This is six months late. But I still want to blog about it. Greg Gore, the publisher of Raymond Smullyan’s “Rambles Through My Library” wrote to me in August 2009 for permission to post my blog review excerpt of Smullyan’s book on the Praxis website.
I was of course more than happy to have the privilege of helping to promote Raymond Smullyan’s books. Hence, my short review appeared here.
Other than reading his books, this was the closest encounter I’ve come to being in contact with Raymond Smullyan.
In my excitement, I wrote a long rambling email to Greg:
How wonderful to hear from a publisher of one of my favourite writers! Your email made my day for two reasons. First, I’m always pleased to receive email from people who chance upon my blog and second, I would love to promote Raymond’s works.
So, yes, please post an excerpt of my review with a link back to my blog on your website. I love Raymond’s works and wish they would be more widely read and I would be very happy to promote his writings in any way. In fact, I love his works so much, I try to collect all his books, including his puzzle books, which unfortunately, I can’t read like his normal books since much more time is required. His puzzle books are perpetually on my “to read when I have a lot of time” list.
I’ve already bought “A Spiritual Journey” and am reading parts of it. I’ve been meaning to write to Raymond for many years but I don’t have his email address to tell him how much I enjoy his books and his humour. He mentioned in “A Spiritual Journey” that he felt complimented when his mother told him Bertrand Russell’s writings reminded her of Raymond. One of my close friends said that Raymond’s works remind him of me due to a certain mischievousness in his writings. I was very pleased to hear that although I know full well I’m no where near the brilliance of Raymond.
Could I please trouble you to convey my great enjoyment of Raymond’s works to him? His mischievous humour often makes me laugh out aloud when reading his books.
Could you tell him he has a fan in Singapore, someone who was a former philosophy student. I know that at least one of the National University of Singapore’s former philosopher faculty staff also reads Raymond Smullyan. This same staff also used an article by Arthur Smullyan (not sure if there is any relationship between the two) in a philosophy of language course that I attended many years ago.
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Many thanks again for your email and the privilege to promote Raymond’s books. If and when Raymond publishes another book it would be a great joy for me to be among the first to know (I know he has another book that will be out in Feb next year).
p.s. If you are interested, you can find other entries about Raymond on my blog if you search for “Raymond Smullyan”, however these entries probably refer to works published by other publishers.
Thanks to a loan from YY several months back, I am currently reading Gaisi Takeuti’s “Memoirs of a Proof Theorist“. This is a compilation of English-translated articles on Godel originally written by Takeuti in Japanese. Unfortunately, the book suffers from some awkward English sentences. The grammar of some sentences could also be further improved. I hope that some editors will improve on this book in future.
I do not have any “genuine understanding” (to use Takeuti’s term) of logic and many of the technical areas discussed in the book are beyond me. Nonetheless, I’ve always had an interest in mathematical logic (which has a history of close association with the treatment of philosophical paradoxes) since my university days and I enjoy reading about famous logicians and their weird and interesting results.
In Takeuti’s book, I enjoyed reading anecdotes and memories of Godel. It was very clear to me that one of the main reasons for this book was for Takeuti to set the record right about the general and mistaken impression of Godel as an “eccentric” or “misanthrope” in view of his social reticence, which Takeuti attributes to Godel’s weak health. It is well known that Godel refused medical treatment in his last days, but the following incident concerning Godel is not well known (See pages 110 and 111) :
In 1970, an acquaintance of his introduced him to a famous doctor in New York and he received treatment. This doctor administered narcotics without informing him, which profoundly upset him, because he believed that narcotics damage the brain. This treatment was an extremely unpleasant experience and I imagine he was afraid more than anything else that it might be repeated.
In an Appendix called “On Godel’s Continuum Hypothesis”, Takeuti also revealed:
Godel sent a five page memo to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. It was hand written, with nonsensical definitions and style, and it gives an impression of doodle. The reason why this happened is that Godel came under the care of a famous medical doctor in New York, who prescribed narcotics without informing him. Under the influence of narcotics, Godel believed he had obtained a beautiful solution of a longstanding question, which he wrote out and submitted.
