Spitballin' Over A New (To Me) Public Health Scare

What's that old saying that (maybe?) was concocted during the rise of totalitarian states? "That which is not forbidden is compulsory."? Or is it "If it's not compulsory, it's forbidden."? Kafka seems to have taken this notion a smidgen further in some of his immortal werks, giving us the impression that you can't even know what's forbidden or compulsory: you wait for the State to knock on your door and they tell you. That Kafka! Such an imagination!

For hypochondriacs like myself, reading about health issues - even and especially health issues of more urgent concern for others - over an extended time can lead me down a similar one-way, no-exit blind alley, and recently I ran up against a doozy.

Sitting Can Kill: It's Like Smoking
Yep. Plug in "sitting down and smoking health risk" into your favorite search engine and sit back...I mean stand up...and drink it all in. Sitting is a hot topic among some researchers, and sometimes I suspect they're having us on. Get this: according to one study, and another one, sitting for more than six hours a day - in any form (at work, watching TV, in a car, etc) - is linked to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity (surprise!), chronic back pain, muscle weakness, posture problems, and early death.

                         Who knew this poor dear pretty thing is slowly inching toward death,
                         AKA, The Big Dirt Nap? It's tough to look at. Avert your eyes! It's 
                         just so...sad!

Now, there are a lot of studies on sitting, and as I read them - all in the midst of a good, long day of sitting on my ass reading books and some articles on my MacBook - I tended to lose track of who did which study; the anxiety and absurdity of it all - that I have spent most of my life, slowly committing suicide all the while thinking I was enjoying a languid life of modernity...it was too much.

All those hours I've sat! I think it was the Institute for Medicine and Public Health, but the anxiety had built so much by then, my ears were ringing, I think I was having palpitations - and I was sitting while reading this schtuff! - The Institute said that, of 6300 people polled, most people spent around 56 hours a week sitting. Lemme see. There's seven days in a week. Seven goes into 56...carry the nine...damn I wish I was better at math...do you need to divide by pi? I forget...Let's just say we spend around eight (8) hours a day sitting, in one way or another. Let's face it: that's a lot of ass-time, folks.

Some of my favorite times of my life were spent sitting. I remember when I first saw Citizen Kane. I sat through it all, oblivious that I was killing myself. There was a time I attended a semi-formal sit-down dinner with many sexy, witty people. We were such fools! We were so totally unsuspecting!

American College of Cardiology: more bringers of bad news for those of us who sit. 54% of people who sit more than six hours a day are likely to die of a heart attack...within 15 years of the moment you read this, or something like that. If I seem something less than the Ideal Reporter here, it's 'cuz this whole sitting story has me dizzy, and I should go lie down, if only because it's better than sitting. I already spend 1/3 of my life there anyway (lying down).

Prof. Marc Hamilton, a physiologist at a biomedical research lab in Louisiana, wrote in the journal Diabetes in November, 2007, "The dire concern for the future may rest with growing numbers unaware of the potential insidious dangers of sitting too much." It's been almost five years since Prof. Hamilton wrote that, and even though I think of myself as someone who "reads everything," I'm only now becoming aware of the insidious dangers. How many more of us are sitting...as you read this!!!

                            Not a pic of me, but a graphic representation of the inner turmoil
                            I feel upon learning of the dangers of sitting, and I'm sitting now!

Another quote from Prof. Hamilton, gleaned from this ABC News article (with video) that shows a bunch of office worker-saps at their nadir - trying to get the corporate work done for Massa by standing at something called a "standing desk" and walking on treadmills - the Hamilton quote: "Smoking and sitting too much have some striking parallels. Decades ago smoking was so common that everyone perceived that...not only was it acceptable behavior, but that there was safety in numbers."

Not much more one can add to that!

What Happens When We Just Sit There
Well, we know that breathing - respiration - causes oxidation. We "rust" inside. No amount of antioxidants is gonna win that battle. Breathing is simply insidious, I tells ya. May as well be sitting while enjoying a few tall, cool, breaths. No one - except Ray Kurzweil - lives forever. I figure, what the hell? Enjoy ourselves while we're here. Have a smoke, maybe? A drink? What's your poison? Have a seat!

So the Dangers of Sitting: as soon as you sit your body goes into "storage mode." We inherited this from our ancestors, who had a tough time remembering when you asked them, "When was the last time you sat?" These ancestors - chances are very good you're related to 'em - were always out working all day, hunting game for the tribe, or farming. They had bodies like gods, or they were starving to death. Sometimes both within a period of 18 months. When they relaxed and pulled up a chair, their bodies really needed to go into storage mode. Ours? Not so much. Immediately, the leg muscles get their electrical current shut off. We go into hibernation mode, and, sitting, burn a whopping one (1) calorie per minute. I assume two or three per minute if you're sitting and fidgeting unnerved with worry because you just found out that sitting kills.

An enzyme that burns fat - lipase - drops in effectiveness by 90%. Pretty much as soon as you plop down and "take a load off." And we are a load, lemme tell you...But I'd rather not. Okay: One in three Unistatians is overweight, many of those ones obese, morbidly obese, and even Reality TV Show Obese.

What To Do?
It came quick. We never saw it coming, in a way. So maybe we're relatively blameless. For 99.99% of our time as hominids, Life Was Hard. Not much to sit for. Then, just a few seconds ago in the longue duree of Epochs, we got TV, La-Z-Boys, beanbag chairs, stereophonic sound, Internet, and scads of other things of comfort to muscles. Absence of toil. A surrealistically easy access to fat and sugar. And BLAMMO: we're a buncha lardasses, sitting and smoking, eating french fries while enjoying a marathon of Mad Men. I say we're blameless. Our paleolithic forebears would've done the same!

We just got capital ell Lucky in the History Sweepstakes.

Allow your imagination, distributed throughout your nervous system, based in your brain, housed in your cranium, bathed in warm, nutrient-rich cerebrospinal fluids and oxygenated blood...allow that imagination to relax unencumbered by basic biological needs. It's all there, on the tray in front of you. Just sit and read, or watch amazing shows. Enjoy the dip. Do you like cookies? Have one! Entertainment! Even our early paleo ancestors sought to modulate their inner states. Hence that Olde Time Religion: sex and drugs, drinking and dancing, drumming. Then, later: Gee Oh Dee...but we still had fun in our off-hours nonetheless.

                   This poor sap will never see it comin.' Will you tell him he's killing himself?
                   I sure won't. He'll find out soon enough. I wonder if he has Sitter's Insurance?

