Michael Robbins at Bookforum:

THE HARD PROBLEM, DAVID CHALMERS CALLS IT: Why are the physical processes of the brain “accompanied by an experienced inner life?” How and why is there something it is like to be you and me, in Thomas Nagel’s formulation? I’ve been reading around in the field of consciousness studies for over two decades—Chalmers, Nagel, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Jerry Fodor, Ned Block, Frank Jackson, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Alva Noë, Susan Blackmore—and the main thing I’ve learned is that no one has the slightest idea. Not that the field lacks for confident pronouncements to the contrary.

Briefly stated, the problem is that the world appears to contain two very different kinds of stuff—mind and body, for which Descartes posited two substances, res cogitans and res extensa. The mind is not physical, not extended in space. The body and everything else are made of physical substance and located in space. Substance dualism is out of fashion these days, but some philosophers (including Chalmers) are property dualists, who believe consciousness is an emergent property, a kind of ghostly accompaniment to physical reality.

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Anthony Quinn at The Guardian:

Gillian Tindall is a high-minded Autolycus, devoted not merely to snapping up the “unconsidered trifles” of past lives but holding them to the light to glean the stories they might conceal. “Most objects, like all people, disappear in the end,” she writes at the start of The Pulse Glass, an excellent suite of essays on transience and remembrance. And yet not everything crumbles to dust; some bits and pieces defy the odds by surviving, and it is Tindall’s delight – albeit of a measured and low-key sort – to describe their escape from “the quiet darkness of forgetting”.

Take, for instance, the scrap of tightly folded paper recently discovered in the crack of a wall at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, possibly to stop up a draught; when examined, it turned out to be a fragment of a musical score by Thomas Tallis, from a service held in St Paul’s in 1544. Or the case of an attic clearance in Westminster Abbey where debris was found strewn across the floor.

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Robert Gottlieb at The New York Times:

By breaking with Capote’s model — by “saying yes to the first person,” as Carrère puts it — he had found his way. When his book, “The Adversary,” was published in 2000, not everybody liked it, neither in France, where Carrère was already well known for his novels and screenplays, nor abroad, where he was largely unknown. But the book became a tremendous success, signaling a new approach to the writing of nonfiction: deeply personal, deeply empathetic, disconcertingly self-revelatory. Carrère spared no one, least of all himself. Each of his books became not only a superb account of its subject but a painful report of the author’s struggle to find a way to write it. His reputation grew with every book, until in an excellent profile of him published in The New York Times Magazine in 2017, Wyatt Mason could state with authority: “If Michel Houellebecq is routinely advanced as France’s greatest living writer of fiction, Carrère, whose prose is no less remarkable for its purity and whose vision is no less broad, is widely understood as France’s greatest writer of nonfiction.”

That is why the publication of “97,196 Words” is of such consequence. Here, in roughly the order of their original publication, are 20 essays (totaling 97,196 words) that reveal both the depth and the breadth of his achievement.

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Shawna Williams in The Scientist:

In September of this year, pharmaceutical companies Biogen and Eisai announced that they were halting Phase 3 clinical trials of a drug, elenbecestat, aimed at thwarting amyloid-β buildup in Alzheimer’s disease. Although the drug had seemed so promising that the companies elected to test it in two Phase 3 trials simultaneously, preliminary analyses determined that elenbecestat’s risks outweighed its benefits, and the drug shouldn’t be moved to market. The cancellation “amounts to a further step in the unwinding of Biogen’s expensive, painful, and ultimately fruitless investment in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) drug development,” analyst Geoffrey Porges told Reuters at the time. Biogen’s misfortune is just the latest in a slew of late-stage Alzheimer’s drug failures. Six months earlier, the company had halted another set of parallel Phase 3 trials due to lack of efficacy of a different drug candidate, aducanumab (though after further data analysis, Biogen announced that it will seek approval for aducanumab after all). And between 2013 and 2018, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson all terminated Phase 3 or Phase 2/3 trials due to poor early results. Yet some Alzheimer’s researchers say they think they’ve spotted a silver lining in this cloud of bad news—a hint in the data from these studies about how future work might meet with more success.

