by Nils Peterson

Years ago I was listening to Robert Bly talk about poetry. It was at a conference on form and he was in the process of leaving Whitman and going on to Yeats as part of his own conscious public wrestling, not so much with the Muse as which Muse and where the Muse comes from. He paused for a moment and, to let his batteries charge, said – “Well, what do you think of this Nils?” He’d been talking about the formal aspect of Yeats, the rhythm and the rhyme and the kind of consciousness such usage requires of the reader and the writer. I, startled, could think of nothing else to say than that Yeats writes the kind of poem that you can wake up in the middle of the night and find that you know by heart without ever having made the effort to memorize it. I mentioned having been at a wedding where, unexpectedly, I was asked to recite some poetry. I was able after a minute of two or two with a pencil to come up with a fairly accurate version of “The Folly of Being Comforted.” Bly nodded, and went on his merry way, but I found myself troubled. So, at the end when he asked for comments, I found I had to add this anecdote.

In the middle ’60s when I first was a new husband, a new teacher, and new father, I met my first indication of the changing consciousness of women in a freshman English class. I was teaching the Yeats poem “A Prayer for My Daughter.” I found it, and in many ways still do a marvelous poem and I spoke of it to my class with great enthusiasm saying that this is what I would wish for my daughter – that she would be “beautiful” but not “too beautiful” and “learned courtesy” for: 

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
by those that are not entirely beautiful…. 

I added that I’ve known enough of it in myself to think that,

An intellectual hatred is the worst. 

While musing in front of the class, thinking of my own infant daughter’s destiny, it seemed as if I too could pray –

May her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious…, 

having had because of growing up as a chauffeur’s child on a great estate, some illusions about what that would be like.

One of my women students, tough, honest, told me – “You’re wrong. You shouldn’t say wish that on your daughter.” In fact, she went on to say that “I had no right to wish that on my daughter.”

I was set back on my heels, shocked. It had seemed to me the most unexceptionable of fatherly wishes, what, indeed, any father, would want. The class finished with a good argument. And Bly’s evening finished when, shortly after my story, Robert said, “Well, something must be happening here because I feel a lot of anger in my stomach and it’s time for bed.” And yes, the evening all of a sudden had become filled with a strange uncomfortable energy. 

But the evening and my story are not quite over. Read more »

Dilara Begum Jolly. Untitled, ca 2014.

More here, here, and here.

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

The Theory of Mind That Says Artificial Intelligence is Possible

Does your dog feel pain? Or your cat? Surely, nonhuman great apes do. Dolphins feel pain, right? What about octopuses? (That’s right, “octopuses” not “octopi.”)They seem to be surprisingly intelligent and to exhibit pain-like behavior – even though the last common ancestor we shared was a worm 600 million years ago.

Given that all these animals (and us) experience pain, it seems exceedingly unlikely that there would only be a single kind of brain or neurological architecture or synapse that could provide the sole material basis for pain across all the possible beings that can feel pain. Octopuses, for example, have a separate small brain in each tentacle. This implies that pain, and other features of our psychology or mentality, can be “multiply realized.” That is, a single mental kind or property can be “realized,” or implemented (as the computer scientists prefer), in many different ways and supervene on many distinct kinds of physical things.

We don’t have direct access to the phenomenal properties of pain (what it feels like) in octopuses – or in fellow humans for that matter. I can’t feel your pain, in other words, much less my pet octopuses’. So, when we say an octopus feels pain like ours, what can we mean? What makes something an example (or token) of the mental instance (or type) “pain”? The dominant answer to that question in late twentieth century philosophy was called the “functionalism” answer (though many think functionalism goes all the way back to Aristotle).

Functionalism is the theory that what makes something pain does not depend on its internal constitution or phenomenal properties, but rather the role or function it plays in the overall system. Pain might be, for example, a warning or a signal of bodily damage. What does functionalism say about the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)? Read more »

Self portrait by reflection in a glass door in Meran, South Tyrol.

by Ethan Seavey

I’ve heard owls are signs of a big shift in your life; I also know that I only really look for owls during those times.