So, what are we to make of this new health scare? I feel we're doomed. Oh, sure, one study shows that people who sit for three hours or less per day lived an average of two years longer, but fer crissakes: how could all that gawdawful standing and pacing and running-around be worth the extra two years when there's such a kaleidoscope of joys to be had, sitting and eating and watching shows. And reading and talking and daydreaming, all while sitting. Do you daydream while lying down? I don't. If you do, fine. When I lie down, I tend to sleep, or doze, or do other things delightfully primal. But no daydreaming.

Hey, I love to walk and ride my bike. I do yoga and it's greatly rewarding. It feels good. But I also sit for at least six hours a day (not that I've begun counting), so I'm doomed. But I'll be going out in style. A heart-attack or cancer? Probably. But am I going to give up Turner Classic Movies? Sitting and reading James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Anton Wilson, science fiction, and phenomenological sociology? Sitting for hours engaged herbivorously with friends, quaffing ales and laffing? Nooo way! I'd rather be dead than give any of that up! Sitting is my birth-right! I'll sit until they carry me out - reclining - in a pine box. (Am I over-reacting?)

Ladies and germs, we start 'em off young, in high-chairs. They think it's "normal" by age seven! I guess what all this has been leading up to is: Good lawd! Who will tell the children?

We're all hopelessly addicted. These news stories about the dangers of sitting are too much, and I won't take them lying down. I'll take them square on the chin, as I sit here, grinning in the face of death, a bit of chocolate syrup having escaped the corner of my mouth, dribbling down into my beanbag. Take THAT!..."reality"?

As one who laffs in the face of Death, I humbly submit to my Dear Readers that I wrote this entire spew while SITTING! My extremities barely moved for about 75 minutes, the blood pooling up ominously near my mid-thorax, no electrical current flowing through any of the networks of nerves forming the off-ramps of my tibia. And you know what? I couldn't care less! (If you don't see another OG post for seven days or more, I've probably died of a heart attack worrying about sitting too much.) If I were not to be cremated (my wish), I would have these words put on my headstone, and the OG readers would know its deeper meaning:

                                    He Could Stand No More

Some Sources:
Is Sitting A Lethal Activity?
Sitting May Lower Life Expectancy, But It's So Comfortable
Is Sitting As Dangerous As Smoking?
The Dangers of Sitting At Work - And Standing

John B. Calhoun, Digital Media and Relative Sanity: Media Hygiene

Ironist-Ethologist John B. Calhoun: Some Background

Have you ever read science fiction writer John Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar? What about Tom Wolfe's non-fiction "New Journalism" book, The Pump House Gang? Ever seen a film called Soylent Green? (Of course you have! Enjoy your next meal...) Did you ever read (or read about) Dr. Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb? He appeared on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson in the 1960s, with his grim neo-Malthusian message about how overpopulation will cause famine, deplete our water resources, and we'd all die, doomed and sick, panicky and screamy and just tremendously bothered, sorta like a horror film. Sorta like Soylent Green. Ehrlich's appearance on the TV, with dire fnord messages made his book an instant best-seller.

(Hint to writers prospecting for writing gold: write a book on how we're all gonna die monstrously horrible deaths because we're not paying attention to something. Use a modicum of statistics, but use imagery like a novelist. You may be livin' on Easy Street before you know it! Then you and I and everyone we love will die in some catastrophe that had nothing to do with the one you warned about in your book. Your Thing was Bird Flu; what really wiped the humans out was an errant asteroid. It's a Win-Win for you [selling a lot of books] and the asteroid [gets to annihilate an advanced civilization, or pull off a "Milky Way Hit Job," as they say at Galactic Central]. You heard it here first!)

So yea: there was this ethologist named John B. Calhoun. Some of you Unistatian history buffs will know about John C. Calhoun. This middle initial B dude was quite different. He built what he called "utopias" for rodent populations, then sat back and watched them reproduce, interact, raise their young, etc, took feverish notes, tabulated his data, did it again and again. His work influenced all the books and the film (and many others, no doubt) I mentioned above. Some sources say Calhoun's term "behavioral sink" - which I think qualifies for what literary critic Harold Bloom called "strong poetry" - has become widely known, although in my experience with highly educated people, 2011-2012, few have heard the term. So I'll put some flesh on it for you, if you don't mind.

                       habit-trail for rodents: sorta between our City and a rabbit's warren?

The people most likely to know "behavioral sink" would be urban sociologists. What Calhoun found was that, when a utopian spatial set-up for rodents - everything they need to be "happy" and which he actually, with a wry smile, labeled as "heaven" - reaches a population density of X, things start to go rapidly downhill toward dystopia. Social norms break down, rodents get aggressive, narcissistic, they die earlier, they fail to pass their genes on, and when they do pass their genes on, they're bad parents. They also have weird sex and abuse drugs and eat too much. Some theorists have said that it's not so much the geometrical space - now cramped to the Xth point - which is bringing on this behavior, but it's the overabundance of social interactions that drives them nuts.

(Remember: we ARE talking about rodents, as studied in a non-Skinnerian way: a set-up that initially, rodents would prefer, in an environment as close to what they'd make themselves, in as natural a setting as possible. And FULL DISCLOSURE: I happen to enjoy some drugs and alcohol and weird sex, and again, I'm not even on Facebook or Twitter and I'm not a rodent to boot. I DO see short attention spans and very deep shallows in more places now, tons of stupidity among people with historically unparalleled access to Information, and lots of indifference to suffering, but am still not totally sold on Calhoun's rodents-to-humans idea. However, he did think that too many/a high frequency of bad social interactions drive things down the Sink, whereas his more famous followers - like Ehrlich - thought population density depleted water and food, and that will do us in. Calhoun thought the social stuff was enough to send us over. I worry that he's more accurate than I'd thought. Moreover, subsequent urban theorists have had some problems with Calhoun's findings, while still thinking he was on to something. Let this all-too-typical parenthetical by the OG constitute an "interlude"? Very well then. Let's move on.) 

Try and tell me you weren't thinking of humans there. No big deal: that's what we do. We try to relate almost everything to how it might bear on our lives. Any questions so far?

Yea, the list of items Calhoun saw among rodents when "utopia" devolved into a "behavioral sink" seems a might close to home, eh? I forgot to mention the rodents, when socially crowded beyond equilibrium, got stressed-out physical illnesses, developed psychosomatic symptoms, and mental illness.

John B. Calhoun was once a big deal, but the vagaries of time and the hyper-mega-turbulent acceleration of ideas, knowledge, and media noise seems to have crowded him out since his heyday: circa 1948-72. Those dystopian books and movies neglected to emphasize an aspect of Calhoun's thought: he was an Ironist among social scientists. He was dismayed that those who were influenced by him were so starkly pessimistic. Because Calhoun wasn't. He believed in the creative ability of humans (let's face it: you study rodents like crazy to learn about humans) to solve their Big Problems. And he thought we needed to seek out what he called "creative deviants" in order to, among other solution-oriented ideas, COLONIZE SPACE!

