Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

Books! Kind of like websites, but you can take them outside and sometimes they have complex ideas in them.

What I’ve been reading:

• Metamagical Themas - Douglas Hofstadter:
  Hofstadter is one of my all-time favorite authors — I love his broad range of interests, smart analysis, and clever writing. This book is a collection of his Scientific American columns from the early ’80s; thought-provoking and fun (even if his strong concern about the possibility of nuclear war doesn’t seem as urgent today as it must have then).
• All The King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren:
  This classic is a dense political novel; I read it after Jesse taught it for a course on Southern Literature and Culture this spring. Fantastic prose, intricate structure and plotting, complex ideas conveyed through fiction - highly recommended!
• The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan:
  A classic, obviously. Friedan’s analysis is straightforward and chilling; despite the amount of time that has passed, the concepts ring true; although it isn’t as strong as it was a few decades ago, the feminine mystique of relegating woman’s function to the sexual still exists.
  She more or less leaves out queer women, women of color, and lower-class women, but even with these problems, the ideas are still valuable. (This book was also fun to read while watching through the first season of Mad Men; the character of Betty is obviously based on Friedan’s examples.)
  I’m in the middle of The Second Sex right now and both books share a key takeaway for me: it’s impossible to fully develop yourself without a role in the world that involves meaningful interaction with other members of society, something that’s been denied to women in a lot of times and places. Finishing up The Feminine Mystique actually helped inspire me for another project that’s in the works — stay tuned!!
• The Drunkard’s Walk - Leonard Mlodinow:
  Read this one for the book club, and it was a lot more interesting than I expected it to be. Mlodinow gives clear explanations of key ideas in randomness and probability along with straightforward examples of their application and engaging anecdotes about the mathematicians who discovered them.

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about whether my activities were “pointful”. As a teenager, I’d obsessively analyze all the work I was doing and judge it by whether it had any measurable, real-world effect — “this shift at the bookstore was pointless because there were two of us and business was slow enough for one of us to handle”, or “my role as a stagehand is pointful because no one else in the show is available to turn on this light at this time”. I’d abandon “pointless” activities in favor of tasks where my presence made a quantifiable difference to some observable outcome.

As you might expect, this could get pretty depressing at times! Now that I’ve reached the ripe age of 23 (and, of course, now understand everything), I have a different perspective. I went canvassing to get out the vote in New Hampshire on Election Day — was this “pointful” by my old standards? Absolutely not! Every voter I talked to had already voted by the time I got to them — and even if I had been able to remind someone to go to the polls, it would hardly have made a difference, from my teenage perspective, to Obama’s tens-of-thousands-of-votes lead. Similarly, I gladly and proudly voted myself — but everything I voted for in Massachusetts was much closer to a 60/30 margin than a 50/50 one. My teenage self might have asked, why would I think it was so cool to participate in these things if it was so obviously pointless?

I used to focus on myself as an individual actor, but my appreciation has deepened for my role in emergent systems. My individual actions in getting out the vote and voting didn’t “make a difference”, but I was one of many cells making up larger systems (the campaign’s organization of volunteers, the electorate) that clearly did affect the outcome of the election — just like individual neurons in my brain die all the time without affecting my thoughts, but neurons certainly aren’t “pointless”, since all of them together collectively make up the larger system of my brain!

I was thinking about this because I’m reading I Am A Strange Loop, which explores some of these issues of emergent properties; it’s by the author of the extremely excellent (but long!) Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is also interested in these questions. For a breezier introduction, check out Steven Johnson’s take.

Also, I’m excited to be reading something new after taking almost six months to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Talk about intense! GR is also, in some sense, about the relationship between actors and larger systems. But it’s not about systems that emerge naturally from the combination of less complex elements — it’s a massive paranoid fantasy, full of ambiguity about what levels of the systems have agency, whether they’re constructed top-down or bottom-up, or whether they even exist!

Regular old emergent systems are much simpler.

I never got very far with Gravity’s Rainbow last fall, but I think that was in large part because it’s too bulky to toss in my purse when I go to work — this year, I started reading while riding/waiting for the T, and apparently I spend a fair amount of time doing that, as I’ve finished two books recently with very little time spent reading in non T-related settings:

The Other End of the Leash, Patricia McConnell

This was a Christmas present from my parents; the author is an animal behaviorist who addresses human misconceptions about canines from a perspective that is part hard science, part personal experience. She contrasts canine and primate behavior: e.g., primates love hugging, while canines find it kind of weird; loud primates get high social status, while canines don’t really respect loudness; etc. I was pleased to take some of this information to my dog job, where I practiced not looking dogs in the eye in order to appear non-threatening. (Successful.)

The Mind’s I, edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

This was a Christmas present from my favorite philosopher of science; it’s a collection of stories, essays, etc. that are primarily thought experiments on the nature of “selfdom” or “mind” (including, e.g., the paper in which Turing proposes the Turing test, some science fiction about robots and putting minds in new bodies, Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” counter to Turing’s arguments), each followed by “reflections” by the editors. I read my first Richard Dawking in this book, and found his analysis of living organisms as “survival machines” for genes compellingly reductionist (I always have a weakness for reductionist arguments). The editors advocate a more-or-less materialist view of the mind, including some fairly convincing arguments against mind-brain dualism; essentially, their position (counter to the position of some of the essayists) is that consciousness comes from a system behaving in the way that a brain behaves. And also, I suppose, minds are tricky, tricky things that no one really understands, but they’re probably just made of neurons and not some amaterial “soul”.