Michael Taylor - Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion (Bodley Head, 2024) ****½

What a wonderful treat of a book. It describes the discovery of "impossible monsters", the skeletons of dinosaurs and other reptiles in the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset, Southwest England, first by the 12-year old Mary Anning. The ongoing discoveries of other skeletons created a completely different view on ancient animals and on the age of the earth, questioning biblical stories in which these strange animals never even featured. But the book is not about the animals themselves, but how they became the subject of intense debates with the Church and scientists who claimed that the earth was only 6,000 years old. 

Not much later Darwin developed his theory of evolution of the species which added even more fuel to the heated discussions. 

The book gives a wonderful overview of the debates that ensued between religion and science, the opposing views, the discrediting of scientific evidence by religious dogma, but also the whole public debate, including the reports of the actual meetings of the Royal Society of Science in which the topics were debated. 

Michael Taylor was born in 1988 and graduated with a double first in history from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD. He is also the author of "The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery". The discoveries of Mary Anning have been made into a worthwhile movie, called "Ammonite" with Kate Winslet in the leading role. 

The discoveries of ancient animals and Darwin's theory of evolution found fertile ground in the now formal questioning of the actual reality of the Bible stories: 

"In 'The Essence of Christianity' (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach developed an anthropological approach to religion, which he described as merely 'the dream of the human mind'. Here, the God of justice represented human ideals of justice, and the God of love was the perfection of human ideals of love; it followed that Christ the miracle-worker was 'nothing else than a product and reflex of the supernatural human mind'. In 'The Life of Jesus' (1835) David Strauss had meanwhile looked at the gospels, striving to separate historical evi­dence from mythology. Though he did not deny that Christ had lived, Strauss decried the New Testament's 'false facts and impossible conse­quences which no eye-witness could have related'. Fatally, in his view, 'there was [for a long time] no written account of the life of Jesus', so that 'oral narratives alone were transmitted'; such tales had become 'tinged with the marvellous', growing into 'historical myth[s]'. For Strauss, these stories 'like all other legends were fashioned by degree', only in time acquiring 'a fixed form in our written Gospels' (p. 133)

The discoveries shoock the very foundations of religious belief, of the concept of right and wrong: 

"And what of the Lord Himself? (conservative priest) Richard Froude despaired at the 'goodness' of a god who had chosen to bless 'arbitrarily, for no merit of their own, as an eastern despot chooses his favourites, one small section of mankind, leaving all the world besides to devil-worship and lies'. Just why were the chosen people chosen? And how could Sutherland believe the Lord to be 'all-merciful, all-good' when He was 'jealous, passionate, capricious, [ and] revengeful, punishing children for their fathers' sin', tempting men 'into blindness and folly' when He knew they would fall, and punishing them eternally in a 'hell prison-house'? This god was not divine. He was 'a fiend' (p. 135)

The broadening of the number of scientists and other amateur scientists to deal with the information and the data, led to even further destruction of the foundations of religious belief: 

"Here, he (William Parker Foulke, an American lawyer) compared 'the modified bird Archaeopteryx' with 'the ordinary Dinosauria' in which class, in con­tradiction of Wagner, he placed the Compsognathus. There were differences to be sure, but Cope remarked upon 'the union of the tibia and fibula [of the Compsognathus] with the first series of tarsal bones, a feature formerly supposed to belong to the class Aves [ that is, birds] alone'. He also looked at 'the transverse direction of the pubes', the hip-bones, and again observed 'an approach to the birds'. After describing other 'bird-like features' such as the number and nature of its vertebrae, Cope suggested that the Compsognathus stood 'inter­mediate between the position in most reptiles and in birds' (p. 249)

"All this was proof, he concluded, that 'the facts of palaeontology . . . are not opposed to the doctrine of evolution, but, on the contrary ... enable us to form a conception of the manner in which birds may have been evolved from reptiles'. The 'fowl that may fly above the earth', sup­posedly created by the Lord on the fifth day of the first week, had in fact evolved from the sixth day's creatures 'that creepeth upon the earth'. The book of Genesis lay in ruins, the dinosaurs had tri­umphed, and even Richard Owen recognised the quality and force of the bulldog's performance. (p. 251)

"John William Draper (American chemist, professor at New York University) moved from the library at Alexandria to the 'pillared halls of Persepolis', from the Arabian schools of mathematics to the courts of the Inquisition, and from Renaissance universities to the learned societies of London. There was no question of his favour: 'The history of Science', he declared, 'is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expan­sive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other'. Of that 'traditionary faith' he was unsparing, describing the development of Catholicism as an 'intellectual night' which settled on Europe, .during which spiritual affairs passed from the control of classical philoso­phers 'into the hands of ignorant and infuriated ecclesiastics, parasites, eunuchs, and slaves'. At last, however, that night was lifting, and civi­lised society had recognised the truth: 'that Roman Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being abso­lutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice - it cannot have both'. (p. 286). 

Taylor's erudition is a pleasure to read, as is the fluency of his writing style. Highly recommended reading. 

Irene Vallejo - Papyrus (Hodder, 2023) ****½

I love books that give a broad, sweeping overview of everything there is to know about a subject, an encyclopaedic vision through history and the boundaries of our knowledge. This is such a book, and even more interesting, it's a book about books, about writing, about the importance of the physical aspects of human writing: clay tablets, parchment, paper, but even more so about what they achieved in terms of sharing stories, ideas and values. Irene Vallejo is a Spanish classical philologist with degrees from the universities of Zaragoza in Spain and Florence in Italy. 

Her passion is clear from the very start. She writes with incredible erudition, but with equal personal joy and personal experience of her relationship with texts and writing. 

 "After all the agonies of doubt, after exhausting every possible delay and excuse, one hot July afternoon, I face the void of the blank page. I've decided to open with the image of some enigmatic hunters stalking their prey. I identify with them. I appreciate their patience, their stoicism, the time they have taken, their steadiness, the adrena­line of the search. For years I have worked as an academic, consulting sources, keeping records, trying to get to know the historical mate­rial. But when it comes down to it, I'm so amazed by the true and recorded history I discover that it seeps into my dreams and acquires, without my volition, the shape of a story. I'm tempted to step into the skin of those who traveled the roads of an ancient, violent, tumultu­ous Europe in pursuit of books. What if I start by telling the story of their journey? It might work, but how can I keep the skeleton of facts distinct beneath the muscle and blood of imagination?  

The initial idea seems to me as fantastical as the journey in search of King Solomon's mines or the Lost Ark, but historical documents show that in the megalomaniacal minds of the kings of Egypt, it was truly possible. It might have been the last and only time - there, in the third century BC - that the dream of gathering all the books in the world, without exception, in a universal library, could become a reality. Today it seems like the plot of a fascinating, abstract story by Borges - or perhaps his great erotic fantasy." (p. XV)

She starts in ancient times, with the endeavour of Alexander The Great to conquer the known world, to create his own city of Alexandria in Egypt, with the largest collection of written material from all the places in his realm. He opened up the world to create a kind of proto-globalism where all cultures could meet and mingle, if not in person, then at least in their written forms. She draws a fantastic picture of how scrolls were written, how they were traded and collected, how they were catalogued and copied. It's a fascinating journey, one that we are of course by and large aware of, but she adds so many snippets of concrete examples and information that it make for fascinating reading. As in this example of the last Egyptian scribes, "who witnessed the shipwreck of their civilization". In 380 CE, Christianity became the compulsory state religion, and pagan cults were prohibited in the Roman Empire. 

