“The Mind is Flat” by Nick Chater

Chater is a professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. His book seeks to explode the myth of the unconscious mind. He suggests that humans do not have thoughts below the mind’s surface waiting to bubble up. Humans “generate our beliefs, values, and actions in-the-moment; they are not pre-calculated and ‘written’ in some unimaginably vast memory store just in case they might be needed…. Introspection is a process not of perception but of invention: the real-time generation of interpretations and explanations to make sense of our own words and actions.” Chater suggests that we know less than we think we know. Therefore, we make up explanations ex post and ad hoc. If we are asked to explain how a bicycle, a zipper, or a thermostat work, most humans find that they only have an illusory conception of the details. This improvisational quality to explanations is referred to as ‘the illusion of explanatory depth’, which is the “contrast between our feeling of understanding and our inability to produce cogent explanations.”

The mind is not a mirror onto the world. It does not store a picture of all its surroundings to be summoned up at will. Instead, when taking in a scene from the outside world, “the brain ‘grasps’ different aspects of the image at different times…. Our brain glimpses, and conceives of, the world fragment by fragment.” Our field of vision is actually quite narrow with our peripheral vision exceedingly blurry. Also, studies have shown that our eyes can take in only one color at a time, before rapidly moving on to the next color in the field. This lack of perceptual depth is true even with mental images. “Our imagination, like visual experience, is a narrow window of lucidity, and what we see through that window is invented — creatively, subtly, intelligently — not merely reported from some fully specified, entirely coherent inner world.” When we are asked to imagine the image of a tiger or a cube upon a table most often we forget to include details such as the direction of the tiger’s stripes or the shadow the cube creates on the surface, until later asked about them when we quickly fill those into our previous mental picture. “We are not examining a fully formed, comprehensively detailed and coloured mental image in our mind’s eye — at one moment zooming in, or shifting our attention to the left and right. We are, instead, creating our mental image, piece by piece, moment by moment, touchpoint by touchpoint.” This is why our dream world seems so disjointed. “Dreams seem to be naturally viewed as the successive creation and dissolution of momentary fragments; in retrospect full of holes and contradictions…. Scenes and even time itself shifts abruptly, people change identities, and appear and disappear without warning…. There is no careful author painstakingly attempting to bring the story into some kind of order — merely a succession of capricious imaginative leaps…. We haven’t forgotten these details; our brain never bothered to specify them in the first place…. Dreams are improvised stories, with few details sketched in. When our minds create them, we lock onto some specific fragments of information; almost everything else is left entirely blank.” This is the same with our daytime thoughts. “Our thoughts are not shadows of an alternative inner reality, to be charted and discovered; they are fictions of our own devising, created moment by moment.”

The brain also invents feelings and emotions based on external clues, sensory inputs, and our own interoceptive system. “The brain interprets each piece of perceptual input (each face, object, symbol, or whatever it may be) to make as much sense as possible in the light of the wider context.” The background details of a photograph will widely change how we interpret the emotions on the photo’s face close-up. Context fuels the imagination. Often, even our own emotion is cued by external context. In psychological experiments, a shot of adrenaline induced either anger or euphoria depending on the external stimuli in the room. “It seems that we are figuring out what emotion we must be experiencing, and doing so, in part, from the state of our own body. We tend to imagine that our emotions well up from within, and cause physiological reaction…. But in reality it seems that we are figuring out what emotion we must be feeling, partly based on observing our own physiological state.” We interpret our interoceptive system based on external clues and then latch onto the emotion that best fits the combined situation. “Having an emotion at all is a paradigmatic act of interpretation, and hence of reasoning.”

The brain’s capacity is constrained by its neural networks. Chater suggests that each interconnected group of neurons can only interact with a single problem at a time. “The brain works by cooperative computation across most or all of its neurons — and cooperative computation can only lock onto, and solve, one problem at a time…. The unconscious cannot be working away on, say, tricky intellectual or creative challenges, while we are consciously attending to some other task — because the brain circuits that would be needed for such sophisticated unconscious thoughts are ‘blocked’ by the conscious brain processes of the moment…. Consciousness, and indeed the entire activity of thought, appears to be guided, sequentially, through the narrow bottleneck: sub-cortical structures search for, and coordinate, patterns in sensory input, memory and motor output, one at a time. The brain’s task is, moment by moment, to link together different pieces of information, and to integrate and act on them right away.” The brain processes the vast amounts of incoming sensory data, but then quickly focuses its attention, discarding all that is irrelevant. “Our brains lock onto fragments of sensory information, and work to impose meaning on those fragments. But we can only lock onto and impose meaning on one set of fragments at a time…. The brain will initially find some basic ‘meaning’ to help pin down which information is relevant and which is not…. As the brain’s processing step proceeds, the effort of interpretation will narrow ever more precisely on the scraps of information that helped form whatever pattern is of interest, and the processing of other scraps of information will be reduced and, indeed, abandoned.”

