Notes from People Watching

A woman with two young children, one in a sling, one holding her hand, pushes an empty pushchair slowly across the crossing. They pass the bored young man waiting at the bus shelter, who has finished his soft drink and carefully put the empty bottle in the recycling, and finished entertaining himself by talking on his cellphone. Suddenly his bus arrives and he is no longer there. The bus shelter is empty.

A family of three passes, a woman and her two daughters, maybe seven and four, walking alone together in single file.

A man in a big sun hat slowly tends and waters the plants at the nursery across the way. People stop and talk to him about the plants.

People sit in their cars in the traffic, scouting out parking spaces at the grocery store. A dog cowers alone outside the meat market or deli, waiting for his owner to come back out. A man reading a book, perhaps a novel, stares into space looking up toward the sky, caught in his own thoughts or processing something he has read, or maybe a combination of the two.

Someone else is reading a textbook, twiddling a pink highlighter in his hand. Now he is on his cellphone, distracted, seeking distraction.

I email someone I first met here once before about other memories of this place:

"Trying to people watch for an hour as part of the parenting program for my son (did I tell you he is out in the Arizona wilderness for several weeks after struggling with computer addiction, truancy and depression)? I remember our first (maybe only) date here at the cafe in Hopkins, a couple of years ago, when I wanted to fall in love with you and you weren't really interested. And the year before I met an older guy here who wanted to fall in love with me, and fly me with my bike in his private plane to go for a weekend ride, but he reminded me too much of my father.

Difficult to people-watch when bombarded with so many memories.

Wow, I had another date here, maybe third or so, with an alcoholic writer/dj who was too stubborn to let someone else publish the four novels he had supposedly written, and so they were lost when his old computer crashed. I still see him sometimes on the bus.

Hey, he dj's an 80's night every thursday - want to go? It would be a fitting conclusion to my meandering thoughts."

Another young man waits at the bus stop now, less composed, his things in disarray all around, and a soda bottle on the bench seat beside him, so only one of the two young women that join him can sit down. She puts her pack on the empty seat beside his soda bottle, and then another young man joins them and they clear him a space, starting a conversation together. The young woman on the end of the bench is not exactly with the others. She sits forward and close, knees together, balancing a plant pot in her lap, playing on her cellphone and occasionally turning her head to follow their conversation.

The man who was staring into space leafs through his book. Definitely not fiction. A whole lot of art pictures are on the first few pages.

Two different dogs now wait outside the deli, both facing the door where their owners entered. A little impatient, but not despondent.

The stuff in front of the young man at the bus stop turns out to be not only his own, he was watching it and saving a seat for his friends, who now grab their packs as the bus inches forward in the traffic.

A young kid tries to enter his car, testing all the doors to see if one is unlocked, then banging on the windows of the empty car. Perhaps he got tired of grocery shopping with his mom. He experiments with pulling two door latches at once. Nothing works. I look at the bus for a moment, and the kid is gone.

Children sit in the car in the traffic, their mom driving. Each alone clutches a juice bottle or senses it with his mouth, neatly strapped in his seat, looking forward into space. The mom looks forward into space also. Nobody talks or looks out.

In another car a child plays with an empty wrapper, pretending it is a hat, and his dad reaches back trying to take it away from him. At least they were communicating.

Every few minutes somebody touches a car the wrong way and its alarm goes off.

I think that once my ex and I met here too, for a divorce discussion meeting. Not particularly productive.

I like that about 50% of the people at this cafe are engaged in conversation with each other, only 25% on laptops, and the rest reading.

Inside the cafe where I went to use the restroom two men sitting at separate tables are talking. I applaud them and almost wish I could join in. Why is it so hard to meet people at cafes these days? It was easier outside of Wholefoods, where I used to sit at a large table under a sunshade, and that necessitated interaction such as asking if I could join the people there already, and new people asking me. Sometimes this led to real conversations and exchanges of contact information, which I never followed through with, but did remember the people to greet them next time we met in the same place.

A woman carries two heavy bags of groceries, two little girls walking alongside, and I wonder why she doesn't ask them for help. Then she sets the bags down and they each grab one hand. I wonder if they are helping her carry, or if she is now carrying them too, safely back to their car, along this busy street. If I were in her place I would have them hold the other handle of each bag and share the weight.

A woman pushes three girls old enough to walk on a tandem trolley loaded with groceries. She is young and happy, and the girls scream with joy and excitement for the ride.

A couple unlocks their bikes and distributes groceries, the man ending up with a heavy bag in one hand, signaling the traffic with it that he is about to pull out, riding single-handed.

I suddenly think of my son on the trail and check my email for urgent news of his visit with his shadow today. An hour has passed since I first sat down.

Hike to Hot Springs

There is something perfect about hiking to a hot spring. The 10-mile journey is enough to make you sore, and then the soak in the tub, in the wilderness, helps feel relief. This reminded me of the "lost penny found" argument for the existence of pain - there is little as rewarding as a pain removed.

At the spring I met an acupuncturist. In retrospect this profession must have some of the same rewards for the patients. I have never tried acupuncture but perhaps I will someday. The hike back left me with bruises on my knee and ankle, because I was distracted by sucking my thumb (literally, I cut it chopping pears for the dessert) and fell.

Great camping recipes (that may have tasted so good because of hunger brought on by carrying a heavy backpack over 10 miles of up and down and fording a cold river):

1. Prosciutto Wrapped Pear
-very simple to make, but watch out with the knife!

2. Campstove Melange
Ingredients:
Pre-cooked lentils
Pasta
Oregano
Garlic
Onion
Prosciutto
Parmesan
Salt
Bread (optional)

Cook everything together over a campstove and then toast the bread if you lack utensils.

3. Intense Chocolate
Ingredients:
1 ziploc bag of dark chocolate chips
1/2 can sweetened condensed milk
water (but not too much)
Pear slices (optional)

Melt the chocolate in the milk. Use as fondue to dip the pear slices, or simply drink up.

