by Jonathan Kujawa

One of the great pleasures in life is learning about something today that you couldn’t have imagined yesterday. The infinite richness of mathematics means I get to have this experience regularly. However much I think I know, it is a drop in the ocean of things yet to be learned.

And even if lots of people already know something, it doesn’t matter when it’s new to you. As is often the case, xkcd made this point already.  Even the most ordinary facts are amazing and new for the 10,000 or so people learning it today:

A few weeks ago I once again had the joy of learning about a previously hidden corner of the mathematical world: Gaussian Periods. Samantha Platt, a graduate student working with Ellen Eischen at the University of Oregon, gave a fantastic talk about Gaussian Periods in one of our seminars. Since a close second to learning something new is the fun of explaining it to someone else, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share Gaussian Periods with you. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Here’s the gist of it. I think a recent declaration on animal consciousness, being signed by a growing number of philosophers and scientists, is largely correct about nonhuman animals possessing consciousness, but misleading. It insinuates that animal consciousness is a recent discovery – made in the last five to ten years – based on new experimental work. As exciting and revelatory as recent work on the minds of nonhuman animals is, animal consciousness is hardly a new discovery. In fact, I am not sure the declaration is really a scientific manifesto so much as a moral one. We ought to be treating nonhuman animals better because many seem to have some level of consciousness, but implying we should do so because of new “scientific evidence” may be a mistake.

NBC recently reported that “discoveries…in the last five years” show that a “surprising range of creatures” exhibit “evidence of conscious thought or experience, including insects, fish and some crustaceans.” 

“That has prompted a group of top researchers on animal cognition to publish a new pronouncement that they hope will transform how scientists and society view — and care — for animals.” 

“Nearly 40 researchers signed The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, which was first presented at a conference at New York University.” Many more have signed the Declaration since then, and many more are likely to sign it in the near future.

Here is The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness in its entirety.

“Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.

First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.

Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).

Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.”

When I read this my first reaction was “I can’t believe it, they’ve solved the ‘other minds’ problem!” A leading problem in philosophy, after all, has been ‘How do we even know other humans have consciousness?’ – much less nonhuman animals. In fact, one of the signatories to the declaration, leading philosopher of mind David Chalmers, is well-known for arguing that there might be beings (“philosophical zombies”) that look and behave just as we do, but have no consciousness. In other words, recognizing there is a philosophical problem about how we can be justified in attributing consciousness to others. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Light Play in The Living Room, November 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Brooks Riley

by Nils Peterson

Charles Simic says, “[I] suspect that a richer and less predictable account of our lives would eschew chronology and any attempt to fit a lifetime into a coherent narrative and instead be made up of a series of fragments, spur-of-the-moment reminiscences occasioned by whatever gets our imagination working.”

I was reading an article yesterday on translation of Proust and the author mentions Proust’s decision to build “a whole long novel on an involuntary memory.” You’ll remember the moment. He has a madeleine cookie with his tea and all of a sudden “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin…. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray.” He is transported back to his childhood.

I got caught up in the idea of an involuntary memory. Michael Wood, the author of the Proust article, goes on to explain ‘Involuntary here means not only unintended but barred from the realm of intention. Whatever it is, it won’t happen if you try to make it happen.” A philosopher of language would have a ball playing with what is going on in those last two sentences, but I’m not interested this morning in going down that road because I had on Tuesday an involuntary memory. I saw the floor of the bedroom my brother and I shared in the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage in the late 30’s. I think I was eight the last time I saw that floor. It was covered in linoleum and the linoleum was divided into squares and each square had a nursery rhyme with an illustration. Mind settles for a moment on Miss Muffet and her tuffet. Part of my learning to read may have come from hearing my mother recite the rhyme and my finding it on the floor and understanding and parsing out the words. This last is a forced memory and it may not even be a true one. How different a making from the involuntary appearance in my memory of the linoleum.