Here's a delightfully well-written article by Will Wiles on Calhoun.

Gadget Addiction and Social Interaction Quality

We live in a world in which some people have the job description of "Information Management Expert." Increasingly, in meeting harried and frazzled clients, they caution that drinking digital information from a fire hydrant is bound to cause the sanest, best-grounded of us to make our brains feel like expired tapioca, our bodies like losing fighters in a Bruce Lee flick, our affects and outlooks on the world like someone being told their dog just died. Must it be like this? Apparently, yes.

Now: I know YOU have kept things in balance. You are "on the ball," but you know others who fit the description. And most importantly: you care. That's why you're here, reading this. It's just the Big-Hearted Person you are. You can't help it. Born that way. It's simply the way you roll. Ya gotsa do what ya gotsa do. Hey, I hear ya. How does anyone ever get by without Us around? Am I right? <cough>

In earlier blogspewage I'd written about the obesity epidemic. Part of the deeply structured reason we have the Problem is because, historically, sugar and fat are cheap and bountiful, whereas for 99% of our time as hominids, that stuff - which we need to stay sharp - was a total SCORE, and everyone in the wandering extended-family band society rejoiced: a bit of honey! Some meat from a large mammal! Now you drive thru Burger King. Same with information. Access to social Others is a bit complex.

In this article about whether Internet Compulsion Disorder should be included in the upcoming DSM-V, we see the classic instant gratification via dopamine-circuit-buzz dealio described. 

Here's an article that compares the Roman writer Petronius (he of the incredible "Dinner With Trimalchio") and surfeit of food, to our surfeit of information. Note the grad student who talks about life online as feeling less like a thinking, feeling human and more like a rat who must press the button for another pellet, forgetting why...Gluttony Going Viral indeed.

Oh, my. It would be easy to link another 400 articles here, related to digital media and addiction. Hey, I'm not immune. Maybe it's the deeper reason why - other than the surface reasons I tell myself - that I'm not on Facebook or Twitter? A social connection, however mediated, and depending on the individual's eccentric nervous system and his/her - to borrow from William S. Burroughs - algebra of need - gives a dopamine reward nod. And for very many of us, this is enough. But then look at how Calhoun's rodents reacted when their social space was crowded. This brings me to a related idea, Neophilia and Neophobia.

                                    Winifred Gallagher, behavioral science writer

Leary and Calhoun

Before personal computers and cell phones - much less Facebook, Twitter, iPads, Siri, X-Box, et.al - Timothy Leary was a technophilic neophile, who saw the pending Internet as a boon (and...it has been, right?) and would be the new LSD. I think he turned out to be basically right. We would live in a "virtual reality" and it would be so interesting that we wouldn't need psychedelic drugs: the new media would be psychedelic itself. And Jaron Lanier - for my money, one of the most interesting geniuses on the planet - pioneered virtual reality. And a young person very much influenced by Leary, Douglas Rushkoff, declared that the counterculture had "won;" the ideas ushered in by Baby Boomers had become mainstream.

And yet, in Winifred Gallagher's terrific 2011 book on neophilia and its discontents, New: Understanding Our Need For Novelty and Change, she cites the other side of Leary's neophilic enthusiasm by invoking...John B. Calhoun, citing his idea of the "behavioral sink" and that, yes, we have increased creativity, communication, ideas and access to information, but what has/will also accelerate is the number of social roles we'll be forced to play, and that things are moving too fast for us to learn how to get a handle. We'll have more competition, negative encounters, and a general dissatisfaction with daily life. Gallagher quotes Calhoun, "Everything is coming at us fast and faster, yet we can't even learn from our experiences unless we have refractory periods to digest them in." (p.169)

This "refractory period" is part of the OG's raison d'etre. I baldly state: we need more quiet, non-electronically-mediated face-to-face communication/interaction with others and we need more time alone in our interiorities, reading stimulating and challenging books. So by my own logic, stop reading my blog! (Waitaminnit: that can't be right...) All the gadgets are fine, but many of us are getting carried away. (Hey you! Are you reading this on a tablet computer while texting someone on the subway? Pay attention! You don't want to miss your stop like you did that one time.) I also think Douglas Rushkoff is right: just as in the Axial Age the very few rabbis or monks read the books to the rest of us, and a very few wrote the books while the rest of us read them post-Gutenberg, we need to learn to program like the programmers and not just consume their programmed gadgets, which have inherent biases in them. I have not taken up programming. The weak version of Rushkoff's advocation of being a "programmer" is to actively seek out and expose the biases of our gadgets. This I enjoy doing.

I am NOT against all our wonderful gadgets. I am for much more thinking about what makes us happy, though. I despise the Bewildered Herd. Making the decision to question how we're being programmed may be a crucial one. Things seem to be accelerating logarithmically, and no one is in control; it cannot be stopped. But we can modify our choices. Am I preaching to the choir here? I suspect so...

M.I.T. scholar of social media and technology in general and internet in particular and how it affects us, Sherry Turkle, wrote books on the exciting possibilities for individuality and the play with identity. That was ten years ago. Now, her latest book is Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. The title gives the gist.

Jaron Lanier's 2009 book You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto, is cited as "essential reading" in Douglas Rushkoff's 2010 book Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands For A Digital Age. I consider Rushkoff's to be THE manifesto for those of you worried about our digital algorithms increasingly programming us, and how to wrest something human back for ourselves, for our sanity. Then read Lanier. Then read their influences and the books in their bibliographies. 

I wonder where Uncle Tim would be on this issue if he were here today?

Or: just say fuck it, and go write on your Facebook wall about LAME blogging jeremiahs and how BORING they are.

My adrenal glands are faxing to my liver and heart, my hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis has gone into fight/flight/feed/fuck mode, so I will bid my Dear Readers adieu for today.

Here's Sherry Turkle for 6 minutes and 17 seconds (not that you "have" that much time!), on Facebook and privacy and cell phones at the dinner table and other things:

Trust Me On This: Deception, Biology, Politics

"Reality is the temporary resultant of the struggle between rival gangs of programmers." - Robert Anton Wilson

When I was 16 I lived with my father just outside of Denver, and he and his childhood friend and drinking buddy got into watching pro-wrestling on TV. The absurdity and theatricality of it all made them howl with laughter. Later I attended a few live shows in downtown Denver, and was struck by the idea that a few people sitting near us seemed to believe the "matches" were on the up-and-up.

