by Dave Maier

If you ever meet a guy who tells you that he is a skeptic, most likely he means that he doesn’t believe in angels or fairies or anything “metaphysical”. Maybe he is a member of CSICOP (the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, publishers of Skeptical Inquirer magazine). We should, he will tell you, examine the evidence carefully before committing to anything, and be neither gullible nor dogmatic. But of course he himself believes plenty of things, and one person’s skeptic is another’s denialist. What, after all, is “intelligent design” if not skepticism about the biological theory of evolution, and climate change “denialism” if not skepticism about climate science? In all such cases the objector accuses his opponents of epistemological dirty pool and demands that the matter be instead illuminated by the sweet light of reason, as manifested (naturally) in his own views and the ironclad evidence for same.

Such battles about which particular things to believe do not concern the philosopher, who has bigger, more theoretical fish to fry. But these fish can smell pretty fishy to those primarily concerned to beat back the dark forces of dogma and superstition (or “metaphysics”). Perhaps they should be left out for the cat.

Not long ago, for example, Bill Nye the Science Guy opined on the value of philosophy. He was not impressed. One of his gripes was that philosophers spill lots of ink on pointless questions such as whether there’s really a real world out there, or whether instead we might all be in the Matrix, maaaan [*bong hit*]. There is much indefensible stupidity and ignorance packed into Nye’s short remarks, and it is not our task today is to air it out, but I did want to say a few things about the very idea of philosophical skepticism.

As it is presented in popular works and (sometimes) in Phil 101, the skeptical question is indeed given in just this form: how do we know anything at all about what’s “out there”? Most of the time we think we know all kinds of things, but here comes the skeptic to burst our bubble, and put everything we thought we knew into question. Maybe we all (or just you) are simply dreaming! Maybe we don’t know anything at all! And yet of course we do, for that way madness lies; so the whole thing looks like a perverse, logic-chopping sideshow. Why should we care about such nonsense?

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by Michael Liss

Film still from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

It is time for navel-gazing here in the US.

We are about to have an election in which the two likely nominees have managed to alienate the electorate to an unprecedented degree. It has led to a surreal atmosphere. Hillary Clinton slogs on with a message that brings to mind the appeal of an appointment with a dental hygienist—it won’t be the highlight of your day, but it’s the healthy choice. Donald Trump has managed to do something quite brilliant—he has identified his target audience, taken disgust with dysfunction, mixed it with a shot of anger, and distilled it into one easily digestible slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

It is a genius-level move by a master salesman. With those few words, Trump seizes for himself and his supporters a core identity as the true heirs of a legacy of American preeminence. Like a classic old building, American greatness is still here—it’s just covered under layers of accumulated grime. With the right man in charge, someone of vigor and boldness, we can sandblast it all away and have a palace—even a cathedral—that celebrates. As we once were, so shall we be again.

But who were we? To what are we returning? That’s a fascinating question, because to own something, you need to be able to define it. And history lacks the clarity of a mathematical proof or a replicable scientific experiment. To paraphrase an interesting point Mary Beard makes in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the historian engages in a work of reconstruction which, by definition, is self-limiting. When the written word is absent or suspect, you learn about things by piecing together inference and fact, as if you were reassembling a broken amphora. You can scientifically analyze the contents, you can date the time it was fired, you can make assumptions about the economic and social standing of the owner and the community he lived in, but, in the end, what you have in front of you is likely the remains of an attractive, once useful, pot. A pot—not an unimpeachable set of facts about the nature of the people who used it.

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Pakistan is digging trenches —graves for people who have not yet died
as the country prepares for another record-breaking heat wave. Scientists
place the blame for rising temperatures squarely on climate change.
……………………………………………………. —IndiaTimes, May 23, 2016

Diggers Dig

...diggers dig.
spades trace dolorous arcs in dry air
making long scars for many corpses.

diggers dig.
sharp bell-like clangs of steel on stone
echo from the depths of this new scar.
the swoosh of pick-heads through air
end in thuds as their pikes take bites.

diggers dig.
men sling dry earth over shoulders.
they lean into their work.
they heave the earth upon itself
raising mountains of waist-high ranges
that parallel the long straight wound they carve.

these sweating ghosts-to-be
who may soon be thrown as well
into the coarse cut of their work,
a ditch that will soon be healed, forgotten, lost
when the undulating range piled by gravediggers
is thrown back in to bury hearts that break,
covering myriad sins: myopia,
misanthropy, masochism, mistake,

diggers dig
this ditch where now-breathing, sweating,
living, loving dead will go—

diggers dig.
we’re so good to ourselves, so profligate
we‘ll waste even our own last breath,
we'll make a place for it in a hewn slash,
bury it in our blue mother’s flesh,
the one we have not wisely loved
but sold for cash instead
.

by Jim Culleny
5/25/16

.

by Humera Afridi

Mere steps from Castle Clinton in Battery Park, on the southern tip of Manhattan, stands a striking bronze sculpture titled, The Immigrants. Created in 1973 by the Spanish sculptor Luis Sanguino, it portrays a group of individuals who have undertaken an arduous voyage. Their gripping expressions and postures tell a story of endurance—borne with patience and prayer; kindled by hope for a life of dignity, free of fear, whose nimbus-like promise will surely unfurl in this new world where they have disembarked.