4. Breakfast Melange
Ingredients:
Leftover Intense Chocolate
oats
1/2 can sweetened condensed milk
water (but not too much)
ground coffee

It would have been a good idea to bring quick-rolled oats. We ran out of gas...

5. Lazy Iced Tea
Steep about 4 bags of Earl Grey tea in a canister of pump-filtered river water. Tastes great after a couple of hours... Carefully squeeze out the bags and remove before drinking.

TIP: Bring whole pears and a knife. I've seen people take sliced fruit in ziplocs instead. Trust me, that tastes awful after a few hours on the trail. A sturdy knife can double as a can opener, and mine has a corkscrew attachment as well. Bring bandaids if, like me, you are clumsy.

Thoughts along the trip: Does a tree in the forest make a sound when it falls and there is nobody to hear it? Seems obvious to me that if there are atmospheric molecules to move then a sound is made. How about on a distant planet or the moon? Only if there is enough atmosphere. How can people even wonder about this question? I suppose it all depends on your definition of sound.

The leaves on the burnt trees by the river made a very interesting sound in the breeze, crackling against each other like a raffia curtain.

I know I need to sleep

I know I need to sleep because I feel I might be coming down with a cold, but I can't. I tried, and my mind filled with thoughts about upcoming social events, making up stories about the people around me. Not sad or anxious thoughts, but somehow I didn't feel tired any longer. I don't even feel hungry or needing sex or physical comfort, just wide awake. My mind trips to the hum of the traffic on the freeway, wondering what it might be like to be going on a journey right now. Where would I be heading, and what would I be leaving? I hear the Amtrak train blow its horn and think about train hopping. Maybe I should start counting sheep. Perhaps there are sheep on the train, going to slaughter. Not a good thought. The past and the future are both very present on trains, and the ability of one thing to stand for another. Me, sheep, sleep. I think about praying, remembering the prayer for leaving my soul in the hands of god when I sleep. Sleep like a little death that sustains us and keeps us alive a little longer. Night trains bearing unloved little elephants on their way to the circus.

Earlier I played on the stepping stones in the park, and noticed for the first time the inscription: Be the change you want to see in the world. But how would I know what will be the results of my actions? I must take some pictures of the my free yoga class in the park. It seemed on the face of it pretty good today. I feel inspired to try a new movement exercise next time, and have students pair up and take turns mirroring each other. I did that at the dance Friday, as is my habit, and somebody said to me felt good. Nobody had said that before and I hadn't thought about it. As a matter of fact, earlier I had mirrored someone because she looked sad and lonely, as though she wanted a dance partner, and she smiled and got really happy.

Objective Reality 2

So, during the discussion at the philosophy group yesterday, I revised my intersubjective view of objectivity in favor of the following: objective reality is that thing which human knowledge aspires to. Whether it exists or not is another question...

Is There an Objective Reality?

Thoughts for philosophy group tomorrow.

What is real? We think we know, can sense it. Plato (Republic) disputed this in his allegory of the cave. Socrates asks his student, Glaucon, to imagine prisoners in a cave forced to look only at the shadows cast on the wall of people, animals and other figures walking by in front of the fire. The prisoners think they know what they are looking at, this is their reality, until one prisoner is set free. He cannot immediately recognize the things that cast the shadows for what they are, although they are more 'real' according to this allegory. Once given time to acclimate to the sun outside, the prisoner loses his facility with recognizing the shadows and begins to appreciate his freedom. Socrates argues that intelligence and reason provide access to an ultimate truth of ideal forms, besides which the reality of our senses pales like the shadows on the cave wall.

As a culture, we are still obsessed with this anxiety over what exists, or what is real, cf. The Matrix.

Aristotle disagreed with Plato, and held that there is no such hidden world of ideal forms, only the sensate world and the world of real human constructs, such as the law.

Kant pointed out the problem is that we are limited by our senses and intuitions. There may be qualities of an object, the thing in itself, which we are unable to sense or know. Bishop Berkeley argued that the world of our senses is no more real than the world of our imaginations, except that we can exercise our will on the world of the imagination, whereas the real world is governed by the will of God. [As an aside, Berkeley used an apple as his first example of a real object. Food for thought - the apple of God's mind's eye]. Hegel said very little with a lot of words, culminating in a predilection for everything to come in threes, in this instance 'being' (aka existence), 'ideas', and 'nature', where nature is the synthesis of the external and internal worlds when they correspond.

So there are a number of possible scenarios here. 1) Reality is not what we think it is, but the privileged few get to see it by virtue of their superior education, reason, or fortune - the freed prisoner in Plato's cave, Neo in The Matrix. 2) Reality may be different from what we think, but we are limited by our senses and will never know for sure, in spite of our desire to know (Kant). 3) Reality is more-or-less what we see and think (Aristotle). 4) Reality is the realm in which the will of God is exercised, instead of our own will. In other words, reality defeats us (Berkeley). 5) Reality is the intersection between what exists and our ideas of it (Hegel).

Incidentally, Berkeley's view was preempted in the creation hymn from the Rigveda (c. 1500-1000 BC): "Whence this creation has come into being; whether it was made or not; he in the highest heaven is its surveyor. Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not."
Which brings us by a leap of faith to Nietzsche's method of genealogy, looking at the origins of ideas as a battleground rather than a building site, and postmodernism with its notions of reality by consensus or intersubjectivity.

What is the problem? I think it is this. We commonly encounter both agreement and disagreement about the real objects of the world. Where the objects are more abstract (God, money, politics, love) there are both more disagreements and stronger feelings. People on the whole don't feel very strongly about, say, apples. We need a theory of reality or existence that can contain both agreement and disagreement, but we are ill equipped to imagine topologically beings walking around with worlds in their heads, of which some parts are shared and some parts private. So we fall down the rabbithole of metaphorical collapse, insisting one way or the other (subjective or objective) and justifying our position by flagwaving on the totem poles of realism and relativism.

Maybe there is some bigger picture where the music and the dance synchronize together, like in a movie? Ah forget it, I'm just trying to be Hegelian.

I think we must concede the question is unanswerable.

