by Paul North

What do movies tell us? They tell stories; they tell about exotic places, wealth beyond our imagining, weapons beyond what would ever be necessary; they tell us about the idiosyncrasies of our celebrities. Besides all this, they almost always tell us something about ourselves. Imagine a screenwriter. What is her material? She works with plot and character yes, but her real material is us, our expectations. A screenwriter has to know, or think she knows, what the widest possible variety of viewers expects to see, so she can decide how to satisfy that in some respects and frustrate it in others. Before they type a word, screenwriters are psychic map makers, walking our internal landscapes, plotting the distant peaks and hidden valleys. They are the original mythographers. They tap into the unspoken myths that we keep secret—even from ourselves. Movies tell out loud secret beliefs we hide. Here is a test: next time you turn on a movie, if it captivates you, ask yourself which of your secrets is being revealed, what dark part of you is being torn out and lit up on the screen.

Fate is one of these secrets. We may talk about freedom, we may think of our future as full of possibilities, we may choose our president, choose our deodorant, choose when to choose and when not to—but in the direst moments, when it becomes too frightening or too difficult to see a way forward, we indulge in our secret belief in the fateful nexus that makes us unable to act. I have heard the most radical intellectuals, whose freedom of thought and imagination dwarfs anyone else's, say that gender differences must be "hard-wired."

Obviously "hardwired" is a way we talk. Like movies though, the way we talk tells us the secrets we keep. Newspaper headlines are also "talk"—they can be equally revealing. Even when the answer is no, we are not hard-wired to do this or that, just raising the question points right at our worry: are we hard-wired for this or that? (Look at "Are We Hard-Wired for War?" (NYT 9/28/13)). It's funny: "hard-wired" or as it's sometimes written—as if it were a technical term—"hardwired," is most often used in the press these days to talk about human psychology. It is, though, a metaphor. To date, no psychologist has discovered any "wires" in us.

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by Michael Liss

My 40th college reunion is coming up. Yes, it's a jolt to the system to realize that I've gone from a skinny young nerd to a skinny vintage nerd in what seems roughly the amount of time it takes to play an Orioles-Yankees game. I'm making the calls and sending the emails to my far-flung (but "curated") group of friends, trying to decide whether Baltimore in Springtime is all that appealing…or should we just wait for 50?

It can get a little hot in April in Charm City. In fact, it can stay a little hot well into September. Along with hot, Baltimore has a well-deserved reputation for humid. It excels at humid. This, along with Chemistry, and, of all things, German, caused me briefly to wonder just what the heck I was doing when my guidance counselor suggested Johns Hopkins and I thought "Hopkins, wow, great idea, Cushing, Halsted, Osler, I'm going to be a doctor!"

Reality can be a cruel mistress. Yet there was something besides an absurd Heat-Index reading that was different about my first few days in college—there was also the sound of ROTC candidates training in the practice field behind my dorm. A reminder of Vietnam and a fate—perhaps my fate—rather narrowly escaped.

If you didn't live through it, it might be hard to grasp the turmoil, anger, and anxiety of the late 60s and early 70s. Turmoil, because no one knew when or how the war was going to end; anger, at politicians who seemed unable to find satisfactory answers; and anxiety—deep fear—that you, or a family member would somehow find himself in a place that few wanted to be for a cause in which many did not believe.

Richard Nixon had called for an all-volunteer army during the 1968 Campaign. Whether he actually believed in the concept or was merely using it as a tactic is hard to say. But he was also looking for a way to defuse the constant anti-war demonstrations. These, he thought, were led by middle and upper-middle class families who were concerned that once their boys completed their college deferments, they would be shipped off to die. Take away their risk, and they would no longer care, allowing him to pursue his strategic aims unencumbered by organized opposition.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg had a wonderful piece in a recent edition of the New York Review of Books about "the trouble with quantum mechanics."

Trouble? You ask….?

Well according to science writer Tom Siegfried, "Quantum mechanics is science’s equivalent of political polarization." He says:

Voters either take sides and argue with each other endlessly, or stay home and accept politics as it is. Physicists either just accept quantum mechanics and do their calculations, or take sides in the never-ending debate over what quantum mechanics is actually saying about reality.

This is to draw attention to the fact that as the mathematical models become increasingly more sophisticated in representing a foundational picture of physical reality, the conclusions that can be drawn from the picture become "impossibly weird." Such weirdness is what led to Schrodinger's cat, for example. Or later on to the weirdness called "entanglement" and the multiverse; both which we can safely describe as being, "extreme weirdness."

To understand what physicists mean when they call something "weird," Weinberg pointedly contrasts the situation in quantum mechanics to the ever-reliable consolation that is classical Newtonian physics; in which one can quite accurately calculate where a ball will land if its velocity and direction are known. Not so in our new universe; for in the crazy upside-down world of quantum mechanics no one can say for sure where an electron will be if it is measured–only where the probability wave is most intense.

