What a way to go

"In the bedroom of his Parisian home, Bergson had been in a coma for twelve hours. Those who witnessed his agony sensed that the end was near when, all of a sudden, the illustrious philosopher began to speak. He gave a lecture, a philosophy lecture, for an hour. He pronounced the words very distinctly. His sentences were clear. His lucidity overwhelmed those who listened to him. And then he said, “Gentlemen, it is five o’clock. Class is over.” And he expired."

"Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" by Emily Herring: https://a.co/gtbzIIx

a good lamp

"…Ours is a multifarious culture, peopled by many kinds of readers and many more kinds of non-readers, and that's exactly as it should be in a big, loud, messy democracy. Some of y'all are out there taking heart from cozy mysteries or Victorian novels or Mary Oliver's poems. Some of you are consoled by seed catalogs or travel brochures or Americana records or old Peanuts comic strips. Maybe you're one who needs them all, in endless combinations, just to get through these dark nights.

…if you have not yet found a source of solace that makes the long winter nights feel shorter, or at least not quite so dark, then turn off the machines and set your chair next to a good lamp…

Margaret Renkl

http://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/opinion/reading-novellas-short-novels.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Sleep on it: Khan on the unconscious and AI

Our brains may have more in common with large language models than we may want to believe.

"...Artificial intelligence is not human, no matter how much it approximates being human. Regardless of how well it conveys intelligence, personality, and creativity, it is not a sentient, perceiving being.

Yet it is important to appreciate that much of the work we credit to our brain isn’t really sentient or part of our perception. Most of our brain’s activity is subconscious, including what we would often consider creativity. Any artist will tell you they often feel a flash of insight that leads to the creative act.

Similarly, how many times have you been told to “sleep on the problem”? I myself am a master of this art. In college, when I faced seemingly intractable math problems, I would engage with them for a few minutes and then delegate them to my subconscious. I would tell my brain to essentially come up with the answers and tell “me” when it was done. Most of the time, I had the answers by the next morning without having to consciously struggle with them. I’m not alone in doing this. Many people find it a useful way to approach difficult problems.

I now do the same thing when I face a tough problem while leading Khan Academy. I have faith that my brain, or someone else’s, will come up with a creative solution by morning. What are our brains doing subconsciously while our consciousness waits for an answer? Clearly, when you “sleep on a problem,” some part of your brain continues to work even though “you” aren’t aware of it. Neurons activate, which then activate other neurons depending on the strength of the synapses between them. This happens trillions of times overnight, a process mechanically analogous to what happens in a large language model. When a plausible solution presents itself, the subconscious then surfaces it to the conscious as a flash of insight.

Meditation gives us direct experience with this. Close your eyes for a few minutes and observe your own thoughts. They really begin to feel very much like the output of a large language model—or several competing models—whose latest output gets fed as input for the next iteration of output. With a bit of practice, your conscious mind can temporarily disassociate itself from these thoughts until you experience stillness or “no thought.” You’ll begin to see your thoughts for what they are and aren’t. They aren’t you.

Think about a flow state that most experts in their craft can attain after the often-noted ten thousand hours of practice (which is analogous to pretraining for generative AI models). They will often say that their greatest creativity or actions occur when they do not allow themselves to be conscious of what they are doing. The best way to ruin their performance, or creativity, is to consciously think about what is happening. Great orators will tell you that it feels like their brain is doing the talking while their conscious selves are just there to observe the output. After making thousands of videos, I often feel this way when I press record. I won’t claim that what experts’ well-trained brains are doing when they create is identical to what large language models do, but it seems awfully similar."

"Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)" by Salman Khan: https://a.co/i8LPsmB

Against specialisation

Academic philosophers these days don't tend to think like young Bergson.

