Michael Prescott's Blog

Much ado about ranting

The blog "Shakespeare" By Another Name recently pointed me to an amusing online free-for-all in which a columnist for the London Times, Oliver Kamm, mixes it up with various anti-Stratfordians (i.e., people who doubt that the works of Shakespeare were written by the man from Stratford).

This issue is not as interesting to me as it once was. I'm still in the Oxfordian camp - I think the author was most likely Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who used Will Shakespeare as a beard - but my world would not come crumbling down if definitive proof to the contrary were obtained. (For some of my thoughts on why Oxford is a good candidate to be the "true" author, click on the "categories" link at the bottom of this post.)

What I found most interesting about the long, heated online debate was how angry Kamm allows himself to become. In fact, he seems to be aboil with rage and indignation almost from the start. He repeatedly characterizes his opponents as cranks and worse, yet seems honestly perplexed that anyone could accuse him of using ad hominems. He also insists that his opponents have no proper academic credentials, though he himself is described in his Times bio as "having been an investment banker and co-founder of a hedge fund" who has an interest in "economic policy, foreign affairs and European literature." It seems odd that his main complaint about his opponents is that they are "amateurs," when he himself is clearly an amateur in Elizabethan studies, as well. Perhaps it is a case of psychological projection.

That's not to say Kamm makes no good points. He strikes a few "palpable hits," I think, though many of his arguments are question-begging and appeals to authority (the very errors he accuses his opponents of committing). He is obviously very intelligent, a fact that makes his vituperative style of expression that much more baffling. You would think that as a bright, sophisticated writer, he would see how he's coming across, but he seems oblivious. His increasingly agitated commentary is perhaps an object lesson in the ego run amok. It underlines a point I've been reflecting on lately - that of all human skills or virtues, self-possession may be the most important. Imagine a world in which everyone could remain self-possessed under even the most trying conditions. War, violence, and cruelty might not vanish altogether (there are self-possessed sociopaths), but would certainly be rarer than they are now.

After reading the debate, I found myself flipping through the book that inspired the Shakespeare blog - Mark Anderson's "Shakespeare" By Another Name, a biography of Edward de Vere written from the perspective that de Vere wrote the works of Shakespeare. Innumerable parallels between de Vere's life and elements of the Shakespearean corpus are explored. Some of these parallels are more convincing than others, but the cumulative effect is immensely persuasive, at least to me.

Here's a small but telling example from page 169 of Anderson's book. De Vere (Oxford) betrayed two friends who were plotting against the Queen; these friends were arrested and imprisoned. Understandably furious with Oxford, they launched a series of attacks on him, alleging a variety of vices and evils. One of the pair, Charles Arundell, testified:

First, I will detect him of the most impudent and senseless lies that ever passed the mouth of any man.... His third lie which hath some affinity with the other two is of certain excellent orations he made.... The second vice, wherewith I mean to touch him though in the first I have included perjury in something [sic] is that he is a most notorious drunkard and very seldom sober ... thirdly I will prove him a buggerer of a boy ... fifthly to show that the world never brought forth such a villainous monster, and for a parting blow to give him his full payment, I will prove against him his most horrible and detestable blasphemy in denial of the divinity of Christ our Savior and terming the Trinity a fable ... that Joseph was a wittold [cuckold] and the Blessed Virgin a whore.

To conclude, he is a beast in all respects and in him no virtue to be found and no vice wanting.

Note the confused syntax and the eccentric numbering, in which the third precedes the second. (It is the third lie, but apparently an example of the first vice.) Compare the above with the speech that Shakespeare puts in the mouth of the inept constable Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing:

Marry, sir, [the accused] have committed false report. Moreover, they have spoken untruths, secondarily they are slanders, sixth and lastly they have belied a lady, thirdly they have verified unjust things, and to conclude, they are lying knaves.

The similarities are obvious, right down to the words "to conclude." It would seem likely that Dogberry is a cruel burlesque of Arundell. If so, whoever wrote the play must have been familiar with Arundell's testimony and must have had reason to lampoon it. Oxford, of course, would meet both criteria.

To publicly lampoon a man whom one has betrayed and handed over to the jailers of the Tower is not the most admirable course of action, to be sure. But no one ever said de Vere was a likable or well-adjusted fellow. Indeed, some of the accusations made against him are probably accurate, though others seem like boilerplate Elizabethan slander. It is quite plausible, for instance, that de Vere was "very seldom sober." But some high-functioning alcoholics can be astonishingly productive; their overconsumption of alcohol can bring on periods of remarkable creativity; they are even capable of works of genius, as I discussed here. Such people are also capable of extraordinary malice -- the kind of malice that might prompt a man to ridicule a desperate enemy whose downfall he has brought about.

The only credible alternative to the Oxfordian theory, it seems to me, is that someone else wrote the plays but was guided by Oxford. This is not impossible, since Oxford was known to serve as a mentor and patron of young writers.

Clare Asquith's book Shadowplay (though it does not include Oxford in the mix) makes an argument along these lines, suggesting that Will Shakespeare of Stratford came under the aegis of Catholic noblemen and served as their mouthpiece. Trouble is, I see little in the Stratford man's background that would supply him with the erudition to write great poetry; and some of the plays, like Love's Labour's Lost, seem to have been written before young Will had even arrived in London. (But the dating of all the plays is endless debated, so this point cannot be conclusive.)

Kamm and others like to point out that Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe were of middle-class origins, yet wrote great plays, and this is true; but both Jonson and Marlowe were recognized early for their talent and given special treatment. Marlowe went to Corpus Christi College; Jonson went to the acclaimed Westminster School and later received an honorary degree from Oxford University. By contrast, the Stratford man appears to have had no education beyond a few years in the Stratford grammar school. Still, we cannot rule out the possibility that Will showed early promise and was shipped off to the household of wealthy relatives who supplied him with tutors and books. This is the theory advanced by E. A. J. Honigmann (discussed somewhat sympathetically by Eric Sams here), and it might be profitably combined with Asquith's musings.

In these matters (as in most matters) it's best not to be too dogmatic. Otherwise we may find ourselves, like Dogberry, declaring that those who disagree with us are, firstly, amateurs and cranks; thirdly, mere dilettantes; secondarily, lacking in all academic respectability; sixth and last, dishonest villains; fifthly, unfit for public debate; and to conclude, they are lying knaves.  

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Postscript. For those who can't be bothered to read the whole comments thread on the Times site, here are some excerpts from Oliver Kamm's posts.

He characterizes those who disagree with him as: "delusional," "conspiracy nutters," and "unscholarly cranks" who make "bogus and ahistorical assertions" and whose arguments are "buffoonery," "absurd," "snobbish, hapless idiocy," a "mound of dross," "pure snobbery and conspiracy theory, and ... an offence against historical scholarship."

"Your entire method of reasoning is ignorant of history and of literary criticism."

"The entire Oxfordian edifice is built on ignorance, snobbery and nothing else."

