Michael Levin - "Living Things Are Not Machines (Also, They Totally Are)"

https://www.noemamag.com/living-things-are-not-machines-also-they-totally-are/

 

 

What places all these systems — living or not — on the same spectrum is the fact that all have aspects that are amenable to the mechanistic and agentic lenses, all exhibit surprises and competencies that our formal models do not capture, and none wear their capabilities and limitations on their sleeve (they must be determined by experiment).

An orthopedic surgeon should see your body as a simple, mechanical machine — they’ve got hammers and chisels, and their approach works very well for their remit. In contrast, a psychoanalyst should emphasize and help augment your growth as a free agent in search of meaning.

 

 

We need to come to grips with the fact that all our frames will miss important aspects of things, that it’s OK to say something about a system without claiming you’ve said everything, and that even the simplest of systems can exert surprising effects that reach higher on the continuum of agency than mere emergence of complexity or unpredictability.

Synthetic systems, which we might think are following an algorithm, may or may not have a degree of true mind, but that determination should not be based on their following an algorithm (any more than the reality of human minds isn’t revealed by their following of the laws of chemistry).

Tobias Rees - "Why AI Is A Philosophical Rupture"

https://www.noemamag.com/why-ai-is-a-philosophical-rupture/

What makes AI such a profound philosophical event is that it defies many of the most fundamental, most taken-for-granted concepts — or philosophies — that have defined the modern period and that most humans still mostly live by. It literally renders them insufficient, thereby marking a deep caesura.

 

 

The human-machine distinction provided modern humans with a scaffold for how to understand themselves and the world around them. The philosophical significance of AIs — of built, technical systems that are intelligent — is that they break this scaffold.

 

 

AI teaches us that this is not so. And not just AI, of course. Over the last two decades or so the concept of intelligence has multiplied. We now know that there are lots of other kinds of intelligence: from bacteria to octopi, from Earth systems to the spiral arms of galaxies. We are an entry in a series. And so is AI.

To argue that these other things are not “really” intelligent because their intelligence differs from ours is a bit silly. That would be like one species of birds, say Pelicans, insisting that only Pelicans “really” know how to fly.

 

 

The work of the self on the self has formed the core of what Greek philosophers called meletē and Roman philosophers meditatio. And the kind of AI system I evoke here would be a philosopher’s dream. It could make us humans visible to ourselves in ways no human interlocutor can, from outside of us, free from conversational narcissism.

 

In fact, one can push that a step further and say that AI systems appear to be capable of distinguishing truths from falsehoods. That’s because truth is positively correlated with a consistent logical structure. Errors, so to speak, are all unique or different. While the truth is not. And what we see in AI models is that they can distinguish between statements that conform to the patterns that they discover and statements that don’t.

So in that sense, AI systems have a nascent sense of truth.

 

 

Gardels: Karl Jaspers was best known for his study of the so-called Axial Age when all the great religions and philosophies were born in relative simultaneity over two millennia ago — Confucianism in China, the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, Homer’s Greece and the Hebrew prophets.

 

 

The practice of writing created new possibilities for analytical thinking that led to increasingly abstract, classificatory nouns and to a form of systematic search and production of knowledge that was not seen anywhere in human history before.

 

 

Fascinatingly, what emerges from this learning process is a high-dimensional, relational space that engineers call latent — in the sense of hidden — space.

 

It is just, and this is the third thing, that this spatial map doesn’t have only the three dimensions — length, width, depth — our conscious human mind is comfortable operating in. Instead, it has many, many more dimensions. Tens of thousands and with the latest models, perhaps millions.

That is, the understanding an LLM has formed is a spatial architecture. It has a geometry that literally determines what, for an LLM, is thinkable.

It is literally the logical condition of possibility — the a priori — of the LLM.

For all we know, human brains also create latent space representations. The neurons in our brain work in a very similar fashion to how neurons work in a neural network.

Yet, despite this similarity, it appears that the latent space representations that a human brain produces and the latent space representations that an AI can produce are different from one another.

 

 

 

Bauhaus School.

When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, in 1919, many German intellectuals were deeply skeptical of the industrial age. Not so Gropius. He experienced the possibilities that new materials like glass, steel and concrete offered as a conceptual rupture with the 19th century.

