Inscription on the Obama Center Museum

Bought our tickets, for September. Pleased to see they’re going fast. Back to the future. “Yes we can!”

Singularly “kooky”

Not the first kooky religion heralding the end of times as we’ve known them, but maybe the most bankrolled. Not that I don't love the Star Trek fantasy vision of an unbounded future, but Jeff and Elon really don't seem like the guys who'll take us there. (I'm glad Captain Kirk got his ride on Blue Origin, though.)

 “The desire for growth is a general feature of much of capitalism. But the idea of a big future filled with virtually unlimited growth, a future of the specific sort longtermism proffers, has held a great deal of currency in Silicon Valley for decades. 36 The most salient example of this is the concept of a technological singularity, usually referred to as the Singularity.  

Believers in the Singularity claim that technological progress has been accelerating and will continue to do so, leading to a singular point where so much change happens so rapidly that the fundamental nature of daily human life will transform beyond all imagination or comprehension. Superintelligent AI and human-machine hybrids will usher in a utopia, end scarcity, and make biomedical discoveries that will allow us to live forever or nearly so. Bounded only by the laws of physics, there will be no practical limit to what a post-Singularity civilization can achieve. According to Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent exponent of the Singularity, the current rate of technological change strongly suggests that the Singularity is coming very soon indeed—no later than twenty years from now, in 2045. “Ultimately, it will affect everything,” he claims. “We’re going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. We’re going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.” 37 

 There’s little scientific basis for the idea of a Singularity and all the attendant miracles it will supposedly perform. Nonetheless, the idea is astonishingly common in Silicon Valley and across the entire tech industry. Kurzweil isn’t some kind of marginal figure. He is a director of engineering at Google, and his books on the Singularity have been bestsellers. 

“The Singularity is a new religion—and a particularly kooky one at that,” said computer scientist and artist Jaron Lanier. “The Singularity is the coming of the Messiah, heaven on Earth, the Armageddon, the end of times. And fanatics always think that the end of time comes in their own lifetime.”” 

      — More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker

I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

Summer rerun season is already here, evidently. https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

Rebecca Solnit, grateful meliorist

A more-than-perfunctory acknowledgments section: 

 “I’m grateful to everyone who refused to surrender in advance. To those who persevered when the future seemed dark, who saw the night as the time in which we dream and grow, who became torches or North Stars when we needed illumination or direction. To all the visionary souls and heroes who made the changes this book tries to describe. To all those making the shifts toward a better world now, the ones just coming into focus or that we’ll see clearly in ten or fifty or a hundred years, the ones that make the news and the ones that happen in secret and touch one life or protect one place. To everyone who keeps looking, hoping, working. To those who know that while we can’t save everything, everything we can save matters.” — The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit 

The long view

That’s what we need to take, if we think positive change can come again. 

“If knowledge is power, memory and perspective are among its most important aspects. Only in the long view can you see the patterns emerging, the way the present builds on the past, the way past surprises guarantee more surprises are coming, the ingredients of change over years, decades, centuries. If you don’t see time on the scale of change, you don’t see change; if you don’t remember how things used to be, you don’t know they’re different than they were and how that unfolded. While some people are too young to remember the past firsthand (and some know it other ways), I’m often struck by my peers who’ve lived through dizzying change and somehow adjusted without noticing it. 

I remember how the economic policies of Ronald Reagan created mass homelessness, but if you forget that, you can imagine homelessness is inevitable or the result of personal failings or local conditions, not primarily a creation of the radical rearrangement of the national economy in pursuit of a return to the old inequality (and similar cuts to social services in other countries produced similar forms of desperation and displacement). From the 1930s through the 1970s, from the New Deal to the War on Poverty, the US government created more social safety nets and more economic equality, lifting up the poor and taxing the rich. Beginning in the 1980s, these achievements were dismantled, and new policies created a more unequal, insecure society. To remember that this was created by specific decisions is to remember that it can be changed again; to remember that something once existed—like California’s tuition-free public universities—is to remember that it can exist again.” 

— The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit 

Winterton Curtis’s humanism (and mine)

Returned my old landlord’s book to the library, with a couple of inserted post-its to amuse and enlighten some hypothetical future borrower. Dr. C's pithy characterization of “the humanistic philosophy of life” remains the best I’ve seen. 

