review -- The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick by Jessica Riskin

In The Restless Clock Stanford Professor of History Jessica Riskin suggests there might be a flaw in how explanations are done in the life sciences, perhaps even in all the sciences. The current model, which she finds incomplete, treats all of nature as a machine whose parts are made of passive, inert matter, moving only when set in motion by external forces. Natural entities are themselves viewed as empty of any active power of their own, of any force, will, purpose, self-direction, self-organization, any trace of what she calls in general “agency.” In order to challenge this paradigm, which she characterizes as "brute mechanistic" or "passive mechanistic," she reviews the history of modern science since the seventeenth century, showing how this dominant view has always been shadowed by alternate views explaining nature in terms that do include agency.

The passive mechanistic model was established during the seventeenth century, but not only as a foundation for purely rational, mechanistic explanations of the world. There was also a religious dimension to regarding nature as a machine, a gigantic clockwork. To the thinkers of that time the wondrous complexity of nature and the marvelous fitness of all its parts required a Great Designer existing outside nature — thus, the Argument from Design. Also, if there was no force within nature responsible for its motion and organization, the force must be outside, in other words, a God winding up the great clock of the universe. Riskin believes that science today, secular and at the same time denying agency in nature, is failing to explain the origin of motion and organization in nature.

As a prime example of an early attempt at describing nature as containing its own agency (which she calls "active mechanism"), she offers a quote from Leibniz. He reinterpreted the idea of a clock as something more than a passive device deriving its activity solely from outside forces, and he provided her the title for her book. “In German,“ Leibniz wrote, “the name for the balance of a clock is Unruhe—that is to say disquiet. One could say that it is the same thing with our body, which can never be perfectly at ease: because, if it were, a new impression of objects, a little change in the organs, in the vessels and viscera, would change the balance and make these parts exert some small effort to get back to the best state possible; which produces a perpetual conflict that is, so to speak, the disquiet of our Clock.” Leibniz's clock is a mechanism, explainable in terms of its component parts, but self-organizing under the power of its own balance, a mechanism with agency, a restless clock.

The Restless Clock gives a detailed discussion of the interaction of theories of passive and active mechanism over a period of more than three hundred years. An astonishing number of cases are covered, from Descartes, Leibniz, and Lamarck to John von Neumann, Stephen Jay Gould and Ray Kurzweil, with dozens more in between. The issue shows up not fully resolved even in the chapter on Darwin who, while usually adamant in rejecting agency in nature, nevertheless lapsed occasionally, admitting the existence of natural powers such as “tendencies” or the innate power to vary.

What would it mean to include agency in scientific explanations? Riskin offers only a few suggestions, such as a heliotropic plant following the path of the sun or electrons moving to conserve charge. But she points out that, in fact, even now scientists often use language that suggests agency: they speak of cells wanting to move toward a wound, proteins regulating cell divisions, or genes dictating the production of enzymes. Scientists insist that such phrases are mere figures of speech, shorthand taking the place of a complete, rigorous, passive-mechanistic description. If that rigorous explanation is not known today, they maintain, it will be found in the future. That hope, according to Riskin, is an article of faith, not of science. She suggests, instead, that agency be given a place in scientific explanations as “a primitive feature of the natural world like force or matter, an aspect of the very stuff of nature’s machinery, and especially its living machinery.” 

The final chapter focuses on an influential treatise by Erwin Schrödinger, a founder of quantum physics. In “What Is Life?” he argued, first, that a living creature is a machine by definition in that it produces and maintains order. “Schrödinger explained that molecules were configurations of atoms occupying their lowest energy level. In order to change configurations, they needed to receive at least a minimum quantum of energy. The stability of a molecule could perhaps account for the order-producing capacity of genes, responsible for maintaining the structure of living organisms both within individuals and across generations.” But Schrödinger goes on to claim that a living creature is more than a machine; it is essentially an agent because, by means of its action of eating, drinking, breathing, photosynthesizing, and so forth, it resists entropy — it avoids decaying into equilibrium. A living creature is thus a clock — but a restless one, a machine with agency.

Despite its detailed scholarship — or perhaps because of it — The Restless Clock is unlikely to win many overnight converts. It winds its way through innumerable theories, debates, and descriptions, through many people, a great deal of biographical material, but with little effort made to tie the pieces together, to summarize, to reveal an overall pattern. The impression is often of a catalogue rather than an argument.