Later I read then-structuralist Roland Barthes's Mythologies (I should say I tried to read Barthes, but the  epistemological [semiotic] assumptions - derived from Ferdinand de Saussure, who I had not read at the time - rendered much of Barthes's work opaque to me) and this 1957 book had an essay on pro wrestling, which I'll link to here, if anyone is interested. Barthes contrasted boxing - in which the thrust is to see who wins, with wrestling, which was a sum of episodes, the point not being about winning, but the sheer spectacle of the thing, which with its pantomimes of characters Good and Evil, had an underlying message of playing on the ideas in mass culture about Justice.

Later I read much of Murray Edelman's work in sociology. He had a lot to say about politics as a spectacle. (Here's the NYT obit for Edelman, which gives a thumbnail of his concerns.) Edelman seems a quite underrated figure; he was writing about things that Jean Baudrillard took up much later, and, while in academic language, Edelman was still quite readable. Some have called him the first postmodern political scientist. Politics? It's a show, sorta like wrestling. Edelman says that people fall into the drama, play parts, internalize the totality of the show, and increasingly take it seriously. What? I'll try to elaborate.

Look at the foggy, mystifying language surrounding politics and its main delivery system, the mass media. Look at how many people seem to not question the semantic content of the jargon and glossary in political-speak. (Because they don't know how? Or they'd rather stick with the "fun" of playing inside the melodrama of politics? I don't know. Edelman seemed to wonder too.) Political institutions are symbolic acts that must be interpreted within some schema or another. But the institutions and acts tend to serve to more or less keep things the same rather than change things. Oh, changes do occur. If they didn't, the Show would get stale, and the players wouldn't be able to take it seriously anymore. It must perpetually seem vital to the players within. Voters who don't show up or who don't follow politics? They're onto the game and don't want to play. They see the game as bullshit. I think Edelman is right here to an extent, but I also think there are people who would rather not know anything; they don't see into/through Edelman's elaborate socio-political spectacle because they never had a serious look in the first place.

Rituals in politics are elaborate. The quantity of them is large and they are repeated so often that people cannot "see" the rituals as rituals. Rather, something solemn about Justice and Freedom and Democracy and The Good and Fairness and Meritocracy is being upheld. (Sorta like...wrestling?) The rituals of politics invest in the authority of the main players on the stage, and we are meant to hold the whole show in awe.

Now, irony and provocation being two of my favorite tropes from intellectuals, I appreciate Edelman's ouvre and I think quite a lot of it is accurate and generally edifying discourse, but, like most of those thinkers we call postmodern, there tends to be an inexorable taking of the thesis to extremes, so that something begins to waft up...what's that? Do you smell it? You do? Then it's not just me, thankgod. Yea, but what is it? Does it smell like burning garbage to you? No? Like unpleasant incense? Really? Oh! Now I know what it is! We've been reading postmodernists, and we smell a reductio ad absurdum. Whew! I was about to get the fire extinguisher.

What I like about Edelman's work is the Things Are Not As They Seem-ishness of it all; I also like that he concentrated on language and semiotic/symbolic analysis, which fits into my main model and along with valued thinkers like Robert Anton Wilson, Alfred Korzybski, Marshall McLuhan, George Lakoff, and even, in a way, Noam Chomsky. Also, there's a thread running from Giambattista Vico's 2000+ years of class warfare of the Rich vs. Everyone Else that Edelman can fit with.

What I don't like about the over-baked aspect of Edelman is the lingering hopelessness, and there's quite a clash between an idea that I think holds much sway - that if you don't "do" politics it'll be done to you - and the sort of paralysis via analysis I get from Edelman, which leads to passivity. He has made me question my role in the political Show, and now I'm far more ironic about it all, but I'm verging away. Back to deception.

In the blogpost from four days ago, I briefly discussed Edward O. Wilson. Another giant in Sociobiology, who was there at creation, was Robert Trivers. In the bibliography for Wilson's revolutionary 1975 work, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis a handful of Trivers's papers are listed. Trivers has been perhaps most noted for being a sort of hardcore exponent of Dawkins's kin selection idea, but with particular emphasis on reciprocal altruism (shorthand: "you scratch my back and then I'll scratch yours" in Biology). When you get into reciprocal altruism, you also allow for "deals" between non-kin. It gets very abstruse when you start to run with it, especially when you're trying to keep in mind what Hamilton wrote, how EOW took it compared to Dawkins, how they sought to create new ideas to separate themselves as the first-line sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists, etc.

As Trivers elaborated on reciprocal altruism, he began to concentrate on something that seemed to spin out of it: deception. And now, after a few decades of writing and thinking about it, he's maybe the foremost thinker on deception from biology on up to humans.

Trivers, a manic-depressive genius since childhood, a longtime pot smoker, classic anti-authoritarian, who, in May of 1979 joined the Black Panthers and, according to David Jay Brown, Trivers's colleague Burney Le Boeuf, called Trivers "the blackest white man I know." (Mavericks of the Mind, p.54)

In John Horgan's review of Trivers's book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, we see this passage:

Trivers calls deceit a “deep feature” of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling “bait” in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune system. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.

So how much of this stuff goes on, in all the domains of our lives? It seems easy to fall into paranoia when contemplating The Spectacle, language as virus, conspiracy, double and triple crosses and agents, counterfeiting, prevarication (the very word seems to be hiding something, no?), "spin," fakes, secrecy, claims of "transparency," the information deformations that occur within status hierarchies, advertising and PR and hypnotic techniques, etc. Let us consider this list as The Shadow of ourselves, vis a vis what we'd prefer to think about "reality": that most of us care about the Truth and act trustworthy, because we want others to act honestly with us. The Shadow would be all that which is...less than trustworthy? 

The vast data from the animal kingdom shows how common camouflage is, how many animals have developed a way to APPEAR far more menacing than they are, on and on. Is deceit built into the fabric of all biology? It appears so. But then so is the attempt to detect...

It's common to read about deceit and lying and note the linkage between our very complex intra-species signaling system (i.e, human language) and how it's exquisitely available for the purposes of deceit. When ants communicate via very elaborate pheromones, the lying has its limits, it seems, at least compared to our signaling systems.

What I also note is the biological metaphor often used in writings on deceit: that lying is "parasitic" upon the truth, and that too many people engaged in deceit tend to ruin a system. From The Oxford Companion To The Mind:

Conveying useful information from one person to another about 'facts' is the essence of this extraordinary human invention. Lying is therefore parasitic upon general truthfulness, and if its incidence becomes too high the system becomes useless.

So here we have a reason for truthfulness that's not lame-brained ("The Bible sez..." or "good people tell the truth!", etc): the system is preserved. But then we must ask, "Is the system worth preserving?" Since Ronald Reagan, people running for office as Republicans have made it part of their platform that government doesn't work and should get out of the way of "people's lives," by which they mean corporations should be able to do whatever they want. Convince people you want a job that you don't think should even exist? What "system" do they favor? And do they really believe what they say or are they being deceptive? Hoo-boy...

