“What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics” by Adam Becker

This book is about the controversies involved in the foundational knowledge of quantum physics. Quantum physics has been integral in developing such practical science as nuclear warheads and silicon transistors. Despite this, the very basic foundations of how and why quantum calculations actually work are still in dispute. In explaining the different theories still posited, Becker explains some of the basic science, the history behind various theories, the methods of various experimental setups, and why a clear conclusion has yet to emerge.

Most physicists subscribe to the Copenhagen Theory. “The Copenhagen interpretation states that quantum physics is merely a tool for calculating the probabilities of various outcomes of experiments…. Quantum physics proves that small objects simply do not exist in the same objectively real way as the objects in our everyday lives do.” It does not exist in the real world. Niels Bohr stated, “there is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description.” Pascal Jordan continued, “the electron is forced to a decision. We compel it to assume a definite position; previously, it was, in general, neither here nor there…. We ourselves produce the results of measurement.” The measurement itself affects the outcome. The electron before was in a superposition, but the measurement interacted with it, it moved to a definite position. “Quantum physics uses infinite collections of numbers called wave functions to describe the world. These numbers are assigned to different locations: a number for every point in space…. The Schrodinger equation ensures that wave functions always change smoothly—the number that a wave function assigns to a particular location never hops instantly from 5 to 500. Instead, the numbers flow perfectly predictably: 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and so on. A wave function’s numbers can go up and down again, like a wave—hence the name—but they’ll always undulate smoothly like waves too, never jerking around too crazily…. The wave function doesn’t tell you how much of the electron is in one place—it tells you the probability that the electron in in that place…. Once you find that electron, a funny thing happens to its wave function. Rather than following the Schrodinger equation like a good wave function, it collapses—it instantly becomes zero everywhere except in the place where you found the electron…. The Schrodinger equation holds all the time, except when you make a measurement.”

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle stated that either you could know the location of an electron or how fast and in what direction it was going, but not both at once. “Heisenberg found a precise formulation of how much information you have to give up about an object’s momentum in order to learn more about its position, and vice versa. You could know a lot about where an object was or a lot about how it was moving—but you couldn’t know both at the same time.” Bohr added to the uncertainty principle the issue of complementarity. He stated, “any observation of atomic phenomena will involve an interaction with the agency of observation not to be neglected…. an independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation.” Becker explains, “the quantum world could only be considered real in conjunction with some kind of measurement apparatus to study that world. And the behavior of the objects in that world, as indicated by such an apparatus, would be best described as either particles or waves, but never both simultaneously. These descriptions are contradictory—a particle has a definite location, which waves don’t.” Bohr did not view this as a problem, however. He stated, “we are not dealing with contradictory but with complementary pictures of the phenomena.” According to Copenhagen, this wave/particle duality is inherent in all quantum phenomena.

Within Copenhagen there was not complete consensus, but all the physicists agreed that it was pointless to talk about what was really happening in the macro world. Quantum physics was not a theory of the world as it actually is. It is a tool for making predictions. “Making accurate predictions about the outcomes of measurements was, for them, enough.” Bohr stated, “there is no quantum world. Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties on the quantum theory being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.” Heisenberg stated, “the atoms or the elementary particles are not as real [as phenomena in daily life]; they form a world of potentialities rather than one of things or facts…. The idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them is impossible…. The transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’ takes place during the act of observation…. The transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’ takes place as soon as the interaction of the object with the measuring device, and thereby with the rest of the world, has come into play; it is not connected with the act of registration of the result by the mind of the observer.” John von Neumann threw his considerable weight behind the Copenhagen interpretation with a proof, which stated that wave functions normally obey the Schrodinger equation, but collapse upon measurement. Von Neumann stated, “we therefore have two fundamentally different types of interventions which can occur in a system. [When an object remains undisturbed, the equation] describes how the system changes continuously and causally in the course of time. [But once measurement is made] the arbitrary changes by measurement [are] discontinuous, non-causal, and instantaneously acting…. We must always divide the world into two parts, the one being the observed system, the other the observer. Quantum mechanics describes the events which occur in the observed portion of the world, so long as they do not interact with the observing portion, with the aid of the [Schrodinger equation], but as soon as such interaction occurs, i.e. a measurement, it requires the [collapse of the wave function].”

