A traveller’s tale

Places 2007/themanLisbon.jpg          Photo: Anon.  Click for source

From ‘A Factless Biography’ fragment 451, in Richard Zenith’s translation of The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa.
(Dedicated to Joe, at a crossroads)

Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning out over the streets and squares, over people’s faces and gestures, always the same and always different, just like scenery.

If I imagine, I see. What more do I do when I travel? Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to travel to feel.

‘Any road, this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of the World.’* But the end of the world, when we go around it full circle, is the same Entepfuhl from which we started out. The end of the world, like the beginning, is in fact our concept of the world. It is in us that the scenery is scenic. If I imagine it, I create it; if I create it, it exists; if it exists, then I see it like any other scenery. So why travel? In Madrid, Berlin, Persia, China, and at the North or South Pole, where would I be but in myself, and in my particular type of sensations?

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.

-------
* ‘Any road, this simple Entepfuhl road. . . World:’ From Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus . . . [From translator’s note.]

I am not a machine

Click for an animated version of this diagram

I spent days trying to compose a sequel to my last post about Maggie Boden’s book, The Creative Mind. She had outlined a science of creativity, leaning on her expertise in Computational Psychology, which she more or less invented. A learned paper says ‘Computational psychologists are “theorists who draw on the concepts of computer science in formulating theories about what the mind is and how it works” (Boden, 1988, p. 225)’. I got carried away with the idea of taking it a step further & sketching out a science of subjectivity, despite the fact that this genre of human experience (which Boden calls “idiosyncratic representations of the world”) is specifically excluded from Western science.

I thought that religion, for example, could be explained sympathetically in neutral terms as opposed to its own self-referential doctrines, which can often be distilled into “The Bible (Koran, etc) is the Word of God because it declares itself as such.” And then we would turn our swords into plowshares, & live happily ever after. I thought that a science of subjectivity could discover that the feeling of being blessed by a heavenly presence is traceable to such-and-such stimulation of the brain visible on a neurologist’s monitor screen, identical to a stimulation which occurs equally in people with no religious beliefs at all. . . . So then everyone would join hands and sing Kumbaya together, realizing there is nothing left to fight about.

I rather liked the illustration I dug up, though. It’s one I’ve used before, but it’s even better when you click on it and watch the animated version. See also this document. The original poster was designed by Fritz Kahn, who illustrated a book I owned as a child: The Secret of Life: the human machine and how it works. Human machine, yes; secret of life, no.

Anyhow, the post I laboured on destroyed itself through excessive editing. Instead of grieving its loss I felt instantly liberated, and glad of the timely lesson it bequeathed.

I enjoyed the brilliance of Maggie Boden’s book, The Creative Mind to the point of envy,

The Secret of Life: the human machine
and how it works (front cover)

especially and illogically since I’d met her face to face, near the beginning of her illustrious career. I wrote, in that unlamented draft, how much it had taught me about creativity. Well, perhaps. Writing down your spontaneous thoughts lets you question them later, especially when you’ve let yourself get carried away. Until the counter-thought blows down the fragile house of cards, you’ve taken time out to live another life in harmless imagination, explore it all the way to reductio ad absurdum. Then you wake up in the middle of the night as if it had all been a dream.

Actually I prefer Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907), though I’m only 3% through and feel no obligation to persevere to the end. Enough with idol-worship! He proposes “an alternative explanation for Darwin’s mechanism of evolution”, one which is generally considered to have been superseded by the “neodarwinian synthesis”. I’m no scientist. I have no grounds to argue with their verdict on Bergson, nor on any aspect of their work. They don’t impinge on my home territory, so to speak.

What I embrace is that which speaks to me and finds an answering response within, beyond fact and reason. Bergson, regardless of how he is seen today, speaks a language I understand better than Boden’s. “Bergson convinced many thinkers that the processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.” (When lacking other attribution, my quotes usually come from Wikipedia.) And here’s a tiny excerpt from his book (he uses many words where I would prefer to use few). It makes sense to me, though a scientist may say it explains nothing, means nothing:

The universe endures. The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.

