Brain Surgery September 4th

Started writing a reply to your email yesterday afternoon.  It turns out that I write “like a nut,” doing lengthy documents that are barely connected to the idea and carry crazy implications.  What I write in the afternoon tends to be worse that what I can write in the morning.

I can do it better by keeping it brief.  I had to have brain surgery September 4th due to microbial infection of my brain.  My surgery has worked out well (by the doctors standards, seems terrible to me).  We saw my doctor yesterday for a quick check on his part.  I didn’t know exactly who he was, (typical symptom of brain surgery), until he told me.  I thought he was a potential member of his staff.  I was surprised that the actual surgeon wanted to check with me.

Your complaints about visiting nurses and various types of therapy weakly matches my experience.  My visitors did speak English and were understandable.  Had one or two good visits, but the majority were poorly prepared nurses.  A couple of them were so bad that Amanda called the medical clinic and reported that we did not want to see xxx, yyy, ever again.

It sounds to me that you live in a wonderful place.  Evidently more summer oriented than annually functional.  I am sure that you a leading the trend and will see great progress in the next few years.

We moved to NH, the state where I grew up. My sister Jane, my brother Harry live close enough to drive over for dinner.  We picked a place to live that is close to the airport, a hospital, and has a nice view of the Merrimack river.  Amanda did several months of research via the internet before we left Maryland to physically inspect this place.  We rented for two years just incase we found something that we liked better. We didn’t.

Recently, a few days ago, I realized that fitness and health do not ensure freedom from disease or a long life.  This generated an early morning sense of urgency to do only what I really want to do and not waste any of my time watching or reading fiction.  (Perhaps this is what happened to me, or I have invented a fake explanation of who I am.)

I have been rereading a Kindle book on philosophy by Mortimer J. Adler.  The reason I know that I am rereading it is that it has notes that I left so long ago that I am a completely different thinker than I was 15 years ago, (Kindle hit the market in 2007.)  I read the book now and I have to read many pages and paragraphs at least three times to understand what Adler is writing.  I felt that this rereading was a symptom of my brain surgery, i.e. stupidity.  Then I found a note, by me years ago, in the book that cited exactly the same information about rereading pages three times.  I believed the repeated reading was related to the complexity of the document.  So I now confuse normal rereading as being a symptom of my stupidity.  I am confusing intelligence with stupidity.

Amanda has confronted me many times for blaming my thoughts and actions on my brain surgery.  She assures me that I am acting effectively and normally. I should stop complaining about the quality of my thoughts and actions.

My lesson is that just because my sense of thinking and feeling is different doesn’t mean that it is worse than it used to be.  It is only different, not worse (i.e. crazier).

Completion of my Life, History

Completion of my Life, History

Can I write essays using email drafts?
Steps:
Send essay to "fvogt@mac.com”
Start writing derived from steno pad notes.

Topic is “completion of my life.” Notes are on page 20231022 Sunday.

In 1990, a few months after separation from my wife Donna, I am taking the Landmark Forum during the month of March, forget the exact date, second week end etc?

I was 35 years old, and I realized that my life was complete. I had accomplished all I wanted, needed in life. I had two children, an ex-wife (soon to be) who would take care of them.
Now at age 68 I discover that there is much more to my life that I had ever imagined. I am still growing and expanding my self. Incredible, how does this happen? I continue to discover my “road to freedom.”


Key insights:
Discovering the ideas and habits that I unconsciously carry with me and use them to drive my behavior. Following discovery making decisions about following or changing them? Can this even done, can I recall them a few days later, can I honestly change my being, am I related to and helping the people that I know? Discovery that what I think is growth is finding out that this is not due to retirement or older age. I find younger people dealing with the same or more complicated issues.

Comments on Detachment and Caroline Myss

Why People Don't Heal and How They Can: A Practical Programme for Healing Body, Mind and Spirit by Caroline Myss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Carolyn Myss on “Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can.”

Miss Myss gets critical comments from some readers for lacking scientific evidence for her ideas. By scientific I image these folks mean randomized double blind trials with thousands of participants. Myss needs to be read in the manner of poetry or scripture, with spirit, not with mechanical reductionist formalism of the scientist. Psychology and theology are not scientific fields because their essence is dealing with human will.

A few of her words that are particular useful for me are:
Page 150, second paragraph, she says “In fact, reaching a detached state of mind for even five minutes a day is so valuable it can infuse your body with the equivalent energy of six months of living in genuine hope.” She suggests prayer or a mantra to attain detachment. [My preference is Meister Eckhart’s treatises “On Detachment.” A person does not need to believe in a god to learn from the arguments and tools of theology.]

Page 191 first paragraph, she provides a daily practice of paying attention to your energy that is facilitated by [and facilitates] detachment. [Preliminay exercises for feeling my energy are feeling, occupying my body, my feet, legs and so on up and out. Eventually, maybe months, years of practice, awareness of energy comes.]

