Tom Wolfe, RIP

[John Marchioro]

Wolfe was a troublesome figure..... But "The Bonfire of the Vanities"
is a brilliant novel, and some of his other writings can be extremely
funny at times even if you disagree with the politics .... Savagely
funny at his best.

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/15/471414238/tom-wolfe-best-selling-author-and-genre-breaking-journalist-dies-at-87

The film of "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was one of the great
disasters in Hollywood history.... I remember watching it in 1991 or
1992 in Tokyo and shaking my head in disbelief at how awful it was....
From start to finish. there is even a book about it:

https://www.amazon.com/Devils-Candy-Bonfire-Vanities-Hollywood/dp/0385308248/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526400047&sr=1-1&keywords=book+about+film+the+bonfire+of+the+vanities

A true cinematic debacle..... Preceded and followed by countless
others, to be sure.

[Matthew Schlecht]

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 11:54 AM, John Marchioro <jkmar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Wolfe was a troublesome figure..... But "The Bonfire of the Vanities"
is a brilliant novel, and some of his other writings can be extremely
funny at times even if you disagree with the politics .... Savagely
funny at his best.

https://www.npr.org/2018/05/15/471414238/tom-wolfe-best-selling-author-and-genre-breaking-journalist-dies-at-87

     Thanks for this.  Read the NYT obit today.

     By coincidence, I'm currently listening (audio CD) to what will probably be Wolfe's final book, "The Kingdom of Language".

     In it, he excoriates Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky (more viciously the latter) for using their fame to promote themselves and to denigrate and shut down alternative schools of thought, among other things, and for attempting to extend their expertise far beyond their scientific training (again, far more viciously with Chomsky).

     At the point where I am now, he has finished off with Darwin, and is landing blow after blow against Chomsky.  With footnotes.

     Wolfe must have done an enormous amount of research, including reviewing Darwin's extensive body of correspondence.

     I've read that Chomsky denies every allegation made.  Possibly including the words "and" and "the".

     Darwin is not available for comment.

     I "read" (i.e., listened to) "I am Charlotte Simmons" last year, and thought it was a bit much.  But, so much of Wolfe is (now, was) a bit much.  I see that a cinematic version is currently in development hell.  Basically how a university mires a promising young woman in mediocrity.
 

The film of "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was one of the great
disasters in Hollywood history.... I remember watching it in 1991 or
1992 in Tokyo and shaking my head in disbelief at how awful it was....
From start to finish. there is even a book about it:

https://www.amazon.com/Devils-Candy-Bonfire-Vanities-Hollywood/dp/0385308248/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526400047&sr=1-1&keywords=book+about+film+the+bonfire+of+the+vanities

A true cinematic debacle.....

     Never saw it, although have always meant to.  Maybe I'll still try it if it's available on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

     I liked "The Right Stuff" (movie, haven't read the book)

     For some reason, I has always associated Tom Wolfe with "You Can't Go Home Again", but that was Thomas Wolfe I just now found out.

     The world needs more eloquent gadflies like Tom Wolfe.

Matthew Schlecht, PhD
Word Alchemy Translation
Newark, DE, USA
wordalchemytranslation.com

[John Marchioro]

"The Right Stuff" is fine film and a fine book as well.

I tried to read "A Man in Full" and while it had some interesting
passages, it never came together for me in the way that "The Bonfire
of the Vanities" did.

I will have a look at Wolfe's last book, I had not heard of it..... An
odd combination, Darwin and Chomsky.

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[Matthew Schlecht]

On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 12:28 PM, John Marchioro <jkmar...@gmail.com> wrote:

"The Right Stuff" is fine film and a fine book as well.

I tried to read "A Man in Full" and while it had some interesting
passages, it never came together for me in the way that "The Bonfire
of the Vanities" did.

I will have a look at Wolfe's last book, I had not heard of it..... An
odd combination, Darwin and Chomsky.

     I thought so at first as well.

     Wolfe views them both through the perspective of the role played in human existence by language, and the attempts to reason out where language came from.