"[Anti-Stratfordian] arguments bear as much relation to literary scholarship as do creationism to science and Holocaust denial to history. It's a sociological and pathological phenomenon rather than a literary one."

"Mr Malim [an anti-Stratfordian] himself is a retired solicitor, with all the competence that that implies for the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature." (Kamm's own background is that of a hedge fund manager.)

"I said you were unscholarly cranks. And yes, of course the Supreme Court Justices you mention [who agree with the anti-Stratfordian position] come into that category. Their expertise in the law is extensive and entirely irrelevant to the field of literature."

"I do not treat my opponents with contempt. I treat them in this case and on this subject with derision."

"Mr Wilkinson, let's get one thing straight. At no time have I engaged in abuse. I've called you a crank and I've described your contributions as fatuous. I've further described the comments on this thread from your comrades as hapless idiocy. If you consider this to be abuse, then you're not cut out for public debate. I invariably address correspondents with courtesy but also directness, and I'm not going to flatter you by pretending that your opinions are worthy of respect or have any value whatever." ("Courtesy"?!) 

"I have carefully explained that I do not engage in abuse, but my restraint doesn't mean that I'm going to have a dialogue with you. Your theories are are no more interesting than they are educated, and while you have every right to be heard, you have no right whatever to be listened to."

"I never engage in personal abuse, but nor do I engage in flattery of cranks, whether creationists, 9/11 truthers, Holocaust deniers or Oxfordians, all of whom use similar methods of reasoning."

"That puts [the anti-Stratfordian position] outside the bounds of legitimate debate: it's at best irrationalism and unabashed amateurism ... More generally, it's pathological and in some cases (e.g. Delia Bacon, who first propounded Francis Bacon as author) literally insane."

"You're yet another who complains about name-calling while failing to identify a single example. I've referred to you (collectively) as cranks and I've commented on the fatuous, pitiful, amateurish and fraudulent contributions that you have made uninvited on this site. What on earth is wrong with that? How does that qualify as name-calling?" (How, indeed?)

"Either you're incompetent or you're a fantasist."

"I decline to treat you with a respect that you haven't earned. Yet again, you complain about abuse yet fail to identify any instance of it. The terms crank, conspiracy theorist, amateur and snob are plainly all descriptive." (Nope, no abuse there. I'm sure Kamm wouldn't take it as an insult if someone used such "descriptive" terms against him. Would he?)  

"What possible value is the opinion of a Supreme Court judge on Elizabethan literature? He may be intelligent and professionally accomplished, but his opinion on Shakespeare is intrinsically worth nothing." (But the opinion of a hedge fund manager is of great value.) 

"I didn't seek your opinions and have no interest in them."

"I can only suppose you thought you'd be treated at worst as a legitimate contributor to honest debate, and at least you now know better."

"Once you intruded into this space, I didn't ignore you but told you the brutal truth: you're a crank, an ignoramus and an amateur. How that can be termed 'vilification' is beyond me: it's a frank and objective assessment of your views and behaviour." (Why, it's not vilification at all. It's just frank talk - and "objective," no less!) 

Although Kamm does make a few substantive points, his overall tone is so hostile that the term "crank" or "nutter" would seem to apply more aptly to him than to most of his correspondents.

I don't know to what extent Oliver Kamm may be typical of hedge fund managers in general, but if the qualities he displays in these comments - overbearing self-righteousness, disdain for any contrary viewpoint, and an unwillingness to even consider the possibility that he is mistaken - are found in equal measure in his colleagues, then the derivatives crisis, which nearly brought down the financial systems of the world, becomes a good deal easier to understand.

I brake for skeptics

It may not seem that way, but this post does have something to do with the paranormal -- or at least with skeptics thereof. But it will take a while to get there.

Recently an article appeared on the Autoblog, describing an experiment carried out at a Burger King restaurant. A speed bump was installed in the drive-through lane. New technology developed by company called MotionPower captured some of the energy from cars that passed over this speed bump and converted it to electricity. The article clearly stated that the experiment produced very little power and was intended only as "an initial durability test."

Despite these caveats, the article attracted a host of negative comments from people anxious to display their superior knowledge of physics. The political blog Ace of Spades, which linked to the article, described the experiment as an "epic fail."

Why was it such a failure, and a laughable one at that? Here's a sample of the commentary from Autoblog readers:

Huh? It's not FREE energy. Energy just doesn't appear out of nowhere. They are STEALING energy from the customers. The customers have to use gas to power their car over the speed bump. So whatever energy that is produced for BK from this speed bump, the customer would have have to use more to get over it, since some energy would most likely be lost in the transfer process.

This is what humanity is up against. Can you imagine that a corporation this big doesn't contain one person that understands the laws of physics. If they just added a 1/10 cent surcharge to each customer they would achieve more for both of us.

They understand the laws of physics, but they don't care. In their world, it is more important to appear green than to actually be green.

Or the people who understand this all too often have no voice in the corporate world. After all, it's an uphill battle to go up against some eccentric executives with MBA.

Anyone who thinks this is a good idea has no grasp of physics.

"Epic fail," indeed. Or so it would appear on the basis of most of the comments that were posted.

Eventually, however, someone who actually bothered to read the article carefully and think about its implications joins the discussion. This person, whose screen name is Joeviocoe, points out that the math supplied in some earlier commentary is wrong:

I think your calculations are WAY off.

Apply common sense. Would BK be interested if it could save only $5 per year? No!

Hybrid cars (like the Prius) use regen braking (the energy recaptured from slowing down from a certain speed)!

If you perform 100,000 braking cycles per year, does it not save you more than $5 in fuel costs?

Now you math freaks, lets have a bit of fun...

Joe goes on to carry out some new calculations that lead to a more sensible result -- namely, that the system might generate a little more than $1000 a year, rather than the five dollars a year estimated by an earlier commenter.

But of course, the Burger King test was not done to make money. It was done to demonstrate the basic feasibility of the system and to show that the technology would hold up under the weight of a succession of vehicles. It was "an initial durability test."

What about the objection that the car's energy is being "stolen" by the device? This would be true if the car didn't have to stop anyway. But in situations where the car is already required to stop, the energy is not stolen. It is simply redirected. (In the case of hybrids that use brake energy to recharge the battery, a case could be made that the energy is being stolen. But most cars are not hybrids.)

It should be obvious that the drive-through lane of a fast food restaurant is not the ideal environment in which to carry out this test. A better choice would be, say, the offramp of a freeway, where vehicles are required to rapidly decelerate. Placing a series of rumble strips on an offramp would allow some of the car's energy, which would otherwise be expended in braking, to be captured and used for some other purpose -- perhaps for lighting electric signs. In a high-traffic area, where vehicles are losing a great deal of energy as they decelerate, the energy captured could be significant.

As Joe sensibly observes: "My idea (perhaps thought of already by others) would be a set of rumble strips that would take away approximately 20 mph from the average car."

