To take another side of the argument (and it has many more than two) is to get lost in one of the numerous logical contradictions of ordinary speech, which allows us to call “a process” a thing and “an object” a thing too. The internal logical structure of one is distinct from the internal logical structure of the other. All processes are nonmaterial, whether they be brain-processes or the process of raising my hand off the table. At the same time, all processes need material to define them. (If I raise a glass off the table, aren’t I doing the same “thing” as raising my hand off the table…? O course I’m not. Which is to say, I am doing the same “thing” [i.e., indulging the same process] only in so far as I am observing the two events at the same degree of empirical resolution. If I want to, I can observe the raising of two more or less identical glasses from the same spot on the table [or even the same glass] at different times, at such a high degree of empirical resolution that their processes can be uniquely differentiated, having to do with drying times of films of water, molecular change and interchange between the table and the glass, etc. And that, alas, exhausts the tale.) Similarly, all material can be defined by process, the most basic of which, for a static object, is simply the process of duration; as it changes (or as I observe it at a higher degree of empirical resolution, so that I become aware of changes in it) we can bring in other processes as well. In this way, all material can be defined by the process (infinitely analyzable into smaller processes) it is undergoing. But the basic terms that are thrown around in this argument — “material event” and “nonmaterial event”—both have an element of self-contradiction (i.e., if “a brain process” can be called “a material event,” then, as the brain is the material, the event must be the process, which implies something like a “material process”… which is nonsense of the same order as “a green smell”) that, it would seem to me, renders them both useless for any serious, logical discussion.
To stand for three hours and watch Vikki Sperling map the image from the retina of the eye of the salamander off the visual tectum of the exposed salamander brain (doubled there, one inverted left-right, and a weaker one right-left) with her gold-filled microelectrodes on their adjustable stands, silences a good deal of the argument in my own head. The behaviorists, with their pretransistor view of the world, say: “But you can’t locate mental occurrences!” We can not only locate them, we can measure them, map them, record them, reproduce them, cut them out, and put them in backwards!
21. A “word” has a “meaning” in the sense that a train has a track; not in the sense that a train has a passenger. Still, word and meaning in most people’s minds, even most philosophers’ apparently, are the same sort of category-mistake that Ryle tried to show existed in the Cartesian separation between body and mind.
Words mean.
But meaning is the interaction of the process into which the eardrum/aural-nerve translates the air vibrations that are the word, with the chemoelectric process that is the interpretative context of the brain. Meaning may be something else as well — as mental occurrences may involve something in addition to as well as brain-processes. But I am sure that they are at least this, which is why empirical exploration strikes me as the only practical way to get seriously further in either discussion.
22. Many scientists and mathematicians fool themselves into thinking there is something eternal about, say, a mathematical proof.
At Marilyn’s bookstall, yesterday, I was browsing in a seventeenth century Latin translation of Euclid’s Elements. Things Euclid took as proofs would horrify — if not bewilder — a modern university senior in math. Euclid’s personal idea of mathematical rigor is entirely different from ours. Fashions in proofs change only a little more slowly than fashions in dress. What is considered to require a proof today is considered self-evident tomorrow. What was considered self-evident yesterday, today is the subject of a three-hundred-page exegesis whose final conclusion is that it just cannot be rigorously established at all!
A mathematician will tell you that a set of proofs, all from one mathematician, may, for example, generate information about the author’s personality. I will certainly agree with anyone who says that such information is probably not terribly important to the proofs’ substance. But anyone who says the information is not there is simply blind.
Even mathematics has its subjective side. And, as extremes come around to touch, one argument gaining popularity now is that something as abstract as “mathematical logic” may turn out to be what, after all, subjectivity actually is.
23. Art conveys possibilities of information to society, i.e., the possible forms information may take. The value of art is in its richness of form. (Cf. Charles Olson’s advice to writers that, without necessarily imitating reality in their fiction, they should keep their fiction “up to” the real.) The relation of art to the world is the aesthetic field of a given culture, i.e., in different cultures art relates to the world in very different ways.
24. Thoughts on my last sixteen years with Marilyn: living with an extra-, ordinarily talented and temperamental poet is certainly the best thing that could happen to a prose writer. I wonder, however, if it works the other way around…? When we fall asleep, like teaspoons, the baby (due in two months) tramples me in the small of my back. But they seem such definitely nonhostile kicks. You can tell it’s just exercise. This evening, for practically a minute and a half, it kicked at almost regular, seven-second intervals, till Marilyn got up from the armchair (a little worried). Well, considering its daddy, it ought to have a good sense of rhythm. (I say living with a talented and temperamental poet is good for a prose writer; but I suspect living with a talented and temperamental poet who happens to possess a rather acute business sense helps too…) [Note: Our obstetrician, Mrs. Ransom, says that when the baby presses against an artery in the womb, often a highly regular spasming of part of the uterine wall can occur, easily confusable with the baby’s kicking. Nothing to worry about. But we do not have a budding Ruby Keeler or Bill Robinson in our midst. Just a pressed artery in some positions.]
25. I suspect the logical atomism of both Russell and Wittgenstein would have been impossible without the visual atomization the Impressionists had already subjected the world to on canvas (and that the Cubists were subjecting it to concurrently with Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s early work). In fact, what is basically wrong with Wittgenstein’s “picture theory of language” is that it rests on an aesthetically simpleminded concept of the way in which a picture relates to what it is a picture of. The twenty-seven-year-old Wittgenstein simply held an amazingly naive view (or, more generously, an extreme nineteenth-century-derived view) of the way in which a picture is a model of a situation. The mistake at Tractatus 2.261 is heartrending:
There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts to enable the one to be a picture of the other at all.
If for must be and identical he had substituted is obviously and similar — and then taken up the monumental task of running these words down to their propositional atomization — he would have solved the problem of the modular calculus (i.e., the critical problem).