sci-fi philosophy

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The fish pendant, on Dick’s account, began to emit a golden ray of light, and Dick suddenly experienced what he called, with a nod to Plato, anamnesis: the recollection or total recall of the entire sum of knowledge. Dick claimed to have access to what philosophers call the faculty of “intellectual intuition”: the direct perception by the mind of a metaphysical reality behind screens of appearance. Many philosophers since Kant have insisted that such intellectual intuition is available only to human beings in the guise of fraudulent obscurantism, usually as religious or mystical experience, like Emmanuel Swedenborg’s visions of the angelic multitude. This is what Kant called, in a lovely German word, “die Schwärmerei,” a kind of swarming enthusiasm, where the self is literally en-thused with the God, o theos. Brusquely sweeping aside the careful limitations and strictures that Kant placed on the different domains of pure and practical reason, the phenomenal and the noumenal, Dick claimed direct intuition of the ultimate nature of what he called “true reality.” Yet the golden fish episode was just the beginning.

more from Simon Critchley at the Opinionater here.

perl on sendak

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The great popular artists have an instinctive relationship with the audience. That was true of Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday at the age of 83. He followed his gut. He kowtowed to no one. He knew that when pop culture really matters, it’s grounded in personal experience—in something the artist feels so strongly that other people cannot help but feel it too. Sendak had been involved with more than 50 children’s books by the time he became a national sensation in 1963 with Where the Wild Things Are. But even after Max in his white pajamas became part of modern mythology, right up there with the Beatle’s Nowhere Man, Sendak refused to take the audience for granted. He was resolutely independent to the end, and he expected the same of the public that had made him famous. There was something of the nineteenth-century reformer about Sendak—an old-fashioned optimism about the capacity of popular art to change public opinion and make the world a better place. He worked hard to provide public theater for children. He took on the subject of homelessness in 1993, with We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, his old familiar cast of adorable child-gremlins now living in hideaways jerrybuilt from cardboard boxes.

more from Jed Perl at TNR here.

A Richer Life by Seeing the Glass Half Full

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” — is the antithesis of optimism. In a book called “Breaking Murphy’s Law,” Suzanne C. Segerstrom, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, explained that optimism is not about being positive so much as it is about being motivated and persistent. Dr. Segerstrom and other researchers have found that rather than giving up and walking away from difficult situations, optimists attack problems head-on. They plan a course of action, getting advice from others and staying focused on solutions. Whenever my husband, a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist, said, “It can’t be done,” I would seek a different approach and try harder — although I occasionally had to admit he was right. Dr. Segerstrom wrote that when faced with uncontrollable stressors, optimists tend to react by building “existential resources” — for example, by looking for something good to come out of the situation or using the event to grow as a person in a positive way. I was 16 when my mother died of cancer. Rather than dwell on the terrible void her death left in my life, I managed to gain value from the experience. I learned to apply her lifelong frugality more constructively, living each day as if it could be my last, but with a focus on the future in case it wasn’t. Yes, I saved, but I also chose not to postpone for some nebulous future the things I wanted to do and could, if I tried hard, find a way to do now. And I adopted a very forthright approach to life, believing that if I wanted something badly enough, I could probably overcome the odds against me.

More here.

The two 3QD summer interns for 2012

Dear Readers and Applicants,

I must confess that I am extremely gratified by the number of amazingly talented and intelligent and fascinating young persons from four continents who applied for our internship. I feel sad that I can only take a maximum of two people but I would like to express my gratitude also to all the other remarkable individuals in the excellent pool of candidates: thank you so much for making the effort to apply. I am sorry that it didn't work out this time but I am glad that I got to know you a little bit, and I want to assure you that it was not necessarily a matter of any applicant being “better” than any other, it is just that I was looking for some specific skills and experience in certain areas. I wish you the best and hope that we have the opportunity to work together sometime in the future.

And now without further ado here are the two 3QD interns for summer 2012:

HenryHenry Molofsky

Proudly hailing from Washington, DC, Henry now lives in Connecticut where he studies philosophy and music at Wesleyan University. He has previously worked at the nationally syndicated public radio program Afropop. He has also spent time studying and being a middle-school English teacher's assistant in Israel. He writes a lot of essays, which sometimes he'll admit he enjoys, but he also enjoys running in the woods, playing crazy parties with his top-40 cover band, and banging on West-African drums with nearly-correct technique. And he is a pianist.