And so, he argued –– very much against the dominant opinion — that it was the duty of architects and artists to explore these new materials, and to invent forms and products that would lift people out of the 19th and into the 20th century.

Today, we need something akin to the Bauhaus — but focused on AI.

We need philosophical R&D labs that would allow us to explore and practice AI as the experimental philosophy it is. 

Claire O'Callaghan - "Metaphors open up our minds - but can also shut them down"

https://psyche.co/ideas/metaphors-open-up-our-minds-but-can-also-shut-them-down

 

Is there danger, then, in these analogies that can delight and inspire? One risk is that they close down possibilities. They can shut down our thinking, coercing it to fit the shape of someone else’s comparison rather than our own. In feeding you an analogy, I’m not just telling you about a thing – I’m telling you how you should think about that thing and, in doing so, robbing all opportunity for your thoughts to take their own meandering leap into unmapped territories.

 

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki - "In Praise of Shadows"

as per April 2026, working link:

https://files.blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/4905/files/2016/09/In-Praise-of-Shadows.pdf

 

Found via the excellent "Glamour" book by Virginia Postrel, shows an intriguing (to the Western eye) view of Japanese or "Easter" approach.

 

Charles Moore in the Foreword:

Flowers and gardens serve as testimonials to our own care, and breezes loosely captured can connect us with the very edge of the infinite. 

 

 

[bathrooms, tiles]

The effect may not seem so very displeasing while everything is still new, but as the years pass, and the beauty of the grain begins to emerge on the planks and pillars, that glittering expanse of white tile comes to seem as incongruous as the proverbial bamboo grafted to wood.

 

The Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, baskingin the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, "a physiological delight" he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and grean leaves.
[...]
Here, I suspect, is where haiku poets over the ages have come by a great many of their indeas.

 

A beautiful woman, no matter how lovely her skin, would be considered indecenet were she to show here bare buttocks or feet in the presence of others, and how very crude, and tasteless to expose the toilet to such excessive illumination. The cleanliness of what can be seen only calls up the more clearly thoughts of what cannot be seen.

And indeed for even the sternest ascetic the fact remains that a snowy day is cold, and there is no denying the impulse to accept the services of a heater if it happens to be there in front of one, no matter how cruelly its inelegance my shatter the spell of the day. But it is on occasions like this that I always think how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science. Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the produtcs of our industrial art - would they not have suited our national temper better than they do?

 

   

  

 

Marco Giancotti - "Boundaries Are in the Eye of the Beholder"

https://planktonvalhalla.com/20240227-boundaries-are-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/

 

 

 human language gives you the impression of being able to categorize things with names

 

 

Consider, for example, the activities that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’ ” — but look and see whether there is anything common to all. — For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! — Look, for example, at board-games, with their various affinities. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. — Are they all ‘entertaining’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball-games, there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck, and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of singing and dancing games; here we have the element of entertainment, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way, can see how similarities crop up and disappear.

And the upshot of these considerations is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: similarities in the large and in the small.

Ludwig WittgensteinPhilosophical Investigations: 66 (

 

 

 

 

 the words we use define boundaries for things, giving us handy ways to tell things apart, but those boundaries are not universal. They’re not “in the world”, they’re practical shortcuts that exist only in human heads. If you look really closely, or if you look at the science, there is no strong reason to draw those lines one way or another. 

 

 

First, the fact that they have their own names can’t be a reason to separate them in that unique manner. We could give a name to the whole subject of the picture, say, “gadorblk”, that from now on we can use to refer to woman-touching-flower-carrying robots whenever we see them. Not very useful, but not prohibited either. You hear of languages that have words for weirdly specific things like “the effect of sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees, creating a dappled pattern of light and shadow” (komorebi from Japanese) and “the roadlike reflection of moonlight on water” (mångata from Swedish). Why shouldn’t a language have a one-word noun for the content of this picture?

As for the idea that we need to count three entities because each of them—the robot, the flower, and the woman—independently has consistent properties (an “identity”) of its own, the question then arises: why not more than three, then? Why not count each panel and screw of the robot separately? You could distinguish each garment worn by the woman, and each petal of the flower, each with its own independent uses and properties. All these things are “attached” to each other by physical forces that, when you look closely, are the forces of atoms pushing or pulling at each other. Just like the atoms of the robot and of the woman’s hands are pushing and pulling at those of the flower.