So why not test the system on a freeway offramp, or a stop sign? The simple answer is that it would be logistically more difficult to carry out such a test. There would be more bureaucratic hurdles to overcome; the freeway offramp or public street would have to be closed temporarily while the system was installed; etc. Most likely it was just easier to run the test at a Burger King.

Now, why am I bothering to post about this at all? What interests me is not the technology itself -- though it does seem to be feasible under the right circumstances -- but the attitudes conveyed by the skeptical comments.

According to the skeptics, the scientists who thought up the experiment don't understand the most elementary scientific principles. Or, if they do understand, their corporate chiefs don't care. The bottom line is that none of the people involved in this experiment had the slightest idea what they were doing, or if they did have some idea, they were willing to mislead the public for some nefarious purpose.

In other words, the mindset of the scoffers is a mixture of intellectual superiority, moral superiority, and unvarnished cynicism, and their responses are based on only the most cursory and superficial reading of the article in question. They don't have to read the material carefully or employ any common sense in evaluating it. They already know that they are smarter and better than everybody else. It's a foregone conclusion that anyone who's come up with something they themselves didn't think of must be wrong. After all, most people are idiots or deluded "eccentrics" or cynical manipulators playing a public relations game.

How easy it must be to approach life from this perspective! There are no questions, only ready answers. There are no doubts, only certainty. There is no need to grasp someone else's point of view, since everybody else is obviously wrong. And there is, of course, no possibility that we ourselves could be wrong ... ever.

As Colin Wilson quipped after reading Martin Gardner's best-selling book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science: "I wish I could be as sure of anything as Martin Gardner is of everything."

And here, naturally, is where skepticism of the paranormal comes in. A great many skeptics  -- though not, I emphasize, all of them -- seem to share the perspective of the scoffers quoted above. How many of the nonprofessional skeptics have actually looked, in detail and in depth, at the evidence for the paranormal phenomena they disparage? Most of the more casual skeptics have probably read, at most, a couple of skeptical books on the subject -- books that already reinforce and confirm their own outlook.

On the basis of this cursory and one-sided examination of the subject, they are quick to rule all paranormal phenomena out of bounds and to dismiss all the evidence collected over more than a century of research by hundreds of investigators on several continents.

And why not? They already know that none of these investigators had the slightest idea what they were doing, or if they did have some idea, they were willing to mislead the public for some nefarious purpose. The researchers in question don't understand the most elementary scientific principles. Or, if they do understand, they don't care. There is no need to examine the evidence, since all of it is obviously wrong.  After all, most of the investigators -- like people in general -- are idiots or deluded "eccentrics, or cynical manipulators playing a public relations game. 

"This is what humanity is up against," they lament, positioning themselves as enlightened saviors of the benighted multitude. "Anyone who thinks there is evidence for the paranormal has no grasp of science," they say, positioning themselves as the only ones who understand - who really understand -- science.  Any experiment that produces evidence for any paranormal phenomenon simply must be an "epic fail."

It's sometimes said that belief in the paranormal is predicated on certain psychological factors, and in some cases this is doubtless true. What is less widely understood is that instinctive, knee-jerk skepticism may also be predicated on psychological factors.

None of us can be totally immune to the influence of our temperament and mindset. It might be best, then, to become aware of our prejudices, parse our words carefully, and think before we speak.

And when we find ourselves speeding a  little too recklessly toward a conclusion -- hit the brakes.

Two for one

Quantum physics can be endlessly fascinating because of the mind-boggling paradoxes it presents us with. The most famous of these, and probably the most easily explained, involves the so-called double-slit experiment. I have read about this experiment many times, but always seem to have trouble retaining the memory, probably because the experimental outcomes are so counterintuitive that they are hard to absorb and retain.

Maybe if I write it down, I'll be able to remember it better. So here goes.

Though I have put it in my own words, this discussion is based on Chapter 8 of the book Biocentrism by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman. If I've made any mistakes, I trust my more physics-savvy readers will let me know.

Let's say we shoot a beam of photons through two slits in a piece of paper so that the photons make an impression on a screen behind the slits. The stream of light will produce wave interference patterns on the screen, indicating that light functions as a wave.

Now let's say we slow down the stream of photons until only one photon is being released at a time. The photon arrives at the pair of slits and has to "decide" (so to speak) which slit to use. Or so it would seem -- but in fact, the photon goes through both slits, and as more and more photons are shot through the slits one at a time, they build up a wave interference pattern on the screen. Thus it appears that even individual photons behave as waves.

So far, so good. But now let's attach a detection device to the slits so that the photon can be observed and measured as it goes through -- before it hits the screen. When we do this, we get a totally unexpected result: no more wave interference pattern on the screen! Now each photon behaves like a particle, not a wave.

This is odd. It seems that the mere act of detecting the photon as it goes through the slits is enough to convert it from a wave to a particle. And it's not as if the detection device itself somehow interferes with the photon. All kinds of variations on this experiment have been done, using a variety of detection devices, and the upshot is that it is the very fact of observing and/or measuring the photon that causes it to behave like a particle.

From here, things get even stranger. Suppose we set up two parallel experiments -- two sets of double slits in front of two separate screens. Then we fire "correlated" particles at these screens. Correlated particles operate in tandem; by measuring one, we can determine the properties of the other.

If we have no detection device attached to either pair of slits, then the correlated particles will make a set of wave interference patterns on each screen, just as we would expect. If we attach detection devices to both pairs of slits, then the correlated particles will behave like particles -- again, just as we would expect.

But suppose we attach a detection device to only one pair of slits, and not the other. What happens then? Both correlated particles behave like particles. In other words, even though only one of the particles is actually being measured as it passes through the slits, the other one behaves as if it has been measured, too. Somehow it seems to "know" that its partner has been detected.

This, however, is not the end of the strangeness. Let's say we modify the experiment so that one correlated particle -- call it particle A -- travels through a pair of slits with no detection device attached to it and hits the screen, while the other correlated particle -- particle B -- takes a longer, circuitous route. Particle B eventually passes through a pair of slits fitted with a detection device, but it doesn't reach the slits until after particle A has completed its journey and registered its impression on the screen.

In this case, surely, particle A would behave like a wave, since it will pass through the slits long before its companion particle has reached the slits on its side of the experiment. The fact that particle B will be detected upon reaching the slits should have no effect on particle A, which will already have finished traveling by that point.

But, as you may have guessed, things are not that simple. What actually happens is that both particles behave like particles, not waves. In other words, particle A acts as if its companion particle has been detected and behaves accordingly -- even though, in fact, particle B has not yet been detected at all.

It's as if particle A not only "knows" when particle B has been detected, but also "knows" that particle B has not yet been detected but will be detected before the experiment is complete. It alters its present behavior to fit an event that will occur to its companion particle in the future.

