Wit’s Soul: Brevity

Die Kürze des Witzes wäre also  wie die des Traumes,  eine notwendige Begleiterscheinung  der  in beiden vorkommenden  Verdichtungen.

-- Dr. S. Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zm Unbewussten (1905 ff)

A Puzzler

As you ponder your personal relation to Appearance and Reality,

ask yourself  this simple yet probing question:

“Am I in a German  book ??”

Cf. an online comment by a reader, during the 2015 Merkelmanic Flüchtlingsfiasko:

Ich habe das Gefühl  im falschen Film zu sein

.

w-w-w-w-W-AK-ing

(Saturday morning,  late-lying abed,
 head full of cobwebs…)

Logy  like a   pot of  honey

slowly  seek  release

from        layer upon   layer   of

dream - drenched     sleep …

Fire/Flies

Fire    flies,

live    light;

flit and flicker

in the night.

Sleep   time

kiss and hug --

dream about

the lightning bug.

West-Easterly Divan (I)

Als ich auf dem Euphrat schiffte,

Streifte sich der goldne Ring

Fingerab in Wasserklüfte,

Den ich jüngst von dir empfing.

Also träumt' ich. Morgenröte

Blitzt ins Auge durch den Baum.

Sag', Poete! sag', Prophete!

Was bedeutet dieser Traum?

The indispensable link

While gliding  over glistening silver river,

Lo! that ring of gold  that you me gave

slid down, slid out, slid off  my frozen finger,

and swam, and sank, to seek  a watery grave.

Now strikes the sun  through leaves on boughs low-leaning,

and wakes me, still adrift  upon the stream.

Ho! Poet, say!  O Prophet,  speak thy meaning:

What means indeed, to me, this drifting dream ??

(Aus dem Deutschen Goethes, aus dem Deutschen von Hammer-Purgstall, aus dem Persischen von Hafis)

Intermediate Oneirics

Q: Who’s in charge of Dreamland?

A: Mister Sleepy.

Q: Where do your dreams go  when you wake?

A:  They are wrapped very gently

  in a blue soft cloth,

  and tenderly laid

  into baskets of teak.

Q: Are dreams true?

A: Is anything else?

dr(eamr)emembered

Fragments, fished up from m

m

memory …

“… fighting a strong rearguard action ….

But on May 27, the King of the Penguins

asked the Germans   for an armistice …”

Awaking; awake;

I shake

my dream(dis/misre)membered

head.

So it had seemed but --

I know that can’t be right!

The Penguins would never surrender !!

~

For more  on the mighty Penguin King,
click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/03/exciting-story.html


 

Dream Joke (Joke Dream)

Die Beziehung des Witzes zum Traum:

Pataphysischer Teil

A Scotsman, a priest, and a rabbi,

walk into a bar.

(and somehow, in some sense, I am that rabbi -- so clothed on the instant, like Woody Allen in that Thanksgiving scene)

Only now, the priest is (at the same time) a polar bear.

The bartender, clearly concerned, leans forward and murmurs:

“Why the long face?”

[χορός : What happened to the Scotsman?

 Dreamer:  I -- oh.  Was there a Scotsman?]

“Desolation Row” -- Norwegian version

Bob Dylan’s legendary concert in Oslo,  15 October 1965, offered an early version of the classic ballad “Desolation Row” -- in Norwegian! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxWYEw4prQ

Note -- This is not a cover!  Even though he is singing in what is obviously a Scandinavian language, fans will still easily recognize the peculiar phrasing and inflections of the Midwest master.

This is the first time he is known to have sung in the heritage language of the Vikings (to whom Robert Zimmerman is related on his mother’s side) -- or indeed, in any Germanic language other than English.

Dylan in Oslo

Mor, gi meg solen!

So -- enjoy!

And note:  All proceeds from this concert, go towards the charity,   “Save the Gefillte Fish”.

You may also enjoy this version of “Desolation Row”, sung by Dylan in a concert at Gallaudet University  in American Sign Language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWq_sOMoq9w

As for his little-known Tel Aviv concert in Hebrew, we must leave this for another time;  but a (grainy) video can be viewed here:

            געפֿילטע פֿיש

[Note:  Hebrew is written from right to left, but read from left to right.  Or is it the other way around?  Anyhow, apologies if my text-editor mangled things during the copy-and-paste process.    Me I haven’t a clue -- those meaningless squiggles are Greek to me.]

~

I studied Old Norse at Berkeley (with Madison Beeler, a gentle old man;  he bequeathed me his complete Grimm’s Wörterbuch when he retired, though I proved unworthy as a bailee).  That sturdy Viking tongue has changed as little, in the past thousand years, as any language on earth.  Accordingly, I can more or less read modern Icelandic.

Norwegian is a different kettle of kippers, however.  Even so, though I am not expert here, it does appear to my unpracticed ear that Mr Dylan (or his Norwegian lyricist) has taken certain liberties with the text.   The whole thing seems to have come out rather a tergo, if you catch my drift.  For, with all due attention to the disparity between the eastern and the western dialects of Norway, the weakening of strong verbs over time, and the Bokmål/Nynorsk/Riksmål/Høgnorsk tetraglossia, what he seems to be singing is:

Paul is dead

dead dead dead

deader than deader than

deader than death itself --

done-for, doomed, down, deceased,
dousing the daisies,

displacing the dandelions,

departed in demise.

O save the gefillte,

the poor dear gefillte,

for pity’s sake:

Save the Gefillte Fish!

~

“Desolation Row” is an affecting song, in a hypnotic sort of way;  but it contains (among many gems) some of the worst lyrics that Dylan ever wrote:  which is to say, the worst that anyone ever wrote.   Couplets like

Einstein disguised as Robin Hood / with his memories in a trunk,

passed this way an hour ago / with his friend, some jealous monk.

tells you nothing of value, either about the father of Relativity, or the hero of the greenwood, or monasticism.    And the further observation, that the celebrated physicist “went off sniffing drainpipes, and reciting the alphabet”,  has little competition for the Bulwer-Lytton Award ™  (a contest actually unfair to Mr. Bulwer-Lytton, who never wrote anything as bad as that).

The Norwegian lyrics are in some ways preferable.

Even so, his delivery is (as ever, in the early/middle period) exquisite.  In the couplet above, the final word of each line  receives is articulated with an aspirated final -k, perfectly attuned to his sardonic mode.   This phonetic polemic power simply deserves a better excipient (classically, in “Positively 4^th Street”).

In the same song, he uses that same word-final plosive to good effect  in the better couplet

I received your letter yesterday,  about the time the doorknob b-broke-hh.

When you asked me how I was doing -- was that some kind of j-joke-hh.

Simply  bare on the page,  that may be  unimpressive;   but his delivery evokes, from that,
a poignancy
impossible to imagine,
unless you have   (suffering, clutching)
heard it.

