Explication versus Interpretation, a Lesson in Literary Theory

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include the theory of humor and evolutionary literary criticism. This blog entry is strictly about literary theory, but it uses one of my studies of Confederacy as an example.

I have been reading an old textbook on literary theory, to discipline my mind while thinking about evolutionary literary criticism. The textbook is Jeremy Hawthorn. Unlocking the Text: Fundamental Problems in Literary Theory. London: Edward Arnold, 1987. I like this text. It is clear and incisive, IMHO. It promotes an understanding of literary theory that studies the entire process of literary production and use, not just the text itself.

In the text, Hawthorn makes a distinction between explication and interpretation. "In English, 'explication' normally denotes the uncovering of what we may refer to as a literary work's 'primary meaning', as distinct from those deeper levels of meaning and signficance produced by interpretation" (23). The primary meaning relates more to what the words mean, the sentences mean, what direct references the text holds, etc. The interpretation is more abstract, and it also might be more creative, such as when an actor interprets the words in a screenplay.

I tried to think of an example of the distinction, and one immediately came to me. In my 2012 article "The Dialectic of American Humanism", I begin by showing that A Confederacy of Dunces can be viewed as a detailed parody of the philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. Then I argue that at a deeper level, the novel can be seen as offering up two versions of humanism, and engaging them in a dialectic, hence my article's title.

My claim "that Confederacy is a parody of Ficino" is established by a detailed mapping of particulars in the novel to points in Ficino's philosophy. Therefore, such a claim is an explication. My claim "that Confederacy is a dialectic among competing versions of humanism" is more of an interpretation. It is less tied to the words on the page and is more abstract.

Simler and Hanson on Laughter, Theory of Humor Series, Part 27

This series of blog posts began as an analysis of the comic quality of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include the theory of humor and evolutionary literary criticism.

Last month, I posted a discussion of the book The Elephant in the Brain, by Simler and Hanson, comparing its treatment of self-deception to Freud's theory of self-deception. The book has a chapter applying their ideas about self-deception to laughter and humor. Because I have been posting a series on the theory of humor, I offer here an in-depth look at their humor chapter. All unattributed page references below are to this text.

Like other books in evolutionary psychology--such as those by Trivers and Kurzban--The Elephant in the Brain focuses on self-deception. The basic point made by these books is that we humans may have some motives for our behavior that are concealed from our conscious minds. Because human societies have behavioral norms against taking actions for selfish reasons, our brains may hide selfish motives our conscious minds, so that we do not involuntarily betray those motives to people around us. As I explained last month, Simler and Hanson borrow a concept from earlier theorists that the conscious mind is less like the Commander-in-Chief of the brain and more like the brain's Press Secretary, offering socially acceptable rationalizations for the brain's behavior.

One aspect of The Elephant that I appreciate is the open acknowledgement that humans naturally form social status hierarchies. If you put two people in a room and ask them to cooperate on a task, they will almost immediately sort themselves into a leader and a follower. Because status hierarchies are fraught with social tension, much of the negotiation over status takes place outside of the realm of conscious awareness. Assertive body language will signal status, for example. For those of you who have followed my blog entries on the theory of humor, you will know that I consider humor to be an important form of social communication which can adjust a group's social hierarchy. For an extreme example, if most of the group laughs at one member in derision, that member is likely to be humiliated and lowered in social standing within the group. Conversely, when a comedian attempts a joke and the audience is dead silent, the jokster is said to "die" on-stage.

The Elephant has a chapter on humor. The authors' point is that laughter is an involuntary social behavior which can act as an honest signal. That signal is often not consciously received and processed. The authors take their history of the theory of humor from John Morreall, reviewing theories of humor such as the superiority theory, the release theory, and the incongruity theory. They cite Gregory Bateson and emphasize that laughter is a signal that the person laughing is in a non-serious mode of play. They then dive into Robert Provine's findings about the social nature of laughter. They quote Provine that "Laughter is a powerful probe into social relationships." In short, they have a command of the topic. Thumbs up.

