Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Expert systems, General Musings, Music, Predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Society, Writing stuff
Just now, my good lady wife was through to tell me that she’s off to take a bit of a nap. Both of us are getting over a touch of something (which I had mentioned last weekend), and on a deeper level still recovering from the profound exhaustion of having been care-givers for her mom.
Anyway, as she was preparing to head off, one of our cats insisted on going through the door which leads from my office into my bindery. This is where the cat food is.
“She wants through.”
“She wants owwwwt.”
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers.”
* * * * * * *
Via TDG, a fascinating interview with Douglas Richard Hofstadter last year, now translated into English. I’d read his GEB some 25 years ago, and have more or less kept tabs on his work since. The interview was about his most recent book, and touched on a number of subjects of interest to me, including the nature of consciousness, writing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Singularity. It’s long, but well worth the effort.
In discussing consciousness (which Hofstadter calls ‘the soul’ for reasons he explains), and the survival of shards of a given ‘soul’, the topic of writing and music comes up. Discussing how Chopin’s music has enabled shards of the composer’s soul to persist, Hofstadter makes this comment about his own desire to write:
I am not shooting at immortality through my books, no. Nor do I think Chopin was shooting at immortality through his music. That strikes me as a very selfish goal, and I don’t think Chopin was particularly selfish. I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer’s soul than do a writer’s ideas capture the writer’s soul. Perhaps some very emotional ideas that I express in my books can get across a bit of the essence of my soul to some readers, but I think that Chopin’s music probably does a lot better job (and the same holds, of course, for many composers).
I personally don’t have any thoughts about “shooting for immortality” when I write. I try to write simply in order to get ideas out there that I believe in and find fascinating, because I’d like to let other people be able share those ideas. But intellectual ideas alone, no matter how fascinating they are, are not enough to transmit a soul across brains. Perhaps, as I say, my autobiographical passages — at least some of them — get tiny shards of my soul across to some people.
Exactly.
* * * * * * *
In April, I wrote this:
I’ve written only briefly about my thoughts on the so-called Singularity – that moment when our technological abilities converge to create a new transcendent artificial intelligence which encompasses humanity in a collective awareness. As envisioned by the Singularity Institute and a number of Science Fiction authors, I think that it is too simple – too utopian. Life is more complex than that. Society develops and copes with change in odd and unpredictable ways, with good and bad and a whole lot in the middle.
Here’s Hofstadter’s take from the interview, in responding to a question about Ray Kurzweil‘s notion of achieving effective immortality by ‘uploading’ a personality into a machine hardware:
Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either — we’ll have virtual worlds galore, “up there” in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.
Well, to me, this “glorious” new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision comes to pass, it certainly would spell the end of human life. Once again, I don’t want to be there if such a vision should ever come to pass. But I doubt that it will come to pass for a very long time. How long? I just don’t know. Centuries, at least. But I don’t know. I’m not a futurologist in the least. But Kurzweil is far more “optimistic” (i.e., depressingly pessimistic, from my perspective) about the pace at which all these world-shaking changes will take place.
Interesting.
* * * * * * *
Lastly, the interview is about the central theme of I am a Strange Loop: that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon which stems from vast and subtle physical mechanisms in the brain. This is also the core ‘meaning’ of GEB, though that was often missed by readers and reviewers who got hung up on the ostensible themes, topics, and playfulness of that book. Hofstadter calls this emergent consciousness a self-referential hallucination, and it reflects much of his interest in cognitive science over the years.
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
In Communion of Dreams I played with this idea and a number of related ones, particularly pertaining to the character of Seth. It is also why I decided that I needed to introduce a whole new technology – based on the superfluid tholin-gel found on Titan, as the basis for the AI systems at the heart of the story. Because the gel is not human-manufactured, but rather something a bit mysterious. Likewise, the use of this material requires another sophisticated computer to ‘boot it up’, and then it itself is responsible for sustaining the energy matrix necessary for continued operation. At the culmination of the story, this ‘self-referential hallucination’ frees itself from its initial containment.