In Takeuti’s writing, it was also clear to me Takeuti is a frank and humble person, compared to say Gregory Chaitin. His frankness is is some times funny. For example, in article recounting his reading of “Godel Remembered”, he writes of Kreisel as follows:
The last article is “Godel’s excursions into intuitionistic logic” by Georg Kreisel. This is a big article occupying 122 pages of a booklet of 186 pages. It has played a substantial role in giving the booklet the style of a book. Typically for Kreisel, it contains too much information in various forms. It is a bit dense to read through, even for me, whose specialty is close to his. Therefore, I read here and there, looking for parts of interest to me. One is Godel’s view of Gentzen, in which can be read: He often called Gentzen a better logician than himself.
Here are some passages that I found amusing (the first is found on page 3 and typical of conversations by mathematicians):
Now, returning to my fundamental conjecture, Godel appeared to think that, if its proof were to be extremely impredicative, then there would be a counter-example and the state of things similar to the Incompleteness Theorem would hold. In fact, what is interesting about my fundamental conjecture is that, if one admitted an extremely impredicative demonstration, then it would become trivial. When I told his to Godel, he was very surprised and he seemed to become more interested in the problem. Godel asked me if I had published that fact, and I replied that I had not because it was trivial. He then said: “Publish it by all means.! Many people will change their views on your conjecture.” As a result, I published a trivial article against my will.
Here is a funny anecdote about Raymond Smullyan on page 4:
Thanks to Godel, during the two years of my stay at the Institute, many logicians such as Bernays, Schutte, and Feferman were there. Smullyan and Putnam were at the University as well. They held a logic seminear every week, and the logic group was very lively. In particular, there were two proof-theorists in the rare Gentzen style together (Schutte and Takeuti), and so we were were high-spirited. Smullyan would make me laugh by referring to us in a joking manner: “Is your name TakeSchutte?”. It is my sense that the energy and morale of logicians in Princeton was due to Godel’s kindness, cheerfulness and warmth.
Here is another amusing passage on Page 108:
The last article is “Godel’s impression on students of logic in the 1930s by Stephen C. Kleene. His writing is very typical of Kleene.
Unless there is some fault of the translation, this seems to me to be an absolutely “trivial” observation.
Last night, I finished reading Raymond Smullyan’s “Rambles Through My Library”. I was absolutely sure I would have enjoyed the book even more if I was in a more idle mood.
In the rambling and distracted style of the book, I will share some passages from the book and my reactions to these passages. Smullyan’s book is largely a commentary and reaction to book passages he enjoyed. Well, this post is largely a commentary and response to Smullyan’s commentary and reaction to book passages he enjoyed. I will quote three passages. Except for the first passage, which reminded me of something not so delightful, all of the other 2 passages I’ve quoted were absolutely delightful.
First this passage (page 75), which was mentioned in passing, in a discussion about John Burrough’s Journal that reminded me of “Underground” by Haruki Murakami:
...I read some time ago a review of a Buddhist movie (called, I believe, Dream Life), which unfortunately I have never been able to catch. I read that when the Buddhist girl came from India to America and saw all these crazy cult religions going around, she shook her and said: “When people no longer believe in anything, they are ready to believe anything!”
In his book containing interviews of victims of the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack Murakami had also included interviews with the Aum Shinrikyo members. I recalled that it was eerie seeing myself in some of the words of those being interviewed, words that reflected disillusionment with a soulless materialist society and the desire to seek something more spiritually fulfilling. It was also eerie also to read about the amount of energy and self-sacrifice spent on misguided endeavors, such as ignoring and replacing one’s conscience with rationalisations to justifying doing harm to others. Such tragedies arose out of a certain steely mental determination to progress on the path and a firm misguided belief that certain actions lead to spiritual progress and liberation and that one must perform those actions, no matter difficult they were. Implicit was also that the degree of difficulty of the endeavor and the corresponding struggle reflected one’s own spiritual inadequacy and was something to be overcome. When overcome, it leads one to spiritual liberation. How perverse! Good intentions lead to bad outcomes when one abdicates one’s own independent judgement. Instead of the self-mastery that leads to spiritual progress, the effort is expended on overcoming one’s conscience. Fearsome indeed!
