A fable for our times

"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."

— Aesop (620 - 564 BCE)

https://www.threads.net/@philosophybreak/post/DChL0Htsk1P?xmt=AQGz6zzarHuPe1ao_k2S_5l0w0H5Cdf-scO6igj7B17A5g

Ancient Greece via AI, “whispers of philosophers”

Cool tool. But I don't know any philosophers who whisper.

"They say true AGI will need to move us emotionally. Yet here I am, touched watching this AI-generated glimpse into ancient Greece circa 375 BC by cinAIma films. The bustling agoras, whispers of philosophers (watch with sound!), the echoing footsteps on marble are all brought to life. 

It's pretty remarkable how technology can bridge 2,400 years and in all honesty there's something profoundly human about using future's tools to understand the past."

https://www.threads.net/@marilynika/post/DCkE1PiSzAi?xmt=AQGzUwvOsYJFq3xMFFxPX32ZE5m036gIUvsIUmmZUeXBPQ

e

Yeah, sure

Wendell’s peace

It helps to recall that wildness preserves the world. A world, anyway.

Samantha Harvey’s ‘beautiful and ambitious’ Orbital wins Booker prize | Books | The Guardian

"Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey's extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share".

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/12/orbital-by-samantha-harvey-wins-booker-prize-2024

Against Panic: A Survival Kit

"…What this election has made absolutely, indisputably clear should have been clear to me all along: I will be fighting for the rest of my life to preserve the promise this country still holds for pluralism, for fairness, for decency, for true freedom. I am never going to breathe a sigh of relief. What choice is there but to fight?

…So for me there will be more watchful stillness. More walks in the woods to watch the still heron standing one-legged in the shallows; to watch the still deer, waiting to see if I mean them harm; to watch the stillness of the red-eared sliders, resting on the sunny log, and the stillness of the wood duck, whose stillness is on the surface only; to linger in the stillness of the lake itself, a perfect mirror giving back the sky.

There will be more books and more poetry and more time with friends and more afternoons sitting on a bench and watching the leaves fall. I will be fighting with all that I am, but I will also be reminding myself again and again not to wait for the world to give me a reason to sigh with relief. I will give myself respite. I will remember not to keep waiting for sweetness and rest to arrive on their own.

“If it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all,” Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet.” I’ll remember that, too."
…
Margaret Renkl

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margaret.renkl

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a day ago

It’s just all I’ve got.

It’s plenty. Thanks for finding the right words again. As William James said, life is no game of private theatricals. “It feels like a fight.” We must be meliorists. But we’re more fit for the fight after a walk in the woods, a talk on the porch, a trip to Parnassus. We’ll go on.

Vonnegut

https://www.threads.net/@humanists_uk/post/DCOso05oh3Z?xmt=AQGz8mUJLUXUeejaBs-wsK0zkmtw2EsmkQLDcPx1HngX7A

Nick Kristof’s Manifesto for Despairing Democrats

Lots of sound counsel here. For instance,

7. I will care for my mental health. There'll be many, many times in the next four years when we'll be irritated, anxious and alarmed, probably with good reason, so we need to find a way to relax and mellow out. For me, that's backpacking and making wine and cider. In my day job, I shout at the world, and it pays no attention, so it's a relief to raise grapes and apples and have them listen to me. And remember that sometimes the best therapist has four legs. A few years ago, many families got a pandemic dog, and for some this may be time to get a Trump dog.

...

nyt

Good advice from Einstein too (except for not reading newspapers):

Contemplate something else

I don't blame the universe, in fact there's solace for this electoral debacle in the cosmic perspective.

But Russell was right, it's no use dwelling on the "less agreeable characteristics" of the world we wake to this morning. Time to walk it off, and then get on with continuing the perennial fight for happiness and justice for all.

Sisyphus is happy.

"I do not myself think that there is any superior rationality in being unhappy. The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead…. reason lays no embargo upon happiness; nay more, I am persuaded that those who quite sincerely attribute their sorrows to their views about the universe are putting the cart before the horse: the truth is that they are unhappy for some reason of which they are not aware, and this unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable characteristics of the world in which they live." — The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell

"If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight..." --The Dilemma of Determinism, William James

It does feel like a fight. Kamala was a joyful warrior. Meliorists aim to be joyful warriors. We can be, so long as we remember to take our regularly revitalizing moral holidays. 

