Current Reading

I've decided to keep a record of some of the things I've been reading that might be of interest to others.

The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

This is an amazing book, one of the most interesting I have read in years. Lee Smolin is a distinguished physicist. His The Life of the Cosmos (1997), The Trouble with Physics (2006), and Time Reborn (2013) were precursors to this jointly-authored magnum opus. Roberto Mangebeira Unger is a Brazilian politician, political activist, and political and legal theorist. He teaches at Harvard Law School. He is a founder of 'critical legal studies' and active in progressive causes, though critical of the Left's assumptions and methods. Unger manifests a grasp of physics and other sciences not common to scholars in the humanities. In a few places, he describes intriguing parallels between his claims about physics and his social and political theories. This book, the product of their unlikely collaboration, is divided in two, the beginning written by Unger (2-347), followed by Smolin's shorter (350-501) part. Unger's contribution is readily accessible to the lay person (like me) with no more than a basic knowledge of modern physics. Smolin's part of the book, in which he proposes research inspired by the book's proposals, has sections opaque to the non-physicist. I found I could generally get the gist of these passages, even while I had no grasp of the specifics. In a way, the book is quite repetitive; the same themes are returned to again and again, examined and re-examined from different perspectives. Some readers might find this tedious, but I found it helpful. For me, the part composed by Unger was a 'page turner,' while most of Smolin's part went more slowly.

Far more goes on in the book than can be adequately described, or even noted, let alone critically examined, in a review. I will for the most part try to set out, in some sort of order, the authors' main contentions.

There is, they say, a crisis in physics, but the well-known failure to reconcile quantum field theory and general relativity, the two branches of fundamental physics, is just a symptom of a deeper problem. Contemporary cosmology, and the rest of physics, fails to take serious account of the most important discovery in all cosmology: the universe has a history. With this in mind, the authors' aim is to inspire research that can move ahead with this crucial fact in view.

As the title indicates, time is real. Current interpretations of general relativity, which 'spatializes' time, construing it as merely a fourth spatial dimension, lead to the idea of the 'block universe,' where the passage of time is an illusion, an artifact of the human mind. For Smolin and Unger, time is the ultimate, underlying reality of the world. Space may well emerge from it. Time is inclusive; nothing stands outside time. Everything changes. Indeed, over time new kinds of things come into existence and with them new ways things can change. The special sciences recognize this: in geology, biology and social science the entities studied do not exist early in the history of the universe, nor did the way they change. There are novel realities that change in novel ways. Physics should emulate these sciences and take time and change seriously.

The quest for timeless laws has led to the predominance of similarly timeless structural explanations in the physical sciences at the expense of more fundamental historical explanations. Structure must be understood in terms of history, not the converse. Time is real because change changes. The scientific, and before it the philosophical, tradition has sought to explain the changing universe by finding changeless laws, a timeless reality, beyond nature. In the current cosmic era, where the universe is relatively cool, there are stable kinds of things and regular ways they change; thus there are laws. But lawfulness is not a necessary feature of the universe. Shortly after the Big Bang, prior to nucleosynthesis, there were not things of distinct, enduring kinds and no laws about how they acted on one another. The same is likely true of the interior of black holes now, and it is likely to be true again in the far future of the universe. Where there is time, there are things acting upon and changing one another. Thus, causation and time can be identified. Opposing common opinion, Unger and Smolin reject the view that where there is cause and effect, there is natural law. Facts about one thing causing another are fundamental to reality. There might, or might not, be nomological regularities in causation. There can be cause and effect with, or without, causal laws. Laws merely report the ultimately ephemeral regularities of causation. Contrary to what many believe general relativity implies, there is one privileged 'now' for the whole universe. The relativity of simultanaeity to inertial frames of reference is a local, not a global, phenomenon. Only the present is real. The past was real and has left its mark on the present. The future remain open, and thus not yet real.

Contemporary physics relies far too heavily on mathematics. (Unger and Smolin are far from alone in making this criticism.) Many physicists are seduced by beautiful mathematical structures that only rarely describe what occurs in the empirically knowable universe, yet they treat mathematics as offering profound insight into the nature of reality. Thus, mathematically intriguing theories like string theory that have no empirically testable implications devour far too much time and resources. There is no Platonic realm of eternal mathematical objects beyond all time and change. There is no conceivable merger of mathematics and physics.

Mathematics is neither discovered nor invented. It exists insofar as we observe the natural world and abstract from it, describing it with particularity and time stripped away. The abstract structures thus in view are recursively and endlessly ramified, as math develops in accord with human imagination constrained only by logical consistency. Most of the resulting mathematics describes nothing in the real world. Smolin describes mathematics as 'evoked,' on analogy to a game like chess which, once brought into existence, has fixed rules and is thus open to endless exploration and elaboration. Math is of genuine, but limited, use in understanding nature. A significant result of the ill-conceived propensity to merge mathematics and physics is the idea that there can be actual infinities in nature, as the singularities posited in the Big Bang, when all the matter of the universe was allegedly infinitely hot and infinitely dense. In the opinion of Unger and Smolin, claiming that there are infinities in the real world, as opposed to in mathematics, simply turns the failure to explain what transpired at the beginning of the universe to an apparent, but not genuine, success. Rejecting these infinities, which are opaque to empirical study, opens the possibility of ascertaining what really occurred at the birth of the universe. Because nothing “just happens” in nature, having no cause, we should assume the earliest state of the universe was the effect of earlier causes.

With the bogus infinities disposed of, there is hope of finding the causal residue of what was going on prior to the beginning of the universe. Thus, the claim of the singular universe is qualified: we may say either that there is just one universe at a time, with each universe the effect of its predecessor universe, or there is just one universe, which exists in different ways at different times. What is emphatically rejected are the multiverse theories, which posit a multiplicity of causally disconnected, and thus forever empirically unobservable, universes beyond our own. Unger is partial to a cyclic conception, on which a universe (or a phase of the universe) begins with its Big Bang and ends with a 'big crunch,' out of which a the next universe comes into being. Because change is always changing, each universe differs from its predecessor. Opposed to acknowledging infinity in nature, Unger tells us that science is not entitled to say that there are infinitely many past universes (or phases of the one universe.) It can only say that there are indefinitely many. To say anything about ultimate origins takes us beyond science. Smolin offers the cosmic selection theory he developed in The Life of the Cosmos, suggesting that for black holes to be possible in a universe, its laws must be fine-tuned so as to produce them, but a black hole gives rise to a new universe. Thus, over time, there is natural selection in favor of universe that produce black holes. (It might be that such universes also happen to be conducive to the carbon chemistry that makes life, and ultimately scientific observers possible. But both authors reject the view that anthropic considerations offer any actual explanations of the nature of the universe.) Readers of the earlier book will appreciate Smolin's discussion of current empirical findings that could, but have no yet, falsified the theory.

The authors are well-aware that their assertion that the laws of nature change encounters a dilemma: either the laws change capriciously, there being no reason why they change as they do, or there is a higher-level, meta-law that explains why nature's laws change as they do. This, of course, either launches a regress of more higher-level laws or means that, after all, there is something that does not change. The more speculative parts of the book present suggestions as to how to solve this problem, but no firm commitment to a particular solution emerges. One possibility is that cosmological natural selection does not, as Smolin argues, embody causal laws; selection is a matter of logical principle. Another possibility might be a principle of precedence: events stochastically tend to repeat past causal sequences, though deviation from them is a source of genuine novelty. One hopes the authors do, or inspire, more work on this problem in the future.

In all this, I have surely omitted matters the authors, and other readers, would regard as important. I hope, though, to have provided as sense of how provocative, and how worth tackling, this book is.

