A Tour of Newhallville

The following is adapted from a letter to the president of the New Haven Preservation Trust in response to an invitation to join his organization.

Dear Mr. S_______,

The receipt of your letter of July 13 reminds me of my intention to write to you about one of your walking tours, conducted during the Festival of Arts and Ideas in June.

I went on the Newhallville tour. I was very curious about this part of the town, because I live in East Rock, which is part of the Newhallville Police District. East Rock has had problems with crime in recent years, but they pale when compared to those of Newhallville.

Our tour guide was a white man, somewhat older, or at least more wrinkled, than I (I am almost 60), who had the misfortune of having to conduct the tour in the rain. I had been wondering if I would be the whitest person there, given the ancestry of much of the population of Newhallville, but in fact there was only one person with obvious African ancestors. All us curious whitish people stood under the overhang of an office building attending to our guide. We were blocking the entrance to the building, so, soon after I arrived, the guide shepherded us down Munson Street. Given the rain, the gas-powered edgers mowing a very wet park lawn, and the traffic on Munson, which increased in volume as the afternoon progressed, it was hard to hear the man. But I caught most of what he said.

All he wanted to talk about was the rise and fall of the industrial base. Having gotten us a block from our starting point, he waved in the direction of the actual residential area of Newhallville and told us those were the houses built for the workers who worked in the factories that were later boarded up. Then he trundled us right back the way we had come, back under the office-building porch, where we stayed for the rest of the "tour," oblivious thereafter to the rush-hour traffic noise and the people entering and exiting the building. We looked out over the edge of the abandoned industrial area. There was a construction site directly in front of us, and diagonally to our right a block of factory-and-warehouse space now partly converted to apartments, all part of the "Science Park" project, an attempt to revive the economy of the abandoned area. (I don't know if the label "Science Park" is technically correct when applied to all the redevelopment projects, but it seems to be the name in general use.) Our hose rambled on about Yale's attempt to invest in the area, its constant changing of course, the constant shifting of who owned what, and who cared about what. The bottom line is that, in spite of the construction activity in front of us, and the bustling traffic we were blocking going in and out of the office building sheltering us, Science Park was barely limping along.

I had not come to hear any of this. Most of it I already knew, but when he dropped references to the current companies invested in the area, he assumed we knew who they were and what nefarious motives they might have. This stuff was lost on me.

My daughter used to come for drum lessons at the home of a famous musician who lived just about a block beyond the houses the guide had waved at. I would have liked to have known more about that area, if there was anything to know — anything written down in places available to us old white people. I also would have liked, in spite of the rain, to have actually walked somewhere. Many of the people in the crowd had umbrellas, and had come to do some walking. It would also be useful to have the tour conducted by someone who lives in the Whalley Avenue area, which was easily reachable on foot from where we stood. I shop there, but the tour made it seem like faraway, alien territory, which may be the impression some suburbanites in our group may have come away with.

The only thing I learned was where the name "Newhallville" comes from. Oh, and the fact that the failure of the Farmington Canal to make it through the district was the historical and symbolic beginning of its bad luck. Other than that, it seems that Science Park was the only important thing that ever happened there.

Sincerely,

Airlie Foyle

On First Looking into Stambaugh's Heidegger

On First Looking into Stambaugh's⁰ Heidegger

Sometimes a purely intellectual work calls forth an aesthetic response. One has only to think of Escher's lithograph Relativity, a deep visual representation of the celebrated artist's superficial understanding of Einstein's equally celebrated theory. Recently, I have been reading Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, a weighty philosophical work, hugely influential on the German and French intelligentsia since it was first published in 1926, and gallicized by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1943. However, I have found it difficult to finish Being and Time, let alone formulate an adequate intellectual response to it.