Einstein disagreed with the Copenhagen consensus. He felt, “the programmatic aim of all physics [was] the complete description of any (individual) real situation (as it supposedly exists irrespective of any act of observation or substantiation.)” His greatest problem with the Copenhagen interpretation was the issue of locality: “the principle that something that happens in one location can’t instantly influence an event that happens somewhere else.” He viewed the instantaneous wave function collapse as violating locality. Schrodinger brought to light the issue of entanglement. “When any two subatomic particles collide, they almost always become entangled. When a group of objects forms some larger object, like subatomic particles in an atom or atoms in a molecule, they become entangled. In fact, nearly any interaction between any particles would cause them to become entangled, sharing a single wave function…. For any entangled system, Einstein’s choice applied: either the system is nonlocal, or quantum physics can’t fully describe all the features of the system.”

David Bohm was the first man to come up with a counter interpretation that could explain the foundations of quantum physics. This was the Pilot Wave Theory. Becker relates, “particles have a wave nature, but there’s nothing “complementary” about it—particles are just particles, and their motions are guided by pilot waves. Particles surf along these waves, guided by the waves’ motion (hence the name). Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle still holds—the more we know about a particle’s position, the less we know about its momentum, and vice versa—but according to Bohm, this is simply a limitation on the information that the quantum world is willing to yield us. We may not know where a given electron is, but in Bohm’s universe, it’s always somewhere…. Bohm’s theory is mathematically equivalent to the Schrodinger equation, the central equation of quantum physics, and therefore it must make the same predictions as any other interpretation.”

The famous double-slit experiment showed the differences between Copenhagen and Bohm. Richard Feynman quipped that the double-slit experiment “has in it the heart of quantum mechanics…. In reality, it contains the only mystery.” Becker states, “the idea of particles, Copenhagen claims, is complementary to the idea of waves. The ideas are contradictory—photons cannot be both particles and waves…. When you aren’t measuring the position of a photon, it is a wave. Thus, photons can interfere with themselves as they pass through the double slit. But measuring the location of a photon forces it to behave as a particle: when the photon hits the screen behind the double slit, it must strike in only one spot.” Becker contrasts that explanation with Bohm’s theory, “photons, according to Bohm, are particles surfing on waves. While a particle can only pass through one slit, its pilot wave passes through both and interferes with itself. That self-interference, in turn, affects the motion of the particle, because it is guided by the wave…. Putting photon detectors on each slit affects each photon’s pilot wave—no matter how ingenious the design, any photon detector must alter a photon’s pilot wave, as ensured by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which in Bohm’s interpretation places limits on how much measuring devices can avoid interfering with the things they attempt to measure…. In Bohm’s account, although measurement can influence a particle’s motion, all particles have definite positions whether or not anyone is looking at them…. In Bohm’s pilot wave interpretation, strange quantum behaviors are minimized for larger objects, which is why we don’t see them in the everyday world.” Bohm’s interpretation did away with the superpositions of electrons and was able to incorporate measurement devices into the quantum descriptions. However, it did not solve Einstein’s problem of nonlocality, “allowing particles to influence each other instantaneously at long distances. A single particle, wandering the universe on its own without bumping into anything, is guided in its path by its own pilot wave and is perfectly local. But introduce a second particle that interacts in any way with the first, and suddenly they are linked—entangled—and the pilot wave of one particle will change depending on the precise location of the other particle, no matter how distant it may be…. Because Bohm’s theory involved faster-than-light connections between particles, it appeared difficult to extend Bohm’s ideas to incorporate special relativity.”

Hugh Everett III was the next physicist to find the Copenhagen interpretation lacking. He took the measurement problem, that wave functions collapsed upon measurement, seriously. He understood that it placed any observer in a solipsistic position. Instead, Everett proposed a single universal wave function, “a massive mathematical object describing the quantum states of all objects in the entire universe. This universal wave function, according to Everett, obeyed the Schrodinger equation at all times, never collapsing, but splitting instead. Each experiment, each quantum event, spun off new branches of the universal wave function, creating a multitude of universes in which that one event had every possible outcome…. There is only one copy of you in each branch of the wave function, and, even if you repeat the experiment, this will still be true—there will be more branches, but each branch will still only have one copy of you. And the Schrodinger equation dictates that each branch will carry on independently of the others, with hardly any interaction between branches…. To each person in each branch on the universal wave function, their world appears to the the only world.” This was Everett’s Many-Worlds Theory.