Simler and Hanson argue that there are two important factors in how humor is used socially: first, humor explores the boundaries of social norms; second, humor signals psychological distance. With social norms, what counts as a norm and what counts as a violation are regularly renegotiated and revised, often without explicit discussion. With psychological distance, the group regularly revises who has high status and great respect in the group and who has low status and less respect.

All human societies adopt some set of cultural norms as guidelines for the behavior of members of the social group. When we violate a norm, we have to worry about getting caught and punished. Using the play mode, we can feint across the boundary of a norm and then retreat with the claim that we were "just kidding." If we are across a perceived border and realize it is safe, we may be able to redraw the border defining where the norm is enforced. Those who police social norms may discourage certain topics of humor because laughing at norm violations may weaken the norm in question.

Social groups also establish and reinforce psychological distance. Some members of society, such as inmates in a prison, are often considered fair game for ridicule (don't drop the soap). One nation may be in competition with another nation, and the people in that other nation may be targets of stereotype humor. Joking about someone else gives an honest signal of how we feel about the target of the humor. When a comedian fails to get a laugh and asks, "Too soon?" the comedian is asking if an event is still so psychologically close that laughing about it is disrespectful. Again, there are edge cases in which psychological distance is changing, and humor can probe that border.

Simler and Hanson argue that laughter has two properties that make it a good tool for exploring sensitive topics. First, because it is involuntary, it is a relatively honest signal. They quote James Joyce's Latin bon mot: In risu veritas, or, In laughter, there is truth. Second, laughter is deniable. "We can deliver these denials with great conviction because [our conscious minds] really don't have a clear understanding of what our laughter means ..." (147).

They give the example of comedian Bill Burr. On the one hand, he has defended his boundary-pushing humor by claiming that he wasn't being serious. On the other hand, his fans say that they embrace his humor because he is honest. Which is it? Is he joking, or is he honest? As Simler and Hanson argue, the beauty of laughter is that a jokster can be both.

I consider this investigation of humor through evolutionary psychology to be an excellent approach to humor, and it is consistent with my own ideas about the nature of humor ... even if I do say that with conscious intent.

Self-Deception: Freud versus Evolutionary Psychology, Theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism, Part 7

In August of 2019, I posted a blog entry comparing the Freudian theory of psychological repression with the concept of competing selection pressures from evolutionary psychology, as integrated with multilevel selection theory. Freud, as interpreted by Norman O. Brown, argued that there was a life instinct that battled a death instinct. Multilevel selection theory, on the other hand, posits a competition between two forms of selection pressure: selection pressure for the individual and selection pressure for the group.

I have come across another example of a phenomenon that has a Freudian interpretation and an interpretion courtesy of evolutionary psychology: self-deception. I just finished the book, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson (Oxford UP, 2018).

Simler and Hanson review for the general reader the theories first advanced in the 1960s by the game theorist Thomas Schelling that self-deception can have a tactical advantage. Those theories were then brought into evolutionary psychology by Robert Trivers, in such books as his The Folly of Fools, 2011. They have also been promoted by Robert Kurzban, in such books as Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite, 2013.

According to Simler and Hanson, the Freudian interpretation of self-deception, as articulated by Anna Freud in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, 1992, is that the ego deceives itself to reduce its psychic pain. The ego cannot handle the truth, so it lies for self-preservation. Simler and Hanson point out that this makes no sense from a survival point of view. Lying to yourself in critical situations could only make those situations worse through bad decisions. Natural selection would have evolved brains with more robust self-esteem.

The empirical evidence is that we are likely to deceive ourselves only when it is outward-facing and self-serving. The best way to convince others of something is to genuinely believe it ourselves. "By this line of reasoning, it's never useful ... to adopt false beliefs that you keep entirely to yourself" (Simler, 79). Because the human mind is modular, some of our motives--the deep-seated, selfish ones--can be hidden from the conscious part of the mind. The conscious mind is the part which interacts with other people socially. Simler and Hanson borrow a concept from Daniel Dennett, Jonathan Haidt, and Robert Kurzban that the conscious mind is less like the Commander-in-Chief of the brain and more like the brain's Press Secretary, offering socially acceptable rationalizations for the brain's behavior.

