I'm amused by the writing style of Patricia Marx, whose new book "Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties" is the main thing I was reading in my Kindle yesterday.
July 15, 2015
"The three-pound wrinkly glop of glopoplasm in your skull contains about a hundred billion neurons, one for every human being who ever be’d."
"Each neuron can hook up with up to ten thousand others (polygamy-style, not serially monogamously). Hence there are at least one hundred trillion neural connections in your brain, which is more than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy, but who’s counting."
I'm amused by the writing style of Patricia Marx, whose new book "Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties" is the main thing I was reading in my Kindle yesterday.
I'm amused by the writing style of Patricia Marx, whose new book "Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties" is the main thing I was reading in my Kindle yesterday.
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De gustibus etc.. I found the style to be affected and annoying by the end of the title of the blog post.
""Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties" and "Lenny" on the same day.
Hmmmm.
I am Laslo.
To be fair, that's the most affected and annoying sentence in the book, probably. I picked it out because of it's over-the-top quality. Maybe it's more likable when encountered in the overall flow.
The previous few sentences:
"[Years ago] most biologists would have told you that your brain is fully formed during childhood and, like a photograph after it’s been developed, is doomed to degrade thereafter with neurons (nerve cells) fading like pigment on paper until you succumb to senility. Forget senility. Today we regard Alzheimer’s and other dementias as diseases rather than as consequences of normal aging. Moreover, we now consider the brain to be as labile as a digital image in the hands of a Photoshop fiend."
Marx, Patricia (2015-07-14). Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (p. 37). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.
I mean its...
Let's be less stupid!
Al Franken writes that way.
From a purely naturalistic POV, everything you believe that is true, and everything you believe is false, are just states of your neural machine, and that state is not dependent on whether anything in all of the universe can even properly be defined as true or false.
Today we regard Alzheimer’s and other dementias as diseases rather than as consequences of normal aging.
Alzheimer’s disease has always been regarded as a disease, that is why it's called Alzheimer’s disease.
"Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties"
Judging by those excerpts, the attempt is failing.
It must take that many possible interconnections to allow it to work as it does -- accidentally.
While the its/it's rule is on the table, let's discuss that. It's stupid. It's like the puncuation-before-the-quote-mark rule. Makes no sense. No more sense than the each-sentence-must-have-a-subject-and-a-verb rule.
When I was in grade school, our English teacher taught us that we must not use an exclamation point except in sentences that began with "what" or "how", as in "What a strange person!" and "How fine a trombone!"
Perhaps I will have less of a stick up the ass when I have drunk more coffee. It often happens.
Alzheimer’s disease has always been regarded as a disease
They symptoms have not always been regarded as a disease. They were seen as natural consequences of aging – thus "senility", the thing that happens to the old. Like all the other crappy things that happen to you as you age.
Around the actual neuroscientists are some serious, responsible folks looking to think, while some others are looking to reinforce a worldview and some others looking for something to write about and make a buck (America never lacks for explainers, and things to talk about at those cafes near universities in the suburbs. TED talks and Aspen Ideas Festivals)
Out there in the public are many people who read magazines for ideas about how to live and what to do, and not much else.
Somewhere out there are ideologues, radicals and pseudo-radicals, people who will be all too happy to attach empathy to 'science.' victimhood to 'art,' and keep their ideas going.
I just love it when scientists get all precious like this. It's just like, they're human too! They've got glop for brains too, just like us, and they've got the prose to prove it, too!
It'll be easier when we shed this mortal coil.
"Alzheimer’s disease has always been regarded as a disease, that is why it's called Alzheimer’s disease."
Surely, there was a point before which it was called Alzheimer's disease.
Terry said...
From a purely naturalistic POV, everything you believe that is true, and everything you believe is false, are just states of your neural machine, and that state is not dependent on whether anything in all of the universe can even properly be defined as true or false.
7/15/15, 9:31 AM
I wouldn't bet the ranch on that. Just because you believe you can fly doesn't mean you can leap off a tall building and fly. At least not on this planet.
I'm old enough to remember when Alzheimer's was not a disease, but a fact of life, in spite of the fact that many of us knew people way old who were not senile, and others who were relatively young but senile.
"I wouldn't bet the ranch on that. Just because you believe you can fly doesn't mean you can leap off a tall building and fly."
I know what you mean, Cubanbob, but the fact that people do sometimes think they can fly and jump off of buildings tends to prove my point. The person who does that has a state of their neural machine that seems valid to them, but does not reflect the state of the "real" world as the rest of us experience it. From a naturalistic point of view, we do not experience reality, our experience of the real world is actually a state of the neural machine in our brains. The division between real world and mental state is not black and white. If you ask me my favorite flavor of ice cream, and I lie and say it is strawberry, in what sense is that a true or a false statement? It isn't a question that can be answered rationally.
@ Terry its one thing as you say about the flavor of ice cream and other subjective realities and it's another when dealing with objective reality. Birdman's neural machine believed he could fly. The universe through the force of gravity begged to differ. There are objective realities that are not depended on our perceptions as interpreted by our neural engines.
Our belief that there are objective realities that are not dependent on perceptions is just another state of the neural machine.
Usually what we call a rational belief is dependent a causal chain that can be replicated. I look up, I see a blue sky. You look up at the same time from the same place, you see a blue sky. It's rational to say the sky is blue.
Then there are irrational observations (I look up and see angels that you do not see), and non-rational observations that are neither rational nor irrational (the blue sky is beautiful).
All beliefs, rational, irrational, and non-rational, are just states of a mechanistic, neuron firing machine in our skulls, if you are a materialist. You make no choices about anything, ever, not even about whether you believe if you can make choices.
This is all from Wittgenstein and Anscombe. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." The problem is that the most important part of existence -- the subjective experience of reality -- lies in the region whereof we cannot speak.
Why isn't serial monogamy polygamy? Serial polygamy, if you will.
Surely, there was a point before which it was called Alzheimer's disease.
Surely, there was a point before which you would have known that that sentence doesn't mean what you intend it to mean. Attempt to maintain those mental faculties!
Anyway, Dr. Alzheimer described his eponymous disease in 1901, and distinguished "it" from general senescence, which of course has been well-known forever.
Funny, I don't associate "stupid" with my mother's dementia. Her reasoning is fine if you present her with facts in a very short time span. (I confess to testing her for my own amusement.) Her problem is that her short term memory is shot. I realized in reading through this post that Mom has reached the poet's ideal; she totally lives in the moment. And that is as annoying as hell, what the teenagers amongst us call stupid.
"Surely, there was a point before which it was called Alzheimer's disease."
Probably. I can't remember.
I mean its...
The it's-its conundrum has to be my most common grammatical mistake. I always want to write "it's" and I never want to write "its." Apparently some part of my brain is convinced that "its" is not a word.
I mean, look at that thing. Its. You're a damn non-word!
Anyway, I have now trained my brain, more or less, to go back whenever I write the word "it's" and to say in my mind, "it is," to see if it fits or not. If I was smarter I wouldn't have to do this, probably.
Seriously, its, who the fuck came up with that one?
One of my favorite insult lines came from one of my Food Animal professors, a good old boy from Iowa who used to say, "If a cow had one more neuron, she could make a synapse."
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