Too many books

Sometimes, when I have finished a book and decide to write down what I think of it, my thoughts are fairly fully developed already. Other times, like this one, I have completed the book but still don't know for sure what my opinion is. So, this review is not so much an expression of an opinion, as the coalescing of one. Apologies in advance if it comes across as an inchoate mess.

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Subtitle: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. I believe non-fiction can be divided into Big Idea books, and Many Little Ideas books. This one is most decidely a Big Idea book. Haidt intends to do for the study of morality approximately what Noam Chomsky did for the study of language. He postulates that morality isn't just an abstraction about which the human mind can think, but a more specific activity that the human brain is predisposed to do, like language. He asserts, moreover, that he has found more than one type of morality module in the human brain, and they provide an emotional response ("this is bad" or "this is good") in advance of rational thought, which is more like a press secretary, coming along afterwards to provide a cover story for why we feel that way.

The great news is that he thinks this provides an explanation for why Right and Left in America disagree so much. The bad news is that if he's right I'm not sure there's much that can be done about it.

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Subtitle: How Trade Shaped The World. Full disclosure: I am an apostate on free trade, at least between nations of very different income levels, so I am somewhat biased against this book. However, reading something from a point of view opposed to yours is a good exercise, so I gave it a shot, to see if it would save my libertarian soul.

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Subtitle: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.

Well, the first thing this book teaches us, is that we cannot, as a species, tell the difference between a computer and a human being. For example, when a computer we are working on is the same one we use to fill out a survey on how we like our computer, we give more favorable answers than if we fill out that same survey on a second computer. Apparently, humans are afraid to hurt the feelings of our computers by telling them to their "face" that we find them frustrating to use. Apparently we are also more or less morons about computers.

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Subtitle: A Theory, A History, A Flood. This is a work of non-fiction, but it has a few clear protagonists.

Robert Cawdrey, who (in English, anyway) seems to have introduced the literate world to the idea of making a book which gave the meaning of words. He had among other tasks to introduce his readers to the idea of "alphabetical order", and explain to them how that worked in order to find the word they were looking for.

Ada Lovelace, the patron saint of computer programmers, who has as much claim as anyone to have written the first computer program (and this before the computer was actually built yet). Sure, Babbage gets more of the credit, but Lovelace did her part, and if Babbage had been able to complete his (getting the hardware working) then she would be more famous for it.

Claude Shannon, the post-WWII Bell Labs/MIT nerd who taught the world to think about "information" as a thing separate from meaning. Which, one could argue, was an omen of what was to come of us as a species.

What Gleick is doing in his book is roughly the opposite of what these (and many other) thinkers did. We can more or less take it as self-evident that words exist, in a sense, independent of the uses they are being put to. We move without thinking of a sequence of limb movements that compose the act of walking or running; we make facial expressions without necessarily thinking of all of the possible muscle movements in the human face and how they are combined. Once upon a time, Gleick is explaining to us, information was invisible like this.

We have grown up with the idea of bytes, letters, words, files, records, and the other units of information and meaning. In a way, it is as difficult for Gleick to explain how these things were discovered (or thought of, however you prefer to think of it), as it was for the discoverers to do it. The reason, is that first he has to explain to the reader, with enough well-chosen anecdotes and analogies to make us really feel it, that it was possible for untold generations of humans to speak language, make music, create images, and yet never need concepts such as 'information', or the distinction between meaning and form. It's almost like trying to explain to an adult what it is like to be a baby who doesn't know any language yet.

Gleick is one of the best in the world at doing this kind of thing, which is to say thinking long and deeply about not only scientific concepts, but the history of how they were arrived at. T.S. Eliot wrote: "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." Gleick starts in our preliterate, literally prehistoric past, and takes us right through human history again, looking at each age through the lens of how we as a species thought about information itself, and ends in the present, where we are drowning in a flood of information that we can neither comprehend, stop, nor ignore. We have no answers, but we understand the questions better than before. From many facts, Gleick brings to us a bit of meaning.