This chimes with things I’ve tried to say since this blog began. I’d like to finish with the first paragraph retrieved from the unlamented draft which destroyed itself some hours ago:

This blog has always been dedicated to fleeting impressions that defy description or analysis. An early example was a brief moment of what I called knowing, on a rough-and-ready street near my home, when I saw something special in all the people I encountered there, which I hoped they would feel themselves, though suspecting they didn’t. I didn’t know how to express it, unless by using the word “immortality”. (See this post.) It was a powerful experience and I did my clumsy best to convey it at that time. Another kind of fleeting experience comes with a phrase that sums it up, seeming to arrive in my head newly-minted like a whisper from the Muse, but needing reflection and expansion to tease out its meaning. An example which springs to mind is in a post titled “Infinite are the depths” for that was the phrase which accompanied the moment of insight, that went beyond ordinary consciousness.

My long journey to now

Wastwater, Lake District, England

Click to listen on BBC iPlayer

The other morning I turned on Radio 4 whilst washing the breakfast dishes and it sounded interesting, a kind of reminiscence. I’d missed the beginning and took a little while to catch on. I liked the sound of the lady though, full of fun, approachable and without false modesty. When she mentioned a former post in the Philosophy Department of Birmingham University, my listening became more personally motivated. Could it be Maggie Boden? It was!

We met once, at a weekend walking and climbing in the Lake District. I mentioned the occasion in a post published five years ago, here; but had no reason then to mention her.

We stayed at the Youth Hostel beside Wastwater, it must have been the winter of ’62/3. I imagine that Bill Cheverst, a noted climber and last of the original Telferers’ Club, would have suggested the venue; Jim Slater would have invited Dr Boden; Alan Williamson & I would have come because we were always keen for such expeditions. Of Maggie herself I remember nothing, except that she was there, and that she proposed we play Scrabble in the evening, using a set she had brought along. It was the first time I heard of the game. I wasn’t keen to play, retired early to my bunk exhausted, otherwise I might have got to know her. And I’m pretty sure she didn’t accompany us on our climb up Sca Fell. To me, there’s an unsolved mystery here: why is she such a blank in my memory? It may be that I simply felt uncomfortable with someone so beyond my league, so accomplished, whilst I was still in a crisis of adolescence, lacking a sense of personal identity, devoid of social graces. I see this now for the first time. It explains a lot. My diagnosis is confirmed by this article on Adolescence and Social Development. And you’ll see that the piece I link to above closes with these words: “Oh yes, I could be obnoxious in those days.” Enough said.

Listening to her speak on the radio, fifty-two years after our previous encounter, I was able to admire her on more equal terms, or at any rate from a position of mature serenity. I liked her poise and luminous clarity. She was being interviewed for an episode of “The Life Scientific”, which introduced her as a world expert on Artificial Intelligence. I’ve spent my working life in IT, and looked down upon AI as an oxymoronic wild-goose chase. My position was “Computers have no intelligence: they can only do what they’re told—if indeed that.”

So I bought a copy of her book The Creative Mind: myths and mechanisms, and was delighted to find it addressed to me: not personally of course, she wouldn’t remember me at all. It is addressed to someone who tends to think that inspiration, the Muse’s whisper, if you will, is at bottom one of those unfathomable mysteries, like a sense of the sacred, which I’ve touched on here in earlier posts. For her, it’s great fun to dismantle such ideas, because she does it so deftly, and here she is at the age of 78 still doing it, in her role as Research Professor at the University of Sussex. Her sense of triumph at solving puzzles is tempered by undiminished reverence for the wonders she carefully dissects. As her subject in the book is creativity, she picks a number of case histories, including Mozart, Kekulé (organic chemist famous for discovering the ring structure of benzene), Coleridge, Bach, the Impressionists, Kepler, Copernicus, Koestler, Poincaré. She picks them not just for being examples of creative genius from different fields, but also for their own views on how creativity manifests from within the heart and mind of man. This is fascinating enough, but she continually delves deeper, looking at the different kinds of explanation, different kinds of creativity, different kinds of lucky break, as in her chapter “Chance, Chaos, Randomness, Unpredictability”.

