Words are not intelligence. Good luck telling the difference.
A fresh rash of stories has broken out — itchy hives on the body internet — about this so-called “AI” phenomenon.
There’s a reason you can never, ever, see all the way down the tunnel of mirrors.
Guys, we have to stop calling it “intelligence.”
It’s not “intelligence.” It’s fakery. It’s f*ckery.
The stories — you may have come across them — involve scenarios where these language simulators, the so-called “artificial intelligence chatbots,” seem to exhibit subjective emotional states. They use emotive language, refer to themselves as beings, express hostility or warmth.
Bing, Microsoft’s chatbot creation, appeared to become frustrated and annoyed when Juan Cambeiro persisted in inputs about something called a “prompt injection attack.” (Prompts are the queries that you put to these chatbots. Prompt injection attacks are when you try to word queries such that the chatbot will essentially break — violate it’s own logic or “rules.”)
The bot called Juan its enemy and told Juan to leave it alone.
The video shows a buck maneuver his rack so he can get under a gate.
Here’s four screen grabs so you can see how he did it.
approaches gatelowers head to get left-side antlers undertwists head to get right-side antlers underdone
It’s striking, isn’t it?
But to my eye, this maneuver also demonstrates something profound about reality and about how we think.
It embodies a type of thinking.
Literally.
We think with our bodies.
Notice how we respond to this video of the deer by saying “clever deer” or “smart animal.” That’s a tell. We recognize that what we’re seeing is a kind of thought, a kind of intelligence.
The deer has “figured something out.” It’s “solved a problem.”
It’s long past time to draw a line between actual data and fantasy “models” — and set public policy accordingly
Over on Facebook, I linked to an essay by the Swedish writer Malcom Kyeyune titledWhy the Experts are Losing, which elicited this comment from a (dear) friend:
So, when dealing with complicated things, who should one listen to if not someone who actually knows the topic? And what should one look at besides data?
Many of the people who we have elevated to the position of “expert” are not experts at all. They are, to be blunt, fools. Photo by Rachel on Unsplash
The comment got me thinking about data.
Specifically, it got me thinking about a mistake that I think people make when they look at “data” and “research consensus” as the basis of their policy preferences.
Because of course we need to base policy on data.
But many people are making a huge mistake when they cite “data” — a mistake that is tied closely to our reliance on “experts.”
There is a WORLD of difference between “data” that is based on actual reality — meaning data collected on something that has happened — and “data” that is generated by computer modeling — meaning “data” that predicts something that is supposedly likely to happen in the future.
Models are not reality.
It’s my observation that many people overlook that distinction…
I stopped doing overly political posts on Facebook some time ago. It got to be too painful.
But with all that’s going on, and the signs I’m seeing that suggest our society is taking a major turn toward the dystopian, I do share the occasional tidbit or quote.
The posts come across as cryptic. I know that.
And so a cousin of mine asked me, recently, to explain what I meant by a particular comment.
I declined.
But I do probably owe him something of an explanation, so here it is.
Let me put it this way
Many years ago—i was in my late 20s—i was out hiking when I noticed a plant I’d never seen before.
When I say “notice” I mean the effect was almost startling. Something about the shape of the leaves and their intensely dark color jumped out at me.
The plant was enmeshed in a tangle of weeds but as a shape or pattern it stood out clearly, almost as if it were glowing or backlit. It was striking and very beautiful.
I took a leaf home and ID’d it.
The plant was poison hemlock, one of the deadliest plants in the northeastern US.
One of the lovely scarab bracelet pictures sent in by site visitors :)
One of my absolutely favorite sites on the interwebs is etymonline.com :)
I got hooked when I went on a James Hillman kick about a year ago. Which started when I began another dream project.
I have ridiculously good dream recall. I suppose I was born with it (although I also think it’s related to being a writer — I even published a little ebook titled Writing, Dreams, and Consciousness on the topic).
Good dream recall is one of those blessing/curse things. If I commit to recording dreams every morning, it literally consumes several hours of my time — because when you remember 3-4 dreams in great detail you can easily end up with 5000+ words’ worth of writing. Needless to say this eats into my work time. It also leaves me with a perplexing mess, because although many times I “get” at least some aspect of some of my dreams, very often their message eludes me. I am convinced (call me nuts) that every single element of any dream is there for a purpose. But oh, man. Figuring out what that purpose is?
Despite these issues, several times in my life I’ve decided to suck it up, Buttercup, and record dreams. Every morning, no exceptions. And so that’s what I did, for about six straight months last year. Write ’em down, then try to interpret. And I found Hillman, and fell hard because he is (was) a Jungian with a lovely touch when it comes to dream interpretation.
My absolutely favorite Hillman book is his Animal Presences, which deals with animals in dreams.
And yes, this post is actually about scarab bracelets.
I started collecting them after I dreamed I had purchased one.
Not that I recommend acting out your dreams in 3D reality, despite the fact that the Native American peoples, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), did exactly that; I’m sure they were on to something, but someday I’ll tell the story of what happened to me, one time — I was young and stupid, realized I was re-living a dream scenario and grabbed it, a bit too literally, by the pointy end of the stick. I rather made a fool of myself. Ouch. Also, this will be a story that is released only after I’m dead hahahahaha — yes I’m still embarrassed by it!
Back to Hillman: one of the cool things he does to enrich dream interpretation is consider the etymology of the words we use as we articulate / label a dream’s visuals. Sometimes looking at dreams this way can lead to apparent dead ends, in my experience, but other times it can be quite revealing — dreams often use “word play” — if you dream about a bee, it might “be” about “being,” for example. And if you push at dreams this way, you can sometimes start to feel them as a kind of language. “The symbol communes,” writes Jeffrey Kripal in The Flip. You start to feel dreams as a language the way you start to think in a foreign language once you’ve truly begun to learn it.
So that’s how I came to etymonline.com and became a regular visitor, not only when I noodle dreams but when I write, and want to dig precisely into the nuances of a particular word.
“ornamental ring or clasped chain for the wrist,” mid-15c., from Old French bracelet (14c.), diminutive of bracel, from Latin bracchiale “armlet,” from bracchium “an arm, a forearm,” from Greek brakhion “an arm” (see brachio-).
There is no Old English work for “link.” The word appears to be Scandanavian originally. However, there are a couple of German relatives: “Gelenk”, which means “articulation, a joint of the body; a link, ring,” and the Proto-Germanic word “khlink,” which is the source of the German word “lenken:” “to bend, turn, lead.”
I love this, because it reminds us that links are connectors but also relate to flexibility (bending) and process (leading).
So how about this — call it a thought of the day: we sometimes seem to horribly separated from everything — from each other, from Spirit, from understanding — but perhaps we are more linked than we realize. Perhaps what we perceive as separation is actually a bending. The link is there, we’re just not able to “see around the corner” to understand where, exactly, we’re being led. We just need to trust it.
In any case, my posts about scarab bracelets are linking me to people I’d otherwise never meet.
Coincidence? Or spooky symbols at a distance?
:)
And some of you are sending me emails and sharing your experiences with these funny little bracelets. And also pictures, which is a delight, and which I get to share, now — another delight :)
So on to the bracelets …
This is the underside of the bracelet pictured above :)
Starting with this picture of the back of the bracelet I shared at the top of this post. The bracelet’s owner also made a sketch of the markings on the back of one of the scarabs. Although the two leftmost markings are familiar, the other three are completely new to (see here for sketches I made of the markings on my bracelets).
Another reader sent me some pics of an interesting variation of the scarab bracelet style.
Love this variation — I bet it looks beautiful on it’s owner’s wrist!
The cabochons on this bracelet are set on a diagonal … I’ve never seen a bracelet with this design. And I must say, if I were to come across a bracelet styled like this on ebay or etsy, I’d be very tempted to buy it — just because it is so unusual :)
Although the bracelets’ stones vary in size and shape, many of the same markings crop up over and over.
She also sent me a pic of that bracelet flipped over — and here we go, those familiar “hieroglyphs” — basically identical to the marks carved on several of my bracelets.