Why did I do this?
Partly in homage to Hofstedter (though you will find no mention of him in the book, as far as I recall). Partly because it plays with other ideas I have about the nature of reality. If we (conscious beings) are an emergent phenomenon, arising from physical activity, then it seems to me that physical things can be impressed with our consciousness. This is why I find his comments about shards of a soul existing beyond the life of the body of the person to be so intriguing.
So I spent some 130,000 words exploring that idea in Communion. Not overtly – not often anyway – but that is part of the subtext of what is going on in that book.
* * * * * * *
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers,” I said, “impressed on the door itself. Maybe the cat understands that at a level we don’t.”
Jim Downey
(Related post at UTI.)
I got the following fantastic anecdote from a good friend (who is a musician) in the course of a discussion about the arts.
On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. If you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches.
To see him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an unforgettable sight. He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.
By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly while he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until he is ready to play.
But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke.You could hear it snap -it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do. People who were there that night thought to themselves: “We figured that he would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and limp his way off stage – to either find another violin or else find another string for this one.”
But he didn’t. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had never heard before. Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that. You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before.
When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done. He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”
What a powerful line that is. It has stayed in my mind ever since I heard it. And who knows? Perhaps that should be the way of life – not just for artists but for all of us. So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have, and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have left.
By Jack Riemer, Houston Chronicle (Feb 10, 2001)
Inspiring, no?
Problem is, it evidently didn’t actually happen.
I wanted to give Riemer proper credit, so started doing a little searching in order to come up with a link to the original article. A Google search gave hundreds of references to various blogs and newsletters which had repeated the article, each giving credit to Riemer, some providing the date the piece ran. But none of the first couple score of hits were to the Houston Chronicle itself.
Hmm.
So I went to the Chronicle’s site, and started searching their archives. I don’t know if there is something wrong with their search function, or the archives are incomplete, or if the piece never ran, but I couldn’t find it.
Hmm.
One of the first places I head when I start getting suspicious about an email item is Snopes. And there it was:
Three Strings and You’re Outre
Claim: Violinist Itzhak Perlman once finished a concert on an instrument with only three strings after one string broke.Status: False.Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2001]
Origins: The piece quoted above did indeed appear in The Houston Chronicle (on 10 February 2001). Verification of any of the details contained within it has proved elusive so far, however.
There’s full details there about how they came to this conclusion, with citations.
Now, the question is: does it matter? I have seen Itzhak Perlman perform in person. Yes, due to the effects of the polio he suffered as a child, he does indeed approach the stage exactly as described. And the man is justifiably considered a genius, one of the greatest violinists ever. So why not just accept the anecdote as an inspirational piece about how genius can overcome challenge?
Well, that was exactly what I initially intended to do, before I started to dig a little in order to give proper credit to the author of the piece.
But I think that what I found is actually more interesting. Hundreds of sites have used the anecdote. Thousands, if not millions, have read it and likely found it inspirational. Why?
Because we want to believe in the power to overcome hardship.
And there’s really nothing wrong with that. The anecdote makes an important point. Yet I would say that it is not necessary to have this particular anecdote to be true – it just makes it easier to be inspired. Itzak Perlman has overcome hardships, developed his latent talent further than most mortals, and worked hard to achieve the success he has experienced. Isn’t that enough?
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings, Government, movies, Nuclear weapons, Predictions, tech, Violence
I’ve written previously about screws-ups with control of nuclear weapons and components thereof. And the recent dismissal of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne also caught my attention, with the explanation that this was due to a failure to properly safeguard the handling of nuclear materials. Now it seems that there was more behind that dismissal than was initially indicated:
US N-weapons parts missing, Pentagon says
The US military cannot locate hundreds of sensitive nuclear missile components, according to several government officials familiar with a Pentagon report on nuclear safeguards.