However, if nothing else, as theory piles upon theory, and one debate shades into another, the book certainly illustrates how terribly difficult it has been for civilization to sort out such a jumble of ideas and arrive at the understanding of the world we now have. And along the way it unearths a truly astonishing collection of historical curiosities.

It even has moments of comedy, as when it describes many elaborate mechanical systems that royalty and other high-ranking Europeans constructed on their grounds in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. These perceiving and responsive machines were able to sense the presence of people and react to them, for example, tempting visitors to pause before a beautiful scene, then bombarding them with a cloud of flour or spraying them with water from hidden pipes, or luring them to sit on a bench, then soaking their bottoms. It was comedy, but it also marked the beginning of machines exhibiting humanlike capabilities.

Review -- Sea Stories: True Adventures of Great Lakes Freighter Captain, Richard Metz, by Richard Metz

Toronto may be a port city on one of the greatest waterways in the world, thousands of ships may pass it by every year, hundreds may turn into its harbour, including cruise ships and ocean-going vessels from as far away as Brazil, Turkey, Germany, Australia, and Japan; it may host thousands of debarking passengers and crew; yet the port leaves barely a ripple in the consciousness of Torontonians. Unlike some of the other ports on the Great Lakes, Toronto does not consider it important to mark the opening of shipping season with any fanfare, apart from a small ceremony on the bridge of the first salt-water ship of the year, where the captain is presented with a top hat made of beaver (the media have other things to do). Torontonians think of shipping about as much as they think of their own heartbeats. Some of this is understandable: with an economy as large and diverse as Toronto’s, shipping is not prized here as it is in places like Thunder Bay and Duluth; our docks, located in remote areas, hidden behind fences and closely guarded, are virtually invisible to the public; and the shipping lanes on Lake Ontario tend to the far side of the lake. But perhaps it’s a latent awareness of our maritime situation that makes the memoirs of a Great Lakes ship captain like Sea Stories: True Adventures of Great Lakes Freighter Captain, Richard Metz not only interesting but also strangely relevant.

The stories Captain Metz wants to tell are of bad weather, drunken crews, failing engines, anchors that drop without warning, narrow locks, lift bridges that might or might not knock off the top of the ship, and near collisions. They are good tales. But at least as interesting for nonsailors is the mental stretching one has to do to remap a familiar region on the imagination. Thunder Bay is no longer on the Trans-Canada Highway a day’s drive beyond Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie; it is a harbour past the Soo Locks and Whitefish Point, past Rock of Ages Lighthouse, on the other side of Isle Royale, tucked in behind Pie Island where you can shelter when southwest gales are blowing. Owen Sound is not a vacation and recreational town; it is a place where you may tie up for the winter. Big urban centres like Toronto, Chicago, and Detroit get little mention by Metz, because he is usually heading to or from smaller places, places that only locals and seamen will have heard of — Burns Harbor, Copper Harbor, Houghton, Lorain, Port Stanley. Movement, rather than mindlessly following roads, requires setting a course over open water, an acute awareness of weather, scrupulously up-to-date charts, a constant monitoring of traffic on all sides, and extremely delicate handling of the ship through locks and canals — the locks at Snell and Eisenhower, the Beauharnois Canal and the South Shore Canal and, of course, the Welland Canal and Soo Locks.

Having Google Maps at the ready adds to the pleasure to reading Sea Stories, since Metz often defines his locations nautically. It was while closing in on Fawn Island in the St. Clair River that a wheelsman horrified the captain by failing to respond an order to turn to port, casually explaining that the wheel had come off in his hand (he was fired). The fog was impenetrable while rounding Mission Point, when a mate raised an alarm to report that an upbound ship was coming their way, underlining the danger by adding, “And it’s Canadian!” (Americans in the 1960s thought Canadians were poor sailors, drunk most of the time. Later Metz worked for many years with a Canadian company and came to believe Canadian sailors were among the finest ship handlers in the world.) We read how Metz hopes to get to Passage Island before a storm hits, how he will have to face a mean Nor’easter close to Angus Island, how when he reaches Battle Island Light he will have to turn and expose his port side to the elements. For sailors the positions would probably come loaded with meaning and memories, but even for general readers the stories light up when we are able to pinpoint the locations on a map.

