Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? Page #6

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it would still be

the Charles River.

You can break it up

into tributaries

that end up somewhere else,

and it would still be

the Charles River.

You can change the contents.

So maybe you build

a manufacturing plant upstream

and the content

is mostly arsenic, let's say.

Well, it's still the Charles River.

On the other hand, there are

very small changes you can make

in which case, it won't be

the Charles River at all.

So suppose you put panels

along the side

so it goes in a straight path

and you start using it

to ship freight up and down.

It's not the river anymore;

it's a canal.

Oh, yes.

And suppose you make

some minimal physical change,

almost undetectable change

which hardens it.

It's called a phase change,

undetectable,

but it makes it glass, basically.

And you paint a line

down the middle,

and people start to using it

to commute to Boston.

It's a highway; it's not a river.

Now, somehow we can go on

and on like this.

We understand all these things

without instruction,

without experience.

They have to do

with very complex notions

of continuity of entities

a physicist cannot detect,

because they're not part of...

I mean, of course

the physical world is part of

them, but it's only one part.

A major part of how we identify

anything in the world,

no matter how elementary,

is the mental conceptions

that we impose

on interpreting

very fragmentary experience.

And our experience

is indeed very fragmentary,

so visual experience is just,

you know,

stimulations of the retina,

but we impose

an extremely rich

interpretation of it,

including things like,

say, continuity.

Actually, a lot of science fiction

is based on this.

So if you... you know, if somebody

is in a spaceship

and they get... I forget

what the word is used.

They're transposed or something.

- Teleportation?

- Yes, tele... tele...

- Teleportation.

- Yeah, okay.

And they go somewhere else,

and they reappear.

Well, I've watched my kids

watching these things.

They understand immediately

that it's the same person

who appeared over there,

though there's no continuity.

On the other hand,

I ask them sometimes,

"Well, suppose that they

had this teleportation"...

or whatever it's called...

"and he appears over there.

"And suppose he's still here.

Which one is the person?"

And at that point,

you get confused.

You don't know,

because our conceptions

don't give an answer to that.

Actually, there are classical

philosophical problems

that are based on this.

One famous one that's called

the ship of Theseus

goes back to the Greeks.

Suppose that Theseus has a ship

and he's on the ocean

and one of the boards falls off.

So he throws it into the sea,

and they put another board there.

It's still the ship of Theseus.

Well, suppose this keeps happening

until every board

has been replaced.

It's still the ship of Theseus.

Suppose someone on the shore

has been collecting

all these boards

and reconstructs what, in fact,

was the actual original ship.

That's not the ship of Theseus.

It's the one that Theseus is on,

even though it's the other one

that's physically identical to it.

This one isn't.

So there's no point trying to

solve the philosophical problem.

The problem is an

epistemological one.

It's something about the nature

of our cognitive systems.

So it appears

that as far as it's understood,

nonhuman animals

have a direct connection

between the symbolic

representations in their minds

and identifiable physical events

in the world.

So you take a vervet monkey,

which has alarm calls,

and apparently those alarm calls

are triggered automatically

by certain... you know,

movement of leaves in a tree,

which they give a predator call,

and apparently it's reflexive.

While I was doing these interviews,

I was editing The Green Hornet.

One day, I walk into the edit room,

and I realized

that some of the object

had a different kind

of entity than the other,

the ones I had interacted with.

It's like if they jumped to tell

me the story we shared.

The sofa... I was so tired

after the shooting

that I asked for something

more comfortable to rest on.

They treated me with a sofa.

But I had to move the chair

to the side to make room.

The coffee table, I dragged it

closer to the sofa

so I could check my emails

while watching the editing

on a giant screen

that was specially installed

for me.

And my editor, of course...

but he's a person,

so it's not surprising

to have a relation with this.

Do you remember the first

exposition you had to science?

Should I tell you

an embarrassing experience

which I've felt guilty about

all my life?

Okay.

In third grade, I decided

I wanted to do a science project

on astronomy,

so the teacher said,

you know, "Fine."

And what I finally did was took

the Encyclopedia Britannica,

and I copied out the

section on astronomy,

and I handed it in,

knowing that that's not

the right way to do it.

And nobody ever... there was no...

I mean, the teacher could

obviously tell, you know,

but there was no

censure or anything.

And... but it's in what must

have been third grade,

so I was eight years old,

so that's about 75 years of guilt.

I had the same experience

than you at school, much later.

The first essay I wrote,

my best friend wrote it for me,

and I got the best notation

for the class,

so I had to read it

in front of everyone.

And have you felt

guilty all your life?

Oh, so horrible!

But the funny part is, I...

We're partners.

But the funny part is,

I got good grades after that.

Yeah, you know, like a lot of kids,

I had a chemistry set

down in the basement

and producing horrible smells

that drove my parents crazy.

And they were hoping I wouldn't blow

the place up and that sort of thing.

Electrical circuits, chemistry,

things like that.

With one... my closest friend

since nursery school

right through high school was...

We would go

every Saturday afternoon.

By the time we got old enough

to take the subway...

you know, 10, 11...

we'd go to The Franklin Institute.

That's a science institute

in downtown Philadelphia

which had lectures, exhibits.

And we'd spend most

of the afternoon

either in The Franklin Institute

or the museum of natural history,

which was right next door.

That was our Saturday afternoon.

Noam spent also

hours at the library,

devouring 19th century

French and Russian literature.

I had just finished reading

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev,

and I pointed out to Noam

that constant feeling

of generalized deterioration

of the world

that each generation

blames the next one for.

"When I was young, life was better.

"Things were much simpler,

blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah."

I was wondering if there were a biological

explanation for this phenomenon.

"When I was young, life was better.

"Things were much simpler, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

But Noam took the conversation

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