Paracosm and religious sensibility

 A paracosm is a detailed, imaginary world. The term is usually used in the psychological descriptions of children. But T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist who is interested in religious sensibilities, uses the term to describe how people build a sense of reality about their religious beliefs.

In her view, it’s a natural process. People who are religious in that way work at it. They spend time in prayer and study. They get into the details.

Luhrmann uses music as an analogy. A beginner plays scales on the piano and eventually performs Mozart. A level of creative detail slowly builds up. And of course the 21^st Piano Concert is real, beautiful, sublime.

Similarly, a Christian mystic might begin by reciting the Lord’s Prayer and will spend hours in contemplative prayer.

Tolkien created a paracosm. St. Augustine did too, I think.

Investigating religious sensibilities

Oliver Sacks had an interesting way of pursuing problems. I think he had the kind of mind that gets carried away by curiosity, a mind that can’t do its homework if it’s interested in something more interesting. (It might take one to know one.)

Here he is talking about religious sensibility:

The tendency to spiritual feeling and religious belief lies deep in human nature and seems to have its own neurological basis, though it may be very strong in some people and less developed in others. … Some religious people come to experience their proof of heaven by another route — the route of prayer, as the anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann has explored in her book When God Talks Back. The very essence of divinity, of God, is immaterial. God cannot be seen, felt, or heard in the ordinary way. Luhrmann wondered how, in the face of this lack of evidence, God becomes a real, intimate presence in the lives of so many evangelicals and other people of faith.

I think there are two religious sensibilities — not one. The two are not compatible, and lumping them together leads to confusion.

In the first kind, people feel a sense of intimacy with the divine.

The other is suggested by Anselm’s Ontological Argument, which claims that God is a logical necessity.

The implications of that view are not acceptable to people who claim that a person can know God.

If God is a logical necessity, no fact about this world could have any relevance about what we could say. The fact that there is baffling beauty in the world could have no bearing on a logical certainty. Neither could the fact that there is evil in the world. Evidence is simply not relevant to something that’s logical certain.

If you hold that sensibility, though, you hold the view that divinity is simply beyond humanity. There’s nothing more we can say.

I think that’s one of several things Wittgenstein had in mind when he said: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Scholars sometimes speak of “Spinoza’s God” or “Einstein’s God,” neither of which is much liked by those who are intimate with the Almighty.

• Source: The long quotation is from Oliver Sacks, “Seeing God in the Third Millennium,” The Atlantic, December 2012.

Descartes thinks about the soul

 One of the strangest bits of thinking I know of is Descartes’s argument for the existence of a soul.

You can imagine not having a body. The very fact that you can imagine that means there’s a logical possibility that a body-less soul exists. (Unicorns don’t exist. But, since you can imagine them, there’s a logical possibility they exist. Perhaps they exist in a distant galaxy. We’d have to go there to confirm or reject the possibility.)

So far, so good. Here’s the strange turn in Descartes’s thought: He held that the fact that you could imagine one without the other — a soul without a body — meant that we have to be talking about two distinct things.

The argument rejects the position that the soul is just a convenient way of talking about characteristics of particular organisms or bodies. We say that John is an honest soul, and Sally is a scientifically-inclined soul, while her brother Sam is an artistic soul. We build the same convenient constructions with words like “minds” and “persons.” But when we’re talking about John’s honest soul, what some of us are really talking about is the organism known as John and some of his traits or characteristics.

That’s what many of us mean when we’re talking about a “soul” or a “mind.”

Descartes argues otherwise. The idea that we can derive “soul” from “body” is simply wrong. His argument contends that the logical distinction implies an ontological distinction — there must be two separate things. Two kinds of stuff.

I think the argument ingenious and fascinating. Philosophy teachers, when they are trying to show students the problem with Descartes’s argument, often tell the story of the Morning Star and the Evening Star.

For eons, human beings looked at the brightest object in the morning sky and called it the Morning Star. And they looked at the brightest object in the evening sky and called it the Evening Star. The two are logically distinct.

But, with advances in astronomy, we learned that both bright objects are not stars, but a single planet: Venus.

The Morning Star and Evening Star are logically distinct ideas, but they are same thing. Similarly, soul (or mind) and body might be logically distinct, but the same thing. Or so it seems to me.

But I have grown used to being wrong— or, rather, changing my mind — about such things. What hasn’t changed is the fascination with Descartes. I was a teenager when I first read this argument. It’s still one of the most interesting specimens in the literature of logic.

• Source: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. The argument is in the Sixth Meditation.

