor, affection, and camaraderie, and the stick of the fear of exclusion and the various social emotions (shame, pity, sympathy, envy, and so on). The former pertains to my biological existence, whereas the latter concerns my social existence, how my place in my community is demarcated by others' opinions of me.
* Given the degree to which a sense of self-worth is determined extrinsically, it would be more accurate to call it a "sense of other-worth".
* We rely on the continuity of kinship relations - the fact that "our people" in some sense of "our" will live on - in order to be at peace with our own individual deaths.
* Socrates says that the body "fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense... and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth." My body might tell me that I have to do one thing at one time, but, at a later time, fill me with regrets and pains for having obeyed it.
* Most of the language of self-care - relax, take time for yourself, don't stress, don't overwork - is a version of the bodily command.
* Intimate relationships - between best friends, or lovers, or close siblings - straddle the divide between body and kin.
* Both the bodily command and the kinship command make us waver. They might give us a loud, clear answer as to what we ought to do, but the answers don't last. By frequently reversing themselves, they prompt us to take life fifteen minutes at a time.
* We stay up too late, we overeat, we avoid answering emails, we make impulse purchase, and we are not always surprised when these things do not end up working out for us. Like Socrates' interlocutors, we might ascribe such choices to being "overcome by pleasure or pain." The person who makes such a claim is called either akratic or weak-willed, and they insist that they wavered with their eyes open.
* According to Socrates, the case they want to describe, where they recognized that one option was better and still freely chose the other, simply can't happen.
* Your body commands you to eat that cookie, presenting that as the best possible option because its judgment about pleasure is distorted by the proximity of the cookie.
* Just because you understand that you will regret this choice in the future, it doesn't follow that you do regret it now.
* The weak-willed person has deluded themselves into thinking that they waver less than they do; they think that, while relying only on their bodies, they can somehow get a stable grip on what's best for their bodies. But that is not true. The body can't take care of itself: it wavers, judging X to be better than Y at one moment and the opposite the next.
* We have developed the habit of using multiple words for the same thing, in order to hide from ourselves the absurdity of our own behavior.
* You're saying that you have some kind of a grip on how you should be acting, but what's actually happening is that you're wavering, because you can't keep that grip for more than fifteen minutes at a time. You waver in how you act and then you waver in how you talk about how you didn't waver when you acted. You can't eve stabilize your sentences for more than a few seconds at a time!
* We've allowed our talk to waver in this way, just because the phenomenon is so common and normal and natural that we can't believe it could be a sign that something is going deeply wrong. But it is. Our problems talking about what is happening reflect a problem in the happening itself. There's a crack at the foundation of human motivation, but we've looked at it so many times that we've convinced ourselves that it is part of the design. In fact there are two cracks: Revenge and
* Revenge is when love wavers into hate. This fact about love - that it disposes us to hate - is, like weakness of will, so routinely subjected to disguises and rationalizations that it is hard to see clearly.
* I'm using revenge somewhat broadly to include all the case where you behave hatefully toward someone - treating harms to them as goods - and understand your behavior as a fitting response to how they have acted, or to how they will act, or to who they are.
* The fundamental directive of the body is to pursue as much pleasure as possible, so when it leads you to pursue less, that is wavering. The fundamental directive of kinship is to benefit one's associates, and so when it leads you to harm them, that is wavering.
* Socrates' approach to revenge is simple: you shouldn't ever do bad things. Bad things don't become good because of who they're done to, or what someone did first, or because they're done in self-defense. No matter what someone did in the past, or will do in the future, they do not "deserve" harm. Being bad is not a way to be good. Harming people isn't good; it's bad. All the ways we talk ourselves into doing bad things are thinly disguised contradictions.
* Socrates is not raising any objection to violence, or killing, so long as they are justified by the good to be achieved, rather than understood as "deserved" in the light of evils done.
* Just as weakness of will entails a prudent image - a kind of "phantasm" - of my future regret, revenge entails an emphatic image, a phantasm of your emotional repudiation of the revenge I am enacting against you.
* Dark Empathy - When I channel your feelings, I can react to those feelings in a way that reverses their valence for you. Thus, I can emphatically import your joy, and be pained by it (envy), or emphatically import your suffering, and be pleased by it (Schadenfreude).
* All forms of empathy, be they dark or heartwarming, begin with my feeling what you feel. Empathy is not a virtue, but a power. Almost every adult has this power to some degree, though some of us have more of it than others, and it can be used for good or ill.
* The Socratic position on revenge can be summed up as a set of truisms:
** No one deserves to be harmed.
** It's never right to do wrong.
** Being bad can never be what makes something good.
*Why would we ever waver from these truisms? The answer is kinship.
*When a boulder or wild beast hurtles toward me, what I feel is fear, not anger. Harms don't generate indignant concerns about accountability unless they strike you as, in some way, disrespectful or offensive, which is to say, as violations of kinship norms.
*When you get revenge, you treat someone in precisely the way that you are forbidden to treat precisely that person. The phenomenon of revenge reveals that the kinship command is capable of ordering us around in a self-destructive way.
*The state of enemy is the product of some event - the person did something wrong, or belongs to a group associated with some wrongdoing.
*Your enemies are people who used to be your friends.
*Our common understanding of self-defense includes a culprit and that means that self-defense, as it is usually understood, hides within it the notion of revenge. The guilt of the party under attack matters more to us than the positive, life-saving value that the act of violence stands to achieve. Guilt transforms kin - whom you were not permitted to harm - into anti-kin.
*The full menu of classic revenge, spiteful revenge, and pre-vengeful revenge allows a person to justify almost any attack on anyone else as being in some sense a case of retaliation against an enemy.
*The kinship command cannot provide stable guidance as to how one should treat those around one.
*Socrates is unwilling to hate anyone, but he is only willing to truly love those people who can see that the aims of kinship - benefits to one's associates - will not be achieved if the kinship command is left to its own devices.
*If your kids have ever said to you, "I wasn't the one who started it," that's a sign that you taught them the logic of revenge. Socrates calls this bad parenting; he doesn't acknowledge such a state as "being provoked".
*Revenge is animated by the desire to teach people lessons and set them straight. Revenge is not pure hate, it is loving hate.
*Revenge and akrasia teach us that our default systems for managing our lives are defective: they make us waver.
*The Socratic method is an alternative to savage commands. It takes the form of a proposal; either you are going to be convinced by me, to go along with what I think, or you are going to convince me to go along with what you think.
*A penalty or reward might suffice to change your mind, but Socrates is not in the business of changing minds. He's in the business of either changing minds or having his own mind be changed, which is to say, the business of figuring out which of those two things should happen. This requires looking into why a person was inclined to do whatever they were going to do, and checking to see whether it makes sense: on examination, does their speech waver, or not?
*It's one thing to be motivationally driven to engage in akrasia or take revenge; it's another to try to explain to someone else why those would be the right course of action. The pressure of objection, refutation, and explanatory clarity exposes the savageness of the command driving you, to the point where you would not be able to demand that anyone else act the way you are acting.
*Everything we do, every choice we make, every action we take, is underwritten by some answer to the question "What should I do?". Socrates' alternative to savage commands allows us to transform our default answers into something different: inquisitive answers.
*Socrates asks us to imagine become people who, instead of setting one command aside in favor of another, discover something better to do with our lives than follow commands. What if you lived, not off of commands, but off of an understanding of what you were doing? Liberation from commands begins with questions.

=== 4. Socratic Intellectualism ===
* The demands of one's body to escape wounds or death can stand in tension with the bonds of solidarity to behave admirably or justly in rescuing friends and relatives.
*To one sufficiently inflamed by the spirit of the kinship command, only honor matters. Cowardice is the worst thing in the world - but so is death.
*For Socrates, when Alcibiades goes back and forth between describing the good as "the just" and "the advantageous" he is not describing two things out there. He's just wavering. There's only one thing out there: the good.
*What if, instead of considering the untutored versions of the bodily or the kinship command, we considered the maximally rational version of those commands? This is the task to which the two dominant strands of ethical theorizing in the West have set themselves.Three strands of Western ethics

==== Kantian Ethics (Deontology/Contractualism) - The Kinship Answer ====

* Constraining one's actions by respect for humanity (in one's own person and that of others).
* Foregrounds respect for each individual's place in a larger whole, stabilizing the kinship answer
* Center's ethics around membership ("I belong to the group of rational beings.")
* Legalistic/regulative form - works by subjecting what you were antecedently inclined to do to a constraint.
* Caring about justice.
* Ancient stoicism offered the first attempt at an enlightened version of the kinship answer. They believed that our truest attachments are not to our families, or associates, or country, but to a world order governed by fixed universal laws. If you understand your place within this larger order, you will see that within it there can be no conflicting interests, and that you never have any reason for revenge. They advocated against all passions, but especially against anger.
* Stoics analyze appetitive motivation in terms of an animal's kinship relation to itself.
* Stoic cosmopolitanism is the ancestor of Kantian deontology, which offers an account of kinship grounded in the power of practical rationality.
* Kant's community is "the kingdom of ends", and his test for an action's value "the categorical imperative".
* John Rawls' A Theory of Justice is a Kantian utopia of sorts.

==== Utilitarianism (Consequentialism) Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick - The Bodily Answer ====

* Bring about the greatest good for the greatest number.
* Foregrounds the maximization of pleasure, offering up a way to stabilize the bodily answer
* Centers ethics around experience ("I feel pleasure and pain")
* Calculative form - works by cost-benefit analysis.
* Caring about advantage
* Comes out of Epicureanism. They showed that is is possible to pursue pleasure without heedlessly opting for the pleasure that is closest at hand. Pleasure lovers who consider the consequences of their choices, and who give future pleasures their proper weight, are also lovers of prudence. The careful, calculative selection of pleasure is the Epicurean response to the problem of weakness of will.
* So long as the Epicurean is able to translate whatever values he wishes to preserve into the language of pleasure and pain, and these pleasures and pains can be weighed against one another, the resulting hedonism becomes a stable guide for life

==== Virtue Ethics (Neo-Aristotelian ethics) ====

* Do whatever the decent (just, kind, courageous, prudent, and so on) person would do if he were in the situation you are in.
* Believes that to exercise virtue - to behave as a just, courageous, wise, and decent person does - is at once the greatest source of pleasure for the individual who so behaves and at the same time the greatest source of benefit for his society.
* If one is raised well in a good society, the voices of the body and of society will have been harmonized into the single song of virtue.
* Kalon (beautiful, noble) - combines the personal allure of pleasant experience and the social appeal of recognition and honor.
* The virtue ethicist does not feel compelled to give you a theoretical account of which kinds of cases will fall into each category because she takes ethical knowledge to be knowledge not of universal principles, but of particulars. Aristotle describes a virtuous soul as similar to a healthy eye: you can simply see what the right thing to do is in each case.
* Aristotle agrees with Socrates that there really is no tension between justice and advantage

==== Neo-Socratic ethics ====
*Callard will propose through this book.
*The war between the just and the advantageous becomes a war that cannot be articulated within Kantianism or Utilitarianism, because it is the war between those theories.
*Socratism is similar to Kantianism and Utilitarianism.
*Trolley problems are traditionally understood as a basis for objecting to the completeness of either Kantianism or Utilitarianism as a system.
*Post-Socratic ethical theory does reveal the possibility of a more systematic and coherent articulation of the objects of the two commands, the goods pertaining to the body and those pertaining to kinship.
*We think we are speaking from some stable position when we insist that there is a difference between justice and advantage, but Socrates would say we are merely being blown back and forth between an impulse towards a calculative or a legalistic form of resolving the question.
*For Socrates, ethics consists in inquiring into untimely questions, rather than in finding ways to read answers off of (either or both) of the savage commands.
*Kantianism and Utilitarianism must allow for the possibility of residual, untamed savagery, and they can, though only at the cost of invoking an entity, such as "the will", which will be tasked with battling it. The virtue ethicist, by contrast, must count motivational failures as cognitive failures.
*If you actually knew what you should do, you would do it. So long as you don't know, holds Socrates, the proper ethical attitude is an inquisitive one.
*The three features of Socratism (that we don't now know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that intellectual conversations are the road to becoming a good person) add up to an intellectualism that many people find so implausible as to be ready to dismiss it without serious consideration.
*The real source of the opposition to Socratic intellectualism is not the commonsense observation that people often act in ways that are ready to repudiate, but the insistence that what we sometimes act against deserves to be called "knowledge".
*Socratic intellectualism turns its back on a very basic human need; the need to already know. Could it really be true that we will have to go through our whole lives, from birth to death, without ever knowing whether we are doing it right? The answer is yes.
*There is no firm ground, and you don't ever get to take foundations for granted.
*There is a problem with utopia. It makes no sense to insist that we spend our lives struggling and toiling to bring about a world that, if we were in it, we'd recoil from. This is the paradox of utopia and it characterizes the entire tradition of utopian writing.
*The paradox of utopia suggests that our thinking about how we should live may not yet be complete.
*Plato (not Socrates!) divides the soul into three parts:
**The spiritual part - Which reflects the demands of kinship.
**The appetitive part - Which reflects the demands of the body.
**The rational part - the natural ruler over the other two.
*The idea that the function of thought is not only to help us get what our body tells us we need, or to behave how our kin want us to behave, but to ask the very question to whic the other two commands provide automatic answers - this is the most important lesson that Plato learned from Socrates.

