p a S S a g e s

"...an alienation not from reason but from emotion,instincts and the will"

The origins of SCHIZOPHRENIA are mysterious. The condition was first described in 1806, but no one is certain whether the illness - or, more likely, group of illnesses - existed long before then but had escaped definition or, on the other hand, appeared as an AIDS-like scourge at the start of the industrial age. Roughly one percent of the population in all countries succumbs to it. Why it strikes one individual and not another is not known, although the suspicion is that it results from a tangle of inherited vulnerabiity and life stressed. No element of environment - war, imprisonment, drugs, or upbringing - has ever been proved to cause, by itself, a single instance of the illness. There is now a consensus that schizophrenia has a tendency to run in families, but heredity alone apparently cannot explain why a specific individual develops the full-blown illness.

Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term schizophrenia in 1908, describes a "specific type of alteration of thinking, feeling and relation to the external world.' The term refers to a splitting of psychic functions, "a peculiar destruction of the inner cohesiveness of the psychic personality." To the person experiencing early symptoms - hearing voices, bizarre delusions, extreme apathy or agitation, coldness toward others - is, taken singly, unique to the illness. And symptoms vary so much between individuals and over time for the same individual that the notion of a "typical case" is virtually nonexistent. Even the degree of diability - far more severe, on average, for men - varies wildly. The symptoms can be "slightly, moderately, severely, or absolutely disabling," according to Irving Gottesman, a leading contemporary researcher. Though mathematician John Nash sucummbed at age 30, the illness can appear at any time from adolescence to advanced middle age. The first episode canlast a few weeks or months or several years. The life history of someone with the disease can include only one or two spisodes. Isaac Newton, always an eccentric and solitary soul, apparently suffered a psychotic breakdown with paranoid delusions at age 51. The episode, which may have been precipitated by an unhappy attachment to a younger man and the failure of his alchemy experiments, marked the end of Newton's academic career. But, after a year or so, Newton recovered and went on to hold a series of high public positions and to receive many honors. More often, as happened in Nash's case, people with the disease suffer many, progressively more sever episodes that occur at ever shorter intervals. Recovery, almost never complete, runds the gamut from a level tolerable to society to one that may not require permanent haspitablization but in fact does not allow even the semblance of a normal life.

More than any symptom, the defining characteristic of the illness is the profound feeling of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility that sufferrs provoke in other people. Psychiatrists describe the person's sense of being separated by a "gult which defies description" from individuals who seem "totally strange, puzzling, inconeivable, uncanny and incapable of empathy, even to the point of being sinister and frightening." For Nash, the onset of the illness dramatically intensified a pre-existing feeling, on the part of many who knew him, that he was essentially disconnected from them and deeply unknowable. As Anthony Storr writes:
"However melancholy a depressive may be, the observer generally feels there is some possibility of emotional contact. The schizoid person, on the other hand, appears withdrawn and inaccessible. His remoteness from human contact makes his state of mind less humanly comprehensible, since his feelings are not communicated. If such a person becomes psychotic (schizophrenic) this lack of connection with people and the external world becomes more obvious; with the result that the suffer's behaviour and utterances appear inconsequential and unpredictable."

Schizophrenia contradicts popular but incorrect views of madness as consisting solely of wild gyrations of mood, or fevered delirium. Someone with schizophrenia is not permanently disoriented or confused, for example, the way that an individual with a brain injury or Alzheimer's might be. He may have, indeed usually does have, a firm grip on certain aspects of present reality. While he was ill, Nash traveled over Europe and America, got legal help, and learned to write sophisticated computer programs. Schizophrenia is also distinct from manic depressive illness (currently known as bipolar disorder, the illness with which it has most often been confounded in the past.

