Afro-American Germans' Search For Identity

Rudi Richardson knew something about what it meant to be a black man in the United States. But after being deported to Germany, the country where he was born, shortly before his 47th birthday, he had to start figuring out what it meant to be black and German -- in a land he barely remembered and whose language he didn't speak.

He started life as Udo Ackermann, born in a Bavarian women's prison in 1955. His mother, a Jewish woman named Liesolette, was serving a prison term for prostitution. His father, whom he never met, was an African-American serviceman named George. Rudi was given up for adoption.Like thousands of other postwar children with black GI fathers and white German mothers, Richardson was raised by an African-American military family in the US. He has spent his life trying to find where he fits in. More

Douglas Hofstadter on his book I Am A Strange Loop

Here is an interview with Douglas Hofstadter on his book I Am A Strange Loop. (See sidebar, this page.) He makes comments on the soul that are relevant to the post, "Weighing The Soul," just below this one. The interview is translated from the Hebrew in the magazine Haayal Hakore.

Interviewer: You use the word “soul”, rather than consciousness. While you clearly qualified the term to remove any religious connotations, avoiding such connotations is not really possible; “soul” is a very loaded symbol in this respect. Why did you choose to use it, and not, for example, “mind” or “consciousness” or any of several other, less-loaded alternatives?

Hofstadter: I used the word “soul” because, out of all the various words that one might use — “consciousness”, “intentionality”, “mind”, and so forth — it is the one that I think most evocatively suggests the deep mystery of first-person existence that any philosophically inclined person must wonder about many times during their life. But I think that the first-person pronoun “I” is just as evocative a word for the same thing. I could also have used the word “spirit”, I guess, but that, too, would have seemed loaded with religious flavor to many readers.

The point is, whenever one talks about what life is, from the inside, one gets very close to what religion itself is all about. It therefore shouldn't be too big a surprise that I appropriated a religion-flavored word to talk about a deep mystery that is so close to the very core of religion.

Interviewer: You present a compelling argument for the notion of a soul surviving its physical body by being spread across multiple brains; the more a person is familiar to others, the better his soul is “present” in their brain, too. How will you respond to the claim that the “presence” of one soul in another soul's brain is merely a simulation mechanism, developed by the evolution process as a means to improve survival? (Being able to predict what members of your clan are about to do can certainly be a powerful survival tool.)

Hofstadter: My argument in I Am a Strange Loop is spelled out clearly. If a person's soul is truly a pattern, then it can be realized in different media. Wherever that pattern exists in a sufficiently fine-grained way, then it is, by my definition, the soul itself and not some kind of “mere simulation” of it.

“Mere simulation” is a phrase that sounds suspiciously like John Searle when he is contemptuously deriding AI in his usual flippant fashion. However, as I see it, there is no black-and-white dividing line between “mere simulations” of a complex entity and full realizations of it — there are just lots and lots of shades of gray all along the way. This spectrum is pointed out in many places in my books, including the three marvelous short stories by Stanislaw Lem included in The Mind's I.

Interviewer: Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near) presents a different take at immortality, a more physical one. Like you, Kurzweil views the soul as “software” that can be executed on different “hardware”. He further believes that in a relatively short while, we will have electronic hardware which is the equivalent of the human brain (which you eloquently characterize as a “universal machine”, capable as “executing” any “soul software”). Once such hardware is available, Kurzweil believes immortality would have been reached: by “downloading” our soul-software onto electronic brains (“Giant Electronic Brains”?), we will become immortals, able to create backups of our souls to be restored in case of disaster, and able to shift our physical location anywhere in the speed of a software download.

Do you share Kurzweil's view of hardware being able to execute human soul software within the foreseeable future? Do you agree with his view of this being the equivalent of immortality — will the software running on the electronic brain be the same “I”?

Hofstadter: I think Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality and deeply longs to avoid death. I understand this obsession of his and am even somehow touched by its ferocious intensity, but I think it badly distorts his vision. As I see it, Kurzweil's desperate hopes seriously cloud his scientific objectivity. More of the translation at Tal Cohen's site.

Weighing The Soul

No self-respecting professor of philosophy wants to discuss the soul in class. It reeks of old-time theology, or, worse, New Age quantum treacle. The soul has been a dead end in philosophy ever since the positivists unmasked its empty referential center. Scientific philosophy has shown us that there's no there there.

But make no mistake, our students are very interested in the soul. More

Life, the Universe, and Everything, Including The Meaning of Life

The Meaning of Life, by Terry Eagleton

In Douglas Adams' The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy, super, pan-dimensional beings pose a problem to the computer Deep Thought. It is to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Deep Thought goes to work. 7 and 1/2 million years later it finally provides an answer: 42.*

42?

