Cosmopolitanism

It was Evan Thompson's thought provoking Why I Am Not a Buddhist that originally made me aware of Kwame Anthony Appiah's philosophy of "universality plus difference".  Since that discovery I managed to put two and two together and realize that Appiah is also the author of the NYT column The Ethicist, which I have occasionally enjoyed without much noting who was playing the role of Anne Landers.  So, despite the fact that I was underwhelmed by Evan's presentation of the philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, when I saw the book at the cat bookstore I figured I should give it a chance  And ... I remain underwhelmed, at least philosophically speaking.  Though I enjoyed and would happily recommend the book.

Appiah is an elegant writer, especially if you're into the whole brevity thing.  One fairly wizzes through his clear arguments and entertaining stories.  There's a great deal of food for thought in both these aspects of the book, and they are woven together especially tightly in this case.  Appiah grew up in Ghana, went to school in the UK, and now teaches in Amerika, so he tells engaging stories about the many cross-cultural ethical dilemmas he has navigated over the years.  Meanwhile, he argues that despite all these cultural differences, we still share so much that we are almost always capable of understanding, tolerating, and even learning from one another, if only we are willing to put a little effort into building what my meditation teacher would call a "universal translator".  So it's both argument and lived experience together that lead him to a slogan for cosmopolitanism that he draws from one of Terence's plays -- "I am human: nothing human is alien to me".  It's an attractive idea that expresses confidence in the possibility of a coexistence without conclusion, an openness that doesn't require agreement on universals (beyond an attitude of openness).  We are all different; but we are similar enough to appreciate and live with that difference.

While this is an attractive vision, I think it's rather underwhelming as philosophy proper.  What Appiah lays out is more properly a matter of religion or politics or just plain common sense.  And much of the philosophical argument in the book is aimed at undermining the various narratives we hear that purport to order all values in light of the one true universal value.  Value-free scientism, religious and racial fundamentalisms, and even all-encompassing theories of colonial cultural appropriation are critically examined and found lacking.  Much of the task of building a cosmopolitan outlook lies in the negative work of loosening up the boundaries and deconstructing the reasons we erect to separate ourselves from the rest of humanity and reinforce our own identities.  In essence, Appiah is just trying to extend the innate moral sensibilities that evolved from our tribal ancestry to cope with a much larger modern world.  This doesn't require him to build a new ethical philosophy (and in fact he is quite skeptical of rationalist ethical philosophy) but mostly just to remove the obstacles we constantly erect to feeling interest in and compassion for people who are different from us.  So in the end it's not really a critique of the book to call it philosophically underwhelming.  Whether or not you consider it our 'natural' tendency, the cultivation of kindness to strangers is something that requires practice, not theory. 

The Phenomenon of Life

I've enjoyed several of architect Christopher Alexander's other books, especially A Pattern Language, and I've always been curious about his 4 volume magnum opus The Nature of Order.  So I was pretty excited when I found a (slightly) discounted copy of volume 1 at the used bookstore.  Unfortunately, as so often happens with magnum opera, here he jumps the shark.  I got something out of reading it and I even share many aspects of the same vision.  But his attempt to create a grand unified theory of everything is too long, too abstract, and too full of breathless insistence on its own profundity to make me want to read the other 3 volumes. 

The basic idea is simple and lovely -- architecture is about bringing space to life.  In retrospect, we can see this as a simple way of describing what the patterns in A Pattern Language are meant to do.  By paying attention to these simple functional patterns we can create spaces that are more pleasant to live in because they respond to many natural human needs.  The resulting spaces don't merely solve a particular problem but weave together a container or a frame that contributes to our overall mood and vitality day after day.  So the goal is to create spaces that create more life, spaces that amplify life instead of disciplining it.  This seems like a fine theory of architecture (and fits remarkably well with Cache's theory in Earth Moves or Stewart Brand's discussion in How Buildings Learn) that lets us clearly articulate some aspects of what's gone wrong with modern architecture.  The fanciest postmodern facades routinely contain nothing more than a set of boxes, optimized for properties such as cost of construction or maximum workplace productivity, boxes which remain utterly indifferent to the actual experience of the human beings they discipline.  At its worst, this 'architecture' actually aims to produce a space that reduces the amount of life that can happen in it, and even at its best it assumes that life is something which can only be properly ascribed to the occupants of space, rather than the space itself, as if our outer context had nothing to do with our inner experience.  Even quite high end contemporary architecture frequently produces these big neutral rooms that function like a sack of space, a container fit for potatoes not people, and then dress this failure up in stylized features that look good in magazines.  The real art here lies not in the architecture, but in the sculpture or the photography, or perhaps simply the marketing.  It frequently seems like we've forgotten that architecture is for living in.

