Wittgenstein Light: Real Refreshment

From metroactive.com, April 23, 2008

I’M RELAXING in a chair upstairs inside Suite 11 of the historic Kiely House in Santa Clara, a Queen Anne Victorian dating back to the 19th century. Dr. Sue Klear, a licensed psychologist specializing in neurofeedback, has just attached seven sensors to my head and face with an odorless skin-prepping gel to prepare me for the initial stages of Brain Music Therapy, an experimental treatment for insomnia, anxiety, depression and stress.

The treatment records an individual’s brain waves using an Electroencephalogram (EEG), analyzes them and then converts them into two piano tracks—one “relaxing file” and one “activating file.” These are eventually burned onto a CD for the patient to play while going to sleep and after waking up, the idea being that the musical sounds form a correlation to your specific brain waves in order to help eliminate imbalanced brain activity. So, theoretically, you end up sleeping much better and function more productively during the day.

Originally developed at the Moscow Medical Academy as a nonpharmacological method for treating insomnia in the early ’90s, Brain Music Therapy has received a boost from some scientific evidence of its effectiveness, including randomized double-blind studies in small-scale groups. It is now used on an experimental basis throughout the world to treat a variety of neurological scenarios including post traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit disorder (ADD) and withdrawal symptoms from drug or alcohol dependence. The Russian-born Dr. Galina Mindlin received the exclusive rights to provide this treatment in the United States in 2004 and has now treated hundreds of patients through her private practice in New York. Twenty other doctors throughout the United States now use the therapy as part of their practice, and Dr. Klear is the only one in the Bay Area who uses it. She runs her practice out of Suite 11 in the Kiely House.

Here’s the procedure: Dr. Klear first takes me through a basic medical evaluation, which includes me filling out two questionnaires, the Beck Depression Inventory and the Subjective Sleep Scale. Then I sit in the chair while the sensors are placed at key points to pick up my brain waves. This part of the procedure takes about five minutes and Dr. Klear throws some tranquil ocean sounds into the stereo to help me relax, the idea being that the patient needs to be in as relaxed a state as possible during the EEG, so the proper brain waves are recorded. She even closes the window to block out the traffic sounds from outside.

My brain waves are then recorded into the software and Dr. Klear sends the files off to the main center for Brain Music Therapy in Moscow. Since the Russians apparently have a patent on the algorithm that converts the brain waves into musical sounds, that part of the process must be done in Moscow and nowhere else, which adds to the conspiratorial Cold War–esque-KBG-mind-control-outer-space quality of this entire scenario. Before succumbing to the EEG, everyone has to sign a “Brain Music Informed Consent,” which includes this statement: “I agree to allow my personalized EEG recording to be emailed to Moscow so that my personalized recording can be created.”

Hmm. While sitting there looking the Cyrillic Russian printed on the panel of the amplifier to which the sensors are connected, I envision intelligence officials in the Kremlin crouched around a database of Americans’ brainwaves with the intent of finding ways to put us all to sleep. I have to laugh, since by sheer coincidence—and I’m not making this up—I have just finished reading Smiley’s People by John Le Carré, a legendary spy novel containing numerous references to the “Moscow Rules,” which are universal unwritten canons of spook tradecraft. In the initial stages of the tale, Smiley keeps bringing up the Moscow Rules over and over again. They remain in my head throughout this treatment.

Entire article here.

From NHS, Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Beauty is an advert for good genes, reports The Daily Telegraph today. It says that “research conducted across cultures and species”, has found that not only are symmetrical faces regarded as being more attractive, but that they also may indicate good genes, health and long life.

The newspaper story is based on research which investigated whether facial symmetry is linked to how feminine or masculine a face is considered to be. However, this research has not investigated or suggested that increased facial symmetry, or “beauty” as the Telegraph describes it, is linked to better genes and that asymmetry is linked to less favourable genes. These are evolutionary theories that have been previously been suggested, mainly in the context of animal mating patterns. The first line of the news article that “beautiful people are healthier and live longer” may or may not be the case, but as this research did not investigate this, it cannot add any evidence either way.

Entire article here.

Robert Hass, poet

From the Online News Hour, April 30, 2008

The problem of describing trees

JEFFREY BROWN: There’s a poem early on here that maybe you could read for us, because it gets at a lot of different themes that you write about. Could you read that for us? It’s called “The Problem of Describing Trees.”  

ROBERT HASS: “The Problem of Describing Trees.” So I think another thing that happened because of this distraction hiatus is that, when you return to the materials of the art, there’s a thing of, what kind of an instrument is this that you were doing?

JEFFREY BROWN: Poetry?

ROBERT HASS: Yes, what are you doing with it? So this is “The Problem of Describing Trees.”

The aspen glitters in the wind.

And that delights us.

The leaf flutters, turning,

Because that motion in the heat of August

Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf

Of the cottonwood.

The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem

And the tree danced. No.

The tree capitalized.

No. There are limits to saying,

In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.