Speaking of which, I just discovered the word epistemocracy today. It means a Utopian society governed by rulers with epistemic humility, meaning they know (and acknowledge) what they don't know. Supposedly coined by Nassim Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan, it is spreading throughout the blogosphere perhaps thanks to the fact that Google's blogger recognizes it (and coincidentally not the word blogosphere itself) as a correct spelling.

Why does the internet impose itself so unquestionably on our reality, like an apple and not like a God?

The Young Girl and the Ammonite

When she was a young girl, maybe two or three years old, her family used to vacation at Lyme Regis, in Dorset. There were a few photographs in the family album that helped Cynthia remember this time. The crisp, cold feeling of the water as she ran in and out of the waves, the radiant '70's windbreakers where her mother sheltered on the chilly beach, the scary feeling of excitement atop the gigantic green slide on the way back home to their rented cottage, and the smell of coalfires in the evening air. In London there was no more coal burning after the clean air act, but her mother said the smell reminded her of her own childhood. Sometimes Cynthia wondered how many of these memories were true, and how many had been fabricated and embellished by speculation each time she looked again at the old photographs. But the photographs were black and white, so the radiance of the psychedelic windbreakers, and the greenness of the vast slide, were things she must have remembered. And, of course, the smell of coal, and the touch of the water.

And the ammonites. They never took pictures of the ammonites, but she remembered them clearly. Inset in the neighbours' whitewashed garden wall, all around the museum and on the pavement outside. She asked her father about them, calling them snails. Those are ammonites, he said, relics of ancient underwater sea-snails. He explained how a fossil is formed, by the dead creature being pressed into stone, and eventually rotting away, the cavity itself slowly filling with rock. Cynthia thought of the spiral inside the Brighton rock that her grandmother once gave her, and wondered if that too was a fossil. She searched underwater, among the seashells, for ammonites, wanting to prove they were not extinct, staying in the icy English Channel so long that her parents first worried about her feet turning blue and then since she seemed happy enough jokingly said to the concerned onlookers that she must have seal blood in her. On the way home, she drew ammonites in the sand, spreading the sand on the foot of the green slide and digging spirals in it until the last of the late evening sun vanished over the playground wall.

Eventually, her search turned from the sea itself to the rocks and cliffs of the sea wall. She dug at the rocks with her fingernails, trying to unearth fossils. It was tiresome work, and she was just about to turn to collecting seashells instead when she saw a large rock in the shape of a woman bending down and washing her hair. Cynthia felt the form of the rock, looking closely, and found to her surprise a tiny bit of the ridge of an ammonite's shell, with which she had become so familiar by rubbing her fingers on the neibhbours' wall every evening until they had become calloused. In her imagination, she pictured the ammonite sitting inside the rock, coiled in the woman's belly, like the fat ripples her mother called her 'spare tire'. She wanted it. It was her ammonite. But she had no idea how to get it out, and soon their vacation was over and they returned to London with only the black and white pictures in the family album, none of them showing the ammonites.

They never returned to Lyme Regis, for shortly after Cynthia's younger brother was born. Her mother placed Cynthia's hand on her belly, and instead of an ammonite she felt inside her brother kicking. He was born with a murmer in his heart, and a mitral valve prolapse which meant that he could die at any moment. Her father explained that the heart pumps blood through two loops, one to the lungs and one to the rest of the body. The hear squeezes the old blood into a new chamber, and the mitral valve stops it from coming back and mixing with the new blood. Like the valve on the big orange bouncy toy that he let her inflate. In her baby brother's heart, the valve was broken, so some of the blood flowed right back when the heart squeezed, making a murmering sound. She tried to listen to his chest on one of the brief visits he had at home, like listening to her grandmother's conch, hoping to hear the sound of the sea. But she didn't hear anything.

Instead of vacations, Cynthia went to kindergarten and her father picked her up while her mother was in and out of the hospital with the new baby. Her father took her to the Museum of Natural History, where she saw the giant ammonites in the entrance hall, just like her ammonite on the beach. She wanted to buy some little ammonites in the museum shop, but they were too expensive so they bought gemstones for her mother, for when she came home. Her mother put on a polite smile, when they hid the stones around the room for her, like fossils, but Cynthia saw her father's face fall. They both fussed over the baby, and Cynthia bounced around wildly on her orange toy, abusing it to see if the little valve would give way like the one in her brother's heart.

When she was an art student, Cynthia went back to Dorset, on a field trip to learn about stonecarving. She and her fellow students stayed at a caravan park on the cliffs, overlooking a small, dingy beach where they had bonfires every night and smoked. During the day, they drove to the quarry, all eight of them in one student's old Volkswagen Golf, with the windows rolled down, blaring Ziggy Stardust out loud to the rolling hills and craggy old people of this large village or small town. There they were lectured by a sculptor who taught art at the nearby community college, then let loose on the rocks, vaguely supported by a local stone mason. The rocks were not only from the quarry itself. The place was a graveyard for old gravestones. The town had decomissioned two cemeteries to make way for a shopping centre, and dumped the stones in the quarry. A few graves remained, ornamentally sandwiched between the Vodafone shop and a council estate, and it seemed nobody mourned the loss of the largest part. Then other towns began dumping their gravestones here from all over Dorset, adding to the natural resource of rock, undoing centuries of human labour and rebuilding mountains in the derelict quarry, piling up high on the cliffs what had long ago fallen into the sea.

Cynthia wandered among the discarded gravestones and boulders, liking the idea of finding something here to use rather than carving more stone out of the quarry's rockface. She started collecting interesting letters and inscriptions, copying them into her sketchbook. Then she sketched a boulder that looked to her as though there was a tortoise hiding inside. She wanted to find a form already hidden in the rock, so there would be less to carve out. She had no idea what she wanted to make, and so imposing her own will on the quarry was meaningless.