Even Einstein lost his nerve at this point, famously saying, "God does not throw dice." And Weinberg wonderfully describes how both Schrodinger and Einstein distanced themselves from quantum mechanics later in their careers for just this reason; as the observational results have led particle physicists into saying the damnedest things.

And interestingly this weirdness eventually led to the two different approaches to the issues, so wonderfully described by Tom Siegfried above. Before reading Weinberg's piece I wasn't actually aware that particle physicists thought in terms of "realism" versus "instrumentalism;" as this is a dichotomy that I associated with an older period in the history and philosophy of science.

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by Dave Maier

As a philosophical term of art, pragmatism is a uniquely difficult to define. This is because pragmatists don’t care about essences or definitions, and when presented with apparent problems with this or that definition of pragmatism, they (we) are likely to shrug. Who cares what something is called, when what matters is what good it is? But surely “pragmatism” has a meaning like any other word – or, if we don’t want to bring meaning into it, we can appeal to pragmatist sympathies in this matter by noting that the concept can be useful, but only if we are clear on how to use it best. This can be tricky, as pragmatists don’t like to be pinned down on anything, semantic or otherwise, without knowing how the issue has come up and why we care, and of course there’s a wide variety of potential answers to those questions.

I mention all this because I have been reading Alan Malachowski’s 2010 book The New Pragmatism, by which, at least in this brief introduction to the subject, he mainly means Richard Rorty and/or Hilary Putnam (whose death a year ago (at 89) I am ashamed to admit I did not notice. One of the book’s epigraphs is from Rorty himself, who tells us, typically, that “I do not think that pragmatism has a True Self.” Throughout the book, Malachowski is pretty consistently a staunch defender of Rorty’s thought, but I wonder here if he has chosen this particular Rortyan formulation to motivate our sense that for all its virtuous resistance to metaphysical sin, it still leaves something important yet undone. Who said anything about a True Self? We just want to know what we’re talking about.

We might naturally start by distinguishing pragmatism from one of its neighbors. In contemporary parlance, in philosophy and in general, while “pragmatism” is generally neutral in tone, the term “postmodernism” is mainly used dismissively. So used, it picks out a (thankfully) short-lived intellectual and cultural movement characterized by trendy nihilism, radical skepticism and relativism, and naive, tendentious, sanctimonious identity politics of the primarily left-wing variety. In linguistic matters at least, vox populi, vox Dei, so I can’t really complain; but it does leave us with some work to do if we are to avoid confusion – which is what we’re here for, so let’s get to it.

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by Sarah Firisen

Science fiction has always run the gamut from extreme prescience on one end to paranoid fantastical delusions at the other, and everything in between. But it has always done more than merely try to predict future technologies, it has played its part in our imagining of the future. From the imaginations of writers and filmmakers spring fantastical creations that generations of science and tech geeks dedicate themselves to making a reality – there may be no better example of this than the fervor around creating Marty McFly’s hoverboard from Back to the Future. And while there is a very long list of fictional universes that have clearly inspired generations of scientists, maybe none has had quite such a direct and sustained impact as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash has had on the envisioning, creation and even lexicon of virtual and augmented reality. The impact is so clear that Stephenson was stalked by the founders of the extremely hyped but uber secretive augmented reality firm Magic Leap and was eventually persuaded to join them as their Chief Futurist. Stephenson even coined the terms avatar and metaverse in his rather dark tale of a pretty dystopian early 21st century.

Actual virtual reality technology has been around maybe 20 years or more in one form or another. But it’s really only in the last few years that a perfect storm of cheap and plentiful data storage, extreme advances in computing power, and perhaps most opportunely, the rise in quality and drop in cost of tiny hi-res screens thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, has meant that finally, despite many false starts, we may be on the cusp of realizing a level of virtual and augmented reality that may come close to Stephenson’s vision.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Wisdom is a product of experience and reflection. As a consequence, it's often quite a long road to that goal. It's for this reason that the poetic expression, "the Owl of Minerva Flies at Dusk," has its effect. Only at the end of the day, once the work is done and we recline in thought, do the insights of what we ought to have done, what the best option was, and what was wrong about a particular decision become clear. We live forward, but we understand backward. And that can occasion distinctive problems.

In democratic politics, this point about insight is certainly true. And it extends not only to the errors we may make as a country, but also to the errors we make in understanding ourselves and our decision-making. In its current form, much democratic theory is focused on the decision-making and argumentative elements of modern political life. This deliberative democratic movement casts democratic life as that of participating in ongoing discussions, wherein all have a voice, no issue is beyond question, and every decision must be justifiable to all those whom it effects. There are admirable ideals, but we understand the ways we can fail those ideals only in making mistakes, only in witnessing the pathologies to which public reason is prone.

