The Liar

Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory - Olin Miller

So this is a story that fits so adroitly to its subject that I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking it was a set-up but it is in fact true for what that assertion is worth (particularly in the context of what follows).

I am always endeavoring to expand my horizons, on my better days out of an allegiance to Truth, Knowledge and Wisdom, failing that out of a relentless dissatisfaction with myself and existence and consequent motivation to “help” or “improve” myself.

In such sprits I recently resolved to work my way through the book Gödel, Escher, Bach which I purchased many years ago and made some headway in and then ran out of steam with. Starting over and completing it has been on my to-do list for a very long time.

As I recently related, I started this book and quickly ran into a situation with the first formal exercise in logic presented in the book for the reader to play with. You can read that essay for a more detailed account of my experience attempting the exercise and reaction to my general failure with it.

Now.

When I approached that exercise in the book I honestly wasn’t looking to make it into essay fodder or whatever. What I did come to it with was a memory. It was a pretty specific memory and it did not remotely occur to me to seriously question it. The memory in essence was of undertaking this exercise, solving it, and feeling good about that.

This was a time in my life (if memory, ahem, serves) when I’d been through some personal and work experiences that gave me cause to doubt the quality of my intellect. I have a very specific recollection of working on this puzzle restoring in some small sense a feeling of confidence in my highest faculties, my ability to contend with the most abstract of human metaphysics, which ability had once got me through the calculus, physics and chemistry, thermodynamics and quantum mechanics with, if not exactly “flying colors”, at least reasonably respectable grades.

So I was genuinely distressed and depressed the other day to be absolutely brick-walled by the little logic game in question. I tried to be philosophical about it but there was a real, grim shadow at the back of my thoughts saying “you know, that’s it - the mind is inexorably on the downhill side”. The best I could hope for is that I was still on the part of that hill where the downward pitch was long and shallow.

But finally I said to myself, look: if you’re going to let that stop you all you’ll have proved is that it doesn’t take much, and my modus is all about persistence these days, so I went back to the book.

Where, immediately, it became clear that there was some fundamental flaw in that memory my whole reaction was based on. It was clear the reader was not expected to solve that puzzle. In fact is appeared it was not meant to be obvious whether the puzzle was in fact solvable at all - and indeed that this was the important point to be derived from attempting it at all.

While I can take comfort in the the fact that my frustration over the puzzle was not a sign of decaying intellect, it’s really just trading one interrogation of my brain’s capacity for another. What in the hell was I remembering? I broke it down into a few possibilities:

1) Had I merely played with the puzzle a bit, given up per the author’s suggestion, and felt satisfied merely with my ability to understand and manipulate the system of symbols and rules? Possible, though it would have been an awfully low bar to clear for forming a lasting memory of accomplishment.

2) Had I played with the puzzle and felt satisfied because I determined to my own satisfaction that the puzzle was unsolvable or at least intrinsically very difficult - and gave it up to have this confirmed in later reading. Equally possible, though this sort of accomplishment doesn’t really fit my memory that well.

3) Did I screw up and falsely “solve” the puzzle by performing some illegal operation without realizing it? This could certainly have happened, although I would think I’d have noticed the discrepancy of subsequent paragraphs that make it clear that a simple, direct solution is not an expected outcome. This interpretation stands out with the possibility that I'm actually getting smarter as I age.

4) Was I actually remembering some exercise from later in the book, one with an actual attainable solution? This possibility alone has at least the prospect of a relatively definitive confirmation, in that I could encounter this hypothetical later exercise and recognize it. Of course it would be hard to fully credit any such recognition in the light of the general dismantling of the memory in the context of the first exercise... And of course this option also raises the specter of going through the same intellectual and emotional wringer all over again.

5) Did I more or less fabricate this memory from a bunch of similar bits and pieces? Certainly I have a large store of wrestling intellectually with tricky constructs and pulling a credible ah-ha moment out of the struggle and feeling good about it.

There’s simply no way to know. And as always in this sort of situation I can’t help but wonder at how much of my memory is suspect: moments and fragments, misinterpreted sensations and misheard conversations, all assembled into narratives by my brain the better to fake there being some sort of sense to it all. It’s a fair point but I can’t see much of a path forward based in continuously dwelling on the fact that the entirety of you memory is suspect in ways that are mostly impossible to verify or correct.

Uncertainty

The essay following was written as it appears: it rapidly became clear to me not long after writing it that that the foundation of this essay was a wholly false premise, which will be clear to anyone familiar with the book I'm discussing. This will be discussed in a subsequent essay tentatively titled "The Liar".

rules
u may be added to any string ending in i
for any x the string mx may be transformed to mxx
iii may be replaced with u
uu may be dropped from the string

exercise: from the starting string mi derive the string mu

So runs, more or less, the first formal exercise in Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, which brings my progress in the book to a standstill this morning. It’s one of those deceptively simple puzzles, trivial at first glance, impossible on closer inspection, requiring the application of insight outside the proverbial box to crack, and to my consternation, which in an hour has worked a fair way towards frustrated anger, I can’t seem to shift it. The issue is easy enough to grasp... To solve it you have to eliminate i. The only way to eliminate i is to work to a string with some multiple of 3i in it. But the only way to increase i is by the second rule transformation, and this "doubling" transformation can’t produce an (n)i where n is divisible by 3. Fiddling on paper produces series after absurd series of strings that keep collapsing to the same dead ends. My creaking, derelict faculties of math and formal logic offer vague insights about factors, primes, 2 is the only even prime, doesn’t that have something to do with it?


