Michael Wang. Holoflora, 2024
Pigment prints and silver halide holograms; 12 artworks.

“Holoflora names a series of artworks that tell the story of Birmingham’s vanished flora. Each work documents a location in Birmingham, as it appears today, where an individual plant species was last recorded within the present city limits. Floating within each photograph is a spectral image of the lost plant, reconstructed as a virtual botanical model. These images are holograms–a photographic technology that was invented in the West Midlands by the physicist Dennis Gabor.

Some species represented, like the fly orchid, haven’t been seen in Birmingham for over a hundred years. Others, like the orange foxtail, were recorded just a few decades ago. Many species disappeared as the environment changed–as woodlands were cleared and fens drained. A few species have always been uncommon in the region. The title of each work includes the species’ common and scientific names and the location and year of its last observation in Birmingham.”

More here, here, and here.

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by Richard Farr

In 2001, in order to become an American citizen, I had to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.” 

Abjure. Prince. Potentate. That this vocabulary from the 1790s persisted as a vehicle for solemnity was appropriate, no doubt. It also struck me as droll, in the circumstances: it was so stereotypically English. And the abjuration itself was a shame because up to then I’d always found Queen Elizabeth (or Mrs Windsor, as we liked to call her) an unfailingly pleasant and undemanding potentate. But for the sake of George II — the American potentate at the time, from whom I received a very nice letter of welcome — abjure I must.

Or perhaps in one sense I could not? For there was a detail I neglected to disclose, or couldn’t find the words to disclose, at my citizenship interview. I had lived in the United States for nearly twenty years at that point. I had acquired an American wife and American sons, and been called out by my sister on the inevitable accent shift: “You’ve started to say ‘pay-us the buddr.’”

Yet I felt as English as the day I arrived. Read more »

by Gary Borjesson

I invite you to explore with me what hospitality is, and why it’s an essential and cosmic principle of all life, but especially human life. The heart of hospitality is to provide the occasion for getting to know anyone or anything. I assume here that “getting to know” is useful and good, and hope that seeing hospitality in a fresh philosophical light will inspire and encourage more (much needed) hospitality.

Hospitality’s main features are writ large here, in our meeting. You are my host, and I the guest receiving your hospitality in the form of your precious attention. In return, I am singing for my supper. This hoped for reciprocity and mutual benefit is a feature of hospitality. I say, hoped for but not guaranteed, because getting to know something involves us in what’s unfamiliar, and to that extent unpredictable. In our case, even if you know me, you don’t know the story I’m about to tell, or how you’re going to feel about it. Depending on whether you like my song, you may kick me out of your mind before I come to the end; or you may hear me out and find (so we both hope!) that your hospitality is repaid by what I’ve offered.

Now is a good time to revisit hospitality. Its brave and welcoming spirit offers a remedy to the forces of polarization, tribalism, and xenophobia that make our time feel so inhospitable. It’s part of any treatment plan that addresses what I’ll call our individual and collective autoimmune disorders, in which parts of the same person or psyche or family or country or planet turn against each other—to their mutual detriment. Sadly, our time is not exceptional. In the face of what’s unfamiliar, our first survival instinct is to fear,  flee, freeze, or fight—even when what we’re facing is an unfamiliar part of ourselves. In psychoanalytic terms, we fear, hate, rage, deny, split, and project.

True hospitality requires courage because facing our fears and opening ourselves to what’s unfamiliar is risky. For, not only is there no guarantee how meetings between strangers will go, there’s no denying it may go badly. Macbeth welcomed the king as a guest in his home, and then killed him in his sleep. Menelaus welcomed Paris as his guest, only to have Paris make off with his wife, Helen. These abuses of hospitality were catastrophic for all parties. Even in our little meeting, there’s the risk you’ll feel you’ve wasted your time, or I my song. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

In Discourse on the Method, philosopher René Descartes reflects on the nature of mind. He identifies what he takes to be a unique feature of human beings— in each case, the presence of a rational soul in union with a material body. In particular, he points to the human ability to think—a characteristic that sets the species apart from mere “automata, or moving machines fabricated by human industry.” Machines, he argues, can execute tasks with precision, but their motions do not come about as a result of intellect. Nearly four-hundred years before the rise of large language computational models, Descartes raised the question of how we should think of the distinction between human thought and behavior performed by machines. This is a question that continues to perplex people today, and as a species we rarely employ consistent standards when thinking about it.