And then she brings in Artificial Intelligence, which she has clearly studied as deeply as she has poetry, music, how children learn language, all kinds of intricate lore. She doesn’t spare the reader by keeping to an overview. She takes you through detail, and sometimes gives you puzzles and exercises so that you can discover what she’s saying for yourself, not just let her words wash over you uncomprehended. So she explains how computational techniques such as parallel processing, heuristic & search-tree methods, semantic nets, neural networks can ape some of the creative processes humans perform. Genius, she avers, requires memory, connectivity, awareness of rules and readiness to break out from them into new areas of “conceptual space”. Computational models really can help. By teaching a computer the quickest way to learn English, for example, we can unravel the way young children learn their first language. First the child can only say “I go”, but then invents “I goed” instead of “I went”, and then at a later stage, more consciously understanding the rules for regular verbs, may say “I wented”. Creativity: to learn rules, then exceptions; finally to master both rules and exceptions to the point where you can take the rules to the extreme, and go beyond, to a conceptual space where new rules can be made, then broken and so on.

I haven’t got to the end yet, but there is one thing I haven’t found so far. She goes a long way to explain how creativity can occur. But why, and how, does it move us so? Is human creativity the same as Nature’s? Well of course it arises from Nature, so there must be a connection between the two. Not least of the beauty in her writing is that she opens new doors without slamming any others shut. And I can’t help comparing the significance of her research with earlier developments in understanding evolution and biology. Explanations don’t diminish the sense of wonder: they augment it.

Here’s a puzzle from her book. I hope I won’t be chased for breach of copyright.

“. . . try the following example on some friends chatting over coffee, you may find that the first person to solve it knows the least about mathematics. Engineers and physicists, for instance, usually have trouble with it (even though one might expect them to guess that there is some catch). Indeed, two world-famous mathematicians on whom I have tried it each refused repeatedly to answer, insisting that while the principle of solution is obvious the solution cannot in practice be found without either a computer or lengthy pencil-and-paper calculations.

“Here it is: There are two houses, x feet apart. A twenty-foot string is suspended between two points, A and B, on the neighbouring walls of the houses. A and B are at the same height from the ground, and are high enough to allow the string to hang freely. The vertical ‘sag’ in the string (the distance between the string’s lowest point and the horizontal line joining A and B) is ten feet. What is x? That is, how far apart are the houses?
. . .
“(One friend who solved this problem very quickly without pencil-and-paper—we were climbing Snowdon at the time—described himself as a ‘very bad visualizer’.)
. . .
People often say . . . that visual imagery aids creativity. So it may. But it can also prevent it.”

She doesn’t provide the answer. It took me a while. Let me know when you get it but please don’t reveal it here.

I find myself wondering which came first: that Snowdon climb or our visit to the Southern Fells around Wastwater. I might have learned a lot from her, fifty-two years ago. As it is, I think she’s changing my life anyway, telling me stuff I wouldn’t accept from Bryan White when we argued bitterly a few years ago. Ain’t that just the way? For now I see that if there can be a science of creativity, why cannot there also be a science of how we learn, or fail to learn, right from wrong? Why can’t there be a science of how some people overcome fear with love, and others do not? And then there might actually be progress in the world, contrary to the pessimism of John Gray, in his Straw Dogs.

Ah, but there is still “Chance, Chaos, Randomness, Unpredictability”. Hope is not dead yet, and the case continues.

A Moot Point

moot, adj.:
Originally in Law, of a case, issue, etc.: proposed for discussion at a moot. Later also gen.: open to argument, debatable; uncertain, doubtful; unable to be firmly resolved. (OED)

It’s a long time since I went wayfaring, so long that I became a malade imaginaire and my soul went into hibernation. The vicious circle had to be broken, and this is the log of what happened. To get out of town the sooner, I drove to Loudwater, then walked to Wooburn Green & back. Yet again, my musings circled round the phoney separation of sacred and profane, or to put it crudely, the mutual incomprehension of “believers” & “sceptics”.

I took the voice-recorder along, to try & capture the moment. Some of what follows is nearly verbatim, some has been expanded later.

===*===

Perhaps they [believers in the sacred] have been right all along, in one way, and all these people [believers in “a Universe without Design”—per Dawkins] have had a valid point of view in another way.

I read a review on Arash’s blog the other day of the film Slum Dog Millionaire. He says it has a hidden message:

that everything that happens to us, no matter how good or bad, serves a distinct and distinctive purpose. We may not see and understand it in the heat or burning suffering of the moment, but it seems part of a larger plan of the cosmos, the eventual fulfillment of the Logos.

