Women Who Look Extraordinary

Henry James and OK Cupid make for an unusual match. But the online dating site recently released statistical findings that confirm, more than a century later, James's observation of what made certain women particularly beguiling.

In his 1880 novel Portrait of a Lady, James describes his inexpressibly intriguing heroine, Isabel Archer, in comparison to her more traditionally beautiful older sister Edith:

Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself) pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two; but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgment, had the entertainment of thinking all the others aesthetic vulgarians.

In other words, the physical allure of Isabel is not that she's universally considered beautiful, but that she is considered extremely beautiful by a minority that recognizes that most people wouldn't agree--and gets a little puff of confident self-satisfaction from that very fact.

If only more online daters read James. OK Cupid's blog (and informal statistical wing), OK Trends, recently announced results that suggest that the Jamesian prescription holds true for profile pictures: women who post pictures that prompt widespread disagreement about their beauty actually get substantially more messages than traditionally attractive women.

Maybe OK Cupid's stats aren't exactly rigorous science, but they're interesting. I'm still willing to classify this as a literary insight belatedly discovered by science...someone call Jonah Lehrer.

Computers...taking over...must...make...soulful art...

I've been thinking a lot about this recent op-ed by Jaron Lanier, which claims that we commit a "devaluation of human thought" when we treat computers like minds.

Lanier gets a number of the facts right: the artificial intelligence spin is a sure boost to any technological story, and the analogies between computer "intelligence" and human intelligence are largely overblown in order to win press coverage. He's also right that it's dangerous to imagine that we'll ever know for sure if it's possible to download human minds into software; any tests we can devise to "make sure" that consciousness has been effectively digitized will be the exact tests that programmers and designers are building systems to satisfy. (We all know that it's possible to train kids to ace a test without educating them; the same risk exists in the design of computer intelligence systems.)

For the most part, I side with N. Katherine Hayles, whose book How We Became Posthuman explains how we came to believe in the idea of a machine intelligence that could be equal to or greater than our own. Hayles has serious doubts about that possibility, namely because it depends upon a belief that the nature of human (or even animal) intelligence could be divorced from its material structure. The mind, she points out, doesn't operate on simple binary principles; until we can create structures that exactly mimic the material workings of the human brain--and to do that, they must be incorporated into a nervous system and "body" that closely parallels our own--we won't ever create an intelligence that works like ours, but better.

That said, I think Lanier has overly simplistic and idealistic images of the bottomless wonder of human intelligence and creativity. He wants to preserve our gasping admiration of "personhood," and feels threatened by the possibility that we may "begin to think of people more and more as computers."

This concern--that human individualism is under fire--has been around for about as long as the idea of human individualism, and I don't see what's compelling or new about Lanier's concern about A.I. It could just as easily be Lanier panicking about the Industrial Revolution turning people into machine parts, about capitalism turning people into "the bottom line"--hell, he could be panicking about how the invention of writing devalues the presence of human teachers, advisors, and memory. His worries that people are passively letting computers mechanically determine their aesthetic choices through Netflix or Amazon is particularly offensive, since it imagines that

(1.) anyone is actually mindlessly doing such a thing [!?] and that
(2.) the aesthetic is the realm of individual expression and taste, which--prior to the existence of evil mechanical algorithms--was some sort of sacred realm in which untarnished individuality blossomed.

I guess those of us who study the arts should be grateful for this bone being tossed our way by a member of one of the more "practical," "sensible" fields. But this is what scientists and engineers always do--they make pleas for the arts and the aesthetic by turning art into a wonderful world that defies logic and keeps us grounded, soulful, human. If this is the price to be paid to get public respect for students and producers of the arts--if we're allowed to be kept around only as the infantilized and inexplicably necessary darlings of scientists, as their extracurricular activities, toddlers and lap dogs--I think most of us would rather be put down.

Let me offer my grounded, soulful, human rebuttal to Lanier's paranoia. Any useful technological breakthrough acts as an extension or distribution of mental processing, so it does work as part of a mind--one that includes human minds in its circuit. It's ridiculous to imagine that the human mind is somehow separate from these systems--as if it weren't altered by the use of a technology like language or writing. All these technologies interact with human minds in reciprocal ways. Recognizing the importance of the human brain in this system is crucial, but we should also recognize that the line between "active mind" and "passive tool" is more arbitrary than someone like Lanier--who wants us to think of computers as "inert, passive tools" to keep his idea of the ineffable human intact--is willing to admit.

The Mind Is Not the Brain?

Recommended: a couple of good online reflections on Marilynne Robinson's new book, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of Self, from D.G. Myers and Amelia Atlas.

While both these reviews are positive, I don't think I'll be picking up a copy anytime soon. Robinson is writing against what she calls "parascientific writing," a handy term that leaves respect for science intact while disparaging the recent trend of popular, scientifically-informed books that tend to argue against a spiritual realm, or that tend to denigrate individual experiences of consciousness.

Agreed: a lot of modern empiricism (and so-called empiricism) tends to denigrate individual accounts of what life or experience consists of. It wants to tell people what they're "really" doing, "really" thinking, and what the world is "really" like, and refuses to listen to what they themselves have to say. Robinson identifies the problem wonderfully. But the solution to this problem doesn't have to be a retrenchment in spirituality, or jaw-dropping wonder at the imponderable nature of existence/the human mind, or a dismissal of neuroscience's materialistic findings about the brain.

In fact, a number of thinkers in a variety of fields have been troubled by the same problem that disturbs Robinson, and have, I think, solved it better. For instance, Robinson's concern about the way "parascientific" writing downplays human experience has also been expressed by the sociologist Bruno Latour. Latour encourages researchers to take people seriously when they describe their sense that superhuman forces, for instance, are compelling them to do things. For someone like Latour, this information is a valuable clue to how the human mind, and how social activity, functions--it isn't some kind of charade to be exposed. (Latour makes this argument in Reassembling the Social.)

Easily my favorite book in this vein--and one of my favorite books of all time--is Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Bateson was a polymath who dabbled in anthropology, sociology, animal communication, and a number of other fields. Steps is an anthology of his writing from the 1940s through about 1970, showing the way he worked through questions of information and communication to form a new picture of what "mind" might mean--a picture that respects human experience and tries to place it appropriately in the framework of a larger system. His view manages to include both the mystical awe that comes with true appreciation for mental processes, and an empirical view that respects and deploys scientific understanding.

Later systems theorists and posthumanists have followed up on this work in various ways that--while equally fascinating--are more academic. (I'm thinking of people like Niklas Luhmann, or Cary Wolfe, whose What is Posthumanism? I'm currently devouring.) If you're interested in this problem--the poverty of popular scientific explanation, the difficulty of reconciling certain scientific claims with felt human experience--I strongly, strongly recommend Bateson's work. But my broader point is that we're at a kind of explanatory impasse, and Robinson has done a fine job identifying it--but the impasse doesn't mean we need to retreat to one camp or another. It means it's time to scout for new paths, and I think systems theory, in its various forms, offers them.