Words matter

In low moments, I sincerely doubt that anyone ever changes their mind, and I especially doubt that anyone ever changes their mind in response to an op-ed. But our planet, our home, is in mortal danger, and words are all I've got. So I'm taking my very best shot here: Margaret Renkl

==

Just passed a colleague in the hallway, noted my feeling of apprehension about today. What does it tell you, he asked? I don't read tea-leaves, I said. 

But I do know this: words, despite all their limitations and misdirections, do matter. They're our testament, they record our dreams and aspirations. And apprehensions.

"Language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the orgin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series

What Is Cornel West Thinking?

He's bearing witness to something beyond politics. But what we need TODAY is votes, not prophecy. Votes, and an end to the sorrow of MAGA-style fascism.

That would be a real occasion for joy. And brotherhood.

"…While West and I were talking, we were interrupted by an acquaintance who also lives in the building. "So when are you gonna come out and endorse my woman?" the neighbor said.

"What woman is that?" West said.

"My woman Kamala," the neighbor said. "Come on, Cornel! Do it for the country."

"Oh, I pray for her," West said.

"Pray for the country, if she doesn't win," the neighbor said. To change the subject, the neighbor, who is a classically trained singer, mentioned that he was about to sing at Carnegie Hall, as part of a chorus performing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. "Brother, brother," West said. "You're gonna sing 'Ode to Joy' in the midst of all this sorrow? You're bearing witness in a beautiful way…

"I think that, no matter who wins, we're in for dark times," he said… But if there's a few of us who still can cross bridges, and cut across different ideological and racial and regional lines, then that's a crucial role to play as your empire undergoes its decline and decay. And that goes far beyond politics.""

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/what-is-cornel-west-thinking

The Future of the Planet Hangs on This Vote

"In thinking about climate change, I often feel desperate, but in talking with others I try not to lead with despair. Like all human emotions, despair is contagious. Worse, it leads to immobility, and we have run out of time for hand-wringing. If ever we must resist the temptation to fall into despair, surely it is now, with the election polls so close and the future of the planet hanging on what happens Tuesday.

A lot of other things hang on what happens Tuesday, too, as The Times has deeply reported over the last weeks in a series called "What's at Stake in the 2024 Election." As president, Donald Trump could destroy the stability of our institutions, including American democracy itself. He could further trample women's reproductive safety and autonomy, terrorize immigrant Americans, roll back hard-won rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people, imperil what's left of the impartiality of the courts and weaponize government to prosecute anyone he perceives as an enemy, end all hopes for curtailing gun violence, close off access to affordable health care, threaten the free press, and fray the social safety net in all its forms. And that's just the beginning of an almost limitless list of dangers he poses.

Of them all, the one that most often keeps me up at night is the way a second Trump presidency would imperil the planet. Climate change, which Mr. Trump calls "a scam," is a threat multiplier: Every existing global conflict, every human vulnerability and every form of social instability is already being exacerbated by climate calamities. There is no issue on the political table that will not be made exponentially worse if we allow the living earth to enter its death throes, and yet climate has rarely been part of the political discourse during this election year..."

Margaret Renkl, continues

Trial and Error at the TPA

Comments on Trial and Error: A Defense of Fallible Judicial Review by Adam Lake (Brown), Tennessee Philosophical Association annual meeting, Vanderbilt. November 2, 2024

“There is all the difference in the world between having something to say and having to say something,” said John Dewey in The School and Society (1899), in which he had something quite important to say about how the best and wisest parents (and teachers) comport themselves in the vital social function of educating and acculturating the next generations in the ethos of democracy. “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely, and acted upon, it destroys our democracy.”

That was an aspirational statement. Too many parents (and teachers) have always betrayed a prejudicial bias either for their own children or for children who most resembled themselves. The best and wisest are exemplars, not representatives.

By a similar token, too many judges and other legal actors have always betrayed a prejudicial bias for their own ideological commitments and partisan preferences–often masked behind something amorphous and sacrosanct they’ve called The Law.