"(In the) Temple of Isis on the island of Philae, to the south of the first cataract of the Nile, (...) a group of priests took refuge, men who were repositories of the secrets of their sophisticated writing system and who had been forbidden from sharing their knowledge. One of them, Esmet-Akhom, engraved on the walls of the temple the last hieroglyphic inscription ever written, which ends with the words "for all time and eternity." Some years later, the emperor Justinian I resorted to military force to close the temple where the priests of Isis were holding out, taking the rebels as prisoners. Egypt buried its old gods, with whom it had lived for thousands of years. And, along with its gods, its objects of worship, and the language itself. In just one generation, everything disappeared. It has taken fourteen centu­ries to rediscover the key to that language. (p.53)

Or in this example on the origin of poetry, which makes sense and appears quite obvious once you think about it: 

"In their effort to endure, denizens of the oral world realized that rhythmic language was easiest to remember, and on the wings of this discovery, poetry was born. During recitation, the melody helps the speaker repeat each line without alteration, since it is when the music is broken that the sequence falters. All of us were made to learn poems in school. Years later, after forgetting so many other things, we find we can still remember these poems with extraordi­nary clarity" (p. 81)

I also liked this example to please and annoy my friends in medical practice: 

"What kind of education did those Greeks receive? They were steeped in culture in all its variety. Unlike us, they weren't remotely interested in specialization. They looked down their noses at knowl­edge of a technical nature. They weren't obsessed with employ­ment; after all, they had slaves to work for them. Those who could avoided anything as degrading as having a trade. Leisure was more refined - in other words, it involved cultivating the mind, fostering friendships, making conversation, and leading a contemplative life. Only medicine, an unquestionable social necessity, demanded its own particular kind of training. As a result, doctors suffered from an overt cultural inferiority complex. All of them, from Hippocrates to Galen, repeated the mantra in their texts that a doctor is also a philosopher. They wished to avoid being confined to their field and tried to show themselves to be cultured, slipping the occasional quote by a key poet into their writings." (p. 179) 

She also gives a reflection on her own academic research, and the book format gives her also the opportunity to write about herself, about her own experiences, sometimes funny, sometimes deeply personal. 

As a PhD student she went to the Oxford Library to do some research, but she is confronted with the obligation to "take the oath": 

"A bald man behind a desk interrogated me with­out making eye contact. I answered all his questions, justified my presence, and showed him the papers he asked for with somewhat intimidating politeness. There was a long silence while he entered my information into his vast database, and then, hands still on his keyboard, in a startling swerve in time, he suddenly stepped into the Middle Ages and informed me pompously that the time had come for me to take the oath. He handed me a small stack of laminated cards that showed, each in a different language, the words I would have to say. I did so. I swore to obey the rules. Not to steal, damage, or deface a single book. Not to set fire to the library or help cause a blaze and watch with diabolical pleasure as the roaring flames engulfed its treasures, reducing them to ash." (p. 44)

 Or this even more personal reflection, which again lifts the book out of the academic space into a more personal environment, the perspective that is obviously excluded from any scientific research and publications: 

"Violence among children and teenagers is protected by a barrier of murky silence. For years I took comfort in not having been the class snitch, the tattletale, the coward. Not to have stooped that low. Misplaced pride and shame made me fol­low the rule that certain stories aren't told. Wanting to be a writer was a belated rebellion against that law. The stories that go untold are exactly the ones you must tell. I decided to become the snitch I was so afraid to be. The roots of writing are often dark. This is my darkness, the darkness that nurtures this book, and perhaps nur­tures everything I write. (p.226)

But of course the main message is the power of literature, of writing, of books in all their forms, how they made ideas accessible to anyone around the world, to start sharing common values and a common culture, or at least to value that they're might be other perspectives to look at the same reality: 

"In a time when the vast majority of Greeks scarcely set foot outside their native village, Herodotus was a tireless traveler. He enlisted on merchant ships, moved in slow caravans, struck up con­versation with many people, and visited a great number of cities in the Persian Empire, to give an account of the war with knowledge of the terrain and a range of perspectives. When he met the enemy in his daily life, he offered a different and more precise vision than any other writer. In the words of Jacques Lacarriere, Herodotus strove to topple his Greek countrymen's prejudices, teaching them that "the line between civilization and barbarism is never a geographic bor­der between countries, but a moral border within every people, and beyond that, within each individual." It's curious to note, so many centuries after Herodotus wrote his work, that the earliest history book begins in a ferociously modern way. There are wars between East and West, kidnappings, mutual accusations, differing versions of the same events, and alternative facts".  (p.162)

It is an ode to knowledge, to intellectual curiosity and debate ...

"In its ambiguous state as a Greek city outside of Greece and the seed of Europe beyond the bounds of Europe, Alexandria came to see itself from the outside. During the Library's greatest era and following in Alexander's wake, the Stoic philosophers were bold enough to teach for the first time that all people belonged to a com­munity without borders and were obliged to accept humanity wher­ever and under whichever circumstances they encountered it. We should remember the Greek capital of the Nile delta as the place where this effervescence was born, where the languages and tradi­tions of others began to matter, and where the world and knowledge were understood to be a shared territory. In these aspirations we find a precursor to the great European dream of universal citizenship. Writing, books, and libraries were the technologies that made this utopia possible". (p.232)

... and of course the incredible value of the freedom of speech: 

"Days before The Satanic Verses appeared in bookstores, during the publicity campaign, an Indian journalist asked Rushdie, off the record, whether he was aware of the row that was coming. The writ­er's response was unequivocal: 'It is a funny view of the world to think that a book can cause riots." 

If we look back at the general history of book destruction, we'll see that in fact, the funny view of the world - the oasis, the strange paradise, the Shangri-La, the forest of Lothlorien - is freedom of expression. Over the centuries, the written word has been stubbornly persecuted, and the times when bookstores receive only peaceful visitors who do not wave flags or wag fingers, break windows or set things on fire, or give themselves over to the primitive zeal for prohibition, are in fact the unusual ones. " (p. 294)

The scientific study of writing and books becomes a personal story as well as a humanistic manifesto. At times it is not easy to follow the logic or the thread of her narrative, because so many pieces of information are provided. It is this wealth that makes the book so entertaining and a pleasure to read. 

Highly recommended!

Abbott Kahler - Eden Undone (Harper Collins, 2024) **½

When buying books on Amazon, they often give "recommendations based on your past choices", and this book popped up, with the amazing subtitle "A True Story of Sex, Murder and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II", which appealed to my boyish nature. 

I will refrain from doing semantic exercises on the description "A True Story" as initiated by the movie Fargo. What happened then is not a story. It is true. A German physician and his patient move to Floreana in 1930, one of the Galápagos Islands with the sole intent of creating their own paradise, their own eden, far from the madness and obligations of society. Dr. Friedrich Ritter also has the high aspirations to write his own philosophical treatise about how to live in this world. He describes their new paradise in a series of newspaper articles, which of course leads to other people sharing his idea. They are followed by another German couple who are looking for a place where their ill and almost blind son, still a boy, can hope to benefit from a good environment. Next comes an Austrian-French sex-obsessed Baroness with two 'male slaves' and an Ecuadorian translator. The baroness is a true narcissist, self-obsessed, manipulative, dictatorial, charming if need be, seductive and commanding. 

Because the media attention they create, they also generate the interest of the very rich Americans, who come to visit with their cruise ships to see for themselves how these Europeans have eked out a living in the harsh environment of the Galapagos. 

Needless to say that this Eden soon becomes a nightmare for all involved, with the truth becoming a commodity as rare as luxury goods. Human nature comes to the fore even among the most principled people, leading to theft, hypocrisy, gossip, shifting alliances, hate, death and murder. 

