Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

I would like at least to begin here an argument that supports the following points. First, we have no strong evidence of any currently existing artificial system’s capacity for conscious experience, even if in principle it is not impossible that an artificial system could become conscious. Second, such a claim as to the uniqueness of conscious experience in evolved biological systems is fully compatible with naturalism, as it is based on the idea that consciousness is a higher-order capacity resulting from the gradual unification of several prior capacities —embodied sensation, notably— that for most of their existence did not involve consciousness. Any AI project that seeks to skip over these capacities and to rush straight to intellectual self-awareness on the part of the machine is, it seems, going to miss some crucial steps. However, finally, there is at least some evidence at present that AI is on the path to consciousness, even without having been endowed with anything like a body or a sensory apparatus that might give it the sort of phenomenal experience we human beings know and value. This path is, namely, the one that sees the bulk of the task of becoming conscious, whether one is an animal or a machine, as lying in the capacity to model other minds.

More here.

Mordechai Rorvig in Quanta:

Nestled among the impressive domes and spires of Yale University is the simple office of Daniel Spielman. His shelves are lined with tall black notebooks, containing decades of handwritten notes, and against a wall sits a large, comfortable couch that looks particularly well used.

“I’m sort of built for sitting still and thinking,” he admitted.

What he thinks about, amid the gothic grandeur of the campus, is a slightly more modern topic: computer science. And over his career, Spielman has produced a slew of influential results, although as he describes it, failure has been his most common outcome. “The key point is you have to enjoy the process of working,” he said. “As long as I enjoy that process, then it’s OK — as long as there’s success once in a while.”

Spielman first came to Yale as an undergraduate before attending graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his doctorate in 1995.

More here.

Philipp Heimberger and Nikolaus Kowall at Social Europe:

1. Italy is living below its means

‘Italy is living beyond its means!’ This omnipresent claim is readily supported by pointing to Italy’s public debt, which amounts to 135 per cent of its economic output. Yet this means only that the public sector is highly indebted—it says nothing about the Italian economy as a whole.

A country lives beyond its means if it imports significantly more goods and services than it exports over the long term. A country that exports as much as it imports is not however living beyond its means, as production and consumption are in line. Indeed, Italy has been recording export surpluses since 2012. Italy’s export surpluses are by no means only due to tourism, as the country exports more industrial goods than it imports. The Italian economy therefore consumes less than it produces—it lives below its means.

More here.

Ali Smith in the European Review of Books:

Dear George Orwell,

Why do we write? Given that words and reality, as you once put it, are so often « no liker » to each other « than chessmen to living beings ».

Because I’m writing to you now from a future no-one could have seen coming –– except maybe yourself, and H G Wells, and J G Ballard and the furthest-seeing writers over the centuries from Sophocles to Margaret Atwood.

Because everything you wrote gifts us with the knowledge that words are the chesspieces by which the powers that be will play their games with our lives. You know, as the current UK Prime Minister puts it, that « human beings are creatures of the imagination », that « people live by narrative ».

More here.

Pranshu Verma in The Washington Post:

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

PROMINENT WHITE FEMINISTS tend to stick together. I would know, after having written a book called Against White Feminism. I was criticized or dismissed by a good many of them, not least the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was asked directly about my book last year and essentially declared that “complicated and difficult conversations” about racism and feminism are a distraction from the need to oppose draconian anti-women laws being pushed by Republicans. Similar furor erupted this week when New York Times journalist Alisha Haridasani Gupta wrote an article titled “The Sunsetting of the Girlboss Is Nearly Complete.” The main “girlboss” in Gupta’s article was Emily Weiss, the former CEO of a make-up company called Glossier. Gupta shows how Weiss—along with a few other female CEOs who have also stepped down from top jobs—represented a form of leadership that celebrated markedly un-feminist values: domination, hierarchy, and capitalist greed. Gupta suggests we’re seeing the demise of a certain kind of acquisitive, ruthless, and white female entrepreneur encapsulated in the girlboss ideal. Among the reasons that Gupta enumerated for the end of Weiss’s tenure was an internal memo in which retail employees complained of a “racist, toxic work environment.” One cited example was the company’s inability to handle situations such as when white teenagers used products in the “experiential” Glossier stores to emulate blackface.

Most millennial feminists have already denounced the girlboss label, which began as the title of a book written by a white woman who advocated a ruthless, “let’s beat the white men at their game” brand of feminism, a sort of younger version of what Sheryl Sandberg so skillfully sold in Lean In.

More here.

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

Jim Al-Khalili has an enviable gig. The Iraqi-British scientist gets to ponder some of the deepest questions—What is time? How do nature’s forces work?—while living the life of a TV and radio personality. Al-Khalili hosts The Life Scientific, a show on BBC Radio 4 featuring his interviews with scientists on the impact of their research and what inspires and motivates them. He’s also presented documentaries and authored popular science books, including a novel, Sun Fall, about the crisis that unfolds when, in 2041, Earth’s magnetic field starts to fail. His latest book, The Joy of Science, is his response to a different crisis.