~

Hmm.  This wonderful nice post has received remarkably few page-views.  Can it possibly be because people think I might just be having them on?   Or is it rather that it features tew few newd pixxx?  Well that is easily remedied!

Icelandic beauty Aurelia Delvaukisdottir

(Ah, nice.  The number of pageviews just doubled.

There’s a lesson in this …)

Dylan’s intonation in this song is by no means unrelievedly sardonic (and here I speak of the album version, as well as bootleg performances of the time, rather than the Norwegian, which instead is characterized by a certain je ne sais quelle mélancolie du nord -- those endless summer days, those long winter nights), but can be, where the lyrics warrant it, quite tender.

~

The above was mostly satire -- or rather, sotie:  having fun with something, not making fun of it.  All in fun;  no harm done.

Yet let us dig down another layer.

This is a strange and slippery business, these backwards soundtracks.   Very few recordings could be illuminated (let alone improved) by this.   Those that admit it, must be (hypothesis here) hypnotic to begin with.   That is, the delivery and the lyrics  must already proceed  from the land of dreams.  The reversal -- rerouting, from the Gates of Ivory, to the Gates of Horn.

We have previously highlighted the reversed version of “Rain” .  Here, the fit is perfect.   The original was already so “aturdido”, that the two are simply duals of each other.  With equal justice, you might say that the album recording  was a reversed version of this one.  (In mathematics, neither dual is privileged w.r.t. the other.)

~

And noch another layer, now:
wir möchten, in des Wiener Nervenarzt Gesellschaft,  etwas weiter hinunterwühlen.   
Of all unexpected things, that satirically-intended photograph above of Mlle. Aurélie Delvaux,  has sparked an insight.   It has to do with duality,  and reversal.

The fascination of that image  presents, upon further reflection, a puzzle.  And puzzles ask to be fiddled with, turned this way and that, and  if possible  taken apart.

For the normally constituted observer, the nates are devoid of interest;  the star of the show, apud virum -- the main course, so far -- hangs (or, circumstances being favorable, stands) in front.

Yet the homologous spot chez la femelle, seems to be somehow lacking something;  in certain stages of arrested development, the attention then swings wildly, to the rear.  The latter (dull flesh, of no procreative power) thus receives the cathexis that, by rights, should settle vorne. 

~

By the time  “Desolation Row” debuted, I was as much a Dylan fan, as the little teeny-tweeny girls (my future bride among them) were Beatles fans.   I had my acoustic guitar, and a harmonica in a holder;  much as, in 1956, I’d had a coonskin cap.  So when I say now that lines like “Einstein disguised” etc. are pretty random, versteht sich:  when the album came out, in 1965, I hearkened to it, every word, with the same intensity as Orphée listening to  “L’oiseau chante … avec ses doigts”.  And the lyrics of that song marked my own  for a time, for better or worse:  as, this poem,

            Mardi Gras

which sprang from the brow of “Desolation Row”, with lyrics like:

They’re selling postcards of the hanging;

they’re painting the passports brown.

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors;

the circus is in town.

~

Okay, all satire aside:  What is Desolation Row, exactly?  It is nothing so simple as an Unhappy Place.

Heard superficially, “Desolation Row” sounds like a bummer, a place you’d want to escape from if bad luck landed you there -- something like Cleveland.   But listen to the lyrics.

First, for those outside, it is a Strange Attractor:

And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah’s great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row

Next,  some people voluntarily go there -- indeed, “escape”:  not from it, but to it:

And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls
“Get Outa Here If You Don’t Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row”

And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

And in the final stanza of the song -- one of his finest lyrics -- Dylan makes plain that, if you do not understand the meaning and the milieu of Desolation Row,  you are not on his wavelength, and attempts at communication are pointless:

Right now  -- I can’t - réad tóo góod --
Don’t send me no more - letters, -- no-o-o …

Not unless // you mail them from :

Deh-soh-la-tion -- Row.

Lyrically, this hearks back to that immortal ballad, Birmingham Jail:

Write me a let-ter / send it by mail,

send it in care  of / the Birmingham jail.

I well understand what Dylan is talking about in this song -- I sought to go there myself, back in the sixties, when I would suck-down a Camel while listening to “Visions of Johanna”.  Laus deo, that much is now behind me.

Desolation Row is like Hell as depicted by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce (unloved, but clung-to by its miserable inhabitants), or like the neurosis of a patient whose epinosic gain precludes cure by analysis.

Orthoëpy of the Day: “regulatory”

The adjective regulatory is a ho-hum word, which we Americans pronounce REG-yu-la-tor-ee, with the stress-pattern of the underlying verb, REG-yu-late.

But in England, it is often pronounced reg-yu-LAY-tor-ee, with stress on the third syllable, and a long vowel.   This strikes an American oddly, the first time you hear it, until you consider that it simply matches the pattern of the related noun, which both sides of the Atlantic pronounce as reg-yu-LAY-shun.

Well, you say tomahto, I say tomayto, right?   Not quite.

For such interplay of stress-patterns, which in English is characteristic only of Latinate loanwords, comes with its own internal logic.  Thus consider: 

    => How do you pronounce classificatory ? <=

An Englishman has no trouble with this:  klass-i-fi-KAY-tor-ee.   Whereas an American would have to resort to KLASS-i-fik-a-tor-ee, with no fewer than five unstressed syllables trailing limply along after the nucleus.   It sounds like a coffee-mug  falling downstairs.

In the case of classificatory,  British English exhibits a crisp double-dactyl;  American, a stress followed by a quinquisyllablic mumble.   But in the case of involuntarily, the roles are reversed:  American has six distinct syllables, either as a double-dactyl or a triple iamb ( in-vol-un-TAR-i-lee,  in-vol-un-TAR-i-lee, whereas British (as I just now heard the word pronounced by a master reader, Mr. Frederik Davidson), can have just four rather mooshed one:  in-VOL-un-tr’ly.

Cf. further, re “conflation of repeated sequences (haplology)”:

To judge from British habits of articulating words like temporary, veterinary,  there exist both hesitation and slurring  in attempts to pronounce both [r-initial] syllables;  then, in order to avoid this, speakers settle for /tεmpǝri, vεtɪnrɪ /,

-- M. L. Samuels, Linguistic Evolution, with special reference to English (1972), p. 17

Many Americans (self included) slur these otherwise, dropping not an r, but the schwa:  TEMP-rar-y, VET-rin-ar-y.

An example in which the (or a) British pronunciation is more boneless than the American:  qualitatively.   Americans have a secondary accent on the third syllable, so that the whole is almost a triple troche.   In the pronunciation used by professional reader Ralph Cosham, reading CSL's Letters to Malcolm, it began like the American version  with chief stress on the first syllable, but then petered out into a succession of unaccented schwas, like air going out of a tire.

