by Brooks Riley
Memory and the Old Man
by Nils Peterson
I
I was telling a joke the other day on Zoom before a fairly large audience and I was telling it pretty well, Swedish accent and all. It’s a joke I have told before and it’s usually well received. However, it requires the word tailgate for the punchline, and that word never came. I sort of hung there on the hook, on the punchline of my joke, dangling like a participle. Eventually someone figured out the word I was missing, finished my joke and we went on to the next teller.
Mostly the words are there on the end of my tongue when they are bid, but an old man’s memory has a will of its own. It will recall what it wants to recall, no longer a servant to the old man’s will. Once I wrote “…sometimes Memory’s the CEO of a corporation grown too large. The boys in the mailroom can’t keep up. Incoming and Outgoing bins overflow. Mail carts lose their letters as they plod from office to office.” Another image I’ve had is that of the word heroically setting off from a distant country maybe located at the base of the spine, but the journey is a heroic one, it’s riding a slow camel and must stop at oases on the way. No wonder it doesn’t arrive till tomorrow, which, of course, never comes.
I wrote the above paragraph yesterday. This morning I remembered that a few months ago I’d tried to tell the same joke and lost it at the same word. So, is there a reason why tailgate has chosen to remain elusive, declaring its independence, refusing to come when called? Maybe it’s joined some hidden cabal of words that no longer want to be biddable, though they’ll arrive sometimes when they feel like it. If I ever tell the joke again, I’m going to write the word down on paper before I set off. I’m sure it’s quite possible that I’ll know the word when I begin the joke, but by the punchline it might well have gone off on its own. Read more »
Monday Photo
Somewhere over southern Germany. When one can see the Austrian alps, I know I am close to home.
Taste and Authenticity
by Dwight Furrow
One longstanding debate in aesthetics concerns the relative virtues of formalism vs. contextualism. This debate, which preoccupied art theorists in the 20th Century, now rages in the culinary world of the 21st Century. Roughly, the controversy is about whether a work of art is best appreciated by attending to its sensory properties and their organization or should we focus on its meaning and the social, historical, or psychological context of its production. The debate is similar in the world of cuisine. How best should we appreciate the food or beverages we consume? Should we focus solely on the flavors and aromas or does authenticity and social context matter?
Formalists argue that works of art are fundamentally vehicles for sensory experience. In painting, the arrangement of lines, shapes, and colors are the primary source of aesthetic pleasure. In music it is harmonic structure, timbre, and the arrangement of musical themes and variations that matters. Narrative, depiction, meaning, and historical context may be interesting but are superfluous to genuine aesthetic value and tend to distract us from the sensory properties which constitute the essence of a work, so claim the formalists.
Diners, chefs, and critics who think that flavor is primary and questions about the origins of food and its authenticity are secondary seem to be channeling the formalist argument.
By contrast, contextualism places great emphasis on the fact that a work is created and appreciated at a particular time and place and by particular individuals. Facts about the social and historical context of a work are essential to it, not merely contingent features. According to contextualists, works lack clear meanings and determinate aesthetic properties when the conditions under which they are created and experienced are not the focal point of attention.
The discourse around food appreciation has taken a decidedly contextualist turn. Read more »
Monday, June 3, 2024
Looking Back on the Second Trump Administration
by Richard Farr
Historians often ask what led to Trump’s landslide victory back in 2024. All those guilty verdicts in the “PornHush” trial certainly helped — the final proof, for many, that the President was an innocent lamb set upon by crooks. And the November exit polls showed that millions of patriotic Americans found democracy a chore anyway, or were actively Fascism-curious, or simply got a buzz out of the fact that, being disempowered in every other meaningful way, they could at least step up and play a part in destroying their own children’s future. But surely the decisive factor was Trump’s inspired choice of running mate — philosopher and controversialist Thomas Hobbes.
Sharp as a tack, a hard-bitten political realist, an intellectual heavyweight, and a precise, stylish communicator — he was so different from anyone else Trump could have chosen! The sore losers claimed he had not been born in the United States, or pointed out that he’d died in 1679. None of that mattered when the electorate saw what an ideal ticket it was.
