Category: Books

My son Chris and his wife Celeste are visiting, and yesterday evening we all went out to dinner at Lucy’s. After the meal, we walked across Coolidge Corner to the Brookline Booksmiths, our favourite local independent bookshop. I’m not sure why, but I picked up a new book by an author I didn’t recognize: The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe. Although it focusses on Blair’s Britain in the period 1999-2003, the story begins a generation before that: it follows the lives of the characters in Coe’s earlier The Rotters’ Club. That book was about a group of teenagers in Birmingham, growing up in the strange world of the 1970’s – Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, strikes, IRA bombings, platform shoes, punk, and so much more. OK, now I was hooked. Clutching The Closed Circle firmly, I headed to the back of the store to find a copy of The Rotters’ Club.

When we got home, I settled down to read The Rotters’ Club. As the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer put it: “A thrillingly traitorous work. It hums along for a hundred pages of wise comedy about teenage love’s mortifications, then cold cocks us with an honest surprise as cruel as it is earned.” And I was hooked. After the “surprise”, I put the book down, stunned, and went to bed. This morning I picked it up immediately after breakfast and read the next 300 pages without a break. It was one of those rare stories with which one has no choice in the matter; I felt as if I was being swept down a turbulent river, clinging onto a branch for support, and then finally being deposited on the bank, breathless. The last 32 pages are a stream of consciousness that is at once urgent and timeless.

Having finished, I did two things. First, I ordered an audio CD edition of the book for my mother in England; even though she is blind, I couldn’t let her escape this tour de force of a story. And I went out to buy the necessary supplies to prepare enough gin and tonic to fortify me for the next chapter in the lives of these characters….

Someone has scanned in all the pages of the 1971 and 1979 editions of the Ladybird book How It Works…The Computer. This is wonderful stuff. I remember using the 1971 edition to explain to relatives (elderly, young, and just plain confused) what it was that I did for a living; I also bought the 1979 edition for my son, Chris, who was five at the time (and a voracious reader). Both pictures and text are priceless.

(Via Boing-Boing.)

Hands up if you’ve ever thought of this plot for a science fiction story:

You discover an ancient device, frozen in a glacier, or embedded in fossils, or whatever. You’re amazed to find that despite its age it seems to be mostly in working order, and shows evidence of having present-day components. It must be a time machine of some kind. You repair it. Eventually you inadvertently activate it, and find yourself, with the device, back in the Pleistocene. You realize that the bones found with the device were yours….

I’m sure that I’m not the only person who read H. G. Wells, extrapolated along the lines that I just indicated, and had a chuckle about the paradoxical implications. Where did the machine come from? Could the contemporary scientist choose not to take the action that causes the machine to operate? What are the precise scientific objections to the sequence (loop?) of events? And maybe there’s a short story to be written about it.

This little speculation is the starting point for John Varley’s new book Mammoth. He adds several twists, which I’ll leave you to discover, but the basic plot is as I’ve described it. To flesh out the short story into a full length novel, Varley has used this tale as a vehicle for satire: satire of corporate capitalism, of entertainment-driven culture, of people’s willingness to be manipulated. Along the way he makes a stab at the scientific and philosophical issues of time travel and causality, but – like the culture that he is satirizing – such reflective moments are swept away by the impulse to action, preferably accompanied by special effects.

The self-causing time machine is still a good idea for a short story, preferably without the Hollywood treatment. Varley has shown us that he is one of the best writers of short science fiction working today. Unfortunately this one got away from him, like a runaway mammoth.

Mammoth. Varley is one of those writers that I’ll buy sight unseen.

Last year a friend recommended a “curious book” to me: Radiant Cool by Dan Lloyd. I started it back in December, but I couldn’t get into it and set it aside. Last week I came across it and finished it in a couple of sessions. C’est la vie.

It’s an odd book. The first two-thirds are a novel: a thriller/mystery involving a philosophy grad student, theories of consciousness, experimental stimulation of various cortical areas, overdoses of SSRIs, and a hyperfictional element which eventually engulfs the characters and the story. Some bits worked, some bits didn’t, and overall I was a bit frustrated.

Then there’s the last third of the book: the appendix. In this, Lloyd (professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, CT) expounds a theory (or at least a programme) of consciousness which has two primary strands: a recursive retention (and hence representation) model derived from Husserl, and a view of the distinctive role played by the representation of time. Now this fascinated me. Early in my Phil.of Mind course with Dennett, I asked several people about exactly this issue – what is the state of thinking on the philosophy of time, and its relationship to the mind. I was pointed at the work of Bas Van Frassen as representing perhaps the best view of the philosophy of time as it applies to science, but I found no satisfactory account of time in mind. Maybe Jerry Fodor can explain how temporal notions are handled in a LOT, but I’m still waiting.

Does Lloyd nail it? No, but that’s just fine: he’s asking the same questions that I’m interested in. I note that David Chalmers has published a piece on Phenomenal Concepts and the Explanatory Gap; it will be interesting to compare his attempted rebuttal of a phenomenal account of consciousness with Lloyd’s ideas. Anyway, the book is RECOMMENDED, mostly for the appendix.