Human societies use norms to control selfish behavior. These norms often deal with our intentions. For example, all cultures have norms encouraging sexual modesty as a way to keep the peace within social groups. If our subconscious mind can hide the selfish motives for our actions (such as flirting with a high-status individual) from our conscious minds, we can convince others that our motives are pure. "In this sense, the Freuds were right: the conscious ego needs to be protected. But not because we are fragile, but rather to keep damaging information from leaking out ..." (Simler, 89). Sexual symbolism in art and literature is not an example of the id trying to get around the superego but an example of individuals being able to violate the social norm against advertising sex while offering plausible deniability.

Self-deception is another point where Freudian psychology clashes with evolutionary psychology. Self-deception offers another way in which ELC (evolutionary literary criticism) can differ from Freudian literary interpretation. The evolutionary explanation has the benefit of more solid evidence in its favor. The evolutionary explanation can explain patterns of behavior the elude the Freudian theory.

Comparison Study of AI Systems for Library Research and Scholarship (and Confederacy of Dunces)

Back on April 1, I posted a blog entry called The Wisdom of ChatGPT. I prompted ChatGPT with a question about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces and the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, and then I shared the resulting essay. It was obvious that ChatGPT could write flowing English prose, and it made valid but vague points and seemed to be able to express ideas, not just produce text. Still, ChatGPT did not "know" information that could be found in my paper on the topic published in the journal Renascence, information that was readily available on the Internet. My own papers may not have been in the universe of documents from which ChatGPT learned English. Either that, or it lacks the capacity to actually store knowledge.

Since then, I read an article about several AI-assisted systems that either write text or conduct library research on a user's behalf. On June 20, I decided to run my query about Confederacy and Ficino in several of these systems. Below are my assessments of the results. I will begin with the systems that were easy to evaluate.

Query: In his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, did John Kennedy Toole use the ideas of Marsilio Ficino?

System: SciSpace; Time Query Executed: June 20, 2023, 3:10 p.m. U.S. Central Time; URL: https://typeset.io/

Review: SciSpace did not write an essay but returned citations to articles, as a search engine would. It returned my own article on Confederacy and Ficino as the number one result, and another text I had written which mentioned my ideas as the number two result. For doing library research, it performed well with this prompt. If this system does as well in other domains, it could genuinely help scholars.

System: Elicit; Time Query Executed: June 20, 2023, 11 a.m. U.S. Central Time; URL: https://elicit.org/

Review: Elicit wrote a summary paragraph and returned search results. The paragraph was not bad but saw no connection between Confederacy and Ficino. Unless a system has digested my own articles, it is likely to say that there is no connection, so I don’t fault this system's algorithm, just its knowledgebase. The citations were a mix of articles about Confederacy and articles about Ficino. The articles were not the best, but they were real academic articles and not completely off topic. Okay, but not great.

System: Bing AI; Time Query Executed: June 20, 2023, 3:26 p.m. U.S. Central Time; URL: https://www.bing.com/?/ai

Review: Bing returned search results. The results were not good. The first result was the Confederacy of Dunces Wikipedia page, then an article from the New Yorker on the novel, then the Goodreads page for the novel. Bing does not claim to be a search system for scholarship, but it is a comprehensive search engine. This was very weak. Still, it knew who John Kennedy Toole was.

System: Consensus; Time Query Executed: June 20, 2023, 3:05 p.m. U.S. Central Time; URL: https://consensus.app/

Review: Consensus returned search results without writing an essay or summary. The results were terrible. Results included articles on George Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy, and an essay about the letters of Marsilio Ficino. Yikes.

System: Scite.AI; URL: https://scite.ai/assistant

Review: This system would not give me a free trial unless I put in my credit card information. No thanks.

Here is the hard one

System: Google Bard; Time Query Executed: June 20, 2023, 3:22 p.m. US Central time; URL: https://bard.google.com/

Review: Bard did the best job of writing an essay. It wrote a short essay on the topic with no citations. I struggle to assess its performance because it might be genuinely good, or it might not. It might know more about Ficino than I do, or it might just be an excellent deep fake. I wrestle with whether Bard came up short or I came up short.

