Over at Philosophy Bites:

Can a computer think? John Searle famously used the Chinese Room thought experiment to suggest that it can't. Daniel Dennett is not convinced. He thinks that Searle's thought experiment is what he calls a 'boom crutch' – a faulty intuition pump. Here, in conversation with Nigel Warburton, he explains why.

Listen to Daniel Dennett on the Chinese Room

Listen to an earlier Philosophy Bites interview with Daniel Dennett on Free Will Worth Wanting

Steve Coll reviews Vali Nasr's new book in the New York Review of Books:

For the last decade or so, Vali Nasr has published original, pragmatic work about Middle Eastern politics. The Shia Revival, his 2006 book, confidently mapped how the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq strengthened Iran and reanimated sectarian conflict in the Arab world and beyond. Forces of Fortune followed three years later; it described presciently the potential of Arab middle classes just before Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan urbanites helped ignite the “Arab Spring.” By that time Nasr had entered the State Department as a senior adviser to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, whom President Obama appointed as a special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. After Holbrooke died suddenly in December 2010, Nasr left the State Department and in 2012 became dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.

In The Dispensable Nation, Nasr dissects what he regards as the overlapping failures of the Obama administration’s foreign policies across the Middle East and South Asia, from Pakistan to Iran to revolutionary Egypt. The book begins as a detailed, analytical memoir of disappointment over how “a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers” undermined Holbrooke’s diplomatic mission in South Asia, as Nasr looked on. The author then embarks on a withering review of first-term Obama administration diplomacy.

He concludes with criticism of Obama’s most important foreign policy conception, the announced American “pivot” toward Asia and away from the Middle East, a reorientation of policy, alliance priorities, and military deployments made possible by the reduction of American involvement in the wars Obama inherited in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most provocatively, Nasr argues that by retreating from the Middle East—and by signaling a withdrawal from “the exuberant American desire to lead in the world”—Obama has yielded strategic advantage to China, for which the United States will pay a heavy price in the future.

More here.

Eugene Wolters in the blog Critical Theory:

Many scholars attack critical theory as “obscurantist” and nonsensical after their brief forays into the field make them realize, “hey, reading is hard.” To be fair, plenty of critical theory is nonsensical bullshit, that despite being empirically invalidated, seems to cling on to dear life in the dark corners of academia. And as we’ve noted before, Noam Chomsky has called out Lacan for being entirely self-aware of his chicanery and also took a jab at Slavoj Zizek. Interestingly enough, Chomsky differentiates Foucault from these alleged charlatans.

Chomsky noted that Foucault, unlike his colleagues, was actually intelligible if you sat him down in conversation. Chomsky said:

I’ve met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible — he speaking French, me English)…

I don’t particularly blame Foucault for it: it’s such a deeply rooted part of the corrupt intellectual culture of Paris that he fell into it pretty naturally, though to his credit, he distanced himself from it.

Now, as Open Culture notes, Foucault admitted to his friend John Searle that he intentionally complicated his writings to appease his French audience. Searle claims Foucault told him: “In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a profound thinker.”

More here.

Lee Billings in Scientific American:

The most accurate thermometer in the known universe sits in a rather nondescript white building in Teddington, England, on the campus of the U.K.’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL). It looks nothing like a slender tube filled with mercury or colored alcohol. Instead, it’s a copper vessel about the size of a large cantaloupe, filled with dilute ultrapure argon gas and studded with microphones and microwave antennas, precisely shaped by a diamond-tipped lathe so that its radius varies with an uncertainty of only about 12 atomic layers of copper. The purpose of this thermometer is not really to measure temperature, however. Rather, new results from this and other similar devices could soon allow scientists to redefine temperature completely and bring it in line with the meter and other standard international units of measurement.

What the device actually measures is the relation between energy, as measured in joules, and temperature, as measured in the international standard unit, the kelvin. This relation is expressed as the Boltzmann constant and, in a perfect world, would be the kelvin’s ideal physical basis. That it’s not is purely a historical accident born of the fact that most of our planet’s surface is covered with liquid water, a substance which conveniently changes to ice or vapor at well-known thresholds of temperature.

More here.

Lee Siegel in the Wall Street Journal:

When people wax plaintive about the fate of the humanities, they talk, in particular, about the slow extinction of English majors. Never mind that the preponderance of English majors go into other fields, such as law or advertising, and that students who don't major in English can still take literature courses. In the current alarming view, large numbers of people devoting four years mostly to studying novels, poems and plays are all that stand between us and sociocultural nightfall.

