The Battle for Attention

The pre-eminent philosopher/psychologist of flights and perchings would be fascinated by the "Birds" who make a deliberate effort to guide and manage their thoughts and "reveries"…

"…In many people's view, it is William James, Henry's brother, who supplied the first comprehensive American model of attention. In a chapter devoted to the subject in his "Principles of Psychology" (1890), James portrayed attention as a restless thing. When we think we're holding it, our mind is winging out on errands and returning; sustained attention is, in effect, a stream of attentional moments. Thus, despite the complexity and multiplicity of the world, "there is before the mind at no time a plurality of ideas." (This insight went on to frame James's philosophical work.) When we look at a statue, the stone doesn't change, but the art work we see does, because we are continually noticing different things. James's model pushes against the idea that attention is something you pay out, free of wandering thoughts and individual reverie..." Nathan Heller

“Rain”

The Beatles tribute show Saturday night at Belmont's Fisher Center was great fun. Beautiful performance space, great acoustics, colorful costumes, dazzling multimedia, timeless music accurately replicated. They showed us, as the song says, "everything is the same"… well, not really. But still  a fabulous trip to yesterday and motivation to read Sir Paul's Life...

Sunday inspiration

Steve Gleason’s good life

What's the last great book you read?

"When I was diagnosed [with ALS], one of the first questions I asked in a journal entry was, "Can I discover peace of mind, even if this disease destroys my body?" That inquiry has been a guiding light for me the past 13 years. "The Good Life: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness," by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, has real-life stories I could relate to, providing insights which have helped illuminate the path for me to live longer, and be grateful and content..." nyt

==

Also...

An indulgent thought at semester's end

But it's also the thought we began with, and will begin with again next semester.

Socrates said it first, long before the Devi'ls Dictionary said it this way, when he heard what the oracle had said about him:

"Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding." — Ambrose Bierce

Yes, Homer. But...

There is also a time to be wordlessly wakeful and aware.

"There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep." Odyssey, XI, l. 379

Less talk, more attention. Then, words. Only then.

Meliorism: unfamiliar formulation

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."*

No. Things worked for are the substance of hope. Faith is the willingness to work, in the spirit of hope, to create evidence in support of the vision of things not seen.

*Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: https://a.co/1gz0zsY

The Fate of Earth Day

...liberals have come to take as a core creed the urgent need to reckon with global warming, and limit carbon emissions. To turn concern into action requires politics. The science of carbon emissions is there. The politics is not. On its anniversary, Earth Day is worth not just celebrating but also studying—as a story with political lessons. ♦

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/when-the-earth-moved?_gl=1*eh8bq7*_up*MQ..&gclid=05dc19316ca81fce994f7f12f1af4029&gclsrc=3p.ds

Peter Attia’s Quest to Live Long and Prosper

Attia's point ("How to Die in Good Health") isn't longevity per se, I think, it's to feel good today and plan to feel good again tomorrow. And to know you'll be ready, whenever the time comes, to rejoin Russell's great sea of "universal life" (which really you're already doing, if you're doing it right). The point is to "live long and prosper" right now. Like Annie Savoy said, "I mean William Blake!

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour...

Attia "compares healthy aging to investing in retirement: contribute what you can, whether it’s a daily walk or an extra half hour of sleep, and the benefits may compound over time."

As we grasp that our days are limited, we seem to abdicate our need for control; we may try to close the gap between what we want and what we have. Healthy aging seems to require a shift in mind-set as much as a shift in muscle mass...
while I’m here, I want to know that I gave it my all,” he went on. “We have this one shot. Wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t make the most of it?”

If "the average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five," well, I'm already doing twice as well.