The brain is so interconnected that it can, most often, only do one thing well at a time. “People could do two things at once when distinct mental calculations — presumably associated with non-overlapping networks of neurons — were involved (e.g. for sight-reading music and taking dictation). And such specialized brain networks can sometimes be developed for highly practised and repetitive tasks.” Even when walking and thinking, people tend to slow their pace when a challenging or novel thought enters their brain. Chater suggests that unconscious thought is a complete myth. The brain is never working away on problems in the background for them only to flash into consciousness when fully formed and worked out. “There is absolutely no sign that we can search for xs when we are currently thinking about ys, or search for ys, when we have been thinking about xs. As soon as we switch from searching one category to searching another, all search processes for that first category appear to cease abruptly.”

Importantly, Chater suggests that there is a neural background that does form an unconscious, but it is not comprehensible, even to our own minds. “The neural processes within each cycle of thought are, crucially, not the kind of thing that could be conscious. They are, after all, hugely complex patterns of cooperative neural activity, searching for possible meanings in the current sensory input by reference to our capacious memories of past experience. But we are only ever conscious of particular interpretations of current sensory input…. We are conscious of, and could only ever be conscious of, the meanings, patterns and interpretations that are the output of this cooperative computation…. Our conscious experience is determined by what the brain thinks is present — the output of the cycle of thought, not its input.” This flow between the brain and sensory input is a two way street that results in predictive processing where some inputs are neglected by neural predictions, which highlight only the relevant information. “Perception, then, is a process of incredibly rich and subtle inference — the brain is carefully piecing together the best story it can about how the world might be, to explain the agitations of its sense organs. Indeed, attempts to interpret sensory input, language or our own memories typically involve inference of great subtlety to figure out which ‘story’ weaves together the data most compellingly…. Perception requires puzzling out the significance of a set of clues, each of which has little significance when considered in isolation.” Therefore, “mental processes are always unconscious — consciousness reports answers, but not their origins.” The brain was constructed, evolutionarily, to relay back to its owner the world as it really is, not the plethora of its inputs how they come in. “In order to decide how to act, we need to know what the world is like; our brains don’t care about the complex process of gathering and knitting together our stable world…. Our sense that seeing and hearing seem continuous arises because the brain is informing us that the visual and auditory worlds are continuous; and subjective experience reflects the world around us, not the operations of our own minds.” There is nothing more withheld within our brains than our own consciousness. “Our conscious experience consists of organizations of the surface of our sensory experience, whether conjured up through perception, imagination, or memory…. We consciously experience the sensory information, broadly construed (including images generated by our own minds; sensations from inside our bodies, such as pain, feelings of exhaustion or hunger; and crucially from inner speech).”

The brain uses past memories to interpret present perceptions. “We layer each momentary thought on top of past momentary thoughts, tracing an ever-richer web of connections across our mental surface…. The interpretation of each everyday scene depends on a vast hoard of past interpretations of everyday scenes. Indeed, perception works by relating, often in the most flexible and creative fashion, our sensory input with our memory of past experience. We do not interpret every sensory impression afresh, but in terms of the memory traces of past sensory impressions.” Importantly, memory stores past interpretations of inputs, not the raw inputs. Therefore, the past that was not deemed necessary to be interpreted is also not remembered. “Today’s memories are yesterday’s perceptual interpretations.” This creates a continuity of thought within the brain. “Our mental life follows channels carved by our previous thoughts, and traces of our present thoughts and actions will shape how we think and act in the future…. We do, after all, possess some inner mental landscape. But this is not an inner copy of the outer world or, for that matter, a library of beliefs, motives, hopes or fears; it is, instead, a record of the impact of past cycles of thought.” 

Metaphor is critical for our interpretation of the world. “Our continual search for meaning is the struggle to find patterns in our present experience, in the light of the past. And so we see one thing in terms of another…. Metaphors, too, are also employed to impose meaning upon one aspect of the world, by drawing on an understanding of another.” It is not that the brain does not have unconscious processes, it is simply that they cannot be accessed to become conscious. There is not a vast store of mental thoughts bubbling below the surface. There are only the inchoate inputs from which the brain creates the only thoughts that it has at all- conscious experience.