Exercise for me is short lived or long lived, short lived to match my attention or long lived to accommodate my frequent breaks for walking, exploring, writing, texting.

I’m running through the gulch and looking at the trees where the owl usually sits in the morning. It’s not morning really anymore. The sun is big in the sky and the owl is nowhere to be seen. I think to see the owl and to prove the shift in my life I’d need to wake up earlier.

After running out of the woods I follow the sidewalk to the water front and walk along that for a while. I see seagulls approach an old man who is bemused that they’ve identified him as a possible food source.

I walk down a pier for a while. It’s meant for fishing but it’s too early in the season for fishing so I don’t see anybody reeling in anything, and I’m looking for marvelous life-changing marlins. I watch a couple kiss on the other side of the pier. They point off into the distance at a warship.

As I run back to the woods, I have the thought that I don’t need to see an animal to decide I’m going through a life shift. That’s when I notice a globe in the water. Read more »

by Oliver Waters

The Matrix films depict a future dystopia in which oppressive super-intelligent machines have imprisoned human beings inside an entirely simulated world in order to exploit them as a power source. The human protagonists of the films – Neo and Trinity – lead a thrilling rebellion to free as many people as possible. It’s rather obvious why they are the ‘good guys’ and the machines are evil: imprisoning people in a virtual cage is wrong.

This is despite the fact that life in the Matrix actually seems more enjoyable than the alternative. Inside, you partake in the heady optimistic era of 1990s America. Outside it, you must endure the dusty remnants of the great civilisational war between humans and machines. There isn’t even any sunshine, on account of the humans having ‘scorched the sky’ to prevent the machines from accessing solar power. The only ‘free’ human city exists deep underground, where there’s very little entertainment unless scantily clad festival raves are your thing.

This is why the notorious character Cypher decides to betray humanity to the machines in exchange for a charmed life in the simulation. As he rationalises while eating a juicy virtual steak: ‘ignorance is bliss’.  The film pushes us to think of Cypher as a deeply mistaken jerk. But why exactly? Why is being trapped in the Matrix wrong even if it is seemingly more pleasurable than living in reality? Because it is assumed that the people stuck inside it possess the inherently human trait of curiosity. Deep down, they want to know how the world really works. By being trapped in a fantasy world, this basic need is being frustrated, even if they don’t know it. Their individual potentials as self-aware beings are being cruelly inhibited, and justice demands that they be freed.

If you haven’t seen the Matrix films by now – where on Earth have you been?

One plausible place is on North Sentinel Island, a tiny member of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. It is remarkable for the fact that the people who live on it (the ‘Sentinelese’) are in almost zero contact with the rest of our global civilisation. There have been several attempts to connect with them over the centuries with varying degrees of failure, brought vividly to life in Adam Goodheart’s recent book The Last Island (2023). The Sentinelese exist today in total isolation – an arrangement enforced by the Indian government within whose sovereignty the island lies. Read more »

by Richard Farr

You might think London’s National Portrait Gallery is a temple of celebrity, and it’s true that many of the faces on these walls belong to mere royalty, or influential past Nabobs, or those more recently glossy with fame. But the people who draw me back again and again are the ones who get to be here only because they were freakishly good at something.   

Poets. Dancers. Singers. Scientists. Generals. Explorers. Actors. Engineers. Diplomats. Reformers. Painters. Sailors. Builders. Climbers. Composers. In a pretty-good eighteenth-century copy of a portrait by Holbein the Younger, Thomas Cromwell is not so much a man as a slab of living, dangerous gristle. Henry James looks dangerous too, in a portrait by John Singer Sargent that more people would recognize as great if inverted snobbery hadn’t turned under-rating Sargent into a whole academic discipline. Humphrey Davy, painted in his forties, could not be more different. He looks about 14; thinking about science has made him glow with delight. 