If anything, schizophrenia can be a ratiocinating illness, particularly in its early phases. From the turn of the century, the great students of schizophrenia noted that its sufferers included people with fine minds and that the delusions which often, though not always, come with the disorder involve subtle, sophisticated, complex fights of thought. Emily Kraepelin, who defined the disorder for the first time in 1896, described "dementia praecox," as he called the illness, not as the shattering of reason but as causing "predominantly damage to the emotional life and the will." Louis A. Sass/B], psychologist at Rutgers University, calls it "not an escape from reason but an exacerbation of that thoroughgoing illness Dostovsky imagined...at least in some of its forms...heightening rather than a dimming of conscious awareness, and an alienation not from reason but from emotion, instincts and the will."


Source: A Beautiful Mind by Slyvia Nasar

"To 'reality' art lends reality"

In my naive, untheoretical, writerly way, I believe in language.

Edmund White's autofiction, The Farewell Symphony,tells us that 'tragedy of sex is that one can never know what this most intimate and moving form of communication has actually said to the other person and whether the message, if received, was welcome'.I have announced this sentence with one tart word: talk ?

Steven Pinker is a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.He specializes in the psychology of language.In 1994, he wrote a brilliant book, The Language Instinct. His initial proposition is that human beings can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision. 'I amnot referring to telepathy or mind control or the other obsessions of fringe science,' he writes. 'These are blunt instuments compared to an ability that is uncontrovesially present in every one of us.That ability is language. Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds.' We are, says Pinker, liable to forget what a miracle this is.

Indeed we are. Deconstruction maintains the opposite. Far from being an instrument of exquisite precision, language is a self-referential system with no necessary purchase on reality - a system in which meaning is endlessly deferred and often contradictory.

But consider Steven Pinker's example of language at work. When octopuses mate, the male octopus's normally grey body suddenly becomes striped. He caresses the female with seven of his arms, slipping the eigth into her breathing tube. A series of sperm packets moves slowly through a groove in his eigth arm, finding rest in the mantle cavity of the female.

The tragedy of sex here is that the male can't ask the female if his intentions are desired. The triumph of language is that, should you now see an octopus turn stripy, you will know exactly what is going on. Simple, isn't it ?


Source: In Defence of T S Eliot by Craig Raine

" ...the unspoken recogniion that understanding can never mean anything more than the perception of connections,ie: unitary features or marks of affinity in the manifold..."

Even in antiquity there were two definitions of beauty which stood in a certain opposition to one another.The controversy between them played a great part, especially during the Renaissance.The one describes beauty as the proper conformity of the parts to one another, and to the whole.The other,stemming from Plotinus, describes it, without reference to parts,as translucence of the eternal splendor of the "one" through the material phenomenon.

In our mathematical example, we shall have to stop short, initially, at the first definition.The parts here are the properties of whole numbers and laws of geometrical constructions, axioms to which arithmetic and Euclidean geometry belong - the great structure of interconnection guaranteed by the consistency of the axiom system.We perceive that the individual parts fit together, that, as pars, they do indeed belong to this whole, and without any reflection, we feel the completeness and simplicity of this axiom system to be beautiful.Beauty is therefore involved with the age-old problem of the "one" and the "many" which occupied - in close connection with the problem of "being" and "becoming" - a central position in early Greek philosophy.

Since the roots of exact science are also to be found at this very point, it will be as well to retrace in broad outline the currents of thought in tht early age.At the starting point of the Greek philosophy of nature there stands the question of a basic principle, from which the colorful variety of phenomena can be explained.However strangely it may strike us, the well-known answer of Thales- "Water is the material first principle of all things"- contains, according to Nietzsche, three basic philosophical demands which were to become important in the developments that followed: first, that one should seek for such a unitary basic principle; second, that the answer should be given only rationally, that is, not by reference to a myth; and third and finally, that in this context the material aspect of the world must play a a deciding role.Behind these demands there stnds, of course, the unspoken recognition that understanding can never mean anything more than the perception of connections, i.e., unitary features or marks of affinity in the manifold.