Thus I have fallen back on poetry, and was inspired to compose the two poems that appear below. I realize that most of my readers are educated enough not to require an explanation of the philosophical and historical references, but for the benefit of the minority, I've included endnotes to explain some of the more obscure allusions. Besides, in the opinion of many experts the endnotes in such works as Eliot's The Waste Land, Nabokov's Pale Fire, and Roget's Thesaurus are vital to their artistic integrity.

Without further ado, my poems:

	Ode to Being
Though he'd agreed to a Sein und Zeit1 edit,
Herr Heidegger'd known he'd regret it,
	For someone in Mainz,
	Consumed with Da-seinz2
Is rumored to've actually read it.
	Ode to Time3
"The Führer stopped returning my calls,"4
Mused Heidegger, "How it appalls!
	If he'd dropped Being and Time
	Behind enemy lines,
The Will would have triumphed5 über alles!"6

Notes

Note 0 Joan Stambaugh's 1996 translation of Being and Time (State University of New York Press) is a big improvement on the classic Macquarrie and Robinson translation (1962).
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Note 1 The German title of Being and Time, which may be loosely translated as "Being and Time."
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Note 2 Literally, "there-being," one of 205 kinds of Being introduced on page 1 of Being and Time. Da-sein is special, in that it is the mode of Being that people exhibit in the course of … you know, being. I added the "z" so it would rhyme better.
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Note 3 The intended sense of "time" is not so much Heidegger's time-as-horizon-of-Da-sein, but world-historical, or welthistorisch, time.
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Note 4 Martin Heidegerr became Rector of Freiburg University in 1933, about the same time as Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and joined the Nazi party a few months later. He participated in the dismissal of many Jews from the faculty. He resigned from his position in 1934 when it began to dawn on him that Hitler had not read anything he had written.
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Note 5 Reference to The Triumph of the Will, the film about the Nazi Party Party Congress of 1934 made by beautiful German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Really, she was very good-looking, in an Aryan sort of way.
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Note 6 The German national anthem is titled "Deutschland über alles." Actually, it isn't, but that's what many people call it. Contrary to popular opinion, in the song, "über alles" does not mean "over everyone," as in "crushing everyone under the weight of our might," but "above all," i.e., "Germany above all," or "Germany first in our hearts." In my Ode, I mean more the thing about crushing. And, you've got to admit the rhyme is clever, or would be if "alles" had one syllable.
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Why, As For Me, Do I Dislike It So Masterfully ...?

I must apologize to my blogger readers for the dreadful formatting errors that plague my posts.
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Actually, I'm not really apologizing, but cursing blogger for many of its infuriating mannerisms and its interfering "templates."
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I prepare my contributions with care, then run them through some transformations to make Blogger happy, mainly converting all "left-bracket-p-right-brackets" and "left-bracket-/p-right-brackets" to newlines. That's where the trouble appears. These appear in four different ways: As newlines in the "edit html" portion of the blogger editor; as paragraph boundaries in "Compose"; as paragraph boundaries in "Preview"; and as nothing at all in the actual blog, which comes out as one gigantic paragraph.
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My latest theory is that this has something to do with the many different newline formats in the world, but my attempts to toss extra control-Ms and control-Js into what I paste into Blogger have led nowhere.
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If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them. Perhaps if I find a cure I can go back and make all my previous postings look readable.
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P.S. The plot has thickened. This post looked just fine until I put in some explicit html character entities (you know, the things with ampersands, like the thing you have to type to get an ampersand; I can't actually type one at this point for fear my computer will melt down). Even when I removed the entities, yielding the "left-bracket-right-bracket" crap a few paragraphs back, blogger remembered and refused to forgive me. So now this post has double-vertical-bars wherever a paragraph boundary should be. But in "Compose" and "Preview" the boundaries are right where they should be.

Ludwig the Thick-Headed Logician

Ludwig the Thick-Headed Logician^seuss

The problem with geniuses is that there's always the possibility that they're having a joke at our expense; or that their seemingly profound sayings are actually the gropings of a dimwit upon which we project our conceptions of what a genius would say. More than occasionally it has seemed to me that Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most respected, or at least discussed, philosophers of the twentieth century, may fall into the latter category.