 

Arthur’s people, and mine

Arthur Brooks has come in for some harsh bashing lately, especially in The New Yorker. It’s not all undeserved. But I’m looking forward to his Vandy commencement and residency this year (a dear family friend is graduating) and appreciate his past contributions to happiness scholarship (and popularizing). And I share his positive feeling for ambitious and aspirational students. 

 “I was born to be a college professor and, in fact, have been on campuses since I was a baby: My dad was a professor. His dad, too. For me, academia is the family business, and mine as well since I took my first professorship nearly thirty years ago. The research is interesting and rewarding, but even more, the students are my people—ambitious strivers just starting out on what promise to be terrific careers and lives. They give me energy because they always are so inspired by ideas, so purpose-driven, and so enthusiastic.” — The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness by Arthur C. Brooks

Little Bezoses, shoplifting Whole Foods avocados etc.

A timely essay, after last night’s Lyceum (in which Prof. Vanessa Wills rightly called out big Bezos and his billionaire buds). Don’t be a mini-Bezos, in the name of Revolution. 

 “… they haven’t taken Philosophy 101. I lost it when Tolentino, asked to ponder what would happen if everyone stole, thought that the categorical imperative was consequentialist, rather than Immanuel Kant’s assertion that some acts are inherently wrong and destroy your own humanity and undermine society. But as she put it…” —Joel Stein 

https://open.substack.com/pub/thejoelstein/p/microlooting?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

ProfessorVanessa Wills to speak on modern loneliness at MTSU’s Applied Philosophy Lyceum

Vanessa Wills, associate professor of philosophy at George Washington University, will delve into the roots of modern loneliness and the importance of friendships at Middle Tennessee State University’s spring Applied Philosophy Lyceum...

https://mtsunews.com/applied-philosophy-lyceum-vanessa-wills-2026/

Kaag's coming

I'm pleased to report that my nagging persistence has finally payed off: John Kaag has agreed to deliver MTSU's Applied Philosophy Lyceum next Fall. Details to follow. 

Can Claude get religion? Or humanism?

"In a public statement of its intentions for its Claude chatbot, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has said that it wants Claude to be “a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent.” The company raised the moral stakes this month, when it announcedthat its latest A.I. model, Claude Mythos Preview, poses too great a cybersecurity threat to be widely released. Behind the scenes, Anthropic has been trying to shore up the ethical foundations of its products, working with Catholic clergy and consultingwith other prominent Christians to help foster Claude’s moral and spiritual development.

Anthropic’s intentions are admirable, but the project of drawing on religion to cultivate the ethical behavior of Claude (or any other chatbot) is likely to fail. Not because there isn’t moral wisdom in Scripture, sermons and theological treatises — texts that Claude has undoubtedly already scraped from the web and integrated — but because Claude is missing a crucial mechanism by which religion fosters moral growth: a body.

While Claude might have a mind (of sorts) that can process information, it cannot meditate, fast, prostrate itself in prayer, sing hymns in a congregation or participate in other aspects of the physical life of religion. And this makes all the difference: According to the scientific literature, it’s the practice of religion — not merely the believing in it — that brings about its characteristic benefits.

There is robust data, for example, linking religion to greater health and well-being. But that link is not strong for people who merely identify themselves as believers. It’s only when people also practice a faith — attend weekly services, pray or meditate at home — that religion’s benefits become pronounced: The more people “do” religion, the happier and healthier they tend to be..." nyt

For the record:

We who “do” humanism are generally pretty happy & healthy too, in my experience. 

For humanists the Happy Human is about celebrating being human – celebrating what human beings can do and celebrating our potential for happiness. Humanists believe we have one life and so we should make the most of our lives by trying to be happy and supporting other people to do the same.

William James on selfhood

Dr. Dianda’s Lyceum address was excellent, effectively making the Jamesian point that a complex and multi-relational self is rarely “fractured” beyond repair. https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3mjuygvzmjk2b

Introducing Dr. Dianda

(As I'll do later this afternoon.)