Amid the deep-green lawns, beds of blooming tulips, and the sunny melodies of street jazz, the bronze figures beckoned. I spotted them on my lunch break, a fortnight or so before Memorial Day. Their raw emotions and the naked display of the human spirit expressed in all its earnestness caught me by surprise. Here in plain sight was a visual testimony to the search for sanctuary—a struggle that is painfully alive in a world beset by wars, but also, immediate and close to home, visceral in the lives of many thousands of immigrants in America who having found refuge here, nevertheless, now tragically live in fear of being deported and separated from their families.

A figure kneels, bare-chested with head thrown back, arms spread wide, broken chain-links dangling from fingers; another clasps both hands in fervent prayer, gaze directed heavenward. Disconcertingly candid and telling is the stance of one at the front of the line, who crouches, with a hand outstretched—surely symbolic of the labor of immigrants, and former slaves, upon whose foundation this nation is built. In the middle of the group stands a robed male of dignified bearing, arm held across his breast in a gesture of allegiance? of self-determination?

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by Leanne Ogasawara

I was recently reading a book by the dreadful Robert Kaplan on the topic of China and the South China Sea, in which the author suggested that Chinese culture exists in one of its purest forms in Malaysia. He argued that only in the overseas Chinese communities that have continuously existed scattered around the Pacific Rim has Chinese civilization survived, uninfected by the tumultuous events of the Communist Revolution. Similarly, I have a friend who is a political philosopher and expert in Chinese philosophy who believes that it is in Japan and Korea where one can most easily find the artifacts of the Chinese civilization–specifically Confucian philosophy. Japan is, after all, a place where a lot of cultural practices and material culture from China have been preserved. And not just China, for much Silk Road artifacts are preserved in Japan as well, for the country has long stood as a kind of terminus, lying at the end of the line in East Asia.

And speaking of Confucianism and the Communist Revolution, have you ever wondered why Confucian philosophy has such a bad name in the West? Largely unknown–except in its fortune-cookie format– if it is recognized at all, the tradition is rarely fully appreciated. This is partly because of its association with patriarchy and elitism– and this bad wrap is something that was invented by the Chinese communists, who strongly discouraged Confucian thinking as being counter-productive to the egalitarian ideals of the revolution. (They were especially worried by its patriarchal stance toward women).

Personally, I've always thought this to be a shame as Chinese philosophy happens to be one of the world's oldest existing philosophies; one which has arguably impacted more human lives than any other philosophy– past or present. It stands as one of the world's greatest philosophical traditions, and it is also my own personal belief that Chinese philosophy–in particular Confucian philosophy– that more than any other tradition is most compelling for what it tells us about the Good Life.

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by Evan Edwards

I have a copy of Franz Wright's Walking to Martha’s Vineyard on my bedside table. It has been there since my son was born last year. I’ve been trying to educate myself on contemporary poets for more than a year now. Wright was the one who happened to stick the most readily. I want my son to know about poetry; good, modern poetry that speaks to the vibrancy of the present. Of course, we’ll always read the classics, but I want him to also get an education in the words of those who aren’t yet dead, who are living and here and maybe coming to speak somewhere nearby at some point so that we can go together to hear a great poet speak in person and then walk out of the lecture hall feeling the brief surge of ecstasy you feel when you experience something extraordinary. Maybe it’s my obstinacy that drew me to him, or maybe it’s just the way that irony works, because of course Franz Wright is dead.

I first encountered Wright through the blog of a poet I met when I lived in Indianapolis. In the interview he gave, I remember feeling overwhelmed by the way he spoke about his recent economic troubles. The way he hadn’t been invited to speak or teach or fraternize (to be part of the brother/sisterhood of poets) since he’d made some admittedly snide and vicious remarks about MFA programs. How he was struggling with cancer. How he didn’t have the means to keep up the struggle for much longer. He was in remission, and had a tenuous relationship with hope. The cancer would, eventually, come back and then end his life in May of last year.

