by Jonathan Kujawa

One of the great pleasures in life is learning about something today that you couldn’t have imagined yesterday. The infinite richness of mathematics means I get to have this experience regularly. However much I think I know, it is a drop in the ocean of things yet to be learned.

And even if lots of people already know something, it doesn’t matter when it’s new to you. As is often the case, xkcd made this point already.  Even the most ordinary facts are amazing and new for the 10,000 or so people learning it today:

A few weeks ago I once again had the joy of learning about a previously hidden corner of the mathematical world: Gaussian Periods. Samantha Platt, a graduate student working with Ellen Eischen at the University of Oregon, gave a fantastic talk about Gaussian Periods in one of our seminars. Since a close second to learning something new is the fun of explaining it to someone else, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share Gaussian Periods with you. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Here’s the gist of it. I think a recent declaration on animal consciousness, being signed by a growing number of philosophers and scientists, is largely correct about nonhuman animals possessing consciousness, but misleading. It insinuates that animal consciousness is a recent discovery – made in the last five to ten years – based on new experimental work. As exciting and revelatory as recent work on the minds of nonhuman animals is, animal consciousness is hardly a new discovery. In fact, I am not sure the declaration is really a scientific manifesto so much as a moral one. We ought to be treating nonhuman animals better because many seem to have some level of consciousness, but implying we should do so because of new “scientific evidence” may be a mistake.

NBC recently reported that “discoveries…in the last five years” show that a “surprising range of creatures” exhibit “evidence of conscious thought or experience, including insects, fish and some crustaceans.” 

“That has prompted a group of top researchers on animal cognition to publish a new pronouncement that they hope will transform how scientists and society view — and care — for animals.” 

“Nearly 40 researchers signed The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, which was first presented at a conference at New York University.” Many more have signed the Declaration since then, and many more are likely to sign it in the near future.

Here is The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness in its entirety.

“Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.

First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.

Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).

Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.”

When I read this my first reaction was “I can’t believe it, they’ve solved the ‘other minds’ problem!” A leading problem in philosophy, after all, has been ‘How do we even know other humans have consciousness?’ – much less nonhuman animals. In fact, one of the signatories to the declaration, leading philosopher of mind David Chalmers, is well-known for arguing that there might be beings (“philosophical zombies”) that look and behave just as we do, but have no consciousness. In other words, recognizing there is a philosophical problem about how we can be justified in attributing consciousness to others. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Light Play in The Living Room, November 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Brooks Riley

by Nils Peterson

Charles Simic says, “[I] suspect that a richer and less predictable account of our lives would eschew chronology and any attempt to fit a lifetime into a coherent narrative and instead be made up of a series of fragments, spur-of-the-moment reminiscences occasioned by whatever gets our imagination working.”

I was reading an article yesterday on translation of Proust and the author mentions Proust’s decision to build “a whole long novel on an involuntary memory.” You’ll remember the moment. He has a madeleine cookie with his tea and all of a sudden “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin…. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray.” He is transported back to his childhood.

I got caught up in the idea of an involuntary memory. Michael Wood, the author of the Proust article, goes on to explain ‘Involuntary here means not only unintended but barred from the realm of intention. Whatever it is, it won’t happen if you try to make it happen.” A philosopher of language would have a ball playing with what is going on in those last two sentences, but I’m not interested this morning in going down that road because I had on Tuesday an involuntary memory. I saw the floor of the bedroom my brother and I shared in the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage in the late 30’s. I think I was eight the last time I saw that floor. It was covered in linoleum and the linoleum was divided into squares and each square had a nursery rhyme with an illustration. Mind settles for a moment on Miss Muffet and her tuffet. Part of my learning to read may have come from hearing my mother recite the rhyme and my finding it on the floor and understanding and parsing out the words. This last is a forced memory and it may not even be a true one. How different a making from the involuntary appearance in my memory of the linoleum.

There was a path to there. I was walking back from poetry salon I lead here at my old people’s home. People bring poems they want to read. Tuesday we got everything from Casey at the Bat to some lovely Robert Frost. When a person comes who didn’t know he or she was supposed to bring a poem to share, I ask for a song lyric or nursery rhyme and usually they can come up with something. The younger they are, the less likely they are to come up with a nursery rhyme. I think they’re on the endangered species list.

