Ninety-nine More Maggots, Mites, and Munchers
by May R. Berenbaum
-Insects are written about in short 1-2 page entries. This is a sequel. I did not read the first book. This short form is fitting for writing about insects. The form of the entries consists of: many puns, perhaps to add some light-heartedness to descriptions of the insectoid horror-world; some discussion of how each species affects the lives of human beings; and of course Latin name, life cycle, diet, mating, unusual behaviors and memorable peculiarities, etc.. Insects are strange and beautiful and they often mess up things for human beings by biting them or messing with their crops. I enjoyed reading this book. First I read it as something to help me fall asleep but then as pure pleasure and distraction for a troubled mind.

Incomplete Nature

by Terrence Deacon

-(I read this book while at the same time reading Dynamics in Action by Alicia Juarrero. I finished Deacon's book first. I decided to read them together, because Juarrero has formally accused Deacon of plagiarism. You can read about that here and here. Read the comments on the latter for more. Anyways I'm trying to get my head around the ideas first.)

Daniel Dennett's review from last December is a good place to start. There are many other reviews of this book around the web, so I won't struggle too much with trying to summarize the ideas. I got a big kick out of reading Deacon's other book, Symbolic Species (link to my write up). That book was about the dialectical co-evolution of language and the brain, and this newer book (2011) is in a way about the co-evolution of self-organizing forms. Both of these books seemed very "dialectical" to me, but I honestly still don't know if I'm using that word correctly or if I'm only using it in my own private way. Anyhow the idea is that as simple material forms work through their thermodynamic changes they can come together in mutually supportive ways to create new meta-forms (like what happens with crystals or whirlpools), which can then combine to form more complex forms-of-forms-of-forms which can be said in a extremely primitive way to look after themselves, to work to persist in their current arrangement of forms, and to reproduce and evolve. Deacon calls this primitive life-form an "autogen." (Juarrero sometimes uses the phrase "structured structuring structures.") It only really exists in theory, but his point is that it's not a totally crazy idea that something like that could have come together billions of years ago on Earth. It doesn't violate the laws of physics.

I associate this kind of "leveling-up" or differentiation with dialectics. In Symbolic Species the 3-part dialectic you needed to get your head around was Charles Peirce's icon > index > symbol. In this book, there's another nested 3-part structure: thermodynamic > morphodynamic > teleodynamic. (Peirce again makes a few cameos here.) The complex lifeforms we know and love evolved after billions of years of teleodynamic activity. There are also difficult chapters that discuss the concepts of information and work in terms of this dialectic.

Deacon discusses how in theory this dialectical geometric logic could unfold in simple material systems, and then towards the end discusses how this logic can apply to what we know about brains and consciousness. The sections on brains were of course what I was interested in. They felt intuitively right to me, for what it's worth, and the parallels with Buddhist ideas were obvious and exciting to see.

He argues against the idea that consciousness and life is to be understood in merely linear terms, such as mechanism/function, or information/computation. Instead we should pay attention to how life emerges from forms of thermodynamic and morphodynamic energy flows which use geometrical arrangements to pit physical processes against each other in order to perpetuate far-from-equilibrium structures. Thus new formal arrangements become new efficient causes. The parts affect the whole, the whole affects the parts. As new arrangements of forms persist, new possibilities arise for new systems and relationships between forms to emerge, and as these affect the ability of the sub-forms to survive and reproduce the new meta-arrangements persist insofar as the sub-forms which support them are selected to perpetuate them. Wholes support parts which support wholes. In this way forms "level-up" into new meta-forms (these are my words for thinking about it). Once these forms (which at this point are no longer merely material, but are self-perpetuating forms-of-forms, and so exist as it were in the spaces between matter, and are "absential" (to use one of Deacon's many neologisms)) found ways to use the patterns of DNA and RNA molecules to integrate different areas of themselves they got really good at generating different architectures for staying alive and reproducing. At this level the material form of the organism is in a sense beside the point—the point is the whole dynamic arrangement of self-perpetuating form (which is parasitic on matter but also paradoxically independent in the sense that it is a dynamic matter/form combo, "more than the sum of its parts" at any one moment, emergent and absential).

A lot of this is standard evolution stuff, but what I guess Deacon is saying is that the important thing is to follow the formal logic of nested spiraling yin/yangs of presences and absences all the way down to the basic level of thermodynamics and back up again in order to see how life and consciousness are best understood in terms of a dialectic of dynamic processes. The higher levels at which information and function and consciousness seem paradoxical only make sense if you take into account the whole multi-dimensional dialectic of presence and absence.

