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.

On Language Equity

“It’s clear from the research, however, that children do not have an adult-like understanding of artificial agents in general. Some evidence suggests that young children are especially likely to anthropomorphize robots and attribute mental states to them. Perceiving them to be human-like (thinking that the robot can see or can be tickled) in fact enhances learning—as does the agent’s responding to the child’s conversational moves in ways that a human might. This leads us into an ethical thicket. Children are likely to learn from an AI if they can form a bond of trust with it, but at the same time, they need to be protected from its unreliability and its lack of caring instincts. They may need to learn—perhaps through intensive AI-literacy training in schools—to treat a bot as if it were a helpful human, while retaining awareness that it is not, a mind-splitting feat that is hard enough for many adults, let alone preschoolers. This paradox suggests there’s no easy fix to the language equity problem in the child’s younger years.”

Julie Sedivy, “When Kids Talk to Machines” - https://nautil.us/when-kids-talk-to-machines-655610/

On Scientific Judgment

“No one should doubt for a second that natural scientists take evidence from observation and experiment very, very seriously. But evidence, regardless of its form, cannot by itself determine what one ought to believe. Two individuals faced with all the same data can nevertheless rationally disagree with one another. This trivial point, easy to appreciate in the abstract, is for some reason treated as a scandal when applied to the domain of scientific inquiry. In the minds of many of my students, the difference between science and whatever the hell it is I do is that scientists can come to consensus because their individual use of scientific evidence guarantees that each one of them will arrive at the same logically unavoidable conclusion about nature. For them, human judgment is simply a contingency by which these logically unavoidable conclusions are reached. The hard truth, which it can take several semesters for them to come to terms with, is that scientists who agree on all the facts nevertheless routinely disagree about how those facts ought to be interpreted — and that, no matter how many more facts they acquire, rational disagreement will always be possible. Anyone who says otherwise is promoting an epistemological fantasy world that, while undeniably comforting, erects more hurdles than it clears when it comes to understanding the production of knowledge... Scientific knowledge is not what we come to believe about nature after making sure that we’ve subtracted the influence of human thought. It is a product of human thought.”

Chris Haufe, “Do Humanists Know Anything,” https://www.chronicle.com/article/do-humanists-know-anything.

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.