Alexis Papazoglou interviews Susan Schneider at the IAI:

If we define consciousness along the lines of Thomas Nagel as the inner feel of existence, the fact that for some beings “there is something it is like to be them”, is it outlandish to believe that Artificial Intelligence, given what it is today, can ever be conscious?

The idea of conscious AI is not outlandish. Yet I doubt that today’s well-known AI companies have built, or will soon build, systems that have conscious experiences.  In contrast, we Earthlings already know how to build intelligent machines—machines that recognise visual patterns, prove theorems, generate creative images, chat intelligently with humans, etc.  The question is whether, and how, the gap between Big Tech’s ability to build intelligent systems and its ability (or lack thereoff) to build conscious systems will narrow.

Humankind is on the cusp of building “savant systems”: AIs that outthink humans in certain respects, but which also have radical deficits, such as moral reasoning. If I had to bet, savant systems already exist, being underground and unbeknownst to the public. Anyway, savant systems will probably emerge, or already have emerged, before conscious machines are developed, assuming that conscious machines can be developed at all.

More here.

Christopher Newfield in the Boston Review:

In his new book, The Walls around Opportunity, Gary Orfield—a leading scholar of civil rights in education—shows that what did work was straightforward legal and budgetary coercion. School districts would no longer be able to file desegregation plans and go home with an A for effort. Civil rights lawyers no longer had to sue each segregated school district one at a time; legislation authorized class-action lawsuits and the withholding of federal funds from any entity that failed to produce measurable progress toward desegregation. Perhaps in part because the United States was a nation created, expanded, and maintained through the use of force, it was force, legal and fiscal, that finally got results—at least for a brief historical moment.

As education economists Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson demonstrate in Can College Level the Playing Field?, that moment has passed. The authors usefully document yawning gaps in opportunity among economic and racial groups at every stage of life in the United States today, and they make two startling points about any possible remedies.

More here.

Inner Family

—after being told by the therapist to “live with my limitations”

I remember how we called them then: “deaf and
dumb.” It was 1950 and Judy’s parents lived
in the apartment house at the corner.

Esther, her mother, born deaf, who frightened us
with her efforts at speech — sounds we’d never
heard — like a soft seal’s bark.

And Fred, her father, who’d lost his vocal cords
in an accident, who’d smile, gesture to me, shake
his hand up and down, acknowledging, then turn
to Esther, touch her hands, explain to her
……. while she went on throwing her arms in the air,
a little wild, afraid he didn’t understand. And she
would settle down, get in the car. And he would
motion to Judy, as I watched. Judy, who spoke as
we did, but who could flash her hands toward them,
signaling in the other language.

These days I remember the Kaufmans and their
struggles to be understood.
I imagine them driving all day and at night in the
motel maybe Fred and Esther would caress, write
some love words on each other’s palms. And
in the dark Judy might try to listen, imagining
fingers that brush across flesh like the swaying
of large summer leaves.

I remember them in these days because they are
my inner family. They urge me to go on, to gesture,
to live bravely somehow, cheerfully, in this
contorted silence I can never accept.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, 1997

Sarah Lyall in The New York Times:

Conor Feehly in Discover:

Human beings — with our big brains, technology and mastery of language — like to describe ourselves as the most intelligent species. After all, we’re capable of reaching space, prolonging our lives and understanding the world around us. Over time, however, our understanding of intelligence has gotten a little more complicated.

Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, for example, wielded a logical-mathematical intelligence. But we now recognize that there are other types of intelligence, too: emotional, bodily-kinesthetic, visual-spatial, musical and social, among others that are specific to different human skill sets. Each one of these types enables a person to solve problems relevant to their own situation. And beyond the different varieties of intelligence among humans, scientists are starting to understand the capacity for intelligence in other species — outside of the narrow, human-centric conceptions that have framed our picture of intelligence until now.

More here.