Wittgenstein was canonized early for his work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The Vienna Circle worshiped him, even though he refused to meet with them or acknowledge their existence. He was a protegé of Bertrand Russell, who brought him to Cambridge, where he reigned as the respected Delphic Oracle for the rest of his life, even though he published nothing. Many of his notebooks were published after his death, the most notable being Philosophical Investigations.

The Tractatus^bib is mainly renowned for its oracular (the word is inescapable) pronouncements, such as

6.52	We feel that when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course then there are no questions left, and this itself is the answer.

Oooh. Actually, I rather like that one.

And of course, the immortal

7	What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.

Although a better translation might be, "About that whereof you cannot speak you must remain silent." Yes, all the paragraphs are numbered, to make them easier to quote and/or seem more profound. There's a Dewey Decimal-kind of system, so that 6.52 is a "comment" on 6.5. So we have

5.6	The limits of my language mean the limits of my world …
5.63	I am my world. (The microcosm)
5.631	There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas If I wrote a book called The World as I found it, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.

Whaddya think?

The parts of the Tractatus that aren't quoted so much are about logic. These parts form most of the Tractatus, and what they have to say about logic is mostly wrong, which raises the question why we should attach much significance to the profundities that supposedly follow from the logic.

Wittgenstein supposedly introduced truth tables in this work, so he gets credit for that, although the uses he puts them to are now generally forgotten. (He had an argument with Frege about whether T and F were objects (Frege) or just entries in truth tables (Wittgenstein). Nowadays we let them play both roles, so Frege won that one.)

But here are some of the mistakes he made: He repeatedly asserts things like, "When the truth of one proposition follows from the truth of others, we can see this from the structure of the propositions. [5.13] … 'Laws of inference,' which are supposed to justify inferences, as in the works of Frege and Russell, have no sense and would be superfluous. [5.132]" His alternative to rules of inference is to imagine all the elementary propositions about the world being lined up, after which all formulas about them could be constructed in advance. Even without complexity theory, this is a hard idea to swallow.^semantics

How about (5.1): "Truth-functions [truth tables] can be arranged in series. That is the foundation of the theory of probability." I don't think anyone ever followed up on this bizarre suggestion.

Then there's the convoluted technique of 6.1203 for checking whether a formula is a tautology. It involves drawing lines between formulas and truth values, but I couldn't get it to work; for any nontrivial formula the links rapidly congeal into an unreadable mess. Now, it is probable that this paragraph has been hailed as the seed from which has sprung tableau-based methods for theorem proving, but it is a flimsy foundation for the later announcements that "… in a suitable notation we can in fact recognize the formal properties of propositions by the mere inspection of the propositions themselves [6.122].… there can never be surprises in logic [6.1251]. … Proof in logic is merely a mechanical expedient to facilitate the recognition of tautologies in complicated cases [6.1262]."

It's odd that someone so aware of Russell and Whitehead's work in Principia Mathematica would think that proving theorems in logic was so straightforward (granted that there is a lot more to PM than proving logic theorems), especially considering that Wittgenstein includes first-order logic in his claims. He explicitly grants at one point that there might well be an infinity of elementary propositions, as well as of the "names" of objects that the propositions are about. So: "Mathematics is a method of logic [6.234]. … Indeed, it is a consequence of this method [equation solving] that every proposition of mathematics must be obviously true [6.2341]."

But the biggest blunder in the Tractatus is its treatment of equality.

4.241	When I use two signs with one and the same meaning, I express this by putting the sign '=' between them. So 'a=b' means that the sign 'b' can be substituted for the sign 'a'. …
4.242	Expressions of the form 'a=b' are, therefore, mere representational devices. They state nothing about the meaning of the signs 'a' and 'b'.