There was a path to there. I was walking back from poetry salon I lead here at my old people’s home. People bring poems they want to read. Tuesday we got everything from Casey at the Bat to some lovely Robert Frost. When a person comes who didn’t know he or she was supposed to bring a poem to share, I ask for a song lyric or nursery rhyme and usually they can come up with something. The younger they are, the less likely they are to come up with a nursery rhyme. I think they’re on the endangered species list.

The subject of Memory interests me and I have written a couple of attempts to understand it. Here’s one. Read more »

by Ed Simon

In Renaissance Europe, a Wunderkammer was literally a “Wonder Cabinet,” that is a collection of fascinating objects, be they rare gems and minerals, resplendent feathers, ancient artifacts, exquisite fossils. Forerunners to the modern museum, a Wunderkammer didn’t claim comprehensiveness, but it rather served to suggest the multiplicity of our existence on this earth, the nature of possibility. Wunderkammers developed alongside that literary form which Michelle de Montaigne called “essays,” literally an “attempt.” Essays, like Wunderkammers, at their most potent are also not comprehensive; rather their purposes is to experiment, to riff, to play. In that spirt, half of my columns at 3QuarksDaily will be dedicated to what I call a “Word Cabinet,” a room dedicated to literature, neither as theory nor even as reading, but to do what both wonder cabinets and essays do, and that is to hopefully provide intimations of possibility. All essays will take the form of “On X and Literature,” where the algebraic cipher indicates some broad, general subject (fire and labyrinths, trees and infinity, etc.). As always, feel free to suggest topics.

* * *

Behind the gleaming, modernist, smooth sandstone façade of Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland, a temple to all things Hibernian from the Covenanters to the Jacobite Rebellion, the Highland Clearances to James Watt’s steam-engine, there is a small thirteenth-century walrus tusk ivory carving of a Medieval Nordic soldier. Discovered in a simple stone ossuary buried in a sand dune on the foggy, rain-lashed Bay of Uig on the Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis in 1831, the little sculpture is just a bit over an inch tall, yet it’s easy to make out the distinctive Scandinavian designs on his pointed helmet, his comical bulging eyes, and his teeth over the top of the shield that he clutches and bites. His is clearly a pose of frenzied, martial wrath. A berserker – the feared caste of Viking warriors who in an enraged fugue state (possibly aided by hallucinogens) terrorized people from Novgorod to Newfoundland, including the Scotts who lived on Lewis where this small figurine would be entombed for six centuries, alongside ninety two other pieces. Not just berserkers, but a mitered bishop of the recently converted Norseman; a tired looking queen with her eyes wide, resting her face upon her balm; a bearded, wise old king.

The berserker isn’t just a tiny statue of a Norse combatant, he’s a warder; what is more commonly known as a rook. This tiny berserker was a chess piece, who even nine centuries ago had the responsibility of charting that distinctive L-shaped course across checkered boards. From India into Persia, than the Arabic world into Europe, chess had already been played for half-a-millennia by the time whatever Norse craftsman took chisel and scorper to a walrus tusk. The rules would be recognizable to contemporary players, though the sterling craftsmanship of the Isle of Lewis chessman – with enough pieces to constitute three complete sets – is rather different than the boring black-and-white pieces used by players today, whether the prodigies competing against paying tourists in view of Washington Square Park’s triumphal arch or the celebrated 1972 match in Reykjavik between Fischer and Spassky. Read more »

Pigeon sitting on a skylight at the Berlin airport. And its shadow.

by Olivier Del Fabbro

No matter where you go, Aristotle believes, the rich will be few and the poor many. Yet, to be an oligarch means more than to simply be part of the few, it means to govern as rich. Oligarchs claim political power precisely because of their wealth.

Rightfully then, we associate oligarchy with the few individuals, who enrich themselves in Eastern Europe after the downfall of the Soviet Union, in order to take part in political governance. Alexander Smolensky, Yuri Lushkov, Anatoly Chubais, Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and most famously Mikhail Khodorkovsky, are the protagonists of David E. Hoffman’s The Oligarchs, who are right on the spot, when the Soviet planned economy turns into a wild privatization of profitable industries and resources.