Next, this passage is from A. Edward Newton, an obscure book collector now largely forgotten (page 79) that I like a lot because it gives me a wonderful excuse to buy more books than I have time to read:
I do not much use any library except my own. I early formed the habit of buying books, and, thank God, I have never lost it. Authors living and dead – dead for the most part – afford me my greatest enjoyment, and it is my pleasure to buy more books than I can read. Who was it who said, “I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul’s reaching towards infinity?”.
Now, no one (myself included) should stop my soul from reaching towards infinity!
I’m not as good as the idler I aspire to be so I only have time for one more passage that I read in Smullyan’s book. It encapsulates my life philosophy and is from a poem by Po Yuchien (page 157):
I’m too lazy to read the Taoist classics, for Tao doesn’t reside in the books;
Too lazy to look over the sutras, for they go no deeper in Tao than its looks;
The essence of Tao consists in a void, clear, and cool,
But what is this void except being the whole day like a fool?
Too lazy am I to read poetry, for when I stop, the poetry will be gone;
Too lazy to play on the ch’in, for music dies on the string where it’s born;
Too lazy to drink wine, for beyond the drunkard’s dream there are rivers and lakes;
Too lazy to play chess, for besides the pawns there are other stakes;
Too lazy to look at the hills and streams, for there is a painting within my heart’s portals;
Too lazy to face the wind and the moon, for within me is the Isle of the Immortals;
Too lazy to attend to worldly affairs, for inside me are my hut and my possessions;
Too lazy to watch the changing of the seasons, for within me are heavenly processions.
Pine trees may decay and rocks may rot; but I shall always remain what I am.
Is it not fitting that I call this the Hall of Idleness?
“If you have a society of selfish people, combined one-to-one with altruistic people, theoretically the altruists should be wiped out. But altruists can co-operate. Which gives them a strong advantage. That is the cause of hope.”
In one widely cited study,’ writes Steven Johnson in his book about the neuroscience of everyday experience Mind Wide Open, ‘he [Pankepp] played dozens of records to chickens attached to equipment designed to record their shivers of pleasure. The chickens turned out to have the strongest positive response to the late-era Pink Floyd record The Final Cut.’ This is important information since, from an evolutionary perspective, if spirituality really is biological, that biology should be found not just in human beings but lower orders as well.
Therefore, I’m not going to describe the technique in detail. Part of this is because I know that if I saw the instructions written out, I would just jump to the end, say “that looks easy,” give it a try for 15 minutes, and then give it up as no good. The technique is simple, but that’s not the same as easy. It’s a completely different experience if you spend a 10 hour day meditating on each incremental step in thoroughly learning the technique. (This is why it makes so much sense to have what seems like an intimidatingly long 10-day course for beginners.) However, I do want to share some of the ideas behind the technique.
Most of what they taught at the intellectual level wasn’t anything new to me, and probably many of you have heard a lot of it before as well. Things like “suffering is caused by attachments to cravings and aversions,” “everything is constantly changing and impermanent,” “the only thing you can really control is how you think and react,” and “only you can truly make yourself happy or unhappy.” The problem is that just knowing this intellectually doesn’t help much because it’s so hard to do anything about it. And for a long time before the life of Gautama Buddha, this theoretical level was all there was, until he came along and created (or rediscovered) a technique for putting the theories into practice. That technique is Vipassana.
The theory says that there are four levels of the mind. The first two are perception and recognition—pretty straightforward utilities that we don’t need to worry about too much. Any sensory input (including thoughts and emotions) passes through these first. The third level is called vedan? in P?li. This is the direct, physical sensation we feel as a result of this input. There are sensations created throughout our body for everything we experience. When we have a reaction to something “out there” in the world, what we are actually responding to is the physical sensation in our body generated by our perception of that object, not the object itself. That response comes from the final level, called sa?kh?ra. It decides whether it likes or dislikes the sensations, then develops cravings or aversions to them, or trots out our old, established, habitual reactions. This is the problematic part, because the world is never conforming perfectly to our wishes, and we’re therefore constantly feeling cravings and aversions that we can’t satisfy, and that’s what makes us unhappy.
