Irises & ChatGPT@3QD

I’ve posted a new article at 3 Quarks Daily:

The Irises Are Blooming Early This Year

Yes, it IS about irises, and contains photos of irises, but it manages to work its way to ChatGPT, where I include another parody of Wallace Stevens’s famous “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Last month it became a poem about an A.I. Now it’s about irises.

Another Stevens imitation

Thirteen Ways
	By Wallace Stevens	By ChatGPT
I	Among twenty snowy mountains,    The only moving thing    Was the eye of the blackbird.	Among twenty blooming irises, The only stirring thing Was the flutter of a butterfly.
II	I was of three minds,    Like a tree    In which there are three blackbirds.	I was of three minds, Like a garden Where there are three irises.
III	The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.    It was a small part of the pantomime.	The iris swayed in the spring breeze. It was a small part of the dance.
IV	A man and a woman    Are one.    A man and a woman and a blackbird    Are one.	A gardener and a sunbeam Are one. A gardener and a sunbeam and an iris Are one.
V	I do not know which to prefer,    The beauty of inflections    Or the beauty of innuendoes,    The blackbird whistling    Or just after.	I do not know which to admire more, The elegance of petals Or the subtlety of colors, The iris blooming Or just before.
VI	Icicles filled the long window    With barbaric glass.    The shadow of the blackbird    Crossed it, to and fro.    The mood    Traced in the shadow    An indecipherable cause.	Raindrops adorned the petals With delicate jewels. The silhouette of the iris Danced upon them, back and forth. The feeling Traced in the silhouette A mystery beyond words.
VII	O thin men of Haddam,    Why do you imagine golden birds?    Do you not see how the blackbird    Walks around the feet    Of the women about you?	O wise gardeners of old, Why do you dream of other flowers? Do you not see how the iris Swirls around the stems Of the flowers beside it?
VIII	I know noble accents    And lucid, inescapable rhythms;    But I know, too,    That the blackbird is involved    In what I know.	I know the language of flowers And the undeniable pulse of nature; But I know, too, That the iris is entwined In all that I comprehend.
IX	When the blackbird flew out of sight,    It marked the edge    Of one of many circles.	When the iris swayed out of view, It marked the boundary Of one of many moments.
X	At the sight of blackbirds    Flying in a green light,    Even the bawds of euphony    Would cry out sharply.	At the sight of irises Dancing in the sunlight, Even the cynics of beauty Would pause in wonder.
XI	He rode over Connecticut    In a glass coach.    Once, a fear pierced him,    In that he mistook    The shadow of his equipage    For blackbirds.	She strolled through the garden, Lost in thought. Once, a joy overcame her, As she mistook The scent of the blooms For irises.
XII	The river is moving.    The blackbird must be flying.	The breeze is stirring. The iris must be swaying.
XIII	It was evening all afternoon.    It was snowing    And it was going to snow.    The blackbird sat    In the cedar-limbs.	It was morning all evening. It was blossoming And it was going to blossom. The iris stood In the garden's embrace.

Meta: A word about process

Some of the articles I write for 3 Quarks are like pulling teeth. I’ll make notes, sketch outlines, draft sections, perhaps as a post here at New Savanna, and then assemble the pieces into the final article on the Saturday and Sunday before the article shows up on Monday. This is one of those pieces: Western Metaphysics is Imploding. Will We Raise a Phoenix from The Ashes? [Catalytic AI]. I liked it a lot. But friends tell me it left them a bit mystified.

Other pieces that come easy. This one for example: Old School: Torpor and Stupor at Johns Hopkins. That was a while ago, so the writing process is not clear in my mind. But I pretty sure it’s one of those pieces where I thought about it a bit, did a little web surfing (in that case, I had to get the photo and a link or two) and then just sat down and drafted it. No doubt I stepped away from the computer every now and then, but it was basically one work session. I wrote a draft Sunday morning and early afternoon, checked it over, and then upload it.

Those two pieces are quite different in kind. The Western Metaphysics piece developed a complex argument whereas Torpor and Stupor was narrative in kind. Complex arguments require a complex web of connections between the various pieces. That’s hard to do and requires you to flit back and forth making things fit and relate. Narratives have a simpler structure. Torpor and Stupor didn’t tell a single continuous story. Rather, it was organized as a set of vignettes, each of them a little narrative. There was no argument to speak of. Just a an overall flow.

