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Shred, blend and rewrite books

[ 8 minute read ]

From a selection of 'Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman; 'Locke' by Michael Ayers; 'The Pattern on the Stone' by W. Daniel Hillis; 'Trainwreck' by Sady Doyle; and 'The Devil and all his works' by Dennis Wheatley.

I rearranged my bookcases yesterday and ended up giving myself a whole bunch of books to read 'urgently'. Once again, I feel like I would just like to plug myself into a digital stream and assimilate the words; but that is all I would do, absorb the words. I might just as well as read a dictionary, which would be a great deal more fun. And there it is. Actually experiencing the words and the definitions in a dictionary is preferable to just ramming words into my brain. Without real-time processing, I would understand nothing because I do not have a computer's operating system in my head. My brain does not compartmentalise everything it experiences, ready for close attention of only designated information at its own leisure.

Still in my head from yesterday is the crazy marshall at a fun-run who waved two cars through a red traffic light when I was crossing the road on my bicycle. I had to leap out of the way with my bike because she distracted the drivers by so wildly gesticulating that they didn't see me crossing. Still in my head from yesterday, is her marshall friend who, once I had leapt back from the cars, came over to me and said, 'Excuse me, there is a queue.' On the pavement / cycle path were a bunch of cyclists. I, however, was on the road; a road-user. I had arrived at my position on the road by using the road. Once the cars had passed there was no queue on the road. Some people are merely hazards to the rest of us. I forget, though, that not everyone can see the world as I do. Oh yes, it seems I am arrogant and merciless. However, we all believe that what we perceive is the same as everyone else perceives; and we are all certain that what we believe is the same that everyone believes, and when we find out that this is not so, we are puzzled, and I suggest, a little scared.

Absorbing the information in the books I want to read now, I think, would be absorbing it through a lens of resentment for me. I am so self-absorbed that I want blinkered people to just leave me alone. Of course, I must admit to also having tunnel-vision. My microcosm of existence is in a macrocosm we call the world. It really is incumbent on me to make sure that everyone else's happy microcosm is not negatively affected by my jaded attitude. Hence, I shall be reading the book, 'Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman. Most of the time straplines and sub-headings do nothing for me, but 'Why it can matter more than IQ' really sings the right tune to me when I consider how the marshalls were weirdly important to themselves. They will never understand what really happened because they pat themselves on the back for doing an entirely different task. 

Michael Ayers, a British philosopher and professor at Oxford University, on writing about the philosopher John Locke (1632 - 1704) in his first chapter, 'Ideas and Things' writes, 'Locke's epistemological thesis is that the ways in which we conceive of the world, including ourselves, are determined by the ways we experience the world.' Although I started reading the book some years ago, I really must read it again with new insights. (That is why I never deface books with dog-ears, highlighting and annotations). Apparently, there is a YouTube video of Professor Ayers talking in 1985 about Locke and Berkeley. I think it is Bishop George Berkeley (1685 - 1783) of Cloyne of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who was an Anglo-Irish philosopher, writer, and clergyman and is regarded as the founder of immaterialism.

Dennis Wheatley in his 1972 book, 'The Devil and all his works', begins with a statement, within which he posits a loose, though considered, opinion that 'To many Christians...the doctrine of the Trinity is no longer fully acceptable. God the Father has faded into the background, and most people find the role of the Holy Ghost somewhat difficult to understand' He then goes on to offer an idea that, using words that were ?acceptable? at the time, [Africans] 'prefer Allah, as the one, indivisible God', for this same reason. I might have to ignore any inference to levels of mental acuity that Dennis Wheatley has inadvertently created with his statement. Reading on, I cannot find that Wheatley was racist, but that may be because it is not important to me. He seems to be able to separate his point from his attitude, and that is enough for me.

 I am not really concerned about inappropriate language, my interest lies firmly in why modern Christians favour 'Jesus' over the 'Father'. I have no care for the Christian God being male or female, because I don't think that God is limited to only one gender. If I believe in a Christian 'God', I also believe in omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence. If I also believe that males and females are equal, yet do not believe they are the same, this does not conflict with the language that was used to talk about any Christian God, or the language that will be used to talk about any Christian God. If I believe that males and females are the same, then 'Father' is the same as 'Mother', and it is only semantics that troubles people. Perhaps a nod to modern attitudes on gender equality by modern Christian churches has exacerbated the state of confusion that Dennis Wheatley talked of.