The Way of the Owl Stacey O’Brien

One of my graduate school professors, realizing that not every reader was sanguine about an entire volume on the logic of conditional propositions, began his book If P, then Q by relating the story of the little boy tasked with reporting on a book about owls. Reading to the class, he began, “This book told me more about owls than I wanted to know.” This is definitely not the case with Stacey Obrien’s Wesley the Owl. To read it is to want to know more about owls, although the author tells us a great deal; it may well make the reader want to know an owl like Wesley. The story begins with Stacy as an undergraduate biology major working in the Cal Tech owl aviary. She eagerly accepts the opportunity to adopt a newborn barn owl. He, or she—barn owls have internal genitalia so their sex cannot be readily determined—has nerve damage to a wing and will not be able to fly well enough to survive if released into the wild. For Stacey, it is love at first sight. And when Wesley opens his eyes, he imprints on her and they are bonded for life. Barn owls mate for life. Those with behaviorist inclinations who disapprove of ascribing genuine thought and emotion to non-human creatures will find Obrien’s account of life with Wesley insidiously undermining their convictions. When Wesley’s initial attempts to fly result in crash landings, Stacey can’t help laughing, and he refused to look at her, emphatically tuning his head away to stare at the wall in embarrassment. Animals like Wesley share with humans the neural mechanisms that underlie emotion, but lack the higher functions humans employ to hide their feelings. The brave little bird wore his heart on his sleeve. Eventually, Wesley reaches sexual maturity and fixes on Stacey as his mate; then it’s her turn to be embarrassed. By the end of Wesley’s life, 19 years after Stacey adopted him, the reader cannot but vicariously share Stacy’s affection for him, and her wonder at a mind so familiar yet alien. There is of late an increasing awareness how many of our companions on this planet are not automata, or merely sentient, but have their own, unique selves. Videos of cockatoos talking, singing, dancing, arguing with their owners and with one another proliferate on YouTube. Irene Pepperberg’s pioneering work with Alex, the gray parrot, has been followed by research demonstrating the remarkable intelligence of crows and even of octopi—see Peter Godfrey-Smith’s wonderful book, Other Minds. As much as this book is the story of an amazing bird, it is no less a story of a human being’s enduring love and how much sacrifice her commitment required. Boyfriends came and went, unable to share her with the owl, their departures sometimes hastened by Wesley’s violent attacks on them. Wesley required constant care. His diet consisted of freshly killed field mice, which Stacy daily chopped up for him. As Wesley’s life was approaching its natural end, Stacey, suffering from a painful and apparently incurable medical condition, was tempted to end her own life. But she could not bring herself to abandon Wesley and betray his trust. She writes, “I now made the decision to honor this little body with the huge soul, and to see him through to the end. I had promises to keep. It’s the Way of the Owl. You commit for life, you finish what you start, you give your unconditional love, and that is enough. I looked into the eyes of the owl, found the way of God there, and decided to live.” We should be grateful that Stacey remained with us to tell this wonderful story.

The Spaces Between Us: A Story of Neuroscience, Evolution, and Human Nature Michael S. A. Graziano

The phenomenon of aging distinguished scientists who write books opining—shall I say pontificating?—on large, non-scientific, matters is familiar. Such works are of mixed worth, for their authors do not always understand that the non-scientific matters they delve into are in their own way as difficult as those of the sciences. More welcome are the offerings of scientists in their prime who take the time to share results that delight and excite them in clear and accessible prose. Michael S. A. Graziano belongs to this latter group. (The physicist, Sean Carroll, is another; I’ve reviewed one of his books elsewhere on Deniable Plausibility.)

I regard Graziano as an extremely important figure. In Consciousness and the Social Brain and Rethinking Consciousness, he makes the case for his “attention schema theory” of consciousness. Consciousness, understood as subjective experience, is for contemporary philosophy and science the “hard problem,” one many regard as too difficult for humans to solve. Those who make the attempt wind up explaining something else and leave the mystery untouched. Graziano’s theory is, in my estimation, the only one that really is a theory of consciousness and which could be true. (He has also written a few short, very weird, novels, including The Love Song of Monkey, which I have also read.)

The Spaces Between Us is a fairly short book, just about 200 pages. The first of its three main parts recounts his work early in his career, not long after it became possible to detect the electrical activity of a single cell, and thus to correlate its excitation with the animal’s behavior. In the course of describing his lab’s discoveries of the novel properties of certain neurons, Graziano gives the reader a sense of how slow the process of neuroscientific discovery is, how the data for a single publishable result acquires months of patient work. And he demonstrates the difficulty of grasping that experimental data is contravening received opinion.

While it was known that there are dedicated neurons that respond—they fire—in response to tactile stimulation of particular parts of the body, the common assumption was that they are general purpose, involved both in protecting the body and in reaching and grasping. Graziano and his assistants discovered that this is mistaken. The cells in question are entirely defensive. For example, a particular neuron fires when the monkey’s right hand is touched, even if only very slightly. But it has no apparent role in motor control. The neurons are multi-modal: the same neuron fires if the hand is touched or if the monkey sees something approaching it. In Graziano’s words: “These neurons, it seemed, were not just looming detectors, triggering a general alarm when anything came close to the body. They were tracking the location of specific body parts and monitoring the proximity of intruding objects with respect to these body parts” (37). It was as though there is a protective bubble of space surrounding the animal’s right hand. Using an apple on a stick and a rubber snake, the experimenters found that the neuron responds differentially to threats and to things it welcomes. Contrary to expectation, the snake, but not the apple, elicited the neuronal response in what Graziano whimsically labelled “biblical neurons.”

It eventually came to light that the size and shape of the protective bubble expands and shrinks as circumstances change. When a human being is using a tool, the bubble enlarges and changes shape; in effect the brain decides the tool is a part of the body. As Graziano puts it, his brain wraps his personal space around his Black and Decker. Although other sense modalities are difficult to experiment with, the researchers found that the neurons that respond to visual or tactile intrusions respond similarly to auditory stimuli. And he speculates that this is also the case with olfactory stimulation.

Switching from the detection of a single neuron’s activity to stimulating it with a tiny electrical current, the researchers made another significant discovery. A prevailing assumption, grounded in much earlier experimentation, was that the stimulation of an individual neuron causes a single, simple movement of the part of the body to which it is connected. Graziano’s lab discovered that applying microcurrent to a particular neuron elicited a complex cascade of bodily motions, such as reaching for an edible object, grabbing it, and moving it to the mouth.

In the second part of the book, Graziano moves into the social dimension of peripersonal space. “The senses are welded together into a visual-auditory-tactile radar for nearby objects” (99), but for humans, preeminently social animals, the radar has been exapted for various purposes. Here, there is less experimental data and more speculation. While there are some cultural differences with respect to the default size and shape of protective space, they are essentially the same for all human beings. Somehow, the early warning system of our multiple defense perimeters can be shrunk or entirely shut down. If not, Graziano asks, he we could we have sex, which involves an emphatic invasion of one’s defensive space? He develops a sequence of conjectural evolutionary explanations of why, for purposes of social communication, we evolved the ability to dial back our automatic responses. We sometimes have reasons to signal that our defenses are down. “Letting yourself be kissed is a way of saying, ‘Yes, my defenses are so far down that I’m letting your biting weapon touch me.’” (118). In three chapters, “The First Smile,” “The First Laugh,” and “The First Cry,” Graziano rejects the once dominant idea that for some reason persons smile, laugh, and cry to express themselves (whatever that means) and argues that these are protective signaling devices; they exist to modify the behavior of those with whom one interacts. For example, crying evolved as a way to communicate to an attacker that he has caused damage—whether or not this is true—and thus need not continue the attack.

The third part of the book, its final chapter, is surprising and poignant. Graziano’s son exhibits behavior in elementary school that upsets his teachers, who interpret it as willfully bad. The boy, for example, walks into, and hangs on, other students and sometimes falls out of his desk to the floor. Though seemingly intelligent, when he writes he compresses the words and sentences into a small area of the paper, crowded together and unintelligible. Eventually, Graziano realizes the amazing coincidence: his son has a defect in the very neural mechanisms he has been working on for years. The teachers and administrators obtusely deny that the child suffers from a neurological disorder and expel him. After litigation, he is finally permitted to attend another school which understands his affliction and provides specialized help. This, along with other therapies, helps him eventually to compensate for his disability. For Graziano, his son’s plight demonstrates the “devastating importance of personal space,” the scaffolding that supports everything we do" (157).