This irises piece was closer to the come-easy kind than the pulling-teeth kind. I had some points to make, but I made them more though analogy and metaphor than explicit argument. It had three sections. ChatGPT’s Stevens imitation went in the middle. I prepared that on Friday evening and made a few notes. More notes on Saturday. But I didn’t start writing until Sunday morning, and then I drafted it from beginning to end over course of, say, two to three hours.

The most interesting thing about the process was the decisions I made on Sunday morning to query ChatGPT about the nature of blossoms. I didn’t need to do that as I already more or less knew the story. But in so doing I was able to introduce ChatGPT into the exposition and thus prepare the way for the poem. That opened the way for the concluding discussion about DNA, strings, and complexity.

I wonder how LLMs manage different kinds of discourse? That’s what’s in the back of my mind.

Yellow Tulips, WAM!

Current Perspectives on Abstract Concepts and Future Research Directions

Banks, B., Borghi, A. M., Fargier, R., Fini, C., Jonauskaite, D., Mazzuca, C., Montalti, M., Villani, C., & Woodin, G. (2023). Consensus Paper: Current Perspectives on Abstract Concepts and Future Research Directions. Journal of Cognition, 6(1): 62, pp. 1–26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.238

Abstract: Abstract concepts are relevant to a wide range of disciplines, including cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, cognitive, social, and affective neuroscience, and philosophy. This consensus paper synthesizes the work and views of researchers in the field, discussing current perspectives on theoretical and methodological issues, and recommendations for future research. In this paper, we urge researchers to go beyond the traditional abstract-concrete dichotomy and consider the multiple dimensions that characterize concepts (e.g., sensorimotor experience, social interaction, conceptual metaphor), as well as the mediating influence of linguistic and cultural context on conceptual representations. We also promote the use of interactive methods to investigate both the comprehension and production of abstract concepts, while also focusing on individual differences in conceptual representations. Overall, we argue that abstract concepts should be studied in a more nuanced way that takes into account their complexity and diversity, which should permit us a fuller, more holistic understanding of abstract cognition.

From the article:

For example, when contrasted with concrete concepts, abstract concepts are typically expressed by words with a later Age of Acquisition, and through linguistic explanations rather than denoting their referents directly (linguistic Modality of Acquisition; Wauters et al., 2003). They also tend to be less imageable, have lower Body Object Interaction scores (BOI: Tillotson et al., 2008; Pexman et al., 2019), and be less easily linked to specific contexts (contextual availability; Schwanenflugel & Stowe, 1989). Abstract concepts are also more variable across participants and cultures (Wang & Bi, 2021) and are generally less iconic (Lupyan & Winter, 2018) than concrete concepts.

Later:

The multidimensional nature of abstract concepts means that defining them purely based on whether they are perceivable or not (i.e., as concrete or abstract) fails to capture their complexity (e.g., Barsalou, Dutriaux & Scheepers, 2018; Borghi et al., 2017), and indeed can even be misleading. Banks and Connell (2022) used the Brysbaert et al. (2014) concreteness ratings to analyze the structure of semantic categories collected in a category production (semantic fluency) task, examining the concreteness of the concepts that comprise ostensibly concrete (e.g., animal, furniture) and abstract (e.g., science, unit of time) categories. Although members of concrete categories overall were more highly rated on concreteness, many (e.g., metal: silver, hat: beret) unexpectedly had similarly high concreteness ratings to more abstract category members (e.g., profession: lawyer, social relationship: teammate). Indeed, certain abstract concepts such as beauty or fitness have been associated with sensory and motor areas of the brain (temporo-occipital visual and fronto-parietal motor areas, respectively; Harpainter et al., 2020). Furthermore, when sensorimotor experience is measured via multiple individual modalities (e.g., Lynott et al., 2020; Speed & Brysbaert, 2021; Vergallito et al., 2020), the concrete-abstract distinction becomes even less clear. When the verbally-produced category members from Banks and Connell (2022) were analyzed based on their grounding in multiple perceptual modalities (vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, interoception) and actions involving specific parts of the body (the head, hands/arms, feet/legs, torso and mouth) many abstract category members were in fact found to be strongly grounded in sensorimotor experience (e.g. sport, social gathering, art form; Banks & Connell, 2021) – that is, the concrete-abstract distinction was much less apparent.

