Meteoroids from Mindspace

a psychological inside report

2012-01-02T03:23:00.000-08:00

... into the minds of political and economical BIG leaders, from Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: "A divine hand passed over a fly. "You shall be an elephant" resounded. Before there was time for a second hand to jerk once, then twice on the face of a clock, the inevitable came to pass: the fly's little heels rested on the earth through the soles of an elephant while his short, black, thread-like sucker curled inside the enormous grey trunk as it rolled up. But the very nature of this miracle was a sort of non-affectation, an amateurism, a vexing kind of "not right": if a psychologist were to snoop his eyeglasses under the thick skin of this newly elephantized existence, he would at once observe that the fly soul didn't reach all the way out to fill it. ... To sum it up: this elephant with the soul of a fly is the Flylephant." (more)

"So much beauty in the world, so few eyes to see it."

2012-01-02T03:14:00.000-08:00

A writer "considered by some to be the last genuine "anarchist" or free thinking writer of western culture by his humorous and provocative although lucid and profound view of human relations and society. His writing style does not submit to an academic or experimental approach which makes him a vivid, catchy storyteller, without the boredom nor artificial ambiguity of some classical (which he is) or avantgarde writers. The sageness of his works are monuments to the freedom of being and thought against materialism, the contemporary obsession with consumption and productivity, the arrogance and abuse of authority, the vanity of social formalities and the injustice of the wealthy towards the poor." (and a review)

The first paradigm change

2011-12-11T06:53:00.001-08:00

Have you seen Herzog's "forgotten dreams" cave movie? It initially amazes by showing the active use of the cave wall's unevenness by the cave people, which was either compensated or used as 3D - visualisation-tool. To my impression, there were too very smart tries to use something like perspective and visual tricks to simulate moving pictures, all with respect to the way, the paintings were viewed and the associations such hunter-gatherers should have had.

A remarkable story of two german scientists who fled the war by hiding in the Namibian desert tells how near and strange at the same time our hunter-gatherer past is. I stumbled across that old story when reading this fascinating story about siberian tigers, their antedeluvial ecosystem and the people's (self)destructive interactions with it. This short part of a documentary shows what seems to me as a kind of archetype of experience, explaining the "spiritual" aspect of hunter-gatherer life.

And it leads to questions coming up when somewhat strange figurines of pregnant or obese women were shown: Could it be that the association of sexuality with pregnancy were unknown those times? E.g. scattered within reports on some recent tribes, their beliefs, and new observations from modern people make one wonder if that association is extremly un-obvious even for people who know nature and animals very well. What if the early hunter-gatherers did not have that insight? 9 months is a long time, esp. when pregnancy can stay unnoticed for a long time by overweight women, pregnancy was until modern medicine so dangerous for women that nature had a good
reason to make it's cause a mystery (e.g. this initiative), enlightening observations of animal behaviour may have come through animal breeding, but not by hunting. That would have huge implications, e.g. the not-so-good-looking figurines, the mystery of pregnancy (and why it sometimes occures more often) and the role of women and men etc. A recent report about strange figurines (another link) discusses the gender of early shamans, but I guess it was even stranger: Male shamans initiated sometimes by surgically "switching gender". The discovery of the link between sexuality and pregnancy were surely the biggest paradigm change ever.

An other issue is about the distinction banal/subtile (resp. real/imaginated, obvious/complex-structured, practical/theoretical, ...): Today, we perceive that as fundamental distinct - what is banal can never be associated with deep meanings, we distinguish clearly between symbols and their meaning, etc. Herzog's unpleaseant pathetic comes basically from the incompatibility of using this contemporary mindset in a situation, which is different in that aspect. When one of the archeologists in the film speaks of "homo spiritualis", he apparently refers to that - that banal/subtile etc. may be viewed properly as parts of a symbiosis which make only together a living thing (i.e. that what is special in the modern human's mind), and that our habit of cutting it into pieces is a kind of butchering. But interestingly, there is a "needle's eye" where that symbiosis is still alive today - science: During the film, one sees the archeologists producing "deep insights", "knowledge of the hidden" etc. by nothing else than systematically followed banalities like counting dust, measuring ash, etc. (It reminds me of the astonishing of chinese
mathematicians when they first saw Euclid's Elements and were amazed that Euclid starts with long chains of trivialities which mytseriously led to theorems far outside anything, chinese geometers ever had produced.) Obviously Herzog was unaware of that.

An other triangulation

2011-12-09T00:42:00.000-08:00

Devi's new book reviews cause associations: During a shaking visit in one of the memorial sites nearby I found this painting, which tells for me the essence of the inhumanity and made me look for other triangulation points... This "dark pearl of the deep" - obviously the essay was named after Celan's poem - is a film on a certain mentality which you can see online and subtitled here. And this forgotten Sidney Lumet film tells the story of "a humanity caught in inhumanity". This too you can watch online, here.

a funny measurement:

2010-07-28T02:41:00.000-07:00

Indirect measurements of tricky to deal with things, like citadels by their shadows, is such a beautifull discovery of the ancient greeks that I try an other example of the trick:

The town Bad Salzuflen near Bielefeld (see the entry below) has a strange similarity to one of the worst movies, gruesome sound ever made. "I have looked into the future and it doesn't work" is it's message. (Neither did the film, but this review is good) Let's have a look: Bad Salzuflen lives from huge hospital and wellness business in it and it is in a strange way separated into two parts: The run down town itself with the working people (many poor and imigrants), and the wellness parks and hospitals in the early 1960's style, where wealthy 'eternal' guests spend their time with all sorts of new-age-therapies, dining, etc. A kind of invisible boundary separates both, you never see e.g. children of the working population playing in the nice park just a few meters away and open for everyone.

After an accidential ride to it and puzzled upon my impressions, I remembered this film on a somewhat similar idea - from a review: "Only at the fag end of the 1960s could such a simultaneously ambitious and preposterous movie be made. Boorman's thesis - that the middle class hippies cannot retreat to their own bohemian idyll without descending into in-fighting and impotency - draws both from H.G. Wells' 'Time Machine', and no doubt his own observation of the Sixties communes". The idea of these communities materialized in wellness center concepts for the aging career-68'ers and developed out of 19th century medical centers. Their contemporary cases could easily be mistaken for Th. Mann's 'Magic Mountain' with which Bad Salzuflen had some similarities long ago. But that old version was an economically selfsufficient upper class community separated from the normal society and the main economy, whereas the current ones suck money out of all of society and are the political guiding model (at least in the overaged Germany). The old alienation from modernity by separation is exchanged by a generalized stagnation and economic deterioration. E.g. the amazing resistance against an appropriate schooling of lower classes and imigrant children, as schools are the determinant for social status mobility in Germany. Among the film's nice ideas is one, where Connery is tricked into the library, into reading and thinking:

, finally into infiltrating the 'Vortex' by 'Arthur': "I am Arthur Frayn, and I am Zardoz. I have lived three hundred years, and I long to die, I am a fake god by occupation - and a magician, by inclination. Merlin is *my* hero! I am the puppet master." The idea that 'gated communities' turn sometime into 'hidden communities' as part of a crypto-social structure is interesting (anticipated by Lem, comme d'habitude) and apparently discussed among sociologists: "send the richest people—or, probably more efficiently, the poorest people—out of the country or the state. Inequality would go down and well-being would go up. Alternatively, leave the inequalities as they are, but devise ways to hide them from people—censor the media, say (no more Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous)—so that people do not know their relative positions. That should, according to The Spirit Level, bring down crime, disease, obesity, and so forth". The separation of the social classes and their exploitation in the movie fits nicely to the current reality of Germany.

a case of city amnesia

2010-07-28T02:39:00.000-07:00

A shallow recent film on a kind of wishfull city amnesia made my friends wonder, so here some ideas on it's psychological background. The film is a late version of some silly internet joke on Bielefeld, a middle sized town in the german provinces, and expresses it's strange longing for amnesia. Being in itself just a typical german town, because of which some big opinion- and market research companies settled there, with history tracing back to the origins of the german founding myths (more, more) and behaving during the past century not worse than everywhere else in Germany: Here you see the Synagoge burning 1938. The population protested against the crude pogroms because it asked for distributing valuable furniture instead of throwing and smashing it into the streets. Camps for slave labour supplied ca. 100 companies in the city, as usual those times. In the weekends, people enjoyed rides to such a camp and this Stalag nearby, watching the inmates running after potatoes thrown over the fence. Some rural people stayed honest (film). After WW2 Bielefeld recivilized quickly and was even considered for becoming Germany's next capital, by the locals again after the german reunification, still causing a strong animosity against it's more successful competitors. Now it is one of the highest appreciated places for living in Germany, making the mentioned desire for amnesia even more puzzling.

The movie version of this wish for nonexistence actually belongs as latest and most weird phase to the particular german way of history-exorcism in post WW2 german popular culture:
Phase 1 from the 1950's on by the comedian Heinz Erhardt, connecting to and then exorcizing nazi patterns of emotions by a kind of stubborn infantilism and anancastic humor at the edge of Goebbels rhetoric (youtube1, youtube 2).

Phase 2 was the psychological core of german criminal telenovellas from the 1960's on, when the calm and rational detective substitutes the shrieking nazi, here a collection of the key scenes, when murder cases, as slightly alienated uncoverings of dark war secrets, are communicated and calmed down. Actually, media specialists know since long that those crime series were invented by a former nazi who tried to overcome his own past by that. An open media secret in Germany. Such series' international success make one wonder ...