There was a rock that looked to her like a dancer, and another that looked like a woman, washing her hair. Cynthia began sketching this rock from all sides, drawing the form of the woman inside in the style of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth. Henry Moore sculpted woman as a landscape, and Barbara Hepworth made women coming out of the hills. They both drew with contour lines and frames, and so Cynthia proceeded to form her washerwoman from all angles inside of the rock. Then, something made her decide to feel the rock. This rock looked familiar. She did not normally imagine women washing inside of rocks. She knew exactly what she was looking for, and she found it - more by touch than by sight, because the whole thing was now faded and a little grimy. The ammonite ridge. Cynthia was convinced this was the rock from her childhood beach in Lyme Regis. She had found her ammonite again.

All plans to minimize carving by seeking a form close to the surface of the rock vanished from her mind, and she began chipping away with her hammer and chisel, mining for ammonite. The stone mason saw her and started to help, saying she had found a nice, big one. He could understand wanting to take it home. As they worked, he told her about how he became a mason, the years of training and the initiation consisting of carving two linked rings using only hand tools. The rock was hard, and after working all day they had only exposed a few centimetres of the outside curve of the ammonite's shell. It seemed to be intact. He suggested renting a power tool and generator to finish the job the next day, as Cynthia and her group were going back to London at the end of the week.

That night, they went to the local pub and drank apple scrumpy. Then they went back to the beach, and since they were out of dope somebody suggested smoking the wild fennel that grew all along the steep path back to the caravan. The next morning, Cynthia woke up in the bed, which was strange because she normally slept on the couch. The teacher from their art school came early, which was also strange, and told them that they had to go home. Apparently, the neighours complained that someone had been seen dancing around on the top of the caravan, threatening people with a mallet, and they were all making a lot of noise. Cynthia was taken aside and gently blamed for being the cause of this collective punishment. At first she remembered nothing. Then, she dimly recalled climbing up the front of the van. She was sure that she handed her mallet to someone down below, so that she could get a better grip, but perhaps they had passed it up to her later. Why was she holding a mallet?

A few weeks later, she and her brother drove back to Dorset to retrieve the ammonite. As children, they had never been close, since her parents took care to protect Jacob from the trials and tribulations of childhood, worrying about his heart. Cynthia felt left out and not a little jealous. Now Jacob was himself out of the house and going to college, and Cynthia hoped they could get to know one another as adults, beyond the constraints of their close-knit family. Once in the Dorset village, they found the friendly mason and with his help, hired a power tool and a generator. They had until sundown to carve out the ammonite, plenty of time since it was June 21st, the summer solstice and longest day of the year. Jacob was good at finding fossils. As a child, he had asked for an archaeologist's pick-axe for his birthday, and promptly came home with a large rock containing a dinosaur's footprint. His finding was confirmed by several bemused experts among their parents' friends. After extracting the ammonite, Cynthia planned to show Jacob the beach. Maybe they could light a bonfire together, to celebrate Midsummer's Night.

When they got to the quarry things started going awry. First of all, it was hard even for all three of them to carry the generator all the way from the car to the rock. Then, the thing wouldn't start up and they had to carry it all the way back and drive into town for a replacement. With two people chipping away by hand, they had revealed about a quarter way around the ammonite. It was nearly sunset when they finally got the second generator going, and Cynthia realized they would have to risk paying for another day's rental. As the sun was setting over the hills, tinging the white walls of the quarry with its red light, Jacob, who had been chipping away at the rock, suddenly collapsed.

Cynthia went through in her mind the steps of cardiac ressuscitation that she had learned years ago at a first aid class. She wondered if this was even the right thing to do for someone with Jacob's condition, the mitral valve prolapse. In that moment, she remembered a recurrent dream or nightmare she used to have about her brother, when they were younger. She had been left to take care of him while her parents went to get something out from the car. They were at a stately home, in the garden, a place way out in the countryside and larger than life. Jacob was just learning to walk, and he stumbled into a maze. Cynthia saw him enter, and ran after him, surprised he was not right there in the entrance. The passageway bent around in a spiral between the tall, dark green boxtrees. Cynthia kept going, expecting to find Jacob at each next bend, running faster and faster. Finally, she arrived at the centre of the spiral, exhausted, and there was no Jacob. She felt terrible. She felt so ashamed, what would she say to her parents when they came back and discovered she had lost her brother? They must be back by now, she should go out and ask them for help. To her surprise, she noticed there were not one but two exits from the place where she found herself, in her mind the centre of the maze. She looked from one to the other with increasing trepidation, trying to remember which passageway she had come from. Which was the way back out? This was the point when she always woke up.

While Cynthia hesitated, the stone mason, who knew nothing of Jacob's condition, had already applied CPR. Jacob spluttered awake, and asked where he was. Cynthia took him to hospital, while the stone mason returned the power tools. Ah well, she thought, he will get the ammonite himself another day. Small payment for rescuing my brother, while I was shamefully trapped in indecision. They had a long wait in emergency, because by now Jacob seemed to be fine. He told Cynthia how he had felt he was falling, not from the little rock but down a great cliff, as his life flashed before his eyes. He saw the light at the end of it. It was hours before he was seen by a doctor and sent home, and by that time Cynthia was too worried about him to attempt any bonfire on the beach. They stayed at a small, innocuous bed and breakfast which was already on the way back to London.

Cynthia and her brother never got close, and eventually he suffered a cardiac arrest and suddenly died. She held as a comfort the image of the light he saw at the end of his near-death experience in Dorset. A year later, when it was time to set the stone for his grave, she drove back just in case the ammonite was still there. To her surprise, there it was, exactly as they had left it, about a quarter revealed from the belly of the woman bending down to wash her hair. Cynthia found the stone mason again, and he helped her load the entire rock onto her van this time. She went back to her old sketchbook, and thought about simply carving the stone woman in the style of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth as she had first envisaged, instead of trying to get 'her ammonite' out of the rock. In the end, she did not have the heart to do even that. She simply lumped the whole thing on his grave. Maybe others would see in it the woman washing her hair, maybe not. Maybe they would find something different. The ammonite was there now, for all to see. At the end of the day, she didn't even know him.

