Psybertron Asks

Apparently 80% of airliner manufacturer order books now depend on the budget airline business. Scary.

I still do a lot of business and domestic air-travel compared to my pledge to reduce it to a minimum, and that will probably continue well into 2010, depending how working life pans out. Sigh. But it is a long time – more than 10 years – since I even considered business class on a business trip.

Recently (like many) I have been taking advantage of budget airlines in Europe (Ryanair in particular) after several years of using internal and transatlantic US carriers. In terms iof service I do have favourite airlines, including BA by choice, if they have an economic fare / route for a given trip. But Ryanair is just too cheap in my opinion. For industry economic viability, for air-safety ultimately if the crew are all sales staff on commission, and for environmental balance in encouraging more discretionary travel. As I said in my pledge I’d support higher taxes on aviation fuel and travel – but of course being trans-national-borders that is unlikely to be possible to administer equitably – and most people would probably reject a taxation solution anyway.

I am amongst the “never again” crowd when it comes to Ryanair – yet perversly, despite having ludicroulsy inconvenient airport locations at the remote end, they often use a convenient local airport at the home end – I expect there is a BAA distortion in the market too, as well as the disruptive pricing policy.

At this rate, I could blog as many words on The Origin Of Stories as Brian Boyd writes.

“Attention” is as important as anything in communication and social behaviours, so not surprisingly we are well attuned to movement, particularly unexpected movement in life events, especially faces, or courses of events in any kind of narrative. So much of Boyd’s story is about play as art and art as play, very specifically their value to human evolution, and fairly obviously attention is part of play and art. Recognizing the value of the abnormal is not just a part of creativity, but also a part of understanding the normal. That doesn’t do justice to the first half of the book, which I have just completed, but hey. So what about the art of fiction, narrative at play ?

The last two chapters of Book 1 are Ch12 Fiction : Inventing Events and Ch13 Fiction as [Evolutionary] Adaptation. Ch12 ends with …

Narrative is always strategic, for both teller and listener, in ways that can range from the callously selfish to the generously prosocial. Because natural selection occurs at multiple levels, it can assist individuals or groups at different levels in their competition with other individuals or groups. But narrative especially helps coordinate groups, by informing their members of one another’s actions. It spreads prosocial values, the likeliest to appeal to both tellers and listeners. It develops our capacity to see from different perspectives, and this capacity in turn both arises from and aids the evolution of cooperation and the growth of human flexibility.

But maximum flexibility, in humans as in others, depends on play.

Wow. A very strong message on memes “likeliest to appeal” as well as the playful evolution of cooperation. Quite early in Ch13 after descriptions of child-invented play narratives, we find this solitary reference to Dawkins …

Thought experiments, Dawkins observes, “are not meant to be realistic. They are supposed to clarify our thinking about reality.”

The immediately following sentences are these …

Thought experiments of fiction may opt for realism, like Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan, or against it, like Aesop’s animal fables. We do not need to be a Samaritan or to travel from Jerusalem to Jericho, or to encounter a wayfarer robbed by the roadside to learn from the example ….

Irony at play I hope. Many a true word.

“If it was possible to carry our messages to you by words we wouldn’t have carried them to you by planes.”
Osama to Obama

Wouldn’t have. Interesting. Better late than never I guess.

The good news is that Reading beat Burnley 1:0 today.

The bad news is that Avatar has to be the biggest pile of one-dimensional crap ever. What, a thousand people in the credits maybe ? And they couldn’t afford to pay anyone to write a story or a script even ? What an unimaginative waste of expensive resources.

Every cliche in the book is OK as an idea, but it would have needed wit and humour to pull it off. And the 9/11 collapsing tower, falling ash, war on terror, shock & awe … how low can you get searching for paper-thin metaphors.

Some (very) good 3D and lighting effects though.

[Post Note – I was so disappointed, I couldn’t be bothered to be specific in the initial review, but the comment from Victor in the previous post – on stories – highlights just one of the massively wasted opportunities in the film – as also blogged here.]

[Post Note 2 : And the scale of the wasted opportunity becomes even clearer. Must investigate where the as-filmed story itself came from … was it crap to start with or ruined in the screenplay ? I see Cameron, scripted right from the original story idea through to the screenplay. Pity, given the immense collaboration on technical and linguistic detail, that more could not have been spared to develop the story before all the money was spent. Somebody tell me if there is a level of irony I’ve missed ? Oh good, maybe I am still sane after all

“critics, many of whom slated its plot, dialogue and characterisation, …”

Yep, plot, dialogue and characterisation. I think they were the missing dimensions of the salient story points.]

Brian Boyd On The Origin Of Stories is a comprehensively researched and referenced story of the evolution of the human mind, psychology and behaviour, involving the evolution of art (representative and not) and stories (true and not) as part of that process, rather than some incidental “cheesecake for the mind” bi-product. Pinker, the originator of that quote, is well referenced and provides supporting cover note :-

“This is an insightful, erudite, and thoroughly original work. Aside from illuminating the human love of fiction, it proves that consilience between the humanities and sciences can enrich both fields of knowledge.”
– Steven Pinker

I’m only about a third through the text (see the previous meta-review), and only as far a the evolution of narrative specifically in the evolution of recalling and representing events and people as agents. Up to this point the evolution has been more generally about art, creativity and communication.

It’s really very good. It fits my evolutionary psychology agenda to a tee, of course, and provides much reinforcement and “illumination”. A recommended read, and I suspect a very important book.