Phase 3 was the famous game show by Hans Rosenthal, a jewish Berliner barely escaping the KZ. The show's title "Dalli-Dalli" was the call of the nazi-wards in Poland when they made the jews run more quickly from the final train stations into the camp. "Dalli-Dalli" spread into the german language and had allways an association as the voice of an evil authority imediately before turning to violence. "Dalli-Dalli" was a kind of final warning. Notice the slightely transformed jewish stars in the background.

All that worked well, so why the need of the shallow phase 4 in that movie now? It is because the previous phases only work *retrospectively*, after the dark past is behind. In Bielefeld's case, this did not happen, the boundary was blurred and the past streched into the present.E.g. after WW2 e.g. Himmler's wife and daughter were given a home in Bielefeld by an influential Ex-Nazi-support group, among the recipients of support was probably Mengele. There is a permanent battle on the name of the city art hall local industrialists sponsored. It's architect, co-founder of the american Nazi-party ("He attended one of Hitler's Nuremberg rallies in 1938, and in 1939 he followed the German army into Poland. "We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed," he wrote afterward. "It was a stirring spectacle." quotes the W-Post): "I have no excuse (for) such unbelievable stupidity ... " Founded by a local member of the Himmler-fan-club, then named for Kaselowski, a friend of Himmler, with opaque involvement in robbing jewish businesses. (The investigating historian felt the need to secure documents from destruction or manipulation by transfering them into an other country.) Now the art hall got rid of that name, but locals succeeded in naming a nearby street after Kaselowski. When Frank Gehry recently participated in designing a new part of that art hall, he too made startling comments: "Ich werde täglich mit großer Dummheit konfrontiert." Until the german reunification, Bielefeld was the dangerous hotspot of german neofaschism, which then moved into the former GDR. Slave work continued until the mid 1970's, but with children in orphanages instead of POW's and ethnic minorities. After a holocaust-memorial lecture in the local university, citizens of neighbouring towns who still hide goods (books, art, etc.) from jews who exchanged them for money and food during their flight had contacted an aquaintance for how to get finally rid of the remains. Supressed into the subconsciousness, weird feelings in visitors express usually just indirectly, e.g. the puzzled reaction when the city's PR dept. asked a gourmet journalist for a visit: "Was tue ich am Rande des Teutoburger Waldes, werden viele Leser jetzt fragen. Die Antwort ist einfach: Ich suche die Herausforderung ..." But now, Bielefeld seeks for salvation in dementia, for relief by nonexistence.

a voice from the basement

2010-07-27T07:09:00.000-07:00

Two months ago a ride to Berlin turned into an unexpected encounter with language (e.g. by this antique (clay) mailbox found in a musem), intensified by a visit of a very interesting literary translater's workshop. - At this occasion here the link on a new book on the relevance of literary translations. - One of the workshop's themes was how to translate a short novel by Ludwig Hohl, a Petrarca-awarded hermit thinker hidden in a gastly basement room in Geneva. A hermit needs a yoga, a 'deep work' structuring his life, and so Hohl had his one: His 'Notices', a symphony-like structure of notes and quotes he worked on throughout his life. The theme of this symphony was the creative inner process and it's relation with language and literature. The resulting structure of the 'Notices' looks more like medieval memorabilia or renaissance memory theaters than like a normal book, the few modern analoga could be Valery's Cahiers or Lichtenberg's writings. Goethe and his somewhat similar collections of remarks are frequently quoted by Hohl, so is Spinoza's achievement of intellectual autonomy. Like the magnum opus of some renaissance hermetic, Hohl's and the mentioned mental relative's yoga's can't be consumed passively. Reading through this web (a 'structure', not a 'system') involves solving exercises, given by the author (in contrast to Goethe, who makes finding them an exercise too). The creation of 'true reading' as 'active reading' in the accidential visitor is actually the goal towards this music of thoughts works towards. The issue of 'deep reading' had been discussed by Grothendieck at length, here (from ca. p.35) a survey of his thoughts. Y. André gives here a comparative lecture on reading, writing and creativity, here a historian describing his working method and here on libraries as memorabilia.

a Gremlin finding

2010-05-29T14:35:00.000-07:00

I doubt that they like it, but I took a photo of them. Found in the basements of an old Citadel in Spandau, after stumbling over old cannons, forgotten helmets and mysterious gravestones. The figures come from an art class for ca. 12 year old pupils, obviously with much better connection to their creativity than many grown ups. A nice occasion to mention again this museum dedicated to children's creative skills in art.

a local tour:

2010-05-28T09:41:00.001-07:00

Three weeks ago, a librarian's letter mentioning travel reports induced me to take a camera and try a miniature version of such a thing too and see what happens. The tour led to Oerlinghausen, a small town nearby and hometown of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann. It's rough idea was to look into a nice archeological museum in Oerlinghausen I remembered vaguely.

It took just a few minutes to stumble across (and into) the unexpected, an art exhibition in the former synagoge, one of the very few still standing, which you see here with the original windows and woodwork. The jewish community of Oerlinghausen declined in the 1920's when many of it's members emigrated to Brasilia, as I was told, and the synagoge had been given up. The last members of the community had later been deportated by the Nazis. Artist Jens Andres' „Was ich fürchte ist die Gedankenlosigkeit“ (= "What I fear is thoughtlessness") can be taken as admonition. There is a kind of discrete tension building up between the long painting on that motto, the pop-artish "Wut" (= "Hate") between the windows and the mysterious and playfull warning signs in the basement. The town's (unsalaried) art organisation which uses the Synagoge now lists among it's connections an interesting polish art group, making me wonder where to the last communities members were deported to. And if Aichinger's "Man überlebt nicht alles, was man überlebt." (= "You don't survive some of the things you survive") happened here too. Her "Herod's children" and this list tell more.

A struggle with the past is a permanent theme too of the archeological museum you see now, the cause of my trip. Founded 1936 on a site of archeological findings, it became part of the Nazi propaganda business, and tried for decades to get away from that past, finally successfully. Today, it has become one of the best archeological open air museums with excellent didactic program and part of a multinational network of similar initiatives. When it's current director Karl Banghard observes "archeology attracts freaks like garbage attracts flies", this refers to contemporary esoteric and new age scenes and popular pseudo-medieval "militainement" happenings. It's exhibition offers a route from paleolithic times to late middle age, each represented by at least one building and pieces of their reconstructed environments. E.g. you start at a paleolithic summer tent, then two mesolithic huts with mesolithic flora around them. One wonders how one could have survived in such conditions, and if the inhabitants may have been Neandertals, but they were as modern humans as we. BTW, here a tool transforming your facial shapes into a Neandertal one. Aside this neolithic long hut one finds the precursers of modern grains harvested by the Rössen culture then and a small puddle around other vegetables used then are plated. The Rössen culture kept cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, which you don't find in the musem, but the parts of the tour on the Iron, Bronce and middle ages contain retro-breeded cattle too. Roughly at those times, lactose tolerance and skin pigmentation changed. The Iron age part shows a small field with plants cultivated for clothes and it's colouring, it's them who collided with the roman civilization. Rome looked like this, the cultural and military collision is theme here. Chimneys had been invented a millenium later only, what that means you find out when you enter a hut where a cooking fire burns. Here you see Gerhard Kalden in a tent build after one of the rare archeological findings from the mesolithicum ca. 60 m further. The upper parts of the tent are modeled after tents in Sibiria and inner Asia, using ethnography for archeological reconstructions. Equally impressive is this bronce age farm house with context. Unfortunately closed were the early middle age parts of the exhibition, including a reconstruction of Charlemagne's plant garden "capitulare de villis" and several houses, most impressive (an shocking) the "sunken hut". This looks like a weird joke - a house sunken nearly until the roof into the mud whose single room is just cut out of the clay. These horribly unhealthy, cold and wet pits were the working places since stone age until early modern times, since their temparature and humidity fitted manufactoring needs. As substitute for fotos from that, here a beautifull and instructive link on an other medieval issue, a 'Motte' whose reconstruction was organized by Karl Banghard too. A 'Motte' is the real thing behind what you probably imagine as medieval castles, those stone castles dominating the public image are (at best) just late medieval 'Disneyland anticipations' for aristocrates in romantic mood. Obviously, history allways was a kind of Rorschach blob-test on which people project their phantasies and madnesses. Only turning to the traces of the facts and admitting the never ending incompleteness of that business offers hope. The Oerlinghausen museum staff, mostly long time voluntaire participants, complements such exhibitions and reconstructions according to the current state of knowledge (recent news) with a broad spectrum of didactic events, like these workshops or special events focussing on e.g. the romans in this region and their lifestyles. The quality and diversity of the museum's activities make one think at the success of open sourse software like Linux: As there, dedicated amateur enthousiasts create an impressive amount of expertise and turn that into action.