Humility

We live in such angry times in part because we live in such unhumble ones, as I note in this excerpt, published in The New York Times today, from my new book, "The Age of Grievance." -Frank Bruni

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/opinion/students-humility-american-politics.html

Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

Remembering speaking with Dennet in Chicago at the APA February 2020, Told him I appreciated his email correspondence back in the 90s (and then later when I asked if he could arrange a meeting with Dawkins). Helped him figure out how to use the APA app, and sat across the aisle from him listening to Philip Kitcher and Martha Nussbaum at that meeting. 

"...I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now…" Thank Goodness! 

==

After decades of enthusiastically following AI’s development, Dennett published a brief, unequivocal essay in The Atlantic earlier this year, “The Problem With Counterfeit People,” arguing that “creating counterfeit digital people” — known as deepfakes — could “destroy our civilization. . . . By allowing the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, and governments to control our attention, these systems will control us.” Humanity’s future, he believes, depends on strict regulation: he wants every AI-generated thing to have some kind of watermark, so we can tell the difference between fake and real. Meanwhile, he’s taken to warning about the gaps in our understanding of the algorithms that drive machine learning. “Don’t worry about whether it is conscious or not, don’t worry about whether it’s alive or not,” he told me. “Worry about the fact that it can replicate and hence evolve independently of us. That’s what’s scary, because you can’t predict the mutations.”

…

“I think that my career has been all about opening philosophers’ minds to the facts they need to know if they are going to avoid the great foible of philosophy, which is mistaking failures of imagination for insights into necessity.”

He paused again, then said he particularly liked the last part of that sentence. “Your imagination is not gonna get any better if you don’t get out there and learn stuff,” he said. Then he repeated one of his more famous lines: “What you can imagine depends on what you know.”

“So maybe,” I asked, “you occasionally need to replace the footing on the barn?”

“Yeah,” he said…

https://downeast.com/arts-leisure/philosopher-daniel-dennett-on-the-illusion-of-consciousness/


Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soulhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul

Dennett versus Searle https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-consciousness-an-exchange/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare


…If we can’t say exactly how we think, then how well do we know ourselves? In an essay titled “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” the philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that a layer of fiction is woven into what it is to be human. In a sense, fiction is flawed: it’s not true. But, when we open a novel, we don’t hurl it to the ground in disgust, declaring that it’s all made-up nonsense; we understand that being made up is actually the point. Fiction, Dennett writes, has a deliberately “indeterminate” status: it’s true, but only on its own terms. The same goes for our minds. We have all sorts of inner experiences, and we live through and describe them in different ways—telling one another about our dreams, recalling our thoughts, and so on. Are our descriptions and experiences true or fictionalized? Does it matter? It’s all part of the story.

Stories aren’t real, and yet they’re meaningful; we tell different stories about our minds, as we should, because our minds are different. The story I tell myself about my own thinking is useful to me. It helps me think, by giving me a handle on my mind when thinking gets slippery. The other day, I got stuck on a problem that troubled me. So I went for a swim, hoping to think it through. I wore a wetsuit against the cold water, and at first focussed only on the sensation of cold, and on steadying my breathing. But eventually I warmed up and relaxed. I treaded water a little way out from shore, buoyed by the waves, and prepared to think about my problem; I turned my mind toward it while I watched a seabird float nearby. Nothing happened for a while. I watched the bird, the clouds, the silver water. Then I sensed a thought in need of expression, as I’d known I would. I cleared my throat while the bird flew away. ♦︎

How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/16/how-should-we-think-about-our-different-styles-of-thinking

The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher

A "philosopher of the moment"… 

"He is not on social platforms; he told El País in a rare interview that he writes three sentences a day and spends most of his time caring for his plants and playing Bach and Schumann on the piano…"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-internets-new-favorite-philosopher?utm_source=threads&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tny&utm_social-type=owned

Life = momentum

"Energy and matter didn’t dissipate after the Big Bang, didn’t flatten out like a puddle into homogenous atomic soup, but clumped and hiccupped into structure. Stars formed, and planets, and surfaces, and seas. That disequilibrium eventually led to us as well.