The "parasite" metaphor brings us back to biology, but other writers have borrowed a metaphor from physics: that deception is like entropy. But I'd rather return to wrestling.

                                 Eric Weinstein, popularizer of the kayfabe idea
                                                  for thinkers caught in "ordinary" economic reality

Eric Weinstein, relating his ideas about information and deceit in economic systems, has drawn on the obscure wrestling term kayfabe. In an article in This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (edited by John Brockman), Weinstein cites recent work in evolutionary biology by the aforementioned Trivers and Richard Alexander that says deceit plays a bigger role than accurate information transfer in systems with selective pressures. "Yet most of our thinking treats deception as a perturbation in the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory that uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information." (p.321) 

Weinstein says that in the early years of wrestling, matches went on for too long, guys got hurt, the matches became boring, and eventually the "sport" became a ritualized thing, "negotiated, choreographed and rehearsed," its complex dramaturgical "rules" closed to outsiders. This seems something like our financial system now, "an altered reality of layered falsehoods, in which nothing can be assumed to be as it appears." Wait, there's more.

Why didn't the "freshwater" Chicago school of economists foresee the 2008 economic meltdown? Why didn't the "saltwater" Ivy Leaguers catch it? Probably because they're caught in the kayfabe: there is a quiet agreement to not let the outsiders know the game is fixed. Note: neither group suffered for not knowing. And still they are "experts." 

Weinstein says that, if you're wondering why there are no investigative journalists doing the real work they used to do and seemingly "bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts," we'd understand this better if we knew what a kayfabe is. And it comes out of the traveling-carnival of hokum that is professional wrestling. 

"What makes kayfabe remarkable is that it provides the most complete example of the process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery." (p.322) Weinstein sees kaybrification as an important feature of love, science, war, finance and politics. And we would all be better served to know this term and its mechanisms. The truly horrifying thing about kayfabe, as I read Weinstein about it, is that it shows the 1%/Ruling Class and its managers how many layers of disbelief the human mind is capable of suspending before fantasy melds seamlessly with reality.

Add to that: wrestling eventually became so over the top that it had to admit it was fake...but the public loved it anyway, or as Weinstein puts it, "Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience." (p.323) (an online link to the Weinstein article I'm drawing from is HERE.)

Going back to my idea about secrecy and spin and deceit and advertising and other such terms as part of the Shadow of truth, and given the kayfabe and Trivers's arguments (even bacteria and viruses employ subterfuge to sneak past your immune system)...to quote a famous painter: Who are we? Where are we going?

My favorite philosopher, Robert Anton Wilson, was not an academic and more like a great generalist-thinker. He gave an interview 36 years ago and here's one Q and his A that, I think, pertains to these topics, and provides a slight slant that allows us more perspective:

Science Fiction Review: How serious are you about the Illuminati and conspiracies in general?

Robert Anton Wilson: Being serious is not one of my vices. I will venture, however, that the idea that there are no conspiracies has been popularized by historians working for universities and institutes funded by the principle conspirators of our time: the Rockefeller-Morgan banking interests, the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, the Trilateral Commission. This is not astonishing or depressing. Conspiracy is standard mammalian politics for reasons to be found in ethology and Von Neumann's and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Vertebrate competition depends on knowing more than the opposition, monopolizing information along with territory, hoarding signals. Entropy, in a word. Science is based on transmitting the signal accurately, accelerating the process of information transfer. Negentropy. The final war may be between Pavlov's Dog and Schrodinger's Cat.

However, I am profoundly suspicious about all conspiracy theories, including my own, because conspiracy buffs tend to forget the difference between a plausible argument and a real proof. Or between a legal proof, a proof in the behavioral sciences, a proof in physics, a mathematical or logical proof, or a parody of any of the above. My advice to all is Buddha's last words, "Doubt, and find your own light." Or, as Crowley wrote, "I slept with Faith and found her a corpse in the morning. I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning." Doubt suffereth long, but is kind; doubt covereth a multitude of sins; doubt puffeth not itself up into dogma. For now abideth doubt, hope, and charity, these three: and the greatest of these is doubt. With doubt all things are possible. Every other entity in the universe, including Goddess Herself, may be trying to con you. It's all Show Biz. Did you know that Billy Graham is a Bull Dyke in drag?
-The Illuminati Papers, p.47

Question from the OG: Where is The Shadow? 

Here's 7 minutes of Chomsky and Trivers, riffing on the topic of deception:

Edward O. Wilson and the Humanities

The following is part of a 1965 Unistat Congressional statute, trying to define the Humanities, and served as part of the context within which the NEA and NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) were founded:

The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.

82 year old Edward O. Wilson has recently released The Social Conquest of Earth, and according to statements Wilson's made in recent articles, it may be his last hardcore, serious sociobiological work. In this latest book, Wilson builds on ideas first articulated deeply in his book Consilience, which sought to ground all human knowledge in the broad discipline of Biology.

The Arts and Biology? Oh hell yea: Wilson has a thick argument for how all the stuff in the above quoted paragraph on the Humanities cannot be known unless we account for the evolution of cognition and the human being's sensory modalities compared to other animals (we are retarded in taste and smell, compared to other animals: what we do well is visual and the auditory), how these cognitive processes are bound in our nervous systems, the heredity that gives rise to our human-ness, and all of the humanities' prehistoric origins.

Having spent a good while perusing Wilson's new book, I'm struck by two things: 1.) He still writes very elegantly for an 82 year old; for a man whose been in the forefront of at least three "revolutionary" movements in Biology, and has articulated very abstruse ideas based in molecular biology and statistical modeling, this man still writes almost poetically at times. And 2.) Wilson, at 82, has ignited yet another scientific firestorm over a basic idea in evolution. This one's such a big deal that at least 137 of his colleagues signed a "we object" statement about Wilson's latest bombshell.

And it's quite the rancorous debate among intellectuals. If you're like me and instead of watching boxing you'd prefer to watch PhDs and public intellectuals and other eminent thinkers whip their symbolic feces at each other, then you really can't top this latest one, with sweet old "EOW" (as I abbrev. him) in the center of it all, getting his colleagues all exercised over...Group Selection. (It's usually not capitalized, but the fulsome vitriol surrounding the idea seemed to warrant caps.)

Aye, EOW says Dawkins's "selfish gene" idea was way overblown. In the more sober works, Dawkins's idea was known as "kin selection." You take care of your own, because their genes/replicators will have a better chance of flourishing in the next generation. Even if you don't have offspring of your own, you aid (in various ways) your nephews, nieces, cousins, siblings. Why? Because they basically carry "your" genes. The further away from your gene pool, the less you find you care about Others. This has given rise to a very "fit" (in a broad sense) gene pool. (Don't laff!) Kinship selection is enough to account for cooperative complex behavior. And, as space/time and light/particle can't be separated, altruism is really the obverse of the coin labeled "selfishness." So say the kin selectionists.

