Kozlov and Biever in Nature:

Scientists have created a neural network with the human-like ability to make generalizations about language¹. The artificial intelligence (AI) system performs about as well as humans at folding newly learned words into an existing vocabulary and using them in fresh contexts, which is a key aspect of human cognition known as systematic generalization. The researchers gave the same task to the AI model that underlies the chatbot ChatGPT, and found that it performs much worse on such a test than either the new neural net or people, despite the chatbot’s uncanny ability to converse in a human-like manner.

The work, published on 25 October in Nature, could lead to machines that interact with people more naturally than do even the best AI systems today. Although systems based on large language models, such as ChatGPT, are adept at conversation in many contexts, they display glaring gaps and inconsistencies in others. The neural network’s human-like performance suggests there has been a “breakthrough in the ability to train networks to be systematic”, says Paul Smolensky, a cognitive scientist who specializes in language at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

More here.

Claire Dederer in The Guardian:

Werner Herzog plays a certain role in the public imagination. At least I think it’s the public imagination and not just my own. The German film-maker has become meme-ified and satirised – not his work, but his person, his wild-haired, Bavarian-accented, sad-eyed, difficult-truth-intoning person. As I read Herzog’s new book, I found myself thinking of the bears at my local zoo. Two young grizzlies were introduced last year; I became fascinated by them and went to see them almost every week. As I watched the bears play and swim and sleep, I was occasionally visited by strange, glinting moments of dark understanding: that they were predators, that if I met them in the wild, they might very well consign me to the void.

Of course, bears are Herzogian (if I may turn man into adjective) – after all, he made the documentary Grizzly Man, about one conservationist’s obsession with the creatures. And the void, too, is ineluctably Herzogian – it hovers at the centre of his work, from Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Fitzcarraldo to the great and largely unloved Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. But really I was thinking about the gap between the way the bears are perceived – adorable! – and the reality of their being: they will eat you. Herzog himself has undergone some kind of similar schism in the popular consciousness. He has become, personally, a zoo animal, and this autobiography reminds us once again that he is a fearsome and strange force.

More here.

A conversation with Louis Brus at The Conversation:

When you were working at Bell Labs in the 1980s and discovered quantum dots, it was something of an accident. You were studying solutions of semiconductor particles. And when you aimed lasers at these solutions, called colloids, you noticed that the colors they emitted were not constant.

On the first day we made the colloid, sometimes the spectrum was different. Second and third day, it was normal. There certainly was a surprise when I first saw this change in the spectrum. And so, I began to try to figure out what the heck was going on with that.

I noticed that the property of the particle itself began to change at a very small size.

More here.

Yascha Mounk in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: I admire you as a writer, but there’s one book of yours that I sort of stumbled across again recently which I found to be deeply insightful and also personally meaningful, and that is The Happiness Curve.

How did you come to write this book? And how did you come to think about the kind of shape that people’s trajectories of life satisfaction and happiness tend to have over the course of our lives?

Jonathan Rauch: This is a very personal book. I am someone who’s had an incredibly fortunate life, just incredibly fortunate. Yet, around the time I turned 40, I began noticing a kind of persistent sense of disappointment and discontent. And I didn’t know why. I assumed it would go away, because it didn’t match with the objective circumstances of my life. But it only got worse. And then it magnified because I began feeling ungrateful, which is a terrible way to feel if you’re the luckiest person on the planet.

More here.

David Mason at The Hudson Review:

Franz Kafka was a champion of defeat, but he was also critically alive in the struggle to become himself. A prolific writer, he is thought to have burned or otherwise destroyed much of his own production. When he knew he was dying of tuberculosis, he asked his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to burn the rest, excluding only the short stories that had already been published and had established his growing reputation. We can be grateful that Brod disobeyed his friend and saw to the publication of the unfinished novels, The Missing Person (as Amerika), The Trial, and The Castle. These books and assorted stories and fragments established Kafka posthumously as a singular genius, not only a great modernist, but a writer who transcended his time, dramatizing psychic battles between individuals and the savage powers of family, law, and the state. These are the very nets that Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus had wanted to fly past, and found he could not. Kafka’s fictions are not allegories, but dreams. Their absurdist logic is absolute and insane, sometimes hilarious, more often nightmarish. Yet they seem true to the world. Only a breathtakingly original artist could have devised them.

more here.