The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us Noson S. Yanofsky

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Wonder Book for Boys and Girls. Noson S. Yanofsky has written what might be called The Wonder Book for Grown-Ups. Don’t let the title mislead you; this is a serious book, not a brief for irrationality, intuition, or mysticism. It casts no doubt on reason as our best, and maybe only, way to know, but demonstrates how reason itself reveals its own limitations. Dealing with the most rigorous logical, mathematical, and scientific reasoning, it takes us on a tour of territories where we come up against the limits of what reason can tell us. Yanofsky covers a lot of ground, devoting short sections to a wide variety of topics, ranging from the familiar, such as the paradox of the liar—“This sentence is false:” if it’s false then it’s true and if it’s true then it’s false—to quantum entanglement—measuring a feature of a particle here determines the result of measuring that feature of another particle a vast distance away.

What counts as a limit of reason for Yanofsky varies with context. Sometimes, what he calls a limit of reason is really a highly counterintuitive result reached by reasoning, or a result that paradoxically conflicts with other things we believe. It’s hard to believe that a perfectly grammatical English sentence can be neither true or false, yet “This is false” can be neither. It’s hard to believe, given special relativity, that information can be transmitted instantaneously, and therefore faster than light, as it is in quantum entanglement. Similarly, his discussion of infinity and transfinite numbers reveals results most people are amazed by, for example that there are just as many odd integers (1,3,5,7,…) as there are integers (1,2,3,4,…), not half as many, as initially seems obvious. Yet this follows inexorably from the concept of infinite sets, as does the existence of transfinite sets that are “larger”—they have greater cardinality—than merely infinite sets. Quantum mechanics implies that, as in Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment, the enclosed cat is neither living nor dead, but in a superposition of the two states, until someone makes an observation. This is true of the world in general. (To my mind, Yanofsky too quickly moves from the fact that a measurement ends the superposition and brings about a definite state—the cat alive or the cat dead—to the conclusion that this depends on a conscious observer, with the implication that objective reality is somehow dependent on human minds.) He explains how, beginning with standard (Zermelo-Fraenkel) set theory augmented with the axiom of choice we can prove that a sphere the size of a pea can be disassembled and then reassembled to form a sphere as large as the sun. The seemingly truistic axiom of choice says that for any set and any partition of that set into non-overlapping subsets a set can be formed containing one representative from every subset. All these, and many others, illustrate not the impotence of reason, but its power.

Yanofsky does not limit himself to reason’s counterintuitive or paradoxical results. He is no less concerned with cases where reasoning brings its own limits to light, formulating problems it proves we cannot solve. There are computational problems that are not absolutely unsolvable, but they are forever profoundly beyond the capacity of human reasoning. Even if every atom in the universe were recruited for computation, it would take, in one relatively simple case, 10 to the 62nd power centuries to solve, far longer than the universe will exist. Another example is the chaotic nature of many physical systems. Even if the system is deterministic, so all its future states are guaranteed by its initial state and the laws that govern its development, its future is unpredictable, so far as humans are concerned, for precise prediction requires infinitely precise knowledge of the initial conditions. Maybe the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil will cause a tornado in Texas, but we will never be able to make the prediction. Problems of this sort contrast with problems that are absolutely unsolvable, standing beyond reason as such, not just human reason. Perhaps the most familiar of the many Yanofsky investigates in this category is the Halting Problem. There is no possible program that can determine whether any given program will fall into an infinite loop, and run forever, rather than stopping (halting.) As is often the case, the assumption that the problem can be solved leads to contradiction. The great virtue of the book is that here, as in almost all the other matters explored, Yanofsky does not merely tell us what is the case, but explains why it must be, in ways accessible to the reader willing to devote a bit of concentration.

I found particularly rewarding the look into Gödel’s incompleteness results—a system of logical axioms powerful enough to frame arithmetic is incomplete in that there are truths that are not theorems; they can’t be proved—and the standard (Peano) axiomatization of arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency. Yanofsky offers a degree of mitigation, noting that what is unprovable in one system, or with one type of methods, is often provable with new methods. For instance, while Galois theory proves that a certain class of equations cannot be solved using addition, multiplication, division, and roots, they can be solved when the tools of calculus are brought to bear. Some problems cannot be solved, and some things cannot possibly be known, but short of those, there is always hope that methods will be devised that solve problems we do not now know how to solve.

Yanofsky affords a relatively small amount of space to distinctly philosophical problems, such as the identity of material objects through time. If we start with a ship, gradually replace its parts, winding up with an exactly similar ship that has no parts in common with the original, is it the same ship? Suppose along the way we save all the removed parts and reassemble them just as they were assembled originally? What’s required for identity: continuous existence or sameness of parts? He arrives at a conclusion I take to be a mistake: physical objects like ships do not really exist! I found this and his other forays into philosophy rather pedestrian, even when not leading to conclusions I take to be plainly false. This might be a matter of my familiarity with the topics. This poses the question whether this is the sort of book that everyone speaks highly of, while making an exception for its inadequacy in his own discipline. Any book that covers so many areas risks this. I don’t think this is the case with this book. Instead, I suspect that the lower quality of the philosophical parts manifests a scientist’s common underestimation of the difficulty of philosophical problems. However, there is so much good in The Outer Limits of Reason that this complaint should dissuade no one from reading it.

Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers Cheryl Misak

This magisterial work is, and will remain, the definitive biography of the great Frank Ramsey. His unexpected, shocking death in 1930 at 27 was an immeasurable loss to 20th-century philosophy. Philosophers today suffer the “Ramsey effect,” which is to come up with a seemingly original idea but then discover that the phenomenal Ramsey thought of it in the 1920s. Ramsey made fundamental contributions not only to philosophy and the foundations of mathematics, but to the theory of probability and to economics. He published no books in his lifetime and a relatively small number of essays. His impact was made largely in talks to meetings of the Cambridge Apostles and the Moral Sciences Club. Yet his continuing influence would be difficult to underestimate. Perhaps his most significant contribution to philosophy is the disquotational theory of truth, a deflationary theory that “It is true that snow is white” is no more than a way to say “Snow is white.” "Ramsification," a method to test for the reasonableness of belief in a theory's unobserved entities, is a staple of today's "Canberra Plan." Born in 1903 into the academic world of Cambridge—his father was a mathematics don and his mother a social activist—Frank Ramsey came of age in its golden age, the era of G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, Piero Sraffa, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. All deferred to him despite his youth. He was the only person Wittgenstein trusted to translate his Tractatus, and his influence is apparent in the famous shift from the “early” to the “late” Wittgenstein. Keynes compared him to David Hume. Some speculate that had he lived, he would have arrived at Gödel’s incompleteness results before Gödel, the theory of computability before Turing, and game theory before von Neumann. Misak details all stages of Ramsey’s brief life, composing a vivid picture of the larger-than-life character he was and the glittering environment in which he thrived. Portraying the large, somewhat naïve, boyish man behind the genius, she relies extensively on private correspondence and often enhances her account with others’ reports of the remarkable impression he made on them. A member of the Bloomsbury group wrote:

Of all our visitors from Cambridge I have no doubt that Frank Ramsey had the most

remarkable brain. . . . There was something a bit abnormal about Frank. He was so huge

in body and in mind, so much bigger and better than the rest of us, that I suspected

that like the Bramley Seedling apple he might be a diploid, that is to say his cells might

have double the number of chromosomes as those of ordinary men. If it were true it

would have accounted for his immense tree-trunk arms and legs, carthorse’s bottom,

and great genial face surmounted by a big broad forehead. . . . But this precocious

intelligence was combined with a childlike innocence. . . . When I brought to his notice

some ordinary tale of petty self-seeking, self-deception, egoism or malice, Frank was at first astounded. Such things did not seem possible to him up there, in the heights. Then he would realise the full implications and humour of folly and silliness, and the self-defeating nature of selfishness and spitefulness, and God-like, his great innocent face would become wreathed in smiles . . . his chuckle was the chuckling of a god.