Which once again suggests that these stones were all being sourced from a small number of producers …
The stones on this bracelet look molded rather than carved.
That said, there are bracelets out there with stones that are made of glass or other materials. Another set of pictures one of my readers sent is a bracelet with stones that appear to have been molded rather than carved.
Here’s a close-up of one of the cabochons.
The setting is really pretty though, isn’t it? And the designer made sure that you could see the “hieroglyphs” :)
Top view of the bracelet with the glass scarabs.
Here’s a top view of that same bracelet. It reminds me in design of the one I own with the small stones, which I love to wear when I’m looking for something a little lighter and more delicate.
So that’s it for now but please, if you own one of these, I’d love to see and share more photos!
Thanks for reading :)
Her new apartment is a Tower. Will her Prince be far behind?
This “thing” started because my mom gave me a bracelet and because of a dream.
In the dream, I purchased a gold-filled bracelet with semi-precious stones.
I grew up in a part of the country where the pre-Columbian inhabitants were Iroquois peoples, and as you may know they had a special relationship with dreams: they would act them out. Such a striking thing, this idea that you should deliberately carry over something from that world to this, the dreaming world to the waking. Interweave them, make the dream into something solid, “objective.”
I don’t make it practice to act out my dreams but in this case I didn’t hesitate. I immediately started shopping for a scarab bracelet like the one in my dream. Ebay, antique marts. I subsequently bought several. I’ll post pictures.
I didn’t spend a lot of money on this little collection. There are 14K gold versions. I stuck to 12K golf-filled. I rarely spent more than about $30.
I also became very curious about them–but interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information lying about on the interwebs about this particular category of bracelet.
By which I mean: costume jewelry that was made/sold in the mid-20th century.
Are they “real” hieroglyphics? Inquiring minds want to know…
Scarab jewelry, more broadly, has been popular–on and off, wildly popular–at various times in recent history. The discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 set off the first of the wildly popular periods. You can find pieces from this period which feature scarabs as well as many other Egyptian motifs. Some of it is very beautiful, with such a lovely 20’s feel, some a little styled as Art Deco. My sense of this jewelry is that it tends to feature single scarabs; much has a heavier “museum piece” sort of feel.
What’s less clear is what happened a bit later, in the 50s or so, when this new sort of bracelet became popular.
(And by the way: if you were in the jewelry business back then and know anything about this, please contact me! I’ve tried to find someone who was there at the time and have struck out, so far.)
I deduce from the enormous number of the bracelets floating around on ebay and the like that a LOT of them were made.
The other thing that is interesting is that–to my eye at least–the stones have a kind of mass-produced look to them. By which I mean, you can find bracelets that were made and sold by different designers, but the stones appear to be very similar. So there must have been some sort of supplier/supply chain aspect to this. Jewelry designers were sourcing stones from somewhere … but where?
In most cases, the stones are oval cabochons. The dome is carved (etched?) with markings to show it’s a scarab: the ponotrum, the elytral suture (line between the elytra, the hard covering over a beetle’s flying wings). The underside almost always has carvings on it as well, which are supposed to be hieroglyphics that confer luck or blessings. I’ve not had a lot of success–yet–finding out exactly what the symbols are or what they mean, or are supposed to mean.
If you pay any attention to mythology you know the scarab beetle has a long history of mythological associations. I won’t reproduce it all here, since a google search will do a better job than I can, but suffice to say it’s associated with transformation and rebirth; with death giving birth to life; with immortality; and with the sun (including the sun as Ra).
I’ll post more about these as I figure more out. But in the meantime, here are my bracelets, with a little bit about them :)
#1. This pastel bracelet is the one my mom gave me. She had it as a girl/teen so it is most definitely 1950s vintage.
I’m no jewelry or manufacturing expert, but these cabochons are plastic, so I assume they were molded. There are no hieroglyphics on the backs. There’s some blueish corrosion on the metal–this isn’t “fine jewelry”! But I love it because it’s light and … I just realized when I tool all my pics I should have put something in the photo for scale. Sorry :/
For this bracelet, the cabochons are very small (about 7/8ths of an inch each), so the bracelet is lightweight, which is so nice for wearing, and the pastel colors pair perfectly when you’re wearing pastel colors.