"Human Smuggling and Border Crossings" by Gabriella Sanchez

This short book is eye-opening for anyone interested in the issue of illegal migration into America. The author is a former police interviewer who became an anthropologist and the book is a detailed case study of border crossings in the Phoenix/Maricopa County area. This book is bound to make you think of the role of coyotes, the American southern border policy, and the process of immigration in general, both legal and illegal, differently. Its narrow focus on the act of the crossing and not the "before and after" of the lives of illegals is invaluable. 

Sanchez's research dispels the notions that most smugglers (coyotes) 1) are part of organized criminal networks 2) are always men 3) don't normally have close familial, friendship, or cultural ties with the migrants 4) don't develop reciprocal bonds with the migrants 5) have previous criminal records, either in America or Mexico 6) are career operators or do it as their primary source of income 7) don't live within the communities that they help 8) are involved in other illicit activities like prostitution or drugs 9) rely on violence to receive payment 10) make extensive profits. After expenses the typical profit is $200 per person 11) do not protect and care for the health of migrants. Many smugglers treat their charges as collaborators and not as cargo 12) have bosses or leadership that they report to or kick money up to. Instead, many coyotes work in an informal, reciprocal, horizontal, ad hoc basis, usually with family or friends to help family, friends, or those with references from migrants they previously had helped cross. 13) are not among the most respected hubs within the illegal and legal migrant community. Sanchez's book helps to sort the realities of illegal immigration on America's southern border from the myths.

“Recovery” by Helen DeWitt

This novella by DeWitt packs a lot into every line. It is serious, funny, and just a little bit strange. DeWitt takes the everyday and turns it on its head to reveal the inner weirdness inside all of us. With lines like, “when you pass a strip mall, what you’re seeing is people who imagined a whole market out there in the world of people just as pathetic as they were. Enough pathetic people so that a store catering to the needs of pathetic people could cover its overheads and turn a profit,” she invokes biting criticism of modern society, capitalist culture, and fellow humanity, all with wit. One of her characters has a cheese-fetish, along with his alcohol addiction, “of course, you could say, it’s not in the spirit of one day at a time. But see, I might be able to handle ordering $3,722 worth of cheese on one day but not be able to handle buying, you know, an 8 oz stick of Monterrey Jack on an as-needed basis daily or bi-daily or weekly for years. Maybe that single day is the only day I can count on being able to get through, you know, the shit associated with cheese acquisition.” DeWitt has the gift of making something so bizarre seem so rational. It is this taut blend between the fantastic and the mundane that makes “Recovery” such a perfect story.

“The Consciousness Instinct” by Michael Gazzaniga

Gazzaniga is the director of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at UCSB. His book begins with a historical overview of various speculations on consciousness over the centuries, starting with the ancient Greeks and continuing through Freud and Schopenhauer, before ending with Gazzaniga’s own opinions on the nature of consciousness. Many of history’s earlier claims about consciousness are still relevant as they lay the foundations for modern controversies that still divide the neuroscience community today. Among the prominent theories Gazzaniga reviews are Descartes’ mind/body dualism, Locke’s tabula rasa (blank slate) formulation, which led to Skinner’s behaviorism, and Hume’s chains of perception. John von Neumann was to add to speculations on the workings of neural networks by proposing the idea of parallel organization, where different groups of neurons could run independently and simultaneously. Chomsky supposedly dealt behaviorism a fatal blow with his ideas on a universal grammar, innate in all humans. Gazzaniga and his mentor Robert Sperry were to conduct research on humans whose brains had been surgically split to ease epileptic seizures. Sperry recounted, “everything we have seen so far indicates that the surgery has left these people with two separate minds, that is, two separate spheres of consciousness.” This research laid waste to the idea that consciousness was located in any particular area of the brain or even, in fact, that each human had one unique conscious ‘self’ at all. Sperry felt that “consciousness may have real operational value, that is more than merely an overtone, a by-product, epiphenomenon, or a metaphysical parallel of the objective process.” Sperry leaned towards the idea of emergentism: that “consciousness emerges from unconscious matter once that matter achieves a certain level of complexity or organization.” This is in contrast to the other major materialist idea of panpsychism: that all matter has some type of consciousness within it, albeit with a wide range of both scale and scope. All modern consciousness researchers strive to get at what David Chalmers has labeled “the hard problem” or Thomas Nagel has described as “what it is like” to be something, subjectively. Nagel stated, “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” These subjective characteristics of experience have sometimes been referred to as qualia. On the other hand, the philosopher Daniel Dennett disagreed that subjective experience was even a scientific problem/issue. He suggested it was all an ultra-realistic illusion and that the sensation of “‘having an experience’ is beyond the realm of the objective” and thus beyond the realm of science. Gazzaniga’s effort in the rest of his book aims to refute this “new dualism” and tries to fit consciousness within the modern research paradigm of the material brain.