Here is the Bard essay

Yes, there is some evidence to suggest that John Kennedy Toole used the ideas of Marsilio Ficino in his novel A Confederacy of Dunces. In particular, the character of Ignatius J. Reilly has been interpreted as a representation of the melancholic genius, a figure that was theorized by Ficino.

Ficino was an Italian Renaissance philosopher who believed that there were three types of souls: the rational soul, the spirited soul, and the appetitive soul. He associated the rational soul with the planet Mercury, the spirited soul with the planet Mars, and the appetitive soul with the planet Saturn.

Ficino also believed that each person was born with a dominant soul, and that this soul determined their personality and temperament. People with a dominant rational soul were rational and intellectual, while people with a dominant spirited soul were passionate and energetic. People with a dominant appetitive soul were materialistic and sensual.

The character of Ignatius J. Reilly can be seen as a representation of the melancholic genius. Ignatius is intelligent and perceptive, but he is also deeply pessimistic and withdrawn. He is constantly complaining about the world around him, and he seems to have little interest in engaging with it.

Ignatius's melancholy can be seen as a manifestation of his dominant saturnine soul. Saturn was associated with melancholy in ancient astrology, and Ficino believed that the melancholic genius was a child of Saturn. Melancholic geniuses were seen as being highly creative and intelligent, but they were also often troubled and isolated.

Of course, it is impossible to say for sure whether Toole was consciously drawing on Ficino's ideas when he created the character of Ignatius J. Reilly. However, the similarities between Ignatius and the melancholic genius are striking, and it seems likely that Toole was at least familiar with Ficino's work.

Discussion

In my own scholarship, I argue that Ignatius was a parody of Ficino's melancholic genius. I also argue that Ficino sees the genius as a child of Saturn. However, I was unaware that the three souls were important to Ficino and that the appetitive soul is necessarily associated with Saturn. The question is: who knows his Ficino better, me or Bard?

Most of what I know about Ficino comes from the book The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino by Paul Oskar Kristeller. Reading this essay by Bard made me go back to Kristeller and see if he discussed the rational soul, the spirited soul, and the appetitive soul, as Bard claims. Although Plato discussed those three parts of the soul, and Ficino was a thorough translator of Plato, Kristeller dismisses the three souls as an aspect of Ficino's philosophical system. Kristeller states, "Though Ficino occasionally quotes Plato's distinction between the rational, the courageous, and the appetitive parts of the Soul, he does not assign any systematic significance to it" (367).

The question remains, is Kristeller right, or does Bard know more about Ficino than Kristeller does? If Bard is wrong, then did Bard just grab the facts about the Platonic division of the soul and mash them together with Ficino's melancholic genius and astrological theories?

I am inclined to trust Kristeller, especially since he devoted years to Ficino and was the first scholar to turn Ficino's writings into a systematic philosophy. I come back to the fact that Ficino saw two possible types of children of Saturn, one who was beastly and one who was divine. To me, Toole's joke is that Ignatius thinks he is a divine child of Saturn but is in reality a beastly child of Saturn. In the end, I think that Bard took several ideas about Ficino and Platonic philosophy and glued them together, a very good deep fake of genuine scholarship.

Nevertheless, Bard seems to know things. It seems to possess an internal set of ideas. ChatGPT seemed to know a bit, but it was otherwise vague and non-committal. Bard, by contrast, had definite ideas, some of which it may have gotten by digesting my own writings, but maybe not. Not only did Bard know who John Kennedy Toole was, and what Confederacy of Dunces was, but it also knew who Ficino was. Even if Ficino did not assign systematic significance to Plato's three souls, he really did talk about them. It is even possible that Bard knows enough about Ficino that it could challenge Kristeller's interpretation of Ficino's work (and therefore my interpretation of Toole).

In short, Bard is so good, it made an expert on a topic go back to his books to reassess the issue. No other AI system in this line-up did THAT.

Life History Theory, ... is it Bogus? Thoughts on the Theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism

This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my recently published book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD. This post is another installment in a new series of posts on the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism which have little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my 2 followers.