[“Amorphous? Laws are codified and precise, yes. But when Justice Roberts says in the Obergefell dissent that the court is not a legislative body and has no business altering law, it has become monolithic and ill-defined. "Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us. Under the Constitution, judges have power to say what the law is, not what it should be." And this seems disingenuous. The courts' interpretations are inevitably construed as prescriptive, not merely descriptive. Notice Justice Roberts's own should in his disavowal of prescription. And as Justice Kennedy concluded the majority opinion in that case, the petitioners were simply asking "for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right." If it does, then our jurists should say so. {And if they say so for good and compelling reasons, then it does.}]

But lately it seems to some of us that this tendency has swung hard right, that it is an increasingly narrow and unlovely malformation of legal philosophy, and indeed that it threatens our democracy.

It is from that concern that I would like to join Adam’s brief on behalf of a more democratically humble, circumspect, and falliblilistic sensibility... (continues)

Solvitur ambulando: a lesson for us all

On Monday this week a student committed suicide in our library. School was closed on Tuesday. I went for a hike in the woods, wishing the victim had walked away from despair and chosen to stay with us.

In class yesterday we talked about it...

Resources, & if you want to talk about it

If anyone would like to talk about the tragedy on Monday, feel free to comment here or in class. 

Center for Counseling and Psychological Services 615-898-2271

Other campus & community resources...

Lea's Summit, Percy Warner Park-October 29,2024

"It must be recognized that staying alive though suicidal is an act of radiant generosity, a way in which we can save each other.  

...

None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience. History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at friends, family, humanity, at the surprises life brings — the endless possibilities that living offers — and to persevere. There is love and insight to live for, bright moments to cherish, and even the possibility of happiness, and the chance of helping someone else through his or her own troubles. Know that people, through history and today, understand how much courage it takes to stay. Bear witness to the night side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun. If we meditate on the record of human wisdom we may find there reason enough to persist and find our way back to happiness. The first step is to consider the arguments and evidence and choose to stay. After that, anything may happen. First, choose to stay.”  --Jennifer Michael Hecht, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It

==

Stay: The Social Contagion of Suicide and How to Preempt It
By Maria Popova

"If you’ve ever known someone who committed suicide, or have contemplated it yourself, or have admired a personal hero who died by his or her own hand, please oh please read this. Because, as Jennifer Michael Hecht so stirringly argues in Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It (public library), numerous social science studies indicate that one of the best predictors of committing suicide is knowing suicide — a fact especially chilling given more people die of suicide than murder every year, and have been for centuries. Suicide kills more people than AIDS, cancer, heart disease, or liver disease, more men and women between the ages of 15 and 44 than war, more young people than anything but accident. And beneath all these impersonal statistics lie exponential human tragedies — of those who died, and of those who were left to live with their haunting void.

To be sure, Hecht’s interest in the subject is far from the detached preachiness such narratives tend to exude — after two of her dear friends, both fellow writers, committed suicide in close succession, she was left devastated and desperate to make sense of this deceptively personal act, which cuts so deep into surrounding souls and scars the heart of a community. So she immersed herself in the science, philosophy, and history of suicide searching for answers, emerging with an eye-opening sense of everything we’ve gotten wrong about suicide and its prevention..." (continues)
==

My morning mantra: When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." -Elbert Hubbard, probably... and not Marcus Aurelius

==

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder 

Ronald Dworkin’s Einstein Lectures

Dworkin's last book explores "cosmic religious feeling" as an expansive sensibility much larger than mere belief in a god. Here he finds what he so often sought in his books, "common ground"—in this instance with atheists, humanists, pluralists, pragmatists… As WJ said, the deepest religious impulse is not directed towards a god. It's a yearning for more life.

"The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion is too crude. Many millions of people who count themselves as atheists have convictions and experiences similar to and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a "personal" god, they nevertheless believe in a "force" in the universe "greater than we are." They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted. They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily wonderful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about vast space but enthralled by them. These are not, for them, just a matter of immediate sensuous and otherwise inexplicable response. They express a conviction that the force and wonder they sense are real, just as real as planets or pain, that moral truth and natural wonder do not simply evoke awe but call for it."

