by Sander Van de Cruys

If there’s one motive governing all our behavior, supervening and bringing about all our other goals or desires, what would it be? Some might say ‘survival’, pointing to Darwin’s theory of evolution. But in practice, this motive is hard to implement: It is impossible to predict or compute what, at any specific instance in time, would increase your fitness or chances of survival. It is impossible to adapt your life choices and goals to expected fitness, without getting paralyzed completely by the sheer complexity of the task —which obviously is detrimental for fitness. And if we do consider it, the motive clearly underdetermines the ways in which we pick goals and ways of life. Should I be a doctor, a lawyer, or a fricking scientist to be as ‘fit’ as I can be? The very question is absurd. Worse yet, there seem to be plenty of ways of life that blatantly go against this principle. Think about hunger strikes, vows of chastity, extremely risky occupations, or merely spending hours in computer games.

One cynical solution to this is that these are all status games. The idea is that we all want to boost our reputation in our group,  and will do what gets us the rewards and recognition of our peers. Given our social nature, our fitness is closely linked to our status in our community, so we have evolved to use it as proxy that we can evaluate in the moment. I can’t help but see the current popularity of this status ‘motive’ in academic and popular-science circles as an exponent of the current online culture, prodding us to amass likes and reputation points. The message of the account is that our activities are basically empty, it is only their results that count: The reinforcements or punishments afflicted by others, who in turn have only learned to reward or punish what people like them have rewarded/punished.

The cynicism is appealing but I can’t get me to buy the content, in the wholesale way it is intended. More to the point, you know this reasoning misses something essential about our motivation, when the supposedly core target doesn’t actually feel rewarding. Any sign of an increase in status shakes me up badly, it gives me stress, instead of rewarding me to my core. Now, I acknowledge I may be atypical. I started out as a researcher of autism, and to describe that work as self-justifying would only be partly mistaken (Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t dare to accuse reputationalists of self-justification through science).

Still, if this reverse effect of status is a quirk, I don’t think it is that quirky. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

How do we regulate a revolutionary new technology with great potential for harm and good? A 380-year-old polemic provides guidance.

In 1644, John Milton sat down to give a speech to the English parliament arguing in favor of the unlicensed printing of books and against a proposed bill to restrict their contents. Published as “Areopagitica”, Milton’s speech became one of the most brilliant defenses of free expression.

Milton rightly recognized the great potential books had and the dangers of smothering that potential before they were published. He did not mince words:

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but …do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men….Yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God’s Image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

Apart from stifling free expression, the fundamental problem of regulation as Milton presciently recognized is that the good effects of any technology cannot be cleanly separated from the bad effects; every technology is what we call dual-use. Referring back all the way to Genesis and original sin, Milton said:

“Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.”

In important ways, “Areopagitica” is a blueprint for controlling potentially destructive modern technologies. Freeman Dyson applied the argument to propose commonsense legislation in the field of recombinant DNA technology. And today, I think, the argument applies cogently to AI. Read more »

Firelei Báez. Sans-Souci, (This threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body), 2015.

Collection Pérez Art Museum, Miami.

“The premise of the show is to bring out subaltern histories, things that are not taught in our textbooks, that exist but haven’t been always named.” – Firelei Báez

More here and here.

Current show.

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by Tim Sommers

Donald Trump is not running for President. He is running to be, as he openly says, “a dictator on day one.” He sometimes implies he will give up these dictatorial powers at some later point. But given that he fomented a coup to prevent the peaceful exchange of power the last time he lost an election, given that his Supreme Court has recently granted him sweeping immunity from prosecution for criminal conduct, and given that he has told Christian Nationalist supporters that if they elect him they would never have to vote again, Trump peacefully giving up dictatorial powers doesn’t seem likely. So, Trump is running for dictator. But it is equally important to be clear about what Trump is running against. It’s usually called liberalism.

Liberalism is the view that the most fundamental principle of justice is that everyone has certain basic rights, liberties, and freedoms. These freedoms are not arbitrary. These rights are the liberties required for people to pursue their own good in their own way (as John Stuart Mill put it) – including having some input on the political system as a whole (via democracy, for example).

The rule of law is one of those basic liberties – the oldest, in fact. It makes possible the rest by mandating that everyone, including the president or king, must obey the law – and that no one is above or beneath the law.