For example, a recent study revealed that most people believe that artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT have conscious experiences just as humans do. Perhaps this is not surprising; when questioned, these systems use first personal pronouns and express themselves in language in a way that resembles the speech of humans. That said, when explicitly asked, ChatGPT denies having internal states, reporting, “No, I don’t have internal states or consciousness like humans do. I operate by processing and generating text based on patterns in the data I was trained on.”

The human tendency to anthropomorphize AI may seem innocuous, but it has serious consequences for users and for society more generally. Many people are responding to the loneliness epidemic by “befriending” chatbots. All too frequently, users become addicted to their new “friends,” which impacts their emotional wellbeing, sleeping habits, personal hygiene, and ability to make connections with other human beings. Users may be so taken in by the behavior of Chatbots that they cannot convince themselves that they are not speaking with another person. It makes users feel good to believe that their conversational partners empathize with them, find their company enjoyable and interesting, experience sexual attraction in response to their conversations, and perhaps even fall in love.

Chatbots can also short-circuit our ability to follow epistemic norms and best practices. In particular, they impact our norms for establishing trust. It is tempting to believe that machines can’t get things wrong. If a person establishes what they take to be an emotional connection, they may be more likely to trust a chatbot and to believe targeted disinformation with alarming implications for the stability of democracy. Read more »

Vineyard in Neustift, South Tyrol. Apparently they put these rose bushes at the ends of the rows of grape vines because they are more susceptible to certain diseases and insects and act a bit like canaries in coal mines. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

First, some good news: I finally understand the Monty Hall problem. Or, at least, I feel like I do, which is still a triumph of sorts, given that this riddle’s empirically incontestable answer tends to evoke visceral, intuitive rejections, even among people who understand and accept every step of the explanation. I first encountered this wicked little brain teaser years ago during my undergrad philosophy studies, and only last week did it click into comprehension, thanks to a fine article by Allison Parshall in the August 2024 issue of Scientific American. The explanation that made sense to me is roughly as follows: When you choose one of three doors, there is a 1/3 chance that the prize lies behind it, and a 2/3 chance that the prize lies behind one of the two doors not chosen. When the host reveals that one of the two unchosen doors has no prize behind it, the odds are unaltered in the sense that there is still a 1/3 chance that the prize lies behind the door initially chosen, and still a 2/3 chance that it lies behind behind one of the doors not chosen. The host’s action just collapses that 2/3 chance into the single remaining unchosen door. So, while the player’s choices are split “50/50” between two remaining options (stay with the already chosen door, or switch to the remaining unchosen door), the odds remain 1/3 (behind the chosen door) versus 2/3 (behind the two unchosen doors, of which only one can now be chosen).

I had come close to understanding this last year when reading another discussion of the problem, which expanded the scenario to 100 doors, with Monty opening all but one of the 99 doors not chosen by the player in the first step of the game. In both the 3-door version and the 100-door version of the game, Monty opens all but one of the doors not chosen, collapsing the distribution of the odds into one remaining choice (2/3 or 99/100, respectively). It was intuitively obvious that if Monty opened all but one of the 99 unchosen doors, then that remaining door was more likely to hide a prize than the one randomly chosen by the player at the start of the game. But the idea that the odds remain the same, while the freedom to choose the wrong door shrinks, didn’t click yet. Now it clicks. I thank Parshall for removing one small but stubborn source of frustration from my life.

And now, a little chronicle about my other problems and solutions. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

I’ve been surfing for about three years. 

Not enough to be a guide of any sort, but certainly enough to realize what a miracle the sport really is.

What follows are nine life lessons surfing has taught me. The more you do anything, the more you realize it can teach you about everything.

1) As long as you start, you’re doing ok

I built a surfboard with my dad when I was 18. In my American high school, you needed a “senior project” in order to graduate.

I’d always wanted to surf, and my dad is a carpenter who can make just about anything. It was a match made in heaven.

When we finally finished putting the orange paint on and it dried out, I officially had a surfboard. I was going to start right away. A new “surfing bro” identity was just around the corner, and the world seemed full of possibility. 

It took 10 more years before I went surfing for the first time. I still haven’t even taken my senior project out for a spin.

But I’m here now, and I’m surfing a lot, and I’m about twice as good as I was last year.

Things don’t need to be perfect before you can invite a little more joy into your life.

I started a decade later than I planned – but I started.

And that’s what matters.

2) Doing something is always different than planning for it

I wish surfing was easy. Or at least one of those things that you can learn from watching a bunch of videos.

