Terminus: SF&F

Often, this blog has posts about the boundaries between different areas of knowledge. In memory of Roger Zelazny, this post will quote from the dialogue between the god Yama and the monkey Tak. They discuss the nature of the beings known as demons, and this is how the discussion goes:

They sat in Yama's chambers, having taken a light meal there. Yama leaned back in his chair, a glass of the Buddha's wine in his left hand, a half-filled decanter in his right.

"Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak.

"Yes – and no," said Yama, "If by 'demon' you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape – then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect."

"Oh? And what may that be?"

"It is not a supernatural creature."

"But it is all those other things?"

"Yes."

"Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not – so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will."

"Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy – it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either."

It is that curious last paragraph to which I must draw the reader's attention. Four points of the compass? It is interesting indeed, and perhaps it shows more insight into the mind of Zelazny's Death-god than anything else. Four choices, and the one choice Death would never choose. But that begs the question, "Which one would Death choose?"

The Moment of Impact

Last night I saw two moments of impact. The first was enormous, the second was on a much more personal level. It seemed facetious to compare the two; only an accident of timing had brought them anywhere near each other and they shared little in common.

In the first, the Nazca plate off the coast of Chile thumped yet again into the underside of the South American plate. The result was an earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale (about 10x the magnitude of the one that hit Haiti earlier). The reverberations resulted in tsunami warnings for places as far away as Japan. Despite the intensity of the quake, the death toll is not expected to cross 250.

In the second, promising Welsh player Aaron Ramsey took a hit from a horrified Ryan Shawcross in the Stoke City-Arsenal soccer match. Shawcross missed his tackle and fractured Ramsey's lower leg so badly that the foot was hanging loosely off the joint. It was clear that players from both teams were badly shaken. Ramsey is 19 years old, 5'11"; Shawcross is only 22, 6'5" and was just called up for England.

How can you compare the two? You can't. The first is a natural event in which more than 200 people lost their lives. The second is an unnatural event in which a young man has broken his leg. But the fact is that they are juxtaposed in our consciousness, and human empathy is such that it is easier to imagine breaking your own leg badly than to imagine the agony of 200 deaths.

When I saw the first event in the media, it was hard to assess my immediate emotional response. I must confess I felt relieved that relatively few people had died. When I saw the second, my heart sank. When the cameras pan away from the scene and the last thing you saw was a crunching impact that leaves someone's leg looking wrong, there's a more visceral sensation.

That highlights the difference between an objectified event and a subjectified one. The former was big, and you felt you ought to feel bad for victims of such a disaster. But the latter was more personal. You felt bad at once. You felt bad later when you realised you honestly felt worse for Aaron Ramsey than for Chile. Emotion is a funny thing.

Emotion and Reason

Quite often, I have mystified students. It's almost as if they have embraced mysticism rather than rationality as far as thinking about themselves is concerned. One thing which triggers this state is when they have to think about emotion.

"What's emotion?"

"Err... it's feelings, right?"

"OK, it's feelings. So how come we think of emotion as a way of knowing?"

"It helps you know how you feel!"

"OK, so your feelings teach you how you feel?"

And so on.

The point is a really simple one. An emotion is a physiological response to a situation, that is linked to a change in psychological perspective. It distills a situation down to a complex but concentrated social package, based initially on 'feelings' (but also on the input of your senses) and tells you whether something is 'good', 'bad', or any one of maybe five or six other basic categories. Sometimes it does this very quickly for something that the reasoning mind cannot cope with easily, simply because the situation is too complex.

At this point, students often ask, "What about love? It's only a physiological response?!"

Well, not only that, but the emotion one calls 'love' certainly does not exist without a physiological response that is linked to a change in psychological perspective. If X says he loves Y and you hook him up to a machine that measures these responses, he will certainly show certain kinds of physiological changes when he's asked to think about Y. If he doesn't show any of the known likely changes, then he doesn't love Y in any sense, simple as that.

But is it possible to love someone purely rationally, without messy emotions getting in the way?

No, actually. Even loving some thing requires emotion. If a person truly loves money, then the sight of a $50k cheque made out to bearer will trigger a bunch of physiological responses linked to a change in psychological perspective. With loving someone, it engages the social parts of the brain even more.

Some say that it's emotion, the social response package, that has made the human brain the size it is; we spend a lot more time feeling than using logic. We make snap judgements about how we feel about people (and things, and situations) almost all the time, and it's so much a part of us that we don't consciously think about it. In short, our feelings are actually the brain making sense of our physiological responses (the 'gut feel', the 'sinking feeling', the uneasiness which you can't pinpoint, the chill down your spine, the crawling of the skin, the hair standing on end, the blush of the cheek, and many more).