Welcome to our Applied Philosophy Lyceum, which we’ve been hosting for 34 years now. Thanks to Dean Lyons and the College of Liberal Arts for their support… and thanks as always to MTSU News for helping us get word of this event out to our campus community. One small correction: we did not “begin as two separate departments”... but we in the now-singular Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies are indeed united in our shared mission to bring the best and brightest public-facing scholars to middle Tennessee for our respective Lyceum and Colloquium events year after year.

(And NOTE, we’ll be doing this again next Friday when we welcome Professor Vanessa Wills from George Washington University. She’ll be talking about love and friendship. But first…)

It is my honor to launch our spring Lyceum season by introducing a speaker I am proud now to have recruited twice: first to serve as Secretary of the William James Society, and now as our speaker this afternoon.

Professor Alexis Dianda received her PhD from The New School for Social Research in 2017. Upon completion of her PhD, she joined Dartmouth College as a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Leslie Center for the Humanities. In 2019, Professor Dianda arrived at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where she teaches for the Department of Philosophy and the Philosophy, Politics, and the Public program.

Professor Dianda’s teaching interests touch upon American philosophy, feminist theory, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy. She is the author of Varieties of Experience: William James after the linguistic turn (Harvard University Press, 2023), which insists that “lived experience must remain the bedrock of our philosophical reflections.”

Among her courses at Xavier: Ethics as Introduction to Philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir, and Philosophy of Hope.

But why, really, have I been so eager to recruit Professor Dianda? It must be because she says things like: “I’m a crazy dog lady… I grew up with dogs and have always been a dog lover.” (Me too. My dad was a vet.) Her pups, pit bull mixes like one of mine, are called Henry Adams, Tillie Olsen, and Huck Finn.

Plus, she reads Montaigne and Melville. So of course she knows all about “fractured selves,” as we’re about to hear.

Welcome to MTSU, Professor Dianda.

“American philosophers are philosophers in the business of offering a vision of America: its people, its principles, its ideals. In this way, the Americanness of American philosophy is, I think, bound to a distinctive impulse toward national self-creation. American philosophers, in other words, are those who take America, the concept, the country, the people, as their object of conceptual and critical inquiry.” Alexis Dianda*

What does American philosophy mean to you?

This is a really difficult question. I usually give two different answers depending on the context. The first is to say that American philosophers share a certain set of philosophical assumptions: they’re pluralists, fallibilists, anti-foundationalists, and anti-representationalists. These features do cover whole swaths of American philosophical thought, and they’re helpful for thinking about pragmatism in particular, which is what most people think American philosophy is. But appealing to these philosophical commitments doesn’t really go very far toward explaining why we exclude from the category people like Derrida or Foucault. And it also doesn’t help us understand why we include (or want to include) people like Santayana, Cooper, Cavell, or Du Bois... (continues)

*Alexis Dianda is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University. She is the author of The Varieties of Experience: William James After the Linguistic Turn (Harvard, 2023) as well as articles and chapters on the work of James and Richard Rorty. Her other research and teaching interests include feminist theory and nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy.

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-alexis-dianda/

Existentialism is not a philosophy

Made my flyer for the fall existentialism course yesterday. Should have put this on it. “Existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy. Most of the living “existentialists” have repudiated this label, and a bewildered outsider might well conclude that the only thing they have in common is a marked aversion for each other. To add to the confusion, many writers of the past have frequently been hailed as members of this movement, and it is extremely doubtful whether they would have appreciated the company to which they are consigned. In view of this, it might be argued that the label “existentialism” ought to be abandoned altogether.” — Existentialism From Dostoevsky To Sartre by Walter Kaufmann https://a.co/0hJm9sln

Special

NYTimes: Artemis II Crew Reunites With Families and Fellow NASA Astronauts

“This was not easy, being 200,000 plus miles away from home,” he said. “Before you launch, it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth, and when you’re out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends."

He added that “It’s a special thing to be a human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth…”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/science/nasa-artemis-moon-astronauts-houston.html?smid=nytcore-ios-sharee

MTSU’s April 17 Applied Philosophy Lyceum speaker to explore the ‘fractured self’

Some fractured facts in this story: we did not begin as "two separate departments," the Dept of Philosophy added Religious Studies to its title and mission a few years ago. Previously, there was no Department of Religious Studies at MTSU. Their speaker series is called a Colloquium, not a Lyceum, a name which has its specific roots in the ancient Athenian school of Aristotle called the Lyceum.

