Category Archives: Pretty Good Posts

Wretched Refuse

January 29, 2006 – 8:27 pm

Here in New York City the Sanitation Department will pick up pretty much anything you leave out for them. Unwanted furniture, old stoves, Christmas trees, paint cans, wooden planks, TV sets, you name it – just leave it at curbside and it’s gone the next day, gobbled up by the big white truck’s insatiable hydraulic maw. But a while back I managed to find the one thing that the system chokes on:

By Malcolm | Also posted in Rubbish | Comments (1)

Dust

January 22, 2006 – 11:09 pm

Yesterday we had a visit from my mother-in-law, Lily Phillips. She has had quite a remarkable life – she grew up in Vienna in an educated family of Jewish heritage, and was separated from her parents just before the beginning of World War II. Although she was technically too old – she was already in her late teens – a place was found for her on the Kindertransport, and she was evacuated to England, where she worked, utterly displaced and alone, as a servant in a succession of strangers’ homes. After the war she made her way to New York City, where she was reunited with her parents, who had managed to escape the ovens as well, and where, as a talented artist, she found work as a comic-book illustrator – an extremely unusual occupation for a woman at the time. She may have been the only one. Lily is very intelligent and well-read, and has kept her mind active in her later years by taking courses in philosophy and literature at Hunter College. Widowed since 1982, she lives alone on East 72nd Street. Her late husband Randolph, himself an extraordinary man, was actually the first chairman of the Committee to Impeach Nixon, argued before the Supreme Court despite not being a member of the bar, and was the defendant in a landmark conscientious-objector case during WWII that set the precedent that objectors may refuse combat service on purely ethical, rather than religious grounds.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Marginalia | Comments (10)

Endpaper

January 21, 2006 – 4:20 pm

I’m fond of books. I tend to accumulate them, and at this point have between one and two thousand of them on shelves, in piles on the floor, and scattered about. But I do have to admit that they are bulky and old-fashioned. In a conversation yesterday with PubSub CEO Gus Spathis, he referred to an attachment to physical books as “quaint nostalgia”. There are few technologies – and let’s acknowledge that the printed word is a technological artifact – that have survived so long essentially unchanged. Books are large, they are heavy, and they are made at considerable cost from wood and cotton and soot. The information represented by a book is, by Information Age standards, completely sessile, and the hard drive of my laptop, which is smaller than almost any book, could easily hold the contents of even the most avid collector’s personal library.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (11)

Caught in the Web

January 20, 2006 – 10:33 pm

I am increasingly aware of how different my twenty-first century life is from the world I grew up in, and in fact from the life led by anyone more than a very few years ago. When I was a young boy, color televisions were a big deal. I remember the introduction of push-button telephones, audio cassettes, digital watches, and hand-held calculators. But the real revolution, of course, is the Internet.

I work as a software developer for a company that does Web search, so perhaps my immersion is deeper than some people’s, but I am noticing that it feels more and more odd to be “offline”. My life consists more and more of being seated at a computer, managing simultaneous streams of information – email, blog posts, online chess games, instant messages, Skype calls, PubSub alerts, news bulletins, desktop weather data, and so forth. Many times a day I wish to know something or other, and immediately retrieve the datum in question from some or other online source. I can swoop down on any part of the world with Google Earth.

Although this is a natural evolution – our success as a species is due above all to our gift for communication, and the Internet might well, I think, be on its way to being the wellspring of an emergent, collective human intelligence that will begin a new chapter in the history of mankind – we have also increased our risk of losing touch with the very real world around us and inside us.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Inner Work, Technology | Comments (2)

Your Attention, Please

January 15, 2006 – 9:14 pm

One of the things that people like to do is “boil down” the staggering complexity of the world into comprehensive rules and principles. Surprisingly, the world itself often cooperates by revealing itself to be, in fact, a rather orderly place that does indeed seem to behave according to laws that are simple enough for us to ferret out.

Some of the rules we have worked out are abstruse, detailed and complicated, yet have held up well under critical examination – quantum mechanics and general relativity come to mind – while others are vague generalities like “there’s a sucker born every minute” and “faint heart ne’er won fair lady”. Some are obviously wrong, like “a watched pot never boils”.

Sometimes we pick one thing and make it the central orgainizing principle of the world. My friend Bob Wyman, for example, has worked out a plausible system of ethics entirely based upon the idea of resisting entropy. Another friend, songwriter Larry Mcnally has written that “Love is everything – everything else is nothing.” He’s not the first to take that stance, but it’s a good song.

Well, I’m not immune to this temptation either, and sometimes I think that the fundamental currency in human affairs – the fungible coin in which the business of mankind is transacted – is attention.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Society and Culture, Inner Work | Comments (6)

Thin Skins

January 14, 2006 – 6:17 pm

Today the Washington Redskins are visiting the Seattle Seahawks for an NFL playoff game. The contest has been attended with the usual hype, but the sportswriters covering the game for the Seattle Times have faced a peculiar challenge – the paper has decided not to allow them to use the name “Redskins” more than once in their stories. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the only other obvious token by which to refer to the team is the name of their hometown, Washington, which happens also to be the the home state of the home team.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Society and Culture | Comments (6)

Mind Over Matter, Part II

January 11, 2006 – 11:16 pm

A recurring theme in here, and in some of the blogs I’m fond of visiting, is the mystery of consciousness. How is it that “mere” matter can become self-aware? Canmatter be the engine of consciousness at all, or does it merely serve as a temporary and intermittent host?

