From Edge.org:

People talk about the future of the intelligent machines, and whether intelligent machines are going to take over and decide what to do for themselves. What one has to figure out, while given a goal, how to execute it into something that can meaningfully be automated, the actual inventing of the goal is not something that in some sense has a path to automation.

How do we figure out goals for ourselves? How are goals defined? They tend to be defined for a given human by their own personal history, their cultural environment, the history of our civilization. Goals are something that are uniquely human. It's something that almost doesn't make any sense. We ask, what's the goal of our machine? We might have given it a goal when we built the machine.

The thing that makes this more poignant for me is that I've spent a lot of time studying basic science about computation, and I've realized something from that. It's a little bit of a longer story, but basically, if we think about intelligence and things that might have goals, things that might have purposes, what kinds of things can have intelligence or purpose? Right now, we know one great example of things with intelligence and purpose and that's us, and our brains, and our own human intelligence. What else is like that?

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Douglas Lain in Zero Books Blog:

Stefany Anne Golberg is a writer for magazines such as The Smart Set, the former Critic-in Residence at Drexel University, a multi-media artist, and a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. Her husband Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy is a founding member of Flux Factory as well, and is a recipient of the Whiting Award. Together their book Dead People, a collection of literary and critical obituaries, is due out from Zero Books in June of this year.

As this week’s episode is about remembering and attempting to understand the significance of the dead it seems appropriate here at the start to offer up a short excerpt from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:

The dead individual, by his having detached and liberated his being from his action or his negative unity, is an empty particular, merely existing passively for some other, at the mercy of every lower irrational organic agency, and the [chemical, physical] forces of abstract material elements, both of which are now stronger than himself, the former on account of the life which they have, the latter on account of their negative nature.(1) he family keeps away from the dead this dishonouring of him by the desires of unconscious organic agencies and by abstract elements, puts its own action in place of theirs, and weds the relative to the bosom of the earth, the elemental individuality that passes not away. Thereby the family makes the dead a member of a community(2) which prevails over and holds under control the powers of the particular material elements and the lower living creatures, which sought to have their way with the dead and destroy him.

In this episode you’ll hear from Thomas J.J. Altizer on Hegel and the death of God, an clip from Gene Martin and Reverend AA Allen and the gospel hymn “God’s Not Dead,”a bit of dialogue from the television show True Detective, a clip from the documentary film “Manufacturing Consent,” and Dan Lett’s “Yeah It’s All Right.”

Morgan Meis in Image:

On a moonless night you can drive around parts of the city, and it is dark. Just dark. No streetlights, no houselights. Nothing. Just the stars and the beams from your headlights illuminating the cracked roads in front of the car.

A few months back, on the east side, near some abandoned buildings and the husks of a few houses that had been burned down almost completely, I heard a rustle in the nearby bushes. A ring-necked pheasant emerged from the undergrowth. It strutted across the grass, clucking and preening. Cocky.

Suddenly, a hawk swooped down from a tree nearby. The hawk, talons extended, made a grab for the pheasant. The pheasant ducked and parried at just the right time and then scurried back into the thicket from which it had emerged.

This, in the middle of metropolitan Detroit.

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Philip Horne at the Times Literary Supplement:

Despite failing health, particularly chronic angina pectoris, James might have completed more books but for the advent of war. He wrote to Edward Emerson on August 4, 1914 that “It has all come as by the leap of some awful monster out of his lair – he is upon us, he is upon all of us here, before we have had time to turn round”. The effect was devastating: “It gives away everything one has believed in & lived for”. British friends and their children were wounded or killed. James flung himself into the war effort – caring for Belgian refugees, visiting wounded soldiers, serving as honorary president of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. Though it was draining, James could cherish what he called, writing to Edith Wharton in May 1915, “the unspeakable adventure of being alive in these days”. He was especially tormented by the prolongation of American neutrality in the face of German aggression – to the point of taking the oath of allegiance on July 26, 1915. “Civis Britannicus sum!” he wrote to Edmund Gosse. London friends were pleased. On August 8, he told Rhoda Broughton of the many welcoming reactions to his act of conscience, declaring that “like old Martin Luther, ‘Here I stand, I can no other’”. But his given reasons looked suspect if not downright treasonous to American detractors, and he hoped for relief, as he told Lucy Clifford the next day, from “White’s Spectator thing” of August 14 – Dr J. William White’s article revealing “another and probably a controlling factor” in James’s decision: an “intense dislike for and disapprobation of the official attitude of America since the beginning of the war”, based on “the principles of civilization and of humanity”.

