James Barnor. Portrait, Accra, ca 1954.

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Thanks Aruna!

by Oliver Waters

Panic about runaway artificial super-intelligence spiked recently, with doomsayers like Eliezer Yudkowsy prophesising that, if current progress continues, literally everyone on Earth will die.

In a way, he’s right. Humanity will probably die out as technology progresses, but not quite in the depressing way he imagines. ‘Humanity’ after all, refers to two distinct things. The first is our biological species – homo sapiens. The second is our collective cultural existence – the beliefs, attitudes, and creations that make us truly who we are. Our biology is merely a platform for our humanities to dance upon, and it is a platform that transhumanists wish to eventually supersede.

If all goes well, we will design and build better bodies and neural systems that more seamlessly integrate with our information technologies. On this trajectory, there will be no grand dichotomy between humans and ‘Artificial General Intelligences’. All persons, whether descended from apes or designed in a lab, will be constantly upgrading their cognitive systems to be ever wiser and sturdier.

The first big step on this journey will involve scanning your brain for all relevant neural information, which would then be loaded into a synthetic brain, attached to a comfortable artificial body. Science fiction has already imagined the countless benefits of existing in such a digital, computational brain. Practical immortality is at the top of the list, given you can ‘download’ your backed-up state of mind into a new body if you happen to be hit by a train or are notoriously assassinated. Read more »

by Nate Sheff

Not long ago, I went to the Yale University Art Gallery and saw their collection of Egyptian art. Seeing the dates on some of the pieces, it occurred to me that I had never really considered just how old Egyptian civilization is. I looked up some historical events to get perspective, and learned that I am closer in time to the assassination of Julius Caesar (44 BCE, which is 2,066 years ago) than Julius Caesar was to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza (circa 2500 BCE, over 2,400 years before Caesar’s death). Caesar’s death is ancient history, and the building of the Great Pyramid is also ancient history, but – for the sake of perspective here – the Great Pyramid’s construction was also ancient for Julius Caesar. That’s how old Egyptian civilization is.

Four-and-a-half millennia is a long time on a human timescale, but not all timescales are human. A core sample from Methuselah, a bristlecone pine living – alive – in the White Mountains of California, shows the tree to be about 4,800-years-old. By the time they started building the Great Pyramid, Methuselah had already spent a couple centuries photosynthesizing on a mountainside, adding rings but not counting them.

Methuselah is the oldest known non-clonal tree. When we consider trees that can reproduce asexually, say, by growing new individuals from existing root systems, we find organisms like Pando, a colony of genetically-identical quaking aspens in Utah, estimated to be about 15,000-years-old. Pando had been alive for several thousand years before Göbekli Tepe, the site of the earliest known megaliths, appeared in Anatolia.

Think of how many generations of birds might have started their lives in Pando’s branches by then. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Varun Gauri

When Yiyun Li took questions about her new novel, The Book of Goose, at my local bookstore, someone said her new novel felt awfully dark. (I don’t remember the precise wording, though Yiyun might, as she sometimes offers people she has met briefly “a detailed account” of their encounter “out of mere mischief.”) Yiyun acknowledged the darkness, then offered an explanation — she was once a propagandist for the Chinese government, she was good at it, but now she hates propaganda, especially propaganda for life. 

There was an audible gasp in the audience, then silence. I suspect many were asking themselves if they could manage without propaganda for life. In my case, I felt called out. What are A Christmas Carol, one of my favorite books, and the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, another favorite, but propaganda for life?