As background to Metz’s adventures, we learn a lot about life on a Great Lakes ship, the cargo, the missions, the many uses of the anchor, the duties of all the ranks from deckhand to captain, their qualifications, the hiring and firing, Christmas away from home, the respect a great cook enjoys. For those of us impressed with what it takes to earn a PhD, the road to a captaincy may come as a shock. Many years of working as deckhand through first mate are required before one can qualify to take the written captain’s exam. Then come the orals. A PhD candidate endures a measly three or four hours. In Thunder Bay Metz began sitting with his examiner at 8:30, took a short lunch break, then continued to 4:30. That was Day One, and it was followed by two more like it. It was grueling and almost inconceivably thorough.

Now retired, Metz lives on Lake Superior, where he still watches the ships and uses his marine radio to talk to those he is familiar with. He notes that there are fewer ships on the lakes now, at least partly because of the decline of the steel industry. New ships can now be over 300 m long, while in his early days a large ship was only half that size. Despite the increase in size, a typical crew today is 12, down from the 34 of his day. The day will come, he believes, when ships will sail without a crew. Metz’s book may thus represent one of the later documents of an era that could be entering its sunset years.

review -- Threads in the Sash: The Story of the Métis People by Fred Shore

Every Canadian knows one thing about the Métis, that they are descended from the union of French fur traders and Indigenous women. That bare little fact usually snoozes in the Canadian mind for a lifetime, perhaps alongside a hazy image of Louis Riel and the factoid of his hanging. But the Métis story deserves a fuller fleshing out, not only because the details are interesting and, in this era of reconciliation, highly relevant, but also because something remarkable, something uncommon, lies at the heart of the Métis story. In the space of only two centuries, a new people was born, a new nation, a unified society with its own language, economy and culture. Between the early 1600s and 1800s the Métis developed from non-existence to a golden age.

For many years no one quite understood what was happening. Children who were born to French fur traders and Indigenous women were regarded simply as French or Indigenous, depending on where they lived. Those who were sent away to be raised in French settlements were accepted there as fully French, with no special meaning attaching to their parentage. Those who stayed with their parents in Indigenous communities were accepted as fully Indigenous. The idea of Métis did not exist.

However, as the fur trading system expanded further and further into the Great Lakes region, the great distances became problematic for the fur companies. A single season was no longer adequate to ship trade goods from headquarters in Quebec City, Montreal and Trois-Rivières to the French and First Nations trappers. As a result, the companies set up depots to store supplies over the winter and staffed them with fur traders and their Indigenous wives and families. Those families living in small, secluded depots, separated from both French and First Nations communities, quietly, unwittingly, laid the foundations of the future Métis nation. A new culture began to take shape, unique to the depots, primarily a blend of French and Indigenous cultures but with the addition of distinctive new practices. Interestingly, the depot people still did not see themselves as having their own identity.

When the French trading system reached beyond the Great Lakes in the late 1700s, into what was then known as Rupert’s Land, the isolation ended and the Métis nation was born. In the open lands of the west the depot people gathered and realized their commonality. Rupert’s Land was English, under the governance of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Métis stood out distinctly because of their language, their Catholicism, virtually every part of their culture. Their self-awakening had begun.

By about 1820 they began a period of rapid self-development and growing self-confidence, an era they later came to regard as their golden age. Recognizing the vast demand for pemmican to supply the hundreds of canoe brigades fanning out across the enormous distances of western and northern Canada, the Métis seized the opportunity and created a powerful new economy based on the buffalo hunt. The effort of organizing hunts on a massive scale inspired them to develop organizational skills to a high level and to institute rules and practices that were later transferred successfully to the military and political spheres. After a hunt, the meat was processed into pemmican, which the Métis sold, insisting always on cash. By refusing to accept the traditional HBC scrip, they freed themselves from the HBC monopoly and were able to buy their trade goods more cheaply south of the border. In an effort to protect their monopoly, the HBC issued laws and regulations, but it had no effect on the Métis, who continued to operate as they liked, whether as trappers, farmers or hunters. Their best years, these years of prosperity and self-assertion, lasted until the process of Confederation began.

