Tree in winter in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by William Benzon

On the one hand, nothing has changed since August 2020, when I wrote GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons. I argued that, yes, GPT-3 marks a major technological breakthrough, one that may transform the way we live. But this technology is not sufficient. It is not deep enough. If we’re not careful, we’re going to crash and burn, like machine translation did in the mid-1960s, and like classical AI did in the mid-1980s (the so-called AI Winter).

I still believe that, though the tech industry seems to have decided that we pretty much know what we need. We just need more of it. Lots more.

It’s not as though nothing has happened since 2020. ChatGPT blew us all away late in 2022. We’ve now got specialized engines for protein folding, predicting the weather 15 years out, and who knows what else. Machine learning won two Nobel Prizes in 2024, Geoffrey Hinton in physics and David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper in chemistry. But the underlying technology is the same as it was four years ago. We’ve just become more adept at exploiting it.

In another sense, however, everything has changed. And least for me. When ChatGPT came out I dove in feet first, using it to analyze Steven Spielberg’s Jaws using the ideas of Rene Girard. I initiated a systematic research program designed to elicit clues about what’s going on under the hood, and I reported some initial results here in 3 Quarks Daily. I also laughed myself silly doing some crazy sh*t, like jamming with ChatGPT about the Jolly Green Giant and a cast of 1000s – well, maybe not 1000s, but you get the idea. I worked like the dickens and had fun.

Then in late November, 2024, I decided I needed to try a new chatbot. I’d heard that the cool kids liked Anthropic’s Claude so I decided to give it a try. First, I verified some of the work I’d done with ChatGPT. Then I decided to load Claude with the complete text of Heart of Darkness, from ancient Rome through London to Belgium over the Atlantic up and down the Congo back to London ending with the Buddha. In no time it was able to produce a good summary of the text. Sweet! Just before he dies, Kurtz (one of two central characters) utters: “My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my…” I asked Claude to explain how that one utterance linked to the whole story, all 39K words. No problemo. We… chatted? talked? interacted? What’s the word? Whatever the word is, Claude and I did it – Europe, ivory, Africa, death & murder, women, FORM, we talked about it all.

I was treating Claude as an intellectual partner, a junior partner to be sure – I took the lead, but a partner nonetheless, a partner who had “read,” for some strange sense of that word, far more than I ever had or would, and could bring it all to bear on this, this what? Conversation? Interaction? Dialog? Confab? We were in this together.

THAT’s what changed, and it changed everything. The fundamental technology is the same as it was in 2020. Bigger, faster, slicker, but under the hood, the same. However, I now had a new kind of relationship with it.

Whenever I’m working on something I’ll hold an imaginary dialog in my head. If it’s a technical issue, my interlocutor might be my old teacher, David Hays, or maybe Tim Perper. If I’m struggling with another piece for 3QD I’ll conjure up a generalized reader of 3QD. Since this conjuring is happening inside my head, sometimes we’ll speak in code rather than spelling things out. When Claude is my interlocutor, everything has to be spelled out. Sometimes Claude exhausts me. But we make it work. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Monte Davis

What’s a blind spot? Physically, it might be an area obscured behind a clump of trees in an otherwise open landscape. Or a gap between the views in the side and rear-view mirrors. Lines of sight cut short, or nonexistent.

Metaphorically, it gains new connotation: a blind spot is something you don’t perceive or understand — and you are unaware of not perceiving or grasping it (while presumably the one who points that out does so.) So: no there there.

Anatomically, it’s the optic disc – the spot on each retina where neurons with news from all the light-sensitive rods and cones of the retina converge into the optic nerves. The optic disc itself, first described in 1666, has no sensors. So perceptually, your blind spots are two portions of the visual field that are inaccessible to vision. Even if you learned about them long ago, try this this simple, clever demo. (The link is a PDF file, and works poorly on a smartphone screen: view it on a desktop or laptop screen, or print it out.)

Are the blind spots big? SWAG it: your field of vision is roughly 210 degrees left to right, 150 degrees top to bottom. The blind spots are ovals 7-8 degrees wide and 5-6 degrees high, making their area less than one percent of the field’s total area. On the other hand, the full moon is just one-half degree across. So those two no-go zones, the blind spots you’re unaware of very nearly all your life, are each about a hundred times the area of the full moon. Are the blind spots small?

As a magazine science writer in 1978, I had an inch-deep acquaintance with neuroscience when I attended a talk by David Marr at MIT. At 32, Marr had been a rising star since his Cambridge doctoral thesis, A General Theory for Cerebral Cortex. (Yes, it was just as ambitious as that sounds.) Trained in mathematics as well as neurophysiology, Marr developed a schema for questions to be answered at different levels in any theory of an information-processing task. At MIT he concentrated on vision, and his talk was electric with ideas.