But we're grateful for the publicity. All good. Looking forward to the event.

https://mtsunews.com/dianda-philosophy-lyceum-dianda-2026/

Lyceum Apr 17

Sisyphus descending

Claude summarizes our conversation

The Jamesian Thread
Throughout the conversation we kept returning to James — his defense of experience against capital-P Philosophy, his insistence that religious experience has cash value even if its metaphysical claims are doubtful, and his sociable pluralism as a model for taking believers seriously without validating supernaturalism. Your own position as a "Jamesian pragmatic pluralist" — secular, humanist, yet genuinely respectful of others' experience — emerged as a principled and difficult stance that avoids both dismissal and condescension.

Secular Grace
The conversation closed on the idea that the fully inhabited secular life has its own raptures — what we called "secular grace." The Jamesian affirmation of existence differs from Nietzsche's in being constitutively social and democratically available: not heroic solitary amor fati but a shared, relational yes-saying. Sisyphus, in James's version, would compare notes with someone on the way back down. All of which, you noted, nicely foreshadows your fall existentialism course.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

https://claude.ai/share/d8099634-f9a2-4f24-9a28-804b3bc4a745

Back in the saddle

I'd gotten out of the habit of recreational (as opposed to campus commuter) biking, in the winter months. But I had good rides in Warner Park Monday and to Centennial yesterday. Felt good and right. Must keep pedaling, nothing on solid earth feels so much like flying (and freedom) as rolling on air-on two wheels, under one's own motive force of propulsion. It's fun, it's fitness-inducing, and in Michael Pollan's phrase (mentioned to Ezra Klein)  it's excellent "consciousness hygiene."

 

Good trouble in KC

https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-235059088?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

 

 

Rethinking Thoreau: We’ve Been Mispronouncing His Name for Centuries

The guy at the Walden visitor center in Concord set me straight on this decades ago. Finally, the rest of the world is also informed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/28/books/review/thoreau-pronunciation-documentary.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

New Ken Burns/Don Henley/Walden Woods documentary:

Henry David Thoreau: Episode 1 - Who are we?

Baseball in Literature and Culture conference, Ottawa KS, March 27 2026

 

UPDATE: Found a couple of slight glitches, fixed in this version (ironically including the slide about the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, and the beauty implicit in imperfection. Ha!) 

Also added Joe Posnanski's "entirely subjective" list of the most fun teams to watch in '26. KC is #3.

Grace on Opening Day

MLB Opening Day (after last night's Yankee rout of the Giants)! I'm off to celebrate with the baseball scholars in Ottawa. Play ball! Play life. Read Richard Powers's Playground, and enjoy the games. Have some fun and earn a high station, in these appalling times. 

"A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace."

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-thursday-march-26-2026/

I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

There’s a line

He looked great

"Until the very end, our friend and colleague Calvin Tomkins looked at his life with a sense of wonder and wry amusement. He died on Friday at the age of one hundred, just a few months younger than The New Yorker, his working home since 1958. Tad (he always went by Tad) was an irrepressibly energetic man with excellent hair, bright, curious eyes, and a shy, slivery smile—and yet, when friends and strangers remarked on how young he looked, he deflected, citing what he called "the three ages of man": Youth, Maturity, and You Look Great…" David Remnick, NYer

Journey on

 In an interesting coincidence, after posting "Just Keep Going" yesterday I received an email from a former student who wondered if I think that life, and countless of its small episodes, are really best characterized as a journey. He mentioned Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, who jumps around in time and place (in his mind) and does not seem to follow any straight path through life. I said I'd get back to him. Here's what I've come up with so far:

It's interesting that your query came on the same day I posted  this (from Playground: A Novel by Richard Powers):

...that classic bit of Quebecoise wisdom. "Attache ta tuque et lache pas la patate!" "Meaning?" "Put on your little beanie cap and don't release the potato." ...the meaning was clear, wasn't it? Hold on tight and keep going. Just keep going. Like any good creature of the tides.

