by John Allen Paulos

Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s new book, I’ve Been Thinking, just came out, and I was reminded of a party game he’s written about. A variant of the child’s game of twenty questions, it is relevant to an increasingly pressing question: How do different social bubbles, media subcultures, or cults develop. Let me start with the game, generalized versions of which are ubiquitous. It’s probably one of Dennett’s most compelling intuition pumps; that is, thought experiments with made-up, but plausible outcomes.

Imagine a group of people at a party who choose one person and ask him (throughout, or her) to leave the room. The “victim” is told that while he is out of the room one of the other partygoers will relate a recent dream to the group. He is also told that on his return to the party, he must try, asking Yes or No questions only, to do two things: describe the dream and possibly figure out whose dream it was.

The big reveal is that no one relates any dream. The party-goers decide to respond either Yes or No to the victim’s questions according to chance or, perhaps, according to some arbitrary rule. Any rule will do and may be supplemented by a non‑contradiction requirement so that no answer directly contradicts an earlier one.

What might happen is that the victim, impelled by his own obsessions, constructs a phantasmagoric, or at least a, weird dream in response to the random answers he elicits. He may even think he knows whose dream it was, but then the trick is revealed to him. The dream, of course, has no author, but in a sense the victim himself is. His preoccupations dictate his questions, which even if answered negatively at first, frequently receive a positive response when slightly reformulated. These positive responses are then pursued. Read more »

To the Palestinian Arabs

after Iqbal (1877-1938)

Sir Mohammad or Allama Iqbal, a giant of South Asian poetry in the 20 th Century writing in Urdu, attended in 1931 the General Islamic Conference in Jerusalem. Iqbal’s message to the Arab world was: “. . .not have any trust in the West and the League of Nations,” the earlier incarnation of the UN, which was headquartered in Geneva.

Neither Geneva nor London will honor your claim
because Arabs haven’t yet learnt to manipulate

the West which is still impassive
to the passion igniting your soul.

History shows, people with unyielding spirit
themselves free from occupation.

Translated from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari

by Richard Farr

Part one: A mere analogy

You’ve always dreamed of foreign travel and you’re aware that there’s a long history of people doing it, and benefiting from it. But you live under a regime that closed the borders a couple of generations ago, at the same time criminalizing the act of researching potential destinations. (Many countries were dangerous, they said, and some tourists were coming home with tie-dyed shirts and peculiar ideas.) To protect the vulnerable, a War on Travel was announced. In the years since, you have grown up with little more than rumors of other cultures, climates, cuisines. 

Change is afoot, however: members of a professional group, the globiatrists, are pushing back. They have looked into the history of travel and they agree it’s fraught with peril. But there’s evidence that some destinations may be the best way to treat Immobility Syndrome (IS), a condition involving chronic inability to be happy with never going anywhere. Drugs have been developed that sometimes help IS sufferers think about something else, but more and more globiatrists say that “for treatment-resistant patients travel may be a risk worth taking, so long as they are chaperoned. By one of us.”

In due course things do loosen up. Amid concern that unwise people might attempt to travel alone (or are already doing so illegally), permits are issued for some IS patients to take “trips.” 

Unfortunately, even seeing a globiatrist and being tested for IS is too expensive for many people. Also the diagnosis may be negative, in which case you have to go to a different globiatrist and try again.  Read more »