ZujajaZujaja Tauqeer

Zujaja is a DPhil student researching military power and medical aid in Pakistan at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. A graduate of Brooklyn College, she will study medicine at Harvard Medical School after completing her DPhil. Born in Lahore, Zujaja left Pakistan with her family to escape persecution against Ahmadi Muslims, and someday, when she's finally out of the classroom, she hopes to return there and work to create an equitable and sustainable healthcare system.

Welcome Zujaja and Henry and get ready for June 18th! You are now Associate Editors of 3QD. And thanks once again to all the brilliant people who applied.

Yours,

Abbas

    Public Access to Publicly Funded Research: it’s only fair

    by Bill Hooker

    Attention Conservation Notice: this post is here to ask you to sign a petition asking the White House to make all publicly funded research publicly available. Read on for background, or go straight to the petition.

    You paid for it — this is about research funded by tax dollars.Index

    You don’t own it — the majority of research is still published under the subscription model, with authors transferring copyright to the publisher.

    You can’t even read it — unless you have access through a subscribing institution, such as a university library, it will cost you around $30-$40 per paper to read the research you funded. The same goes for the researchers whose salaries you also pay: either their institution pays millions of dollars per year in subscriptions, or they pay the same $30-$40 per paper to access the work they need to build on. And no matter which institution they work at, they don’t have access to everything they need. Not even Harvard can afford full access.

    That’s not right.

    It’s not right, but some vested interests like it that way and are spending plenty of lobbying dollars trying to keep it that way. Recently, though, researchers and the public have been pushing back.

    The Cost of Knowledge Boycott coincided with the withdrawal of the RWA, universities are canceling subscriptions, editors are resigning from the boards of toll-access journals, and there has been a good deal of mainstream media coverage.

    It’s important that we push back. We, meaning everyone — whether you’re a patient who wants to take control of their own healthcare, a backyard scientist who wants to know more about how the world works, or a taxpayer who wants their investment in research to yield the maximum return, it’s in your interests to stand up and tell the government that all research funded by all federal agencies should be publicly available. It is high time we took back the science we paid for.

    The US government funds a lot of research. I mean, a lot. Counting just the research budgets over $100 million, we have the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health & Human Services, Homeland Security and Transportation; the Environmental Protection Agency; NASA; and the National Science Foundation. Of all those agencies, only the NIH (which is just one part of HHS) has a public-access policy.

    All of that research is paid for by taxes. All of that research should be publicly available. That’s the premise and the promise of this petition to the White House:

    Read more »

    The Inner Lives of Animals

    by Namit Arora

    BonoboIt is often said that humans are the only animals to use symbols. So many other claims of human uniqueness have fallen away—thoughts, emotions, intelligence, tool use, sense of fairness—what's so special about symbols, you ask? I share your skepticism, dear reader, and in the next few paragraphs I'll tell you why.

    Let's begin by clarifying what “symbol” means here. One way to do this is to contrast symbols with signs. A sign, such as a red light, a grimace, a growl, or a thunderstorm, signifies something direct and tangible, making us think or act in response to the thing signified. Issuing and responding to signs is commonplace in Animalia. A symbol, on the other hand, is “something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention”. A symbol allows us to think about the thing or idea symbolized outside its immediate context, such as the word “water” for the liquid, “7” for a certain quantity, and “flag” for a community. What is symbolized doesn't even have to be real, such as God, and herein lies the power of symbols—they are the building blocks of abstract and reflective thought. Evidence of material symbols used by humans dates back at least 60-100K years, when burial objects and decorated beads start to appear in archaeological finds. Linguistic symbols were almost certainly in use long before then.

    According to Susanne Langer, symbols serve “to liberate thought from the immediate stimuli of a physically present world; and that liberation marks the essential difference between human and nonhuman mentality … Words, pictures, and memory images are symbols that may be combined and varied in a thousand ways.” It is only through symbolic thought that we imagine the past or the future—mental time-travel, including episodic memory, requires the use of symbols. Indeed, language is really a system of symbolic communication, combining words (which are symbols) and syntax. If non-human animals lack symbols, what and how do they really think?