So did Aristotle nail it? All four causes are accounted for and back in action. There's a lot of discussion of Aristotle in this book and Dynamics in Action, which I look forward to finishing. Greek science's turn toward the timeless and mathematical and away from the contextually embedded narrative description is a big issue in that book. What about Lao Tse? "Clay is fashioned into vessels but it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends.” (Deacon quotes this too.) Deacon also discusses the "discovery" of zero as analogous to what he is trying to say about absential "things." (More often he uses the word "ententional" to refer to these absent forms that make a difference. I don't think that word is going to catch on.)

I haven't mentioned how difficult to read this book is yet. It's not super bad, but it's pretty difficult. He coins a lot of new words, which normally I'm fine with, and even wish more writers would do, but other reviewers have felt it was a bit much. You need to have a pretty basic understanding of physics and biology. I'm no master wordsmith but I couldn't help but feel at times like he could have explained things more clearly and that he was making it more difficult than was necessary. I'd love to take a crack at diagramming or drawing comics about the ideas in this book and Juarrero's book. Deacon throws in a few diagrams, but it seems to me like visualization would really help. Saying "figure/background reversal" over and over doesn't quite drive the point home without an illustration, like one of these.

The How of Happiness

by Sonja Lyubomirsky

-Bought this at a book sale, read it off and on before bed. It's like one of those books full of laboratory research on psychology students that is generalized into advice about how to change your life for the better. It's not the most inspirational book, but it's definitely full of things to do. I guess it tries to be comprehensive. The large quantity of activities and suggestions in the book ironically seemed depressingly overwhelming to me. I guess it would be a good reference book to have around and pull out every once in a while. Things like: be grateful, savor the pleasures of life, spend quality time with your loved ones, have goals, don't work too hard, meditate, etc.

The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain

by Terrence W. Deacon

-This is an incredible book. I heard about it in that "This Explains Everything" book when someone mentioned it as having huge explanatory power. It really does -- I learned a lot, about Peirce and about the brain (I have only read a few books about the brain, and the anatomy and lobes can get p. boring, but I feel like I'm getting more of a sense for the territory, and now it's actually getting exciting to read about) and evolution and animals, and so much of what I've been learning this year felt like it came together in this book: brains, language, evolution, and even Buddhism (which is not in the book--that's my own spin on it). The writing is very dry, but I didn't have any problems because each chapter was fascinating, almost breathtaking. There's so much ground covered in this book that you feel sometimes like he's asking you to take his word for a lot of things that aren't really "proven" in the book, but I didn't have a lot of problems with that. It was enough to watch the whole argument come together, its scope and logic. I haven't followed up yet or read more about Deacon or the book (it came out in 1997) so we'll see what I find as I read more recent work by him or other people on these matters.

Some ideas in the book:

-Finally learned about Peirce and icon-index-symbol triads. (Can't believe it took me this long).

-Language undergoes its own evolution in order to better fit the environs of the human brain, and vice versa.

-Children learn language so easily, not because of a "grammar module" built into the brain, but because human brains and language has evolved to better take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of the human brains of children, as they develop, and vice versa.

-The proportionally large human cortex changes the statistics (the "votes") of neural connections in the brain such that the brain is more connected to itself, and this allows more dialectical patterns which give rise to thinking in symbols.

-Humans have more frontal cortical control over our breath, and thus our level of arousal and speech, than animals do, probably because of evolutionary pressures once spoken language came on the scene.  ("focus on the breath...") For the same reasons our larynx has changed to allow a wider range of tones.

-His theory is that the earliest symbol use arose out of the problem of how to arrange mating pairs in groups of proto-humans. This part seems pretty speculative. When the advantages of larger group sizes for hunting came into conflict with the problems of how to arrange mating pairs (avoiding cuckolding, sharing child-rearing, etc.) he thinks a kind of early marriage ritual, a kind of "social contract" emerged. This ritual behavior opened up the space for symbolic thinking. (Very fitting ideas for this blog!) "The near synchrony in human prehistory of the first increase in brain size, the first appearance of stone tools for hunting and butchery, and a considerable reduction in sexual dimorphism is not a coincidence. These changes are interdependent. All are symptoms of a fundamental restructuring of the hominid adaptation, which resulted in a significant change in feeding ecology, a radical change in social structure, and an unprecedented (indeed, revolutionary) change in representational abilities."

