by Sarah Firisen

Science fiction has always run the gamut from extreme prescience on one end to paranoid fantastical delusions at the other, and everything in between. But it has always done more than merely try to predict future technologies, it has played its part in our imagining of the future. From the imaginations of writers and filmmakers spring fantastical creations that generations of science and tech geeks dedicate themselves to making a reality – there may be no better example of this than the fervor around creating Marty McFly’s hoverboard from Back to the Future. And while there is a very long list of fictional universes that have clearly inspired generations of scientists, maybe none has had quite such a direct and sustained impact as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash has had on the envisioning, creation and even lexicon of virtual and augmented reality. The impact is so clear that Stephenson was stalked by the founders of the extremely hyped but uber secretive augmented reality firm Magic Leap and was eventually persuaded to join them as their Chief Futurist. Stephenson even coined the terms avatar and metaverse in his rather dark tale of a pretty dystopian early 21st century.

Actual virtual reality technology has been around maybe 20 years or more in one form or another. But it’s really only in the last few years that a perfect storm of cheap and plentiful data storage, extreme advances in computing power, and perhaps most opportunely, the rise in quality and drop in cost of tiny hi-res screens thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, has meant that finally, despite many false starts, we may be on the cusp of realizing a level of virtual and augmented reality that may come close to Stephenson’s vision.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Wisdom is a product of experience and reflection. As a consequence, it's often quite a long road to that goal. It's for this reason that the poetic expression, "the Owl of Minerva Flies at Dusk," has its effect. Only at the end of the day, once the work is done and we recline in thought, do the insights of what we ought to have done, what the best option was, and what was wrong about a particular decision become clear. We live forward, but we understand backward. And that can occasion distinctive problems.

In democratic politics, this point about insight is certainly true. And it extends not only to the errors we may make as a country, but also to the errors we make in understanding ourselves and our decision-making. In its current form, much democratic theory is focused on the decision-making and argumentative elements of modern political life. This deliberative democratic movement casts democratic life as that of participating in ongoing discussions, wherein all have a voice, no issue is beyond question, and every decision must be justifiable to all those whom it effects. There are admirable ideals, but we understand the ways we can fail those ideals only in making mistakes, only in witnessing the pathologies to which public reason is prone.

We experience living in a democracy and then we see the particular kinds of challenges and errors to which reasoning together can be prone. Perhaps we should have anticipated the effects of group polarization that seem to define contemporary political discourse, but we understand it all too well now that we live under its conditions. The incurious dogmatism of epistemic closure, the slippery euphemism of Orwellian Newspeak, and the abuses of and visceral reactions to political correctness are all political phenomena that require we see as developments from histories and arising within particular social settings. We do now know them a priori.

The Owl of Minerva Problem at first looks like a simple point about the retrospective nature of knowledge: You must first have experience to know, so knowledge must be dependent on (at least some) events of the past. But the Owl of Minerva Problem raises distinctive trouble for our politics, especially when politics is driven by argument and discourse. Here is why: once we have a critical concept, say, of a fallacy, we can deploy it in criticizing arguments. We may use it to correct an interlocutor. But once our interlocutors have that concept, that knowledge changes their behavior. They can use the concept not only to criticize our arguments, but it will change the way they argue, too. Moreover, it will also become another thing about which we argue. And so, when our concepts for describing and evaluating human argumentative behavior is used amidst those humans, it changes their behavior. They adopt it, adapt to it. They, because of the vocabulary, are moving targets, and the vocabulary becomes either otiose or abused very quickly.

Consider the use of fallacy vocabulary less as a device for the cool evaluation of arguments, now, but rather as a tool of evasion or attack.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

While laying in bed on the night of January 20, 1884, Lewis Carroll conjured up the following puzzle:

Three Points are taken at random on an infinite Plane. Find the chance of their being the vertices of an obtuse-angled Triangle.

That is, since any three points on a sheet of paper can be connected to form a triangle, what's the likelihood that one of the angles is more than ninety degrees if you pick those points at random?