Comment: I note, as an extreme example, that sodium chloride is a concrete physical substance, but the concept is abstract, as opposed to the concept, salt, which is concrete. Less, extreme, animals are all physical things, but the concept, animal, seems to be abstractly defined, the same with plant. Try to produce compact physical descriptions that encompass all plants or all animals. It is between difficult and impossible. What all animals seem to have in common are the roles they can play with respect to verbs such as see, hear, smell, run, jump, eat, and so forth, in contrast to plants and mere physical objects. Similarly, plants can live, grow, and die, while physical objects cannot. And then we have terms such as chair and table, which seem best defined in terms of their affordances for people rather than their physical characteristics, which can vary widely.

The article continues with some more discussion and offers this: "any theories have also argued that our understanding and representation of abstract concepts relies more on language than the sensorimotor dimension, and particularly linguistic distributional relations (e.g., Borghi, 2020; Crutch & Warrington, 2005; Dove et al., 2020; Vigliocco et al., 2009)."

And so forth. An interesting and useful piece of work.

Sex and the City Redux

Claire Moses, As ‘Sex and the City’ Ages, Some Find the Cosmo Glass Half-Empty, NYTimes, April 13, 2024.

Twenty years since the series finale of “Sex and the City” aired, a new generation of television watchers has grown into adulthood. After all of the episodes were released on Netflix this month, media watchers wondered how the show — and Carrie’s behavior — might hold up for Gen Z.

Would they be able to handle the occasional raunchiness of the show, the sometimes toxic relationships? Were the references outdated? “Can Gen Z Even Handle Sex and the City?” Vanity Fair asked. (For its part, Gen Z seems to vacillate between being uninterested and lightly appalled about what they consider to be a period piece.)

The show had a very different effect on its longtime fans, many of them a generation or two older. When it aired, “Sex and the City” changed the conversation around how women dated, developed friendships and moved about the world in their 30s and 40s.

Even if some of the show’s character arcs aged poorly, many of its original fans still relate to Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, no matter how unrealistic it may have been to live on the Upper East Side with a walk-in closet full of Manolo Blahniks on the salary of a weekly newspaper columnist.

What Candace Bushnell thinks:

“There was a romance to dating that younger women tell me doesn’t really exist anymore,” Bushnell said in a phone interview. “Now internet dating and using dating apps — it feels more like a job.”

For Carrie and her friends, dating is more of a pastime: They meet men at gallery openings, cocktail parties, book launches, a Yankees game, the gym, and more. The four of them also have weekly brunches and endless cocktails where they dish about their latest exploits.

Bushnell, who is touring her one-woman show “True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City,” said that the show gave people a new way of looking at their romantic lives.

The test of time is a hard one to pass, and the show’s record is far from perfect. But its frank discussions of sex and gendered expectations seemed to open doors for other shows after it, including “Girls” and “Insecure,” and helped change the image of single women in their 30s.

Others:

For longtime fans who are now Carrie’s age or older, the show has gone from aspirational to relatable to recognizable — again, minus those hundreds of pairs of stilettos.

Watching the show now, Marta Barberini, 37, said, “you’re not talking about your future self; you’re talking about your present self.”

See my earlier Media Notes post: The Seven Year Itch, Mad Men, Sex and the City [Media Notes 117].

Hoboken sky flower

Innovation through prompting: Democratizing educational technology

Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick, Instructors as Innovators: A future-focused approach to new AI learning opportunities, with prompts, Social Science Research Network, April 21, 2024:

Abstract: This paper explores how instructors can leverage generative AI to create personalized learning experiences for students that transform teaching and learning. We present a range of AI-based exercises that enable novel forms of practice and application including simulations, mentoring, coaching, and co-creation. For each type of exercise, we provide prompts that instructors can customize, along with guidance on classroom implementation, assessment, and risks to consider. We also provide blueprints, prompts that help instructors create their own original prompts. Instructors can leverage their content and pedagogical expertise to design these experiences, putting them in the role of builders and innovators. We argue that this instructor-driven approach has the potential to democratize the development of educational technology by enabling individual instructors to create AI exercises and tools tailored to their students' needs. While the exercises in this paper are a starting point, not a definitive solutions, they demonstrate AI's potential to expand what is possible in teaching and learning.

