“Moby-Dick or The Whale” by Herman Melville

Even for most who have yet to read this novel, people know that it is about a whale. Melville takes massive deviations from his plot, which is, at heart, a whale hunting voyage, to digress on the anatomy and history of the sperm whale, the details of the construction and everyday mechanics of a whaling ship, the ethnicity, background, personalities, and responsibilities of its crew, the culture, history of warfare, and dietary habits of Polynesians, and much more. But in the end, this is a novel about one man, Captain Ahab, and his obsession with one white sperm whale, Moby Dick, who took his leg in battle on the high seas.

The novel is told by Ishmael, a former merchant marine, who is on his maiden whaling voyage. “They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though…. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!”

Most American whaling ships, in Melville’s time, launched their multi-years voyages from Nantucket. “Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and rests on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.”

Melville stressed that the whaleman was born from particular stock. “And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm richer.” Melville describes Ahab’s ship in the midst of its hellish journey, “Then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.” It is not until the last thirty pages of the novel that the Pequod, finally, gives chase to Moby Dick, “They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltlessness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.”

“A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs that Made our Brains” by Max S. Bennett

Bennett explicitly states at the beginning of this book that his discussion only details the path to intelligence that humans, specifically, took through the evolutionary process. That said, in his explanations, he references the commonalities that primates, mammals, vertebrates, and multi-celled creatures, etc shared with human development, when appropriate. “Breakthrough #1 was steering: the breakthrough of navigating by categorizing stimuli into good and bad, and turning toward good things and away from bad things. Six hundred million years ago, radially symmetric neuron-enabled coral-like animals reformed into animals with a bilateral body. These bilateral body plans simplified navigational decisions into binary turning choices….

Breakthrough #2 was reinforcing: the breakthrough of learning to repeat behaviors that historically have led to positive valence and inhibit behaviors that have led to negative valence…. Brains formed into the basic template of all modern vertebrates: the cortex to recognize patterns and build spatial maps and the basal ganglia to learn by trial and error. And both were built on top of the more ancient vestiges of valence machinery housed in the hypothalamus…. While trial and error does not explain all of animal learning, it undergirds a surprisingly large portion of it…. To solve the temporal credit assignment problem, brains must reinforce behaviors based on changes in predicted future rewards, not actual rewards. This is why animals get addicted to dopamine-releasing behaviors despite it not being pleasurable, and this is why dopamine responses quickly shift their activations to the moments when animals predict upcoming reward and away from rewards themselves…. Both disappointment and relief are emergent properties of a brain designed to learn by predicting future rewards…. In the brain, the result was the vertebrate cortex, which somehow recognizes patterns without supervision, somehow accurately discriminates overlapping patterns and generalizes patterns to new experiences, somehow continually learns patterns without suffering from catastrophic forgetting, and somehow recognizes patterns despite large variance in its input…. It is also not a coincidence that pattern recognition and reinforcement learning evolved simultaneously in evolution….

Breakthrough #3 was simulating: the breakthrough of mentally simulating stimuli and actions…. [The] neocortex enabled animals to internally render a simulation of reality. This enabled them to vicariously show the basal ganglia what to do before the animal actually did anything. This was learning by imagining. These animals developed the ability to plan. This enabled these small mammals to re-render past events (episodic memory) and consider alternative past choices (counterfactual learning)…. If you have a rich enough inner model of the external world, you can explore that world in your mind and predict the consequences of actions you have never taken…. It is when the simulation in your neocortex becomes decoupled from the real external world around you—when it imagines things that are not there—that its power becomes most evident…. Habits are automated actions triggered by stimuli directly (they are model-free). They are behaviors controlled directly by the basal ganglia. They are the way mammalian brains save time and energy, avoiding unnecessarily engaging in simulation and planning…. Humans and, indeed, all mammals (and some other animals that independently evolved simulation) sometimes pause to simulate their options (model-based, goal-driven, system 2) and sometimes act automatically (model-free, habitual, system 1)….

Breakthrough #4 was mentalizing: the breakthrough of modeling ones own mind…. This in effect, meant that these primates could simulate not only actions and stimuli (like early mammals), but also their own mental states with differing intent and knowledge…. The bigger the neocortex of a primate, the bigger its social group…. Animals who fell into the strategy of group living evolved tools to resolve disputes while minimizing the energetic cost of such disputes. This led to the development of mechanisms to signal strength and submission without having to actually engage in a physical altercation…. Understanding the minds of others requires understanding not only their intentions but also their knowledge…. The best evidence for social projection theory is the fact that tasks that require understanding yourself and tasks that require understanding others both activate and require the same uniquely primate neural structures…. When a primate watches another primate do an action. its premotor cortex often mirrors the actions it is observing…. Teaching requires understanding what another mind does not know and what demonstrations would help manipulate another mind’s knowledge in the correct way…. Understanding the intentions of movements is essential for observational learning to work; it enables us to filter out extraneous movements and extract the essence of a skill…. Both theory of mind and anticipating future needs are present, even in a primitive form, in primates, but not in many other mammals….