If you only know Lewis Carroll from Alice in Wonderland you may be surprised that his thoughts turned to mathematics. In fact, his day job was to be a mathematician at Christ Church college in Oxford under the name Charles Dodgson. In addition to his more famous works of fiction, he was known for writing several mathematical texts. When teaching linear algebra I always take a day to talk about Dodgson Condensation [1].

Lewis Carroll working on a pillow problem.

One of the books he wrote is Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow Problems Thought Out During Wakeful Hours. It is the compendium of 72 math problems Dodgson pondered and solved while waiting to fall asleep. Helpfully he also gives the date he dreamt up the problem and the solution he devised. Go here if you'd like to take a look at the other 71 problems.

The Obtuse Triangle Problem is No. 58. Before we take a look at his solution we should step back a minute. What does it mean to pick three points at random? Like most politicians' speeches, it sounds good but falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. Are we to pick x and y coordinates for each of these points? Alternatively, we could pick an angle between 0 and 360 degrees and a distance and, starting at the origin, take the point at that angle and distance. Or, since all we care about is the resulting triangle, maybe we should randomly pick an angle between 0 and 180 degrees, pick two side lengths at random, and make the triangle made by drawing two sides of those lengths with that angle between them. I'm sure we could come up with a dozen different ways to randomly pick a triangle.

If a random triangle was a random triangle, and if the world was fair and just, then the odds of an obtuse triangle would be the same regardless of our method. Sadly, the world is neither fair nor just. It will matter how we choose to pick a random triangle [2].

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“The woolly mammoth vanished from the Earth 4,000 years ago,
but now scientists say they are on the brink of resurrecting the ancient
beast in a revised form, through an ambitious feat of genetic engineering.”
— Hannah Devlin inThe Guardian

Lazarus

If the wooly mammoth becomes the new Lazarus
reborn from an ice sarcophagus
does it mean that we may all return one day
to beat our breasts at the injustice of death
but also to rejoice in miracles? It’s an
honest question, we’ve been asking it
for generations, yet it’s never been answered
but in myth, the story that elevates ignorance
to poetry, that blazes red trails in pigment,
that ends up only as sublime music to our ears,
elusive, illusory as the apparition of tomorrow

But we still have this day
It seems never to end

Jim Culleny
2/21/17

by Jalees Rehman

The Affordable Care Act, also known as the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", "Obamacare" or the ACA, is a comprehensive healthcare reform law enacted in March 2010 which profoundly changed healthcare in the United States. This reform allowed millions of previously uninsured Americans to gain health insurance by establishing several new measures, including the expansion of the federal Medicaid health insurance coverage program, introducing the rule that patients with pre-existing illnesses could no longer be rejected or overcharged by health insurance companies, and by allowing dependents to remain on their parents' health insurance plan until the age of 26. The widespread increase in health insurance coverage – especially for vulnerable Americans who were unemployed, underemployed or worked for employers that did not provide health insurance benefits – was also accompanied by new regulations targeting the healthcare system itself. Healthcare providers and hospitals were provided with financial incentives to introduce electronic medical records and healthcare quality metrics.

As someone who grew up in Germany where health insurance coverage is guaranteed for everyone, I assumed that over time, the vast majority of Americans would appreciate the benefits of universal coverage. One no longer has to fear financial bankruptcy as a consequence of a major illness and a government-back health insurance also provides for peace of mind when changing jobs. Instead of accepting employment primarily because it offers health benefits, one can instead choose a job based on the nature of the work. But I was surprised to see the profound antipathy towards this new law, especially among Americans who identified themselves as conservatives or Republicans, even if they were potential beneficiaries of the reform. Was the hatred of progressive-liberal views, the Democrats and President Obama who had passed the ACA so intense among Republicans that they were willing to relinquish the benefits of universal health coverage for the sake of their political ideology? Or were they simply not aware of the actual content of the law and opposed it simply for political reasons?