Writing stories is a little like stonecarving. Sometimes one comes with a plot fully formed and one hacks away at the quarry, regardless of the shape of the rock. Sometimes one looks at the rocks of life and sees something hiding just beneath the surface, waiting to be told. If you take a moment to look at the rocks, maybe you will see something there. It's not always about finding ammonites.

Are Apples the Thingiest Things?

Out of curiosity, I searched on 'apple' through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Apple is used in 42 entries, almost invariably as an exemplar or instanciation of objective reality. The first entry that came up was, interestingly, the one on pain. There, apple is used as an example of a thing we can all sense - we all see, hear, smell, taste the same apple - as compared with pain, which is private. We each have direct knowledge from experience only of our own pain, in our own bodies. Another entry was the one on neutral monism. Monism is the idea that everything consists of one kind of stuff. According to neutral monism (as opposed to idealism or materialism) this one stuff of reality is neither mental nor physical. Spinoza was a neutral monist, according to SEP. Apples are used to illustrate Bertrand Russel's strange notion that things are organized around holes, that happen to project their aspects into the minds of the observers:

"The characteristic feature of the of this construction procedure is that it gathers up into one object the spatially scattered appearances of the object they are said to constitute. A particular oddity to this way of proceeding is that the groups that are physical objects are “hollow”—the apple presents apple-appearances all around it but it does not present such appearances where it is, i.e., in the region occupied by the apple. This central region “may be as small as an electron or as large as a star.” (Russell 1927a, 217) It is this feature of the view that critics such as A.O. Lovejoy have in mind when they call Russell's view “centrifugal realism” (Lovejoy 1930, 203) according to which “all material things…are built around holes” (Lovejoy 1930, 198) Russell happily acknowledged this consequence of his view and expressed in such slogans as: “‘Matter’ is a convenient formula for describing what happens where it isn't. (Russell 1927b, 126)." (SEP)

Apples are interesting, because they themselves are organised around a core. A core is a thing like a heart, we use it for expressions such as 'core values' to mean something central and incontrovertible. As already mentioned, apples were used in Wikipedia to differentiate Aristotle's philosophy from Plato's. Plato believed in a world of universal forms, where the perfect apple might reside, whereas for Aristotle the essence of appleness was in the core of each apple. Maybe having a core is the reason apple was used in that example. Imagine it being a potato!

In fact, I suggest that the heart symbol used in European iconography bears a much stronger resemblance to the seed-case of an apple sliced along the core than it does to any of the anatomical parts it is said to depict (an ox's heart, a woman's vulva). Go ahead, open an apple and tell me if I'm wrong.

SEP has zero entries for avocado, and while oranges are mentioned they are rarely used in the same way as apples. There are many more pages using 'egg' than 'apple', but eggs are cited as much for their potential (to become a chicken, or an embryo) as they are for their thingness as eggs. Leading me to wonder, are apples the thingiest of all things?

More Apple-y Thoughts

When I used the Hebrew for apple in my username, people kept imagining that I was referring to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. I'm not sure why the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is commonly depicted as an apple. According to Wikipedia, it comes from a confusion around the Latin word malus which means evil as an adjective, and apple as a noun. The Hebrew bible states simply the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. The nature of the fruit is unspecified. This confusion reminds me that as a very young child, when I was learning to speak, I used to think that the expression 'by mistake' which I quickly learned to use when I did something wrong, was related to steak. I would imagine accidentally dropping a piece of steak on the floor. I didn't much like steak.

Knowledge is like a tree, it has stems and branches. It grows outward exponentially, as in the biblical 'be fruitful and multiply.' Think of all the articles published in scientific journals these days. So much knowledge, so much easier to access.

A few years ago when my grandmother was dying I went to the public library in the neighborhood of London where I grew up. The hallways were filled with crateloads and carts of books for sale or for free. The emptying shelves were being replaced by rows of computers. There was a line of people waiting for their 15 minutes free time on the public computers. When we want to know something new, or even remember something we once knew and forgot, we tend to look it up on Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't like the thousands of articles spreading out from the tree of knowledge, it's like one branch or one web being whittled away by thousands of people. I wonder where all the rest of the knowledge goes? Maybe some of it keeps being rediscovered, like the bedframe I stub my toe on every morning. Douglas Adams wrote that there is a planet where the lost biros end up. Maybe there is a planet for lost knowledge. Maybe the lost knowledge goes like shooting stars to rejoin the Kabbalistic glow at the end of the universe, where it is all of one piece with the knowledge that remains found.

But what about the knowledge that simply is false, or at least very human? Like mistaking malus = apple for malus = evil, or the steak in 'by mistake'? Sometimes it becomes part of culture, and sometimes it remains only a funny image in a small child's mind.

I agree with the biblical story that knowledge of right and wrong is the most primitive kind, a binary representation of the branching structure itself. Aristotle held that knowledge stems from experience via reasoning, and he was the first to codify logic. But logic requires there to exist right and wrong thoughts.

Apple Planting in America

Inspired by Richard Brautigan's book Trout Fishing in America, I have decided to go Apple Planting in America and write a philosophical travel journal. When I drive across the country with my son, we will bring a box of apples with us and plant the cores as we go along, taking pictures of their locations with the GPS coordinates on a new iPHONE. Amazing what we can do, now! Someone could even go around after us finding them and taking them out, displacing them, or enhancing them by planting an actual appletree seedling.

I've always liked apples, the fruit, not the computers. Perhaps because they hit all the senses at once, sight, smell, touch, flavor - even sound (crunch). I use variants of apple in different languages as usernames and passwords for many things. Once I identified as a quince! In Hebrew, apple is part of the word for many other things. An orange is a golden apple, and a potato an earth apple. The latter is true for French, as well. The reason for using apples in this way is not because I like the fruit, it was simply because the first time I was required to make one I was trying to program an Apple-Mac computer in ThinkC. It quickly did the apple-thing on me. Macs always freeze when I try to use them, and display a timer icon. At the time, it was a little black-and-white clock, but in later years that was replaced by a rainbow-colored bow or hourglass that looked not entirely unlike an apple core.