But if such a unitary principle of all things exists, then -and this was the next step along this line of thought- one is straightaway brought up against the question how it can serve to account for the fact of change. The difficulty is particularly apparent in the celebrated paradox of Parminides.Only being is; non-being is not.But if only being is, there cannot be anything outside this being that articulates it or could bring about changes.Hence being will have to be conceived as eternal, uniform, and unlimited in space and time.The changes we experience can thus be only an illusion.

eXcerpted from: Science and the Beautiful - Werner Heisenberg in Quantum Questions edited by Ken Wilber.

"Binary logic has always been the logic of power".

Suppose we replace your brain with a computer chip. How would you change? Would you still be you?
What you still be you? What if we replace only two-thirds or half your brain with a chip? Would you think only black-and-white digital thoughts? Would your brain house a digital mind? Or would your mind use fuzzy logic? Would your thoughts be fuzzy or gray?

Fuzzy means shades of gray between 0% and 100%. Most concepts are fuzzy because they have inexact borders. There are no hard lines between water that is warm and not warm or between sunsets that red-orange or not red-orange or between front teetch that are crooked and not crooked. These concepts have opposites that shade into each other.

Hard lines occur most often in math and in politics. Circles and squares have black-and-white boundaries because for well over 2,000 years we have defined them that way with binary logic. But we can define an infinitude of fuzzy circles and squares that generalize the old binary cirles and squares. A fuzzy circle might look like a jagged ideal circle. Its level of jaggedness would give a measure of its fuziness or how much the circle looked like a non-circle. An ultra-fuzzy circle might look as if one painted a circle with a spray can rather than drew a circle with an ink pen.

Politics is all about drawing about hard lines and backing them up with the force of the law. The line between a legal and illegal blood-alcohol level is a hard line because the state draws it as a line. A hard line in math depends on the fiat of definition. A hard line in politics depends on both fiat and force. That is why the same blood-alcohol level can land you in jail in one state or country and leave you free to drive at risk in another.

The state supplies much of scoiety's demand for hard lines. A glance at any tax code shows that governments tend to over-supply this demand. The legal language of the tax code itself is shot through with fuzz of all types. This fuzz allows more choices but seldom for the taxpayer. It gives more license to those in power because it lets them draw lines through wider spheres of action.It gives them logical wiggle room. This is the suzzy version of the Golden Rule: Those with the most power tend to draw the hard lines.

Binary logic has always been the logic of power.

The term digital age means an information age based on the binary units of information 1 and or yes and no. These on-off bits are digital building blocks. They define what is true and what is false. We can use any two symbols and the mark them on paper or press them in mud or build them into the two states of an on-off switch or logic gate. A digital computer chip may contain millions of tiny on-off switches based on whether enough electrons flow across a gae or whether a well traps enough electrons.

A digital circuit in a chip may store a bit value as 1 if the input voltage exceeds three volts and store it as 0 if the voltage is less than two volts. The chip must have some ay to round off voltages that fall between two and three volts in the fuzzy "noise margin". A digital system based on fiber optics assigns the bit value of 1 if a light is on in the fiber and assigns the bit value 0 if it is off.It too must round off the fuzzy middle ground of dim light values. The same holds for a digital polymer memory chip of the future. Such a plastic chip assigns the bit value of 1 if a molecule lies in one state and assigns the bit value of 0 if the molecule lies in some other state. The more futuristic digital quantum computers go further. They not only assign quantum bit or "qubit" the value of 1 if an atom's nucleus spins in an "up" state and assign it the value of 0 if the nucleus spins in a
"down" state. The statistical laws of quantum mechanics allow the same quibit to take on both the value 1 and the value of 0 at the same time.

Computer chips have fueled the digital age but they did not invent it. Binay logic did. The "law" of either-or did. But binarylogic does not work as well with how we think or reason. Our minds must work to define a circle as the locus of points equally far from a center point. We struggle to trace out the logic steps in a barroom argument or in a judicial decision or in a mathematical proof.