The problem with this superficially plausible idea appears as soon as you consider a formula such as ∀x(f(x) ⊃x=a), which Wittgenstein does in paragraph 5.5301. For here x is not a "sign" whose "meaning" is the same as that of a, but just a placeholder for some arbitrary object, which or might not happen to be a. The formula says that all objects that have property f "are a," i.e., equal to a. Or, in his words: "What this proposition says is simply that only a satisfies the function f, and not that only things that have a certain relation to a satisfy the function f." But the clause after the comma in the quoted sentence is simply wrong. As Kripke says somewhere, the "certain relation" in question is merely the smallest reflexive relation, a perfectly well defined entity. It may sound useless, but Wittgenstein has provided the perfect example of its usefulness. We're all familiar with others, such as specifying of a sequence S that S_i=S_j ⊃ i=j, which is the standard way to say that the elements of the sequence are distinct.

(One way to see the point is to invert the implications, so that we get formulas like ∀x(x≠a ⊃¬f(x)). Now "≠" seems like a perfectly good relation, or at least it's not obvious what's wrong with it. This formula says the same thing as before, only in the form, "Anything but a does not have property f." Wittgenstein's comeback would probably be that all such syntactic transformations do not change the underlying proposition, which is "obviously" always the same.)

The reductio ad absurdum of Wittgenstein's position on equality is where it gets him with existential quantifiers. In what follows I use a more modern notation than his for the formulas:

5.532	… I do not write '∃x,y(f(x,y)∧x=y)', but '∃x(f(x,x))'; and not '∃x,y(f(x,y)∧¬(x=y))', but '∃x,y(f(x,y))'. (So Russell's '∃x,y(f(x,y))' becomes '(∃x,y(f(x,y))) ∨ (∃x(f(x,x)))'.) …
5.5321	Thus, for example, instead of '∀x(f(x) ⊃ x=a)' we write '((∃x(f(x))) ⊃ f(a)) ∧ (¬∃x,y(f(x)∧f(y)))'. And the proposition, 'Only one x satisifies f( )', will read '(∃x(f(x))) ∧ (¬∃x,y(f(x)∧f(y)))'.

Like many of Wittgenstein's proposals in the Tractatus, this one sounds superficially plausible, but is completely unworkable. The problem is that it makes substitution into contexts with bound variables almost impossible. There is a useful little lemma in formal logic that states that if Q does not contain a free occurrence of x, then '∃x(P ∨ Q)' is equivalent to '(∃xP) ∨ Q'. But this is not true in Wittgenstein's world. Suppose P is just 'P(x)' and Q is 'N(a) ⊃ ∃y(R(a,y)'. In the version with wide quantification over x, the second quantifier is inside the first, and therefore (I guess, who really knows) it must become

∃x(P(x) ∨ (N(a) ⊃ (R(a,x) ∨ ∃y(R(a,y)))))

if it is to be equivalent to the version where the first quantifier has narrow scope.

There's a less obvious philosophical problem, too. We've gone to all this trouble to avoid having to mention the harmless little predicate '=', but we end up having to think about equality constantly. In fact, basic predicate calculus does not treat equality as a built-in constant. You must define it by adding axioms. That raises the question whether equality can be defined by axioms. That is, in all models of these axioms does '=' refer to a predicate recognizable as equality? If you do want to think of '=' as a logical symbol (akin to '∀' or '∨'), then you can use "first-order logic with equality," and simply stipulate that '=' refers to the relation {⟨ο,ο⟩ | for any ο}. Wittgenstein's approach makes all these issues impossible to avoid, or to deal with explicitly.

In his defense, when he wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, nobody really understood these issues very well. Tarski's theory of truth was still ten years in the future, although Skolem had already published what is now known as the Skolem-Lowenheim Theorem.