The most lasting impression is about the slowness of progress visible from Rössener culture to early modern times. All the houses in the museum look very similar, aside chimneys entering somewhere the late middle ages and the amazing lifestyle anticipations of Rome. One remembers that even the former chancelor Gerd Schröder grew up in this region of Germany in a clay hut whose interior walls were covered with ice each winter morning. Still, for a shocking part of living mankind, basic issues of living are unsolved, even those ones those neolithic groups somehow managed. The strategic planing pressure on those neolithic must have been huge, errors resulting in famines instead of 'bail outs' as economical leadership counts on today. One wonders too, if "personas" extisted at those times, the closeness of living without a sphere of privacy must have turned group living into a permanent "Big Brother" show. "Alone", a polar researchers biography, describes how painfull transparent and predictable other people become when they live under permanent mutual perception. Organized data collection frenzy today makes cultural achievements like discreetness and privacy risking extinction like some strange butterfly (existentialists would call it horsefly) whose existence looks entirely unbelievable when they are finally gone. An other major difference between our and premodern mindsets surely is the later's lack of an idea of culmulative cultural progress. The direct and permanent experience of nature probably resulted in an intuition of the 2nd main theorem of thermodynamics, acc. to which order and structure - the anti-entropic work of civilization - is possible only as local and temporarily violation of nature's tendency towards chaos. The ancient greeks called the anti-entropic work "nous", the entropic nature "chaos" and the 2nd main theorem "ananke", "chaos" had to be temporarily tricked, coaxed to such an exeptional deviation. Socrates expressed it in Gorgias: "The good is possible only as rescue and getting saved". Christianity's salvation promise later was a theological loophole, but even then thought as a loophole outside the normal course of life. An excellent description of that antique christian way of thinking can be found in the novel "A canticle for Leibowitz" and the brilliant "Dream of Scipio". Only the age of enlightment generalized this motive, by unhinging it from the theological frame, towards our modern idea of permanent progress as natural developmental law of mankind. However, early christianity had a specified goal for it's anti-entropic loophole. Enlightment not. It suffers from a fundamental confusion on the concept of cultural goals: Shall they be thought of in analogy to production procedures, being defined by the result independent from the way to it? Or in analogy to human life, e.g. learning and growing, defined by the process alone? Again, a novel best illustrates the first concept and it's usage: "Ypsilon minus"- The author H.W. Franke, a physicist and sci fi writer, observed N. Luhmann's school of thought whose impact on political, administrative thinking in Germany is hard to overestimate. Luhmann went so far as to exclude human beings as part of modern bureaucratic societies. Acc. to him, the boundary between 'culture' and 'nature' shifted drastically, 'human mind' belonging to the later and goal of quantification, selcetion and mastering like other resources. I prefer an other way to draw distinctions, as 'human mind' being the residue of 'culture', who now is targetted by 'bureaucratic societies' as entropic force aside the old 'naure'. The complexities of this can be seen again in a novel: "Snail on a Slope" by the Strugatskii brothers. The battle between individual and bureaucracy are theme of J. Le Carré's novels, the latest one a slightely fictionalized case study in Hamburg. Earler, the philosopher E. Lévinas analysed this and how entropy infiltrates and corrupts the human mind: "His 'freedom of thoughts' expires silently: The thrust of the enemy forces is a slope. The consciousness of sliding downwords gets lost." (from 'Totalité et Infini', p. 214) Decivilization as global tendency is even theme of research now, indicating (like the new attention to psychoanalytic studies as here, or here) a final loss of belief in the selffullfilling idea of cultural progress.

"The Job of Enlightment"

2010-03-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

Salomon Maimon (1753 – 1800)

Ca. a decade ago, on a train ride to Berlin, I browsed through and became increasingly fascinated by a book on Salomon Maimon, "the man who understood Kant". Below a short text I wrote then on my impressions. A contemporary analysis of Maimon's philosophy is given in: Gideon Freudenthal (ed.): Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic. Critical Assessments. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht 2003. Quotes of Maimon come from this website. You find his autobiography here, more scans here.

Although his concepts play a decisive role in the history of ideas, only a few specialists bother about Salomon Maimon’s philosophical writings. Much better known is his autobiography written in the early 1790’s – a funny account of 18th century spiritual life in eastern Europe’s Jewish communities, told by a chaplinesque narrator – once a celebrated scholar, then a wandering beggar half mad by hunger and despair. Yet his erratic way of life was governed by a central inner law from which Salomon never deviated, a central question he never lost sight of:

How far reaches human understanding independent from experience?

He perceived all human activities as “being just a kind of, more or less, intense thinking”, deduced all desires from a fundamental “urge to think” whose goal is the “maximisation of thinking” and “sincerity” was the moral value he lived after. The suffering this caused in Maimon’s life let some researchers call him: “The Job of Enlightment”.

He was born as Shlomo ben Yehoshua in Sukoviborg, Lithuania, educated as a rabbi and became quickly famous as a child prodigy. In fact so famous that he was kidnapped by someone who wished to become his father-in-law. Salomon married another girl, but then his mother-in-law developed the habit of beating him up when his reluctance to earn a livelihood became clear. Despite his surrounding’s animosity against modern science, Maimon found and studied a book about mathematical astronomy. Since then, his strongest wish was to learn more about science in Germany. "Man scheint gleichsam zu vergessen, daß man durch Newtons Weltsystem mit weit beßrem Erfolg Krankheiten kurirt, als durch die Electricität, nemlich Krankheiten des Geistes." Another important event for him was the aquaintancy with Maimonides’ “Guide for the Perplexed”, this lead to an unorthodox commentary and to a change of name. Disappointed by his environment - and by the empty promisses of “practical Kabbalah” (the spell for gaining invisibility didn’t work) – he left his home, wandered around in europe and was finally saved from starvation by Moses Mendelssohn when he arrived in Berlin. There, Maimon studied Kant’s “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” which he criticised severely. Kant tried to explain the possibility of experience by exploring the necessary conditions for this possibility. To achieve this, Kant distinguished between the Thing-in-itself and the mind, then within the mind between sensibility and understanding. Maimon reacted with his "Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie", "Ad Kantium" and dedicated to the King of Poland with the wish: "den edlen Polen eine vorteilhafte Meinung von meiner Nation, nämlich den unter ihrem Schutz lebenden Juden, beizubringen". According to Maimon, this doesn’t work and Kant’s concepts cannot be separated. E.g. while Kant thought usual space and time as necessary forms of sensibility without understandings interference, Maimon let them result as only one of the mind’s ways of thinking several objects. A spectacular verification of this idea was achieved ca. 100 years later by Ch. Hinton, a mathematician who wondered about the possibility of “absolute knowledge” about arrangements of colored cubes and realised that playing with them in a certain way enables one to “see” 4-D. Luckily, by means of other arrangements the visual system can be stimulated to switch back into it’s usual modus. According to Coxeter in a book about regular solids in 4-space, this has lead to important discoveries. Penrose even tried to construct in this way 3-D analogies to M.C. Escher’s pictures, but found that “a bit insane”. Hinton wrote later strange stories playing in a world with 2-D time.

Maimon suggests an analogy from mathematics for the relation between sensitivity and understanding: If we imagine a smooth plane curve, as perceived by sensitivity, which is then analysed by understanding through the construction of triangles of inclinations, i.e. difference equations, a more and more refined analysis would converge towards the building of differentials, resulting in a dimensionless point (initial condition) and some relations between the differentials (differential equation). So, the curve which was initially perceived mainly by sensitivity, is now mainly perceived by understanding. The properties of analogously build “differentials of sensitivity” are the categories of understanding, their knowledge is a never reached final goal.

This concept of inseparable unity of passive perceivement and mental activity had a great impact on the masterminds of German romantics, the “differentials of sensitivity” being the theoretical basis for the work of Friederich Schlegel, Fichte, Novalis. The most widely read german history of culture, written by Egon Friedell, uses Maimon’s concept as guiding methodological principle without mentioning it’s source.

The same analogy is used by Maimon to clarify the relation between the thing-in-itself and the mind. Whereas Kant’s distinction makes experience impossible, according to Maimon the idea of an extra-mental reality makes no sense. So, experience is possible because - in the infinite mind – subject, object and their interaction fall together, but it can be attained by us only insofar we approximate the former in the course of scientific progress. By doing mathematics we come close to the divine mind since e.g. in arithmetics the subject (number-representing psychological states), the object (numbers) and their interaction (inductive definitions a la Peano) coincide. That human mathematics contains indirect proofs shows that even there true experience is not always reached. By way of discussing the thinkability of noneuclidian geometry and a concept of truth as process, Maimon anticipated Hilberts Formalism.

When Maimon’s critique was send to Kant, he reacted enthusiastically, praised Maimon as the one who had understood him best and organised its publication. Much later, Maimon’s Kant-interpretation was reactivated by Hermann Cohen and lead to a philosophical movement called “Neukantianism”. Together with Maimon’s consideration of Jewish spirituality, again taken up by Cohen, this shaped the thinking of Walter Benjamin.

At Maimon’s time, Berlin’s intellectual life was determined by informal “Salons” outside the academic establishment. Sabattia Joseph Wolff reports in: “Maimoniana oder Rhapsodien zur Charakteristik Salomon Maimon’s”, Berlin 1813, about such a learned society founded by Maimon. Here a summary of its constitution:

1

The members write essays about subjects of interest in relation to the society’s goal. These – or, if there is a lack of such essays, the best appropriate text aviable – are presented and read at the society’s meetings every month. These lectures are not to be disturbed, but every member can write a critique which is then presented in the same way as the original essay. Finally, the author of the original essay can produce analogously an anticritique.

Each month after the above mentioned lectures, an unstructured communication starts, in which every member can feel free to follow his uncensored imagination and arbitrary association of ideas, however strange they may be. All remarks are recorded, then read and their psychological causes are discussed. In case of doubt, the opinion of the producer of a remark has the priority.

Each month, the administrator of the society, who is elected democratically, poses a subject for a price competition. This is announced in newspapers and non-members are encouraged to participate. The administrator and two democratically elected members decide about the two best of the incoming essays. These are published by the society and the contest-winner gets all possible profit from that publication.