Robert Gates, US defence secretary, recently fired both the US Air Force chief of staff and air force secretary after an investigation blamed the air force for the inadvertent shipment of nuclear missile nose cones to Taiwan.
According to previously undisclosed details obtained by the FT, the investigation also concluded that the air force could not account for many sensitive components previously included in its nuclear inventory.
One official said the number of missing components was more than 1,000.
You know the ‘warehouse scene’ at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? That’s how I always envision any government-related storage or supply system. And everything I’ve ever heard from friends who have served in the military has done nothing to change my opinion – well, for the better, anyway.
So it comes as little surprise that substantial amounts of “sensitive nuclear missile components” have gone missing. Not that this is particularly comforting, mind. As I’ve said before, I’m one of the people who grew up fully expecting a nuclear war of some variety sometime during my life. And in spite of the ‘detargetting’ bullshit of the ’90s, I still do. That’s bad enough. But it would *really suck* if such a thing were made possible because of the lax clerical policies of our own government.
Jim Downey
Cross posted to UTI.
Filed under: Babylon 5, Emergency, General Musings, Health, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, movies, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Travel
This is disturbing:
‘Back from dead’ case stuns doctors
THE case of a man whose heart stopped beating for 1-1/2 hours only to revive just as doctors were preparing to remove his organs for transplants is fuelling ethical debates in France about when a person is dead.
The 45-year-old man suffered a massive heart attack and rescuers used cardiac massage to try and revive him without success before transferring him to a nearby hospital.
Due to a series of complex circumstances, revival efforts continued for longer than usual for a patient whose heart was not responding to treatment, until doctors started preparations to remove organs.
It was at that point that the astonished surgeons noticed the man was beginning to breathe unaided again, his pupils were active, he was giving signs that he could feel pain – and finally, his heart started beating again.
Several weeks later, the man can walk and talk.
As John Sheridan might say: “Death? Been there, done that.”
Deciding on when someone is irrevocably dead is actually a very difficult thing to do, and through the ages there have been many instances where people thought to be dead have either spontaneously revived, or been re-animated through the use of medical technology. The Victorians had something of a phobia about premature burial, but the concept of a lych gate has existed for centuries (my first encounter with such can be found here, towards the bottom).
When you add in a legitimate need for organs appropriate for transplantation, which need to be ‘harvested’ quickly, then you’re pushing two conflicting timelines. This is evidently part of the problem which has led to the ethical debate mentioned above. Add in new research into ‘suspended animation‘, and things are going to get even more confused.
Welcome to the future.
Jim Downey
*recognize the quote?
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Astronomy, Cosmic Variance, General Musings, John Lennon, Philip K. Dick, Quantum mechanics, Science, Science Fiction, Scientific American, Sir Arthur Eddington, Space, Writing stuff
*Apologies to both John Lennon and Philip K. Dick.
Last Saturday, my sister and her husband came to town, and we celebrated Thanksgiving. Yes, about six months late.
* * * * * * *
About two weeks ago Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance had a teaser post up about a new article of his in Scientific American. Carroll has long been one of my favorite reads in cosmology, and his discussion of the cosmological basis for time’s arrow was delightful. From the opening of the article:
Among the unnatural aspects of the universe, one stands out: time asymmetry. The microscopic laws of physics that underlie the behavior of the universe do not distinguish between past and future, yet the early universe—hot, dense, homogeneous—is completely different from today’s—cool, dilute, lumpy. The universe started off orderly and has been getting increasingly disorderly ever since. The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.
The arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain. Increasingly, however, this puzzle about the universe we observe hints at the existence of a much larger spacetime we do not observe. It adds support to the notion that we are part of a multiverse whose dynamics help to explain the seemingly unnatural features of our local vicinity.
