John Heil in IAI News:

Why is consciousness so perplexing to so many? Perhaps, owing to our being conscious, we regard ourselves as experts on the matter, and it seems to us blindingly obvious that consciousness could not possibly be a brain state or process. We have a front-row seat, an unmediated first-hand awareness of what conscious experiences are like, and we know well-enough what brain processes are like. The two could not be more different. In the hands of philosophers, this sentiment is transmuted into the doctrine that consciousness cannot be identified with, or ‘reduced to’, anything physical. The reduction in question must be a relation among explanations, or predicates, not as it is sometimes cast, a relation among properties. What would it be to reduce something to something else?  If the As are not reducible to the Bs, explanations of the As could not be derived from explanations of the Bs, nor could A-terms be analysed or paraphrased in a B-vocabulary.

Why does our confidence in the outré character of consciousness not extend to tables and trees? Take tables. We know what tables are like, and we know what physics reveals about their makeup. Individual tables are solid, coloured, smooth to the touch, but physics tells us that tables are, as Eddington put it, mostly empty space sparsely populated by colourless particles. Or tables might turn out to be perturbations in fields, thickenings in spacetime, or something stranger still. We are content to leave it to physics to discover the nature of whatever it is that makes assertions about individual tables true, thereby telling us what those tables are. Our inability to extract truths about tables from truths about particles or fields is unremarkable: tables are, in this regard, irreducible. What would be remarkable is someone’s insisting that from this it follows that tables could not possibly be clouds of particles or disturbances in fields, because tables obviously differ from such things. Claims to the effect that tables ‘arise’ or ‘emerge’ from clouds of particles or perturbations in fields, while more common, would be no less remarkable.

Why not think the same of consciousness? Why not think that neuroscience, and ultimately physics, might eventually reveal the nature of whatever makes particular ascriptions of consciousness true, what consciousness is?

Two shibboleths bar the way.

More here.

NATALIE DIAZ, “The Mustangs” from Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb on Vimeo.

[Buy Natalie Diaz’s book Postcolonial Love Poem by clicking here.]

Migration

rows assemble in the bare elm above our house.
Restless, staring: like souls
who want back in life.

            —And who wouldn’t want again
            the hot bath after hard work,
            with soft canyons of splitting foam;
            or the glass of spring water
            cold at the mouth?

            To be startled by beauty—drops of bright
            blood on the snow.
            To be radiant.

All morning the crows watch me in the garden
putting in the early onions.
Their bodies look oiled.
Back in, back in,
they shake the wooden rattles. 

by Jenny George
from the Academy of American Poets

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

This is a special episode of Mindscape, thrown together quickly. Many thanks to Tara Smith for joining me on short notice. Tara is an epidemiologist, and a great person to talk to about the novel coronavirus (and its associated disease, COVID-19) pandemic currently threatening the world. We talk about what viruses are, how they spread, and a lot of the science behind virology and pandemics. We also take a practical turn, talking about what measures (washing hands, social distancing, self-isolation) are useful at combating the spread of the virus, and which (wearing masks) are probably not. Then we look to the future, to ask what the endgame here is; Tara suggests that the kind of drastic measure we are currently putting up with might last a long time indeed.

More here.

Yuval Noah Harari in Time:

Many people blame the coronavirus epidemic on globalization, and say that the only way to prevent more such outbreaks is to de-globalize the world. Build walls, restrict travel, reduce trade. However, while short-term quarantine is essential to stop epidemics, long-term isolationism will lead to economic collapse without offering any real protection against infectious diseases. Just the opposite. The real antidote to epidemic is not segregation, but rather cooperation.

Epidemics killed millions of people long before the current age of globalization. In the 14th century there were no airplanes and cruise ships, and yet the Black Death spread from East Asia to Western Europe in little more than a decade. It killed between 75 million and 200 million people – more than a quarter of the population of Eurasia. In England, four out of ten people died. The city of Florence lost 50,000 of its 100,000 inhabitants.