    Read more »

    Monday Poem

    My breathing system seems to be:
    these lungs within; without: those trees
    ……………………….. —Inspiration.

    Conjoined

    There are mountains in this pic of withered leaves—
    as from a satellite

    and voids

    in shadows they recede

    but I see
    brittle peaks

    bright spines
    curling from dead stems
    dry as earth desiccated by the practices
    of men:

    light filaments
    that have broadcast life and breath:

    sucked dioxide carbon in,
    transmuted it like alchemists then
    expired it as oxygen

    dry lungs of trees
    alveoli complements

    sister lungs as close and tight as twins; consider:

    when that one dies
    this one withers
    .

    by Jim Culleny
    5/15/12

    Withered Leaves

    Ed Bilous: 21st Century Music Man

    by Randolyn Zinn

    5543Machine-048c
    Ed Bilous, the composer and teacher, met me the other day at Juilliard where he has created the Center for Innovation in the Arts. Last month he was awarded the William Schuman Chair at Juilliard and you will be able to watch a video of his stirring speech at the end of this interview where he makes the case for re-imagining our educational system with the arts placed at the center of the curriculum.

    Ed and I met In the early 1980s when we were teaching artists together at Lincoln Center Institute–the aesthetic education program that matches artists with schoolteachers to prepare students for seeing productions of dance, theater and music.

    Randolyn Zinn: What year was that exactly…?

    Ed Bilous: Had to be between ‘81 and ’83. I was working on my PhD at Juilliard at the time.

    RZ: Just think, no cell phones or Internet. The extent of personal technology were our SONY Walkmans and telephone answering machines with tiny reel-to-reel tapes inside. You couldn’t dial in for your messages from outside the house.

    EB: That’s right.

    RZ: So how did you become so adept with technology and its interface with music?

    EB: Technology has always been a part of music making. The shift from harpsichord to piano was largely a technological revolution, as was the creation of the organ. When you think about early composers a thousand years ago, their resources were fairly undeveloped, basically just primitive string and wind instruments. Bit by bit, technological changes brought them to life in a way that allowed far more expressivity and creativity until we got the kind of instruments we see in the orchestra today. The transformation from harpsichord to piano is amazing. The harpsichord doesn’t really have dynamics; you play loud or you play soft, but you can’t really achieve a crescendo. Having that ability with the piano transformed music making and a whole new kind of playing and composing. Trumpets went from just being bugle-like things, cones of brass, to instruments with valves that allow all kinds of sophisticated chromatics and articulation. So…technology has always been a part of music.

    Read more »

    Coordinates: how symbols talk to geometry

    by Rishidev Chaudhuri

    Like the rest of us poor mortals, wandering in constant confusion between things and the names for things, bewitched by language and unable to resist it, mathematicians and physicists are constantly struggling with their representations and yet entirely reliant upon them to grasp the world.

    Many of the fundamental intuitions that we start to describe the world with are geometric or spatial: this is a point; this is another point; walk in this direction to get from the first point to the second; this is the path a particle takes. If we want to make this precise, to describe and classify and manipulate and compute, we need to be able to make these statements precise. The simple act of drawing a pair of coordinate axes on a flat surface and using pairs of numbers to describe points is extraordinarily powerful, yoking algebra and symbolic manipulation to geometry and spatial intuition, and it unlocks for us a language within which to watch spatial and temporal processes unfold. Similarly, describing points on the surface of the Earth by pairs of numbers (latitude and longitude are the most common) allows us to specify locations relative to other locations, to calculate distances and trajectories and to describe and communicate quantities that vary across the surface of the Earth, like weather patterns and temperatures.

    OrthCoord-page001

    But in picking a particular representation we've done a certain violence to the geometric structure we started with, by forcing an arbitrary layer of description on top. We might have decided to describe points relative to axes at right angles, like so:

    But we could equally well have rotated the axes, or shifted the center, or chosen axes that were at other angles, like so:

    SkewCoord-page001

    Similarly, the standard way to describe points on the surface of the Earth is by their distance from the equator (i.e. latitude) and their distance from a line perpendicular to the equator and passing through Greenwich (longitude), but I could choose to describe places by how far away they are from my house and in which direction relative to some local landmark. And this is how we generally give directions locally.

