Mondaugen's Miscellany

The Joy of Workmanship Complete

 

Two weeks ago, I submitted the rewrite of manuscript to Linden publishing. The first draft of The Joy of Workmanship, was too academic, my publisher said, and needed heavy edits. So I rewrote it, taking out technical, historical, and physiological chapters and digressions. Some of the philosophical and evolutionary stuff stayed. I added the comments and thoughts of a range of craftsmen. I added anecdotes from my own learning process. In truth, it's a better book now, and hope Linden accepts it.

I don't miss the earlier draft. It was much heavier on the intertwined science of hands, brains, language, thought and workmanship, thereby closer to research notes than a readable book. Still, the material fascinates me.

This is a digression into that academic stuff:

I sent a copy of the new draft to my friend Dave, a thoughtful and well-read fellow, and he replied, quoting my first chapter:

"Making with our hands has a far deeper correspondence and connection to speaking a language (and thereby conscious thought) than you might think. In fact, learning to work with your hands is an analogous process to learning a language."

I bet if somebody had pointed this out to Noam Chomsky forty or fifty years ago his head would have exploded. So much of his work was dedicated to proving the "uniqueness" of humans, and I don't remember once seeing him acknowledge this.

I thanked him for picking up on this point. I'd bet Chomsky (and most other 20th-century linguists) would have dismissed it with a wave of their hands.

 

The prejudice that the body has little to do with thought is old and deep. It's the idea that the soul-infused brain drives the merely mechanical body, that we’re still human if we’re a brain floating in space. Free will is a battle against the sins of the flesh. Consciousness is an ether produced in the brain. It's “I think, therefore I am.” I think this prejudice has misled us. A better understanding of human nature involves the body as an active and necessary participant in our humanity.

 

To say "I do, therefore I think," would get you laughed out of any august institution and into a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Philosophy departments are founded in words, explore words, conclude with words. There are no tablesaws in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University.

 

And yet complex tool making predates language acquisition, possibly by millions of years. Some scientists argue that tool making was the foundation and origin for language, and thereby of thought, and possibly consciousness itself. They argue that we think and speak the way we make. Would Chomsky and others look for the universal grammar of language in the workmanship of our hands? It's too kooky an idea within our current scientific and philosophical paradigm. Who am I to think it's a valid question, I don't have the credentials, just the experience. And yet, those with credentials are piecing together this very picture.

 

Kelly Lambert's research, described in Lifting Depression: A neuroscientist’s hands on approach to activating your brain’s healing power, finds how much busy hands affect brain chemistry: "I made up this term called 'behaviorceuticals,' instead of pharmaceuticals, in the sense that when we move and when we engage in activities, we change the neurochemistry of our brain in ways that a drug can change the neurochemistry of our brain..." OK, so can we all admit that Doing at least influences thinking, even beyond the idea of a pure soul resisting bodily temptations? That hormones and other nerve systems (e.g. the vagus) do some thinking and guiding of our behavior is now evident. So much of science offers evidence of how the brain is body, and how thought is thereby body. Thinking is as physiologically-based as digesting and moving limbs, and I have begun to believe, is involved in both of those activities. We literally don't think without our bodies, especially our hands.

 

Dave pointed to the work of Henry Rosemont Jr., who argued that archaic Chinese was never a spoken language, only written. It would be, therefore, a language that is entirely visual (like sign language), but also impossible to use without tools and materials, e.g. a pen and paper or equivalent, to create it. Daniel Glaser perhaps clarifies the implications of this. He's a neuroscientist at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study at the University of London. Iin an interview by Alok Jha in "Babbage: The science that built the AI revolution -- part one." March 6, 2024, The Economist Podcast, he muses:

...I do think that intelligence is something that allows us to manipulate objects. It's very rare for somebody to be just intelligent without using some kind of external system, even if they've internalized it. So language would be an example of an external system which you put in your head. But actually, smart people use tools well. While we're talking we've got somebody, very friendly, in the room operating some complex sound recording equipment, and you're (the interviewer) using a Mac to structure your thinking and look at the questions. That's intelligence. We use these prosthetics and actually again when we come to think about large language models and the contemporary developments in AI, one of the things that intelligent people like us do is to make good use of these tools ... [people] use it to enhance their own intelligence... this ability to use tools is something that we observe in the history of man, actually, when these frontal lobes develop, and something that is a marker of a time when our intelligence probably really took off.

Pause for a moment to think of language itself as an external tool that we have internalized. The Latin root of "manipulation" is in our hands, and we manipulate the tool of language to do our thinking. Little hands in our brains, using tools, to extend the metaphor.