But Wittgenstein fled from formal logic. He repudiated the whole idea that if you expressed everything in a perfect language you could avoid mistakes. Well, who can blame him for that insight, whether or not you find his later philosophy as profound as most philosophers think. Perhaps, though, he took a look at how technical formal logic was getting and decided he just couldn't deal with it. He decamped so speedily and completely that no one seems to think of his early work in the context of logic at all.

Notes

Note seuss With apologies to Dr. Seuss. If this note is puzzling, you are among the benighted many who believe that his work began with The Cat in the Hat, which was actually about where it came to an end.
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Note bib All quotes from the translation by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, 1961, Routledge and Kegan Paul. The original German version was published in 1921, and had a perfectly ordinary German title, which could be translated, "A Logico-Philosophical Treatise." The Latin translation must have been inspired by the feeling that we had another Newton or Russell on our hands.
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Note semantics Okay, I guess you could say that Wittgenstein was groping toward a semantic, as oppose to proof-theoretic, approach to logic, which makes him, again, a pioneer. It's his insistence that there's only one, obvious approach that seems so strange.
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The 43% Solution

Humans have a taste for meat, which means that as countries develop economically a larger and larger fraction of their diet is meat. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of grain to feed a cow, grain that could be used to feed people who are not lucky enough to be on the income elevator. Growing and processing that grain takes energy, and hence increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thus making global warming worse. Instead of feeding people, we then feed a cow, and give the cow to people. So if you eat a cow, you are depriving people of food and polar bears of habitat. (Not to mention aggravating the cow-fart problem.) The world's population is expected to stabilize in a few decades, but by then it will have doubled. It's hard to imagine that all of those people will be able to eat as we do.


If enough people stop eating meat, the problem will go away. The demand for meat will fall, and so will the price of grain. As poorer nations develop, they will perhaps not find the eating of meat so attractive. Being vegetarian to make all these good things happen, rather than for health reasons or to avoid killing animals, is called economic vegetarianism. Now, what are the odds of a lot of people becoming vegetarians? Pretty slim.

Nonetheless, every time I bite into a burger or a steak, I cringe at the thought of all the grain that went into the cow that I'm eating. So I have decided to become a 3/7 vegetarian. That is, I will eat meat four days a week. I have a simple system: I eat meat on Wednesdays and weekends, counting Friday as a weekend day. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday I abstain, or, more positively, I eat yummy, yummy vegetables.

What about cheese and eggs? They're produced by animals. Don't worry! They're okay! For one thing, becoming a vegan is a lot harder that becoming a vegetarian, even fractionally. But it just seems reasonable to me that it takes less grain to produce 1000 kcal of cheese than 1000 kcal of meat because you get to use the same cow again; you don't have to build one from scratch.

Perhaps this will be the start of a movement. It's not hard, people! You don't have to eat tofu and TVP; you can maintain your unhealthy lifestyle with ice cream and pastry if you want. And if you do eat tofu on Monday, you have just 48 hours until meat is on your plate again.

Pedestrian Ethical Quandary

I sent the following letter to the "Ethicist" column of the New York Times Magazine. He didn't deem it worthy of publication; and who can blame him? So into the blog it goes …

My son and I are engaged in a seemingly trivial ethical argument about the etiquette of pushing the "pedestrian walk" button at an intersection. In some parts of the country, notably New England, where we've spent most of our lives, the "Walk" light will never come on unless some pedestrian pushes a button, usually big, round, and somewhat tarnished, but, with luck, functional. One then has to wait for the correct point in the cycle: If you're trying to cross at the corner of Broad Ave and Main Street, the pedestrians might get to go only after the cars on Broad have had their green.

Here's the ethical question: Is it okay to cross after pushing the button if there are no cars coming but the Walk light hasn't come on yet? I say No: By pushing the button you've made a back-up reservation for a time period when you can walk, just in case you don't get a chance earlier. It happens rather often that the opportunity arises to get across the street without the need for the Walk light, because there's a lull in the flow of cars. By pushing the button and then not using the time slot you've reserved, you've made someone else, the motorists who have to sit there watching a deserted intersection with brightly lit Walk lights, pay for your guarantee that you'll get a chance to walk.

