With the Cryptonomicon in mind, I expected a story similarly overfraught with meandering detail, but found myself pleasantly surprised. A well worked out future world, centered on changes in politics brought about by the development of nanotechnology, provides a nonintrusive background for a neo-victorian play on education and the value of the individuum that is as much fun as it is solid. While the psychology and character development, as is so unfortunately common in Science Fiction, take second stage after the geeky technostuff and the equally geeky ramifications of the technostuffs effects, the result is a delightful study. While the end is maybe a bit forced, this still makes me want to read Snowcrash now, Stephensons debut.

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I had heard that his movie was good, but I was surprised to find just how well this 1951 SciFi-Horror crossover has withstood the test of time. An intelligent script and believable characters, a stroy relying on try suspense instead of cheap effects, a truly frightening creature and well acted and filmed scenes all make this a gem worth remembering. While Carpenter’s remake, especially its intense atmosphere of paranoia, is superior in some ways, I would find it hard to compare the two overall. Which means that for its sheer age, Nyby’s version wins. Yay Nyby!
Don’t be mislead by the poster art, by the way, rarely have I seen a poster that was so far aesthetically and in content from the movie it represented.

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This could have been another movie using a feel-good story to enahnce understanding an accepance for a minority by depicting some of its members as struggling, but good humans-like-us. That is an approach that is both commendable for its beneficial impact on society mores and slightly suspicious for its tendency to avoid the more troubling aspects or consequences of the problem under study. On an abstract level this movie falls into this category, as the storyline feels improbably constructed from the standard ingredients of such fare, but the detail, and the performance of its leads, catapult it onto a different level. It’s too bad Huffman was up against Witherspoon’s more broadly appealing performance in Walk the Line at the Academy Awards.

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Watching movies about the holocaust, even – or especially – ones that are as well made as this one, is exhausting and disturbing, and I’m not entirely sure why I keep doing it again and again. Partly it’s the general feeling that an evil forgotten is one likely to be repeated, but there also is the irrational, yet very compelling obligation to understand the monstrosity which seems to stem from my being a member of the culture that committed this singular crime. These matters aside, this particular documentary, drawn from material collected for Spielberg’s Visual History Foundation, is masterfully composed and edited, and should be seen by many, including you.

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I’ll try and sum up yesterdays insane rant on the counter-materialism arguments from philosophy of mind a bit more neatly and readably.

There are other things wrong with the individual arguments, and I’ve pointed out a few of the fallacies in that post, but the main thread linking them all, is the technique of using a though experiment to prove a point on the mind. This, of course, is in a long philosophical tradition, and presumes that introspection is the best way to investigate the mind. Not so.

The arguments all run thusly: “Assume the mind is only X. Now imagine Y. See how in your imagination, the mind cannot be X? Case closed.” I believe all the arguments follow this scheme.
Imagine you know all about colour, now imagine seeing it for the first time, see how you didn’t imagine having that experience? Imagine knowing all about bats. See how that doesn’t make you imagine feeling like one?
Imagine working through an algorithm creating behaviour that seems to indicate understanding. See how you don’t imagine understanding what you’re doing?
Imagine the mind is physics. Now imagine the universe as it is, but without mind. See how that’s possible, showing that the mind is more than physical?

And on and on. These arguments can indeed show us the structure of our intuitions about the mind, which indeed is dualistic. But this intuition is but a small part of our actual minds, and not close to the most interesting. Moreover, to generalise the arguments to apply to all of the mind implies the assumption that our intiuitions about our own minds are always correct. Not only is there no logical reason to assume that, neuropsychology tells us that it is actually false. We are wrong about our minds all the time. Independent of their other shortcomings, none of the logical arguments against materialism works for this reason alone.

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Everyone’s favorite drama of swear and cuss is entering its third season, and judging from the opening episode, it’s going to be great. I have a hard time nailing down just exactly how they do it, but every moment of Deadwood’s reenacted history seems to be a goddam fucking delight. Partly, I think, this is due to the subtlety of plot and dialogue, that often lets you understand something said or done only much later, without making a fuss about such a resolution, as minor scripts might. And to a large part it’s the miraculous cast, Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen above all that lift this onto a plane all its own. Too bad the cokesnorting cocksuckers over at HBO cancelled the concluding fourth season and replaced it with a compromise. It’s a fucking disgrace. But for the time being, let’s enjoy season three, shall we?

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Jeanne Moreau’s sulking femme-fatale act is annoying to watch, and parts of the story don’t seem to make sense – why did Tavernier not escape through the floor after the elevator had gone almost all the way down to the ground floor? Why would a Jury let the murderer off easily, while being harsh on Moreau’s scheming wife? But these minor quibbles aside, it’s a very original story, and a very entertaining movie. As a window into history, I found the German characters, with their obvious postwar Wirtschaftswunder wealth and ruthless joviality particularly fascinating.