The strain seems to have been too much. On July 30, only four days after his great step, James was again taken ill. His diary would look back: “Date from that day the beginning, with intermissions, very brief, of all this late and present (Sept. 12th) crisis”.

more here.

Reinaldo Laddaga at Cabinet Magazine:

I’ve always found it intriguing that canonical histories of early twentieth-century art and literature, usually so generous in their treatment of the emergence of the historical avant-garde, never mention its most spectacular development: the creation, and ultimate failure, of the so-called Italian Regency of Carnaro. In a certain way, this omission is understandable. What happened between 1919 and 1920 in the contested city of Fiume, when—under the leadership of writer Gabriele D’Annunzio—a peculiar alliance of soldiers, artists, and adventurers occupied the city with the initial intention of annexing it to Italy, complicates the most common narrative in which modern art and progressive politics by nature go together.¹ But, as historian Roger Griffin’s excellent Modernism and Fascism observes, a number of avant-garde movements shared fascism’s aspiration to cure the world (or at least Europe) of anomie and a loss of vitality. These conditions were understood as by-products of modernity, and particularly so at the end of a war that made patent the failure of modernity’s promise of material and social progress. Both movements proposed a return, in the midst of crisis, to a primordial space where the envoys of a new humanity could gather the seeds for a future world. In Fiume, fascists and Dadaists, futurists and Bolsheviks, were, for a few months, in the same camp.

Let’s try to imagine Italy at the end of World War I. A constitutional monarchy the disparate regions of which had only very recently integrated, it had entered the war in 1915 on the side of the British-French alliance one year after the hostilities started, having received from France and England guarantees of territorial compensation. The ensuing three years of combat caused in this mostly traditionalist, agrarian society an even deeper upheaval than the one suffered by its allies.

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James McWilliams at The American Scholar:

In 2012, Paul Miller, a 26-year-old journalist and former writer for The Verge, began to worry about the quality of his thinking. His ability to read difficult studies or to follow intricate arguments demanding sustained attention was lagging. He found himself easily distracted and, worse, irritable about it. His longtime touchstone—his smartphone—was starting to annoy him, making him feel insecure and anxious rather than grounded in the ideas that formerly had nourished him. “If I lost my phone,” he said, he’d feel “like I could never catch up.” He realized that his online habits weren’t helping him to work, much less to multitask. He was just switching his attention all over the place and, in the process, becoming a bit unhinged.

Subtler discoveries ensued. As he continued to analyze his behavior, Miller noticed that he was applying the language of nature to digital phenomena. He would refer, for example, to his “RSS feed landscape.” More troubling was how his observations were materializing not as full thoughts but as brief Tweets—he was thinking in word counts. When he realized he was spending 95 percent of his waking hours connected to digital media in a world where he “had never known anything different,” he proposed to his editor a series of articles that turned out to be intriguing and prescriptive. What would it be like to disconnect for a year? His editor bought the pitch, and Miller, who lives in New York, pulled the plug.

more here.

