Whistling past it

I was sharing Halloween treats at the Honors College yesterday when the Dean approached. "I have a question: why is your Philosophy Department photo in the graveyard?" He wondered if it was meant to convey a philosophical sentiment.

Good question. I did not submit it for that use, and I don't know who found it and posted it.

But I do recall taking the shot on a milestone birthday (they're all milestones, at this age) while pondering Montaigne (channeling Plato and Cicero) on philosophizing as "learning to die"... As a glass-half-full person, though, I prefer the flip-side: learning to live. Same thing.

So I'm happy to stand by that photo, Dean. I'm still learning.

And then the Dean reached into my treat jar and pulled out an Almond Joy. "Sometimes you feel like a nut," he affirmed. Yes indeed, I said. And that, too, is a philosophical observation.

Mad, bad, and dangerous...

We'll observe Halloween in class today, last time I'll be doing that since this time next year I'll be retired.

I'll not wear my Mad Scientist outfit to class, I'd be blind. Anyway, the Mad Anti-scientist in contemporary America is far scarier and more prevalent. Maybe I should have planned to come as RFK Jr.

31 years!

October 27, 1995 was a uniquely happy day, when we welcomed to the world the kid who'd be my constant companion and unstinting delight for the rest of that decade and beyond, 'til preschool cut into our quality time at Bookstar, Davis-Kidd, the Bellevue public library, the Red Caboose Park, in the backyard playing wiffle ball, attending Nashville Sounds games and snagging Jake the Diamond Dog's autograph...

 

What golden hours, what glorious days, what unsullied memories! 

William James Society newsletter, Fall 2026

 Presidential message/swan song-

This will be my last presidential dispatch to the William James Society newsletter, as I prepare to hand off the baton to John Kaag in January. It’s been a privilege and pleasure to occupy this position and this modest platform, as WJS’s 17th president. It may not be a bully pulpit exactly, or even a race, but it surely is something of a relay procession and subset of John Dewey’s “continuous human community in which we are a link.”

... (continues)

• AUDIO https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-353331743?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=35ogp
• https://wjsociety.org/news/

The digital cave and the artificial state

It’s Lyceum day at MTSU with John Kaag. He’ll shed light on our digital cave. So it’s a good day, too, to start Jill Lepore’s new book…

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore

“The Artificial State is the factory farming of humans, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, as if humans were becoming to machines what animals had become to humans.” 

“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of . . . the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century. 

Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI. 

With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity. 

Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/246856645-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-artificial-state