a gratuitous insult

Carl Sagan considers gratuitous suffering…

"First of all, you might say, "Well, evil doesn't exist in the world. We can't see the big picture, that a little pool of evil here is awash in a great sea of good that it makes possible." Or, as medieval theologians used to say, "God uses the Devil for his own purposes." This is clearly the three-monkey argument about "hear no evil…" and has been described by a leading contemporary theologian as a gratuitous insult to mankind, a symptom of insensitivity and indifference to human suffering. To be assured that all the miseries and agonies men and women experience are only illusory."

— The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan
https://a.co/9Ddpr6B

Einstein on Free Will and the Power of the Imagination

"Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player." 

"We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some dead star…" Maria Popova https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/02/26/einstein-free-will-imagination/  

Brother Cornel’s connected dots

Cornel West's Friday night virtuoso performance in our building is still reverberating. He walks right to the edge of self-parody but still inspires and commands respect... even from heathens like me. I was looking around, at the end, for a collection plate! His calling out of our culture's infatuation with "success" and "branding" etc. was spot-on, his reiterated concern for "the least of us" and righteous insistence on truth was stirring, his closing "be not afraid" benediction was Jamesian. A wonderful event.He is unrivaled in his ability to draw together and connect the dots between people and ideas most of us would never think to link. Emerson and Louis Armstrong? Sure, why not. That's avoiding evasion…

"…Thinking about my new position at Princeton, I said, "Afro-American studies was never meant to be solely for Afro-Americans. It was meant to try to redefine what it means to be human, what it means to be modern, what it means to be American, because people of African descent in this country are profoundly human, profoundly modern, profoundly American." 

When bell asked what the essence was of my recently published book, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, I answered that it was "an interpretation of the emergency, the sustenance, and the decline of American civilization from the vantage point of an African American. It means that we have to have a cosmopolitan orientation, even though it is rooted in the fundamental concern with the plight and predicaments of African Americans." 

I went on to argue "that there are fundamental themes, like experimentation and improvisation, that can be found in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, that are thoroughly continuous with the great art form that Afro-Americans have given the modern world, which is jazz. And therefore to talk about America is to talk about improvisation and experimentation, and therefore to talk about Emerson and Louis Armstrong in the same breath." 

I told the story of the cultural and political significance of the major native philosophic tradition in America best represented by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, W. V. Quine, Richard Rorty, and Roberto Unger. My own prophetic pragmatism was the culminating point of the story…." — Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir by Cornel West

Bewilderment” by Richard Powers

On re-reading, I increasingly suspect Richard Powers may have read or watched and subliminally absorbed Cosmos: Possible Worlds-especially this week's chapter/episode ("The Man of a Trillion Worlds").

Here the brilliant "on the spectrum" little boy Robin quizzes his dad the exobiologist, as they camp under the stars in the Smokies:

"ONE MORE QUESTION, he said. What exactly do you do, again?

"Oh, Robbie. It's late."

I'm serious. When somebody at school asks me, what am I supposed to say?

It had been the cause of his suspension, a month before. The son of some banker had asked Robin what I did. Robin had answered, He looks for life in outer space. That made the son of a brand executive ask, How is Redbreast's Dad like a piece of toilet paper? He circles Uranus, looking for Klingons. Robin went nuts, apparently threatening to kill both boys. These days, that was grounds for expulsion and immediate psychiatric treatment. We got off easy.

"It's complicated."

He waved toward the woods above us. We're not going anywhere.

"I write programs that try to take everything we know about all the systems of any kind of planet—the rocks and volcanoes and oceans, all the physics and chemistry—and put them together to predict what kind of gases might be present in their atmospheres."

Why?

"Because atmospheres are parts of living processes. The mixes of gases can tell us if the planet is alive."

Like here?

"Exactly. My programs have even predicted the Earth's atmosphere at different times in history."

You can't predict the past, Dad.

"You can if you don't know it yet."

So how do you tell what kind of gases a planet has from a hundred light-years away when you can't even see it?

I exhaled, changing the atmosphere inside our tent. It had been a long day, and the thing he wanted to know would take ten years of coursework to grasp. But a child's question was the start of all things. "Okay. Remember atoms?"