                         Wilson is said to have collected a million different ant species?

I loved reading Dawkins's great book (I consider this The Selfish Gene), because it was so intellectually thrilling. But EOW - perhaps the eminence gris among all evolutionary biologists - now says, basically, kin selection has been given far too much its due.

[Caveat: Although a generalist, I know enough about the politics of Biology to know that, even with my honest attempt to define kinship selection very briefly above, there are probably readers who want to wring my neck for simplifying it too much. Or, I guess, "getting it wrong." In the comments, please!]

Darwin himself - for EOW the greatest thinker ever - thought quite a lot about individual selection and didn't know anything about genes, but seemed to intuit them.

So, we've got individual selection, kin selection (which, from W.D. Hamilton's 1964 paper on, has been the foremost exponent for the "theory of everything" in Biology...until EOW's mathematical colleagues found basic errors in Hamilton's math), and group selection, which, until now, or until EOW achieves his paradigm shift, is a "woo-woo" idea not taken seriously, or if proffered by a Credentialed One, has been attacked as Heresy.

There's a lot to discuss for the generalist, but EOW thinks the time has come to explain the Big Q: how did humans and ants and other social creatures conquer? It's because they are "eusocial." Yes, but how? Well, there must be "trigger" genes that give rise to a species' complex forms of cooperating beyond kin or individual selection.

Harnessing molecular genetics, anthropology, ecology, and cognitive science, EOW says when termites or wasps or humans or (of course!) ants or snapping shrimp or a certain kind of mole rat develop a "defensible nest" they have passed through an evolutionary bottleneck and the genes that encourage cooperation and division of labor - even if individuals are not related! - has made them "realize" that a defensible nest is an advantage that accrues to all...and I'm still trying to understand the argument for group selection, but it's fascinating, even thrilling intellectual thought-stuff!

But what a magnificent intellectual Edward O. Wilson is, has been, and always will be. Even if his Group Selection gets shot down in 30 years, he's certainly caused his most eminent colleagues to think, not to mention your humble yet somehow overweening correspondent.

Listen to EOW on NPR's Talk of the Nation from a few months ago, on this very subject.

Poetry, Conversation, Translations, In-Form-a-Tion, Etc

In an interview about his book of poetry titled Uselysses, Noel Black recalls a time with Harry Mathews at a San Francisco art school, and I like this passage because it sheds light on my two previous blogspews on "translation":


Harry Mathews came and gave a lecture to a class I took at New College, and I had this amazing conversation with him afterward about the “I” and “self” and that whole labyrinth. I’ll never forget what he said to me because it was so freeing. I’m paraphrasing here, but what he said is that Americans, because most of us only speak one language, have a tendency to believe that language comes from within us out of some sort of linguistic font of self, which leads us to this “I” to which we cling. For a lot of Europeans, on the other hand, many of whom are polyglots, language is something external that’s not only mutable, but easily rearranged and manipulated and only loosely regarded as any part of a fixed self. By that measure, he had concluded after many years of living abroad, that you could only know yourself with the shared language you were using with another person, i.e. you are creating a different self with each different person you’re with in whatever common language you happen to share. I loved that idea so much because what it says is that the I is always in relationship, that it’s a conversation, a community.
-gleaned from this Levi Rubeck interview with Noel Black

It seems what Noel Black is getting from Harry Mathews here supports what Lera Boroditsky has been arguing in her academic career. But then, beware: this is me, today, interpreting/translating/fumbling to explain to my Dear Reader what I think is going on. Lots may get lost in my grapples with Boroditsky's  thought, with what Noel Black seeks to remember ("I'm paraphrasing here...") from his time with Harry Mathews, what Mathews thinks "makes sense" vis a vis European polyglots and language and the "self" versus what monolingual Unistatians think about where language comes from, how it relates to a "self," etc, etc, etc.

I'll return to Noel Black's poetry later, but want to try and haul in some things about interpretations, translations, and Information Theory.

                                     How ordinary my having a blog seems!

One of my own spiritual fathers, Robert Anton Wilson, often wrote and talked about the acceleration of information. In his cosmic intellectual goofy-sufi-like humor, he eventually dubbed this mathematical doubling the Jumping Jesus Phenomenon, and if you don't know what it is, the first paragraph in this link gives the inkling. RAW took this stuff seriously, if not siriusly, and he actually has quite a lot to say about the statistical mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, and the social, personal, political and philosophical implications of it. Terence McKenna had some similar things to say on this topic, although they seemed more teleological and metaphysical in bend than RAW's. If one looks at Ray Kurzweil's work, particularly the fat The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil seems to have picked up from RAW and his influences on information doubling and logarithmically taken it to another level, but that's for The Reader (and future history?) to decide.

There's also quite an abundant literature that seeks to determine boundary distinctions and interactions between types of knowledge, and, more fascinating to me, the differences between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. I have found nothing but vast abstruse disagreements here. Which is fine with me.

RAW, in his widely dispersed writings on information doubling in history, touched on the qualitative aspects therein, but any reader can easily miss that in favor of what I see as - wild and ironically - a Platonified view of how information works. If Claude Shannon's and Warren Weaver's and John Von Neumann's and Norbert Wiener's and Gregory Bateson's and...all  the others mentioned in James Gleick's marvelous 2011 book The Information - the information that can be quantified and more or less given a relatively thick description as to how it worked within a scientific/technological sense - THAT information...then yes. Maybe. But I wonder about our brain's unrealistic expectations of information transformation, mostly because I played, at childhood birthday parties, the game of Telephone...and never stopped thinking about what it meant. (Huh? WTF is the OG onto now?)

I remember how funny it was that, what went into the first kid's ear turned out, after the 16th iteration, to be shorter and weirder and having almost no resemblance to the original. Why was it funny?

Well, humor may be a way to let our guards down and admit we're not perfect. We seem not even close to perfect. And that it's okay, because being human? We're far too complex to get strings of information exactly right, using our wetware. (I didn't think this stuff about Telephone until the last couple years.) Getting data and memory 100% is not something we do well in these embodied minds of aggregated replicators and evolutionarily legacy-ed mind-software. But what about other implications?