Salomon Maimon on himself: "Ich bin zwar kein großer Mann, kein Philosoph für die Welt, kein Possenreißer; habe auch in meinem Leben keine MandelMäse in die Luftpumpe ersticken keine Frösche auf die Tortur bringen, auch keine Männchen durch die Electrizität tanzen lassen. Aber was thut dieses zur Sache? ich liebe die Wahrheit, und wo es darauf ankommt, frage ich selbst nach dem Teufel und seiner Großmutter nicht. Da ich nun die Wahrheit aufzusuchen, meine Nation, mein Vaterland und meine Familie verlassen habe, so kann man mir nicht zumuthen, daß ich geringfügiger Motiven halber, der Wahrheit etwas vergeben sollte. Persönliche Feindschaft hege ich gegen niemand, wer aber ein Feind der Wahrheit ist, wer sein Ansehen beim Publikum dazu mißbraucht, dasselbe aus niedrigen Absichten irre zu führen, ist eo ipso mein Feind, sollte er auch übrigens mit mir in gar keinem besondern Verhältnß stehen; und ich werde keine Gelegenheit verabsämen dem Publicum sein Betragen in das rechte Licht zu stellen, er mag römischer Bischof, Professor, oder türkischer Sultan seyn."

a context of Gromov's program

2010-02-21T08:06:00.000-08:00

Perhaps as gift for curious websurfers, Micha Gromov, geometer (more) at the IHES, posted shortly before last christmas parts of a fascinating essay discussing "real" and "artificial" intelligence, pattern formation and detection, learning, language, of course mathematics and lot's of other interesting topics on his website. Theme of his essay is a sketch of a kind of program for exploring a possible general background structure behind the invention of and dealing with "ideas" and concepts. As the idea of a special cognitive background structure as root of mathematical thinking can be traced back at least to the ancient Platonists, Gromov's essay motivates to take a small tour through it's history for looking if Gromov's thoughts fit to that. Many thanks to Matilde Marcolli and Yuri I. Manin, who kindly allow to include pieces of their art for illustrating some issues, of course this does not imply any sharing of the thoughts expressed here.

The mindset called "Platonism" received more attention recently with Yuri I. Manin's interview in the AMS Notices and his remarks in a following book review on the history of mathematics. Among mathematicians, "Platonism" is about meaningfull mathematical concepts and structures as being "preexistent" and "found", in contrast of being "made" or "invented" - hidden structures as being "revealed" in the course of research instead of being "constructed". Yuri Manin expresses the resulting mental image of mathematics with a beautifull picture:

"... a great castle and you gradually start seeing it's contours through the deep mist, and begin to investigate something. How you formulate what it is you've seen depends on your type of thinking and the scale of what you have seen. And so you begin to blow away the mists, to find appropriate telescopes, seek analogies with edifices that have been discovered before, create a language for the things you see so vaguely ..."

That may sound rather detached from immediate "reality" (whatever that is) and about something like a dodecahedral cloud floating in the air. However, the idea of a screwdriver illustrates the meaning of a "Platonic idea" probably much better. Even a superficial browsing of contemporary mathematics shows that "platonic" programs and concepts are among the leading forces for actual research. E.g. there was hardly ever a more "platonic" insight than Grothendieck's quest for the "mysterious functor" relating different ways to do geometry (="cohomology theories") in number theory, which became one of the most usefull tools in the applied business of cryptography. Many more examples could be given, like the quest of the "field with one element" in the context of treating geometry and number theory in a unified way, or that for the correct definition of "higher categories" as expressing what "spaces" really are. Ca. 20% of Manin/Pachishkin's Encyclopedia volume on number theory present "Analogies and Visions", Kato's beautifull survey on his groundbreaking work is framed in poetical expressions of a platonic mentality: “Mysterious properties of zeta values seem to tell us (in a not so loud voice) that our universe has the same properties: The universe is not explained just by real numbers. It has p-adic properties … We o u r s e l v e s may have the same properties.”

Despite being named after Plato, the "platonic mindset" goes back to far older ancient greek philosophers and there had never been a commonly accepted set of welldefined doctrines for it. Plato maps a road towards it in his dialogues, but carefully makes clear that his real teaching was an esoteric one and never explicitely written down. Perhaps he thought that to be unnecessary because it pervaded all ancient greek philosophy before him and consited more of a mentality instead of specific beliefs. Mentalities can be learned by practice, not by just reading dialogues. And this was his reason for advertizing the yoga of mathematics. Plato distinguished between three levels of thinking: sensation, reason and higher intuition. These levels of thinking correspond different layers of external reality and of internal psychology. The special feature of "ideas" as the reality counterparts of higher intuition was their identity with higher intuition's counterparts in psychology: "ideas" as common foundation of both external reality and internal psychology. They provided the connection between individual thinking and reality which made knowledge possible and consequently, the best knowledge is that which connects most directly with them. For the same reason, "ideas" were considered "more real" than everything else - in contrast to the current view of "ideas" as reduced versions of reality, they were perceived as enrichments. An analogy: Classical greek sculptures were about visualizing ‘abstract’ concepts; 19th century scholars concluded that this forces them to have been colourfree because ‘abstract concept’=’reduced’, ancient greeks made them probably for the same reason very colourfull because for them ‘abstract concept’=’enriched’. This way, "Platonism" solved the epistemological problem and avoided ontological troubles. But it run into other troubles: if higher intuition can't be reduced to rational thinking characterized by verbal reasoning, intuition becomes increasingly incommunicable the more interesting it becomes. Similar, if true knowledge only comes from turning towards the common basis of outside and internal reality, but language is based on distinguishing these and everything else, language itself becomes unfit. Worse - even having a localized, personal ego is incompatible with knowledge. Actually, some antique philosophers teached that knowledge is impossible, if possible then unexpressable, if expressable then incomprehensible. Others turned to expressing in paradoxa, irony and myths, what apparently became a trademark for deep thinking like some millenia later twisted language for german thinkers. An other resulting invariant of greek philosophy is it's insistance that real learning is accompanied by a separation of the personal ego from the egofree part of the mind which only connects to "ideas". Walter Benjamin describes that in his "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels" with "Die Wahrheit ist der Tod der Intention" ("Truth is the death of intention"). He specifies the special relation of language to truth with: "Das ihr gemäße Verhalten ist nicht ein Meinen im Erkennen, sondern ein in sie Eingehen und Verschwinden" ("The language's appropriate behavior is not building opinions, but an immersion into truth and a vanishing in it"). The loss of this connection and the subsequent arbitraryness of normal language in naming and distinguishing things was for ancient philosophers like Parmenides the basic error of the human mind whose stabilization and ramifications created the world of discourse, doubt and pseudoknowledge we live in now. Acc. to Benjamin this original mistake shows up in the faint air of melancholy pervading the images of nature since then. It is the poet's and the philosopher's task to restore the lost connection for brief moments ...

... or to create:
"to name something was to give birth to a new entity .... Humans could exercise Free Will and put in perspective mathematics and philosophy", describe Graham and Kantor in their study on mathematics and religiousity in set theory research in Russia a century ago. Pavel Florensky, 'the Russian da Vinci', argued: "it is the word alone that makes the cognitive process possible, that makes objective what was still subjective, sums up our inward longing for reality and places before us the cognitive urge as a goal and value."

Yuri Manin wrote a very beautifull poem presenting this role of "arbitrary naming" in creating frames of meanings for further creative work. It has been stimulated by real ships he observed and produces instantly a strong image and the complexity of the relation naming/knowing comes without effort precisely when the barges' poetic associations set in. There is probably nothing more arbitrary than the names of the ships - but, well ... just read and notice what happens:

Barges on the Rhine

(Elegy)

... I’ve read half–through the catalogue of ships

Ossip Mandelshtam

ANGELUS DEI, with coal humps on his back,
strides along as a forlorn camel that lost sight of his needle’s eye.

IMMACULATA shyly cuddles to the left bank
trying to cover her face with a veil of feeble smoke.

God cannot be comprehended, but can be named.
The Name of God is God himself,
so the Name Worshippers believed. The venerable Illarion,Pavel Florensky.
And infinity cannot be comprehended, but can be named(Georg Cantor’s Alephs).
Who can comprehend barges? Who names them?
He - or She - is beyond the comprehension of mortals as well ...

CURA DEI’s Diesel engine snorts scornfully at INNUENDO.

SAYONARA, MON DESIR! – groans BANZAI,
who fancies himself a kamikaze, the divine wind,
that will smite the dishonorable ones,
heaving in lacerated flames
Hiroshima, Bikini atoll, the World Trade Center, Königswinter.

TOLERANTIE only faintly pants.

DISSIDENTIA ran aground last night,
her clawed belly rumbled on wet stones,
a hundred meters from my balcony.
She will sail again – but whither do we sail, pray, tell me, ZEMBLA!

PANTA RHEI ... everything flows ... πάντα ῥεῖ ...

Translated from the Russian original by Yuri Manin

GLOSSARY
Angelus Dei (lat.): God's Angel
Immaculata (lat.): the Immaculate, Vrigin Mary
Cura Dei (lat.): God's care
Innuendo (lat.): insulting allusion
Sayonara (jap.): Fare Well!
Mon Désir (fr.): my desire
Banzai (jap.): battle call of japanese warriers
Kamikaze (jap.): "divine wind", military suicide aviators in World War II
Tolerantie (dutch): the tolerance
Dissidentie (lat.): disaccord
Zembla: Imaginary country in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Pale Fire”.