From this vantage, the question of whether we’re alone could almost become moot. We’re not alone because we’re not separate from the swirl of a galaxy’s arms or the way wind catches dust in a gyre. We’re no more an anomaly than an atom is. How could we ever consider ourselves alone?

But at the same time, life is also something apart from the rest. A protein is more than an atom, a cell is more than a protein—some thresholds are clearly being crossed. Even if the lines are arbitrary, the differences are not.

When we pursue knowledge about the origin of life, we’re thinking about what life is. Is life self-replicating information? Is life a new way for the universe to organize energy? Is it, as Carl Sagan and others have put it, a way for the universe to experience—and hope to understand—itself?

It’s all of those, of course. Life is information and energy and awareness. It’s a squirreling away of entropy, so that one bit of ordered matter can look at another and try to know it. It’s momentum rolling, for a moment, uphill."

--"The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos" by Jaime Green: https://a.co/239Dkpi

Coming summer '24

  

MALA 6050 Americana: Streams of Experience in American Culture B term (7/1-8/9) web assisted (Tuesdays 6-9:10pm in JUB 202) w/Phil Oliver

Cosmic philosophy

Sagan: the stars are in us, we are star-stuff contemplating the stars, a way for the universe to know itself.

 

Tyson: The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.

 

Aurelius: Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.

Blowing smoke

For just over a week, Mount Etna, one of Europe's most active volcanoes, has been spewing circular, mostly white smoke rings into the skies over Sicily… https://nyti.ms/3Je4FKO

Eclipse or lecture

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A post shared by Phil Oliver (@osopher)

https://youtu.be/tfnav2afQnI

Healthy Minds, Flourishing Lives

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A post shared by MTSU Honors College (@mtsuhonors)

 

 

POSTSCRIPT. It was pleasing to receive a group email from Dr. Evins of the Honors College, at semester's end, thanking all the faculty participants for their contributions to the Mental Health semester series. These remarks in particular gratified: 

"...It was a really really really good series, thanks to all the wonderful presenters. Truly excellent... Phil touched on so much. He brought the classics and the wisdom of the ages directly to the students in one meta Philosophy lecture. It was powerful. The students will have much to say about the many points he touched on in his lecture. And also about going outside to walk the dog :) ...Also, Tom stood up for cat culture as personal therapy, balancing out Phil very nicely. (My husband is an Epictetus guy. I myself brought Epictetus home from both Phil and Tom.)"

Cat culture? Well, whatever works. 

 

MTSU Honors Lecture Series Spring 2024, here are the links to videos from each lecture; some videos are better than others depending on who was there to be the videographer!, but much was, happily, captured:

1/22 M. Evins, Honors Intro

1/29 Michelle Stevens, MTSU Center for Fairness, Justice, and Equity

2/5 Mary Kaye Anderson, MTSU Counseling Services

2/12 Rudy Dunlap, MTSU Health and Human Performance

2/26 Seth Marshall, MTSU Psychology

3/4 Spring Break – No Classes

3/11 Sarah Harris, MTSU Nutrition and Food Science

3/18 Kent Syler, MTSU Political Science

3/25 Rev. Susan Pendleton Jones, Belmont University

4/1 Bill Dobbins, NAMI-TN

4/8 Phil Oliver, MTSU Philosophy

4/15 Honors Student Presentations: Emilie Conners, Eli Ward, Madalyn Dye

4/22 Tom Brinthaupt, MTSU Psychology

Nearly eclipsed

 It will almost eclipse my Honors Lecture...

Across North America on Monday, the moon will materialize and eat into the yellow orb of the sun, casting a shadow over a swath of Earth below, causing a total solar eclipse and reminding all in its path of our planet’s place in the cosmos.

