Episode 24 - Slaughterhouse Five: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens

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Jeff and Darron continue to explore an idea Jeff first proposed in episode 12 - developing an analytical cognitive lens that uses concepts from cognitive science and related fields, and science more generally, in and attempt to better integrate modern neuroscientific and psychological concepts into our engagement with fiction and our understanding of the actions, motivations, and biases of characters and the humans who create them. In this episode they examine Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five, delving into the nature of time, the human perception of time, how time is presented in the novel, and the implications of this presentation for the major themes of the book. Jeff presents various ideas and theories about human consciousness that they then try to apply to both what is presented in the actual text, as well as to the author himself.

Notes:

  • 2:00 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 2021

  • 2:16 - Watch Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson describe “The Pyramid of Choice” and how it leads to justification of actions, leading to further action and self justification, which is an idea they present in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts which have been referenced in multiple prior episodes

  • 2:46 - Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

  • 2:49 - Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

  • 3:04 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 2021 

  • 5:22 - See “Psychoanalytic Criticism” from the “Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism” subsection of the Purdue Online Writing Lab website

  • 5:24 - See the Wikipedia entry on Psychoanalytic theory, which was first laid out by Sigmund Freud

  • 12:56 - Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

  • 14:00 - Listen to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast Episode 158 - David Wallace on The Arrow of Time

  • 16:39 - See the “Presentism and Eternalism: Two Philosophical Theories of Time” blog post from freelance writer and journalist Sam Woolfe

  • 19:10 - See the 2021 documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (IMDB), watch the trailer (YouTube), and read “Unstuck in Time: the Kurt Vonnegut documentary 40 years in the making” (The Guardian, 2021)

  • 19:18 - Bernard Vonnegut

  • 20:34 - The theory of special relativity was proposed by Albert Einstein in his 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” 

  • 24:28 - See From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel Dennett, read a review from Philosophy Now, and watch Dennett give a talk discussing some ideas presented in the book (YouTube)

  • 26:37 - According to Wikipedia, Laplace's demon was a notable published articulation of causal determinism on a scientific basis by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814, who in his essay “A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities” stated “We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”

  • 30:48 - See the bombing of Dresden in World War II Wikipedia entry

  • 32:38 - “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” - This quote comes from Vonnegut’s 1965 novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - the story of Eliot Rosewater, a World War II veteran and millionaire who develops a social conscience, abandons New York City, and establishes the Rosewater Foundation in Rosewater, Indiana, "where he attempts to dispense unlimited amounts of love and limited sums of money to anyone who will come to his office." Vonnegut's fictional alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, appears for the first time in this novel and one of his stories is about aliens from Tralfamadore. Rosewater himself later makes an appearance in Slaughterhouse Five as a fellow patient in a veteran’s hospital where he befriends Billy Pilgrim and introduces him to the novels of Kilgore Trout. This is a notable example of the intertextuality that Vonnegut used effectively throughout many of his novels. 

  • 35:23 - See The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains by Joseph LeDoux, and read Lisa Feldman Barrett’s review in Nature

  • 36:01 - See “Cognitive behavioral therapy” (National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2013) and “Written Exposure Therapy for PTSD:A Brief Treatment Approach for Mental Health Professionals” (American Psychological Association)

  • 44:30 - See the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” as proposed by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in his work Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man

  • 44:32 - Romanticism

  • 46:20 - Dadaism

  • 48:57 - See The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio DaMasio and read “The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio review – why feelings are the unstoppable force” (The Guardian, 2018)

  • 49:52 - See “Memes 101: How Cultural Evolution Works” (Big Think)

  • 50:46 - According to Wikipedia and other sources, the bombing of Dresden remains controversial and is subject to an ongoing debate by historians and scholars regarding the moral and military justifications surrounding the event. Immediate German propaganda claims following the attacks and postwar discussions of whether the attacks were justified have led to the bombing becoming one of the moral causes célèbres of the war. A 1953 United States Air Force report defended the operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target, which they noted was a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort. Several researchers claim that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas which were located outside the city center. Critics of the bombing have asserted that Dresden was a cultural landmark while downplaying its strategic significance, and claim that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and not proportionate to the military gains. Some have claimed that the raid constituted a war crime. Some people, including many in the German far-right, refer to the bombing as a mass murder, calling it "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs". In the decades since the war, large variations in the claimed death toll have fuelled the controversy, though the numbers themselves are no longer a major point of contention among historians. In March 1945, the German government ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000 for the Dresden raids, and death tolls as high as 500,000 have been claimed. The city authorities at the time estimated up to 25,000 victims, a figure that subsequent investigations supported, including a 2010 study commissioned by the city council. The extent to which Vonnegut intentionally promulgated a potentially false account of the bombing remains somewhat unclear. In the special introduction to the 1976 Franklin Library edition of the novel, he wrote: “The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.” The death toll of 135,000 given by Vonnegut was taken from The Destruction of Dresden, a 1963 book by David Irving. In a 1965 letter to The Guardian, Irving later adjusted his estimates even higher, "almost certainly between 100,000 and 250,000", but all these figures were shortly found to be inflated: Irving finally published a correction in The Times in a 1966 letter to the editor lowering it to 25,000, in line with subsequent scholarship. Despite Irving's eventual much lower numbers, and later accusations of generally poor scholarship, the figure popularized by Vonnegut remains in general circulation. By contrast, the total casualties of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is generally considered to be around 200,000 people, mostly civilians. The necessity of their use is still controversial to this day, and it remains the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict. For more see “Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” and “Bombing of Dresdent in World War II”