 

Sam Dresser - "Heidegger v Carnap: how logic took issue with metaphysics"

https://aeon.co/essays/heidegger-v-carnap-how-logic-took-issue-with-metaphysics

Interesting article about metaphysics and Heidegger and Carnap. Heidegger being a nazi-sympathisant was messed up.

Logic will not stand in his way; logic, says Heidegger, is not 'the highest court of appeals'. His point is that humans can understand things in ways that aren't strictly intellectual. In our day-to-day lives, we talk about 'nothing' all the time. ('What did you do in school today?' 'Nothing'.) We can use the concept in this way because we have a pre-theoretical idea of what 'nothing'... is, Heidegger says Getting to this 'pre-theoretical' place is the very heart of the philosophy as a whole. It means going 'beyond' logic, or perhaps 'behind' it, to appeal to the what-it-is-like-ness of being a person. Heidegger wants to show - but not really to argue for - the idea that logic doesn't exhaust what we can meaningfully say about existence.

It is through moods such as boredom, joy or anger that the world 'discloses' itself to us, Heidegger says.

Now for the twist: the reason we can toss 'Nothing' about so easily - the reason why we have an inkling of 'Nothing' even if we can't directly speak about it - is that there's a particular mood that 'discloses' Nothing. That mood is anxiety. While fear tends to have a singular object, like a vengeful spider or a murderous clown, anxiety lacks a target. It shears away meaning, revealing the pointlessness of it all, the utter, hollowed-out barrenness of existence.

Perhaps it takes a mind as subtle as Ludwig Wittgenstein's to really, truly understand Heidegger. After reading Heidegger's lecture, Wittgenstein remarked:

To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being [Sein] and anxiety [Angst]. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language.

Much of the disagreement between Heidegger and Carnap boils down to the notion of 'limits': the limits of words, the limits of knowledge, the limits of expression. And limits naturally prompt questions about beginnings: where to start when we do philosophy, and how does that starting point influence wherever we might be headed? In logic, Carnap found firm ground from which to launch his own philosophy, and to articulate the kind of thinking that should be classed as truly 'philosophical'. For Heidegger, logic is useful but not sufficient. There is so much more to say, so much more to question, so much more bound up with the business of being alive.

Matthew Hung - "Kowloon Walled City: Heterotopia in a Space of Disappearance"

https://mascontext.com/issues/trace/kowloon-walled-city-heterotopia-in-a-space-of-disappearance

Heterotopia was a term first coined by Michel Foucault in 1967 to an audience of architects where he used it to explain the spaces of otherness. These spaces are sites that are places outside all places but at the same time related to all the other sites from which it is located against. Foucault used the mirror as a metaphor for a Heterotopia due to its ability to reflect and disrupt. When considered in such a way the Kowloon Walled City can be seen as such a mirror to Hong Kong where some aspects of it confirm through its similarity with the rest of the colony but also unsettle through its rejection of the norms outside the informal settlement.

Foucault outlined principles or characteristics that are present in all Heterotopias and these can be seen in the Walled City. One such principle is that Heterotopias exist in diverse forms but can be broadly categorized as either Heterotopias of Deviance or Heterotopias of Crisis. Heterotopias of Deviance are places where those "whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed" such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Meanwhile, Crisis Heterotopias are places where those who, in relation to the society they live in, are in a state of crisis such as adolescents and the elderly but could equally apply to the refuge. During the Walled City's time in Hong Kong, it provided a place where those people that were in a state of crisis could reside. In particular, it allowed those refugees who had been alienated by China, but also inconsistent with the new orders of the colonial government, a place to live in a state of crisis.

The Cursed Judge

Found on Nebula, interesting-enough discussion of video games, like Jacob Geller, Errant Signal, Daryll Talks Videogames, ...

Philosphy Tube

somewhat interesting, philosophy stuff, about beauty in ugly times

David Robson - "Words as feelings"

https://aeon.co/essays/in-the-beginning-was-the-word-and-the-word-was-embodied

amazing article.  This seems to indirectly confirm my suspicion about names like "Mordor" and "Nazgul" sounding angry and dangerous!

Try to guess their meaning from the two available options:

1. nurunuru (a) dry or (b) slimy?

2. pikapika (a) bright or (b) dark?

3. wakuwaku (a) excited or (b) bored?

4. iraira (a) happy or (b) angry?