Minds are not digital processors. Our concepts are fuzzy to the core and our reasoning is approximate. The statement "Red apples taste good" holds for each of us only to some degree. The statement's fuzz or vagueness stems in part from the subjective nature of taste and from the fuzziness of taste and goodness. The statement's fuzz stems in large measure from the fuzziness of an objective "fact": A given red apple is not a pure red or 100% red apple. There is a continuum of exceptions between a pure red apple and a pure not-red apple.

There is always a continuum of exceptions.

We draw hard lines through fuzz to help manage the exceptions. This gives up accuracy for simpicity but favors action over description. It lets us paint the world with the 1s and 0s of the digital age. The technique is quick and dirty but if often gets things done. It helps us pick and sort and sell red apples as well as make claims about how good they taste.

Trouble occurs if we take these binary carvings too seriously. Then we can lose the balance between fuzz and precision. The ironay of the digital age is that things are fuzzier than ever. Fuzz grows as the bits pour in.

The digital age has its own uncertainty principle: Issues get fuzzier as their parts get more precise.[/B


eXcerpt from: The Fuzzy Future by fuzzy mathematician Bart Kosko.1999.

...Music is the sound of math...

Why should Beethoven's symphonies have stopped at nine?

The old brain answer is that Beethoven brain died when he was still sketching his tenth symphony. His brain was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Nature and nurture made the eggs and then in time nature killed the goose. We will have to make due with those nine grand eggs for the next thousand million years.

This view does not even hold up in meat terms.

Someday we could in theory go to Beethoven's grave in Vienna and scrape the DNA from his bones and decayed flesh. Or we could use the tufts of Beethoven's hair that have sold at auction. Then we could re-gene Beethoven clones in the spirit of cloning dinosaurs from far less complete DNA in the film Jurassic Park. We could train the little Beethoven on his old works. They cold play the works on the piano or synthesizer. Or they could conduct the works before fawning crowds. Rich philanthropists could commission new string quartets and concertos and perhaps engage the young brothers in competitions. Beethoven's works would only grow in number and perhaps grow in quality.

Many groups would of course protest this "genetic engineering." Some would try to pass laws to stop it. Others might try to save human race by bombing the dead man's tomb. These vocal efforts would supply a like demand from the press for quick displays of virtue. But there would be strong incentive for some form of the Beethovens to supply the worldwide demand for more Beethoven. The franchise would be too profitable not to exist. It would slake too many things.

There would be more Beethoven.

Smart systems do not need to scrape the old master's bones. They can watch and learn. They can train on art patterns. They can learn the key features of the art patterns and learn the rules that produce those features.

And smart systems can in principle learn whatever skills musicians acquire as music training reshapes their brains. Brain scans have shown that musicians have a larger left planum temporal region of their brain than non-msicians have. Playing a musical instrument also improves verbal memory.

Music makes a good test domain. Simple rules form tones out of frequencies and form chords out of tones. Composers work with broad rules of harmony to move from chord to chord. Many also use explicit or implicit rules of melody: If the melody line walks down in steps then it leaps up many tones. If the melody line leaps down twice in a row then it walks up three steps. Composers from Mozart to John Williams also group chords and themes in larger chunks or other characteristic patterns.

Music makes a good test domain for a deeper reason: It is the art form closest to math. The frequencies that make up tones have an exact math form. A tone is energy that vibrates in time. An octave above a tone doubles the tone's frequency and so vibrates twice as fast. An octave below halves the frequency and vibrates twice as slowly. The Greek explored the simplest tones in terms of ratios of whole numbers. Most Western music still depends on these simple tones and scales. Eastern and some modern music often use much more complex math schemes.

Music is the sound of math.

We could in theory write Beethoven's Ninth Synphony as one long differential equation. Then the music would unfold as a type of sonic wave in a sea of silence.

Music symbols have evolved as a crude shorthand for this math. The symbols compress a lot of information about time and energy. Music symbols allow one to compose and play music without math. Beethoven was so bad at math that he often had to add up long columns of numbers because he cold not multiply well.

The key problem with music symbols is learning to think in terms of them.

eXcerpted from: Fuzzy Future by fuzzy mathematician Bart Kosko :1999: