On Australian Citizens' Assemblies

“Is it at all possible to have a sensible conversation about political reform in Australia?... In order to discuss various matters, in 2012 the Irish Parliament convened a Citizens’ Convention which then led to a series of Citizens’ Assemblies on specific topics, several of which became forerunners to successful referenda... Surprisingly, Australia was, until recently, a leader in citizen juries, having undertaken more than any other country, except Germany. But the political firmament hasn’t changed. To be fair, politics is much the same the world over. Most people still equate robust debate with political one-upmanship. The unseemly debate that bogged down the referendum didn’t need to happen. A patently better approach would’ve been to convene a Citizens’ Assembly to deliberate on the question — to act as the focus of a national conversation, rather than the slanging match that is Canberra.”

Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, “Could the Voice Referendum Process Have Benefitted from an Irish-style Citizens’ Assembly?” - https://www.abc.net.au/religion/would-the-voice-referendum-benefit-from-a-citizens-assembly/103147650. Given my work on citizens assemblies in deliberative democracy over the years, I'd wholeheartedly agree.

On the Fragility of Grand Hotels

“In all their fragility, grand hotels were liberal institutions par excellence. They depended on the free movement of goods and people as well as the self-regulatory capacity of guests and staff. And yet, at the heart of the thing lay a dark irony. The grand hotel as a liberal institution, much like the era’s liberal constitutions, disenfranchised the majority for the benefit and prestige of the minority... this story of the failure of liberal hoteliers is in microcosm the story of the failure of German liberalism, a catastrophe that expanded from the Kaiserhof to the chancellery to the rest of Europe and then the world. The decisions of liberal businessmen mattered. Faced with their nemesis in flesh and blood, they turned to liberal argumentation for support. It didn’t work. Their dilemma has become a perennial one. What should a corporate board of directors do when the interests of democracy and the interests of their business don’t seem to align? Favor the latter was the answer in 1932. Is it still?”

Adam Bisno, “Hitler, the Hotel Guest,” - http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/11/hitler-the-hotel-guest/. This post on Bisno’s open access new book Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy: Liberalism and the Grand Hotels of Berlin 1875-1933, provides a terrifying insight into the paradox of tolerance noted in Popper’s The Open Society. The hoteliers of Weimar Republic Berlin failed to respond to this paradox and ended up complicit in the rise of Nazism. As the chairman of Hotel Kaiserhof argued, “we must remain neutral on matters of religion and politics. Our houses must remain open to all.” The all under consideration was the Nazi hotel guest Adolf Hitler. The loss of Jewish guests and business was, of course, excluded by Meinhardt’s ‘all.’ As Bisno astutely notes: “Meinhardt’s… liberalism was of no help against the Nazis, who were adept at using the precepts of free speech, free political association, and equal access to gain entry to liberal institutions only for the purpose of destroying them.” The paradox of tolerance is its opposition to intolerance. In order to protect a tolerant space for people to speak freely, people must actively oppose those who seek to destroy the freedom of others. On the one hand, it fosters spaces where people are free to disagree with each other on a wide array of topics, such as religion and politics. On the other, it opposes racism which undermines the equality of all human beings. In sum, Hotel Kaiserhof should have been clear-minded about why it should have excluded Hitler for the sake of protecting a tolerant space of free access by Jewish patrons. Or said another way, it’s the historical context through which to appreciate the tensions in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I wrote about some years ago and the absurdities explored in Ruben Östland’s The Square.

On Brains on Books

“De Hamel’s book [The Manuscripts Club] is a group biography, reaching back to the Middle Ages and forward to the 20th century, of the old and affable brotherhood (and sisterhood) of manuscript lovers... Another new book out this season, Adrian Johns’s The Science of Reading, pairs curiously well as a bookend with de Hamel’s to the act of reading. Johns seeks to explain how we read; de Hamel seeks to explain why... Reading shapes the thinking of book lovers in ways that go beyond merely what they read. I remember sitting, in college, in a lecture that the professor was giving extemporaneously, without notes. At one point, he said, ‘As I said above…’ He was writing the words in his head as he spoke, or at least he was moving through his ideas spatially as one would down a page. Was this oral culture, written culture, or a mix of the two? If we can’t separate the dancer from the dance, what hope do we have of separating reading from the reader?”

