by Ali Minai

“I’ll just google it again”, said my daughter when I asked her to remember something. It was a very reasonable suggestion, but it led me down an interesting line of thought about the nature of knowing and its recent transformation. Much has been said and written about how the Internet has changed human knowledge, in both positive and negative ways. The positives are obvious. The magic of the Internet, the World-Wide Web, and utilities such as Google and Wikipedia, have put enormous knowledge at our disposal. Now any teenager with a smartphone has effortless access to far more information than the greatest minds of a century ago. Even more importantly, the Internet has opened up vast new possibilities of learning from others, and allowed people to share ideas in ways that were unimaginable until recently. Not surprisingly, all this has led to a great flowering of knowledge and creativity – though, unfortunately, not without an equally great multiplication of error and confusion.

In terms of negative consequences, perhaps the most widely explored idea is that of epistemic bubbles – closed informational ecosystems enabled by social media connecting largely like-minded individuals. With little external input and minimal internal dissent, people in such bubbles can quickly fall prey to outlandish beliefs without the possibility of correction. The hazard of epistemic bubbles is compounded by the Internet’s facilitation of false information – fake news, so to speak. Of course, neither epistemic bubbles nor false information is new, but the Internet has supercharged both by lowering the barriers to entry so far that random TikTok personalities and Twitter ideologues can have a degree of influence that was previously reserved for a small, better-informed elite. On the positive side, this democratization of information has broken through the systematic indoctrination that elites have imposed on societies throughout history. At the same time, it has also led to an unprecedented undermining of facts and the disintegration of a shared experience of reality. But my concern in this article is with a more subtle, well-known – but perhaps insufficiently understood – effect of the Internet on human knowing: The externalization of knowledge and its consequences for creative thought. Read more »

by Fabio Tollon

You’ve heard about AI. Either it’s coming for your job (automation), your partner (sex robots), or your internet history (targeted adverts). Each of the aforementioned represent very serious threats (or improvements, depending on your predilections) to the economy, romantic relationships, and the nature of privacy and consent respectively. But what exactly is Artificial Intelligence? The “artificial” part seems self-explanatory: entities are artificial in the sense that they are manufactured by humans out of pre-existing materials. But what about the so-called “intelligence” of these systems?

Our own intelligence has been an object of inquiry for human beings for thousands of years, as we have been attempting to figure out how a collection of bits of matter in motion (ourselves) can perceive, predict, manipulate and understand the world around us. Artificial Intelligence, as eloquently surmised by Keith Frankish and William Ramsey, is

“a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding, modeling, and replicating intelligence and cognitive processes by invoking various computational, mathematical, logical, mechanical, and even biological principles and devices.”

AI attempts not just to understand intelligent systems, but also to build and design them. Interestingly enough, it may be the case that we could in fact design and build an “intelligent” system without understanding the nature of intelligence at all. Important to keep in mind here is the distinction between narrow (or domain specific) and broad (or general) AI. Narrow AI are systems that are optimized for performing one specific task, whereas broad AI systems aim at replicating (and surpassing) many (if not all) capacities associated with human intelligence. Read more »

“Time is a static in the mind.”—Malachi Black, poet

Timesea

In the days when there were bona fide summers
when months were loyal to the expected,

when they stayed more or less within their lanes,
December not copping the joys of July, for instance,

when seasons honored tradition and did not
insist on mukluks in June or ban January snow,

time (though always mercurial) made sense,
or at least we’d trimmed its arrogant sails

whose masts and spars, like antennae,
we trained to troll timesea for wind steady enough

to give clear chronometric reception —something to rely upon.
But time has always ebbed and flowed like tides, it fell

and rose random as waves, so we concocted clocks
to lock time’s fundamental pace, the regularity of its sine.

But time is simultaneously as un-pin-downable
as background noise, a universally evasive
static in the mind
.

by N. Gabriel Martin

Perhaps there is no greater testament to the triumph of individualism than the pro-gun slogan “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” It takes an extremely narrow conception of responsibility to deny that lax gun laws are to blame for high rates of gun violence, but that view is pervasive anyway. Now, however, the Black Lives Matter movement is drawing broad popular attention to the fundamentally systemic character of racism, and giving us an opportunity to overthrow individualism.