Stephen Hsu in Nautilus:

In Daniel Keyes’ novel Flowers for Algernon, a mentally challenged adult called Charlie Gordon receives an experimental treatment to raise his IQ from 60 to somewhere in the neighborhood of 200. He is transformed from a bakery worker who is taken advantage of by his friends, to a genius with an effortless perception of the world’s hidden connections. “I’m living at a peak of clarity and beauty I never knew existed,” Charlie writes. “There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem… This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy.” The contrast between a super-intelligence and today’s average IQ of 100 would be greater still. The possibility of super-intelligence follows directly from the genetic basis of intelligence. Characteristics like height and cognitive ability are controlled by thousands of genes, each of small effect. A rough lower bound on the number of common genetic variants affecting each trait can be deduced from the positive or negative effect on the trait (measured in inches of height or IQ points) of already discovered gene variants, called alleles.

The Social Science Genome Association Consortium, an international collaboration involving dozens of university labs, has identified a handful of regions of human DNA that affect cognitive ability. They have shown that a handful of single-nucleotide polymorphisms in human DNA are statistically correlated with intelligence, even after correction for multiple testing of 1 million independent DNA regions, in a sample of over 100,000 individuals. If only a small number of genes controlled cognition, then each of the gene variants should have altered IQ by a large chunk—about 15 points of variation between two individuals. But the largest effect size researchers have been able to detect thus far is less than a single point of IQ. Larger effect sizes would have been much easier to detect, but have not been seen. This means that there must be at least thousands of IQ alleles to account for the actual variation seen in the general population. A more sophisticated analysis (with large error bars) yields an estimate of perhaps 10,000 in total.¹ Each genetic variant slightly increases or decreases cognitive ability. Because it is determined by many small additive effects, cognitive ability is normally distributed, following the familiar bell-shaped curve, with more people in the middle than in the tails. A person with more than the average number of positive (IQ-increasing) variants will be above average in ability. The number of positive alleles above the population average required to raise the trait value by a standard deviation—that is, 15 points—is proportional to the square root of the number of variants, or about 100. In a nutshell, 100 or so additional positive variants could raise IQ by 15 points. Given that there are many thousands of potential positive variants, the implication is clear: If a human being could be engineered to have the positive version of each causal variant, they might exhibit cognitive ability which is roughly 100 standard deviations above average. This corresponds to more than 1,000 IQ points.

More here.

Nathaniel Popkin at The Millions:

Reading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, or perhaps any masterwork of its scope, like War and Peace, one experiences a sequence of intellectual, emotional, and bodily responses. They are, at least in part:

Wonder at the impossible genius of the author, who can sense, with panopticon vision, the authentic truths of many worlds, and give voice to them, as if a ventriloquist or an interpreter of dreams;

Thirst for more of those worlds and the words to describe them, words swallowed as quickly and desperately as they can be provided;

Laughter at the absurdity of human desire and failure, rendered in deadpan brilliance and sly humor; and

Melancholy that settles in as sweet sickness of mind and body, the very pain of conscious life, the splendor and the terror.

“Few other contemporary novels had ever involved me so completely,” says director Robert Falls, a Tony Award-winner who is artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. He read 2666 inNatasha Wimmer’s English translation as soon as FSG put it out in 2008 and, seduced, began working on a stage adaptation.

Eight years later, the play 2666, which Falls adapted and directed with Goodman’s playwright-in-residence, Seth Bockley, is on stage in Goodman’s blackbox, in a five-and-a-half hour production. The play thrills — indeed producing wonder, thirst, laughter, and melancholy — when Falls and Bockley trust themselves as interpreters, like Bolaño, of conflicted and contradictory reality. When they forget, pigeonholing characters into cartoons Bolaño never intended, the show becomes exhausting. By the end, after almost a quarter day, one is merely thrilled to move again and then to consider sleep.

more here.

Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times:

Liebling was drawn to boxing, but so were Joyce Carol Oates and William Hazlitt, neither of whom is easily pictured doing high-speed pad work amid buckets of bloodied spit in a basement gym. George Bernard Shaw wrote a novel about the sport (Cashel Byron’s Profession, 1882). James Baldwin covered Floyd Patterson’s 1962 fight with Sonny Liston. Current New Yorker editor David Remnick published a book about Muhammad Ali (King of the World, 1999) in between lighter subjects such as Barack Obama and Russia. All but one or two of Norman Mailer’s novels cringe with inadequacy next to The Fight, his account of Ali’s 1974 showdown with George Foreman in Zaire. Gay Talese, George Plimpton, Hunter Thompson: all thrived at the intersection of professionalised violence and literary journalism.

