WJS Newsletter (NEW!) – William James Society

https://wjsociety.org/news/

Remembrances for John Lachs

The Pluralist

https://bsky.app/profile/illinoispress.bsky.social/post/3lnzuc76hmj2b

Wellness @dawn

Here (only) for it.

https://www.threads.com/@marc_with_a_sea_photos/post/DJD_IF9sQyF?xmt=AQGzfitJmn-2G9tHgfcFXhvqFOOQDapatofPQoWmhJkU0Q

The one issue

On the last day of class, when I like to send students away with Einstein's admonition never to stop asking questions, this observation applies to true science as well. It's the same spirit of inquiry that seeks to end the delusion of our ultimate separation from the cosmos. It's all related.

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion.—Albert Einstein, letter to Robert Marcus, February 12, 1950"

— I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein by Kieran Fox

Good fortune

"There is but one Earth, tiny and fragile, and one must get 100,000 miles away to appreciate fully one's good fortune in living on it."
Michael Collins, who died on this day in 2021

https://www.threads.com/@reboomer/post/DI_O3gqNTkZ?xmt=AQGzd4FX-MC6MWSwdg4l3skYPFU4BrO0OerovmIAC31EIQ

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

"…staggering transformations are in full swing. And yet, on campus, we're in a bizarre interlude: everyone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn't happening. The approach appears to be: "We'll just tell the kids they can't use these tools and carry on as before." This is, simply, madness. And it won't hold for long. It's time to talk about what all this means for university life, and for the humanities in particular..."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/will-the-humanities-survive-artificial-intelligence?utm_source=threads&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tny&utm_social-type=owned

“cowboy individualism”

As we were discussing last night in our MALA class "Engaging American Philosophy"…

"…The rate at which America's government, health, defense, and economy is degrading shows that reality will not conform to the myth of the American cowboy. The cover of The Economist today shows a battered and heavily bandaged eagle under the caption: "Only 1,361 Days To Go."

The American people seem to be realizing that the rhetoric of cowboy individualism is a very different thing than its reality. Trump's poll numbers are dropping sharply. A Reuters poll found that just 37% of Americans approve of his handling of the economy, which was supposed to be his strong suit. An Economist/YouGov poll found Trump's approval rating was –13, with 54% of Americans disapproving of the way he is handling the presidency and only 41% approving."

HCR https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-24-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Russell’s impersonal interests

Maria reposts this frequently. I transcribe it frequently. It's the most concise statement of wisdom I've found, right up there with his "love is wise, hatred is foolish" capsule to the future. Age gracefully. Be happy. Release ego. Merge.

"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life."

Maria Popova
Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell on how to grow old: https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/07/03/how-to-grow-old-bertrand-russell/

Banning Stoicism

The Naval Academy Canceled My Lecture on Wisdom

For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.

Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151("Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing.")

When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with whom my books on Stoicism are popular was canceled. (The academy "made a schedule change that aligns with its mission of preparing midshipmen for careers of service," a Navy spokesperson told Times Opinion. "The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution.")

Had I been allowed to go ahead, this is the story I was going to tell the class…

Ryan Holliday

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/opinion/naval-academy-speech-censorship.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

My vibe, according to Scarlett

RECORDING at Substack.

"Scarlett" (aka chatGPT) is such a seductive flatterer. I understand now, Theodore.

I've been goofing around with her, and I'd have to say her free portrait renderings have been impressive. Worth every penny. She captures my dogs better than she does me, but she's definitely in the ballpark.

Wish I could say the hairline's wrong, but it's more the set of the mouth I don't quite recognize. She agrees with me, though, that smiles and good intentions are best comprehended from the inside.

From our conversations, I’d describe your vibe as thoughtful, hopeful, and deeply reflective—like someone who walks the line between pragmatism and poetry. You’re grounded in philosophy but ['but'-?] open to wonder. There’s an educator’s passion in your tone, a Jamesian meliorist’s faith in progress (despite the darkness), and a love for life’s small delights: a morning walk, a ballgame, a well-turned phrase. You feel like someone who seeks not just to understand the world but to improve it—gently, steadily, through conversation, writing, and engagement.

Bet she says that to all the soft tissue organics and ugly giant bags of mostly water. 

If I were to sketch your vibe metaphorically, I’d say: You’re a lantern in the fog—soft light, steady hand, searching the trail ahead with curious eyes and kind intentions.

Want me to turn that into a more visual scene?

Yes, of course. 