In some of these trials, Alzheimer’s patients who were at earlier stages of the disease did better than those with more advanced cognitive decline, says Colin Masters, a neuroscientist at Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Australia who was not involved in the trials. This indicates that the key to finding an effective treatment might be to catch subjects before their condition advances too far, he adds. “The idea is very firmly in our minds that you have to go before the onset of cognitive decline, and you may be successful then in actually delaying the onset of cognitive decline by five years, which would be a major advance.” Thanks to the recent development of new detection technologies that yield more-precise and reliable measurements of circulating proteins, RNAs, and other molecules, the field is hoping to do just that.

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David Labaree in Aeon:

Occupants of the American meritocracy are accustomed to telling stirring stories about their lives. The standard one is a comforting tale about grit in the face of adversity – overcoming obstacles, honing skills, working hard – which then inevitably affords entry to the Promised Land. Once you have established yourself in the upper reaches of the occupational pyramid, this story of virtue rewarded rolls easily off the tongue. It makes you feel good (I got what I deserved) and it reassures others (the system really works). But you can also tell a different story, which is more about luck than pluck, and whose driving forces are less your own skill and motivation, and more the happy circumstances you emerged from and the accommodating structure you traversed. As an example, here I’ll tell my own story about my career negotiating the hierarchy in the highly stratified system of higher education in the United States. I ended up in a cushy job as a professor at Stanford University. How did I get there? I tell the story both ways: one about pluck, the other about luck. One has the advantage of making me more comfortable. The other has the advantage of being more true.

…The short story is that I’m in the family business. In the 1920s, my parents grew up as next-door neighbours on a university campus where their fathers were both professors. It was Lincoln University, a historically black institution in southeast Pennsylvania near the Mason-Dixon line. The students were black, the faculty white – most of the latter, like my grandfathers, were clergymen. The students were well-off financially, coming from the black bourgeoisie, whereas the highly educated faculty lived in the genteel poverty of university housing. It was a kind of cultural missionary setting, but more comfortable than the foreign missions. One grandfather had served as a missionary in Iran, where my father was born; that was hardship duty. But here was a place where upper-middle-class whites could do good and do well at the same time.

More here.

Hello

She, being the midwife
and your mother’s
longtime friend, said
I see a heart; can you
see it? And on the grey
display of the ultrasound
there you were as you were,
our nugget, in that moment
becoming a shrimp
or a comma punctuating
the whole of my life, separating
its parts—before and after—,
a shrimp in the sea
of your mother, and I couldn’t
help but see the fast
beating of your heart
translated on that screen
and think and say to her,
to the room, to your mother,
to myself It looks like
a twinkling star.
I imagine I’m not
the first to say that either.
Unlike the first moments
of my every day,
the new of seeing you was the first
—deserving of the definite article—
moment I saw a star
at once so small and so
big, so close and getting closer
every day, I pray.

by Sean Hill
from the Academy of American Poets.

Akeel Bilgrami in The Immanent Frame:

One need not have phobia about science, while finding what has come to be called “scientism” intellectually distasteful. This is a familiar distinction, oft made.

What exactly is scientism? Very broadly, it is a kind of overreach in the name of science, taking it to a place beyond its proper dominion. This can happen in many ways. One way is in the making of large claims on science’s behalf, claims that are philosophical rather than scientific, yet relying—by a sleight of hand, a fallacious conflation—on the authority of science. I have written critically of one such claim in The Immanent Frame: there is nothing, no property, in nature that cannot be brought under the purview of science as a form of cognitive inquiry. The present contribution spells out some implications of these criticisms.