"The young Bergson's aversion to specialisation had started at some point in the late 1870s, when he discovered that, unlike other academic disciplines, philosophy was not limited to a specific object but opened up an infinity of theoretical avenues. It represented an opportunity to encompass all areas of knowledge, to look at the biggest, most important problems, to embrace every aspect of reality in one sweeping gesture. By choosing philosophy, he would not have to abandon any of his interests but could keep them all under investigation. Conceivably, Bergson had also realised in that moment that mathematical problems, though fascinating, were too narrow for his intellectual ambitions. By specialising as a mathematician, he would be willingly cutting himself off from whole areas of human knowledge, whereas, as a philosopher, the entirety of human knowledge would be his subject matter."

— Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People by Emily Herring

https://a.co/d5qCnO6

The unrestricted circle of humanity

Not many philosophers enter that circle anymore. 

There was indeed something special about the way the professor spoke. He held as a principle that “there is no philosophical idea, however profound or subtle, that cannot and should not be expressed in everyday language,” and that philosophers should “not write for a restricted circle of initiates; they write for humanity in general.” --Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People by Emily Herring: https://a.co/2HY2Lu3

Serious

"It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world." —Mary Oliver, Invitation

English heritage

That ubiquitous internet attribution to Ben Franklin of the line that beer is proof that God loves us is surely apocryphal.

"His (London) colleagues nicknamed him the Water-American because he refused to partake in the ubiquitous beer drinking: a pint before breakfast, with breakfast, after breakfast, with the midday meal, at six, and a last one before bed. (Franklin preferred Madeira.) Franklin also prided himself on healthy habits…"

— The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss

The point of trying

Meliorists know: the point is to try.

"…In the aftermath of an election that will return a climate denier to the White House and a climate-denying party to control of Congress, it sometimes seems impossible to keep going. Every effort feels Sisyphean. Any possible change for the better is about to be demolished by the outrageously unqualified industry toadies whom Donald Trump has named to run the agencies that protect our wilderness, our air, our water. Our future.

More and more I find it hard not to ask the question I have spent my adult life avoiding: What is the point of even trying?

Recently I read an old essay by the Kentucky author and farmer Wendell Berry, who has been writing for more than six decades about the need to heal the separation between human beings and the natural world. In his essay "A Poem of Difficult Hope," which appears in his book "What Are People For," Mr. Berry argues that the success of any protest should not be measured by whether it changes the world in the way we hope it will.

'Much protest is naïve; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come," he wrote in 1990. "If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.'

At my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better. When I have been downhearted in the past, I have always explained to myself that I am not alone in my efforts to cultivate change — by writing, by planting, by loving the living world in every way I can find to love it. Individual efforts gather momentum through the individual efforts of others.

Men in power did not wake up one morning and decide to give women the vote. White Southerners did not wake up one morning and decide to dismantle Jim Crow. Those things happened, if imperfectly and still incompletely, because hundreds of thousands of people worked together for years to make them happen.

But where preserving biodiversity is concerned, we don’t have years. Where stabilizing the climate is concerned, we don’t have years. Once a species becomes extinct, it remains extinct forever. Once the climate hits an irreversible tipping point, it will tip. In that context, the Republican takeover of Washington is a catastrophe that is hard to reconcile with a plan to plant more flowers and install more nest boxes.

So I am taking comfort from Wendell Berry, who has lived a life of ceaseless protest against the desecration of the earth and its creatures (most recently in an essay for The Christian Century called “Against Killing Children”). Even at 90, he is not asking himself what the point is...."

—Margaret Renkl, How to Keep Your Own Soul Safe in the Dark

Good mornings

Cutting back on social media, but not on sunrises and morning saunters...

View on Threads

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Billy Renkl (@billyrenkl)

The Surprising Allure of Ignorance

"…Socrates maintained that there is no shame in being wrong, just in doing wrong. He was right. But it's not the way we initially feel, especially when someone else exposes our errors…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/02/opinion/ignorance-knowledge-critical-thinking.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Better times

Moving beyond the end…

"No wonder there is no lack of prophets who prophesy the early eclipse of our civilization. I am not one of these pessimists; I believe that better times are coming."