== Part Two: The Socratic Method ==
* Each of the three ingredients of Socratism, open-mindedness, inquiry, and separating truth from falsity - conceals a paradox.
* We tend to prefer problem-solving to inquiry, which is why, so often, when faced with a genuine question, our first instinct is to try to turn it into a problem. When Einstein was confronted with "What is Time?", he turned it into "How would clocks behave under various circumstances?"
* Socrates demonstrates that we already have, in us, ideas we do not quite know how to live up to. Learning philosophy is less like filling a void and more like untying a knot. Philosophy begins not in ignorance, not in wonder, but in error.
=== 5. The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox ===
* Kleist: "I want you to speak with the reasonable purpose of enlightening yourself."
* Kleist's insight - that I can give you more than what I seem myself to have - is Socratic.
* Our tendency is to assume that thinking is like breathing: something each person does for themselves.
* Aporia - The absence of a route or a way forward or path by which to proceed.
* As a midwife, Socrates claims that what his interlocutor is doing is recollecting something they already know, and he is only helping them in that process: bringing hidden wisdom to light.
* Is Socrates as arrogant as he seems, or as ignorant as he claims to be? Is he a provocative gadfly or a cooperative midwife?
* Plato's dialogues are typically divided into three periods:
** Early - Showcasing the person and views of the historical Socrates, with a special focus on the events surrounding his death.
** Middle - In which Plato is beginning to produce and to put forward some of his own original ideas.
** Late - Where he does so to an even greater degree and Socrates either does not appear or is not the main speaker.
*Socrates equates the negative process of refutation and the positive process of discovery. The gadfly and the midwife are the same person.
*James: "We must know the truth; and we must avoid error - these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws."
**If you have the goal of avoiding falsehood, you should always suspend judgment (be skeptical)
***If a question strikes you as one that leaves you fully free to indulge in the luxury of indefinitely holding out for objective evidence, you can call it a "Cliffordian question".
***Descartes started in a Cliffordian manner, but his skepticism seems more credible than the edifice he builds afterwards.
**If you have the goal of securing truths, you should never suspend judgment (be credulous).
***James wants to invoke this "preliminary faith", which he also calls a "will to believe", only in areas of inquiry where the question is momentous, and where there is a need to act. But even in theoretical pursuits, we are forced to invest in the truth of an idea in advance of decisive evidence.
***Aristotle starts in a more Jamesian way, but the risk is that he isn't sufficiently skeptical
**Trying to be credulous and skeptical at the same time is like trying to go forward and backward at the same time or trying to build what you are concurrently tearing down.
*Anscombe pointed out that although a person usually finds out what other people are doing by observation - by going out and looking at the evidence - a person doesn't find out what he himself is doing in that same way. If I say I'm talking, it's because that's what I intend to be doing.
*Agents can be wrong about what they are doing, so they don't count as knowing what they are doing. Still, a person clearly stands in some especially non-skeptical relation to those events in the world that are her own actions.
*But even if we don't have knowledge of what we are doing, it seems true to say some of our beliefs about what we are doing are distinctive; they seem to have been freed from the usual demand to check whether what we believe is actually the case. We could call these "Jamesian beliefs".
*Socrates conceived of learning as a social activity where one person prioritizes the pursuit of truth and the other person the avoidance of error. The Jamesian rule and the Cliffordian rule don't conflict if they are given to two different people.
*If refutation is, in truth, a cooperative, collaborative process, why does it appear so adversarial to those whom Socrates refutes? It is because they are convinced that they can do, by themselves, what Socrates is trying to help them do. Socrates comes across as someone who offers to cooperatively divide the task of shopping - and then follows you around the supermarket taking things our of your cart and putting them back on the shelf. If he seems to be interfering with your part of the work, that's only because you've inflated the size of your part.
*You see the activity of thinking as indivisible, because, at bottom, you're sure that you can do it on your own. You find it incredible and unacceptable that thinking is something you need help to do.
*Arguing is stressful - thinking, we tell ourselves, is enjoyable. Socrates would say: that's because you're not actually thinking.
*Socrates tells us that our minds are not as powerful as we thought they were. When we shelter from the demands and pressures of the outside world and quietly engage in an activity we call "thinking to ourselves", that is not in fact when thinking happens. Thinking happens during the uncomfortable times when you permit others to intrude into your private mental world, to correct you.
=== 6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge ===
* Error does not tend to survive introspective awareness of itself; when you catch your mind in going astray, at that very moment your mind cleans up its act.
* You can look at the erroneous though, but you can no longer look at the world through it. Our errors are blind spots, which is why real open-mindedness is so difficult.
* Sentences in the form "p is the case, but I believe it isn't" or "p is the case, but I don't believe it is" - are sometimes called "Moore sentences" after GE Moore.
* The Moore sentence is not a contradiction; it is a blind spot.
* Conventional wisdom says it's just straightforwardly impossible to believe or sincerely assert a Moore sentence.
* Socrates understood refutation as the hallmark of his philosophical activity, and the Socratic dialogues even have a name for the experience in which refutation culminates: aporia
* Aporia - being refuted - is something that is experienced and felt by the person who undergoes it.
* Being refuted feels like ignorance, confusion, perplexity, whereas once you have changed my mind, the perplexity is over and I think I am now in the right. And if I have suspended judgment I at least know I am not wrong, so that is a kind of safety as well.
* The possibility of asserting Moore sentences and the possibility of refutation are one and the same. What is at stake in Moore's paradox is nothing less that the practice of philosophy itself.
* Socrates is not telling Alcibiades that he is wrong, but getting Alcibiades to say, "I'm wrong" and then he's making sure that Alcibiades sees that those were his own words.
* Moore sentences are, first and foremost, evaluative judgments about some belief. The problem with first personally asserting a Moore sentence is that it would require me to take a critical attitude towards my own thoughts, and I do not seem able to do this. When I assess what you think, I compare it to the way the world really is. But looking at how the world really is is how I figure out what I think in the first place. When I ask myself what I think about something, I am already asking what is true about that thing. There is no room for a separate assessment step, which means that my thoughts are evaluatively inaccessible to me.
* To say I am biased to myself is a wild understatement; I am not more likely to judge my beliefs true; I am utterly incapable of judging them false. I am not evaluating them at all, because they are evaluatively inaccessible to me.
* The act of seeing is, in some way, self-blind. What does the seeing cannot see itself, just as what does the knowing cannot know itself - at least, not by itself.
* Suspending judgment is the conceptual analog to twisting or turning my body to bring parts of myself I can't usually see into view.
* It is Socrates who identifies the philosophically troubling form of self-blindness, namely our stubborn inability to subject certain of our beliefs - the ones whose guidance matters most ot us - to evaluative standards. It is our load-bearing beliefs - the ones that answer untimely questions - that we struggle to evaluate.
* Socrates is playing Clifford, whereas his interlocutor is playing James. The interlocutor uses his answers to furnish the thesis to be examined, whereas Socrates uses his answers to examine that thesis. It is because the Clifford role is entirely responsive, skeptical, and critical and negative that Socrates denies having said anything.
* Once the project of saying what Alcibiades thinks is distributed over two people, "p, but I don't believe it" becomes both sayable and thinkable. Socrates discovered that the space of speech is more capacious that the space of thought. It allows a person to see their own mistakes.
=== 7. Meno's Paradox ===
* We are not sure what we mean by "think". Forget about machines. When do I myself count as thinking? Do nonhuman animals think? What is thinking? If we cannot answer these questions, we seem very far from bring able to say what it would be for a machine to think.
* Philosophical inquiry is not an attempt to solve well-defined problems; it is, instead, an attempt to ask important questions.
* When philosophical questions can be formulated as problems, that is when they leave the orbit of philosophy and become part of science or economics, etc.
* Meno's paradox calls into question the very possibility of searching: either the search is unnecessary, because you already have what you're look for, or it is impossible, because you don't know what you're looking fro, and so wouldn't know it if you found it.
* A problem is something you need to move out of the way so that you can go on with what you were doing before the problem arose. A question is a very different sort of beast. To ask a question is to be on a quest.
* When Socrates insists that Meno keep virtue whole and not split into parts, he is reminding Meno that "What is virtue?" is a question, not a problem.
* A misunderstanding characteristic of the primal scene (when a philosopher speaks philosophically for the first time with a non-philosopher) is when the philosopher is asked to provide a definition of the very term she hoped the conversation would explicate. The non-philosopher sees definition as the prerequisite for solving whatever problem the philosopher wanted us to solve, but there was no such problem. The philosopher wasn't posing a problem. She was asking a question.
* WVO Quine famously denied the existence of a priori knowledge; and even those who don't deny it outright might be inclined to limit its scope to math and logic.
* Socrates' commitment is to the possibility that there are real, genuine questions, and that improving our answers to these questions is a project worthy of our efforts.
* The Socratic method is inquisitive refutation, refutation cures normative self-blindness, inquiry allows us to ask questions (as opposed to solving problems). This is what thinking is.
* Thinking is the road from ignorance about the most important things to knowledge about them.
* A Socratic (as opposed to dictionary or stipulative) definition must come at the end, and not the beginning, of a process of inquiry: it is the upshot of having figured out what something really is.
* It is the Socratic method that allows us to think about untimely questions in an open-minded, inquisitive, and truth-directed manner.
* If I do multiplication, it is not obvious that what I have done counts as thinking. "Will computers ever be able to think?" is a difficult question. Someone who is convinced that deploying an algorithm such as multiplication amounts to thinking must concede not only that nonhuman calculators think, but that they are much better at it than we are.
* In order to qualify as a thinker, it is not good enough that the computer imitate a human being. It has to imitate a human being who is, in the paradigmatic sense of the word, thinking.

== Part Three: Socratic Answers ==
* Somehow the trademark ignorance of the philosopher itself amounts to expertise in the domains of love and death and politics.
* You Socratize something when you show that it must be understood in the light of something else, something of which it is the imitation.
* In general, the Socratizing move takes the form "A is the real B". For example, "Understanding is the real tattoo." With this move, Socrates scrapes the dust and cobwebs off of an ordinary or everyday concept and reveals it to be something higher, more transcendent, more demanding, and often more real than we had thought.
* Socrates unified domains as distinct as love, death, and politics not be analyzing them in terms of some underlying common denominator, but rather by seeing them as converging upward toward a single aspiration: inquiry into untimely questions.
* He is making the radical claim that, for ignorant people like us, human goodness is primarily expressed in how a person conducts herself in inquiry, and that conversation is where we find our true home. This amounts to the Socratization of the whole of life.
=== 8. Politics: Justice and Liberty ===
* To say that human beings are social picks out the fact that a normal human life is a life spent with other humans; to say that we are political means that we live together under a shared idea of how to do so.
=== 9. Politics: Equality ===
* The moralist tells you to strive to be on par with everyone else, whereas the anti-moralist tells you to strive for elevated status.
* Human interactions are replete with status-seeking behavior.
* Mike Tyson and AJ Ayer.
* A person wants to be recognized by someone whose recognition she, in turn, recognizes; she wants to be standing on the same plane as that person, and to have that plan be, in some, elevated. Elevated does not mean elevated over the person she's talking to; and nor does it necessarily mean at the absolute top.
* Equality is a value in the service of which we are willing to die.
* What we are guarding is, at most, the appearance of equality.
* For the most part, we make an effort to treat each other as though we were equal, and that often involves tactfully ignoring the ways in which we are not. Much of what gets called "social skill" involves inducing the feeling of equality in the face of all the facts that challenge this feeling.
* Living in a world of fragile and partly fabricated equality means living in constant fear of disrespecting others, and being disrespected ourselves.
* When it comes to equality, we are only just barely keeping it together.
* Real equality means you know that you are useful, important, and valuable to me not because I tell you those things, or send you signals to the effect, but because I am making active use of you, leaning on you, doing something I could not be doing without you. The practice of equality is where equality comes alive.
* We're not horrified by having our minds directed by others; we're horrified by being excluded from the circle of who gets to direct others. We want to believe we are fit to lead and direct, but we don't need to do it all the time.
* Unlike Hobbes, Smith does not see the basic human condition as that of a war of all against all.
* Are we supposed to conclude that the preference for speaking - which is often censured as egotistical and narcissistic - is actually a sign of some deep altruism in us? With most goods, we prefer to get them, rather than giving them. Why does it work the other way with cognitive goods?
* Smith's answer is: because when you give someone a cognitive good, what you get, in return, is a signal of your own worth. Their willingness to receive the products of your mind is a mark or a sign of your fitness to lead.
* Precisely because rulers are in a position to compel obedience, they are highly attuned to the slightest signals of disrespect. This is why those who lead and rule can be so touchy about symbols and signals validating their claim on authority, and so insistent on forbidding even the slightest deviation from their method of directing others' minds.
* In acknowledging to you that you can direct my mind, I am allowing you, however temporarily, to play the role of teacher or leader. You are in charge; you are, for now the knowledgeable one; I am your subordinate. But if you really were knowledgeable, you wouldn't depend on my acknowledgment. There is something very strange in the practice of seeking, from someone, proofs that you do not need such proofs from them.
* If I need to be the one who does the persuading rather than the one who was persuaded, then I have something to prove. If I have nothing to prove, then I am no less pleased to be persuaded than to persuade.
* Respecting someone means that even when they say what you believe to be false, you regard their orientation toward the truth as sufficient to structure your interaction with them.
* So: they disagree with you, which means you see them as other, as distinct from you, but you still recognize them as being oriented towards the truth, which means you can nonetheless interact with them as a mind. You see them as another mind.
* To engage with a point of view that conflicts with your own, but to continue to engage with it as a point of view on the truth - that is what it is to recognize someone as your equal.
* Praise for intelligence or intellectual ability touches us so deeply because it speaks to our most fundamental wish: to be treated not as a physical thing, not as a social thing, but as an intellectual thing. The ultimate form of respect is being seen in terms of one's power to help others figure out how to live.
=== 10. Love (and Irony) ===
* Socrates says "love is wanting to possess the good forever."
* In Socrates' picture, other people are not for fusing with. Other people allow the restlessness of love to drive us upward.
* Socratic irony: "His whole life is one big games - a game of irony."
* Before and during Socrates' life, irony was a term of opprobrium, but eventually it becomes a term of admiration and approval. Vlastos argues that it was Socrates to whom we today own the positive conception or iron. He says it is Socrates' major cultural contribution to the sensibility of western Europe.
* For Vlastos, Socrates instantiates a good (complex) kind of dissimulation. From Hegel onward, many philosophers have carried forward this supposedly Socratic legacy of positive irony - there is a good way of not saying what you mean.
* But what is supposedly deceptively concealed from Thrasymachus (the participant) is the very same thing that is supposedly elegantly conveyed to Cicero (the observer).
* When it comes to catastrophe, we waver, depending on our level of personal involvement. The same is true of Socratic irony, and the two poles we waver between - involvement and uninvolvement - are alive and well today.
* The theory of Socratic irony is the theory that Socrates is not someone you can be. You can only play Socrates.
* But Socratic irony is what Socratic intimacy looks like to those who can't believe in it.
* I have come to see less and less ironic distance or detachment between Socrates and his interlocutors. Increasingly, Socrates seems to be putting all his cards on the table, and this strikes me as an act of great friendliness, openness, and humanity. Where I once saw Socratic irony, I now see Socratic love.
=== 11. Death ===
* Socrates: "We should not become misologues (ie, haters of reason), as people become misanthropes. There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.
* When it comes to the question of hat happens in death (ie, the soul dies or the soul goes to another place), we wave in the form of superstition. The philosophical approach to death is the principled rejection of superstition.
* Death is real, corpses really are not ensouled, and Socrates will not put up with any superstitious nonsense to the contrary.
* FOMO (fear of missing out) vs philosophical FONA (fear of not arriving (at the end of a project).
* Epicurean arguments against the fear of death are designed to keep you stably ensconced in the present; Socratic arguments against the fear of death are designed to move you forward.
* Socrates has become an expert at taking his eye off the clock.
* Socrates denies that his true self is the person he is when no one is looking, believing that he is his truest self when he's arguing with this friends.
* What helped Socrates face death was not his belief that the soul was immortal, but his inquiry into whether it was.
* This is the Tolstoy problem: there is a thought you are avoiding your whole life, namely, the thought that your life may be unjustified, and when you confront it, your life unravels.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

