March 31st;
Dinner with Bob. I contact
Weekly Standard.
March 30th;
As often, last week's cat-allergy asthma blends smoothly into a thick
head cold. Is my immune system hoaxing itself? Or dinner with
Gordon last night?
Still, lying on my floor in bright Sunday-morning sunshine, I finished
Len's
English translation of Antal Szerb's
'Journey by Moonlight'.
Lovely, light
readable English prose with not a word out of place. A late 1930s honeymoon in Italy
of two Hungarian newlyweds, Mihaly and Erzsi. Mihaly is
likeable and human enough, but the whole book palls for any reader who
has actually met all those Hungarian types so accurately portrayed in it. With
their pompous little musings about the questions of life, expressing flamboyant
certainty about vague things and fake confusion about simple things, these
puffed-up Hungarians were not hard to recognise. Both sexes see the other
with a precious mixture of awe and condescension (as they still do in Hungary)
- tiresome in the extreme. Erzsi goes hunting for a 'tiger' of a man, while Mihaly is so
pathetically in the thrall of one old love, Eva, that he wants nothing more than
to die in her presence. Yuck. Much of the writing is gorgeous and weightless and
some of the portrayals of Italy as a place are truly mesmerising, but the people....
In particular, the smug self-regard of the two Hungarian females,
effortlessly at peace with their own wise, instinctive mystery, was repulsively
familiar to this reader.
A cameo American girl called Millicent is patronised by
Mihaly as endearingly trivial and flat, lacking all that wonderful,
tragic, sophisticated Europeanness, one thing Szerb's unsure Hungarian heroes are
very sure of. Much of the characterisation is uncannily
true to type - my problem is who the uncannily true-to-type characters are.
March 29th;
Check: NY-based
gawker & schooling-themed
Brian's education blog.
March 28th;
After 12 hours' sleep I
feel quite reasonable.
March 27th;
Drive to Budapest on low sleep in hot sun.
March 26th;
A pretty busy day. We go for lunch with Assunta, a famed friend of
Robin from his Berlin
days, in her garden just outside Vienna. A curry and a very friendly dog.
Then we coffee with ex-gourmet-chef journalist Severin and his young Danish wife Majken
in the
Palm
House,
a sort of mini Crystal Palace full of 30-foot-tall palm trees.
Then we join Oliver, his gorgeous sisters Eva & Vilma, and mother for dinner with Oliver's
colleague Angelika & her computerist boyfriend Thomas.
March 25th;
Playing
Christian Death and
Psychic TV tapes,
Robin and I drive (past many Austrian pig farms, but also rousing views of
authentic Alps) to Vienna, where
Oliver and his mother welcome us. We learn about
military history
from Oliver over an Italian meal near the
Turkish Embassy.
March 24th;
Lunch with Finky, who alarms the Polish au pair by taking Puedi's children onto the garage roof,
followed by a trip to help Puedi ferry rubbish from Elka's house to a municipal recycling place.
In the evening I find
easyinternetcafe is
not actually easy at all {no staff, so blocked sites undeblockable},
then a stimulating drink with Florian and
Clarissa,
who works with glass artists like
Brian Clarke.
March 23rd;
Robin and I sleep late enough to miss the lunchtime
outing to lake with Puedi and Fuffi. We wander around
doing a long afternoon breakfast.
Later Googoo and Lucy come for dinner. Lucy and Puedi explain the
ski-resort-based
TV drama series they
are writing. Googoo casually mentions a Munich socialite who vomits in women's handbags.
March 22nd;
A long drive to Munich. After Puedi chats with us into the small
hours, I drift asleep at 5.30am in a room
full of toys where a giant fluffy green
M&M
character watches over me from behind a red and yellow
hammock.
March 21st;
Hello Cora!
Still don´t understand how I got 120 hits today
from her Brazilian site, since I can´t read a word of Portuguese.
We visit two galleries, Johen and Schoettle, showing
photos by Elgar Esser, and
Nuel´s one-time boss,
Thomas Rehbein, showing ceramics and sketches by
Elmar
Trenkwalder. A fine dinner at Alice´s where we meet
her neighbour, portrait painter Alexander, a gentle soul in the same family as
Schlieffen of the Plan.
March 20th;
After a relaxed start, Robin and I wander around
Cologne. Alice, a painter of natural skies and
treetops, takes us to an exhibition called
´Schweigern´
in a set of lawyers´ offices and then to
her 39th-floor flat. We look down on the lights of
Cologne, hear a few belching, rhythmic roars of a lion
rogering one of his lionesses down in the zoo below,
and leave. Robin gets vertigo, insists on walking down
while we get the lift, and has to telephone us for
help when he locks himself in a 2nd-floor garden.
