Philosophical notes…
On Alien Recognition
“What does an ant see when it looks at your face? I didn’t know. I thought about ants because a bug’s perspective seemed like the most alien thing I could imagine. I didn’t understand then that the machine behind the eye of that camera is much more alien than an ant. Scientists know a lot of things about insect optical processing. But no one knows what artificial intelligence sees when it looks at a picture of your face. The large language models that programmers train to identify faces are black boxes. Even the engineers don’t know how or in what form your face appears to the system. All they know is that AI likes your face to be brightly lit. And that it prefers for you not to smile.”
Michael Clune - https://harpers.org/archive/2025/08/your-face-tomorrow-michael-clune-ai-facial-recognition. This an interesting summary of AI limits to facial recognition. Whenever I read someone compare AI to alien intelligence it reminds me of Weizenbaum’s similar in sight in his 1976 Computer Power and Human Reason. This week I was discussing with students in class some recent limits in AI technology. One of the students uploaded Picasso’s Guernica to test image reconition software we gave them to play with online. It demonstrated clearly how much the technologies can’t ‘recognize’ and even direct comparisons of the same face typically only share 80% confidence. Nonetheless, when asked if they’d prefer a doctor’s diagnosis alone, or an AI diagnosis alone, or a combination of both, the majority opted for the latter. What’s interesting is how best to model such collaborations. To address this challenge we’re comparing models of AI with more sophisticated accounts of human cognition. For instance, last week outlined human excellence at the frame problem in light of Dreyfus’s model of skill in What Computers Still Can’t Do. That was context to compare with computer science summaries of how AI technologies work. The course is unique in that it includes computer science, mathematics and philosophy academics all presenting and discussing these matters together with students each week.
On Cellular Memory
“Perhaps a definition of memory should extend beyond behavior to encompass more records of the past. A vaccination is a kind of memory. So is a scar, a child, a book. ‘If you make a footprint, it’s a memory,’ Gershman said. An interpretation of memory as a physical event — as a mark made on the world, or on the self — would encompass the biochemical changes that occur within a cell. ‘Biological systems have evolved to harness those physical processes that retain information and use them for their own purposes,’ Gershman said. So, what does a cell know of itself? Perhaps a better version of Barbara McClintock’s question is: What can a cell remember? When it comes to survival, what a cell knows of itself isn’t as important as what it knows of the world: how it incorporates information about its experiences to determine when to bend, when to battle and when to make a break for it.”
Claire Evans - https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-a-cell-remember-20250730/. I’m between writing projects at the moment, focused on a new course in ethics, and finishing editing tasks for past projects in press now. I hope to return to the implications of this work on cell memory in future work on biosemiotics and biodeconstruction.
On Questioning AI
“Of course, none of these tools can tell us the ‘right’ answers to philosophical questions because there are none. These are timeless debates, designed to stretch us. But that’s exactly why they matter. When we explore questions like these, we’re also exploring how we define ourselves: what we value, how we decide, and what we believe it means to be human. So, can AI really help us think through those things? I think it can, at least a little. These tools reflect the worldviews, biases, and knowledge structures of the data they’re trained on. No, they don’t have beliefs or experiences. But they do model how we argue and explain. And sometimes that’s enough to help us form our own answers. Especially if any of us are lacking someone who’ll adopt the role of a critical thinking partner in real life. In the end, using AI to explore philosophical questions is less about the answers and more about the act of questioning itself. It turns the tool into a mirror. One that helps us see how we think, what we notice, and where we might go next.”
On Humboldt’s World
“By midcentury, the culture of German universities looked a lot like that of modern academia. Professors split their time between research and teaching duties, but found research ever more relevant for their own professional advancement. They considered themselves members of distinct fields with their own practices and methods. They published in specialized journals. They wrote their own dissertations, which contained original contributions to human knowledge. Everyone agreed that there were way too many adjuncts. Every university in the world today has incorporated at least some element of this model... Of course, nobody took to the German university ideal more eagerly than the Americans. The founders of Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago were explicitly built on German models. Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, was a committed Germanophile, and reformed Harvard’s graduate school along German lines. The whole institutional structure of American graduate education is German, from academic departments (an outgrowth of the seminar) to doctoral dissertations. It’s Humboldt’s world, and we’re just living in it. ”
Clara Collier, “The Origin of the Research University” - https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research-university.