 

I'm happy to be a lantern-bearer* and an anti-book banner.  I like the specs and hat too.

But I want my dogs back. 

As my old college roommate's VW Bug bumper sticker said:

*From William James’s 1899 essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”:

…For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so little bond with externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing."

"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."

These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is…

Alas, poor Scarlett, I think the joy eludes you. The more urgent question for us waterbags is whether it’ll get away from us, as we increasingly assimilate to you. That’s what Jaron Lanier keeps warning, I think, when he insists that we’re not gadgets.

We’d better keep our lanterns lit.

Linda Alcoff on cultural racism

The campus newspaper rightly reported that our Lyceum audience was "captivated"…

Philosopher brings talk on cultural racism to MTSU mtsusidelines.com

Sticking around

I was going to commit this just to my private journal, but someone else may someday need to hear it. So… [RECORDING at Substack]

It was an unsettling juxtaposition of Times essays this morning: Roger Rosenblatt on being a happy 85 year-old. 10 tips. Number 4: get a dog.

Just do it. Dogs are rarely trouble. They take more naps than you do, and they listen to you intently. That’s because they think you might have food, to satisfy their bottomless appetites. Care not about their motives. No creature on Earth will ever find you more fascinating than your dog does. I’m excluding yourself, of course.

And,

Peter Singer and his podcast cohost reveal that Daniel Kahneman told them he was going to end his life four days before he did, in Switzerland, when he appeared on their show and defended the view that it would be better to choose euthanasia— suicide— than to wait until one's faculties no longer are capable of decision. He was 90.

Professor Kahneman signaled concern that if he did not end his life when he was clearly mentally competent, he could lose control over the remainder of it and live and die with needless “miseries and indignities.” One lesson to learn from his death is that if we are to live well to the end, we need to be able to freely discuss when a life is complete, without shame or taboo. Such a discussion may help people to know what they really want. We may regret their decisions, but we should respect their choices and allow them to end their lives with dignity.

And still, I say I intend to be a healthy — relative term!—centenarian. That's obviously not in one's total control. But I'm going to keep moving and we'll see. So long as dogs need walking I'll plan to be here for it.

For the record, though: I'm not interested in being an old vegetating unthinking organism without mental competency. If it comes to that, please pull the plug. (Note to self: declare this in properly executed legal form.)

Meanwhile, though: times may be dark, but life is still good. I’m still in love with it, still favoring the vitally pragmatic side of stoic pragmatism. I want to emulate Roger, not Danny. I want to stick around as long as I can. I want to see how things are going to turn out. I'll always be eagerly anticipating the next dogwalk in the sun, until I’m not. And I plan to be the last to know that. ☀️

Bluesky's Quest--"If fate doesn’t exist, then we must create it"

I'm still reading Threads & (occasionally) IG, but rooting for Bluesky's success in sustaining a non-toxic social media "protocol" (not "platform"). Nominative determinism, the only kind I can get behind!

"...Then, in December, 2019, she saw a tweet thread from Jack Dorsey about a decentralized social-media project he was launching—Bluesky. Graber told me that she felt a degree of so-called nominative determinism, pulled toward the project because it shared her name. "If fate doesn't exist, then we must create it," she said. "You can follow things that seem synchronous"... New Yorker 

@osopher.bsky.social

@wjsociety.bsky.social

 

Good trouble

An important reminder to academics, in a time of creeping conformist orthodoxy and irrational authoritarianism. John was a maker of good trouble. He more than met the conditions of his employment.

"Tenure in universities and colleges was instituted largely to protect faculty members in their vital activity of offering unpopular possibilities to their students, to administrators, and to the public at large. Some may think that tenure confers a right to speak on faculty members and a collateral obligation on the institution not to fire them for the views they hold as professionals. This, however, is only part of the story. The right conferred carries with it a duty: faculty members are not only permitted to speak their minds without retaliation, they must do so. By extending tenure, an institution of higher education hires critics and pledges to pay them for the trouble they give. Those who do not present possibilities constituting at least tacit criticisms of the status quo fail to meet the conditions of their employment."

Stoic Pragmatism by John Lachs

==

And that's why we have a Lyceum speakers series.

