"A system of extraordinary complexity" -- Steven Pinker

Pink Floyd or language acquisition? Pinker or Which One's Pink? Is it an either/or or is it both?

Both. Tonight I'll try to segue from listening to Steven Pinker discuss his latest book on the relationship between word choice and human nature, to listening to the great Pink Floyd cover-band Which One's Pink? rattle off some of the best chosen lyrics describing the nature of human existence ever put to song. I'll focus on trying to tease out the connections...


I am toying with this one as a kind of warm up: Pinker advocates what he calls "Learnability Theory" to explain the complex process of language acquisition. In his own words, it posits a theoretical scenario involving four parts:

1. A class of languages. One of them is the "target" language, to be - attained by the learner, but the learner does not, of course, know - which it is. In the case of children, the class of languages would - consist of the existing and possible human languages; the target - language is the one spoken in their community.
2. An environment. This is the information in the world that the learner has to go on in trying to acquire the language. In the case of children, it might include the sentences parents utter, the context in which they utter them, feedback to the child (verbal or nonverbal) in response to the child's own speech, and so on. Parental utterances can be a random sample of the language, or they might have some special properties: they might be ordered in certain ways, sentences might be repeated or only uttered once, and so on.
3. A learning strategy. The learner, using information in the environment, tries out "hypotheses" about the target language. The learning strategy is the algorithm that creates the hypotheses and determines whether they are consistent with the input information from the environment. For children, it is the "grammar-forming" mechanism in their brains; their "language acquisition device."
4. A success criterion. If we want to say that "learning" occurs, presumably it is because the learners' hypotheses are not random, - but that by some time the hypotheses are related in some systematic - way to the target language. Learners may arrive at a hypothesis - identical to the target language after some fixed period of time; - they may arrive at an approximation to it; they may waiver among a - set of hypotheses one of which is correct.

Now, if we were to suppose that the Pink Floyd oeuvre was a language (the target language) and a concert the "environment," then what we are left with is to explain a learning strategy and a success criterion. My theory is that there is such a wide gulf between enlightened and cretin Floyd fans because the Floyd linguistic universe is only suitable to a select number of individuals with the preexistent "hypotheses" necessary to penetrate Floyd's deep grammar, and hence meaning. Hearing a Floyd song, or recognizing a Floyd tune or string of lyrics is not the same thing as comprehending and learning Floyd--once learned, it becomes a language tool that can be used as a stand-alone communication system, albeit only with other enlightened Floyd-language users.

One of the crucial preexisting "hypotheses" necessary for learning the language of Floyd is the spectral-nihilism algorithm, which is essentially a predisposition of the individual brain to interpret existence and "input" as significant in its spectral relations--the way different levels and modes of perception and existence interact with one another--but which are insignificant and devoid of ultimate meaning when taken as a whole--that is, a thorough-going nihilism about the ultimate ground of being.

More on Floyd acquisition after I see the show...

Islamo-Marxism?

An interesting, though sadly derivative article from the neo-con publication City Journal (from the guys that brought you the Broken Windows theory of crime no less!).

If Islamic extremism is the new Marxism...then why does it look so damn different on the ground? Conflating a revolutionary ideology with an apocalyptic theology is daft at best. The fact is that Islamic extremism IS attracting the same youth that a few decades ago would have become part of the lumpen Marxist fellow-travellers and sometime errand boys. But simply because radical Islam appeals to the same group of disaffected, alienated youth, doesn't mean that it has the same characteristics (but perhaps the same future) as revolutionary Marxism.

Sociologist Olivier Roy has done a lot of wonderful work showing how radical Islam has borrowed and appropriated Marxist ideas as it has become more and more Westernized. But despite this fact, Islamic extremism remains a very different bird.

The value of this comparative approach is not in revealing the parallels in ideologies, but in revealing the condition of a large swath of disaffected, alienated youth not necessarily exclusive to urban underclass communities. The fact is that there exists in every generation a slice of youth that rebel against the contemporaneous order...the challenge for that order is to create avenues of incorporation wherein these youth can find their voice and identities while still engaging the social order surrounding them. Criminalizing their ideas or otherwise shunning them from the public space is a sure way to bolster the extremists of any age, whether they be Marxists, radical Islamists or common gang members.


City Journal Current Issue

Theodore Dalrymple
Islam, the Marxism of Our Time
Some troubling signs in Europe
17 September 2007

From an Islamist point of view, the news from Europe looks good. The Times of London, relying on a police report, recently observed that the Deobandis, a fundamentalist sect, now run nearly half of the 1,350 mosques in Britain and train the vast majority of the Muslim clerics who get their training in the country. The man who might become the sect’s spiritual leader in Britain, Riyadh ul Haq, believes that friendship with a Christian or a Jew makes “a mockery of Allah’s religion.” At least no one could accuse him of a shallow multiculturalism.