Gazzaniga describes the brain as being separated by independent neural modules. “Modules are specialized and frequently localized networks of neurons that serve a specific function…. The perks of brain modularity are that it saves energy when resources are scarce, allows for specialized parallel cognitive processing when time is limited, makes it easier to alter functionality when new survival pressures arise, and allows us to learn a variety of new skills.” On top of this modular structure of the brain is a layered architecture. “Each layer in a system operates independently because each layer has its own specific protocols, the set of rules or specifications that stipulate the allowed interfaces, or interactions, both within and between layers.” This layered system allowed humans to evolve from simpler life forms, while keeping their lower-level structures and building on top of them, rather than beginning a unified functioning structure from scratch. Therefore, many of our bodily functions, from metabolism to replication, are formed using the same core-processes as that of simpler forms of life, such as bacteria, since we all share the same genomic sequences. This layered architecture evolved because it limits the effects of localized malfunctions, making repair or replacement easier, and making for a more robust, if less efficient, system. “Because each layer can provide a wide range of diverse functions, the system has greater flexibility as a whole, giving it a great advantage when facing a changing environment. This type of layout is ideal in an evolutionary sense because the number of vulnerabilities in the system is limited, while the opportunities for diversification are abundant.” Neural redundancy becomes a feature, not a bug, of this system. Therefore, “there may not be a specific modular hierarchy that allows consciousness to manifest itself in one way or another. Specific modules work relatively independently and, rather than being a neatly ordered queue of modular processing, the contents of our conscious experience may be the result of some kind of competition: some processing takes hold of your conscious landscape at a given moment in time…. The multitude of conscious-producing modules simply diversifies your conscious portfolio…. The modular brain makes consciousness resilient because of the plethora of possible paths that can lead to a conscious moment…. The brain operates in a modular fashion, but it also suggests that independent modules can each produce a unique form of consciousness.”

Gazzaniga feels that consciousness research could learn a great deal from quantum physics, particularly the idea of complementarity: that matter, such as electrons, can have both particle-like and wavelike properties. There is both the macro-world of Newtonian physics and the micro-world of quantum physics, in which the same matter behaves by different laws, all at once. Particular to quantum mechanics is the idea that the observer matters. He affects the system by his very observation of it. Any measurement requires an observer who is separate from the object measured. “The measurement itself may be precise and objective, but the process of measurement is subjective.” Gazzaniga suggests that “human consciousness was way too high a layer in the architecture of all living organisms to put the epistemic cut between the observer and the observed, between the subjective experience and the event itself.” The key to consciousness might begin with the difference between the living and the lifeless. He quotes Howard Pattee, “I have taken the point of view that the question of what constitutes an observation in quantum mechanics must arise long before we reach the complexity of the brain. In fact, I propose…. that the gap between quantum and classical behavior is inherent in the distinction between inanimate and living matter…. Our models of living organisms will never eliminate the distinction between the self and the universe, because life began with this separation and evolution requires it…. This is a universal and irreducible complementarity. Neither model can derive the other or be reduced to the other.” Gazzaniga suggests that these “two complementary modes of behavior, two levels of description are inherent in life itself, were present at the origins of life, have been conserved by evolution, and continue to be necessary for differentiating subjective experience from the event itself.” William James had suggested the idea of polyzoism: that “every brain-cell has its own individual consciousness, which no other cell knows anything about, all individual consciousness being ‘ejective’ to each other.” Gazzaniga suggests that each cell has a very rudimentary conception of the subjective ‘self’, built on the fact that each cell has semiotic closure, the key to independent living systems present in all cells. He continues, “neural circuits are structures with a double life: they carry symbolic information, which is subject to arbitrary rules, yet they possess a material structure that is subject to the laws of physics.” Gazzaniga suggests that consciousness is the linkage of independent neural modules that span across time and memory. “Each mental event is managed by brain modules that possess the capacity to make us conscious of the results of their processing…. Those single bursts of processing parade one after another, seamlessly linked by time…. Our smoothly flowing consciousness is itself an illusion. In reality it is made up of cognitive bubbles linked by subcortical “feeling” bubbles, stitched together by our brain in time…. Consciousness is inherent throughout the brain.”