There’s also an epistemic side to liberalism. There are facts. These facts are often knowable. There are reliable, though fallible, procedures for arriving at them. These procedures and these facts are potentially available to everyone directly, via reasoning and empirical investigation, or indirectly from reliable sources. So, in addition to respecting the rights and liberties of everyone, our social institutions must be responsive to facts and expertise and avoid being overly political. Read more »

by Jeroen van Baar

Now that I live in Washington DC, I take every opportunity I get to sample the seafood sold at a floating market down by the wharf. It’s the oldest open-air fish market in continuous operation in the United States, dating back to 1805. But while the market is a local feature, the fish itself is not. This is partly due to globalization: tilapia is farm-grown in countries like China and Indonesia, frozen, shipped, and sold defrosted at the wharf. But even the cod, a fish historically abundant in the Atlantic Ocean, is rarely caught nearby. As it turns out, the reason for this is not economical, it’s ecological. And it provides a valuable view into the weaknesses of science and mathematical modeling.

The story starts about five hundred years ago, when Spanish and Portuguese fishermen sailed West to find huge populations of Atlantic cod swimming around what we now call the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The fishing was good and the fishermen hauled home barrel upon barrel of Basque-style salted bacalao, roughly 150 metric tons per year. This became a staple protein in Europe for centuries and for a while, all was well.

Enter modernity. By the middle of the twentieth century, engineers had developed such powerful bottom-scraping nets and fish-finding sonar systems that cod landings shot up to over 1,000,000 tons in 1968 (see figure). European freezer trawlers took home a big share of this pie, which upset local fishermen who had started seeing sub-par yields. The Canadian government therefore claimed an exclusive economic zone not 3 but 200 miles off the coast, which contained about 90% of the Grand Banks area. The locals then deployed massive trawlers of their own. This led to a decrease in overall cod landing but a recovery in Canadian cod production, and for a while, all was well.

Soon, however, the yearly yield of cod stagnated again. This is when fishermen and policymakers got worried. Could it be that there was something wrong with the cod population itself? Clever ecological modelers came up with a way of calculating a ‘maximum sustainable yield’ (MSY), set at 16% of the total population, which should theoretically leave enough fish to repopulate each year. For a while, all was well, as this mathematical might settled everyone’s nerves. But fishing floundered further and the Grand Banks cod population collapsed almost entirely in 1992. The government quickly called a moratorium on cod fishing, which was renewed indefinitely in 1993. It marked the end of what was once the greatest fishery on Earth. Read more »

I Crane My Neck

My view is of nothing
other than the black dot of Icarus
hung beneath the canopy of a
wax wing in a field of grey,
a boy suspended by invisible
filaments thinner than human
hairs strung (I must assume)
from the canopy above
now caught in an updraft
drawing the careless boy
close enough to the sun
to melt wax and ruin
his last day

Jim Culleny, 8/4/24
Photo by Abbas Raza

by Mike Bendzela

Today is a bit of an experiment. I take the row covers off of two forty-foot rows of beans (three varieties) as the plants have become so big so fast in the ungodly heat they are pressing against the cloth. Afterwards, in the early evening, I let the chickens out of their sweltering little house to run free for a couple of hours. I will watch them to see if they bother the plants. The birds might peck at and scratch up the bean plants, but these plants are so large the birds should be indifferent to them. The experiment is a success: The plants bask in full sunlight while the birds rummage for grubs around them. I decide to leave the row covers off for now and will recover them at night to deter the deer. One’s smallness is manifested in gardening, as the gardener is a single organism set against myriads. It is wise to tend to one’s insignificance during these times. Come what may, no one will care much about those who stay at home husbanding rows of Maxibel haricots.

*

With the row covers off, I can spend a sweaty half-hour or so weeding the thick crab grasses, galinsoga, and lamb’s quarters growing between the rows. Some of these are introduced plants, meaning the garden is a symbol of human perturbation of the biosphere in more ways than one. You must take care to grasp the weeds down low to remove whole plants from the soil because plants break off easily near the root, and you don’t want the weeds regrowing from the remaining root mass. This is especially troublesome with the grasses, which feature thick root mats. An evolutionary adaptation is at work here: Had prehistoric grazing ruminants been able to pull whole plants out of the ground with their teeth, that would have spelled the end of that plant variety. Grass varieties with regenerative stems and rugged roots survived grazing, persisted, and thus multiplied. For millions of years during the Miocene Epoch, grasses outwitted the horsey lips of Parahippus and the like. In the garden, I just have to stay ahead of them. They will outwit me if I get lazy, so it is a battle that never ends. Like dealing with contemporary stressors, patience and tenacity are key.

