On Looking at Consciousness

“To the man with a scanner, everything looks like a brain. But of course, there are other tools for exploring what consciousness might be — not just what it is for, but what it is like... But what of Thomas Nagel, whose classic essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ set the parameters of House’s search? It’s true that a number of neuroscientists and their readers have contested Nagel’s claim that there is something it is like to be a bat, and that this subjective dimension of consciousness is inaccessible to objective study. One can imagine why practitioners dedicated to just such studies might object to such prima facie limits. But House adopts Nagel’s perspective, albeit without naming him. ‘The one and only thing we know for certain for every one of us,’ House writes early on, is that ‘there is something that it is like to be us.’ And for both men, that ‘something’ remains just beyond the grasp of anyone but the person experiencing it. Subjective knowledge of me never evolves into objective knowledge of you. Try as we might, ‘we can only ever scratch the surface of what really goes on inside’ others. While this view leads Nagel to pessimism, House holds out hope that if we just keep scratching, we’ll bridge the divide and explain what it is like to be a bat — or any other conscious being.”

Henry M. Cowles, “What Is It Like to Have a Brain? On Patrick House’s ‘Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness,’” https://dev.lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-is-it-like-to-have-a-brain-on-patrick-houses-nineteen-ways-of-looking-at-consciousness/. The need to bring together first person phenomenological analysis of consciousness with third person neuroscientific scanning the brain remains a vital future task it seems.

On Philosophical Style

“While there’s a role for philosophy written in this way, Setiya’s specific subject seems to me to demand something else. When someone’s trying to make me feel better about the dead-serious subject of life’s shittiness, I want them fully engaged in the task, and I want the delivery to recall to me what isn’t shitty about life: what’s beautiful, vivid, and free. The most beloved philosophical pessimists — Schopenhauer, Aurelius, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus — paradoxically pull this off. They’re each distinctively themselves on the page, and their conviction that the world is shot through with ugliness and futility is conveyed in such artful, unfettered language that the medium serves, at least partly, to undermine the message. Reading them is like watching someone teeter on the edge of a crater, then dart back at the last minute, with a skip and a chuckle. The abyss is still there, they’re already sliding back toward it, we know it’ll get them, get us all, in the end — but what a line, what a moment, what a flex! It makes you glad to be alive, just to have witnessed it. ”

Helena de Bres, “The Philosophy of Shittiness: On Kieran Setiya’s ‘Life is Hard,’” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-philosophy-of-shittiness-on-kieran-setiyas-life-is-hard/. Interesting summary of the recent “Life is Hard.” The reviewer echoes a sentiment that arises in the Suffering: Comparative Studies course I have been teaching this semester. It compares similar philosophers in a way that allows students to delve deeply into their respective talent for facing the edge of the cliff, but pull back to affirm life’s beauty and freedom.

On Library Museums

“The most touching piece in the gallery, however, contains no intelligible message at all: a tiny square of paper preserves a young child’s shaky-handed attempt to write the alphabet, its margins given over to a forest of zigzags and doodles where concentration had flagged. I thought of this child when I myself recently began to study Hebrew: a thousand years and thousands of miles removed, we were united in our attempt to yoke unfamiliar letters under mastery. But absent learning a new writing system later in life, it takes artifacts like this one to make legible something that the average adult’s effortless literacy overwrites in the palimpsest of human experience: the relationship to language one had as a child, when reading was still wondrous and difficult and strange, a tussle with an angel you’d yet to get the better of; the days of scrawling letters backward, sideways, on wide-ruled paper and with crayons held with the whole fist. Like a modern genizah, the library museum is a physical manifestation of the preciousness of the written word, a reminder of the love and devotion that thousands of years of human culture have paid to a genre of object that is passing increasingly out of this world. Leaving that exhibition, I thought of the books I had on my shelves, of the book I was carrying for the journey home, of the books that have accompanied me every day of my life. Dog-eared, underlined, water-warped after a sudden rainstorm, with birthday wishes or author signatures or notes for school written in, they spoke as only a physical object could—not just of themselves but also of my own life. Perhaps as reading happens increasingly in a digital form, what we lose is this: the meaningless things that in sum become meaningful, those aspects of a book’s significance that exist beyond words.”

Erica Eisen, “Ode to the Library Museum,” - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/24/ode-to-the-library-museum/

On the Crowd and I

“Set to Tognetti’s rhythmically dynamic reworking of the music of JS Bach, Mela reflects on pilgrimage and the ways we are drawn to celebration. Rufus Blackwell’s footage takes us to the Kumbh Mela festival in India, where millions gather to bathe in the holy water on the banks of the Ganges. We travel to the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, a buddhist celebration in Thailand, and the Coachella Festival in the US, revealing in the color, energy and joy of shared communion.”