This is Your Mind on Plants

2026-07-26T15:44:51Z

Robert.adlington:

== Introduction ==

* Societies condone the mind-changing drugs that help uphold society's rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it.
* Humans have identified plants that:
** Lift the burden of physical pain
** Render us more alert or capable of uncommon feats
** Make us more sociable
** Elicit feelings of awe or ecstasy
** Nourish our imagination
** Transcend time and space
** Occasion dreams and visions and mystical experiences
** Bring us into the presence of ancestors or gods.
* Evidently, normal everyday consciousness is not enough for us humans; we seek to vary, intensify, and sometimes transcend it, and we have identified a whole collection of molecules in nature that allow us to do that.
* Each substance in this book represents one of the three broad categories of psychoactive compounds:
** The downer/sedative (opium)
** The upper/stimulant (caffeine)
** The outer/hallucinogen (mescaline)
* A pharmakon, from the Greek, can be either a medicine or a poison; it all depends - on use, dose, intention, and set and setting. It also means "scapegoat", a role that these substances have played in the drug war.
* Human consciousness is always at risk of getting stuck, sending the mind around and around in loops of rumination; mushroom chemicals like psilocybin can nudge us out of those grooves, loosening stuck brains and making possible fresh patterns of thought.
* The notion of a beyond, of a hidden dimension of reality, or of an afterlife - may be memes introduced to human culture by visions that psychoactive molecules inspired in human minds.

== Opium ==

*Poppy seedpods contain significant quantities of morphine, codeine, and thebaine, the principal alkaloids found in opium.
*Regarded as "God's own medicine", preparations of opium were as common in the Victorian medicine cabinet as aspirin is in ours.
*Alkaloids taste bad; it's conceivable that plants produce them as a defense against pests
*The opium tea seemed to subtract things: anxiety, worry, grief. It is a pain killer in every sense: "definitely lightens the existential load.
*I just didn't need to have all that visual information, thank you very much!
*Like sitting out on the porch of one's consciousness, watching the world go by.

== Caffeine ==

* Caffeine is one of the most studied psychoactive compounds there is.
* For most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness. Something like 90% of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of soda).
* That's pretty much all writers do: take the blooming multiplicity of the world and our experience of it, literally concentrate it down to manageable proportions, and then force it through the eye of a grammatical needle one word at a time.
* Alkaloids are nitrogen-containing compounds, biosynthesized by both marine and terrestrial organisms, often with strong biological properties. They are among the largest classes of natural products and are found particularly in plants.
* Has the discovery of caffeine by humans been a boon or a bane to our civilization?
* Coffee, tea, and chocolate (which also contains caffeine) arrived in England during the same decade - the 1650s - so we can gain some idea of the world before caffeine and after. Coffee was known in East Africa for a few centuries before that - it's believed to have been discovered in Ethiopia around AD 850 - but it does not have the antiquity of other psychoactive substances, such as alcohol or cannabis or even some of the psychedelics, like psilocybin or ayahuasca or peyote, which have played a role in human culture for millennia. Tea is also older than coffee, having been discovered in China, and used as a medicine since at least 1000 BC, though it wasn't popularized as a recreational beverage until the Tang dynasty, between AD 618 and 907.
* Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.
* By the 15th C, coffee was being cultivated in East Africa and traded across the Arabian Peninsula.
* Within a century, coffeehouses had sprung up across the Arab world. In 1570 there were more than 600 in Constantinople alone.
* Coffee offered the Islamic world a suitable alternative to alcohol, which is specifically proscribed in the Koran. The notion that coffee somehow exists in opposition to alcohol would persist in both the East and the West.
* This Arabian culture gave birth to modern mathematics. In China, the Tang dynasty also represented a golden age suggesting some causal link.
* The fact that you needed to boil water made tea and coffee the safest things to drink.
* The tannins also have antimicrobial properties and so societies thrived as microbial diseases declined.
* In 1629, the first coffeehouse opened in Venice and in 1650 in Oxford, England.
* Coffeehouses in London were distinguished by the interests of their patrons: Lloyds Coffee House for shipping, the London Stock Exchange grew out of Jonathan's coffee-house and the Royal Society and Tatler magazine out of Grecian.
* The first teashop in London was opened by Thomas Twining in 1717.
* If alcohol fuels our Dionysian tendencies, caffeine nurtures the Apollonian.
* The scientific consensus seems to be that caffeine does improve mental (and physical) performance to some degree:
* Caffeine improves our focus and ability to concentrate, which surely enhances linear and abstract thinking, but creativity works very differently. it may depend on the loss of a certain kind of focus, and the freedom to let the mind off the leash of linear thought.
* Cognitive psychologists distinguish between:
** Spotlight consciousness - illuminates a single focal point of attention, making it very good for reasoning
** Lantern consciousness - in which attention is less focused yet illuminates a broader field of attention. Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness; so do people on psychedelics.
* Many of the coffee plants grown in the New World today are descendants of an original plant smuggled out of Mocha in 1616, offspring of a theft nearly Promethean in its impact. Now the West had taken control of coffee - and coffee took control of the West.
* Caffeine and the minute hand on clocks arrived at more or less the same historical moment.
* It was tea from the East Indies - heavily sweetened with sugar from the West Indes - that fueled the Industrial Revolution.
* The first tea plantations in China were cultivated thousands of years ago by monks, who found that sipping tea was an important aid to meditation.
* Tea also contains a great many vitamins and minerals - one of the highest concentrations in any plant - and prodigious quantities of polyphenols, compounds rich in antioxidants (tea contains more polyphenols than red wine).
* Soon after the East India Company began trading with China, cheap tea flooded England, rapidly displacing coffee as the nation's preferred caffeine delivery system. A beverage that only the well-to-do could afford to drink in 1700 was by 1800 consumed by virtually everyone, from the society matron to the factory worker. To supply this demand required an imperialist enterprise of enormous scale and brutality, especially after the British decided it would be more profitable to turn India, its colony, into a tea producer, than to buy tea from China.
* The widespread use of caffeine is, arguably, one of those developments in human history, like the control of fire or the domestication of plants and animals, that helped life us out of the state of nature, providing a new degree of control over biology, in this case our own.
* Caffeine keeps adenosine, a neuromodulator, from doing its job by getting in its way. Over the course of the day, adenosine levels gradually rise in the bloodstream, and as long as no other molecule is blocking its action, it begins to slow mental operations in preparation for sleep. As adenosine builds up in your brain, you begin to feel less alert and a mounting desire to go to bed - what scientists call sleep pressure.
* It also causes increases in adrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine (the latter, typical of drugs of abuse, and probably accounting for caffeine's mood-enhancing qualities.
* Regular coffee consumption is associated with a decreased risk of several cancers (including breast, prostate, colorectal, and endometrial), cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, dementia, and possibly depression and suicide.
* Coffee and tea are also the leading source of antioxidants in the American diet, a fact that may by itself account for many of the health benefits of coffee and tea.
* The energy that caffeine gives you has been borrowed from the future and must be paid back with interest, via the quantity and quality of your upcoming sleep.
* By the end of the 18th C, tea was being consumed daily by just about everyone in England. It accounted for an estimated 5% of the nation's GDP and depended on two articles (tea and sugar) "imported from opposite ends of the earth"!
* In order for the English mind to be sharpened with tea, the Chinese mind had to be clouded with opium.
* If you pair caffeine with any flavor, people will express a preference for that flavor.
* Alfred Peet almost single-handedly introduced Americans to good coffee in 1966.
* By one estimate, roughly half the world's coffee-growing acreage - and an even greater proportion in Latin America - will be unable to support the plant by 2050, making coffee one of the crops most immediately endangered by climate change.
* In less than a thousand years, coffee has managed to get itself from its evolutionary birthplace in Ethiopia all the way here to the mountains of South America and beyond, using our species as its vector.
* Who could have guessed that a secondary metabolite produced by plants to poison insects would also deliver an energizing bolt of pleasure to a human brain, and then turn out to alter that brain's neurochemistry in a way that made those plants indispensable?

== Mescaline ==

* The Rio Grande is the only place in the world where the peyote cactus grows wild.
* San Pedro (Wachuma) is the other mescaline producing cactus, this one from the Andes.
* Huxley describes a "principle appetite of the soul" for a means of transcending the limitations of circumstance, the various walls - whether of habit or convention or selfhood - that confine us. For him, it was mescaline that had shown him a "door in the wall".
* 1940s - LSD created by Sandoz Laboratories
* 1957 Gordon Wasson writes about "mushrooms that cause strange visions" (psylocybin) in Life magazine.
* Huxley "For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else."
* That's why our usual perception of the world is "limited to what is biologically or socially useful"; our brains evolved to admit to our awareness only the "measly trickle" of information required for our survival and no more.
* 1897 - a german scientist isolated the psychoactive substance in peyote.
* 1919 - an austian chemist synthesizes mescaline.
* The cactus has been used by the indigenous peoples of North America for at least 6,000 years, making it the oldest-known psychedelic.
* Shulgin on mescaline: "More than anything else, the world amazed me, in that I saw it as I had when I was a child."
* A mescaline trip can last 14 hours.
* While in the trance state, rigid narratives about yourself tend to soften until it becomes possible to construct new ones, typically narratives of transformation or rebirth.
* "That is the problem with you whites. You always want to know everything. We just experience it."
* "There is enough to see here. To see, to understand, to experience. A sufficiency of reality."
* I was a helpless captive of the present moment, my mind having completely lost its ability to go where it normally goes, which is either back in time, following threads of memory and association to past moments, or forward, into the anxious country of anticipation. I was firmly planted on the frontier of the present and, though this would soon change, there was nowhere else I wanted to be, or anything else I needed from life in order to be content. Whatever was in my field of awareness - this sumptuous feast of reality! - was sufficient.
* To an extent, this is what all psychedelics do - not so much change how we feel inside as imbue the world around us with never-before-appreciated qualities.
* These (William Carlos Williams') eyes are the eyes I was seeing with! Here was the sheer isness of the given world and its objects at a particular moment in time. Haiku consciousness.
* Wide open, my senses were admitting to awareness exponentially more of everything - more color, more outline, more texture, more light. It was, to quote from Huxley, "wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying.
* Without the usual filters of consciousness there came the fear "of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cozy world of symbols, could possibly bear."
* Never had my eyelids felt so crucial - powerful technologies for changing the channels of consciousness.
* The notion that there is so much more out there (or in here) than our conscious minds allow us to perceive is consistent with the neuroscientific concept of predictive coding.
* Psychedelics seem to mess with this system in one of two ways:
** In some cases, the brain's predictions about reality go haywire, as when you see faces in the clouds or musical notes leapt to life or something happens to convince you you're being followed. Common on LSD or psilocybin, this kind of magical thinking might occur when top-down predictions generated by the brain are no longer adequately constrained, or corrected, by bottom-up information arriving from the world via the senses.
** But if Huxley's account and my experience are representative, then something very different happens in the brain on mescaline. Here the bottom-up information of the sense and the emotions inundates our awareness, sweeping away the mind's predictions, maps, beliefs, and "cozy symbols" - all the tools we have for organizing the inner and outer worlds - in what feels like a tidal wave of awe.
* This is exactly where we live, amid these precious gifts in the shadow of that oncoming moment.
* He called himself a chakaruna - a human bridge for people to walk across to get where they need to be.
* We have three bodies (pachas, worlds), he explained:
** The physical
** The mental
** The spiritual
* The plant allows all three bodies, little by little, to vibrate at a higher frequency until it is only light, pure light. This is what is meant by illumination. The plant allows you to disconnect from the mind. You can't figure it out mentally. You need to feel it in your physical body.
* When any part of your body has been affected by destructive energies or trauma, the heart will close down to protect itself. A closed heart will not heal. It will not express its feelings. The mind becomes more active because the heart's not feeling anymore. The mind will go into the past or it will go into the future, which doesn't really exist, and it will get stuck in a chaos, between remembering the past and trying to go into the nonexistent future. And it will lose the gift of life, which is to live and be present in the moment. Wachuma locates and unblocks the dense energies of trauma so that the mind might quiet and the heart might speak again, returning us to the gift that is the present moment.
* It's your choice. We make the world with our words. Say it. Say the words right now.
* Many shamans regard tobacco as the most powerful of all plant medicines
* We cut our cords to the discordant or destructive energies that connect us to others in the past.
* The medicine attenuates the bonds of the past, making it easier to let go of regrets. And then we forgive ourselves.
* The future doesn't exist.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning

2026-07-26T15:44:28Z

Robert.adlington:

* These (older, primary) processes strive towards gaining pleasure; physical activity draws back from any event which might arouse unpleasure. (Here we have repression.)

* Senses - The increased significance of external reality (the setting up of the reality principle) heightened the importance, too, of the sense-organs that are directed towards that external world, and of the consciousness attached to them. Consciousness now learned to comprehend sensory qualities in addition to the qualities of pleasure and unpleasure which hitherto had along been of interest to it.
* Attention - A special function was instituted which had periodically to search the external world, in order that its data might be familiar already if an urgent internal need should arise - the function of attention. Its activity meets the sense-impressions half-way, instead of awaiting their appearance. At the same time, probably, a system of notation was introduced, whose task it was to lay down the results of this periodical activity of consciousness - a part of what we call memory.
* Action - Motor discharge was now employed in the appropriate alteration of reality; it was converted into action.
* Thinking - Restraint upon motor discharge (upon action), which then became necessary, was provided by means of the process of thinking, which was developed from the presentation of ideas. Thinking was endowed with characteristics which made it possible for the mental apparatus to tolerate an increased tension of stimulus while the process of discharge was postponed. It is essentially an experimental kind of acting, accompanied by displacement of relatively small quantities of cathexis together with less expenditure (discharge) of them.
** It is probably that thinking was originally unconscious, in so far as it went beyond mere ideational presentations and was directed to the relations between impressions of objects, and that it did not acquire further qualities, perceptible to consciousness, until it became bound to verbal residues.
* Day-Dreaming - With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This activity is phantasying, which begins already in children's play, and later, continued as day-dreaming, abandons dependence on real objects.
* Just as the pleasure-ego can do nothing but wish, work for a yield of pleasure and avoid unpleasure, so the reality-ego need do nothing but strive for what is useful and guard itself against damage.
* Actually the substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle implies no deposing of the pleasure principle but only a safeguarding of it. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a later time.
* Education - Can be described as an incitement to the conquest of the pleasure principle, and to its replacement by the reality principle; it seeks, that is, to led its help to the developmental process which affects the ego.
* Art - Brings about the reconciliation between the two principles in a peculiar way. An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality. Thus in a certain fashion he actually becomes the hero, the king, the creator, or the favorite he desired to be, without following the long roundabout path of making real alterations in the external world.
* Sex - While the ego goes through its transformation from a pleasure-ego into a reality-ego, the sexual instincts undergo the changes that lead them from their original auto-erotism through various intermediate phases to object-love in the service of procreation.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

How the World Made the West

2026-07-26T15:44:10Z

Robert.adlington:

== Introduction ==

* Civilization emerged in two stages: singular and plural. The noun was first used in France in the 1750s to denote an abstract concept of advanced society. From the 1760s it was championed by Scottish philosophers who delineated a standard set of evolutions that led to this full realization of human potential, form hunters to shepherds to farmers to merchants and industrialists.
* In 1828, François Guizot introduces the idea of plural civilizations and, at about the same time the notion emerged that humans could be divided into races with differing natural capacities and intelligence.
* Civilizational thinking and the West slowly cam together in a notion of "Western Civilization" characterized by democracy and capitalism, freedom and tolerance, progress and science.

== 1. A Single Sail (Byblos, c. 2000 BCE) ==

* 10,000 BCE: As the global climate settled and warmed at the end of the Ice Age, exchange became more important in the so-called Fertile Crescent. In the new temperate conditions abundant local game and wild plants prompted the first experiments in agriculture. Pioneers took local wild grasses with small, easily dispersed seeds and by careful and repeated selection they nudged them into producing fat, firmly attached grains, easier for jumans to harvest, eat, and process into flour bu now in need of human intervention to reseed.
* Another form of selective breeding turned wild animals into human servants: dogs had long been bred from wolves for hunting companions, but now aurochs were transformed into cows, boars into pigs, and sheep were coaxed out of their natural aggression.
* Farming required a more sedentary lifestule, but it still depended on contact and communication. Each domestication took place in a specific are area of the Fertile Crescent - wheat, cattle and sheep in the northern hills, barley and pigs in different areas west of the Euphrates, and goats in what is now Iran.
* 7000 BCE - All the new breeds are found throughout the region. This involved more than just swapping seeds and stock: people had to explain to each other how to sow, cultivate, harvest and cook the new plants, and how to breed, feed and care for the new animals.
* 3500 BCE - The wheel and axel are invented
* Late 3000s BCE, Uruk on the Euphrates was a true city of 250 hectares - about the size of London's Soho - with canals, temples, and a population of 20-40k.
** Here is developed the first known system of standard weights and measures, based on the load an average man could carry (a talent) and on the length of his forearm (a cubit).
** The first writing appears here too. Initially just a counting system - circles for tens, lines ofr ones - but then scribes added pictograms to show what was being counted. By the end of the millennium, they had extended this code to record the local language and then literature in signs imprinted into clay tablets with a stylus and now now as cuneiform, from the Latin for "wedge-shaped".
* Late 3000s BCE - Depictions of boats with sails first appear on objects made in Kush and soon after in Egypt
* 3000 BCE, Upper and Lower Egypt come together under the "Old Kingdom" dynasties that wrote in hieroglyphs, built the pyramids, and ruled over more than a million people.
* 3000 BCE - Donkeys have reached Egypt as a form of transport.
* 2600 BCE - Egyptian records start to document regular sea trade with Levantine ports.
* 2500 BCE there is a patchwork of cities rules by kings covering southern Mesopotamia, some with 10k inhabitants.
* 2400 BCE - Wealthy tombs at Ur fill up with exotic stones from far-flung places.
* 2000s BCE, bronze is invented.
* 1500s BCE - Boats with keels

== 2. The Palace of Minos ==
== 3. The Amber Routes ==
== 4. The Erupting Sea ==
== 5. Band of Brothers ==
== 6. Alphabet City ==
== 7. Regime Change ==
== 8. I Am Not Your Servant ==
== 9. Through the Pillars ==
== 10. The Invention of Greece ==
== 11. The Assyrian Mediterranean ==
== 12. He Who Saw the Deep ==
== 13. The Bitter River ==
== 14. The King of Kings ==
== 15. The Persian Version ==
== 16. Continental Thinking ==
== 17. Of Elephants and Kings ==
== 18. Clouds in the West ==
== 19. Fighting for Freedom ==
== 20. Rome, Open City ==
== 21. Trade Winds ==
== 22. Salt Roads ==
== 23. The Rise of the Barbarians ==
== 24. Kings of the World ==
== 25. The Father of Europe ==
== 26. The Translation Movement ==
== 27. The Sign of the Cross ==
== 28. Kalila wa-Dimna ==
== 29. The Land of Darkness ==
== 30. A New World ==

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

2026-07-26T15:43:47Z

Robert.adlington:

== Places ==

* [https://maps.apple.com/place?address=13+Rue+Ravignan%2C+75018+Paris%2C+France&coordinate=48.886324%2C2.338378&name=13+Rue+Ravignan 13 rue Ravignan, Montmartre] - Picasso's studio where Stein sat for her portrait
* [https://maps.apple.com/place?address=20+Bloomsbury+Square%2C+London%2C+WC1A+2NS%2C+England&coordinate=51.519252%2C-0.123689&name=20+Bloomsbury+Square 20 Bloomsbury Square, London]
* [https://maps.apple.com/place?address=27+Rue+de+Fleurus%2C+75006+Paris%2C+France&coordinate=48.846961%2C2.329278&name=27+Rue+de+Fleurus 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris] - First apartment
* [https://maps.apple.com/place?auid=71898644131995722&address=Bilignin%2C+Belley%2C+France&coordinate=45.765787%2C5.664665&name=Bilignin&lsp=6489 rue Gertrude Stein, Bilignin], near Belley
* [https://maps.apple.com/place?address=5+Rue+Christine%2C+75006+Paris%2C+France&coordinate=48.854530%2C2.339842&name=5+Rue+Christine 5 rue Christine, Ile de la cité] - Second apartment
* [https://maps.apple.com/place?place-id=I37BA7A2ABBAB16E3&address=16+Rue+du+Repos%2C+75020+Paris%2C+France&coordinate=48.860685%2C2.399429&name=Tombe+de+Gertrude+Stein&_provider=9902 Père Lachaise] - grave
* [https://maps.apple.com/place?auid=9783441732949742914&address=45110+Germigny-des-Pr%C3%A9s%2C+France&coordinate=47.845757%2C2.266746&name=Germigny-des-Pr%C3%A9s&lsp=6489 Germigny-des-Prés] - the oldest church in France, where Toklas converts to Catholicism
* [https://maps.apple.com/place?address=16+Rue+de+la+Convention%2C+75015+Paris%2C+France&coordinate=48.845248%2C2.278813&name=16+Rue+de+la+Convention 16 rue de la Convention] - Toklas' final apartment

