Rapture of the Deep

Today I went to Tsunami Books for a book talk featuring two local authors. One was John Zerzan, who is internationally prominent in the anarchist movement; he’s 82 and has just written a memoir. The other is Rick Levin, a long-time journalist who just couldn’t stand having an office job anymore and decided to become a bus driver instead; his book is a novelization of his experiences with that. I bought the Zerzan book before John’s talk – he’s a gentle and thoughtful man who’s very well read. After Rick’s talk, in which he read passages from the book, I bought his too, as he seems very entertaining and insightful.

I got both of the books signed, and I had very different conversations with the two authors. John and I chatted about the Unabomber and his manifesto. Rick and I chatted about my neighborhood bus line, which he says is the prettiest in the community – and apparently the time the bus got stuck at a weird angle on our neighborhood hill, during an ice storm, has become legendary.

Meanwhile, at the Vegas Magic event, I’d mentioned that David made top 32 in the pro tour qualifying event. Well, today he won his 8-person draft and qualified for Pro Tour Amsterdam! That’s going to complicate their trip to Europe, but hopefully in a mostly good way.

Emma: A Modern Retelling, by Alexander McCall Smith. This book tells the story of Emma as set in modern Norfolk. I’d read it before, and this time I think I enjoyed it a bit less, but it was fine. The backstories for Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Taylor, which take up the first third of the book, are especially entertaining, and Frank Churchill is quite amusing too. It’s a fine line between making Emma go a bit too far with her schemes versus making her obnoxious, and a lot of the time I felt he was going over that line – she’s less sympathetic than the original. Still, if you like the original, I recommend this version.

Gōdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I can’t believe I finished it! This book is 742 pages, plus its 23-page 20th anniversary preface. The overall point of the book is that intelligence and consciousness may refer to the level of our awareness where we can notice paradoxes that depend on the context in which we’re thinking. My statement right there probably isn’t clear at all, which may be why he spends more than 700 pages developing his ideas. He does so quite playfully – he uses illustrations by M.C. Escher to show the types of paradoxes he’s referring to, and he ends each chapter with an amusing dialogue between odd characters (mostly Achilles and a Tortoise), where the dialogues are themselves verbal counterparts of various Bach fugues.

The largest chunk of the book, “Part One” (of two parts), is devoted to explaining Gōdel’s finding that any system of mathematics has to be inherently incomplete because it cannot include comments on itself as part of its system – there’s always a level beyond that system. This part of the book relies on 200+ pages of number theory. I found myself reading only four or five pages a day for those sections, and counted that as quite enough. There was even one long passage, pp. 225-227, that I mostly skimmed and didn’t bother delving into properly. I was wondering whether I should even continue… and then blessedly the author switched gears to talking about self-referential statements in the context of Zen Buddhism, which was a whole lot more accessible.

I decided I could continue, and although I did get mildly bogged down when he also went into considerable depth on how messages embedded in DNA work, with amino acids and enzymes and such, eventually we found ourselves operating in a world that’s much more familiar to me – thinking about contexts and consciousness – and that’s where we stayed.

It’s brilliant, but I’m not exactly on board with his guiding assumption that there’s a value to creating machines that have self-awareness just as humans do. I mean, sure, we could create devices that could reason, but without the emotional inputs that are so important in human decision-making, their reason would never be quite like ours – and presumably those emotion-laden inputs, like empathy, are needed to inform ethical action. So we could use machines to augment our own rationality, but also using them to guide our actions would be at our peril. Or even worse: letting them act without our guidance.

This book was published in 1979, and I assume a highly intelligent man like Hofstadter has continued to develop his ideas over the last 40+ years. I wonder if his devotion to artificial intelligence continues. I saw online that he’s no fan of the “large language models” that have been used to give machines some understanding of how systems of concepts work together via languages, but what does he think about the prospect for creating ethical machines, and ensuring the ethical systems “developed” by machines would be compatible with our own?

By the end, I found myself wondering yet again about the bias many mathematicians have toward simplicity, such that whether something is simple (and beautiful) tends to indicate that it is true. I’m reminded of Andrew Wiles’s solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem – the theorem (which Hofstadter mentions) is simple, but the solution (published almost 20 years after this book) most definitely is not. One of the things we’re learning from politics these days is that simplicity is very often quite wrong – it’s complexity that includes all of us, and more ethical to embrace it.

