I have, I think, made reference from time to time to what is called “senior moments.” By and large, it is proper names that I have difficulty calling up – at one time, as I have remarked, I simply could not keep in my mind the name of the great soprano Kathleen Battle. Yesterday I had a quite bizarre senior moment when I was talking with Susie. I was trying to recall the word that one uses for damage to the lining of the stomach or the intestine caused by stomach acid. I simply could not recall that word.
Then I remembered that in one of the 35 or so hour long
lectures that I have posted on YouTube I use the word. I recalled that it was
in the four lecture series on The Thought of Sigmund Freud. I recalled that it
was in the first of those lectures. I recalled exactly where in the lecture I
used the word. So I went to YouTube, called up the first of the Freud lectures,
almost immediately found the place where I use the word and heard myself say “ulcer.” “That is it!” I cried and told Susie the word
I had been trying to recall.
I mean, that is weird. What is going on in the brain that
blocks my recollection of a particular word but allows me to remember exactly
where I used it in a recorded lecture?
32 comments:
What is even more frustrating is when you cannot remember a word that you have used thousands of times, and then, after being distracted, cannot even remember what the word was that you were trying to remember in the first place.
Answer: The pre-established harmony.
"The most common causes of peptic ulcers are infection with the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) and long-term use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin IB, others) and naproxen sodium (Aleve)."
What are the implications of this for the notion of "free will"?
Few would deny that our bodies and our minds do all sorts of things without our conscious effort. (Consider the body's reaction on gazing upon a very sexually attractive person in a provocative pose.) In fact, all too often they act in ways contrary to our conscious desires.
In the case of a forgotten name or other bit of information, minutes or even hours after we have given up consciously attempting to remember the lost datum, it often just pops up, as if out of the blue. That would seem to be strong evidence that there are parts of the mind that act outside of our direct, conscious control—and outside of our awareness.
If we have these parts of the mind that act beyond our conscious control, and of which we have no direct awareness, how can it be argued that the decisions we make are made freely?
(Btw Prof Wolff I hope you read those articles I sent you about memory and names retrieval.)
I think "senior moment" is apt. It happens to me all the time. I turn 75 in a few days. I don't remember having that precise experience prior to 60 or so. By the way, I have been following David Sinclair's lectures on youtube about stalling or reversing aging. He's a leading researcher at Harvard and recommends intermittent fasting (IF) among other things. So I have been doing it now for about 8 months. Lost some weight, which isn't the purpose of it and I do feel younger. Too complicated for me to explain but something about cells not getting the right information as we age and his IF helps
with these things. You need to search for him on YouTube if you're interested. I think he and others doing research on the aging process are onto something.
Off topic (but then so much on this blog site is off topic) but in connection with a previous topic:
https://www.bostonreview.net/reading-list/reviving-the-radical-king-copy/
Probably most of the regular commenters in this blog are people who had a better than average memory capacity when they were in high school or college and maybe even had little patience with others who tended to forget stuff that they remembered.
I at least don't have much sense of what it is "normal" to remember since I used to remember much more than others.
I forget names and often don't recall well the content of what I read a short while ago, but most people in my high school for example didn't recall much of what they read.
@ Erich
Memory and free will,
I think that the "free will" is not clear by looking at "decision". In this point I am Cartesian. I think that the fact that man can "suspend" his decisions opens freedom. So I would argue that we are all more or less procrastinators who enter history through this act of suspension. And in doing so, time "emerges" in the sense of Bergson's "durée". From then on, the term "memory", has a slightly different meaning.
I had never heard of Diamond & Silk until yesterday.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/are-americans-being-poisoned-diamonds-memorial-goes-off-the-rails
This is unbelievable, but it actually happened{
https://www.google.com/search?q=diamond%2C+funeral&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS927US927&oq=&aqs=chrome.0.35i39i362l8.2082451j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:6516dc77,vid:9IafFHH_3qE
Post-script:
This may come across as racist, but the United States has finally achieved being a color-blind nation, when Blacks and Whites can be equally stupid.
Fwiw, I'd never heard of Diamond and Silk until I read your comment.
I only learned about them when I caught Jimmy Kimmel’s spoof on Trump’s eulogy at the memorial service. This was our former President at the top of his oratorical skills:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3qdllDsGm4
Below is a disentanglement of sister Silk’s eulogy to her beloved sister. You can’t make this stuff up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmPj5bY4qNs
I trust I have brightened everyone’s day about the future of America.