The rest of Métis history is much less upbeat. As Confederation approached, English newcomers from Ontario arrived, greedy for land and power, hostile to the Métis, openly racist, and ready to use fraud and violence to achieve their ends. They were largely supported by John A. Macdonald and the central Canadian government. In less than a generation the Métis lost their economic base and were driven off their lands around the forks of the Red River into the outer fringes of the west. They were hardly alone in suffering and being dispossessed during the expansion of Canada. All Indigenous people suffered. As the “taming” of the West continued, many of the smaller, marginalized groups, those without a clear national identity, such as “non-status Indians,” were eventually absorbed into the Métis nation.

The largest of these other groups were the descendants of HBC employees, some of whom had, like French fur traders, married Indigenous women. However, their experience was very different from the French. Because the HBC system focused everything on the fort — trappers came to the fort rather than the company going out to the trappers — Indigenous women had to live in the fort with their husbands, and children were raised in the fort, where they were given a British upbringing. But the HBC officials brought deep-seated racist attitudes from Britain, and although the children lived in British settlements and were raised in British ways, they were never accepted in society, always cruelly stigmatized as “half-breeds”. Instead of recognizing their potential and recruiting them to be valuable employees, the HBC exploited them only as cheap labour. As their numbers grew, they moved out of the forts and took up farming in the areas surrounding the forts, rejected, yet always thinking of themselves as British. Thus they were never able to develop an independent sense of identity. Eventually, however, their position as permanent exiles became untenable, and they too merged into the Métis nation.

The final chapters of Fred Shore’s Threads in the Sash spell out the details of the promises made to the Métis, the promises broken, the treaties ignored, the abuses perpetrated, the theft of land and rights, all aimed at crushing a proud and enterprising people. It also presents the current legal and moral case against the Canadian government and the grounds the Métis have for seeking compensation. Starting in the late 1960s, a century after their dispossession at the Red River, the Métis have re-awakened as a people, regrouped, reorganized, and determined a way forward that they hope will lead to a restoration of some of their former independence. As the largest of Canada’s Indigenous groups, numbering almost half a million, one-third of all the Indigenous people of Canada, the Métis must arrive at a satisfactory settlement with the rest of Canada, if Canada’s ambitious reconciliation process is to have any chance of success.

review -- The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought

The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought

by Dennis G Rasmussen

For historical writers, a feud is a gift—lurid attacks, entertaining insults, factions, court cases—all guarantee drama. Love affairs are even easier with ecstasies, cries de coeur, torrents of letters, the language heated and glowing, rising sometimes into poetry. But friendship, what is there to write about in a friendship? What will the emotional highlight be, a letter of congratulation, a heartfelt testimonial? The author can note the times and places of their meeting, but even if Boswell were on the sideline recording every word, it would likely consist of little more than good-humoured banter mixed with shop talk. In The Infidel and the Professor political science professor Dennis C. Rasmussen tries, quite successfully, to bring to life the friendship between the two premier figures of the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment: David Hume, about whom Isaiah Berlin wrote “no man has influenced the history of philosophical thought to a deeper and more disturbing degree,” the infidel, the great skeptic, whose far-reaching doubts unnerved the religious establishment; and Adam Smith, the professor, the placater of the establishment, author of The Wealth of Nations, which has been described precisely as “the one book between Newton’s Principia and Darwin’s The Origin of Species that actually, substantially, and almost immediately started improving the quality of human life and thought” and extravagantly as “probably the most important book that has ever been written.”

Hume, twelve years senior to Smith, is remembered today for his philosophical works, with John Locke and George Berkeley as a founder of British empiricism, for his famous analysis of causality as merely the “constant conjunction” of events, and for his skeptical examination of arguments for religion. But in his essays and in his six-volume History of England he wrote about much more than philosophy, including political economy, where Smith would make his mark. Rasmussen spends a good deal of time tracing—with a light touch, thankfully—the pervasive intellectual influence Hume exerted on Smith, presenting the first of Smith’s two books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as a quiet dialogue with Hume. Even The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s magnum opus, his most original work, was influenced in critical ways by Hume’s writings.

 Intellectual influences aside, however, depicting the friendship remains problematic. Because Hume was a regular letter writer, Rasmussen does what he can by quoting Hume’s invitations to Smith to join him in Edinburgh or meet him in London or Paris. And he reveals in detail their itineraries as they move about, even from house to house, showing how their paths crossed, or might have crossed, even when he can offer nothing about whether they did in fact meet or what happened if they met. He quotes their expressions of esteem and describes the small favours they did for each other in the business of publishing and book promotion. It is all gentle and civilized, entirely fitting for major thinkers of the Enlightenment. But it does not stir the blood.