John Bell was another Copenhagen heretic. He believed Von Neumann’s proof was incorrect. It purported to rule out any explanation of quantum physics that used hidden variables. “A hidden-variables interpretation assigns definite locations or other properties to quantum objects before they are observed, even if those properties can’t be calculated from the theory itself. These properties go unseen in the mathematics of quantum physics.” Bohm’s pilot wave interpretation is one such theory. Bell thought Einstein’s EPR paper, which questioned the locality of quantum physics, was another way around hidden variables. Bell tried to resolve the differences between Copenhagen, Bohm, and EPR. “The single wave function shared by the two entangled photons guarantees that they will always behave in the same manner when encountering two polarizers with matching axes…. Therefore, if nature is local, the wave function is not everything—there must be hidden variables. So either quantum physics is incomplete, or nature is nonlocal. We cannot have both locality and completeness in quantum physics…. So either the predictions of quantum physics are wrong and nature can be local, or quantum physics is right and “spooky action at a distance” is real.” Bell explained, “certain particular correlations, realizable according to quantum mechanics, are locally inexplicable, They cannot be explained, that is to say, without action at a distance.” This was Bell’s impossibility proof. “Bell’s theorem really leaves only three unequivocal possibilities: either nature is nonlocal in some way, or we live in branching multiple worlds despite appearances to the contrary, or quantum physics gives incorrect predictions about certain experimental setups.”

Dieter Zeh was the next quantum physicist to poke holes in the Copenhagen consensus. He independently came up with a Many-Worlds Theory, which in many ways resembled Everett’s. (Everett left academia for the Pentagon after barely receiving his PhD at Princeton after squabbles with Bohr, his thesis advisor, John Wheeler, and others at Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen and so his theory was promptly forgotten.) Zeh started by positing, “let’s assume that the universe is a closed system, like a nucleus.” Becker continues that Zeh’s “general idea, a system in a superposition, with its components strongly entangled—could explain how measurement works in quantum physics, without resorting to any of the tricks the Copenhagen interpretation used…. Quantum physics says that the measurement device will become strongly entangled with the thing it’s measuring…. The measuring device interacts with the experimenter, and everything else in the room, and eventually the entire universe—so when a small quantum system interacts strongly with a large object, ultimately, the entire universe ends up like Schrodinger’s cat, splitting into dead-cat and alive-cat “branches.” And the inhabitants of each branch of the universe only see one outcome…. The different branches of the universe are extraordinarily unlikely to interact.” Zeh explained, “the observer sees only one component [of the Schrodinger’s cat state] and not the superposition of all the others. So, that solves the measurement problem.” Bryce DeWitt added, “the universe is constantly splitting into a stupendous number of branches, all resulting from measurementlike interactions between its myriads of components. Moreover, every quantum transition taking place on every star, in every galaxy, in every remote corner of the universe is splitting our local world on earth into myriads of copies itself.” This interpretation, therefore, never requires any wave functions to collapse. It does require an almost infinite number of universes, however. We are actually living in a multiverse.

This Multi-Worlds interpretation was bolstered by the discoveries of String Theory and of the concept of inflation, which “says that the very early universe expanded extraordinarily quickly for a minuscule fraction of a second—increasing in size by a factor of about 100 trillion trillion in about a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second—then resumed expanding more slowly…. According to inflation, the universe is unable to escape “eternal inflation”: as inflation ends in one part of the universe, it continues in others, and “bubbles” of noninflating universe continually appear in the inflating region. We live in one of these bubbles; other bubbles would be their own universes, cut off from all others, and each might have its own laws of physics and assortment of fundamental particles. And because inflation is eternal, there would be an infinity of these bubbles—an infinite multiverse of inflation. String theory, meanwhile, doesn’t describe a single universe but instead describes a “string landscape,” a phenomenally huge number of possible universes—10^500 or more.”

