by Brooks Riley

by Mike O’Brien

Living next to the United States, Canadians can develop a warped sense of normality. It is similar to living with an alcoholic; sure, you may drink a bit much from time to time, but compared to their whirlwind of self-intoxication, is it really so bad? Of course, your liver function isn’t graded on a curve, so such comparisons can dangerously trivialise the harms of objectively excessive and destructive behaviour.

This warping of perspective is obvious when comparing Canada’s laws to those of the USA, on one hand, and the EU, on the other. (Confusingly, French Canadians refer to the United States by the initials “É.-U.”, for “États-Unis”. Why must they be so difficult?) Our labour laws sometimes hew closer to the stingy, even brutal, labour regime of our southern neighbour, where legally protected paid sick leave or parental leave is viewed as some kind of Communist science fiction. Compared to the more robust worker protections of many European countries, Canada’s weaker rules seem deficient and outdated. But compared to the cruel feudal hellscape of the USA, it’s practically a worker’s paradise.

This is but one example of our (federal, provincial and municipal) governments’ laxity in pursuing their mandate to uphold peace, order and good government against the constant, avaricious wheedling of capital interests. It doesn’t help that the vast ecosystem of improper moneyed influence down south is able to cross our borders seamlessly, offering strategic advice and resources to Canada’s own environmental ruiners in the energy, mineral and agribusiness sectors. With barely a 10th of the USA’s population, and much less of its economic and cultural might, our sovereignty over our own material affairs is tenuous, especially when it conflicts with Uncle Sam’s desire for “security”, be that in the form of abundant energy supplies or a socialism-free continent. Read more »

Apartment building in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Derek Neal

A few months ago, I wrote about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Spring and how his focus in this book is the examination of two worlds: the physical world that exists apart from us (the outside world), and the world of meaning and significance that is overlaid on top of this world through language and consciousness (the inner world). Knausgaard’s main goal seems to be to shock us out of our habitual, unreflective existence, and to bring about an awareness with which we can experience our lives in a different way.

Since reading Spring, I’ve picked up a few other books from the Knausgaard “tree,” by which I mean books by authors who’ve influenced Knausgaard. One is The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke, published in 1970, and the other is Pan by Knut Hamsun, published in 1894. I know these authors influenced Knausgaard because he says so himself in his My Struggle series. Reading them after having read Knausgaard is sort of gob smacking. What I thought were inventions by Knausgaard, or keen, unique insights into the human condition, are already present in Hamsun and Handke. This isn’t a knock on Knausgaard, but more of a criticism of myself, to think that someone could create something out of nothing, forgetting that every book or piece of art has a lineage and a history within which it exists. Isn’t the joy of discovery always tempered by the realization sometime later that someone, somewhere, has already done the thing you thought was new? Read more »

….—on a cartoon by Harry Bliss

..Yes, But . . .

… It’s
… a mixed bag
….a contentious thought
….a hard truth
….a contradiction of emotions
….a matter of time
….a bittersweet line
….a fickle notion
….a double standard
….a salve
….a remedial lotion
….a half-truth
….a deep and restless ocean

Jim Culleny, 2/25/23

by Rafaël Newman

On two separate occasions in mid-February this year, the Swiss parliament, or Bundeshaus, and adjoining ministry buildings in Bern had to be evacuated and searched following bomb threats. During the first incident, in which a lone man in military dress attempting to clear security at the parliament was apprehended when traces of explosive material were found on his person, locals were uncannily reminded of a text by the late, great Bernese singer-songwriter Mani Matter (1936-1972). In “Dynamit,” written over half a century ago, Matter tells of his daring intervention upon realizing that the bearded man he has met outside the Bundeshaus plans to blow up the building, because he is “for anarchy”:

What other choice did I have as a burgher
Than to attempt to dissuade him?—I spoke
As well as I could of our state’s many plusses:
The Rütli and freedom, democracy too;
I mentioned them all, and I begged him to stop.