5. guzuguzu (a) moving quickly or (b) moving slowly?

6. kurukuru (a) spinning around or (b) moving up and down?

7. kosokoso (a) walking quietly or (b) walking loudly?

8. gochagocha (a) tidy or (b) messy?

9. garagara (a) crowded or (b) empty?

10. tsurutsuru (a) smooth or (b) rough?

The answers are: 1(b); 2(a); 3(a); 4(b); 5(b); 6(a); 7(a); 8(b); 9(b) 10(a).

If you think this exercise is futile, you’re in tune with traditional linguistic thinking. One of the founding axioms of linguistic theory, articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 19th century, is that any particular linguistic sign – a sound, a mark on the page, a gesture – is arbitrary, and dictated solely by social convention. Save those rare exceptions such as onomatopoeias, where a word mimics a noise – eg, ‘cuckoo’, ‘achoo’ or ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ – there should be no inherent link between the way a word sounds and the concept it represents; unless we have been socialised to think so, nurunuru shouldn’t feel more ‘slimy’ any more than it feels ‘dry’.

Yet many world languages contain a separate set of words that defies this principle. Known as ideophones, they are considered to be especially vivid and evocative of sensual experiences. Crucially, you do not need to know the language to grasp a hint of their meaning. Studies show that participants lacking any prior knowledge of Japanese, for example, often guess the meanings of the above words better than chance alone would allow. For many people, nurunuru really does feel ‘slimy’; wakuwaku evokes excitement, and kurukuru conjures visions of circular rather than vertical motion. That should simply not be possible, if the sound-meaning relationship was indeed arbitrary. (The experiment is best performed using real audio clips of native speakers.)

Yet Westermann’s later research found that there was also something special in ideophones’ phonological features. Comparing the ideophones of half a dozen West African languages, he noted that certain ‘front’ or ‘closed’ vowels – such as the [i] sound in the English word ‘cheese’ – tended to be used to represent concepts that were light, fine or bright, for instance; while ‘back’ or ‘open’ vowels – such as the [ɔ] sound in ‘talk’ or the [ɑ] in past – tended to be associated with a sense of slowness, heaviness and darkness. Meanwhile, voiced consonants such as ‘b’ or ‘g’ – so-called because they require the vocal cords to resonate – were associated with greater weight and softness, while voiceless consonants, such as ‘p’ or ‘k’, tended to be used to represent lighter weights and harsher surfaces. So, for example, in Ewe, someone kputukpluu is thinner than someone who is gbudugbluu.

He found similar relationships with linguistic tones. In many languages, the pitch at which a syllable is spoken can change a word’s meaning. Westermann found that words representing slowness, darkness and heaviness tended to have lower tones than those depicting speed, agility and brightness, which were formed of higher tones. Many also include the repetition of syllables, which can be used to signify number and a continuous action or state. So, for instance, in Ewe, kpata is used to denote one drop falling, but kpata kpata depicts many drops falling.

These patterns have now been observed in the ideophones of many other languages. To take a couple of examples from Basque – a language isolate that also has more than 4,000 ideophones – tiki taka, with its closed, frontal [i] sound, means taking quick, light steps, while taka taka, with a more open [a] sound, denotes taking heavier steps; tilin tilin means ‘small toll’, and tulun tulun ‘big toll’.

Meanwhile, in Japanese you have gorogoro, which, with its voiced ‘g’ sounds, represents a heavy object rolling continuously, while korokoro, with a voiceless ‘k’, represents a lighter rolling object. Similarly, bota means a ‘thick/much liquid hitting a solid surface’, while pota means a ‘thin/little liquid hitting a solid surface’. If you are a Pokémon fan, you might even notice these sound-meaning relationships in your favourite characters. Pikachu, for instance, is named after the Japanese ideophone pikapika, which means sparkle. As Westermann had noted, the voiceless consonants and front [i] vowels are often associated with brightness in a number of languages.

An early version of this experiment can be found in the writing of the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in the late 1920s, who tested participants in Tenerife. But the result has now been repeated many times, in many different cultures. In almost all cases, bouba is chosen to represent the shape on the right by the vast majority of participants, while kiki naturally seems to fit a spiky, pointed object.

