On AI after Avicenna

“Similarly, if an artificial neural network were presented with the task of the sheep, it would not reason as the human does, from a general concept of wolf-ness to features of the particular wolf such as dangerousness. Instead, it would reason as the sheep does, constrained to the realm of particulars... Ibn Sina’s core criterion for personhood—reasoning from universals—closely resembles systematic compositional generalizability. This criterion could provide a potentially testable standard for personhood. In fact, so far, AI has failed this test in numerous studies. Whether or not one adopts it as a solution, Ibn Sina’s account provides a new lens on the problem of personhood that challenges the assumptions of consciousness-centered accounts. Scientific ethics is so often concerned with the cutting edge—the latest research, the newest technology, a constant influx of data. But sometimes the questions of the future require careful consideration of the past. Looking to history allows us to look beyond the preoccupations and assumptions of our time and may just provide refreshing approaches toward current stalemates.”

Abigail Tulenko, “What Philosopher Ibn Sina Can Teach Us about AI,” - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-philosopher-ibn-sina-can-teach-us-about-ai.

On Kant's 300th Birthday

““We are radically free. Not pleasure but justice can move human beings to deeds that overcome the deepest of animal desires, the love of life. We want to determine the world, not only to be determined by it. We are born and we die as part of nature, but we feel most alive when we go beyond it: To be human is to refuse to accept the world we are given. Kant was driven by a question that still plagues us: Are ideas like freedom and justice utopian daydreams, or are they more substantial?... At the heart of Kant’s metaphysics stands the difference between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be. His thought experiment is an answer to those who argue that we are helpless in the face of pleasure and can be satisfied with bread and circuses — or artisanal chocolate and the latest iPhone. If that were true, benevolent despotism would be the best form of government. But if we long, in our best moments, for the dignity of freedom and justice, Kant’s example has political consequences.”

Susan Neiman, “Why the World Still Needs Immanuel Kant,” - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/arts/immanuel-kant-300-anniversary.html

On the History of Equality

“McMahon has set himself an almost impossible task: to analyse humanity’s most powerful and contested idea throughout history and across the globe. Most attempts at total histories of ideas fail. Depth is sacrificed to achieve breadth, the reader is marched along too strict a chronological path or the author gets stuck in an etymological quagmire. But McMahon succeeds. This book is deeply researched, tightly argued and sparklingly written. It ought to be read by anyone interested in equality, and also anyone interested in people, history, God, politics, religion, nationalism, war or love... There is some hard politics ahead of us, for sure. If we are to stand any chance of cultivating a humane reimagining of equality, we will have to do some hard thinking too.”

Richard Reeves, “Why Some Are More Equal Than Others” - https://literaryreview.co.uk/why-some-are-more-equal-than-others. My own work approaches this idea through the paradox of tolerance, i.e. that tolerance is not infinitely extendable. To create spaces of equality we are obligated to oppose the intolerant. It is also worth noting how religion and religious ideas have informed our thinking on these matters. As Habermas has noted, tolerance arises as a 17th-century legal matter in response to religious diversity.

On Compulsory Voting

“Recently, however, compulsory voting has entered mainstream debate... This nascent debate marks an exciting effort to make the actual electorate more representative of the eligible electorate and potentially shift political power. Yet modern debates have so far largely overlooked one angle of analysis: history. Though no writer since the 1950s has devoted more than two paragraphs to the history of compulsory voting efforts in the United States, the idea has a rich American tradition. Policies first emerged before the Founding. And debates especially picked up beginning in the 1880s and through the Progressive Era, when twelve states considered the policy, including two — Massachusetts and North Dakota — that passed amendments letting their legislatures enact it.”

Harvard Law Review, “Compulsory Voting’s American History” - https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-137/compulsory-votings-american-history/. Australia already has this, and I’d say, having lived in both countries, this solves a few (not all) challenges facing democracies today. Politicians in Australia don’t have to incite people to vote because the practice is already compulsory. They also rely on healthy traditions around voting days such as the famous sausage sizzle. I’ve often wondered if this is some sort of joke about citizens who delegate authority to parliamentary representatives, i.e. Australians don’t necessarily want to watch laws being made, but they do enjoy having a vote about who does the sausage-making. In any case, as an advocate of deliberative democratic systems, compulsory voting is not a panacea. But I think it can play an essential part in the aim to enrich democratic cultures.