It isn’t the puzzle itself or even my failure with it that is getting to me. It is a familiar sort of frustration, knowing you are overlooking some obvious simplicity you are blinded to by some equally simple yet false assumption. I have in recent memory spent more than a few good hours purposely cultivating a similar state playing puzzle games like Braid or Portal.

What’s getting to me is that I know for a damn fact that I already solved this, in no more than 20 or 30 minutes, a decade, maybe 12 years ago, the first time I attempted to read the book.

Maybe I didn’t even figure it out last time, I think. Maybe I just wandered into the right territory noodling around with the transformations. Far from impossible: just the other day I solved all the levels of a tile-flipping flash puzzle game on the internet without ever really grasping the rules, just a lot of clicking and blindly following intuition.

Even so this explanation smells of bargaining to me. As someone still rather freshly exposed to the experience of grief I know that bargaining comes on the heels of denial and I wonder what it is I am trying to deny.

No choice but to give it up for the time being and get things done. In the middle of laundry half an hour later it occurs to me that I may just end up having to accept that I simply no longer possess the class of mind that allowed me to make short work of the puzzle at 28 or 30 years old. And that this is what is really bothering me.

Hofstadter advises the reader not to worry about whether they solve the puzzle: the intent is only to get the “flavor” of it. Oh, and to “Have fun!”

Fucking geniuses.

-=-

Briefly, nearly twenty years ago, I understood Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. By this I don’t mean that I was acquainted with a more or less narrative, prose explanation of the origins and significance of it - something I suppose I still possess to a degree and which I could beef up and give a quick spit shine with an hour or two on the internet.

But during the quantum mechanics section of a tough physical chemistry course series, in the latter half of earning my bachelor’s degree, I was led through the derivation of the actual mathematical expression of the principle, and I understood it. You can talk about the principle but I understood, in that class, that the talking only gets you within a certain vicinity of this level of thought. You can only get to its real meaning through the math. And it was a beautiful thing.

Looking back I suspect that it was also an experience that did away with any lingering ideas I might have been harboring that there was a chance of my personally adding anything really important to science. I was capable of hanging on for the ride as a better intellect than mine illuminated for me the product of mind that had operated on a level that much higher again. But it was immediately evident to me that there wasn’t the slightest inkling of a possibility that I could ever produce original thought like that.

-=-

I have to wonder if I could even work up to the point of being able to follow the derivation of Heisenberg’s principle now. I try to keep up on the science news and indeed still work in the field, but I’m very far from such rarefied stuff. I guess it could hardly be a more moot point at this stage of the game. I will take Hofstadter’s advice and try not to worry, to focus on making the most of what I can manage in the midst of my ordinary human uncertainty.

departures and arrivals

Dad showed up in a dream last night, a thing I've been expecting. First time I remembered, anyway, except for one other where he was a minor presence, sitting silently in a room where other people were, where other things were going on. In this dream I was leaving some sort of apartment. I was supposed to have everything packed but my sparse belongings were still in a partial state of disarray. I was up on a high floor and the vibe of the building and halls was more like a hotel than an apartment but the space was large. No sense of context at all in the dream, of why or when, just there, and going. Dad came alone to pick me up. I had closed circuit cameras patched in through the television, saw the car arriving, saw him coming up and spoke to him at the door. No Jennifer, no Jonah, but the cats were there oddly enough. Did he come inside? I can't remember. I woke up, it was 3 am.

I wonder when the last time Dad came to collect me on his own was? For the most part Mom was always along, and then it has been a long time since I started responsible for my own transportation. Some time in college no doubt; I never had a car and nobody at school was ever going my way. The only time that stands out in my mind though was when he came to pick me up after the freshmen orientation session the midsummer before I started. Smoking with Jack at picnic tables out back of the apartments while I waited for him to come. 22 years.

determined to have fun

When I started working I decided that I would do something to please me and at the same time would not try to analyze why it pleased me... Mostly it’s a visceral - the inside reaction... I just listened to this voice and the voice said “I’d like to do that” and that was the end of the conversation.

Getting to know Ed

Ed Emberley, Children's Book Illustrator | by Ed Emberley

View this entire course and more in the lynda.com Online Training Library®.

I wish that I had about a hundred hours of Ed Emberley just chatting while drawing with marker pens because this is very pleasing.

I crave, covet, pine for that sentiment I extracted from this video and posted above. Nothing feels further from the truth of my present situation. No idea how to go about finding a road between here and there, how to "find out how to find out" as someone advised me in a rather random exchange.

If you lost the knack of listening to that voice that tells you what you'd like so long ago that you can't really remember being able to hear it, what then? This line of inquiry is very depressing.