*

Galinsoga is a plain-Jane weed that can sort of imitate the crop it is plaguing, thus evading detection. As you weed, it will suddenly appear near a plant like an afterthought: Say what? Crab grasses always look like crab grasses, but they can hide between plants and crowd out the very stems of the crop plant. You push aside a bean plant, find grass, and say, I thought so! Lamb’s quarters, with its spike of goose-foot-shaped leaves, stands out insolently, like thought-deadening slogans. You rip out whole plants, one by one, but it takes time. Your reward will be a year’s worth of glass jars full of pressure-canned green and wax beans. Now is a good time to focus on securing the things you set store by. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

I first recognized discrimination against women while I was in the 1st grade. I attended a Catholic school run by nuns, the Sisters of the Holy Family. When Sister asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered, “A Priest!”

It made sense to me. I could see myself in a leadership role in the Church. In the Church, priests have the most power and maintain dominance over all the congregation, and that’s where I wanted to be!

“Why Carol,” Sister said to me, “you must know no girls are allowed to be priests. But you could be a nun.”

A nun? No way! Nuns were clearly subservient to priests, and did all the inferior work in the parish. They cleaned, cooked, ran the school. They had no power. No thanks, not for me. I couldn’t understand why women can’t be priests. If not a priest, I didn’t want a religious career.

By the time I was 9, I realized it was not just the Church—it was jobs, and banks, and sports, and education, and even my own family. I was pitcher in my brother’s sandlot baseball team (actually, our “whiffleball” team in the alley). At age nine, my brother made me leave the team, even though I was a good pitcher. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Countries can be sensitive as teenage girls about their names. The change from Turkey to Türkiye aligned Türkiye’s name in Turkish with its internationally known name, but mainly, disassociated itself from the bird with the goofy reputation.

Some countries’ names become less ethnic (Zaire to Democratic Republic of the Congo) and others more (Swaziland to Eswatini). Some countries change their names for politics (Macedonia to North Macedonia).

They say Czechia changed its name for marketing. Moldova may not need a name change, but it could maybe use some rebranding. The state news agency is Moldpres and the phone company is Moldtelecom. Sounds vaguely unhygienic.

But on substance and politics, the three-and-a-half-year government of 52-year-old Maia Sandu in Chișinău, Moldova’s capital, is playing a shaky hand like a poker shark, navigating a small agrarian nation riven into parts toward the West, with many thanks to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Moldova borders only Romania and Ukraine. Its fate is tied utterly to the war. To be clear right up front, I wanted to visit this summer because, depending on the outcome of the war, visiting later might not be possible, maybe for a long time.

Like everywhere else, Moldova’s electorate is divided. President Sandu’s pro-Russian predecessor Igor Dodon has been charged with all manner of crimes by all manner of authorities Moldovan and Western, crimes of high treason, corruption and racketeering. The U.S. Treasury has piled on with conspiracy charges. These charges have left Dodon effectively neutered as a political player for now.

Sandu’s most prominent current challenger, Ilan Shor, is only 37 years old. The former mayor of a Moldovan town of 20,000 called Orhei, Shor was convicted in 2017 in a fraud scheme that cost the country about a billion dollars, or 12% of its GDP at the time. Read more »

by Daniel Shotkin

This week marks one year since Affirmative Action was repealed by the Supreme Court. The landmark ruling was a watershed moment in how we think of race and social mobility in the United States. But for high schoolers, the crux of the case lies somewhere else entirely.

Like many others, getting admission to a ‘top college’ is high on my bucket list. So when cable news analysts and op-ed columnists were arguing the facts of the case, my eyes turned elsewhere. For me, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was about the troves of confidential admissions documents being publicly released as evidence. What these documents showed has changed my view on college admissions.

What does a college look for in a student? Boy, would I like to know.

Consulting college admissions pages for a straightforward answer feels like visiting the Oracle of Delphi. Yale’s admissions website describes Yale students as “those with a zest to stretch the limits of their talents, and those with an outstanding public motivation.” Columbia writes that they look for “intellect, curiosity, and dynamism that are the hallmarks of the Columbia student body.” What these soul-searching terms fail to describe is what a ‘zest to stretch the limits’ translates to on paper. Harvard is a bit more honest, though—“there is no formula for gaining admission.”