The first rule of fight club is that you write about fight club, a lot. No sport has been chronicled in greater depth or quality than boxing. There is some famous baseball prose by Don DeLillo, among others. Cricket yielded a great book (CLR James’s Beyond a Boundary, 1963) and tennis a great essay (David Foster Wallace’s “Federer as Religious Experience”, 2006). Football has amassed something of a canon over the past 20 years but nothing commensurate with the game’s imperial presence in the world.

Boxing does not vie for the attention of writers with other sports, but is on another plane with war and romance. It is clear that just one exponent of ringcraft — Ali, nowadays forced by Parkinson’s disease to let others tell his story — has inspired a more distinguished bibliography than entire human pursuits.

More here.

From The Economist:

Guilt-free intercourse may, as Philip Larkin wrote, have begun in 1963, but sexual reproduction has been around a good deal longer than that. Single-celled organisms began exchanging and mixing up genetic information in ways modern biologists recognise as rudimentary forms of sex about two billion years ago. Yet the question of why sex exists at all remains troublesome. A creature which reproduces asexually passes on all of its genes to each of its progeny. One that mates with another, by contrast, passes on only half of them. On the face of things that is a huge selective disadvantage. There must therefore, evolutionary biologists believe, be equally huge compensating benefits.

Two ideas exist about what these might be. One is that the constantly changing genetic variety sex creates stops parasites and pathogens evolving stable techniques for exploiting a host species. This is the “Red Queen” hypothesis, an allusion to a character in “Through the Looking-Glass” who had to run as fast as she could to stay in the same place. The other idea is that the continual mixing of genes from generation to generation separates good and bad mutations, permitting the bad ones to be purged by natural selection without taking the good ones along for the ride. This process was described by Joel Peck, one of its progenitors, as plucking rubies from rubbish.

“Plucking rubies” and the “Red Queen” are not mutually exclusive. Both could be true. But, while the queen has experimental evidence to back her up, rubies have had little such validation. Until now.

More here.

Elizabeth Karp-Evans in Guernica:

Last September, I found myself in a packed auditorium at The New School in New York for the launch of Freeman’s, a biannual literary journal conceived by the editor, writer, and critic John Freeman. On the cover of this issue, the names of Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, and Haruki Murakami appeared between newer authors such as Ishion Hutchinson and Laura van den Berg; at the event, Hutchinson’s unassumingly elegant recital of Windfall and van den Berg’s uncontrollably funny reading of The Dog made their places clear among confirmed champions. The launch was spirited, informed, and generous in a uniquely Freeman way. He speaks—often at length—in the enthused yet not overbearing manner of a city organizer or a weekend volunteer encouraging you to vote. It’s no surprise that Freeman has spent most of his career organizing and advocating for some of the most vital literary voices of the last two decades.

“Very little in the world that is interesting happens without risk, movement, and wonder,” Freeman writes in his first letter to the reader. This notion is at once his prevailing professional ideology and personal mantra. Freeman grew up in the Midwest, Long Island, Pennsylvania, and then, California. He has worked at a bank, an advertising agency, as an editor of children’s books, and as president of the National Book Critics Circle. This might account for some of his interest in finding and addressing others of the same pension—those who float on the margins—and his preoccupation with the complexities and contradictions of the social world, specifically in America.

