Man and Aggression

Found Ashley Montagu’s “Man and Aggression” for almost free at the annual Co-op book sale. Had vaguely heard of him so bought it. Twelve pages in, I am having serious doubts about the utility of reading the rest of it.

He makes a good point that part of the eagerness of people to believe in explanations of aggression based on “instinct” or human nature is because this absolves them of responsibility for aggressive acts. This seems rather plausible.

That is the only good thing I have to say about what I’ve read so far. The rest has been drivel about how all human behaviour is learnt. When I came across that assertion my first thought was, what a better a straw man for Steven Pinker to dismantle? And, indeed, a quick look in The Blank Slate reveals that he does use Montagu as a punching bag. And one can hardly say that to be unfair; in fact I thought Pinker might have exaggerated the extremity of the Blank Slate doctrine, but in Montagu we have a respected anthropologist spouting utter nonsense.

Ane example of a “fact” Montagu presents that is now (and perhaps even then?) known to be mythical:

“…there exists not the slightest evidence of hostility between neighboring hordes of early man…. when [neighboring hordes] met it is extremely unikely that they would have been any less friendly than food-gathering hunting peoples are today.”

One could hardy imagine a cruder version of the myth of the noble savage.

Work in Progress

Reading Beckett’s The Unnamable to find out why Berio used it (apart from the obvious existential theme) in his Sinfonia (the text to the famous third movement can be found here). He does quote a large chunk of the part where the artist talks about the audience. But the other parts seem to be taken from random parts of the novel, and the order in which they are taken does not correspond to the order in which they appear in the novel. Mostly Berio just seems to use them opportunistically. But, being human, I can’t help but wonder why he uses the phrases that he does. The novel is a minefield of existential phrases that can appropriated to mean whatever one wants them to mean, but one doesn’t want to believe that Berio simply shot fish in a barrel, as such. One prefers to think that he had to so some sort of active hunting for particularly apt phrases.

Osmond-Smith, in his monograph, annotates all the musical and textual references, but there is one phrase he labels as “origin unknown”. The phrase in concern is “With not even a small mountain on the horizon, a man would wonder where his kingdom ended“. “A man would wonder where his kingdom ended” does indeed appear in Beckett. The passage in context:

Decidedly this eye is hard of hearing. Noises travel, traverse walls, but may the same be said of appearances? By no means, generally speaking. But the present case is rather special. But what appearances, it is always well to try and find out what one is talking about, even at the risk of being deceived. This grey to begin with, meant to be depressing no doubt. And yet there is yellow in it, pink too apparently, it’s a nice grey, of the kind recommended as going with everything, urinous and warm. In it the eye can see, otherwise why the eye, but dimly, that’s right, no superfluous particulars, later to be controverted. A man would wonder where his kingdom ended, his eye strive to penetrate the gloom, and he crave for a stick, an arm, fingers apt to grasp and then release, at the right moment, a stone, stones, for it to come back to him, and suffer, certainly, at having neither voice nor other missile, nor limbs submissive to him, bending and unbending at the word of command, and perhaps even regret being a man, under such conditions, that is to say a head abandoned to its ancient solitary resources.

Not that that helps me to understand its inclusion any better. Sure, it’s in the general vein of confused, grey existential angst, but it also seems more referential than the other quoted portions of the monologue. That is, more than the other parts of the monologue that Berio quotes, this one actually sounds like it could mean something outside the artist’s mind. I hesitate to say that it sounds more concrete, but I do mean at least something along those lines. Or perhaps, like Beckett’s protagonist, I’m just imagining things.

The first part of the phrase is more intriguing. What kind of metaphor is that? The only literary reference Google turns up is something from Henry James’ Italian Hours. In context:

I had been looking all winter across
the Campagna at the free-flowing outline of the Alban Mount, with
its half-dozen towns shining on its purple side even as vague
sun-spots in the shadow of a cloud, and thinking it simply an
agreeable incident in the varied background of Rome. But now that
during the last few days I have been treating it as a foreground,
have been suffering St. Peter's to play the part of a small
mountain on the horizon, with the Campagna swimming mistily
through the ambiguous lights and shadows of the interval, I find
the interest as great as in the best of the by-play of Rome.

Doesn’t seem at all a likely source for Berio’s quote, much less explain why he tacked it on to the beginning of the quote from Beckett. Is he referring to some real person? With a real or metaphorical kingdom? The existential quotes seem at least to fit in the general drift of the piece, but this kingdom thing seems particularly out of place.

Some strange listening issues with that Schubert A flat Impromptu (D935, I think). Always thought it was in E flat, fooled by constant presence of E-flat in left hand (although the bass is clearly in A flat). So much so that when I whistle it to myself or mentally sing it, I transpose it down to E flat. And usually fail to catch myself doing that.