There seem to be three avenues by which people approach this mystery – philosophy, science, and mysticism. I have the intuitive conviction that they will, ultimately, give consistent answers – in other words they are all three digging toward the same hidden truth, though from different directions, and with different tools. My wish is to try to follow the progress on all three fronts, and to participate actively where I can.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Mind and Brain, Reason and Philosophy, Inner Work, Science | Comments (13)

Birds of a Feather

December 20, 2005 – 1:08 am

From Hans Zinsser’s scholarly and delightful book Rats, Lice, and History: Being a Study in Biography, Which, After Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable for the Preparation of the Lay Reader, Deals With the Life History of Typhus Fever comes the following:

More than any other species of animal, the rat and mouse have become dependent on man, and in doing so they have developed characteristics which are amazingly human. In the first place, like man, the rat has become practically omnivorous. It eats anything that lets it and – like man – devours its own kind, under stress. It breeds in all seasons and – again like man – it is most amorous in the springtime. It hybridizes easily, and, judging by the strained relationship between the black and the brown rat, develops social or racial prejudices against this practice. The sex proportions are like those among us. Inbreeding takes place readily. The males are larger, the females fatter. It adapts itself to all types of climates. It makes ferocious war upon its own kind, but has not, as yet, become nationalized. So far it has still stuck to tribal wars – like man before nations were invented. If it continues to ape man as heretofore we may, in a few centuries, have French rats eating German ones, or Nazi rats attacking Communist or Jewish rats; however, such a degree of civilization is probably not within the capabilities of any mere animal.

The book is lighthearted, erudite, and without question the best book about vermin and pestilence you have ever read.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Books | Comments (1)

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

December 13, 2005 – 12:19 am

I love the English language. I love its immense vocabulary, largest of them all. I love its rich history of assimilation, which began with multiple invasions of the Scepter’d Isle itself, continued with the Earth-girdling expansion of the Empire, and which, with English now the international language of science and commerce, shows no sign of abatement.

It is a tricky, idiosyncratic tongue, full of broken rules and irregular spellings, in which the same strings of letters can take a bewildering variety of pronunciations (consider cough, though, through, plough, and rough). But from the pen or tongue of a master – a writer such as Shakespeare, Churchill, Joyce, Nabokov, Perelman, Tennyson, Austen, Twain, Wodehouse, Dickens, Pope, Swift, Shelley – the English language can lilt, evoke, command, arouse, describe, amuse, exalt, gladden, inform, seduce, provoke, abash, and delight with incomparable beauty, power and nuance.

But the icing on the cake is Cockney rhyming slang.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Language | Comments (0)

Personality

December 11, 2005 – 9:39 pm

Here in the Western world, we tend to lionize those with the “big” personalities – the people who, brimming with confidence and untrammeled by self-doubt, bask in the glow of public attention as they go about their important business. They are the envy of all, and serve as models for the aspiring. Even the word “lionize” is telling – we admire the lion for his fierceness, courage, and power, but most of all for his dominance. The lion gets what he wants. Should we, then, be lions too, if we intend to get what we want? The answer is not so simple: it all depends on what we want.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Inner Work | Comments (5)

Please Don’t Spoil My Day,
I’m Miles Away

December 7, 2005 – 11:45 pm

A common idea in esoteric teachings is the notion that we live our lives too mechanically, that we are in fact in a kind of waking sleep. The notion seems silly at first. Of course we aren’t asleep! Sleep is what we do at night in our beds. During our busy days we are conscious, we are active, we are engaged. But consciousness is a tricky business, and one of its sneakier properties is that it can’t see its own edges. To put that another way, it takes consciousness to be aware of consciousness, and that means that unconsciousness cannot be aware of itself.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Mind and Brain, Reason and Philosophy, Inner Work | Comments (9)

Chess!

December 3, 2005 – 12:23 am

I love chess. I’ve been playing since I was just a little boy. I’m no master, but I can play a decent game, and every now and then I have played an excellent one.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Chess | Comments (3)

Five and Seven

December 2, 2005 – 12:22 am

It is easy for us to bustle though our busy lives without pausing to reflect that so much of our familiar and comfortable world was not created by us, but bequeathed to us by those who lived and died long before we took our cue to strut briefly upon the stage. Here in Gotham one tends to take the city itself for granted, as if it were given feature of the natural world, but if one stops to consider that every last brick, every nail, every floorboard, every window, every doorknob, every layer of paint in every one of the city’s innumerable structures, from the meanest toolshed to the loftiest tower, was carefully put in its place by some human hand, the scale of one’s indebtedness to those who went before us is almost ungraspable in its immensity. To these multitudes, almost all of them nameless and forgotten, we owe nearly everything – our cities, our nations, our languages, our religions, our music, our literature, our science, our mathematics, our art, our culture, and even the very bodies that we inhabit. I think it is worthwhile to dwell on this astonishing fact every so often.

