The Weaver Fish (3 page)

He tilted his head slightly, directing my attention once more over his shoulder to the busy CAD screen behind.

Anna Camenes
was Founding Editor of
Altimeter
magazine. She flies Row 14.

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The Norwegian-British logician, linguist and dream theorist Edvard Tøssentern is unaccounted for, and presumed to have died when the research balloon
Abel
disappeared during a severe storm over the South China Sea.

A man who seemed to inhabit fully three or four careers at the one time, he contributed to applied logic, led both theoretical and field research programmes in linguistics, and became simultaneously revered and reviled for demolishing the bogus foundations of dream analysis, finally closing the chapter on a century of Freudian and Jungian psychologies.

In logic, Tøssentern was best known for the invention of structures called inductive graphs, which serve to formalize the transitivity of a very general class of epistemic relations. They have proved to be a powerful tool of symbolic reasoning with particular utility in causation analysis. In certain circles, and this delighted him, the technique has gained a reputation as the enemy of political rhetoric—many a suspect argument being fatally dispatched by its application. Recently, using a probabilistic formulation, Tøssentern had increased the generality of inductive graph methods, with intriguing implications for game theory, machine intelligence and automated translation.

In the early 1990s, Tøssentern headed a campaign which resulted in the formation of the Cambridge-based Language Diversity Initiative. This is now a major programme with conservation operations throughout the world. Tøssentern personally brought to public notice the forgotten linguistics of the Ferendes (Friendship Islands), and the intimate connection between daily language and the folklore of the mysterious weaver
fish. This, in fact, became a subject of special interest to him, and he was known to be editing the collected papers of Thomas MacAkerman, who first described the weaver fish and its curious place in language in 1816. Following the Indian Ocean tsunami of late 2004, when seafloor seismic shocks and disturbances to benthic ecology were conducted well beyond the Ferendes, Tøssentern became aware of unsubstantiated claims to weaver fish sightings. It was his desire to investigate these reports that drew him back to the South China Sea, and to the small LDI research station whence he disappeared.

Of all his contributions to intellectual life, however, probably the most far-reaching was a new theory of dreams. Interestingly, though he was foremost a scientist and published normally in the refereed literature, Tøssentern viewed this work as belonging to
belles-lettres
as much as to scientific discourse. For the matters in question, he valued the informed judgement of a greater interested audience more than fanciful theorizing and the flawed empirical methodologies available to dream research. There was as well, he observed ruefully, an almost unassailable academic bias in favour of theories that powered the psychoanalytic industry.

As was often the case, Tøssentern began his enquiries with a simple question and a surprising proposition. Observing the proportion of animal life spent sleeping, he asked: Why has this state of extreme vulnerability (to predation) so prospered in natural selection? And: Dreaming is not incidental to sleep, but its very purpose. The puzzle of sleep thereby became the puzzle of dreaming, and why this activity should be so evolutionarily advantageous.

In essence, Tøssentern proposed that the dream was instructional: a highly evolved but pre-lingual, pictorial mechanism by which knowledge benefiting survival was communicated from one generation to the next, so that, for example, what we term instinctual behaviour in animals is learned from exemplary imagery in the dream. In the sleeping animal, we observe the autonomic and motor rehearsals for complex survival behaviours. In the case of human dreaming, its utility is subsumed by the development of language; the
normative codes of socialization, survival and reproductive behaviour are instructed verbally. Therefore, in humans, the machinery subserving the translation of wakeful experience into dream, its reproduction during sleep, and its inheritance, is in a state of advancing atrophy. This degeneracy, and the lack of a natural grammar of visual scene description, explain the fragmentation and apparent irrationality that typify our dreams. The characteristic amnesia for dreams is illusory, but also fundamental; it serves to disambiguate the lesson world from the lived world. Tøssentern believed that the obsession with symbolism in dream analysis was a mistake. The content of a dream was a portrayal of reality distorted by information loss and neural processing error, and its interpretation was consequently a problem of image restoration. In any event, much of the ancestral content (the earliest of which is characteristically nonverbal and non-graphical) no longer analogized coherently into a rapidly evolved human culture, and was further contaminated by recent, personal (and, of course, defective) dream invention.

With one idea, Tøssentern provided a new ontology and a theory of phenomenology and semantic content for dreaming. He viewed symbolic theories as interesting but over-determined; they should be reconceptualized only as attempts to translate pre-lingual, disordered imagery into language, and be cleansed accordingly—particularly of mysticism. Using arguments that we cannot reproduce here, he also systematically dismissed other contemporary neuropsychological and neurocognitive theories, being especially (though politely) contemptuous of the idea that dreams are not actually or vestigially purposive but are epiphenomenal to a nightly clearing of memory, or even more fatuously, result from random nerve firing.

Edvard Oliver Montague Tøssentern was born mid-Atlantic, aboard MV
Okeanos
en route to New York, on the night of 28 February, 1953. His mother, Henrietta (née Montague), was travelling to join her husband Henrik Tøssentern, who had sailed three months earlier to take up a professorship in mathematical logic. She was accompanied by thirteen-year-old Lucy from her previous marriage to the cellist Pierre Tiese, a union that was dissolved amicably in 1942. Edvard was to become deeply
attached to his stepsister, and her scandalous death in the Oriel Gardens affair of 1963 caused him permanent grief.