I seem to have a problem with hearing bass lines. The Schubert one should be obvious. But in my auditory consciousness it’s the E flat that pervades everything. Females have more difficulty hearing lower frequencies, she tells me. Possible explanation for why I’m terrible at identifying seventh chords — I can almost always only hear one of the higher tones, and not the bass tone.

W. D. Hamilton on cloning

W. D. Hamilton, my favourite biologist by a light year, makes better points about cloning in a few elegant sentences (in this volume) than Houellebecq managed in an entire novel. He points out that attractive as cloning might be, humans will eventually revert to sexual reproduction because of the latter’s advantages in keeping parasites and genetically transmitted disorders at bay. He is amusingly frank about the dispensibility of the male sex when it comes to reproductive cloning, and imagines that it will be a horde of feminists who embrace cloning because it would allow them to do without males.

In a quietly stunning style I’ve come to mentally label as “Hamiltonian”*, he unfolds the following:

The frightening implication for me as a male who has tended to appreciate his penis and testicles is not principally that of female-to-female cloning giving rise to a wholly feminine communal scenario, such as I have sketched. All the arguments and facts in this volume should eventually convince you, I hope, that it is the general fate of clones, after their creation, to become steadily less healthy. If they do so, the health of clonal humans will eventually reach the point where anything, even having old-fashioned babies shared genuinely with a partner, will come to seem a best choice even to the greatest of egotists. If lack of conviction conveyed in my arguments for the immediate effects of the Parasite/Red Queen connection has been your problem, then, at least when you look to the very distant future, you will probably still hope that after such experiments have been watched failing there can be still enough men somewhere on the planet — perhaps on some far South Sea island — to bring us back to what we are now, to being bisexual. So far this one is much less discussed and yet the same kind of technique that has just opened the way to the creation of Dolly the sheep is quietly laying this very feminine baby on our doorstep too.

He then proceeds to poetically place the development of cloning as a natural stage in our progressive warping of naturally occurring entities, a progress that started with the Neolithic domestication (and hence standardisation) of crops:

The drive towards nameable and standard crops that began in the Neolithic Revolution and brought us our smooth fields of wheat and barley… a drive that has made already almost square and box-ready tomatoes, our chickens so tender and so over-ready for the oven that they collapse under their own weight if reared to adulthood — all of this vast trend that has been and is still going on is surely hardly likely to pause in its stride now just because people are feeling shocked for a week or two at a prospect of clonal Howard Hugheses. Cows with no bull in their field have been familiar for a very long time and this is just one aspect of the unnatural inbreeding and genetic restriction that are both already well accepted. Few seem even to notice how, under modern practices, the cows themselves are seldom seen in the fields either and in some cases might hardly know how to stand up in fields and what to do if they came. Thus it is clear that not many of us are going to turn even a hair if bulls should quietly cease to exist, which will be the likely outcome of both of the breeding systems mentioned above. If our milk and beef stay cheap, why should we care? This will be the general reaction.

He ends the essay with a firm yet gentle dismissal of those who fear that cloning will result in the loss of personal identity (a fallacy that Houellebecq falls prey to):

Instead of mumbling on about human dignity, we should certainly think much more about things we already do to reduce it in our distant cousins. Surely it is obvious that twins and healthy clones lose only the tiniest jot of dignity, if at all, compared with a man who is forcibly kept alive after he has expressed his wish to die, or compared with a turkey too heavy and weak to stand up without breaking its legs.

And indeed, nowadays there are also plenty of people, who would be in the otherwise healthy age range, who cannot walk very far without destroying their knee joints, and who do not care to remedy this. The image of these people enthusiastically consuming vast quantities of poultry who are physically handicapped in the same way they are (in effect these people are creating the demand for such poultry, so they are actively making it the case that they are, as such, eating the feathered analogues of their unhealthy selves in a bid to accentuate these very same unhealthy aspects) recalls a feedback loop, or something self-referential, of sorts.

And surely it is obvious that people will damn well call whatever they want dignity. Hamilton’s words constitute one sparkling drop of wisdom in a vast ocean of irrational inanities.

More on this incredible scientist and philosopher (yes, I believe he deserves that appellation) later.

*A pity he has to share the surname of that other great scientist who is generally behind the normal use of “Hamiltonian”.

The Tritone Paradox

An applet demonstrating the Tritone Paradox. I unambiguously perceive the first tone as lower than the second at both frequencies. Most people perceive the first tone as higher than the second when both are played at 110 Hz, but the second as higher than the first (which is correct) at 160 Hz. I poked around Diana Deutsch’s website a bit hoping she had something on whether people with perfect pitch are susceptible to the paradox. It would seem that they would have to be unsusceptible to it, by the definition of perfect pitch. And it would also explain why I was not fooled by it. But then I was fooled by the Shepard’s Tones illusion. Evidently if the transitions are finely-grained enough, my pitch-discerning abilities fail as well. When I hear the next octave and try to recall the previous octave, I can hear that there’s something fishy; that it doesn’t sound as high as it should be. But I cannot help but hear the transition from one note to the next as increasing in pitch. I wonder if people who have never been exposed to music (much less trained to recognise relative pitches) are susceptible to the Shepard’s Tones illusion. Is there a chance that they will hear the frequency rather than the musical note?