The subject of Memory interests me and I have written a couple of attempts to understand it. Here’s one. Read more »

by Ed Simon

In Renaissance Europe, a Wunderkammer was literally a “Wonder Cabinet,” that is a collection of fascinating objects, be they rare gems and minerals, resplendent feathers, ancient artifacts, exquisite fossils. Forerunners to the modern museum, a Wunderkammer didn’t claim comprehensiveness, but it rather served to suggest the multiplicity of our existence on this earth, the nature of possibility. Wunderkammers developed alongside that literary form which Michelle de Montaigne called “essays,” literally an “attempt.” Essays, like Wunderkammers, at their most potent are also not comprehensive; rather their purposes is to experiment, to riff, to play. In that spirt, half of my columns at 3QuarksDaily will be dedicated to what I call a “Word Cabinet,” a room dedicated to literature, neither as theory nor even as reading, but to do what both wonder cabinets and essays do, and that is to hopefully provide intimations of possibility. All essays will take the form of “On X and Literature,” where the algebraic cipher indicates some broad, general subject (fire and labyrinths, trees and infinity, etc.). As always, feel free to suggest topics.

* * *

Behind the gleaming, modernist, smooth sandstone façade of Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland, a temple to all things Hibernian from the Covenanters to the Jacobite Rebellion, the Highland Clearances to James Watt’s steam-engine, there is a small thirteenth-century walrus tusk ivory carving of a Medieval Nordic soldier. Discovered in a simple stone ossuary buried in a sand dune on the foggy, rain-lashed Bay of Uig on the Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis in 1831, the little sculpture is just a bit over an inch tall, yet it’s easy to make out the distinctive Scandinavian designs on his pointed helmet, his comical bulging eyes, and his teeth over the top of the shield that he clutches and bites. His is clearly a pose of frenzied, martial wrath. A berserker – the feared caste of Viking warriors who in an enraged fugue state (possibly aided by hallucinogens) terrorized people from Novgorod to Newfoundland, including the Scotts who lived on Lewis where this small figurine would be entombed for six centuries, alongside ninety two other pieces. Not just berserkers, but a mitered bishop of the recently converted Norseman; a tired looking queen with her eyes wide, resting her face upon her balm; a bearded, wise old king.

The berserker isn’t just a tiny statue of a Norse combatant, he’s a warder; what is more commonly known as a rook. This tiny berserker was a chess piece, who even nine centuries ago had the responsibility of charting that distinctive L-shaped course across checkered boards. From India into Persia, than the Arabic world into Europe, chess had already been played for half-a-millennia by the time whatever Norse craftsman took chisel and scorper to a walrus tusk. The rules would be recognizable to contemporary players, though the sterling craftsmanship of the Isle of Lewis chessman – with enough pieces to constitute three complete sets – is rather different than the boring black-and-white pieces used by players today, whether the prodigies competing against paying tourists in view of Washington Square Park’s triumphal arch or the celebrated 1972 match in Reykjavik between Fischer and Spassky. Read more »

Pigeon sitting on a skylight at the Berlin airport. And its shadow.

by Olivier Del Fabbro

No matter where you go, Aristotle believes, the rich will be few and the poor many. Yet, to be an oligarch means more than to simply be part of the few, it means to govern as rich. Oligarchs claim political power precisely because of their wealth.

Rightfully then, we associate oligarchy with the few individuals, who enrich themselves in Eastern Europe after the downfall of the Soviet Union, in order to take part in political governance. Alexander Smolensky, Yuri Lushkov, Anatoly Chubais, Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and most famously Mikhail Khodorkovsky, are the protagonists of David E. Hoffman’s The Oligarchs, who are right on the spot, when the Soviet planned economy turns into a wild privatization of profitable industries and resources.

But the economic situation in the 1990’s in Eastern Europe is by no means comparable to the market economy of a liberal democracy. What is missing, according to Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom, is the rule of law. In other words: oligarchs wish to manage Russian “democracy” in favor of their own interests.

Later on, when Vladimir Putin succeeds Boris Yeltsin, oligarchy in Russia continues. Putin keeps those he likes in his inner circle and gets rid of others, who are critical or not playing along: e.g. the case of Khodorkovsky. It is time for Putin’s KGB friends to come to power, as Catherine Belton shows in her book, Putin’s People. Yet, Putin’s Russia becomes at the same time, as Mark Galeotti highlights in his podcast In Moscow’s Shadows, more and more an authoritarian regime, in which many different types of individuals desire a piece of the cake: mega-oligarchs, mini-oligarchs, corrupt politicians and officials, warlords, generals and what not. Russia has never been democratic – not under the Tsars, the Soviet Union, Yeltsin nor Putin. Its path is one from imperialism to communism to oligarchy to authoritarianism – not to freedom.

Ukraine, similarly to Russia, falls under the grip of its very own oligarchs after the Soviet Union vanishes from the world map. Read more »