What Are You Best At?

“So, after all these millennia,
what are you best at, my man?
What rocks your boat,
what stokes your passion,
what makes your day?” God asks
His creature

His creature replies,
“What I love most is conflict.
It’s what I do most reflexively
(not counting ruts of lust), and in
serial manner I might add,
down bloody centuries.
What I do best, my specialty,
is war —if I must say so myself,”

“And why do you think
this is so?” asks God.

“Isn’t that something only
you would know?” replies
His creature, paraphrasing
Dylan

Jim Culleny
10/10/22

by Jonathan Kujawa

Some years ago we discussed Brobdingnagian numbers. You can find the 3QD essay here. These are numbers that are so mind-bogglingly large they defy human imagination. Perhaps the most famous is Graham’s number. It’s so large I can’t write it down for you. It’s not that I refuse to write it down; I can’t. If I used one Planck volume per digit, Graham’s number would take up more than the observable universe [1]. Still, we would like to use and study such numbers and other hard-to-contemplate mathematical objects.

With the advent of computers and computer science, one reasonable way to describe a mathematical object is via a computer algorithm. That is, a step-by-step recipe that describes the number or question we are interested in and that could (at least in principle) be implemented on a computer. This is a pretty reasonable way to ringfence the parts of mathematics on which we might claim our minds can handle (maybe with help from computers).

For example, computable numbers are real numbers that are knowable in this sense. If we want to know the number’s nth digit, we can write down an algorithm that computes that nth digit for us. Even though the digits of π go on forever and have no discernable pattern, we have such algorithms for the digits of π, so it is computable. Likewise, there is a recursive formula for Graham’s number. It, too, is computable.

We aren’t limited to numbers. In a pair of 3QD essays last year (here and here), we saw that mathematicians have made significant progress in turning mathematics and mathematical thinking into things a computer can work with. There we saw machine learning help mathematicians make new connections and insights, and theorem verification software can help check the validity of results.

Before getting too cocky, it is worth remembering that we learned that most real numbers aren’t computable. Things that are computable go far beyond our everyday experience, but we shouldn’t forget there are vast seas beyond computable’s shores.

With this in mind, it is perhaps worth trying to understand the limits of what is computable. Read more »

Benny Andrews. Portrait of The Portrait Painter, 1987.

More here, here, and here.

by Tim Sommers

“Mankind was first taught to stammer the proposition of equality” – “Everyone is equal to everyone else” – “In a religious context, and only later was it made into morality,” Nietzsche wrote. Elsewhere, he called “human equality,” or “moral equality,” a specifically “Christian concept, no less crazy [than the soul],” moral equality “has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity…[it] furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.”

There is some evidence for this view.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” says America’s Declaration of Independence, “that all men [sic] are created equal…” “Self-evident” is not in the first draft.  It appears in Benjamin Franklin’s, not Jefferson’s, handwriting. Franklin apparently struck out what Jefferson had written and replaced it with “self-evident” – a philosopher’s word. Jefferson had written “sacred & undeniable.” His first draft also specified that people weren’t just created as equals, but that it was  “from that equal creation [that] they derive their rights inherent & unalienable.” (We should also note that, ironically, though quite typically, Jefferson equates human equality with equality between men, in fact, he implicitly presupposes that only white, property-owning men or equals. Equality has excluded as well as included.)

Nietzsche isn’t the only one who thinks that moral equality is a Christian idea. The “Judeo-Christian idea of equality,” that “All humans are of equal and positive worth because of some intrinsic property,” Louis Pojman has argued, “must be grounded in a transcendent reality, one that is not discoverable apart from religious authority.” Read more »

by Robyn Repko Waller

Cringy. Real. Surreal. Socially Suspect. A lot can (and has been) said about Nathan Fielder’s HBO docu-comedy The Rehearsal. Are the clients actors? Are the actors acting? Is Fielder an actor or  client? Script becomes life and life becomes script in a recursive dream (nightmare?) of which one cannot help but be an onlooker. [Season 1 spoilers ahead.]

The initial premise seems wholesome if it was not so intrusive. Help folks live out their fraught future endeavors with a host of trained actors, replica sets, and practically limitless rewinds. ‘Immersive’ doesn’t do The Rehearsal justice. Fielder, the former magician, spins realism. Fielder and HBO seem to spare little expense to engineer clients’ test scenarios — the full-scale bustling bar down to the torn chairs and spices and patrons, an Oregon farmhouse homestead with the dream garden and steady supply of child actors. Creator of worlds of possibility. Worlds of possibility for action and transformation.

But can being embedded in a rich social simulation transform us? Prepare us for a changed future self? Plenty of shows and movies exploit the intrigue of transformation to capture viewers, but few are philosophical enough to explore the conditions for transformation, for shaping the self. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Clay tennis courts in Neustift in South Tyrol.

by Eric Bies

In 1930, the German anthropologist Berthold Laufer published a monograph on the phenomenon of people eating dirt.