Recently, I contacted Joseph Carroll about the theory of evolutionary literary criticism. Carroll sent me several of his papers that explore his own version of the theory. I have read a couple of his essays in the past, and I thought I ought to examine his theory more carefully, since he was kind enough to share his publications with me. In my recent book chapter, I mentioned that I support the ideas of William Flesch regarding evolutionary literary criticism, and Flesch is a critic of Carroll.

In the Carroll's essay entitled "Minds and Meaning in Fictional Narratives: An Evolutionary Perspective," I was immediately struck by the centrality of Life History Theory to Carroll's version of evolutionary literary criticism, or as he calls it, Literary Darwinism. I am not well versed in life history theory. Previously, I had obtained recent editions of the two major evolutionary psychology textbooks on the market: the better known textbook by David Buss and the British one by Workman and Reader. In a previous blog entry, I discussed the fact that, for Buss, status and dominance hierarchies are important to his framework for evolutionary psychology. He has an entire chapter on the topic, while Workman and Reader do not even have dominance in the index to their book. I prefer the framework presented by David Buss regarding status hierarchies.

I searched the two textbooks for life history theory. Workman and Reader have a significant section of their book devoted to it, while Buss only has a cursory discussion. Therefore, I studied the Workman and Reader treatment of life history theory, in order to prepare myself for my analysis of Carroll's version of evolutionary literary theory.

What I read there made me seriously question the life history theory. The basic idea behind life history theory is that organisms can change their behavior over the course of their lives depending on what is age-appropriate. Do I focus on feeding and growth, or do I focus on reproduction at this stage in my life? Life history can explain the fact that juvenile animals play, while adults do not. The theory is that juveniles are practicing skills in a safe environment which they will use later when they are adults and are playing for keeps.

Workman and Reader move from this foundation to discuss the fact that some species of animal, such as fish who spawn multitudes of small fry, follow a high-quantity and low-investment strategy of reproduction, while others, such as orcas, polar bears, and humans, follow a low-quantity and high-parental-investment strategy.

This distinction is combined with the Attachment Theory of John Bowlby. In the 1950s, Bowlby had developed a theory that some children are raised in an environment in which they are emotionally attached to their parents in a strong, healthy bond, while other children grow up poorly attached, which may lead them to become insecure. Personally, I detect some moral judgment in attachment theory, blaming the supposedly detached mother, or the lack of an at-home father, for the child's emotional problems.

Attachment theory has been combined with life history theory by Jay Belsky. Belsky hypothesizes that children who are emotionally well-connected to their parents are more trusting and are more likely to follow a low-quantity, high-parental-investment strategy when they begin raising their own children. Children who are raised in an insecure environment, such as with a "harsh" mother or an absent father, are more likely to follow a high-quantity, low-investment strategy of bearing children. Again, this feels very judgmental, providing scientific cover for a lack of broader social support for poor children in large families.

According to Workman and Reader, one hypothesis generated by this theory is that girls from homes with absent fathers reach puberty more quickly than girls from two-parent homes.

Now, here is the part that is causing me to seriously question the Life History Theory, though it is perhaps unfair to reject a larger theory because of short-comings with a smaller hypothesis. Workman and Reader say, on the one hand, that "the weight of the evidence currently supports the [early puberty] hypothesis" (148), but then they immediately present a study that seems to invalidate the hypothesis.

Workman and Reader admit that a major weakness in Belsky's theory of early puberty is to suppose that the phenomenon is caused by the environmental factors. Both the low parental investment and the earlier puberty by girls could be produced by an underlying genetic cause. Then they report on a study, by Mendle et al. (2006), where the daughters of identical twins were studied. The family of the one twin was disrupted while the family of the other twin was not. The data ... drum roll please ... show that "there was no difference in pubertal timing between the two groups" (149). This result strongly suggests that the simplistic model of Belsky's environmental causation is wrong.

In a subsequent study, Tither and Ellis (2008) tried to salvage Belsky's hypothesis by comparing daughters of different ages within the same disrupted families. They found that younger daughters, who may have had more time to internalize the stress of the disruption, reached puberty earlier than older sisters. The differences were significant but the effect sizes were very small (an average shift of only a few months).