Individualism stands in the way of serious public debate about many of our most serious social and political problems—from gun control to the erosion of public infrastructure and the racial wealth gap. That’s because it makes the onerous demand that in order to identify a problem, you’ve also got to find out who is responsible. F. A. Hayek, one of the principle architects of this ideology, put it like this: “Since only situations which have been created by human will can be called just or unjust, the particulars of a spontaneous order cannot be just or unjust: if it is not the intended or foreseen result of somebody’s action… this cannot be called just or unjust.”[i]

According to Hayek, complaining about a circumstance for which no one is entirely to blame is like complaining about the weather. It isn’t enough to point to some inequality, such as the gender pay gap, to recognise it as a social problem that we should try to correct. We can identify it as a fact, but in order to see that it is a problem, you have to find a culprit. Otherwise, doing something that alters it would actually be unjust (it might take money away from men, or take autonomy away from corporations).

The result is that we can prosecute the person who pulled the trigger, after they have already killed, but we’re powerless to do anything to stop the next gunman. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

By 2025, protective living communities (PLCs) had started to form. The earliest PLCs, such as New Promise and New New Babylon, based themselves on rationalist doctrines: decisions informed by best available science, and either utilitarian ethics or Rawlsian principles of justice (principally, respect for individual autonomy and a concern to improve the lives of those most disadvantaged). Membership in these communities was exclusive and tightly guarded, and they had the advantage of the relatively higher levels of wealth controlled by their members. 

One such community, New Promise, began as a complex of buildings 60 miles outside of Moab, Utah. These buildings included living accommodations, a central meeting hall/library/theater, a food market, a health care station, and a network of gardens and walking trails, along with infrastructure buildings such as a water reclamation plant and a solar power station. Nearly all of its residents are able to work from home. Visitors are allowed only after a medical screening, and new members are admitted only after a rigorous screening process. Community dues are set at one-third of income, and the community is managed by a board of seven elected officials. There are two recorded instances of families being evicted from the original New Promise, in each case because, in the view of the governing board, they were not willing to abide by the decisions of the community.

New Promise offers a high standard of living and a buffer against both disease and political instability. In exchange, the community requires individuals to subordinate their own interests to those of the community. Applicants with strong religious or political ideologies are not admitted. Its members are typically highly-educated workers in technology, education, or business. “In New Promise you are free to do as you please,” said one member, “so long as what you’re doing doesn’t make anyone else miserable.” Read more »

by Joan Harvey

Let’s face it, I’m tired. A phrase completely knotted up in the rather damaged circuitry that is my brain with Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles who managed to out-Dietrich Dietrich while being her own amazing self (if you haven’t watched this in at least the past few days you probably should). But, for better or worse, unlike Kahn, my tiredness is not from thousands of lovers coming and going and going and coming and always too soon.

But I digress. Tiredness is a digression from normal life. Repeated rounds of tiredness have been one of the leftovers people have reported experiencing from Covid-19, and, as I looked into it, from other viruses as well. I doubt I had Covid-19, but I did get very ill after flying back from NYC in late January and I’ve been struggling with recovery ever since. The tricky thing, the thing that really sucks, is that whereas with most bouts of tiredness one can recover relatively quickly and start normal physical activity, with this post-viral business, even tiny amounts of exercise can deplete one so much that only days of total rest really help. And, though I have past experience with this, I’m still not particularly well trained for it. The bigger problem, for me as well as others with this type of fatigue, is that one can feel fine during exercise, and then afterward become, as I have been, completely exhausted and shaky for days. As a pamphlet describing post-viral fatigue puts it, “Doing too much on a good day will often lead to an exacerbation of fatigue and any other symptoms the following day. This characteristic delay in symptom exacerbation is known as post-exertional malaise (PEM).” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Callum Watts

I worry. Asking someone out, speaking in public, stepping onto a flight, for me these mundane moments percolate with anxiety. These are personal fears, inner battles of no real relevance to the wider world and disconnected from any broader social meaning. Over the past couple of years though, I have had two experiences of fear that were both personal and political. I was caught in a terrorist attack and was struck down with covid-19 during the global pandemic. In each case the fear of death echoed bone deep within me, and in each case that fear reverberated through the body politic and society. What interests me is the political aims for which that fear can be harnessed and the authenticity of the use of that fear. I don’t believe that we should be stoking fear for political ends, but we cannot escape the fact that our fears are already in the political arena, and so we must learn to live with them.