     Scraping about for some unique feature that set humankind apart from the other beasts (and to appease religious authorities and other gentry who were not keen on having their animal roots showing), Darwin came up with "language".  He then stumbled into the question of how did humans come to acquire language, since all Darwinian evolution was supposed to be governed by gradual linear changes.  This was before that upstart Stephen Jay Gould began to promulgate "punctuated evolution".  I can't do justice to Wolfe's send-up of the early and contrived theories about the origin of language, but Wikipedia offers a digest:

[ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#Early_speculations ]

     Chomsky comes in because he has attempted to abolish any more elaborate origin of language theories with his single mutation theory, that a single mutation gave rise to a language generating "device" in humans.  Sort of a deus ex chomskyia explanation, completely undeterred by the lack of any physiological evidence therefor.

[John Marchioro]

First of all, I should preface this by saying that I met Noam Chomsky
twice, during his office hours at MIT. And I also audited his course
on politics at MIT when I should have been studying for my general
exams, a longer time ago than I care to think..... An interesting
experience, one that left me with some admiration for Chomsky but also
doubting a lot of things he has written.

Now back to what Matthew wrote: Along these lines, there is a very
sharp article by John Searle (who I think knows more about these
issues than Tom Wolfe, and certainly a lot more than me) in the NYRB
about a decade or so back about the "failure of the Chomsky
revolution". I posted it in full on the predecessor list to this one,
and can perhaps retrieve and repost it if anyone among the handful of
people out there is interesting. The main thrust was that Chomsky had
promised that his view of language would produce a number of results
"eventually", and few of those promises were realized in the end. I am
no linguist, but it has always struck me that (while Chomsky was
almost certainly correct that the Skinnerian view of how language was
completely wrong) mathematics is at best a very distant relation in
cognitive skills, and trying to use mathematical models (and that is
ultimately what transformational grammar is, it is math by another
name) to map language will inevitably run into a long series of walls,
not only the obvious internal inconsistencies of any given natural
language, but more basic things like semantics....

That is a layman's view, and I know it undoubtedly sounds ignorant and
sophomoric to the experts. But for evidence, have a look at computer
translation programs... If language were simply a matter of coming up
with sophisticated grammar rules and their permutations, computers
would be generating translations with 100% accuracy by now. It ain't
happening, and I doubt that will change soon, if ever.

That seems to me to be a separate question from Chomsky's politics,
however. Chomsky was rightly appalled at the Vietnam War, and bravely
spoke up about it at a time when many academics, many of them in
fields much more closely connected to the war machine, were either
silent or ardently supported the horrors being inflicted on Vietnam. I
really think that it is very wrong to say that Chomsky used the
stature that he had gained from his pathbreaking work in linguistics
(work that has unquestionably refocused what had been an impoverished
debate, even if ultimately the Chomskyite view of language is itself
replaced by something different) to pontificate about US foreign
policy. A better question is why his colleagues down Massachusetts
Avenue, people like John King Fairbank and Benjamin Schwarz and
Stanley Hoffman and many others, did not speak up more loudly in
opposing that horrendous war, EARLY ON, at a time when it might have
made a difference.

Needless to say, there were others, like Lucien Pye (MIT) and Samuel
Huntington (Harvard), who were gung ho for the entire effort, even if
they started to express tactical doubts after the venture went awry.

We have seen this play out again more recently, with the same pattern.
People who spoke up were subjected to abuse - I think of Juan Cole in
particular - while the "policy intellectuals" behind the whole
thing.... were rewarded by being appointed to the presidency of the
World Bank. First Robert MacNamara, thenPaul Wolfowitz. Tell me that
THAT is right.

All that said, it does not mean that everything Noam Chomsky has said
about US foreign policy is correct. A lot of it isn't. A lot of it is
warmed over Rosa Luxembourg and the like. But whatever it is, it seems
to me to be very separate from Chomsky's work in the linguistics
field, which should be judged on its own merits and not by Chomsky's
personal politics. Just as I think the quality of a novel like "The
Bonfire of the Vanities", which I am sure is offensive to some, should
be judged on its merits, not on Wolfe's politics, though there the
distance between the novel's contents and the author's politics is
far, far closer.