Now, it seems to me that paradoxical behavior of this kind simply cannot be explained on the model of an objective reality that exists totally independent of consciousness. The model that I have been looking at lately -- here and here -- is the virtual reality model suggested by physicist Brian Whitworth (and recommended to me by Ben Iscatus). Whitworth suggests that the paradox of wave/particle duality can be explained if we think of our cosmos as a kind of virtual reality simulation in which all objects exist essentially as information in a database. According to this model, an object always has a potential existence, but it has no actual existence until the calculations are made that allow the object to be "drawn" on the "screen" of our reality.

Suppose we are playing a video game. In our virtual world, we are facing due south, and looking at a building. The building appears as an object in our world because the CPU has done the calculations necessary to draw the building on the screen. Meanwhile, behind us, in the direction of due north, there is a mountain. This mountain is not on the screen; we are not looking in that direction; therefore the CPU does not do the calculations necessary to draw the mountain. It would be a waste of processing power to do so. The mountain exists, for the moment, only as a potential. It is real, in the sense that the information necessary to draw it really exists in the database. But it is potential, in the sense that the drawing has not been done because our attention is not focused in that direction.

If we pivot so that we are now facing due north in our virtual environment, then the mountain will come into view. This means that the CPU now has to do the calculations necessary to draw the mountain on the screen. The mountain has become manifest. It is no longer a potential; it is, for the moment, an actuality. Meanwhile, the building that we were looking at earlier has now vanished from the screen. The CPU no longer has to do the calculations necessary to draw the building, which is now relegated to the status of a potential. Wherever we turn our attention in our virtual environment, the CPU draws that part of our environment. Wherever we are not looking, the CPU does not perform the calculations necessary to draw that part of our environment. Our point of view determines which parts of our virtual world are made manifest at any given time, and which parts remain unmanifest.

Applying this model to the double slit experiment, we can say that detecting the photon (or other particle) as it goes through the slits requires that the "CPU" perform the calculations necessary to "draw" the particle on the "screen" that is our physical reality. Even our conscious intention to detect the particle will trigger the necessary information processing; thus, particle A in the last experiment will be manifested (localized) when it goes through the slits because of our intention to detect particle B, even though our intention has not yet been carried out.

When undetected (unmeasured, unobserved), the particle will behave like a wave -- specifically a probability wave, or a probability distribution of all the possible points in space that the particle could inhabit. The particle will not occupy any one particular point because, to do so, the calculations necessary to "draw" it would have to be carried out, and the calculations are not performed when the particle is unobserved. The particle still exists, just as the mountain in our virtual reality environment exists even when it is not on the screen; but, like the mountain, the particle exists as a potential, or (one might say) in an indeterminate form. It is indeterminate because the calculations that would determine its precise location and other characteristics are not presently being made.

The big question, if this model is correct, is what exactly serves as the information processor. My guess, which could be wrong, is that the information processor is consciousness itself. Brian Whitworth has a different view; he regards consciousness as an emergent property of the virtual-reality environment, and sees the information processor as something entirely separate.

In any case, if consciousness is necessary to manifest objects in the universe -- if objects exist only as probability distributions until and unless they are observed by a sentient being -- then the question arises: How could there be a universe before the appearance of the first living organism? It's no good to say that God's consciousness was observing everything and making it manifest, because if that were true, then presumably God (being omniscient and eternal) would still be observing everything all the time -- in which case, particles would always behave like particles and never like waves, since there would never be a time when they were unobserved. In fact, however, particles do behave like waves a great deal of time, specifically when they are unobserved; so if there is an omniscient consciousness overseeing the universe, its observations clearly cannot affect the behavior of subatomic particles.

The logic of wave/particle duality, then, seems to lead to the conclusion that the universe, prior to the appearance of sentient life forms, existed in an indeterminate form, as a vast cloud of possibilities, a dizzying array of probability distributions, none of which had been actualized. This is the conclusion that Robert Lanza and Bob Berman reach in Biocentrism. The chicken-and-egg problem -- how could the first sentient lifeform ever exist in actuality if the universe itself was only a potential? -- can perhaps be addressed by positing a tangled hierarchy.

It seems too weird to be true ... but perhaps, as evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane famously observed, "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can imagine."

Or, to quote astrophysicist Sir James Jeans: "The stream of human knowledge is impartially heading towards a non-mechanical reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of this realm."

Q & A and I

Today I posted a somewhat off-topic comment about virtual reality theory (previously discussed here and here) on the blog Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature. After putting it up, I thought of various possible questions and objections, and decided to write them down, along with my answers. The resulting dialogue is sort of an interview with myself.

Self-indulgent? Narcissistic? Solipsistic? Yes, yes, and yes. Here it is, anyway.

First, my comment:

At this point I think reality may consist of just two things: consciousness and information. Consciousness acts like an information processor. The whole shebang may be analogous to a virtual reality environment, in which the "objects" are actually reducible to calculations. Such an environment appears to be real, and is real on its own terms, but the trees, buildings, and bodies of a VR world are not objectively real in the sense of existing in and of themselves.

An interesting article (PDF) by physicist Brian Whitworth argues that a VR world could resolve the conundrums of quantum physics, such as the measurement problem and nonlocality:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0801/0801.0337.pdf

For a taste of Whitworth's argument, consider the well-known fact that subatomic particles seem to exist in a particular point in space only when observed or measured, while the rest of the time they appear to occupy a range of potential positions (the particle/wave dichotomy). Whitworth suggests that a particle's position is calculated only when attention is directed to it - much as, say, a tree in a VR world is drawn by the CPU only when we turn the avatar to look at it.

Whitworth sees consciousness as an emergent property, while I think it is more likely to be either primary or, perhaps, coeval with the basic constituents of physical reality (information). The first position would fall under the category of philosophical idealism; the second would be a form of neutral monism.

How it all works in detail is, of course, far beyond me, and I could be entirely wrong.

Now my simulated Q & A:

"So you're saying consciousness creates reality?"

I would not use the word "creates" because it is ambiguous. Does the CPU create the VR simulation? Yes -- in the sense that it performs the calculations necessary to draw the VR world on the screen. No -- in the sense that it makes no creative choices; it blindly follows a set of instructions (the program). The real creator is the programmer. So who wrote the program that serves as the basis for the VR simulation we call "the universe"? For want of a better term, I would have to say: God. This is why I think consciousness is (probably) primary. God is consciousness, and according to this scenario, God preexisted physical reality.

"Then who created God?"

Unless we want an infinite regress, we have to stop somewhere, at some First Cause. It is difficult to posit anything in the universe as a First Cause, since all observation indicates that every object and event in the universe is contingent on other objects and events. Within the context of the universe, we seem to be faced with a chain of contingency stretching back as far as we can see. If this is so, then the First Cause must be outside the space-time universe, where the chain of contingencies does not apply. This First Cause would be "necessary," rather than contingent. The medieval scholastics, who dreamed up this argument, naturally saw God as the necessary First Cause -- the uncaused cause or prime mover.

"According to your point of view, then, your consciousness can create whatever it wants?"