Carroll goes on to explore what those hints (and the implications of same) are in some detail, though all of it is suitable for a non-scientist. The basic idea of how to reconcile the evident asymmetry is to consider our universe, as vast and ancient as it is, as only one small part of a greater whole. We are living, as it were, in a quantum flux of the froth of spacetime of a larger multiverse:
Emit fo Worra
This scenario, proposed in 2004 by Jennifer Chen of the University of Chicago and me, provides a provocative solution to the origin of time asymmetry in our observable universe: we see only a tiny patch of the big picture, and this larger arena is fully time-symmetric. Entropy can increase without limit through the creation of new baby universes.Best of all, this story can be told backward and forward in time. Imagine that we start with empty space at some particular moment and watch it evolve into the future and into the past. (It goes both ways because we are not presuming a unidirectional arrow of time.) Baby universes fluctuate into existence in both directions of time, eventually emptying out and giving birth to babies of their own. On ultralarge scales, such a multiverse would look statistically symmetric with respect to time—both the past and the future would feature new universes fluctuating into life and proliferating without bound. Each of them would experience an arrow of time, but half would have an arrow that was reversed with respect to that in the others.
A tantalizing hint of a larger picture, indeed.
* * * * * * *
Philip K. Dick, tormented mad genius that he was, said something that has become something of a touchstone for me: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
It is, in fact, a large part of the basis for my skeptical attitude towards life. But it also leaves open the idea of examining and incorporating new information which might be contrary to my beliefs. It is this idea which I explored over the 132,000 words of Communion of Dreams, though not everyone realizes this at first reading.
But what if reality only exists if you believe in it?
That’s a question discussed in another longish piece of science writing in the current issue of Seed Magazine, titled The Reality Tests:
Most of us would agree that there exists a world outside our minds. At the classical level of our perceptions, this belief is almost certainly correct. If your couch is blue, you will observe it as such whether drunk, in high spirits, or depressed; the color is surely independent of the majority of your mental states. If you discovered your couch were suddenly red, you could be sure there was a cause. The classical world is real, and not only in your head. Solipsism hasn’t really been a viable philosophical doctrine for decades, if not centuries.
But that reality goes right up against one of the basic notions of quantum mechanics: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Or does it? For decades, the understanding of quantum effects was that it was applicable at the atomic-and-smaller level. Only in such rare phenomenon as a Bose-Einstein Condensate (which in Communion is the basis for some of the long-range sensors being used to search for habitable planets outside our solar system) were quantum effects seen at a macroscopic scale. But in theory, maybe our whole reality operates at a quantum level, regardless of scale:
Brukner and Kofler had a simple idea. They wanted to find out what would happen if they assumed that a reality similar to the one we experience is true—every large object has only one value for each measurable property that does not change. In other words, you know your couch is blue, and you don’t expect to be able to alter it just by looking. This form of realism, “macrorealism,” was first posited by Leggett in the 1980s.
Late last year Brukner and Kofler showed that it does not matter how many particles are around, or how large an object is, quantum mechanics always holds true. The reason we see our world as we do is because of what we use to observe it. The human body is a just barely adequate measuring device. Quantum mechanics does not always wash itself out, but to observe its effects for larger and larger objects we would need more and more accurate measurement devices. We just do not have the sensitivity to observe the quantum effects around us. In essence we do create the classical world we perceive, and as Brukner said, “There could be other classical worlds completely different from ours.”
Indeed.
* * * * * * *
Last Saturday, my sister and her husband came to town, and we celebrated Thanksgiving. Yes, about six months late. Because last year, going in to the usual Thanksgiving holiday, we had our hands full caring for Martha Sr and didn’t want to subject her to the disconcerting effect of having ‘strangers’ in the house. Following Martha Sr’s death in February, other aspects of life had kept either my sister or us busy and unable to schedule a time to get together.