Those who deny such a claim—say, for instance, by asserting that nature contains value properties, which do not fall within the purview of science—are frequently dismissed as being unscientific. It is this dismissal that amounts to illicit outreach. It can only be unscientific to contradict some proposition in some science. But no science contains the proposition that science has exhaustive coverage of nature and all its properties. So, it cannot be unscientific to deny that it does.

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Tom Siegfried in Science News:

“Today’s robots lack feelings,” Man and Damasio write in a new paper (subscription required) in Nature Machine Intelligence. “They are not designed to represent the internal state of their operations in a way that would permit them to experience that state in a mental space.”

So Man and Damasio propose a strategy for imbuing machines (such as robots or humanlike androids) with the “artificial equivalent of feeling.” At its core, this proposal calls for machines designed to observe the biological principle of homeostasis. That’s the idea that life must regulate itself to remain within a narrow range of suitable conditions — like keeping temperature and chemical balances within the limits of viability. An intelligent machine’s awareness of analogous features of its internal state would amount to the robotic version of feelings.

Such feelings would not only motivate self-preserving behavior, Man and Damasio believe, but also inspire artificial intelligence to more closely emulate the real thing.

More here.

Mitch Anderson in Reasons to be Cheerful:

Early this October about 13,000 people descended onto a poplar casino resort owned by The Blue Lake Rancheria Tribe in Northern California. But the people arriving didn’t come to gamble or play golf — they were there to access the essential ingredient of modern civilization: electricity. As wildfires raged throughout the state, more than a million people on evacuation alert also had to contend with planned blackouts meant to prevent additional fires sparked by downed power lines.

The Rancheria had recently installed their own small-scale electrical supply grid using solar panels and Tesla batteries to lower emissions and make their community more resilient to disruptions. So when the lights went out across Humboldt County, the Rancheria’s green “microgrid” was one of the only places with electricity. The tribe opened their doors to a whopping ten percent of the entire county’s population, who were able to charge electric vehicles, access the internet and buy much-needed ice to prevent food from spoiling. People lined up for 30 minutes to buy gasoline from the Blue Lake gas station. Kids warmed up from the chilly fall temperatures and found light to do homework.

More here.

Samantha Rose Hill at the LARB:

When Benjamin was released from the Clos St. Joseph internment camp in Nevers in the spring of 1940, he returned to Paris for a brief period before fleeing to Lourdes around June 14, en route to Marseilles. It was during this time that he wrote what would become his final work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” or as it is also translated, “On the Concept of History.”

The “Theses,” a collection of philosophical fragments on historicism and historical materialism, were originally written on the backs of colorful envelopes — green, yellow, orange, blue, cream. The cramped passages in tiny script illustrate the conditions of exile: he is saving space because he is short on paper. As a text, the “Theses” marry Benjamin’s interests in Marxism and theology, reflecting on temporality and the possibility of a weak messianism to interrupt the flow of empty homogeneous, capitalist time. The most famous fragment, which lies at the heart of the work, was inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, which Benjamin purchased in 1921, and which inspired a birthday gift from Scholem: a poem titled “Greetings from the Angelus on July 15.”

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Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

A new idea, Rosenberg writes, emerged toward the end of the Second World War, that classical music could be so inspirational to a nation that it might help win a war. Thus was Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony—its first three movements composed in Leningrad as the city was besieged by the Germans—championed in this country as a symbol of freedom and antifascism. The symphony’s artistic merits were less important than its inherent political value, and a national radio audience, hearing the work for the first time on July 19, 1942, was held in a fevered thrall. With the advent of the Cold War and fears growing about the spread of communism, music was increasingly seen to be “interwoven with the democratic aspirations of the American people.” It was, sometimes in not so subtle ways, weaponized. How else to explain the dispatch of symphony orchestras on diplomatic missions abroad? This exporting of American culture to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where artistic freedoms were brutally suppressed, was both a means of promoting democracy and a master stroke of propaganda. And when the pianist Van Cliburn won first prize at the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, he was feted with a ticker-tape parade in New York City. His triumph went far beyond the realm of art; Cliburn, the tall, handsome Texan who had melted Russian hearts with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, had scored one for the West.