-Recognize that the distinctions between conscious/nonconsciousness, mind/body, intentional/mechanical, and human/animal do not all line up vertically with each other. Animals have minds and thoughts, and a kind of consciousness, but they are not able to use symbolic languages, though a few chimps have shown limited but real abilities to think symbolically.

This last idea--that some chimps, named Sherman and Austin, actually learned to think symbolically--is leaned on heavily in the argument of the book. I don't know anything about these experiments or how accepted they are.

The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination

by Matthew Guerrieri

-I saw Guerrieri on the Colbert Report (you can watch his appearance here), and this book sounded like it was right up my alley -- I'm working on my 5th Ganges symphony, I'm obsessed with formalism and abstractions and "organic wholeness," and I had literally been thinking about the concept of a "hall of mirrors" as one of the formal organizing ideas for Ganges 5. So when he talks on Colbert about how the Romantics and esp. ETA Hoffmann adopt the Fifth as their anthem because it fit their ideas about achieving an organic unity of life, after passing through a "hall of mirrors" of repetition, twinning, doppelgangers, etc., I was very excited to read this. And it's pretty good. It wasn't as heady a read as I was expecting, it's more written at a magazine article level. Sometimes he draws connections that seem pretty forced, but that goes with the territory. It reminded me at times of Nicholson Baker's "Lumber" essay (which I recently read), where the forced connections between disparate echoing forms is the logic of the writing, both the form and the content of the writing, which creates an exhilarating hall of mirrors effect, and points to the hall of mirrors of nature that writing itself is. I'm guessing this was the original impulse for writing this way about the Fifth in the first place, but the effect is not as evident or intense as "Lumber." I enjoyed the short but sweet discussions of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Adorno, and also the use of the Fifth in WW2, which I didn't know anything about. Also there's Charles Ives, EM Forster and Ralph Ellison, the whole Beethoven was black thing, commercial jingles, etc.

Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning

by Benjamin K. Bergen

-This is a book by a student of George Lakoff about the experimental evidence for the Embodied Simulation Theory of meaning. The idea is that when the brain is trying to decipher the meaning of language, as heard or read or etc., it makes use of brain systems whose original functions pre-date language: systems for memories of motor control, for locating things in space, for sensory information, etc. These systems run a sort of "virtual reality" simulation to try to "picture" or "feel" what it would be like to experience the world according to the language before it. Bergen talks about the brain using systems built for motor control and "bootstrapping" them up into use for language. I'm not sure what to think about all this. On the one hand the experiments seem convincing, I guess, though it got pretty tedious reading about experiment after experiment (these guys love their experiments, and bless them for it), and it "feels" sort of right--an organism develops a brain to organize bodily systems and respond to its environment, and then the brain develops the power to turn on itself and include itself in its models, and this recursion and modeling kicks into overdrive with the development of language as a socially shared modeling system--but all the while reading the book a little voice in my head kept saying that something wasn't adding up. I don't have the energy right now to think this through but it seems like there's some intro to philosophy type questions being side-stepped? Or maybe not? Out of my depth. 

There's a bit in the book about abstraction and metaphor that was interesting to me. Bergen says that they don't yet understand how embodied mental simulation works when we talk and think about abstract language. We seem to easily understand abstract concepts in metaphorical terms, and abstractions seem to be made up of a lot of dead metaphors, but the mental simulations of metaphors and abstractions seem somehow different than simulations of more concrete scenarios. But it seemed to me like, aren't we able to make simulations of simulations? Models of models, maps of maps? And we go from there? We think in mental simulations, but we can also take those simulations and treat them like objects to be simulated. We seem to be able to nest them within each other? I don't know, I'm out of my depth again.

This Explains Everything

ed. John Brockman

-"Edge.org presents original ideas by Todays Leading Thinkers." Q: What is your fave deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? This was fun to read! I picked it up at the library, then ended up reading it all the way through. The order of essays sometimes let's you picture them nested within each other in beautiful ways, for which I guess we can thank John Brockman. Many of the answers are versions of Darwin: adaptive systems, emerging complexity from simplicity, even within physics and mathematics, no surprise -- but the way they all play off each other is a real head trip. I have nothing negative to say. It ends with "empiricism" itself as a sort of ultimate self-adapting system. At some level of abstraction I suppose you just end up back with "us" as the explanation for everything, a hall of mirrors?

