Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages

Animadversions

Aeon Papers (03/01/22)

(Text as at 03/01/2022 23:58:34)

*** THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS NOTE ***


(For the live version and other versions of this Note, see the tables at the end)

For Text Colour-conventions (at end of page): Click Here.


Introduction Papers Read: 462 Papers Unread: 1,984 → Pri 1: 227 Pri 2: 665 Pri 3: 369 Pri 4: 228 Pri 5: 195 Pri 6: 116 Pri 7: 79 Pri 8: 53 Pri 9: 52

Introduction
  1. The Aeon eZine, described in Aeon: About:-
    1. Covers a large number of philosophical topics that I’m particularly interested in from a semi-professional point of view.
    2. It also covers others that are of more general interest, for which I’ve read papers as they crop up but don’t really have much time to comment on.
    3. Finally, there are others – and particularly videos – which are not as relevant, and which I often ignore.
  2. In May 2020, Aeon launched a new platform Psyche, described in Psyche: About. I’ve just treated the Psyche videos and papers as for Aeon.
  3. This Note contains links to Aeon & Psyche papers and videos I've found interesting – or hope to find interesting – from 2019 onwards, together with a few others that I’d not had time to categorise in this Note1. It represents an attempt to gain benefit from Aeon without incurring the overheads previously exemplified in the Note just cited. I intend to combine the two Notes in due course.
  4. The items accessed now appear in two lists: those I’ve read, and those I’ve not. The latter list ought to be itself divided in two – those I intend to read and those I don’t. This is because the items arrive too rapidly to be read, at least while I’m in “catch-up” mode. However, I’ve decided to simply prioritise the items, with the lower-priority items likely to remain languishing at the bottom. The priorities are fairly random, and subject to revision. I recently decided to restrict “priority 1” items to a maximum of 10, though I’ve not stuck to the resolution.
  5. I note here that this page is getting too slow to load, so I will need to split it. This may be either by priority, or by topic, but deciding what to do is quite complex and needs thinking through.
  6. Those I’ve read appear first, in reverse date of publication. I’ve tried to add a brief footnote for each.
  7. For the list of items I’ve not read, the items most recently published appear – within their respective priorities – at the top of the list when accessed, though with the videos first as they’re quicker to get through. Some of these items were "reminders" sent out at weekends when new material doesn't appear, so can have much earlier publication dates than their sequence in the list might imply. I’m in the process of adding the dates, which appear in red.
  8. The counts of the papers read – and unread by priority – appear in the table above, with hyperlinks to the lists.
  9. Note that where a date appears, this is the date published, not the date read. Any comments or additional information appear as a footnote, followed by clicking the date. Click on the paper title for the link to the full text on the Aeon website.
  10. I intend to add links to the PID Notes, where applicable, to which these works are relevant, and to their authors if they appear in my database. Also, if a paper turns out to be important enough for my research, I’ll incorporate it into my database so the hyperlinks to the topic of interest work better and I can add more information.
  11. While this was supposed to be a “quick and dirty” approach, I unfortunately ran into the MS Access 64k-character size-limit for long text. Thankfully, this can be over-ridden if the text is populated using Access Basic code, so I’ve added the wherewithal to achieve this. The references to “WebRef= nnnn” signify the primary key for a couple of tables I use to generate this page.
  12. A note on completeness: I’ve now been through all the emails received from Aeon since the beginning of 2018. Relatively few were omitted. Those for 2017 were dealt with in this Note2, though my selection criteria were more rigorous in those days.
  13. I have to add a note of warning to myself. These papers are – in most cases – especially in the case of those selected – fascinating and informative. But they also lead on to other papers cited that are likewise fascinating and informative, or important if I am to follow in detail or critique the arguments put forward. There is no end to this process, which may end up as a distraction from constructive work.
  14. Some of the papers or videos are republications from other sites of interest. While noting the above comment, I will list them here (in the order they came to my attention):-
    → Closer to Truth
    → Neurophilosophy
    → Woit - Not Even Wrong
    → 3Blue1Brown
    → Institute of Arts and Ideas
    → Philosophy Overdose
    → Physics Reimagined
    → YouTube: Then & Now
    → The Royal Institution
    → FT - Five Books
  15. I ought to add a note on why all this is worth bothering with.
    1. Firstly, some items are relevant to my research or other projects, and provide a more contemporary or less formal / more exploratory approach than I’ll find in academic papers or books.
    2. Secondly, there are items on a very wide range of subjects that might be treated in magazines or broadsheets but which are dealt with in greater depth here.
  16. So, my intention is to use Aeon for general culture and education, and Newspapers for … news.


Items Pending


Items Read

Items Not Yet Read
  1. Priority: 1
  2. Priority: 2
  3. Priority: 3
  4. Priority: 4
  5. Priority: 5
  6. Priority: 6
  7. Priority: 7
  8. Priority: 8
  9. Priority: 9