Indeed, so much have you brightened it that I don't have to follow these links. ;)
And here is Joan Baez’s tribute to Diamond (also a tribute to s. wallerstein’s favorite balladeer):
https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube%2C+Baez%2C+Diamonds+and+Rust&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS927US927&oq=youtube%2C+Baez%2C+Diamonds+and+Rust&aqs
Great song, but I'd hardly call it a "tribute".
Well, the diamond part is, but not the rust.
From the song, I get the impression that Baez contributed the diamonds to the relationship, while Dylan did not behave well. That's also what I gather from having read a biography of Dylan.
In any case, it's an incredibly moving song, the best Baez song that I know of. Maybe her poetry wasn't so "lousy" after all.
s. wallerstein,
I agree it is a great and moving song about a relationship. As we have both stated in prior comments, any work of art is amenable to varying interpretations. I would suspect that they both contributed diamonds, and perhaps Dylan contributed more rust than Baez. But are not all our memories – of relationships, of family, of our work and accomplishments – a mixture of diamonds and rust, in varying proportions?
P.S.: And Baez’s poetry may not have been entirely “lousy,” but I think that you would agree that Dylan composed far more gems than did Baez – or most any other contemporary poet.
s wallerstein,
Did you listen to the videos on AI music that I linked to in the last thread?
Eric,
No, I haven't had a chance yet. I'll try to listen to them later this afternoon.
Marc,
For sure, all our relationships are mixtures of diamonds and rust, but there are certain conventional rules for being a good partner or a good son or a good father, etc.: let's say, rules that any trained family therapist can explain to you in less than fifteen minutes and Dylan did not follow them in his relationship with Baez. Nor did he try to establish alternative rules as did Sartre and Beauvoir in their relationship: he "kept things vague" as the songs point out.
As for Dylan's genius, I agree with you completely. Someone who begins a song with the lines, "Ain't it just like the night to play tricks/when you're trying to be so quiet" or "Once upon a time/you dressed so fine/threw the bums a dime/in your prime/ didn't you?" with a certain stress on the "didn't you?" has a "way with words" as Baez also notes.
The world is waiting for a biography of Dylan comparable to the ones Rudiger Safranski wrote about Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger, biographies where he immerses himself in their work and their lives simultaneously in order to get into their heads.
There are too many great Dylan songs, with superb opening lines, to list here. But the song which for me is his most lyrical, which comes closest to Dylan Thomas’s poetic genius, is Mr. Tambourine Man – like a Chagall painting in verse - written in 1965 when he was only 24 years old:
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you
and spins off into dreamlike reverie.
It's sad to see him end up doing commercials for Cadillacs.
Especially one where he drives by scenes of rural poverty, which in his early days imitating Woody Guthrie could have inspired a great protest song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRkch5FcN-8
Oh No!! I had never seen that ad. What could have possessed him to do it? He surely does not need the money.
It does not speak well of human nature, that anyone can be corrupted for the right price. This, from the guy who wrote,
“I said, Could you help me out, I got some friends down the way"
"The man says, "Get out of here, I'll tear you limb from limb"
I said, "You know they refused Jesus, too", he said, "You're not Him.”
It is often said that Dylan was the "voice of a generation".
He represents the contradictions of the generation of the 60's, our generation.
On the one hand, we protested against the evils of the war in Vietnam and racism.
On the other hand, we sought personal liberation, "to be free".
At the time the establishment was very conservative: Eisenhower, Nixon, Pat Boone, "Leave it to Beaver", etc, and thus, when we protested against the war in Vietnam and the bomb, we were also protesting against a conservative view of sexuality, of what clothes to wear, of how long a man's hair could be, of whether a woman could wear jeans, of whether you can dance "freely" without following some pre-established steps, etc.
However, capitalism soon realized that there was a lot of money in sexual liberation, in female liberation, in gay freedom, in "freer" styles in clothes, etc.
I'm reading an interesting book by a French philosopher, Eric Sadin, The Tyranny of the Individual (not translated into English yet, but translated into Spanish) where he details how Silicon Valley, the center of today's capitalism, arises from the California counter-culture, with its ideal of "total freedom" and "individual expression".