The word remission comes up one time in the interview, in the context of saying that he’s posted on Facebook saying that he is in the state of remission, and that he can give talks and readings, if anyone wants to get in touch with him. There was something very tender and heartbreaking in that statement. Here is one of the greatest living poets, recipient of a fucking Pulitzer Prize in poetry, Guggenheim fellow, son of poetry royalty, subtlest and most brutal portrayer of spiritual suffering, reaching out for work through his personal social media page. The desperation of that. It seemed hauntingly appropriate to speak of remission in that moment.

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by Bill Benzon

My paternal grandfather, Axel Benzon, was a Dane. He and his wife, Louise, immigrated to America early in the 20th Century. He was trained as an engineer, was educated in the classics, and took up photography and woodcarving. He ended his professional career as chief engineer of the main U.S. Post Office in Manhattan.

He kept a diary, the pages of which are generically entitled: “Leaves from my diary.” It’s not handwritten, kept in one of those blank books one can buy at a stationary store. It’s typed on ordinary 8.5 by 11 paper. I’ve got a photocopy of much or most of it, but, judging by his index, not all.

In commemoration of this Memorial Day, May 31, 2016, I would like to share some passages from his diary, passages written just before the United States was drawn into the war. As you read these passages keep in mind that you are reading the reflections of a well-educated middle-class European who had immigrated to the United States.

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—because despite being enlightened, civilized, advanced, and free, we are trapped—

by Paul North

In the 1930s a Hungarian psychiatrist, Leopold Szondi, began to think that families predetermine the lives of their members, before he was deported to Bergen-Belsen because his family was Jewish. Through a special negotiation he and other intellectuals were released and sent into exile. Szondi settled in Switzerland, where he worked the rest of his long life on tests and treatments for Genotropism, the name he gave to this curse on families. Members of a family share, he thought, a narrow set of psychological tendencies that are transmitted across generations. Who you choose as a life partner, what kind of career you end up practicing, even how much money you make are all determined up to a point by a ‘familial unconscious.'

The familial unconscious contains drives and needs specific to the family and gives them their desires, their limits, their fate. Now, although Szondi wanted to release individuals from the family's unconscious predeterminations, and he invented a therapy to do so, the principle that underpinned his therapy was itself a fateful idea. Instead of staying limited by family traits, he wanted you to learn that: “Wahl macht Schicksal” — “Choice makes fate.” With this principle, Szondi hoped to break through the walls of his patients' familial unconscious. What if he succeeded? Well, through this principle he also locked patients into a new idea of destiny. Fate may not pre-determine you, but it does determine you. The way it determines you now is not necessarily better, only different. Now your fate happens to you choice by choice.

Let us imagine that there is a history for the idea of fate. It is a fiction or a semi-fiction, but that doesn't matter. It will help us to see a pattern. The first stage of the history is ancient, even archaic. We see Greek and Roman worry about fate all over epic poetry and stoic philosophy. In monotheisms, however, and especially in Christianity, fate takes a back seat to a different kind of story, where what happens at the end of time cannot be pre-judged by humans. At the end of all things, whether it comes as a last judgment or a gift of grace, a human-looking God will be there, making all the final decisions.

The philosophical essayist Odo Marquard, who first sketched out this historical tale about fate—the fate of fate, he called it—was right: the weightiest things in life, which used to be completely out of our hands (threads were held by “the fates,” judgments were made by God) at some point were put directly into our hands. After the great monotheisms (this is fiction too: we know they have not ended), everything, Marquard wrote in 1981, comes to be seen as made by human beings, including the highest things, like God, history, and truth. He notes that the expansive new human power of making did not actually put an end to the fate idea. Just because we began to think of ourselves as in charge, as making all things, including our own history, our ideas and ideals, this did not mean that we were free—on the contrary.

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by Matt McKenna

Angry Birds is one of those generic children’s films that incorporates already popular intellectual property to mitigate the risk of losing money. The logic is that kids might skip a boring film about madcap animated animals, but if these madcap animated animals are the same ones with whom the children already have an established connection through video games, toys, and school supplies, the terribleness of the film won’t impact revenue. It works too: Angry Birds, a movie based on a smartphone video game franchise, has already made $164 million at the box office worldwide. I don’t mean this as a knock on children’s taste in films–the same risk reduction strategy applies to grown-up films as well. I bring up the Angry Birds intellectual property only because the “angry” in Angry Birds reflects the “angry” in America’s current political zeitgeist. So while children aren’t allowed to vote in the upcoming 2016 election, Hollywood is still able to provide them with an alternative entertainment option that promotes anger as the most responsible reaction to current events.

