by Bill Benzon

Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, The University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Permanent Crisis hits close to home. In the first place, I have been trained as a humanist, my degree is in English Literature. But I have long suspected that the sense humanists have of being under attack (by agencies in the culture at large) is at least as much a feature of humanities culture as it is a perception of the world in which they live. Thus I am biased in favor of the thesis Reitter and Wellmon are arguing.

Second, most of the book is an examination of debates that took place within the German academy in the nineteenth century. Why is that important to me? Because my alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, was explicitly founded on the German model in 1876, the first American university to be so founded. The words Bildung and Wissenschaft that march through this text like Sherman’s troops through Georgia also surrounded me at Hopkins.

But first I urge you to settle into a comfortable chair, pour yourself a drink, coffee, tea, scotch, a white wine spritzer, whatever. This is going to take awhile. As you know, it is customary in some quarters for a reviewer to use the occasion to expatiate on their own views while treating the book under review as but a pendant on that disquisition. I hope, Paul and Chad, that my abuse of this privilege is not so flagrant as is so often the case in, for example, The New York Review of Books but I found your argument so compelling that I had to toss in my 2 cents.

In the first section I lay out their argument as I understand it. Then, after a generous quotation from the book, I illustrate the argument with some observations by the late J. Hillis Miller, a contemporary humanist of the first rank. Miller’s observations set up the third section, where I stray from the text entirely, and discuss the ways in which schools could use the internet to revamp humanities instruction and public outreach in ways suitable to the contemporary world. I loose it entirely in the fourth section, where I explain how one ancient text, Plato’s The Crito, has been central to my own life, and then move closer to the Reiter’s and Wellmon’s text with a discussion of Goethe’s Faust, which also has personal significance. I conclude on a note of measured open-ended pessimism. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

In my last essay for 3QD we talked about how we are at the beginning of a new era in mathematics. As a discipline mathematics has the mythos that it is True and Eternal, but it is also a human endeavor and has its share of errors. Fortunately, it is a robust and self-correcting system that usually catches and corrects these errors.

For several decades we have had proof verification software. Versions of such software are useful in the so-called “real world”. NASA, for example, is keen to avoid software crashes. After all, if you brick the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars it’s not like you can just reboot it. NASA sponsors an ongoing series of meetings devoted to formal verification methods.

In mathematics, however, proof verification software has yet to play an important role. For both human and technical reasons, research mathematicians and proof verification folks live on different planets. My last essay was about the software package Lean and the fact it is quickly getting up to speed with undergraduate level mathematics and even knows about manifolds and perfectoid spaces (geometric objects used by researchers every day). Heck, perfectoid spaces were introduced by Peter Scholze less than a decade ago — a blink of an eye in the long arc of mathematics.

In fortuitous timing for 3QD readers, Lean made news just last week. In December Peter Scholze laid down a challenge to the Lean community. It was called the Liquid Tensor Experiment. Last week the challenge was answered.

The revolution has begun! Read more »

by Tim Sommers

In an interesting recent article on Aeon, “You are a Network” (based on her 2019 book, “The Network Self”), Kathleen Wallace argues that anthropological, narrative, feminist, and communitarian views of the self have all converged on the idea that you are a network.

But you’re not.

At least part of what she has in mind is that the self is a process not a substance, that it’s essentially relational, and that it can be extended in various ways – for example, what we count as our cognition can be extended beyond the boundaries of our own mind and body. It’s a neat idea, but I don’t think it’s true.

The argument that “you are a process” is orthogonal to the question of what sort of thing or process you are. For example, physicalists (philosophers committed to what used to be called “the slogan”: “everything that is real is physical”) prototypically also describe the self as a process. It’s a brain process. So, I don’t think the substance/process bit is the real issue.

So, I want to talk about whether you and I are essentially relational and whether our cognition can be extended or networked. With all due respect to the view, my aim is deflationary. There are relational properties, but you cannot essentially be your relational properties. And that idea that we can extend our cognition is basically just a metaphor. Let’s start there. Read more »

Jean Shin. Fallen. Installation at Olana State Historic Site, New York.

“… In the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of hemlocks were cut down for the tanning industry, which used the tannin in the tree’s bark for the commercial demands of leather-making. The devastating loss of these evergreen forests would have been visible from Olana’s hilltop. With an artist’s eye toward the cycles of nature, Church would also include fallen trees in his paintings.”

“In memory of the millions of hemlocks that fell in the 19th century to the local leather-tanning industry, Jean Shin used antique bark-peeling tools to remove the tree’s outer layer before giving it a protective new coat …”

More here, here, and here.

by Peter Wells

Seventy years ago, according to William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (Carey, 2009), the future Nobel prizewinner was a middle-aged English teacher in a private boys’ school in Salisbury, UK, and not enjoying it. He had written three novels, none of them published, though some of his poems had gone into print. His novel about schoolboys killing each other on a tropical island, originally entitled Strangers From Within, was begun in 1951 and first sent to a publisher in 1952. It was rejected by seven publishers before Golding sent it to Faber & Faber in 1953, where the reader, Polly Perkins, pronounced it:

An absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atomic bomb on the colonies and a group of children who land in the jungle near New Guinea. Rubbish and dull. Pointless.