I do think life is a journey, or really a series of journeys, though not often simply linear. Some of them end up  at a preconceived destination but many get rerouted along the way. I'm 69. The line from my starting point in 1957 to here is jagged, with lots of unplanned side-trips and unexpected excursions. As the song says, "I wouldn't take nothin' for my journey(s) now!" 

 Some of us do pursue goals with single-minded commitment, but most of us are diverted or set new goals along the way. Most of us don't go time-tripping like the Vonnegut character but almost all of us find ourselves thinking frequently about the past and imagining the future.

 The late American philosopher John J. McDermott used to say "the nectar is in the journey," which I interpret as: the joy of life is in experience, which cannot and should not be entirely plotted beforehand. Be open to novelty and spontaneity, make lots of plans and feel free to improvise. Form reliable habits that will facilitate your goals, but don't let habit stand in the way of a good time. 

Nietzsche said "the formula of my happiness is a yes, a no, a straight line, and a goal." I interpret that to mean that a sense of forward direction in this life, and an ability to say yes to the "demon" who proposes eternal recurrence, is how to go about "becoming who you are"... but as I say, a long lifetime should be expected to generate many and sometimes contradictory goals, many navigational corrections, many yeses and noes, many experiment in living. And forget the straight line.

But I do weary of hearing everything these days described as a journey: your weight-loss journey, your fitness journey, your journey to wellness et al. It's become a tired cliche.

And I do get your point about the landscape of memory being more of a still-life to contemplate, rather than an expedition to somewhere. This is the platonic sort of sensibility that philosophers like George Santayana have extolled, when contemplating and appreciating "essences" stored in mind and accessible at will. William James called that a "perfection of rottenness"... I wouldn't go that far, but I do think action and movement is generally more conducive to the good life than contemplation for its own sake.

I don't know if I've addressed your concerns and interest in this topic, let me know. But I'm glad to know your journey thus far has brought you to meliorism!

And happy Spring!

Just keep going

"THE NEXT DAY they were mostly quiet on their drive back to Durham. Something had changed between them after the night's fire on Ocracoke, some shift toward intimacy she wasn't ready for. His eyes on the road, Limpet asked, "Do you have a life philosophy?" "Life philosophy?" The phrase felt like a contradiction in terms. "Words you live by."

She didn't live by words. She lived by life. But the question was sweet, and she did her best. She fed him that classic bit of Quebecoise wisdom. "Attache ta tuque et lache pas la patate!" "Meaning?" "Put on your little beanie cap and don't release the potato." Bart Mannis laughed so hard he almost ran them off the highway. But the meaning was clear, wasn't it? Hold on tight and keep going. Just keep going. Like any good creature of the tides."

— Playground: A Novel by Richard Powers
https://a.co/0c1VZjoK

“A few extra years”

More Todd May. This could be a rationale for unhealthy living, at precisely the time of life when its opposite is most crucial… but possibly also least subject to one's control. I'd say "a few extra years" at the end of the road is nothing to take lightly. Taking them lightly is something I've noticed some of my young students do, and when they do I usually accuse them of ageism.

But ask me again after I've "retired from all that."

"Another way a person can know what they need but not care about it might be in regard to health as they age. Some older folks will know that, if they want to continue being healthy, they need to cut back on sugar or see a doctor regularly or start exercising more. But they don't, because they don't really care enough to do so. This example is a complicated one, though. For some, neglecting their health is probably not a matter of laziness but of another need: to let go of some of the ongoing concerns that have characterized their lives. For many of us, life is extraordinarily regimented. We are told what we need to do for our education, our jobs, our health, our child-rearing, even what we should definitely check out on vacation. When we retire from all that, there is something to be said for sacrificing a few years of life for living more heedlessly. Put another way, it may be that for many of us the need for unconstrained living is more important than the need for a few extra years of life."

— Care: Reflections on Who We Are (Philosophy: The New Basics) by Todd May
https://a.co/0iqXzKAa

Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times by Todd May

A surprisingly lighthearted approach to a heavy subject, though not so surprising coming from the philosophical advisor to The Good Place. Most lives are indeed worth living, we may agree, while still also wondering whether the total species impact of humanity hasn't been a net loss for life on this planet.

But wouldn't our self-inflicted extinction be an awful abrogation of responsibility? Don't we owe it to the future of life to stick around and try to clean up the mess we've made?