“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” by Ludwig von Wittgenstein (translated by Frank P. Ramsey)

This short book of logic was the only work of Wittgenstein’s published in his lifetime. He warns in the preface, “this book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it.” Despite this dire warning, the book, nonetheless, does prove useful, even to those not so immersed in formal logic and philosophical conjecture. He states that the aim of his book is to “draw a limit to thinking, or rather- not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think on both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language, and what lies on the other side will simply be nonsense.” A main theme of Wittgenstein’s is to parse out the purpose and limits of language. “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.” Furthermore, he delineates, “colloquial language is a part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it. From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language.” On formal logic, specifically, he states, “a logical entity cannot merely be possible. Logic treats of every possibility, and all possibilities are its facts.” Later he clarifies, “logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world.” On theoretical reasoning, he comments, “an a priori true thought would be one whose possibility guaranteed its truth. Only if we could know a priori that a thought is true if its truth was to be recognized from the thought itself (without an object of comparison).”

Wittgenstein has quite a lot to say about the true nature of philosophy. “Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness…. Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word “philosophy” must mean something which stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences)…. Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions’, but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy, thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.” As was Wittgenstein’s nature, he later complicates his own thoughts, “philosophy is the discipline that deals with all those propositions that are assumed to be true without proof by the various sciences…. The inexpressible is contained- unexpressed- in the expressed…. There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” Wittgenstein’s riddles often leave quite a handful to ponder. He ends his book with another warning, “my propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.” Finally, Wittgenstein cautions, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

“Modern Liberty and Its Discontents” by Pierre Manent

This is a collection of essays written by the French philosopher on the topics of modernity, politics, and religion. Manent was influenced both by Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss and while some essays deal specifically with their thoughts, others focus on the history of philosophy and sociology more broadly. All the essays are connected by the exploration of what it means to be an individual in modern society. Manent writes about the tension of “liberal democracy (necessarily caught between the promotion and the critique of representation, between the emancipation of the individual and the imposition of a uniform rule).” He teases out the dichotomy of liberty and equality that is at the heart of democracy. Man gradually becomes aware of the freedom and responsibilities than modernity brings. “In Tocqueville’s democracy the power of democracy is not the power of man over man, or the power of one party over another, or it is so only very secondarily and provisionally. It is rather the power of man over himself: more and more actions, more and more sentiments, more and more thoughts, come to live under the democratic regime.” One check to this impulse has naturally been the institution of religion. “By its origins and perhaps its essence, it is external to democracy; this is why it can regulate democracy. It says to democratic man’s liberty, to his envy, and to his disordered passions, you will not go any further!” As democratic man has become individuated he has lost his natural social bonds, for better and for worse. The separation of Church and State was not an equal divide. It is “founded on an essential inequality of consents, which gives a decisive advantage to the public institution over the private one. The inequality of the consents demanded or required translates into the essential superiority of the state over the churches in the regime of separation.” Through the social contract man has consented to be ruled by men.

Modernity tried to build a world ex novo. Manent quotes Charles Peguy, the modern State“ is opposed, it runs counter to all the ancient cultures, to all the anciens regimes, to all the ancient cities, to everything which is culture, to all that is a city.” The conception of the city, as either Platonic or Aristotelean ideal of community, no longer has purchase. Modernity has nothing to learn from the past. Or rather, it picks and chooses at its will and leisure. Manent reflects, “we no longer perceive the extraordinary audacity of the original project of establishing the human world on the narrow point of the human will.” Modern philosophy, starting with Machiavelli, became infatuated with the rational will and the science of what was possible. “It is precisely modern humanity that desires to be the sovereign over nature, creator of its own nature.” Democracy has severed itself from past humanity, from tradition, custom, and culture. “The man of the future, man par excellence, is a being without conscience.” Manent, reflecting on Aurel Kolnai, suggests that man would be better served by combining the moral absolutes of his own conscience with the traditions of conservatism. “We are born in and act in a world already structured by institutions, models, achievements, traditions- by traditions, moreover, which do not force us to be “traditionalists,” precisely because we have the good fortune to be heirs to the tradition of rationally criticizing tradition…. It is because there is a natural and necessary tension between the conscientious and the conservative attitudes that the prudent man has to learn how to combine them, to learn that the relative weight of each depends on circumstances and on the agent’s ability to compose and harmonize, judiciously and even stylishly, the various legitimate themes of free conduct. A conscience with a lively sensitivity to universal moral demands but also well aware of political constraints, of ambiguities and conflicts of values and the uncertainties attending action: a conscience which, when it is at odds with the world, does not hurry to condemn the world but takes time to weigh the adversary’s reasons.”