The idea behind Vipassana is to learn to set up a filter of sorts between the vedana and sankhara parts of your mind. From a direct experience of the vedana we can choose how best to react, without being slaves to our old habits of behavioral patterns or emotional reactions. The first part of doing this consists in developing your awareness. You learn to be aware of and focus on all the myriad sensations constantly going on in your entire body, from the most obvious to the most subtle. The second part requires developing your equanimity. Whatever sensations you observe, you do so objectively, dispassionately, taking them as neither good nor bad. If the sankhara comes in and tries to make you react, you don’t give in to it. The more you practice this awareness and equanimity together, the more you also come to realize (experientially) how much everything really is constantly changing. These things we form attachments to are coming and going, arising and passing away, all the time. Which makes it easier, of course, to just take things as they come and not form cravings or aversions for them.
Decisions depend very heavily on how people’s options are described.
People are more willing to treat 600 people infected with a deadly virus when they are told the treatment will save 200 of those lives, than when they are told that it will kill 400 of them. People are more likely to donate to a charity when the cost is described in terms of pennies per day instead of dollars per year. And more people say they could live on 80 percent of their income than say that they could save 20 percent of their income.
Descriptions are the psychological equivalent of a camera lens. Psychologists use the term “framing effects” to describe their influence. An investment banker who is delighted by saving $5 on a pair of shoes but disgusted by receiving $1,000 for a year-end bonus has experienced the power of framing effects.
After years of using prostitutes, the turning point in Naipaul’s life comes in 1972 when he finds a woman he desires: Margaret, whom he has met in Buenos Aires. She apparently refused to be interviewed for the book, but her archived love letters supply the missing narrative. They are rapturous, despairing, pleading, speaking of “his cruel sexual desires”. She acknowledges that he is her black master, that he regards his penis as a god, that she will worship it, abase herself.
This word “master”, used often in the letters, is interesting. It is a slave word. In role playing – and most of these love letters refer to highly eroticised power games – the master is regarded as dominant; but, paradoxically, it is usually the submissive person, the masochist, who has the ultimate power – maddening for the sadist.
Here is one instance. Margaret shows up unexpectedly in Wiltshire. Naipaul is displeased with her. He beats her and afterwards explains, “I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt . . . She didn’t mind at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn’t appear really in public. My hand was swollen.”
“Margaret was Vidia’s ideal woman,” French writes. “He could string her along and mistreat her with her abject consent.” He later writes, in paraphrase, “She said she had done things to Vido that would have made her sick with anybody else, and yet she longed for the time when she could do them again.” It is no exaggeration to describe the relationship between Naipaul and Margaret as a version of The Story of O.
French treats his private life scrupulously. He shows how much Naipaul owed to his first wife, Pat, whom he met when both were at Oxford. She helped him through a nervous breakdown, chivvied him with good advice, supported him from her earnings as a teacher in the first years of the marriage, organised his daily life, and remained his most devoted and admiring reader and adviser. But she could not satisfy him sexually; he had, as he confessed when already distinguished, frequent recourse to prostitutes, an addiction he found necessary but shameful. Then in Argentina he met a married woman, Margaret, who gave him for the first time in his life full sexual satisfaction.
As the novel recounts, he began a new relationship (with Cate Haste, the writer who has been his wife for the past 35 years). He and Lisa agreed on a separation. Divorce proceedings started. Then, in 1971, on an evening when he postponed going round to see her, she killed herself, with their daughter in the house. “It was an incredible rupture,” Bragg says bleakly. “It was a rupture because she went, it was a rupture because I had a crack-up, it was a rupture because of the analysis, it was a rupture because one’s whole life spiralled out of control. And there was such pain. And the death of Lisa just never stops.”