In an interview afterward, I asked Marr what he’d like to know about our non-perception of the blind spots. He replied that he hadn’t given it much thought, but the answer would probably involve interpolation from the surroundings of the spots, and integration over time as our gaze moves. Then he brightened:

“But that would be relatively simple sleight of hand. The real trick is keeping you unaware of just how narrow your macular and foveal vison is, and how sketchy all the rest is. I’d love to understand that!” Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

You arrive in Makkah, a stranger. The skyline, a hotel-scape, all cold commerce, won’t let you forget it. But aren’t you here to come closest to your heart, finally, to behold the Ka’ba whose cosmic coordinates you would easily recognize, even with eyes closed, led by a primordial longing? Your eyes are closed this instance as you walk towards it; you are sublimely solitary and sublimely inseparable, conjoined with every manifestation of reality, all at once. The crowds around you are immense, as is the crowding of your consciousness, a jostling in every dimension. It takes some work to access the Makkah of the heart. There is an escalator and a few stairs you must descend, and yes, there is a hand to hold as you step down with your eyes closed. You are grateful for this hand, a new hand, but it belongs to no stranger. You trust your newly found teacher S. Sadiyya’s hand the way you earlier trusted S. Hamza’s words about sighting the Ka’ba with the energy of prayer alone at first, eyes shut. There is a verse by the poet Hafez e Shirazi about dipping your prayer rug in wine if your teacher says so, but you, educated in the West, accustomed to calibrating cultural distances, have not come to trust teachers without question. These teachers, however, share the culture of your very heart, guided and guiding with both ilm (knowledge) and ishq (love) in beautifully balanced measures.

What you are about to witness with your eyes for the first time, is the magnet whose force was your first turning as a newborn in your father’s arms when he made the Adhan/Azaan in your ear, also the direction you turned, or sought to turn to five times a day, every day. Today you embody that compass. Labbayk, “Here I am,” the compass says, “I answer your call.” When you open your eyes, the Ka’ba appears as magnificence and mercy, a simple cube structure covered in hand-embroidered black silken cloth; the words that appear on it are more than two-dimensional letters, they carry Divine revelation, “ayaat,” signifying each realm of creation. You are one among hundreds of thousands of roving bodies at any given time here, but you feel the outward stirrings cease. For a moment the air becomes cool and there is a palpable stillness and silence; could it be a breath of “Sakinah,” the quality of peace holding both tranquility and habitation— the peace you enter as an abode, “Maskan,” the peace that envelops every fiber of your being. It feels, without doubt, like your first homecoming. All other homes and arrivals were illusions.

The first calls to prayer made from the noble sanctuary itself flood you with emotion; you recall the calls past, every day, every season, at times live from a nearby mosque, mostly a recorded voice under the roof of your exile. You have brought a collective ache here; the ache of a dispossessed people, haunted by war, genocide, displacement. You, who are all ache, are now becoming all prayer. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Rorschach Landscape, Guilin, China, January 2020.

Digital photograph.

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The Music of What Happens

The music of what happens
begins with the bottom line of drums
—percussion, the thumps of
bass in sync with a wind of horns,
baritone, bassoon, and in the
whispers of brushed snares, in the

round tones of tympany, and, in the
rests; the spaces between, those silent
shifts that may change everything:
a thunder-crash of cymbal —but then,
again, a rest, a void followed by
bells of glockenspiel;

the music of what happens comes by violin’s
delicately sweet squeals, comes by all
as expressed in its sum:

the orchestra, the choir, quartet,
the trio, duet, the band—

the music of what happens is in
the concerted song of time,
its sum

Jim Culleny
12/29/24

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by Jonathan Kujawa

Four years ago was peak COVID-19. I was thinking about moving furniture, which led to this essay here at 3QD. The topic was the problem of moving a sofa down a hallway with a 90° corner:

The problem is to find the “couch” of largest possible area that could be smoothly pushed down the hallway, around the corner, and then onwards. Leo Moser first asked this question in 1966 [1]. The image above is the couch found by Joseph Gerver in 1992. Gerver’s couch has an area of approximately 2.2195 square meters (where the hallway is exactly 1 meter wide).

As we talked about in that essay four years ago, Gerver used some clever math to find the shape of his couch. If you look very closely, you’ll notice that the corners are clipped off, and the inner semi-circle isn’t exactly a semi-circle. Without those tweaks, you have Hammersley’s couch from 1968, which has an area of π/2 + 2/π ≈ 2.2074 square meters. Several decades of time and Gerver’s hard work got us a whopping 0.0121 square meters.