Misak’s portrayal of Bloomsbury’s foibles, from which Ramsey’s genius did not fully inoculate him, is engaging, a window into the tumultuous intellectual world of post-Great War Britain. With them he experimented with psychoanalysis, open marriage, and radical social reform. Misak wisely leaves explanations of Ramsey’s technical work to experts in the relevant disciplines. She interpolates their contributions in separate sections, usually of a few pages. For example, she invites a logician to contribute a section on Russell's theory of types.

Unlike his brother Michael, who eventually became the Archbishop of Canterbury, Frank was an atheist. When his brother died, Michael shocked his fellow believers by saying that if there were to be any atheists is heaven, one would be guileless Frank. I conclude with Frank Ramsey’s own encapsulation of his view on life:

In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and

its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less

valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of

my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the

world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you,

and you despise me. . . . On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is

pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better

for all one’s activities.

Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe Hugo Mercier

Hugo Mercier is a cognitive scientist working at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. He is the co-author, with Dan Sperber, of the remarkable The Enigma of Reason. Not Born Yesterday is a similarly eye-opening book, drawing on findings in social psychology and cognitive science that confound the reader’s expectations. Before reading this, my view was that a great many people go through life with propaganda sponges where their critical thinking capacities ought to be. The data Mercier advances significantly challenges this opinion. Summarizing, he writes “the take-home message of this book is: influencing people isn’t too easy, but too hard” (269). Framing the issue in evolutionary terms, he points out that the innate disposition to be easily fooled and taken advantage of by what others say would be culled by natural selection. On the other hand, those not disposed to trust others and believe what they say would miss out on valuable information obtainable only by reliance on others, a primary benefit of social life. Mercier contends that what evolution has endowed us with is “open vigilance.” We have a subtle cognitive mechanism that makes most of us most of the time adept at differentiating the trustworthy from the untrustworthy. We are receptive but not gullible. He offers evidence from a wide variety of sources that it is much harder than most people suppose to get people to believe things. For example, political propaganda, campaign advertising, and commercial advertising have at best marginal effects on what we believe and do. Phenomena such as the rapid spread of “fake news” and rumors gone viral on the web do not, Mercier argues, support the conclusion of widespread credulity that affects behavior. Instead, these exceptions reveal the underlying structure of the open vigilance mechanism. Mercier does not explicitly reach this conclusion, but I take what he writes as implying that preposterous beliefs, such as the Earth being flat, or prominent Democrats running a pedophile ring out of a pizza restaurant in Washington, are not really believed by their proponents. Expressing them has other functions consistent with a lack of gullibility. The open vigilance mechanism evolved among our forebears who had little contact with strangers and few information sources outside the small hunter-gatherer bands in which they spent their lives. Thus, they had a great deal of immediate evidence about others’ credibility, or lack thereof. We, their descendants, inhabit a world in which much valuable information comes from strangers and persons we never meet. Thus, we are overly vigilant and would be better off becoming more trusting. Ironically, if Mercier is right, then the belief that most people are gullible is a mark of gullibility.

An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know Randy E. Barnett and Josh Blackman

Josh Blackman is a professor of law at South Texas College of Law who has written extensively on Obamacare and on religious liberty. Randy Barnett, who teaches law at Georgetown, is a proponent of libertarianism founded in natural law. He is known for his The Structure of Liberty, Restoring the Lost Constitution, and Our Republican Constitution, all valuable works accessible to those of us outside the legal profession. Barnett also has the distinction of being the only constitutional law scholar to have played a role in a horror film, InAlienable. The book benefits from being the joint effort of an author from a regional law school, where teaching tends toward the practical, and one from an elite, national school where focus is often on large, theoretical issues. Initially, one might wonder why the interpretation of the Constitution is such a complex matter. In contrast to, say, the Bible, which requires serious exegesis, it was written in our own, not an ancient, language, by persons well known to history in a well-understood context. It addresses just the structure and mechanics of government, nothing mysterious or profound. And it is well under 100 pages long. But, of course, much is at stake in its interpretation. Barnett’s libertarian, limited government stance is not explicit in the book, but readers familiar with it will find confirmation that the history of constitutional law is principally a history of attempts, many successful, to thwart the strict constraints the founding document plainly places on the power of the Federal Government. Trained as a philosopher, I find many of the arguments advanced in favor of expanding its power mere rationalizations. Not to deny, though, that some cases do allow for honest disagreement. Unlike similar volumes I own, which arrange cases alphabetically or chronologically, Barnett and Blackman structure the book thematically, with a few significant cases discussed under fifteen heads, such as “The Privileges and Immunities Clause” and “The Free Exercise of Religion.” Of particular interest are discussions of recent cases an author has argued before the Court. Designed for entry-level students, it includes study questions and provides access to online videos about each case. A very helpful appendix consists of the Constitution annotated to show the sections that are at issue in the cases the book examines. The reader who works through this book will not simply know 100 important cases, but have a deepened understanding our Constitution’s history and its impact on our lives.

America’s Forgotten Colonial History Dana Huntley

The moral legitimacy of the founding and continued existence of the United States in anything like its traditional form is currently contested in elite quarters, ironically among those who have most benefitted from the nation’s heritage of political and economic liberty. Huntley, who has a doctorate in British literature and has been the editor of British Heritage magazine, does not explicitly challenge such propagandistic exercises as the 1619 Project, but his sober, but entertaining and accessible account of the diverse motivations behind the colonization of North America effectively answers them. It fills in the large blank space most of us have in our knowledge of what went on in the crucially formative century and a half between Plymouth Rock and the American Revolution. Connecting developments in the colonies to tumultuous events back in Britain, such as the Civil War, the Cromwellian Commonwealth, and the Restoration, with their differential impacts on the various colonies, the book helps explain how we came to be what we are today. Huntley deftly explores how differences in religion, worldview and economic opportunities afforded by, and constrained by, geography explain the social and economic structures of the growing colonies. And it makes clear the origin and significance of the sharp differences between the thirteen colonies that nonetheless eventually, perhaps amazingly, unified to create the United States. The book is well illustrated with the author's own photos.

Rules of Civility Amos Towles

A mark of an excellent writer is the ability to write about something in which the reader has no initial interest yet to engage and hold his interest seemingly effortlessly. Who wants to read a book about oranges? Anyone should, if John McPhee wrote it. I had already read and greatly enjoyed Towle’s A Gentleman in Moscow (noted below), which I got hold of because its topic—a Russian nobleman under house arrest by the Bolsheviks for years in a grand Moscow hotel—was immediately intriguing. Not so, the subject of his first novel, Rules of Civility, which I read only because I so enjoyed A Gentleman in Moscow. The story is about two young women making their way in 1930s New York City. The girls are not wealthy. As the narrative begins, the principal character is a typist in a law firm. Fortuitously, they come into contact with, and develop romantic relationships with, sons of New York’s “high society.” This sort of thing holds no a priori interest for me; but in the execution it was completely engaging. One striking aspect that makes Towles’ Depression era New York so different from today’s reality is how egalitarian and morally decent it seems, how civil. I was reminded of David Gelernter’s non-fiction 1939: The Lost World of the Fair. The world of Rules of Civility is, alas, lost.

Daniel Dennett: Reconciling Science and Our Self-Conception Matthew Elton

Dennett is a very influential philosopher yet in significant ways outside the philosophical mainstream. I admire his work a great deal, at least when he isn’t playing the role of village atheist. I believe that in my own book, The Material Image, I quoted him more than anyone else, generally in the form of “Yes, but…” I’ve found that non-philosophers concerned with areas Dennett explores in books such as Content and Consciousness, Consciousness Explained, and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea find his work difficult to grasp. Professional philosophers who interact with Dennett’s work in particular areas may well be unclear on how his entire corpus hangs together. Elton’s book is a service to both audiences. One aspect of Dennett’s writing makes is highly entertaining but also difficult to integrate into a theoretical system is that, unlike most Anglo-American philosophers, his methodological focus is not close argument in the service of theory construction. Instead, he makes his points by way of ingenious stories, thought experiments, intriguing examples, and striking analogies. Dennett writes lucidly, yet some misread him in ways that seem downright willful, such as those who claim that he denies the existence of consciousness, despite having authored a 528 page book dedicated it explaining it. Elton's book will highlight the absurdity of such claims. His introductory book maps the overall territory of Dennett’s thought. The book is not uncritical, but its disagreements with Dennett are largely on secondary or expository matters. He helpfully traces the gradual shifts in Dennett’s terminology over the years. One drawback is that this was published prior to Dennett’s most recent “big book,” From Bacteria to Bach and Back. But it is still of significant value to anyone who is interested in Dennett. As everyone ought to be.

