Longer Views (55 page)

To stand for three hours and watch Vikki Sperling map the image from the retina of the eye of the salamander off the visual tectum of the exposed salamander brain (doubled there, one inverted left-right, and a weaker one right-left) with her gold-filled microelectrodes on their adjustable stands, silences a good deal of the argument in my own head. The behaviorists, with their pretransistor view of the world, say: “But you can't locate mental occurrences!” We can not only locate them, we can measure them, map them, record them, reproduce them, cut them out, and put them in backwards!

21. A “word” has a “meaning” in the sense that a train has a track;
not
in the sense that a train has a passenger. Still,
word
and
meaning
in most people's minds, even most philosophers' apparently, are the same sort of category-mistake that Ryle tried to show existed in the Cartesian separation between body and mind.

Words mean.

But meaning
is
the interaction of the process into which the eardrum/aural-nerve translates the air vibrations that
are
the word, with the chemoelectric process that is the interpretative context of the brain. Meaning may be something else as well—as mental occurrences
may
involve something in addition to as well as brain-processes. But I am sure that they are
at least
this, which is why empirical exploration strikes me as the only practical way to get seriously further in either discussion.

22. Many scientists and mathematicians fool themselves into thinking there is something eternal about, say, a mathematical proof.

At Marilyn's bookstall, yesterday, I was browsing in a seventeenth century Latin translation of Euclid's
Elements
. Things Euclid took as proofs would horrify—if not bewilder—a modern university senior in math. Euclid's personal idea of mathematical rigor is entirely different from ours. Fashions in proofs change only a little more slowly than fashions in dress. What is considered to require a proof today is considered self-evident tomorrow. What was considered self-evident yesterday, today is the subject of a three-hundred-page exegesis whose final conclusion is that it just cannot be rigorously established at all!

A mathematician will tell you that a set of proofs, all from one mathematician, may, for example, generate information about the author's personality. I will certainly agree with anyone who says that such information is probably not terribly important to the proofs' substance. But anyone who says the information is
not
there is simply blind.

Even mathematics has its subjective side. And, as extremes come around to touch, one argument gaining popularity now is that something as abstract as “mathematical logic” may turn out to be what, after all, subjectivity actually
is
.

23. Art conveys possibilities of information to society, i.e., the possible forms information may take. The value of art is in its richness of form. (Cf. Charles Olson's advice to writers that, without necessarily imitating reality in their fiction, they should keep their fiction “up to” the real.) The relation of art to the world
is
the aesthetic field of a given culture, i.e., in different cultures art relates to the world in
very
different ways.

24. Thoughts on my last sixteen years with Marilyn: living with an extra-, ordinarily talented and temperamental poet is certainly the best thing that could happen to a prose writer. I wonder, however, if it works the other way around . . .? When we fall asleep, like teaspoons, the baby (due in two months) tramples me in the small of my back. But they seem such definitely nonhostile kicks. You can tell it's just exercise. This evening, for practically a minute and a half, it kicked at almost regular, seven-second intervals, till Marilyn got up from the armchair (a little worried). Well, considering its daddy, it ought to have a good sense of rhythm. (I say living with a talented and temperamental poet is good for a prose writer; but I suspect living with a talented and temperamental poet who happens to possess a rather acute business sense helps too . . .) [Note: Our obstetrician, Mrs. Ransom, says that when the baby presses against an artery in the womb, often a highly regular spasming of part
of the uterine wall can occur, easily confusable with the baby's kicking. Nothing to worry about. But we do not have a budding Ruby Keeler or Bill Robinson in our midst. Just a pressed artery in some positions.]

25. I suspect the logical atomism of both Russell and Wittgenstein would have been impossible without the visual atomization the Impressionists had already subjected the world to on canvas (and that the Cubists were subjecting it to concurrently with Russell's and Wittgenstein's early work). In fact, what is basically wrong with Wittgenstein's “picture theory of language” is that it rests on an aesthetically simpleminded concept of the way in which a picture relates to what it is a picture of. The twenty-seven-year-old Wittgenstein simply held an amazingly naive view (or, more generously, an extreme nineteenth-century-derived view) of the way in which a picture is a model of a situation. The mistake at
Tractatus
2.261 is heartrending:

There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts to enable the one to be a picture of the other at all.

If for
must be
and
identical
he had substituted
is obviously
and
similar—
and then taken up the monumental task of running these words down to their propositional atomization—he would have solved the problem of the modular calculus (i.e.,
the
critical problem).

The point is: There is
nothing
identical in a picture and what it depicts. There is
nothing
identical in the model and what it is a model of. Nothing, nothing at all! They share not one atom in common! They need not share one measurement! Only the perceptive context imposes commonality on them, for a variety of learned and physiological reasons. (G. Spencer-Brown's elegant, elegant argument wobbles, ultimately, on the same pivot point.) There are only identical processes some
thing
else can undergo in response to both—emblematic of their relation. And, presumably, different processes as well—emblem that the two (original and depiction)
are
distinct and, possibly, hierarchical.

For A to be recognized as a model of B, first a set of internal relations, as A relates to itself, must be read from A, then processed in some way probably similar to a mathematical integration; then
another
set of internal relations must be read from B (some of the relations
may
be similar to those read from A; but they need not be) and then integrated (by a similar process; or by a very different one), and the two results compared; if I find the
results
congruent, then I recognize A as a model of B in the context of the joint integrative process that produced the congruent results. But information about A may come to me
via photograph, while I may have to gather information about B, blindfolded, with just my hands, from miniature plastic sculptures. Even so, if I have developed the proper interpretative context, I may well be able to recognize that, say, some small, plastic object B is a model of the photographed object A (checkable against a sight model when the blindfold is removed), while other small plastic objects C, D, and E are
not
—in terms either of the context I've developed, or in terms of the more usual sight context—models of A.