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by Brooks Riley

To paraphrase Heinrich Heine, I dream of Weimar in the night—not the era, but the town of Weimar, a lovely word on its own, one steeped in intellectual significance, historical resonance, cultural audacity, political and artistic enlightenment, philosophical bravura–and in modern times monstrous atrocity.

I remember the first time I heard the word Weimar. It wasn’t that small town in Germany where Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Liszt, Luther, Cranach, Bach, Wagner, Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, Strauss, Schopenhauer and countless other thinkers and artists once lived–or even where Kafka on a visit fell in love with the daughter of the caretaker of Goethe’s house.

It wasn’t the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement. It wasn’t the place where the new German constitution was signed in 1919 launching the legendary Weimar Republic, that glittering era of promise before the darkness fell. And it wasn’t the town closest to the murderous concentration camp at Buchenwald.

It was our Weimaraner, a hunting dog my father acquired to quell his thirst for a canine to tip the balance in a feline household. But Tonndorf, named for the castle a few miles from Weimar where my father, Artillery Commander of the 6^th Armored Division had quartered with his regiment at the end of World War 2, wasn’t allowed in our household, and was banished to the stable with the horses, where he spent hours hoping to catch a rat coming out of a hole in the earthen floor of a stall, successful only once in all his years, when an emerging rat took a wrong turn and landed in his maw.

Weimaraners were exotic in the mid-Fifties. They hadn’t been discovered by William Wegman or immortalized in the Museum of Modern Art. What I remember best about Tonndorf was the color of his coat, my favorite color, taupe. Taupe is the color gray with a smile, a hint of warmth that seeps through the sober neutrality of lightened black. I never think of Weimar without somehow seeing taupe, and when I look at Goethe’s color wheel, I can’t help wishing he had added that smile.

It would be many years before I actually went to Weimar, years before I began to understand the subterranean currents that would lead me there. So many interests of mine had their genesis in Weimar or were inextricably entwined with it. In college, a term paper of mine dealt with Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy, which was written and premiered there. In it, I posited that Schiller might have foreseen the dangers of Napoleon, and had written Wallenstein as a parable. Ironically, Weimar later briefly fell to Napoleon.

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by Katalin Balog

"As he died to make man holy, let us die to make things cheap." –Leonard Cohen, "Steer your way"

In this article I use a distinction borrowed from philosophy, between objectivity and subjectivity, to look at the nature of the Trump presidency. I explicated that distinction in more detail in some earlier posts here, here and here.

For all the ridiculousness of our president there is a whiff of the devil about him – by monumental bad luck, America has managed to elect a person embodying the worst of human nature. He combines thoughtlessness and utter disregard for standards of objectivity and reason with the soullessness and banality of reality TV run amok. Despite real parallels with 1930s Europe and more recent autocratic regimes across the world, the Trump era also offers novelty; it is its own, unique brand of awfulness, made in America.

In trying to grasp Trump's uniqueness, many commentators resort to psychology. In this essay, I want to propose a more philosophical perspective, a sort of psycho-philosophical approach that, in my view, allows one to appreciate better the psychic vortex that sucks up and annihilates anything of value around Trump. He is the inverse Midas: everything he touches turns immediately into junk. Business, entertainment, social media and now our national politics – very little is safe from his seeping menace. Kierkegaard's philosophy offers some clues to understanding this situation.

Kierkegaard suggested that the mind oscillates between two primary perspectives on the world: objective and subjective – and that the relationship between these approaches determines what kind of a person we are going to be. Objectivity is an orientation towards reality based on abstracting away, in various degrees, from subjective experience, and from individual points of view. An objective approach is based on concepts and modes of thinking about the world that is accessible from many different points of view. A subjective orientation, on the other hand, is based on an attunement and direct reflection on the inner experience of feeling, sensing, thinking and valuing that unfolds in our day-to-day living. It is the difference between an abstract, objective conception of water as a potable liquid that is also found in lakes, rivers and oceans, and the subjective concept of it based on what it is like to drink it or swim in it on this particular day in this particular place. Objective and subjective, of course, comes in degrees. Scientific concepts are the most objective but many of our everyday concepts are also of the more objective variety. The most subjective conceptions are those that arise in direct reflection on experience.

