Daily Aphorism #4: Homage to a Three-Pound Organ

The more I learn about the brain, the more I am amazed and confounded. It doesn't seem possible that brains should work nearly as well as they do. Let me rephrase . . . it doesn't seem possible that brains should work at all. For starters, what's with consciousness? Yes, we are exquisite survival machines, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should expect to have a front seat to the show, the sounds and lights and smells and touches associated with surviving. But we are plopped into front row seats and it's glorious and terrifying to be a conscious witness to our day-to-day adventures. This makes no sense to me. It seems that we could be exquisite survival machine yet not be conscious of anything. What is the value-added of being conscious witnesses? I'm not a believer in "free will," so I'm not convinced that it is necessary to have a conscious commander of my body. On the other hand, I can't believe that natural selection threw in would would seem to be an expensive add-on like consciousness just for the entertainment value.

All of the above is a mere warm-up to another miracle performed by brains. Today I was looking for a tiny bluetooth speaker, but could not find it. I decided to walk down to work in my basement on an entirely unrelated project, but my mind returned to the search for the bluetooth speaker. While standing in my basement, my three-pound brain retraced my steps over the past week, ruling out certain locations any playing little "videos" convincing me that the speaker was not somewhere other than my house. Then while my eyes were wide open, my mind generated imagery of me placing that little speaker next to a guitar case in my bedroom (two floors up). This imagery was vivid and convincing. I was now certain of where the speaker was, even though I wasn't yet looking at the speaker. I walked upstairs and found it exactly where my brain said it would be. My three-pound brain created an accurate model of my house and replayed my activities over the past week. It did this quickly and effortlessly, generating "videos" and a rationale for why I put the speaker where I did. Billions and billions of microscopic neurons doing something that seems impossible, even after I saw that it could actually happen. My brain did it without any programming by any sentient being. I has no central processing unit and no traditional software. As best we know, this set of miracles occurs as the result of this Hebbian insight: Nerves that fire together wire together.

My difficulties understand the magnificence of the brain reminds me of the story of the engineers who, studying the anatomy and physiology of a bumblebee, concluded that it would be impossible for such a creature to fly.

And now that same brain that found my lost object harnesses the intricacies of the English language, allowing me to share this story about how two ways in which ordinary brains are beyond-belief extraordinary. The only reason we aren't repeatedly stunned and disoriented by the amazing things are brains can do is because we have gotten used to such miracles, day after day after day.

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The Importance of Free Inquiry at the Academy

Heterodox Academy has released this 3-minute video arguing for something that 20 years ago would have puzzled most people.

This video advocates for

  • Free Inquiry at the Academy
  • Encouraging the Life of the Mind, and
  •  The Use of Evidence when taking positions, rather than relying on mere feelings.

But this is 2021, and we are, in many places, continuing our descent into a new Dark Ages where an increasingly acceptable way to win an argument is to silence one's opponents, using economic threats and brute force if necessary, even at the Academy.

I fully support the following ideas of Heterodox Academy:

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I fully support the above ideas in my role as a law professor and in my personal life. As an attorney affiliated with Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), I am willing to push back against persons and organizations violating these principles where they involve violations of civil rights, including violations of the First Amendment.

In fact, FIRE has now established a Faculty Legal Defense Fund to protect the speech of faculty members.  Here is how it works:

Public college and university faculty who face a threat of sanction by their institution or have been punished for expressive activity—whether it’s instruction, scholarship, or speaking on issues of public concern—can submit matters for FLDF consideration. They can do so through FLDF’s dedicated 24-hour Hotline at 254-500-FLDF (3533), or submit a case online. Our staff quickly review the matter and, if it falls within FLDF’s mandate, connect the faculty member with one of the experienced nearby lawyers in the FLDF network for assistance.

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Daily Aphorism #3: Go to the Fear

I sometimes procrastinate and I have often wondered why. Procrastinating keeps me from getting things done, yet I hate it when I fail to get things done. Yet I still sometimes procrastinate. I bark at myself for my procrastinating and I usually deserve it.

In few years ago, it occurred that the main reason I procrastinate is fear. I fear that I haven't thought things true well enough to begin the project and this is sometimes true. Or I fear that I might not execute well and that is sometimes true. Or I fear that others might not like what I am about to do, which is sometimes true. But none of these are good reasons to fail to get the thing done. My personal battle cry is "Go to the Fear!" Identify the most reprehensible home repair project and get to work! Or pick up the file I least want to work on in my work as a lawyer. Or pick up the phone and make that call that I dread.

"Go to the Fear!" has a Stoic equivalent: "The Obstacle is the Way."

When I'm at my best, I'm going to the fear. I'm using the "obstacle" as my beacon for tell me where to go. What's the worst thing that can happen? You might fail, but then you will have gained knowledge in your failure and it's better to learn the outcome sooner than later. And many times you won't fail.

So always go to the fear!

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The Plight of Popularizers

When I think of excellent popularizers, I first think of Carl Sagan (astronomy), but there are others, such as Thomas Sowell (economics). How difficult is it to be an excellent popularizer? Damned hard, according to (linguist) John McWhorter, an excellent popularizer in his own right. Sowell's work was the overall topic on this recent episode of The Glenn Show, featuring McWhorter and Glenn Loury, joined by Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute. Here is what McWhorter had to say about difficult task of popularizers:

What people don't always know is that if you devote yourself to being a popularizer, to a certain extent, you're not taking the easy road. And I have never heard anybody say to me, as a linguist popularizer, that the popularizing isn't real work. So I'm not saying this out of some sort of pique. If anybody says that about me, and they must have, they've never said it to me. I get nothing but respect to my face, but I think a lot of people think popularizing isn't as hard as doing the real thing.

Having tried to popularize, it isn't just that you take away the detail and write stuff down. A lot of people who think "I could sit down and write a book in plain English, you know, explaining only what the ordinary person can understand. But I choose to do the real thing and write in tapeworm sentences and write with exquisite detail, etc." A lot of those people, I very humbly say, you have to have them sit down with, metaphorically, a blank piece of paper, and you are going to write about what you do. And this is the thing: Decide what you're going to put in terms of what the layman can understand, what is going to be a subtraction, what you're going to share with, you know, 55 specialists. But then not only write down what the layman can understand, but make it so that the layman will actually read it. It's one thing to put it on paper, but come up with a book that more than two people are going to read and then tell me that I'm just a "popularizer" and that I'm doing the easy thing because, frankly, not everybody can do that.

I know, there's some very noble popular linguistics books written by very smart and very nice people. But I must admit somewhere towards the middle, I find places where I think the reason that this book hasn't gotten around is because this person doesn't happen to have that particular knack. I remember one, I'm not going to mention it where he gets to a concept that is a little hard, you can get it across to people. But frankly, you'd have to know how. But he says, "Get some coffee. This is hard." And I thought "No, you don't tell them to get some coffee. You figure out how to get it across to them without them drinking any damn coffee!" That sort of thing. It means that you have to work at it. With Tom, it's hard work, what he's done, especially when you can read it as an ordinary person, I think.

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