Breakthrough #5 was speaking: the breakthrough of naming and grammar, of tethering our inner simulations together to enable the accumulation of thoughts across generations…. First, humans evolved bigger brains…. Second, humans became more specialized within their groups…. Third, population sizes expanded…. And fourth, most recent and most important, we invented writing. Writing allows humans to have a collective memory of ideas that can be downloaded at will and that contain effectively an infinite corpus of knowledge…. We synchronize our inner simulations, turning human cultures into a kind of meta-life-form whose consciousness is instantiated within the persistent ideas and thoughts flowing through millions of human brains over generations…. The emergence from language was as monumental an event as the emergence of the first self-replicating DNA molecules. Language transformed the human brain from an ephemeral organ to an eternal medium of accumulating inventions.”

“An Experiment in Criticism” by C.S. Lewis

Lewis pontificates on the art of reading well. “The first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement an furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before…. Scenes and characters from books provide them with a sort of iconography by which they interpret or sum up their own experience.”

Lewis steps back to describe what makes a reader a good reader. “The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way…. The distinction can hardly be better expressed than by saying that the many use art and the few receive it…. We must never assume that we know exactly what is happening when anyone else reads a book…. No novel will deceive the best type of reader. He never mistakes art either for life or for philosophy. He can enter, while he reads, into each author’s point of view without either accepting or rejecting it, suspending when necessary is disbelief and (what is harder) his belief…. Every episode, explanation, description, dialogue—ideally every sentence—must be pleasurable and interesting for its own sake…. It is very natural that when we have gone through the ordered movements which a great play or narrative excites in us—when we have danced that dance or enacted that ritual or submitted to that pattern—it should suggest to us many interesting reflections…. But we had better not feather on them the philosophical or ethical use we make of it.” Lewis concludes, “And if it is worth while listening or reading at all, is is often worth doing attentively.”

“Open Socrates” by Agnes Callard

Callard begins by describing what she calls “untimely questions.” These are questions whose presumed answers we take as a given and base how we run our lives upon these suppositions. These are questions we do not want asked and ruminated over. “When we settle on answers to the central questions of our lives without ever having opened up those questions for inquiry, that is a recipe for wavering. A mind tasked only with thinking its way through the next fifteen minutes is likely to find itself acting inconsistently.” Callard begins by quoting Socrates, himself, ““I go back and forth about all this—plainly because I don’t know.” What causes Socrates to waiver is his failure to have inquired sufficiently…. Socrates thinks that his circumstances call for inquiry, whereas his interlocutors are inclined to cut off the inquiry and move on with their lives. As Socrates sees it, by preemptively closing the questions, they consign themselves to a lifetime of wavering.”

Socrates attempts to answer these foundational questions by pausing for a minute and not assuming anything. This is something the typical person cannot do. We cannot do this because the answers to these questions are intertwined with how we already live our lives. “We cannot “step back” to a detached position from which having no answer at all is permissible: questions and answer are magnetically attracted to one another, and the space for thought is eliminated.” Socrates attempts to answer these questions through dialogue. “Each of his conversations is a high-wire act in which Socrates manages to sustain an inquiry into the very question his interlocutor is least likely to tolerate. These are untimely questions.”

What is Socrates’ method? Socrates needs dialogue to unearth the answers to these untimely questions. “At first, Socrates’ interlocutors often conflate the activity of defining the concept in question with that of showing how it applies to and affirms their own behavior…. They first feel that the questions are so straightforward as to hardly deserve consideration, and then give “answers” that amount to performative self-affirmations…. People need to approve of the choices that they are, at that very moment, making. Socrates’ questions pinpoint beliefs the person needs to have…. A belief that one needs to have is a belief that one is acting on…. I don't pause to consider how an action should be performed when I am already performing that action…. The relevant belief is already operational…. The most interesting and most elusive questions will be the ones whose answers we must give at every moment of our lives, for their whole duration…. Our load-bearing answers to untimely questions tend to give rise to predictions that specify what needs to be true in the future in order for my answer to guide my action in the present…. When something matters to our ability to navigate our lives, we need to have a belief about what will happen, because we make use of that belief, in the activity of living.”

Furthermore, Callard stresses, Socrates is concerned, firstly and lastly, with defining the terms of the debate. Correct and complete definition is paramount, “Socrates is always telling his interlocutors to treat what he is saying as a question about what X is, not as a problem about how to find an X. He’ll instruct them not to break X into pieces, or not to simply give an example of X…. Socrates sometimes speaks of the Form of Justice, or the Form of Piety, or the Form of whatever X he and his interlocutor are examining. “The Form of X” simply refers to the version of X that you must have in mind so as to answer the question “What is X?” This is why “The Form of X” is synonymous with “X itself” or “the essence of X.”… The Form of X is X, considered as a question to be answered, rather than as a problem to be solved.… A Socratic definition… is the endpoint, the quarry.”

Finally, Callard stresses what makes Socrates unique. “Socrates’ identification of the quest to be a good person with a quest for knowledge underlies the distinctively Socratic denial that anyone ever acts against their better judgment…. If you actually knew what you should do, you would do it. So long as you don’t know, holds Socrates, the proper ethical attitude is an inquisitive one.”