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Sophia Nguyen in Harvard Magazine:

The Dark Room Collective began with loss. As the members tell it: on December 8, 1987, Strange, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and their two housemates piled into a car to make it to Harlem by noon, for the funeral of James Baldwin. More than 4,000 paid their respects at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, William Styron, and Amiri Baraka spoke at the service. Strange and Ellis, aspiring writers who first met Baraka at a reading at Tufts University, came at his invitation (“It was probably very clear that we needed a lesson in Who We Owed,” Ellis later reflected in an essay) and his eulogy may have left the deepest impression. Baldwin’s spirit “will be with us as long as we remember ourselves,” Baraka told the attendees. “For his is the spirit of life thrilling to its own consciousness.” Strange had stood in the same room as Baldwin once. He had come to Harvard for a tea, and, as she later wrote in the literary magazine Mosaic, she felt “too shy to break through the thick clot of fans around him and offer the admiration he had been accustomed to for decades.” She and Ellis, their mourning amplified and made vague by distance, felt their hero’s absence as a double negative; having never known him in person, they missed him twice over. The funeral filled them with new urgency about honoring their literary ancestors while they were still alive. They began planning the following spring.

In a third-floor room of their house used for storing old photographic equipment, they’d been building a library they christened “The Dark Room: A Collection of Black Writing.” At the time, 31 Inman was alreadya communal house for artists and activists. Strange worked as a community organizer in Roxbury and as a prisoner advocate through Cambridge’s American Friends Service Committee; Ellis was a projectionist at the Harvard Film Archive and a clerk at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop. As Ellis recalls in his 2007 poem “Spike Lee at Harvard,” the bookshop experience was fraught, and in that way, instructive: “I got my first glimpse/of the life of poetry/(through the Grolier’s/cinematic glass window).” The life on display was orderly and monochromatic: the faces in the portraits above the shelves were nearly all white. At some point, his employer wondered if the black poets should be shelved separately so customers might more easily find their work; Ellis said he didn’t think so. (An intervening line, dry but not unkind, adds: “Well, at least she asked.”) This homogeneity reflected the shop’s surrounding scene.

Literary events in Cambridge rarely featured artists of color, though a number of prominent black writers taught in the Boston area.

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Michael J. Lewis at The New Criterion:

It is one of history’s cheekier pranks that the first architect ever to appear on television was that thirty-year-old prodigy with the movie-star face, Albert Speer. Nazi Germany was the first country to introduce television broadcasting, just in time to cover the 1935 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg. If you search for it, you can watch a short clip as Speer drives his convertible into his newly enlarged rally grounds, banters with a reporter, and then speeds off with a jaunty Hitler salute.

Of course the world knows Speer from an entirely different media appearance. This was his testimony at the Nuremberg trials, where he dramatically accepted full personal responsibility for Nazi war crimes, the only one of the accused to do so. His subdued, humble demeanor could not have contrasted more with the evasiveness, self-justification, and unconcealed haughtiness of his co-defendants. It was literally the performance of his life, and it saved him from certain execution. Having stepped into the role of “the good Nazi,” Speer never relinquished it. Upon serving his twenty-year sentence, he published a series of fascinating though self-serving memoirs, beginning with Inside the Third Reich (1970). Through it all he played the part of the naïve and innocent artist, who was guilty of nothing more than letting his childlike eagerness to build overwhelm his good judgment and moral sensibility.

That pose is no longer tenable. Archival finds in Germany and elsewhere have shown that Speer could not have been ignorant of the Nazi extermination camps, as he claimed, but was involved in finicky detail with their construction and operation.

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Siddhartha Mahanta at The New Yorker:

In the summer of 1964, Samuel Beckett arrived in New York City for his first and only trip to the United States, to oversee production on what would be his first and only film. Titled “Film,” it was commissioned by the avant-garde publisher Barney Rosset as part of a triptych; the other two pieces were written by Harold Pinter and Eugène Ionesco (both of whom, like Beckett, were published by Rosset’s Grove Press), though Rosset was unable to bring those to fruition. Beckett, by the mid-nineteen-sixties, had cemented his global reputation with the successes of “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” and he and Rosset marshalled a remarkable collection of talent for their movie: celebrated theater director Alan Schneider; cinematographer Boris Kaufman, who had worked on “12 Angry Men” and “On the Waterfront,” among other films; and, most notably, the silent-screen legend Buster Keaton.

