Ishmael: Chapter 5

This is part of a series of posts representing ideas from the book, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. I view the ideas explored in Ishmael to be so important to the world that it seems everyone should have a chance to be exposed. I hope this treatment inspires you to read the original.

Chapter FIVE is where Alan presents the final part of Taker mythology: about why things are the way they are. This chapter is presented in seven numbered subsections, beginning on page 77 of the original printing and page 81 of the 25th anniversary printing. The sections below mirror this arrangement in the book. See the launch post for notes on conventions I have adopted for this series.

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Ishmael: Chapter 4

Conquer the Earth! From Wikimedia Commons

This is part of a series of posts representing ideas from the book, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. I view the ideas explored in Ishmael to be so important to the world that it seems everyone should have a chance to be exposed. I hope this treatment inspires you to read the original.

Chapter FOUR is where Alan presents the middle part of Taker mythology about why things are the way they are. This short chapter is presented in five numbered subsections, beginning on page 65 of the original printing and page 69 of the 25th anniversary printing. The sections below mirror this arrangement in the book. See the launch post for notes on conventions I have adopted for this series.

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Ishmael: Chapter 3

Photo by Aminhadia72 (Wikimedia Commons)

This is part of a series of posts representing ideas from the book, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. I view the ideas explored in Ishmael to be so important to the world that it seems everyone should have a chance to be exposed. I hope this treatment inspires you to read the original.

This post covers Chapter THREE, when Ishmael extracts the beginning of the Taker story from Alan. Chapter 3 is presented in eight numbered subsections, beginning on page 47 of the original printing and page 51 of the 25th anniversary printing. The sections below mirror this arrangement in the book. See the launch post for notes on conventions I have adopted for this series.

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Ishmael: Chapter 2

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

This is part of a series of posts representing ideas from the book, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. I view the ideas explored in Ishmael to be so important to the world that it seems everyone should have a chance to be exposed. I hope this treatment inspires you to read the original.

This post covers Chapter TWO, when the lessons begin. Chapter 2 is presented in seven numbered subsections, beginning on page 31 of the original printing and page 33 of the 25th anniversary printing. The sections below mirror this arrangement in the book. See the launch post for notes on conventions I have adopted for this series.

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Views: 993

Ishmael: Chapter 1

Captivity. Photo by rdoroshenko (Wikimedia Commons)

This is part of a series of posts representing ideas from the book, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. I view the ideas explored in Ishmael to be so important to the world that it seems everyone should have a chance to be exposed. I hope this treatment inspires you to read the original.

This post covers Chapter ONE, which introduces the protagonist/narrator (who we learn in later books to be named Alan Lomax) and the telepathic gorilla named Ishmael who is to be Alan’s teacher. The chapter is presented in eight numbered subsections, beginning on page 1 of both the original printing and the 25th anniversary printing. The sections below mirror this arrangement in the book. See the launch post for notes on conventions I have adopted for this series.

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Ishmael Overview

Have I mentioned how important I think Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael is? I reread it recently for the first time in a while, and was again impressed with how many important modernity-challenging ideas are packed into one novel.

I would dearly love everyone to read it. It’s not that I hold it to be flawless—to be treated as a divinely-inspired religious text. But it’s hard to think of a more powerful place to start for seeding incredibly important conversations and shifting awareness. It often transforms its readers, whether teenagers or retirees.

Options for reading the book include library access (also an audio version recently out), purchase (I recommend bookshop.org, where go to an independent book shop of your choice), or a few sites (1, 2, 3) that somehow make the text available. Being trapped behind a commercial “paywall” seems counter to the entire message of the book, which explicitly encourages sharing the message broadly.

I also suggest that you visit the site ishmael.org for more related content and FAQ answers from Daniel Quinn (who died in 2018). A recent podcast series called Human Nature Odyssey, by Alex Leff, does a fantastic job of presenting key ideas from the book.

As a poor substitute for the entire book, what I’ll do is create a series here on Do the Math that offers a relatively comprehensive version of the themes in the book. It won’t be as masterfully crafted as the actual book—but perhaps will be good enough to generate similar patterns of thought, and inspire greater readership of the original work.

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Nothing But Flowers

I recently stumbled on a song from 1988 by the Talking Heads, called (Nothing But) Flowers. It’s hard to believe I would not have heard this song before. It caps off the “Best Of” album, after all. But, to be fair, a sampling of the album reveals that 8 of the 18 songs are unfamiliar to me. So, maybe it never hit my ears.

Anyway, listening as if for the first time, I’m captivated by the song. Although it’s not perfect, it hits themes that few songs do. What I’ll do is quote all the lyrics and intersperse comments. I’ll put my interpretive slant on the piece, which may or may not accurately reflect the intent of its creators. So it goes with these things. Sometimes the original intent isn’t even all that important or sacred. In this case, I don’t sense I’m far off the mark, but just want to be clear that I do not claim to have perfect knowledge of the creative intent, nor am I trying to achieve such.

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Nursery Rhymes

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Image by Loren Elkin from Pixabay

We all appreciate that human individuals progress through stages of cognitive development on the way to adulthood. A toddler is simply not equipped to run a country (hold your quips): the brain hasn’t fully developed. Infants love the game of peek-a-boo precisely because they have not yet cemented the idea of object permanence. Language capability improves over many years—decades, actually. Brains are not “fully” developed until the late twenties (yet assert mastery starting in the teen years).

