by Robyn Repko Waller

The case for the illusion of conscious agency from neuroscience is far from a straightforward conclusion.

Last month I introduced a curious disconnect in public perception of neurotechnology. Whereas reports of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) inspire celebration of expanding agency, the public seem wary that neuroimaging exposes the illusion of conscious agency. The curiosity being that both use neurotechnology to decode motor intentions from the same brain regions of interest. If one threatens our conscious control as human agents, doesn’t the other? If one is a celebration of human agential control, isn’t the other?

That is, I suggested there that, to the contrary, these like research programs ought to be treated alike. Either both applications of neurotechnology deal in diminished agency or, alternatively, neither does. I ended that discussion with a promissory note to defend my insistence that such research doesn’t threaten our control as agents. Here I’ll briefly outline the case, as it’s made, for the illusion of conscious will from neuroscience. Then I’ll argue why we ought to strike a more optimistic note about our scientific understanding of humans as acting consciously and freely (elsewhere I’ve laid out more detailed discussions of science of free will).

I’ve elaborated frequently in this column about the sense of agency and free will that most of us believe we enjoy. I’ll rehearse those important notions again here. The narrative of human agency is not simply that we act in goal-directed ways, actively affecting change beyond the impinging of happenings to us. Humans (and perhaps other complex animals) don’t just forage about locating resources or evading predators, or so we contend. It seems we exercise a much more meaningful kind of agency. That is, free will is not just that I control my bodily movements, but that I exercise meaningful control over what I decide to do.  Read more »

Elderflower tree in bloom in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in June of 2021.

by Charlie Huenemann

Of course, it pays to be cautious when you read philosophers writing about what exists. They are slippery, weaving in and out between “in one sense” and “in another” like clever eels wearing togas. The fact that we can talk about what doesn’t exist has long been a problem for philosophers: for what are we talking about? Surely what doesn’t exist must exist in some sense!

So, of course, in one sense just about anything we can talk about exists: it exists even just as a concept, or a figment, or a thin abstraction, or some ghostly possible being. But, in another sense, when we really get down to it, and wrestle to the ground the protean stuff that really does exist — the stuff that even God would be forced to recognize as existing (that is, if God really did exist) — well, there’s not as much of it. We can talk about more than there is.

Good thing, too, as I think that most of the things we concern ourselves with — including ourselves — don’t really exist. Bruises, cancers, headaches, memes, bars of gold, economies, jobs, gods, angels, souls, friends, enemies, alliances, and wars: none of these things exist. Not really, not ultimately, not as God sees the world (assuming, again….). All of those things depend crucially on cognitive systems which construct models satisfying their experience, and which project those models onto the so-called “world”, which, whatever it is, does not contain the elements postulated by those models. And — you probably guessed it — cognitive systems don’t really exist either. Now comes the part where I try to explain myself. Read more »

by Martin Butler

Individualism has been blamed for the break up of communities, personal alienation and rampant western consumerism. At the same time, with its focus on liberty and human rights, it is lauded as the crowning glory of western culture. How do we come to terms with this paradox?

Individualism feels natural to the modern western mind. We balk at the idea of living according to the preconceptions of tradition, religion or authoritarian elites. Individualism is promoted in diverse lifestyles, chosen identities, family structures and types of relationships, in everything from artistic and popular taste to our belief systems and ways of making money. This trend has been turbo-charged by the Internet, as now we all have a mouthpiece through which to proclaim our choices and opinions. The philosopher Charles Taylor recognises that modern western culture is not uniform but identifies three ways in which it embraces individualism: “it prizes autonomy; it gives an important place to self-exploration, in particular of feelings; and its visions of the good life generally involve personal commitment.”[1] He also points out that the political expression of this individualism comes in the modern focus on rights.

