Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Do you really need cognitive science to reach that conclusion?

Well, that’s a whole other ball game.

Couldn’t he have come to the same conclusion in therapy?

Now what possible reason would he have to go to therapy? Do you know something I don’t? Let’s not deviate too much. I have a question for you. You know what the most dangerous thing in the world is?

What? I asked.

A story, replied my father. I’m not kidding. Stories are dangerous. And I don’t mean stories whose messages are capable of endangering. I mean that the form itself is dangerous, not the content. You know what a metaphor is? A story sent through the super distillation of imagination. You know what a story is? An extended metaphor. We live in them. We live in this swirling mass of stories written by scribes hidden in some forgotten room up there in the towers. The day someone thought of calling pigeons flying rats was the day the fate of pigeons was sealed. Does anyone who hears them called flying rats stop to ask if pigeons actually carry disease? Or Plato’s cave. If a fellow knows nothing else about the man, he knows something about a cave and shadows. You’ve heard that good fences make good neighbors, but did you know that when Robert Frost wrote those words he meant the opposite of what that phrase has come to stand for? Frost was being ironic; he was talking about the things that divide us. But the image contained in the bare words Good fences make good neighbors —that image is so good, so vibrant, that in our minds, in the minds of so many, it’s broken free of its unspoken ironies.

My father paused.

My mother told me, some years ago, that when she first met my father she was charmed by the way this young physicist treated everything in such an ethereal, abstract way. But quite soon she came to find it annoying, especially when she wanted to talk to him about things that couples talk about, private things , she said to me. As my mother saw it, either he was not taking things seriously or he was not inhabiting the moment; he was somehow not only abstracting whatever they were discussing but also abstracting himself out of it. But I came to see, she said, that it was precisely his tireless distancing and questioning that brought him, for instance, to a view of Pakistan’s behavior in 1971 that cost him — cost us — his friends and much of his family. At the time, I must tell you, I thought him rather too quick to judge our country so adversely, even though he would have told you he thought himself slow. I thought him rather selfish as well. In the end, I was the slow one; it took me a little longer to shed from my eyes the scales of a rather phony patriotism. I came to understand that your father was not in fact a disembodied mind, which can be charming in the way they are whose heads float in the clouds. Thinking for him was purposive because it clarified the root of action.

These, my mother’s words, insofar as I remember them, come back not infrequently when I talk to my father. At times, I have caught myself expecting the kind of conversation I might have with intimate friends or colleagues — caught myself, I say, because I become aware of the expectation when it confronts and is defeated by that curious mix of distancing and intimacy that is the essence of my father’s language. And yet, more often than not I have found some kind of solace in what he says.

You are faced with certain choices, continued my father. Or so you think. But you have other choices also, choices you might have overlooked. You have an overabundance of choice.

And now I remember Zafar’s words from a long time ago. For most men, he said, the choices they make are determined by their constraints, but for the very rich, their constraints are determined by the choices they make. As I think of my father and recall those words of my friend, it is little wonder that I grew so fond of Zafar so quickly — and perhaps little wonder also that I often found him infuriating.

Don’t you chaps think choice is an illusion?

You chaps ? said my father.

Scientists. Free will is an illusion and all that.

The word choice means different things, said my father. There’s a fork in the road whether or not the traveler has any choice about which to take. I’ve always been a little puzzled by this popular notion that scientists reject free will.

It’s a break in causation, I interjected.

A break in causation indeed. But physicists have been happy with breaks in causation ever since quantum mechanics entered the scene.

Yes, but quantum mechanics is pretty esoteric, don’t you think?

There was an article in Scientific American in 2001 in which the author stated that quantum mechanics underpins thirty percent of U.S. gross national product, from semiconductors to lasers and magnetic resonance imaging. I’m not sure how he came to that figure, I have to say. In fact, I wrote to the fellow to ask him about it but got a most unsatisfactory reply. He couldn’t remember where he’d found the figure. In any case, when quantum physics conceived particles ruled by uncertainty and indeterminism, that was the day science called a truce and breaks in causation reentered its domain. Yet people still think free will an unscientific concept because it involves such a break. I think this misconception is related to another misconception about science, one I often come across in arts and humanities scholars, which is that they think we deal with certainties and definite knowledge. That’s wrong in fourteen different ways, but at the very least it demonstrates a lack of understanding of what scientists actually do. They work at the frontier of science, which is where the fun is, and which is also where there is anything but certainty. It is about adventure, even for theoretical physicists like me. Which neatly leads me to ask you if you’ve thought about taking risks.

That’s what my job involves, I replied.

You’re only taking a risk if there’s really something at stake. Why not set off on a completely different angle?

You mean quit finance?

There’s a great study Daniel Kahneman talks about in his Nobel lecture. Patients are more likely to agree to a treatment if its effectiveness is described in terms of survival rates rather than in terms of mortality rates, even though the two are the same thing, in the end — so to speak. Actually, it turns out that even doctors are more likely to recommend the treatment if it’s described in terms of survival rates. And you’d think they’d know better. If you call it quitting your job, it doesn’t sound so good. How about striking out on a new adventure?

You think striking out sounds better? Tell that to the last batter at the bottom of the ninth, with bases loaded, I said.

See? Language matters.

Whatever you want to call it. I’m not finding all this very helpful, I have to say.

Have you considered writing things down?

For what purpose?

I find mind maps quite useful.

You think I need to draw mind maps?

A common mistake about religion is that belief comes before practice.

Why would you practice if you didn’t have belief?

Here’s a little experiment. Make a sad face. Actually, it works better when you’re on your own. Try making a sad face.

I did as he suggested.

Now imagine you’re very happy.

Again, I did as he suggested.

It’s difficult, no?

Okay. But so what?

There’s a great study in which subjects were shown slapstick cartoons and asked to rate how funny they were. One cohort was asked to hold a pencil in their mouths, sideways between their teeth, while watching. That group reported the cartoons as being funnier than the other group did.

Why should holding a pencil in your mouth make a difference?