I, Human

"Who was it who first said, "I don't know what I think until I see what I write"? Versions of this statement have been attributed to writers as various as Joan Didion, William Faulkner, Stephen King and Flannery O'Connor. Google's robot doesn't know who actually said it, but almost anybody who writes, whatever they write, will tell you it's true.

In "I, Robot," the 2004 film loosely inspired by Isaac Asimov's classic sci-fi novel of the same name, one robot is unlike all the others of its model. It has feelings. It learns to recognize human nuance, to solve problems with human creativity. And with those attributes comes the questions inevitably raised by being human. Twenty-six minutes into the film, the robot asks, plaintively, "What am I?" This is a question writers ask every day. I suspect everyone else does, too..."

Margaret Renkl https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/opinion/i-human.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Edward Abbey on how to live and how to die, 19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir's resolutions for a life worth living, Oliver Sacks in love

…Long after he composed his passionate prospectus for how (not) to die and not long before he returned his borrowed atoms to the earth, Abbey offered his best advice on how to live in a speech he delivered before a gathering of environmental activists:

It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here.

So… ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.

Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

Couple with Anna Belle Kaufman's spare and stunning poem about how to live and how to die, then revisit the poetic science of what actually happens when we die.

Maria Popova 

https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/edward-abbey-simone-de-beauvoir-oliver-sacks

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Who’s afraid of Beowulf?

And who will be our Grendel?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rYTyqPItej0&si=T0JLVdGCB3QTSF-T

What’s a humanist?

Depends on who you ask.

Not quite my definition:

Humanists are non-religious people who shape their own lives in the here and now because we believe it's the only life we have. A lot of people share humanist values without even knowing the term. Maybe you're a humanist! Find out by taking our quiz! https://humanists.uk/humanism/how-humanist-are-you/

My preferred version: 

Some humanists (Spinoza, Einstein, John Dewey for example,) are natural pietists who revere nature and the cosmos, regard life as precious and sacred, and are vitally concerned for the future of life (while harboring no fantasy of a supernatural afterlife for themselves personally). 

But some others are as you say.

Like Santayana said…

Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions

https://theonion.com/historians-politely-remind-nation-to-check-whats-happen-1819572992/

Praise Song for a False Spring

Any sign that nature is working as it ought to reminds me to keep faith in the future.

As bad as things are, as bad as they might yet get, this is not the end of the story. We don't know what will happen, but we know this: Even the bitterest winter doesn't last forever. Spring is coming.

--Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/17/opinion/nature-false-spring.html?smid=em-share

A happy and virtuous consciousness

Yesterday was Henry Adams's birthday.*

Late in William James's life-very late-he and Adams corresponded about Adams's entropic pessimism. 

William's attitude is key to finding delight in dark times. It's never too late to be happy.

From the summer of 1910:

…The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"—save that it sets a terminus—for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of which rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity" factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human institutions—their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget—being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium—in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalisés that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one question.

There! that's pretty good for a brain after 18 Nauheim baths—so I won't write another line, nor ask you to reply to me. In case you can't help doing so, however, I will gratify you now by saying that I probably won't jaw back.—It was pleasant at Paris to hear your identically unchanged and "undegraded" voice after so many years of loss of solar energy. Yours ever truly,

WM. JAMES.

[Post-card]

The Letters of William James, Vol. 2 gutenberg.org

* https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-sunday-february-95e?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios (Richard Ford too. Frank Bascombe deals with the second law better than Henry did.)

"the springs of life"

“If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life.”
– HDT, Walking

SOLVITUR AMBULANDO
60 Quotes on Walking
Poetry, song, scripture, and literature provoke contemplation of the paths of life -- and spur putting one foot in front of the other RUSSELL SMITH 

https://substack.com/home/post/p-157058529?source=queue

A genuinely happy birthday

[Recording on substack...]

I've not been capturing so many "daybreak" reflections in this space lately, having committed awhile back to  doing (and holding close) more personal journaling.