“The Joy of Science was motivated by this sense that a lot of us have, that public discourse is becoming increasingly polarized,” Al-Khalili tells Nautilus. “There seems to be a rise in irrational, anti-scientific thinking, and conspiracy theories. And there’s no room for debate, particularly amplified by the internet and social media.” His message is that we should all be thinking more critically. “If we could export some of the ideas of science, when science is done well, into everyday life, I think we would all be happier, more empowered.”

Al-Khalili tells me that doling out advice is quite the departure for him. But after a long career in physics and science communication, he says with a laugh, “I’ve reached that stage where I arrogantly think I can impart wisdom to the world.” In our interview, Al-Khalili discusses, among other things, the unprecedented level of cognitive dissonance nowadays, what’s wrong with Occam’s razor, and whether ideological thinking conflicts with a scientific mindset. He also defends “scientific realism,” and walks me through a puzzle about light that Einstein dreamt up as a teenager.

More here.

Justin Vassallo in Phenomenal World:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 US presidential election, defenders of the postwar liberal international order panicked over the return of their bête noire: neomercantilism. Signs of nationalist protectionism meant the revival of neomercantilism, a surge in trade wars, and the loss of the cooperation and openness that underpins globalization.

In light of the resurgent emphasis on the importance of energy independence, greater fixed investment, and reviving domestic production, now is a critical time to acquire a better understanding of this misunderstood and oversimplified philosophy. As defined by political scientist Eric Helleiner in his engrossing new book The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History, neomercantilism was, before 1939, “a belief in the need for strategic trade protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power in the post-Smithian age.” Helleiner’s book is essential for grasping earlier theories of state-led development that diverged from classical liberalism, as well as their relevance in an era where pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions and Russia’s war in Ukraine have further eroded confidence in globalization.

One of Helleiner’s central theses is that neomercantilism had a truly global span, with endogenous roots outside of Western Europe and North America.

More here.

Nóra Schultz in Tocqueville 21:

Reading Raymond Geuss’s Philosophy and Real Politics a couple years ago was like a breath of fresh air. Geuss was writing about exactly the things that many of us young, left-leaning students at Cambridge wanted to think through at the time: namely, how the rise of authoritarian politics in certain parts of the world seemed to have given Western liberalism a renewed importance and intellectual force, thereby shrinking the space for systematic critique of liberalism’s own damaging political and economic practices. And how, making matters more difficult, radical politics – especially at universities – had increasingly become an identity to assume, rather than a meaningful commitment to the historical notion of organising for large scale social transformation. Moreover, there was the frustrating intellectual problem of how to maintain the critical force of Marxist thought while acknowledging the historical failures of “actually existing socialism”.

Geuss seemed to have it all: he offered relentless criticism of liberalism, but without the reactionary baggage present in some fashionable works of “post-liberalism”; he showed a way of thinking about politics through a non-sectarian, anti-utopian Marxist lens; and he conveyed a deep knowledge of the history of political thought and philosophy. The combination was bound to impress. It was simply inspiring to see a vision of political philosophy that was both politically radical, and defined with reference to the real world  rather than abstract, value-driven debates. Moreover, Geuss’s realism seemed to offer both new avenues of theoretical research, and the (re-)discovery of marginalised texts and authors.

More here.

Kate Kirkpatrickis and Sonia Kruks in Aeon:

Old age is not exactly a time of life that most of us welcome, although globally speaking it is a privilege to reach it. In Western societies, the shocked realisation that we are growing old often fills us with alarm and even terror. As Simone de Beauvoir writes in her magisterial study of the topic, La vieillesse (1970) – translated in the UK as Old Age, and in the US as The Coming of Age (1972) – old age arouses a visceral aversion, often a ‘biological repugnance’. Many attempt to push it as far away as possible, denying that it will ever happen, even though we know it already dwells within us.

In fleeing from our own old age, we also seek to distance ourselves from its harbingers – from those who are already old: they are ‘the Other’. They are (with some exceptions) viewed as a ‘foreign species’, and as ‘outside humanity’. Excluded from the so-called normal life of society, most are condemned to conditions where their sadness, as Beauvoir puts it, ‘merges with their consuming boredom, with their bitter and humiliating sense of uselessness, and with their loneliness in the midst of a world that has nothing but indifference for them’. Beauvoir’s work sets out to show how old people are viewed and treated as the Other ‘from without’ and also – by drawing on memoirs, letters and other sources – to present their experiences ‘from within’. Her aim is to ‘shatter’ what she calls the ‘conspiracy of silence’ surrounding the old for, she insists, if their voices were heard, we would have to acknowledge that these were ‘human voices’ (emphasis added).

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Max Boot in The Washington Post:

I admit to having been skeptical, ahead of time, of the hearings planned by the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021. What more is there to be said, I wondered? The evidence of Donald Trump’s guilt in inciting an insurrection was already so obvious that it was hard to imagine that the committee would have much to add. This was not, after all, a situation such as Watergate, where the scandal happened behind closed doors. The entire nation saw Trump’s incendiary remarks and tweets, and the riot that followed, on national television.