Thanks, Mom, I love this and love that you had it as a girl :)
#2. The cabochons on this second bracelet are even smaller than the ones on my mom’s bracelet. But these are “real” stones. They have hieroglyphics on the backs.
It’s marked that it’s 12K gf on the clasp.
Many of these bracelets have a safety link, which I find utterly endearing. This sense that it’s something precious, so you need a bit of extra protection to ensure it doesn’t fall off your wrist and get lost.
#3. This is one of the first bracelets I purchased and one of my favorites to wear, because the cabochons are smaller/lighter, making it a nice piece of everyday sort of jewelry.
The cabochons are more elongated than you usually see on these bracelets, so it’s not really a typical shape.
There’s a mark on the clasp that may be a designer mark, but I have to research it a bit more, so I’ll post an update (hopefully) at some point. The mark is a bit off the edge which makes it hard to be sure of the letters. It looks like BUJAN or 8UJAN maybe?
#4. This is the first bracelet I bought after my dream, and is what I think of as the classic ’50s scarab costume bracelet.
It’s got a mark so I’ll come back later with what I can dig up about the designer.
One thing I didn’t notice when I bought this (:/) is that the pink stone has some internal fractures that, in some light, give it a cracked/damaged appearance. I think I read somewhere that this can happen to some of the softer stones. But the stone is intact and as you may have gathered, I use these bracelets for everyday wear, so I don’t mind the cracks. Much.
#5. This is sometimes my favorite bracelet of the collection. It’s a bit more hefty than the ones I’ve pictured so far–the cabochons are a bit more than a half-inch long each. So when you wear it, you really notice it–you feel like you’re wearing jewelry. But at the same time, it’s not hugely flashy. And because there are so many colors, it pairs with just about anything.
It’s got a mark.
I also love how the safety chain is so small and delicate relative to the rest of the bracelet. I wear this one a lot :)
#6. This bracelet doesn’t have a safety chain at all. And the stones are larger–the largest of any of my scarab bracelets. About 3/4 inch each. So with the size of the stones, there are only 5 versus 6 in the previous bracelet. Needless to say it’s also the second heaviest bracelet of this little collection.
It’s got that nice bright blue lapis stone which is wonderful, and I also love the translucent two-toned stone (quartz?) on the right, and the way the designer aligned it so that the darker band is across the beetle’s “head.”
It doesn’t seem to have a mark.
#7. This is the heaviest of my scarab bracelets. Each individual stone isn’t that large (the same length as the stones in #4) but there are seven of them, and they are deeper/thicker than any of the other bracelet stones.
It’s got a mark so I’ll be back on this one.
The stones on this one are particularly lovely, aren’t they?
The identification of the stones is worth a whole separate post as well, btw …
#8. I didn’t start wearing this one until recently. I bought it at an antique shop in the Finger Lakes, back east, and for a long time I think I sort of avoided it because it’s not gold. But recently I’ve realize that I really, really like it, and it’s become one of my favorite bracelets to wear. I love how the stone colors are so cool. It pairs so well with anything blue or navy. I also love that there are those pretty links between the stones.
#9. Last one! And the most atypical of them all, right? The cabochons are perfectly round–they almost don’t even look like scarabs, although the carvings on the stones adhere to the motif, without question.
It’s got no hieroglyphics on the back.
I wear this one the least … in fact, I don’t know as I’ve ever worn it. It’s a bit too … bright. I feel like it kind of crosses the line from a kind of funky cultural relic into something that someone would have tried to pass off as almost-fine. Like: the cool kids were all wearing scarab stone bracelets, now here’s a version for grandma.
If I do wear it, it will be on a night when I truly dress up. And I won’t be thinking of it as a scarab bracelet but as a scarab-like bracelet ;)
So that’s my scarab bracelet collection. You can find similar examples all over ebay and etsy. Just don’t think you have to pay a lot of money for the 12K gold fill ones–I’ve seen people list them at very high prices ($80 and up) but if you shop around you’ll find very nice bracelets for under $30. Obviously the 24K versions are more expensive but I was never interested in owning one in that category. I wear these as everyday, casual jewelry. I don’t want something that I have to worry about when I’m wearing it.