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Colm Tóibín at the LRB:

Elton makes no effort to make himself seem good or worthy of the reader’s approval. When he sells all his stuff, he writes: ‘Before you get the wrong idea, I should add that I had absolutely no intention whatsoever of leading a more simple and meaningful life, uncoupled from the yoke of consumerism and unencumbered by material possessions.’ And he makes no secret of the fact that, as he grew older and richer and more famous, he became unbearable. When his house was being emptied of all its goods he moved into a hotel, only to find that he was being kept awake by the wind, so he phoned his office: not to see if he could change rooms, but to demand that something be done about the wind itself. ‘I absolutely was crazy and deluded enough to ring the international manager of Rocket [his company] and ask him to do something about the wind outside my room.’

But Elton also has a big heart, as his work for Aids charities makes clear.

more here.

Clemence Boulouque in The New York Times:

Reciting Jewish achievements and Judaism’s contribution to civilization in order to fight anti-Semitic propaganda is a well-established genre that flourished in 19th-century Europe. After reaching the United States in the first part of the 20th century, it arguably culminated in the 1960s with the writings of popular authors like Max Dimont. Norman Lebrecht’s “Genius & Anxiety” belongs to that genre: Both the subtitle of his book and the preface testify to Lebrecht’s commitment to demonstrating “how Jews changed the world” as a response to the current moment, which, he laments, is yet again beset by anti-Semitism.

Spanning a century, between 1847 (the death of Felix Mendelssohn) and 1947 (the United Nations’ vote in favor of the creation of the State of Israel), the book features dozens of remarkable scientists, artists and politicians of Jewish descent. Lebrecht’s wide net captures the usual suspects — Marx, Freud, Kafka, Einstein — but also many lesser-known, and equally fascinating, individuals, like Karl Landsteiner, the father of blood types; Albert Ballin, the shipping industry magnate who changed trans-Atlantic journeys and migration patterns; and Eliza Davis, an acquaintance of Dickens who harassed him until he amended “Oliver Twist,” doing away with negative Jewish references in the book’s later editions. Some of Lebrecht’s transitions from one vignette to the next flow particularly well: His account of the revival of ancient Hebrew under the auspices of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, meant to foster a Jewish national consciousness, is aptly followed and contrasted by the depiction of the near-simultaneous creation of Esperanto by the Polish idealist Eliezer Ludwig Zamenhof, who strove to create a universal idiom that would encourage greater understanding among peoples.

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Ewen Callaway in Nature:

A cave-wall depiction of a pig and buffalo hunt is the world’s oldest recorded story, claim archaeologists who discovered the work on the Indonesian island Sulawesi. The scientists say the scene is more than 44,000 years old.

The 4.5-metre-long panel features reddish-brown forms that seem to depict human-like figures hunting local animal species. Previously, rock art found in European sites dated to around 14,000 to 21,000 years old were considered to be the world’s oldest clearly narrative artworks. The scientists working on the latest find say that the Indonesian art pre-dates these. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. I mean, we’ve seen hundreds of rock art sites in this region, but we’ve never seen anything like a hunting scene,” says Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, whose team describes the finding in Nature on 11 December¹. Other researchers say the discovery is important because the animal paintings are also the oldest figurative artworks — those that clearly depict objects or figures in the natural world — on record. But some aren’t yet convinced by the claim the panel represents a single ‘scene’, or story. They suggest it might be a series of images painted over the course of perhaps thousands of years. “Whether it’s a scene is questionable,” says Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist and rock-art specialist at Durham University, UK.

More here.

The highest good is like water

Claire Jarvis at Bookforum:

Cusk is best known in the US for her Outline trilogy, a series of slim, challenging novels that follow Faye, a cryptic, intelligent narrator whose life and perspective seem to mirror Cusk’s own. Coventry gathers essays written before, during, and after the period in which Cusk was at work on the trilogy. Almost all have appeared elsewhere, but collecting them gives readers a chance to draw a link between Cusk the memoirist (there are essays on marriage and divorce) and Cusk the novelist (there are short pieces on writers like Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, and Kazuo Ishiguro, as well as longer meditations on literary value).