Individual man has often found himself lost at sea, alone, left to his own devices. He has demanded of the political authority that it acknowledges his consent. “The communities to which people belong in the democratic world no longer command them…. The past itself, understood as the community of those who are dead, has lost all authority to command, whether it be in the moral, social, political, or religious sphere, and is no more than a collection of “memorable places” thrown open to historical tourism.” History no longer advises and urges caution. The past is only studied for amusement. Tradition is quaint. “The only vocation that contemporary man recognizes is that of being an individual. Modern man aims to become ever more the author and artist of all his ties- to be always more un-obliged or disconnected.”

Throughout these essays, Manent is at heart a philosopher. “Philosophy is the endeavor, at once heroic and unobtrusive, to keep one’s distance, to refuse one’s adherence to all these interpretations by interposing between them and oneself the small question, What is?” Philosophy is a disposition. “Philosophy is essentially skeptical. It is therefore not a doctrine, system, or view of the world, but a way of life.” Socrates was the philosopher par excellence. “One must act morally, and not think morally.” More so than even romantic love, true friendship guides the path of the philosopher. in the past, the bonds of friendship were desired because they engendered the quest for a common truth in man. The ideal man sought “the life of reason, the life dedicated to understanding life… “The love of wisdom” (philosophy) is literally, and nonmetaphorically, the most erotic of the soul’s dispositions, the one that leads toward its highest possibility and that consequently is capable of forming the strongest human tie because it is the most genuine one…. Life is worthy of being loved because it is capable of being understood.” 

“The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels” by Edward St. Aubyn

This is a collection of five short novels, “Never Mind”, “Bad News”, “Some Hope”, “Mother’s Milk”, and “At Last”, which together span about 860 pages. Fictionally, the books span most of the protagonist’s, Patrick Melrose’s, life. The novels track specific momentous events in Patrick’s life, each proceeding after long biographical gaps, giving vignettes of the aristocratic life of the Melrose clan, beginning when Patrick is five and ending when he buries his mother, as an adult, with two young boys of his own. In fact, each novel takes place over a single day in Patrick’s life, albeit interspersed with flashbacks. His life might be considered the focus, but the drama is seen through the eyes of multiple characters. In the meantime, there are vast sums of money spent, inheritances and disinheritances galore, bitterness, rape, pedophilia, heroin addiction, philosophy, snobbery, erudition, cults, affairs, deaths, Freudian analysis, and plenty of British humor. These books combine all I like best as an Anglophile. The humor is ironic and perverse, in a naturally British way. The character development is supreme. The characters are both relatable and so distant all at once. The plot is serious at times, but always on the threat of facetiousness. The story is gripping, but at the same time, incidental to the hilarity and morbidity of the characters. The novels were all breezy reads, but perfect little books.

“Surfing Uncertainty” by Andy Clark

Clark is a philosopher who specializes in logic and metaphysics. However, this book combines neuroscience and embodied cognition to give a theory of the predictive brain. Clark has coined this process predictive processing and it relies heavily on Bayesian logic. “It is the kind of automatically deployed, deeply probabilistic, non-conscious guessing that occurs as part of the complex neural processing routines that underpin and unify perception and action…. Brains like ours…. are predictive engines, constantly trying to guess at the structure of the incoming sensory array. Such brains are incessantly pro-active, restlessly seeking to generate the sensory data for themselves using the incoming signal (in a surprising inversion of much traditional wisdom) mostly as a means of checking and correcting their best top-down guessing. Crucially, however, the shape and flow of all that inner guessing is flexibly modulated by changing estimations of the relative uncertainty of (hence our confidence in) different aspects of the incoming signal. The upshot is a dynamic, self-organizing system in which the inner (and outer) flow of information is constantly reconfigured according to the demands of the task and the changing details of the internal (interoceptively sensed) and external context.” Our brains are constantly in action, making top-down guesses about the sensory data to learn about our external world. The brain is creating models and then slowly modulating them, based on past experience, to improve future predictions. Crucially, the brain is not a passive system. Action plays a critical role in predictive processing. “Our massed recurrent neuronal ensembles are not just buzzing away constantly trying to predict the sensory stream. They are constantly bringing about the sensory stream by causing bodily movements that selectively harvest new sensory stimulations. Perception and action are thus locked in a kind of endless circular embrace…. [The brain is able to] use action upon the world to reduce the complexity of its own inner processing, selecting frugal, efficient routines that trade movement and environmental structure against costly computation.”

