Italo Calvino’s Imaginary Worlds
Jeanette Winterson at The New Statesman:
Invisible Cities is built like a Boolean Truth Table. The mathematical table shows all possible combinations of inputs, and for each combination the output that the circuit will produce. It’s a logic operation. The categories we find in Invisible Cities – Hidden Cities, Cities and Desire, Cities and Memory, Thin Cities, Dead Cities, and so on – aren’t random. Once chosen, these “inputs” will reveal their “outputs”. Think of a Truth Table as including a column for each variable in the expression and a row for each possible combination of truth values (or cities in our case). Then add a column that shows the outcome of each set of values. That’s the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
The mapping out of possible truth values is the hot debate sparred back and forth across the space the two men occupy whenever they meet. At first, Polo’s space is offered as places he has seen and been. Gradually, the emperor begins to describe the cities, and Polo must tell him if they are real – moving carefully around what the word “real” means.
more here.
Tuesday Poem
Thinking Thought
“Oh, soul,” I sometimes—often—still say when I’m trying
… to convince my inner self of something.
“Oh, soul,” I say still, “there’s so much to be done, don’t want
… to stop to rest now, not already.
“Oh, soul,” I say, “the implications of the task are clear,
… why procrastinate, why whine?”
All the while I know my struggle has to do with mind being
… only sometimes subject to the will,
that other portion of itself which manages to stay so recalcitrantly,
… obstinately impotent.”
“Oh, soul,” come into my field of want, my realm of act, be
… attentive to my computations and predictions.”
But as usual soul resists, as usual soul retires, as usual soul’s
… old act of dissipation and removal.
Oh, the furious illusive unities of want, the frail, false fusions
… and discursive chains of hope.
by C.K. Williams
from C.K. William Selected Poems
The Noonday Press, 1994
The burden of the humanities
Wilfred McClay in The New Criterion:
Back in the 1980s, an editor at Harvard University Press had the bright idea of asking some of the leading lights of the day to write their own version of a philosophical dictionary, modeled on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764). The project petered out rather quickly, presumably because there turned out to be so few scholars around who had the breadth and wit to write such a book. But the great sociologist Robert Nisbet rose to the challenge and produced a philosophical dictionary, with the saucy title Prejudices, that was infinitely more charming and enlightening than its French model. It appeared in 1982.
Among the topics appearing in the table of contents for Nisbet’s dictionary is the term “Humanities.” The essay on that subject provides us with an excellent starting place for the present inquiry. It begins as follows:
A faculty member was accosted by a colleague with the words, “I understand you spoke against the humanities the other day at faculty meeting.” “No indeed,” was the reply. “I love the humanities. I would die for the humanities. All I asked was, what the hell are the humanities?”
More here.
The Human Brain Has a Dizzying Array of Mystery Cells
Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:
An international team of scientists has mapped the human brain in much finer resolution than ever before. The brain atlas, a $375 million effort started in 2017, has identified more than 3,300 types of brain cells, an order of magnitude more than was previously reported. The researchers have only a dim notion of what the newly discovered cells do. The results were described in 21 papers published on Thursday in Science and several other journals.
Ed Lein, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle who led five of the studies, said that the findings were made possible by new technologies that allowed the researchers to probe millions of human brain cells collected from biopsied tissue or cadavers. “It really shows what can be done now,” Dr. Lein said. “It opens up a whole new era of human neuroscience.”
More here.
Monday, October 23, 2023
Getting Lit: Two Memories
by Richard Farr
We called my English teacher Scab for no particular reason except that it took the edge off our terror. A big man in a double breasted jacket, he wore tinted glasses that hid his expression. His head looked as if it had been carved rather carelessly from a boiled ham. “You are not going to like me,” he said to us in our first class, when I was 13. “I am the iron fist inside this institution’s velvet glove.”
It was a front, mainly. He did not suffer fools, including his pupils and most of his colleagues, at all gladly. He probably dreamed of teaching at a university, where he could have discussed Chaucer’s prosody without first getting people to stop making farting noises.
By the time I turned 17 he had softened a little, as if he could see that some of us might one day turn into bona fide human beings. And that year the national syllabus gods gifted us what was (as I gradually came to see) an absolute corker. Among other succulent morsels there were chunks of The Canterbury Tales, all of both Othello and Lear, Gulliver’s Travels, Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party.
