Philosophical notes…
On Leadership Service
“Disrespect doesn’t just demotivate. It also disrupts focus, causing costly mistakes. In a medical simulation, professionals in neonatal intensive care teams had to diagnose a potentially life-threatening condition and then respond rapidly with the correct procedures. Right beforehand, some of them were randomly assigned to hear a visiting expert disparage their work, saying they wouldn’t last a week in his department. Briefly insulting physicians and nurses was enough to reduce the accuracy of their diagnoses by nearly 17 percent and the effectiveness of their procedures by 15 percent... It’s a pattern I’ve seen time and again in my research: Givers add more value than takers. Studies show that tech companies are more profitable when servant leaders are at the helm. The competitive advantage comes from treating people better than they expect and earning their trust, which makes it easier to attract, motivate and retain talent. That doesn’t mean being soft on people. Servant leaders aren’t shy about dishing out tough love. But they put their mission above their ego, and they care about people as much as performance.”
Adam Grant - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/opinion/elon-musk-leadership-business-education.html?smid=url-share. In academia, administrative roles are often referred to as leadership service. More recently, that language has shifted a bit, and some now refer to it as engagement. However, in light of the literature noted above, it seems service is the right moniker. There is reason to think that a posture of servant leadership that aims to give can actually increase an organization’s productivity over the long term. Emphasis is on the long term in my view. On the one hand, it is important to align our aims with an evidence-based approach to leadership. On the other hand, accuracy only comes through day-to-day practice of what can feel like a Sisyphean task amidst all the challenges facing higher education today.
On Paripatetic Rumination
As is my habit, I walk quite quickly along the beach at least three to four times a week. Round trip, this covers three miles (5km) at a minimum, nine miles a week, 468 miles a year, and thousands of miles over a decade. The point is, I pass many fellow Novocastrians taking in the views in this stunning part of the planet. This Good Friday was no different as I wove my way through crowds walking the coastline as the king tide ebbed and flowed with ten to fourteen-foot waves.
On another such walk, I noticed a pristine purple crock in the size range of a toddler. A loose-fitting shoe, surely it had to have been left behind rather recently. My mind began conjuring a story about the fate of the little clog until I caught the glimpse of a similar purple shade peaking out of a packed pram being pushed some twenty meters up the promenade. The probability was high that the crock I’d just seen could be reunited with its owner, had I the courage to head back to recover it.
As I approached the family ensemble, I could see the mom notice something missing and inquired with the dad who had charge of the stroller. Shoulders shrugged, heads turned, as the implications of the loss slowly approached a state of potential drama. As the hero in this story, I passed at just that moment and, without a word, handed his salvation to him like two runners in a relay race. “Thank you!” “No worries!” And like that, I was on my way, lost again in peripatetic rumination.
Upon recounting this act of kindness to a colleague, I was asked how it felt to have done such a good little deed. The question seemed to include a subtle worry that my tale was grounded in the conceit of humble bragging. But what if the little girl had not recovered her shoe? Think of the fit of tears as the family packed its incomplete beach caravan into the car. What then if she listlessly persisted with wearing just one favorite sole, her other bare foot blistering as the uneven gate pulled her in circles? My intervention just may have staved off scoliosis. Not to mention the marriage I saved. Had the mom connected the complete carelessness of her partner to a longer string of events, the relationship may have broken under the strain. No, my act likely intervened in the course of history, reversing the consequences of lifelong pain and heartbreak.
Then again, maybe none of that was true. This doubt made me consider cosmic explanations. Maybe my updated karma calculations might ward off future calamity or reincarnation as a cockroach. If the Buddhists turned out to be wrong, maybe I’d miss out on extra time in purgatory. Or maybe I’d enjoy a more restful slumber before awaking in the eschaton if Martin Luther had it right. Pascal’s wager notwithstanding, what is a walk if not a chance to slow the inevitable gravity pulling us all six feet under? The world always looks darker when staring into the cast of your own shadow. Sometimes, a small act of kindness is all you can do to look up.
