There has been a flurry of biographies in recent years about Baruch Spinoza. Among them: Spinoza, A Life by Steven Nadler ; Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind by Steven Nadler ; A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age by Steven Nadler ; Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity by Rebecca Goldstein; Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity: 1650-1750 by Jonathan Israel; The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart; Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio
Each of these volumes is commendable to the reader interested in the man whom Albert Einstein called "The greatest of modern philosophers." And to read the written word of Baruch Spinoza himself, there is the relatively recent edition of Spinoza's Complete Works translated by Samuel Shirley.
When Benjamin DeCasseres wrote Spinoza: Liberator of God and Man, he cites only John Colerus' The Life of Benedict Spinoza (1705) and a unnamed volume authored by John Maximilian Lucas published in 1719 as his sources on the life of Baruch Spinoza. As the list of books above demonstrates, the late 20th and now the 21st centuries are increasing their attention to Spinoza.
DeCasseres' small book is not a biography, but it is what The Washington Post obituary writers would call "an appreciation." It is an appreciation of the philosophical foundations of the thinking of Baruch Spinoza: mystical pantheism born of the mind of Plotinus; Epicurus' pursuit of happiness and avoidance of anxiety; and Giordanno Bruno's pantheism. It is also an appreciation of how Spinoza's writings have influenced modern thinking.
An important aspect of Spinoza's thinking is his rejection of anthropotheism. DeCasseres, however, has a very different take on anthropomorphism or anthropotheism than Spinoza's works describe. "The evolution of the idea of God is an anthropomorphic evolution," DeCasseres writes. "It has grown and expanded with the growth and expansion of the consciousness of certain individual men. God is always, and will always be, a 'personal' God, for he is always generated in a unique and individual sensibility. He is the reflection of a man's consciousness. But God's liberation proceeds just in the minds of thinkers. When the greatest degree of universalization of the idea of God is reached, as it was in the brain of Spinoza, the personality of the universalizer becomes one with the universal generalization of all the shackles of relation melt in the Absolute, and the All and any one of its infinitesimally small modes of relative and fugacious existences become one, as in the case of Spinoza. Hence the consciousness of Spinoza and God become interchangeable."
"God in Spinoza is still anthropomorphic and Panmorphic because the mathematical reasoning which Spinoza used to reach him is man-form and has no reality that we know of outside of man's brain; because the peculiar mystical intuitions of Spinoza which urged him to use this process are man-form, and because the internal and external universes with which he identified God are man-form.
"God is, then, still a prisoner, even in Spinoza, of the human reason, of mystical intuition and of the phenomenal universe. And his liberation by Spinoza consists in this: that within the limits of the imaginative Absolute, the imaginative Eternity and Infinity and the imaginative intuitions of Spinoza's consciousness God ceases to be bound by any relation, special attribute, special law or special incarnation. What was Spirit became flesh, say the incarnationists. But Spinoza says, What was flesh now becomes Spirit, and other than Spirit nothing is or can be. Therefore I am --- and you are --- God."
This is poetic hogwash. [God] cannot be a prisoner and at the same time be liberated, and it was not so "even in Spinoza." DeCasseres treats every creation of human imagination as "anthropomorphic." For Spinoza, god was not the creation of human imagination; it was something (all of Nature) the human mind came to understand through reason. By DeCasseres' definition, the Big Bang is anthropomorphic as is quantum mechanics simply because it is the creation of the human imagination. DeCasseres is wrong about god as "prisoner"; DeCasseres is correct that Spinoza did liberate "god" from its anthropomorphic tether. Spinoza did imagine Eternity and Infinity, without special attribute or special incarnation, and he imagined the entire physical universe and everything within that universe, and he imagined it without limit in time and without limit in space, and he called it god. What is anthropomorphic is something with special attributes (mode and extension in Spinoza's parlance), and by acknowledging this much, DeCasseres is inconsistent in saying Spinoza's god "without special attribute or special incarnation" was anthropomorphic.
Spinoza's god does not choose between good and evil; Spinoza's god does not love or hate; Spinoza's god does not cause miracles to happen; Spinoza's god does not hear prayers or respond to them; Spinoza's god does not bring things into being because something that is "absolute" and infinite [meaning that it represents everything] does not create itself. On this last point, it is logical to be sure, but I have to part company with Spinoza, not because of his pantheism or because of his objection to anthropotheism, or because of his objection to a Creator, but because nature is constantly creating and bringing things into being. At some point, a physical system (even a system of nature called "god") --- such as Spinoza's system (see March 6, 2012 post) --- has to address the fact that "things" in that system are brought into being that did not previously exist, at least in the same form they previously did. While I can agree with Spinoza that an anthropomorphic god did not "create" man, evolution as we know it is a fact of nature and the human species certainly was created by evolutionary forces. If "god" represents everything in nature, than god certainly represents evolutionary creation and bringing things into being. That is the "logic" of Spinoza's system, in my view.
Spinoza had enormous influence on Enlightenment discussion of a deity. His was not the only view that varied from anthropocentric Christian, Jewish, and Muslim visions of god. (See May 24, 2010 post). But however we may agree that, in Spinoza's system, god is untethered from its anthropcentric chains, most humans today still believe in an anthropocentric deity who hates, kills, loves, creates, discriminates, is petty, responds to human pleas, and has a wide variety of other human features. (See December 20, 2011 post and May 12, 2010 post and June 12, 2011 post).
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Bill O'Reilly, Killing Lincoln (2011)
Was Abraham Lincoln the 19th century equivalent of Jesus Christ (nee Yeshua, English name Joshua)? Or was he the 19th century equivalent of Julius Caesar? Bill O'Reilly seems to believe he is one or the other, or perhaps both. Like Jesus, Lincoln was well-read in the scriptures and had a premonition of his death. The biblical story of the death of Jesus, however, reads more like an assisted suicide. (See September 9, 2010 post). A lingering question over Lincoln's death is whether the President and some in his inner circle were negligent in failing to make a more robust effort to protect the President given that there were both intelligence and rumors indicating that persons might try to take his life. Lincoln did not have death wish. As O'Reilly points out, the President was turning his attention to the reunification of the States now that the war was over and a man with that objective would not have had a death wish.
Others have attempted to draw parallels between Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln, but the only meaningful similarities are that both were leaders and both were assasinated at approximately 56 years of age. The more interesting angle, which is not lost on O'Reilly, is Lincoln's interest in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and the fact that Mary Lincoln bought her husband a copy of the Shakespeare play shortly before he was killed. Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, had acted in the Shakespeare play, the only play in which he performed with both of his brothers.
In the epilogue, O'Reilly concludes, "Just as the story of Julius Caesar has been told and retold for centuries, the tragedy that befell Lincoln should be known by every American. His life and death continue to shape us as a people, even today. America is a great country, but like every other nation on earth it is influenced by evil. John Wilkes Booth epitomizes the evil that can harm us, even as President Abraham Lincoln represents the good that can make us stronger." Here, O'Reilly uses the word tragedy to refer to an event. In contrast, Shakespearean tragedy, such as Julius Caesar, is not an event, but a story-form , in which (typically) the protagonist represents an admirable, but nevertheless flawed character, who suffers a fall. Most would probably concede that the death of Julius Caesar was not a tragedy: a dicator was overthrown in the name of the people of Rome. And the admirable but flawed character of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar who meets his demise, is not Caesar, but one of Caesar's assassins, Brutus. While Lincoln's interest in the story of Julius Caesar makes for an interesting coincidence, the parallels between Lincoln's death and Julius Caesar are limited. Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is not an admirable but flawed character. As O'Reilly acknowledges, Booth was undoubtedly flawed by his false sense of self-importance, but he was not admirable: he was evil.
O'Reilly calls his book a "thriller," and it is certainly written as a page-turner. Despite a number of minor factual errors, O'Reilly's book is documented history. It is not historical fiction. This book therefore demonstrates that even historical research, if all of its purported facts are uncritically accepted, might have the power to shape belief in an uninformed way. While this outcome is unlikely with respect to beliefs about the good represented by Abraham Lincoln or the evil represented by his assassin, Booth, it could misinform the public about how Mary Surratt was treated (p.278) while she awaited her fate.
The "tragedy" in the story of Lincoln's death, if you want to call it that, lies in the unfinished business of reconciling the war-torn nation. Six weeks before his death and five weeks before the end of the Civil War, Lincoln sets out his vision for a post-Civil War America in his second inaugural address: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." Would the Reconstruction have been any different had Lincoln lived to fill out his second term? Would a subsequent Supreme Court have tolerated Jim Crow? And would we have experienced the level of racial lynchings across the southern states that ensued in the decades after the Civil War was over? (See December 16, 2010 post). We will never know, but if Booth's murderous act had consequences, these are the kind of consequences that were possibly put into motion by his act.
Others have attempted to draw parallels between Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln, but the only meaningful similarities are that both were leaders and both were assasinated at approximately 56 years of age. The more interesting angle, which is not lost on O'Reilly, is Lincoln's interest in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and the fact that Mary Lincoln bought her husband a copy of the Shakespeare play shortly before he was killed. Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, had acted in the Shakespeare play, the only play in which he performed with both of his brothers.
In the epilogue, O'Reilly concludes, "Just as the story of Julius Caesar has been told and retold for centuries, the tragedy that befell Lincoln should be known by every American. His life and death continue to shape us as a people, even today. America is a great country, but like every other nation on earth it is influenced by evil. John Wilkes Booth epitomizes the evil that can harm us, even as President Abraham Lincoln represents the good that can make us stronger." Here, O'Reilly uses the word tragedy to refer to an event. In contrast, Shakespearean tragedy, such as Julius Caesar, is not an event, but a story-form , in which (typically) the protagonist represents an admirable, but nevertheless flawed character, who suffers a fall. Most would probably concede that the death of Julius Caesar was not a tragedy: a dicator was overthrown in the name of the people of Rome. And the admirable but flawed character of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar who meets his demise, is not Caesar, but one of Caesar's assassins, Brutus. While Lincoln's interest in the story of Julius Caesar makes for an interesting coincidence, the parallels between Lincoln's death and Julius Caesar are limited. Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is not an admirable but flawed character. As O'Reilly acknowledges, Booth was undoubtedly flawed by his false sense of self-importance, but he was not admirable: he was evil.
O'Reilly calls his book a "thriller," and it is certainly written as a page-turner. Despite a number of minor factual errors, O'Reilly's book is documented history. It is not historical fiction. This book therefore demonstrates that even historical research, if all of its purported facts are uncritically accepted, might have the power to shape belief in an uninformed way. While this outcome is unlikely with respect to beliefs about the good represented by Abraham Lincoln or the evil represented by his assassin, Booth, it could misinform the public about how Mary Surratt was treated (p.278) while she awaited her fate.
The "tragedy" in the story of Lincoln's death, if you want to call it that, lies in the unfinished business of reconciling the war-torn nation. Six weeks before his death and five weeks before the end of the Civil War, Lincoln sets out his vision for a post-Civil War America in his second inaugural address: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." Would the Reconstruction have been any different had Lincoln lived to fill out his second term? Would a subsequent Supreme Court have tolerated Jim Crow? And would we have experienced the level of racial lynchings across the southern states that ensued in the decades after the Civil War was over? (See December 16, 2010 post). We will never know, but if Booth's murderous act had consequences, these are the kind of consequences that were possibly put into motion by his act.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Baruch Spinoza, The Emendation of the Intellect (1660)
The life and works Baruch Spinoza have fascinated me since I was a teenager. A teacher who took an interest in my intellectual development assigned me a series of books to read, including Spinoza's Ethics. It was at that time I learned a little bit about Spinoza's life, including his excommunication from the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. As for his work, Ethics, I was admittedly too young to appreciate fully what he had written. I did understand that he believed that through reason and scientific inquiry one could come to know nature (which Spinoza referred to as "god"). I also comprehended a monism that was systematically complete, avoiding theological inconsistencies that had plagued monotheism from its Hebrew foundations.