    And so, now that we've introduced a way of describing space, we have to be careful that we don't get led astray by our representations, and that we keep separate the convenient descriptors that we use and the spatial and physical quantities that we're trying to describe. Depending on our system of representation, the particular coordinates attached to London and New York might vary dramatically. But our calculation of the physical distance between them shouldn't depend on how we've chosen to represent them.

    Physicists and mathematicians have developed a lot of theory to derive and explain which quantities are physically meaningful (e.g. the distance between London and New York) and which quantities are simply consequences of the particular representation that we have chosen (e.g. the longitude of New York). This is often not trivial. For example, as Einstein famously found, the distance in space between events will be calculated differently by observers moving at different velocities (a form of coordinate dependence), but there is a quantity called the interval that combines the distance and time between events that all observers can agree on.

    Read more »

    Monkey Fire

    by Mara Jebsen

    I met a tipsy older lady in a place;

    She said, “Honey, it doesn't really come clear

    'til you're sixty.” But she wouldn't say

    what. The television was blaring

    about chimpanzees. Some journalist

    had likened our president to a chimp.

    Meanwhile, a chimp named Travis

    was reported to have sipped

    wine; and more recently tea, laced with Xanax,

    before his “unprecedented

    killing spree.” The reporters said Travis

    “had no history of violence,” but one of

    my students, who'd grown up in T's town

    knew a guy Travis had attacked-back

    when they were kids. The bartender, Gene

    checked it on his i-phone, and there were photos

    of the owner–or should I say “mother?” snuggled

    up tight with the chimp, before bed.

    Read more »

    Saadia Toor and “The State of Islam”

    by Omar Ali

    The-State-of-Islam-Toor-Sadia-9780745329918Saadia Toor is an assistant professor of sociology and social work at the City University of New York and recently published a book about Pakistan titled The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War politics in Pakistan. She states that the book grew out of her PhD thesis (a doctoral thesis in developmental sociology titled “”The Politics of Culture and the Poetics of Protest: Pakistani Women and Islamisation, 1977-1988.”). The book’s official blurb states:

    The State of Islam tells the story of the Pakistani nation-state through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, in order to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the rise of militant Islam across the world. Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam, and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined political realm, The State of Islam is a Gramscian analysis of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period. The author uses the tools of cultural studies and postcolonial theory to understand what is at stake in discourses of Islam, socialism, and the nation in Pakistan…

    She also states that:

    I wanted to subvert this discourse by highlighting the complexity of Pakistan’s history and the primacy of people’s struggles within it, as well as the role of the US-aligned establishment (and, at key junctures, liberals) in quashing these struggles and the alternate political and cultural visions they embodied.

    It is indeed possible to write a good work of history that is also a subtle work of socialist (or other) propaganda and that appeals to the author’s in-group while reaching a larger audience. But this takes a lot of skill and experience and Ms Toor, unfortunately, is unable to manage this feat. In her youthful enthusiasm for her version of the socialist cause (a cause she formally joined by becoming a member of the Pakistan workers and peasants party or Mazdoor Kissan Party, while back in Pakistan researching her PhD thesis) leads her to shoehorn every event into an academic-Marxist narrative that owes more to to Tariq Ali and fashionable Wesern academic prejudices than to the actual history of Pakistan. Of course, it is possible for youthful enthusiasm to produce a great book (John Reed’s “Ten days that shook the world” comes to mind) but unfortunately, this is not that book.