Well, at least 'til after the WBC final?

"…the idea that humans are destroying life on the planet for many of our fellow creatures or that we could get into a war that would make life unlivable for many others—that's not so crazy. Instead, it's fact. And how about the thought that given what we're doing, perhaps we should seriously consider whether we should go extinct, whether the world would be better off without us? Maybe that's not so crazy either.

The not-craziness of it is why I've been thinking about this for some time now. In fact, several years ago I penned some very preliminary thoughts on it for the (now extinct) New York Times blog The Stone, raising the possibility that human extinction might be at once a tragedy and a good thing. It would be a tragedy for two reasons. First, in addition to the suffering that would precede it, it would involve the loss of much of what humans value and only humans can create: art, science, and so on. Second—here is the classically tragic part—that loss would be caused by humans. We, like King Lear or Oedipus, would be the cause of our demise. But our extinction would not be all bad news. The end of human existence would also be the end of the massive suffering humans cause, largely to non-human animals. (Granted, we also cause a good bit of suffering to one another—and not just through social media.
But, as I'll argue in the next chapter, for most of us our lives, in the end, are well worth living.) It's not that animals don't cause suffering to one another. Of course they do.

But no non-human animal can cause the extraordinary level of suffering that humans do, through factory farming and the consumption that goes along with it, deforestation, plastic disposal into the oceans, scientific experimentation, and the like…"

— Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times by Todd May
https://a.co/0jeNMx01

“Rationalists”

Child's Play

"…Scott Alexander is one of the leading proponents of rationalism, which is—depending on whom you ask—either a major intellectual movement or a nerdy Bay Area subculture or a small network of friend groups and polycules. Rationalists believe that the way most people understand the world is hopelessly muddled, and that to reach the truth you have to abandon all existing modes of knowledge acquisition and start again from scratch. The method they landed on for rebuilding all of human knowledge is Bayes's theorem, a formula invented by an eighteenth-century English minister that is used in statistics to work out conditional probabilities. In the mid-Aughts, armed with the theorem, the rationalists discovered ["discovered"] that humanity is in jeopardy of a rogue superintelligent AI wiping out all life on the planet. This has been their overriding concern ever since…"

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee

I asked Claude…

According to an article in Philosophy Now magazine, ChatGPT's favorite philosopher is Hannah Arendt. Grok likes Friedrich Nietzsche. Gemini is fond of Socrates. Do you have a preference for any particular philosophers?

https://claude.ai/share/01f91fb2-d9bc-4838-9676-5a785d1c7305

“choose a direction and keep on walking”

"…you do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking—though that metaphor makes it sound as though it already exists, if at a distance, rather than that the process itself creates it and covers the distance between the idea and the actuality."

— The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The secular soul: not magic, but…

"The seeming immateriality of consciousness has so far resisted all the tools of reductive science, and this is what has allowed an aura of magic to bloom around it. I suspect that the "problem of consciousness" has become a proxy for our own resistance to reductive explanation, which in turn must have something to do with our fear of mortality—that final unwished-for reduction of all that we are and all that we value in life to mere matter—to ashes or compost. Descartes called the immaterial half of his dualism a soul, and souls, after all, are indestructible. The hardness of the hard problem has given us a secular version of the immaterial, immortal soul.

The idea, or wish, that consciousness cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental nourishes theories like panpsychism and idealism—two versions of the concept that consciousness pervades the universe and is itself as fundamental as matter or energy, perhaps even more so.

Panpsychism, you'll recall, is the theory that everything—even a rock or a grain of sand—has some infinitesimal parcel of protoconsciousness, with these parcels combining, somehow, to create the sort of complex mental lives we experience.

In the other version, idealism, consciousness comprises a universal field that precedes matter; the function of brains is to tune in to this field, much as a radio picks up and plays signals floating in the electromagnetic field, bringing them into our awareness.

I'm guessing it's ideas like these that my lunch companion had in mind when he pejoratively deployed the word magic. I share his skepticism. Yet at the same time, I find it no more plausible that a small, wet, spongy chunk of animal flesh can wake up and become aware of not only itself but also the fact that it's aware of itself! This, too, feels like magic.

It argues for keeping an open mind."

— A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan
https://a.co/0gony14i