According to Le Figaro, 70 percent of Muslims in France intend to keep the fast during Ramadan, up from 60 percent in 1989. Better still, from the Islamist point of view, non-practicing Muslims feel increasing social pressure to comply with the fast, whether they want to or not. The tide is thus running in the Islamists’ favor.

Best news of all for the Islamists, however, comes from Germany. Two of the men that the German police arrested in early September for plotting a series of huge explosions in the country were young German converts to Islam. It is impossible to know how many such German converts there are, but it is thought to run into tens of thousands, principally men; in the nature of things, it is also uncertain how many of them are attracted to extremism, but few people are so attracted by moderation that they are converted by it.

The man believed to be the leader of the little group, Fritz G., the son of a doctor and an engineer, was himself a student of engineering, of mediocre attainment. He grew up in Ulm, where a quarter of the population is now Muslim, and at the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 15, he began to frequent the Islamic Information Center of Ulm, and also the comically named Multikultihaus in the neighboring town of Neu-Ulm, where young men of jihadist views, including Mohammed Atta, had long congregated. In 2004, he was spotted at the Ulm Islamic center, selling a journal called Think in the Islamic Way. In December of that year, the police found propaganda in favor of Osama bin Laden in his car. In 2006, he went to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.

His fellow conspirator, Daniel S., came from a well-off family and converted early in life to radical Islam. He traveled to Egypt to learn Arabic, and then returned to Germany, where he sometimes irritated his neighbors by praying loudly in Arabic three times a day.

All this suggests that Islam is fast becoming the Marxism of our times. Had Fritz G. and Daniel S. grown up a generation earlier, they would have become members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang rather than Islamic extremists. The dictatorship of the proletariat, it seems, has given way before the establishment of the Caliphate as the transcendent answer to some German youths’ personal angst.

This is good news indeed for Islamists, but not so good for the rest of us.

Knowledge is Power

An interesting article from the NY Times today. The fact is, there exists an entire cottage industry within prisons to procure and distribute literature promoting violence and racial hatred. However, there also exists a parallel industry, desperately combing the sparse shelves of prison libraries for the classics, philosophy, social criticism, history, anything to broaden the mind and raise it over the concertina-lined enclosure that keeps the understanding and the will bound in ignorance and fear.

Taking the illegal books out of prisons will help, rather than hinder, the sinister industry's prospects and clientèle. It will teach the inmates, many of which are incredibly smart and attuned to the machinations of power, that they are being denied knowledge as a form of control, as part of a technology of control, further reinforcing their opposition to the state, to the guards, and to anyone different from their own small, safe world that they have built within the prison.

A laissez faire policy is what has the potential to do the most good, and not just laissez faire, but an active policy that would focus on bringing in as many diverse and intelligent voices as possible, in the form of words on the page, into the prison culture. Because when we speak of books, we speak of culture, of the primary cultural influence upon the hermetic universes that are prison houses. In fact, prisons, by their very structure, should be the easiest cultures to influence...one just has to understand just what kind of environment one is dealing with, an understanding obviously not a part of the mental universe of our prison authorities, both State and Federal.

Interestingly, there does not exist even an approved "secular" reading list for prisons. This situation, I have found, is responsible both for the religious extremism that is frequently a part of prison culture, as well as for the woefully archaic and disconnected moral and civic values that are created in a context where engaging with non-religious ideas about the world and society and ones place in it are expressly forbidden. I have seen with my own eyes the Federalist Papers and Common Sense purged from an inmate's room...and I had to keep my own copies of Paine's The Rights of Man and Mill's On Liberty close to my chest in order to keep them from being confiscated...an outrage? No, a travesty borne of complete incompetence.

Critics Right and Left Protest Book Removals


By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: September 21, 2007

The federal Bureau of Prisons is under pressure from members of Congress and religious groups to reverse its decision to purge the shelves of prison chapel libraries of all religious books and materials that are not on the bureau’s lists of approved resources.

'Standardized Chapel Library Project' Lists

These lists were provided by a source who works in the federal prison system. The exact date of the lists is unknown, and they may have been revised.
Bahai
Buddhist
Catholic
General Spirituality
Hindu
Islam
Jehovah's Witnesses
Judaism
Messianic
Mormon
Nation of Islam
Native American
Orthodox
Other Religions
Pagan
Protestant
Rastafarian
Sikh
Yoruba
Related

Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries (September 10, 2007)

Outrage over the bureau’s decision has come from both conservatives and liberals, who say it is inappropriate to limit inmates to a religious reading list determined by the government.

The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of some of the most conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, sent a letter on Wednesday to the bureau’s director, Harley G. Lappin, saying, “We must ensure that in America the federal government is not the undue arbiter of what may or may not be read by our citizens.”

Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said in an interview, “Anything that impinges upon the religious liberties of American citizens, be they incarcerated or not, is something that’s going to cause House conservatives great concern.”