Nobby’s Beach, Newcastle, Australia
On RISC Architecture
“RISC-V does not take three months. It takes closer to four years. If I’ve failed, so far, to account for the precision of this work, let me try again here. Computer architects are not software engineers, who use programming languages to talk to the machine. Even coders who can speak assembly or C, the so-called low-level languages, still do just that: They talk. Computer architects need to go deeper. Much deeper. All the way down to a preverbal realm. If they’re speaking at all, they’re speaking in gestures, motions: the way primitive circuits hold information. Computer architecture isn’t telling a machine what to do. It’s establishing the possibility that it can be told anything at all. The work is superhuman, if not fully alien. Put it this way: If you found the exact place in a human being where matter becomes mind, where body becomes soul—a place that no scientist or philosopher or spiritual figure has found in 5,000 years of frantic searching—wouldn’t you tread carefully? One wrong move and everything goes silent.”
Jason Kehe - https://www.wired.com/story/angelina-jolie-was-right-about-risc-architecture/. Interesting summary of RISC (reduced instruction set computer) which surpassed CISC (complex instruction set computer) in the 1980s because of its superior “performance and cost.” Computers rely on ISAs (instruction set architecture), and RISC-V International is a Switzerland-based company promoting its open-access option. “Computer architectures are so named because, well, that’s exactly what they are—architectures not of bricks but of bits… Everyone has their own way of explaining it. The ISA is the bridge, or the interface, between the hardware and the software. Or it’s the blueprint. Or it’s the computer’s DNA. These are helpful enough, as is the common comparison of an ISA to a language. ‘You and I are using English,’ as Redmond said to me at the conference. ‘That’s our ISA.’ But it gets confusing. Software speaks in languages too—programming languages. That’s why Patterson prefers dictionary or vocabulary. The ISA is less a specific language, more a set of generally available words.” It strikes me that this difficulty explaining ISAs echos the current neuroscientific debate about the relationship between language and the brain. For instance, in extended mind (EM) theory, language provides particular benefits that the brain couldn’t supply on its own. Wetware and software interact in what Clark refers to as the mangrove effect in a 1998 essay on “Magic Words.” Sometimes, the tree (language) does not grow into the island (brain), but the island arises around the growth of the tree. It strikes me that depictions of RISC computer architecture might better be understood along these lines.
On Bureaucracy
“The anthropologist Michael Herzleld, drawing on fieldwork in Greece, refers to the stories we tell each other about bureaucracy as ‘secular theodicies,’ that is to say, efforts to explain, and sometimes to explain away, the existence of incompetence, indifference, or corruption of political institutions. We tend to condemn bureaucracy and bureaucrats when better explanations elude us. There is an old saying that a myth is the imaginative or imaginary resolution of real contradictions; the myths of bureaucracy seek not only to resolve paperwork’s contradictions, but also the contradictions in our own thought. We have been unable to reconcile our theories of the state’s power with our experience of its failure.”
Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork, p. 10-11. I came across this book some years ago when researching the history of written artefacts in scroll, codex and print. Scholars often forget that bureaucracy has French etymological roots and came to prominence after the French Revolution. “There is no trace of the idea in Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Burke, or even Hegel. Yet by the 1850s it was all the rage” (p. 11). Paper power had become tied to the aim to hold accountable the autocratic power of the monarch. It should, therefore, not be surprising to find any person with autocratic tendencies attacking bureaucracy. Because autocracy crosses partisan lines, it is worth listening for this distinction. Whenever I hear people denigrate archivists or even the more simple need for record keeping, generally in the form of meeting agendas and action notes, I hear the murmurs of a tyrant.
This concern was highlighted in Timothy Snyder’s 2017 twenty chapters On Tyranny, which he summarized recently online. The first two are “do not obey in advance” and “defend institutions.” This captures some of the challenges bureaucracy poses, given that bureaucracies themselves have procedures to foster obedience. Hence, cog in the wheel ethical defenses abounded after the second world war. As Hannah Arendt noted, calculating paper trails is not thinking. This is why Snyder also recommends believing in truth and investigating. As Kafka points out, bureaucracy is not simple. His argument in this book is worth reading carefully if only because “paperwork is unpredictable and that this unpredictability is frustrating… modern political thought was both founded and confounded by its encounters with paperwork” (p. 10).