For further pronunciation fun, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/pronunciation

~

A word about stress and vowel-tensing.

I have long fretted over the lack of convenient pronunciation for the very useful word classificatory.  There exists, to be sure, a rough synonym, easily pronounceable by a babe in arms:  taxonomic;  but this word, in the context of Chomskyan linguistics, is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of barf. 

Having heard somewhere (Prof. Ch. Fillmore, probably) that the Brits pronounce this word with penultimate stress, I somehow fell into pronouncing it in my mind as klass-i-fi-KAT-or-ee, with a short stressed vowel.  An error, with no basis in pattern.

Now things begin to get interesting.

The other night, I dreamt that a certain young man’s job prospects were

            “cheb-i-CHEE-vi-an”

The pronunciation, with a tensed stressed vowel, is the predictable result of adding the suffix -ian to the name Chebichev (CHEB-i-chev).   The idea, within the dream, was that his job prospects (respresentative of those of millennials generally) were uncertain, like the shapes in a famous painting by an artist of that name.  

Even at the time, that struck me as an unusual word.  Upon waking, I seized upon the dream as a counter-example to Freud’s assertion that the words we hear in dreams, we have heard before, or are a blend of several such.  Whereas here, the word is apparently not blended with anything, but rather has been subjected to a phonological rule, with rare results.

The painting in question -- a favorite of my brother’s when he was in high school, a reproduction of which hung on his wall after a family visit to MOMA, where the original is displayed -- is called “Hide and Seek”.  Only, the artist’s name is Chelichev (Tchelitchew), with an l instead of a b.  Chebichev was a mathematician,  with whose work I am only vaguely familiar.

FWIW.

~

Here we are not really concerned with the pronunciation of this or that specific word, nor with the amusing habits of our cousins across the pond (a description that can be used no matter which side of the pond  you yourself happen to hail from), but rather with the phonological economy of a language -- cf. Martinet’s classic L’Economie des changement phonétiques.   That is to say, our perspective is (in happy parallel to the modern tendency of differential geometry) no longer local, but global:  considering a linguistic-units fate  only in tandem with that of its fellows.  The textbook example being the Great Vowel Shift, in which the articulatory trapezoid, the Germanic vowel-whale, rolled slowly over in its sleep.

In the case of an American baffled by classificatory, or an Englishman tripped-up by involuntarily, we see the paradoxical  situation of a speaker left in the lurch by his own language.   Part of the explanation for the possibility of this, is that, to an extent, it is not our own language, not entirely:  a large unruly immigrant population of Graeco-Latin Fremdgut, along with borrowings of a greater or lesser residual flavor of Frenchness, have come to disturb the simply Saxon pattern:  mostly forestress, and transparent structural reasons when not;  vowel-alternations  minor.   There is no native analogue of the insanely contra-semantic and even contramorphological wordstress in psychology, where the least-important, merely-transitional syllable gets the stress (versus the natural psychic, or the less-than-ideal but still defensible psychological).    Even a simple French disyllable like garage  gets us all in a worrit:  Americans pronounce it to rhyme with massage or mirage, Englishmen to rhyme with carriage.   And when it  comes to a word like internecine -- all bets are off.

The fault by no means lies in any pointless, Basque-like complexity of the lending languages:  in Latin and in French, the stress-patterns are as easy as can be.  Yet somehow English managed to ingest these borrowings sideways, or wrong-way-round:  like that classic jest of third-grade playgrounds -- pull a pinch of skin out from either side of your neck; “What’s this?”; (kid says) “I dunno”; (you say) “A moron swallowing a pencil.”

French, by contrast, virtually never suffers so dramatic an orthoëpic quandary;   but then, it pays a larger metrical price, quite lacking the resources to construct something as stunning as “Sir Patrick Spens” or “Pied Beauty”.   To anyone whose blood still thrills  to the rhythms of our helmed and byrnied ancestors, such milksop codswallop  as the alexandrin  is near-beer at best.

~

A couple of further concrete examples.

Just now I happened upon a sentence in M.L. Samuels’ Linguistic Evolution (1972), that read:  “A comparison of three Dravidian languages has shown that simplificatory changes of phonology and grammar take place …”  (p. 108).

Now, the author teaches in Glasgow.  Were he American, or solicitous of American readers, he would have written simplifying or even simplificational -- the latter, though exactly as much a mouthful as simplificatory, is at least instantly clear in pronunciation.

[Update 11 May 2014]  Another example from Mr. Davidson (a.k.a. David Case), again from Bleak House:  "with his confirmatory cough", stressed còn-fir-MAY-tor-ee.

~

It has long been pointed out, that an extremely arcane writing-system like that of Chinese or Japanese, as opposed to a maximally transparent one like that of Spanish, reserves literacy for a kind of scribal priest-caste, and those beholden to it.  Certainly, the English spelling-system, which is rather a mess (though much closer to the Spanish end of the spectrum, than the Mandarin), presents burdens to whose would observe the niceties of orthography (less so to any who are content simply to read):  but all that is not pertinent to the problem noticed here.   Our bafflement at how to pronounce certain words, has little to do with the writing-system, nor with any mandarin impositions of any sort.  The fact is, words like confirmatory and classificatory lie already implicit in the language, for anyone who uses the words confirm/confirmation and classify/classification.   The the problem, how to pronounce these less-familiar derivata, is identical, whether you are analphabetic or an English professor.

(It does have a little something to do with the writing-system, however.  In Latin, (Classical) Arabic, and Spanish, you can tell from the spelling  which syllable is stressed: in the former cases, owing to certain simple syllabic rules;  in the last-named case, likewise save for certain exceptions, which however are called-out to the reader by an acute accent over the stressed vowel.)

Thus, only the other day, I put up a post (“Dylan Mystery Album”) which used one of my favorite words [Alert to logophiliacs:]  resipiscence.   Which I have come across in reading, and savored, yet have never heard pronounced.   And so, before publically using it (albeit not orally), I looked up the received pronunciation (fortunately, it turns out, there is only one), and was startled to learn that it differed from what I had always silently said to myself in my mind’s ear:   the approved pronunciation has main stress on the third syllable.

[Update July 2016]  Reading aloud one evening, my wife pronounced indefatigable as in-de-fa-TEEG-a-ble -- quite on the measure of British class-i-fi-CATE-or-ee.   I personally say in-de-FAT-ig-a-ble;  but that is morphosemantically opaque, whereas her version nicely brings out the notional relation to fatigue (with its French-derived oxytone).  Might this be another case where the Brits displace the accent?  But no, according to the dictionaries, no;  she came up with it on her own hook.

