Uptown Bloody Mary.
Spent today at home doing office work. It was cold this morning so I put on some long underwear and wool socks. It took a couple of hours for the radiators to get it tolerable, but between some heat and a couple of layers of clothing I was comfortable eventually.
The Uptown is closing Nov. 1, at least until they can find a new location, and I need some glasses.
I’m hoping I can get over there again on Friday a.m., but I’m not certain I’ll be able to, so I went tonight to get a bloody mary and buy a pint glass.
Simone had invited me to triva at the LT, which I begged off of b/c of work. I hit the Uptown nonetheless, but in my defense: (a) it was on my to-do list – shopping for pint-glasses – and felt like necessary work; (b) I popped in after making some photo-copies at FedEx for work, so the overall outing included the last bit of work-related business of the day.
Anyhow, the bloody mary was somewhat thin. Seems you have to ask if you want any horseradish at all. I remember them being better. The last time I drank one there was probably when I poured my beer into the tomato mix, which Leah can recount more accurately than I.
Why I Dropped My Philosophy Major:
Today I started reading 2666. I still have a 200 pages or so of Neil Stephenson’s Anathem left to go. I am enjoying Anathem, but not nearly as much as Stephenson’s prior work. 2666 seems to be written for literature nerds instead of computer nerds. It may be the same kind of pulpy nerd-thriller that Stephenson writes, but because it’s written for a different variety of nerd I’m not drawn to it as much. Too early to tell for sure.
In terms of Anathem, I am disturbed because it reminds me of a funny thing that happened towards the end of my philosophy career at Carleton. There was a retiring professor in the philosophy of science who I admired and chose as my advisor, while I still thought of philo as a major. After years of me admiring him, he shared with me something which led me to believe he was crazy.
He was an old guy who had a great presence in the classroom. He was fit despite his age. He used to coach the XC ski team. He had jowls (thin-guy jowls) that made his speech weighty and ponderous. He was stern. I think he had a soft spot for me. I might have been his last advisee. What a disappointment I must have been.
For four years he refused to share with his students, at least in my presence, his personal opinions on any of the matters we discussed in class. I had no idea what his world-view was until my senior year, when I took a small seminar with him. The seminar was on the general topic of free will as it related to physical mechanics.
This is where Stephenson’s Anathem has me disturbed: I think he is espousing the same goofy theories that my erstwhile philo advisor from Carleton adhered to. Stephenson’s action sequences are great, and his vision of a society of monastic nerds is fun to immerse myself in, but the metaphysics coming out of his characters’ mouths is distractingly nutty.
Anyway, in my last course with my old advisor we were discussing the same themes Stephenson is exploring in Anathem. The details of the debate are too tedious to explain. Generally there was a thing with Newtonian mechanics and free will, and then another thing with quantum mechanics and free will. One bunch of folks seemed to think that Newtonian mechanics didn’t leave room for free will, and another thought that quantum mechanics could save it. I thought they were both way off base and didn’t think the discussion mattered at all.
One day at the end of our discussion I said as much, and my advisor admitted that he believed that the magic of what it was to be human was that human brains are capable of somehow predicting, and maybe even influencing, quantum events which other theories seem to say we have no ability to control or predict.
I am no physicist, but based on my understanding of his position I began to think he was crazy. It wasn’t just that I’d come to view the emperor without clothes: it was like he’d flushed his raiments down the toilet and run into the street naked and stark raving bananas. He might as well have admitted to believing in reincarnated thetans or something.
So I liked Stephenson writing about the science of the 1600’s in the Baroque Cycle, but I don’t like his science fiction quite as well b/c it seems to involve metaphysics that border on insane. At least it’s comforting to have Stephenson writing fiction which seems aimed, reader-demographic-wise, 100% straight at me. Even if it’s imperfect. Maybe I should relax my standards and focus on the story, which is a good one.
Focusing on the story is probably a good idea for 2666 also.
