my mind on books

By chance I’ve just read two novels that deal with issues of identity, coming from opposite directions:

Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel by Rivka Galchen and The Soul Thief: A Novel by Charles Baxter.

In Atmospheric Disturbances, a first novel written by a younger woman, the narrator is an older man, a psychiatrist, who believes his wife has been replaced by an impostor. In The Soul Thief, the author’s fourth novel, the narrator is a graduate student who suspects another character is stealing or trying to steal his identity.

How much change or discontinuity can the concept of identity accommodate? What if the people you know suddenly don’t recognize you? What if the past you thought was yours is told to you as someone else’s story?

Charles Baxter on “questions of identity”

‘Atmospheric Disturbances’ website

I came across this passage from A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman that offers another perspective on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (See also discussion of Carr’s article at edge’s Reality Club)

Why have we as a nation become more and more illiterate? We blame television and the computer, but they are not causes. They are results of a prior condition that invited them in. They arrived to fill a gap. When imaginative ability declines, other ways to communicate appear. These ways work even though they too are dyslexic in structure: simultaneity of bits, odd juxtapositions, messages that do not move linearly from left to right. Yet television and personal computers communicate.

Evidently, reading does not depend solely on the ordering of words or the ordering of letters in the words. Indeed, poets use dyslexic structures deliberately. Reading depends on the psyche’s capacity to enter imagination. Reading is more like dreaming, which, too, goes on in silence. Our illiteracy reflects our educative process away from the silent grounds of reading: silent study halls and quiet periods, solitary homework, learning by heart, listening through a whole class without interruptions, writing an essay exam in longhand, drawing from nature instead of lab experiments. This long neglect of imaginational conditions that foster reading — Sputnik and the new math; social problems and social relatedness; me-centered motivation; the confusion of information with knowledge, of opinion with judgment, and trivia with sources; communications as messages by telephone calls and answering machines rather than as letter writing in silence; learning to speak up without first having something learned to say; multiple choice and scoring as a test of comprehension — has produced illiteracy. (“Right to Remain Silent” excerpted in A Blue Fire p. 170)

Dr. Seligman’s Authentic Happiness site at Penn

books by Martin Seligman at Amazon

The Retreat of Reason: A Dilemma in the Philosophy of Life (Oxford University Press, 2005, 2008)

Product description:

One of the main original aims of philosophy was to give us guidance about how to live our lives. The ancient Greeks typically assumed that a life led in accordance with reason, a rational life, would also be the happiest or most fulfilling. Ingmar Persson’s book resumes this project, which has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy. But his conclusions are very different; by exploring the irrationality of our attitudes to time, our identity, and our responsibility, Persson shows that the aim of living rationally conflicts not only with the aim of leading the most fulfilling life, but also with the moral aim of promoting the maximization and just distribution of fulfillment for all. Persson also argues that neither the aim of living rationally nor any of the fulfillment aims can be rejected as less rational than any other. We thus face a dilemma of either having to enter a retreat of reason, insulated from everyday attitudes, or making reason retreat from its aspiration to be the sole controller of our attitudes.
The Retreat of Reason explores three areas in which there is a conflict between the rational life and a life dedicated to maximization of fulfillment. Persson contends that living rationally requires us to give up, first, our temporal biases; secondly, our bias towards ourselves; and, thirdly, our responsibility to the extent that it involves the notion of desert and desert-entailing notions. But giving up these attitudes is so overwhelmingly hard that the effort to do so not only makes our own lives less fulfilling, but also obstructs our efficient pursuit of the moral aim of promoting a maximum of justly distributed fulfillment.
Ingmar Persson brings back to philosophy the ambition of offering a broad vision of the human condition. The Retreat of Reason challenges and disturbs some of our most fundamental ideas about ourselves.

The review at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews begins:

This book has been long in the making and it is no exaggeration to say that it was worth the wait. The dramatis personae in Ingmar Persson’s hugely impressive work are the rationalists and the satisfactionalists. The controversy between the two camps concerns one of the profoundest questions in philosophy, viz. the question of how one ought to live. Rationalists hold that human lives should be permeated by a pursuit of philosophical truth and that life should be led in accordance with such truth. Satisfactionalists hold that life should be led in ways that make them as fulfilling as possible, in terms of pleasure and felt satisfaction. …

Naturalistic Decision Making and Macrocognition ed. by Jan Maarten Schraagen et al (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008) forthcoming

Perspectives on Cognitive Task Analysis: Historical Origins and Modern Communities of Practice by Robert R Hoffman; Laura G Militello (New York: Psychology Press, 2008) forthcoming

Social Cognition and Developmental Psychopathology ed. by Carla Sharp; Peter Fonagy; Ian M Goodyer (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) forthcoming

Social Life and Social Knowledge: Toward a Process Account of Development (Jean Piaget Symposium Series) ed. by Ulrich Müller et al (New York: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2008) (“Search Inside” available at Amazon)

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of the Mind) by Andy Clark (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) forthcoming

Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills ed. by Nancy Frey; Douglas Fisher; (Thousand Oaks, CA : Corwin Press, 2008)

The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition ed. by Philip Robbins; Murat Aydede (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
forthcoming

The Kingdom of Infinite Space: An Encounter with Your Head by Raymond Tallis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) forthcoming

The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) by Scott Atran; Douglas L Medin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008) (“Search Inside” available at Amazon)

Visual Tools for Transforming Information Into Knowledge by David Hyerle (Thousand Oaks, CA : Corwin Press, 2008) forthcoming

Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life by Sandra Aamodt; Sam Wang (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2008) (“Search Inside” available from Amazon)

Your Brain: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald; Peter Meyers (Sebastopol, Calif. ; [Farnham] : O’Reilly, 2008)