This frustration can be felt in the 2018 film Transit, based on a 1944 Franz Kafka-esque novel by Anna Seghers. The film is set in contemporary France, and revolves around a man trying to escape an occupying government’s crackdown on human beings without the right papers. Camps are created and soon full as the “cleansing” begins. Transit papers ensure he is both visible and has the right to leave and to become invislbe. At one point, the protagonist in the film tries to check into a hotel. “So, I can only stay here if I can prove that I don’t want to stay?” The paradox haunts the entire film.
“That’s the terrible thing. Not that they stare at you, your dirty, tired face, your torn clothing. The terrible thing is that they don’t see you. That you don’t exist in their world.”
On Tracing the Extended Mind
“In sum, Clark provides a cognitive science complement to the deliberative communication between people of differing religious and moral viewpoints. This, in the end, may be his most salient contribution to the study of religion. However, here again, clarity about Clark’s complementarity remains crucial. Language directly enhances our capacity to adjudicate moral and religious disagreements. However, in so doing, Clark presumes inherent openness to deliberation and willingness to exchange viewpoints. Moreover, in defending EM on this point, he suggests that the reasons for supporting this view could not be derived from cognitive science. My contention is that the trace opens EM to wider hermeneutic, political, and ethical justifications, some of which are already evident in Derrida’s various evaluations of religion’s multiple possibilities. Following Immanuel Kant, he understood ‘two strata’ or layers of religion, one cultic and the other moral (Derrida, [1998] 2002, p. 49, Cf.; Kant, [1792] 1934, Book I, scts 3–4). Derrida recognized that a notion of interiority was at work in both strata and was not interested in a naive return to the Enlightenment era after the horrors of the twentieth century (Derrida [1998] 2002, p. 89). Nonetheless, in their difference, Derrida again noted a potential ‘trace’ of religion that can only ‘begin and begin again: quasi-automatically, mechanically, machine-like, spontaneously’ (Derrida [1998] 2002, p. 57). As I have written elsewhere, this trace encompassed religion’s written materiality (Stanley 2022a, pp. 135–38). EM now presents another model to apply Derrida’s trace to the future of situated religious cognition.”
Timothy Stanley, “Tracing the Extended Mind,” https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/16/2/189. This is the concluding paragraph to an article just published as part of a special issue on situated religious cognition for Religions. I concluded my last book on Printing Religion after the Enlightenment by noting the connection between Derrida and extended mind theory. The trace appears in both Clark and Derrida when considering the gap between brain and mind. This is a first foray into making that connection more explicit. I finally had a chance to write up what I’d first noticed some three years ago. Forthcoming essays will include more work on these interactions and present a fuller picture of EM’s contribution to philosophy of religion.
On AI Mirrors
“After all, having AIs that can beat us at chess is one thing—but now we have algorithms that write convincing prose, have engaging chats, make music that fools some into thinking it was made by humans. Sure, these systems can be rather limited and bland—but aren’t they encroaching ever more on tasks we might view as uniquely human? ‘That’s where the mirror metaphor becomes helpful,’ [Vallor] says. ‘A mirror image can dance. A good enough mirror can show you the aspects of yourself that are deeply human, but not the inner experience of them—just the performance.’ With AI art, she adds, ‘The important thing is to realize there’s nothing on the other side participating in this communication.’ What confuses us is we can feel emotions in response to an AI-generated ‘work of art.’ But this isn’t surprising because the machine is reflecting back permutations of the patterns that humans have made: Chopin-like music, Shakespeare-like prose. And the emotional response isn’t somehow encoded in the stimulus but is constructed in our own minds: Engagement with art is far less passive than we tend to imagine.”