Alexander's goal, however, is not simply to define architecture, or critique other pretenders to the throne (although there is quite a lot of the latter here).  He wants to systematically explore how to create spaces which are alive.  Which brings us to the tricky question that occupies all of volume 1 -- what do me mean by life?  With this book, Alexander tries to go well beyond the somewhat vague and intuitive way of posing this question that I've started with.  He wants to literally define the life of a space in an 'objective' manner, as if the space itself had a sort of structural life inherent in its geometry, irrespective of the humans who might happen to occupy it.  In fact, in some sense, Alexander's vision has no place in it for living humans per se, since in the end nothing exists for him but space itself.  This would be the supposedly objective medium that nevertheless has a quasi-mystical capacity for arranging itself into subjects or, as Alexander terms them, "centers".  These centers are not pre-existing entities, but arise as nodes in a field constituted by smaller centers.  But then they also react back upon the smaller nodes that they unify, modifying those centers, and hence modifying themselves in a perpetual feedback loop.  It's turtles both all the way up and all the way down.  It's an empty non-dual world where all of space is alive to varying degree, and "life" is little more than a measure of the sort of "density of space" in a certain region.  Thus when Alexander talks about architecture bringing a space to life, he means it literally -- architecture is the queen of the arts and sciences because it manipulates space directly, and the architect is a kind of god because they create life through this manipulation.  Like I said, it's a theory of everything. 

Setting aside the architectural hubris of it, I find the general idea quite attractive.  It's very similar to Deleuze's idea of folding, or Joanna Macy's understanding of dependent origination as a form of systems theory, or Simondon's crystallization schema for individuation. All of these are descriptions of the way something arises out of nothing in the manner of a vortex.  And they all share an infinite recursive structure  both in spatial and causal terms (what Macy calls mutual causality).  Insofar as I have a philosophy, this is pretty much it.  So Alexander adds another metaphor we can use to think about how ontology works -- he thinks of it as the production of centers.  He also fleshes out an interesting list of 15 ways that centers can interact to amplify one another and even create new centers.  I'm unclear how useful these would be for creating architecture in the colloquial sense (for those purposes, we might be better served by treating them as 15 categories that encompass his 253 pattern language), but they do provide food for thought.  Perhaps in principle anything can happen in mutual causality, but in practice there do seem to be certain ontological patterns that frequently repeat.

Why then, if I like this vision, am I not going to read volumes 2-4?  Ultimately, the problem isn't with Alexander's vision, but his articulation of it.  While he endlessly insists on how this view of the world is profoundly different, he spends a lot of time trying ineffectively to justify it using the same old philosophical concepts of 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity' that it clearly explodes.  So, for example, he spends forever telling us how life is an 'objective' property of a region of space that can measured mathematically.  But this mathematics is pretty sketchy, which of course is hardly surprising given the complexity of the question and the recursive creativity of life.  Having failed to convincingly calculated objective life, the text promptly pivots to assure us that the best test of life is actually the "mirror-of-self" test, a completely subjective measure that asks whether space A or space B is more like a "picture of our deepest self".  We are to assume that this will somehow just naturally agree with the previous objective measure, even though we are simultaneously cautioned that it takes a lot of introspection to perform this test correctly.  All of this risks legislating that what is 'natural' or 'living' is simply whatever Alexander likes.  In fairness, he contends throughout that, at bottom, we all basically like the same stuff, or at least feel alive in the same spaces.  And while I think there's a lot of truth in that, it's pretty clear it doesn't make for a scientific consensus.  If I tell you that 75% of physicists think theory B is better, you'd hardly consider the matter settled, and yet Alexander seems routinely willing to dismiss this level of diversity of opinion about his own measures as due to people just not getting it.  So ultimately the problem is that these elaborate justifications of his theory take up a lot of space and yet actually end up detracting from it for everyone.  They won't change the mind of the 'hard-nosed' materialists who will remain unconvinced that the universe contains anything but marbles.  And for those of us who have already joined the choir, they simply get in the way, muddy the point with amateur philosophy, and dilute what we can take from his ideas by spreading them out of four times as many pages as were required.  I find I'm slowly becoming more curmudgeonly with long books -- if you can't say it in 150 pages, you probably don't know what's truly important to say, and if you find yourself talking for 1500 pages, something has clearly gone wrong.  Don't give me your magnum opus that sums up everything.  Give me a single idea worked to completion.

