Asimov on interdisciplinarity-
"Knowledge is indivisible. When people grow wise in one direction, they are sure to make it easier for themselves to grow wise in other directions as well. On the other hand, when they split up knowledge, concentrate on their own field, and scorn and ignore other fields, they grow less wise — even in their own field." — Isaac Asimov
https://philosophors.substack.com/p/the-wisdom-letter-197
Anthony Gottlieb wants us to overlook Gottfried Leibniz's "best of possible worlds" theodicy and give the old philosopher a break. [The Man Who Knew Too Much, Jan.6]
William James was an ecumenical philosopher prepared to give just about every variety of experience-based philosophy more than an even break. But he rightly drew the line at Leibniz,
a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate, you have only to read that charmingly written 'Theodicee' of his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove that the world we live in is the best of possible worlds. --William James, Pragmatism Lecture I: The Present Dilemma in Philosophy
The notion that suffering on earth could ever be adequately compensated by its hypothetical absence elsewhere in the cosmos is indeed a feeble attempt to rationalize the insufferable.
That's hope.
"F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” but the summations of the state of the world often assume that it must be all one way or the other, and since it is not all good it must all suck royally. Fitzgerald’s forgotten next sentence is, “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
You wonder what made Vaclav Havel hopeful in 1985 or 1986, when Czechoslovakia was still a Soviet satellite and he was still a jailbird playwright. Havel said then, The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed."
"Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities" by Rebecca Solnit: https://a.co/2ykoSIT
Now, to work on that Presidential Address in D.C. in March...
"...William Gass complained about the effects of the American penchant for simplicity on the country’s writing, so often reduced to the meat and potatoes of straightforward storytelling. In the contemporary fragment novel, the inverse has occurred. What a plainly narrated adventure was to Gass’s pioneers, a performance of profundity is to the fragment novelist. Oracularities, the more muddled and gently elegiac the better, are offered as evidence of sophistication. “Can you think of writing as a gaze?” the narrator of Drifts asks her students. “Maybe writing was about being visible when I felt invisible,” she reflects later. “Or maybe writing was about becoming invisible again after having become too visible. Maybe it was both. I wasn’t sure anymore.” Zambreno comes close to clarifying that her method hinges on her resistance to clarity—though of course the method itself rebuffs clarification. “One of the notes I take that spring: ‘vagueness.’ Another: ‘signs,’” she writes. Maybe what this means is that vagueness is a sign of poignance, but then it is not altogether clear what it means. After all, why think when you can mimic thinking? And why write a novel when you can meditate on the difficulty of writing a novel? Fragment novels are in effect reflections on novels that, by their own admission, their authors never end up finishing: “What prevents me from writing the book?” asks the protagonist of Drifts. “The heat, the dog, the day, air-conditioning, desiring to exist in the present tense,” and so on and on. It is less a novel than a gesture at a novel. At first glance, the fragment novel’s structural equivocations about how its pieces hang together and substantive equivocations about all its internal architecture appear antithetical to two of the declutterer’s foremost tics: her allergy to euphemism and her request that everything be stashed in its proper place. But in fact the novel’s studied evasiveness is the product of its commitment to tabling wants and honoring needs, in accordance with the minimalist’s most cherished directive. There is no plot, no food, no friends, and very little dialogue. Perhaps the fragment novel is not in fact constructed by way of removal, but it might as well be, for it is no more than an accumulation of negations."
"All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess": https://a.co/caQ5YMc
Still finding enough non-toxicity on Threads to exclude my current feed from the general "social media"-bashing that's become fashionable lately. Deleting "X" was therapeutic. But this has my attention (it would have John Lachs's attention too):
Feeling It Out
Alice Gregory’s article on the philosopher L. A. Paul and her circle of oddly amusing philosophers was itself amusing and instructive (“Note to Selves,” December 9th). A great deal of what passes for the pursuit of wisdom in academia these days is, indeed, esoteric, technical, and, finally, irrelevant. But it should be noted that Professor Paul is hardly a pioneer in asserting, however “hesitantly,” that “experience has a kind of value” and that philosophy ought to be less “detached from ordinary life.” William James and the pragmatists said it long ago. In 1900, James, immersed in preparing lectures that would become “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” described the “problem” he set himself as “to defend (against all the prejudices of my ‘class’) ‘experience’ against ‘philosophy’ as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life.”