Picture a warm summer night in London’s bustling Borough Market. I’m enjoying one of those endless evenings of conversation, eating and drinking with my family. My sister has just left early to meet some friends, when all of a sudden running, scuffling and shouting can be heard. It’s difficult to explain why, but a certain franticness in the movement and a strident tone to the shouts make my blood run cold. My whole body freezes and a tension forms in my chest, like a knot being pulled tight. Then as screams and shouts mingle with gun fire and things smashing, the knot dissolves as adrenaline courses through me. I’m alert, focussed, prepared to take control and spring into action. Months later, that initial stab of fear would still occasionally manifeste and get my adrenaline pumping. This could be triggered by being in a public space or on public transport, a loud noise, or by the memory of someone bleeding out on the floor. These fears were mine, yet they quickly became absorbed into a wider debate. Read more »

Mother Writes to the ‘Lion of Kashmir,’ Long Deceased

February 2020
Dear Sheikh Sahib,

They tell me,
you are buried on the left bank of Naseem lake with views
of Hazratbal shrine, your tomb guarded by India’s troops.

I tell them,
this represents one of those paradoxes’ history keeps throwing
up: the same people who jailed you for many years now guard
your tomb and the same people whose ‘Lion’ you were are un-
happy with you for throwing their lot with the illiberal Pandit
Nehru who strung up Kashmir on the flagpole of secularism.

The world approved, but for decades the Congress Party
did to Kashmir by night what today the BJP is doing by light.

Sheikh Sahib, in your heart of hearts, you must have known
that we the Muslims of Kashmir struck at the core of Hindu
nationalist idea of Akhand Bharat, united, undivided India
from Afghanistan to Myanmar Thailand Cambodia and Laos. Read more »

by Joshua Wilbur 

There are times when I can’t look away from The Avenue at Middelharnis. 

Completed in 1689 by the Dutch Golden Age artist Meindert Hobbema, the painting has entranced viewers for centuries. The English landscapists of the Romantic period admired and emulated its unusual composition. A young Van Gogh saw The Avenue in London’s National Gallery in 1884. “Look out for the Hobbema,” he would later write in a letter to his brother Theo. René Magritte allegedly produced forgeries of Hobbema’s paintings, and his Empire of Light seems to me a surreal reinterpretation of the Dutch master’s masterwork. 

I say that I can’t look away from the painting because I set it as my computer’s background a few months ago. Artsy, I know. I see The Avenue a few times a day, usually in browser-obscured flashes. Sometimes I’ll push everything aside and just space out into it. 

The painting is a great example of an “open” work of art. As described by Umberto Eco, open works encourage multiple interpretations and respond to the viewer’s evershifting historical situation, stage in life, or mood. If closed creations communicate one thing, open works communicate many things. They meet us where we are. I should say something about where I am and where we are before going further down The Avenue.  Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

In our modern society, we are awash in a near constant barrage of information. It can be difficult for even the most critically-minded among us to sift through all of that information and vet it for truthfulness. It’s likely that we all are subject to some misinformation that we believe in the course of our daily engagement with mass media. Although it’s more pervasive and immediate in today’s interconnected world, this state of affairs has existed since the beginning of the industrial age, starting with publishing in the nineteenth century and then onto broadcasting media of the twentieth century. But, if the medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan argued, what do these generations of engagement with mass forms of broadcasting actually mean for us as a society? The content fades away into the background to some degree while the medium shapes our shared experiences. Broadcasting and social media have become a shared prism on world, with differing interpretations of events experienced in a similar way.