Now I’m tired. Pretty productive day. Have to drive to Brainerd tomorrow. Time to sleep now.
Photo-a-Day 
October 21, 2009 at 2:46 pm
best. post. ever.
October 21, 2009 at 3:24 pm
I never knew that’s why you dropped the major. Thanks! I suspect I would’ve reacted similarly to a statement like that back when we were 20.
But I don’t think his belief is outright crazy — or at least, no crazier than most other metaphysical beliefs. I guess it can be disturbing if your mentor crosses the line from philosophy into metaphysics though!
I’m reading Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God series right now, & what I’m getting from it is that science is just another teleology & methodology. And that it’s pretty beautiful how diverse & strange, yet patterned & comforting, the diversity of human belief is. I mean, unified field theory is an exquisite but also deeply unsettling when laypeople think deeply into it.
The danger, I guess, is that a lot of New Agers try to unify 20th c. physics w/ metaphysics. And there’s not much logical ground for their position.
Anyhow, if 2666 is anything like The Savage Detectives, don’t expect too much illumination from the plot. ‘Tec had an “entropic” shape, like Gravity’s Rainbow: it diffused its energy & let its characters fade into the background. It’s beautiful & artistically hard to pull off, but not conventionally satisfying. Keep us updated on your progress!
October 21, 2009 at 3:46 pm
While we were at Carleton, Roger Penrose gave a talk flogging his new book The Emperor’s New Mind. I bought his book but never made it past page six, so what follows is largely half-remembered speculation — his talk and book were pretty much about how there were these tiny features in nerve cells which tended to amplify quantum mechanical effects, providing a bridge up to the macro scale. And here, he asserted, is the secret of consciousness.
I’m pretty sure that this is nonsense because:
a) /Every single piece of matter/ projects quantum effects onto the macro scale, so who cares? and
b) Free will is a logical problem, not an engineering one. So positing a physical structure to explain it just outsources the problem without solving it — it’s pretty much a ‘God of the Gaps’ response.
That said, Penrose has infected shockingly many people with his ideas, including Stephenson (who name-checks him in the acknowledgments) and, presumably, plenty of Carleton folk of that era. Your prof was probably just relating the flavor-of-the-month rather than espousing his core beliefs.
I should really read the damn book before I scoff further. I do recall that in his talk Penrose he provided a great illustration of a system that was deterministic without being computable which was pretty alarming. (It involved tiling, of course. Dude knows his tiles.)
October 21, 2009 at 7:56 pm
interesting…….
and here i thought it was that you were just sick of comps…
we should get together for beer some time.
October 23, 2009 at 3:05 am
Penrose! I think I do remember seeing him as a talking head on some show once and saying some funny things. I had no idea he was well known for that kind of magic-brain talk. Anyway, it totally makes sense. Stephenson’s been talking about Penrose tilings for chapters on end.
Beer. That is true. So is the ‘sick of comps’ thing.
I should have stolen a few of those drop/add cards for use later in life:
“Sorry, judge … I’ve decided I don’t want to write this brief after all, so I filled out this little blue slip and had my adviser sign it. Been nice working with you!”
October 24, 2009 at 1:50 pm
I’m especially amused because I didn’t even know there was a philosopher of science at Carleton! He must have taught the Zeno’s Paradox freshman seminar that I dropped for introductory geology. More than anything I’m impressed with his ability to rarely let on what he actually thought about the material. Now that I teach, I can appreciate the amazing amount of self-discipline and deliberate pedagogical choice reflected in such an approach. Anyway, thanks for the fascinating story (and good luck with the book).
October 24, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Yeah, Sipfle taught Zeno’s. I didn’t know you were in it, even for a little while. … In fact, I was wait-listed and only got in because a couple of others dropped out. Maybe you were the one who let me in!
October 24, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Hilarious. I think I only went to the first day of class, so you might be right. My favorite Stephenson is the Diamond Age, by the way. I couldn’t make it through the cycle (but maybe that was because prelims interfered, I can’t remember).