Category: Books

I think I may have to buy some all of these.

John Scalzi fisks Goldberg:

I’ve not read Goldberg’s book so I’m not entirely sure what alchemy he uses to argue that a right-wing, anti-socialist political movement is and always was actually a left-wing socialist political movement, but I do suspect whatever argument it is, Mussolini himself would have found it less than satisfying, and being as much the political journalist as Goldberg is, would likely have offered him fair argument on the point, if he didn’t just have him, oh, shot.

It’s been a cold and wet weekend here in Seattle, and my PowerBook has been acting up again. I thought of taking it to the Apple store over in Bellevue, but I couldn’t face the prospect of going to a mall just before Christmas. I’ll keep my fingers crossed, double-check the Time Machine backups, and hope that it keeps going for a few more days. The PMU is obviously starting to fail, but it’s still under AppleCare…
So I had a quiet couple of days. I went to see the movie version of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, and thoroughly enjoyed it in a twisted sort of way. Avoid if you’re squeamish, though. ((I started looking up the Greek names for all the relevant phobias – blood, razors, etc. – until I read that most of those terms are completely inauthentic.)) I finished Pullman’s “The Amber Spyglass” (UK edition, no bowdlerization.)), read some more philosophy books, and had lunch with a friend who’s joining Google. The rest of the time was devoted watching football: Liverpool putting on a great show against Portsmouth, Manchester United scraping a win over Everton, and a gritty win by Chelsea.

It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad,” begins Colin McGinn‘s review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. “It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.”

Thus begins the story in today’s Guardian about the controversy that has erupted around McGinn’s review of Honderich’s book. The two protagonists have issued charge and counter-charge, both personal and professional, and the philosophical blogosphere has weighed in with opinions ranging from “unprofessional” to “right on the money” (not forgetting “great fun to read”).
It so happens that I have a small contribution to make on this subject. Back in the spring of 2005 I was attending Dan Dennett’s Philosophy of Mind course at Tufts, and inevitably I had to write a term paper. ((This was the first academic course I’d taken since the mid-70s, and my paper-writing skills were not merely rusty but positively fossilized!)) We were free to use any (relevant!) book or article as the starting-point for the paper, and after considering Hornsby’s “Simple Mindedness” and Noë’s “Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?”, I decided to work with Honderich’s “On Consciousness”. I’d picked it up at the Harvard Coop some months before, for reasons that are now entirely forgotten.
Within a couple of days I knew that I was in trouble. The more I read and re-read the book, the more it seemed to be no more than a sustained argument from personal incredulity. Honderich repeatedly declared that certain propositions were “unswallowable”, as if this constituted a knock-down argument. I checked in with Dan and told him that instead of identifying, expounding, and critiquing Honderich’s thesis, I would only be able to address the fatal weaknesses in one of his core motivations. And so I did. (PDF here.) It wasn’t a great paper, but I felt that it was a reasonable effort given my unfortunate choice of material. As I wrote:

Beyond his unshakeable belief that functionalism is unbelievable, Honderich offers no argument. Indeed he acknowledges that “it is not easy to construct an argument against strict functionalism”, and that is is perhaps impossible to find a premise more secure than his inescapable conviction. In a note, he acknowledges that his objection can be said to beg the question. Nevertheless he argues that this “shows that there is a role in inquiry for something other than arguments.”

Something other than arguments? Not, apparently, if you want to be taken seriously in Philosophical Review.

How can one make two films based on JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit? It’s quite a short book…

Andrew Sullivan has posted a review of “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency” by Charles Savage. It looks like an essential, if blood-pressure-raising, read.

One thing I’d forgotten, of course, is one central case in which torture did give us actionable intelligence:
“Al Qaeda continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction… I can trace the story of a sernior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained and he has told his story.”
The man who spoke those words was Colin Powell at the UN. The “operative”, we now know, was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi. He was waterboarded and given Bush-approved hypothermia treatment, i.e. frozen till he could take it no longer. It was only then that he told of al Qaeda’s links with Saddam’s WMDs. Guess what? Libbi subsequently retracted his confession. According to ABC News, the CIA subsequently found al-Libbi “had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment.” So I now realize that part of the reason I believed the WMD case for war against Saddam was because the Bush administration had been secretly torturing suspects and got false confessions. The biggest intelligence failure in recent US history – the WMD case in Iraq – was partly created by the torture policy.

Of course this will not convince those who respond reflexively to the term “waterboard” by comparing it to student hazing, or argue that it can’t be torture if it was used in SERE training. ((Sully cites the Chief of Training at SERE, who wrote: “SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques used by the US army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What was not mentioned in most articles was that SERE was designed to show how an evil totalitarian, enemy would use torture at the slightest whim. If this is the case, then waterboarding is unquestionably being used as torture technique.“)) Such people are utterly beyond the reach of reason.

