by Rachel Robison-Greene

In Discourse on the Method, philosopher René Descartes reflects on the nature of mind. He identifies what he takes to be a unique feature of human beings— in each case, the presence of a rational soul in union with a material body. In particular, he points to the human ability to think—a characteristic that sets the species apart from mere “automata, or moving machines fabricated by human industry.” Machines, he argues, can execute tasks with precision, but their motions do not come about as a result of intellect. Nearly four-hundred years before the rise of large language computational models, Descartes raised the question of how we should think of the distinction between human thought and behavior performed by machines. This is a question that continues to perplex people today, and as a species we rarely employ consistent standards when thinking about it.

For example, a recent study revealed that most people believe that artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT have conscious experiences just as humans do. Perhaps this is not surprising; when questioned, these systems use first personal pronouns and express themselves in language in a way that resembles the speech of humans. That said, when explicitly asked, ChatGPT denies having internal states, reporting, “No, I don’t have internal states or consciousness like humans do. I operate by processing and generating text based on patterns in the data I was trained on.”

The human tendency to anthropomorphize AI may seem innocuous, but it has serious consequences for users and for society more generally. Many people are responding to the loneliness epidemic by “befriending” chatbots. All too frequently, users become addicted to their new “friends,” which impacts their emotional wellbeing, sleeping habits, personal hygiene, and ability to make connections with other human beings. Users may be so taken in by the behavior of Chatbots that they cannot convince themselves that they are not speaking with another person. It makes users feel good to believe that their conversational partners empathize with them, find their company enjoyable and interesting, experience sexual attraction in response to their conversations, and perhaps even fall in love.

Chatbots can also short-circuit our ability to follow epistemic norms and best practices. In particular, they impact our norms for establishing trust. It is tempting to believe that machines can’t get things wrong. If a person establishes what they take to be an emotional connection, they may be more likely to trust a chatbot and to believe targeted disinformation with alarming implications for the stability of democracy. Read more »

Vineyard in Neustift, South Tyrol. Apparently they put these rose bushes at the ends of the rows of grape vines because they are more susceptible to certain diseases and insects and act a bit like canaries in coal mines. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

First, some good news: I finally understand the Monty Hall problem. Or, at least, I feel like I do, which is still a triumph of sorts, given that this riddle’s empirically incontestable answer tends to evoke visceral, intuitive rejections, even among people who understand and accept every step of the explanation. I first encountered this wicked little brain teaser years ago during my undergrad philosophy studies, and only last week did it click into comprehension, thanks to a fine article by Allison Parshall in the August 2024 issue of Scientific American. The explanation that made sense to me is roughly as follows: When you choose one of three doors, there is a 1/3 chance that the prize lies behind it, and a 2/3 chance that the prize lies behind one of the two doors not chosen. When the host reveals that one of the two unchosen doors has no prize behind it, the odds are unaltered in the sense that there is still a 1/3 chance that the prize lies behind the door initially chosen, and still a 2/3 chance that it lies behind behind one of the doors not chosen. The host’s action just collapses that 2/3 chance into the single remaining unchosen door. So, while the player’s choices are split “50/50” between two remaining options (stay with the already chosen door, or switch to the remaining unchosen door), the odds remain 1/3 (behind the chosen door) versus 2/3 (behind the two unchosen doors, of which only one can now be chosen).

I had come close to understanding this last year when reading another discussion of the problem, which expanded the scenario to 100 doors, with Monty opening all but one of the 99 doors not chosen by the player in the first step of the game. In both the 3-door version and the 100-door version of the game, Monty opens all but one of the doors not chosen, collapsing the distribution of the odds into one remaining choice (2/3 or 99/100, respectively). It was intuitively obvious that if Monty opened all but one of the 99 unchosen doors, then that remaining door was more likely to hide a prize than the one randomly chosen by the player at the start of the game. But the idea that the odds remain the same, while the freedom to choose the wrong door shrinks, didn’t click yet. Now it clicks. I thank Parshall for removing one small but stubborn source of frustration from my life.