The most intimidating item by far was Paradise Lost Books IX and X — a hundred-score lines of theology that we found impenetrable, as if we were trying to hack our way back into an overgrown Eden long after its attendants’ banishment. Our feet tangled in the archaic vocabulary. Classical allusions stung our ignorant faces at every turn. (“Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous’d”? “Not sedulous to indite”? Both of these gems were on the first page of Book IX.) Scab spent a couple of weeks trying to make sense of it all for us but we were illiterate adolescents, lost and flailing inside an erudite adult’s poem. One day he sighed melodramatically and changed tactics. “I’ll read it to you,” he said. “Don’t think. Don’t even try to think. Just listen.”
What happened next I can’t articulate with any clarity, except to say that the words melted onto his tongue like expensive chocolates, rendering his voice thick and smooth, and it was as if he had become Milton; it was as if I was present at the creation and was witnessing the poem erupt for the first time from the dark materials of the blind freedom-fighter’s imagination.
“Don’t think. Just listen.” Read more »
Remembering Rey
by Mark Harvey
A week before he died, I drove my good friend and ranch foreman, Rey Rodriguez, to Denver to catch a bus to Chihuahua, Mexico. He was taking a two-week vacation to visit his family there. On the three-hour drive to Denver, we practiced answering questions for the test given to immigrants applying for US citizenship. He had downloaded 100 potential questions onto his phone and had been studying for more than a year to take the test. I often wondered why he didn’t take the test sooner because he had the questions down. Most of the test is composed of the sort of useless memorization you’d find in an American high school in 1950.
Who was Benjamin Franklin? What do the fifty stars on the American flag represent? Where is the Statue of Liberty? Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
I have no idea how this test ensures that an immigrant will make a good citizen other than ensuring that the applicant knows far more about American history than the complacent homeowner in Pasadena, California, going all red-faced about keeping “illegals” out of ‘America—between bites of avocado that the “illegals” planted, picked, and packed.
We probably went through 60 questions and Rey didn’t miss one. My suspicion is that Rey had very mixed feelings about becoming an official gringo. Like many Mexicans, he had done the Mexico-America dance for years. Traveling great distances from Chihuahua to places like Yuma, Colorado, to work on a giant feedlot, the Central Valley of California to harvest vegetables, or western Colorado to work on our ranch.
He liked America okay and admired certain things about gringos. But his heart and soul were in Mexico. America was a way to stay afloat financially. I asked him what the average wage of a ranch worker in Mexico was and I reckon American ranch workers make in the neighborhood of 10 times as much. Read more »
Monday Poem
Coronasomnia
by Deanna Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog)
I am no stranger to waking up in the middle of the night with a nameless feeling of dread. Like everyone else I know, I developed chronic insomnia around age 40, which was exacerbated by the “election” of Trump and the ongoing pillage of American democracy. And then perimenopause wreaked its havoc in the form of hormonal swings, night sweats, and troubled dreams. But this was different. This night—just over a month ago—I woke bolt upright out of a dead sleep, gasping for air, disoriented and terrified. I leapt out of bed and staggered to the bathroom, so dizzy I was bumping into walls. I found the toilet, closed the lid (an ongoing bone of contention in our household), and sank down with my head between my knees. I was dying. I knew, absolutely and with pure and stainless conviction, that I was dying. Dizziness washed over me, an intense feeling of disorientation, and I knew that it was my spirit separating from my body. I was swept with waves of grief. I haven’t written everything I want to write. My partner is in the next room and I don’t want to say goodbye yet. My family, my friends. Work to do, parties to throw. This toilet—it really needs to be cleaned. This is not dignified. I promise, Powers That Be, that from this moment forward I will no longer be cavalier about my life, if you just spare me now.
Suddenly a scrap of memory. A conviction that one is dying—that sounds familiar. I think … that can happen in panic attacks? Maybe I’m having a panic attack? But—how can this be? I have had panic disorder and intermittent generalized anxiety since I was 16, and have had hundreds of panic attacks in my life—never before did I become convinced that I was dying. For me the worst part of panic is the feeling of derealization, as if the world around me is fake and I am in a dream. (It’s very difficult to explain why this feeling is so horrifying to those who have never experienced it—you just have to trust me.) But that night in the bathroom I suddenly remembered that the sensation of dying is on the long list of panic attack symptoms, one I had always skipped over when reading about my disorder since it didn’t apply to me. And yet here we were.
Okay, okay. I might as well try the usual techniques I’ve perfected over the years. Deep breathing. Walking in circles while shaking my hands and feet. Splashing cold water on my face. Above all—not fighting it. Letting the feelings pass through me and trusting that I would come out the other side. It worked; I was released from the iron grip of terror; my soul returned to my body; I lived.