On Monday evening I went along to Town Hall Seattle for a talk by Jennifer Ackerman, author of the new book Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body. I’ve posted a review at Amazon.com, but since they filtered out the hyperlinks I’ll repeat it here with edits restored:

A useful summary of the state of the science for the lay audience
I suspect that most of us assemble an ad hoc model of how bodies work when we are children, and then forget about the subject until things go wrong or major stories hit the news. Recent advances in genetics, endocrine analysis, imaging, and so forth mean that much of what we learned is probably wrong, or at least woefully inadequate. Ackerman’s book provides a nice survey of the state of the art, mixing the simply fascinating (e.g. the way temperature affects our tastebuds) with the extremely practical (many medical tests, including simple observations like temperature, vary so much over the day that it makes sense to timestamp them). One of my favourites: why do sick people always seem impatient with their caregivers? It turns out that if you have a fever, your sense of the passage of time is substantially compressed.
One reviewer was ticked off by the first person style, which I found weird: should Ackerman have concocted an artificially neutral, PC persona? I don’t think so. She quotes Thoreau: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well”, and the book is better for it.
I do, however, wish that in the Acknowledgments she had credited the title of the book to King Crimson. Also, it would be nice if she or her publisher had put up a website with links to the various research papers and authors that she cites. Paper end-notes don’t really cut it any more.

I rated it four stars. ((I just had an odd thought: buy this and read it just before the holiday season this year, and I guarantee you’ll never run out of fascinating conversation pieces.))
As for the meeting itself, it was a typical book tour session, and none the worse for that. The audience was smaller than I expected; there was another event taking place elsewhere in Town Hall, and I suspect that the crowd of Town Hall regulars was split as a result. No matter; I enjoyed it very much, and I hope Ms. Ackerman did too. She didn’t say much about the “sex” in the book; I told her afterwards that we’d had Steven Pinker a few weeks ago, and even the most graphic comments on the subject would seem tame after his presentation on swearing…

Another day, another scientist. Tonight it was Nobel Laureate James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. He’s just published a fascinating memoir, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, and he came to Pacific Science Center to talk about it. The format was billed as a “conversation”, but within a few minutes Watson was into his flow and ignored any attempts to turn it into a dialog. And that was just fine: it was Watson we had come to see. The obvious question: is “Boring” in the title of the book meant to be a verb or an adjective? “An adjective when you’re young, a verb when you’re old.” And there were many other pearls of wisdom. Interestingly, the book does not have an index. There is a list of important characters – a dramatis personae, if you like. Then each chapter ends with a summary of the “lessons learned” from that period of his life, and all of the lessons are gathered together at the end. Watson more or less admitted that he’d followed this pattern as a provocative experiment, but it seems to work. (I bought a copy, and read a chapter while waiting for things to start.)
Watson was passionate about the importance of science, and what he sees as the absurdity of a society in which a baseball umpire or a Wall Street trader are paid more than those involved in fundamental science. If we want more students taking science, stop pointing fingers at high schools ((Which, he claims, do much better than when he was an adolescent.)) or universities. Just pay scientists more; rational self-interest will do the rest. He was equally scathing about the kind of people making scientific decisions in Washington – “and don’t think that it will get better if we elect a Democratic president; our problems go much deeper”. He spent some time talking about Harvard, and Lawrence Summers, and women in science. His view is that the discoveries are going to be made by those who are prepared to spend 80 hours a week in the lab, regardless of gender. ((That’s why he recommends that doctoral candidates should choose a young thesis adviser without children.)) And this naturally led to a question about Rosalind Franklin, and he went into more detail about things than I had heard before. I need to read the book to confirm what he said, however.
Normally I don’t bother with book signings, but this evening I decided to get in line to get my copy signed. I think I just wanted the chance to shake the hand of a giant .

OK, not really. But Steven Pinker’s talk at Town Hall Seattle this evening explored three ideas:

• How language reveals our sense of “folk-physics”
• How swearing helps us understand emotions
• How innuendo explains the way we construct relationships

These and other themes are from his new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. In his persuasive analysis of the forms and role of swearing, Pinker used five of George Carlin’s Seven Words with a frequency and academic precision which had the (standing room only) audience rolling in the aisles. If this book tour brings him to your home town, do go along and see him – unless you’re easily offended, of course.
And on Thursday we have James Watson at the Pacific Science Center.

David Chalmers just posted a round-up of recent books on consciousness. To my great annoyance, it looks like a wonderful list of must-read books. ((Fortunately I already have a couple of them, including the Galen Strawson article and rebuttals. See, I’m already saving money!)) Time to check my book-buying budget. One volume in particular stands out:

Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Brian McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen.  This consists of ten pairs of articles, taking each side of central topics in the philosophy of mind: e.g. Tye vs Shoemaker on representationalism, Jackson vs McLaughlin on a priori physicalism, Kim vs Loewer on mental causation, Fodor vs Heck on nonconceptual content, Segal vs Sawyer on narrow content, Prinz vs Peacocke on nonperceptual consciousness, and so on.

I’m a sucker for this kind of quasi-debate format. Think of There’s Something About Mary, or Views Into The Chinese Room. Of course I’ve already pre-ordered Chalmers’ The Character of Consciousness ((h/t to oz)) – a little something to look forward to next March…