On Earworms
And the Permeability of Identity
When I was young, I heard a TV ad jingle. It caroled, like a nursery rhyme, “How many cookies did Andrew eat? / Andrew ate eight thou-sand! / How do you keep your carpet neat? / Call ANdrew-eight-eight-thou-sand!”
And I still have that in my head! Once I even called the number; decades too late, of course! The company fades away, but the jingle lingers on!
On Heinlein’s Checklist
Robert Heinlein wrote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Let’s see now: I have changed diapers, written sonnets, balanced accounts, built walls, taken orders, given orders, cooperated, acted alone, solved equations, analyzed new problems, programmed computers, and cooked tasty meals.
I have tried on occasion to comfort the dying, and to fight; but neither efficiently.
I have never planned an invasion, butchered a hog, conned a ship, designed a building, set a bone, or pitched manure. I have snuck indoors, killed mice, driven an RV, erected tents, reset passwords, and pitched leaf compost, but those don’t count. Nor have I died, gallantly or otherwise; but neither had Heinlein when he wrote this list.
So I stand at 12 to 2 to 7. The 2 and the 7 I mark down to lack of experience, and the (usually fortunate) lack of need to acquire such experience. So by Heinlein’s count, I stand as mostly human already, and trainable to full humanity if absolutely necessary.
A little birdie tells me that most people would do about as well as me. That same birdie tweets that Heinlein, when he wrote this checklist, had already passed 20 of his 21 tests. Therefore I retort to Heinlein:
A human being should be able to define humanity in self-serving terms. Objectivity is for others.
The Numerology Letdown
Numerology has long been a disappointment to mathematicians. The failed romance of numerology goes back to Pythagoras. He proclaimed that number rules the universe; and in a sense we are all Pythagoreans now. (But reformed Pythagoreans; the square root of two and all that.)
You would think that if number rules the universe, then the numbers themselves should be relevant to everyday life; but no. Yes, harmonious musical chords are based on integer ratios; and yes, the sum of the squares of the sides of a right triangle equals the square of the diagonal; these Pythagorean insights are valid; but “five equals marriage” is not. The applications of mathematics deal with the numbers as a class, not as individuals.
Numbers are like Hollywood stars; they have properties and relationships, but no personalities.
The Racist Bone
Consider the phrase “I haven’t got a racist bone in my body!” I wonder; what would a racist bone be? After introspection I have decided that the best candidate would be the coccyx; the vestigial tail-bone.
The coccyx reminds us that our ancient ancestors had tails, and presumably other beastly traits. Among these was probably tribalism, which in us, their descendants, manifests as nationalism, religious fundamentalism, racism and classism.
So alas, I myself do have a racist bone in my body; or more precisely, a tribalist bone; worse yet, everybody has that same bone; fortunately it’s vestigial.
Who First Ate Cheese?
Somebody had to be the first to eat cheese. I feel sorry for that someone, but admire that someone’s courage and luck. Surely there had been nothing else to eat, for miles and miles around, and for a long time too. All that was left was this smelly gunk at the bottom of the milk jug. But our heroine ate it, and survived.
Do you think our heroine’s tribe thought cheese to be health food? Not at first, and rightly so; no doubt her tribefolk had all sorts of bad reactions to cheese, starting with lactose intolerance and going on up to obesity and heart disease. But evolution proceeded, and now lactose intolerance is a rarity, and Frenchmen eat cheese yet stay thin.
I wonder about the origin of other healthful foods. Yogurt, for instance. Somebody had to be the first to eat that. Again, it must have been hard times.
Evolution continues unabated, even within civilization; for now civilization is the environment our genes must adapt to. If milk and cheese are cheap, then lactose intolerance is a genetic defect, and milk becomes health food. If you need readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic merely to survive on these mean streets, then so long dyslexia. If flu, measles and the common cold regularly go pandemic in the cities, then your grandchildren, if any, will have kick-ass immune systems.
I predict that in 10,000 years, Cheetos will be a health food.
Local Optimism
Voltaire mocked Leibnitz (in the guise of Dr. Pangloss) for proposing that this is the ‘best of all possible worlds’. But Leibnitz, co-inventor of the calculus, knew the difference between local and global maxima. A global maximum is the largest value that a function reaches, for any input; whereas a local maximum is the largest value that a function reaches, in some neighborhood of the locally-maximizing input.
I therefore propose this modification of Panglossian optimism; Local Optimism, which states that this is the best of all sufficiently similar possible worlds. Any stable world locally optimizes; it’s the best of all nearby possibilities.
Local optimism suggests that there may be many stable worlds, some better than ours. There may also be inherently unstable worlds, that are the worst of all sufficiently similar possible worlds.
Any continuous path from one stable world to another must begin by getting worse.
Any continuous path from one stable world to a better one must, in between, pass through the worst world on the path.
A path from one stable world to a better one that never gets worse must be discontinuous.
Analogs of local optimism are confirmed - and fundamental - in biology and physics; Darwinian evolution for biology and the Law of Least Action for physics. Local Optimism has sufficient scientific support to appeal to the likes of Leibnitz; yet also sufficient satiric undertones to appeal to the likes of Voltaire.