As one reads Ethics, it is difficult to fathom why his excommunication for heresy by Amsterdam's Jewish community was so harsh. While Spinoza's god is not the same as Yaweh of the Hebrews, Spinoza seems reverent and respectful enough to be considered "religious" in his own way. So what could Spinoza have done to offend the leaders of the Jewish community of mid-17th century Amsterdam to warrant excommunicating him from their community forever and ordering its members to have no communication with him or read any of his writings?
Steven Nadler has shed some light on the mystery of Spinoza's excommunication and banishment in his book, Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind and his earlier book, Spinoza, A Life. The curses uttered against him were as vague as they were vicious, and yet his later writings exhibit a reverence of the infinite that is seldom heard or seen. Nadler deduces that the offense leading to Spinoza's expulsion from the Jewish community was his refusal to anthropomorphize the deity and recognize one's soul as having eternal life.
Whether Nadler is correct, or whether there was a wider offense will never be known. There are some who suggest that he had drawn the attention of Amsterdam's civic leaders, who leaned on Jewish community leaders to control Spinoza's religous and philosophical discussions among the gentile community. According to his biographers, Spinoza did not believe in the literalness of the Scriptures and he was less than observant. The bible, Spinoza believed, was written by men, not god. Spinoza was skeptical that the rabbinate had special knowledge of of the Torah, and disagreed with their interpretations of the Torah. Spinoza also found contradictions in the Scriptures treatment of Judaism's anthropomorphic god: reminiscent of Jose Saramago's god in Cain (see December 20, 2011 post), in a monotheistic world controlled and determined by one god, what room was there for the devil? For sure the monotheistic god had to be responsible for both good and evil. God could not be infinite if it was only responsible for the good. Spinoza was also known to mingle and engage in intellectual studies and discussions with gentiles, some of whom were described by Dutch Calvinist leaders as atheists.
I will soon be attending a play entitled The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656 by David Ives. In anticipation of this theatrical event, my curiosity was piqued as to whether anything in Spinoza's first writing following his expulsion from Amsterdam's Jewish community might reveal his beliefs that apparently led to his condemnation. The Emendation of the Intellect is an unfinished work, only 30 pages long, and was not published during his life, but it does reveal some of his early critical thoughts. Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at age 23. Two years later, he began writing The Emendation of the Intellect.
Spinoza opens The Emendation of the Intellect with the line, "After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life, and I realized that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else, whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity." Freedom from anxiety is an Epicurean value, and biographers believe that Spinoza had been exposed to the philosophy of Epicurus. We can surmise that " Spinoza's "anxiety" includes the precarious financial position he finds himself in at the helm of his family's debt-laden trading business, which he and his brother Gabriel inherited from their father. Spinoza cites that "most men regard riches, honor, and sensual pleasure as the highest good, each of which can be viewed as by-products of the pursuit of commercial success, and Spinoza probably found little happiness in this endeavor. And while he is perhaps "trapped" in the family business, he is at the same time pursuing his intellectual interests, engaging with persons outside the Jewish community of Amsterdam, including Christian dissenters. In his intellectual pursuits, Spinoza "resolved" to discover whether there was a "a true good [that] could alone affect the mind . . and afford [him] a continuous joy to all eternity." This pursuit, he says, is the "highest happiness."
While lack of success and anxiety over risks in the commercial world may be a motivation to seek Epicurean peace of mind, Spinoza was also faced with a cognitive dissonance as his emerging intellectual beliefs became confrontational with his family and cultural community that had taught him much of what he knew in the first place. But Spinoza did not follow the traditional cognitive dissonance model that resolves the anxiety by living a lie or changing his beliefs to suit the majority. He pursued an independent course devoted to improving his intellect --- the subject of his first written (although unpublished) work. The Emendation of the Intellect is a precursor to his Ethics. The Emendation of the Intellect is not intended to explicate Spinoza's views on a deity. In The Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza refers to another planned work, which he calls his "philosophy." This is not Ethics. It is a reference to another unpublished work known as A Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, in which he begins to explain his views on god in writing.
We can find in The Emendation of the Intellect several references to Spinoza's views on the human soul, which Nadler says were critical to the harshness of Spinoza's excommunication. For example, "When we clearly perceive that we sense such-and-such a body and no other . . . we clearly infer that the soul is united to the body." Later, "from the fact that I know the essence of the soul, I know that it is united to the body." For Spinoza, the "soul" is a reference to the "mind." And when he says that the soul is united to the body, he means that the mind is united to the brain. Ideas in the mind "correspond to the specific reality of its object [in nature]. This is identical to the saying of the ancients that true science proceeds from cause to effect, except that, as far as I know, they never conceived the soul, as we are here doing, as acting according to fixed laws, a sort of spiritual automaton." Clearly, at this early age of his intellectual life, Spinoza, in contrast to Descartes, did not accept the idea that the soul was separate from the body. He was not a dualist. When a person dies; his/her soul dies.
We find in this small pamphlet, an early Enlightenment rationalist trying to conquer skepticism. (See January 21, 2011 post). And to conquer skepticism in the pursuit of a "true good," he describes a "method" that demands to know "what are the circumstances with which the fictitious, the false, and the doubtful perception are concerned, and how we may be delivered from each of them." Spinoza seeks to confront superstition. What prevents us from having clear and distinct ideas about something and its attributes is confusion --- which causes us to have only partial knowledge of a complete whole or unity composed of many constituents -- failing to distinguish between the known and the unknown, and also attending at the same time without any distinction to the many constituents containing in a single thing. And the source of confusion is fictitious ideas. "The less men know of Nature, the more easily they can fashion numerous fictitious ideas, as that trees speak, that men can change instantaneously into stones or springs, that ghosts appear in mirrors, that something can come from nothing, even that gods can change into beasts or men, and any number of such fantasies." Part of the source of confusion and fictitious ideas arises from when we think of things in an abstract way --- abstraction. "The origin of Nature can neither be conceived in an abstract or universal way." Another source of confusion and fictitious ideas is failure to doubt [question critically], which arises from our "failure to reflect upon the deceptiveness of the senses." Spinoza believes, "if, after being in doubt, a man acquires true knowledge of the senses and of the manner whereby through their means distant things are represented, then the doubt is in turn removed." Finally, the limits of our memory (forgetting), unstrengthened by the intellect, is another source of confusion and fiction. Abstraction, failure to doubt, and forgetful memory give rise to imagination, "arising not from the power of the mind but from external causes, in accordance as the body, dreaming or waking, receives various motions."
Several of the postings in this blog have referred to the role of memory, imagination, and the fictitious. (See May 22, 2011 post; June 28, 2011 post; June 12, 2011 post; December 20, 2011 post). Unlike Spinoza, I don't believe that our capacity for fiction and fantasy is necessarily or absolutely detrimental to our ability to appreciate the good. Our capacity for creative arts and fiction have some relationship to our evolutionary success, and while fiction that amounts to self-deceit is not typically positive, it can be viewed in an evolutionary context. (See February 4, 2012 post). But certainly, human imagination has been critical to advance our knowledge of the physical world. (See July 30, 2011 post). Effective fiction may also help us understand our biases and transform the way we see the world, and all for the good. Similarly, we have seen that our capacity for abstraction is probably a key to our evolutionary success. (See October 25, 2011 post and June 12, 2011 post). One wonders what Spinoza would think of John Searle's "modern era of philosophy" infused with a huge body of knowledge, not known to the Enlightenment philosophers, that Searle says is "certain, objective, and universal." (See January 21, 2011 post). Yet at the same time, widespread belief in religious fictions that Spinoza found so troubling in the mid-17th century still permeate social discourse and obscure knowledge of truth (see June 12, 2011 post and February 4, 2012 post): would Spinoza think humanity has made much progress toward "something whose discovery and acquisition would afford [him/us] a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity" because we have now accumulated a larger body of knowledge about life and nature that is certain, objective, and universal? Spinoza, his biographers would argue, and I would agree, still has enormous relevance to the 21st century.
What I found most impressive him about his life is his independence of mind. While strong divisions among nations and and divisions among segments of a society during the mid-17th centure were attributable to slavish acceptance of group norms, our body politic in 21st century United States is likewise extremely divided among those subscribing to different group beliefs. The extent to which "reason" prevails in public disourse, as opposed to bias, emotion, and/or intuition has probably changed only modestly since the mid-17th century. Solutions are seldom sought behind the veil of ignorance that I described in a previous post with a view toward adopting an impartial lens toward justice, the public good, and nature (see January 11, 2011 post).
As one reads Ethics, it is difficult to fathom why his excommunication for heresy by Amsterdam's Jewish community was so harsh. While Spinoza's god is not the same as Yaweh of the Hebrews, Spinoza seems reverent and respectful enough to be considered "religious" in his own way. So what could Spinoza have done to offend the leaders of the Jewish community of mid-17th century Amsterdam to warrant excommunicating him from their community forever and ordering its members to have no communication with him or read any of his writings?
Steven Nadler has shed some light on the mystery of Spinoza's excommunication and banishment in his book, Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind and his earlier book, Spinoza, A Life. The curses uttered against him were as vague as they were vicious, and yet his later writings exhibit a reverence of the infinite that is seldom heard or seen. Nadler deduces that the offense leading to Spinoza's expulsion from the Jewish community was his refusal to anthropomorphize the deity and recognize one's soul as having eternal life.
Whether Nadler is correct, or whether there was a wider offense will never be known. There are some who suggest that he had drawn the attention of Amsterdam's civic leaders, who leaned on Jewish community leaders to control Spinoza's religous and philosophical discussions among the gentile community. According to his biographers, Spinoza did not believe in the literalness of the Scriptures and he was less than observant. The bible, Spinoza believed, was written by men, not god. Spinoza was skeptical that the rabbinate had special knowledge of of the Torah, and disagreed with their interpretations of the Torah. Spinoza also found contradictions in the Scriptures treatment of Judaism's anthropomorphic god: reminiscent of Jose Saramago's god in Cain (see December 20, 2011 post), in a monotheistic world controlled and determined by one god, what room was there for the devil? For sure the monotheistic god had to be responsible for both good and evil. God could not be infinite if it was only responsible for the good. Spinoza was also known to mingle and engage in intellectual studies and discussions with gentiles, some of whom were described by Dutch Calvinist leaders as atheists.
I will soon be attending a play entitled The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656 by David Ives. In anticipation of this theatrical event, my curiosity was piqued as to whether anything in Spinoza's first writing following his expulsion from Amsterdam's Jewish community might reveal his beliefs that apparently led to his condemnation. The Emendation of the Intellect is an unfinished work, only 30 pages long, and was not published during his life, but it does reveal some of his early critical thoughts. Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at age 23. Two years later, he began writing The Emendation of the Intellect.
