The Believing Brain

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them As Truths
© 2011 Michael Shermer
400 pages

The human brain is an incredible organ, capable of storing vast amounts of information and using that information creativity, to change the world and to fascinate itself.  It is also a belief-making engine. In The Believing Brain, psychologist and skeptic Michael Shermer examines the nature of belief and the biology which sustains it. He then applies lessons learned there to evaluate human beliefs in politics, religion,  and the paranormal.

Most readers will have heard the expression that there is a thin line between genius and insanity. The Believing Brain bears this out, because the same abilities of the brain that allow for creativity, insight, and wisdom can lead to conspiracies and schizophrenia.  Human intelligence is based on the ability of our brains to discern patterns:  to associate a noise or a smell in the wild with a looming predator, to interpret behavior as safe or hostile. Because the biological incentives for robust pattern-detection are great -- literally life and death  -- humans are extraordinarily good at it, to the point that we see things that aren't there, like human faces in Mars or in whorls in wood.  The same pattern-making ability that allowed early farmers to plan their labors by the seasons also led them to believing the position of the sun in the sky at the time of their birth meant good or ill.

Another key concept of the early book is the pervasive tendency for humans to believe there's a force behind the patterns -- an agent.  Early on Shermer addressees dualism, which in this context refers to a divide between the mind and the body.   Shermer's most recent publication, Heavens on Earth, rebukes (among other things) the transhumanist fantasy of downloading brains into computers and achieving life eternal.   The brain and our minds are inseparable, Shermer states; every aspect of our personalities has a physical cause within the cranium, and it's a little disconcerting to realize at first.  Just as we think of a ghost in the machine -- a discrete Mind controlling the body -- we tend to look for a purpose behind the connections we see, inventing conspiracies . We all experience this -- a stray thought that the universe is plotting against us when the traffic lights are all red during a trip made in haste.  Our brains continually invent stories to explain what happens; even if a person's nervous system is manipulated by outside lab equipment,  prompting them to suddenly stand up,  the subject will instantly invent a reason why he stood up -- "I wanted to get a Coke".

Shermer has previously examined beliefs like alien abductions, conspiracies, etc. in detail, using books like Why People Believe Weird Things. Here he dissects them again in brief, but chiefly as as an extension of the aforementioned discussion on patterns and agency.  Shermer believes that alien abductions and conspiracies have erupted in part to fill the vacuum created by secularization.  Societies were once bound together by religions which gave the cosmos and the beings within it meaning; now, many people are led to recreate that sense of meaning  by attaching themselves to causes which are part of a grand narrative of the world.

Crucial to understanding belief -- any belief -- is that emotions precede reason.   Whatever our pretensions, human beings are not rational creatures who approach a subject, collect facts, and then determine whether this or that policy is effective, or this suspicion is valid.   Instead, we lean in toward ideas; we attach ourselves to things that sound good, and then support them with facts.  A disciplined mind can then correct itself  -- but we're inherently believers.  The more emotionally active our brain is at the time of encountering an idea, the less likely we are to make a rational decision.

There's an enormous amount to process in a book like this, and it recommends itself to those with an interest in lucid thinking.

Agent to the Stars

Agent to the Stars
© 1997, 2005 John Scalzi
286 pages

They're heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere.  Extraterrestrials exist, and they've been watching our television.  The good news is they don't hold it against us -- though they don't want to meet any of our politicians.  They've seen the debates.   Who are they? They are the Yherjak, an amiable race of aliens who have the misfortune of looking like giant mounds of snot. They smell like fish. And...they're aware that this will cause a little image problem in a first contact situation.   Obviously, they need a good agent to finesse things -- to maybe use Hollywood to introduce the planet the idea of repulsive-but-friendly aliens.   Such is the setup for Agent to the Stars, a wonderfully funny  light-SF tale that features sarcastic aliens,  talking dogs,  and a little Hollywood drama, including abducted paparazzi.

After reveling in the Star Trek spiff that was Redshirts,  and especially in the codas which so transformed a comic novel into something seriously touching, I looked forward to this on its premise alone. Scalzi doesn't disappoint. This is not 'serious' science fiction, or anything close to it;  our aliens are smelly blobs of goo that have learned everything they know on Earth by watching TV, and their language is laced with culture references and sitcom quips.  Their interactions with humans --  main character Tom Stein, rising talent agent, is not the first -- have helped them put things into perspective, and to realize that  people don't spontaneously have conversations in which they recommend laxatives to one another while watching TV --  but  their fanboy passion for television makes them goofy fun to hang around.

This is not purely a comedic novel; as with Redshirts there are serious moments, developing late in the novel when one character is involved in a serious accident that, tragic as it is, presents an opportunity if the morality of it can be worked through.  Tangentially connected to the main story is Stein's well-meaning attempt to help one of his starlets branch out by landing her a serious role as a Holocaust survivor who later becomes a civil rights activist in the US's turbulent sixties.  The movie is a biopic about a real-world survivor-activist, and her efforts to help people see the essential humanity of one another, looking past differences in appearance and culture, obviously gives the aliens' desire to contact humanity and be received in brotherhood a little more oomph.