by Ali Minai

Artificial intelligence – AI – is hot right now, and its hottest part may be fear of the risks it poses. Discussion of these risks has grown exponentially in recent months, much of it centered around the threat of existential risk, i.e., the risk that AI would, in the foreseeable future, supersede humanity, leading to the extinction or enslavement of humans. This apocalyptic, science fiction-like notion has had a committed constituency for a long time – epitomized in the work of researchers like Eliezer Yudkowski, Nick Bostrom, Steve Omohundro, Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, and several others. Yudkowsky, in particular, has been a vocal proselytizer for the issue of existential AI risk. This might have remained a niche issue but the emergence of ChatGPT and other extremely large artificial intelligence (AI) models in late 2022 has made it both more mainstream and more urgent. A major factor in this is that some of the most important pioneers in the area, such as Geoff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, have expressed great alarm. Hinton, whose pioneering work on neural network learning is at the core of today’s big AI systems, is quoted as saying: “My intuition is: we’re toast. This is the actual end of history.” Understandably, such statements have elicited skepticism from many others such as Yann Le Cun, who see AI as promising great benefits to humanity. The problem is that both groups are likely right, and we have no way of knowing who is more correct. Though various people have thrown probabilities around, there is no way to credibly estimate the probability of an event that has never happened.

Most of the debate outlined above is focused on risks posed by artificial general intelligence (AGI), which refers – approximately – to the kind of versatile, flexible, and autonomous intelligence seen in humans. The argument of those raising the alarm is that such intelligence, if it were to be achieved, would necessarily entail capabilities in the machine that would make it very dangerous to humans. This is an interesting and vast topic with philosophical, psychological, and engineering dimensions. It will be treated separately in the second part of this two-part series of articles. The present article, i.e., Part I, will attempt to lay out a principled framework for characterizing the large range of risks posed by powerful AI, and briefly discussing those that stem from sources other than the very nature of AI. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The term ‘problematic’ seems to be everywhere these days – even in academic philosophy settings where people are supposed to take some care about what they are saying. Both intellectually and morally it is a bad word to use and we should stop.

In ordinary conversation, social media, and even mass-media and academic publications it has now become routine to come across the claim that such and such a person, idea, word or other thing is ‘problematic’.

For example in popular culture: “Sorry, Ross Geller From ‘Friends’ Is Very Problematic”

Or, more specifically to academic moral philosophy: “Kant is problematic these days”

The general point being communicated is negative – the audience is definitely supposed to understand that there is something significantly morally wrong with those ideas or people. But what is it that is so wrong? Despite the consequences such allegations can have – and are often fully intended to have – the accuser seems to feel little responsibility to explain or justify their claim.

In particular, while the problematiser will generally give some indication of the source of the wrongfulness (e.g. Ross tried to kiss his cousin in season 7; Kant made several seemingly very racist remarks in his writings on anthropology), these are rarely set out as a proper argument that includes all 3 required elements:

1. the evidence they are relying on and its sufficiency (not merely relevance) to support
2. a specific conclusion (not a vague sense of wrongness, or just ickiness), and
3. why that conclusion itself matters (so what?)

Not only do we lack reasons to take the claim seriously; we don’t even know what the claim is! Like the “many people are saying” model of misinformation, the problematiser positions themself as merely passing on potentially helpful information for others to make their own use of, without taking any responsibility for its reliability. Sometimes they back away even further and say only that “Such and such might be problematic“. Read more »

“It was only when my father died in 2016 that this deep truth of human existence
hit me: there are two basic categories of people, the living and the dead, and the
members of both categories are equally people. Some people are dead people,
in other words.” —Justin Smith-Ruiu, from 3 Quarks Daily

Knot

There are days I speak to Mom or Dad, who are
no longer here so to speak, but I hear no reply
unless I count a coincidental breeze
riffing through the leafy larynx of a tree,
or a hawk or crow who, perfectly timed,
swings into a downdraft to close the space between,
calling to an offspring still learning
—but I am not a hawk or crow and am
ignorant of their language

The thing is the opacity of this enigma: the Celtic knot
of their once having been, a tangle as incomprehensible
as their not having been once before:
….. before they ever were,
….. before they ever breathed
….. then both suddenly did

But (and so), I engage them hoping (but little) that they’ll
come to me in a dream or sudden fabulous thought, and they do,
each seizing an end of that impossible knot, snapping it into
a single line but longer than anything that can be reduced to words

Jim Culleny 11/11/23

by Derek Neal

The narrator of Alberto Moravia’s 1960 novel Boredom is constantly defining what it means to be bored. At one point, he says “Boredom is the lack of a relationship with external things” (16). He gives an example of this by explaining how boredom led to him surviving the Italian Civil War at the end of World War II. When he is called to return to his army position after the Armistice of Cassibile, he does not report to duty, as he is bored: “It was boredom, and boredom alone—that is, the impossibility of establishing contact of any kind between myself and the proclamation, between myself and my uniform, between myself and the Fascists…which saved me” (16).