I'm sticking with that commitment, reinforced by the recent WAPO story about a centenarian who's been keeping a daily journal without lapse for 90 years! Never mind that most of her entries are pretty banal--where she went, who she spoke with, what she had for dinner etc. Wouldn't it be amazing to have a shelf full of dated personal journals you could pull down at will, full of that kind of ephemera along with the occasional deeper reflection too? 

Michael Palin also inspires, in this regard.

But there are still times that do call for a step back and a shared stock-taking, when reflection wants wider expression. This morning is one of those times.

A thunderstorm rolled into middle Tennessee early this morning, stirring our big pup Nell to the anxious heavy panting that loud atmospheric disturbances trigger in her. There was going to be no sleeping through that. So I commenced my usual pre-dawn routine and put the water on to boil a bit earlier than usual.

I recently switched digital journals (which I've been keeping fairly constantly for a few years now) from the Google docs platform to Apple, when I learned of an upgrade to the iPhone Journal app. That's where my daily journaling routine now begins, with (mostly) voice dictation to unpack whatever partial thoughts, feelings, and perceptions happen to be sitting on the surface of awareness as the fresh-dripped coffee pour begins to kick in. (I do measure out that portion of my life in coffee spoons, Mr. Eliot.)

This morning's early digital journal recorded my deep gratitude for family and friends who made my 68th birthday very special yesterday. Good conversation, good memories, good food, good times. 

It began with an hour-long group text with far-flung pals whose acquaintance goes back decades to grad school and beyond--nearly half a century, in the case of my buddy from Mizzou. We celebrated our respective 21st birthdays (his the day before mine) as callow undergraduate philosophy neophytes on a snowy night in Columbia Missouri forty-seven years ago last night. We've agreed that we must try to arrange a repeat performance on the semi-centennial of that milestone in 2028, wherever we are. 

Then a shared catfish basket and brownie a la mode at a new (to us) lunch venue called The Ridge with my wonderful wife.

Later our generous daughter popped over for a visit. She always brings light and cheer, and frequently the best baked goods in town-her own creation.

Then, a fabulous sushi dinner at Ginza (next door to Parnassus) with the delightful couple we like frequently to meet there.

A simple day, simple pleasures, affectionate memories that surfaced with the storm this morning and made their way first into my digital journal, then the bedside Moleskine, and now (in less personal detail) here. I don't want ever to lose them, those priceless memories. And so I've notched them (as Thoreau and Virginia Woolf and others have said one must) on the stick of externally stored memory.

Pretty good way to start a rainy day in February, way better than scrolling the latest offenses to decency emanating from what used to be the world's most emulated seat of democracy.

(And, note to self: that presidential address to the William James Society in DC is scheduled for a month from today, bright and early. Get it done.) 

Could say more. And will. But this will do for now.

It’s Abe’s birthday too

"…The idea of a small government that serves the needs of a few wealthy people, Lincoln warned in his era, is "the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent."

HCR 

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-11-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

On the soul of a materialist and the value of a “plurality of consciousnesses”

Dan Dennett was a good teacher.

"…Patient, smart, and imaginative, Dennett could explain concepts from every angle, inventing new ones if given the time. And I also hadn't reckoned with the communicativeness of personality—the fullness of an individual, even briefly glimpsed, and what it suggested about what they might know. What is a materialist philosopher—a person who doesn't believe we have souls—supposed to be like? I'd had a picture in my head, something involving coldness, bluntness, harshness, and it was wholly wrong, a caricature waiting to be erased. It wasn't so much that Dennett's personality made me reconsider his ideas, but that his specificity made me consider them more specifically. The more you know a person, the more interesting they become. This can be true not just for who they are but for how they think. And the stakes are higher when you're face to face. It's easy to close a book, and harder to end a conversation…

Some novels, Bakhtin thought, even allow us "to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses," a perspective that is "born at a point of contact" between people. By knitting together those voices, a profile could similarly allow readers to consider the possibility that all the sides of an argument were, together, right…

