by Paul Braterman

When those in authority withhold promised information, we must fear for the worst. That is now the situation at Imperial College. As I write, the President’s Board is considering erasing from public view the role of one of the College’s founders, TH Huxley, despite his distinguished contributions throughout his life to education, science, and the abolition of slavery and other forms of discrimination. It is also considering erasing JBS Haldane’s name because he once discussed eugenics, even though he strongly opposed to this movement in its heyday, on the grounds that it was scientifically unsound and merely a rationalisation for the dominance of the upper classes.

This perverse outcome is the result of a deeply flawed process, as I have discovered by examination of the public record, supplemented by information from within Imperial’s faculty. It may well be too late to change the Board’s decision, but it is never too late to learn from the events that have led to this debacle.

It is by now widely known by now that:

as part of the commendable activity of reviewing its past and encouraging diversity, Imperial College appointed a History Group to make recommendations,

that this Group has recommended the purging of Huxley’s name and bust from the relevant building, on the grounds that he contributed to “scientific” racism and hence to eugenics,

that this recommendation has provoked widespread opposition among Imperial College academic staff and elsewhere,

that 40 distinguished academics have put their signatures to a letter of protest,

that these signatories include 17 members of Imperial’s own Faculty, Faculty at 11 other universities and research institutes, 19 Fellows of the Royal Society as well as several members of comparable overseas bodies, 4 Sirs, a Nobel Prize winner (Sir Paul Nurse), a Breakthrough Prize winner (John Hardy), a McArthur Fellow (Russell Lande), and many of our most distinguished science communicators, including, most relevant in the present context, Adam Rutherford, author of How to Argue with a Racist and Control; the Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics,

that the journal Nature refused to publish this letter, on the grounds that they regarded it as a petition, which they no longer carried (Huxley, of course, was among the founders of Nature),

and that, thanks to the initiative of an alert journalist, the letter eventually appeared, sandwiched between others, in the London Daily Telegraph, together with an article summarising its contents. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

How do we know that the external world exists in anything like the form we think it has? Assuming that we think, therefore we are, and that it’s hard to doubt the existence of our own immediate sensations and sense perceptions, can we prove that our senses give us reasonably reliable access to what the world is really like?

One thing that stands in our way is a variety of “skeptical scenarios” or “undefeated defeaters” (Knowledge is basically justified true belief without any undefeated defeaters.) Here are some well-known skeptical scenarios/defeaters: How do you know that you are not… (i) dreaming, (ii) being fooled by an evil demon; (iii) currently using a really good VR-rig; (iv) on a “holodeck” like the one in “Star Trek”, (v) currently in William Gibson’s immersive, plugged-in version of “cyberspace”, (vi) in “The Matrix” or, anyway, a matrix; (vii) in Nozick’s “experience machine”; (viii) a brain in a vat being electro-chemically stimulated to believe you are not just a brain and the world around you is going on as before; or (ix) part of a computer simulation? (You don’t need to recognize all of these to get the general idea, of course.)

David (“The Hard Problem (of Consciousness)”) Chalmers, in his new book “Reality+”, doesn’t want us to think of these as skeptical scenarios at all. Being a brain in a vat, he says, can be just as good as being a brain in a head. Most of what you believe that you know about, say, where you work, what time the bus comes, or how much is in your checking account is still true, relative to your envattedness, according to Chalmers.

It seems tenuous to me to claim that “most” of your beliefs could be true in such a scenario. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Bey Unvaan. February, 2022.

Digital photograph.

by David Oates

Looking at this photo brings a rush of feeling ­­– complicated, lovely, heartbreaking: a simple still life captured from the churning reality of the sea and the shore, which of course means also the weather, the wind, the atmospheric chemistries and grinding tectonics and magmatic uplifts and erosions and all high things toppling and washing down to the sea, all far things brought to shore, all shores grinded and washed away – all accumulating here, in this moment of randomness.

And . . . that this is beautiful.

Why is this beautiful? What excess of indifferent cosmic love has so arranged our universe, that dead randomness be beautiful?

Can you stand on the shore and not feel it? Or under the starry night?

Our hearts are broken by beauty. And mended by it. And we are undone, truly, in feelings and cycles beyond resolution. All we can do is go mute. Wipe the tear away. Turn our faces to a loved one, to see if these runes might be written there too.

Sometimes they are.

But now, in 2022, how are we to think of natural beauty and solace? When the seas are acidifying, rising, heating up. The whole planetary heat-budget going haywire. Species dying, ecosystems crashing. And worse to come.

This is an essay about lost refuges. Can I still stand on the shore and be restored, spiritually renewed? Yes. But, Reader, it is very hard work. Hard, heavy work. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Saw this from my train window while entering Munich a couple of weeks ago.

by David M. Introcaso

In late January the United States Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee released a draft discussion of its COVID-prompted public health bill titled, “Prepare for and Respond to Existing Viruses, Emerging New Threats, and Pandemics Act” (PREVENT Pandemics Act). Patty Murray, HELP Committee Chairwoman and Washington State senator, defined the bill as one that would “improve the nation’s preparedness for future public health emergencies.”  We need to, Senator Murray stated further, “take every step we can to make sure we are never in this situation again.” The draft is fatally flawed because inexplicably the HELP Committee, the Senate “public health” committee, does not address much less recognize ever-increasing health harms caused by the climate crisis. As a result, the committee’s bill is what Orwell would term a “flagrant violation of reality.”