The bureau, the target of a class-action lawsuit by prisoners because of the book purge, is hearing criticism from a broad array of religious groups and leaders. Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group based in Washington, sent an alert to its members, who within 48 hours sent the bureau more than 15,000 e-mail messages urging it to scrap the policy. The issue is also a hot topic on conservative Christian talk radio shows.

Spokesmen for the Bureau of Prisons said it was not reconsidering its policy. The bureau said it was prompted to act by a report in 2004 from the inspector general of the Department of Justice, which mentioned that since most prisons did not catalog their library materials, radical books that incite violence and hatred could infiltrate the shelves.

Initially, the bureau set out to take an inventory of every book and item in its chapel libraries. When the list grew to the tens of thousands, the bureau decided instead to generate lists of acceptable books and materials — about 150 items for each of 20 religions or religious categories. It calls that plan the Standardized Chapel Library Project.

Prison chaplains were instructed in the spring to remove everything not on the lists, and put it in storage. The bureau said it planned to issue additions to the lists once a year.

Douglas Kelly, a Muslim inmate at the minimum security Federal Prison Camp in Otisville, N.Y., said his chaplain showed up in the chapel library with garbage bags one day last spring and removed “hundreds and hundreds” of volumes. The only thing left on the sole shelf devoted to Islam was a Koran and a few volumes of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.

“It’s very important to have as much material as possible,” said Mr. Kelly, a recent convert who said he learned about Islam from a book another prisoner gave him. “What I know of Islam, and what I’ve been able to practice so far, has been as a result of the literature and the books I’ve been able to get ahold of. Unfortunately this purge has curtailed our short supply.

“I’ve seen the list of approved books, and 99 percent of them, we never had to begin with,” said Mr. Kelly, 40, who pleaded guilty to using a false identity. He said that prisoners were permitted to keep only five books of their own.

Mr. Kelly is an original plaintiff in the lawsuit against the bureau, and expects to sign on as a plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, which was refiled in late August. The other named plaintiffs are a Christian and a Jew.

Mr. Kelly and the Christian plaintiff, John Okon, agreed to a telephone interview, but Mr. Okon decided not to participate when officials at the Otisville prison insisted on sitting in the room during the interview. (The Jewish plaintiff has already been released to a halfway house and declined an interview).

Some organizations that advocate for inmates’ religious rights say they have privately been trying to persuade federal authorities to rethink the policy.

Leaders of the Aleph Institute, a Jewish group, and Prison Fellowship, a Christian group, say they met last week with the director of the Bureau of Prisons and Acting Deputy Attorney General Craig S. Morford.

Rabbi Aaron Lipskar, executive director of the Aleph Institute, a group founded by the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher movement, said that the government officials tried to reassure them that a book could be restored to the library if a prisoner requested it, the chaplain vetted it from start to finish, the chaplain sent a certification form to the bureau in Washington and the book made the updated approval list.

“I find it almost impossible that they can expect a prison chaplaincy department, which is already so strained, to take the time to review all these materials,” Rabbi Lipskar said. “No matter to what extent they try to fix this policy, it will never come out right.”

God in the Dock

Does faith to some extent require one to put God in the dock? On the contrary, it is frightful to think of a God that is beyond his own justice...especially when His nature seems, in mnay respects, to be contrary to it. An interesting story in this connection...

News : State News

Nebraska State Senator Sues God
Case attempts to bring attention to unnecessary lawsuits


State Senator Ernie Chambers has filed a lawsuit against God.

State Senator Ernie Chambers is noted most for shedding light on issues by publicly confronting those in prominent positions. Chamber's newest target holds the highest position of them all: He’s suing God.

The purpose of the lawsuit is to show that anyone can sue anyone else, according to The Associate Press.
“It’s Ernie Chambers,” Matt Baker, first year University of Nebraska-Lincoln law student, said. “He just does thing like that.”

Baker said that, of course, Chambers could attempt this, but the turnout probably won’t be good for him if it does go to court.

Chambers’ reasoning behind the lawsuit is to show that this lawsuit, along with many others, is frivolous.

“People might call it frivolous but if they read it they'll see there are very serious issues I have raised,” Chambers said in an interview with the AP.

Chambers filed the lawsuit in response to a current lawsuit against District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront. Cheuvront, the judge in a Lancaster County sexual assault trial, prohibited the use of words such as “rape” and “victim” so as to not sway the court one way or the other.

The accuser, Torey Bowen, is suing the judge because she said he violated her free speech rights, according to the AP.

Chambers said his case against God comes from threats from The Almighty. He claims the threats come from widespread terrorization that God has caused with floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters, according to the AP.

Assistant Professor of Law Eric Berger thinks Chambers' lawsuit is frivolous. photo: courtesy of UNL College of Law

Eric Berger, UNL assistant professor of law said he was entertained by the story but doesn’t know what the outcome of the lawsuit could be.

“People are paying attention because it’s an unusual suit, but at the end of the day there’s probably a better way of denouncing frivolous lawsuits,” he said.