He spends the years of war attempting to escape boredom through painting, but his efforts are unsuccessful: “I felt that my pictures did not permit me to express myself, in other words to deceive myself into imagining that I had some contact with external things—in a word, they did not prevent me from being bored (23). The boredom that the narrator describes is not simply a lack of interest in an activity, but something deeper, more akin to meaningless, existential despair, or Camus’ idea of the absurd. His boredom is what we might call ennui in English (the French word for boredom), which seems to indicate a more profound weariness and listlessness than ordinary boredom.

Time moves slowly when one is bored, and one would like to find a way to speed it up. The narrator, Dino, says that painting is “as good a way of passing the time as any other” (16). His mother, talking about a book she’s reading but whose author she can’t remember, says “What matters to me is to pass the time, more than anything else. One author or another, it’s all the same to me” (55). Reading, for Dino’s mother, provides a cure for boredom because she does not feel that her life is meaningless, whereas Dino’s painting is unable to provide the meaning his life lacks. Time passes for her but not for him. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

The only light in the second-class train compartment came from the moonlight, which filtered through the rusty iron grill of the window. The sun had set hours earlier, a fiery red ball swallowed whole by the famished Rajasthani countryside. I sat at the window on the bottom berth of my compartment of the Sainak Express, headed from Jaipur to Delhi.

I was tired, but it was too early to bunk down for the night. Glued to the bench seat, I alternated between staring into the dreamy moonscape that lay beyond the window and glancing furtively at the exhausted looking woman sitting on the bench seat opposite me. She wore a crumpled cotton salwar kameez. There was nothing particularly remarkable about her, except that I don’t recall having ever seen someone so young looking so tired. In her arms lay a plump baby boy, who must have been four or five months old. Not that I was an expert in such things, not at age twenty anyway. Next to her sat a cross-looking woman who she addressed as “Mummy-ji”. Her mother-in-law.

Mummy-ji kept barking instructions in Punjabi at this haggard looking woman. It was not a language I understood but, from the daughter-in-law’s response, it was clear the older woman was orchestrating the rhythm of her grandson’s feeding schedule. The baby, having little choice in the matter, seemed bewildered. He was chock full. Finally, when he could take no more, he pursed his lips and turned away from his mother’s breast. He looked at me with a plaintive expression, as if begging me to tell them to stop. They did. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

In one of those strange cases of synchronicity that occasionally arise in publishing, two books – issued within a year of each other – appeared on the same under-researched topic, a discussion of the lives and intellectual impact of the philosophers G. E. M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgely. The first of the books to appear, The Women Are Up To Something, by Benjamin Lipscomb, traces the lives of all four philosophers, with a central focus on their training at Oxford and their formative years as budding professional philosophers, but with a discussion of the full scope of their intellectual lives. The second book, Metaphysical Animals, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, is more tightly focused on the period in which the four philosophers found their professional footing; whereas Lipscomb’s book takes the reader up to Mary Midgely’s death in 2018, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman end their narrative in the 1950’s.

Both books are worth reading, though Lipscomb’s is perhaps the more engagingly written of the two. Lipscomb organizes each of the main chapters around one of the philosophers, making it easier to follow the narrative, whereas Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman hew more closely to chronology to structure their account, tracking each of the philosophers’ developments in every chapter, making it sometimes more difficult to keep track of all of the names of the secondary characters. Despite covering much of the same ground, both books often treat the same anecdotes and philosophical content in slightly different ways – and have sufficient non-overlapping content – so that I am happy that I read both books.