And now, a little chronicle about my other problems and solutions. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

I’ve been surfing for about three years. 

Not enough to be a guide of any sort, but certainly enough to realize what a miracle the sport really is.

What follows are nine life lessons surfing has taught me. The more you do anything, the more you realize it can teach you about everything.

1) As long as you start, you’re doing ok

I built a surfboard with my dad when I was 18. In my American high school, you needed a “senior project” in order to graduate.

I’d always wanted to surf, and my dad is a carpenter who can make just about anything. It was a match made in heaven.

When we finally finished putting the orange paint on and it dried out, I officially had a surfboard. I was going to start right away. A new “surfing bro” identity was just around the corner, and the world seemed full of possibility. 

It took 10 more years before I went surfing for the first time. I still haven’t even taken my senior project out for a spin.

But I’m here now, and I’m surfing a lot, and I’m about twice as good as I was last year.

Things don’t need to be perfect before you can invite a little more joy into your life.

I started a decade later than I planned – but I started.

And that’s what matters.

2) Doing something is always different than planning for it

I wish surfing was easy. Or at least one of those things that you can learn from watching a bunch of videos.

But you can’t.

Before my first time out, I spent a few hours on YouTube. Learning how to paddle, studying the drop in, watching videos of the surfing greats.

It didn’t help a bit.

That first day, the ocean forced me into the gap between planning and practice. Read more »

Sughra Raza. After The Rain. Vermont, July 2024.

Digital photograph.

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by Barry Goldman

Imagine a hunter, a tree, and a squirrel. The hunter is on the ground, the squirrel is clinging to the tree, and the tree is between two of them. As the hunter moves, the squirrel moves, always keeping the tree between them. The hunter goes around the tree. Does he go around the squirrel?

Yes. The squirrel is in the tree, and the hunter went around the tree. Therefore, the hunter went around the squirrel.

No. In order to “go around” the squirrel, the hunter must at some point be in front of the squirrel, and at other points he must be to the squirrel’s right, behind the squirrel, and to the squirrel’s left. That’s what it means to “go around” something. The hunter in the hypothetical was always directly facing the squirrel. He was never to the squirrel’s left or right and he was never behind the squirrel. Therefore, the hunter did not go around the squirrel.

So it depends on what “go around” means. If you adopt one definition, the hunter went around the squirrel. If you adopt the other, he didn’t. So what? Who cares?

That’s fair. But it isn’t so much the hunter and the squirrel I’m concerned about. I’m interested in legal disputes. And the judicial interpretation of contracts and statutes presents just this question: When we have competing definitions, how should we go about determining which one to adopt?

Let’s try another example. Is a taco a sandwich? That sounds like the same kind of silly waste of time as the hunter and the squirrel problem, and it is. Until it becomes the subject of a lawsuit. Read more »

Drinking It All In

A long way up Bray Road past the point where the first of
two small brooks cross beneath
it came to me in a new way that you and I are still
breathing four decades after we met
at the threshold of the unknown,
the part that comes
after now

and here we are, still there, poised together
even though we were strangers then, and now
you are my most intimate love;
no one knows me better

the sun’s slant was perfect on our walk, every particle or
wave, not a thing wrong with it,
perfect the way it shone, the way it distended the
shadows of things that stop light,
creating dark corollas, opaque spaces, the wild grid of
leafless trees spread across the road,
or shadow patterns of thick foliage of a juniper blanket
on a bank fronting a long porch, the slope of Robert’s
field bending up behind heaving stone walls on its back
without a hint of sweat

but there were no cows today ambling down to lap the brook
just you and I drinking it all in

Jim Culleny
11/9/21

by Malcolm Murray

As AI evolves, so do the risks it poses on society. The risks of AI today are already unrecognizable from those of a few years ago. As a dual-use technology, similar to nuclear power, the capabilities of AI bring great benefits as well as great risks. As opposed to nuclear power, however, the risks from AI are borne by society as a whole even as the benefits may only accrue to parts of society. This means we need to start focusing on societal AI risk management.