In-Page Footnotes

Footnote 3: Aeon: Video - Vertigo AI (WebRef=11256)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Who, exactly, authored this AI-generated spin on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo?
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Machine learning technology can feel eerily ubiquitous in the algorithmic undercurrent of our daily lives, but humanity is likely still in the very early stages of unleashing the power of machine learning to transform our world.
      • In addition to its potential to overhaul such spheres as transportation and medicine, the Los Angeles-based artist Chris Peters predicts that its impact on entertainment will move far beyond just spitting out recommendations. He writes: ‘By 2050, you will be able to turn on your TV and order the machine to write and render a new show just for you, all within a few seconds.’
      • Peters’s experimental short Vertigo AI provides a snapshot of machine learning in its contemporary, perhaps primordial, form. Generated from running the Alfred Hitchcock classic Vertigo (1958) through an artificial intelligence computer 20 times, the resulting film offers a glimpse into the technology’s current capabilities and limitations.
      • It’s also a work of art in its own right, with its uncanny, noir-infused AI-generated script and imagery striking a haunting tone, while also raising fascinating questions of authorship.
  2. Notes
Footnote 4: Aeon: Video - Planktonium (WebRef=11266)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Peering into the eerie world of plankton reveals a variety of vital creatures
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Diverse, numerous and vital to life on Earth, plankton are microscopic, mostly single-celled organisms that live in sunlit regions of watery environments. Through photosynthesis, these small lifeforms produce half of the world’s oxygen. Over the past several decades, however, the climate crisis has caused worrying disruptions in plankton populations, with their numbers decreasing in open oceans and increasing in near-shore waters, sometimes leading to harmful algal blooms.
      • The Dutch photographer and filmmaker Jan van IJken’s short film Planktonium uses high-definition microscopy to bring the beauty and wide variety of plankton into view. As he focuses on just one species at a time, some resemble familiar cellular forms, while others appear as if creatures born of an alien planet. Paired with an ethereal ambient composition by the Norwegian artist Jana Winderen, the film offers a stunning perspective on this hidden, essential world. For more awe-inspiring glimpses into nature from van IJken, watch Becoming and The Art of Flying.
  2. Notes
    • Well, it's interesting enough, but it'd be better with a commentary on what you're looking at.
    • There's a 15-minute version which would be a strain to watch. 3 minutes was enough.
    • The Editor's Abstract seems confused as to what Plankton are. They are a wide range of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria and viruses, only the first category of which photosynthesise. The film shows both plants and animals (and possibly bacteria).
    • See Wikipedia: Plankton.
Footnote 5: Aeon: Pigliucci - Musonius Rufus: Roman Stoic, and avant-garde feminist? (WebRef=11231)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Massimo Pigliucci
    • Author Narrative: Massimo Pigliucciis an author, blogger and podcaster, as well as the K D Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His academic work is in evolutionary biology, philosophy of science, the nature of pseudoscience, and practical philosophy. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (2017) and Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk (2018). His most recent work is Think Like a Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World (2021).
    • Author's Conclusion
      • So we deal with the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. But we constantly strive to make it a better place for everyone. Modern Stoicism is not the passive life philosophy of enduring whatever life throws at you with equanimity. That is a caricature. It is a philosophy that recognises both the limitations on our capacity to change the world and the possibility of making some change.
      • Striving to find the sweet spot between endurance of the world as it is and the drive to improve things without battering your head against an immovable wall is the essence of Stoicism. What is genuinely surprising is the degree to which thinkers such as Musonius Rufus laid the foundations for radical egalitarianism 2,000 years ago. We should recognise these Stoics as at least protofeminists, and build on their insights.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting and informative article, though rather focused on one aspect of Stoic thought – proto-feminism – and is probably a plug for the author’s just-published second book on Stoicism.
    • The Stoic idea of ‘improve what you can and put up with what you can’t’ seems to be reflected in the popular quote from St. Francis.
    • Continuing the Christian theme … the Stoics (and the author) seem to think that people are born good – the antithesis of evangelical Christian thought (if people are naturally good, they don’t need saving, they just need to pull their socks up). The author mentions that “some” evolutionary psychologists hold with the “naturally good” idea, though most – or at least the authors of once-popular books – focus on our inheriting the objectional ways of our hunter-gatherer forebears (though contemporary hunter-gatherers are – of course – saints).
    • It seems that contemporary thought – at least as portrayed by liberal news outlets – hold that women are naturally good, but men naturally bad; or maybe they are just brought up that way.
Footnote 6: Aeon: Shakespeare - We are all frail (WebRef=11234)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Tom Shakespeare
    • Author Narrative: Tom Shakespeare is a social scientist and bioethicist. He is professor of disability research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he co-directs the International Centre for Evidence on Disability. His books include Openings to the Infinite Ocean: A Friendly Offering of Hope (2020) and Disability: The Basics (2017). He lives in London.
    • Aeon Subtitle: We should be able to acknowledge that disabilities can cause pain and suffering without disabled people feeling dehumanised
    • Author's Introduction
      • Can the disadvantages that disabled people often experience be attributed to intrinsic vulnerability, or do they result from social arrangements? This is a pressing question, both because of the global disability rights movement, and also because of the current COVID-19 pandemic.
      • It’s also a very personal question for me. I was born with short stature (achondroplasia). Due to this rare genetic condition, I have had prolonged episodes of back problems, which have come with associated pain and immobility. In 1997, I was bed-bound for six months with sciatica. In 2008, I became paraplegic and spent 10 weeks in a spinal injury unit. Since then, I have used a wheelchair and had constant neuropathic pain. In 2021, I have been bed-bound for months with pain and restriction. I know that many health conditions, irrespective of social context, can be very disabling. In adulthood, I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which made sense of many aspects of my schooling. While it has not always been an obstacle, and may even have helped me ‘join the dots’, I would say it has also limited me as a scholar.
      Author's Conclusion
      • Disability will always be with us, even though we can now do much to improve human health and reduce the risks. We are embodied beings, and impairment is the human condition. We have injuries and we develop diseases. If we are fortuitous, we live long lives and develop the impairments associated with ageing, such as macular degeneration and dementia. In the end, we all die.
      • I agree with Barnes and all those disability academics and activists who want to remove obstacles and build a more inclusive world. One of the positive lessons from the sad tragedy of COVID-19 is that digital communications can be more inclusive. As long as you can get access to a computer or tablet, online platforms can be barrier-free, and can connect people who were previously excluded by physical or communication barriers.
      • Even as we succeed in creating an inclusive world, we need to accept our limitations. Some people will never be able to live or work independently. All of us will grow weary and die. True inclusion is to value people equally, regardless of their abilities. Happiness comes from acceptance of frailties.
  2. Notes
    • This is an interesting and sensibly balanced piece, though - from a quick skim - it has attracted a number of less sensibly balanced comments.
    • It is useful to have a piece on disability by a philosopher who is disabled.
    • The author draws a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic problems with disability.
    • He's right to say - following his own experience - that some disabilities are intrinsically unpleasant and the sufferer would be better off without them.
    • He's also right to say that society can help or hinder; also, that what counts as a severe disability is to some extent society-dependent. Some disabilities matter more or less extrinsically because of the help society can provide for their amelioration (via technology or otherwise) and also for the importance - in the relevant society (taking into account its needs, wealth and technological sophistication) - of the missing or restricted abilities of the disabled person. To put things bluntly and insensitively, intelligent ‘cripples’ can have a much better life in a rich technological society than in a poor agrarian one.
    • I agree strongly that disability is not just 'diversity'. Also, with the contentious point that - while people with disability should be fully accepted and supported - it is right for pre-natal screening and other antenatal precautions to be used to reduce the prevalence of certain unpleasant conditions.
    • I also agree strongly that disability is a spectrum rather than a binary condition that people either have or don’t have.
    • I think in one of the comments there’s a discussion about whether evolution has provided an ideal ‘template’ against which individuals can be measured. Possibly, and routinely used for non-human animals – but not often helpful when applied to humans.
    • For Tom Shakespeare, see Wikipedia: Tom Shakespeare and Wikipedia: Shakespeare Baronets.
    • See Wikipedia: Achondroplasia.
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Shakespeare (Tom) - We are all frail"
Footnote 7: Aeon: Video - When Vikings lived in North America (WebRef=11185)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A Viking axe struck a Newfoundland tree in the year 1021. Here’s how scientists proved it
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus, the Norse became the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic and settle in North America. This long-posited theory was finally proven in the 1960s, following an archeological expedition to the site of L’Anse aux Meadows on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland.
      • Until recently, the exact timing of the Viking settlement was only speculation, based on architectural remains, a few surviving artefacts and interpretations of Icelandic sagas written in the 1200s.
      • But, as this video from Nature explains, using new carbon dating techniques, scientists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have found the exact year that a tree was felled by a Viking axe – 1021 CE.
      • Further, this research also marks the earliest known point in history by which human migration had encircled the globe.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Aeon: Video - The Vinland Mystery
      → Aeon: Hansen - Vikings in America
    • Well, this is interesting and informative - particularly with the details of the recent refinements of radio-carbon dating using tree-rings and markers from solar activity.
    • The enigmatic comment at the end of the Editors' abstract isn't claiming that the Norsemen circumnavigated the globe, but that they - travelling west - had met up with earlier migrants who had migrated east from Siberia before the land-bridge submerged.
    • I do hate - however - the comparison with Columbus. I agree that the archaeological evidence does prove that the Norse reached Newfoundland, but this had zero geopolitical consequences, as the Norse didn't settle there (I don't know whether any alien diseases were transmitted either way).
    • Also, it's rather arbitrary whether Greenland - already as of 986 occupied by the Norse (and continually so thereafter) - is part of Europe or North America. Wikipedia: Greenland suggests the latter; having Greenland part of Denmark (or - earlier - Norway) is a political accident. So, ‘America’ had been discovered – uncontroversially – even earlier. The incremental island-hopping involved isn't as spectacular as sailing west in the hope of finding a quick way to China round the globe.
    • Columbus, of course had a much tougher task, and the fall-out from his discoveries was earth-changing: positively for Europe and negatively for indigenous Americans.
Footnote 8: Aeon: Video - Bug Farm (WebRef=11153)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Familiarity breeds roach-respect, and even love, for a group of Florida insect farmers
    • Editors' Abstract
      • ‘This is a really beautiful roach’, says Tequila Ray Snorkel, chief technology officer at the sustainable bug farming operation Ovipost, as she attempts to sell the audience on the charm of cockroaches – in particular, their lovely faces. And, as the film Bug Farm explores, Snorkel isn’t the only one on the small LaBelle, Florida farm who’s developed a fondness for insects that outsiders might find peculiar.
      • A film at the intersection of farm labour, Southern US culture and humanity’s relationship with the insect world, the US director Lydia Cornett’s charming short documentary reveals how, when it comes to the workers dealing with critters most people find gross or pesky, often both, seeing them up close fosters a new appreciation.
  2. Notes
    • This is an entertaining but rather odd film.
    • It's really about the working lives of the people who raise and package the insects, and how they find the work better than the alternatives.
    • One of the workers in the small firm - a Mexican lady who still seems only to speak Sapnish - has been working there for 18 years, and now her daughter does too.
    • The technical guy appears to be a gay chap from California who's happy to be accepted. We see him doting on a cockroach and attending to a singed finger.
    • So, while there's some reference to the positive attitudes to the insects - meal worms, crickets and cockroaches - this isn't the main point of the film.
    • There's also no explanation at all as to what the point of it all is - what happens to the insects after they are packaged up in boxes, nor that any of the workers care, even though they claim they care for them while they grow (and that they grow better if the workers care).
    • PID Note: Animal Rights
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Bug Farm"
Footnote 9: Aeon: Mallette - How 12th-century Genoese merchants invented the idea of risk (WebRef=11154)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Karla Mallette
    • Author Narrative: Karla Mallette is professor of Italian and Mediterranean Studies and chair of the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History (2005), European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean (2010), and Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean (2021).
  2. Notes
    • Interesting enough, but a history - rather than mathematics - lesson.
Footnote 10: Aeon: Video - Street angel (WebRef=11147)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Seeking authenticity in a Chinatown built for tourists and Hollywood movies
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Since its development in the late-19th century, Chinatown in Los Angeles has existed as an enclave of diaspora, displacement and elaborate Hollywood fantasy. Today, it’s a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, with streets that seem to flicker between past and future, artifice and authenticity.
      • In her short film Street Angel, the multidisciplinary artist Michelle Sui (Chinese-born, Los Angeles-raised) highlights voices from Chinatown’s remaining working-class Chinese American population as she navigates its streets and intricate history.
      • Throughout, she sings a refugee song from the Chinese film Street Angel (1937), attracting reactions of delight and curiosity from residents and passersby.
      • Through her unique construction, Sui builds an exploration of Chinese American identity and culture that’s exponentially more sophisticated than the vast majority of media to have used the neighbourhood as a backdrop over the past century.
  2. Notes
    • Rather too long, but interesting enough.
    • It gives some insight into past US racism against non-blacks, but no obvious current offences.
    • The producer does seem to act rather oddly, by going around singing, though less oddly than if she wasn't accompanied by a camera man!
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Street angel"
Footnote 11: Aeon: Video - The development of mindreading (WebRef=11142)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jennifer Nagel
    • Aeon Subtitle: Forget babbling and toddling – mindreading is babies’ most incredible skill
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Attempting to ‘mindread’, or figure out what another person might be thinking, is something that most adults do instinctively, and it’s part of a learning process that begins in the first few months of life.
      • For instance, at a year old, most babies can decipher that a person glaring at a piece of food is contemplating eating it, and can even predict the path they’re likely to take to the morsel.
      • But, as Jennifer Nagel, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, lays out in this animation, forming a deeper sense of what another person might (rightly or wrongly) believe in a given situation is a more complex process that develops throughout childhood.
      • And, as Nagel explores, whether babies innately understand that other people have beliefs, or whether they’re simply recognising patterns when they appear to understand other minds, is still subject to controversy among philosophers and developmental psychologists alike.
  2. Notes
Footnote 12: Aeon: Video - Five Stories (WebRef=11105)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘Once upon a time…’ Deconstructing our insatiable appetite for stories
    • Editor's Abstract
      • ‘Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.’
        → Jean-Luc Godard from Godard on Godard (1968)
      • In 2019, archeologists from Griffith University in Australia were excavating a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi when they discovered a roughly 45,000-year-old cave painting depicting small biped beings with animalistic characteristics known as therianthropes hunting wild beasts – likely pigs and buffalo. Given the painting’s age and location, archeologists have debated whether humans or another form of hominin created it. Regardless, Maxime Aubert, who was part of the research team, said: ‘This hunting scene is – to our knowledge – currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.’
      • Writing about the discovery in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik placed it in the context of a dust-up between the director Martin Scorsese and the forces behind perhaps the most ubiquitous storytelling operation of our own time – the people behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise and its legions of vocal fans. Scorcese had knocked Marvel for flooding cinemas with predictable, morally simplistic and easily consumable storytelling. But, for Gopnik, this discovery showed that Marvel hadn’t dampened the public’s ability to absorb challenging stories over a series of decades, but had, instead, tapped into something rather primordial. ‘Our oldest picture story,’ Gopnik wrote, ‘seems to belong, whether we want it to or not, more to the Marvel universe than to Marty Scorsese’s … there is no denying our collective relief when the therianthropes arrive to save the day.’
      • So, for all the possible stories out there, suffused with all the endless complexities and ambiguities of the world in which we find ourselves, why do we return to the same narratives over and over, as if scratching an insatiable, many millennia-long itch? The Canadian writer, actor and director R H Thomson endeavours to deconstruct this question in the short film Five Stories, which was created on the occasion of his receiving a Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award at the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards in Canada in 2015. Aided by stylish and kinetic filmmaking from the Canadian director Aisling Chin-Yee, Thomson discusses what he thinks of as the five most common stories across all time – the survival story, the love story, the mystery story, the transformation story and the creation story.
      • Framed as a mostly one-sided, scene-jumping discussion between Thomson and a young woman portrayed by the Canadian actress Michelle Adams, Thomson works through a ready list of examples for each archetype, as well as a brief analysis of why we’re drawn to them – from the need-to-know hook of mysteries to the yearning-to-be-made-whole at the centre of love stories. But, ultimately, why all this time spent crafting, telling, reconfiguring and absorbing narratives across centuries that, quite often, seem to serve no obvious or immediate purpose? ‘You push back against despair,’ says Thomson, almost wondering aloud. ‘That tapestry of stories that makes the inner universe makes the outer universe liveable’.
  2. Notes
    • Fair enough. The film seems to fill out the last paragraph, only, of the Editor's Abstract.
    • Rather oddly - according to contemporary tastes - there's rather a lot of 'mansplaining' going on.
    • Indeed, his female interlocutor only says four words - 'so, why the one?' - and these are - to me - incomprehensible.
    • It's all a bit 'continental' - oracular explanation or interpretation of how things are.
    • PID Note: Fiction
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Five Stories"
Footnote 13: Aeon: Video - The Rashomon effect (WebRef=11101)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: What can a Kurosawa classic tell us about reality, knowledge and truth?
    • Editors' Abstract
      • A samurai is found dead. Four eye-witnesses come forward to tell their version of events, but their stories contradict one another. What’s going on?
      • This is the premise at the centre of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon (1950), which is based on two short stories by the Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. However, the notion that many seemingly reliable observers could be convinced that they each saw something very different is more than just an inventive plot device.
      • As this TED-Ed animation explores, what’s become known as the ‘Rashomon effect’ has, time and time again, reared its head in psychological studies, showing how hidden factors including biases can influence one’s view of reality. And, beyond the Rashomon effect’s important practical implications for law, psychology and even science, it also raises even deeper philosophical questions about the concepts of reality, knowledge and truth.
  2. Notes
Footnote 14: Aeon: Video - Moths in slow motion (WebRef=11091)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Witness the majesty of moths taking flight at 6,000 frames per second
    • Editors' Abstract
      • ‘Whose day isn’t gonna be better after watching a pink and yellow rosy maple moth fly in super-slow motion?’
      • You might think of moths primarily as the pesky creatures that get drawn to your lamplight and love nothing more than gnawing through your well-worn knitwear. However, as this video from the Evolutionary Biology and Behavior Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University shows, they can also be quite majestic – especially when captured on ‘fancy science cameras’.
      • Shooting seven different moth species at a whopping 6,000 frames per second (fps) – compared with the standard 24 fps for film and television – the biologist Adrian Smith, who heads the research lab, guides viewers through the incredible biophysics of moth flight.
  2. Notes
    • Contrary to the Editor's Abstract, this says nothing about the 'the incredible biophysics of moth flight'.
    • However, it is a good watch!
Footnote 15: Aeon: Video - The elephant's song (WebRef=11086)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A bluesy ballad tells the story of Old Bet, the first circus elephant in the US
    • Editors' Abstract
      • In 1806, Hachaliah Bailey, a farmer in Somers, New York, bought an elephant to help plow his farm. He paid $1,000 and named her Old Bet. He soon realised that he could make more money from her as a paid attraction, so he began travelling the country with Old Bet and charging curious onlookers 10 cents for a rare glimpse.
      • Structured around a bluesy country ballad by the US composer Sam Saper, this film from the US animator Lynn Tomlinson recalls Old Bet’s tale from the imagined perspective of the farmer’s dog.
      • Via distinctive handcrafted animations made with clay-on-glass and oil pastels, Tomlinson brings a mournful sense of pathos to the story of the first circus elephant in the United States, while hinting more broadly at the tragic centuries-long history of exotic animal exploitation for the sake of human entertainment.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Wikipedia: Old Bet
    • This is all very sad, though it's an immersive experience rather than a philosophical reflection.
    • It doesn't look (from Wikipedia) as though much is really known about the specific case.
    • PID Note: Animal Rights
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - The elephant's song"
Footnote 16: Aeon: Video - Fifty per cent (WebRef=11069)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: To know or not to know? Lillian weighs the costs of a life-changing genetic test
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Lillian Hanly, a television producer and filmmaker in New Zealand, has a 50 per cent chance of testing positive for Huntington’s disease. It’s a hereditary condition that gradually erodes physical and cognitive functions, and often cuts lives short by decades.
      • Her documentary – part of the filmmaking initiative Loading Docs’ 2021 short film collection – charts Hanly’s deliberations about getting tested (or not) and shares her touching conversations with family members who have faced the same decision.
      • More than just a medical or family story, Hanly’s film is a meaningful exploration of what it means to live with the certainty of death amid the many uncertainties of life.
  2. Notes
    • Quite a touching piece.
    • Lillian decides not to get tested for now, but will do so later
    • The editor's comment about "living with the certainty of death" is true of us all, but something we don't focus on unless the fact is pushed in our faces.
    • See (as usual) Ivan Ilych.
    • PID Note: Ivan Ilych
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Fifty per cent"
Footnote 17: Aeon: Video - The impossible map (WebRef=11071)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: There are many ways to make a flat map of the world – each of them a unique distortion
    • Editors' Abstract
      • As almost everyone learns in primary school, it’s impossible to represent a round object on a flat surface without imposing some major distortions. But the concept has perhaps never been as clearly or amusingly demonstrated as in this stop-motion animation from 1947.
      • Using clay moulds, grapefruits, radishes and red paint to make its point, the vintage educational short cleverly demonstrates how each and every flat map of the world represents a grand compromise.
  2. Notes
    • Despite coming from 1947, this is a very clear educational video.
    • But, I wasn't clear why Aeon decided to re-publish it.
Footnote 18: Aeon: Fleming - A theory of my own mind (WebRef=11061)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Stephen M. Fleming
    • Author Narrative: Stephen M Fleming is professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, where he leads the Metacognition Group. He is author of Know Thyself: The Science of Self-awareness (2021).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Knowing the content of one’s own mind might seem straightforward but in fact it’s much more like mindreading other people
    • Author's Conclusion
      • There is still much to learn about the relationship between theory of mind and metacognition. Most current research on metacognition focuses on the ability to think about our experiences and mental states – such as being confident in what we see or hear. But this aspect of metacognition might be distinct from how we come to know our own, or others’, character and preferences – aspects that are often the focus of research on theory of mind.
      • New and creative experiments will be needed to cross this divide. But it seems safe to say that Descartes’s classical notion of introspection is increasingly at odds with what we know of how the brain works. Instead, our knowledge of ourselves is (meta)knowledge like any other – hard-won, and always subject to revision.
      • Realising this is perhaps particularly useful in an online world deluged with information and opinion, when it’s often hard to gain a check and balance on what we think and believe. In such situations, the benefits of accurate metacognition are myriad – helping us recognise our faults and collaborate effectively with others.
  2. Notes
Footnote 19: Aeon: Gonzalez-Crussi - Shaggy and strong, or shorn and sharp? Hair’s evolving symbolism (WebRef=11052)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Frank Gonzalez-Crussi
    • Author Narrative: Frank Gonzalez-Crussi is professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. He is the author of many books on medicine and the body, including Notes of an Anatomist (1985), A Short History of Medicine (2007) and The Body Fantastic (2021).
    • Author's Introduction
      • As a conspicuous feature of the human body, hair – or its absence – is also a major element of social perception and identity. Yet the symbolic meaning of hair is far from fixed. Historically, the ways in which this bodily component has been regarded have been astonishingly varied, fluctuant and often contradictory. This is evident in even a brief sampling of the rich lore built by our multifaceted views on hair.
  2. Notes
    • Useful, if a bit patchy, historical background
Footnote 20: Aeon: Video - Alison Gopnik: Cognition, care and spirituality (WebRef=11056)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Alison Gopnik
    • Aeon Subtitle: Caring for the vulnerable opens gateways to our richest, deepest brain states
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Humans often fancy themselves quite extraordinary specimens in the animal kingdom. But while most recent research undermines our centuries-long claims of human exceptionalism, there are some ways in which we are quite unique – especially when it comes to childhood and childcare. Indeed, even when compared with our closest primate relatives, humans spend a truly inordinate amount of time – roughly 15 years at the beginning and the end of the lifespan – as vulnerable creatures, not reproducing, and largely dependent on others.
      • In this Aeon Original animation, Alison Gopnik, a writer and a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, examines how these unparalleled vulnerable periods are likely to be at least somewhat responsible for our smarts.
      • Exploring how different brain states accompany different life stages, Gopnik also makes a case that caring for the vulnerable, rather than ivory-tower philosophising, puts us in touch with our deepest humanity.
  2. Notes
Footnote 21: Aeon: Video - Serial parallels (WebRef=11032)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A whirlwind tour of Hong Kong’s high-rises is an awesome meditation on urbanity
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Hong Kong’s skyline is defined by towering apartment high-rises, which are themselves characterised by immense size, muted colours and the relentless repetition of their facades.
      • In his experimental animation Serial Parallels, the German artist Max Hattler finds inspiration in the city’s vertical sprawl, building a whirlwind animation from still photographs of these buildings.
      • As a staggering number of units move in and out of view, with scattered open windows and clothes hung out to dry, hinting at the separate lives each window represents, viewers might find the proceedings awe-inspiring, anxiety-inducing or, perhaps more likely, a bit of both.
  2. Notes
    • This film is far too long. You get the idea after 10 seconds, so there’s no need for the whole 9 minutes.
    • You also don’t get a feel for how close together some of these huge blocks are. It’s almost as though neighbours in adjacent blocks could shake hands.
    • But you do get a feeling for just how hutch-like these apartments are, and how similar each apartment is to the others in the same and neighbouring blocks.
    • You get no idea of what the residents think of it all, as they aren’t consulted.
    • My only interest is having spent a week in HK on business, and seen this first hand.
Footnote 22: Aeon: Video - The Standard Model (WebRef=11036)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The Standard Model might be the most successful theory in science. But what is it?
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Built on the quantum physics breakthroughs of the 1920s, the Standard Model of particle physics is, according to the physicist David Tong at the University of Cambridge, the most successful scientific theory in history. But, unlike other revolutionary theories such as evolution by natural selection, heliocentrism or even general relativity, the Standard Model is quite difficult to sum up in brief. And so, no surprise, it’s nowhere near as widely understood.
      • In this animated explainer, Tong does his best to bridge this knowledge gap without skimping on the complexities.
      • With the aid of some nifty visuals, he details how the Standard Model describes the interactions between 12 elementary particles and three fundamental forces, as well as what’s missing from the model, and why it isn’t quite a theory of everything.
  2. Notes
Footnote 23: Aeon: Taylor - Jefferson’s university (WebRef=11008)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Alan Taylor
    • Aeon Subtitle: Thomas Jefferson founded a university believing it would safeguard republican freedom. Slavery was another matter altogether
    • Excerpts
      • Introductory: Used to separating people sharply into villains or heroes, Americans struggle to accept that a person of the past might both inspire as a democrat and alarm as an exploiter, and could promote both higher education and racist speculation. It could balance our assessment if we restored Jefferson to his own revolutionary times, when leaders promoted a new culture appropriate to their radical new form of government: a republic. Jefferson tried to navigate a narrow course by advancing democracy without directly confronting the slave system of his beloved Virginia. His solution lay in founding a university.
      • Conclusion: We expect schools to remake students into the sort of people that we cannot persuade our contemporaries to be. This places unrealistic expectations on teachers, schools and students. Adolescents have their own passions and interests. If you want to change society, you had better do so more directly rather than through school curriculums that you imagine will incline young people to do your future bidding. However, by improving conditions in schools, we enhance teachers’ ability to inspire and inform students, who need the resources to decide for themselves how to become creative and responsible citizens. Good schools are sufficient ends in their own right.
      • Commentator 1:
        1. Jefferson is the devil incarnate. Besides a few flowery words, the truth is that he swindled the taxpayers of Virginia into building HIS university which rapidly became party town for all the “trust fund” plantation kids. UVA was a party town for idiot racists even in my day, so seems little has changed over the past 200 years, which sounds about right for something Jefferson was involved in.
        2. Jefferson is a man who specifically enslaved little boys because he needed him for his nail making foundry, a HUGELY profitable business for old TJ. He’s also a serial rapist and the author of the Kentucky Resolutions, which he secretly authored and then lied about.
        3. The guy is a self-anointed fraud with just enough education to make his shtick believable. How anyone still respects that guy anymore is beyond me.
      • Commentator 2:
        1. We should judge people within the context of their times. Thomas Paine was perhaps a more pure figure philosophically, but he wasn’t able to do more than write. His ideas were illuminating but not foundational. Jefferson’s approach was to not only inspire but also to change and protect. He was a gradualist, true; but without his opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts and his advocacy of freedoms of religion, expression, press, assembly and conscience, we’d look as a nation a lot more like Texas today than anything else. We look entirely too much like it already, and not in a good way.
        2. Jefferson was certainly aware of his many contradictions but for his time, with his capabilities and skills, he is an example of our better angels. Neither he nor any of the other founders nor any of us is complete and without contradictions. How well we resolve them and we accomplish both despite and because of them is the only just way to consider them.
        3. No Jefferson, probably no state university system at all. Without Jefferson, no Library of Congress. Without Jefferson, no alternative to a society we might not want to envision – where Hamiltonian economics and Adams tendency toward the Unitary Exectutive would have been enthroned.
        4. Without Jefferson’s example and influence, the Constitution would have frozen society; but it is a living document, not the 12 Tablets of Rome but a procedural and process guide; without Jefferson’s example, encouragement and influence, the framers led in large part by Madison would not have conceived of a “more perfect union” and created a document that charges us to change, to become better, and to continue the American experiment.
  2. Notes
    • There’s lots to say about this:-
    • The article isn’t really about slavery, but it shows the difficulty of dismantling a slave society (rather than a society with slaves) without ruining its economy (or at least appearing to do so to the slave-owners). That’s why compensation for slave-owners (however distasteful it appears in seeming to acknowledge human beings as property) was a practical approach for Great Britain, but less so for the Antebellum South.
    • The reluctance of the land-owners to finance the education of the poor is noted; the argument that educating slaves makes them dissatisfied in their work applies to those that have to – on account of poverty – undertake menial and unfulfilling jobs. I imagine that in the golden future, when such jobs are undertaken by robots, ethicists and compensation lawyers will show outrage at how the middle and upper classes kept a section of society in poverty in order to get their bins emptied.
    • Jefferson seems to have a clear – but rather unenlightened – view of the purpose of education, which is to enable the citizenry of a democracy to resist the wiles of kings, aristocrats and other despots. There’s no mention of education as intellectual enrichment of the individual, though I agree that understanding how we got to where we are, how alternative societies run, and how the world works have practical as well as intellectual benefits.
    • The problem Jefferson’s eventual scheme – of creating a university to educate the future elite of an improving society – was that he spent all the money available on the buildings, so there was nothing left to support those who could not finance themselves. This had the effect of entrenching the then elite and their noxious views.
    • I doubt supporters of the ancient universities should get too smug about this, as for much of their history they did the same thing for the bulk of the students, though there were scholarships for the poor, even if the teaching wasn’t up to much.
    • I seem to remember another paper on Aeon charting the evolution of American universities from Jock academies to world-class academic institutions, but I couldn’t find it.
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Taylor (Alan) - Jefferson’s university"
Footnote 24: Aeon: Agren - An idea with bite (WebRef=11011)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: J Arvid Ågren
    • Author Narrative: J Arvid Ågren is a Wenner-Gren Fellow at Harvard University and Uppsala University, and the author of The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution (2021).
    • Aeon Subtitle: The ‘selfish gene’ persists for the reason all good scientific metaphors do: it remains a sharp tool for clear thinking
    • Author's Conclusion
      • To me, the gene’s-eye view has offered all the drama I need. More practically, the gene’s-eye view has persisted for the same reason all good metaphors do, because it aids our thinking as we take on the complexities of the living world. It helps us structure our thoughts and it prompts us to address questions that can be answered empirically. At their best, metaphors have many things in common with mathematical models in that they help to isolate and examine certain properties of a biological observation.
      • At their worst, they make us dismiss other things. For example, the metaphor of a ‘tree of life’ is a great way to illustrate the degree of relatedness between different species. Too much emphasis on species as branches can also lead us to ignore evidence of such phenomena as hybridisation and horizontal gene transfer. Conceptualising evolutionary history as a competition between selfish genes offers a powerful way to work out the logic of natural selection, and it seamlessly makes sense of things such as genomic conflicts. But the gene’s-eye view achieves its success by ignoring other properties of life. It happily sacrifices details about genes’ biochemical structure and their interaction. In situations where those details matter to evolution, the gene’s-eye view becomes less helpful.
      • We should always worry not only about what questions a metaphor makes us ask, but also what questions go unasked. That being said, biology is difficult, and we need all the help we can get. When properly understood, the gene’s-eye view offers some of the best help there is.
  2. Notes
Footnote 25: Aeon: Video - Hisako Koyama, the woman who stared at the sun (WebRef=10949)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Meet the citizen scientist who changed how we see the Sun, and science itself
    • Editor's Abstract
      • In 1944, while Tokyo was under Allied aerial attack, sirens warned citizens to remain indoors as the government blacked out the city. Hisako Koyama, a Tokyo resident then aged 28, used these perilous, dark moments as an opportunity to pursue her passion for astronomical observation.
      • But as this evocatively animated video from TED-Ed explores, it was her meticulous and innovative daylight sketches of the Sun that would ultimately capture the attention of the astronomy world.
      • Melding Koyama’s inspiring biography with the science of sunspots and solar flares, the short is at once a glimpse into the Sun’s somewhat hidden cycles and a celebration of the contributions of citizen scientists.
  2. Notes
    • Interesting and brief.
    • I was initially somewhat antipathetic about the topic - expecting it to be special pleading about allegedly unfairly forgotten and unrewarded female scientists, but it's not that at all.
    • It shows the importance of having an idea, and then following it through for years and decades.
    • It's mildly surprising that this massive data-collection exercise has been left to a 'citizen scientist', but maybe this is how it should be, leaving the detailed interpretation of the data to the appropriately qualified individuals, not wasting their time on straightforward stuff.
    • I was reminded of the division of labour between:-
      → Tycho Brahe (Wikipedia: Tycho Brahe)
      → Johannes Kepler (Wikipedia: Johannes Kepler)
      → Isaac Newton (Wikipedia: Isaac Newton)
    • I was glad the video didn't dwell on this, because the parallel isn't close. Brahe had to build his own telescope, decide what was worth recording, and was generally trail-blazing.
Footnote 26: Aeon: Video - Hacking enlightenment (WebRef=10952)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘Meditation without meditating’ might be possible. Can it also be made ethical?
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Over the past several decades, studies examining the potential for meditation to curb mental anguish and increase wellbeing have yielded promising, if complicated, results. For patients, complications can arise when meditation is marketed as a ‘happy pill, with no side effects’.
      • This commodification and oversimplification is at the root of a conundrum for Jay Sanguinetti and Shinzen Young, the co-directors of SEMA Lab (Sonication Enhanced Mindful Awareness) at the University of Arizona.
      • In the early stages of developing a technology that they believe could lead to meditative states without the need to meditate – a Silicon Valley-ready concept if there ever was one – the duo now must navigate the intricate ethics of introducing such a powerful product to the world.
      • This short film from The Guardian follows Sanguinetti and Shinzen in their quest to ‘democratise enlightenment’ via ultrasound technology, while also attempting to ensure that, when the time comes, it will be properly implemented as a therapeutic tool.
  2. Notes
Footnote 27: Aeon: Video - When can you trust the statistics? (WebRef=10939)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The modern world is littered with statistical noise. Here’s how to find the signal
    • Editor's Abstract
      • A $3.2 billion budget deficit; a 10 per cent improvement in quality of life; 760,000 jobs added this quarter. Confusing, out-of-context, incomplete and flat-out inaccurate statistics no doubt account for a good chunk of our era of information overload – although you wouldn’t want to put a percentage to that. In this video from BBC Ideas in collaboration with the Open University, the UK writer and broadcaster Tim Harford offers three helpful tips for sifting through the noise to find the signal when it comes to investigating statistical claims.
  2. Notes
    • Simple little video, with no maths.
    • Asks you to remember "three C's":-
      → Calm, Context, Curiosity
    • So, when faced with a statistical claim, disentangle your emotions, consider how this statistic fits in with whatever else we know, and do some digging.
Footnote 28: Aeon: Video - Between strangers (WebRef=10937)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Crowded spaces, complete strangers – meditations on the urban commute
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Perhaps no artwork has better expressed the peculiar commingling of togetherness and aloneness inherent to modern urban life than Nighthawks (1942). The US artist Edward Hopper’s painting depicts four characters’ lives intersecting, if not connecting, in a late-night New York City diner. While there’s very little suggestion of motion in the image, it carries an intense sense of trajectory – of past and present colliding to bring strangers into a single space. The figures populating the frame seem to possess entire lives outside of this scene that can only be hinted at by the artist, and guessed at by the viewer. Is the man sitting solo at the counter resting after a long day of work? Avoiding face-time with his family? Biding time before catching a train? It’s impossible to know, and oh-so human to wonder.
      • Like Hopper, the US filmmakers Jimmy Ferguson and Catherine Gubernick find inspiration in close-proximity urban disconnection and the impulse to craft narratives about the hidden lives of passersby in Between Strangers (2019). Throughout the short, a nameless male voice recalls the daily, mechanical idiosyncrasies of commuting to the heart of Manhattan. Accompanied by a series of artfully filmed black-and-white New York street scenes, the man contemplates the somewhat paradoxical anonymity of crowded commuter trains, subways cars and city streets. In particular, he reflects on the experience of having seen, but never having spoken to, a man he commuted alongside for some 15 years.
      • Although heads are captured buried in phones throughout, the film spares the viewer an overwrought or clichéd scolding on our modern lack of connection. (Look no further than Nighthawks for evidence that solitude and alienation predate the smartphone.) Instead, the film offers something much more original and honest. Navigated without judgment or an agenda, Between Strangers interrogates the ‘instinctive decision just to remain strangers’ – an experience that, while often unspoken or even uncontemplated, will nonetheless, for many viewers, be profoundly familiar.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Hopper's Nighthawks: look through the window.
    • I really enjoyed this film, much more than the commentary (though the link to Nighthawks was useful, though maybe not quite the same situation).
    • There are two situations mentioned on the account of the daily commute, and both have to do with the need - for one reason or another - not to connect with the person near you.
    • The first is the abusive muscle-man, whom you have to ignore since he's trying to pick a fight that he would certainly win.
    • The other is the fellow-commuter that you see every day but whom you have to ignore. As the narrator says, if you don't, you'll need to interact every day and you'll lose your personal space.
    • Both these situations remind me of my own commute. The narrator doesn't say what he does with his commuting time, but mine was precious to me as it gave me a couple of hours a day for my own projects either side of those imposed by work and home. I've known people set up bridge schools on long commutes, but this would be to waste the time, in my view, though better than just nattering.
    • Which further reminds me that there were unwritten rules for commuter trains - nattering was not allowed, and it was very irritating when people broke the rules - and the silence.
    • All this has nothing to do with a failure to 'connect' in the modern world; hence, maybe, it differs from the chap in Nighthawks who may simply be lonely. That said, I often used to dine alone in a restaurant when working away from home. It seemed odd initially, but you get used to it, with the help of a half-carafe or two of red wine.
    • Commuting in a big city is completely different from what happens on occasional journeys. Even there, you might have things to do, though these get tiresome during a long journey and some interaction with strangers might provide relief, especially as you're less likely to see them again and so incur on-going 'maintenance costs'.
Footnote 29: Aeon: Video - Kids game (WebRef=10931)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The charity that teaches underprivileged kids to humanely hunt their next meal
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The San Antonio metropolitan region is one of the highest-poverty areas in the United States. Roughly one in four children living there experiences hunger.
      • The short documentary Kids Game follows a hunting outing led by the charity City Kids Adventures, which offers outdoor excursions to underprivileged and at-risk San Antonio youth.
      • Capturing the participants in a non-intrusive verité style, the Belgian-born, US-based director Michiel Thomas skilfully tracks the action with a nonjudgmental eye, bringing evenhandedness to a scene – kids holding large guns, learning to kill – that could easily be misconstrued or politicised.
      • Instead, Thomas invites the viewer to draw out and interrogate their own reactions, whether it’s alarm at the image of kids shooting animals, warmth at the teachers’ focus on ethics and growth, frustration at the children’s food poverty despite their country’s vast wealth, or perhaps more likely, some incongruous combination thereof.
  2. Notes
    • This is a well-made film, but one that left me with mixed emotions and muddled thoughts - much as the Editors' Abstract would suggest.
    • The idea seems to be that the children get to go on an adventure and provide food for themselves and their families (though maybe not very much).
    • It looked like the chosen children were the 'deserving poor' - they seemed well-spoken and sensitive, and not overly enthusiastic about killing animals. They didn’t look the sort to go toting guns round the ‘hood.
    • Maybe there's a sub-plot of exposing 'city kids' to where their meat (when they can get it) comes from. It's certainly 'harvested' more humanely than would be the case in a commercial abattoir, though maybe the ‘shots’ are selective. It doesn’t seem that humane – whatever the instructions to the contrary – to have completely untrained kids taking pot-shots at live animals. It could only happen in the US – or at least it couldn’t happen in the UK.
    • I wondered whether there would be too much pressure to ‘make a kill’ and what happens to those children who – for whatever reason – don’t?
Footnote 30: Aeon: Video - Kabuki: The classic theatre of Japan (WebRef=10934)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Close-up on kabuki – the colourful ‘pure entertainment’ of Japan’s Edo period
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Kabuki theatre is a highly stylised form of dance-drama that came to prominence during Japan’s isolationist Edo period (1603-1867). At the height of its popularity in the mid-18th century, skilled kabuki performers became celebrities, with their likenesses carved into colour woodblock prints and sold as mementos.
      • Commissioned by the the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, this film from 1964 showcases vivid scenes from a kabuki theatre in Tokyo, where masters of the form still perform for eager audiences today.
      • A colourful melding of ‘pure entertainment’ and artistry, it’s easy to become engrossed in kabuki’s hallmark eccentricities – especially the characters’ exaggerated make-up, costumes, movements and intonations. Aspects of the form captured in the film – including its post-feudal themes and use of male actors in both masculine and feminine roles – also provide small glimpses into the mores and values of the Edo period.
  2. Notes
    • Worth watching, if only for the enlightenment that the female parts are performed by male actors.
    • Also interesting was the role of the koken (stage hands and assistants who are also stylised actors but carry on their role to assist the main actors in a semi-invisible manner).
    • But, without understanding of the language and of the social tensions of the Edo period, it's not possible to get much of an idea of what is going on, and why.
    • However stylish it is, it rapidly gets dull for outsiders.
Footnote 31: Aeon: Golob - Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid (WebRef=10911)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Sasha Golob
    • Author Narrative: Sacha Golob is a reader in philosophy at King’s College London and co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Visual Arts (CPVA). He has published extensively on modern French and German philosophy and the philosophy of art. His current research explores moral progress and decline.
    • Introductory Snippet
      • Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Stupidity is tough to fix. This is exacerbated by the way it dovetails with other vices: stubbornness stops me from revisiting my concepts even as they fail me. But once we understand stupidity’s nature, things are a little brighter than they might seem. To view political opponents as primarily cynical transforms them into Machiavellian monsters, leaving no space for anything but a zero-sum battle for domination. To view political opponents as primarily dumb is to suggest an irreparable flaw – one that, in our deeply hierarchical society, we often project on to those without the ‘right’ educational credentials. Both moves also offer a certain false reassurance: with a bit of reflection, we can be fairly sure that we are not cynical and, with the right credentials, we can prove that we are not dumb. But we might well, nevertheless, be caught in the net of stupidity. If history is anything to go by, a few hundred years from now, our descendants will find at least one part of contemporary morality almost unintelligible – ‘How could decent people ever have believed that?’ If they are not to condemn us as evil, they might well have to conclude that we were stupid.
  2. Notes
Footnote 32: Aeon: Middleton - Poseidon’s wrath (WebRef=10910)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Guy D. Middleton
    • Author Narrative: Guy D Middleton is a visiting fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University. His books include Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths (2017) and Collapse and Transformation: The Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age in the Aegean (2020).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Vanished beneath the waves in 373 BCE, Helike is a byword for thinking about disaster, for ancients and moderns alike
    • Author's Conclusion
      • What exactly happened to ancient Helike and Bura is not clear, despite more than 50 years of scrutiny by archaeologists and geologists. But we can be sure that there was a catastrophe of some kind that destroyed the city and killed many inhabitants, which was sufficiently powerful to make Helike a byword for disaster; we know enough about the region to believe that it is plausible.
      • Contemporary calamities such as the Indian Ocean tsunami can show us the real human experience – the terror, the cost in lives, and the aftermath – of these ancient disasters, as well as pointing to the way people respond to such events, and even how they might eventually recover from them.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting and easy read.
    • There's much presentation of the ancient evidence, together with the disappointing modern archaeology.
    • While it looks certain (to me) that Helike was once under the sea, it's not clear that it still is, such is the geological instability of the region.
    • We are referred to Aeon: Video - Plato's Atlantis.
Footnote 33: Aeon: Video - Cosmology in the dark (WebRef=10894)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Pedro G. Ferreira
    • Aeon Subtitle: Building ‘bigger and better’ has pushed cosmology forward. Can it take it any further?
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Over the past half-century, cosmology has evolved from a largely speculative science to one founded in precise and rigorous measurement and observation. Much of this transformation has been built on the back of increasingly powerful tools for observing the Universe, from telescopes to gravitational wave detectors. However, following decades of breakthroughs, this extraordinary progress has recently come to something of a halt, stalled by several mysteries: dark matter, dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
      • So how should cosmologists press forward? In this instalment of Aeon’s In Sight series, Pedro G. Ferreira, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, addresses what he calls the ‘cosmological chasm’ between ‘the physics we know and love, and some of the phenomena that we observe, but simply can’t make head nor tail of’.
      • Offering something of a ‘state of the field’, Ferreira charts three distinct approaches scientists could take to address the vexing puzzles of dark matter, including why ‘building bigger and better’ tools and collecting ever-greater amounts of data might or might not be the answer.
  2. Notes
    • This talk is not hugely informative, and is little more than a reminder of Aeon: Ferreira - The cosmic chasm.
    • His three approaches - which I didn't altogether understand (as far as relevance is concerned) are:-
      1. Phenomenological models - trying to fit stuff together even if this breaks our favoured models.
      2. To look at the dynamics of individual galaxies, on which we have huge amounts of data.
      3. Use table-top experiments utilising QM - eg. interferometry with atoms.
Footnote 34: Aeon: Video - The great wave by Hokusai (WebRef=10888)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: How Hokusai’s Great Wave emerged from Japan’s isolation to become a global icon
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Under the Wave off Kanagawa (or simply The Great Wave) by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was instantly popular in Japan upon its first printing around 1830. In the decades since, the work has grown to become a global phenomenon, with reproductions ubiquitous on the internet and lining a great many suburban living-room walls.
      • The UK art writer James Payne takes on Hokusai’s masterpiece in this instalment from his YouTube series, Great Art Explained. And, as he explores, there’s something quite apropos about the piece’s widespread popularity, given that woodblock printing was then a highly commercialised Japanese art form and that, with time, the piece came to symbolise the end of Japan’s isolationist Edo period (1603-1867).
      • Examining Hokusai’s life, times and work in the context of art history, Payne provides a sharp analysis of why The Great Wave has become such a resounding artistic and commercial success.
Footnote 35: Aeon: Video - Aerial sheep herding in Yokneam (WebRef=10891)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Watch the elegant flow of a sheep herd, seen from the sky above Israel
    • Editor's Abstract
      • When it comes to mesmerising animal flock movements, starlings tend to get all the love. But this short video from the Israeli aerial photographer and filmmaker Lior Patel makes the case that, given an overhead view and a bit of a speed nudge, a flock of sheep can be just as captivating.
      • Following the movements of a herd ranging from 1,000 to 1,750 sheep over seven months above the Peace Valley in northern Israel, Patel constructed this compelling video. Seen from a distance and then sped up, the animals trickle across the frame like a fluid substance.
      • The resulting short makes for a small peek into dynamics of herding behaviours, as well as a striking spectacle.
Footnote 36: Aeon: Video - Plato's Atlantis (WebRef=10875)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Not a lost kingdom but a parable – how to read Athens in Plato’s story of Atlantis
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The supposed mystery of whether Atlantis was truly a kingdom lost to time all but disintegrates after reading Plato’s writings on the mythical state. As described in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, both written around 360 BCE, the island nation was an idyllic land of plenty. Its inhabitants – sired and ruled over by Poseidon, and thus half-gods and half-mortals – ‘despised everything but virtue’. Ultimately, however, ‘human nature got the upper hand’, causing them to fall out of the gods’ favour, and dooming the kingdom to become an ‘impassable barrier of mud’ following a devastating earthquake.
      • This video from the YouTube channel Voices of the Past provides a direct translation of Plato’s surviving words on Atlantis from Critias. An imagined nation constructed to provide a foil to his ideal society, Plato nonetheless leaves few details to the reader’s imagination in his descriptions of the land. Beyond the structures of Atlantis’s government and the character of its people, the text is replete with intricate details on topics ranging from local wildlife to cuisine, architecture and design. The text is also notable for what’s been lost to time. Zeus, seeing that the people of Atlantis have become ‘full of avarice and unrighteous power’, gathers all the gods and – well, the rest we might never know. Ostensibly a morality tale of a people that had it all and lost it to greed and infighting, read today, the text makes for an intriguing insight into Athenian culture during Plato’s life.
  2. Notes
    • I've no doubt that the Author is right - that this is a parable, much like "More (Thomas), Marius (Richard), Ed. - Utopia", which also has lots of detail.
    • I'd have preferred a discussion of this contention and the lessons to be learnt for contemporary society rather than just a reading of Critias in a rather ironic voice.
    • See Wikipedia: Atlantis.
Footnote 37: Aeon: Video - Is life meaningless? And other absurd questions (WebRef=10863)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Albert Camus built a philosophy of humanity on a foundation of absurdity
    • Editors' Abstract
      • With a worldview formed amid the unfathomable human suffering of the early 20th century, Albert Camus’s writings reflect on the inherent absurdity of the human condition, including his best-known work, the novella The Stranger (1942).
      • But the arc of his career, from his ‘cycle of the absurd’ and his ‘cycle of revolt’ to his ‘cycle of love’ – left unfinished after Camus himself met a rather meaningless end in a car accident – points towards a humane philosophy, centred on a defiant pursuit of freedom and value in a futile, incomprehensible universe.
      • This animation from TED-Ed scopes Camus’s career, outlook and cultural influence, shedding light on how, where he might have found hopelessness, he instead found inspiration.
      • For more on Camus’s life, including how his worldview clashed with those of his existentialist contemporaries, watch the Aeon original animation Sartre vs Camus.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Albert Camus
    • I found this brief Video clear and enlightening, though was surprised to be told that The Stranger ("Camus (Albert), Connolly (Cyril), Gilbert (Stuart) - The Outsider") was a more seminal novel than "Camus (Albert), Gilbert (Stuart) - The Plague".
    • The Video title, while witty, gives the wrong impression. The question 'Is life meaningless?' isn't an absurd question. But, finding a meaning for life is difficult in the face of life's absurdities (like Camus's early and random death as a passenger in a car crash).
    • I think the feeling of meaninglessness stems from unsatisfiable demands for permanence, and treating life as a goal ("salvation") rather than as a process that has to come to an end.
    • We give our lives meaning by our projects and relationships. If some of what we do outlives us, all to the good - assuming we do good. We can't sensibly ask for more.
    • See "Nagel (Thomas) - The Absurd" which deals with – and rejects – Camus’s response to the perceived absurdity of life.
    • Otherwise ... there was no reference to Camus being a goalie for Algeria, though this seems to have been an exaggeration, as he only played for a junior team of a club, and retired with tuberculosis aged 17.
    • For the referenced Aeon Video, see Aeon: Video - Sartre vs Camus, which references on to a third item - a brief Paper this time.
    • See Wikipedia: Albert Camus.
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Is life meaningless? And other absurd questions"
Footnote 38: Aeon: Tillson - Imagine you could insert knowledge into your mind: should you? (WebRef=10855)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: John Tillson
    • Author Narrative: John Tillson is a senior lecturer in philosophy of education at Liverpool Hope University, UK. He is the author of Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence (2019).
    • Author's Conclusion
      • It’s true that our journeys sometimes form part of our goals: when our purpose is to climb a mountain rather than simply be at the top; to score a goal rather than just place a ball in the back of net. In those cases, knowledge insertion might not help us achieve what we want. However, it would enrich our set of opportunities for effort, achievement and state value, while leaving us plenty of time to make the most of them. If we could, then, we should use knowledge insertion often.
      • Since we can’t (at least not yet), we can still appreciate that teacher-student relationships are valuable in themselves, and that our efforts and achievements are valuable precisely because they’re unavoidable for reaching our goals. At the same time, we should feel relaxed about taking shortcuts – because it’s not always the journey that matters.
  2. Notes
    • This is a stimulating paper, which I intend to comment on in detail shortly.
    • The author comes down on the side of “knowledge insertion” being a good thing that we should accept if it ever comes available, mainly on the grounds that knowledge is a good thing, that time saved in its acquisition can be used for other worthwhile purposes, and that any ancillary benefits of traditional education can be achieved in other ways, again using the time saved.
    • We are referred to Aeon: Hanusiak - Feel free to stop striving: learn to relish being an amateur, on this general topic.
    • It is, of course, a plug for the author's "Is Knowledge Insertion Desirable?", Educational Theory, Volume70, Issue4, August 2020, Pages 483-505, which is – unfortunately – behind a pay-wall.
    • The starting point is consideration of Neo's learning Kung Fu in The Matrix (a commentator points out that this is portrayed as rapid learning, rather than 'knowledge insertion')
    • A couple of points immediately struck me.
    • The first was not just the remoteness of the ultimate practically, but the very coherence (and under-specification) of such Thought Experiments. Just how is this knowledge to be "inserted"?
    • The second had to do with the pace of (psychological) change: identity may not be preserved if too much change is made too quickly.
    • Further comments – and the elaboration of the above – will have to await my paper on this topic!
    • PID Note: Transhumanism
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Tillson (John) - Imagine you could insert knowledge into your mind: should you?"
Footnote 39: Aeon: Video - Nero: the man behind the myth (WebRef=10834)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A balanced account of Nero’s life reveals the ‘editing and destruction’ of history-making
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Popular culture and even historical writings are replete with depictions of Nero, the emperor of Rome from 54-68 CE, as a tyrant, uninterested in the suffering of his subjects and inclined towards almost every form of sadism imaginable. The truth, however, is much more complicated.
      • In this video from the British Museum, the curators Thorsten Opper and Francesca Bologna provide a tour of the exhibition ‘Nero: The Man Behind the Myth’, which will be featured at the museum from 27 May to 24 October 2021.
      • Taking viewers through an array of artefacts offering insights into Nero’s life, times and legacy, Opper and Bologna present Nero as a complex figure, capable of acts of cruelty, but also broadly popular with the Roman citizenry.
      • In doing so, they also shed light on the process of history-making more generally, which, while not necessarily ‘written by the winners’, is certainly shaped by a confluence of political manoeuvring, elite opinion and surviving materials.
  2. Notes
    • This strikes me as yet another attempt to demonstrate that everything we thought we knew about the past is upside down - with all the heroes being villains and the villains heroes.
    • This can be done sensibly (as with Caligula, showing that his early reign was positive and popular, before he ‘went mad’).
    • And it is also true that history is written by the victors, so Nero – like Richard III – might have got an undeservedly bad press.
    • But contrasting the opinion of the elite with the people isn’t normally seen as a sensible approach. Nero was a populist and appealed to the people, but we wouldn’t take the then contemporary positive popular evaluation of Donald Trump – or Adolf Hitler, for that matter – as indicative of their true standing and worth.
    • Also, it’s worth asking why the particular antipathy towards Nero? Suetonius is hardly enthusiastic about any of the 12 Caesars. In later ages, Nero was hated because of his persecution of the Christians, but this would have made him popular at the time, and didn’t contribute to his damnatio memoriae by the senate (which was, admittedly, reversed by Vitellius (a usurper presumably seeking authentication and hardly a reliable judge of character) – see Wikipedia: Damnatio Memoriae).
    • The decision to bury – rather than repurpose – the Domus Aurea (see Wikipedia: Domus Aurea) is extraordinary without some very strong motivation.
    • I’m unconvinced by suggestions that all the political tensions arose from the resented power of the women in the Julio-Claudian household in a patriarchal society – another popular contemporary trope.
    • This presentation focuses on every positive reading of the evidence (or non-evidence) and only very reluctantly admits to any negatives. While it may attempt to ‘redress the balance’ it is not in any way a ‘balanced account’. In fact, it is itself an example of the ‘’editing and destruction’ of history-making’.
Footnote 40: Aeon: Video - Not the same river. Not the same man. (WebRef=10832)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A leaf, a bird and a fisherman animate Heraclitus’ aphorism on flux
    • Editors' Abstract
      • It is not possible, said the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, to step into the same river twice. As the argument goes, the river is made up of constantly flowing waters, for one thing; for another, people themselves are always changing – life experiences accumulating like sediment on a stream bed. Heraclitus was alluding to the idea of flux: that it doesn’t make sense to think in terms of static states of being, but, rather, in terms of processes unfolding over time.
      • In the contemplative film Not the Same River. Not the Same Man by the German-English filmmaker Michelle Brand, a fisherman takes his boat out to a river, while a bird circles above, and a leaf falls, tracing ripples on the water’s surface. In just a few hand-painted lines of bold blue, black and red acrylic, Brand captures the river’s flow and the fleeting thoughts of the fisherman as they animate his face. Staggered, overlapping frames create an echo of movements just gone by. The pulsing soundtrack, by the Polish accordion ensemble Motion Trio, captures the insistent pull of the water. Both the river and the fisherman are in constant change, but they also transform each other: when the fisherman steps into the river, eddies swirl away from him; and the river washes and soothes his feet, feeds him with fish. A bird, flying in and out of the scene, seems to wait for the chance to catch a fish stirred up by the fisherman’s presence.
      • Animation, a process that turns static images into movement over time, is an apt medium for Heraclitus’ aphorism. Each frame is hand-painted, so even moments of stillness seem to flicker with the subtle variations in how a line was formed or how the paint dried. No two frames, and no two moments, are identical. Yet, the past leaves its mark on the present, like small waves in the boat’s wake.
      • Heraclitus’ ideas are known to us only through fragments, preserved in the writings of others, with most of his work lost to time. His aphorism of the river has been picked up and turned over like a pebble in the palms of so many thinkers over the millennia – accruing new layers of meaning through different interpretations. For some, Heraclitus’ ancient theory of flux even seems to have anticipated some of the latest ideas in quantum mechanics.
      • The idea of impermanence, of fleeting, ephemeral moments, can be a melancholy one for those who would wish to hold on to a cherished state, but the idea of flux also suggest possibilities for new experiences and sensations in the inevitable process of transformation. As the fisherman himself seems to dissolve in fluttering lines of paint, he joins the river on its course – a final metamorphosis wrought by time.
        → Written by Freya Howarth
  2. Notes
    • The Editor’s Abstract is essential if you want to make any sense of the animation which – like Heraclitus’ aphorism – is obscure and you can make of it what you like.
    • I though it absurd to suggest that there’s any connection between Heraclitus’ ideas and Quantum Mechanics: much less so than Democritus and atomism, which is at least a speculation in the same area.
    • But the Editor is right to make the connection to "Vieira (Celso) - Which is more fundamental: processes or things?". Aristotle, together with most subsequent philosophers (and common sense) went for Substances as persisting things, rather than a Process view.
    • The author draws attention to the frames of the animation, but doesn’t make the connection to the stages of a perdurantist account of persistence, which is also contrary to the Substance view.
    • I suppose that Benedict de Spinoza’s idea of a single substance – God or Nature – marries the two views (though effectively sides with the Process view).
    • PID Note: Change
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Not the same river. Not the same man."
Footnote 41: Aeon: Video - Rotifiers: charmingly bizarre and often ignored (WebRef=10826)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: An ode to the humble rotifer – one of nature’s simplest and strangest creatures
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Ever since humans first peered into the microbial world in the late-17th century, observers have been intrigued and mystified by the roughly 1,000-celled creatures known as rotifers.
      • Scientists have learned much about these small animals over the past several hundred years, having identified some 2,000 species in the phylum Rotifera. But much about them, including their reasons for congregating in colonies and their ability to reemerge following extensive hibernation, remains mysterious.
      • This short video from the YouTube channel Journey to the Microcosmos takes a close-up look at how these creatures live, die and dry out to enter a peculiar state somewhere in between.
      • Brimming with captivating visuals and insights, the video provides an intriguing look into the intricate world of small-scale life unfolding just out of human sight.
  2. Notes
Footnote 42: Aeon: Reeves - Lies and honest mistakes (WebRef=10831)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Richard V. Reeves
    • Author Narrative: Richard V Reeves is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he directs the Future of the Middle Class Initiative and co-directs the Center on Children and Families. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, National Affairs, and The New York Times, among others. His latest book is Dream Hoarders (2017). He lives in Washington, DC.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Our crisis of public knowledge is an ethical crisis. Rewarding ‘truthfulness’ above ‘truth’ is a step towards a solution
  2. Notes
    • This is - mostly - very sensible stuff.
    • It is heavily indebted to "Williams (Bernard) - Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy".
    • It is good to point out that a false statement is not necessarily a lie - it may be made in good faith - but if it is repeated after the mistake is pointed out, it then becomes a lie.
    • He also points out the importance of presenting the evidence in a balanced way, and not just selecting that which bolsters your case.
    • But the most important aspect is to actually care that what you say is true, and - up to your limits - to check that it is so.
    • Something that was especially useful was the suggestion that social media companies are accountable for what goes on on their platforms not so much for failing to police it, but because of their business model which encourages "click bait" rather than truth. Unfortunately, there has to be a business model of some sort and if the current companies switched to something like a subscription service, people would migrate in droves to the free services that would spring up using the click-bait model. The genie is out of the bottle.
    • A couple of other useful Aeon papers are cited:-
      → Aeon: O'Connor - The information arms race can’t be won, but we have to keep fighting, and
      → Aeon: Dermendzhiyska - The misinformation virus
    • There are a lot of comments, which I've not had time to read in detail yet.
Footnote 43: Aeon: Video - How an infinite hotel ran out of room (WebRef=10807)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Check in to the Hilbert Hotel, and learn why some infinities are bigger than others
    • Editors' Abstract
      • In 1924, the German mathematician David Hilbert raised a peculiar and seemingly paradoxical question: are some infinities bigger than others? The answer he arrived at – yes, actually – might have been impenetrable to non-mathematicians if not for the thought experiment he devised involving a hotel with an infinite number rooms.
      • This video from the Australian filmmaker and educator Derek Muller builds Hilbert’s ‘infinite hotel’ and populates it with some strange, fuzzy creatures to demonstrate how the mathematician arrived at his groundbreaking conclusion, and touches on the real-world implications of his discovery.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting popularisation piece on an example of the diagonalisation argument.
    • I'd always thought of this as being due to Gregor Cantor (see Wikipedia: Cantor's diagonal argument, 1891) rather than David Hilbert (see Wikipedia: Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel, 1924), and I suppose Hilbert popularised Cantor's discovery.
    • The film (and Editors' Abstract) ends with an enigmatic reference to practical applications - the film implies for the mobile phone. Maybe for encryption?
Footnote 44: Aeon: Coffman - The Margaret Mead problem (WebRef=10809)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Elesha J. Coffman
    • Aeon Subtitle: Mead, so radical about gender and sex in her early work, doubled down on the differences between men and women later. Why?
    • Extracts
      • Introduction: Viola Klein was vexed. She did not know the world-famous anthropologist Margaret Mead personally, but she had glimpsed Mead’s mind in her groundbreaking early books, especially the radical study Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). Klein also studied gender roles, although her own first book, The Feminine Character (1946), had not made nearly as big a splash as Mead’s. Klein believed that the two scholars were on the same side of the fight to liberate women from outmoded, biologically based restrictions. And then, in 1949, it seemed that Mead’s mind changed. Klein’s ally had become an enemy, and she wanted to know why.
      • Conclusion: (Mead) admitted to Klein that her graduate students ‘were completely enraged after I had given a semester on cultural conditioning, when I gave a final lecture on temperament. [They] said with great bitterness that I couldn’t have it both ways.’ She did want to have it both ways – sex and temperament, male and female, nature and nurture. Why choose, when life always offered so many different experiences and mysteries?
  2. Notes
Footnote 45: Aeon: Video - By the river (WebRef=10805)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: At India’s ‘death hotels’, devout Hindus seek liberation from cycles of rebirth
    • Editors' Abstract
      • For the people of Varanasi – the holiest of India’s seven sacred cities – death is a blessing. Stretching along the banks of the river Ganges, Varanasi is a place where devout Hindus go to die in the hope of achieving moksha: freedom from the endless cycle of death and rebirth (samsara). ‘Death hotels’ provide a home for those in wait: from the elderly or dying to some who are in good health when they check in and spend half a lifetime waiting for their salvation. For such healthy devotees, the promise of going ‘directly to God’ and a peaceful death make living in a death hotel an essential aspect of their being, even if it means leaving family and friends behind.
      • In By the River, the Norwegian Brazilian director Dan Braga Ulvestad brings us inside the spiritual gates of Varanasi, immersing us in a city where funeral pyres burn in plain sight and decomposed bodies float downstream. Interviewing the faithful residing in two hotels, Mumukshu Bhawan and Mukti Bhawan, Ulvestad examines how deeply embedded death is in the culture, conversation and conscience of those living in Varanasi – children and adults alike. One resident explains that many locals cremate bodies for their livelihoods, a cultural tradition that has been passed down through generations – and one that is not reserved for adults alone. In a surprising turn, a group of children candidly discuss how they, too, partake in the ritual: ‘we burn the body and our work is done’.
      • The film’s final sequence at the Ganga Aarta ceremony offers us a sense of how intimately connected the living are with those who came before them. This spiritual ritual is an explosion of music, prayer and fire, bringing thousands together on the banks of the River Ganges to honour the dead. Ulvestad and the Australian director of photography Caleb Ware capture expressions of grief and solemn reflection as the bodies of the recently deceased are enveloped by crackling fire. While orange embers fly through the night sky, tears streak the cheeks of those moved by the ceremony. Prayers are whispered over the beat of drums and sound of horns; flowers are scattered; and the sky becomes shrouded in smoke.
      • By the River grapples with profound and enduring questions: what does it mean to have a good death? Can the true meaning of life be understood only in dying? What does it mean to be forever in search of salvation – and what can that pursuit cost? Underlying the film’s artful visuals are ideas about the mechanics of suffering and of contentment. The result is an engrossing portrayal of a cultural tradition, as well as a powerful contemplation of the human condition.
  2. Notes
    • See Wikipedia: Moksha. Moksha seems to be the Hindu equivalent of the Buddhist nirvana. But, I think it's a state of bliss rather than of nonexistence.
    • For Varanasi (Benares) see Wikipedia: Varanasi.
    • The film is - of course - interesting and poignant, but is uncritical of the beliefs underlying the practices recorded.
    • For instance, where does the idea of 8.4 million rebirths before achieving human status come from, and why should anyone believe it, even if reincarnation makes any sense?
    • PID Note: Death
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - By the river"
Footnote 46: Aeon: Video - Charting animal cognition (WebRef=10802)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Marta Halina
    • Aeon Subtitle: How a ‘periodic table’ of animal intelligence could help to root out human bias
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Over the past several decades, issues of animal rights have transformed from something of a niche cause to a mainstream concern in much of the world. It’s no coincidence that this increased consciousness has occurred amid a flurry of research detailing how nonhuman animals thrive, suffer, emote and process information in ways quite similar to humans. And it’s not just our primate cousins that seem to possess surprising levels of smarts – even small-brained creatures such as honeybees can count and grasp abstract concepts. Our rapidly evolving understanding of nonhuman animal intelligence poses myriad important questions for scientists, philosophers and lawmakers. For instance, to what extent should legal protections of ‘personhood’ apply to nonhuman animals? And can we ever hope to get past our own biases when assessing the minds of other beings?
      • As Marta Halina, a senior lecturer in philosophy of cognitive science at the University of Cambridge, explains in this latest instalment of Aeon’s In Sight series, these emerging ethical issues demand a new framework for helping us to better understand cognition in its many varieties and root out anthropocentrism. One potential tool, Halina says, is through creating something akin to a periodic table of elements for intelligence, guided by both qualitative and quantitative assessments. Through her work on a new initiative researching ‘the major shifts in computational organisation that allowed evolving brains to process information in new ways’, Halina hopes to help build a scientifically rigorous backbone for this proposed ‘periodic table’ of cognition.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting project, but a bit low on the details of what this "periodic table" would look like.
    • But I like the idea of looking into the evolutionary lineages and seeing where the major changes in cognition occur.
    • I'm slightly suspicious of the current craze for praising the cognitive abilities of bees. Whatever tricks they can be persuaded to perform, can they really be claimed to possess Concepts (of zero, or anything else)?
    • I agree that non-human animals should have their cognitive abilities evaluated in their own terms, rather than by comparison with those of human beings. But I'm not convinced that researchers who agree with this really take it on board, preferring tricks such as tool use (which has been a major cause of human progress) to - say - social skills.
    • Also, isn't the key point in our treatment of other animals whether they can - and to what degree - suffer, both physically and mentally, rather than which human-devised obstacle-courses they can run? In particular, is there anything it is like to be that animal? That’s why I don’t like the waters being muddied by bees and sponges.
    • PID Note: Animals
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Halina (Marta) - Video - Charting animal cognition"
Footnote 47: Aeon: Reiff - How important is white fear? (WebRef=10804)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mark R. Reiff
    • Author Narrative: Mark R Reiff is a Political, Legal and Moral Philosopher, University of California, Davis. He lives in Sacramento. He is the author of the books In the Name of Liberty: The Argument for Universal Unionization (Cambridge University Press, 2020); On Unemployment, Volume I and II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), xploitation and Economic Justice in the Liberal Capitalist State (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Punishment, Compensation, and Law: A Theory of Enforceability (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He is currently working on his fifth book, called The Unbearable Resilience of Illiberalism. He has taught political, legal, and moral philosophy at the University of Manchester, the University of Durham, the University of California at Davis, Sonoma State University, and the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. In 2008-09 he was a Faculty Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
    • Aeon Subtitle: It’s become a commonplace that demographic anxiety is driving white voters to the far Right. This is dangerously wrong
    • Author's Introduction
      • Why are so many white people throughout the liberal democratic world moving to the illiberal Right? The conventional explanation is that they are being driven by fear of the ‘demographic shift’. That is, because of immigration, both legal and illegal, and differing fertility rates among the relevant groups, white people of specific ethnic and religious backgrounds will soon no longer make up the electoral majority in the regions they currently dominate. Losing their majority status, in turn, is understood as meaning that the days of white privilege and political dominance in liberal democratic societies are now numbered.
      • An alarming number of whites, however, are not prepared to allow a commitment to liberalism to stand in the way of resisting the threat that the demographic shift seems to pose to their self-interest. They are accordingly embracing nationalist, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and other anti-liberal attitudes, and the parties and politicians that express them, in an effort to retain their social, political, economic and cultural dominance.
      • ...
      • But the demographic shift explanation is in fact both unconvincing and dangerous. It is unconvincing because it is built on a series of what are in fact highly implausible presumptions. It is dangerous because it disguises the fact that what is really going on is not a battle with what philosophers call akrasia, or weakness of the moral will – the struggle to live up to our moral ideals when doing so seems contrary to our self-interest. Rather, the battle is over what moral values society should embrace. It is a battle over whether society should remain committed to liberalism, even if imperfectly so, or whether it should reject the aspirations of liberalism entirely and embrace illiberalism and all the consequences that flow from this.
  2. Notes
    • Well, this is an interesting paper that deserves a closer read than the one I've given it.
    • But it seems to describe society in a very prejudicial way as divided between the sainted liberals - who display all the liberal virtues and beliefs - and the rest (or at least the white rest) who hold the antithesis of these beliefs and display all the illiberal vices. Things are much more complex.
    • It's also very US-centric, and assumes there is such a thing as "white privilege" that those who enjoy it will do all in their power to preserve.
    • This is all very debateable, and the response - from what I'd always imagined would be an overwhelmingly liberal readership - has been at best mixed (I've saved the comments and the author's responses for future analysis).
    • However, I need to read up on just what liberalism is now supposed to be, and "Fawcett (Edmund) - Liberalism: The Life of an Idea" would be a good place to start.
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Reiff (Mark R.) - How important is white fear?"
Footnote 48: Aeon: Zadra - What dream characters reveal about the astonishing dreaming brain (WebRef=10803)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Antonio Zadra
    • Author Narrative: Antonio Zadra is a sleep and dream researcher at the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur’s Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine and a professor of psychology at the Université de Montréal. His books include When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep (2021), co-authored with Robert Stickgold, and The Dreamkeepers (2020), a suspense novel blending sleep science with dream mythology. He lives in Montreal, Canada.
    • Extract
      • In our recent book, When Brains Dream (2021), Robert Stickgold, a sleep and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School, and I drew on scientific findings to argue that while dreaming, the brain explores novel and creative associations between recently formed memories and older, often only weakly related memories, and monitors whether the resulting narrative constructed from these memories induces an emotional response. If an emotional feeling is detected, we argue that the brain tags the association as potentially valuable, strengthening the link between the two memories and making the association available once you wake up.
      • This model suggests that one adaptive function of dreams resides in the brain’s ability to imagine possibilities within our dreams, to evaluate our reactions to them, and to use this information to better prepare us for an uncertain future. This overarching function of dreams is likely optimised when people react to their dreams much like they react to the things they consciously experience during wakefulness. And, for the most part, that’s exactly how we behave in our dreams. After all, it’s usually only after we wake up that we realise that the experience we were having was in fact a dream. While immersed in the dream-world, we typically believe that the dream is real, which is why we feel sad in a dream upon being told that a loved one has passed away, or bewildered by the fact that we find ourselves unprepared for that high-school exam, or why we run away in a panic from a knife-wielding figure.
      • If our model is correct, it would help to explain why the people we encounter in our dreams, while not physically real, certainly seem to behave as if they are, and why we, the dreamers, routinely engage with them as if they were autonomous, conscious beings. The unpredictability of dream characters is also consistent with, and important for, several other recent models of dream function, such as: the threat simulation theory of dreams (this is the idea that dreams evolved to help prepare us for a range of real-life threats and dangers); the social simulation theory of dreams (which sees dreaming as an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism that allows us to rehearse waking social perceptions and interactions); and the longstanding idea that dreams play a role in emotion regulation.
  2. Notes
Footnote 49: Aeon: Mackay - The whitewashing of Rome (WebRef=10789)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jamie Mackay
    • Author Narrative: Jamie Mackay is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Frieze and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. He is the author of The Invention of Sicily (July 2021). He lives in Florence, Italy.
    • Aeon Subtitle: White supremacists fetishise ancient Rome – but antiquity was more diverse and polychromatic than racists will admit
    • Author's Conclusion
      • The significance of Rome changes with every generation, and ours is no exception. Yet there is an opportunity here, as well as a threat. While classicists face the urgent question of how to redeem their discipline from colonial bias, cultural practitioners have an unprecedented chance to help the wider public engage with an idea of Rome that’s more diverse, realistic and interesting than the monochrome fantasy that has dominated our recent past. As white supremacists storm the centres of Western governance, this is not just a niche issue. It could play a vital role in strengthening our democracies.
  2. Notes
    • There's much that is sensible in this paper, but also much with which I disagree.
    • I intend to write at length on this paper, so won't say any more here.
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Mackay (Jamie) - The whitewashing of Rome"
Footnote 50: Aeon: Video - Organism (WebRef=10782)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The city as an emergent life form, with architecture as the skeleton and roads as veins
    • Editor's Abstract
      • While comparing cities to living things perhaps isn’t as novel in 2021 as it was when Organism was first released in 1975, the analogy has never been as dizzyingly inventive or convincingly rendered as in this experimental short by the US filmmaker Hilary Harris.
      • Working primarily from time-lapse footage of New York City, Harris intersperses biological microscopy and voiceovers describing the structures and functions of the human body to meticulously assemble the metaphor – roads, bridges, tunnels and trains form a grand circulatory system; shipping, distribution and waste management networks mirror the digestive process.
      • With the frantic yet orderly action set to a hypnotic score, the viewing experience is at once experiential and thought-provoking, hinting at broader reflections on emergence and the self.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting enough film, but a bit laboured, and it doesn't add much to the Editors' Abstract.
    • There's rather too much of the cars / bloodstream analogy, which isn't even a very good one.
    • Also, while there may be philosophical questions about super-organisms, it takes more than a film to explicate - let alone answer - them.
    • PID Note: Organisms
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Organism"
Footnote 51: Aeon: Video - Out of mind (WebRef=10785)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: What it’s like to have aphantasia, the inability to visualise images in the mind’s eye
    • Editors' Abstract
      • After his mother’s death, Alex Wheeler felt guilty about how quickly he was able to move on from the initial shock, especially when compared with his siblings. His perspective on his emotions would come into clearer view when, by chance, he learned of a newly coined neurological phenomenon known as aphantasia, in which individuals are unable to generate images in their mind’s eye.
      • In the short documentary Out of Mind, Wheeler retells his story and connects with the UK neurologist Adam Zeman, whose pioneering research on aphantasia gave it a name and brought it into public view, and the UK artist Amy Right, who also has aphantasia.
      • Through Wheeler’s story, the UK filmmaker Simon Mulvaney explores the fascinating connections between images and emotions at the brain level.
  2. Notes
    • This was - to a degree – fascinating, as I’d not heard of aphantasia (though there’s an earlier article on the topic in my ‘priority 1’ queue – but it raises lots of questions, some of which may be answered by the above paper.
    • The first is the need for a clearer account of the symptoms. It wasn't clear to me whether there is no visual memory, or whether it's just the imagination that cannot conjure up images. Are those with the condition unable to play chess, and how do they do in IQ tests that check for visual-spatial ability? Mnemonists use visual imagery to remember lists, which would be impossible for someone with this condition. What about other mnemonics – eg. those I use for Japanese Kana. Presumably the use of storyboarding wouldn’t be affected.
    • Is it like an imaginative version of blindsight? One sufferer likens the condition to a PC where everything is in working order except the monitor, so is there manipulation of visual data going on under the hood that is just not available to consciousness? How do artists with the condition 'do their stuff' otherwise?
    • It looks like reviewing photographs elicits memories, but those memories can't be summoned up visually otherwise. The suggestion seems to be that our emotional connections to others is visually-mediated, and is weakened in those with the condition who can seem psychopathic.
    • There’s a lot more on aphantasia in the Web, starting with Wikipedia: Aphantasia. This – interestingly – includes Derek Parfit as a ‘sufferer’, but not Oliver Sacks, as in the . Wikipedia links to "Appleyard (Bryan) - Derek Parfit’s quest for perfection".
    • PID Note: Psychopathology
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Out of mind"
Footnote 52: Aeon: Video - The Mozart effect (WebRef=10771)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: No, Mozart isn’t a brain hack for babies – here’s how music really affects intelligence
    • Editors' Abstract
      • In 1991, a small study conducted at the University of California, Irvine found that young adults received a modest brain boost from listening to Mozart before performing small mental tasks. From this, an exaggerated mythology surrounding what became known as ‘the Mozart effect’ emerged, linking exposure to classical music with heightened intelligence – especially in babies.
      • In this animation, the UK broadcaster and psychologist Claudia Hammond dissects how a mania for this Mozart effect took hold, and what the research on music and intelligence actually says. In doing so, the short video also provides a telling look at how academic studies are often distorted and overstated in the media and in the public imagination.
  2. Notes
    • All very sensible.
    • The bottom line is that any pleasurable activity has a positive effect.
    • Also, that learning to play the piano gives a 3-point IQ boost (though quite how this could be determined isn't explained).
    • The author points out that "the Mozart Effect" seems intuitively reasonable, which may explain its uncritical reception.
    • My intuition would be that anything orderly, peaceful and rational should help, while Gangsta Rap and other rackets wouldn't.
    • PID Note: Intelligence
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - The Mozart effect"
Footnote 53: Aeon: Video - Sounds for Mazin (WebRef=10777)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Navigating the world of hearing is a joy and conundrum for Mazin
    • Editors' Abstract
      • ‘Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness – ’
        → from ‘Echo’ by Raymond Antrobus, from his poetry collection The Perseverance (2018)
      • When the British Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus began to learn British Sign Language (BSL) as a student at the Blanche Nevile School for Deaf Children in London, he found himself caught between the hearing and Deaf worlds. Hearing pupils teased him if they saw him speaking BSL, while Deaf students made fun of his lack of fluency, calling him a ‘baby signer’. He writes: ‘Looking back, this was when I most needed the nurturing of a Deaf identity, one that wasn’t medical, but philosophical, one that … valued Deafness as a way of being.’
      • This tension of living between hearing and signing communities animates Sounds for Mazin by the Dutch director Ingrid Kamerling, who follows 12-year old Mazin in the weeks leading up to and following cochlear implant (CI) surgery. Like Antrobus, Mazin lives in a state of simultaneous participation and exclusion: he signs fluently at school, but can’t talk much with his hearing family at home; he aches to communicate with his loved ones, but he doesn’t want to ‘abandon’ the Deaf friends who have chosen a life without an implant.
      • Mazin is excited to get his CI, he wants to hear the TV and chat with hearing friends. Nevertheless, Kamerling’s film doesn’t shy away from the tensions surrounding implants within the Deaf community. Mazin’s friend Kateline feels that her friends with CIs have abandoned her and accuses them of leaving her out. If everyone gets a cochlear implant, she says, ‘there won’t be any Deaf people left’. Her comment echoes a statement from the National Association of the Deaf in the US: ‘Deaf people like being Deaf, want to be Deaf, and are proud of their Deafness.’ For some, deafness is a disability that can be ‘cured’ with a cochlear implant, but for others, Deafness is a cultural identity that should be embraced, celebrated and respected. This latter group sees cochlear implants as an existential threat to Deaf culture and the community to which they belong.
      • Even as it shows the moment when sound first rushes into Mazin’s world, the film takes a balanced approach that moves decisively away from the ‘miracle cure’ angle of viral ‘hearing for the first time’ videos. It immerses the audience in the experience that can accompany the overwhelming sensory flood when an implant is turned on, revealing sound as unexpected and sometimes unpleasant, and showing the painstaking training necessary to distinguish and identify different sounds. Still, there are also moments where Mazin is visibly delighted. The detail of the world roars – the fine crackle of a cellophane wrapper brushed with an arm, the delicate trickle of water from a spoon, the hiss of breaks at a pedestrian crossing, the endless song of a saucepan that he clangs, like a cymbal, just for its music.
      • But it’s not only the post-implant world that has, as Antrobus says of powerful hearing aids, ‘glistening clarity’. When Mazin is playing and signing with his friends, there’s a sense of joyful volume; Kateline’s signing is full of exuberant expression; and as Mazin watches a silent field of players darting on a football pitch, the movement has an intensity – as if the lack of sound somehow turns the action up. Mazin speaks little, but close-ups on his face compel the viewer to study every emotion that passes over it. Apprehension, fear, delight, joy, discomfort – each appears and vanishes in the flick of an eyelid or the crease of a brow. Perhaps the viewer’s heightened attention mirrors the attunement that Deaf people must pay when navigating the world, lipreading, studying eye contact, paying close attention to body language and facial expression. In sign language, which is made up of dozens of hand gestures, palm orientation, location, movement and expression, a subtle change can completely alter the meaning. Every detail speaks.
      • Studying Mazin’s face, a question unfurls. His family are overjoyed, his friend is dejected, but how does Mazin feel? As he enters the world of sound, Mazin must grapple with his Deaf identity, find his own way of being and belonging, his own space of deafness.
        → Written by Nicola Williams
  2. Notes
    • A fascinating film.
    • I had some unanswered questions though. Mazin appears to be able to speak Dutch - the language of his adoptive country - well enough, together with the native language of his family (Amharic, maybe). His intonation isn't anywhere near that of a profoundly deaf person (like his friend Kateline - they sign and speak at the same time). He also seems to be able to converse well enough in speech with his family, who don't sign, but maybe he's lip-reading. I presume he wasn't born deaf, unlike his friend, who has family members who are deaf.
    • What the world sounds like to Mazin - before and after his operation - is well simulated (I suppose). It's not clear whether he can understand speech without visual clues - he didn't respond to his name, but he responded (with joy) when the implant was being calibrated, and he can hear a range of sounds, though saying (in Dutch) that the surgeon's voice sounded squeaky. When his hearing is tested by his teacher, she continues to sign to him while speaking.
    • But I find it disturbing that there should be a reluctance to seek a cure for deafness on the grounds that it would lead you away from your "community" or "identity".
    • While there are of course positives in "community", deafness is a sensory deprivation. I think analogies can be made with other enriching but dangerous activities, like getting an education or learning the language of your adoptive country. Both will - while opening up new vistas - separate you to some extent from your birth community, and - in the short term at least - may lead to some unhappiness on both sides. But it need not do so longer term. The same goes for leaving home, but it has to be done if we are to grow.
    • This is not to belittle the deaf community. There's a distinction between the people in the community and what it is that initially bound them together. The fear is that this initial bond, once broken, will sever all ties for those once qualified as members. But need this be so?
    • It would be pathological for a hearing person to want to be deaf (at least in normal circumstances), just as it is for an able-bodied person to want to be disabled. All things considered, it is better to be hearing and able-bodied, for the individual and society. But clearly, things go better for those with such prima facie deprivations to form communities with similar people who know what it is like, and who can share the skills needed to ameliorate the condition.
    • Manumission wouldn't automatically make a slave's life go better, but - all things considered - it would be wished for in most circumstances.
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Sounds for Mazin"
Footnote 54: Aeon: Video - Thai country living (WebRef=10765)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The rhythms of rural Thailand, where both food and music are sourced from the ground
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Thai Country Living is a film with a title that doesn’t leave you wondering. This charming short documentary by the UK filmmakers Ben and Dan Tubby (also known as the Tubby Brothers) takes viewers on a brief journey to the Isaan region, in Thailand’s northeast.
      • The host for the trip, Suman Tapkham, provides the home cooking, with ingredients fresh from his small farm; the music comes via a bamboo instrument known as a khaen, which Tapkham crafts by hand; and the warm conversation is largely made of reflections on his life spent in the country, and his worries that the unique culture there might soon be lost.
      • Through their portrait, the Tubby Brothers capture a slice of Thailand far from the bustle of Bangkok most commonly associated with the country, and, for many viewers, a more than welcome portion of armchair travel.
Footnote 55: Aeon: Video - A brief history of the devil (WebRef=10738)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The devils you know – how Satan became a versatile stand-in for all manner of evil
    • Editors' Abstract
      • From the three-headed man-eater of Dante’s Inferno to the Mephistopheles of German folklore, clad and caped in red in a Goethe-penned stage production, depictions of Satan have mutated into a fearsome multitude of pitchfork-wielding, fire-summoning and otherwise malevolent creatures.
      • But how did a somewhat minor character from the Old Testament evolve into a versatile shorthand for all manner of human evil?
      • Featuring a parade of the many meme-ified devils that have come to permeate the public imagination, this crafty animation from TED-Ed provides a brief history of how some of Satan’s most infamous forms came to be.
  2. Notes
    • This is a pretty worthless effort. It gives very little detail, and nothing outside the western tradition.
    • It also - while mentioning Jesus' temptations, exorcisms and Revelation - and Job in the OT, makes no mention of the Fall of Man, only the fall of Satan.
Footnote 56: Aeon: Video - Degrees of uncertaincy (WebRef=10695)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: How much can science really tell us about the future of climate change?
    • Editors' Abstract
      • There are a few basic facts about climate change that we can be near-certain about: the global temperature is rising, this change is being driven by humans, and it represents a serious threat to a great many living things on the planet – humans included.
      • But due to countless complexities and uncertainties, the trajectory of the global temperature in our deep past and, more pressingly, our near future is riddled with known unknowns.
      • In Degrees of Uncertainty, the US video essayist Neil Halloran takes a data-centric deep dive into the climate crisis, emphasising the vital importance of rejecting fatalism when it comes to solving the problem. In doing so, he also charts the evolution of science itself since the age of enlightenment, and makes a case for science demanding scrutiny from an informed public, especially journalists.
      • You can explore an interactive version of this video at Halloran’s website (NeilFilms.com).
  2. Notes
    • This isn't a 'climate change denial' piece, but just shows the degrees of uncertainty in the various projections.
    • The author distinguishes the hard from soft sciences, and the soft sciences are important in planning a response to climate change.
    • It seems the author is a pessimist as far as governments being able to provide an appropriate response, given human nature.
    • My view is that we need to move away from fossil fuels in any case, as they are running out, but until less developed economies have alternatives to help them catch up, they won't play ball.
    • And the same goes for rich countries - short term convenience and social status always seems to trump long term prudence.
    • It might be better to assume counterfactually that climate change is a natural event, and find technological methods to accommodate it - as we'll have to do come the next ice-age.
    • PID Note: Probability
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Degrees of uncertaincy"
Footnote 57: Aeon: Video - The seeker (WebRef=10693)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: When his faith crumbles, an ‘Amish atheist’ rebuilds his world from scratch
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Kenneth Copp’s life has been defined – and twice upended – by his commitment to seeking the truth. Born into the Pentecostal faith in Virginia, at the age of 17 Copp became an Amish convert, favouring its ‘quiet but dedicated Christianity’ to some of the more ‘wild and ecstatic’ tenets of his parent’s denomination. After trading his pickup truck for a team of horses, he was baptised and later married into the community. Decades later, his world again irrevocably changed when, while reading the Bible with a critical eye, he discovered what he viewed as manifold contradictions and ethical problems. His faith unraveled. Excommunication from his community – including a heartbreaking split from his wife and 10 children – followed shortly after.
      • The acclaimed short documentary The Seeker finds Copp several years out from his loss of faith, living as a self-described ‘Amish atheist’. Donning a traditional beard, running a small farm and wood shop, and often travelling via horse and buggy, he has held on to the aspects of the lifestyle that he loved while shedding the religion at its core. By doing so, he seems to exist in a culture of his very own – one of traditional living and progressive values. A dedicated environmentalist intent on keeping his carbon footprint low, it’s now measured morality rather than religious devotion that binds him to a simple life. But owning an iPhone or watching a movie from time to time? No God, no foul. Where once he believed a plain existence would deliver his soul to heaven, now he hopes his Earthly journey will end with his body buried under an apple tree.
      • The US filmmaker Lance Edmands’s portrait of Copp shares a workmanlike elegance with its subject. Scenes from Copp’s farm and wood shop in Maine are beautifully captured on 16mm film – a medium with a tangible, mechanical aesthetic of its own. The naturalistic sounds of Copp’s daily routine intertwine with his gentle-yet-expressive voice and a sparse acoustic score. Mirroring Copp’s pace of life, Edmands finds resonance in gentle simplicity.
      • The film’s restrained, atmospheric character shouldn’t be mistaken for a lightness of subject matter or low stakes. Indeed, through Copp’s unique story, Edmands grapples with profound questions: can devout faith and rational enquiry ever coexist comfortably? What does it mean to be forever in search of truth – and what can that pursuit cost? But the quandary at the film’s core, underpinning the rest, seems to be: how should we live? It’s an unsolvable puzzle, of course, but one that Copp seems content to spend a lifetime pursuing.
  2. Notes
    • A very gentle and evocative short film.
    • Kenneth Copp’s life-journey shares some elements with my own, which is why I watched the film.
    • One thing I didn't quite understand was why - if the Amish community he moved on to with his family practiced 'critical thinking skills' - they still adopted the Amish practice of 'shunning' - rather than trying to convince - those who 'stray from the faith'. Maybe they did.
    • I've always hoped for some non-fundamentalist middle-way, but have not been able to find one; nor have I found any like-minded 'seekers after truth' in that regard, though I've not really taken the opportunities an internet search might provide. A point to be followed up on?
Footnote 58: Aeon: Video - Hum chitra banate hai (We make images) (WebRef=10681)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A joyously animated myth retells why painting is prayer to India’s Bhil people
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The art of the Bhil people of central India is instantly recognisable for its bright colours, fantastical human forms and, above all, mesmerising dot patterns. Today, the unique character of these images is celebrated in books, folk art museums and, in the case of the short film Hum Chitra Banate Hai (We Make Images) (2016), a beautiful animation. But for centuries, this distinctive painting style existed primarily on the clay walls of Bhil homes, with twigs serving as the painting tools, and plants and oils generating the vivid pigments. More than decoration or artistic expression, the making of these pictures, taking place on festival days and depicting ancestors and scenes from Bhil folklore, represents an act of ritualistic prayer.
      • So, why do the Bhil people paint? That’s the question at the centre of Hum Chitra Banate Hai, directed by the Indian artist and storyteller Nina Sabnani in partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where she is an associate professor at the Industrial Design Centre. For the project, Sabnani teamed up with the Bhil artist Sher Singh Bhil to bring to life the myth behind the tradition of adorning homes with elaborate frescoes. Narrated from the perspective of a rooster, the story recounts a journey to find a shaman to bring relief from a catastrophic drought. Once located, the shaman inspires the Bhil to paint their homes – an act that brings rain, bountiful crops and, ultimately, peace and prosperity.
      • The artistic collaboration results in a playful and evocative animation, with a visual style unlike anything you’re likely to find on your streaming service of choice. This absorbing imagery, combined with the unpretentious storytelling and the expressive narration of the celebrated Indian actor Raghubir Yadav, builds a world into which it’s easy to dissolve. But beyond its brisk charms, Hum Chitra Banate Hai is also an accomplished work of visual ethnology. By bringing authentic Bhil imagery to life, Sabnani and Singh Bhil at once share and express a tradition at the centre of Bhil culture, portraying a people to whom art, nature and spirituality are inseparable.
  2. Notes
    • Well, it's a well-made animation, but it only explains the myth behind the artistic tradition, not the real reason.
    • But, it was pleasing to be able to read the Hindi title! हम चित्र बनाते हैं.
Footnote 59: Aeon: Video - The undying hydra (WebRef=10673)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Blend up a hydra, and its cells will coalesce back into a full creature. How?
    • Editors' Abstract
      • A relative of jellyfish, the rice-sized freshwater creatures known as hydra are, at first glance, rather basic – all tentacles and mouth, with lives dedicated to nabbing passing prey. But, as scientists have gradually been discovering over centuries, these simple organisms have such a unique capacity for regeneration that they’re considered biologically immortal.
      • As this video from the science documentary series Deep Look explores, the hydra’s ability to rebuild itself is so powerful that the animal can even reform after being essentially blended at a cellular level.
      • Providing astonishing high-definition glimpses of its microscopic world, this short details why the secret to the hydra’s invincibility is in its stem cells, and how scientists hope to harness its qualities to benefit humans.
  2. Notes
    • Interesting enough, and worth following up further.
    • I'm not sure whether this should be categorised against 'Scattered Objects', Intermittent Objects, 'Disembodied Existence', 'Death' or simply 'Animals'!
    • The motivation for first three categorisations is the question whether the Hydra - like a watch - survives disassembly and reassembly, and whether it exists in the interim - either as a scattered object or in disembodied form.
    • There's an earlier 'short' that I've not imported yet - 'The animal that wouldn't die'.
    • Further comments may follow a review of that video.
    • PID Note: Disembodied Existence
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - The undying hydra"
Footnote 60: Aeon: Video - Lee Smolin: space and time (WebRef=10653)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Lee Smolin
    • Aeon Subtitle: Time is fundamental, space is emergent – why physicists are rethinking reality
    • Editors' Abstract
      • From Isaac Newton’s ‘absolute space’ and ‘absolute time’, which envisioned the two phenomena as fundamental and separate, to Albert Einstein’s ‘spacetime’, which condensed them into a single concept, the relationship between space and time has been the mystery driving fundamental physics for more than four centuries.
      • And over the past several decades, some physicists, including Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, have come to believe that the fabric of reality is perhaps due to be torn into yet again.
      • In this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the series Closer to Truth, Smolin discusses how developments in quantum mechanics have left physicists with questions that special relativity can’t seem to accommodate, and why the solution might be a conception of reality in which time is fundamental, and space emergent.
  2. Notes
    • I couldn't make a whole lot of this, given the brevity of the discussion and the complexity of the issues.
    • One introductory point I found interesting was the discussion between Newton and Leibniz about whether moving the whole universe to the left made any difference - or sense. Newton thought it did, as he posited absolute space as the stage on which things take place. Leibniz thought not, because all the relations between objects would stay the same.
    • Maybe this is either the motivator for, or a consequence of, Leibniz's controversial second law - the identity of indiscernibles?
    • PID Note: Time
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Smolin (Lee) - Video - Lee Smolin: space and time"
Footnote 61: Aeon: Video - The lion man (WebRef=10666)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Although his story is a mystery, the Lion Man forever binds us to our prehistoric past
    • Editors' Abstract
      • With its origins dating back some 40,000 years, the small ivory sculpture known as ‘The Lion Man’ for its melding of human and animal forms is the oldest known image of a creature sprung from human imagination.
      • Created for the exhibition ‘Living With Gods’ (2017-18) at the British Museum in London, this animation traces the fascinating archeological history of the iconic object, as well as what its preternatural character tells us about our prehistoric ancestors – and, indeed, humanity itself.
  2. Notes
    • This is very brief, and very speculative as far as the purpose of the Lion-Man artifact is concerned.
    • I've come across discussion of this artifact before, but I'm not sure where. There's no cross-reference on Aeon.
    • See Wikipedia: Lion-man.
    • I'm slightly suspicious about the amount of reconstructive work that's been necessary to reassemble the fragments.
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - The lion man"
Footnote 62: Aeon: Video - Why do we, like, hesitate when we, um, speak? (WebRef=10648)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya
    • Aeon Subtitle: Ums, likes and y’knows get no respect – but they’re vital to conversation
    • Editors' Abstract
      • If you’ve ever listened to a recording of yourself speaking, the frequency with which you used fillers such as ‘um’, ‘uh’, ‘like’ and ‘y’know’ might have grabbed your attention – and perhaps your scorn.
      • Indeed, these verbal hesitations have been viewed as undesirable since the days of ancient Greece and, more recently, the American linguist Noam Chomsky characterised them as ‘errors’ irrelevant to language. But could there be more to these utterances than initially meets the ear?
        In this short animation from TED-Ed, Lorenzo García-Amaya, assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan, reveals how ‘filled pauses’ can give conversation partners important context clues, communicate emphasis, help tether related thoughts together, and so much more.
  2. Notes
    • This seems to be a minor swipe at Chomsky for denying that pauses are parts of speech even when filled with ‘ummms’.
    • I agree it’s obvious that their function is to provide a space for the speaker to think while keeping hold of the conversation. Otherwise, an interlocutor might butt in and move the conversation on in an unwanted direction.
    • PID Note: Language of Thought
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Garcia-Amaya (Lorenzo) - Video - Why do we, like, hesitate when we, um, speak?"
Footnote 63: Aeon: Video - Phrenology: the weirdest pseudoscience of them all? (WebRef=10633)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The ‘dangerous nonsense’ of phrenology shows how pseudoscience takes hold
    • Editors's Abstract
      • In the 19th century, the Viennese physiologist Franz Joseph Gall placed a formidable thumb on the scales of the ‘nature vs nurture’ debate when he proposed a simple – and, as we now know, false – solution to the age-old conundrum. Everything you need to know about someone’s character, he argued, could be predicted by the shape of different brain regions – and by extension, the contours of their head.
      • That phrenology, as it became known, was built on conjecture rather than empiricism was clear to a great many scientists of the era. Still, it caught on in the public consciousness, and often with sinister consequences.
      • This animation from BBC Reel provides a brief history of phrenology, shedding light on why facile solutions often gain traction over rigorous empiricism, and how pseudoscience can sometimes open gateways for the real thing.
  2. Notes
    • This is a rather irritatingly smug little video.
    • Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the origins of phrenology to know whether it was genuinely always a pseudoscience or just "conjectural science" - in the Popperian sense - that was later refuted.
    • You'd need to know the intellectual mood of the time. The narrator notes that the idea that intellectual functions are localised in the brain is in fact largely correct. But it wouldn't have been easy to prove that at the time. But the idea of innateness - in contrast to the Lockean idea of a "tabula rasa" - was rather a bold conjecture. Both poles of the nature / nurture divide can be accused of being politically motivated, and both - in isolation - are false.
    • No doubt it was "hoped" that the internal structure of the brain - which was inaccessible - could be determined from external features. This turned out to be wrong. Later, EEGs adopted much the same approach, but with better success as the skull, etc, are less of an impediment to the transfer of information in this respect.
    • It'd be nice to know how the phrenologists "calibrated" the various bumps they thought they'd found against the supposedly corresponding psychological traits. No doubt they read in what they hoped to get out. Not the first or last.
    • It's probably worth distinguishing what - if practised now - would be a pseudoscience - from when it was first conjectured.
    • For more information, see Wikipedia: Phrenology, which interestingly notes the use of "paleo-phrenology" to determine (or conjecture) the mental capacities of extinct hominids by investigating the inside of their skulls, and comparing this with the comparable structure for modern humans. Of course, a lot more is now known about brain structure to make this a sensible approach.
    • PID Note: Brain
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Phrenology: the weirdest pseudoscience of them all?"
Footnote 64: Aeon: Video - Samurai rules for peace and war (WebRef=10625)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A samurai rulebook offers guidance on how to kill enemies and refrain from gossip
    • Editors' Abstract
      • From the 10th century till their abolition in the 1870s, samurai were a class of Japanese military nobility who inherited lives as warrior protectorates (bushi) for feudal lords, and had a notoriously strict and intricate honour code.
      • This video from the YouTube channel Voices of the Past explores two scrolls from the famed samurai school Natori-Ryu’s 17th-century rulebook.
        1. The first scroll has codes of conduct for peacetime, with guidance ranging from the universal, such as the pitfalls of talking behind someone’s back, to the extremely samurai-specific, such as keeping a home garden that doesn’t leave you vulnerable to enemy attack.
        2. The second scroll lays out the rules of engagement in wartime and paints a much more violent portrait of samurai life, built around intricate rules for killing and being killed.
      • These primary sources offer an intriguing window into the samurai value system, in which loss of reputation was considered a fate far worse than death.
  2. Notes
    • A very interesting summary.
    • I've had a quick look for Natori-Ryu’s 17th-century rulebook on Amazon and on Wikipedia. There seems to be a multi-volume edition, the first of which is The Book of Samurai - Fundamental Samurai Teachings: The Collected Scrolls of Natori-Ryu: The Fundamental Teachings: 1 by Antony Cummins & Yoshie Minami. However, it’s rather long (420 pages) and expensive (£17.50) and too “niche” for my interests. It seems to be a hit with the martial arts community, so maybe it’s not for me.
    • The most important aspect of Samurai life seems to have been the acceptance that their whole life and wellbeing stems from service to the Lord of the Clan, from whom they receive an allowance and to whom they owe unswerving loyalty.
    • Maybe this is rather idealised, as it seemed to have become much more laid back by Yukichi Fukuzawa's time.
    • There are some rather grizzly accounts of what to do with enemy heads collected during and after battle, together with ensuring the right person gets the credit, and there are no falsifications.
    • Also, there are instructions for "familial executions" for servants who run away during battle: they themselves, as well as their parents and children, are to be killed. This seems to be a standard oriental approach to 'justice' in the case of heinous crimes (usually treason) - see Wikipedia: Nine familial exterminations - and reflects the communal (especially familial), rather than individual, basis of morality.
Footnote 65: Aeon: Video - Colette (WebRef=10628)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A French resistance fighter reluctantly revisits her past in this Oscar-winning portrait
    • Editors' Abstract
      • During the Nazi occupation of France, 14-year-old Colette Marin-Catherine joined the French resistance alongside her family. ‘We were playing cat and mouse. And playing with fire. Or rather, fire was playing with us,’ Marin-Catherine, now 92, recalls. Sadly, not everyone in her family would live to see France liberated. Her brother Jean-Pierre was just 17 when he was arrested for stockpiling weapons. He would die in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in March 1945, just three weeks before the camp was liberated.
      • In this short documentary, Marin-Catherine faces her trauma with the support of a history student named Lucie Fouble – only 17 years old herself. For the first time in her life, and with Fouble ever by her side, Marin-Catherine travels from France to Germany to visit the camp where some 20,000 Nazi prisoners including her brother died.
      • The US director Anthony Giacchino and the French producer Alice Doyard won the 2021 Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) for this poignant portrait of bravery and healing amid the long, painful echoes of the Second World War. An accomplished and moving piece of filmmaking, Colette is a reminder of the tremendous power of individual stories to humanise history.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting - and (of course) poignant - film.
    • It wasn't clear in the film how young the "researcher" was, or who was ultimately responsible for encouraging Colette to revisit the past and make a first visit to Germany.
    • Colette's brother - Jean-Pierre - had been highly intelligent (bumped up two years at school) and Colette admitted that this - and the 3-year age difference - meant that they hadn't been close.