A story about the cellphone

  I traded cellphones and suddenly found myself with a lot more time on my hands.

The new phone is allegedly light years ahead of the old clunker, but my sudden liberation had nothing to do with technological efficiency.

The new phone doesn’t work. It doesn’t cooperate with my hearing aids. It won’t let me read my newspapers.

The first day was bad. The second day I sensed possibilities.

Don’t get me wrong. The phone is useful technology. It has many tools, which I’m unwilling to give up. But it had also become a tool for fidgeting — and that I can do without.

Montaigne said that when the ancient Cretans wanted to curse a man, they prayed that he would catch a bad habit.

The late arrival of negative numbers

 Here is a remarkable line from Pascal’s Pensées: “I know people who cannot understand that when you subtract four from zero what is left is zero.”

Do you hear the tone? It’s the exasperated sound of a man who’s frustrated that he has friends who can’t grasp the simplest ideas in mathematics.

What we notice: This learned man had no concept of negative numbers. I’m pretty sure I learned about them from Miss Fisher in third grade.

Leidy Klotz pointed out Pascal’s difficulty in his book Subtract (Aug. 27, 2022).

We tend to think — well, at least I do — that our conceptual foundations develop incrementally, in roughly the order we learn them in school. (We’re ready for negative numbers in third grade but have to wait on geometry until later.)

Pascal’s line is evidence that’s just not so.

Pascal did some interesting work on probability theory. Soon after Pascal died, Leibnitz and Newton developed calculus in the late 1600s. Meanwhile, the leading lights of Western Civilization would stumble along without negative numbers, which didn’t come into common usage until the 19^th century.

• Source: Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less; New York: Flatiron Books, 2021.

Dylan Thomas's spellbinding voice

 When I was a boy, my father brought home an album from the library. The recordings were of Dylan Thomas reading poems.

Abilene, Texas was not exactly a cosmopolitan place in the early 1960s. Thomas was a spellbinding reader. His voice was an instrument I’d not heard before.

I was too little to understand anything he said. But I came away with a conviction that I would like to know poets.

Decades later, I found, in a public library, a book by Ralph Maud and Aneiran Talfin Davies on Thomas’s readings.

Thomas made radio broadcasts featuring his favorite poets. He called them “anthologies,” with comments. He loved the Welsh poets, and so he would read Wilfred Owen, Sir Philip Sidney and Edward Thomas.

His collection of performance material was made by simply copying poems he liked by hand. He’d get a poem in memory by copying it.

He had about 80 in his collection. They were his standards on his reading tours. He could do a broadcast on the spot.

He liked D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” with its description of the ship that will take the soul to Valhalla and Housman’s “Infant Innocence” (The grizzly bear is huge and wild … ) 

A concert, if that’s the right word, covered favorite themes: death, doubt, drink.

I like a lot of poets. Today, Thomas would be far down on a list of my favorites. But in a way he got me started.

The real influence here was that of my father. He was a teacher, and he stopped by the college library almost every day. He’d bring home wonders in his scarred and battered briefcase.

Somehow, I came away with the idea that I could get an education from the library. In a way, I did.

• Source: Dylan Thomas’s Choice: An Anthology of Verse Spoken by Dylan Thomas, edited by Ralph Maud and Aneiran Talfin Davies; New York: New Directions, 1963

'Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less'

 We humans want more. We strive for more. To get more — money and possessions, mainly — we work more.

And so we have “time famines” among software engineers. The War College discovered that the Army had ordered its officers to complete 297 days of activities in 256 days. There are always more tasks, never less.

Leidy Klotz, a professor at the University of Virginia, has made a study of this rush for more. His research shows humans “systematically opt for more,” even when subtracting provides a better solution.

Part of this is culture, and part is biology. Kangaroo rats are famous hoarders. They are not abstract thinkers. They acquire and store things, including calories, on instinct. We humans seem to have the same instincts.

I’m interested for at least a couple of reasons.

I worked for corporations. I was puzzled at the constant demands to do additional tasks, even when doing them hurt our productivity and our products. I agree with Klotz’s view that subtraction is a neglected tool.

But also I’m a writer, and good writing is largely about subtraction. If you give people a writing sample and ask them to improve it, most will add length. But people who habitually write are likely to cut it. They subtract words, delete sentences. They edit.

Klotz’s book suggests a lot of things — corporate work routines and economics that drive climate change — could benefit from people who think about less, rather than more, about subtraction, rather than addition.

Personally, I have a new list: Things to Stop Doing.

• Source: Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less; New York: Flatiron Books, 2021.