But you can’t.

Before my first time out, I spent a few hours on YouTube. Learning how to paddle, studying the drop in, watching videos of the surfing greats.

It didn’t help a bit.

That first day, the ocean forced me into the gap between planning and practice. Read more »

Sughra Raza. After The Rain. Vermont, July 2024.

Digital photograph.

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by Barry Goldman

Imagine a hunter, a tree, and a squirrel. The hunter is on the ground, the squirrel is clinging to the tree, and the tree is between two of them. As the hunter moves, the squirrel moves, always keeping the tree between them. The hunter goes around the tree. Does he go around the squirrel?

Yes. The squirrel is in the tree, and the hunter went around the tree. Therefore, the hunter went around the squirrel.

No. In order to “go around” the squirrel, the hunter must at some point be in front of the squirrel, and at other points he must be to the squirrel’s right, behind the squirrel, and to the squirrel’s left. That’s what it means to “go around” something. The hunter in the hypothetical was always directly facing the squirrel. He was never to the squirrel’s left or right and he was never behind the squirrel. Therefore, the hunter did not go around the squirrel.

So it depends on what “go around” means. If you adopt one definition, the hunter went around the squirrel. If you adopt the other, he didn’t. So what? Who cares?

That’s fair. But it isn’t so much the hunter and the squirrel I’m concerned about. I’m interested in legal disputes. And the judicial interpretation of contracts and statutes presents just this question: When we have competing definitions, how should we go about determining which one to adopt?

Let’s try another example. Is a taco a sandwich? That sounds like the same kind of silly waste of time as the hunter and the squirrel problem, and it is. Until it becomes the subject of a lawsuit. Read more »

Drinking It All In

A long way up Bray Road past the point where the first of
two small brooks cross beneath
it came to me in a new way that you and I are still
breathing four decades after we met
at the threshold of the unknown,
the part that comes
after now

and here we are, still there, poised together
even though we were strangers then, and now
you are my most intimate love;
no one knows me better

the sun’s slant was perfect on our walk, every particle or
wave, not a thing wrong with it,
perfect the way it shone, the way it distended the
shadows of things that stop light,
creating dark corollas, opaque spaces, the wild grid of
leafless trees spread across the road,
or shadow patterns of thick foliage of a juniper blanket
on a bank fronting a long porch, the slope of Robert’s
field bending up behind heaving stone walls on its back
without a hint of sweat

but there were no cows today ambling down to lap the brook
just you and I drinking it all in

Jim Culleny
11/9/21

by Malcolm Murray

As AI evolves, so do the risks it poses on society. The risks of AI today are already unrecognizable from those of a few years ago. As a dual-use technology, similar to nuclear power, the capabilities of AI bring great benefits as well as great risks. As opposed to nuclear power, however, the risks from AI are borne by society as a whole even as the benefits may only accrue to parts of society. This means we need to start focusing on societal AI risk management.

AI capabilities are set to only continue to evolve in the years to come. Naturally, there is considerable uncertainty regarding how exactly they will evolve. However, massive investments have already been made and are continuing to be made. By some estimates, there have already been hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI, and future discrete projects are now in the $100 billion range, such as the rumored Microsoft and OpenAI Stargate project. The scaling laws that have been observed over the past years have meant that money alone (in the form of compute and data) has inexorably led to capability advances. The significantly different capabilities between GPT-4 and GPT-3 were not due to size alone, but it played a large role.

Therefore, even if no further conceptual breakthroughs were to happen (which is unlikely), capabilities will continue to advance. Given what we already know about the risks involved, it is incumbent on us as a society to manage these risks so that society as a whole can reap the benefits from AI and not suffer from the risks. This necessitates broad, interdisciplinary efforts under the banner of societal AI risk management. Read more »

by Derek Neal

Karl Ove Knausgaard went around for many years claiming that he was sick of fiction and couldn’t stand the idea of made-up characters and invented plots. People understood this to be an explanation of why he had decided to write six long books about his own life. There was some truth in this, but the simple contrast between fiction and reality was complicated by the fact that Knausgaard referred to his autobiographical books as novels. Were they real? Was the Karl Ove of the story the same as the author? It seemed like it, but then why call them novels? The problem lay with the word “fiction.” Like a German philosopher, Knausgaard had his own definitions for words that we thought we all agreed on. Here’s how he explains his meaning of “fiction”:

At that time, I was also tired of fiction in a broader sense. It seemed to me that fiction was everywhere—TV news, newspapers, films, and books all provide a flood of stories, a continuous dramatization of the world. So what I did, naively, was to try to take the world back.