On the History of Language

“We start with a feeling, an ineffable je ne sais quoi, that our language shapes our world. But to assess the truth of this claim, the scientist wants a hypothesis – a rigorous, experimentally testable statement of precisely how language shapes our world. Quasi-mystical meditations on my life in language are not the stuff of modern scientific journals. But any properly formulated hypothesis will necessarily be reductive and deflationary – devising empirical tests of the supposed differences in our worldviews inevitably means transforming our innermost feelings into detached, foreign objects that we can observe and analyse from the outside. Such tests can arguably never capture the totality and primordiality of the original feeling. Does this mean that the scholarship of previous centuries has no place in today’s world or, alternatively, that modern science simply cannot fathom the philosophical depths explored by earlier work? Past and present scholarship are complementary. The writings of earlier scholars – however speculative they may seem to us now, and whatever problematic assumptions they may be built upon – undeniably capture something of our human experience and can inform the investigations of present-day researchers. In turn, the hypotheses and experiments of latter-day linguists and psychologists provide another perspective – shaped by the scientistic worldview of our own era – on these enduring questions of the connections between mind and language. In all these cases, we cannot even make sense of the questions without understanding something of the specific intellectual contexts in which they have arisen.”

James McElvenny, “Our Language, Our World,” - https://aeon.co/essays/does-language-mirror-the-mind-an-intellectual-history. This is an interesting summary of the need for historical context in the philosophy of language. There is evidence that something as simple as left-right spatial distinctions turns out not to be universal in light of cross-cultural comparison. For instance, the Gurindji people speak of spatial relationships in east-west-north-south positions. Linguistic debate about such differences sometimes echoes to me, William James’ example of an argument about a squirrel circling a tree. To cite another example, while some linguists have cited the irrelevance of Kant’s early work as an example of left-right egoism, his later Critique of Pure Reason developed a broader notion of space and time relevant to hypothesizing about linguistic diversity. Such insights are fodder for McElvenny’s point that our questions about the relationship between language and the mind can often benefit from a deeper analysis of past debates. Relevant advice when considering the question of whether language can be understood as an extension of the mind, discussed briefly in a recent Philosophy Bites interview with David Chalmers here.

On Philosophy and Neuroscience

“Many of the best philosophers of mind, like Andy Clark, are immersed in the world of philosophy and that of neuroscience. There are plenty of philosophers who don’t carve up their way of thinking about the mind into ‘philosophy’ and ‘neuroscience’; we just want a picture of what the mind is like, and any sources of information about that are relevant. There are big questions about where consciousness comes from, how it evolved, what it is, and how we experience the world. There’s a cluster of unresolved issues, and plenty of them still have a philosophical flavour. The neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell just published a book about the nature of free will: Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. It’s impossible to write intelligently about that as a neuroscientist, I think, without touching on the long philosophical history around that topic. And even if you want to be a hardcore neuroscientist saying, well, philosophy has nothing for me, moral issues don’t go away just by looking at the brain. Or, if they seem to, you end up with a very strange moral philosophy.”

Nigel Warburton, “The Best Philosophy Books of 2023 recommended by Nigel Warburton” - https://fivebooks.com/best-books/best-philosophy-books-2023-nigel-warburton/

On Surveillance at Scale

“In San Francisco there’s always another video. New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive, a culture of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, at scale... A camera offers the illusion of a private sentry, serving you and your castle. Control your tiny corner of a flailing city. Yet once you capture something you didn’t expect, say, a neighborhood vigilante mystery unfurling on your doorstep, the control is breached. Your cam blasts up and away into the stratosphere of attention. The cops get it, the footage gets passed to the prosecutor, who hands it to the defense attorney, who tosses it like chum to the ravenous media, and before you know it, your house cam is on CNN, it’s playing on All In With Chris Hayes, it’s making rhetorical points against Tucker Carlson, it’s basically a live birth on a San Francisco sidewalk, boomeranging the eyes right back on you, threatening to put you on the witness stand, sending a WIRED reporter marching up to your garage on a Friday afternoon, hoping to talk. You wanted to surveil. You end up surveilled. ”

Lauren Smiley, “How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco,” - https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-doom-loop-citizen-surveillance/.

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.