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet Reif Larsen

I think this is a children’s book, but I’m not sure. The shape of the category sometimes eludes me. I learned to read at a young age and was reading on something like an adult level in elementary school. Thus, I had little childhood experience with the books children of my age were supposed to enjoy. I got hold of a copy of this after seeing the film based on it, The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet. I liked the movie, but as is so often the case, the book was better. T. S. Spivet is a ten-year old prodigy growing up on a remote ranch in Montana. His forte is scientific illustration in the classic style that exemplifies his profound scientific understanding. Apparently, this is a dying, but still prized art. The book’s margins contain many examples. For instance, T.S.’s Notebook G38 contains his exquisitely detailed illustration of Unihemispheric Slow-wave Sleep in the Bottlenose Dolphin, the animal, its brain, and graphs of its EEG expertly rendered in the space of a page's margin. The film was marred by replacing the scientific illustration that won the prize with a perpetual motion machine; apparently the drawings were insufficiently interesting. T.S.’s father is a stereotypical Montana rancher, stoic and silent. His mother is a distracted eccentric entomologist. T.S.’s brother is dead as the result of an accident for which T.S. considers himself to blame. A phone call from the Smithsonian sets the plot in motion. T.S. has won a prize for scientific illustration. Unbeknownst to the young Spivet, a professor at the university has entered his work in the contest. The Smithsonian mistakenly assumes that the talented Mr. Spivet is an adult. T.S. accepts the invitation to travel to Washington to accept the prize and make the acceptance speech. He decides not to inform his parents and to make the trip by train as a hobo. To the adult mind, this is inexplicable, but it makes perfect sense to the boy genius. He gets on a train and rides much of the way east in a Winnebago RV being shipped on a railcar. He has a variety of experiences en route, meets various eccentrics, dodges railway bulls, and arrives at the Smithsonian bleeding from a stab would inflicted by a lunatic encountered in the Chicago rail yards. He gets patched up, accepts the prize, makes the speech, becomes a minor celebrity, and is reunited with his family. Some wisdom has infused his immature brillance. Some readers will think the whole thing is silly, but I was delighted by it.

Paris in the Present Tense Mark Helprin

I am a great fan of Helprin. His Refiner’s Fire is one of my all-time favorite books, as is Winter’s Tale. In Paris in the Present Tense we meet an aging Frenchman, Jules Lacour. A widower, he is an accomplished cellist and music teacher at the Sorbonne, who has, he feels, failed to reach his full potential. He has an enduring love for his wife, now dead, yet readily falls in love with beautiful, but unattainable, young women. Jules is haunted by the murder of his parents by the Nazis, which he witnessed as a young child. He has no fear of his own death, seeing it as a way to be reunited with his wife. But he is terrified by the prospect of his grandson’s death. The boy is slowly dying, but some hope lies, at least in Jules’ mind, in getting the boy to the United States for extremely expensive treatment. Jules devises an illicit scheme to procure the money for this, commits murder, and eventually engineers his own death. As this proceeds, he falls in love with one of his students who now, too late, reciprocates his affection. The book is a memorably beautiful meditation on life, art, sacrifice, death, and love.

God and Politics in Esther Yoram Hazony

Hazony, an Israeli political scientist, has authored two other books, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, and the controversial The Virtue of Nationalism. I’ve learned much from, and highly recommend, both. God and Politics in Esther is at least as worthy of the reader’s time as these other volumes. Esther is an anomaly in the Hebrew scriptures because it makes no explicit reference to God. Esther is a young woman living in Persia, along with many other Jews removed from exile in Babylon into exile in the Persian empire. Esther is inducted into the gormless king’s harem and, thanks to her intelligence and beauty, becomes his wife. The king’s rule descends into tyranny and a new vizier persuades the king, who does not know his queen is a Jew, to order the liquation of the entire Jewish population. Colluding with her wise cousin Mordechai, a courtier, Esther cleverly manages to discredit the vizier, save the Jews, and have those who hate them exterminated. The holy day of Purim celebrates the memory of the episode. While many scholars regard the events that thwart the plan to kill off Persia’s Jews either as a series of coincidences or as miraculous divine interventions, Hazony contends that they are the result of human effort, ingenuity, and courage. However, he does not see this natural causation as opposed to God’s work in human affairs. It is, he says, paradigmatic of God’s work in this world, today no less than in the ancient world. He illustrates this with the case of a missel that was unexpectedly blown off course, allegedly because of divine intervention, that would otherwise have fallen on Tel Aviv. “The key to Esther,” he writes, is that the absence of God does not induce defeat and despair in face of the world’s evil (170). In the course of Hazony’s close reading of the biblical text, he delves insightfully into the nature of anti-Semitism, the task of the person of faith in resisting tyranny and idolatry, and the virtue of giving up moral purity for the sake of doing good in a fallen world. Addressing the herem, the genocide commanded by God in the conquest of Canaan, Hazony offers the only credible explanation I know of of how a good God could endorse such moral horror.

Reduction and Mechanism Alex Rosenberg

Reduction and Mechanism is a very short book; at 74 pages, it’s more like a long essay. Yet it requires my longest description. The mid-20th century reductionist project is widely regarded as having foundered on multiple realizability, among other things. Despite the fact that the things with which the special sciences, such a biology, psychology, sociology, economics, deal are entirely physical, their (supposed) laws, and thus their kinds, categories, concepts, cannot be translated into those of physical science, ultimately chemistry and physics. Even though, for example, someone being in a particular mental state, such as pain, is identical to a particular configuration of elementary particles in her brain (token identity), the qualitatively identical pain of that person at another time, or of another person, or of a creature of another sort, need not be the same kind of arrangement of particles (type non-identity). A human and a Martian might be in pain, but they will not be in the same neural, and thus not the same physical, state. A specifiable configuration of elementary particles may be sufficient for being in pain, but not necessary for it. Pain cannot be identified as, and thus cannot be defined as, a particular type of configuration of particles.

The initial debate between reductionism and anti-reductionism is history, but on Rosenberg’s account what was essentially at stake in that debate continues in a contemporary form. Today’s reductionists and anti-reductionists share the assumption of physicalism. All facts are “fixed” by the facts about the items known to physics. Two worlds exactly similar in their physical state are ipso facto exactly similar in every way. (Christians, and other theists, will qualify their physicalism, saying that physics fixes all the natural facts.) What reductionists and anti-reductionists disagree on is whether explanations that involve functional kinds “can be or need to be deepened or improved by, completed, or perhaps replaced” by explanations involving the underlying physical reality (4). Pain, for example, is a functional concept. A mental state is pain just if it is characteristically caused by bodily damage and characteristically causes evasive behavior. Rosenberg’s focus in this little book is biology, which is replete with functional kinds, such as “organism, organ, tissue, cell, organelle, and gene” (4). But this can be generalized to all the sciences, such as psychology, sociology, and economics, that pertain to humankind.

The issue is methodological, not ontological. For example, any given gene just is a particular macromolecular structure, yet the concept gene cannot be defined in molecular biological terms. Does this render functional explanations, which ignore the underlying physical realization, adequate, or should functional biology be grounded in molecular biology?

The early reductionist project envisioned the laws of special sciences such as biology as derivable from the underlying physical laws that govern their constituents. However, Rosenberg sees its inevitable failure as due to the fact that there are no laws in biology or the other special sciences. There are only generalizations about what is contingently now the case. They support no exceptionless counterfactual claims. Contrast, e.g., “If something is a coin in my pocket, it is silver, so if this—a wooden nickel—were in my pocket, it would be made of silver” and “If something is a silver coin, it melts at 961.8° C,” so if this—whatever it is—were a coin made of made silver, then it would melt at 961.8° C.” The former relies on a transient generalization and expresses no law, but the latter expresses a law that supports the prediction. The generalizations of biology involve functional concepts, and all functions are due to natural selection. As it happens, a particular gene’s nature is fixed by the configuration of amino acids that constitute it, but this is what Francis Crick called a “frozen accident.” Genes are things, whatever they are made of, that serve a particular function. In other actual or possible times and places, genes could have quite different physical components.