We experience living in a democracy and then we see the particular kinds of challenges and errors to which reasoning together can be prone. Perhaps we should have anticipated the effects of group polarization that seem to define contemporary political discourse, but we understand it all too well now that we live under its conditions. The incurious dogmatism of epistemic closure, the slippery euphemism of Orwellian Newspeak, and the abuses of and visceral reactions to political correctness are all political phenomena that require we see as developments from histories and arising within particular social settings. We do now know them a priori.

The Owl of Minerva Problem at first looks like a simple point about the retrospective nature of knowledge: You must first have experience to know, so knowledge must be dependent on (at least some) events of the past. But the Owl of Minerva Problem raises distinctive trouble for our politics, especially when politics is driven by argument and discourse. Here is why: once we have a critical concept, say, of a fallacy, we can deploy it in criticizing arguments. We may use it to correct an interlocutor. But once our interlocutors have that concept, that knowledge changes their behavior. They can use the concept not only to criticize our arguments, but it will change the way they argue, too. Moreover, it will also become another thing about which we argue. And so, when our concepts for describing and evaluating human argumentative behavior is used amidst those humans, it changes their behavior. They adopt it, adapt to it. They, because of the vocabulary, are moving targets, and the vocabulary becomes either otiose or abused very quickly.

Consider the use of fallacy vocabulary less as a device for the cool evaluation of arguments, now, but rather as a tool of evasion or attack.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

While laying in bed on the night of January 20, 1884, Lewis Carroll conjured up the following puzzle:

Three Points are taken at random on an infinite Plane. Find the chance of their being the vertices of an obtuse-angled Triangle.

That is, since any three points on a sheet of paper can be connected to form a triangle, what's the likelihood that one of the angles is more than ninety degrees if you pick those points at random?

If you only know Lewis Carroll from Alice in Wonderland you may be surprised that his thoughts turned to mathematics. In fact, his day job was to be a mathematician at Christ Church college in Oxford under the name Charles Dodgson. In addition to his more famous works of fiction, he was known for writing several mathematical texts. When teaching linear algebra I always take a day to talk about Dodgson Condensation [1].

Lewis Carroll working on a pillow problem.

One of the books he wrote is Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow Problems Thought Out During Wakeful Hours. It is the compendium of 72 math problems Dodgson pondered and solved while waiting to fall asleep. Helpfully he also gives the date he dreamt up the problem and the solution he devised. Go here if you'd like to take a look at the other 71 problems.

The Obtuse Triangle Problem is No. 58. Before we take a look at his solution we should step back a minute. What does it mean to pick three points at random? Like most politicians' speeches, it sounds good but falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. Are we to pick x and y coordinates for each of these points? Alternatively, we could pick an angle between 0 and 360 degrees and a distance and, starting at the origin, take the point at that angle and distance. Or, since all we care about is the resulting triangle, maybe we should randomly pick an angle between 0 and 180 degrees, pick two side lengths at random, and make the triangle made by drawing two sides of those lengths with that angle between them. I'm sure we could come up with a dozen different ways to randomly pick a triangle.

If a random triangle was a random triangle, and if the world was fair and just, then the odds of an obtuse triangle would be the same regardless of our method. Sadly, the world is neither fair nor just. It will matter how we choose to pick a random triangle [2].

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“The woolly mammoth vanished from the Earth 4,000 years ago,
but now scientists say they are on the brink of resurrecting the ancient
beast in a revised form, through an ambitious feat of genetic engineering.”
— Hannah Devlin inThe Guardian

Lazarus

If the wooly mammoth becomes the new Lazarus
reborn from an ice sarcophagus
does it mean that we may all return one day
to beat our breasts at the injustice of death
but also to rejoice in miracles? It’s an
honest question, we’ve been asking it
for generations, yet it’s never been answered
but in myth, the story that elevates ignorance
to poetry, that blazes red trails in pigment,
that ends up only as sublime music to our ears,
elusive, illusory as the apparition of tomorrow

But we still have this day
It seems never to end

Jim Culleny
2/21/17

by Jalees Rehman

The Affordable Care Act, also known as the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", "Obamacare" or the ACA, is a comprehensive healthcare reform law enacted in March 2010 which profoundly changed healthcare in the United States. This reform allowed millions of previously uninsured Americans to gain health insurance by establishing several new measures, including the expansion of the federal Medicaid health insurance coverage program, introducing the rule that patients with pre-existing illnesses could no longer be rejected or overcharged by health insurance companies, and by allowing dependents to remain on their parents' health insurance plan until the age of 26. The widespread increase in health insurance coverage – especially for vulnerable Americans who were unemployed, underemployed or worked for employers that did not provide health insurance benefits – was also accompanied by new regulations targeting the healthcare system itself. Healthcare providers and hospitals were provided with financial incentives to introduce electronic medical records and healthcare quality metrics.

