Lecture 1: introduction

Borges and I:
a Quest for Self-Knowledge

'Do you advise me to look?' asked Frodo.

'No,' she said. 'I do not counsel you one way or the other. I am not a counsellor. You may learn something, and whether what you see be fair or evil, that may be profitable, and yet it may not. Seeing is both good and perilous. Yet I think Frodo, that you have courage and wisdom enough for the venture, or I would not have brought you here. Do as you will!'

The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien

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We've seen and heard so much — what have we learned?
Not for one moment has the Self been spurned;
Fools gather round and hinder our release:
When will their stale, insistent whining cease?
We have no freedom to achieve our goal
Until from Self and fools we free the soul.

from The Conference of the Birds
by Farid ud-Din al-Attar

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self-knowledge

"I have referred, in the course of this note, to the Mantiq ut-Tair (Colloquy of the Birds) by the Persian mystic Farid ud-din Abu Talib Mehammed ibn-Ibrahim Attar, who was assassinated by the soldiers of Tului, Genghis Khan's son, when Nishapur was sacked. Perhaps it will not prove idle to summarize the poem. The faraway king of the birds, the Simurg, drops an exquisite feather in the middle of China; weary of their ancient anarchy, the birds determine to find it. They know that their king's name means "Thirty Birds"; they know that his royal palace stands on the Kaf, the circular mountain which surrounds the earth. They undertake the almost infinite adventure. They fly over seven valleys, or seven seas; the next-to-the-last one is called Vertigo; the last, Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert; others perish. Thirty of them, purified by their labors, set foot upon the Mountain of the Simurg. At last they contemplate it: they perceive that they are the Simurg, and that the Simurg is each one of them and all of them." Jorge Luis Borges, The Approach to al-Mu'tasim

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Borges: a sentence as a lightning illuminating a mountain

"Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius."

Jorge Luis Borges, The Approach to al-Mu'tasim

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the Zen of writing: trained not-doing

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Fall	Spring
Brains, Minds, and Numbers   Computing Minds   Computing Brains   The Astonishing Hypothesis   Perception   Memory   Language   Thinking	Being No One Attention Kinds of awareness The phenomenal Self Access consciousness The narrative Self Narratives of others Altered states   Imagine Free will Ethics Wisdom   Let There Be Light   Mind the Gap

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technicalities

— readings

• reserve
• password

— writing

— questions

— schedule

slide 9

an exemplary question

In the fall of 1917, I [Warren S. McCulloch] entered Haverfold with two strings to my bow — facility in Latin and a sure foundation in mathematics. I "honored" in the latter and was seduced by it. That winter, Rufus Jones [the President of Haverford] called me in. "Warren," said he, "what is thee going to be"? And I said, "I don't know." "And what is thee going to do?" And again I said, "I have no idea; but there is one question I would like to answer: What is a number, that a man may know it, and what a man, that he may know a number?" He smiled and said, "Friend, thee will be busy as long as thee lives!"

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an improved version of McCulloch's question

Our question, to emphasize it once again, is not to ask what kind of thing a number is, but to think what kind of mechanism could represent so many physically possible or impossible, and yet self-consistent, processes as number does.

Kenneth J. W. Craik (1914-1945)
The Nature of Explanation (1943)

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the last word, from McCulloch

We have learned that the answer depends upon how we ask the question. And we have learned to ask the question so as to get an answer of a kind that we can use.

Warren S. McCulloch
Through the Den of the Metaphysician, Thales 7:37-49, 1951; reprinted in The Embodiments of Mind, MIT Press, 1965

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"We have learned that the answer depends upon how we ask the question"

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another exemplary question

It is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes in your head correlate with consciousness, while others do not; what is the difference between them?

Francis Crick and Christof Koch (1998)

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ecce homo