In March 1520, a single smallpox carrier – Francisco de Eguía – landed in Mexico. At the time, Central America had no trains, buses or even donkeys. Yet by December a smallpox epidemic devastated the whole of Central America, killing according to some estimates up to a third of its population.

More here.

Gideon Lichfield in the MIT Technology Review:

To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members.

We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is that things won’t go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things never will.

It’s now widely agreed (even by Britain, finally) that every country needs to “flatten the curve”: impose social distancing to slow the spread of the virus so that the number of people sick at once doesn’t cause the health-care system to collapse, as it is threatening to do in Italy right now. That means the pandemic needs to last, at a low level, until either enough people have had Covid-19 to leave most immune (assuming immunity lasts for years, which we don’t know) or there’s a vaccine.

How long would that take, and how draconian do social restrictions need to be? Yesterday President Donald Trump, announcing new guidelines such as a 10-person limit on gatherings, said that “with several weeks of focused action, we can turn the corner and turn it quickly.” In China, six weeks of lockdown are beginning to ease now that new cases have fallen to a trickle.

But it won’t end there. As long as someone in the world has the virus, breakouts can and will keep recurring without stringent controls to contain them.

More here.

Jonathan Kay in Quillette:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared COVID-19—the acute respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus—a pandemic. And almost everywhere you look, the data appear to show a frightening exponential rise in new cases. As I write this, on March 17th, the latest available reports show that confirmed cases have doubled in Italy over the last five days. In Spain, the most recent doubling period has been just three days. In France, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, the UK, and Netherlands, the figures are four, three, three, five, three, and four respectively. When these facts are presented in graph form, the vertiginous lines suggest a world feverishly coughing its way into apocalypse.

But assuming that governments act responsibly, and absent some horrifying SARS-CoV-2 mutation, there will be no apocalypse. Stock markets and economies will suffer greatly. But even this damage can be mitigated through decisive action. The more aggressively that our leaders act to suppress the spread of COVID-19, the more quickly the crisis will pass, and the sooner we will all be able to return to normal daily life. The decisions we make now could mean the difference between a global recession and a historical event on par with The Great Depression.

The good news is that we definitely can suppress COVID-19, even if no cure or effective vaccine emerges. We know this because it already has been done in the most populous country on Earth.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

One of the best-known sketches from Monty Python’s Flying Circus features John Cleese as a bowler-hatted bureaucrat with the fictional Ministry of Silly Walks. It’s a classic of physical comedy, right up there with the troupe’s Dead Parrot sketch (“This parrot has ceased to be!”) in terms of cultural significance.

A pair of scientists at Dartmouth College [corrected] have performed a gait analysis of the various silly walks on display, publishing their findings in a new paper in the journal Gait and Posture. It’s intended in part as a commemoration on the 50-year anniversary of the sketch but also to draw attention to the need for a more streamlined peer review process for grants in the health sciences.

The two authors, Erin Butler and Nathaniel Dominy, are married, having met 12 years ago at Stanford. (Butler was a TA for a class where Dominy gave a lecture on the evolution of bipedalism.) Dominy is the Monty Python fan. “So, put together a Monty Python fan with a creative scientific mind and an expert in gait analysis, and this paper is what you get,” Butler told Ars. Or, as they wrote in their paper, “It really is the silliness of the sketch that resonates with us, and extreme silliness seems more relevant now than ever before in this increasingly Pythonesque world.”

More here.

Liesl Schillinger at Lit Hub:

Usually a question like this is theoretical: What would it be like to find your town, your state, your country, shut off from the rest of the world, its citizens confined to their homes, as a contagion spreads, infecting thousands, and subjecting thousands more to quarantine? How would you cope if an epidemic disrupted daily life, closing schools, packing hospitals, and putting social gatherings, sporting events and concerts, conferences, festivals and travel plans on indefinite hold?

In 1947, when he was 34, Albert Camus, the Algerian-born French writer (he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years later, and die in a car crash three years after that) provided an astonishingly detailed and penetrating answer to these questions in his novel The Plague.

more here.