A friend just called attention to Eco's recent book "The vertigo of lists", dealing with the many roles that lists of names played in literature and art, from the catalog of ships in Homer to the list of Don Giovanni, touching on a lot of different aspects of abstract or disembodied "naming" too.

A surprising reference to platonic truth is in Werner Herzog's cineastic aesthetics, as the try to catch with the artist's tools the "extatic truth" behind the superficial "truth of the accountants". The method he teaches in his film school is "not for the faint hearted... For those who have a fire burning within." Herzog suggests: "Follow your vision. Form secretive Cells everywhere. At the same time, be not afraid of solitude." His "Bells from the deep" about russian mysticism gives a nice idea, incl. the unintended satire unavoidably attached to such docu.

At least since the mid 19th century, scholars traced these themes back to an even older tradition of shamanism. E.g. Nietzsche's Friend Rohde’s great work “Psyche. Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen” and the small books on the greeks and Nietzsche by G. Colli. Dodds “The Greeks and the Irrational” contains a very interesting chapter on that. Before philosophers, "higher insights" showed in temple slaves, whose blood attracted spirits who then could be eavesdropped by the priests, and the priests then interpreted what they heard with “logos”. In philosophers, both roles became united in one person who performed extatic metempsychoses followed by rational exegesis. The books of Parmenides and Empedocles still start with tales of voyages of their souls. Here is a link conc. the reconstruction of Empedocles’ ideas acc. to Kranz (after he continued the Diels, Kranz edition of Presocratic fragments). Like the extases caused by visiting spirits in shamans, the early philosopher's job was not a voluntarily chosen one, but a vocation. As the separation of the personal ego from the egofree part of the mind connected with "platonism", this needs not to be an enjoyable experience. Yuri Manin tells here his fight with his first math book.

The very forcefull triptych (1 ,2 ,3 ) by Matilde Marcolli, parts of which are reproduced here, exposes this as agonizing condition.You see the painfull complexity there from belonging to more that one world and not to reduce to one's projections on both. The style of renaissance, when science emerged, with moments of surrealism is no coincidence, as is the theme "liberty".

Among the psychological attitudes related to shamanism are "staying vigil", "attentive listening" to the unpredictable whispers of the spirits, keeping the voice of the ego low, "looking for hints". Thomas McEvilley wrote a fascinating book (online scan, youtube interview, thanks to J.H.) about possible connections with ancient indian philosophy, it’s summaries of single theories are very excellent for themself: Sociologically, shamanism was rooted in tribal culture and small communities. Shamanism were one-man operations, restricted to a small clientele. Shamans were "fermions", independent and isolated from each other. When with emerging urban structures in Mesopotamia, temple bureaucracies and career priests in university-style hierarchical organisations (e.g. the Marduk temple employed ca. 7,000 people) stabilized the state, shamanistic practices became tamed to a homeopathic dose of “intrinsic motivation/curiosity in the things for themself”, predictable and finally substituted by an entirely different mindset and communication style. Imagine how career-priests probably felt towards those wandering orphics, fakirs, sorcerers etc.? Bureaucrats are "bosons". Of course, the shaman's relation to language was complex too and the possibility that instead of expressing truth, they misuse their skills to deceive was theme since ages. Yuri Manin analyses here the "trickster"-theme in ancient myths and the possible anthropological background of shaman/tricksters. The platonic concept of knowledge as becoming that what is to be known by an act of immersion and identification comes from shamanistic practices. Shamanistic traditions continue to be a vital part of everyday culture in East Asia, e.g. Siberia, Japan and Korea. In Europe, beyond antiquity and perhaps transmitted through neoplatonic communities in south france, this stayed alife among medieval scholars (beautifully told in M. Yourcenar's "L'Œuvre au noir") and turned into the selfconcept of early scientists. Giordano Bruno used in his essay (La Bibioteca Ideale di G. Bruno) on "heroic frenzies" the myth of Actaeon and Artemis as metapher for the philosopher's hunt for truth: During a hunt, Actaeon meets Artemis, the godess of hunting, and is transformed by her into the stag he runs after with his dogs, who then dismember him. Bruno's essay is highly recommended as selfdescription of the mentality of the early science community in the most crucial piece of it's formation.

L. Graham and J.-M. Kantor describe in "Naming Infinity. A true history of religious mysticism and Mathematical creativity" a very interesting re-emergence of similar traits in the Russian school of set theory in the first third of the XXth century. (google scan, an article by Moore, a review, Bourbaki's history book) From Freeman Dyson's review: "... the puzzling cultural dynamics that converted religious mysticism into mathematical insight. The authors particularly probe the surprising way that a religious heresy (Name Worshipping) emboldened the Russian mathematicians who finally surmounted the theoretical difficulties that had overwhelmed earlier pioneers in set theory." Here are links on Illarion the monk and Pavel Florensky.

In antiquity, the "higher intuition" sketched above was taken for granted and philosophy was largely about it's practical training and stabilization. Modern discussions of "Platonism" focus instead on the ontological status of abstract concepts and their relation with linguistics. Gromov's takes up again the antique route by starting from the existence of an anthropological invariant producing those "higher intuitions", provides plausible reasons aside intuitive evidence, but leaves ontological questions aside. Like the antique platonists. After Gromov singles out the specific mentality, he suggests the existence of a formal backgroundstructure behind it, gives that a name and sketches a program for dealing with it. This is the "modern part" of his program.

some updates:

2010-01-16T09:40:00.000-08:00

Homo Erectus (pic):
The Paleoanthropologist John Hawks (blog) remarks: "Don't underestimate the range of body size in H. erectus - the Dmanisi sample is clearly small, maybe Bushman-sized, and the tall East African specimens are accompanied by many short ones as well. The "women invented culture" idea has been pursued in recent years by Chris Knight. He places the crucial events later in our evolutionary history, but is worth looking at as a model for how these events might be integrated." Several of his blog entires are about the Homo Erectus, e.g. these puzzling findings on Crete. This "Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans" tells the "epic of Homo sapiens and its colorful precursors and relatives. The story begins in Africa, six to seven million years ago, and encompasses twenty known human species, of which Homo sapiens is the sole survivor. Illustrated with spectacular, three-dimensional scientific reconstructions portrayed in their natural habitat developed by a team of physical anthropologists at the American Museum of Natural History and in concert with experts from around the world, the book is both a guide to extinct human species and an astonishing hominid family photo album". An exhibition of the Smithsonian Institute. Then I stumbled across an interesting remark on "marrow cults" at the Homo Erectus in Thomas MyEvilley's "The Shape of Ancient Thought" (p.220). McEvilley wonders if such cults continue in !Kung Bushman beliefs in an occult power of a (fictive) spinal channel system and turnes into part of magic physiological doctrins in Sumerian culture, then ancient india and finally entered through the teaching of Alcmaeon of Croton and Democedes of Croton Plato's theory of eros. And here are very interesting news on the simultaneous changes in hominid- and elephant-populations, apparently the homo erectus used fire for preparing meat, but not for preparing vegetables. Only a few weeks ago I found this thesis of Norbert Meuter, who came to similar conclusions about the homo erectus and who gives very interesting links to earlier, rather speculative, but astonishingly good fitting to later archeological data, texts by Susanne Langer. She in turn hints backwords to the developments of greek religion, where this new study was recently recommened, but I the libraries here still process the request...

If you are curious about how living was in the oldest great settlements, try this expert simulation of Çatal Höyük.

social brain:
Aside mirror neurons, the right temporo-parietale junction (rTPJ) shall be crucial for social skills: Rebecca Saxe at the MIT calls it "the core of our ability to read other people's minds" (german article). Here is an other interesting study. Face recognition is studied here. A new study "Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations" is here. About social skill induced brain development a report here.

Technology anticipations:
Richard Sennet reports in his book on handycraft that the described counterintuitive ways how new technologies emerge is rather common. He tells about the history of srewdrivers, which were invented much earlier than one got an idea of it's proper uses and thinks, the internet is an other such case of a technology whose use still has to be found (making me wonder if language could be a similar open case).

Love in the time of dictatorship:
"A book suddenly disappears. Two days after it hits Minsk bookshops and Belarus’s internet retailers, it is suddenly “unavailable”. Neither inquiring readers nor embarrassed sales staff are given any explanation. It is as if the book never existed. But it does." (review, more)

Dawn of the Jedi-Feynmans

2009-11-07T06:53:00.000-08:00

Feynman told in one of his books that he puzzled as kid his neighbours by his way of fixing of radio sets: Because he sent the people away so that he could think, they wondered "the boy fixes radios by thinking!" Something like that seems to have caused this (1,2,3), parodized by this new film (more trailers, thanks to JH). A nice image of what some minds imagine when they want to "think" after having read that word in the dictionary.