This might lead someone to conclude that explanation in biology and the other special sciences is autonomous, ultimately independent of what happens to be going on at the level of physical realization. From this one could derive a pluralist conception of the methods appropriate to science, one for the law-governed phenomena of physics and chemistry, others for various other domains, with none taking precedence. However, Rosenberg disputes this. All functions are ultimately due to natural selection, which is a fundamental physical law. Entities of any kind, whether molecules or elephants, that can replicate with variation when the probability of future replication depends on environmental factors, is subject to natural selection and possibly adaptation. It (as a species) adapts to that environment (or goes extinct). It has features whose function is to do things that make its replication more probable. Given the second law of thermodynamics, i.e., increase in order is possible only at the cost of increasing disorder elsewhere, natural selection is the only (natural) way for adaptation, and thus function, to come about. “Forget design—evolution is a mess” (49). It takes nothing more than physics to get from a world in which there is no adaptation, no function, no biological complexity, no persons, and no societies of persons to one where there is a profligacy of such things. For all Rosenberg knows, the initial transition might be highly improbable. But it is the only possibility. Thus, all functional, and thus all special science, explanation is necessarily physical explanation. There is no fundamental pluralism of methods in science.

Rosenberg rejects eliminativism, the idea that we can or should dispense with the functional explanations that characterize the special sciences, replacing them with explanations that utilize only the concepts of physics. No useful explanation of how the tiger got its stripes speaks of quarks and electrons, without which there would be no tigers, striped or otherwise. But the evolutionary history that endowed tigers with stripes can be better understood when we invoke the specific molecular events that make stripes possible and, in the historical circumstances of the evolutionary lineage, necessary. Against a pragmatist construal of explanation in terms of human interests, Rosenberg insists that explanation is an objective, logical relation between what explains and what is explained, but he acknowledges that there are many possible explanations that are useless for human beings. Nonetheless, while there are valuable explanations that prescind from the underlying physical details, all things being equal, more details are always better.

The methodological descendant of reductionism is what Rosenberg labels mechanism, “the demand that biology uncover mechanisms, and ultimately molecular, physical mechanisms, and that biological systems and processes be explained by identifying the mechanisms that compose them” rather than by subsuming them under general causal laws (56). Mechanistic explanations are causal explanations, but they identify causally necessary “difference makers.” Excise a component and things will happen, or not happen. This is the model of biological research in which genes are identified by what phenotypically happens when they are removed; thus, the gene named wingless plays an essential role in building wings in a variety of creatures, for its removal prevents the development of wings. Ultimately, in Rosenberg’s view, the mechanist must take up the task of showing that natural selection itself is a mechanism and thereby substantiating the view that all explanation above the level of physics-chemistry is in terms of physical mechanism.

This slight book with great clarity covers much of the territory of Darwinian Reductionism: Or How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology (2006) a long and challenging book. Readers dubious about Rosenberg thanks to his eccentric popular volume, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (2011) will find in Reduction and Mechanism an excellent introduction to this philosopher’s serious and important work.

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Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump George Papadopoulous

I should begin by saying that I was disposed to believe Papadopoulos, having become convinced that Trump’s enemies would do anything, no matter how vile, to bring him down. The author’s candor—he does little to make himself look good—reinforced my supposition that he was the victim of a setup, engineered by the “deep state” and enacted in Europe, beyond the reach of U.S. law, one designed to manufacture evidence that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russians. The story is an admirably frank account of a young, ambitious, and inexperienced, perhaps naïve, specialist in the geopolitics of the Mediterranean oil business becoming ensnared in the Russia hoax. Much of the short book establishes the context of Papadopoulous trying to make a name for himself in the heady world of political consulting where advancement depends crucially upon ‘connections.’ (Those familiar with the fine Richard Gere film Norman: The Moderate Rise and Moderate Fall of a New York Fixer will recognize the landscape.) Everyone claims to be close to someone Papadopoulous would benefit by getting to know.

His main aim, besides making a name for himself, is to convince the United States that Ergodan’s increasingly Islamist Turkey is not a reliable ally for the United States. The oil reserves newly discovered off the coast of Israel and in the waters near Cyprus, should not be piped through Turkey to Europe, but through Greece. The United States should strive to make Israel, Greece, and Cyprus its best allies in this part of the world and weaken its reliance on an increasingly hostile Turkey. This angers people in the Obama administration and in Britain who have a stake in the status quo. Papadopoulous becomes subject to suspicion and harassment, which only intensifies when he joins the Trump campaign. He believes that his campaign for this shift in policy made him a target even before the coup against Trump was hatched. I have not come across this claim anywhere else.

Seeing a way to enhance his career prospects, he lands a job with the Ben Carson campaign and, when it folds, he accepts an unpaid position as an advisor to the Trump campaign while continuing to pursue his career in Europe. He aspires to a position in the Trump administration. Understandably, when Papadopoulous was accused, the Trump campaign distanced itself from him, portraying him as very minor figure. In the book, he makes the contrary case that his role was fairly significant.

Papadopoulous has a series of increasingly odd encounters. A remarkable collection of shady characters impose themselves upon him, taking advantage of his desire to make useful contacts, clumsily turning conversations to Russia, which lies outside his expertise, interests and the ostensible subject of the meetings. Most well-known are his meetings with the mysterious Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud and with Alexander Downer. Alexander Downer, for reasons never made clear, meets Papadopoulous in a London wine bar, and later claims—with some inconsistencies—that Papadopoulous told him that the Russians had Clinton’s emails. Papadopoulous insists that he has no memory of this, though acknowledges that it is possible he did. In any event, the leap from passing on such a juicy rumor to being in any way involved with the Russians is extravagant. If someone was conspiring with the Russians on Trump’s behalf, it’s hard to imagine he would pass this information to strangers.

Mifsud’s connections to Western, not Russian, intelligence agencies is now known, while his current whereabouts is unknown. He introduces Papadopoulous to a Russian woman who he falsely purports is Vladimir Putin’s niece. Papadopoulous finds all this strange, but fixated on pursuing his career aims, pays it little heed. It’s only over time that he begins to wonder if he is the object of some sort of organized operation, though he has no idea what it could be.

What turns out to be the fateful event occurs when, out of the blue, Mifsud tells Papadopoulous that the Russians are in possession of Hilary Clinton emails. Months later, when the FBI interrogates Papadopoulous, permitting him no means to check his notes or saved emails, he apparently mistakes the sequence of events, telling the agents that he did not have contact with Mifsud in April of 2016, when in fact he had sent him one email. (Whether he actually made the false statement is unknown, since the FBI neither made the transcript of the interview available or introduced it as evidence. But Papadopoulous is acknowledges he could well have made the mistake.) There is no discernible reason for him to lie about this, and no apparent reason to doubt it was a mistake of the kind anyone would make under the circumstances. But it was for this “lie” that he was eventually sent to prison, and it was from this perjury trap that the Obama regime interfered with the election and launched its attempted coup.

While he is overall credible, on a few occasions, the incuriosity Papadopoulous ascribes to himself is hard to take at face value. People ask to meet with him in bars and restaurants and then push their phones close to him, obviously recording him, but he never asks why. Mifsud tells him the Russians have the Clinton emails, yet Papadopoulous says he did not ask how Mifsud knows this, how the Russians got them, or what “dirt” they contained. However, the one time he wisely acted on his suspicions was, surely, the one great thing he did that turned out to be a great service to his country. An Israeli-American, Charles Tarwill, obscurely connected to the world of intelligence, recruits him for work the nature of which is never explained. He presses a briefcase containing $10,000 in cash on Papadopoulous, who is about to return to the United States. Suspecting something is amiss, he leaves the money with a lawyer and flies to the U.S. without it. Upon landing at Dulles Airport, he is intercepted by FBI agents who search his luggage, and are furious that the money is not there. He thwarted the FBI’s attempt to create the damning story that the Trump campaign received the money by Russia.