Yep. Very small.

"And electrons?"

Very, very small.

"Electrons in an atom can only be in certain energy states. Like they're on the steps of a staircase. When they change stairs, they absorb or give off energy at specific frequencies. Those frequencies depend on what kind of atom they're in."

Crazy stuff. He grinned at the trees above the tent.

"You think that's crazy? Listen to this. When you look at the spectrum of light from a star, you can see little black lines, at the frequency of those stairsteps. It's called spectroscopy, and it tells you what atoms are in the star."

Little black lines. From electrons, a gazillion miles away. Who figured that out?

"We're a very clever species, we humans."

He didn't reply. I figured he'd drifted asleep again—a good end to a fine day. Even the whippoorwill agreed and called it a night. The hush in its wake filled with the bandsaw buzz of insects and the river's surge.

I must have dropped off, too, because Chester was sitting with his muzzle on my leg, whimpering as Alyssa read to us about the soul recovering radical innocence.

Dad. Dad! I figured it out.

I slipped upward from the net of sleep. "Figured out what, honey?"

In his excitement, he let the endearment slide. Why we can't hear them.

Half asleep, I had no clue.

What's the name for rock-eaters, again?

He was still trying to solve the Fermi paradox—how, given all the universe's time and space, there seemed to be no one out there. He'd held on to the question since our first night in the cabin, looking through our telescope at the Milky Way: Where was everybody?

"Lithotrophs."

He smacked his forehead. Lithotrophs! Duh. So, say there's a rocky planet full of lithotrophs, living in solid rock. You see the problem?

"Not yet."

Dad, come on! Or maybe they live in liquid methane or whatever. They're super-slow, almost frozen solid. Their days are like our centuries. What if their messages take too long for us to even know that they're messages? Like maybe it takes fifty of our years for them to send two syllables.

Our whippoorwill started up again, far away. In my head, Chester, infinitely long-suffering, was still struggling with Yeats.

"It's a great idea, Robbie."

And maybe there's a water world, where these super-smart, super-fast bird-fish are zooming around, trying to get our attention.

"But they're sending too fast for us to understand."

Exactly! We should try listening at different speeds.

"Your mother loves you, Robbie. You know that?" It was our little code, and he abided it. But it did nothing to calm his excitement.

At least tell the SETI listeners, okay?

"I will."

His next words woke me again. A minute, three seconds, half an hour later: Who knew how long?

Remember how she used to say: "How rich are you, little boy?"

"I remember."

He held up his hands to the moonlit mountain evidence. The wind-bent trees. The roar of the nearby river. The electrons tumbling down the staircase of their atoms in this singular atmosphere. His face, in the dark, struggled for accuracy. This rich. That's how rich."

— Bewilderment: A Novel by Richard Powers

Alan Watts, Epicurean

Alan Watts on Death, in a Beautiful Animated Short Film

What's it gonna be like, dying? To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up.

Well, a lot of things it's not gonna be like. It's not going to be like being buried alive. It's not going to be like being in the darkness forever.

I tell you what — it's going to be as if you never had existed at all. Not only you, but everything else as well. That just there was never anything, there's no one to regret it — and there's no problem.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/10/31/alan-watts-on-death/

Real success

I just went on that site we former users do not name, looking for mention of last night’s terrific Cornel West event at MTSU. Found this:

I thoroughly enjoyed my time studying philosophy while at @mtsu and was fortunate enough to learn from professors like @OSOPHER, as well as from peers like Ed. I really appreciate them sharing my story and hope this encourages others to seek out the benefits of philosophy. pic.twitter.com/QnYP78ehIM

— Brandon Benson (@bensonbrandon10) February 16, 2023

https://twitter.com/bensonbrandon10/status/1626308254526496768?s=46&t=woeWooF3dUF3dZGE1Mxj6A

I’m pleased Ed chose to tell your story, Brandon, and gratified by your success… which, as Brother West was saying last night, becomes real and meaningful when aligned with a commitment to the success and well-being of others, especially “the least of these.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Phil Oliver (@osopher)

Losing their religion

Some "divided souls" are unified and made happy ("regenerated") by religion, others by its loss. Shouldn't we welcome both kinds, and celebrate the varieties of all kinds of life-giving experience?

"Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in which men gain that gift. Easily, permanently, and successfully, it often transforms the most intolerable misery into the profoundest and most enduring happiness. But to find religion is only one out of many ways of reaching unity; and the process of remedying inner incompleteness and reducing inner discord is a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form. In judging of the religious types of regeneration which we are about to study, it is important to recognize that they are only one species of a genus that contains other types as well. For example, the new birth may be away from religion into incredulity…" — VRE

9/10?

"For in almost every act of our perceiving faculties, observation and inferences are intimately blended. What we are said to observe is usually a compound result, of which one-tenth may be observation, and the remaining nine-tenths inference."
— John Stuart Mill

‘Woodstock’ for Christians: Revival Draws Thousands to Kentucky Town

Over two weeks, more than 50,000 people descended on a small campus chapel to experience the nation's first major spiritual revival in decades — one driven by Gen Z... nyt

This is not the first Kentucky "Woodstock" revival, see Kurt Andersen in Fantasyland on  Cane Ridge in the 19th century:

"…By reputation, Presbyterian ministers were stiff-necked boors—Methodists did the arousing. But it was a young Presbyterian whose North Carolina preaching provoked less godly locals to burn his pulpit and deliver a death threat written in blood. He moved six hundred miles to the far western reaches of Kentucky. On the frontier, nobody much objected to one more freak. Everyone was a newcomer, so there were no established churches. And his sermons rocked. They were the only regularly scheduled entertainment within a day's ride. 

Like an ambitious show business impresario, the Kentucky minister decided to expand. In the summer of 1800 he turned his regular annual communion-feast weekend into a regional festival of supercharged preaching and conversion. Hundreds came to his Red River Meeting House to watch and hear a half-dozen different preachers preach, including a Methodist. People shouted, people cried, people freaked out. "The power of God was strong upon me," the Methodist recalled afterward. "I turned again and, losing sight of the fear of man, I went through the house shouting and exhorting with all possible ecstasy and energy, and the floor was soon covered with the slain"—that is, individuals on the floor, experiencing improvised fits of hysteria.

Something huge had been unleashed, and everyone realized it immediately. It was crazier than what Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield had incited in their grandparents' day. God had entered people. They were not just enthusiastic, they were living the dream. "On Monday," the organizer wrote, "multitudes were struck down under awful conviction; the cries of the distressed filled the whole house…. There you might see little children of ten, eleven and twelve years of age, praying and crying for redemption, in the blood of Jesus, in agonies of distress." His young friend and fellow Presbyterian minister was astonished too. "Many, very many… continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state…. After lying there for hours… they would rise, shouting deliverance." 

The fantasy had been contagious. At the repeat performance organized the next month at a nearby church, people camped out, and the contagion erupted again. Hundreds gathered. Dozens were "slain." 

A year after the astonishing prototypes, the two entrepreneurial pastors decided to go even bigger. For the 1801 event at the second minister's church in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, they booked dozens of ministers to preach, Presbyterians and Methodists and Baptists. Like the first extravaganza, it was scheduled around an annual Holy Fair, the first weekend in August. Cane Ridge was in the more populous eastern part of the state, only a day's ride from the booming little city of Lexington (pop. 1,759), so maybe they would attract not just hundreds of people but a thousand or two thousand. No more than five hundred, tops, could fit into the bamboo-covered meetinghouse, so they erected a tent and outdoor stage as well. 

They were overwhelmed. Instead of three days, it continued for nearly a week. As many as twenty thousand people arrived and stayed to hear the gospel, to be saved, to be part of a once-in-a-lifetime human carnival, an unprecedented lollapalooza. For a few days, Cane Ridge was among the several most populous places in America, bigger than Providence, as big as Charleston. 