This leaves the beings puzzled. Not to worry, though, Deep Thought predicts that another, more powerful computer would eventually be made and it would calculate the question for the answer.

Terry Eagleton's title, The Meaning of Life suggests the antics of Douglas Adams' imagination, but the book itself is a very good and serious read.

In Elizabethan times, Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be or not to be," was not just a question posed by the Prince of Denmark, but when answered, one which would have application to everybody, not just Hamlet. In our postmodern world, if I ask the same question it is my business and not yours. In Eagleton's book, this is not an issue easily dismissed. Here is one review of his book.

* When asked about his choice of numbers, Adams said of 42, it is "A completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could, without any fear, introduce to your parents."

Does High Culture Humanize Us?

When we think of high culture, names come to mind. Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes. To appreciate and gain understanding of their works, we develop sensibilities and sensitivities. To do so, humanizes us. So goes the thinking. Does it humanize everybody? Not according to this account:

"To walk through Dresden’s museums, and past the young buskers fiddling Mozart on street corners, is to wonder whether this age-old question may have things backward. It presumes that we’re passive receivers acted on by the arts, which vouchsafe our salvation, moral and otherwise, so long as we remain in their presence. Arts promoters nowadays like to trumpet how culture helps business and tourism; how teaching painting and music in schools boosts test scores. They try to assign practical ends, dollar values and other hard numbers, never mind how dubious, to quantify what’s ultimately unquantifiable.

The lesson of Dresden, which this great city unfortunately seems doomed to repeat, is that culture is, to the contrary, impractical and fragile, helpless even." More

The Final Days of Charles Sanders Peirce

One morning in late December 1906, Henry Alsburg was called by his landlady in Prescott Hall at 471 Broadway in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She wanted Alsburg "to come into one of the rooms to see an old gentleman, who had been ill and was very likely dying."

Entering the room, Alsburg found a sick man, suffering from malnutrition, his body worn out. Asked his name, the man answered "Charles Peirce."

Without enough money to buy food, Peirce was the same man of whom Bertrand Russell later said, "Beyond doubt . . . he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever."

Today there are university research centers devoted to Peirce studies and pragmatism in Brazil, Finland, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. His writings have been translated into several languages, including German, French, Finnish, Spanish, and Swedish.

Peirce was a brilliant man, acknowledged as the brightest of the bright even in his day. A logician, he pioneered the modern study, Semiotics--the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols.

Henry Alsburg--who found Peirce ill and dying--studied under William James, the first of the modern psychologists. Alsburg quickly told James about Peirce, whom James had held as a friend. Hearing about the man, James said, "Why, I owe him everything!" He and Alsburg left the Harvard campus, climbing into a cab to take Peirce home to James' house.*

Peirce spent much of his last two decades unable to afford heat in winter, and living on stale bread given him by the neighborhood baker. Unable to afford new stationery, he wrote on the blank side of his old manuscripts. An outstanding warrant for assault and unpaid debts led to his being a fugitive in New York City for a while. His debts were settled and his property taxes as well as mortgage were paid by his brother James Mills Peirce and his neighbors, relatives of Gifford Pinchot (chief of the US Forest Service under Theodore Roosevelt).

As an example of Peirce's mind, there is this: In his "F.R.L." [First Rule of Logic] (1899), Peirce states that the first, and "in one sense, this sole" rule of reason is that, in order to learn, one needs to desire to learn and desire it without resting satisfied with that which one is inclined to think.

So the first rule is to wonder.

Without steady income, he wrote for money in Popular Science Monthly Number 12 (November 1877), an essay titled "The Fixation of Belief." It can be read here.

*(William James In The Maelstrom of American Modernism, Richard Robertson, Houghton Mifflin 2007, p. 137)

Internet addiction: A New Category of Mental Disorder

The next volume of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the psychology bible, will include a new category that addresses people addicted to the internet without even knowing it. "Internet addiction sounds like a punch line. But it ruined my brother's life. . . . [He] sleeps in a roomy tent, atop three mattresses he's acquired from one place or another, between a set of railroad tracks and Oregon State Highway 99, in a clearing ringed by blackberry bushes. He lives most days the same way. He gets up when he feels like it, walks to the local grocery outlet, and uses food stamps to buy a microwaveable meal. Then he treks over to the local soup kitchen and enjoys a free lunch, answering the greetings of his other homeless pals, who speak to me highly of the obese, bearded man they call 'Ace.'

When the rest of his buddies head off to the park to suck down malt liquor or puff weed, Andrew eyes a different fix at the Oregon State University computer lab, which is open to the public. He'll spend the next 10 hours or so there, eyes focused on a computer screen, pausing only to heat up that microwaved meal." More