On Cooperation
“AI is very good at retrieving knowledge and reasoning about formal problems, but many of the issues that we face today require a different sort of skill—the ability to bring people together to cooperate. We have yet to see much evidence that AI is good at this—although there have been some early attempts, including one that I led at Deepmind. [A study on whether AI can function as a political mediator.] The ability to solve formal problems, like playing Go at Grandmaster level or solving logic puzzles, does not necessarily equip you for the real world, where things tend to be quite messy. Outcomes are uncertain—stochastic rather than deterministic—and challenges can arise without warning.”
Nick Hildon - https://nautil.us/ai-has-already-run-us-over-the-cliff-1217080/. This is Chris Summerfield’s response to the question “Many people envision a near future where AI solves the looming issues of the day, but as you discuss in the book, this expectation may be misplaced. Why?” This is an interesting summary of Summerfield’s book, These Strange New Minds.
On Kierkegaard’s Birthday
“A detached reason that cannot enter into the viewpoints of others cannot be fully objective because it cannot access whole areas of the real world of human experience. Kierkegaard taught me the importance of attending to the internal logic of positions, not just how they stand up to outside scrutiny. This is arguably even more vital today than it was in Kierkegaard’s time. In a pluralist world, there is no hope of understanding people who live according to different values if we only judge them from the outside, from what we imagine to be an objective point of view but is really one infused with our own subjectivity... But perhaps Kierkegaard’s most provocative message is that both work on the self and on understanding the world requires your whole being and cannot be just a compartmentalised, academic pursuit.”
Julian Baggini - https://aeon.co/essays/happy-birthday-kierkegaard-we-need-you-now. Kierkegaard’s 212th birthday was on 13 May. The essay summarizes his persistent relevance. I have just finished a book on empathizing with different religious viewpoints, which is scheduled for publication later this year. My approach to the study of philosophy, religion and ethics is similar in many ways to Kierkegaard’s. I hadn’t realized how rare that is in philosophy, but Baggini summarizes his uniqueness quite well.
I suppose it’s worth noting a point of contrast with the above article in that Kierkegaard doesn’t speak of a leap of faith so much as a leap to faith in his Journals and Papers (III, 20). He talked about it in this context as a kind of boiling point. On the one hand, faith is a disposition to be developed. On the other hand, it is totally inadequate in the face of the qualitative difference between our immanent materiality and transcendent otherness. Leaping to a faithful disposition involves a kind of pathos, passion, and infinite interestedness. Ferreira discusses this well in the Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (p. 217-218). Whatever Kierkegaard meant by paradox, it spoke to this human experience of waiting for a boiling point that seems beyond our control. His caricature of Hegel made the point in a different way: “Leaping means to belong essentially to the earth and to respect the law of gravity so that the leap is merely the momentary, but flying means to be set free from telluric conditions, something that is reserved exclusively for winged creatures, perhaps also for inhabitants of the moon, perhaps – and perhaps that is also where the [Hegelian] system will at long last find its true readers” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 124). One wonders whether Kierkegaard will be read on the moon someday.
On Leadership Service
“Disrespect doesn’t just demotivate. It also disrupts focus, causing costly mistakes. In a medical simulation, professionals in neonatal intensive care teams had to diagnose a potentially life-threatening condition and then respond rapidly with the correct procedures. Right beforehand, some of them were randomly assigned to hear a visiting expert disparage their work, saying they wouldn’t last a week in his department. Briefly insulting physicians and nurses was enough to reduce the accuracy of their diagnoses by nearly 17 percent and the effectiveness of their procedures by 15 percent... It’s a pattern I’ve seen time and again in my research: Givers add more value than takers. Studies show that tech companies are more profitable when servant leaders are at the helm. The competitive advantage comes from treating people better than they expect and earning their trust, which makes it easier to attract, motivate and retain talent. That doesn’t mean being soft on people. Servant leaders aren’t shy about dishing out tough love. But they put their mission above their ego, and they care about people as much as performance.”