We aren't creatures of pure reason. We can't be. The brain is too heavily involved in emotion for any of our thoughts not to have any feelings associated with them at all. An honest person will admit it; only the worst kind of pseudo-scientific thinker will assert otherwise.

Two Ravens

Over the last three days, by some strange synchronicity, several very different and probably unrelated people have expressed interest in the little project I designed and implemented at the end of 2004. It's an odd little project, combining as it does threads from C S Lewis, Neil Gaiman, various mythologies, modern technology and computer science, and half a dozen other peculiar things that have been known to run through my head.

The project revolves around two entities of dubious provenance who call themselves Huginn and Muninn, or Thought and Memory. On one level, they are the two ravens said to accompany Odin All-Father. On another, they are two angelic beings neither fallen nor unfallen; on a third level they are powerful archetypes and key elements of the universe in which we live. In fact, there are other levels, and part of the interesting thing about these levels is that Thought, of course, doesn't remember very well — and Memory sometimes lets Thought do all the thinking, or not.

The form is unusual; there is a short poem followed by two snippets of dialogue. This doesn't vary, although the style and shape of each triptych does. A lot of it probably requires explanatory notes, but it's more fun to just read through the whole thing in the way prescribed (that is, scrolling up from the bottom of the very long page). There are 180 proper entries. You can ignore all the embedded links if you want — they're not particularly interesting or important.

I think it is possibly one of the best pieces of work I've ever created. Some of you will realise from this how limited I am, while others might be kind enough to say nice things. But it's mine and I like it. So there. Heh.

Stacking

How many things can you put in one place? It depends on how much leeway you are allowed in other dimensions besides the one(s) that determine the location of the place. I remember all this stuff by reading people like Donald Knuth a long time ago, in my other life as a computer scientist. To this day, I have not found a better computer science textbook (i.e. a textbook about any particular aspect of that field) better than the first three volumes of his TAoCP.

Some time ago, a student asked me how the various things I have studied in my life affect the kind of behaviour I evince while living the rest of my life. I think I've mentioned some of those behavioural quirks before (for example, here). You can probably find more by searching for 'life' and 'computer' or whatever in this blog.

I think that all of the things I've learnt stack in my brainspace, and provide bonuses which are independent of each other. But you'll have to ask my Master if that is true.

Walker

Sometimes, it's good to take a very long walk. The direction of this walk should be perpendicular to other directions, like those of life, of thought, of boredom or of pain. Thus aimed, one is straightened and yet not straitened; one is made free.

Atomic Thought (Part 1)

The idea that things can be reduced to 'indivisibles' has been around for millennia. Two kinds of 'indivisible' concept predominate: either you find things so small that nothing is smaller (i.e. fundamental particles and the concomitant idea of 'quantum' – the smallest gap or difference in things) or you find that the whole universe is one thing expressed in different ways (i.e. one indivisible continuum with odd snarls in it like a twisted multidimensional blanket).

In more recent times, people like Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein sought in various ways to reduce thought to basic elements, with which all other thoughts could be expressed – forlorn endeavours but still an interesting kind of project.

But there must be some basics, surely?

Yes, I suppose there are. Having had the occasion to teach literature, economics, history, chemistry, physics, mathematics and computer science over the years, I must confess to a few bad habits.

Firstly, I've always tried to figure out what the basics (or 'first things') of each discipline are.

Secondly, I've always tried to link them together in some sort of coherent narrative for each discipline.

Thirdly, I've always tried to link these basics across disciplines.

Why 'bad habits'? I think that in many cases, even if I was successful, elements of the narrative constitute wishful thinking. You can create a beautiful narrative that works on many levels, but it still might not be true. Take a simple conceptualisation of science, for example.

Supposing I observe a million things and craft a theory that accounts for all these observations. Well, what I've done is join the dots, which doesn't necessarily constitute truth. But what if I then predict the next 100,000 observations successfully using my theory? Well, then I might still be joining more of the same dots. But what if I then create an experiment specifically to disprove my theory and fail? Wow, that's... science, for now.

The problem is that a lot of our criteria are flagrantly metaphysical, and we don't acknowledge that. The ideas of what to observe, what to eliminate, what to build upon, what to try and prove incorrect; a lot of these things require us to make value judgements and use our intuition. The reason people get conflicted and find error in science is that at the heart of it, science is a human endeavour. It has all the variability of the human condition, desperately kept under some sort of control.