Here's a substack column by Ethan Mollick that is based on that paper: Innovation through prompting: Democratizing educational technology, April 22, 2024.

Three contrasting structures: Hoboken Manhattan Hoboken

Lex Fridman talks with Ted Gibson about language, LLMs, and other things [i.e. Linguistics 101 for LLMs]

This is a long podcast and I’ve not listened to all of it. I’m excerpting part of the conversation – which I’ve taken from this transcript – which speak to two of my hobby horses: 1) the apparent lack of linguistic knowledge in the LLM community, and 2) the idea that LLMs are built on relationships between words. On the first point, I’m using Lex Fridman as a proxy for the LLM community, though he does not work on LLMs. But he is trained in computer science and machine learning, is generally familiar with LLMs, and has interviewed a number of experts in machine learning. I was just a little surprised to hear that the idea of sentence structure being tree-like seemed new to him. I thought “everyone” knew that, where by “everyone” I mean anyone in the last 50 to 60 years with a technical interest in how the mind words.

The second point is where things get interesting. In the discussion of language Gibson hammers home the distinction between form and meaning in language. And then, in discussing LLMS, he talks about them as being based on language forms, but not meaning. I think that’s right – keeping in mind that I use those terms a bit differently than they’re being used here (see this post, for example), but not in a way that’s inconsistent with what I believe Gibson is saying.

NOTE: The machine-generated transcript the transcript has the names reversed (as of today, Apr. 22), so I have corrected that. Nor have I checked it against the video for accuracy.

Linguistic knowledge and dependency theory

Let’s start with a bit from the beginning of the conversation:

LEX FRIDMAN: (00:03:23) Did you ever come across the philosophy angle of logic? If you think about the 80s with AI, the expert systems where you try to maybe sidestep the poetry of language and some of the syntax and the grammar and all that kinda’ stuff and go to the underlying meaning that language is trying to communicate and try to somehow compress that in a computer representable way? Did you ever come across that in your studies?

EDWARD GIBSON: (00:03:50) I probably did but I wasn’t as interested in it. I was trying to do the easier problems first, the ones I thought maybe were handleable, which seems like the syntax is easier, which is just the forms as opposed to the meaning. When you’re starting talking about the meaning, that’s a very hard problem and it still is a really, really hard problem. But the forms is easier. And so I thought at least figuring out the forms of human language, which sounds really hard but is actually maybe more attractable.

LEX FRIDMAN: (00:04:19) It’s interesting. You think there is a big divide, there’s a gap, there’s a distance between form and meaning, because that’s a question you have discussed a lot with LLMs because they’re damn good at form.

EDWARD GIBSON: (00:04:33) Yeah, I think that’s what they’re good at, is form. And that’s why they’re good, because they can do form, meanings are …

LEX FRIDMAN: (00:04:39) Do you think there’s … Oh, wow. It’s an open question.

EDWARD GIBSON: (00:04:42) Yeah.

LEX FRIDMAN: (00:04:43) How close form and meaning are. We’ll discuss it but to me studying form, maybe it’s a romantic notion it gives you. Form is the shadow of the bigger meaning thing underlying language. Language is how we communicate ideas. We communicate with each other using language. In understanding the structure of that communication, I think you start to understand the structure of thought and the structure of meaning behind those thoughts and communication, to me. But to you, big gap.

This is basic, very basic. It’s not that “form is the shadow of the bigger meaning” but that syntax is (based on) the form of meaning, relationships between semantic elements.

Now we’re a bit later in the conversation where Gibson is talking about syntactic dependency.

LEX FRIDMAN: (00:10:59) [...] There’s so many things I want to ask you. Okay, let me just some basics. You mentioned dependencies a few times. What do you mean by dependencies?