Breakfast of Champions

I decided to quickly breeze through this one because I just saw Alan Rudolph's cinematic version.  Though the film was a complete commercial flop it actually had some interesting elements that reminded me of things like Fear and Loathing and Schizopolis.  I can't say it was a great movie, but it was kinda entertaining, and this is exactly how I would describe the novel as well. It's certainly not one of Vonnegut's best.  It's too scattered and indulgently meta-fictional to not feel a bit like a well know writer trying to come up with just anything to publish.  But it's also got a few great laugh-out-loud moments that only the non-author of "Wear Sunscreen" could have come up with. 

The Anomaly

Thanks for this one goes to another esteemed colleague from Tejas, Dr. Maddog, who recently suggested that I might find Hervé Le Tellier's novel interesting.  And while I'm not sure describing it as a "novel' is completely accurate (Le Tellier called it a scoubidou of short stories), I definitely enjoyed and would recommend the book.  The plot centers on the gradual revelation of the eponymous anomaly, and there's little point in discussing it without giving away the central conceit.  However, part of the pleasure of the story lies in initially knowing nothing about how it's structured, so ...

SPOILER ALERT

The anomaly is a duplicated plane together with all its passengers.  Air France flight 006 from Paris to New York lands in March, and then an identical flight literally falls out of the sky again in June.  Accordingly, the novel is broken into three parts -- the stories of the various passengers before the anomaly has been revealed to them, the comic relief provided by the deep state machinations that bring the two sets of passengers together once the anomaly is discovered, and the aftermath of this strange duplication.  The first part is an interesting stylistic exercise because each character's story is told through the lens of a particular type of genre fiction (ie. thriller, drama, sci-fi, psychological novel, etc ...).  It makes for a very fast paced and interesting way of setting up what we gradually see coming -- something about the flight they took back in March unites these otherwise unrelated and unsuspecting characters.  It's a neat trick on Le Tellier's part because introducing so many characters so quickly might otherwise have left us confused and bored rather than off-balance but intrigued.  The second part, as I say, is mostly comic relief.  Imagine Douglass Adams or Mel Brooks describing the Deep State tripping over itself in an effort to contain such an anomalous event.  The third part is naturally the most interesting bit, since it explores the classic literary theme of the double or doppelgänger.  Here, Le Tellier pursues the main metaphor that guides our interpretation of the anomaly -- it lends credence to Nick Bostrom's version of the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation.  Many folks don't think about the connection between this modern version of the double (or n-tuple) and the long tradition of thinking about twins, though, as Le Tellier makes clear, he is not one of them.  Modern simulation believers tend to treat the hypothesis as a scientific one, when in fact its main function -- reiterated from mythology down to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche -- is ethical.  And this is clearly what the third part of the novel is all about.  What exactly would you learn from meeting your double? 

What most simulation hypothesis adherents fail to understand is that a duplication of identity in time and space meant to prove that there is a glitch in the matrix can never be a physical fact.  But thinking about such a duplication has long served as a lens with which to examine our concept of identity and our notion of reality.  This has been true ever since the Buddha compared the body to a lump of foam and consciousness to a magic trick.  The prehistory of this idea that there is something illusory about reality basically encompasses all of history.  The modern simulation hypothesis is amusing because it simultaneously taps into the deep root of this intuition, at the same moment that it betrays it.  Because the simulation is based on analogy to the contemporary computer, we immediately assume that it must be run by some programmer and on some hardware. These seem to be the necessary correlates of the idea that we are nothing but software.   Inevitably, this analogy leads directly to the establishment, explicit or not, of a concept of "base" reality composed of both an ideal base 'knower' and a material base 'known'. 