Alice says I should read
Frans de Waal´s other book, a
companion to
´Chimpanzee Politics´. Then to a
Vietnamese restaurant.
March 19th;
We bid farewell to Kate and Jules. Robin becomes
slightly tense as we struggle to leave the traffic
jams of south London behind. Miraculously, we make the
5pm ferry crossing
and reach Nuel in Cologne at around
2am.
March 18th;
Welcomed by Kate last night, today once again Jules
helps out and puts me in touch with Ben. Then I meet
Billy the linguist in person at the Festival Hall for
a herbal tea! Every bit as mellow yet precise as his
weblog suggests. I buy the DNA special print edition
of New Scientist, get back to Kate´s, and she, Robin
and Amir are relaxing.
March 17th;
Bus down to London today. Not yet had a chance to check
that Caucasian
oil-pipeline website mentioned by Laura,
who I met while out having a coffee with John on Saturday.
March 16th;
Also rich in black and white line drawings, mother's 1962 copy of
T.H. Savory's
'Zoology'
in the Teach Yourself Books series - back when they had the stern,
wasplike yellow and black covers, was an odd read. On one hand enjoyable to find
an old-fashioned straight-into-the-action book starting with single-celled
microbes and going from there. On the other hand, a slightly fuller glossary of
zoology terms might have helped. Unapologetically taxonomic.
Here's the first paragraph of Chapter 5, page 51:
"The mesenchyme
or more or less solid mesoderm
of the Platyhelminthes
is the focus of attention in the next stage of the
evolution of the animal body. It is found to have changed from a
mesogloea
supporting a few more or less isolated cells into a distinct cellular layer
with functions of its own. In it there appears a space, known as the coelom,
and the cells which line this, the
splanchnic mesoderm outside the gut, and
the somatic mesoderm below the
ectoderm,
play so important a part in the lives
of animals that possess them that these animals are customarily preferred
{sic} to as the Coelomata."
Has so much really changed since 1962?
Remember, this is a teach-yourself
book {priced, not cheaply for then, at 7s / 6d}. The slogan "Alert minds
choose Teach Yourself Books" certainly made me feel a bit dozy.
I obviously had not been paying attention in
chapters 1 to 4. Coelom & Coelomata do get defined, but some of the other
terms caught me a little off guard. Am I silly to want a bit more explaining?
Perhaps lists of names really do/did define biology.
What would Savory make of the new suggestions to
replace
Greek and Latin naming of species with DNA-based barcodes,
I wonder?
March 15th;
Robert Kaplan's
book about the history of zero
from the library was interesting,
and has lots of charming black and white drawings taken from historical sources.
A double page of herb-like plant drawings showing the evolution of various
modern words for zero, nil, nought etc is a treat.
Disguising his strong views with lots of cheerful wit, he comes down quite firmly
on the idea that the zero-and-place-value system was not [as usually claimed]
an Indian 6th or 7th century AD innovation, but actually was something they got
from more secretive Greeks in a roundabout way in the late Hellenic period.
'The Nothing that is', like
Adrian Woolfson's book,
rather indulges its own
sense of the lyrical, but with much better judged humour, and a lighter touch.
The point where an Old English author from 1300 is quoted to explain
Knuth's
notation for
Ramsey numbers
is a typical moment. Even where,
later in the book, Kaplan keeps the whimsy pedal pressed fairly close to the
floor, you're still left wishing you'd had him as a maths teacher, instead
of the grey-faced dullards we all actually got.
March 14th;
Finish mother's copy of
Bede's
'History of the English Church and People' over
breakfast. Strangely soothing to read. Wonderfully plain and unpretentious in
tone, earnestly recounting various miracles with a mixture of apologetic
assurances that a friend had spoken to a witness who really saw it, and a
touchingly sincere concern that each miracle story may help the reader's own
soul. An appealing glimpse of a nation with four languages ['English'
{like modern Dutch or Frysk?}, 'Pictish' {in Scotland}, 'Scots' {mainly Ireland
and the west of what's now Scotland}, and 'British' {Old
Welsh?}]. The idea of Old Welsh/Cornish being spoken all the way down from Ayr to
Carlisle to Blackpool to Liverpool through Wales to Bristol and the whole of
the West Country is nice. Striking how everybody back
then [from about 600 to the 720s AD] was
(a) routinely racked by sickness, death,
& thoughts of heaven or hell, and
(b) very glad to politely and generously
entertain strangers and guests, despite language barriers, probably
for a bit of company. Presumably the few above peasant level had a lot of spare
time to either pray with great intensity morning and night, study and teach
scriptures in a variety of languages [quite a few Dark-Age Brits, Bede approvingly
mentions, understood Greek as well as Latin], or invite in holy travellers from
a neighbouring kingdom for a fortnight of discussion. I suppose people still like
meeting travellers, but find it harder to justify.
