This summer I spend my leisure hours sitting on the deck watching the workers build the pool and I muse on matters political, philosophical, psychological, and so forth.
Is my building a pool an implicit endorsement of the current administration in this election year? Am I, as the Acting President once asked, better off today than I was four years ago?
But no, this pool has been underway since the Carter administration, if I remember correctly. I'm not sure that I do. The heat is affecting my circuitry, slowing my thoughts and curling them up like newsprint in the sun, or like this fly spiraling lazily over that pool worker like a buzzard over a desicated corpse.
And the thermometer on the deck railing reads 100 degrees soporifically Fahrenheit.
These are the days of summer reading, and the mail has brought mine. The September issue of Scientific American has arrived, a special single-topic issue on mind and brain. Not so many years ago it was still possible to question whether mind and brain were a single topic. Now Francis Crick and Christof Koch can present research findings on the most profound mental puzzle, the nature of consciousness. Is consciousness a thing or a process? Can there really be any objective data on consciousness? Is consciousness observable? Another person's consciousness is not directly observable to me, although I'm pretty sure that several of those workers down there are only marginally conscious. But can I observe, or detect, my own consciousness? As Jonathan Miller says in the same issue, "consciousness is not detected at all, because that would imply that it could pass undetected, and that doesn't make sense." Can you do science on something that is inherently undetectable?
The study of the mind is rife with paradox, in which fact I take paradoxical comfort.
The fly lights on the flyswatter.
Other articles in the issue deal with mental disorders and the developing brain and visual imagery. One article on sex differences in brain function ought to be controversial, but my observations this summer tell me that temperature is a much stronger influence than gender or even species or natural vs. artificial being, as in Alfred Bester's classic science fiction story, "Fondly Fahrenheit." If it weren't so hot I'd go get that Bester collection and include an apt quote here. Geoffrey Hinton sketches an overview of work in neural networks, but doesn't break any really new ground.
This issue of Scientific American is worth reading, a guide to the future, in case you can't tell from my writing style, baked dry as it is of all enthusiasm.
There is a lot of enthusiasm in Beyond Cyberpunk, another medium of summer reading that the mail has brought. There is a lot of a lot of things in this HyperCard stack set on five disks. It also is a guide to the future, but a more twisted future than Scientific American's. Beyond Cyberpunk is, at least in part, cultural criticism, touching, or rather landing with a grating noise, on music, politics, sex, literature, technology, comic books, and, you know, stuff like that.
The premise that its subjects, and its approaches to these subjects, is some kind of "stuff like that" is what justifies taking Beyond Cyberpunk seriously. Its authors are arguably dealing with one esthetic or ethic or style or let's say cultural stance, and the essays, manifestos, reviews, and practical advice in the stacks all, by that same argument, support or at least feed on, that stance. Beyond Cyberpunk is a nonlinear, multimedia manifesto of a developing cyberculture--an essay by Susan Sontag, if Susan Sontag were a character in a William Gibson novel and her essay were an explication of the politics of a plumbing manual written by Harry Tuttle.
Beyond Cyberpunk is from The Computer Lab, Rt. 4, Box 54C, Louisa, VA 23098.
As I sit here watching the workers take what I can only assume is a tea break, I decide that I am working on writing the perfect C++ program, using Robert M. Pirsig's method: "How to paint a perfect painting--make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally."
I am perfecting myself.
Copyright © 1992, Dr. Dobb's Journal