The War on Grammar

The editor of the Cambridge Grammar of English was on the radio today, defending the controversial stance of the new edition of the style guide, which says that rules of grammar are less important than clear communication. It argues that if the reader or listener's understanding is not compromised, then "good" grammar has been used, a stance I am inclined to agree with since, as I have argued in an essay on this site, we rarely realise just how much abuse our language can take and still allow our message to get across.

However, the editor also said, as I did in that essay, that we must recognise that language works not just by what we say, but also how we say it. Consequently, saying something with sloppy disregard to regular rules in a conversation with friends (probably scattering the word "like" liberally throughout as well) is fine. However, in a formal essay, no matter how well-researched it may be, if the writer cannot use language in a controlled and orthodox way, I am less likely to be persuaded by his arguments. Thus it was with some amusement that on the day I heard the radio programme, I received a letter from the Home Office, responding to a letter I had sent to them through Amnesty International, regarding the trials (or lack of) of terrorist suspects. In the page-long response, I counted five basic errors of grammar or style, including several Governments lacking apostrophes, and the obfuscatory sentence, "It is not our policy to discuss individual cases and that the majority of those who have been detained for national security reasons are the subject of court orders made by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission under the Contempt of Court Act." Needless to say, that the press office at the Home Office cannot write correctly is hardly the least of my worries about the way our government has acted in the "War on Terror," but this evidence certainly does little to modify my opinions.

Postgraduate Diary: Making Reading Fast

Whenever I read critical works in the past, I used to be a fastidious note-taker, making chapter-by-chapter synopses as I read, creating abstracts, copying out key quotations, all neatly word-processed and filed. This form of "active" reading worked for me, as I found I could concentrate better on what were often quite challenging, and sometimes dull, secondary texts; secondly, finding precisely where that quote I later needed came from was simply a matter of using the search facility on my PC.

Such a form of reading is no doubt the best when, as is the case for undergraduate essays, you might only need to read a couple of texts which, your lecturer has assured you, will shed the most light on the topic in question. When it comes to a PhD, however, the reading list is infinite (or at least exponential) as every book you read points to several other potentially vital texts in its bibliography. Six months in, and my reading list is already 100 books and articles long. Perhaps the biggest challenge for me has been to learn to break away from my careful plotting of a critical book through detailed note taking, and instead to learn to read in a more laid back way, unconcerned if parts of chapters skip my comprehension, just so long as the general thesis of the book becomes clear. With such an expansive reading list, to carry out the sort of note taking I used to would be impossible, and occasionally this leads to frustration, as I try to access the database of my flawed memory, rather than my computer's perfect memory, in order to recollect where an argument or quote I suddenly, a month of writing later, I realise I would like to inject into my argument. There is thus a delicate balance to be found between reading fast, and making reading fast, making it stick in your mind by commentating actively on it as you read.

The speed reading workshop I attended today threatened to upset any balance between the two I had found. Promising to treble my initial, average to high reading speed (450 words per minute), I worried whether it might also result in reducing to a third my ability to comprehend difficult texts. However, though I am always cynical about these skills workshops that promise much and often deliver little, the reading tools we were taught were practical, the effects immediate, and the threat to comprehension not particularly great. In fact, the most simple thing we were told was to go back to primary school, and pick up again that pen or finger your teacher told you to put down if you wanted to be a good reader, and to trace every word with it. This allows the eyes, rather than saccading in leaps across the line, to smoothly flow across every word or every chunk of words (the next exercise in speed reading being to comprehend phrases, rather than words, at a time). The net bonus was two-fold: firstly, my speed doubled to about 800 words a minute; secondly, because I was engaging more of my brain in the exercise of reading, I was less distracted by events around me, my attention wandered less, and my comprehension (though obviously difficult to measure in a workshop environment) went up. If only I had been taught these tricks five years ago!

Postgraduate Diary: First Aid

When I was an undergraduate, a poster for one of the union's late night events said: "Don't let your degree get in the way of your education!" Whilst I'm not entirely convinced that dancing in a sweaty club drinking warm, still Fosters is entirely "educational," I do agree with the sentiment. So it was refreshing to have spent today doing something vitally educational, yet with little in relation to PhDs, as I attended a first aid workshop. Yes, it involved getting down with some dolls and manoeuvring people into odd positions (perhaps not so different to the union event, then). But by the end of it, I felt quietly confident that I had actually learnt something tremendously important. Although much first aid is common sense (raising injured limbs and watering burns, just like your mother always taught you), it's nice to be reassured, and to know that it is in my power now to save a life through CPR, rather than standing passively on the sidelines.

A Grand Idea

Watching Steve Grand lecturing yesterday, or more specifically watching his answering questions at the end, was like being a spectator at a fencing match, as he deftly parried and stabbed at challenges about the nature of consciousness with his sharp intellect. The creator of the computer game Creatures, once said to be the cleverest man in Britain, was arguing that what we know as consciousness is something of a sham, a highly predictive simulation of the way our world is at the moment we experience it. This "multiple drafts" model is Daniel Dennett's idea in Consciousness Explained, and I have a lot of time for it, as it explains many of the blips in our perceptions. Anyone who has ever tried, with frustration, to draw a coin will know how effectively our mind informs us that a coin is round and thus it is the roundness we try to transfer to paper, rather than the oval we actually see. Grand used the example of your brain tracking an eagle dropping from the sky; because it takes 500 milliseconds for the light from the eagle to reach your eye and pass through the interpretive receptors in your brain, by the time this processing is complete the eagle will not be where it was when you first "saw" it. The world we see, and the world we know, are not one and the same.

The problem I had with Steve Grand's ideas, however, was his argument that if you modelled an electron on a spreadsheet (inputting data for co-ordinates in space, charge, etc.), then modelled enough electrons in combination to form a hydrogen atom, then enough to form a two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, then enough to form many trillions of these, then you would have "made" water vapour. This, following on only from the fundamental rules you described at the molecular level would, without no further intervention from a deus ex machina (i.e. The Programmer) eventually condense and fall in the form of rain which, eventually, would form a lake, rivers and so on, all behaving almost precisely as rivers do in the real world. It would be so precise, in fact, that the resultant entity, because it follows precisely the same laws of physics at the real thing, simply residing in the software rather than reality, would be a lake. However, the challenge I would make to this is how would I know when I was looking at the digital lake that it was a lake, and not my garden pond, or the Red Sea. In order to know the lake was a lake, I would need to put it in a context that defines "lakiness," namely it is probably large, not artificial, and often exists in the basin between or at the end of river valleys. In order to produce a digital lake that was real enough to be called a lake one would also need to model the environment, including soil, hills, light, sound that permit our senses to interpret it as such.

With a similar level of recursion, how would one define when conscious life has been created artificially? To model this, one would need to take the serial processor of the computer, which would model a parallel processor, which would model evolving life, which would evolve to model consciousness which is, as Grand says, only a simulation anyway. Where, on this long scale of replication, is the oval office where the buck of being stops? It would be easy if we had a firm knowledge of where life - and especially conscious life - begins. It would make ethical issues such as determining whether to withhold the life support of a severely handicapped baby that much more regular and straightforward. Sadly, though, the problem is not, nor will ever be, that easy. Whether it will be cybernetics and artificial intelligence, or discursive philosophies of mind that will come closest to a definition of consciousness, watch this space (it may take a while...).