    • Jean-Pierre had been working as a slave-labourer in the tunnels in which the V2 rockets were manufactured when he died. Life expectancy in the tunnels was only one month. See Wikipedia: Mittelwerk.
    • While Colette was clearly moved by the experience of the trip to Germany, she seems to be a non-nonsense person, and couldn't endure the self-serving speech by the former mayor of Nordhausen at a reception. He makes reference to the wicked Nazis without admitting that they were Germans.
Footnote 66: Aeon: Video - Light and microscopy (WebRef=10611)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: There’s no one way a microbe looks, only different clever methods to see it
    • Editors's Abstract
      • In one sense, there are many ways to see a microbe, but in another, truly none at all. That’s to say, the array of microscopy methods developed since the Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first peered into the microbial world in the 1670s are, by necessity, extraordinary distortions. Each represents a means of manipulating light to translate creatures that are, by definition, too small for the human eye to see. The result is a microbial world in which a single creature can look entirely different depending on the microscopy method used to capture it.
      • This video from the YouTube channel Journey to the Microcosmos takes viewers on a tour of the many clever methods that scientists have developed to shine a light on small-scale life. The result is both an intriguing slice of science history and a highly illuminating visual investigation.
  2. Notes
    • There's an account of four different techniques, with subtitles, that I'd thought of transcribing, but life's too short.
    • The names of the four selected methods of Microscopy are:-
      → Brightfield
      → Darkfield
      → Phase Contrast
      → Polarised Light
    • The philosophical point at the end is that none of these methods show the micro-organisms as they "really are".
Footnote 67: Aeon: Grubbs - If you think you’ve got a porn addiction, you probably haven’t (WebRef=10614)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Joshua Grubbs
    • Author's Conclusion
      • For some people, reducing or stopping pornography use might always be an ideal, but such ideals shouldn’t come at the expense of wellbeing every time the ideal isn’t met.
      • What might be more helpful, and kinder, is for such people to consider the morals and values that are causing them distress, and consider whether or not that distress is actually helping them get closer to those values. If not, they might be better off reducing that distress by learning to accept their own flaws and shortcomings. Then, they can work toward the values that actually matter – this will help someone much more than calling themselves ‘addicted’.
      • Lastly, some individuals might reconsider whether watching pornography is a ‘flaw’ at all, or whether it might be – for many people at least – a source of simple pleasure in a complicated life.
Footnote 68: Aeon: Video - This is Bate Bola (WebRef=10609)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Behold the fearsome beauty of Rio’s other carnival, on the outskirts of town
    • Editors's Abstract
      • ‘Let the beast out!’
      • A unique melding of Portuguese, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous traditions, Carnaval do Brasil is a nationwide celebration with deep cultural roots. And in Rio de Janeiro, which is home to the world’s largest carnival celebration – and, by many accounts, the world’s largest annual party – it’s also a major economic driver, with more than 1.5 million tourists flocking to the city each year to join in.
      • But just a few miles from the endlessly documented samba sessions, floats and massive crowds that characterise Rio’s beachside celebration, thousands of locals experience a form of Carnaval that tourists – and their money – almost never touch. A surreal collage of fireworks, colourful smoke and chaotic, joyful noise, the celebration known as ‘Bate-bola’ is, to residents of Rio’s landlocked favelas and working-class suburbs, the only game in town.
      • With roots in a Portuguese tradition known as caretos, Bate-bola is centred on processions of flamboyant costumes. In the Brazilian tradition, the clothing takes on an eccentric flare that resides in an uncanny valley between playful and demonic. In This Is Bate Bola, a documentary account of the festival as celebrated in Guadalupe, a neighbourhood in the north of Rio, kaleidoscopic wigs, light-up whistles and even character’s from Disney’s Peter Pan (1953) pop up as festival garb. Crafted year-round by local Bate-bola ‘crews’, the costumes are revealed in boisterous street parades known as saídas (‘exits’) on the Sunday before Lent.
      • For residents who take part, it’s a weekend of immense joy – a cathartic celebration a year in the making. The event is permeated by a forceful sense of pride and, at times, sheer braggadocio. Crews adopt names such as ‘Elite’ and ‘Best There Is’ as they lay their claim to the most fiendishly beautiful Bate-bola look. They howl rallying cries such as ‘We’re fucking great!’, as if demanding respect for their vibrant and neglected corner of the city.
      • It’s these street-level rivalries between crews that have also earned Bate-bola a reputation for violence that’s not entirely undeserved. ‘There’s a few crews that go out armed, and they end up ruining it for the rest of us,’ says one crew member. But for many, the violence is overshadowed by the intense sense of personal and communal jubilation that the celebration brings. ‘People see lots of things wrong in our communities. They don’t see the joy here,’ another crew member says. ‘All this is very little compared to our happiness.’
      • The British directors Ben Holman and Neirin Jones, also based in Brazil, give Bate-bola an appropriately spectacular treatment in their immersive short. The filmmaking parallels the event itself: a sense of gathering electricity in the first half culminates in an overwhelming explosion of sights and sounds once the crews are unleashed on the streets. Fireworks are lit from fence posts. A man alternates swigs of Red Bull with Johnnie Walker Red Label. Music erupts from a literal wall of speakers. The original, atmospheric score by the US composer Ben LaMar Gay brings the visuals a heightened sense of pandemonium and elation. It makes for a worthy account of a cultural tradition that’s remained, until now, unseen by outsiders.
  2. Notes
    • A well-made documentary, though it's difficult to appreciate the chaos and menace - as well as the excitement - without actually being there.
    • It's also difficult to appreciate what the lives of favella-dwellers are like, year round, especially the alleged positives.
    • The prayer before the "saida" was interesting - not led by a priest but by a young woman, it seemed communal and heart-felt. Not altogether incongruous - like preparation for a medieval battle.
    • Compare and contrast with Via dolorosa and (of course) City of Samba, which I've not yet watched.
Footnote 69: Aeon: Video - The secret language of trees (WebRef=10590)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The incredible – and still quite mysterious – way trees trade information via their roots
    • Editor's Abstract
      • While researching her doctoral thesis, Suzanne Simard, now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, made an astounding discovery – trees in forests seem to possess complex information superhighways in their root systems that allow them to share information.
      • Her 1995 doctoral thesis on the topic has been part of a revolution in how scientists view plants, leading many to suggest that they possess cognitive abilities, and even intelligence.
      • This animation from TED-Ed details the symbiotic relationship – between tree roots and fungi called mycorrhizae – that serves as the foundation of these intricate intra-tree communication networks, allowing them to trade news on topics such as drought and insect attacks, and even detect if an incoming message has been sent by a close relative.
  2. Notes
    • Well, it's interesting and enlightening to a degree.
    • However, there's no explanation about how the signalling works - and particularly how the more complex signalling listed in the summary. Also, how this is known.
    • All that appears in the video is a description of how sugars are transferred, with lots of admissions of ignorance as to why, as the fungus appears to get no obvious reward.
    • But just what messengers are used to indicate that messages are from "related trees" is left a mystery.
    • PID Note: Plants
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - The secret language of trees"
Footnote 70: Aeon: Dermendzhiyska - The misinformation virus (WebRef=10577)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Elitsa Dermendzhiyska
    • Author Narrative: Elitsa Dermendzhiyska is a science writer and social entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology, research and mental health. She is the editor of the mental health anthology What Doesn’t Kill You: 15 Stories of Survival (2020). She lives in London.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Lies and distortions don’t just afflict the ignorant. The more you know, the more vulnerable you can be to infection
    • Author's Conclusion
      • I’ve wondered recently if, ..., misinformation is becoming part of the culture, if it persists because some of us actively partake in it, and some merely stand by and allow it to continue. If that’s the case, then perhaps we ought to worry less about fixing people’s false beliefs and focus more on shifting those social norms that make it OK to create, spread, share and tolerate misinformation ... one way to do this in practice – highly visible individual action reaching critical mass; another way could entail tighter regulation of social media platforms. And our own actions matter, too. ... We are, each and every one of us, precariously perched between our complicity in the world as it is and our capacity to make it what it can be.
  2. Notes
    • This is an important topic, and the paper gives it a reasonable airing, though I wasn’t convinced by the subtitle that the highly educated may be more susceptible to fake news than the ignorant. I suspect this claim is there just to catch the reader’s attention, and is itself a self-referential form of “fake news”.
    • She is right, though, in her claim that the highly-educated are good at interpreting information so that it seems to support their cherished beliefs. And also, that they are good at defending their beliefs whatever the counter-evidence, rather than simply following the argument where it goes. I’ve often noticed this amongst philosophers (especially those with religious beliefs).
    • There are some useful research results (or claims) about the resilience of false beliefs; even where a false claim is retracted, the belief engendered by it tends to remain stuck.
    • There was an interesting snippet that – maybe unintentionally – shows that you read what you expect to read. She pointed out that most will not notice the “not” in the retraction “Listening to Mozart will not boost your child’s IQ”, at least when the retraction is recalled; hence the retraction reinforces the (presumed) false belief in the longer term. I didn’t notice the “not” until alerted to it.
    • The author points out the disconnection between belief and action. Even when anti-Vaxers are convinced of their false beliefs, they are still no more likely to get vaccinated.
    • Another good point is that people allow their private beliefs to be over-ridden by those of their espoused ideology, or group identity.
    • I read the paper in the light of the possibility that I might myself be susceptible to false beliefs, and noted that people in general are more alert to other people’s false beliefs than their own.
    • Climate-change denial came up as motivated by a reluctance to face up to its consequences. It strikes me that there are three issues here:-
      1. is there climate change (yes).
      2. Is it caused by human activity (yes, mostly).
      3. Should we take drastic measures to reverse or forestall it? If so, which ones?
      It seems possible to respond positively to questions ‘a’ and ‘b’, but to have diverse responses to question ‘c’. We might take the view that nothing can be done, or that what needs to be done should be the same as if the answer to question ‘b’ was ‘no’. This is not the same as ‘denial’, though is easily labelled thus as it has somewhat the same consequences.
    • I agree with her conclusion.
    • PID Note: Information
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Dermendzhiyska (Elitsa) - The misinformation virus"
Footnote 71: Aeon: Scheidel - The road from Rome (WebRef=10580)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Walter Scheidel
    • Author Narrative: Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities, professor of Classics and history, and a Catherine R Kennedy and Daniel L Grossman fellow in human biology, all at Stanford University in California. His recent books include Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (2019) and The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (2017), and he is co-editor, with Peter Bang and Christopher Bayly, of The Oxford World History of Empire (2021).
    • Aeon Subtitle: The fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t a tragedy for civilisation. It was a lucky break for humanity as a whole
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Long before our species existed, we caught a lucky break. If an asteroid hadn’t knocked out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, our tiny rodent-like ancestors would have had a hard time evolving into Homo sapiens. But even once we had gotten that far, our big brains weren’t quite enough to break out of our ancestral way of life: growing, herding and hunting food amid endemic poverty, illiteracy, incurable disease and premature death.
      • It took a second lucky break to escape from all that, a booster shot that arrived a little more than 1,500 years ago: the fall of ancient Rome.
      • Just as the world’s erstwhile apex predators had to bow out to clear the way for us, so the mightiest empire Europe had ever seen had to crash to open up a path to prosperity.
  2. Notes
    • This is a racy and interesting piece, but it begs a lot of questions.
    • The main thesis is that sprawling self-contained empires - while they may provide peace and stability for those that go along with the status quo - don't provide the stimulus for innovation that's needed for human progress. The Chinese empire is the favoured example.
    • The author's claim is that we need free-market capitalism to get things going.
    • For good or ill, the smaller highly competitive states of Europe that developed after the fall of the Western Empire were more conducive to innovation.
    • This may be true, but it took an awful long time to get going and – as the author notes – involved a lot of collateral damage. I expect matters are more complicated, and that chance events play a part.
    • I wondered whether this approach is compatible with - or orthogonal to - the geographical approach to explaining geopolitics in "Marshall (Tim) - Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics".
Footnote 72: Aeon: Video - Should computers run the world? (WebRef=10554)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Hannah Fry
    • Aeon Subtitle: Algorithms are sensitive. People are specific. We should exploit their respective strengths
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The capabilities of algorithms and human brainpower overlap, intersect and contrast in a multitude of ways, argues Hannah Fry, an associate professor in the mathematics of cities at University College London, in this lecture at the Royal Institution from 2018. And, says Fry, planning for an efficient, ethical future demands that we carefully consider the respective strengths of each without stereotyping either as inherently good or bad, while always keeping their real-world consequences in mind.
      • Borrowing from her book "Fry (Hannah) - Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine" (2018), Fry’s presentation synthesises fascinating studies, entertaining anecdotes and her own personal experiences to build a compelling argument for how we ought to think about algorithms if we’d like them to amplify – and not erode – our humanity.
  2. Notes
    • Some fairly motivational excerpts from "Fry (Hannah) - Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine".
    • I got the "Bach" question wrong!
    • This is second such motivator for the book from Aeon, the others being Calculating art, which I don't seem to have read.
    • However, I do have the book, and it's on my priority list.
    • I think I agree with her overall thesis, that we should use algorithms to do the spadework, but allow human over-ride where it would be obvious to a human that a mistake has been made.
    • The trouble with this idea is defining just when such a review is needed - without either requiring as much human work and expertise as was supposedly saved by the algorithm or requiring another algorithm.
    • PID Note: Transhumanism
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Fry (Hannah) - Video - Should computers run the world?"
Footnote 73: Aeon: Challenger - The joy of being animal (WebRef=10556)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Melanie Challenger
    • Author Narrative: Melanie Challenger works as a researcher on the history of humanity and the natural world, and environmental philosophy. Her books include On Extinction (2011) and How to Be Animal (2021). She is a current member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Human exceptionalism is dead: for the sake of our own happiness and the planet we should embrace our true animal nature
    • Author's Conclusion
      • It might well be in the rallying of our own bodily resources that our greatest opportunities lie. When we reconsider all that we gain by being animals, we’re confronted by some powerful resources for positive change.
      • Just think of the gobsmacking beauty of bonding. If you have a dog beside you as you read this, bend down, look into her eyes, and stroke her. Via the hypothalamus inside your body, oxytocin will get to work, and dopamine – organic chemicals implicated in animal bonding – and, before you know it, you’ll be feeling good, even in the dark times of a pandemic. And, as it happens, so will your dog, who will experience a similar physical response to the bond between you both. Oxytocin is produced in the hypothalamus of all mammals.
      • In other words, our bodies might well be our best and most effective tool in the effort to strike a new balance between humans and the rest of the living world. If we can tip ourselves more into a bonding frame of mind, we might find it easier to recognise the beauty and intelligence that we’re hellbent on destroying. By accepting that we’re animals too, we create the opportunity to think about how we might play to the strengths of our evolutionary legacies in ways that we all stand to gain from. If we can build a better relationship with our own reality and, indeed, a better relationship with other animals, we’ll be on the road to recovery.
  2. Notes
    • This is in effect a plug for "Challenger (Melanie) - How to Be Animal: A New History of What it Means to Be Human", so my main comments will have to wait until I've read that book.
    • The paper's focus is mostly on what we - and other animals - lose by our intellectualist approach to what we are.
    • I have to say that the focus on the mind is that of intellectuals more than that of the generality of mankind, but what the intellectuals take to be self-evident does tend to become comman currency.
    • There are two issues that are interwoven, if not exactly muddled up, in the paper:-
      1. What are we? Animals.
      2. Given that we are animals, how should this affect our attitude to life, other animals and the world generally.
    • I was pleased to see the rejection of "Parfit (Derek) - We Are Not Human Beings" (which I need to push up my reading list) and of transhumanist hopes, but felt that their rejection was motivated more by the bad consequences of following the transhumanist path rather than that it's metaphysically incoherent, given that we are animals.
    • PID Note: Human Animals
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Challenger (Melanie) - The joy of being animal"
Footnote 74: Aeon: Ferreira - The cosmic chasm (WebRef=10523)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Pedro G. Ferreira
    • Aeon Subtitle: Physics as we know it is elegant and exquisitely accurate. It tells almost nothing about the deepest riddles of the Universe
    • Author's Conclusion
      • It might also be time to think differently about which experiments we’re deploying in our search for the new physics. While the impetus has been for bigger and better, it makes sense to step back and consider alternatives. There’s a glorious history of research in fundamental physics driving technological change – forcing researchers to come up with ingenious new devices and experiments that allow them to measure elusive phenomena. Some countries are already investing millions of pounds and dollars in research in new quantum technologies for such purposes – peanuts compared with the really big experiments and new colliders under consideration. Efforts are underway, for example, to harness the quantum interference of atoms to open a new window on to gravitational waves. Or, on a different front, tabletop experiments are being devised to look for some of the more exotic forms of dark matter that have been proposed. Again, it’s an exploratory route, guided by controlled theoretical speculation, but the payoffs would be far-reaching.
      • I’ve spent most of my adult life staring at the cosmic chasm – the abyss between what we know and what we don’t. And while our knowledge of the Universe has improved dramatically in that time, our ignorance has become only more focused. We’re no closer to answering the big questions about dark matter, dark energy and the origins of the Universe than when I started out. This isn’t for lack of trying, and a titanic effort is now underway to try and figure out all these mysterious aspects of the Universe. But there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed, and we might end up never really grasping how the Universe works. That’s why we need to be creative and to explore. As Einstein once said: ‘Let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.’ While bridging the cosmic chasm might not be a matter of survival, undoubtedly it’s one of the most pressing challenges of modern science.
Footnote 75: Aeon: Video - Rooms (WebRef=10524)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: How our rooms shape our world, and vice versa
    • Editor's Abstract
      • A nearly inescapable fact of modern life is that most of us spend more time in just a few rooms in our homes than the sum of time spent anywhere else on Earth – and perhaps doubly so over the past year of pandemic-related lockdowns. And so, unsurprisingly, our spaces also tend to occupy a rather prominent place in our minds. Do they need a clean? A redecoration? To be ditched for a new arrangement altogether? And what – good, bad and ugly – do they reveal about us to visitors?
      • Featuring clever animated sequences in which talking, shifting shapes transform along to the reflective words of interviewees, Rooms explores how the mental and physical spaces of our rooms intersect and overlap.
  2. Notes
Footnote 76: Aeon: Video - Via dolorosa (WebRef=10522)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Close-ups on the faces of Spanish Holy Week convey the rapture of group ritual
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Encompassing the eight days between Palm Sunday and Easter, Holy Week in Spain (Semana Santa) is an elaborate festival of spectacle, Spanish culture and, for the devoted, fervent piety. A remembrance of a central tenet of Christian faith – Jesus’ persecution, death and resurrection – the week is characterised by penance processions carried out by Catholic brotherhoods and associations through streets across the country.
      • In the coastal Mediterranean city of Málaga, home to one of Holy Week’s most historic and famed celebrations, processions feature massive tronos (thrones or floats). Intricately adorned with Christian imagery, some of these structures are so massive that they must be carried by dozens of men who have trained for the task. Along the route – called Via Dolorosa (‘Way of Sadness’) in reference to Jesus’ final walk through Jerusalem – tronos are often accompanied by the sound of military drums and the scent of candles, held by women in tow. Streetside crowds greet them with roaring applause and even the occasional serenade of a mournful flamenco verse.
      • The grand, arresting scene draws hundreds of thousands of tourists – faithful and secular – each year. This makes the Dutch director Menno Otten’s decision to focus only on the faces and movements of a single group of trono-carrying men in his short documentary Via Dolorosa (2013) an intriguing one. In doing so, he draws attention to the festival as an intense religious ritual – one in which the penitents, with great strength and intense discipline, briefly embody the sacrifice at the centre of their faith.
      • Through intimate close-ups dramatically lit by streetlamps, Otten and the Dutch cinematographer Lennart Verstegen capture expressions of pain, solemn reflection and spiritual elation. The weight of the trono and the moment are only hinted at by the grimaces of the men and the noise of the crowd. Despite the narrow perspective, there’s a sense of the group as a whole, as the men lift, shift and shout anthems in choreographed unison. Ultimately, this unique framing provides an impression of the participants as occupying both physical and spiritual spaces, within themselves and as a part of something greater, amid a transcendent moment.
  2. Notes
    • An impressive film, though I'm not sure what it says of the piety of either the Brotherhoods or the onlookers. Presumably wearing a blindfold shows extra seriousness.
    • I originally thought the focus too narrow, but it does bring out the physical challenge and the psychological connections between those carrying the heavy load.
    • It probably needs to be watched in a darkened room to get the full sombre effect - though some of the "Brothers" seem rather jolly, initially at least.
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Video - Via dolorosa"
Footnote 77: Aeon: Video - Michael Rakowitz: haunting the West (WebRef=10516)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Michael Rakowitz
    • Aeon Subtitle: Looted artefacts are reborn as ‘ghosts’ in an artist’s protest against colonisation
    • Editor's Abstract
      • As a child, the US artist Michael Rakowitz was visiting the British Museum in London when his mother, who is of Iraqi-Jewish heritage, asked him a troubling question: why were priceless Assyrian artefacts displayed here, of all places? Rakowitz’s ensuing epiphany – that ‘it was a museum, but it was also a crime palace’ – has informed his work as an artist ever since.
      • This short documentary details how Rakowitz is inspired by his desire to make Western institutions confront colonisation as both a historical and a contemporary reality.
      • The film focuses on his project ‘The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist’ (2006-), work on which was still ongoing during the COVID-19 lockdown. Calling his artworks ‘ghosts’ that have returned to haunt the halls of Western museums, Rakowitz and staff from his studio recreate artefacts looted from the National Museum of Iraq after the US invasion in 2003, as well as archeological sites subsequently destroyed by ISIS.
      • ‘In this moment when we’ve lost the close proximity to one another,’ Rakowitz says, ‘we’re making these lost objects … where we can locate one another and feel like we’re not alone.’
  2. Notes
    • I’d expected not to enjoy this video, and I was not altogether disappointed! It does, however, raise important issues.
    • I don’t accept the major premise of the video, that these Middle-Eastern artworks found in European museums were “looted”, at least not in the modern sense of the term as an illicit activity.
    • Throughout history, victorious nations have taken it as licit to appropriate much of the wealth – and sometime the population – of defeated nations. So, the Romans, and Byzantines, filled their cities with artworks taken from Greece and Egypt. This shows cultural respect in a manner of speaking – better this than wanton destruction (as Alexander the Great and Persepolis; eg. WHE: Alexander The Great & the Burning of Persepolis) or the removal of precious metals for melting-down.
    • There has been lawless looting – as when the Crusaders sacked Byzantium and various artworks found their way to Venice (eg. Wikipedia: Sack of Constantinople), but this wasn’t quite the situation under colonialism.
    • I believe that during these later periods Europeans thought of themselves as acquiring the artworks by legitimate purchase from the Ottomans who were considered their rightful and negligent owners (I had in mind the partial destruction of the Parthenon, but it seems to have been at least partly down to the Venetians (History Today: The Parthenon is Blown Up), in a battle anticipating that for Monte Cassino (Wikipedia: Battle of Monte Cassino).
    • Respect for antiquities and for the art of Oriental cultures is an Enlightenment idea. Previously, ancient sites had been used as quarries or erased to make room for new buildings (consider St. Peters in Rome; eg. Wikipedia: Old St. Peter's Basilica).
    • The relevance of the video is increased by the US artist Michael Rakowitz's mother being of Iraqi-Jewish heritage, in that he implies that the “looted” heritage is his heritage. While there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Iraq since the deportation to Babylon (or possibly earlier – of the Northern Kingdom to Assyria), there have been many highs and lows, and it’s doubtful that the Iraqi Jewish diaspora is descended from those in Iraq at the time the antiquities were made.
    • For a brief but informative history of the Jews in Iraq, see The Museum of the Jewish People: The Jewish Community of Iraq.
    • As Rakowitz notes, Islamic State has destroyed much of Ur and other Middle Eastern sites. At least the antiquities are safe in European (and American) museums (though many may have been destroyed during WW2). See Wikipedia: List of destroyed heritage for a depressing list of historical destruction.
    • A case can be made for returning the originals of antiquities to their original locations, where known, and retaining copies in museums. But it’s not clear that the current populations of these areas “culturally own” them given the movement of populations over the millennia.
    • Rakowitz also has a justifiable complaint against the (mainly) US involvement in modern Iraq and the devastation (of antiquities) caused thereby.
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Rakowitz (Michael) - Video - Michael Rakowitz: haunting the West"
Footnote 78: Aeon: Video - Unfold the maths of origami (WebRef=10519)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Why are NASA engineers borrowing techniques from origami artists?
    • Editor's Abstract
      • With roots in the 17th century, traditional Japanese origami mines beauty from rules, limitations and, ultimately, mathematics. But there’s more to origami than just aesthetic value – scientists, engineers and designers have borrowed from the art form for a wide range of practical purposes.
      • As this short from TED-Ed details, this includes a ‘starshade’ proposed by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, intended to block exoplanet-hunting space telescopes from the glare of distant stars.
      • Featuring appealing and instructive stop-motion visuals from the French animator Charlotte Arene, this short provides a nifty primer on how origami artists are able to fold square pieces of paper into near-infinite forms both beautiful and useful.
  2. Notes
    • This is a truly fascinating 5-minute video.
    • The mathematical constraints on origami patterns are explained in detail, but not proved - just a bit of hand-waving to show that if any rule is violated, the paper won't fold flat. It seems that folding flat is a requirement for origami models.
    • It also seems that - rather than just trying things out - an origami 3-D shape can be planned out beforehand in 2-D.
    • It's not explained whether the Japanese knew of the mathematical rules, nor whether they proved them.
    • As always, Wikipedia has something interesting to say: Wikipedia: Mathematics of paper folding.
    • Following some links, it seems that the proofs - while by Japanese - have been achieved in the past 50 years.
Footnote 79: Aeon: Jaekl - Am I my connectome? (WebRef=10497)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Philip Jaekl
    • Aeon Subtitle: Each human brain possesses a unique, intricate pattern of 86 billion neurons. If science can map it, immortality beckons
  2. Notes
Footnote 80: Aeon: Video - The lost sound (WebRef=10498)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A playful tribute to the words our grandparents used (but we can’t pronounce)
    • Editor's Abstract
      • In her short film The Lost Sound, the Australian filmmaker Steffie Yee playfully interrogates how language evolves, causing words – and even sounds – to disappear within cultures between generations.
      • Featuring the contemporary Japanese poet Hiromi Itō reading from her own poem ‘On Ç’, Yee’s brief animation features an unseen woman struggling to bequeath a fictional lost sound to an animated character – to no avail.
      • A second-generation immigrant herself, Yee’s resonance with the source material permeates the short, which brings Itō’s words to life via an idiosyncratic blend of percussive, hypnotic music and an eclectic visual style.
  2. Notes
    • A very odd short film. I could make nothing of it really.
    • The narrative is in Japanese.
    • Since Japanese is severely limited in its sound system, the difficultles are unsurprising.
Footnote 81: Aeon: Video - The death of Julius Caesar (WebRef=10493)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Plotting, premonition and chaotic violence – an ancient account of Caesar’s demise
    • Editor's Abstract
      • ‘The body of Caesar lay just where it fell, ignominiously stained with blood – a man who had advanced westward as far as Britain and the Ocean, and who had intended to advance eastward against the realms of the Parthians and Indians, so that, with them also subdued, an empire of all land and sea might be brought under the power of a single head. There he lay.’
      • Nicolaus of Damascus was a prominent Jewish writer, philosopher and statesman of the first centuries BCE and CE. More than earning his multi-hyphenate status, during his life he served as a tutor to the children of Antony and Cleopatra and met, as an emissary, the emperor Augustus, writing, among other works, his biography – from which this vivid account of Julius Caesar’s assassination is excerpted. A haunting depiction of one of the most infamous moments in history, his retelling is rich with context, dramatic ironies and illustrative details, including glimpses into the Roman Senates’ plotting and the chaotic violence of the ultimate act.
  2. Notes
    • Interesting enough, though no great revelations.
    • I'd not heard of Nicolaus of Damascus.
    • See Wikipedia: Nicolaus of Damascus, amongst many other possible links.
Footnote 82: Aeon: Gallagher - How to learn a language (and stick at it) (WebRef=10449)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: John Gallagher
    • Aeon Subtitle: Forget about fluency and how languages are taught at school: as an adult learner you can take a whole new approach
    • Author's Key Points
      • Set specific, achievable goals at every stage, and test yourself to see if you can hit them.
      • Find the method or methods that work for you – remember there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to language learning.
      • When working with a teacher or conversation partner, make sure what you’re learning is helping you reach your goals.
      • Develop the ability to analyse your language level and work out what specific areas need work.
      • Use apps and other learning resources mindfully and with an understanding of what they can – and can’t – do.
      • Find free and compelling content online, and remember the principle of comprehensible input.
      • Make your language learning a part of your life, from your media consumption to your friendships and communities.
  2. Notes
Footnote 83: Aeon: Levy - Final thoughts (WebRef=10455)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Neil Levy
    • Aeon Subtitle: Do deathbed regrets give us a special insight into what really matters in life? There are good reasons to be sceptical
    • Author's Conclusion
      • In his recent book on the midlife crisis, the American philosopher Kieran Setiya argues that these crises can arise because, as we complete our projects, they lose their meaning for us. These projects are telic: they have a goal, and it’s our commitment to this goal that makes them meaningful to us. Once we’ve achieved that goal, they come to seem absurd. Setiya counsels us to ward off the midlife crisis by finding value in the atelic: in activities that don’t have a goal beyond themselves (going for a walk for the sake of it, rather than to get somewhere, for example). Whatever the merits of his solution to the problem that he sees midlife as posing, Setiya’s distinction is a helpful one. Telic pursuits are diachronic; atelic are not, or not necessarily. From midlife, when those of us who are lucky have achieved some of our goals, these telic pursuits seem pointless and absurd. But we remain in the midst of life and have to find a way to recommit to ongoing projects (Setiya recommends finding value in the moment, in the atelic aspects of our telic activities).
      • At each life stage, we face a different mix of telic and atelic activities. These activities are meaning-conferring for us; they constitute what’s valuable. Perhaps the perspective from the deathbed authentically reflects what matters for those who are forced to withdraw from ongoing activities, in view of their foreshortened temporal horizon, and what has value for them. But their wisdom doesn’t illuminate what has value for those lucky enough to be able to continue to engage in worthwhile telic activities. From outside the telic, only the atelic (or the pursuit of very short-term goals) retains meaning. Companionship, contemplation, beauty… they remain available to the dying and take on extra force. But their perspective is partial. Perhaps from the deathbed certain goods are grasped especially forcefully, but others slip away entirely. It’s not because these commitments lack value that they’re seen as pallid or pointless; it’s because their value can be fully grasped only from the inside.
  2. Notes
    • An excellent paper!
    • The first reason for scepticism is that what people say, and how people interpret and remember what is said, are skewed by expectations of what ought to be said by someone not wanting to appear shallow.
    • The second - and more important - reason is that what is deemed important is constrained by your circumstances and the options open to you. Money may seem unimportant provided you have sufficient. Your projects are important to you - and the reason for living - provided you have a reasonable expectation of time to carry them out.
    • I didn't altogether agree that for our telic activities "... their value can be fully grasped only from the inside". Those who developed a Covid-19 vaccine wouldn't treat its achievement as "absurd", nor is its value only intrinsic. People may die somewhat happier if they think that they achieved something comparatively enduring and worthwhile.
    • PID Note: Death
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Levy (Neil) - Final thoughts"
Footnote 84: Aeon: Video - A brief history of melancholy (WebRef=10440)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: From imbalanced humours to brain chemistry – on the evolution of melancholy
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The Ancient Greeks blamed sadness on bodily humours called ‘melaina kole’ (black bile). Today, clinical depression is often understood as an imbalance of brain chemicals – although this is a paradigm that many experts believe is overdue for an update.
      • This animation from TED-Ed offers a brief examination of the history of melancholy, scoping how philosophers, poets, writers and scientists have envisioned and altered our understanding of the experience across the ages.
  2. Notes
Footnote 85: Aeon: Video - The Sutton Hoo helmet (WebRef=10436)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The meanings and mysteries of the iconic Sutton Hoo helmet brought vividly to life
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The early Anglo-Saxon artefact known as the Sutton Hoo helmet has, since its origins in the 7th century, passed through many incarnations, including: exquisite armour, long-dormant burial object, astounding archeological discovery and high-stakes puzzle.
      • Today, the Sutton Hoo helmet – so named for the site in the English county of Suffolk at which it was discovered in 1939 – lives on as one of the British Museum’s most famous pieces.
      • In this video, Sue Brunning, curator of the museum’s European Early Medieval Insular Collection, examines the iconic object, revealing the multitude of meanings and mysteries it holds.
      • Through her investigation, Brunning brilliantly captures how history is an ever-fluid work in progress, being made and remade as new discoveries are brought – often quite literally – to light.
Footnote 86: Aeon: Godfrey-Smith - Philosophers and other animals (WebRef=10426)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Peter Godfrey-Smith
    • Author Narrative: Peter Godfrey-Smith is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (2016). He lives in Sydney.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Christine Korsgaard argues that we can extend a Kantian moral framework to include other animals. But her argument fails
  2. Notes
    • This paper 'encouraged' me to buy "Korsgaard (Christine) - Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals", the topic of the paper, and comments thereon must await reading that book.
    • Enough to say here that I find Kantian arguments difficult to follow, and critiques of them even more difficult, so I didn't really understand either Korsgaard's arguments as summarised, nor Godfrey-Smith's objections to them.
    • I think - on balance - that looking for a perfect, neat solution to animal welfare is a distraction. The focus should be on amelioration where this can be done easily and where the abuses are most obvious and “high-volume”. Ignore foxes.
    • Also, we need to recognise the facts of the natural world. Most animals die young - a consequence of litter sizes and limited resources - and few grow old - a consequence of predators focusing on the weak - so humans don't have an obligation to improve on this situation provided the lives of their animals are not made miserable by over-exploitation.
    • So, there's nothing wrong with "free range" farming, or the humane use of domesticated animals for work or companionship, as the alternative is for such animals not to exist.
    • PID Note: Animal Rights
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Godfrey-Smith (Peter) - Philosophers and other animals"
Footnote 87: Aeon: Video - Sabine Hossenfelder: Searching for beauty in mathematics (WebRef=10424)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Sabine Hossenfelder & Robert Lawrence Kuhn
    • Author Narrative: See Wikipedia: Sabine Hossenfelder.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Against ‘beauty’ in science – how striving for elegance stifles progress
    • Author's Abstract
      • That there is an inherent ‘beauty’ and ‘elegance’ to the laws of nature is a view that permeates the field of physics. But, according to the German theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, the notion that the further you peer into reality, the easier the equation gets, has no basis in reality. Indeed, since the mid-20th-century, the maths of physics has become increasingly knotty, even as many physicists have continued to search for a path back to simplicity.
      • In this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the PBS series Closer to Truth, Hossenfelder makes the case that this fixation on beauty isn’t just misguided – it’s stifling scientific progress.
  2. Notes
    • Seems sensible enough. She's happpy with seeking simplicity as part of the scientifc method, but that otherwise the mathematical models of science have to fit the facts.
    • So, nuclear physics has got more complicated by adding the weak and strong nuclear forces to electromagnetism and gravity.
    • Quote from Einstein - no simpler than is necessary.
    • But the standard model is a mess, even though it works.
    • Grand Unified theories - attempting to unify the 3 electro-nuclear forces - have not been successful, so we don't know whether there is any unification to be had.
    • This search for simplicity assumes that mathematics has a cetral role in reality (not just physics).
    • Hossenfelder thinks we're just selecting the mathematics - some mathematics would not be simple at all.
    • Some physicists are trying to impose their own narrow-minded idea of beauty on the laws of nature. This is not proper scientific methodology. It's often justified by cherry-picking historical examples.
    • This is - presumably - a plug for her latest book: Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018)
Footnote 88: Aeon: Video - A small antelope horn (WebRef=10420)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Carlo Rovelli
    • Aeon Subtitle: Sitting by the fire with a nomadic tribe, a physicist ponders the many shapes of wisdom
    • Author's Abstract
      • The Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli is a pioneer in the field of quantum gravity, and often thought of as one of the world’s foremost scientific thinkers.
      • In this brief animation by James Siewert, which features narration from the Swazi-English actor Richard E Grant, Rovelli recalls communing with members of the Hadza tribe of northern Tanzania – one of the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth.
      • Sitting by the fire, thoughts of the peculiar trajectory of Homo sapiens and the many shapes of human wisdom flicker in his head, as he ponders the gaps, large and small, between his world and theirs.
  2. Notes
    • I can't but think that the message of this video is completely bonkers.
    • It seems to be fixated on "human inequality", while asserting - of course - human equality, which supposedly started in the Neolithic period when humans - in general - stopped hunter-gathering and started farming.
    • Are all the products of civilisation really so useful, we are asked to consider? Well, some not, but mostly 'yes'. As Hobbes said, otherwise life is nasty, brutish and short. And poor and solitary - in that there would be very few human beings.
    • Sitting round the fire with hunter-gatherers, he wonders how it was so easy to understand one another. He must be joking - do they really understand one another? What's it like to have no knowledge of science or civilisation? We "understand" our tiny grandchildren - but we forget how little they know (forgetting our own limited outlook on the world at their age, and what a long - indeed lifelong - process education is).
    • The narrator wonders how much hunter-gatherers know that he does not. Much, I'm sure - but I imagine he tacitly thinks they know what he knows, which they don't, and mistakenly discounts the importance of what he knows. Not, of course, his speculations in Quantum Gravity, which very few people understand, which doesn't matter much as they are probably not along the right lines.
    • As a general principle, it's allegedly easy to maintain "equality" in a very small isolated group. All equally poor and ignorant, however exotic the occasional enjoyment of a night round their campfires might seem.
    • Of course, it can be argued that such groups should not be forcibly assimilated into "civilised society". But if parents in our country failed to educate their children to an adequate standard, or limited their range of experience, their children would be taken from them. Why do we criticise powerful countries that don't share our values, while being indulgent towards indigenous primitives? Romantic ideas about the 'Noble Savage'?
Footnote 89: Aeon: Video - How Big Tech betrayed us (WebRef=10411)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Rana Foroohar
    • Aeon Subtitle: Tech companies shroud their algorithms in secrecy. It’s time to pry open the black box
    • Author's Abstract
      • The so-called father of capitalism, Adam Smith, would frown upon the ‘free markets’ of the 21st century, argues the US economics writer Rana Foroohar.
      • For Smith, a functioning market required
        → transparency,
        → a mutual understanding of exchanges and
        → a shared moral framework.
      • And, as Foroohar puts it in this brief animation for the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), surveillance capitalism – pioneered by Google, and now, to varying degrees, ubiquitous worldwide – comes up short on all three fronts.
      • Featuring excerpts from a presentation given by Foroohar at the RSA House in London in 2019, this brief animation lays out the many ways in which surveillance capitalism continues to encroach unchecked, and one potential plan for course correction.
  2. Notes
    • Initial impressions:
      • This is a very tendentious / opinionated account, which assumes its audience is on board with certain basic assumptions (which may not be the case, from a straw poll of one, though was probably the case on delivery). The tone of voice implies that all that’s said is obvious, indubitable and is a straightforward reading of the nefarious practices of Big Tech. Contrast this with being grateful for all the useful – and now invaluable – freebies given out with our phones.
      • Anyway, I’m summarising the argument, and then adding a few questions or comments.
    • Summary:
      • 80% of corporate wealth in 10% of firms - those with the most corporate data & intellectual property. Facebook, Amazon, Google …
      • Google invented the business model of “surveillance capitalism”: capturing and selling to advertisers your on-line (and increasingly off-line) activity to build a profile of you, then selling that information to advertisers so they can target you to a microscopic level.
      • Think about that as it moves into Finance, Healthcare and Insurance.
      • Boxes in people's cars (and homes?) - pick up dodgy driving (though actually only not reacting quickly enough and the like: the example is that - with a child in the back - a parent might decide to stop more slowly than otherwise). Black mark. Incredibly creepy. Completely changes the business model from the collective - risk sharing / pooling - to separating us all into individuals, as individual risks.
      • Perhaps there’s a pool of uninsurable people: it creates a tier system, with some people being completely disenfranchised.
      • Rather an obscure comparison between Wall Street (mostly pre-Crash) and Big Tech. The Banks are more accountable. A transaction in data is a barter transaction.
      • Adam Smith’s three prerequisites for a properly functioning market:-
        1. Equal access to information
        2. Transparent transactions, so both parties know what’s being exchanged
        3. A shared moral framework.
      • Can argue that with Big Data, none of these are in effect.
      • Opacity in the financial crash – Weapons of Math Destruction – derivatives. Big Tech transactions are even more opaque (it is alleged).
      • Opacity: we don’t know what’s happening in the algorithmic black box. Big Tech firms don’t want to open it up, hence resistant to the policing of political advertising.
      • A possibly elegant answer to some of these problems: privacy, competitiveness, innovation would be to create digital data banks where companies of all sizes and all industries could have access to data, but only in a way that citizens and democratically-elected governments would decide.
      • We – allegedly – need to move from the old capitalist model to a more equal sharing of this (information) wealth pie.
    • Questions / Observations:
      • ”Surveillance capitalism” is a term loaded with the negative connotations of the police state. Let’s step back: we get a lot of “free” software from the Tech firms that enriches our lives. It needs to know our likes and dislikes in order to work well and seamlessly. There has to be a trade off as such wonders can’t be provided for nothing. I do admit that the Big Tech profits are excessive and taxes too small. Also, that there has to be trust and regulation of data privacy. No doubt many people wouldn’t want their on-line activities made public, and it is creepy knowing that your every move is being watched and is never erased.
      • What's wrong with micro-level targeting? It’s better for all parties than random junk mail, and can even be a service for the potential customer.
      • Boxes in cars: This was marketed so that safe drivers can save money on their insurance. No doubt it might move on from that. But why should dangerous drivers not pay more for insurance? Currently car insurance is crudely segmented by age, car and postcode.
      • Insurance wasn’t invented so that we were all treated equally, but so that the risk was shared where the risks were outside our control, and were more than we could bear in the case of a rare but very expensive event.
      • Shared moral framework: how has this ever been possible with international trade?
      • Black boxes: the issue with Machine Learning is that there’s nothing to reveal – the rules are not encoded in any way that can be read out, because they weren’t fed in.
      • Data Banks: this would need a lot of spelling out. Also, access would need to be paid for, else how would the collection be funded? And there’s need to be clear descriptions of just how this data should be interpreted, which would also need to be paid for. And the algorithms don’t exist in a publishable form.
      • Despite my objection to the above presentation of the problem, I agree that the Big Tech world has just grown and the long-term implications haven’t been thought through. If it was the State that was collecting all this data, it would be much worse – and who would own these data banks but the State? At least with private companies we can stop using their products, however inconvenient this might be. Big Tech knows that if it abuses its position (too much) some luddite will come along and smash it up.
      • For the speaker, see Wikipedia: Rana Foroohar. She’s a well-connected journalist with a BA in English Literature, who may not really know what she’s talking about. Bashing Big Tech is big business (as was bashing Big Pharma until they rescued us from the plague), and has a ready audience. While it’s not mentioned in the talk, this must be a plug for her book: "Foroohar (Rana) - Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles - And All of Us", which I’ve just ordered and don’t expect to enjoy much, much less so than "O'Neill (Cathy) - Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy" at any rate.
      • I suppose I should buy and read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff, but I'll see how I get on with the above book first.
    • PID Note: Transhumanism
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Foroohar (Rana) - Video - How Big Tech betrayed us"
Footnote 90: Aeon: Video - Kachalka (WebRef=10409)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A gym built of Soviet-era scraps is a creative community hub
    • Author's Abstract
      • Its name derives from the Ukrainian for ‘to pump’, and it’s built from scrap metal, so it would be easy to think of the Kachalka gym in Kiev as a Muscle Beach Venice (way, way) east of Los Angeles – a place for hardbodies only, novices need not apply. But in fact, whether you’re looking to get as buff as a World’s Strongest Man competitor, land a few blows at a punch-bag built from car tyres, or simply pose awhile on the machines, the outdoor, free-to-all gym has room for you. It even comes with its own on-site volunteer instructors and sports masseurs.
      • This short documentary from the Irish filmmaker Gar O’Rourke assembles scenes from the semi-legendary open-air gym, which could seem ripped from a post-apocalyptic movie if it wasn’t for the kindly nature of the gym’s users. O’Rourke frames Kachalka with a light touch and a droll eye: there’s an inherent humour to the proceedings, as everything from massive, brawny hands to high heels meet the metal of the squeaky, makeshift machines.
      • What’s striking is just how serious and how elderly many of this gym user’s are. But beneath their earnest self-absorption, the short documentary captures the communal nature, deep resourcefulness and creative spirit inherent in the space. After all, the distinctive gym wasn’t built for novelty, but out of necessity. The film’s narrator – an unnamed regular – explains how Kachalka was born during Soviet times, when factory workers collected scrap metal and brought tools from work to build the fitness space. Today, that gym regular keeps ‘the Mecca of Kiev’s sport’ alive as part of a team who help design and weld new machines to keep visitors coming. ‘I have completely actualised myself here,’ he explains, referring to his work building Kachalka – proving, perhaps once and for all, that the path to self-actualisation can embody many forms.
Footnote 91: Aeon: West - Pause. Reflect. Think (WebRef=10393)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Peter West
    • Author Narrative: Peter West is a teaching fellow in Early Modern philosophy at Durham University in the UK.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Susan Stebbing’s little Pelican book on philosophy had a big aim: giving everybody tools to think clearly for themselves
    • Author's Conclusion
      • At a time when the arts and humanities, including individual philosophy departments, are under institutional and political pressure to justify their continued existence, the model of public engagement offered by Stebbing’s Thinking to Some Purpose is worth some consideration. I’m not suggesting that a ‘transfer of knowledge’ approach should be replaced by a ‘skills and training’ one. Studying and contributing to philosophy can be an end in itself.
      • But in an era of fake news and 24-hour news cycles, if philosophers are also able to help us pause, reflect and think clearly, regardless of the subject matter at hand, then that’s surely a good thing for them to do.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → L. Susan Stebbing
    • Interesting enough, though it is rather of historical interest (despite critical thinking being of perennial relevance).
    • There's an interesting contemporary link to suggestions for contemporary books on the topic: FT - Warburton - The Best Five books on Critical Thinking. Nigel Warburton recommends two books I've got (and read).
    • This link - and especially to the site itself (FT - Five Books) - was the best find from this paper, though I doubt I can afford to spend much time following it up.
Footnote 92: Aeon: Puchner - How a secret European language ‘made a rabbit’ and survived (WebRef=10385)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Martin Puchner
    • Author Narrative: Martin Puchner holds the Byron and Anita Wien Chair in drama and in English and comparative literature at Harvard University. As general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, he has brought 4,000 years of literature to students across the globe. He is the author of The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization (2017) and The Language of Thieves: My Family’s Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate (2020).
    • Author's Introduction
      • They started out as apprentices looking for masters, students looking for teachers, or soldiers looking for wars, but they ended up as travelling tinkers, peddlers, beggars and thieves, members of the itinerant underground of central Europe. Carrying forged papers and false names, they were feared by peasants, shunned by burghers and hunted by the police. Catholics and Protestants, Jews, Sinti and Roma – they had little in common, neither bonds of religion nor ethnicity, except for the life into which they had drifted, the life of the road.
      • The underground of central Europe, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, is all but inaccessible to us today. Those wandering its roads left few traces of themselves, except for the secret signs they carved on trees to warn each other of aggressive policemen and rabid dogs, or to recommend kindhearted householders willing to provide bread and water. These markings faded but there remains a way to catch glimpses of this lost world: its language. Over the course of hundreds of years, the people of the road evolved a distinct way of talking that strengthened their resilience, fostered solidarity and helped them survive. As it was purely spoken, this language, too, almost disappeared – had it not been for police forces across central Europe that decoded it like the cipher used by enemy powers. Collaborating across jurisdictions from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, the police recorded this language by arresting its speakers and forcing them to divulge their words and phrases. The police also named it: Rotwelsch.
      • Rot was a word for beggar (in Rotwelsch), and welsch could mean Italian but mostly it meant foreign and incomprehensible. There was some truth in the name, because Rotwelsch speakers freely mixed German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Czech and Romani, the language of the Sinti and Roma (who used to be called Gypsies because they were falsely believed to have originated in Egypt) in ways that were incomprehensible to outsiders. To German or Yiddish speakers, it sounded as if Rotwelsch speakers had stolen words and twisted their meaning.
      • Rotwelsch was a name for the language used not by the speakers themselves but by those who regarded vagrants as untrustworthy foreigners.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Wikipedia: Rotwelsch.
    • As is often the case, this paper is a plug for the author's latest book.
    • Rotwelsch is a sociolect, "the speech of any distinct sub-group", because it doesn't have its own grammar, but uses German.
    • Interesting account of "in a pickle" and "doing a rabbit".
    • Also, the author's family involvement: grandfather - a Nazi - attempted to eliminate the language, along with its speakers, while his uncle tried to revive it.
Footnote 93: Aeon: Sunar - I have no mind’s eye - let me try to describe it for you (WebRef=10386)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Neesa Sunar
    • Author Narrative: Neesa Sunar is a freelance writer on mental health. She works as a mental health advocate and runs a mental health discussion group on Facebook called What is Wellness? She is also the author of Memories of Psychosis: Poems on the Mental Distress Experience (2019) and a singer/songwriter with guitar. She lives in New York.
    • Author's Introduction
      • I have aphantasia, a neurological condition that leaves me with a ‘blind mind’s eye’: the inability to mentally visualise my thoughts. While most people are able to ‘see’ images associated with stories and thoughts when their eyes are closed, I have never had this gift. When I close my eyes, I experience only darkness. I have no sensory experience.
  2. Notes
Footnote 94: Aeon: Video - Who decides how long a second is? (WebRef=10390)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: There was nothing quick about how we arrived at the standardised second
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Measuring the length of a second might seem simple, but this history of the time unit from TED-Ed shows how the road to the modern, standardised second was anything but.
      • Written by John Kitching, a Fellow at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, the video details how the advent of global communications and transit systems left the world in need of a more precise and universal understanding of a second – and how that search ultimately led to the atomic clock.
  2. Notes
    • Fair enough account of the rationale behind the Caesium clock.
    • The talk mentioned the importance of synchronised clocks in a global world, but didn't mention relativistic issues (either SR or GR, both of which are important at the accuracy required)
    • PID Note: Time
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Who decides how long a second is?"
Footnote 95: Aeon: Video - Nyctophobia (WebRef=10369)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The dark side of ego loss – what it’s like to disappear into depersonalisation
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Ego loss is often characterised as an enlightened and contented state – the purview of such soul-searchers as deep meditators, psychonauts and ardent Buddhists. But as some people who struggle with anxiety understand all too well, the perpetual feeling of self-dissolution known as depersonalisation can be one of the nastiest manifestations of their disorder. The condition involves a harrowing feeling of detachment from oneself that can arise in an instant, sometimes last for years, and is often accompanied by a derealisation, in which the world appears strange and surreal.
      • In this short film, the French-Canadian filmmaker and set designer Jean-François Boisvenue explores how a lifetime of precarious mental health culminated in an excruciating period of depersonalisation in his early 20s. Using animated light displays projected onto his body to convey his sense of discord, Boisvenue recalls how depersonalisation swept over him, upending his sense of self and reality for months before he was able to heal.
  2. Notes
Footnote 96: Aeon: Video - Quantum fluctuations (WebRef=10371)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘Moving paintings’ evoke a quantum particle collision at the Large Hadron Collider
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The London-based artist Markos R Kay works at the intersection of digital art and science, building bridges between the sometimes esoteric work of scientists and the public. For his piece Quantum Fluctuations: Experiments in Flux (2016), Kay set out to visually express a quantum interaction – a phenomenon that’s notoriously unobservable.
      • First, Kay crafted a scientifically informed visual style, incorporating influences ranging from the abstract expressionists to Richard Feynman. Kay then created ‘moving paintings’ from these visuals using computer software intended to mimic the supercomputers that simulate particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. The sequence of events visualised in this excerpt from Quantum Fluctuations is as follows:
        1. Underlying event: representing the background particle interactions that occur in a hadron collider during a particle collision.
        2. Proton beam: hundreds of trillions of protons are accelerated to near the speed of light.
        3. Hard subprocess: the main event during a high-energy particle collision.
        4. Parton showers: radiation in the form of virtual quarks and gluons caused by the energy of the collision.
        5. Hadronisation: these particles become composite hadrons.
        6. Decay: unstable composites break apart and light is emitted.
      • There’s an idiosyncratic beauty to the resulting imagery and an inherent tension in the work, which melds careful planning with spontaneity, and offers an abstract peek into the unseeable. For the best experience, we recommend watching with your video player at the 4K setting. You can view Quantum Fluctuations in full at Sedition: Quantum Fluctuations.
  2. Notes
Footnote 97: Aeon: Tasioulas - All in one (WebRef=10345)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: John Tasioulas
    • Aeon Subtitle: Human rights, health, the rule of law – why are these concepts inflated to the status of totalising, secular religions?
  2. Notes
    • Rights (ought to) provide strong protections because they impose duties on others. That's why it's important not to inordinately expand what falls under the category of a 'right'.
    • The author - rightly - resists the expansion of concepts - such as rights or the rule of law - to include anything that we think useful or admirable.
    • But even he doesn't go far enough, in my view. He - helpfully (in being explicit about the reason) but wrongly (in my view) agrees that it was correct to put "socioeconomic rights" – such as rights to health, work and an adequate standard of living - on an equal footing with long-familiar civil and political rights, such as freedom of religion and the right to a fair trial. His reason is that "One way of justifying the existence of socioeconomic rights is by arguing that, whatever might have been true of the distant past, in the conditions of modernity, with enhanced technological and organisational capabilities, it’s feasible to argue that all human beings, simply by virtue of their humanity, are owed access to certain minimum levels of healthcare, work protection and so on."
    • The reason I'm resistent to this is that it's not a conceptual but practical issue. Rights impose duties and it's essential to decide whose duty it is to fulfil that right. This is clear in the case of the civil and political rights - it's the duty of the polity under which the individuals with the rights live. So, it's the duty of the Chinese to give all their civizens their civil rights (not "the West", which has no authority in China, though it has a duty to complain and impose sanctions, provided this is likely to be beneficial and welcomed by those deprived of their rights).
    • So, it's the duty of States with the resources to satisfy the so-called socioeconomic rights of their citizens to do so, provided this can be done without infringing other rights of their citizens (eg. by imposing punitize taxes to pay for largesse), and provided it doesn't encourage too much of a spirit of dependency.
    • He resists conceptual overreach, but not conceptual evolution. However, I'm doubtful that whatever - at a time and place - we consider to be a 'right' is a part of that concept. Maybe this boils down to arguments about Nominalism in the theory of Universals.
    • For instance, it's not part of the concept "animal" that any particular species falls under it - especially those yet to be discovered. Though, I suppose, the concept might evolve to accommodate the characteristics of such species when discovered (or themselves evolved) but not by adding them to the "bag".
    • Links:-
      → "Nussbaum (Martha) - Beyond anger"
      → Aeon: Sebo - All we owe to animals
      → "Woodruff (Michael) - The face of the fish"
      → Aeon: Andrews & Monso - Rats are us
      → Rogan - Why Amartya Sen remains the century’s great critic of capitalism
      → Rescuing Human Rights by Hurst Hannum (downloaded from Cambridge Core)
      → Josiah Ober’s book Demopolis (2017) (downloaded from Cambridge Core)
      → BBC: Jonathan Sumption - Reith Lectures, 2019
      → "Tasioulas (John) - Are human rights anything more than legal conventions?"
    • PID Note: Concepts
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Tasioulas (John) - All in one"
Footnote 98: Aeon: Wright - How to be a genius (WebRef=10342)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 99: Aeon: Freamon - Gulf slave society (WebRef=10286)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Bernard Freamon
    • Author Narrative:
      • Bernard Freamon is adjunct professor at New York University School of Law and emeritus professor at Seton Hall University School of Law.
      • He is the organiser of a website on the Islamic law on slavery, ijma-on-slavery.org.
      • His most recent book is Possessed by the Right Hand: The Problem of Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim Cultures (2019).
      • He lives in New York City.
    • Aeon Subtitle: The glittering city-states of the Persian Gulf fit the classicist Moses Finley’s criteria of genuine slave societies
  2. Notes
    • This is a very interesting and important paper, even though it is a plug for the author's excruciatingly expensive book.
    • The website (ijma-on-slavery.org) looks very informative, and is free, of course! It's aim is "seeking the declaration of a consensus among Islamic scholars that slavery and slave trading are illegal under Islamic law".
    • There is a useful mention and discussion of "Finley (Moses I.), Shaw (Brent D.), Ed. - Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology".
    • I've also purchased "Hunt (Peter) - Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery" to provide further background.
    • I think that I'm convinced that the Gulf States are effectively slave societies, even though employers don't legally own their employees. They couldn't survive without this cheap and constrained labour. They treat the workers appalingly, though the death rates - while terrible - are nowhere near the rates of the historic slave societies (though these are skewed by the high death rate in transportation; in service it was in slave-owners' interest to keep their 'property' alive and functional).
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Freamon (Bernard) - Gulf slave society"
Footnote 100: Aeon: Video - The wolf dividing Norway (WebRef=10287)
  1. Aeon
    • Author Narrative: Editor's Abstract
      • During the 1960s, wolves nearly vanished from Norway’s landscape due to overhunting; now, there are no more than 70 wolves left in the country.
      • Although the wild predators – known to prey on farmers’ livestock – received protection under law in 1971, the debate between hunters and conservationists over the fate of the remaining endangered population has been heated and divisive ever since.
      • The Wolf Dividing Norway shows how this debate culminates in December 2019, as groups on both sides of the conflict wait to hear whether the government will authorise the annual winter wolf hunt.
      • With unprecedented access to remote communities at the heart of the debate, the Norwegian documentary filmmaker Kyrre Lien humanises the frustration coming from both sides, providing a sensitive look at one of Norway’s most polarising topics.
    • Aeon Subtitle: The divisive debate over hunting Norway’s endangered wolves
  2. Notes
    • A sad but fascinating documentary, letting both sides tell their story.
    • Yes - wolves are dangerous to livestock (and people) and can probably spread disease. And yes, they do need to be kept in check or they'll over-predate on livestock (which are not in a 'state of nature', so there's no natural predator / prey balance). But the hunters' case is compromised by their love of hunting - the cull is something they look forward to, rather than treating it as a painful duty. It was interesting to see their complete lack of concern for the animals they hunt, even when identifying a couple of the dead juveniles as 'puppies'.
    • And yes, there should be room for top predators to co-exist, especially if their absence causes an imbalance in the ecosystem. But the future of the planet doesn't depend on the wolf population in Norway. Yet, the needless destruction of beautiful and impressive animals is a tragedy.
    • Sociologically, there are parallels between the polarisation of the two sides in the 'stuggle' over the wolves and debates over Brexit and Trump. The choices are binary and irrevocable (for a while) with no middle ground, and 'catastrophe' for the losing side.
    • PID Note: Animal Rights
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - The wolf dividing Norway"
Footnote 101: Aeon: Frevert - The history of humiliation points to the future of human dignity (WebRef=10290)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Ute Frevert
    • Author Narrative: Ute Frevertis the managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She has published numerous books in English and German, some of which have been translated into Japanese, Chinese and Arabic, and the latest of which is The Politics of Humiliation: A Modern History (2020). She is a member of the British Academy as well as two national academies in Germany, and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Tampere, Finland.
  2. Notes
    • Rather a dull piece. It rightly points out the welcome shift from the political use of humiliation as a way of punishment and control.
    • It's also right that all human beings should be accorded respect in the absence of evidence that they don't deserve it.
    • But it leaves open the question of how society should deal with those who genuinely don't deserve respect because of their free and antisocial actions.
    • It's not criminal to be morbidly obese or perpetually drunk; sometimes these may be medical conditions outside the individual's control, but sometimes not.
    • Quite what society should do in such cases is difficult to decide, but accepting the situation as "diversity" isn't good enough. Some encouragement to reformation is required, and a forceful realisation that society deprecates such optional conditions or activities may be helpful.
    • Maybe making anti-social behaviour that has no deeper meaning have unpleasant consequences for the perpetrator is appropriate, but in a rich society it can always be side-stepped. In a poor society, 'wasters' are a drain on scarce resources that cannot be afforded, whereas resources can always be found in a rich society.
    • But the sort of shaming that demands absolute conformity to arbitrary and ever-changing standards of fashion is to be deplored, as is that that focuses on things the shamed individual can do nothing about.
Footnote 102: Aeon: Video - The evolution of cynicism (WebRef=10279)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Cynicism was born when Diogenes rejected materialism and manners
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Plato once described the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope as ‘a Socrates gone mad!’ It’s a good comparison. Like Socrates, Diogenes gave the bird to respectable society. He undermined status and manners in the 4th century BCE with his bottomless reserve of shamelessness and irreverence, opting to live on the streets like a stray dog. But, of course, there was a method to his madness.
      • In this short video by TED-Ed, the Irish philosopher William D Desmond explains how Diogenes lived an authentic and ascetic life in accordance with nature, and how in doing so he founded the philosophy of cynicism – an iconoclastic tradition that continues to illuminate and infuriate today.
  2. Notes
Footnote 103: Aeon: Video - Kidnapper ants (WebRef=10265)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Incredible footage captures the ants that transform other species into loyal servants
    • Editor's Abstract
      • You might assume that a creature incapable of feeding itself would have a one-way ticket off the food chain and into the dustbin of extinction. But some ant species with mandibles that are ill-equipped for eating have developed a clever – if not quite mutual – means of finding sustenance and perpetuating.
      • Known as ‘kidnapper’ or ‘slave-making’ ants, these parasitic creatures raid the nests of other ant species, capture their young and carry them to their home nest. Using scents to keep the new arrivals oblivious to the fact that they’re far from home, the kidnappers deploy their captors to tend to their young, forage for their food, and even chew and feed it to them in a process known as trophallaxis.
      • Captured in stunning high definition by the science documentary series Deep Look, this short video tracks red kidnapper ants in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California as they raid, kidnap and brainwash the young from a nearby black ant species’ nest.
      • You can learn more about this video at KQED: Kidnapper Ants Steal Other Ants' Babies - And Brainwash Them.
Footnote 104: Aeon: Sykes - Sheanderthal (WebRef=10260)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Rebecca Wragg Sykes
    • Author Narrative: Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a Palaeolithic archaeologist and honorary fellow at the University of Liverpool, specialising in Neanderthals. She is co-founder of the Trowelblazers website, celebrating women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists through the ages, and the author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art (2020). She lives in Wales.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. What can archaeologists tell us about how they lived?
  2. Notes
    • Interesting enough. Useful to know what can be learnt about the Neanderthals from DNA analysis, and that it is this that reveals the sex of the specimens, rather than the (scarcely available) pelvic bones.
    • Of course, it's important to remember that half of the Neanderthal 'cave men' were women. But it doesn't help to be told that "based on living people, around one in 2,000 Neanderthals might have been intersex" or that there may have been occasional female-female 'relationships'. What have such speculations to do with the archaeology?
    • Again, interesting to see what evidence is used to determine the lifestyles of the Neanderthal sexes (ie. the state of bones and teeth indicating the use to which they were put, particularly in the preparation of skins).
    • Also, interesting speculative comparisons made between Neanderthals and - on the one hand - bonobos and chimps and - on the other - the much closer (in both evolutionary and behavioral terms) - modern hunter-gatherers.
    • PID Note: Evolution
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Sykes (Rebecca Wragg) - Sheanderthal"
Footnote 105: Aeon: Video - Fukuzawa Yukichi in Europe (WebRef=10223)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘Farcical situations’ and culture clashes – when Japan met modern Europe in 1862
    • Editor's Abstract
      • In 1862, the celebrated Japanese author, publisher and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi was one of 40 men who travelled as part of the first Japanese embassy to Europe, where he served as a translator. The landmark trip followed a diplomatic mission to the United States in 1860, which Yukichi also joined. These envoys took place in the wake of centuries of strict isolationism enforced by Japan’s feudal military government, the Tokugawa shogunate, between the 1630s and the 1850s, making its members some of the first Japanese people in generations to experience a culture outside of their own.
      • The result, according to Yukichi, who wrote about the trip in vivid detail in his Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa (1897), was a combination of ‘farcical’ cultural misunderstandings, eye-opening glimpses into the greater world, and tense moments of geopolitical diplomacy and posturing. Featuring readings from a 1934 English translation of his autobiography, this video tracks Yukichi’s experiences during stops in Paris, where he was awed by the grandeur of the Hotel du Louvre; London, where he was bewildered by the sloppiness of representative government; Amsterdam, where the nature of land ownership in Holland caused confusion; and Russia, where he translated a tense negotiation on the disputed Sakhalin Island. The excerpts make for an utterly fascinating historical document, offering a snapshot of the times in each of the countries represented, and providing a window into the mind of Yukichi, who would later become a leading voice against Japanese isolationism.
  2. Notes
    • This is a really interesting video, and encouraged me to investigate the Autobiography itself: "Fukuzawa (Yukichi) - The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa"; which, after some dithering, I've purchased.
    • While the video gives a flavour, it'd be nice to read more. It's fascinating to see a non-European-eye view of exposure to foreign cultures.
Footnote 106: Aeon: Video - In dog years (WebRef=10215)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The joys and heartbreaks of loving a creature who ages faster than you
    • Editor's Abstract
      • That humans and dogs age on vastly different timescales is a fact that most dog owners understand all too well. This unfortunate reality ripples throughout the Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s documentary In Dog Years.
      • A spiritual sequel to her film Norman, Norman, in which she finds herself half-contemplating cloning her beloved, ageing Shih Tzu, Romvari keeps the camera at dog-level in this short as she captures 10 sunsetting stories of human-canine companionship.
      • Brimming with humour, heart, and very good boys and girls, these vignettes give rise to a bittersweet celebration of the ephemeral joys of loving dogs as family.
  2. Notes
Footnote 107: Aeon: Romeo & Tewksbury - Plato in Sicily (WebRef=10214)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Nick Romeo & Ian Tewksbury
    • Author Narrative:
      • Nick Romeo is a journalist and author, and teaches philosophy for Erasmus Academy. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, National Geographic, The Atlantic and The New Republic, among others. He lives in Athens, Greece.
      • Ian Tewksbury is a Classics graduate student at Stanford University in California. His primary research interests include archaic poetry and ancient philosophy. He works on the digitalisation of Homeric manuscripts for the Homer Multitext project.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Plato travelled to the decadent strife-torn court of Syracuse three times, risking his life to create a philosopher-king
  2. Notes
Footnote 108: Aeon: Video - My name is Anik (WebRef=10201)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: It’s a clash of cultures when Anik’s granddaughter comes home to learn Kurdish
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The short film My Name Is Anik by the filmmaker Bircan Birol – who was born in Turkey but is now based in Scotland – documents the time she spent in Istanbul trying to learn Kurdish from her grandmother.
      • The endeavour is hardly straightforward, as her grandmother – whose given Kurdish name is Anik but often goes by the Turkified name Belguzar – has a complex relationship with her mother tongue, which evokes poignant and painful memories.
      • Tender and heartfelt, Birol’s short is at once an accomplished work of autobiographical filmmaking and a revealing glimpse into the confluence between language, culture and identity.
  2. Notes
    • The video was a bit disappointing. I suppose I'd been hoping to get an idea of Kurdish, but it's not really possible as the dialogue is in Turkish, my command of which - though I've given it some attention - isn't up to the job (though there are English sub-titles).
    • It's also not possible - for me at any rate - to understand the psychology of it all; why grand-daughter and grand-mother seem to rub one another up the wrong way, and what Anik's attitude to her native tongue and language really is.
    • Anik seems to be very fluent in Turkish, so was it always her first language?
    • However, it was interesting to see the openness of Istanbul cafe culture to Kurdish culture.
Footnote 109: Aeon: Limburg - Am I disabled? (WebRef=10184)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Joanne Limburg
    • Author Narrative: Joanne Limburg is a poet, memoirist and novelist. She teaches creative writing at the Institute of Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge, and her books include the poetry collections Femenismo (2000) and The Autistic Alice (2017), the novel A Want of Kindness (2015) and the memoirs The Woman Who Thought Too Much (2010) and Small Pieces (2017). She lives in Cambridge, UK.
    • Aeon Subtitle: With my pen hovering over a form, there is no easy answer: better to provoke stigma with support, or resist classification?
  2. Notes
    • There are – to my mind – two issues raised by this essay:-
      1. What is the scope of “disability”, and is it a univocal term?
      2. What assistance should society afford to the “disabled” and should the same assistance be supplied to all those so labelled?
    • My views are that
      1. “Disability” has become too general a term, and that not all those categorised as “disabled” are in fact so, or at least not so as to need extra assistance. If we’re trying too hard to provide a level playing field, we’d need to add a “handicap” to those who we might label “gifted” in one way or another.
      2. Giving everyone labelled “disabled” a “blue badge” is inappropriate, given the reason these were created in the first place.
    • So, our author has Asperger’s syndrome (or at least has found a psychiatrist to label her as such). It seems this entitles her (in the UK) to classify herself as “disabled” and she wonders whether she should, given that she didn’t realise she had “the condition” until age 42 (she’s now aged 50). She eventually decides that she will. She “bigs up” the condition by describing it as “autistic spectrum disorder (ASD)”.
    • The author cites a book - Disability Theory (2008) by Tobin Siebers (see Siebers - Disability Theory). I’ve looked at it on Amazon, but couldn’t bring myself to buy it. It gets good reviews by students needing it for course reading, but looking at the Abstract and other books linked with it filled me with gloom.
        “Intelligent, provocative, and challenging, Disability Theory revolutionizes the terrain of theory by providing indisputable evidence of the value and utility that a disability studies perspective can bring to key critical and cultural questions. Tobin Siebers persuasively argues that disability studies transfigures basic assumptions about identity, ideology, language, politics, social oppression, and the body. At the same time, he advances the emerging field of disability studies by putting its core issues into contact with signal thinkers in cultural studies, literary theory, queer theory, gender studies, and critical race theory.”
    • This whole issue has been caught up in the diversity and identity politics debates, not to mention the neurodiversity debate. The author cites Rosqvist, Etc - Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm, from which I have "Stenning (Anna) - Understanding empathy through a study of autistic life writing".
    • This has been discussed in other papers on Aeon:-
      → Gupta - Is crip the new queer?,
      → Costandi - Against neurodiversity,
      → Evans - The autism paradox.
    • The author says that she hadn’t considered her “condition” as a disability because this didn’t fit in with her mental image of a disabled person as associated with “the wheelchair symbol, the guide dog, the white stick, the prosthetic limb, the accessible toilet”. Well, indeed.
    • I’d not realised that the availability of “blue badges” had been widened to include “non visible” disabilities. There’s an article on the BBC Website (BBC - Blue badge permit 'shocking disparity' revealed) that points out “shocking” disparities amongst local authorities in issuing badges to the newly qualified. In particular, “Anxiety Disorder” is included, and justified because people who are anxious about finding a parking space will tend not to go out. Well, indeed again. I have this anxiety, and therefore don’t go out when there are unlikely to be spaces.
    • The trouble is that if the net is widened too far, the process will be self-defeating. If half the spaces in a supermarket car park were labelled “disabled”, people with serious mobility issues would not be able to park close enough to get relief, and half the able-bodied people wouldn’t be able to park at all. Similarly, if half the working population are categorised as “key workers” – and given the interconnectedness of society, whose job isn’t “key” if you consider the long-term consequences of it not being done – then lock-downs are ineffective.
    • As for Asperger’s, many highly-skilled IT people (like myself) are borderline Asperger’s or beyond, but get on just fine – at least amongst similar types, and are just “a bit odd”. They aren’t disadvantaged on balance, so why should they be – or want to be – classed with those who are?
    • PID Note: Psychopathology
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Limburg (Joanne) - Am I disabled?"
Footnote 110: Aeon: Video - Why are we so attached to our things? (WebRef=10181)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Christian Jarrett
    • Aeon Subtitle: Feeling connected to objects is a fundamental – and fraught – part of human nature
    • Editor's Abstract
      • From heirlooms to collectables to clothes, our self-image tends to extend well beyond our skin and into our things. While just how attached to possessions people are varies by culture, decades of research has shown that connecting with objects is a hard-wired part of being human.
      • Scripted by Christian Jarrett, deputy editor of Aeon’s sister publication, Psyche, this playful TED-Ed animation takes a brief dive into what’s known as the ‘endowment effect’ – or the tendency of humans to place a disproportionately high value on the things they view as their own.
      • Drawing from some of the most fascinating and telling studies conducted on the topic, the short video touches on the many (sometimes surprising) ways in which we imbue our things with meaning.
Footnote 111: Aeon: Video - The sound of gravity (WebRef=10161)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: How science finally caught up with Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves
    • Editor's Abstract
      • In 1916, shortly after publishing his theory of general relativity, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves – warps in space time caused by accelerating matter that ripple outward at the speed of light. However, he believed these ripples would be so slight as to be undetectable, before eventually abandoning the concept altogether. But following decades of scientific developments suggesting their existence, as well as technological innovations making their detection possible, in 2015 a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the California Institute of Technology recorded humanity’s first direct observation of the phenomena.
      • Created by the US filmmakers Sarah Klein and Tom Mason in collaboration with the MIT School of Science, this documentary tracks how the US physicist Rai Weiss, now professor emeritus at MIT, stood on the shoulders of his fields’ biggest giant to prove the existence of gravitational waves, a century after Einstein had predicted them. Relaying an inspiring story of imagination, ingenuity and dedication giving rise to a monumental breakthrough, the documentary reflects on how scientific ideas travel – often circuitously – across generations.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting video, featuring the 87-year-old Rai Weiss, the discoverer of gravitational waves.
    • The video doesn't focus on how many 'events' have been found, nor how to tell where they originated, or what events they might be (the video just refers to mergers of black holes).
    • It seems that multiple detectors, separated by thousands of miles, can determine the direction of the event because of the timing differences.
    • See Wikipedia: LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), for general background, and Wikipedia: List of gravitational wave observations for the full list of 50 events.
Footnote 112: Aeon: Video - Daily life in Egypt: ancient and modern (WebRef=10156)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Stunning century-old footage of the Nile valley carries echoes from the ancient past
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Released by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1925, this short film features nearly century-old footage of daily life in the Nile valley. With a distinctly Western perspective, the piece establishes similarities between early 20th-century Egypt and Pharaonic Egyptian life – including mud brick architecture, preindustrial farming and weaving techniques, and the centrality of festivals and the river to the region’s culture.
      • As hinted at by the introductory titles, these through-lines from ancient past to then-present are perhaps overstated, with centuries of Islamisation and Arabisation following the conquest of Roman Egypt in the 7th century CE barely acknowledged.
      • Despite this shortcoming, the refurbished footage is still a visual thrill, providing an extraordinary window into life along the Nile valley as it existed at the dawn of anthropological filmmaking.
  2. Notes
    • Interesting enough, mostly as evidence for Egyptian peasant life in 1925, with some shots of Cairo.
    • The parallels between life in 1925 and ancient Egypt are very clear early on, when agriculture is presented, but towards the end there don't seem to be as many parallels; ancient Egyptians had no camels, so there can be no parallel for camel-racing, for instance; this was earlier acknowledged when transportation was discussed.
    • It's stated that there's a parallel between Islamic saints-day celebrations and ancient Egyptian festivals, but no evidence is presented.
    • So, I'm not fully clear what the point of the film is. I suspect it's mainly supposed to be about 1925 Egyptian life, with some attempt to show how static the forms of life are.
    • I didn't notice any "particularly western perspective", but agree that the centuries of Arabisation aren't explicitly acknowledged - other than by not attempting many ancient Egyptian parallels. Also, there's no mention of the Ottomans (or the British).
Footnote 113: Aeon: Video - Don't think twice (WebRef=10128)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: As dementia trims the tree of knowledge in John’s brain, music holds firm
    • Editor's Abstract
      • At the age of 24, John Fudge took a violent fall while climbing the white cliffs of Dover in the south of England, splitting open his head and losing consciousness. The extent of his injuries weren’t revealed until decades later, when doctors decided to perform a brain scan after John slipped into a deep depression. The results revealed extensive brain damage, including a progressive form of dementia.
      • Now, 10 years on from his diagnosis, John’s wife Geraldine compares his brain to an oak tree, its limbs of knowledge being slowly trimmed away, causing John great mental anguish. His only relief comes when he’s able to live in the moment, such as when he plays guitar and sings – his musical abilities being an as-yet untrimmed branch.
      • Don’t Think Twice offers an insight into John’s life, including visits from Jon, a young volunteer who joins him for music sessions at home. An affecting and unusually honest portrait of dementia, the UK director Harry Hitchens leaves his viewers to find relief and peace, like John, in the musical moments tucked in between difficult realities.
  2. Notes
    • Well, this is an affecting video, but it's very odd in some respects.
    • Jon is said to be suffering from dementia, to be losing branches of knowledge, and to be suffering from depression. But nothing in the video demonstrates this, in that he seems to be perfectly up-beat and competent. True, he says, and is said to have said, negative things, but he doesn't look miserable - his wife looks much worse than him in this regard. Also, there's no evidence presented of his loss of knowledge. We never see him trying to do things and failing.
    • Also, it sounds like his cliff-fall isn't the cause of his dementia, just something that Jon has latched on to as a comfortable explanation of his predicament.
    • He does seem to be an excellent musician, though that doesn't seem to have been his career.
    • The idea of living in the moment is a good one for people whose 'career' (in the sense of a grand life-project) is over, or who recognise that they are on a downward path. But, presumably, you have to be a long way down that path before there are no achievable goals you can set yourself - things maybe less cognitively intensive - that always got crowded out by other then more challenging and fulfilling things.
    • I saw a headline today - but didn't follow it up - that seemed to be suggesting that giving up on being goal-driven might make us happier. Maybe, but is 'happiness' the highest good. Better Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. See Ask a Philosopher: Why dissatisfied Socrates is better than a satisfied pig.
    • PID Note: Psychopathology
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Don't think twice"
Footnote 114: Aeon: Klein - The rise of the bystander as a complicit historical actor (WebRef=10079)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Dennis Klein
    • Author Narrative: Dennis Klein is professor of history and director of Jewish studies in the Department of History at Kean University in New Jersey. His latest book is Survivor Transitional Narratives of Nazi-Era Destruction: The Second Liberation (2017).
  2. Notes
    • An interesting, though not very clear, comparison between bystander complicity in the Nazi era and similar subsequent cases in the US.
    • Points out the expectations of protection of people assimilated into another community, and how these expectations can be dashed.
    • But this happens in ethnic conflict all over the world today, and throughout history, often on a much wider and more vicious scale even than in the US, though not (I would have thought) than in Nazi Germany.
    • I agree that bystanders are complicit. The trouble is that while sometimes it's obvious that you're a bystander - you're actually standing watching as in the photo from 1938 Vienna - but sometimes you don't naturally come into contact with the issues, or - in particular - the people affected by them - which are in areas you never need go to.
    • Yet if something needs to be done and you're not doing it, you're also a complicit bystander, though there are degrees of complicity.
Footnote 115: Aeon: Muecke - What Aboriginal people know about the pathways of knowledge (WebRef=10090)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Stephen Muecke
    • Author Narrative: Stephen Muecke is professor of creative writing at Flinders University, Adelaide, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His most recent books are The Children’s Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia, co-authored with Paddy Roe (2020) and Latour and the Humanities (2020), edited with Rita Felski.
    • Author's Introduction
      • What can living in one place for 60,000 years teach a people? Walking with Aboriginal people in the far North-West of Australia has given me some idea. When I wrote the book Reading the Country (1984) with the Berber artist Krim Benterrak and the Nyikina elder Paddy Roe, we walked the world that Paddy was born in – what his people call ‘Country’. I found that the conceptual structure of his world was completely different to the Western one in which I had been trained. Not only was his knowledge not reproduced in books like the ones he nevertheless wanted to write with me, but it had nothing to do with authorship. Knowledge didn’t originate with individuals, and the concept of mind was irrelevant. Knowledge was on the outside; it was held in ‘living Country’. And humans had to get together to animate this knowledge.
      Author's Conclusion
      • How do they (indigenous people) get them (the moderns) to understand? How do they make their knowledge inspirational, as I asked at the beginning? You have to get out of your speeding vehicles, slow down to walking pace, and look around and see what needs to be kept alive. Each territory has its own nature, and living in that place teaches you that you are part of it: you breathe its air, drink its water and share its nutrients. And they compose your own living tissues in the same proportions. There is no escape; there is no better world. There is a song that teaches you this, now that you have taken the time to listen; it’s not just a matter of ‘putting your mind to it’ or accepting the facts. The Country has been singing this song for generations. I wish I could sing Paddy’s ancestors’ Dreaming song that makes the oysters grow fat – but this is not the time and this is not the place.
  2. Notes
    • I dare say I might have read this paper with more attention, as I've probably not got it's message right.
    • It struck me as a little bit relativistic, but it may simply be that motivation for the usefulness of knowledge transfer is required.
    • The author is right to point out that the impact of the 'scientific world-view' on indigenous peoples has been exploitative of their natural resources.
    • He is also right to point out that indigenous peoples know their own environments better than the casual observer (or even the industrious scientist to some degree). Their voices need to be heard.
    • More might be said.
Footnote 116: Aeon: Video - The five-minute museum (WebRef=10084)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Fast-forward through a history of human artefacts, from arrowheads to plastic toys
    • Editor's Abstract
      • For his short film The Five-Minute Museum (2015), the UK director Paul Bush was given access to objects in some of the premier historical museums of Europe, including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Bern Historical Museum in Switzerland.
      • The resulting short video provides a whirlwind survey of human history, from arrowheads to plastic toys. Flipping through objects at a rate of 24 images per second, Bush builds a series of stop-motion animations spanning from the Bronze Age to the Information Age, and touching on such timeless and intertwined human endeavours as religion, recreation, food, currency and war.
      • Meticulously crafted with impressive sound design to match, the resulting film forms an arc that perhaps mirrors the character of humanity itself – brimming with contradictions, and cascading ever forward.
Footnote 117: Aeon: Video - Roger Penrose: Why did the universe begin? (WebRef=10071)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Roger Penrose & Robert Lawrence Kuhn
    • Aeon Subtitle: A cyclical, forgetful Universe – Nobel prizewinner Roger Penrose details an astonishing origin hypothesis
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Since the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965, the Big Bang theory has been the dominant model of our Universe’s origin. In the ensuing decades, an obvious and yet still deeply unsettled question has emerged at the core of cosmology: what happened before it? While many scientists hold firm that there’s no decent evidence to support the notion that anything existed before the Big Bang, new hypotheses have cracked open the door for the possibility.
      • The UK mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, a professor emeritus at Oxford University and co-recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, is a convert to the camp of thinkers entertaining the notion of a pre-Big Bang state. In this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the PBS series Closer to Truth, Penrose details a somewhat mind-boggling idea he’s advanced known as the ‘conformal cyclic cosmology’ hypothesis, which proposes that our Universe is just one in an infinite series.
      • For more on the prospect of a before, before the Big Bang, watch Aeon Video’s interview with Tim Maudlin, a professor of philosophy at New York University.
  2. Notes
    • This deserves several attempts to understand what Penrose is saying, but I doubt it can be understood without the mathematics
Footnote 118: Aeon: Video - Palenque (WebRef=10065)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The steady drumbeat of life in the first free town in the Americas
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Palenque is a film made from rhythms. Musical rhythms, daily rhythms, visual rhythms. Rhythms of work, of speech and of play. It’s also a film that breaks its own stride, shifts focus and doesn’t explain. Enchanting and challenging, it immerses us in a place and a community unlike any other, San Basilio de Palenque, which sits in the foothills near the port city of Cartagena in Colombia.
      • The first town of enslaved Africans in the Americas to gain freedom from European colonial powers, San Basilio is also the only surviving palenque (meaning ‘walled city’ or ‘fortress’) – the name given to communities of Africans who escaped slavery in Colombia and lived autonomously, often working to free others who were enslaved. In 2005, UNESCO declared the distinctive cultural space of San Basilio de Palenque a ‘Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’. The culture of the town remains deeply connected to its African roots with ‘complex funeral rituals and medical practices … evidence of the distinct spiritual and cultural systems framing life and death in the Palenque community. Musical expressions … accompany collective celebrations, such as baptisms, weddings and religious festivities as well as leisure activities.’
      • Eschewing this historical background, except for a brief explanatory text at the end of his short documentary, the Colombian filmmaker Sebastián Pinzón Silva offers a sensorial experience of life in this town of 3,000 people, more than three centuries after its first inhabitants won their freedom in 1691. Throughout, the many rhythms of people’s lives weave in and around each other, creating a rich sense of the community’s bonds, without any sort of didacticism or fixity of meaning.
      • A loosely repeating day-night-day pattern undergirds the film, but it wavers and breaks apart now and then, often for poetic purposes. Similarly, Palenque moves from one town resident to another with a logic that’s more musical than narrative. Of greater importance than understanding who does what, when and why, Pinzón Silva seems to be saying, is to pay attention to something far subtler and more significant, an ineffable spirit of the place. He points to this by creating a complex set of linkages from scene to scene and through repeating motifs. A shot from under a drum looks like the Sun, then gives way to an image of the cloud-streaked Moon. Much later, that drum returns, this time with the Sun rising behind the man playing it. The thumping rhythms of preparing cornmeal follows a sequence with a farmer harvesting corn and precedes another of women pounding clothes on a riverbank. The repetition of the sounds of work pulse through the entire film. So too does song, which, it seems, permeates every aspect of life in San Basilio de Palenque, from walking out to the fields to lamenting the death of a loved one.
      • Yet Pinzón Silva’s suggestion of a ritualised quality to their everyday life doesn’t box the community into a magic realist fairytale. Rather, the film’s power derives from the way it renders San Basilio de Palenque vivid, solid and palpable, all while offering us a sense of another form of being, one in which these living people are intimately connected with those who came before them. As Burgos, the woman who sells sweets from a tray she carries on her head, says on a stop in the cemetery: ‘This is the olive tree where all the dead in Palenque come to take shade, right at noon.’
  2. Notes
    • This is very atmospheric and enjoyable to watch, but it's difficult to work out how the community makes a living.
    • See Wikipedia: San Basilio de Palenque, which has further links (though it doesn't answer the above question, but does reveal the identities of the statues in the film).
    • There are interesting onward links from the above, particularly Wikipedia: Palenquero, which explains the language - Palenquero - spoken in the film, which is a Creole based on Spanish and Kikongo, but influenced by the Portuguese of the 16th century slave traders.
    • Kikongo is a Bantu language, like Kiswahili, so - by analogy - ought to be Englished as 'Kongo', as indeed seems to be the case: Wikipedia: Kongo language. See my Language Animadversions on Swahili
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Palenque"
Footnote 119: Aeon: Video - Visitors (WebRef=10049)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: In a remote town near Area 51, UFO believers and locals contemplate the beyond
    • Editor's Abstract
      • ‘I’ve never seen necessarily an alien but I’ve met some humans that might not be considered born here …’
      • In June 2019, a prank Facebook event titled ‘Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us’ went viral, with some 1.5 million users indicating – ironically or not – an interest in blitzing the famed US Air Force facility in Nevada, long rumoured to contain evidence of extraterrestrial life. By the time the event date arrived in September, most of the world had moved on from the gag. Ultimately, only about 1,500 people descended on the remote Nevada towns around Area 51 – the vast majority of whom had no real designs on storming the facility.
      • One such attendee was the New York-based filmmaker Scott Lazer, who travelled to the town of Rachel, Nevada, located 27 miles north of Area 51, where a small UFO-themed festival was taking place. There, he found the expected, eccentric collection of UFO diehards recounting sightings and contemplating the nature of extraterrestrial life. But Visitors, his short documentary account of the event, offers more than just an invitation to tour a peculiar subculture. As he interviews true believers and Rachel locals alike, a thread begins to emerge – of people striving to make sense of their place in a strange universe, and seeking connections with something greater than themselves.
  2. Notes
    • I couldn't really see the point of this.
    • It's somewhat atmospheric, but most of the people filmed are just odd bods with weird beliefs, not that these beliefs, such as they might be, are clearly articulated.
Footnote 120: Aeon: Simpson - When is it ethical to vote for ‘the lesser of two evils’? (WebRef=10053)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Robert Simpson
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Nonvoting conscientious objectors would do well to remember this. While acting in line with your principles is a good thing, in certain scenarios, that’s because it embodies a type of indirect strategy for making a positive impact in the world. For most of us, that aim speaks in favour of using our vote on the least-worst option.
      • For a committed few, it means using our vote (or nonvote) to send a message about the urgency of the principles that the leaders of ‘our’ side have broken faith with.
      • But it doesn’t mean doing nothing – and we should be wary of anyone portraying their desire to sit things out as a mark of integrity. That is to misunderstand why and how integrity matters in the political morality of citizenship.
  2. Notes
Footnote 121: Aeon: Video - De artificiali perspectiva, or anamorphosis (WebRef=10043)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The Renaissance art illusion that proved everything is a matter of perspective
    • Editor's Abstract
      • By the 16th century, European painters had become masterful at crafting illusions of perspective, giving viewers an impression of lifelike, three-dimensional depth on flat surfaces.
      • Building on this well of Renaissance knowledge, a small handful of artists began pushing linear perspective further still, crafting works that required the viewer to occupy a single vantage point – or series of vantage points – in order to be fully understood.
      • Today, this sort of visual illusion, known as anamorphosis, is responsible for viral internet phenomena such as the 3D street paintings of the Rome-based artist Kurt Wenner.
      • At its inception, however, the technique was used to both provocative and whimsical effect, often adding subversive new meanings to works once revealed.
      • In this short film, the celebrated US animation team Stephen and Timothy Quay, better known as ‘the Brothers Quay’, evoke a dark fairytale with their exploration of the technique, which combines stop-motion puppetry with some notable examples of anamorphosis from the 16th and 17th centuries.
  2. Notes
    • Interesting enough, but dates from 1991, and the filming and puppetry techniques are self-consciouly archaic even for then.
    • The end result is that the illusions of perspective aren't as clearly displayed as they might be.
    • The film ends up with the well-known skull in Holbein's 'The Ambassadors', but it's not very clear. Nor is the earlier fresco of St. Francis on a convent wall, though at least there's an attempt to show how it was done.
Footnote 122: Aeon: Watts - Fiddling while Rome converts (WebRef=10045)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Edward Watts
    • Author Narrative: Edward Watts is a professor and Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair in Byzantine Greek History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity (2015), Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny (2018) and The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2021), among others. He lives in Carlsbad, California.
    • Aeon Subtitle: A generation of pagan bureaucrats amassed wealth and status while Roman emperors Christianised the world around them
    • Author's Abstract
      • Pagan cults were particularly ill-prepared to respond to a monotheistic religion that actively worked to permanently take worshippers away from the old gods. This wasn’t how paganism worked. It wasn’t rare for pagans to add a new god to the list of deities to whom they prayed, but most traditional cults didn’t ask their adherents to stop worshipping other gods when they prayed to a new one. This tolerance made a great deal of sense in Rome’s diverse pagan religious marketplace, but it also meant that pagan cults had no experience fighting for the loyalty of their followers when the Christian church told Romans that they must choose to worship either Christ or the old gods. Once state support turbocharged the church’s ability to reach across the empire, many Romans naturally preferred the promise of a new Christian empire to the traditions of the past. When they were asked to choose, Romans overwhelmingly chose Christianity.
      • The final pagan generation’s shortsightedness still stands out. They acquiesced to the rule of Christian emperors pursuing the elimination of paganism in exchange for a few decades of government salaries and fancy titles. These men could have fought against a change they fundamentally disagreed with. They got rich instead. Everyone tempted to believe that future generations will have time to address difficult issues that we selfishly choose to ignore should remember their sour legacy.
  2. Notes
    • This is an interesting read, though probably a plug for the author's "Watts (Edward) - The Final Pagan Generation: Rome's Unexpected Path to Christianity", which I've just purchased.
    • It seems to have a message - beyond the interesting recounting of events - that it is important to stand up for your principles rather than taking the money and keeping your head down.
    • That said, I'd be interested to know who he thought was on the right side of history. It could be argued that Christianity was better thought out than the rag-bag of cults it replaced.
    • What the author regrets seems to be the cultural loss in the sweeping-away of the old religions.
    • Also, that in a world where all religions are false, the less divisive and destructive they are the better. Just leave everyone to their private delusions.
    • It occurs to me that a view that religion was a private and tolerant matter until the Christians came to power seems to ignore the earlier persecution of Christians (and the Jews in Maccabean times). It seems usually the case that departure from the religion of the state has been seen as treasonous, never more so than with the Roman imperial cult.
Footnote 123: Aeon: Video - The greatest Briton? (WebRef=10029)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Hero or scoundrel? An iconoclastic biography of Winston Churchill
    • Editor's Summary
      • Most mainstream portrayals of Winston Churchill, such as the critically acclaimed film The Darkest Hour (2017), focus on his role in the Second World War, standing tall in the face of potential Nazi obliteration with a combination of brilliant foresight, fighting spirit and soaring rhetoric.
      • While this is, of course, an important part of the celebrated British prime minister’s legacy, the characterisation paints an extremely incomplete picture of his life, leaving out a great number of important, unflattering facts.
      • This short from the UK filmmaker Steve Roberts deploys a combination of claymation and biting iconoclasm to shine a light on the failing-up nepotism, political opportunism and murderous white supremacy that are often glossed over in surface-level treatments of Churchill’s biography.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Winston Churchill
    • First Thoughts
      • I'd not at this point watched the video, brief though it is, but expected to hate it. The title – suggesting Churchill might have been a “scoundrel” – deserves the good beating with umbrellas that would have been Steve Roberts’ fate at the hands of the matrons (such as my mother) who – rightly – saw Churchill’s pivotal role in rescuing the world from barbarism. Britain had the opportunity to “do a deal” with Hitler and carve up the world rather than accept the “blood, sweat and tears”. Without Churchill, that’s how things would have gone.
      • I'm aware of Churchill's many mistakes and failings. I suspect that - were the failings of all "Great Men" highlighted – there would be none left to act as an inspiration.
      • Also, the more tests a person is exposed to, the more mistakes they will make (many of these mistakes only being recognized as such in retrospect), and the more powerful they were, the greater the consequences of their mistakes.
      • Besides, someone’s “greatness” is independent of their failings, especially if they have been a pivotal influence on world history, political or cultural. Gesualdo or Caravaggio might have been murderers, and Wagner a racist and general all-round horrible person, but that’s not relevant to their greatness.
      • Also, I'd prefer it if there was a level playing field on this sort of revisionist history. Churchill had many talents and, some might say, rivaled Oscar Wilde as a wit and literary figure, while Wilde rivaled Churchill as a smoker and drinker. We don’t – these days – focus on Wilde’s failings (including his sexual relations with under-age boys; not that Wilde would have considered such things as failings, I don’t suppose; see Guardian - Jad Adams - Review of Neil McKenna's 'The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde') but portray him as a saint struggling against prejudice.
      • But in the end, it doesn’t much matter whether or not an individual is a well rounded blemish-free paragon of virtue, provided they did the job they needed to do at the key moment.
    • Second Thoughts
      • Well, I’ve watched it now and it’s even more annoying than I’d expected and – at the risk of sounding like a reactionary old git – is worthy of, if not actually beneath, contempt.
      • I suppose it’s an attempt to redress the balance whereby hagiographers ignore the blemishes of their heroes, but it goes to ridiculous extremes.
      • Some of the suggestions – that Churchill was a dunce because he did badly at Harrow – are utterly absurd, given his literary and historical skills and wit (not to mention his Nobel Prize). Also, the suggestion that Officers in WW1 stayed safely behind the lines (when in fact they were the first “over the top”) is offensive in the extreme.
      • It is true that some of Churchill’s views are disturbing to modern sensibilities, but they did not set him apart from his contemporaries in any bad light – compare his racism to Hitler’s – except towards the twilight of his career when he became on the wrong side of history.
      • Some of his great failures – in particular Gallipoli – were presumably down to his willingness to take risks. The attempt to open a second front to avoid the stalemate of the trenches was sensible and visionary, but unfortunately didn’t work.
      • His decision to resist Hitler rather than cut a deal was an even greater gamble, but one that had to be made.
      • It would be interesting to know who “the UK filmmaker Steve Roberts” (whoever he is) thinks is the “Greatest Briton”. His animation is doubtless a belated response to the absurd 2002 BBC poll (see Wikipedia: 100 Greatest Britons), which had Churchill coming out on top (with Princess Di farcically in third place and Guy Fawkes in 30th).
Footnote 124: Aeon: Ogden - Being eaten (WebRef=9978)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Lesley Evans Ogden
    • Author Narrative: Lesley Evans Ogden is a science journalist whose work has appeared in Natural History, BioScience and Science, among others. She lives near Vancouver in Canada.
    • Aeon Subtitle: The fear of becoming a meal is a powerful evolutionary force that shapes brains, behaviour and entire ecosystems
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → John R. Krebs
    • An interesting paper, that deals with complex ecological issues.
    • It points out the importance of predation in maintaining ecosystems in balance.
    • But it also points out the negative impact of fear of predation on the flourishing of species, and its transmission across the generations, and makes parallels – not followed up – of PTSD in humans.
    • PID Note: Evolution
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Ogden (Lesley Evans) - Being eaten"
Footnote 125: Aeon: Video - Newton's three-body problem (WebRef=9951)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A millimetre makes a world of difference when calculating planetary trajectories
    • Editor's Summary
      • Calculating the trajectories of two gravitating bodies is straightforward mathematics. But introducing even just one more variable into an orbital system can make its long-term trajectory impossible to predict.
      • In 2009, two researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz investigated just how difficult this mathematical phenomenon – known as the ‘N-body problem’ – makes forecasting the eventual fate of our own corner of space.
      • The team ran 2,000 simulations of the solar system’s trajectory up to 5 billion years into the future, with the only variable being less than a millimetre difference in the distance between Mercury and the Sun. The simulations yielded a stunning array of results, including the possibility of Mercury careening into the Sun, colliding with Venus and destablising the entire inner solar system.
      • This animation from TED-Ed breaks down the N-body problem with rich visuals and methodical clarity, and concludes with scientists’ efforts to minimise N-body unpredictability as humans press further into space.
  2. Notes
    • It'd have been nice to have had some of the mathematics in detail.
    • The issue is that in the 2-body problem, a simplification (using the centre of mass) makes the system soluble because the number of variable equals the number of equations of motion.
    • But this doesn't work for 3-body and above.
    • So, simulations have to be run instead, and because the systems are chaotic, tiny differences in initial condition can end up with utterly different outcomes, despite the system being deterministic.
    • The video pointed out that increasingly powerful computation enables more accurate prediction, but didn't stress that this computational error is in addition to the initial condition error.
    • It was noted that if one of the three bodies is very light in comparison to the other two, the problem reduces to a 2-body problem for practical purposes.
    • At the end we were referred to a sci-fi film rather than a maths book!
Footnote 126: Aeon: Nadler - When to break a rule (WebRef=9953)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Steven Nadler
    • Author Narrative: Steven Nadler is the William H Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Spinoza: A Life (2nd ed, 2018), A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (2011), and (with Ben Nadler) Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy (2017). His most recent book is Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (2020).
    • Aeon Subtitle: A virtuous person respects the rules. So when should the same person make a judgment call and break or bend them instead?
  2. Notes
    • An excellent discussion of when to apply a law and when not to.
    • Also, explains why laws have to be clear, exceptionless and universal. But their application is context-sensitive.
    • Gives good reason why catch-all ethical reductionism fails (whether Kantian or Utilitarian).
    • All pretty much common-sense, really.
Footnote 127: Aeon: Hansen - Vikings in America (WebRef=9941)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Valerie Hansen
    • Author Narrative: Valerie Hansen is Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University in Connecticut. Her books include The Silk Road: A New History (2012), The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 (2nd edition, 2015) and The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began (2020).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Centuries before Columbus, Vikings came to the Western hemisphere. How far into the Americas did they travel?
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Aeon: Video - The Vinland Mystery
      → Aeon: Video - When Vikings lived in North America
    • This is an interesting enough article. I suspect it of being a plug for the author's 2020 book The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began.
    • I think it's certain that the Vikings got from Greenland to North America around 1000, and possible that 'they' - or maybe one boat-load - got as far as Mexico, though the evidence is very weak.
    • But it depends what's to be built on these flimsy foundations and what axe the author has to grind.
    • It strikes me as absurd to claim that these tenuous and ill-evidenced links show that by 1000 the world was 'connected' and that 'Globalisation' had begun.
    • Globalisation requires more than a few traded skins.
    • In any case, there had been trade (and possibly contact) between Rome and China along the Silk Road 1000 years earlier (see Wikipedia: Sino-Roman relations).
    • For the Vikings and the Americas, see Wikipedia: Norse colonization of North America
Footnote 128: Aeon: Dahl - Young children use reason, not gut feelings, to decide moral issues (WebRef=9928)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Audun Dahl
    • Author Narrative: Audun Dahl is associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
  2. Notes
    • Another interesting paper.
    • The author is an experimentalist, and has conducted tests on the moral sense and reasoning powers of children.
    • She has found that the pessimistic view - that our moral sense lacks foundations and is based on gut instincts - is mistaken.
    • Also, that children do "reason" about moral problems put to them.
    • She points out that some conflicting moral stances are caused by differences over the facts, which can be manipulated. Otherwise, they can be down to weighing conflicting factors differently, as in the case of abortion.
    • This is all well and good, but I have a suspicion that reasoning may be used to support our gut instincts, rather than being the cause of them.
Footnote 129: Aeon: Video - Is our attention for sale? (WebRef=9923)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A handful of executives control the ‘attention economy’. Time for attentive resistance
    • Editor's Summary
      • From fitness tracking devices to search engines, it’s easy to think of personalised technologies as convenient shortcuts and useful tools for working towards goals.
      • But, argues James Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute and a former Google employee, the primary aim of personalised tech is to keep users coming back by any means necessary – and often in a way that encourages empty distraction.
      • In this brief animation featuring audio from a 2017 lecture at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) in London, Williams makes the case that the consolidation of the ‘attention economy’ to just a handful of companies is an unprecedented and deeply fraught human experiment – and one that demands active, attentive resistance.
  2. Notes
    • This video is too brief, and adds nothing to the underlying audio.
    • The author is right that it's easy to be distracted by the on-line world, but distraction and lack of focus and effort has always been a problem.
    • I think that the upsides of all this ready information outweighs the downsides provided we keep it under control.
    • I don't believe that "Big Tech" has the goal of keeping us distracted. They obviously want to make money, and the business model involves giving us lots of useful stuff for free, provided we let them fire advertising at us. You can skip the ads if you pay for a premium service. Doing this restricts the amount of stuff you can afford to see (assuming you stick to premium services). And that leads to less distraction. I don't see a necessary problem.
    • PID Note: Transhumanism
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Is our attention for sale?"
Footnote 130: Aeon: Elliot - Origin story (WebRef=9894)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Natalie Elliot
    • Author Narrative: Natalie Elliot is an assistant professor at St John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a science writer. Her writing has appeared in The New Atlantis and Parallax. She lives in Santa Fe and New York.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Perched on the cusp between biology and chemistry, the start of life on Earth is an event horizon we struggle to see beyond
    • Author's Introduction
      • How did life originate? Scientists have been studying the question for decades, and they’ve developed ingenious methods to try to find out. They’ve even enlisted biology’s most powerful theory, Darwinian evolution, in the search. But they still don’t have a complete answer. What they have hit is the world’s most theoretically fertile dead end.
      • When scientists look for life’s origins, they usually work in one of two directions. They work backwards in time through the record of organisms that have lived on Earth, or they work forward from one of the many hypothetical prebiotic worlds in which life could have emerged.
      Author's Conclusion
      • When we look at the work in origins of life from the time of Darwin on, we see that the field is astonishingly resilient – perhaps not unlike the emergent life systems that it studies. When it hits a dead end, it spontaneously reconceives of itself. The theoretical frameworks that animate its research have adapted Darwin’s thinking in myriad ways, and now they’re moving beyond Darwin into new theoretical frames.
      • These frames make us pay attention to life in different ways. When we recognise the universal ways that matter organises and replicates; when we entertain the possibility that the transmission of information across computational and cultural systems can mark the emergence of life; when we turn to the biosphere as a living system, we begin to look for life in places that often seem inanimate. We look for signs of life in the outer planets or in the interstices of rocks and ice; or we see life replicating in the iterative tapestries of culture. We look for ways that life surprises us. It almost seems as though life emerges precisely when our ideas about it begin to conform to the phenomenon that we are attempting to conceive.
  2. Notes
    • This is a survey paper, but its overall message isn't clear. It deserves a second read.
    • It's funded by the Templeton Foundation, but there's no explicit religious content.
    • There's a brief mention of Jeremy England. I looked him up. There's a talk: YouTube: Jeremy England: What is life? that might be interesting. According to the Amazon reviews of his book Every Life Is on Fire, there's a strong religious element to the book - the reviews were therefore strongly polarised. It seems the author is an orthodox rabbi as well as a physicist.
    • There's also a fairly extensive quotation of David C. Krakauer.
    • PID Note: Life
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Elliot (Natalie) - Origin story"