Adam Tooze at The New Statesman:

As Bruno Latour confided to Le Monde earlier this year in one of his final interviews, philosophy was his great intellectual love. But across his long and immensely fertile intellectual life, Latour pursued that love by way of practically every other form of knowledge and pursuit – sociology, anthropology, science, history, environmentalism, political theory, the visual arts, theatre and fiction. In this way he was, above all, a philosopher of life in the comprehensive German sense of Lebensphilosophie.

Lebensphilosophie, whose leading exponents included figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, enjoyed its intellectual heyday between the 1870s and the 1930s. It was a project that sought to make sense of the dramatic development of modern science and the way it invaded every facet of life. In the process, it relentlessly questioned distinctions between the subject and knowledge and the foundations of metaphysics.

more here.

Dan Stahl at The Millions:

First, let’s be clear about what “usage” means. It isn’t grammar, though the two are related and often treated together in such page-turners as The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage and The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation. Grammar is a language’s set of rules for putting words together; usage is how people actually put words together. Remember it this way: usage is how language is used.

So Bryan A. Garner didn’t release a fifth edition of his Modern English Usage to explain the difference between coordinate and subordinate clauses—that hasn’t changed since 2016, when the previous edition was published. He’s here to update us on changes in how people speak and write in real life. Six years ago, for instance, using “they” as an alternative to “he” or “she,” Garner wrote, “sets many literate Americans’ teeth on edge.” As his new guide notes, the Chicago Manual of Style, New York Times, and Associated Press all now allow it.

More here.

Ashleigh McMillan in The Age:

Health experts are calling for a rethink of Australia’s COVID-19 approach after a new study showed one in 10 people will end up with “long COVID”.

According to the report, published on Friday in the academic journal Nature Reviews Microbiology, at least 65 million people worldwide already have long COVID, or post-COVID conditions, which is when symptoms persist for more than 12 weeks after the initial infection.

It is estimated more than 10 per cent of those who catch COVID-19 will experience chronic health issues, with women aged between 30 and 55 particularly at risk.

More here.

Hasan Ali in The Nation:

For centuries, intersex people—those who possess both male and female sexual organs—and those assigned male at birth who have subsequently identified as women have left their homes and joined third-gender communities, where they have been able to express their femininity without fear of persecution. These societies are organized around a guru-chela (master-disciple) system of kinship and have their own rules, rituals, and dispute resolution mechanisms. In Pakistan, the terms used to describe people who belong to these communities are varied and sometimes used interchangeably. Most common among them are the words hijra and khawaja sira, two historically distinct groups who are conflated in the modern day.

More here.

City Lights 1961

Going there for the first time
it was so much smaller then
that crowded downstairs full of poetry
racks of tattered little mags against the wall
those rickety white tables where folks sat reading/writing
Vesuvio’s was like an adjunct office

Arriving again a year later, two kids in tow
Lawrence gave me a huge stack of his publications
“I’ve got books” he said “like other people have mice”

And North Beach never stopped being mysterious
when I moved out here in 1968
that publishing office on Filbert & Grant was a mecca
a place to meet up with my kids if we got separated
during one of those innumerable demonstrations
(tho Lawrence worried, told me I shd keep them
out of harm’s way, at home) I thought they shd learn
whatever it was we were learning—
Office right around the corner from the bead store
where I found myself daily, picking up supplies

How many late nights did we haunt the Store
buying scads of new poems from all corners of the earth
then head to the all-night Tower Records full of drag queens
& revolutionaries, to get a few songs

And dig it, City Lights still here, like some old lighthouse
though all the rest is gone,
the poetry’s moved upstairs, the publishing office
right there now too & crowds of people
one third my age or less still haunt the stacks
seeking out voices from all quarters
of the globe

by Diane di Prima
from Poetic Outlaws

City Lights Books

From The Scientist:

As with weeds in a garden, it is a challenge to fully get rid of cancer cells in the body once they arise. They have a relentless need to continuously expand, even when they are significantly cut back by therapy or surgery. Even a few cancer cells can give rise to new colonies that will eventually outgrow their borders and deplete their local resources. They also tend to wander into places where they are not welcome, creating metastatic colonies at distant sites that can be even more difficult to detect and eliminate.

