Alan Jacobs

The Mind’s Eye would have been a disappointment had it looked no further for clinical material. But there’s a redeeming fifth case: Oliver Sacks. And when the author steps into the clinical spotlight the book comes to life. His well-documented absent-mindedness, ]what is variously called my “shyness”, my “reclusiveness”, my “social ineptitude”, my “eccentricity”, even my “Asperger’s syndrome”’, can, he thinks, be put down to lifelong face blindness. A rare consequence of brain injury, it is now understood to be quite common in the general population, varying in severity from habitual misrecognition of acquaintances to not recognising one’s own children. Sacks’s problem seems to fit at the more severe end of the spectrum, among those who are discombobulated even by their own reflection. On one occasion, he finds himself grooming his beard in a restaurant window only to realise that ‘what I had taken to be my reflection… was in fact a grey-bearded man on the other side of the window, who must have been wondering why I was preening myself in front of him’.

The language that has been developed over the centuries for talking about the mental and spiritual side of life is not some feeble, amateurish 'folk-psychology'. It is a highly sophisticated toolbox adapted for just that difficult purpose. The vocabularies of the sciences are also well adapted for their own purposes, but this means they cannot be used anywhere else. Physical truths can only be answers to physical questions. Indeed, the great achievement of Galileo, Newton and their friends consisted in narrowing the scope of those sciences to concentrate them on topics where their methods were wholly suitable. People who are now led by that success to treat them as a panacea for other kinds of problem are being naive.

The moral of all this is, I think, that Hitchens is simply wrong. The poison does not come from religion itself but from political misuses of it. The kinds of idea that we class as religious actually range from the excellent to the awful, from the poisonous to the most nourishing. But there is a general tendency for new imaginative ways of understanding life to emerge from religious thinking – that is, from thoughts which go beyond current human horizons. This is bound to happen simply because they have quite new kinds of truth to convey. Thus the Greeks, when they came to grasp the idea that the earth as a whole bountifully supplied all their needs, worshipped it under the name of Gaia, mother of gods and men. And thus Pythagoras, when he discovered a new mathematical order pervading phenomena from the heavens to the laws of sound, naturally conceived that order as something greater than humanity; something therefore that should be deeply venerated.

In this way many of the moral insights we value highly today – for instance, the coherence of the cosmos and the value of the individual soul, as well as the conviction that All is Number – have originally been shaped in religious contexts. If we decide to drop those contexts as obsolete we lose half the meaning of the ideas themselves.

— Mary Midgley

And increasingly, Facebook is performing the social filtering for us, absolving us of the guilt implicit in that as well. Social media structures communication between friends so that the responsibility for listening — inescapably built into earlier mediums that structured talk between friends as person-to-person — is modulated into a vaguer injunction to respond if and when you feel like it. Because status updates and the like are not addressed to anyone specific, they don’t generate an obligation in anyone specific to pay attention. The messages instead compete in an attention marketplace that Facebook’s interface creates and moderates, in which the currency is comments and ‘likes’ and the other click-driven responses that the company can measure and process algorithmically.

The restoration mind-set of the next Christians is similar to that of the early Christians lived. Both are consumed with loving their neighbors, serving their communities, being good citizens, and sharing the ‘good news’ of Jesus. This way of being Christian dominated during the first 300 years of the church’s existence, which was not-so-coincidentally a time of great expansion for the faith.

Given this tendency, it makes sense that we often rely intuitively on external rules to help ourselves out. A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychologist at M.I.T., did a fascinating experiment examining one of the most basic external tools for dealing with procrastination: deadlines. Students in a class were assigned three papers for the semester, and they were given a choice: they could set separate deadlines for when they had to hand in each of the papers or they could hand them all in together at the end of the semester. There was no benefit to handing the papers in early, since they were all going to be graded at semester’s end, and there was a potential cost to setting the deadlines, since if you missed a deadline your grade would be docked. So the rational thing to do was to hand in all the papers at the end of the semester; that way you’d be free to write the papers sooner but not at risk of a penalty if you didn’t get around to it. Yet most of the students chose to set separate deadlines for each paper, precisely because they knew that they were otherwise unlikely to get around to working on the papers early, which meant they ran the risk of not finishing all three by the end of the semester. This is the essence of the extended will: instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.

