McCarthy, C. (2022). Stella Maris (First edition). Alfred A. Knopf.
Selected concepts and passages
Page numbers taken from large print edition.
- “Wittgenstein was fond of saying that nothing can be its own explanation. I’m not sure how far that is from saying that things ultimately contain no information concerning themselves” (88).
- “The complexity of mathematics has shifted it from a description of things and events to the power of abstract operators. At what point are the origins of systems no longer relevant to their description, their operation?” (89).
- “The rage of children seemed inexplicable other than as a breach of some deep and innate covenant having to do with how the world should be and wasn’t. … At what stage in a child’s life does rage become sorrow? … The injustice over which they are so distraught is irremediable. And rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief” (127).
- “Schopenhauer thought that if the universe vanished music alone would remain. The rules are the music. Without the rules you have nothing but noise. … But this set of rules—I think I’d call them laws, laws of music—is selfcontained and complete. They are known and there will never be any more of them. Is that true of mathematics? Is there such a thing as a grand unifying theory of mathematics?” (130).
- “The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesn’t go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonder why the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is” (131).
- “Sometimes you get a clear sense that doing math is largely just feeding data into the substation and waiting to see what comes out. I’m not even sure that it’s all that wise to commit things to memory. What you log in becomes fixed. In a way that the machinations of the unconscious would appear not to” (131).
- “I don’t really like to write things down. … I think for most people to leave things unrecorded is to leave them free to look around for fresh analogies. They go about their business and come back from time to time and report to you. A written statement—or an equation—is a sort of signpost. A waystation. It tells you where you are and gives you a new place to start from” (132).
- “[The unconscious] has been on its own for a long time. Of course it has no access to the world except through your own sensorium. Otherwise it would just labor in the dark. Like your liver. For historical reasons it’s loath to speak to you. It prefers drama, metaphor, pictures. But it understands you very well. And it has no other cause save yours” (132).
- “Do you believe in an afterlife?/ I don’t believe in this one” (155).
- “The unconscious is simply a machine for operating an animal. What else could it be? Most of what we do is unconscious. … The unconscious evolves along with the species to meet its needs and if there’s anything spooky about it it’s that it sometimes seems to anticipate those needs. It can’t afford surprises. It’s one of the things that troubled Darwin” (170).
- “Do you think the sense of self is an illusion?/ … I think it’s a dumb question. Coherent entities composed of a great number of disparate parts aren’t—as a general rule—thereby assumed to have their identities compromised. … If we were constructed with a continual awareness of how we worked we wouldn’t work. You might even ask that if the self is indeed an illusion for whom then is it illusory?” (172).
- “If you claim that mathematics is not a science then you can claim that it need have no referent save itself” (174).
- “The inner guidance of a living system is as necessary to its survival as oxygen and hydrogen. The governance of any system evolves coevally with the system itself. … Every faculty but language has the same history. The only rules of evolution that language follows are those necessary to its own construction” (229).
- “The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation. … The unconscious must have had to do all sorts of scrambling around to accommodate a system that proved perfectly relentless” (230).
- “Platonists seem more or less silent as to the origin of mathematics and remarkably unconcerned as to what might be the purpose of computation in an uninhabited universe” (237).
- “But to claim that numbers somehow exist in the Universe with no intelligence to enable them does not require a different sort of mathematics. It requires a different sort of universe” (238).
Reading notes
- Read prior to The Passenger.
- Further reading
- Godel’s 1931 paper
- Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, chapter on “The Meaning of Numbers”: “A distinction between mathematics as numeracy and mathematics as chronology” (175).