Kahler brings it like a documentary, extensively using excerpts from letters and articles, and literally including all events that took place, which gives possibly a very distorted view of the actual boring life these people must have had on the island, with the exception of the conflicts that were documented. The book has also no literary ambition to bring more than just a report. It's a missed opportunity with this kind of material to work from. 

It's a fascinating microcosm of humanity, isolated and reduced to a handful of people. It could have been staged for a play, to reduce the madness of our kind on one tiny location, with high hopes and lofty aspirations leading to a predictable catastrophy within a very short time span. It's a mirror to all of us, and if a fiction author had developed a plot such as this one, the reader would say it's possibly too programmatic, too artificial to be credible. 

In this sense it really is a story. But then a true one. 

Kevin J. Mitchell - Free Agents - How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton University Press, 2023) *****

Earlier this year I read Robert Sapolsky's "Determined - Life Without Free Will" in which he argues that our idea of free will is only an illusion, and that any action our body takes is actually the result of hundreds of unconscious forces that work in it. Much earlier, I also read Sam Harris's "Free Will" which makes a very similar claim, although less substantiated and more philosophical. 

As a counter-argument I came across this delightful book by geneticist and neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell, professor at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and author of the blog "Wiring The Brain". 

In contrast to his blog, he does not take Sapolsky head-on in this book, but it's clear that some of the arguments come from refutations of some of Sapolsky's claims. Both books are well-documented, both are written by experts in their fields, and both come to different conclusions. Both agree that there is no 'immaterial I" that takes decisions, or that there is no mind-body duality. Both agree that many of our decisions are pre-determined by patterns of culture, genes, education, etc. They disagree whether this body can make any deliberate choice now, at this very moment, by weighing the pros and cons of certain actions. Sapolsky will say the choice is automatic. Mitchell will say that our neurons balance the options and our brain eventually makes a choice. That our body has "agency". 

Interestingly enough, the recent debate on this topic, and largely the spark that lit the fire for the books of Sapolsky, Harris and Mitchell goes back to an experiment conducted by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet in 1983. Mitchell also comes with a different interpretation on the methodology and the result of the data. 

I share a whole lot of text below, as examples of parts of his arguments. I can only recommend that you read the whole book. 

This question of morality is a topic that Sapolsky ends his book with. And the question is essential. Without free will, how can we make moral decisions? 

"Another barrier to a clear explication of the arguments around whether free will exists is that they are often approached from the direc­tion of their consequences for our positions on moral responsibility. If people are not really in control of their actions - if we are nothing more than physical automata, mounting a wonderfully sophisticated but ul­timately empty simulacrum of free will - then how can we be worthy of praise or blame? How can we defend judgment or punishment? The stakes here could not be higher. The idea of moral responsibility is the foundation not only of our legal systems but also of all our social interactions. We are constantly thinking about what we should or shouldn't do in any given circumstance and probably spend even more time thinking about what other people should or shouldn't do ( or should or shouldn't have done). But tying the discussion of free will to the issue of moral responsibility muddies the waters. Questions of moral responsibility are crucially important, of course, but they are confounded by all kinds of additional issues: the nature and origins of our moral sensibilities, the evolution of moral norms, the legal philosophies underpinning our justice systems, and the complex and innumerable pragmatic decisions that societies and individuals have to make to keep our collective existence stable. Ask­ing what kind of free will we want that will let us maintain our positions on moral responsibility can become almost a theological exercise in motivated reasoning" (p.17)

Mitchell goes very deep into the origin of our species and explains how even in the most basic forms of life, choices are made, obviously not conscious choice, but choices all the same. Even the very first cells, who function based on chemical reactions, start having options on how to proceed. The concept of 'information' as the basis for agency is essential to his thesis. 

"Although their behaviors appear simple from the outside, these single-celled creatures are thus far from being passive stimulus-response machines. Their response to a given signal depends on what other signals are around and on the cell's internal state at the time. These organisms infer what is out in the world, where it is, and how it is changing. They process this information in the context of their own internal state and recent experience, and they actively make holistic decisions to adapt their internal dynamics and select appropriate actions. This represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe. The behavior of the organism is not purely driven or determined by the playing out of physical forces acting on it or in it. Clearly, a physical mechanism underpins the behavior, which explains how the system works. But thinking of what it is doing-and why it is doing it-in terms of the resolution of instantaneous physical forces is simply the wrong framing. The causation is not physical in that sense-it is informational." (p.62)

or a little further ...

"These simple organisms are not aware of those reasons. But it is still correct to say that the organism is doing something because it increases its chances of persistence. Or, at a finer level, that it is moving in a certain direction to get food or to escape a predator. It's right to think of various components and subsystems as having functions. And it's right to say the organism is acting on the basis of inferences about what is out in the world, rather than simply being triggered by external stimuli. The mecha­nisms are simply the means by which those goals are accomplished. Even these humble unicellular creatures thus have real autonomy and agency, as organized dynamic patterns of activity, causally insulated from their environment, and configured to maintain themselves through time. It is not merely that they hold themselves apart from the world outside: they act in the world and on the world in a goal-directed manner. They are causal agents in their own right. As evolution proceeds, the degree of autonomy increases-at least along some lineages, like the ones leading to humans. The tight coupling of perception and action is loosened. With the advent of multicellularity and especially the invention of nervous systems, additional layers of processing emerge. Organisms evolve the means to represent sensory in­formation internally without directly acting on it. More sophisticated control systems emerge for guiding action over longer timeframes. Organ­isms develop internal systems of evaluation that free them from the brutal, life-or-death judgment of natural selection. Crucially, all these systems are informational. Meaning becomes the currency of cognition." (p. 67)

The complexity of our bodies implies that our brains receive information from various sources inside and outside the body, information that needs to be integrated, balanced and decided upon based on neural hierarchies in the brain.  

"But the coupling between perception and action is at least loosened a bit. There are now some intermediate stages of processing-carried out by the middle layers of interneurons-during which multiple signals are integrated to allow the animal to respond to the situation as a whole, as opposed to independent stimuli. Specific interneurons collect signals from multiple sensory neurons responding to diverse aversive stim­uli, while other interneurons sum the activity of a different set of sen­sory neurons responsive to diverse attractive stimuli. The relative activ­ity of these interneurons is then itself integrated at another stage to determine whether the sum of attraction outweighs the sum of aversion. All of this is dependent on the context: responses to those integrated external sensory signals differ depending on the current internal state of the animal."(p.91)

 At a further stage, information becomes meaning. 

"When configured in this way, perceptual systems are not just pro­cessing information-they are extracting meaning. The patterns of neu­ral activity across different areas in the visual hierarchy represent the system's best guesses of what is out in the world, focused on what is most relevant and important for the survival of the organism. Those guesses are not merely passively computed through successive levels of information processing. The organism is actively, subjectively interpret­ing this information, bringing its prior experience and expectations to bear. (p.118)

In this sense, we are neither a machine nor is there a ghost in the machine. We are an organism that decides. 

"In a holistic sense, the organism's neural circuits are not deciding­: the organism is deciding. It's not a machine computing inputs to produce outputs. It's an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons. Those reasons are derived from the meaning of all the various kinds of information that the organism has at hand, which is grounded in its past experience and used to imagine possible futures. The process relies on physical mechanisms but it's not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms. What the system is doing should not be identified with how the system is doing it. Those mechanisms collectively comprise a self, and it's the self that decides. If we break them apart, even conceptu­ally, we lose sight of the thing we' re trying to explain. 

