64 - A Glorious Accident
Hey there, !
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep - The Tempest, William Shakespeare
I’m a freaking nerd, and this last obsession of mine is another contributing piece of evidence to this.
I watched this Dutch public access documentary series, “A Glorious Accident“, consisting of a number of interviews with big thinkers back in 1993, the year of my birth. It’s mainly of white, male participants (something that is commented on by one of the participants) sharing their ideas on metaphysics, the meaning of life and the cutting edge new scientific ideas of the time.
The host, Wim Kayzer, sent a letter with the quote above, and a description of his lofty ambition for this docu-series that would end with a full day’s discussion together with all the participants in a room. Each of the participants was a titan in their field: a psychologist, a physicist, a palaeontologist / biologist, and a few philosophers with starkly different ideas of the world, and each accepted, excited to meet each other in that final conversation.
Each episode is around 1.5 hours each, and that last episode is 3 hours long - so I won’t bore you with the details. If you’re interested, you’ll go watch it. If you’re not, you won’t care :D
Regardless, I wanted to document my key takeaway from each of the interviews for future reference, but also so that you don’t have to watch through ~20 hours of content to do so :)
Enjoy!
Oliver Sacks (psychologist): How does the mind work? Are memories like photos? Or reconstructions? How are they stored, and what happens when we reconstruct them in the future? Sacks takes us through a number of fascinating examples of deviations in consciousness, including a few people who had woken up from comas of 20+ years, and that though they were in old bodies, they had young minds. He tells stories with a soft voice, laughing wryly at his own observations, and you can see he greatly admires the rest of the participants (in the last conversation being one of the most active participants).
Rupert Sheldrake (para-psychologist): Is science always right? Why do we assume rules are unchangeable - that the fundamental rules of science are rock-solid? Sheldrake was the weirdest guy of the bunch, who nevertheless presented the most radical, interesting ideas. He was critical of the scientific dogma - the rigid thinking about eternal rules from the time of the Big Bang to now (that science must assume are unchanging, to do experiments on). His main idea is that of ‘morphic resonance’ - a more ‘organic’ way of thinking about how organisms learn. This resonance concerns organisms of the same form - once one learns something, all the others can learn it as well. Is it true? Who knows. One of his more wild questions in the final episode was ‘what if the sun had a consciousness’. Weird dude, but at least he was pushing interesting ideas.
Daniel Dennett (philosopher): Is the mind like a machine? Are we just information patterns that can be replicated into a computer? Dennett presents persuasive, interesting arguments that consciousness is very ‘machine-like’ and that we are essentially organic robots. To me, many of his ideas were essentially nitpicking ‘do I know you’re conscious, or do I just infer it from your actions?’, like the outputs of a machine. However, one of the ideas I found appealing was that our minds are just a pattern of information; in which case, sometime in the future we might be able to replicate that into a computer, or another human being. Many of the other participants criticised the reliance on machine-like, industrial metaphors of thinking about the mind (arguing for more organic models of living), but nonetheless agreed that we couldn’t necessarily make inferences or conclude on whether the mind is that way, since there’s not really a way to check.
Stephen Toulmin (philosopher): Should philosophers focus on the metaphysical questions, and how to detail them in the most ‘rational’ way possible? Or should they be focussed on what is practical, what is useful? Toulmin was focussed on pragmatic philosophy, and this particular video was focussed on the technical difference between consciousness created in our heads (a la Dennett), versus one which lives within the world, the environment, the people around us that we interact with. It was one of the weaker ones for me, but his extensive discussion about his role in the war, and his views on the evil of humanity being dissipated by bureaucracy were really interesting.
Freeman Dyson (physicist, mathematician): contrary to what I thought this video would be about (physics, maths, engineering), a lot of this video was focussed on Dyson’s role in Bomber Command during WW2, especially the Dresden bombings. Though it wasn’t a very philosophical video, it was captivating to hear how pragmatic he was - talking plainly about ‘well, my job was to make the bombing as efficient as possible, so that’s what I did’. He grew up in such a different world; he knows that what he did at the time wasn’t necessarily right, but it was what he did and he had introspected enough to understand that even his rationalisations (“well, if we were efficient, they would stop fighting quicker”) were not wholly true. However, once he starting talking about the potential of technology, that’s where you see him light up - in one particular example, discussing his concept of a ‘astro chicken’ - what happens if life gets loose in the universe? How can an organism evolve to live in the vacuum of space?
(NB: I will also note that Dyson was the only participant who mentioned the fact that their conversations did not have enough young people, or women, or non-white people. And he was the oldest out of the whole group.)
Stephen J. Gould (palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist): What’s the point of trying to answer unanswerable questions? Is it all just a waste of time? Gould was one of the most argumentative of the bunch - he kept criticising questions given by the host in a strong New Yorkah accent, but had incredibly insightful thoughts on how evolution had been wrongly absorbed by the populace (at that time, anyway). Instead of thinking we had any design, or purpose whatsoever, he had come to the idea that we’re just a random assortment of trial and error based on adaptations to our environment; any measure of ‘purpose’ is ridiculous. In other related information, his field of expertise was a particular type of African land snail. What a life.
Chat soon :)
✔️ Real Life Recommendations
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The Number Devil - I remember this book from years and years ago - it was one of the first books I read that made me love maths. It was presented as the main character dreaming about this Number Devil that would show up and present different puzzles, patterns and mathematical anomalies - the Fibonnaci sequence, triangle numbers, different levels of infinity, prime numbers etc. The names and sequences are changed to be more appealing to kids, but I still feel that it’s a fascinatingly presented book.
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A short history of nearly everything - I may have recommended it before, but I’m happy to do so again; Bill Bryson has written this really good piece about the history of science, and how it developed over time. He makes the content really interesting - learning about how people first isolated hydrogen, or oxygen, the way that cells form, the way that humans first discovered fossils, the list goes on! Another really fun read :)
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Expiring vs Permanent Skills - another concise, simple piece from Morgan Housel of the Collaborative Fund; breaking down the difference between expiring (those which change with technology and the times) and permanent skills (not being a jerk, being adaptable - essentially, soft skills). His thesis is that continuously working on your permanent skills pays off over many decades as the compounding interest exponentially grows.
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AI Ruined Chess. Now, It’s Making the Game Beautiful Again - another nerdy link - this one about how the creation of chess AI has led to quicker iterations of new forms of chess (no-castling, self-capturing, pawns can move twice at any time). They can be more rapidly analysed, more quickly discarded if they suck, and most importantly, evolve into beautiful games to play with as humans.
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Secret Gyms and the Economics of Prohibition - “When markets get pushed underground, quality control tends to go down” - when gymrats still need their fix, they’ll go to ‘speakeasy’ gyms, where mask aren’t worn and social distancing isn’t a thing, leading to an environment where the virus could more easily spread (potentially). The law of unintended consequences?