Elyse Graham, “This Is Your Brain on Books,” - https://www.publicbooks.org/this-is-your-brain-on-books/. I relied on De Hamel and Johns both in my last monograph as there is much to be admired in their approaches to book history.

On Language-Centrism

“If future AI systems are anything like current AI systems, they will not have neurons, but they will closely resemble us in terms of linguistic behaviour. Today, even as scientists approach the question of consciousness by examining neural correlates, we are wondering about nonbiological consciousness in AI systems. The question of AI consciousness sits uneasily next to the neurocentrism of current science. It may be that the anthropocentrism drives opinions about what is conscious more than the neurocentrism. Neurocentrism is a consequence of the anthropocentric reasoning that drives consciousness research, with mammalian-like nervous systems being identified as the key feature. If Chat-GPT encourages researchers to move away from neurocentrism, we may end up back with the language-centrism that Griffin worked to undermine. That would not be productive science.”

Kristin Andrews, “What It’s Like to Be a Crab,” - https://aeon.co/essays/are-we-ready-to-study-consciousness-in-crabs-and-the-like. Interesting summary of recent consciousness studies of humans and animals. Begins with the twenty-five year old bet about neural correlates lost by the neuroscientist Christof Koch to the philosopher David Chalmers. The broader issue concerns how consciousness studies should proceed and the degree to which anthropomorphic assumptions about neural complexity and language use should dominate. What goes unnoticed, it seems to me, is that simple organisms can have linguistic capacities. Biosemiotics and bio-deconstruction aim to lean into this aspect of biology. How should we understand a single-celled organism that ‘remembers’ being poked and avoids it in future? Does the interpretation of the stimulus amount to signals and, therefore, a kind of writing? These questions are pursued by others, but I hope to explore them further in the coming years. In any case, the essay helpfully highlights how presumptions about linguistic or neural capacity inform scientific testing of consciousness in crabs and AI.

On Medieval Time

“The thinking man’s timepiece was the astrolabe, first developed in Greece but significantly improved by Arab astronomers and mathematicians in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The instrument comprised a stack of concentric brass plates, carved with the celestial sphere. By rotating the top plate, simulating the motion of the heavens, it was possible to take readings that could reveal the positions of stars, the distances between astral bodies and the phase of the moon. It could also be used to tell the time of day at a certain latitude, based on the altitude of the sun and the calendar date... The scholastic philosopher Nicholas Oresme, at the end of the 14th century, was the first writer to imagine the universe as a vast mechanical clock, in which ‘all the wheels move as harmoniously as possible.’ But the metaphor could be turned inside out: earthly clocks were made by fallible humans. The writer of ‘Dives and Pauper’, a 15th-century devotional treatise, was keen to point out that the apparent neutrality of mechanical movement was a façade: ‘in citees & townes men rule them[selves] by the clock, and yet properly to speke the clock ruleth not them but a man ruleth the clock.’”

Tom Johnson, “Take That, Astrolab “ - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/tom-johnson/take-that-astrolabe. Interesting summary of timepieces and their implications for ways of thinking and being.

On Citizens' Assemblies

“Around the world, democracies are struggling with angry populations who are fed up with politicians who don’t seem to represent them effectively. Fortunately, there’s an alternative. Hugh Pope—a veteran reporter on the Middle East who also spent 15 years working for International Crisis Group—introduces us to the growing movement for ‘citizens’ assemblies’, where ordinary people get together to decide what’s best for the community. He argues that these assemblies have already been used effectively on important issues that are difficult for politicians to tackle and reveals how the French president, Emmanuel Macron, came to find out about them.”

“The Best Books on Citizens’ Assemblies Recommended by Hugh Pope - https://fivebooks.com/best-books/citizen-assemblies-hugh-pope/. A collection of works that resonate with my work on religion in deliberative democratic practices.