AI capabilities are set to only continue to evolve in the years to come. Naturally, there is considerable uncertainty regarding how exactly they will evolve. However, massive investments have already been made and are continuing to be made. By some estimates, there have already been hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI, and future discrete projects are now in the $100 billion range, such as the rumored Microsoft and OpenAI Stargate project. The scaling laws that have been observed over the past years have meant that money alone (in the form of compute and data) has inexorably led to capability advances. The significantly different capabilities between GPT-4 and GPT-3 were not due to size alone, but it played a large role.

Therefore, even if no further conceptual breakthroughs were to happen (which is unlikely), capabilities will continue to advance. Given what we already know about the risks involved, it is incumbent on us as a society to manage these risks so that society as a whole can reap the benefits from AI and not suffer from the risks. This necessitates broad, interdisciplinary efforts under the banner of societal AI risk management. Read more »

by Derek Neal

Karl Ove Knausgaard went around for many years claiming that he was sick of fiction and couldn’t stand the idea of made-up characters and invented plots. People understood this to be an explanation of why he had decided to write six long books about his own life. There was some truth in this, but the simple contrast between fiction and reality was complicated by the fact that Knausgaard referred to his autobiographical books as novels. Were they real? Was the Karl Ove of the story the same as the author? It seemed like it, but then why call them novels? The problem lay with the word “fiction.” Like a German philosopher, Knausgaard had his own definitions for words that we thought we all agreed on. Here’s how he explains his meaning of “fiction”:

At that time, I was also tired of fiction in a broader sense. It seemed to me that fiction was everywhere—TV news, newspapers, films, and books all provide a flood of stories, a continuous dramatization of the world. So what I did, naively, was to try to take the world back.

“A continuous dramatization of the world.” Fiction is not the novel, then, but the incessant urge to interpret and narrativize experience, instead of simply presenting things as they are: the truth. Of course, when one thinks they are seeing the truth they may be simply telling a different story, and they may have blind spots; but still, one can try, one can write against interpretation. This is what Peter Handke, one of Knausgaard’s favorite authors, does in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. He’ll write a sentence that goes something like, “The house seemed unoccupied because the door was open,” and then he’ll follow that sentence with, “The house seemed unoccupied even though the door was open.” Which one is it? What is the connection between an open door and the presence of someone in a house? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Robert Jensen

Smart people sometimes say not-so-smart things about freedom of speech.

Let’s start with Elon Musk, the boss at Tesla and SpaceX, and his often-quoted declaration that he is a “free-speech absolutist.” Whatever one thinks about Musk, he seems to be a smart person. But that’s a silly statement.

After he bought Twitter and then banished from the platform various people whose speech he didn’t like, critics labeled Musk a hypocrite. I’m not much interested in that, since I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have a bit of hypocrisy hiding somewhere in their lives, myself included. A more important observation is that if Musk, and all the other people who claim to be free-speech absolutists, actually meant it, they would be admitting that they are moral monsters.

No one really means it. There is no such thing as a free-speech absolutist.*

To be a true absolutist—and to endorse that as the guiding principle for First Amendment law in the United States—would mean rejecting any limits on any speech no matter what the consequences. That’s what “absolute” usually means—to do something, well, absolutely, without exceptions.

Absolutism would mean there would be no libel laws allowing people to recover damages when others deliberately lie about them. There would be no laws against the distribution or possession of child sexual abuse materials, once more commonly called child pornography. There would be no laws against speech that advances a conspiracy to murder someone. And the list goes on.