Two aspects of the story are poignant. As his life is beginning to fall apart, Papadopoulous meets and falls in love with the beautiful, talented Italian—not Russian, as some believe!—woman Simona. They marry days before he goes to prison. While the judge denies him the right to speak publicly about his case, she passionately ably defends him on the news channels. When, with great trepidation, Papadopoulous arrives at the medium security prison, the officials welcome him as the unjustly sentenced man he is, and the other prisoners give him a standing ovation. He is far from alone in seeing himself as an victim of the deep state that operates outside all bounds of decency.

Books like Gregg Jarrett’s The Russia Hoax and Dan Bongino’s Spygate are valuable as carefully researched, objective unraveling of the complex web of conspiracy of which Papadopoulous’ ordeal was just one thread, but Deep State Target provides a victim’s irreplaceable first-person perspective.

From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life David Haig

A recurring division among philosophers is between conceptual conservatives and conceptual liberals. Scientific investigation reveals that nothing in reality precisely falls under a familar concept. Conceptual conservatives, assuming that they accept this result, conclude that what we once thought exists in fact does not. Conceptual liberals see the scientific discovery as reason to revise the concept: “X exists, but it’s different than we thought.” Conceptual liberalism can lead to radical results. (Cf. Galen Strawson in the review prior to this one.) For example, some say that the concept of free choice involves agents being the ultimate causal originators of their choices. We cannot have this capacity, being material beings fully enmeshed in the causal order to nature. Thus, nothing corresponds to the concept: there is no free choice. In contrast, conceptual liberals opt for a revision of the concept of free choice, excise ultimate origination, and conclude that we are free, though freedom is not quite what we thought it was. In another context, Daniel Dennett, who wrote this book’s Forward, epitomizes conceptual liberalism on the current scene. He contends that Darwin did not show us that complex, adapted biological organisms merely appear to be designed, but that our concept of design calls for revision: natural selection—or simply nature—designs biological organisms. Design does not require intelligence or foresight. There is no objection to ascribing this intentional characteristic, the sort of thing we have always assumed belongs solely to conscious rationality, to the mechanisms of nature. Haig’s book works out a thoroughgoing program of conceptual revision in application to human life. It is a “partial rehabilitation of final and formal causes” in explaining how we came to exist (269). Meaning and purpose seem mysterious only because we fail to see that in simpler forms they long precede their appearance in human life. Alluding to Ryle’s “ghost in the machine,” Haig says, “there is no ghost in the semantics” (287).

Haig writes, “the main task of this book is to explain how a physical world of matter in motion, or material and efficient causes, gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning, of final and formal causes” (xxiv). Purpose and meaning are not latecomers, emerging only with human beings, but are discernible from the start, or at least in the biochemistry that gave rise to life. In this physical world, everything at this level, as well as at the level of human individuals and societies, can in principle be explained entirely in terms of mechanism, of efficient and material causation, but in practice, intentional concepts are systemically indispensable. Meaning is the product of the interpretation of information, of differences; this occurs in the mechanisms of biological reproduction: “Life is made meaningful by a multitude of mindless interpreters reinterpreting the molecular metaphors of other mindless interpreters. RNA polymerases transcribe DNA as RNA, tRNAs interpret codons as places to deposit amino acids. Ribosomes translate RNA prose into protein poetry….organisms are self-constructed interpreters of genetic texts in environment contexts” (245-6). Those texts are an account of what has succeeded in the past and a defeasible expectation of what will succeed in the future.

Haig is a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard. Some of his research has focused on “genomic inscription:” some of our genes bear markers that indicate which parent they originated from. His account of how they can conflict within us is an entry into an examination of the way each of us is the result of societies of strategizing, sometimes conflicting, sometimes cooperating, genes. “The genome has aspects of a fractious and poorly informed committee attempting to set policy, but with most decisions on how to implement policy taken elsewhere.” For example, inscribed genes engage in intragenomic conflict striving to implement a reproductive strategy that favors parental, or maternal, genes, but the brain the genes constructed has ideas of its own, and decides to delay childbearing for the sake of graduate school.

Despite the title, there is a great deal of Darwin and just a modicum—one brief chapter—concerning Derrida. Haig sees Derrida’s contention that there is no “original meaning” as parallel to the fact that all adaptation is exaptation. “Primary intentionality is the repetition of causes that worked in the past” (285). Much more of interest goes on in From Darwin to Derrida than can be briefly summarized. One caveat is that there is a great deal of biological science in this book, much that the lay reader (like me) will find daunting.

Things that Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, etc. Galen Strawson

Things that Bother Me consists of nine essays. Eight present philosophical views about the self, the mind, and freedom for which the author is well known. The essays he includes are generally more accessible to the non-professional reader than his other work. Four of the essays report on Strawson’s own sense of self, memory, personal narrative, and death. This Strawsonian phenomenology will strike most readers as unusual. The essays’ value lies not in persuading the reader of theories about the identity through time of a person, but in making the point that there are significant differences among people with respect to the ways they experience their temporal existence. People who think about philosophical matters tend to have either of two dispositions. Conceptual liberals see scientific discovery and philosophical analysis as properly revising our concepts. “X exists, but it’s rather different than we thought.” Others are conceptual conservatives who tend not to welcome conceptual revision, and either reject proposed revisions as tantamount to denials of the existence of X, or, if the scientific or philosophical conclusions cannot be denied, to construe them as revealing that X does not exist. Conceptual conservatism often leads to radical conclusions, which is what we see in Strawson. He is perhaps best known for his argument that human freedom is an illusion, and that both compatibilist and libertarian accounts are at odds with our concept of freedom. Thus, our concept of freedom is the concept of an impossibility. Strawson reaches this radical conclusion rather than recognizing that our concept of freedom is incoherent but that it can be revised, leaving us with an idea of a freedom suitable for human beings. Strawson regards the project of explaining how the configuration of non-conscious physical components in a human brain results in consciousness as a mere evasion that hides an absurd denial of subjective experience. This project leads to the conclusion that consciousness exists, but it’s quite different than we thought. Here, Strawson’s conservatism leads to a radical conclusion panpsychism. Consciousness is just what it seems to be, yet somehow present in all physical things; it’s a fundamental characteristic of reality. Neither saying that none of us are free or that everything is conscious is, for me, a reasonable price to pay to avoid conceptual revision.

The final essay is an autobiographical account of Strawson’s adolescent life in the late 1960s, focused on his drug use and quest for spiritual enlightenment. Perhaps, this is meant to illustrate what the earlier essays report about his sense of self, but if so it’s not obvious. It might lead one to suspect that drug use is a precursor to developing bizarre philosophical views.

The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis Leon R. Kass

Reading biblical scholarship written by Jews is valuable for Christians, who have much to learn, and some parochialism to unlearn, by listening to the original recipients of what we rather ungraciously label the Old Testament. This is a very close, fascinating, and profound reading of the book of Genesis, written by Leon Kass, University of Chicago professor and chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics in the first Bush administration. It grew out of an informal reading group in which Kass and his wife worked through Genesis with a group of students, seeking its relevance to contemporary issues. The book is very long with something interesting happening on almost every one of its well over 600 pages. I’ve read it off and on for a few years, and finally finished. In Kass’ own words, “The book of Genesis is mainly concerned with this question: is it possible to find, institute, and preserve a way of life that accords with man’s true standing in the world and that serves to perfect his god-like possibilities?” God’s attempt to inculcate human beings into that way of life, which is life in covenant with him, is described in the rich, complex, and often ambiguous account of the lives of the biblical characters. Kass does not read the biblical witness to God's gracious action in human affairs as culminating in Christ, Israel's Messiah and the world's Savior, yet as a Christian, I found his reading of the biblical text profound and enriching.