Henrik Tøssentern had occupied, with equal facility, academic posts in musicology and mathematics in both Oslo and London. During the war he was active in a Norwegian Resistance cell devoted to signal interception and decryption. His contribution was noted by the British Admiralty, which drafted him to Bletchley Park in 1942. It was there that he met Henrietta, a linguist seconded from the Foreign Office, and they were married in 1945. The eponymous Tøssentern transform (referred to by him as
K N
transformation), now indispensable in quantum cryptography, belongs to Henrik.

The family remained in the United States until Edvard was eight, moving then to Oslo, London, Paris and Oxford. While still at school in Paris, he published a paper on problems in the translation of subjective terms, illustrated extensively with the vocabulary of pain. His graduate studies were at Cambridge, which he made his lifelong home, and where he became a Fellow of Nazarene College.

His home in Chaucer Road was famed for relaxed hospitality and a kind of informal, salon scholarship. It also housed an enviable library that expanded adventitiously into available living space; it is said that the mathematician Rodney Thwistle thought it imprudent to continue visiting as, room after room, ‘books displaced oxygen'. Nevertheless, the vitality somehow remained. In recent conversations, Tøssentern shared ideas that, typically, unified his interests. One was concerned with defining semantic coherence (he used the example of narrative sense) in terms of a suite of conserved properties (such as temporal, nominal and causal content). Another was an inductive graph-based approach to spatial reasoning and image analysis. One is tempted to speculate that some of these advances might have led to a rigorous method of dream description.

Tøssentern set out from Madregalo on Greater Ferende in fine weather on 1 April. He was an experienced navigator and was flying alone. Authorities describe
Abel
as an all-weather steerable balloon with hurricane-rated burners, fully equipped for emergencies, and provisioned for three weeks of powered
flight. It carried specialized skipping traps thought suitable for the capture of weaver fish, though these were unlikely to have been deployed in very rough conditions. Final contact with
Abel
was an automatic status signal recorded by ground stations at 1543 hr GMT on 3 April, approaching midnight local time. Far Eastern news services report that an extensive air-sea search was downgraded after failing to locate any trace of the craft or its pilot. Investigations continue locally, and statutory enquiries will be conducted both by the United Kingdom and by Norway.

Tøssentern had many friends, and some will remember back a few years to a convivial evening at Chaucer Road when Edvard spoke movingly of spiritual and psychological identity, and his own sense of statelessness. Trans-cultural parenthood, birth at sea, international schooling and his being non-discriminately multilingual were the complex predicates to an indistinctness of personhood that he revealed as deeply saddening. His words were memorable in being both very exposing but also surprising, because he was a man of considerable fun, with evident certainty of self, and appeared relaxed in his many worlds. It is difficult to accept that his last experience was like his first, travelling in the night, again at sea.

Edvard Tøssentern never married. He is survived by his close companion, the psychiatrist and aviation writer Anna Camenes.

Rede Professor Wallis Pioniv contributes:
The proposition that primitive dream imagery might reproduce, albeit imperfectly, the experience of one's ancestors, including their terrors, was rather too existentially charged for post-modern sensitivities, for which the meaninglessness hypothesis of memory de-junking was much more appealing. Even worse, the notion that one's own ideation, one's own monsters, or indeed oneself as a monster, might be transmitted forward to future generations threatened deeply held assumptions about the privacy of the mind and an individual's discretionary power of inviolable concealment over unedifying thoughts.

For a suggestion so injurious to universally approved beliefs about personal identity, free will and autonomy, Tøssentern was subjected to a firestorm of attacks, many
ad hominem,
and many
based fallaciously on accusations of essentialism, teleologism, and Lamarckism. Nevertheless, despite a temperamental disdain for the non-rational, he responded to all his critics with practical argument, recourse to first principles, appeal to precedent, and a methodical display of the evidence. Only occasionally here did exasperation intrude on formality: in the appraisal of competing theories, he applied, along with standard measures of best fit and parsimony and the rest, a novel test of ‘least silliness', which quieted whole blocs of academe indefinitely.

Tøssentern knew, of course, that from a biological point of view the outstanding problem to address was the claim of heritability. Recent decades had brought to pre-eminence the molecular genetic basis of life, and the idea that a dream synthesized from experience in the parent could be passed to offspring was stigmatized by discredited theories of acquired-trait inheritance. Tøssentern argued, however, that although the nucleotide sequence was clearly necessary for inheritance in complex organisms, it had not been proved sufficient, and to suppose otherwise was conceptually restrictive (and, he thought, an act of hubris). Indeed, it could not be so proved until the mechanism of every potentially heritable feature, including, possibly, dreams, had been explained. Though desperately unfashionable, this was strictly logical, and given the state of the art, not refutable. Most importantly, the argument dispersed a siege of intemperate orthodoxy and served to legitimize a body of serious research. It is fair to say that the Tøssentern theory is now accepted by most major schools of philosophy, psychology and cognitive science, and it remains only for mainstream biology to fully accommodate the paradigm. Extraordinarily, by the close of the twentieth century, the signs were there: evidence is accumulating of epigenetic heredity based on selective methylation of DNA segments in the genome. How obvious it now seems that Tøssentern was right to demand an open mind on the possibilities.