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by Amanda Beth Peery

In Pliny the Elder's Natural History, he describes a fourth-century BC painter, Apelles of Kos, as superior to all other painters. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Apelles "continues to be regarded as the greatest painter of antiquity even though none of his work survives." How is it possible that the artist seen as the greatest painter of all of antiquity is one who left no surviving works? One possibility is that his fame has been expanded by myth and time, and with no works left to show the truth, his skills have been inflated beyond their due. That's probably true, but I believe there's another, more legitimate reason for Apelles' reputation. Apelles' art—often conveyed through the descriptions of ancient writers like Pliny—has engendered other art. One way of measuring the greatness of a work of art is to ask whether it gives rise to other works, or to say it differently, whether or not it inspires.

Apelles of Kos was the court painter of Macedon under Alexander the Great. Pliny recounts various stories about him, many of them gems. In one, Apelles comes to Egypt, then ruled by one of the Ptolemies (the first Ptolemy, I think) whom Apelles once knew. A court jester invites Apelles to a feast at the royal palace, but unbeknownst to Apelles, Ptolemy has long harbored a hatred for the artist and the pharaoh is enraged to see him at the feast. Ptolemy commands Apelles to tell him who invited him. Apelles, who never knew or doesn't remember the jester's name, picks up a piece of charcoal from the cold hearth and begins to draw the jester's face on the palace wall. Within just a stroke (or two), Ptolemy recognizes his jester. Apelles has captured the jester with just a single line.

Apelles is famed not only for his superior skill but also for his dedication to his art. Pliny attributes to Apelles the phrase "nulla dies sine linea," or "not a day without a line," because the artist worked every day. Apelles exemplified the artist's lifestyle and was so respectable and respected that he could speak out against Alexander the Great himself. In one story, Alexander is sitting for a portrait expounding his theories on art, going on at length, until the artist quietly begs him to stop because the boys grinding the colors will laugh at him. We don't know what Alexander was saying, but by stopping him, Apelles—in his innocence—asserted the artist's superior knowledge of the craft and maybe even the way of seeing and ways of creating that artists are able to access. Alexander, who had been tutored by Aristotle (who was tutored in turn by Plato, who was tutored by Socrates) cannot rival Apelles'—or the color-grinding boys'—intimate knowledge and experience of art. In this story Apelles rejects the very sources of knowledge in the West. He is insisting that there is another type of knowledge. Or he is insisting, at least, that there are other things to know.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The ghost that lurks around the old Bombay Company bookshelf is the ghost of an elliptical future, trailing the past like a spectacular, burning, comet-tail. It is the wispy energy of my own half-dreamed, half-written book that hovers over the rows of books I use for research, mostly works of history and poetry. After a night of writing, I have finally met my deadline. The life-size mirror leaning in the corner shows a pale face, preoccupied with time; my work is to not forget the past, and to call to poetry what may be forgotten. I am now searching for a book for remembrance, a book by the American Sufi poet Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore. I want to honor this poet whose work I consider a beacon and who is now saying his goodbyes, dying of cancer. I am flailing for time, mine, his, and ours as poets, especially as Muslim poets living through times of brutal daily deaths. Weeks from now, earthly time will stop for him, moments from now, time will slow down for me, indefinitely.

The bookshelf phantom is poised to make projectiles of treasured objects— a miniature Chinese cabinet and framed Turkish calligraphic art on an easel— heavy objects that will slide down and cause multiple concussions and head/neck trauma. I am stunned but remain conscious, not bleeding but suddenly fatigued. It is ironic that one of the objects is Turkish— I had met Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore and his wife Malika at the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival where he and I were both awarded the Hikmet Poetry Prize, where I recognized kindred souls in both Daniel and Malika and found a reservoir of inspiration and made lifelong friends at the Turkish House in Cary, NC. Despite the shock of the accident, I feel the surge of a promise, a kind of reassurance.