My only criticism is that she does not discuss how truly difficult and challenging it is to hold onto detachment or energy awareness for more than a fleeting moment.

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My Notes from "Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World"

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl T. Bergstrom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A good review, for scientists and engineers, and probably news to the liberal arts culture (reference C. P. Snow's "The Two Cultures"), of the current use of numbers, statistics and charts to mislead readers.

The final chapter "Refuting Bullshit" is the best chapter of the book. Read this chapter first if you are in a hurry. Then fill any gaps in understanding by reviewing the previous chapters and sections as needed.

Page 232 says, "A single study doesn't tell you much about what the world is like. It has little value unless you know the rest of the literature and have a sense about how to integrate these findings with previous ones. Researchers weigh the evidence across multiple studies and try to understand why multiple studies often produce seemingly inconsistent results."

They quote Jonathan Swift, "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it."


In chapter 9 he explains a principle called the "base rate fallacy" based on the statistical concept of "p-value."

He uses several examples, one is a suspect whose finger print matches the finger print on file with the police. The reported odds of this are one in 10 million. But the probability that the suspect is guilty requires that we know how many other peoples have the matching finger print. It turns out that in a database of 50 million, 5 other people are a match also.

Therefore the odds of the person being guilty are one in five, not one in 50 million!

When the suspect comes up with a matching finger print then the probability must evaluated agains all the others who also have a matching finger print.

He provides more examples, Lyme disease testing, testing for ESP with playing cards, why so many "proven" science results cannot be duplicated by other scientists. If you come up positive on a Lyme disease test the probability of your having Lyme disease must be based on the population of positive results. How many false positives for Lyme exist? At the time of this book, it was a surprisingly large percentage.

My take away is the the "p-value" error may be like finding theories to fit the data. About as bad as selecting data to fit the theory. For theories based on research of huge amounts of data, data can always be found to support many spurious correlations.

[Please note that they say matching finger print, distinct from the same finger print.]
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Self Awareness through Literature

Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature by Angus Fletcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have not read Wonderworks since May 25th, 2022. I asked myself why I was putting it off. I realized that the underlying idea that most of what we do is driven by how we feel is a little bit depressing. It is like I am a puppet on biochemical strings, endorphins, adrenaline, oxytocin, dopamine. On the other hand I have enhanced awareness of how my body feels and how it is affected by my thoughts, food, and exercise. Intellectually I have known about this for a long time, but I am becoming aware of it at a deeper, more direct level than before.

For years I have puzzled over the difference between awareness, attention and knowing. In summary, awareness is direct perception of what is happening in my body. It is wordless, knowledge that does not come through ideas or perception. I found this discussion and distinction in Mortimer Adler’s theory of language presented in his small book “Some Questions about Language” page 99 in chapter 4, question number six. I found that going to any one section of this book and trying to read it for a quick answer to my questions is incomprehensible without first studying the intellectual scaffold of all the preceding pages. I had to be very patient to get to page 99 and I found that I could not read this book in anything but short doses each day. Almost as difficult as studying my mathematics books.

So back to Wonderworks, I immediately see that what I get from books I also get from my own thoughts and memories. In a sense every thought or memory is a potential story and produces its own feeling in me. I was surprised to recognize that the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is to find thoughts and possibilities that inspire me to get up and get things done, until this new awareness I just thought it was a result of habit and my good character, ;).

What it really is, is using my imagination to manage my body chemistry to excite myself into action. What a great tool that I didn’t even know I was using automatically. If anyone had asked me prior to starting to read Wonderworks, I would have said that I can call on my imagination to manage my feelings, but I don’t do it except on rare occasions when I feel in need of a little extra grit or happiness. Now I see it happens all the time, I am a continuous flow of feelings driven by my behavior and diet. But I am more than this in a way that I can’t yet describe yet.

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Notes from "Twilight of Democracy" by Anne Applebaum

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I gained several valuable insights from this book:

On page 16 she cites the work of Karen Stenner (https://www.karenstenner.com), a behavioral economist, who argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a word that is more useful than personality, because it is less rigid. Authoritarianism appeals to people who cannot tolerate complexity.

On page 29 she says "If you are someone who believes that you deserve to rule, then your motivation to attack the elite, pack the courts, and warp the press to achieve you ambitions is strong. Resentment, envy and above all the belief that the "system" is unfair--not just to the country but to you--these are important sentiments among the nativist ideologues of the Polish right, so much so that it is not easy to pick apart their personal and political motives.
Then she goes on to delve into a case study of this phenomena by looking at two brothers who went in opposite ways. Very interesting.

On page 38 she distinguishes between the "Big Lie" and the "Medium-Size Lie" use in propaganda. The effort to avoid the facts of reality, but still have the lies believed, lead to these lies.

On page 45 she continues a specific discussion of conspiracy theory in Polish politics by generalizing that "The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth."