On the other hand, individuals need society, but there is a sense in which individualism is anti-social and works against community. Historically, societies have placed limits on autonomy and rights, on personal commitments and even self-exploration. Liberalism was supposed to be the solution through building a society on the acknowledgment of the value of individualism, and so was designed to cope with conflict and difference – this, after all, is the essence of Mill’s harm principle. The modern thinker who has gone furthest in exploring the consequences of full-blown individualism, however, is Robert Nozick. Starting from the simple premise that individuals are autonomous beings with rights, Nozick struggles to form anything we would recognise as a fully functioning society, famously concluding that “Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labour”.[2] So he avoids the paradox simply by downplaying the social nature of human existence and embracing the individualistic.  His insistence on individual rights is so strong that the group can make next to no claims on anyone without their explicit consent. His minimal state does no more than protect these basic rights. Read more »

Lolla Rossa

in a field behind our house, Lolla Rossa,
transfigured in morning light
becomes

becomes
the instant a groundhog
just on haunches drops
and scuttles under the shed

becomes
the light that shaped her

becomes
particles, waves or both
which transcendentally
show themselves to us here
in this room, and there too
fifty feet down the slope

….. present themselves:

lettuce, whose ruby leaves,
tight, gathered, convoluted at mortal edges
echo the muscle songs of our closest star
as dawn trumpets blow to raise her
….. —Miles Davis from a corner
of this universal room
spinning past the iris of a laser
from the darkness of a CD tray
as coral clouds collect to praise her

Lolla Rossa un-transfigured now
as a nimbus glides from play to pause
and grays her

by Jim Culleny
10/20/12

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

Yeats composed his poem, “Among School Children”, after visiting St. Otteran’s School in Waterford in February, 1926, when Yeats was in his early 60s. It is probably best known for the couplet that concludes it: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Here is Helen Vendler leading a class on the poem at the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University, in 2007.)

Read in its entirety, one of the major themes of its eight stanzas is the divergence between image and reality, and how humans suffer from attempting to privilege ideas over reality. In a note he wrote for himself in March, 1926,  while composing the poem, Yeats describes the theme of the poem this way: “School children, and the thought that life will waste them, perhaps that no possible life can fulfill their own dreams or even their teacher’s hope.” 

Despite the suggestion of Yeats’s own note, the poem doesn’t really deal with the dashed hopes of the students themselves. Instead, Yeats’s focus in the poem is on the illusions of the childrens’ mothers — and of the nuns who are their teachers. Read more »

A solitary field scabious wildflower in an alpine meadow. Photo taken in early June in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Alexander C. Kafka

A shy high-school student asks a girl out. Desperate for some wheels, he buys a sorry ’65 Chrysler sedan and, with it, a heap of trouble. 

That’s not a bad premise for a noir action comedy, but the new release First Date squanders the concept from script through edit in a preposterous, humorless, bloody, and nihilistic mess of a movie.

For their feature debut, the writer-director duo Manual Crosby and Darren Knapp were clearly trying to concoct a spicy blend of Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and Guy Ritchie. But First Date has no originality, wit, or directorial flair, only derivative burnt scrapings of violence and meanness. Despite one half-hearted, swiftly corroded moment of civility, the screenplay is three-quarters F-bombs, one-quarter cynical shootings and beatings. 

The production has an undeniable energy and the unfertilized seeds of its crowded characterizations might have been more ambitiously nurtured. The dynamic between the passive hero Mike (Tyson Brown) and Kelsey (Shelby Duclos), the kickboxing dynamo he desires, is an intriguing gender inversion of the traditional. A misfit crew of baddies also discuss Steinbeck as a book group. And there’s a droll coffee-table meme. 

But such promising touches wither under the screenwriters’ sadistic hand, as does the unlikely introduction of an older couple with distinct memories of the junker car. Mike’s passivity, rather than a challenge to overcome, becomes worrisomely defining and dramatically flat. The criminal gang’s constant foul-mouthed blathering, within minutes, becomes merely grating. Michael’s parents are oblivious, Kelsey’s are crass and unfeeling, and a couple sports-car-obsessed neighborhood jocks are insipid teen-farce throwbacks with nothing to say. Only Nicole Berry, as a poker-faced sheriff’s deputy, has any real hint of quirky depth.

Direction is halting toward the beginning but finds its momentum by a tense standoff scene, and sedate Hawaiian-guitar riffs give the score an unexpected, somewhat demented vibe. But ultimately, First Date is just bleak. As social commentary, it’s numb, and as entertainment, it’s numbing. 

by Michael Liss

Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions. There may be in every government a few choice spirits, who may act from more worthy motives. One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest…

–Alexander Hamilton, 1787.

March 4, 1800. John Adams, Second President of the United States (and first President to be defeated for reelection) was leaving Washington on the 4:00 a.m. stagecoach to Baltimore, the first stop on his way back home to his beloved home and his wife Abigail. He would not be in attendance when, later that day, his successor (and former Vice President), Thomas Jefferson, would take the Oath of Office and deliver his Inaugural Address.