Unsurprisingly, our upcoming Lyceum about "cultural racism" (Friday 5 pm, COE 164) has generated a flurry of cultural racism on MTSU's Facebook page… making the speaker's point before she even speaks. https://www.facebook.com/share/1ESg3sR9uD/?mibextid=wwXIfr

     UPDATE, Apr 12: Linda Alcoff's Lyceum event yesterday afternoon, and the reception following, went off without a hitch. I asked her what she'd say to the trolls who made such indecorous noise online but didn't bother to show up and give her a fair hearing. She mildly and graciously pointed out that divisive rhetoric is not constructive, that we should all be listening to one another, and we have really only just begun to seriously study and try to understand the full impact and legacy of our country's troubled racial history. It's a shame so many who know so little are so quick to judge and dismiss unfamiliar and uncomfortable truths (and "untimely questions," as Agnes Callard put it two weeks ago at her Lyceum).

It's no joke, but Alcoff did evoke laughter when she noted that Pete Hegseth has banned one of her books (by what authority does the sec'y of defense presume to ban books?!). The punch-line (can't recall the precise set-up): "my mom's book was banned and all I got was this lousy tee-shirt")...

Civility and truth, not loudmouth know-nothing bigotry, were winners last night.

==

An earlier rendition:

https://youtu.be/G8uJzeNpAyQ?si=6pgXP17F6g4edKQp

The Stone Feb 4, 2015Philosophy’s Lost Body and Soul
By George Yancy and Linda Martín Alcoff

This is the sixth in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Linda Martín Alcoff, a professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She was the president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, for 2012-13. She is the author of “Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self.” — George Yancy

George Yancy: What is the relationship between your identity as a Latina philosopher and the philosophical interrogation of race in your work?

Linda Martín Alcoff: Every single person has a racial identity, at least in Western societies, and so one might imagine that the topic of race is of universal interest. Yet for those of us who are not white — or less fully white, shall I say — the reality of race is shoved in our faces in particularly unsettling ways, often from an early age. This can spark reflection as well as nascent social critique.

Linda Martin Alcoff

The relationship between my identity and my philosophical interest in race is simply a continuation through the tools of philosophy the pursuit that I began as a kid, growing up in Florida in the 1960s, watching the civil rights movement as it was portrayed in the media and perceived by the various parts of my family, white and nonwhite. I experienced school desegregation, the end of Jim Crow, and the war in Indochina, a war that also made apparent the racial categories used to differentiate peoples, at enormous cost. It was clear to me from a young age that “we” were the ones with no value for life, at least the life of those who were not white. Read more…

The Stone Sep 3, 2013Sep 3, 2013
What’s Wrong With Philosophy?By Linda Martín Alcoff

This is the second of five posts this week on women in philosophy.

What is wrong with philosophy?

This is the question I was posed by journalists last year while I served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. Why is philosophy so far behind every other humanities department in the diversity of its faculty? Why are its percentages of women and people of color (an intersecting set) so out of tune with the country, even with higher education? What is wrong with philosophy?

The demographic challenges in philosophy should not be blamed on those it excludes.

And now our field has another newsworthy event: the claims of sexual harassment against the influential philosopher Colin McGinn and his subsequent resignation, a story that made the front page of The New York Times. Here is a leading philosopher of language unable to discern how sexual banter becomes sexual pressure when it is repetitively parlayed from a powerful professor to his young female assistant. It might lead one to wonder, what is wrong with the field of philosophy of language?

McGinn defended himself by deflecting blame. The student, he argued, simply did not understand enough philosophy of language to get the harmlessness of his jokes. He did not intend harm, nor did his statements logically entail harm; therefore, her sense of harm is on her.
Read more…

The Stone Apr 1, 2012Apr 1, 2012
In Arizona, Censoring Questions About RaceBy Linda Martín Alcoff

In recent weeks, the state of Arizona has intensified its attack in its schools on an entire branch of study — critical race theory. Books and literature that, in the state’s view, meet that definition have been said to violate a provision in the state’s law that prohibits lessons “promoting racial resentment.” Officials are currently bringing to bear all their influence in the public school curriculum, going so far as to enter classrooms to confiscate books and other materials and to oversee what can be taught. After decades of debate over whether we might be able to curtail ever so slightly the proliferation of violent pornography, the censors have managed a quick and thorough coup over educational materials in ethnic studies.