Like the other VP aspirants, Hobbes described Trump as our only hope in dark times. In fact he iced that particular cake by calling him “our very Salvation, our Messiah, in whose Second Coming should we not earnestlie beleeve?” Like them, he also said that modern intellectual fads such as democracy, the separation of church and state, an independent judiciary, a free press and the rule of law were “monstrous and absurd Doctrines, manifest Phantasmes of Satan” and “beleeved in not, save by Idiots.” But he didn’t just say those things because it was the only way to land a lucrative government sinecure from which he he could denounce the evils of government, or because his highest aspiration was to visit Palazzo a Lago and rub shoulders with the shiftless rich. No — he said them because he could prove them.
His election-cycle bestseller Leviathan used rigor and logic to demonstrate two key political facts:
First, the ideal system of government — indeed the only system of government a rational agent will choose — is absolute monarchy. Argument in a nutshell: (i) it’s not just Trump who’s a vicious, self-interested brute — we all are; (ii) human nature being so dire, safety is more important than liberty; (iii) sorry but you can’t have both. Read more »
Monday Poem
Do Top Dogs Care
I place my body — life, in hands of
corporate heads and engineers
I am in my seat perched above a wing
and through this little porthole peer.
I slide my sight along its graceful lines,
to its distant tip, vague among clouds.
We’re far from earth up here.
I know this wing’s shape from books,
a form imagined by the brothers Wright
and other seers; a shape that lifts and
holds us up, aloft, until a runway meets
our landing gear, until all nuts and bolts
designed to be just here, just there,
perfectly in place, set and tightened
to the breadth of a hair are proved in hope
that no other inclination drives the calculus,
trusting that the bottom line of corporate worth
is not the top line for which its top dogs care,
Jim Culleny, 5/31/24
Sing, Mate, Die: The 2024 Cicadas Rally
by Mark Harvey
“…they came out of little holes in the ground, and did eat up the green things, and made such a constant yelling noise as made the woods ring of them, and ready to deafen the hearers…” —William Bradford, Massachusetts, 1633
If you missed the totality last month when the moon fully obscured the sun and can’t wait until August 23, 2044, for the next total solar eclipse, don’t despair. There are still some very good reasons to rent a strange Airbnb in a strange county you’ve never visited to witness another rare event in nature: the emergence of a trillion cicadas. If you’re inclined to get the best seats for this event, you might want to start looking at flights to Illinois and Iowa, where the bugs will really take over.
For those who don’t follow cicadas, this year we’re seeing what amounts to a Sturgis rally or Woodstock for insects: a hell of a lot of showing off, really loud music, lots of sex, and truly living for the moment. Periodical cicadas, as they’re called, live underground as nymphs for years, and then spend only a few weeks above ground as adults after they’ve emerged to mate. There are two types of periodical cicadas, one which emerges every thirteen years, and one which emerges every seventeen years. What’s exciting this year—if you’re an entomologist—is that two adjacent broods, one from the seventeen-year gang and one from the thirteeners, have synched up so they are both emerging the same year. The last time this happened was in 1803.
This being America, there’s even a clumsy portmanteau to describe making a special trip to hear the insects: cicada-cation. Read more »
Disrupting the Comprehension of Large Language Models: Adversarial Attacks
by David J. Lobina
In previous posts on AI [sic], I have argued that contemporary machine learning models, the dominant approach in AI these days, are not sentient or sapient (there is no intelligence on display, only input-output correlations), do not exhibit any of the main features of human cognition (in particular, no systematicity), and in the instantiation of so-called large language models (LLMs), there is no natural language in sight (that is, the models make no use of actual linguistic properties: no phonology or morphology, no syntax or semantics, never you mind about pragmatics).
The claim about LLMs is of course the most counterintuitive, at least at first, given that a chatbot such as ChatGPT seemingly produces language and appears to react to users’ questions as if it were a linguistic agent. I won’t rerun the arguments as to why this claim shouldn’t be surprising at all; instead, I want to reinforce the very arguments to this effect – namely, that LLMs assign mathematical properties to text data, and thus all they do is track the statistical distribution of these data – by considering so-called adversarial attacks on LLMs, which clearly show that no meaning is part of LLMs, and moreover that these models are open to attacks that are not linguistic in nature. It’s numbers all the way down!