It was considered by his contemporaries (and most of us would agree) a sour note to end a Presidency. As Washington had voluntarily given up the office when he could have been President-for-Life, a peaceful transition of power was a demonstration of continuity and the stability of a young nation’s experiment in democracy. Adams had lost, fairly so under the rules of the day, and many felt he needed to express public acceptance, particularly at a time when the verdict was not merely a change of person, but also of political philosophy.

There are many explanations for Adams’ behavior, one of which is that Jefferson might have made it known that Adams would not be welcome, but the one that fits best is that, in the absence of a real tradition, Adams was following his heart. He’d had enough of Philadelphia and the new swamp that was Washington, of politics and political infighting, of being judged too harshly for his failures and praised too little for his accomplishments. Like every President since who has lost, the sense of rejection was unavoidable. In Adams’ case, more so because Jefferson and he had once been close, and because some in Adams’ old party, the Federalists, had pointedly withheld support—Alexander Hamilton foremost amongst them, but even some of his old friends. It was time for him to leave. Read more »

by Usha Alexander

[This is the tenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

On February 18, 2021, NASA landed Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars. Perseverance is the latest of some twenty probes that NASA has sent to bring back detailed information about our neighboring planet, beginning with the Mariner spacecraft fly-by in 1965, which took the first closeup photograph. Though blurry by today’s standards, those grainy images helped ignite widespread wonder and fantasy about space exploration, not long before Star Trek also debuted on television. By the 1970s, science-fiction storytelling was moving from the margins of pop-culture into the mainstream in film and television—and so followed generations of kids, like myself, who grew up expecting off-world adventurism and alien encounters almost as much as we anticipated the invention of video-phones and pocket computers and household robots, as our conceptual bounds for the human story were pushed ever farther outward.

And so much of our expectation has come true. Smartphones and Zoom calls and Roombas are just the most mundane examples of how our techno-fantasized future has manifested in daily life. There’s promise of even more to come, as cultural forces continuously work to realize not only our imagined technotopia of flying cars and jetpacks, but even to seek out those elusive alien encounters. Perseverance rover is, in fact, a robotic astrobiologist: its purpose on Mars is to seek out direct signs of alien life—microbial fossils, if not living microbes themselves. But even should the Martians disappoint us by their absence, information gathered by Perseverance is still intended to help us make that next “giant leap for mankind”: human colonization of Mars. What was until quite recently still generally regarded an outlandish notion seems now widely accepted as the obvious next chapter in our human Manifest Destiny. Indeed, the more we know about the unsuitability of that cold, airless, radiation-beleaguered rock, the more we seem inspired to conquer it. Read more »

Delita Martin. Rain Falls From The Lemon Tree. 2020

Acrylic, Charcoal, Decorative Papers, Hand Stitching

More here and here.

by Rafaël Newman

It’s been 40 years this past month since the election of François Mitterrand as President of France. Today, June 21, is the day chosen by his first Minister of Culture for the Fête de la Musique: what has come to be known as “World Music Day” in the English-speaking countries that have since, along with scores of others, enthusiastically adopted the annual festival.

Mitterrand was the first Socialist in the history of the Fifth Republic to attain the office of president, and his term, historic as well for its unprecedented (and still unrivalled) duration, was characterized among other things by grand gestures of support for culture, both classical and popular, focused not only on Paris but increasingly on the cities and towns of the traditionally underserved French provinces. Following a nation-wide study of amateur musicianship commissioned by Culture Minister Jack Lang, which found that one out of two young people in France play a musical instrument, Mitterrand’s government in 1982 initiated the annual Fête de la Musique, to be held on the day of the summer solstice, and to feature multiple, simultaneous public performances by musicians, both amateur and professional, playing for crowds of varying dimensions, from busker’s circle to stadium-sized audience.

Although Mitterrand’s cultural policy was in some respects a continuation of his predecessor’s efforts at modernization and opening, Giscard’s patrician air had lent his presidency the cast of a bygone era, and it was left to Mitterrand, the former Vichy functionary and perennial also-ran, to reap the benefits of a sea change in French public affairs, symbolized in part by the Fête, an annual celebration of a vital, and vitally homespun, national creativity. The Fête was thus effectively part of an image campaign: a rebranding, or, less cynically and more in keeping with the cultural theory of the era, a re-imagining of the French community, and a libidinous recommitment to its revolutionary pillars of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Read more »