We are The Brothers Frank.

While Asleep

Two girls are sitting across from one another, eating lunch.  Chick chick chick chick chick. That is the sound of their iPhones being typed on, and it is the only sound coming from their table, because each girl is as immersed in her 3.5-inch color screen as anyone ever gets immersed into anything.  Chick chick chick chick chick.

I hope they’re texting each other.  I know they’re not, because when people get immersed in SMS exchanges, they make the same expressions of sympathy and attention they’d make in conversation, only they make them to their phones.  As if the phones need to feel listened to.  Maybe they do, I don’t know.

If I had an iPhone, and if I were the type to observe Lent, I might give up my iPhone for Lent.  Last night in my dream someone said “For Lent, I’m giving up.”  I hope no one actually said that.

There is a theory about consciousness which states that it (consciousness) cannot happen in the brain, that a brain alone does not suffice for producing conscious experiences.  A brain is necessary, yes, but it must also have a world to interact with.  Consciousness, in this theory, is fundamentally an interaction between an organism and its environment; and without both organism and environment, no consciousness.  It is like the performance of a symphony.  Where is the symphony in space?  What one thing causes it?  There are no answers to those questions.

If this view is right, then dreaming is something of a mystery.  If we can have conscious experiences while dreaming, while we’re disconnected from the world and deep in sleep, then it seems like the brain is sufficient for consciousness after all.

One philosopher’s response is that dream experiences are not really very much like conscious experiences.  Dreams are unstable, incoherent; our waking experiences are comparatively stable.  Maybe the brain is sufficient for dream experiences, but not for consciousness proper.  (The philosopher who says all this is Alva Noë, whose book Out of Our Heads is excellent.)

I think something is wrong with this response.  Many of my dreams are indeed much stranger than waking life, but I wake from my most vivid dreams remembering events that never happened.  These dreams feel real.  If the brain is sufficient for dreams like these, it seems to me sufficient for conscious experience.

There is another response that, though wilder, tempts me.  The force of the dream objection comes from the assumption that we’re disconnected from the world while we sleep.  Perhaps we’re not.  It’s conceivable that during vivid dreams, we’re interacting with the world in a way that the perception science can’t yet account for.  If in fact this is what we’re doing, then it still makes sense to claim that consciousness is fundamentally an interaction between an organism and the world.

I recognize that to make this response is to posit a mysterious way of interacting with the world while dreaming.  And yes, that may sound a little weird.  But to someone who has dreamed a conversation and later discovered that the other person dreamed the very same conversation on the very same night, a mysterious way to interact with the world may strike him as just that—mysterious, but not implausible.

I am one such person.

Leaving the Movie Theater

Yes, Roland Barthes has an essay called “Leaving the Movie Theater,” and no, this is not that essay.  This isn’t even an essay at all.  Has anyone coined a good one-word phrase for “short bit of writing on a weblog”?  Is it “post”?  “Post” sounds stupid.

Anyway, the movie theater.  Seems like all theaters have at least twice as many exits as entrances, and tonight I left by one of those extra ones in the back.  Hadn’t done that since I was a kid.  The back exits usually lead through dim, unfinished hallways to doors that, although they open right to the street, are mostly invisible to anyone who walks by.  It’s a special kind of camouflage called irrelevance.  Everybody knows those doors only let out, not in, so eventually we learn not to waste effort even seeing them.

This particular back exit indeed led to one of those doors, but it led with charm.  The hallway was tiled, the lights were not dim but moody, and the bathrooms—there were bathrooms back there—were classier than the ones in the more travelled part of the theater.

Soon I got lost.  Yes, in a hallway.  Look, it twists left and right, has two staircases (the first of which seems to exist only to give the second purpose; it leads to lower but otherwise normal bit of hallway, which leads to the second staircase, which in turn takes you right back to ground level), and some parts of the hallway are pretty convincing imitations of small rooms.  Really.  I wouldn’t mind gathering a few friends there for drinks.

And then it hit me.  Someone is using this hidden, classy, back hallway as a secret cocktail bar for people much cooler than I am.  They enter late at night through the doors that no one notices.

Or, if someone isn’t doing this, someone should.  I’m adding it to the list.

The list, by the way, is the List of Careers to Explore Once Thesis is Done.  “Musician” is on there too.

This Was a Bad Idea

It’s apparently more difficult to hit a parked car than a moving one.  Yes?  So yesterday, after nearly getting hit by a bike, I decided to start behaving like a parked car and stop dead any time a cyclist might maybe come near me, thinking I’d be harder to hit this way.

But no, I nearly got hit by a bike three times today, and at least one of the riders gave me a look like I’d insulted him.

It occurred to me shortly thereafter that I had insulted him.  His face said that most bike messengers are very good at avoiding pedestrians indeed, that they manage it all the time, that they’re used to people walking slowly in straight lines, and that, come to think of it, I’d lived in New York for three-and-a-half years before even almost-hitting a bike, and I’ve still never actually been hit by one.

So I’d come up with a bad solution to a problem that never really existed.  And I’m beginning to wonder how often I do this without realizing it.

And beginning to wonder is probably as far as I’ll get, since already I can tell I don’t want to know.

It’s Like When

I think I can explain why I’m so excited about this, but only if I tell a very short story first.

When an acquaintance of mine, a former NYU grad student, got offered a job at U.C. Berkeley, I told him he’d landed the closest thing that professional philosophy has to a major-label record deal.  I wasn’t trying to explain to him the awesomeness of his situation—he knew that already.  I was, rather, trying to empathize, and I seem to understand things best by analogy with the music world.  This former grad student happened to play in a rock band once upon a time, so I know he got it.  And he even laughed some, though maybe at me.

I bring this up because I’m currently taking an ethics course from Thomas Nagel, which, in music, would be like taking a songwriting course from Paul McCartney.  Nagel is one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, and not because he writes things like “Yesterday / All my troubles seemed so far away”.  No, he writes things like this:

“There is a persistent temptation to turn philosophy into something less difficult and more shallow than it is.  It is an extremely difficult subject, and no exception to the general rule that creative efforts are rarely successful. I do not feel equal to the problems treated in this book.  They seem to me to require an order of intelligence wholly different from mine.  Others who have tried to address the central questions of philosophy will recognize the feeling.”

Thomas Nagel, humble genius.

Incidentally, the original first two lines of “Yesterday” were these: “Scrambled eggs / oh my baby how I love your legs”.  I’d like very much to hear them sung.

: .

C