Likewise, W. Daniel Hillis, in his 1998 book, 'The Pattern on the Stone', which has the sub-heading, 'The Simple Ideas that make computers work', makes an assertion about how computers may, or may not solve, the 'Travelling Saleman' problem. I believe it is a Maths problem, which is given to students as, 'Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?' Hillis makes note that the time grows exponentially with the size of the problem, 'No-one knows any algorithm that is order n² or even n³, or n to any power, that will accomplish this. Yeah, I am confused by 'n' too, but I think 'n' is the number of cities in this problem. Welcome back to those happy days of algebra! Hillis wrote, 'If we add ten more cities to the salesman's itinerary, the problem gets a thousand times harder'. I don't know about that because I only think in ways to solve problems using my analogue brain. A bit further on, Hillis, writes, 'No predictable technical breakthroughs in computers will help solve the travelling salesman problem, since even a computer a billion times faster will still be stumped by the addition of a few more cities. 

What I find interesting about Hillis's statements is his complete lack of realising that just 28 years later, his belief is tested by A.I. I don't pretend to understand whether he is now proved wrong; it is not really my aim to do that. I am interested in how something we believe to be true today is false tomorrow. I suggest that, no amount of studying in 1998 that Hillis may have undertaken might have led him towards building A.I. assistive technology. Just as John Gall, the Systems Theorist, said, 'A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked'. Likewise, It is the evolution of understanding that fascinates me.

'Trainwreck' by Sady Doyle, in her 2017 book, with the sub-heading, 'The women we love to hate, mock and fear....and why', writes about the shaming of Mary Wollstonecraft (and a lot more else). Doyle finishes a paragraph with: 'Even if you believed in the brotherhood and equality of all mankind, you didn't want to march into battle calling yourselves the Crazy Slut Fan Club'. Doyle continues her point with, 'The only way for a woman to engage in feminism at all it turned out, was to actively participate in the shaming: Harriet Martineau, one of the few to carry the torch, declared that. "Mary Wollstonecraft was, with all her powers, a poor victim of passion, with no control over her own peace, and no calmness or content except when the needs of her individual nature were satisfied". Doyle finishes with her own alarm that there was an idea that real feminists were entirely unlike Mary Wollstonecraft and allowing her into the movement set it back. She quotes Harriet Martineau again, '[Their] advocacy of Woman's cause becomes more detriment, precisely in proportion to their personal reasons for unhappiness, unless they have fortitude enough [...] to get their own troubles under their feet, and leave them out of the account in stating the state of their sex". Doyle goes on to say that Wollstonecraft was considered to be a whore, a madwoman, an idiot and a joke, and most of all, responsible for setting women's rights back and so was 'wrecked'. I think today, we might say 'cancelled'; except that by modern standards, women today might consider Wollstonecraft as being nothing less than a free woman.

I have never read about Mary Wollstonecraft in the same light that Harriet Martineau casts on her. My interest is not in feminism and whether it is right or necessary or who advocates for it best. My interest is how opinion changes according to the information we are given, and importantly, the environment in which we receive it.

I selected the book 'Emotional Intelligence - Why it can matter more than IQ' (1996) by Daniel Goleman, because it fell open, after a few previous openings, at the chapter, 'Pandora's box and the power of positive thinking'. After Pandora had let almost everything out of the box, she was just in time to stop 'hope' flying away. Daniel Goleman mentions a study by a University of Kansas psychologist, C. R. Snyder, in which the psychologist found that hope is elemental in recovering from disappointment, and thus achieving higher grades after a setback. People with low hope levels just gave up and plodded along believing they could do no better and like a self-fulfilling prophesy continued to get low grades, while people with high hope levels accepted the setback and studied harder, which invariably meant they achieved higher grades than the disappointed 'plodders'. Goleman's book contains a whole lot more on EQ.

My task is to mesh all my chosen books together; to find parallels and connections and attempt to portray how I understand the world, myself and others. But not portray it to all and sundry. No, I need to portray it to myself.  I need to be able to 'see' the invisible whiteboard with pithy statements on it that fit my mind. And this needs to be in a format that, if I ever want to, I would be able to explain to others. If it cannot be explained to others, I feel that it is of no use to me, since it would suggest to me that I have lost my way, and fabricated an illusion of the world and all that is in it.