  • 54:27 - Hyperreality

  • 56:03 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 04 - Too Cultured from October 2020

  • 56:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 05 - It’s Alive from October 2020

  • 56:26 - Gilgamesh

  • 56:40 - Sodom and Gomorrah

  • 56:53 - The Republic by Plato

  • 58:40 - See “Plato on storytelling”

  • 1:00:17 - Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

  • 1:00:22 - Global Workspace Theory

  • 1:03:25 - According to Wikipedia, Split-brain is a type of disconnection syndrome when the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is severed to some degree. It is an association of symptoms produced by disruption of, or interference with, the connection between the hemispheres of the brain. The surgical operation to produce this condition (corpus callosotomy) involves transection of the corpus callosum, and is usually a last resort to treat certain types of epilepsy. After the right and left brain are separated, each hemisphere will have its own separate perception, concepts, and impulses to act. Having two "brains" in one body can create some interesting dilemmas. When split-brain patients are shown an image only in the left half of each eye's visual field, they cannot vocally name what they have seen. This is because the image seen in the left visual field is sent only to the right side of the brain, and most people's speech-control center is on the left side of the brain. Communication between the two sides is inhibited, so the patient cannot say out loud the name of that which the right side of the brain is seeing. A number of famous and important studies have been done with split-brain patients who received this treatment. As described in the 2015 Atlantic article “One Head, Two Brains”, in a 1977 study with a 15-year-old split-brain patient from Vermont identified as P. S., psychology professor and cognitive neuroscience researcher Michael Gazzaniga and his graduate assistant Joseph LeDoux (who was mentioned earlier in this episode) performed a visual test where they asked P. S. to stare straight ahead at a dot, and then flashed a picture of a chicken foot to his right, where it was only seen by his right eye and transmitted to his brain’s left hemisphere, and a picture of a snowy scene to his left, where it was only seen by his left eye and transmitted to his brain’s right hemisphere. Directly in front of the patient—so that he could process the sight with both hemispheres—was a series of eight other pictures. When the researchers asked him to point to the ones that went with the images he saw, P. S. pointed to the picture of a chicken head and a picture of a snow shovel. When faced with incomplete information, the left brain can fill in the blanks. So far, the results were as expected: Each hemisphere had led P. S. to choose an image that went along with the one that he had seen from that side moments earlier. The surprise came when the researchers asked him why he chose these two totally unrelated images. Because the left hemisphere, which controls language, had not processed the snowy scene, they believed P. S. wouldn’t be able to verbally articulate why he chose the snow shovel. According to Gazzaniga, “The left brain doesn’t know why,” because “That information is in the right hemisphere.” Neither hemisphere knew what the other had seen, and because the two sides of his brain were unable to communicate, P.S. should have been confused when Gazzaniga asked him why he had picked the two images he did. But as Gazzaniga recalled in his memoir, P. S. didn’t skip a beat: “Oh, that’s simple,” the patient told them. “The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” Here’s what happened, as the researchers later deduced: Rather leading him to simply say, “I don’t know” to Gazzaniga’s question, P.S.’s left brain concocted an answer as to why he had picked those two images. In a brief instant, the left brain took two unconnected pieces of information it had received from the environment—the two images—and told a story that drew a connection between them. Gazzaniga went on to replicate the findings of this study many times with various co-authors: When faced with incomplete information, the left brain can fill in the blanks. Based on these findings Gazzaniga developed the theory that the left hemisphere is responsible for our sense of psychological unity—the fact that we are aware of and reflect upon what is happening at any given moment. “It’s the part of the brain,” Gazzaniga said, “that takes disparate points of information in and weaves them into a storyline and meaning.” For more on the fascinating subject of split-brain research, see “One Head, Two Brains” (The Atlantic, 2015) and a description of a “Split Brain Experiment”, and the “Split-brain” Wikipedia entry

  • 1:08:33 - Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience by Michael S.A. Graziano

  • 1:14:05 - Hamlet by William Shakespeare