Mountains, sky,

The aspens doing something in the wind.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, the line, “There are limits to saying in language what the tree did.”

ROBERT HASS: Yes.

Limits of saying anything

JEFFREY BROWN: By implication, there are limits to say anything. 

ROBERT HASS: Yes. I mean, there are two ways of saying this — or there are a million ways of saying this. One way is to say what Wittgenstein said, language philosophy in the early 20th century, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” which I don’t think is quite true.

Entire interview here.

According to Wittgenstein, the meaning and understanding of a word cannot exceed our ability to explain it (PI 75). A speaker may understand more than he explains, but not more than he is able to explain.  This excludes the meanings of words and our understanding of them which are determined by hidden rules in the mind or brain of which we are ignorant.

Sam Harris

From samharris.org

We are preparing to run another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need volunteers to help us refine our experimental stimuli. This promises to be the first study of religious faith at the level of the brain. By responding to the four surveys I have posted online, you can make an enormous contribution to this work.

You’ll find links to these surveys on my home page.

Please answer as many of the surveys as you can. If you only have time to answer one, please choose at random (otherwise, we will have many more responses to the first than to the others).

Feel free to post this message to your blog or to forward the relevant links to your friends. I especially need Christians to respond, as one of the goals of these surveys is to design stimuli that a majority of Christians will find doctrinally sound.

I will, of course, pass along the results of this work the moment I have something to report.

Many thanks for your help.

All the best,

Sam

www.samharris.org

The raw material of a career in philosophy are the fragments the great figures offer us and which we glean slowly over time from the pages of their works and in inumerable conversations with our peers. We arrange them into manuscripts and conference papers, and later create new configurations for future publications. We are constantly arranging and organizing the thoughts of others into a pattern which includes our own minimal contribution. Typically, my own fragment is the smallest of the lot. The rest are the thoughts of other thinkers. But, at least, the arrangement itself is original and novel, and may be noteworthy and of interest to others. Is that it? Well, the arrangement may offer a new understanding of some issue or problem befuddling many, so that the order of the fragments is of some importance, or it may be preparatory to a grander research agenda.

If philosophy is judged meaningless because, it is said, the subject ‘doesn’t make a difference’, it should be asked immediately what paradigm stands behind the use of ‘makes a difference’. Usually, it is something like ‘injecting penicillin prevents certain infections and diseases’, which clearly cannot be applied to philosophy. Philosophy is not like that. What is it like, then?

Anyone who understands Mozart or Beethoven hears consonance in their music. This is expressed primarily in tonality and rhythmical order. In tonal compositions there is an ordered progression of related tonalities (typically tertian sonorities) that finds its purpose and resolution in the home key. When the home key is reached, there is a sense of rest, of purpose attained. Consonance is the analogue of a rationally meaningful world.

My experience of living abroad in Taiwan, of living in an environment radically different from New Zealand is not like this. It is more like an atonal composition. In atonal compositions there is no home key, and therefore little sense of purpose or resolution. This is an exageration no doubt, but it illustrates a point. If you are so miserable, why bother staying? - What is ‘home’, anyway?

Whatever else it means, and I am able to offer no more than a furtive sidelong glance at it, I think it can be compared fruitfully with aesthetic appreciation. Wittgenstein discusses this in a remark published in Culture & Value, p. 58e. There he talks about art and how it is thought to convey a ‘feeling’. Wittgenstein partially agrees with this traditional characterization:

You really could call it, not exactly the expression of a feeling, but a least an expression of feeling, or a felt expression. And you could say too that insofar as people understand it, they ‘resonate’ in harmony with it, responds to it. You might say: the work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself.

Is home a feeling? I am not referring to a single dwelling by ‘home’, which merely occupies the foreground of a much larger picture. I am attempting to capture something about the picture itself, of the whole. Wittgenstein’s term ‘felt expression’ suggests that the relation of art to the world is appreciative, art is appreciated for being important. This suggests a method of knowing through feeling, which is global rather than mundane in nature. Is there a unique kind of knowing proper to feelings?

Let’s look at Wittgenstein’s simile of ‘harmony’, or, as he says, art that resonates. The word ‘resonate’ is a verb meaning ‘to sound again’.  One who understands art ‘resonates’ in harmony with it. How? Wittgenstein says: one ‘responds to it’. This suggests that art is understood by a spontaneous act of perception, and not by diagnosis. One who responds to art may therefore convey his understanding by an answering expression or gesture as by some appropriate gesture in words (consider understanding facial expressions). I think that home is like this.

I do not ‘resonate’ in harmony with Taiwan. Is that clear enough to me? The person who lives here and ‘understands’ life in this country, is like someone whose total experience of Taiwan reverberates within him simultaneously as his own or as the music of Mozart does for millions, or as a piston fits into a cylinder, and so on. All the tonalities that sound off in a person and in the environment that exist in harmony form chordal structures, and stacked together they blend into one and sound off simultaneously, without effort or transition to something else.  