Golding might have continued for a further twenty years in the job he hated, had not a new member of the Faber & Faber team, Charles Monteith, picked up the well-thumbed manuscript from the reject pile and taken it home. Should we be grateful to him? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Varun Gauri

The narrator and main character of Ishiguro’s new novel is Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF, for short). In other words, she’s an artificial intelligence, a robot, a machine. Klara’s job is to befriend and care for a sick young teenager, Josie.

Why would Josie, or any human being, want to befriend an artificial intelligence?

To being with, Klara is “really cute.” Her hair is “neat and short.” Not only does she resemble a human, Josie observes, but Klara looks French! Klara is also “really smart.”  She has “many unique qualities,” perhaps foremost “an appetite for observing and learning,” unlike many of the other AFs, especially the ones that have all the latest technical advances but which people don’t seem to take to. For these reasons, Josie instinctively picks out Klara at the AF store.

Klara’s descriptions of human life are direct and novel. The reader notices her language, which, as James Wood observes, powerfully makes the real truly strange, defamiliarizing, and thereby renewing, our perceptions of the world. For instance, she repeatedly acknowledges the sun not for its warmth or the lovely shadows it casts, as a human narrator might, but for the sun’s “patterns” and its “nourishment,” as a a solar-powered machine would, one imagines. Her accounts of human emotions are alternately astute and bizarrely precise: “My impression was that the Mother was at that moment the most lacking in tension I’d witnessed since my arrival.” Klara is especially attuned to the ways in which loneliness creeps into human life, and says this about the importance of Josie joining her mother for morning coffee before the mother leaves for work: “I understood then that if she failed to join the Mother for the quick coffee, there was the danger of loneliness creeping into her day, no matter what other events filled it.” Read more »

This was one of the earliest videos I made after I learned to fly drones some years ago, in the Milland neighborhood of Brixen, South Tyrol. I was mainly just testing out the capabilities of my DJI Phantom drone, which flew quite beautifully, even with some wind.

by Brooks Riley

Time is a double-jointed trickster, bending this way and that to elude the tempi of one’s needs.

Time isn’t what it used to be. The pandemic has altered our perception of it. This is why time is no longer quite as valuable as it was before we were suddenly assaulted with too much of it. It used to be a commodity in short supply. It’s even been called a currency (time is money), but the reverse was never true. No matter how many billions Mr. Bezos has, he has no more hours in his day than I do.

Utilization of time has also changed. Novels still require the same amount of time to read as they always have, but audiobooks actually slow down the storytelling process: Where eyes once flew over the page, a human voice now dictates the pace at which we enjoy the authorial content as we keep our eyes on the road and our hands on the wheel.

All this leads to the question of just how our grasp of time or time-passing has been altered aesthetically by the convergence of that motherlode of time, the pandemic, with the rising popularity of elongated storytelling formats like TV series—those time-indulgent, episodic ways to weave a tale, unhurried by a two-hour time limit. Where movies used to define—and confine—our consumption of a narrative, series now populate the streaming platforms, becoming increasingly dominant in the menu listings and more sophisticated in their dramaturgy.

They get no respect. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

Some decades back the typical voting pattern in many democracies used to be that the rich and upper middle classes used to vote in general for right-leaning parties, while the relatively poor voted for left-leaning parties. But in recent decades this pattern has been shifting: many of the professional or more educated voters in some of those countries are increasingly going for left or green parties, while many of the poor working-class voters are turning to right-wing parties, sometimes led by populist demagogues. Thomas Piketty and his associates in a new paper issued by the World Inequality Lab have provided data to show that for 21 western democracies the more educated voters have over the years become more left supporters than the less-educated voters. Piketty has described this elite division between high-education and high-income people colorfully as that between the Brahmin Left and the Merchant (the corresponding Indian caste term would have been ‘bania’) Right. He does not go much into explaining this pattern but it is clear that as education expands (measured by average years of schooling of the adult population) the left or center-left parties now can have a viable base even in the relatively rich or upper middle classes. Education often makes one appreciate more liberal values, which may sometimes outweigh their worries about higher taxes that the left parties may inflict.

But this still leaves unexplained why the less-educated poor are leaning right. Of course the shocks of job losses due to global integration and automation have hurt them (particularly as low education makes it more difficult to adjust to changes in market demand and technology), but why are they turning right instead of turning toward far-left parties which are often anti-globalization and in favor of more social protection for working classes? I’d suggest that this is for two major reasons. The first has to do with economic policy, and the second predominantly cultural. Read more »

by Ali Minai

Among all the fascinating mythical creatures that populate the folklore of various cultures, one that stands out is the golem – an artificial, half-formed human-like creature that comes to us from Jewish folklore. Though the idea goes back much further, the most famous golem is the one said to have been created and brought to life by the great Rabbi Loew of Prague in the 16^th century. Stories of various other golems have also come down through history, each with its own peculiarities. Most of them, however, share some common themes. First, the golem is created to perform some specific function. For example, the golem of Prague was created to protect the Jews of the city from pogroms. Second, the golem is capable of purposive behavior, but in a limited way. And third, the golem is activated by a human master by tagging it with a word (or words), and can be deactivated by removing or changing the word.

