by Katalin Balog Winners and losers It might seem that the idea that one should remain indifferent to success is for losers. Yes, it is my own professional and personal setbacks that all of a sudden so sharpened my insights into the downsides of success. But actually, I am not new to this idea. I…

by Katalin Balog In a recent bestseller, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argue that artificial superintelligence (ASI), if it is ever built, will wipe out humanity. Unsurprisingly, this idea has gotten a lot of attention. People want to know if humanity has finally gotten around to producing an accurate prophecy of impending doom. The argument…

by Katalin Balog “…eventually he regained his balance and dismissed all thought of resistance from his mind, and concentrated on accepting the dizzy state of the world that was spinning round him as a perfectly natural state of affairs…” —László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance (trans. George Szirtes) I grew up in communist Hungary, the…

by Katalin Balog I don’t know if I am going to submit this for the essay contest. Not just out of shame that I myself was unable to come up with something on my own, but because of my inability to ground myself in any sense of reality concerning the terrifying matters that surfaced –…

by Katalin Balog It was the first day of a Tibetan Buddhist retreat in 2016. We were about to participate in a ritual of chants and burning sage. Before we proceeded outside, the head teacher asked all of us to invite someone we would like to share this moment with. Instantly and vividly, my grandfather…

by Katalin Balog Nathaniel in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman loses his sanity over having fallen in love with a wooden doll, the beautiful automaton Olympia. Olympia is an invention of a mad scientist and a master of the dark arts. Like Mary Shelley’s monster, born of the romantic imagination, she is the first…

by Katalin Balog The mind-body problem in its current form – an inquiry into how the mind fits into the physical universe – was formulated by René Descartes in the 17th century. In his Meditations, a thin volume of philosophy that had a monumental effect on all later Western philosophy, he famously argued that it…

by Katalin Balog In the past, when I asked students if they would want to enter the Experience Machine – a fictional contraption thought up by the philosopher Robert Nozick – they would generally say no. In the Experience Machine, one would have virtual experiences: for example, of a life blessed with mountains of pleasure,…

by Katalin Balog If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Laments about young people’s declining mental health, their inability to…

by Katalin Balog It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do…

by Katalin Balog Not so long ago, people had a very different concept of the mind and human nature. Our European heritage is a vision of the body as our mortal coil which we feel and command with our soul. The soul was thought to be immortal and exempt from the laws of nature so…

by Katalin Balog This is the last in a series of four essays on subjectivity and objectivity. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. "…tie me to earth…" (Angel Damiel from Wings of Desire) 1. Mind and body Descartes thought God could create a disembodied mind – indeed he…

by Katalin Balog "As he died to make man holy, let us die to make things cheap." –Leonard Cohen, "Steer your way" In this article I use a distinction borrowed from philosophy, between objectivity and subjectivity, to look at the nature of the Trump presidency. I explicated that distinction in more detail in some earlier…

by Katalin Balog There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.(Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”) *This essay, on the personal in politics, is written in lieu of the final instalment of The Brain’s I, a series I have been publishing here on the subjective/objective divide in our lives and thought. The…

by Katalin Balog This is the third of a series of four essays on the mind and the brain. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here. Conscious will is our curse and blessing. It can seem our highest faculty, to be used for good or ill; it also can seem as the…

by Katalin Balog This is the second of a series of four essays on understanding the mind. You can read part 1 here. The mind's relation to the physical world is a hard thing to understand. The difficulty comes in no small part from the fact that there are two, radically different ways of going…

by Katalin Balog This is the first of a series of three essays on understanding the mind. As I am writing this, I am behind schedule for my deadline. In the past I thought procrastination was a moral issue; perhaps not a failing, but a moral issue: a choice. Growing up in a Communist country,…

by Katalin Balog I. Trump In the last 30 years, I have witnessed, criss-crossing the Atlantic, first, my native Hungary's transition from communism to democracy and capitalism, and, for the past 6, its about-face: the sudden dismantling of the institutional system of liberal democracy, as well as the rapid spread of crony capitalism, the establishment…