I drove back from Tahoe Sunday afternoon. Tippy !McSlippy, otherwise known as my white Mazda Navajo, needs new tires if she’s ever to go up there again. We got stuck in a snow bank on our way to Tahoe Donner XC and I got to put the chains on.

On a positive note, she does like the highway. I got something like 300 miles on that tank of gas, which is about 100 more than I normally get. I put the cruise control on 67 and cruise along. I like going slow. I like being passed left and right. It makes me feel morally superior for a little while, and then I quit noticing and just look out the windows and listen to my music. If anyone’s going to feel annoyed, it’s not going to be me.

The air above the Central Valley was unusually clear that day. From Auburn you could see the skyline of Sacramento rising in the midst of a vast emptiness that is not, in fact, so empty as it appears, but has been carpeted more or less in Wal-Marts, CompUSAs, TGIFs, and the other flora of the “strip mall” ecosystem. But when the air is that clear and you’re going sixty-seven something strange happens, because you stop being stuck on a strip of concrete somewhere between point A and point B. You can see things approaching from far off. And if you know what they are you feel yourself to be moving about on the face of a vastly shrunken earth. Mt. Diablo looms all the way from Davis, as does the eastern escarpment of the coast ranges, with that strange gap leading to Lake Berryessa and on to Napa. Every overpass that brings you more than about ten feet higher than usual reveals something you knew was there, but had never seen as a part of any whole.

Andro gave me a copy of The Mind’s I for Christmas, and I am about three quarters of the way through it. I was surprised to discover that I am a better materialist than Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, combined. I mean that I would make a better materialist, because I actually believe in a material basis for mind, and they would like to think that you can abstract it from its mater. (Material and Mother have the same root.) They are a bit less cocky than the AI people back in the sixties and seventies who thought mind could be reduced to the sort of formal operations computers do, but they do think that it will emerge from a whole bunch of formal operations that resemble the operation of neurons. Perhaps it will, though I am not sure why it matters, since we won’t understand how mind emerges from a billion simulated neurons that much better than from a billion real ones.

But I am relatively certain it will not, because matter matters. This is, I admit, a slightly heretical statement in respect to modern scientific dogma. The idea of modern science is that you can replace material interactions with formalized causes, just as you can describe the motions of a body in outer space without reference to its size, shape, or indeed anything but its mass. Is that really true? It isn’t even true of the mass in space, if it is anything but a perfect sphere. Is there such a thing as a perfect sphere?

In one of his dialogues Hofstadter claims that the experience of looking at music is equivalent (at least in principle) to hearing it played, in an attempt to prove that music is independent of its medium. By analogy, mind must be independent of its medium. There are two objections to this comparison. The first is that what one appreciates about a performance of music is its individuality, the specific interaction between the performer and the material of the composition. (Though that is becoming increasingly less so, as recordings replace performance as the means by which people hear music.) Still, one could imagaine a world in which the “performance” of a piece consists of an individual copy of a score, perhaps with more or less stress on certain chords, a spatial rubato, etc.

The second objection is more substantive, and it has to do with the fact that music is about something. It is not a purely formal exercise (although one sometimes suspects, from his descriptions of it, that it is not much more to Hofstadter), but refers to something. It can refer, of course, to many different things, but there is something it refers to in a proper sense, and that something is time.

There is a lot more to be said about this with respect to how brains work, but I will conclude with the observation that what has always bothered me about most of the research on intelligence is that it’s being done by a bunch of gnostics who have no interest in what it means to be in time and space. But I suppose the people who can be in the world go and be in it. Matter has a way of winning these engagements.

(cdm | TimeAndSpace)