The remarkably insignificant fact that, a half-century ago, 14% of the undergraduate population majored in the humanities (mostly in literature, but also in art, philosophy, history, classics and religion) as opposed to 7% today has given rise to grave reflections on the nature and purpose of an education in the liberal arts.

Such ruminations always come to the same conclusion: We are told that the lack of a formal education, mostly in literature, leads to numerous pernicious personal conditions, such as the inability to think critically, to write clearly, to empathize with other people, to be curious about other people and places, to engage with great literature after graduation, to recognize truth, beauty and goodness.

These solemn anxieties are grand, lofty, civic-minded, admirably virtuous and virtuously admirable. They are also a sentimental fantasy.

More here.

Carl Franzen in AlterNet:

A Canadian duo and their Kickstarter-funded, pedal-powered helicopter have won one of the longest-standing challenges in the history of aviation — keeping a human-powered aircraft hovering up in the air at height of at least 9.8 feet, within a 32.8 by 32.8-foot square, for 60 seconds minimum. The challenge, known as the Sikorsky prize, has withstood at numerous failed attempts since it was established in 1980, 33 years ago, even with a $250,000 bounty. But it was finally bested earlier in June by the Atlas, a gigantic human-powered helicopter designed by Cameron Robertson and Todd Reichert, aeronautical engineers from the University of Toronto, who cofounded a company AeroVelo.

The pair funded the construction of their winning aircraft through a successful Kickstarter campaign last year, and just barely managed to beat a rival team from the University of Maryland, whose craft Gamera failed to stay within the square-foot range required by the prize, as Popular Mechanics reports.

The Atlas is controlled by having a single pilot pedal a bicycle-like wheel to turn the aircraft's four enormous, independent rotors (one at each corner). The entire span of the craft is 190 feet.

More here.

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

Children of the Jacaranda Tree is a novel with a great weight of history attached to it. This much is made explicit by the author's note that accompanies the proof copies, telling readers that this is “an attempt … to shed light on this dark moment in Iranian history, on its tales of violence, prison and death … to give voice not only to the victims of this atrocity but also to the ordeal of their families and their children”. The “dark moment” is 1988, when thousands, or tens of thousands, of political prisoners were assassinated in Iran; their number included Sahar Delijani's uncle. Her parents were fortunate to have been released from prison prior to the “purge”.

…At the centre of the web of connections are three women prisoners – Azar, who gives birth in prison; Firoozeh, who is known to have turned informant in exchange for prison privileges; Parisa, who has one child growing up outside prison and is pregnant with a second. Through these women and their families a narrative emerges that is more effective than one that cleaves to an individual. The pain of women prisoners who have to give up their children; the pain of parents and sisters who don't know what is happening to those they love who are imprisoned; the pain of letting go of the nephews and nieces you've been raising, when their mothers are finally released from prison; the pain of suppressing the truth; the pain of discovering the truth; the pain of leaving Iran, the pain of staying and the pain of return: all these are held within these linked stories.

More here.

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times:

The amateur magician and the magical beauty. Their first names alone conjure a time when the words Hollywood and glamour still held hands. Ava Gardner was “essential to the Hollywood myth about itself,” as her friend Dirk Bogarde observed, and so was Orson Welles. Orson was “his own greatest production,” as the Hollywood chronicler Peter Biskind writes, and so was Ava. Two new books — “My Lunches With Orson” and “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations” — unearth vintage conversations with the stars in their final years, when they were broke, in bad health, unable to get work and mourning their lost grandeur. But oh, what gorgeous wrecks they were, and what mesmerizing stories they told, these Sunset Boulevard Scheherazades.

…Even maudlin, Welles and Gardner are magnificent. “A lot of booze has flowed under the bridgework,” Ava says. Both hit the big time as teenagers, Boy Genius and Girl Vamp, landing Time covers in their 20s. They had in common a bawdy honesty, a desire to shock and a lust for living extravagantly. The lion and lioness in winter are poignant. The cosmopolitan man who made “Citizen Kane” could not get financing to make a movie. The green-eyed woman who dazzled in Technicolor in “The Barefoot Contessa” was drinking, smoking, coughing and listening to old Sinatra-Tommy Dorsey recordings that Sinatra sent her after her strokes. “Who’d have thought the highlight of my day is walking the dog,” dryly notes Gardner, who once danced all night and then began drinking Dom Pérignon in the studio makeup room at 5 a.m. “I miss Frank,” she says, even the fights. She knows he will outlive her: “Bastards are always the best survivors.”

More here.