But of course this concept is nonsense; the materialist philosophy this concept relies on is self-contradictory, and there's no way we could ever know if we were in base reality  By contrast, just about any experience can suggest to us that we are a sort of simulation.  The encounter with a double obviously provides an extreme example because the individual identity we all subjectively feel literally provides the model for our very concept of identity. If there can be more than one me, then I am immediately forced to rethink my innate conviction that I am a unique, atomic, self-existent entity and consider a world that is capable of producing multiple copies of my self.  This is why we reach so naturally for the simulation hypothesis in this instance.  

Notice though, what's actually happening here.  We are simply perceiving two of the 'same' thing.  But this very act implies some sort of consciousness that the things are not the same, otherwise we would not say that there are two of them.  To be exactly the same, they would have to perfectly overlap in space and time and not just in DNA and personality as Le Tellier's characters do.  In which case we would not perceive two separate things but a single one.  Perceiving two things that are 'the same' is hardly the stuff of science fiction though.  It's our most commonplace experience.  We are constantly fabricating the identity of all things when what we are given is ceaseless flux.  When we say that we see two of something it's a sort of shorthand -- we take it for granted that if we look more carefully, we'll find these things differ in some way, and that we can later go on to specify how the two distinct sets of phenomena were similar enough to treat as the same for certain purposes.  In other words, embedded within the very concept of repetition is the notion that the identity of things are constructed, that the solidity of objects is not innate but depends on context, and that our perception of reality is changeable.  These are all observations that most everyone would agree with but that we all constantly overlook in everyday experience.  The power of the anomaly lies in the way it forces these truths on us by showing us they apply even to the one thing we think cannot be constructed -- our self.  But in principle, every experience can be anomalous.  Indeed, we might think of our brain's main job as to avoid seeing every experience as anomalous so as not to be overwhelmed by it.  But take some drugs or sit very still for a long time and watch the way your perception changes.  All of our experience and all of the things in it are constructed, fabricated, and hence empty.  The only thing you need to do to observe this is watch.  So the world that is capable of producing multiple variations of me is not some post-human hyper-technoligcal simulation, but this very world, which is already in itself a sort of simulation, a "star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightening in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream".

So naturally, this brings us to the question of what we can learn from the shock of meeting our double and seeing our reality and our identity as a construction.  The answer is probably obvious -- we can, if we choose, imagine reconstructing it some other way.  The theme of duplication constantly illustrates a world of possible variation.  Whether due to chance or wisdom, we could be different.  This is often the central point in doppelgänger stories like Dostoevksy's The Double or Notes from Underground where the hero is poised on a knife edge of self-aggrandizement and self-abasement, or Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, where the author's recreation of the Quixote is, "verbally identical, but ... almost infinitely richer".  And it is certainly the deeper significance of Nietzsche's myth of the Eternal Return.  We have lived this exact moment before, indeed innumerable times before, down to its finest details of feeling and motivation.  But what exactly is this moment that we are reliving?  And is our awareness that it is being re-lived a source of joy or the greatest weight?  The answers, according to Le Tellier, vary.  Some of us love our double as ourselves (Slimboy), and some of us need divorce proceedings (Lucie).  Some of us make a change (André) and some of us repeat the same sorrow (David).  And if we look carefully in the mirror, we'll probably find that most of us go through all of these emotions every single anomalous day. 

Built From Broken

I think someone from GMB must have recommended Scott Hogan's no-nonsense guide to keeping the body running.  Since our library had a copy I perused it very quickly and found it quite interesting.  While I haven't double-checked any of the references and investigated the quality of the studies Hogan cites, it does appear to live up to its subtitle: A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body.  The focus throughout is not on how to build the most muscle mass or train for any specific sport, but on what really counts as we get older -- the ability to maintain a wide range of motion in a variety of circumstances.  Hogan provides some scientific backing to an empirical conclusion I had already arrived at; this basically comes down to how well your joints and connective tissue function.  So what we really need to train is joint health.  