No, in this model, consciousness -- as an information processor -- is limited to making calculations on the basis of existing (preprogrammed) data. Consciousness cannot conjure up a unicorn, because a unicorn is not part of the available data. Consciousness can conjure up the tree in your backyard, which exists only as a potential until some being's consciousness is focused on it. The tree always exists in the database, so to speak, but the calculations necessary to manifest it as a physical object are performed only as needed. The unicorn, on the other hand, does not exist in the database at all.

"Then consciousness is purely an information processor and has no creative function?"

I would say that information processing is only one role of consciousness. It can perform other roles, which are creative -- such as evaluating what it observes, or imagining new uses for the things it perceives, or directing the body to take various actions in order to creatively explore and interact with its environment. Perhaps the lowest level of consciousness is limited to information processing, while higher levels incorporate this lower level but go beyond it. The evaluative and creative potential of an amoeba is limited at best, but virtually unlimited for a human being.

"When you say 'consciousness,' are you talking about individual human consciousness or God's consciousness?"

That's another ambiguity, since the term can refer to either. My guess is that individual consciousness -- the consciousness of particular lifeforms -- is what serves as an information processor, while God's consciousness is analogous to the programmer who set up the system and is now letting it run. That's not to say the programmer doesn't tweak the system from time to time, to make it run better or at least differently. The exact relationship between the individual mind and the mind of God is the $64,000 question. Most mystical adepts would probably say that the individual mind is a small offshoot of God's much greater mind -- sort of an exploratory tendril extended into the universe. We might think of God's consciousness ramifying into billions of minds to explore every nook and cranny of Creation.

"If the individual consciousness 'draws' reality, then is reality different for each observer?"

I would say no, because once the calculations have been made -- i.e., once the information has been processed -- then the resulting structure exists in our physical world, and will be the same for all observers. In other words, reality is independent of the observer in the sense that the information being processed exists independently; but it is dependent on the observer in the sense that the processing is not actually carried out until someone directs his attention in that direction. A tree in a VR simulation always exists potentially at a certain spot, but the CPU does not draw it until the avatar has turned to look at it.* The action of turning the avatar "creates" the tree in one sense (causes the CPU to generate the image) but is noncreative in another sense (the tree already exists in the program; it hasn't been drawn, but all the necessary data are already there).

*This assumes we're looking at the VR environment from the avatar's point of view -- "through its eyes," we might say. I gather that in some VR simulations it's possible to switch from an avatar's point of view to an objective perspective. This might correspond to an out-of-body experience, in which one views one's physical body from an external vantage point.

Seeing the past

More than three years ago, after blogging about Stephan A. Schwartz's book The Secret Vaults of Time, I bought his follow-up work The Alexandria Project, which deals with the use of psychics to guide archaeological digs in Alexandria. Reading the book should have come easily to me, since I am interested not only in psychic phenomena but also in ancient Alexandria -- in some ways the most intellectually exciting city of the ancient world. Yet for some reason I did not get to the book until recently. It was worth the wait.

Originally published in 1983 and reissued in 2001, The Alexandria Project recounts two archaeological expeditions in 1979 that made use of information supplied by various psychics, including two psychics -- Hella Hammid and George McMullen -- who accompanied the author on his first trip. The author's intention was to show that psychic talents can supplement information provided by more conventional by more conventional sources, making archeology more efficient. Both before and after 1979, Schwartz conducted other such experiments, often with notable success.

The most dramatic part of the book recounts marine archaeological probes conducted in Alexandria's harbor, in which divers -- following instructions from the psychics -- found many sunken ruins, including what were evidently the Timonium (a building erected by Mark Antony) and the palace of Cleopatra. An ancient seawall and what may be the ruins of the legendary lighthouse of Pharos were also discovered.

Schwartz himself admits that the existence of ancient ruins on the harbor floor came as a surprise to nobody. It was well understood that Alexandria's shoreline had receded over the centuries, and that structures which had stood along the coast in ancient times were now underwater, having collapsed on account of beach erosion and frequent earthquakes. His point, though, is that finding these structures in the large harbor would ordinarily require far more time and effort than his team expended. He writes:

There was no question that any group of divers, swimming careful search patterns, would have found what we found. The Eastern Harbor is unlike Marea [another Alexandrian site], in that there are general locations of certain ancient structures in [the works of the Roman writer] Strabo and other sources; and the water is shallow ... Here, the issue would not primarily focus on only the psychic -- unless a specific object predicted was found, and that would require another probe -- but rather, on the role psychic data could play in making archeology more efficient and less costly. Other diving teams could have found what we found, but not as quickly or as easily. It would have been extremely difficult to make several of these finds with just the sonar to guide us, and careful search patterns would have taken weeks. But with historical sources, and the psychics, we were able to make a reasonable first approximation of what could be seen on the harbor floor in just a few days. [pp. 231-232]

Unfortunately the poor visibility of the polluted harbor waters impeded the divers' work, and many interesting sites had to be left unexplored. Subsequent marine archaeological work carried out by a French-Egyptian team in the 1990s has, according to Schwartz, confirmed "both the generalities and specifics" of the psychics' predictions. Schwartz comments only briefly on these developments in an epilogue to the new edition, referring to reader to his Web site for details. Though the site contains much material of interest, I could not find a discussion of the more recent work in the harbor. At Jeff Rense's site, however, I found an article by Beverly C. Jaegers, which recounts Schwartz's work and then reports: 

Almost as an anticlimax, the Oceanex, bearing Franck Goddio, world-famed submarine explorer, his diving and filming teams along with a sophisticated array of nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometers and computers (along with a much improved sonar array) arrived in that same harbour in 1996, and began a thorough survey.

Apparently totally unaware of the earlier pinpointing of sites by remote views and divers, Goddio was nevertheless able to rediscover the Timonium ruins, the limestone-paved area, sphinxes, statues and sites they felt were the palaces and Isis temple. This confirmed the accuracy of the Mobius probe.

Some archaeological work was also undertaken by Schwartz's team on dry land, with generally positive results. In one case, an attempt was made to open the wall of a crypt, after both of the on-site psychics reported sensing a subterranean complex. Interestingly, both psychics advised against digging at the particular spot chosen (out of necessity) by Schwartz, saying that behind the wall the excavators would find not only an impenetrable mass of debris but also a second wall. A veteran Egyptian archaeologist scoffed at the idea of a second wall, but such a wall was in fact discovered. As predicted, the dig proved unfeasible, stopped by the debris, the second wall, and bureaucratic complications.

The two psychics also spent hours in the blistering triple-digit heat of the Egyptian desert, pinpointing a spot where digging would reveal an ancient structure. One psychic, George McMullen, embedded stakes in the ground that indicated the contours of the building's walls, which were, of course, underground and invisible to normal senses. Excavation did reveal a building at that spot, with walls that matched McMullen's layout. Moreover, prior to excavation, Hella Hammid visualized a short, broken column in the center of the building, an unusual and unexpected feature. The column turned out to be there. McMullen sensed that the column had been used in conjunction with a "fire pit" -- a claim that seemed inexplicable until a local Bedouin explained that such columns were indeed used as primitive "hot plates" for cooking.

