The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I walked out to the end of the fishing pier on Washington Blvd -- about as far west as I could go without getting wet -- and looked back at the beach, the surf, the palm trees, at the pastel apartment buildings. It was Sunday morning and I had a plane home to catch.
I know Los Angeles much better as a setting for stories and novels and films (and blogs) than as a location. Visits to my grandparents' house once or twice a year over the course of my childhood were enough to familiarize me with a little eastern corner of Beverly Hills, and the Tar Pits, and one or two beaches; the city at large remained terra incognita, hundreds of miles of undifferentiated streets and freeways. The last time I was there was in 2005, to memorialize and to mourn my grandmother Marjorie. Yesterday we gathered in Marina del Rey to bid farewell to my grandfather Hershel's earthly presence; and today I am bidding farewell to this great unknown, Los Angeles, for what I imagine will be a long time.
Hershel looms large in my memories and aspirations. He was a man of science and an inventor, something I have wanted to be (or "wished I were", or wished I could be) at moments of my life. Together, Hershel and Marjorie founded the Biofeedback Institute of Los Angeles. When I was visiting with Hershel after Marjorie's memorial service he showed me a project he was working on, a simple virtual reality which the user controlled via headband-mounted EEG electrodes -- it struck me as the coolest thing I had ever seen and prompted me briefly to question all the choices I had made up to that point, choices that meant I was not working on something so amazing.
Aside from being a brilliant man and an innovator, Hershel was a deeply thoughtful, analytical man. When I am at my intellectual best I like to think I am carrying on some of the behaviors and thought patterns I learned from him. Very glad I was able to be present at his memorial, listen to people's memories of him and reconnect over his past. I do not feel it is appropriate to say he should "rest in peace" as he was, for all the years I knew him, a firmly committed atheist and materialist -- instead I will hope that his memory continues to live on after his presence is gone, and continues to affect the people who knew him.
Nørretranders spends quite a bit of space in Chapter 9, "The Half-Second Delay", dealing with the experiments of Kornhuber and Deecke and of Benjamin Libet and with their indications that the consciousness of a decision to act is epiphenomenal -- that the volition to act arises out of unconscious processes, the conscious decision is a back-formation, a way for consciousness to explain the volition to itself. The result seems pretty clear from the experiments as they are described;* according to Nørretranders it causes a big problem for believers in free will. If volition is pre-conscious/unconscious/non-conscious, the argument goes, then the notion of our acting out of our free wills is illusory.
It is not completely clear; but I don't think that Nørretranders is expounding his own belief here, but rather explaining a debate that is going on. It's difficult to tell because he does not attribute to anybody the argument that Libet's results negate free will; he just states it as a common-sense difficulty with the results. But it doesn't seem so clear-cut to me, and I'm interested to see where he goes with it. My gut sense is that free choice can be exercised without necessarily being a conscious act; that innate urges and instinctual volitions are not necessarily mechanical or deterministic. If consciousness is an epiphenomenon of one's brain state, why shouldn't the conscious decision process -- the back-formed story of a conscious decision process -- be epiphenomenal to processes in the brain state which are indeed deciding to act?
*Though note, these results from Trevena and Miller call Libet's results into question.
Wow! Spotify was not around yet a few years back when I tried to build a playlist of songs from Inherent Vice from YouTube videos... Now GalleyCat's Jason Boog has answered the call with his own playlist. Boog has shared a bunch of other literary-themed playlists, too. Thanks for the link, Christine!
So when we say "information" in everyday life, we spontaneously think of information-as-the-result-of-a-discarding-of-information. We do not consider the fact that there is more information in an experience than in an account of it. It is the account that we consider to be information. But the whole basis of such an account is information that is discarded. Only after information has been discarded can a situation become an event that people can talk about.
The User Illusion Chapter 5, "The Tree of Talking"
I'm kind of taken with Nørretranders' description of information, in these early chapters, as that which is not communicated -- as what has to be discarded in order for communication to occur. The state of being that one wishes to impart to one's interlocutor contains, necessarily, orders of magnitude too many bits of information for it to be expressed across any available channel of communication; so before one speaks one must create meaning by throwing away information. This also applies, in a different way, to memory -- in order to remember a moment of being one must forget vast reams of context.
posted evening of August 15th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
Yesterday afternoon I had a chance to go to The Strand, lovely bookstore that I have not been back to for far too long, and took the opportunity to buy several books that have been on my reading list for a long time now.
Theogony and Works and Days, by Hesiod. (tr. M.L. West)
Uno y el universo and Heterodoxia, both by Ernesto Sabato.
I felt like a kid in a candy store... Now I just have to avoid my initial impulse which is to jump in and start reading and commenting on all of them at once!
posted afternoon of August 14th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Book Shops
In the first chapter of Tor Nørretranders' User Illusion (an engrossing and highly interesting read which I am starting on the recommendation of the Julian Jaynes Society) I find a quotation from James Clerk Maxwell which I think will serve very nicely as an epigraph for READIN (and for the phenomenon of blogging in general):
A memorandum-book does not, provided it is neatly written, appear confused to an illiterate person, or to the owner who understands it thoroughly, but to any other person able to read it appears to be inextricably confused.
I don't really see yet how Nørretranders is planning to move from thermodynamics and information systems to consciousness and perception; but his enlightening summary of the history of physics in the 19th and 20th Centuries is delicious reading even without the frisson provided by wondering where he is headed with it.
posted afternoon of August 14th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Epigraphs
At 3%, Chad links to a lovely essay on Tove Jansson's work, on the occasion of her latest novel to be published in translation: Matthew Battles examines "the subtle, encompassing marvel of her project in fiction."
Yesterday afternoon I had a chance to go to The Strand, lovely bookstore that I have not been back to for far too long, and took the opportunity to buy several books that have been on my 