Vox Tablet over at Tablet magazine, a podcast:

Nearly 120 years after the Dreyfus Affair shook the world, you would think we know all there is to know about the seminal case involving a French Jewish officer falsely accused of treason. Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty and deported to prison on a small, remote island, and it was only after his family, joined by leading intellectuals of the time, rallied in protest that he was acquitted, his case becoming a cornerstone of the democratic French republic.

A flood of books on the topic followed, from Emile Zola’sJ’Accuse onward. Yet French historians showed remarkably little interest when, a few years ago, the French army made available parts of its archive that include the notorious secret dossier that had been used to indict the Jewish captain. The file sheds light not only on the case itself but also on the complex web of personalities, institutions, and societal attitudes that surrounded it.

All these details might have remained in the shadows were it not for the dogged work of French historian Pierre Gervais. Gervais is the co-author of a recent book, available in French only, about the secret file. On today’s podcast, from his apartment in Paris, Gervais speaks with Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz about his discoveries. Leibovitz has also written a book on these latest revelations about the Dreyfus Affair; it’s just out as an Amazon Kindle Singlepublished by Tablet Magazine. [Running time: 19:50.]

Seven experts discuss Alexander Cooley’s Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia, over at The National Bureau of Asian Research. S. Enders Wimbush:

Every great contest needs some great contestants. Yet the triangular contest for power in Central Asia among Russia, China, and the United States is very unequal, more scalene than equilateral. Of these, Russia strikes me as the least able to compete effectively for the long haul. Spiraling down across virtually all measures of power, authority, and influence, Russia is a dying state tempting debilitating crises at multiple levels. Cooley’s discussion of Russia’s seeming indifference to the fate of Central Asia after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 is spot on, as is his assessment that “the main challenge in analyzing Russian policy toward Central Asia is that it lacks a single overriding strategic goal” (p. 51). This begs the question: how can a state compete effectively if its objectives are unclear and its competitive resources are being quickly depleted? Nearly all Russian initiatives to regain prestige and stature in the region have failed to impress the Central Asians, much less the Chinese. Writing in 2011, I concluded that “Russia is not one of Asia’s rising powers but the opposite.” [2] I see nothing today suggesting otherwise.

Can we say that the United States also lacks an overriding strategic goal in Central Asia? When Central Asia was suddenly released from Soviet control in 1991, Americans were even more indifferent to the region than the Russians because few of them knew anything about it. I am unaware of Central Asia ever figuring in U.S. strategy at more than a transactional level. Cooley’s account strengthens this conclusion.

President Obama underlined the transactional basis of U.S. involvement by fixing the date for the transaction to end in 2014. This decision was apparently made without regard for the longer-term strategic implications of the United States’ virtual disappearance from this contest—not just for China and Russia but for all of Eurasia’s key actors. Consider that Central Asia today is arguably the world’s most contested geography. Powerful regional states—Russia, China, India, Iran, and Turkey—all seek a competitive advantage in the Central Asian space. This list includes four nuclear powers, with a fifth (Iran) close at hand and possibly a sixth (Turkey) further over the horizon. Outside contestants—for example, the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia—increase the density of this strategic soup. Is this an arena where the United States can afford strategic fatigue?

Name an African artist. Name two more. It’s a struggle: African art still has the most minor presence in the world’s museums, biennales, galleries. And when we do see it, too often it lacks the context for us to make sense of it. Tate Modern’s double show of Sudan-born Ibrahim el-Salahi, who lives in Oxford, and Meschac Gaba, based between Benin and the Netherlands, acknowledges this. An exhibition of muted, introverted visionary painting is set against a loud, bright deconstruction of social currency – the same contrast, as it happens, that Tate Britain negotiates in its summer shows devoted to L.S. Lowry versus Patrick Caulfield. But while Millbank luxuriates in familiar-name blockbusters, Bankside sets out to break preconceptions and clichés, for the first time according two Africans the large-scale singular exhibitions customarily devoted to western artists. In the 1960s el-Salahi was shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art alongside Picasso and Mark Rothko but he is unfamiliar on today’s art circuit.

more from Jackie Wullschlager at the FT here.