Matter’s panic, he claims, lent a special force to his oratory (“The Swiss independence address I delivered / Would have made horses stand and salute”), and he is ultimately successful in talking down the would-be terrorist. That night in bed, however, having awarded himself a private medal for heroism, Matter has second thoughts:

Was it correct to praise Switzerland thus,
That is a question I ask to this day.
And if there’s one thing I learned from that fellow,
I walk by the place and I think of it still:
It’s only a matter of time, and explosives,
To blow the whole Bundeshaus into the sky.

In the course of one brief cabaret number—a recording of its live performance lasts barely two minutes—Matter conjures up the twin, opposing poles of the Swiss political consciousness: its conservative attachment to patriotism and traditional values (freedom, democracy) and its anarchist (or at least libertarian), anti-institutional streak. Read more »

by Marie Snyder

Freud got some things right, and this isn’t a post to slam him. But he understood the whole concept of the unconscious mind upside-down. It’s a lot like Aristotle’s science, with the cause and effect going in the wrong direction. It’s still pretty impressive how far they got as they laid the foundations for entirely new fields of study. I assimilated most of what’s below from neuropsychologist Mark Solms’s 2019 Wallerstein Lecture. It’s fascinating, but over three hours long, and he talks really fast! I’m just a novice in this field of affective neuroscience, and I don’t know enough to be sure his confidence in this theory is warranted, but it’s a really interesting way to understand ourselves. 

Here’s the gist of it.  

Freud figured that the conscious part of our mind, the part that’s aware of our world and ourselves, was something that could be located in the brain, but he placed it in the cerebral cortex, the outermost area that does all the thinking. That makes sense because it’s how we connect to the outside world. However, according to Solms, the conscious part is actually way in the innermost region of our brain at the upper part of the brain stem. This has been backed up with studies on people with encephalitis that have found that it’s not essential to have a cortex in order to have emotional responses and an awareness of the world and self. When neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp had his students guess which rats didn’t have a cortex, they guessed incorrectly because the rats missing this intellectual part of their brain were friendlier, more lively and interactive; they didn’t have a cerebral cortex inhibiting their movement toward total strangers much like happens with the subdued inhibitions of friendly drunkenness. 

So Freud got the placement wrong. But even more important is which parts of us are within our conscious awareness. He famously divided our mind into three: id, ego, superego, much like Plato’s tripartite soul, and deduced that the id – our drives for pleasure – were entirely unconscious. But Solms explains that many in the field today argue that our affective center, the forces that push us toward pleasure and away from pain, is necessarily conscious in order to make us aware of our needs. And then decision making, which happens in the cerebral cortex, is mainly – like, 95% – automatic, without consciousness. 

How can that be? We’re all aware of thinking right this moment, right? It all has to do with the efficiency of our memory systems.  Read more »

Ntozake Shange, right, with Janet League in her play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” 1976. Bettmann/Getty Images

More here, here, and here.

by Brooks Riley

by Terese Svoboda

In my last post, I focused on the 100,000 Loyalists who fled to Canada after the Revolutionary War, and hypothesized that they were fleeing an American war of terror. Otherwise, why move? Now I’m living in Canada as a permanent resident, though for only half the year at a time, wallowing in socialism-lite and Canada’s very sane “peace, order and good government” rather than America’s individualistic “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” I found living under Trump regime terrifying, and fled. A victim of terrorism? Or a traitor?

Depends on who’s asking.  If it’s Fox News, the instigators of the January 6th debacle were patriots. The case of Benedict Arnold, America’s best known traitor, is more clearcut. This “most enterprising and dangerous” of all the American generals,^[1] led revolutionary forces against British-held Quebec in a blinding snowstorm on the last day of 1775,  just hours before the soldiers’ contracts were up. ^[2] It was the first defeat of the Revolution. Five years later, he surrendered the American fort at West Point to the British in return for money and a command in the British army. That was the same year he informed the British of a proposed American invasion of Canada. After his defection, he should’ve fled to Canada with other wealthy Loyalists because when he settled in England, he was spurned. ^[3]The bottom line is that a traitor can’t be trusted.