However, although we can reject a reductionist, purely mechanistic approach, that should not send us running in the other direction toward a nebulous, mysteriously nonphysical mind that is "in charge": the ghost in the machine. Our minds are not an extra layer sitting above our physi­cal brains, somehow directing the flow of electrical activity. The activity distributed across all those neural circuits produces or entails our mental experience ( and similarly for whatever kinds of mental experience other animals have). The meaning of those patterns for the organism has causal power based on how the system is physically configured. We can thus build a holistic physical conception of agency without either re­ducing it or mystifying it." (p. 144)

"This skepticism seems partly due to the enduring intellectual legacy of French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, which has shaped the Western scientific tradition. One of Descartes's most famous ideas is that the world is made of two very different types of substance: the physical and the mental. This dualist position gets around having to explain how physical stuff can produce immaterial things like thoughts by simply positing that thoughts occupy a kind of parallel realm of the mental. The problem with this idea-pointed out by some of Descartes's contemporaries, such as the astute and wonderfully titled Elizabeth, Prin­cess of Bohemia - is that it does not explain how the physical and the mental realms can interact. They clearly seem to, because thinking about doing something can indeed lead to us doing it - physically moving our bodies and things in the world - but how? Descartes did not have a good answer to this question (though he did propose a route of communication through the pineal gland, for no particularly good reason). 

You would think we would have moved on by now, after four hun­dred years, but it seems we still get hung up on a version of the same question: How could having a conscious thought move physical stuff around? Doesn't that somehow violate the laws of physics? It seems to require a mysterious form of top-down causation in which the mental pushes the physical around. But this apparent mystery only arises if we think of the mental as some realm of free-floating thoughts and ideas. It's not a question of whether immaterial thoughts can push around physi­cal stuff. Thoughts are not immaterial: they are physically instantiated in patterns of neural activity in various parts of the brain, which can naturally have effects on how activity evolves in other regions. There's no need to posit a "ghost in the machine"-you're not haunting your own brain. The "ghost" is the machine at work." (p. 268)

 By accepting our free will as an evolutionary outcome that gives us powers no other animal has ever had, we also need a heightened sense of responsibility, anticipation and morality. 

"By being able to think at this level, we turn isolated elements of knowledge into a more general understanding of how the world works, something that artificial intelligence still struggles to do. And we can deploy that understanding in directing our own behavior, even in osten­sibly novel situations. We can combine these nested hierarchies of con­cepts and maps of causal relations and system dynamics in new, creative ways within this abstract cognitive space and thereby engage in open­ended, model-based reasoning. We can imagine things. In effect, we can mentally simulate a model of the world and "run" it in fast forward, predicting and evaluating outcomes of various actions over short and long timeframes. 

Our ability to model the world in this way gives us unprecedented control over our environments. When faced with some problem, we have the ability to see the bigger picture by taking into account a wider context and a longer time horizon. This means we can avoid getting stuck in local optima - the quickest, easiest solution to a local problem­and instead optimize for global parameters. We can think strategically, not just tactically." (p. 254)

Without a doubt Mitchell's book is more than welcome and was a great relief to have his substantiated arguments for free will. Even when Sapolsky argues that the absence of free will may be morally liberating, his concept still felt suffocating and utterly reductionist. Mitchell's arguments are scientifically sound and they offer us a much stronger and open foundation to start working on, both as an individual and as a society. 

I have the intense pleasure of seeing my four grandsons - between one month and four years old - learn about the world and their immediate environment. When I see them discover their feet (the youngest) or make choices when playing, or interacting with each other, the only thing I see are four distinct characters, exploring, choosing, reasoning, fantasising, enjoying themselves and the freedom they have to do this. They are not little machines who are fully determined by culture or genes. They are four individuals enjoying life (well ... OK, sometimes not). Their life is in front of them. They will make billions of choices in the future. That is what life offers them, what it offers us. 

Anybody interested in evolution, cognitive science, society and ethics should read this book. But don't trust me ... I am fully confident that you can do this based on your own free will. 

Bart D. Ehrman - Armageddon - What the Bible Really Says About the End (Simon & Schuster, 2024) ****

Few things are more intriguing than religious beliefs. Texts written in ancient cultures have received over the years a status of divine truth, regardless of their factual accuracy, their physical possibilities, their internal contradictions and their lack of morals. Bart Ehrman studied religion when still a strong evangelical believer. His knowledge of the ancient languages and ancient history helped him understand the reality behind the texts. I can recommend many of his thirty books, half of which I have read. In the New Testament, the latest book, called "Revelation", written by a certain John of Patmos, describes Armageddon, the End Time, when Jesus returns and the Good will be separated from the Evil. This Book stands in stark contrast to the other books in the New Testament, in that it shows a return of the god of the Old Testament: it's no longer a loving and caring god, but a god full of wrath, vindictive, violent, powerful. A god who demands full submission and slavelike obedience. 

The imagery is strong violent, hallucinatory, excessive, with symbols and signs that are sometimes hard to interpret for modern day readers, but even in the earliest centuries scholars expressed their lack of understanding and there was a lot of discussion whether or not to include it in the New Testament. Eventually it was, but people like Martin Luther put them in the annex to his translation of the book. 

The most amazing thing is that this text is still a very lively prospect among evangelical christians, especially in the United States, and a strong part of Donald Trump's followers. They believe that Jesus will only come back to earth for the end times, when the jews reconquer the Mount of the Rock, and restore the original Temple that was destroyed in 40 CE. That explains the strong support for Israel and the sometimes inexplicable disregard for the human suffering of the Palestines. 

That people actually believe this, and actually build their life around this possibility is astonishing: 

"We are talking about a wide-ranging cultural phenomenon. One fairly recent poll indicates that 79 percent of Christians in America believe Jesus will be returning to earth at some point. Another poll taken in 2010 shows that 47 percent of the Christians in the country believe Jesus will return by 2050 (27 percent definitely and 20 percent probably)." (p. 15)

Many Christian sects have even determined with precision when exactly this would happen. Ehrman gives a great overview of all the wrong calculations by recent Christian sects, but being demonstrably wrong did not deter them from believing. The downside is that because a precise date for the end time was presented, the cult's followers often sold their farms, or did not harvest, or even gave all their belongings away, in the hope of buying their ticket to heaven. 

"Instead of admitting they were wrong, however, the group buoys itself by explaining to one another what really happened, jus­tifying themselves in face of the disconfirmation by pointing out a slight error in their calculations or claiming the event was inten­tionally delayed and then resetting the date. But most interesting, the group further resolves the dissonance by becoming more evan­gelistic, going out to win more converts to their views. Why would a mistake make someone missionary? The theory behind cognitive dissonance is that if more people acknowledge you are right, it eases the psychological trauma of knowing that you are probably wrong. So you set out to win over other devotees. Thus, the Millerites and their resetting of dates. Each time the expectation is disconfirmed, the group gets larger and more fervent, until the Final Disappointment takes effect. But even then, the idea does not necessarily go away, nor do the groups themselves. Various American religious groups emerged from the Millerites' Great Disappointment-"at least 33," accord­ing to sociologists of religion Rodney Stark and William Sims Bain­bridge. Hope springs eternal, and these groups thrive among us today, holding strong eschatological views about the coming end­normally, now, without setting dates. The two break-off groups most familiar to modern readers are the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists" (82-83)

Another major distinction between this Book and the Gospels, is the future vision of life after the final judgment. The followers of the Lamb or the Lord, will live in absolute power and absolute opulence: all infidels will be violently tortured and destroyed and the followers will live in a city of gold with all the riches and wealth one can imagine. Whereas the Gospels advocate for humility, service, caring, love, even for people of other groups, the Revelation is a brutal tale of reconquering power from Rome, and doing with other peoples exactly what was being done to them in the first place. After the End Times, the oppressed will be the oppressors, the poor will be massively wealthy. Instead of inspiring with new insights, spirituality and brotherhood, the Book of Revelation continues the ancient power narrative, with only a shift in power. 