A sinologist by training, Laufer’s study—“the evaluation of the whole question of geophagy”—begins with a trip through Ancient China, where for hundreds of years Han, T’ang, and Sung soil disappeared down eager gullets. From there, the globe: he tours Malaysia, Polynesia, Melanesia, Australia, India, Burma, Siam, Central Asia, and Siberia, stopping off among Persians and Arabs before continuing on to Africa, Europe, North America, Mexico, Central America, and South America. His conclusion? People all over have eaten dirt for a very long time … And yet rarely does one find a Malaysian or an Indian, a Siberian or an Arab, an African or a Mexican swallowing down the plucked clod raw. Almost always water is added to the earth first: in the Yun-ho Mountains, white clay “is mixed with water and beaten on a stone” before it is eaten; in the Philippines, “it is a common thing to mix the earth taken from the nests of ‘white ants’ with water”; in Nishapur, where Omar Khayyam penned his Rubáiyát, the clay is softened with “rose-water and a little camphor,” then shaped into loaves.

Of course, few have particularly prized the practice Laufer describes in all its inventive renditions: as when the occupants of Leningrad remained under unremitting siege for 872 days and turned, in the interest of evading death by starvation, to their suppers of book glue and snow, so the chronically hungry everywhere and forever have tended to eye the lumps of mud out back with all the despairing expediency of a cratered gut.

Even now it remains common practice in the poorer parts of places like the Subsaharan to attempt to recuperate certain vital minerals as iron, calcium, and zinc, including incidental traces of vitamins B and C, through a sometime diet of dirt. Read more »

by Ethan Seavey

My grandmother’s bird of choice is the rooster. She was raised in rural Kentucky and now lives in rural Wisconsin. She collects all sorts of roosters (and, by extension, some hens): wall art, printed dish towels, ceramic statues as small as a pinky and as large as a lamp, coin bowls and blankets and something nostalgic in each one.

If you don’t mind stepping briefly into her condo, we can see what it’s like. Eyes everywhere. Thoughtless, energetic eyes. Suspicion and preparedness. A rooster’s eye is life because it is anxiously awake, unsure why, but it is safe because it is always aware of sources of suspicion; suspicion, of course, comes from an abundance of anxiety. So those eyes don’t think much about what they’re watching. I’m sure you’ll find it hard to find hundreds of rooster eyes in your peripheral vision, but you’ll get used to it. If you feel overwhelmed, you can look outside her large windows, you can see the small and glassy lake with sailboats gliding over its surface like razors through taut fabric.

My mother’s bird of choice is the crow. She unconsciously developed an uncanny connection with them. It started during our group quarantine, after the onset of the pandemic. We spent April through May isolated in our ski cabin. We had no friends there so we could not be tempted to socialize. We could social distance easily, with the majority of the houses nearby sitting empty, their owners waiting for the ski resort to reopen. Read more »

Editor’s Note: Frans de Waal’s new book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, has generated some controversy and misunderstanding. He will address these issues in a series of short essays which will be published at 3QD and can all be seen in one place here. More comments on these essays can also be seen at Frans de Waal’s Facebook page.

by Frans de Waal

Since men lack a nurturing instinct, we can’t expect them to take care of kids. It would be “unnatural.”

This false appeal to biology is often heard in defense of traditional gender roles. Thus, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson mocked the paternity leave of U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg as a way of “trying to figure out how to breastfeed.”

At first sight, the behavior of other primates supports the assertion that caretaking is not for males. Male apes may offer protection to mothers and young, but that’s all. Raising offspring is a female job. The maternal load is so heavy that bonobos and chimpanzees get pregnant only every five or six years. They cannot handle more progeny. Mothers carry the youngest on their belly, a juvenile on their back, while an older one follows them through the forest. Young apes remain dependent for up to a decade, and mothers receive no assistance to speak of.

But oddly (or perhaps not so oddly if we assume that the genders are psychologically more similar than different), males are perfectly capable of childcare. They have a remarkably well-developed caring “potential”. We sometimes get a glimpse of this potential after a mother’s death, when there is all of a sudden an orphan whimpering for attention. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

I recall a party game I once wrote about. The game, described by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in his book “Consciousness Explained,” is a variant of the familiar childhood game requiring that one try to determine by means of Yes or No questions a secretly chosen number between one and one million. (Twenty questions are sufficient.)

In Dennett’s more interesting and suggestive game, one person is selected from a group of people at a party and asked to leave the room. He (or she) is told that in his absence one of the other partygoers will relate a recent dream to the other attendees. The person selected returns to the party and is then told that, through a sequence of Yes or No questions about the dream, he should try to do two things: reconstruct the dream and identify whose dream it was.

