Book review: The Mind-Body Problem

A philosopher and a mathematician walk into a restaurant

The Mind-Body Problem is a very well-done, entertaining novel. I came across it from Patrick Collison’s list of “particularly great” books.

The story follows Renee Feuer, a Jewish graduate student in philosophy at Princeton who marries a mathematical genius, Noam Himmel. The author, Rebecca Goldstein, was a Jewish graduate student in philosophy at Princeton who married a mathematical physicist, Sheldon Goldstein. Just saying.

Evidence for souls

Noam is a dualist, i.e., someone who believes that mind, or consciousness, is separate from body. He cites evidence like that of a 20th-century woman whose dreams included verses in what turned out to be medieval French, and who recalled a 13th-century group of Puritan-like believers in stunning detail.

Some of the details she reported—what color robes the Cathar priests wore, for example—were at variance with accepted scholarly views but were eventually verified when the records of the inquisitors who had persecuted the sect were translated. Many of the names of the historically insignificant people the woman had described were also found in these records.

Perhaps most interesting, however, is his deductive proof against materialism — the view that mind is entirely a function of the body. The proof may be original to Goldstein.

1. If a person is identical with his body, he would not survive his death.

2. If a person is identical with his body, he would survive his death.

3. So if a person is identical with his body, he both would and would not survive his death.

Since any proposition that entails a contradiction can’t be true, we can deduce from 3 that:

4. A person is not identical with his body.

The first premise is uncontroversial, but the second premise requires its own proof. That proof follows a reductio ad absurdum. Ex hypothesi:

A. A person is identical with his body.

B. A person doesn’t survive his death.

C. A person’s body survives the person’s death.

D. If a person is his body, then if his body exists, he exists. From A, C, and D follows:

E. A person does survive his death.

But B and E contradict each other, showing that you can’t assert A, B, C, and D. Since C and D are supposed to be obvious, the inference is that you can’t assert A and B; that is, if A, then not B: If a person is identical with his body, then he does survive his death: and that is precisely the conclusion to be proved here, the second premise of the first argument.

The proof seems wrong, but it’s hard to say what’s wrong with it exactly. Ava, a physicist friend of Renee’s, has an interesting reaction to the proof:

I don’t know what’s wrong. I haven’t given it much thought and I don’t intend to. There’s something wrong. Look, it took centuries to find out what was wrong with all those so-called proofs of God’s existence, that one that tries to show that God’s existence follows from his definition as all-perfect. It took centuries to find out what the fallacy was there. You’ve got to trust common sense before a priori reason.

The state of philosophy research

Throughout the book, the narrator criticizes the temperament of modern philosophy research. The criticism is Big if True:

The questions were now all of language. Instead of wrestling with the large, messy questions that have occupied previous centuries of ethicists, for example, one should examine the rules that govern words like “good” and “ought.” … No more dark, inaccessible regions lying beyond the reach of reason’s phallic thrusts. …

The philosophical mind has long craved a limited universe. The pre-Socratic Pythagoreans, in their table of opposites, listed “limited” on the side occupied by “order,” “light,” “good,” and “male.”

From an essay by Paul Graham, who studied philosophy as an undergrad, I think this criticism is true:

Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words. Do we have free will? Depends what you mean by “free.” Do abstract ideas exist? Depends what you mean by “exist.”

Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I’m not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time?

The Institute for Advanced Study

There is interesting detail on the history of the illustrious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The IAS is like Bell Labs in that, as Renee says, “[a]nyone who is anyone in our world has done time here”. Russell, Einstein, Godel, von Neumann, Feynman. You name it.

Abraham Flexner founded it in 1930 as an institute where members would be “free to pursue their ideas, unencumbered by teaching responsibilities”. Oppenheimer called the Institute “an intellectual hotel, dedicated to the preservation of the good things men live by”. The Institute was devoted to the “usefulness of useless knowledge”. Naturally, faculty was at first restricted to mathematicians. (As a happy side-effect, they cost little to maintain: “a few men, a few rooms, books, blackboards, chalk, paper, and pencils”.)

Like IAS, I have always found the University of Gottingen fascinating. Gauss, Hilbert, Klein, Dirichlet, Riemann, Noether, Szilard, Jordan, Heisenberg, and Born taught here. Half a century before them, the Brothers Grimm taught here! Oppenheimer got his doctorate here. So significant was it in science and math that it made German an international academic tongue. Gottingen declined when Nazis purged Jews from it. After the purge, the Nazi minister of education asked Hilbert, “How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?” Hilbert said, “There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore.”

Goldstein writes that “Hitler ranks only after Bamberger and Fuld [who chartered the IAS], someone once said, in terms of helping the Institute become what it is, as scholar after scholar fled Göttingen for Princeton.”