"We have already seen that the book is massively violent. (...) I want to stress that the violence of the book is not an end in itself but a means to an end. The ultimate goal is revenge. But more than that, it is limitless possessions and power. In the end, the right people will get what the wrong people have now. As New Testament scholar Christopher Frilingos has so succinctly expressed, the book is all about who will dominate the world: ''A frankly imperialist nar­rative, Revelation predicts the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of a Christian one." Revelation does not adopt a new Christian attitude toward wealth and domination. It instead affirms the attitude promoted by Roman culture, the same view held by most people who choose not to follow the teachings of Jesus: wealth and domination can be ultimate goods." (172) 

This text that at first reading appears to have been written by a madman, and that for sure no publisher would even think of publishing today if anyone came with this manuscript, is still today a text that determines the thinking of millions of gullible people, even to the extent that it plays a role in the power politics of the Middle-East. 

 

Fons Van Dyck - De Toekomst Is Terug (Pelckmans, 2024) ***½

Vele zaken zijn cyclisch, en de tijden evolueren. Rond 2010 leidde ik bij Janssen de "branding" oefening om het merk Janssen wereldwijd in de markt te zetten nadat alle farmabedrijven van de groep Johnson & Johnson onder één merk geïntegreerd werden. Samen met bedrijfsmerkenspecialist Fons Van Dyck en zijn teams organiseerden we workshops in Europa en de VS met alle betrokkenen om het merk precies te kunnen positioneren, gevolgd door teksten, video's en ander communicatiemateriaal om het merk tot leven te brengen. Dit jaar werd het merk "Janssen" ten grave gedragen en de organisatie herdoopt in Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, een hele mondvol, en een terugkeer naar het merk van het moederbedrijf. 

Van Dyck is één van die weinige professionals die naast hun werk ook intellectueel maatschappelijk betrokken zijn, met zijn wekelijkse columns in de krant, maar ook als publicist en spreker. Dit is al zijn vijfde boek, een supergoed gestoffeerd werk over een onderwerp dat een kwarteeuw in zijn hoofd heeft zitten spelen. Een merk bestaat uit zeer diepe emotionele associaties die aansluiten bij de doelstellingen van het bedrijf als bij de verwachtingen van de klant. Ook hier wordt diep onder de oppervlakte gegraven om de essentie te vatten. 

Zeer vergelijkbaar is zijn uitgangspunt hier dat er vier krachten onze samenleving bepalen, als grote drijfveren die als optelsom van alle individuen ook de brede golven aangeven van de trends die we zien en mee helpen tot stand komen, en die hij gemakshalve alle vier met "Ver-" doet starten. 

Die krachten zijn Verkennen (om grenzen te verleggen), Verbinden (in harmonie met onze omgeving), Veroveren (van macht, status en rijkdom), Verdedigen (wanneer we ons bedreigd voelen). Ze bepalen de grote tendenzen in onze samenleving als een golfbeweging van het sentiment van de massa. "Verkennen" en "Verbinden" klinken positief, en "Veroveren" en "Verdedigen" negatief, maar dat is niet noodzakelijk: ze kunnen van lading veranderen. 

Naast deze grote krachten, die Van Dyck toelicht met voorbeelden uit het bedrijfsleven, de mode, de wielrennerij en uiteraard de politiek en vele andere sectoren, verwijst hij naar zijn mentor Helmut Gaus, professor aan de Universiteit van Gent over diens theorie van de grote trends in de samenleving, een cyclus die varieert tussen de veertig en zestig jaar. En gemakshalve vergelijkt hij die met onze vier seizoenen. 

De voorlaatste 'zomer' situeerde zich in 1971, het ongebreideld toekomstoptimisme als een gevolg van de toegenomen welvaart, technologische vernieuwing, en democratie. 

Deze cycli met uiteraard lente en herfst tussenin variëren om de veertig tot zestig jaar. Onze vorige winter was eind jaren '80, met veel werkloosheid, Tsjernobyl, AIDS, terreur (Bende van Nijvel, CCC), enz. Volgens de auteur was de vorige zomer in 2021. Mij verbaast dit. De angst - ook door Covid - met alle anti-vaxers, het extreem-rechts gedachtengoed dat al opgang maakte, was toen al een paar jaar bezig. Maar goed, misschien moet je abstractie maken van een aantal zaken om de grote tendenzen te kunnen vastleggen. 

Voor alle duidelijkheid: deze cycli zijn een reflectie van een mentale dominantie in de samenleving, zoals bijvoorbeeld voortuigangoptimisme versus angst voor de toekomst, vertrouwen in elkaar versus argwaan, en heeft slechts onrechtstreeks te maken met effectieve gebeurtenissen in de samenleving. 

Vandaag gaan we een mentale winter in. Van Dyck geeft de resultaten van een opiniepeiling die hij liet uitvoeren bij onze Vlaamse medeburgers. Zo denkt bijvoorbeeld 91% van de mensen dat de angst van mensen voor de toekomst zal toenemen, of vindt één op de drie Vlamingen dat het onverantwoord is om vandaag kinderen op de wereld te zetten. Deze mentale winter is ook te meten aan het stemgedrag van de bevolking, waarbij Verdedigen en Veroveren vandaag sterker staan dan Verbinden en Verkennen. De mensen plooien op zichzelf terug, stemmen extremistisch en ze denken dat sterke leiders met veel macht wenselijk zijn. 

Ik heb mijn twijfels bij de geïdentificeerde cycli als een soort fatalistische onvermijdbaarheid. Ze zijn ook zeer Westers en zelfs relatief lokaal. Maar ook al ben ik het niet met alles eens wat in Fons Van Dycks boek staat, zijn goed gedocumenteerde visie is meer dan het lezen waard, en zoals elke grote intellectuele inspanningen nodigt dit ook uit tot meer diepgaande reflectie over het lot van ons als mensen. Van Dyck blijft echter optimistisch en eindigt zijn boek met een aantal handvatten om de toekomst aan te pakken. 

Meer dan het lezen waard. 

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein - Noise - A Flaw in Human Judgment (William Collins, 2022) ****

Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" became a global bestseller, and rightly so, even if many of the book's core positions have been challenged by some cognitive scientists. Be that as it may, the book managed to open many minds to relfect on our own inuitive way of thinking, often very fast and even subconsciously, rarely with considered and conscious rationality. Driving that message home to us humans is already a major achievement, even if I'm not too optimistic about what it actually leads to in practice. 

"Noise" will probably not be a bestseller at the same level, yet it also deserves to be read by many. The core proposition of the book is that we all have a decision-making 'bias' that is linked to our perspective, culture, education, profession, etc. This 'bias' is well understoord by anybody involved in research, in opinion-polling or other levels of understanding decision-making. At the same time there is also 'noise' in the system, a problem of the same nature that is less widely acknowledged. "Noise" is the variation in choices or decisions made based on the same data, and that demonstrate a lack of coherence within an organisation or within the same person. 

The book gives dozens and dozens of examples of for instance claims administrators in insurance companies who give entirely different sums to claimants even if the damage is the same, or judges who give totally different sentences for identical crimes, or doctors who give totally different diagnoses for the same presented symptoms by patients. The stunning factor in the given examples are not only that there is variation in their decisions, but how wide the variations can be, as from three months to three years in the context of court sentences. A even more stunning fact is the variation by one and the same individual. Kahneman and colleagues mention studies that were conducted by presenting the same cases to the same judges or doctors six months after the first evaluation. The same judges and doctors came to a completely different decision so many months later. Some of these differences may even change depending on the moment of the day. Judges are more lenient with a full stomach, and less lenient on an empty one. The same is true with doctors apparently. 