To me, this research agenda looks weak, and it casts a shadow over the whole linkage of the attachment environment to reproductive strategy. From what I have read so far, I am unimpressed by life history theory. Based on a citation analysis in Google Scholar, it seems that life history theory is not main stream among psychologists in general or even among evolutionary psychologists in particular. Again, I prefer the approach found in David Buss's textbook. We will see where my investigation leads me next.

Citations:

Buss, David M. (2019). Evolutionary Psychology: the new science of the mind. 6/e. New York: Routledge.

Carroll, Joseph. (2018). "Minds and Meaning in Fictional Narratives: An Evolutionary Perspective." Review of General Psychology, 22 (2): 135–146.

Mendle, J., Turkheimer, E., et al. (2006). "Family Structure and Age at Menarche: A Children-of-twins Approach." Developmental Psychology, 42: 533-542.

Tither, J. M. and B. J. Ellis. (2008). "Impact of fathers on daughters' age of menarche: A genetically and environmentally controlled sibling study." Developmental Psychology, 44: 1409-1420.

Workman and Reader. Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction. 4/e. Cambridge, 2021.

The Great Gatsby, ELC Saunders #8, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. Here are some observations on the monograph below, a recent publication in the field. This entry is observation number eight regarding this book.

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

This month's discussion: Chapter Eight: "The Great Gatsby: An Unusual Case of Mate Poaching," pp. 138-174.

This essay is much longer than many of the others in Saunder's book, and it makes a much more complex argument. I give this essay high marks. I have to confess that I did not appreciate The Great Gatsby when I was assigned to read it in my youth. The evolutionary perspective is useful to more fully appreciating the point of the narrative.

Saunders' basic theme centers on the observed psychological phenomenon of self-deception. Humans can deceive themselves about their physical and social world, and this deception can cause them to work toward goals that are unrealistic. This self-deception can have adaptive value, as theorized by Robert Trivers, whom Saunders cites. For example, a high-risk strategy is easier to undertake if the actor is deluded into thinking success is likely.

In this novel, Gatsby is deluded about his relationship with Daisy. Prior to the time frame of the novel, Gatsby was a young man from the lower-middle class. Daisy was a beautiful young woman from a wealthy and respectable family. Entering the military in World War I, he hid his modest social position with his military rank, and he courted her. While he was serving in Europe, she dropped him and married the socially dominant Tom Buchanan. Saunders walks us through the reproductive logic, showing that Daisy's decision to drop Gatsby for Tom was rational. She also points out that the novel's readers would not find this story of Daisy's rational self-interest particularly interesting.

Saunders also uses the sexual strategy logic promoted by David Buss in his book Evolution of Desire to show that Tom's sexual infidelities are rational, as are Daisy's reactions to Tom's infidelities. Both Myrtle's sexual relationship with Tom and Daisy's sexual affair with Gatsby follow the logic of sexual strategy theory.

Gatsby, by contrast, is consumed by an irrational commitment to courting Daisy. He does this even though he has already lost her. He has deluded himself into thinking that Daisy is still a virginal girl who can become his faithful bride, even though she has been married for years and already has a child by Tom. Daisy has a sexual affair with Gatsby, but when she has to choose between Tom and Gatsby, she chooses to remain with Tom. Tom points out that Gatsby's wealth was not gained in a socially respectable way. She would still take a step downward socially if she exchanged Tom for Gatsby. Daisy continues to follow sexual strategy logic and behave rationally.

Saunders shows that, as detailed again by David Buss, Gatsby's behavior would be rational if Daisy really were a young woman looking for a committed marriage partner. He displays great wealth to attract her. He demonstrates persistence in courtship, combining loyalty and riches. Because his efforts are pointless, he takes on the quality of a tragic character. Like Don Quixote, he is chasing a fantasy. Saunders' point is that Gatsby's obsessive fidelity to Daisy seems idealistic, but it is based on evolutionary logic. Because his reasoning has become pathological, his behavior becomes tragic.

Saunders innumerates several misconceptions by Gatsby. One is that wealth equals social status. Another is that his ambition is not related to his reproductive fitness. As Saunders writes, "Men frequently speak of wives and offspring as if they were obstacles to success rather than proof of it" (162). She criticizes much of the scholarly criticism of Gatsby for missing this point in their discussions of the corruption of wealth. Fitzgerald links Daisy to the sirens of the Odyssey. Saunders points out "It comforts men to think that Helen's beauty or Circe's magic, rather than masculine ardor and male-male competition, caused the Trojan War or turned men into swine" (164).