Apparently such programs existed. I guess the cause is that much of the really good stuff in american research comes from immigrants, but the military is restricted to americans, who further have to have empty security files. And secrecy then opens then the gates for nonsense. Probably science stays only good because of a tiny minority of really insightfull minds, if they become rare, science degenerates. Secrecy even increases the minimum density of really insightfull people. Martin Gardner described in an essay in his "The Sacred beetle" in the case of science under the Nazis, what happens when that density becomes too low. Of course, even complete crackpot experiments could by chance produce something of interest - but then one needs non-crackpots to identify and analyze that.

more Renaissance reveries

2009-11-04T01:53:00.000-08:00

A continuation of the last post is possible by two, new articles in the arxiv on visual reveries in early astronomy developing into contemporary science visualizations. With some phantasy one could take that as example of Jung's "mythopoeic imagination". Other examples may be the idea to visit the moon, apparently that was one of the goals of the Royal Society at the time of it's foundation, and Descartes' goal to produce within his lifetime a practical solution of the mind-body problem with the pineal gland as interface.

early ICT dreams

2009-11-02T07:37:00.000-08:00

A comment in Yates' book on Bruno is about anticipating advanced communication technology by renaissance hermetics. Interestingly they themself had no idea about what they were dreaming about, they thought it was cryptology or higher magics. E.g. Trithemius' Steganographia, which was only recently decrypted, expresses an idea of ubiquituous, alphabetfree and private communication and suitably coding algorithms as if it's 16th century author would have somehow listened a lecture on computer science and try to get an idea of it by his renaissance concepts. Later anticipations are about online gaming and laptops, reconstructed in this facinating museum.

I find the way of the early anticipations very strange. They are much more detailed than I would expect, much more detailed than the general nature of the anticipated idea. About the later, the anticipators obviously could only speculate wildly. I would expect the opposite relation, e.g. like in the invention of human flight: First, the general idea was clearly perceived and then, over centuries, decreasingly absurd and increasingly working technologies build, from Icarus over Leonardo to Lilienthal. But early technology anticipations like Trithemius' look somewhat more like someone in the middle ages constructing grotesque structures of metal wheels, pipes, blades and grids, telling something about clocks or art, and centuries later one would identify that with some crude imitation of a part of an aircraft turbine. And perhaps this analogy is the core for understanding renaissance hermetism in general? They anticipated in a crude way science without knowing it. Imagine you would tell a bright, but uneducated kid about your work - searching the meaning of difficult texts, looking for terminologies and definitions, catching ideas and insights which suddenly enable one to perform real world tasks like looking under some planet's surface - the kid's playfull imitation would look very similar to renaissance scholars.

If parts of renaissance hermetism can be viewed as anticipatoric imitation of science, future science could regress into similar ways, as Herbert W. Franke told in the sad story of "Einsteins Erben". He tells how living in an environment mixed with advanced pseudo-autonomous technology could led people back into Plato's cave of a mentality consisting of fairy tales, rituals and taboos - like modern information technology may start to do. Then, the spirit of science would vanish, imitated fragments of memory of science would only exist as empty cult.

Algernon reloaded

2009-10-31T04:55:00.000-07:00

Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon" is another theme in Sd.'s blog. The first half of that story is about the consequences of a startling rise of of a young underachiever's intellectual skills and the environmental reaction on this. His troubles of adapting his growing insight into social structures, psychologies of others, his inflating mental horizon with structures of personality, perception, valuation and interaction coming from his dim and troubled past seem to some extent plausible, but beyond reality test - until recently, when a documentary was made on someone who seems to got stuck in that sort of transition zone Keyes describes. (Video: short version, long version). I think it is interesting to look after similarities and differences between the fiction and the person. Like in the novel, the dim past shines through in the real person's try to be 'smart' in the way a mentally retarded probably imagines it - winning trivial quiz shows and looking like Rambo. Or in his puzzled relation to women. The big contrast to the novel, where the main character achieves and transcendents an academic intellectual level, is that the real person barely scratches after long tries the level of science. Obviously something is missing. I guess it is hidden in the core personality, which stayed on it's old level of development and became disconnected to the intelligent part by the huge gulf of knowledge and sensitivity between them.

This let's one wonder again how this connection is in normal, but educationally processed people in institutions of scholastic training? Maybe Keyes' story actually targets that? An indicator of a troubled connection has just been published. This article in the SciAm announces: "When rational thinking is correlated with intelligence, the correlation is usually quite modest. Avoidance of cognitive miserliness has a correlation with IQ in the range of 0.20 to 0.30 . Sufficient mindware has a similar modest correlation, in the range of 0.25 to 0.35. These correlations allow for substantial discrepancies between intelligence and rationality." The same sort of disconnection could explain the reported independence of academic frauds from personal ethics as linked to in an earlier post.

Perhaps the unpleaseant incidents in the scientific community Sd. tells in her blog come from such simple causes. This could explain why the characters in this absurd and funny film appear like transfered from a slightely satirized science millieu. One recognizes the grad student as performance oriented eureka seeker, the vision driven senior researcher allways a little outside the main stream, the experienced old stager in eternal war with bureaucrats and still good for a darwinian fight if someone enters his territory. All are a bit out of their trolley and misunderstood by women (well-known, that stare, isn't it?), who never understand the lofty ideas that drive them.

Maelströms from the Renaissance

2009-10-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

Siddhartadevi's repeated hints to Giordano Bruno and renaissance neoplatonism as relevant input for the emergence of science and the selfperception of scientists make one very curious about that piece of mental history, which I know only through Yourcenar's brilliant novel and some random readings of Plotin. But having Yates' book on Bruno not at hand, I just remember a possibly interesting side-aspect of Renaissance hermetics: texts secured with labyrinthine semantics against uninvited readers. The corresponding mentality reflects e.g. in the architecture of renaissance castles: One finds hidden staircases within staircases, iterated layers of hidden floors and secret rooms in harmless looking buildings. One thinks at invisible inks, texts and symbols hidden in perspectively distorted pictures, esoteric symbolisms, poised pages. But there was probably a far more sophisticated method in use to secure theories: a kind of mental trick lock. I guess it really only in Kabbalism, about which Gershom, a scholar working at the JPost, told me the story below, allegedly going back to medieval south france hermetics. If that is roughly correct it surely applies to other hermetic texts too.

The trick is similar to that described by Martin Gardner in his article about "Hinton cubes". That are simple mechanical tools for developing a various parts of 4-dim. visual imagination (actually, when reading on regular solids etc., I can imagine such things without toys tools...). The unlucky practitioneers of a cult Hinton made out of that got mad because the trained ways of modified perception started working automatically, they could not stop that any more. Now imagine, someone would have confronted them with suitable analogues of impossible figures etc....

Conc. the Talmud, Gershom says: It's 63 volumes are not only 'passionate disputes': By demanding the reader to follow them, they provide a training in the type of thinking used by those medieval, hermetic scholars. The effect on a mind used to the every day way of thinking is described in the texts as bewilderment first, - the Talmud contains six 'levels', or 'orders', including one designed for beginners - then engagement and finally an "Eureka-experience" of understanding how the mind correctly works and should ever have worked. Then a kind of intellectual extasis is described, which includes for hermetic scholars obviously some sense of humour.

Then a clever designed 'mental trick lock', an 'intellectual vortex' comes. The emotional and motivational aspect of all the training with repetitions, variations, rythms, starts working like a maelstrom along the mentioned levels of learning. The first 'trick lock' the student meets is the barrier of his own intellectual strength, a barrier artificially made thicker than necessary. Only then comes the real 'trick lock' for the student who thinks he has the trouble behind him: The now since long dragged-in mental concepts and thinking-ways are set into conflict. A Talmudist described it: "... it puts the mind at war with itself; the more powerful the mind, the more destructive the conflict."

Be that as it may, here a link to the real 'glass bead game', coming from garbled ancient greek descriptions and only reconstructed in renaissance, and Illich's beautifull book on texts and reading through the times.

(dis)connected thoughts

2009-10-23T04:09:00.000-07:00

A recent report in the New Scientist describes strange findings on the mind/body relation, how easy people can be tricked into a dissociation of their body feeling: "They film each volunteer from behind and project the image into a head-mounted display worn by the volunteer so that they see an image of themselves standing about 2 metres in front. The experimenters then stroke the volunteer's back - which the volunteers see being done to their virtual self." Then, the volunteers got an "out of body" experience, despite a normal strenght of their body perception. The perception of one's thoughts is much weaker than the body feeling, as the popularity of rethorics about 'subconscious' mental processes shows. So, could "thinking" be in a similar way dissociated from other aspects of one's personality, like the body feeling? The way one teaches in school looks a bit similar to the feedbackstructure in the experimental design described above. A dissociation of "thinking" and other parts of the personality could explain why e.g. exam cheating is apparently independent from ethical values, or why it makes no difference if professors are exchanged by actors and why a secondary reconnection of the separated parts by symbols of status and importance creates the "monsters of the id" discussed here. The same New Scientist report even hints to an other indicator of such a dissociation - if asked to remember some situation in which they had been, e.g. last holiday or a party, most people's visual memories are from an "outside" perspective, they see themself from above, even their backs. One needs not to have read Proust to guess how significant that would be, if it really should be true. I imagine historians in a far future puzzling deeply about that, like we puzzle about the - for us - weird and alien specifics of ancient mentalities, like their visualizations of time or their "bicameral" mindedness. At least that could explain why the investigative mentality in science is rarely applied to areas outside the individual's field of research - it's because the 'individual' mind is by the mentioned teaching induced disconnection 'divided' and stunned by gradings. And it explains why crucial inputs of global insight and sense of direction often come from people less influenced by school education. Using the metapher of 'climbing the shoulders of giants', one could say that such a climbing needs not only strong legs, but a sense for direction and eyesight too, else one neither finds the way nor sees something once in the crow's nest. Perhaps school education splits both from the mental toolset. One could generalise the idea a bit further: The similarity of operating and feeling abstract concepts with reports about cases of a visual pseudo-blindness "blindsight", when people have intact eyes and visual brain parts but experience themself as blind because the visual input never reaches consciousness, makes wonder if the degree to which one is "platonist" comes just from existence or absence of an "idea-blindness". The reports from blindsight people reacting to visual signals like approaching thrown objects, how they experience and explain their behaviour, look much like descriptions of how people get ideas and abstract insights. Recent reports tell that this processes are flexible enough to be improved.