China and Olympics 2008
Olympic Regret by Tom Scocca at the Boston Globe
Excerpt:
But the People’s Republic makes an irresistible villain in the ongoing international dramas, for both fair and unfair reasons. To old-line Cold Warriors, it is an unrepentant godless Communist dictatorship; to the post-Cold War left, it is a cradle for unchecked global capitalism at its most abusive. It is taking manufacturing jobs from the Western working class and flouting the ethical and environmental values of the intellectual class. It still handles dissent by locking up dissenters. It is hostile to freedom of the press, which guarantees it bad press.
In the late 1980s, “there was a Hindu yogi who was offering a night class, and my students asked me what I thought about that,” she said. “I hadn’t heard him speak. I was thinking, ‘I’m a Christian, what can a pagan teach me?’ But the students shamed me into going to hear him. Here I was, teaching a course in religion, and I didn’t know anything about this.
“So I went to hear him speak. And when he got done, I said to myself, ‘There are a lot of things this man could teach me.’”
What Meadow will explain to her critics—at least the ones who do her the courtesy of letting her respond—is that there’s a distinction between Buddhism as religion and Buddhism as a meditation technique. One is a belief system; she doesn’t teach that. The other, the one she focuses on, is a process.
“Christianity includes a call to meditate, but it never provides a method of meditating, a step-by-step guide on how to do it,” she said. “As a result, a lot of Christian meditation gets stale because you get stuck. The yogi saw the problem right away and helped me fix it.”
For her, the turning point came when she finagled her way into an intensive meditation workshop in 1989.
Other Stuff I Enjoyed Reading and Should Have Posted Earlier
Born a modestly well-off villager, Mao lived like an emperor, carried on litters by peasants, surrounded by concubines and placated by everyone. Yet his most famous slogan was “Serve the People”. This paradox illustrates one aspect of his brilliance: his ability to justify his actions, no matter how entirely self-serving, as being done for others.
Psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance”—the ability to make a compelling, heartfelt case for one thing while doing another. Being able to pull off this sort of trick is an essential skill in many professions. It allows sub-standard chief executives to rationalise huge pay packages while their underlings get peanuts (or rice).
...Mao’s abandonment of friends and even wives and children seemed to be based on a calculation of which investments were worth maintaining and which should be regarded as sunk costs. Past favours were not returned. According to Ms Chang and Mr Halliday, a doctor who saved his life was left to die on a prison floor after being falsely accused of disloyalty. Mao let it happen: he had other doctors by then.
...Under Mao, China didn’t drift, it careened. The propellant came from the top. Policies were poor, execution dreadful and leadership misdirected, but each initiative seemed to create a centripetal force, as everyone looked toward Beijing to see how to march forward (or avoid being trampled). The business equivalent of this is restructuring, the broader the better. Perhaps for the struggling executive, this is the single most important lesson: if you can’t do anything right, do a lot. The more you have going on, the longer it will take for its disastrous consequences to become clear. And think very big: for all his flaws, Mao was inspiring.
In the long run, of course, the facts will find you out. But who cares? We all know what we are in the long run.
...There is a modern moral in this story. We have been creating ecological crises for ourselves and our habitats for tens of thousands of years. We have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point out that each solution only brings us face to face with the next crisis, optimists that no crisis has proved insoluble yet. Just as we rebounded from the extinction of the megafauna and became even more numerous by eating first rabbits then grass seeds, so in the early 20th century we faced starvation for lack of fertiliser when the population was a billion people, but can now look forward with confidence to feeding 10 billion on less land using synthetic nitrogen, genetically high-yield crops and tractors. When we eventually reverse the build-up in carbon dioxide, there will be another issue waiting for us.
If Birgitta is the patron saint of Europe, Kreuger was the patron saint of sinners; he was arguably the most brilliant and ambitious swindler who ever lived. In the first three decades of the 20th century, he built up an industrial empire founded on the most humble of innovations, the Swedish-made safety match, that lit a fire of speculative excess around the world creating, then burning through, fortunes that would be measured now in the billions. In the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, writing in 1961, “Boiler-room operators, peddlers of stocks in the imaginary Canadian mines, mutual-fund managers whose genius and imagination are unconstrained by integrity, as well as less exotic larcenists, should read about Kreuger. He was the Leonardo of their craft.”