 

We opine that children don't learn their multiplication tables, but rather rely on calculators to do it for them. Can we pause, step back, and realize that Glaser's argument, that the language of mathematics itself is a tool that we use to multiply, makes a hand-held calculator no different in kind? Spiders use their webs to think, apparently. I see the same with our many prosthetics, most especially our hands. Our concept of cognition has to extend beyond our brains-floating-in-space to include our bodies, at a bare minimum, for us to understand cognition at all.

 

Without tools and making, how can our distinct, human intelligence be conceived? How can we study intelligence ignoring tools, making, and the hands that do it? We have, and for centuries. It's a most peculiar blind spot, Puritan prejudice even, towards the (disgusting and low) body in favor of the (pure and high) mind. Please let's stop this silliness and look at ourselves as we are, and how we actually work.

 

Where did language come from? Theories that language first developed as gesture, then into full-blown sign language, before leaping to our verbal communication systems, are growing in acceptance. We're discovering how the sensory and motor control areas of the brain overlap and interact with our language centers. To dive into the deep end, read Kolodny, Oren and Shimon Edelman, “The evolution of the capacity for language: the ecological context and adaptive value of cognitive hijacking.” Royal Society Publishing, 2017.). This is the theory that the brain systems we used to make complex tools (which predate language, possibly by millions of years) were adapted by our communication systems to create thought. First came hands. Then came tools. Then came thought based in the systems we use to make things. We literally think the way we make, using the same parts of our brain.

 

Dictionaries say that workmanship is the degree of skill with which a product is made. What if our workmanship drives our thought? That when we learn to make something well, we learn to think well?

 

When we can escape the prejudices and single-direction cause-and-effect thinking that smart-people-think, dumb-people-make, and the brain drives the hands, we can explore how the hands drive the brain, how making helps people think, and how we develop our humanity when we think with our hands. These questions lead to fascinating ideas and insights.

 

I welcome the day that the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University buys its first tablesaw.

 

...

 

What does "joy" have to do with it? Well, wait for the book.

 

 

Dog Wisdom

As long as it is not moving or alive, Mr. Wombles sniffs it. He strains the leash on our walks, lingering at lamp poles, nose-deep in piles of rotting leaves, searching across grass. At sections of fence, at empty bags, at the bare sidewalk, he points his nose and snuffles. On average, he sniffs fifteen things a minute. On a half hour walk, this adds up to some 450 discrete items of nose information. Some he deems worthy of a reply, and pisses on them. And while he is an eager explorer of the smells of things, he has no interest in other dogs. He walks past them hurriedly, without a glance.

At home, Mr. Wombles naps. He naps on our laps, or naps at our feet. When we leave, he naps by the door. When we pick up the leash, however, he leaps with excitement, makes hamster noises, and proves impatient if we don't get down the stairs fast enough. This is what I have observed. The outdoor land of smells, apparently, is his joy. Smelling is, apparently, his life's work. This is what I have concluded.

A dog's sense of smell is legendary, a million times more sensitive than a human's. If I can discern, with my amateur human nose, a range of powerful smells from dog poo, to rotting leaves, damp earth, and fresh-cut grass, his dog nose must offer encyclopedic volumes of professional-grade information. Is a well-aged MacDonald's hamburger wrapper a Dickensian novel to him? Does it speak of tragedy, comedy, or romance? After ten seconds of intense sniffing, what does he conclude?

Yes, I know -- If I have to ask, I'll never understand.

I have a fear that his sniffing is the olfactory equivalent of reading People Magazine. He's after the street gossip, especially the news available in other dog pee-- what Trudi Terrier has been eating, if Polly Pekinese is pregnant, what disease Franz Furripants has contracted, etc. And when he pees in reply, he is bragging about his own diet and health.... I got salmon last night, motherfuckers....

It would leave me wounded to own such a shallow dog.

His lack of interest in living dogs, however, puts this fear to rest. Were he a practiced and enthusiastic gossiper, he would be interested in up-to-date news, offered by the living dogs themselves. He would stop and sniff their behinds, and not ignore them. He would never miss a nose bump. I see these dogs, straining at their leashes to get at another dog.

But Mr. Wombles sniffs alone.

Instead, I think he pursues dog wisdom. His sniffs are an examination of the historical olfactory record. He needs time and space to evaluate each smell, reach conclusions that are not clouded by the moment. He is pursuing a higher understanding of the essential quandary that is life. Mr. Wombles wants to know, and understand why we are here. Each smell is a single piece in a gigantic puzzle. With four walks a day, and approximately 1800 sniffs per day, he must have assembled over 650,000 pieces to the puzzle in every year of his life. As we guess he's 7 years old, that's 4 1/2 millions sniffs.

What has he learned? What can he conclude?

I don't believe he has attained dog wisdom yet. I don't see the signs. When he no longer runs outside to sniff some more, but sits, lotus position, at home, meditating, then I figure he will have reached the edges of dog wisdom.

What will he do when he attains dog wisdom? Will he teach other dogs? Will they listen?