On Neural Correlates of Consciousness

“Two friends — David Chalmers, a philosopher, and Christof Koch, a neuroscientist — took the stage to recall an old bet. In June 1998, they had gone to a conference in Bremen, Germany, and ended up talking late one night at a local bar about the nature of consciousness. For years, Dr. Koch had collaborated with Francis Crick, a biologist who shared a Nobel Prize for uncovering the structure of DNA, on a quest for what they called the ‘neural correlate of consciousness.’ They believed that every conscious experience we have — gazing at a painting, for example — is associated with the activity of certain neurons essential for the awareness that comes with it. Dr. Chalmers liked the concept, but he was skeptical that they could find such a neural marker any time soon. Scientists still had too much to learn about consciousness and the brain, he figured, before they could have a reasonable hope of finding it... But the 25-year bet, at least, has been resolved: No one has found a clear neural correlate of consciousness. Dr. Koch ended the evening by carrying to the stage a wooden box full of wine. He pulled out a 1978 bottle of Madeira and gave it to Dr. Chalmers.”

Carl Zimmer, “2 Leading Theories of Consciousness Square Off” - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/science/consciousness-theories.html.

On Extending Collective Intelligence

“Extending the collective intelligence of others was a practical solution, not an idealistic one. Atherton’s group observed that, because the new computer terminal locations at Syracuse were ‘remote from a reference librarian or any other human specialists in the user’s interest area’, they would need an additional source of help, which could be found in ‘the human intelligence of all other users of the system’... Atherton’s group saw that we would lose expert intermediaries; they designed for this cost. In 2022 and 2023, as the first generative AI search engines, including academic search engines such as Elicit and Consensus, were introduced to a wide set of users to both great excitement and scepticism, it is similarly useful to analyse what will be lost when researchers come to rely on these tools.”

Monica Westin, “Ingenious Librarians,” https://aeon.co/essays/the-1970s-librarians-who-revolutionised-the-challenge-of-search. Extended mind theory has much to say about the theoretical modeling of our reliance upon others in search technologies.

On the Unwritten World

“The comparison between the world and a book has had a long history starting in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. What language is the book of the world written in? According to Galileo, it’s the language of mathematics and geometry, a language of absolute exactitude. Can we read the world of today in this way? Maybe, if we’re talking about the extremely distant: galaxies, quasars, supernovas. But as for our daily world, it seems to us written, rather, as in a mosaic of languages, like a wall covered with graffiti, writings traced one on top of the other, a palimpsest whose parchment has been scratched and rewritten many times, a collage by Schwitters, a layering of alphabets, of diverse citations, of slang terms, of flickering characters like those which appear on a computer screen... In a certain sense, I believe that we always write about something we don’t know: we write to make it possible for the unwritten world to express itself through us. At the moment my attention shifts from the regular order of the written lines and follows the mobile complexity that no sentence can contain or use up, I feel close to understanding that from the other side of the words, from the silent side, something is trying to emerge, to signify through language, like tapping on a prison wall. ”

Italo Calvino, “The Written World and the Unwritten World,” - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/01/05/the-written-world-and-the-unwritten-world/. An interesting comment from a lecture Calvino gave in 1983. It evinces a kind of mysticism about the unwritten world. One wonders what Calvino might have made of the more recent biodeconstruction of Francesco Vitale. As Calvino noted in this same lecture, “I started from the irreconcilable difference between the written world and the unwritten world; if their two languages merge, my argument crumbles.”

On Bruegel's Multiplicity

“Antwerp was now the most cosmopolitan city in Europe. This plunge into the overwhelming world of sophisticated reality had a profound psychological effect on the young Bruegel. Moored up along the quayside he would have seen lateen-sail barques from Portugal, three-masters which had voyaged from ports as far afield as Zanzibar and Stavanger, their cargoes loaded onto barges from Delft or Mosel, barrels being rolled across the cobbles by sailors in ragged and exotic garb, marking them out as Finnish, Scottish, or Moorish. Lined up for sale would have been opened crates of currants from Cyprus, tulip bulbs from Constantinople, reeking salted hides from the eastern Baltic, barrels of sweet wine from Sicily... Yet all this went deeper than mere impressions and appearances. How could he absorb and express the sheer variety of teeming life he found milling around him amongst the vast cobbled space of the Grote Markt, overlooked by windowed cliffs of many-storied houses, with the great unfinished Gothic tower of the Cathedral of Our Lady reaching into the sky above the rooftops? How could he render such scenes without being overwhelmed by the sheer teeming multiplicity and variety of it all?”