Here some significant quotes from the end of Ch10 Understanding & Recalling Events and the beginning of Ch11 Narrative : Representing Events. Firstly, the game-theoretic battle-of-wits (*), behaviour :

The capacity to track other agents effortlessly surely derives from the need of any flexible agent facing potential predators, prey, partners, rivals or allies to infer the maximum information about the likely next behaviour of those who could make a decisive difference to its fate.

Our capacities to comprehend events and to recall and reconfigure them in memory develop in us naturally, and to a considerable extent without language. But that we can handle events so well individually does not prevent us from trying to find ever more interesting ways to relate events, if we have good reason to – as we do.

It becomes clearer as we move into Ch11 that Boyd is using the word language here in a narrow sense of symbolic written & verbal communication …

Narrative need not involve language. It can operate through modes like mime, still pictures, shadow-puppets, or silent movies. It need not be restricted to language, and often gains impact through enactment or the emotional focussing that music offers in dance, theatre, opera or film, of the visual focus in stage lighting, comics or film. But language of course makes narrative more precise, efficient and flexible.

Narrative need not involve language, but it does need external representation, not merely internal [diffuse, distractable, mental] “representations” of events as we witness, recall, anticipate, imagine or dream them. Lately it has become almost a truism to speak of the self or of experience as fundamentally narrative. Despite the near-concensus, we have little reason to think that this is true in either case.

[….] It would be burdensome to tell ourselves continuously the story of ourselves. But why should we tell any stories to others ?

[….] Active communication, especially via voice, allows the rapid transmission of detailed, complex, contingent information. Although such signals remain comparatively cheap, they cost senders in time, energy and risk.

[….] How then, does cooperative communication establish itself ? And how can we explain the much more complex and costly communication of narrative.

Dawkins and Krebs argued in 1978 that “communication should arise more for competitive than for cooperative reasons: we should expect the manipulation rather than accurate transmission of information”. But competition thrives best on concealing information: a predator silently stalking its prey, and ambush catching enemies unaware. Cooperation by contrast, usually stands to gain from communication.

[….]  Signals that eveolve through competition tend to be costly, as arms-races develop between insistent senders and receivers. [….] Signals used for cooperative purposes, by contrast – eg conspiratorial whispers – will be energetically cheap and informationally rich. This is what we find ….

[….] Brains evolved not to give humans rich mental lives – though we are delighted they do – but to permit the creatures that have them to make better decisions …

The psychology of better decision-making. My agenda I’d say. Reading on.

(*) Post Note – When I say “battle” of wits, I’m not talking about competitive situations. In my experience even debating with yourself and friendly collaborators, communication – forward directed intentional communication – is still a “battle of wits” if intended understandings and outcomes are to be achieved. Then again, maybe I’m just a lousy communicator 😉

Before I review reading the content of Brian Boyd On the Origin Of Stories, a few words on the style and structure of the book itself.

There are 540 pages of which 130 are notes, bibliography and index. The 410 pages of text contain only index numbers for the notes, individual references to some of the source names, but almost no discussion of those or their arguments. The notes themselves refer to the specific sources by author surname and date and you need to further cross refer to the bibliography to see exactly who and which published work.

The consequence is that the style of the book itself is a narrative of statements / assertions, with explanatory hows, whys and wherefores simply stated without discussion – references in the text being simply the index of end notes.  This means it is very dense – packed with “factual” information on its subject matter, the evolution of cognition, art, narrative and fiction.

The opposite feature is that if you want to study and analyse the arguments and orginal sources, it is meticulously referenced, but it requires equally pains-taking effort to follow-up. It does therefore make it near impossible to both read it and study it at the same time.

So, I am reading it, after browsing the references for a general picture … all the expected bio, mind & lingustic evolutionary writers E.O.Wilson, D.S.Wilson, Dennett, Pinker, Dawkins, Gould, Lewontin, Chomsky, Baron-Cohen, Barthes, as well as many more in the spheres of art and literature. Fascinating.

[Incidentally, Denis Dutton The Art Instinct – which I also have to read – refers and is referred to and shares a great number of the same references.]

A lot of reading recently.

I finished and blogged some views of Chris Hitchens – God Is Not Great.
[Here][Here][Here]

I’m currently very much enjoying Brian Boyd – On the Origin Of Stories.
Will blog some initial review in a moment.

I also have to read ….

Denis Dutton – The Art Instinct, wich refers to the above and has a lot of common references, including Steven Pinker who provides cover notes too.

Steven Toulmin – Cosmopolis, The Hidden Agenda Of Modernity (1990).
Steven Toulmin – Return to Reason (2001)
Paul Feyerabend – Against Method.
Levitt &  Dubner – Superfreakonomics
Roger Griffin – Modernism And Fascism.

And whilst I’m at it, a few catch-ups. I blogged about Hitchens’ GING, Lawson’s Closure and about Diamond’s Collapse. Did I mention Le Carre’s Most Wanted Man, Dostoyevski’s Notes From The Underground, between Lewycka’ History of Tractors in Ukrainian and  Hosseini’s Kite Runner and Thousand Splendid Suns … oh and Dante’s Divine Comedy after all that Salman Rushdie too ? Funny about two years ago I told myself I had to stop reading and concentrate on writing. Weird.

Good to see the restoration of balance of Muslim history in the evolution of ideas has reached even The Science Museum.

Well I never knew that (that such inscribed biblical references existed on US weapons). Talk about onward christian soldiers ! Good news that the management spotted it and has taken the small action needed.

Another collection of stunning “nature” photographs – all subject to much artistic treatment, but nevertheless …. stunning and creative.

I’ve posted a few of these before – I guess they are attractive – but the reason I posted this one is that I had just noticed this news story today. (Can’t find the post where I linked to this competition originally …. but I will.)