Where the weather cooperates, millions of people will behold the disorienting, disquieting wonder of darkness in daytime. They will experience it on the beaches of Mexico and the plains of Texas; throughout the Midwest, New York State and New England; and across pockets of eastern Canada, from the steeples and spires of Montreal to the rugged coastline of Newfoundland... (continues)

Behind eclipse glasses or other safe means of viewing the phenomenon, they will watch the moon’s shadow grow until the light is extinguished.

In some places, it will be dim for as long as four and a half minutes, and in those moments eclipse viewers may gasp. They may shout. They may clap. They may even cry.

At this moment, it is dark in the South Pacific Ocean, where the eclipsed sun will first rise. As you prepare for this event to glide into your area, here’s what to know:

• The partial eclipse will first make landfall in North America near Mazatlán, Mexico, around 12:51 p.m. Eastern. It will reach the edge of Texas, near Eagle Pass, around 1:10 p.m. Canada will catch its first glimpse at 3:12 p.m. The Canadian province of Newfoundland will be the last major piece of land to see the total eclipse, which will conclude there around 3:45 p.m.

• The eclipse will carve a southwest-to-northeast path, sweeping through San Antonio at 2:33 p.m., Dallas at 2:40 p.m., Little Rock, Ark., at 2:51 p.m., Indianapolis at 3:05 p.m., Cleveland at 3:13 p.m. and Buffalo at 3:18 p.m.

• While the eclipse is most impressive when viewed at totality, hundreds of millions of people may experience a partial eclipse. In Chicago, the sun will be about 94 percent obscured. In Boston, 93 percent. In New York (around 3:25 p.m. Eastern time) and Philadelphia, there will be a 90 percent eclipse.

• Even the most devoted eclipse chasers know that they are at the mercy of the clouds. The New York Times’s weather data team has been tracking the forecast, which showed that nearly everyone along the path in the United States will have at least some chance of clouds obscuring their view. Danger of severe storms also compounded that concern in many parts of Texas. But there were some bright spots on the eclipse path, including Maine and other parts of New England, and optimism expressed for parts of Arkansas through Cleveland.

• In the United States, about 32 million people live along the eclipse’s path, and countless more will be driving toward it (and, eventually, away from it), creating gridlock. Allow extra time, and lots of it.

• It is never safe to look at the sun without protective eyewear. Throughout the partial stage of the eclipse, use eclipse glasses or try to construct a pinhole viewer to observe the shadow over the sun indirectly. It is safe to look at the fully eclipsed sun only for the duration of totality.

• The next opportunity to see a total solar eclipse in the 48 contiguous U.S. states and Canada isn’t until 2044. To see a total eclipse before then, you’ll need to travel.

• 
  

The Sun, the Shadow, and the Unselved Self: Helen Macdonald on Eclipses as an Antidote to Ideologies of Otherness and a Portal to Human Connection – The Marginalian

"…And then something else happens, a thing that still makes my heart rise in my chest and eyes blur, even in recollection. For it turns out there's something even more affecting than watching the sun disappear into a hole. Watching the sun climb out of it…"

https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/09/15/helen-macdonald-vesper-flights-eclipse/

Why I Love Baseball

My conference presentation today in Ottawa. I'll be lucky, as usual, to get through a fraction of the slides. But that's okay, I enjoyed making them.

Natural poetry

How to Breathe With the Trees

"… Writing a poem might seem like the least practical way imaginable to address melting glaciers, bleaching coral, drought, pollution and the like, never mind the overarching catastrophes of climate change and mass extinction. What can language do to save us now? What can something so small as a poem possibly do to save us now?

The answer lies in poetry's great intimacy, its invitation to breathe together. We read a poem, and we take a breath each time the poet takes a breath. We read a nature poem, and we take a breath with the trees. When the trees — and the birds and the clouds and the ants and even the bats and the rat snakes — become a part of us, too, maybe that's when we will finally begin to care enough to save them."

Margaret Renkl
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/opinion/ada-limon-poet-nature.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hU0.lOZT.XzlSs8kIsJDE&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=m