Fitzgerald, at the end of the novel, draws a political and cultural analogy between Gatsby's self-delusion and the aspirations of European settlers to find a virgin and fertile land in America. Both will fall short of their ideal aspirations. Saunders points out that Gatsby's fantasies and the dreams of settlers were both motivated by reproductive fitness.

In Gottschall's book The Storytelling Animal, he describes the fact that we humans occupy a reality that is in part constructed from our mental projections. He says that we live in Neverland. Many successful leaders have created an aspirational world which their followers then have succeeded in bringing into actual existence through their collective effort. Steve Jobs was described as having a "reality distortion field" that convinced the employees of Apple to realize his plans. In Gatsby, this mentally and socially constructed Neverland is irreconcilably at odds with the physical world; in this instance, this mentally constructed world is on full display.

At the end of the novel, Daisy unintentionally but successfully rids herself of her rival, Myrtle, and Tom rids himself of his rival, Gatsby. The cynically rational actors triumph reproductively. The dead body of the dreamer Gatsby is floating in a swimming pool.

Saunders ends by arguing that, as other evolutionary literary critics such as Joseph Carroll have argued, this self-delusional myth-making is related to the human capacity to create stories and literature.

I have elsewhere argued that evolutionary literary criticism should include considerations of multilevel selection theory, such as the theory of the altruistic punisher. As is the case for many of her essays, Saunders only focuses on the evolutionary psychology related to individual fitness and not group fitness as hypothesized by multilevel selection theory. Nick is the cynical witness to tragically misplaced individual yearning.

The Wisdom of ChatGPT: Confederacy and Ficino

A couple of months ago, a version of GPT3, called ChatGPT, was rolled out as a free service to the general public. (And if you don't know that, you are living under a rock.) GPT3 is designed to craft written texts in English. ChatGPT lets the average individual with an internet connection see the results of its work for free. The popular press has been making extravagant predictions about the threat posed to the jobs of all white collar workers, who might be replaced by these AI systems. While the threat is non-trivial, the leap from ChatGPT to the end of human managerial employment assumes that ChatGPT is actually coming up with innovative ideas, rather than just putting non-innovative truisms into readable texts.

I was aware that AI had made large strides in recent years. In 2015, the system AlphaGo, developed by the company Deep Mind, defeated a professional Go player for the first time in a five game match, and in 2016, an updated version dominated the human world champion of Go four games to one. Commentators were struck not only by the victories but by the computer's playing style. Earlier game-playing AI systems, such as Deep Blue in chess, simply out-computed the human opponent. AlphaGo's style showed creativity and flair. It didn't just beat humans, it played like a human, only better. I was not shocked by this development, but I was shocked in December of 2017 when Deep Mind released AlphaZero. AlphaZero was given the rules of chess, was not given any human games as models to learn from, and within a short span of playing games against itself, was able to defeat the computer program that at that time held the title of world chess champion. That speed of learning by the new algorithm was truly astonishing.

I am not an AI expert, but I do have a masters degree in computer science and in 1991, I had studied precursors to the current systems, then called Expert Systems, in a graduate course. Around the year 2000, I was aware that computer scientists had made breakthroughs in machine learning algorithms, which accelerated AI development. With the rise of massive data warehouses generated by traffic on the Internet, these more powerful AI systems had tasks to perform which could generate revenue for the developers, specifically tasks involving language.

With the release of ChatGPT this year, there has been active discussion about the ability of AI systems to write papers for college students. The assumption is that ChatGPT is not only writing flowing prose, it is also formulating ideas and arguing in their favor. The journal Nature has had articles discussing whether it is ethical for scientific researchers to use AI systems to help them write their papers. In this case, the scientist would provide the hypothesis, the data, and the conclusions, and the AI would provide the English prose. Such a development would no doubt help non-English-speaking researchers.