Adam Grant - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/opinion/elon-musk-leadership-business-education.html?smid=url-share. In academia, administrative roles are often referred to as leadership service. More recently, that language has shifted a bit, and some now refer to it as engagement. However, in light of the literature noted above, it seems service is the right moniker. There is reason to think that a posture of servant leadership that aims to give can actually increase an organization’s productivity over the long term. Emphasis is on the long term in my view. On the one hand, it is important to align our aims with an evidence-based approach to leadership. On the other hand, accuracy only comes through day-to-day practice of what can feel like a Sisyphean task amidst all the challenges facing higher education today.
On Paripatetic Rumination
As is my habit, I walk quite quickly along the beach at least three to four times a week. Round trip, this covers three miles (5km) at a minimum, nine miles a week, 468 miles a year, and thousands of miles over a decade. The point is, I pass many fellow Novocastrians taking in the views in this stunning part of the planet. This Good Friday was no different as I wove my way through crowds walking the coastline as the king tide ebbed and flowed with ten to fourteen-foot waves.
On another such walk, I noticed a pristine purple crock in the size range of a toddler. A loose-fitting shoe, surely it had to have been left behind rather recently. My mind began conjuring a story about the fate of the little clog until I caught the glimpse of a similar purple shade peaking out of a packed pram being pushed some twenty meters up the promenade. The probability was high that the crock I’d just seen could be reunited with its owner, had I the courage to head back to recover it.
As I approached the family ensemble, I could see the mom notice something missing and inquired with the dad who had charge of the stroller. Shoulders shrugged, heads turned, as the implications of the loss slowly approached a state of potential drama. As the hero in this story, I passed at just that moment and, without a word, handed his salvation to him like two runners in a relay race. “Thank you!” “No worries!” And like that, I was on my way, lost again in peripatetic rumination.
Upon recounting this act of kindness to a colleague, I was asked how it felt to have done such a good little deed. The question seemed to include a subtle worry that my tale was grounded in the conceit of humble bragging. But what if the little girl had not recovered her shoe? Think of the fit of tears as the family packed its incomplete beach caravan into the car. What then if she listlessly persisted with wearing just one favorite sole, her other bare foot blistering as the uneven gate pulled her in circles? My intervention just may have staved off scoliosis. Not to mention the marriage I saved. Had the mom connected the complete carelessness of her partner to a longer string of events, the relationship may have broken under the strain. No, my act likely intervened in the course of history, reversing the consequences of lifelong pain and heartbreak.
Then again, maybe none of that was true. This doubt made me consider cosmic explanations. Maybe my updated karma calculations might ward off future calamity or reincarnation as a cockroach. If the Buddhists turned out to be wrong, maybe I’d miss out on extra time in purgatory. Or maybe I’d enjoy a more restful slumber before awaking in the eschaton if Martin Luther had it right. Pascal’s wager notwithstanding, what is a walk if not a chance to slow the inevitable gravity pulling us all six feet under? The world always looks darker when staring into the cast of your own shadow. Sometimes, a small act of kindness is all you can do to look up.
Nobby’s Beach, Newcastle, Australia
On RISC Architecture
“RISC-V does not take three months. It takes closer to four years. If I’ve failed, so far, to account for the precision of this work, let me try again here. Computer architects are not software engineers, who use programming languages to talk to the machine. Even coders who can speak assembly or C, the so-called low-level languages, still do just that: They talk. Computer architects need to go deeper. Much deeper. All the way down to a preverbal realm. If they’re speaking at all, they’re speaking in gestures, motions: the way primitive circuits hold information. Computer architecture isn’t telling a machine what to do. It’s establishing the possibility that it can be told anything at all. The work is superhuman, if not fully alien. Put it this way: If you found the exact place in a human being where matter becomes mind, where body becomes soul—a place that no scientist or philosopher or spiritual figure has found in 5,000 years of frantic searching—wouldn’t you tread carefully? One wrong move and everything goes silent.”
