The Economist pretty much captures the bind that Bowie has faced over his career. The man who retains the longest stretch of creativity in rock music (1971-1980) blew it by trying to keep cutting edge. With his genuinely great crooning voice he could have out done Rod Stewart’s American Songbook by a mile, but instead tried vainly to keep up with “yoof” culture. The latest release is OK as an album track but as a single? Hardly – though I like the reflective tone that only comes with consciousness of ones own mortality.
John Everett Millais’ Mariana
Having just viewed the Tate’s fantastic pre-Raphaelite exhibition I thought I’d share my favourite piece, the highly erotic Mariana by John Everett Millais.
Oil on Wood 59.7 x 49.5 cm
Accepted by HM Government in lieu of tax and allocated to the Tate in 1999.
Hayek, Hebb, and Heisenberg: Toward an Approach to Brain Functioning
Here’s the second of the extracts from a bona fide neuroscientist (and friend of Fuster). Gerald Edelman of course is also someone who recognized Hayek’s genius in this area.
. . . the mind must remain forever in a realm of its own which we can now only directly experience it, but which we shall never be able fully to explain or to ‘reduce’ to something else (Hayek, 1952, 8. 98).
F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order must rate as one of the most creative books written on general philosophy of neuroscience. Though Hayek was a Noble-prize winner in economics, and was not educated as a neuroscientist his book opens up a new window on neuroscience, and this window certainly offers great possibilities to neuroscientists working on unifying aspects of neuroscience. Guided by the fundamental view of Fuster (1995) I have tried to suggestively interpret Hayek’s concepts firstly as a work on memory and brain dynamics (Başar, 2004), and more recently, as a more general work on the brain-body-mind relationship (Başar, 2010). Though a detailed description and interpretation of Hayek’s philosophical psychology is not possible because of space constraints, I will try to explain three concepts that are embedded in the work of Hayek: 1) D. O. Hebb’s learning theory (1949) 2) The S- Matrix concept of quantum dynamics developed by W. Heisenberg (1943), and 3) The Feynman Diagrams as a consequence of the S-Matrix theory.
In the first half of the twentieth century two important books introduced outstanding holistic and dynamic approaches to brain functioning. The first, Donald Hebb’s book (1949) related to the organization of behavior, inspired several neuroscientists in search of the “Hebb neuron.” According to Hebb, the functioning of the brain after learning is a “different” brain compared with the same brain before the learning process. Though Hayek developed his theory almost twenty years prior to the publication of Hebb’s book, The Sensory Order was published three years after Hebb’s book. The chain of ideas developed in this theory is highly pertinent to the dynamic nature of the living brain. Hayek states: We shall see that the mental and the physical word are in the sense two different orders in which the same element can be arranged; though ultimately we shall recognize the mental order as part of the physical order (Hayek, 1952, section). Hayek argues that it is the whole history of the organism that will determine its action with new factors contributing to this determination on later occasions that were not present on the first.
In The Sensory Order asked the question “what is mind?” and discussed the relationship between mind and body or between mental and physical events (Hayek, 1952, 1.49). Hayek classifies “emotion” as a special type of disposition for a type of actions which, in the first instance, are not necessitated by a primary change in the state of the organism, but which are complexes of responses appropriate to a variety of environmental conditions. “Fear,” “anger,” “sorrow” and “joy” are attitudes toward the environment, and particularly towards fellow members of the same species. This means that a great variety of external events, and also some condition of the organism itself, may evoke one of several patterns of attitudes or dispositions, which will affect the perception of, and the responses to, any external event. “Emotions” may thus be described as affective qualities similar to the sensory qualities and forming part of the same comprehensive order of mental qualities. Hayek further proposes that we must distinguish between two different kinds of physiological “memory” or traces left behind by the action of any stimulus. One is the semi-permanent change in the structure of connections or paths and which determines the courses through which any change of impulses can run (similar to Hebb’s principle). The other is the pattern of active impulses proceeding at any moment as results of a stimuli received in the present and past and perceived also as merely part of continuous flow of impulses of central origin, which never altogether ceases, even when no external stimuli are received.