We don't want to judge judges or doctors here, but show how we all should reflect on our own inconsistencies in judgment. In that respect, this book is again an eye-opener for anyone interested in the quality of our thought processes. 

The only downside in the book is the lack of recent data to substantiate their positions. Many of the studies that I double-checked had data from the '90s. It may be that nothing has changed since then, but I think that especially in medicine, many things have changed, including better diagnostics and the use of artificial intelligence to help mitigate the problems mentioned in the book. 

Recommended reading. 

Peter Godfrey-Smith - Living On Earth (Harper Collins, 2024) ***

This book is the follow-up of Peter Godfrey-Smith's "Metazoa", a book that I really liked for the new insights it brought to me regarding the emergence of consciousness in animals. It is the final book in the trilogy that started with "Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life", which I haven't read. 

This book is less scientific and more observational, like a documentary. He describes the animals he watched under water, in the jungle, in the desert and other places, but without adding many new scientific insights, just adding additional examples and depth to what he wrote earlier. The book ends with a strong plea to safeguard the planet and its vulnerable ecosystem, a topic that we fully endorse. 

We are destroing the earth's riches and wonder and surprises. Sentient beings that took millions of years to develop, with all their skills and features of today, are being wiped out by the dumbest of all animals. We agree, of course, but I did not buy the book to confirm my opinion. 

Douglas R. Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979) *****

This fascinating and genial book was published in 1979, when I was at university. It was a kind of a hype among my fellow-students, and even if I did not understand (or read) half of it, it opened a world, or rather a universe of thinking, while at the same time presenting it in an incredibly creative way. Earlier this year, I decided to read it in full and buy a copy. Fourty-five years later, it is still as enthralling as it was then. Hofstadter explores the boundaries of our thinking, where reason and logic meet their limits in paradoxes, contradictions, self-references and loops. The subject is about cognitive science, logic and computer sciences (and Artificial Intelligence), and he learns us how meaning and meaninglessness exist and how they come to life (or not) in abstract systems, including the human mind and the perception or delusion of the self or the "I". 

I do not think the book would have so much resonated with larger audiences or with us at that time, if it were not for the extensive illustrations of Dutch artist M.C. Escher and his impossible drawings, or the long dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise, occasionally joined by the Crab, and further illustrated by analysing the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, and their inherent structural elements of self-reference and loops, as in the sentence sequence: 

"The following sentence is false

The preceding sentence is true"

The starting point of course are the theorems of German mathematician Kurt Gödel: "The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure(i.e. an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. For any such consistent formal system, there will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system" (Wikipedia)

On top of this, Hofstadter develops dozens of new ways of looking at familiar or less familiar problems of logic and computation. He creates his own different logical systems in the book to illustrate his points, to take the reader without knowledge of mathematics or the formal language of computer scientists by the hand, and explain whatever elements he wants to demonstrate. 

He describes it as follows: 

"Here one runs up against a seeming paradox. Computers by their very nature are the most inflexible, desireless, rule-following of beasts. Fast though they may be, they are nonetheless the epitome of unconsciousness. How, then, can intelligent behavior be programmed? Isn't this the most blatant of contradictions in terms? One of the major theses of this book is that it is not a contradiction at all. One of the major purposes of this book is to urge each reader to confront the apparent contradiction head on, to savor it, to turn it over, to take it apart, to wallow in it, so that in the end the reader might emerge with new insights into the seemingly unbreachable gulf between the formal and the informal, the animate and the inanimate, the flexible and the inflexible.  This is what Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is all about." (p.26)

or:  

"No one knows where the borderline between non-intelligent behavior and intelligent behavior lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists is probably silly. But essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:

• to respond to situations very flexibly; 
• to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances; 
• to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages; 
• to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation; 
• to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them; 
• to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them; 
• to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways; 
• to come up with ideas which are novel. "

"This little debate shows the difficulty of trying to use logic and reasoning to defend themselves. At some point, you reach rock bottom, and there is no defense except loudly shouting, "I know I'm right!" Once again, we are up against the issue which Lewis Carroll so sharply set forth in his Dialogue: you can't go on defending your patterns of reasoning forever. There comes a point where faith takes over." (p. 192)

On the origin of life:  

"A natural and fundamental question to ask, on learning of these incredibly intricately interlocking pieces of software and hardware is: "How did ever get started in the first place?" It is truly a baffling thing. One has to imagine some sort of a bootstrap process occurring, somewhat like that which is used in the development of new computer languages - but bootstrap from simple molecules to entire cells is almost beyond our power to imagine. There are various theories on the origin of life. The run aground on this most central of all central questions: "How did Genetic Code, along with the mechanisms for its translation (ribosome_ tRNA molecules), originate?" For the moment, we will have to content ourselves with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than with an answer and perhaps experiencing that sense of wonder and awe is more satisfying than having an answer-at least for a while". (p. 548)

 Or using nice examples to make the reading easier to digest: 

"Here is a well-known children's joke which illustrates the open-endedness of real-life situations: 

• A man took a ride in an airplane. 
• Unfortunately, he fell out. 
• Fortunately, he had a parachute on. 
• Unfortunately, it didn't work. 
• Fortunately, there was a haystack below him. 
• Unfortunately, there was a pitchfork sticking out of it. Fortunately, he missed the pitchfork. 
• Unfortunately, he missed the haystack. 

It can be extended indefinitely. To represent this silly story in a frame­based system would be extremely complex, involving jointly activating frames for the concepts of man, airplane, exit, parachute, falling, etc., etc." (p. 675)

His ultimate endeavour is to link the world of abstract logic with the physical reality we live in, and of course especially our brain and its capacity to for abstract thought, to cross the levels set by scientific disciplines and to come to an more holistic understanding of the interactions. 

"My belief is that the explanations of "emergent" phenomena in our brains-for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will-are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing "resonance" between dif­ferent levels-quite like the Henkin sentence which, by merely asserting its own provability, actually becomes provable. The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself. 

 This should not be taken as an antireductionist position. It just implies that a reductionistic explanation of a mind, in order to be comprehensible, must ring in "soft" concepts such as levels, mappings, and meanings. In princi­ple, I have no doubt that a totally reductionistic but incomprehensible explanation of the brain exists; the problem is how to translate it into a language we ourselves can fathom. Surely we don't want a description in terms of positions and momenta of particles; we want a description which relates neural activity to "signals" (intermediate-level phenomena)-and which relates signals, in turn, to "symbols" and "subsystems", including the presumed-to-exist "self-symbol". This act of translation from low-level physical hardware to high-level psychological software is analogous to the translation of number-theoretical statements into metamathematical state­ments. Recall that the level-crossing which takes place at this exact transla­jon point is what creates Gödel's incompleteness and the self-proving character of Henkin's sentence. I postulate that a similar level-crossing is what creates our nearly unanalyzable feelings of self. In order to deal with the full richness of the brain/mind system, we will have to be able to slip between levels comfortably. Moreover, we will have to admit various types of "causality": ways in which an event at one level of description can "cause" events at other levels to happen. Sometimes event A will be said to "cause" event B simply for the reason that the one is a translation, on another level of description, of the other. Sometimes 'cause" will have its usual meaning: physical causality. Both types of causality-and perhaps some more-will have to be admitted in any expla­nation of mind, for we will have to admit causes that propagate both upwards and downwards" (p. 709)

And of course also the existence of free will. Are we the consequence of algorithms (historical/cultural/social/genetic/contextual/...) or not. 