Worshipping genius

Throughout the book, Goldstein develops the idea of “mattering zones”. Roughly speaking, someone’s mattering zone is the properties of people or objects that they value:

Since we can discard these attributes even less easily than our clothes, we can always be strictly categorized according to the perceptions emanating from these areas: of who matters (the beautiful, the athletic, and the intelligent, respectively) and who doesn’t (the ugly, the flabby and the dumb). Contempt for the unfit is stronger, I think, than disdain for the plain. Perhaps because of the passivity of beauty? But no, intelligence is every bit as passive, a gift either granted or denied. And yet the scorn felt for the unintelligent is an almost moral outrage. Never mind that the dull can’t help themselves, that they would, granted the sense to do so, have chosen to be otherwise. Their very existence is felt as a moral affront by those of us who dwell where the genius is hero. The color of our zone is only just discernably lighter than the true black of those who perceive people according to their acceptance of some moral or religious or political code.

Genius reigns prime in Renee’s mattering zone. She pities a woman who married a would-be genius historian that turned out to be a dud.

It’s a good thing, it occurred to me, that such errors as Dorothea’s don’t happen in math, where a proof is a proof whether of a theorem or of genius. (Casaubon was an historian of religion, his futile research on a Key to All Mythologies.) I, at the very least, had the real thing.

The humanities are entirely suspect:

The greater the certainty of one’s results, the less the concern with others’ opinions of oneself.

Thus at the end of the spectrum occupied by sociologists and professors of literature, where there is uncertainty as to how to discover the facts, the nature of the facts to be discovered, and whether indeed there are any facts at all, all attention is focused on one’s peers, whose regard is the sole criterion for professional success. Great pains are taken in the development of the impressive persona, with excessive attention given to distinguished appearance and faultless sentence structure.

Renee is positively subservient to genius. From Renee and Noam’s first dinner to parties where her husband humiliates her, she’s star-struck with Noam. (“The problem with you, Renee,” a friend helpfully explains, “is that you think the male sexual organ is the brain.”) Renee wants to be like Einstein’s second wife who kept the house in order and did little else, of whom Einstein said: “I’m glad my wife doesn’t know any science. My first wife did.”

Her character arc in the novel is a shift in her mattering zones, which comes about after (here comes a spoiler; avert your eyes) Noam loses his genius:

Any view that confers degrees of mattering, that distinguishes between those who matter and those who don’t, has no objective validity. We all count in precisely the same way. That’s the view from nowhere inside, the view from out yonder. And its contemplation beckons to me like a liberation.

Flash essays

It’s wrong to dismiss fiction as not idea-dense enough to be worth your time. Good fiction is shot through with insightful mini-essays. For example:

Like all people in academia, I count my years the way the Bible does, from September to September. (Like schoolchildren, too—just one of the many ways in which the life of an academic is continuous with his childhood.)

More examples: when the superiority differential between us and our colleagues becomes large enough, we “stop envying and start adoring”. The narrator feels “an immediate closeness to anyone who loves New York or hates Los Angeles. Either condition is sufficient, but I’ve found that satisfaction of the one usually entails satisfaction of the other.” Noam observes that GH Hardy wrote his defense of mathematics research after he stopped producing mathematics research: “Obviously after. A mathematician with his powers doesn’t have any interest or time to write a book like this.”

What’s the difference between “obvious” and “trivial”?

A great difference. A theorem is obvious if it’s easy to see, to grasp. A theorem is trivial if the logical relations leading to it are relatively direct. Generally, theorems that are trivial are obvious. If the logical relations leading to it are straight, it’s easy to get to. And conversely. Thus the sloppy conflation of the terms.” He glanced darkly at Raoul. “But the meanings are different, as are the extensions. Sometimes the logical relations are direct but not so accessible. You know the old joke about the professor who says that something is trivial and is questioned on this by a student and goes out and works for an hour and comes back and says, ‘I was right. It is trivial’?Well, you couldn’t substitute ‘obvious’ for ‘trivial’ in that joke.

A nice meditation on the joys of living in an apartment:

I hadn’t realized at the time the dangers with which I was flirting, the precarious nature of the world of property ownership we had almost entered: that world of intimate, complicated, aggravating relationships with painters, plumbers, carpenters, gardeners, and electricians. Much of the conversation at dinner parties was devoted to the intricacies of these relationships, the degree of sensitivity they required. And though they were always amusing tales, told with the lightness and gaiety suitable to the occasion, I could glimpse the soul suffering that lay behind, and always felt correspondingly grateful for a situation that allowed us to go running with any household woe—from a clogged toilet to a mouse in the pantry—to the kind and efficient people at the university housing office.