On 5/16/18, Matthew Schlecht <matthew.f...@gmail.com> wrote:

[John Marchioro]

Well, what Chomsky argues is that language is one obvious emergent
feature of the human brain.... And not the only one. Mathematics is
another. To give an example, there are a lot of extremely complicated
kinship systems in various so-called "primitive" societies in the
world, so complicated that anthropologists use the term "kinship
algebra" for them. but you find that even aboriginal peoples without
written language produce individuals with an innate ability to grasp
such systems, which can only be mapped with fairly sophisticated
math.... Not EVERYONE can do this, no, but it is surprisingly
sophisticated and some people have an uncanny ability to understand
how the system functions, even in societies where no pencils and paper
exist.

This is pretty basic, but what Chomsky did was revive certain notions
of human nature that you find in classic thinkers like von Humboldt
and in anthropologists like Franz Boas.... A more positive and open
conception of innate human abilities and possibilities, which had been
lost during the dominance of Skinnerian behavioralism. If Wolfe
addresses all this, fine, but if he does not he clearly missed the
entire point of Chomsky's project. It started with a famous article
that completely demolished the Skinnerian view of language, and even
if Chomsky's revolution did not produce the results that had been
promised, the Skinnerian view was utterly discredited forever.

https://chomsky.info/1967____/

On 5/16/18, Matthew Schlecht <matthew.f...@gmail.com> wrote:

[John Marchioro]

Other emergent properties of the human brain that come to mind are
those related to art in its various forms: Music, painting, dance,
etc.

Perhaps even morality itself is an emergent feature of the mind once
the brains of our paleolithic forbearers reached a certain size? If
so, it will be even less susceptible to mathematical mapping than
language has been.

Somewhere here I have a book about seven different conceptions of
human nature: Marx (labor, man who realizes his essence through the
creative act of work), Nietzsche (morality, main as the appraising
animal), etc. Fascinating stuff, but like a lot of things, probably
always subject to inconclusive debate.

And certainly not the basis for cheap political attacks.

[Matthew Schlecht]

On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 12:14 PM, Matthew Schlecht <matthew.f...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

     By coincidence, I'm currently listening (audio CD) to what will probably be Wolfe's final book, "The Kingdom of Language".

     That should be, "The Kingdom of Speech"
     [ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_Speech ]

     Finished it today while out doing errands.

     Wolfe's thesis is that the faculty of speech is not evolutionarily linked at all, or perhaps only coincidentally, and should be viewed as a tool or artifact.

     Ergo, both Darwin and Chomsky got it quite wrong when it comes to the faculty of speech, which is no more a biological construct than is a socket wrench, a differential equation, or an iPhone.  Something humans devised and perfected using the materials and manipulations available to them.

[David J. Littleboy]

>From: Matthew Schlecht

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> By coincidence, I'm currently listening (audio CD) to what will
> probably be Wolfe's final book, "The Kingdom of Language".
>
>
> That should be, "The Kingdom of Speech"
> [ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_Speech ]
>
> Finished it today while out doing errands.
> Wolfe's thesis is that the faculty of speech is not evolutionarily
> linked at all, or perhaps only coincidentally, and should be viewed as a
> tool or artifact.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

> Ergo, both Darwin and Chomsky got it quite wrong when it comes to the
> faculty of speech, which is no more a biological construct than is a
> socket wrench, a differential equation, or an iPhone. Something humans
> devised and perfected using the materials and manipulations available to
> them.

Well, sort of.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Humans clearly have some amount of
(evolutionarily created) hardware support for language, both neural and
anatomical. And the intellectual capability to use speech is clearly
running* on evolutionarily created hardware**.

The zeroth level problem here is that (and this is something that even now
lots of people get wrong) is that evolution isn't explanatory of the
functionality itself. Evolution happened to create, say, flight, but
evolution doesn't explain how flight works (Bernoulli effect, control
systems). Ditto for intelligence. Evolution designed great wings, but
doesn't know why they work.

