... than a frontal lobotomy.
I'm sure Howard Dully would agree. In 1960, Dully, age 12, was given a transorbital lobotomy because, apparently, he was a problem child. From “My Lobotomy“: 45 years later, a man tries to learn why:
Dully never went back to school, never graduated. At the insistence of his stepmother, he was made a ward of the state, drifting from juvenile hall to halfway houses to Agnews State Hospital, a mental hospital in Santa Clara, Calif. He committed petty crimes, drank too much and lived on disability payments. He no longer felt welcome at his parents' home.
Yet his intellect, sense of humor and emotions survived. A big, amiable man — 6 feet 7 inches tall, with laugh lines in the corners of his eyes — he eventually earned a two-year degree, married and became a tour-bus driver.
And five years ago he went looking for answers: Who had done this to him, and why?
In Dully's own words (from 'My Lobotomy': Howard Dully's Journey):
"If you saw me you'd never know I'd had a lobotomy," Dully says. "The only thing you'd notice is that I'm very tall and weigh about 350 pounds. But I've always felt different -- wondered if something's missing from my soul. I have no memory of the operation, and never had the courage to ask my family about it. So two years ago I set out on a journey to learn everything I could about my lobotomy."
In his research, he found his medical file, with detailed notes and photographs from early consultations through the actual operation. “As those who watched the procedure described it, a patient would be rendered unconscious by electroshock. [The doctor] would then take a sharp ice pick-like instrument, insert it above the patient's eyeball through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving the instrument back and forth. Then he would do the same thing on the other side of the face.” There's even a rather graphic picture of Dully undergoing to operation.
Dully has made his exploration public, recording his journey in a radio series. You can download an MP3 of an NPR story on Dully here. More information about Howard Dully and his procedure here.
Whew, 750+ pages later, and I've wrapped up reading Douglas Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. From the Wikipedia entry on the book:
At one level, it is a book about how the creative achievements of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach interweave. As the author states: "I realized that to me, Gödel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to reconstruct the central object, and came up with this book."
The central theme of the book is more abstract. Hofstadter asks: "Do words and thoughts follow formal rules, or do they not?" In the preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition, Hofstadter laments that his book has been misperceived as a hodge-podge of neat things when it does have a theme. He stated: "GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?"
Overall, the book looks at the author's views on how consciousness and a sense of self can arise from what is nothing more than the mind, a collection of neurons that follow fairly precise rules at a granular enough level. How can something as complex as a symphony be produced by what is nothing more than a collection of cells?
What made the book such an enjoyable read was the author's ability to meld these three individuals' lives and work together into a seemingly finely interwoven mosaic. In virtually every chapter there's multiple works by Escher that, upon seeing them within the context of the chapter's topic, makes you think Escher created that work for Hofstadter's book. Similarly, I learned a lot about music structure and the little games and slieghts of hand Bach's works contain.
One unique thing about this book was the structure. Between each chapter the author included a dialog between, typically, Achilles and the Tortoise. These two chums would have discourses on topics that played into the material presented in the following chapter. These dialogs are worth the price of admission alone. In particular the Crab Canon is a piece where a new character, the crab, is introduced, and he has one line right smack dab in the middle of the dialog. The first half and second half of the dialog, however, are identical in words, but shifted in meaning. For example, the dialog starts with Achilles saying, “Good day!“ as a greeting, and ends with the Tortoise saying “Good day!“ as a goodbye. It's amazing how well it all works together. (You can read this particular dialog in its entirety here.) In music, a crab canon is “ a kind of canon in which one line is reversed in time from the other (e.g. FABACEAE <=> EAECABAF).“
Hofstadter explores these ideas in part by looking at Goedel's incompleteness theorem, which states that given a complex enough of a formal system (such as number theory), there are theorems in the system that are true but cannot be expressed in the system. In other words, interesting formal systems are incomplete. The canonical example used to illustrate Goedel's theorem is the statement, “This sentence is false.” Goedel's theorem is founded in number theory, not English, but the point is that given a complex enough system, there are things that are “beyond” the system.
The chapters I enjoyed included:
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The one on
Zen Buddhism, which I knew little to nothing about beforehand, but like the explanation that the author provided. Sounds like a very interesting philosophy. (How honest/complete an overview the author gave, I don't know, not being familiar with the philosophy myself.)
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The chapters describing the basics of the cell, how cell's replicate and how DNA, RNA, mRNA, and ribosomes work together to create the proteins used by the cell.
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The final chapter, as it posed many open-ended questions about "strange loops and tangled hierarchies" (a concept discussed throughout the book) in everyday life.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to those who are interested in a discussion on what might constitute consciousness, thought, the soul, and existence, and how these concepts can be materialized from lower-level mechanical processes. Furthermore, the author examines how he views things like true artificial intelligence - a computer with a soul, with a sense of self - would have to be accomplished. Understand that the author does not get to these concepts right off; rather, he spends significant time building up the base of understanding to have a discussion on these topics, and the topics are not fluff ones. At times it can take several minutes just to get through a single page (at least for me).
But if you put the time in, I think you'll reap the reward by the book's end. Personally I liked every chapter except for the few close to the end that detailed the “progress” in AI research. (I use “progress” in quotes because this book was written back in 1979.)