"One way to gain some perspective on the free-will question is to replace it by what I believe is an equivalent question, but one which involves less loaded terms. Instead of asking, "Does system X have free will?" we ask "Does system X make choices?" By carefully groping for what we really mean when we choose to describe a system - mechanical or biological - as being capable of making "choices", I think we can shed much light on free will." (p. 711)

We will come back to this topic when reading Robert Sapolsky's "Determined". 

Even if in some respects the book is a little dated, especially when describing Artificial Intelligence or genetics, it remains one of the milestone books on cognitive science and logic, absolutely unique in terms of content and form, incredibly complex yet fun to read, even if it is impossible to understand everything, as most readers such as myself will have to confess. 

Ignaas Devisch - Een Kleine Filosofie Van Grote Emoties (Pelckmans, 2023) ***

In dit korte en frisje boekje schrijft filosoof Ignaas Devisch over het belang van onze 'grote emoties'. En dit kunnen vele soorten emoties zijn: als iets wat je raakt als individu, als iets dat je kan delen met anderen, als een sterkte om je te kunnen uitdrukken. Hij wijs echter ook op de gevaren van het gebruik van emoties op de juiste plaats en het juiste moment. Het moet relevant en authentiek zijn, en geen vorm van zelfzuchtige zelfpromotie.

"Een gesprek met een journalist of een bekende per­soon gaat al gauw over de mens achter de functie en hoe die in het leven staat, welke donkere pe­riodes die heeft meegemaakt en wat hem of haar drijft. Niet hoe de wereld is staat centraal, maar hoe we die ervaren en met die ervaring naar bui­ten komen. En het is maar de vraag of we hier niet doorslaan en stilaan terecht zijn gekomen in een opbod aan getuigenissen." (blz 31)

Of nog:  

"De Nederlandse filosoof Theo de Wit het stelt kan slachtofferschap een aantrekkelijke manier wor­den om jezelf op de kaart te zetten en aandacht te eisen, maar gaat die aandacht gepaard met een ranzig kantje. Zeker 'in een postideologische wereld waar 'waar­heid' vooral gevoelsmatig beleefde waarheid aan het worden is. Respect voor anderen is dan vooral respect voor andermans beleving van de waarheid. De kritische vraag naar de feiten achter die beleving kan dan als uiterst ongewenst worden ervaren; over gevoelens is het namelijk moeilijk discussieren.' Wanneer emoties een wapen worden om ons ge­drag niet langer ter discussie voor te willen leg­gen, wordt het lastig om met elkaar samen te leven. Zoals Plato dacht dat je emoties kan uit­schakelen om goed te kunnen nadenken, zo pro­beert men hier het omgekeerde: de gevoelens worden aan het gesprek of het debat onttrokken zodat ze de status van vastliggende waarheid ver­krijgen en anderen er geen toegang of zelfs geen verhouding tot hebben." (blz 73)

Als iemand die de belangen van patiënten behartigt, kan ik het alleen maar eens zijn met volgende paragraaf: de mens is meer dan een klinisch gegeven, en behandelingen zijn meestal pas succesvol als ze echt rekening houden met de volledige mens. 

"Wie daarentegen met mensen omgaat - denk aan artsen die patiënten ontmoeten - heeft wel de­gelijk andere kennis nodig dan alleen klinische gegevens. Weten hoe iemand eraan toe is en wat een ingreep met hem of haar doet, is allemaal bij­zonder relevant en noodzakelijk voor een goeie omgang met elkaar. Dan gaat het vaak om erva­ringskennis waar emoties een grote rol in spelen, en minder het louter cijfermatige of in formules om te zetten data. " (blz 56)

 Niet alle emoties komen evenveel aan bod, en misschien is emotie als drijfveer tot handelen misschien de grootste misbedeelde in dit overzicht. We doen wat we doen omdat we ergens door gepassioneerd zijn, nieuwsgierig zijn, moreel geschokt zijn. Deze diepe emotie dat de wereld beter kan zijn, lukt enkel dankzij de energie die deze emoties tot stand brengen. Als Plato zijn figuurlijke paarden met de ratio in bedwang denkt te houden en de emoties naar de achtergrond wil brengen, dan stopt hij ook het draaien van onze wereld. Zelfs de grootste wetenschapper - die uiteraard geen persoonlijke gevoelens in haar methode toelaat -  doet haar onderzoek gedreven door een diepe persoonlijke overtuiging en emotie. 

Maar ik kan het iedereen aanraden. Denken over emoties met Devisch als gids, biedt veel inzichten en stof tot nadenken. Het is geen wetenschappelijk werk uiteraard, maar een persoonlijke mijmering die zeer laagdrempelig en zelfs een tikje persoonlijk. 

John Glassie - A Man Of Misconceptions (Riverhead Books, 2012) ****

Several years ago I read Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès novel "Là Où Les Tigres Sont Chez Eux" in which he extensively mentions the 17th Century polymath and jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who was as much a scientist as he was a fantast and con man. For one or the other reason I stumbled upon a biography of the man, which is easy to recommend for anyone interested in the history of science or religion. 

To the man's credit, he was interested in everything, and his arrogant self-confidence made him also belief he was the best at everything, from math over astronomy and physics to medicine and linguistics, and of course also astrology and alchemy. He taught for more than 40 years at the Roman college. He wrote extensive books on many subjects. Some of his contributions were valuable, but for many of them he got away with them because nobody else had any knowledge on the subject. 

His books were read by scientists and philosophers such as Leibniz, Descartes and Christiaan Huygens. Descartes sent the books back with the following comment: "The Jesuit is quite boastful; he is more of a charlatan than a scholar". Leibniz was then much younger and absolutely fascinated by Kircher's writings, even if he already asked for some evidence for the claims made by the Jesuit. 

The Jesuits were at that time among the world leaders in science education and development, and Kircher's role is best placed in this context. 

"Clavius envisioned an elite corps of mathematician priests "distributed in various nations and kingdoms like sparkling gems," serving as "a source of great fear to all enemies" and as "an incredible incitement to make young people flock to us from all the parts of the world." Many of his proposals were put in place. And so while he was rigorously and rather inflex­ibly educated in Aristotelian and Thomist doctrines, Kircher also received private instruction in the very discipline that was beginning to undermine them." (p.34)

Although already at that time, the role of the jesuits was often mocked, and Kircher clearly did not match the description of the ideal jesuit: 

"Recall that for the Jesuits, the path toward Christ was predicated on an effort to achieve humility. It's unclear how well or how often Kircher took a good look at his apparent lack in that regard. But given that hypocrisy is almost requisitely present in human beings, and common among religious, political, and philosophical practices, he surely wasn't the only vain or selfinterested member of the Society of Jesus. As the satirizing sermon by a monk from another order in Rome went, the Jesuits "are the best Men that Live on the Earth. They are as Modest as Angels. They never open their eyes to cast a Look upon the Ladies at Church. They are such great Lovers of Restraint, that you never see them in the Streets. They are so in Love with Poverty, that they Despise and trample upon all the Riches in the World. They never come near Dying Persons or Widows, to importune them to be Remember' d in their last Wills .... They never go among Courts, or mind State Affairs."  (p.209)

Kircher claimed that he could decipher hieroglyphs, and because nobody else had any clue, he was believed in this matter. When a heavy fallen obelisk was found, Kircher even gave the translation of the side that had not been revealed yet because it was still lying on the ground. 