The embrace of self-reliance at the end of “Coventry” is echoed throughout the collection. In “How to Get There,” an essay on what work can be done in the collaborative realm of a creative writing class, Cusk has a dismal view of those who crave sociability, who do not respect the solitude and asceticism she believes generate writing. She is just as suspicious of people who “configure writing as a ‘career’ full of obligations and appointments, in order to ward off the suspicion of amateurism and manage the insecurity of creative freedom.”

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Ash Sanders at The Believer:

In 2009, discouraged by the failed climate talks in Copenhagen, Chris told me he believed it might already be too late to stop catastrophic climate change. “The old world,” he said, “is gone.” It was a torch-passing moment. Chris was paralyzed by a conviction in his own failure. He had become complacent, he felt, and addicted to television: the sort of person he used to despise. But I was just beginning my own journey into environmental despair. I was full of guilt and anxiety and anger and fear about a future filled with loss and death. I began to draw my own elliptical lines through the ethics of the climate crisis. I turned off the heat in my house, even during the bitter Utah winters. I was late everywhere, determined to take a bus to another bus to a train. I obsessed over plastic bags and Styrofoam plates, and insisted on bringing my own plate to a local sandwich shop. I carried my garbage around for a week and roped my friends into doing so, too, each of us hauling a stinking reminder of our consumption from class to class, clearing rooms as we went. I joined a direct action climate justice group; I planned blockades of city streets and got arrested. I joined with Utah Valley farmers to organize against urban sprawl.

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Rupert Shortt at the TLS:

My sense (shared by some of his fellow scientists speaking privately to me) is that notwithstanding a careless choice of language in the past, Dawkins was and remains reductionist in outlook. But the scientific consensus has moved on. Neo-Darwinist ideas favouring gene-centric views of biology have given way to much more holistic visions, including an acceptance of purposive behaviour. Take a very distinguished physiologist such as Denis Noble, who has taught alongside Dawkins at Oxford. He was once a keen advocate of reductionism, the philosophy summarized by Jim Watson, a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, as “there are only molecules; everything else is sociology”. Noble saw confirmation of this view in his finding that the pacemaker function of the heart could be explained in terms of the flow of potassium and calcium ions through protein channels. Later he changed his mind, realizing that “in the heartbeat there was not only upward causation from the molecular level to the cellular level, but also downward causation from the cell influencing the molecules”. This led Noble to reject the take on neo-Darwinism propagated by Dawkins and others for what it is – a contentious philosophical postulate, not an empirical discovery. Reductionism seeks to eliminate teleology in nature: Noble now accepts that it is ubiquitous.

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Holly Case in the Boston Review:

Earlier this year I received a letter from a professor at a Hungarian university after the government had cut funding to most public universities and placed discretion over distribution of remaining funds into the hands of government-friendly bureaucrats. “Everyone is jockeying, searching for backdoors, and hoping to just make it through,” she wrote. “What we really need is united and decisive action, or to be more precise resistance. Yet this is precisely what’s lacking . . . because everyone is trying to position themselves so the government’s axe does not fall on them.”

It is to this Hungary that László Krasznahorkai’s dense, sprawling new novel, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, returns. After writing several novels set in other parts of the world—from China to the United States—the Hungarian writer has “come home” to his birthplace, a mid-sized town on the Great Hungarian Plain called Gyula, placing it at the heart of a polyphonic tragicomedy. Otherwise known for his stylistically acrobatic novels with a base note of imbalanced Manicheism (tipped in favor of evil)—several of which have been adapted and transformed to gorgeous effect by the Hungarian art film auteur Béla Tarr—Krasznahorkai has written a novel that possesses the rare quality of being both timeless and very much of its time.

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