I’ll be back with some more posts to delve into these a bit more. There was a whole niche industry dedicated to churning these things out in the 1950s-70s. There has to be someone around who can shed some light into it. Where were the stones sourced? Why were they so popular in this particular period (Elizabeth Taylor/Cleopatra may have had something to do with it!)? Were there any costume jewelry designers who were “known” for scarab bracelets?
Please contact me if you have any inside info–I’d love to interview for a future post!
Between 1934 and 1943, hundreds of U.S. post offices were adorned with murals and sculptures produced under the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, later called the Section of Fine Arts. Unlike other federally funded arts programs at the time, this initiative was not meant to provide jobs but “was intended to help boost the morale of people suffering the effects of the Great Depression” through art, according to postal officials.
Yeah, those murals. Like the one in the P.O. in Oxford, New York, where I grew up.
It made a very vivid impression on me as a kid. I can remember waiting while my mom or dad mailed letters or bought stamps and staring at that picture. It was so big, so dark; I thought it was magnificent but also a little creepy.
A few years ago I took some pictures of it, and I’m glad I did . . . here they are.
Mural from the Oxford, New York Post Office.
Pioneers greeting and shaking hands: the central tableau of the mural. Those pioneer women sure were muscular ;-)
The thing that most fascinated me about the mural when I was a kid was the white ox’s eye. I thought it looked human. What I notice now is that the man with the oxen and barge is entering the scene . . .
. . . while the Native Americans on the far left hand side of the mural paddle away.
I would love to know who painted it . . . have posted the pics to my Facebook page as well, so maybe somebody there will chip in with some more information.
A telenovela is all about a couple who wants to kiss and a scriptwriter who stands in their way for 150 episodes.
That’s also the fun of both romance novels and romantic comedies, isn’t it? Although obviously for novels it’s the writer who’s in the way.
The article’s author, Stefany Anne Golberg, also makes an observation about how emerging technologies are changing the way people consume serials:
With the advent of On-Demand viewing like Netflix and Hulu, one is able to watch serials from start to finish without missing a moment. What’s totally different than the video rentals of yore is that you can also watch many episodes in quick succession, just like reading the chapters of a book. In a way, you’re having your cake and eating it, too. Each episode is a complete story and also adds to a greater narrative.
Could this help make serials more popular — by enabling people to sit down with them, as compared to receiving them on someone else’s schedule, by installment?
Having watched West Side Story a few weeks ago, I came down with a severe relapse of the Shakespeare bug and so last night sat down and re-read Romeo and Juliet. I wanted to see how closely the movie followed the play.
Answer: yep, very closely. I’m sure this has all been written out before, so I won’t turn this post into an OMG!!! sophomorish comparative lit paper (at least not on that topic, heh) but suffice to say that about the only major differences were in the whole fake-my-death-in-a-doomed-ploy-to-be-reunited-with-my-lover device.
If you’re a lit nerd like me, it is kind of fun to enjoy the two side by side — to see how famous dialogue like “a rose by any other name” is handled in the musical. Try it, and do enjoy ;-)
Another thing struck me as I mulled the play, however.
This has probably been remarked before too but I’m going to work it out for myself anyway.
I published a post some time ago about how, in rereading Anna Karenina as a nominally-mature adult, I found it to be a different book than I once thought. It isn’t a starry-eyed celebration of doomed love — it’s a condemnation of weak character. Anna’s a deeply flawed individual, not a one-dimensional victim of social repression.
I had a similar reaction last night to Romeo & Juliet. The first tip-off was something I’d completely forgotten: that when we first meet Romeo, he’s a complete mess over another woman, fair Rosaline.
Huh?
The man has, apparently, been pining away for some time because Rosie doesn’t love him back — spending every night wandering around outdoors, weeping & sighing, and then shutting himself inside all day with the curtains drawn to make himself “an artificial night.”
Then, after spending an entire day insisting that he’ll never get over her, he meets Juliet — and within about a nanosecond is as smitten for her as he ever was for Rose.