I did not sleep again that night. Read more »
The Ape And The Holy Man: A Fable
by Mike Bendzela
An Ape meets a Holy Man who is visiting a zoo. The Holy Man has made a career of debasing such animals as the Ape, and now the Ape sees an opportunity to preempt him. She is a fabulist and must act quickly.
“The animals are trying to tell you something.”
“I don’t speak animal,” the Holy Man sneers.
The Ape ignores him and continues: “Once upon a time–”
Some monitor lizards–opposed to the increasing presence of cobras in their midst–held a public meeting to air their concerns. “Fellow Lizards!” one outspoken lizard said to those gathered. “The cobras intend to surround us, defeat us, and take our land. But they won’t stop there; we all know how snakes are. If we don’t do something quickly, they will swallow all our young!” Inflamed by this speech, the lizards quickly mobilized. They sought out the snakes, surrounded them, and defeated them. But, for reasons no one has been able to fathom, the triumphant lizards then devoured every snake egg they could find.
“Indeed,” the Holy Man says, “someone is always plotting against you.”
“Would you like to hear the moral?”
“I’m all ears.”
The most depraved acts may be committed in the name of preventing depravity.
“In other words,” the Holy Man says, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” Read more »
Perceptions
Shilpa Gupta. Untitled 2009.What is Thought that a Large Language Model Ought to Exhibit (But Won’t)?
by David J. Lobina
Artificial General Intelligence, however this concept is to be defined exactly, is upon us, say two prominent AI experts. Not exactly an original statement, as this sort of claim has come up multiple times in the last year or so, often followed by various qualifications and the inevitable dismissals (Gary Marcus has already pointed out that this last iteration involves not a little post-shifting, and it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, anyway).
I’m very sceptical too, for the simple reason that modern Machine/Deep Learning models are huge correlation machines and that’s not the sort of process that underlies whatever we might want to call an intelligent system. It is certainly not the way we know humans “think”, and the point carries yet more force when it comes to Language Models, those guess-next-token-based-on-statistical-distribution-of-huge-amounts-of-data systems.[1]
This is not to say that a clear definition of intelligence is in place, but we are on firmer ground when discussing what sort of abilities and mental representations are involved when a person has a thought or engages in some thinking. I would argue, in fact, that the account some philosophers and cognitive scientists have put together over the last 40 or so years on this very question ought to be regarded as the yardstick against which any artificial system needs to be evaluated if we are to make sense of all these claims regarding the sapience of computers calculating huge numbers of correlations. That’s what I’ll do in this post, and in the following I shall show how most AI models out there happen to be pretty hopeless in this regard (there is a preview in the photo above). Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
What does it mean to have a ‘right to life’?
by Oliver Waters
If you were a medieval peasant in the year 1323 AD, would you have believed that slavery was morally permissible?
The odds are that you would have. After all, most people at the time saw slavery as a permanent fact of life, not an abomination that ought to be abolished. But it’s very tempting to assume that you, as a rational, thoughtful individual, could have transcended your historical setting to grasp its transcendent wrongness.
To do so however, you would have needed to reject the mainstream beliefs of your society. You would have had to think through the issue via first principles. This would include developing a coherent theory that accounted for human moral equality – a tall order, given the bulk of humanity didn’t manage this feat for another few hundred years.
It can be fun to pass judgment on the silliness of past generations, but the real work of moral philosophy is figuring out which ideas we take for granted today that future generations will look back on with the same contempt as we do for slavery.
After all, as Mark Twain warned:
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
With that in mind, here’s a moral claim that’s obviously true, according to most people alive today:
It is always morally wrong to kill an innocent human being.
When we look at this claim more closely however, from first principles, it appears to be not only false, but a dogma responsible for a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering. Read more »
Poetry in Translation
Learning and Love
by Mohammad Iqbal (1887-1935)
“Love is madness,” Learning said.
“Learning is suspicion and doubt,” Love said.
O Learning, do not a bookworm be, you are veiled
Love is radiant, steadfast, a pageant of life and death
Learning displays the divine essence logically; love illogically
“Question everything,” says Learning. “I am the answer,” says Love
Love is a king as well as an ascetic, dweller, and a dwelling, enslaves
Even royalty, champions life with certainty, throws open the gate of love
Laws of love forbid rest, allow tumult of storms, the joy of reaching a shore;
Forbid love’s harvest after all. Learning is Son of the Book; Love, the Mother.