EDWARD GIBSON: (00:11:12) Well, what I mean is in language, there’s three components to the structure of language. One is the sounds. Cat is C, A and T in English. I’m not talking about that part. Then there’s two meaning parts, and those are the words. And you were talking about meaning earlier. Words have a form and they have a meaning associated with them. And so cat is a full form in English and it has a meaning associated with whatever a cat is. And then the combinations of words, that’s what I’ll call grammar or syntax, that’s when I have a combination like the cat or two cats, okay, where I take two different words there and put together and I get a compositional meaning from putting those two different words together. And so that’s the syntax. And in any sentence or utterance, whatever, I’m talking to you, you’re talking to me, we have a bunch of words and we’re putting them together in a sequence, it turns out they are connected, so that every word is connected to just one other word in that sentence. And so you end up with what’s called technically a tree, it’s a tree structure, where there’s a root of that utterance, of that sentence. And then there’s a bunch of dependents, like branches from that root that go down to the words. The words are the leaves in this metaphor for a tree.

LEX FRIDMAN: (00:12:34) A tree is also a mathematical construct.

EDWARD GIBSON: (00:12:37) Yeah. It’s graph theoretical thing, exactly.

LEX FRIDMAN:(00:12:38) A graph theory thing. It’s fascinating that you can break down a sentence into a tree and then every word is hanging onto another, is depending on it. [...]

LEX FRIDMAN: (00:13:05) Can I pause on that?

EDWARD GIBSON: (00:13:06) Sure.

LEX FRIDMAN: (00:13:06) Because to me just as a layman, it is surprising that you can break down sentences in mostly all languages.

Again, this is fundamental. I suppose I had something of a preview of this sort of thing when I learned Reed-Kellogg sentence diagramming in the sixth grade. It’s still kicking around – there’s lots of stuff about it on the web – but I don’t know how routinely it’s taught these days. I learned about syntactic trees in my sophomore year when I took a course in psycholinguistics.

LEX FRIDMAN: (00:18:22) I love the terminology of agent and patient and the other ones you used. Those are linguistic terms, correct?

EDWARD GIBSON: (00:18:29) Those are for meaning, those are meaning. And subject and object are generally used for position. Subject is just the thing that comes before the verb and the object is the one that comes after the verb. The agent is the thing doing, that’s what that means. The subject is often the person doing the action, the thing.

LEX FRIDMAN: (00:18:48) Okay, this is fascinating. How hard is it to form a tree in general? Is there a procedure to it? If you look at different languages, is it supposed to be a very natural … Is it automatable or is there some human genius involved in construction …

EDWARD GIBSON: (00:19:01) I think it’s pretty automatable at this point. People can figure out the words are. They can figure out the morphemes, technically morphemes are the minimal meaning units within a language, okay. And so when you say eats or drinks, it actually has two morphemes in English. There’s the root, which is the verb. And then there’s some ending on it which tells you that’s the third person singular.

I think that anyone working with LLMs should be conversant with the distinction between the meaning-bearing aspect of language and the positional aspect. They may not need this familiarity to work with transformers, but they should know that the distinction is basic to language mechanism. After all, the positionality of tokens is something that is central to the transformer architecture. They should know that it’s central to language itself and not just an aspect of the transformer architecture.

Blossoms

Emotion Recollected in Tranquility [affective technology]

I originally published this in The Valve in May of 2009, where it is followed by an interesting conversation. Keith Oatley elaborated at OnFiction, citing relevant empirical studies.

* * * * *

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

—William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

In his 1997 best-seller, How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker suggested that, however important art may be to humans, it is not part of our specifically biological nature:

We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another pleasure technology. In this chapter I will suggest that the arts are a third. (p. 525)

This triggered a backlash of arguments asserting that, no, the arts are not mere mental cheesecake, they are an essential component of human nature, our biological nature.

I was somewhat bemused by the whole fracas. While I have a long standing interest in the neural basis of the arts, I find thinking about biological adaptation to be frustratingly difficult, something I’d prefer to ignore. My editor for Beethoven’s Anvil, William Frucht, however, thought otherwise. And so I dutifully joined the parade of those who shilled for the biological bona fides of art and argued that music was indeed biologically adaptive. Specifically, music reduced anxiety in the group and thereby made it more fit to encounter real challenges and dangers. More recently, and inspired by Pinker's own The Stuff of Thought, I argued that story-telling allows us to share perceptions, feelings, and values that we cannot talk about.