Dennett persuaded me. By the time I'd finished writing the Profile, I no longer believed in the hard problem—and I no longer felt that denying its existence was a slight against my idea of what it meant to be human. The experience left a high watermark in my intellectual life. Ever since, I've found it difficult to be satisfied with reading or thinking on my own. If someone's ideas fascinate, perplex, or frustrate me, I want to get to know the person. If I don't understand some question, I want to "report it out…""

—Joshua Rothman

An Academic's Journey Toward Reporting

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/an-academics-journey-toward-reporting

Evolutionary humanism

Today marks the 216th birthday of Charles Darwin. For us, it's a day to reflect on Darwin's underpinning values – his humanism – and to recognise what was once considered radicalism has become common sense to most people today. DarwinDay

Our most noble attribute

#DarwinDay salutations! Today is a fantastic day to contemplate the profound effect that Charles Darwin has had on the entire world. It's astonishingly to think that so few people have so radically changed how we view humanity, and for the better, too.

(Not just dogs)

No to theocracy (and no to a severe edit)

 I wrote a letter in response to 

Ross Douthat’s recent column on religion. It'll run, says Peter Catapano, but it's been trimmed down to the last paragraph. [UPDATE: It was published Feb 15 online, and ran in the print edition Sunday Feb 16]

So here's my edit:

To the Editor:

Re: Ross Douthat, Feb.7--

Ross Douthat's convergent arguments for a god based on "Fine Tuning" (aka the "anthropic principle") and human consciousness, while impressive coming from a "precocious undergraduate," do not finally compel assent. As Carl Sagan put it in his book Pale Blue Dot, “There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.”

And as Rebecca Goldstein has said of "intelligibility" arguments alleged to prove the divine probity of human consciousness (Argument #35 in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, from the intelligibility of the world), they point (if anywhere) to something like Spinoza's pantheistic impersonal god, aka the universe itself, and not an object of personal worship.

Undergraduate conversations about the possible existence of a god are fun, sometimes. But insisting that they should make us all religious flirts insensibly, at this moment of political blitzkrieg in Washington, with theocratic intolerance. We don't all need to be religious, any more than we all need to be Republican.

Phil Oliver
Nashville
The writer is an associate professor of philosophy at Middle Tennessee State University.

“the ricochet wonder of it all”

Important not to lose that, in distracting and chaotic times like these.


"I'm stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else," poet Diane Ackerman wrote in her Cosmic Pastoral, which so enchanted Carl Sagan — her doctoral advisor — that he sent a copy of the book to Timothy Leary in prison. "Wonder," Ackerman observed nearly half a century later in her succulent performance at The Universe in Verse, "is the heaviest element in the periodic table of the heart. Even a tiny piece of it can stop time."
…
https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/08/12/eating-the-sun-ella-frances-sanders/

Tenderness as an Act of Resistance

Margaret Renkl and Kate DiCamillo "remind us that we know how to fight, and how to keep fighting."

"…I fall into the mineshaft of despair over and over again, and over and over again something (the moon, an eagle, the snow) or someone (a kid who tells me that  makes them feel brave, a stranger who looks me in the eye and smiles, a grandparent who tells me about reading aloud to their grandchild) will reach down to pull me out," she wrote. "I've learned to not resist these hand-holds. I've learned to let the beauty of the world and the bravery of other people pull me up and out of the despair."

I thought of Ms. DiCamillo when I read about the Democrats' Senate sit-in and the countrywide protests held last week. I thought of her when the F.B.I.'s acting director, Brian Driscoll, stood up to the bullies demanding the names of agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases; when security officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development refused to give Elon Musk access to internal systems; and again when Ellen L. Weintraub, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, refused to step down after President Trump fired her on social media. All around us, brave people are fighting. Even if some of those fights prove to be doomed, they remind us that we know how to fight, and how to keep fighting.