Imagine that I publish a story saying Elon Musk runs an international drug trafficking ring, that he uses those illicit profits to offset hidden losses at Tesla, and that his mismanagement of the electric car company is the result of his addiction to fentanyl. That story is, to the best of my knowledge, false on all counts. If Musk sued me for knowingly making false and defamatory statements (the kind that injure one’s reputation), he likely would recover money damages, punishing me for my speech, a rejection of an absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech. Most people would agree that libel law is justified. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

“Aik Shaam,” “An Evening (By the River Neckar)” is Iqbal’s ode to silence. A short lyric poem, it describes a rare personal moment in the vast corpus of a poet who is known by such hefty honorifics as “Allama” (the “learned one”), the “national” poet, “poet-philosopher,” or “Poet of the East.” This poem is an instance where we find a poet of great stature revealing his vulnerability, seeking pause, perhaps from the overwhelming disquiet of confronting the political tensions of his times as a scholar visiting Europe, a colonized subject of the Raj in a climate of rising awareness, perhaps negotiating intense homesickness in beautiful Heidelberg, or as many suggest, being lovelorn (as an already married man) for Emma Wegenast, the German tutor who was instrumental in guiding him through a remarkable turning point in his life by introducing him to Goethe’s poetry.

Literary correspondence between Iqbal and Emma Wegenast offers clues to their attachment. Though Iqbal’s biographers are better qualified to discuss their relationship and surmise what they will from it, Emma’s role in inspiring Iqbal to gain insights into Goethe’s works is significant to anyone interested in understanding Iqbal’s poetry. Before returning to a brief annotation on the poem, here are some thoughts on how the study of Goethe’s poetry, plays and philosophy left a deep impression on Iqbal, as reflected in his masterworks following his stay in Germany.

Iqbal’s poetry, valued for its exceptional originality in both the idiom he coined and the range of topics he stretched Urdu poetics into containing— is an important example of what is classified as “World Literature.” This, in no small measure, is due to the strong influence of Goethe (who was the first to come up with the term “Weltliteratur” or “World Literature”) but also Iqbal’s inclination to dissect, balance and appreciate the radically diverse, syncretic traditions of his own South Asian culture many years prior to encountering Goethe’s work. The book (besides Faust) that made a lasting impact on Iqbal’s psyche was Goethe’s West-ostlicher Divan or West-Eastern Divan. Iqbal was to compose “Payam e Mashriq,” a great work of his own, in response to Goethe and Rumi, that other sage Iqbal held in the highest regard. Read more »

by Angela Starita

Captains back from Barbados, manor houses, sugar plantations, slavery. This is the economic backdrop of a Jane Austen novel. But New Jersey, central New Jersey, was, it turns out, a locus of this trade too. Or more accurate to say, it was a locus of the fruits of the sugar trade. A website I found written by an amateur historian talks about the huge size of a fortune by a family called Morris all made in the sugar trade. He goes on to talk about enslaved people coming from Barbados who had learned farming there and then in NJ learned iron smithing. In 1804, New Jersey law stated that the children of slaves born after July 4, 1804 would be freed on their 21^st birthdays if female, 25^th if male. This of course kept slavery largely in place and in fact, NJ was the last northern state to abolish slavery, the result of an amendment to the state constitution in January 1866.

The Morris estate is a short walk east from the site of the North American Phalanx (NAP), a planned community built on the ideas of a French philosopher, Charles Fourier, mentioned in earlier columns. Constructed on a 673-acre site Colts Neck, NJ in 1843, the NAP sought to provide residents with work both meaningful and pleasurable. The land had previously belonged to someone named Joseph Van Mater. One source claims that he was single and aspired to own 100 slaves, but deaths (presumably the slaves’) kept him from reaching his goal. It goes on to say that “in his will he [Van Mater] freed all his slaves and, stories handed down, tell us they wandered up and down Phalanx road for days, lost and forlorn.” The NAP wouldn’t let them stay on the land they’d worked their whole lives. Commentary on the NAP rarely mentions the site’s past or the irony that a community designed to free us of drudgery had, just a few years before its founding, been worked by slaves.