I now have another proposal to offer, one based in a line of thinking I began entertaining in the mid-1970s when I learned about state-dependent memory. I first learned about state dependence when I read a review of the literature on altered states of consciousness in which Roland Fischer reported an experiment originally performed by D. Goodwin (“The Cartography of Inner Space” in Hallucinations, Siegel and West, eds. 1975, p. 199). Subjects were first made drunk and then asked to memorize nonsense syllables. When their recall was tested while sober they performed poorly. Their recall dramatically improved, however, if they once again became drunk. More recently, Daniel L. Schacter has written of mood-congruent memory retrieval: “Experiments have shown that sad moods make it easier to remember negative experiences, like failure and rejection, whereas happy moods make it easier to remember pleasant experiences, like success and acceptance” (Searching for Memory, 1996, p. 211). Recall of experience is best when the one’s brain is in the same state it was in when one had that experience. That is what is meant by state dependence.

 

Given that motivation and emotion are mediated by over a hundred neurotransmitters and neuromodulators (Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 1998), the state dependent nature of memory has profound implications for our ability to recall our personal experience. As I have previously argued:

If records of personal experience are [biochemically biased], especially in the case of strongly emotionally charged experience, then how can we get a coherent view of ourselves and of our world? The world of a person who is ravenously hungry is different from the world of that same person when he or she is consumed with sexual desire. Yet it is the same person in both cases. And the apple, which was so insignificant when sexually hungry—to the point where that apple wasn't part of the world at all—becomes a central object in the world once sexual desire has been satisfied and hunger asserts itself. Regardless of the person's [biochemical state], it is still the same apple.

If this is how the nervous system works, then how does one achieve a state of mind in which one can as easily remember an apple as a sexual object? That is to say, how does the brain achieve a biochemically “neutral” state of mind from which one can recall or imagine any kind of experience?

I suggest that story-telling is a way of accomplishing this. Parents tell stories to children in a setting that is comfortable and safe and those stories are generally calibrated with a sense of what interests and pleases the child, but is not too frightening. Children hear stories in which characters are hungry or thirsty, but eventually find food and water, in which characters are lost and frightened, but then found, in which important relationships are imperiled, but restored, in which new relationships are formed and, in time, in which important relationships may be lost forever. They are allowed to experience a wide range of emotional behavior in a context where they are safe.

In the course of arguing that literary works trigger emotionally-charged personal memories, Patrick Colm Hogan tells about a two-old boy’s use of the Peter Rabbit story (The Mind and Its Stories, 2003, p. 67):

Kurt . . . hears the Peter Rabbit story and becomes fascinated with it. He listens to the story repeatedly. He then retells the story, such that “real-life events that Kurt had experienced . . . in the company of his mother and grandmother . . . are attributed to Peter Rabbit and his mother.” The fact that Kurt integrates his own memories into his retellings of the story – his explicit “personalization” of these stories . . . suggests that memories played a part in his enthusiastic response to the story initially.

Yes. But also, and in view of biochemical reality, I suggest that the story gives him a way of accessing and organizing those memories.

And not only young children, but teens and adults experience stories in ways that ensure communal approval. In oral cultures, stories are experienced among friends and familiars. One hears the grunts and murmurs of approval of our fellows, the common laughter, but also the communal sighs of disma; these mingle together and establish the story itself as a good and necessary pleasure. In literate cultures we may read stories in private, but we discuss them among our friends, or in school. Theatrical performance, movies and television are frequently experienced in the company of others. In one way or another, literary experience is institutionalized as shared communal experience.

My argument is that this communal experience of stories helps us to create neural circuits that give us the ability to recall a wide range of experience without our having to be in a neurochemical state approximating that which mediated that experience. Stories – as well as poems and plays – allow us to experience a wide range of desires and feelings in an arena where our personal lives are secure and protected, where our experience is socially approved. Without the constant experience of emotionally charged stories, our memories would be captive to the current mood.