 To add pizzazz to the book, Rasmussen makes set pieces of the few incidents which were dramatic(-ish). The oft-told story of Hume’s encounter with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, gets its own chapter. Rousseau, fleeing arrest warrants in France and Switzerland for his radical ideas, and frightened by the mobs that had stoned his house, accepted an offer from Hume to help get him out of France and find him shelter in England. Friends of Hume warned “you are warming a viper in your bosom,” and, sure enough, the edifying spectacle of a great, disruptive writer coming to the aid of a fellow great, disruptive writer soon fell to pieces. Rousseau, unstable and delusional, accused Hume of leading a conspiracy to silence him and bury him in obscurity. Upon Rousseau’s returning to France incognito, Hume published documentation of the affair and, in his private correspondence, made several waspish comments about Rousseau, probably, given his genial personality, the only remarks of that nature he ever made in his life.

 For twenty years after finishing his History of England, Hume stopped publishing. “Too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich,” he explained to friends. “When I see my bulk on a shelf, as well as when I see it in a glass, I would fain prevent my growing more corpulent either way.” It was during and after his final illness that Smith’s part in the friendship was put to the test. Hume asked Smith to oversee the publication of his yet-unpublished Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. It would be his most thorough (and skeptical, of course) discussion of the rational arguments for religion. Despite their many years of friendship and despite the poignant timing of the request, Smith refused. Although Smith was probably a Deist, if not an atheist, almost certainly not a Christian, he had lived his whole life hiding his true beliefs to avoid the hornet’s nest of the religious establishment. Hume did not press him and found another acquaintance to take on the job. In the end, however, Smith redeemed himself somewhat and was roundly condemned as a result. While the establishment eagerly waited to hear of Hume’s deathbed conversion to Christianity or, just as good, of his dying in spiritual agony, Smith published a tribute that described Hume dying serenely and concluded with a sentence that caused an uproar: “Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” It generated the eighteenth century equivalent of a Twitterstorm.

 The Infidel and the Professor may offer no new revelations or overturn big theories, but it makes for a thoroughly enjoyable read. Rasmussen’s prose is transparent and easy, free of the usual academic clunkiness. And, luckily for the reader, we hear much more from witty and good-humoured Hume than from serious and reserved Smith, giving us, for example, this account of Hume’s visit to Maria Theresa, the Holy Roman Empress: “After we had a little conversation with her Imperial Majesty, we were to walk backwards, through a very long room, curtseying all the way. And there was very great danger of falling foul of each other, as well as of tumbling topsy-turvy. She saw the difficulty we were in and immediately called to us, Allez, allez, messieurs, sans ceremonies. Vous n’etes pas accoutumés a ce movemen et le plancher est glissant. ("Go on, go on, sirs, without ceremony. You are not accustomed to this movement and the floor is slippery.") We esteemed ourselves very much obliged to her for this attention, especially my companions, who were desperately afraid of my falling on them and crushing them.”

review -- Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire by Leslie Peirce

Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire

by Leslie Peirce

The sultan’s harem was an object of constant fascination for the West. For European women it was probably a nightmare, a symbol of horror and sexual degradation; for men it seemed a pleasure garden, a perfect setting for erotic fantasies. For the sultan himself, however, it was neither. While hardly a palace of pain, the harem had a serious purpose that was not about indulging his lusts, for above all else it served a dynastic function. It was a factory for male heirs. No real importance attached to the sultan’s momentary feelings (never mind the concubine’s) provided the essential duty was performed — one sultan put the empire in jeopardy because he was not attracted to women — and once the woman became pregnant the erotic relationship ended. She was banned from his bed and withdrew permanently into the women’s quarters of the palace.

Unlike the royal houses of Europe, where primogeniture was designed to ensure orderly succession after the death of a king or queen, the Ottomans developed a very different system. The sultan would create several potential heirs from among the concubines. After giving birth to a son, the concubine, now a royal mother, would separate from the sultan and devote her life to raising her son. All her efforts were directed toward inculcating in him the character and the political and military skills required to outmaneuver, when the sultan died, all the other sultan’s sons, so that he could seize the throne, either through skill or violence. (Female children, free from a future of this high-stakes competition, were prized and raised with great affection.)

