Pantar Weblog

Greenwich Village seems like the name of a charming New York neighborhood, one name and one neighborhood among the many charming neighborhoods of New York. But for people who live in Greenwich Village, the reality is different. Of all the neighborhoods in New York, Greenwich Village stands apart because it is an actual village. Greenwich Village has been a village for 200 years, and here it remains, nestled among many the many districts, neighborhoods and thoroughfares of New York City.

What accounts for this state of affairs, for the persistence of a village in one of the world’s great metropoles? In the early 19th century, Greenwich Village was outside New York City. As the latter grew, incorporating forests, ponds, pastures and cowpaths into its urban bulk, it engulfed Greenwich Village. But the village did not digest so easily, and it maintained its unique street pattern, unbearably confusing to outsiders. It is on these pleasantly twisting streets, intolerable to cars yet friendly to pedestrians, that Villagers meet, crossing paths as they go about their daily business.

Many of the buildings in Greenwich Village date from the 19th century as well. It is this combination, streets and buildings, that have maintained the identity of Greenwich Village. They’ve kept the Village a village. Unlike the rest of New York City, Greenwich Village has a preponderance of low-density residences. If you live in Greenwich Village, you’re more likely to know you neighbors because there are less of them to know. So the residents of Greenwich Village, who are likely to know their neighbors, are also likely to say “hi,” particularly if they run into one another on a pleasant, twisting street lined with the healthy trees and shrubs that shade this neighborhood village.

The owner of 501 Hudson Street has asked permission to build a glass curtain high-rise at that address. As a resident of Greenwich Village, I urge that New York City not grant that permission. Greenwich Village is not only a great place to live, it’s a great place to visit. Tour groups visit my street daily, and they come for the well-preserved historic district. The proposed building at 501 Hudson would diminish that sense of history, overshadowing the splendid Federal row houses and many other historic buildings that emanate in several directions from its site. That lot is currently occupied by low-rise buildings, and the profile of these buildings is critical to maintaining the historic character of the neighborhood. They allow the ambient light and sense of openness of a 19th century village rather than an overbuilt city of the 21st century. The materials of the proposed building are all wrong: glass skirted by a modest lining of brick baguettes. It would stand in unwieldy contrast to its neighbors, notably the garden of St. Luke in the Fields directly across the street.

The worst effect of 501 Hudson St lies in its precedent. While this building would cause irreparable harm to the ambience of a key intersection in the Village—Hudson and Christopher—it would pave the way to similar incursions in the heart of the historic district. Starting with this building, each of its successors would have an easier time of erecting modern high-rises, each of which will contribute to a loss of our sense of history. Eventually Greenwich Village will be a neighborhood among neighborhoods, not a village, with nothing to recommend it more or less than any of thousands of neighborhoods in any contemporary city.

From Alternative Views, a show I cohosted in 1992.

“We don’t need a body to feel a body.”

Secrets of the Senses, a special edition of Scientific American, is one of the best I’ve read. Purportedly about sensation, it touches on much larger issues like identity and awareness. Not long ago these issues would have been solidly in the realm of philosophy or, even less productively, in religion, but not they’ve become objects of productive scientific inquiry.

My favorite article deals with phantom limbs. It’s long been a mystery why amputees continue to feel lost appendages. They even report proprioception, the awareness of placement in space, and adjust their habits to fit the position of an illusory limb. One subject wouldn’t sleep on hi back or right side because he felt like he was crunching an arm twisted in those areas.

A favored theory asserts that neural stumps called neuromas continue to send impulses to the brain. But several observations militate against the theory. Severing the nerves upstream doesn’t affect the sensation, and people with severed spinal cords possess the sensation as well. The most telling argument derives from people born without limbs. They still have the sensation of possessing them and not just through obscure tingles or gnawing pain. A girl born without hands used would spread phantom fingers on a table to count.

Melzack proposes that the sources of phantom limbs lies in the brain rather than the external nervous system. His analysis concludes that at least three cognitive systems are required to generate the phenomenon – the somatosensory system, the cognitive system and, surprisingly, the limbic system. The first is an obvious candidate, as it integrates the maniold of sensation into a body. It’s Kantian function now known to reside in the parietal cortex. (See the Transcendental Aesthetic in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.) There’s a nice anecodote about body awareness at this point, one that stands in distinction from phantom limbs. People with damage to the parietal cortex often don’t recognize their own body; they’ve been known to push their leg out of bed because they think it belongs to someone else.

Naturally cognition translates that complex into conscious awareness. The limbic system, the seat of emotion but also of motivation, or what we might call will, comes in because it explains the emotional state produced by the awareness of phantom limbs.

The sum of these systems forms what Melzack calls the neuromatrix, a complex of systems that integrates sensations along inherited neural pathways. So our sense of body is not something that develops from having one so much as its hardwired into our brains, and thus genetically determined. The little girl without hands still has the sensations associated with hands, even though she’s never moved a finger.
This article demonstrates how clearly our sense of self - identity and other functions one might ascribe to a soul – derive from organic systems. When we combine this with the work of Francesco Varela, notably Principles of Biological Automony, and other work being done in perceptual science, we find the basis for non-reductive theories of consciousness. I say non-reductive because they don’t lead to a counter-intuitive negation of fields of inquiry that I think are proper for the humanities: history, ethics and aesthetics. Works like Man-Machine, by De La Mettrie, or the publications of Patricia and Paul Churchland dessicate the rich vocabulary, and the attendent conceptual richness, of human experience.