Until last weekend. And that’s OK. Because life is what we make of it. Whether that applies to cosmology or not I’ll leave up to the scientists and philosophers for now (though I have weighed in on the matter as mentioned above and reserve the right to do so again in other books). This I can tell you – it was good to see my sister and her husband, and the turkey dinner we ate was delicious.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, BoingBoing, Bruce Schneier, Civil Rights, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Government, Privacy, Society, Travel
Survey: Americans make 41M fewer air trips
WASHINGTON – Nearly half of American air travelers would fly more if it were easier, and more than one-fourth said they skipped at least one air trip in the past 12 months because of the hassles involved, according to an industry survey.
The Travel Industry Association, which commissioned the survey released Thursday, estimated that the 41 million forgone trips cost the travel industry $18.1 billion — including $9.4 billion to airlines, $5.6 billion to hotels and $3.1 billion — and it cost federal, state and local authorities $4.2 billion in taxes in the past 12 months.
When 28 percent of air travelers avoided an average of 1.3 trips each, that resulted in 29 million leisure trips and 12 million business trips not being taken, the researchers estimated.
Gee, like this is a surprise. Between the airlines doing everything possible to squeeze each and every last penny out of their customers to cover increasing fuel costs and their own ineptitude, to absurd security theater practices, to idiotic behaviour by TSA personnel, travel by air has become such a pain in the ass that it is hardly news that people avoid unnecessary air travel whenever possible. But it is good to see some solid numbers on the impact these factors are having, and perhaps it will prompt some changes. I can hope, can’t I?
How about you? Have you changed travel plans in the last couple of years to avoid air travel? Because we were 24-hour care providers for someone with Alzheimer’s until early this year, my wife and I have had limited opportunities to travel recently. But I certainly would not have flown anywhere if I could avoid it. And we’re planning a trip out to Denver to visit friends this summer, and are going to drive the 12 hours rather than fly (as we did some years back when we last went out there) in order to avoid all the hassles. So yeah, the air travel environment has definitely changed *my* behaviour.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Ballistics, Gardening, General Musings, Guns, Health, Patagonia, Predictions, Publishing, Richard Matheson, Science Fiction, Sleep, Travel, Writing stuff
You may have noticed that some of my posts have gotten a little longer over time, at least in the last couple of months. I haven’t been doing word counts or anything, but that is my sense of it, looking back over the archives. This is because I am emerging from the exhaustion of caring for Martha Sr, slowly but surely.
And as this progresses, it is interesting to see how certain aspects of my life are starting to come back to me. My wife and I have started to resume something that can be called a social life, getting together with friends for lunch or dinner, having people over. I finally got that book review of the Matheson Companion done – that had been hanging over my head for a while. I’m putting together the stuff for the ballistics testing, and figure that we’ll have the website for that up next month some time. I got my garden in, and am harvesting strawberries. This is good.
And I’m starting to get a creative itch again. No, not the low-level sort of creativity that goes with this blog and my conservation work. I’m thinking about the next novel. I’ll probably toss out what I have written of St. Cybi’s Well, and just start fresh – those first couple of chapters were so long ago that I barely remember what I intended to do with them. It takes (me, anyway) a lot of mental energy to juggle all the various threads in a decent novel, and I’m not ready just yet to tackle that. But I am thinking about it, and that is a very good sign.
And I have another idea for something completely and totally unrelated, which would also be a lot of fun. But I have to wait to get a new computer system for that – this old thing just doesn’t have the capabilities which would be required. I would also need to learn some new software programs. From these facts you can guess that this idea would have something to do with the ‘net, and you would be right, but that’s all I’ll say for now.
Oh, yeah, and I need to learn survival Spanish sometime before going to Patagonia in October.
It’s nice to feel this way again.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Babylon 5, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Writing stuff
One of my favorite episodes of the SF series Babylon 5 comes in the final season (not my favorite season, by a long shot). It is episode #92, A View from the Gallery, and is unusual in that the main focus of the episode is on a couple of maintenance workers, and their ‘common man’ perspective. Here’s what the series creator, J. Michael Straczynski, had to say about the episode:
One of the things I always do is look for ways to turn the series format on its head, and show us our characters from other perspectives, since perspective is so much at the heart of the show. Whether that’s jumping forward in time, or an ISN documentary, or seeing everything through the eyes of a third party (or two), it’s always a risk, because it’s never what one expects to see, and a lot of people like to see what they expect to see.