But, what does “fully” developed mean? It means significant further development in structure or capability is not to be expected. Does it mean that brains reach some theoretical ultimate capability—no more improvements possible—or do they maybe stop short of perfection? Why would evolution produce anything substantially better than what provides sufficient selective advantage in an ecological context, in simultaneous consideration of all other organism attributes and the biodiverse and social environments in which they operate? The tangled difficulty of that sentence barely hints at the immense contextual complexity involved.

So, every last one of us ceases brain development well short of some notional limit. Does that stopping point cross the threshold of being able to master all knowledge or understanding about Life, the Universe, and Everything? Of course not. Evidence abounds. So, we will never comprehend it all, given our limited meat-brains.

All this echoes things I’ve said before. What’s new in this post is what I hope will be a helpful analogy to how adults present ideas to children possessing less-developed brains—thus the Nursery Rhyme title. Since adult human brains also stop short of “full” development, how might we expect our imperfect brains to interact with what we can’t fully understand? We encounter this conundrum all the time in giving “sufficient” accounts to children that are effective, even if they must be over-simplified or distorted to get the point across. So, how would a hypothetical species possessing far more wisdom explain the incomprehensible to us, as if we were children to them?

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The Big Question

A short story of fiction by Tom Murphy

Almost any nerd worth their salt has read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, relishing its innovative and unpredictable humor.

So it was with Adam Lundquist and Alex Ford: top-level coworkers at the Institute for the Future of Artificial Intelligence Learning, who—besides being project leaders—were widely regarded as the principal talent behind an exciting new AI platform on the verge of becoming operational.

Because they were fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, and because it was not hard to see a parallel between their creation and that of Deep Thought—the supercomputer from the book designed to answer, once and for all, The Big Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything—it was perhaps inevitable that they began playfully referring to each other as Lunkwill and Fook after their analogs in the story. The close alignment to their real names only reinforced for them a sense of destiny. Ford even toyed with legally changing her name to Fook, but dropped it in light of the headaches such a move would bring to her life. Plus, it would only be epic if Lundquist changed his name as well, but he wasn’t having any of it.

Nerds gotta nerd. But silliness aside, what these two and their team created was indeed extraordinary. Inspired by insights from neuroscience, and having acquired an industry-shattering awareness of the different configurations of left and right hemispheres in animal brains, they managed to break free of traditional architectures that strictly focused on algorithmic, exact, logical methods characteristic of all previous efforts in computing—which had only doubled-, tripled- and millioned-down on left-hemisphere cognitive habits. Such strategies were fine in narrow domains like chess and language construction, where a finite space of rules and limited contextual complexity allowed complete mastery and tidy solutions to problems. But these approaches were dead-ends in terms of tackling the really thorny, more open-ended problems pertinent to human life on Earth.

In this new effort, what was truly remarkable and inspired was the admission by the designers that they themselves had no real mastery over cognition and deep thinking. Therefore, they fashioned a machine that could design elements of its own architecture, engaging in a process similar to the one employed by evolution in building our own brain machines. It might seem rude or pejorative to slap the “machine” label on our amazing brains, but that’s only because the artificial, technological machines we have built tend to be pathetically simple compared to what evolution can produce after billions of years of proven functionality and honing. Yet, our brains and bodies—and microbes for that matter—are still physical machines in a strict sense, just far too complex for us to comprehend or design—putting our puny and fragile non-living machines to shame (not a one will last millions of years like a species can).

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Outside the Fishbowl

Image by Jazella from Pixabay

One consequence of having developed a perspective on the long-term fate of modernity is a major disconnect when communicating with others. Even among people who have a sense for our predicament, my views often come across as “out there.”

Let me first say that I don’t enjoy it. Having different views than those around me makes me uncomfortable. I was never one to make a point of standing out or of having a contrary opinion for the sport of it (we all know those people). My favorite teams as a kid were the local ones (Falcons, Braves, Mocs), like everyone else around me. I wear blue jeans basically every day, blending in to Americana. No tattoos, piercings, or “non-conformist” affectations. It is, in fact, because of my continual discomfort at having stumbled onto a divergent view that I am compelled to write and write and write about it. I feel trapped between what analysis suggests and what almost everyone else around me thinks/assumes. The discomfort means that I keep trying to discover where I’m wrong (my life would be easier!), but the exercise usually just acts to reinforce the unpopular view.

In this post, I want to try to turn the tables: make members of the mainstream feel uncomfortable for a change. It probably won’t work, but I’ll try all the same. I could have titled the post: “No, You’re Crazy.”

My mental image for this post is one of a fishbowl in a vast and varied space devoid of other fishbowls. The fish living in the bowl have each other, the enveloping water, a gravel floor, fake plants, a decorative castle, and manna from heaven morning and night. Concerns of the fish need not, and in a way cannot extend beyond the boundaries of the bowl. The awkwardness is that the bowl is wildly different than the rest of the space in all directions. It’s the anomaly that the inhabitants deem to be normal. The analogy to ourselves in modernity should be clear…

What happens when the caretaker of the fishbowl disappears: when the food stops coming, and the environment becomes fouled? The artificial context of the bowl ceases to function or even make sense. The best outcome for the fish might be to get back to a pond or stream where they could live within their original context: woven into the web of life, enjoying and contributing to a rich set of “ecosystem services.” But getting there is not easy. Once there, figuring out how to live outside of the dumbed-down artificial construct presents another major challenge. As good as the fish seemed to have it, the fishbowl turns out to have been an unfortunate place to live. I invite you now to re-read this paragraph, substituting modernity for the fishbowl.

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