What unites these colleges is that they all enforce holistic review in admissions—considering all parts of an application to paint a full picture of the student. In doing so, colleges acknowledge all sorts of factors like income level, parent education level, and extenuating circumstances. On paper, recognizing these factors levels the playing field for both disadvantaged and privileged students. But the information disclosed in the Affirmative Action case reveals what many of us have long suspected—that top colleges use holistic admissions to maintain an elite. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

An air of the erotic hangs over “Norman Rockwell: The Scouting Collection” – a show of 65 paintings by America’s master illustrator currently on display at the Medici Museum of Art in Warren, Ohio.

The pictures came to the Medici Museum after a Los Angeles Times article revealed that the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) had covered up decades of child sexual abuse by scout leaders and volunteers – triggering epic lawsuits and eventually sending the BSA into bankruptcy.

The Medici Museum is a stark-white building in the middle of a large, empty parking lot. Pushing through its glass doors, the first thing you see on the wall is an icon of American illustration: Norman Rockwell’s 1959 painting of a cheerful scout, captured mid-stride, waving to the viewer. This was the cover of that year’s Boy Scout Handbook. The next thing you see is a naked woman, kneeling to the right of Rockwell’s scout – and you immediately go over to check her out. She looks so real!

The nude is one of several figures by American artist Carole Feuerman owned by the Medici. Feuerman is a former illustrator who switched to erotic sculpture in 1978 and now specializes in hyper-realistic swimmers. The Medici displays Feuerman’s figures cheek by jowl with Rockwell’s scouts in one of the odder juxtapositions you’ll ever see in a small, regional museum – places where odd juxtapositions are often the rule.

As we all know, Norman Rockwell is the preeminent illustrator of the 20th century. His paintings, once scorned by connoisseurs, are now eagerly sought after by the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Top-tier Rockwells have gone for up to $48 million at auction. Although the collection of paintings at the Medici includes some third and fourth-rate Rockwells, it’s still said to be valued at around $120 million.

How did these valuable pictures wind up in a modestly sized museum, in a suburb of a small city, just outside Youngstown, Ohio? A museum that was only established in its present form in 2020? Read more »

by David Introcaso

Arguably the greatest global health policy failure has been the US Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) refusal to promulgate any regulations to first mitigate and then eliminate the healthcare industry’s significant carbon footprint.

With US healthcare spending projected to equal $4.9 trillion this year, HHS is effectively responsible for regulating more than half of the $9 trillion global healthcare market.  Because of its size as well as infamous fragmentation and waste, US healthcare’s estimated 553 million metric tons of annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions account for approximately 25% of global healthcare GHGs.  If it was its own state, US healthcare would easily rank within the top 10% of the highest GHG polluting countries.

The health harms associated with GHG emissions and an equal amount of air pollution constitute an immense public health crisis and pose the greatest threat to patient safety.  These harms are innumerable and unrelenting and impact everyone, everywhere, always.  Presently, they are largely defined as toxic air pollution resulting from fossil fuel combustion, climate-charged extreme weather events and vector borne diseases.

Per the World Health Organization (WHO), 99% of the world’s population is exposed to PM2.5, or fine particulate matter, 2.5 microns in diameter or less, substantially the result of fossil fuel combustion.  As the world’s leading environmental health risk, the effect is over eight million global deaths annually.  Children are disproportionally victimized because they breathe more air per kilogram of body weight, breathe more polluted air being closer to the ground and have undeveloped lungs, brains and immune systems.  For seniors, a recent study published in British Medical Journal concluded that no safe threshold exists for the chronic effect of PM2.5 on their overall cardiovascular health.

Per the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for the five year period ending in 2022 the average cost of billion-dollar climate-charged disaster events, that include drought, flooding, extreme heat, hurricanes, tornados and wildfires, equaled $119 billion, triple the average annual cost since 1980. Read more »

Paraglider over the center of Brixen, South Tyrol.

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Dearest Reader,

Thanks to your support, today it has been exactly 20 years since I started 3QD. Not many small websites last this long, especially in the increasingly difficult media landscape and the onslaught of information begging for our attention from multiple channels: social media, WhatsApp, email, etc., etc. But you have trusted and appreciated our efforts to bring you only what is interesting and important. We couldn’t have kept going without you and we’ve had fun doing the work that we do. So on behalf of all of us, thank you!