Another possible interpretation is Information Theory. “If the wave function is information of some sort, rather than being a physical object, then many of the puzzles at the heart of quantum physics seem to melt away. In particular, the measurement problem seems much easier to explain if the wave function is information—your information changes when you make a measurement, so it’s no surprise that wave functions change dramatically when measurements occur…. [However] information-based interpretations of quantum physics ran the risk of collapsing into solipsism as well. If the information that the wave function represented was your information, what makes you so special?”

A final quantum interpretation is Spontaneous-Collapse Theory, which “manages to leave most of the predictions of standard quantum physics intact, while altering them enough to solve the measurement problem…. In Spontaneous-Collapse Theory, the quantum wave function is real, but it doesn’t obey the Schrodinger equation perfectly. Instead, sometimes the wave function collapses. But this collapse has nothing to do with observation or measurement—the collapse happens entirely at random, for no reason at all, whether or not anyone is looking…. Though a single-particle wave function might not collapse on average until a billion years have passed, the solid objects of our everyday lives…. are generally composed of at least 10 million billion billion individual particles. If each one of those particles’ wave functions is compulsively pulling the handle of its own slot machine, then, on average, at least one of them will hit the collapse jackpot every millionth of a second. But because the particles…. are all continually interacting with each other, they’re all entangled—which means they all share a single wave function…. As Bell put it, in Spontaneous-Collapse Theory, Schrodinger’s cat “is not both dead and alive for more than a split second.””

Quantum physics has enormous predictive power in the real world. The equations have yielded amazing advancements in science and technology. Therefore, it somewhat amazing that its basic foundations are still in dispute. Most physicists today believe in the Copenhagen interpretation. In graduate programs it is taught that Bohr was right and Einstein wrong. However, dissent has also grown. Today, the multi-worlds interpretation has garnered a few famous adherents, especially among those who still work specifically on the foundations of quantum theory. Perhaps one day a true consensus will truly develop.

“Reasons and Persons” by Derek Parfit

This is one dense book of philosophy. It has many thought experiments and digressions that make it more bearable, but each page (and almost every sentence) has to be pondered over and reread to get the full depth of Parfit’s arguments. The beauty of this book is that it makes you reexamine your most cherished and basic beliefs. It makes you question the very essence of the Self and what makes you you. 

Parfit argues that humans would benefit from a new way of seeing the world. “Our reasons for acting should become more impersonal.” When viewing our own actions and weighing their morality it is often not enough to look at their effects in isolation. “It is true, of the act of each, that its effects on others are trivial or imperceptible. We mistakenly believe that, because this is true, the effects of our acts cannot make them wrong. But, though each act has trivial effects, it is often true that we together impose great harm on ourselves or others.” Actions often have imperceptible harms and benefits. It is better to be a rational altruist, who views it as irrelevant whether their acts perceptibly harm another.

Another area in which it behooves humans to be more impersonal is in relationships to their own children, family, and friends. “If we follow this impersonal principle, and give no priority to our own children, this will be better for all our children. Impersonality is again better, even in personal terms.”

Parfit considers effects logically and with numeracy. He takes into account probability and risk. “When the stakes are very high, no chance, however small, should be ignored. The same is true when each chance will be taken very many times.”

Parfit believes human morality should accept the Critical Present-aim Theory. “On this theory, the fundamental unit is not the agent throughout his whole life, but the agent at the time of acting. Though CP denies the supreme importance of self-interest through time, and of a person’s whole life, it is not impersonal. CP claims that what is rational for me to do now depends on what I now want, or value, or believe. This claim gives more importance to each person’s particular values or beliefs.” The reason this makes more sense to Parfit than a self-interest belief, which takes account of a person’s values throughout his life, is Parfit’s views on the nature of the Self. “We cannot explain the unity of a person’s life by claiming that the experiences in this life are all had by this person. We can explain this unity only by describing the various relations that hold between these different experiences, and their relations to a particular brain. We could therefore describe a person’s life in an impersonal way, which does not claim that this person exists…. Persons are not, as we mistakenly believe, fundamental.”