All around us, too, is beauty — art and music and stories, like the brave mouse in "The Tale of Desperaux," that make us feel brave, too; evergreens that shelter singing birds and hardwoods trembling on the verge of green; lighted planets lined up in a parade across the night sky; glowworms hiding deep in the leaf litter, waiting for warmth to turn them into fireflies; ponds with clouds scudding across their shining surface, and turtles sleeping deep in their soft mud…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/opinion/trump-resistance-compassion.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Experience Pill

Still sounds pretty "invasive" and unreal to me…

"In 2018, researchers restaged Robert Nozick's Experience Machine thought experiment… to see if, forty years later, Nozick's findings—that people would reject the Experience Machine because it offered pleasurable experiences that were not "in contact with reality"—still held. 

They discovered that if you replaced Nozick's invasive machine with an Experience Pill that promised a lifetime of pleasurable experiences with no side-effects, people were more likely to say they would take it. The researchers hypothesized (correctly, as it turned out) that "the less invasive an intervention is—the less it severs contact with reality—the more people will be prepared to accept it.""

— The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen
https://a.co/hWJSWYB

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief

 by Maxine Kumin

Blue landing lights make
nail holes in the dark.
A fine snow falls. We sit
on the tarmac taking on
the mail, quick freight,
trays of laboratory mice,
coffee and Danish for
the passengers.

Wherever we're going
is Monday morning.
Wherever we're coming from
is Mother's lap.
On the cloud-pack above, strewn
as loosely as parsnip
or celery seeds, lie
the souls of the unborn:

my children's children's
children and their father.
We gather speed for the last run
and lift off into the weather.

"Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief" by Maxine Kumin from Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief. © Penguin, 1989. Reprinted with permission. WA

Letting our freedom flag fly

We'd misplaced this garden flag, haven't flown it in a few years. Found it last night. Putting it out there this morning.

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Resistance is not futile…

But sometimes debate is. I've read that you should never argue with someone whose television is larger than their bookcase.

Mark Twain said never argue with a fool, observers might be unable to tell the difference. I don't spend much time trying to dissuade MAGA people, though I'm happy to ask them lots of questions. But as Lucy [or Sally, or Marcie, or?] told Charlie Brown, "I don't think about things I don't think about." So I don't expect thoughtful responses.

Maria Popova: "When debate is futile – remembering Bertrand Russell (who died on this day in 1970 having lived nearly a century and won the Nobel Prize) with his extraordinary response to a fascist's provocation."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/10/06/bertrand-russell-oswald-mosley/

Flow redux

Socially mediated distraction via iPhone isn't the form of attentive flow we need.

"When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote more than twenty years ago about “flow”—that state of being in which someone is so involved in an activity “that nothing else seems to matter”—he argued, “Attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.” We might believe that our attempts to fill our interstitial time with mediated distractions qualify as an effort to optimize our experiences under less than optimal conditions. But the concept of flow needs to be revisited in an era of smart machines."

"The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World" by Christine Rosen: https://a.co/bNObLyT

Russell’s happy merger

"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life." — BertrandRussell, The Conquest of Happiness

I agree with Russell in spirit, but "personal transcendence" requires at least enough ego to generate those wider interests. I'd say you should make your interests personal and expansive. Inclusive. Connective. "Larger than yourself." Pretty sure that's what he meant anyway. Impersonal means more than merely  personal. Interpersonal. We don't need zero ego, we need a social ego that bonds us with our species and with the future of life. That's how you transcend time and mortality. Or try.

Note: he says not that the ego recedes but that its walls do.  They become permeable. The self doesn't disappear, it grows and becomes part of "universal life." The trick is to feel and embody that before shedding mortal form. It's Peter Ackroyd's "trans-end-dance, a.k.a. the dance of death" (Plato Papers).

Maria Popova: Bertrand Russell died on this day in 1970, having lived nearly a century and won the Nobel Prize, leaving us his immortal wisdom on how to grow old.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/07/03/how-to-grow-old-bertrand-russell/