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I like the idea of multiplayer games, but this incarnation of it, with a rigid world full of unchanging story elements and a large number of people running around in it, doesn’t quite fulfill the promise. I’d like to see more interaction possibilities beyond the mere killing of monsters in a group, and some plasticity in the world makeup. As it is, the game is just a combination of chat and RPG. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing interesting about it, either.

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I consider this a great book, not so much because I agree with what Searle says in it. In fact, I don’t agree with hardly anything he says. But it does provide a nice, comprehensive introduction into the philosophy of mind, and it lists several recent major arguments in the field. Searle’s deliberately naive style, calling whole schools of thoughts “complete desasters”, is fun to read, and invites counterarguments. The downside might be that it encourages half baked criticism and opinionation much like what I’m putting down here. Did I say downside? Upside, I meant. So let’s start ranting.

The main thrust of his book is to provide an alternative to materialism and dualism, both of which Searle perceives as having failed to explain the mind. In the case of dualism, the arguments are hardly worth repeating, I’ll restrict myself to the main one, which is: if there is something that is distinct from the physical, how can it work as a causal agent or indeed, interact with the physical at all? Let’s leave it at that, dualism is a straw mean not worth beating on.

Much more interesting are the arguments against materialsm, in other words, the notion that the mental is nothing but the physical and identical with it. Cowardly shirking the technical arguments about type-identity and token-identity, for I admit a certain shakyness on the terminology, I find the rest of the bunch entirely unconvincing. Be it Mary the color scientist, the hapless bat whose experience we will never have, the Zombie arguments, the argument of history-without-mind, Searle’s own chinese room. All are designed to bring out an apparent contradiction, in effect saying: look, I assumed that the mental is the physical, and I arrive at an absurd or impossible conclusion, therefore it can’t be so.

For example, to pick one: assume we know everything there is to know about bat’s brains. Then we still don’t know what it’s like to be one, i.e. there is something about being a bat that all our knowledge doesn’t reveal to us. On a brief glance I see three things wrong with the argument. First, it’s not at all clear to me that it is possible to know everything there is to know about a bat’s brain. It might just turn out to be too complex a process to hold in a human mind. Second, I don’t see any evidence one way or the other that would allow me to conclude that knowing all there is to know about the bat would or would not allow me to have the experience. I think it’s unlikely, but as long as we don’t know what experiences are, arguing with hypothetical situations and claiming to know what experiences would and would not arise seems premature. Third, and most importantly, I’m pretty sure wanting to have the experience of being a bat is confusion. In a physical analogue, if I know everything there is to know about hydrodynamics and the physics of waves, will I physically be like a wave? More to the point, will the fact that I will not be physically like a wave prove there is something in addition to the physical about a wave? Some wavy-ness not capturable by any physical theory? Of course the answer is no, and the question is the result of a mixup: the theory is not the object.

Back to the bat: even if I could know all there is to know, and even if that didn’t give me access to everyhting it means to be feeling like a bat myself, all that says is that the actual object of my theory, the experience, exists independent of the theory. And it’s just silly shamanism to demand that we obtain properties of the described by describing it. The confusion arises because in the case of experiences the theory and its object seem to both be mental processes, but that is not relevant. The experience of the bat is a state of the bat’s brain, and of course I can’t be in that state. I’m not a bat’s brain, silly.

None of the other arguments work any better, they all are a mix of unfounded assumptions and unwarranted conclusions. The Chinese Room for example slyly axiomatically uses the common sense notion that following a bunch of cards will not produce understanding, and then, Heureka!, concludes triumphantly that algorithms can’t produce understanding. True, if you put it in as an assumption. Assume that they do, and suddenly the ficticious Searle in his room will shuffle cards and understand what he’s doing, whatever that means.

The main reason all these arguments have to be fallacious is that they try to deduce an empirical fact from first principles. Whether or not the mind is physical, algorithmical or reducible is an empirical question for neuroscience, and all the counterarguments tell us more about the internal structure of our minds, the things we take for granted and the things we can think than they do about these empirical facts. Searle sees this for some of the issues, but is blind to it whenever his own beliefs are concerned.

So his eternal mantra that the syntacic can’t cause the semantic, and his argument for freedom of will, based mostly on his hunch that nature wouldn’t have made us think we have freedom of choice if we didn’t, share their weaknesses with those of the strawmen of materialism criticism his naive realism originally set out to burn.

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Not much happens in this cute little comic, a bird investigates a human walking and napping in the woods, another bird gets eaten, and a snake behaves out of character of species, but the reduced, calm way its drawn makes this a little gem. The bird exploring the sleeping human is particularly endearing.

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