I just finished Aaron Glantz’s How America Lost Iraq. Essential reading. Like many others, including Glantz’s editors at Pacifica, I opposed the war. What Glantz’s account suggests is that – contrary to my prejudices – the U.S. actually had a chance to win the peace. They squandered the opportunity, and then came Fallujah…. What a stupid, incompetent, callous waste.
From Publisher’s Weekly: The failure of the American adventure in Iraq is all the more tragic for its promising beginnings, according to this engrossing memoir of the occupation and insurgency. Glantz, a correspondent for the progressive Pacifica radio network, arrived in Iraq immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Against his editors’ expectations, he discovered that, although tried by the chaos and lack of basic services, most Iraqis applauded the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Returning in 2004, he found that goodwill squandered, as Iraqis grew increasingly angry at the continuing absence of electricity and clean water, high unemployment, anarchy in the streets and mass imprisonment of innocent people by American soldiers who couldn’t tell insurgents from civilians. With the brutal sieges of Fallujah and Najaf in April 2004, Glantz contends, the transformation of the United States in the eyes of Iraqis from liberator to oppressor was complete.

Herewith an almost complete list of the books in the philosophy of mind section of my collection:

Continue reading “Phil. of mind books”

During my recent Philosophy of Mind course I acquired a number of fascinating books in the field. In a couple of cases I read the book immediately from cover to cover; for most, I merely dipped into the book when I bought it, promising myself that I’d return to read it properly when time permitted. Well, time now permits, and I’ve had a wonderful time over the last week reading John Perry’s Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness.
Obviously the most important thing about the book is the argument: a careful and detailed account of a stance, which Perry dubs antecedent physicalism, that addresses the recent neo-dualist arguments such as Chalmers’ zombies, Kripke’s modal C-fibers, and Jackson’s Mary. Now these are targets that many philosophers have been taking aim at over recent years; what makes this book so delightful is the elegance and economy with which Perry mounts his particular attack. I found his treatment of knowledge as including both subject matter content and reflexive content more satisfactory than, for example, the idea of distinguishing between “know that” and “know how”. The way that he adapted the “centered worlds” argument (which I think originated with Chalmers) has caused me to re-evaluate my attitude towards issues of possibility and conceivability: I think that centering worlds (by agent and time… but what else?) makes some kinds of modal argument much more plausible. (But conceivability still feels like a very slippery notion.)
The thing that really sets this book apart, however, is the quality of the writing: simple, clear, and direct. Perry avoids both over-cautious pedantry and hyperbole. So far I have encountered relatively few philosophers that can achieve this clarity: Christopher Hill and Fred Dretske come to mind.
Highly recommended.

While visiting the Museum of Fine Arts on Saturday, I picked up a Taschen book called Japanese Graphics Now. A big, handsome coffee-table tome (600 pages, around $40) covering all aspects of contemporary Japanese graphic design. And the piece de resistance: “We’ve also thrown a DVD into the package, on which you’ll find a video tour of the coolest places to visit in Tokyo, interviews with art directors, filmmakers, and designers, and the latest and greatest television commercials from Japan.”

(The Suntory “cherubim” commercials are delightfully bizarre, as is the one for WOWOW. As for the video tour of Tokyo, it brought back so many memories for me…..)

One thing that Doug Hofstadter mentioned in his lecture yesterday was that many conventional ideas about physicalism – strict supervenience, law-like causality between the “levels” – are likely to be plain wrong: it seems likely that higher-level systems can be remarkably insensitive to changes in their physical underpinnings. So even though it is true that minds are implemented in brains, and brains are biological structures composed of cells and molecules and atoms which obey the laws of physics, that doesn’t mean that one can (or should) look for law-like relations between mental properties and microphysical properties.¹ Of course functionalists don’t have any problem with this. The objections seem to come, on the one hand, from philosophers like David Chalmers who see this gap as a reason to toss physicalism overboard, and on the other hand from neuroscientists like Christof Koch who expect to be able to build their house of neurobiological cards all the way up to the top.

While on this subject, Hofstadter recommended a new book by the Nobel physicist Robert Laughlin, A Different Universe – reinventing physics from the bottom down. I picked up a copy this lunchtime. From the fly-leaf:

The edges of science, we’re told, lie in the first nanofraction of a second of the Universe’s existence, or else in realms so small that they can’t be glimpsed even by the most sophisticated experimental techniques. But we haven’t reached the end of science, Laughlin argues-only the end of reductionist thinking. If we consider the world of emergent properties instead, suddenly the deepest mysteries are as close as the nearest ice cube or grain of salt. And he goes farther: the most fundamental laws of physics – such as Newton’s laws of motion and quantum mechanics – are in fact emergent. They are properties of large assemblages of matter, and when their exactness is examined too closely, it vanishes into nothing.

I suspect that this book may turn out to be more provocative than rigorous, but that’s OK.

[UPDATE: I’ve now read the first 6 chapters of the book. It’s WONDERFUL!!! Thought-provoking, mind-bending, funny, profound…. I’ll post a full review in a few days.]

¹ If this sounds poorly worded, blame me – this is my interpretation, not Douglas’s exact words.