Paul Strathern, “The Sheer Teeming Multiplicity and Variety of It All: The Life and Work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/sheer-teeming-multiplicity-and-variety-it-all. Bruegel’s 1563 The Tower of Babel would be part of his answer.

The Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563. Kunsthistorisches Museum.

On Digital Provenance

“Today, most people take it for granted that the Web, and indeed the Internet it is built on, is, by its nature, anti-contextual and devoid of provenance. We assume that decontextualization is intrinsic to the very idea of a digital network. That was never so, however; the initial proposals for digital-network architecture, put forward by the monumental scientist Vannevar Bush in 1945 and the computer scientist Ted Nelson in 1960, preserved provenance. Now A.I. is revealing the true costs of ignoring this approach. Without provenance, we have no way of controlling our A.I.s, or of making them economically fair. And this risks pushing our society to the brink.”

Jaron Lanier, “There Is No A.I.” - https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/there-is-no-ai. As Lanier notes, if A.I. had inbuilt provenance then it could more easily achieve the “foundation agreement” amongst his tech colleagues “that deepfakes—false but real-seeming images, videos, and so on—should be labelled as such by the programs that create them. Communications coming from artificial people, and automated interactions that are designed to manipulate the thinking or actions of a human being, should be labelled as well. We also agree that these labels should come with actions that can be taken. People should be able to understand what they’re seeing, and should have reasonable choices in return.”

On Narrow AI

“And when we say narrow AI, the AI that’s optimizing, that’s really all it is. It is a machine. It is a tool. Even if it is driving us around in an autonomous vehicle, it is not intelligently thinking, and it is not at all able to reason with common sense. Even artificial intelligence is somewhat of a misnomer. When we think of intelligence, there are many types of things that aggregate to cause us to think someone is intelligent. If someone does only one thing extremely well, do we call that personal intelligent? If they can’t explain why they did what they did, other than knowing the most probable stock to buy today is this stock, or that we should not loan this person money because the default likelihood is 23 percent. Is that really intelligent? I don’t think so.”

Kai-Fu Lee, “We Are Here to Create,” https://www.edge.org/conversation/kai_fu_lee-we-are-here-to-create. Interesting conversation with a pioneer of artificial technology from March 26 2018. An engineer with a deep understanding of how AI works, Lee highlights the narrowness of AI and its key differences from human cognition, thinking and consciousness. His conclusion is also worth noting: “I don’t have the solutions, but if we want to come back to the question of why we exist, we at this point can say we certainly don’t exist to do routine work. We perhaps exist to create. We perhaps exist to love. And if we want to create, let’s create new types of jobs that people can be employed in. Let’s create new ways in which countries can work together. If we think we exist to love, let’s first think how we can love the people who will be disadvantaged.”

On Daily Rituals

“Daily Rituals is one of those books where you wish you had the idea. He looks at thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists and asks how they work... Of course, everybody’s different and there is lots of variety, but after a while, you do discern certain patterns. There are outliers, but the majority of these people work between three to five hours a day. And they have built into their days times where they are doing something that’s nothing to do with their work. That might be having lunches with their friends, it might be going for long walks. That makes perfect sense to me. If you’re going to do anything that involves your mind and thinking well, there’s only a limited amount of space you can give to that. In order to think well, you need to then make sure the times when you’re not doing it are giving you the opportunity to let things stew, to work away in your unconscious, in the background of your mind, or give you the rest and relaxation so when you come back, you’re rejuvenated.”

Julien Baggini, “Five Books on How to Think,” - https://fivebooks.com/best-books/how-to-think-julian-baggini/.

On Comparing Religious Ideas

“However, religious ideas are not self-contained. Christian ideas were strongly influenced by ancient Greek thought; Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism have interacted continually throughout history; and Indian religions have been influenced by many philosophical perspectives, which have themselves interacted in various ways. Religious ideas are in continual interaction, and continually changing, even, ironically, when they sometimes claim to be changeless. Changes of language and of interpretation become evident to any alert historian of ideas, so that even to understand one tradition fully requires a knowledge of the social and cultural influences which forced new problems and new solutions on that tradition.”