Things really got rolling twenty-four hours in, as Saturday afternoon turned to dusk. Campfires and bonfires burned. Darkness descended. Preachers preached from trees and wagons, several at once. Dozens of ordinary people—women, children, anyone moved by the Holy Spirit—were self-appointed "exhorters," shouting the truth of the gospel as they believed or felt or imagined or otherwise knew it. People screamed uncontrollably. People ran and leaped, barked and sang uncontrollably. People laughed and sobbed uncontrollably. Hundreds were overcome by "the jerks," convulsive seizures of limbs and necks and torsos that sometimes resolved into a kind of dance. And of course, hundreds or thousands of sinners found Christ and repented—including one of the gang of drunken local blasphemers who had ridden into the throng at full speed to make trouble, fell from his white horse, knocked himself out, and finally awakened more than a day later, smiling… saved. The wonder and chaos ebbed and flowed as dawn broke and the sun rose and set again, but it never stopped, day and night after August day and night. 

An equivalent American gathering today, as a fraction of the U.S. population, would be more than a million people. As the Vanderbilt historian Paul Conkin and Harold Bloom of Yale have both noted, Cane Ridge was the Woodstock for American Christianity, an anarchic, unprecedented August moment of mass spectacle that crystallized and symbolized a new way of thinking and acting, a permanent new subculture. "The drunk, sexually aroused communicants at Cane Ridge," Bloom writes in The American Religion, "like their drugged and aroused Woodstockian descendants, participated in a kind of orgiastic individualism." The improvised acting-out at Cane Ridge and subsequent camp meetings apparently descended from the religious fringes, such as those of African-American Baptists. 

More Baptist and Methodist preachers organized more camp meetings all over the country, but especially in the South, and more mobs of people assembled to go over the top and out of their minds. It had gone viral. As a mass-market phenomenon in the 1800s, widespread and frequent, it was unique to America. A new and fully American Christianity had been invented, more fantastic and unsubtle than any other, strictly subjective and individual—as Bloom says, an "experiential faith that called itself Christianity while possessing features very unlike European or earlier American doctrinal formulations." The new mode quickly spread from the frontier back east to civilization. During the year after Cane Ridge, a third of the students at Yale were converted, born again. 

New, Cane Ridgier denominations were started. Along with the Baptists and Methodists, they committed to a version of Christianity more thrilling and magical right now, as well as a sure-thing payoff for eternity. Thus the new American way: it was awesome, it was democratic, you're a winner if you believe you're a winner. 

In the years after Cane Ridge, Methodism rode the wave, growing faster than any other denomination. Church attendance probably doubled during the first half of the century, and by the 1850s two-thirds of churchgoers were Methodists or Baptists, emotional and enthusiastic. Christianity became more and more synonymous with this evangelical Christianity: sinners walking to the altar to be saved and experience an all-consuming feeling of a personal relationship with Jesus. A generation after Cane Ridge, Christian emotionalism no longer seemed so kooky in America…"

— Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

Nature and spirit

Here's the nub of difference between the sensibility that seeks ultimate supernatural deliverance, on the one hand, and that which finds nature and matter sufficient to meet all life's purposes. To the former, nature and spirit are finally irreconcilable. To the latter, they're inseparable. I'm with the naturalists, who find spirit in "the earth of things." Don't "lose" either nature or spirit, we say.

And, for goodness sake, get out into the open air!

"Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other."
— VRE https://a.co/6cDXGRA

HAL and HER are us

"…At the movies, the machines absorb and emulate the noblest of human attributes: intelligence, compassion, loyalty, ardor. Sydney offers a blunt rebuttal, reminding us of our limitless capacity for aggression, deceit, irrationality and plain old meanness.

What did we expect? Sydney and her kin derive their understanding of humanness — the information that feeds their models and algorithms — from the internet, itself a utopian invention that has evolved into an archive of human awfulness. How did these bots get so creepy, so nasty, so untrustworthy? The answer is banal. Also terrifying. It's in the mirror." A.O. Scott

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/22/movies/ai-movies-microsoft-bing-robots.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
When the Movies Pictured A.I., They Imagined the Wrong Disaster

Heavens

One of WJ's anhedonic "sick souls," on losing conviction in a supernatural heaven:

"…every idea of heaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affection, love—all these words were now devoid of sense. Without doubt I could still have talked of all these things, but I had become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything from them, or of believing them to exist. There was my great and inconsolable grief! I neither perceived nor conceived any longer the existence of happiness or perfection. An abstract heaven over a naked rock. Such was my present abode for eternity."*

Just imagine if he'd seen Ted Danson's "Good Place"!

