Trying to make Sense of Red
—A Tennessee Cleanup

Its janitors are sweeping up its sins—
senators are on the floor with whisks and
fine-toothed combs. They crawl and sift,
scooping, collecting photographs
of those they’ve lynched
they cram them into
rubbish bins

—before their kids get wind

they ban   their two-faced history,
they ban   before their children come to know,
they ban   before their jittering pot lid blows

—but

maybe    they skew and hack the rules
..  ………  to save kids from what history shows,
maybe    they obfuscate for mercy’s sake,
maybe.   before their children come to see and judge,
maybe.. .they’d rather have them shot in schools

Jim Culleny, 4/8/23

by Mindy Clegg

In their oft-cited classic examination of the modern mass media, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky described modern American news media thusly: “The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.”¹ In other words, democratic states use privately-owned media as a means of social control. Private corporations own and operate media outlets and they work with the US government because the power of the state dovetailed with their own economic interests.

The groundwork for this state of affairs emerged out of intellectual discourse in the early days of mass media. In the wake of the first world war, prominent intellectuals like Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays suggested a set of strategies for channeling democratic impulses expanding in the United States to better align with the wishes of the ruling classes.² Such analysis was and continues to be necessary, as many are unaware of the very real pitfalls of corporate media in democratic societie. These systems are now often globalized which shape our understanding of the past and present that we must understand in hopes of changing them. But we must also wonder if the singular focus on these systems of control lead to the feelings of hopelessness that many of us feel about our institutions these days. As much as describing what dominates us feels cathartic, focusing only on the systems of control and not on resistance makes the problem seem insurmountable. I argue that we need to look for the cracks as much as describe the problem posed by corporate medi. Understanding the democratic alternatives within and outside of the mainstream production of popular culture can help us to see these cracks. Read more »

Sughra Raza. NYC, April 2023.

Digital photograph.

by David J. Lobina

The hype surrounding Large Language Models remains unbearable when it comes to the study of human cognition, no matter what I write in this Column about the issue – doesn’t everyone read my posts? I certainly do sometimes.

Indeed, this is my fourth, successive post on the topic, having already made the points that Machine/Deep Learning approaches to Artificial Intelligence cannot be smart or sentient, that such approaches are not accounts of cognition anyway, and that when put to the test, LLMs don’t actually behave like human beings at all (where? In order: here, here, and here).[i]

But, again, no matter. Some of the overall coverage on LLMs can certainly be ludicrous (a covenant so that future, sentient computer programs have their rights protected?), and even delirious (let’s treat AI chatbots as we treat people, with radical love?), and this is without considering what some tech charlatans and politicians have said about these models. More to the point here, two recent articles from some cognitive scientists offer quite the bloated view regarding what LLMs can do and contribute to the study of language, and a discussion of where these scholars have gone wrong will, hopefully, make me sleep better at night.

One Pablo Contreras Kallens and two colleagues have it that LLMs constitute an existence proof (their choice of words) that the ability to produce grammatical language can be learned from exposure to data alone, without the need to postulate language-specific processes or even representations, with clear repercussions for cognitive science.[ii]

And one Steven Piantadosi, in a wide-ranging (and widely raging) book chapter, claims that LLMs refute Chomsky’s approach to language, and in toto no less, given that LLMs are bona fide (his choice of words) theories of language; these models have developed sui generis representations of key linguistic structures and dependencies, thereby capturing the basic dynamics of human language and constituting a clear victory for statistical learning in so doing (Contreras Kallens and co. get a tip of the hat here), and in any case Chomskyan accounts of language are not precise or formal enough, cannot be integrated with other fields of cognitive science, have not been empirically tested, and moreover…(oh, piantala).[iii] Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

Despite many people’s apocalyptic response to ChatGPT, a great deal of caution and skepticism is in order. Some of it is philosophical, some of it practical and social. Let me begin with the former.

Whatever its usefulness, we naturally wonder whether CharGPT and its near relatives understand language and, more generally, whether they demonstrate real intelligence. The Chinese Room thought experiment, a classic argument put forward by philosopher John Searle in 1980, somewhat controversially maintains that the answer is No. It is a refinement of arguments of this sort that go back to Leibniz.

In his presentation of the argument (very roughly sketched here), Searle first assumes that research in artificial intelligence has, contrary to fact, already managed to design a computer program that seems to understand Chinese. Specifically, the computer responds to inputs of Chinese characters by following the program’s humongous set of detailed instructions to generate outputs of other Chinese characters. It’s assumed that the program is so good at producing appropriate responses that even Chinese speakers find it to be indistinguishable from a human Chinese speaker. In other words, the computer program passes the so-called Turing test, but does even it really understand Chinese?