When I first thought of this idea, I remembered a story about someone planting apple seeds across America. This was confused in my mind with a story about George Washington, or perhaps Lincoln, and an apple or cherry tree. I probably read both stories in an American Grade School reader when I was 6. It came from a used bookstore in Israel, and was one of the few new English books that I owned at the time, which I hadn't brought with me from London, so I kept it fondly even after the corner was chewed off by the dog.

Looking on Wikipedia, I quickly discovered that the story was about Johnny Appleseed, a real historical character and Swedenborgian missionary who traveled around the outposts of Ohio preaching about not harming animals, and planting nurseries with apple seeds supplied by the cider brewers who wanted more apples in America. Johnny Appleseed lived on other people's floors, wore discarded old clothing, and went barefoot in the summer.

It was George Washington who killed a cherry tree with his new hatchet, when he was 6, after being told it was good to use on wood. Then his father, outraged finding the stump, asked who had damaged the tree. Little George confessed to the act, saying he couldn't lie, and his father was so delighted that his son had spoken the truth he was not angry with him for killing the tree.

According to Aristotle, the form of an apple exists within each apple, whereas Plato thought there was a world of universal forms, where ideas exist like 'good' that have no particulars in this world. Aristotle thought there were particulars of everything.

I could have made the story be about Lincoln and an apple tree, and had his father as the itinerant seed planter. Lets try that. Lincoln, Sr. traveled around the West planting apple seeds, and preaching about not harming animals. Finally, he settled in Sinking Spring Farm, in Kentucky, with his young wife. One day his six-year-old son Abraham was given a hatchet, and told it worked well on wood. Trying it out, he accidentally killed one of his father's precious apple trees. Lincoln Sr. was outraged to find the apple tree felled, and asked who had committed this felonous deed. Unable to lie, young Abraham confessed. Although the apple tree was precious to Lincoln Sr. he was happy that his son had told the truth. Lincoln, like his father, avoided killing animals.

The truth, I think, is fleeting, like a trout. Reality is more like an apple. Memories are precious but often false. This meditation was made possible by Wikipedia, the collective efforts of many minds working together to perfect knowledge.

Many years ago, I planted a seed in Wikipedia. I planted the proverb "He who eats alone, dies alone," under Jewish proverbs, because my father used to say that. Curiously, I found out from a friend whom I lunched with that it was actually an Italian proverb. I could not find a biblical or other Hebrew source for the saying, so I surmised that its popularity in Israel could have stemmed from the stories of Holocaust refugees who had spent months or years wandering the shores of Italy before finally gaining passage to Israel. I did not change my entry in Wikipedia, but after a while I found the expression listed under Italian proverbs and removed from Hebrew ones. Interestingly, I now see that it has been reinstated in Wikiquote as a Jewish proverb as well as an Italian one.

The proverb has a number of possible endings. He who eats alone, dies alone. He who eats with others, dies of starvation. He who eats alone, chokes alone. Hey - this one is in Arabic and may account for both Hebrew and Italian interpretations. Spanish preservers 'chokes'. I think I caught a glimpse of the trout.

Thoughts on male and female jealousy

After a conversation I had with someone the other evening, we came up with the following hypothesis. Jealousy is different in males and females, and seems to follow opposite (and hence equally irrational) order considerations. Men seem to be more jealous when their partner (either monogamous, polyamorous, or whatever) is seeing or in love with somebody that they consider inferior, a jerk, 'don't know what she sees in him.' On the other hand, women are more jealous when their partner (or former partner) is with a younger, more attractive, or accomplished woman, whereas they are less sensitive to him seeing a woman they consider inferior. For either sex, their view of the ordering seems the only rational one but clearly neither way is rational.

I wonder what you think of this hypothesis. Please feel free to add examples and counter-examples in your comments. In particular, I would be interested in finding out whether a man would feel more jealous if his former partner were with a jerk. It makes no sense to me that he would, but then the whole male perspective on jealousy makes no sense to me, and seems to hark back to primate ancestors giving in to the alpha male, never mind droit de seigneur. And how does it work for gays, lesbians, and others?

Thoughts on rationality

The topic for this month's philosophy group is 'are we rational?' To me it seems obvious that the answer is no. But lets look at the question from a number of different perspectives.

There are many ways in which humans could be rational. We could have a part that is rational, as contrasted with emotional, appetitive and spiritual or willful parts. We could have the ability to reason correctly. We could behave in a predictable fashion to further our individual or collective goals, or some other goal. We might collectively have the ability and desire to come up with better rules for reasoning about things.

The ancient Greeks (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) conceived of the soul as having different parts, including a rational part, and various bestial-appetitive parts, and perhaps a spirit or will as well. We could be rational by virtue of having a rational part. Kant considered that there was a structure to reason. It couldn't be made to account for morality and duty, but it did explain for him the interaction between a-priori knowledge and knowledge derived from experience, including the synthetic principles by which a-priori ideas are put together.

Experiments by Tversky, Kahneman and others since the 1970's show that even if we have a rational part, we are very bad at making reasonable decisions based on certain kinds of information. For example, we overestimate the likelihood of conjunctions (two things happening together at once are never as likely as each one singly), we ignore base rates (the probability of somebody having, say, a deadly disease, based on the results of a screening test, depends on how prevalent the disease is in the first place), and we give false significance to illusory conjuctions (which accounts for part of the fascination of 25 random things and the like on facebook). In fact this is hardly surprising, given how long it took historically for humans to discover how to reason correctly based on probabilities - the thousands of years between the invention of language and money, and the theorems of Laplace and Bayes were likely filled with people losing out on bad bets. Those who gained were probably just lucky. Gigerenzer showed that when the information is presented differently in these experiments people will sometimes make the right decision, but this just begs the question - why have a commonplace way of presenting the information that leads to errors? And why don't people learn? Gigerenzer argues that human reasoning is ecologically valid because we have only a limited capacity to process information, and our survival dictates that we come up with decisions in the nick of time.

Economists like to think that people act to further their selfish goals, because this makes marketplace behavior predictable. Many studies show that this is not so. People favor egalitarianism (fairness) and punish cheating behavior even at personal cost.