Both books also share a similar weakness, one perhaps unavoidable in works aimed at a broad, non-specialist audience. It’s that they tend to flatten out the discussion of deep philosophical questions, leaving readers with the impression that the debates of the past have been settled. In the case of both books, the suggestion is that the story of Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, and Midgely is the story of how this band of outsiders could push back against the ascendancy of the fact-value distinction in ethics. Read more »

The P44 long-term parking lot at Munich airport where I sometimes leave my car when flying out from there.

by Rebecca Baumgartner

A few months ago, I was eating dinner at a restaurant and the manager stopped by to see how I was doing. When he saw me reading War and Peace, we got into a conversation about what the book was about, why it was so long, and whether it was worth it (the answer to the last one is “yes,” by the way!). After a few minutes of conversation, he assured me he would get it and try to read it. And then he comped my meal.

I love it when things like that happen. I don’t mean getting free stuff (although that does happen sometimes – just the other day I had a cashier at Target randomly give me a $5 gift card because he liked my Legend of Zelda shirt and was happy to find a fellow fan). What I really mean is the surprisingly pleasant, spontaneous interactions we have with strangers, acquaintances, and other “weak ties,” to use the sociological term. For example, the other day I showed up at my favorite Italian restaurant and before I’d even sat down, the waiter had brought me my wine and informed me that he’d already put my order in.

What amazes me is just how meaningful and interesting and life-affirming these exchanges feel. It feels good to be recognized and remembered, even in the context of trivial things like pizza and coffee (which are actually not that trivial, in my opinion). Baristas remembering your name, a coworker remembering your birthday or pet’s name, someone asking after the random body part that was hurting the other day – all of these are dopamine hits for our socially wired brains. Each one says You have a community. You’re safe. This person has your back. Of course, in reality it’s not that simple, but in a very significant sense, it almost doesn’t matter if those beliefs are literally true or not. The simple fact that your brain holds them has a psychologically healthy and protective quality all its own.  Read more »

by Barry Goldman

I started this series of articles by claiming the adoption of the rule of law was the second biggest mistake in the history of the human race. I modeled my claim on Jared Diamond’s assertion that the biggest mistake in human history was the adoption of agriculture. I said the move from face-to-face resolution of disputes by people who knew each other to a bureaucratic system of written rules administered by strangers did not advance the cause of justice. I explained some of the most serious defects of the legal system here, here, here, and here. Essentially, the system of written laws distracts us from our real disputes and prevents us from proposing particularized, nuanced resolutions; the rich and powerful control the process; and the system pays for itself by extracting value from the disputants. Then I promised I would propose an alternative.

The alternative is that we resolve our disputes the way our ancient ancestors did, by talking to each other. This is not just historical romanticism. The idea that talking to each other is a good way to solve problems has support in modern psychology. Consider, for example, “the illusion of explanatory depth.” Here’s a question: On a scale of 1 to 7, how well do you understand how a zipper works?

Most people say they know how a zipper works. You pull the tab up, the little teeth fit together, and the zipper closes. You pull the tab down, the little teeth separate, and the zipper opens. Right. But that describes what a zipper is. Everybody knows what a zipper is. The question is whether you know how it works. Please describe in as much detail as you can all the steps involved in a zipper’s operation.

Finished?

Okay, now try the first question again. On a scale of 1 to 7, how well do you understand how a zipper works?

What you have just demonstrated is the illusion of explanatory depth. It isn’t just you, and it isn’t just zippers. We all believe we understand much more than we do. There are books on the subject. One of the most accessible is The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. Read more »

by Michael Liss

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. —Edward M. Kennedy, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City, June 8, 1968

Bobby Kennedy’s casket, covered by an American flag, attended to by the powerful and the humble. In the audience, the Kennedy clan, the Kennedy brain trust, friends and admirers and rivals. Lyndon Johnson, presiding over his second Kennedy funeral. Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller. Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy. When the service concluded, the casket was taken to Penn Station. From there, a private train, carrying over 700 mourners and reporters, headed through big cities and small towns to Washington. Watching it pass, more than a million common folks, young and old, black and white, some there for the spectacle, most to pay their respects. Then to Arlington, to be buried near his older brother Jack.