Julien Crockett interviews Robert Sapolsky at the LARB:

JULIEN CROCKETT: Most of the discoveries you reference in Determined are from the last 50 years, and half are from the last five, pointing towards a recent shift in biology and related fields. How has the answer to the fundamental question in biology—what is life?—changed during your career?

ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY: The main trend I’ve noticed is people arguing about whether viruses are alive or not. Which gets to the mechanistic point: they’re made of the same stuff as the organisms they infect, the same building blocks, all working by the same principles. So there is some sort of continuum with life. At the other end is deciding when something is dead—when does life end? And what does it mean? We have been able to get EEG waves out of a pig’s brain hours after it has been removed. There is also research suggesting that being in a coma is a heterogeneous experience. So brain death is not quite as straightforward as we used to think.

more here.

Tanvir Khan in The Scientist:

Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer and contributes to 15 percent of all cancer-related deaths in women worldwide. Though 20–30 percent of patients with early-stage breast cancers eventually develop metastatic cancer, few effective treatments for preventing rapid metastatic progression exist.¹

Tumor cell motility and invasion are essential drivers of metastasis, as tumor cells must migrate away from the primary tumor and invade new sites. Tumor cells at the primary cancer site promote metastasis by recruiting immunosuppressive inflammatory cells, such as activated macrophages, neutrophils, and myeloid-derived suppressor cells, which facilitate tumor cell migration and survival.

More here.

Geoffrey Bear in Time:

The Osage elders’ teachings about life and death were about both the seen and unseen. “We follow the drum,” they said. “This little drum helps make the big drum go,” they said. My generation knew the big drum as where we dressed in our finest traditional clothes and enjoyed the intimacy of our families. Across four-day long ceremonies, each of us carried into the day and night our own beliefs, as formed around the order of the dance. Our parents’ generation grew up during WWII and the Korea Conflict.

They ventured out into the world to seek the American Dream of a fine house, two cars to park in the garage, a large yard, good jobs, good schools for their children, and the freedom to dream and build on those thoughts, which in turn became hopes. When able, they traveled back to the dances to the sound of the big drum, and often, one of their parents rode along. My grandma, for example, would sit quietly in the back seat with my brother and me as she looked out the car window teaching us to count in Osage. She would say the names of things we could see and touch. She left it to her brothers to teach us the ways of the sweat lodge and much about what we could not see. None of them spoke of the “Osage Reign of Terror”—a time before my parents were born—a time in the 1920s and 30s when Grandma and her brothers were young and just starting to build their own lives.

More here.

Coffee Shop in the late Afternoon

The beautiful woman gone
leaving the shop to young men making
their way in the January world
with cell phones and computers –

and me.

Outside, a sunny day.
too warm for the season.

A phone rings – a barista calls out
“Tall vanilla soy latte.”
Strange talk to one who grew up
with a nickel cup of joe.

There are fewer and fewer
native speakers of one’s born language.

You learn to live with translations.

by Nils Peterson

Adam Tooze in his Substack newsletter:

Whoever governs America, dysfunctionally or not, speculating about a post-American world, is a waste of time. And there a few key areas of global affairs in which American institutions today play a crucial organizational role. I have written often in this newsletter about the dollar system and its resilience. The dollar continues to be the basis for global finance. Though it dare not speak its name, the Fed acts as a global central bank.

It is also true that American leadership and military spending does hold structures like NATO together. But that is not “the world”. It is an exclusive military alliance.

More here.

Editorial in Nature:

Early in 1993, a manuscript landed in the Nature offices announcing the results of an unusual — even audacious — experiment. The investigators, led by planetary scientist and broadcaster Carl Sagan, had searched for evidence of life on Earth that could be detected from space. The results, published 30 years ago this week, were “strongly suggestive” that the planet did indeed host life. “These observations constitute a control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial life by modern interplanetary spacecraft,” the team wrote.

The experiment was a master stroke. In 1989, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft had launched on a mission to orbit Jupiter, where it was scheduled to arrive in 1995. Sagan and his colleagues wondered whether Galileo would find definitive evidence of life back home if its instruments could be trained on Earth. They persuaded NASA to do just that as the craft flew past the home planet in 1990.