“… a lot of people like to see what they expect to see.” Indeed.
* * * * * * *
A new study comparing our sun to the general range of ‘main sequence‘ stars has concluded that it is pretty much run-of-the-mill. And this has significant implications for the possible development of life elsewhere. From NewScientistSpace:
There’s nothing special about the Sun that makes it more likely than other stars to host life, a new study shows. The finding adds weight to the idea that alien life should be common throughout the universe.
“The Sun’s properties are consistent with it being pulled out at random from the bag of all stars,” says Charles Lineweaver from the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. “Life does not seem to require anything special in its host star, other than it be close.”
And from Cosmos:
To get a better answer, Robles and his co-workers simultaneously compared 11 stellar characteristics that could plausibly influence the evolution of life.
They looked at parameters such as: the Sun’s mass; age; metallicity (the amount of elements heavier than helium and hydrogen, such as oxygen, carbon and nitrogen); as well as its rotation rate; its whereabouts within the galaxy; how it ‘bobs up and down in the galactic plane’; and the activity of its photosphere. Using statistical methods, these were measured against data available on other stars.
* * *
“When analysing the 11 properties together, the Sun shows up as a star selected at random, rather than one selected for some life-enhancing property,” Robles said. “The upshot is that there doesn’t seem to be anything special about the Sun. It seems to be a random star that was blindly pulled out of the bag of all stars.”
* * * * * * *
When I was growing up, I always wanted to think that I was special. I was that unlikely hero from so many Science Fiction stories, the kid who had some undiscovered special ability or trait that would prove to be remarkable. Believe it or not, the death of my parents just as I was entering adolescence fed this fantasy. Think about literature, and you’ll see that this is actually a fairly common trope: the orphan who discovers his ‘real’ history, and goes on to greatness. There are even elements of this in Communion of Dreams, both with the main character and with the Chinese girl. It is a very common theme.
Of course, real life isn’t like that. As smart and well educated as I was, I didn’t grow up to be particularly remarkable. I’ve had plenty of successes, plenty of failures, accomplished things which gave me a touch of fame here and there. But for the most part, I am like most people – just trying to get through life with my self-respect more or less intact.
And that’s OK. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of fantasy – of having dreams and desires, goals that you work towards even though they may never be achieved in quite the way you would like. I wouldn’t have started this blog, were that not the case. But it is healthy to maintain perspective, to understand that only wishing for something will not make it so.
* * * * * * *
“… a lot of people like to see what they expect to see.”
Think about that again. JMS was talking about some of the flack he took over doing something a little bit unconventional with what had become a well established and much beloved television series. But he did not betray any of his principles, didn’t go for some kind of a cheap emotional trick. He just offered a different perspective, challenged people to open up their thinking a bit.
For centuries, one of the basic tenets of common belief was that God put us here, and that we were at the center of creation. As science has expanded our understanding, we came to realize that we weren’t at the center of creation. Or the solar system. Or the galaxy. Or the universe.
As I mentioned a few days ago, there is a growing awareness that Earth may not be unique in holding life, even intelligent life. Discovering that there is nothing particularly unusual about our local star adds to this awareness. We may be nothing special, just one island of life in a universe teeming with the stuff.
And that’s OK.
Jim Downey
My friend looked up from her grilled salmon, surprise on her face. “I didn’t know your father was a policeman.”
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I came across a very thought-provoking article a few days ago, about the intersection between idealism and reality when it comes to who should get a college education. It’s a longish piece, but definitely worth reading, and I have sent it to a couple of friends who teach at the college/university level. Here’s one particular passage:
There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college—but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don’t think that’s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy”? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don’t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors’ prison.