For the record, though, my own experience remains the backbone of my atheistic humanism.Phil Oliver
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Middle Tennessee State University
Nashville, Tenn.
"What had Bruno said about the future? When we face our need to control it, we are better able to resist that need, and to live in the present.
I stopped reading news articles. I stopped watching videos. My new rule about drinking had been an attempt to rid myself of a crippling attachment. The internet was yet another crippling attachment, and so I banned it.
I walked for hours each afternoon on knobby paths along the cliffs above the sea. I walked to a lighthouse and watched its magnificent crystal flash and turn.
There’s that old myth about the humble lighthouse and the giant battleship. The ship has mistaken the lighthouse for a boat, a little pissant boat that better get out of its way. The captain of the battleship comes on the radio, to command the little boat to move, a boat that he doesn’t understand is a lighthouse on a rock. The captain believes he is in a power struggle with the thing in his path and that the more forceful and arrogant he is, the more likely it will yield. He is not wrong that he is engaged in a struggle for dominance. He’s only wrong that he’ll win." Creation Lake: A Novel by Rachel Kushner
"In the bedroom of his Parisian home, Bergson had been in a coma for twelve hours. Those who witnessed his agony sensed that the end was near when, all of a sudden, the illustrious philosopher began to speak. He gave a lecture, a philosophy lecture, for an hour. He pronounced the words very distinctly. His sentences were clear. His lucidity overwhelmed those who listened to him. And then he said, “Gentlemen, it is five o’clock. Class is over.” And he expired."
"Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" by Emily Herring: https://a.co/gtbzIIx
"…Ours is a multifarious culture, peopled by many kinds of readers and many more kinds of non-readers, and that's exactly as it should be in a big, loud, messy democracy. Some of y'all are out there taking heart from cozy mysteries or Victorian novels or Mary Oliver's poems. Some of you are consoled by seed catalogs or travel brochures or Americana records or old Peanuts comic strips. Maybe you're one who needs them all, in endless combinations, just to get through these dark nights.
…if you have not yet found a source of solace that makes the long winter nights feel shorter, or at least not quite so dark, then turn off the machines and set your chair next to a good lamp…
Our brains may have more in common with large language models than we may want to believe.
"...Artificial intelligence is not human, no matter how much it approximates being human. Regardless of how well it conveys intelligence, personality, and creativity, it is not a sentient, perceiving being.
Yet it is important to appreciate that much of the work we credit to our brain isn’t really sentient or part of our perception. Most of our brain’s activity is subconscious, including what we would often consider creativity. Any artist will tell you they often feel a flash of insight that leads to the creative act.
Similarly, how many times have you been told to “sleep on the problem”? I myself am a master of this art. In college, when I faced seemingly intractable math problems, I would engage with them for a few minutes and then delegate them to my subconscious. I would tell my brain to essentially come up with the answers and tell “me” when it was done. Most of the time, I had the answers by the next morning without having to consciously struggle with them. I’m not alone in doing this. Many people find it a useful way to approach difficult problems.
I now do the same thing when I face a tough problem while leading Khan Academy. I have faith that my brain, or someone else’s, will come up with a creative solution by morning. What are our brains doing subconsciously while our consciousness waits for an answer? Clearly, when you “sleep on a problem,” some part of your brain continues to work even though “you” aren’t aware of it. Neurons activate, which then activate other neurons depending on the strength of the synapses between them. This happens trillions of times overnight, a process mechanically analogous to what happens in a large language model. When a plausible solution presents itself, the subconscious then surfaces it to the conscious as a flash of insight.
Meditation gives us direct experience with this. Close your eyes for a few minutes and observe your own thoughts. They really begin to feel very much like the output of a large language model—or several competing models—whose latest output gets fed as input for the next iteration of output. With a bit of practice, your conscious mind can temporarily disassociate itself from these thoughts until you experience stillness or “no thought.” You’ll begin to see your thoughts for what they are and aren’t. They aren’t you.
Think about a flow state that most experts in their craft can attain after the often-noted ten thousand hours of practice (which is analogous to pretraining for generative AI models). They will often say that their greatest creativity or actions occur when they do not allow themselves to be conscious of what they are doing. The best way to ruin their performance, or creativity, is to consciously think about what is happening. Great orators will tell you that it feels like their brain is doing the talking while their conscious selves are just there to observe the output. After making thousands of videos, I often feel this way when I press record. I won’t claim that what experts’ well-trained brains are doing when they create is identical to what large language models do, but it seems awfully similar."
"Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)" by Salman Khan: https://a.co/i8LPsmB
There was indeed something special about the way the professor spoke. He held as a principle that “there is no philosophical idea, however profound or subtle, that cannot and should not be expressed in everyday language,” and that philosophers should “not write for a restricted circle of initiates; they write for humanity in general.” --Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People by Emily Herring: https://a.co/2HY2Lu3
"…In the aftermath of an election that will return a climate denier to the White House and a climate-denying party to control of Congress, it sometimes seems impossible to keep going. Every effort feels Sisyphean. Any possible change for the better is about to be demolished by the outrageously unqualified industry toadies whom Donald Trump has named to run the agencies that protect our wilderness, our air, our water. Our future.
More and more I find it hard not to ask the question I have spent my adult life avoiding: What is the point of even trying?
Recently I read an old essay by the Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry, who has been writing for more than six decades about the need to heal the separation between human beings and the natural world. In his essay "A Poem of Difficult Hope," which appears in his book "What Are People For," Mr. Berry argues that the success of any protest should not be measured by whether it changes the world in the way we hope it will.
'Much protest is naïve; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come," he wrote in 1990. "If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.'
At my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better. When I have been downhearted in the past, I have always explained to myself that I am not alone in my efforts to cultivate change — by writing, by planting, by loving the living world in every way I can find to love it. Individual efforts gather momentum through the individual efforts of others.
Men in power did not wake up one morning and decide to give women the vote. White Southerners did not wake up one morning and decide to dismantle Jim Crow. Those things happened, if imperfectly and still incompletely, because hundreds of thousands of people worked together for years to make them happen.
But where preserving biodiversity is concerned, we don’t have years. Where stabilizing the climate is concerned, we don’t have years. Once a species becomes extinct, it remains extinct forever. Once the climate hits an irreversible tipping point, it will tip. In that context, the Republican takeover of Washington is a catastrophe that is hard to reconcile with a plan to plant more flowers and install more nest boxes.So I am taking comfort from Wendell Berry, who has lived a life of ceaseless protest against the desecration of the earth and its creatures (most recently in an essay for The Christian Century called “Against Killing Children”). Even at 90, he is not asking himself what the point is...."
—Margaret Renkl, How to Keep Your Own Soul Safe in the Dark
"...The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.
Society and Personality
WHEN WE SURVEY our lives and endeavours we soon observe that almost the whole of our actions and desires are bound up with the existence of other human beings. We see that our whole nature resembles that of the social animals. We eat food that others have grown, wear clothes that others have made, live in houses that others have built. The greater part of our knowledge and beliefs has been communicated to us by other people through the medium of a language which others have created. Without language our mental capacities would be poor indeed, comparable to those of the higher animals; we have, therefore, to admit that we owe our principal advantage over the beasts to the fact of living in human society.
The individual, if left alone from birth would remain primitive and beast-like in his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can hardly conceive. The individual is what he is and has the significance that he has not so much in virtue of his individuality, but rather as a member of a great human society, which directs his material and spiritual existence from the cradle to the grave. A man’s value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in this matter. It looks at first sight as if our estimate of a man depended entirely on his social qualities. And yet such an attitude would be wrong.
It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine-each was discovered by one man. Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society-nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community. The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion..."
"The World As I See It" by Albert Einstein: https://a.co/ck9RjxZ
"…once our acts have crystallized into a fixed routine, they may keep evolving, taking on symbolic significance and adding layers of meaning to our actions — this is called "ritualization." We can think of rituals as routines with a significant symbolic load… Ritualization is a potent stabilizing agent, a simple salve for a stressful time if only we are mindful of how we use its powers."
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-hidden-powers-of-everyday-rituals/
“The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can't even be appraised as simply "happy", but only in terms of "Yes, I'll take it all, thanks" or "No, I believe I won't." Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life's about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me.”― Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land
*I met the Hawk in Ottawa a few years ago, at the Baseball Conference. What a nice man. Like the philosophers--Socrates, Cicero, Montaigne et al--who think their vocation is about learning to die, he got into the mortality business himself when his playing days were through. But I think he also always understood that the meaning of life is to live.
