Sunday, March 23, 2003

I was skiing in the Alps without net access for Spring break, then too busy trying to catch up with work to post for a while, then spending too much time watching the war news (sigh). The skiing was good, the terrain amazing, the food excellent, the company great fun. No new snow, though, so we searched for cool North-facing off-piste steeps, and corn on South and West faces. We got the goods quite a few times, although we had to face icy chunks and slush to get there. East faces were very dangerous, with wet slides to the ground coming down frequently. 1:01:47 PM

Steve says: Paul Berman wrote a fascinating piece on Sayyid Qutb. The philosophical underpinnings of al Qaeda ... and not what you might expect. Required reading [Steve Crandall's Surf Report 2.0] I agree it is valuable reading, but I disagree about “not what you might expect.“ Quite expected by anybody who ever read the fundamental The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn (I must read his more recent book). Better than any other writing I know, Cohn's book nails the striving for a unitary, unambiguous melding of mind, society and world at the heart of totalitarian ideologies. Since I read this book in the 70s, I have wondered about possible sociobiological causes for the persistent return of totalitarian memes in different forms. One partial psychological model would involve a conflict between the actual multipolarity of mind (see Dennett's Counsciousness Explained) and the illusion of a unitary conscious will (see Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will). Different people accommodate this fundamental dissonance more or less well. Evolutionarily, this variation would reflect a trade-off between the value of single-mindedness and the value of opportunism. In different situations, single-minded focus or opportunistic jumping around may be the best policy. The evolution of attention and self-reward mechanisms in the brain is molded by this tension, leading to a distribution of abilities in the population, as there is no single optimal setting. Extremes classified as mental illness (ADD, Asperger's,...) suggest the reality of this variation. Memes that coopt the drive for unity will spread in biologically receptive sections of the population. Intellectually gifted young people may on average be more susceptible (those intellectual gifts are often tied to extreme powers of concentration, see math, chess and coding prodigies). The tension between multipolarity and unity exists in all complex information systems, including societies, as it is a reflection of fundamental computational trade-offs. Totalitarian ideologies and societies are associated with the inner striving for a perfect inner order with a single source of authority; the fear of chaos and ambiguity, inner and outer. Liberal society at its best is a reflection of the real limitations of minds and other information-processing systems: there is no center, and total coordination costs too much in missed opportunity — lost freedom. That's why liberal society and modern natural science, especially biological science, are inextricably linked (see Roy Porter's The Creation of the Modern World, Robert Wright's Nonzero, except for its bizarre, self-defeating finale, and Dennett's Freedom Evolves). 12:28:42 PM