The punch line is that no one has related any dream. When asked, the individual partygoers are instructed to respond either Yes or No to the subject’s questions according to some completely arbitrary rule. Any rule will do, but should be supplemented by a non-contradiction clause so that no answer directly contradicts an earlier answer or contradicts obvious facts. The Yes or No requirement can also be loosened to allow for an occasional Maybe.

Now let me change the scene. Instead of the unlucky partygoer, consider an ardent QAnon member. Instead of the other partygoers let’s substitute people who pretend to be from the news media (to rouse the member’s antagonism) but who agree to be governed by similar arbitrary rules. Finally, rather than having the subject try to reconstruct the dream and identifying the dreamer, let’s examine whatever disgusting scandal the QAnon member believes to be the case and to whom he attributes it.

Clearly this is more a thought experiment than an empirical result, but I would guess that the likely outcome in both cases is that the subject, impelled by his (or her) own obsessions, will often concoct an outlandish dream or gruesome story in response to the random answers he elicits from the partygoers or the “media” people. The situation is a kind of Rorschach test without the inkblots. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Shadow Self-Portrait in a Reflection of a Window in a Window.

Oolloo House, Vermont. October 22, 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Joan Harvey

POZZO: Which of you smells so bad?

ESTRAGON: He has stinking breath and I have stinking feet.

POZZO: I must go.

― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

There are many perplexing things in the world, but one of the more perplexing, only recently discovered by me, is that a substantial number of people, most of whom I assume to be women, wish to smell like old books. While it is easy to have a passion for, say, invertebrates, or designer sneakers, without necessarily wanting to smell like a pink-faced broad-nosed weevil or a favorite pair of old Nikes, apparently book lovers are different. It appears that for some bookworms, parting with their yellowing bound volumes is so distressing they need a way to carry the reminder with them though the day. And one way to carry around these literary longings is to douse themselves in the scent of books or sometimes whole libraries.

I came across the phrase “excessive bibliophilia” in Wayne Koestenbaum’s book Ultramarine. A newish book, so one without much smell. Koestenbaum was referring to Queen Christina, but I wonder if excessive bibliophilia doesn’t equally apply to those who feel they must smell like old libraries even in the boudoir. Perhaps while reading de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir? After looking into book-themed perfumes I’m surprised there isn’t one with that name. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by David J. Lobina

I must say that, for someone who is a sort-of linguist and typically pays attention to the latest linguistic customs, I was quite surprised by the recent, sudden transformation of Kiev into Kyiv in the English-speaking media. Now, I’m not as obsessive about all things language as some of my fellow linguists, who seem to be able to notice every detail and nuance in the way language is used today everywhere they go – on posters in the underground, in the media, by eavesdropping on people’s conversations, etc. (TimeOut used to publish a section called Overheard in London, and I’m sure some of my friends followed it religiously) – but I have been following the Russo-Ukrainian War, as Wikipedia calls it, to some extent since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and even more so since Russia’s invasion of mainland Ukraine in February 2022 (236 days and counting, as I start this piece), and whilst I am sure that I was already aware of the use of the word ‘Kyiv’ to refer to the capital of Ukraine, I have nevertheless been taken aback by the fact that it has now become nearly universal in the English-speaking press to use the word ‘Kyiv’ instead of ‘Kiev’, even though employing the latter had been the norm for decades before current events.[1]

I especially mention “the English-speaking media” because the situation is rather different in other languages; this is clearly the case in the publications I follow in Italian and Spanish, where the use of the word ‘Kiev’ remains by far the most common, if not in fact as universal in these languages as ‘Kyiv’ has now become in English. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

It was announced last week that scientists have integrated neurons from human brains into infant rat brains, resulting in new insights about how our brain cells grow and connect, and some hope of a deeper understanding of neural disorders. Full story here. And while no scientist would admit they are working toward the development of some Rat Man who will escape the lab and wreak havoc on some faraway island or in the subways, it’s impossible not to wonder.

There are some legitimate and difficult ethical questions in this territory, such as whether we should work toward “curing” all conditions labeled as “disorders”, including those conditions that have become woven into people’s lives so thoroughly that they would rather not lose them. Autism, for example, can be a terrible burden in some cases, but in others it serves as a valued feature of one’s individuality, an element in the core of who they are. It’s difficult to follow the precept of doing no harm as we dig deeper into human natures and find it’s not always obvious what counts as a harm. There is a medical/pharmaceutical mindset that likes to pound down any nail sticking up, which is running into the fact that some nails prefer to stick up, thank you very much.

But as we leave those problems to more insightful minds, I would like to turn instead to an illegitimate and silly worry, which we shall call “Ewww”:

Ewww = What if my neurons end up in a rat brain? Would I feel its whiskers twitching, feel hungry for garbage, and find fulfillment by running endlessly inside a little wheel?

As I said, it’s not a legitimate worry, but it’s hard for many of us not to feel a tug in its direction, because many of us are entranced by illusions about consciousness. Read more »