In the early years of the empire, before concubines were turned into royal mothers, sultans had married princesses of other nations, as European royalty did. This practice, however, did not last, the Ottomans judging that the danger presented by foreign-born wives with divided loyalties outweighed the benefit of creating political alliances. The marriageable daughters of leading Ottoman families were also ruled out as potential mates on the grounds that this, too,  might encourage challenges to the the ruling dynasty. Thus concubines and the dynastic harem came into being. But where could a steady supply of concubines come from? Since they would live as slaves, Islamic law presented a sticking point, since it forbade a Muslim from enslaving another Muslim. The solution was for the Ottomans to buy Christian slaves from Crimean Tatars, whose periodic raids virtually emptied villages over wide areas in the nearby countries to the north, in what are now the Balkan states, Ukraine and southern Russia.

One such slave was a clever girl of seventeen, probably from southern Russia. Despite the horrific experience of enslavement, she must have impressed her captors, for they named her Hürrem, Persian for “joyful” or “laughing.” She probably began in the household of a high official before being given as a gift to the sultan. “Young but not beautiful, although graceful and petite” was how she was described in a report written by a Venetian ambassador.

Suleyman the Magnificent, aged twenty-six, had already sired a son with another concubine before he encountered the girl. Then, as tradition dictated, the mother and the boy were shunted aside, and in 1520 Suleyman moved on to Roxelana, as she was then known, the next womb in the assembly line. That’s when something unaccountable happened between the two, something completely out of the norm, something that in time overturned many of the empire’s precedents and traditions. Many people thought she exercised black arts over the sultan and called her a witch. Today there would be people pointing to the Stockholm Syndrome. But the most credible explanation is that Suleyman and Roxelana simply fell deeply, passionately in love.

What alerted the rest of the world was that, after giving birth, Roxelana continued as Suleyman’s mistress rather than being banished to a remote nursery. Suleyman did not turn his attentions to another concubine. In fact, it was later said that he was never unfaithful to her all his life. Within a short space of time, the couple had five more children. Nothing like that had ever happened in Ottoman history. More and more Roxelana appeared with him in the main palace, normally off limits to women except for brief conjugal visits. Finally she moved there permanently into her own apartments. And after his mother died, Suleyman freed her from slavery, and the two married, forming a monogamous, nuclear family in the sultan’s palace, mother, father and children. Throughout the empire and throughout Europe people were amazed.

If Roxelana had done nothing else, her transformation from slave girl to sultan’s wife would have ensured her a place in history. But after she settled into her new position, she proved to be much more than a clever girl who merely knew how to take advantage of opportunities. Her intelligence she placed in the service of the sultan and the empire, keeping herself up to date on political affairs, advising him, even engaging in diplomacy of her own by corresponding with and sending envoys to influential figures in foreign countries. Other powerful women were of special interest to her, such as Princess Bona of Milan, who married the King of Poland, and her daughter, Isabella, Queen of Hungary (a letter to Isabella began, “We are both born from one mother, Eve …”). She also made a name for herself through many charitable works, starting with a large complex in a neighbourhood in  Istanbul known for its women’s market. The third largest complex in the city — no one would mistake her power — it consisted of a mosque, two schools, a fountain, and a hospital for women. In cities and towns across the empire and beyond she founded soup kitchens, hostels, baths, and mosques, including in the holiest cities of Islam, Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. After her death, succeeding generations of royal Ottoman women looked to Roxelana as an example and made themselves wielders of real political power, serving as advisors to their sons and sometimes serving as regents.

Empress of the East is an excellent biography of Roxelana, covering most of what is possible to know about this extraordinary woman. It is especially strong in explaining Ottoman traditions and putting Roxelana into her political context. It is not, however, a vivid portrait. Contemporary sources are scant. Some of her letter to Suleyman have survived, but they consist largely of effusive missives telling him how much she misses him. Some European diplomats sent reports on what they observed about the Ottoman court. But mostly the author tries to put Roxelana's life together through circumstantial evidence. It produces truth and precision at the expense of drama. For drama one could turn to the Turkish television series "Magnificent Century," available on Netflix (sometimes), in which Roxelana plays a big part.  It contains a lot of historical fiction, of course, but it makes a welcome complement to this more serious biography. Afterwards one might listen to the second movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 63, which was written about 1780 as incidental music for a stage work which featured Roxelana.