March 13th;
Finish the
Hebden Bridge Library copy of
Adrian Woolfson's
'Life without genes'
around midnight. Compelling in parts, deeply annoying in others. An initial
foray into various kinds of increasingly-large toy hypermarkets, culminating in
the awesomely-sized 'Toy Space' is clever. Woolfson uses Toy Space
[a planet-sized shop containing all possible toys, once made, to be made, and
that can be made, ever] to explain the idea of Gene Space, a vast collection
of kits of all the possible permutations of DNA-codings and perhaps other codings
too. Woolfson's obvious debt to Borges' more crisply expressed
'Library
of Babel' image - a combinatoric collection of all possible strings of printed characters,
so all possible books, containing all actual books as a tiny subset -
is vaguely alluded to later, but not really acknowledged.
The main ideas are interesting, but clouded over by Woolfson's hip-scientist pose.
He discusses the structure of DNA, how it might have evolved from simpler
mechanisms for inheritance, and how very early life must have had not
digital, but analogue genetics, like analogue gramaphone records before digital compact
discs. These might have been temporary clusters of molecules in tiny rock pools or
small fluid-dynamic cells of perhaps thermally self-ordering fluid within bigger
seas of chemicals. This would have been interesting if he hadn't got carried away by his
version of Borges' metaphor into producing so much
dodgy prose. Perhaps writing like this: "And you embrace
these things with open
arms. The cowboy greets the Indian. Together we kiss the ether, our saddle is every
tomorrow. But we have no space for this conjuring deception, these tricks, this
hocus pocus. - ..." [and on and on and on, across the vast
expanses of Pseudy Waffle
Space...] helps many readers. A refreshing glimpse of
wild science? I hope so. But other affectations, such as
always writing
'discreet'
when he means the other word
'discrete',
pale into insignificance
next to Woolfson's substance-abuse-style fantasies. I would have liked more
about the early, self-organising, almost shapeless forms of pre-gene life,
more about the future of modified genes, and frameworks for heredity other than
DNA. And a lot less lurching between florid passages and
paragraphs bristling with big biology words. Some wonderful ideas, interesting facts and speculation,
and plenty of energy - 2 or 3 books later could be something superb. Once it's
evolved a bit.
March 12th;
Encouragement, from both John by phone and Liberty Belle, via
Samizdata,
by e-mail, to write about
Jumping Jacques Chirac for a US magazine.
March 11th;
I finish Peter's copy of
'The Figure in the Landscape' by John Dixon Hunt.
A very smooth, but quite bewildering read. Bewildering largely because it's about
18th-century English poetry, landscape gardening and landscape painting,
and I know next to nothing about any of the three. Towards the end,
the scraps of things I half-recall of
Alexander Pope,
Capability Brown, or Thomas Gainsborough
all started fitting a bit better into bigger changes of fashion and beliefs.
Like any new subject area, a bit of a slippery ice wall at
first. Probably starts to take shape more after 3 or 4 books.
March 10th;
I trot over to
Hebden Bridge and back. Again.
March 9th;
I wade through the Sunday newspapers.
The
Observer Magazine has an article about art curators who are
"iconoclastic"
[i.e. break pictures]. What's wrong
with simple words like 'bold'?
March 8th;
Last night Ed & I heard
Simon Armitage read his poems. This morning
Len's translation of
'Utas es Holdvilag',
'Journey by Moonlight',
by Antal Szerb arrived by post.
March 7th;
So, I'll put links here to wherever I stick it, but the brief outline of my
view is that Searle's
Chinese Room argument is just as deeply flawed as the
artificial-intelligence community claim, essentially assuming what it seeks to
show {the specialness of first-person consciousness}, but that Searle's
philosophical instincts are still in the right direction. Inverting Turing's
simulation test, so as to claim that even a perfect simulator [a person locked
in a room full of rulebooks for turning Chinese writing into English writing]
is still not a real intelligence, is bold of Searle. He attacks Turing's
simulated-thinking-is-as-good-as-real-thinking case apparently at its strongest
point. But the room-bound nature of the Chinese Room [like the Turing Test]
"pumps" Searle's intuition
just like everyone else's, and stops both detractors and proponents of machine
intelligence from seeing the real issue, which is autonomy. The
Robot Reply seems
to get close, but is just cladding the Chinese Room in a moving shell. Both Searle
and his opponents, AI defenders like
Daniel Dennett,
have got it upside down. [Though Dennett got very close, worrying about what
he called
'cognitive wheels' and the AI
'frame problem' -
but notice how in his very 2nd sentence "Its only task was to fend
for itself." the design assumption subtly smothers any autonomy assumption before it
could even get started.]