Berlin’s emergence as one of Britain’s foremost public intellectuals occurred alongside the intensification of the Cold War. Given his wartime work and continuing contacts with British, American and Israeli diplomats and politicians, it was perhaps only to be expected that he should be seen by some as enjoying too close a connection with power. In later years he became for his more imaginative detractors a faintly sinister figure, a donnish Machiavelli moving events secretly from behind the scenes. David Caute’s Isaac and Isaiah may have been written to support this view, but in many ways it can be read as a defence of Berlin’s consistent integrity. As Caute writes, ‘Whereas Isaiah Berlin tended to be consistent in his prime values whatever platform he chose – book, essay, lecture, broadcast, newspaper article – there were several Isaac Deutschers.’ It is a comment that captures the paradoxes of his well-balanced, informative and vivid book, which makes interesting use of Caute’s memories of conversations he had with Berlin when they were both fellows of All Souls in the early 1960s (Caute resigned his fellowship in 1965). The short last chapter reproduces letters between Berlin, the University of Sussex and others which, Caute thinks, tend to support the accusation that Berlin vetoed the application of Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher for a position in Soviet studies at the university, where Berlin served as external member on the academic advisory board.

more from John Gray at Literary Review here.

Richard Gunderman in The Atlantic:

Earlier this week data published in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicated that the life expectancy of people in the United States has increased over the past two decades by three years, to 78.2. This means that the average American today enjoys an extra 1,100 days of life.

…Suppose through some wonder of modern biomedical science we could suddenly double our life expectancy by staying in bed 20 hours per day, or giving up all solid foods, or never again reading a book. Would we do it? To say that we are willing to pay any price in order to increase the length of our lives is to say that we have forgotten what it really means to live. The Struldbruggs in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels are immortal specimens, but they are also miserable human beings, whose unending lives prove to be not blessing but curse. Before we spill too much ink bemoaning the U.S.'s declining standings in the world life expectancy race, we should devote a bit more time to reflection and conversation around what really makes a good life. Though Wolfgang Mozart and Martin Luther King died before the age of 40, they managed to lead extraordinarily productive and admirable lives that enriched the rest of mankind. By contrast, many of us may realize our ambition to become nonagenarians or even centenarians and yet contribute too little that really makes a difference. By this standard, our fiercest competitor is right here at home.

The real measure of a life is not how long it lasts. The real measure of a life is what we make of each and every day. We have exactly the same number of minutes per day as the Gateses and Buffetts of the world. How effectively are we making use of this time? I suspect that the best way to lead a truly full life is not by straining every sinew to keep our hearts beating to the last possible moment, but instead by bringing ourselves and others as fully to life as possible. And I won't be surprised to learn someday that living deeply also does far more than diet and exercise to keep us going as well.

More here.

From HowStuffWorks:

Genes appear to have a big role in our intelligence and talents. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a specific gene that may help manage our skill level for organizing things logically. And although this is just one part of the mystery between our genes and intelligence, the discovery certainly warrants some thought. This type of discovery may help explain why early studies in regard to intelligence seem to favor genetics over environment when it comes to IQ. Those studies showed that even though some adoptive children grew up in an environment completely separate from their biological parents, their IQs were more aligned with theirs than that of the adoptive parents [source: Dryden]. However, that's not the end of the story. As mentioned, the possible gene linked to organizing things logically is a piece of a much larger puzzle. That goes for intelligence and other talents, as well. Most of the time, when society claims someone as a genius, it's for multiple traits — personality, cognitive capacity, motivation — working together. As it turns out, these traits and others like them have been linked to strong hereditary underpinnings [source: Kaufman].

Even though these beloved traits have a basis in genetics, that doesn't mean they're set in stone. After all, one trait may require collaboration of multiple genes. According to cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, a hereditary advantage for a trait that might lead us to great things isn't a sure thing. Genes develop on their own, on their own timeline. That means that someone could be a child prodigy if everything comes together early on, but genius might not emerge until later in life — and it can even wane. This is where genetics and environment collide. While we might be able to thank our moms and dads for a genetic propensity for genius, their hard work creating a nurturing environment might deserve more applause than handing over their DNA should get.

More here.