The evocative power of ideophones might therefore reflect on an inherent sound symbolism understood by all humans. Although we don’t know the exact origin of these universal connections between sounds and meanings, one attractively parsimonious answer comes from human biology and the bodily experience of speech. According to this theory, subtle feedback from our mouth and throat primes us to associate certain phonemes with certain concepts. The mouth tends to form a rounder shape when we form an [o] sound, compared with an [i] sound – which might help to explain the kiki/bouba phenomenon. Voiced consonants such as ‘b’ also last for a marginally longer time than voiceless consonants such as ‘t’ – which might explain why they are associated with slower speed.

As part of the same study, Dingemanse also asked Dutch participants to memorise various lists of word pairs. In one, the ideophones were paired with the correct translation that matched their sound symbolism (kibikibi was paired with its true meaning, ‘energetic’, for instance). In another, the Japanese ideophones were paired with words of the opposite meaning (kibikibi was paired with the Dutch word for ‘tired’).

Over all the experiments, the participants found it far easier to learn the ideophones paired with their correct meaning, remembering about 86 per cent of the ‘congruent’ word pairs, compared with 71 per cent of the word pairs in which they had been given the wrong translation of the ideophone. Once again, this was not true in another experiment that measured how well they learnt Japanese adjectives – supporting the idea that there is something special about ideophones, and the way they are formed, that makes them particularly vivid.

Sam Woodward - "The terror of reality was the true horror for H P Lovecraft"

https://aeon.co/essays/the-terror-of-reality-was-the-true-horror-for-h-p-lovecraft

 

[opening paragraph of 'The Call of Chtulhu']

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

As an absolute determinist, Lovecraft's metaphysics describes an infinite universe in eternal predetermined motion: 'each human act,' he wrote, 'can be no less than the inevitable result of every antecedent and circumambient condition in an eternal cosmos.' This left no room for teleology, the notion that the universe is moving towards some pre-ordained goal, or that humans and other species are evolving for some purpose. His determinism was accompanied by a strict materialism that, in line with the views of many of his contemporaries, made the immaterial - the soul and spirit - inconceivable. These views shaped the nightmarish figures in his tales, which are not apparitions or spectres, the 'supernatural beings of conventional horror writing, but materially real horrors that only appear supernatural because of humanity's inability to comprehend their true nature.

Through a belief in the impossible, Lovecraft thought we might 'acquire a certain flush of triumphant emancipation comparable in its comforting power to the opiate dreams of religion'. But that would happen only if we had, he believed, 'the illusory sensation that some law of the ruthless cosmos has been - or could be - invalidated or defeated'. In that sense, the illusory depictions of nature contravened in weird fiction tales provide some respite, even if only aesthetic, from the rigid and unerring clockwork of the mechanistic and predetermined universe.

Jim Baggott - "Quantum dialectics (How Soviet communist philosophy shaped postwar quantum theory)"

https://aeon.co/essays/how-soviet-communist-philosophy-shaped-postwar-quantum-theory

As the founders of the theory argued about what it meant, the views of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr began to dominate. He concluded that we have no choice but to describe our experiments and their results using seemingly contradictory, but nevertheless complementary, concepts of waves and particles borrowed from classical (pre-quantum) physics. This is Bohr's principle of "complementarity". He argued that there is no contradiction because, in the context of the quantum world, our use of these concepts is purely symbolic. We reach for whicever descsription - waves or particles - best serves the situation at hand, and we should not take the theory too literally. It has no meaning beyond its ability to connect our experiences of the quantum world as they are projected to us by the classical instruments we use to study it.

Bohr emphasised that complementarity did not deny the existence of an objective quantum reality lying beneath the phenomena. But it did deny that we can discover anything meaningful about this. Alas, despite his strenuous efforts to exercise care in his use of language, Bohr could be notoriously vague and more than occassionally incomprehensible. Pronouncements were delivered in tortured "Borish". It is said of his last recorded lecture that it took a team of linguists a week to discover the language he was speaking.

Complementatiry also fell foul of the principal political ideologies that, in different ways, dominated human affairs from the early 1930s, through the Second World War, to the Cold War that followed. Both Bohr and Einstein were of Jewish descent and, to Nazi ideologues, complementarity and relativity theory were poisonous Jewish abstractions, at odds with the nationalistic programme of Deutsche Physik, or 'Aryan physics'. But the proponents of Deutsche Physik failed to secure the backing of the Nazi leadership, and any threat to complementarity from Nazi ideology disappeared with the war's ending. Much more enduring were the objections of Soviet communist philosophers who argued that complementarity was at odds with the official Marxist doctrine of 'dialectical materialism'.