Of course there was no guarantee that Gerver’s couch was the biggest possible. Dr. Gerver’s approach made no promises that it gave the best possible, after all. A little more convincing is the fact that in 30 years we haven’t been able to do any better. But mathematics is a game of centuries and millennia — a few decades is small potatoes. In 2018, Yoav Kallus and Dan Romik proved that the couch could be no larger than 2.37 square meters. But the gap in size between Gerver’s couch and the Kallus-Romik upper bound is an order of magnitude larger than that between the couches of Gerver and Hammersley.

I’m not an expert in this area, but if you asked me a month ago, I would have said it could be many years before we’d resolve Moser’s couch question. Indeed, this could easily be out of reach forever. Many easy-to-state math questions are practically unsolvable. One could make infinitely many tweaks to Gerver’s couch as possible improvements. Or, you could do some entirely different shape, maybe something fractally and totally unexpected.

Part of the problem is that there is no single formula that gives you the area of all possible couches. If you had such a formula, you could try to maximize its output like you learned to do in your Calculus class. But if different shapes have different area formulas, there is no effective way to tackle them all at once.

This is no doubt my own human biases, but I find it a big bummer that Hammersley’s couch with an area given by a beautiful formula using pi is not the maximum. Once you show me that tweaks can give you bigger couches with ugly areas like Gerver’s, my hope for a definitive answer pretty quickly disappears.

So I was gobsmacked to see two interesting papers about Moser’s couch problem in the last few weeks. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

Tim LaHaye’s career shows a direct line of descent within creationist thinking, from Reagan-era anti-Communism, through a more diffuse blanket opposition to humanist thinking, to American exceptionalism and the impulses that would later express themselves in 21^st-century Christian Nationalism.

LaHaye gives us a bridge between traditional morality, anti-Communism and Reaganism, and present-day Christian Conservatism, with humanism having taken the place of Communism. His claim that evil humanists had successfully conspired to take over the American power structure is echoed in today’s denunciation of the “deep state,” the end-of-the world thinking of his highly successful Left Behind novels underlies much of the religion-linked opposition to action on climate change, and his rejection as satanic of every idea that he regards as unbiblical now surfaces as anti-wokeism, along with opposition to examining America’s racist past and to the teaching of evolution.

Add to this his lamenting a morally superior past, his claim that American exceptionalism is biblical, along with capitalism, and his appeal to moral patriotic Americans (he repeatedly links those adjectives in his writing) to take back the country from the forces of evil, and we have a direct link to the doctrines of evangelical Trumpism. His claims that the US constitution is Bible-based, that the US “was founded on a basic consensus of Christian principles – more so than any nation in history,” and that the division of powers was inspired by a biblical awareness of the fallen nature of man, fall short of more recent assertions that the constitution itself was divinely inspired, but nonetheless point the way to the explicit Christian Nationalism now about to assume power.

LaHaye graduated in 1950 from Bob Jones University, then as now strictly six-day creationist and socially conservative, and later became pastor of Scott Memorial Baptist Church (a.k.a. Shadow Mountain), in the suburbs of San Diego. Here he served for 25 years, developing the church into a megachurch, while embarking with his wife on a broadcasting career, offering family advice from their socially conservative Christian perspective. In the 1960s he committed himself to anti-communism, joining the John Birch Society. He was also powerfully influenced, as were many other creationists in his generation, by the philosopher Francis Schaeffer, who regarded faith as absolute, Genesis 1 – 11 as foundational to our knowledge of space and time, and all secular thinking that ignored this foundation as misguided. Read more »

by Ed Simon

The twentieth-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope” is among the more enigmatic concepts in literary theory, a discipline not defined by a deficit of them. In his 1937 essay “Forms of Time in and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” later published in his seminal collection The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin writes of his eponymous neologism that it involves the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature,” consciously drawing from Einstein’s discovery of space-time in a manner that’s metaphorical, but as the critic makes clear, “not entirely.”

What Bakhtin is getting at, in a manner that may seem esoteric but is estimably useful, is that in a given work of literature, space and time are not separatable, but inextricably connected, and that furthermore a particular relationship between those two qualities – that is a particular chronotope – is what defines specific literary genres. Within a given chronotope, “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought out, concrete whole,” writes Bakhtin, “Time… thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”

This year I tried to read as many examples of Bakhtin’s favored form of the novel as I could, and as always I didn’t go into my casual reading with a preordained theme in mind, but perhaps because of the exigencies of our current historical moment, many of the works on my list this year were obsessed with time, with thickness and fleshiness, and how that temporality connects to space. Novels took place in the past, present, and future, in alternate histories and as kaleidoscopic nesting narratives, but throughout those that impressed upon me the most urgency there was a distinct sense of the chronotope, of how fiction is a form of time travel. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Where you are, death is not. Where death is, you are not. What is it that you fear? –Epicurus

I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw them. They were driving one of those huge pickups with four back wheels instead of two – what I now know is called a “dually” – and they kept drifting to the side of the road, hitting the rumble strip, and then jerking back into their lane.