We have recently been making some significant improvements to the site, as you may have noticed. For more on the history of 3QD and how we came to do what we do, you could read this excellent profile by Thomas Manuel, “Why the Web Needs the Little Miracle of 3 Quarks Daily” in The Wire. Keep in mind that what used to be the original “Monday” essays from 3QD’s own writers are the ONLY things which now appear on the front page of the site, usually a few every day of the week except for Saturday (when we now take a complete holiday), and starting on Monday each week. The curated links which we still post every day (except Saturday) can be seen now by clicking the “Recommended Reading” link in the main menu near the top of every page.

Now help us keep going for another 20 years, and please click here now. We’ve always kept 3QD free but the donations and subscriptions from people like you are what have kept us going (and always allowed those who can’t afford a subscription, like students, to access all of 3QD free of charge). We really do need your help more than ever to keep human-curation alive in this AI- and algorithm-dominated digital age.

Yours ever,

Abbas

by Adele A. Wilby

Marine biologist Helen Scales’ previous book The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed, brilliantly provided us with a glimpse of the wondrous life forms that inhabit the abyss, the deep sea. She also made known her profound concern for the future of ocean life posed by human activity. She now expands on those issues and concerns in her new book, What The Wild Seas Can Be: The Future of the World’s Seas. Scales provides us with a fascinating exposition of the pre-historic ocean and the devastating impact of the Anthropocene on ocean life over the last fifty years. Her main concern, however, is the future of the ocean and her new book makes a major contribution to people’s understanding of the repercussions of human activity on ocean life and the measures that need to be taken to protect and secure a better future for the ocean.

From the outset the breadth of Scales’ knowledge of the ocean is apparent, when, in Part One, she suggests we ‘let’ go’ of our customary understanding of time and she takes us back to the ‘backstory’ of the ocean millions, even billions, of years ago. Evocative prose render just how the pre-historic ocean floor of the Palaezoic era was swarming with trilobites of all shapes and sizes. Twenty-five thousand species of trilobites are known to have existed, yet despite their abundance not a single living trilobite can be found in today’s ocean: they went extinct. She uses this example to highlight that abundance is no guarantee of the survival of a species in the ocean.

Scales continues to narrate, how, over the course of the history of the planet, catastrophic natural events have periodically decimated ocean life. Fewer than one in ten ocean species survived the Permian extinction event that ended the Palaeozoic era 250 million years ago and marked the beginning of the Mesozoic period. It is challenging for us to imagine the ocean swarming with reptiles during the Mesozoic era, yet Scales provides numerous examples of those species. Nevertheless, over the millennia of the Mesozoic era some reptiles also went extinct while others continued to evolve. In today’s ocean, the only living reptiles are sea turtles and sea snakes. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

Imagine I place you in front of a computer screen, show you the image of two coloured shapes – e.g., a yellow triangle and a red circle – and then ask you if the sentence the triangle is yellow and the circle is red describes the image. You’ll very quickly answer that it does indeed, and then you’ll probably ask me what gives – was that a tricky question? (It wasn’t.) But what if I ask you whether the sentence the triangle is yellow OR the circle is red describes the same image? Don’t imagine it and don’t answer the question – I once ran this experiment, so go and read it! The short of it is that adults do accept the OR sentence as a description of an image of a yellow triangle and a red circle, though to a lesser extent than with the AND sentences. (A previous 3QD entry discusses some of this; here.)

What if I then tell you that young children, between the ages of 3 and 6, treat disjunction or and disjunctive sentences such as [the triangle is yellow] or [the circle is red] not as the disjunction of formal logic, which is the usual case in adults – namely, such sentences are true if one or both clauses are true (a clause is what appears within brackets) – but as if disjunction and disjunctive sentences were conjunction and and conjunctive sentences – that is, for young children disjunctive sentences are only true if both clauses are true (to wit, the triangle is yellow AND the circle is red) and not true if only one of the clauses is true.

This particular result has been obtained in a few experiments, and though it is regarded as a mistake – disjunction ought to allow for a situation when only one clause is true, otherwise why use disjunction instead of conjunction?! –  it does seem to tell us something about how children acquire the logical connectives and and or (the usual story is that children’s semantic and pragmatic abilities do not develop paru passi).