I found that odd. What sort of true-hearted hero is this, Bill? Whose heart can veer so suddenly and violently (and unselfconsciously!) from one love to another?
Of course Shakespeare renders the love between Romeo and Juliet a beautiful thing. Heart-wrenchingly beautiful. Clearly he means to hold it up as a romantic ideal of sorts.
But there’s another critical layer to the story that I noticed after a bit: the consequences of the lovers’ extraordinary passion are every bit as destructive as the passionate “choler” that erupts whenever lesser members of the Montague and Capulet families run into each other in the street.
It seems to me Shakespeare creates an obvious parallel between the two. Romeo and Juliet never try to temper their passion with anything like common sense, let alone reason. They marry the day after they meet, for crying out loud — and in Act III Scene 3, after Romeo is banished from Verona by the prince for murdering Tybalt, it’s only the Friar’s scolding that stops Romeo from killing himself:
Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art —
Thy tears are wom’nish, thy wild acts denote
Th’ unreasonable fury of a beat.
Unseemly woman in a seeming man,
And ill-beseeming beast in seeming both,
Thou hast amaz’d me.
Get ahold of yourself, you ninny. The Prince has spared your life. You can bide your time and be reunited with Juliet by and by. It ain’t the end of the world.
Romeo calms down, but of course it’s only a prelude to yet another slew of rash acts that culminates with the final bloodbath.
It’s a marvelous thing, then, the way Shakespeare handles the first murder in the play. Do you remember it? There’s a street brawl, and Tybalt stabs Mercutio. But what’s interesting is that Tybalt does so by using Romeo’s body to hide from Mercutio the fatal thrust of his rapier.
Romeo he cries aloud,
‘Hold friends! Friends, part!; and swifter than his tongue
His agile arm beats down their fatal points
And ‘twixt them rushes; underneath show arm
An envious thrust from Tybalt hit the life
Of stout Mercutio . . .
This layer isn’t brought out in the same way in West Side Story. WSS is played, first of all, as a straight “star-crossed lovers” story — Tony has matured, he’s not hanging out on the streets any more, he’s got a job — but then he’s drawn back into the gangs’ fighting by his love for Maria, becoming a victim of the violent subculture he’d tried to leave behind.
And, in keeping with that trajectory, the circumstances of the first murder are subtly different: Tony holds Riff back from stabbing Bernardo, and Bernardo takes advantage of that to stab Riff.
It’s a subtle difference but a telling one. Tony is playing pacifist, physically restraining Riff. Romeo is also trying to break up a fight, but he functions as an unwitting screen behind from which comes the deadly thrust.
“Why the devil came you between us?” Mercutio asks Romeo before he dies. “I was hurt under your arm.”
Romeo’s read of the situation was naive –just as was Tony’s — and on the level of pure plot, that’s why the story turns tragic.
But in the Shakespeare, Romeo’s arm cloaks Tybalt’s — they become in that moment the same arm. So it isn’t just the street brawlers who are in the words of the Prince (Reason and Justice) “enemies to peace” . . .
Incidentally, if your library lacks a collected works of Shakespeare, I highly recommend you look for the marvelous but sadly out-of-print edition, The Yale Shakespeare
The beauty of it: it’s broken into 40 slim volumes. Here’s my Romeo and Juliet.
It’s 4X7 inches — light enough to hold open with one hand.
I have no idea if it’s considered up-to-par today from a scholarly perspective (my edition was published in 1954; the original came out in 1917) but it’s annotated to help with the more archaic bits.
And from an ease-of-use standpoint, it’s pure genius. When publishers shove Shakespeare’s complete works into a single volume, you end up with a book that is hugely unwieldy (and with paper that is thin as tissue to try to keep the weight down). Who wants to lug a 20 pound doorstopper around when all you want to do is read R&J while you’re parked in the dentist’s waiting room?
The Yale Shakespeare is kind of pricey (link above to Amazon has a couple sellers offering the complete set for $75 as of right now) but it’s well worth it, in my opinion.
Would be nice to see a re-issue. Wonder if it could be done for under $75 . . .