America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.
Crashes and burns? Yes, because as the author discusses, not everyone has the capability to function at the college level. This is obvious to anyone who has given the matter any consideration. But it is sobering to read the accounts of Professor X about being the one who has to convey this to actual, real, students.
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Come Monday, across the street from my home there will be a big golf tournament. No, not some PGA event. It’s a benefit thing, done to help raise money and awareness for the local “Officer Down” fund. They’ve done this there each year for the last four or five. As I drive in and out of my neighborhood I’ll get to see the big signs touting the event.
It’s odd. Perhaps I should connect with the organizers. Perhaps I could be of some assistance. Because my dad was killed on the job, he was an “Officer Down“. That was almost 40 years ago, and you’d think I would be ‘over it‘ by now. You’d be wrong.
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My dad dropped out of school in the 8th grade, though I think he got a G.E.D. later. Back in the 50s you didn’t need much education to get hired as a cop.
My mom graduated from High School.
I grew up in a very blue-collar household. Comfortable enough by the standards of the time, but not what you would call an ‘intellectually rich’ environment. I distinctly remember being told that I read too much, and needed to go outside and play more. We didn’t have books or original art around the house, though my mom did draw a little.
I did well in school, though. And even with my antics and acting out, I was a straight A student through High School. Thanks to something like our local “Officer Down” fund, and insurance, and money donated for that purpose, I was able to attend one of the best undergraduate schools in the country. It is entirely possible that had my father not been killed, I would not have been able to swing attendance at such a school for financial reasons. Because of this, I’ve always had some real mixed feelings about my college education, as excellent as it was.
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My friend looked up from her grilled salmon, surprise on her face. “I didn’t know your father was a policeman.”
I am used to this. Have been for a very long time. The surprise that someone who is well read, well educated, who writes, creates, and owned an art gallery, could have come from such a background. My friend’s husband, who was there with us, was one of the artists I used to represent. We’ve dined and worked together, shared many conversations and experienced both joy and sadness in the turn of our fortunes. I make no pretense of being an intellectual, no claim to a true academic knowledge of any subject. But still, she was surprised to hear that my dad was a cop.
Because, for all that we Americans assume that we exist in a classless society, we still make huge assumptions about one another on the basis of education.
So, while I do not argue with Professor X that there are, indeed, those who do not belong in college, I think that it is always important that we try and make those opportunities available. I’m smart, but I am not exceptional – it is only because of my education that I seem not to be the son of a cop. Sure, some will fail in an attempt to get a college degree, or sufficient credits to earn this or that position. But they need the chance to find this out for themselves.
I realize that this was not the argument from that article in the Atlantic. Or is it? Judge for yourself from this concluding paragraph:
One of the things I try to do on the first night of English 102 is relate the literary techniques we will study to novels that the students have already read. I try to find books familiar to everyone. This has so far proven impossible. My students don’t read much, as a rule, and though I think of them monolithically, they don’t really share a culture. To Kill a Mockingbird? Nope. (And I thought everyone had read that!) Animal Farm? No. If they have read it, they don’t remember it. The Outsiders? The Chocolate War? No and no. Charlotte’s Web? You’d think so, but no. So then I expand the exercise to general works of narrative art, meaning movies, but that doesn’t work much better. Oddly, there are no movies that they all have seen—well, except for one. They’ve all seen The Wizard of Oz. Some have caught it multiple times. So we work with the old warhorse of a quest narrative. The farmhands’ early conversation illustrates foreshadowing. The witch melts at the climax. Theme? Hands fly up. Everybody knows that one—perhaps all too well. Dorothy learns that she can do anything she puts her mind to and that all the tools she needs to succeed are already within her. I skip the denouement: the intellectually ambitious scarecrow proudly mangles the Pythagorean theorem and is awarded a questionable diploma in a dreamland far removed from reality. That’s art holding up a mirror all too closely to our own poignant scholarly endeavors.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 