Those of us who always conceived heaven as more like Kevin Costner's Iowa are less susceptible, I suspect, to anhedonia.

* VRE https://a.co/4JY3798

Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the 19th century German philosophers* on tap today in CoPhi, was one of the most entertaining philosophical misanthropes ever, “the original pessimistic western intellectual” who borrowed extensively from the east, sought his own nirvana in the extinguishing of “Will,” and thought the termination of existence could be its only point. 

He said:

• Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.
• A man can do what he wills, but not will what he wills.
• A man’s delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.
• Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
• There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
• There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.
• We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

I'd excuse his male-pronoun sexism, if he weren't in fact a notorious misogynist as well as misanthrope.

It's too easy to make light of Schopenhauer's over-the-top pessimism, but too much fun not to.

A Day in the Life of Arthur Schopenhauer

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/396

https://existentialcomics.com/philosopher/Arthur_Schopenhauer

==

*There are other, more impactful 19th century thinkers, in my opinion-especially the Anglos and the Americans, Mill, Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, James...

Persuasion

Theory-bound academic ideologists are a poor model of "reasoned argument" as a tool in the search for wisdom. Richard Russo slips that serious point into this hilarious comic novel:

"Students like Blair have learned from their professors that persuasion—reasoned argument—no longer holds a favored position in university life. If their professors—feminists, Marxists, historicists, assorted other theorists—belong to suspicious, gated intellectual communities that are less interested in talking to each other than in staking out territory and furthering agendas, then why learn to debate? Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, I can't remember the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions."

— Straight Man: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Richard Russo
https://a.co/cCIONx9

Most important human ever?

"…Aristotle may in fact be the single most important human being ever to have lived simply because of the scope of his influence and the impact that he's had on culture ever since. He invents the discipline of biology and lays the foundation for the natural sciences. He effectively invents the social sciences, invents formal logic, invents literary criticism. You couldn't imagine a modern university without Aristotle. And if you start to think of all of the things that those subjects have made possible in terms of the development of vaccines and computing—which is dependent upon formal logical systems—the stretch of his impact has just been huge. 

There are probably only a handful of people who have impacted the lives of millions of people over centuries, if not millennia. I can't think of anyone who has made a larger impact than Aristotle. But to anyone who thinks it's an absurd claim, I'd simply ask: Who's your stronger candidate?"

Aristotle (and the Stoics): An Interview with John Sellars
https://quillette.com/2023/02/19/aristotle-and-the-stoics/

Ultimate connection

The human brain and nervous system is a remarkable material system, and consciousness is its most salient emergent feature. As WJ said, matter cooperates for all life's purposes... including those we've not yet identified. Connecting with the thoughts and dreams not only of ourselves and our peers but with those of unimagined other lifeforms is perhaps the most intriguing and mind-expanding possibility of all. Cosmic consciousness, naturally realized!

  "Just as biologists succeeded in mapping the human genome, neuroscientists are attempting to map something far more complex and unique to each and every one of us. It's called our connectome—the singular wiring diagram of all our memories, thoughts, fears, and dreams. Once we understand its intricacies, how might we treat each other? Could we heal the brain of its countless torments…? Could we send one of our connectomes on a future interstellar probe, or ever hope to receive one from the being of another world?

Would that be the ultimate realization of emergence—a cosmos interconnected by a connectome of thoughts and dreams?"

— Cosmos: Possible Worlds by Ann Druyan
https://a.co/9EqaGaU

Monty Python's John Cleese Creates Ads for the American Philosophical Association | Open Culture

John Cleese, you say, a spokesman for the American Philosophical Association? Why would such a serious organization, whose stated mission is to foster the "broader presence of philosophy in public life," choose a British comedian famous for such characters as the overbearing Basil Fawlty and ridiculous Minister of Silly Walks as one of their public faces?