So where do we go from here? I'll be taking a quick look at basics as I scan this year's Theory of Knowledge essay questions and leave some thoughts on them.

Fading Ghosts

For three years, the battalion was senior to all the rest. They had occupied the same barracks for a large part of that time, and as the former major walked along the company lines, he could not help but feel a twinge of emptiness. He was used to taking the salutes from certain faces, the tactful avoidance of others; he could not help but feel unease when those salutes came from soldiers he did not know.

"But their names are known to God," he told himself. And so, he steeled himself and learnt the new names. He could not help, on occasion, but to draw comparisons between those who had marched off never to return, and those who were their replacements. It was odd, strangely dissatisfying. He had not felt that way for many years.

And slowly, a little at a time, he learnt to be trusted and to give trust again. He learnt the names. He read them as he used to read their seniors. While at times he would see the ghostly vanguard or the spectral knights, and once even an Arthurian wraith, he learned to carry on, giving the old lecture with new jokes, teaching the new equipment as he had taught the old.

Very slowly, he blended with his craft. In time, though he did not know it, he would himself become one of them, a fading memory on a field of blue and gold.

Watershed

Cold, wet, watery; which is to say: it is cold, the cold has resulted in a huge amount of precipitation, and on this planet, that precipitation is mostly water. And then it petered off. Now, it is cold and wet, but less watery. It will not be dry tonight.

I'm opinionated about education. I believe I have the right to form those opinions, keep those opinions, develop those opinions, and attempt to inflict them on people as a form of testing. Opinions are opinions, but when used as the basis for policy, it is good that they are tested. Some opinions are clearly wrong in certain circumstances; it is clearly not right to say that not all opinions are clearly wrong. Some opinions are more important to some people; that is, having greater import and significance; and some opinions are less important.

The reasons one might believe in this are simple: everyone practises a sort of ranking. This is a consequence of neurobiology; certain sounds, sights, and stimuli are responded to more sharply than others. It is like blue light and red light. Building from this fundamental truth, it becomes obvious that some news items, some effects and affects, some consequences of policy are of greater import to some people. Can it be said that this is clearly the case of certain matters?

Yes, I believe so. Time and time again, in any belief system, one is told that X is fundamental to belief, or that Y is of key importance, or that Z1 and Z2 are the greatest and second greatest commandments. Hence, if you have a belief system, it might be true (by fiat, or by acclaim, or by authority, or by necessity, or axiomatically) that something in it is of greater importance than all other things. If I were a Christian, for example, I might consider this to be more important than any kind of worldly knowledge or wisdom: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; and your neighbour as yourself."

Why would I do that? Because, according to my putative belief system, the author and completer of my faith said that these were of paramount importance in the context of commandments. If I want to be true to the system, I have to believe that in any discussion of commandments (i.e. things we are told to do), these are the most important. And so on.

There is a dangerous trap in postmodern thought (although not all of it) which begins with saying that all viewpoints are equally non-definitive. This might be true, charitably speaking, but it is not the same as saying that all viewpoints are equivalent or identical or equal; in content, authority, utility, economy, and other qualities, they will be of differing value.

Think on these things, said the apostle. Think.

What Do You Think?

Since we began investigating the Iridescent Battaglia of the Dom Perignon in 1998, the one clear thing that has stood out, has stood the test, and has been understood is that it requires the utmost valour of the self to be expressed incisively and with felicity of more thought.

In other words, it rewards those who think well and express exactly what they think. It does not reward the lazy or the slothful, the dishonest or mendacious. These receive their just reward because such attitudes lead to behaviours which form products of dubious value. It is as She said.

What I think about education in this respect is twofold:

1) The thinking mechanism must be engaged. What does the material say? What can you rationally infer from it, within the rules of its discipline? Have you discussed this with other thinking people? Does the combination of your reasoning and your dialogue lead to a rigorous construct that withstands counterargument, is precise in its terms and accurate in its objectives?

2) The product must be worked on. There's no such thing as an essay or presentation which cannot be improved – it's only the degree to which it can be improved over the initial conception, proposal or draft. If you think that the final product springs full-blown to glory as if it is Athena from the head of Zeus, you are sadly mistaken. Draft and polish, re-draft and re-polish, to the limit of your time.

There is a third that walks besides these. It is always a bonus for the student to have accumulated a storehouse of diverse sources, wonders and fragments. It is necessary for breadth (although not for acuity) to read as much as possible while asking and answering two main questions about what is read: "How does this text affect the world and how I view it?" and "How does this affect me and my relationship with the world?" The two questions are similar but the second one speaks more of engagement.