My son says, Go ahead and walk! Once you've pushed the button, the motorists are going to have to wait, so what good does it do anyone for the pedestrian to be delayed? To add to the plausibility, suppose it's raining. How does it help the drivers for the pedestrian to get wetter?

Of course, the obvious answer is that one shouldn't push the button if the odds are that it's unnecessary. At some streets and times of day you know perfectly well that nine times out of ten you won't need the button. But sometimes one pushes it by habit or miscalculation, and then this ethical conundrum looms.

We realize that this question involves a trivial amount of inconvenience to the people involved, but if you multiply it by the many thousands of intersections blessed with these buttons, perhaps the issue may seem more pressing.

Sincerely,
…

Warning: Making Ice

There are a few people who still use old-fashioned ice-cube trays — including me. I mean the plastic kind that you fill yourself and then twist to get the ice cubes out. (I suppose the even older kind with a complex system of metal levers and partitions are still around.) I think the reason people prefer the hi-tech version connected directly to the plumbing is their nervousness at the prospect of water expanding out of control.

When people fill ice-cube trays, they often put little more than a little puddle in each plastic cup. The reason is that they have heard that water, unlike most materials, expands when frozen. I hate to be anticlimactic, but the amount of expansion in volume is about 10%. Two cubes that differ in this volume are impossible to distinguish unless placed side by side, because the linear dimensions of the big one are only 3% larger. However, in a cup of an ice-cube tray, because the sides are almost vertical, except at the bottom and top, the height will in fact increase by about 10%. This still isn't very much, especially considering that there is a bit of space at the top for it to expand sideways into.

But as I was watching my daughter refilling an ice-cube tray the other day, moistening the bottom of each cup, it occurred to me that what people visualize, if they haven't done the math, is ice exploding out of control, sort of like the Incredible Hulk. From each little plastic cup in the tray, an iceberg will emerge capable of sinking the freezer as though it were the Titanic. "More," I said to my daughter. She splashed a bit more water in. "More," I said, wrestling it from her and proceeding to fill each cup almost to the rim.

Poor child; she grew up in a house with an automatic ice maker, and is ill-equipped for the real world. But it's a parent's duty to train each child to deal with the myriad threats the world poses, and I do not shrink from my duty. There are many things I cannot shelter her from out there, but one of them is a tray full of those dinky ice cubes of every size except "large."

Brain Bubbles

My sister-in-law recently sent my spouse and me a pointer to a a video by a neuroanatomist, referenced in TEDBlog. My beloved played this thing, and I heard the speaker, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, start to describe the brain and its hemispheres, the right one, which "functions like a parallel processor," and the left, which "functions like a serial processor." With growing apprehension, I heard her say,

Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment…. It thinks in pictures …. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems, and then explodes into this enormous collage …. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family….

This is the problem with having two computers in the same room; sometimes one spouse starts to run an audio the other really didn't want to hear. (Hey, who knew that the Voyeurweb tittie cam even had audio?) As Dr. Taylor waxed more and more ecstatic about the right hemisphere, I tried to stifle a rising urge to shout, "This is utter crap!," but I was not successful. Meanwhile, an essay on one brain hemisphere must be followed, as the night the day, by an essay on the other:

Our left hemisphere … thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details…. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to the external world. It's that little voice that says to me "Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home…." It's that calculating intelligence that … reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am; I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate, I become a single, solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me, and separate from you….

At this point I had to leave the room, because I really couldn't interrupt my spouse's session with Dr. Taylor with a spell of badgering about how absurd the good Dr.'s descriptions were.