It was early June, Old Mine Road just east of Litchfield, Illinois, late on a Friday. I was working as a courier out of St. Louis and I had just completed my last run of the week, intravenous medication for a little girl on a farm, one of those runs that makes you feel okay about what you do, and I was heading back to St. Louis.

It was a clear evening so I could see these guys from way off, drifting then jerking, drifting then jerking. The problem, my problem it turns out, was that this was a two-lane road with a sixty-mile-an-hour speed limit, no shoulder, and the roadbed was raised about four feet or so above soybean fields on either side. Furthermore, we were coming up on a stretch of road hemmed in on both sides by guardrails. I actually considered driving off the road to avoid them. I pictured my conversation with my insurance agent not going well, though.

I slowed a little and drove between the guardrails. They drifted again and hit the nub end of the guardrail head-on. The back of their truck rose into the air and all four back wheels came off and spread out across the highway like hellfire missiles. I sped up a little and managed to drive under a tire coming straight at my windshield, then I hugged the guardrail as tightly as I could, but the truck was upside down now sliding across the pavement on its roof, sparks flying, and I was out of room.

(A policeman who interviewed me a few hours later, even before it was clear whether I would live or not, insisted the truck was not upside down. “People don’t remember things after trauma like that.” I said, “Why are you talking to me then?”)

Then it hit me.

Every pane of glass in the car exploded at once, my airbag deployed, and the car went through the guard rail becoming airborne and knocking a four-by-four post into the air so that it spun in front of the windshield like a helicopter rotor. As soon as I saw it, I thought, “That’s going to come through the windshield and hit me in the face.” Then it came through the windshield and hit me in the face. Read more »

by Varun Gauri

I suppose proud Indians are all alike, but every American-born, confused desi is confused in their own way.

The Ohio hills reminded me of the snow-capped Himalayas. Not that I’d seen the Himalayas. I had seen a documentary about the heroism of Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, the dynamic duo who first scaled the Everest summit (it was about Hillary’s heroism, mostly). Then a storm dumped over a foot of snow on Cleveland in January 1978, on top of the two or three feet already on the ground, and 80-mile-per-hour winds kicked up six- and seven-foot snow drifts along my newspaper route. I completed my deliveries, nonetheless, returning home, cold and frost-bitten, by 8 am. Obviously, Sir Edmund and Sherpa Tenzing wouldn’t have been deterred, either.

Another childhood hero was my mail order guru, Paramahansa Yogananda. I fell for him because, unlike the other mystical outfits I wrote to, his Self-Realization Fellowship accepted thirteen-year-olds. Also, Guri-ji and I had the same birthday. I started meditating on a metal folding chair covered with a white blanket, in my bedroom closet, because the Fellowship recommended insulating yourself from worldly currents. I continued to be a committed, avid disciple throughout my teenage years, even maintaining my practice at a high school summer program at Cornell University. My roommate Marc, from Dallas, was startled when, opening our dorm-room closet to grab a pair of his shoes, he found me seated on a blanketed chair, palms upturned on my knees. Marc and I later had a productive conversation about the cultural differences between Texas and Ohio.

At home, behind my bed, I mounted a glimmering handloom tapestry from rural Rajasthan. For a costume party cum talent show, I had dressed up in a saffron loincloth, with a trident staff and an alms bowl for props (plus some random forehead markings). I watched the Gandhi biopic three times, learned the basic cricket rules, read the Bhagavad Gita, fasted on fruit and nuts on Tuesdays, and ate pungent okra-in-chapati sandwiches at lunch in the school cafeteria.

I was on Team India. To be a fan is to celebrate your team’s wins as your own, and I felt honored that my country had apparently invented the number zero. Indians had built glorious temples, palaces, and ancient cities with impressive feats of engineering. “We” made major contributions to logic, philosophy, linguistics, and religion. Gandhi was the most significant figure of the 20^th century. Yoga was taking off everywhere. These were vicarious victories, as when your team receives multiple All-Star selections. Read more »

Walked by a small truck with a bit of snow and ice on its windscreen, and this reflection of a tree.

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by Brooks Riley

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