Bodies are not vehicles or add-ons for intelligences. Rather, intelligences are
subordinate features of bodies,
serving higher-level animal needs like food, survival, sex. No system built
into a box, even a moving box, is going to be intelligent, because both
the consciousness defenders
[like John Searle]
and the cognitivists [like Dennett or
Pinker] have misconstrued thinking as a facility giving clever answers and
both see the essence of thinking as somehow about thinking {albeit
contrastingly: experiental + circumstantial
on the one hand, logicist + functionalist on the other}.
In fact thinking is about doing, so as to do what that animal wants.
It's a facility assisting clever decisions
by an autonomous entity [such as a squirrel] which already
has other things it needs to do more urgently than think.
At 5 pages it's a bit long for here {I've only just pruned this page}.
So 'Giving the Chinese Room a mind of its own' or
'A linguist locked in the Chinese Room' or whatever, will link from
here when/if it finds a home....
March 6th;
Tomorrow and tomorrow for the Chinese Room. How to summarise? I hope it
isn't another
'intuition pump' as
Dennett would put it, but we'll see.
No cash-journalism replies yet. Those
busy-busy-busy London editors still frantically occupied, pumping
printers' ink through the arteries of this great nation.
March 5th;
The second day I bump into Peter on the approach to
Hebden Bridge, again wearing
a yellow flower in his buttonhole.
March 4th;
Perhaps I'll post something about
Searle's
Chinese Room argument against
strong artificial intelligence tomorrow.
Not really enough room [ha!] here. Can
anyone suggest a decent discussion list?
I might call it
'A linguist locked in the Chinese Room' if
I find somewhere to put the whole article, though lots of other fun titles beckon.
But I'm pretty sure now I know what's wrong with Searle's argument, and
where his cognitive-science & AI opponents go wrong too.
March 3rd;
Sent article to editor at Loaded.
March 2nd;
Ed takes me along to a lovely dinner party at Peter's {a poetry-filled cottage
up on the
tops} with Gaia and Tim.
March 1st;
Meet Ed for
a drink in Halifax.
February 28th;
Finished another old book I was 3/4 through.
Steven Pinker's
'Words and Rules'
takes us into the heart of his own
specialism, which is grammar, mainly regular and irregular verbs in English
and German. This can be a surprise if you've previously
read him chattily discussing evolutionary
roots of human thought in general, cheerily introducing us to other people's
research.
He explains how people with different brain conditions make revealingly
different kinds of mistake with "wug tests" [tests to put endings on
invented nonsense words], giving us clues about how those languages
distinguish regular and irregular [Pinker supports Twain, perhaps German
exceptions do outnumber German rules by some counts!], and how our brains do
the same. The book gives an excellent feel for the austere precision needed
for real science - one question at a time, carefully chosen to give one
clear answer either way. By the end, he is claiming
Wittgenstein's "family resemblance" argument is a fresh view of the classes
of things we pick out in reality from Aristotle's defined types. Though the
idea that classes of resembling families have 'prototype' [he means
'archetype', I think] members sounds like a bit of a slip. Bluejays are
more essentially 'birdy' [for Euro-American experimental subjects?
surprise, surprise...] than cockatoos or penguins. Wouldn't that depend
where your particular culture stood along a spectrum of
resembling, overlapping categories? Is a Wittgensteinian
fuzzy category any more than an Aristotelian category where
a couple of other Aristotelian categories pop up unusually close by?
More interesting, he suggests that far from mistakes like 'buyed' and
'thinked' revealing something distinctive about children's brains, these
typical children's mistakes shaped the very language - the other way
round. They may have helped, he says, decide which verbs kept which endings
and which dropped out of the irregular clan, being regularised [and very
occasionally going the other way] by each new generation of children's
& other new learners' errors over the centuries.
Despite its big ideas about how we categorise the world, the book's
thin air of high-altitude cognitive research is a bit overbracing.
Nagging doubts lurk. Is it really possible to deduce so much about
the evolution of the brain from the difference between German s plurals and
German n plurals? Isn't
MIT the institution that rode much of its
reputation on the detailed do-ability of strong
artificial intelligence? If some
things are understood according to rules, and some case by case, so what?
And shouldn't this kind of linguist learn a few more languages before they
start looking for this kind of brain-culture fit?
-
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact@otherlanguages.org
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