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by Misha Lepetic

There's a certain kind of conversation in which I find myself every so often, which can roughly be summarized as "What's the big deal about DJing"? As someone who was a quasi-professional DJ in a former life, and is currently what one friend terms a 'monastic DJ', I've sensed a substantial gap in lay understanding of not just what a DJ does while engaged in the act of mixing, but also the place occupied by DJs in the contemporary musical ecosystem. This attitude — not unlike looking at a Jackson Pollock while muttering to yourself that you could do just as well — has received further support from the rise and fall of the spectacularly excessive (and, to my ears, creatively bankrupt) EDM scene; the unholy marriage of superstar DJs, casino-based clubs and overpriced bottle service; and the fact that watching someone DJ is fundamentally uninteresting.

Is there any value in mixing other people's music? When viewed from the most reductive position, the answer is clearly not. As critic David Hepworth noted in a now-deleted blog post, "You must surely realise that you make your living by putting on records, which is only a tiny bit removed in degree of difficulty from switching on the radio." If that's all that DJs are good for, then I suppose it's a relief that streaming services and software-driven playlists have come along to put this particular horse-and-buggy paradigm out of its misery.

Instead, it's more helpful to look at the larger role that DJs play in parsing the ocean of music in which we swim in these post-Napster days. Just as we turn to critics in other fields to understand what we should be reading or watching, we also turn to DJs for clarity on what to listen to. In this sense, the appropriate metaphor is one of the DJ as tastemaker.

In order to talk about how a DJ guides others' taste in music, we have to address the DJ's own, internal process. Over time, a DJ is a collector, a curator and an editor. Of course, being a DJ involves inhabiting all three of these roles at the same time, all the time, but there is also a progression here. I'll go over each of these and then return to what it means to be a tastemaker at the end of this post.

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by Katrin Trüstedt

Fundamental questions of migration and asylum that determine contemporary political debates also take center stage in some contemporary theaters. On the German speaking stage, Asylum seekers have made a lasting impact that gave rise to recent controversial discussions. Announcing his latest book, professor at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch Bernd Stegemann claimed that the impact of the "refugees on stage" marks a problematic turn towards authenticity. It implies, according to him, a form of banishing mimetic art from the stage on which no fictive world is emerging anymore. In line with several "new realisms" and a dominance of documentary forms, refugees are put on the stage as "real human beings" that are supposedly just "being themselves." Stegemann understands this as a takeover by a performative art form that not only expels mimetic art from the theater, but in his view also furthers a new populism with its claim for authenticity.

This diagnosis underestimates the complex conditions and reflective potential of the contemporary stage. A play like Elfriede Jelinek's The Charges (the Supplicants) does not take the appearance of "real people" for granted. Rather, it explores the question what it means to enter a stage, to make an appearance, and to take on or receive a role, even "as oneself." And it highlights especially what it means to appear as a "stateless," in the double sense of being without state and being without status. Not only any claim for authenticity is very much up for debate here, but the very foundations of mimetic as well as of performative art is being explored. In Jelinek's text, the question of asylum on the one hand, and the very nature of the theater on the other are fundamentally linked.

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Things We Learn

Things come to us
out of nowhere

they come

Surfers riding waves
we learn the nuances of gravity
its center-of, its bonding property,
its Gs, its fatal promise, we learn
how to stand erect and,
for the most part, stay that way
learn how to take a fall
how to shuck and jive
through sticky moments
through disequilibrium to stoop
or, chest out, stand tall
falling even into the troughs of its waves
we ride, we glide skulls full of juice
snapping, crackling through calculations
needed to adjust, adjust
we learn to know the force of the wave
behind, its feel, learn to fear and not to,
to not let its immensity in terror lock us,
to knock us off our board, we learn
immediately where our feet should be,
the optimal pose, how to shift without thought,
to enter the exhilaration of a barrel
and ride despite threat of a lethal dive
to surface sane, with soul intact, alive

Jim Culleny
2/18/17

by Paul Braterman

Evolution has nothing to do with progress. Most evolution doesn't even have anything to do with adaptation, and it is perfectly possible for a change that is worse than useless to spread through a population. Paradoxically, however, such non-adaptive change may be a necessary prelude for major adaptations.