Parfit’s views on personhood do not imply a dismissal of the subjective world. “What are called subjective truths need not involve any subject of experiences. A particular thought may be self-referring. It may be the thought that this particular thought, even if exactly similar to other thoughts that are thought, is still this particular thought—or this particular thinking of this thought. This thought is an impersonal but subjective truth.”

However, Parfit denies the conception of the Further Fact of something like a Cartesian soul, ego, or any other type of mind/body dualism. “On the Reductionist View that I defend, persons exist. And a person is distinct from his brain and body, and his experiences. But persons are not separately existing entities. The existence of a person, during any period, just consists in the existence of his brain and body, and the thinking of his thoughts, and the doing of his deeds, and the occurrence of many other physical and mental events…. Personal identity just involves physical and psychological continuity. As I argued, both of these can be described in an impersonal way. These two kinds of continuity can be described without claiming that experiences are had by a person.”

Parfit also ruminates on how the ever-changing Self can affect love. “It may be clear to some couple that they love each other. But if they ask whether they are still in love with each other, they may find this question perplexing. It may still seem to them that they are in love, yet their behaviour towards each other, and their feelings in each other’s presence, may seem not to bear this out. If they distinguished between successive selves, their perplexity might be resolved. They might see that they love each other, and are in love with each other’s earlier self.” In fact, Parfit later suggests, “we can love, and believe we are committed to, someone who is dead. And the object of such love and commitment may be, not someone who is dead, but some living person’s earlier self.” This can be true because “we may regard some events within a person’s life as, in certain ways, like birth or death. Not in all ways, for beyond these events the person has earlier or later selves. But it may be only one out of the series of selves which is the object of some of our emotions, and to which we apply some of our principles.”

This view of the Self leads to Parfit’s views on morality and responsibility. “We no longer have the right to do whatever we like, when we affect only ourselves. It is wrong to impose upon ourselves, for no good reason, great harm…. These claims again give less importance both to the unity of each life and to the boundaries between lives…. I believe that what matters is Relation R, psychological continuity and/or connectedness…. This is what matters and the physical continuity does not matter…. On the Reductionist view, the unity of our lives is a matter of degree, and is something that we can affect.” We can affect this through the process of keeping a connectedness with our former selves as we age in our continual bodily process. “I want my life to have certain kinds of overall unity. I do not want it to be very episodic, with continual fluctuations in my desires and concerns. Such fluctuations are compatible with full psychological continuity, but they would reduce psychological connectedness.”

Parfit believes “that Relation R— continuity and connectedness— gives us a reason to be specially concerned about our own futures. This reason may not be as strong as the reason that would be provided by the Further Fact. And, because psychological connectedness is a matter of degree, we should reject the claim that it must be irrational to care less about some parts of our future.” However, Relation R, rather than the Further Fact, “makes me care less about my own future, and the fact that I shall die. In comparison, I now care more about the lives of others.” Parfit continues on death, “I believe that we ought not to be biased towards the future. This belief does not beg the question about the rationality of this bias. On any plausible moral view, it would be better if we were all happier. This is the sense which, if we could, we ought not to be biased towards the future. In giving us this bias, Evolution denies us the best attitude to death.”

Parfit makes the case that morality is simply a means and not an end in itself. “Compare two people who are trying to relieve the suffering of others. The first person acts because he sympathizes with these people. He also believes that suffering is bad, and ought to be relieved. The second person acts because he wants to think of himself as someone who is morally good. Of these two people, the first seems to be better. But the first person has no thoughts about the goodness of acting morally, or the badness of wrongdoing. He is moved to act simply by his sympathy, and by his belief that, since suffering is bad, he ought to try to prevent it. This person seems to regard acting morally as a mere means. It is the second person who regards acting morally as a separate aim that is in itself good. Since the first person seems to be better, this supports the claim that acting morally is a mere means.”

Parfit suggests that two of our moral beliefs can often compete and yet neither is intrinsically wrong. “We may have a pluralist morality in which we believe that it would be better both if there was greater equality and if there was a greater sum of benefits. There may then be cases where greater equality would lower sum of benefits. Our two principles would here conflict. But there would be no inconsistency in our moral view. We would merely have to ask whether, given the details of the case, the gain in equality would be more or less important than the loss of benefits.”