By reading, I do not mean the dilettante's approach to texts, which is skimming and googling. That would be akin to calling a boardsurfer a naval diver. Because narratives are predominantly linear in design (think 'stream', 'flow', 'plot' etc) as an artifact of the inescapable constraint that we live in (apparently) linear time, it is actually more effective to read a text from beginning to end than to hop around like a kangaroo on amphetamines. Those texts which cannot be handled this way (unfortunately, perhaps?) contribute much less (in practice, rather than in theory) to the world of ideas.

(That is not to say we cannot gain from lateral readings or tangential readings or texts which are not structured sequentially. I love many of these, and they serve to enrich the corpus and add bells and whistles to the canon. But it can't all be spices, bells and whistles. I would prefer to take bell, book and candle to those who think so.)

A student once described a teacher who, when questioned, replied almost invariably, "What do you think?" That student was of the opinion that this teacher wasn't really teaching – or was hedging, squirrelling, or weaselling from a position of ignorance. My personal opinion is that it was good enough for Socrates, and it is a valuable approach to education. In my experience, students know a lot more than they care to admit to; some know more than they think they know; and all can contribute a lot more when they are actually forced to think, painful step by painful step.

Along The Shelves

If the book is Mao
Then it is red
If the book is read
Then it is done
If the book is Donne
Then poetry.

If the thought is kind
Then it is young
If the thought is Jung
Then it is typed
If it is typed
Then document.

If you love some one
Then two or more
If you love some More
Then seasons all
Blur into one
Poetic intent.

And there I leave you
With my cold coffee
And a dish of roses.

Thought And Memory

Thought and memory are both functions of the brain. Each of them uses nodes in what is a massive but finite biological environment. And so, as 21st-century neurophysiologists have confirmed, you can have thought or memory, but not often large amounts of both at the same time. And if you do have both in large amounts, social interaction is probably the next thing to go.

This is probably why Odin, the All-Father of Norse mythology had two ravens named Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory) on his shoulders. And yet, even with those two powerful adjunct assistants, he could not see enough of Ragnarok to save his people or his world. He attempted sacrificing one eye (sensory deprivation can focus other modes of thought) and even hanging on the world-tree to the point of death (privation, ditto). Thought and Memory are insufficient in the end.

Thought and memory, sight and insight; the human brain encompasses the universe, and that not of itself.

Heat

The last few days have been sultry, and not in the alluring kind of way, but like a humid and suffocating embrace. The heat is on, as the classic says. And I am beginning to wilt.

It isn't the heat on its own, of course. The killer is the high humidity. I remember in my younger days, when I was running a computer centre. To enhance performance, we sealed the CPU room, and turned on two airconditioners and two dehumidifiers. The temperature fell to 12 C on average, with a humidity way below the normal 99% or so. Those times were the best times in my life.

Nowadays, my advice to computer users is still the same. Keep the room cold, dry and dust-free. Insulate it from sunlight with curtains and suchlike. In the long run, it will pay off in terms of the longevity and effectiveness of your computer. And you know what? I would give the same advice for silicon-based machines.

Random Thoughts

Sometimes your brain just spills over. They aren't even stubs. Maybe shrubs.

Why is she 1/12 now? Is she inching her way to some sort of apotheosis? Or is she just bigger than when she was 1/15, and of that, a flyhalf to boot? Ah, who am I to complain (explain?) - I used to be a hooker myself.

Why do some people have such expressive lower lips? It isn't as if they need them. Sometimes God hands out His bonuses in such a quirky way. Or is the plural of bonus actually boni? Viruses -> viri, then. But vir means 'man'. Argh.

Nobody remembers that old TV series, That's Entertainment. But someone seems to have reinvented it. Oh ho ho. I enjoyed myself. And someone, when I learnt it was accidental, it tasted even more delicious.

What is the difference between suaku and ulu? Wait a minute, I actually know this. Wow, I will pass this test with flying colours! Errm. It isn't a test. It's only a survey. I am so disappointed.

I no longer make much fun of the boys. I have made fun of so many of them for so many years. And that includes myself.

Faith

I think there has been too much nonsense written about faith, evidence, truth and knowledge. Perhaps the first thing about faith is that it is certainty which eludes reason. If there is a deductive process leading to B from A, then B is not a matter of faith (excepting the matter of belief in A, which might very well be a matter of faith). If there is evidence leading one to conclude that C is a likely scenario accounting for all the evidence, then this is a matter of reason as well. Only if there is a complete absence of conclusive evidence, all evidence being the sort that is supportive rather than directive (i.e. the evidence is consistent with the scenario, but does not necessitate it), can there be space for faith.