That aside, the novel is consistently funny throughout, and I'm going to keep poking around for more by Scalzi.

Death of a Reader

This is why I keep mine in multiple, short stacks that support each other like bricks.  

Real Dissent

Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion
© 2014 Tom Woods
356 pages

Note: I read this in August 2016, but the review of it languished as a draft.

In most presidential elections, 2016 being an obvious outlier, Americans are presented with that most exhilarating of choices: a career bureaucrat-politician wearing a red tie, and a career bureaucrat-politician wearing a blue tie. Coke or Pepsi,  behold the variety! Tom Woods contends that the range of media-approved opinion available to Americans today is small enough to fit on an index card -- one that should be set fire to. Real Dissent is written as the match.  The book collects over a decade's worth of Woods' political debate and writing, organized into categories on war, markets, monetary policy, and other material, chosen with an eye for conversations and opinions that push the envelope -- and addressed to Americans of all political stripes.

Although the political parties gamely put on a show every two years about social issues and spending, in practice little changes regardless of who is in power. Both parties reliably support military excursions abroad, resulting in a state pf permanent war and an omnipresent surveillance state. Both are enthusiastic proponents of regulating every facet of American lives, increasing  costs and frustration, but despite their track record will still announce themselves champions of the people.   The problem goes beyond politics, however, as the traditional media tends to walk hand in hand with DC. The wars which have permanently mired American lives and resources in the middle east were promoted by the media, and views outside the establishment are only mentioned to quickly dismissed so the grey-suited grownups and go back to whether DC should bomb the Iranians or just starve them.

Woods' declared goal in destroying imposed restrictions on thought implies that he isn't merely writing to libertarians. He frequently highlights books that transcend party lines, and gives special place to Bill Kauffman, whose screenplay of Copperhead  saw a community stressed and destroyed by a feud between  two good if disagreeable men. The tragedy of of Copperhead was born because those men placed ideology above their relationship to one another as neighbors. Woods' section on the Federal Reserve includes many overtures to progressives,  as do his writings on the problems of centralization in general. He also attempts to appeal to conservatives' better angels, using the anti-war writings of the traditionalist godfather, Russell Kirk, to offer reproach..

Although the last American election saw two populist candidates challenge and -- in Trump's case, rout -- the establishment candidates,  neither of the populist figures is particularly promising  for the future of American politics given the short-lived nature of populist movements.    Personally, as much as I dislike the establishment, I don't like its present challengers much better. In a culture flooded with toxic politics, the peaceful clarity of libertarianism, rooted in as sensible and humane a conviction as we can ask for --  the golden rule --   would be welcome.

Finding My Antonia

This morning I spotted a used copy of my Antonia in a used bookstore and picked it up for the daunting price of $0.25,   having previously enjoyed Cather's works in O Pioneers! and Death Comes For the Archbishop.   Seeing it reminded me that I'd seen a news headline about the anniversary of the book's publication, and I looked it  up.   Based on the description below, it sounds promising:

My Àntonia is an antidote for much that ails the exhausted West. How is it that with our enormous wealth and comfort we are still unhappy, witnessed by the rising drug and suicide problems?  Àntonia is not a self-creator, a cosmopolitan, a world-traveler, and she is quite poor.  She ages before her time, taking on a haggard look, missing some of her teeth.  But she is happy.  With Àntonia as a model we can see that loving the place you are is essential to happiness.  The vice of acedia is not just that of “sloth” as defined by laziness or lethargy, but that of being unable, in the words of Peter Lawler, to be at home with one’s homelessness.  It is a kind of restlessness that Tocqueville put at the heart of the American condition. Flannery O’Connor opined that it is better to be someplace rather than no place. Making the best of our locale, trying to improve it, truly loving it and the people who are our neighbors, makes for a more fulfilled, contented life than one of rootless ambition.

Distractions old and new

One of Isaac Asimov's robots short stories features a curious problem:  a robot is running in circles, unresponsive to commands. The troubleshooters who feature in the story quickly realize that there's a logic conflict:  the robot's in-built orders, both to save humans and to preserve itself, cause it to advance in one direction, then retreat as the danger grows.  I've been running in circles the past week or so myself, with an array of really promising books before me --  all enticing, but none so compelling that I can fight the distraction to dabble in the others.   On the table are The Believing Brain; Where Wizards Stay Up Late-- The Origins of the Internet;  Flygirls;  Ravensbrück, Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women;  Our Only World;  and The Moral Animal. And there are more inbound, because when you can't get into what you're reading the obvious solution is to..buy more things.  It's the American way.