For why does the universe minimize action? Is it lazy?
Collective Individuality
In my writngs I call into question the existence of money. I call this philosophy ‘aplutism’; it calls money a fiction. Any money system’s reality is at best social; money’s value is determined by a market, which is by definition transpersonal. Therefore there is no such thing as “my” money system; it is by definition “ours”.
Therefore money is collectivist! It has to be, otherwise it wouldn’t be fungible. The same goes for language. Words have to have shared meanings, or they have no meanings at all. Or take Reason; there is certainly no such thing as “my” rationality, distinct from “ours”. If anyone has Reason, then Reason is the common property of all mankind.
(Once Calvin, of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, was told to answer a test question “in your own words”. A loophole! So he answered in gibberish.)
A curious political paradox emerges. Money, speech and Reason are the gods of libertarian individualism, but they’re also as collectivist as the fire department! Money, speech, reason and much else (for instance the Rule of Law) is collective by nature. We all have rule of law or none of us do. In such a situation the only rational policy is to build government relating to such things on collective principles.
The money that you make is yours; but it is denominated in terms that are ours. Your speech is free, you may say whatever you like, but you’d better use English, and not some private language of your own, if you wish to be understood. You have your individual rights under the law; but the law is a creature of the State. And so on.
The individual and the collective are interdependent; they only make sense in terms of each other. Yin and Yang.
The paradox works in the other direction as well. Every collectivist movement ends up being run by a powerful individual, usually an alpha male. The army needs a general, the church needs a priest, the commune needs a manager.
The human dilemma is that we are individual yet social. Monty Python parodied the paradox in this scene from their “Life of Brian”:
Brian to crowd: “I mean, you’re all individuals!”
Crowd: “YES, WE’RE ALL INDIVIDUALS!”
Lone man in crowd: “I’m not!”
Rudyard Kipling celebrated the paradox with:
The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
Signed,
the illusion of the individual Nathaniel
Against Uniqueness
What does it mean, to be unique? To be the best, the exception, the only? It seems a positive thing somehow, but really it has a lot of negativity built in.
To be unique is to have a certain description – that indeed is the positive part of uniqueness, especially if the description is flattering; but to be unique also means that nothing else has that same description. Nothing else whatsoever is like the unique; hence there is negativity within uniqueness.
Were a lover to say, “I love my friends and relatives and many others, including you,” well, the one wooed might find his ardor limited, but soothing; but were he to say, “I love only you,” well how thrilling, but stressful. The lover of many needs keeping an eye on; but the lover of only-one is needy, clingy, and potentially dangerous.
Once I was walking through Harvard Square when someone ran up to me, calling another man’s name. It turned out that there was another mathematician there, one who looked like me, at least from behind. I found this revelation reassuring; if I’m part of a type, then we must be on to something.
I felt the same sense of collective security when I noticed that raccoons have hands. Evidently hands are a good idea; someone else seconded the motion. If we were the only animals with hands, then I might doubt the soundness of the concept; but as is, if there’s something that we ought to do with these hands, but we fail, then there’s a back-up team, to do it in our place. How reassuring!
Uniqueness is the enemy of positivity just as the best is the enemy of the good. The unique is the least positive of the positives; for irreplacibility equals insecurity. Uneasy rests the One, for fear that there might be another One.
All could be good but only a few can be best; therefore the good are a better bet than the best.
Therefore we should all renounce uniqueness. Never sell your soul, not for a treasure, nor even a penny; instead give it away for free.
Zurn, Tork and Bobrick Explained
One BayCon, at the Santa Clara Hyatt Regency, I was in the men’s-room on the first floor. I noticed that all the urinal plumbing bore a corporate logo: ZURN. I thought, “Zurn?!”; then I turned to wash my hands. The towel dispensers had a corporate logo: TORK. And the hot-air hand-dryers bore the name BOBRICK.
Zurn? Tork? Bobrick? Corporate names are weird for some reason; they have a dream-like quality. This, at a science-fiction convention, invited appropriation by imagination. I figured that Zurn has got to be an evil interstellar emperor, and Bobrick the Earthling adventurer who overthrew him, but I wasn’t sure about Tork. Was he Zurn’s minion, or Bobrick’s sidekick?
Puzzled by this, I proceeded towards the science-fiction convention’s Info desk. Before reaching the escalators, I met a fellow conventioneer; a tall fellow wearing a fez. I told him about Zurn, Bobrick and Tork, and asked about Tork. He said, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to wipe your memory.” I replied, “Maybe we’ve had this conversation before.”
I went up the escalator, to the science-fiction con’s Info desk. I told them about Zurn, Bobrick and Tork, and asked about Tork. They handled this absurd question with aplomb, and between them and me, we figured out that Tork started out as one of Zurn’s minions, but ended up as Bobrick’s sidekick.
Later I met the fez fan again. I said, “Your attempts to suppress the truth have failed.” Then I told him about Tork’s switching sides.
And that is how much sense corporate names make.