Complementarity looked just like the kind of positivist gibberish that Lenin had sought to annihilate. A reality accessible only in the form of quantum probabilities did not suit the needs of the official philosophy of Soviet communists. It appeared to undermine orthodox materialism. Nevertheless, an influential group of Soviet physicists, including Vladimir Fock, Lev Landau, Igor Tamm and Matvei Bronstein, promoted Bohr's views and for a time represented the 'Russian branch' of Bohr's school. This was not without some risk. Communist Party philosophers sought their dismissal, to no avail, largely because they could not agree on the issues amongst themselves.

Solar Sands

Videos in the same style as Jacob Geller / Errant Signal.

less focused on games though.

Christian Donlan - "The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds"

https://www.eurogamer.net/the-beauty-and-drama-of-video-games-and-their-clouds

Secret Knowledge, a book about looking twice and noticing what nobody else has spotted,

Andrew Kipnis - "The ghosts haunting China's cities"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/14/the-ghosts-haunting-chinas-cities-death-dying-funerals-superstition

As China urbanises, its ideas about ghosts are transforming. Only in urban and urbanising China are ghosts equated with strangers. In traditional, rural Chinese society, ghosts were often thought of as relatives or kin who had been mistreated in life and not given a proper burial. The whole purpose of a funeral was to make sure that a dead relative became an ancestor instead of a ghost. When a person's social universe is composed almost entirely of family, then both good and evil must be located within the family. In urban settings, these can be separated: family can be imagined as purely good, while evil is located in strangers.

Scott Aarsonson - "Does fermion doubling make the universe not a computer?"

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7705

I wanted to make a deeper point. Even if the fermion doubling problem had been a fundamental obstruction to simulating Nature on a Turing machine, rather than (as it now seems) a technical problem with technical solutions, it still might not have refuted the version of the simulation hypothesis that people care about. We should really distinguish at least three questions:

1. Can currently-known physics be simulated on computers using currently-known approaches?
2. Is the Physical Church-Turing Thesis true? That is: can any physical process be simulated on a Turing machine to any desired accuracy (at least probabilistically), given enough information about its initial state?
3. Is our whole observed universe a “simulation” being run in a different, larger universe?

Crucially, each of these three questions has only a tenuous connection to the other two! As far as I can see, there aren’t even nontrivial implications among them. For example, even if it turned out that lattice methods couldn’t properly simulate the Standard Model, that would say little about whether any computational methods could do so—or even more important, whether any computational methods could simulate the ultimate quantum theory of gravity. A priori, simulating quantum gravity might be harder than “merely” simulating the Standard Model (if, e.g., Roger Penrose’s microtubule theory turned out to be right), but it might also be easier: for example, because of the finiteness of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, and perhaps the Hilbert space dimension, of any bounded region of space.

Virginia Postrel - "The Power of Glamour"

 

Glamour is, rather, a form of nonverbal rhetoric, which moves and persuades not through words, but through images, concepts, and, totems. (Even when conjured as word-pictures, glamorous images are perceived and remembered as emotionally resonant snapshots, not verbal descriptions.)

Glamour is powerfully persuasive. Yet because it relies on imagery and channels desire, it is often dismissed as trivial, frivolous, and superficial.

the old Scots word glamour described a literal magic spell. Glamour (or a glamour) made its subject see things that weren't there. A 1721 glossary of poetry explained: "When devils, wizards or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to cast glamour o'er the eyes of the spectator." Glamour could, Scott wrote in 1805, "make a ladye seem a knight; / The cobwebs on a dungeon wall / Seem tapestry in lordly hall." That power was believed to stretch into the real world. In his diary, Scott worried that "a kind of glamour about me" was mking him overlook errors in his page proofs; he wondered whether the right herbal concoction "would dispel this fascination." (As both magic and metaphor, glamour and fascination are closely related.)

Glamour [...] emerges through the interaction between object and audience. Glamour is not something you possess but something you perceive, not something you have but something you feel.

