Skip to main content

Inventing Dylan

An album cover with a black background. Diagonally aligned, a photo of a man runs across one side of the cover. He is in a brown shirt and looks at the camera, turning the left side of his body towards it. To the right of him are large words printed on the black background, reading: "Bob Dylan", "Like a Rolling Stone", and "Gates of Eden".

Jonah Lehrer has left his post at The New Yorker amidst a bit of scandal.

Lehrer is the author of a non-fiction book on neurology, called Imagine, published in March of this year. The subtitle of Lehrer's book sounds a bit ironic now, "How Creativity Works."

Lehrer uses Bob Dylan as one of his examples of a creative individual, someone whose creativity can be understood through contemporary neuroscience.

Well, this is how creativity doesn't work: making up sh!t and attributing it to someone else.

Michael Moynihan pointed out in the devastating article that forced Lehrer's admission and resignation at TNY, Lehrer had simply lied. He had invented some Dylan quotes out of thin air, and in other cases terribly distorted their significance to fit his broader neurological narrative. Lehrer has now admitted as much, "The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquoations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes."

You can read the pertinent chapter of Lehrer's book for yourself here.

I think there's something broader to say about this than simply, "Shame on you, Josh Lehrer."

This is, I would hope, a setback for the cause of contemporary neuroscience or for its prestige witht he broader public. The scientists should do what they can to press their field forward, of course, but I do personally have the feeling that in another 100 or 200 years the state of their science circa 2012 will look very primitive. Consider the way in which the alchemy of as late as 1700 looked to the chemists (properly speaking!) of as early as 1800.

The real neurologists of the not-too-distant future will see that neuroscience as we backward creatures know it could even begin to explain anything, including Dylan.

Admittedly, the neurologists of today dress so fine, they can throw the bums a dime in their prime, can't they? 





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more