Thomas Gainsborough is all over the place to good effect next door, in the National Gallery, but his self-portrait here makes him look embalmed. It seems almost cruel to have placed him next to his contemporary Joshua Reynolds, whose own self-portrait demonstrates how far wit and brio can take you. A less successful Reynolds captures Samuel Johnson looking morose, or constipated; no greater contrast than with that prince among wits Laurence Sterne (Reynolds yet again), seen in full gloat after the publication of Tristram Shandy.  Read more »

Homes

we all leave home eventually,
leave the dark comfort of wombs,
leave the home of childhood,
some earlier than others depending upon
the warmth or not of particular hearths.
inevitably some step out
and abandon silver spoons like Siddhartha
who was not comforted by comfort,
while some break from huts of sheer neglect.
eventually, some even leave
the cocoon of self,
cracking its cramped shell,
flying beyond its confines,
its imaginary limits
its walls of mirrors
its life sentence
its aloneness

Jim Culleny, 4/4/22

by Mary Hrovat

There are worse places to be a stargazer than south-central Indiana; it’s not cloudy all the time here. I’ve spent many lovely evenings outside looking at stars and planets, and I’ve been able to see a fair number of lunar eclipses, along with the occasional conjunction (when two or more planets appear very close together on the sky) and, rarely, an occultation (when a celestial body, typically the moon but sometimes a planet or asteroid, passes directly in front of a planet or star).

For example, I was lucky enough to have clear skies in March 1996 on the night comet Hyakutake made its closest approach to Earth; from a relatively dark site, it was visible near the North Star, its long faint tail sweeping the sky like a hand on a clock. I also got to see the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in December 2020, the closest such conjunction since 1623. There were also a number of clear evenings before the conjunction, so I could watch the two planets drawing closer to each other on the sky. A viewing party for comet Hale-Bopp, on a night in 1997 when the moon was full and Venus was visible in the western sky after sunset, was notable for clouds coming and going, but we got to see the comet and the planet, and the moon was remarkably pink through hazy clouds.

However, we do get a lot of overcast nights. Indianapolis, the closest city for which I can find data, receives 55% of available sunshine; annually, it sees 88 clear days, 99 partly cloudy days, and 179 cloudy days. As a result, I’ve missed a fair number of lunar eclipses, meteor showers, and other astronomical events over the decades. When I was an astronomy student in the 1980s, I remember standing on the balcony of the observatory with a classmate, wondering whether the clouds that had moved in were there to stay. The climate here fosters doubt about the possibility of clear skies. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Figure in Environment, May 1974.

Pastel drawing on paper.

by Mike Bendzela

We love our antique coal range. Are we bad people? The answer is easily “Yes,” of course, but it has less to do with our infatuation with the coal range than with our membership in the club of approximately 1.5 billion in the industrialized world. Our utter dependence on the energy-intensive collective economic system of the developed nations makes us pretty damned rapacious, by historical standards. Our individual dependence on the coal range, not so much. The gargantuan footprint of the human enterprise is nothing any of us can do a thing about. Therefore, I say, Gather ye anthracite while ye may.

Why bother with the hassle of such an antiquated heating system? We live in a rambling, restored, 18th century Maine farmhouse with 19th century additions and barn. My spouse, Don, is a retired cabinetmaker and carpenter, an aficionado of 19th century mechanical systems, and an amateur historian of Maine’s rural social life.  He bought the stove decades ago and, with the help of a local mason, installed the edifice into the opening of an existing kitchen fireplace. It required mortaring cast iron panels into a pre-built brick infrastructure. The stove thus sits flat against the fireplace wall instead of sticking out into the room like most cast iron stoves.