The Book of Goose is the story of two French farm girls, Agnès and Fabienne. Fabienne’s older sister died in childbirth, her father is a drunk, and her mother has passed away, meaning Fabienne has to tend the farm rather than attend school. Agnès’ older brother was badly wounded in the war, her sisters have gone and married, and her parents are narrow-minded and conventional. The girls, poor and lonely, already know the world is “full of nonsense.”  Read more »

by Ed Simon

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is.
If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. —Augustine, Confessions (397)

Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once. —Richard Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom (1922)

Twenty-six years ago, on a late-afternoon, late-summer sojourn down Liverpool’s Bold Street, a High Street of dark pubs and record stores, Donner kebab counters and chip shops, Frank accidentally walked into 1965. On his idyl perambulations to meet up with his wife at Waterstone’s, where she was grabbing a copy of Trainspotting, and Frank noticed a different slant of light, an alteration in the atmosphere, a variation in the sounds from the street, a drop in temperature. The summer odor of warm beer and fetid air replaced with the crispness of Christmas time. Approaching the bookstore, the Cranberries blaring on the music system, and mid-tune it’s replaced with a tinny radio playing a Herman’s Hermits number. Bold Street’s pedestrians were no longer wearing Oasis and Blur t-shirts, now they were men in boating jackets and mop tops, women in Halston dresses and pixie cuts. The road no longer paved, but cobblestoned. Frank noted that the Waterstone’s façade was now of a shop named “Cripps,” a woman’s clothing store that had been on this spot but closed decades before. Just as he crossed the threshold, and Cripps was abruptly transformed back into a bookstore. Misapprehension, misconception, misinterpretation? Hallucination or hoax? Vortex or ghosts? As paranormal writer Rodney Davies helpfully opines in Time Slips: Journeys into the Past and Future, “One theory state that past, present, and future are all one… But our limited consciousness can only experience time by being in what we know as ‘the present.’” Mayhap.

If you are the sort who absent-mindedly scrolls through accounts of the occult with dubious provenance, or as has spent innumerable hours listening to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast A.M., if you’ve ever heard of “John Titor” and wanted to believe, then you may already be familiar with Frank’s temporal flickering in the “Liverpool Time Slip.” Not the only such anomalies – there are accounts of tourists coming upon Marie Antoinette’s retinue while at Versailles and of guests in Cornish manor houses wandering into the seventeenth-century, backroad drivers in Arizona overtaken by futuristic vehicles and London streets destroyed by the Luftwaffe restored to pre-war completeness. Read more »

A stationary passenger train behind and between two cars of a moving cargo train, at the train station in Bozen, South Tyrol.

by Mike Bendzela

“What genre do you play in, Mike?”

“Old time.”

“That’s rather vague, isn’t it?”

[An actual conversation.]

Old time music (some write “old-time” or “oldtime”) is where my interests in rural American folk history, cultural evolution, and language-play come together to form a most satisfying way to lay waste to time. Yes, old time is a thing.

At the end of the last century, at the age of 39 and seemingly without conscious volition, I rented a violin. I thought I wanted to be a “bluegrass” player. I was so naive I had to ask the clerk at the music rental store, Is the fiddle the same as the violin?

The answer is, Yes, but no. Turns out, I wasn’t actually interested in playing no stinkin’ bluegrass violin. This requires some explanation.

The radio station at the local university where I work used to have a program called “Lost Highway,” which featured old country music: folk, old time, honky-tonk, all of which I thought of as “bluegrass.” Some of this bluegrass I liked; some of it I found extremely irritating. I had yet to learn the fine distinctions among genres. But some of this music was enchanting, haunting, primeval.

Then, in 2002, I swung by The Appalachian String Band Festival (“Clifftop”) at Camp Washington-Carver, in the West Virginia mountains, on the way back to Maine after a family reunion with some relatives in Kentucky. I tend toward social avoidance and usually don’t go to such places, but Clifftop turned out to be a road-to-Damascus moment for me: At last, I had found my genre—and, presumably, my people. When I expressed my amazement over lunch to an Asian-America fiddler and software developer sitting at a picnic table with me, he enthused, “Start listening to Bruce Greene!” I was on my way to learning a new language. The timing was perfect: my ambitions of being a fiction writer had quietly crashed, and I was seeking something redemptive to do. Finding old time was like being handed a loaf of crusty bread after a ten-year diet of wet sawdust. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

Oh, where were you in Chicago?
You know I didn’t see you there
I didn’t see them crack your head
Or breathe the tear gas air
Oh, where were you in Chicago
When the fight was being fought?
Oh, where were you in Chicago?
‘Cause I was in Detroit

Where were you in Chicago? —Written and performed by Phil Ochs.

