Is God Data?

John Searle

Here is an interesting formulation that comes to unseat an implausible theory. In the course of demolishing Christof Koch’s, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist in The New York Review of Books (“Can Information Theory Explain Consciousness,” TNYRB, 1/10/13) the philosopher John Searle makes the following point. “mental phenomena can be ontologically subjective but still admit of a science that is epistemically objective. You can have an epistemically objective science of consciousness even though it is an ontologically subjective phenomenon.” Translation you can talk scientifically about what goes on inside the head. Searle describes Koch as a friend, but one wonders how their friendship will fare after this review? Searle is a monist who believes consciousness is a "biological phenomenon" that can be explained just as we do “digestion or photosynthesis.” Any modestly humanistic person, even one who believes in God, will buy Searle’s idea. God may exist, but we don’t have to take the Cartesian view that makes consciousness a product of a divine spirit. We know too much about the brain to have to need God. God isn’t a necessity. Still there is one unsettling aporia here and it relates to the advent of artificial intelligence, another subject Searle has written about. Let’s say consciousness can exist without the body, in a computer for example. Let’s say we have a cybernetic form of consciousness that has no relation to biology. Rejoice all you closet dualists. The information bits that Searle trashes, the “panpsychism" that Koch argues for, may show that what we know as mind can exist without the body. God (whatever he, she, it is), it turns out, may lie in the data.

Our Man in Peking

In an article entitled “Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months,” (NYT, 1/30/13), Nicole Perlroth describes a new universe which reads like a bestselling computer game. “Based on a forensic analysis going back months,” Perlroth writes, “it appears the hackers broke into The Times computers on September 13 when the reporting for the Wen articles was nearing completion. They set up at least three back doors into users’ machines that they used as a digital base camp. From there they snooped around The Times’s systems for a least two weeks before they identified the domain controller that contains user names and hashed, or scrambled, passwords for every Times employee.” One mustn’t make light of a situation in which the attacks occurred as reprisals for memorable and exhaustive reporting on October 25^th “that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings." However, the description does recall a 21^st century version of the harum scarum that went on in Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana. In the novel, (the movie version starred Alec Guinness), vacuum cleaner parts are used as the MacGuffin, drawings of which are meant to outline an enemy base. Here Perlroth’s description of a cyber attack reads like an actual war, though no lives are lost. The fact of America being vulnerable to a cyber attack is no small matter. On the other hand, what would you prefer, nuclear Armageddon with the loss of millions of lives, or the loss of trillions of bytes of data and millions of passwords?

Germans Crack Down on Bestiality

According to a recent Times piece, “Germany’s upper house of Parliament, the Bundesrat, voted Friday to criminalize… ‘using an animal for personal sexual activity.’” (“German Legislators Vote to Outlaw Bestiality," NYT, 2/1/13). One hopes the irony of having an a political organization with a name like Bundesrat pass the ban was not lost on the German electorate. Zoophiles, or those who oppose animal rights groups in sanctioning the blessings of animal love “argue,” according to the Times “that their  relations with their pets, or ‘partners’ as they prefer, are entirely mutual." Michael Kiok is identified in the piece as director of Zoophilic Engagement for Tolerance and Enlightenment and David Zimmerman, a director who is described as having “had a Great Dane with which he occasionally had sex…now...lives with his similarly zoophilic boyfriend and their Dalmation” after his Great Dane passed away. The question, of course, is not simply whether the sex is consensual. Beyond the fact that there is literally no way of telling if a dog is giving his or her consent, one might question whether an animal really knows what is best for itself and if so which ones? For instance Mr. Zimmerman’s Great Dane might have been considered by some to be more in a position to make judgments of this kind than Mr. Zimmerman’s boyfriend’s Dalmation. Great Danes give the appearance of being more considered in their choice of sexual partners while there is an impulsive streak in Dalmations, often known as “firehouse dogs," which might mitigate against their deferring gratification. These are some of the questions that the Bundesrat should consider if these issues ever come back to the floor of the chamber.

Walking Drifting Dragging

Log of Limits (Snow Walks) by Ellie Ga

It is becoming increasingly hard to feel a sense of place in our current globalized world. Wherever you are, you're instantly connected to everywhere else you have ever been and there is both a consoling and frustrating familiarity to the world. The internet is everywhere along with KFC, McDonald’s and a host of spinoffs that infect even the most third world of third world countries. OK Pyongyang might be the exception. The discipline of psychogeography and the work of writers like W.G. Sebald and Will Self  devoted as they are to unfolding the historical connections and memories which create a sense of uniqueness in place is a countervailing movement in our culture. The Walking Drifting Dragging show  recently exhibited at the New Museum explored this tendency in visual media. Four artists  defined boundaries within specific terrains: The New Yorker, Ellie Ga, dealt with the Arctic, Eunji Cho from Seoul studied crossing points in Berlin, Paulo Nazareth’s (Belo Horizonte, Brazil) worn down sandals attested to his trek from Brazil to New York City and Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain of Desire Machine Collective (Guwahati, India) used video and a hand drawn map to trace out river pathways between Northern India and Bangladesh. The show was part of the Museum as Hub project, devoted to themes of internationalism in art and while most museums play lip service to indigenous culture, Walking Drifting Dragging had the curious effect of making the viewer stop in his tracks long enough to recognize that he or she might be creating their own path, right there and then.

Little Fugitive

One of the most interesting things about Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashley’s production of Little Fugitive, currently being revived at Film Forum, is that it came four years after Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (l948). Engel actually shot the movie in a cinema verite style with a hand held 35mm camera, not a common piece of photographic equipment at that or in any time in the history of American film. If Bicycle Thieves is an iconic piece of Italian neorealism then Little Fugitive might be sui generis example of American hyperrealism. The scene where Lenny (Richard Brewster) tries to locate his kid brother Joey (Richie Andrusco) on a crowded Coney Island beach is uncannily reminiscent of the doomed attempt to retrieve the stolen bicycle, the needle in a haystack, amongst the mountains of bicycles that fill the streets of De Sica’s post-war Rome. What makes Little Fugitive singular in American cinematic history is that it’s about objects rather than a story. Americans genuinely like their bread and butter, which is to say plot, but while Little Fugitive literally had plenty of bread and butter—in the form of cotton candy, watermelon, hot dogs and soda pop—it didn’t provide the kind of bread and butter most filmgoers generally seek. The story is rather simple, young Joey runs away when he is tricked into believing he’s murdered his older brother. Joey has his seven year old version of a Walgurgisnacht and Last Supper in one, riding on the El to Coney Island, passing signs reading “Smile It’s Worth a Million Dollars and Only Costs a Dime” and hearing shills in front of an arcade crying out “everyone knocks them down, you will too,” seeing the ferris wheel and the steeple chase and caressing the head of a merry-go- round horse. The brilliance of the film is to see guilt from the point of view of a seven-year-old and from that character’s height too. Joey survives by collecting the deposits on bottles he finds next to impervious lovers under a boardwalk or nestled into a jetty. “Why did you run away?” Lenny asks his younger brother at the end. “It was just a joke.” “Why didn’t you tell me,” Joey says and that’s a wrap. In the meanwhile Little Fugitive, awash in the imagery of the great photographer Ruth Orkin, creates its own iconography. The motto is, don’t ever underestimate the intelligence of the movie going public. Just because Hollywood plays to the lowest common denominator doesn’t mean that audiences aren’t capable of a helluva lot more (Little Fugitive opened in 5000 theaters in l953) and still can draw substantial audiences today. Little Fugitive is a great American movie that proves the point.