The newest science provides the basis for spectacular advances in bioengineering, but it also leaves room for scholars to explore the realm of human creation. Science explains why things are so, but, as of yet, it does not provide prescriptions for behavior. I think there are reasons why science will never encroach on those last bastions of the humanities. (I’ll give those reasons sometime later.) Even if we completely understand the basis of life, it will be left to philosophers, artists, businesspeople and politicians to decide what we are to do with that knowledge.

Answers to questions posed by Monocle Magazine.

01 What’s your favourite neighborhood in the world and why?
The West Village sector of Greenwich Village in New York City. It’s an area of extraordinary architectural charm that’s inhabited by a diverse yet neighborly community of people. It’s a place where one quickly finds solidarity with fellow inhabitants, all of whom are bound by one thought: How lucky am I to live in the West Village! Before moving to the Village I shunned my neighbors, favoring privacy, but now I found myself as surrogate uncle to two boys parented by single moms, having drinks with the owner of the corner pet food store, and involved in a local group that’s resisting plans to develop a glassy high-rise on our beloved street.

02 What features would make it better?
The West Village retains its 19th century street plan, making it difficult for automobiles to glide through as they do the rest of Manhattan. I think we should make it even less car-friendly by banning streetside parking except for pick-ups and deliveries. The roads should be narrowed, with the extra space devoted towards more promenades devoted to pedestrians and bicycles. Commitment to community gardens should be firm and open, with sidewalks, roads and other impermeable cover be removed to expose fertile Manhattan topsoil. Individual dwellings should be assigned inalienable plots where the dweller can grow flowers vegetables or whatever suits their fancy. In tribal fashion, these plots could be let but not sold to others.

03 What city’s residents enjoy the best quality of life?
San Franciscans surely live near the peak of urban possibility. The city sparkles in a constant wash of sunlight, air and water. The many peaks within the city create a panoply of vistas to be enjoyed by those who dwell on them along with their visitors and those who are casually passing through. Exuberant Victorian homes cascade over the city, and their nuanced colours are a joy to behold. Gardens abound, and many neighborhoods are fragrant with jasmine, gardenia, roses and other brilliant flowers. The ocean air scrubs the palette, enhancing the flavour of the city’s high-end cuisine, made by top chefs from superb local produce and served with world-class local wines. It’s a place where romance is around every corner, where the colors and tastes match what we feel when we say, “I’m in love!”

Underneath the romance of San Francisco lies a thoughtful and well-organized urban infrastructure. Farmer’s markets and food co-ops abound. The city has excellent and typically charming public transport, cable cars and streetcars, many of colorful vintage. The buses are more prosaic, but being electric they are far quieter than their petrol-addled cousins. And it’s always fun to see a bus veer off the street, roll to a stop, then disgorge its driver to reset the electric leads, which fall off frequently.

04 Where do you currently reside?
Greenwich Village

05 What elements does your current environment have right? What’s going wrong?
Greenwich Village is a pleasant jumble of architectural styles dating from the early 19th century to present day. Its roads require local knowledge to navigate, and their irrational planning deters drivers from using the neighborhood as a throughway. It lies in proximity to the vast cultural resources of New York City. All this is good. Without vigilance the neighborhood could gradually lose its charm. There is constant pressure from developers who want to put nondescript glass-curtain highrises at our superb low-count addresses.
Greenwich Village used to be a village, and it retains the autochthonic charm of a community that has organically developed around a set of common needs. The layout and attitudes of Greenwich Village, and of all villages, represent our past but, contrary to what most developers say, they also represent our future. Thriving cities of the future will not allow real estate to developers to mine the skyline for maximum profit. (The grid structure of a skyscaper mirrors that of an extractive mine.) Instead they will concentrate high-rise development in areas of least geographic consequence, allowing those who want to build 21st century villages that recognize the continuities of city living with history and the broader world of life that includes plants, animals and even the soil that’s now buried beneath concrete.

The relation between mathematics and the world has been an enduring mystery. How is it that numbers, which exist in an abstract realm accessed through symbols, so effectively describe the physical world? Does mathematics describe another realm, one that is immaterial and one that, in theological terms, is either transcendent or immanent to material things? Or are numbers a kind of thing themselves?
Various schools of thought have formed around approaches to this problem. One approach, first formulated by Plato, holds that numbers exist in a world of their own as a kind of model for the material world. We access this world directly through intellect, discovering mathematical theorems as a kind of terrain. Another school holds that numbers are approximations for what happens in the world …
Having decided that we can’t appeal to a transcendent realm of numbers, we are left again with the question, “What is a number?” Set theory goes a long way towards answering the question in formal terms, as numbers can be generated by logical operations performed on primitive entities called “sets.” Sets are collections of abstract entities, and, if we examine these entities from a naïve perspective, they intuitively correlate to groupings of objects, collections of things in the material world. Yet there has been no clear definition of the relationship between sets and collections of things. Sets are logically defined, while collections of real objects are defined for reasons ranging from biology to industry to culture. Nonetheless something fundamental ties the logic of sets to the definition of a horses, igneous rocks and Barbie dolls.

1) Know that you are going to identify with your worldview at every stage of your personal growth.
2) Accept that these identifications are temporary.
3) Be willing to change your identity every day. Take a flexible attitude. Don't defend an "I" that you know is temporary.
4) Allow your ability to quietly observe without judgment to replace the infrained ideas you reach for automatically.
5) When you have the impulse to struggle. use that as an immediate signal to let go. Open a space for a new answer to unfold on its own.
6) When you can't let go, forgive yourself and move on.
7) Use every opportunity to tell yourself that all other viewpoints are valid, every experience valuable, every insight a moment of
freedom.