    Read more »

    Envy, or, The Last Infirmity

    Sven Birkerts in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

    1336866570It was the face of F. Murray Abraham playing Antonio Salieri in Milos Forman's film adaptation of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus that finally touched me off. Who knew that envy had so many expressions, that it was such a great subject? Why hadn't I gotten it before? I had seen Amadeusseveral times over the years, but this is how it is with movies, with books, with everything — you need the eyes to see what is to be seen. But even so, how could I still have thought that it was about Mozart. About — what does “about” even mean? Centering on? Mapping to? Representing? Mozart in the film has nothing to do with the Mozart of artistic imagination or our received notions of greatness. He is a silly little grasshopper, a buffoon, even though sublime melodies are seen to issue from his every pen stroke. He very clearly cannot help his genius; it has been stuffed into him like an irrepressible filling. I never understood: how could the man, the boy-man, be such a fool? It made no sense. At least not if Amadeus was viewed as his movie, about him. But the other night — it took this long — I got that I'd been dense. Amadeus was about Salieri, first to last, and if Mozart came across as he unflatteringly did, it was because Salieri cast him so in his rancorous memory. The gulf between Mozart's personality and his gift was what his rival saw, what his jealous rage projected.

    More here.

    Against the Infantilization of the Natural History Museum

    Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

    6a00d83453bcda69e20168eb8cd469970c-320wiIt has often struck me that no greater misfortune can befall a natural history museum than for it to come into enough money for renovations. These typically take the form of interactive screens displaying 'fun facts' directed at eight-year-olds, and they require the removal of anything that reeks of the past, which is to say also the removal of the very idea of natural history, in favor of some eternally present, unceasingly entertaining, Chuck E. Cheese-like arcade.

    Just think about it: what kind of adult goes to a nature museum these days? I mean an adult who does not have some child in tow: a child, it is presumed, in need of perpetual edification? I mean a proper, auto-edifying, end-in-him-or-herself adult. These days, museums that are not about art are about nature, nature is about science, science is about education, and education, as we know, is for the kids, insofar as they, finally, are the future.

    Art for the grown-ups, then; nature for the kids. But education must be fun, so out with the rancid body parts in formaldehyde with calligraphic labels in Latin; in with the touch screens that tell you, as if you did not already know this since the age of two or so, that dinosaurs are birds, that Pluto is no longer a planet, and, in case you forgot this for a fraction of a second, that learning is fun. But all this thoroughly and disgustingly ideological rebranding requires money, which, as I've already suggested, the best museums of natural history do not have.

    More here.

    Mathematicians Come Closer to Solving Goldbach’s Weak Conjecture

    Davide Castelvecchi in Scientific American:

    One of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics is also among the easiest to grasp. The weak Goldbach conjecture says that you can break up any odd number into the sum of, at most, three prime numbers (num­bers that cannot be evenly divided by any other num­ber except themselves or 1). For example:

    35 = 19 + 13 + 3
    or
    77 = 53 + 13 + 11

    Mathematician Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, has now inched toward a proof. He has shown that one can write odd numbers as sums of, at most, five primes—and he is hopeful about getting that down to three. Besides the sheer thrill of cracking a nut that has eluded some of the best minds in mathematics for nearly three centuries, Tao says, reaching that coveted goal might lead mathematicians to ideas useful in real life—for example, for encrypting sensitive data.

    The weak Goldbach conjecture was proposed by 18th-century mathematician Christian Goldbach. It is the sibling of a statement concerning even numbers, named the strong Goldbach conjecture but actually made by his colleague, mathematician Leonhard Euler. The strong version says that every even number larger than 2 is the sum of two primes. As its name implies, the weak version would follow if the strong were true: to write an odd number as a sum of three primes, it would be sufficient to subtract 3 from it and apply the strong version to the resulting even number.

    More here.

    Can you identify?

    Laura Miller in Salon:

    Book_mirror-460x307The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later. The suggestibility of readers isn’t news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science’s job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge — if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.

    A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured. The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.

    More here.

    Sunday Poem

    Still Life
    —static: from the Latin sto, stare, to stand.

    Once there were four green apples arranged
    In a simple pyramid on a white china plate.

    Once a painter rendered them on a cheap canvas
    That was left hanging in the kitchen of the house

    She bought soon after a truck plowed through
    The windshield of the car her husband was driving.

    In the remodeled kitchen that still let in a draft,
    After toast and tea, she would stand before the frame.

    From the shadow limning the apples’ bottom edges
    She could almost hear a low hum, the static of objects

    Pulled through time, the slight hiss of their resistance,
    The one sound when everything is standing still.
    .

    by H.L. Spelman