An adversarial attack is a technique that attempts to “fool” neural networks by using a defective input. In particular, an adversarial attack is an imperceptible perturbation to the original sample or input data of a machine learning model with the intention to disrupt its operations. Originally devised with machine vision models in mind, in these cases the technique involves adding a small amount of noise to an image, as in the graphic below for an image of a panda, with the effect that the model misclassifies the image as that of a gibbon, and with an extremely high degree of confidence. The perturbation in this case is so small as to have no effect to the visual system of humans – another reason to believe that none of these machine learning models constitute theories of cognition, by the way – but the perturbation is the kind of mathematical datum that a mathematical model such a machine learning model would indeed be sensitive to (all graphics below come from here). Read more »
Perceptions
Vivian Maier. October 29, 1953, NY, NY.An Interview with Robert Pogue Harrison (Part 2 of 2)
by Gus Mitchell
Part 1 of this interview can be found here.
Professor, writer, talk show host, part-time guitarist–Robert Pogue Harrison stands in a category of one among American intellectuals of his generation.
His first book, The Body of Beatrice (1988) a study of the Vita Nuova, lay well within his wheelhouse as a Dante scholar; since then, however, Harrison has charted an increasingly idiosyncratic course as a thinker, a writer, and an educator––in the broadest sense of the word.
Harrison joined the faculty of Stanford in 1986 and became chair of the Department of French and Italian in 2002. He turned 70 this year and announced his retirement. (Andrea Capra’s tribute, part of at a day-long celebration of Harrison’s career at Stanford held on 19th April, was recently republished by 3 Quarks Daily.)
Harrison has written books at a steady clip, each beautifully written and finely wrought, combining intensely felt thought and erudition with quietly challenging daring. His subjects–the forest, the garden, the dead, our obsession with youth–might appear dauntingly bottomless. Yet Harrison’s style, a graceful inter-flowing of literary, philosophical and (increasingly in his recent work) scientific reference-points, gives the impression that one is both ascending and descending, reaching strange giddy heights while delving deep to the essential mysteries at the core of the matter in hand.
It’s the same style that marks the conversations and monologues of his radio show-cum-podcast, Entitled Opinions. I stumbled across an episode of Entitled Opinions sometime in 2020 on the iTunes Podcast app while looking for something about W.H. Auden. But the show has been broadcasting for almost 20 years, “down in the catacombs of KZSU” (Stanford’s local radio station) where, in Harrison’s phrase, “we practice the persecuted religion of thinking.” Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
Spring Killing, Redux
by Mike Bendzela
The week before Memorial Day, I’m back to my old tricks again, poisoning pests in my little orchard. It’s the period after petal fall, when the romance of bloom season gives way to the horrors of war. Commencing in mid-May in Maine, I walk among fruit trees amidst a profusion of blossoms; but by the end of the month, I lie awake at night worrying over a contingent of apple pests — I know I’m going to be busy for a few weeks. I’ve written previously about the trials of raising a species (Malus sieversii) originally from Kazakhstan in the ghastly climate of northern New England. The pests of the northeast — natives such as plum curculio and flatheaded appletree borer, and introduced invaders such as European sawfly and codling moth — have brilliantly adapted themselves to our New World orchards. You have to admire the intrepid little buggers for fulfilling their Darwinian duties so efficiently.
One cannot reach a truce with creatures whose brains are smaller than the tip of a pen. Plant a buffet of fruits that insects like — apples, pears, plums, and peaches — and don’t be surprised if they show up for the feast — in droves. And so, I must strap on a backpack sprayer, or hook a thirty-gallon tank to the back of my riding mower, and start killing. If I want table-quality heritage apples to sell to local markets, I have to resign myself to the equivalent of waging a napalm campaign against my arthropod companions. Does farming have to be like this, even on such a small scale? Must we slaughter our competitors? This question bugs me to no end. Read more »
Monday Photo
New growth, even on the evergreen trees, in the woods near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.
On the Road: Africa Offshore, Cape Town to the Red Sea
by Bill Murray
A nasty typhoon punished southeast Africa in early 2023. Cyclone Freddy dropped six months of rain in six days, killed 1400 and pounded the poor, overmatched region for thirty-eight long days. From its origins in the Indonesian archipelago, Freddy wound up across the entire breadth of the Indian Ocean before battering the continent, reversing course, then returning to do it again. It was the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded.
Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique almost never get good press. The modest coverage of last year’s hurricane that struck twice paled alongside coverage of a terror attack in 2021 in the northern Mozambican coastal town of Palma. Survivors recount an utterly harrowing siege, an attack so ferocious that French energy giant Total fled from its $20 billion liquified natural gas investment there, and operations have yet to resume.
Around 200 Black locals and 20 expat contractors found themselves holed up inside the Amarula Palma Hotel. Authorities called in South African private military company Dyck Advisory Group and, as Amnesty International described things,
After the majority of the white contractors and a few well-off Black nationals – among them the Administrator for Palma – were rescued, those left behind attempted to flee by ground convoy but were ambushed by ‘Al-Shabaab.’
This isn’t the better known Al-Shabaab, but rather a local and more rag-tag group loosely affiliated with other Islamic insurgents. Theirs is a shaky, patchwork ideology incorporating local grievances, like Total’s control over local mineral wealth.
Several countries, Angola, Botswana, Rwanda, South Africa maintain a peacekeeping presence in northern Mozambique now and low level fighting is still going on, 36 months later. The poor governance and political instability that give rise to insurgencies like these color the rest of our story. Read more »
Andrea Scrima’s LOOPY LOONIES At Kunsthaus Graz, Museum Joanneum, Austria
by Andrea Scrima
#1: SAYING NO
In the talk Judith Butler gave upon receiving the Adorno Prize in 2012, she asks: “Can one lead a good life in a bad life?” Her question springs from a conclusion Theodor W. Adorno formulated in Minima Moralia: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”). Years later, he speculated whether modern humans were already too damaged to live in a right world, should such a world ever come into being. Butler nonetheless asks if it’s morally permissible to “wish simply to live a good life in the midst of a bad life,” but concedes that it’s not so simple. It would seem that to pursue the “good” life, one must reject the “bad” life and everything it demands from us. Yet isn’t the term “the good life” already far too tainted by consumerism to be of any real use?
Let’s speak instead of a “true life” as opposed to a “false life.” But what is the nature of this undertaking, and what would the true life entail? The fact that we are interdependent and vulnerable beings presupposes a set of conditions required for even a minimally decent life: food, shelter, clothing, a halfway functioning society, some kind of livelihood. Butler reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s observation that it’s not enough to be alive, to merely survive—that for a life to be considered a life, it has to be lived with meaning and purpose.
Thus, our demand must be not merely for life, but for a liveable life. And yet our lives are not entirely in our hands; they are subject to political and economic structures that rob individuals and entire peoples of their agency and doom them to precarity, and often worse. In Problems of Moral Philosophy, Butler reminds us, Adorno asks “how the broader operations of power and domination enter into, or disrupt, our individual reflections on how best to live.” Read more »
Monday, May 27, 2024
The Frozen Trucker and the Fugitive Slave
by Barry Goldman
The “frozen trucker case” got a fair amount of attention a few years back. At Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing Senator Al Franken hammered him about it. You can watch it here. The facts of the case are these:
Alphonse Maddin was employed as a truck driver by Petitioner TransAm Trucking (“TransAm”). In January 2009, Maddin was transporting cargo through Illinois when the brakes on his trailer froze because of subzero temperatures. After reporting the problem to TransAm and waiting several hours for a repair truck to arrive, Maddin unhitched his truck from the trailer and drove away, leaving the trailer unattended. He was terminated for abandoning the trailer.
Maddin challenged his discharge in a proceeding before an Administrative Law Judge and won. TransAm appealed to the Administrative Review Board, and Maddin won again. TransAm then appealed to the Court of Appeals, which issued its decision in August of 2016, more than seven years after the incident.
The 10th Circuit found in Maddin’s favor, with Gorsuch in dissent. All that is water under the bridge. Today Gorsuch has a life appointment to the Supreme Court, and Franken is back in private life. But it is worth revisiting the case for what it can tell us about legal reasoning and judicial decision making. Read more »
The Large Language Turn: LLMs As A Philosophical Tool
by Jochen Szangolies
There is a widespread feeling that the introduction of the transformer, the technology at the heart of Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s various GPT-instances, Meta’s LLaMA or Google’s Gemini, will have a revolutionary impact on our lives not seen since the introduction of the World Wide Web. Transformers may change the way we work (and the kind of work we do), create, and even interact with one another—with each of these coming with visions ranging from the utopian to the apocalyptic.