review -- I Am Not a Brain by Markus Gabriel and Consciouness: a very short introduction by Susan Blackmore

For many people, philosophy is a swamp, a madhouse, an ear-splitting cave filled with pointless,  hair-splitting, logic-chopping argumentation. That may be true, but periodically we all find ourselves falling into that swamp, that madhouse, that cave. In the early days of computers, digital technology lured us in, asking us to ponder whether robots will one day look us in the eye with human-like intelligence. Much hair-splitting and argumentation ensued, with no clear results. Today the philosophical abyss opens again, thanks to sweeping claims made by neuroscience, which believes it has found the answers to some big questions. Does a mind exist or only a brain? What exactly is our inner life, our consciousness? Where does consciousness take place? How can something immaterial make connections with the material body? Is there any reality to the self, the ego, our feeling that we are the agents of our own actions? With recent discoveries about how our thoughts and actions depend on the brain, how can we believe that we have free will? Most of these questions go back many hundreds of years, and the philosophers who took them on, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Russell, and others disagreed with each other in a thousand ways. Perhaps we are nearing a day now when science will provide the final answers.

In her clear and concise monograph, Consciousness : a very short introduction, psychologist Susan J. Blackmore outlines the scientific findings on consciousness. The experiments and case studies she presents are entertaining and thought-provoking, as they seek evidence in dreaming, synaesthesia, multiple personalities, ouijah boards, out-of-body and near-death experiences, animal consciousness, and so on. Even ordinary experiences seem to yield insights. For example, since people can commute to or from work for half an hour or more and have no memory of doing it, they must have somehow been conscious to navigate and obey traffic signals. Yet it’s not a normal sort of consciousness that leaves no trace in memory immediately afterwards. In the 1960s one of the most startling discoveries was made when brains were scanned of subjects performing very simple physical operations, such as moving an arm. Parts of the brain associated with preparing for physical movement were found to be activated a full half-second before the conscious subject thought they had decided to move the arm. This raised grave doubts as to whether we are really agents of our own actions, whether the self exists, and whether we have free will.

Dubious Conclusions

Philosophical questions are ubiquitous in Blackmore’s account. Again and again as she describes what science says about consciousness, she bumps into the problem of explaining the connection between what scientists observe from the outside and what we as individuals experience from the inside, and she admits repeatedly that she cannot give an answer. She uncovers indications that seem to undermine the common sense view but never quite gets to proofs. To cover the gap she invokes future discoveries—coming ”soon,” she says—when our technologies will be more advanced. Perhaps we will even discover the elusive “neural correlates of consciousness.” In the meantime, however, Blackmore does not bind herself to the evidence at hand, instead deeming the preliminary indications to be, likely, the whole truth. This leads to some peculiar theses. The mind, she believes, that is, the self, the entire mental world, is an illusion, and we ought to live dutifully keeping in mind that it is all an illusion: “This is tough, but I think it gets easier with practice,” she says, without offering any tips on how it is to be done. Free will is also an illusion, according to Blackmore, but, since studies have shown that rejecting belief in free will increases one’s tendency to depression, we should live “as if” we believe in free will. Her book is an excellent introduction to the science of consciousness, but when it addresses ancient philosophical questions, it founders badly.

A Critique of Neurocentrism

In the recently published I Am Not A Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the Twenty-First Century German philosopher Markus Gabriel takes the philosophical questions head-on in a multi-pronged attack on what he calls “neurocentrism,” the blurring, even the identification, of mind and brain. The claims of today’s neuroscientists and psychologists, he believes, are riddled with omissions, incoherence, and bad logic. In a book sometimes dense with argument, sometimes light and spacious, making its points with references to Fargo and Doctor Who almost as often as Kant and Hegel, Gabriel subjects the pillars of neurocentrism to close scrutiny, picking away at their logic, exposing their presumptions, and investigating alternative explanations.