***
Translated From the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari
The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the Origin of Animal Farm: A Conversation between John Reed and Andrea Scrima
by Andrea Scrima
Twenty years ago, John Reed made an unexpected discovery: “If Orwell esoterica wasn’t my foremost interest, I eventually realized that, in part, it was my calling.” In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, ideas that had been germinating suddenly coalesced, and in three weeks’ time Reed penned a parody of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The memorable pig Snowball would return from exile, bringing capitalism with him—thus updating the Cold War allegory by fifty-some years and pulling the rug out from underneath it. At the time, Reed couldn’t have anticipated the great wave of vitriol and legal challenges headed his way—or the series of skewed public debates with the likes of Christopher Hitchens. Apparently, the world wasn’t ready for a take-down of its patron saint, or a sober look at Orwell’s (and Hitchens’s) strategic turn to the right.
Snowball’s Chance, it turns out, was only the beginning. The book was published the same year as Hitchens’s Why Orwell Matters, and the media frequently paired the two. In the years that followed, Reed wrote a series of essays (published in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Believer, and other journals) analyzing the heated response to the book and everything it implied. Orwell’s writing had long been used as a propaganda tool, and evidence had emerged that his political leanings went far beyond defaming communism—but if facing this basic historical truth was so unthinkable, what was the taboo preventing us from seeing? Reed’s examination of our Orwell preoccupation sifts through the changes the West has undergone since the Cold War: its cultural crises, its military disasters, its self-deceptions and confusions, and more recently—perhaps even more troubling—its new instability of identity. The Never End brings together nine of these essays and adds an Animal Farm timeline, a footnoted version of Orwell’s proposed preface, and the Russian text Animal Farm originally drew from to more clearly assess the circumstances behind, and the conclusions to be drawn from, the book’s global importance. Read more »
Monday Photo
Mountain huts next to a stream running through a meadow near Meransen, South Tyrol, yesterday.
The Many Faces of Dementia
by Carol A Westbrook
Dementia refers to progressive, irreversible cognitive impairment usually seen in the elderly. The clinical findings of dementia almost always include some degree of memory impairment. We didn’t know much about how memories were formed in the brain until 1953, when the now-famous patient named Henry Molaison, HM, had removal of an area in the temporal lobe of his brain called the “hippocampus” the operations successfully prevented seizures, but unfortunately HM also lost the ability to form new memories of events, and his recollection of anything that happened in the preceding eleven years was severely impaired. Other types of memories such as learning physical skills were not affected. This was the first step in learning about how and where memories are formed in the human brain.
We now know that the hippocampus plays an important part in the formation of new memories by the physical interaction and modification of neurons, and it also processes short -term memories into long-term memories, which are then stored in the frontal cortex. Specific brain structures have other specific tasks in memory development, (see figure 2) such as the amygdala, the area of the brain which adds emotional pertinence to memories such as fear, pleasure or pain, whereas physical skills and movement are dependent on the cerebellum. We are beginning to understand how and why specific brain lesions can lead to different forms of dementia. Read more »
Sunday, October 22, 2023
Amitava Kumar: Advice for writers
Amitava Kumar in his Substack newsletter:
During a public conversation with Salman Rushdie on stage in New York City, I asked if he had advice for postcolonial writers. Rushdie said he had a rule for young writers: “There must be no tropical fruits in the title. No mangoes, no guavas. None of those. Tropical animals are also problematic. Peacock, etc. Avoid that shit.” (More of that exchange is to be found here.) I have made it a practice of mine to ask writers for advice. Back in 2020, in the New York Times Book Review, I had published a few examples of what various writer-friends had written when signing copies of their books. Compiled in that list are the words of Lydia Davis, Yiyun Li, Tommy Orange, Zadie Smith, Colum McCann, Mark Doty, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jenny Offill. (Jenny Offill’s advice, for instance, is: “If you want to write, don’t have a backup plan. Also, always put a dog in your book.”) In the past few weeks, weeks during which I have continued to not write, I have been diligent about collecting advice from writers who have come through the Cullman Center.
More here.
The Mathematician Who Shaped String Theory
Steve Nadis in Quanta:
Eugenio Calabi was known to his colleagues as an inventive mathematician — “transformatively original,” as his former student Xiuxiong Chen put it. In 1953, Calabi began to contemplate a class of shapes that nobody had ever envisioned before. Other mathematicians thought their existence was impossible. But a couple of decades later, these same shapes became extremely important in both math and physics. The results ended up having a far broader reach than anyone, including Calabi, had anticipated.
Calabi was 100 years old when he died on September 25, mourned by his colleagues as one of the most influential geometers of the 20th century. “A lot of mathematicians like to solve problems that finish off work on a particular subject,” Chen said. “Calabi was someone who liked to start a subject.”
More here.