Sarah Neilson at The Seattle Times:

The words social distancing have already defined 2020, and everyone is already tired of them (and coronavirus, for that matter). Despite how terrible it feels to not be close to people, this is what community care looks like right now. Luckily, books still exist, and can be their own vehicle for connection. And what better reading material for right now than books where the characters are, in some way, alone? None of these are dystopian (at least not in the traditional sense), but are instead characterized by protagonists with complex interior lives who are either isolated (in some way that’s not about a contagion) or fiercely independent, or both. Happy introverting, readers!

“My Morningless Mornings” by Stefany Anne Golberg

If you’re ready to get cerebral while also being hypnotized by prose, this slim memoir is perfect. Golberg writes about isolating herself in the night, rejecting the world’s attachment to day. The dark brings on all kinds of meditation on psychology, death, art and what it means to be awake. This might be the ultimate quarantine read.

more here.

Robinson Jr. and Melton Jr. in The Atlantic:

Old age, said the ancient Greek philosopher Bion of Borysthenes, is “the harbour of all ills; at least they all take refuge there.” While the quotation is obviously nothing new, some things do change, among these society’s pace of life and its knowledge of aging. In the past two centuries we’ve seen more change in these areas than in the law designed to protect America from the dangers of elderly presidents. Given the current crop of presidential contenders, the law’s failure to keep up may very well erupt into both a political and a constitutional crisis in the not-so-distant future. The original Constitution did provide for presidents who grew unable to carry out the duties of the office. Under Article II, Section 1, in the event of a president’s “inability to discharge the powers and duties” of the presidency, the vice president would take over. But this short passage skirts over several pitfalls. One of the biggest was first raised in the 1787 Constitutional Convention by John Dickinson, a delegate from Delaware. Addressing an early draft of the provision, which had slightly different wording, he asked two questions that still plague the country today: “What is the extent of the term ‘disability,’” he asked, “& who is to be the judge of it?” So far as anyone knows, his questions went unanswered by his fellow delegates.

Presidential inability hasn’t exactly been a rarity. Beginning with George Washington, who nearly died of a monthlong bout of pneumonia a few months into his presidency, a number of chief executives have been incapacitated, from periods ranging from a few hours to several weeks. In 1881, President James A. Garfield, mortally wounded by an assassin, lingered for two and a half months before dying. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson suffered a major stroke, which permanently altered his cognitive functioning. During his final years, Franklin D. Roosevelt was suffering badly enough from cardiovascular disease to cause his top subordinates severe worry before his death, from a cerebral hemorrhage, and in 1981 Ronald Reagan was under general anesthesia for a time following John Hinckley’s assassination attempt. There are many more examples.

More here.

David Cyranoski in Nature:

As the new coronavirus marches around the globe, countries with escalating outbreaks are eager to learn whether China’s extreme lockdowns were responsible for bringing the crisis there under control. Other nations are now following China’s lead and limiting movement within their borders, while dozens of countries have restricted international visitors. In mid-January, Chinese authorities introduced unprecedented measures to contain the virus, stopping movement in and out of Wuhan, the centre of the epidemic, and 15 other cities in Hubei province — home to more than 60 million people. Flights and trains were suspended, and roads were blocked. Soon after, people in many Chinese cities were told to stay home and venture out only to get food or medical help. Some 760 million people, roughly half the country’s population, were confined to their homes, according to the New York Times. It’s now two months since the lockdowns began — some of which are still in place — and the number of new cases there is around a couple dozen per day, down from thousands per day at the peak. “These extreme limitations on population movement have been quite successful,” says Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease scientist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

In a report released late last month, the World Health Organization congratulated China on a “unique and unprecedented public health response [that] reversed the escalating cases”. But the crucial question is which interventions in China were the most important in driving down the spread of the virus, says Gabriel Leung, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of Hong Kong. “The countries now facing their first wave [of infections] need to know this,” he says.

More here.