Experiences resonate within a person in sequence. Taken individually, they form melodies and play out in the course of a person’s life. The world is played out in a person just as a musical chord is played out in sequence or individual notes are played out in sequence to form melodies. A person ‘at home’ in a place anywhere in the world is like an harmonic progression, it seems to me, and one who is not, is nothing more than a dissonant interval. It is therefore up to this person to resolve the tension that wars within him.

It would be difficult to be at home in a world whose sum total musical experience consisted of Richard Clayderman, or Karlheinz Stockhausen.  Imagine what such a life would be like. Clearly, a question of balance between consonant and dissonant forces is necessary if home is to take root.

It seems to me that philosophy is properly managed when unity is given to the disparate pronouncements that pop up in discussion. An able host spins these individual fibres into a thread whose combined strength is in the expert twisting of fibre on fibre. The complexity of philosophy is the overlapping of many fibres. It is no easy thing to handle a philosophical discussion like this. On the other hand, nothing is worse than to see a discussion denegrate into a ‘battlecry’ match.

From the Atlantic Online, June 1997

Michael Nedo, the director of the Wittgenstein Archive, in Cambridge, England, is a happy man. The archive is deeply in debt, the building is in dire need of repair, and complications in Austrian politics have delayed any chance of getting further funding. But Nedo is at last on the way to accomplishing what he set out to do more than two decades ago: he has issued six volumes of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s papers, in exactly the form and sequence that Wittgenstein wrote them, and several more volumes are in preparation.

This is the first time since the philosopher’s death, in 1951, that anything he wrote has been published in unaltered, unedited form. As Nedo puts it, “Wittgenstein’s own connections, which he himself called the most important thing in his work, have been restored.” One might expect a certain amount of scholarly rejoicing. But the saga of these papers, and of Nedo’s beleaguered edition in particular, is so fraught with petty squabbling and bad blood that except for reviewers in the nonacademic press, nobody has mustered even one faint cheer.

Not that such wrangling over the papers of dead philosophers is as rare as one might expect. Ever since Elisabeth Föörster-Nietzsche edited her brother’s final manuscripts (and in some cases actually forged whole passages) to reflect her own anti-Semitic and fascist views, it has become almost a tradition in the philosophical community to suspect the editors, colleagues, or relatives of philosophers of nefarious behavior with their literary remains. Thus rumors abound concerning the manuscripts of Charles Sanders Peirce, George Santayana, and Martin Heidegger, to name just a few.

Yet the Wittgenstein wars seem especially unfortunate, if only because Wittgenstein himself was a moral purist of the highest order: a man who abandoned all the worldly honors – and worldly goods – that had been bestowed on him in order to lead what he called a “decent” life. After serving as a volunteer soldier in the armies of his native Austria during the First World War, he gave away the vast fortune he had inherited and spent years teaching peasant children in the poorest of alpine villages. Having tried and failed to get work as an ambulance driver at the front during the Second World War, he left his professorship at Trinity College, Cambridge, to serve as a porter in a London hospital. If his genius inspired reverence in the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes, his personal history has made him a hero even to some who hardly know his work.

The fate of his manuscripts is also distressing because of the ratio of what he published to what he left behind. Such was his perfectionism that during his lifetime he published only a single book, of seventy-four pages. This was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), which altered the practice of philosophy, perhaps forever, by calling into question the ability of language to talk about ethical and metaphysical questions in any meaningful way. Wittgenstein maintained that language could only show; it could not say anything that went beyond description: “Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. . . . Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” To establish the limits of what could be spoken of, he stripped language down to its logical structure, which he saw as mirroring that of reality.

Believing that the Tractatus had cleared up all the confusions that “tormented” philosophy, Wittgenstein decided it would never be necessary for him to write anything further. After his six-year stint as a schoolteacher, he worked for a time as an undergardener in a monastery, and seriously considered becoming a monk. But in 1929 some of his Cambridge admirers – chief among them Keynes, who occasionally referred to Wittgenstein as “God” – persuaded him to return to the university to teach, and he began to rethink the problems he thought he had solved. Though he was adamantly opposed to their being widely circulated, a set of notes he dictated to his students during the thirties once again spawned whole new lines of philosophical inquiry.

In those notes – designated the Blue and Brown Books, after the colors of the notebooks in which they were first taken down – Wittgenstein abandoned his earlier quest for a logically perfect language to consider how language acquires meaning through use, the multiple ways it functions “in the stream of life.” When the Blue and Brown Books were passed around, in crudely stenciled form, the general view was that he had revolutionized philosophy for the second time, although some claimed that he had killed it for the second time – by rendering permanently suspect any writing about the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Apart from his work on language, he also wrote about the foundations of mathematics, about color, and about the idea of certainty. When he died of cancer, at the age of sixty-two, he bequeathed nearly 30,000 pages of manuscript – many of them handwritten, almost all in German – to three of his former students, with instructions to publish “as many of my unpublished writings as they think fit.” It was, on the face of it, a simple enough request. But as soon as his trustees began issuing posthumous volumes, the accusations started flying.

Entire article here.