One explanation for why cancer cells can withstand such inhospitable environments and growing conditions is an old adage: What doesn’t kill them makes them stronger.

At the very earliest stage of tumor formation, even before cancer can be diagnosed, individual cancer cells typically find themselves in an environment lacking nutrients, oxygen or adhesive proteins that help them attach to an area of the body to grow. While most cancer cells will quickly die when faced with such inhospitable conditions, a small percentage can adapt and gain the ability to initiate a tumor colony that will eventually become malignant disease. We are researchers studying how these microenvironmental stresses affect tumor initiation and progression. In our new study, we found that the harsh microenvironments of the body can push certain cancer cells to overcome the stress of being isolated and make them more adept at initiating and forming new tumor colonies.

More here.

Toni Morrison at Literary Hub:

My stories come to me as clichés. A cliché is a cliché because it’s worthwhile. Otherwise, it would have been discarded. A good cliché can never be overwritten; it’s still mysterious. The concepts of beauty and ugliness are mysterious to me. Many people write about them. In mulling over them, I try to get underneath them and see what they mean, understand the impact they have on what people do. I also write about love and death.

The problem I face as a writer is to make my stories mean something. You can have wonderful, interesting people, a fascinating story, but it’s not about anything. It has no real substance. I can fail in any number of ways when I write, but I want my books to always be about something that is important to me, and the subjects that are important in the world are the same ones that have always been important.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

There are few human impulses more primal than the desire for explanations. We have expectations concerning what happens, and when what we experience differs from those expectations, we want to know the reason why. There are obvious philosophy questions here: What is an explanation? Do explanations bottom out, or go forever? But there are also psychology questions: What precisely is it that we seek when we demand an explanation? What makes us satisfied with one? Tania Lombrozo is a psychologist who is also conversant with the philosophical side of things. She offers some pretty convincing explanations for why we value explanation so highly.

More here.

Mary Harrington in the Hedgehog Review:

If the last few years tell us anything, it is that we are well beyond Peak Progress. The decades since the turn of the millennium have seen two international financial crises, terrorist attacks, a return of great-power politics, a brutal and potentially catastrophic war in eastern Europe, a global pandemic, and (at the time of writing) rocketing inflation.

Against this backdrop, what hope is there for those who want to build? It is an urgent question: The rolling crises show no signs of abating and promise to make life steadily poorer, tougher, and more uncertain for all but the wealthiest. And if building fundamentally requires families, families require solidarity between the sexes. Throughout much of human history and culture, this has meant marriage.

But what marriage means has varied over time. I have argued elsewhere that the “angel by the hearth” conception of private womanhood that conservatives usually refer to when they talk about “traditional marriage” emerged as a byproduct of industrialization, and that women in fact lost agency in some respects in the transition from productive agrarian households to bourgeois industrial ones. I have also argued that the romantic ideal of marriage emerged alongside that model of private womanhood. That is, women lost economic agency in family life and, in response, came to believe that they should be prized both as the more morally elevated half of the relationship and as an individual in an intimate relationship.

More here.

Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

Unlike other naturalists, who had studied preserved specimens, Jeanne realized that she could only discover the true origin of the shell if she observed living creatures. To bypass the evolution-mounted obstacle of their extreme shyness, she designed and constructed one of the world’s first offshore research stations — a system of immense cages she anchored off the coast of Sicily, complete with observation windows through which she could study the argonauts undisturbed. Every day, she prepared food for them, rowed her boat to the cages in her long skirts, and knelt at the platform, observing for hours on end.

But long skirts and long hours in cold water make not for a felicitous scientist. And so, in order to transfer her observations and experiments ashore, Jeanne Villepreux-Power pioneered the aquarium.

more here.