Footnote 131: Aeon: Hazrat - A history of punctuation (WebRef=9897)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Florence Hazrat
    • Author Narrative: Florence Hazrat is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of English at the University of Sheffield, working on parentheses in Renaissance romance. Her first book Refrains in Early Modern Literature is forthcoming, and she is currently writing a book called Standing on Points: The History and Culture of Punctuation.
    • Aeon Subtitle: How we came to represent (through inky marks) the vagaries of the mind, inflections of the voice, and intensity of feeling
Footnote 132: Aeon: Video - Mary's Room (WebRef=9895)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Can you know everything about colour if you see in black and white? A thought experiment
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Can we ever know everything about something we can’t experience? The Australian philosopher Frank Jackson pondered this question in a thought experiment in 1982, which imagined a neuroscientist named Mary who understood everything there was to understand about colour vision, without ever having experienced it herself. If, in an instant, her black-and-white experience of sight shifted into colour, would she glean any new insight?
      • Detailed with stylish, shapeshifting animation in this short from TED-Ed, Jackson’s thought experiment ponders felt subjective experience (or ‘qualia’, for all the past and current philosophy students) and its relationship to knowledge. The questions raised by ‘Mary’s Room’ – including whether anything about experience transcends physical facts – remain some of the most perennial and unsettled in philosophy, even if Jackson himself actually reversed his position, concluding that the experience of colour vision does indeed correspond to a brain state, albeit one we don’t yet fully understand.
  2. Notes
    • The paper from 1982 is "Jackson (Frank) - Epiphenomenal Qualia", which starts with 'Red Fred' before moving on to 'Red Mary'.
    • 'Red Mary' appears again in a later paper - "Jackson (Frank) - What Mary Didn't Know" - which was written in response to "Churchland (Paul) - Reduction, Qualia and the Direct Introspection of Brain States".
    • This short video is slick and puts forward the Knowledge Argument well. It is right to say that most of us are inclined to go along with it, in that we do think that experience teaches more than 'book learning' in these cases.
    • The key claim - based on this TE - is that qualia can't be explained by physical facts.
    • We might reply that if we knew what qualia were, we would know more than Mary, and maybe then experiencing qualia wouldn’t tech us anything new. This seems to have been Jackson’s later position, which accepted that “seeing red” did correspond to a brain state.
    • The talk suggests that this TE means that even if we knew everything about the structure and function of someone else’s brain, we still wouldn’t know what it was like to be that person. I don’t buy this – it sounds like the Zombie argument, which is an inconceivable TE. We can proceed by analogy with our own experience, given commonality of structure and function.
    • I was also unimpressed by the claim that there are some things permanently beyond our comprehension merely because we can’t experience them. Sounds like Nagel’s ‘bat’ argument.
    • I didn’t like the talk’s suggestion that qualia are unique to the individual. We have similar brains, so we’re going to have similar experiences. Same goes for animals. That’s why sticking to physicalism and avoiding mystery is so important.
    • The talk also points out the objection to functionalism and whether a machine could be conscious. A full simulation of the brain won’t necessarily be conscious. My feeling on this is that a full simulation is not possible in a digital computer – it would have to be a simplified model, which might not be enough. We don’t know what gives rise to consciousness – even though we’re committed to it being physical – so we can’t model it. Say it involved QM? How would we model that on a digital computer?
    • PID Note: Consciousness
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Mary's Room"
Footnote 133: Aeon: Flack & Mitchell - Uncertain times (WebRef=9856)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Jessica Flack & Melanie Mitchell
    • Author Narrative:
      • Jessica Flack is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and director of the Collective Computation Group at SFI.
      • Melanie Mitchell is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and professor of computer science at Portland State University. She is the author of Complexity: A Guided Tour (2009) and Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (2019).
    • Aeon Subtitle: The pandemic is an unprecedented opportunity – seeing human society as a complex system opens a better future for us all
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Rather than attempt to precisely predict the future, we have tried to make the case for designing systems that favour robustness and adaptability – systems that can be creative and responsive when faced with an array of possible scenarios.
      • The COVID-19 pandemic provides an unprecedented opportunity to begin to think through how we might harness collective behaviour and uncertainty to shape a better future for us all.
      • The most important term in this essay is not ‘chaotic’, ‘complex’, ‘black swan’, ‘nonequilibrium’ or ‘second-order effect’. It’s: ‘dawn’.
  2. Notes
    • A complex paper which deserves a second read.
    • Maybe a plug for Melanie Mitchell's book on AI? I had a look at this on Amazon, but it doesn't look worth buying at the moment - at least not until I've read "Bostrom (Nick) - Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies".
    • I wasn't sure quite how the new forward-looking systems could be devised, but agree that fixing the problems exposed by the last unexpected event (however recognizable in hindsight) won't necessariy help with the next unexpected event unless it's of the same kind.
Footnote 134: Aeon: Dresser - How to not fear your death (WebRef=9853)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Sam Dresser
    • Aeon Subtitle: You exist, but one day you won’t. An Epicurean perspective can help you feel less afraid, and even grateful for life’s finitude
  2. Notes
Footnote 135: Aeon: Video - The Fayum portraits (WebRef=9846)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Haunting dispatches from the edge of the Roman Empire, just before its collapse
    • Author's Conclusion
      • ‘So, with imperious hand, fortune turns the wheel of change.’
      • The funerary paintings known as the ‘Fayum portraits’ are named for the Egyptian desert oasis region of Fayum, just west of the Nile, in which many of them have been found. Painted on the outskirts of the Roman Empire as it began to decline in the first centuries CE, these stark and hauntingly lifelike images were fashioned while their subjects were alive, and placed over their mummified bodies upon burial.
      • Depicting diverse people of mostly modest means – including Greeks, Jews, Syrians and Roman bureaucrats – the portraits reveal the region as both a colonial outpost and a cultural melting pot, where outsiders adopted Egyptian cultural and religious practices, including mummified burial, as their own.
      • Produced for an 1988 exhibition of Fayum portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, this short film pairs the paintings with excerpts from contemporary religious texts, dispatches from those living in Fayum at the time, and the guidance of the US art historian Richard Brilliant.
      • The result is a rich window into daily life – and death – amid the fall of Rome.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting and atmospheric presentation of the topic.
    • It is wonderful to see such lifelike portraits from nearly 2,000 years ago.
    • See Wikipedia: Fayum Mummy Portraits, which seems to dispute some of the factual claims of the video, which hails from 1988.
    • Wikipedia suggest that the portraits weren't made early in life and displayed about the house, but were commissioned on the death of the individual. The reason this is claimed is that the ages as represented in the paintings correlate well with the age at death of the mummies to which the paintings are attached (when they still are). As such, they are witness to the low life expectancy during the period.
    • While lifelike, they were not necessarily painted from life, but were somewhat formulaic.
    • They were painted not at the very end of the empire, but during periods of convulsion when it seemed to be falling, but revived. Egypt remained Roman until the Islamic conquest.
    • The paintings are pre-Christian, in the sense of before Christianity became the state religion, and the subjects are not Christians, though one of the voice-overs has a lady asking "who will deliver me from this body of death", which might indicate that Paul in Romans 7:24 was using a well-known expression.
    • The video suggests that the portraits are of all classes, but Wikipedia suggests they are of the upper classes.
Footnote 136: Aeon: Duckworth - Catastrophes and calms (WebRef=9755)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Renée A. Duckworth
    • Author Narrative: Renée A Duckworth is an associate professor at the University of Arizona and an associate editor at The American Naturalist. She is interested in ecology and evolutionary biology, with a particular focus on understanding how behaviour evolves.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Evolution is extraordinarily creative in the wake of a cataclysm. How does life keep steadily ticking over in between?
    • Author's Conclusion
      • When the Chicxulub meteor hit Earth 66 million years ago, billions of organisms perished, and the survivors were forced to flexibly respond and form novel systems of interactions that were ‘good enough’ to survive. During this reorganisation, natural selection no doubt sorted rapidly between traits and strategies that functioned and those that did not. But where did novelty come from?
      • A slow wait for the right set of mutations to come along isn’t an option during a catastrophic event. Instead, the flexible responses of individual organisms probably produced an abundance of novel variation, on which selection could act. These flexible responses would have ranged from innovative behavioural strategies, to new associations between various organisms, to novel phenotypes produced from developmental stress or hybridisation. If they were capable of being inherited, these new variants would have provided the basis for rapid evolutionary changes that eventually led to a new stable state. The result was groups of species, traits and interactions completely distinct from those that reigned during the era of the dinosaurs.
      • The pattern of evolutionary stasis dominates the history of life on Earth. Yet, too often, we’re more focused on explaining change instead of understanding how things stay the same. The irony here is that the key to both of these problems might be the same. A better understanding of how populations remain stable – the feedbacks and feedforwards, the built-in flexibility and responsiveness of the system, the redundancies and mechanisms of resiliency – might enable us not only to better understand evolutionary stasis, but also allow us to predict how organisms change when their stable state is disrupted.
      • Most importantly, viewing evolution through a systems lens fundamentally changes how we view the story of life on Earth. It’s not a story of the constant struggle for existence. Rather, it’s a story that resides in the pauses – the uneventful interludes, where components of the systems maintain the status quo, and change necessarily comes with painful and extreme disruption.
  2. Notes
Footnote 137: Aeon: Copeland - DNA testing is easy. It can also turn your family upside down (WebRef=9757)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Libby Copeland
    • Author Narrative: Libby Copeland is a journalist, whose writing about culture, science and human behaviour has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate and The New York Times, among others. The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are (2020) is her first book. She lives in Westchester, New York.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting paper, probably a plug for the author's book.
    • Useful to know how many people sign up to DNA databases, and how the increasing database size leads to increasing numbers of 'matches'.
    • In the absence of matches, information on ethnicity can be revealed.
    • The bulk of the paper looks at how people respond to unexpected discoveries - in particular how they react to the news that the man they thought of as their father is not - for whatever reason - their biological parent.
    • The most interesting part of the paper is the (undiscussed) painting at the top: A Family Group (1524) by Bernardino Licinio. It's in the Royal Collection: Bernardino Licinio - A Family Group, Inscribed 1524. The discussion there mentions the dispute over the fruit, but doesn't mention any symbolism. Surely the father's stern expression and pointing towards the boy with the fruit must symbolise something along the lines of 'forbidden fruit' (and presuamably explains why this portrait was selected for this paper), but the mother's expression is perfectly innocent. Also, if this is a case of cuckoldry, why would the family portrait have been painted?
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Copeland (Libby) - DNA testing is easy. It can also turn your family upside down"
Footnote 138: Aeon: McMaster - What rude jibes about Caesar tell us about sex in ancient Rome (WebRef=9746)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Aven McMaster
    • Author Narrative: Aven McMaster is associate professor in ancient studies at Thorneloe University at Laurentian in Ontario, Canada.
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Caesar’s career gives us a fascinating glimpse of both Roman normative ideology, and the way that actual lives could work within and against that ideology. There is much about Roman sexuality that isn’t admirable and certainly shouldn’t be emulated. But few things provide as powerful a tool to fight tendencies to naturalise any one view of sexuality as the broad and deep cultural history of sex and gender in human life.
      • It shows that many common assumptions about sexuality and power are indeed just assumptions – that heterosexuality and military prowess don’t automatically go together, and that hypersexuality doesn’t necessarily make someone manly and powerful. What we are too often taught to think of as ‘natural’ is, in fact, dependent on the societal values of a particular time and place, and what is obviously ‘true’ in one culture is just as obviously unthinkable in another.
      • This can be a liberating realisation: if these basic connections between sexuality, masculinity and power aren’t inherent, then they can be changed – we can, in fact, choose for ourselves how we shape our ideas about gender and sexuality, today and in the future.
  2. Notes
    • This is an interesting and informative account of aristocratic Roman sexual mores. The author doesn't mention the "aristocratic" element, but it mustn't be forgotten.
    • However, I'm not sure what lessons can (or at least should) be drawn from it.
    • Ethics is taught in philosophy courses (at least at Birkbeck) from the ancient Greek perspective to show that there are different understandings of ethics and the good life from the Christian one that students (before they became increasingly "diverse"; but it applies to whatever cultural background the student is from) might be used to and think "natural".
    • This article uses Julius Caesar rather than the Greeks to draw the conclusion that certain "assumptions" about male heterosexuality and power aren't "natural" but are culture-relative.
    • It seems that the Roman view was that male sex was all about domination - whether of others (male or female) and of self. Obviously the author doesn't like the “domination” aspect of all this - nor the Roman allowance of the sexual ill-treatment of slaves and minors. But I can't see how this has anything to do with resisting attempts to "naturalise" sexual ethics. The fact that other societies had other views doesn't imply that we are "liberated" to act how we feel like.
    • I find the idea of "ethics naturalised" a fairly promising approach to resolving interminable ethical disputes. What leads - or might be expected to lead - to flourishing in all societies might be seen as objectively good. Slavery and the general abuse of the powerless doesn't lead to the flourishing of the powerless, so while it might be "natural" in that all societies in the past adopted such practices, this doesn't make it good (or "right").
    • I still think that matters of “plumbing” and the original reproductive purpose of sex means that some sexual practices are "natural" and others not so. But there aren't necessarily any clear ethical implications from this. Human societies have transcended nature in many ways for the good. Modern wealth and technology mean that practices that might have had bad consequences in the past no longer do in our current state of affluence and technological sophistication.
    • Anyway, I thought the logic of the argument might have been laid out more clearly. I thought the same data might have been used to demonstrate that there was no moral objection to slavery or to sex with minors had our culture been supportive of such abominable practices, assuming value-laden terms such as "abominable" are allowed.
Footnote 139: Aeon: Weidman - Do humans really have a killer instinct or is that just manly fancy? (WebRef=9748)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Nadine Weidman
    • Author Narrative: Nadine Weidman is a lecturer on the history of science at Harvard University. She is the author of Constructing Scientific Psychology: Karl Lashley’s Mind-Brain Debates (1999) and Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (2004), co-authored with John P Jackson, Jr.
    • Author's Conclusion
      • The sciences on which they built their theories might have been superseded. But today’s sciences of human nature – sociobiology and evolutionary psychology – have adopted the claim for an evolved predisposition for aggression. The 1960s bestsellers ushered in a genre of popular science that still depends on speculative reconstructions of human prehistory. It also still draws comparisons between the behaviour and emotions of humans and animals.
      • The grudging compliment we pay a powerful man – ‘he’s an alpha male’ – is one hint of the genre. But we ought to be careful about what we believe. Theories of human nature have important consequences – what we think we are shapes how we act. We believe in such theories not because they are true, but because we are persuaded that they are true. The history of the claim for a killer instinct in humans encourages us to think of the ways in which scientists argue and try to persuade. Storytelling, in this view, is a crucial element of both the science and its public presentation.
  2. Notes
    • I'm not sure this is really arguing anything. It's just trying to say that evolutionary psychology is a set of reconstructions that are accepted if they strike a chord of realism. But this doesn't make them true.
    • Fair enough, I suppose, but selective accounts of fights between male animals that don't lead to death could be off-set by accounts of those that do (whether by accident or design).
    • Also, genocide doesn't seem to have disappeared with the Nazis.
    • PID Note: Evolution
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Weidman (Nadine) - Do humans really have a killer instinct or is that just manly fancy?"
Footnote 140: Aeon: Video - Susan Greenfield on neuronal assemblies (WebRef=9747)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Susan Greenfield
    • Aeon Subtitle: Why don’t we feel pain in dreams? The answer might lie in a new frontier of neuroscience
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The UK research scientist Susan Greenfield believes that neuronal assemblies – coalitions of millions of brain cells that activate and disband over a scale of millimetres and milliseconds – could be a Rosetta Stone for explaining shifts and differences in states of consciousness.
      • Although research about these cellular systems is still in its early stages, Greenfield thinks that further study could help neuroscientists bridge the chasm between the local neural networks and large brain regions that currently characterise our framework for perception.
      • And, as she proposes in this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the PBS series Closer to Truth (2000-), bridging this gap might be key to unlocking some of the foremost puzzles of consciousness – from sleep, dreams and wakefulness to mental illness.
  2. Notes
Footnote 141: Aeon: Townsend - How Aztecs told history (WebRef=9751)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Camilla Townsend
    • Author Narrative: Camilla Townsend is distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her research in Nahuatl-language sources has garnered numerous awards, including a Guggenheim and a Public Scholar award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her latest book is Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (2019).
    • Aeon Subtitle: For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices
    • Author's Conclusion
      • For the Aztecs, history didn’t require textbook-like consensus. In their understanding, truth wasn’t singular and could accommodate different perspectives. This pattern had almost certainly been part of their social practice for many generations, as they sat around campfires, talking and telling stories, trying to build common cause with the friends they’d made along their route. Now they turned it into an art form, a formalised way of keeping history that literally depended on multiple speakers standing up at different moments.
      • Yet this relativism didn’t mean that the Aztecs believed that there was no truth. Their historians never gave up on the idea that there is a truth that transcends differences in perspective. Their histories reminded listeners that, together, they had trekked a long way, over rough terrain and through painful events, to come to the present moment. They weren’t now about to give up everything with a shrug of the shoulders and an implicit conclusion that no one could ever know what happened or why.
      • In fact, the truth was that the past was still with them, the efforts of their multiple sets of ancestors still a part of who they were – and everybody present in the community needed to continue to give all they could in order to make the future come into being. They had survived their journey from the desert far to the north; they had survived bitter warfare in the central valley. By the mid-1500s, when they were transcribing the old performances, they had survived the arrival of the Europeans. This was no time to give up. Rather, it was a time to add another perspective, that of the Christians. Truth, they said again, was composite. History, they believed, was long – the trail of meandering footprints wound on for years – and it was constructed of such constituent truths. Writing in the colonial era, they wrote their own history interspersed with references to what they now knew had been happening in Europe at the same time and, when they arrived at the period after the conquest, they wrote about the efforts of both sets of people to manage their lives together. The new, they were convinced, didn’t necessarily have to obliterate the old.
Footnote 142: Aeon: Video - Plato's alegory of the cave (WebRef=9750)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Orson Welles’s psychedelic 1973 adaptation of Plato’s timeless ‘allegory of the cave’
    • Editors' Abstract
      • ‘It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honours, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.’
        → Plato’s Republic, Book 7
      • Plato’s 'allegory of the cave' thought experiment ponders the experience of prisoners shackled in a cave from birth, only able to see the shadows of objects projected onto a wall. The text then traces the journey of a prisoner who is set free from the cave, given the opportunity to experience reality in the glow of the sun, and, upon returning to the cave, is met with laughter by the other prisoners, who think him a fool for struggling to re-adjust to his old existence.
      • A simple story yielding complex commentaries on the nature of reality and wisdom, Plato’s timeless allegory is built into the foundations of modern philosophy, and, more than two milennia later, still stirs debate.
      • Carried by a rich narration from Orson Welles, this rarely seen 1973 animated adaptation of Plato’s words populates the tale with haunting human figures, bringing retro-surreal life to the parable.
  2. Notes
    • This is just a narration of the text, with no commentary apart from an exhortation at the beginning to 'seek truth rather than illusion'.
    • All very well, but it'd be nice to know what the illusions are supposed to be, and what the truth.
    • Presumably it's not Plato's theory of eternal Forms that's the truth, and the senses - while not giving us access to the whole truth - are a necessary source of knowledge.
    • I had a go at Plato's Theory of Forms in this BA Finals Essay.
Footnote 143: Aeon: Little & Backus - Confidence tricks (WebRef=9733)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Andrew Little & Matthew Backus
    • Author Narrative:
      • Andrew Little is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
      • Matthew Backus is the Philip H Geier Jr Associate Professor at the Graduate Business School of Columbia University in New York City. His work has appeared in Bloomberg News, Slate and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
    • Aeon Subtitle: The ignorant pundit is absolutely certain; the true expert understands their own limits and how to ask the right questions
    • Author's Conclusion
      • So, how do we foster trust and integrity in discourse on science? A small but real part of the problem is that reputational incentives to appear qualified and knowledgeable drive experts to overstate their certainty.
      • One way to counter this tendency is to ask better questions, and that usually means questions about the nature of the evidence and what it allows.
      • We can also change the way that we relate to experts, not just listening to the loudest and most confident voices, but to those with a track record of only claiming as far as the evidence will take them, and a willingness to say ‘I don’t know.’
  2. Notes
Footnote 144: Aeon: Press - Mummies among us (WebRef=9736)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Michael Press
    • Author Narrative: Michael Press is an archaeologist and writer living in Bloomington, Indiana. He is the author of Ashkelon 4: The Iron Age Terracottas of Ashkelon and Philistia (2012).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Before death became a source of disgust and denial, Europeans cheerfully painted with – and ingested – human remains
    • Author's Conclusion
      • At least some displays of dead bodies in museums continue to be popular. Mummy exhibitions are huge draws. Starting in the mid-1990s, a series of exhibitions under the title Body Worlds has displayed corpses and body parts preserved by a process called plastination (replacing body fat and water with plastic, so that the bodies don’t decay) and arranged in various lifelike poses. Tens of millions of people have visited these exhibitions and the various knockoffs they have inspired. But mummies aren’t like ordinary dead bodies; they are the long-ago deceased of another civilisation, ones we often see as artifacts more than as people. Body Worlds, meanwhile, does everything it can to make the bodies on display look unlike corpses. Far from putting dead bodies on show, it hides them – it makes death invisible.
      • If changes in how we treat mummies really reflect practical changes in how we experience dead bodies – changing what we then project on to an ethical plane – what does this mean for how we might treat mummies in the future? Thinking about these issues seems especially appropriate now, when routines of daily life and the rituals of death have, for so many of us, been upended in a short time. We know that attitudes toward the dead, both ancient and modern, have changed drastically at multiple points in history. They might be about to change again.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting - if somewhat disgusting - paper.
    • Some revolting detail about the use of ground-up mummies in medicine during the medieval and early modern period - eventually abandoned not because it was inethical or disgusting, but because it didn't seem to work work.
    • Similarly, use of ground-up mummies in brown pigments - used up until the Pre-Raphaelites - was abandoned only because the supply dried up.
    • The author points out the way dead bodies - of the recent dead - are no longer part of everyday experience for most people, which may have changed our attitudes to ancient mummies.
    • I've always thought it a bit disrespectful to have them on display, though I'm all for their scientific investigation.
    • PID Note: Death
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Press (Michael) - Mummies among us"
Footnote 145: Aeon: Video - Solos (WebRef=9734)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Sketches from a Barcelona square offer an elegant celebration of people-watching
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Barcelona’s squares (plaças in Catalan, plazas in Spanish) are the beating heart of the Catalonian capital – beloved to residents and tourists alike. Breaking the monotony of the city’s gridded streets, these open outdoor areas percolate with the comings and goings of al fresco diners, makeshift football matches and all iterations of art and commerce.
      • Formed from sketches made while the London-based filmmaker Gabriella Marsh was living in Barcelona, the brief animation Solos captures daily life in a small square in the historic Gràcia neighbourhood. Streets are swept, families squabble and friendly greetings are exchanged. And yet these mostly mundane scenes transform into something quite remarkable via Marsh’s stylish hand-drawn images and composer Joe Bush’s gentle piano score.
      • What emerges is an elegant meditation on the intersections of streets, stories and social forces that give shape to a city block.
Footnote 146: Aeon: Edison - True musical virtuosos are minimalists who put roll before rock (WebRef=9737)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mike Edison
    • Author Narrative: Mike Edison is an author, editor and musician. Formerly editor of High Times and Screw magazines, his writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and The New York Observer, among others. As a drummer, he has opened for bands including Sonic Youth, Sound Garden and the Ramones. His books include the memoirs I Have Fun Everywhere I Go (2008) and You Are a Complete Disappointment (2016); the social history Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! (2011); and Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters (2019). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Virtuosity is just a word. Say it enough and it doesn’t mean anything. You can call a pie a cake, but it doesn’t make it so, and anyone who thinks that Jeff Beck or Buddy Rich offers more musical potency than Muddy Waters or Charlie Watts, solely based on the illusion of their instrumental prowess, is perversely wrong.
      • It goes without question that the Rollings Stones – The Greatest Rock’n’roll Band in the World – would need The Greatest Rock’n’roll Drummer. But if you are asking who is ‘the best’ drummer, you are asking the wrong question.
  2. Notes
    • A very sensible piece.
    • He's right that it's not the number of notes that matters - as in the hysterics of 'guitar heroes' - but the right notes.
    • He's also right that the drummer's job is to serve the band, not to perform drum solos. Hence Charlie Watts and Ringo do just fine.
    • Interesting to see his connection with (but not a band-member of) the Ramones ('Sheena is a punk rocker') and Soundgarden ('Black Hole Sun').
    • This - like punk rock itself - is a reaction to the excesses of glam rock.
    • That said, anything that's a reaction to something else itself then needs to be reacted to, and is transitory.
Footnote 147: Aeon: Video - The meaning of a monument (WebRef=9726)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The American Museum of Natural History grapples with its most controversial piece
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The ‘Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt’ was commissioned by the City of New York to stand in front of the American Museum of Natural History in 1925, and was finally unveiled to the public in 1940. A co-founder of the museum and avid outdoorsman, Roosevelt’s commitment to conservation was reflected in many of his policies as president, including the vast expansion of national parks, forests and monuments. But despite his contributions to the field of natural history, the statue – depicting a horseback Roosevelt flanked by a Native American figure and an African figure – has been controversial for decades, with detractors arguing that it’s a monument to white supremacy. Further complicating its symbolism are Roosevelt’s recorded views on race, which were in some ways progressive for a white man of his time, but would today be condemned as unequivocally racist.
      • Released by the American Museum of Natural History in 2019 – prior to the institution’s decision to remove the statue in the wake of the George Floyd protests in June 2020 – this short film was created to help contextualise the work for museum visitors. Leading scholars in the fields of art, history and African and Native American studies weigh in on the sculpture’s intended and perceived meanings – alongside museum visitors, many of whom are relaying their first impressions of the monument. The resulting short is captivating both as a history and as a reading of the wider cultural moment, in which institutions are being forced to grapple with their legacies, and governments are reassessing who and what should be celebrated in public spaces.
  2. Notes
    • It’s interesting that an African American sculptress supports the artistic merit of the statue. I can’t agree. While it’s technically well done, there’s something cheesy about it.
    • It’s primarily about Theodore Roosevelt, not his anonymous guides, so they can’t all be given the same focus, but this involves what appears to be subordination. Of course, in the class structure of the time, race aside, the supporting figures would have been subordinates. But the statue implies (or can be taken to imply) that the subordination applies to the races as well as to the representative individuals.
    • As is pointed out, the American Indian and the African are supposed to be TR’s guides to exploring the American and African wildernesses. They are portrayed “nobly”, but it all seems very condescending, as in the “noble savage”, and are too easy to be misunderstood. In particular, the African is not an African American. Also, the Native American is a pastiche image from various tribes, and wouldn’t have been wearing ceremonial dress in his capacity as a guide. It’s all a bit of a muddle.
    • As for TR’s “good points” for which he should be remembered, someone points out in the video that creating the American national parks involved displacing Native American tribes. No doubt. But then Capability Brown’s work in landscaping gardens for the English aristocracy involved the destruction of whole villages, as have the creation of roads and railways for general utility. No doubt the creation of game reserves in Africa and India has had the same consequences. What can you do?
    • As all seemed to agree, TR wasn’t by any means one of the most racist of US presidents, but was progressive for his time, so rejecting representations of him on those grounds would be inappropriate.
    • True, he was a eugenicist – but, again, that was popular science of its time and not completely absurd in principle (it is common sense when applied to animal breeding, and we are human animals), though it’s not something we ought to want to institute amongst human beings other than to attempt to eradicate hereditary diseases (and even there it’s highly controversial). What are absurd now are the theories of racial hierarchy, which might have appeared like common sense at various times in the past, but which have been empirically disproved whenever there has been a level playing field, and also when we note that different races and cultures have appeared superior to others at different points in history.
    • Anyway, I think the statue is a bad piece of art, and I shed no tears now that it’s gone.
    • That doesn’t mean I’m supportive of removing any representation of anyone who had some character traits or policies that seem reprehensible to some modern sensibilities. Where would it all end?
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - The meaning of a monument"
Footnote 148: Aeon: Dingemanse - The space between our heads (WebRef=9728)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mark Dingemanse
    • Author Narrative: Mark Dingemanse is associate professor in language and communication at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He won the Heineken Young Scientists Award in the Humanities 2020.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Brain-to-brain interfaces promise to bypass language. But do we really want access to one another’s unmediated thoughts?
    • Author's Conclusion
      • ... the human condition is enabled by a flexible communication system that saves us from the uninhibited sharing of private processes while still helping us to collaborate in ways unmatched elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Language is a filter between the private and the public, and an infrastructure for negotiating consent and dissent.
      • As research into brain-to-brain interfaces matures, let’s make sure to incorporate the powers of selection and negotiation, so as to extend human agency in meaningful ways.
  2. Notes
    • A sensible paper, pointing out the risks inherent in Brain-to-Brain Interfaces, should they ever reach and significant level of sophistication.
    • That says, there's a lot of hype around about the progress that's been made, which is minimal.
    • it is noted that "Portions of this essay are revised from the author’s chapter in Distributed Agency (2017), edited by N J Enfield and Paul Kockelman."
    • The title of this chapter is "Brain-to-Brain Interfaces and the Role of Language in Distributing Agency".
    • PID Note: Transhumanism
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Dingemanse (Mark) - The space between our heads"
Footnote 149: Aeon: Video - Oppy: The life of a rover (WebRef=9729)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: What the Martian surface looked like to Oppy – humanity’s most resilient rover
    • Editor's Abstract
      • When NASA successfully landed the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity – nicknamed ‘Oppy’ – in 2004, the plan was to explore the Martian terrain for 90 days. Through expert engineering and careful handling, Oppy was able to exceed its designed lifespan 60 times over, exploring the planet for nearly 15 years.
      • Over the course of its impressive expedition, Oppy made a number of key geological discoveries and broke several records, including longest off-world distance travelled at 28 miles.
      • Then, in 2018, following one of the most intense dust storms ever recorded on Mars, Oppy relayed its final message to Earth: ‘My battery is low and it’s getting dark.’
      • This short video from the US filmmaker John D Boswell, also known as melodysheep, uses images captured by Oppy and music composed using the sounds of Martian winds to pay anthropomorphic tribute to the resilient rover – and by extension, those responsible for its awe-inspiring journey.
Footnote 150: Aeon: Stonebridge - The plague novel you need to read is by Bachmann, not Camus (WebRef=9730)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Lyndsey Stonebridge
    • Author Narrative: Lyndsey Stonebridge is professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham. Her book Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights will be published in November 2020, and she is currently writing a new book on Hannah Arendt for Jonathan Cape.
    • Author's Conclusion
      • ‘I’ve often wondered,’ Bachmann wrote in the 1960s, ‘just where the virus of crime escaped to – it cannot have simply disappeared from our world 20 years ago just because murder is no longer praised, desired, decorated with medals …’ Exactly like Camus, she saw that European fascism had released an insidious kind of evil into the world. Around the same time, Arendt (who admired Bachmann) used the expression ‘the banality of evil’ to similarly describe an endemic criminality that hides itself in tacit principles, values, procedures, in everyday language and everyday tyranny. The problem for that generation was how to respond.
      • In the end, The Plague’s moral clarity belonged to the witnesses, not to the invisible victims. ‘What it is that one learns in the midst of such tribulations,’ concludes Dr Rieux, is that ‘there is more in men to admire than to despise.’ Maybe. But compare the final words of Malina: ‘It was murder.’ ‘I maintain,’ wrote Bachmann, ‘that still today many people do not die but are murdered.’
      • Camus used the fictional metaphor of the plague to expose the political and historical scourges of his time. By contrast, our plague is real: our historical and political metaphors are out of control. There is ‘a pandemic of’ we say – and what we also mean is that there is violence we can’t stop, and which seems to infect not only lives and minds, but the very words we use. And that it is killing us. On this point, Bachmann is our closer contemporary.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Judt - A hero for our times
      → Rose - Pointing the Finger - ‘The Plague’
    • The author seems to inhabit a different bubble to me, so that the issues that concern her must be obvious in her circle, so she doesn't think they need clearly stating, even for outsiders (assuming she's writing for such rather than her own echo chamber). So:-
      1. There are references to "the historical hatreds of white men" and
      2. "Even before the murder of George Floyd, the return to The Plague didn’t feel quite right. It has always been a book of ghosts, of missing Black and brown persons and silent women" and
      3. "'The women in The Plague … have been in lockdown for a long time when the story begins.' This spring, the absence of the Arabs of Oran in the novel all too accurately mirrors the contemporary whitewashing of Black bodies, deaths and health workers. "
    • What is she on about? These are issues that have been around for ever, and have usually been - and in most places in the world still are - submerged under other much more serious existential threats to the bulk of the population, including - of course - these 'oppressed' groups.
    • I suppose this is her point – Camus’ The Plague ignores all the issues that are currently of concern to those who take for granted the solution of the problems that concern most societies, including those that faced France in WW2. Maybe Bachmann’s book addresses contemporary concerns – or at least some people’s concerns – better than Camus’. However, …
    • The reason we have time and energy to worry about and - no doubt inadequately - address them is that - by historical standards (at least in the West) - times are so good, even for the 'oppressed'.
    • In times past, the killing of George Floyd wouldn't have made the news let alone caused an international conflagration. It wasn't an "execution" or a "public lynching" but an act of violent stupidity on the part of a police officer who can't seriously be supposed to have intended to kill George Floyd on camera in front of a crowd of witnesses. In some times and countries they'd have just shot him, and the on-lookers as well.
    • Certainly, blacks and the more poorly-paid health workers deserve better, and women haven't yet achieved 'equality' - however that's supposed to work out - but the situation of women, ethnic minorities and "the poor" is unimaginably better than it was a few decades ago (and still is in most of the world).
    • The Plague is wrestling with what should be done in a police state where thousands are being transported to their deaths for supposedly being 'sub-human' or summarily executed for dissidence. Whatever the short-comings of the police either side of the Atlantic, we are very far from that state of affairs, though not so far in some other countries.
    • Today, the Lebanese government has just negligently blown up its capital. Syria and Yemen have disappeared off the radar while we bicker about whether teachers should or shouldn't have their inflated exam grade proposals rebased.
    • The present risk is that Covid-19 will so weaken the economy that all these second-level issues will be submerged completely for a generation.
    • Get a grip.
Footnote 151: Aeon: Mack - Big space (WebRef=9720)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Katie Mack
    • Author Narrative: Katie Mack is assistant professor of physics at North Carolina State University, where she is also a member of the Leadership in Public Science Cluster. She is the author of The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (2020).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Our planet is a tiny porthole, looking over a cosmic sea. Can we learn what lies beyond our own horizons of perception?
    • Author's Conclusion
      • The cosmic horizon defining our observable universe is a hard limit. We can’t see beyond it, and unless our understanding of the structure of reality changes drastically, we can be confident we never will. The expansion of the cosmos is speeding up; anything beyond our horizon now will be carried away from us faster and faster, and its light will never be able to catch up. While we might never be able to say with certainty what lies beyond that border, what all the theories have in common is that our observable universe is part of a much, much larger space.
      • Whether that space contains a multiverse of bubbles, each with different physical laws; whether it’s part of an ever-growing cosmos of which we are only one part, in one cycle; or whether space extends outward in directions we can’t conceive, we currently just don’t know. But we’re seeking clues.
      • The patterns in the cosmic microwave background light, the distribution of galaxies, and even experiments testing gravity and the behaviour of particle physics are giving us insight into the fundamental structure of the Universe, and into its evolution in its earliest moments. We are getting closer and closer to being able to tell our whole cosmic story. We can already see, directly, the fire in which our universe was forged, the moments just after its beginning. With the clues we are gathering now, we might, someday, follow the story all the way to its end.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting article.
    • An endnote says that the essay is based on her book, which came out on 4th August 2020 and costs £15 from Amazon.
    • However the essay itself doesn't deal with the end of the universe, only how it might be structured and how our view of it is limited.
    • I could buy her book, but it'd never reach the top of the pile, and if it ever did, it'd be out of date.
Footnote 152: Aeon: Video - All inclusive (WebRef=9713)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The ritualised excess of life aboard a cruise ship is tragic and parodic by turns
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The cruise industry as it exists today – somewhat affordable, aggressively fun, indulgent by design – is a relatively new phenomenon, rooted in the 1960s, when passenger ships struggled to compete with air travel. After a pivot to all-inclusive pleasure voyages, cruising is now a $45 billion industry, beloved by some for its budget-friendly luxuries and amenities, and bemoaned by others for its environmental toll, treatment of workers, and – as highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic – health risks.
      • The observational documentary All Inclusive drops viewers head-first into the strange rituals of tableside conga lines, captain meet-and-greets and pool cannonball contests that characterise the cruise experience.
      • While the Swiss director Corina Schwingruber Ilić’s tongue-in-cheek tone permeates throughout, the film offers more than just an invitation to gawk, as ‘fun’ plays out in a series of over-the-top pastimes, hinting at the economic and social stratification between guests and workers.
  2. Notes
    • Well, I've never wanted to go on a cruise, and - if they are anything like the one illustrated on the video - for good reason.
    • Hideously low-brow with no redeeming features. Even if the food and drink were good - which I doubt - everywhere is crowded and noisy.
    • Not quite as intrusive as a Hi-di-hi holiday camp with compulsion to join in, but less opportunity to escape.
    • Give me two weeks in solitary on bread and water any day.
Footnote 153: Aeon: Jarrett - How to read more books (WebRef=9718)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Christian Jarrett
    • Aeon Subtitle: Modern life can feel too frantic for books. Use these habit-building strategies to carve out time for the joy of reading
  2. Notes
    • This article is basically trying to help occasional readers find the time an motivation to read more. This is not my problem. Rather, my time is already maxed out, and am fully motivated, but want to read more in the time available. Mind you, I don't need lessons in speed-reading tosh either.
    • Reading is all very well, but I think you need to write something on what you've read or else whatever you thought you learned will be lost to you. Also, you'll have no way of reminding yourself of what you've read without reading it again.
    • A supposed spin-off benefit of reading identified by the author is cognitive ‘reserve building’. I'm not a fan of spin-off benefits, and I've read about 'cognitive reserve' recently in "Costa (Albert) - The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language" (pp. 113-120), as a possible benefit of bilingualism. The down-side seems to be that cognitive reserve hides the signs of dementia by the use of various unconscious coping strategies so that - when these fail - the final collapse is very sudden. OK, you've had extra time, but - should there be a cure provided the disease was picked up early, you'd have missed out.
    • Not forcing yourself to read a book to the end is good advice. Mustn't be followed too often. Maybe you'll occasionally miss out - but usually there'll be the opportunity for another try if it's an important book. But best not to waste precious time.
    • However advice quoted is "... start more books, quit most of them, read the great ones twice. I think that a lot of readers would be well-served if they did that."
    • A quotation appropriate to my situation: 'We buy the books, they pile up, but we never get round to reading them – the Japanese even have a term for it, tsundoku. '
Footnote 154: Aeon: MacLeod - In an unstable economy, I found freedom and security in sex work (WebRef=9717)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Tamara MacLeod
    • Author Narrative: Tamara MacLeod is the pseudonym of a freelance writer, sex worker and activist based in England.
    • Author's Conclusion
      • After all, what kind of work is good for our mental health and what kind is bad? With the internal conflicts of capitalism laid bare, as they are now, I would suggest that bad work demands the impossible from us. It’s work that insists we do it only because we want to, that underpays when we are overqualified, that demands absolute loyalty and gives nothing in return, that demands more time than we have. It’s work that doesn’t permit us to be ourselves, not even a little bit.
  2. Notes
    • The author - well educated and intelligent - is arguing that her line of work isn't any worse for her mental health than the available meaningless and absurd alternatives; and the pay's better. It seems 'mental health' is a central - but confused, says the author - line of argument in the (well-meaning) feminist anti-sex-work lobby.
    • It doesn't enter into any of the controversies about the objectivisation of women, only about improving 'working conditions'.
    • I slightly wondered whether it might shed some light on the psychology of the courtesan Saeeda Bai in "Seth (Vikram) - A Suitable Boy". It doesn't. Saeeda Bai seems more like an Indian version of a classical Geisha (as understood in popular culture) rather than performing the tawdry work this paper alludes to.
Footnote 155: Aeon: Herz - Introverts are excluded unfairly in an extraverts’ world (WebRef=9714)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Noa Herz
    • Author Narrative: Noa Herz is a neuroscientist and a neuropsychologist studying human memory and emotion. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.
  2. Notes
    • As an introvert myself, I read this with interest, but note the upsides and downsides of the trait. During lockdown, and probably generally in the digital age, introversion may be an advantage.
    • There were saome interesting facts, if that's what they are: that 33% are introverts, 33% extroverts and the rest in the middle. And, that it's a continuum.
    • That there's a distinction between introverson and shyness. "Unlike shyness, which is more about a fear of being judged negatively, introversion is defined as a preference for quiet, less stimulating environments."
    • "Jung ... described introverts as preferring to direct their attention inward, to their own feelings and thoughts, and how they lose energy during social interactions. Extraverts, by contrast, direct their attention outward, gain energy from social interactions, and lose energy during periods of solitude."
    • "Eysenck proposed a physiological explanation for the difference between introverts and extraverts. Extraverts, he said, have a lower baseline level of cortical arousal relative to introverts, leading them to search for external stimulation to increase their motivation, attention and alertness. Introverts’ higher baseline arousal levels, in contrast, lead them to withdraw."
    • I agreed that "the rules" are made by extroverts, but - maybe because it's no longer an issue for me - I doubt that making "safe spaces" for introverts is really going to fly. There are so many groups that seek special treatment. Maybe this is appropriate for those at the extreme ends of the spectum, but surely not for such a large minority.
Footnote 156: Aeon: Fine - Sexual dinosaurs (WebRef=9709)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Cordelia Fine
    • Author Narrative: Cordelia Fine is a psychologist, writer and professor in the history and philosophy of science programme at the University of Melbourne. Her latest book is Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (2017). She lives in Melbourne.
    • Aeon Subtitle: The charge of ‘feminist bias’ is used to besmirch anyone who questions sexist assumptions at work in neuroscience
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → "Fine (Cordelia) - Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society"
    • I didn't dislike this essay anywhere near as much as I'd expected I would.
    • It's obviously a plug for her book - as it opens and closes with the injunction not to reject its message without reading it.
    • It's difficult to approach this subject without simply defending an entrenched intuitive position and feeling that the other side "would say that, wouldn't they".
    • But the author is right that preconceptions and background assumptions need to be removed from scientific enquiry (or at least - since this injunction is impossible to satisfy - acknowledged).
    • Like her, I'm suspicious of Simon Baron-Cohen's team's "findings" of psychological differences by sex in very young babies, based on attention. Subconscious bias in the experiments (arising from knowing the sex of the infant being tested) is a real risk.
    • That said, the "equal but different" hypothesis does seem to be supported by so much parental experience that it's difficult not to be predisposed to accept it unless you feel "oppressed" in some way (even if legitimately so).
    • It's difficult to disentangle nature from nurture scientifically as it's inethical to perform the sort of experiments that it's also inethical - but at least legal - to perform on other great apes.
    • But the idea that males and females might be attuned by evolution to different roles doesn't seem bonkers. Nor does the thought that people of different genders full under lagely but not entirely coincident bell-curves when any particular trait is evaluated seem potty.
    • Anyway, I've ordered the book, and we'll see.
Footnote 157: Aeon: Video - Time-based currency by Robert Owen (WebRef=9707)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: One banknote per hour of work – Robert Owen’s utopian reboot of money
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The Welsh-born manufacturer and social reformer Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a quintessential capitalist success story, having risen from modest origins to become a wealthy textile manufacturer in Scotland. However, he grew to reject the dehumanising excesses of the system that had ushered in his fortune, writing that Britain’s monetary structure ‘has made man ignorant; placed him in opposition to his fellows; engendered fraud and deceit; blindly urged him forward to create but deprived him of the wisdom of joy’. This led Owen to devise an audacious plan to recentre the financial system around ingenuity, community and justice.
      • Introduced in 1832, the radical idea was called the National Equitable Labour Exchange – a system of currency built on the idea that labour is the source of all wealth, and that goods should be bought and sold based on the time it took labourers to produce it. While the Exchange lasted only a few years, the idealistic project helped to lay the groundwork for some of Owen’s more successful later reforms, such as shorter working days, with the ultimate goal of a workday based on the principle of ‘eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest’.
      • This brief video essay is part of a British Museum series in which curators examine objects of interest in their collections. Ben Alsop, curator of the museum’s Money Gallery, inspects a note issued by the Equitable Labour Exchange representing an hour of work.
  2. Notes
    • Brief, but interesting. The video doesn't add much to the Abstract.
    • The reasons for the failure appear to have been twofold. Firstly, an excess of unsaleable goods (this wasn't explained). Secondly, that it rewarded slow and incompetent workers who took longer to produce their wares. Seems obviously fatal to me; and the same goes for all sorts of egalitarian schemes.
Footnote 158: Aeon: Video - In the wake (WebRef=9710)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Kerala’s skilled hand-weavers struggle to survive the rising tides of modernity
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The Indian-born, US-based filmmaker Natasha Nair’s short documentary In the Wake brings viewers inside the colourful and tactile world of a weaving community in Kerala, the state on India’s southwest coast still recovering from the wreckage of flooding in 2018.
      • The skilled weavers produce textiles for sarees, the traditional South Asian women’s garments, and must fully engage their bodies and minds in their work, the craft of which has been passed down through generations.
      • In addition to natural disasters, the mostly female workers must also contend with competition from power-loom machines producing sarees that can be sold at half the price of their own hand-loomed products.
      • Nair skilfully captures the vivid hues and kinetic sounds of the work, while her brief portrait of craft ponders if the rich tradition of the Kerala weavers can ultimately survive the rising tides of modernity.
  2. Notes
    • Interesting. The looms are completely human-powered.
    • I watched it partly because of a general interest in India, developed as a result of visits there as a result of my work (to the more northerly Pune rather than Kerala)
    • But also because of the claims in "Tharoor (Shashi) - Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India" that the British had destroyed the Indian textile industry.
    • The technology here looks slightly beyond "cottage", but not quite up to the standard of the eighteenth-century mills in the north of England, which used power.
    • Though the level of skill involved seems greater.
Footnote 159: Aeon: Zucca - Much ado about uncertainty: how Shakespeare navigates doubt (WebRef=9711)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Lorenzo Zucca
    • Author Narrative: Lorenzo Zucca is a professor of law at King's College London. His latest book is A Secular Europe: Law and Religion in the European Constitutional Landscape (2012). He is currently working on his next book, entitled The Poet of Uncertainty: How Shakespeare Helps us Navigate an Uncertain World.
    • Author's Introduction
      • William Shakespeare lived in an age of uncertainty. His society was traversing a number of unpredictable challenges that spun from the succession of the heirless queen Elizabeth to the ascent of a new class of merchants. But the biggest issue had to do with religious conflicts. In the premodern world, religion provided absolute certainty: whatever we knew was implanted in our mind by God. We didn’t have to look any further. Once that system of beliefs started to collapse, Europe was left with a yawning gap. Religion no longer seemed capable to explain the world.
      • René Descartes and Shakespeare, who were contemporaries, gave opposite answers to the sceptical challenge: Descartes believed that our quest for knowledge could be rebuilt and founded on indubitable certainties. Shakespeare, on the other hand, made uncertainty a leitmotiv of all his works, and harnessed its creative power.
      Author's Conclusion
      • Shakespeare’s scepticism is compatible with the human quest for truth. To live in an uncertain world means accepting that our quest for truth is limited and fraught with errors; yet we cannot but engage with it: Ulysses’ last journey beyond the pillars of Hercules is the image of humanity bent on our next quest, sailing an uncertain sea without anxiety or sadness.
      • I’d much rather navigate this uncertain world with Shakespeare than be fooled into believing with Descartes that humans have a way of building our house of cards upon a bedrock of certainty.
  2. Notes
    • An excellent brief essay, and I look forward to the author's forthcoming book.
    • Naturally, I agree with it. In particular, I agree that Plato's excoriation of the poets for not sticking to heroic heroes and vilainous vilains, but mixing things up as in real life is a grave error that only appeals to totalitarian regimes.
    • Of course, it's important to go no further in cementing our beliefs than the evidence warrants. We have to live our lives based on our best evaluation of what is the case, but have to be open to correction. Aiming for certainty is hopeless.
    • I was intrigued by the reference to a "brave new world", which is discussed, but where I found an essay on line that suggests the expression is tinged with irony, since Prospero's island world will be populated with rebels. See Brave New World.
Footnote 160: Aeon: Cooperrider - Hand to mouth (WebRef=9692)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Kensey Cooperrider
    • Author Narrative: Kensy Cooperrider is a cognitive scientist, who has written for Scientific American Mind and JStor Daily, among other publications, and hosts the podcast Many Minds. He lives in Chicago.
    • Aeon Subtitle: If language began with gestures around a campfire and secret signals on hunts, why did speech come to dominate communication?
    • Author's Conclusion
      • None of this is to say that the gesture-first theory has prevailed – far from it. Rather, it is to say, first, that the allegedly ‘fatal flaw’ of gestural theories might prove, in the end, to be merely a flesh wound and, second, that speech-first theories have their own problems.
      • Ultimately, questions about modality are just one layer of the larger puzzle of language origins. Even if we were able to establish some version of a gesture-first proposal as not merely plausible but likely, there would be many more layers to contend with.
      • We would also want to understand how we came by our abilities to read other minds, to sequence and combine ideas, to conceptualise abstractions such as ‘tomorrow’ and ‘truth’. We would need to explain, not merely whether we first conveyed meaning by hand or by mouth, but why we felt an itch to mean anything at all.
      • It is this multilayered complexity that makes the evolution of language the ‘hardest problem in science’ – and also one of the most tantalising.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting paper.
    • The arguments for 'gesture first' centre on neural and behavioural connections between hand and mouth, child development and similarities between contemporary great apes and our presumed evolutionary ancestors.
    • For some reason a reason for the connection between hand and mouth - namely eating - isn't mentioned.
    • Lots of the supposed advantages of speech over gesture are undermined by sign-languages, which are as rich semantically as speech.
    • The suggestion for the motivating factor for a gradual transition from gesture to speech is that speech is more economical - ie. it takes less effort.
    • Maybe ...
    • PID Note: Evolution
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Cooperrider (Kensey) - Hand to mouth"
Footnote 161: Aeon: Ghosh - Counting China (WebRef=9690)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Arunabh Ghosh
    • Author Narrative: Arunabh Ghosh is a historian of modern China and an associate professor in the department of history at Harvard University. His first book is Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China (2020). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
    • Aeon Subtitle: By rejecting sampling in favour of exhaustive enumeration, communist China’s dream of total information became a nightmare
    • Author's Conclusion
      • From the vantage point of today, the travails of China’s statisticians during the 1950s might appear quaint, their obsession with definitional issues and their rejection of probabilistic methods an artifact of a more ideologically driven time. That would be a mistake. The concerns that drove them are with us today, as alive and as urgent as they were 70 years ago. At their heart is a set of basic and timeless questions: what do we need to know and how should we know it? Their answers gave them confidence to value exhaustive enumeration above all else. This confidence has echoes in today’s Big Data revolution, which similarly insists that the more information we quantify, the better shall our knowledge be, and the more appropriate our solutions.
      • There are other lessons. Today, as in the 1950s, randomised sampling and in-depth case studies remain valuable but are increasingly neglected. Instead of ignoring them, we need to recognise that each method – the randomised, the ethnographic and the exhaustive – offers unique insights. And although none is a panacea, together they constitute a far more supple toolkit, expanding both what we can know and how we can know.
      • The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the world to confront the uncertainty principle afresh. Much as mid-20th-century Chinese statisticians discovered, the timely delivery of data and the guarantee of their accuracy sit in some tension with one another. To achieve precision in both remains as great a challenge today. The choices that Chinese officials made then weren’t always easy or self-evident ones; neither are those that are being made today. And they affect two other values that we ought to cherish: transparency and commensurability. Timeliness and accuracy are of little use if we don’t make the data freely available and if we don’t use commonly agreed standards. A lack of both transparency and commensurability hobbled statistical work in 1950s China. They remain as intractable today, generating confusion that, in its most vicious form, can sow deep distrust between researchers, institutions and communities.
      • As we continue to confront biased and manipulated data in our daily lives, the example of 1950s China reminds us of the importance of separating outcomes that can be traced to first principles (‘statistics is a social science’) from those that are a result of post-hoc manipulation (‘this estimate is too low, let’s report a higher one’). In a world increasingly divided by narrow nationalist visions, recognising that all data are biased, but that not all biases are the same, might well be a matter of life and death.
  2. Notes
    • Probably a plug for the author's book.
    • This paper is more a history lesson than a book on the application of statistics.
    • It doesn't deal with how the rise of Big Data and AI allows non-sampled data to be collected and processed in a way that would have been inconceivable in the 1950s. So the issue of accuracy vs timeliness may be mitigated somewhat these days.
    • Consequently, it doesn't deal with the bias AI might have in aggregating data, but does note that this is a problem for human beings as well.
      → See "O'Neill (Cathy) - Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy", and others.
    • The author mentions ideological reasons against sampling (the future socialist utopia is certain not merely probable), but doesn't mention the surveillance aspect - of the state wanting to know what all its citizens are up to, and how loyal they are. Sampling is no use in this regard. This is what worries people in the West about Big Data and the possibility that the State - and not just advertisers - will help themselves to it.
    • PID Note: Probability
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Ghosh (Arunabh) - Counting China"
Footnote 162: Aeon: Temkin - How to interpret historical analogies (WebRef=9687)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Moshik Temkin
    • Author Narrative: Moshik Temkin has taught American and international history and public policy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Harvard University in Massachusetts, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (2011) and is writing a book on leadership in history for PublicAffairs.
    • Aeon Subtitle: They’re good for kickstarting political debate but analogies with the past are often ahistorical and should be treated with care
    • Author's 'Key Points'
      • Historical analogies can be powerful tools for connecting the past to the present, but they are only one such tool that history provides us.
      • Historical analogies should be understood primarily as political statements in a market-driven media environment. They are not a replacement for historical analysis.
      • Historical analogies are not algorithms and they cannot tell the future; history does not repeat itself.
      • Historical analogies can be great starting points for discussion and debate. At their best, they illuminate history in new ways and create an urge to learn more about the past.
      • Historical analogies can clarify where we stand on moral issues, by using examples from the past to make a powerful point about the present.
  2. Notes
    • I didn't like this paper as it seems written for people who share the author's political intuitions.
    • It seems to me that historical precedent is useful in helping to decide what to do in present circumstances if we can see how things worked out in the past. Of course, history is not repeating itself, because each situation is different in many ways, but if we argue dispassionately about the relevant commonalities, we might see whether a proposed course of action is likely to turn out well.
    • So, for example, removing a dictator and leaving a power vacuum is not likely to lead to good, as only the worst of dictatorships are worse than chaos. That was anticipated in the first Gulf War, sadly thereby betraying the Marsh Arabs, but forgotten by the time of the Second, leading to even worse disasters. Then forgotten again with Libya.
    • There are endless examples of closely-fought civil wars being disasters, but they continue in Syria and Yemen. Almost any peace – including victory for the incumbent despot – would be better than these wars for the bulk of the population.
    • Using the term "concentration camp" for the US immigration facilities is absurd. The term is now so associated with the Nazi extermination camps that it has no application where extermination isn't the intent. There are "immigration camps" all over Europe into which overwhelming numbers of migrants are “concentrated” for want of anywhere else to put them. What are countries that - because of wanting to maintain their standard of living - have non-porous borders supposed to do with hundreds of thousands of migrants? What would opening the borders say to other migrants?
Footnote 163: Aeon: Platts-Mills - On Matthew’s mind (WebRef=9661)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Ben Platts-Mills
    • Author Narrative: Ben Platts-Mills works for Headway East London, a charity that supports survivors of brain injury. In 2013, he led on the development of the life-writing project, Who Are You Now? which publishes survivors’ stories. He is the author of Tell Me the Planets: Stories of Brain Injury and What It Means to Survive (2018). He lives in Hackney, east London.
    • Aeon Subtitle: An operation to remove a brain cyst changed Matthew’s identity. Who will he become after the next round of surgery?
  2. Notes
Footnote 164: Aeon: Owen - The inward gaze (WebRef=9664)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: M.M. Owen
    • Author Narrative: M M Owen is a British nonfiction author and chief technical writer at Studio Mistfit. He obtained his PhD at the University of British Columbia
    • Aeon Subtitle: In Hermann Hesse’s novels, as in his life, self-discovery walked a tightrope between deep insights and profound solipsism
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Novels such as Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game contain real insights. The world’s wise have all, like Hesse, attempted to take a sharp shovel to the cracked earth of their character. But taken as a whole, Hesse’s work and life demonstrate that self-examination is a tightrope. We can take Hesse’s writings, and see what can be seen, down at those depths of self-exploration. Perhaps we can gather some directions, for our own searches. But if the messy, fleshy world of other souls matters to you, then pluck the pearls and surface once again. In this life, the inward gaze will take you only halfway.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Hermann Hesse
    • I read four of Hermann Hesse's novels - Narziss and Goldmund, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game while at King's and shortly thereafter - before I made my trial at Parkminster.
    • As the author notes, they are students' books that you needs to grow out of so you can get on with life.
Footnote 165: Aeon: Davis - Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress (WebRef=9668)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Joseph E. Davis
    • Author Narrative: Joseph E Davis is research professor of sociology and chair of the Picturing the Human Colloquy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. His latest book is "Davis (Joseph E.) - Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery" (2020).
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Mental health treatment needs to re-engage with the language of persons. This means suspending the detached, third-person stance toward patients, and attending to their actual experience and circumstances. And it means encouraging patients themselves to avoid this stance and draw on the normal ways that people make sense of their emotions and actions. In this everyday language, we intuitively refer to intentions and desires and a person’s reasons for thinking, acting or feeling as they do. When explaining difficult experience, we don’t ordinarily speak of causation or mechanisms but presuppose of our own action and that of others some degree of freedom and control, and we pay attention to relationships, history and social context, such as adverse events, confounding circumstances or unrealised dreams. Even episodes of psychopathology can be explored in the language of persons, as when psychologists speak of hallucinations, delusions, compulsions and so on. Unlike the mechanical picture of a brain misfiring, this language permits a form of understanding that can bring unusual and challenging mental states into conversation with a person’s relation to the world.
      • Recovering this interpretive conversation means sharply circumscribing if not dropping biogenetic talk. It means seeking understanding, which is what people dealing with emotional suffering, like those we interviewed, yearn for. An understanding as persons, embodied and situated in a life-world. An understanding that is the enemy of fear and requires no othering.
  2. Notes
    • This is basically a plug for his book ("Davis (Joseph E.) - Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery"), but it raises interesting questions.
    • Basically, people surveyed think there are three categories of mental health:-
      1. Health: maybe minor worries we all have which are resolved as they always have been.
      2. Minor mental illness - eg. depression - that can be fixed by a pill as there's a chemical imbalance in the brain.
      3. Major mental illness where the brain is seriously malfunctioning.
    • People in categories (a) and (b) look down on those in category (c), and those in category (a) are understanding of those in category (b).
    • The author doesn't like this state of affairs, and thinks the 'quick fix' supplied to category (b) is counter-productive both for them and for a sympathetic view of those in category (c), in that it undermines our sense of autonomy.
    • I'll write more when I've read the book.
    • PID Note: Psychopathology
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Davis (Joseph E.) - Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress"
Footnote 166: Aeon: Daut - The king of Haiti’s dream (WebRef=9669)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Marlene L. Daut
    • Author Narrative: Marlene L Daut is professor of African diaspora studies in the Carter G Woodson Institute and the programme in American studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of:-
      → Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (2017),
      → Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (2015); and
      → the forthcoming collection An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions, edited with Grégory Pierrot and Marion Rohrleitner.
    • Aeon Subtitle: How a utopian vision of Black freedom and self-government was undone in a world still in thrall to slavery and racism
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Understanding the kind of state Christophe tried to create means understanding that the world he lived in was one where the liberty of Black people was everywhere under threat. To deny that diplomatic nonrecognition, the return of slavery and the threat of foreign occupation made governing Haiti complicated is to contest the very force and power of slavery and colonialism. The spectre of Black freedom and self-government in the Americas was so frightening that its realisation brought punishment to Haiti again and again. At the same time, the insidiousness of Atlantic World slave economies was so great that, even though he never did reinstate slavery, the king of Hayti still profited from the institution. Indeed, by trading with the colonial powers, the break with the capitalist order sparked by the initial slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue dissipated into the air.
      • Still, even though his rule was full of the kinds of contradictions facing every modern state, paradoxically, the end of the Christophean era would lead to a Haiti that was far less free than the one King Henry left behind. No one knows how things might have turned out had Christophe lived, but we do know how things turned out without him. Christophe was adamantly against paying any reparations to the French. And his death opened the door for France to extort Haiti for millions as the price of the very liberty that the Haitian people had already spilled so much of their blood to secure.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Wikipedia: Henri Christophe
    • An interesting, though rather revisionary and hyperbolic account.
    • The author doesn’t explain Henry Christophe’s suicide – but it was rational: he’d had a debilitating stroke and was facing a rebellion and invasion from the South.
    • On balance, though, I think her conclusion is fair; forming a just but economically viable society in the face of international distrust and opposition was difficult, though he does seem to have been tempted by the trappings of grandeur somewhat like the Pigs in Animal Farm.
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Daut (Marlene L.) - The king of Haiti’s dream"
Footnote 167: Aeon: Davies - Here be black holes (WebRef=9672)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Surekha Davies
    • Author Narrative: Surekha Davies is a historian of art, science and ideas at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and the author of Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (2016). She is currently writing two books: on curiosity cabinets, and on monsters.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Like sea monsters on premodern maps, deep-space images are science’s fanciful means to chart the edges of the known world
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Illustrations of the natural world in regions inaccessible to observers need to be understood on their own terms: not as decoration or fantasy, but as information that is assembled as – and functions as – a diagram. Olaus’s sea-monster mappings and today’s black holes belong to a long tradition of scientific image-making that depicts objects existing at the edge of our technologies of vision, and that requires sensory evidence and a means of gathering information – but also strategies for representing that information. These techniques don’t merely reflect observations: they participate in knowledge-making itself.
      • Comparing black holes and sea monsters challenges our ideas about fact and fantasy in scientific imagery. It shows how attending to the affects of early visual styles on modern eyes helps us to better understand the character of scientific diagrams. While future generations might see the 2019 image of M87* as superstition, fantasy or even fakery, if they dig deeper they’ll see the practices of knowledge-making and synthesis behind the image, not just the terabytes of data gathered, but the imaginative leaps required to look into and make sense of deep space.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting paper, but I wasn't too convinced by it.
    • I agree that there are difficulties in portraying visual images of entities at the limits of our knowledge and perceptual abilities. And, that there are analogies between deep space and the depths of the oceans.
    • But the image of the black hole is a mathematical attempt to portray something that is theoretically invisible. It's not speculation.
    • Also, it's not actually claiming to protray the black hole, but its effects; the black hole itself is indeed black.
    • And it's a simple transformation of wavelengths from radio to visual that allows us to visualise it.
    • But, I suppose, it's easy to forget that this is what has taken place.
Footnote 168: Aeon: Kim - From vice to crime (WebRef=9623)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Diana S. Kim
    • Author Narrative: Diana S Kim is assistant professor in the Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and a core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. Her latest book is Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across Southeast Asia (2020). She lives in Washington, DC.
    • Aeon Subtitle: European empires were addicted to opium smoking. Then their own agents launched a moral crusade to prohibit it
    • Author's Conclusion
      • The political theorist Bernardo Zacka shows how, in democratic states, street-level bureaucrats develop moral dispositions while working in difficult environments with conflicting normative demands. In his book When the State Meets the Street (2017), Zacka writes: "As frontline workers in the public services, they are condemned to being front-row witnesses to some of society’s most pressing problems without being equipped with the resources or authority necessary to tackle these problems in any definitive way."
      • Ethical dimensions of administrative work are harder to see in settings, such as a colonial state, that formally institutionalise racial, ethnic and class-based inequalities. Yet the more we look at the work of the individuals who perform daily state administration, the more we are forced to reckon with a form of moral agency that makes sense in an uncomfortable way. The better we understand the intractable problems they struggle to solve, the more we end up confronting the ingenuity and creativity that bureaucrats can wield.
      • But why is this unwelcome? What is so uncomfortable about finding something ‘good’ in ‘bad’ actors? And does thinking historically sometimes help us avoid figuring out why exactly we feel how we do about agents of the state? These are blunt versions of difficult questions about how to judge others and the uses of history. It is easy to either condemn or condone. It is also tempting to withdraw altogether, to either avoid the personal discomfort of strong emotions or the crude seductions of moral relativism. But there is a wide grey area in between. This space is unsettling, and indeed difficult terrain in which to think and feel. Yet, compared with the alternatives, surely the more thoughtful approach is to encourage suspicion of our own convictions before venturing to judge what others do. It is the kind of empathy with which we might hope that historians of the future will judge us and our role in our own difficult times.
  2. Notes
    • This is an interesting account of opium consumption in South East Asia, from its occasional use - mostly tolerated in an ambivalent way - to its increased use under colonialism as its revenues became important to both trade and tax.
    • I think her main complaint is that the later attemt to eradicate usage portrayed substantial percentages of the indigenous societies as ‘morally wrecked’ by its use. This seems to have been an exageration.
    • But she then considers the difficulties and freedoms of local administrators by way of policy and interpretation of the situations they faced.
    • Situating ourselves in their shoes leads to moral ambiguity and maybe greater sympathy.
Footnote 169: Aeon: Video - Peter and Ben (WebRef=9621)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: After 30 years of solitude, Peter forms an unlikely friendship with a fellow loner
    • Editors' Abstract
      • ‘I had left my flock, and Ben had left his.’
      • After taking a walk through a remote Welsh valley, Peter committed himself to a life there, and disconnected from the outside world. In doing so, he found a solitary inner peace – a peace he maintained for nearly three decades, until, one day, he stumbled upon a lamb that had been left for dead. Finding kinship with the fellow ‘dropout’, Peter took the abandoned creature home and named him Ben.
      • The short Peter and Ben (2007) by the UK filmmaker Pinny Grylls captures the duo’s relationship three years after their chance meeting, as Peter attempts to return Ben to the wild. With a melancholic piano score and sweeping views of the Welsh countryside, her touching film lends a lyrical beauty to this tale of unlikely connection and camaraderie between outsiders.
  2. Notes
    • An affecting short film, though it could do with more background on Peter the hermit.
    • It looks like Ben found his way home!
    • PID Note: Animal Rights
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Peter and Ben"
Footnote 170: Aeon: Hughes - How to choose a bottle of wine (WebRef=9620)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Natasha Hughes
    • Author Narrative: Natasha Hughes is a Master of Wine. She works as a freelance wine and food writer; consults for restaurants, wine producers and private clients; and hosts seminars and events for both consumers and members of the wine trade. She also judges at wine competitions around the world, and is a panel chair at the International Wine Challenge.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Bite into a strawberry, talk to a wine geek, pore over a map: forget wine snobbery and develop your own distinctive taste
  2. Notes
    • Vaguely interesting, but I've no time to become a wine buff.
    • Some useful-looking links for more information should I need it.
Footnote 171: Aeon: Summers - Why won’t the sin wash away? When thinking ethically goes awry (WebRef=9622)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jesse Summers
    • Author Narrative: Jesse Summers is adjunct assistant professor of philosophy and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. His latest book is Clean Hands? Philosophical Lessons from Scrupulosity (2019), co-authored with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.
    • Since this is basically a plug for the book, I've lifted the book's Amazon write-up below ...
      Amazon Book Description of Clean Hands: Philosophical Lessons from Scrupulosity
      • People with scrupulosity have rigorous, obsessive moral beliefs that lead them to perform extreme, compulsive moral acts. A waitress with this condition checks and rechecks levels of cleaners and solvents to avoid any risk of poisoning her customers. Another individual asks repeatedly whether he fasted correctly, despite swallowing his own saliva. Those with scrupulosity stretch out their prayers for hours to be sure that they have said nothing incorrectly. They worry constantly about cleanliness, sinfulness, and all the ways they could be falling short of perfection.
      • Using a range of fascinating case studies, Jesse S. Summers and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argue that scrupulosity constitutes a mental illness and not moral sainthood. In doing so, they consider several important philosophical questions: Do the moral beliefs and judgments of those with scrupulosity differ from ours, or are these individuals just stricter in their moral observance? Are they morally responsible for their actions? Should they be pressured into psychiatric treatment, even when therapy leads them to act in ways they find immoral?
      • Summers and Sinnott-Armstrong illustrate how psychiatric cases can inform the way we think about these and other philosophical issues, particularly those surrounding responsibility, rationality, and the nature of belief, morality, and mental illness. Clean Hands? will fascinate psychiatrists who treat patients with scrupulosity, philosophers who study morality, and anyone who has ever wondered about and struggled with the obligations and limits of morality.
  2. Notes
    • It's fair enough, but the book is co-authored with a fairly militant atheist, and the thesis suggests a rather distorted view of what "religion" is all about.
Footnote 172: Aeon: Video - The paradox of the ravens (WebRef=9625)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Marc Lange
    • Author Narrative: Marc Lange is a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    • Aeon Subtitle: Is a red apple proof that all ravens are black? A paradox of scientific logic
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Can we learn anything about what makes a raven by looking only at apples? The German-born logician Carl Gustav Hempel (1905-97) thought that, using the inductive logic that scientists rely on to prove or disprove hypotheses, you ought to be able to – but in such a way that clashes mightily with human intuition. This peculiar ripple in reasoning, which became known as ‘the raven paradox’ due to the example Hempel used to elucidate it, goes as follows:
        1. All ravens are black
        2. If something is not black it is not a raven
        3. The fact that my pet raven is black supports the hypothesis that all ravens are black
        4. The fact that my apple is red also supports the hypothesis that all ravens are black
      • The sequence appears to break down somewhere between the third and fourth claims. And yet, upon examination, inductive logic tells us that claim four does indeed follow. In this brief animation, Marc Lange dissects why Hempel’s claim seems to hold to reason, even as it cuts against our intuitions in a way that seems unresolvable.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Carl Hempel
    • This is an excellent brief account of the 'Ravens' paradox.
    • The narrator points out a tension between three plausible assumptions:-
      1. Instance Confirmation of 'All Fs are G'
      2. Equivalence Condition: If two hypotheses say the same thing about the world, evidence confirming one also confirms the other
      3. 'All ravens are black' is equivalent to 'All non-black things are non-ravens'
    • We are left with three choices:-
      1. One of the 'plausible assumptions' is false
      2. There's something wrong with the logic of the argument
      3. The 'implausible conclusion' - that (say) a red chair confirms that all ravens are black - isn't implausible after all.
      The narrator doesn't actually express an opinion on which of his three alternatives he'd prefer!
    • I wrote an essay on this question as an undergraduate at Birkbeck back in 2002: see Induction, addressing the question 'The lesson of Hempel’s Paradox is that whether observations confirm a hypothesis is never independent of background information. Discuss.'. I seem to have agreed with the premise of the question.
    • PID Note: Probability
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Lange (Marc) - Video - The paradox of the ravens"
Footnote 173: Aeon: Black - Unboxing mental health (WebRef=9627)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Melissa Black
    • Author Narrative: Melissa Black is a clinical psychologist and postdoctoral researcher at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Our system for diagnosing mental disorders doesn’t work. The transdiagnostic model offers a humane, clinically sound alternative
    • Introductory Excerpt
      • When I began my clinical psychology training, psychological difficulties were presented as discrete categories of disorder, likely because this has been the best way to organise information about mental health. However, once I started working with people in therapy, it quickly became abundantly clear that this system didn’t fit – most of the people I worked with would have met the criteria for multiple official diagnoses. I wondered how I was going to integrate information across several treatment manuals in a coherent way to work effectively with the numerous difficulties that many of my clients were experiencing.
      • Despite the need for guidelines to support decisions about who ‘has a disorder and who needs treatment’, the categorical diagnostic system is no longer fit for purpose. There is a mismatch between research and public policy on the one hand, which are often based on the categorical system, and, on the other hand, what it’s actually like to live with mental health problems and work in day-to-day clinical practice. It isn’t appropriate or accurate to place the experience of many individuals into convenient diagnostic categories. Clinicians and people with lived experience of mental ill-health have known this for decades, but only more recently have researchers begun to take notice.
      • That’s why the emerging ‘transdiagnostic approach’ to mental health is potentially so important. It defines mental health along a continuum; according to this view, we all share the psychological processes, such as irrational beliefs, anxieties and low moods, that underlie so-called ‘disorders’, but we exhibit them to varying degrees. This helps to account for the apparent overlap between traditional disorders, and makes more sense of the broad spectrum of mental health experiences – from more common, everyday stresses and anxieties understood by almost all people, to anxiety, mood, psychotic or eating difficulties that interfere with someone’s ability to function in their daily life. The transdiagnostic approach promises to shine a light on the common factors that underlie poor mental health, so as to improve classification, research into biopsychosocial processes, and treatment development.
  2. Notes
    • I've taken an excerpt from near the start of the paper, because it rambles on and on - and to actually test out the claims you'd need to refer to a forrest of research papers.
    • But the underlying message is simple and obvious. Diagnostic categories are pigeon-holes for convenience and individual sufferers share symptoms from multiple slots. So, actual therapy cannot be specific to one diagnosis.
    • I've always thought it obvious that psychological diagnoses don't have the same certainty as physiological diagnoses, both as to whether particular individuals 'have' the ailment in question, and whether the ailment itself actually exists, rather than being a brief way of summing up the symptoms rather than specifying the cause. Compare 'major depressive disorder' with "broken toe" (which is an accurate and treatable diagnosis of the symptom 'sore toe').
    • I'm not sure what the readership of this paper is supposed to be. There's a paragraph that refers to affective and non-affective disorders as though everyone has heard of them and understands the distinction. I don't think I had (and didn't) - but 'affective' disorders are those involving moods. The examples are bipolar disorder and schizophrenia respectively, but a Google to determine the meaning of the distinction turned up Schizoaffective disorder (Wikipedia: Schizoaffective disorder) which combines the two alternatives, being characterised by 'abnormal thought processes and an unstable mood.'
    • PID Note: Psychopathology
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Black (Melissa) - Unboxing mental health"
Footnote 174: Aeon: Woodruff - The face of the fish (WebRef=9605)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Michael Woodruff
    • Author Narrative: Michael Woodruff is professor emeritus of biomedical sciences at Quillen College of Medicine at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of more than 120 professional publications, and his research interests include cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of mind.
    • Aeon Subtitle: They’re not cuddly, they don’t behave at all like us – yet they are sentient. Why fish belong in the moral community
  2. Notes
Footnote 175: Aeon: Kachru - Ashoka’s moral empire (WebRef=9608)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Sonam Kachru
    • Author Narrative: Sonam Kachru is assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a contributor to Words Without Borders.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Being good is hard. How an ancient Indian emperor, horrified by the cruelty of war, created an infrastructure of goodness
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Wikipedia: Ashoka
    • Somewhat rose-tinted, I suspect. But interesting.
    • Also, from pottering around on Wikipedia, it seems that Ashoka may have been half or quarter Greek, based on political intermarriage between the Mauryans and the Seleucid Greeks
Footnote 176: Aeon: Video - How we build perception from the inside out (WebRef=9599)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Anil Seth & Nigel Warburton
    • Aeon Subtitle: Anil Seth on why our senses are fine-tuned for utility, not for ‘reality’
    • Editors' Abstract
      • It’s easy to mistake our conscious experience for an ongoing, accurate account of reality. After all, the information we recover from our senses is, of course, the only window we’ll ever have into the outside world. And for most people most of the time, our perception certainly feels real. But the notion that our senses capture an objective external reality can be dispelled by considering something as fundamental as colour, which can be culturally influenced and, even within a single culture, leave the population split between seeing the same picture of a dress as black-and-blue or white-and-gold.
      • In this instalment from Aeon’s In Sight series, Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the UK, puts our imperfect relationship with reality in perspective.
      • In conversation with Nigel Warburton, consultant senior editor at Aeon+Psyche, Seth argues that it’s not just that our perceptions provide flawed accounts of the outside world, but that our brains aren’t in the business of recovering the outside world to begin with. So it’s more accurate to think of our conscious experience as a series of predictions that we’re incessantly and subconsciously fine-tuning – a world we build from the inside out, rather than the outside in.
      • For more from Anil Seth, read his Aeon essay on the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness ("Seth (Anil Kumar) - The real problem").
  2. Notes
Footnote 177: Aeon: Orent - Stealth infections (WebRef=9601)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Wendy Orent
    • Author Narrative: Wendy Orent is an Atlanta-based anthropologist specialising in health and disease. She is the author of Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease (2012).
    • Aeon Subtitle: From the Black Death to polio, the most dangerous pathogens have moved silently, transmitted by apparently healthy people
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Perhaps the most fearsome aspect of this pandemic is the terror it causes. It’s like the terror caused by polio before the Salk and Sabin vaccines delivered us, or that made people flee the Black Death, without realising that they carried it with them. The very idea of stealth pathogens has the power to derange us. On the one hand, you have truckloads of armed protestors demanding that the US ‘open up’ because they believe that hospitals are really empty and COVID-19 is just a hoax. On the other hand, there are conspiracists attempting to persuade us that the pandemic was actually planned by Big Pharma or Microsoft’s Bill Gates to harm citizens or force them to accept new, lethal, moneymaking vaccines. The stealth-spreading aspect of coronavirus leads us, unfortunately, to hysteria and terror, but the only way out is through science.
      • The medical community led us out of the long fear that was polio, and developed antibiotics to treat the plague. It’s likely that they will develop an effective vaccine and treatment for this, too. We will need to rely on vaccinations and antiviral therapies, because the dream that this globally entrenched pathogen will somehow, magically, vanish is just that. It’s possible that, like most novel respiratory pathogens, SARS-CoV-2 will, over time, lose something of its virulence, as germs do if they depend on keeping their hosts mobile in order to spread. Even the 1918 influenza, in a relatively short time, lost its great lethality and became an ordinary flu, one that is with us still.
      • But stealth-spreading pathogens might not need to moderate their virulence, not quickly, or, perhaps, not at all. The Black Death never lost its virulence, and neither did the three great Manchurian pneumonic plague outbreaks of the 20th century, which killed nearly 100,000 people. Polio (though not primarily a respiratory pathogen) has been with us since the dawn of recorded history, its virulence unmodified over the course of time.
      • Back and forth, round and round: the deadly tracks of SARS-CoV-2 across our planet might continue for a long, long time, while we attempt to test, trace, shutdown and isolate it out of existence, until we have a true treatment or a safe, effective vaccine.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → "Orent (Wendy) - The Black Death"
    • Fascinating and somewhat disconcerting.
    • Probably partly a plug for her book, which - hailing from 2004 - may be fine for the history, but maybe otherwise out of date?
    • But, there seems to be an interesting parallel between Covid-19 and previous - though much more deadly - 'stealth diseases'.
Footnote 178: Aeon: Agostini & Thrope - This is not the end. Apocalyptic comfort from ancient Iran (WebRef=9600)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Domenico Agostini & Samuel Thrope
    • Author Narrative:
      • Domenico Agostini is a senior lecturer in ancient history at Tel Aviv University. His latest book, The Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Myth of Creation, co-authored with Samuel Thrope, is forthcoming.
      • Samuel Thrope is an American writer and translator based in Jerusalem. He has written for The Nation, The Daily Beast and Haaretz, among others. His latest book, The Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Myth of Creation, co-authored with Domenico Agostini, is forthcoming.
    • Authors' Introduction
      • At its height, around 620 CE, the Sasanian empire ruled over a territory stretching from Jerusalem in the west to Samarkand in the east. The royal court at the ancient city of Ctesiphon, near present-day Baghdad, was the political heart of this vast realm, and its official religion was the ancient Iranian faith, Zoroastrianism. In royal iconography, the king of the Sasanians was likened to Ohrmazd, the good creator God: just as Ohrmazd vanquishes the evil spirit Ahriman, so, too, does the king triumph over his enemies on the battlefield. For at least 1,000 years, the Zoroastrian faith held sway over the empires of Persia.
      • In 651 CE, the Sasanian empire collapsed. Armies commanded by the second and third Islamic caliphs, Umar ibn al-Khattab and Uthman ibn Affan, relentlessly pushed defeated Persian forces eastward from the imperial heartland in Mesopotamia. Yazdegird III, the last Sasanian king, was murdered. The remnants of the royal family fled to China. It was a total defeat, unprecedented in Iranian history. Faced with today’s world-changing events, this Iranian experience has much to teach us. In responding to an event different from, but in many ways proportionate to, our own, Zoroastrians, followers of the ancient Iranian religion, sought comfort in the apocalyptic – a comfort we might now turn to as well.
  2. Notes
    • Interesting background on the Sasanians and the beliefs of Zoroastrianism - see also Wikipedia: Sasanian Empire.
    • Probably a plug for the authors' forthcoming book.
    • I couldn't really see any connection with the present day, though I've maybe not read the article with sufficient attention.
    • Fairly contemporary Zoroastrians feature in "Mistry (Rohinton) - A Fine Balance".
Footnote 179: Aeon: Video - Making music from brainwaves and heartbeats (WebRef=9585)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Grace Leslie
    • Aeon Subtitle: Can biofeedback help to unlock the mysteries of music’s therapeutic effects?
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The US musician and research scientist Grace Leslie works at the frontiers of biotechnology and experimental music.
      • From her Brain Music Lab at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, Leslie and her students probe the physiological effects of sounds and rhythms, including how biofeedback could potentially be used to create new sonic therapies.
      • Leslie’s lab work is inseparable from her unique original music, in which she synchronises instrumental performances with her own biorhythms and, in doing so, prompts her audience to synchronise with her. The result, she’s been told, are sounds akin to ‘a warm bathtub’.
      • To hear more of Leslie’s work, watch the Aeon Video original Neurosymphony (Aeon: Video - Neurosymphony), which pairs an excerpt from her album Chapel (2018) with high-resolution MRI scans of a human brain.
  2. Notes
    • It might be interesting to know that such research is going on, but this brief video is useless at giving more than an incomprehensible overview.
    • Time is wasted explaining the meaning of acronyms (like ECG) that everyone knows anyway, but no indication at all is given about how algorithms that use this data might work.
    • Also, there's no explanation at all about how this ties in with the author's musical composition, or how the feedback from her audience works.
Footnote 180: Aeon: Skibba - Does dark matter exist? (WebRef=9587)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Ramin Skibba
    • Author Narrative: Ramin Skibba is an astrophysicist turned science writer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, Scientific American and Nature magazine, among others. He is based in San Diego.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Dark matter is the most ubiquitous thing physicists have never found: it’s time to consider alternative explanations
    • Excerpt
      • It’s important to pay attention to who decides which phenomena to study, which research earns major government grants, which big experiments get funded, who gets speaking opportunities at scientific conferences, who is media savvy, who wins prominent fellowships and awards, and who gets promoted to high-profile faculty positions.
      • Different choices sometimes can shape the future trajectory of science. And when choices by theorists and experimentalists coincide symbiotically, Pickering argues, it can be challenging for an upstart theory – such as modified gravity – to get a fair hearing.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting paper, giving background to the motivation for – and the disappointing search for – dark matter. Also interesting to hear of counter-suggestions, namely, to modify theories of gravity. However, there are also methodological and sociological issues, much as there are with string theory.
    • While the paper makes interesting comments about the sociology of science - and this is important for the careers of scientists - there's only one thing that "a true scientist" ought to be interested in, and that "being right" (for the right reasons, as well). Those who are wrong will end up as footnotes to history, but of no importance to science as such.
    • So, sociology is of little importance to scientific progress in the long term except for those areas on the disputed borders of science - theories that are impervious to experiment for either practical or theoretical reasons.
    • Real science will come out in the long term. If this is not possible, then it should not be funded in the first place, especially at considerable expense. Money could be better spent.
    • It seems the trouble with “dark matter” is that it hasn’t been detected. It might simply be undetectable. Modified theories of gravity sound rather radical and just as ad hoc, but they might be right. It’s a bit like the rival theories for the discrepant orbit of Mercury – a new theory of gravity (GR) or a planet that couldn’t be detected. However, Einstein didn’t need any funding to come up with GR.
    • It seems that modified theories of gravity have difficulty accounting for the distribution of matter post big-bang while dark matter seems to be able to account for it.
    • No doubt we need to watch this space: any modification to gravity needs to be elegant and principled, and not just a bodge to account for spiral galaxies.
Footnote 181: Aeon: Frankish - Our greatest invention was the invention of invention itself (WebRef=9582)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Keith Frankish
    • Author Narrative: Keith Frankish is a philosopher and writer. He is an honorary reader in philosophy at the University of Sheffield, a visiting research fellow with the Open University, and an adjunct professor with the Brain and Mind programme at the University of Crete.
    • Extracts
      • How did hypothetical thinking develop? I want to introduce two suggestions, one by the Israeli linguist Daniel Dor, the other by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett. Neither is directly about hypothetical thinking but, combined, they offer a compelling picture of how humans acquired the capacity for it.
      • Dor’s proposal, made in his book The Instruction of the Imagination (2015), is about the nature and origins of language. In outline, the story is this ... The trick was to take the sound or gesture already associated with a thing and use it in a new way – not as an invitation to experience the thing, but as an instruction to imagine it ... With this, communication was released from the here and now. As Dor puts it, a Rubicon was crossed: ‘For the first time in the evolution of life, humans began to experience for others, and let others experience for them.’ This was the birth of language ... Over time, Dor explains, humans gradually improved this new technology of communication. They mutually identified new signs for things important to them, creating a ‘symbolic landscape’ that carved up the experienced world into discrete features, and they settled on conventions for linking signs together in ways that indicated the relations between the features specified ... If Dor’s suggestion is right, then language would have paved the way for hypothetical thinking ... they created new ideas in the act of talking, playing around with instructions to each other’s imaginations and waiting till they hit on one that got a positive response. It was a collective process of trial and error. How then did humans make the transition to solitary hypothetical thinking, conducted in the privacy of their own minds?
      • Here we come to Dennett’s suggestion, made in his book "Dennett (Daniel) - Consciousness Explained" (1991) ... Our brains, he argues, are composed of multiple specialist systems, which operate non-consciously and in parallel. The conscious mind is a temporary level of organisation – a ‘virtual’ system – that we create for ourselves through certain learned habits of self-stimulation ... Humans formed habits of private speech and gradually developed the ability to talk to themselves silently in inner speech ... Elaborated and refined, the stream of self-generated speech and other imagery, and the associated mental reactions, came to form what we call the conscious mind.
      • Though made earlier, Dennett’s suggestion complements Dor’s nicely. When our ancestors started to talk to themselves, they were learning to instruct their own imaginations, and it would not be a big step from this to using the instructive process in a creative way, privatising practices that had previously been social. Now, when they faced a problem, they could explore it on their own, stimulating themselves with questions, suggestions and visual images ... The big difference was that humans could now take control of the process, rapidly and systematically exploring new possibilities in their minds rather than waiting for the world to present ideas to them. They now had a method of invention.
    • Conclusion
      • As they cultivated these habits, mentally stimulating themselves and paying careful attention to the results, humans did something else, too. They created the sense that there was a private world inside them, where their real self lived and thought, a world that sometimes seemed more real to them than the one around them. In a sense, they created their own conscious minds and selves.
      • If Dor and Dennett are right, the key factors in setting humans on their unique path were the invention of a new way of communicating and the discovery of how to use it creatively, first socially and later in private. These activities are now central to human life, and our brains and vocal systems have probably become adapted in many ways to facilitate them, but they were initially cultural innovations. We might say that humans’ greatest invention was the invention of invention itself.
  2. Notes
    • Sounds fairly plausible, but Dennett's explanation of consciousness - if requiring internalised natural-language speech - would deny consciousness to the higher animals. This - I would submit - is a fatal drawback, unless the consciousness he's talking about doesn't include phenomenal consciousness.
    • However, it would be fine if the language is Jerry Fodor's Language of thought.
    • But, if that were the case, the higher animals would be able to reason with themselves. Maybe that's not too absurd, as they do seem to be able to problem-solve to some degree.
    • The reason external speech (rather than the private language of thought) is important in this context is that it allows ideas to be shared (and, with writing, recorded) so that a group-wide treasury of ideas and practices can be built up.
    • But, having mental models of other members of your group that you can talk to might help with problem-solving as the paper suggests.
Footnote 182: Aeon: Dresser - Peak ellipsis (WebRef=9578)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Sam Dresser
    • Author Narrative: Sam Dresser is an editor at Aeon. He lives in New York.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Does philosophy reside in the unsayable or should it care only for precision? Carnap, Heidegger and the great divergence
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Heidegger’s and Carnap’s styles of thinking and communicating were, to put it mildly, profoundly different from one another. Within that difference, we glimpse the openings of a widening chasm that defined Western philosophy in the 20th century, setting apart two methods or styles of philosophy that are commonly called the analytic and Continental traditions (the story of which is taken up by Michael Friedman in A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger [2000]). But regardless of this divergence, both Heidegger and Carnap believed themselves to be doing philosophy – even when the question of what philosophy is, and the methods by which it should be conducted, was itself at the centre of philosophical disagreement.
      • Perhaps what unites philosophy of all stripes is that its practitioners are likely to run up against the limits of language. We have no other option but to use language – broadly understood – to communicate philosophical ideas; yet we always try to go beyond it, because it always seems like there’s something more to say. To my mind, that’s because the central event that ignites any interrogation about humanity’s place in the world and who we are comes from an inexhaustible well of wonder. That wonder can arise in many different forms, and it can be experienced in as many different ways as there have been thinking people on the Earth. But in its most fundamental form, its most universal articulation, its most profound rendering, the wonder from which philosophy springs is perhaps best wrought by the immortal, unanswerable, unquenchable question: why is there something rather than – …
  2. Notes
    • This paper seems to suggest there's no sensible middle ground between Continental Philosophy and Logical Positivism.
    • I think it's agreed that Logical Positivism was an over-reaction to extreme metaphysical waffling and an attempt to tie philosophy more to what could actually be known.
    • In eliminating metaphysics, it tended to eliminate any questions worth asking.
    • But it's possible to ask questions that are worth asking and can't - at least yet - be answered definitively by the sciences. But the intention must be to set these questions up in proper form so that science or logic might have a say in answering them. If it can't, even in principle, they are idle.
    • This might seem to rule out ethics … and to a degree it does as it seems that ultimately the only way to get yourself heard on ethical questions is to shout louder. But if ethical questions are tied to human flourishing (and the flourishing of other sentient beings) as is almost universally agreed, then the sciences have something to say on just what those things are and what are sensible ways to achieve them.
    • Interestingly "why there is something rather than nothing" appears as a section in a modern book on Metaphysics: See "Van Inwagen (Peter) - Metaphysics: Part Two: Why The World Is - Introduction". But I doubt it's a question worth spending much time on as there's probably no way of answering it (on the assumption that the ontological argument is unsound).
Footnote 183: Aeon: Video - The fist of modernity (WebRef=9576)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Lewis Waller
    • Aeon Subtitle: Modern policing was set up to protect the powerful from a ‘criminal underclass’
    • Editors' Abstract
      • ‘Move along there, please.’
      • In most parts of the world, a constant police presence is taken for granted – accepted as the cost of a safe, functional society. But a standardised and preventative police force is a relatively new phenomenon.
      • The police state of today is partially rooted in the views of the 18th-century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham on criminality, which were codified with the establishment of the Metropolitan Police force in London in 1829.
      • This analysis from the English video essayist Lewis Waller explores the evolution of British policing through the lens of its development from the 18th century to the 20th.
      • Synthesising archival footage, primary sources and original writing, Waller argues that the modern police state is rooted in an almost wilful misunderstanding of the root economic causes of criminality, and the will of the powerful to protect themselves.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → YouTube: Then & Now.
    • This is one of the most absurd and tendentious videos I’ve come across. It is also subversive, but that’s not the reason it’s absurd.
    • It’s on the “Then and Now” YouTube channel, so it’s presumably supposed to be comparing the past with the present, but it just seems to be muddling them up.
    • Clearly, in the early 19th century there was real poverty – in the form of destitution and starvation – and there’s a good case for saying that then – and even until the introduction of the welfare state after the second World War – extreme poverty was the source of most crime against property. Those that were transported to Australia for stealing food actually ended up with a much better life than the starvation that had led them to steal in the first place. But this is emphatically not the situation in modern Britain. Extensive poverty – though some of it is real – exists by definition not as a fact along the lines of Dickensian (or modern Indian) destitution.
    • The use of the term “modern police state” is clearly tendentious as this term is reserved for the intrusive suppression of dissent as exemplified by the East German Stasi, the Gestapo and no doubt to some degree modern China. To use the term of any modern state that has a police force is a muddle and an attempted defamation by association.
    • No doubt the role of the police need continual reassessment. But what are the alternatives? Local vigilante groups? Neighbourhood watch with guns? Would the author like Neo-Nazis to come and trash his home and office without any recourse to law enforcement or deterrence thereby?
    • There are numerous visual quotations from what are presumably “propaganda films” for the friendly “bobby on the beat” in the style of Dixon of Dock Green, presumably to be seen as slightly sinister and ridiculous (as all such films and advertising generally seem to be to modern sensibilities now that social manipulation is done more subtly). Community “policing by consent” is – in most circles – the ideal that has been lost by “the savage Tory cuts”.
    • The general theme that police were introduced by the rich and powerful to suppress a starving underclass is – even if true – an example of the genetic fallacy. Even if the police were originally introduced for malign reasons, as seems doubtful in any case, this is no argument against their useful existence now.
    • As with all public institutions, there are downsides and areas needing reform. And, maybe, there are downsides to a compliant population rather than free anarchy. But a complex modern society with a population ten times the natural “carrying capacity” of the land (even when efficiently farmed), everything needs to run more or less on time, and it just can’t be allowed that your stuff – or your car – are misappropriated on a regular basis.
    • Maybe the author hopes that in his ideal society without poverty, however defined, there would be no crime. I suspect he’d be disappointed. Some people would always have more than others, and there’d always be temptations to get rich quick – or simply to get stuff you can’t afford – at others’ expense. Thieves aren’t after food, but bling, bigger tellies and better phones. Thankfully they won’t find any such at my place, and equally thankfully they’ve not yet tried. But those who have been burgled are left traumatised. The gain to the thieves is much less than the loss to those burgled, both in monetary and psychological value.
Footnote 184: Aeon: Vince - Ancient yet cosmopolitan (WebRef=9555)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Gaia Vince
    • Author Narrative: Gaia Vince is a freelance science journalist, broadcaster and nonfiction author. Her work has appeared in the BBC, The Guardian, New Scientist, Australian Geographic and Science, among others. She is the author of Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made (2014) and Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time (2019).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Art, adornment and sophisticated hunting technologies flourished not only in prehistoric Europe but across the globe
    • Author's Conclusion
      • ... the better a group’s connections to other groups – and the better the connections are within a group – the more chance for individuals to acquire new cultural practices and technologies. And the reverse is also true – small, isolated communities can experience a cultural evolution towards simpler, less diverse technologies, effectively losing culture.
      • The great flowering of culture we enjoy from our Cro-Magnon ancestors was not evidence of a cleverer, ‘more evolved’ people but because the demographic, social, environmental and cultural changes that occurred at this time in Europe drove cultural complexity. Ice-age populations might have been particularly dependent on trade networks for food and resources, and these would also have led to an exchange in cultural ideas and traits. And new environments produce cultural adaptations that would have been unnecessary for societies continuing to live in the same conditions. Cultural complexity takes time to build up, so generally the trend is towards a greater number of technologies and practices. This is not a reflection of the individuals’ biology or intellectual capabilities, but rather the complexity of their societies.
      • In the coming decades, with new techniques, we’ll uncover ever more evidence of early complex culture at sites across the world.
  2. Notes
    • In general, a sensible paper - though I wish people would stop banging on about silly Europe-centric eugenic science that turned out to be incorrect. Also, not all historical - but wrong - science is "pseudo-science" if it was following the best evidence and understandings of the time. It becomes pseudo-science if pursued today when the evidence contradicts it (or where its true believers don't care about the evidence).
    • It looks like the evidence has it that the cognitive adaptations that enabled the rise of stone-age culture are even more ancient, and that the subsequent flowering of early culture depended on population-size and chance events rather than on genetic change.
    • I thought some claims are just too inclusivist to be credible; eg. "In fact, everyone who was alive in Europe 1,000 years ago and has living descendants – that’s 80 per cent of them – is the ancestor of every European alive today.". What mixing has there been between the people of (say) Ireland and Croatia in the last 1,000 years?
    • A passage (which I've indexed into key points) that deserves careful thought (sometime) is:-
      1. It is fitting then, that it has been advances in genetics, particularly in population genetics, that have shown up the fallacy of any biological definition of race, revealing that all humans are almost exactly the same genetically (anatomically and cognitively).
      2. The reason that all living humans are now so similar – much more similar than two chimpanzees – is because we emerged recently (no more than 300,000 years ago) as a relatively small population, and we have since experienced substantial bottlenecks and a lot of migratory breeding.
      3. Any two humans now differ by an average of 1 in 1,000 DNA base pairs (0.1 per cent), which shows remarkably low genetic diversity compared with great apes.
      4. There is, then, no basis for any claim for European distinction in innate intelligence, behaviour or morals. Europeans are no more ‘evolved’ than any other living people.
    • Provisional Responses:-
      1. Well, it depends on what you mean and what your expectations are. My view is that the differences between people and populations are real – and in one sense minor. Pathological cases aside, we can all walk and talk, but that's abstracted away when we compare people's abilities. All faces – again, pathological cases aside – are pretty similar, but that doesn’t make all people equally beautiful or equally ugly, and beauty or ugliness has nothing to do with race. Of course, some deny there’s any such thing as beauty, but their world is too impoverished for most of us to live in.
      2. I'm not sure of the mathematics of all this, and precisely what is being claimed, but the (other) Great Apes are very few in number compared to humans, and in general genetically isolated, though that may not affect the claim. There are two sub-species of Chimpanzee - it's not clear whether they are "pooled" or not. Anyway, seems Chimpanzees have been through the same – or more severe – genetic bottlenecks as Homo sapiens.
      3. Minor genetic differences can have huge physiological and behavioral differences. What's the genetic difference between different breeds of dog?
      4. Accepted. But not because of the arguments supplied in this paper.
    • I Googled to seek an answer to the question in “c” above question and Ostrander - Genetics and the Shape of Dogs turned up, with the interesting sub-title "Studying the new sequence of the canine genome shows how tiny genetic changes can create enormous variation within a single species". The article claimed that "We also showed that the genetic variation between dog breeds is much greater than the variation within breeds. Between-breed variation is estimated at 27.5 percent. By comparison, genetic variation between human populations is only 5.4 percent. Thus the concept of a dog breed is very real and can be defined not only by the dog's appearance but genetically as well." I'm not sure what measure is being used here, but I'm sure it isn't the same as those in the paper under discussion, or in those that claim humans share 99% of their genome with chimps. This area of popular science seems to be a muddle, but no-one cares for the facts, only to grab at some claim that supports their politics.
    • I’ve bought the author’s book: "Vince (Gaia) - Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time", but I don’t know if and when I’ll get time to read it.
    • PID Note: Evolution
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Vince (Gaia) - Ancient yet cosmopolitan"
Footnote 185: Aeon: Bowles - Learning Nahuatl, the flower song, and the poetics of life (WebRef=9550)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: David Bowles
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Rediscovering the unadulterated indigenous myths of Mexico can help both Mexicans and Mexican Americans clarify their sense of self, of belonging to something greater, of being the latest in a long line of heroic and noble souls that have sought to balance chaos and order in North America for millennia. Psychological healing and health arise from such a perspective.
      • But using Classical Nahuatl as a way to harness the Coyolxauhqui Process and find spiritual equilibrium in the midst of nepantla? That is Tlacayotl, the Way of Humanity. A gift bequeathed by the ancients to all of us, their biological and spiritual children alike.
  2. Notes
Footnote 186: Aeon: Video - The secret history of the Moon (WebRef=9551)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A massive collision, or something stranger? An epic exploration of lunar origin theories
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The tidiest theory of the Moon’s origin is known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis – the idea that, amid the volatile early era of the solar system’s formation, a Mars-sized protoplanet collided with the primordial Earth. From the massive ensuing explosion, much of the planetary debris coalesced into a new, Earth-orbiting body.
      • But while the theory accounts for much of what we understand about the Moon, it leaves some critical question unanswered. Namely, if it was formed mostly from a foreign body, why do lunar samples show the chemical makeup of the Moon and Earth to be nearly identical?
      • In this video, the US filmmaker John D Boswell synthesises animations and original music with the voice of the planetary scientist Sarah T Stewart to explore several theories for the Moon’s birth, as well as for how it might have helped to yield life on Earth.
      • The result is a stylish, speculative lunar history that might inspire a renewed sense of awe for our closest celestial companion.
  2. Notes
    • The video is entertaining enough, but it's a bit slow and patchy. It's probably best just to read Wikipedia! See Wikipedia: Origin of the Moon.
    • The video discusses and rejects the 'Nuclear Explosion' hypothesis before favouring the 'Synestia' hypothesis.
    • It suggests that lunar vulcanism twice led to surface water, and that micro-organisms from the Earth might have found their way there following asteroid impact.
    • It doesn't mention the tides as important for evolution on Earth, but suggests that 'as Earth evolved, the Moon's gravity stabilized its tilt, protecting life from extreme swings in climate.'
    • It suggests that we have to go back to the Moon to resolve outstanding questions.
Footnote 187: Aeon: Sha - Neuroscience has much to learn from Hume’s philosophy of emotions (WebRef=9547)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Richard C. Sha
    • Author Narrative: Richard C Sha is professor of literature and an affiliate professor of philosophy, as well as an affiliate of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, all at the American University in Washington, DC. His books include Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750-1830 (2009) and Imagination and Science in Romanticism (2018).
    • Author's Introduction
      • We are in the midst of a second Humean revolution. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), the Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that: ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions …’ By ‘passions’, Hume meant what we now call emotions. What gave him such faith in the passions that he could accept reason’s enslavement to them? Hume understood reason to be incapable of producing any action, and the passions to be the source of our motivations. So he insisted that we must attend to the passions if we want to understand how anything gets done.
      • Much recent neuroscience has found that human rationality is weaker than is commonly presumed, and the emotions make it possible to make decisions by granting certain objects salience. Why does this second Humean revolution matter and what, if anything, can the second revolution learn from the first?