“Concert Program: The Crowd and I [featuring music by Beethoven, Chopin, Ives, Shostakovich, Sibelius and Richard Tognetti],” Australian Chamber Orchestra, https://www.aco.com.au/whats-on/2022/the-crowd-and-i. I had the chance to visit the recently renovated Sydney Opera House this weekend for the ACO’s Crowd & I performance. This is one in a series set to video such as their previous Reef (2013), Mountain (2017) and River (2021). This edition juxtaposed the vastness of space and the Australian Northern Territory’s Tanami Desert with the intimacy of the human gaze between strangers in New York, Tokyo subways, British football fans and the eyes of masked medical workers. Crowds themselves featured as mosh pits, traffic riddled freeways, refugee camps, riots, peaceful protest movements and religious festivals. The final movement took the audience on a high speed train journey from Tokyo to Kyoto accompanied by the solo piano Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 1 by Frederic Chopin. The visualization of so many divergent facets of human encounter emanated a rather ghostly spectral quality. It was both disorienting and cathartic after the pandemic. One moment of levity used polka to transform a football match into a coordinated dance. It made me think of the intersubjectivity of Hannah Arendt’s vita activa.

On the Philosophy of History

“Hegel [1770 - 1831], one of the most influential of the modern philosophers, described history as the progress in the consciousness of freedom, asking whether we enjoy more freedom now than those who came before us. To explore this, he looked into the past to identify periods when freedom was moving from the one to the few to the all, arguing that once we understand the true nature of freedom we reach an endpoint in understanding. That end of history, as it’s known, describes an understanding of freedom so far progressed, so profound, that it cannot be extended or deepened even if it can be lost.”

Melvyn Bragg, “Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” BBC4 In Our Time Podcast - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017k8w

On Greek Learning

“I have offered here three snapshots, each one of which could be expanded into very long and intricate histories. But my point is a simple one. In late antiquity, the Renaissance and the 19th century, the study of the Classical past was a fundamental and instrumental force in changing the shape of Christianity, and in revolutionary ways. For late antiquity, the study of Classics was integral to the formation of Christianity as a theological and critically sophisticated intellectual enterprise. For the Renaissance, the rediscovery of Greek learning fuelled the transformational violence – intellectual and physical – of the Reformation and the foundation of Protestantism. For the 19th century, Classical philology and critical history challenged the status of the texts of Christianity, and drove the doubts and transformations of secularisation, with continuing and profound purchase on contemporary culture.”

Simon Goldhill, '“What Did Classics Do to Christianity?” - https://antigonejournal.com/2022/06/classics-christianity/

On Personal Libraries

“Now I use ‘The Library of Babel’ as a metaphor for the landscape of my own library. My books are not organized alphabetically, or, for the most part, by genre. The arrangement seems to have been made entirely at random, unless you know the quirk by which it was conceived. Books are placed next to one another for companionship, based on some kinship or shared sensibility that I believe ties them together... I marvel that the complexity of the human heart can be expressed in the arrangement of one’s books. Inside this paper universe, I find sense within confusion, calm within a storm, the soothing murmur of hundreds of books communing with their neighbors. Opening them reveals treasured passages gently underlined in pencil; running my hand over the Mylar-wrapped hardcovers reminds me of how precious they are. Not just the books themselves, but the ideas within, the recollections they evoke. ”

Leslie Kendal Dye, “The Organization of Your Bookshelves Tells Its Own Story,” https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/06/personal-library-book-organization-system/661326/. My library is mostly organized on affinities and historical relations. Kant lives next to Hegel and Kierkegaard, Derrida has a home above Heidegger. A collection of book historians live in the living room. Barth lines the top of a few shelves, which is a joke about critics who saw his project as a cathedral in the clouds.

On the Evolution of Writing

“In a small West African village, a man named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a compelling dream. A stranger approached him with a sacred book and then taught him how to write by tracing a stick on the ground. ‘Look!’ said the spectral visitor. ‘These signs stand for sounds and meanings in your language.’ Bukele, who had never learned to read or write, found that after waking he could no longer recall the precise signs the stranger revealed to him. Even so, he gathered the male members of his family together to reverse engineer the concept of writing. Working through the day and into the following night, the men devised a system of 200 symbols, each standing for a word or a syllable of their native Vai language. For millennia, varieties of the Vai language had been passed down from parents to children—but before this moment no speaker had ever recorded a single word in writing. This took place in about 1833 in a region that would soon become the independent nation of Liberia. Vai, one of about 30 Indigenous languages of Liberia, has nearly 200,000 speakers today in the Cape Mount region that borders Sierra Leone… Unlike ancient peoples, early Vai script adopters recognized the social, cultural, and political importance of writing and applied the new script straightaway to a wide array of practical concerns. From shopping lists to high literature, their constant use gave it regular opportunities to change and adapt quickly. Every time Vai writers dashed off a note or wrote out a homework exercise, they introduced tiny personal idiosyncrasies, some of which were assimilated by readers and reproduced, while others failed to catch on. The bottom line: Written letter shapes evolve over time, but so do the purposes and technologies of writing itself. The continued endurance of the Vai script of Liberia is a monument to the brilliance of its first creators who retrieved writing from a dream, then let it free to trace its own successful path.”