“Dylan Mystery Album”

For several years, mostly while I was in college, the most precious dream-theme was the “Dylan Mystery Album”:  in sleep, I would imagine some unreleased Dylan song, which would come as an ineffable revelation.  This motif was triggered, of course, by the “basement tapes” and various other pirated releases.  The closest actual item to these oneiric imaginings, was “Please, Crawl out your Window”, which is sufficiently strange even when completely awake.

Later, his career went on and on, evolving in a direction that no longer interested me, his springy voice gone.  He released album after album, most of which I never listened to.

But as the years go by, ever new material is released, including from that golden early period, which he later churlishly repudiated,  but which lives on as a nonpareil, for those of my generational cohort.  Such is the age we live in:  Nothing remains buried; everything gets posted on YouTube.  I fully expect  sometime soon  to witness the actual “I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him” speech, by Brutus, in the original Latin, recorded on-site at the time.

Anyhow -- Just stumbled on a bunch from the year of our Lord nineteen sixty-two -- when I was only twelve, and quite unaware of Dylan (nor could I have fathomed him then, had  by some chance  I heard).

Try this.

This is why we love the guy.

“Standing on the Highway”  (Not previously heard.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npzYWD7YtYU

“Fixing to Die”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLvLu_dsGyQ

A version of this was on his first commerically released album:  and that performance was vastly more powerful:  distilled, as it were, and concentrated, from innumerable previous performances  that most of us never heard.   This earlier version  thus constitutes a contribution to lyrical aetiology.

(Additionally, this version includes a verse  not included on the Columbia album.) 

(I’m stealin’ -- I’m stealin’ -- pretty mama doncha tell on me:

 I’m stealin’ back  to my   old-time  used-to-be …)

~

Oh my!  Just learned this:

On youtube it’s stupidly hard to find Bob Dylan songs, especially with all those cover version trying to catch you out. Turns out that in order to prevent Bob Dylan videos from being taken down, a few crafty buggers have been uploading his songs with one of his earlier stage names – ‘Elston Gunn’. I don’t know if this should count as a meme, but there seem to be an endless amount of videos with ‘Elston Gunn’ instead of ‘Bob Dylan’.

-- http://knowyourmeme.com/forums/meme-research/topics/18627-elston-gunn

As witness (“Percy’s Song”):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTZBeA139Rw

And (kind of terrible, actually) a guitarless version of "Positively 4th St.":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUA2Fod7nHc

With guitars this time, but even worse;  late Dylan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzBJ0362g4E


"It Ain't Me Babe".
Not as good as the soulful album version, but FWIW:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_sc9n5tX0w

OK ... Let's give some credit to the guys in suits, at corporate Columbia,
who selected from among (evidently) many possibilities,
such as should be consecrated to History,
on the albums.
By and large, they chose well.

~

"Desolation Row".
OTOH ...  I like the tempo on this *much more* (and the delivery as well, upon mature consideration) than the album version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yicGKHTOSKU
Nonetheless, it must be said, that this version is somehow 'posterior'.   It is most effective  for those of us who already (long ago) heard the original version, and memorized the lyrics (which are a bit less distinct here).  Also, additional harmonica work.  (Not especially memorable; but we savor His harmonica  as we recall each ... [redacted].)

For a Norwegian version of this classic song, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/06/desolation-row-norwegian-version.html


"Visions of Johanna".
Neither better nor worse than the "Blonde on Blonde" published version,
but personally I prefer it,
simply because I, too often, took in the official recording,
while smoking,
and self-pitying ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwM_VH8H4c0

Yipes! Another that's even better ... Amazing ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxH3ObIAr8o
Srsly ... I need to retire ... and take up smoking ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDHTJPGYuIE

~

Oh Lord!  1961 no less.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95N1rFtC7-E

[Zip to the very end of this, for a wonderful parable about East Orange, New Jersey.]

Dreams are a cheat.  I would awake from a “Mystery Album” episode, shaken, trembling and cherishing it:  but the lyrics and music had quite melted by morning.  And as for the deep inner Meaning … It had the feel of an epiphany, but the epiphany was empty.  It was like the ineffable insights of the stoned, which, upon resipiscence, if recalled at all, are revealed as silly and shabby.

Whereas these can be savored in complete lucidity.

My earliest memory (if it be real) is of climbing out of my crib, and plopping onto the floor.   One of these days (before I die), a video of the event  will appear on YouTube.

One can only conclude  to the imminence of The Rapture.

~

Quite an interesting concept, really, this "Elston Gunn".  Self-concealing, much like the "Traveling Wilburys".
We have, then:
Real name:  Robert Zimmerman.
Stage name (exoteric):  Bob Dylan.
Conundrum-inside-an-enigma name (esoteric):  Elston Gunn.
But for the real cognoscenti -- what?  Yet another level down ...

Eliminative materialism (expanded update)

…those bright and breezy Americans  who call themselves Behaviourists.  They declare with some warmth that there is really nothing in their minds, and that they only think with their muscles.

-- G.K. Chesterton,  Robert Louis Stevenson (1927)

Biology is only the Fascist substitute for sociology.

-- Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth (1940)

… that faulty inference  from the plausible view of the cognitive sovereignty of sense, to the absurd conclusion that explanatory models of human conduct must be in terms of elements similar to ‘sensation’ or ‘stimulus’.  The inference is quite fallacious, though an entire movement in psychology (Behaviourism) is based on the failure to see this.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p. 16

Abstract:   The psycholytic style of current neuroscience-invoking reductionism  is intellectually and philosophically unilluminating;   and the social and political effects to which it is often put  are morally debilitating.   Taking ever-more-microscopic tallies of the goings-on in neural tissues  is of interest only to a histologist.   The attempt to press such observations into service as solvents of long-standing noëtic questions  is unsuccessful, probably in principle so. 

As Freud put it in the first paragraph of his final summary of his own work, the Abriss der Psychoanalyse (1938), we know about the brain on one side, and consciousness on the other, but

Alles dazwischen ist uns unbekannt;  eine direkte Beziehung zwischen beiden Endpunkten  ist nicht gegeben.  Wenn sie bestünde, würde sie höchstens eine genaue Lokalisation der Bewusstseinsvorgänge liefern  und für deren Verständis  nichts leisten.

That is to say such correlations amount to a higher phrenology.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

[Prefatory note:  An earlier nineteenth-century forerunner]

Köhlerglaube der Wissenschaftler

In the course of the Materialismusstreit …, the German Darwinist Karl Vogt  published a widely read essay entitled Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft (1855), in which he tried  with cynical witticism  to dispense with the problem of the human soul [NB: and mind].  According to Vogt, thought is a secretion of the brain  just as the digestive juices are secretions of the stomach, bile a secretion of the liver, and urine a secretion of the kidneys.