Philip Ball, “AI Is the Black Mirror” - https://nautil.us/ai-is-the-black-mirror-1169121/. An interesting interview and review of Shanon Valor’s 2024 The AI Mirror. It echoes similar concerns raised by Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1976 Computer Power and Human Reason I noted earlier here. He also recognized the confusion between human reason and computer calculations. This latest interview is less hopeful at times than I remain about the degree to which we can build ethical capacity into computer science studies. “Vallor tells me she once tried to explain to an AGI leader that there’s no mathematical solution to the problem of justice. 'I told him the nature of justice is we have conflicting values and interests that cannot be made commensurable on a single scale, and that the work of human deliberation and negotiation and appeal is essential. And he told me, "I think that just means you’re bad at math." What do you say to that? It becomes two worldviews that don’t intersect. You’re speaking to two very different conceptions of reality.' What we’ll be aiming to do in our new ethics of emerging technology course is start with mathematic principles and build AI ethical engagement in response.
On Habermas Machines
“Researchers from Google recently issued a paper describing what they call a ‘Habermas machine,’ a LLM meant to help ‘small groups find common ground while discussing divisive political issues’ by iterating ‘group statements that were based on the personal opinions and critiques from individual users, with the goal of maximizing group approval ratings.’ Participants in their study ‘consistently preferred’ the machine-generated statements to those produced by humans in the group and helped reduce the diversity of opinion within the group, which researchers interpret as ‘AI … finding common ground among dicussants with diverse views.’ So much for the ‘lifeworld’ and ‘intersubjective recognition.’ It appears that people are more likely to agree with a position when it appears that no one really holds it than to agree with a position articulated by another person.”
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 Divine Discontent
“The most fulfilled people I know tend to have two traits. They’re insatiably curious—about new ideas, experiences, information and people. And they seem to exist in a state of perpetual, self-inflicted unhappiness... But it’s this restless pursuit of greatness, even when they feel demoralized and inadequate, that shapes their lives and makes things interesting. So let’s not call it dissatisfaction. Let’s call it a divine discontent... To me, divine discontent is about cheerfully seeking out dissatisfaction. It’s choosing to ask, What could be better? What can I improve? It’s a feeling that practitioners across many fields—in literature, art, music, performance, film; but also the sciences, engineering, and mathematics—can relate to.”
Celine Nguyen, “The Divine Discontent” - https://www.personalcanon.com/p/the-divine-discontent.
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.
“Arthur: Nescaffier only gets one line of dialogue.
Roebuck: Well, I did cut something he told me. It made me too sad. I could stick it back in, if you like.
Arthur: What did he say?”
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.
“Nescaffier: They had a flavor.
Roebuck: I beg your pardon?
Nescaffier: The toxic salts in the radishes. They had a flavour. Something unfamiliar to me. Like a bitter, moldy, peppery, spicy, oily kind of earth. I never tasted that taste in my life. Not entirely pleasant, extremely poisonous, but still a new flavour. That’s a rare thing at my age.
Roebuck: I admire your bravery, lieutenant.
Nescaffier: I’m not brave. I just wasn’t in the mood to be a disappointment to everybody. I’m a foreigner you know.
Roebuck: The city is full of us isn’t it? I’m one myself.
Nescaffier: Seeking something missing. Missing something left behind.
Roebuck: Maybe with good luck we’ll find what eluded us in the places we once called home. ”
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.
“Arthur: That’s the best part of the whole thing. That’s the reason for it to be written.
Roebuck: I couldn’t agree less.
Arthur: Well, anyway, don’t cut it.”
On Minimal Cognition
“Cognition isn’t reserved only to vertebrates with language, reason, or self-awareness. There are more primitive cognitive subsystems within us, around us, and all along the ladder of evolutionary time. Studying them is the purview of an emerging interdisciplinary field in biology: ‘minimal cognition’ or ‘basal cognition’... That is to say, in order to get useful answers, it helps to meet the slime mold where it’s at. Other organisms may help us to answer different questions. And if we align our questions with the inherent capabilities of the organisms we employ in our computational experiments, we can yoke together our interests, too. Maybe that’s why I’m so interested in minimal cognition. Not only because it opens up the definition of what a brain can be, but because it binds us to the world, drawing our brains into a broader phenomenon that touches life at every level. We’re nothing special. As Reid said to me, laughing, ‘in some ways, it’s information processing all the way down.’”
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.