In the last section of his book, Parfit tries to tie his morality into a unifying theory through sheer effort of reasoning. He admits he does not fully succeed. He discusses some major unresolved problems at length. I will skim over some without doing justice to any. 

One is the Non-Identity Problem. The Time-Dependence Claim states that “if any particular person had not been conceived when he was in fact conceived, it is in fact true that he would never have existed.” Parfit goes on to debate what then we, in the present, owe to future generations. “Since these future people’s lives will be worth living, and they would never have existed if we had chosen [otherwise, any choice we do make] is not only not worse for these people: it benefits them.” In the future, the same people will not exist based on whatever choice we choose in the present. Should we then conclude about how our actions might affect the future, “since it will be bad for no one, our choice cannot have a bad effect?”

On morality, Parfit argues “it becomes more plausible, when thinking morally, to focus less upon the person, the subject of experiences, and instead to focus more upon the experiences themselves…. We are right to ignore whether experiences come within the same or different lives…. When we are trying to relieve suffering, neither persons nor lives are the morally significant units…. Suffering is compensated if it comes within a life that is worth living. If it comes within a life that is not worth living, it is uncompensated…. It is always bad if there is more uncompensated suffering. To this badness there is no upper limit…. The badness of this suffering cannot be reduced by the fact that other people are happy…. [However,] when there is more suffering only because there are more lives lived that are worth living, this extra suffering does not make the outcome worse.”

Parfit discusses his Repugnant Conclusion: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.”

Parfit contrasts his Absurd Conclusion: “In one possible outcome, there would exist during some future century both some population on the Earth that is like the Earth’s present actual population, and an enormous number of other people, living on Earth-like planets that had become part of the Solar System. Nearly all of the people on these other planets would have a quality of life far above that enjoyed by most of the Earth’s actual population. In each ten billion of these other people, there would be one unfortunate person, with a disease that makes him suffer, and have a life that is not worth living.

In a second possible outcome, there would be the same enormous number of extra future people, with the same high quality of life for all except the unfortunate one in each ten billion. But this enormous number of extra future people would not all live in one future century. Each ten billion of these people would live in each of very many future centuries.

On our view, the first outcome would be very bad, much worse than if there were none of these extra future people. The second outcome would be very good. The first would be very bad and the second very good even though, in both outcomes, there would would be the very same number of extra future people, with the very same high quality of life for all except the unfortunate one in each ten billion….

This conclusion followed from the asymmetry in our claims about the value of quantity. We placed a limit on quantity’s positive value, within some period, but we placed no limit on its negative value. To avoid the Absurd Conclusion we must abandon this asymmetry.

We cannot plausibly place a limit on quantity’s negative value. It is always bad if there is uncompensated suffering, and this badness never declines. We must therefore remove the limits on quantity’s positive value. When we remove this limit, we need a new way to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion.”

Parfit concludes, “because we can easily affect the identities of future people, we face the Non-Identity Problem. To solve this problem we need a new theory about beneficence. This theory must also avoid the Repugnant and the Absurd Conclusions, and solve the Mere Addition Paradox.

Since I have not yet found this theory, these conclusions are unwelcome. They undermine our beliefs about our obligations to future generations…. I believe that, though I have so far failed, I or others could find the principle we need…. But, before we have found solutions, we ought to regret this conclusion. With more unsolved problems, we are further away from the Unified Theory. We are further away from the theory that resolves our disagreements, and that, because it achieves this aim, might deserve to be called the truth.”