Thus we do not have to be sexually aroused to recall occasions of sexual arousal, nor do we have to be have to be angry or grieving to recall occasions of great anger or the darkest grief. The stories we have learned in the company of others have created a “level playing field” in the mind, neutral ground from which we can survey the full range of human experience. If we can, perhaps in private, step back from the living of life to recall and examine our feelings and actions, that is because our experiences with stories have created a rich weave of mental prototypes through which we can recall and interrogate even the most densely emotional of our experiences. Conversely, if we cannot do this, then how can we construct a coherent view of ourselves? If the sexually aroused self has trouble recalling any life episodes other than those involving sexual arousal, and the vengeful self can recall only incidents of vengeance, and the thirsty self has little sense of any geography beyond that leading to water, then how can we see ourselves and our fellows whole? Such a life would seem to be one of almost constant dissociation (cf. my article on the self in life and fiction).

This view is different in emphasis from the common notion that stories are useful because they allow us to gather and share information. My argument is not about the usefulness of the information enfolded in stories, but about how the social situation of story telling facilitates our ability to recall incidents of a kind captured in stories. The usefulness of that information is of little or no account if we cannot access that information except from within very specific states of mind. Story-telling creates a mental arena in which we can review and become self-consciously aware of the full range of our feelings and behaviors, where we can see them in relation to one another.

* * * * *

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to consider the implications of this idea for the value of psychoanalysis both as therapeutic practice and as a theory of mind.

No mas

Literature and Emotion [affective technology]

I'd originally posted this back in 2011, but I'm bumping it to the top 1) on general principle, and 2) because it's relevant to some of my current thinking about literature and our experience of it.

 

A correspondent recently brought up the topic of emotional response to literature. It’s an important topic, one I’ve thought about from time to time, but I don’t have any particular insight into it. Still, I’ve put together a few thoughts.

First, an excerpt my review of William Flesch, Comeupance (Harvard UP 2007). Flesch introduces the notion of vicarious experience, which is the most interesting idea on emotion in literature that I’ve read since Susanne Langer’s more general idea of virtual experience. Then I consider a childhood practice by way of looking at a section from Tom Sawyer, where Tom deals with negative feelings by running away to become a pirate. Finally, I have abstracts about and links to two old posts, originally the The Valve (now defunct), but now copied to New Savanna.

Vicarious Experience: William Flesch

Excerpted from Altrusim, Gossip, and the Vicarious Apprehension of Human Living, Twentieth-Century Literature 55.4, Winter 2009, 629-633.

* * * * *

[Flesch’s] point is that, when we experience fiction, we monitor the lives of fictional characters using the same bio-behavioral “equipment” we use in monitoring our fellows as we keep “score” of their “credits” and “debits” in the “group account.” The need to monitor our fellows gives us a vicarious interest in their actions, and that vicarious interest is emotionally charged.

Flesch develops this notion of vicarious experience through reference to David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in particular, and Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The anger we feel upon witnessing transgression comes not through some identification with the victim or victims of the transgression, but belongs to the affective component of our social monitoring system. This anger is, in effect, a sentiment on behalf of the group, not on behalf of any particular individuals. The pleasure we feel in just punishment or just reward, Flesh argues, is similarly vicarious and on behalf of the group, not some particular individual or individuals.

How do we monitor our fellows? There is direct observation, a behavioral mode we share with other animals. But we can also exchange tales about them, we can gossip. Flesch thus argues that fiction is, in effect, gossip about imaginary people.

To my mind, the most important consequence of this position has to do with our emotional engagement in the lives of literary characters. As Flesch remarks in a footnote criticizing “orthodox” literary Darwinists: “they treat literary characters as motivated by the same things that motivate real humans, rather than as representations to whom real humans react. It’s our reactions that psychology can analyze, not the actions of literary characters” (p. 231). Flesch thus does away with the nasty problems inherent in the vague notion of “identification” that he regards as being grounded in a mistaken conception of imitation. Given that vicarious interest “is an irreducible and primary attitude that we take toward others” (p. 15) Flesh goes on to argue that identification, such as it is, must in fact depend on our vicarious experience of a character.