I resemble that remark

A visit to the shores of lullabies,
Where Archimedes, counting grains of sand,
Is seated in his half-filled universe
And sorting out the grains by shape and size.
Above his head a water-ceiling sways,
Beneath his feet the ancient magma-flows
Of metamorphic, underearth plateaus
Are moving in slow motion, all in play,
And all is give-and-take, all comes and goes,
And hush now, all is well now, close your eyes,
Distant ocean-engines pulverize
Their underwater mountains, coarse to fine,
In granite-crumbs and flakes of mica gold
And particles of ancient olivine;
And water waves sweep back and forth again,
Materialize, and dematerialize,
Retrieving counted grains and dropping more
Uncounted grains in heaps along a shore
Of granite-particled infinities,
Amassing shores for drawing diagrams.
Behind him, on the shores of Sicily,
His legendary works accumulate:
Discarded toys, forgotten thought-machines,
And wonder-works, dismantled on the sand:
A ship, reduced to ashes by a mirror;
A planetarium in hammered bronze
Whose heaven rotates, taking its own measure;
The fragment of a marble monument —
A sphere inscribed within a cylinder —
Forgotten, overgrown with stems and leaves;
A vessel, filled with water to the brim
To weigh Hiero’s golden diadem,
But emptied on its side now, overturned;
And numbers fading in papyrus scrolls
He sent by ship to Alexandria:
Approximated ratios glimpsed within
The wondrously unlocked square root of 3;
And 3.141 … : a treasure-store
Marcellus cannot plunder; cannot use;
And 1.618 … : the weightless gold
No scales are needed for, no lock and key,
Ratio divine, untouchable in war;
And block-and-tackle pulleys; water-screws
And other spirals, angles, cubes, and spheres;
The iron lever rusting at his feet
A relic from the time he told the King
Assembled with the court: Give me a place
Whereon to stand, and I will move the earth;
And as he spoke, another earth appeared,
One grain among innumerable grains
And nearly weightless as a grain of sand,
And high above the giant fortress walls
Of Syracuse his mental catapults
Are hurling mental boulders one by one
At Roman warships sinking in the bay —
Far off, a shipwreck; up close, bubble foam
Sweeps forward on the sand, sweeps off again
With remnants of a Roman war machine —
Even the Roman sailors, disembarked
From sinking ships, and rowing toward the beach
In lifeboats set afloat from battleships
Now sinking in the distance — even they
Are falling fast asleep above their oars,
And undulating ropes lash in the wakes
And bob along, the ropes asleep as well —
All drifting past the legendary shores
Where Archimedes counts the grains of sand …
It never ends, this dire need to know,
This need to see a diagram unfold
In silent angles, drawing in the sand,
This need to see a diagram achieve
Self-organizing equilibrium
Among the mica flakes and granite-crumbs,
This need to fill the universe with sand,
And all in play, with everything in play,
And every night before he falls asleep
In cold and heavy sand, he leans to brush
The clinging sand-grains from his naked feet
And myriads appear, self-multiply,
And multiply again: Let this be X,
Let this be X times X, and let there be
More myriads of zeroes grain by grain
In sacks of sand where one by one by one
More sacks of sand are filled with other grains,
Let numbers coalesce and re-emerge
Unharmed by coalescence and unchanged;
And always let a higher number form
And every single number have a name:
Ten to the power of the sixty-third;
A vigintillion grains of sand, times eight;
Eight vigintillion, plus or minus one:
A number for the demiurge to ponder,
Sprawling in his sleep among the bags
Of sand grains pouring into Syracuse
Where Archimedes draws a diagram …
It never ends, this dire need to know,
Even beneath the smoking sword of war
A Roman soldier raises overhead
Mid-thought, mid-diagram, even before
He finishes the drawing at his feet,
Even before he has the chance to say:
Let whosoever can, complete — but then
A soldier lifts the smoking sword of war,
And he’s forgotten what he meant to say.
Black heavens, pouring into Syracuse
In granite-particled infinities
Amass another shoreline at his feet.
He falls asleep in cold and heavy sand
And finishes his drawing in his sleep
Before the edges of the lines he drew
Begin to crumble grain by grain by grain
With everything in play, and all in play
A myriad appears; self-multiplies;
And waves of water sweep around and through,
Retrieving counted grains and dropping more
Uncounted grains in heaps in lullabies
Where Archimedes falls asleep and sees
A grain of sand appear: the final grain;
Ten to the power of the sixty-third,
Times eight; the sum complete before his eyes;
And then another grain is added: One;
A sack of sand tips over, pours away,
Black heavens pouring out infinities
Of sleeping islands, sleeping Sicilies,
And water waves appear and sweep away
Forgotten wonder-works and thought-machines,
And heaven revolves, a planetarium
For calculating distances between
The heavenly stars and measuring their size,
All twirling in slow motion, slower still,
And slower still, and all is sleep and peace,
The universe asleep before his eyes
Beside an ocean moving in its sleep,
And distant ocean-engines pulverize
Their underwater mountains, coarse to fine,
And water waves appear and disappear
Retrieving counted grains and leaving more
Uncounted grains in heaps in lullabies,
Where Archimedes, counting grains of sand,
Is seated in his half-filled universe,
And sorting out the grains by shape and size,
And all is well now, hush now, close your eyes,
And one … by one … by one … by one … by one …
The flakes of mica gold and granite-crumbs
Materialize, and dematerialize.

(here)

Ms. Hartsock, 23, diligently typed notes. A hard-working student who maintains an A average, she was frustrated by the online format. Other members of her discussion group were not pulling their weight, she said. The one test so far, online, required answering five questions in 10 minutes — a lightning round meant to prevent cheating by Googling answers.

In a conventional class, ‘I’m someone who sits toward the front and shares my thoughts with the teacher,’ she said. In the 10 or so online courses she has taken in her four years, ‘it’s all the same,’ she said. ‘No comments. No feedback. And the grades are always late.’

As her attention wandered, she got up to microwave some leftover rice.

the book in the browser

[vimeo 15826571 w=400 h=300]

The Booki.sh reader from Inventive Labs on Vimeo.

Via if:book.

At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.