Philosophical notes…
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.
On the Indosphere
“But Dalrymple does give full measure to the last and greatest achievement of the Indosphere: the spread of much of culture that we recognise as distinctively modern... No less crucial in the formation of ‘the West’ as we know it was the evolution of the university system from the early Buddhist monasteries in Northern India into the madrasas and thence into Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne. The lineage of those secluded quads with their communities of dedicated scholars is clear. There was no greater example than the university of Nalanda in Bihar, with its endless courtyards and temples and its ten thousand monks and scholars. Dalrymple describes in alluring detail the three thousand-mile pilgrimage in 629 ad of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang from the Chinese capital to visit this amazing place. No freshman from the sticks can ever have had his mind more thoroughly blown by the uni experience. This is perhaps the most brilliant example of the traffic running predominantly one way from China to India. It was India that was so often the destination and the hub.”
Ferdinand Mount, “One-way Traffic” - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/ferdinand-mount/one-way-traffic. Interesting review of The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple. 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
“‘Once the historian writes with footnotes, historical narrative becomes a distinctly modern’ practice, Grafton explains. History is no longer a matter of rumor, unsubstantiated opinion, or whim. ‘The text persuades, the note proves,’ he avers. Footnotes do double duty, for they also ‘persuade as well as prove’ and open up the work to a multitude of voices... Pierre Bayle’s enormously influential Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697) is the thing to cite here. The Dictionary ‘consisted in large part of footnotes (and even footnotes to footnotes).’ Within a few decades scholars emulating Bayle ‘were producing footnotes by the bushel—and satirists were making fun of them for doing so.’”
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
“Humans exist at an uneasy threshold. We have a dizzying ability to make meaning from the world, braid language into stories to construct understanding, and search for patterns that might reveal larger, more steady truth. Yet we also recognize our mental efforts are often flawed, arbitrary, incomplete. Woven throughout the centuries is a burning obsession with accessing truth beyond human fallibility—a utopian dream of automated certainty... It might be said that ‘ChatGPT is bullshit,’ as the title of one recent paper, coauthored by philosopher of science Michael Townsen Hicks, asserts—citing the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit as ‘speech intended to persuade without regard for truth.’ Instead of an externally calculated, more pure truth, these machines are distilling and reflecting back to us the chaos of human beliefs and chatter. The hope remains that we might scale these models indefinitely to reach the point of general intelligence. That is, more extrapolation than certainty—the models may already be coming to a point of diminishing returns given they require an immense amount of data for minimal improvements in their performance. In fact, the LLMs of today are missing something even Llull and Leibniz believed was essential to their machines: reason. ”
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.