As victims of terrorism, as political refugees –  the losers! –  the Loyalists struggled to leave America. Many of them walked through land held by hostile Native Americans who had been badly treated by double-dealing Americans and British. Sometimes the trip took months, especially those from New York where the majority of the Loyalists lived. Much like asylum-seekers today, once they arrived in Canada, they were kept in camps and given the bare minimum and dreadful prospects: the least productive land, not enough shoes, terrible housing,  and, in some cases, some dreadful weather. Many starved. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Fourteen months ago I wrote a 3QD column titled Among The Non-Humans about sometimes obscure, often extraordinary abilities of animals and plants. Today, let’s look at a few more:

Groupers visit giant moray eels resting in their crevices and shake their heads three to six times a second directly in front of the eels, usually a few centimetres away from the moray’s heads, to recruit them to hunt together. • Parrots demonstrate self-control and can delay gratification by not eating an immediate low-quality reward in favor of a delayed high value reward. • When certain tiger moths hear bats echolocating, they turn on a jamming signal that clicks 4,500 times a second, throwing off bat ranging. The moths usually win. • Vampire bats give other bats food to save them from starvation. • Bumblebees will give up sleep to care for their hive’s young, and can remember good and bad experiences, hinting at a form of consciousness. • Chimpanzees help each other get tools that are out of reach • Swimming at speed, the bluefin tuna’s top fins retract into their bodies, and they swim at seventy kilometres an hour, faster than a great white shark. So perfectly evolved are they for powering through the ocean, Pentagon-funded scientists have used the tuna body-shape as a model for the US Navy’s underwater missiles. Read more »

At the train station in Bruneck, South Tyrol, looking east.

by William Benzon

ChatGPT is based on the same underlying computational architecture as GPT-3, which was released in the summer of 2020. That’s when I started reading “GPT for Dummies” articles. Some were more useful than others, but none of them gave me what I wanted. So I started poking around in the technical literature. I picked up a thing or two, enough to issue a working paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons. [GPT = Generative Pretrained Transformer]

Then three months ago OpenAI let ChatGPT loose on the web. WOOSH! The sky’s on fire, the ice caps are melting, the oceans are rising, and baby needs a new pair of shoes. Badly.

I started all over, reading those “Dummy” articles and poking around in the technical literature. But, and this is important, I also spent an enormous time playing around with ChatGPT and blogging about it, writing almost 70 blog posts and four working papers. That taught me a great deal. If only I knew how to read the tea leaves.

All that time and effort, and I still don’t know what’s going on. “This is not good,” says I to myself, “not good at all. If no one’s going to tell me how this puppy works, I’m just going to have to figure it out for myself.”

That’s what I’m doing now. I’m going to write until the last sentence is finished. Then I’m going to send the article off to Abbas, go for a walk, eat dinner, go to bed, wake up Monday morning, and see if it makes sense. There’s a reasonable chance that it will, in which case I’ll feel satisfied for a day and then start all over again, revising my ideas, coming up with new ones, getting frustrated, laughing myself silly, and in general having a grand old time making sense of these strange new machines, these artificial intelligences, these chatbots, these miracles of rare device. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

Google the phrase “is it time to care about the metaverse?” and there are a wealth of articles, mostly claiming that the answer is yes! Are they right?

In the next six months, I’m going to start on a home-building project. While I’ve done home renovations before, building a house from the ground up is a new and scary experience. I’m not a good visualizer; during the home renovation project, I couldn’t look at a bathroom tile and imagine what an entire bathroom would look like using that design. Given this, it was great that our architect used 3D software that enabled us to “walk through” the house plan. But how much more effective would it be if I could really “live” in a virtual copy of the house for a while? If there was a digital twin of the house design in the metaverse, my avatar could inhabit it for a while and get a real feel for whether that kitchen is big enough and whether the tile for the floor is a bit much or just right.