The next step in Searle’s argument asks us to imagine a man completely innocent of the Chinese language in a closed room, perhaps sitting behind a large desk in it. He is supplied with an English language version of the same elaborate set of rules and protocols the computer program itself uses for correctly manipulating Chinese characters to answer questions put to it. Moreover, the man is directed to use these rules and protocols to respond to questions written in Chinese that are submitted to him through a mail slot in in the wall of the room. Someone outside the room would likely be quite impressed with the man’s responses to the questions posed to him and what seems to be the man’s understanding of Chinese. Yet all the man is doing is blindly following the same rules that govern the way the sequences of symbols in the questions should be responded to in order to yield answers.  Clearly the man could process the Chinese questions and produce answers to them without any understanding any of the Chinese writing. Finally, Searle drops the mic by maintaining that both the man and the computer itself have no knowledge or understanding of Chinese. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

[This will be a two-part essay.]

Ischemia

When the burly, bearded young man climbs into the bed with my husband, I scooch up in my plastic chair to get a better view. On a computer screen nearby, I swear I am seeing, in grainy black-and-white, a deep-sea creature, pulsing. There is a rhythmic barking sound, like an angry dog in the distance. With lights dimmed and curtains drawn in this mere alcove of a room, the effect is most unsettling. That barking sea creature would be Don’s cardiac muscle.

It is shocking to see him out of his work boots, dungarees, suspenders, and black vest, wearing instead a wraparound kitchen curtain for a garment. He remains logy and quiet while the young man holds a transducer against his chest and sounds the depths of his old heart, inspecting valves, ventricles, and vessels for signs of blood clots. This echocardiogram is part of the protocol, even though they are pretty sure the stroke has been caused by atherosclerosis in a cerebral artery.

The irony of someone like Don being held in such a room, amidst all this high-tech equipment, is staggering. He is a traditional cabinetmaker by trade and an enthusiast of 19^th century technologies, especially plumbing systems and mechanical farm equipment. He embarked on a career as an Industrial Arts teacher in Maine in the 1970s but abandoned that gig during his student teaching days when he decided it was “mostly babysitting, not teaching.” The final break came when he discovered that one of his students could not even write his own name, and his superiors just said, “Move him along.”

In the dim quiet, while the technician probes Don’s chest, I mull over the conversation we just had with two male physicians. They had come into the room and introduced themselves as neurologists—Doctors Frick & Frack, for all I remember. Read more »

Fish in a pond in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Mary Hrovat

McCormick’s Creek State Park is one of my favorite hiking spots. The creek flows through a little canyon with a waterfall in a beautiful wooded area. I’ve been visiting the park for more than 40 years. It’s a constant in my life, whether the waterfall is roaring in flood or slowed to a trickle during a dry spell or, once in a great while, frozen solid. 

Late in the evening of Friday, March 31, an EF3 tornado struck the campground in the park. It caused considerable damage, and two people were killed. After the tornado left the park, it seriously damaged several homes in a rural area just outside Bloomington. It was part of an outbreak of 22 tornadoes throughout the state. A tornado that hit Sullivan, Indiana, destroyed or damaged homes and killed three people. 

It was tough to see spring beginning with such serious damage and loss of life in a beloved spot. It was also sobering to see photographs of the destruction in Sullivan. It seems that I’ve seen many such images from places to the south and southwest of us this winter, and in fact 2023 has been an unusually active year for tornadoes in the U.S. so far. There have already been more tornado fatalities in 2023 than in all of 2022 nationwide.  Read more »

Prophets on the Nairobi Expressway

by Rafiq Kathwari

“Please take the next flight to Nairobi,”
my niece said, her voice cracking over

WhatsApp. “Mom is in ICU. Lemme know
what time your flight lands. I’ll send the car.”

Early February morning on the Upper West Side,
I wore a parka, pashmina scarf, cap, gloves, rode

the A-Train to JFK, boarded Kenya Airways,
and 12 hours later

even before we landed at NBO, I peeled off my
layers anticipating equatorial warmth, the sun

at its peak, mid-afternoon. I waved at a tall, lean
man holding up RAFIKI scrawled on cardboard.

“Welcome,” he said.
“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Moses,” he said as we flew on the Expressway,
built by the Chinese.

“Oh,” I said. “My middle name is Mohammed.
Let’s look for Jesus and resurrect my sister.”