Keith Ward, “On ‘Comparative Theology,’” - https://philosophyofreligion.org/?p=525740. This is an excerpt from an interesting blog on the future of philosophy of religion, which just posted a series on comparative work. I’ve cited Ward’s approach in the past as part of the outline of a model for comparative political theology in deliberative democratic societies. It recognizes that religious ideas often interact in ways that require great comparative care and sometimes result in irresolvable differences. As Eric Steinhart on this same website also argues, “comparison reveals difference rather than unity.” Also worth noting in this context is Timothy Knapper’s post on the Global Critical Philosophy of Religion project, which now hosts a unit in the American Academy of Religion annual conference program. I’d just add that my own approach locates the comparative task in the deliberative democratic context of building up citizen capacities to encounter differences and respond to religious strife. I’m writing a textbook this year on Understanding Religion through the Eyes of Others (Routledge, 2024) that develops this approach to studying diverse religious thinkers with these comparative concerns in view.

On Reading the Enlightenment

“Darnton approached the history of the book through the publishing trade. Kates, by contrast, is a Trinitarian not a Unitarian. His history depends on giving almost equal weight to authors, publishers and readers. His books are written, printed and read: each element has to be given proper recognition... The result of Kates’s trinitarian approach is that his book is not a history of ideas, nor book history, nor cultural history, nor a study in reception. It is, in parts, all of these, but much more than the sum of its parts. After all, authors and publishers are also readers; and readers, as they write letters and compile commonplace books, are also authors, not to mention the source of publishers’ profits. Only a Trinitarian approach can grasp the complexity of the book as written, printed and read. I hope no future historian of ideas will write about a book printed before the Industrial Revolution without asking how many copies were printed, how much they cost and who actually owned them.”

David Wootton, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/february-2023/the-enlightenment-as-reading-project/. Interesting review of Gary Kates’ recent The Books that Made the European Enlightenment. It highlights the need for ongoing innovation in studies of complex interactions between readers, writers and publishers, one that can be quite difficult given some of the information isn’t easily available. Nonetheless, it is also worth noting that Darnton’s “communication circuit” and later Thomas Adams and Nicholas Barker’s “socio-economic conjuncture” both recognized the need for apprehending these complex interactions. As I wrote recently, “Darnton placed the book’s production in the exterior circle surrounding intellectual influences, political and legal sanctions, and publicity that overlaps with the economic and social conjunction. By contrast, Adams and Barker invert that relation. Their model’s center is the publication, manufacture, distribution, reception, and survival of the artifacts themselves. The former model maps the book-culture relation as a centrifugal interaction where written artifacts radiate out from the culture. The latter provides a centripetal relation whereby the artifacts themselves are impacted by the culture.” Printing Religion after the Enlightenment, p. 136. It is worth noting that what goes assumed in much cultural history is the model of the human mind itself, which relies on enlightenment epistemologies increasingly questioned by recent cognitive science. Hence, there is a need for new history of the book engaged with situated cognition.

On Slow Productivity

“Slow productivity is all about identifying alternatives. I’m trying to develop this notion of productivity that’s based on, at the large time scales, the production of things you’re proud of and that have high impact, but on the small time scale, there’s periods where you’re doing very little. Right now, I open the book with a story of John McPhee, working on one of his first really complex New Yorker pieces. He spent two weeks lying on a picnic table in his backyard trying to figure out, How am I going to make this piece work? On the small scale, you’re like, you spent all day lying on a table, you’re incredibly unproductive. But zoom out to John McPhee’s career, and you’re like, you’re one of the most productive and impactful writers of all time. So how do you actually work with your mind and create things of value? What I’ve identified is three principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, but obsessing over quality. That trio of properties better hits the sweet spot of how we’re actually wired and produces valuable meaningful work, but it’s sustainable.”

David Marchese “The Digital Workplace is Designed to Bring You Down,” nytimes.com/interactive/2023/01/23/magazine/cal-newport-interview.html. Interesting interview on the need to rethink how we work towards producing things of value in digital workplaces of which universities are increasingly akin. The three principles identified are apropos in my view. Doing fewer things and obsessing over quality are key, but there is a lot that goes into establishing daily practices that support a longstanding natural pace of work. It made me think of bird migration, a mammoth global scale task for some species. Yet when watching them in their element, they seem free and in concert with each other as they move through space and time. Imagine writing the next book with that coincidence of liberty and distraction free purpose. While our current digital predicament carries its own difficulties, it’s also worth noting that the “demon of distraction,” has longstanding historical antecedents as noted in the recent review article of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction here: .wsj.com/articles/the-wandering-mind-book-review-medieval-history-the-demon-of-distraction-11674232751.