On page 144, she quotes others from de Tocqueville to Reagan "... that American patriotism is unique, both then and later, was the fact that it was never explicitly connected to a single ethnic identity with a single origin in a single ethnic identity with a single origin in a single space." {To me this seems like common sense, but apparently not if someone needs to emphasize it.}



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Mathematics, Why am I studying my college textbooks?

First I want to have a better understanding of what my mind does in the process of solving mathematical problems, proving theorems and general propositions in mathematics.  Why do I want this? Because I plan to develop a deeper understanding of Objectivist epistemology compared to the one presented by Mortimer J. Adler’s “The Four Dimensions of Philosophy” and “Ten Philosophical Mistakes”.  Adler’s “object of thought” vs Rand’s “mental entity.” 

A second reason for deepening my knowledge of calculus and related topics in topology and abstract algebra is to be able to read Penrose’s “The Road to Reality.”   Penrose suggests in his preface to the book that by working through the exercises he presents, an interested reader can gain better knowledge of the mathematics that powers quantum physics.  His exercises  worked fine for me up to about chapter 5 where he asks for proof of his expansion of exponentials in radial coordinates as an exercise for the interested reader.  I recognized the process, but I don’t think I ever mastered in the first time around in my calculus, or physics, courses.  Then he goes way deeper into Complex Analysis than I ever did.  I disposed of my Complex Analysis book when we were paring down our possessions.  Fortunately Penrose recommended a complex analysis textbook  by one of his students. It is available for free on-line, and I am excited for the chance to study it.

Third, my high school assessment of psychology let to math as the “perfection” of human thinking, thus the pinnacle of psychological study.  Inspired by Isaac Asimov’s “Second Foundation” novel.

My reading Feynman’s biography by James Gleick “Genius” clarified the distinction for me that Penrose had alluded to, understanding more than just manipulating symbols but grasping the meanings of the equations in as near a sensory manner as possible.  Rand speaks of this in her essays about rationality, but never dives deep into it the way the physicists do.

Coincidentally, I am reading a history of economic thought in “Hayek’s Challenge” by Bruce Caldwell.  The history cites epistemological errors in the use of abstract concepts by brilliant people in the early 1900’s.  Sadly I still run across many of these same kinds of errors in current social, economic, news, and other reporting.  

My best guess is that many of these people come from a literary background and have no hands on appreciation for the role of abstract concepts used as tools to understand reality.  It as if I told them about a the concept of a circle, they would want to see empirical proof that it exists, else what good is it?  How many studies have we heard about over the years that dig into the causes of poverty, and they always come up with the same answer.  I can remember at least three that I have listened to, while commuting to work, over the decades.  It is reassuring that they all get the same answer, but does the endless accumulation of data ever going to give something essentially new?  It is like going out and gather data on all the examples of circles in the world in an attempt to prove the concept of circle.  Each area of knowledge has its own modes of investigation, and proof.  History is not the same as mathematics, chemistry is not the same as economics.  The problem with economic research is trying to meet the demand for forecasting in order to support state policy.  

Politics motivated the money spent in educating economists, hence economists doe the best they can to support providing the desires of politicians to “control” the economy for the benefit of the “common good,” e.g. more votes, more money for politicians.  I believe this phenomena explains I. Kant’s theories of reason, and ethics.  To support his Prussian King.

Example of learning, the definition of a function:

My initial steps were a cursory review of material that I “thought I knew.”  Well maybe I missed some of the nuances, such as. the definition of supply set, that I glossed over because it seemed pretty trivial.  The contents of the domain are drawn from the supply set.

The resistance to learning the formal definition of a function was that I had an intrinsic preference for curves instead of ordered pairs.  Because I feel very bored with infinite series, number theory, set theory, fields, all the algebraic reasoning that goes into this stuff.  

As I continue to study math, I make more and more connections between fields of math that I had not appreciated before.  Algebra (abstract algebra), matrices, calculus, series, polynomials, the limits of what may be calculated.

As I observe the back and forth of imagination and logic I develop a much greater personal appreciation for imagination.  Some how this study has also allowed me to recognize the allusions to this imagination-logic process by all sorts of people.  Allusions that I would have not and did not notice in the past.

Even current debate in mathematical theory about teaching and understanding calculus, a geometrical, image based (imaginative) approach or a more formal abstract explanation based in proven number theory,  delta-epsilon proofs.  The debate is still current and driving other lines of mathematical investigation.  

What would make this discussion more interesting would be the demonstration of the various findings and writings of these uses and discussions of imagination and logic.  Imagination comes before logic in our thinking, both developmentally and functionally, but many people stop at imagination because it moves so quickly and feels so satisfying, but really it is a short cut to thinking by skipping verification of imagination by the use of logic and establishing consistency with prior knowledge.  Even Kant mentions the importance of confirming imagination by logic unless it is his special intuition.  

[TODO: Quote Kant on above comments about verification of imagination]