The theory of brain functioning or the “new psychology” as described by Hayek in The Sensory Order still merits important attention as a general framework in stimulating brain-storming approaches to brain-body-mind integration. This essay has described some possibilities to bridge Hebb’s Theory and the quantum brain approach with the insights of Hayek.
Why Jazz Happened
Review from Reason
As I later became interested in political theory, the relationship between the cultural individualism of jazz and the political individualism of libertarianism seemed so natural to me that, with all the innocence of youth, I frequently expressed surprise upon discovering that few of my libertarian friends shared my interest in this form of music.
The improvisations that characterize jazz have produced the most individualistic form of art in American history. Solo jazz musicians are at once composers, arrangers, and performers; and the variety found in their solos reflects the individuality of the musicians themselves.
Oakeshott on Education
Here are some extracts from my co-editor Paul’s essay.
Toward the end of his essay on “The Universities,” Oakeshott returns once more to the issue of specialization, this time in a less polemical, more thoughtful manner. Though he believes that Moberly has exaggerated the problem, he nevertheless acknowledges that the disintegration of the world of knowledge into a set of miscellaneous specialisms “is something we suffer from at the present time and that it is destructive of the university we are considering.” Still, we must not look for quick or simple remedies. The problem of integrating the world of modern knowledge is “one of the most difficult of the current problems of philosophy: a century of pretty intense thought has already been given to it without much result.” For this reason, “to expect a university to provide an integration of its curriculum is asking for dishonesty” (VLL, 131–32).
It is in connection with the university’s “gift of an interval” that Oakeshott finally touches on the practical, indeed transformative, effect of liberal education on the student. “Nobody,” he writes, “could go down from such a university unmarked.” Not only will the student have acquired a discipline of mind that “puts him beyond the reach of the intellectual hooligan”; he will also “have learned something to help him lead a more significant life. . . . He will have had the opportunity to extend the range of his moral sensibility, and he will have had the leisure to replace the clamorous and conflicting absolutes of adolescence with something less corruptible” (VLL, 102–3). Here Oakeshott echoes another one of the great themes of Cardinal Newman, who claimed that the reason why it is more proper to speak of the university as a place of “education” rather than of “instruction” is because education “implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of our character.” Oakeshott does not dwell at length on this practical and transformative effect of liberal education in the two essays we have been considering—no doubt partly because it muddies his polemic against Moberly’s emphasis on the university’s role in providing students with existential meaning and purpose—but it plays an increasingly larger part in his later writings on education.
The new emphasis on self-cultivation and self-realization is evident from the outset of “The Study of ‘Politics’ in a University,” where Oakeshott defines education as the “process of learning, in circumstances of direction and restraint, how to make something of ourselves.” Learning how to make something of ourselves, however, is not something we can do simply on our own or independent of a particular context. Self-realization or self-cultivation necessarily involves initiation into a particular, historical civilization, in the process of which we “discover our own talents and aptitudes in relation to that civilization and begin to cultivate and to use them” (RP, 187).
It is remarkable to think that Oakeshott wrote this passage in 1974, before the advent of personal computers, the Internet, e-mail, cell phones, Facebook, and Twitter. But for all its insight into the world in which children now grow up, the passage unwittingly raises a question about the sharp division Oakeshott draws between the university and that world. Nothing would seem to be clearer than that the university Oakeshott prizes cannot survive in a world degraded in this way. The university must exert some sort of cultural influence on this world if only to secure the conditions of its own existence. Oakeshott himself asks how the university should respond to the current hostility to intellect and spirit that prevails in today’s world; he answers, by “a quiet refusal to compromise” (VLL, 42). But such a response seems to fall short of what is really needed. To remain a lonely island (or interval) in an otherwise hostile sea is ultimately to accede to the inevitable and engulfing flood.
Horror
Grief
Pete and Dud – Jesus
Christmas with the Armstrongs
Here is a lovely article (with recordings) featuring the very excellent Ricky Riccardi, author of the superb biography of Pops.
manwithoutqualities 