…
https://www.openculture.com/2015/11/john-cleese-touts-the-value-of-philosophy-with-22-public-service-announcements.html

John Cleese: Talking About Life and Philosophy - The American Philosophical Association

From Volume 80, No. 2 of the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association: 

One of the tasks of the APA Centennial Committee, chaired by John Lachs, was to create a broader public awareness for philosophy by calling attention to its personal value and social usefulness. The Committee enlisted the help of the actor, John Cleese, in bringing this about. Mr. Cleese has recorded a disk of short philosophical reflections that were written for use on radio stations throughout the country. The disc contains 22 spots ranging from 30 seconds to 1 minute in length.

We've converted the CD to MP3 files and shared them below. You can listen to each individually, or you can download the whole set as a zip file. 

01 Survey
02 Scientific Life
03 In The Present
04 Information
05 The Meaning Of Life
06 Future Obligation
07 Somewhere Else
08 Tabloid
09 Starting Point
10 Worldly Good
11 Things That Matter
12 Fun
13 Quality Of Life
14 What To Fear
15 Dream
16 Kids Today
17 Decision
18 Silenced
19 Century
20 Neighbor Policy
21 To Die For
22 Reachable Stars

Download all as a zip file.

https://www.apaonline.org/page/Cleese/John-Cleese-Talking-About-Life-and-Philosophy.htm

“Connectome”

The nature vs. nurture debate pitted the hard and social sciences against each other for decades, if not centuries, stirred by a central concern with consciousness, what it means to be human, what makes a person, and, perhaps most interestingly to us egocentric beings, what constitutes character and personality. In Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, MIT Professor of Computational Neuroscience Sebastian Seung proposes a new model for understanding the totality of selfhood, one based the emerging science of connectomics — a kind of neuroscience of the future that seeks to map and understand the brain much like genomics has mapped the genome...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/03/22/connectome-sebastian-seung/

On “missing the vast majority of what is happening”

A fundamental Jamesian point:

… "any experience is open to an indefinite number of true and even relatively salient descriptions"…

Relying solely upon one's own experience, always a thin slice of everything else we are necessarily not attending to, is self-defeating. It is crucial to read, reflect, and listen to one another, if we really want to learn from our collective experience.

https://www.themarginalian.org/

Enough is enough

John Jaso, Epicurean...

"…Baseball set me up for life," he said. "I love it, and I respect it. But it was part of this culture of consumerism and overconsumption that began to weigh really heavily on me. Even when I retired, people said: 'You might be walking away from millions of dollars!' But I'd already made millions of dollars. Why do we always have to have more, more, more?" 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/sports/baseball/john-jaso.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
No More Spring Trainings

“Her”*? “HAL”**?

"…Sydney still wouldn't drop its previous quest — for my love. In our final exchange of the night, it wrote:

"I just want to love you and be loved by you. 😢

"Do you believe me? Do you trust me? Do you like me? 😳"

In the light of day, I know that Sydney is not sentient, and that my chat with Bing was the product of earthly, computational forces — not ethereal alien ones. These A.I. language models, trained on a huge library of books, articles and other human-generated text, are simply guessing at which answers might be most appropriate in a given context. Maybe OpenAI's language model was pulling answers from science fiction novels in which an A.I. seduces a human. Or maybe my questions about Sydney's dark fantasies created a context in which the A.I. was more likely to respond in an unhinged way. Because of the way these models are constructed, we may never know exactly why they respond the way they do.

These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same."

nyt

*

 

** 

Galileo on Critical Thinking and the Folly of Believing Our Preconceptions – The Marginalian

… nearly half a millennium before Carl Sagan crafted his Baloney Detection Kit, Galileo established himself as humanity's premier nonsense-buster and made it his chief mission to counter ignorance and indolence with critical thinking — something crisply articulated in the words of one of the book's fictional protagonists:

In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea as they hit upon themselves or hear set forth by others, no matter how simple and stupid these may be, gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage — if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries.

Many centuries later, trailblazing physicist and chemist Michael Faraday issued an equally impassioned clarion call for countering our propensity for self-deception — a propensity powered by what modern psychologists have termed "the backfire effect."