But Chomsky's real problem is that he set out to create a science of
language that excludes intelligence. And that's unreasonable. So
unreasonable that it quickly leads to problems. (To make academic life a
comedy of errors, the linguists who tried to include intelligence in their
linguistic theories tended to be a tad flaky, and lost the "Linguistics
Wars" something fierce.) Of course, "fixing" those problems as they came has
kept the linguists quite busy over the last 50 years...

But that gets back to the problem of what is intelligence, and we're not
doing very well at figuring this out. Each time we come up with something
we'd like to see as clearly representative of human though (using words,
tools, counting, recognizing oneself vs. other individuals in a mirror),
someone demonstrates an animal doing it. But the idea that we'd ever succeed
in explaining why we sleep late on Sundays to any animal is nuts.

*: Lots of people don't like the computer metaphor, but they're wrong. Long
story short: the brain is either a computer or it's magic. Since there's no
such thing as magic, it's a computer. The latest news is that the biologists
are finally figuring out that DNA is not just static definitions of
proteins, but can describe processes. I.e. it's a programming language. All
that "junk" DNA whose functions they couldn't figure out, couldn't be
figured out because they don't understand computation. (Hint: computation is
more complex than anything that can be described by mathematics.)

**: Another issue here is whether a computational system as amazingly
efficient as the human brain (it does its work zippy fast despite neurons
being quite slow) could arise as an "emergent phenomenon" from repeated
simple units doing the same thing over and over again. This strikes me as,
again, ridiculous. I'm perfectly happy with evolution being a seriously
great computer designer. Suffice to say, I think the "neural network" types
in AI are barking up a dead wrong deadend path.

--
David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

[John Marchioro]

A couple of brief comments:

Computers do not have souls. Human beings do.

Computers do not understand things like irony. That is, no computer
program is sentient in the way that human beings are, and probably
never will be. Sure, you can install an "irony subprogram" or "humor
subprogram" like Data on Star Trek. Good luck with that. And the
reason that human beings understand humor and irony and do countless
other things that computers cannot do (except perhaps win high level
chess games) is that they have souls and are sentient beings.

I would urge people to Google something up about emergent properties
and the whole concept of emergence in evolutionary thought. There is a
simple message in it. Once the human brain reached a certain size it
became capable of a long list of things that other primates and
outliers like dolphins could never fully achieve: Speech, abstract
thought including rudimentary mathematics, detection of orderly
processes in nature and the ability to impose some order on an
otherwise chaotic nature through them, art.... And all that happened
70,000 or 80,000 years ago, long before civilization arose itself.

Maybe some day a computer with such emergent properties will be
created. It is the stuff of a thousand scifi movies. Personally I yawn
every time I see this plot regurgitated at this point. Computers may
be able to win a chess match, and predict the weather, and crunch huge
piles of data. They will never have souls, though. They will never
produce a beautiful piece of music except as a random outcome of
massive output of crummy music. They will never write a beautiful
sonnet except as a random outcome of the same. When it comes to such
things, computers are just the high tech version of a million monkeys
pounding away on typewriters trying to produce a masterpiece. And
anyone who thinks that at monkey randomly pounding away on typewriter
is going to produce "Hamlet" or another masterpiece is a fucking moron
who does not understand anything about the human soul.

[David J. Littleboy]

>From: John Marchioro

>A couple of brief comments:
>
>Computers do not have souls. Human beings do.

The concept of "soul" is a religious concept, and has nothing to do with
physical reality.

>Computers do not understand things like irony.

Not yet...

>That is, no computer
>program is sentient in the way that human beings are, and probably
>never will be.

Well, yes to the first part, and the second part is your intuition based on
a faulty understanding of what computation is. The computers and the
software we have today are a tiny tiny subset of what computation (as a
mathematical thing) includes.

(I'm actually not interested in making a sentient computer, I'm interested
in how the existing sentient computers work. But that's a minor point.)