A Gentleman in Moscow Amos Towles

The fictional Russian count the novel’s title refers to is put under house arrest by the Bolsheviks in a once-great Moscow hotel. He spends most of the rest of his life there. The story’s focus is his relationships with other guests and various employees of the hotel. This, Towles' second novel, is beautifully written and an engaging story with a surprising end. The great question is what does it mean to be a gentleman, an honorable man, in a totalitarian society. This is Towles' second novel. I look forward to reading his first novel, Rules of Civility.

That All Shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation David Bentley Hart

This semester, the faculty reading group in which I have participated for years read this. If you are a Christian disposed to reject the traditional doctrine of everlasting damnation in favor of seeing Christ as the savior of all humankind, you will find this a delightful book, one that advances effective philosophical, theological, and biblical arguments to debunk belief in Hell from a theologically conservative point of view. If you are not so inclined and committed to the view that not all shall be saved, this will make your head explode. Despite offering arguments that belief in eternal damnation depends on denying that God is the Good, on a conception of radical human freedom that has no basis in reality, and on a willfully obtuse reading of the New Testament, Hart’s principal claim is that those who believe God would inflict everlasting punishment on any creature—“infernalists”—are pathological, beyond rational argument, and probably don’t really believe what they purport to believe anyway. The book is a rhetorical tour de force in its denunciations of infernalists, e.g., referring to followers of Augustine and Calvin on the issue, he writes, “if this is one’s religion, then one is simply a diabolist who has gotten the names in the story confused.” The arguments Hart adduces are by and large, compelling, but it is clear that his principal aim is not to persuade, but to express moral outrage at the traditional belief. I found the most valuable part of the book his enumeration of the NT texts that at face value literally teach universal salvation in contrast to the plainly non-literal texts appealed to in defense of Hell. Beyond the fraught issue with which the book deals, it invites reflection on the broader question of our dual responsibility to both respect tradition and to subject it to ongoing criticism in light of Scripture, reason, and the lived experience of the Church.

Truth and Paradox Tim Maudlin

Maudlin develops an elegant solution to the liar–“This sentence is false”: if it’s true then it’s false and if it’s false then it’s true—and related paradoxes. He develops a three-valued logic: true, false, and groundless, and he distinguishes the idea of a proposition being true and being permissible. His resolution of the paradoxes does have some counterintuitive implications, but he makes it clear that no account can avoid violating our intuitions. This lies well outside whatever specialty I have in philosophy, but I found his approach intriguing and convincing. Maudlin’s main interlocutors are Tarski and others who believe that no language free of paradox can ascribe truth to its own sentence and contend that to say a statement is true requires a shift to a higher-order metalanguage. Maudlin’s approach avoids this expedient.

Through the Valley of the Kwai Ernest Gordon

This is a surprising, and undeservedly mostly forgotten, book published in 1962. People of my generation are familiar with the 1957 movie The Bridge Over the River Kwai, based on a novel by Pierre Boule, but Gordon’s memoir of life as a POW building a railroad and bridge in the jungles of Thailand during the second world war is very different. Gordon, a Scot member of the British forces in Burma is captured by the Japanese and imprisoned. The conditions are horrific: sadistic brutality, disease, starvation, and death, and despair all around. The prisoners have lost all hope and are indifferent to the suffering of their fellow-prisoners, doing whatever it takes to prolong one’s survival, e.g., stealing food from their sick and dying fellow prisoners. In this abyss of dehumanization, a few small acts of self-sacrificial kindness start a cascade of goodness that eventually radically transforms the prisoners. Faith in God gradually awakens and it gives them hope that overcomes hate and death. By the war’s end, they are caring for the Japanese guards who cruelly mistreated them. We glibly speak of God bringing good out of evil; Gordon presents a vivid account of this really happening. Thanks to my friend Mike Kugler for recommending this.

The Virtue of Nationalism Yoram Hazony

This is an important book. Contrary to received opinion, nationalism, the belief that the nation-state, dedicated to the interests of its citizens, is the best form of political organization human beings can realize. It is the one feasible alternative to imperialism, the belief that the nation-state should be subordinated to an overriding, universal conception of the good at the expense of national sovereignty. The election of Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit movement in the U.K. are examples of the re-emergent nationalism that Hazony applauds. He argues that the current denigration of nationalism, which takes the evils of Nazi Germany as the epitome of nationalism that must be avoided at all costs, is fallacious. Nazi Germany’s attempt to force other nations into the Third Reich was an imperialist, not a nationalist, project. The reflexive condemnation of Israel by American and European elites arises out of its nationalist will to survive. Hazony regards the European Union as the most salient current example of imperialism. On Hazony’s account, the rights of individuals and minorities can be reliably safeguarded only in the system of nation-states. Hazony, an Israeli-American, regards the origins of nationalism and of opposition to empires as originating in ancient Israel. I have read and recommend his earlier book, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, where he develops this theme. The Virtue of Nationalism challenges both Americans, who have to ask whether the United States has the will to survive as a nation-state, and Christians, who proclaim a universal faith, transcending national identities.

The Long Way Home Louise Penny

This is, I think, the ninth excellent Louise Penny novel I have read. Six more books, which I look forward to reading, remain, and one hopes there are more to come. All these detective fictions feature Chief Inspector Gamache, head of the homicide division of Quebec’s police force. The overwhelming sense one has reading this and all her novels is that she loves her characters and loves writing about them. An interconnected group of superbly developed, interesting characters populates the books. The novels are best be read in order because the latter books make reference to events in the earlier ones. For example, The Long Way Home is about the search for a secondary character from the earlier novels who has disappeared. Her writing is gentle and lyrical, even as it portrays Gamache hunting down brutal murderers. Gamache succeeds, like his creator, by painstakingly uncovering the emotions that motivate human action. Like most protagonists of modern detective fiction, Gamache is a flawed character; unlike them, his flaws arise from his virtues, his concern for others and his generosity. He is one of the most plausibly good characters I know of in the fiction of our cynical age. This book, like some others in the series, focuses on artists and their works. She has a remarkable ability to imagine wonderful works of art and almost convince the reader that he is seeing or hearing them. Anglophone Penny, who grew up in Toronto, sets the stories in Quebec. The province, beloved by the characters as well as by the author, is itself a character in these novels, as is the fictional Three Pines, the idyllic remote village that's home to most of the characters. Penny is concerned with the "spiritual" dimension of human life in the best sense of that term. This does not detract from the opportunity her writing affords to learn how to swear in Quebecoise!

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic David Mendelsohn

Mendelsohn teaches classics at Bard College. He is scheduled to teach an undergraduate seminar on Homer’s Odyssey and his father invites himself to sit in on it. Mendelsohn agrees and his father promises he will keep quiet and just listen. At the first class meeting, the father, to the students’ amazed delight and Mendelsohn’s chagrin, declares that Odysseus is no hero. Mendelsohn moves from frustration to appreciation of his father's imposing himself on the class. He deftly chronicles his father’s effects on the students over the course of the semester, relating what he learns from and about his father and his relation to him. Intertwined with this are Mendelsohn’s musings on Telemachus, the son in search of his missing father Odysseus, and on Laertes, Odysseus’ despairing father. If, like me, you read Homer as an inattentive undergraduate years ago, this brings the old story to life. I have also read Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, his harrowing account of his attempt to reconstruct the circumstances of the murder of his relatives in the Holocaust. It’s not for the faint of heart but with that warning I highly recommend it.

Maudie

This is a beautiful film starring Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke. Directed by Aisling Walsh. It is based on the true story of Maude Lewis, Nova Scotian ‘folk’ painter, portraying her life-long struggle with debilitating arthritis. her unlikely marriage, and her eventual wide recognition as an artist. Even Vice-President Nixon bought one of her paintings. However, the focus is less on her painting than on her relationship with Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke). Lewis, who grew up in an orphanage, is unsocialized, barely articulate, rough, and sometimes cruel. Escaping from the domineering aunt she lives with, she takes a job as Lewis' housekeeper. He informs her that in the household she is less important than the dogs and slaps her. Nonetheless, they eventually marry. Maudie is the suffering servant who humanizes, and with her love, redeems Lewis. Hawkin’s portrayal of the daughty Maudie, undaunted by her crippling condition, the indifference of her family, and Lewis’ initial disdain for her and her art, is simply amazing.