Unlike escapist entertainment that simply provides emotional distraction, glamour is escapist in the profound sense identified by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Echoing Queen Christina's Antonio, Tuan argues that escapism is the essence of culture, which he defines as "the totality of means by which I escape from my animal state of being." This uniquely human escapism allows us to shape the world, and ourselves, through deliberate action.

    A human is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is. Humans not only submit and adapt, as all animals do; they transform in accordance with a preconceived plan. That is, before transforming, they do something extraordinary, namely, "see" what is not there. Seeing what is not there lies at the foundation of all human culture.

A single static two-dimensional portrait – a selective representation "preserved for posterity" – is, by its very nature, deceptive. Viewers perceive such a portrait differently from a real human being. If, as [Jessica] Coen claims, young women do not realise that "most waists don't really bend without a roll of flesh" or that "a 40-year-old woman actually does have some wrinkles," it is because they've mentally edited away those flaws in the people they see every day. In the flux and movement of life, the mind overlooks imperfections that appear glaring in a still image. Retouching may therefore produce an image truer to the mind's eye. 

Charisma (originally a religious term) is a quality of leadership that inspires followers to join the charismatic leader in the disciplined pursuit of a greater cause. More colloquially, charisma is a kind of personal magnetism that inspires loyalty.
    Charisma in either sense is a personal characteristic like intelligence. A place, an idea, even an object can be glamorous, but only a person can be charismatic. And while glamour depends on the audience's receptive imagination, even unsympathetic audiences can feel the power of charisma.
    Most important, glamour requires mystery, allowing the audience to fill in the details with their own desires. Glamour doesn't persuade the audience to share a leader's vision. Instead, it inspires the audience to project their own longings onto the leader (or movie star, vacation resort, or new car).
    [...]
    Charisma enhances leadership; glamour enhances sales.

 

 

 

 

Reid McCaster, Edward Smith, Astrid Rose - "Okay hero"

Bunch of essays on Metal Gear Solid.  Nothing crazy but enjoyable to read.

This is a world where reasonable assumptions about anybody or anything are eventually all rendered moot, owing to increasingly complex information and technology. It represents the end of knowledge, the type of postmodern, perpetually self-reconfiguring society described in 1979 by French historian Michel Foucault, whereby new versions of understanding–new discourses–simply transpose old, without any of them ever being proven objectively true or false. In Foucaultian postmodernity, all truth is relative, disembedded from traditional, face-to-face means of communication, individuals are free to credibly distribute their versions of knowledge to anyone and everyone, creating a world where, if enough people share and are convinced of a discourse, that discourse is assimilated into everybody's reality. Here, the once-local members of FOXHOUND have gone rogue; soldiers without a war, their actions have become singular and apolitical, and they've turned on their countrymen.

Adam Phillips - "What we talk about when we talk about giving up"

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/02/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-giving-up-adam-phillips

There tends to be a determined cultural consensus that life is, and has to be, worth living (if not, of course, actually sacred).

There are, to put it as simply as possible, what turn out to be good and bad sacrifices (and sacrifice creates the illusion - or reassures us - that we can choose our losses). There is the giving up that we can admire and aspire to, and the giving up that profoundly unsettles us. What, for example, does real hope or real despair require us to relinquish? What exactly do we imagine we are doing when we give something up? There is an essential and far-reaching ambiguity to this simple idea. We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can't.

All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, is a bout sacrifice, about what we should give up to get the lives we should want. For our health, for our planet, for our emotional and moral wellbeing - and, indeed, for the profits of the rich - we are asked to give up a great deal now. But alongside this orgy of improving self-sacrifices - or perhaps, underlying it - there is a despair and terror of just wanting to give up. A need to keep at bay the sense that life may not be worth the struggle, the struggle that religions and therapies and education, and entertainment, and commodities, and the arts in general are there to help us with. For more and more people now it seems that it is their hatred and their prejudice and their scapegoating that actually keeps them going. As though we are tempted more than ever by what Nietzsche once called "a will to nothingness, a counter-willan aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life".

Whether we are giving up on confidence, or on free speech, or on sociability, or on wanting, or on meaning, or on life itself, it is, as it were, the return we have in mind, however unconscious we are of the deal being brokered. What we want from any given sacrifice is always worth discussing. Sacrifice and its discontents is what there is to talk about. Givign up, or giving up on, anything or anyone always exposes what it is we take it we want.