— The World As I See It (1934) by Albert Einstein
https://a.co/f9qt4Pe

The world as he saw it

"...The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.

Society and Personality

WHEN WE SURVEY our lives and endeavours we soon observe that almost the whole of our actions and desires are bound up with the existence of other human beings. We see that our whole nature resembles that of the social animals. We eat food that others have grown, wear clothes that others have made, live in houses that others have built. The greater part of our knowledge and beliefs has been communicated to us by other people through the medium of a language which others have created. Without language our mental capacities would be poor indeed, comparable to those of the higher animals; we have, therefore, to admit that we owe our principal advantage over the beasts to the fact of living in human society.

The individual, if left alone from birth would remain primitive and beast-like in his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can hardly conceive. The individual is what he is and has the significance that he has not so much in virtue of his individuality, but rather as a member of a great human society, which directs his material and spiritual existence from the cradle to the grave. A man’s value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in this matter. It looks at first sight as if our estimate of a man depended entirely on his social qualities. And yet such an attitude would be wrong.

It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine-each was discovered by one man. Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society-nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community. The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion..."

"The World As I See It" by Albert Einstein: https://a.co/ck9RjxZ

Ritualization

"…once our acts have crystallized into a fixed routine, they may keep evolving, taking on symbolic significance and adding layers of meaning to our actions — this is called "ritualization." We can think of rituals as routines with a significant symbolic load… Ritualization is a potent stabilizing agent, a simple salve for a stressful time if only we are mindful of how we use its powers."

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-hidden-powers-of-everyday-rituals/

Happy Thanksgiving

The gratitude holiday. I just reread Oliver Sacks on the subject. He was defiantly grateful in the face of his late-life cancer diagnosis. In “My Own Life” he channeled David Hume and extolled an attitude of “detachment” that my own father (James C. Oliver, 1928-2008) also used to recommend. It fits our moment:

“This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.”

I’d like to feel that way too. It’d be easier if we could forget who’s about to recover the nuclear football. Really forget him. But the gifted young people in my Honors classes this semester have given me the same reassurance.

I made my annual Thanksgiving Eve trek down the Trace to Hohenwald yesterday, to fetch brother-in-law home for the holiday. It was an exceedingly pleasant trip, coming and going, sharing the Parkway (with its 50 mph limit) with just a few drivers, cyclists, and runners. Most repetitive rituals are, eventually, aren’t they? Especially when coupled with the thought, harder to suppress with each passing year, that for all we know it could be the last. 

Anyway, this is a fine holiday. Younger Daughter and her fiancé will be here soon, the house will be filled with the pleasant familiar old aromas and stories and parades etc. We’ll be appropriately grateful for all we have and try not to dwell on what (and who) is missing. 

I’m going to go now and pull Lay of the Land off the shelf and share some of Frank Bascombe’s gratitude too.

“The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can't even be appraised as simply "happy", but only in terms of "Yes, I'll take it all, thanks" or "No, I believe I won't." Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life's about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me.”― Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land

 

It's not all hooey, as my father more sagely understood. It's good to be grateful and know it. Clap your hands. Doff your cap. Swing.*

*I met the Hawk in Ottawa a few years ago, at the Baseball Conference. What a nice man. Like the philosophers--Socrates, Cicero, Montaigne et al--who think their vocation is about learning to die, he got into the mortality business himself when his playing days were through. But I think he also always understood that the meaning of life is to live.

World’s oldest man dead at 112

Mr Tinniswood previously told the BBC he been "quite active as a youngster" and did "a lot of walking", but said he had no idea why he was blessed with such longevity. He insisted he was "no different" to anyone else, adding: "You either live long or you live short - and you can't do much about it."

https://c.im/@BBC/113548787978016155

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

Thread

margaret.renkl

1d

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