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!

by Carol A Westbrook

One of my earliest memories was of Christmas Eve in 1954. I was about 3 or 4 years old, playing under a table at my grandmother’s house. My sister and a cousin were with me, playing with a small wooden crate filled with straw. The crate represents the manger in the stable in Bethlehem 1,954 years ago, where the animals welcomed the baby Jesus, since there were no rooms in the inn. We three kids were waiting for the adults to come to the table to join us for Wigilia, the traditional Christmas Eve feast, after which we would move to the living room, sing Polish Christmas Carols, and wait for an uncle disguised as Santa to arrive with presents for everyone.

The wooden crate and the Christmas Eve feast were Polish traditions. This is not surprising since my grandparents were only a few decades away from their life in Poland, when they left the to marry and raise a family in Chicago. Like most of the other folks in our neighborhood, we still had strong ties to Polish customs and religion.

Our Catholic religion was full of magic, which we took for granted. Prayers to St. Anthony would help you find something you lost. Want something really, really bad? Say a novena, for 9 days of prayer. St. Jude can help solve hopeless cases, like cancer. If you were paralyzed or had some other awful condition, you might make a pilgrimage to Lourdes, in hopes of a cure. Many were cured there. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Over the years I have heard many stories about Mahalanobis. One relates to his youth. He and Sukumar Ray (Satyajit Ray’s father, a pioneer in Bengali literature of nonsense rhymes and gibberish) were the two contemporary Brahmo whiz kids active in literati circles. They used to arrange regular meetings at someone’s home for serious discussion. But as usually happens in such Bengali middle-class gatherings, much time was taken up in the serving and enjoyment of food delicacies. Mahalanobis objected to this and said this was leaving too little time for discussion. So he sternly announced that from now on no food should be served in the meeting. For the next couple of times people morosely accepted the rule. But Sukumar subverted it, by one time arriving a little early and persuading the food-preparers in the household (usually women) that for the sake of the morale in the meeting, food-serving should be resumed. By the time Mahalanobis arrived, everybody was relishing the delicacies, which infuriated him, but he gave up.

His sternness was evident also in the way he ran ISI in Kolkata. Those days most people there had as office space only a cubicle with adjustable wooden partitions. I have heard that Mahalanobis used to express his satisfaction/dissatisfaction with your work by overnight adjustment of those partitions. In the morning you arrive and find your cubicle shrunk, so you know the Director’s adverse evaluation of your work. I used to know a very decent soft-spoken artist, B.N. Parashar who at one time worked at ISI. One morning when he saw his cubicle shrunk, he was found quietly sobbing. (When I met Parashar later, he was a renowned artist in Kolkata. This generous unassuming man was very popular with the street children near his hostel. He trained a poor village woman, Shakila, to do montage art, and she excelled in it and had several exhibitions both in India and abroad.) Read more »

 by Martin Butler

This is what my dad used to say when as an idealistic teenager I would propose various utopian schemes for reforming society. I suspect it encapsulates the response of many who view themselves as grounded in the ‘real world’. We might want to dismiss the saying as crude anti-intellectualism, but it’s worth further examination if only because it’s such a widely held sentiment.[1]

As a teenager my first thought in response to this was that if a theory doesn’t work in practice, it can’t be ‘alright’. The only test of a theory, I thought, is that it should have a viable practical application. This makes sense when we consider scientific theories: it is simply nonsensical to say gravity might be alright in theory but not in practice. It’s only alright in theory because it works in practice. Einstein’s theory of general relativity only became more than ‘just a theory’ when measurements taken during the solar eclipse of 1919 corroborated its predictions. It was clearly alright in practice, therefore also in theory. Of course, there are other ways in which a theory might at least appear to be ‘alright’ – it might, for example, be an elegant theory or possess a satisfying simplicity. Perhaps this is all those who use the saying mean, although I think there are more interesting issues lurking in the background, especially when we come to abstract political, social or moral theories. Read more »

Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
And looking up I noticed (it) was late
………………—John Lennon, A Day in the Life

Mystical Fun

Jim Culleny
9/14/16

by Joseph Shieber

Within the last few weeks, a high ranking official within the municipal government in Philadelphia resigned for making anti-Semitic remarks. Among those remarks, apparently, was the claim that the Holocaust film Schindler’s List was “Jewish propaganda.” 

It’s probably a sign that I’ve been thinking about these issues for too long, but my first thought was, Why is it an insult to call something propaganda? What’s wrong with propaganda?