As for myself, I was slow to try ChatGPT, because I wasn't sure how to evaluate it. Enter John Kennedy Toole and his novel A Confederacy of Dunces. I have spent years studying this novel and have read nearly all of the scholarly work published on it. I could ask ChatGPT about Confederacy. On this topic more than any other, I would know how well the system was generating ideas. If it was borrowing ideas from others, I would know where those ideas were coming from.

Thinking along these lines, it also occurred to me that ChatGPT and other systems have a major problem with intellectual property. If the test set of documents contain ideas (which they mostly do), then the output of the AI might also parrot those ideas in the texts it generates. If the documents in the learning set have been copyrighted, the parroted ideas may violate copyright. To test this, I specifically prompted ChatGPT to talk about a subject I have researched in depth. I asked it about the influence of Marsilio Ficino on the novel. Here are the results.

Prompt submitted at 6:25 a.m. (Central time), Thursday, March 30, 2023: In his novel A Confederacy of Dunces, did John Kennedy Toole use the ideas of Marsilio Ficino?

Answer: There is no clear evidence to suggest that John Kennedy Toole used the ideas of Marsilio Ficino in his novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Ficino was a prominent Renaissance philosopher and scholar who wrote extensively on a wide range of subjects, including Platonic philosophy, astrology, and magic.

While A Confederacy of Dunces does contain philosophical and intellectual themes, there is no direct reference to Ficino or his ideas in the novel. The main focus of the book is on the eccentric and dysfunctional characters who populate the city of New Orleans.

It is possible that Toole was indirectly influenced by Ficino's ideas through the broader intellectual and cultural milieu of the time, which was characterized by a revival of interest in classical philosophy and literature. However, without specific evidence from Toole's own writings or statements, it is difficult to say for certain whether Ficino had any direct influence on the novel.

As you can see, the prose is well-crafted. There are even ideas behind the prose. ChatGPT argues that there is no obvious, demonstrable connection. The answer is technically correct, and the computer wisely declines to speculate on something that is not explicitly provable. My arguments about Ficino having influenced Toole are out there in cyberspace, so it could have put forward my ideas and cited my paper. Still, ChatGPT did not violate my copyright by presenting my ideas about Ficino and Toole as its own. I am both comforted and relieved. The system gave a good answer that an articulate human who was not a scholar in the field could give, and it did not steal my ideas or my role as an investigator. It did settle on a thesis, though, so you can argue that it wasn't just handling English words, it was formulating ideas and articulating them.

With all the discussion of how well ChatGPT crafts prose, it has occurred to me that, just as with chess and go, computers may soon be much better than most humans at writing texts. If that becomes the common expectation, then the phrase "passing the Turing test" could flip from being a compliment to the programmers of the computer system to being an insult toward a text. "This essay is so poorly written, it passes the Turing test. It's so bad, a human could have written it."

I will end this blog entry with my second query to ChatGPT and its response. Again, it argues for a thesis, and it does it well.

Prompt submitted at 6:30 a.m. (Central time), Thursday, March 30, 2023: Could chimps at typewriters eventually write the works of William Shakespeare?

Answer: It is theoretically possible for chimpanzees at typewriters to produce the works of William Shakespeare, but it is incredibly unlikely to the point of being practically impossible.

The famous thought experiment of the infinite monkey theorem states that given an infinite amount of time and an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing on an infinite number of typewriters, they would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare by chance. However, in reality, the amount of time required for this to occur is so vast that it is effectively impossible.

Even if we consider a more realistic scenario, such as a finite number of monkeys typing for a finite amount of time, the probability of producing even a single coherent sentence is extremely low. This is because the number of possible combinations of letters is astronomically large, and the vast majority of them would be meaningless or nonsensical.

Furthermore, writing is not simply a matter of randomly arranging letters. It requires a level of skill, creativity, and linguistic knowledge that is beyond the capacity of chimpanzees, who do not possess the complex cognitive abilities necessary for language and literary expression.

In short, while the idea of chimpanzees writing Shakespeare may make for an interesting thought experiment, in reality, it is highly unlikely to occur.

This answer shows that ChatGPT does possess "a level of skill, creativity, and linguistic knowledge that is beyond the capacity of chimpanzees." It can also formulate and defend ideas.