The golem has made many appearances in literature – especially in science fiction and fantasy – and its linkage with artificial intelligence is implicit in many of these instances. Though the golem is often portrayed as not particularly intelligent, the analogy with AI is clear in that the golem can act autonomously. More pertinent here, though, is another aspect of the golem’s behavior: Obedience. The golem has no purposes of its own, and is obedient to the desires of its master – though, interestingly, golems do rebel in some stories, which makes the analogy with AI even more apt.

The End of AI

The present time is seen by many as the golden age of AI, despite the fact that other “golden ages” have come and gone up in smoke in the past. The thinking is that this time AI has truly arrived because it is more grounded and has infiltrated down to the very core of modern human life. No aspect of life today – from medicine and finance to education and entertainment – remains unaffected in some fundamental way by AI. It is built into cars, cameras, and refrigerators. It analyzes investment portfolios and consumer preferences. It recognizes faces for security and for logging into digital devices. It lies at the core of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and many of the other technology and consumer giants that shape our lives. In these last fourteen months of the COVID pandemic, tools enabled by AI have been used extensively in data analysis, clinical practice, and pharmaceutical innovation. Indeed, so pervasive has AI become that, in many cases, it is not even noticed. We take it for granted that things in our lives – phones, watches, cameras, cars, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and even homes – will be “smart”. Increasingly, we expect things to understand what we are saying, and in the near future, we may expect them to understand our thoughts as well. The time is also at hand when more and more of the complicated things we do, from driving to writing legal briefs, will be left to AI. In a real sense, we humans are outsourcing our minds and bodies to algorithms. No wonder some very smart people are worried that AI may make slaves of us all, while others seem to be relishing the prospect of merging with smarter machines to become gods. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Beech Bark Landscape. June, 2021.

Digital photograph.

by Charlie Huenemann

Suppose you are Father God, or Mother Nature, or Mother God, or Father Nature — doesn’t matter — and you want to raise up a crop of mammals who can reason well about what’s true. At first you think, “No problem! I’ll just ex nihilo some up in a jiffy!” but then you remember that you have resolved to build everything through the painstaking process of evolution by natural selection, which requires small random shifts over time, with every step toward your target resulting in some sort of reproductive advantage for the mammal in question. Okay; this is going to be hard.

Given what you know about reasoning and truth, the mammal is going to have to have access to some way of abstractly representing the world to itself, or language. That in turn will require a community of language users; and that will require a community of beings who fare better through cooperation. This immediately raises the problem of how to evolve beings who are both selfish and social. Selfishness requires cheating whenever you can get away with it, but sociability requires trustworthiness. Striking a workable balance between selfishness and sociability is tricky, but not impossible, as anyone who has worked in corporate knows.

As if that tension isn’t hard enough: if what you want in the end are mammals who can reason well about what’s true, that raises even more problems. Reasoning well about what is true profiteth a mammal little. It does not reliably help a mammal in its selfish strivings, since it is often better for the mammal to believe all sorts of falsehoods that give it undue confidence (hope), or steer it clear of dangers (superstition), or hate its competitors (envy and jealousy). Nor does reasoning well about what is true help the mammal in terms of sociability, since a mammal is often more sociable by being stubbornly loyal to its clan (tribalism), or by taking on risks or burdens on behalf of the group (altruism), or caring for those who offer it no advantage (selfless love). Selfishness, sociability, and rationality: pick two, but you can’t have all three. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

I’ve always loved the name Sinus Iridum (Bay of Rainbows), which describes a beautiful semicircular dark feature on the face of the Moon. Browsing a lunar map reveals other names equally beautiful or evocative: Sinus Concordiae (Bay of Harmony) and Sinus Aestuum (Seething Bay), for example. Other lunar plains with watery names include Mare Anguis (Serpent Sea), Palus Somni (Marsh of Sleep), and Mare Imbrium (Sea of Showers). Montes Harbinger is a group of mountains in Mare Imbrium; when they’re lit by the rising sun, they herald the approach of sunrise to Aristarchus crater.

Alexander von Humboldt, who is remembered in place names all over Earth, is also recognized on the Moon. Mare Humboldtianum lies on the divide between the near and far sides of the Moon; in the 1830s, Johann Heinrich von Mädler named this lunar sea for Humboldt because it extends from the known into the unknown.

The Moon has a lake for every season (literally—Lacus Autumni and so on) and lakes for many moods: lakes of happiness, fear, dreams, hatred, and hope; also the lake of forgetfulness (who doesn’t sometimes want to take a swim there?), the lake of time, the lake of solitude.

We’ve cast a net of words over the Moon for as long as we’ve had words. Before we could see individual features in any detail, the enigmatic markings on the Moon provided a Rorschach test of sorts, a space onto which we projected our imagination. To me, the man in the Moon has always meant the sort-of face that you can see on the Moon (and its many stylized representations), but the traditional stories about the man in the Moon in Western culture often involve punishment or banishment. Read more »

by Brooks Riley