*

I know nothing about the history of slavery in neighboring Howell, the town where I grew up. In my years there, the mid-1970s-’80s–there were two distinct Black neighborhoods. One was about a quarter of a mile from my house; the other along Route 9 near a poor white neighborhood of converted summer bungalows called Freewood Acres, a portmanteau of the two adjacent towns, Freehold and Lakewood. To call these areas neighborhoods might imply a grid of streets with houses, but both were more like family compounds–one piece of land with woods on either side where maybe ten small shacks arranged in no particular order that I could discern without internal streets or walkways separating them. I’d heard classmates refer to one of the two as the Black Village; in my hearing at least, it wasn’t a pejorative but a geographic point of reference. I only knew two Black girls from the neighborhood near me, and we never talked about how our families came to live in Howell. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

Before the first round of voting in the French legislative elections on June 30, the author and activist Edouard Louis posted the following on Instagram:

To those who would still be loath to vote for the Nouveau Front Populaire on Sunday because they have too many differences with one fraction or another of this union of leftwing parties: when you cast your vote, the political issue at stake is not whether you can find someone, a party, an individual, an alliance, with whom you might be perfectly in agreement on all things. Absolute agreement does not exist: we are never totally in agreement with others, including with those in our own camp, including with our closest friends, including with ourselves. Who has never come home of an evening turning over something they’ve said during the day and wondering, “Now why did I say that?” Since perfect and total agreement is an impossible fantasy, the issue at stake is rather: how can we create a space of disagreements that would render our disagreements effective, creative? How can the disagreements among La France Insoumise, the Verts and the PS be the point of departure for a more inventive, a more progressive politics?

What Louis is evoking here—the constructive interaction of differences in the name of a greater good—is in effect the basic recipe for politics: bringing together disparate actors with a common stake so that they can work on producing compromise solutions to complex problems. What is also commonly known as collaboration.

In the event, two weeks later, after the second round of voting in France on July 7, an unusually high turnout and a successful strategy of selective withdrawal of candidates have produced the potential for a situation known as cohabitation, in which the President of the French Republic represents a different party from that holding a majority (or at any rate forming the government) in the Assemblée Nationale. At least, that is what will almost inevitably be the case, unless Emmanuel Macron is able to split the left and form a centrist coalition with rightwing Socialists and the rump of the old Gaullist party. Read more »

Looking pretty sitting on my office wall: Distoleon tetragrammicus

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by Jeroen Bouterse

Even after discussing Daniel Chandler’s inspiring application of John Rawls in my previous column, I remain on the lookout for a book that delivers a sweeping, original and sound vision for the future of the liberal and democratic world, saves it from its social problems through policy proposals that are simultaneously transformative and unthreatening (enough for all interested parties to accept and implement them immediately), and provides a sure and painless path to undercutting popular support for illiberal and authoritarian politics. Ideally, it also solves climate change and ends factory farming, and does not require me personally to change too much. Disappointingly, Alexandre Lefebvre’s new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, only achieves some of these things.

Lefebvre’s argument is that it is possible to be a ‘liberal all the way down’. This possibility is not obvious. First of all, we may think of our society as liberal, but it is more accurate to think of it in terms of ‘liberaldom’, in the same way European societies used to be part of Christendom: dominant cultural expressions revolve around liberal tropes and sensibilities, but that doesn’t mean our society is unfailingly producing genuine liberals who strive to produce genuinely liberal social arrangements.

Second, it is commonly claimed that a liberal society doesn’t require its citizens to have a specifically liberal conception of the good. People with diverse conceptions of the good can (and rationally ought to) support liberalism precisely because it guarantees them the freedom and resources to pursue their own conception of the good life. Lefebvre does not object to this, but he thinks something is missing. A liberal conception of the good life does in fact exist, and it is both possible and desirable for people to pursue it.

A liberal view of what is good and valuable in life is not separated from liberal political values, but integrated in it. “The right is our good”, Lefebvre writes. In so far as liberalism as a political framework seeks to organize society along the lines of fairness, liberals are people who derive meaning from bringing a fair society closer. Again, there are other legitimate conceptions of the good life that can be in harmony with liberalism; but being ‘just’ a liberal does not mean trivial conformity to the status quo. It is a full way of life, in analogy to being a committed Christian or Stoic. Read more »