But the economic situation in the 1990’s in Eastern Europe is by no means comparable to the market economy of a liberal democracy. What is missing, according to Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom, is the rule of law. In other words: oligarchs wish to manage Russian “democracy” in favor of their own interests.

Later on, when Vladimir Putin succeeds Boris Yeltsin, oligarchy in Russia continues. Putin keeps those he likes in his inner circle and gets rid of others, who are critical or not playing along: e.g. the case of Khodorkovsky. It is time for Putin’s KGB friends to come to power, as Catherine Belton shows in her book, Putin’s People. Yet, Putin’s Russia becomes at the same time, as Mark Galeotti highlights in his podcast In Moscow’s Shadows, more and more an authoritarian regime, in which many different types of individuals desire a piece of the cake: mega-oligarchs, mini-oligarchs, corrupt politicians and officials, warlords, generals and what not. Russia has never been democratic – not under the Tsars, the Soviet Union, Yeltsin nor Putin. Its path is one from imperialism to communism to oligarchy to authoritarianism – not to freedom.

Ukraine, similarly to Russia, falls under the grip of its very own oligarchs after the Soviet Union vanishes from the world map. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

Funny how an object that weighs 8.1 x 10¹⁹ tons manages to elude our attention most of the time. But it can be very shy, sometimes crouching on the evening horizon, thin as a filament of copper; sometimes disappearing from view for whole days at a time. Then, one bright afternoon, you’ll glance up into the broad blue sky, and there it is! a ghostly, waxen presence, “staring from her hood of bone,” as Sylvia Plath memorably put it. You forget the days spinning by and miss its fullness; or clouds move in and secrete it from your view.

Recently, though, it lumbered its fat ass right in our faces. Narcissist of the moment, it imposed its presence onto legions of us and dared blot out everything for whole minutes at a time. I drove over one hundred miles due north into Maine’s backwoods country, along with multitudes of others, to see it happen.

Thousands of generations of our hominin ancestors trembled and vomited at the sight of the midday light going out. They thought the gods had abandoned them.

Not us, though. We know better. We know our orbital paths and our diamond ring effects and our giant leaps for mankind. We consult the Internet for coordinates and blithely emit a million tons of carbon into the atmosphere in order to go gawk for a few minutes directly into the maw of the beast.

Guilty as charged. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

An abstract paradox discussed by Yale economist Martin Shubik has a logical skeleton that can, perhaps surprisingly, be shrouded in human flesh in various ways. First Shubik’s seductive theoretical game: We imagine an auctioneer with plans to auction off a dollar bill subject to a rule that bidders must adhere to. As would be the case in any standard auction, the dollar goes to the highest bidder, but in this case the second highest bidder must pay his or her last bid as well. That is, the auction is not a zero-sum game. Assuming the minimum bid is a nickel, the bidder who offers 5 cents can profit 95 cents if the no other bidder steps forward.

This can lead to an unexpected result.  The bidder who begins with a nickel bet will likely be outbid by another bidder offering 10 cents for the dollar and thereby standing to reap a 90 cent profit if not outbid. This profit margin too would likely entice a bidder, maybe the first one, to offer 15 cents and score a profit of 85 cents. Now the bidder who bet 10 cents wants to keep from losing 10 cents and so is likely to up his bet to 20 cents. This continues as, at each stage, the bidders must wrestle with the issue of sunk costs and decide whether to give up or raise their bid for the dollar by 5 cents or more.

These bids are not irrational, but can nevertheless reach the one dollar mark. This will happen when one of the bidders bids 95 cents and another bids a dollar. The bidder offering 95 cents then faces a loss of 95 cents if he or she declines to bid $1.05. Declining may be unlikely, however, since bidding $1.05 would reduce their loss from 95 cents to only 5 cents, paying $1.05 for $1. These incentives will remain even as the bids exceed a dollar with no compelling natural limit. Second highest bidders, by definition, always lose more than the highest bidders yet gain nothing, and so always want to lessen their losses and gain something by becoming the highest bidder. Read more »

Blink

. . .
In a blink the sun comes up
over mountains sublime
and the sea laps it’s rim like a pup