      Author's Conclusion
      • Hume’s idea that reason serves the passions has in important ways found scientific support. Our rationality serves our passions, and we have less control over the passions than is commonly presumed. By stipulating that reason is the slave of the passions, Hume warns us of the consequences of not having the right habits.
      • When neuroscientists equate emotion and action, it narrows emotion to survival and underestimates the ways in which the emotions can foster deliberation. While neuroscientists set the timescale of the emotions to no more than a few minutes, Hume insists that it will take nothing less than a lifetime to get our emotions right.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → David Hume
    • Interesting, but I wasn't sure what the "first Humean revolution" was supposed to be and what lessons had been learnt from it. I'd always assumed this would be causation, but it doesn't seem relevant to the present case - though maybe it's down to what causes our actions.
    • Maybe there's a correlation between "habit" and "constant conjunction"?
Footnote 188: Aeon: Studebaker - The ungoverned globe (WebRef=9546)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Benjamin Studebaker
    • Author Narrative: Benjamin Studebaker is a graduate teaching assistant in politics and international studies at the University of Cambridge and a teaching associate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
    • Aeon Subtitle: The end of the liberal order would unleash chaos; its continuance means unconstrained economic suffering. What to do?
    • Author's Conclusion
      • So we are faced with a terrible choice. We can continue to embrace the nationalist strategy of keeping the liberal order alive by creating the conditions under which it will die. That will end in the dissolution of the order, collapsing economic growth, with massive increases in the costs of goods and services. Our living standards will be dramatically reduced. The nation-state will make a comeback, but at the cost of the prosperity that we have been building since the Second World War.
      • Or we can embrace radical democratic reforms, and attempt to convince ourselves that they will empower us, or at least give us the satisfying feeling of empowerment. We can retreat into localism, even as the critical decisions are taken far away from us. We can build a realm of illusions, where the institutions we participate in are not the ones that shape our lives.
      • Finally, we could try to salvage the order by constructing institutions that enable us to meaningfully govern it. But to do that, we’d have learn to do politics with people who are different from us. Can that be done? Probably not. And that means either the nation-states will kill the liberal order, or they will find a way to disguise it in democratic daydreams. The liberal order might not last much longer.
Footnote 189: Aeon: Dyzenhaus - Lawyer for the strongman (WebRef=9522)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: David Dyzenhaus
    • Author Narrative: David Dyzenhaus is a professor of law and philosophy and holds the Albert Abel Chair of Law at the University of Toronto. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and lives in Ontario.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Demagogues do not rise on popular feeling alone but on the constitutional ideas of Weimar and Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt
  2. Notes
    • An interesting paper from a historical viewpoint, though highly political.
    • It tries to blacken the names and arguments of those wanting to "control the judiciary" by associating them with the ideas of one of the German jurists involved in smoothing the way for the rise of the Nazi party; the legal arguments centred on the use of executive power.
    • It takes a dim view of the Judicial Power Project (Judicial Power Project).
    • I had some sympathy with Boris Johnson’s proroguing of Parliament given the very special circumstances at the time. Obviously, it was “working the system”, but the Executive was being prevented from governing and – because of the fixed-term parliament act – couldn’t call an election without the agreement of the opposition, which was withheld. I also felt that the Supreme Court made law rather than simply interpreting it, and made it in line with their majority political views.
    • The discussion of the cases put forward by Gina Millar’s lawyers in the final third of the paper are important, though I’d have liked to hear the other side of the story.
Footnote 190: Aeon: Melechi - Beware of lateral thinking (WebRef=9524)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Antonio Melechi
    • Author Narrative: Antonio Melechi is an honorary research fellow in the department of sociology at the University of York. He is the author of Fugitive Minds (2003) and Servants of the Supernatural (2008).
    • Aeon Subtitle: De Bono’s popular theory is textbook pseudoscience: unsound, untested and derivative of real (unacknowledged) research
  2. Notes
    • I came across Edward De Bono when at school. I think I found what he had to say rather unhelpful, and exceedingly repetitive, and assumed he was “in it for the money”.
    • I seem to have accumulated a lot of books by him (mostly unread) – 8 in fact, picked up rather cheaply.
    • The fact that others got there first, and that he doesn’t source his ideas using references is not too much of a worry for me – and might be antithetical to his whole approach.
    • But the lack of testing of the techniques to see if they actually work is a major shortcoming.
    • I was pleased to see that “brainstorming” – another fad to supposedly aid creativity – also gets the boot when it’s actually tested. I hated it, as the loudest and stupidest seemed to get most floor-space, talking about things of which they knew nothing, and had not thought about.
Footnote 191: Aeon: Foulkes - Ever taken pleasure in another’s pain? That’s ‘everyday sadism’ (WebRef=9523)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Lucy Foulkes
    • Author Narrative: Lucy Foulkes is an associate editor at Aeon+Psyche. Previously an academic psychologist, she is interested in social psychology and mental health. Her first book, about the science of mental illness, will be published in 2021.
    • Author’s Introduction
      • At times, we understand and feel others’ pain so acutely it might as well be our own. We wince at another person’s injuries and cry when we see people suffering, even strangers. This empathy is a vital social tool: when we recognise and feel someone’s distress, we’re driven to help. Yet despite its prevalence and importance, empathy is not the only way we might respond to others’ pain. There exists a twin process, the dark mirror of empathy, called sadism. This capacity, to instead feel pleasure from other people’s pain and suffering, is not as rare as you might think.
      Author’s Conclusion
      • In our ancestral past, hurting others – particularly those who posed a threat – might have led to more food or protection, or served as a warning to enemies and competitors. If witnessing others’ pain was linked to an increased chance of survival in this way, it’s logical that the experience evolved to become rewarding to some extent. The advantages of a sadistic impulse are still apparent today – in many settings, including prisons and schools, aggression and violence can confer social status. In the workplace, deriving pleasure from others’ losses could provide the impetus to win promotion or earn more money. In extreme cases, such as in criminal gangs, high levels of sadism could even increase one’s own chances of survival.
      • Whatever its advantages, sadism causes untold suffering. It’s associated with bullying, for example, which can have a serious negative impact on victims’ mental health for years after the bullying has ended. By recognising and better understanding sadism, we can counteract its harmful consequences. But first we must shake the notion that it exists in only a tiny proportion of people. The capacity to experience pleasure at others’ distress exists, to some degree, in many of us.
  2. Notes
Footnote 192: Aeon: Apperly - Gentileschi. Let us not allow sexual violence to define the artist (WebRef=9517)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Eliza Apperly
    • Author Narrative: Eliza Apperly is a producer at Intelligence Squared and a freelance writer, editor and translator. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, BBC, Reuters and The Art Newspaper. She is based in Berlin.
    • Author’s Conclusion
      • To call for a different kind of discourse around Gentileschi is neither to diminish her trauma, nor to espouse a cold formalism that suggests that art exists beyond the body of either artist or viewer. It is, instead, to liberate her oeuvre from Tassi’s grip and to grant Gentileschi the full reach and space of her creativity.
      • It is to celebrate and study her extraordinary depictions of violated and violent women, but also to recognise her many paintings that lie beyond those tropes: her portraiture and self-portraiture, her allegories and saints, her Madonna and Child and Mary Magdalenes.
      • ‘The works,’ as Gentileschi wrote to a patron in 1649, ‘shall speak for themselves.’
Footnote 193: Aeon: Happe - Autistic people shouldn’t have to use ‘camouflage’ to fit in (WebRef=9515)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Francesca Happé
    • Author Narrative: Francesca Happé is professor of cognitive neuroscience at King's College London. Her books include Autism: A New Introduction to Psychological Theory and Current Debate (2019), co-authored with Sue Fletcher-Watson, and Girls and Autism: Educational, Family and Personal Perspectives (2019), co-edited with Barry Carpenter and Jo Egerton.
    • Author’s Conclusion
      • Western visitors in Japan are easily identified as foreign, and their cultural faux pas are usually quickly forgiven. In contrast, for the autistic children and adults trying to negotiate the nonautistic world, their mistakes are often met with bullying and ostracism.
      • Improving understanding and acceptance of autism across society is essential. Negative first impressions of autistic adults are improved when the viewer knows the adult is autistic, and when viewers have greater autism knowledge and less autism stigma, which shows the benefits to be had if wider society were better informed. If we can succeed in encouraging more positive and inclusive attitudes to autism, then autistic people will no longer be forced to hide behind ‘masks’.
  2. Notes
    • I know the author is an expert on Autism, but I’m suspicious of the whole division between “neurotypicals” and “the diverse rest”, as though certain psychopathologies aren’t (or don’t cause) problems – let alone being deficiencies – but are simply differences “end of”. Also, the supposition that this is a binary situation – you’re either “typical” or you’re not, rather than that all of us are odd (ie. atypical) in one way or another.
    • Also, I dislike the whole “diagnosis” idea for traits that form a spectrum. Over much of the range, it’s arbitrary who falls within the pale, and who outside. We should all accept ourselves for who we are, and others should try to accept us, but we still all need to try to get along even if this is more difficult for some than for others. Being “diagnosed” with something that’s not a pathology is perverse. If it’s a pathology, it should be treated or mitigated. If it’s something to be accepted or even celebrated, then it’s just a character-trait.
    • I suspect there’s some sort of analogy with attitudes towards (mild) autism and historical attitudes towards left-handedness. In my mother’s childhood, left-handed children were forced to write right-handedly because it was deemed to be a disadvantage to be left-handed in a right-handed world. These days you can buy left-handed golf clubs and the like, so it doesn’t matter so much.
    • I agree that society as a whole should be more accepting of odd behaviour that can’t be controlled. But not if, with some effort and learning, it can be. If you want to fit in, but find it difficult, then “neurotypicals” should not reject you. This welcoming response doesn’t come naturally, has to be taught, and is difficult for most. Also, if non-typicals don’t want to fit in – then fine as well. But they can’t expect to be accepted while refusing to try.
    • I say this as someone who found it very difficult to “fit in” in my childhood; but it’s something that has to be learnt, unless you opt out completely. Yes, you pretend to be interested in all sorts of things; but eventually you do come to enjoy them as well. The same goes for understanding certain nuances in conversation; you just have to learn it, however difficult, or you can’t expect to make your way.
    • See also:-
      → May – Autism from the Inside.
      → "Mitchell (David X.) - Almost everything I’d been told about my son’s autism was wrong"
    • PID Note: Psychopathology
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Happe (Francesca) - Autistic people shouldn’t have to use ‘camouflage’ to fit in"
Footnote 194: Aeon: Ellis - From chaos to free will (WebRef=9516)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: George F.R. Ellis
    • Author Narrative: George Ellis is the Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (1973) with Stephen Hawking.
    • Aeon Subtitle: A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
  2. Notes
Footnote 195: Aeon: Vinocour - Criminally insane (WebRef=9512)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Susan Vinocour
    • Author Narrative: Susan Vinocour is a retired clinical and forensic psychologist, a former prosecutor and a former associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. She is the author of Nobody’s Child (2020), and lives in Pittsford, New York.
    • Aeon Subtitle: The insanity defence offends the conscience, has no basis in modern psychiatry, and penalises poor and black defendants
    • Author’s Introduction
      • Since the dawn of recorded law, Western societies have recognised that some people shouldn’t be held liable for their acts because they are non compos mentis – not in their right mind. This exemption from criminal sanctions was seen as an act of mercy required by basic morality: it was immoral to exact vengeance against a person who didn’t know that his behaviour was wrong. This principle was well-established in English common law, and from there into the law of the United States.
      • The question has always been ‘the kind and degree of insanity that would excuse its victim from punishment for an act which if done by a sane person would bring upon him the sanctions of the law’, as put in the House of Lords in 1843.