Angry Birds’ protagonist is Red, a bird who isolates himself from his community by being a pugnacious jerk. While the other adult birds are nauseatingly nice, Red is sociopathic: in one of his first scenes, Red assaults a father and smashes the father’s egg to cause a premature birth of the bird within (the baby bird survives, thank goodness). Of course, Red’s nasty disposition is eventually validated when the island is invaded by deceitful pigs who claim to be friendly but wind up stealing the birds’ eggs. Because Red had previously warned his fellow birds that the visitors were up to no good, he is subsequently chosen to lead these once wimpy flock to battle against the duplicitous pigs. By the end, Red defeats the pigs, saves the stolen eggs, and the birds who used to look down on Red now sing songs about how angry and valiant he is.

If Angry Birds wasn't so boring, it's horrifying moral would be the the film’s primary attribute. Reinforcing the current “you're either with us or against us” political climate in America, Angry Birds’ moral hinges on the idea that kindness is for the weak, and aggression is the only way to avoid looking like a sap.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Argumentation is the term used to denote the activity of arguing with a real interlocutor, in real time, over claims that are actually in dispute. When argumentation is properly conducted, the parties involved exchange arguments, objections, criticisms, and rejoinders, all aimed at discerning the truth (or at least what one would be most justified in accepting to be true). To be sure, argumentation does not always result in a consensus among disputants; even when argumentation is impeccably conducted, disagreement often persists. But this is no strike against argumentation. This is for a few reasons. First, the open exchange of reasons, evidence, and criticism is, after all, the best means we have for rationally resolving disputes and pursuing the truth. Insofar as we want a rational resolution, this is not only our best means, it's our only means. Furthermore, even when argumentation does not dispel disagreement, it can provide disputants with a firmer grasp of precisely where they differ. So even if argument doesn't yield consensus, it does yield fecundity. And, as John Stuart Mill famously observed, understanding the views of one's critics is an essential element of understanding one's own views.

We have frequently claimed in this column that argumentation comes naturally to human beings. People aspire to form and maintain true beliefs and eschew false beliefs, and the central way in which they enact this aspiration is by arguing with each other. Of course, that people are naturally disposed to engage in argumentation does not entail that people are naturally adept at it. The pitfalls of human reasoning are abundant, and there is rightly a substantial academic industry devoted to identifying, studying, and cataloguing them.

Yet detecting argumentative pitfalls is itself part of the activity of argumentation. When we argue, for sure, we argue about things. And so most argument has all the vocabulary of any other talk about the world. But when we argue, we aren't just looking at the things we are talking about, we are evaluating what we've said as reasons. And so, we must have a vocabulary that doesn't merely track things we are talking about, but it must also track how we've talked about it. That's what it is to assess whether you think someone's reasoning is acceptable or not. The issue isn't always about whether you accept what an interlocutor says, but it's also about how the things they say logically relate to each other.

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by Daniel Ranard

Math works pretty well. We can count apples and oranges; we can scribble equations and then launch a rocket that lands gently upright. When an argument is indisputable, we colloquially say “do the math,” and we speak of events that will happen with “mathematical certainty.” Math works so well that you're forced to wonder: why, and what does it mean about our world? I won't fully answer these questions, but I'll offer a few perspectives.

You don't need to know much math to see it works. Say you go apple-picking with a friend; you count 12 as you pick them, and your friend counts 19 of her own. How many apples are in the basket? Maybe you crunch the numbers on a scrap of paper, just to be sure. You manipulate symbols on a page, and afterward you make a claim about reality: you know how many apples you would count if you pulled them out.

But was that math or just common sense? If you're not impressed by addition, let's try multiplication. I suspect many of us encounter our first real mathematical “theorem” when we learn that A times B is B times A. As Euclid wrote circa 300 BC, “If two numbers multiplied by one another [in different orders] make certain numbers, then the numbers so produced equal one another.” This fact may be so familiar you forget its meaning: 4 x 6 = 6 x 4, or rather 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 = 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4. It may be obvious, but a curious child would still ask, why? The equation demands proof, much like the Pythagorean Theorem. Euclid gave a proof in Book VII, Proposition 16 of the Elements. And though he proved an abstract fact using abstract symbols, the world seems to obey this arithmetic rule: if you have four groups of six apples, Euclid predicts you can always rearrange them into six groups of four.

Maybe it's no surprise we can use arithmetic to make these predictions. But what about the success of more sophisticated math and physics?