Lauren Christensen in The New York Times:

When the Restoration ended his career in Britain’s Commonwealth government in 1660, John Milton turned his full attention to the verse tragedy he’d started around 1640, then called “Adam Unparadised.” By now in his 50s, blind and ailing, Milton composed “Paradise Lost” aloud, in bed or (per witnesses) “leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it,” memorizing the stanzas to be transcribed in another’s hand.

Of the resulting 10,000-line manuscript he sent to the Stationers’ Company in London in 1665, only 798 lines survive. These 33 pages correspond to Book 1 of 10 in the first, 1667 edition; a second edition, in 1674, would regroup the poem into 12 books. In the penmanship of a single, professional scribe, the pages are almost certainly a fair copy: a final, corrected version compiling the rough drafts that, in Milton’s case, would have borne the distinct markings of his various amanuenses, as they received his dictations.

More here.

Servants

My mother gone for months, my brothers away at school,
I’d open the dictionary and there were:
Dishabille, the French governess, or Scurrilous, the riding master,

Worry always at her needle, or Corpulent, the cook,
all so much more interesting
than the kids at school or my father’s weekend cronies.

They even smelled better
and the smells had stories to tell:
Nutmeg, Hedge Garlic, Turmeric, Clove.

They just needed a little prompting.
I liked to imagine words putting up their feet by the fire
and talking of their masters.

stiff-backed Faithful, snail-faced Obedient,
mousy Useful, usually discreet Wisdom
siphoning off a little of their lord’s best brandy

and telling a few off-color jokes,
even footmen and chambermaids deserving a life.
Misery, Rancor, Mischief, Solitude, over-worked under-

paid help that had done their best
to raise me. So what if I couldn’t open my mouth
at school? So what if I had trouble talking

to my father? I was included in the Ribald
secret life of vowels and consonants,
Raillery, Rumor, Escapade,

my nanny, my scullery maid, my gamekeeper,
their belly laughs in the stables,
winks in the parlor, their carryings-on beneath the stairs.

by Christopher Bursk
from The First Inhabitants of Arcadia
the University of Arkansas Press, 2006

Rebecca Panovka at Bookforum:

EARLY IN ELIF BATUMAN’S NEW NOVEL Either/Or, she quotes a blurb on the front of Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, extracted from its 1986 review in the New York Times. “Good writers abound—good novelists are very rare,” the critic theorizes, deeming Ishiguro “not only a good writer, but also a wonderful novelist.” For Either/Or’s narrator, the distinction comes as a shock. Since she was young, Selin has aspired to become a novelist, and she views much of her life to date as training for that vocation. Assessing herself according to the reviewer’s implied rubric, Selin realizes that her facility with language, her sparkling insights and clever turns of phrase, may not be sufficient. “It was what I had been counting on,” she thinks. “My sense of being a good writer. My stomach sank with the knowledge of how wrong I had been.” This is in some sense the anxiety that haunts Either/Or: Batuman is demonstrably, incontrovertibly a good writer—but is she a good novelist? (And what is a good novel anyway?)

more here.

Richard Eldridge at the LARB:

No wonder, too, then, that there is a current public of soi-disant intellectuals eager to learn about past experiments in living, especially those with a significant philosophical dimension. And so we have Peter Neumann’s Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits (translated by Shelley Frisch), “a fascinating and highly readable story of ideas, art, love, and war,” as one blurb has it, and a picture of “a world intoxicated with the possibilities of thought,” according to another. Jena in 1798 to 1800 was a backwater provincial city of 5,000 residents, one-fifth of whom were students. Initially attracted by the presences at the university first of Karl Leonhard Reinhold and then J. G. Fichte, both of whom were associated with the free thinking of Kantianism and the French Revolution, a circle of intellectual friends, including women as equals as well as men, formed around the brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel.

Friedrich and Dorothea Veit (Moses Mendelssohn’s divorced daughter) set up house in Leutragasse 5, where they were soon joined by August and his wife, Caroline (widow to Johann Böhmer and later to marry Friedrich Schelling after divorcing August).

more here.

Rebecca Brenner Graham in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Although existentialist philosophers rarely labeled themselves as such or agreed on a definition of what they were doing, existentialism is a coherent and sound philosophy. It begins with the claim that “existence precedes essence,” meaning that people enter the world (they exist) before they can be said to have a fixed definition (or essence). They are free to create their own essence, and with this freedom comes responsibility. The contrast between how strange it is to exist and the reality that we are here is called “absurdity.” From absurdity, nihilists would avow that life is meaningless, and thus do whatever they want. Existentialists, however, typically reject nihilism and embrace authenticity. For Martin Heidegger, authenticity was related to our “being toward death.” For Friedrich Nietzsche, the “eternal return of the same” counsels us to live as if our life will repeat itself eternally.

Some French existentialists, however, posited more nuanced ideas of authenticity that engaged with other people, systems of oppression, and the world. Skye C. Cleary’s How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment explores Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas of existential authenticity and applies them to life today.

More here.