by Tim Sommers

Facing immanent death, his friends and followers inconsolable, Socrates, according to Plato, attempted to console them.

He called fear of death “the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown,” adding that “no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”

In other words, (i) death should only be feared if it is known to be bad; (ii) no one knows that death is bad; therefore, (iii) death should not be feared. The problem with (i), of course, is that some of our greatest fears, of the dark, for example, are fears about the unknown. Maybe, we should be afraid because we don’t know.

But Epicurus argued. “[D]eath is nothing to us, since everything good and bad lies in sensation, and death is to be deprived of sensation… [W]hen we are, death is not, and when death is present, then we are not.” So, (i) after we die, we no longer exist (or have sensations); (ii) Nothing is bad without being bad for someone who exists (and has sensations). Therefore, (iii) nothing can be bad for us after we die. Of course, (i) depends on already believing that we cease to exist at death, which seems obvious to me, but clearly a lot of people disagree.

But back to Plato. He had a better argument than “we don’t know”. Here it is. (i) Death is either like a peaceful, dreamless sleep, which is a good thing; (ii) Or death involves joining a permanent community of heroes and philosophers, which is also a good thing. Therefore, “Whichever of these it is, death is a good thing.” Now, the “permanent community of heroes and philosophers” bit is very culturally specific, so let’s adjust (ii). Replace the “permanent community of heroes and philosophers” with whatever you think the after life is like. Or we might just say that if death is more than a peaceful sleep, it involves something new and, hopefully, interesting, or at least not terrible. But this has a problem similar to the one that bedeviled Socrates’ first argument. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Water flowing over rocks in the river Eisack last week as it makes its way through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by John Allen Paulos

Covid has given rise to a variety of counterintuitive mathematical outcomes. A good example is this recent headline (link below): One third of those hospitalized in Massachusetts are vaccinated. Anti-vaxxers have seized on this and similar such factually accurate headlines to bolster their positions. They, and others as well, interpret them as evidence that the vaccine isn’t that effective or perhaps hardly works at all since even states with very high vaccination rates seem to have many breakthrough infections that lead to hospitalization. Contrary to intuition, however, such truthful headlines actually indicate that the vaccine is very effective. I could cite common cognitive biases, Bayes’ theorem, graphs, tables, and formulas to explain this, but a metaphor involving fruit may be more convincing and more palatable.

Let’s assume we have a very large casserole pan full of cherries and a small bowl of grapes. Say there are 500 cherries in the huge pan and 50 grapes in the small bowl. Further assume that the cherries alone have been treated with a substance that very substantially reduces spoilage and that nevertheless 3 of them are spoiled, as are 7 of the untreated grapes. Now for the perhaps obvious punchline, let’s identify these 550 fruit with people in a highly vaccinated state, the cherries with the vaccinated people, the grapes with the unvaccinated people, and the spoiled 10 pieces of fruit with those who are hospitalized. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Growing up in India I knew how hierarchical and status-oriented Indian society was, but the city of New Delhi took it to a bureaucratic extreme. I was told that in those days, if you gave out your Government quarters address, people would immediately know your approximate salary scale. The city’s residential pattern, inherited from the colonial rulers, was highly structured. If you are a top Secretary in a Ministry, your assigned quarters will be a large bungalow with acres of gardens in prize real estate in the city center, often a short distance from your office which you traverse in a chauffeur-driven official car. But if you are a lowly clerk or an orderly/peon in the same office building, you’ll come in a crowded bus from many miles away often outside the city.

Since I used to go to office by bus (until a colleague started giving me a ride in his car), I also noticed a peculiar pattern in the plying of Delhi state buses, compared to the buses I was familiar in Kolkata. You are waiting at a bus stop along with dozens of other people of different age groups and different amounts of baggage with them, and you’ll see bus after bus skipping your stop, particularly if they don’t have to unload any passengers at that stop. (Economists, of course, will point out that the bus driver and conductor on fixed pay have no incentive to take more passengers). And if the bus does have someone getting off at that stop, it will stop some distance away, and by the time all the waiting passengers with their baggages run to reach there, the bus is likely to have sped off. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

A man rides an empty suit. The suit tells others what to think of the man, though it would not fit him. The man does not control the suit, but merely takes a ride upon it, come what may.

In his twenties, Franz Kafka composed a long story, “Description of a Struggle”, which remains one of his most enigmatic works. It follows a dream-like logic from a party, to a stroll through Prague, to an encounter with “a monstrously fat man” being borne in a litter by four naked men, to a supplicant once known by the fat man who prayed by bashing his own head against the stone floor of a church, to a final scene on a mountaintop, where a stabbing takes place, though it does not seem to be very consequential. The end. 

Max Brod thought it was a work of genius, though John Updike thought it was adolescent posturing. (¿Por qué no los dos?) Like all of Kafka’s works, it shows up on your doorstep like a locked desk that you are sure contains something you need, but the key is locked inside it; and when you finally bash the desk open, you find your own corpse with a toe tag reading “GUILTY OF BREAKING THE DESK”. Maybe some of the strange imagery Kafka himself could neither explain nor control, maybe some of it spoke of his own secrets, maybe all of it is an existential parable. 