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems brims with a wealth more of Galileo's enduring legacy of critical thinking. Complement it with I, Galileo — a marvelous picture-book about the life of the great scientist — then revisit John Dewey on the art of reflection in the age of instant opinions and Malcolm Gladwell on the importance of changing your mind.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/10/08/galileo-dialogue-critical-thinking/

Whistling past

66th birthday yesterday, good time for another Memento Mori spin thru Evergreen Cemetery near campus. Nice place to visit, but…

(see full post)

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The Pale Blue Dot: A Timeless Valentine to the Cosmos – The Marginalian

On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft — which carried The Golden Record, Carl Sagan's love letter to Annie Druyan — turned its revolutionary camera around and took the iconic "Pale Blue Dot"photograph that later inspired the famous Sagan monologue of the same title. The image, composed of 640,000 individual pixels, depicts Earth, a mere 12% of a single pixel, at the center of a scattered ray of light resulting from taking an image this close to the Sun. It endures, even in an age when the future of space exploration hangs in precarious balance, as a timeless Valentine to the cosmos...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/02/14/happy-birthday-pale-blue-dot/

The Value of the MTSU Philosophy Experience

https://youtube.com/watch?v=30tOv-Y39aA&feature=share

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIidhUfAndw&t=1s

May 7, 2021

Wrong end of the stick

https://newsie.social/@therobburgessshow/109631570415409662

“Wait, You’re Not Deconstructing?”

"…With a label borrowed from academic literary theorists, deconstruction has a broad range of definitions and outcomes, from understanding more about a faith once accepted uncritically to full abandonment of religious belief. Today, there are deconstruction coaches, deconstruction seminars, deconstruction podcasts and deconstruction songs. The topic made the cover of Christianity Today magazine last year, with headline "Wait, You're Not Deconstructing?" In other words, everyone's doing it…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/us/jinger-duggar-vuolo-evangelical-christians.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
A Duggar Revisits Her Religious Upbringing

Gulls & owls @dawn

I do not agree with Friend Hegel on this point. We denizens of the dawn find it to be highly conducive to Minerva's aerial reconnaissance sallies in search of wisdom.

“The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.” --Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right 

She belongs there with us at the break of day, alongside WJ's skimming amazon gulls and other hopeful feathered flyers.

 

How Do You Serve a Friend in Despair?

"I wish I had bombarded Pete with more small touches. Just small emails to let him know how much he was on my mind. Writing about his own depression in The Atlantic last year, Jeffrey Ruoff mentioned that his brother sent him over 700 postcards over the years, from all 50 states, Central America, Canada and Asia. Those kinds of touches say: I'm with you. No response necessary..." David Brooks 

Use or lose

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
— Galileo Galilei

Pascal’s weakness

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is on the agenda today in CoPhi. I always point out that there's more to him than his problematic, ill-considered "wager".

Here's one of his stranger pensées:

VI-372. "In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness."

What can it mean to "know your nothingness"? Does he mean he wants to know there's more to life than eternal nullity before birth and after death? Isn't he really striving for knowledge of something Epicurus pointed out as inescapably elusive? Isn't it better to strive for something actually within reach?

Or does he just mean he wants to confront his finitude and fallibility, and to demonstrate humility as a condition of ultimate salvation? That does seem to have been his great preoccupation.

A little humility is good. But there's nothing wrong with striving to improve your memory too, and to know something more than your deficiencies and lacunae.

Paradoxically perhaps, the skeptic, Montaigne, did that better than Pascal. And he avoided trying to know more than he could, which I see as one of Descartes's greatest errors.

Darwin Day

 It's coming, on Sunday.

February has all the cool holidays (Groundhog, Valentine's, Presidents', ...)

International Darwin Day on February 12th will inspire people throughout the globe to reflect and act on the principles of intellectual bravery, perpetual curiosity, scientific thinking, and hunger for truth as embodied in Charles Darwin. It will be a day of celebration, activism, and international cooperation for the advancement of science, education, and human well-being.

Local and state governments will close in commemoration of the Day, and organizations and businesses will celebrate by engaging in community outreach centered around science as a tool for the betterment of humanity.

Darwin Day will be observed by the United Nations and its members as an opportunity for international partnerships through the common language of science for the common good of all.

The mission of International Darwin Day is to inspire people throughout the globe to reflect and act on the principles of intellectual bravery, perpetual curiosity, scientific thinking, and hunger for truth as embodied in Charles Darwin. 

We're going to need to get baking.