From my remarkable friend George Beke, who might best be described as a cultural archeologist, a tireless scholar of the symbolic and esoteric artifacts of bygone times, comes an extraordinary insight into one of the most familiar features of our common cultural framework – the days of the week.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Southern Style

November 30, 2005 – 1:45 am

Visitors to this site (they already number in the tens, in just a few short months) may have noticed the “Martial Arts” link category over in the sidebar. As of this writing there are four links, of which three-quarters seem to be about something called “Hung Ga”, or “Hung Gar”.

So what’s the deal? I shall explain.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Martial Arts | Comments (1)

Welcome to the Machine

November 21, 2005 – 11:59 pm

I’m fond of metaphors. In fact – with apologies to Will Rogers – I never metaphor I didn’t like. Here’s one that seems rather apt to me lately:

Life is a Pachinko machine.

By Malcolm | Also posted in General | Comments (1)

You’ve Got Questions? They’ve Got Answers.

November 9, 2005 – 1:23 am

I’ve been spending a lot of time around philosophers lately, and I’ve noticed something.

Before I begin, let me say, for purposes of full disclosure, that although I have had a lifelong interest in philosophy, I was raised by two scientists. My mother is a physical anthropologist, and my father, an immunologist, did the research that led to the eradication of rH hemolytic disease. He was in fact recently considered for the Nobel Prize.

So, despite my deep and genuine admiration (envy, even, on occasion) for the purity and discipline of the trained philosophical mind, sometimes I can feel a bit, shall we say, conflicted. And although what we now call science (a relatively recent arrival) was, in its infancy, known as “natural philosophy”, science and philosophy are two different things entirely.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Reason and Philosophy | Comments (9)

Mind over Matter, Part I

October 27, 2005 – 11:35 pm

For many years I have been curious about consciousness. It is something that most people never think much about, but when you begin to wonder about it it is hard to let the subject go. Consciousness is at the same time the most familiar phenomenon there is, and the oddest of all. We give it up every night and regain it each morning, without wondering how such a change might be possible. We know that consciousness is bound, somehow, to our bodies (and, we assume, not to the ordinary objects of the world), but we cannot begin to imagine how such a binding might be arranged. Consciousness can be aware of itself, but unconsciousness cannot, and so we do not see the “edges” of our consciousness, as we can demonstrate by trying to observe ourselves in the act of falling asleep. Our experiences of our lives in the fleeting present, and of the memories that are all we have of the past, are dependent for their very existence upon our our consciousness.

As reader of these pages will know, I follow quite closely the conversation at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website. Lately Bill has treated his visitors to a good hard look at the philosophical treatment of several aspects of consciousness, such as qualia, dualism-vs.-physicalism, and intentionality. I highly recommend his site to any readers who are curious about the various views that animate this discussion; Bill’s blog is a rara avis in philosophical discourse: simultaneously scholarly, engaging, and accessible. He also attracts a respectable ensemble of readers and commenters.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Mind and Brain, Reason and Philosophy | Comments (3)

Shining Star

October 9, 2005 – 12:31 am

Here is a remarkable image. It is the blazing surface of our Sun.

Each of the small granular regions in the picture is roughly the size of Texas. The Earth would fit comfortably within the large sunspot in the center.

Although they appear black in this image, sunspots are dazzlingly bright, as bright as lightning. It is only by contrast to the surrounding photosphere that they seem dark.

It is easy to look at such an image and marvel at it as an unusual and strangely beautiful visual phenomenon without making a deeper effort to establish a mental connection between our local context and what is being depicted here. Dwell for a moment on the scale of the scene in this photograph, both in relation to our Earth and to the Sun itself.

It is interesting that the picture can be taken in as somehow representing an object of comprehensible size.

“As above, so below.”

By Malcolm | Also posted in General | Comments (2)

Are Qualia Epiphenomenalia?

September 21, 2005 – 12:44 am

A lively discussion has been going on over at Bill Vallicella’s website. I seem to be spending so much time over there, in such engaging company, that I am getting very little done in here!

One of the topics we’ve been grappling with is the physicalist view of the mind. As you might have guessed from previous posts, I hold the view that our minds are entirely grounded in the physical world: that all of our thoughts, memories, fears,imaginings, etc. – in short, our inner lives – are the result of the activity of our physical bodies, in particular our nervous systems. We are a long way from completing the scientific program that will exhaustively map subjective experience onto objectively measurable physical states and transactions, but I do believe, along with most scientists studying the problem, that the idea is sound, and the goal attainable, in principle at least. But this view, all but hegemonic among research scientists, has met considerable resistance in the philosophical community. A recent posting at Dr. Vallicella’s site sums it up:

Marvelously complex as it is, the brain is just another chunk of the physical world. Study it till doomsday with the most sophisticated instruments, map every cubic millimeter of it, establish detailed correlations between brain regions and types of conscious phenomena — and what do you accomplish? You learn more and more about a highly complex piece of meat.

By Malcolm | Also posted in Mind and Brain | Comments (19)