Spinoza opens The Emendation of the Intellect with the line, "After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life, and I realized that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else, whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity." Freedom from anxiety is an Epicurean value, and biographers believe that Spinoza had been exposed to the philosophy of Epicurus. We can surmise that " Spinoza's "anxiety" includes the precarious financial position he finds himself in at the helm of his family's debt-laden trading business, which he and his brother Gabriel inherited from their father. Spinoza cites that "most men regard riches, honor, and sensual pleasure as the highest good, each of which can be viewed as by-products of the pursuit of commercial success, and Spinoza probably found little happiness in this endeavor. And while he is perhaps "trapped" in the family business, he is at the same time pursuing his intellectual interests, engaging with persons outside the Jewish community of Amsterdam, including Christian dissenters. In his intellectual pursuits, Spinoza "resolved" to discover whether there was a "a true good [that] could alone affect the mind . . and afford [him] a continuous joy to all eternity." This pursuit, he says, is the "highest happiness."
While lack of success and anxiety over risks in the commercial world may be a motivation to seek Epicurean peace of mind, Spinoza was also faced with a cognitive dissonance as his emerging intellectual beliefs became confrontational with his family and cultural community that had taught him much of what he knew in the first place. But Spinoza did not follow the traditional cognitive dissonance model that resolves the anxiety by living a lie or changing his beliefs to suit the majority. He pursued an independent course devoted to improving his intellect --- the subject of his first written (although unpublished) work. The Emendation of the Intellect is a precursor to his Ethics. The Emendation of the Intellect is not intended to explicate Spinoza's views on a deity. In The Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza refers to another planned work, which he calls his "philosophy." This is not Ethics. It is a reference to another unpublished work known as A Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, in which he begins to explain his views on god in writing.
We can find in The Emendation of the Intellect several references to Spinoza's views on the human soul, which Nadler says were critical to the harshness of Spinoza's excommunication. For example, "When we clearly perceive that we sense such-and-such a body and no other . . . we clearly infer that the soul is united to the body." Later, "from the fact that I know the essence of the soul, I know that it is united to the body." For Spinoza, the "soul" is a reference to the "mind." And when he says that the soul is united to the body, he means that the mind is united to the brain. Ideas in the mind "correspond to the specific reality of its object [in nature]. This is identical to the saying of the ancients that true science proceeds from cause to effect, except that, as far as I know, they never conceived the soul, as we are here doing, as acting according to fixed laws, a sort of spiritual automaton." Clearly, at this early age of his intellectual life, Spinoza, in contrast to Descartes, did not accept the idea that the soul was separate from the body. He was not a dualist. When a person dies; his/her soul dies.
We find in this small pamphlet, an early Enlightenment rationalist trying to conquer skepticism. (See January 21, 2011 post). And to conquer skepticism in the pursuit of a "true good," he describes a "method" that demands to know "what are the circumstances with which the fictitious, the false, and the doubtful perception are concerned, and how we may be delivered from each of them." Spinoza seeks to confront superstition. What prevents us from having clear and distinct ideas about something and its attributes is confusion --- which causes us to have only partial knowledge of a complete whole or unity composed of many constituents -- failing to distinguish between the known and the unknown, and also attending at the same time without any distinction to the many constituents containing in a single thing. And the source of confusion is fictitious ideas. "The less men know of Nature, the more easily they can fashion numerous fictitious ideas, as that trees speak, that men can change instantaneously into stones or springs, that ghosts appear in mirrors, that something can come from nothing, even that gods can change into beasts or men, and any number of such fantasies." Part of the source of confusion and fictitious ideas arises from when we think of things in an abstract way --- abstraction. "The origin of Nature can neither be conceived in an abstract or universal way." Another source of confusion and fictitious ideas is failure to doubt [question critically], which arises from our "failure to reflect upon the deceptiveness of the senses." Spinoza believes, "if, after being in doubt, a man acquires true knowledge of the senses and of the manner whereby through their means distant things are represented, then the doubt is in turn removed." Finally, the limits of our memory (forgetting), unstrengthened by the intellect, is another source of confusion and fiction. Abstraction, failure to doubt, and forgetful memory give rise to imagination, "arising not from the power of the mind but from external causes, in accordance as the body, dreaming or waking, receives various motions."
Several of the postings in this blog have referred to the role of memory, imagination, and the fictitious. (See May 22, 2011 post; June 28, 2011 post; June 12, 2011 post; December 20, 2011 post). Unlike Spinoza, I don't believe that our capacity for fiction and fantasy is necessarily or absolutely detrimental to our ability to appreciate the good. Our capacity for creative arts and fiction have some relationship to our evolutionary success, and while fiction that amounts to self-deceit is not typically positive, it can be viewed in an evolutionary context. (See February 4, 2012 post). But certainly, human imagination has been critical to advance our knowledge of the physical world. (See July 30, 2011 post). Effective fiction may also help us understand our biases and transform the way we see the world, and all for the good. Similarly, we have seen that our capacity for abstraction is probably a key to our evolutionary success. (See October 25, 2011 post and June 12, 2011 post). One wonders what Spinoza would think of John Searle's "modern era of philosophy" infused with a huge body of knowledge, not known to the Enlightenment philosophers, that Searle says is "certain, objective, and universal." (See January 21, 2011 post). Yet at the same time, widespread belief in religious fictions that Spinoza found so troubling in the mid-17th century still permeate social discourse and obscure knowledge of truth (see June 12, 2011 post and February 4, 2012 post): would Spinoza think humanity has made much progress toward "something whose discovery and acquisition would afford [him/us] a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity" because we have now accumulated a larger body of knowledge about life and nature that is certain, objective, and universal? Spinoza, his biographers would argue, and I would agree, still has enormous relevance to the 21st century.
What I found most impressive him about his life is his independence of mind. While strong divisions among nations and and divisions among segments of a society during the mid-17th centure were attributable to slavish acceptance of group norms, our body politic in 21st century United States is likewise extremely divided among those subscribing to different group beliefs. The extent to which "reason" prevails in public disourse, as opposed to bias, emotion, and/or intuition has probably changed only modestly since the mid-17th century. Solutions are seldom sought behind the veil of ignorance that I described in a previous post with a view toward adopting an impartial lens toward justice, the public good, and nature (see January 11, 2011 post).
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Donella Meadows, Thinking In Systems (2008)
Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Dutch Jew and author of Ethics, was a systems thinker. Perhaps one of the greatest systems thinkers. Ethics is sometimes referred to as a "philosophical system," but it is that and more than that in describing a system. Spinoza is a material naturalist. He contemplates a deterministic system that incorporates the entire material world, and his name for that system is "god." While his contemporary detractors unfairly described him as an atheist, he was, in fact, a pantheist.
Professor Michael Morgan, the editor of Spinoza Complete Works, wrote this paragraph in his Introduction to the book:
"If the key that unlocked the secrets of possibility for us as human beings was unity and totality, the wholeness and order of all things, then the reality that grounded the aspiration to this unity and order was the fact that each of us, as natural objects and as human beings, was precisely located in that unity and order; each of our places was determined in every way, and we were thereby endowed with a very particular point of view on the whole. In a letter to Henry Oldenburg of November 1665, as he attempts to clarify the nature of parts and wholes, Spinoza provides us with a famous image. Each of us is, he tells us, like a little worm in the blood. Nature is like the entire circulatory system or like the entire organism, interacting with only a small part of it and experiencing only a very limited region. Even if we grasp the fact that there is a total system and understand its principles to some degree, our experience is so circumscribed and narrow that we are bound to make mistakes about our understanding of they system and our place in it. Myopia confines our understanding, no matter how we seek to overcome it. And we do. We aspire to experience every detail, every event, and every item as part of the whole, to see it from the perspective of the whole rather than from our own narrow point of view. Our success is limited; we can free ourselves and act in terms of the whole, but only within limits. Our goal is to free ourselves from the distortions and corruptions of our finitude, to become free, active, and rational. These are all the same, and are aspects of becoming like the whole, which is what the tradition dignifies with the title "God" or "divine" or "the Highest Good."
For Spinoza, as Professor Morgan writes, "reason in us was akin to reason in nature; one order permeated everything and enabled us, as rational beings to understand ourselves and the whole and to live peacefully and calmly within it. This was the key to science, to ethics, and to religion. It was the key to all of life. It was his goal to show, clarify, explain and teach it --- to the benefit of all humankind." Morgan's remarks about Spinoza could have formed a preface to Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems. My purpose in highlighting Professor Morgan's statement is that systems thinking is not new. It has been going on for centuries, and I doubt if Spinoza was the first systems thinker.
By the 1960s, systems thinking had become more widely adapted in academic curriculum, at least at the collegiate level. Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, is widely credited with introducing systems analysis to public policy during his tenure from 1961-1969. Systems analysis grew to become integrated in addressing engineering problems, business problems, communities, as well as looking at systems in nature (the environment). And it was during this time that Jay Forrester founded the System Dynamics group at MIT. Donella Meadows emerged from the System Dynamics group at MIT and began thinking about socio-ecological systems. Meadows' objective, as with Spinoza, was to "help us understand ourselves and the whole and to live peacefully and calmly within it."
"A system is not just any old collection of things," she writes. "A system is an interconnected set of elements ["people, cells, molecules, or whatever" she says elsewhere] that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose." These elements are "interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered or driven by outside forces. But the system's response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world." Systems can be simple, or they can be extremely complex. Spinoza's system, if you think about it, may be the most complex of all, because it attempts to contemplate all of physical nature as a system. At that level, one can only discuss a system in terms of grand generalities, as Spinoza does in Ethics.
I go back to the very first posting on this blog (see August 17, 2009 post) and the discussion of units of information as the most fundamental unit of physical nature. "Systems of information-feedback control are fundamental to all life and human endeavor, from the slow pace of biological evolution to the launching of the latest space satellite," Meadows quotes Jay Forrester from his book Industrial Dynamics. "Everything we do as individuals, as an industry or as a society is done in the context of an information-feedback system." The mechanism that provides that information-feedback is known as a "feedback loop," and it is regarded as responsible for creating consistent behavior within a system over time. A feedback loop is a mechanism that monitors the parameters of the system that triggers adjustments (which Meadows refers to as "resilience" or elasticity) and ensures stasis within parameters which, in many cases, ensures the survival of the system (human body, community, ecological niche) or continuation of functional purpose in the case of an engineered artifact or system of artifacts. Stasis and survival are not guaranteed; sometimes perturbations can overwhelm feedback systems resulting in the demise of the system.
This is reminiscent of Antonio Damasio's discussion of the brain's role in maintaining homeostasis in the body. "Life requires," Damasio wrote in Self Comes to Mind, "that the body maintain a collection of parameter ranges at all costs for literally dozens of components in its dynamic interior. All the management operations to which I alluded to earlier --- procuring energy sources, incorporating and transforming energy products, and so forth --- aim at maintaining the chemical parameters of a body's interior (its internal milieu) with the magic range compatible with life. The magic range is known as homeostatic, and the process of achieving this balanced state is known as homeostasis." (See April 8, 2011 post). Damasio is describing at least the human nervous system of which the brain is a part, but probably more than one system comprising a larger system that is the human organism.