      Author’s Conclusion
      • What can be done to rehabilitate the insanity defence? There are the obvious process fixes: all defendants should have equal access to legitimate defences, and this means providing adequate funding for public defender services, smaller caseloads, and more money for investigation and mental health evaluations. There should be clear competency standards for attorneys raising an insanity defence, just as there are for attorneys in cases involving the death penalty. We should establish higher standards for those who perform forensic psychiatric evaluations. Structurally, we should have the issue of insanity decided by a panel of three judges rather than by a jury. This would likely reduce the effects of both bias and emotion, and temper the desire for retribution regardless of mental state.
      • But the most profound change must be in the definition of insanity itself. It must be brought into conformance with psychiatric realities, and back to its moral and ethical roots. Those whose criminal act is the product of an irrational delusion or compulsion brought about by mental illness, rather than by bad character or the desire for personal gain, should not be the object of conviction and retribution.
      • In sum, it offends the conscience, and erodes the moral basis of the criminal justice system, to convict and punish those whose mental illness prevented them from knowing that what they were doing was morally wrong, all the more so when those convicted are disproportionately impoverished and people of colour.
  2. Notes
Footnote 196: Aeon: Horn - The history of the incubator makes a sideshow of mothering (WebRef=9505)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Claire Horn
    • Author Narrative: Claire Hornis a Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund researcher in law at Birkbeck, University of London.
    • Author’s Conclusion
      • What’s perhaps most striking over the long and troubled history of artificial wombs is the persistent assumption that gestation could be fully automated. The idea appears to spring from politically divergent impulses.
        1. On the one hand, a disdain for pregnant people, such that replicating the work of their bodies seems like no mean feat; and,
        2. on the other, a frustration with a world in which the burden of reproductive labour still falls so heavily on women.
      • To this day, Western publics seem much more invested in the idea of the incubator-artificial womb as a replacement to gestation, rather than as a bridge to human care and a device that will always require a network of people to make it run. Infants in incubators have always been cared for by nurses, as the women’s studies scholar Irina Aristarkhova argues in her book Hospitality of the Matrix (2012). Yet when we fantasise about ectogenesis, the relational features of human pregnancy – the entangling of pregnant person and foetus – usually go unremarked. However early a technology might let neonates leave their cases of glass and plastic, it’s almost certain that they will still depend upon the love of one human, at least.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting and slightly disturbing account of the history of the incubator.
    • The dilemma at the end is also important, though I don’t see why the incubator can’t just be seen as a medical aid – a necessary intervention in a time of crisis, much like life support – neither a means of belittling ordinary care nor trying to share the burden.
    • See whether the work of Elselijn Kingma has anything to say on this.
    • PID Note: Pregnancy
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Horn (Claire) - The history of the incubator makes a sideshow of mothering"
Footnote 197: Aeon: Hui - In praise of aphorisms (WebRef=9500)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Andrew Hui
    • Author Narrative: Andrew Hui is associate professor in literature at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He is the author of The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (2016) and A Theory of the Aphorism (2019).
    • Aeon Subtitle: What if we see the history of philosophy not as a grand system of sustained critique but as a series of brilliant fragments?
    • Excerpts
      • Consider Heraclitus’ ‘Nature loves to hide’; Blaise Pascal’s ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me’; or Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed.’ Heraclitus comes before and against Plato and Aristotle, Pascal after and against René Descartes, Nietzsche after and against Kant and G W F Hegel. Might the history of thought be actually driven by aphorism?
      • Much of the history of Western philosophy can be narrated as a series of attempts to construct systems. Conversely, much of the history of aphorisms can be narrated as an animadversion, a turning away from such grand systems through the construction of literary fragments. The philosopher creates and critiques continuous lines of argument; the aphorist, on the other hand, composes scattered lines of intuition. One moves in a chain of logic; the other by leaps and bounds.
      • Before the birth of Western philosophy proper, there was the aphorism. In ancient Greece, the short sayings of Anaximander, Xenophanes, Parmenides or Heraclitus constitute the first efforts at speculative thinking, but they are also something to which Plato and Aristotle are hostile. Their enigmatic pronouncements elude discursive analysis. They refuse to be corralled into systematic order. No one would deny that their pithy statements might be wise; but Plato and Aristotle were ambivalent about them. They have no rigour at all – they are just the scattered utterances of clever men.
      • Here is Plato’s critique of Heraclitus: If you ask any one of them a question, he will pull out some little enigmatic phrase from his quiver and shoot it off at you; and if you try to make him give an account of what he has said, you will only get hit by another, full of strange turns of language.
      • Plato’s repudiation of his predecessor’s gnomic style signals an important stage in the development of ancient philosophy: the transition from oracular enunciation to argumentative discourse, obscurity to clarity, and thus the marginalisation of the aphoristic style in favour of sustained logical arguments. From Socrates onward, there would simply be no philosophy without proof or argument.
      • Yet I think it is possible to defend Heraclitus against Plato’s attack. Perplexity arising from enigmatic sayings need not necessarily lead one to seizures of thinking. On the contrary, it can catalyse productive inquiry.
  2. Notes
    • While aphorisms are thought-provoking – partly because of their obscurity – it is only by analysing their meaning that you can get anywhere and decide what is the case.
    • And while I’m suspicious of system-building, in that most systems are built from dubious foundations, we do need systematic thinking so that our thoughts in one area don’t contradict those we have in another.
    • That’s the trouble with bundles of aphorisms – we don’t know whether there’s a consistent message.
    • Some won’t care (along the lines of the Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass aphorism about self-contradiction), I do.
Footnote 198: Aeon: Williams - The fight for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (WebRef=9473)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Howard Williams
    • Author Narrative: Howard Williams is professor of archaeology at the University of Chester in the UK. His most recent book is Digging into the Dark Ages: Early Medieval Public Archaeologies (2020), co-edited with Pauline Clarke.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Racists use it to bolster their ethnohistorical myths, but historians and archaeologists should not abandon the term
    • Author’s Introduction
      • Since September 2019, medieval scholars have heatedly debated the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’. The dispute began in relation to claims of racism and sexism within the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, which is an academic organisation dedicated to the study of the history, archaeology, literature, language, religion, society and numismatics of the early medieval period (c450-1100 CE). Some scholars argued that changing the society’s name would be a step against racism and sexism, specifically in how academics research and interpret the early medieval past. Rapidly, the criticism moved from striking the term ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ from the name of the society (now the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England), to arguing that we should stop using ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ for lowland Britain in the mid- to late-1st millennium CE and ‘Anglo-Saxon world’ for the region’s connections across early medieval Europe and beyond.
      • The campaign quickly degenerated to slurring anyone who disagreed with these changes as ‘racist’, and anyone making a qualifying statement, or correcting or disputing the bases and framing of the debate, as an apologist to the racist uses of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Online proclamations declared that scholars must signal their commitment to change by removing the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ from their writings and courses, as well as to ‘cancel’ those scholars who might wish to persist in using the term.
      • As an archaeologist of early medieval Britain and Scandinavia, my view is that the term still has a place in both research on material culture, the built environment and landscapes of the early medieval period, as well as its public engagement and education. Those proclaiming that ‘early medieval England’ and ‘early English’ are somehow clearer and less fraught are ill-informed about the contemporary uses and abuses of the early medieval past.
      Author’s Conclusion
      • By casting all uses and users of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as ‘racist’, the academic lobby to ditch the term risks alienating scholars, commercial archaeologists, the heritage sector, stakeholder communities, faith groups and enthusiasts, as well as potential future researchers, from a popular field. Hence, rather than leave ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ to become a playground for extremists, populists, self-publicists and fantasists, we have a scholarly duty to re-energise our efforts to pursue and disseminate rigorous research and modes of public engagement that leave no space for false narratives and make clear the discipline is open to all. Rather than a ‘post-“Anglo-Saxon” melancholia’ where we ‘start again’ from scratch without the term, as some scholars have suggested, Anglo-Saxon archaeology can continue to revaluate and reconfigure its strengths in delivering both detailed original research and public outreach.
      • This is why I have signed a joint statement by more than 70 experts, and have been contributing articles to other magazines, maintaining that we must stay with, and fight for, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and ‘the Anglo-Saxon period’, challenging academic and popular misconceptions and misuses. In this regard, those proposing that we replace ‘Anglo-Saxon’ with ‘Early English’ and ‘Old English’ risk peddling a linguistic and nationalistic emphasis far more open to misuse than ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Particularly, ‘English’ confuses language and perceived ethnicities past and present; adopting it for archaeological material and monuments is ill-considered at best. As such, I remain an advocate of the critical, cautious but widely established and understood use of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as a gateway, open to everyone, for exploring the complex and diverse material worlds of the mid- to late-1st millennium CE. To paraphrase the motto of the Council for British Archaeology, I advocate that we should work towards an ‘Anglo-Saxon archaeology for all’.
  2. Notes
    • Between the counter-polemical sections (mostly contained within the introductory and concluding sections excerpted above) this article contains much useful information on the current, and historical, field of Anglo-Saxon (or "early Medieval") studies both popular and academic. Also about the history of the Anglo-Saxon period, in broad brush.
    • Naturally, it's a shame that the term "Anglo-Saxon" has been hijacked by white supremacists in the US (just as the term "Aryan" was hijacked by the Nazis), but that doesn't mean - as the author argues - that the terms should be abandoned, especially given how embedded they are in the literature and culture.
    • There's lots that's reported in this article that's dispiriting, particularly judging people of past ages by modern standards. It's not as though racism, sexism and slavery were invented by "the British" (whoever they were) or other European powers. They were just the latest on the scene viewed from our own perspective. Prior to the industrial revolution, or at least the Iberian invasions of the Americas, the greatest empires were Ottoman or Chinese. European feudalism (still extant in Russia into the 19th century) treated the majority of the population pretty much as slaves - estates were sold along with their serfs - though the treatment was not as brutal as in the New World, or as in the Ancient World.
    • History has always been written by those with an axe to grind, and historical accounts are always subject to revision from new perspectives. Part of the motivation for Anglo-Saxon studies was to rehabilitate the pre-Norman inhabitants of Britain from the bad press given them by the Norman invaders. And, I suppose, the Arthurian legends were to rehabilitate the Romano-Britains from their supersession by the Germanic invaders, and Celtic traditions to show their cultural legacy in the face of invasions by the before-mentioned waves.
    • All nations have had their foundation myths in order to bind their populations together into a cohesive whole – historically needed to resist the incursions of the nation next door. I can't see how the new myths being proposed - that the forebears of all white people were wicked - can help in this regard.
    • The author sites a couple of incendiary articles:-
      → Karkov - Post ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Melancholia, and
      → Rambaran-Olm - Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting “Anglo-Saxon” Studies
Footnote 199: Aeon: Wilson - The trolley problem problem (WebRef=9475)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: James Wilson
    • Author Narrative: James Wilson is professor of philosophy at University College London. He is director of the MA in philosophy, politics and economics of health, co-director of the UCL Health Humanities Centre and co-director of the MA in health humanities. He lives in London.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Are thoughts experiments experiments at all? Or something else? And do they help us think clearly about ethics or not?
    • Author’s Conclusion
      • Overall, ethical thought experiments are, at best, fallible ways of constructing simplified models that map rather imperfectly onto the world as we experience it, and can distort as much as they illuminate. So should we give up on them as sources of ethical insight?
      • Responsible thinking requires calibrating our levels of credence to the reliability of our intellectual tools. Clearly, ethical thought experiments are not particularly reliable tools. But that’s not to say that we have other, more reliable tools. Pre-theoretical ethical ‘common sense’ is subject to distortions brought by prejudice, power and many other factors, and the reason why we turn to philosophical ethics in the first place is that it’s unclear how to resolve competing ethical duties that arise at a pretheoretical level. Ethical thinking is hard, and even our best tools for doing it are not very good. Humility should be the watchword.
  2. Notes
Footnote 200: Aeon: Rees - The good scientist (WebRef=9469)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Martin Rees
    • Author Narrative: Martin Rees is the United Kingdom’s Astronomer Royal. He is a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and a member of the House of Lords. He is also the author of 10 books, most recently On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (2018).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Science is the one culture that all humans share. What would it mean to create a scientifically literate future together?
    • Author’s Conclusion
      • ... the promise that science offers is greater than ever; but so too are the threats from its misuse. The stakes are getting higher, and the world is getting more interconnected. To harness the benefits while avoiding the dangers and ethical tradeoffs demands international collaboration, guided by values that science itself can’t provide.
  2. Notes
    • I found this a rather disappointing – because rambling – paper, given its distinguished authorship. Maybe it’s a plug for his book. I’ve just listed a few points of note …
    • Rees mentions "Snow (C.P.) - The Two Cultures" positively, though thinks that Snow’s milieu led him to make too stark a contrast, thought his general drift is still relevant today. .
    • ’Science offers huge opportunities, but future generations will be vulnerable to risks – nuclear, genetic, algorithmic – powerful enough to jeopardise the very survival of our civilization … intellectual narrowness and ignorance remain endemic, and science is a closed book to a worrying number of people in politics and the media.’
    • He thinks – given how hard it is to understand (even) the atom – that we should be skeptical “about any dogma, or any claim to have achieved more than a very incomplete and metaphorical insight into some profound aspect of existence” but thinks that atheistic scientists should aim their fire at fundamentalisms rather than the mainstream religions which have come to an accommodation with science, and to which many of their colleagues belong.
    • Scientists differ in temperament – contrast Darwin and Newton.
    • Science is “organized skepticism”, including skepticism of scientific theories themselves. This reminded me of Richard Feynman.
    • “As the American cosmologist Carl Sagan said: ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’”
    • “No one should let a craving for certainty – for the easy answers that science can seldom provide – drive us towards the illusory comfort and reassurance that (the) pseudosciences appear to offer. ”
    • “When one discusses the ‘great unknowns’, there’s less of a gap between the expert and the public – neither one has a clue.”
    • “The smallest insect is structured far more intricately than a star or a galaxy, and offers deeper mysteries.”
    • Scientific theories are waiting there to be discovered; the same is not true of artistic achievements – they are created.
    • Some scientific theories have been unfortunately-named and otherwise misunderstood: relativity and uncertainty have been seized upon as ammunition for relativist cultural theories, and social Darwinism also comes in for a swipe.
    • The applications of science have an ever greater impact on society. We need a scientifically-literate populace, and a scientific community that cares about the social application of their discoveries.
    • Mary Warnock gets appreciation for facilitating embryo research, and the European rejection of GM Crops is bemoaned, given they have been feeding the US for decades with no ill effect.
    • … and much else.
Footnote 201: Aeon: Russell - Vice dressed as virtue (WebRef=9460)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Paul Russell
    • Author Narrative: Paul Russell is professor of philosophy and director of the Lund|Gothenburg Responsibility Project at Lund University in Sweden. He is also a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Canada. His latest book is The Limits of Free Will (2017).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Cruelty and morality seem like polar opposites – until they join forces. Beware those who persecute in the name of principle
  2. Notes
    • A very interesting paper.
    • It distinguishes moralism from morality, and divides moralism into a 'vain' form and a 'cruel' form. The former moralist cares mostly for his own moral standing ('grandstanding') while the latter is more interested in the infliction of pain and humiliation on the object of moral scorn.
    • The author also distinguishes 'impure' from 'pure' forms of cruel moralism. The former occurs in - say - show trials, where the victim is most likely entirely innocent, and knows it, and the prosecutors themselves may be constrained by 'the system'. In the latter 'pure' case, the victim is indeed guilty, but the judge inflicts pain beyond what is necessary to fit the crime.
    • Examples are given from contemporary culture, with anonymous excoriations on social media being prime examples of pure cruel moralism.
Footnote 202: Aeon: Nuttall - On gibberish (WebRef=9454)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jenni Nuttall
    • Author Narrative: Jenni Nuttall is a lecturer in English at Exeter College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship (2007) and Troilus and Criseyde: A Reader's Guide (2012). She blogs at Stylisticienne and is working on a book on poetic innovation and poetic experiment in the 15th and early 16th centuries.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Babies babble, medieval rustics sing ‘trolly-lolly’, and jazz exults in bebop. What does all this wordplay mean for language?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • To create gibberish is both to flee from the familiar features of our mother tongue and yet also to draw on our deepest understandings of what language is and how it works. Gibberish plays a vital role too in giving us our own language as babies and infants.
      • Writing about the work and methods of philosophy in his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein values the ‘bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.’ Gibberish is perhaps the bumpiest of human communications, yet through it we discover much about language, its possibilities and its boundaries.
  2. Notes
    • Much interesting background. It's not philosophical in the main (the reference to Wittgenstein appears out of the blue in the last paragraph).
Footnote 203: Aeon: Liu - Tea and capitalism (WebRef=9450)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Andrew Liu
    • Author Narrative: Andrew Liu is an assistant professor of history at Villanova University near Philadelphia. He is the author of Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (2020).
    • Aeon Subtitle: The China tea trade was a paradox: a global, intensified industry without the usual spectacle of factories and technology
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Today, the global division of labour encompasses not only capital-intensive, vertically integrated firms, but also, especially in the postcolonial world, horizontal networks of labour-intensive factories – some located in living rooms – that formally resemble the Chinese tea workshops of earlier eras. Precisely because of their labour intensity, such factories for automobiles, textiles and electronics have proven cheaper, more flexible and more adaptable to changing market conditions than their midcentury predecessors. Such strategies powered the ‘rise’ of East Asia in the late-20th century, and they have since been exported to an expanding China, where the government now seeks to restore the country’s earlier world standing, from the era of ‘chinoiserie’.
      • The story of Asia has been fundamental to the transformation of the global political economy since the late-20th century, but it has often been marginalised in accounts of neoliberal capitalism that focused on a handful of intellectuals in Euro-America. In turn, these accounts struggle to make sense of the rise of China, without a deeper understanding of how the history of capitalism has long been intertwined with the region. If our goal is to tell a more integrative story, then a valuable starting point would be to recognise that China, and Asia more broadly, was not a mere bystander to capitalism’s 18th-century birth in Europe. From the beginning, its people helped to power circuits of capital accumulation spanning the globe – especially through the tea trade – resulting in impersonal pressures toward expansion and acceleration. These social dynamics, shared in common with the rest of the industrial world, have often gone undetected, because they expressed themselves in local and idiosyncratic ways.
Footnote 204: Aeon: Leppin - As the Ancient Greeks knew, frankness is an essential virtue (WebRef=9455)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Hartmut Leppin
    • Author Narrative: in New York, 1930. Photo by Bettmann/Getty