As I’ve written before, my ex-husband and I were very into Second Life about 16 years ago. He was a Senator in the ROMA sim, while I used my software development skills to learn the language for building and scripting to become a fashion designer. Dabbling in virtual architecture and construction, I built my own stores, and I also built my ex-husband a villa on a plot of virtual land he bought in the ROMA sim. Way back then, virtual worlds were mostly escapes from the real world. There was the occasional brand that set up a Second Life store, but they never really seemed to know what to do with the technology.  Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Like most people, I have been baffled, mystified, unimpressed and fascinated by chatGPT, the new AI engine that has taken the world by storm over the last few months. I cannot remember any time that a new AI development got so much attention, led to so much mockery and caused so much alarm. As the writer Ted Chiang wrote, chatGPT – and what would inevitably be its subsequent versions and spinoffs – represent a blurry, lossy, version of the Internet, containing all the unique strengths and gory flaws of that medium. There is little doubt that chatGPT is not intelligent the way humans are based on the complete lack of nuance and and elementary factual errors it still makes as it cobbles together patterns from data without high-level understanding. But there is also no doubt that it creates an illusion of human intelligence that is beguiling, endlessly fascinating, addictive and frankly disturbing and potentially dangerous. Dangerous not because the machine is intelligent but because humans will no longer be able to distinguish between intelligence and the illusion of intelligence.

Some people think that AI engines like chatGPT herald a global threat of artificial general intelligence (AGI) because of their unprecedented ability to generate misinformation and the illusion of intelligence. AGI is AI that escapes from its narrowly defined applications to become all-encompassing. We should grapple with the challenges that AGI would pose, even if the probability of a true AGI remains slim. But as the parent of a 2-year-old, I feel an even more urgent question looming over the horizon: what are chatGPT or AGI going to do to our children’s generation? How can we try to ensure that they can handle the challenges posed by these unprecedented technological developments?

We don’t know how to answer this question yet since the impact of technology on society is inherently unpredictable – who would have predicted that social media would drive us apart by cocooning us in our echo chambers instead of triggering a global open exchange of ideas – but some lessons from history combined with old-fashioned, boring common sense might help us make sense of the brave new AI world that chatGPT represents. When the new becomes unpredictable and risky, the old-fashioned and boring may not look too bad. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

On “The Joy of Abstraction” by Eugenia Cheng.

Category theory has variously been called “abstract nonsense,” “diagram chasing,” or the “mathematics of mathematics.” Some mathematicians find it a useful language, some a crucial tool for developing insights and obtaining new results, and more than a few have no use for it at all. I am currently teaching one of our first-year graduate courses. Because of the topic and my tastes, the students have seen a smattering of category theory. Another professor might skip that point of view entirely. This is all to say that even serious students of mathematics are unlikely to see category theory until graduate school.

Eugenia Cheng wrote a Ph.D. thesis entitled “Higher-Dimensional Category Theory: Opetopic Foundations”, has written more than a dozen research papers on all sorts of serious categorical topics, and was formerly a tenured professor at the University of Sheffield, UK. A decade or so ago, Dr. Cheng decided to give up the traditional academic track and put her energy into bringing mathematics to a broad audience. Dr. Cheng is now a Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a writer of popular math books, a frequent guest on TV shows, and an all-around evangelizer for thinking about math in novel and humanistic ways.

Eugenia Cheng recently wrote a most peculiar book. It is an introduction to category theory for people whose math education might have stopped with high school. With such modest prerequisites it is remarkable that by the end of the book you are wrestling with advanced topics that my first-year graduate students still haven’t seen! It sounds ambitious and even a little nuts. Dr. Cheng is about the only person in the world with the very particular set of skills needed to write such a book. Read more »