Early from Ian Macan’s novelAtonement“From 2001, a little girl sits on the floor, taking into account how strange that she has a body. She looks at her hand: Is it not strange that” this device is to seize, this fat spider “, is part of it? It bends a finger, Then it was evaluated. The secret of itself, the part of which was really responsible.
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When I read “Takfir”, in college, I loved this clip. My father was a nerve world, and we often talked about the brain; Like a girl in the novel, I was fascinated by the relationship between our bodies and our minds. I also admire the McCan style. There was an intellectual and intellectual feeling in his language, which suggested a fun rapprochement of art and science-a tone specifically designed for one of the English father.
“Takfir” is not a novel about science; An ethical story, follows a person who chooses a catastrophic and then tries to compensate. But Makan’s next novel, “Saturday“The brain surgeon had a hero, and focused on what philosophers call the problem of the mind and body-the issue of how the physical things that we made are related to the self-experience that we have as beings with consciousness.” Is it possible to explain, how does the matter become conscious? ”He asks the surgeon himself while working on a brain The patient. Nobody knows exactly how “this is a well -protected kilogram or so from the cells.” It actually carries experiences, memories, dreams and intentions. ” Even if this puzzle is solved one day, “Wonders will remain, that just wet things can make this bright interior cinema of thought, sight, sound and touch is linked to the presence of a pilgrim of illusion, hovering like a ghost in his center.” In the novel, a disorganized man is divided To the surgeon’s house. Is the man responsible for his actions, or is his brain wrong? If his brain leads him – supposed, our brains lead all our actions – which makes it somehow less than a person?
By the time I read “Saturday”, in 2005, I was at the Graduate School, and I studied for a PhD. in English. For my thesis, I decided to look at how novels think about the mind in the era of neuroscience. “Saturday” was part of a long tradition: Camello Gulji invented a technique to see the details of the neurons in 1873, the same year that Liu Tolstoy began writing.Anna Karenina“Over the next century, when scientists understood more about the brain, the novelists have become increasingly designed to depict mental life. Many accounts have also asked questions that were also asked by philosophers: Did we have a free will? How much is language and thought related? We were just the brains, or something else? Science is a good explanation for how the object developed the view of the first person. What is mysterious in that? – In an influential book, “Clearer“People like Chalmers described them as” philosophers ’syndrome: he made a mistake in failure for an insight into necessity.”
I read “clearer awareness”, a few other Dennett books, and generally immersed in this field known as the philosophy of reason. I was not fully convinced of his financial position. He believed that there was no basic contradiction between personal and objective views; Whether we imagine something as an object or a topic that simply depends on the “position” that we took towards it. I couldn’t see how this was logical. In fact, the book made me a little angry. I was with Vladimir Nabokov, who, when he was asked what he surprised most about life, he referred to “the miracle of consciousness-that sudden window swings on a lighting landscape in the middle of the night of dissatisfaction.” I felt that Dennett, and those who thought along similar lines, refused to uniquely and holy human existence.
Academic advisers, who were immersed, immersed me to allow me to follow up on my project, and more when I added more philosophers, larger and more forbidden novels, in this mix. Years have passed. I read and re -read, formulated and deleted. In the end, I realized that I do not want to be a professor after all, and left the graduate program. I did not finish my thesis. But I benefited from the experience of working on it. I read a lot of wonderful books. I reached some opinions about the big questions that fascinated me – the Open that I believed was established well, and it is unlikely to change. I read so much that I thought I knew what I was talking about.
In 2017, Dennett published a book entitled “From bacteria to Bach and return: the development of minds“I learned about it in advance, from the propaganda department for the publisher. By that time, I was a journalist; my academic life was a contract in the past. In an email to an editor who suggested that I write about the book, I noticed that I did not agree with Denit” on many fronts, ” Then I added, “But what I know?”