Jason Kehe - https://www.wired.com/story/angelina-jolie-was-right-about-risc-architecture/. Interesting summary of RISC (reduced instruction set computer) which surpassed CISC (complex instruction set computer) in the 1980s because of its superior “performance and cost.” Computers rely on ISAs (instruction set architecture), and RISC-V International is a Switzerland-based company promoting its open-access option. “Computer architectures are so named because, well, that’s exactly what they are—architectures not of bricks but of bits… Everyone has their own way of explaining it. The ISA is the bridge, or the interface, between the hardware and the software. Or it’s the blueprint. Or it’s the computer’s DNA. These are helpful enough, as is the common comparison of an ISA to a language. ‘You and I are using English,’ as Redmond said to me at the conference. ‘That’s our ISA.’ But it gets confusing. Software speaks in languages too—programming languages. That’s why Patterson prefers dictionary or vocabulary. The ISA is less a specific language, more a set of generally available words.” It strikes me that this difficulty explaining ISAs echos the current neuroscientific debate about the relationship between language and the brain. For instance, in extended mind (EM) theory, language provides particular benefits that the brain couldn’t supply on its own. Wetware and software interact in what Clark refers to as the mangrove effect in a 1998 essay on “Magic Words.” Sometimes, the tree (language) does not grow into the island (brain), but the island arises around the growth of the tree. It strikes me that depictions of RISC computer architecture might better be understood along these lines.
On Bureaucracy
“The anthropologist Michael Herzleld, drawing on fieldwork in Greece, refers to the stories we tell each other about bureaucracy as ‘secular theodicies,’ that is to say, efforts to explain, and sometimes to explain away, the existence of incompetence, indifference, or corruption of political institutions. We tend to condemn bureaucracy and bureaucrats when better explanations elude us. There is an old saying that a myth is the imaginative or imaginary resolution of real contradictions; the myths of bureaucracy seek not only to resolve paperwork’s contradictions, but also the contradictions in our own thought. We have been unable to reconcile our theories of the state’s power with our experience of its failure.”
Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork, p. 10-11. I came across this book some years ago when researching the history of written artefacts in scroll, codex and print. Scholars often forget that bureaucracy has French etymological roots and came to prominence after the French Revolution. “There is no trace of the idea in Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Burke, or even Hegel. Yet by the 1850s it was all the rage” (p. 11). Paper power had become tied to the aim to hold accountable the autocratic power of the monarch. It should, therefore, not be surprising to find any person with autocratic tendencies attacking bureaucracy. Because autocracy crosses partisan lines, it is worth listening for this distinction. Whenever I hear people denigrate archivists or even the more simple need for record keeping, generally in the form of meeting agendas and action notes, I hear the murmurs of a tyrant.
This concern was highlighted in Timothy Snyder’s 2017 twenty chapters On Tyranny, which he summarized recently online. The first two are “do not obey in advance” and “defend institutions.” This captures some of the challenges bureaucracy poses, given that bureaucracies themselves have procedures to foster obedience. Hence, cog in the wheel ethical defenses abounded after the second world war. As Hannah Arendt noted, calculating paper trails is not thinking. This is why Snyder also recommends believing in truth and investigating. As Kafka points out, bureaucracy is not simple. His argument in this book is worth reading carefully if only because “paperwork is unpredictable and that this unpredictability is frustrating… modern political thought was both founded and confounded by its encounters with paperwork” (p. 10).
This frustration can be felt in the 2018 film Transit, based on a 1944 Franz Kafka-esque novel by Anna Seghers. The film is set in contemporary France, and revolves around a man trying to escape an occupying government’s crackdown on human beings without the right papers. Camps are created and soon full as the “cleansing” begins. Transit papers ensure he is both visible and has the right to leave and to become invislbe. At one point, the protagonist in the film tries to check into a hotel. “So, I can only stay here if I can prove that I don’t want to stay?” The paradox haunts the entire film.
“That’s the terrible thing. Not that they stare at you, your dirty, tired face, your torn clothing. The terrible thing is that they don’t see you. That you don’t exist in their world.”