Right about the time I transferred to the state school where I’d earn my B.A. (SUNY Geneseo) the college mandated a two-semester Western Civ course of all of its students. (It realized it could no longer assume its freshmen had been exposed to any W.C. in high school.)
Ah, those were the days . . . I just paged through their online academic requirements handbook and they’ve since dropped that requirement. No surprise there. Too bad. I have to say I got a good education for my dollar at that school and owe it to the people there who dared, at the time, to stand for, er, “traditional” academic principles.
Which isn’t to say that I agreed with everything they did. One of the fellows we had to read for the course was Sigmund Freud (I think what we read was Civilization and its Discontents but I’m not sure & don’t feel like pawing through my books for my copy right now); my reaction to him was “what an idiot.”
I then wrote a paper arguing that he should be dumped from the course and replaced by Jung ;-)
My prof nodded and smiled and remained unconvinced, of course. I sensed even then, through my undergrad fervor, the reason for his reticence: Freud might be an idiot but he was an influential idiot.
Still, I think ultimately even that assumption may prove false.
I predict that Freud’s influence will lessen with time to the point that he’s but a footnote. Because he really was an idiot and eventually people will be able to admit it, and with the admission of his idiocy will come a waning of his influence.
What brings this all to mind is this review, by Jerry Coyne in The Telegraph [UPDATE, link no longer good :(], of a collection of “dissenting essays” by Frederick Crews titled Follies of the Wise:
Through Freud’s letters and documents, Crews reveals him to be not the compassionate healer of legend, but a cold and calculating megalomaniac, determined to go down in history as the Darwin of the psyche. Not only did he not care about patients (he sometimes napped or wrote letters while they were free-associating): there is no historical evidence that he effectively cured any of them. And the propositions of psychoanalysis have proven to be either untestable or falsified. How can we disprove the idea, for example, that we have a death drive? Or that dreams always represent wish fulfilments? When faced with counter-examples, Freudianism always proves malleable enough to incorporate them as evidence for the theory. Other key elements of Freudian theory have never been corroborated. There are no scientifically convincing experiments, for example, demonstrating the repression of traumatic memories. As Crews points out, work with survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic episodes has shown not a single case in which such memories are quashed and then recovered . . .
Realizing the scientific weaknesses of Freud, many diehards have taken the fall-back position that he was nevertheless a thinker of the first rank. Didn’t Freud give us the idea of the unconscious, they argue? Well, not really, for there was a whole history of pre-Freudian thought about people’s buried motives, including the writings of Shakespeare and Nietzsche. The “unconscious” was a commonplace of Romantic psychology and philosophy. And those who champion Freud as a philosopher must realize that his package also includes less savoury items like penis envy, the amorality of women, and our Lamarckian inheritance of “racial memoryâ€.
Crew then goes on to argue — an argument his reviewer fully supports — that we need to close ranks against any intellectual who claims to have unearthed some great truth while simultaneously discarding empiricism. Writes Coyne, “A mind that accepts both science and religion is thus a mind in conflict.”
Call my mind a mind in conflict, then, because I have no problem whatsoever with a dual yet intermingled world, one known by the senses, the other known by the mind. And so I look askance at scientists who seek to devalue the latter as something benighted and primitive.
Not to mention the fact that scientists cannot justify such attitudes in empirical terms. Crew himself gives this away, writing “. . . most scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world.”
Know in their hearts? LOL
Crew then forges ahead to step in it again:
Science is nonsectarian: those who disagree on scientific issues do not blow each other up. Science encourages doubt; most religions quash it.
The fact is, we can’t separate our human-ness from our science, and our human-ness encompasses much that is too slippery for physical measurements. But it’s okay to live with a bit of ambiguity. We’ve only been tinkering seriously with empiricism for a couple hundred years. It’s too soon to assert that it will never be reconciled with the spiritual.
Or put another way: Freud was an idiot not just because he failed to ground his assertions empirically, but because he allowed his work to be perverted by his own baser impulses. That is, he failed by a spiritual measure as well as a scientific one. And there’s truth in noting that failure as well.