Coming at fitness from this slightly different angle doesn't necessarily imply a huge change in the exercises we do.  The book is filled with pretty standard looking stuff.  But knowing what the prime target is, and knowing something about the way joints differ from muscles in their response to training, can definitely change how we do many of these exercises.  The takeaway isn't earth shattering nor terribly different from the approach GMB constantly cultivates.  We want to move more often, with greater attention to the details of our exercise, through a greater range of motion (with perhaps a lighter load), and above all, more slowly (especially in the eccentric phase).  In addition to explaining why these principles are important to our joints and giving us a list of exercises, Hogan describes a 4 week workout program that includes an interesting periodization.  Though the exercises stay the same, each week is devoted to a specific goal like "connective tissue remodeling", "hypertrophy", "strength", and "endurance plus energy loading".  The changing goals correspond to changes in not only sets and reps and weights, but in how we perform the exercises.  Since I just finished the book, I can't comment on how effective this workout program is for healing painful joints and preventing injury, but it sounds plausible and I'm eager to give it a shot.

The Volcano Lover

Even though she's gotta be high in the running for the sexiest female intellectual of all time, I'd only ever read a few of Susan Sontag's essays.  So when the cat bookstore kindly furnished a copy of one of the novels, I figured I had to give it a shot.  I found it a bit slow going for the first hundred pages or so but it gradually grew on me.  While Sontag never makes this obvious, and doesn't even tell you the names of the characters, it turns out she's written a historical novel.  

The plot consists in the real lives of three famously intertwined characters from 17th century English history -- William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the kingdom of Naples, his second wife Emma Hamilton, the most famous and notorious beauty of her age, and Horatio Nelson, the British answer to Napolean, the most famous war hero of his day.  As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia articles, the plot is historically accurate, and Sontag's fiction lies only in her narrative attempt to get inside the experience of these characters.  This accuracy also accounts for why the novel begins relatively slowly, and as a meditation on the art of collecting.  Sir William was one of those Englishman who "discovered" the beautiful antiquities of "backward" regions that today populate the British Museum (such as the Portland Vase).  This placid existence of a wealthy collector accounted for the first 50 years of Sir William's life.  Things only changed when, after his first wife died, he made his greatest find and discovered Emma, a former prostitute pawned off on him by his cousin.  Emma turned out to be not merely a beautiful trophy wife, but so remarkably intelligent and creative that she quickly became the talk of Europe despite her scandalous history.  Despite an age difference of 30 years, the two married and lived quite happily for many years.  Until Horatio Nelson turned up on the doorstep one day, fresh from his historic victory in the Battle of the Nile but desperately ill and in need of nursing.  Thus began a passionate affair between Emma and Nelson that Sir William, now in his dotage, simply accepted as inevitable.  At this point the center of gravity of the novel naturally starts to shift away from Sir William, and becomes more of a reflection on gender relations circa 1800.  Sontag shines most in the way she illuminates the psychology of the asymmetric situation you can easily discover by examining the wikipedia articles.  A huge chunk of Emma's is taken up by her decade long involvement with Nelson, but Emma barely merits a passing mention in the much longer Nelson article, despite the fact that she bore him a child and that the two lived in open sin for many years while Nelson remained married to another woman.  History demands that both the hero and the temptress fit in a certain mold, and Sontag imagines how ill-fitting this must have been for these larger than life characters.

Finally, my favorite part of the novel was the last 50 pages, which contain a lovely narrative twist (not to be confused with a plot twist) that I won't spoil.

A History of Mathematics

Back when I was working on the Leibniz project, I realized that I could do with a better grasp of the history of mathematics.  Deleuze was making all sorts of references to the development of the calculus that I mostly followed, but only more or less.  So, after a bit of research, I settled on this Boyer and Merzbach tome.  It definitely did help me better understand the way that the calculus was originally oriented around infinite series; this has mostly been lost in how it is taught today (well, at least how it was taught 30 years ago).  But I actually found that the most interesting part of the book was the first 300 pages leading up to the calculus.  It was fascinating to read about things like Mesopotamian sexagesimal fractions and the incredible work of Apollonius on the conics.  While it's a cliche, it really does give one a renewed appreciation of how far ahead of their time the Greeks were.  Unfortunately, even though I read it slowly and in small doses, I find it hard to recommend the book as a whole.  While I began reading pretty closely and working out some of the problems myself, by the final 150 pages or so I was mostly just skimming.  Once they go past Euler and Gauss you pretty much need a complete undergraduate education in pure math to follow much of the story.