The plot of “Film” is, not surprisingly, scarce. “O” (Keaton) a dilapidated figure who wears an oversized trench coat and a flattened white Stetson, is pursued by “E” (the camera, essentially—and, by proxy, you, the viewer). O scurries along Pearl Street, in the bombed-out area beneath the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. He collides with an old couple who are dressed in quaint Victorian style, and whose perturbed stares slowly twist into horror. When E then confronts them, they shrink in the “agony of perceivedness,” according to the script.

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Laura Kehoe at the New Statesman:

I spent many months in the field, along with many other researchers, trying to figure out what these chimps are up to. So far we have two main theories. The behaviour could be part of a male display, where the loud bang made when a rock hits a hollow tree adds to the impressive nature of a display. This could be especially likely in areas where there are not many trees with large roots that chimps would normally drum on with their powerful hands and feet. If some trees produce an impressive bang, this could accompany or replace feet drumming in a display and trees with particularly good acoustics could become popular spots for revisits.

On the other hand, it could be more symbolic than that – and more reminiscent of our own past. Marking pathways and territories with signposts such as piles of rocks is an important step in human history. Figuring out where chimps' territories are in relation to rock throwing sites could give us insights into whether this is the case here.

Even more intriguing than this, maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine that could indicate sacred trees. Indigenous West African people have stone collections at“sacred” trees and such man-made stone collections arecommonly observed across the world and look eerily similar to what we have discovered here.

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Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Gigantic mimiviruses fend off invaders using defences similar to the CRISPR system deployed by bacteria and other microorganisms, French researchers report¹.

…Like prokaryotes, mimiviruses are plagued by viruses known as virophages, Raoult, La Scola and their colleagues reported in 2008². Six years later, in 2014, they found a virophage — named Zamilon — that infects some kinds of mimivirus but not others³. Raoult hypothesized that these infections, which sap a mimivirus’s capacity to copy itself, could have led to the evolution of a defence system much like CRISPR. In bacteria and another kind of prokaryote, called archaea, CRISPR systems store a library of short DNA sequences that match those of phages and other invading DNA. When a foreign DNA sequence with matching sequences in this library attacks a cell, specialized ‘Cas’ enzymes unwind the intruder DNA and chop it into pieces, stopping an infection. Biologists have now repurposed CRISPR as a technology to edit genomes. To determine whether mimiviruses have a similar defence system, Raoult’s team analysed the genomes of 60 mimivirus strains and looked for sequences that match those of the Zamilon virophage. Mimiviruses that were resistant to Zamilon also harboured a short stretch of DNA that matched that of the phage. Adjacent to these sequences, Raoult’s team found genes encoding enzymes that can degrade and unwind DNA. In CRISPR immunity, too, the genes encoding the Cas enzymes sit beside the sequences that recognize the virus. Blocking activity of different components of the system made the mimiviruses susceptible to Zamilon virophage attack.

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Katalin Balog in the New York Times:

Art is often the subject of philosophy. But every now and then, a work of art — something other than a lecture or words on a page — can function as philosophy. “Son of Saul,” a film set in Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust, is such a work of art. It engages with a profound set of problems that also occupied the 19^th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.

Written and directed by the Hungarian filmmaker László Nemes, “Son of Saul” won awards at Cannes, the Golden Globes and elsewhere before making its way to the Oscars to win the award for best foreign language film. It follows a day in the life of Saul, a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of mostly Jewish prisoners the Nazis forced to assist with herding people to the gas chambers, burning the bodies and collecting gold and valuables from the corpses. The film creates a direct, experiential and visceral engagement with these events by maintaining a relentless focus on the minute-to-minute unfolding of Saul’s world.

In long, unbroken shots, we see the reality of the death camp revealed, its textures made tangible. By using close-ups and shallow focus images throughout, Nemes gives viewers no opportunity to disengage from Saul’s point of view. It is as though we are shadowing him in hell.

More here.