What does it mean to be human?

I've just splashed out  for another book I can't afford. This time it's Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape Our Live by Jesse J Prinz. New Scientist had an interview with Prinz in the 21 January 2012 issue. (There is a link to the interview, Humans Are Learning Machines, but you need to be a subscriber to access it). Also,  there was a favourable review of it in the London Times this morning. but it also requires a subscription to view.  If I were going to digress (which is of course exactly what  I am doing obviously),  I'd say something moody here about  the free dissemination of knowledge   disappearing and how  I guess soon only the rich will be able to afford the  luxury of information.

Prinz emphasizes  flexibility, nurture and cultural influences as the important ingredients in arriving at what we are and what we might become. He makes short work of evolutionary psychology's claims that our natures are largely the result of our evolutionary origins. He disagrees with their assertions that since we evolved from  higher simians--bonobos, gorillas and some of the higher apes-- we must still be like them in critical ways.

The section on the cultural roots of depression were enlightening. For example, he  claims that depression does not have its origins in genetics only. He discusses the alarming increase in depression rates among young Americans. He thinks they result in changes in culture. In 1955 only 2% of  twenty-five-year-old Americans were depressed. Now the number is closer to one in every four American in that age group have had a severe bout of depression.  Prinz says the increase is due in large part to peer interaction. That is that we're learning from each other how to be depressed.

The Second, Third, and Fourth Cultures and Their Discontents

Felix, qui, potest rerum cognoscere causa

(“Fortunate is he who is able to know the causes of things”)
~Virgil

I actually had two comments posted to one of my recent blog entries, and that seemed strange. I think of this process as the solipsistic beginning of my writing day. It's a sort of warm up where I give myself permission to write about what I thought about when I couldn't sleep or when I was waiting in a long queue in a shop.  [Since these are solitary and disorganized, I need to unlink this blog from my social network links. No-one could read these ramblings without becoming totally crazed with boredom).


Last night my sleep was interrupted by thoughts on C. P. Snow's  account of the two cultures, science and the arts, and the hostility and the lack of communication between them.  Raymond Tallis' in "The Eunuch at the Orgy: Reflections on the F. R. Leavis" (1995) outlines some of the systemic problems which dog attempts to communicate across the cultures of sciences and the humanities, but it seems a slightly  dated now. The arrogance and airs of 'omnescience' which Tallis saw among humanities intellectuals have now largely been displaced by the a pervasive drive  to make science and scientific research the sole arbiters of  cultural relevance and 'truth'.  In other words, the sciences won the culture wars a long time ago. now few reputable thinkers make assertions which are not  demonstrably valid within a naturalistic, scientific framework. 


The beginnings of the ascendency of the sciences  can in small part be traced to a classic online essay published in 1991 by John Brockman, Edge: The Third Culture. The essay is for Brockman part  cri du coeur and partly a call to scientists to reinforce the  the barricades against  the dubious thinking of unscientific infidels. It's a master class in how to rebrand science to guarantee its cultural ascendency.  In the essay, he makes no mention of any thinker who is not a  credentialed  scientist, other than to lament that Snow's original speech included a  "new definition by the 'men of letters'" [but] "excluded scientists such as the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the mathematician John von Neumann, the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, and the physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg."


Brockman was advocating that   "third-culture [scientifically proficient] thinkers...avoid the middleman and endeavor to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public."


What has happened in the two decades since Brockman's Edge essay is that the pendulum has swung strongly away from any consideration of the humanities except as inferior attempts at explanation best left to professional scientist. 


Now don't think that I'm some sort of anti-science Luddite who thinks we should all return to studying the classics and leave science and scientific literacy as the purview of the scientists.  That is not my point at all. This is the twenty-first century. We all need to be conversant about the major new trends  in the sciences. Obviously they are of critical cultural importance.  