More here.

Daniel Callcut in Aeon:

The acclaimed British philosopher Bernard Williams, writing in the 1970s, showed that a common way of arguing for moral relativism is confused and contradictory. Nonetheless, he went on to defend a philosophical worldview that incorporated some of relativism’s underlying ideas. There is much to learn, when we think about the ongoing culture wars over moral values, from the encounters with relativism that recur throughout Williams’s work. First, however, it’s useful to understand why a prevalent feature of the culture wars, arguing over which words to use, itself quickly leads to arguments over relativism.

More here.

Johnny Lyons at The Dublin Review Of Books:

The subtitle of David Edmonds’s biography of the English philosopher Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is liable to raise more than a few eyebrows. Surely a mission to save morality is something only a God-like being could take on. And since God is dead, or rather has ceased to be believable, the prospect of rescuing morality must have vanished too. So is the subtitle to suggest that Parfit really was blessed with superhuman powers? Or are we to read it ironically, perhaps as a satirical comment on one philosopher’s exaggerated view of his own importance?

The book’s first page leaves the reader in no doubt that the protagonist’s own view of what he was doing was seriously intended. Edmonds opens with an episode when Parfit, in his later years, found himself hospitalised following a sudden failure of his lungs. Observing the steady stream of visitors entering the patient’s room, one of the nurses grew curious and asked Parfit what he did for a living to which he replied: ‘I work on what matters.’

more here.

Jeanette Winterson at The New Statesman:

Invisible Cities is built like a Boolean Truth Table. The mathematical table shows all possible combinations of inputs, and for each combination the output that the circuit will produce. It’s a logic operation. The categories we find in Invisible Cities – Hidden Cities, Cities and Desire, Cities and Memory, Thin Cities, Dead Cities, and so on – aren’t random. Once chosen, these “inputs” will reveal their “outputs”. Think of a Truth Table as including a column for each variable in the expression and a row for each possible combination of truth values (or cities in our case). Then add a column that shows the outcome of each set of values. That’s the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

The mapping out of possible truth values is the hot debate sparred back and forth across the space the two men occupy whenever they meet. At first, Polo’s space is offered as places he has seen and been. Gradually, the emperor begins to describe the cities, and Polo must tell him if they are real – moving carefully around what the word “real” means.

more here.

Thinking Thought

“Oh, soul,” I sometimes—often—still say when I’m trying
… to convince my inner self of something.
“Oh, soul,” I say still, “there’s so much to be done, don’t want
… to stop to rest now, not already.
“Oh, soul,” I say, “the implications of the task are clear,
… why procrastinate, why whine?”
All the while I know my struggle has to do with mind being
… only sometimes subject to the will,
that other portion of itself which manages to stay so recalcitrantly,
… obstinately impotent.”
“Oh, soul,” come into my field of want, my realm of act, be
… attentive to my computations and predictions.”
But as usual soul resists, as usual soul retires, as usual soul’s
… old act of dissipation and removal.
Oh, the furious illusive unities of want, the frail, false fusions
… and discursive chains of hope.

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. William Selected Poems
The Noonday Press, 1994

Wilfred McClay in The New Criterion:

Back in the 1980s, an editor at Harvard University Press had the bright idea of asking some of the leading lights of the day to write their own version of a philosophical dictionary, modeled on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philo­sophique (1764). The project petered out rather quickly, presumably because there turned out to be so few scholars around who had the breadth and wit to write such a book. But the great sociologist Robert Nisbet rose to the challenge and produced a philosophical dictionary, with the saucy title Prejudices, that was infinitely more charming and enlightening than its French model. It appeared in 1982.

Among the topics appearing in the table of contents for Nisbet’s dictionary is the term “Humanities.” The essay on that subject provides us with an excellent starting place for the present inquiry. It begins as follows:

A faculty member was accosted by a colleague with the words, “I understand you spoke against the humanities the other day at faculty meeting.” “No indeed,” was the reply. “I love the humanities. I would die for the humanities. All I asked was, what the hell are the humanities?”

More here.