We rarely have public discussions on what a mass mediated society means for us, taking its existence for granted. Perhaps turning to a classic treatment of mass society might remind us of the historical and social constructedness of mass media. One such compelling work was the 1967 work by Situationist Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (published in English in 1970). Debord’s work has become a classic among philosophers, disaffected youth, and scholars attempting to come to grips with the role mass media plays in modern life. In this essay, I will argue that some of Debord’s assertions, such as his claim about the passivity encouraged by the spectacular industries, are incomplete. No form of mass medium was ever accepted passively. Rather, people as consumers often actively engaged with mass media, even if the goal was passive acceptance from the top down. I use the example of popular music to illustrate the point. Read more »

This alpine meadow near my house went through yellow, purple, and white phases before finally blooming with all three colors simultaneously in a “second wave” now. It probably does this every year but I had not noticed until the coronavirus lockdown got me into the habit of walking by this area daily for some exercise and I started paying closer attention to my surroundings.

by Mike O’Brien

It’s a bountiful feast for discriminating worriers like myself. Every day brings a tantalizing re-ordering of fears and dangers; the mutation of reliable sources of doom, the emergence of new wild-card contenders. Like an improbably long-lived heroin addict, the solution is not to stop. That’s no longer an option, if it ever was. It is, instead, to master and manage my obsessive consumption of hope-crushing information. I must become the Keith Richards of apocalyptic depression, perfecting the method and the dose.

Structure is important. Historical time-frames help. Covid is bad, and current, and a direct threat to me, but a once-a-century pandemic arriving right on time shouldn’t disrupt my worrying on a macro level. I’ve budgeted acute anxiety for just this kind of thing.

The protests in the US are full of promise, both for good and for ill, but the systemic problems whence they sprung are old news. The uprising should have happened decades ago. They may happen again, for the same reasons, decades hence. Waiting for the US to realize necessary and inevitable progress is a mug’s game.

I confess that I’m very Euro/America-centric in my socio-political doom-tracking. I really ought to give fair due to Indian ethno-nationalism, Russian counter-intelligence, African famine, Arab revolutions and South American neo-fascism. Sorry, I’m Canadian. After worrying about the US and the UK, there are barely any hours left in a day. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

Because I have a lot of experience with depression, I approached George Scialabba’s How to Be Depressed with an almost professional curiosity. Scialabba takes a creative approach to the depression memoir, blending personal essay, interview, and his own medical records, specifically, a selection of notes written by various therapists and psychiatrists who treated him for depression between 1970 and 2016. I don’t know if I could bear to see the records kept by those who have treated me for depression, assuming they still exist, and I wasn’t sure what it would be like to read another person’s medical history.

I found that the clinical notes, which are the core of the book, present a painfully accurate description of chronic depression and its treatment. Scialabba’s sense of being stuck is reflected in the way the same concerns come up repeatedly: procrastination, worries about being dependent, a sense of unrealized potential, feelings that he’s not accomplishing enough, especially compared to others, and concerns about whether his relationships will last. There’s not much sense of any concrete ways in which these concerns are addressed, or if they were ever successfully resolved.

This part of the book was sometimes difficult to read, but I’m glad it was written and published. It captures a certain airless circularity that I associate with my own struggles against depression. The book as a whole also reveals how the effects of depression are compounded with time. Chronic or recurring depression is qualitatively different from the experience of a single episode, and I don’t think this fact gets the attention it deserves. When Scialabba, in an interview later in the book, spoke of bitter memories, I could see why he used the word bitter. Read more »

by Peter Wells

Saving endangered languages is an activity the virtue of which seems to be beyond question among Western liberals. Endangered languages, as conventionally identified, are usually spoken by poor and vulnerable people in remote areas of developing countries, so our sympathies are engaged. The least we could do, it seems, to alleviate their misery and show solidarity with them, would be to preserve their language.

At the same time, it is also urged that the endangered languages are valuable in themselves. Followers of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity) assert that each individual language can express concepts which no other language can express. Therefore, they insist that it is important not only to record these languages before they die, but also to keep the language communities alive so that they continue to use them.