Subtitle: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains With Machines - and How It Will Change Our Lives.

Generally speaking, non-fiction can be divided into One Big Idea books and Many Small Ideas books. This is a One Big Idea book. The author is best know to the world as "that guy who hooked up a monkey's brain to a robot, so the monkey could move the robot by thinking". He does tell us about that, and the many incremental steps that led up to it. But it's neither the introduction nor the finale to this book; it appears roughly halfway through.

Prior to that, Nicolelis takes us on a brief (roughly hundred year) history of brain science, from interpreting bumps on the skull to connecting electrical probes inside living brain tissue to a sensor. In between, he returns frequently to the ongoing debate as to how the brain works. Is it a toolbox of somewhat isolated modules, or is it a more or less holistic network where the various abilities are emergent properties of the whole? Nicolelis lies towards the latter end of this spectrum of opinion, and is not afraid to say so, but he does a creditable job of discussing the many twists and turns in the attempts of science to gain some kind of purchase on the slippery slopes of the topic of how neurons make up brains.

After leading us through experiments interfacing with the brains of rats and primates, including the after-the-fact-obvious observation that the way brains behave when they are awake and moving their body around freely is way different than the way brains behave when sedated and inside a restrained body, we get to the moment which put Nicolelis on the map. Using only the power of thought, a monkey named Aurora was able to move a robotic arm to perform tasks it had previously done with its own arms. Most impressively, it did this without having to move its own arms. Perhaps most impressively, its own arms were still free to move, but the monkey figured out that it wasn't necessary, and switched on its own accord to just using the robot arm.

From there, Nicolelis goes on to explore what this means about the way the brain works. Most obviously, it means that people who have lost limbs or the use of them will someday be able to move prosthetic robot replacements instead. Slightly less obviously, it means that our own body image is not in any sense hardcoded into our brains; we can (relatively quickly) rewire our brains to understand that our body is a different shape than it is.

In the last part of the book, Nicolelis is able to let his dreams take flight in a way that he cannot in an academic paper. Nicolelis believes, it seems, that humanity is preparing to reinvent itself. From the replacement of lost or paralyzed limbs, we will move on to wings, direct control of vehicles, or exploration of space without leaving the planet. He apparently thinks we will probably live to see our species kick its own evolution into overdrive. In the last chapter, he takes on such questions as, at what point do we cease to be humans? Does it matter? How attached are we to the very idea of an individual identity? What keeps this from being yet another hyperbolic exercise in wishful science fiction, is that he has real-world experience of the technical challenges involved.

Nicolelis' book is readable, with enjoyable historical anecdotes and adequate guidance through the technical discussions. His enthusiasm for his topic is clearly sincere, and one cannot deny the importance of the topic. How accurate his predictions of our near future are, I cannot claim to know, but it's an interesting diversion from the current grinding depression of the hidebound and retrograde trends of our day to day news. If you want to make your current troubles seem small-scale and transient, this is the book to give you something really significant to think about.

Subtitle: "By Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". Ah they knew how to write a subtitle in those days.

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Subtitle: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. This is a book by those researchers who demonstrated that if your friends get fat, you are more likely to get fat, and if you ditch your fat friends for skinny ones, you will be more likely to get skinny. Also, if your friends get divorced, it makes your marriage more likely to end in divorce, and if most of your friends are not divorced the odds of your marriage staying together are better.

So, you know, fun guys.
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Subtitle: The Secret Lives of Cells. Lewis Wolpert chose a quite grandiose title for what is, in reality, a quite detail-oriented book, more like the subtitle suggests. Which isn't to say it isn't good, or doesn't deliver. If you want to know why we die, you have to know how we live in the first place, and that means we have to know what we're composed of. But don't expect Wolpert to connect the dots for you.

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Subtitle: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose.

What fast food, war, pornography, TV, and teddy bears all have in common
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