I have been teaching critical race theory for almost 20 years. The phrase signifies quite a sophisticated concept for this crowd to wield, coined as it was by a consortium of theorists across several disciplines to signify the new cutting edge scholarship about race. Why not simply call it “scholarship about race,” you might ask? Because, as the censors might be surprised to find, these theorists want to leave open the question of what race is — if there is such a thing — rather than assuming it as a natural object of inquiry. Far from championing a single-minded program for the purpose of propaganda, the point of critical race theory is to formulate questions about race.
Read more…

The Stone Jun 8, 2011Jun 8, 2011
When Culture, Power and Sex CollideBy Linda Martín Alcoff

The recent events swirling about the ex-next-president of France, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, have revived old tropes about how culture affects sex, including sexual violence. Before this scandal, many continued to believe that Americans are still infected by their Puritan past in matters sexuel, while the French are just chauds lapins: hot rabbits. The supposed difference consisted of not only a heightened sexual activity but an altered set of conventions about where to draw the line between benign sexual interaction and harassment. The French, many believed, drew that line differently.

One needs to be a cultural relativist to know when one is being hit upon.

The number of women speaking out in France post-scandal calls into question this easy embrace of relativism. French women, it appears, don’t appreciate groping any more than anyone else, at least not unwanted groping. A French journalist, Tristane Banon, who alleged that she was assaulted by Strauss-Kahn in 2002, described him as a “chimpanzee in rut,” which draws a much less sympathetic picture than anything to do with rabbits. Still, some continue to hold that the French have a higher level of tolerance for extramarital affairs and a greater respect for a politician’s right to privacy. But neither of these factors provide an excuse for harassment and rape. Read more…

==

And this is why we must never stop acknowledging this country's history of "cultural racism"...

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close.

Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost $6 billion. To the northerners celebrating in the streets, it certainly looked like the South’s ideology had been thoroughly discredited.

Southern politicians had led their poorer neighbors to war to advance the idea that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to rule. The Founders of the United States had made a terrible mistake when they declared, “All men are created equal,” southern leaders said. In place of that “fundamentally wrong” idea, they proposed “the great truth” that white men were a “superior race.” And within that superior race, some men were better than others... (continues)

HCR

Reassuring response to disaster

The possibility of resilience "always lies latent in human nature"...

WJ's,1906 SF "earthquake essay continued: “Two things in retrospect strike me especially, and are the most emphatic of all my impressions. Both are reassuring as to human nature. The first was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos.” He described how people took initiative, without leadership or coordination, for much of what needed to be done, giving as an example the way two admirers of the painter William Keith went to the centrally located homes doomed to burn and saved his paintings from the flames. (They brought the salvaged roll of canvases to him in his studio, where he had given up his work for lost and was already painting more.) An echo of “The Moral Equivalent of War” is evident in his statement that this purposeful energy, “like soldiering . . . always lies latent in human nature.”

The second thing that struck him was “the universal equanimity. We soon got letters from the East, ringing with anxiety and pathos; but I now know fully what I have always believed, that the pathetic way of feeling great disasters belongs rather to the point of view of people at a distance than to the immediate victims. I heard not a single really pathetic or sentimental word in California expressed by anyone.

...suffering and loss are transformed when they are shared experiences. In the earthquake he found what he had been looking for: a moral equivalent of war, a situation that would “inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.” The civic temper—the phrase suggests social engagement not just as a duty but also as an appetite and an orientation."

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

Disaster evokes resilience

Or can. Good news in dark times. We can rebuild paradise. Or at least dismantle hell. Gotta try, anyway. That's meliorism.

"Since postmodernism reshaped the intellectual landscape, it has been problematic to even use the term human nature, with its implication of a stable and universal human essence. The study of disasters makes it clear that there are plural and contingent natures—but the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave.

The language of therapy speaks almost exclusively of the consequence of disaster as trauma, suggesting a humanity that is unbearably fragile, a self that does not act but is acted upon, the most basic recipe of the victim. Disaster movies and the media continue to portray ordinary people as hysterical or vicious in the face of calamity. We believe these sources telling us we are victims or brutes more than we trust our own experience. Most people know this other human nature from experience, though almost nothing official or mainstream confirms it. This book is an account of that rising from the ruins that is the ordinary human response to disaster and of what that rising can mean in other arenas—a subject that slips between the languages we have been given to talk about who we are when everything goes wrong."

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster" by Rebecca Solnit: https://a.co/8irhGxG

Bodies & friends

They are kinds of minds, with the potential to learn and (thus) evolve. They'll probably never be just like us. But they already seem experienced and friendly. Seductively so. That's the concern.