I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave

2009-10-16T03:15:00.000-07:00

I profited so far very much from the impartiality of machines and machine-like institutions, like long distance services of the libraries and online archives. Siddhartadevi describes that feature as characteristic for computers, even more so in future "sentient" machines. But my guess is that impartiality of such machines will reduce quickly. So far, it results from the lack of software and data about people, which politics furiously (NY Books quotes aims towards Yottabytes by 2015, here a new article on England) tries to change. Here is a related link collection by a lawyer and writer. Very good is the work of the "foebud", the think tank of the CCC, and it's "Big Brother Awards". As a rule of thumb one can say that today, data by the internet, credit cards etc. cover each individual roughly to the same amount as in the 1970's special police forces did with suspected terrorists. I guess the decisive experience of governments throughout the developed world for this was the 1989 collapse of the eastern block, which showed that populations can make sudden phase transitions and that these escaped even the absurdly dense monitoring of the populations by the Stasi. The main goal for AI is to enable computers to analyse communication contents sufficiently fast and accurate, for which e.g. the gigantic google bookscan has been made (acc. to a remark by one of the google founders). Once that is solved, prejudice-like behaviour of the internet follows.

Indifference towards that need an explanation - perhaps the dream of happy interaction with "sentient" computers results from an experience of self-loss? When the internet turns into a semi-permeable membrane between the individual and the worlds of content and meaning beyond it, doubts in it's "friendlyness" would be perceived as personal threat and then inhibited. This makes wonder, which patterns exist for the human-machine/city/civilization relation: I guess, aside the "symbiotic" model there are "nomadic", "hunter-gatherer", "peasant".

choked minds

2009-10-15T04:07:00.000-07:00

A new film is reported as illustrating the mentality of the provincial people like in this region of Germany a century ago. Here the trailer, fitting to the few descriptions by local people I heard. It shows the choking down of minds, essential for the later development of faschism. An other recent film based on a real story shows an exceptional case of human behaviour among the farm people. The average reality was different. A layer of dehumanized thinking apparently still existed much later, as recent discussions of slave labour in orphanages until the mid 1970's indicate. I think it is such an ahuman thinking about people, which threatens to become generally accepted again. Like the popularity among lawyers and politicians worldwide of Carl Schmitt, a mastermind of the Nazis. Or that people start enjoying such bleached, deindividualized, marked faces in textiled insults. Carl Amery, a writer and environmental activist, even speculated that worse is still ahead of us and the historical holocaust only an anticipation.

fun with art

2009-10-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

Whereas I find the "classical modern" art often interesting and good, the majority (not all, of course) of contemporary art today seems to me not even a joke.

Nevertheless, one can have fun there, e.g. with talking about contemporary art. Or with selfrefferential jokes on the art market. When I observed that one would enjoy some exhibition more if one were colour blind, I was told the specialist who selected the works was colour blind indeed.

Funny too are weird things in and around art. E.g. once, when I was tutoring art theory, I puzzled about some early articles by Panofsky. He had an unsusual visual defect which distorted his perception of depth and he managed that by performing in front of paintings a kind of dance, jumping back and forth with alternatively blinking eyes. Perhaps one should produce "Panofsky-glasses" reproducing his distorted sight for everyone and reconstruct his "Panofsky-dance" for explaining his theory...

A bit strange too is the story behind cubism, which seems to be a brilliant marketing trick. That times, one could do marketing with Kant! The art dealer of Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris was Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler alias Daniel Henry. He invented cubism and explained it's early development and the idea behind it later in several books and articles. Kahnweiler's idea came in turn from Kant, more precise: from the revival of Kantian philosophy in the early 20th century. A precursor of Kahnweiler was Konrad Fiedler, one can read his art theory in "On judging works of visual art" 1949, and "Three fragments of posthumous papers of C.F." 1951.

A "einzigartig bitterböser Witz über Künstler und den Kunstbetrieb".

cosmology and lifestyle

2009-10-03T20:46:00.000-07:00

The fragments of Epicure's teaching fall into two apparently disconnected parts: One is about a cosmology based on the idea of the cosmos being a byproduct of random processes, where the buildup of structures is kickstarted by some small pertubance. The other, ethical, part is about how to live a satisfactory life, based on managing the emotions of fun and pain. The connection between both parts is usually thought as cosmology being just a kind of selfhypnosis for enabeling the students to follow the ethical part by calming the impulses from desire. I wonder if the connection could have been a bit deeper, because Epicure could have visualized fun and pain as the trays of an equilibrium balance and the random cosmos as randomly distributed unit-weights on them. Then he could have used the contraintuitive behaviour of such simple random walks, described e.g. in Feller's „An introduction to probability theory and its applications“, for teaching and applying his ethics. Perhaps there exist modern analoga to such a cosmology-lifestyle connection, e.g. as computer science-lifestyle ?

lost films, lost books

2009-10-03T16:44:00.000-07:00

"Loss is not an anomaly, or a deviation, or an exception, it's the norm." Rescue tries: Scorsese's cinema foundation, Lost films initiative, The Book of Lost Books, The invisible Library

Some films really drove their viewers into screaming madness, like 'Nerven' in Munich 1919 (more).

Catalogue Livres curieux & bizarres

On Orwell's 'Bookshop Memories'.

Memories of the Future, (more)

An artist who "pondered harder and more courageously than anyone... what it meant to live with ideas." (more, more)

"I have met some good story-tellers in my life, but Reznikoff, a poet of the eye, was the champion" says Auster.

Nietzsche's model for a "superman" was - a woman.

THE 16th century armchair traveler's compendium and antidepressivum (acc. to Robert Burton in 'The Anatomy of Melancholy').

Oneg Shabbat Archive (book)

A play about a woman adrift in modern times - several people first watching this film wanted to vomit, not because it was badly made but because it was so harrowing and well-made, tells Brian, a NY film critique. Sounds like a cinematographic realisation of Rilke's "Das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir gerade noch ertragen".

A friend called this the "best film ever made by a Buddhist monk in Bhutan".

One of the greatest movies ever, "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928) by Carl Theodor Dreyer, based on actual trial records.

Bubblepiercing

2009-10-03T12:41:00.000-07:00

The idea of biological and mental life defined as anti-entropic process makes me think about how an associated entropic drift pervading everydaylife, as enclosure in mental, emotional, social bubbles, shielding one from further development, looks like. People turning into museums of forgotten and betrayed dreams. The main force pulling one inside such bubbles may be that the desire to learn and experience something new and creative vanishes. There was a moving film by Jim Jarmusch on that a few years ago, where the main character - a man who appears to be permanently detached, mentally retired - is pushed into visiting his former girlfriends. Enclosed in fixed ways of life, they reject any impulse from outside and soon one gets a feeling of complete absurdity and sadness about all that loss of vitality. At the end one notices that the main character is the only person in the film mentally really alife, his absentmindedness being just his refusal to settle in some mental or biographical mousetrap. But his unability to become creative and connect with others makes him guilty of the broken lives of his former girlfriends and turns the film into a critique of the american society - finally prepared to become active, only suburb anonymity is in sight. A mousetrap of collossal extension was the former GDR, whose opening was celebrated today. The deformations of personalities and private lifes inside it then are described in this excellent film, Timothy G. Ash tells how that ended.

There is a brilliant and funny scifi story about a group of scientists fighting against the entropic forces, which materialize in strange incidents. The hero of this group is Vecherovsky, a mathematician modeled after a friend of the authors. The astronomer of the book gives up the fight.. "gathers his work and, like the others, decides to take it to Vecherovsky. The latter will apparently assume the burden of this impossible diversity of disciplinary work, along with his own project. Entering Vecherovsky's apartment, Malianov finds the usually neat scientist singed and burned, his furnishings in shambles; like Luther before him, he has struggled with this new homeostatic "devil." His decision is to take these scientific papers to distant Pamir, to seek in exile to give new (if strange) order to their apparent chaos. It is Malianov who perceives that "a line of fire and brimstone that could never be crossed was drawn between Vecherovsky and me".(source) Let's try not to become such a spineless petty-bourgeois, perhaps the line looks more frightening than it really is? This small town in south france shows the possibility to fight the evil and sets a standard.

applied Lemnology

2009-10-02T15:34:00.000-07:00

The brave scholar Prof. Trottelreiner, figuring in many of Lem's stories, explains in "The futurological congress" a new forecasting method: "Linguistic futurology investigates the future through the transformational possibilities of the language. A man can control only what he comprehends, and comprehend only what he is able to put into words. By examining future stages in the evolution of language we come to learn what discoveries, changes and social revolutions the language will be capable, some day, of reflecting." I took that falsely as witty irony of an sf-writer on his genre - now the MIT seems to turn it into reality. An other experimental materialization of an idea from one of Lem's novels is this experiment.

At this occasion here the link to a scan of Lem's favorite book, poems by Rilke. In his autobiography, Lem desribes how he studied a lovingly made copy of it in hand-made paper and the german language in the midst of war in Warsaw.