The term “propaganda” itself stems only from the 17th century, when the Catholic Church formed the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, a committee of cardinals responsible for the Church’s efforts to proselytize non-believers. The use of the term as a denotation for a strategy for influencing public opinion, however, only really exploded at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, as journalism became professionalized. It was then that practitioners, theorists and politicians began to reflect on the ways in which governments and other organizations could use media outlets to shape public opinion.

Here, for example, is the Google Ngram viewer of “propaganda” from 1600 to 2016:

Although the term is less than 400 years old, the phenomenon of propaganda is far older. The pyramids of Egypt, to take one example, are propagandistic, attesting to the power of the Pharaohs who could enslave thousands of people to erect them. (But see this.) So are the coins stamped with the likenesses of the Roman emperors and circulated throughout the Mediterranean.

Given its ubiquity as a phenomenon, it is surprising how meager the theoretical discussion of propaganda actually is. Although there was a surge in works attempting to treat propaganda as a subject of academic inquiry in the first half of the 20th century, since then there have been comparatively few studies of propaganda, apart from largely historical assessments. Read more »

Moth

A tap at the black glass,
discrete, but urgent.
A night moth, big as
a beech leaf, burnt,
brown, wind-ripped,
flaps in its frame,
peddling high-step,
then ascends the pane
as if winched, hovers
against the jamb,
plunges free fall, recovers,
begins again to climb,
then crabs sidewards
across the window,
drifts back, then upwards
again, this time slow,
as if searching the glass
for a seam to pick,
for some sort of puchase,
a fault line to attack,
to work on, to ply
its cotton-thin but
infinite industry
against and force apart
the bruisingly firm
petals of this strange
rectangular bloom,
first seen as a wink of orange
inviting it down
from the dark pasture
and across the lawn
to the one-eyed house where
it now, with more hope
than method, more drive
than design, gropes
at the glass as it strives
to leave behind the night,
to cross the invisble thin
barrier, and taste the  bright
sweet life of the world within.

by Emrys Westacott

Beauford Delaney. James Baldwin (Circa 1945-50).

More here, here and here.

by Guy Elgat

A couple of weeks ago, on the pages of this website, some critical comments on Richard Rorty’s general argumentative style were made, and, sympathetic to these comments, this inspired me to join the discussion with some criticism of Rorty of my own and, while I am at it, throw in some criticism of Daniel Dennett, for, as will be seen, they both have some mindboggling and implausible things to say about the experience of pain. This, in my view, stems from one of the things they have in common despite their many and substantial differences, namely, their deep animosity to anything Cartesian.

The experience of pain, and indeed any qualitative experience at all – what is referred to in philosophical circles with that ugly word “qualia” – is the bugbear of all hard-nosed and tough-minded philosophers who, enamored of the methods and results of the sciences, seek to eliminate or reduce any and every residue of the mental that is subjective, first-person, infallible, private, intrinsic, or indeed, qualitative. These properties, characteristic of the Cartesian mind, though certainly not conceived by Descartes in these very terms, threaten the scientific image of the world where everything is supposed to be objective, quantitative, extrinsic, and open to experimentation, verification and revision. As such, qualitative, first-person experiences are to be, if not explained away, expelled or expunged from any respectable philosophy. And while Rorty himself was not in any way a science-enthusiast, he shared Dennett’s scientifically-infused critical attitude to the Cartesian mind: the Cartesian legacy in the philosophy of mind must (not without some glee) be quashed, no matter the philosophical cost. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Derek Neal

One of those mysterious concepts that we use as a criterion for judging a novel or film is a “sense of place.” I call it mysterious because it’s so often poorly defined—we recognize it because we can feel it, but what goes into creating it? How can one go about transporting a reader, for example, into a time and place via text? I’m under the impression that if asked this question, most people would mention things like using the five senses to describe a character’s impressions of his or her surroundings, or providing detail via adjectives and adverbs. This may be a gross generalization, but it’s what I’ve gathered from my experience in creative writing courses. It’s also the sense I get from reading short stories in literary journals, which seem to be where aspiring writers publish their attempts at fiction. I often find this writing technically good, but lifeless; it has all the components of effective writing but doesn’t add up to anything compelling. I don’t mean to suggest that I could do better, but I do know what I enjoy reading and what I don’t.

Another way to create a sense of place, and this is my preferred method as a reader, is to include an abundance of proper nouns relating to real places, streets, and buildings. I’m not sure why this works. It would seem that this way of writing should only make sense for readers who have visited the places being mentioned, while readers unfamiliar with the locations might feel something lacking and be unable to create an image in their minds. But do we ever really create an accurate image of what we’re reading, or do the words on the page merge with our own ideas and create something unique in the mind of each individual reader? I’d say it’s the latter. Read more »