One evening McMullen participated in an informal experiment in which he was given six potsherds and asked to arrange them in chronological order. This he did. The Polish archaeologist supervising the test said that it had taken a team of experts several years to properly arrange the shards along a timeline. McMullen accomplished it in a matter of minutes. (Of course it could be argued that the Polish architect, who knew the correct sequence, unconsciously signaled McMullen during the test. But this kind of explanation would not cover McMullen's many successes when working in the field.)

The psychics' work included notable "hits," some "misses," and a great many predictions that could be neither substantiated nor disproved. An example of the latter is George McMullen's explanation of why Alexander the Great continued fighting long after his principal enemy, the Persians, had been defeated.

I'll tell you one reason why Alexander was out all the time fighting in other countries. It was like today's sports. As long as you keep the people's interest up, they are going to come and pay the freight. But in this case it wasn't a team or a sport, but an army and -- it was fighting. So who's going to pay for this? And the soldiers have to keep winning once they get started. He wasn't really out to conquer the world. It got so that one thing led to another. When he started his campaign he wanted to do what he knew how to best, and that was to fight.

This sounds plausible to me -- more plausible than the romanticized view of Alexander as a visionary -- but of course there is no way to know if it's true, as Schwartz himself points out.

Schwartz's book is written in a straightforward style and a sensible tone; he does not come across as a credulous "believer," but instead as a serious researcher interested in testable predictions and concrete results. He strikes me as honest and reliable, though I wish he had spent less time detailing his endless run-ins with the Egyptian bureaucracy; a little of this material goes a long way.

In his epilogue to the new addition he laments the knee-jerk, know-nothing skepticism that greeted the announcement of his team's results. One archaeologist, who had never worked in Egypt, publicly dismissed the whole project as "phony visions cribbed ... from a tourist guide." But no tourist guide could have specified the alignment of an ancient building's walls under the Egyptian desert, or the locations of the underwater ruins in the harbor. Indeed, Mieczyslaw Rodziewicz, the Polish archaeologist who assisted Schwartz, and who was considered the world's foremost authority on Alexandrian archeology, said that "the discoveries [in the harbor] are of the highest importance, because they extend our plan of the ancient city." The seawall and other underwater ruins found by Schwartz's team lie considerably farther from shore than the experts had expected.

In the last chapter of the original edition, Schwartz speculates on what it all means:

I know there may be critics who will attack this work and, in some details, they will be right. We could have done it better. In later experiments we have already done so. But all science could be better, and hopefully each experiment is more sophisticated than the one that preceded it. The character innuendo, which is the most prevalent form of criticism, is really no criticism at all. And the statements that the psychic basically cannot exist, based on what we understand of the universe, and that therefore there must be some other explanation, really have reached the point where they say more about the critics than the research they are criticizing.

Criticism should always play an important role in parapsychology, as it does in the rest of science, but it is time to go beyond the dispute over whether or not the psychic exists. Those who wish to argue this are welcome to do so; but we also need to start asking new questions.

Suppose we entertain a new perspective, one which does not tie consciousness to the parameters of time and space. Suppose consciousness, of which what we call the psychic is a part, exists independent of the brain. Is this nonsense? There is, as yet, no absolute answer to the question. But there is mounting evidence in disciplines as widely separated as quantum physics and neurophysiology that suggest consciousness is not only more than the brain, it is perhaps the core around which the universe has grown....

I find myself most in agreement with the late Dr. Wilder Penfield, director of the Montreal Neurological Institute, and one of the leading neurophysiologists of this century. As the father of brain-mapping -- a technique in which portions of the brain receive direct electrical stimulation to determine their function -- he looked back on a career of mapping thousands of living brains and concluded -- albeit with reluctance -- that "it will always be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain...."

Penfield saw the brain as a computer and felt that if the brain was harmed, the body or reasoning abilities of a person would be impaired. He stressed that hurting the brain does not necessarily mean hurting the mind. The mind-self might not be able to communicate or control its vehicle -- the body -- but that was not evidence that it had been injured. When one consider[s] that numerous cases have been reported of people with little or no brain tissue, who are nonetheless functional and successful -- or individuals in other cases who have died and been resuscitated, bringing back accurate observations about places and events distant from their temporary corpse -- the question of the mind/body relationship is even less clear.

Regardless of this confusion and the lack of a universally accepted theoretical model, applied research should be pursued, and it may help in the development of the needed theories. And new theories about these anomalous phenomena will lead to new instruments with which to test the theories. No one can say yet exactly what shape either instrument or theory will alternately take, but there are suggestions -- and we should be prepared to accept matter, energy, and life itself as different points on the same spectrum. This will alter science as much as Einstein's equations, and life as much as the industrial revolution. When both sides of the mind -- the intuitive and the analytical -- finally function together in concert, we may find something behind both of them that we now only dimly perceive. [pp. 265-267]

Levin's epiphany

Last night I stayed up late to finish Anna Karenina. Though I found parts of it dull, the book overall was a powerful reading experience. Toward the end it moves in a decidedly spiritual direction, as the character of Levin - a stand-in for Tolstoy himself - reaches the climax of his inner struggle.

Tolstoy underwent such a struggle in his own life, which led him eventually to formulate a new understanding of Christianity as expressed in his book The Gospel in Brief.

In the closing chapters of Anna Karenina, he delineates this struggle with uncanny sensitivity and self-awareness. Anyone who has wrestled with these questions will recognize at least some of what Levin is going through, although his particular solution to the problem is his (and Tolstoy's) own.

Here are some excerpts from Constance Garnett's translation, which is online here. (The translation I read was by David Magarshack, and is more modern than Garnett's, but Garnett's has the advantage of being in the public domain and available for cutting and pasting.) The excerpts begin with Chapter 8 of Part 8.

=======

Ever since, by his beloved brother's deathbed, Levin had first glanced into the questions of life and death in the light of these new convictions, as he called them, which had during the period from his twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptibly replaced his childish and youthful beliefs--he had been stricken with horror, not so much of death, as of life, without any knowledge of whence, and why, and how, and what it was. The physical organization, its decay, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, evolution, were the words which usurped the place of his old belief. These words and the ideas associated with them were very well for intellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, and Levin felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloak for a muslin garment, and going for the first time into the frost is immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole nature that he is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perish miserably.

From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still went on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his lack of knowledge.

He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new convictions were not merely lack of knowledge, but that they were part of a whole order of ideas, in which no knowledge of what he needed was possible.

At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound up with it, had completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late, while he was staying in Moscow after his wife's confinement, with nothing to do, the question that clamored for solution had more and more often, more and more insistently, haunted Levin's mind.

The question was summed up for him thus: "If I do not accept the answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do I accept?" And in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find anything at all like an answer.

He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops and tool shops.

Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every conversation, with every man he met, he was on the lookout for light on these questions and their solution. What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the majority of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their old beliefs for the same new convictions, and yet saw nothing to lament in this, and were perfectly satisfied and serene. So that, apart from the principal question, Levin was tortured by other questions too. Were these people sincere? he asked himself, or were they playing a part? or was it that they understood the answers science gave to these problems in some different, clearer sense than he did? And he assiduously studied both these men's opinions and the books which treated of these scientific explanations.

One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his mind, was that he had been quite wrong in supposing from the recollections of the circle of his young days at college, that religion had outlived its day, and that it was now practically non-existent. All the people nearest to him who were good in their lives were believers. The old prince, and Lvov, whom he liked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch, and all the women believed, and his wife believed as simply as he had believed in his earliest childhood, and ninety-nine hundredths of the Russian people, all the working people for whose life he felt the deepest respect, believed.

Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading many scientific books, was that the men who shared his views had no other construction to put on them, and that they gave no explanation of the questions which he felt he could not live without answering, but simply ignored their existence and attempted to explain other questions of no possible interest to him, such as the evolution of organisms, the materialistic theory of consciousness, and so forth.

Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happened that seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit into the rest of his life.

He could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and that now he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about it, it all fell to pieces. He could not admit that he was mistaken then, for his spiritual condition then was precious to him, and to admit that it was a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those moments. He was miserably divided against himself, and strained all his spiritual forces to the utmost to escape from this condition.

These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker or stronger from time to time, but never leaving him. He read and thought, and the more he read and the more he thought, the further he felt from the aim he was pursuing.

Of late in Moscow and in the country, since he had become convinced that he would find no solution in the materialists, he had read and reread thoroughly Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, the philosophers who gave a non-materialistic explanation of life.

Their ideas seemed to him fruitful when he was reading or was himself seeking arguments to refute other theories, especially those of the materialists; but as soon as he began to read or sought for himself a solution of problems, the same thing always happened. As long as he followed the fixed definition of obscure words such as SPIRIT, WILL, FREEDOM, ESSENCE, purposely letting himself go into the snare of words the philosophers set for him, he seemed to comprehend something. But he had only to forget the artificial train of reasoning, and to turn from life itself to what had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with the fixed definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces at once like a house of cards, and it became clear that the edifice had been built up out of those transposed words, apart from anything in life more important than reason.

At one time, reading Schopenhauer, he put in place of his will the word love, and for a couple of days this new philosophy charmed him, till he removed a little away from it. But then, when he turned from life itself to glance at it again, it fell away too, and proved to be the same muslin garment with no warmth in it....

All that spring he was not himself, and went through fearful moments of horror.

"Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible; and that I can't know, and so I can't live," Levin said to himself.

"In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me."

It was an agonizing error, but it was the sole logical result of ages of human thought in that direction.

This was the ultimate belief on which all the systems elaborated by human thought in almost all their ramifications rested. It was the prevalent conviction, and of all other explanations Levin had unconsciously, not knowing when or how, chosen it, as anyway the clearest, and made it his own.

But it was not merely a falsehood, it was the cruel jeer of some wicked power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one could not submit.

He must escape from this power. And the means of escape every man had in his own hands. He had but to cut short this dependence on evil. And there was one means--death.

And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of shooting himself.

But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living. ...

[One day in a conversation with a peasant, Levin has an epiphany.]

Levin talked to Fyodor about this land and asked whether Platon, a well-to-do peasant of good character belonging to the same village, would not take the land for the coming year.

"It's a high rent; it wouldn't pay Platon, Konstantin Dmitrievitch," answered the peasant, picking the ears off his sweat-drenched shirt.

"But how does Kirillov make it pay?"

"Mituh!" (so the peasant called the house porter, in a tone of contempt), "you may be sure he'll make it pay, Konstantin Dmitrievitch! He'll get his share, however he has to squeeze to get it! He's no mercy on a Christian. But Uncle Fokanitch" (so he called the old peasant Platon), "do you suppose he'd flay the skin off a man? Where there's debt, he'll let anyone off. And he'll not wring the last penny out. He's a man too."

"But why will he let anyone off?"

"Oh, well, of course, folks are different. One man lives for his own wants and nothing else, like Mituh, he only thinks of filling his belly, but Fokanitch is a righteous man. He lives for his soul. He does not forget God."

"How thinks of God? How does he live for his soul?" Levin almost shouted.

"Why, to be sure, in truth, in God's way. Folks are different. Take you now, you wouldn't wrong a man...."

"Yes, yes, good-bye!" said Levin, breathless with excitement, and turning round he took his stick and walked quickly away towards home. At the peasant's words that Fokanitch lived for his soul, in truth, in God's way, undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst out as though they had been locked up, and all striving towards one goal, they thronged whirling through his head, blinding him with their light.

Levin strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in his thoughts (he could not yet disentangle them) as in his spiritual condition, unlike anything he had experienced before.

The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly occupied his mind. These thoughts had unconsciously been in his mind even when he was talking about the land.

He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully tested this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.

"Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And could one say anything more senseless than what he said? He said that one must not live for one's own wants, that is, that one must not live for what we understand, what we are attracted by, what we desire, but must live for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can understand nor even define. What of it? Didn't I understand those senseless words of Fyodor's? And understanding them, did I doubt of their truth? Did I think them stupid, obscure, inexact? No, I understood him, and exactly as he understands the words. I understood them more fully and clearly than I understand anything in life, and never in my life have I doubted nor can I doubt about it. And not only I, but everyone, the whole world understands nothing fully but this, and about this only they have no doubt and are always agreed.

"And I looked out for miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle which would convince me. A material miracle would have persuaded me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it!

"Fyodor says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That's comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can't do anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the same Fyodor says that one mustn't live for one's belly, but must live for truth, for God, and at a hint I understand him! And I and millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now-- peasants, the poor in spirit and the learned, who have thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing--we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by the reason--it is outside it, and has no causes and can have no effects.

"If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

"And yet I know it, and we all know it.

"What could be a greater miracle than that?

"Can I have found the solution of it all? can my sufferings be over?" thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of going farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass.

"Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand," he thought, looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch-grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf of goat-weed. "What have I discovered?" he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goat-weed out of the beetle's way and twisting another blade of grass above for the beetle to cross over onto it. "What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered?

"I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.

"Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass and of this beetle (there, she didn't care for the grass, she's opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and the clouds and the misty patches, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? into what?--Eternal evolution and struggle.... As though there could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that in spite of the utmost effort of thought along that road I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings. Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: 'To live for God, for my soul.' And this meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mysterious and marvelous. Such, indeed, is the meaning of everything existing. Yes, pride," he said to himself, turning over on his stomach and beginning to tie a noose of blades of grass, trying not to break them.

"And not merely pride of intellect, but dulness of intellect. And most of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of intellect. The cheating knavishness of intellect, that's it," he said to himself.

And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill.

Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death, and forgetfulness, he had made up his mind that life was impossible like that, and that he must either interpret life so that it would not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil, or shoot himself.

But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many joys and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.