The brain is constantly learning as it is constantly predicting everything that will happen to the body in the next moment, in an ever-rolling cascade. Perception is very near-term top-down prediction modified by the senses. “Prediction error [is] a kind of proxy for any as-yet-unexplained sensory information. Prediction error here reports the ‘surprise’ induced by mismatch between the sensory signals encountered and those predicted…. Perception is indeed a process in which we (or rather, various parts of our brains) try to guess what is out there, using the incoming signal more as a means of tuning and nuancing the guessing rather than as a rich (and bandwidth-costly) encoding of the state of the world.” It is actually our expectations, to a large extent, that determine what we see, smell, and hear. A prediction does not create our sensory world, but it does focus our attention. “Brains like ours are constantly trying to use what they already know so as to predict the current sensory signal, using the incoming signal to select and constrain those predictions, and sometimes using prior knowledge to ‘trump’ certain aspects of the incoming sensory signal itself. Such trumping makes good adaptive sense, as the capacity to use what you know to outweigh some of what the incoming signal seems to be saying can be hugely beneficial when the sensory data is noisy, ambiguous, or incomplete.” Again, the non-passive nature of the brain is crucial. “Action is not so much a ‘response to an input’ as a neat and efficient way of selecting the next input, driving a rolling cycle. These hyperactive systems are constantly predicting their own upcoming states and actively moving about as to bring some of them into being.”

Each percept is constructed with the help of the brain’s priors. These priors influence future expectations in a probabilistic manner. The brain then combines the likelihood of these priors with raw sensory data. “Attention, thus construed, is a means of variably balancing the potent interactions between top-down and bottom-up influences by factoring in their so-called ‘precision’, where this is a measure of their estimated certainty or reliability.” When evaluating sensations, the brain is constantly separating the signal from the noise, using prior knowledge. This process happens through hierarchical Bayesian inference based on precision-weighted guesses at every level. These predictions then influence future action in a proactive fashion. Memory is also crucial in predicting our future. Fernyhough suggests, “if memory is fallible and prone to reconstructive errors, that may be because it is oriented towards the future at least as much as towards the past…. similar neural systems are involved in both autobiographical memory and future thinking, and both rely on a form of imagination.” In the end, perception is the brain’s best guess as to reality. “Perception (rich, world-revealing perception) occurs when the probabilistic residue of past experience meets the incoming sensory signal with matching prediction.”

Prediction allows our bodies to live in the present. As Franklin and Wolpert assert, “delays are present in all stages of sensorimotor system, from the delay in receiving afferent sensory information, to the delay in our muscles responding to efferent motor commands…. we effectively live in the past, with the control systems having access to out-of-date information about the world and our own bodies.” This is overcome by predictive processing. “Forward models provide a powerful and elegant solution to such problems, enabling us to live in the present and to control our bodies…. you treat the desired (goal) state as observed and perform Bayesian inference to find the actions that get you there…. Motor control is, in a certain sense, subjunctive. It involves predicting the non-actual proprioceptive trajectories that would ensue were we performing some desired action. Reducing prediction errors calculated against these non-actual states then serves…. to make them actual. We predict the proprioceptive consequences of our own action and this brings the action about….. ‘Active Inference’ then names the combined mechanism by which perceptual and motor systems conspire to reduce prediction error using the twin strategies of altering predictions to fit the world, and altering the world to fit the predictions.”

Frith makes the case that “our perceptions are fantasies that coincide with reality.” Hohwy suggests, “what we perceive is the brain’s best hypothesis, as embodied in a high-level generative model, about the causes in the outer world…. Conscious experience is like a fantasy or virtual reality constructed to keep the sensory input at bay.” Thus, the human brain is bounded by an external reality. “Prediction-driven learning delivers a grip upon affordances: the possibilities for action and intervention that the environment makes available to a given agent.” The brain is then constantly making its best guess as to what course will reduce prediction error. This might be by modifying its predictions or it might be through acting. This results in “‘affordance competition’ in which…. possible motor responses are being simultaneously prepared, and in which ‘the human brain does not wait for a decision to be completed before recruiting the motor system but instead passes partial information to prepare in a graded fashion for a probable action outcome’…. Such pro-active readiness, to be genuinely useful, must necessarily be multiple and graded. It must allow many possible responses to be simultaneously partially prepared, to degrees dependent upon the current balance of evidence.”

