Entries from February 2009 ↓

If you have ever bought a house, you probably have experienced what I think of as imaginary prosperity.

You get the mortgage, you sign all the papers, and you realize that you have just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars.  And suddenly, lesser expenses seem like nothing.  So you happily buy a new couch, carpeting, major appliances, and various other additions to the house, secure in the knowledge that while you are spending thousands on all of these things, that money is nothing compared to what you’ve just shelled out for the house itself.  You spend money that you might not spend under other circumstances, and all because you are already spending so much anyway.

That’s a dangerous financial place to be in.  After all, you don’t really have all that extra money.  Quite the contrary!  But still you spend, and all because you figure hey, what’s another thousand or two when you’re already spending hundreds of thousands anyway.

And that’s where the US government is right now.  We’ve put $700 billion into the financial bailout.  We’re getting ready to pass an $800 billion stimulus bill.  And right now, in the midst of an economic crisis, we are deeply mired in imaginary prosperity.  After all, what’s another couple hundred billion dollars, what with all the other money pouring out of the treasury?

Now don’t get me wrong.  I think we need the stimulus, and I think we needed the bailout.

But I am worried about how we’re going to find fiscal discipline again.  Because we’re going to have to.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman. This is a young adult/older kid’s book about a young girl who finds herself in an alternate world with an evil version of her parents. Entertaining, though slight - and there is going to be a stop-action movie of it made by Tim Burton coming out this year. (And oh - Gaiman’s Graveyard Book, which I wrote about here previously, just won a Newberry Medal. Well deserved, in my view.)

The Sharing Knife: Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold. I’m a big fan of Bujold - she’s one of the handful of authors who I’ll read whenever she comes out with a new book. I’m much less of a fan of this series, which is a combination romance and fantasy-adventure. Not bad, but not her strongest work. But this, volume four, appears to be the end, so I can look forward to having her write in other worlds again.

I am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter. I mentioned this in my last blog post. This book examines the nature of human consciousness, walking a fine line between those who claim that consciousness results in some mystical quantity (often referred to as a “soul”), and those who would say that we’re all only a bunch of particles doing their particle thing. Instead, Hofstadter sees our brains as being symbol processing machines that are sufficiently complex to represent and reflect on ourselves. In other words, we are complex feedback loops, capable not only of presenting photographic feedback (as happens, for example, when you turn a TV camera on a television that shows what that camera is recording), but of containing ourselves as a complex symbol susceptible to detailed analytical reflection. Add in a dollop of some of the more interesting math of the twentieth century (the work of Kurt Goedel, who managed to prove that there are truths outside of any mathematical system that cannot be proven using the tools of that system) and you have a book that deeply impressed me.

I’ll go even further: this book has come closest of anything that I’ve ever come across to matching what I think is the source of the self, and will, after some thought, probably go on the short list of books that had a profound impact on the way I think about the world. I’m probably going to write more about this here in the weeks to come - I’m still processing it, deciding where I agree and disagree with Hofstadter, figuring how it all fits into my own world view. But for now, I leave you with this observation by Hofstadter: consciousness is an illusion viewed by an illusion, lacking the solid reality of the things out in the world, but nevertheless real in the eye of the illusion. And we, of course, are the illusion.