-- Kurt Reinhardt, Germany: 2000 Years (1950, 2^nd edn. 1961), p. 594

By now, the man in the street has become acclimated to the notion of secretions, and is unlikely to be swayed by that account.  He will notice that, somehow, the liver never secretes anything but bile, the kidneys, urine;  whereas the brain ‘secretes’ such unexpected and unprecedented and mutually contradictory things as:  Catholicism, Communism, situation comedies, and the Urysohn Metrization Theorem.

But the underlying atheist-nihilist idea, that of wave-of-the-wand eliminativism (it does not even deserve the name of reductionism), whereby you eliminate the problem from consideration, rather than doing anything to actually solve it,  ever and again resurrects itself, morphing into a semblance of life, from some discarded afterbith.

~      ~      ~      ~      ~

[Herewith our original essay  from a couple of years ago]

We did not have to wait for the tribe of those laboratory nihilists known as neuroscientists, to behold an academic school dedicated to reducing free will and cogitation to the level of meat.  The behaviorists were there first.    And it is our great good fortune that we are spared the chore of actually reading and refuting their earlier and generally gratingly ill-written output, since their fifteen minutes have expired(*), the quietus marked by a famous and scathing review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, by Noam Chomsky, way back in 1959 (a good year -- aye, a vintage year).

 

Skinner himself, and others of his spawn, continued to “engage in writing behavior”.(**)   And like the dragon’s-teeth of Cadmus, the doctrine springs up ever anew, in this or that contorted form.

Maxfield Parrish:  Cadmus

[(*)  I spoke too soon.  Savor my groveling retraction here.]

[(**)  The phrase was made famous by a journalist who, to test the nature of asylum-based therapy in general  and involuntary commitment in particular, had himself commited, and immediately began acting perfectly normal, and telling the doctors he’d like to go home.  He kept a journal of his experiences.   This latter fact did not go unnoticed by the keenly observant psychiatric nurses, who wrote in his chart, “Patient engages in writing behavior.”  An immortal and dactylic line.]

Skinner, apart from his paid occupation of making life miserable for rats, is best known as the author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971 -- not such a good year).  The title echoes that of Jenseits von Gut und Böse,  by that other evil troll, Nietzsche:   beyond, not in the sense of uplift, but of, “Get O-o-o-vah-rit!” -- A similar bit of titular legerdemain (sugar-coated in the title, rat poison on the inside) was perpetrated by Patricia Churchland, in Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain (1986).  What is really being proposed there is not Unity, but Anschluss, with the mind playing the hapless role of Austria.

Professor Skinner, hard at work in the lab

Again, prior to contemporary neuroscientists, there were philosophers who ground much the same axe.   Wikipedia (s.v. “Self-refuting idea”), re eliminative materialism, speaks of identity theorists like the philosophers Boring and Smart, who “claim that ideas exist materially as patterns of neural structure and activity.”  Now, that is one unilluminating and bone-headed idea.  By which I mean, of course, no more than that it is an unilluminating and bone-headed pattern of neural structure and activity.  Owing possibly to an excess of calcium at one of the synapses.

And why, indeed, stop short at the level of the cells, themselves already doubtless epiphenomenal?  Take it right down to quantum mechanics!   Let some gaggle of labcoats come up with the Schrödinger equation for the Bible, and another for “Paradise Lost”, and show us how certain passages -- excuse us, certain Hermitian forms -- of the former, lead directly to the eigenkets of the latter.  Put literary critics  plumb out of work.
(Something more than just a joke:  Cf. entomologist/ultrareductionist Edward Wilson donning the robe of a Milton scholar here.)

-- A further word about this scenario of ideas as “patterns of neural structures and activity".  It really is little more than ye olde idea of Ideas as Pictures-in-the-head, but dressed up in a modern labcoat (the sort worn by actors playing doctors on TV); and this is one subterranean source of  plausibility of a doctrine that  on logical (and indeed theological) grounds  is a tissue of absurdity.

~

What gives the “thought is a physical pattern” account some specious plausibility, is our modern picture of vision:  which, to be sure, is vastly more complex than the everyman’s pre-theoretical account, whereby the vision of an apple is like a little apple in my eye.  (Compare, indeed, the etymology of the word pupil.)  -- Actually, the completely pre-theoretical account doesn’t even involve vision at all;  it’s just, “Behold! an apple!”  (or, holophrastically:  Gavagai!)

In that account, we begin with the beheld object.  

  (a)  It is, as a ding-an-sich, as hopelessly unknowable in its totality as a black hole;  yet like those reticent celestial bodies -- the veiled houris of the stellar harem -- by their corona ye may know them (that, and a bit of math).

  (b)  From this object -- let us take it to be specifically a coffee-cup, since we have proved the existence of these -- photons and phonons and perhaps even an occasional Higgs boson, bounce and boing and go-or-do-not-go through visual slits, in some inextricable and inexplicable quantum fashion, to wind up

  (c ) landing on, and lighting up, this or that spot on the retina.  From there,

  (d) ganglia shiver and synapses thrill, and eventually

  (e) the visual cortex receives various rude jolts, after which

  (f) the rest of the brain somehow sorts it all out, until finally

  (g) the mind says, “Aha!  There it is!  Time for a spot of java!”

Unfortunately, this comparatively simple scenario won’t do for the generality of ideation.  It would seem that, when these reductionist gentlemen contemplate an “Idea”, they go no farther than an analogue of (f) or at best (g), for an object of thought as simple as a coffee-cup (or, in their own case, their own endlessly contemplated navel) -- the ‘idea’ of one, rather than the image of one.  -- One is reminded of Hadamard’s plaint, in The Psychology of Mathematical Invention, that previous researchers into thought-processes had restricted themselves to the elementary thumb-sucking mental-motions of the Beoetians, which simply do not display the richness of thought-processes of research mathematicians, so that his own researches had to start from scratch.
(Similarly, generative linguistics would not have gotten far, had it never considered sentences more complex than "John is fat.")

For consider:

What the cognitive eliminativists are proposing, is not that a thought consists of some pattern of little electrochemical twitches and irritations plus ideation (the thinker contemplating the canvas of his own neuroprocesses, as it were);  their explicandum cannot involve the explicans.  No, it is really just -- splat -- that.

Now consider the following ideas:

  (a)  A topological space T is regular.

  (b)  T has a countable basis for its topology.

To each of these corresponds -- in Henry’s head -- a cortical panorama (A, B) not unlike a TV test-pattern plus static, or a Jackson Pollock painting on a bad day.