The world that humans perceive is “our world” in that it is the world best understood by humans. “What we perceive is (when all is going well) the structured external world itself. But this is not the world ‘as it is’, where that implies the problematic notion of a world represented independent of human concerns and human action repertoires. Rather, it is a world parsed according to our organism-specific needs and action repertoire.” Humans create and actively modify our own world. Through language “our own thoughts and ideas now become available, to ourselves and others, as potential objects for deliberate processes of attention…. Courtesy of all that material public vehicling in spoken words, written texts, diagrams, and pictures, our best predictive models of the world (unlike those of other creatures) have thus become stable, reinspectable objects apt for public critique and systemic, multi-agent, multi-generational test and refinement. Our best models of the world are thus able to serve as the basis for cumulative, communally distributed reasoning…. Our human-built worlds are not merely the arenas in which we live, work, and play. They also structure the life-long statistical immersions that build and rebuild the generative models that inform each agent’s repertoire for perception, action, and reason.”

“Seven Pillars of Wisdom” by T.E. Lawrence

This is a memoir of Lawrence’s part in the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during World War I. It reads like an action novel, interspersed with penetrating insights as to the fundamental nature of man. Lawrence is a keen judge of character with a terrific eye for detail, both of his surroundings and of men in his company. This makes his prose flow in flowery, yet unpretentious, bursts. Lawrence was having the time of his life on the Arabian Peninsula and it showed. Even before the campaign started Lawrence had spent years in the Middle East, was fluent in many of the Arabic dialects, and was well versed in Bedouin and Turkish history. In Feisal, the aging Sherif of Mecca’s most competent and inspiring son, he found a face for the Arab insurrection- a modern prophet of the desert. The Bedouin were a hard, simple people given to Manichaean dichotomies and a strict code of honor, valor, and glory. 

Lawrence’s memoir makes great sociology of the Arab people in general. The outdated facts sometime still reveal the most essential character. “The Wahabis, followers of a fanatical Moslem heresy, had imposed their strict rules on easy and civilized Kasim [a town]. In Kasim there was but little coffee hospitality, much prayer and fasting, no tobacco, no artistic dalliance with women, no silk clothes, no gold and silver head-ropes or ornaments. Everything was forcibly pious or forcibly puritanical…. It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia. Always the votaries found their neighbors’ beliefs cluttered with inessential things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their preachers.” Lawrence was at his flowery best when describing the character of the men he fought with. In describing one minor sherif, “he feared his maturity as it grew upon him, with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.” 

Life in the desert was an adventure; one saga after another. Lawrence had studied the military strategy and tactics of Clausewitz, Jomini, and Napoleon while at Oxford, but he relied as much on improvising by the seat of his pants as grand strategy. He was often hindered by his own British command or by the predilections of his Arab charges. They liked big noises. It was no matter that machine guns were rusty, cumbersome, and not ideal for mobile desert warfare. Of more tactical use were the mines and dynamite that he lined the Hejaz Railway, linking the Turkish garrison in Medina with supplies from the outside world. His aim was to never let the Turks assemble in mass, to never create a front, and, instead, make the Turks guard multiple flanks, stretching them at all points with hit and run maneuvers. This was guerrilla warfare in the desert, with probing, raiding, and individual valor taking the place of formations and fixed battle. It was not always a brutal war, however. Lawrence admitted that, “we felt sorry always for the men of the Turkish Army. The officers, volunteer and professional, had caused the war by their ambition- almost by their existence- and we wished they could receive not merely their proportionate deserts, but all that the conscripts had to suffer through their faults.” 

Lawrence’s greatest hardships were desert rides spanning hundreds of miles on the back of a camel without food for days, in search of the next oasis to water himself and his ride. Often he would sleep in the saddle, sometimes drinking putrid water from wells poisoned by Turks, and occasionally was forced to kill one of his own mounts to eat the camel meat. Well, perhaps his greatest hardship was the time he was caught spying inside an Ottoman occupied village, had to feign being a Circassian conscript, and was brutally beaten by the Turkish officers when he did not yield to the sexual advances of the provincial Governor. For the rest of the war he was mostly able to avoid other contact with the Turks and their bullets, mainly being attacked by fleas, scorpions, and dysentery. 

Lawrence’s greatest success, with Fiesal’s help, was uniting the disparate nomadic tribes in a spirit of national Arabness. “Fiesal brought nationality to their minds in a phrase, which set them thinking of Arab history and language; then he dropped into silence for a moment: for with these illiterate masters of the tongue words were lively, and they liked to savour each, unmingled, on the palate.” By the end of the war Lawrence had been campaigning among the Bedouin for over two years and his loyalties remained divided between the British and the Arab armies. He was never at comfort amongst either. After the capture of Damascus he asked leave from General Allenby as to not be part of the British betrayal of the Arabs, foretold in the Sykes-Picott agreement. “The essence of the desert was the lonely moving individual, the son of the road, apart from the world as in a grave.”