Preparing for “emerging new threats” appears unrelated to the Pacific Northwest’s recent 1,000-year heat wave, made 150 times more likely by Anthropocene warming, that killed 1,400 including Chairwoman Murray constituents, moreover seniors.  In sum, last year produced 20, $1 billion climate-related disasters.  Over the past five years these have cost Americans $750 billion.  Last summer’s heat dome also killed Senate Finance Committee Chairman constituents.  Unlike the HELP Committee, Senate Finance did hold, for the first time in nine years, a climate-crisis related hearing this session.  However, Senator Wyden defined the climate crisis exclusively as a tax policy problem.  In his opening statement, he argued, “Getting the policy right . . . is the whole ballgame.”  If only.  How does tax reform remedy the 58% of excess annual US deaths caused by fossil fuel emissions particularly when greenhouse gas emissions, moreover CO2, remain in the atmosphere for upwards of a thousand years. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

Soon K.N.Raj gave up his Vice-Chancellorship and moved to his home state, Kerala, and started a new institution, Center for Development Studies (CDS). He tried to lure me (and Kalpana) to join the faculty  there, and even offered to get us land on which he’d persuade his friend Laurie Baker (a resident British-Quaker architect) to build us a low-cost, energy-efficient beautiful house (like his own). At CDS, he not merely provided intellectual leadership, he was the pater-familias for the group. After a whole day of teaching and seminars, in the evening he’d visit his colleagues’ homes, try to solve their multifarious domestic problems, while his wife, Sarsamma, will minister to their sundry medical needs. Once driving me to the airport, when I was all praise for the young institution and the community he was in the process of building, he asked me if I had any word of criticism. I told him it was too much of a “Hindu undivided family” for my taste. Raj corrected me and said it was not “Hindu” — he did not seem to mind the “undivided family” part.

While I did not join CDS, though visited it a few times, Raj did twist my arm to take up the only work I ever did in my life for any government anywhere — he got me to chair a commission of enquiry into Kerala’s plantations, appointed by the CPI government of Achutha Menon, a friend of Raj. Suresh Tendulkar, whom I brought as a co-member, and I worked hard to write a detailed official report, which by now insects must have chewed up in some ministry dungeon in Thiruvananthapuram, but this gave me an opportunity to travel up and down the countryside, have a closer look at Kerala’s remarkable society and economy, and the beautiful lush green landscape. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

SOCRATES: Dear sir! You seem to be an happy fellow, able to enjoy the mixed bitter and sweet fortunes of life!

DUDE: Oh, hey, man! Nice toga thing you got going on there. Let it hang, right?

SOCRATES: You are kind! And, indeed, perhaps too kind; for should one man compliment another on what is mere appearance, on the mere vestiges of one’s life?

DUDE: Oh, vestiges, right … What are you having there, old timer? Sangria? White Russian for me, Gary.

GARY: Sure thing, Dude.

SOCRATES: Can you tell me, dear Dude, whether the unexamined life is worth living?

DUDE: Right, the … uh, how’s that again?

SOCRATES: The unexamined life. Pardon me, but I have noticed that you are not exactly a man who delves into the nature of life, of truth, or of knowing.

DUDE: “Delves”? No, I guess I’m not much into the whole delving thing.

SOCRATES: And yet you seem quite happy, Dude!

DUDE: Well, you know, you take what you can when you can, if you can. The Dude abides. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

You are waiting for Helen, and as she comes out of the underground, she blurts out, before saying hello or embracing you, as is her custom, the following sentence:

I decided to write to him on a boat

Yes, good idea, you say, followed by wait, what? what do you mean? and are you sure?! You are not being flippant, and you know full well who Helen is intending to write to, though you may be uncertain about what she might write; it is just that you find the sentence unclear. Or as a linguist would put it, the sentence is ambiguous, for it can mean two different things, depending on the intended meaning.

Helen may have taken the decision to write to the mysterious man while she was on a boat (perhaps she has just been on a boat trip) or she may have decided that she will do the writing while she’s on a boat (perhaps she’s planning a boat trip).

The ambiguity is syntactic in nature, as it is a matter of whether the phrase on the boat modifies the verb to decide or the verb to write – that is, it depends on the way in which these words and phrases relate to each other within the sentence. Linguists often use so-called syntactic trees to explicitly outline the structure of sentences, but we can make do with brackets here, as shown below (I’ll let you work out which intended meaning is which; I may or may not have changed the order in which I have described the possible meanings in order to confuse, though).

I decided to [write to him [on a boat]]

I [decided to write to him [on a boat]]

This phenomenon is rarely if ever noticed in conversation – no-one but a linguist would ever say to an interlocutor such a thing as I’m sorry, but that sentence you have just uttered is syntactically ambiguous, what do you mean exactly? This is because the overall context in which conversations take place usually helps hearers (and indeed readers) work out what the speaker/writer actually meant. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Kaamdani, Approaching Santiago, Chile, 2017.

Digital photograph.

by Brooks Riley