26. About every fragment of reality, an infinite number of different statements can be made. For every fragment of reality, an infinite number of different models can be made.

27. On one side of a paper write: “The statement on the other side of this paper is true.” Now turn the paper over and write: “The statement on the other side of this paper is false.” Now put down your pencil; and turn the paper over several more times, considering the truth and falsity of the statements you have written—till you perceive the paradox.

The young Bertrand Russell noted that the whole of the
Principia Mathematica
remained shaky because of it; he came up with one resolution that, later, as an older man, he repudiated. Karl Popper has, somewhere, a proof that it cannot be resolved at all.

It can.

But to follow the resolution, fold up the paper and put it in the breast pocket of your Pendleton, as I did on the train platform in South Bernham one May, and come along with me.

Vanessa Harpington had gone off painting in North Africa, but had sweetly left the keys to her country home circulating among various of her Camden Town friends. So I'd come down to pass that summer in a fine old English house with my friend Alfred, himself the long-haired nephew and namesake of a rather infamous Polish Count K.

One rainy afternoon, I was in the sitting room, with a sketch pad, making a drawing of the scene outside the window—rain splashing through the leaves of one of the small sycamores in the yard—when Alfred, smoking a meerschaum carved into a likeness of A. E. Van Vogt, wandered in, looked at my drawing, looked out the window, looked at my drawing again, and nodded. After a moment's silence, he said: “Would you say you are making a model of the situation outside the window?”

“I suppose you could call it that,” I said, sketching a line in for the drapery's edge.

“Would you say that it models the fact that it is raining?”

“Well, all those slanted lines
are
supposed to be raindrops. And the runnels of water on the windows there . . .” I looked up.

Alfred had stepped forward. The streaming pane silhouetted his hawkish features. He took another pull on his pipe and, expelling small puffs of smoke, intoned: “Truth . . . Falsity . . . Model . . . Reality . . .” and glanced back.

“I
beg
your pardon?” I said. There was a sweetish aroma in with the tobacco.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” Alfred said, “that logically speaking, ‘true' and ‘false' can only be applied to statements
about
the real; but that it is nonsense to apply either one directly
to
the real? I mean—” He took his pipe and pointed with the stem toward the window; his long hair swung—“if, in here, in the sitting room, you were to make the statement, ‘It is raining outside,' or some other model of the situation you perceive through the glass—”

“Like a drawing?”

“—or a sculpture, or a photograph; or a flashing light that, by arrangement, we had both agreed to interpret as, ‘It is raining outside,' or some abstract mark on a piece of paper, or an arbitrary set of musical notes that we had some such similar agreement—”

“A sign—” I said. “An image, a symbol—”

“
I said a model. Do
accept my terminology.” The partially silhouetted head cocked. “I'm only trying to save you pages and pages of semiological hair-splitting. Now: As I was saying, suppose I chose to model the situation outside with the statement, ‘It is raining outside,' rather than the way you are, with a pencil and paper, then you might have come along, observed my model—or, in this case, heard what I said—observed the garden through the window, and commented: ‘That is a true statement.' Or, if you will, ‘That is a true model.'—”

“I think that's a rather limited way to look at, say, well any
aesthetic
model.”

“So do I! So do I!” said Alfred. “But if we had agreed that we
were
going to use the model in that way, for the purely limited purpose of obtaining information about a limited aspect of reality—say, whether it was or was not raining—then we
could.
”

“Okay. If we agreed first.”

“But, by the same token, you can see that it would be perfectly ridiculous for you to come along, point out the window and say, ‘The outside is true,' or ‘The rain is true,' or even ‘The rain outside is true'.”

“Oh, I could
say
it. But I do get your point. If I did, I wouldn't be using ‘true' in any truly logical way; I'd be using it metaphorically; aesthetically if you will; as a sort of general intensifier.”

“Precisely. Do you see, then, what allows one to put ‘true' or ‘false' on a model, such as my statement on your picture?”

“I suppose,” I said, squinting at my paper and considering asking Alfred to step just a little aside beside he was blocking a doffing sycamore branch, “It's because I've been working very hard to get it to look like what . . . I'm modeling—Alfred, do you think you might move to the left there just a bit—”

“Oh, really!” Alfred stepped directly in front of the window and jabbed his pipe stem at me. “All Vanessa's oak paneling, these leather bindings and dusty hangings, seem to have addled your brain. A statement doesn't
look
like the thing it models! When I say ‘It is raining,' neither the ‘it' nor the ‘is' refers to anything real in the situation. And the position of the pointer on that barometer dial over there—just as good a model of what's going on outside as any of the others we've mentioned—has no internal structure similar to the situation it's modeling at all (though it's
attached
to something that has an internal structure
dependent
on it; but that's a different story)! No, some structural similarity may explain
why
you choose to use a particular thing
for
a model, but it is the use you are putting it
to
—the context you are putting it
into
, if you will—that, alone, allows you to call it ‘true' or ‘false.' Truth and falsity, the potential for being true or false, are not manifestations of the internal structure of the thing that is, potentially, to be so labeled. They are, rather, qualities ascribable to a given thing when, in a particular context, it is functioning in a particular way, i.e., modeling some situation truly (however we choose to interpret that) or modeling it falsely (however we choose, given a particular, modular context, to interpret that) . . .”