And consider that, as we all know by now, (a) and (b) imply

  (c)  T is metrizable.

which in turn duly corresponds to some porridge of pixels (C) on Henry's cortex.  Fine, we grant that.
But how  by all that is holy  do (A) and (B) imply (C)?  The moreso as Henry’s cortical idiosyncrasies  differ from those of Hector (A’, B’,C’), let alone those of the silicon-based mathematicians of the planet Gnorf:  who, whatever their physiological differences from ourselves, must reach exactly the same conclusion as did Urysohn, since that conclusion is, in fact, a fact (laid up in heaven, where Churchlands do not penetrate, and the worm corrupteth not).

[An attempt from an entirely different direction, to reduce the complexly interrelated richness of mathematics to triviality, by translating it into a non-mathematical world of discourse  entirely unsuited to it (in this case, the mushy one of metaphor), is  Where mathematics comes from:  How the embodied mind brings mathematics into being (2000), by   George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez.  You can tell already by the subtitle, that the authors are no Platonists.   I did coursework with George, briefly at Harvard and later at Berkeley, where at one point I TA’d for him;  so I shall not criticize him here, lest I fall into the crime of magistricide.   Yet I must sadly concur with the verdict of the reviewer, Terence Langendoen, in the March 2002 issue of the refereed journal Language.]

~     ~      ~

Ethicists should likewise soon be out of a job.  The latest in the public press:

The End of Evil?
Neuroscientists suggest there is no such thing.
Are they right? 

A word:  I have no quarrel at all with the reductionist program as propounded and practiced by, say, Steven Weinberg (who embraces the term).  The problem comes in with the eliminativists who do not really mean to explain things, but to explain them away.

For remarks on the ontology of attributes, and their vulnerability to the eliminativist attack, click here.

~     ~      ~

What tends to get eliminated, in these proceedings, are things like consciousness and free will -- features of which we had grown rather fond.   Their very familiarity (as “folk theory”), for these gentlemen,  somehow tells against them.  As though a good rule of thumb were, If the ancient Greeks believed it, it must be wrong.  An eternal verity gets rechristened a “stagnant theory”. 

(Extraordinary idea, that, in any case: that to be any good, a theory must, like a fashion-slut, annually change the length of her skirts.  By that measure, the truths of numbers known to Diaphantos must be positively mildewed.)

Here  phlogiston plays ever and again the useful role of whipping-boy.  (Indeed, given the continued prominence of this ethereal etwas in philosophical debate, it must count as one of the most fruitful scientific hypotheses ever.  If it didn’t not-exist, someone would have to uninvent it.)  

The line of reasoning, reduced to its essentials, runs:  Well if that thing turned out not to exist, maybe freedom and God and all that lot   are just illusions too.

One problem with this angle of attack is that there's more to physics than phlogiston.  Also on the roster of theoretic posits  we find:  acceleration, force, electromagnetism, atoms, protons …  Phlogiston went out on a limb, which broke;  atoms & co. went out on a limb, and so far it seems to have held.   The eliminativists are being rather choosy in what to highlight.

Another problem with their reasoning  is that it’s nonsense.   Shooting down this or that hypothesis of theoretical physics, or even the whole lot of them, is not at all the same thing as denying what every mother has been telling her children since the beginning of time.   We are rather more certain of our own consciousness and free will, than we are of protons.

Let us examine another favorite butt of their mirthless hilarity.  Your great-great-grandsires believed in God, and that the sun set in the west.  The more fools they!   We New Atheists proclaim triumphantly that the earth circles the sun, and not the other way about.  Therefore, everything else you believe is false as well.

But in point of fact, you haven’t got much further along by taking the sun as the rest-point of your dynamical system, than when you stood firm on the earth.  For now you may be held to depict a system in which the entire galaxy whirls lumbrously around the axis of a single, peripheral, faint star.

In reality, none of these choices of a reference frame intend the absurdities ascribed to them.   Each has its use for some purpose or other.  Grandpa was well within his rights, both cosmologically and theologically.

~     ~      ~

~   Commercial break  ~            

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwzOXzZWUik

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

All biochemists and molecular biologists today are ‘mechanical materialists’.

J. Maynard Smith & E. Szathmáry, The Origins of Life (1999), p. 11

Probably no harm in that, so long as the molecularists  stick to their last, and don't go sounding off in the Sunday supplements about matters that concern them not;  indeed, it would be more concerning, were they all Cantorian Realists, or Presbyterians.   But the day when all musicologists, or mathematicians, or literary critics, take mechanical materialism for their lodestar and touchstone, is the day when we shall cease to learn anything of interest about music, math, or literature.

~     ~      ~

 

We earlier glanced at the program of consilience, which (speaking somewhat informally) depicts the sciences stacking up one atop the other, like proverbial pancakes, while the life-giving maple syrup of shared method and ontology, seeping from one to the next, unites them.   (That summary, while not perfect, is both more concise and somewhat clearer than what you may glean from scattered passages in Wilson’s book.)  Eliminative materialism takes all this a step further:  the whole stack is squashed flatter than flat (again, the individual pancake has passed into legend for this very quality) into an inedible paste: the which, however, is declared to be the sole reality, things like syrup and pats of butter being just figments of your imagination (which itself does not exist).  Understandably, this philosophy was quite popular among the guards at Belsen-Belsen.

That may sound harsh, but truly, the often creepy frisson of the behaviorist/neuroscientific mindset does recall certain experiments during that unlamented Reich which were better left undone.  Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 19, on the founder of American Behaviorism:

Watson presented a baby with a white rat, and then clanged a hammer against an iron bar, alledgedly making the baby associate fear with fur.

Thus, to all our weightier indictments against Nominalism in all its forms, we add this slogan:   

“Behaviorists Hate Bunnies.”

(Our own favorite behaviorist, jolly Dr. Quine, does suffer from a certain lagomorphobia,  in his obsession with "undetached rabbit parts", documented here.)

Wilson pens a highly entertaining parable of the termite ethical code, extoling:

…the deep, saprophytic, basidiomycetic penetralia of the soil …. the sanctity of the physiological caste system; the evil of personal rights (the colony is ALL!); … the aesthetic pleasure of eating feces from nestmates’ anuses  after the shedding of our skins; and the ecstasy of cannibialism … (it is more blessed to be eaten than to eat).

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p.  148

This is jolly stuff, skillfully done; probably give Donald Trump a stiffie.  Yet one senses a sour note,  as the (“consilient”) goal of the eliminative materialists   is to provide a similar account of human morality, decency, caring, flights of fancy, love …. Ever again and inevitably, these proctoscopists return to the anus, the central life-ring (Lebenszirkel) of their Weltanschauung.

~     ~      ~

To be fair to the reductionist program, let us briefly consider a proposal narrated by Wilson, who is both a much more graceful writer  and a more congenial companion than Skinner or the Churchlands.

Wilson offers one worked-out example of  basically eliminative reduction (or ‘consilient’ explanation): from oneirology straight down to biochemistry.  Here is a sketch of the bad old days of Freud:

Mysticism and science meet in dreams.  … When we sleep, the ego releases its grip on the id…  Freud … -- to put it as kindly as possible -- guessed wrong.