Meta Math! The Quest for Omega
by Gregory Chaitin

The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

by Nicholson Baker

-The section of essays labeled "Mixed" was a waste of space. One essay is just a collection of typos he's made and saved in a file on his computer. Another terrible piece is written high on pot, which might not be a problem, but it's just stupid fancy vocab words and nonsense. But I enjoyed the rest, more or less. I liked this least when Baker tries too hard to be fancy and "writerly" with his descriptions and vocabulary. But "Lumber," the huge essay that ends the book was really fun to read, and the library science section was, too. I recommend those, if you like the kinds of things I like. Of course I really like it when Baker is sensitive to the potential to go "meta" and play with recursion in any subject, and which he really piles on in the amazing "Lumber" essay, and you find it also in "Model Airplanes" with the model-making machine that might make models of itself.

Zen and the Brain

James H. Austin, MD

-I don't know about this book. I started reading it because I was looking for exactly something that talked about meditation in a scientific context, and came across this book at the library. It's 697 pages and obviously a labor of love. I skimmed a lot of the brain stuff, which was not really for a general reader, even though it wanted to be. The rest of it...I can't really recommend reading the whole thing, though I learned a few things. If you're interested, you can really just skip to the summary chapters, written in Q&A form. The main point seems to be that meditation, over years of practice, desynchronizes the many systems of perception and awareness which are woven together in the brain in egocentric and delusional ways, and allows them to loosen up their patterns, which improves things, and at some point these systems can, possibly, snap back together in a simpler and awakened enlightened state. I have more to say but I'll leave it there for now.

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
by Lawrence Wright

Essays of E.B. White
-Nothing wrong with this. Really loved reading these, and sad to be finished. This and One Man's Meat may have given me the purest reading pleasure I've come across in my past couple of years of aimless reading. I'm not even interested in farm stuff or New York City! He could write.

Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages
by Alex Wright

You Are Not So Smart
by David McRaney
-see here

Sure, I had issues with this book. Studies have shown, "science tells us," that kind of thing. OK...? So slow down, check your work, make sure you're not fooling yourself. And don't trust everything you read...says the popular science book. Be careful out there, everyone. I guess this was a more accessible Thinking Fast and Slow. 

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
by Peter Turchi
-enjoyed very much

Designing Universal Knowledge
by Gerlinde Schuller
-recommended

Bizarre Books
by Rusell Ash and Brian Lake
-awesome

Mindfulness in Plain English
by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
-2nd time through.

Teach Us to Sit Still
by Tim Parks
-Jacket copy: "Overwhelmed by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, Parks follows a fruitless journey through the conventional medical system only to find relief in the most unexpected place: a breathing exercise that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parks anticipated finding answers; he was about as far from New Age as you can get. As everything that he once held true is called into question, Parks confronts the relationship between his mind and body, the hectic modern world that seems to demand all our focus, and his chosen life as an intellectual and writer."

Me: Mindfulness helps Parks get over crotch pain. It was easy and interesting to read and moving and didn't feel like bullshit. The stuff about how a life of writing and thinking affects one's body over the long term -- tensing muscles, stresses -- seemed true and important to keep in mind. As it ended, though, I would have liked to hear more about whether he was able to make peace with the conflict he experienced between mindfulness and the writing life. If at all. Obviously he wrote the book; how did mindfulness inform the sitting down to write? But maybe that's beyond the scope of this book.

Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
- There seem to be several other books on similar topics, but is the first book I have read about biases and heuristics, so a lot of this was new to me. I really enjoyed reading it despite all the potentially boring discussion of studies and story problems. This seems like the book to read.

I've often thought that I'd love to write/read a "how to" book that talked about basic decision making and thinking, and the stuff in this book would be valuable for a book like that -- the easy errors to avoid, etc. I'm predicting that a lot of this book will stick with me for a long time, like the thing about how predictions are almost always wrong.

Incomplete list of things to remember: don't jump to conclusions from small sample sizes, don't jump to conclusions period, regression to the mean, What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI), halo effect, priming, question substitution, repetition=familiarity=positive feelings, System 2 is lazy, experiencing self vs. remembering self, experts in low-validity environments are worse than random chance, Wall Street is bullshit, get the outside view, formulas and checklists beat intuitions...