To attend to something and yet want nothing from it, these seemed to be the essentials of the second way of perceiving ... if by chance we should have discovered the knack of holding wide our attention, then the magic thing happens.

The "magic thing" is to "make boredom and weariness blossom into immeasurable contentment"; the second kind of attention "brought a quality of delight completely unknown to the first kind". Wide attention reenchants the world, narrow attention can diminish it. Narrow attention creates a certain kind of person - is a way of overdefining oneself; wide attention provides alternatives, alternative ways of seeing ourselves and others. Clearly what Milner is describing here as wide attention is a form of attention purged of aims and wants and conventional satisfactions (it is a version of forgetting oneself); and she describes in vivid detail her struggles to attain this wide attention, freed as it seemed to be of Darwinian and Freudian and indeed acquisitive purposes. It is a version, as she acknowledges, of what Blake called "vision". It acknowledges that any idealogy of virtue can only ever be a provocation.

Our frustration is the key to our desire; to want something or someone is to feel their absence; so to register or recognise a lack would seem to be the precondition for any kind of pleasure or satisfaction. Indeed, in this account, frustration, a sense of lack, is the necessary precondition for any kind of satisfaction.

Caitrin Keiper - "Do Elephants Have Souls"

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/do-elephants-have-souls

One of the major clues that elephants have something we would recognize as inner lives is their extraordinary memories. This is attested to by outward indicators ranging from the practical – a matriarch's recollection of a locale, critical to leading her family to food and water – to the passionate – grudges that are held against specific people or types of people for decades or even generations, or fierce affection for a long-lost friend.

After the elephant had struck him, she "realized" that he could not walk and, using her trunk and front feet, had gently moved him several meters and propped him up under the shade of a tree. There she stood guard over him through the afternoon, through the night, and into the next day. Her family left her behind, but she stayed on, occasionally touching him with ther trunk. When a herd of buffaloes came to drink at the trough, she left his side and chased them away. It was clear to the man that she "knew" that he was injured and took it upon herself to protect him.

Staff members at the Elephant Sanctuary told me of an incident with one of their "girls," who spotted a falled bird outside her barn and ran right over to it, utterly distraught. She crooned and stroked it and did not settle down till it had been properly laid to rest. What did this mean to her, exactly? We don't know. But she was clearly very moved by a fellow creature's woe and had no trouble seeing it for what it was, different life forms through they were.

In his thoughtful 1985 essay "Tool, Image, and Grave," the phiosopher of biology Hans Jonas takes up three activities attributed solely to humans.

On one count, elephants fail the tool test, for they do not make artefacts they then reuse. [...] However, they do use objects as intermediaries between them and their environment, such as stick to scratch between their toes and remove bugs from other areas, or twisted clumps of grass like Q-tips to clean inside their ears or whisks to swat at flies. As J.H. Williams recounts in "Elephant Bill" (1950), work elephants in Asia collared with bells have been known to plug up the bells with mud so that they can go and steal bananas in the middle of the night unnoticed – a purposeful modification of someone else's tool. Elephants dig holes for water, cover them with plugs of bark and grass, and return later to their secret stash. Elephants learn by trial and error what sorts of materials do and do not shock them in their efforts to break through electric fences – and in at least one recorded instance (described in Lawrence Anthony's The Elephant Whisperer, 2009), followed the buzzing of the fence all the way around to its origin, the generator, which, having been stomped to smithereens, allowed them to untwine the fence and go their merry way.

Ruby, who spent almost her entire life at the Phoenix Zoo and was given paints for recreation after her keepers observed her always doodling in the sand, would commonly select paint colors that matched events around her, such as visitors' shirts outside her cage or the red, yellow and white of a fire truck that had pulled up with flashing lights earlier in the day.

Jonas's final and strongest criterion is the grave. [...] Here [man] is joined by the elephants, the only other known creatures that – whatever it may mean to them – purposively commemorate their dead, in a way Joyce Poole calls "eerie and deeply moving": "It is their silence that is most unsettling. The only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they investigate their dead companion. it's as even the birds have stopped singing." Using their trunks and sensitive hind feet, the ones they use for waking up their babies, "they touch the body ever so gently, circling, hovering above, touching again, as if by doing so they are obtaining information that we, with our more limited senses, can never understand. Their movements are in slow motion, and then, in silence, they may cover the dead with leaves and branches."