Ed Stein argues in his book Without Good Reason that we should not jump to the conclusion that people are irrational, that this is an empirical question but the jury is out. He favors a naturalist epistemology (theory of knowledge) which is based on a mix of descriptions of people's beliefs and norms of how one should believe (reminiscent of Kant). Perhaps the errors people make in these cognitive experiments could be overcome by sufficient education. Bartley argues that we can be rational if we hold all our beliefs subject to logical and empirical criticism. Quine describes human knowledge as a web in which the outer, peripheral beliefs are subject to contrary evidence whereas the central ones are less so, but can move historically out - such as the belief that the sun circles around the earth.

I wonder if our belief that there is a rational part to the soul will shift far enough out that it can be abandoned, and what would be the effect of this. On the whole I think people's behavior is largely predictable and irrational, accounted for by a basic herd instinct compounded with various cultural traditions.

If we are irrational, the question 'are we rational?' becomes somewhat inaccessible, because we could never show that our beliefs about this were rationally based. However, assuming (or defining) that we are are rational would lead to obvious errors in predicting human behavior and beliefs, unless we decide that we are rational in exactly the ways we do behave and believe which would negate the purpose of using the word rational in the first place.

There is a difference between predicting human behavior and explaining or understanding it. Everyone seems to have a central belief about the structure of the soul, and most of these beliefs are culturally based, whether they come from Greek philosophy, various religions, or from Freud. This seems to be a class of belief which people hold subject to neither empirical nor logical criticism. It often includes impenetrable elements such as the unconscious or subconscious, the spirit, free will, consciousness, or even thought and reason itself.

I definitely see historical progress in our ability to make logical (rational) inferences concerning things like probability and in conditions of complexity where our basic intuitions are wrong. This progress is a cultural artifact that necessitates the existence of two things in my worldview. First, that some ways of reasoning are objectively better than others. Second, that humans have the potential capacity, given the right education, to see this. While I would dispute the contention that some people are more rational than others, I believe that historically some societies have had more knowledge about reasoning than others, and the collective ability to make more reasoned decisions and hold more reasonable beliefs, or at least to logically criticize false beliefs and wrong decisions.

Aha moment

I realized the other day, as I was biking up Mount Diablo, that I still have probably most of my life ahead of me. I thought about the fact that I've only been having sex for about half my life, and how much more of that there is to come. I thought of all the things I've learned in the past 38 years, and how much more I could learn in the next forty-odd years. Perhaps I should keep a scrapbook, otherwise it might be too much to remember.

The view of the sunset as I rode down the mountain was magnificent. If I could paint a picture in words, it would be a pink sky with the crisp lines of blue hills in the distance, the red sunbeams snagging the fog in the valley as it rolls over the pale dry grass beside the orange tinted tarmac. I had a flat near the bottom and my friend helped me change the tube by the light of a bikelamp in the cold dusk. It would be nice if he noticed I love him and if he stopped wanting to date other women, but we always have such wonderful adventures together. Maybe I am too forgiving.

Today I learned a new yoga pose from a book. Garbha pindasana or womb pose involves sitting in lotus and squeezing the hands and forearms through the space between the shins and the calves and then balancing with the chin resting on the hands. I taught it to my students, who seemed to have a good lotus position.

Questions about the soul

I used to think I was not a dualist, taking in the critiques of Descartes with his ridiculous partitioning of mind and body and strange notions of how they interacted and affected one another. The upside-down image on the back of the retina that needs to be re-rotated for the benefit of some strange homunculus, looking at periscopically it via the pineal gland. How would he even know which way was up? Much more insidious was Descartes' identification of the self, 'I', with thought. I think therefore I am. Hegel pointed out that only stopping up the eyes and ears made this mode of existence possible. But the identification of the self with thought, and obsession over the existence of consciousness, has continued to dog Western philosophy and its latter day manifestations as pseudoscience.

Materialism posits that all facets of existence can be reduced to physical arrangements of matter and energy in space and time. I have no qualms about this idea. The problem is that we still don't know exactly how it happens in a way that produces our everyday experiencing. I venture to hypothesize that while individual consciousness manifests as the complex patterns of activation of many different neurons in the brain, together with the chemical signals that they use to communicate with one another, it is also determined by the people around us and the cultural legacy of historical brain activity in many, many people now dead who first came up with concepts such as the soul and God, and found words and language to communicate them with their contemporaries.

It would be a sad thing if our ability to transcend our individual existence once again in this same way became bogged down by neurobiological hyperbole.

Dog ritual, science as religion

This morning when I took my dog for a walk his friend Chauncey was out in the yard, barking to greet him. We crossed the road so that the dogs could say hi and to my surprise, after wagging tails and sniffing both ends through the gate, my dog peed on the gatepost. I was just about to reprimand him for what looked to me like bad dog etiquette, when Chauncey proceeded to do exactly the same thing. They both stood there, taking turns peeing in each other's general direction on opposite sides of the same gatepost. It must have been a ritual they developed together, away from the broader dog culture. My dog almost thinks he is a cat anyway. He adores our cat, who regularly joins us on our evening stroll. The dog tries to make friends with other cats and is at best indifferent towards other dogs, a mixture of frantic fear and aggression signaled by loud barks and fur bristling along his spine.

Taking turns peeing in one another's general direction from opposite sides of the same gatepost. I wondered sadly if this what many human interactions have become as we immerse ourselves in increasingly unnatural environments.

Somebody asked me what I thought about the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, so I watched it. My view is that science as religion is no more harmful than any other religion. Analysing the movie, we seem to have replaced God with the Quantum Universe (both out there and within ourselves), Bad or Evil with Addiction (chemical addiction and, slightly more troublingly, addiction to emotions) and Good with Self-Evolution, Awareness, Knowledge, Creation/Creativity and/or nonattachment. Genuine scientists as well as chiropractors and spiritual leaders served as the priests and prophets of this new religion. If badly spun metaphors of quantum theory and neurobiology are what gives you those tingles down the spine associated with spiritual feeling, then karma to you. I vaguely remember experiencing that when as a 17 year-old physics student I finally understood Dirac's matrices. Sadly the moment was fleeting as it took a great deal of mental effort to follow the math. My one qualm about all this is that if Jesus were nonattached, why would he have bothered? The same goes for Moses or Maimonedes, who was among other things a great physician. Show me someone who did some great thing for the benefit of humanity who was not emotionally attached to the world and the creatures on it. Oh, and what about the imagination? If all these other things are Good, then why not also Imagination?