“Fathers and Sons” by Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev’s novel takes place in the landscape of 19th century Russia, a place and time undergoing rapid change as enlightenment ideas flowed eastward from Europe and gradually began to affect the Russian landed gentry and intelligentsia  This novel is largely about the generational divide in these changing times. It was a time when the young were exerting themselves and the old felt their time had come and gone. New scientific and political ideas ruled the day. The serfs were now free and were paying rent on their newly granted lands. Masters bent over backwards to think of themselves as liberal and servants walked about with an air of self respect bordering on haughtiness. However, this novel is about even more than all of that. It turns on the universal nature of man, his eternal needs, the meaning of life, and on love itself. Turgenev was himself pulled in competing directions- not liberal enough for the reformers and dangerously free thinking for the conservative establishment. He sometimes tried to have it both ways, but firmly considered himself an enlightened mind. Belinsky was his mentor, friend, and inspiration. This novel successfully depicts the changing times in Russia, while doing credit to both the old guard and the new fashions of thinking, just like the author himself.

“The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues- Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo” by Plato

Is Plato’s Socrates fact or fiction? I suppose we will never know. The Socrates that emerges in Plato’s dialogues is far more wise than your average Joe. And he knows it. And he wants you to know it too. Or Plato does. We can never be sure. Whether it is bashing his Sophist enemies or smartly getting the best of an interlocutor, Socrates always comes off on top. He triumphs in a way that always makes his humbleness seem, if not insincere, a feigned modesty or, perhaps, a modest arrogance.

The dialogues start with the “Euthyphro” and the charges brought against Socrates by Meletus. “He says he knows how the youth are corrupted and who are their corrupters. I fancy that he must be a wise man, and seeing that I am anything but a wise man, he has found me out, and is going to accuse me of corrupting his young friends. And of this our mother the state is to be judge…. He says that I am a poet or maker of gods, and that I make new gods and deny the existence of old ones.” These were serious charges in the Athens of Socrates. The rest of the dialogue is back and forth on the nature of the gods and on the nature of piety. “The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved by the gods.” What is man’s relationship with his gods? “But where reverence is, there is fear.” And what is the point of sacrifice to those who already have it all? “I wish, however, that you would tell me what benefit accrues to the gods from our gifts. That they are givers of every good to us is clear; but how we can give any good thing to them in return is far from being equally clear. If they give everything and we give nothing, that must be an affair of business in which we have very greatly the advantage of them.”

In the “Apology” Socrates gets at the nature of truth. He begins by deriding his Sophist opponents. “Unless by the force of eloquence they mean the force of truth; for then I do indeed admit that I am eloquent. But in how different a way from theirs!” He opposes his own state of mind with his typical critic. “For he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know…. And so I go my way, obedient to the god, and make inquisition into the wisdom of any one, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; and if he is not wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise; and this occupation quite absorbs me.” Socrates next expounds on the good life. “A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong- acting the part of a good man or of a bad…. The greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue…. The life which is unexamined is not worth living.” On the nature of death Socrates says, “for this fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance?”

In the “Crito” Socrates begins by discussing popular opinion. “But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many? Good men, and they are the only persons who are worth considering, will think of these things truly as they happened.” Socrates urges restraint from the practice of taking an eye for an eye. “The greater the zeal the greater the evil…. And what of doing evil in return for evil, which is the morality of the many- is that just or not?…. Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him…. Now [I] depart in innocence, a sufferer and not a doer of evil; a victim, not of the laws, but of men.” 

In the “Phaedo” Socrates pontificates on the nature of the soul after death. “While we are in the body, and while the soul is mingled with this mass of evil, our desire will not be satisfied, and our desire is of the truth…. But when returning into herself she [our soul] reflects; then she passes into the realm of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her kindred, and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging. And this state of the soul is called wisdom?” Death releases one from the constraints of the body. “And is not philosophy the practice of death?… Each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, and engrosses her and makes her believe that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and ways, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure…. Let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who has cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him, and rather hurtful in their effects, and has followed after the pleasures of knowledge in this life; who has adorned the soul in her own proper jewels, which are temperance, and justice, and courage, and nobility, and truth- in these arrayed she is ready to go on her journey to the world below, when her time comes.”

“Ghost Fleet” by August Cole and P.W. Singer

This is an entertaining novel written by two “Washington-insider” foreign policy wonks. The quality of the prose is poor, but despite that I could not put the book down. The premise is that America is surprise-attacked by the Chinese PLA with the help of the Russians, of course. The book manages to avoid much hint of xenophobia, however. The strength of the book is in detailing how many new weapons systems and technological advances could be used both by the American military and our enemies in plausible scenarios. Perhaps the most fun part of the book are the chapters which describe an American insurgency that arises following a Chinese occupation of Oahu. While the parallels to the current insurgencies in Af/Pak and Iraq are not subtle at all, it still makes for contemplative thought.

