At a talk I gave this weekend, a man in the audience (a pyschiatrist, actually) took an interactionist view of the mind: he said that while the brain could certainly influence the mind, the reverse was also true: mind can causally influence the brain. I failed at the time to convince him otherwise. I realize now that what I should have said was this: Can the wind influence air molecules?

Obviously, the wind IS air molecules. Nothing more. If one says that the wind influences air molecules, all one is really saying is that if a whole bunch of air molecules happen to be moving in some direction (that’s what we mean by “wind”), this motion will influence other air molecules. That is to say, air molecules influence each other, which is obviously true. Wind itself doesn’t have any existential status, let alone causal power, over and above its constituent parts.

To prove his point, the psychiatrist said that things like counseling can work better in some psychiatric conditions than medication. Fine. QED for top-down causation, he thought: a non-biological intervention influences biology. But how does counseling work? It involves talking. How does that talking make a difference to the listener and his or her brain? The sound from the talking goes in their ear, and that produces electrical activity in the auditory nerve, etc. If that sound is organized just right, the neurons processing it will influence other parts of the brain in such a way as to change emotion, or thought processes, or whatever. But at the end of the day, it’s neurons influencing other neurons. Moreover, what PRODUCED the talking, on the part of the counseling therapist, is their vocal apparatus, which is also controlled by their brain. So all we’re really seeing here is neurons affecting other neurons. (And neurons, of course, are similarly reducible into their constituent parts. Predictability, of course, is another matter, mostly because of nonlinear dynamics.) If one wants to refute that, the burden is to document a mental event that has no neural correlate (see also supervenience).

This whole episode reminds me strongly of the time a graduate student in English told me that Shakespeare was so much more that a sequence of letters. (She was railing against my delivery of the infinite monkeys scenario.) Excuse me? Shakespeare IS so much more? IS? What the hell are you talking about?

All aboard the non sequitur bus!

My wife was managing two high-profile meetings today and spent a good deal of time last week preparing for exigencies. Double check the room reservation. Allow extra time in the morning. Plan for backup tech support. Check to see how long the laptop can go before the screensaver locks out a critical user and requires re-authentication. And so on.

Meanwhile, my students are designing and building model bridges. As part of this month-long project, they test individual components under load and are told that their final design should include a factor of safety of 2.0. I.e. the design should support twice as much weight as we expect the bridge to actually experience.

If I were Malcolm Gladwell, I would write a book called “Overbuilt,” which would be about the many advantages of…not worst-case-scenario planning, exactly, but bad-case-scenario planning. It would be about the virtues of paranoia. The world throws low-probability events at us all the time: not only is the IT guy sick, but the projector has a burnt-out bulb and the post-it note that had our room reservation on it came unstuck from the monitor and fell to the floor, where it was missed because yada yada.

Planning for such things isn’t just prudent. It’s a shared characteristic of the punctual, the effective, the reliable in every domain. Even in the realm of pure idea, we expect critical thinkers to consider objections to their claims, to anticipate counterarguments, and to systematically eliminate, minimize, or otherwise contain those oppositions.

Our imaginations are rarely as creative as Murphy’s forces. The second law of thermodynamics wants you to fail. To ensure that your project is successful, you need a plan that will work when the shit comes down. And if it doesn’t come down today, it probably will tomorrow.

Thus, one of my favorite mottos: Semper paratus. Always ready.

“I always wanted an education.” This suggests the perspective of a consumer. Education is something coveted, something we get. — As if we could go down to the education store and pick one up for the price of tuition (and get what we paid for).

What if we spoke about schools as workshops rather than stores — places where students go to construct or make an education? Or if we saw a teacher as a mechanic rather than Santa Claus — someone whose job it is to help you maintain or repair ideas, rather than give them to you?

In Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased by either “k” or “s,” and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might well reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i,” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g-j” anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear, with Iear 5 doing awai with useles double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Ier 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov the ridandant letez “c,” “y,” amd “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch,” “sh,” and “th” rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xreawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. Haweve, sins xe Wely, the Airiy, and xe Skots du not spik Ingliy, xei wud hev to hev a speling siutd tu xer oun lengwij. Xei kud, haweve, orlweiz lern Ingliy as a sekond lengwik et skuul.

Iorz feixfuli,
M.J. Yilz

Shields MJ (1980) “Iorz Feixfuli”, reprinted in Espy WR (1980) Another Almanac of Words at Play. Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., New York, p. 80.