Affective Technology: Mark Twain

Excerpted from my essay, Talking with Nature in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, November 2004, downloadable from SSRN. I'd be like to hear from anyone who employed this strategy at one time or who knows children who've done so.

* * * * *

When I was young my parents would punish me by sending me to my room. Not only was I thus unable to continue doing whatever it was that I had been doing, but I was also separated from the world in general and, of course, separated from my parents in particular. While confined to my room I would feel aggrieved and brood for a bit and sooner or later imagine a scenario in which I had died somehow. I would continue the story by imagining my parents grieving for me, and saying how they had wronged me, but it's too late now because I'm dead. By then I would start feeling better.

This, of course, is a form of play, though it is not the sort of thing that typically comes to mind when we think of childhood play. But play it is, for it required me to imagine myself in a role quite different from my actual situation. It also required that I imagine a situation in which my parents were as bereft as I felt, thereby making me superior to them.

I have no idea how common this particular mood-altering play scenario is, but something like it seems to have informed Chapters 13 through 15 of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. While the incidents in those chapters may have been based on Twain's childhood experience, those chapters are themselves works of fiction. We can read them in an hour or so, but they depict fictional events that transpired over a course of days.

As Chapter 13 opens, Tom is feeling aggrieved. His aunt had recently punished him for a prank he had played on the family cat and Becky Thatcher was ignoring his romantic overtures.

Tom's mind was made up now. He was gloomy and desperate. He was a forsaken, friendless boy, he said; nobody loved him; when they found out what they had driven him to, perhaps they would be sorry; he had tried to do right and get along, but they would not let him; since nothing would do them but to be rid of him, let it be so; and let them blame him for the consequences -- why shouldn't they? What right had the friendless to complain? Yes, they had forced him to it at last: he would lead a life of crime.

Tom encounters his friend Joe Harper, who is of a similar mind, and they join up with Huck Finn and run away to Jackson's Island, where they intend to live a fine life as pirates.

Late in their second day they hear canon shot over the water. Tom concludes that the townsfolk suspected the boys had drowned and so were trying to bring their bodies to the surface. That night—we are now in Chapter 15—Tom slips back to town and sneaks into his house. There he listens to his Aunt Polly and to Joe's mother commiserating over their loss, affirming that, though a bit devilish, their boys were good at heart. These words had a powerful effect on Tom:

Tom was snuffling, now, himself — and more in pity of himself than anybody else. He could hear Mary crying, and putting in a kindly word for him from time to time. He began to have a nobler opinion of himself than ever before. Still, he was sufficiently touched by his aunt's grief to long to rush out from under the bed and overwhelm her with joy — and the theatrical gorgeousness of the thing appealed strongly to his nature, too, but he resisted and lay still.

Tom then returned to the island in time for breakfast and "recounted (and adorned) his adventures. They were a vain and boastful company of heroes when the tale was done."

Though I do not recall the details of any of the childhood fantasies I employed to restore my sense of well-being, I rather suspect that Twain's three chapters are more richly realized than anything I managed to conjure up. The most interesting aspect of Twain's story is that the boys ran away to become pirates. That is, within the means available to them, they did their best to become free and autonomous actors rather than being bound to adults in the role of a child. It was from within that bit of adventuresome pretense that Tom overheard the heart-warming conversation. Though sorely tempted, he did not immediately break from his pretended autonomy. Rather he returned to the island and thus afforded Twain the pleasure of extending this theme through four more chapters worth of variations.

Seven Sacred Words: An Open Letter to Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker has been a severe critic of literary studies. I open the letter by showing that arguments he makes in the final two chapters of The Stuff of Thought can be fashioned into an account of why literature is so important to us. I go on to give a brief and sympathetic account of what’s happened in literary studies since the 1950s. Pinker gives a brief reply. Think of this as a companion piece to my note on emotion recollected in tranquility.

Emotion Recollected in Tranquility

This is another take on why literature is so important. It gives a neural interpretation of Wordsworth’s famous characterization of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility and argues that emotionally charged literature facilitates the creation of an emotionally neutral mental “space” in which memories of all kinds can be evoked. Think of this is a companion piece to my open letter to Pinker.