Here & There (77 page)
Authors: Joshua V. Scher
45.
Princeton philosopher.
46.
“First Person Plural” in
The Atlantic
, November 2008.
47.
Malle wrote an award-winning dissertation on social interaction, familial dynamics centered on recognition of intentionality, and how we learn to make inferences about mental states in morally evaluating behavior.
48.
To Me
, published in
Fictions of the Self
, Princeton University Press 2008.
49.
What Freud called our Eros impulse.
50.
Kai remains a mystery. There’s no record of any graduate students, lab assistants, or Department employees by that name. Who was this? To Reidier? To Eve? Extramarital?
51.
Seife, Charles.
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
. New York: Penguin, 2000. Print.
52.
One of the most famous consequences of relativity: time slows down at high speeds. Time is relative. In grasping this, Einstein, in one fell swoop of chalk, also obliterated absolute speed. A person on the train is correct in stating the station is moving backward, as the person on the platform is equally correct in asserting the train is moving forward. If they both happened to be carrying synchronized stop watches and the train went half the speed of light on a round trip to the restaurant at the edge of the universe, their time keeping would be drastically off in assessing how long the trip took. The respective point of view of each would be that the other is in error.
53.
Δt′ = Δt / √(1 - v
2
/ c
2
)
54.
Adhering to the warping of three-dimensional space as a result of gravitational forces.
55.
Luc Sante in his article “Sontag: The Precocious Years” for
The New York Times
, February 1, 2009, in discussing the journals and notebooks of Susan Sontag, posits how diarists either write with the hope of publishing or the fear of being published. Both however preclude innocence in journal-keeping. There is no true voyeuristic insight for the reader in these confessionary works, simply a fiction in which both the writer and reader are complicit.
56.
Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulations” in
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings,
ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), p.166.
57.
Ibid.
58.
Where is your father?
59
What is happening?
60.
Bertram was most likely referencing the unorthodox practice of opening up his notes on Eve to me. It’s an understandable and forgivable reaction for any psychologist in spite of the Department’s insistence on National Security and the threat of a court order compelling his cooperation under the Patriot Act.
61.
Author of several narrative science books, including
Teleportation: The Impossible Leap
. See
www.daviddarling.info
.
62.
David Darling in his book
Teleportation: The Impossible Leap
(locations 67-75 in the Amazon Kindle version).
63.
Bennett, Brassard, Crépeau, Jozsa, Peres, and Wootters.
64.
Darling, locations 148-51.
65.
Later Ms. Hubbard had young Reidier explain his method. He shrugged and said, well, since they were all pairs it wasn’t too hard. Prodded a little more he revealed how he saw that by adding 1 and 100 he got 101, and likewise that by adding 2 and 99 he got the same number, and so on. So all he had to do was multiply 50 x 101.
66.
Martin Dent (theater critic) from his article, “The Mise en Scene of a Multimedia Mystic,”
The Village Voice
, March 15, 1980.
67.
Kaleb described this anecdote while discussing the nature of an audience’s suspension of disbelief in an interview for the July/August issue of
American Theater Magazine
in 1981.
68.
Martin Dent (theater critic) from his article, “The Mise en Scene of a Multimedia Mystic.”
69.
Richard Feynman, from his lecture given at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, December 29, 1959
70.
Paul Valery
71.
Ibid.
72.
The Panopticon is a prison designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The design concept permits an observer to observe (-
opticon
) all (
pan
-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to determine if and when they are being watched, thereby establishing a “sentiment of a sort of omnipresence”
[i]
and invisible omniscience.
Bentham himself described the Panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”
[ii]
*
[i]
Bentham, Jeremy.
Proposal for a New and Less Expensive Mode of Employing and Reforming Convicts
(1798).
[ii]
Bentham, Jeremy.
Panopticon
(Preface). In Miran Bozovic (ed.),
The Panopticon Writings
, London: Verso, 1995, 29-95.
*
For those of you still feeling a little lost, just go to Hulu.com and watch any episode of the HBO series
Oz
. Also, I looked up Schrödinger’s cat to refresh my memory. Hilary was right not to explain it in a footnote. It’s just a quaint little philosophical conundrum involving a black box, poison, a radioactive trigger, and a cat that might or might not be alive. Other than the box part, I don’t understand Reidier’s joke at all. I don’t know, maybe it’s hilarious to physicists. Or cats.
73.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
, written by Michel Foucault, published in 1975.
74.
There’s an eerie, borderline omniscient, resonance in this nanobot footage. In spite of the terrifyingly apt irony, I am convinced that neither Eve nor Reidier were aware of the constant and omnipresent observation and recording of their lives by the Department.
*
*
I knew she could only resist so long before injecting herself. Still, she relegated herself to the confines of a footnote. Props for that, Mom. And yeah, this is a tad eerie. Especially since you’re the Watcher in all this.
And I guess by extension, me. All of us really. Implicated through the simple act of reading.
