On Habermas Machines
Rob Horning, “Habermas Machines” - https://robhorning.substack.com/p/habermas-machines.
Interesting that Google engineers would think the ends justify the means in this case. It’s almost as if they asked an AI bot how to create a machine to achieve consensus and it replied by gaming a solution to achieve that end. Horning rightly cites the problem in that consensus is achieved but in a way that leaves people isolated in networks of systemic surveillance. “In other words, tech companies can posit a world where all political discourse occurs between isolated individuals and LLMs, and the data produced could be used to facilitate social control while everyone gets to feel heard. The automated production and summarization and summation of political opinion doesn’t help people engage in collective action; it produces an illusion of collective action for people increasingly isolated by media technology.”
In contrast, Habermas’s view of democratic decsision-making inherently includes a process of mutual recognition. It’s a point even more crucial to Arendt’s view of human plurality in political spaces of appearance. Recognition or Anerkennung in German includes a notion of cognitive empathy where people learn to see each other’s perspectives. Intersubjective habits develop between people in and through deliberative practices. For instance, what’s been documented in jury forums is not simply that just decisions can be made. As well, people leave the experience with stronger ties to their fellow citizens. They come to believe that justice is possible through collaborative relationships. As I noted in my book Religion after Deliberative Democracy (p. 70), “one case study ‘discovered that each aspect of jury service has a different kind of impact on jurors, with the final jury deliberation not always providing the most important civic lesson.’ In a summative table, they outlined such positive impacts upon participation in voting, confidence in legal institutions, emotional connection to political action, local community groups, and political and civic faith’” Gastil, John, E. Pierre Deess, Philip Weiser, and Cindy Simmons. 2010. The Jury and Democracy: How Jury Deliberation Promotes Civic Engagement and Political Participation . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 174–75.
This is not to say that AI may not become an aid to deliberative democratic practices. Rather, the measure of success for “Habermas Machines” must ensure that the means are more substantially included in the ends.
On The French Dispatch
There are times when writing deadlines loom, and the only hedge against nagging other todos is to put on a quiet movie seen several times before. The difficult task at hand is comforted by something repeating itself in the background. Repetition being impossible, the hermeneutic spiral kicks in and a scene inevitably jumps out (I’m thinking of Kierkegaard and Ricoeur at this point). Here’s one such example from Wes Anderson’s typically idiosyncratic The French Dispatch (2021). The movie gravitates around a menagerie of dislocated journalists. It’s “set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional twentieth century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in ‘The French Dispatch Magazine’.” At one point near the end of the film, the managing editor, Arthur [Bill Murray], comments upon something missing in one of Roebuck’s [Jeffrey Wright] essays for the Tastes and Smells section about a chef named Nescaffier [Steve Park]. There’s an awkward tension in the air that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had a critic look over their carefully crafted work.
The film cuts to Nescaffier, lying on a medical recovery bed, after having eaten a poisoned radish in a scheme to save the police chief’s son.
The film returns to Arthur and Roebuck’s editorial tête-à-tête, which now seems to be intimating an underlying theme. The movie wanders through several quite different and equally eccentric stories from the magazine. At times, you’re left wondering if there would be any actual paying subscribers in an era where print was the primary medium of distribution. However, this scene impresses a profound feeling of nostalgia or the pain that arises when you miss something that can never return. It seemed to me that on this day, The French Dispatch was about an often unspoken feature of cosmopolitan life.
On Minimal Cognition
Claire Lewis, “What's a Brain? On Bacterial, Cellular, and Other Minimal Minds” - https://clairelevans.substack.com/p/whats-a-brain. Interesting brief summary of minimal cognition. My view is increasingly similar, but if this is the case, it means there are hermeneutic and semiotic interests here.
On the Indosphere
Ferdinand Mount, “One-way Traffic” - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/ferdinand-mount/one-way-traffic. I uncovered this ancient connection between Hellenistic and South Asian cultures while writing a chapter on the early eighth-century thinker Shankara for my forthcoming book on Religion through the Eyes of Others. His birthplace in Kerala was part of the trade network Dalrymple outlines in The Golden Road. It is also thought that he adopted the Buddhist model of monastic training, noted here as the inspiration for later Islamic madrasas and European universities. It’s a forgotten legacy and one that disrupts any strict binary between East and West. Nonetheless, Shankara is a unique thinker who takes significant time and consideration to understand as just one voice amongst many in the Indosphere.
On Bayle’s Footnotes
Matthew Wills, “History’s Footnotes,” https://daily.jstor.org/historys-footnotes/. One of the key contrasts between the scientific and enlightenment interest in evidence and recent web design and AI models, is a lack of provenance, which I noted here. Bayle’s work is one of the key points at which the concept of critique enters the English language. He was a Huguenot refugee, another French word that arrived around this time.
On Truth Machines
Kelly Clancy, “The Perpetual Quest for a Truth Machine,” https://nautil.us/the-perpetual-quest-for-a-truth-machine-702659/. This is an interesting intellectual history tracing the connections from Llull’s thirteenth-century Ars Magna to Leibniz’s 1666 Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria to George Boole’s 1854 Laws of Thought to Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1960s ELIZA and ChatGPT today.
On Scientific Judgment
Chris Haufe, “Do Humanists Know Anything,” https://www.chronicle.com/article/do-humanists-know-anything.
On AI after Avicenna
Abigail Tulenko, “What Philosopher Ibn Sina Can Teach Us about AI,” - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-philosopher-ibn-sina-can-teach-us-about-ai.