== Part 1: Life ==
=== 1. Out of the Old World ===
* Noticed at Harvard by William James
=== 2. Vita Nuova ===
* Stein had concluded that people's varying attention spans were a product of their "complete character" or "bottom nature", a driving force deep within them which directed everything they did. "I began," she wrote, "to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations... endlessly the same and endlessly different." There was no such thing as repetition, Stein argued; rather, the essence of human expression was insistence or emphasis. However many time a story is told, whether by different people or the same person at different times, it undergoes changes which do less to reveal what actually happened than to provide an insight into the speaker's personality.
=== 3. Man of Letters ===
* Otto Weininger's system (in Sex and Character) was profoundly misogynist. Fundamental to his theory was the idea that "female" traits were passive, sexual, devoid of logic and consciousness, while "male" ones were active, deliberate and ethical. Only those with the greatest concentration of masculine traits approached his system's highest level, that of genius.
* "Repeating is the whole of living," she adds, "and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living."
=== 4. Extreme Cubist Literature ===
* She attempted to empty her mind of what she called "associational emotion" - the meaning a word conventionally bears, which holds within it a memory of all the previous times it has been used in that way. "I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word," Stein told an interviewer in 1946, "and at the same time I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense."
=== 5. A Puzzle Picture ===
* -
=== 6. Shoving the Unshoveable ===
* "...paragraphs were emotional and sentences were not". While an individual sentence might express a single idea, a paragraph was more like a mood, a state of mind, or a landscape: a context in which relations between distinct, even contradictory, elements might emerge.
* While Joyce's characters, like Proust's, are saturated with their own pasts, and he charged his words with a wealth of accumulated meanings - to preserve "all the crackling short circuits of idea associations which have existed between sounds and signs throughout the long evolution of our language" - Stein (the editors argued) set out to wring those associations out of language entirely, in order to afford her words "an bsolute or static quality", and hold an exact moment in sharp focus.
=== 7. Knockout and a Wow ===
* "The twentieth century," she wrote, "is a century which sees the earth as no one has ever seen it. " (ie from above)
* "Government is the least interesting thing in human life," she argued, rising to her feet, "creation and the expression of that creation is a damn sight more interesting... the real ideas are not the relation of human beings as groups but a human being to himself inside him."
* She suggested that narrative has lost its meaning in an age where newspapers, cinema, photographs, and radio bombard us with "what is happening": we don't need more stories about what people have done, she argued, when "the thing that is important is the intensity of anybody's existence".
* "The business of art," she explained, "is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present." More explicitly that even before, she laid out her theory of the function of memory in language, which she aimed to break down: that each appearance of a word, invokes, in the reader, memories of its previous uses - and the process of remembering, the mental formation of an association between the word and what it has described before, creates a gulf between the reader and the text before them, holding the word in bondage.
=== 8. Publicity Saint ===
* At the heart of The Geographical History - a constantly shifting work incorporating dialogues, plays, and elements of autobiography - is a distinction between human nature and the human mind, two parts of the self which Stein insisted have "nothing whatever to do with" one another. Human nature, Stein suggested, is personal identity, assured by memory and external validation; the human mind, by contrast, stands outside of personality, and is the element capable of artistic creation.
* She had mooted the distinction a couple of years earlier, reflecting on her own writing practice, which required her to clear her mind entirely of disturbances in pursuit of clarity, such that she could forget where, or even who, she was: "Begin again," she often instructed herself when her concentration momentarily broke, refocusing her thoughts to take fresh aim at what she was trying to say.
* "I am I not any longer when I see," she had written. "This sentence is at the bottom of all creative activity. It is just the exact opposite of I am I because my little dog knows me."
=== 9. To Be Historical ===
* "Writers only think they are interested in politics," Stein told the Partisan Review in 1939, "they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics."
== Part 2: Afterlife ==
=== Reckoning ===
* In her writing, geniuses (like saints) are always portrayed as "most intensely alive", standing somehow outside of time due to an ability to see themselves beyond mortal existence, which she called "a future life feeling".
=== 10. Poisoned Wheat ===
* -
=== 11. Diagram Book ===
* What she admired in Picasso's work, and sought to emulate in her writing, was his refusal to use objects "as a point of departure" to suggest allegories or further meanings. Instead, he wanted to depict their essence, in and of itself. She connected him with Cézanne, "the great master of the realization of the object itself."
=== 12. A Sacred Trust ===
* -
=== 13. Chronique Scandaleuse ===
* History, she suggests, is not fixed, but can be revised if a couple so choose.
* "Real thinking," she wrote in a notebook, "is conceptions aiming and aiming again and again always getting fuller, that is the difference between creative thinking and theorizing." She was coming to see the process of creation - the struggle to realize a vision - as the most significant aspect of a work of art; its final form, she thought, marked the culmination of a long, vital battle in the artist's mind.
* How "vital singularity" may emerge from tradition; how an individual steeped in the past may break out of it, discover themselves, and learn - like Adele in QED - to see "things as they are".
=== 14. Parades and Fireworks ===
* -
=== 15. What is the Question? ===
* Reid lambasted Stein's work for its opacity, maintaining that in stripping away all associations from words she was eliminating the possibilities of beauty, emotion, and imagination, and - iconoclastically - rejecting the rich history of human knowledge.
=== 16. The Branches ===
* John Cage used sounds like Stein used words: not for the purpose of melody, illustration, or narrative development, but for themselves. Both saw experience as something impressionistic and cumulative, not linear: their work was intimately bound up with time, demanding close attention to, and in, the present moment. The function of art, Cage suggested - echoing Stein - is "to draw us nearer to the process which is the world we live in."
* Stein as a major forerunner to a cluster of writers whose work "recognizes language itself as the crucial human experience".
* Each time the word "may" occurred, it had been crossed out and replaced with a different word - "today, "day", or "can" - even where such replacements rendered the sentences incomprehensible.
=== Epilogue ===
* -

[[Category:Books]]

We Are Our Brains: From the Womb to Alzheimer's

2026-07-26T15:43:19Z

Robert.adlington:

== Introduction ==
* Einstein's brain contained unusually many glial cells
* Jacob Moleschott: Just as kidneys produce urine, the brain produces mind.
== 1. Development, Birth, and Parental Care ==
* Labor is trigger when the child accounts for around 15% of the mother's metabolism.
* While still in the womb, the brain cells in the child's hypothalamus respond to a drop in blood sugar level in the same way that they later respond to a lack of food in adulthood, by stimulating the stress axis. This induces a series of hormonal changes, making the uterus contract. The contractions, stimulated by oxytocin, make the baby's head press against the cervix. This in turn triggers a reflex, via the mother's spinal cord, which causes the release of yet more oxytocin. The baby's head then exerts more pressure, triggering the same reflex. The child can only escape from this chain reaction by being born.
* We now know that schizophrenia is an early developmental brain disorder largely caused by genetic factors. So a difficult birth can be seen as a failure of interaction between the brains of mother and child.
* A difficult labor or premature or delayed labor tends to be the consequence of a problem in fetal brain development.

=== Maternal Behavior ===

* During pregnancy, the pituitary gland secretes the hormone prolactin, which prompts nesting behavior.Oxytocin, the "bonding hormone" - It's the messenger of affection, generosity, tranquility, trust, and attachment, and has been found to suppress fear by affecting the amygdala, the center of fear and aggression.Vasopressin makes men hostile but women more likely to approach strangers, because they are better at distinguishing friendly features.Society could be improved by giving men a whiff of oxytocin and women a whiff of vasopressin.Abnormal blood levels of vasopressin and oxytocin have been found in people with autism, who also display small genetic variations in the proteins that are the brain's vasopressin and oxytocin receptors.

=== Paternal Behavior ===

*Patriarchy is though to have developed when our ancestors had to exchange the protection of the jungle for a more vulnerable life in the savanna.
*The male's protection of the female and her child had an evolutionary advantage: Humans were able to reproduce every two to three years, while female chimpanzees, who were solely responsible for their young and therefore had to look after them and feed them for much longer, could reproduce only every six years.
*Scents given off by the pregnant female may cause the behavioral changes in expectant fathers.
*Fatherhood induces changes in the prefrontal cortex. The number of synapses in this area increases suggesting a reorganization of the local network. It also becomes more sensitive to vasopressin, the chemical messanger that promotes social behavior and aids fathers in their new tasks.

=== Early Brain Development ===

* Children who are seriously neglected during their early development also have smaller brains, their intelligence and linguistic and fine motor control are permanently impaired, and they are impulsive and hyperactive. Their prefrontal cortices can be particularly undersized. Studies have shown that orphans adopted before the age of two go on to develop normal IQs of 100, while those not adopted until 2-6, attain average IQs of 80.
* The frontal cortex is the site of Broca's area, which is crucial for language. When adults learn a second language, another sub-area of this region is involved. But if children are brought up bilingually from an early age, both languages use the same frontal areas and the left caudate nucleus check which language system is being used.
* When doing mental arithmetic, the Chinese use different parts of the brain than Western Anglophones.
* The bond between mother and child is first established during pregnancy through the mother's voice.

== 2. Threats to the Fetal Brain in the "Safety" of the Womb ==
* Thyroid hormones are necessary for normal brain development but can only function if sufficient iodine is incorporated into the hormone.
* Exposure to lead, mercury, DDT, PCBs, dioxins and many other substances can disrupt fetal brain development, as can ingestion of nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, and other addictive substances.
* Our levels of aggression and stress are set before birth for the rest of our lives.
* Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) - Patients can want to have limbs amputated because they feel they don't belong to them. Scans show that their frontal and parietal cortices respond differently to a touch on the leg according to whether it's the accepted or the rejected leg.
== 3. Sexual Differentiation of the Brain in the Womb ==
* The brain differentiates along male or female lines in the second half of pregnancy, due to a male baby producing a peak of testosterone or a female baby not doing so. It's in this period that the feeling of being a man or woman - our gender identity - is fixed in our brains for the rest of our lives.
* Gender-base behavioral differences are fixed in our brains before birth.
* In Western culture women use eye contact to understand other women better while men experience eye contact as testing their place in the hierarchy and can feel threatened by it.
* Development after birth seems to have little impact on our sexual orientation.
* Homosexual behavior has now been observed in around 1,500 animal species from insects to mammals.
* Male-to-female transexuality (MtF) occurs in 1 in 10k individuals while FtM occurs in 1 in 30k.
* The differentiation of our sex organs takes place in the first months of pregnancy, while the sexual differentiation of the brain occurs in the second half. In the case of transsexuality we expect to find female structures in the brains of MtF transsexuals and vice versa in FtM and this has been the case.
* it may be that the neural body map of MtFs lacks a penis and FtMs lack breasts and so the individuals don't recognize these organs as their own and want to get rid of them.
* The smaller the amygdala, the more likely an individual was to commit pedophilic crimes.
== 4. Puberty, Love, and Sexual Behavior ==

=== Puberty ===
* In puberty, the pituitary gland starts to produce sex hormones. The craving for new experiences, the readiness to take great risks, and the impulsive behavior are all part of preparations to leave the nest.
* People with a mutation in the KISS1 system never enter puberty.
* Melatonin, a hormone produced by the pineal gland, is one of the substances that prevent the onset of puberty in children.
* Normally, the brain cells that stimulate the sex hormones develop at the place where a fetus's nose develops. The cells then migrate along the olfactory nerve to the hypothalamus. This process is distruped in patients with Kallmann syndrome, so that not only do they not enter puberty, they also lack a sense of smell.
* A youngster's parents function as his or her temporary prefrontal cortex.
* Adults distribute assignments across different brain areas. Adolescent PFCs can sometimes function at an adult level but need to work much harder to do so, as they fail to outsource tasks to other brain areas. As a result, a teenager's PFC reaches the ceiling of its capacity earlier, and distractions can undermine the performance of assigned tasks.
* After the age of seventeen, young people commit fewer crimes. It seems logical to assume that this curve reflects the gradual development of the PFC, which inhibits impulsiveness and promotes moral behavior.

=== Love and Sex ===

* People who are in love also have raised levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
* Our partners are determined initially by our ancient reward circuitry. Only when the most intense period of infatuation has passed does the cerebral cortex take over.
* Many areas of the brain are constantly busy inhibiting our sexual urges. This is usually effective for around 23 hours a day.
* Electrically stimulating the amygdala has been shown to induce pleasant sexual sensations.
* To encourage us to truly commit to reproduction, the brain provides orgasm as a reward. It releases dopamine into the nucleus accumbens and oxytocin in the hypothalamus.
* The thalamus is the central structure for all erotic sensory information.
* DNA polymorphisms, tiny differences in the gene for the protein that receives dopamine's chemical message are correlated to the degree of sexual desire, arousal, and activity.
* In brain scans, brain activity during orgasm is similar to the response to a heroin injection.
* Activity in the female brain is concentrated in the motor and sensory areas of the cerebral cortex; in the male brain it's mainly in the occipito-temporal cortex and the claustrum.
* In both sexes, the cerebellum regulates muscle contractions during orgasm.
* Without being aware of it, American female students dress more fashionably around the time of ovulation.
* Strippers tips are also much higher around ovulation.
* Erotic images provoke greater arousal and brain activity in men than in women.
* In men aged 46-55 brain areas like the thalamus and hypothalamus cease to display activity, a sign that aging reduces arousal in response to erotic stimuli
* Lesions in the temporal lobe can cause people to develop Klüver-Bucy syndrome with symptoms of hypersexuality and hyperorality. Loss of inhibition has also been reported in individuals with lesions of the thalamus or the subthalamic nucleus.
* Depression is associated with higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, which can deprive patients of all the pleasure in life (anhedonia).
* In able-bodied men, psychogenic erections start in the brain and erotic impulses in the sex organs travel up the spinal cord.
* Epileptics whose condition is sparked by a focus in the cerebral cortex sometimes feel as if they are having an orgasm just before a seizure, due to electrical stimulation of the brain cells in that area.

== 5. Hypothalamus: Survival, Hormones, and Emotions ==
* The idea that brain cells could produce hormones was first suggested in the 1940s by the Scharrers. "Nerve gland cells" proved to be a universal cell type that regulates many bodily processes throughout the animal kingdom by means of hormones. The Scharrers' observations founded the discipline of neuroendocrinology.
* The hypothalamus:
** Memory information is transmitted from the hippocampus via the fornix to the mammillary bodies, and the routed to the thalamus.
** The suprachiasmatic nucleus is the biological clock.
** Thermoregulation and sexual activity are governed by the preoptic region, while the tuberomammillary nucleus, the only place where histamine is produced in the brain, is important for focusing our attention.
** The areas that regulate appetite and metabolism are the infundibular (arcuate) nucleus and the paraventricular nucleus.
** The paraventricular nucleus and the suproptic nucleus send fibers to the posterior pituitary, where oxytocin and vasopressin are released.
** The infundibular nucleus sends fibers to the capillaries of the hypophyseal portal system, where neuropeptides are released that regulate the anterior pituitary.

=== Depression ===
*All forms of depression feature overreaction of the stress axis. We respond to stress by activating nerve cells in the hypothalamus, which send a substance called corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) to the pituitary gland and the brain. The pituitary gland in turn stimulates the adrenal gland to produce the stress hormone cortisol. CRH and cortisol equip our brains and bodies to cope with stressful situations. But if th stress axis becomes overactive, a stressful event can lead to the overproduction of both CRH and cortisol, and these substances can affect the brain so strongly that depression results.
*Seasonal affective disorder.
*Various cell groups become hyperactive in the hypothalamus of depressive patients. In many cases the stress axis (the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis) is strongly activated.

=== Obesity, Anorexia and Narcolepsy ===

* In the Western world, around 60% of adults are overweight and 30% are obese.
* The leptin hormone is produced by fat tissue and helps the hypothalamus know how full we are, but if there are mutations in the leptin gene or receptor the hypothalamus will conclude that there's no fat tissue and continually prompt you to eat, resulting in morbid obesity.

* The symptoms of narcolepsy are cause by the absence of hypocretin (or orexin) in the hypothalamus.
* All the symptoms of anorexia nervosa can also be caused by a cyst, a small tumor, or some other abnormal process in the hypothalamus.
* Anorexia sufferers may maintain the process of voluntary starvation because they become addicted to the diet-triggered opiates released by their brains, which activate the reward center at the base of the striatum.

== 6. Addictive Substances ==
* Addictive substances affect the brain by mimicking its own chemical messengers. Brain cells themselves produce a whole range of opiates and cannabinoids. The nicotine in a cigarette has the same effect as the chemical messenger acetylcholine.
* Addictive substances also affect the availability or the action of natural chemical messengers. Ecstasy increases levels of serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin.
* All such substances have a direct or indirect effect on the brain's dopamine reward system, whether or not via an opiate system.
* The sex hormones that circulate after the onset of puberty place an enormous burden on the adolescent brain and can bring on the symptoms of schizophrenia. The same applies to cannabis.
* Studies show that cannabis users are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia.
* Ecstasy was originally patented as an appetite suppressant in 1914
* 20 minutes after swallowing ecstasy, increased amounts of serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin are released. All tiredness vanishes and you feel happy and want to hug everyone.
* Brain scans of ecstasy users show permanently reduced activity in the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, and cerebral cortex.
== 7. The Brain and Consciousness ==
* If something gets in the way of the brain's information supply, it starts to make up information to fill the gaps.
* We need the cerebral cortex to think, speak, hear, feel emotion, and move our limbs.
* When someone is in a vegetative state, their brain stem functions are still intact.
* In locked-in syndrome, the brain and the spinal cord are completely separated due to damage low down in the brain stem that prevents nerve fibers from controlling muscles. The brain is otherwise intact, and the patient is fully alert, but they can't communicate their alertness to their surroundings (except close their eyelids and move their eyes).
* Brain-dead means irreversibly fixed pupils, the absence of brain stem reflexes, and the permanent absence of "higher brain functions" like cognition and consciousness.
* There are two aspects to consciousness:
** Conscious of our surroundings - Found in every living organism. Even single-celled creatures creep toward food and away from poisonous substances.
** Conscious of ourselves - A child starts to recongize itself in a mirror between the ages of one and two.
*The cerebral cortex, the thalamus, and a functional link between the two are all necessary for consciousness.
*The thalamus lies in the center of the brain and it's there that all sensory information (except smell) is received and rerouted to the cerebral cortex.
*Self-consciousness is not a metaphysical construct. Your brain constantly manufactures the sense that your body belongs to you, using sensory information from muscles, joints, vision, and sensation.
*All recent research suggests that the joint activity of enormous numbers of neurons in communication with a number of brain areas provides the foundation for consciousness.
== 8. Aggression ==
* Boys are more aggressive than girls and this is determined before birth. Girls with adrenal gland abnormalities that cause them to produce too much testosterone before birth are also more aggressive later.
* Some children are markedly more aggressive than other and they are more likely to commit crimes. 72% of young offenders in Dutch prisons have been sentenced for crimes of aggression.
* In addition, delinquency is strongly linked to substance abuse, psychoses and ADHD.
* Darwin: "education and environment produce only a small effect on the mind of anyone... most of our qualities are innate."
* Men are 5x more likely than women to commit a murder.
* Men murder a relative or acquaintance in only 20% of cases, while for women it is 60%.
* The incidence of murder peaks around the age of 20-24. After this age, the decline is due to the late development of the prefrontal cortex, which restrains impulsiveness and promotes moral behavior.
* Decisions to go to war are more influenced by the amount of daylight and the temperature than by military strategy. In the northern and southern hemisphere, wars are typically declared in the summer, while around the equator, season doesn't play a role.
* Studies show that 90% of young people in prison have a psychiatric disorder, and 30% of individuals detained under hospital orders have ADHD.
* Some psychopaths have a malfunction of the amygdala, which prevents them from seeing from their victims' facial expressions that they are suffering and thus from feeling empathy for them.
* During dream sleep we exhibit many of the characteristics of psychiatric and neurological disorders. Our higher visual centers are activated and we hallucinate like patients with schizophrenia.
* Some sleepwalkers who are extremely mild and amiable when awake are shockingly violent when asleep.
== 9. Autism ==
* People with autism often have synesthesia, a condition in which sensory and cognitive pathways are interlinked. Synesthetes have unusually strong connections between the various areas of the cerebral cortex. As a result, the visual cortex, which normally occupies itself only with the sense of sight, receives extra information about calculation going on in other areas of the brain. Complex calculations suddenly become easy when they are translated into images.
* But Daniel Tammet also has extraordinary linguistic abilities, being able to learn a new language in a single week, even Icelandic! That's an unusual combination, but what makes Tammet unique as a savant are his well-developed social skills, which tend to be lacking in autistic savants.
* There are blurry borders between what is considered normal and what is classified as a psychiatric problem. The dividing line between psychiatric disorders and great gifts is often a very narrow one and strongly depends on how someone is viewed by their surroundings.
* Autism is marked by severely disrupted social skills and a very confined repertoire of activities and interests.
* In was first described, independently, in
** 1943 by Leo Kanner in Baltimore - who described mentally subnormal children who scarcely spoke and displayed symptoms that were mostly neurological.
** 1944 by Hans Asperger in Vienna - who described the children as intelligence machines, who had a precocious grasp of language, could talk about their experiences and feelings, and were normally abled.
*Brain development in autism is atypical. From ages 2 to 4 there is too much brain volume, delaying growth in some areas and prematurely terminating it in others. The main cause is genetic.
*The syndrome is 10x more likely if the father is in his 50s rather than his 20s.
*The symptoms appear early, around age three. Children with autism don't make contact with others and have motor problems due to a developmental disorder of the cerebellum.
*People with autism have trouble interpreting emotion and empathy. They don't understand why another child is crying.
*Temple Grandin built a "hug machine" in which she could lie, with the sides controlled by air pressure, squeezing against her.

=== Savants ===

* Half of savants have an autistic spectrum disorder, and the other half have brain damage or a brain disease.
* They are able to make unconscious use of algorithms
* The term "idiot savant", coined in 1887 by John Langdon Down, is used to describe the combination of an exceptional gift and low IQ (0 to 70)
* Savants appear to store all the information that enters their short-term memory in their long-term memory too. They can remember vast quantities of trivial facts, like license plates and railway timetables; it's as if they are unable to forget information.
* [[google:stephen+wiltshire+art|Stephen Wiltshire]] is known for his ability to draw a landscape from memory after seeing it just once. Artistic savants always have a strong preference for a particular subject and a particular technique. They almost never draw people; the social brain is their Achilles' heel.
* It's thought that the brain damage allows links with other brain structures to be reinforced, enhancing the functioning of the visual cortex.
* [[wikipedia:Kim_Peek|Kim Peek]], who was born without a corpus callosum, (his brain had no connection between the right and left hemispheres), would read two pages of a book simultaneously. He read 9,000 books about the history of the US and knew them all from memory.
* Epilepsy is often associated with autism.
* One theory is that everyone possesses potential savant talents localized in the "lower" regions below the cerebral cortex that are suppressed by "higher" processes. Darold Treffert calls this the "little Rainman" that each of us possesses.
* Talents sometimes disappear with age. One autistic girl Nadia, lost her remarkable talent for drawing horses by the time she was nine. It would seem that the improved functioning of the left side of the brain, which is responsible for speech, inhibited here drawing skills.

== 10. Schizophrenia and Other Reasons for Hallucinations ==
* Up until the 1950s, schizophrenia was "treated" by means of a lobotomy, and outpatient procedure that involved severing the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex. Opponents called it "partial euthanasia" since it turned patients into robots.
* Schizophrenia affects 1% of the population. Around 10% of schizophrenics try to kill themselves.
* It is characterized by:
** "Positive" symptoms - Abnormal experiences, like delusions and hallucinations. They can't be distinguished from real experiences because they take place in the same areas of the brain where external stimuli are normally processed.
** "Negative" symptoms - The loss of normal abilities, like taking initiative, organizing one's life, tidying up one's room, and looking after oneself. These are caused by reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex. A current therapy is to apply transcranial magnetic stimulation to that area. Stimulating areas of the cerebral cortex that are extra active can also reduce hallucinations.
*Changing hormone levels during puberty and menopause bring on the disease, though a predisposition for it arises in the womb.
*As the disease progresses, the brain shrinks and its ventricles (cavities) become larger, creating too much space between the convolutions of the brain.
*There are no brain changes that are specific to schizophrenia, so diagnosis is entirely dependent on psychiatric investigation.
*Schizophrenia is around 80% genetic.
*Birth is the first functional test of a child's brain.
*After birth, an environment full of stimuli increases the right of schizophrenia. You're more likely to develop the disease if you live in a city rather than the country.
*Whether cannabis induces the disease or simply brings forward the moment at which symptoms occur is still a subject of fierce debate.
*In schizophrenics, a high percentage of cells in the hippocampus are in disarray - something that can only happen in the first half of pregnancy. Abnormal patterns of brain convolution are also found, as well as groups of cells that have failed to migrate to the right place in the cerebral cortex. This too can only happen during early development.

=== Hallucinations Due to Lack of Stimuli ===
*If brain structures stop receiving information in a normal way, they start making up information. This applies both to sensory information - from eyes, ears, and limbs - and memory information.
*When your brain manufactures information on the spot where it's normally processed, it's interpreted as if it had entered from outside via the normal route.
*The brain stops producing old information once it receives fresh input again, and it makes no difference whether the input is meaningful or has no information content.
*Phantom sensations following amputation appear to be based on the same principle. Lacking customary input from a limb, the brain "makes up" the presence of the missing arm or leg.
*In schizophrenia, input to areas of the cerebral cortex is also reduced, so the hallucinations provoked could be caused by the same mechanism.
*Mountaineers, especially when alone, sometimes have very vivid hallucinations (hearing voices, seeing people, or have out-of-body experiences) or are overcome by fear. So it's interesting that the revelations received by the leaders of the world's three main religions were preceded by a period of isolation in the mountains. When the brain is very isolated it starts to use stored experiences and thoughts to manufacture things - sometimes even new religions.

=== Other Hallucinations ===
*Mark Twain: "When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
*For an old brain, an anesthetic is like a dose of near-lethal poison. In intensive care, up to 80% of patients experience delerium.
*The condition sometimes resembles dementia, but delirium strikes all of a sudden, while the onset of dementia is gradual.
*Delirium is basically caused by an overdoes of the chemical messenger dopamine.
*Around a third of people over 65 who experience delirium die within a few months.

=== Hearing Voices ===

* There are people who aren't psychotic and yet hear voices. Between 7-15% of the population hear voices, yet only a fraction have mental health problems.
* Unlike psychotic patients, healthy people can control their voices. They can call them up as well as order them to go away at inconvenient times. Functional brain scans show that in the healthy group, brain activity isn't very different from that of patients with psychosis.
* In people who hear nasty voices, the right side of the brain is much more active.

== 11. Repair and Electric Stimulation ==
* Since performing compulsive actions makes people with OCD feel good, it's thought that the brain's reward system is involved.
* Our taste for sweet food depends on a single hedonistic hotspot at the base of the brain. Disabling that area makes sweet food taste repellent. Likewise, the hypothalamus is necessary for infatuation, maternal love, and pair forming.
* Oxytocin and vasopressin play a role in infatuation, orgasm, pair forming, and maternal love. Deficiencies in those two chemical messengers are associated with autism.
* If fetal donor tissue is implanted in your brain, what characteristics might you acquire from the donor?
* In gene therapy, pieces of DNA containing the code for a particular protein (a gene) are inserted into a cell. The cell then starts to produce medicine in the form of the gene product, that is, a new protein.
== 12. The Brain and Sports ==
* Around 17% of professional boxers (including Muhammed Ali) have Parkinson's.
== 13. Moral Behavior ==
* In 1951, 18,608 lobotomies were performed in the US, mainly on schizophrenia patients.
* Empathy - the capacity to recognize and share the feelings of others - provides the basis for all moral behavior. Such behavior has a long evolutionary history and certainly isn't exclusive to humans.
* Of all the stimuli that bind communities together, having a common enemy is the most powerful of all.
* Inherent in the biological objective of morality - promoting cooperation - is that members of one's own group receive preferential treatment.
* People usually don't think at all about moral acts. Instead they act quickly and instinctively, on a biological impulse. It's only afterward that they think up reasons for what they did unconsciously in a flash.
* In an experiment in which adults pretended to be sad, children aged 1-2 responded by trying to comfort them. And so did pets.
* When you see someone move a hand, the same neurons fire in your brain as when you make that movement yourself. Mirror neurons help us to learn by imitation - a process that's largely automatic. Newborn babies can copy the mouth movements of adults before they are an hour old. The same neurons react to displays of emotion, enabling us to sense what others are experiencing and thus providing the basis for empathy.
* Men accused of murder often display malfunctions of the PFC.
* The origins of empathy lie in a mother animal's caring behavior toward her offspring.
* The reason humans are so good at torture is precisely because they excel at imagining what others feel. In fact, the more empathetic they are, the crueler they can be.
== 14. Memory ==
* The various forms of learning, memory, forgetting, and thinking - and thus, in a sense, our minds themselves - are the result of synaptic contacts in different brain areas being affected by the many chemical messengers contained in neurons.
* In professional violinists, the part of the cerebral cortex that directs the fingers of the left hand is 5x as large as in people who don't play a stringed instrument.
* William Scoville removed large portions of the temporal lobe from H.M. After the operation, H.M. was unable to learn or retain information, although his short term memory was intact. The pathway from short to long-term memory had been cut off.
* Working memory is crucial for processing language and is though to be underdeveloped in children who suffer from dyslexia.
* The hippocampus specializes in combining sensory information.
** The location of the restaurant you arranged to meet up at, what the person you're meeting looks like, the sounds and smells from the kitchen, and the position of the set table are all fused into a single coherent item of autobiographical memory, the chronicle of your life.
** And later, at least if the dinner was worth it, this information is transferred to the long-term memory.
** The hippocampus does all this in close partnership with an area located nearby on the underside of the cortex: the entorhinal cortex (AKA parahippocampal gyrus).
** This was also removed from H.M.'s brain
*It's also in the entorhinal cortex that the first signs of Alzheimer's appear.
*The hippocampus is also essential for spatial orientation

=== Long-Term Memory ===
*The amygdala imprints memories that carry a strong emotional charge under the influence of the stress hormone cortisol. As a result, a traumatic experience is immediately stored for good in the long-term memory. And that explains why over 80% of our earliest memories have negative associations.
*There's a clear evolutionary advantage in imprinting danger in the mind - for instance in wartime - so that when a similar situation occurs you're immediately on the alert.
*Sometimes this natural tendency becomes pathological however. PTSD is a sign that the amygdala has done its work too well, preventing the prefrontal cortex from signaling to the veteran that the danger is over.
*An exaggerated response by the amygdala to negative stimuli also underlies borderline personality disorder, whose symptoms include emotional instability and impulsiveness.
*While we sleep, the hippocampus constantly activates memories and transmits them to the cerebral cortex (we're not sure if this is during REM or quiet sleep).
*The route information takes on its way to the long-term memory starts in the entorhinal cortex.
**It's then briefly stored in the hippocampus in a process directed by the prefrontal cortex.
**From there it follows two pathways, one taking it back to the cerebral cortex for long-term memory storage and the other - much longer - carrying it along the great arch of the fornix, suspended in the septum to the hypothalamus, where some fibers travel to the mammillary bodies.
**The mammillary bodies pass on information the thalamus. Small infarctions in this area can lead to severe memory problems and even dementia.
**The information travels on from the thalamus to areas of the cerebral cortex from which memories of facts and events can be consciously recalled. This is known as the declarative or explicit memory.
*Different types of information - music, images, and faces - are stored in different parts of the cortex.
*Capgras syndrome - While being able to recognize a friend, partner, or close relative, the sufferer feels no emotional connection to them and is therefore convinced that they are impostors. This delusion that a loved one has been replaced by something else - a robot or extraterrestrial - leads to paranoid behavior
*Vision is processed in different parts of the brain. There are patients who:
**Couldn't see movement. When cars were in motion she couldn't see them, but when they stopped, they suddenly became visible.
**Could see but could not recognize colors
**Could see color but not shapes
**Have no perception of brightness and can't tell whether they are switching a light on or off.
*The safest storage place for information is our remote memory, where we keep language and music. It's the last part to be affected by Alzheimer's.

=== Implicit/Procedural Memory (Cerebellum) ===
*The Cerebellum contains 80% of our neurons and ensures that our movements and speech are flowing and coordinated. When you shake your head violently, for instance, it allows you to keep your eyes fixed on one point. It contains the memory of how to do things. It keeps track of motor learning during our development, from crawling to standing and walking, then cycling, swimming, playing the piano, and driving a car, and it constantly steers performance of these tasks. The program for these complex actions - our implicit memory - is stored and updated in this remarkable little computer, allowing us to perform them completely automatically.
*By practicing the same tasks over and over, they become fully automatic and are transferred to the implicit or procedural memory in the cerebellum.
*The cerebellum also suppresses the impact that your own actions have on other parts of the brain. That's why you can't tickle yourself. Your brain wants to give priority to unexpected sensory input that might require an urgent response.
*The large neurons of the cerebellum, know as Purkinje cells form while we're still in the womb. But the vast majority of the small neurons, called granule cells, form only after birth. So all developmental brain disorders, including autism and pedophilia, make their mark on the cerebellum.
== 15. Neurotheology: The Brain and Religion ==
* Meta-analysis has shown a correlation among atheism, education, and IQ.
* Receptiveness to religion is determined by spirituality, which is 50% genetically determined, as twin studies have shown.
* The number of serotonin receptors in the brain corresponds to scores for spirituality. And substances that affect serotonin, like LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, can generate mystical and spiritual experiences.
* The evolution of modern man has given rise to five behavioral characteristics common to all cultures: language, toolmaking, music, art, and religion.
* The evolutionary advantage for religion is clear:
** Religion binds groups:
*** It's sinful to marry an unbeliever.
*** Numerous social rules are imposed.
*** You must be recognizable as a member of the group.
**The commandments and prohibitions had a number of advantages including on health.
**Faith is a source of comfort and help at difficult times and gives a sense of purpose.
**God has the answer to everything that we don't know or understand and belief makes you optimistic.
**Faith takes away the fear of death - all religions promise life after death.
**Religion sanctions killing other groups in the name of one's own god.
*Spiritual experiences cause changes in brain activity (like everything else we do).
*Alzheimer's disease is linked to the progressive loss of religious interest.
*Hyperreligiosity is associated with frontotemporal dementia, mania, obsessive-compulsive behavior, schizophrenia, and temporal lobe epilepsy. A number of these disorders are knon to make the dopamine reward system more active.
*A high proportion of patients with psychoses are religious, as their condition often prompts an interest in spirituality.
*Praying for others is largely something you do to relax yourself. Doing yoga also reduces cortisol and increases production of the sleep hormone melatonin (as does meditation); the sympathetic autonomic nervous system is also less active after yoga exercises. So it has a de-stressing effect.
*Geschwind syndrome - The symptoms include obsessive writing, loss of interest in sex, and extreme religiousness. This rare form of epilepsy may well explain the behavior of various historical figures: the apostle Paul, the prophet Muhammed, Joan of Arc, Vincent van Gogh, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
*People from non-Western cultures never report seeing Jesus or God during a seizure. It seems that the divine image imprinted in our brains during early development reemerges during epileptic seizures, along with artistic, literary, political, or religious creations and our mental store of thoughts and convictions.
== 16. There Isn't More Between Heaven and Earth ==
* Throughout history, all cultures have postulated the existence of a soul.
* When one's life is in acute danger it appears that all of these memories are retrieved not one after the other but virtually simultaneously, leading to what is called "panoramic memory". This can go hand in hand with strong spiritual or religious feelings.
* The feeling of tranquility and the absence of pain in near death experiences is ascribed to the release of opiates or stimulation of the brain's reward system. The vision of a tunnel is caused by reduced blood circulation in the eyeball, starting on the periphery of the field of vision.
* The placebo effect results from unconscious changes in brain function that reduce the symptoms of a disease. It is caused by the patient's own expectations of treatment.
* The brain can be prompted by a placebo to bring about the exact functional changes that are needed to reduce the symptoms of depression increased activity in the prefrontal cortex and reduced activity in the hympothalamus.
* The doctor figure is itself a walking placebo.
== 17. Free Will, a Pleasant Illusion ==
* Three components to free will:
** You could have abstained from the action.
** The action must be carried out for a reason.
** You should feel that you're carrying it out of your own volition (subjective)
*We start life with a host of possibilities and talents but also many limitations, like a congenital tendency to addiction, a set level of aggression, a predetermined gender identity and sexual orientation, and a predisposition for ADHD, borderline personality disorder, depression, or shizophrenia.
*We're born into a linguistic environment that shapes our brain structure and function without us being free to choose our mother tongue. The religious environment in which we end up after birth also determines how we shape our spirituality.
*In other words, we are not free to change much of our native identity. Nor can we decide to have a certain talent, or to abstain from thought.
*Nietzsche: "A thought comes when "it" wants, not when "I" want."
*Our brains can function excellently without conscious thought. But they have to be trained to do so. It's only by feeding the unconscious brain a huge amount of data over a long period of time that an art expert is able to "sense" when he's looking at a forgery, and it's only be seeing a great many patients that a medical specialist develops the "clinical glance" allowing her to make a diagnosis almost as soon as a patient enters the room.
*Wegner believes that the illusion of free will is necessary in order to give an action personal legitimacy. It's like a rubber stamp saying "I did this!".
*The precursors of artistic development go back about 164,000 years, to our common roots in Africa, but mankind appears to have "discovered" art about 30,000 years ago, more or less simultaneously in France, Australia, and Africa.
*It seems that if we're aware fo what we do but lack a sense of autonomy (free will), our body feels like an alien object. It has accordingly been suggested that the illusion of acting out of free will might well be the price we have to pay for consciousness.
== 18. Alzheimer's Disease ==
* Alzheimer's can in many ways be seen as a premature, accelerated, and severe process of brain aging.
* Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia and the number of patients is expected to double over the next 30 years.
* Every active neuron sustains damage, just as a car engine does, through wear and tear. Neurons can repair themselves - but only to a certain extent. Tiny flaws remain and mount up over the years, causing the degeneration that is the aging process. In the case of individuals whose brains aren't good at repairing themselves or who incur a lot of brain damage, this degeneration is more serious and occurs faster, resulting in plaques and tangles, which lead to the onset of Alzheimer's.
* Alzheimer's travels through our brains by a fixed route, starting with tangles in the cerebral cortex and abnormalities in the hippocampus.
* We lose abilities in almost exactly the reverse order in which we acquire them:
** Stage 1: You function normally.
** Stage 2: You start to lose things and find it hard to carry out your job but can still maintain a semblance of normality.
** Stage 3: Your co-workers notice that you can no longer handle difficult situations at work.
** Stage 4: You have trouble with complex tasks, like handling finances.
** Stage 5: You start to need help choosing what to wear.
** Stage 6:
*** 6a: You need help getting dressed.
*** 6b: And washed.
*** 6c: And going to the toilet.
**Stage 7:
***7a:You can only speak about half a dozen intelligible words.
***7b: You lose the power of speech entirely.
***7c: You cannot walk unaided.
***7d. You cannot sit unaided.
***7e. You lose the ability to smil.
***7f. You cannot hold your head up, and finish curled up in a fetal position.
*Growing up bilingual, having a good education and a challenging job, and remaining active in old age reduce the likelihood of Alzheimer's.
*The circadian system is impacted by Alzheimer's, and this is why patients are restless and get up at night.
== 19. Death ==
* Atoms have such a long life that each of our own atoms existed in many millions of organisms before being built into our bodies.
* Water molecules are constantly being recycled - drunk, urinated, purified, evaporated, and then rained down again, so in any glass of water there is a real likelihood that one of the molecules has passed through Napoleon's bladder.
== 20. Evolution ==
* The relative size of the brain compared to the animals body has a clear correlation with the quality of the brain as an information processing machine.
* Encephalization Quotient (EQ) - The animal's brain weight on top of what is needed to regulate body functions. Humans score by far the best on this measure.
* EQ is largely determined by the development of the cerebral cortex. The increase of our brain size was caused by an increase in the number of building blocks (neurons) and their connections. So the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex is a good measure of intelligence.
* These are grouped into functional units called columns, the cross-sections of which have remained at around half a millimeter, but the number of columns has vastly increased.
* A clear correlation has been found between the size of primates' cerebral cortex and the size and complexity of the social group.
* Primates started to live in social groups around 52m years ago.
* The complexity of life in groups is strongly determined by pair formation and monogamy, both of which place considerable demands on the brain. They require optimal selection of a fertile partner as well as complex negotiations between partners.
* The mechanism of monogamous partner choice in humans is thought to have developed about 3.5m years ago.
* Whereas impulse speed in tissue other than the nervous system rarely exceeds 0.1cm/sec, the simplest neuron can transmit impulses at 0.1 to 0.5m/sec and neurons can reach conductivity speeds of 100m/sec.
* Mice possess 1,200 olfactory receptor genes, while we have only 350 left.
== 21. Conclusions ==
* By adulthood, there is very little about our brains that can be modified, and our characteristics have been established. This structuring of our brains determines their function: we are our brains.
* Our character - that is, our innate qualities - emerges more and more strongly in the course of early development.
* The combination of inherited characteristics (from genes) and intrauterine effects (from environment and maternal behavior) on brain development gives rise to congenital properties.
* 27% of Europeans suffer from one or more brain disorders.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Ambigrammia

2026-07-26T15:42:44Z

Robert.adlington:

* 10. As in any work of art, almost the entire creative process lies hidden beneath the surface.
* 16. Cheating of this sort, and of a myriad of other sorts, lies at the heart of the art of ambigrammia.
* 20. Is that first shape really a "D"? Is the final shape really an "E"? Such questions make it sound as if precise scientific determination is called for, but category membership is blurry and is influenced by context, and the nearby letters (or nearby shapes, to use a more neutral term) form a context in which each of these four shapes is perceived. Even if each shape taken in isolation is a somewhat shaky member of its intended alphabetic category, it's a different ballgame when all four are placed side by side, since now, the shaky alphabetic suggestion made by each one, supplemented by the prior existence of the familiar name "DAVE" results in each questionable part reinforcing all the other questionable parts, and the overall upshot is, mirabile dictu, a strong member of the higher-level "DAVE" category.
* 21. After all, written words, no less than letters are visual categories, and they too can have members and non-members, and dubious in-between cases.
* 28. Over the next fifty years (from 1920), experimentation with far-out letterforms continued apace, passionately exploring heretofore unimagined regions of alphabetic space.
* 35. A successful ambigram is an artwork delicately balanced on the knife-edge between creation and discovery. It is, on the one hand, a highly personal artistic invention, and yet it is, at the same time, a find that anyone could have made.
* 35. Well, no - I take it back - not anyone! That's the most important point here. In order to be a high-quality ambigram-discoverer, you must be able to see, in your mind's eye, a myriad of ways to distort letters while maintaining their identities, and all sorts of novel ways of breaking letters into pieces (or combining letters or letter-pieces into new wholes).... But no only imagination counts; also a reliable intuitive sense for designs that will probably "play in Peoria"... versus those designs that veer so far off into wild territory that their readability is lost. And lastly, a strong sense of esthetics is crusial - the ability to imbue a calligraphic design with a unified, appealing style.
* 35. Only someone who possesses all these skills will be able to see the beautiful metaphorical shell lying on the metaphorical beach, partially covered by drifts of metaphorical sand. Yes, the exotic shell is objectively there, lying in plain sight for "anyone" to see - but, ironically, very few people have the vision needed to recognize it.
* 35. Creativity as seeing.
* 36. I would argue that artistic creativity in general is nothing but selection - and for me photography reveals this truth more clearly than any other activity does.
* 40. Picasso: "In a flash, they joined together in my head. The idea of the bull's head came to me before I had a chance to think."
* 43. The seldom-noticed ambiguities lurking under nearly every stone in everyday language are similar to the potential ambiguities lurking in the letters making up each word and name we encounter - ambiguities that allow an ambigrammist to turn a word or phrase into an ambigram - but it takes a lot of practice to develop a sensitivity that allows one to "see" what is there (and always was there) but that goes unseen by nearly everyone.
* 54. But it's a specific type of imagination - one that involves stretching category boundaries left and reight. That is to say, violating norms left and right. And another term for norm-violation is cheating. That's the name of the game in ambigrammie - cheating left and right, cheating up and down, cheating across the board, cheating every which way.
* 55. The human perceptual system is vary forgiving - up to a point. It is forgiving because there are often many redundant clues as to category membership. If one clue is missing or is even severely contradicted, that may not matter, because othe clues can make up for its naughtiness.
* 57. Oscillation in ambigrams involves neither rotation nor reflection, but just a perceptual shift.
* 58. When reading, a human brain is doing two things at once - namely, reading letter and reading words. (I'm simplifying for the sake of clarity. The reading brain is doing many things at once, but that's not crucial for our purposed here.). When reading in a bottom-up fashion, you put letters together to hypothetize a word that contains them in the given order. Conversely, when reading in a top-down fashion, you perceive a word as a whole and hypothesize the existence of several constituent letters inside it.
* 58. But how could someone read a whole word without first having recognized the letters inside it? That sounds like nonsense. Indeed, it seems self-evident that when you read, you mentally put together strokes to see letters, then letters to see words, and then words to see phrases - in other words, you carry out perception from the bottom up, always moving from smaller visual elements to larger ones.
* 61. Your brain has a repertoire of visual concepts of words as wholes, and thanks to those higher-level expectations embedded in it, it often sees words faster than it can make out the letters that make them up. Moreover, your brain even has visual expectations for written language-chunks at levels higher (meaning larger) than that of words. See Scott Kim's boxed proverbs.
* 63. Your lifetime as a speaker of your native language has provided you with countless thousands of words, names, and phrases, and those are the concepts that embody your passive expectations.
* 75. A top-notch ambigram is one whose out-and-out cheating aroused no suspicion on the part of most viewers; it reads easily (hopefully instantly) in both directions, and merely seems to have some innocent little embellishments that add charm to it.
* 79. Terms like "read" or "readable" get very blurry. Is the red display above a genuine instance of the word "salsa"? Or is it merely very close to being one? Are the second and fifth shapes in the display actually "a"s?
* 83. To make ambigrams well, you have to develop a strong and reliable internalized Peoria, and you can develop such a model is and only if you regularly ask the opinions of viewers who feel have reactions that are typical of your larger and unseen intended audience.
* 85. Art is a spread-out social phenomenon. The lasting quality of a piece of art, or of an artist, is judged not by one person but by humanity as a whole, or at least by large chunks of humanity. A great work of art jibes with, and thereby reveals, a vein of receptivity in the collective human mind. Put more succinctly, great art is crowd-pleasing art.
* 85. Chopin wasn't playing for Peoria; it simply turned out that his music played in Peoria. To create deep art, you have to obey your own innermost artistic instincts, but those instincts have to be informed by the reactions of people you respect. In the end, it's a subtle balance between your own most private and personal taste and the external world's taste. That's why even Frédéric Chopin, child genius that he was, had to receive a high-quality musical education in order to become Chopin.
* 88. Ambigrammatical analogues to the famous duck/rabbit bistable image (or the Necker Cube).
* 97. Name or word familiarity is a crucial top down force constantly exploited in ambigrammia.
* 99. Ambigrammia forces you to concentrate on two different ways of looking at one thing. But since working on two levels at once is something that comes naturally to me, I feel justified in saying that these discoveries were made "on my own", not with artificial help.
* 99. No matter how many riffs you have concocted before, you find yourself continually confronted with novel challenges whose solutions inspire new discoveries, which you then add to your ever-growing repertoire of riffs. And what at one time was not you at all gradually becomes an intrinsic and permanent part of you.
* 111. All of these "strange fusion" examples exploit the idea that there is no sharp distinction between two separate shapes and a single shape. More generally, whenever one is dealing with a complex structure composed of parts, it is always a judgment call as to whether this is one thing, several things, or many things. It's no natural for us to perceive a fellow human being as an organized collection of dozens of organs, let alone as a collection of trillions of cells, not to mention as a collection of trillions of trillions of elementary particles, but any of those viewpoints is just as valid as the "natural" one. Is "AMBULANCE" one shape, two, nine, or more?
* 112. In this case ("quince pies") the disqualification comes from the fact that the ambiguity is not perceptual but conceptual; it requires some kind of abstract thinking. But where lies the boundary between percepts and concepts?
* 126. In Le Ton beau de Marot, I tried to bring readers around to my stance of placing form on an equal level with content, in poetry translation.
* In this "Schweiz, suisse, svizzera, switzerland" ambigram (is it one or is it a set of four?), there are confirming reverberations sloshing simultaneously upwards and downwards among three hierarchical levels - letters, words, and the four-word phrase. (There is actually a fourth and even finer level - that of pen-strokes.) The perceptual locking-in takes place ultra-quickly and totally unconsciously. Any act of perception involves a subtly mixture of bottom-up and top-down processing, and ambigrammia is all about exploiting that mixture.
* 141. Below the surface of any human decision you can probably find dozens of little forays into possibility space, all of them nudging the decider in one direction or another.
* 144. World knowledge comes in. Prior knowledge exerts a powerful top-down effect on how the mind unconsciously assigns a shape to a letter category. Long-time familiarity with the state name "Michigan" makes you read the outline of the state as a capital "I".
* 147. Phrases are to words as words are to letters. Some are very short, like "Thank you" and "Good luck" and "Merry Christmas"; some are frequent sentences, like "I don't know" and "I see your point"; some are famous expressions from literature, like "To be or not to be" and "Let there be light"; some are idioms and proverbs; some are book titles, movie titles, song titles... Each of these thousands of items that you know like the back of your hand is an abstract visual category in you mind.
* 148. The phrase "We all live in a yellow submarine" exists in your mind and in the minds of millions of people around the globe. It's there as a chunk, and it can readily be triggered by a visual stimulus.
* 153. How can one consciously take into account all the myriads of unconscious pressures due to both category membership and esthetics?
* 153. I don't pay attention to all those pressure consciously. I do a bit of it consciously, but most of the work takes place behind the scenes. Or to put it more accurately, I did it in my youth, while I was training myself to write this way and not that way. It was done during my period of a million mistakes! When I was in elementary school, I made all sorts of elementary mistakes, and I made higher-level mistakes when I was in high school, and so forth. Now I'm much older and I still make plenty of mistakes - there's no doubt of that - but they're at a yet higher level.
* 154. To internalize other people's eyes is extremely tricky and takes years of practice. But no matter how much practice you have at judging legibility, you can never be sure of your judgment.
* 155. ...there was no precise goal that I was trying to reach...
* 161. This kind of jumping back and forth is typical of my modus operandi (and maybe of everyone's) in artistic creation - one idea triggers another; which then feeds back into and modifies the idea that gave rise to it - and around and around in a virtuous circle this process can go, eventually converging on a stable final creation.
* 162. There's no exact answer to most counting questions ("How many towns are in Italy?", "How many friends do you have?"); it all comes down to how you assign things to categories.
* 163. Even if some of its letters are hard to make out on their own, that's a red herring; its letters are not on their own, but are together. That's the nature of ambigrams; letters are grouped inside structures, so there's a resonance between the whole and its parts - the parts suggest a whole, and the whole confirms the parts.
* 164. In perception we are influenced by stimuli coming at us on many levels.
* 199. ...about how certain parts of words are far more important for legibility than other parts are; about the unconscious expectations generated by a lifetime of exposure to zillions of letters, words, names, phrases, typefaces, ads, and styles of handwriting; about the ineffable holy trinity of Grace, Elegance, Beauty...
* 234. Emmy Noether's theorem states that to every continuous symmetry of the laws of physics there is a related quantity that is conserved, an idea that stunned the world when she discovered it. Thus:
** That the laws of physics are time-invariant (they don't change as time passes) implies that energy is conserved.
** That they are translation-invariant (they don't vary as you move from place to place) implies momentum is conserved.
** That they are rotation-invariant (they don't depend on one's orientation in space) implies that angular momentum is conserved.
*255. All serious researchers in physics are always driven by their unconscious esthetic tastes; taste is in fact the principle determinant of what they find promising, interesting, or believable.
*275. Actually, hallucination is a standard ingredient of the normal act of reading, and it takes place surprisingly frequently in reading-aloud. The kind of unconscious substitution error, which we all commit sometimes, comes from having a rich associative network, including an immense amount of world knowledge. An in ambigrams, such acts of perceptual hallucination not only are allowed, they are constantly needed.
*279. Maybe 300 hours of work, with roughly one decision taking place per second, yields about one million decisions for making the ambigrams of the 50 state capitals.
*285. In the white heat of creation, it felt as if the idea of semicircles came to me, not from me, and out of nowhere.
*285. The final polished piece is the outcome of thousands of microscopic decisions, most of which I was unaware of even as I made them.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]

Nine Minds

2026-07-26T15:42:15Z

Robert.adlington:

* 30. Excerpts from Kana's scale of loneliness:
** 0 - Contentment - Being wholly at ease with the world.
** 3 - Mild Isolation - Aloneness is noticed regularly, living and work spaces seem excessively large.
** 4 - Moderate Isolation - Aloneness is unpleasant like body odor, days feel very long.
** 6 - Estrangement - Sense of not belonging, being unlike others, connection is difficult.
** 8 - Severe Exclusion - Sensation of being cut off from others by an invisible wall.
** 10 - Foresakenness - Empties life of meaning, all possibility of connection seems lost.
* 63. "Sometimes (neurotypical people) they'll tell themselves a story..." Colleagues would fall in with each other's certainty... Some can get pretty wound up if you can't see how everything points to so and so... So Warren would take a look, but something would niggle at him. A problem of logic.
* 72. Things are never only as they appear. Because something is doesn't mean it always was.
* 73. Our lives are lived forwards but understood backwards.
* 113. Like Billy, Elly had grown more or less silent by the age of two, devoting herself to her senses to the exclusion of people, playing by herself in ways that quickly became repetitive.
* 117. Billy's way of thinking and feeling and perceiving bypasses words. This inarticulacy has nothing to do with any lack of intelligence or curiosity or the desire to reach out to others. It has to do with an inner world that is pictorial, musical, and the many meanings he is able to find in shape, color, motion, tone, and rhythm.
* 143. For sighted people, a room is filled with light. Every item, feature, piece of furniture is a different reflection of this light. A white door looks different to a long desk or a thick wall because each reflects the light in its own way. Now, for Amanda, who is blind, a room is filled not with light but sound. Sound, bouncing constantly back and forth, much as sighted people's light, is a reflection of everything that surrounds her.
* 147. Aspects of autistic thought are especially conducive to creativity, she'd said, notably literary creation. Inventing and playing with words; speaking - or writing - at length on a favored topic; reveling in rhyme and the repetition of sounds; listing, arranging, classifying.
* 148. Wanting to reach out, but doubting it'll be worth the effort, since his effort would need to be so much greater than most other people's.
* 148. It's always been my experience that what we do with our minds, we do with our whole bodies.
* 157. All those words that opened rooms within rooms within rooms inside you. Words that took your mind in at least five different directions at once.
* 243. Dan Ackroyd's psychologist talked of childhood schizophrenia (as the autistic spectrum was still called then in some parts)... An excess of imagination, it was thought, leading the child inwards. Only later would autism become associated with blankness, or incapacity. No longer associated with imagination, let alone artistry.
* 246. When Danny came out of the theater, he felt more alert to the life that pulsed all around him... There they were, the very same theater games that he played, in the prim gossips who matched their faces to their listener's reaction, in the gestures of candor, or encouragement, or exaggeration that animated hands, in the gaits that stiffened as a cop or a clergyman passed.

[[Category:Consciousness]]
[[Category:Books]]