On the one hand, we might soon outsource large swaths of boring, routine tasks—summarizing large, dry technical documents, writing and checking code for routine tasks. On the other, we might find ourselves out of a job altogether, particularly if that job is mainly focused on text production. Image creation engines allow instantaneous production of increasingly high quality illustrations from a simple description, but plagiarize and threaten the livelihood of artists, designers, and illustrators. Routine interpersonal tasks, such as making appointments or booking travel, might be assigned to virtual assistants, while human interaction gets lost in a mire of unhelpful service chatbots, fake online accounts, and manufactured stories and images.
But besides their social impact, LLMs also represent a unique development that make them highly interesting from a philosophical point of view: for the first time, we have a technology capable of reproducing many feats usually linked to human mental capacities—text production at near-human level, the creation of images or pieces of music, even logical and mathematical reasoning to a certain extent. However, so far, LLMs have mainly served as objects of philosophical inquiry, most notable along the lines of ‘Are they sentient?’ (I don’t think so) and ‘Will they kill us all?’. Here, I want to explore whether, besides being the object of philosophical questions, they also might be able to supply—or suggest—some answers: whether philosophers could use LLMs to elucidate their own field of study.
LLMs are, to many of their uses, what a plane is to flying: the plane achieves the same end as the bird, but by different means. Hence, it provides a testbed for certain assumptions about flight, perhaps bearing them out or refuting them by example. Read more »
Monday Poem
—“For all practical purposes a lie is as true
as the bias of its believer.” —Roshi Bob
Plum of a Lie
If I told you a lie
would you believe it?
….. Will it be a true lie? Will it
….. pierce my bias to the bone? Will it
….. meet my need?
Does that matter?
….. As sure as my world is flat, it does.
It would be a help then?
….. I cannot believe without a true lie
….. therefore, please tell me a plum of a lie,
….. gild it, make it sing, craft it so well
….. I’ll not know, have it swell,
….. have its juice challenge the
….. breadth of the universe
Shall I then?
….. Please, please—
.Jim Culleny,
3/27/18
Living Your Best Life?
by Martin Butler
The expression ‘Live your best life’ is very much in vogue. It appears more than 3 million times in Instagram posts, which are no doubt full of pictures of smiling attractive 20-somethings completing amazing sporting feats, strolling along glorious beaches or doing exciting things in exotic places. Working 12 shifts delivering parcels for Amazon presumably doesn’t make the grade. As with many other inspirational (or is it aspirational) sayings that pepper the internet, perhaps we should dismiss this expression as just part of the froth produced by internet influencers desperate for our attention. But what does its popularity say about our times? Let’s look beyond the predictable healthy lifestyle stuff and try to actually make sense of it as a philosophical idea. After all, if interpreted generously, it does have a certain philosophical pedigree.
To start with, what does best actually mean? It very much depends on how we view human beings. Regarded in a narrowly hedonic way, where the only things that matter are pleasure and pain, our best life would be one where we avoid as much pain and experience as much pleasure as possible. This is clearly implausible for many reasons, one being the conclusion of Nozick’s powerful thought experiment: few would regard their best life as being permanently hooked up to an ‘experience machine’ which eliminated pain and provided you with nothing but delightful pleasure. The passive experiencing of pleasure would not be enough. A best life surely requires that we participate in meaningful activities which lead to fulfilment and flourishing, a point which tends to lead to a more individualistic notion. Most people are roughly similar in terms of what they find pleasurable and painful; masochists excepted, human beings tend to find physical injury painful and sweet food pleasant. This is not the case, however, with regards to living a fulfilling life. I personally wouldn’t find a life dedicated to martial arts, rock climbing or running marathons fulfilling, but for many these activities are deeply fulfilling. So is there something distinctively modern about the individualism implicit in living your best life? Read more »
Latifa Echakhch. Taqsim, 2017.