Piers Kelly, “What the Vai Script Reveals about the Evolution of Writing,” sapiens.org/language/vai-script-evolution/. Such accounts of the relation between orality and writing always reminds me of Derrida’s early Of Grammatology. As I noted in my recent Printing Religion after the Enlightenment, “Derrida’s expanded notion of writing undercuts any privileging of written cultures precisely because language itself always already includes the logic of writing. Deconstruction applies to any culture with linguistic signification and its multiform relation to material artifacts” (p. 117). Derrida discussed these interconnections in terms of his notion of “arche-writing” (Of Grammatology, p. 60). What’s often missed is that he developed it as a “new concept . . . which I continue to call writing only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing” (Of Grammatology, p. 56). It seems to me to be an underutilized empirical resource when considering the evolution of writing.

On Cohen's I and Thou

“It is an intriguing [Aristotelian] illusion that the solitary thinker, in his state of eudaemony, is most likely to attain full selfhood. We [Jews] know, however, that the isolated self exclusively engaged in thinking cannot be an ethical self. The ethical self must be engaged in action. For this self, there exists no I without a Thou. Reah means ‘the other,’ the one who is like you. He is the Thou of the I. Selfhood is the result of an unending relation of I and Thou as well as its abiding ideal. True, the ideal remains the ideal, as the task [of ethical action] remains the task. But an ideal is an ideal only because and insofar as it asks to be emulated so that I may approximate it. And a task is a task only because I am charged with it, because it is incumbent upon me. By working at this task, I work on myself, toward my selfhood. In short, selfhood ensues from the interaction between I and Thou.”

Hermann Cohen, “I and Thou: Selfhood through Ethical Action (1908)” in Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen, (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1971), p. 218. An interesting historical note on the origins of I-thou relations in European philosophy. Cohen was a major figure in Neo-Kantian thought at the University of Marburg and the first Jewish full professor appointed in Germany. Generally popularized by Martin Buber’s 1923 I and Thou (Ich und Du), the terminology was later repeated by various others such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio. I came across Cohen’s use of the terminology years ago while researching Barth’s Neo-Kantian background, illuminated helpfully by Simon Fisher’s 1988 Revelatory Positivism? Barth's Earliest Theology and the Marburg School. I had been hunting down various Neo-Kantian texts via interlibrary loan, one of which still had the library records in its front matter. As an indication of how few read through this material, I was the first since Fisher to check the rare German text out of Oxford’s Bodleian library. As it happens, I’m writing a lecture on Buber for this semester’s Philosophy of Religion course, so wanted to cite the context after Kant where the problem of a groundless ethical ego arises. Cohen’s 1908 note arose from his study of Maimonides, and was then taken further again in his 1919 Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (pg. 15-16ff).

On Robopoetics

“Frost’s diction hones our cognition, schooling us to see the world in a fresh way. None of that is possible with gpt-3. Short for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer,’ the model is unique not simply because of what it does, but also how it does it. It learns about language from watching grammar and syntax in action. The algorithms effectively train themselves. They pick up patterns in the data and, through a relentless process of trial and error, approximate them. That’s how, under the right conditions, gpt-3 can parrot impressively realistic paragraphs of text. Its credibility, however, drops to zero the longer you spend with it. Eventually you realize it is vacantly yoking bits of colloquialized detritus, bobs and tags of speech. Of course, the system makes a nice show of making sense, so we forgive its failures. But the failures are no less real: malfunctioning tones, misfires of inflection. gpt-3’s output is a shell of hyperactivity with nothing inside—a mesmerizing mix of materials without a center, language on autopilot. This is what led the MIT Technology Review to call gpt-3 ‘a fluent spouter of bullshit’ and the researcher Timnit Gebru to warn against giving too high a mark to the program, citing the human tendency to ‘impute meaning where there is none...’ For gpt-3 to pull off the real thing will require that algorithms not only move data, but are moved by it; that they not only consume our experiences but feel the fleetingness of our lives. How do you confer knowledge of mortality? There is no computational shortcut for that. Compressed into Frost’s choice of ‘appall’ was a lifetime’s insight on loss. This is why poetry, unlike so much else our species has mastered, cannot be copied. It’s an artifact of introspection that can only be mastered by our species. There is no superhuman way to write poems because we write them by virtue of being what a computer isn’t: human.”

Carmine Starnino, “Poetry and Digital Personhood,” newcriterion.com/issues/2022/4/poetry-digital-personhood. An interesting summary of recent natural language processing developments. While not cited, it echoes debates about the way poetry is endemic to human being after Martin Heidegger’s work. This was a point taken forward in Hubert Dreyfus’s What Computers Still Can’t Do. At issue is the degree to which human minds are, in essence, not reducible to computation. The point made in the essay above is similarly that the pursuit of robopoetics is a red herring. Nonetheless, the essay cites the more interesting question which is the degree to which AI can be applied to manipulate human behavior, nonetheless. While incapable of poetry, computational approaches to language are beginning to excel at exploiting natural human empathy and emotions. In another register, it is interesting how so many video games have trafficked on the human feeling of frailty or what Heidegger referred to as the poetics of being towards death. The anxiety built into the video game is often precarious lives lost. While incapable of replicating Frost’s poetry, they nonetheless excel at generating clickbait.