Everything Bagel

Before your first bite, you hold it
under your nose
and close your eyes.
It’s like listening
to the snow falling
before sticking out your tongue.
Or feeling the felt
on the valves of a trumpet
before playing.
Or, before I kiss you,
to lay my eyes on you
like a blanket, slide
the silk edge of my attention
down your lashes,
your cheeks,
along your lips,
top and bottom,
out to the rounded corners.

by Steve Price
from Narrative Magazine

Neil Irwin in the New York Times:

To understand why the world economy is in grave peril because of the spread of coronavirus, it helps to grasp one idea that is at once blindingly obvious and sneakily profound.

One person’s spending is another person’s income. That, in a single sentence, is what the $87 trillion global economy is.

That relationship, between spending and income, consumption and production, is at the core of how a capitalist economy works. It is the basis of a perpetual motion machine. We buy the things we want and need, and in exchange give money to the people who produced those things, who in turn use that money to buy the things they want and need, and so on, forever.

What is so deeply worrying about the potential economic ripple effects of the virus is that it requires this perpetual motion machine to come to a near-complete stop across large chunks of the economy, for an indeterminate period of time.

No modern economy has experienced anything quite like this.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

“What good is half a wing?” That’s the rhetorical question often asked by people who have trouble accepting Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Of course it’s a very answerable question, but figuring out what exactly the answer is leads us to some fascinating biology. Neil Shubin should know: he is the co-discoverer of Tiktaalik Roseae, an ancient species of fish that was in the process of learning to walk and breathe on land. We talk about how these major transitions happen — typically when evolution finds a way to re-purpose existing organs into new roles — and how we can learn about them by studying living creatures and the information contained in their genomes.

More here.

Michele Masneri in Wired:

I have never been much of a runner, but on Saturday I find myself suiting up for exercise and meeting a friend for a run. It has been a week since the Italian prime minister ordered the closure of almost everything—schools, offices, banks—and the city is as empty as the set of a Fellini film. Only retailers deemed vital—supermarkets, pharmacies, tobacconists, newsstands—remain open (with a disputable choice of what kind of shopping is “vital”). Seems like exercising outdoors is deeply vital: I’ve never seen so many runners around the town. They are near the Coliseum; they are in the Piazza Venezia. They are everywhere.

Romans are not known to be super sporty, though. Seeing all those people in their shorts and running shoes reminds me a lot of San Francisco, where I lived from 2016 to 2018 while working as a correspondent for the Italian press.

Even the friend I am going to meet tells me on the phone: “Mi raccomando”—don’t forget—“dress up in runner’s outfit.” I don’t have any actual runner’s outfits. “Figure out something,” she says. The fact is, we don’t actually plan on running at all. Nevertheless my friend shows up in a completely orange get-up—orange leggings, orange cap, orange scarf to cover her mouth. “If you look like a runner you have less chance that the Police will stop you,” she tells me. I rustle up some loose gym clothes.

More here.

Jasmina Tumbas at Art in America:

The Belgrade installation of Sound Corridor missed an opportunity to connect Abramović’s work to that of her contemporaries. But it was nevertheless a startling introduction to an exhibition with a haunting soundscape, evocative of melancholy, death, and nostalgic enchantment. Moving from the corridor of recorded gunfire into the lobby, one could hear Abramović’s screams from the video Freeing the Voice (1975) on the second floor. For that performance at the SKC, the artist lay on her back screaming for three hours, until she lost her voice. On the first floor, a large but quiet black-box installation featured video footage from The Artist Is Present (2010), the performance staged during her retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Opposite this installation stood Private Archaeology (1997–2015), a set of wooden cabinets holding a collection of sketches, collages, artifacts, and ephemera from Abramović’s archive, a deeply self-mythologizing installation that surprisingly did not include any reference to her SKC involvement. At the top of the stairs, large projections showed black-and-white footage of some of Abramović’s best-known works: Freeing the Voice, mentioned above; Freeing the Body (1976), in which she wrapped her head in a black scarf and danced for eight hours, until she collapsed; and several of her performances made in collaboration with German artist Ulay, including one where they slam their bodies together, and another where they sit opposite each other and scream.

more here.