“Houdini’s Box- The Art of Escape” by Adam Phillips

In this short book Phillips switches back and forth between chapters “analyzing” Harry Houdini and an unnamed male patient with a sexual fetish and commitment issues, while ruminating on life as continual escape. In the life always focused on escape there is a constant basic tension. “What we want is born of what we want to get away from.” Phillips also reminds that the act of escape is a verb- a doing. “Getting free was the adventure, not being free.” There are two parts to every successful escape- a beginning and an end or a before and an after, if you like. “A person running away from something, the psychoanalyst Michael Balint once remarked, is also running towards something else.” What we are running away from maybe more known to us than what we are running to. We may be more sure of that (and the why). “Phobias remind us, in all their unreasonable urgency and their frantic commitment to safety, just how fundamental a sense of our avoiding things is to our sense of ourselves…. It is as though if we can keep ourselves sufficiently busy escaping, we can forget that that is what we are doing. The opposite of fear, one could say, is choice.” Sometimes escape is the easiest option. Sometimes that is because it is no option at all. Whatever escape is, however, it is only a beginning. “One can escape into doubt about what one wants, or one can escape from doubt about what one wants.” Escape is the easy part. It is only then that one’s options truly begin. Phillips concludes by pondering the fate of Emily Dickinson. No one knows what she was escaping from. Her escape was inward, into seclusion- physically, emotionally, and intellectually. “There is, she seems to say, no freedom in the notion of escape; it merely reveals what the prison is really like.”

“A Horse Walks into a Bar” by David Grossman (translated by Jessica Cohen)

This book, written in Hebrew, won the Man Booker International Prize. It is an uncomfortably strange novel. There is tension in every word as the story slowly struggles to build. The very act of reading each page borders on a tedium that makes one squirm. The story takes place over the course of a single evening at a small town Israeli comedy club, with frequent flashbacks of snippets of the distant past, gradually revealed, which hint at a boding conclusion. The story is narrated by a retired judge, who has been invited to the club by the stand-up comic, a friend from his childhood whom he hasn’t spoken to in over fifty years. “In all my fleeting friendships with other boys there had been a sort of mutual anonymity that was comfortable and masculine, but with him…” The book progresses through the comedy routine, which skips from strange, to boring, to embarrassing, to laugh-out-loud funny before cycling back again. “Wait, you’re from the settlements? But then who’s left to beat up the Arabs? Just kidding! You know I’m kidding, right?” There are numerous jokes embedded in the narrative, yet the story is definitively more depressing than funny. It is unclear how much of this is Grossman’s intent, but he has clearly written the comic to be an awkwardly intriguing character who you cannot help but feel sorry and ashamed for at once. “That’s how this life turned out. Man plans; God fucks him.” There is an underlying mystery to the childhood friendship between the judge and the comic and so the reader continues through the painful tension of the stand up routine to find out just exactly how deep their bond really is.

“Some Trick” by Helen DeWitt

This is a collection of short stories. DeWitt’s stories are ostensibly unrelated, but many focus on the themes of writing, artistic creation and integrity, and the business side of art. Being DeWitt, she throws in more than a few references to philosophy, mathematics, and the classics, as well as inserting her biting wit often. She comments of one character, “he wore a suit because hacks must dig for dirt in a suit.” Philosophizing on death, she has another character pontificate, “Nobody thinks God actually died: they think it was never alive in the first place.” Another character comments on the Japanese aesthetic, “haiku- it is an art of subtraction, an art with a horror of the extraneous, but it’s not so much that it has a horror of the extraneous as that it avoids histrionics, Western art gives the impression by contrast of being saturated with sincerity.” Not many characters in this collection are likable. Many seem to be trying too hard. Most are pompous, pedantic, and/or money grubbing. A few are memorable in their outrageousness. The depictions of the creative world DeWitt chose to display in this collection are of a most unflattering light.