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This was one of my favorite books as a child – I had a hardcover copy that had been my mom’s – and it was fun to reread it. There were two things I hadn’t noticed or known then. First, the robin, who is a major character, is of course a European robin, not an American robin. As a child I naturally pictured the bird I knew as a “robin,” but the European robins are actually cute and delightful, as they’re more like sparrows or finches than like our American robin, which is really a thrush. Second, it was mentioned a few times that the brown winter grass was greening up for spring, and as a child this didn’t make sense, because our grass here in Oregon is lush and green year-round. However, I have since learned that in places like North Carolina the grass is also brown and dormant in the winter; Oregon is just an exception to these things (as is California, of course, where the grass is only green in winter but brown all summer). This time I also noticed the adult cousin who is Colin’s doctor, and who hopes to inherit if Colin dies. I was pleased that he wasn’t actually malevolent and was properly delighted when Colin’s health improved. As a modern reader, I was relieved to see that when the people referred to the “blacks” of India they were never actually derogatory toward them. Another thing I noticed was that the various Yorkshire folk always referred to daffodils as “daffydowndillys,” but Mary knows them as “daffodils” despite having only interacted previously with the servants in India. Maybe???

I wondered if, in the last chapter, there would be hints of the children’s future. Mary obviously loved Dickon and was attracted to him physically, but their social class differences would presumably preclude an eventual marriage, most likely? In the book, though, there’s no talk of the future except for Colin’s plan to become a scientist (and an athlete), and I see on Wikipedia that at least one modern commentator sees this emphasis on Colin as serving the patriarchy. Of course, too, when the book was published they had no idea that war was coming in the next few years. The boys were technically too young to serve in 1914, but Dickon would have been old enough later, so that’s sad. I hope he would have made it home again and that the natural world would have healed him too, as it did the other two children.

We always have a highly entertaining skit as part of my employer’s annual meeting, and two years ago I got to contribute a little video of reading outside and passing an Olympic torch. This year they’re making another special effort to include those of us who work remotely (I’m not even funded and haven’t been for years) – the skit’s theme is Monty Python and the Holy Grail (I assume substituting “grant” for “grail”), and those of us who are remote were asked to sign up to help sing or whistle an adaptation of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” from The Life of Brian. The revised lyrics are quite entertaining – the challenges of getting funded in an era of forbidden language and sometimes even AI grant reviewers.

I can’t whistle a tune at all, and I’m no great singer – I’ve never seriously considered joining a choir like several of my friends. I do know this tune, though – it’s very simple, and I can sing it in a key that works for me (rather low). So today was my online meeting with L and E, who would record whatever the employee wanted to contribute, whether that was whistling, singing parts of the song, or simply bopping their head from side to side or putting a pet on screen. E sang it to me first… and then I sang it myself. Their reaction was priceless – apparently I did considerably better than anyone else had, up to that point. I suspect that few of the others were even willing to sing at all. They described me as “musical” compared with the others, and I don’t think anyone else has ever done that in my life. So that made me very happy.

I’m not even sure how they can paste the clips together, since each of the singers will be singing in whatever key they wanted, but I’m looking forward to seeing it. Also I had Ajani on screen some too. I’ll get to see it in a week.

The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley. In this prequel to The Blue Sword, we learn about the legendary Aerin, queen of Damar, whose life was by no means like readers probably imagined it. One thing I especially appreciated about the story is that the author spends several chapters at the end wrapping things up in more detail than usual.

The Lost Years of Merlin, by T.A. Barron. Merlin Saga #1. My friend lent me this book, one of his childhood favorites, which I hadn’t heard of before. The premise is that Merlin’s life was very interesting before he met Arthur, and our author is filling in the blanks. Merlin (called “Emrys”) is mysteriously cast ashore in Wales as a small child and then lives there for years. Then, on the verge of adolescence, he causes a fire that (apparently) kills a bully and blinds himself, although he develops an alternate form of seeing, and comes to realize that he should set out to sea to visit a mysterious magical land. Most of the book takes place there, where he gradually learns more about himself through helping others. The descriptions are beautiful, and the story is interesting, although much of it is set up as just a long series of encounters. Merlin is a bit frustrating because he gets these ideas in his head and I suppose we’re to assume that they’re part of some magical intuition, although some of his ideas are clearly false.

Also – having read most of John Muir’s books, I was surprised when an early scene was clearly borrowed from Muir’s adventures in the Sierra Nevada. I wondered if the author had come up with this independently, or had read Muir at some point and forgotten, or what… but I learned that the author considers himself a great fan of Muir’s work, and when I discussed it with others over dinner we concluded that the scene was an “homage.”