Creation Myth

This is a story handed down.
It is about the old days when Bill
and Florence and a lot of their kin
lived in the little tin-roofed house
beside the woods, below the hill.
Mornings, they went up the hill to work,
Florence to the house,
the men and boys to the field.
Evenings, they all came home again.
There would be talk then and laughter
and taking of ease around the porch
while the summer night closed.
But one night, McKinley, Bill's young brother,
stayed away late, and it was dark
when he started down the hill.
Not a star shone, not a window.
What he was going down into was the dark,
only his footsteps sounding
to prove he trod the ground. And Bill
who had got up to cool himself,
thinking and smoking, leaning on
the jamb of the open front door,
heard McKinley coming down,
and heard his steps beat faster
as he came, for McKinley felt the pasture's
darkess joined to all the rest
of darkness everywhere. It touched
the depths of the woods and sky and grave.
In that huge dark, things that usually
stayed put might get around, as fish
in pond or slue get loose in flood.
Oh, the things could be coming close
that never had come close before.
He missed the house and went on down
and crossed the draw and pounded on
where the pasture widened on the other side,
lost then for sure. Propped in the door,
Bill heard him circling, a dark star
in the dark, breathing hard, his feet
blind on the little reality
that was left. Amused, Bill smoked
his smoke, and listened. He knew where
McKinley was, though McKinley didn't.
Bill smiled in the darkness to himself,
and let McKinley run until his steps
approached something really to fear:
the quarry pool. Bill quit his pipe
then, opened the screen, and stepped out,
barefoot, on the warm boards. “McKinley!”
he said, and laid the field out clear
under McKinley's feet, and placed
the map of it in his head.
.

by Wendell Berry
from Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
Counterpoint Books, 1998

Tom Streithorst in the LA Review of Books:

WE LIVE LIKE GODS, and we don’t even know it.

We fly across oceans in airplanes, we eat tropical fruit in December, we have machines that sing us songs, clean our house, take pictures of Mars. Much the total accumulated knowledge of our species can fit on a hard drive that fits in our pocket. Even the poorest among us own electronic toys that millionaires and kings would have lusted for a decade ago. Our ancestors would be amazed. For most of our time on the planet, humans lived on the knife-edge of survival. A crop failure could mean starvation and even in good times, we worked from sun up to sundown to earn our daily bread. In 1600, a typical workman spent almost half his income on nourishment, and that food wasn’t crème brûlée with passion fruit or organically raised filet mignon, it was gruel and the occasional turnip. Send us back to ancient Greece with an AK-47, a home brewing kit, or a battery-powered vibrator, and startled peasants would worship at our feet.

And yet we are not happy, we expected more, we were promised better. Our economy is a shambles, millions are out of work, and few of us think things are going to get better soon. When I graduated high school, in 1975, I assumed that whatever I did, I would end up somewhere in the great American middle class, and that I would live better than my father, who lived better than his. Today, my son doesn’t have nearly the same confidence. Back in those days, you could go off to India for seven years, sit around in an ashram, smoke pot and seek spiritual fulfilment, and still come home and get a good job as a copywriter at Ogilvy and Mather. Today kids need a spectacular resume just to get an unpaid internship at IBM. Our children fear any moment not on a career path could ruin their prospects for a successful future. Back in the 1970s, pop stars sang songs about of the tedium and anomie of factory work. Today the sons of laid-off autoworkers would trade anything for that security and steady wage.

On the one hand, technology has made us all much more productive than we were 30 years ago. On the other, jobs have evaporated.

Alex Worsnip in Prospect:

It is a near-truism that philosophy operates at a remove from the “real world.” Many philosophers suppose that the answers to questions in logic, epistemology and metaphysics are independent of particular empirical facts about how human society happens to be set up. But what about ethics and political philosophy? How far should philosophers concerned with these areas take into account the messy reality of everyday life?

Not far at all, says one venerable tradition that dates back at least to Kant in the 18th century, and probably as far as Plato. From this perspective, the job of ethics and political philosophy is to work out how things ought to be. This need not be closely related to how things actually are. For the philosopher trying to imagine the ideal society or specify the nature of virtue, engaging in detail with the world in its current state (or in its historical forms) may be unnecessary or even unhelpful.

This traditional picture, however, has always had its detractors. In recent years the attack has been led by a group identifying themselves as “political realists,” counting amongst their number philosophers such as Raymond Geuss and the late Bernard Williams. According to the realists, the traditional picture risks making political philosophy both irrelevant and falsely universalistic, mistakenly supposing that the same abstract principles are applicable to societies of radically different kinds. Realists have singled out many of the most prominent political philosophers of the 20th century—John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin and GA Cohen—for particular scorn.

The realist critique of these philosophers—let’s call them, by contrast, the “idealists”— encompasses a number of distinct charges, not all of which sit well together. One criticism is that the idealists’ abstract theories of justice are insufficiently engaged with real politics. Another related accusation is that their demands are unrealistic, standing no chance of being implemented. Another common charge, although a very different line of attack, is that idealists—Rawls in particular—are apologists for the political status quo, cooking up a convenient justification for the US’s particular brand of liberal democracy. Finally, the realists sometimes seem sceptical about the whole project of formulating theories of justice, suspecting that such theories are merely ideological devices that obscure power relations, or that there is in fact no universal theory of justice independent of particular societies and their convictions.