In the end, my editors decided that instead of reviewing the book, I must write a Dennett profile– A long piece it described as a person, and he narrated the course of his life. Dennett was a game, and I was arranged for the first time in Seattle, where he would have attended a conference. I was spending a few days with him there, and watching him arguing around the mind with some philosophers and scholars. After that, later in the month, I was met again in Boston (he was a professor of Tuffs), and he attended the annual Christmas party (Punche Many. After staying there for several days, I will return to New York to interview Chalmers, who is now studied at New York University, then drafting my story.
I have written all kinds of pieces – reviews, criticisms, and articles – but it was not a profile. I was both personal and intellectual, about spending a lot of time with a prominent philosopher whose thoughts bothered me. Read Dennett books as if you were preparing for an exam. I was following the scientific approach. In academic circles, you can follow systematically, determine a question and then study it; I read what was written and talked to colleagues or students; You can design experiments, teach seminars, or write papers, with the aim of becoming an expert and developing an original point of view. If you fail, you are at least trying to explore your question strictly and methodological. Do not continue with a person’s Christmas party and then driving with them to Maine.
This approach – which highlights – always hit me. Didn’t he risk introducing an element of arbitrary component in an objective process otherwise? If you want to understand the complex questions of philosophy, was it suspended with one philosopher the correct idea? What is the goal of knowing what such a person did, wore, or eat, in the specific days a correspondent visited? I attracted part of me towards a more dismantled way to work. I wanted to stay in the world of thought. I was still in the era of school.
He was cloudy in Seattle, and a snow in Boston and Maine; Denit I love snow. He walked with a wooden stick that had carved himself. He had a jolly energy, which was not understood, unabated. It can seem to do anything – piano play, call square dance, slide a window, legend, and sailing. When I spoke to him, he was staring at you, heavy immersion, then spoiled you with your wrong concepts, but warmly, the way the coach guides a player. I learned a lot about Dennett as a person during the time we spent together.
I also learned a lot about the value of being there. For one reason, I reduced the importance of time. Report means hours of conversation in the car; A room to ask the same questions over and over again; The gradual decrease in embarrassment of the individual about ignorance or uncertainty; A frightening position to listen and quiet monitoring; The possibility of misunderstanding. The patient, smart, and imagination, can explain Dennett concepts from every angle, and inventing new concepts if you give time. I also did not count on the personality’s communication – filling the individual, even a glimpse in short, and what I suggested about what they might know. What is the physical philosopher – a person who does not think we have souls – possesses like? I had a picture in my head, something that involves cold, frankly, and cruelty, and it was completely wrong, a caricature awaiting erasure. It was not so much that Denit’s character made me reconsidered his ideas, but his specificity made me consider them more specific. The more you know the person, the more interesting they become. This can be true not only for those who are but for how they think. The risks are higher when you are face to face. It is easy to close a book and difficult to end the conversation.
I finished the profile draft shortly after my return, and I sent it to my editor; Call me just a few minutes later. He said that only by scrolling through the document, and recording the large regularity of its paragraphs, he could have seen what the problem was: the piece was like a big article. There is a need for “scenes”, sections that read as if they were in a novel – exchange dialogue, moments of work, small small paragraphs indicating physical revolutions. I was there personally. What happened? Readers wanted to be there too.
I knew about these types of scenes. I read it on other profiles, but I also studied it in the novels. In a play, the scene was an official thing: a unit of drama, an extended reaction with a clear start and end. It can be a scene in an equal organized novel, or it may be slippery and justice – just a rhythm of concrete reality, or a flash of vision. The surgeon that opens a skull can be a scene; So can a girl whose fingers evade? The viewer can be made simply, one of the annoying factors together. In “Saturday”, the surgeon takes “Scalpel” and makes a small incision. Another doctor asks, “How much blood we lost?” Various wounds realize a special tool, ADSON. “It uses Adson to lift homogeneous blood.” This combination of piggers and distinct details, sometimes internal or transparent – how does ADSON clock looks exactly? The illusion can be invoked that we see something real. It can create what the literary scene called Roland Partis “the effect of reality”.