""They in turn marveled at my boldness," Kircher claimed, "and perhaps my lack of temerity, but several decreed that the truth of the matter must be determined by the original on the obelisk itself' After the obelisk had finally been rolled, they compared Kircher's scheme with the newly revealed side. "And when they had discovered that soundly and without error all of my markings were composed as on the original," he recalled, "they were utterly stupefied, those same men who were formerly mocking my interpretations as merely pure conjecture." This left "certain individuals saying that this knowledge had been inspired by the power of God, while several, not without calumny, even asserted that the knowledge had been acquired by some illicit pact with a demon. Some, finally, judged that this type of knowledge, attained by many years of study, was able to be acquired by the strength of a singular intellect." (p.204)

Kircher collected automata and made some himself, such as this wonderful tool that could do almost anything: 

"What is known about Kircher's device comes from an instruc­tional guide he wrote titled Specula Melitensis (Maltese Observatory), which, as one historian says, mostly conveyed Kircher's "enthusiastic capacity for fatiguing detail." The apparatus had "the form and figure of an observatory," or watchtower, hence its name, and it evidently employed the Llullian discs. Beyond that, it's hard to say precisely what this instrument looked like or how it worked. A "universal chronoscope" was on "the first cubical side." A "cosmographic mir­ror" was on the second. A "physico-mathematical mirror" was on the third, and the fourth cubical side was used for "medical-mathematical" purposes. The top of the structure was a pyramid. In all, the device had one hundred twenty-five functions. Among other things, it could be used to determine: 

• the "amount of dusk"
• the "flux and reflux of the seas"
• the astrological houses of the planets
• the signs of disease and "simple medicines for healing"
• the best times to go fishing and to give birth" (p.90)

He was fascinated by everything, often boastful, less competent and scientific than he presented himself, but like with Leibniz, his unbridled interest in everything, and his incredibly productive output on so many topics raised the interest among other, possibly better scientists, to also start investigating the same topics with more success. 

"Peiresc put it very mildly when he said that Kircher's ambitions were "a little grander than the ordinary goals of his colleagues." This led to a lack of restraint as well as other problems, including a certain flexibility with the truth. But for Kircher there were greater truths and lesser ones; there were different measures of truth, metaphors, and-multiple meanings, things for which fact-based modern science has no place. Progress required another kind of split, between the literal and the literary. But that was not a split Kircher ever would have been able to abide. And it makes sense that as his scientific reputation diminished, his work continued to capture and to fuel the creative imagination. (p. 269)

This biography is well-documented, well-written and offers a fascinating view on the century when science was still in its early infancy. That some did not make great inventions such as Kircher, is inevitable. His broad interests, his assured self-confidence and his deliberate fabrications make this a wonderful read. 

Giorgio Parisi - In A Flight Of Starlings (Allan Lane, 2023) ****

Giorgio Parisi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021 for his “discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”

In this short book he describes, explains and muses on complex systems, such as the flight of starlings, which is only the subject of the first chapter. His writing is simple, elegant and accessible, and easy to understand for the lay reader. 

He explains how as a young researcher he was encouraged to focus on just a few subjects instead of "concentrating on a few important ones. On the one hand this was obviously good advice, but on the other it was precisely by studying many things at once that I was able to make connections between different fields, the basis of many later discoveries"(p. 46). Next to starlings, we learn about the boiling of water and phase transitions, spin glasses, quantum physics, metaphors in physics and how ideas are born. Each chapter is worth reading, even if the first chapter on the flight of starlings was why I bought the book. The essence is about Parisi's work in complex system and the interaction of the various elements that they consist of. 

"In the context of physics, 'exchanging information' is equivalent to 'being subject to forces'. But generally speaking - given that the model can be applied to many fields of study, from physics and biology to economics and so on - there are many objects whose behavior depends on the behavior of other objects that are more or less in proximity to them, given that objects that are too far apart from each other cannot exchange information" (p. 47)

Not surprisingly, scientists from other disciplines are not always too happy when experts from other fields intrude in their area of interest. Just like anthropologists and sociologists hated the biologists who started with sociobiology, here the biologists are sometimes not all too happy when physicists come on their turf, when of course this cross-breeding is where the fun is. 

"We defined new standards of investigation in biology by using techniques originated and developed in statistical physics to solve complex and disordered problems. Not all biologists ap­preciated this incursion into their territory: some have shown themselves to be very interested in the results, while others have found our investigations to be too short on biology and top-heavy with math. The work was rejected by various journals that are probably kicking themselves now. After the great success of our first· article, which was cited in almost two thousand scientific publications, many others have followed." (p.17)

 And of course that's also where the value of analysing complex systems comes from. Understanding their workings at a very basic and abstract level, amplifies their use across contexts and areas of interest. 

"The actual world is disordered, and as we said at the start, many situations in the real world can be described as a large number of elementary agents that interact with each other. These interactions can be schematized with simple rules, but the results of their collective action are sometimes really unpredictable. The elementary agents can be spins, atoms or molecules, neurons, cells in general-but also websites, financial traders, stocks and shares, people, animals, components of ecosystems, and so on. 

Not all interactions between elementary agents generate dis­ordered systems. Disorder is born from the fact that certain ele­mentary entities behave differently from others: some spins try to go in opposite directions; certain atoms are different from most others; certain financial actors sell shares that others are buy,ing; some dinner guests actively dislike others who have been invited and want to sit as far away from them as possible. In all these disordered cases, the mathematical and conceptual tool I found is indispensable for tackling the problems associated with them." (p.80)

The book is an easy read, but with a very important topic. 

Daniel C. Dennett - Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Penguin, 1995) ****

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett passed away earlier this year. He is one the four riders of the apocalypse, together with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, called like that for their outspoken and often militant atheism. This was a good reason to read one of Dennett's initial books on Darwin's theory of evolution. 

Thirty years after publication, the book is somewhat outdated, luckily, but unfortunately also very actual. Many of his references about genetics, quantum physics and artificial intelligence are of course no longer entirely correct, and would have been presented in a very different way today, considering the incredible progress that was made in the last decade and years. But the essence of what he writes is still valid. The idea that life is the result of random chance events, with some basic rules that continue to be subjected to chance, and the organsism's fitness to survive in an often hostile environment, is something that - my guess - roughly 90% of the world's population would still reject today. 

"Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe. 

Right from the beginning, the cost of doing something is running the risk of doing it wrong; of making a mistake. Our slogan could be: No taking without mistaking. The first error that ever was made was a typographical error, a copying mistake that then became the opportunity for creating a new task environment (or fitness landscape) with a new criterion of right and wrong, better and worse. A copying error "counts" as an error here only because there is a cost to getting it wrong: termination of the reproductive line at worst, or a diminution in the capacity to replicate. These are all objective matters, differences that are there whether or not we look at them, or care about them, but they bring in their train a new perspective. Before that moment, no opportunity for error existed. However things went, they went neither right nor wrong. Before that moment, there was no stable, predictive way of exercising the option of adopting the perspective from which errors might be discerned, and every mistake anybody or any­thing has ever made since is dependent on that original error-making pro­cess. In fact, there is strong selection pressure for making the genetic copying process as high-fidelity as possible, minimizing the likelihood of error. Fortunately, it cannot quite achieve perfection, for if it did, evolution would grind to a halt. This is Original Sin, in scientifically respectable guise. Like the Biblical version, it purports to explain something: the emergence of a new level of phenomena with special characteristics ( meaners in one case, sinners in the other). Unlike the Biblical version, it provides an explanation that makes sense; it does not proclaim itself to be a mysterious fact that one has to take on faith, and it has testable implications. (p. 203)

This core idea cannot be repeated enough. It's a message of humility. It's a message that requires collaboration and pragmatic solutions among people for the complex problemas that we are confronted with, instead of relying on age-old and unworkable rigid ethical concepts. 

A large part of the book consists in refuting concepts of other academics whose writings and viewpoints are no longer a point of discussion today. If you can live with this, the book is still easy to recommend, and Dennett's knowledge of various scientific disciplines and the rigour of his approach are an absolute pleasure to read. 

Our world has lost a great mind.