I gave this sort of experimental undertaking a go recently by focusing on much younger children, the so-called “terrible twos” (around 24 month old), as the children from previous experiments tend to have an average age of 4 years, and by then children already manifest rather sophisticated linguistic abilities. And to that end we used the so-called intermodal preferential looking paradigm (the IPLP). The IPLP has been successfully used to study the acquisition of grammatical phenomena with children as young as 13-15 months and has been especially useful with children aged 18 months and above, so perfect to our purposes! Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Raafat Majzoub

In this conversation—excerpted from the Aga Khan Award for Architecture’s upcoming volume, Beyond Ruins: Reimagining Modernism (ArchiTangle, 2024) set to be published this Fall, and focusing on the renovation of the Niemeyer Guest House by East Architecture Studio in Tripoli, Lebanon—Raafat Majzoub invites Costica Bradatan to discuss failure in lieu of architecture’s role as a narrator of civilization and to unpack preservation as a grounding human instinct.

Preorder your copy here.

Raafat Majzoub: I am curious about your perspective on ruins. They seem to be closely connected to failure and humility, topics you engage with in depth in your latest book, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.[1] Failure in the sense of languages becoming ruins after their utility dies off, buildings becoming ruins for lack of management or maintenance, ideologies becoming ruins for the depletion of stamina.

Costica Bradatan: Ruins seem indeed closely connected to failure and humility, but perhaps in a manner even more dramatic than the one you suggest. The sight of ruins, as you point out, may evoke poor management or even a complete failure of maintenance. It is almost common sense: bringing something into existence is only one half of the process; the other half is keeping it in existence, which makes it, I imagine, a process of continuous creation.

Yet the presence of ruins signals something deeper, more serious, and more devastating: the fundamental precariousness of all things human, the eventual ruination of everything that comes from our labour, the “vanity of it all”. No matter how much care we take of something, how much time and effort we invest in its maintenance, it will eventually “fall into ruin”. Ruins are our destiny.

In this sense, ruins remind us of just how close to nothingness we always are. They are part of this world, and yet they evoke another. They are a border marker – literally, the boundary stone – that separates two realms: existence and non-existence. And in that respect, they are fascinating objects to study. They signify the nothingness in the proximity of which all things human exist, and to which they will return eventually. Read more »

by Katalin Balog

Not so long ago, people had a very different concept of the mind and human nature. Our European heritage is a vision of the body as our mortal coil which we feel and command with our soul. The soul was thought to be immortal and exempt from the laws of nature so that our actions are not determined by anything outside of the boundaries of the soul. Souls of all sorts, of angels and spirits in addition to humans, permeated the universe. The universe was an ordered cosmos with human beings at the center of it with a very special role to play in it. It was commonly held that only the soul can truly exhibit creativity and intelligence which no mere mechanism could replicate. Dreams and visions were considered important messengers. All this is quite intuitive; and its remnants are probably deeply ingrained in the everyday manner in which we still think about ourselves. Descartes – who was also one of the founders of modern science – gave voice to many of these views in his philosophy and his influence on the field remains to this day.

During the last three hundred years, and especially in the 20^th century, science has ushered in monumental changes in how we think about ourselves. It has become common knowledge that the mind and the brain are tied together in a systematic way. But what proved most consequential is the tremendous progress of physics, and in particular the idea, generally endorsed by scientists and philosophers, that every physical event can be fully explained in terms of prior physical causes. Since physical events include the movements of our bodies through space, it follows that our actions have purely physical causes. Since this leaves no room for the independent causal agency of the soul, belief in an immaterial, immortal soul not determined by physical reality has steadily declined. Materialism – or, as it has recently been dubbed, physicalism – the view that everything in the universe, including minds, is fundamentally physical, is ascendent. According to physicalism, mental processes – like feeling hungry or believing that most kangaroos are left-handed – happen in virtue of complicated physical processes in the brain. The recent rise of artificial intelligence is calling into question the uniqueness of human creativity, the very idea of distinctly human activities such as storytelling, poetry, art, music. Some predict that artificial intelligence, even perhaps soon, will be able to replicate every aspect of our humanity, except, arguably though controversially, conscious experience. There is not much about the premodern conception that has survived these changes, except the view that we are conscious beings, i.e., that there is, in Thomas Nagel’s expression, something it is like to be us. There is something it is like to hear the waves lapping against the shore or seeing water shimmering in a glass. Being a human being who perceives the world, and who thinks and feels, comes with a phenomenology of which we can be directly aware. Read more »