      Hartmut Leppinis professor of ancient history at Goethe University Frankfurt. His main research fields are the history of ancient Christianity and the history of political ideas in Antiquity.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • The basic feature of the parrhesiastic game remained the same as it had always been: the ascetics would confront even emperors who didn’t dare attack them; doing so, the ascetics displayed their courage. The emperors who were seemingly humiliated showed their piety listening patiently to the reprimands. Two Christian virtues were staged in such a context. [...]
      • The history of frankness in the classical sense reveals a dilemma of the role of public speech. Freedom of speech is a basic civil right, but nobody can ignore how easily this right is misused. Lack of knowledge and the lack of responsibility make freedom of speech a risky right. Yet, even if a speaker possesses these qualities, even if he or she is listened to, the parrhesiastic game can start again.
      • Today, a girl who doesn’t smile and even shows signs of evident distress has become our most popular parrhesiastés. Greta Thunberg is the truthteller who relies on the authority of scientific knowledge to explain to us how to decide on our future. The power of this role in history, in its importantly different guises, is certainly one of the reasons for her dramatic impact. In her role, however, she also provides an opportunity for those she reprimands to stage our willingness to listen and to applaud to our rigid critic in a long-standing tradition. But this can only be the first step.
  2. Notes
    • If I understand this paper correctly, the main point is that - a bit like the court fool, or the slave saying to the general in his triumphal chariot "remember you are only a man" - holy simpletons are allowed to have their say in a game, but no-one really takes any notice. The powerful carry on as before, suitably chastised.
Footnote 205: Aeon: Eden - Cigarette! Exquisite fiend, ephemeral friend, how I miss you (WebRef=9452)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Caroline Eden
    • Author Narrative: Caroline Edenis a writer and journalist for The Guardian, Financial Times and Times Literary Supplement, among others. She is the author of Samarkand (2016) and Black Sea (2018). She lives in Edinburgh.
  2. Notes
    • I was put off any thought of smoking by my parents indulgence of the same, and - even before the scientific evidence was in - by it's obvious unhealthiness. The author has fond memories of her parents' smoking, while all I can remember is the stink.
    • However, it's interesting to hear the other side of the story, particularly the references to Istanbul.
    • I'm glad it's (mostly) gone. The rembered smokiness of offices, trains and bars does not fill me with nostalgia.
Footnote 206: Aeon: Frohlich - Frames of consciousness (WebRef=9453)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Joel Frohlich
    • Aeon Subtitle: Can electrical impulses in the brain explain the stuff that dreams are made on? What a new consciousness-detector reveals
  2. Notes
    • The paper starts off with a fascinating fact - that a 24-year-old Chinese woman with lifelong problems with balance was found to be without a cerebellum, which contains more than half the brain's neurons. I'm not sure what this had to do with the main theme, though.
    • The paper describes attempts to find "covert consciousness" in seemingly unconscious patients by placing them in an fMRI scanner and asking them to visualise playing tennis. It seems 10% could. This was then used to get yes/no answers - "yes" = visualise, "no" = don't, and at least one patient seemed to be responsive.
    • Then a third - "worrying" - experiment was undertaken in which healthy volunteers were given general anaesthetic and given the same test, and 20% of them appeared to be responsive.
    • Now, I'm "worried" by this from a methodological viewpoint. It is true that there are accounts of people being conscious (or claiming to have been conscious) under general anaesthetic; sometimes this can be because of mistake by the anaesthetist, but some form of continued consciousness seems normal. However, it doesn’t represent contact with the outside world at least as normally understood. The consciousness is usually of a dream-like quality, and any events are very rarely remembered. See "Bonhomme (Vincent), Etc. - General Anesthesia: A Probe to Explore Consciousness".
    • A form of communication may work, but it is not to a wakeful “locked in” person, but to a sort of dreaming automaton.
    • I’m not really sure what this has to say about “covert consciousness”.
    • …
    • PID Note: Consciousness
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Frohlich (Joel) - Frames of consciousness"
Footnote 207: Aeon: Stinson - Algorithms associating appearance and criminality have a dark past (WebRef=9438)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Catherine Stinson
    • Author Narrative: Catherine Stinson is a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy and ethics of artificial intelligence at the Center for Science and Thought at the University of Bonn in Germany, and at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.
  2. Notes
    • This – despite my initial misgivings – isn’t a terribly controversial paper and is surprisingly balanced.
    • The thesis is that the categorisation of faces using machine learning and facial recognition technology is analogous to 19th-centurn phrenology.
    • The author is careful to avoid just using phrenology as a term of abuse, and rehearses the objections to it. Essentially it wasn’t completely off the rails scientifically – in that mental functions are now agreed to be localised in the brain. So, many of the 19th-century objections to it were unsound. But it has now outlived any possibility of usefulness as the deductions from it were invalid (and there are better ways these days of determining mental traits).
    • But her objections to the use of the modern-day equivalent (as with the original) isn’t that it’s scientifically unsound, but that it has no good usage and therefore should not be undertaken even “for academic interest”.
    • There are lots of objections to the algorithms and how they are trained: their sample sets tend to be the geeks creating the algorithms, ie. young, affluent, white males, so the algorithms have difficulty with members of other groups (hence not being able to tell apart Afro-Americans and gorillas, which is grist to the white-supremacist mill). She doesn’t mention this, though.
    • The objection she does raise is the use of Chinese criminals. My thought was that the training – using mug-shots for criminals and work-website-photos for non-criminals – was that the criminals were all looking pretty dour, as presumably they are instructed to look, and the others are all smiley. She does mention the source of the photos, but seems to object more to the Chinese justice system and the cementing of biases therein (those looking like criminals are more likely to be convicted), poor people are minorities more likely to be involved in crime, on account of necessity, and the like.
    • I agree that some things shouldn’t be done – you shouldn’t make biological weapons just because it’s interesting – but you don’t always know beforehand the benign uses that technology may prove helpful for. It might be useful to know that certain public spaces are frequented more by some groups than others for positive reasons (eg. to encourage those missing out to go, if it’s a useful resource). Better than sociologist with clip-boards.
    • But I agree – along with "O'Neill (Cathy) - Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy" (not cited in this paper) – that machine-learned algorithms are easily distorted by the presuppositions of their creators / minders.
    • PID Note: Transhumanism
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Stinson (Catherine) - Algorithms associating appearance and criminality have a dark past"
Footnote 208: Aeon: Stegenga - Gentle medicine could radically transform medical practice (WebRef=9435)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jacob Stegenga
    • Author Narrative: Jacob Stegenga is a reader in philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Medical Nihilism (2018) and Care and Cure: An Introduction to Philosophy of Medicine (2018). He lives in Cambridge.
  2. Notes
    • A useful reminder that not all medical problems are best got round by medication or other interventions, and that “Big Pharma” has huge incentives to develop and market medicines that are of little benefit (or little incremental benefit over against existing medication) while ignoring those most needed, but with low profit margins.
    • His recommendations include removing intellectual copyright for medicines to address the above. He thinks the argument that this would lead to less research as “tired”, pointing out that major breakthroughs in the past were made by independent scientists.
    • He also suggests – sensibly – that the testing of drugs should undertaken by those who don’t benefit financially by the tests being successful.
    • Finally, that there should be more trials of the withdrawal of drugs to check whether they are needless. In general, patients are healthier the few drugs they take.
    • Finally, more “painful” but non-interventionist therapies – diet and exercise – should be encouraged. He notes that “social distancing” for Covid-19 is non-interventionist and “painful” – but effective.
    • Some of this could be disagreed with, no doubt, but it’s an important balance to the status quo where a doctor isn’t seen to be doing his job if no drugs are prescribed.
Footnote 209: Aeon: Rees - Are there laws of history? (WebRef=9434)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Amanda Rees
    • Author Narrative: Amanda Rees is a historian of science in the department of sociology at the University of York, and editor of the British Journal for the History of Science. Her latest book, Human, co-written with Charlotte Sleigh, is forthcoming in May 2020.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Historians believe that the past is irreducibly complex and the future wildly unpredictable. Scientists disagree. Who’s right?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Mathematical, data-driven, quantitative models of human experience that aim at detachment, objectivity and the capacity to develop and test hypotheses need to be balanced by explicitly fictional, qualitative and imaginary efforts to create and project a lived future that enable their audiences to empathically ground themselves in the hopes and fears of what might be to come.
      • Both, after all, are unequivocally doing the same thing: using history and historical experience to anticipate the global future so that we might – should we so wish – avoid civilisation’s collapse.
      • That said, the question of who ‘we’ are does, always, remain open.
  2. Notes
Footnote 210: Aeon: Video - Detachment, objectivity, imagination: a critique (WebRef=9413)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Lewis Waller
    • Aeon Subtitle: Why Romantic historians acknowledge the human feelings behind the facts
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Following the Age of Enlightenment’s emphasis on empiricism, Romantic historians such as the French writers Augustin Thierry (1795-1856) and Jules Michelet (1798-1874) viewed human emotion as vital to – and inexorably part of – constructing meaningful renderings of history.
      • This piece from the UK video essayist Lewis Waller offers a brief intellectual history at the nexus of Romanticism and historiography.
      • From there, Waller makes the case that, by rejecting the possibility of objective detachment from historical facts and embracing feelings and narrativisation, these Romantic thinkers built more ‘truthful’ histories than empiricists.
  2. Notes
    • The author points out that historical "facts" are selected from the documentary evidence and woven into a narrative that cannot fail to reflect general contemporary concerns and the interests of the historian in particular.
    • Hence, he thinks that novels are more "truthful" than works of history.
    • While this is true, novels have no external "facts" to connect to, so can't be inaccurate or biased about them.
    • Historians should aim to be objective - putting themselves and their readers into the mindset of those who enacted the events they are narrating, insofar as this is possible.
    • What they write should be larded with humility. But it is not fiction.
Footnote 211: Aeon: Ferracioli - For a child, being carefree is intrinsic to a well-lived life (WebRef=9414)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Luara Ferracioli
    • Author Narrative: Luara Ferracioli is a senior lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Sydney. She is completing a book on the ethics of immigration.
    • Author's Conclusion
      • ... a child who isn’t carefree lacks the mental space required for the enjoyment of all the good things in her life.
      • If we want children to endorse play time, education, friendships and familial relationships by feeling joy, pleasure, amusement and delight towards them – and so lead good lives as children – then we’d better create the conditions for children not only to access such goods but also to be carefree. This, in turn, requires governments that are willing to take mental health seriously from an early age and create policies that put carefreeness centrestage of what it means for a childhood to go well.
Footnote 212: Aeon: Manion - Female husbands (WebRef=9410)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jen Manion
    • Author Narrative:
      • Jen Manion is associate professor of history at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Their (sic - this indicates that the author is "trans" as "they" use this term for "female husbands" in the paper; this is confirmed towards the end of the paper itself) books include Taking Back the Academy!: History of Activism, History as Activism (2004), co-edited with Jim Downs; Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (2015); and Female Husbands: A Trans History (2020).
      • See Jen Manion: Home Page.
      • There's a "media note": "If you are wondering about pronouns, feel free to refer to me by my name, they/them, or she/her". From the note, and the look of the photo, I presume Jen has transitioned from male to female.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Far from being a recent or 21st-century phenomenon, people have chosen, courageously, to trans gender throughout history
Footnote 213: Aeon: Ward - Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us? (WebRef=9412)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Warren Ward
    • Author Narrative: Warren Ward is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Queensland. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Lovers of Philosophy (2021).
    • Excerpts
      • ... (The) oft-repeated observation - that despite all our medical advances the mortality rate has remained constant – one per person - reminded me that death (and disease) are unavoidable aspects of life. It sometimes seems, though, that we’ve developed a delusional denial of this in the West. We pour billions into prolonging life with increasingly expensive medical and surgical interventions, most of them employed in our final, decrepit years. From a big-picture perspective, this seems a futile waste of our precious health-dollars.
      • Don’t get me wrong. If I get struck down with cancer, heart disease or any of the myriad life-threatening ailments I learnt about in medicine, I want all the futile and expensive treatments I can get my hands on. I value my life. In fact, like most humans, I value staying alive above pretty much everything else. But also, like most, I tend to not really value my life unless I’m faced with the imminent possibility of it being taken away from me.
      • When the Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware interviewed scores of people in the last 12 weeks of their lives, she asked them their greatest regrets. The most frequent (regrets), published in her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying (2011), were:
        1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me;
        2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard;
        3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings;
        4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends; and
        5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
      • Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with melanoma. As a doctor, I knew how aggressive and rapidly fatal this cancer could be. Fortunately for me, the surgery seemed to achieve a cure (touch wood). But I was also fortunate in another sense. I became aware, in a way I never had before, that I was going to die – if not from melanoma, then from something else, eventually. I have been much happier since then. For me, this realisation, this acceptance, this awareness that I am going to die is at least as important to my wellbeing as all the advances of medicine, because it reminds me to live my life to the full every day. I don’t want to experience the regret that Ware heard about more than any other, of not living ‘a life true to myself’.
  2. Notes
Footnote 214: Aeon: Baggott - How science fails (WebRef=9405)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jim Baggott
    • Aeon Subtitle: For the émigré philosopher Imre Lakatos, science degenerates unless it is theoretically and experimentally progressive
  2. Notes
    • Discussion of the theories of the usual suspects:-
      → Imre Lakatos
      → Karl Popper
      → Thomas Kuhn
      → Paul Feyerabend
      → Larry Laudan
    • Basically, Lakatos is a compromise between Popper and Kuhn. A paradigm shift isn't a herd instinct but a rational response to played out theories.
    • Interesting biographical background on Lakatos.
    • Mentions String Theory and the Scientific Method by Richard Dawid.
Footnote 215: Aeon: Video - Leonard Susskind - Why do we search for symmetry? (WebRef=9387)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Leonard Susskind
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘The whole thing is a monstrosity!’ How a symmetry heretic sees the Universe
    • Author's Abstract:
      • Leonard Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University in California and a self-described ‘beauty-symmetry-elegance heretic’, rejects the popular notion that there’s something wonderfully symmetrical and simple about the building blocks of our world. Rather, he contends, conceptions of physics as elegant and uncluttered are shortcuts created by our pattern-seeking brains that rarely hold up to scientific scrutiny.
      • In this interview from the PBS series Closer to Truth, Susskind argues that, dating back to the Ancient Greeks, what’s often been perceived as elegant simplicity was almost always a fiction or an approximation covering for a much messier reality.
  2. Notes
    • I agree that the Standard Model (in so far as I understand it) is a hodge-podge, and there's insufficient data to place any reliance on whatever symmetries are there.
    • I also agree that what we find "beautiful" says as much about us as it does about the world. Susskind contrasts butterflies with slugs. He doesn't spell it out, but doubtless both have marvelous and repulsive elements, depending on one's perspective.
    • That said, lack of simplicity in any theory is an indicator that it's not right, and is a stimulus for further research.
    • The question is whether this simplicity goes all the way, and whether the correct theory is actually more messy than we would like.
    • As Susskind says, the world is what it is.
Footnote 216: Aeon: Ellis - Philosophy cannot resolve the question ‘How should we live?’ (WebRef=9388)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Dave Ellis
    • Author Narrative: Dave Ellis is a PhD student and tutor in philosophy and religion at Bangor University in Wales.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • When considering how to answer the question How should we live?, we should first reflect on how it is being asked – is it a cognitive question looking for a literal matter-of-fact answer, or is it also in part a non-cognitive spiritual remark in answer to a particular human, and particularly human, situation?
      • This question, so often asked by us in times of crisis and despair, or love and joy, expresses and indeed defines our sense of humanity.
Footnote 217: Aeon: Video - Three ways to smell cancer (WebRef=9384)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: How harnessing the power of dogs could help scientists sniff out cancer early
    • Author's Abstract:
      • Humans have long harnessed the olfactory superiority of dogs for hunts and, more recently, to sniff out bombs, drugs and people during search-and-rescue missions. Now, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania are hoping to make early cancer detection the next frontier for canine-human collaboration.
      • Inspired by previous research that found dogs could be trained to detect the scent of ovarian cancer in blood cells, the research team is working on a mechanical device – an ‘electronic nose system’ – to capture the same odour profile. Ultimately, the team hopes to develop a practical medical instrument to help doctors catch this deadly, elusive cancer earlier.
Footnote 218: Aeon: Martinho-Truswell - We need highly formal rituals in order to make life more democratic (WebRef=9383)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Antone Martinho-Truswell
    • Author Narrative: Antone Martinho-Truswell is the dean and head of house of Graduate House at St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney, as well as a research associate in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. His current work is focused on how birds learn concepts and process information. He lives in Sydney, Australia.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Benedictus, Benedicat, per Jesum Christum, Dominum Nostrum. Amen.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • In 2019, it was an act of fortitude to stand before 100 newly enrolled graduate students – mostly Australian, few with any experience of an ancient college – and insist that in this brand-new, modern building, at our very first dinner, we would wear academic gowns, say grace in Latin, and pass decanters to the left. It was harder still to say the same to a dozen busy and seasoned academics who joined us. But it was the right choice, and the college is better for it. In this modern university, my students and academics come from every political, religious, social and economic background one can imagine; they don’t have anything extrinsic in which to believe together. College gives them something to believe in as a whole.
      • The college needs ritual, tradition, anachronism and whispers of the numinous to bind together this diversity. Not to smooth it out, but to unite it in true engagement. Any apartment building can fill itself with diverse residents who politely acknowledge each other in the hallways, then keep to themselves. It takes a formal, traditional, ritual-filled ancient college to make them all feel as though they’re truly of one kind – even if that ancient college is only a year old.
      • Benedicto, Benedicatur, per Jesum Christum, Dominum Nostrum. Amen.
Footnote 219: Aeon: Camporesi - It didn’t have to be this way (WebRef=9378)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Silvia Camporesi
    • Author Narrative: Silvia Camporesi is an associate professor in bioethics and society at King’s College London, where she is also director of the master’s programme. She is interested in everything related to emerging biotechnologies, genetics, ethics, gender and sport.
    • Aeon Subtitle: A bioethicist at the heart of the Italian coronavirus crisis asks: why won’t we talk about the trade-offs of the lockdown?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • I find myself in the privileged position to be isolated with my family of four, with access to a garden. I imagine telling my younger son about how we spent the first few months of his life. The world that my children are set to inherit will have a very different social texture to the one that I grew up in, playing unsupervised in the cobbled alleys of Forlì.
      • COVID-19 will become a hiatus in our lives, a time that will mark a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Do you remember when we used to go to cafés and read the communal paper? we might say to one another. Oh yes, I do, before coronavirus. And after? It’s still too early for us to make any solid predictions. I only hope it’s not a society in which we’re all wearing masks, sipping our espressos at a polite distance, video-chatting with family members and friends far away.
  2. Notes
Footnote 220: Aeon: Lopez-Cantero - Your love story is a narrative that gets written in tandem (WebRef=9379)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Pilar Lopez-Cantero
    • Author Narrative: Pilar Lopez-Cantero is a lecturer in philosophy at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She researches ethics and moral psychology, particularly personal relationships, narrative and the self-concept.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • In love, there are no easy guidelines. But perhaps, by coming to recognise the degree to which overlapping and different narratives shape our expectations in love, we can avoid some of the worst outcomes. Perhaps, too, we have a philosophical duty to interrogate the extent to which our narratives are shaped by crass romantic clichés from songs, movies and sitcoms – even if we wrongly believe ourselves above them.
      • However, it won’t suffice to recognise that we’re all entangled in complex webs of romantic narrative. We also need to make sure that we are truly co-authoring our we-narratives. The people we love are not just characters, but also creators, of our shared story. To love each other better, we should respect this. The world is unlikely to furnish us with a perfectly matched storyteller, but love won’t flourish if each of us is trying to tell a different story.
  2. Notes
Footnote 221: Aeon: Video - Do I see what you see? (WebRef=9364)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: What a rare form of dementia reveals about how we construct the world outside
    • Editor's Abstract:
      • Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), also known as Benson’s syndrome, is a rare form of dementia in which the brain’s spatial reasoning, visual processing and spelling and calculating functions deteriorate. In the vast majority of cases, the condition is caused by Alzheimer’s disease.
      • Because the symptoms frequently manifest before declines in memory and cognitive skills, PCA means that people who have it are very much aware that something has gone awry with their perceptions – they reach out again and again to pick up a coffee cup they see but can’t grasp, or watch as the words in their newspaper begin to move and mutate.
      • This short film from the British animator Simon Ball guides viewers through the strange and unsettling experience of PCA from the perspective of six individuals with the condition. In addition to offering an empathic window on the day-to-day difficulties of living with the disorder, the film also provides insight into how we all construct our worlds from within.
  2. Notes
Footnote 222: Aeon: Schoenfield - Why do you believe what you do? Run some diagnostics on it (WebRef=9366)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Miriam Schoenfield
    • Author Narrative: Miriam Schoenfield is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.
  2. Notes
    • I’ve read this paper twice, and I still can’t understand what the author is getting at. The title suggests you can check out your belief system by “running diagnostics”, but the text seems to deny that this is possible for our fundamental political, ethical or theological beliefs.
    • Her main intuition is that you cannot evaluate some worldviews – namely the ones you were brought up in – from within them. She notes that people evaluate the evidence differently, depending on their initial standpoint.
    • All this is fair enough to a degree, but it seems to suggest that we are sunk in relativism, where we’re stuck with whatever belief system we were raised in.
    • But this just seems plain false. People do rebel against whatever their parents or society inculcate into them. They have “conversion experiences”, or just forget it all and learn something new when they move away from home.
    • I think the problem for her is justifying why you hold on to beliefs that you were raised in that you happen to believe to be correct. She doesn’t think you can use the argument that you “just got lucky”.
    • She makes several analogies with buying thermometers. You buy a thermometer from a shop known to sell mostly dodgy ones. But, you get lucky because the one you actually buy is from a very reputable manufacturer. I’m not sure of the application of this analogy to the case in hand, but it’s surprising that she doesn’t suggest actually trying to calibrate the thermometer. Maybe this isn’t possible – if there’s no ultimate standard thermometer against which to calibrate?
    • My own view is that a degree of relativism in the ethical or political sphere is impossible to avoid. We have ultimate values that others may not share. But we are inclined to defend these values, and if it can be demonstrated that these reasons are invalid or unsound, then we need to shift our position or find better arguments for it. And many people do follow such a path, and abandon silly beliefs when persuaded of their insupportability. Others may carry on regardless, of course, and no doubt that’s what happens much of the time. But the inability of some people not to see reason is a practical rather than theoretical problem.
    • PID Note: Information
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Schoenfield (Miriam) - Why do you believe what you do? Run some diagnostics on it"
Footnote 223: Aeon: Krakauer - At the limits of thought (WebRef=9361)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: David C. Krakauer
    • Author Narrative: David C Krakauer is the president and William H Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. He works on the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth. Whereas the first is admired but rare, the second is feared but common. He is the founder of the InterPlanetary Project at SFI and the publisher/editor-in-chief of the SFI Press.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Science today stands at a crossroads: will its progress be driven by human minds or by the machines that we’ve created?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Data can be acquired without explanation and without understanding. The very definition of a bad education is simply to be drilled with facts: as in learning history by rote-memorising dates and events. But true understanding is the expectation that other human beings, or agents more generally, can explain to us how and why their methods work. We require some means of replicating an idea and of verifying its accuracy. This requirement extends to nonhuman devices that purport to be able to solve problems intelligently. Machines need to be able to give an account of what they’ve done, and why.
      • The requirement to explain is what links understanding to teaching and learning. ‘Teaching’ is the name we give to the effective communication of mechanisms that are causal (‘if you follow these rules, you will achieve long division), while ‘learning’ is the acquisition of an intuition for the relationships between causes and their effects (‘this is why long division rules work’). The nature of understanding is the very ground for the reliable transmission and cultural accumulation of knowledge. And, by extension, it is also the basis of all long-term prediction.
      • Obscure quotation from Jorge Luis Borges excised ...
      • It is the challenge of the 21st century to integrate the sciences of complexity with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The most successful forms of future knowledge will be those that harmonise the human dream of understanding with the increasingly obscure echoes of the machines.
  2. Notes
Footnote 224: Aeon: Schechter - What we can learn about respect and identity from ‘plurals’ (WebRef=9360)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Elizabeth Schechter
    • Author Narrative: Elizabeth Schechter is an associate professor in the department of philosophy and in the cognitive science programme at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Self-Consciousness and ‘Split’ Brains: The Minds’ I (2018).
  2. Notes
Footnote 225: Aeon: Video - Test subjects (WebRef=9347)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: For some, animal testing is ‘just science’. For others, it’s just not right
    • Editor's Abstract:
      • Animal testing is still widely viewed as the least worst option for biomedical progress, even though researchers know more about animal sentience than ever, and animal rights movements – including vegetarianism and veganism, as well as bans on animal-tested cosmetics – have made significant gains.
      • In Test Subjects, the scientists Frances Cheng, Emily Trunnell and Amy Clippinger each explain how completing their PhDs marked a profound turning point in their approach to animal testing. Now working with the animal rights organisation PETA, which executive-produced this short documentary, they detail their personal journeys from using animals in the lab to researching and promoting alternatives.
      • With sensitivity and emotion, the UK director Alex Lockwood explores their experience of staking out an unpopular position in the scientific community, as well as the anguish that animal experimentation can inflict upon researchers and test subjects alike.
  2. Notes
    • I'm very sympathetic to the view that - in almost all circumstances - testing on animals is morally wrong, but I'm interested to see the reasons given.
    • It's a very complex area if you have a broadly utilitarian approach to ethics, because nothing is absolutely ruled out.
    • Also, given the bad deal (to put it very mildly) that animals get in the food industry, it's important not to focus on the wrong area, where level of cruelty is fairly low, or numbers are relatively few (as in fox hunting), when the main area is left unaddressed.
    • The argument made by the main interlocutor (Frances Cheng) was that testing on animals was only about 5% transferrable to humans, and this is generally known in the profession, which rumbles on regardless.
    • This argument fails against a calculus that gives (near) zero weight to animal lives when compared with those of humans, but should still stop much research as a waste of (human) resources, as another interlocutor herself notes. She views animal research as stuck in the past - and that “we can and should do better”.
    • It seems that the medical research hierarchies are very tetchy about questioning the methodology - and even object to acknowledging the researcher’s debt to those animals "who gave the ultimate sacrifice" during the research for their PhDs.
    • I suspect that much of our medical knowledge couldn't have been derived so quickly without animal experimentation, thought that experimentation should have been much better controlled and more humanely undertaken (and the reason it wasn't was down to Cartesian assumptions that animals are automata). However, now so much of this knowledge has been obtained, and we have better reasons to assume the sentience of other animals, there's much less justification for carrying on down a path that leads to so much distress (and not just for the animals, but for the sensitive humans who undertake the experimentation).
    • The researchers point out that - as ought to be obvious to all - their experimental animals "have emotions and suffer in the same way we do". I liked the PETA poster shown with a picture of a rat with the caption “I am not a piece of lab equipment”.
    • PID Note: Animal Rights
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Test subjects"
Footnote 226: Aeon: Broks - Unholy anorexia (WebRef=9344)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Paul Broks
    • Author Narrative: Paul Broks is an English neuropsychologist-turned-freelance writer. His work has appeared in Prospect, The Times and The Guardian, among others. He is the author of Into the Silent Land (2002) and The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: a Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey Through Consciousness (2018). He lives in Bath, UK.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Medieval mystics starved the body to feed the soul. Understanding this perfectionist mindset could help treat anorexia today
    • Author’s Conclusion
      • I have sketched an impressionistic outline of anorexia, medieval and modern, as the manifestation of a perfectionist mindset locked into a dimension of experience that penetrates the very core of what it is to be human. Let’s call it the animality/spirituality dimension. Experiences along this continuum are fuelled, one way and other, by the basic emotion of disgust, and they run from the grossest sensations of physical revulsion to the most elevated feelings of spirituality and awe. The animality/spirituality dimension underlies our deepest (irresistibly Cartesian) intuitions of selfhood. Intellectually, as sophisticated naturalists, we can deny the separation of body and mind but, experientially, the sense of division is inescapable. We are instinctive dualists.
      • Anorexia arises from conflict between these two aspects of our being, the physical and the mental. In both its medieval and modern forms, it is an expression of ‘mind over matter’, a way of asserting mental over physical selfhood. Muting the imperatives of animal nature, it amounts almost to a rejection of embodiment, and a disavowal of the fundamental need for food. Mental resources are marshalled for battle against the body, and disgust is the motivator. If, as the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said, spirit and flesh are ‘the eternal enemies’ in Christian consciousness (and anorexia is by far most prevalent in Western, Judeo-Christian cultures), then food is a natural battleground. Doubtless the causes of anorexia are multifactorial but disgust, the ‘body-and-soul emotion’, will, I suspect, turn out to be a significant thread in the tangle of biological, psychological and social factors that combine to create this strange and devastating disorder.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting article, though not hugely relevant to my research concerns.
    • Some rather disgusting accounts of the ascetic practices of some female medieval Saints.
    • PID Note: Psychopathology
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Broks (Paul) - Unholy anorexia"
Footnote 227: Aeon: Jones & Paris - How dystopian narratives can incite real-world radicalism (WebRef=9342)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Calvert Jones & Celia Paris
    • Author Narrative:
      • Calvert Jones is an assistant professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Bedouins into Bourgeois: Remaking Citizens for Globalization (2017).
      • Celia Paris is a leadership development coach at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
    • Authors' Conclusion
      • Dystopian fiction continues to offer a powerful lens through which people view the ethics of politics and power. Such narratives might have a positive effect in keeping citizens alert to the possibility of injustice in a variety of contexts, ranging from climate change and artificial intelligence to authoritarian resurgences worldwide.
      • But a proliferation of dystopian narratives might also encourage radical, Manichaean perspectives that oversimplify real and complex sources of political disagreement.
      • So while the totalitarian-dystopian craze might nourish society’s ‘watchdog’ role in holding power to account, it can also fasttrack some to violent political rhetoric – and even action – as opposed to the civil and fact-based debate and compromise necessary for democracy to thrive.
Footnote 228: Aeon: Heneghan - Is there a limit to optimism when it comes to climate change? (WebRef=9339)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Fiacha Heneghan
    • Author Narrative: Fiacha Heneghan is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
  2. Notes
    • This is an interesting article that I don't have time to give it's due attention.
    • It divides climate activists into:
      1. Optimists - who think we can succeed in mitigating the effects, and that it will turn out to our long-term economic good, whatever the up-front costs, and
      2. Pessimists - who think we will fail in our objectives, but that we should carry on anyway.
    • The author equates the two sides as exemplifying the distinction between consequentialists - the optimists - and Kantians - the pessimists, with whom the author seems to side.
    • I can't see why the sides need to be drawn in that way. Presumably one could be a pessimist - thinking that we're likely to fail - but carry on for consequentialist reasons, in that there are degrees of failure, and worse failures have worse consequences than lesser ones.
    • Also, admitting the likelihood of failure allows you to plan for how you will adapt to failure.
    • Throughout "success" is taken to equate to limiting gobal temperature rise to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
Footnote 229: Aeon: Levy-Eichel - I was homeschooled for eight years: here’s what I recommend (WebRef=9322)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mordechai Levy-Eichel
    • Author Narrative: Mordechai Levy-Eichel is a lecturer in political science at Yale University. He is the cohost of the forthcoming podcast AntiEducation. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Like one’s country, one’s education is, at its core, an ongoing experiment. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks notes, in his introduction to The Koren Siddur (2009), that ‘Prayer is less about getting what we want than about learning what to want.’
      • If nothing else, for those who usually entrust their kid’s education to others, a few weeks or months of homeschooling is an opportunity to encourage our students to do something novel, different, unexpected – to learn what we could and should want, for them, and for us.
      • As a society, we have become exceptionally bad at encouraging our charges to be idiosyncratic and independent. These qualities are not measured by standardised tests, but are just as socially important as a vaccine for COVID-19. Being stuck at home for a few weeks and months, forced to homeschool, is a daunting prospect – but also a tremendous opportunity to cultivate the virtues of independence and original thinking.
  2. Notes
Footnote 230: Aeon: Video - Ball - Understanding quantum entanglement (WebRef=9321)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Philip Ball
    • Aeon Subtitle: Quantum entanglement is tough to dumb down, but this analogy can help detangle it
    • Editor's Abstract:
      • The term ‘quantum entanglement’ refers to quantum particles being interdependent even when separated, to put it in exceedingly simple terms. Because this behaviour was so at odds with his understanding of the laws of physics, Albert Einstein called the phenomenon ‘spooky action at a distance’. And because it is so hard to square with our own lived experience, it is often used as one of the foremost examples of ‘quantum weirdness’.
      • In this expansion on a previous Royal Institution presentation (Royal institution - Philip Ball - Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics is Different), the UK science writer Philip Ball details a metaphor devised in the 1990s by Sandu Popescu, professor of physics at the University of Bristol, and Daniel Rohrlich, a physics researcher and lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, to help bring our current best understanding of quantum entanglement into focus. In doing so, Ball also provides an enlightening window into physicists’ evolving understanding of the quantum world throughout the 20th century.
  2. Notes
Footnote 231: Aeon: Contera - Engines of life (WebRef=9320)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Sonia Contera
    • Author Narrative: Sonia Contera is a biological physicist and nanotechnologist. She is associate professor of biological physics at the University of Oxford, a senior fellow at the Oxford Martin School, and a research fellow at Green Templeton College. She is the author of Nano Comes to Life: How Nanotechnology Is Transforming Medicine and the Future of Biology (2019).
    • Aeon Subtitle: At the level of the tiny, biology is all about engineering. That’s why nanotechnology can rebuild medicine from within
    • Author's Conclusion
      • What the new nanotechnology seems to point toward is an inexorable dimming of the boundaries between the sciences. Though still in an embryonic state, the new transmaterial science of producing artificial materials inspired by biology is already being used to create new medicines, develop new strategies for regenerating tissues and organs, and improve the responses of the immune system. In parallel, hybrid bioinorganic devices that mimic biological processes will soon be used in new computers and electronic devices.
      • By increasingly refining our ability to learn biology using the methods of physics, nanotechnologists are throwing off the yoke of reductionism, and learning how to distil the recipes of the Universe in order to fabricate and assemble matter from the nanometre scale up. In the process, they are revolutionising technology and medicine.
  2. Notes
Footnote 232: Aeon: Nguyen - Time alone (chosen or not) can be a chance to hit the reset button (WebRef=9316)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Thuy-vy Nguyen
    • Author Narrative: Thuy-vy Nguyen is an assistant professor in psychology at Durham University in the UK.
    • Author's Conclusion
      • In a culture fuelled by fast-paced lifestyles and convenient technologies, we are easily pulled by our devices and our obsession with productivity. When we are alone, we find ourselves working, and when we have a free moment, we want to catch up with what other people are doing by picking up our phones. This can be true even when people are in lockdown and unable to socialise in person.
      • Such a mindset, in which we actively seek to avoid solitude, only increases the chance that we’ll find the experience unpleasant when it arises. Conversely, by seizing the opportunity for relaxation and reflection afforded by moments (or even stretches) of solitude in our busy lives, we can reap the benefits.
      • Time when we are unexpectedly alone can be difficult but, at least for some of us, it can also be a blessing in disguise.
  2. Notes
    • It is important to find time for reflection when alone.
    • I enjoy being alone, but mainly because most of my activities require concentration and freedom from interuption.
    • However, it's easy and tempting for me to fill my time to the brim with intellectual activities that exclude reflection as much as socialising would do.
Footnote 233: Aeon: Wellmon - The scholar’s vocation (WebRef=9318)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Chad Wellmon
    • Author Narrative: Chad Wellmon is professor of German studies and history at the University of Virginia. He is most recently the co-editor of Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures (NYRB Classics 2020).
    • Aeon Subtitle: A century ago, Weber both diagnosed the ills of the corporatised, modern university, and pointed out the path beyond it
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Weber didn’t believe in the guarantee of human self-perfection. He rejected the unconstrained expectations of some liberals and more-radical socialists who held out hope that an embrace of human autonomy would make such perfection possible. His was a bleak, not a perfectionist, liberalism for which freedom was inextricable from duty and responsibility.
      • But it was a liberalism nonetheless, and so his final injunction to his audience in Munich was: ‘We should set to work and meet the demands of the day – of our life’s work – both professionally and personally.’ In these final lines, Weber ties the vocational to the human; the specialised, disciplined and constrained to the responsibility to lead a life. We have no other choice but to act as though such perfection is our potential future. In a disenchanted age, we all, not only the self-christened intellectuals, must go about the work of learning how to live. Whoever continues to look out over the horizon hoping for a prophet or history or reason to bring meaning avoids the work of becoming human.
Footnote 234: Aeon: Bond - We are wayfinders (WebRef=9319)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Michael Bond
    • Aeon Subtitle: Navigation and spatial awareness sustained humans for tens of thousands of years. Have we lost the trail in modern times?
  2. Notes
    • This was an interesting article - probably a plug for the author's book, which I've resisted the temptation to buy (thus far).
    • Interesting warnings about the over-use of GPS technology.
    • Interesting to note that spatial skills decline from age 19+. Spatial ability is (or was) my strongest suit in IQ tests. I suspect it has declined.
    • Also interesting to read about the - newly Christened - DTD (Developmental Topographical Disorientation) disorder of 2% of the population who are always getting lost.
    • Otherwise, loss of direction is a prime component of Alzheimer’s.
    • The author connects our understanding of where we are with who we are.
    • I was disappointed that there was no reference to navigational skills in other animals (such as dogs) - though the magnetic sense of some birds is mentioned (and magnetic direction-sensing in humans is rejected as unsubstantiated and unneccessary).
    • PID Note: Psychopathology
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Bond (Michael) - We are wayfinders"
Footnote 235: Aeon: Gordin - Identifying Einstein (WebRef=9303)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Michael D. Gordin
    • Author Narrative: Michael D Gordin is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and the director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University in New Jersey. His latest book is Einstein in Bohemia (2020).
    • Aeon Subtitle: For Albert Einstein, being Jewish and German were not questions of identity but rather mutable matters of identification
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • The point about mutuality of identification is not peculiar to exceptional cases such as Einstein’s, or to the more general 20th-century tragedy of the Jews and the Germans. This is just how identification works. Because there are so many agents doing the identifying – states, religious communities, neighbours, tourists, one’s parents, one’s children, oneself – the multiplicity of identifications is bound to laminate and then amalgamate. We have built manifold identifications for ourselves and others, and anything that has been built can be dismantled and reassembled. None of them has to remain impossible.
  2. Notes
    • This is a fascinating account of Einstein’s various citizenships and affiliations – identities and identifications, in the author’s terms. It details lots of the factors that come into play when one identifies oneself with certain grouping, or is identified with them by others.
    • But it also – for me – raises lots of questions about the interrelatedness of societies and their citizens, and the relation of societies and those who live amongst them who are not citizens.
    • It raises a lot of questions in the age of “citizens of the world”, who aim to be – and can be, on account of their wealth (or patrons) – free of any particular society; as well as about – as in Einstein’s lifetime and all ages – the case of refugees, who have been displaced from their own societies.
    • The Jews – when not assimilated – have been refugees throughout history, more or less.
    • There has always been distrust of those whose primary allegiance has not been to the State – whether it be a nation or an empire – but to their own “community within a community”. This is not a racial topic – it applied to indigenous Catholics during the English reformation, where it was assumed (as was sometimes the case, as their religious confession demanded) that their primary allegiance was to the Pope rather than to the King or Queen of England. In that case the state really was under threat from within and without. At other times, the seriousness of the treat – or indeed the threat itself – has been imagined (as in the McCarthyite era in the US).
    • As the author acknowledges, Einstein is a special case; an early “citizen of the world”. His celebrity (and innate gifts) freed him from the dependence on (and therefore commitment to) the communities that ordinary mortals are tied to. The author is also right that his various identifications and the reasons for them have lessons for us all.
    • But for most, society involves a lot of give and take – you put in and you take out – and rich societies can afford a lot of latitude. We all put something in, and we all take something out, and it is right that some put more in than they get out, not only morally but practically as otherwise societies could not function. But we can’t all be free agents.
    • Also, strong societies can afford – and applaud – their rebels who want things to be different (and, they say, better). But they need to hold together, particularly in times of stress. In times of peace and plenty you can be as liberal as you like. But in times of existential threat, people need to take sides so that there can be coordinated action (sometimes this may lead to revolution). Societies can afford a few celebrity rebels, but they can’t afford for too many people to follow them unless revolution is to be embraced.
    • These are very big questions indeed.
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Gordin (Michael D.) - Identifying Einstein"
Footnote 236: Aeon: Video - 9at38 (WebRef=9297)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The violinist staging a concert of unity at the border between North and South Korea
    • Aeon Abstract:
      • The South Korean violinist Hyung Joon Won has held a singular – and perhaps quixotic – dream for the past seven years: a joint concert by North and South Korean musicians at the world’s most contentious border. At 160 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) separates the two countries at the 38th parallel. On this narrow strip, the threat of all-out war hangs heavy – and anyone with a violin case or a film camera gets short shrift.
      • The South Korean-born filmmaker Catherine Kyungeun Lee follows Hyung Joon as his plan for a show of peace at the border teeters between success and collapse, at great personal cost to him. Filmed in 2015, her documentary traces the confluence between fraught geopolitics and all-too-human struggles on the peninsula.
      • Lee is now directing two documentaries in East Africa. One tells the story of a child-soldier who became a Harvard graduate and activist who was jailed in South Sudan, and the other follows the woman in charge of realising Somalia’s first democratic election in 50 years, despite seemingly insurmountable opposition.
  2. Notes
    • A rather odd little documentary. The musical content isn't great. Hyung Joon Won seems a well-balanced chap with a silly obsession - enough to spilt up with his wife over, and one never likely to lead anywhere, even if he does eventually get his concert.
    • Anyway, this attempt got nowhere, and they held a concert in a village close to the border.
    • The film doesn't mention any inspirational connection with Daniel Barenboim and Wikipedia: The Eastern Divan Orchestra. The latter has been a success, but the barriers are less forbidding - being psychological rather than physical - and the chances of a successful "bringing together" of communities - or elements of them - are greater.
Footnote 237: Aeon: Isaacs - Chemobrain is real. Here’s what to expect after cancer treatment (WebRef=9299)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Anton Isaacs
    • Author Narrative: Anton Isaacs is senior lecturer in the Department of Rural and Indigenous Health at Monash University in Melbourne. His work has appeared in The Conversation and Frontiers in Psychiatry.
    • Extract:
      • ... today we have enough research evidence to suggest that chemobrain is a real phenomenon, although it remains poorly understood. In fact, it’s not clear in many cases whether the cause is the treatment itself, the stress of the treatment and illness, or even a direct effect of the cancer. I believe that the link with stress is strong, and most recommendations for symptom-alleviation are to reduce stress.
      • There are multiple symptoms associated with chemobrain, including some or many of the following:
        1. Difficulty remembering words and spellings, as well as recalling names and faces;
        2. Forgetting previously known routines, inability to multitask, and difficulty navigating traffic;
        3. Inability to stay focused on a task, getting easily distracted, and going blank or becoming confused;
        4. Easily losing things;
        5. Difficulty learning new skills; and
        6. Frequently repeating oneself.
      • These symptoms can affect people’s self-confidence, social relationships and even their ability to perform jobs that require substantial intellectual input.
  2. Notes
Footnote 238: Aeon: Barwich - It’s hard to fool a nose (WebRef=9295)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Ann-Sophie Barwich
    • Author Narrative: Ann-Sophie Barwich is a cognitive scientist, empirical philosopher and historian of science, technology and the senses. She is assistant professor at Indiana University, Bloomington in the departments of history, philosophy of science and cognitive science. Her book Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind is forthcoming in 2020.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Theories of perception are heavily tilted to the visual: we have much to learn from our surprisingly acute sense of smell
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • The scientific study of the senses, down to the molecular and cellular level, invites us to revisit the basis of our inherited philosophical assumptions about perception.
      • Received philosophical analysis approaching the objectivity of the senses as ‘one percept matching one stimulus’ proved an ill-defined artifact of a prescientific intellectual tradition. It obscures our understanding of smell. It bypasses a lot of other sensory sensations, including the hidden senses of proprioception and interoception. And it even obscures genuine understanding of vision.
      • In effect, it is their causal principles and mechanisms – not some naive input-output pairing that treats the sensory system as a black box – that determines how our senses grant us access to reality.
      • To understand perception across all senses, including perceptual constancy as well as variation, requires a much more detailed look at the actual processes that connect the world with our mind. Only that way might we get to understand both.
  2. Notes
    • This is an unexpectedly facinating paper.
    • I've seen (and ignored) a fair number of announcements on Philos_List about the philosophy of olefaction. Maybe they arose from this author.
    • My main interest is because of the alleged increased sensitivity of the canine nose, whose olefactory bulb is 10 times as large as the human.
    • However, this paper tells us, humans have the same number of neurons in their olefactory bulbs as do rats (though, of course, our body mass is massively larger, as are our noses).
    • It seems that human brains suppress most of the chatter from their olefactory bulbs, only waking up in exceptional circumstances.
    • Presumably this is not the case for dogs, who "live in a world of smells".
    • As can be seen from the author's conclusion, she thinks philosophical accounts of perception have been skewed by focusing on vision.
    • She also suggests that vision is necessarily subject to illusions, whereas olefaction is not. I'm doubtful.
Footnote 239: Aeon: Wojtowicz - If all our actions are shaped by luck, are we still agents? (WebRef=9285)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jake Wojtowicz
    • Author Narrative: Jake Wojtowicz is a PhD graduate from King’s College London. He is interested in the philosophy of law, ethics and the history of ethics.
    • Aeon Subtitle: If all our actions are shaped by luck, are we still agents?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • One could read Williams and come away dispirited, left with a pessimistic view of the world. After all, Williams focuses on regret rather than the happy accidents that can affect our lives. He uses examples such as the lorry driver and draws on heart-rending stories from literature, such as Anna Karenina’s suicide. There is little comfort in his focus on how, even if we are cautious in what we aim to do, we can be felled by a stroke of luck. Williams can be a bleak read. At least the Kantian picture puts our fate in our hands.
      • But there is also something deeply empowering in Williams’s move away from the Kantian picture. Reflection on luck need not urge us to retreat to the secure but restricted domain of what we fully control; it can reaffirm our potency as agents and encourage our ambition. We can make a mark on the world and sometimes that mark can be a spectacular one. From a work of art to a strike on the football pitch, from the things we write to the meals we make, these things don’t just happen: we have to seek them out and use our skills to bring them about. And they are our actions – marks we make on the world as agents.
      • Without accepting that we might fail, that we might end up regretting what we have done, we wouldn’t be able to achieve any of these things. There is something richer and more uplifting in recognising this, rather than living our lives in the secure but impotent realm where trying is all that matters.
  2. Notes
    • This is a useful brief paper expounding moral luck, as in "Williams (Bernard) - Moral Luck".
    • Williams distinguishes Agent-Regret (where bad consequences resulted from our action through no fault of our own) from Agent-Remorse, when we did something bad intentionally.
    • The example is accidentally running over a child, when obeying the law perfectly. Kant would have us not worry, provided our intentions were right. But, as agents, Williams thinks we should have regret, but not remorse. The regret is – I suppose (I’ve not yet read the paper) – a deeply personal feeling. We don’t just regret the happening, but regret that we were responsible – that our act did it.
    • I suspect that part of the reason for regret is that if we’d acted slightly differently things would – or might – have turned out better. I might have left earlier – maybe I was late, but still driving within the speed limit; or I might have left unusually early. Either way, I wouldn’t have been there at the unfortunate time. Or I might have driven more slowly (maybe to the irritation of other road users, if any), and so on.
    • Some situations – where I’m hardly an agent at all – seem to demand much less regret. For instance, if someone randomly pushes me off a balcony (maybe by accident) and I land on a child, killing her, … would I feel the same sense of regret as in the RTA case?
    • Anyway, the paper is right to point out that all sorts of luck impacts on our agency, and if we’re wanting to appropriate the good luck, we have also to take the bad.
Footnote 240: Aeon: Video - Soft awareness (WebRef=9286)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: What’s it like to chat with an AI that mimics you? Uncanny conversations with Replika
    • Author's Abstract:
      • Replika is a chatbot that was launched in 2017 with the aim of offering users emotional support – or, as the company’s advertising copy puts it, becoming their ‘AI friend’. To give users a personalised experience, the deep learning bot gathers information about conversation partners by asking them questions, adapts to their conversational style and, over time, attempts to mimic them. Beyond companionship, Replika’s creators believe that the technology could eventually serve as a conversational stand-in for deceased loves ones.
      • In Soft Awareness, Anastasia Sif Karkazis, a Danish film student and co-director of the film, engages in a series of conversations with Replika, drifting between a series of loosely connected subjects – including art, dreams and identity. Throughout, the exchanges seem to teeter between meaningful and unintelligible, offering a window on Karkazis’s inner world, how Replika ‘understands’ her, and the many hazy areas in between. Beneath the surface of these uncanny exchanges, larger questions about privacy and the contours of intimacy between humans and AI slowly emerge.
  2. Notes
    • This is an interesting video!
    • The video tries to contrast the real person with the chatbot (Replika) by focusing on the physicality of the human protagonist (Anastasia) while nothing else is said. This makes the video longer than it needs to be.
    • I wasn't so struck by any oddity in what Replika said as the abstract above claims. I was mightily impressed. There was some very superficial accommodation to the speech patterns of Anastasia, but I didn't see any mimicking.
    • However, it was clear that when Anastasia probed Replika about its aims, rather than playing its game, it started to come out with the company policy on privacy in a very robotic way.
    • PID Note: Transhumanism
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Soft awareness"
Footnote 241: Aeon: Harlitz-Kern - To see the antisemitism of medieval bestiaries, look for the owl (WebRef=9283)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Erika Harlitz-Kern
    • Author Narrative: Erika Harlitz-Kern is an adjunct instructor at Florida International University in Miami. She is a public historian and writer whose work has appeared in The Week, The Daily Beast and The Washington Post, among others.
  2. Notes
    • A succinct and moderately interesting paper on bestiaries, and the difference between the negative medieval (and Roman) appraisal of the owl and the positive classical Greek one.
    • But I think the lady doth protest too much. As she notes, the trope of the “dirty” owl persisted centuries after the expulsion of the Jews, so may just be a figure for sinners.
Footnote 242: Aeon: Parks & Manzotti - You are the world (WebRef=9279)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Tim Parks & Riccardo Manzotti
    • Author Narrative:
      • Tim Parks is a British author, translator and essayist. He has written 14 novels, the latest of which is In Extremis (2017), and has translated works by Italo Calvino, Niccolò Machiavelli and Giacomo Leopardi, among others. His nonfiction books include Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness (2018) and Dialogues on Consciousness (2020), co-authored with Riccardo Manzotti. He lives in Milan, Italy.
      • Riccardo Manzotti is a philosopher, psychologist and AI expert. He is an associate professor of theoretical philosophy at the IULM University in Milan. His books include The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One (2017) and Dialogues on Consciousness (2020), co-authored with Tim Parks.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Are your decisions made by your brain, or via the experience of the world relative to your body? A dialogue on consciousness
  2. Notes
Footnote 243: Aeon: Video - Do you have imposter syndrome (WebRef=9259)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Sandi Mann
    • Author Narrative: Sandi Mann is a psychologist and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Do you feel like a fraud after a success? It can mean you’re doing something well
    • Author's Abstract:
      • ‘When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud, and take everything away from me?’
        → Tom Hanks, winner of two Oscars, four Golden Globes and six Emmys, interviewed in 2016
      • First coined in a 1978 research paper on high-achieving women in the workplace, the term ‘imposter syndrome’ describes those who believe they have less talent that others think, who attribute any personal successes to luck, and who worry that they’ll ultimately be exposed as the frauds they perceive themselves to be. This kind of reflexive self-doubt is not so much a ‘syndrome’ as it is a widespread state of psychological distortion, with roughly 70 per cent of people experiencing it at some point in their lives.
      • In this video from BBC Ideas, Sandi Mann discusses the roots of imposter syndrome and details some practical ways to fight it.
Footnote 244: Aeon: Ho - No patient is an island (WebRef=9262)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Anita Ho
    • Author Narrative: Anita Ho is associate professor at both the Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia and the Bioethics Program at the University of California, San Francisco. She is also a scientist at the Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences (CHÉOS).
    • Aeon Subtitle: How a concern to protect the autonomy of patients leads to the exclusion of families just when they are needed the most
  2. Notes
    • This is all sensible and unsurprising stuff. Maybe it reflects the situation in the US more than in the UK.
    • The paper rightly points out the tension between an individual's autonomy and their narrative identity, which most often includes friends and family members.
    • It also points out that the treatment options often impact on such people - in that they are frequently involved in subsequent care-giving. Consequently, they should be involved in discussions of choice of treatment.
    • PID Note: Death
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Ho (Anita) - No patient is an island"
Footnote 245: Aeon: Dubal - Against humanity (WebRef=9265)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Sam Dubal
    • Author Narrative: Sam Dubal is a medical anthropologist and a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book is Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army (2018).
    • Aeon Subtitle: What the Lord’s Resistance Army can teach us about flaws in the ideal of human rights and the fight for justice
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • When we decry the conditions of children held in cages as dehumanising, are we not replicating a form of thinking that treats them like abused animals – where being ‘humane’ means not letting them sit in their own urine or be infested with lice? To ask that migrants be treated humanely is to claim some very basic forms of equal treatment – access to toothpaste, diapers and medical care, for example. While necessary, these are hardly sufficient to achieve the good – namely, the kinds of justice due after years of imperial, racist, capitalist exploitation that created the violent conditions under which they became migrants.
      • At the same time, we should be wary of using humanity to positively equate or compare Latinx kids in cages with their white, middle-class American age-equivalents. These caged kids are not also human; they are extraordinary beings, superhumans, having made incredible, dangerous journeys across lands to escape from the ugly margins of capitalism and empire that made them who they are (and killed many of their peers). Whatever commonalities might exist, unequal structural forces have shaped them into radically different and incommensurable forms of existence. They should be respected and recognised, rather than flattened by providing the deceptive material trappings of a basic humanity. Just as a bar of soap or a flu shot does not give them justice, neither does asserting their essential sameness to rich age-mates growing up in the heart of global empire.
      • Humanity’s abstract universality aims to help us connect to people in very different circumstances, but at the expense of encouraging us to wrongly think of ourselves as like them. At the same time, humanity claims to reach for the good of universal justice, when in reality its claims are shaped by particular Western ideas about justice that have historically oppressed rather than emancipated non-Western others. It might be time to give up on humanity as a byword for emancipation or liberation, and instead call more precisely on what we often ask for in the name of humanity: justice and recognition for those constructed in and deeply marginalised by past and present structures of imperialism, racism, colonialism and capitalism.
  2. Notes
    • This a bold, articulate and dangerous paper. It was brave of Aeon to publish it.
    • I’d not even heard of the situation in Uganda, nor of the beliefs of the “Lord’s Resistance Army”, which seems to be a Totemist / Animist version of Islamic State. The author doesn’t use these terms, but that seems to be what he means.
    • The author appears to know what’s going on in Uganda, but has too many post-colonial chips on his shoulders to think straight.
    • While interesting curiosities, totemism and animism are false beliefs and – in general – false beliefs are to be discouraged, even if those who hold them may live a more “authentic” existence than those of more orthodox persuasion. Especially if that existence involves perpetrating atrocities. I was reminded of Kurtz’s “pile of little arms” monologue in Apocalypse Now: see monologuedb: Apocalypse Now, Walter E. Kurtz.
    • The author is right to point out that humanism is “genetically” a white middle-class male world-view, but it is a prime example of the genetic fallacy to claim that it is thereby false.
    • The author’s book gets some plaudits, mostly for its boldness, but is considered derivative and insufficiently engaged with the literature by a reviewer at the LSE: Tim Allen: Book review – Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Footnote 246: Aeon: Mishra - Talent, you’re born with. Creativity, you can grow yourself (WebRef=9264)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jyoti Mishra
    • Author Narrative: Jyoti Mishra is assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and director of NEAT Labs at the University of California, San Diego.
Footnote 247: Aeon: Video - The solar do-nothing machine (WebRef=9263)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘Toys are the prelude to serious ideas’ – the contraption that kicked off the solar age
    • Author's Abstract:
      • In 1957, Charles and Ray Eames, the legendary husband-and-wife design team, created a solar-powered kinetic sculpture for the Aluminum Company of America ( ‘Alcoa’).
      • Although the American designers coined their novel contraption ‘The Solar Do-Nothing Machine’ for its whimsical look and lack of evident purpose, in reality its creation was something of a breakthrough, marking one of the first uses of solar power to produce electricity.
      • In 1995, the Eameses’ grandson, the US artist, writer and designer Eames Demetrios, discovered unedited footage of the machine, and produced a short film from the material.
      • Set to a breezy jazz score, the piece is at once a small joy to watch in its own right and a testament to the Eameses’ belief that ‘toys and games are the prelude to serious ideas’.
  2. Notes
    • The film is just a waste of time to watch, I think. It's in a retro style, to appear made in the 1950s, as indeed the footage was.
    • Maybe it is self-consciously referring to the ancient Greek discovery of steam-power (by Hero of Alexandria; Wikipedia: Hero of Alexandria) which was put to no useful purpose in the Aeolipile (Wikipedia: Aeolipile).
Footnote 248: Aeon: Rolston - Don’t take life so seriously: Montaigne’s lessons on the inner life (WebRef=9257)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Dorian Rolston
    • Author Narrative: Dorian Rolston is a writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Atlantic, among others. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Montaigne was well aware that the promise of getting away from it all was a fool’s errand since, wherever you go, you take yourself with you: ‘It is not enough to have gotten away from the crowd,’ he writes, since ‘we must get away from the gregarious instincts that are inside us.’ Instead, to quote Albius Tibullus, one of the Latin poets he grew up with, ‘be to thyself a throng’. This is where I hoped my dad might take note: shut in with no one but himself for company, there might still be a chance for great companionship. ‘We have a soul that can be turned upon itself,’ writes Montaigne, ‘it has the means to attack and the means to defend, the means to receive and the means to give.’ Sadly, my dad didn’t see his own soul this way and, after falling into a depression of his own, he took his own life.
      • I wonder now if Montaigne’s back shop was less the writer’s saving grace, lifting him from the depths of despair, but not the act of writing from within it? ‘Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves,’ he writes – and I take it he means that the quality of the inner dialogue will determine the quality of the life.
      • Montaigne’s mental chatter had a buoyancy to it, as he bounced from one subject to the next, going with the current. What I couldn’t convey to my dad, evidently, was this lightness of attention, distilled in that most famous of Montaignisms: ‘Que sais-je?’ (What do I know?) In his celebratory portrait of Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837 comments that: ‘His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road.’ Not taking life quite so seriously – the pursuit of happiness notwithstanding – might then be Montaigne’s key to dying well. After all, there might be no surer inner peace in one’s final days than not needing it so badly.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Michel De Montaigne
    • Two sub-plots in this essay.
      1. Firstly, the author’s unsuccessful attempts to get his elderly, depressive and curmudgeonly father to “snap out of it”, using Montaigne’s essays.
      2. Secondly, an attempt to understand why Montaigne chose a life of solitude in his tower, which he referred to as his “back shop”, and what this solitude was meant to achieve – basically, a communing with himself.
    • The text of the first half of the second bullet above seems to be corrupt, and I don’t know how to repair it.
    • This essay requires a second reading – and my copies of Montaigne’s Essays (in French and English) require a first!
    • PID Note: Death
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Rolston (Dorian) - Don’t take life so seriously: Montaigne’s lessons on the inner life"
Footnote 249: Imperial - Impact of NPIs to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand (WebRef=9249)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
    • Not Aeon, but logged here for want of a better place.
    • It makes grim reading. It seems that the original government strategy of mitigation, while it would get the epidemic over in 3 months, and would save half the lives of no action, would still lead to 250,000 deaths.
    • The recommended approach seems to be that towards which the government is moving; lock-down for an extended period. Initially 5 months, but the process then needs to be repeated, after a month's gap, and then 2 months' further lock-down, until a vaccine is fully available and rolled out. So, we're in for it for a further 18 months by the look of things.
    • Hard copy filed in "Various - Papers in Desk Drawer".
Footnote 250: Aeon: David - Patient, know thyself: how insight helps to treat psychosis (WebRef=9254)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Anthony David
    • Author Narrative: Anthony David is a practising psychiatrist in the NHS and the director of the University College London Institute of Mental Health. His latest book is Into the Abyss: A Neuropsychiatrist's Notes on Troubled Minds (2020).
  2. Notes
    • This seems such an obvious thesis - that if you have insight that there's something wrong with you and that the medical support offered is likely to make you well, then your treatment is more likely to make you better - that it's surprising that it should have been resisted.
    • I've added the author's book to my list of possible purchases, but have not bought it yet!
    • PID Note: Psychopathology
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "David (Anthony) - Patient, know thyself: how insight helps to treat psychosis"
Footnote 251: Aeon: Video - The researcher's article (WebRef=9243)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Excitement, baby steps and reams of rejections – how scientific knowledge builds on itself
    • Author's Summary:
      • Getting a paper published in a respected scientific journal can be an exhilarating opportunity for researchers to contribute to their fields, but it’s often a patience-testing exercise in rejection, rewriting and waiting.
      • In this short by the French filmmaker Charlotte Arene, the physicists Frédéric Restagno and Julien Bobroff, both of the University of Paris-Saclay, offer surprisingly amusing accounts of their own experiences of the ‘letter’, the most common format for publishing research in physics.
      • With Arene providing jaunty stop-motion visuals, The Researcher’s Article is an enlightening and lively paean to the process of adding a small drop to the well of scientific knowledge.
Footnote 252: Aeon: Hanna - Whose limb is it anyway? On the ethics of body-part disposal (WebRef=9244)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Esmee Hanna
    • Author Narrative: Esmée Hanna is an associate professor in the School of Allied Health Sciences at De Montfort University Leicester in the UK.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Although criticised by some as being an amorphous concept, dignity allows us to consider all the groups involved in limb disposal, ensuring it is ethical for all parties. The broad nature of the concept of dignity is a positive for ethical limb disposal: it could provide a framework to ensure that the grief that some patients experience after amputation is given an outlet through offering disposal options that support the grieving process.
      • We have rituals and practices round the disposal of the deceased – we should too for the disposal of limbs. We must ensure that patients feel that their limbs have been handled appropriately, sensitively and respectfully – in other words, with dignity.
  2. Notes
Footnote 253: Aeon: Hochman - Is ‘race’ modern? (WebRef=9238)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Adam Hochman
    • Author Narrative: Adam Hochman is a lecturer in philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He currently holds the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award through the Australian Research Council.
    • Aeon Subtitle: To counter racism, scholars must trace the idea of ‘race’ to its origins, but asking the right questions is half the battle
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Racialisation is not something humans have always done. It is a specific way to naturalise group identity, and it serves as a basis for discrimination and persecution.
      • Many race scholars assume that we need to continue to classify people racially for social justice purposes – for instance, to determine who is eligible for affirmative action and reparations programmes. But this is only doubling down on the mistakes of the past.
      • What matters is how people are racialised and how racism has affected them – not their so-called ‘race’.
      • Does this mean that we should aim to be post-racial? No. We cannot go past something that never existed. We should aim to be post-racist instead.
  2. Notes
    • The author claims as a fact that “races don’t exist”. Also, that – as a concept – races are late medieval, but that “scientific” versions of what are races are modern inventions.
    • He pooh-poohs the thought that the concept “race” is ancient, saying that since the Greek genos was applied to women, it cannot mean “race”. Fair enough.
    • But whatever we say about words, the categorising of nations by physical characteristics is ancient, as is exemplified by Clement of Alexandria’s quotation (2nd / 3rd century CE) from Xenophanes (6th / 5th century BCE) about how people depict their gods. Just as cattle or horses would depict their gods as their conspecifics, so “Ethiopians say that their gods are snub–nosed and black, Thracians that they are pale and red-haired.” See Wikipedia: Xenophanes.
    • The confusion seems to have arisen from the (probably) false supposition that races are sub-species (Wikipedia: Subspecies). But it does seem that genetically isolated populations develop (or maybe have developed from exemplars of) particular sets of anatomical characteristics and are easily recognisable thereby. Of course, there’s no ideal stereotype, many gradations and the like.
    • What’s wrong with acknowledging that there are Nordic, or Han Chinese races? And so on. Acknowledging that races exist isn’t the same as racism, which is prejudice against races merely because their typical characteristics differ from those of one’s own group.
    • Much more could be said on this difficult subject, on which it is dangerous to talk much.
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Hochman (Adam) - Is ‘race’ modern?"
Footnote 254: Aeon: Mauch - Slow hope (WebRef=9240)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Christof Mauch
    • Author Narrative: Christof Mauch is director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and the Chair in American Culture and Transatlantic Relations, both at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich. He is an affiliated professor in history at LMU Munich, and an honorary professor at Renmin University in China. He is the author of Slow Hope: Rethinking Ecologies of Crisis and Fear (2019).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Climate change is an emergency but despair is not the answer. The world is full of untold stories of people-powered change
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Today’s saving powers will not come from a deus ex machina. In an ever-more complex and synthetic world, our saving powers won’t come from a single source, and certainly not from a too-big-to-fail approach or from those who have been drawn into the maelstrom of our age of speed. Hope can work as a wakeup call, an antidote to lethargy. It acknowledges setbacks: the dialectics of ecological crisis, environmental awareness and necessary action. The concept of slow hope suggests that we can’t expect things to change overnight. If the ever-faster exhaustion of natural resources (in ecological terms) and the ‘shrinking of the present (in social terms) are urgent problems of humans, then cutting down on exhaustive practices and working towards a ‘stretching of the present’ will be ways to move forward.
      • Identifying ways to transcend the craze of consumption, production, travel and extreme workloads in a merry-go-round world can be inspiring and subversive. Our saving powers will come from diverse cultures and initiatives, from thinkers and mavericks and urban and rural communities around the world. They will come from a growing number of people who understand the power inherent in the way that we imagine better worlds, who think creatively and act ecologically: from women and men who are inspired by slow hope.
Footnote 255: Aeon: Cottingham - What is the soul if not a better version of ourselves? (WebRef=9239)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: John Cottingham
    • Author Narrative: John Cottingham is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Reading, professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Roehampton, London, and an honorary fellow of St John’s College, Oxford University. His latest book is n Search of the Soul (2020).
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Not least, the idea of the soul is bound up with our search for identity or selfhood. The French philosopher René Descartes, writing in 1637, spoke of ‘this me, that is to say the soul by which I am what I am’. He went on to argue that this soul is something entirely nonphysical, but there are now very few people, given our modern knowledge of the brain and its workings, who would wish to follow him here. But even if we reject Descartes’s immaterialist account of the soul, each of us retains a strong sense of ‘this me’, this self that makes me what I am. We are all engaged in the task of trying to understand the ‘soul’ in this sense.
      • But this core self that we seek to understand, and whose growth and maturity we seek to foster in ourselves and encourage in others, is not a static or closed phenomenon. Each of us is on a journey, to grow and to learn, and to reach towards the best that we can become. So the terminology of ‘soul’ is not just descriptive, but is what philosophers sometimes call ‘normative’: using the language of ‘soul’ alerts us not just to the way we happen to be at present, but to the better selves we have it in our power to become.
      • To say we have a soul is partly to say that we humans, despite all our flaws, are fundamentally oriented towards the good. We yearn to rise above the waste and futility that can so easily drag us down and, in the transformative human experiences and practices we call ‘spiritual’, we glimpse something of transcendent value and importance that draws us forward. In responding to this call, we aim to realise our true selves, the selves we were meant to be. This is what the search for the soul amounts to; and it is here, if there is a meaning to human life, that such meaning must be sought.
  2. Notes
    • While no doubt trying to say something serious and important, this sort of philosophy is just too woolly for my taste. It's full of wholesome assertions, but no real proofs or justifications in the non-hand-wavy sense.
    • It's good to see his apparent espousal of materialism, while allowing space for the 'spiritual' in a metaphorical sense. Materialism doesn't need to imply a base physical hedonism.
    • But otherwise there are too many pious (surprisingly in the not-obviously religious sense) assertions that appear rather baseless.
    • No doubt it’s a plug for his new book on the subject of the Soul. I’ve had a quick look on Amazon, but I’m not tempted.
    • PID Note: Souls
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Cottingham (John) - What is the soul if not a better version of ourselves?"
Footnote 256: Aeon: Jaarsma - Choose your own birth (WebRef=9242)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Ada Jaarsma
    • Author Narrative: Ada Jaarsma is professor of philosophy at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. Her latest book is Kierkegaard After the Genome: Science, Existence and Belief in This World (2018).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Every human is both an animal with a deep evolutionary history and an individual who must bring their existence into being
  2. Notes
Footnote 257: Aeon: Gutmann - Testosterone is widely, and sometimes wildly, misunderstood (WebRef=9241)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Matthew Gutmann
    • Author Narrative: Matthew Gutmann is professor of anthropology and faculty fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. His latest book is Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short (2019).
  2. Notes
Footnote 258: Aeon: Wu - Hypocognition is a censorship tool that mutes what we can feel (WebRef=9236)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Kaidi Wu
    • Author Narrative: Kaidi Wu is a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of Michigan.
    • Extract: It is a strange feeling, stumbling upon an experience that we wish we had the apt words to describe, a precise language to capture. When we don’t, we are in a state of hypocognition, which means we lack the linguistic or cognitive representation of a concept to describe ideas or interpret experiences.
Footnote 259: Aeon: Vandergheynst & Vonèche Cardia - Why lifelong learning is the international passport to success (WebRef=9222)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Pierre Vandergheynst & Isabelle Voneche Cardia
    • Author Narrative:
      • Pierre Vandergheynst is professor of electrical engineering and computer and communication sciences, as well as vice-provost for education at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
      • Isabelle Vonèche Cardia is a historian, by training, and currently a researcher with the REACT Group at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
  2. Notes
    • This paper is sensible enough, but applies mostly to technological subjects.
    • Most companies already seem to participate in “professional development” schemes to keep their staff up-to-date.
    • There’s one mention of lawyers, but otherwise nothing for arts graduates.
    • Also, nothing recommended for the “improvement” of the general population, who may have missed out on education – or failed to understand its purpose – as they grew up and now need their lives enriching, not to mention being made better citizens.
Footnote 260: Aeon: Morus - Supermensch (WebRef=9224)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Iwan Rhys Morus
    • Author Narrative: Iwan Rhys Morus is professor of history at Aberystwyth University in Wales. He is the editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of Science (2017), and his most recent book is Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future (2019).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Superman et al were invented amid feverish eugenic speculation: what does the superhero craze say about our own times?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • In 2002, Michael Shermer – editor of The Skeptic magazine – paraphrased Arthur C Clarke’s dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic when he said that any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilisation would be indistinguishable from God. Writing in Scientific American, Sherman was trying to cut God down to size, but his remark also captures the important point that aspirations to divinity are built into the contemporary understanding of technology and what it can deliver: ‘Men of the future may become as gods,’ as that 1900 headline put it. That’s the work that superheroes do for tech culture now. They’re the shape of things to come.
      • But the superheroes also demonstrate what a peculiar kind of divinity this is – shorn of the spirituality that is supposed to define our relationship to the divine. The divine power that the technological future offers devotees is purely material. And the doors of that technological heaven will be opened only for the elect who have the material means to enter.
  2. Notes
Footnote 261: Aeon: Frances - The lure of ‘cool’ brain research is stifling psychotherapy (WebRef=9227)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Allen Frances
    • Author Narrative: Allen Frances is an American psychiatrist. He was chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine in North Carolina, and of the task force that produced the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV (1994). He is the author of Differential Therapeutics (1984), Your Mental Health (1999), Saving Normal (2013), Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis (2013), and Twilight of American Sanity (2017).
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Drug companies are a commercial Goliath with enormous political and economic power. Psychotherapy is a tiny David with no marketing budget; no salespeople mobbing doctors’ offices; no TV ads; no internet pop-ups; no influence with politicians or insurance companies. No surprise then that the NIMH’s neglect of psychotherapy research has been accompanied by its neglect in clinical practice. And the NIMH’s embrace of biological reductionism provides an unintended and unwarranted legitimisation of the drug-company promotion that there is a pill for every problem.
      • A balanced NIMH budget would go a long way toward correcting the two biggest mental-health catastrophes of today. Studies comparing psychotherapy versus medication for a wide variety of mild to moderate mental disorders would help to level the playing field for the two, and eventually reduce our massive overdependence on drug treatments for nonexistent ‘chemical imbalances’. Health service research is desperately needed to determine best practices to help people with severe mental illness avoid incarceration and homelessness, and also escape from them.
      • The NIMH is entitled to keep an eye on the future, but not at the expense of the desperate needs of the present. Brain research should remain an important part of a balanced NIMH agenda, not its sole preoccupation. After 30 years running down a bio-reductionistic blind alley, it is long past time for the NIMH to consider a biopsychosocial reset, and to rebalance its badly uneven research portfolio.
Footnote 262: Aeon: Dashan - It is not you, but existence itself, that is fundamentally unsound (WebRef=9233)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Natalia Dashan
    • Author Narrative: Natalia Dashan is a writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, Palladium Magazine and Forbes, among others.
    • Central Excerpt:
      • A popular framing of mental health divides people into two categories: you are either sane or insane. Let’s call this the split-group framing. If you are sane, you stay away from therapists. You stay away from hospitals, away from meditation retreats, away from psychics and health gurus. These are not for you – and if you venture into this territory, then at best you are mentally ill, and at worst you are somehow an inferior, weaker sort of person.
      • There is another framing that challenges this: therapy and mental health treatments are not just for the insane – they are for everybody. Let’s call this the everyman framing. This idea has been gaining traction in the zeitgeist of the past few years. Everybody has problems, and everybody can benefit from talking to somebody. Everybody can improve their communication skills, become more resilient, and level up their mental game.
      • Neither of these paradigms is completely correct. The first is wrong because the symptoms of mental illness do not fall into a dichotomy. Many diagnoses in the DSM-5 can be described on a spectrum of severity, a person can have more than one diagnosis, and the parameters for each diagnosis itself undergo debate by psychologists. The second paradigm is an improvement in that it tries to eliminate the stigma around mental health treatment, but it is still a limited framework. Instead of splitting the nuance into a ‘sane’ versus ‘insane’ dichotomy, it flattens it into ‘everybody is slightly off’.
      • But these distortions are minor compared with the much larger piece of the puzzle that is not just wrong in both paradigms but missing entirely. And this is the fact that most mental health care does not take place in the psychologist’s office at all – but in the way we live our lives.
  2. Notes
    • While the extract given above is fairly sensible, I couldn’t make much sense of most of this essay, which seems to revolve around an autobiographical account of an episode of heatstroke in Vietnam.
    • The essay’s sub-title is misleading, and the essay doesn’t deliver the exciting discussion anticipated.
Footnote 263: Aeon: Andrews & Monso - Rats are us (WebRef=9232)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Kristin Andrews & Susana Monsó
    • Author Narrative:
      • Kristin Andrews is the York Research Chair in Animal Minds and a professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto. She is on the board of directors of the Borneo Orangutan Society Canada and a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada.
      • Susana Monsó is a post-doctoral fellow at the Unit of Ethics and Human-Animal Studies of the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna.
    • Aeon Subtitle: They are sentient beings with rich emotional lives, yet we subject them to experimental cruelty without conscience. Why?
    • Authors' Conclusion:
      • When we take the time to step back and treat rats as individuals – as Fouts did with Booee and Goodall did with David Greybeard – we can come to see rats not as research tools, but as sentient beings who have the capacity to enjoy rich emotional lives. As researchers found out more about primates, they realised that primates required protection, leading to welfare legislation and oversight committees. However, as we find out more about rats, rather than changing the way we treat them, science is repeating the mistakes made in the early days of primate research. Harlow’s ethically questionable logic was that monkeys are similar enough to humans to be used as models for human mental disorders, but not similar enough to warrant the same levels of protection from harm. The justification for the rat research is that rats are similar enough to humans to serve as good models of human health, including mental health, but not similar enough to warrant any legal protection from harm. Some scientists even welcome this lack of care toward rats, who with other rodents are considered to ‘offer a cheap, convenient and ethically less controversial alternative to non-human primates in the study of social cognition’. While the free use of rats in research might be less ethically controversial than the use of primates – given the relative lack of rat ambassadors – it is not more ethically justifiable.
      • It is understandable to make an ethical mistake once. But, after realising the error, we should be better prepared to see the problem in new cases. Moral progress depends on realising that two cases are alike in morally relevant ways. The failure to generalise from one case to another can lead us to continue making the same ethical mistakes in new contexts. We cannot deny the moral costs of creating psychopathologies in rats in order to treat psychopathologies in humans, while weighing those costs and condemning the practice in primates. The very similarity that is appealed to in justifying the science – that primates are vulnerable to physical and mental pain, that they have emotions and relationships that can be destroyed when they are denied normal maternal care – is what creates the moral cost of creating those harms. These moral costs exist in the case of rats too. It is only our moral short-sightedness and relentless anthropocentrism that have prevented us from taking them into account.
  2. Notes
Footnote 264: Aeon: Video - What is déjà vu? (WebRef=9234)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A brain glitch? A sign of quantum entanglement? What science says about déjà vu
    • Author Summary:
      • Roughly two-thirds of people have had déjà vu, or the weird feeling that a new situation has been experienced before. Yet its prevalence belies just how mysterious the phenomenon remains to researchers, despite some extraordinary recent leaps in neuroscience. In part, this is because it’s extremely difficult to instigate déjà vu in the lab.
      • But as this brief animation from BBC Ideas shows, scientists do have some hypotheses for what brings déjà vu to the surface of consciousness – from the idea that it might be a built-in processing glitch in the brain, or an indication of healthy memory, to the slightly more puzzling notion that it’s part of quantum entanglement.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting little video.
    • Most of it revolves around suggestions that déjà vu is down to slight timing differences of neural processes in the brain – either laterally or otherwise.
    • Alternatively, it could be a symptom of memory (whereby similar views are identified).
    • The wackier alternatives (quantum entanglement as a window to parallel universes) are just mentioned at the end and not seriously entertained. Similarly, it’s noted than in The Matrix déjà vu is a glitch in the simulation, parallel to the glitches in our brains mentioned above, but not posited as a solution!
Footnote 265: Aeon: Video - Walk (WebRef=9208)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘Why do we need colours?’ A blind boy and a sighted girl experience a meadow
    • Author's Abstract:
      • ‘What do you think the grass looks like?’
      • Two friends – a blind boy and a sighted girl – wander through a meadow, riding their bikes, picking dandelions and doing their best to avoid stinging nettles. Now and then, the girl probes the contours of the boy’s sensory experience, often to his annoyance. After all, how can he explain what it’s like to not know or even understand colours, or why his experience doesn’t require them? Deriving depth and nuance from the simple premise of children at play, the Polish filmmaker Filip Jacobson reflects on the possibilities and limits of communicating subjective experience, as well as the diversity of ways to internalise the exterior world.
  2. Notes
    • While the video is very sweet, it doesn't really answer any questions. Interesting to see the blind boy riding a bicycle, though!
Footnote 266: Aeon: Video - Musical traumas (WebRef=9210)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: It’s great to learn music as a child – except when it’s no fun at all
    • Author's Abstract:
      • There’s a romanticised view that learning music as a child is a profoundly enriching experience, that it’s a portal into a world of creativity and a means of achieving a host of secondary cognitive benefits.
      • While learning an instrument is all of that and more for some people, music lessons can also be the locus of a very particular set of traumas, from the indignity of being forced to practise the piano with teacups on your hands to the paralysing performance anxiety that might surge forth at a dreaded recital.
      • Composed of the true stories of unhappy music students rendered in varied animated styles, and shot through with an undercurrent of dark humour, this short from the Serbian filmmaker Miloš Tomić plumbs the depths of music education – including the gargantuan gap between fantasising about greatness and actually achieving it.
  2. Notes
    • Entertaining, and true to life, in my experience!
Footnote 267: Aeon: Gertz - Nihilism (WebRef=9211)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Nolen Gertz
    • Author Narrative: Nolen Gertz is an assistant professor of applied philosophy at the University of Twente and a senior researcher of the 4TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology in Eindhoven, both in the Netherlands. He is the author of The Philosophy of War and Exile (2014), Nihilism and Technology (2018) and Nihilism (2019).
    • Aeon Subtitle: The risk of nihilism is that it alienates us from anything good or true. Yet believing in nothing has positive potential
    • Author's Introduction: Nihilism is a constant threat. As the 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt recognised, it is best understood not as a set of ‘dangerous thoughts’, but as a risk inherent in the very act of thinking. If we reflect on any specific idea long enough, no matter how strong it seems at first, or how widely accepted, we’ll start to doubt its truth. We might also begin to doubt whether those who accept the idea really know (or care) about whether or not the idea is true. This is one step away from thinking about why there is so little consensus about so many issues, and why everyone else seems to be so certain about what now appears to you so uncertain. At this point, on the brink of nihilism, there’s a choice: either keep thinking and risk alienating yourself from society; or stop thinking and risk alienating yourself from reality.
  2. Notes
    • This is an interesting paper that deserves more of my attention.
    • It’s not concerned with Nihilism in the philosophy of PID (the idea that persons don’t exist), nor particularly with nihilism as a political doctrine, but with the epistemological concept.
    • The basic idea – as the introduction makes clear – is that our claims to knowledge are without foundation. Then, if this is true, what do we do about it.
    • The author divides those who accept this position into active and passive nihilists. Active ones follow up in some life-changing way on their nihilism. Passive nihilists, on the other hand, carry on as normal.
    • I’d understood passive nihilism in the context of philosophy of religion (or philosophy of science) as anti-realism where you understand a set of beliefs as false, strictly speaking, but as useful either for living your life, or structuring your thought and practice.
    • PID Note: Nihilism
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Gertz (Nolen) - Nihilism"
Footnote 268: Aeon: Wayland-Smith - This ragged claw (WebRef=9214)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Ellen Wayland-Smith
    • Author Narrative: Ellen Wayland-Smith is an associate professor of writing at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well Set Table (2016) and The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America (2020).
    • Aeon Subtitle: It is a crab; no, a worm; no, a wolf. Early physicians weren’t entirely wrong to imagine cancer as a ravenous disease
  2. Notes
    • Basically an autobiographical account of the discovery of the author’s breast cancer together with various historical understandings of the disease and reflections on mortality, though not of the experience of living with the disease.
    • Contains some interesting etymology.
Footnote 269: Aeon: Robinson - Would you rather have a fish or know how to fish? (WebRef=9213)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jonny Robinson
    • Author Narrative: Jonny Robinson is a tutor and casual lecturer in the department of philosophy at Macquarie University. He lives in Sydney.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • And so it is with knowledge. Yes, it’s better to know, but only where this implies an accompanying attitude. If, instead, the possession of knowledge relies primarily upon the sporadic pillars of luck or privilege (as it so often does), one’s position is uncertain and in danger of an unfounded pride (not to mention pride’s own concomitant complications). Split into two discrete categories, then, we should prefer seeking to knowing. As with the agent who knows how to fish, the one who seeks knowledge can go out into the world, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding, but in any case able to continue until she is satisfied with her catch, a knowledge attained. And then, the next day, she might return to the river and do it all again.
      • A person will eventually come up against the world, logically, morally, socially, even physically. Some collisions will be barely noticeable, others will be catastrophic. The consistent posture of seeking the truth gives us the best shot at seeing clearly, and that is what we should praise and value.
  2. Notes
    • I’d previously heard the trope of fish and fishing in the context of helping 3rd-world peasants to be self-sufficient. However, this is nothing to do with that idea.
    • Rather it is asked whether it is better to seek knowledge, even though you might not find it – possibly because of having to start from a disadvantaged position – or to be handed it on a plate without paying it much attention.
    • Unsurprisingly, the author is in favour of the former. This is not because the journey is more important than the arrival, or that there’s no knowledge to be found, but because the practice of seeking knowledge trains you better to find it where it is there to be found.
Footnote 270: Aeon: Asma - Ancient animistic beliefs live on in our intimacy with tech (WebRef=9216)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Stephen Asma
    • Author Narrative: Stephen T Asma is professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago and a member of the Public Theologies of Technology and Presence programme at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California. He is the author of many books, including The Evolution of Imagination (2017), Why We Need Religion (2018) and his latest, The Emotional Mind: Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition (2019), co-authored with Rami Gabriel.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • So our new ‘tech-animism’ might not be detrimental at all. I might not really be ‘helping’ the robot, and it might not be ‘helping’ me, but behaving as if we’re actually relating – even bonding – keeps our empathic skills honed and ready for when it really counts. Immersion in tech relationships is not creating the loneliness epidemic. It’s a response to it. The actual causes of the loneliness epidemic started way before digital dominance.
      • Our new animism – animism 2.0 – might be quite helpful in keeping the social emotions and skills healthy enough for real human bonding, perspective-taking and empathy. Instead of dehumanising us, this tech-animism could actually be keeping us human.
  2. Notes
    • While the paper is interesting, I’m not convinced.
    • Contrary to the author’s position, animism of any form – given that it involves attributing minds to entities that lack them – is childish, given this is what young children do with regards to their teddies.
    • If it’s done knowingly, for emotional support, it’s rather pathetic.
    • If it’s done unknowingly, it portrays a false view of the world.
    • No doubt there are some spin-off benefits, as the author suggests, as there are with many practices, but clear distinctions need to be made if clarity of thought is to be maintained
Footnote 271: Aeon: Video - Chunyun (WebRef=9215)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Chinese New Year is a stunning spectacle of human migration in 3 billion journeys
    • Author's Abstract:
      • Chinese New Year (also known as Lunar New Year), which starts on the new moon that falls between 21 January and 20 February, is celebrated by some 1.5 billion people around the world. And, as travel has become more affordable to China’s rapidly growing middle class, the holiday now accounts for an estimated 3 billion trips (called chunyun in Chinese), making the celebration the world’s largest annual human migration.
      • The New York-based filmmaker Jonathan Bregel uses scenes of this extraordinary human flow to convey both the sheer magnitude of the movement of people and the moments of celebration that are a crucial aspect of the holiday.
  2. Notes
    • Rather dull, and shows what seems to me to be the mundanity of the event
Footnote 272: Aeon: Longworth - The ethics of speech acts (WebRef=9217)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Guy Longworth
    • Author Narrative: Guy Longworth is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK. His latest book, co-authored with Jennifer Hornsby, is Reading Philosophy of Language: Selected Texts With Interactive Commentary (2005).
    • Aeon Subtitle: It’s one thing to say something. It’s quite another for a person to do (or not do) something because of what you’ve said
  2. Notes
    • An interesting paper by one of my former supervisors.
    • The aim of the paper is – I think – to persuade us that pornography undermines women’s freedom of speech by making certain of their speech acts – namely those such as “I refuse to have sex with you” – ineffective by persuading (some) men that women (in general) don’t mean what they say when making such statements.
    • I wasn’t convinced, and I wasn’t convinced that Guy was either, though he wanted to be.
    • But the paper is important in explaining J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, which are divided into:-
      1. Locutionary Acts: Basically any meaningful statement.
      2. Illocutionary Acts: A statement intended to have an effect on the hearer, such as a request.
      3. Perlocutionary Acts: A statement that succeeds in having an effect on the hearer, such as a successful persuasion.
Footnote 273: Aeon: Heneghan - A place of silence (WebRef=9219)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Liam Heneghan
    • Author Narrative: Liam Heneghan is professor of environmental science and studies at DePaul University in Chicago. His latest book is Beasts at Bedtime: Revealing the Environmental Wisdom of Children’s Literature (2018).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Our cities are filled by the hubbub of human-made noise. Where shall we find the quietness we need to nurture our spirit?
  2. Notes
    • An interesting paper that's split into roughly two parts - Athens and Chicago.
    • Noise pollution is yet another aspect of the environmental problems we face.
    • He contrasts the two aspects of (ancient) Greek culture - roughly, the noise of the agora and democratic politics and the hesychasm of the contemplatives; both are necessary, though he replaces the religious quiet with a secular version he calls avoesis ("absence of noise", in modern Greek).
Footnote 274: Aeon: Video - A Jew walks into a bar (WebRef=9186)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Being a stand-up comedian is hard. It’s even harder when it’s against your religion
    • Abstract:
      • Have you heard this one before? An ultra-Orthodox Jew breaks the rules by going online, falls in love with stand-up comedy, and starts performing in clubs to help manage his crippling social anxiety. With deadpan delivery, and often wearing traditional Jewish Orthodox clothing, David Finkelstein has developed a comedic sensibility that connects with audiences at open mics in New York City.
      • But even as he grows ever more comfortable on stage and finds a second home in the comedy community, the experience is rife with challenges and compromises. Finkelstein is still devout and attempts to adhere to as many of his religion’s rules as possible, even as he operates in a cultural ‘grey area’ by performing. This means no physical contact with women, no vulgarity, and no shows on the Sabbath, which nixes the desirable slots on Friday and Saturday night. And, most challenging of all, it means navigating between two very different worlds as he tries to keep the faith while pursuing his passion.
      • An endearing fish-out-of-water tale that grapples meaningfully with questions of religious values, culture and mental health, A Jew Walks into a Bar follows Finkelstein as he tries to establish himself in the stand-up scene. The short is one-third of the US filmmaker Jonathan Miller’s feature-length documentary Standing Up (2019), which follows three unlikely stand-ups as they pursue comedy in New York.
Footnote 275: Aeon: Tracy - Find something morally sickening? Take a ginger pill (WebRef=9185)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jessica Tracy
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • We don’t have to extend our beliefs about right and wrong to behaviours that don’t actually hurt others, even if we find them disgusting. The tendency to do so is an ancient evolutionary holdover and, with the help of modern sanitation and safe sex practices, it’s one we can afford to set aside.
      • Yet this kind of moralisation is manifested frequently in response to a number of behaviours that, to some, appear to tarnish the presumed purity of the human body. The belief – held by 51 per cent of people in the United States – that it is wrong to engage in gay sex is shaped by the moralisation of sanctity. Some people might feel disgust in response to certain sexual behaviours (in the same way that most children do to all sexual behaviours) but, for adults, that emotional reaction is a misfire. Their disgust is not a valid signal of danger. And our research shows that moral beliefs based on sanctity concerns represent a different category of morality than those based on harm and fairness. We were able to shift people’s sanctity beliefs simply by giving them ginger. A moral view that changes on the basis of how nauseous we feel is probably not one that we want to put a lot of stake in.
      • Instead, many of us would prefer to hew to a set of moral standards that come from a coherent, rationally derived philosophy about enhancing justice and mitigating harms. Certain human behaviours do make us feel sick. But we need not rely on those feelings as a basis for our moral principles, or when judging others for what we feel to be immoral.
      • Before deciding that something is wrong, we might ask ourselves, is it just that I’m disgusted by it? Or, when encountering what appears to be a moral dilemma, we could play it safe and reach for a ginger ale.
  2. Notes
    • The idea – demonstrated by a double-blind experiment – is that some behaviours are literally disgusting, and the physical disgust – and thereby the moral repugnance – can be removed by administering ginger, a folk-remedy for motion sickness.
    • This only works for moderately disgusting behaviours – those beyond the pale are immune to the remedy.
    • The moral is that we should ignore our disgust if the behaviour doesn’t harm anyone (in today’s society).
    • The point that children find all sex disgusting is a good point that has occurred to me before. If you think too carefully about many normal bodily functions, they are pretty disgusting, so why are some aberrant ones deemed especially so?
    • My own view is that some activities are such that they use the body in ways for which evolution hasn’t formed it, and are – most likely – more harmful than the standard methods.
Footnote 276: Aeon: Evans - Perennial philosophy (WebRef=9181)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jules Evans
    • Author Narrative: Jules Evans is policy director at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary at the University of London. He is the author of Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations (2013) and The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher’s Search for Ecstatic Experience (2017).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Aldous Huxley argued that all religions in the world were underpinned by universal beliefs and experiences. Was he right?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Any literate or curious person can’t help but notice the interesting similarities between different traditions’ spiritual techniques – I am struck by the similarities between Stoicism and Buddhism, for example. We can learn from other paths and travellers along our way, and recognise the wisdom (perhaps divine wisdom) in other traditions. We can meet practitioners from other faiths in friendship, as the Dalai Lama meets with his friend Desmond Tutu.
      • Crucially, we can always remember that God/ultimate reality is greater than any of our religions, that human understanding is limited and prone to error and sin (particularly the sins of overcertainty, arrogance and intolerance), and we will probably all be surprised along the way. Interreligious dialogue isn’t just a nice extracurricular activity, in this view – it’s an essential part of our journey beyond our biases, deeper into truth.
      • Not everyone will accept this sort of inclusivism. Some will insist on a stark choice between Jesus or hell, the Quran or hell. In some ways, overcertain exclusivism is a much better marketing strategy than sympathetic inclusivism. But if just some of the world’s population opened their minds to the wisdom of other religions, without having to leave their own faith, the world would be a better, more peaceful place. Like Aldous Huxley, I still believe in the possibility of growing spiritual convergence between different religions and philosophies, even if right now the tide seems to be going the other way.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Aldous Huxley
    • An interesting background piece by a sensible author. I won't be following it up, though.
Footnote 277: Aeon: Green - A psychiatric diagnosis can be more than an unkind ‘label’ (WebRef=9179)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Huw Green
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Psychiatric diagnoses are imperfect, sketchy theories about how people’s minds can give them trouble. We know that they are largely less precise and valid than is popularly understood, but this does not render them totally uninformative. We have learned snippets of useful information by considering psychological problems in terms of categories: the effectiveness, or not, of treatments for particular groups of people; the elevated risk of suicide among others.
      • Many symptoms can seem to ‘make sense’ in the context of a person’s life, but we know that humans are sense-making machines, so we need to be vigilant against ‘making sense’ where it is only illusory. The great intellectual challenge of clinical psychology is to integrate knowledge about reasons and people with knowledge about causes and mechanisms. We should avoid relying solely on diagnostic information, but we shouldn’t discard it altogether.
Footnote 278: Aeon: Greenberg - This mortal coil (WebRef=9159)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jeff Greenberg
    • Author Narrative: Jeff Greenberg is a professor and social psychology programme director at the University of Arizona. His books include The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Life in Death (2015), co-authored with Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszczynski.
    • Aeon Subtitle: The fear of death drives many evils, from addiction to prejudice and war. Can it also be harnessed as a force for good?
  2. Notes
    • This seems an eminently sensible thesis. Basically, for evolutionary reasons, we are all subconsciously terrified of death, and we respond either by denying that death is the end for us as individuals or seek some other lasting effect from our lives.
    • The latter “solution” means that we wish that whatever we’ve done persist in its effects, which also means that the forum in which we’ve acted should persist. It also requires us to bolster our self-esteem, so that we can consider ourselves as amongst those whose effects are worth preserving.
    • In turn, all this can make us antipathetical towards those who would – or are perceived to want to – overthrow this forum for our action. Those suspected of being potential overthrowers may be all those outside our own circle (usually considered quite widely).
    • There’s quite a lot of evidence presented to support the view that being reminded of our own impending death leads to more conservative views – though it can also apply to hard-liners on the left.
    • PID Note: Death
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Greenberg (Jeff) - This mortal coil"
Footnote 279: Aeon: Video - The hairy Nobel (WebRef=9163)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘The secrets of exotic matter’ revealed by the winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics
    • Abstract:
      • The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to David J Thouless, F Duncan M Haldane and J Michael Kosterlitz for their ‘theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter’ that ‘revealed the secrets of exotic matter’.
      • If that sounds massively difficult to comprehend – you’re right, it is. But, as this collaboration between the French filmmaker Charlotte Arene and the research team Physics Reimagined (at the University of Paris-Saclay) shows, sometimes complex and seemingly obscure discoveries can have consequences well beyond the walls of a laboratory.
      • With a distinctive, shapeshifting animated style, The Hairy Nobel combs through the surprisingly fascinating history of topological insulators, including how their discovery cascaded into breakthroughs in several fields of research, including electronics, superconductors and quantum computers – and prompted a new one.
  2. Notes
Footnote 280: Aeon: Kaufman - Neither person nor cadaver (WebRef=9137)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Sharon Kaufman
    • Author Narrative: Sharon Kaufman is professor emerita and former chair (2012-2018) of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Her latest book is Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives and Where to Draw the Line (2015).
    • Aeon Subtitle: The body is warm, but the brain has gone dark: why the notion of brain death provokes the thorniest of medical dilemmas
  2. Notes
Footnote 281: Aeon: Video - The viral origins of the placenta (WebRef=9139)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: In the tug-of-war between mother and baby, the placenta is a life-giving referee
    • Abstract:
      • The womb isn’t as welcoming a space for a developing offspring as you might imagine. Indeed, from the moment an embryo is implanted in the mother’s womb, her immune system views the foreign body as something of an invader. Thereafter, the relationship between mother and developing baby is at least partially defined by a biological war over resources. In this clash, the placenta serves as a life-giving intermediary between mother and offspring, allowing for the transport of nutrients while keeping blood supplies entirely separate.
      • With a surrealist-inspired touch, this animation by Diana Gradinaru for The Royal Institution of Great Britain traces the many functions of this fascinating, essential and short-lived organ, as well as its viral evolutionary origins.
  2. Notes
Footnote 282: Aeon: Madison - Investigating Homo floresiensis and the myth of the ebu gogo (WebRef=9142)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Paige Madison
    • Author Narrative: Paige Madison is a graduate student at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. She is interested in the history of paleoanthropology, Neanderthals, Australopithecines and Homo floresiensis.
    • Author's Conclusion: H floresiensis revealed that the past was more bizarre than we imagined, full of evolutionary hodgepodges, unexpected migrations, and life in surprising places. And while the legend of ebu gogo failed to echo paleoanthropological reality, such botched connections are not always the case. Researchers from geology to palaeontology turn to folklore, and events from volcanic eruptions to fossil discoveries have shown that science has something to gain from engaging with legend. Even the fabled creature with a lion’s body and an eagle’s beak introduced to Greek travellers as the griffin was likely grounded in encounters with dinosaur bones. The interplay between science and myth has become ever more complex – and more interesting. After all, if hobbits once lived on a remote Indonesian island, what else was once possible?
  2. Notes
Footnote 283: Aeon: Klein - The politics of logic (WebRef=9143)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Alexander Klein
    • Author Narrative: Alexander Klein is an associate professor of philosophy and director of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre at McMaster University in Ontario. His first book, ‘Consciousness Is Motor: Warp and Weft in William James’, is forthcoming.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Should philosophy express the national character of a people? Bertrand Russell’s ‘scientific’ philosophy was a bulwark against nationalism
  2. Notes
    • This paper looks at Russell’s pacifism as a stimulus for his claim that logic is a universal language, and that what is true is true everywhere. I agree with this, and that it is at the core of analytic philosophy. Also, that it is under attack and has been since the rise of postmodernism (which is not mentioned in the paper, which refers further back to idealism, which has faded from view).
    • Towards the end, the paper refers to the work of Michael Huemer, and quotes his attack on the History of Philosophy: “Let’s suppose that you have a really good historian of philosophy, who does a really great piece of work by the standards of the field, which also is completely correct and persuasive. What is the most that can have been accomplished? Answer: ‘Now we know what philosopher P meant by utterance U.’ Before that, maybe some people thought that U meant X; now we know that it meant Y. This is of no philosophical import. We still don’t know whether X or Y is true.”.
    • I agree with this in part, but think this is a bit of a caricature – and reflects the history of ideas rather than the History of Philosophy per se, which ought also to engage critically with the thoughts of past philosophers. But I do detect a tendency to defend the views of past heroes over and above their intrinsic merits.
Footnote 284: Aeon: Video - Norman, norman (WebRef=9145)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: How does Norman, a 16-year-old Shih Tzu, see the pet cloning dilemma?
    • Abstract:
      • Loving a pet is usually accompanied by a sombre and unavoidable truth: unless you’ve bought a puppy to accompany you through your final days or are providing excellent care to your tortoise, your dear animal companion will likely precede you in death. However, if you’re a dog owner who happens to have $100,000 to spare, the wonders of modern medical technology do offer a potential loophole.
      • Co-starring the Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari, her beloved 16-year-old Shih Tzu Norman and the US singer and dog-cloning proponent Barbra Streisand, Norman, Norman follows Romvari as she falls into a YouTube hole on the promises, perils and prohibitive cost of pet cloning.
      • Bittersweet and inflected with understated humour, this offbeat short debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2018.
  2. Notes
Footnote 285: Aeon: Video - The mushroom hunters (WebRef=9135)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘Observe everything’: Neil Gaiman’s celebration of culture’s journey from science to knowledge
    • Abstract:
      • Some mushrooms will kill you,
        while some will show you gods
        and some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify.
      • The UK-born writer Neil Gaiman wrote the poem ‘The Mushroom Hunters’ for an event held in Brooklyn in 2017 to celebrate ‘great scientists and scientific discoveries’.
      • In this animated adaptation of the poem performed by his wife, the American musician and artist Amanda Palmer, its themes of inherited wisdom, female power and humanity’s irrepressible pursuit of knowledge are visualised in striking watercolours to offer a richly imagined perspective on the relationship between science and culture.
Footnote 286: Aeon: Maskivker - Given how little effect you can have, is it rational to vote? (WebRef=9116)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Julia Maskivker
    • Author Narrative: Julia Maskivker is an associate professor of Political Science at Rollins College in Florida. She is interested in ethical and political theory; in particular, theories of justice and equality. She is the author of Self-Realization and Justice (2012); Rationality, Democracy, and Justice (2014), co-edited with Claudio Lopez-Guerra; and The Duty to Vote (2019).
  2. Notes
    • A sensible article, essentially saying that – while it may seem that my individual action does nothing, collectively these individual actions do.
    • This is analogous to solutions to the “free rider” paradox.
    • Analogies are also made to reducing an individual’s carbon footprint and to donations to charity. Neither of these individual actions solve the problems they address, but collectively they do.
    • The cost of individual action is discussed, and deemed negligible for casting a vote (in the free world at any rate), though maybe less negligible in doing so in an informed way.
    • I would note that the costs and benefits vary greatly in cases that may seem to be analogous. An individual gift to charity has – in general – at least a proportionate benefit to the cost, though excessive giving could undermine this equation if it led to local responsibilities being abrogated. But some carbon footprint reduction strategies – not travelling at all, for instance – could lead to greater hardship than the problem to be solved, whereas avoiding needless journeys clearly has a net positive benefit.
    • Some might object that in “first past the post” voting, there’s no linear relationship between expenditure and gain. Take voting in a “safe seat” where an individual vote makes no difference, even a small one as in other virtuous acts. I suspect there’s an analogy with the sorites paradox.
Footnote 287: Aeon: Trivellato - The rumour about the Jews (WebRef=9104)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Francesca Trivellato
    • Author Narrative: Francesca Trivellato is the Andrew W Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author of The Familiarity of Strangers (2009) and The Promise and Peril of Credit (2019). She is a founding coeditor of Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Antisemitism flourished in response to the unsettling, abstract growth of finance capitalism in the early modern world
Footnote 288: Aeon: Thomas - Before, now, and next (WebRef=9022)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Emily Thomas
    • Author Narrative: Emily Thomas is an associate professor in philosophy at Durham University. She mostly writes on the history of philosophy, and is the author of Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British Metaphysics (2018). Her forthcoming book, The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad, will be published in 2020 by Oxford University Press.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they? On McTaggart’s philosophy of time
  2. Notes
Footnote 289: Aeon: Green - Africa, in its fullness (WebRef=8888)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Toby Green
    • Author Narrative: Toby Green teaches Lusophone African history and culture at King's College London. His latest book, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019), was awarded the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and will be published in paperback in January 2020.
    • Aeon Subtitle: The West focuses only on slavery, but the history of Africa is so much more than a footnote to European imperialism
    • Author's Conclusion
      • ... there is so much more to African history than stale narratives of slavery and colonialism.
      • One of the most insidious consequences of European colonialism was the devaluing of precolonial history and cultures. As the revolutionary Amílcar Cabral from Guinea-Bissau wrote in a key essay in 1966, colonial force required not only military control but also an ideological conquest, and this necessitated the undermining of older histories and cultures on the continent.
      • The legacy of this lurks in the continuing devaluation of African history and the need to update the way it is taught and studied, both inside and outside the continent.
      • Long into the postcolonial era, the effects of this colonial effort live on in the migration crisis, and the loss of former ways of knowledge that – like those related to ecology, and many other things – have much to offer the world in the 21st century.
  2. Notes
    • This is a fairly sensible paper, and effectively a plug for his latest book: A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution, which I might buy, and may even read one day.
    • He's right that West African history should be told from the perspective of the indigenous cultures, with colonialism and the slave trade mentioned only insofar as they impact on them (which, of course, they do greatly).
    • The examples given in the paper do, however, seem to be very intertwined with European intervention. Freetown in Sierra Leone is - of course - a British creation.
    • It is poignant how academia in Africa is stymied by lack of funds for books and poor infrastructure, including unreliable and slow internet connections, exacerbated by civil wars and corruption.
    • The author thinks – rightly – that Africa ( which is not a single nation but a diverse continent) needs to develop a positive self-image and not to share the developed-world’s view of itself as a basket case in need of help (despite this – sadly – being the case).
    • The way to do this is by telling its own history – but that’s always too far down the priority list to attract interest and resources. So, the author – not himself African – has developed an A Level course in West African history.
    • I imagine it must be a fine tightrope that needs to be traversed between “doing down” and “bigging up”.
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Green (Toby) - Africa, in its fullness"
Footnote 290: Aeon: Paik - Robogamis are the real heirs of terminators and transformers (WebRef=8807)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jamie Paik
    • Author Narrative: Jamie Paik is professor of mechanical engineering and director of the reconfigurable robotics lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne.
    • Author's Conclusion: Robotics technology is advancing to be more personalised and adaptive for humans, and this unique species of reconfigurable origami robots shows immense promise. It could become the platform to provide the intuitive, embeddable robotic interface to meet our needs. The robots will no longer look like the characters from the movies. Instead, they will be all around us, continuously adapting their form and function – and we won’t even know it.
  2. Notes
Footnote 291: Aeon: Video - Wolf pack (WebRef=8792)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A masterwork of nature filmmaking that helped transform how wolves were seen
    • Aeon Abstract:
      • The Canadian author, artist and naturalist Bill Mason (1929-1988) was celebrated for his films exploring his country’s vast wilderness. Perhaps his best-known work is a trio of films about wolves – Death of a Legend (1971), Cry of the Wild (1972) and Wolf Pack (1974) – aimed at educating the public and dispelling negative myths about the animals.
      • For Wolf Pack, the shortest of the trilogy, Mason chronicled the lives of wolves facing the dramatic changes of the seasons over the course of a year, elucidating the central role of social hierarchies and cycles in their lives.
      • With profound respect and admiration for the wolves permeating each sequence, Mason finds brutality and beauty in the pack’s perpetual struggle for survival, creating an iconic entry in the crowded field of nature documentaries.
  2. Notes
Footnote 292: Aeon: Lenz - The adversarial culture in philosophy does not serve the truth (WebRef=8763)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Martin Lenz
    • Author's Conclusion: Seeing critique as part of the claim, then, would mean altering the evaluative stance towards ideas as well as their proponents. The more we can toy and tinker around with a claim, the more we can understand its implications. The appropriate metaphorical resources for naming this philosophical practice should not be derived from warfare but from playgrounds, where reinvention and serendipity guide our interactions. The critical nature of philosophy will thrive more if we model our conversations on the playful exchanges among friends rather than on the idea of a tribunal looking to tear down a philosopher who has an idea.
  2. Notes
Footnote 293: Aeon: Sommer - Reasons not to scoff at ghosts, visions and near-death experiences (WebRef=8769)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Andreas Sommer
    • Author's Conclusion: By making this quasi-clinical proposal, I’m aware that I could be overstepping my boundaries as a historian of Western science studying the means by which transcendental positions have been rendered inherently ‘unscientific’ over time. However, questions of belief versus evidence are not the exclusive domain of scientific and historical research. In fact, orthodoxy is often crystallised collective bias starting on a subjective level, which, as William James himself urged, is ‘a weakness of our nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can’. No matter if we are committed to scientific orthodoxy or to an open-minded perspective on ghostly visions and other unusual subjective experiences, both will require cultivating a relentless scrutiny of the concrete sources that nourish our most fundamental convictions – including the religious and scientific authorities on which they rest perhaps a little too willingly.
  2. Notes
Footnote 294: Aeon: Video - Spinoza's 'Ethics' - what do you mean by 'God' (WebRef=8592)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Freedom is learning to like what it’s rational to like: Spinoza’s ‘abominable heresies’
    • Abstract:
      • Today, the philosophical treatise known as the Ethics (1677) by Baruch Spinoza ("Spinoza (Benedict de), Curley (Edwin), Hampshire (Stuart) - Ethics") is widely considered a masterwork of philosophy. But at the time of its publication, Spinoza’s radical vision of God as synonymous with nature was enough for the Portuguese-Jewish congregation of Amsterdam to excommunicate him for ‘abominable heresies’.
      • In this short video from the London Review of Books, the British philosopher and historian Jonathan Ree dissects the radical rationalism of the Ethics, elucidating Spinoza’s once-unconventional views on God, freedom and the necessity of approaching the world with an ‘intellectual love’ above all else.
  2. Notes
      While it's interesting to hear what Jonathan Ree has to say, I've never been able to extract anything clear from the Ethics itself, not that I've tried since my undergraduate days, so never know whether commentators are saying what Spinoza said, or what they would have liked him to have said.
Footnote 295: Aeon: Isaac - Is artificial-womb technology a tool for women’s liberation? (WebRef=8578)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Sasha Isaac
    • Author Narrative: Sasha Isaac recently graduated from New York University where she studied bioethics. Her master’s thesis was on transnational surrogacy in India.
  2. Notes
Footnote 296: Aeon: Video - Polyphonic Mozart (WebRef=8581)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Singing Mozart in the MRI shows how overtone singers can hit two notes at once
    • Summary:
      • In polyphonic overtone singing, vocalists manipulate their tongue, mouth and throat to produce two tones at once. While the technique has emerged in disparate societies, it is thought to have originated in (and is most commonly associated with) Mongolian culture.
      • For this video, the German singer Anna-Maria Hefele entered an MRI machine to perform Mozart’s ‘Sehnsucht nach dem Frühling’ (‘Longing for Springtime’), alternating between ‘normal’ monophonic and polyphonic overtone singing.
      • Produced by researchers at the Freiburg Institute for Musicians’ Medicine in Germany, the MRI imagery provides an extraordinary peek into the distinct differences between these singing styles, revealing yet another marvel of human physiology.
  2. Notes
      Thankfully this is very brief. Not very enlightening, and the effect isn't very impressive, and has nothing to do with Mozart, or so I imagine.
Footnote 297: Aeon: Pigliucci - Consciousness is real (WebRef=8572)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Massimo Pigliucci
    • Aeon Subtitle: Consciousness is neither a spooky mystery nor an illusory belief. It’s a valid and causally efficacious biological reality
  2. Notes
Footnote 298: Aeon: Gross - How pottering about in the garden creates a time warp (WebRef=8553)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Hariet Gross
    • Author Narrative: Harriet Gross is professor of psychology, as well as acting pro vice chancellor and head of the College of Arts, at the University of Lincoln in the UK. Her latest book is The Psychology of Gardening (2018).
Footnote 299: Aeon: Lane - Rules or citizens? (WebRef=8542)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Melissa Lane
    • Author Narrative: Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics and director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Her books include Eco-Republic (2011/2012) and The Birth of Politics (2015), and she often appears on the In Our Time broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Ancient Athenian and Greek practices afford us insights into how and why to maintain real accountability in public life
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Guerin, McCrae & Shepheard - Accountability in modern government: Recommendations for change
      → Gasaway & Parrish - Administrative Law In Flux: An Opportunity For Constitutional Reassessment
      → Lane - Antianarchia: interpreting political thought in Plato
    • This is an interesting paper in two regards. Firstly, it gives an account of Athenian democracy – and to a lesser degree the Roman Republic – that might be new to most. Secondly, it applies this historical survey to the present day in the US and UK.
    • I suspect many readers not interested in ancient history won’t get to the second part, and so won’t know what the paper is really about, as it’s not at all well signposted, though the sub-title is a clue.
    • The paper does point out that ancient Greek city states were much smaller than modern democracies, but I think it underestimates the disruptive effect of persistent litigation if any citizen can “call out” any minister or bureaucrat mid-term.
    • Also, it’s clearly a response to current disquiet about political accountability; yet there’s much more accountability in the US and UK systems, despite recent chafing, than under most governments – democratic or otherwise – currently or historically.
Footnote 300: Aeon: Lyons - Philosopher of the human (WebRef=8520)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Johnny Lyons
    • Aeon Subtitle: One can only imagine how much nobler and more decent the world might be if it took more notice of Isaiah Berlin
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Berlin - Two Concepts of Liberty
    • This is a useful paper, describing Berlin’s contention that ethical discussions should be rooted in real-life, and especially historical, contexts, rather than confined to a discussion of concepts.
    • It points out the tension between two forms of liberty:-
      1. Negative (freedom from molestation) and
      2. Positive (freedom to do what you like provided you don’t interfere with others’ freedoms).
      Berlin pointed out that positive freedoms have tended towards the construction of utopias that have turned dystopic.
    • Berlin seems to have thought that ethics can be objective without there being a single right answer to every moral dilemma. This could have done with further elaboration.
Footnote 301: Aeon: Video - Mary Beard: women and power (WebRef=8507)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mary Beard
    • Aeon Subtitle: Why Medusa lives on – Mary Beard on the persistent legacy of Ancient Greek misogyny
    • Summary:
      • ‘To be men, they have to learn to silence women. I don’t think we’ve entirely got over that.’
      • From philosophy and politics to literature and art, the Western world has inherited much from Ancient Greece. But one disturbing cultural legacy is the enduring view of women as lesser beings who should shut up and stay out of the public intellectual sphere. Our social media is rife with examples of this persistent misogyny, which casts vocal women as stupid, shrill or some combination of the two.
      • As the classicist Mary Beard of the University of Cambridge argues, nearly every leading female politician has been at some point depicted as Medusa – that beautiful woman of Ancient Greek myth who was transformed into a hideous beast as punishment for her own rape.
      • In this video, commissioned by the Getty Museum on the occasion of Beard receiving their 2019 Getty Medal for contributions to the arts, she elaborates on the telling similarities between Ancient Greek depictions of women and those in our own times.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Wikipedia: Medusa
    • This - like most of what Mary Beard has to say (at least on screen) - is just an incoherent rant. She assumes her interlocutors will be sympathetic - or else too antipathetic to be worth arguing with.
    • She mentions – without attribution – Ovid’s version of the myth without saying that it is “late”. It fits her feminist case.
    • That said, there are many other cases amongst the Greek myths of (groups of) females – the harpies, furies, sirens, maenads and maybe others. Many of these terms are still used misogynistically.
Footnote 302: Aeon: Egan - Is there anything especially expert about being a philosopher? (WebRef=8480)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: David Egan
    • Author Narrative: David Egan is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at CUNY Hunter College in New York. He is the author of The Pursuit of an Authentic Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Everyday (2019).
    • Author's Introduction:
      • Outside a university setting, telling people that I’m pursuing a career in philosophy can be a bit of a conversation stopper. More times than I can count, I’ve faced the bemused but well-intentioned question: ‘How is that useful?’ I seem like a nice guy, smart, capable – why am I intent on doing something that won’t make me rich and won’t in any appreciable way make the world a better place?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • So how is philosophy useful? The response I’ve learned to counter with is that the question being asked is itself a philosophical question. One of the things we do in philosophy is precisely to ask what’s worth doing and why. For the most part, my questioners have already presupposed a fairly limited set of acceptable answers to the question of what’s worth doing – answers that generally bottom out in the material wellbeing of oneself and others. But those answers, innocuous as they might seem to the speaker, are philosophical answers to a philosophical question.
      • In other words, we’re all doing philosophy all the time. We can’t escape the question of what matters and why: the way we’re living is itself our implicit answer to that question. A large part of a philosophical training is to make those implicit answers explicit, and then to examine them rigorously. Philosophical reflection, once you get started in it, can seem endlessly demanding. But if we can’t avoid living philosophically, it seems sensible to learn to do it well.
  2. Notes
    • This is a sensible analysis.
    • The author points out that philosophy - like acting - builds on skills that are core to being a person, so "beginners" can succeed in the right context, though not in all.
    • In contrast, knowledge of - and skills in - the "hard" sciences and (say) violin-playing are specialisms rather than part of everyone's skill-sets.
    • So - I suppose - the entry costs to the specialisms is much higher, and so they seem to demand more skill.
    • That is not to say that training in the non-specialist humanities is a fraud. Not every actor can play Hamlet convincingly, and philosophers need to sharpen up their analytical and critical skills to perform competently.
Footnote 303: Aeon: Video - Julian Barbour: what is time? (WebRef=8481)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Julian Barbour
    • Aeon Subtitle: From sky charts to atomic clocks, time is a mysterious story that humans keep inventing
    • Summary:
      • The standardisation and accuracy of human timekeeping has improved by leaps and bounds over the millennia – from tracing the stars, to the invention of timepieces, to the atomic 'clocks' of today. But for all our efforts, the concept of time, including whether it’s little more than an illusion of human psychology, remains deeply puzzling.
      • In this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the PBS series Closer to Truth, the independent British physicist Julian Barbour endeavours to distinguish between our experience of time and its scientific underpinnings, including what has and hasn’t changed about our conception of time since we first looked to the skies to measure it.
  2. Notes
    • This video is too brief to say anything sensible, but was useful in introducing me to Julian Barbour, whom I'd not heard of before.
    • Barbour's view is that time is an illusion.
Footnote 304: Aeon: Video - The driver is red (WebRef=8474)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A spy thriller for an era in which the Holocaust risks being forgotten
    • Summary:
      • 'The noose that had hung his friends after the war for what they had done, the noose that he thought he had escaped, had found him.'
      • In the wake of the Second World War, former SS officials and Nazi collaborators fled Europe, hoping to evade prosecution and knowing that South American governments were sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Adolf Eichmann, the chief 'architect' of the Holocaust, was the highest ranking member of the Third Reich to escape to the continent, where he made Buenos Aires his new home and 'Ricardo Klement' his new name.
      • The US artist Randall Christopher’s animation The Driver Is Red follows the Israeli mission that captured Eichmann on 11 May 1960, forcing him to finally stand trial for his crimes. With the pace and tension of a spy thriller, the short documentary frames the fervour for justice as a tribute to those who committed themselves to tracking down Nazi war criminals long after the Second World War’s end. Now that very few people with memories of Nazism’s rise are still alive, Christopher made the film freely available online, warning of the ominous spectre of 'extreme nationalism, open racism, attacks on the press [and] reckless talk of war' in our own era.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → The Driver is Red
    • 'The driver is red' was the code-expression in a telegram to Mossad to announce that Eichmann had been found, so that the snatch-squad could assemble.
    • While the animation covers the tracking, finding and snatching, it doesn't cover how Eichmann was smuggled out of Argentina.
    • For more information, see Wikipedia: Adolf Eichmann (capture).
Footnote 305: Aeon: Labaree - Pluck versus luck (WebRef=8467)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: David Labaree
    • Author Narrative: David Labaree is Lee L Jacks professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. He is the former president of the History of Education Society and former vice president of the American Educational Research Association. His most recent book is A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education (2017).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Meritocracy emphasises the power of the individual to overcome obstacles, but the real story is quite a different one
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • In fact, the only thing that’s less fair than the meritocracy is the system it displaced, in which people’s futures were determined strictly by the lottery of birth. Lords begat lords, and peasants begat peasants.
      • In contrast, the meritocracy is sufficiently open that some children of the lower classes can prove themselves in school and win a place higher up the scale. The probability of doing so is markedly lower than the chances of success enjoyed by the offspring of the credentialed elite, but the possibility of upward mobility is nonetheless real. And this possibility is part of what motivates privileged parents to work so frantically to pull every string and milk every opportunity for their children.
      • Through the jousting grounds of schooling, smart poor kids can, at times, displace dumb rich kids. The result is a system of status attainment that provides advantages for some while at the same time spreading fear for their children’s future across families of all social classes. In the end, the only thing that the meritocracy equalises is anxiety.
  2. Notes
    • This is an honest but rather annoying piece.
    • It purports to show how – for the “advantaged” – the climb up the greasy academic pole is much easier than for the “disadvantaged”.
    • The author is of the type I recognise from King’s – a politico / waster who blew his opportunities as an undergraduate at an elite institution (Harvard) but who still ends up making it good on account of his background and connections.
    • In one of the author’s re-tellings, he shows that the “making good” was a struggle, and did involve a lot of grit, but he confesses that the success of these efforts was in the main ultimately down to his connections, coupled with some lucky breaks.
    • While this is no-doubt correct, I think this is biased towards the experiences of those in the liberal arts. In mathematics and the hard sciences, no amount of connections will get you anywhere without hard work and ability. You have to get things right.
    • Maybe amongst those few, preferment in teaching or administrative posts is still more likely for those with the right pedigree, but great intellect will still win through. I wonder if Richard Feynman has anything to say on the matter?
    • One thing I did note in my own experience is that those from privileged backgrounds were much better prepared by their schools – both academically and socially – which made settling in and the rigours of the academic work much easier to accommodate. But wasters – like myself – only have themselves to blame.
Footnote 306: Aeon: Pogosyan - Why learning a new language is like an illicit love affair (WebRef=8468)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Marianna Pogosyan
    • Author Narrative: Marianna Pogosyan is a lecturer in cultural psychology at the IES Abroad in Amsterdam and at the University of Amsterdam’s Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics (PPLE) college in The Netherlands.
    • Author's Introduction: Learning a new language is a lot like entering a new relationship. Some will become fast friends. Others will hook their arms with calculus formulas and final-exam-worthy historical dates, and march right out of your memory on the last day of school. And then sometimes, whether by mere chance or as a consequence of a lifelong odyssey, some languages will lead you to the brink of love.
  2. Notes
    • Interesting piece, describing how learning and living in a new language affects your use of your mother tongue.
    • The author is Armenian, but lived in Japan from childhood.
Footnote 307: Aeon: Sayare - Consider the axolotl: our great hope of regeneration? (WebRef=8268)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Scott Sayare
    • Author Narrative: Scott Sayare is a writer currently based in New York. His features and essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New Republic, The Guardian and The New Yorker, among others.
    • Extracts:
      • Like earthbound immortals, salamanders regenerate. If you cut off a salamander’s tail, or its arm, or its leg, or portions of any of these, it will not form a stump or a scar but will instead replace the lost appendage with a perfect new one, an intricacy of muscle, nerve, bone and the rest. It will sprout like a sapling. Science has been chopping up salamanders for more than 200 years with the aim of simply understanding the mechanics of their marvels, but more recently with the additional aim of someday replicating those marvels in ourselves. Might salamanders be the great hope of regenerative medicine?
      • In its most common form, which scientists call the white mutant, the axolotl resembles what the translucid foetus of a cross between an otter and a shortfin eel might look like. On the internet, it is celebrated for its anthropoid smile; in Mexico, where the Aztecs once hailed as it as a godly incarnation, it is an insult to say that someone looks like one. Behind its blunt and flattened head extends a distended torso resolving into a long, ichthyic tail. The axolotl can grow to nearly a foot in length; four tiny legs dangle off its body like evolutionary afterthoughts. It wears a collar of what seem to be red feathers behind each cheek, and these ciliated gill stalks float and tremble and gently splay in the water, like the plumage in a burlesque fan. They grow back if you cut them off, too. Precisely how the animal accomplishes this, or any of its feats of regrowth, is not well understood.
      • If the axolotl mirrors us so nicely, it’s fitting that we, too, are neotenous. Our flat faces, small noses, hairless bodies and upright postures are all features of infancy in our evolutionary cousins and forebears. We also spend more of our lives in a juvenile state than any other primate. Our brains grow rapidly for a longer period, and are consequently larger; our childhoods are greatly extended, providing occasion for the lengthy training of those brains. We also maintain throughout our lives a ‘remarkable persistent juvenile characteristic of investigative curiosity’, in the words of the zoologist Konrad Lorenz. ‘The constitutive character of man,’ Lorenz wrote in 1971, ‘is a neotenous phenomenon.’
  2. Notes
Footnote 308: Aeon: Hekman - Canine exceptionalism (WebRef=8248)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jessica Hekman
    • Author Narrative: Jessica Hekman is a postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. She is interested in the genetics of canine behaviour, and writes a blog called The Dog Zombie.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Trainers working with dogs every day have documented extraordinary talents and skills. Will science ever catch up?
    • Final Paragraph: The perspective of dog trainers, with their deep experience in real-world canine abilities, provides a rich source of theories for academics to test. Collaboration between dog trainers and research scientists could lead to a partnership that deepens our understanding of canine cognition. Dog trainers will keep exploring dogs’ learning limits. Now it’s up to the scientists to reach out and use this resource.
  2. Notes
    • This deserves some serious study, especially as there's an example of a Tibetan Terrier (allegedly) performing imitative behaviour.
Footnote 309: Aeon: Video - Finkel - Cuneiform writing with Irving Finkel (WebRef=8221)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Irving Finkel
    • Aeon Subtitle: How writing began, and other unexpectedly funny stories about cuneiform
    • Abstract: Cuneiform, the ancient Sumerian script that emerged in Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent circa 3000 BCE, is the first known system of written communication to move beyond pictograms into abstract representations of language. In this lecture, as unexpectedly funny as it is edifying, Irving Finkel, a writer and curator at the British Museum in London, elucidates how cuneiform developed into an advanced writing system with its own internal logic, contradictions and – for those who would attempt to decipher it centuries later – exasperating snags. Having hooked the audience at the Royal Institution in London, Finkel then reveals how a trilingual inscription at Mount Behistun in modern-day Iran became cuneiform’s very own Rosetta Stone, unlocking secrets of the script previously thought lost to time.
  2. Notes
    • This is a very witty lecture by a lecturer bearing a striking resemblance to myself, at least in my winter mode.
    • I was interested to note the similarities in the semiotic structures of the Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic scripts.
    • There's a reference to 'Finkel's book', though it's not stated which. Presumably it's Cuneiform, British Museum Press (11 May 2015), 112 pp. No doubt this is a replacement for "Walker (C.B.F.) - Reading the Past: Cuneiform", which hails from 1987 and is only 64 pp. But as I've purchased but not yet read this book, it wouldn't be rational to buy Finkel's.
    • However, I've just now bought "Finkel (Irving) - The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood", which has some cuneiform in it, and which expatiates on the tablet the translation and interpretation of which greatly enhanced Finkel’s reputation.
Footnote 310: Aeon: Jarrett - Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material (WebRef=8222)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Christian Jarrett
    • Author Narrative: Christian Jarrett is a senior editor at Aeon, working on the forthcoming Psyche website focused on psychological wellbeing. A cognitive neuroscientist by training, his writing has appeared in BBC Future, WIRED and New York Magazine, among others. His books include The Rough Guide to Psychology (2011) and Great Myths of the Brain (2014). His next, on personality change, will be published in 2021.
    • Conclusion: It’s important not to overstate the scientific case against trigger warnings. Research into their effects is still in its infancy and, most notable, none of the recent studies has focused on their use among people with mental-health diagnoses. Yet already the results are surprisingly consistent in undermining the specific claim that trigger warnings allow people to marshal some kind of mental defence mechanism. There is also a solid evidence base that avoidance is a harmful coping strategy for people recovering from trauma or dealing with anxiety. The clear message from psychology then is that trigger warnings should come with their own warning – they won’t achieve much, except encourage maladaptive coping and the belief that folk are sensitive and need protecting.
  2. Notes
    • This is all very comfortably saying what I wanted to hear, and believe to be true.
    • It cites a book that Jonathan Sacks had as his book of 2018: “One of the most bracing reads of 2018 was Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (Allen Lane). Confronting the ever-growing constraints on free speech in universities, the authors show how a generation of students is being encouraged to develop mindsets that will do them psychological as well as intellectual harm. Brilliantly written, forcefully argued and highly original in its approach, this report from the front line of student politics is an important warning and a powerful defence of the university as a place where we give a respectful hearing to views with which we disagree.”
Footnote 311: Aeon: McLeish - Science + religion (WebRef=8223)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Tom McLeish
    • Author Narrative: Tom McLeish is a professor of natural philosophy in the Department of Physics at the University of York in the UK. He is the author of Faith and Wisdom in Science (2014), Let There Be Science (2016) and The Poetry and Music of Science (2019)
    • Aeon Subtitle: The science-versus-religion opposition is a barrier to thought. Each one is a gift, rather than a threat, to the other
    • Author's Conclusion: A relational narrative for science that speaks to the need to reconcile the human with the material, and that draws on ancient wisdom, contributes to the construction of new pathways to a healthier public discourse, and an interdisciplinary educational project that is faithful to the story of human engagement with the apparently chaotic, inhuman materiality of nature, yet one whose future must be negotiated alongside our own. Without new thinking on ‘science and religion’, we risk forfeiting an essential source for wisdom today.
  2. Notes
    • I've not engaged with this piece as much as I should have, so may have missed its point.
    • It was interesting to see the repositioning of the "where were you ..." passage in Job in the service of a scientific worldview (rather than as "shut up!")
    • Seeing the forebears of science in religion is special pleading. The scientific method had to arise somewhere, sometime, and all advanced societies at the time were religious.
    • Maybe the monotheistic religions do denigrate human reason, but they don't thereby inculcate empiricism and experiment. Surely Job has to go against experience to maintain his faith in the light of experience, as have theists throughout troubled times.
Footnote 312: Aeon: Pyne - The planet is burning (WebRef=8207)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Stephen J. Pyne
    • Author Narrative: Stephen J Pyne is an emeritus professor at the school of life sciences at Arizona State University. His latest book is Fire: A Brief History (2019).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Wild, feral and fossil-fuelled, fire lights up the globe. Is it time to declare that humans have created a Pyrocene?
    • Conclusion:
      • Third-fire upsets the choreography between natural and anthropogenic fire directly by competing with second-fire and indirectly by altering the climate. Even if fossil-fuel burning and its legacy vanished overnight, we would still have deep obligations to get fire right in living landscapes. The consequences of our effluent-gagged atmosphere will linger for decades, perhaps centuries into a deep future. But as we ratchet third-fire down, we need to ratchet second-fire up. Third-fire adds to Earth’s carbon load. First-fire and second-fire recycle what exists.
      • Still, fire’s three-body problem will persist. Unless the Milankovitch cycles dim and the oceans and continents abruptly rearrange themselves, the cold will remain camped outside the gates, waiting for a crack that it can wedge into another ice age. At some point in the future, we will have to rekindle third-fire. For a few generations, it needs to remain in the ground as fossil fallow. Then we will see if our fire powers will destroy or save us.
      • Our history has been a story of how we and fire have co-evolved. The same holds for our future.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Aeon: Pyne - Burning like a mountain
    • The three fires are, in order, natural fire caused by lightening; man-made fire burning organic materials; and, the burning of fossil fuels.
    • Fire is necessary to partially off-set the Pleistocene alternating ice-ages versus temperate climate.
    • However, too much burning of fossil fuels upsets the balance.
Footnote 313: Aeon: Stone - Thinking about one’s birth is as uncanny as thinking of death (WebRef=8208)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 314: Aeon: Matthews - What is to be done about the problem of creepy men? (WebRef=8166)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Heidi Matthews
    • Author Narrative: Heidi Matthews is an assistant professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Canada, where she also co-directs the Nathanson Centre on transnational human rights, crime and security. She researches and teaches the law of war, international criminal law, and law and sexuality.
    • Extract: As researchers warn, what most people intuit to be creepy aligns closely with the attributes of individuals and populations already on or beyond the boundaries of social acceptance. The mentally ill and disabled, the physically deformed, those with ticks or other abnormal movements or facial features, the impoverished and the homeless are all more likely to be judged creepy. With this knowledge, we need to guard against confirmation bias when perceived creeps actually do act in harmful ways.
  2. Notes
Footnote 315: Aeon: Video - Walter Lippmann - public opinion and propaganda (WebRef=8153)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Before Chomsky, there was Lippmann: the First World War and ‘manufactured consent’
    • Abstract / Introduction:
      • While the ‘manufacture of consent’ is an idea now mostly associated with Noam Chomsky, the phrase was actually coined by the US journalist and writer Walter Lippman in his influential book Public Opinion (1922) – a fact that Chomsky and Edward S Herman, his co-author of Manufacturing Consent (1988), readily acknowledge.
      • Lippman contended that, because the world is too complex for any individual to comprehend, a strong society needs people and institutions specialised in collecting data and creating the most accurate interpretations of reality possible. When used properly, this information should allow decisionmakers to ‘manufacture consent’ in the public interest.
      • However, in one of the most damning critiques of democracy, Lippman identifies how public opinion is instead largely forged by political elites with self-serving interests – powerful people manipulating narratives to their own ends.
      • This video essay from the YouTube: Then & Now channel dives into Lippman’s legacy, starting with his study of the rise of the importance of public opinion during the First World War, and extending through an examination of why, a century after Public Opinion, democracy still has a major mass-media problem.
Footnote 316: Aeon: Hall - Classics for the people (WebRef=8142)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Edith Hall
    • Author Narrative: Edith Hall is a professor in the department of classics and Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London. She has published more than 20 books, broadcasts frequently on radio and television, and publishes widely in mainstream and academic journals and newspapers. Her latest book is Aristotle's Way (2018).
    • Aeon Subtitle: A Classical education was never just for the elite, but was a precious and inspiring part of working-class British life
    • Conclusion: The experiences of classical antiquity by the historical British working class have been messy, complicated and diverse. They have, by turns, been inspirational and depressing, too. But, finally, they can also help us think about the place of the ancient Greeks and Romans within the modern curriculum. Classical education need not be intrinsically elitist or reactionary; it has been the curriculum of empire, but it can be the curriculum of liberation. The ‘legacy’ of Greece and Rome has been instrumental in progressive and enlightened causes, both personal and political. Understanding the ancient world can enrich not only the imagination and sociocultural literacy but also citizenship skills and the power of argumentation and verbal expression. Recovering the working-class classicists of the past can also function as a rallying cry to modern Britain to support the case for the universal availability in schools of classical civilisation and ancient history, and for the revival of the proud tradition of free or affordable university extension schemes across the nation.
Footnote 317: Aeon: Irish - The self in dementia is not lost, and can be reached with care (WebRef=8143)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Muireann Irish
    • Author Narrative: Muireann Irish is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sydney in Australia.
    • Extracts
      • The view that without our memories we are no longer ourselves is pervasive, and has led to the use of stigmatising language, even within the dementia-care setting, such as ‘loss’, ‘disintegration’ and ‘unbecoming’. There remains a recalcitrant perception that in parallel with the progressive pathological onslaught in the brain is the inevitable demise of personhood, akin to a ‘living death’.
      • Viewing dementia in this way, as an erosion of the self, might serve a protective function, enabling carers to detach from the confronting reality of dementia, with metaphors of bereavement commonly used in relation to the anticipatory grief experienced by carers. However, recent research by my lab challenges the idea that the self is entirely lost in Alzheimer’s. Of course, people with dementia experience significant changes in their self-concept, self-knowledge, social relationships, perception of their own capacity, and even their physical appearance. Yet the essence of the person endures. Recognising this has important implications for approaches to care. We must consider the experience of the people living with dementia, even if this means challenging or confronting our own perceptions or expectations about their selfhood.
      • While the illness is devastating, not all memories are obliterated by Alzheimer’s, and much of the person’s general knowledge and recollection of the distant past is retained. There remains a vast repository of life experiences, personal history, stories and fables that endures, even late into the illness.
  2. Notes
    • This is very light on the philosophy of the Self, but may eventually come in useful as a guide for coping should it become necessary.
Footnote 318: Aeon: Video - I came from the unknown to sing (WebRef=8129)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Ghazi Hussein
    • Author Narrative:
      • The poet Ghazi Hussein was born to a Palestinian family exiled in Syria. Starting at age 14, he was subjected to 20 years, on and off, of imprisonment and torture, and deemed ‘guilty of carrying thoughts’ though never formally charged. In prison, Hussein often felt hopeless and wished for death but, through his poetry, he was able to build a mental sanctuary that saved his life.
      • In 2000, he arrived in the UK, where, after a three-year legal struggle, he and his family gained political asylum, settling in Edinburgh.
      • Now a BAFTA award-winning playwright and acclaimed poet, Hussein continues to draw on his experience of oppression, using his writing to explore and confront the racism he encounters in Scotland. Despite this, he still considers Edinburgh his first and only home, a place where he has a voice.
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘My cell is smaller than my size’ – how writing poetry saved a political prisoner
    • Summary: In this short film by the UK-Iranian artist Roxana Vilk, Hussein reflects on the pain and perseverance that has defined his life, performing poems from his book Taking it Like a Man: Torture and Survival, a Journey in Poetry (2006).
Footnote 319: Aeon: Degroot - Little Ice Age lessons (WebRef=8127)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Dagomar Degroot
    • Author Narrative: Dagomar Degroot is an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University and co-director of the Climate History Network. His most recent book is The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (2018).
    • Aeon Subtitle: The world’s last climate crisis demonstrates that surviving is possible if bold economic and social change is embraced
    • Author’s Conclusion
      • The past tells us that when climatic trends make it impossible to live in the same city, grow food in the same way or continue existing economic relationships, the result for a society is not invariably crisis and collapse. Individuals, communities and societies can respond in surprising ways, and crisis – if it does come – could provoke some of the most productive innovations of all. Those responses, in turn, yield still more transformations within evolving societies. If that was true in the past, it is even more true today, as seismic political and cultural changes coincide with the breakneck development and democratisation of artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and other revolutionary technologies.
      • Most attempts to estimate the economic or geopolitical impacts of future warming therefore involve little more than educated guesswork. The future is hard to predict – perhaps harder than it ever was – and both collapse and prosperity seem possible in the century to come. So let us approach the future with open minds. Rather than resign ourselves to disaster, let us work hard to implement radical policies – such as the Green New Deal – that go beyond simply preserving what we have now, and instead promise a genuinely better world for our children.
  2. Notes
    • There are a few – fairly gentle – criticisms of this sanguine view of our prospects.
    • While the impending crisis is greater, our resources to meet it are also greater.
    • However, these resources are not evenly distributed and many countries will lose out badly.
    • There are also many other challenges and risks that may complicate matters.
Footnote 320: Aeon: Video - Do you think science can understand everything? (WebRef=8108)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Can science understand everything? NASA scientists attempt to answer the question
    • Summary: ‘Please define everything…’
      This short documentary is built around a single question posed in 2005-6 to scientists working at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley: ‘Do you think science can understand everything?’ Most of them pause or take a deep breath before venturing out on such thin ice. From seeking clarity on the meaning of the question, to weighing careful, nuanced answers, to relative certainty one way or the other, their perspectives provide a fascinating window on to the varying motivations and world views of scientists working at the frontiers of human knowledge.
Footnote 321: Aeon: Vernon - Divine transports (WebRef=8105)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mark Vernon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Whether via music, dance or prayer, the trance state was key to human evolution, forging society around the transcendent
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • ‘For myself, I remain an atheist,’ Dunbar told me. ‘The trance hypothesis is neutral about the truth claims of religions whether you believe or don’t, though it does suggest that transcendent states of mind are meaningful to human beings and can evolve into religious systems of belief.’
      • And in this final observation there is, perhaps, some good news for us, whether we’re religious or not. It’s often said that many of today’s troubles, from divisive political debates to spats on social media, are due to our tribal nature. It’s added, somewhat fatalistically, that deep within our evolutionary past is the tendency to identify with one group and demonise another. We are destined to be at war, culturally or otherwise. But if the trance theory is true, it shows that the evolutionary tendency to be tribal rests on an evolutionary taste for that which surpasses tribal experience – the transcendence that humans glimpsed in altered states of mind that enabled them to form tribes to start with.
      • If we long to belong, we also long to be in touch with ‘the more’, as the great pioneer of the study of religious experiences William James called it. That more will be envisaged in numerous ways. But it might help us by prompting new visions that exceed our herd instincts and binary thinking, and ease social tensions. If it helped our ancestors to survive, why would we think we are any different?
  2. Notes
    • I ought to have something profound to say about all this, but don’t.
    • I think the author is correct to dismiss the “new atheists” when they treat the issue of religion as purely a matter of fact.
    • However, while the non-cognitive aspects of religion are essential to the participants, without the factual underpinning – so that religious practice is a heart-felt response to something real rather than something fanciful – the practice is of no interest to me, whatever its value in cementing societies together.
Footnote 322: Aeon: Vallgarda - Keeping secrets (WebRef=8102)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Karen Vallgarda
    • Aeon Subtitle: All families have secrets, from the innocent to the deeply sinister. Are there good reasons to keep them under wraps?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Instead of unequivocally condemning secrets, then, we might recognise that, although some are harmful, others are useful and, perhaps most importantly, a secret can be enabling and suffocating, protective and oppressive all at once. What we need to ask is therefore: whom does the secret protect? Does it undergird asymmetrical relationships of power, does it challenge them, or does it do both at the same time? And to confessions: whose truth was established as the truth and what did this do?
      • Once we move beyond the confinements of the cultural imperative of disclosure, secrecy and confessions will prove to be a powerful lens through which to examine how the emotionally charged micropolitics of the family tie in with the macropolitical currents in any society, past or present.
Footnote 323: Aeon: Video - Donald Hoffman - The Case Against Reality (WebRef=8094)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Donald D. Hoffman
    • Abstract:
      • Many scientists believe that natural selection brought our perception of reality into clearer and deeper focus, reasoning that growing more attuned to the outside world gave our ancestors an evolutionary edge.
      • Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, thinks that just the opposite is true. Because evolution selects for survival, not accuracy, he proposes that our conscious experience masks reality behind millennia of adaptions for ‘fitness payoffs’ – an argument supported by his work running evolutionary game-theory simulations.
      • In this interview recorded at the Howthelightgetsin Festival from the Institute of Arts and Ideas in 2019, Hoffman explains why he believes that perception must necessarily hide reality for conscious agents to survive and reproduce.
      • With that view serving as a springboard, the wide-ranging discussion also touches on Hoffman’s consciousness-centric framework for reality, and its potential implications for our everyday lives.
  2. Notes
Footnote 324: Aeon: Baillie - We all know that we will die, so why do we struggle to believe it? (WebRef=8096)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 325: Aeon: Demuth - Turn and live with animals (WebRef=8068)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Bathsheba Demuth
    • Aeon Subtitle: The slaughterhouse ethic of Soviet and American whalers tells us we must look beyond communism and capitalism to survive
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • The logic of expanding consumption, of the commercial whaler and the factory ship, is the logic of the slaughterhouse: one that conceals death from the people who take it into their homes, or eat it, or wear it. Doing so sloughs off moral harm upon the proximate few, while many of us, the relatively wealthy in particular, stay at a distance, indulging in the illusion that humans are not dependent on others – on the gift of the whale, in Yupik terms, or on healthy populations and habitats, in the language of ecology.
      • In the 19th and 20th centuries, this slaughterhouse logic defined the relations between whales and people. Angyi was not the patrimony of either sort of foreign whaler, capitalist or socialist, but from their labour both developed conceptions of cetacean emotions, perhaps even moral action. Some described a kind of ethical injury done by ignoring the sentiments and sentience of whales. Yet the societies that sent market and socialist whalers to the Bering Strait left their labourers no space to act on such experiences. The term for this might be dehumanised work or alienated work, except it is more. Labour that reduces the world only to the tallied commodities of profit or plan impoverishes a society’s moral imagination. It is blind not just to the death necessary to sustain life but to the wills, emotions and even ethical judgment of other living beings.
    • Angyi: Part of being a good person involved hearing what, as the hunters took to their boats and readied their harpoons, a whale spoke. On St Lawrence Island, generations of whalers described how a bowhead could keep close, in sight even when submerged, but always just out of harpoon range. Sometimes, the pursuit lasted more than an hour. Eventually, the bowhead would choose either to swim away or to surface close to the right-hand side of the boat, the side where the harpooner sat waiting. The Yupik word for this behaviour is angyi, from the root ang-, which signifies the act of giving. After a period of deliberation, a bowhead chose to give itself to its hunters, speaking through her movements her consent to die.
  2. Notes
    • Clearly the idea of Angyi is sentimentalised and – strictly speaking – false. But it’s a more wholesome view of the interdependence and mutual sentience of all animals than that adopted by industrial “farming”.
    • The article also points out the natural longevity of bowhead whales – up to 200 years. They remain in the arctic, and the cold slows their metabolism. Warm-water or migratory species don’t live so long – though up to 100 years for the larger species.
Footnote 326: Aeon: Ward - Mistaken (WebRef=8066)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Daniel Ward
    • Author Narrative: Daniel Ward practices as a lawyer specialising in commercial litigation and international arbitration. He is also a PhD candidate in legal studies at the University of Cambridge and has published papers on political and legal theory.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Assuming that another person’s opinions are immune from criticism is not a marker of respect. It is, in fact, dehumanising
    • Author’s Conclusion:
      • General infallibility creates the illusion that people are essentially mindless. It holds that we believe what we believe, and value what we value, for no reason at all, or at least for reasons that are unintelligible to anyone else. Under those conditions, no one can engage with anyone else’s views or take them seriously. If, today, identities are becoming increasingly tribally defined, with each group living in its own ‘bubble’, this is an illusion that we urgently need to learn to see through.
      • To err is human. Missteps, misapprehensions, misspeakings, momentary lapses and mess-ups are part of the fabric of life. Yet we are capable of making mistakes precisely because we are thoughtful, intelligent beings with complex goals and sincerely held values. We wouldn’t be able to if we were otherwise. Regrets: we’ve had a few. But we are the wiser for them.
  2. Notes
    • The author’s (rejected) notion of personal “infallibility” is motivated my Paul A. Samuelson’s economic assumption that the agent’s preferences are infallibly revealed by what they spend their money on, even though some of their purchases may turn out to be mistaken.
Footnote 327: Aeon: Video - Raymond Tallis - What is Extended Mind (WebRef=8059)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Raymond Tallis
    • Aeon Subtitle: 'Minds have always been outside themselves': Raymond Tallis on extended cognition
    • Summary:
      • In this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the PBS series Closer to Truth, the UK philosopher, writer and retired neuroscientist Raymond Tallis offers his nuanced view of the extended mind thesis, proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998. Their paper "Chalmers (David) & Clark (Andy) - The Extended Mind" shifted the bedrock of modern philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, and eventually became the most cited philosophy paper of the decade.
      • Its thesis was that our consciousnesses are constantly integrating and being moulded by outside objects, including other people, in ways that suggest that the mind extends far beyond the confines of the skull, or even the skin.
      • Somewhat controversial upon its publication, the paper’s central idea gained greater popular traction as innovations in technologies such as medical implants and smart devices seemed to narrow the gap between human cognition and external objects.
      • Two decades on from the paper’s publication, Tallis finds much to admire and to critique in its central contention, embracing the notion that our minds are in no way constrained to the brain, while rejecting the idea that devices such as smartphones open up novel pathways for understanding consciousness.
Footnote 328: Aeon: Sebens - What’s everything made of? (WebRef=8060)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Charles Sebens
    • Author Narrative: Charles Sebens is an assistant professor of philosophy at the California Institute of Technology. He is interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics, classical field theory, and quantum field theory.
    • Aeon Subtitle: To answer whether the fundamental building blocks of reality are particles, fields or both means thinking beyond physics
Footnote 329: Aeon: Morell - What do mirror tests test? (WebRef=8033)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 330: Aeon: Video - Turns out that, even when Einstein was wrong, he was kind of right (WebRef=8036)
  1. Aeon
    • Summary:
      • Ever since Albert Einstein supplanted the Newtonian model with his general theory of relativity in 1915, his revolutionary work has been the bedrock of modern physics. Some six decades after his death, many of his ideas, including gravitational waves and spacetime’s curvature beyond our solar system, continue to be confirmed by physicists working at the limits of human understanding. And even when Einstein logged his most notorious calculating error – failing to account for the possibility of an expanding Universe in his field equations of general relativity – he would actually later be proven kind of, sort of right.
      • This animated explainer from MinutePhysics breaks down the equation that became known as ‘Einstein’s biggest blunder’, including how the discovery in 1998 that the Universe was not growing consistently, but accelerating, brought it back to life.
Footnote 331: Aeon: McAndrew - Houses of horror (WebRef=8037)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Francis McAndrew
    • Aeon Subtitle: A ragged curtain, a creaking attic, a dark cellar – what explains the architecture of creepiness, and its enduring appeal?
  2. Notes
Footnote 332: Aeon: Video - Neurosymphony (WebRef=9595)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Grace Leslie
    • Aeon Subtitle: See and hear the human brain as you’ve never experienced it before
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The Laboratory for NeuroImaging of Coma and Consciousness (NICC) at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston studies the process of recovering consciousness after traumatic brain injuries. Using more than 100 hours of MRI scans of a human brain unaffected by neurological disease or traumatic brain injuries, a team at the NICC compiled the highest-resolution rendering of a full human brain on record, detecting objects smaller than 0.1 millimetres.
      • Neurosymphony, exclusive to Aeon, explores three distinct perspectives on the brain, using videos of the scans made freely available by the NICC.
      • The video pairs the imagery with an excerpt from the album Chapel by the US electronic musician and music-cognition researcher Grace Leslie, in which she converts her brainwaves into music.
      • Beyond providing an unprecedented glimpse into the intricacies of the human brain, the NICC team hopes that these images will assist other researchers in identifying abnormalities associated with complex brain conditions such as coma and depression.
  2. Notes
Footnote 333: Aeon: Burton - To make laziness work for you, put some effort into it (WebRef=7999)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Neel Burton
    • Author Narrative: Neel Burton is a psychiatrist and philosopher. He is a fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford, and his most recent book is Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking (2019).
  2. Notes
Footnote 334: Aeon: Van der Horst - The Bible’s first critic (WebRef=7957)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Pieter van der Horst