What did this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly, but thinking wrongly.

He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had sucked in with his mother's milk, but he had thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.

Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

"What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me." And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.

"I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give an answer to my question--it is incommensurable with my question. The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all men, GIVEN, because I could not have got it from anywhere.

"Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one's neighbor reason could never discover, because it's irrational."

And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly and her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun cooking raspberries over the candles and squirting milk into each other's mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching them at these pranks, began reminding them in Levin's presence of the trouble their mischief gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble was all for their sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the milk, they would have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.

And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with which the children heard what their mother said to them. They were simply annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did not believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived by.

"That all comes of itself," they thought, "and there's nothing interesting or important about it because it has always been so, and always will be so. And it's all always the same. We've no need to think about that, it's all ready. But we want to invent something of our own, and new. So we thought of putting raspberries in a cup, and cooking them over a candle, and squirting milk straight into each other's mouths. That's fun, and something new, and not a bit worse than drinking out of cups."

"Isn't it just the same that we do, that I did, searching by the aid of reason for the significance of the forces of nature and the meaning of the life of man?" he thought.

"And don't all the theories of philosophy do the same, trying by the path of thought, which is strange and not natural to man, to bring him to a knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly that he could not live at all without it? Isn't it distinctly to be seen in the development of each philosopher's theory, that he knows what is the chief significance of life beforehand, just as positively as the peasant Fyodor, and not a bit more clearly than he, and is simply trying by a dubious intellectual path to come back to what everyone knows?

"Now then, leave the children to themselves to get things alone and make their crockery, get the milk from the cows, and so on. Would they be naughty then? Why, they'd die of hunger! Well, then, leave us with our passions and thoughts, without any idea of the one God, of the Creator, or without any idea of what is right, without any idea of moral evil.

"Just try and build up anything without those ideas!

"We only try to destroy them, because we're spiritually provided for. Exactly like the children!

"Whence have I that joyful knowledge, shared with the peasant, that alone gives peace to my soul? Whence did I get it?

"Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled with the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, full of them, and living on those blessings, like the children I did not understand them, and destroy, that is try to destroy, what I live by. And as soon as an important moment of life comes, like the children when they are cold and hungry, I turn to Him, and even less than the children when their mother scolds them for their childish mischief, do I feel that my childish efforts at wanton madness are reckoned against me.

"Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but it has been given to me, revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief thing taught by the church.

"The church! the church!" Levin repeated to himself. He turned over on the other side, and leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing into the distance at a herd of cattle crossing over to the river. "But can I believe in all the church teaches?" he thought, trying himself, and thinking of everything that could destroy his present peace of mind. Itentionally he recalled all those doctrines of the church which had always seemed most strange and had always been a stumbling block to him.

"The Creation? But how did I explain existence? By existence? By nothing? The devil and sin. But how do I explain evil?... The atonement?...

"But I know nothing, nothing, and I can know nothing but what has been told to me and all men."

And it seemed to him that there was not a single article of faith of the church which could destroy the chief thing--faith in God, in goodness, as the one goal of man's destiny.

Under every article of faith of the church could be put the faith in the service of truth instead of one's desires. And each doctrine did not simply leave that faith unshaken, each doctrine seemed essential to complete that great miracle, continually manifest upon earth, that made it possible for each man and millions of different sorts of men, wise men and imbeciles, old men and children--all men, peasants, Lvov, Kitty, beggars and kings to understand perfectly the same one thing, and to build up thereby that life of the soul which alone is worth living, and which alone is precious to us.

Lying on his back, he gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. "Do I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round arch? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it not round and not bounded, and in spite of my knowing about infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid blue dome, and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it."

Levin ceased thinking, and only, as it were, listened to mysterious voices that seemed talking joyfully and earnestly within him.

"Can this be faith?" he thought, afraid to believe in his happiness. "My God, I thank Thee!" he said, gulping down his sobs, and with both hands brushing away the tears that filled his eyes.

Dangerous liaisons

In a recent post I quoted from Richard Carlson's self-help book You Can Be Happy No Matter What. I recommended the book and mentioned that I've found it very useful.

But I don't want to give the impression that I agree with everything Carlson has to say. I think his approach can be too simplistic and, at times, even dangerous. Here's an example from his chapter on relationships:

Think about someone you know whom you perceive to be an offensive or demanding person -- someone you have difficulty maintaining a positive feeling toward. Now, despite your difficulty, you know there are people who feel warmly toward that person. How do they do it? Are they blind to the facts? No. They do the same thing we all do for people we care about, without even knowing it. They look beyond the person's behavior. The person they like is not a static personality, set forever in stone, but someone whose behavior fluctuates according to his level of insecurity. They say, "Oh, Jim didn't mean what he said. He tends to lose his temper, and sometimes he says things he shouldn't." They see Jim, whereas you look at Jim's behavior.

We are all capable of looking beyond another's behavior, and do it all the time intuitively. We dismiss or defend the actions of people we love when we understand that they are feeling insecure. To improve our relationships we need to do the same thing with intention, to have a warm feeling for someone even though we don't feel they deserve it. As we practice this, our rapport and feeling of mutual respect will increase. [Page 81]

Now, there is certainly some truth in this, and in many cases it can probably work, but I would not recommend Carlson's approach in all situations. For one thing, it is not always possible or even desirable to separate the "behavior" from the person. A person, after all, is responsible for his behavior. More important, to intentionally overlook bad behavior on a regular basis is to reward and even enable that behavior.

Consider the case of a battered spouse. The thought process described by Carlson is exactly that of a wife whose husband has just physically abused her. "Oh, Jim didn't mean to hit me. He tends to lose his temper, and sometimes he does things he shouldn't." The battered wife doesn't look -- doesn't want to look -- at Jim's behavior. She wants to look at the "real" Jim, who is somehow distinct from the bad things he does. She wants "to have a warm feeling for someone even though [she doesn't] feel they deserve it."

Practicing this technique will not cause the "rapport and feeling of mutual respect" between the wife and her husband to increase. Quite the opposite. The more excuses she makes for Jim's behavior, the worse his behavior is likely to be.

Carlson would probably say he's not talking about really bad behavior, such as acts of violence. But there are other kinds of abuse. Jim might not beat up his wife physically, but he might subject her to chronic emotional abuse, which can be just as bad.

In general, Carlson strikes me as someone who has had little experience of the dark side of life -- someone who dramatically underestimates the amount of sheer malice that's out there in the world. His techniques work well in dealing with people who are basically decent and well-meaning, but I think they would fail -- in fact, I think they would bring about the opposite effect to the one that he intends -- when applied to people who are just plain bad.

And such people do exist. They're not the majority, but they're not an inconsequential minority, either.

In other words, there are wolves in the woods. And not all of them can be won over by simple acts of kindness. Some of them perceive kindness as weakness, and will take ruthless advantage of you if you let them. They will bite the hand you extend to them.

So by all means, read and profit from Carlson's book. But as always, caveat lector.