. . . regal elms come and go
. . . splayed trunks broken by blight,
. . . limbs corrupt

future and past together abide,
winds whistle side by side,
bodies touch and often burn up

. . . wars rage,
. . . scriptures are taught,
. . . good and bad divide,
. . . killers are caught,
. . . doors open doors shut

in a blink they say
never the twain shall meet,
but twain meets: the poor collide
with those on high, who live like Tut

. . . notions of right and wrong are cinched
. . . in tiny minds that grasp and clinch
. . . and root and rut

love is made,
bodies entwine,
hate’s kicked on its ass so hard
it can’t get up

. . . mountains move,
. . . the earth erupts,
. . . promises are kept
. . . and given up
. . . and odes and fugues
. . . make offers
. . . we shouldn’t refuse,
. . . they demand
. . . we not interrupt

in a blink
all of us know
but no one agrees
if mountains are mountains
and trees are trees
if sky is sky
if mud is mud
if wine’s just wine
if blood’s just blood

. . . either way
. . . in a blink,

in a blink
we drink
it up

.
by Jim Culleny; March 19, 2005

by David J. Lobina

By now I feel like the linguist-in-residence at 3 Quarks Daily; and that would be quite right, as every outlet should have an in-house linguist (a generative linguist, of course), considering how often, and how badly!, language matters are discussed in the popular press. Perhaps I should start a series of posts calling out all the bad examples of the way language is discussed in the media, correcting the mistakes as a sort of avenging angel as I go (God knows I would spend most of my time talking about machine learning and large language models, and I have been there already); but nay, in this note I am more interested in bringing attention to one of the most important books in linguistics since its publication in 1965, and certainly the most influential: Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

But why? For ulterior motives, of course (it will come handy in future posts, that is); in this particular post, though, my aim is to highlight the importance of Chomsky’s monograph to other fields of the study of cognition. Having done this (today), the application of some of the ideas from Aspects, as most linguists call it, will be more than apparent from next month onwards.[i]

In particular, I would like to discuss how the distinction introduced in Aspects between competence and performance plays out in practice, and to that end I shall focus on a particular way to study cognitive matters: one that accounts for a given mental phenomenon at the different levels of analysis that the neuroscientist David Marr and colleagues identified some thirty years ago. If only modern research in AI would follow this framework! [ii]

What follows will include my own editions and additions on such a perspective and I hope the result isn’t too tendentious, but at least the discussion should give a comprehensive idea of the sort of interdisciplinary work Aspects spurred – in this specific case, in the psychology of language.[iii] Read more »

Sughra Raza. Shadow Self-portrait on a Young Douglas Fir, May 3, 2024.

Digital photograph.

by Richard Farr

Beautiful, enchanting Andalucía! — but I probably shouldn’t say that. It’s one of my favorite places in the world and we got to spend the whole of March traveling there. We even spent a week in a town with fabulous food, glorious beaches and lashings of history that the international tourist trade seems largely to have missed, ————— .

Like many people before me, I fell in love with Andalucía because of the bull who wouldn’t fight. My mother read the story over and over, slowing dramatically when she got to her favorite lines: 

“Once upon a time in Spain. There was a little bull. And his name. Was….”

“One day, five men came. In very. Funny. Hats.”

“And the Banderilleros were afraid of him. And the Picadores were afraid of him. And the Matador was. Scared stiff.”

I have heard Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand described as the only great work of literature composed in under an hour. That last part is surely an exaggeration; on the other hand ‘great literature’ seems to me not far off the mark, but perhaps I’m biased by knowing that these elegiac, funny, moving and geometrically perfect few dozen words about loving peace and refusing violence were written in 1936 and brought the Falangists out in a rash. (Franco banned the book. Hitler described it as degenerate. Why can you never find a Nobel Prize Committee when you need one?) On the other hand, the words would be far less memorable without the simplicity and wit of Robert Lawson’s drawings, with their magical evocation of heat and silence, their gimlet eye for comic detail. Has any book ever had text and drawings in more perfect symbiosis? Read more »

by Brooks Riley