What are the rituals of this new religion? The two ritual actions depicted in the move show the deaf protagonist (illustrating the limitations of our senses) tattooing herself with hearts using an eyeliner and then immersing herself in a hot bath. Later, she tosses away her anti-anxiety pills. Perhaps watching the movie is a ritual in itself in some circles. What the Bleep do I know?

Some Thoughts

Pursuing men is not a worthwhile activity. I feel sorry now for ever having tried it, and although I feel tempted to do it again I am better able to control the impulse. I learned a lot in a year or two of dating. What I learned is that friendship is much more valuable to cultivate. I really needed friends, and it can be hard to turn acquaintanceships from dating into friendships. If I rely on my friends I can avoid pursuing men and all the feelings of loneliness that inevitably arise from this activity.

Notes for Practical Philosophy

Can philosophy be practical? I would argue that it always is, in the sense that philosophers believe their views to be of worldly merit. Probably even the most abstruse philosopher is not analyzing something simply to find out how it is constructed, but is writing about it at least in part in order to have an impact by changing people's thoughts and actions. Philosophers such as Plato, Confuscius, Machiavelli, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche all had ideas not only about what is but also how it should be, which they presumably believed in. The difference between a religion and a philosophy is that the former derives its justification from authority, personal or divine inspiration, whereas the latter derives its justification from reasoned inference usually based on replicable or universal phenomenological observations. However, it would be misleading to say that Philosophy as a whole system of knowledge can be practical, because there are as many different philosophies as there are philosophers. A life lived according to Spinoza would be very different from a life lived according to Nietzsche!

As a system of knowledge, philosophy has been losing ground to science over the past few hundred years, as more and more content becomes subject to empirical research. Like philosophers, scientists these days seem to be flirting with proscriptions for life, or at least neurobiological theories of why we humans are the way we are. Scientific theories derive their validity from a particular kind of observation and inference. I somehow doubt that Darwin wanted us to live by his theory, although he probably wanted us to change our minds about some things, but try telling that to Richard Dawkins.

I would argue that philosophy is of practical value as a way of thinking about things, not only about so-called philosophical questions but everything that can be addressed with thought, including (but not limited to) how to live, and other questions that have now become the provenance of science. Philosophy as a method concerns itself with critiques of the connections between ideas, thought in other words, and without such a critique ideas can become connected or disconnected simply by spurious juxtapositions. A train of thought can lead to a conclusion that might be false or erroneous, and philsophy urges us to beg the question 'but does that really follow?'

The philosophical method is discursive, and will not necessarily lead to one right answer in questions of practical life value such as whether to change careers, relationships, or to commit suicide, any more than it results in a single decisive view on what things are or why we are here. But it can help us avoid certain kinds of errors that come from wrong thinking, whether our own or others'.

The motivation to come up with a solution generally originates in feelings. Perhaps it's like a cooking timer.

Truth, Torture and Bicycles

I've been wondering why you were still on my mind, after I forgave you for everything last year, and I realized there was something I hadn't forgiven you for yet. You asked me to lie to you about a certain thing, then you asked me about that thing and broke off our friendship because I lied. On another occasion, you told me, you stole some woman's bike because she was shouting at you, and then you felt indignant that she wanted you to return it instead of coming to pick it up herself in her car. (It was actually somebody else's bike that she was keeping in the first place, but while that has parallels too in this story we will leave it aside for the moment). Anyway, I realized it's kind-of the same thing. I said something that upset you (like the woman with the bike, shouting at you) so you stole my truth (like you stole her bike) by asking me to lie about it, and then when you asked me that question you expected me to reclaim my truth instead of handing it back to me. You could have said, I know I asked you to lie about this, and that was confusing, but now I want to know what really happened. It's your truth anyway, I had no business taking it away from you in the first place, and now I'm just asking and you can give it freely or choose not to give it to me. Instead you rode around on my truth. I don't even know where you went with it, so I couldn't come and get it if I had wanted to. Can someone ride on somebody else's truth? Maybe that's what torturers do. They forcibly take somebody's truth, leaving that person in pain. I forgive you for torturing me.

I hope that by writing this down it will finally go away. The magical power of words.

Meditation on meaning

"... intellectual arguments if "inconsistent" may cease to be intellectual arguments, but human behavior, if inconsistent, does not cease to be human behavior; and economic systems are closer to being extended and materialized forms of behavior than to being intellectual arguments. Thus to identify them as "contradictory" or "inconsistent" does not announce the alarming character of the dislocation that Marx actually attempts to convey. Similarly, to describe the departure from the model as its "falsification" would be more appropriate if the model were bodying forth the nature of "truth" rather than the nature of "fictions and made things." " (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain).

These are fragments that I shore against my ruin:
That minutes I spend on the phone with some lonely person, or hours face to face, or the share of an hour doing yoga, help someone get through their days. While I may be a replaceable part of a broader system, somebody has to be in my place. I make no claims to heal anybody only to allow healing to happen. In another culture, perhaps, I would be a priest or a shaman or a family elder. But I like being where I am.

Scarry claims that work is an organized system of pain that promotes the imaginative creation of cultural artifacts. My work is constantly creative and pain free.

Scratch that. Saying goodbye is hard. Therapists are paid in order to suffer the pain of ultimately letting go. Not for the pleasure of holding onto somebody's memories, but for the cost of erasing them.

I work in a bizarre organization where almost nobody is paid, in the midst of a culture that makes Mammon our god and expects from him the kind of truth that Marx expects. The biggest taboo in the broader culture is money. I wonder what is our biggest taboo? Perhaps I'm too close up to see it.