True faith is a stark, cold position. It is a redoubt set in a ring of high stone walls against a black and starless sky. Faith does not lend itself to questioning, and faith may entertain reason but is not susceptible to it. Faith has often been called an emotion, but it isn't even that - emotion has physiological effects and antecedents, but faith is too subtle for those. Faith is not a matter of the crude sensory perception of the body, or even the finer differential perception that the body derives from those senses.

Faith is thus not reliable in the evidential sense or the deductive sense; it is not reliable in terms of instinct, emotion or perception - if it were, it would be undermined by anything which could defeat these guardians of the mind. Why should faith be of any use to us then?

Faith is of use when no evidence or reasoning, no perception or emotion, can give us an answer. In a darkness where all human powers are cloaked and baffled, it is the one thing that might give us a chance of sight at all. For faith, as the Good Book says, is the assured certainty of things that are hoped for, and the substantive reality of things which are not perceived. It is justified true belief (as some have said about knowledge) which contains its own justification, certifies its own truth, and leads to raw and unembellished belief.

And it does not sit well with everyone, for there will always (of necessity as well as nature) be those who must see as through a glass darkly. It does not always sit well with me; it has a terrible bedside manner and an uncompromising personality. But I have learnt that it is the only thing, besides hope and love, that can be relied upon in dark times.

Innards

For many years, whenever people used the phrase internal assessment, I would think of my brother-in-law the specialist in internal medicine. It was then a short step from internal assessment to haruspimancy. As they say, the quality of life depends on the liver.

This haphazard and peculiar divinatory practice was, of course, designed to produce useable knowledge. The main problems of knowledge are obvious - how it is obtained; how it is justified; of what use it is, what applications it has; what intrinsic properties, propensities and biases it contains and presumes upon; how it is sufficient for certain purposes and not for others; how well does it support other knowledge; what forms it takes and how resilient those forms are - and so on.

The trick in any argument involving knowledge is to narrow an issue down to which problem of knowledge best describes it, and what can be done to resolve the issue on that basis. For this, the proponent has to bring to bear an established set of analytical tools, with the results displayed to best effect. Begin with the difficulties of the issue, and why the problem chosen is a problem at all. Then examine the ways in which the problem can be resolved, and propose a method of resolution. If the argument can be sustained with each point justified, logically linked (i.e. with consistency and inevitability) and relevant to the case, then the argument is strong; if the argument shows insight, originality, precision and brevity, so much the better.

Yet, all arguments have logical consequents. If these are then summarised and dealt with in a way that is clear, rational, and easily understood when complete, the argument is likely to be successful on the appreciative (as opposed to purely cognitive) level of assessment. Regardless, if the argument remains hypothetical, it is unlikely to have utility value.

For an argument to develop utility value, it must be shown to be directly applicable to a contemporary and important issue. This applicability must be demonstrated to be direct as opposed to tangential, specific as opposed to general, and provide a good level of resolution. Most important, it must make abstract principles relevant to concrete reality in a way that leaves little scope for opponents to complain about vagueness and exceptions of various kinds.

Throughout, the proponent of the knowledge-based argument should remain calm, controlled, clear, coherent and consistent. At no point should circular or specious arguments be employed - be on guard against such! If you can pass this test of communication, then the argument is complete, the innards intact, and the assessment of such innards auspicious.

=====

And at the end of all that, I must say that this was not such an argument, nor was meant to be.

Interlude 5: Research

For ten years now, I've been accumulating data about the place in which I work. I have watched and counted and drawn inferences and listened to people and watched the fabric of history unravel and the palimpsest rewritten. I have seen facts interpreted and misinterpreted, recorded so that they become more artifact than fact. And in the end, who is to say what the truth is, or what it ought to be?

The fact of human existence is that it is malleable. Eternity is something we apprehend but cannot comprehend, and that ruins us for the big picture. So for those who cannot stand to look out into the infinite unknown - and yet know what infinity is about - there is nothing but the small (and ever-decreasing) circles of perception and detail.

We know now that the brain creates its own pictures of reality. The simplest case which can carry this image is this: the human eye does not see anything if it is moving. But we seem to see seamlessly. This is because the brain sees a start picture and an end picture, and interpolates everything else. The brain, we now know, is selective in what it records, and it ceaselessly re-edits memories. The more we emphasize or reiterate or dwell on memories, the more true they become, the more reality we build into them - even if they were never true.

This is the problem of human research. It is based on consensus, and where it is based on fiat, it must fail.