When I heard that Chicago will host the 2024 Democratic National Convention next August, (August 19-22,) it brought back a flood of memories. Memories, not only of the convention itself, but of the 60’s. “The 60’s” did not exactly span the decade but began in 1963 , when John F Kennedy was shot, and ended in 1975, when the war in Vietnam ended. During this relatively short period, our country went through a large number of societal changes, including political changes, changes in gender stereotypes, in racial interactions, in acceptable speech, in sexual mores. This was the time when we Baby Boomers came of age, when the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1954, began to flex their muscles and recognize how much they could accomplish, and what a loud voice they had when acting as a group. For example, they influenced clothing styles and music. They had tremendous purchasing power, as most of the clothing for sale after the 60’s was more appropriate for a-19–year-old than for a 40 or 50- year old American!

I am a Boomer, and I turned 18 in 1968. High school graduation was behind me, and I was looking forward to college in October at University of Chicago. The summer was fun.

I had a part-time job in an office, so the hours were short and I had plenty of time to go to the beach or to socialize in the long, hot summer evenings of the Midwest. My boyfriend, Greg, enjoyed driving, so he took me around the city a lot. I had a good friend who was volunteering for McGovern’ campaign. We Boomers supported McGovern because he was anti-war– which seemed to be the most important quality a candidate needed to get this the votes of our large block. Although quite frankly I was always more interested in feminist issues. Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

Do you watch TV with subtitles, even when watching something in your native language? I never used to, but over the past 10 years or so, it started to feel more and more necessary, and now if I try to watch something without them, I inevitably miss a few bits of dialogue and it drives me crazy. It’s not just when characters speak sotto voce or very quickly (although witty, fast-paced shows like Gilmore Girls virtually demand to be watched with subtitles for that very reason). Even dialogue that’s meant to be at normal speaking speed and volume sometimes just doesn’t sound as clear as it should. 

When I came across a recent piece by Devin Gordon in The Atlantic titled “Why Is Everyone Watching TV With the Subtitles On?” my interest was piqued. When I mentioned the article to my husband, his response was, “Oh, good, is it going to talk about how you can’t hear dialogue clearly in TV shows anymore?” 

What I expected was an insightful analysis of audio trends in the film industry over the past few years and maybe some corporate shenanigans on the part of the streaming companies (more on that in a bit), but what I got was…complaining about millennials? Yes, that’s right, the article began by blaming the prevalence of subtitles on millennials.  Read more »

(Known Miniscule) + (Unknown Immense) is . . .

before the sun rose, they rose,
they were soft-spoken to shadows
so as not to stir them

they let blood and would sometimes sweat and spit.
when shadows were too cruel. they prayed for light

tree’s sunlit shadow: big trunk moves in wind
limb dangling, brushes asphalt

ah! Matryoshkas, nesting shadows easily swallowing
tiny others,
……………….huge devours small
shadow peas in a shell-game of
ballooning unknowns in onion-like layers of doubt
balanced upon a fulcrum, at rest in a dissatisfying
but absolute equation:

(the known-miniscule) + (the unknown-immense)
are ever balanced
…………………………………………………………………………  So,

Jim Culleny
©11/15/15-Rev. /6/25/23

by Joseph Shieber

In “The Bizarre Bad Criticisms of Our Merit Paper,” a recent blog post in defense of the “Defense of Merit in Science” paper, the Rutgers psychology professor Lee Jussim doubles down on the conflation of “merit” with “objective truth.”

For example, in highlighting what he takes to be an underlying logical incoherence of criticisms of the “Merit” paper, Jussim writes this:

Anyone who believes the critics [sic] claims have merit (including the critics themselves) implicitly accepts our central argument that science has to be judge [sic] on its merits, even if they pose as critiques of our paper.

And this:

It is impossible for there to be no scientific merit and for the claim that there is no scientific merit to … have merit.