I wish to suggest that this project, while well-meaning, is ill-conceived. It seems to employ an unscientific definition of the term ‘language’, and to rely upon a disputed theory about the nature of language. It is unrealistic in terms of what carrying it out would involve, and finally, and most importantly from the point of view of liberalism, it would tend to reduce, rather than increase, freedom. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Some people claim that the prominent display of statues to controversial events or people, such as confederate generals in the southern United States, merely memorialises historical facts that unfortunately make some people uncomfortable. This is false. Firstly, such statues have nothing to do with history or facts and everything to do with projecting an illiberal political domination into the future. Secondly, upsetting a certain group of people is not an accident but exactly what they are supposed to do.

I start with the point that erecting statues is a political action and therefore subject to a political logic. Statues are political insofar as erecting them has a cost – not merely the direct costs of building it, but also the opportunity cost of using scarce public space this way rather than another – that only successful political mobilisation can meet. In particular, the more controversial the statue, the more political capital is required to overcome the opposition to its public display, and the more distinctly political must be its logic (in contrast to merely decorative public sculptures that no one much minds). So what is the political pay-off that can justify the political expense of erecting controversial statues? I believe controversial statues are a kind of political communication, a signal to supporters and opponents of the values and people in charge, in which the offensiveness of the message is key to its effectiveness.

Such statues communicate to those on the losing political team. They say, ‘Fuck you. We’re in charge’. To black people in America, the wave of monuments in the 1950s to confederate generals who defended slavery sent two clear messages. Firstly, it sent a message about domination: that the civil rights movement had not and would not change who ruled and in whose interests. Secondly, it sent a message about political values: that this domination was justified by nothing but power and would not be constrained by considerations of justice or the rule of law. Deliberately erecting statues that celebrate odious values shows to the oppressed that moral appeals are hopeless and will not even be heard; that – whatever the new voting laws say – they will never recognised as equals. Read more »

Gull on a Spar

I’m a gull on a spar —so much sea,
so little far

this perch is so unsteady
I wonder what my bearings are

the roll and sway and pitch,
the other gull-calls I am hearing

as ship slides into ditch of trough,
this captain must be drunk the way he’s steering

or the helmsman is asleep, his compass eye is off,
the sluggish rudder’s answer is as drawn-out as a stutter

and I’m clinging to this spar like a baby to its mother
as the sun is going down wind screams or it is singing

the ship’s eighth bell is ringing,  the moon is coming up—
the image in that mirror, is that me or is that other?

Jim Culleny
6/24/20

by Paul Braterman

Timefulness: How thinking like a geologist can help save the world, Marcia Bjornerud, Princeton University Press, 2018/2020, pp 208, sale price $8.84/£7.00 through publisher

There are many excellent overviews for the general reader of how life on Earth has changed over time (see, for a recent example, Neil Shubin’s Some Assembly Required, which I reviewed here recently). The history of the Earth itself has not been so well served, and Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, by Marcia Bjornerud, Professor of Geology and environmental Sciences at Lawrence University, is a welcome and timely addition to this badly under-represented genre.[1] The book is beautifully written, in plain language, with complex ideas explained with great simplicity and the use of strikingly appropriate verbal imagery. Behind this transparency of language lies a deep love and knowledge of her subject. The book should appeal to anyone looking for an overview of the Earth as the abode of life, or a perspective on our place in time, and how recklessly we are compressing the tempo of natural change.

The author presents her book as an argument for what she calls timefulness, the perception of ourselves as living in and constrained by time, of time itself as having both extension and texture, of the acceptance of our own mortality, and of our own responsibilities. This she sees as severely lacking in our society. We expect people to know something about distances on the map, but not about the timescale of the events that have shaped the Earth, as if what happened before we were born and what will happen after we die did not really exist. We have an economic system that (at least in normal times) depends on the expectation of continued growth, although if maintained over a very brief interval of geological or even historical time, such growth is clearly unsustainable.[2] Consumerism, rather than conservation, is regarded as good citizenship. Read more »