Now what? Politics is like a terrible machine, always lurching forward, soulless and with no conscience. The political world stopped for Robert F. Kennedy for a week—because it would have been unseemly not to—but that’s all it stopped for. Bobby Kennedy was dead, but his rivals were alive and wanted the prize. The relentless counting of delegates ran parallel to the math of mourning and, quickly, passed it by. There were still primaries and state nominating conventions. There were speeches to give, doors to be knocked on, commercials to create, interviews, telethons, bumper stickers, and, more cold-bloodedly, wooing of the delegates Bobby had won, and perhaps even some of his team.

There was a complicated three-dimensional chess to this. Where would Bobby’s voters and Bobby’s team go? McCarthy, with his “pure play” anti-war message, wasn’t a perfect fit, either on ideas or demographics. Bobby’s campaign was more than that. He’d brought a passion for economic and social justice, with a special connection to working class and minority voters. Read more »

by R. Passov

Mary Jane, when she lived at the end of my block, would periodically warn me that the giant sugar maple in front of my house was not doing well. Water it, she would say and get it tended. She was probably in her early eighties when she first offered that advice. As I got to know her, I discovered she had advice on many subjects.

Her grandson and my son played together on the local sports teams, just as Mary Jane’s five sons had. Once she overheard my son mention how cold his bedroom was. That prompted her to come by with an armload of newspaper which she said, if stuffed under my son’s mattress, would help. It did help. I stopped being stingy and let the house warm up.

On a cold December day I found her standing at the end of my driveway, dressed in all black but missing a glove. Mary Jane, I said, now I know what to get you for Christmas – a glove.

She flew right past my attempt at humor. That won’t be necessary, she said. I’m going to Florida next week. You know, she explained, there are a lot of old people there so if you go to a thrift shop the clothes you can buy are hardly worn. I got this whole outfit at one and intend to go back and get a glove.

Not long after telling me where she intended to find a single glove, she rather petulantly asked why, if I had been divorced for over a year, had I not asked her over for dinner. She was thirty years my senior and the matriarch of our block. I was flattered. This Saturday, I said, if you’re free. I am, she said, and I’d like a steak, potatoes and broccoli.

She was my first post-divorce date. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Yarn Art on The Mass Ave Bridge, July 2014.

Digital photograph.

by Rafaël Newman

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe that they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames up and smoulders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view. —Ivo Andrić (tr. Lovett F. Edwards)

I was accompanied through the last week of October by a succession of Bosnians: Adnan introduced me to Sarajevo; Emir and Senad took me through Eastern Bosnia; Ajla and Merima led me down the valley of the Neretva River to visit the dervish monastery at Blagaj and the reconstructed bridge at Mostar; and Ahmo, the stoical busman employed by Funky Tours, drove me three 12-hour days in a row through the multiethnic heartland of former Yugoslavia.

It was the time of year when I usually accompany my partner, Caroline Wiedmer, a professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Franklin University Switzerland, and a group of students on Academic Travel, the extramural component of a semester-long course with an international theme. (I have written about past travels here, here, and here.) “CLCS 220: Inventing the Past,” a course in memory studies Caroline has offered many times since 2007, has typically focused on French, German, and Polish sites of Holocaust remembrance, an early specialty of hers; this year it was devoted to Sarajevo, as well as to other towns in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and to a study of the culture of memory there, nearly thirty years after the Dayton Agreement put an end to the violence and atrocities surrounding the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Our daughter, Hella Wiedmer-Newman, was also along on the trip. Her work as a doctoral student in art history at the University of Basel focuses on art and memorialization in postwar ex-Yugoslavia, and this, together with her growing proficiency in the Bosnian language, made her an obvious choice to lead some of the on-site seminars in Sarajevo. Read more »