Spinoza's system can only be explained in generalities because there is simply too much information in the universe for any intelligent body to comprehend. We are forced to acknowledge and live with a laissez-faire dynamical system for all of nature in the hopes that perturbations across nature are managed by nature's own information-feedback systems and stasis is achieved. We can try to control or engineer only the small subsystems we can touch in our remote corner of the universe (or multiverses). "People who are raised in the industrial world," writes Meadows, "and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely the mind-set of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control. . . . "Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never understand our world, not in the way our reductionist science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything. We can't find the proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror." We are also returning full circle to a previous discussion of "entropy" and the "thermodynamic condition." (See August 15, 2011 post).
Spinoza would be disappointed by Meadows' conclusion, but she is right. Our scientific method, our philosophy has largely abandoned deterministic systems; we think in terms of probabilities in order to manage uncertainty. (See July 30, 2011 post). This does not mean, Meadows says, that we should stop "doing" just because we can't control something or anticipate every surprise. But we can listen to what the system tells us and "discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone." And with this conclusion, Spinoza would have felt more comfortable.
Professor Michael Morgan, the editor of Spinoza Complete Works, wrote this paragraph in his Introduction to the book:
"If the key that unlocked the secrets of possibility for us as human beings was unity and totality, the wholeness and order of all things, then the reality that grounded the aspiration to this unity and order was the fact that each of us, as natural objects and as human beings, was precisely located in that unity and order; each of our places was determined in every way, and we were thereby endowed with a very particular point of view on the whole. In a letter to Henry Oldenburg of November 1665, as he attempts to clarify the nature of parts and wholes, Spinoza provides us with a famous image. Each of us is, he tells us, like a little worm in the blood. Nature is like the entire circulatory system or like the entire organism, interacting with only a small part of it and experiencing only a very limited region. Even if we grasp the fact that there is a total system and understand its principles to some degree, our experience is so circumscribed and narrow that we are bound to make mistakes about our understanding of they system and our place in it. Myopia confines our understanding, no matter how we seek to overcome it. And we do. We aspire to experience every detail, every event, and every item as part of the whole, to see it from the perspective of the whole rather than from our own narrow point of view. Our success is limited; we can free ourselves and act in terms of the whole, but only within limits. Our goal is to free ourselves from the distortions and corruptions of our finitude, to become free, active, and rational. These are all the same, and are aspects of becoming like the whole, which is what the tradition dignifies with the title "God" or "divine" or "the Highest Good."
For Spinoza, as Professor Morgan writes, "reason in us was akin to reason in nature; one order permeated everything and enabled us, as rational beings to understand ourselves and the whole and to live peacefully and calmly within it. This was the key to science, to ethics, and to religion. It was the key to all of life. It was his goal to show, clarify, explain and teach it --- to the benefit of all humankind." Morgan's remarks about Spinoza could have formed a preface to Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems. My purpose in highlighting Professor Morgan's statement is that systems thinking is not new. It has been going on for centuries, and I doubt if Spinoza was the first systems thinker.
By the 1960s, systems thinking had become more widely adapted in academic curriculum, at least at the collegiate level. Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, is widely credited with introducing systems analysis to public policy during his tenure from 1961-1969. Systems analysis grew to become integrated in addressing engineering problems, business problems, communities, as well as looking at systems in nature (the environment). And it was during this time that Jay Forrester founded the System Dynamics group at MIT. Donella Meadows emerged from the System Dynamics group at MIT and began thinking about socio-ecological systems. Meadows' objective, as with Spinoza, was to "help us understand ourselves and the whole and to live peacefully and calmly within it."
"A system is not just any old collection of things," she writes. "A system is an interconnected set of elements ["people, cells, molecules, or whatever" she says elsewhere] that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose." These elements are "interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered or driven by outside forces. But the system's response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world." Systems can be simple, or they can be extremely complex. Spinoza's system, if you think about it, may be the most complex of all, because it attempts to contemplate all of physical nature as a system. At that level, one can only discuss a system in terms of grand generalities, as Spinoza does in Ethics.
I go back to the very first posting on this blog (see August 17, 2009 post) and the discussion of units of information as the most fundamental unit of physical nature. "Systems of information-feedback control are fundamental to all life and human endeavor, from the slow pace of biological evolution to the launching of the latest space satellite," Meadows quotes Jay Forrester from his book Industrial Dynamics. "Everything we do as individuals, as an industry or as a society is done in the context of an information-feedback system." The mechanism that provides that information-feedback is known as a "feedback loop," and it is regarded as responsible for creating consistent behavior within a system over time. A feedback loop is a mechanism that monitors the parameters of the system that triggers adjustments (which Meadows refers to as "resilience" or elasticity) and ensures stasis within parameters which, in many cases, ensures the survival of the system (human body, community, ecological niche) or continuation of functional purpose in the case of an engineered artifact or system of artifacts. Stasis and survival are not guaranteed; sometimes perturbations can overwhelm feedback systems resulting in the demise of the system.
This is reminiscent of Antonio Damasio's discussion of the brain's role in maintaining homeostasis in the body. "Life requires," Damasio wrote in Self Comes to Mind, "that the body maintain a collection of parameter ranges at all costs for literally dozens of components in its dynamic interior. All the management operations to which I alluded to earlier --- procuring energy sources, incorporating and transforming energy products, and so forth --- aim at maintaining the chemical parameters of a body's interior (its internal milieu) with the magic range compatible with life. The magic range is known as homeostatic, and the process of achieving this balanced state is known as homeostasis." (See April 8, 2011 post). Damasio is describing at least the human nervous system of which the brain is a part, but probably more than one system comprising a larger system that is the human organism.
Spinoza's system can only be explained in generalities because there is simply too much information in the universe for any intelligent body to comprehend. We are forced to acknowledge and live with a laissez-faire dynamical system for all of nature in the hopes that perturbations across nature are managed by nature's own information-feedback systems and stasis is achieved. We can try to control or engineer only the small subsystems we can touch in our remote corner of the universe (or multiverses). "People who are raised in the industrial world," writes Meadows, "and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely the mind-set of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control. . . . "Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never understand our world, not in the way our reductionist science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the trivial, we can't optimize; we don't even know what to optimize. We can't keep track of everything. We can't find the proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror." We are also returning full circle to a previous discussion of "entropy" and the "thermodynamic condition." (See August 15, 2011 post).
Spinoza would be disappointed by Meadows' conclusion, but she is right. Our scientific method, our philosophy has largely abandoned deterministic systems; we think in terms of probabilities in order to manage uncertainty. (See July 30, 2011 post). This does not mean, Meadows says, that we should stop "doing" just because we can't control something or anticipate every surprise. But we can listen to what the system tells us and "discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone." And with this conclusion, Spinoza would have felt more comfortable.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music (2007)
A debate has raged over the past fifteen years as to whether music is an adaptation, a trait that emerged as a result of an evolutionary process. Several well-known psychologists and neuroscientists have weighed in on this subject including Steven Pinker, Daniel J. Levitin, and Pascal Boyer. Pinker, on the one hand, has dismissed music as "auditory cheesecake," while Levitin is convinced that music is an adaptation. Neither, in my view, is precisely correct. In the parlance of evolution, an adaptation is a trait that has a functional role in the life of an organism that evolved and is maintained as a result of natural selection. What we typically think of as music --- a song, with or without words --- is not an adaptation; it is not a trait. As is the case with language and learning, it is our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating, and performing music that is the trait. That capacity has a functional role in the life of an organism.
In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker referred to music as "auditory cheesecake." It confers no survival advantage, he asserts, but music is merely a "confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties." Music, says Pinker, is a "technology [or a "spandrel" as Stephen Jay Gould might have said], not an adaptation." With music, humans merely exploit the language and communication system that evolved through survival and sexual selection pressures.
Levitin, a former musician and sound specialist turned neuroscientist at McGill University, explains that he "took notice" when Pinker called music "auditory cheesecake" and described music as "useless" as far as biological cause and effect are concerned. In contrast, Pinker puts language, vision, and social reasoning in the category of adaptations that have survival value for the human species. "Music could disappear tomorrow," Pinker says, and our "lifestyle would be virtually unchanged." The musician in Levitin was clearly professionally enraged. So he wrote a book on the subject, This is Your Brain on Music. The final chapter of this book, where Levitin challenges Pinker's views, is titled "The Music Instinct," borrowing a phrase from an earlier Pinker book titled The Language Instinct.
By "instinct," Pinker means that language does not have to be learned. But at its most fundamental level, Pinker does not mean that a language --- the English language, or the Chinese language, or the French language --- does not have to be learned. Humans are not born with genes for English, Chinese, or French language; specific languages are not inherited. At the biological level, we are born with a capacity for language and speech and a capacity for learning a language and speaking that language. In support of his claim that language capacity is a human adaptation, Pinker relies on several attributes, including the fact that it is universal across all cultures and that there are specific brain structures that recognize the rules of speech.
Levitin argues that our capacity for music and learning and creating and performing music is no different. The auditory system that detects, senses, and computes the attributes of music, as well as hands and feet that can be used to to create or establish rhythm, the vocal system that can create tone and pitch, and brain structures that uniquely relate to tone, rhythm, pitch, and chords are physical traits. "Music's evolutionary origin," Levitin writes, "is established because it is present across all humans (meeting the biologists' criterion of being widespread in a species); it has been around a long time (refuting the notion that it is merely auditory cheesecake); it involves specialized brain structures, including dedicated memory systems that can remain functional when other memory systems fail (when a physical brain system develops across all humans, we assume that it has an evolutionary basis); and it is analogous to music making in other (non-human) species. Rhythmic sequences optimally excite recurrent neural networks in mammalian brains, including feedback loops among the motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the frontal regions. Tonal systems, pitch transitions, and chords scaffold on certain properties of the auditory system that were themselves products of the physical world, of the inherent nature of vibrating objects. Our auditory system develops in ways that play on the relation between scales and the overtone series. Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability."
Like the English, Chinese or French languages, we still need to learn classical music, folk music, jazz music, and rock and roll music and we need to learn how to perform (speak) these different types of music. And we create technologies for performing music, just like we have created technologies for communicating words.
In The Information, James Gleick (see August 15, 2011 post) cites a 19th century missionary's experience in Africa with tribesmen who communicated across great distances with drum beats, on the one hand an early form of Morse Code, and on the other hand, the drumming relied just as much on rhythm as well as the tone from the beat for conveying meaning. Although it will likely prove impossible to determine, I do not think we can rule out that music (not the same kind of music we think of today) may have been an early prototype for language. Linguistics has led to the discovery that the human brain has formal rules for language syntax. Is the brain not hardwired with formal rules for mathematics and music as well?
Pascal Boyer writes in Religion Explained, " The fact that the brain comes equipped with many specialized inferences and can run them in the decoupled mode may explain why humans the world over engage in a host of activities that carry no clear adaptive value. To illustrate this, consider the auditory cortex of humans, which must perform several complicated tasks. One of these is to sort out the sounds of language from other noises. Information about noises is sent to associative cortical areas that categorize the sounds and identify the nature of their source. Information about the source's location is handled by other specialized circuitry and sent to specific systems. The auditory system must also isolate the sounds of language. All normal humans have the ability to segment a stream of sound emerging from someone else's mouth in terms of isolated sounds, then send this purified representation to cortical areas specialized in word identification. To turn a stream into segments, the system must pay attention to the specific frequencies that define each vowel and the complex noises of consonants, as well as their duration and their effects on each other. To do this, the auditory cortex comprises different subsystems some of which specialize in pure tones and others in more complex stimuli. All this is clearly part of a complex, evolved architecture specialized in fine-grained sound analysis, a task of obvious adaptive value for a species that depends on speech for virtually all communication. But it is also has the interesting consequence that humans are predisposed to detect, produce, remember, and enjoy music. This is a human universal. There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For instance, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way." Boyer adds, "This phenomenon is not unique to music. Humans everywhere also fill their environments with artifacts that overstimulate their visual cortex, for instance by providing pure saturated color instead of dull browns and greens of their familiar environment. . . . These activities recruit our cognitive capacities in ways that make some cultural artifacts very salient and likely to be transmitted."