“A continuous dramatization of the world.” Fiction is not the novel, then, but the incessant urge to interpret and narrativize experience, instead of simply presenting things as they are: the truth. Of course, when one thinks they are seeing the truth they may be simply telling a different story, and they may have blind spots; but still, one can try, one can write against interpretation. This is what Peter Handke, one of Knausgaard’s favorite authors, does in The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. He’ll write a sentence that goes something like, “The house seemed unoccupied because the door was open,” and then he’ll follow that sentence with, “The house seemed unoccupied even though the door was open.” Which one is it? What is the connection between an open door and the presence of someone in a house? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Robert Jensen

Smart people sometimes say not-so-smart things about freedom of speech.

Let’s start with Elon Musk, the boss at Tesla and SpaceX, and his often-quoted declaration that he is a “free-speech absolutist.” Whatever one thinks about Musk, he seems to be a smart person. But that’s a silly statement.

After he bought Twitter and then banished from the platform various people whose speech he didn’t like, critics labeled Musk a hypocrite. I’m not much interested in that, since I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have a bit of hypocrisy hiding somewhere in their lives, myself included. A more important observation is that if Musk, and all the other people who claim to be free-speech absolutists, actually meant it, they would be admitting that they are moral monsters.

No one really means it. There is no such thing as a free-speech absolutist.*

To be a true absolutist—and to endorse that as the guiding principle for First Amendment law in the United States—would mean rejecting any limits on any speech no matter what the consequences. That’s what “absolute” usually means—to do something, well, absolutely, without exceptions.

Absolutism would mean there would be no libel laws allowing people to recover damages when others deliberately lie about them. There would be no laws against the distribution or possession of child sexual abuse materials, once more commonly called child pornography. There would be no laws against speech that advances a conspiracy to murder someone. And the list goes on.

Imagine that I publish a story saying Elon Musk runs an international drug trafficking ring, that he uses those illicit profits to offset hidden losses at Tesla, and that his mismanagement of the electric car company is the result of his addiction to fentanyl. That story is, to the best of my knowledge, false on all counts. If Musk sued me for knowingly making false and defamatory statements (the kind that injure one’s reputation), he likely would recover money damages, punishing me for my speech, a rejection of an absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech. Most people would agree that libel law is justified. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

“Aik Shaam,” “An Evening (By the River Neckar)” is Iqbal’s ode to silence. A short lyric poem, it describes a rare personal moment in the vast corpus of a poet who is known by such hefty honorifics as “Allama” (the “learned one”), the “national” poet, “poet-philosopher,” or “Poet of the East.” This poem is an instance where we find a poet of great stature revealing his vulnerability, seeking pause, perhaps from the overwhelming disquiet of confronting the political tensions of his times as a scholar visiting Europe, a colonized subject of the Raj in a climate of rising awareness, perhaps negotiating intense homesickness in beautiful Heidelberg, or as many suggest, being lovelorn (as an already married man) for Emma Wegenast, the German tutor who was instrumental in guiding him through a remarkable turning point in his life by introducing him to Goethe’s poetry.

Literary correspondence between Iqbal and Emma Wegenast offers clues to their attachment. Though Iqbal’s biographers are better qualified to discuss their relationship and surmise what they will from it, Emma’s role in inspiring Iqbal to gain insights into Goethe’s works is significant to anyone interested in understanding Iqbal’s poetry. Before returning to a brief annotation on the poem, here are some thoughts on how the study of Goethe’s poetry, plays and philosophy left a deep impression on Iqbal, as reflected in his masterworks following his stay in Germany.

Iqbal’s poetry, valued for its exceptional originality in both the idiom he coined and the range of topics he stretched Urdu poetics into containing— is an important example of what is classified as “World Literature.” This, in no small measure, is due to the strong influence of Goethe (who was the first to come up with the term “Weltliteratur” or “World Literature”) but also Iqbal’s inclination to dissect, balance and appreciate the radically diverse, syncretic traditions of his own South Asian culture many years prior to encountering Goethe’s work. The book (besides Faust) that made a lasting impact on Iqbal’s psyche was Goethe’s West-ostlicher Divan or West-Eastern Divan. Iqbal was to compose “Payam e Mashriq,” a great work of his own, in response to Goethe and Rumi, that other sage Iqbal held in the highest regard. Read more »