One of the "reasons" the market tanked in 2008 was "we" ("quants" and others) had written algorithms into very posh hi-powered computers that took in data about either buying or selling, and in microseconds, made "decisions" on whether it was buy or sell time. And the data/information the algorithms were working on was extensive. But it was based on earlier data strings that supposedly represented something in the Actual World that you or I would care about...like buying a house. But again: this data string was based on decisions made in microseconds from other data strings. It was like Telephone, only these algorithms were making buy/sell decisions without any human minds interposed. And yet, all you needed was one bit of some "interpretation" (can robotic algorithms, no matter how complex, be said to interpret?) that the algorithm "thought" was okay...to be wrong in some way. And then we had a sort of Telephone-like iteration which resulted in something that was not given to the same mirth of a children's backyard party and something rather like a Worldwide Economic Depression. Oh, humans, talking amongst themselves, playing by what the "rules" allowed, made bad decisions too...

Were there unethical, even criminally negligent decisions made? You betta you ass there were.

                            There's a LOT missing in this basic schematic, no?

Why do we allow complex mathematical formulae, worked over at blinding speeds by hi-powered computers, to make "decisions" about what are basically human values? Because it seemed/seems like a cost-efficient or "neat-o" idea? I read about this stuff and the FOLLY angers me. (Hence the Robin Hood Tax seems like a very sound idea to me.)

Now, I'm writing this based on my best understanding as a Generalist, some dude reading books, and maybe I've missed something? Maybe the authors I've read missed something? Maybe I misread some tiny bit based on some tiny bit someone, who I trust KNOWS something...errr...missed? Hey, that's life.

It's not at all convincing or clear to me that higher levels of abstracted information make for something healthier, to borrow from a hippie slogan, "for children and other living things." Too many artifacts and errors creep. We must always have something like an attempt of wise humans refereeing. It seems far too many Geeks and policy makers do not get this.

And that's my point. Information transfer from brain to brain or from algorithm to algorithm of from algorithm to brain is not a Platonically perfect dealio, ladies and germs. And the repercussions are not academic; they come packing a world of hurt at times.

Back to Black...

Noel Black's Uselysses
Gawd, what a delightful, funny book of poetry. This alone should be enough to pique you, but maybe my taste is not close enough to yours, so I'll say a few things about why I like the book.

Black remembered someone calling themselves a "depressionist," and, being an artist in today's Unistat? It's easy to feel useless, no matter how much effort and soul-bearing you do. For a punster  - who prefers portmanteau to pun, as Joyce preferred the portmanteau as stylistic device -"uselysses" can describe the interior feelings of many an artist in this day and age.

He's steeped in the poetic tradition, but feels its weight, Whitman appearing at odd times throughout the book, laying his body down along the entire stretch of road one might drive from New York to San Francisco. And, steeped in the art school/academic and especially San Francisco poetry scene (where certain, say LANGUAGE poets live in their own poetic fiefdoms while poets of Other Schools theirs), he had to leave, go back to Colorado Springs, where he was brought up by a gay father who died of AIDS, and a lesbian mother. He goes back to evangelical right wing hotbed Colorado Springs to reclaim it, in some Whitmanian sense, for Art.

Another of the younger poets who draw upon and allude to TV and pop culture (almost) as much as anyone, Black's surrealistic sensibility and sense of the cosmic absurdity of his own fleeting thoughts in the mundane get worked over into something truly artistic and human and hilarious. Aside from a very witty section of short poems all based on how some famous poets died, he's perhaps best-known as the author of a chapbook (contained in Uselysses) called Moby K. Dick, (an odd concatenation of Philip K Dick's book Ubik and Melville's masterwork) in which he takes books he's loved and combines their deeper structures, has a sort of ethereal chat between both books (or book/another author), and neither book comes to the reader in bold relief; rather, the odd intertwining essence-ish-ness of each book speaks in the short poems, variously titled "Lord Jim Thompson," "Paul Austerlitz," "Watchmen in the Rye," "Huckleberry Finnegans Wake," "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold Blood," you get the idea.

If you're a Joycean looking for something in, say, "Huckleberry Finnegans Wake" you're unlikely to come away with anything, save for the idea that a poet drew, in some odd way, on Finnegans Wake. Black's purpose here seems closer to William Burroughs's use of the cut-up method, only Black is cutting up general feelings - interpretations - in his mind about the two books, how his sense of himself was subsumed while reading those books, and how his made-meanings of texts dreamily interposed in the overnight "dialogue" between both books as they sat on his shelf.

But this is Black at his artsiest. The Noel Black I had most fun with was the one who wanted to write poetry again because it was FUN, and he had calendrical time and geographic distance from two places he'd tried to make it, San Francisco and Brooklyn. Colorado Springs seems to suit him fine. Here are some lines from a poem that, to me, depict my favorite aspects of Black. From "Poem of Carl Sagan":

It must be confusing for Christians
who arrive in Heaven
to find Carl Sagan seated at the right hand of God,
which is a gigantic, glowing vagina
floating above the Captain's chair
on the deck of the Starship Enterprise.


"It's interesting - and I never imagined this - "
says Carl, using the weirding voices of Science to soothe the recently dead,
"that the Universe is merely an emanation of the brain,
which as we look into it, tricks us into believing 
that we are gazing into an unfathomable outward expanse
that is but the unknowable inner reaches of our own minds. Now,
who would like to be reborn?"


Vaginal wormholes, C. S. Lewis perturbed by it all, Star Trek's spaceship as the Holy Ghost, telling someone they'll understand heaven a lot better if they re-read Dune, then here's Carl Sagan again:

Then he unzips his burnt-orange windbreaker
and a laser of love shoots out
from the spectral Starfleet logo upon his heart,
zapping them all into the raptures of wordless knowledge
as God folds their souls into dream.


If this all sounds vaguely like you and your funny friends, high in college, your parents split up or dead, listening to the Scorpions in someone's mom's basement in Unistatian suburbia in 1981, then yea: you probably have something in common with Noel Black. And you can either confirm or deny this by reading this book, but ESPECIALLY the last part, a rather long poem called "Prophecies For The Past," which was, to me, one of the most moving poems I've read by a currently living poet. I found Uselysses in my public library, but will buy the book if only for "Prophecies For The Past," which articulates a living reality for so very many of us, growing up in broken homes in cultural poverty pockets or suburban white America, last 30 years of the 20th century.

Noel Black, family man, seems wonderfully jester-wise and nutty, wears his resilient heart on his sleeve, which I picture as paisley right now, for some reason. I loved this book.

More On Translations (NOT: "Moron Translations")

Searle and Future AI Robots

In the previous installment here, I briefly alluded to Prof. John Searle, and it was because his philosophical invention of the "Chinese Room" still is, for me, a Thought Experiment that I've found exceedingly stimulating. As I see it, as of today's date, I think he makes a strong case for the impossibility, in principle, of the Machine Language translation to have anything like a human mind behind it: it only executes algorithms; no matter how accurate and seemingly human-like its responses, it doesn't truly understand.

                             One of my favorite living academics, John Searle of Berkeley

                             Photo from, as much as I can glean, 2005, Mexico. Not sure

                             who took it, but I'd guess Dagmar?