My own view is that language and music are means of communicating information and that language and music were preceded by proto-language and proto-music, both probably emerging in the same relative human time period. Both, in my view, were likely essential to human evolution as a social species. It also may be true, as Darwin surmised, that music was favored by sexual selection pressures. I think back to the views of V.S. Ramachandran (see October 25, 2011 post) attempting to resolve the discrepancy of views between Steven Pinker and S.J. Gould on language and evolution. For Ramanchandran, language did not evolve from some general mechanism for thinking (Gould), but neither did it evolve specifically for purposes of communication (Pinker). What is innate and what evolved, says Ramachandran, is the competence to acquire rules of language. The actual acquisition of language occurs as a result of social interaction. Ramachandran believes that language was enabled by cross linkages in the brain between different motor maps (e.g. the area responsible for manual gestures and the area responsible for orafacial movements). Can we say that what is innate about music is the competence to acquire rules of music, and that the actual acquisition of music occurs as a result of social interaction? If we think of music simply (at least initially) in terms of rhythm and vocal intonation, there is little to separate music and language including symbolic attachments. The most significant difference, however, is that music appears to reach and appeal to human emotions in a way that language perhaps does not. (See January 14, 2012 post and November 6, 2011 post).
Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin has made his career studying music and the human brain. In This Is Your Brain on Music, Levitin explains each of the attributes of music --- pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key, melody, and harmony --- and describes how the brain's architecture is essentially hardwired to deal with each element. "Different aspects of music are handled by different neural regions --- the brain uses functional segregation for music processing, and employs a system of feature detectors whose job it is to analyze specific aspects of the musical signal such as pitch, tempo, timbre, and so on. Some of the music processing has points in common with the operations required to analyze other sounds; understanding speech, for example, requires that we segregate a flurry of sounds in words, sentences, and phrases, and that we are able to understand aspects beyond the words, such as sarcasm. Several different dimensions of a musical sound need to be analyzed --- usually involving several quasi-independent neural processes --- and they need to be brought together to form a coherent representation of what we are listening to."
When we comprehend music, not as a song, but in terms of its attributes --- pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key, melody, and harmony --- we can recognize that these are not "technologies" as Pinker refers to music.
In the discussion of Christof Wolff's biography of J.S. Bach (see January 14, 2012 post), I mentioned the long-associated relationship of music and mathematics. Steven Pinker describes our "mathematical intuition" --- babies have the capacity to register quantities very early, which may not necessarily involve counting as we know it, but to distinguish between more or less and later to distinguish intuitively in terms of probabilities. From early mathematical intuition emerges human activity such as counting, measuring, shaping, estimating, moving, and proving. Each of these activities leads to more formal mathematical reasoning: counting (arithmetic), measuring (real numbers, calculus) shaping (geometry, topology) estimating (probability, statistics), moving (mechanics, calculus, dynamics), proving (logic). Formal mathematics emerges from our mathematical intuition, says Pinker. This same reasoning informs me that formal music emerges from our musical intuition --- our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating, and performing music.
While music exploits some of the same neural pathways that speech and language exploit, the fact that there are specially evolved components of the brain that are used in processing some of the elements of music would suggest that our capacity to appreciate, learn, and manipulate the attributes of music had some independent evolutionary value. Levitin observes that music "technology" has been around a long time --- at least 60,000 years based on musical artifacts that have been uncovered. But our capacity for music --- by which I mean our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating and performing music --- must have preceded the creation of musical artifact: there is music in song; there is music in tapping fingers and feet, which does not require a flute or drum. The origins of human language and whether it preceded music are, like the origins of music, murky. There is evidence that human language is at least 50,000 - 100,000 years old. For those who subscribe to the view that a FoxP2 gene mutation contributed to the development of human speech, that might put language in the 50,000 - 60,000 years ago range, about the same time as the oldest age of musical artifacts. It is therefore not entirely outside the realm of plausibility that our language instincts and our music instincts co-evolved or that one only slightly --- in the eons of evolutionary timescale --- preceded the other in human evolution.
In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker referred to music as "auditory cheesecake." It confers no survival advantage, he asserts, but music is merely a "confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties." Music, says Pinker, is a "technology [or a "spandrel" as Stephen Jay Gould might have said], not an adaptation." With music, humans merely exploit the language and communication system that evolved through survival and sexual selection pressures.
Levitin, a former musician and sound specialist turned neuroscientist at McGill University, explains that he "took notice" when Pinker called music "auditory cheesecake" and described music as "useless" as far as biological cause and effect are concerned. In contrast, Pinker puts language, vision, and social reasoning in the category of adaptations that have survival value for the human species. "Music could disappear tomorrow," Pinker says, and our "lifestyle would be virtually unchanged." The musician in Levitin was clearly professionally enraged. So he wrote a book on the subject, This is Your Brain on Music. The final chapter of this book, where Levitin challenges Pinker's views, is titled "The Music Instinct," borrowing a phrase from an earlier Pinker book titled The Language Instinct.
By "instinct," Pinker means that language does not have to be learned. But at its most fundamental level, Pinker does not mean that a language --- the English language, or the Chinese language, or the French language --- does not have to be learned. Humans are not born with genes for English, Chinese, or French language; specific languages are not inherited. At the biological level, we are born with a capacity for language and speech and a capacity for learning a language and speaking that language. In support of his claim that language capacity is a human adaptation, Pinker relies on several attributes, including the fact that it is universal across all cultures and that there are specific brain structures that recognize the rules of speech.
Levitin argues that our capacity for music and learning and creating and performing music is no different. The auditory system that detects, senses, and computes the attributes of music, as well as hands and feet that can be used to to create or establish rhythm, the vocal system that can create tone and pitch, and brain structures that uniquely relate to tone, rhythm, pitch, and chords are physical traits. "Music's evolutionary origin," Levitin writes, "is established because it is present across all humans (meeting the biologists' criterion of being widespread in a species); it has been around a long time (refuting the notion that it is merely auditory cheesecake); it involves specialized brain structures, including dedicated memory systems that can remain functional when other memory systems fail (when a physical brain system develops across all humans, we assume that it has an evolutionary basis); and it is analogous to music making in other (non-human) species. Rhythmic sequences optimally excite recurrent neural networks in mammalian brains, including feedback loops among the motor cortex, the cerebellum, and the frontal regions. Tonal systems, pitch transitions, and chords scaffold on certain properties of the auditory system that were themselves products of the physical world, of the inherent nature of vibrating objects. Our auditory system develops in ways that play on the relation between scales and the overtone series. Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability."
Like the English, Chinese or French languages, we still need to learn classical music, folk music, jazz music, and rock and roll music and we need to learn how to perform (speak) these different types of music. And we create technologies for performing music, just like we have created technologies for communicating words.
In The Information, James Gleick (see August 15, 2011 post) cites a 19th century missionary's experience in Africa with tribesmen who communicated across great distances with drum beats, on the one hand an early form of Morse Code, and on the other hand, the drumming relied just as much on rhythm as well as the tone from the beat for conveying meaning. Although it will likely prove impossible to determine, I do not think we can rule out that music (not the same kind of music we think of today) may have been an early prototype for language. Linguistics has led to the discovery that the human brain has formal rules for language syntax. Is the brain not hardwired with formal rules for mathematics and music as well?
Pascal Boyer writes in Religion Explained, " The fact that the brain comes equipped with many specialized inferences and can run them in the decoupled mode may explain why humans the world over engage in a host of activities that carry no clear adaptive value. To illustrate this, consider the auditory cortex of humans, which must perform several complicated tasks. One of these is to sort out the sounds of language from other noises. Information about noises is sent to associative cortical areas that categorize the sounds and identify the nature of their source. Information about the source's location is handled by other specialized circuitry and sent to specific systems. The auditory system must also isolate the sounds of language. All normal humans have the ability to segment a stream of sound emerging from someone else's mouth in terms of isolated sounds, then send this purified representation to cortical areas specialized in word identification. To turn a stream into segments, the system must pay attention to the specific frequencies that define each vowel and the complex noises of consonants, as well as their duration and their effects on each other. To do this, the auditory cortex comprises different subsystems some of which specialize in pure tones and others in more complex stimuli. All this is clearly part of a complex, evolved architecture specialized in fine-grained sound analysis, a task of obvious adaptive value for a species that depends on speech for virtually all communication. But it is also has the interesting consequence that humans are predisposed to detect, produce, remember, and enjoy music. This is a human universal. There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For instance, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way." Boyer adds, "This phenomenon is not unique to music. Humans everywhere also fill their environments with artifacts that overstimulate their visual cortex, for instance by providing pure saturated color instead of dull browns and greens of their familiar environment. . . . These activities recruit our cognitive capacities in ways that make some cultural artifacts very salient and likely to be transmitted."
My own view is that language and music are means of communicating information and that language and music were preceded by proto-language and proto-music, both probably emerging in the same relative human time period. Both, in my view, were likely essential to human evolution as a social species. It also may be true, as Darwin surmised, that music was favored by sexual selection pressures. I think back to the views of V.S. Ramachandran (see October 25, 2011 post) attempting to resolve the discrepancy of views between Steven Pinker and S.J. Gould on language and evolution. For Ramanchandran, language did not evolve from some general mechanism for thinking (Gould), but neither did it evolve specifically for purposes of communication (Pinker). What is innate and what evolved, says Ramachandran, is the competence to acquire rules of language. The actual acquisition of language occurs as a result of social interaction. Ramachandran believes that language was enabled by cross linkages in the brain between different motor maps (e.g. the area responsible for manual gestures and the area responsible for orafacial movements). Can we say that what is innate about music is the competence to acquire rules of music, and that the actual acquisition of music occurs as a result of social interaction? If we think of music simply (at least initially) in terms of rhythm and vocal intonation, there is little to separate music and language including symbolic attachments. The most significant difference, however, is that music appears to reach and appeal to human emotions in a way that language perhaps does not. (See January 14, 2012 post and November 6, 2011 post).
Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin has made his career studying music and the human brain. In This Is Your Brain on Music, Levitin explains each of the attributes of music --- pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key, melody, and harmony --- and describes how the brain's architecture is essentially hardwired to deal with each element. "Different aspects of music are handled by different neural regions --- the brain uses functional segregation for music processing, and employs a system of feature detectors whose job it is to analyze specific aspects of the musical signal such as pitch, tempo, timbre, and so on. Some of the music processing has points in common with the operations required to analyze other sounds; understanding speech, for example, requires that we segregate a flurry of sounds in words, sentences, and phrases, and that we are able to understand aspects beyond the words, such as sarcasm. Several different dimensions of a musical sound need to be analyzed --- usually involving several quasi-independent neural processes --- and they need to be brought together to form a coherent representation of what we are listening to."
When we comprehend music, not as a song, but in terms of its attributes --- pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key, melody, and harmony --- we can recognize that these are not "technologies" as Pinker refers to music.
In the discussion of Christof Wolff's biography of J.S. Bach (see January 14, 2012 post), I mentioned the long-associated relationship of music and mathematics. Steven Pinker describes our "mathematical intuition" --- babies have the capacity to register quantities very early, which may not necessarily involve counting as we know it, but to distinguish between more or less and later to distinguish intuitively in terms of probabilities. From early mathematical intuition emerges human activity such as counting, measuring, shaping, estimating, moving, and proving. Each of these activities leads to more formal mathematical reasoning: counting (arithmetic), measuring (real numbers, calculus) shaping (geometry, topology) estimating (probability, statistics), moving (mechanics, calculus, dynamics), proving (logic). Formal mathematics emerges from our mathematical intuition, says Pinker. This same reasoning informs me that formal music emerges from our musical intuition --- our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating, and performing music.
While music exploits some of the same neural pathways that speech and language exploit, the fact that there are specially evolved components of the brain that are used in processing some of the elements of music would suggest that our capacity to appreciate, learn, and manipulate the attributes of music had some independent evolutionary value. Levitin observes that music "technology" has been around a long time --- at least 60,000 years based on musical artifacts that have been uncovered. But our capacity for music --- by which I mean our capacity for appreciating, learning, creating and performing music --- must have preceded the creation of musical artifact: there is music in song; there is music in tapping fingers and feet, which does not require a flute or drum. The origins of human language and whether it preceded music are, like the origins of music, murky. There is evidence that human language is at least 50,000 - 100,000 years old. For those who subscribe to the view that a FoxP2 gene mutation contributed to the development of human speech, that might put language in the 50,000 - 60,000 years ago range, about the same time as the oldest age of musical artifacts. It is therefore not entirely outside the realm of plausibility that our language instincts and our music instincts co-evolved or that one only slightly --- in the eons of evolutionary timescale --- preceded the other in human evolution.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools (2011)
The subtitle of Robert Trivers' tome to his nearly lifelong obsession with deceit is The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Here is the "logic":
1) Deception is widespread across nature. We are most familiar with this fact in the context of camouflage. Evolution has favored genetic characteristics that conceal a species from its predators. This is not deception in the sense of an intentional or purposeful mental act, but it is nevertheless deception. Trivers also documents deceptive behavioral acts in the non-human animal kingdom that are designed to enhance reproductive success, but again these are typically not intentional or purposeful mental acts, but genetically-driven hardwired behavior in the species. Cognitive-based acts of deception in the non-human primate community appear to occur.
2) Deception is therefore an adaptive strategy that favors survival and reproductive success and must be understood in that light.
3) Deception is widespread in the human species. Trivers cites examples of deception in courtship that appear to be related to reproductive success. There are examples of deception that are related to survival. The Folly of Fools is a catalogue of the examples and means by which humans deceive other humans, a subject that a prior posting in Shakespeare's King Lear addressed (see August 28, 2011 post). And while deceit is a frequent, clever device in Shakespeare's works, deceit has been a feature of the literature of tragedy and comedy since ancient times. False identity is a frequent dramatic device in comedies. The big difference, however, in acts of deception by humans and deception in other species is that human deception is largely, but not entirely a cognitive phenomenon.
This brings us to the larger topic of Trivers' book: self-deception in human life. The question he poses from the outset of this book is this: our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner. Why then, do we act to "destroy" or depreciate the quality of that information through self-deception? Intuitively, one would think that gathering, correctly interpreting and using accurate, detailed information would the be the successful evolutionary adaptive strategy; however, the extensive catalog of the ways in which humans deceive themselves, and The Folly of Fools overwhelms its readers with examples that make you feel that that is all that we do (a point I will come back to later), suggests, by its prevalence, that self-deception is the successful evolutionary strategy. Trivers' explanation: self-deception is essential to humans' ability to practice deception --- "we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others." Trivers' lament is that if humanity understood better that the reinforcing cycle of self-deception and deception we practice frequently has such disastrous consequences for humans --- he discusses aviation and space disasters, war and other conflicts, and even professional disasters in the social sciences --- we would be better at fighting self-deception and reap benefits, both individual and social that we are foregoing by succumbing too easily to deceit.
Readers who are willing to cast aside his and her various biases --- cultural and religious, personal including emotional --- and mentally transport themselves to a state that one of my college professors, John Harsanyi, and later John Rawls called "the veil of ignorance" (see May 12, 2010 post and January 11, 2011 post) will easily accept that the litany of ways Trivers describes that we deceive ourselves are true. The telling of false historical narratives begins with self-deception. This includes self-deception that is deployed for purposes of in-group-integration, nation-building and the construction of religion and religious institutions. Importantly, self-deception is aimed at inflating the self (ego), or, correlatively, derogating others, inducing a sense of empowerment, moral superiority, and control. These examples occur at the level of individuals, however they are deployed at the group level and have their group-level "us versus them" correlates: inflating the family, the community, the corporation, the tribe, the nation, the religion, the race, the species, etc. and derogating other families, communities, corporations, tribes, nations, religions, races and species.
Where The Folly of Fools falls flat is the absence of any significant discussion of how self-deception actually occurs. The fact of self-deception is well-documented by Trivers, but the mechanism is not. There is certainly a larger story here, and some of the prior postings on this blog cover some of the elements: bias, imagination, and memory. The term "bias" appears many times in this book, but it is nowhere systematically explored as it is in Robert Shermer's The Believing Brain (see June 12, 2011 post). Trivers' tome would benefit from inclusion, even if only by reference, of a discussion of the literature of bias. It is instructive for how false historical narratives, political beliefs, religious beliefs, and even our assumptions about the behavior of others are formed. Underlying the formation of bias is how the mind really works --- something we know a lot about now although our knowledge is by no means complete either. The idea of heuristics, as described by Shermer (again, see June 12, 2011 post), the brain's capacity to solve problems through intuition, trial and error, rules of thumb, or other informal shortcuts, when there is no formal means for solving the problem is significant in the formation of beliefs. If Shermer is right that evolution has brought us to form beliefs first and only later do we try to inform our beliefs with facts, then Trivers' starting point to his thesis (stated above) --- that our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner --- is misplaced, or is at least missing an important aspect of how our mind works, that we do not always take in "accurate and detailed" information.
Other postings on this blog have discussed the fact that areas of our brain are devoted in part to trying to explain the information that our sensory organs have delivered to the brain. (See e.g. May 22, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post). In other posts I have referred to this as our "storytelling" capability, but it includes our capacity for abstraction and imagination and analysis. Imagination is deployed for a variety of mental acts: to explain the physical world that is either to large or too small for us to see (see July 30, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post); to explain history after rigorous research supported by contemporaneous documentation (see January 14, 2012 post, December 16, 2010 post and March 24, 2010 post); to create pure fantasy (see e.g., June 28, 2011 post and March 28, 2010 post); and to merge both fantasy and history in a retelling that is is either fiction or historical fiction (see July 17, 2011 post and November 16, 2011 post). Douglas Hofstadter, whom I mentioned in the previous post, had this to say in Godel, Escher, Bach:
"Not all descriptions of a person need to be attached to some central symbol for that person, which stores that person's name. Descriptions can be manufactured and manipulated in themselves. We can invent non-existent people by making descriptions of them; we can merge two descriptions when we find they represent a single entity; we can split one description into two when we find it represents two things, not one --- and soon. This 'calculus of descriptions' is at the heart of thinking. It is said to be intensional and not extensional, which means we can 'float' without being anchored down to specific objects. The intensionality of thought is connected to its flexibility; it gives us the ability to imagine hypothetical worlds, to amalgamate different descriptions or chop one description into separate pieces, and so on. Fantasy and fact intermingle very closely in our minds and this is because thinking involves the manufacture and manipulation of complex descriptions."
This is what our mind does, and self-deception is one potential outcome of our cognitive processes. Sometimes that self-deception is accidental, sometimes it is unknowing, and sometimes it is intentional. As Robert Shermer and others have documented, the deception can begin at a very early age before we are of a maturity to act against it and by the time we reach an appropriate age to question what we believe, we are too invested in or it is too costly to rebut engrained beliefs. At this point, it is a matter of memory and human memory is not limited to "accurate and detailed information." (See September 20, 2011 post). The brain has ways of categorizing information in less than a detailed way.
It is possible to read The Folly of Fools and conclude that humans suffer from a persistent state of delusion. If that is the true, the skepticism that Enlightenment philosophers confronted (see February 27, 2011 post) may well still be warranted, and perhaps John Searle's view of the 21st century that the era of skepticism was long past (see January 21, 2011 post) is perhaps unwarranted. I don't think so. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter cites research indicating that truth telling appears to be the default position of the human brain, and that deception involves extra cognitive effort requiring more energy. The question of whether humans are more inclined to tell the truth or to self-delude themselves is an unanswered question in my view, but I am not inclined to the view that our default state is self-deception. In the prior post discussing Carter's observation, I noted she had not discussed or accounted for the mental short-cuts we often engage in (heuristics) that may rely on certain biases in our perception or understanding of things observed. Those short-cuts may circumvent the extra cognitive effort that self-deception requires.
Trivers seems to think that our difficulty in addressing reality is that neurophysiological system (and hence our conscious experience) is always a fraction of a second behind the actual sensory experience. "Regarding one's personal life, the problem with learning from living is that living is like riding a train while facing backward. That is, we see reality only after it has passed us by. Neurophysiologists have shown that this is literally true. We see (consciously) incoming information as well as our internal intention to act, well after the fact. It seems as if it is difficult to learn after the fact what to predict ahead of the fact; thus our ability to see the future, even that of our own behavior, is often very limited." It is true, as Trivers says, that the left side of our brain devoted to explaining what it is we are experiencing follows by milliseconds the actual sensory experience of what is actually happening to us. But we are talking milliseconds. The fact of the matter is that humans do have the ability to see the future coming (sometimes imperfectly, but sometimes with greater prescience than we realize). As we live our lives, we are, during our waking hours, facing forward. One of the most amazing capacities of the human mind, and perhaps some other species as well, but certainly in humans is that it plays what Antonio Damasio referred to as the "movie within a movie," and we are able mentally visualize and anticipate what is about to happen. Mirror neurons may trigger something as we watch another person that enable us to anticipate what is going to happen to someone else. So we are not living our lives facing backward. Perhaps it is when we are asleep, as Rita Carter noted (see November 6, 2011 post), and our mind is busy building memories, that we are looking backwards.
1) Deception is widespread across nature. We are most familiar with this fact in the context of camouflage. Evolution has favored genetic characteristics that conceal a species from its predators. This is not deception in the sense of an intentional or purposeful mental act, but it is nevertheless deception. Trivers also documents deceptive behavioral acts in the non-human animal kingdom that are designed to enhance reproductive success, but again these are typically not intentional or purposeful mental acts, but genetically-driven hardwired behavior in the species. Cognitive-based acts of deception in the non-human primate community appear to occur.
2) Deception is therefore an adaptive strategy that favors survival and reproductive success and must be understood in that light.
3) Deception is widespread in the human species. Trivers cites examples of deception in courtship that appear to be related to reproductive success. There are examples of deception that are related to survival. The Folly of Fools is a catalogue of the examples and means by which humans deceive other humans, a subject that a prior posting in Shakespeare's King Lear addressed (see August 28, 2011 post). And while deceit is a frequent, clever device in Shakespeare's works, deceit has been a feature of the literature of tragedy and comedy since ancient times. False identity is a frequent dramatic device in comedies. The big difference, however, in acts of deception by humans and deception in other species is that human deception is largely, but not entirely a cognitive phenomenon.
This brings us to the larger topic of Trivers' book: self-deception in human life. The question he poses from the outset of this book is this: our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner. Why then, do we act to "destroy" or depreciate the quality of that information through self-deception? Intuitively, one would think that gathering, correctly interpreting and using accurate, detailed information would the be the successful evolutionary adaptive strategy; however, the extensive catalog of the ways in which humans deceive themselves, and The Folly of Fools overwhelms its readers with examples that make you feel that that is all that we do (a point I will come back to later), suggests, by its prevalence, that self-deception is the successful evolutionary strategy. Trivers' explanation: self-deception is essential to humans' ability to practice deception --- "we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others." Trivers' lament is that if humanity understood better that the reinforcing cycle of self-deception and deception we practice frequently has such disastrous consequences for humans --- he discusses aviation and space disasters, war and other conflicts, and even professional disasters in the social sciences --- we would be better at fighting self-deception and reap benefits, both individual and social that we are foregoing by succumbing too easily to deceit.
Readers who are willing to cast aside his and her various biases --- cultural and religious, personal including emotional --- and mentally transport themselves to a state that one of my college professors, John Harsanyi, and later John Rawls called "the veil of ignorance" (see May 12, 2010 post and January 11, 2011 post) will easily accept that the litany of ways Trivers describes that we deceive ourselves are true. The telling of false historical narratives begins with self-deception. This includes self-deception that is deployed for purposes of in-group-integration, nation-building and the construction of religion and religious institutions. Importantly, self-deception is aimed at inflating the self (ego), or, correlatively, derogating others, inducing a sense of empowerment, moral superiority, and control. These examples occur at the level of individuals, however they are deployed at the group level and have their group-level "us versus them" correlates: inflating the family, the community, the corporation, the tribe, the nation, the religion, the race, the species, etc. and derogating other families, communities, corporations, tribes, nations, religions, races and species.
Where The Folly of Fools falls flat is the absence of any significant discussion of how self-deception actually occurs. The fact of self-deception is well-documented by Trivers, but the mechanism is not. There is certainly a larger story here, and some of the prior postings on this blog cover some of the elements: bias, imagination, and memory. The term "bias" appears many times in this book, but it is nowhere systematically explored as it is in Robert Shermer's The Believing Brain (see June 12, 2011 post). Trivers' tome would benefit from inclusion, even if only by reference, of a discussion of the literature of bias. It is instructive for how false historical narratives, political beliefs, religious beliefs, and even our assumptions about the behavior of others are formed. Underlying the formation of bias is how the mind really works --- something we know a lot about now although our knowledge is by no means complete either. The idea of heuristics, as described by Shermer (again, see June 12, 2011 post), the brain's capacity to solve problems through intuition, trial and error, rules of thumb, or other informal shortcuts, when there is no formal means for solving the problem is significant in the formation of beliefs. If Shermer is right that evolution has brought us to form beliefs first and only later do we try to inform our beliefs with facts, then Trivers' starting point to his thesis (stated above) --- that our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner --- is misplaced, or is at least missing an important aspect of how our mind works, that we do not always take in "accurate and detailed" information.
Other postings on this blog have discussed the fact that areas of our brain are devoted in part to trying to explain the information that our sensory organs have delivered to the brain. (See e.g. May 22, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post). In other posts I have referred to this as our "storytelling" capability, but it includes our capacity for abstraction and imagination and analysis. Imagination is deployed for a variety of mental acts: to explain the physical world that is either to large or too small for us to see (see July 30, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post); to explain history after rigorous research supported by contemporaneous documentation (see January 14, 2012 post, December 16, 2010 post and March 24, 2010 post); to create pure fantasy (see e.g., June 28, 2011 post and March 28, 2010 post); and to merge both fantasy and history in a retelling that is is either fiction or historical fiction (see July 17, 2011 post and November 16, 2011 post). Douglas Hofstadter, whom I mentioned in the previous post, had this to say in Godel, Escher, Bach:
"Not all descriptions of a person need to be attached to some central symbol for that person, which stores that person's name. Descriptions can be manufactured and manipulated in themselves. We can invent non-existent people by making descriptions of them; we can merge two descriptions when we find they represent a single entity; we can split one description into two when we find it represents two things, not one --- and soon. This 'calculus of descriptions' is at the heart of thinking. It is said to be intensional and not extensional, which means we can 'float' without being anchored down to specific objects. The intensionality of thought is connected to its flexibility; it gives us the ability to imagine hypothetical worlds, to amalgamate different descriptions or chop one description into separate pieces, and so on. Fantasy and fact intermingle very closely in our minds and this is because thinking involves the manufacture and manipulation of complex descriptions."
This is what our mind does, and self-deception is one potential outcome of our cognitive processes. Sometimes that self-deception is accidental, sometimes it is unknowing, and sometimes it is intentional. As Robert Shermer and others have documented, the deception can begin at a very early age before we are of a maturity to act against it and by the time we reach an appropriate age to question what we believe, we are too invested in or it is too costly to rebut engrained beliefs. At this point, it is a matter of memory and human memory is not limited to "accurate and detailed information." (See September 20, 2011 post). The brain has ways of categorizing information in less than a detailed way.
It is possible to read The Folly of Fools and conclude that humans suffer from a persistent state of delusion. If that is the true, the skepticism that Enlightenment philosophers confronted (see February 27, 2011 post) may well still be warranted, and perhaps John Searle's view of the 21st century that the era of skepticism was long past (see January 21, 2011 post) is perhaps unwarranted. I don't think so. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter cites research indicating that truth telling appears to be the default position of the human brain, and that deception involves extra cognitive effort requiring more energy. The question of whether humans are more inclined to tell the truth or to self-delude themselves is an unanswered question in my view, but I am not inclined to the view that our default state is self-deception. In the prior post discussing Carter's observation, I noted she had not discussed or accounted for the mental short-cuts we often engage in (heuristics) that may rely on certain biases in our perception or understanding of things observed. Those short-cuts may circumvent the extra cognitive effort that self-deception requires.
Trivers seems to think that our difficulty in addressing reality is that neurophysiological system (and hence our conscious experience) is always a fraction of a second behind the actual sensory experience. "Regarding one's personal life, the problem with learning from living is that living is like riding a train while facing backward. That is, we see reality only after it has passed us by. Neurophysiologists have shown that this is literally true. We see (consciously) incoming information as well as our internal intention to act, well after the fact. It seems as if it is difficult to learn after the fact what to predict ahead of the fact; thus our ability to see the future, even that of our own behavior, is often very limited." It is true, as Trivers says, that the left side of our brain devoted to explaining what it is we are experiencing follows by milliseconds the actual sensory experience of what is actually happening to us. But we are talking milliseconds. The fact of the matter is that humans do have the ability to see the future coming (sometimes imperfectly, but sometimes with greater prescience than we realize). As we live our lives, we are, during our waking hours, facing forward. One of the most amazing capacities of the human mind, and perhaps some other species as well, but certainly in humans is that it plays what Antonio Damasio referred to as the "movie within a movie," and we are able mentally visualize and anticipate what is about to happen. Mirror neurons may trigger something as we watch another person that enable us to anticipate what is going to happen to someone else. So we are not living our lives facing backward. Perhaps it is when we are asleep, as Rita Carter noted (see November 6, 2011 post), and our mind is busy building memories, that we are looking backwards.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (2000)
I am not a music scholar. I enjoy listening to music, and I enjoy playing music. But I have never taken the time to study music as much as I might like. My introduction to J.S. Bach did not arise listening to his music. I learned something about part of his musical oeuvre while reading Douglas Hofstadter's book Godel, Escher, Bach twenty or more years ago. Hofstadter's interest in Bach is the canon and fugue, and specifically Bach's The Art of the Fugue and The Musical Offering. Admittedly, I struggled reading Hofstadter's book. I was not familiar with Kurt Godel, and, except for his name, I was not familiar with J.S. Bach either. Only the prints of M.C. Escher, which fascinated me, had I had some prior exposure to. And Godel, Escher, Bach is not really about Kurt Godel, M.C.Escher, or J.S. Bach. Their ideas or works are mere tools for Hofstadter to talk about the coherence of the brain --- what some refer to as the "binding problem" --- which refers to the brain's ability to simultaneously receive several sensory inputs, triggering many different neurons in different parts of the brain, perhaps triggering a memory and/or a mental image of something about to happen, resulting in a unified conscious experience. Godel, Escher, Bach was a heady reading experience, even if I did not understand it all at the time, and I have often thought that it deserved a re-read a couple of decades later.
But our subject here is J.S. Bach. Hofstadter caused me to listen to The Art of the Fugue. I was probably lured into thinking that a Bach fugue is just as inventive and interesting as an Escher print. The sensory experience is different. Escher is a visual experience that confounds all experience. For a Bach fugue, you can close your eyes and make the fugue primarily an auditory experience. Best heard and listened to with a set of headphones, the meaning of fugue comes alive in Bach's exposition. If this is Bach, I thought, I am sold. I listened to The Well Tempered Clavier and The Goldberg Variations as well and discovered the same experience. What the listener is experiencing is polyphony: multiple voices, sometimes "speaking" at the same time, often responding to an earlier voice, but nevertheless speaking harmoniously and recursively. This is referred to as counterpoint. Among contemporary composers, the music of Steve Reich is an example of counterpoint. In harmony and recursion, there is a sense of coherence that simulates in part the kind of coherence that the binding problem speaks to.
Music and mathematics have been associated with each other since antiquity, and there is a "mathematical" feeling to Bach's music, not only its metre, but its harmony as well. This has been noted by others, including Hofstadter. Where music, like the compositions of J.S. Bach, present patterns and harmony, it is not surprising that we should find a relationship between numbers, functions, and rhythm and harmony. In contrast, I think of a work like Ornette Coleman's Skies of America, which for lack of a better word seems "chaotic," inspired by that aspect of life where patterns are disrupted and dissonance prevails. It is still music, but the mathematical beauty that some find in canons and fugues seem to break down in a composition like Skies of America. In the liner notes to Skies of America, Coleman writes, "Skies of America is a collection of compositions and the orchestration for a symphony orchestra based on a theory book called The Harmolodic Theory which uses melody, harmony, and the instrumentation of movement of forms . . .The writing is applied to harmolodic modulation meaning to modulate in range without changing keys. There are eight themes and a harmolodic movement for each theme." But harmolodics, admits Coleman, is an expression that is "freed from tonal limitations, rhythmic pre-determination, or harmonic rules." Fugues and canons, which are constrained by tonal limitations and harmonic rules, do not march to the harmolodic theory. It may not be the case that all forms of music share an affinity with mathematics.
The affinity between music and mathematics must be derivative of the physics of sound and how sound is managed by the auditory cortex in the brain. Pascal Boyer points out that the architecture in the brain's auditory cortex evolved to allow humans to to hear specific frequencies for vowels and consonants, and this capacity has predisposed our species to detect, produce, remember and enjoy music. "This is a human universal," he writes in Religion Explained. "There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For example, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way."
Boyer's view that music is an outgrowth of our capacity to hear speech and communicate is not a universal view; others believe that music is a prototype communication system connected to our emotional wiring. In short, some form of music, preceded linguistic communication. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter describes a "tingle factor" associated with music triggering an emotional response --- relaxation, arousal, tension, relief --- because sound is processed in parallel by the limbic system, which notes its emotional tone, and perhaps recognizes a similarity between a musical tone and vocal signals that carry emotional messages. J.S. Bach's fugues and canons generate an emotional tug that primarily triggers relaxation in my view, and certainly a sense of order within the world. The emotional connection may explain a close correlation between music and religion, particularly where rapture is a component of the religious experience.
In reading a biography of J.S. Bach (1685-1750), by one of the leading Bach scholars, I thought I might learn more about the fugue and counterpoint. I did not. I probably learned more about counterpoint from Hofstadter. Wolff's book assumes a level of knowledge of music and Bach's music that I do not yet have. But I did learn much more about Bach the composer and the man then my limited experience with his most familiar fugues and canons, which are perhaps the most secular pieces of his ouevre.
Bach is a musician of the 18th century Enlightenment, and not surprisingly his music is inspired by his belief in his god, and the influence of the Lutheran Church in central Germany is huge in both his life and the life of the community in which he lived. Bach is the composer of many sacred works that I am totally unfamiliar with, but I suspect that true Bach aficionados are undoubtedly rapturous about. Just as religion and the State were joined at the hip, religion and the arts had sponsors in common, if not unified interests as well. Religion likely embraced music because it did "tingle" emotions and, as others have opined, music can be a shared community building experience that institutions, whether religious or not, have deployed in the recruitment and retention of adherents. To the extent that religion is a transcendent experience, music can be transcendental as well. A tour of any major art museum around the world to look at the paintings of leading painters prior to and even during this era reveals the close relationship between art and religion. Even in the 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings of landscapes, seascapes, and ordinary life that does not transparently wear some religion on its canvas, there is nevertheless the theme that no event, however small in the cosmic scheme of things, is not one of god's creations. In science and math, Newton and Leibniz were both wedded to their religions and the governing political-religious authorities. The interesting side of this relationship is that the arts are substantially funded by the political or religious authorities. On the payroll of the communities in which he lived, Bach was essentially a public servant, and his professional obligations included providing for church music and music at other public events. True, there were some private, secular gigs on the side at coffee houses and other venues that provided remuneration, but composing and performing sacred music for church services was the priority of his employment. For musicians today whose music might be said to be inspired by the sacred, funding from political and religious authorities or sources is not all that significant. One has to wonder, however, whether the world would ever know Bach's canons and fugues if it was not for that system of public funding of the arts that existed in centuries past.
An aspect of Christoph Wolff's biography of J.S. Bach that intrigues the reader is the intellectual candor of the author. One of the learnings from this biography is that Bach's life, while documented in some ways, is not well-documented in other important details. Furthermore, much of Bach's written musical scores have not survived. Bach himself did not write down much about his life. And Wolff admits in his preface, "Thus, conjectures and assumptions are unavoidable, and this book necessarily calls for numerous occurrences of 'probably,' 'perhaps,' 'maybe,' and the like." If only the writers, editors and redactors of the Bible and its commentators --- Hebrew and Christian portions alike --- had the courage to muster that kind of intellectual courage to admit that their sources were not so well documented and could not bring themselves to confess that they were forced to speculate and conjecture, and that some of what they were retelling was, quite frankly, "probably" the stuff of fiction. There are a lot of "probablys," "would haves," and "perhaps'" in this telling of the life of J.S. Bach. Still, it is a credible biography; there is enough of a contemporaneous historical record about his life, and the written works he left behind that support the telling of this story, despite what is missing.
A highlight of Bach's life in music, in my view, is his constant rewriting and even "morphing" of earlier musical works. One could only learn this from an expert on Bach. Wolff refers to this as Bach's constant pursuit of musical perfection. This is not all that unusual in modern times: songs written in today's musical genres do not always sit still; they have ways of evolving. Bach evolved his music to suit different instruments and perhaps a different listener. His secular music borrowed from his sacred music. Wolff conjectures that in borrowing from previous compositions, Bach was economizing in meeting his obligations to his employers, essentially saying that there was no way that Bach could truly create a novel composition week-in and week-out for decades without borrowing from earlier investments of creative time. Wolff is probably correct. This fact also allows Wolff to conclude that while we do not have every written composition that Bach created, we probably have the core of his work, enough to conclude that, for his time, Bach was the most inventive musical composer of his time, whose works resembled no other composer.
But our subject here is J.S. Bach. Hofstadter caused me to listen to The Art of the Fugue. I was probably lured into thinking that a Bach fugue is just as inventive and interesting as an Escher print. The sensory experience is different. Escher is a visual experience that confounds all experience. For a Bach fugue, you can close your eyes and make the fugue primarily an auditory experience. Best heard and listened to with a set of headphones, the meaning of fugue comes alive in Bach's exposition. If this is Bach, I thought, I am sold. I listened to The Well Tempered Clavier and The Goldberg Variations as well and discovered the same experience. What the listener is experiencing is polyphony: multiple voices, sometimes "speaking" at the same time, often responding to an earlier voice, but nevertheless speaking harmoniously and recursively. This is referred to as counterpoint. Among contemporary composers, the music of Steve Reich is an example of counterpoint. In harmony and recursion, there is a sense of coherence that simulates in part the kind of coherence that the binding problem speaks to.
Music and mathematics have been associated with each other since antiquity, and there is a "mathematical" feeling to Bach's music, not only its metre, but its harmony as well. This has been noted by others, including Hofstadter. Where music, like the compositions of J.S. Bach, present patterns and harmony, it is not surprising that we should find a relationship between numbers, functions, and rhythm and harmony. In contrast, I think of a work like Ornette Coleman's Skies of America, which for lack of a better word seems "chaotic," inspired by that aspect of life where patterns are disrupted and dissonance prevails. It is still music, but the mathematical beauty that some find in canons and fugues seem to break down in a composition like Skies of America. In the liner notes to Skies of America, Coleman writes, "Skies of America is a collection of compositions and the orchestration for a symphony orchestra based on a theory book called The Harmolodic Theory which uses melody, harmony, and the instrumentation of movement of forms . . .The writing is applied to harmolodic modulation meaning to modulate in range without changing keys. There are eight themes and a harmolodic movement for each theme." But harmolodics, admits Coleman, is an expression that is "freed from tonal limitations, rhythmic pre-determination, or harmonic rules." Fugues and canons, which are constrained by tonal limitations and harmonic rules, do not march to the harmolodic theory. It may not be the case that all forms of music share an affinity with mathematics.
The affinity between music and mathematics must be derivative of the physics of sound and how sound is managed by the auditory cortex in the brain. Pascal Boyer points out that the architecture in the brain's auditory cortex evolved to allow humans to to hear specific frequencies for vowels and consonants, and this capacity has predisposed our species to detect, produce, remember and enjoy music. "This is a human universal," he writes in Religion Explained. "There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For example, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way."
Boyer's view that music is an outgrowth of our capacity to hear speech and communicate is not a universal view; others believe that music is a prototype communication system connected to our emotional wiring. In short, some form of music, preceded linguistic communication. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter describes a "tingle factor" associated with music triggering an emotional response --- relaxation, arousal, tension, relief --- because sound is processed in parallel by the limbic system, which notes its emotional tone, and perhaps recognizes a similarity between a musical tone and vocal signals that carry emotional messages. J.S. Bach's fugues and canons generate an emotional tug that primarily triggers relaxation in my view, and certainly a sense of order within the world. The emotional connection may explain a close correlation between music and religion, particularly where rapture is a component of the religious experience.
In reading a biography of J.S. Bach (1685-1750), by one of the leading Bach scholars, I thought I might learn more about the fugue and counterpoint. I did not. I probably learned more about counterpoint from Hofstadter. Wolff's book assumes a level of knowledge of music and Bach's music that I do not yet have. But I did learn much more about Bach the composer and the man then my limited experience with his most familiar fugues and canons, which are perhaps the most secular pieces of his ouevre.
Bach is a musician of the 18th century Enlightenment, and not surprisingly his music is inspired by his belief in his god, and the influence of the Lutheran Church in central Germany is huge in both his life and the life of the community in which he lived. Bach is the composer of many sacred works that I am totally unfamiliar with, but I suspect that true Bach aficionados are undoubtedly rapturous about. Just as religion and the State were joined at the hip, religion and the arts had sponsors in common, if not unified interests as well. Religion likely embraced music because it did "tingle" emotions and, as others have opined, music can be a shared community building experience that institutions, whether religious or not, have deployed in the recruitment and retention of adherents. To the extent that religion is a transcendent experience, music can be transcendental as well. A tour of any major art museum around the world to look at the paintings of leading painters prior to and even during this era reveals the close relationship between art and religion. Even in the 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings of landscapes, seascapes, and ordinary life that does not transparently wear some religion on its canvas, there is nevertheless the theme that no event, however small in the cosmic scheme of things, is not one of god's creations. In science and math, Newton and Leibniz were both wedded to their religions and the governing political-religious authorities. The interesting side of this relationship is that the arts are substantially funded by the political or religious authorities. On the payroll of the communities in which he lived, Bach was essentially a public servant, and his professional obligations included providing for church music and music at other public events. True, there were some private, secular gigs on the side at coffee houses and other venues that provided remuneration, but composing and performing sacred music for church services was the priority of his employment. For musicians today whose music might be said to be inspired by the sacred, funding from political and religious authorities or sources is not all that significant. One has to wonder, however, whether the world would ever know Bach's canons and fugues if it was not for that system of public funding of the arts that existed in centuries past.
An aspect of Christoph Wolff's biography of J.S. Bach that intrigues the reader is the intellectual candor of the author. One of the learnings from this biography is that Bach's life, while documented in some ways, is not well-documented in other important details. Furthermore, much of Bach's written musical scores have not survived. Bach himself did not write down much about his life. And Wolff admits in his preface, "Thus, conjectures and assumptions are unavoidable, and this book necessarily calls for numerous occurrences of 'probably,' 'perhaps,' 'maybe,' and the like." If only the writers, editors and redactors of the Bible and its commentators --- Hebrew and Christian portions alike --- had the courage to muster that kind of intellectual courage to admit that their sources were not so well documented and could not bring themselves to confess that they were forced to speculate and conjecture, and that some of what they were retelling was, quite frankly, "probably" the stuff of fiction. There are a lot of "probablys," "would haves," and "perhaps'" in this telling of the life of J.S. Bach. Still, it is a credible biography; there is enough of a contemporaneous historical record about his life, and the written works he left behind that support the telling of this story, despite what is missing.
A highlight of Bach's life in music, in my view, is his constant rewriting and even "morphing" of earlier musical works. One could only learn this from an expert on Bach. Wolff refers to this as Bach's constant pursuit of musical perfection. This is not all that unusual in modern times: songs written in today's musical genres do not always sit still; they have ways of evolving. Bach evolved his music to suit different instruments and perhaps a different listener. His secular music borrowed from his sacred music. Wolff conjectures that in borrowing from previous compositions, Bach was economizing in meeting his obligations to his employers, essentially saying that there was no way that Bach could truly create a novel composition week-in and week-out for decades without borrowing from earlier investments of creative time. Wolff is probably correct. This fact also allows Wolff to conclude that while we do not have every written composition that Bach created, we probably have the core of his work, enough to conclude that, for his time, Bach was the most inventive musical composer of his time, whose works resembled no other composer.
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