The problem is that there is a difference between saying that scientific CLAIMS should stand and fall on their merits and that scientists’ success should be determined by their merits. The former statement has to do with standards of evidence and objective truth. The latter statement, in contrast, has to do with qualities of scientific researchers correlated with advancing science, as well as with our confidence in our abilities accurately to assess those qualities.

It shouldn’t need stressing, but perhaps it does. What makes a statement or claim meritorious – its originality, interest, truth-likelihood, etc. – is different than what makes a PERSON meritorious. One obvious difference, of particular importance given Jussim’s own focus on objective truth, is that PERSONS aren’t truth-evaluable.  Read more »

by Jochen Szangolies

In the previous column, I wrote about how forces originate from quantum mechanics, using the electric force as an example. Rather than being caused by ‘virtual’ particles being tossed back and forth, which is a picture that seems alluringly intuitive, but ultimately misleads more than it clarifies, a better way is to think in terms of the most characteristic feature of quantum mechanics: interference. Quantum objects, you recall, may appear as particle-like dots upon measurement (say, causing a tiny dark spot on a photographic plate), but are best described in a wave-like manner otherwise. And, while particles can only pile up, waves can both reinforce each other and cancel out, which leads to the familiar pattern of interference.

Interference is most often discussed in terms of the double slit experiment, where, say, electrons are aimed at two narrow, nearby apertures, and, rather than just piling up behind each slit, produce a picture of bands of greater and lesser intensity. But in fact, interference isn’t just important in the quantum realm in the course of clever experiments in which scientists try to get the quanta to identify, once and for all, as wave or particle, only to be frustrated by their refusal. In an often quoted heuristic, suppose what happens if one particle is sent to an aperture with three slits, or four, or five, or more than one aperture: each time, you have to sum the contributions along each possible path to obtain the final intensity at any possible end point of its journey. But once you take that process to the limit, where you have ‘slits everywhere’, at every point in space, you find you can still use that same prescription: sum up the contribution of every possible path, to obtain the intensity (or the probability of finding the particle) at each final point. Thus, we were led to Feynman’s ‘sum over paths’-picture of quantum mechanics. Read more »

Demas Nwoko. Dominican C Church, Ibadan, Nigeria, 1970’s.

More here and here.

by Ada Bronowski

Nanni Moretti has always been a melancholic in denial. Perhaps more than any other film-director raised on the French New Wave – born in 1953, shooting his first short in 1973 – Moretti has been turning around the question that François Truffaut posed as a key to the seventh art: is cinema more important than life? But where for Truffaut, or Rossellini, as for many amongst their long and glorious lineage (from Spielberg to Tran Anh Hung) the dilemma has been between a painful reality full of obstacles on one side and a ‘harmonious’ path where ‘there are no traffic jams’ (to speak like Truffaut in his 1973 Day for Night), on the other – in other words, where cinema is the path of escape towards a world where dreams (or nightmares) come true – for Moretti, it is the dilemma itself which is the essence of cinema.

Film is a fact not a possibility. As such, the world of film-making, from its fabrication to the way “these people” are and speak is part of everyday life. In a Moretti film, it is completely normal for the characters to walk down a street and pass by a film crew setting up for a shoot, to comment on it, walk in and out of a scene.  Films in the film are the norm: sometimes we see the shoot and sometimes we hear a shoot is taking place. With Moretti, what is in the frame and what is out of the frame is always arranged so as to give us the impression of mere chance: when we see in the frame first a group of high school kids plotting to occupy their school (and therefore think the occupation is the drama) in Ecce Bombo (Moretti’s second film from 1978), and then realise, because the camera moved back a little, that the older brother of one of the kids, played by Moretti himself, is staring at the group barely hidden behind the door, only to then, through a further retreat of the camera, see that Moretti’s father is standing behind him watching his son watching his sister, it is a whole new philosophy of the camera that is put in place. A philosophy whose axiom is that the unframed life is not worth living, by Socrates-the-Cameraman. Read more »

by Brooks Riley