As someone who grew up in Germany where health insurance coverage is guaranteed for everyone, I assumed that over time, the vast majority of Americans would appreciate the benefits of universal coverage. One no longer has to fear financial bankruptcy as a consequence of a major illness and a government-back health insurance also provides for peace of mind when changing jobs. Instead of accepting employment primarily because it offers health benefits, one can instead choose a job based on the nature of the work. But I was surprised to see the profound antipathy towards this new law, especially among Americans who identified themselves as conservatives or Republicans, even if they were potential beneficiaries of the reform. Was the hatred of progressive-liberal views, the Democrats and President Obama who had passed the ACA so intense among Republicans that they were willing to relinquish the benefits of universal health coverage for the sake of their political ideology? Or were they simply not aware of the actual content of the law and opposed it simply for political reasons?

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by Brooks Riley

To paraphrase Heinrich Heine, I dream of Weimar in the night—not the era, but the town of Weimar, a lovely word on its own, one steeped in intellectual significance, historical resonance, cultural audacity, political and artistic enlightenment, philosophical bravura–and in modern times monstrous atrocity.

I remember the first time I heard the word Weimar. It wasn’t that small town in Germany where Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Liszt, Luther, Cranach, Bach, Wagner, Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, Strauss, Schopenhauer and countless other thinkers and artists once lived–or even where Kafka on a visit fell in love with the daughter of the caretaker of Goethe’s house.

It wasn’t the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement. It wasn’t the place where the new German constitution was signed in 1919 launching the legendary Weimar Republic, that glittering era of promise before the darkness fell. And it wasn’t the town closest to the murderous concentration camp at Buchenwald.

It was our Weimaraner, a hunting dog my father acquired to quell his thirst for a canine to tip the balance in a feline household. But Tonndorf, named for the castle a few miles from Weimar where my father, Artillery Commander of the 6^th Armored Division had quartered with his regiment at the end of World War 2, wasn’t allowed in our household, and was banished to the stable with the horses, where he spent hours hoping to catch a rat coming out of a hole in the earthen floor of a stall, successful only once in all his years, when an emerging rat took a wrong turn and landed in his maw.

Weimaraners were exotic in the mid-Fifties. They hadn’t been discovered by William Wegman or immortalized in the Museum of Modern Art. What I remember best about Tonndorf was the color of his coat, my favorite color, taupe. Taupe is the color gray with a smile, a hint of warmth that seeps through the sober neutrality of lightened black. I never think of Weimar without somehow seeing taupe, and when I look at Goethe’s color wheel, I can’t help wishing he had added that smile.

It would be many years before I actually went to Weimar, years before I began to understand the subterranean currents that would lead me there. So many interests of mine had their genesis in Weimar or were inextricably entwined with it. In college, a term paper of mine dealt with Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy, which was written and premiered there. In it, I posited that Schiller might have foreseen the dangers of Napoleon, and had written Wallenstein as a parable. Ironically, Weimar later briefly fell to Napoleon.

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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 posts here, here and here.

For all the ridiculousness of our president there is a whiff of the devil about him – by monumental bad luck, America has managed to elect a person embodying the worst of human nature. He combines thoughtlessness and utter disregard for standards of objectivity and reason with the soullessness and banality of reality TV run amok. Despite real parallels with 1930s Europe and more recent autocratic regimes across the world, the Trump era also offers novelty; it is its own, unique brand of awfulness, made in America.

In trying to grasp Trump's uniqueness, many commentators resort to psychology. In this essay, I want to propose a more philosophical perspective, a sort of psycho-philosophical approach that, in my view, allows one to appreciate better the psychic vortex that sucks up and annihilates anything of value around Trump. He is the inverse Midas: everything he touches turns immediately into junk. Business, entertainment, social media and now our national politics – very little is safe from his seeping menace. Kierkegaard's philosophy offers some clues to understanding this situation.

Kierkegaard suggested that the mind oscillates between two primary perspectives on the world: objective and subjective – and that the relationship between these approaches determines what kind of a person we are going to be. Objectivity is an orientation towards reality based on abstracting away, in various degrees, from subjective experience, and from individual points of view. An objective approach is based on concepts and modes of thinking about the world that is accessible from many different points of view. A subjective orientation, on the other hand, is based on an attunement and direct reflection on the inner experience of feeling, sensing, thinking and valuing that unfolds in our day-to-day living. It is the difference between an abstract, objective conception of water as a potable liquid that is also found in lakes, rivers and oceans, and the subjective concept of it based on what it is like to drink it or swim in it on this particular day in this particular place. Objective and subjective, of course, comes in degrees. Scientific concepts are the most objective but many of our everyday concepts are also of the more objective variety. The most subjective conceptions are those that arise in direct reflection on experience.

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