One of the most powerful images driving us toward the neurocentric, materialistic view is that of a machine-like universe consisting of nothing but particles and energy, all locked into a chain of causality stretching from the beginning of the universe until its end. Because our brains belong to that realm, and because the brain is the originator, apparently, of all thought, it is argued that we are mere automata (as are all other conscious creatures), our entire mental world functioning beyond our control, inescapable and foreordained. Gabriel attempts to weaken the force of that image, pointing out, for example, that the current state of physics is not a closed, finished system: it cannot yet integrate gravity with quantum mechanics, it has no account of dark matter and dark energy, and causality seems vitiated by probabilities. However, he accepts the validity of determinism—as applied to the world of matter. Taking it further, though, is, he says, to over-extend one model of explanation over the entire cosmos.

The World Does Not Exist

Gabriel’s most unusual argument was presented at length in a previous book (and TEDTalk) entitled Why the World Does Not Exist. It is not possible, he believes, to step outside everything that exists, comprehend it all at once in a God-like glance, and thus see both the entire contents and the absolute limits of “the world” or “the universe.” That’s what materialists think they have done when they declare that only matter and energy exist. But why only matter and energy? Do numbers not exist? The rules of logic? How about facts? Or the Federal Republic of Germany, Hamlet (the play, not the physical words printed on the page), relationships, democracy, love? Gabriel contends that it is a mistake to assert that everything that exists belongs to a single class and that everything that exists cannot be comprehended in a single frame of reference. Instead, he wants us to accept a countless number of what he calls “fields of sense,” so that, just as it is meaningful and true to say that chairs and rainbows exist, in other fields of sense it can be meaningful and true to say that principles exist, or friendship or even Ebenezer Scrooge. Of course, Gabriel’s main interest in this argument is to clear the way for the mind and its cognates to be recognized as existing just as surely as atoms.

A chapter is devoted to each of consciousness, self-consciousness, the self, and freedom, as he both deals with various reductionist views of the mind and develops his own position, which he calls New Realism. Much of it is the common sense view of the mind — that it is real (although not a mysterious ‘substance’ and not existing apart from the brain); the true originator of many, but not all, of our actions; and operating with free will, even as it is subject to unconscious processes. He offers a tricky notion, though, for the defining function of the mind, which he takes to be its ability to think creatively about itself, ceaselessly to form conceptions of itself. At least part of what this means is our ability to imagine our own identities, as a Christian, for example, or a German, a patriot, a gift to the opposite sex (the mind can make errors about itself, of course) or a plaything of fate. This feature he takes to be absolutely crucial: “The human mind does not have a reality that is independent of its self-images.” Because a self-image has consequences in action and engenders a multiplicity of further thoughts, Gabriel believes it is important to push back against neurocentrism’s false image of the mind as illusory and unfree.

Here and there Gabriel raps the knuckles of some incidental figures, such as Richard Dawkins for his thesis that the human is no more than an elaborate biological mechanism devoted to the single purpose of passing on genes, Freud for his idea that the mind is enslaved to the libido, and Silicon Valley types who anticipate cyborgs and a future when an individual’s human experience can be uploaded to a computer, a network, or a USB stick. “Darwinitis” comes under fire for invoking a remote, mythical past to explain concepts such as egoism, altruism, good, and evil in terms of the struggle for survival and genetic transmission rather than accepting the historical development of these concepts, already so well documented in culture.

The Other Sciences of the Mind

“Nothing is more human than the wish to deny one’s humanity,” wrote philosopher Stanley Cavell. Again and again Gabriel sees attempts to reduce our humanity to something other than, and always less than, human. The German word for the humanities, he points out, Geisteswissenschaften, means “sciences of the mind” and consists of subjects such as philosophy, history, musicology, linguistics, and theatre studies. There, he thinks, is where we learn the most about the human mind. Neuroscience undoubtedly helps us understand the biological phenomena without which, of course, there is no mental life. But it has not proven that we are identical with our brains or provided satisfactory explanations of mental phenomena. More important, it seems unlikely ever to provide the level of insight into ourselves that we find beyond the sciences in figures like Sophocles, de Tocqueville, Proust, or Niebuhr.

I Am Not A Brain could be much better focused. As it shifts from topic to topic, the connections can be fuzzy, sometimes leaving the feeling of a miscellany, as if portions were patched together from notebooks. Nevertheless, it is very stimulating, invites repeated readings, and provokes hours of reflection. Written with the lay reader in mind without sacrificing intellectual rigour, it offers a bracing reminder to keep our guard up against, not neuroscience itself, but its philosophical pretensions.