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p. 74

Wilson is in fact a kind and temperate man; that mild rebuke is as strongly-worded as anything in the book.  (He is even able to discuss the Postmodernists without resorting to scatological invective, a task far beyond my own capacities.)

But now (p. 75) for the good news:

The competing and more modern hypothesis of the basic nature of dreaming  is the activation-synthesis model of biology.  … Sleep descends upon the brain when chemical nerve cell transmitters … such as norepinephrine and serotonin, decline in amount… Simultaneously a transmitter of a second kind, acetylcholine, rises in amount.  …

Etc., etc.; we skip to the exciting climax on the next page:

The electrical membrane activity, still mediated by acetylcholine at the nerve junctions, moves from the pons (the P of PGO), a bulbous mass of nerve centers located at the top of the brain stem, upward to the lower center of the brain mass, where it enteres the geniculate nuclei (G) of the thalamus, which are major switching centers in the visual neuronal pathways.  The PGO waves then pass on to the occipital cortex (O), at the rear of the brain, where integration of visual information takes place.

Voilà ! Any questions?  No?  We're done then.

Oh dear -- did I type all that up aright?  Was it not perhaps the serotonin that flows into the thingummy, thereby (de)activating the thalamo-geniculo-pataphysico reaction?  Well, no matter;  for you will notice that we have so far learned absolutely nothing about actual dreams.(*)

(*  Don’t misunderstand:  this is sound, painstaking work, and it is excellent that someone is doing it.  No doubt it will prove crucial to some hyperspecialists in the approriate microcompartment of biochemistry.  For the general man of science and letters, on the other hand, it is precisely as fascinating as the mysteries of the pancreas.)

This lacuna Wilson hastens to remedy by rushing in with his own broad-brush description, eclipsing that of that bungler Freud:

We fly through the air, swim in the deep sea, walk on a distant planet, converse with a long-dead parent … In dreams we are insane.  We wander across our limitless dreamscapes as madmen.

Hm.   Doesn’t ring a bell, either with my own experience or that of friends with whom I have discussed such things.    In my own dreams, I tend to be at work, or in a classroom, or (oddly) at some sprawling party on the grounds of a great country house.   No flying through the air;  more like, irksome difficulties catching the right bus.  But let that pass.   No doubt spending your days as a reductionist  means you must compensate with florid fantasies at night.

But the real killer is that last line.   It is, I believe, wildly and crucially false.   The real mind-set of the typical dreamer was captured perfectly by Louis Carroll:  Alice retains her level-headedness, while all around her are acting fantastically, and she rather taxes them for their behavior.  (A similar depiction occurs in the long-running comic strip, "The Strange World of Mr Mum".  The eponymous everyman wanders bemused through the strangest situations.)  What the dreamer beholds  may resemble the visions of psychotics:  yet the dreamer is not psychotic. In our dreams we remain our real selves:  we retain, in particular, our unbanishable morality, not doing in dreams what we would not do or at least fantasize doing in waking life. (Morality: a word anathema to some of these gentlemen -- though here Wilson himself is sound enough -- yet it survives the oneiric lysis, as it shall survive their nihilism.)  We remain perfectly rational, only…. just not at our best.   For instance, in dreams I often work out etymologies, or expound mathematical ideas.  These are without exception in error -- hey, happens to the best of us -- but that is what I do, I don’t imagine I’m a prophet, or a giant cockroach, or that everyone is out to get me, or what not.

Freud may not have nailed it, but you’ll learn more about actual dreaming from Die Traumdeutung than from this ultrareductionist stuff.

[Update]  I am currently re-reading Die Traumdeutung;  some actual reflections might follow.
Preliminary musings here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/appendix-to-appendix-on-oneiric.html
And now this;
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/die-traumdeutung-still-further-updated.html

~     ~      ~

That only somewhat facetious polemic brings me to another point.   While specialists of this or that stripe  may want to drill down to the last detail, what most of us require -- expressing this somewhat provocatively -- is an explanation that is as shallow as possible, in that it digs down only as far as it needs to, to clear things up a bit.  (Compare Quine's "Maxim of shallow analysis:  Where it doesn't itch, don't scratch.")  And even if you wind up doing a deep-dive yourself, what you intellectually retain is likely to be an explanatory skeleton. 

Thus, take mathematics.  When a proof is truly “irreducibly reductionist” (to coin a phrase), like that of the Four-Color Theorem,  where intermediate guiding Ideas, of general application, do not emerge, but everything is tediously and computationally broken down into a bad-infinity of special cases, mathematicians are disappointed and frustrated.   What we want ultimately is an agencement of Leading Ideas.  We might dutifully check the details of the proof, but these we shall probably not retain.

(Keynes, whose Treatise on Probability  brims with Leading Ideas, charmingly prefaces one particularly symbol-ridden chapter with absolution for any reader who wishes to skip it.  “We do it, to show that the thing can be done;  the exercise is more for the benefit of the writer, than the reader.” [Quoting from memory, so you might not be able to Google that.])

So, suppose we wish to know what launches birds or butterflies on their migrations.  What we hope to hear about is an account in terms of concepts antecedently familiar or at least learnable without too much fuss -- things like average temperature, extremal (trigger) temperature, average length of daylight, or depletion of ambient foliage.  Or, how do they find their way.   We are prepared for an explanation in terms of magnetism, starlight, or even “an instinct, varying in its details from species to species, whose guiding factors are as yet unknown”.   In the first-named case, we are open to talk about iron molecules in the inner ear;  but if the account in inextricably entangled in the details of the cross-effects between the ornithoboson cycle and the L-dextro-retro-feniculation mechanism, it’s TMI, and we tune out.  A ‘molar’ elucidation suffices for the general public and for the general zoologist   (and indeed, even this much is often too much to ask in practice;  apparently major mysteries remain about many migration-patterns, including the celebrated case of the Monarch butterfly).  An avian histologist might want to know more about those iron particles and their interaction with the inner ear.  But at some point even he is satified to call it a day, content to say, of levels yet further down, The Thing Can Be Done.

[Update 26 April 2012]  And now, for pigeons, it has been:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/science/study-sheds-light-on-how-pigeons-navigate-by-magnetic-field.html?hpw

[Update 14 July 2012]  And trout:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-magnetic-sensing-cells-20120714,0,828028,print.story
And sharks (a segment this morning on NPR).

Now, sometimes, perhaps usually, no such shallow-draught explanation will be forthcoming.  Thus, the saga of individual animals gets you only so far towards the understanding the appearance and disappearance of species; a lower-level unit, the gene, turns out to be quite handy; and to further understand the behavior of these, we occasionally have to get down among the DNA.