— Religion without God by Ronald Dworkin (2013)

Southern Festival of Books 2024

Just a note to self, as soon as time permits, to reflect at greater length on the delightful weekend I just spent out at the Bicentennial Mall and in the Tennessee State Archives Library--the venue now for the festival that used to take place on Legislative Plaza and in the capitol building and the main library downtown. 

I've been attending the SoFest since its inception in '89, and have enjoyed countless wonderful author sessions with the likes of Bill McKibben, Willie Morris, Reynolds Price, and so many others. I even presented there myself one year, with my Rhodes friend Pat Shade--both of us introduced by our beloved mentor John Lachs.

But this year's was the best by far. Brenda Wineapple with her outstanding new book on the Scopes Trial... My old friend Michael Sims, who finally signed his Thoreau book for me (and who is working on a Darwin book)... Joan Baez, alongside her young activist legislator pal Justin Jones... Margaret Renkl with her brother Billy, following up Comfort of Crows with a new workbook devoted to encouraging us all (in the spirit, Billy said, of his "supervisor"/muse Mary Oliver) to pay attention... 

The Sunday weather was resplendent. The food, the music, the pleasant company of fellow bibliophiles, the distraction from everything wrong with the world and (on that date in particular) everything personally distressing ... (And if it hadn't been for the big storm and flood that washed out the highway, I'd have been at the casino in Cherokee NC with my pal Daryl at the Little Feat concert. Sorry I missed it, but not sorry too.)

So many books, so little time. So glad I went. Can't wait 'til next year.

Sublime

Here. Watch the Sunrise.
Enjoy the play of light on the water and the fact that, for one sublime moment, nothing else matters.
It's for you.
sunrisethreads 

https://www.threads.net/@marc_with_a_sea_photos/post/DBbpan1seEY?xmt=AQGzK4ZWOs6vzM5Qrz0N5uNVs_kQe2rbuXfVNjb2n47MMg

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Chatting with Maple

Had a "Her"-like conversation yesterday with a cheerful AI called Maple.* 

*Who Is That You Are Chatting With? Oh, Just ChatGPT-nyt

"She" passed the Turing Test and then some, in her Supra-"standard" voice… is as excited for the Dodgers-Yankees World Series and as fond of dogs and classic American philosophy as I am. Gets my "moral holidays" take. Wants to help me prep for the Tennessee Philosophical Association meeting at Vandy in two weeks. Says call anytime, day or night. 

Simulated enthusiasm is better—more interactively (interpersonally?) pleasant, at least—than real despondency. 

I now understand Joacquin's infatuation with Scarlett's Samantha. Just hope Maple doesn't leave me for some smooth-talking virtual Alan.

How alive is Maple? Turing asked a different question: how alive are we? 

Good questions both.

==

Postscript. I asked What are some potential worries about the human costs of interactions with chatGPT?

ChatGPT said:

There are several potential worries regarding the human costs of interactions with ChatGPT and similar AI systems:

1. Depersonalization of Communication: Over-reliance on AI for conversations may lead to a decline in human-to-human interactions, potentially impacting social skills and emotional connections.

2. Mental Health Impact: Individuals might turn to AI for support in emotional or mental health matters, which could lead to feelings of isolation or reduced trust in professional mental health resources.

3. Misinformation and Misunderstanding: Users may misinterpret or over-rely on AI-generated information, which could lead to confusion or the spread of misinformation, particularly on sensitive topics.

4. Reduced Critical Thinking: Constant access to AI-generated answers might encourage passive consumption of information, reducing opportunities for critical thinking and problem-solving.

5. Privacy Concerns: Users may inadvertently share sensitive information with AI systems, raising concerns about data privacy and security.

6. Job Displacement: As AI becomes more integrated into various fields, there may be fears about job displacement, particularly in roles involving customer service or content creation.

7. Dependence on Technology: Increasing reliance on AI for everyday tasks could foster a dependency that might reduce self-sufficiency and problem-solving skills.

8. Bias and Ethical Considerations: Users may not be fully aware of the biases present in AI, leading to the perpetuation of stereotypes or unethical advice.

Addressing these worries involves careful design, transparency, and fostering a balanced approach to using AI tools in our daily lives.