The original coal grate was burned out, so Don made a pattern of  it in carved hardwood and delivered it to a foundry to be cast in iron. Coal grates must be bulky and heavy, as coal burns at a much higher temperature than wood and will destroy a wood grate. Don devised an iron pipe “water back” to go through the firebox and cemented it in place with refractory cement. (The original brass water back was missing.) Water runs through this water back, heats up, and fills the copper-nickel alloy “range boiler” to the left of the stove. From October through May, that is, during the heating season, all the hot water for the house is heated through the coal range. During the hot months we switch on the electric hot water heater and use a propane stove for cooking. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

In a recent video by Damien Walter about the Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem, the role of the Holocaust is brought front and center in Lem’s body of work. According to academic and author Elena Gomel, his work demanded that we grapple with that incomprehensible event. It’s a question that matters still since in the modern era we continued to see violence with seemingly little reason. But, Walter argued, we have refused to learn a critical lesson from the Holocaust which is a form of denial of that horrific event: Lem’s insight that the Holocaust was not a deviation from the march of history, but a byproduct of modern history itself. One particular aspect of the Holocaust that Lem explored was the kitsch culture of the Nazis. Lem believed that kitsch had its worst expression in Nazi culture. Was Lem correct? Was there a direct line between kitsch culture and destructive states? Lem honed in on a key aspect of mass society and how it shapes us and is shaped by us. I would agree to a degree. Kitsch, a critical byproduct of modernity, has been both a means of reinforcing and resisting oppressive forms of power. At its worse it can be used to motivate awful forms of violence. But kitsch can also be wonderfully subversive. Read more »

Train entering Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, from the south.

by David J. Lobina

Like the study of any other complex idea, the analysis of nationalism requires building up boundaries between different phenomena, drawing various theoretical distinctions, and recognising the inevitable splits that arise within what may look like a whole ideology at first. It is by teasing out the building blocks of nationalism that we may obtain a better view, and it is by drawing attention to its psychological underpinnings that it might be possible to make sense of where nationalism comes from, both as an idea and as a real-life event.

Say what?

Well, this is a nice little summary of my general take on the phenomenon of nationalism, as laid out, from the perspective of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, here, here, and here, and with a little help from the anarchist thinker Rudolf Rocker (here, here, and here).

I am bringing this into play now once again as a way to provide the right segue to the long-promised conclusion to my series on the use and abuse of fascism to describe current political events, especially in the US (started here). It’s been quite a while since then, and there is a fair amount to pick up and discuss, and so I thought it would be in my best interest to write a sort of “refreshment” about what I was on about last time around.

The final-parter, which will double down on my original point – to wit, that the term fascism is used far too loosely these days, that most of the people it is being applied to are hardly fascists in any meaningful sense, and that modern political undercurrents bear little to no relationship to the European fascism of the 1920-30s, especially to Italian fascism – will come out next month and hopefully bring an end to the series (pending commentary forcing me to retake it later on, of course; actually, do comments still exist at 3 Quarks Daily? I haven’t seen any recently). Read more »

by Gus Mitchell

(Read Pt. 1 and Pt. 2)

Everything is content and content is everything. An uncountable noun, like information, content has a monolithic singularity to it. A meme, tweet, image, targeted ad; a song, podcast, TV show or movie on a streaming platform; an explainer, a reaction; clickbait articles, legitimate journalism; bodycam footage of police taking down a gunman or a teenager; screenshots of appalling dating app interactions; an influencer retooling her school shooting trauma to sell Bioré skincare products on TikTok—it’s all content.

Of course, there are shades and varieties. Shareable content. Meme-able content. Viral content. Relatable content. Quality content. Exclusive and original content. Parasocial content: a conversational podcast, familiar voices filling up the dull silence of shopping, cooking, walking. Or ambient or second screen content, the actual content of which is negligible given that you’re probably consuming more content on another device at the same time.

What keeps us in this voracious state of content consumption? Decades ahead of his time, the late British spiritual writer and lecturer Alan Watts may have hit on an explanation. In a talk delivered in the late 1960s, he described the experience of flicking through Life Magazine as one of “pacified agitation.” Being in this state, he noted, leaves you with “a set of impressions” rather than giving you anything to “chew on.” It is this same agitation that keeps us coming back, consuming ever more content in search of some ever-elusive contentment. But it’s impossible to feel full when the internet’s capacity for containing, sharing, and proliferating its content is limitless. We cannot speak of the contents of the internet as we would once have named the contents of a book or a jar. The plural implies finitude, the singular a flatness, without depth or dimension. Read more »