This post was inspired by a recent opinion piece (open access here¹) in BMC Biology, entitled "Splendor and misery of adaptation, or the importance of neutral null for understanding evolution" (I will explain what "neutral null" means later). The paper itself is in parts highly technical, with 86 references to the original scientific literature, but I will try here to give a general overview of some of the main conclusions, and to place them in context.

Darwin and Wallace both thought that evolution was driven by selection. If so, then whenever we find a feature in an organism, it makes sense to ask what function it serves. The function may for example be help in survival (natural selection, in the narrowest sense of the term), or help in obtaining mating opportunities (sexual selection).

L: The recurrent laryngeal nerve passing under the aortic arch. Illustration by Jkwchui after Truthseeker-2004, via Wikipedia

Because the evolution of a species is constrained by its history, there will be features that are themselves non-adaptive, but come about as side-effects of more important adaptive changes. Such incidental maladaptions include the tortuous paths of major nerves and arteries, which have arisen as the unwanted by-product of changes in body plan since our fish-like ancestors. One well-known example is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which loops under the aorta near the heart and back up again on its way from the cranium to the larynx and oesophagus. In a fish, its path is more or less a straight line, but as the heart has moved down in the body, and the aorta with it, the nerve has been forced into this contorted pathway.

Likewise, we can expect to find vestigial organs, which once had a function, and are now redundant, but have not yet completely disappeared. An example is the pelvis of the whale, inherited from its four-legged ancestors. Such vestigial organs often acquire secondary functions, in the phenomenon known as exaptation. The bones in the mammalian ear, related to bones in a reptile's flexible jaw, illustrate this. [Insert diagrams: whale pelvis; jaw-to-ear] And indeed whales use their pelvis and femur relics in sexual embraces.

R: Sperm whale with drawing of skeleton, NOAA via Wikipedia

Adaptationism is the view that all aspects of an organism are, directly or indirectly, the result of selection. So every feature needs to be explained, either in terms of its own function, or as an incidental relic or side-effect of more directly functional features. This is a natural enough assumption, but like all assumptions it requires justification. Otherwise it is merely a "Just So" story.

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by Yohan J. John

As a neuroscientist, I am frequently asked about consciousness. In academic discourse, the celebrated problem of consciousness is often divided into two parts: the "Easy Problem" involves identifying the processes in the brain that correlate with particular conscious experiences. The "Hard Problem" involves murkier questions: what are conscious experiences, and why do they exist at all? This neat separation into Easy and Hard problems, which comes courtesy the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, seems to indicate a division of labor. The neuroscientists, neurologists and psychologists can, at least in principle, systematically uncover the neural correlates of consciousness. Most of them agree that calling this the "Easy Problem" somewhat underestimates the theoretical and experimental challenges involved. It may not be the Hard Problem, but at the very least it's A Rather Hard Problem. And many philosophers and scientists think that the Hard Problem may well be a non-problem, or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein might have said, the kind of problem that philosophers typically devise in order to maximize unsolvability.

One might assume that as a neuroscientist, I should be gung-ho to prove the imperious philosophers wrong, and to defend the belief that science can solve any sort of problem one might throw at it: hard, soft, or half-baked. But I have become increasingly convinced that science is severely limited in what it can say about consciousness. In a very important sense, consciousness is invisible to science.

The word "consciousness" means different things to different people, so it might help to cover some of the typical ways its used. The most objective notion of consciousness arises in the world of medicine. We don't usually require a degree in philosophy to tell when a person is conscious and when they are unconscious. The conscious/unconscious distinction is only loosely related to subjective experience: we say a person is unconscious if they are unresponsive to stimuli. These stimuli may come from outside the body, or from the still-mysterious wellspring of dreams.

But the interesting thing about any "medical" definition of consciousness is that it evolves with technology.

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