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by Misha Lepetic

“I got my own pure little bangtail mind and
the confines of its binding please me yet.”
~ Neal Cassady, letter to Jack Kerouac

One of the curious phenomena that computing in general, and artificial intelligence in particular, has emphasized is our inevitable commitment to metaphor as a way of understanding the world. Actually, it is even more ingrained than that: one could argue that metaphor, quite literally, is our way of being in the world. A mountain may or may not be a mountain before we name it – it may not even be a mountain until we name it (for example, at what point, either temporally or spatially, does it become, or cease to be, a mountain?). But it will inhabit its ‘mountain-ness' whether or not we choose to name it as such. The same goes for microbes, or the mating dance of a bird of paradise. In this sense, the material world existed, in some way or other, prior to our linguistic entrance, and these same things will continue to exist following our exit.

But what of the things that we make? Wouldn't these things somehow be more amenable to a more purely literal description? After all, we made them, so we should be able to say exactly what these things are or do, without having to resort to some external referents. Except we can't. And even more troubling (perhaps) is the fact that the more complex and representative these systems become, the more irrevocably entangled in metaphor do we find ourselves.

In a recent Aeon essay, Robert Epstein briefly guides us through a history of metaphors for how our brains allegedly work. The various models are rather diverse, ranging from hydraulics to mechanics to electricity to “information processing”, whatever that is. However, there is a common theme, which I'll state with nearly the force and certainty of a theorem: the brain is really complicated, so take the most complicated thing that we can imagine, whether it is a product of our own ingenuity or not, and make that the model by which we explain the brain. For Epstein – and he is merely recording a fact here – this is why we have been laboring under the metaphor of brain-as-a-computer for the past half-century.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

(this is the sequel to last month's 3QD essay on the Pancake Problems)

I frequently come across a rafter of wild turkeys on bike rides through the countryside near my home. This particular group is recognizable thanks to having a peahen as an honorary member. Just this morning I was treated to a startling surprise: the peahen was busily herding a brood of chicks! I would have thought peacocks and turkeys were too distantly related to successfully breed. Apparently nobody told the peahen. I haven't seen any other peacocks in the neighborhood, so it would seem that she is more than friends with one of her turkey buddies. According to the internet, peacock/turkey hybrids (turcocks? peakeys?) are a thing which can happen.

Going by looks and their natural geographic ranges, my wrong guess was that peacocks and turkeys should be pretty distant on the tree of life. In the not-too-distant past, classification of species depended on such observational data.

Nowadays we can dig directly into the DNA to look for answers about relatedness. In the past decade it became possible to sequence the entire DNA of an organism. Not only that, but it's become fast and cheap. In fifteen years we've gone from the Human Genome Project taking thirteen years and $2.7 billion dollars to sequence the human genome to now being able to do it in days for $1,000. The progress in this field puts Moore's Law to shame.

It's one thing to have the data, it's another to put it to use. To deal with the flood of information pouring out of DNA sequencers an entirely new field called computational molecular biology has sprung up. It's a wonderful combination of biology, mathematics, and computer science.

A good example of this is turnips. Looking at them in the garden you might guess that they are more closely related to radishes than cabbage. In the 1980s Jeffrey Palmer and his collaborators looked at the mitochondrial genomes of turnips and cabbage and found that the genes they contained were nearly identical. What was different was the order of those genes [1]. The random mutations which occurred over the years didn't change the genes themselves, only their position in the DNA.

Even better, Palmer and company saw that the kind of rearrangements which occur are of specific kind. When a mutation occurs, what happens is that a segment of DNA consisting of some number of genes is snipped out, flipped around, and put back in, now in reverse order. For example, if genes were the numbers one through five, a typical sequence of mutations might look like:

Here at each step the segment of genes to be snipped out and reversed is indicated with an underline. Because each mutation reverses the order of some of the genes, folks call it a reversal.

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by Brooks Riley

In the last year, two extraordinary events have indelibly changed the immediate course of history, for better or worse. In an utterly surprising move, Germany, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, spontaneously accepted over a million refugees, most of them from the war in Syria, only slightly changing the demographic landscape of that rich, stable, mature and responsible democracy, but making a much bigger splash.

This year, for reasons that are still unclear, America’s Top Wild Card has all but bagged the Republican nomination.

The two events are unrelated, and yet they serve to make one ponder the nature of nationhood and expectation. The two protagonists of these events could not be more different. So too their nations.

Trump has succeeded in the land of the free-for-all, a place where narcissism is rewarded with undivided attention. Trump has just about won the Republican nomination, not because he’s the best man, not because he knows jack all about governing, government, foreign policy or any other policy, not because he’s rich, not because he’s got a new vision, not because he’s promised the moon, not because he wants to help the poor, but because he’s loud. He’s so loud that we can hear him all the way over here on the other side of the Atlantic.

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