More thoughts: if, as Deutsch postulates, people’s interpretations of the Tritone Paradox are dependent on their native languages, what bearing does this have on the disproportionate occurrence of perfect pitch amongst autistic people? Keep in mind that one of the symptoms of autism is an impairment of verbal ability. Not all autistic people are impaired in that respect, but certainly there exist musical savants with perfect pitch who are impaired thus. Perhaps language “interferes” with one’s absolute pitch recognition abilities? But that would not explain why speakers of more tonal languages like Chinese are also more likely to have perfect pitch. Here we have the situation where perfect pitch, which is surmised to be linked to language somehow, occurs disproportionately in a group of people who mostly have impaired verbal abilities, and in another group of people who have had special training in recognising pitches in verbal interaction.

Humphrey on consciousness, and various digressions

I read with interest that the cognitive psychologist Nicholas Humphrey lists Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as one of five books that have inspired him. This should be completely unsurprising. Humphrey after all does philosophy part-time. I read How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem last winter, before I had read a word of Wittgenstein. That first reading left me intrigued, unconvinced and slightly confused. Now, having had a sufficient dosage of when-language-goes-on-holiday arguments, I find it a much easier read. The category mistake of lumping sensation together with perception seems, I think, quite clear. The evolutionary story he provides as an explanation for sensation as we know it is stunning. I am confused, however, as to how the monitoring of sensory responses does not constitute full sensation as we know it. While it is true that humans have many sensations that are just sensations without the accompanying automatic sensory responses that Humphrey postulates were the very beginnings of the mechanism of sensation, and hence that the “privatisation” of sensory activity is required if Humphrey’s model is to explain much of human sensation, there is nothing to suggest that the monitoring of sensory responses itself could not have the immediacy, ownership, presentness and whatnot that privatised sensory activity presumably has. This is somewhat tangential to Humphrey’s argument though, since assigning this monitoring the status of sensing would not undermine the argument.

Also, inasmuch as Humphrey’s “thickness factor” is a necessary quality of consciousness (I have doubts about this), then full privatisation is indeed necessary to produce the self-referential loops that he uses to explain the thickness of consciousness.

While comparing this “thickness” to the “rich self-confirming sound of a piano with the sustaining pedal down” makes for a lyrical metaphor in the spirit of his hero Wittgenstein, I think this might fall prey to the criticisms Humphrey makes of other people’s definitions of consciousness at the start of the paper. “Hazy or imprecise descriptions can only be a recipe for trouble,” he says in response to Damasio’s definition of consciousness as a ‘movie in the brain’. I myself have not decided where I stand on the “hazy but correct” versus “clear but simplified” issue. In fact I was a bit surprised when he slammed hazy definitions of consciousness, since it would appear that the later Wittgenstein would have balked at insisting on a crystal-clear definition of consciousness, and indeed Humphrey’s hazy definition of “thickness” is Wittgensteinian in that aspect.

One can see how Goedel, Escher, Bach, another book that Humphrey lists as an inspiration, has inspired him. The theory of self-referentialism as the explanation of the “thickness” of sensation clearly derives from Hofstadter, whom I’m sure would also have appreciated Humphrey’s vividly explanatory mental-loop-within-an-amoeba diagrams.

I have a theory that people who as children are fascinated with physics also tend to have a philosophical tendency that exceeds the norm even amongst academics. And Humphrey, who wanted to be a physicist as a child but switched to psychology after starting out in physics at Cambridge, serves as another example. There are a disproportionate number of philosophers who started out as physicists or mathematicians (disproportionate in comparison to those who started out in other non-philosophy disciplines). Wittgenstein himself wanted to study with Boltzmann but the latter died too early and W. ended up studying engineering. Physics majors where I’m studying now disproportionately choose philosophy-oriented courses to satsify the core humanities requirements. It is plausible that a fascination with abstract and “fundamental” concepts is common to the pursuit of both physics and philosophy, and hence tends to attract similar types of people.

My writing of people who were fascinated by physics “as children” seems to imply that others are as naive as myself in letting themselves get bedazzled by philosophy at the expense of physics as they age, and not the other way around. More likely, however, it’s simply that if you were not fascinated by physics as a child, you wouldn’t have taken enough physics classes to prepare yourself for further study in physics, thus forestalling any substantial growth in physics-related ruminations even if the bug hits you later in life. In contrast, it is much easier for physicists to hurdle the barriers of academic philosophy and switch disciplines should they be seized with idealism later in life.

Final digression, hopefully: I was rather impressed with the suitability of Wittgenstein’s musical metaphors in PI, and hence was not surprised to learn that he has perfect pitch.