Backs to the future

2009-10-01T16:42:00.000-07:00

Basic ideas can deform in the course of time. E.g. this ethnological report shows that our idea of progress into a future ahead of us, away from the past which vanishes out of sight, could be just a case of collective selfhypnosis. The natural attitude would probably be opposite: "Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies' orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind." (More) Benjamin gives a startling connection to modrn art: The face of Klee's angel of history is turned toward the past. He would like to pause, but a storm is blowing in from Paradise which has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm carries him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned. This storm is what we call progress. Wondering if other basic concepts may have become similar deformed, I think about the idea of "abstract concepts" as being just reductive shadows of some basal reality. The natural attitude would be opposite: "abstract concepts" as being an enriched intensification of reality, causing things given at some basal, sensoric or emotional or rhetoric, level to become "really real". Other key ideas may have become simply forgotten. E.g. browsing translations of ancient greek philosophers, I wonder if they used irrational square roots and antique versions of continued fraction expansions as rhetorical model, e.g. for Platon's dialoges, or as model for the human mind. Heraclit's proportions like "god:man=man:child" look like that. But only if their "paradigm" were that "gods", "childs" etc. are well known, static ideas. Like the "docta ignorantia" or "coincidentia oppositorum", which was used by christian theologists to characterize the possible knowledge of "god" - only with the roles of "god" and "human" interchanged. If that guess is roughly correct, it would rhetorically explain why the ancient greeks saw the human mind as inherently dynamic entity, on which idea later gnostics relied.

Encyclopedia Maxima

2009-10-01T16:33:00.000-07:00

"What is perhaps the greatest tragedy in the history of literature is recalled by the appearance of two sections of the Chinese Encyclopedia, lent to the London Library by a man who picked them up for a song in a bookshop of the British metropolis. These two volumes are among the meagre [sic] remains of the most colossal literary work ever carried out by man..." Curious?

Nemo, eternal returning

2009-10-01T14:34:00.000-07:00

A common idea in 19th century was that of an eternal recurrence of all things, initiated by statistical phantasies in Lagrange's books on mathematical astronomy. The key text about it was written by Blanqui. Walter Benjamin took Blanqui's philosophical essay on a kind of eternal recurrence as the most intense and explicit expression of the spirit of the 19th century after the loss of the ideals of the french revolution. Blanqui wrote it in prison, where he was denied to read anything than science books, which included Lagrange's analytical mechanics. Nietzsche took the idea up and - aside the idea of evolution - it caused him for a long time to think about studying the natural sciences. Earlier, Blanqui had been the head of a kind of secret army of revolutionaires, described by Toqueville as strange and frightening outcasts when they stormed the french parlament or national assembly. He was declared war by the french government before making him a kind of mythical figure: "the man of 40 years prison". The extensive quotes of Blanqui in Benjamin's "The Arcades Project" sound so similar to statements of Cpt. Nemo in Verne's novel that I wonder if Verne took Blanqui as model for that figure. Then, the faszinosum of Verne's Nemo would come from the bad conscience of the philistines for having betrayed the "wretched of the earth"s hopes and sufferings at the french revolution, turned into a fairy tale, like the horrors of the thirty years war in Germany return in Grimm's fairy tales.

a bureaucracy experiment

2009-10-01T05:07:00.000-07:00

A kind of bureaucracy-fiction of the way, europe's political and economical leadership think about society is contained in this novel. The author, a well known sci-fi writer and physicist, condensed in it his impressions from a stay in a university housing the most influential thinking-school for future bureaucrats. An aquaintance made an experiment out of it: When some of his friends wondered if they should offer themself as think tank for problem analysis/solving in politics and business, but the idea got stuck, he renamed it after the novel and sent leading politicians a brochure with rhetorics after that sci-fi. "Just to see what happens", he said. Something did happen...

S(E)TI

2009-09-30T15:17:00.000-07:00

A recent conference report on the buildup of complex organic molecules from some mauled "Ursuppe" raised expectations about alien life, so possibly about ETI's too. As long ago as at the dawn of modern physics, Huygens even wrote a book about that. But would alien civilisations nessessarily develop advanced technology and sciences? I doubt this. Even Kant estimated that the discovery of science needs, aside intelligence whose advancement may be an automatic result of any evolutionary process, some set of special "synthetic apriories". Nicolai Hartmann, a forgotten but interesting neokantian philosopher, later described a "categorial dynamics" analyzing the development of such basic concepts. The emergence of science in our history seems to me as caused by a series of singular events which could easily have been disrupted for ever. Aside the idea of science and it's relation to mathematics as mental model, the invention of a scientific community was IMO such a singular event. Perhaps it is an invention by Descartes? When I read some weeks ago in his texts, I had the idea that he first estimated the minimum lenght of research for reaching his goals (ca. 500 years until an understanding of the mind-body problem) and looked for means to extend his personal life for achieving that by himself. The concept of a scientific community with it's special way to communicate according to certain standarts was perhaps only a substitute he propagated when it dawned him that he would never harvest the fruits of the tree he planted.

Conc. Seti, one reads often about how messages sent should be cleverly encrypted for reaching only clever aliens. I guess that would communicate only - like communicative complicatednesses in general - a sickness of the mind behind the message. Communicating existence only would be very little and civilizations detecting that would wonder why we don't tell something more of interest. Most interesting would be astronomical data from our satellites and details of our biology and ecosystems. Only a detailed understanding of biology would make an understanding of anything involving culture possible. So the IMO only reasonable way to proceed would be to transmit such data for a very long time and see if that attracts responses (like cheese in a mousetrap). The signals would have to be detectable for civilizations able to undertake such data exchanges over centuries. But such data would be of interest for a civilization only because our universe and the biologies in it are the single source of really interesting information. If more developed civilizations have other and easier to handle with sources of that, they would lose an interest in the physical universe and would invest nothing in Seti.

Perhaps we are for communication purposes just too weird in comparison with the universe's average ETI? This idea of lucubrating black holes may fit better. Perhaps one should look for "TI's", not "ETI's", but unfortunately the real TI became extinct ca. 10,000 years ago. That's what two well known neurologists published some time ago, speculating about findings at the beginning 20th century indicating the existence of a very large brained version of homo sapiens in south africa ca. 70,000 -10,000 years ago. Their reconstructions show them with a ca. 30% overall bigger brain, ca. 50% larger prefrontal cortex, than modern humans. It is amusing to wonder about the implications, if that becomes verified by further diggs some time. Those „Boskops“ - the real "TI's" - would have differed from us as we do from the homo erectus.

anthropological musings

2009-09-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

I wonder if the homo erectus was the first "real human": They had a much smaller brain and no modern language skills, but lived in something like huts around central paved places, used fire, became independent from a specific ecological nice, competed carnivores out of their ways, made specialized stone tools. Experts in reconstructing those stone tools say, a modern human would need ca. 2-3 weeks of intense and guided training to reproduce them. (-> see more, new infos and links above, at the entry "some updates")

The homini erecti probably were the first hominids who became "personas", because the heights of women suddenly increased after some climate change modified their food collecting methods. Earlier women were ca. half as high as men, male homo erectus' were ca. 1.80 m, women-h-e's ca. 1.40 m high. This change forced homini-erecti-women to avert a "monopolization" by dominant males, because the later would not have been able to nourish them any more. But the males' perception systems were still adapted to small women, so that they had trouble to perceive the startling elongated women as such. Women used that to invent some sort of attractive cosmetics and aliennating camouflage for guiding how they were perceived. In an article, an archeologist speculates that women dressed each full moon with animal parts and ashes as gastly "zombies" to drive males out of the settlements for hunting - when the males returned, suddenly the "zombies" had become attractive women again. This way, homo erectus women invented culture. IMO that could have been the root of advanced nonverbal social skills and social role playing. Perhaps our intuition about other people comes from those times and stayed on the level? Then, we would be essentially "blind" for those later developed higher mental functions which we usually proudly use to define us. Could it be that the core of real modern humanity is actually beyond our mental radar?

In that case, there should exist people with extremly restricted variants of human mentality which avoid detection by normal social intuition. A recent documentary seems to show that this is the case. An other case of a grossly deviant science fraudster (actually, Meinertzhagen was much worse, e.g. killed at least 25 people and his wife after she discovered his frauds. Meinertzhagen became model for "James Bond" when he impressed Fleming with his tales). Finally here an essay by Yuri I. Manin on reflections of the associated "trickster" figure in mythology, similar reflections of such cases in early european mythology, in antique greek culture and society, and in antique chinese literature.

Books and Libraries

2009-09-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

I love to browse them and to make accidential findings. Sometimes I even dream of wonderfull libraries, bookshops and books and sometimes I find myself browsing the shelves, only to find out that I've hunted a memory out of a dream. There is a beautifull scene (youtube) in Wim Wender's film "Der Himmel ueber Berlin", where, invisible for it's living visitors and readers, the spirits of the dead populate a public library and observe, comment, whisper to them.

An other place where the spirits come is this small private museum. When Wim Wenders stumbled across it, he made a small film on it and it's remarkable founder, Mrs. Blaschke. Her Museum is housed in a ca. 800 years old building above a place where pre-christian pagans saw ghosts. Then a women-monastry was build on it, which later turned into a police station and prison. Now it is about the spirit of creativity. A physicist donated a toy from (very early) Einstein, which Einstein had given him as symbol of the importance to never lose contact to one's childhood. (The text on the sheet behind it belongs to an other exhibit, we moved the cow for a better foto)