75.
This phrase is actually a misquotation. The closest the show ever got to it was “Beam me up, Mr. Scott.”
76.
The Director not only installed nanobots all over Reidier’s home and office, he bugged himself for each and every one of their meetings. This, being early on, was only an audio bug.
77.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a type of specialized MRI scan that measures blood flow related to neural activity.
78.
Measures weak magnetic fields outside the skull.
79.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation, applies strong-pulsed magnetic field from outside the skull.
80.
Pierce is paraphrasing Newton who once modestly said, “If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
81.
Resonant choice of words. Was Pierce insightful or was he consistently listening in on the Reidier home? Though it seems a moot distinction, inevitably, his perspective would color his treatment of Reidier and the events surrounding him. Like with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the observer ultimately affects the observed.
82.
This video documentation was compiled from “hitcher feeds” (nanobots that have attached themselves to an individual’s clothes, hair, etc. after being brushed against).
*
*
Are you kidding me?! Hitcher feeds. The fucking nanobots can latch onto your clothes and hair and just tag along?! When did Hilary learn about these? Did she start burning her clothes periodically and giving herself DNA-cleansing scrubdowns?
83.
Due to questionable audio quality during this portion of the footage, that statement might not be accurate. However, upon multiple hearings as well as some technical adjustments, Reidier does seem to say cucumber eyes. The only reason it has been kept in at all is due to the fact that it resonates with various other peculiar phrases peppered throughout the material. Whether these are somehow part of a thematic reality or merely a collection of odd malapropisms has yet to be determined, but should be kept in mind nevertheless.
84.
Mark Roth, “Why do we think spiders and snakes are so scary? It just might be evolution.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, March 7, 2007.
86.
Bertram references the eighteenth-century philosopher, David Hume. Hume was particularly brutal with his assertions about epistemology, how we know what we know. He focused specifically on how information rests on our belief in matters of fact. He observes how,
When one particular species of event has always, in all instances, been conjoined with another, we make no longer any scruple of foretelling one upon the appearance of the other . . . We then call that one object,
Cause
; the other,
Effect
. We suppose that there is some connection between them; some power in the one, by which it infallibly produces the other, and operates with the greatest certainty and strongest necessity. (Hume,
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
(1748), pp. 80-81.)
Hume supports his challenge of our understanding of knowledge with a favorite example, a seemingly undeniable given, our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. Obviously, this is a matter of fact, based upon our conviction that the sunrise is an effect caused by the earth’s rotation. Our belief in this causal relationship, however, is based upon past observations. We hold this to be true because every day, since the dawn of humanity, the sun has risen. But our confidence that this will continue in the same manner tomorrow cannot be justified by referencing the past. We have no rational basis for believing the sun will rise tomorrow, yet believe it, we do.
87.
Stranger anxiety develops in the first year. Once separation anxiety develops (also in the first year) when mother departs, normal infants are upset. Ecco was not an infant, but barely acknowledged the absence of Eve. And when he did, it was an act of curiosity not fear.
88.
According to Jerry Fodor, an American philosopher and cognitive scientist at Rutgers University, “Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn’t really philosophical to begin with.”
89.
See
Chapter VI
.
90.
As much as scientists hold themselves up as “rational” beings, often many of them take on God complexes in their work. Consider Oppenheimer’s famous allusion to the Bhagavad Gita after overseeing the first successful test of a nuclear bomb when he states, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” A mathematician, Dr. Theodore Kaczynski, after resigning from a post at the University of California, Berkeley, at the age of twenty-five, took it upon himself to reform society and lead a worldwide revolution against the effects of modern society’s “industrial-technological system” and became the Unabomber. Even the much beloved and admired Einstein once wrote that God does not play dice with the universe, to which Niels Bohr reportedly replied, “Stop telling God what to do with his dice.”
Reidier, however, avoids the deistic mantle, spurning any assumption of control, let alone godly perspective or power. At least consciously. On a subconscious level, he consistently seems to play the part of Prometheus trying to steal fire from the gods.
91.
“The dissolution of memory is inversely related to the recency of the event.”
~Théodule-Armand Ribot
92.
A. Franklina; G. V. Drivonikou; L. Bevis; I. R. L. Davies; P. Kay; and T. Regier, “Categorical perception of color is lateralized to the right hemisphere in infants, but to the left hemisphere in adults.”
PNAS
March 4, 2008, vol. 105, no. 9 3221-3225.
93.
“Babies See Pure Color, but Adults Peer Through Prism of Language,” March 3, 2008.
Wired.com
(
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/babies-see-pure/#ixzz0qBGnZmFm
).
94.
Robin Lloyd, “Infants Have ‘Amazing Capabilities’ That Adults Lack”
LiveScience.com.
May 24, 2007. 02:00 p.m. ET.
http://www.livescience.com/health/070524_infant_intelligence.html
.
95.
Ibid.