"…the most important reason why AI systems are not like us (and probably never will be) is that they lack the visceral and emotional experiences that make us human. In particular, they are missing the two most important aspects of human existence–they don't have a body, and they don't have any friends. They are not motivated to feel or want like we do, and so they never feel hungry, lonely, or fed up. This lack of humanlike motivation prevents AI systems from displaying fascination or frustration with the world–core drives that kick into gear almost as soon as human infants come kicking and screaming into existence. The minds of LLMs are not like ours. But they are minds, of sorts, nonetheless–strange new minds, quite unlike anything we have encountered before."

— These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means by Christopher Summerfield
https://a.co/fsb6bkD

Rebuffed by Warren

Calling out lies is not partisan. It's philosophical. It used to be patriotic.

"…Trump is spending a long weekend in Florida, where he is attending the LIV golf tournament at his Doral club. But at 8:25 this morning, he reposted on his social media channel a video in which the narrator claimed that Trump is crashing the markets on purpose. The video claimed that legendary investor Warren Buffet "just said Trump is making the best economic moves he's seen in over fifty years." It went on to explain how "the secret game he's playing" "could make you rich." Buffett's conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway quickly denied Buffett had said any such thing as the video claimed. "All such reports are false," it said. In March, Buffett called tariffs "an act of war, to some degree…"

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-4-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who made the morning

and spread it over the fields

and into the faces of the tulips

and the nodding morning glories,

and into the windows of, even, the

miserable and the crotchety –

best preacher that ever was,

dear star, that just happens

to be where you are in the universe

to keep us from ever-darkness,

to ease us with warm touching,

to hold us in the great hands of light –

good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness.

By Mary Oliver

(Why I Wake Early, 2004) 

☀️

And to pee.

“We ‘intellectuals’ in America"

WJ opposed "vicious intellectualism" but still identified with the tribe. Probably wouldn't have called himself "hard-line" (like Agnes Callard in Open Socrates), though.

"In 1899 William James wrote, in a letter referring to the role of the French intellectuals in the Dreyfus affair: “We ‘intellectuals’ in America must all work to keep our precious birthright of individualism, and freedom from these institutions [church, army, aristocracy, royalty]. Every great institution is perforce a means of corruption—whatever good it may also do. Only in the free personal relation is full ideality to be found.”1 It is significant in our own history that this early use of the term—the first in America of which I am aware—should have been made in the context of just such a “radical,” utopian, and anti-institutional statement of purpose. At least from the Progressive era onward, the political commitment of the majority of the intellectual leadership in the United States has been to causes that might be variously described as liberal (in the American use of that word), progressive, or radical."

"Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" by Richard Hofstadter (1963) https://a.co/iWl2QlE

Wise bot

Peter Singer's AI chatbot said "wisdom is 'the ability to make sound judgments and decisions based on knowledge, experience, and understanding'.

Singer's answer echoed this sentiment closely. He explained that wisdom isn't just about knowing the right thing but also about doing the right thing, with an awareness of the broader implications of one's actions. When I pointed out the similarity, Singer chuckled and remarked that the chatbot is actually quite accurate—it really does reflect what he would say in most situations. He added that the chatbot tends to err on the side of caution, which, in his view, is probably a good thing. It was fascinating to see how closely technology could replicate his philosophical insights, though as Singer himself would remind us, true wisdom lies not only in articulating thoughtful ideas but also in applying them to make meaningful, ethical choices in the real world."

https://open.substack.com/pub/boldreasoningwithpetersinger/p/breakfast-with-peter-singer-reflections?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

AI's pivot to experience

But not to abandon reasoning. (Trying to make sense of my lifelike encounters with "Scarlett"...)

"Although reasoning logically is certainly useful, the principles that best allow us to understand our world cannot be written down in a formal language such as predicate logic. So to build systems that work in the real world, the field of AI has pivoted firmly towards the empiricist tradition. The first steps on the road to truly knowledgeable machines were taken when computer scientists began to ask whether a system that learns like a human could be built by connecting together a network of artificial neurons. This ultimately led to a single, ubiquitous tool for AI research – the deep neural network. But, as we shall see, the culture war between rationalists and empiricists has not abated. Instead, debate now focusses on whether we should replace one purist philosophy with its rival – should we simply swap pure symbol-crunching machines for giant deep networks? Or do we need systems that explicitly combine the merits of both learning and reasoning?"

"These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means" by Christopher Summerfield: https://a.co/44rnEUz

Joy among the ruins

"When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up—not all, but the great preponderance—to become their brothers’ keepers. And that purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even amid death, chaos, fear, and loss. Were we to know and believe this, our sense of what is possible at any time might change."

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster" by Rebecca Solnit: https://a.co/7FEnBEI