World Science Festival Online Starting Tomorrow

The World Science Festival is taking place starting today in New York City, but the good news is you can watch quite a few of the sessions online here.

I'm particularly interested in "Beautiful Minds: The Enigma of Genius" which will air on Saturday at 8:00 pm EST.

In ancient Rome, the genius (plural genii) was the guiding spirit or tutelary deity of a person, family (gens), or place (genius loci). The noun is related to the Latin verb gigno, genui, genitus, "to bring into being, create, produce." Because the achievements of exceptional individuals seemed to indicate the presence of a particularly powerful genius, by the time of Augustus the word began to acquire its secondary meaning of "inspiration, talent."

I'm hoping they're going to discuss all types of genius and more about recent scientific advancements on determining how genius develops - whether it is inherited genetically and if they will discuss the long-running "Genetic Studies of Genius" which started in 1921 at Stanford University which is now the oldest and longest running longitudinal study in the world.

The link for this particular session at the World Science Fair mentions Immanuel Kant, famous for coining the phrase genius in the 1700's in his work Critique of Judgement. Kant believed that genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have t be taught by another person and originality is the essential character of genius. Arthur Schopenhauer goes one step further:

"Talent hits the target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."

Schopenhauer believed that a genius is someone in whom intellect predominates over "will" much more than in the other average person.  In his aesthetics, the predominance of the intellect over the will of the "genius" allows him (or her) to create artistic or academic works that are objects of pure disinterested contemplation, the chief criterion of the aesthetic experience for Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer's words, "they fall into the mire while gazing at the stars", which is an allusion to Plato's dialogue Theaetetus in which Socrates tells of Thales (the world's first philosopher) being made fun of for falling while trying to studying the stars.

In this dialogue Socrates asks his friend Theodorus if he knows of any geometry students who show particular promise and is told to seek out Theaetetus who is "intelligent, virile, and an orphan". Socrates and Theaetetus discuss three definitions of knowledge: knowledge as nothing but perception; knowledge as true judgement; and knowledge as a true judgement with an account - all of which are found to be unsatisfactory and ends with Socrates announcement that he has to go to to see the judge to answer to charges that he has been corruptinng the young and failing to worship the gods.

When Socrates asks Theaetetus to venture a guess as to what knowledge is, Theaetetus suggest that "knowledge is nothing but sense perception".

In the end of the dialogue, Socrates compares the human mind to a birdcage. He says it is one thing to possess knowledge and another to have it about one, on hand. He later discards his birdcage analogy (something Socrates does often, but hey, he was a philosopher) and concludes the dialgoue by announcing he again has to go to court, but this time he will be on trial, and we all know how that ended.

For me personally I philosophically adhere to both Schopenhauer and Kant's statements about genius, but I think it is a rather strict definition. I've been in the company of many people whom would be considered "geniuses". My mother was a math a prodigy who could do geometry despite never having been taught any maths beyond adding and subtraction. My best friend is also a math prodigy who has a spatial intelligence on par with Einstein. But there are other sorts of genius that aren't given as much credit as they deserve. I hope that the non-traditional aspects of genius will be given due consideration during this particular session of the World Science Festival because in many ways non-traditional genius, which I define as "being good at things that cannot be measured", is far more rare in society than most people realise.

A beautiful mind today has become synonymous with John Forbes Nash Jr. the Nobel Prize winning economist and mathematician portrayed by Russell Crowe. But what is a beautiful mind? In Nash's case he "hit the target no one else" could "see". I think it is easier and more justifiable to say a beautiful mind is any mind that allows itself to be led by creativity, imagination, and curiosity and that the modern day definition of "genius" must be adapted for those who are not simply skilled in maths or sciences because by defining it as such it limits of abilities as human beings.

By my definition every child has the potential for genius, but then again I've always believed that in the war of "Nature vs. Nuture", nuture is far more important, but I do firmly believe this. Find out what a child is naturally curious about, give them the right tools and encouragement, and perhaps that child's curiosity will find their target and perhaps it may turn out to be simply a "talent" as opposed to "genius", but being talented at anything is not to be scoffed at either. If you don't think so, you should meet my goddaughter who can music on any instrument she's given and then listen to me try to play the guitar!

Will you tune in for the WSF sessions? If you do, be sure to post your thoughts.

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The Pre-NY's Clean Up

The new year is approaching and so, bored out of my mind I decided to rearrange the books.

I should have taken some photos during the process - when there were books going up the stairs and me up to me cloxters (sp?) in Beckett.

Here is the first snap. One bookshelf uses a heavenly quirky system.

First shelf: The bible under the lost books of the bible and Colin Wilson's The Occult. Random serious thinkers like Emerson,Kahil Gibran, Nietsche, and Rabelais. Complex scientific books, chess strategy books, Philip K. Dick, the letters of Mozard, biographies on Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. A book on art.

Second shelf: Greek mythology, Plato's The Symposium, 3 Volume set of Gibbon's Roman Empire, erotica like Bataille's L'Histoire d'Oeil, Rimbaud, Blake, and Shakespeare.

Third shelf: sadly only three volumes by African authors and then starts the hugenormous American lit section breaking at Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn and continuing on the fourth shelf with Miller's Rosy Cruxification. The fourth shelf gets us past Vonnegut and Wharton and ends with Tobias Wolfe.

Fifth shelf: pretty much starts with Beckett and Joyce with a few other Irish authors in between before going into English lit with Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy sitting comfortably next to a few volumes of Chesterton.

Sixth shelf continues where the fifth stopped adding Gerald and Lawrence Durrell, Philip Larkin, and Pound's ABC of Reading. The sixth shelf also gets to bear the burden of my Somerset Maugham obsession. I have a stunning set of his short stories printed by Folio Society which can be a bit hard to get your hands on, a pleuthora of paperbacks including The Moon and Sixpence (my second favorite of his works after The Razor's Edge) and a first addition of his Writer's Notebook, which was a birthday gift from someone extremely sexy to me. I mean dear.

Seventh shelf has a bit of English including my budding collection of Evelyn Waugh. So far I've collected his diaries, the complete collection of his short stories, Put Out More Flags, and A Little Learning.

The rest of the shelf has a mix of European authors such as Hamsun, Kundera, Strindberg, and Sebald.

By the time I was tired and feeling much less motivated. Since I decided to organize by type of literature I still had: Russian, Asian, French, and loads of biographies, oversized books, and odd one offs like a book on Jack the Ripper. Where does one keep the Ripper?

As you can see, I also don't have enough shelf space. In my perfect world, one of the things I would require to be perfect would be bookshelves. They would never be too shallow for bigger books or too deep for littler ones. As you can see the problem with the second bookshelf was that it's far too deep for paperbacks.

The top has the most room, so the most books. Over half the shelf is various Asian literature including (drum roll please)...All the books from Mishima's Sea of Fertility (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel)! Soseki, Murakami, and a little known book called The Gay Genius. The little chunk left is stacked with Russian and Latin American/Hispanic Literature, including my new favorite Unamuno and my old favorite Asturias.

The rest of the shelf isn't worth taking about except a few great memoirs (The Words, Jean Paul Sartre and Rodin's On Art and Artists).

Still, I got the job done.

Then I thought, why not further refine the system?

But only for a second. I did go through and pull out books I wanted to remember to read, but I'm not touching a thing otherwise!

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