Dylan driving his Cadillac (for pleasure, he's not commuting to his job or picking up the kids at school or going to the supermarket) is expressing that individualistic idea that doing your own thing is what life is about and it's more fun in a Cadillac along an almost empty highway than taking the subway at rush hour.
Achim Kriechel,
I am not sure I understand what you mean. I think you are saying the same as what Sophie Berman writes of Descartes:
Descartes seems, however, to diverge from Anselm in a major way by accepting the idea of a "liberty of indifference," where the content of what is chosen is irrelevant to the definition of freedom. In this definition, freedom is understood as a strictly neutral capacity to affirm or to deny, to bear or to suspend judgment. This capacity enables us to pick arbitrarily among things to which we are indifferent; it also enables us to pursue or to avoid a good, to give or to withhold our assent to a truth
In Meditation 4, Descartes wrote:
[T]he power of will consists only in this, that we are able to do or not to do the same thing (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or shun it), or rather in this alone, that in affirming or denying, pursuing or shunning, what is proposed to us by the understanding, we so act that we are not conscious of being determined to particular action by any external force....
Whence, then, spring my errors? They arise from this cause alone, that I do not restrain the will, which is of much wider range than the understanding, within the same limits, but extend it even to things I do not understand, and as the will is of itself indifferent to such, it readily falls into error and sin by choosing the false in room of the true, and evil instead of good.
Here Descartes identifies the absence of consciousness "of being determined to particular action by any external force" as an essential feature of the will. He also says that a clear and perfect understanding of matters comes from God, but that the will has a tendency to extend to matters he does not understand.
Well, the fact that we are not aware of (conscious of) an external force impelling us to take a particular choice (or refrain from making a choice) does not mean that there is no such force. Further, the force of which we are not aware but which is driving our decisions (or our indifference) needn't be external, it could be an internal force.
And what does it mean for Descartes to speak of restraining the will? There is an implication that the will is independent, in some degree, of some other part of the mind (the part that restrains the will—the "I"). What then is driving the will? If the will has/involves opinions on matters that the rest of the mind do not fully understand, what is the source of those opinions? (To the extent that they may be erroneous or "sinful," the source is not God, according to Descartes. So what is it?)
Iirc, there is a well-known British literary scholar who's written a book about Dylan. Maybe Christopher Ricks, but I'd have to check.
"It's sad to see him end up doing commercials for Cadillacs."
It looks like a triple crossover. Lots of folks from back in the day can now afford Escalades and have the time. Also Dylan had a show on XM back then so XM, Cadillac, his show and GM had some connection to satellite radio so some ad guy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_Time_Radio_Hour
(Looks like CA's Antelope Valley, the car doesn't have a front plate so dealer car, gas station - 90th and J - currently seems to be for sale.)
@ Eric,
perhaps you can remember the so-called Libet experiments, which reignited the discussion about the concept of "freedom" in the 1960s. Libet believed at that time to have definitively proven that "freedom" (or what Kant calls the spontaneity of reason) is an illusion. He interpreted the results of his experiments in such a way that long before a person has the subjective impression of making a decision, a process in the brain can be "measured" that is correlated with this decision.
Well, it is obvious that in a philosophical discussion of this question first of all the term "freedom" should be clarified. In this context, one can point out that Libet's experiments, which were later repeated with improved imaging techniques, basically come to nothing. Salopp formulated, one drills at the wrong place for oil, because if freedom "happens" before it expresses itself as "taken choice", then one measures with such experiments only the effect and not the cause.
The passages from the Meditations quoted by you clarify very well what I meant with regard to Descartes' concept of freedom. he refers elsewhere to the concept of "epoché" (ἐποχή) from ancient philosophy. The quoted passage also illustrates very well Descartes' search for the "fundamentum inconcussum" as the basis of every moral decision. If I see it correctly, he could not answer their questions, not even through his ego cogito.
correct "your questions"
I have a similar memory block.
Mine involves an inability simultaneously to remember certain pairs of proper names... for example, the actors who played Leopold and Loeb in the 50's movie: Bradford Dillman and that other guy.... oh right, Dean Stockwell. (Got 'em both this time.) And the two most prominent Canadian women cellists: Offra Harnoy, and that other one... whose name I cannot now recall.
Very strange.
The second one is: Shauna Rolston.
(I can never get both!)
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