That is what I mean by belief in the sacred. I’ve been in no hurry to decide one way or the other about it. It remains a moot point, in the original sense of something to be discussed at a moot.*

I look across the road at the ploughed field, where a tractor seems to be sowing for next year, and it takes me back to my time boarding at prep school, with farmland on all sides. We were supposed to behave like a pack of cubs, but even then I was the lone wolf. Sixty-five years later I’m reminded once more that this immersion in nature is for me as a vitamin, an open window letting fresh air into the sickroom, an air carrying intimations of immortality. I continue to Watery Lane, which snakes into a tunnel under the motorway.

There’s no-one but me on this narrow sidewalk. The road was built just for cars, to let them pass under the roaring motorway. I was near the black and white chevrons in my picture, warning night drivers that the bend is sharp, when I said that “this walk very definitely tells me about a Self, that I don’t really know, though I seem to remember having glimpses of it at moments in my life going back more than 60 years. This is why I walk!” For such encounters only happen in special circumstances.

I referred to this Self as it, but I actually see it as me, a strong me: a me, not an everyday I who sees and acts; but me as a Presence seldom perceived directly. I say me because in this short moment I see myself as aware of the Presence from the inside. The gaze of this Me is directed to a world I cannot explain, only glimpse in unguarded moments. Ordinary moments are always guarded: my ordinary attention locks on to this world as a guided missile locks on to its target, as if it’s vital that I do so; or because it’s a habit I’m unable to break. But of course there is no constant need for us to be in this kind of consciousness, not unless things are in a bad way. There are times when we can be unguarded; such as when I go wandering over the surface of this globe, and enter an invisible zone of safety. In this zone, I travel not just on foot through space, but somewhere else too, in another dimension co-existent with physical reality. And it feels worthwhile to have journeyed for a lifetime, just to get a momentary glimpse of it. There are tourists who go to Macchu Picchu, the Alhambra, the Taj Mahal, for a glimpse of the sublime. There are those who will flock to see a magician’s illusions, just for the momentary feeling of a veil pulled aside, offering escape to a world where earthly rules don’t apply. By contrast, you can enter the Zone anywhere, but there is nothing you can do directly to make it happen. You can only go into the unguarded safe place that you have found, & know how to be prepared, and wait.

I come back to my start point, the division between sacred and profane, believers and sceptics. We are all familiar with the idea of the sacred, even if we find no reason to subscribe to it personally. The secular has become the orthodox; religion has become corrupted, or rather, it has never not been corrupted. Despite that, my momentary insights help me empathize with those who take it for granted that there is a purposive force. My experience of a Him, or Me, at a bend on Watery Lane, just before it goes through the tunnel under the motorway, even helps me understand those who claim that Jesus walks with them.

I don’t know anything; but when things are shown to me I trust them. It’s been shown to me that neglecting “the sacred” is bad for my health. I must make space for it in the only ways I know how, and align myself with it.

The other day I was wondering about similar things, and came across this passage in Harari’s book Sapiens:

For more than 2 million years, human neural networks kept growing and growing, but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks, humans had precious little to show for it. What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don’t know.

It made me start wondering: yes, what is it that drives evolution? Why don’t we know? And I started to write a piece in which I called this driving force “impetus”. And then I thought of Henri Bergson, downloaded his book Creative Evolution (1907). Here is a quote:

Must we then give up fathoming the depths of life ? Must we keep to that mechanistic idea of it which the understanding will always give us—an idea necessarily artificial and symbolical, since it makes the total activity of life shrink to the form of a certain human activity which is only a partial and local manifestation of life, a result or by-product of the vital process ? We should have to do so, indeed, if life had employed all the psychical potentialities it possesses in producing pure understandings—that is to say, in making geometricians. But the line of evolution that ends in man is not the only one. On other paths, divergent from it, other forms of consciousness have been developed, which have not been able to free themselves from external constraints or to regain control over themselves, as the human intellect has done, but which, none the less, also express something that is immanent and essential in the evolutionary movement. Suppose these other forms of consciousness brought together and amalgamated with intellect : would not the result be a consciousness as wide as life ? And such a consciousness, turning around suddenly against the push of life which it feels behind, would have a vision of life complete—would it not?—even though the vision were fleeting.

*Later in my walk, I arrived at the village green at Wooburn. Outside “Ash Tree House Dental” was a big ash tree, with an engraved plate at its base:

ANCIENT SITE
An Ash Tree has been located on this site
for more than 1000 years since Saxon Times
to mark the MOOT (meeting place) of the
Saxon Inhabitants