Consider further,  the symmetries of snowflakes.  The usual explanation is straightforwardly intuitive, local and deterministic.  But somehow I don’t buy it.   It just feels as though such endlessly varied detail, with symmetries nonetheless rigidly enforced, brewed in a whirling cauldron of stochastic accident, must have some energy-minimizing post-editing -- something global (or “holistic”, if you like that word) along the lines of surface tension, or of standing waves on tympani.  In which case you’ll be dragging in Bessel functions, or calculus of  variations, or quantum mechanics.   And in that case  snowflakes will be one of those phenomena that can barely be intuitively understood.  In this, it would join ranks with what may be a host of questions that Homo sapiens will never really understand.  -- This is the Mysterian stance.  Believe it or not, this is also the orthodox Judeo-Christian-Muslim position towards the ultimate unknowability of the mind of God -- certain TV preachers and football coaches to the contrary.

So:  Reduce as you can and as you must, but not for its own sake.  Practically, cognitively, there is a price to pay.   The naturalist tracking an ecosystem knows he may need to have recourse to natural selection, perhaps to geology, a bit of statistics -- but it’s not as though he can’t wait to get his hand on the string theory of the thing. 

Or consider the case of generative syntax, which over the years has dug ever deeper, and become increasingly abstract in its ontology of explanation, drifting further and further from categories familiar to Jespersen.  Yet it did this, not out of any fetishism for abstraction, nor reductionism for its own sake, but rather because earlier, more traditional and intuitive attempts just did not work.  Indeed, the principle figure behind this sweep of developments has also consistently been in the forefront of debunking popular but vacuous styles of reductionism.

~     ~      ~

Again, to be fair, let us quote a man whose mind we entirely admire, whose prose sparkles like dew-bedecked blooms at break of dawn.  None other than -- but you have already guessed -- the master himself, Mr. Willard (“Van”) Orman Quine:

Corresponding to every mental state … the dualist is bound to admit the existence of a bodily state  that obtains when and only when the mental one obtains..  The bodily state is trivially specifiable in the dualist’s own terms, simply as the state of accompanying a mind that is in that mental state.  Instead of ascribing the one state to the mind, then, we may equivalently ascribe the other to the body.  The mind goes by the board, and will not be missed.(*)

(*In fairness to Quine, let us hasten to add, that his core concern here is quite abstractly ontological, even quantificational, as befits a symbolic logician.   It may even be compared to the notion, not of dualism, but of duality, in mathematics, being related rather like the positive and the negative of a photograph, where either one will do.  --  Still, his chosen periscopic viewpoint leads to some no very edifying reflections: “Mental states, construed as states of nerves, are like diseases.”  And such reasonings spawned venomous afterbirths  with Dennett and the Churchlands.)

This nifty epiphany casts our Quine into something of a Little-Jack-Horner state (= excitation of synapse #5328b), for (coming to his senses) he straightly confesses that “this effortless physicalism smacks of trickery”.   Yet what he says is true enough. --  True… enough, for sake of argument; that no such isometric reduction has ever actually been made and perhaps never will, is beside the present point.  Let us grandly grant it done;  Nobels all round, lads!  What then?  Well, then, nothing.  We are back where we were.

For: every carpet has an underside.  We may even concede (perhaps over-generously) that both sides are interderivable:  given the one, you can work out the other.  Now, you and I prefer the upper side, where green birds are depicted in an azure sky, and the prince urges his huntsmen  forward in the chase.  Equally -- and it is their right, -- the proctoscopic philosophers prefer to ogle the underside, an unintuitive tangle of knots and loose ends.  You and I can observe why the green beings  appear on a background of blue;  whereas the proctoscopists can only stare miserably at their welter of circumanal shorthairs.

Such, indeed, is the case most favorable to the proctoscopists, where we are concerned only with a single static pattern.  Consider now -- well, our old friend, the Urysohn Metrization Theorem.  All the proctoscopists can do, in trying to wrangle with that, is to examine the brains (not, note:  the thought processes) of actual people trying to wrangle with it, since the theorem itself is incorporeal.  (Compare the Competence:Performance  distinction, in linguistics. Recall as well the unprofitability of obsession with the latter.)  And granting our epistemological vivisectionists  superhuman abilities  far beyond the offing of likelihood, they will be able to peer into everybody's brain-pan  and inspect the various chemical blurps, electric fizz, and meandering fat-globules  of the would-be topologists.  Yet worse, far worse for their case -- even granted their ability to somehow read off, from this mephitic brew, such messages as “SMITH - NOW - CONSIDERING - FIRST-COUNTABILITY.  UH-OH, SMITH SAD.   MEBBE FIRST-COUNTABILITY NOT ENOUGH. OH NOES!!”, -- they will be not a whit closer to understanding the theorem.  For their data-set consists of all the various blunderers of the earth, barging about, running into dead-ends, committing fallacies, thinking they’ve proved it whereas in reality (victims of a misfolded protein) they did not -- really one would like to see Monty Python work this one up into a skit.  (They did the complete works of Marcel Proust;  why not Urysohn?)  For the truth of the theorem resides, not in the cloaca which these gentlemen are pleasured to inspect, but in the realm of Invisibilia, the kingdom of the Lord of Hosts.  And the valid mathematical moves made by this or that fallible incarnated creature, in their groping attempts to approach the truth, gain their validity, not from thermodynamic or statistical considerations, but from our miraculous harmony with such abstract truth itself, which stems, we know not whence;  though some of us have an inkling.

That, technically, one might perform such fundamental (or rather fundament-level) analyses or rather catalyses,  shows only that it is possible, by the wrong sort of reduction, to reduce meaningful phenomena to the meaningless.  We may dub this excretory reduction, as opposed to explanatory reduction.  And the craft practiced by these proctoscopic coprophiles, we may dub stercochemistry.  (Not a typo, that:  sterco-, not stereo-.)  Indeed, in this perspective, we notice that the doctrine of -- eliminative materialism, is singularly well-named.

Envoi:

… grob geredet, wie gesagt:

womit noch keineswegs  der Wunsch  ausgedrückt ist,

auch grob gehört,

grob verstanden zu werden …

-- Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral

[Update 10 III 2012]   For a briefer, parallel argument, in a lighter vein, click here:
Eliminative Immaterialism

[Update 28 III 2012] Roger Scruton weighs in:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/7714533/brain-drain.thtml

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Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

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[Update 13 April 2012]  This particular post keeps receiving a disproportionate number of pageviews.  Since the Comments are virtually nonexistent, I am at a loss to know why.

If you have been enjoying it for its sober philosophical content, and want more, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Realism

If, on the other hand, you rather relish the invective, trouncing the nihilists, then you might further appreciate this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/09/philosophy-porn.html