An aside on the economics of full-time Talmudic study:

Lakewood has two identities. It’s a pretty little resort community, and it’s also the Princeton of yiddishkeit. Life there presents Judaism at its purest: the men learning in the elite kollel, which is like a graduate department for Talmud; the women producing children and also teaching or running little businesses in their basements to augment the meagre stipends the kollel pays their husbands. Some of the families actually live quite well, supported by the wife’s father. This is one of the great blessings of wealth, to be able to buy a scholar for a son-in-law and support him in the way of life one couldn’t choose for oneself.

An aside on the vocabulary for describing romance:

I overheard a group of pubescent girls, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, chattering and giggling, and I caught the phrase “making out.” It startled me. I hadn’t heard the phrase in so many years. In fact, now that I heard it again I was surprised it still had a place in adolescent vocabulary. For the phrase is used by those who are teetering on the brink, approaching without yet plunging in to the inestimable depths; the plunge known in that same vocabulary, at least as it was employed in my adolescence, as “going all the way.” I hadn’t thought teenagers now hesitated on the other side long enough to have use for a phrase like “making out.”

On human nature

Goldstein makes funny observations on human nature. Most sharply realized is Renee’s mother:

How had I failed her this time? What maternal expectations was I once again in the process of thwarting?

And then I understood, saw it as I had never seen it before. My mother’s whole life is devoted to worry. …

Then a few weeks ago she had learned that Tzippy was pregnant, and now I was calling to tell her that I’m marrying. A Jew yet. No wonder she sounded wounded. We children had callously deprived her life of its substance and meaning. She was holding the telephone receiver and staring down into the existential abyss.

“Of course I’m happy,” she repeated weakly. “Overjoyed. Tell me, what is the young man like? What does he do? Don’t tell me he’s also a philosopher.” Do tell me, do tell me, her voice was begging.

Renee’s father thinks that his wife’s constant worrying is “her way of loving. Try to understand.”

And she is knowledgeable, too, admirably informed on current events: local, state, national, international—for all could adversely affect her family. She watches the news on television from four in the afternoon until eight in the evening, and then again from ten until twelve. If the phone rings at eight I know who is calling, to tell me to get rid of my house plants (a four-year-old has died from nibbling on a castor oil plant), not to answer the door (a man-and-son team has raped three women in northern New Jersey), not to make any plans to visit Seattle (a geologist has predicted that Mt. Rainier could go off sometime in the next twenty-five years).

How does Renee’s mother quibble?

My mother had never commented directly on Noam’s age. She frequently chooses the medium of “the aunts” to make her points. Then, if I react very badly, she can say sympathetically, “Well, you know your aunts.”

Renee’s mother is “an extremely ambitious woman. You give her a bean, she wants to make a whole cholent.” When Renee gives in to a request for a house party with the extended family after the marriage, her mother asks whether she would be open to a mikvah.

But I didn’t give her a chance to finish her thought. “Mom, I’ve had it. You’re never satisfied. I give you a son-in-law, a Jewish genius son-in-law, you want a rabbi to marry us. I give you your rabbi, you want a party. I give you a party, you want me to go bobbing around naked in holy waters. I’ve had it. No mikvah, no party, no rabbi. Be happy you’re getting a son-in-law and an honest daughter.”

In the end, we were married by a justice of the peace in Trenton.

Neat turns of phrase

The narrator asks, how to describe her love for her father “in an age whose face is set in a knowing Freudian smirk?”

Descriptions of the narrator’s beauty (gratuitously generous descriptions) are peppered throughout the book, and sometimes they’re clever: “Although my interior is unmistakably Jewish, I have an exterior that would have inspired a poster for Hitler Youth.”

A woman Renee doesn’t like is described as having a chest that is “concave”.

One of the narrator’s friend’s first boyfriends was “one of the freshman mistakes of the admissions office at Columbia College (Ava had a knack for sniffing them out—they could have used her in admissions)”. Scathing.

A professor’s advances on Renee are described thus: “My professor in symbolic logic began to make some nonsymbolic gestures, coming out finally with a proposition that went beyond the elementary calculus.”

Noam insists on gathering facts before beginning a personal debate: “Let’s not waste time discussing this thing in a factual vacuum.” This douchey phrase captures a common sentiment well. It’s hard not to start using it.

Miscellanea

I learned that Cal Berkeley is mispronounced. It’s named after the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, pronounced Barkeley. The university’s Wikipedia page confirms this.

Noam Himmel’s — and, perhaps by extension, Rebecca Goldstein’s — mathematical pantheon is interesting: “Archimedes, Newton, Gauss, they were gods. Euclid, Descartes, Fermat, Euler, Lagrange, Riemann, Cantor, Poincaré, Hilbert, and Gödel—they’re the minor deities.” Noam would consider himself no more than a “demigod”—in the same class as “Jacobi, Weierstrass, Kronecker, Kummer, and Dedekind”.