One thing is for sure: the story shatters in every way. We might expect a story with a beginning, middle, and end: nope. We might expect some clarity about just whose story it is: nope. We might expect facts to stay fixed, or people to inhabit their own bodies: nope. We might expect some thread of consistency, conversations that make even minimal sense, words of wisdom that do not culminate in irrelevant banalities. Nope, nope, nope. That the work is offered as a story, and even as a description, is an exaggeration. It’s something, all right, and we may try to read it as a story, but the damned thing will not cooperate. It keeps falling apart the more we try to hold it together, like a human life, come to think of it. Read more »

Gabriel’s Mad Ave. Apocalyptic Horn

…. “I’m still dwelling on how ironic all the feverish proclamations of capitalism
…. are going to look someday.”  —Justin E. H. Smith, Philosopher

I’m through with dumpster dinners
at the corner of Wall Street and New
I’m so unsold by the Coke sign’s faded blush
that thrusts from desiccated dollar dunes,
an embarrassment, a crass embellishment
stuffed in the cleavage of a spent whore
who promised eternal bliss but ended a hag
with smeared lips and hellish scent,
cyclone’s gone that slew the sacred cow
when gangs of suited crooks blew through
with milking stools to sit beside her tits of gold
with digits itching to draw her dry
with lips pursed to suck her blood
with a singeing sort of lust, twisted,
a rusty screw that drills down and down
until nothing’s left to suck or bust,
I’m done . . . we’ve lurched too long through
spoiled earth as Gabriel’s Mad Ave.
apocalyptic horn rather croaked than blew
.
by Jim Culleny
9/13/14

by Robyn Repko Waller

Recent news heralds the advancement of the “first living robots,” the scientifically exciting xenobots, and their astonishing ability to self replicate.

Xenobots are millimeter-sized life forms comprised of complexes of frog stem cells (from the species Xenopus laevis), whose shape is tailor engineered by AI according to their human-prescribed task. Capable of locomotion and transport, thanks to their rigid structure and contracting, xenobots  have the potential to aid in localized medicine delivery and vital maintenance and clearing functions within a living system. Xenobots may even help gather and clear microplastics. All this from a biodegradable lifeforms, capable of sustaining itself without supplementary nutrients for weeks.

And now researchers Joshua Bongard and Michael Levin and a team of scientists at University of Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard have demonstrated that xenobots can self-replicate, or reproduce, with “parent” xenobots constructing “offspring” xenobots who then in turn produce third-generation offspring xenobots, etc. Evolutionary success? The key being their characteristic “Pac-man” form — a form determined by an evolutionary algorithm from billions of configurations to be optimally conducive to self-replication.

That xenobots are a medical and environmental breakthrough is obvious and scientifically exhilarating. Here I will set aside their groundbreaking applications and technological potential to ask a more philosophically motivated question. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

A new post, a novel series, and back to all things cognitive science about language. In this chapter of this column, which hopefully won’t feature any politics but perhaps a little bit of ideology, I will focus on the very thorny issue of how language and thought relate. Or said otherwise, the issue of whether we think in a natural language such as English or Italian, or instead in something else together – in The Language of Thought (LoT), as I shall in fact argue!

The question of how language and thought relate is possibly time immemorial, and the extant literature too large to review satisfactorily in a series of posts. Such a description of the general state of affairs won’t surprise anyone; what may raise a few eyebrows, perhaps, is the claim that large tracts of the modern literature are afflicted by two rather important problems. Firstly, scholars focused on this relationship are hardly ever clear as to what they take language and thought to be exactly, as definitions are rarely put forward; and complementing this, the very same scholars are usually rather vague regarding how language and thought are supposed to relate at all. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

Potentiality and actuality, the difference between what is possible and what is… tout court. I think a lot about design and about the iterative steps between the first dim glimpses of a realized form, and its final perfection. The process itself is something sublime, impressive and compelling apart from its products. I’ve witnessed it in art, in philosophy, and occasionally in the editing of my own work. Something is trying to manifest itself, and rarely crosses over from the imagined to the sensed world perfectly without some struggle. Botched canvases. Blotted pages. Centuries of mostly wrong arguments, dialectically filtered and distilled. Whether or not the ideal is ever reached, the progress towards that limit is something to behold.

Of course, manifest reality is a rough and tumble affair, and instantiated possibilities do not always stay instantiated forever. Techniques are lost, texts crumble away, songs are forgotten. The fact that they did exist seems to carry a different weight than possibility that they could exist. There are books that don’t exist today because they were never written, and there are books that don’t exist because they were burned. Both absences make the world poorer than it could be (assuming that these books are of net positive value, as some are). Read more »

by Brooks Riley

I Remember My First Great American Love

I remember the first time I met Sophia at O’Hara’s the quintessential American café on Restaurant Row in Manhattan’s Theatre District, 35-years ago on the Tuesday before Good Friday.

I remember leaves sprouting after the long winter nakedness.

I remember she paused at the coat check.

I remember she had on a sleeveless, navy blue, pinch-pleated silk dress with spaghetti straps.

I remember her raven hair shining, cut to shoulder length, defining her facial features, smooth nose curving at the tip naturally.

I remember an enticing space between her top two teeth.

I remember her pearl-adorned neck.

I remember the dress hugged her slim waist where the flirty pleats began, hemmed just above her knees, revealing her long legs.

I remember she had on black pumps.

I remember she looked at the mirror behind the oak bar before walking to the corner table where I stood, my hand extended.

I remember heads whipped around.

I remember when our eyes met, I saw a yearning.

I remember offering her a chair.

I remember the scent of jasmine, pale rouge on her cheeks.

“What does the emblem on your blazer mean?” she said. Read more »

View of the Dolomites from the Villanderer Alm in the South Tyrol. Photo taken last week during a walk in the mountains. Happy holidays!