On Early Counting

“Figuring out when humans began to count systematically, with purpose, is not easy. Our first real clues are a handful of curious, carved bones dating from the final few millennia of the three-​million-​year expanse of the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic era. Those bones are humanity’s first pocket calculators: For the prehistoric humans who carved them, they were mathematical notebooks and counting aids rolled into one. For the anthropologists who unearthed them thousands of years later, they were proof that our ability to count had manifested itself no later than 40,000 years ago... the ancient Mesopotamians must have been counting in base 60 on their fingers long before they, or, indeed, anyone else on the planet, could set out numbers in writing. The Mesopotamians’ unique counting method is thought to come from a mix of a duodecimal system that used the twelve finger joints of one hand and a quinary system that used the five fingers of the other. By pointing at one of the left hand’s twelve joints with one of the right hand’s five digits, or, perhaps, by counting to twelve with the thumb of one hand and recording multiples of twelve with the digits of the other, it is possible to represent any number from 1 to 60. However it worked, the Mesopotamians’ anatomical calculator was a thing of exceptional elegance, and the numbers they counted with it echo through history. It is no coincidence that a clock has twelve hours, an hour has sixty minutes, and a minute has sixty seconds.”

Keith Houston, “The Early History of Counting,” - https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/early-history-counting.

On AI Religion

“AI is slowly becoming part of the religious sphere. In an era marked by rapid technological advancement, we are seeing everything from artificial intelligence to robots slowly seep into our everyday lives. But now, this technology is increasingly making inroads into a realm that has long been uniquely human: religion. From the creation of ChatGPT sermons to robots performing sacred Hindu rituals, the once-clearer boundaries between faith and technology are blurring... AI Jesus provides insight on both spiritual and personal questions users ask on his channel... A unique intersection of religion and robotic technology has emerged with the introduction of robots performing Hindu rituals in South Asia... In June 2023, hundreds of Lutherans gathered in Bavaria, Germany, for a service designed and delivered by ChatGPT.”

“Navigating the Intersection between AI, Automation and Religion – 3 Essential Reads,” - https://theconversation.com/navigating-the-intersection-between-ai-automation-and-religion-3-essential-reads-211587. I’ll be teaching a new course on Virtual Religion next year that addresses some of these matters.

On AI Aliens

“Humans and computers belong to separate and incommensurable realms... For Weizenbaum, we cannot humanise AI because AI is irreducibly non-human. What you can do, however, is not make computers do (or mean) too much. We should never ‘substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding and love,’ he wrote in Computer Power and Human Reason. Living well with computers would mean putting them in their proper place: as aides to calculation, never judgment. Weizenbaum never ruled out the possibility that intelligence could someday develop in a computer. But if it did, he told the writer Daniel Crevier in 1991, it would ‘be at least as different as the intelligence of a dolphin is to that of a human being.’ There is a possible future hiding here that is neither an echo chamber filled with racist parrots nor the Hollywood dystopia of Skynet. It is a future in which we form a relationship with AI as we would with another species: awkwardly, across great distances, but with the potential for some rewarding moments. Dolphins would make bad judges and terrible shrinks. But they might make for interesting friends.”

Ben Tarnoff, “A Certain Danger Lurks There”: How the Inventor of the First Chatbot Turned against AI.” - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai.

On Writing for Perplexity

“In the current/future of AI writing, how do we avoid producing stochastic students or becoming language models ourselves? Bender and her coauthors argue for more critical engagement with language models and implicitly offer us paths forward. They note that language models work statistically, predicting next words without reference to meaning. Drawing on the fact that writing from language models tends to be predictable, AI writing detectors use perplexity to discriminate between AI and human writing. But a student, if we’re not careful, can also predict words without reference to meaning. If a student is taught and rewarded for commonplaces and stock genres, they will reproduce their training data: the boring commonplaces no teacher relishes reading and no writer learns from reproducing. Instead, we should teach and write for perplexity — not so much to avoid plagiarism detectors but to avoid the commonplaces that block critical thinking. We should all write for critical inquiry.”

Annett Vee, “Against Output,” In the Moment - https://critinq.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/against-output/. She is referring to Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major and Schmitchell’s recent paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?”