Previous - 131. Walt Whitman
Spring
With all the rain and cold, I had missed the stealthy approach of spring. In recent days, though, I've noticed that the Japanese maple out my kitchen window is mostly green, and the poor tree in the pot in our alley -- the one that was shifted about all last year and suffered an abusive, radical pruning of its few branches, now has sprouted a few new leaves from what few branches remain. (Curiously, I'd advocated pruning the tree in the past only to be ignored by the woman who "takes care" of the garden. Fate has given the tree a more severe pruning than I would have.)The dark obverse of spring's sticky young leaves (I think that was Ivan K's phrase) is pollen. My allergies, surprisingly in abeyance so far this year, have finally kicked in.
George Eliot - From Proust Was a Neuroscientist
p27 ... Inspired by Isaac Newton's theory of gravity, which divined the cause of the elliptical motions found in the heavens, the positivists struggled to uncover a parallel order behind the motions of humans. [Footnote: Newton himself wasn't so naive: "I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies," he wrote, "but not the madness of people."] According to their depressing philosophy, we were nothing but life-size puppets pulled by invisible strings.
The founder of this "science of humanity" was Pierre-Simon Laplace... Laplace didn't need God [for his cosmic laws] because he believed that probability theory, his peculiar invention, would solve every question worth asking, including the ancient mystery of human freedom.
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p28 ...Since everything was merely matter, and matter obeyed a short list of cosmic laws (like gravity and inertia), knowing the laws meant knowing everything about everything. All you had to do was crank the equations and decipher the results. Man would finally see himself for "the automaton that he is." Free will, like God, would become an illusion, and we would see that our lives are really as predictable as the planetary orbits. As Laplace wrote, "We must . . . imagine the present state of the universe as the effect of its prior state and as the cause of he state that will follow it. Freedom has no place here."
I'm doing something I rarely do, write notes on a first reading, so I don't know where this is heading. But if this doesn't end up with quantum uncertainty I will be shocked and disappointed.
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p29 James Clerk Maxwell... realized that Laplace's omniscient demon [from a thought experiment] actually violated the laws of physics. Since disorder [entropy] was real (it was even increasing), science had fundamental limits. After all, pure entropy couldn't be solved. No demon could know everything.
...While Laplace believed that you could easily apply statistical laws to specific problems, Maxwell's work with gasses had taught him otherwise. While the temperature of a gas was wholly determined by the velocity of its atoms [this is anachronistic I think unless you substitute "molecule" for "atom"] -- the faster they fly, the hotter the gas -- Maxwell realized that velocity was nothing but a statistical average. At any given instant, the individual atoms were actually moving at different speeds. In other words, all physical laws are only approximations. They cannot be applied with any real precision to particulars. This, of course, directly contradicted Laplace's social physics...
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p32 In many ways, [George Henry] Lewes was [Herbert] Spencer's opposite [Spencer has just rejected Eliot]. Spencer began his career as an ardent positivist, futilely searching for a theory of everything. After positivism faded away, Spencer became a committed social Darwinist, and he enjoyed explaining all of existence -- from worms to civilization -- in terms of natural selection. Lewes, on the other hand, was an intellectual renowned for his versatility; he wrote essays on poetry and physics, psychology and philosophy...
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p32 ...He wanted to be a "poet in science." She wanted to be "a scientific poet."
p33 ...A stubborn skeptic, Lewes first became famous in 1855 with his Life of Goethe, a sympathetic biography that interwove Goethe's criticisms of the scientific method with his romantic poetry. In Goethe, Lewes found a figure who resisted the mechanistic theories of positivism, trusting instead in the "concrete phenomena of experience." And while Lewes eagerly admitted that a properly experimental psychology could offer an "objective insight into our thinking organ," he believed that "art and Literature" were no less truthful, for they described the "psychological world." In an age of ambitious experiments, Lewes remained a pluralist.
Candide
"English Visitors to Ferney: A Sampling"Edward Gibbon, August 1763
p113 ...After a life passed in courts and Capitals, the Great Voltaire is not a meer country Gentleman, and even (for the honor of the profession) sometimes a farmer. He says he never enjoyed so much true happiness...
The play they acted was my favorite Orphan of China. Voltaire himself acted Gengis and Madame Denys Idame... Perhaps... I was too much struck with the ridiculous figure of Voltaire at seventy acting a Tarter Conqueror with a hollow broken voice, and making love to a very ugly niece of about fifty... [Did he not understand her position in the household?] The whole Company was asked to stay and set Down about twelve to a very elegant supper of a hundred Covers... The supper ended about two, the company danced til four, when we broke up, got into our Coaches and came back to Geneva, just as the Gates were opened. Shew me in history or fable, a famous poet of Seventy who has acted his own plays, and has closed the scene with a supper and ball for a hundred people. I think the last is the more extraordinary of the two.
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