Speaking of buying things,  I finally succumbed to the temptation to acquire a Windows 98 retro-gaming rig.   My original intent was to re-format an old machine, but while trying  in vain to find appropriate software,  I saw someone selling a refurbished Dell for a pretty good price.  It boasts 100 GBs of hard drive space and 512 MB/RAM.  (Laughable now, but  ten times the resources of my first Windows machine.)  It booted to an error screen because the shipper inserted a floppy disk, which gave me a laugh.  Once the empty floppy was removed, I was in business. I bought the machine solely to play Star Trek Elite Force, Star Trek Armada, and Star Trek Away Team, all of which are now installed and running. Since I still have the hard drive from my defunct 2004 computer, I've imported old custom maps that can't be found online anymore..  I suppose this is the 21st equivalent of someone digging around in their attic, finding boxes of records from high school, and then buying a record player to relive their salad days.

 I've forgotten surprisingly little Windows 98 navigation, in part I think because I learned to use computers on a Windows 95 system, and my 'formative years' so to speak were using it at school and then Windows 98 at home.  It wasn't until 2004 that I began using an XP, and I didn't stop thinking outside of 9x's architecture until Windows 10 made it possible to access everything on the PC via the search bar.  That was also possible on Windows 8, but I really did not like the tiles system.  It's fine on a phone, but when I'm in front of a desktop computer, I want my DESKTOP. 

My only problem so far is finding utilities that will actually install and run: even finding files published in 97-99 which say they're compatible hasn't produced any which will run.  The lack of Winzip I can live with, and even Winamp.  Not being able to take screenshots, though, is grating. The two shots above were taken with my camera.

Pirate Cinema

Pirate Cinema
© 2012 Cory Doctorow
384 pages

All Cecil B. DeVille wanted to do was make movies. He didn't mean to ruin his family's lives or start a revolution. In the not-too-distant future,  consumer electronics have concealed chips which monitor and report web activity, and when that involves streaming or downloading copyrighted material,  the reprisal is extreme: three-time offenders have their household internet connection terminated for a year.  When Cecil's hobby of downloading movies and remixing their scenes to make new stories  catches the attention of the authorities and his home loses connection, the results are devastating:  Cecil's father loses his job and his sister begins sliding into academic failure. Horrified by the repercussions, Cecil flees to the streets, there to befriend eccentrics who have dropped out of society.  Raiding dumpsters for food and living in an abandoned bar,  Cecil finds the knowledge, the tools,  the will, and the friends that he needs to fight back.

At the heart of this teen political thriller is the debate over intellectual property. This is a recurring theme in Doctorow's work, but the center of everything here. In the book's world, the American entertainment/recording industry has essentially captured Parliament:  both of the major party-alliances pass whatever bill it urges.  While attending an illicit screening of remix films,  Cecil learns that a bill is heading toward Parliament which will allow for the incarceration of anyone -- even minors -- who breach very broadly-defined copyright laws.  Even excerpting scenes for use in a YouTube movie review could land a kid in serious jail time.   Armed with a self-built laptop sans corporate spyware, Cecil and friends launch an agitation campaign to spread the word and hopefully force an upset.   As with Little Brother,  Doctorow uses the novel to debate an issue.  Doctorow's publication history indicates that while he's  a proponent of looser copyright laws,  there are limits to how far that can be taken.  Here,  the moments of nuance as  other characters challenge Cecil's  presumptions are overshadowed by the flagrant bullying of the entertainment industry, who divide their time between creating garbage films and  bankrupting or jailing kids.

I found Pirate Cinema interesting from every angle;  from  Cecil's  obsessive interest in producing films by creatively remixing scenes from one particular actor's vast corpus of works, to his exploration of an illicit society --  living in abandoned buildings, exploring underground London and looking for places to host film screenings,   finding technological workarounds to counter technological surveillance, and  of course the debate itself.  Because his story is set in London, Doctorow also unleashes the full power of British English.   Doctorow's other novels set in America were written or edited so well to match an American voice that the hurricane of British lingo took me by surprise. I'd be really curious about a Brit's perspective, whether his use of slang flows well or if its just a little much.  (Imagine a narrator who sounds like Eggsy from Kingsman: The Secret Service, prior to  wearing suits and speaking RP.)  My used copy of the book is  a discard from a Canadian library, though, so there may be an American edition out there that refers to dumpsters and drugs instead of skips and sugar.

Although part of the novel are unrealistic -- the lack of dangerous and seriously disturbed people among the homeless who Cecil meets, for instance,  and the over-the-top villainy --  I found Pirate Cinema both clever and fun. Intellectual property and copyright issues are an on-going issue as we find ourselves more and more immersed in an ocean of content.  What makes this novel especially interesting is that people really do edit films the way Doctorow describes; I've seen trailers made for movies that don't exist (Titanic 2: Jack's Back) ,witnessed the crew of Deep Space Nine react to Star Trek 2009, (they disapproved), and watched 'movies' that used footage from video-games, sometimes edited or framed to make it more cinematic.  Improvisation with already-existing materials is the basis of culture and innovation: even  at a professional level. I can't help but think of John Carmack of ID Software  creating a way to have side-scrolling PC games by using the first level of Mario as his subject.   Cecil's is a case that's more troublesome: while he IS using footage in original ways, the film itself is someone else's product, and it cost them to produce it.