> Sure, you can install an "irony subprogram" or "humor
>subprogram" like Data on Star Trek. Good luck with that.

Again, the problem here is that "computation" (what DNA and human brains
does) isn't limited by your imagination. Really. Your argument comes down to
"because I can't see how to implement things reasonably flexibly, they can't
be." And that's a terrible argument.

> And the
>reason that human beings understand humor and irony and do countless
>other things that computers cannot do (except perhaps win high level
>chess games) is that they have souls and are sentient beings.

(Computer chess and go have nothing to do with human intelligence. They are
representative of how AI has completely failed to even try to ask the
interesting questions.)

Anyway, what's going on inside the brain has to be _explainable_ and
_understandable_ in computational terms, because that's the only thing it
could be. Alan Turing proved that computation is the only thing you can make
from physical objects, and the brain is a physical object.

That we're failing to explain and understand it doesn't speak to whether
it's explainable and understandable.

>I would urge people to Google something up about emergent properties
>and the whole concept of emergence in evolutionary thought. There is a
>simple message in it. Once the human brain reached a certain size it
>became capable of a long list of things that other primates and
>outliers like dolphins could never fully achieve: Speech, abstract
>thought including rudimentary mathematics, detection of orderly
>processes in nature and the ability to impose some order on an
>otherwise chaotic nature through them, art.... And all that happened
>70,000 or 80,000 years ago, long before civilization arose itself.

Again, I don't buy the "emergent phenomenon" idea. (Note that this is a
sidebar to the main question. If the brain implements these things as
"emergent phenomenon", it's still a computational system doing computation.)

[John Marchioro]

Well, we are not going to disagree.

My view is this. The body and its architecture are the vessel for a
soul, the human brain included. Call that a religious concept all you
wish, it is the only way to explain consciousness, which transcends
the physical world. you may not be able to prove that in a laboratory
of course, but anyone who thinks reproducibility in a laboratory is
the best test of what exists in the real world and beyond this world
has an extremely dubious and limited view of "reality".

If the body's architecture, particularly the brain, are damaged or
congenitally flawed or whatever, the soul cannot realize its hopes,
desires and the rest the way in which those beings whose architecture
is not damaged can. So sure, the wiring of the brain has to be
correct. But no soul, no nothing. That is what is called "dead".

A computer is a machine. It is not conscious. Sure, it works well
enough.... When you have a power source. Just like other machines do.
But it is fundamentally inanimate. Even the lowliest paramecium has
life (and maybe a soul too, though I am afraid I do not keep up with
such theological debates). A computer does not have life. And sure,
you can analogize between a computer and human thought processes all
you wish, and there are some interesting parallels. But computers are
not and never will become conscious, no matter how many "Terminator"
films they make.

On 5/16/18, David J. Littleboy <dav...@gol.com> wrote:
>

[John Marchioro]

I meant "we are not going to agree".

[John Marchioro]

https://www.economist.com/prospero/2018/05/15/tom-wolfe-chronicler-of-america?cid1=cust/ddnew/email/n/n/20180516n/owned/n/n/ddnew/n/n/n/nNA/Daily_Dispatch/email

[John Marchioro]

Just went to the newsstand to buy this week's "Economist" (my
subscription has lapsed and I have been busy paying a thousand other
bills and my taxes, hopefully I can send in the $120 to renew shortly,
buying on the newsstand ain't cheap....).

On the newsstand this week:

National Enquirer: "There Were Three Shooters Who Killed Kennedy!"

Comment: Yeah. Ted Cruz's father, Ted Cruz's mother and Ted Cruz's wet
nurse. Glad that case has finally been solved.

Newsweek: Meghan Markle

Comment: None

Men's Health: Two Women at Once - How It Works

Comment: If you need to read an article about this, you probably
should not try it.

Men's Health (again): The Black Panther Workout (with cover adorned by
photo of the very ripped stud who played the Black Panther in the
film)

Comment: Body shaming is bad enough, but this is downright unfair.