Nevertheless, I'm also drawn toward the eerie converse: maybe all we're doing is executing mental logical algorithm-like strings of thought-stuff when we're operating, on all our levels of Being. One strand of thought about AI that extrapolates to some future Singularity sees the AI robots (probably fairly attractive and somewhat "graceful" in bodily movement?) as very adept intelligences in some ways that are far beyond ours, while we Humans are still able to do things (with humor, irony, and empathy?) that the AIs don't - and won't - quite get. Intuitively, this line of prognostication makes sense to me.

So, the experiment I ran using Michael Chabon's line from a recent essay in the New York Times on Finnegans Wake and H.P. Lovecraft was AI "machine mind" attempting a series of translations. I wonder what it would look like if a series of humans who were skilled enough to translate English to Chinese, one who could translate Chinese to Arabic, another person Arabic to Spanish, one rare wily one for the Spanish to Ukrainian, a Ukrainian to Dutch person, and then someone taking from that entire series of translations, with Dutch in hand, translating it back to English? At present I lack the funding, the research grant, or lots of Dad's money to conduct such a whimsical experiment, so I must be happy with the ease of something like Babel Fish. 

What Was the Damned Point?

I've not blogged on this stuff before, but for the past three and a half years, I've been enmeshed in something I think of as the Neo-Whorfian Model, which derives from the classic Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and which seemed to devolved to a rather robust debunking by anthropological linguists and others roughly in the cognitive sciences of Hard Whorfianism: that each language creates a different worldview. What has been labeled Soft Whorfianism was given its due (despite some rather overweening Chomskyites): the language we speak shapes the cognitive "realities" we find ourselves in. 

                                Lera Boroditsky, one of the most fascinating researchers

                                      in the revived field of linguistic relativity 

The Neo-Whorfian stuff seems to be waxing now, and I'm currently in thrall with people like Lera Boroditsky and George Lakoff. I think language seems a strong part of a total environment, and neurologically it's instantiated/"mapped" on neural circuits that other parts of our brain seem to think "are" the "things" that are wired in as circuits there, in brain-matter. But maps deceive. They also give different, abstracted-from-existential/phenomenological "reality" perspectives, depending on the intentions of their makers. In my playful experiment, I imputed intentionality and mind to the Machine. This seems analogous to trying to communicate in a foreign country and not quite having the adequate language, a situation I've been in many times, one which seems always sobering if bracing. With all the pantomiming, pointing, mispronunciations, and frenzied attempts to use the Phrase Book in real time, I don't know if the future AI-bots will be better than us, or we'll have augmented ourselves to keep up with them. Maybe they'll just kick our asses. (I just now recalled a brilliant book I read that speaks to this. I read Slaves To The Machine right after it came out, and it had a drug-like effect.)

Finnegans Wake and Translations: Strange But True

Simply put: I find the very idea confounding. And yet there it is: Finnegans Wake was translated into French, Dutch, German, Polish, and wildly (and absurdly?) enough, Japanese and Finnish! I have no comment, but wonder who, how, why, to what end, what do readers get out of these...?

I must surmise that this proves there is no limit to what a certain sort of linguistic freak will attempt. Which I find totally wonderful.

Next thing you're gonna try and tell me is that they're going to get a Chinese version of it. Yea, right...

Possibly the Wake represents a Third situation, juxtaposed with the two alluded to above (humans and AI using language to translate/communicate). To briefly play with this idea, let us see Joyce's book as the apotheosis of extremely dense wordplay in the Novel. Many devices the Novel (and its writers) has/have developed are used therein. It requires above all Time, but pays off in overflowing information flow-through in the nervous system and its wetware architecture; the Novel's ability to create Other Worlds in the minds of its readers may still be unparalleled. So might the Novel's ability to develop empathic circuitry be nonpareil. Whether any one given reader of the Wake sees this limbic tropism occur within themselves seems peculiar to that reader; for many others Joyce's "claybook" appeals to the musical sense, and the frontal cortex and its abilities to Solve Problems...Not to mention something variously labeled "The Creative Self" or "Artistic Mind."

Short Commentary on the Wiki for Books Most Translated
I take it the Jehovah's Witnesses see translation as a major strategy. Pinocchio comes in at number three? It still needs to be translated into another 152 languages to surpass the Witness tome. No one's catching The Bible. I checked the Vegas odds on Pinocchio  or any of the others in the Top 10 surpassing The Bible by 2050, and they'll give you 300 to 1 odds for The Little Prince, but I really don't have a dog in this fight. Verne's 20KLeagues is a truly fantastic book, but what makes it so much better than any of his other stuff, much less anything by H.G. Wells? I can't account for those who translate for the rest of the world, and looking at this list makes me feel awfully parochial for some odd reason. The various translators themselves? Worldwide? Bless them with fine drugs, fantastic sleep, transcendent sex, and much laughter, for what they do is an act of love towards humankind...(Yes, even the army of Jehovah's Witnesses translators. I mean what the hell, right?)

Finally, I must confess that Paulo Coelho's 1988 book The Alchemist, tied with Harry Potter (!) at 67 languages? I'd never heard of it. Now I feel I must get to that book before the newly minted summer's up.

Re: Tom Robbins

He said Robert Anton Wilson turned him on to the idea of reading Finnegans Wake. Robbins has kept a copy bedside for years, has only read a few pages before nodding off, but for him, the Wake engenders wonderfully weird dreams. He said something like this in a documentary film on Robert Anton Wilson titled Maybe Logic. 

In the previous blog on translation, I ended with Robbins. In his book Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins there's a short piece called "Lost In Translation" in which he gives a passage from his 1984 book Jitterbug Perfume in its original (it's hilariously, tomrobbinsy surrealistic in its anthropomorphizing of vegetables), then a "back-translation" from the Czech (something analogous to my weirdo experiment with Babel Fish), and Robbins seems quite okay with it. Some of the "meaning" from the original surrealistic vegetables' attributes and aspirations (especially the beets!) has been altered. But what of it? It still swings!

Robbins thinks some translations are "more precise" than others. It seems no one can judge this more accurately than the writer of the original, although I've seen some fascinating arguments that question this. Here's the end of TR's piece on "literal back-translation":

I've been told by bilingual readers that until recently, when the insensitive publisher unduly hurried the translator, I've been reproduced in Italian with scant loss of meaning or intent; but that the Mexican version of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues is quite "sleazy," a description that probably doesn't displease me as much as it ought.

Incidentally, Jitterbug Perfume in Czech back-translates into Perfume of the Insane Dance. I'm not sure but that I don't prefer that title to my own. So, if much is lost in translation, something on rare occasions may also be gained. (pp.209-211)