Still, for a number of reasons, I think it's time to give this trend of making science to arbitator of all culture some  deep and critical thought.  Jonah Lehrer, who wrote Proust Was a Neuroscientist , has begun to popularize what he's labelled  the Fourth Culture.  As he defines it:


If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we'll need to create a new movement that coexists with the third culture  but that deliberately trespasses on our cultural boundaries and seeks to create relationships between the arts and the sciences. The premise of this movement--perhaps a fourth culture--is that neither culture can exist by itself. Its goal will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments...


Lerher's earlier article in Seed on the roles of science and art is a good place to get more background on his position. 


A quick list of some of the books and thinkers I consider fourth culture thinkers [even if they lived long before the twenty-first century] would be:


1. Giordano Bruno...I'm rereading him right now, and he was an amazing [if technically pre-scientific thinker], even if his writing style is ornate and egotistical for 21st century readers.
2. The Cambridge Quartet by John Casti (Many critical reviewers don't appreciate the fact that sometimes the only way to fully understand a period of time, is to think about it imaginatively.)
3. A Certain Ambiguity by Suri. More books like this one might be a first step to begin to expose the 'culture wars' for what they often are: Dictatorial posturing and overtures to false 'certainties'. 
4. H. Allen Orr's piece in The New York Review of books entitled The Science of Right and Wrong. I added this after finding it referred to in a comment section, being impressed  and mildly amazed by how well it fits the points I was making here earlier today. 


I could make this list a lot longer, but I need to get to my REAL projects.  Nobody pays for solipsistic ramblings. If they did, I'd be quite rich obviously. 

Giordano Bruno, Free Thought and Its Suppression

One summer long, long ago and far, far away,  I went to the Houston Public Library. It was a way for my mother to get me out of the house and silence my  complaints that there was 'There's nothing to do.' It was before kids with similar complaints could find relief in a game console.

 In my desultory browsing I found a book with an intriguing title, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno by Paul-Henri Michel. I was obsessed with cosmology and had been since my my dad had given me a subscription to a children's science magazine on my tenth birthday, the same birthday that I'd been given my first telescope.

My odd slightly  neurotic preoccupation with the univese was a lot like Woody Allen's in Annie Hall.  So when I found a whole book on the enigmatic subject, I was immediately enthralled  and decided to try reading it, even though its adult vocabulary made was a bit of a  hard slough for me. Within the first  five pages I was hooked. I found a comfortable chair facing a large window, and  read for hours. Whenever I looked up, I'd see hard-hatted workers  in the massive highrise, which was under construction  across the street from my window, flying paper air planes and leaning out to see if their latest attempt was more air worthy or not.

It seemed to me to fit with what I was reading. I read to page 179 before my mother came to collect me. I stopped with this sentence, "The Earth, the Moon, the Sun and the planets are so many 'worlds' which. taken together constitute a 'system' and any organism whose laws we are permitted to know... consequently, there is a plurality of worlds in a universe which is unique because nothing exists outside of it."

That was my first introduction to Giordano Bruno, and I've been intrigued by him ever since. So much so that I've been to Rome four times on the anniversary of his being burned alive by the Vatican on the 17th of February 1600.  He still intrigues me, and I've noticed that with the recent discovery from NASA of so many exoplanets [which predict that there are prehaps as many as one for each star in our galaxy], Bruno seems more topical then ever. It will be 412 years since he was burned alive for holding what the Catholic Church claimed were heretical ideas.

Since no one reads this, I will likely use this forum to think aloud about how culture views of Bruno have changed since he was first widely reintroduced by Frances Yates, who was a brilliant scholar, but was almost certainly mistaken when she painted him as a magical thinker seeped in medieval tinged hermetics.  It took a number of years before Bruno's image was revised through the thorough new interpretations by Hilary Gatti, Ingrid Rowland and others. 

Religion and Free Thinking

I've been reading a lot lately, and one of the most interesting area I've been delving into is evolutionary psychology. Before actually reading some books, journal articles and chapter essays in a few science book, I had a very dim view of the whole discipline, but that has changed.
Here's a list of my reading so far:
Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World by Malcolm Potts
Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavor by Godfrey Miller 
Why We Believe in God: A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith by J Anderson Thomson
A chapter in Future Science: Cutting Edge Essays from the New Generation of Scientists [edited by Max Brockman
Specifically Children's Helping Hands by Felix Warnerken, pages 17-29
The Moral Life of Children by Paul Bloom [New York Times May 5, 2010]

Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered: Thinking about the Mystery of the Primes

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

~The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

I was recently given a book,  The Mystery of the the Prime Numbers by Matt Watkins. It is an eccentric and addictive read. I’ve become so obsessed by the primes that I’m also reading Marcus du Sautoy’s Music of the Primes at the same time.

If you are not a mathematician or interested in mathematics, you might well be asking yourself “What is so interesting about prime numbers anyway? Aren’t they just the numbers we learned about in school through the rote definition: ‘A prime is a number whose only factors are 1 and itself. That means there is no whole number that evenly divides the prime number.’” Yawn!

Yes, teachers of mathematics do often tend to limit rather than enhance our sense of curiosity. However, if you think that the primes can be limited to this stale definition, you owe yourself an exploration into  the strange, amazing landscape of the primes.  For example, there is no largest prime number, and we can never draw up a complete list of primes. Why? Well, according to the Fundamental Theorem of  Arithmetic a counting number must either be prime or split up into primes-there’s no third option. Think about it for a minute, as Euclid did many centuries ago. If there were only a finite number of primes, as he pointed out, then multiplying them all together and adding 1, would produce a number which was not divisible by an prime at all, and that’s impossible. Yes, there is an infinitude of primes.

Also fascinating is the fact that the primes refuse to conform to any pattern and for that reason they have uses in the real word for encryption and information security.  Strangely enough, as Riemann realized, they can be turned into wave functions. These are, of course, the patterns of music, of quantum waves and much more. As du Sautoy points out in his book that for  the physicist Michael Berry these waves are “not just abstract music, but can be translated into physical[if cacophonous] sounds] that anyone can listen to.”

If you’re deeply interested in fleshing this out, you might be interested in some specific work, not covered in either book , of  Fields Metalist, Terrance Tao who has described one approach to proving the prime number theorem in poetic terms–in listening to the “music” of the primes. We start with a “sound wave” that is “noisy” at the prime numbers and silent at other numbers; this is the   Von Mangoldt function. Then we analyze its notes or frequencies by subjecting it to a process akin to the Fourier transformation; this is the Merlin transformation. Then we prove, and this is the hard part, that certain “notes” cannot occur in this music. This exclusion of certain notes leads to the statement of the prime number theorem. According to Tao, this proof yields much deeper insights into the distribution of the primes than the “elementary” proofs.

I’ll likely write more on this. I can’t stop thinking about it.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE ELECTRONIC PANOPTICON

I'LL BE POSTING A ON THIS SOON.

IYI here are 25 things that Google knows about you, and remember this list was created in 2009 BEFORE we had Google +.

Here’s a thought experiment.  Imagine for a moment that you are sitting watching a video entitled Philosophy and the Panopticon. Pretend also that the video is about the fact that electronic surveillance data is being gathered on every move you make from the time you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night. For the purposes of this though experiment ask yourself how you would feel if you knew that almost all the activities you engage in every day are captured by various method: surveillance cameras, records of electronic transactions and internet traffic logs. Interested parties, whether they are governmental, advertising or just curious individuals,  can gain access to views of streets you walk, the exterior of the  office building where you work and even the house where you live in. They know what you buy either on the net or in shops by electronic transition. Ask yourself how you would feel if without your knowledge or permission those who are interested can find out which movie you’ve rented, which magazines you read, which website you visit and how often you visit them.  Also what if your data is just one profile in vast electronic consumer or bureaucratic databases? What if every time you used Google for an internet search or send or receive e-mail you’d left a digital trail others can follow.

As you’ve probably already guessed this is not a farfetched scenario. It’s pretty much the world as we find it in the 21^st century. And I made this video because I just signed up for Google+.  Have you? If you have, have you ever felt apprehensive about the information that is electronically collected about every move you make? Because I do, and that made me wonder what philosophy might have something to say on this state of affairs? Well, perhaps the best place to start is with Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), one of the founders of Utilitarianism which is the philosophical idea that we should aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. Something that is slightly less well known is most a an unusual architectural program he advocated which he called the Panopticon.
Though it was never actually built during his lifetime, the Panopticon is Bentham’s vision for what he thought would be a scientifically-designed maximum security prison. Circular in shape, the structure features a central tower with individual cells radiating outward uniformly like spokes in a wheel. The characteristic feature of this arrangement is that there is a complete asymmetry of knowledge, and hence power: the guards in the central tower can see into any of the cells at any given time, but due to special blinds the inmates cannot see the guards, or if they are being watched at any specific moment.
Bentham was a social reformer genuinely believed that social order and control could be fostered if the prisoners internalized the sense that they were being observed by unseen eyes. He also believed that the idea behind the Panopticon could be utilized in schools, factories, and hospitals. It’s a certainty that he could never have imagined the uses his idea is now being put to in the form of internet surveillance. Bentham was serious when he claimed that “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instructions diffused … all [brought about] by a simple idea in Architecture.” Not everyone was as optimistic as Benthan. When Bentham’s contemporary Edmund Burke saw the plans for the Panopticon he called it “a spider in the web.”
The postmodernist philosopher, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), contended that the nature of the oneway surveillance in the Panopticon – what he referred to as the gaze – resulted in an asymmetry of knowledge, and therefore of power. Ultimately, Foucault argued, the omniscient surveillance created conditions whereby the observed themselves became instruments of their own suppression. So whereas Bentham viewed his Panopticon as a technology for reforming men, Foucault saw a method for creating “docile bodies.” Foucault writes that the major function of the Panopticon is:
To induce a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual use unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who uses it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearer.
For Foucault who died in 1984, the Panopticon was the result of the misuse of power permeated modern institutions from governments to corporations. With the accelerated use of digital surveillance technologies within modern democratic states, are we in danger of creating an ‘electronic Panopticon’? And would this necessarily be a bad thing? Jeremy Bentham would probably say no. As a Utilitarian who once famously described civil and natural rights as “nonsense on stilts, “Bentham might argue that “the greatest good for the greatest number” outweighed quaint notions about human dignity. If the Panopticon principle can guarantee peace, order, and stability in social affairs and unlike Orwell’s nightmarish vision of ‘Big Brother’ the modern surveillance state is turning out a lot more like an electronically-monitored ‘consumer paradise’ or ‘Disneyworld’ where “people are seduced into conformity,” not forced. If so, perhaps there is a sense in which each of us – in so far as we approve of and acquiesce in the continued construction of the surveillance state will be soon be a society of social
Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon principle, on the other hand, appears to assume some sort of conception of human nature and human dignity. This is surprising from a philosopher associated with post-modernism. But Foucault’s analysis and criticism of the Panopticon principle can remind us of all we stand to lose in the surveillance state. That constant surveillance tends to promote self-censorship, breeding conformity not creativity. That eliminating deviancy can also mean eliminating eccentricity and the exceptional. And that though the surveillance state promises to answer so many of our needs there is at least one need it cannot answer – the need to be left alone in peace to think and act as we desire.

Reality? Video about an interview with Leonard Suskind in Scientific American

pp

It's difficult to explain Susskind on YouTube, where everybody is feed the dubious idea that human beings are looking at "objective reality."

Suskind is very good in explaining why this simplistic view of 'reality' has serious problems embedded within it.