Dr. Taylor is a neuroanatomist, who, according to her website, "specializes in the postmortem investigation of the human brain." Fine; I'm sure she knows her way around dead brains like the back of her hand. But her knowledge of the living variety has apparently been garnered from the same pop-psych books that just about everyone seems to have absorbed and believed unquestioningly. You know the type: They promise to help you unleash the potential of your right brain, which processes information "nonlinearly," and so can help you think outside the box.

There is a grain of truth in these theories, and that is that in most people language is mostly processed in the left hemisphere. Damage to certain areas results in linguistic deficits that are by now somewhat predictable, although by no means understood.

That's about all we know that is relevant to the issue at hand, regarding differences in processing abilities in the two hemispheres. In particular, spatial reasoning and other sorts of nonverbal abilities do not show any asymmetry; they are, as far as anyone can tell, carried out by tissue distributed across both hemispheres. The mechanisms of consciousness, described in authoritative tones by Dr. Taylor, are still controversial, but all the proposed "neural correlates" of consciousness do not show the sorts of asymmetries she takes for granted.

Indeed, the only reason that I have ever been able to glean for the near-universal opinion that the left hemisphere is "serial" and the right "parallel" is the assumption that language is serial in a way that other human capacities are not. This assumption is derived from the obvious fact that words are spoken, and heard, one at a time, and that deciphering the meaning, and intelligibility, of a sentence depends upon assembling the words into sentences that preserve the order in which the words were uttered. At a cocktail party, you may or may not succeed in isolating the words one person is saying, but if you don't you will hear a meaningless babble.

Furthermore, many people are insecure about, shall we say, their "debating skills." They may have strong opinions about, for instance, capital punishment, but faced with an argument that conflicts with those opinions they often just get frustrated. I say "they," but I think everyone has been in this position at one time or another. It's comforting for us to think that we have arrived at our opinion "holistically," whereas our opponent is good at thinking "linearly." The opposing argument is, after all, stated in the form of an argument, whereas what we have is a cloud of opinions that we feel must be justified somehow. Wouldn't it be great to think that there are merely two styles of thinking, each valid in its own way, and that the one we use transcends the stifling linearity of argument and arrives at a deeper truth while at same time connecting us to all the other "energy beings" who agree with us?

When you add it all up, it's a mighty slim set of reasons to believe some patent absurdities, which I will try to refute:

• The left hemisphere does not "think in language." The ability to produce and understand language may or may not reside entirely in the left hemisphere, even if much of it does, in most people. But to suppose that the thinking required to understand language is itself transacted in language is a ridiculous case of circular reasoning.
  
• The brain is a parallel processor, all over. It has billions of neurons that generally find something to do most of the time. This is just as true of the left hemisphere as the right. Think about it: In a sizable fraction of people the language areas are in the right hemisphere; if a child suffers an injury to their left hemisphere, the right one can often adapt. Would that mean the right hemisphere turns serial?
• There is nothing serial about language, or at least what we normally think of as "linguistic thinking." The standard example of "linear" thinking is a mathematical proof. But even if a proof is linear, that doesn't mean the thinking required to find or understand the proof is linear. At the very least there are many blind alleys in searching for a proof, and you can't really understand the proof without reproducing some of that search.
• People who claim that language is "linear" are overlooking poetry and fiction. Texts in these forms are sequences of words just as much as proofs are, but no one would believe that writing or understanding a poem is just a matter of grasping one word after another.
• We do not become "separate...individuals" because an inner voice says "I am." To believe that is to believe that there weren't any separate individuals until the evolution of language. I'm guessing individualhood is as old as the first cell. Of course, consciousness didn't come along until later, but most of us believe that dogs and chimpanzees are conscious, and they don't have inner voices speaking English to them.

The truth is, we know remarkably little about how the brain thinks, in spite of much recent progress in neuroscience, and hullabaloo about techniques such as fMRI. Nonetheless, people like Jill Bolte Taylor love their preconceptions, and it will be a long time before they stop speaking as though there were evidence to back them up.