    • Author Narrative: Pieter van der Horst is a scholar specialising in New Testament studies, Early Christian literature and the Jewish and Hellenistic context of Early Christianity. He is professor emeritus in the faculty of theology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and is the author of many books, including Studies in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (2014).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Centuries before Spinoza, there was Ḥiwi al-Balkhi, a Jewish freethinker for whom the Bible was too irrational for faith
Footnote 335: Aeon: Baggott - But is it science? (WebRef=7958)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jim Baggott
    • Aeon Subtitle: Theoretical physicists who say the multiverse exists set a dangerous precedent: science based on zero empirical evidence
  2. Notes
Footnote 336: Aeon: Stark - My autism journey: how I learned to stop trying to fit in (WebRef=7960)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Eloise Stark
    • Author Narrative: Eloise Stark is a DPhil student in psychiatry at the University of Oxford. She blogs for Student Minds and The Mental Elf, and writes for The Psychologist.
    • Author’s Conclusion: Early on, I felt a huge resistance to being different. But I’ve grown to realise that it’s not about being different for the sake of being different, it’s about being the most authentic version of yourself, particularly in relationships, because sharing and expressing one’s true self with others can increase openness, sincerity and trust. I think a large part of my journey has been to accept myself the way I am and to stop trying desperately to ‘fit in’. I am who I am, I’m autistic and proud, I’m different, and for the first time in my life, I’m okay with that.
Footnote 337: Aeon: Frankish - The consciousness illusion (WebRef=7959)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 338: Aeon: Video - The Infamous Windmill Problem (WebRef=7970)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Can you solve this slippery maths puzzle that doubles as a morality tale?
    • Summary:
      • The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is an annual competition for the brainiest of high-school maths whizzes in the world.
      • This animation from the US YouTuber Grant Sanderson, who creates maths videos under the moniker 3Blue1Brown, breaks down a question from the 2011 IMO that proved especially challenging to competitors.
      • Between Sanderson’s methodical analysis and the nifty animations, the maths-minded might convince themselves that they would have come up with the answer all on their own.
      • But Sanderson, ever the savvy instructor, crafts his lesson around how to find the solution as well as being mindful of how knowledge is obtained.
      • In doing so, he transforms an algebra puzzle into a lesson on empathy, pedagogy and the nature of discovery.
  2. Notes
Footnote 339: Aeon: Spiegelhalter - Citizens need to know numbers (WebRef=7964)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
    • An interesting article. It's an edited extract from "Spiegelhalter (David) - The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data", and a plug for it, no doubt. It worked as I've bought the book.
    • My first thought is that it shows just how complex the subject is, given that anomalous statistics are bound to happen by chance.
    • The correct application of statistical methods is a very complex matter, especially if statistical tools are in the hands of non-mathematicians who have no understanding of the underlying theory.
    • This book mostly takes the mathematics as read, and goes straight to the application. It'll be interesting to see if it avoids the problems above, which is its aim.
Footnote 340: Aeon: Pariseau - How a scientific attempt to demystify Buddhist meditation yielded astounding results (WebRef=7973)
  1. Aeon
    • Summary:
      • In 1981, Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, set out to study the ancient meditation practices of Buddhist monks on the Tibetan Plateau. With the Dalai Lama’s blessing, Benson spent roughly a decade in remote regions of the Himalayas in northern India researching an especially intense technique known as tummo, as well as the physiological effects of other advanced forms of meditation. Rather than debunking the seemingly tall tales of advanced practitioners capable of raising their body temperatures to dry cold, wet sheets around their bodies, Benson’s work actually confirmed and expanded upon these anecdotes. In particular, by tracking vital signs and body-heat output during meditation sessions, Benson found that these monks possessed remarkable capacities for controlling their oxygen intake, body temperatures and even brainwaves. In 2013, a second study conducted on advanced Tibetan tummo meditators by Maria Kozhevnikov, a cognitive neuroscientist the National University of Singapore, corroborated much of what Benson had observed, including practitioners’ ability to raise their body temperatures to feverish levels by combining visualisation and specialised breathing.
      • This extended trailer for the UK filmmaker Russ Pariseau’s feature documentary Advanced Tibetan Meditation: The Investigations of Herbert Benson MD relays portions of Benson’s landmark research, which ultimately signalled a seismic shift in how Western science views Buddhist meditation. Simultaneously, the material makes evident the disparate ways that Western scientists and Tibetan Buddhists understand the self.
Footnote 341: Aeon: McLeish - Science is deeply imaginative (WebRef=7895)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Tom McLeish
    • Author’s Conclusion
      • I could say precisely the same of science, so how might a richer appreciation of the service provided by the creative imagination in science be developed in a practical way? There are consequences for both practising scientists themselves, and for the wider community.
      • Reflecting on my own formation as a professional physicist, I cannot recall a single hour spent during my doctoral or postdoctoral training on even as instrumental an aspect of creativity as the discussion of working practices or lifestyles that might enhance the vital creative flow of scientific ideas. Yet there is much to be said: the regular engagement with the visual and auditory, the alternation of sharp mental focus and integrative defocusing, the allowance for fallow periods when working on a problem ­– all these are worth talking through early in a scientific career.
      • More widely, the contemplative good of lay science, of engagement with high-quality scientific writing, including the poetic ‘notable exceptions’ – "Carey (John), Ed. - The Faber Book of Science" is a good start (1995) – recognising that science holds as deep a structural place in human culture as art does, will only enrich and enable. By exploring other avenues into science than the formally educative – its history and philosophy, its deep ideas simply put, and a rediscovery of the joy brought by acute observations of nature – more people might discover that the notion that ‘science is not for me’, too often acquired early in life, is simply a cruel deception.
Footnote 342: Aeon: Eagleman - Why time seems to fly as you get older (WebRef=7868)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: David Eagleman
    • Summary:
      • Most adults seem to agree that the older you get, the quicker time flies by. This feeling might, on its surface, seem like one of life’s more enigmatic qualities.
      • But according to the US neuroscientist David Eagleman, there’s actually a pretty straightforward scientific explanation for this phenomenon: habitual situations require much less of our attention than novel ones and, as we age, we become much more likely to be fixed in our routines, and much less likely to encounter anything out of the ordinary.
      • So, as Eagleman suggests in this animation from BBC Ideas, if you want to pump the brakes on your experience of time, try pursuing new experiences – large and small.
Footnote 343: Aeon: Costandi - Against neurodiversity (WebRef=7869)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Moheb Costandi
    • Author Narrative: Moheb Costandi is a molecular and developmental neurobiologist, author and freelance science writer. He writes the blog Neurophilosophy, and his latest book is Neuroplasticity (2016). He lives in London.
    • Aeon Subtitle: The movement has good intentions, but it favours the high-functioning and overlooks those who struggle with severe autism
Footnote 344: Aeon: Mynott - Birds are ‘winged words’ (WebRef=9876)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jeremy Mynott
    • Author Narrative: Jeremy Mynott is an emeritus fellow at Wolfson College in Cambridge. A former publisher (head of Cambridge University Press) turned author, he has written books in classics, ancient history and natural history. His latest is Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words (2018).
    • Aeon Subtitle: The Classical world abounded with avians – and so birds took up in the human imagination, nesting in our language and art
  2. Notes
    • An interesting plug for the author's latest book!
    • A summary, from classical times, of how birds have been used as figures of speech and as indicators of the changes in the seasons (and, yes usefully) as portents.
    • Very many species of birds were regular features of urban and country life, well known and understood by all. Sadly, this is no longer the case.
    • Useful to know that "Cloud Cuckoo Land" comes from Aristophanes' The Birds.
Footnote 345: Aeon: Video - Crannog (WebRef=7871)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘When it comes to the end, we all want the same things.’ Why animals need a good death
    • Aeon Summary
      • Alexis Fleming has devoted her life to providing palliative care for sick and disabled animals. At the animal hospice she established in rural Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland, she treats every sheep, chicken and pig with the same gentle care and patience that most people reserve for dear friends and family. Underlying her work is a deep conviction, with her since childhood, that all animals desire comfort, safety and companionship in their final days.
      • Fleming herself is living with a life-threatening disease, and her proximity to death somehow buoys her up as she tends to the sick and dying around her.
      • In making her short documentary Crannog with a spare, observational style, the Glasgow-based director Isa Rao mirrors the intimacy, strength and tenderness of Fleming’s labour of love.
      • The video’s title comes from the Gaelic for an ancient form of dwelling found in Ireland and Scotland that often housed extended families, and is an apt metaphor for Fleming’s world, one in which moments of intense joy and sorrow are unified by a deeply felt sense of purpose in caring for others.
  2. Notes
Footnote 346: Aeon: Stern - The way words mean (WebRef=7896)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 347: Aeon: Video - Andy Clark - Virtual immortality (WebRef=7888)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Andy Clark
    • Aeon Subtitle: Your body is scanned, destroyed, then reproduced. Do ‘you’ live on the copy?
  2. Notes
Footnote 348: Aeon: Video - ‘You wanna get rid of me?’ When the time comes to move mom into assisted living (WebRef=8027)
  1. Aeon
    • Summary:
      • During their weekly Sunday breakfast together, Ivy discovers that her octogenarian mother Riki is losing her memory. Soon after, Ivy decides that Riki would be better off moving out of the cozy Brooklyn apartment where she lives alone, and into an assisted living community in the Bronx, closer to Ivy’s own home. But, of course, when it comes to big family decisions, nothing is ever quite that easy.
      • Ivy is making the request out of love, but Riki – resistant every step of the way – thinks her daughter is being controlling. When the time for a trial run at the community arrives, Ivy’s siblings start to question whether the move is premature, while Riki’s neighbours suggest that she’ll never be back.
      • These delicate interpersonal dynamics are skilfully explored in this short documentary by New York-based filmmaker Brandon Barr. A tender and intimate portrait of ageing and the complexities of familial love, Sundays with Riki is likely to resonate with anyone who has helped to care for – or just cares about – an elderly relative.
Footnote 349: Aeon: Victoria - Zen terror (WebRef=8072)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Brian Victoria
    • Author Narrative: Brian Victoria is a senior research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, a recognised independent centre of the University of Oxford. He is also a Buddhist priest in the Soto Zen sect. He is author of Zen War Stories (2003) and Zen at War (2006). His upcoming publication is entitled Zen Terror in Prewar Japan: Portrait of an Assassin (2019).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Master Nissho Inoue and his band of assassins teach some uncomfortable truths about terrorism, for those who will hear.
Footnote 350: Aeon: Pigliucci - Richard Feynman was wrong about beauty and truth in science (WebRef=7974)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 351: Aeon: Video - Hoplites! Greeks at war (WebRef=8178)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Frozen for millennia, an ancient Greek soldier is freed to charge into battle once again
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The artifacts that underlie so much of our understanding of the ancient world can often feel like brittle remnants of a dim and dusty past that’s hard to access without context and extensive knowledge. But sometimes just a little kineticism can transform a bit of pottery into a living story.
      • Such is the effect of this animation produced for an exhibition at the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at the University of Reading in the UK, which breathes life into war scenes from a vase found on the island of Euboea and thought to date to roughly 550 BCE.
      • The story follows a spear-wielding hoplite (citizen-soldier in the infantry) as he moves through several stages of the wartime experience. After witnessing a ceremonial animal sacrifice performed by a priest, he departs for battle alongside his fellow soldiers, fights the enemy and creates a trophy from their discarded equipment to mark his side’s victory.
      • Learn more about the video at the Panoply Vase Animation Project website.
  2. Notes
Footnote 352: Aeon: Video - The Vinland Mystery (WebRef=8229)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: How a husband-and-wife team proved Leif Erikson beat Columbus to Norse America
    • Editors' Abstract
      • ‘In this great ocean, many have found still another island, which is called Vinland, since there grow wild grapes. But beyond, everything is filled with intolerable ice and terrible fog.’
        → Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum (c1070)
      • Up until the 1960s, the existence of a pre-Columbian Norse settlement on the North American continent had long been hypothesised but never proven. That finally changed when a Norwegian husband-and-wife team – the explorer Helge Ingstad and the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad – pieced together historical hints that led them to pursue the fabled settlement on the island of Newfoundland in present-day Canada, far north of where other historians believed Norse ruins might be found.
      • This 1984 National Film Board of Canada documentary tells the remarkable story of how the Ingstads were eventually able to confirm that mysterious mounds in this remote stretch of Newfoundland were indeed Norse in origin, forever reshaping modern perspectives on European and North American history.
  2. Notes
Footnote 353: Aeon: Pettinen - Will we ever know the difference between a wolf and a dog? (WebRef=8240)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Katja Pettinen
    • Author Narrative: Katja Pettinen is a cultural anthropologist at Mount Royal University in Canada. She is interested in the nature and methods of skilled movement acquisition in the context of Japanese-based martial arts practice. She lives in Calgary.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • While humans were observing these wolves and helping them along the path to becoming proto-dogs, the reverse was also the case. In this co-evolutionary story, proto-dogs had begun to extend their attention, and their fundamental sociality, increasingly toward humans who would later become their primary companions in life. Through this shift in shared attention and sociality, many canids we know so intimately today sniff very different things, acquire their food, and conduct their sociality quite differently from wolves. As a result, the corresponding umwelten – the very minds in question – are distinct from each other.
      • The productive way of making sense of this difference is not to centre on any particular absolutes, though some have been suggested by empirically oriented researchers. The main challenge here is in the fact that organisms differ both as a result of their evolution and as a result of their upbringing; individuals are not the same as species. What a biosemiotic perspective can offer is a more holistic account of the differences; on a species level, human-dog umwelten overlap far more than human-wolf umwelten.
      • Whether this turn of things was for the better or the worse, especially from the point of view of dogs, is up for discussion.
  2. Notes
Footnote 354: Aeon: Video - Devenir (WebRef=9362)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Judith Butler
    • Aeon Subtitle: From ‘The Second Sex’ to ‘Gender Trouble’ – Butler’s hat tip to de Beauvoir
    • Editor's Abstract:
      • The American philosopher Judith Butler is one of the preeminent contemporary thinkers on issues at the intersection of gender and identity. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley and at the European Graduate School, she’s perhaps best-known for her book Gender Trouble (1990), which argues that gender, sex and sexuality are continuous and highly mutable cultural performances, and not predetermined by human biology.
      • This brisk and energetic video from the French filmmaker Géraldine Charpentier-Basille animates cutouts of diverse human forms to accompany an extract from a 2006 interview with Butler in which she cites "de Beauvoir (Simone) - The Second Sex" (1949) as inspiration.
      • Although brief, the piece is an excellent conversation-starter on the question of what ‘becoming’ might mean, both in the context of gender and more broadly in the pursuit of the ‘authentic’ self. It’s also a pleasing reminder of the many ways that ideas spread and transmute over time.
    • Full Text:
      • So I went back to "de Beauvoir (Simone) - The Second Sex" and there I found this one passage where she says that one is not born a woman but rather becomes one, and I wrote something about this problem of becoming and I wanted to know does one ever actually become one or is it (that) to be a woman is mode of becoming without end; a mode of becoming that doesn't end - that has no end or goal. And then I thought, well maybe you could say the same about of gender more generally - that one is not born a man but rather becomes one - or perhaps one is born a male or female but becomes something which is neither a man nor a woman. And it seemed to me that this notion of becoming - devenir - could lead to any number of directions.
  2. Notes
    • The interview-extract, which I've transcribed in full from the audio, is really too brief to make much of, though it is a stimulus to read "de Beauvoir (Simone) - The Second Sex", though this is rather a mighty tome.
    • However, I agree that there's a distinction between biological sex and the roles expected of the individuals that fall under these categories in various societies.
    • While roles are not pre-determined by biology, I do think that things go better if biology is acknowledged as the way things are and people go with the flow rather than swim against it.
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Butler (Judith) - Video - Devenir"
Footnote 355: Aeon: Video - How ISPs violate the laws of mathematics (WebRef=9377)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: If simple logic isn’t working with your internet company, try Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory
    • Author's Abstract:
      • This tongue-in-cheek animation from the US YouTuber Henry Reich – the mind behind MinutePhysics – is a creative exercise in how not to lose your cool when faced with the abyss of illogic.
      • Recalling the mundane, mindnumbing tribulations of trying to get a straight answer on billing from his internet service provider (ISP), Reich concludes that the company isn’t just guilty of subpar customer service – their policies also break nearly every fundamental law of modern mathematics.
      • Reich’s clever excoriation of telecommunication companies was created for The Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses (BAHFest), an annual ‘celebration of well-argued and thoroughly researched but completely incorrect scientific theories’.
  2. Notes
    • Really rather silly.
    • It does, however, recommend How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life, by Jordan Ellenberg
Footnote 356: Aeon: Pitock - Here’s to naps and snoozes (WebRef=7446)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Todd Pitock
    • Author Narrative: Todd Pitock is an award-winning writer whose journalism has appeared in The Atlantic, Discover and Smithsonian, among others. He lives in Philadelphia.
    • Aeon Subtitle: American work culture, seeping around the globe, threatens to ruin the pleasures and benefits of public, communal sleep
  2. Notes
Footnote 357: Aeon: Alter - How translation obscured the music and wordplay of the Bible (WebRef=8341)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Robert Alter
    • Author Narrative: Robert Alter is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of more than 20 books, most recently The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (2018).
  2. Notes
Footnote 358: Aeon: Isbell - How seeing snakes in the grass helped primates to evolve (WebRef=8128)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Lynne A. Isbell
    • Author Narrative: Lynne A Isbell is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well (2009). She is interested in primate behaviour and ecology.
    • Author’s Conclusion: The snake detection theory takes our seemingly contradictory attitudes about snakes and makes sense of them as a cohesive whole. Our long evolutionary exposure to snakes explains why ophiophobia is humanity’s most-reported phobia but also why our attraction and attention to snakes is so strong that we have even included them prominently in our religions and folklore. Most importantly, by recognising that our vision and our behaviour have been shaped by millions of years of interactions with another type of animal, we admit our close relationship with nature. We have not been above or outside nature as we might like to think, but have always been fully a part of it.
Footnote 359: Aeon: Svoboda - The broad, ragged cut (WebRef=8513)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Elizabeth Svoboda
    • Author Narrative: Elizabeth Svoboda writes on topics from creationist biology classes in Galápagos schools to the connections between suffering and selflessness. She is the author of What Makes a Hero? (2013) and, for children, The Life Heroic: How to Unleash Your Most Amazing Self (2019). She lives in San José, California.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Aptitude and IQ tests are used to distinguish those young people who deserve a chance from those who do not. Do they work?
  2. Notes
    • I sympathise with most of this paper. It agrees that IQ (and similar) tests play a part in sensible selection processes, but that they don't give the whole story.
    • I have at various times been under the illusion that it's innate talent, rather than hard work, that matters. I feel disappointed when Ronnie O'Sullivan loses to some less talented grafter, when "the best man" doesn't win.
    • But success in life is largely due to the grafters, and rightly so.
    • High IQ can make you think success should come to you without effort (it doesn't) because at school it did (largely).
    • Also, on the assumption that IQ tests measure a general intellectual ability, a successful IQ-tester doesn't encounter the self-culling that someone of more specific abilities encounters. To achieve success, it's usually necessary to find something you're good at, and interested in, and spend all your time focussed on it. Someone who's good at everything can easily hop around from one thing to another without really mastering anything. Someone whose abilities are more focussed has the choice of what to focus on made for them.
    • I'm not convinced that the sort of intelligence measured by IQ tests ignores creativity and social skills, and rewards those who toe the societal line. It's argued in Hi-Q circles that those with high IQs are perfectly well adjusted to their peers, but have little in common with the vast majority of people and therefore don't fit in. While somewhat self-serving, there's much truth in this.
Footnote 360: Aeon: Mitchell - Wired that way: genes do shape behaviours but it’s complicated (WebRef=8088)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Kevin J. Mitchell
    • Author Narrative: Kevin Mitchell is a neurogeneticist. He is associate professor at the Smurfit Institute of Genetics and the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. His latest book is "Mitchell (Kevin J.) - Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are" (2018).
    • Author's Conclusion: The relationship between our genotypes and our psychological traits, while substantial, is highly indirect and emergent. It involves the interplay of the effects of thousands of genetic variants, realised through the complex processes of development, ultimately giving rise to variation in many parameters of brain structure and function, which, collectively, impinge on the high-level cognitive and behavioural functions that underpin individual differences in our psychology.
  2. Notes
Footnote 361: Aeon: Chittka & Wilson - Bee-brained (WebRef=8181)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 362: Aeon: Baggott - What Einstein meant by ‘God does not play dice’ (WebRef=8093)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jim Baggott
    • Extract:
      • Bohr and Heisenberg argued that science had finally caught up with the conceptual problems involved in the description of reality that philosophers had been warning of for centuries. Bohr is quoted as saying: ‘There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ This vaguely positivist statement was echoed by Heisenberg: ‘[W]e have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ Their broadly antirealist ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ – denying that the wavefunction represents the real physical state of a quantum system – quickly became the dominant way of thinking about quantum mechanics. More recent variations of such antirealist interpretations suggest that the wavefunction is simply a way of ‘coding’ our experience, or our subjective beliefs derived from our experience of the physics, allowing us to use what we’ve learned in the past to predict the future.
      • But this was utterly inconsistent with Einstein’s philosophy. Einstein could not accept an interpretation in which the principal object of the representation – the wavefunction – is not ‘real’. He could not accept that his God would allow the ‘lawful harmony’ to unravel so completely at the atomic scale, bringing lawless indeterminism and uncertainty, with effects that can’t be entirely and unambiguously predicted from their causes.
  2. Notes
Footnote 363: Aeon: Baggini - Hume the humane (WebRef=8101)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Julian Baggini
    • Aeon Subtitle: Hume believed we were nothing more or less than human: that’s why he’s the amiable, modest, generous philosopher we need now
    • Concluding Paragraph: The problem for fans of David Hume is how we can be enthusiastic advocates of someone so opposed to enthusiasm. If the case for Hume is to be made in Humean terms, it has to be gently but eloquently argued for. More importantly still, perhaps, it has to be demonstrated. True lovers of the secular, reasonable way of life Hume stood for ought to avoid hysterical condemnations of religion and superstition as well as overly optimistic praise for the power of science and rationality. We should instead be modest in our philosophical pretensions, advocating human sympathy as much, if not more, than human rationality. Most of all, we should never allow our pursuit of learning and knowledge to get in the way of the softening pleasures of food, drink, company and play. Hume modelled a way of life that was gentle, reasonable, amiable: all the things public life now so rarely is.
Footnote 364: Aeon: Law - Do you see a duck or a rabbit: just what is aspect perception? (WebRef=9373)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Stephen Law
    • Author Narrative: Stephen Law is the editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal THINK. He researches primarily in the philosophy of religion. His books include The Philosophy Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking (2003) and A Very Short Introduction to Humanism (2011). He lives in Oxford.
    • Author's Conclusion
      • In short, ‘seeing as’ is a philosophically rich topic that connects with – and can help to shed light on – many central questions in philosophy: questions about the nature of perception, about what it is to grasp meaning, and about rule-following.
      • However, the notion of ‘seeing as’ also provides a more general thinking tool with potentially all sorts of applications. Consider, for example the question of what makes an ordinary object – Marcel Duchamp’s upturned urinal or Tracey Emin’s unmade bed – a work of art? Is what makes such an object an artwork the fact that we see it as such?
      • The idea of ‘seeing as’ also crops up in religious thinking. Some religious folk suggest that belief in God doesn’t consist in signing up to a certain hypothesis, but rather in a way of seeing things. What distinguishes the atheist from the believer, it’s argued, is not necessarily the ability to recognise the cogency of certain arguments for the conclusion that God exists. Rather, what the atheist misses out on is the ability to see the world as God’s handiwork, to see the Bible as the word of God, and so on.
      • Just as some suffer from a kind of aesthetic blindness – they can’t see a particular painting by Pablo Picasso as a powerful expression of suffering – so, some suggest, atheists suffer from a kind of religious blindness that means they’re unable to see the world as it really is: as a manifestation of the divine.
      • This last example brings me to a word of warning, however. Seeing something as a so-and-so doesn’t guarantee that it is a so-and-so. I might see a pile of clothes in the shadows at the end of my bed as a monster. But of course, if I believe it’s a monster, then I’m very much mistaken. And I can be shown to be mistaken.
  2. Notes
Footnote 365: Aeon: Aronson & Duportail - The quantified heart (WebRef=8824)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Polina Aronson & Judith Duportail
    • Aeon Subtitle: Artificial intelligence promises ever more control over the highs and lows of our emotions. Uneasy? Perhaps you should be
    • Authors' (near) Conclusion: We exist in a feedback loop with our devices. The upbringing of conversational agents invariably turns into the upbringing of users. It’s impossible to predict what AI might do to our feelings. However, if we regard emotional intelligence as a set of specific skills – recognising emotions, discerning between different feelings and labelling them, using emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour – then it’s worth reflecting on what could happen once we offload these skills on to our gadgets.
  2. Notes
Footnote 366: Aeon: Purcell - Life on the slippery Earth (WebRef=8448)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Sebastian Purcell
    • Author Narrative: Sebastian Purcell is assistant professor of philosophy at SUNY-Cortland in New York, where he researches history, social conditions, globalisation, concepts of justice and Latin American philosophy.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Aztec moral philosophy has profound differences from the Greek tradition, not least its acceptance that nobody is perfect
Footnote 367: Aeon: Callcut - What are we? (WebRef=8826)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Daniel Callcut
    • Author Narrative: Daniel Callcut is a freelance writer and philosopher. He is the editor of "Callcut (Daniel), Ed. - Reading Bernard Williams" (2009). He lives in Stamford, United Kingdom.
    • Aeon Subtitle: On Paul Gauguin, authenticity and the midlife crisis: how the philosopher Bernard Williams dramatised moral luck
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Most people – if not everyone – struggle with the gap between whom they want to be, and who they are. You might, for example, very much want to be a daring person but it’s just not you. Should you still pursue your desire if the wished-for identity is not achievable?
      • Williams doesn’t advise what to do in such situations. But in his imagined scenario of a failed Gauguin, he does give a picture of what a dire state you can get into when you relentlessly try to achieve something only to find out that it’s not you. You might get to Tahiti, fail at your work, and discover that you are not a great artist after all. You are merely a shit. Your ground project in life, your art, might be based on an illusion, even if your deepest impulse is to pursue it. Think twice, then, before you head out to the South Seas.
  2. Notes
    • This is a useful article, because it reminded me of a small slew of other papers that had been in my queue. Not only the subject of the paper - namely
      → "Williams (Bernard) - Moral Luck",
      but also:-
      → "Nagel (Thomas) - Moral Luck: Response to Bernard Williams",
      → "Nagel (Thomas) - Moral Luck",
      → "Williams (Bernard) - Moral Luck: A Postscript", and
      → "Hartman (Robert J.) - Moral Luck"
    • However, despite its title, it has no real connection with the question that is the primary focus of my philosophical research, namely “What are we?”.
    • I agree with the author’s conclusion, and certain specifics about the case of Gauguin himself (which Bernard Williams explicitly excludes from what is effectively a TE).
    • Callcut says this is a male thing – analogous to a mid-life crisis – but Williams also includes the (admittedly fictional) example of Anna Karenina. He also suggests that (the real) Gauguin’s art is undermined by his moral failings – in particular because he “was an abuser of young Polynesian girls whom he knowingly infected with syphilis”. This is a very complex matter, but where would it all end if we always blacklisted art on the basis of its creator’s morals, especially – though probably not in Gauguin’s case – where standards have changed over the centuries?
    • This is all in the context of great art – someone leaves their clear responsibilities in order to follow their “calling”. Williams’s point is that you cannot know whether you were right in following your muse until you are proved right by success (however defined), and this success depends on either internal or external luck. I’ll comment on this under Williams’s paper, hopefully.
    • But - it strikes me – this is all rather precious. Forgetting whatever Gauguin got up to in Tahiti, simply leaving his wife and family is something that men – and women – do every time they get divorced (or split up having produced a family but not having got married). They do this seeking “happiness”, not just “being themselves”. Can’t this apply to someone who feels constrained by the life they are in without the (now, mostly) acceptable excuse of “running off with someone else”?
    • There’s an undercurrent of #MeToo in all this, and an appreciative reference to Mary Beard banging her drum, to the effect that – despite Bernard Williams continuing to have (at least in 2014) a posthumous reputation in Cambridge as a “supporter of women’s causes” – that Williams’s work has a ‘decidedly bloke-ish feel’. Rather irritating.
    • PID Note: What are We?
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Callcut (Daniel) - What are we?"
Footnote 368: Aeon: Hall - Why read Aristotle today? (WebRef=8104)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Edith Hall
    • Aeon Subtitle: Modern self-help draws heavily on Stoic philosophy. But Aristotle was better at understanding real human happiness
    • Concluding Paragraph: Aristotle’s ethical writings, ..., contain few explicit instructions about how to act. Aristotelians need to take full responsibility in deciding what is the right way to behave and in repeatedly exerting their own judgment. The chief benefit that Aristotle can bestow on us today, which makes him so useful and practically applicable, is his alternative conception of ‘happiness’. It cannot be acquired by pleasurable experiences but only by identifying and realising our own potential, moral and creative, in our specific environments, with our particular family, friends and colleagues, and helping others to do so. We need to review both what we choose to do and what we avoid doing, because wrongs caused by omission can be just as destructive as those we commit. This involves embracing emotional impulses but also ensuring that we are using them as guides to what is good rather than letting them dictate our actions. And we need to do these things continuously, since cultivating virtue, and the happiness that comes with this approach to life, can never be anything less than a lifelong goal.
Footnote 369: Aeon: Rachlin - Teleological behaviourism or what it means to imagine a lion (WebRef=8903)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 370: Aeon: Pierre - Die like a dog (WebRef=8894)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Joseph Pierre
    • Aeon Subtitle: Pet dogs often have a peaceful death that forestalls protracted suffering and pain. Why can’t we do the same for humans?
  2. Notes
Footnote 371: Aeon: Whitmarsh - Black Achilles (WebRef=8451)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Tim Whitmarsh
    • Author Narrative: Tim Whitmarsh is the A G Leventis Professor of Greek culture at the University of Cambridge, and has held professorial posts at Oxford and Exeter. His latest book is Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (2015).
    • Aeon Subtitle: The Greeks didn’t have modern ideas of race. Did they see themselves as white, black – or as something else altogether?
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Colour vocabulary is often felt by its users to be natural and obvious, because the visual register is so immediate and vivid to us. We think that the colours we see are inscribed into the order of things. At a physiological level, indeed, that may be true. But when our brains begin the process of making sense of those neurological signals, then, inevitably, we start using the categories that we have learned from those around us.
      • Looking into the past and training ourselves to see with the eyes of other cultures, are powerful ways of denaturalising our inherited conceptual categories, and of recognising that they are not inevitable.
      • The final irony is that the Ancient Greeks, so often thought of in Europe and North America as self-evidently white, would have been staggered at this suggestion.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → "Sassi (Maria Michela) - The sea was never blue".
    • This is an interesting but rather pointless paper.
    • Yes - the ancient Greeks' colour-words don't map straightforwardly onto ours.
    • And, yes - their statues were painted so their contemporary marble whiteness doesn't show the ideal Greek skin-colouration.
    • And as the author points out, their interest in skin-colour only had to do with sun-tan. Aristocratic women were supposed to stay indoors, so white female skin was valued as a sign of high birth. However, aristocratic men were supposed to be warriors (even if only part-time), so male whiteness of skin amongst aristocrats was a sign of effeminacy. But this – together with the evidence of DNA and comparison with modern Greeks – shows that they were “white”. Any black Achilles was an artifact of vase-production techniques.
    • That at least some ancient Greeks were aware of racial characteristics is shown by Xenophanes’s famous quote: “Ethiopians say that their gods are snub–nosed [σιμούς] and black; Thracians that they are pale and red-haired”. See Wikipedia: Xenophanes.
    • The paper is presumably arguing against white-supremacists who claim the ancient Greeks were “on their side”. Fair enough, but they won’t be reading articles like this.
    • Sounds like the ancient Greeks probably were casually racist, but didn’t major in the subject.
    • The author claims “We might add that modern geneticists too find classification by skin colour unhelpful, and indeed avoid the term ‘race’ (a meaningless category in biological terms). There is relatively little genetic difference between the human populations of different continents, and levels of skin pigmentation are a very poor proxy for general genetic relatedness. The distinction between ‘black’ African and ‘white’ European peoples, then, is not just unGreek: it’s also unbiological.” While I agree that typical skin-colour is only one of many racial characteristics – and one shared by typical exemplars of very different races – it and other racial characteristics are still a useful way of categorizing peoples and need not be associated with prejudice (positive or negative). It’s a method of categorisation that has been universally used and one that many (if not all) peoples self-identify with, whether certain academics think they ought to or not.
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Whitmarsh (Tim) - Black Achilles"
Footnote 372: Aeon: Kasmirli - What we say vs what we mean: what is conversational implicature? (WebRef=8956)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Maria Kasmirli
    • Author Narrative: Maria Kasmirli is a philosopher and teacher. She is currently a research associate at the University of Sheffield and a teacher at the School of European Education in Heraklion, Crete.
    • Excerpts:
      • Paul Grice argued that conversational implicatures arise because speakers are expected to be cooperative – to make contributions appropriate to the purpose of the conversation in which they are engaged. More specifically, they are expected to follow four conversational maxims, which can be summarised as:
        1. Give an appropriate amount of information (the maxim of quantity);
        2. Give correct information (the maxim of quality);
        3. Give relevant information (the maxim of relation); and
        4. Give information clearly (the maxim of manner).
        According to Grice, a conversational implicature is generated when an utterance flouts one or more of these maxims, or would do so if the implicature weren’t present. In such cases, we can preserve the assumption that the speaker is being cooperative only by interpreting their utterance as conveying something other than, or additional to, its literal meaning, and this is its implicated meaning.
      • The distinction between what is said and what is conversationally implicated isn’t just a technical philosophical one. It highlights the extent to which human communication is pragmatic and non-literal. We routinely rely on conversational implicature to supplement and enrich our utterances, thus saving time and providing a discreet way of conveying sensitive information. But this convenience also creates ethical and legal problems. Are we responsible for what we implicate as well as for what we actually say?
      • Not all philosophers and linguists accept Grice’s explanation of how conversational implicature works, but everyone agrees that he highlighted a real phenomenon that is pervasive in human communication. Grice provided us with an important thinking tool and, with it in your mental toolbox, you will find conversational implicatures, and the issues they raise, everywhere.
  2. Notes
Footnote 373: Aeon: Pessoa - Robot cognition requires machines that both think and feel (WebRef=8970)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Luiz Pessoa
    • Author Narrative: Luiz Pessoa is director of Maryland Neuroimaging Center, principal investigator at the Laboratory of Cognition and Emotion, and professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. He is the author of The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (2013).
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • The point is not that emotion is needed for intelligent, autonomous robots – the answer is yes – but that emotion needs to be hooked up to everything that goes on in a cognitive system. Emotion is not an ‘add-on’ module that endows a robot with feelings or allows it to express an internal state, such as the current risk of overheating. Its integration is a design principle of the information-processing architecture. Without emotion, no being that we might create can have any hope of aspiring to true intelligence.
  2. Notes
Footnote 374: Aeon: Smithsimon - How to see race (WebRef=8992)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Gregory Smithsimon
    • Author Narrative: Gregory Smithsimon is professor of sociology at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York, and the CUNY Graduate Center. His latest book is Cause ... And How it Doesn’t Always Equal Effect (2018).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Race is a shapeshifting adversary: what seems self-evident takes training to see, and twists under political pressure
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Getting rid of racism requires clarity about the nature of the enemy. The way to defeat white supremacy is to destroy it. The US will truly be ‘majority non-white’ only when white is no longer the privileged citizenship category, when white is no more meaningful than the archaic Octoroon or Irish. This is not to discount the anxiety about cultural loss conjured by talk of an imagined colourblind future, but to recognise the inextricability of racial identities and power inequality. With work, perhaps the next expansion of whiteness will be into oblivion.
  2. Notes
    • This paper needs careful analysis, which I;ve not supplied.
    • It strikes me that there's a temptation to treat 'race' as a universally malign social construct, and that discussion is 'coloured' by too much focus on the abuses of the past and the present - particularly in Germany and the US, and far too much focused on the situation of Blacks in prosperous countries.
    • But, most 'races' are proud of their race - and many non-white races look down on other races of whatever colour.
    • We can't substitute nationality for race, because the diasporas of many races (Jews, Armenians, ...) see themselves as members of that race, as well as as citizens of their adoptive country. This is especially so where their race has been a great civilisation or has achieved great things in the past.
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Smithsimon (Gregory) - How to see race"
Footnote 375: Aeon: Temkin - What’s the best option? (WebRef=9032)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Larry S. Temkin
    • Author Narrative: Larry Temkin is distinguished professor of philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. His latest book is Rethinking the Good: Moral Ideals and the Nature of Practical Reasoning (2012).
    • Aeon Subtitle: It seems only logical: if A is better than B, and B is better than C, then A is better than C. Right? Not necessarily
  2. Notes
    • The author argues that the “better than” relation is intransitive because its evaluation depends on contextual factors that vary from situation to situation, unlike “taller than” where there is a universal standard.
    • I think that the real problem with what appear to be circles of “better than” relations is that the relation itself is ill-defined.
    • In order to be evaluated at all it needs to subscribe to some form of utilitarianism / hedonism where the value of any outcome can be cashed out in “hedons”. If this is a coherent schema, and if the possession of n hedons is always better than the possession of m hedons if n > m, then “better than” would be a transitive relation.
    • The problem may be either that the whole idea of hedons is silly or incoherent – values are truly incommensurable, or at least cannot be cashed out as numbers – or that it is being misapplied (or maybe subject to sorites paradoxes).
    • A favourite sorites-style problem would be a failure to calculate marginal utilities correctly.
    • Also, what might have been a correct value-judgement at the time may be undermined by subsequent events, like an economy-car bought the day before you won the lottery and which a rich person would not be seen dead in.
Footnote 376: Aeon: Robinson - Thus spake Albert (WebRef=8100)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Andrew Robinson
    • Aeon Subtitle: You probably know a quote from him. He probably never said it. How did Einstein become a touchstone of all that is wise?
    • Concluding Paragraph: The phenomenon of Einstein misquotation is largely driven by an all-too-human desire for mystification and for authority figures, epitomised by the two words ‘iconic’ and ‘genius’. When relativity first became popular in the 1920s, many people assumed that Einstein could be cited to the effect that everything is relative, including truth; that all observations are subjective; and that anything is possible. ‘I like quoting Einstein,’ as the Jewish-American author, historian and broadcaster Studs Terkel declared with a grin in an interview with The Guardian on his 90th birthday in 2002. ‘Know why? Because nobody dares contradict you.’ Terkel’s quip is especially ironic, given Einstein’s lifelong distrust of authority – particularly in physics, education or politics. But even here, Einstein commands the last word. In an authentic aphorism for an unnamed friend, he wrote in 1930: ‘To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.’
Footnote 377: Aeon: Han - The copy is the original (WebRef=9024)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Byung-Chul Han
    • Author Narrative: Byung-Chul Han is professor of philosophy and cultural studies at the Berlin University of the Arts. His latest book is "Han (Byung-Chul) - Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese" (2017), translated by Philippa Hurd.
    • Aeon Subtitle: In China and Japan, temples may be rebuilt and ancient warriors cast again. There is nothing sacred about the ‘original’
  2. Notes
Footnote 378: Aeon: Olberding - The outsider (WebRef=9043)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Amy Olberding
    • Author Narrative: Amy Olberding is the Presidential Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. Her latest book is The Wrong of Rudeness (2019).
    • Aeon Subtitle: As a philosopher, I can’t conceal my class. But I prefer the counsel of my grandmother to platitudes about ‘impostor syndrome’
  2. Notes
    • This was an interesting article - by a philosopher who grew up on a farm in the US - and now owns (and seems to run) that farm.
    • She therefore didn't have the cultural background expected of an academic (in philosophy, at least).
    • I - to a degree - remember feeling like her at King's (though maybe more for social reasons than cultural). Mathematicians weren't expected to have much culture.
    • It's useful in philosophy to have practitioners from different backgrounds. However, it's not hard to "catch up", and is probably a duty, so you can talk the same language and recognise the same tropes.
    • But, there's no need to be "assimilated" or to lead a life of pretence for fear of expoure "as an imposter".
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Olberding (Amy) - The outsider"
Footnote 379: Aeon: Russell - Philosophical intuition: just what is ‘a priori’ justification? (WebRef=9038)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Bruce Russell
    • Author Narrative: Bruce Russell is professor of philosophy at Wayne State University in Michigan.
    • Extract:
      • A priori justification is also the basis of our fundamental moral beliefs. We are justified in believing that it is wrong to torture children for the fun of it because we have an a priori intuition that it is: it seems wrong based on our understanding of the concept ‘wrong’.
      • Some people are utilitarians and think that what we should do is what will produce the best consequences. But suppose we can save five people in desperate need of a vital organ only if we kill, and then cut up, an innocent person and harvest his organs to save the five? Imagine that transplant surgery has been perfected so that there is no worry that the organs will fail or be rejected. Imagine, also, that no one will be caught if the plan is executed. Suppose, further, that all six people are good people with loved ones, friends, similar jobs, etc. Most people have the philosophical intuition that it would be wrong to kill the one and harvest his organs to save the five.
      • So fundamental moral principles and theories can receive justification, and be refuted, through a priori means. Because our moral reasoning in everyday situations always involves at least implicit appeal to fundamental moral principles, and the justification of those fundamental moral principles is a priori, the justification of all of our moral beliefs rests partly on a priori justification.
  2. Notes
    • Bruce Russell argues that philosophical intuitionism is the claim that certain truths are so just by the meaning of the concepts involved.
    • I’m not sure this is quite right – making it equivalent to the a priori – but it’s nearly right. Some things are true just because they are – no further argument is possible. There’s a dialogue somewhere in "Hofstadter (Douglas) - Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll" that deals with this.
    • Bruce Russell is a moral intuitionist (follow the link from his name) as is demonstrated in the extract from the paper. I think a utilitarian would have to argue that their theory could account for the “organ cannibalisation” case on utilitarian grounds – that, despite the apparent gain in utility in the narrow sense, if you take a wider view there would be a decrease in utility overall (because of public demoralisation and fears, for instance). The intuitionist says this is beside the point – it’s just wrong, and we know this from the meaning of the word “wrong”.
    • The trouble with intuitionism is that philosophers’ intuitions differ, and I doubt it’s due to their meaning different things by their concepts, though maybe it is.
Footnote 380: Aeon: Rees - Animal agents (WebRef=9053)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Amanda Rees
    • Author Narrative: Amanda Rees is a senior lecturer in the department of sociology at the University of York. Her work has been published in the British Journal for the History of Science and Social Studies of Science, among others. Her latest book is The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art of Field Science (2009).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Can they shape their own lives? Or the course of history? It’s time to reconsider the significance of animal agency
    • Author's Conclusion: For those of us who share our lives with pets, companions or working animals, managing our daily lives depends on recognising not just the needs, but the intentions, capacities and capabilities of the nonhuman – not least the extent to which we rely on such qualities. For the past century or so, these commonsense, lay understandings of animal agency have been marginalised as examples of sloppy anthropomorphism. It is now past time to take this tacit, non-expert knowledge seriously. By adopting a new approach to animal agency, we can develop new ways of thinking about multiple, distributed agencies and the way that they are remaking the world. In the age of the Anthropocene, we cannot afford to assume that these changes will always and forever be under conscious human control.
  2. Notes
Footnote 381: Aeon: Video - Why dogs have floppy ears (WebRef=9058)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Why do domesticated animals tend to have floppy ears, short snouts and lighter skin?
    • Aeon Summary:
      • Charles Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication was published in 1868, nine years after On the Origin of Species. Among a number of topics related to domestication and heredity, the book asked why tamed animals tend to have floppier ears, shorter snouts and lighter, blotchier skin than their wild counterparts – a set of traits he referred to as ‘domestication syndrome’.
      • The question went unanswered during Darwin’s lifetime but, as this animation from NPR’s Skunk Bear reveals, scientists might have recently discovered the answer hiding in the cellular makeup of domesticated animal embryos.
  2. Notes
    • The answer suggested is that there's a correlation between the various effects of embryonic neural crest cells. Domesticated animals were initially selected and then bred for their relative docility - linked to relative shortfalls of adrenalin - which is produced by the adrenal glands near the kidneys that arise from these cells. Fewer neural crest celss, less adrenalin. The other features - floppy ears and so on - are a side effect. There are still some unanswered questions noted - why don't all domestic animals have these features?
    • You'd have thought that floppy ears would be bad news for aggressive animals - and wouldn't last long if they were born with them and kept getting into fights.
    • PID Note: Animals
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Cole (Alan), Aeon - Video - Why dogs have floppy ears"
Footnote 382: Aeon: Bier - The tech bias: why Silicon Valley needs social theory (WebRef=9080)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jess Bier
    • Author Narrative: Jess Bier is an assistant professor of urban sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. She is the author of Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine (2017).
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • The skewed institutions that result should be everyone’s concern. If tech companies are serious about building a better society, and aren’t just paying lip service to justice for their own gain, they must attend more closely to social theory. If social insights were easy, and if practice followed readily from understanding, then racism, poverty and other debilitating systems of power and inequality would be a thing of the past. New insights about society are as challenging to produce as the most rarified scientific theorems – and addressing pressing contemporary problems requires as many kinds of knowers and ways of knowing as possible.
  2. Notes
    • This is probably an important paper for me to read and reflect on, despite the fact that I find it annoying.
    • I doubt that either the technocrats or the sociologists are entirely objective. Both have their agendas and read the data in the light thereof. There’s a culture within each of the two disciplines that you can’t sit comfortably in if you don’t share it.
    • I also suspect that both sides of the story are right to a degree.
Footnote 383: Aeon: Video - The ladybug love-in (WebRef=9076)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Every winter, ladybirds break their solitude and assemble for a once-in-a-lifetime love-fest
    • Aeon Summary: The Hippodamia convergens (the convergent ladybug, or ladybird) beetle spends most of its life alone, feasting on aphids and other small, soft-bodied insects. But each year as the cold weather sets in, they migrate to hibernation hiding places – generally the same cozy spots. Their journey is made all the more impressive by the fact that the insects, which live only up to a year, have never been to the meet-up points before. Scientists believe that they find their way using pheromone trails left by previous generations. And, as this short video from the science documentary series KQED Science: Deep Look shows, when they assemble en masse to enter a state of diapause and eventually mate in the spring, it’s a natural wonder worth beholding. You can read more about this insect’s lifecycle at KQED Science.
  2. Notes
      Of interest simply because we seem to get clusters of ladybirds in the curtains in our front bedroom, to the disgust of my daughters when one or other of them stay there.
Footnote 384: Aeon: Video - All what is somehow useful (WebRef=9132)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Haunting photographs of farm animals reveal more than initially meets the eye
    • Abstract:
      • All What Is Somehow Useful rhythmically arranges pictures from a series of early 20th-century animal experiments to a decidedly disturbing effect, evoking something of an eerie children’s story or lullaby, filled with friendly barnyard creatures whose fates are rather less cheerful.
      • The sequences seem to reveal something both impressive and sinister about human nature, illustrating how adept we’ve become at using animals to serve our own ends.
      • The short film features glass-plate photographs from a collection at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg’s Institute of Agricultural and Nutrition Sciences in Germany.
  2. Notes
Footnote 385: Aeon: de Zavala - Why collective narcissists are so politically volatile (WebRef=9133)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Agnieszka Golec de Zavala
    • Author Narrative: Agnieszka Golec de Zavala is a senior lecturer in psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poznan, Poland.
    • Excerpt
      • Collective narcissists are not simply content to be members of a valuable group. They don’t devote their energy to contributing to the group’s betterment and value. Rather, they engage in monitoring whether everybody around, particularly other groups, recognise and acknowledge the great value and special worth of their group.
      • To be sure, collective narcissists demand privileged treatment, not equal rights. And the need for continuous external validation of the group’s inflated image (a negative attribute) is what differentiates collective narcissists from those who simply hold positive feelings about their group.
Footnote 386: Aeon: Evans - The autism paradox (WebRef=9128)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Bonnie Evans
    • Aeon Subtitle: How an autism diagnosis became both a clinical label and an identity; a stigma to be challenged and a status to be embraced
    • Author’s Abstract
      • To date, most attempts to categorise human development reach a peak at which they generate more problems than they can explain. Psychoanalytic theories of ‘maternal deprivation’ reached their zenith when the political model they supported was no longer viable. The same thing happened with post-war intelligence-testing, so the idea of ‘intelligence’ had to be recast. Autism research in the 1960s ‘solved’ many problems of the previous generations, by finding ways to support individuals who had previously been excluded – but it also began to fail those individuals as soon as it started making population-wide claims about how autistic people were ‘impaired’. Autism diagnoses were the foundation of social support, but individual dignity and identity were lost in the process. Many neurodiversity advocates are now clawing back these rights to tell individual stories. Yet this activism takes place against an unfortunate backdrop of grave threats to the public services that support autistic individuals.
      • Is there really an autism paradox? Or is this actually a paradox of human difference, and of what it means to delineate human types while also offering people the best opportunity to thrive. If we are to think creatively about how to identify difference without stigmatising it, it pays to think historically about how autism research got us to this point. Such history offers a rather humbling lesson: that it might very well be impossible to measure, classify and quantify an aspect of human psychology, without also muting attempts to tell the story differently.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Aeon: Costandi - Against neurodiversity
    • This is an interesting account of the various historical approaches to those on the autistic spectrum.
    • Also, of the 'neurodiversity' movement.
    • However, it fails to properly account for the concerns of some that - because it's a spectrum - some on the far end are severely disadvantaged and they and their carers need a lot of help.
    • On one end of the scale - especially Asperger's - 'embracing diversity' is the correct approach. Individuals with the syndrome may be 'a bit odd' in certain respects but may have compensating benefits. But, even if not, they are perfectly functional and don't need meddling with.
    • But individuals who can't speak, or spend all day banging their heads against a wall, aren't 'diverse'; there's something wrong with them and they (and their carers) need help.
    • PID Note: Psychopathology
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Evans (Bonnie) - The autism paradox"
Footnote 387: Aeon: Video - Are university admissions biased? (WebRef=9375)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: How a statistical paradox helps to get to the root of bias in college admissions
    • Author's Abstract:
      • Simpson’s paradox is a statistical phenomenon in which a trend appears in small data sets, but differs or reverses when those sets are combined into a larger group.
      • One of the most fascinating examples of the paradox comes from a study about gender bias in graduate admissions at the University of California, Berkeley in 1973, when roughly 44 per cent of male applicants were accepted, compared with only 35 per cent of female applicants. These figures appeared to show an obvious bias against women, but when the data were broken down by department, they actually showed a slight bias in favour of women.
      • This animation from MinutePhysics explains just how Simpson’s paradox occurs and, in the case of Berkeley, how the paradox highlighted a deeper societal bias that pushes women towards departments that are more crowded, have less funding, and offer poorer employment opportunities.
  2. Notes
Footnote 388: Aeon: Video - Confucian ancestor worship (WebRef=9554)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Nigel Warburton
    • Aeon Subtitle: Why Confucius believed that honouring your ancestors is central to social harmony
  2. Notes
    • What can you get from a 2-minute animation?
    • Also, I didn't think it said anything about 'why', only 'that'.
    • I suppose the idea is that you are to understand your place in the world to be located within the family, which teaches you how to live.
Footnote 389: Aeon: Video - Lan Yan (WebRef=9409)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: In the shadows of high-rises, Shanghai’s small neighbourhoods struggle to survive
    • Editor's Abstract
      • In China’s biggest city Shanghai, urbanisation and modernisation have led to the decline of shikumen – traditional neighbourhoods where families live alongside one another in shared residences on cramped, narrow streets.
      • This short documentary explores the pleasures and stresses of life in Lan Yan, a shikumen that has survived as government-sponsored high-rise apartment buildings have swallowed up all the surrounding areas.
      • A collaboration between students from San Francisco State University and Shanghai Normal University, the film follows Zhang JianXin, a bus driver and longtime Lan Yan resident, who is raising his daughter to share his fondness for a fast-disappearing way of life. Knowing the state’s drive for modernisation will likely soon sweep Lan Yan away, Zhang reflects on what is lost when tight-knit communities are replaced by high-rises that most residents don’t want and can’t afford.
  2. Notes
    • Excellent insight into the disappearing older parts of Shanghai.
    • Also of relevance universally - more efficient and convenient dwellings come at the cost of community.
Footnote 390: Aeon: Video - Birth of a bee (WebRef=10164)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: From egg to the air: 21 days of bee development condensed into one mesmerising minute
    • Editor's Abstract
      • After just three weeks of development, worker bees emerge from their brood cells fully formed, flying out to begin supporting their hive.
      • In a stunning high-definition time-lapse video, the US photographer Anand Varma follows the bee’s stages of development from egg to larvae to pupa to worker bee, with a sprightly score to match the insects’ rather startling journey into being.
  2. Notes
    • This is rather an astonishing video and does last a minute, though it seems less!
    • There seems to be a late surge in bee development, though it's not possible to tell whether this is an artifact of the film, as it doesn't 'watch' a particular cell continuously.
Footnote 391: Aeon: Video - George Saunders: on story (WebRef=11025)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A story is like a black box – you put the reader in there: George Saunders on storytelling
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The US writer George Saunders is celebrated both for his masterful prose and empathic storytelling. A MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award finalist, Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, was released in 2017 to wide acclaim.
      • In this short video, the author deconstructs what makes for an effective story, and describes his personal strategies for writing, revealing the importance of conversing with your characters, the pitfalls of fixing your intentions in place, and why good storytelling is a bit like being in love.
  2. Notes
    • Worth listening to.
    • The idea seems to be to let stories unfold by asking questions of the characters, and developing them that way (as a writer).
    • Since it was published in 2017, it was soon after the speaker's first novel, published in the same year.
    • I wonder whether it has anything to say of (supposedly) factual stories (like the Gospels)?
    • PID Note: Fiction
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - George Saunders: on story"
Footnote 392: Aeon: Smith - For centuries European aristocrats proudly claimed foreign ancestry (WebRef=7997)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 393: Aeon: Video - Animated life: Pangea, Wegener and the continental drift (WebRef=9340)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: How an Earth science outsider finally put the Pangea puzzle together
    • Editor's Abstract:
      • For centuries, scientists – and pretty much anyone who had ever laid eyes on a world map – noticed that the continents seemed to fit together like puzzle pieces. But it wasn’t until the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener became convinced that the continents once formed a mega-continent and had been drifting away ever since, that anyone truly began to understand why.
      • While on a field expedition in Greenland in 1906-08, Wegener noticed how ice caps looked like puzzle pieces after they had fractured and drifted apart. He concluded that something similar must have happened with the continents and began publicising his ‘continental drift’ hypothesis in 1912.
      • But even though it offered a compelling explanation for some of geology’s most fundamental unanswered questions, continental drift received an icy reception from the geology community, who viewed Wegener as a naive outsider. It wasn’t until 50 years later – well after his death during yet another Greenland expedition – that his theory, confirmed and slightly altered by the discovery of plate tectonics, became widely accepted.
      • Part of Sweet Fern Productions’ Animated Life series, this short animation recounts Wegener’s extraordinary life story, and makes a case for the importance of outsiders and interdisciplinarity in science.
      • To learn more about continental drift and plate tectonics – and endemic sexism in the scientific community – watch Marie Tharp: Uncovering the Secrets of the Ocean Floor.
Footnote 394: Aeon: Aamodt - On shared false memories (WebRef=3863)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 395: Aeon: Lemonick - Living in the now (WebRef=8124)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Michael D. Lemonick
    • Author Narrative: Michael D Lemonick is the opinion editor for Scientific American. His latest book is The Perpetual Now: A Story of Amnesia, Memory, and Love (2017).
    • Aeon Subtitle: She can paint, but not name a painting; learn new music without knowing a tune. Lonni Sue is teaching us much about memory.
  2. Notes
Footnote 396: Aeon: Colombo - Why children ask ‘Why?’ and what makes a good explanation (WebRef=9028)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Matteo Colombo
    • Author Narrative: Matteo Colombo is an assistant professor in the Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics, and Philosophy of Science, and in the Department of Philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. His research interests include the philosophy of cognitive science, moral psychology and the philosophy of science.
    • Excerpts
      • [...] What is a good explanation? And how can we find out? Philosophers of science have traditionally answered these questions by concentrating on the norms governing scientists’ explanatory practice, evaluating these norms on the basis of their intuitions on a battery of cases involving putative explanations.
      • Starting with the work of Carl Hempel in the 1960s, philosophers of science have articulated three main models of explanation.
        1. According to Hempel’s covering-law model, explanations are arguments demonstrating that what is being explained logically follows from some general law.
        2. Another approach is the unificationist model, which says that good explanations provide a unified account that can be comprehensively applied to many different phenomena. Newton’s theory of gravity and Darwin’s theory of evolution are lovely explanations because they enjoy a great unifying power.
        3. The causal mechanical model is perhaps the most popular among philosophers. It says that good explanations reveal organised component parts and activities that make things happen.
      • These models capture the form of many good explanations. However, philosophers should not assume that there is only one true model of explanation, and that a decision must be made about which model tells us what a good explanation really is. That is, many assume that a single, ‘one-size’ explanatory model fits all areas of enquiry. This assumption means that philosophers have often ignored the psychology of explanatory reasoning.
      • Giving a good answer to a ‘Why?’ question is not just a philosophical abstraction. An explanation has cognitive, real-world functions. It promotes learning and discovery, and good explanatory theories are vital to smoothly navigating the environment.
      • [...]
      • Results from psychology also expose a striking similarity between children’s and scientists’ explanatory reasoning. Both children and scientists look out in the world, trying to find patterns, searching for surprising violations of those patterns, and attempting to make sense of them based on explanatory and probabilistic considerations. Children’s explanatory practices offer unique insight into the nature of good explanation.
      • Models of explanation should be calibrated on data about actual explanatory practice from psychology, but also from the history and sociology of science. The same conclusion applies to other traditional topics studied by philosophers of science like confirmation, theory change, and scientific discovery, where all too often abstract philosophical theorising obfuscates the cognitive foundations of science. Empirically grounded studies of explanation are clearly telling us something important about how people explain, what they find explanatorily valuable, and how explanatory practices change over one’s lifetime. If every child is a natural-born scientist, philosophers of science would do well to pay more attention to the psychology of explanation, and particularly to children’s ‘Why?’ questions and explanatory reasoning. They will get a more nuanced understanding of what makes for a good explanation.
  2. Notes
Footnote 397: Aeon: Video - Sartre vs Camus (WebRef=9068)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Sam Dresser
    • Aeon Subtitle: How did the 20th century’s most glamorous intellectual friendship go wrong?
    • Editors' Abstract
      • In the wake of Second World War, the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were close friends. They drank and argued together, often spending long nights out on the town. All around them, Paris was being rebuilt. Through their writing, Sartre and Camus hoped to guide this new France toward a more equitable future. They became celebrities, their every movement reported in the newspapers. But it was not to last. In 1952 they fell out bitterly. The disagreement between Camus and Sartre became the philosophical feud of the century. Why did it happen? And how could two such close friends become such unforgiving enemies?
      • Camus versus Sartre is the first instalment of ‘Philosophy Feuds’, Aeon’s original series of short animations, each of which tells the story of a famous – or not so famous – spat, break-up, falling-out or fracas. More than just revealing the hilarious and all-too-human pettiness of the world’s greatest thinkers, ‘Philosophy Feuds’ is about the fascinating ideas behind each of these rifts – and how these ideas continue to matter today.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → "Dresser (Sam) - How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free"
    • Hmmm ... the Editor's Abstract doesn't tell us anything about what the break-up was about.
    • The animation is rather too droll and American for my taste, but is pleasingly short and informative.
    • The basic reason for the split seems to have been over the application of communism to real societies and different assessments of the value of individual human beings. Sartre had a low view of human nature and individual human value, and so was more accommodating of Stalin's repressive regime than Camus, who was more optimistic.
    • There's no link for ‘Philosophy Feuds’. From a quick scan it looks like the second was Aeon: Video - Freud vs Jung:, but maybe that was the last!
Footnote 398: Aeon: Video - Seeing the invisible: van Leeuwenhoek's first glimpses of the microbial world (WebRef=10621)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘I could not but wonder at it’: history’s first glimpses into the microbial world
    • Editors' Abstract
      • ‘What do you do when you see things that no one has ever seen before?’
      • When the Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek pointed a new, handcrafted microscope down into a jar of algae in 1674, he became the first person to learn of the microbial world. ‘And the motion of most of them in the water was so swift and so various, upwards, downwards, and round about, that I confess I could not but wonder at it,’ he later wrote to the Royal Society of London. What followed was one of the most outstanding cascades of scientific breakthroughs in history: from bacteria to protozoa to sperm to blood cells we learned that the vast majority of life is invisible to the naked eye and, in many cases, fundamentally inseparable from us.
      • This imaginative animation from Sweet Fern Productions probes van Leeuwenhoek’s first glimpses of the microbial world, as well as the indelible mark his work left on science and the ongoing quest to understand how microscopic life shapes our existence.
Footnote 399: Aeon: Okoro - This is your morning (WebRef=9304)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Enuma Okoro
    • Author Narrative: Enuma Okoro is a writer, speaker and creative consultant. She is a TEDx speaker and an award winning author of four nonfiction books, and numerous essays and articles. She has written widely on culture, faith and identity for publications including NPR, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Quartz, The Washington Post, The Guardian, ABC's Good Morning America, and more. She is currently finishing her first novel. Born in New York City, she was raised in America, Cote d'Ivoire and England but currently splits her time between New York, Nigeria and Italy.
    • Aeon Subtitle: I left the US, the land of my birth, sickened by racial injustice. But the return to a homeland is not a simple matter
  2. Notes
    • This is a very interesting article. I’m not sure of the message to take from it. Is it restricted to those “racial outcasts” like the author or to anyone who wants to settle where their parents were born but where they’ve never lived, whatever their race? Or even to those who want to go back to where they were born, having made their fortune in the big city. Will they be accepted as though they’d never left?
    • The author’s rejection in Nigeria is at least partly racial – she’s treated as at least partly white. But she can’t expect just to fit in, not knowing the indigenous languages or anything much about the culture.
    • It’s interesting that her parents made no attempt to teach her about her roots, or speak to her in their native language, Igbo. Presumably they wanted her to “fit in” to her adoptive home rather than think of herself as an ex-pat.
    • There’s also something of having your cake and eating it. Yes – there is endemic racism in the US (but there is probably everywhere; and not just because of skin colour – think of the experience of the Jews); but her parents and she herself have presumably benefitted from leaving her native village. As she says “Here, where there is so little to rely on, no healthcare, no steady electricity, no trustworthy security, and no government that seems to care for its people. I ask myself quietly, can this be sacred ground?”.
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Okoro (Enuma) - This is your morning"
Footnote 400: Aeon: Video - Territory (WebRef=10443)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Clash of cousins: monkeys and humans wage a droll turf war at the Rock of Gibraltar
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The Rock of Gibraltar is an imposing limestone monolith, towering 426 metres over the Mediterranean Sea on the southern coast of Spain in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. Its prominent place in European myths and its impressive views have long made it a draw for tourists, as has the population of Barbary macaques inhabiting the Gibraltar Nature Reserve on the rock’s upper reaches. However, the macaques aren’t bothered by human-imposed borders, frequently venturing off the reserve and into town, where they wreak mischief on tourists and residents alike.
      • Subtly and playfully observed, Eleanor Mortimer’s amusing short documentary Territory puts us on the ground in the ongoing, low-key turf war between the people of Gibraltar and the clever primate cousins who are utterly indifferent to their will.
  2. Notes
Footnote 401: Aeon: Delistraty - Drugs du jour (WebRef=9207)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Cody Delistraty
    • Author Narrative: Cody Delistraty is a writer and historian based in New York and Paris. He writes on literature, psychology and interesting humans. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, among others.
    • Aeon Subtitle: LSD in the ’60s; ecstasy in the ’80s; ‘smart’ drugs today: how we get high reflects the desires and fears of our times
    • Author’s Abstract
      • Here, it is worth stepping back. Over the past century there has been an intimate interaction between culture and drugs, each informing the other, exemplifying the cultural directions in which humans have wanted to go – be it rebelling, submitting or moving entirely outside of all systems and constraints. Taking a good look at what we want today’s drugs and the drugs of tomorrow to do provides an idea of the cultural questions we are looking to solve. ‘The traditional model of drugs that do something active to a passive user,’ says Walton, ‘will very possibly be superseded by substances that empower the user to be something else entirely.’
      • Surely, this possibility will come to pass in some form or another in a relatively short time – drugs allowing a total escape from the self – and with it we will see the new crop of cultural questions that are being raised, and potentially answered, by drugs.
      • Patterns of drug use over the past century gives us a surprisingly accurate insight into wide swaths of cultural history, with everyone from Wall Street bankers and depressed housewives to college students and literary scions taking drugs that reflect their desires and answer their culture’s issues. But the drugs have always reflected a simpler, consistent truism. Sometimes we have wanted out of ourselves, sometimes we’ve wanted out of society, sometimes out of boredom or out of poverty; but always, whatever the case, we have wanted out. In the past, this desire was always temporary – to recharge our batteries, to find a space away from our experiences and the demands of living pressed upon us. However, more recently, drug use has become about finding a durable, lengthier, existential escape – a desire that is awfully close to self-obliteration.
  2. Notes
    • I think the author is right that there’s a symbiotic relationships between the drugs in use in a society and the issues within that society. This is hardly surprising.
    • But societies are not uniform, either within nations or across the world. Some people are more interested in manipulating their psyches than others.
    • I didn’t think his closing suggestion that drugs might be used to escape from the self had anything going for it. It might have been a temporary fad in 2016, but I’d not heard of it.
    • I do, however, think – despite my own continual use of coffee to stay awake and wine to get to sleep – that the use of mood-enhancing drugs (or – worse – performance-enhancing drugs) is “cheating” and that they are cheap ways of appearing to solve underlying problems that need to be addressed in other ways.
    • Performance-enhancement is beloved of the transhumanists, and may indeed lead to an arms-race where the rich become even more privileged, but need these drugs to compete against one another. But if all this goes the way they think, they’ll be overtaken by the machines in any case. Such drugs should be banned in some circumstances – as in sports – especially by students, where it just is a form of cheating. Use by those doing useful work is another matter, but there might be other ways of achieving the same end (like, say, having more surgeons); but single strenuous “missions” might only be possible (provided they are necessary) with such assistance.
    • However, I am sympathetic to Andean porters chewing coca or 1950s housewives needing their “little helper”. But, even there, it’s masking a problem that society should fix.
    • PID Note: Transhumanism
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Delistraty (Cody) - Drugs du jour"
Footnote 402: Aeon: Video - Teaching Philosophy to Children (WebRef=9960)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Teaching philosophy at school isn’t just good pedagogy – it helps to safeguard society
    • Editor's Summary
      • Teaching philosophy to children has been shown to sharpen reasoning and communication skills. Moreover, students who engage in philosophical thinking are better able to grapple with concepts that might otherwise be beyond their grasp.
      • But, according to Emma and Peter Worley of The Philosophy Foundation, a UK-based organisation that specialises in doing philosophy in the classroom, what’s even more important than these cognitive advantages at the individual level are the societal benefits of having a population that thinks critically and coherently.
      • In this instalment of Aeon’s In Sight series, the Worleys describe how, beyond teaching children to ‘think well’, spreading philosophy is a safeguard against the sorts of educational and societal structures that tend towards authoritarian control.
  2. Notes
    • I thought the Editors' Summary of this brief talk didn't give the right flavour.
    • The Worleys did conclude with the idea that training in philosophy is good for society in preventing political manipulation, and they did agree, just before that, that while philosophy has lots of spin-off benefits, that's not the primary reason for doing it.
    • Their suggestion is that - like music or mathematics - philosophy is an important human activity.
    • They don't teach philosophy to (young) children by teaching them the history of ideas, but by giving them philosophical problems to solve themselves in group discussion.
    • The example given is of giving a group of children (aged 8) a square of four 2's and asking them how many numbers are there. This would be recognised by a trained philosopher as a type-token distinction (4 tokens of one type); but the children can come up with this distinction themselves (and much else besides in the philosophy of mathematics ... such as just what are numbers).
    • Emma Worley admitted that she has difficulty with these questions, and others such as why is mathematics so useful in describing reality, so I'm not sure how such discussions end up.
    • I have some reservations about philosophy being taught too young. It's important to be taught what's what before you philosophise about just why what is is as it is. Also, children need some stable account of reality rather than too early an exposure to Socratic aporia.
Footnote 403: Aeon: Martinho-Truswell - The minds of other animals (WebRef=9085)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Antone Martinho-Truswell
    • Author Narrative: Antone Martinho-Truswell is a researcher in the department of zoology at the University of Oxford. His current work is focused on how birds learn concepts and process information.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Animal consciousness is taboo in many areas of biological science. What’s so hard about the inner lives of other species?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Yet the antipathy to animal consciousness can crowd out equally valid accounts, simply because they demand higher cognition. It is absolutely true that we shouldn’t call on consciousness to explain how ducks solve the problem of detecting sameness and difference. But that proscription doesn’t mean the wholesale rejection of cognitive explanations in favour of sensory computations. Cognitive abilities such as abstract representation are not the same as consciousness. They just seem to cohabit in the one species – humans – to which we are comfortable ascribing consciousness. Cognition is a much easier nut to crack than consciousness, and seems to be reliably related to various physical properties (brain-to-body ratio, and neuron number and density, for example, among many others). There is no reason to shy away from ascribing cognitive abilities for fear of accidentally summoning the spectre of consciousness. The former offers plenty of richness without needing to be proxy for the latter, and an optimism about cognition invites experiments in unusual directions (such as unexpectedly discovering ‘abstract thought’ in ducklings).
      • If my ducklings do ‘think’, whatever that might mean, the best evidence for it is the fact that vertebrate brains are broadly more alike than they are different. That being the case, we should not assume either low-level or high-level cognition as the default when looking at such creatures. It is only a muddling of the distinction between consciousness and cognition, and researchers’ convention against assuming consciousness, that forces us to play down the intellectual prowess of our companion species. We would do well to break this habit.
      • To be clear, I have no crusade to blow open the doors of animal behaviour research and declare every animal a conscious mind. But nor should we be hubristic about the differences between humans and other vertebrates. That’s another sin in the biological sciences. As Ecclesiastes reminds us: "Therefore the death of man, and of beasts is one, and the condition of them both is equal: as man dieth, so they also die: all things breathe alike, and man hath nothing more than beast: all things are subject to vanity. "
  2. Notes
    • The author seems somewhat ambivalent, almost inconsistent, in the way he treats his animals. He seems happy to adopt "the intentional stance" towards his pet parrots, but a more behaviorist approach to his ducklings in the lab. The latter is necessary for methodological reasons - he says - to avoid anthropomorphisms, while the former is more practically expedient.
    • But whether or not animals are conscious matters to them - if they are indeed conscious - so it's important to get it right, and to ere on the side of caution and avoid hubris.
    • The author supports the "argument from analogy", they he seems to parcel it up as an argument from parsimony. It is not only by analogy that I know other people are conscious (because
      I know I am) but is also the simpler explanation. So, we can make analogies based on brain structure and size to assume that other vertebrates are most likely conscious.
    • Fair enough, but the main motivator for the assumption that certain animals are conscious is their behaviour being analogous to our behaviour. If I don't know that my dog Henry is conscious, I'm not sure what I do know.
    • The author's distinctions between thought, cognition and consciousness are nonetheless important.
    • PID Note: Animals
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Martinho-Truswell (Antone) - The minds of other animals"
Footnote 404: Aeon: Video - Smith - Aristotle was wrong and so are we: there are far more than five senses (WebRef=8022)
  1. Aeon
    • Abstract:
      • Scientists have long known that there’s much more to our experience than the five senses (or ‘outward wits’) described by Aristotle – hearing, sight, smell, touch and taste. Yet the myth of five senses persists, perhaps because a clearer understanding of our sensory experience at the neurological level has only recently started to take shape.
      • In this instalment of Aeon’s In Sight series, the British philosopher Barry C. Smith argues that the multisensory view of human experience that’s currently emerging in neuroscience could make philosophising about our senses much more accurate, and richer, allowing philosophers to complement the work of scientists in important ways.
      • But first, philosophy must catch up to the major advances being made in brain science.
  2. Notes
Footnote 405: Aeon: Taylor - The examined life (WebRef=9266)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: John L. Taylor
    • Aeon Subtitle: Students are working harder than ever to pass tests but schools allow no time for true learning in the Socratic tradition
  2. Notes
    • Naturally, I'm sympathetic to the 'teach students to think for themselves' approach - in particular, teaching them how to learn, and inspiring them with a love of whatever the subject is.
    • I never knew what "prep" was - not having been to a public school - but I can see it as a good idea for the well-motivated: get the spade work out of the way in pre-reading, so that the important issues can be focused on rather than imparting information in the lesson. It is analogous to Supervisions at Cambridge, or Tutorials at Birkbeck, where previously-submitted work is discussed, though on a 1-1 basis.
    • I do strongly disagree with the support given to Plato’s account of Socrates in the Meno getting a slave-boy to prove (effectively) Pythagoras' theorem (see Maxwell - The Geometry Experiment in Plato's Meno). It’s leading the witness, whatever some philosophers say (not that they, nor our current author, nor the one linked to above, have any truck with the Platonic theory of knowledge as recollection of truths learned in past lives). But I agree that gentle leading of the student where he gets stuck is helpful, but not leading by the nose through a complex proof, because this doesn’t necessarily help with understanding the structure of a proof so that it’s any help next time round.
    • Also, the approach suggested in the essay is more applicable to liberal arts than maths, sciences, history, languages, or any subject with a lot of factual content and a lot of basic facts to be mastered before you get to the interesting bits. But the website above does think it’s useful in the sciences, and that the old Socratic method is useless.
    • Finally, I don’t recognise education as exam-driven as anything new. While I enjoyed the projects we were given in the first year at grammar school, and remember “general studies” in the 6th form with some affection, these were exceptions. Most of classroom education (other than art or science practicals) involved being talked at in class. There were “round the class” translation sessions in French or Latin, but these were more terrifying than stimulating. Grammar school education was totally geared to public examinations way before there were league tables.
    • Maths “education” at Cambridge was anything but, involving passively sitting taking notes for hour after hour, utterly lost during the latter parts of the courses. I agree that this is an absurd way of imparting information, and worthless for teaching technique.
Footnote 406: Aeon: Brennan - The right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge (WebRef=9131)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jason Brennan
    • Author Narrative: Jason Brennan is professor of strategy, economics, ethics and public policy at Georgetown University. He is the author, together with Peter Jaworski, of Markets Without Limits (2015), and his latest book is When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (2018).
  2. Notes
    • This is another paper I'm surprised can be published these days.
    • The idea seems less radical than it might be - just a basic citizenship-style test to ensure some understanding of society and the political process.
    • The trouble is, it'd never be accepted, because the disadvantaged would be deemed likely to fail it, and many wouldn't even bother to take it, whereas they can at least turn up at the polling station as things stand.
    • It might be a sensible programme for dictatorships thinking of transitioning to democracy in societies with an uneducated population, if there are any such places.
Footnote 407: Aeon: Video - Further - Seth Shostak (WebRef=9386)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Seth Shostak
    • Aeon Subtitle: Imagine alien signals are detected. Here’s what happens next
    • Author's Abstract:
      • Planets aren’t rare. Life is surprisingly durable. The more we’ve learned about the Universe, the more the search for extraterrestrial life has shifted from science fiction to serious scientific undertaking.
      • So it’s worth considering how humanity would react if we learned, through some distant but unmistakable signal, that lifeforms elsewhere in the Universe were communicating with us.
      • In this interview, Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Center for SETI Research in California, discusses how first contact is more likely to be perspective-shifting than Earth-shattering.
  2. Notes
    • This video interview is far too short. It's interesting to see a smart guy expatiating on why our perspective has recently changed, because of the apparent abundance of exo-planets.
    • However, he hardly says anything about how this would affect our attitudes and lives generally. He just says, without argument, that we'd carry on as normal. Maybe we would - as people say we would (and should) if we knew the world would end shortly. But, maybe not.
    • PID Note: Transhumanism
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Shostak (Seth) - Video - Further - Seth Shostak"
Footnote 408: Aeon: Young & Priest - It is and it isn’t (WebRef=9402)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Damon Young & Graham Priest
    • Author Narrative:
      • Damon Young: is a philosopher and author. He is an associate in philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and founding faculty at the School of Life in Melbourne. His latest book is The Art of Reading (2016). He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
      • Graham Priest: is distinguished professor of philosophy at City University of New York and professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne. His latest book is One (2014). He lives in New York.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ is not just a radical kind of art. It’s a philosophical dialetheia: a contradiction that is true
  2. Notes
    • This - as the sub-title suggests - is really just giving an example of Dialetheism - the view that there can be true contradictions (see Wikipedia: Dialetheism and SEP: Dialetheism)
    • So, the example is of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ which both is, and is not, a work of art.
    • I don't believe any of this.
    • ‘Fountain’ isn't an artwork, and 'art' isn't what the current 'art-world' says it is.
    • This is mildly interesting because of Lynne Rudder Baker's claim that what makes a statue a statue (rather than a lump of clay) is its relation to an art-world.
    • I don't think I buy that either, though this is an easily-repaired part of her theory of constitution. It's a statue if its creator intended it to be a statue.
    • PID Note: Logic of Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Young (Damon) & Priest (Graham) - It is and it isn’t"
Footnote 409: Aeon: Video - Hopper's Nighthawks: look through the window (WebRef=10946)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The flickering ray of hope in the stark loneliness of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The American artist Edward Hopper (1882–1967) was part of the realist movement, and his oil paintings depict isolation, modernity and everyday life in the US.
      • Nighthawks (1942), likely his best-known work, portrays a nighttime scene of customers sitting in a near-empty Manhattan diner.
      • In this video essay, Evan Puschak (also known as The Nerdwriter) explores the themes of voyeurism, vulnerability and alienation that pervade Hopper’s work, and considers whether Nighthawks’ historical context might lend it a surprising air of optimism.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Between strangers.
    • Interesting - The Nerdwriter is very succinct and cogent.
    • The 'context' noted in the Abstract is Pearl Harbour.
Footnote 410: Aeon: Video - Slingshots of the oceanic (WebRef=9875)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The voyages of Ancient Pacific mariners echo in modern space exploration
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Adapted from a post at BLDGBLOG, this short animation is an Aeon original made in collaboration with the filmmaker and animator Flora Lichtman.
      • There are many ways of moving through the Universe – of travelling from one point to another over great, even extraordinary distances. There is also a way of using the world for your own ends: taking advantage of slopes, winds, currents or gravitational fields, as fuel-efficient resources for your own acceleration.
      • Gravity-assisted space travel is one such example, when a spacecraft uses the gravitational pull of a nearby planet or other celestial body to ‘slingshot’ itself toward another, more distant goal. Crucially, the target or destination here is one that could not have been reached without this assistance, not only in terms of the ship’s velocity but even in terms of its original direction of travel.
      • You head toward one place to get to another – or, channelling Hamlet, ‘by indirections find directions out’.
      • Remarkably, this metaphorically rich idea of heading in one direction to arrive somewhere else entirely connects gravitational slingshots with the oceangoing people who settled remote island chains in the South Pacific. These ancient mariners learned to use a combination of seasonal winds and celestial navigation to push ever farther east, reaching the most extreme outer edges of Polynesia.
      • Early human settlement of the offshore Pacific revolved, in part, around enduring, large-scale meteorological phenomena that are still little understood. Most of these phenomena relied on what the maritime historian Brian Fagan called ‘an elaborate, usually slow-moving waltz involving two partners – the atmosphere and the ocean’. The local seasonal winds, combined with large but predictable long-term climatological events the size of continents, could be used to propel people from one archipelago to another.
      • We can draw a rough analogy between this climatologically assisted exploration of the remote outer Pacific and the careful interplanetary techniques of gravity-assisted space travel. Imagine, for example, a well-organised group of extreme maritime navigators standing on the shores of an isolated Pacific island chain 1,000 years ago, looking much further out to sea, knowing that there are distant land masses there, ever more island worlds whose presence is implied by the behaviour of the winds, clouds and currents.
      • More important, from generations’ worth of experience navigating the vast and inhospitable space of the Pacific, these same families know that only a particularly strong atmospheric cycle will be able to take them there – and that they must wait another season, another year, another decade, for these assistive winds to arrive. They are timing their launch.
      • Like NASA scientists calculating the positions of Mars and Jupiter as they hope to slingshot themselves beyond the black horizon of the solar system, these navigators would have known that the regional winds also move in cycles, or perhaps even that an unpredictable 100-year superstorm will be required to bring them further out into the ocean.
      • Awaiting these alignments, they temporarily become land-based, settling on a particular island and raising their children on the atmospheric folklore of a journey yet to come – telling themselves a science fiction not of interplanetary travel, but a kind of anthropological Star Trek of outer-sea exploration. Then, of course, the winds pick up – or ominous Antarctic clouds begin to appear on the southern horizon again for the first time in a generation – and everyone knows what these signs really mean. The skies are clicking back into place and, spurred on by this vast meteorological clock, they begin to build new canoes, their own wooden space probes for pushing the limits of a maritime universe.
      • It’s simply a different kind of sling-shotting: not between planets using gravity, but from island chain to island chain, riding a long tail of Pacific winds you know won’t last, and that only appear once per generation. Future storms will take you to distant archipelagoes where your descendants will then have to wait another year – another decade, another century – memorising the climate and plotting their woven way through the ‘slow-moving waltz’ of the world’s rhythmic winds and currents.
  2. Notes
    • The video itself is pretty worthless - far too brief.
    • The 'Editors' Abstract' is much more interesting, though I have some questions.
    • One of the great problems with human space travel is getting the crew back home. This is necessary if the destination is inhospitable, but less so if it is habitable, provided the crew is able to reproduce there, or be joined later by others.
    • The question I have over Pacific navigation is 'how did they get back home, if they relied on very occasional winds to get them out?'
    • If they couldn't get home again, how could there be learning from experience, except within that group? The "home" group would be none the wiser as to whether the voyage had led to success, and might have assumed the navigators had just died.
    • Is the idea that a whole community sets out on one of these journies?
Footnote 411: Aeon: Potts - Charisma is a mysterious and dangerous gift (WebRef=9349)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: John Potts
    • Author Narrative: John Potts is a professor of media at Macquarie University in Australia. He is interested in culture and technology, digital media, media history, contemporary arts, and intellectual history. His latest book is The New Time and Space (2015).
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • The charismatic leader might be thrilling, even captivating, but the success of that leader might not leave a political party, or a democracy, in a healthy state.
      • ‘Charisma’, as an idea, spans 2,000 years. Is there a link between contemporary charisma – considered a special form of authority – and the religious charisma of Paul’s time? It lies in the notion of innateness, of the gift. Paul said that no bishop or Church required the blessing of charisma: it simply lighted on the individual, as a spiritual gift. Charisma today is enigmatic, an unknown or X factor, somehow irreducible. Nobody knows why rare individuals are blessed with charisma: it remains, as ever, a mysterious gift.
Footnote 412: Aeon: Devji - Against Muslim unity (WebRef=11065)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Faisal Devji
    • Author Narrative: Faisal Devji is professor of Indian history and fellow of St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, where he is also the director of the Asian Studies Centre. His latest book is Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (2013).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Even the pilgrimage to Mecca exposes the myth of a united Islam and the formative power of the wider world
    • Author's Conclusion
      • The calls for Muslim unity are no less, and no more, than the collective expression of a pious wish by a random assortment of dignitaries. If pressed or asked to take any actual measures signifying unity, even the signatories of these declarations would immediately find themselves in disagreement about ‘Muslim unity’.
      • At root, however, the problem is not the details of these calls for unity. It is the essence, the very ideal of consensus. As a matter of course, calls for Muslim unity customarily violate the spirit of their claims by anathematising their Muslim opponents. Calls for unity are not high-minded but, in a word, disingenuous, a seemingly noble pretext for anathematising or demonising opponents.
      • Even more deeply, however, the ideal of unity is inherently anti-political. The Deobandi cleric was right in identifying the political as the sphere offering the only real potential for peaceful accommodation of differences and disputes. Posturing about an illusory ‘Muslim unity’ tends only to alienate Muslims from the political world of nation-states that govern their societies. From this perspective, Muslim militancy, too, is actually a consequence of de-politicisation and not, as is commonly presumed, the reverse.
      • Whether by Western or Middle Eastern governments, condemnations of terrorism in religious language, in the name of Islam, are losing causes. Real problems will not be solved on theological terrain. When liberals and advocates of tolerance too celebrate or promote moderate Islam, it is another step away from the world of politics and institutions, the world of progress and solutions. The quest for harmony, for unity, is a siren song, and is to be resisted.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting article.
    • The main point seems to be that any apparent unity is imposed by the Saudis.
Footnote 413: Aeon: Video - The ray-cat solution (WebRef=9929)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Could the weirdest solution to the problem of nuclear waste also be the best?
    • Editor's Summary
      • In 1981, the US Department of Energy and the civil engineering company Bechtel Corp assembled a task force to help tackle the problem of how to warn future humans to stay away from radioactive nuclear waste sites thousands of years into the future.
      • Perhaps the strangest solution came from the French author Françoise Bastide and the Italian semiologist Paolo Fabbri, who proposed genetically engineering cats to change colour in response to radiation, and creating a mythology of danger around those cats.
      • An exploration of unusually creative problem-solving, the French director Benjamin Huguet’s film probes how the once-obscure, decades-old ‘ray-cat solution’ has recently found new life.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Wikipedia: Human Interference Task Force
    • I'm not sure what the point of this short video really is - whether it's a serious suggestion or whether it's an illustration of creative problem-solving.
    • It doesn't look like the technical problem of genetically-engineering cats to change colour in response to radiation is likely to be solved any time soon, though it doesn't seem to be impossible.
    • The philosophical interest derives from the difficulty of transmitting a message to a civilisation in the far future that would have a different language and might not be able to translate our own.
    • The heading implies this is a solution to the problem of disposing of nuclear waste, but as such it is somewhat absurd. I suppose it's just about possible that in tens of thousands of years time the deserts in which nuclear waste is scheduled to be stored deep underground will have become fertile with people (and cats) living on top of them, with a need for warning.
    • The worries tend to be about leakage into the water system and such like, which cats wouldn't be able to help with. What would people do if their cats changed colour in response to drinking the water? Maybe they'd move elsewhere. But I imagine there are more important problems to worry about.
Footnote 414: Aeon: Video - Onbashira Matsuri, Japan (WebRef=11150)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The Japanese festival that’s one of the world’s most spectacular – and dangerous
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The Onbashira matsuri or festival held at Nagano in Japan is one of the world’s most enduring – and dangerous – spiritual rites.
      • The festival is part of Shinto tradition, and has been held every six years for more than a millennium.
      • It begins in April with teams of young men pulling 16 fir logs up one side of a mountain, and then, in a thrilling, nerve-wracking display of bravado, riding them down the other side.
      • The festival concludes in May, with a colourful celebration that sees each of the logs mounted at a shrine.
      • Serious injuries and even deaths aren’t unusual at Onbashira due to the risks inherent to each of the events.
      • Onbashira Matsuri, Japan is a brief and breathtaking plunge into the vibrant, frequently mysterious rhythms of the 2016 festival.
  2. Notes
Footnote 415: Aeon: Stallard - The outsiders (WebRef=9396)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Avan Judd Stallard
    • Author Narrative: Avan Judd Stallard holds a PhD in history from the University of Queensland, Australia. He is a freelance writer and lives in London.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Has evolution programmed us to shun and turn our backs on refugees – even when they might die without our help?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • The more we understand the modules of the brain and how they make decisions, the easier it will be to override instincts that have no meaning in the world today. In our multicultural, international, highly mobile world, fear of the outsider might be one more instinct we will have to overcome.
  2. Notes
    • This is somewhat similar to the earlier Aeon: Kohn - Us and them.
    • Lots of familiar argumnets from evolutionary psychology.
    • Interesting to see Modularity of Mind invoked to explain how we can passionately hold inconsistent beliefs.
    • Also sensible - contra much pop-Evolutionary Psychology - that (as the author writes in his conclusion) we don't have to submit to our evolutionary programming (or - worse - claim that that is just 'human nature' and incorrigible).
    • All this aside, however, the 'free movement of people' does put a strain on the economies and securities of societies that's not purely imagined.
    • It's best if countries didn't meddle in the affairs of other states and foment or directly cause the problems that lead to masses of refugees in the first place.
Footnote 416: Aeon: Root-Gutteridge - The songs of the wolves (WebRef=8897)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Holly Root-Gutteridge
    • Author Narrative: Holly Root-Gutteridge is a postdoctoral researcher at Syracuse University in New York, where she studies wolves, conservation and large mammal biology.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Wolves’ howls are eerie, beautiful and wild. But what are they actually saying to each other?
    • Author's Conclusion: Have wolves evolved to convey meaning in their calls? I don’t know for sure, but I think so. To my ears, a happy wolf surrounded by a pack has a very different howl to a lone voice crying in the wilderness, and a love duet with a mate does not match the chorus howl made with the new pups raising their tiny heads to the sky, but all the sounds are beautiful. Perhaps one day we will even understand their meaning.
  2. Notes
Footnote 417: Aeon: Bari - What do clothes say? (WebRef=7998)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Shahidha Bari
    • Aeon Subtitle: Clothes can be forms of thought as articulate as a poem or equation. Why then does philosophy like to dress them down?
  2. Notes
    • This is a long and rather dull article with lots of claims, but little argument. I skimmed it rather than reading it with interest or attention.
Footnote 418: Aeon: Tesfaye - What amnesiacs tell us about memory: Q&A with Brenda Milner (WebRef=8125)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Rackeb Tesfaye
    • Introduction:
      • Henry Molaison, aged 27, had surgery to alleviate his severe epileptic seizures in 1953. During the operation, part of the temporal lobe on both sides of his brain was removed, suctioning out most of his hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure now known to play a crucial role in forming memories. The operation cured his epilepsy, but caused anterograde amnesia, impairing his ability to form long-term memories.
      • The neuropsychologist Brenda Milner, credited by many for creating the field of cognitive neuroscience, was the first researcher to conduct rigorous testing on Molaison, famously called HM in popular literature and medical texts. Her groundbreaking observations of HM and others revolutionised memory research and our understanding of memory networks. At the age of 97, Milner continues to work as a professor in neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute. Here, she retraces her early work on memory and its implications.
  2. Notes
Footnote 419: Aeon: McGowan - Silicon phoenix (WebRef=9431)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Kat McGowan
    • Author Narrative: Kat McGowanwrites about health, medicine and science for magazines including Nautilus and Quanta, and is a contributing editor at Discover. She lives in New York City and California.
    • Aeon Subtitle: A gifted child, an adventure, a dark time, and then … a pivot? How Silicon Valley rewrote America’s redemption narrative
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Elon Musk
    • This is mildly interesting, but hardly enlightening.
    • It describes the self-image of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as they conduct their careers from start-up to a crisis point (which may involve a pivot - a strategic change of direction) to either success or failure.
    • It also treats of the intentions of some of the more successful entrepreneurs to "change the world".
    • While the paper discusses the psychological struggles of these people, it doesn't in any way discuss what it is they actually do.
    • An entrepreneur has to have something to build and sell. Some of them did the building themselves, at least in part (notably Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak and Mark Zuckerberg) while others had big ideas that others did the spadework on (presumably Elon Musk and Steve Jobs). It'd be interesting to know how those with the development skills managed to find the niche that led to their huge success, and whether it's largely chance that they succeeded when others failed.
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "McGowan (Kat) - Silicon phoenix"
Footnote 420: Aeon: Video - The need for a new bioethics (WebRef=8437)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Alondra Nelson
    • Aeon Subtitle: From identity politics to medicine, the DNA revolution demands a new bioethics
    • Editor's Abstract
      • From the discovery of the double helix structure in 1953, to the Human Genome Project of the 1990s and early 2000s, to the Precision Medicine Initiative announced by President Barack Obama in 2015, the DNA revolution has touched almost every corner of society.
      • While a deeper understanding of genetics offers great potential for positive social change and targeted medical treatments, it also presents complex new ethical challenges that must be confronted with care and a thorough understanding of the history of racism in science.
      • In this Aeon interview, Alondra Nelson, dean of social science and professor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia University in New York, argues that this unique moment requires a new bioethics that takes into account ‘the full social life of DNA’.
  2. Notes
Footnote 421: Aeon: Ojiaku - Is everybody a racist? (WebRef=9376)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Princess Ojiaku
    • Author Narrative: Princess Ojiaku is a science writer whose work has appeared in Scientific American, Popular Science, and Pacific Standard, among others. She lives in Chicago.
    • Aeon Subtitle: The studies just keep coming. Unconscious racism is pervasive. It starts early. And it creates a deadly empathy gap
  2. Notes
    • This is quite a balanced - and probably sound - article.
    • It demonstrates that - despite conscious denials - there is implicit bias against other races from within any racial group.
    • I'd expected this to focus on racism against blacks - and it does - but not just because the author is black, but because most of the examples of racism - in America at least - have blacks as the victims, given the power imbalance between the races.
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Ojiaku (Princess) - Is everybody a racist?"
Footnote 422: Aeon: George - How looting in Iraq unearthed the treasures of Gilgamesh (WebRef=9172)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Andrew George
    • Author Narrative: Andrew George is professor of Babylonian at SOAS, University of London, and the translator of the Epic of Gilgamesh for Penguin Classics.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • The Epic of Gilgamesh asserts the endurance of civilised values in the face of barbarity. It is an ancient monument like Nimrud, Hatra and Palmyra, but its substance is words and ideas, and so it cannot be destroyed like material things. And it is not yet complete. More tablets like the one in Sulaymaniyah will come to the surface, either on the market or through regular excavations.
      • Then, on some distant future day, we will have finally reconstructed this most majestic Babylonian poem. All that is needed is committed Assyriologists, and the will of liberal society to sustain and perpetuate this tiny academic field that still has so much to teach about our human condition.
  2. Notes
Footnote 423: Aeon: Law - Belief in supernatural beings is totally natural – and false (WebRef=9403)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Stephen Law
    • Author Narrative: Stephen Law is the editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal THINK. He researches primarily in the philosophy of religion. His books include The Philosophy Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking (2003) and A Very Short Introduction to Humanism (2011). He lives in Oxford.
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Whatever the correct explanation for the peculiar human tendency to believe falsely in invisible person-like beings, the fact that we’re so prone to false positive beliefs, particularly when those beliefs are grounded in some combination of testimony and subjective experience, should provide caution to anyone who holds a belief in invisible agency on that basis.
      • Suppose I see a snake on the ground before me. Under most circumstances, it’s then reasonable for me to believe there is indeed a snake there. However, once presented with evidence that I’d been given a drug to cause vivid snake hallucinations, it’s no longer reasonable for me to believe I’ve seen a snake. I might still be seeing a real snake but, given the new evidence, I can no longer reasonably suppose that I am.
      • Similarly, if we possess good evidence that humans are very prone to false belief in invisible beings when those beliefs are based on subjective experience, then I should be wary of such beliefs. And that, in turn, gives me good grounds for doubting that my dead uncle, or an angel, or god, really is currently revealing himself to me, if my only basis for belief is my subjective impression that this is so. Under such circumstances, those who insist ‘I just know!’ aren’t being reasonable.
  2. Notes
    • The author is convinced that both contradictions between belief systems and scientific counter-evidence imply that all beliefs in supernatural beings are in fact false.
    • However, he's unconvinced that the HADD theory (Hyperactive Agency-Detecting Device) is sufficient to explain the prevalence.
    • See the conclusion above. I wasn’t convinced by that explanation, either. I suspect it would undermine most beliefs in testimony, and probably begs the question.
    • He references Pinker - The Evolutionary Psychology of Religion.
    • PID Note: Religion
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Law (Stephen) - Belief in supernatural beings is totally natural – and false"
Footnote 424: Aeon: Barash - Paradigms lost (WebRef=9842)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: David P. Barash
    • Author Narrative: David P Barash is an evolutionary biologist and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle. His most recent books are Through a Glass Brightly (2018) and Strength Through Peace (2018), co-authored with his wife, the psychiatrist Judith Eve Lipton.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Science is not a ‘body of knowledge’ – it’s a dynamic, ongoing reconfiguration of knowledge and must be free to change
    • Author's Conclusion
      • The loss of paradigms might be painful, but it is testimony to the vibrancy of science, and to the regular, unstoppable enhancement of human understanding as we approach an increasingly accurate grasp of how our world works.
      • According to the Bible, having eaten forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we were punished for our disobedience. As we pursue knowledge – not of good and evil, but (as Shakespeare put it) of how the world wags – we too must absorb a kind of punishment. Fortunately, losing a paradigm is less devastating than being kicked out of paradise.
      • Moreover, unlike the purported ways of God, science doesn’t need any special justification – to men or women – beyond the satisfaction it provides as well as the practical insights it yields. Every paradigm lost is compensated by wisdom found.
  2. Notes
    • Another interesting paper. It's important to point out - along with Feynman - that all scientific knowledge is provisional.
    • But it's also important to point out - as this paper does - that it is progressive. Worse theories are replaced by better ones that explain all the previous one did, and then some. Or usually so, anyway.
    • The real issue is epistemological - in particular, the ethics of belief. The fact that any scientific theory - in particular those at the frontiers of knowledge - may be wrong doesn't mean that we can believe what we like, or ignore any scientific advice should it be inconvenient.
    • There are a lot of comments on the paper; some deal with the limits of science, and the ethics of its application when the evidence is uncertain, but action is required urgently.
    • The paper was written before the Covid-19 pandemic. It'd be useful to have a paper addressing the "action under uncertainty" question, and the situation where there's no paradigm to follow, but just a lot of experts with different views and politicians having to choose amongst them.
Footnote 425: Aeon: Video - The Feynman Series - Beauty (WebRef=8209)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Richard Feynman on why science adds beauty in the Universe: it does not subtract
    • Abstract: Throughout the 20th century, the prominent US theoretical physicist Richard Feynman gained a reputation as an eloquent and accessible public spokesperson for science and enquiry. This short film, with audio excerpted from a 1981 BBC documentary on Feynman titled The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, features Feynman explaining why he believes beauty reveals itself through science, investigation and uncertainty.
  2. Notes
Footnote 426: Aeon: Video - What really happens when we talk (WebRef=9130)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Sophie Scott & Nigel Warburton
    • Aeon Subtitle: There’s a lot more to conversation than words. What really happens when we talk?
    • Abstract:
      • It’s no surprise that speech is the primary means of communication for humans – we talk a lot. Yet most of the study of speech in psychology and cognitive neuroscience has focused on language. There is, however, another aspect of speech that reveals fascinating insights about our behaviour beyond just the words we say to each other: conversation.
      • In this Aeon interview, the UK neuroscientist Sophie Scott dissects the hidden physiology and psychology at work during conversations, and discusses why being superior conversationalists might have given us an evolutionary leg-up over our primate cousins.
  2. Notes
    • I've never seen someone gesticulate so much when speaking! I don’t know whether this is to demonstrate that there’s more to a conversation than the words, but – while she says that you hardly notice these other things – I couldn’t but help notice!
    • The overall theory seems to be that human conversation is mostly a form of social grooming - maintaining our place in the social hierarchy - that has taken the place of the physical grooming of our primate ancestors. Because it is more efficient, it allows us to have a wider social network.
    • She mentions that most conversations are gossip rather than imparting technical information. She's speaking as a woman.
    • The supposed interviewer - Nigel Warburton - says not a word!
Footnote 427: Aeon: Video - Dabbawalla (WebRef=9584)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Mumbai’s amazing lunch couriers bring office workers home-cooked meals every day
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Continuing a tradition that dates back to the 19th century, Mumbai’s dabbawalla food delivery services consist of teams who transport meals cooked by wives and mothers at home to husbands and sons at work.
      • In Dabbawalla, the US filmmakers Mirra Fine and Daniel Klein explore the lively practice over the course of a day, following several food couriers as they hustle to bring a taste of home to the workplace.
  2. Notes
    • Having worked in India (Pune) - if only for a few weeks on a few occasions - and having been to Mumbia - I'm always interested in scenes of Indian life.
    • I'd not known that such a service existed - where the food is delivered from one unknown place to another - twice the trouble and risk of a standard takeaway delivery.
    • No doubt the charges must be fairly minimal, and the risks quite high.
    • But that's life in India. All very efficient and uncomplaining.
Footnote 428: Aeon: Video - The Big Bang (WebRef=9094)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Tim Maudlin & Nigel Warburton
    • Aeon Subtitle: Was there any before, before the Big Bang?
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Scientists now have a fairly thorough understanding of the event known as the Big Bang, but what, if anything, came before it?
      • According Tim Maudlin, professor of philosophy at New York University, modern cosmologists must consider two possibilities: that the universe was born of out nothing, or that the Big Bang was preceded by ‘another state’.
      • However, both possibilities – that time simply began, or that an infinite amount of time has elapsed – provoke discontent among scientists and philosophers, which leaves the door open for a range of competing theories.
Footnote 429: Aeon: Malchik - The end of walking (WebRef=9251)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Antonia Malchik
    • Author Narrative: Antonia Malchik writes essays and articles on science, travel and other topics for a variety of publications. Her first book is A Walking Life (2019). She lives in northwest Montana.
    • Aeon Subtitle: In Orwellian fashion, Americans have been stripped of the right to walk, challenging their humanity, freedom and health
  2. Notes
    • Interesting, but - despite protestations to the contrary - the author is describing a primarily American problem.
    • That said, since we moved to a country road not far out of town, I've had to get used to walking the dog on roads without pavements.
    • Time was when such roads would be unknown and unused other than by those living in them. However, given the ubiquitous Google Maps, now everyone uses them as short cuts.
Footnote 430: Aeon: Video - Kempelen's chess-playing automaton (WebRef=10774)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A chess-playing machine hoax that beat the best and helped inspire the computer
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Generations before sophisticated artificial intelligence was widely thought possible, automatons – elaborate machines frequently intended to mimic lifelike movements – were the closest that humans had come to simulating life. Though aspects of their underlying mechanisms date back to ancient Greece, by the 18th century, automatons had become quite sophisticated, and were used as both ‘the playthings of royalty’ and a ‘testing ground for technology’ throughout the world.
      • Kempelen’s Chess-playing Automaton tells the strange, largely forgotten story of one of the most infamous and influential automatons ever created: the Austrian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen’s chess-playing ‘Turk’.
  2. Notes
    • This is interesting enough, but doesn't explain how the illusion was performed.
    • For this, see Wikipedia: Mechanical Turk.
    • While the 'Turk' probably did serve as an inspiration for true AI, the article's sub-title is completely incorrect. It didn't 'beat the best' (losing whenever it came up against Master players) and didn't really 'help inspire the computer' any more than any other automaton - though it wasn't itself an automaton - as it was always known to be an illusion.
    • That said, it seems to have been very cleverly done. It's amazing how long it remained in use without the secret being revealed. These days some 'whistleblower' would have spilled the beans 'in the public interest', in return for a large fee.
Footnote 431: Aeon: Frisch - Why things happen (WebRef=8065)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mathias Frisch
    • Author Narrative: Mathias Frisch is a philosopher at the University of Maryland, and a member of its Foundations of Physics Group. He is the author of Causal Reasoning in Physics, Cambridge University Press, 2014.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Either cause and effect are the very glue of the cosmos, or they are a naive illusion due to insufficient math. But which?
Footnote 432: Aeon: Video - The truffle hunters (WebRef=9716)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: In central Italy, hunting truffles is a loving partnership between man and dog
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Prized by chefs for their strong, complex flavour, and highly priced due to their rarity, truffles are, pound-for-pound, one of the most expensive foods in the world. Central Italy’s Marche region is one of the few places on earth where several varieties of truffles grow plentifully and naturally.
      • Still, the comparatively weak noses of humans are not up to tracking truffles even in ideal growing areas. Enter the loyal truffle-hunting dog.
  2. Notes
    • Interesting as an illustration of human-dog relationships.
    • There's not quite enough dog in the video, so you couldn't get to know him.
    • The owner seemed to love his dog as much as he loved his wife!
    • It looks like working dogs form a closer bond with their owners than do those of a more ornamental variety.
    • PID Note: Animals
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - The truffle hunters"
Footnote 433: Aeon: Video - The death of Socrates (WebRef=9245)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Can philosophy and morals be transmitted through a painting?
    • Author's Summary:
      • The French painter Jacques-Louis David was a pre-eminent figure in the Neoclassical movement. His painting ‘The Death of Socrates’ (1787), based on Plato’s account of the execution of Socrates for blasphemy in 399 BC, is widely considered a seminal Neoclassical work.
      • This video essay from the US filmmaker called The Nerdwriter, breaks down the ‘interplay of historical, personal, political and aesthetic elements’ that make David’s painting not just technically impressive, but a masterwork that conveys deep ethical concerns through visual storytelling.
  2. Notes
    • Rather strangely, and unexplained: while the narrator is US and speaking in English, there are sub-titles in Hebrew.
    • But the film is well put together, and the text interesting and coherent.
Footnote 434: Aeon: Video - Daniel Levitin on information overload (WebRef=10945)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Daniel Levitin
    • Author Narrative: See Wikipedia: Daniel Levitin.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Why daydreaming should replace multitasking amid our information overload
    • Editors' Abstract
      • Since 1986, the amount of information we absorb has increased fivefold and our options for getting more have become almost limitless. In this talk, Daniel Levitin, a professor of psychology and behavioural neuroscience at McGill University in Canada, reveals the surprising effects that ‘information overload’ is having on our brains, and how we can best combat the data deluge.
      • Video by the RSA.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → "Levitin (Daniel) - The Changing Mind: A Neuroscientist's Guide to Ageing Well"
    • This video is a collection of snippets from a (much) longer talk, and most of it seems common sense. I excerpt a few snippets – with my comments – below. The talk is quite old – from 2015 – so the information overload will be even worse today.
    • More information has been created in the last few decades than in the whole of human history prior thereto.
    • Ignoring options to be rejected – like when shopping – has a cognitive overhead: so (I’d say) browsing rather than looking up what you want is cognitively wasteful. I used to find that spending too long browsing through museums or art galleries made me feel ill.
    • A large part of the excerpted talk focuses on multi-tasking. The speaker points out (or alleges) that multi-taking doesn’t in fact take place (any more than it does on a single-processor computer); instead, a co-ordinating area within the brain (in the Insula: see Wikipedia: Insular cortex) – discovered by the speaker’s team – switches back and forth between the tasks being juggled, making the process less efficient than single-tasking because the switching uses up resources. The speaker says that ‘by every objective measure’, by the end of the day single-taskers have got more done – though they may not feel this way – than multi-taskers.
    • While this is probably what most people imagine in any case, I doubt single-tasking is that efficient after a certain elapsed time; productivity declines as boredom or confusion sets in.
    • The speaker does have an answer to this, pointing out that after a period of down-time many problems ‘solve themselves’ due to sub-conscious mental processing. He also suggests that 40-60 minutes for single-tasking is the ideal (as I used to find on my immensely-valuable commutes, while much time on long-haul train journeys was wasted due to mental exhaustion).
    • I’m not convinced that ‘mind wandering’ is a good thing in general; just that when you’re stuck on a problem you should drop it and move on to something else. Levitin suggests that 15 minutes ‘mind wandering’ every two hours is ideal.
    • I liked his suggestion that an afternoon nap will do as ‘down-time’, but disagree with him that 20 minutes is the limit, lest fuzziness results on awakening on account of a build-up of certain chemicals in the brain. I don’t find this to be the case, and need an hour (though partly to catch up on my sleep-debt; though he claims a 15-minute nap is worth an hour and a half’s sleep the night before, not to mention 10 points in IQ).
    • PID Note: Information
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Levitin (Daniel) - Video - Daniel Levitin on information overload"
Footnote 435: Aeon: Video - Epigenome - the symphony in your cells (WebRef=9231)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Could we harness epigenomics to become master DNA conductors?
    • Author Summary:
      • Our cells perform an amazingly vast variety of tasks within our body, from the brain cells that transfer the electronic impulses related to thoughts, to the white blood cells that wage war on harmful foreign intruders. Perhaps even more remarkable, almost all of our cells are different interpretations of the same exact code: our unique DNA sequence.
      • Using musicians and conductors interpreting a score as a metaphor, Epigenome: The Symphony in Your Cells explains how cells reading from the same code are able perform distinct functions, and how chemicals can alter these functions over time.
  2. Notes
    • The video itself doesn’t really work: the orchestral images and excerpts from Beethoven’s Vth are a distraction; I had to listen to the script again without looking at the images in order to remember what had been said.
    • Interesting concepts:
      → Epigenome (a cell’s combined set of genetic changes / switches);
      → Epigenomic changes differentiate cell types;
      → Methylation (turning genes off);
      → DNA wrapped round histones (proteins; affects which and how many genes are read);
      → Increase in methylation in older brains;
      → Environment (diet, habits) affects the epigenome;
      → Diseases are linked to epigenomic changes (cancer: lack of control; Alzheimer’s: increased methylation – possibilities of preventative drugs);
      → Epigenomic changes are passed on to the next generation of cells;
    • Note: distinction between:
      → “Epigenetic” (change to the genome: passed on from one generation of organism to the next)
      → “Epigenomic” (change to the Epigenome: passed on from one generation of cells to the next)
Footnote 436: Aeon: Video - The odd tale of the clever octopus (WebRef=10729)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The wily and merciless veined octopus stalks an unsuspecting rock crab
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Known for assembling sea scraps into impromptu forts used for stalking prey, the veined octopus is one of the most cunning predators in the Pacific Ocean’s tropical waters.
      • Setting the tone with a pulsing, ominous score, Jose Lachat’s short nature video features a veined octopus taking cover in a clam shell in a quiet and calculating search for its next meal.
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Wikipedia: Amphioctopus marginatus.
    • An interesting short film.
    • The octopus hardly 'stalks' the crab, but just hides in the clam-shell until the crab wanders past and then pounces on it.
    • It'd be interesting to know how a seemingly soft-bodied animal like an octopus actually kills and eats the crab.
    • In the film it just seems to embrace the crab until eventually it leaves the clam shell and squirts out the shell and other indigestible parts of the crab and then returns to its hiding-place.
    • PID Note: Animals
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - The odd tale of the clever octopus"
Footnote 437: Aeon: Flora - How luck works (WebRef=11118)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
    • This is an interesting, but slightly muddled and uncritical paper.
    • It seems to confuse many things. Some successful runs are down to luck (coin tosses), in that there’s no possibility for the exercise of skill. Others – sports winning streaks – are mainly down to skill, but due to the “fine margins” (just in / just out) some luck is involved. You can ‘push your luck’ by taking too many risks.
    • On winning streaks, it depends what the streak consists in. It’s noted that people are prone to the gambler’s fallacy – the false belief that a long winning or losing streak is due for a change. As a result, they may change their strategy. Winners, thinking they are due for a crash, make more conservative bets; losers, thinking they are due a win, make riskier bets. Both thereby extend their streaks. But there’s nothing particularly lucky about a streak of dead certs, nor a string of losing bets on no-hopers.
    • It’s difficult to see how the Chinese idea of “lucky noses” can be other than absurd.
    • That said, thinking that you’re lucky may make you willing to take risks, and that’s the way to win big (but equally to lose big). Maybe you can take advantage of the bankruptcy rules; provided you’re allowed ‘repeat trials’, your losses are shared with your creditors, while your winnings are substantially your own.
    • As is noted, thinking of yourself as lucky can make you more optimistic, and therefore a harder worker, which normally brings greater rewards than pessimism. That’s ‘making your own luck’ – but it has little to do with luck!
    • PID Note: Probability
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Flora (Carlin) - How luck works"
Footnote 438: Aeon: Video - The animal that wouldn't die (WebRef=10781)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The hydra’s amazing resilience challenges ideas that all living things must die
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The idea that living organisms are born to reproduce and ultimately die is one of the most common and widely accepted ideas about life across cultures. But is it true?
      • Using whimsical animation, The Animal That Wouldn’t Die explores the strange case of the hydra – a creature that seems to play by a different set of rules than anything else in nature.
      • Following the work of two scientists separated by many generations, this documentary investigates the surprising regenerative power of the small fresh water animal, and how the concept of the ‘circle of life’ might not be as universal as we once thought.
  2. Notes
Footnote 439: Aeon: Video - The German who came to tea (WebRef=10195)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: An English centenarian’s moving friendship with a German POW during World War II
    • Editor's Abstract
      • For Annie Day, who turned 100 in 2012, memories of taking in two German prisoners of war for Christmas holiday at the height of the Second World War remain crystalline, even after seventy years.
      • After learning from her young son that she could entertain nearby POWs for Christmas dinner, she opened her home and shared her wartime rations.
      • Following a surprise visit from one of the prisoners many years later, the two forged a bond that lasted for decades.
      • A moving story of humanity and kindness transcending bellicose times, The German Who Came to Tea is also a meditation on what memories stay with us, and why.
Footnote 440: Aeon: Video - Creo (WebRef=9406)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: ‘If you can do puberty, you can do old age’: a 90-year-old athlete’s perspective
    • Editor's Abstract
      • ‘I’m losing a little, but I’m using everything I’ve got,’ says the 90-year-old artist Leonard Creo, for whom old age means working much harder to achieve less than before. But all that effort is still an endeavour worthy of care and attention: Creo keeps his body active through racewalk training six days a week, and exercises his mind by sculpting and painting. Ultimately, Creo sees the possibility of happiness pragmatically, as just having something you want to do and doing it regularly.
      • Moss Davis’s film shows this approach to life in action, and it seems to be doing Creo much good.
Footnote 441: Aeon: Evans - Real talk (WebRef=9854)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Vyvyan Evans
    • Aeon Subtitle: For decades, the idea of a language instinct has dominated linguistics. It is simple, powerful and completely wrong
  2. Notes
    • A useful summary of the case against the 'Language Instinct'
    • For the case for - apart from numerous published works by Chomsky, Pinker, Crain and others - see my Poverty of Stimulus essay.
    • I'm not hugely impressed by the arguments against the instinct, but agree with criticisms of Universal Grammar and worries about genetic encoding.
    • I've not studied the Comments on the Aeon paper, but they don't look very perceptive from a quick scan.
    • I suspect that spoken language arose from a Language of Thought, shared in more primitive forms by other animals lacking our vocal abilities and larger brains.
    • PID Note: Language of Thought
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Evans (Vyvyan) - Aeon - Video - Real talk"
Footnote 442: Aeon: Hanlon - The golden quarter (WebRef=9188)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Michael Hanlon
    • Author Narrative: Michael Hanlon was a science journalist whose work appeared in The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph, among others. His last book was In the Interests of Safety (2014), co-written with Tracey Brown. He lived in London.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Some of our greatest cultural and technological achievements took place between 1945 and 1971. Why has progress stalled?
  2. Notes
    • I found this quite a convincing piece. Much recent progress has indeed been incremental rather than revolutionary.
    • I also found his diagnosis - that we have become more risk-averse and conformist as a society.
    • Basically, we can no longer play fast and loose with peoples lives "for the greater good" - and it would be for the greater good, in speeding up the delivery of innovation at the risk of some deaths along the way.
    • I blame the lawyers.
    • Also, note that this article was written at the end of 2014, and not much has changed since then.
    • Other than Covid-19, of course. And the response to that has been to avoid risk at any cost.
    • However, we mustn't underestimate what's going on under the guise of machine-learning and knowledge sharing via smart-phones and the internet.
Footnote 443: Aeon: Video - X-Ray Man (WebRef=8075)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Decades after participating in secret nuclear tests, a veteran tells his story
    • Summary:
      • Decades after participating in secret nuclear tests, a veteran tells his story
      • In 1957, a young man named Darrell Robertson enlisted in the US Army and participated in a secret training programme in the middle of the Nevada desert. He and his fellow recruits were sworn to secrecy and, for decades, told no one of their experiences. In 1996, the US government declassified the project and Robertson was finally able to tell his story.
      • In X-Ray Man, Robertson recalls training exercises in which the Department of Defense used him and other soldiers in nuclear tests more than a decade after the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were already well known.
Footnote 444: Aeon: Video - My favorite picture of you (WebRef=9302)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A man looks back on life with his beloved wife – on the ebb and flow of memories
    • Editors' Abstract:
      • As we grow older, some memories linger while others recede, becoming flashes of action that flicker for a moment before disappearing. My Favorite Picture of You takes on a lifetime of memories in under four minutes, as an elderly husband and wife recall moments shared together over the years.
      • At once a poignant love story and a rumination on the passage of time, the film takes us on a journey through the past, celebrating memories both special and mundane, and lamenting those that have been lost.
  2. Notes
    • I found this short audio-visual almost unbearably sad.
    • Initially, without reading the above abstract, I thought it was a son interviewing his beloved but senile mother. His voice sounds much younger and his mind much more active than hers, which are both tired and flat. But it is her husband.
    • He seems to remember everything, at least with the aid of the photos, and asks her opinion on various things. But - it seems - she can remember nothing.
    • Insufficient background is given, but I assume this is a loving husband visiting his wife in a care home and trying (but failing) to elicit in her memories of their happy life together, which is now to all intents over.
    • PID Note: Memory
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - My favorite picture of you"
Footnote 445: Aeon: Talbot - The good death (WebRef=9007)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mary Talbot
    • Author Narrative: Mary Talbot is an editor-at-large at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and her journalism has appeared in The New York Times and Beliefnet, among others. She lives in New York.
    • Aeon Subtitle: It’s a modern dream that we can plan a good and peaceful death but what can we really do to meet the end of all we are?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • Of course, improving the circumstances and care of the sick, old and dying – doing what we can to ensure people get the good death they want – is critical; a humanitarian revolution that has yet to take place. But most of the circumstances of our deaths are ultimately beyond our control. It could be me sitting in a drenched diaper with the TV blasting. It could be me having food shovelled in my mouth when I don’t want to eat. It could be me asking for morphine when I’m wracked with pain and hearing I’ll have to wait two hours for the next dose.
      • The only thing that is within our control is inside. To die contentedly like that, in a dingy room with no privacy, filled with indifferent strangers, will take serious inner work. If I can get that ‘thing’ from the meditation, it will be the most reliable medicine I can have, accessible whenever I need it, when all else fails. As I see it, it’s the only hope for the good death I want – unburdened, unafraid, mindful.
  2. Notes
Footnote 446: Aeon: Video - Internet archive (WebRef=9258)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Internet pioneer Brewster Kahle has a dream – universal access to all knowledge
  2. Notes
    • This was an interesting video, though it's somewhat out of date, hailing from 2014.
    • The Internet Archive website is Internet Archive, and for contemporary information see Internet Archive: About.
    • I'd not realised there was a digitised book programme, and it's interesting to see it in action. One thing that struck me is how incredibly tedious it must be to do the scanning, even with a bespoke book-scanner, and I wondered how likely it is to have pages omitted. Still, better than nothing.
    • The scanned books are all stored in huge containers, though it wasn't clear how they could be retrieved. Again, still, better than nothing.
    • I had vaguely heard of the Internet Archive, probably via search results or links in papers, and had assumed it recorded - or tried to record - every change to every webpage. It doesn't look as though this is the case.
    • Also, it's not restricted to archiving web-pages, but many other media.
    • There are copyright issues that have to be respected.
    • I've not used it yet, but will bear it in mind.
Footnote 447: Aeon: Graziano - The first smile (WebRef=9370)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Michael Graziano
    • Author Narrative: Michael Graziano is a neuroscientist, novelist and composer. He is Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University in New Jersey. His latest book is Consciousness and the Social Brain (2013).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Why do laughter, smiles and tears look so similar? Perhaps because they all evolved from a single root
    • Extracts
      • ...
      • Our experiments focused on a specific set of areas in the brains of humans and monkeys. These parts of the brain seemed to process the space immediately around the body, taking in sensory information and transforming it into movement. We tracked the activity of individual neurons in those areas, trying to understand their function. A typical neuron might become active, clicking like a Geiger counter when an object loomed towards the left cheek. The same neuron would respond to a touch on the left cheek, or to a sound made near it. When we ran tests in the dark, the neuron would become furiously active if the head moved in a way to take the left cheek towards the remembered location of an object: the neuron was ‘warning’ the rest of the brain that a collision was about to occur at a particular spot on the body.
      • Other neurons scoped out the space near other parts of the body. It was as though the entire skin was covered with invisible bubbles, each one monitored by a neuron. Some of the bubbles were small, reaching only a few centimetres from the surface. Others were large, extending metres. Collectively, they created a virtual safety zone, like a massive layer of bubble-wrap around the body.
      • ...
      • And why should so many of our social signals have emerged from something as seemingly unpromising as defensive movements? This is an easy one. Those movements leak information about your inner state. They are highly visible to others and you can rarely suppress them safely. In short, they tattletale about you. Evolution favours animals that can read and react to those signs, and it favours animals that can manipulate those signs to influence whoever is watching. We have stumbled on the defining ambiguity of human emotional life: we are always caught between authenticity and fakery, always floating in the grey area between involuntary outburst and expedient pretence.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting article which may be substantially correct.
    • But it is open to objections that there's an evolutionary-psychological explanation for any trait, and little control over the 'just-so' stories told, especially where the parallels with bonobos and the like aren't close.
    • PID Note: Evolution
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Graziano (Michael) - The first smile"
Footnote 448: Aeon: Video - Danielle (WebRef=11119)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Imperceptible and unstoppable: the ageing process comes to life
    • Editors' Abstract
      • The passage of time is often difficult to visualise, its effects so gradual they can be hard to perceive.
      • We age but we don’t even notice it: in one photo, a child; in the next, an adult.
      • In Danielle, the filmmaker Anthony Cerniello achieves a remarkable visual expression of ageing, animating still photos of various members of one family to depict a girl’s passage from childhood to old age.
  2. Notes
    • This is very well done. I watched it before reading the blurb, and assumed it was a computer-enhanced set of stills from the same person over a 60-year period.
    • But – as the blurb says – it’s nothing of the sort. It’d be interesting to know how it’s done.
    • The changes are indeed gradual as – it is said – is required for physical continuity to be identity-preserving (though the source of the change is also relevant).
    • More could be said …
    • PID Note: Physical Continuity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Danielle"
Footnote 449: Aeon: Video - Why do I study physics? (WebRef=11136)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Maybe I’m not even here, and other crazy, beautiful stuff physics told me
    • Editors' Abstract
      • In her short animated documentary Why Do I Study Physics?, Xiangjun Shi finds beauty in both the orderly world of physics and the chaos of real life.
      • Touching on concepts as diverse as gravity, time and parallel universes, she offers a personal response to the fundamental questions that physicists are trying to answer.
  2. Notes
    • Interesting enough and maybe worth pondering over the questions raised, but not enough reflection in the animation itself.
    • Also, the sound quality / accent makes it difficult to follow.
    • Maybe worth a second viewing.
Footnote 450: Aeon: Video - Devil in the room (WebRef=10929)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: A world between dream and reality: the science – and horror – of sleep paralysis
    • Editor's Abstract
      • Have you ever woken from a deep sleep, totally lucid but unable to move? Devil in the Room explores this space between dream and reality, explaining the science and history behind sleep paralysis, a mystifying and often terrifying phenomenon in which dreams intrude upon waking life.
      • Through evocative stop-motion animation and puppets, the film recreates these waking dreams, bringing vividly to life spiders that seem to crawl out from under the bed, and the feeling of a monstrous presence lurking just out of sight.
  2. Notes
    • An interesting-enough film, though it goes on a bit for what it has to say.
    • It does give the history of folk-misinterpretation of sleep-paralysis.
    • Also, a little bit of common-knowledge science behind it.
    • Of interest to me was the suggestion that it is probably behind the 'alien abduction' experiences, so I suppose that what the experiences seem to be experiences of is a culturally-determined matter.
    • In this regard, the phenomenal character of NDEs, while there's a common culturally-independent kernel, is somewhat culturally-determined.
    • PID Note: Psychopathology
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Aeon - Video - Devil in the room"
Footnote 451: Aeon: Francis - Is this life real? (WebRef=9312)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Matthew Francis
    • Author Narrative: Matthew Francis is a science writer and speaker specialising in physics, astronomy, and the culture of science. His writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Philosophers and physicists say we might be living in a computer simulation, but how can we tell? And does it matter?
  2. Notes
Footnote 452: Aeon: Flyn - Last supper (WebRef=9101)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Cal Flyn
    • Author Narrative: Cal Flyn is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and New Statesman, among others. She lives in the Highlands of Scotland.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Like the deadly pufferfish, wild mushrooms are for culinary daredevils. Care to play Russian roulette with your dinner?
  2. Notes
    • Interesting - I read it because I know a bridge-player who's enthusiastic about collecting wild mushrooms.
    • But - fascinating though their study might be - it seems madness to eat any of them given the risk-reward ratio is so much in favour of risk.
Footnote 453: Aeon: Keim - I, cockroach (WebRef=8285)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 454: Aeon: Gregg - Keep smiling (WebRef=9507)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
    • This is - most likely - a plug for "Gregg (Justin) - Are Dolphins Really Smart? The Mammal Behind the Myth". See my comments on that.
    • I'm sure he's right to say that the affinity of dolphins for humans has been over-egged, and he's right to say that encounters are not always friendly.
    • He's also right to say that - in general - (domesticated) dogs are more friendly towards humans than are dolphins, as is to be expected, given that's what dogs have been bred for; but, again, some dogs are distinctly unfriendly and even dangerous.
    • I thought his dismissal of anecdotal evidence of dolphins rescuing swimmers was a bit glib.
    • The text doesn't discuss any of the dolphin's cognitive abilities.
    • The title implies, but the text doesn't pick up on, the fact that the dolphin's perpetual smile isn't any indicator of mood, as it would be in humans.
    • PID Note: Animals
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Gregg (Justin) - Keep smiling"
Footnote 455: Aeon: Gray - The play deficit (WebRef=9252)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Peter Gray
    • Author Narrative: Peter Gray is a psychologist and research professor at Boston College. He writes the Freedom to Learn blog, and is the author of Free to Learn (2013) and "Gray (Peter) - Psychology" (2011).
    • Aeon Subtitle: Children today are cossetted and pressured in equal measure. Without the freedom to play they will never grow up
  2. Notes
    • This is an excellent paper, and easy reading given that it's longer than most on Aeon.
    • I agree with the arguments - on the usefulness of childhood play for adult life, and the need for it to be substantially unsupervised, so that children can set their own agendas and work out their own solutions to the problems that arise.
    • I thought the author was - while admitting "there are bullies" - a little too sanguine about how accommodating children are of one another, but did agree that if play is to take place at all, each child must get something out of it or they won't co-operate or even take part.
    • I remember being given a lot of freedom outside school - to roam the countryside with friends - before education got serious at grammar school. Then the fun stopped.
Footnote 456: Aeon: Rowlands - A right to believe? (WebRef=8987)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mark Rowlands
    • Author Narrative: Mark Rowlands is professor of philosophy at the University of Miami. His latest book is Running with the Pack (Granta).
    • Aeon Subtitle: You are entitled to believe what you will, but your beliefs must be subject to criticism and scrutiny just like mine
  2. Notes
    • The author argues cogently for the sensible thesis that we normally have the right to express our views but not the right to compel people to attend to them, and that because beliefs conflict, the expression of some beliefs explicitly contradicts, and therefore attacks, the beliefs of others. Having some beliefs as “protected species” would curtail free speech.
    • What the author thinks falls outside the criticism of belief is forcing (what seem to be to us) true beliefs on others. So, “messing with their brains” is not allowed – even though in the past this might have been the case (cf. "Kesey (Ken), Faggen (Robert) - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", though the Jack Nicholson character’s lobotomy is for bad behaviour rather than to correct delusory beliefs).
    • The essay doesn’t cover the ethics of belief – whether we have a moral duty to believe some things where the evidence is strongly in their favour, and to eschew beliefs where the evidence is greatly against.
    • The essay starts with a true case where a philosophy student in an introductory class objects that the philosophy of religion lecturer is undermining his religious beliefs, to which he has a right. The lecturer is ordered by his dean to desist, meaning that philosophy of religion is no longer taught. Rowlands takes this to be self-evidently a bad thing, and the rest of the essay explains why. But I think there can be cases where there might be a moral case for the lecturer to hold back a bit. It depends on how the lectures and classes are conducted. The lecturer knows more philosophy than the student – who might not even have volunteered for the class. If he uses this advantageous position, let alone his authority, to browbeat the student into admitting his beliefs are unsubstantiated, or to ridicule them, this might be going too far. The same might be true of teachers of young children who have been inculcated to espouse beliefs by their parents that they scarcely understand. That said, philosophy majors shouldn’t take the subject if they aren’t willing to have their most cherished beliefs challenged and possibly undermined.
Footnote 457: Aeon: Kohn - The Neanderthal mind (WebRef=9432)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Marek Kohn
    • Author Narrative: Marek Kohn is an author and journalist. His most recent book is Turned Out Nice: How the British Isles will Change as the World Heats Up.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Troglodytes who couldn’t compete, or humans with complex culture? The mystery of our nearest relatives deepens
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • The draft Neanderthal genome has already revealed differences from modern humans in genes that might affect cognition – which highlights an uncomfortable reason why Neanderthals matter so much to us: race. Already one non-scientific account, provoked by George M Church’s remarks in Regenesis, shows how the new genomic image of the Neanderthal could subvert perceptions of modern human unity.
      • A Daily Mail article this January (2013) argued that, since up to four per cent of DNA in living people of non-African descent can be traced to Neanderthals, ‘if the Neanderthals did have any useful genes for intelligence, we most likely picked them up and honed them over generations’. The implication that ‘we’ do not include people of African descent, who would lack the full complement of genes for intelligence carried by everyone else, is even more insidious for being an unstated by-product of the argument against human genomic engineering. However it unfolds, the Neanderthal story seems destined to retain its racial undertones.
      • It will also remain a story pulled this way and that by fragments whose age and scarcity gives them a power out of all proportion to their size. Another tooth, another toe-bone; another twist and another turn. Researchers will continue to draw opposite conclusions from the same evidence. But the pace of discovery and interpretation, of surprise and synthesis, seems to be gathering an unprecedented momentum. Being Neanderthal hasn’t been this exciting for more than 30,000 years.
  2. Notes
    • The bulk of this article is about disputes between Spanish enthusiasts for advanced Neanderthal cognition and culture (mainly predicated in their possible use of naturally-occuring holed shells for necklaces) and the bulk of paleontologists who have a less sanguine view.
    • Then - as in the Conclusion quoted above - the potential for racist interpretations takes over at the end.
    • This is odd, given that in the body of the paper it is argued that Neanderthals, specialised for darker, northern, climates had larger eyes and more brain-space (the "bun" at the back of the head) devoted to visual processing. This is said to leave them with less brain-power for other things, in particular for coping with larger social groups.
    • They are therefore thought to have less that 5-level intentionality (Shakespeare had 6-level in order to come up with the 5-level plot of Othello), which would leave them lost in today's socially-complex world.
    • Therefore it's odd to suggest that "we" Europeans might have picked up "smarts" from them unavailable to Africans who didn't come into contact with them. "Thicks" more likely.
    • In any case, whether there are races, and whether they differ in their abilities, ought to be an empirical matter, though what we should do with such knowledge - if reliably obtained - would be an ethical / political one.
    • PID Note: Evolution
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Kohn (Marek) - The Neanderthal mind"
Footnote 458: Aeon: Gamble - The end of sleep? (WebRef=9073)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jessa Gamble
    • Author Narrative: Jessa Gamble is a science writer and co-owner of the Last Word On Nothing blog. Her latest book is The Siesta and the Midnight Sun: How We Measure and Experience Time (2011). She lives in Yellowknife, Canada.
    • Aeon Subtitle: New technologies are emerging that could radically reduce our need to sleep - if we can bear to use them
    • Author's Introduction: Work, friendships, exercise, parenting, eating, reading — there just aren’t enough hours in the day. To live fully, many of us carve those extra hours out of our sleep time. Then we pay for it the next day. A thirst for life leads many to pine for a drastic reduction, if not elimination, of the human need for sleep. Little wonder: if there were a widespread disease that similarly deprived people of a third of their conscious lives, the search for a cure would be lavishly funded. It’s the Holy Grail of sleep researchers, and they might be closing in.
    • Author's Conclusion: Should technologies such as tDCS (Transcranial direct-current stimulation) prove safe and become widely available, they would represent an alternate route to human longevity, extending our conscious lifespan by as much as 50 per cent. Many of us cherish the time we spend in bed, but we don’t consciously experience most of our sleeping hours — if they were reduced without extra fatigue, we might scarcely notice a difference except for all those open, new hours in our night time existence. Lifespan statistics often adjust for time spent disabled by illness, but they rarely account for the ultimate debilitation: lack of consciousness. Now a life lived at 150 per cent might be within our grasp. Are we brave enough to choose it?
  2. Notes
Footnote 459: Aeon: Blum - The white man Jesus (WebRef=7867)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Edward J. Blum
    • Author Narrative: Edward J Blum is a professor of history at San Diego State University. His latest co-authored book The Color of Christ (2012), was named one of Publishers Weekly's best books of 2012 in religion.
    • Aeon Subtitle: There’s a reason why the Bible is silent about the colour of Jesus’ skin. So why has this become an issue for our age?
  2. Notes
    • I’m not sure that the paper says why “There’s a reason why the Bible is silent about the colour of Jesus’ skin”, as its sub-title claims, though it does quote a Presbyterian minister from the 1880s to the effect that “the lack of biblical detail about Christ’s physical features was crucial to the universal appeal of Christianity”.
    • While this may be so, “race” is of central importance in much of the Bible – people are either Jews or gentiles – but “colour” seems not to have been an issue – so Paul says there’s now no difference from the viewpoint of salvation between Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free. But “black or white” doesn’t seem to enter his head.
    • There’s much interesting discussion about the difficulty of portraying Biblical characters visually without taking racial sides.
    • PID Note: Race
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Blum (Edward J.) - The white man Jesus"
Footnote 460: Aeon: Vernon - What is love? (WebRef=11074)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mark Vernon
    • Author Narrative: Mark Vernon is a psychotherapist and writer, and works with the research group Perspectiva. He has a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy, and degrees in theology and physics. He is the author of A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the Evolution of Consciousness (2019) and Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey (forthcoming, September 2021). He lives in London.
    • Aeon Subtitle: Forget the modern romantic notion of ‘the one’. True love means looking beyond the couple and out towards life
    • Author's Conclusion
      • Triangular love, where space is made in a relationship for life (and love) beyond the confines of the couple, is the highest form of human love because it makes a good life possible. As the philosopher Anthony Price puts it in "Price (Anthony W.) - Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle" (1989), ‘in a promising soul well prompted, it is receptive of, and responsive to, the opening of new vistas’. It is a less fearful and self-obsessed love than that of Narcissus, and has space for others unlike Aristophanes’ glued-together lovers. To use Iris Murdoch’s phrase in her reading of Plato, this love has ‘an increased awareness of, sensibility to, the world beyond the self’.
      • But this raises an important question. If we want a way out of romantic confines, where can we pay homage to Anteros today? Craig Stephenson points out that what we popularly call the statue of Eros on the Shaftesbury memorial fountain in Piccadilly is actually Anteros. It was made in 1893 by the sculptor Alfred Gilbert who felt his own life mirrored the struggles of the rival brothers of love. Gilbert saw a reflection of his impulsive character in Eros and longed to know for himself more of the realism associated with Anteros. He must have felt that Anteros was the more suitable god to invoke in the heart of that romantic part of London. Personally, I offer Anteros a surreptitious, reverent bow each time I pass. It is in cautious thanks for the tricky side of love.
Footnote 461: Aeon: Davis - Trickster and tricked (WebRef=9221)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Erik Davis
    • Author Narrative: Erik Davis is a writer, culture critic and independent scholar. His latest book is Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica. He lives in San Francisco.
    • Aeon Subtitle: All gurus try to undermine their followers’ egos and expectations, so does it matter if the teacher is a real fraud?
    • Excerpt:
        Religion (and its shadowy ally, the occult) has always managed the boundaries between things — life and death, order and chaos, self and world, novelty and tradition, the knowable and the infinite. It is absurd to imagine that the force of such preoccupations should dissipate at a time of cultural crisis and confusion such as ours. Many of those ever-fluctuating boundaries, once patrolled by religion, have erupted into border wars, just as the very notion of a border has been dissolving. It’s easy to take up a simplistic position when we try to appreciate how spirituality and the secular, belief and scepticism, dance their tango, but surely it’s far better to pay attention to how and when these boundaries get drawn — and what happens when they dissolve, or turn out to be not what they seem.
      • This is what makes Vikram Gandhi’s trickster documentary Kumaré (2011) — for all its considerable problems — one of the more thought-provoking and unexpected takes on the dynamics of modern spirituality I’ve come across in many a moon. I’m happy that the film is now available for digital download after a year or so of touring the festival circuit to rather mixed — and sometimes puzzled — reception.
      • Gandhi (his real name) was born in New Jersey and is an alumnus of Columbia University. But in the film he impersonates a long-haired, orange-robed, heavily accented Hindu guru called Sri Kumaré for months on end, gathering a small New Age flock that then witnesses its teacher’s shocking ‘Great Unveiling’ at the close of the film. Gandhi’s experiment is essentially a cruel sceptic’s prank, designed to expose the exotic projections and gullible fantasies animating today’s spiritual seekers. In this, it shares some creative DNA with Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian whose sometimes merciless hoodwinks reveal a seething political subconscious that is hard to glimpse without these sorts of ethically problematic ruses. Kumaré provides a number of easy yucks and painful gotcha moments. But in a manner that Gandhi himself did not seem to anticipate, his story winds up being more emotionally nuanced and even charming than its prankster précis implies.
  2. Notes
    • This deserves a lot more attention than I’ve the time to give it at the moment!
Footnote 462: Aeon: Kohn - Us and them (WebRef=9395)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Marek Kohn
    • Author Narrative: Marek Kohnis an author and journalist. His most recent book is Turned Out Nice: How the British Isles will Change as the World Heats Up.
    • Aeon Subtitle: From newborns to nation states, we trust similarity. But does that mean we must hate difference?
  2. Notes
    • A most interesting paper, though not very focussed, which also goes for these jottings, which could have done with being written straight after I’d read the paper.
    • It starts off with a convincing account of infant facial recognition. It’s important that infants – and then children and adults – can make fine distinctions between faces that are objectively very similar, so they can tell them apart. No doubt this is done by constructing a default paradigm face – or maybe several – from those presented to them; then calculating differences between the paradigms and those presented. Faces from rarely-seen ethnicities may then all have large variances and hence “look the same”.
    • There is then lots of discussion about the pull between “selfish genes” that benefit the individual and “group selection” that benefits the group.
    • As social beings, we collectively do better in groups and define ourselves in contrast to “the other”, as exemplified by warring tribes New Guinea and by experiments in which people are randomly assigned to groups, which individuals then support and favour, often being spiteful towards those in the other group.
    • That said, it doesn’t seem to matter much what symbol we rally round – it can be a colour of shirt as easily as colour of skin (as is exemplified by football supporters, not that this is mentioned).
    • The author thinks – rather hopefully – that the national support for multi-racial “Team GB” at the London Olympics indicates that the concept of Britishness has evolved, but notes that “we” are (at the time of writing – Jan 2013) suspicious of Muslims and unwelcoming to immigrants.
    • And much else …
    • PID Note: Narrative Identity
    • This paper is important enough to be logged: See "Kohn (Marek) - Us and them"
Footnote 463: Aeon: Vedral - What life wants (WebRef=8961)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Vlatko Vedral
    • Aeon Subtitle: Dead matter has no goals of its own, yet life is constantly striving. That makes it a deep puzzle for physics
    • Excerpts:
      • The latest chapter in the attempt to derive biology from physics comes from an Israeli physicist, Addy Pross. He suggests that, very much as inanimate matter conforms to thermodynamics by maximising entropy, living beings strive to maximise what he calls ‘kinetic stability’. This is not the same as maximising entropy production. Rather than reaching a passive state of equilibrium, as all inanimate matter inevitably does according to the Second Law, living systems achieve a dynamically stable state, but they have to keep working in order to maintain it. The dynamically stable state is fragile and needs constant re-establishment.
      • Picture a bird flapping its wings only to stay suspended in one place in the air: this requires careful balancing, and though it is clearly dynamic, it still results in a stationary condition.
      • If Pross is right, we might have the ingredients to reduce the key features of evolutionary biology to chemistry. And given that chemistry is reducible to quantum physics, it seems as though we might be able to go all the way from biology to quantum physics. This would be a great achievement. However, like any great achievement, it raises questions.
      • We started by saying that what discriminates living from non-living systems is a sense of purpose. If biology is reducible to quantum physics, and typical quantum objects such as atoms and molecules show no sense of purpose, where does the transition occur? Where does the ‘desire’ to achieve the state of kinetic stability come from? This, of course, brings us back to square one. One easy way out is to conclude that purposefulness is simply an illusion. Pross would probably say that it is an emergent property that arises when chemistry becomes complicated enough. But given that this sense of purposefulness is how we identify life in the first place, perhaps we should resist conclusions that seem to wave it away too easily.
  2. Notes
Footnote 464: Aeon: Hanlon - World next door (WebRef=9374)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Michael Hanlon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Nine theories of the multiverse promise everything and more. But if reality is so vast and varied, where do we fit in?
    • Author's Conclusion:
      • We should not be surprised by the multiverse. Every time we have taken a look at the world around us, it has expanded. Copernicus realised that the Earth was not the centre of creation. Edwin Hubble realised that the Milky Way was just one galaxy among billions. Now we suspect that ‘reality’ is, in fact, something so magnificently vast that we struggle even to comprehend the parameters of how to describe it. Brian Greene finds this amazing and, clearly, rather wonderful.
      • So, from my own position of profound befuddlement, do I. But I also find it rather troubling. There are things missing from the multiverse: an intelligible place for consciousness, for one. Then there is the sense that, in a world where all possibilities become certainties and anything that can happen does happen, moral purpose is even more elusive than in the old-fashioned singular universe. If your evil twin is out there (which, in an infinite ‘flat’ universe, he or she certainly is), what does it matter what you do in your bit of eternity? For half a millennium science has been chipping away at the idea that humanity is central and unique. The multiverse replaces the chisel with a wrecking ball.
  2. Notes
    • This paper is basically a disguised plug for "Greene (Brian) - The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos", which I've just bought having had a quick look to see if there's anything published more recently that 2012.
    • The author goes through Greene's "9 theories", basically as in Wikipedia: Multiverse, so I've extracted them from there:-
      1. Quilted: The quilted multiverse works only in an infinite universe. With an infinite amount of space, every possible event will occur an infinite number of times. However, the speed of light prevents us from being aware of these other identical areas.
      2. Inflationary: The inflationary multiverse is composed of various pockets in which inflation fields collapse and form new universes.
      3. Brane: The brane multiverse version postulates that our entire universe exists on a membrane (brane) which floats in a higher dimension or "bulk". In this bulk, there are other membranes with their own universes. These universes can interact with one another, and when they collide, the violence and energy produced is more than enough to give rise to a big bang. The branes float or drift near each other in the bulk, and every few trillion years, attracted by gravity or some other force we do not understand, collide and bang into each other. This repeated contact gives rise to multiple or "cyclic" big bangs. This particular hypothesis falls under the string theory umbrella as it requires extra spatial dimensions.
      4. Cyclic: The cyclic multiverse has multiple branes that have collided, causing Big Bangs. The universes bounce back and pass through time until they are pulled back together and again collide, destroying the old contents and creating them anew.
      5. Landscape: The landscape multiverse relies on string theory's Calabi–Yau spaces. Quantum fluctuations drop the shapes to a lower energy level, creating a pocket with a set of laws different from that of the surrounding space.
      6. Quantum: The quantum multiverse creates a new universe when a diversion in events occurs, as in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
      7. Holographic: The holographic multiverse is derived from the theory that the surface area of a space can encode the contents of the volume of the region.
      8. Simulated: The simulated multiverse exists on complex computer systems that simulate entire universes.
      9. Ultimate: The ultimate multiverse contains every mathematically possible universe under different laws of physics.
    • There's also a nod to Martin Rees's idea (which I'm tempted to share) that some form of multiverse might explain why our universe is fine-tuned to allow the existence of life, via the anthropic principle.
Footnote 482: Aeon: Hill - When hope is a hindrance (WebRef=11088)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Samantha Rose Hill
    • Aeon Subtitle: For Hannah Arendt, hope is a dangerous barrier to courageous action. In dark times, the miracle that saves the world is to act
  2. Notes
Footnote 569: Aeon: Ariel - Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking (WebRef=10217)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Nana Ariel
    • Author Narrative: Nana Ariel is a writer, literary scholar and lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University, a fellow of the Minducate Science of Learning Research and Innovation Center, and a guest lecturer at Harvard University. She specialises in theoretical and practical rhetoric and in adventurous pedagogy. She lives in Tel Aviv.
  2. Notes
Footnote 585: Aeon: Johnson - Archaeology excavates the layers of meaning we leave behind (WebRef=10066)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Marilynn Johnson
    • Aeon Subtitle: Archaeology excavates the layers of meaning we leave behind
  2. Notes
Footnote 597: Aeon: Lachmann & Walker - Life ≠ alive (WebRef=8120)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 603: Aeon: Rowland - We are multitudes (WebRef=6661)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Katherine Rowland
    • Aeon Subtitle: Women are chimeras, with genetic material from both their parents and children. Where does that leave individual identity?
  2. Notes
Footnote 607: Aeon: Video - Small is beautiful: impressions of Fritz Schumacher (WebRef=11001)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Bigger isn’t better – the renegade ‘Buddhist economics’ of E F Schumacher
  2. Notes
Footnote 610: Aeon: Video - Carl Sagan's message to aliens (WebRef=10025)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: How do you message an alien? Carl Sagan offers some simple suggestions
  2. Notes
Footnote 612: Aeon: Video - Mary Beard: Women in power (WebRef=9957)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mary Beard
    • Aeon Subtitle: To understand the aversion to powerful women, look to the Greeks, says Mary Beard
    • Editor's Abstract
      • The Western world’s demonisation of women in power can be traced back to Ancient Greece, argues the celebrated UK classicist Mary Beard. For clear evidence of this centuries-long thread, look no further than the online depictions of Hillary Clinton as Medusa, freshly beheaded by a Trumpified Perseus, that made the rounds in the US presidential election in 2016.
      • In this lecture at the British Museum in 2017, Beard contends that this Ancient Greek disdain for female power continues to shape language and attitudes in less obvious, but similarly destructive ways.
      • With sharp humour and a slew of incisive examples, Beard makes the case that, to truly overcome archetypes of powerful women as irresponsible, dangerous and conniving, female power needs a new framework focused on results, and decoupled from prestige.
      • For a brief take on similar themes, watch this short documentary (Aeon: Video - Mary Beard: women and power), which was commissioned by the Getty Museum on the occasion of Beard receiving their 2019 Getty Medal for contributions to the arts.
  2. Notes
    • This is a very long lecture, and one with which I'm completely out of sympathy, so I gave up watching it after about 10 minutes. I may try again in the future.
    • As the Editor's Abstract suggests, this is (an immensely prolix version of) Mary Beard: women and power. Follow the link for comments on that.
    • As noted in the link above, I object to Mary Beard's lecturing style, which assumes all her points are accurate, and that she doesn't need to argue for them. She talks down to her audience and assumes they will all agree with her.
    • I wish she'd stick to her area of expertise - the classics - and be more descriptive - with a side-line in contemporary application - rather than majoring on radical feminism while using the wicked ancients (the men, anyway, radically reinterpreted) as a stick with which to beat contemporary males.
Footnote 616: Aeon: Video - What toddlers can teach us about how the human brain does science (WebRef=8002)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: What toddlers can teach us about how the human brain does science
  2. Notes
Footnote 617: Aeon: Video - Are you sure? Truth, certainty and politics (WebRef=8188)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: What wrapping a rope around the Earth reveals about the limits of human intuition
  2. Notes
Footnote 619: Aeon: Video - The truth about algorithms (WebRef=8539)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Algorithms are opinions, not truth machines, and demand the application of ethics
  2. Notes
Footnote 621: Aeon: Video - You gotta believe (WebRef=8774)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Nina Paley
    • Aeon Subtitle: Goddesses of antiquity offer Moses a path away from patriarchy – via funk and soul
  2. Notes
Footnote 627: Aeon: Video - The man who turned paper into pixels (WebRef=8509)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: The ‘father of information theory’, Claude Shannon brought us our digital world
  2. Notes
Footnote 645: Aeon: Stewart - The subjective turn (WebRef=10064)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jon Stewart
    • Aeon Subtitle: For Hegel, human nature strives through history to unchain itself from tradition. But is such inner freedom worth the cost
  2. Notes
Footnote 646: Aeon: Dunn - My sister, my mirror (WebRef=10028)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Lily Dunn
    • Aeon Subtitle: Vanessa and Virginia – intimates in art, adversaries in love. Can we ever transcend the primal envy of the sisterly bond?
  2. Notes
Footnote 651: Aeon: Vernon - The four-fold imagination (WebRef=9899)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Mark Vernon
    • Aeon Subtitle: William Blake saw angels and ghosts and the Hallelujah sunrise, even on the darkest day. We need to foster his state of mind
  2. Notes
Footnote 652: Aeon: Hoffmann - Repetition and rupture (WebRef=9901)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
    • Aeon Subtitle: Reinhart Koselleck, the last great theorist of history, sought in the apparent chaos of events a science of experience
  2. Notes
Footnote 655: Aeon: Roeser - Emotions should be in the heart of complex political debates (WebRef=9619)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 660: Aeon: Mitchell - Sex on the brain (WebRef=7965)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Kevin J. Mitchell
    • Aeon Subtitle: Humans, like other mammals, exhibit sex differences in their brains and psychological traits. But what do they signify?
  2. Notes
Footnote 666: Aeon: Arikha - The interoceptive turn (WebRef=7727)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Noga Arikha
    • Aeon Subtitle: The science of how we sense ourselves from within, including our bodily states, is creating a radical picture of selfhood
  2. Notes
Footnote 681: Aeon: Calcutt - Against moral sainthood (WebRef=8476)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Daniel Callcut
    • Aeon Subtitle: As philosopher Susan Wolf argues, life is far more meaningful and rich if we do not aim at being morally perfect
  2. Notes
Footnote 685: Aeon: Fry - Calculating art (WebRef=8616)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Hannah Fry
    • Aeon Subtitle: Artistic success takes a mysterious mix of talent, luck and timing. But could algorithms now predict and produce the hits?
  2. Notes
Footnote 686: Aeon: Brewer - Slavery-entangled philosophy (WebRef=8686)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Holly Brewer
    • Aeon Subtitle: John Locke took part in administering the slave-owning colonies. Does that make him, and liberalism itself, hypocritical?
  2. Notes
Footnote 687: Aeon: Bindel - Prostitution is slavery (WebRef=8831)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Julie Bindel
    • Aeon Subtitle: The free-market arguments won’t wash: prostitution trades on the lives of the poor and marginalised – just like slavery
  2. Notes
Footnote 691: Aeon: White - What did Hannah Arendt really mean by the banality of evil? (WebRef=8884)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 696: Aeon: Price - Taming the quantum spooks (WebRef=6676)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: Huw Price & Ken Wharton
    • Aeon Subtitle: Reconciling Einstein with quantum mechanics may require abandoning the notion that cause always precedes effect
  2. Notes
Footnote 706: Aeon: Video - Frederick Copleston and Bryan Magee on Schopenhauer (WebRef=8862)
  1. Aeon
    • Authors: F.C. Copleston & Bryan Magee
    • Aeon Subtitle: The intellectual legacy of philosophy’s greatest pessimist: life is suffering, art is supreme
  2. Notes
Footnote 709: Aeon: Terello - Craft your own renaissance with tips from Boccaccio’s Decameron (WebRef=10572)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 715: Aeon: Herring - Laughter is vital (WebRef=9630)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Emily Herring
    • Aeon Subtitle: For philosopher Henri Bergson, laughter solves a serious human conundrum: how to keep our minds and social lives elastic
  2. Notes
Footnote 718: Aeon: Baggini - Secular pilgrimage (WebRef=8021)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Julian Baggini
    • Aeon Subtitle: Visiting Wittgenstein’s home evokes the philosopher’s serious, ascetic mind (no doubt he would disapprove its restoration)
  2. Notes
Footnote 719: Aeon: Habgood-Coote - Thinking on your feet (WebRef=8259)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Josh Habgood-Coote
    • Aeon Subtitle: Don’t just do it, think about it too: how Gilbert Ryle’s philosophy of mind can help athletes teach themselves to improve
  2. Notes
Footnote 721: Aeon: Hall - Speak to the shoemaker (WebRef=8352)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Edith Hall
    • Aeon Subtitle: Philosophy need not be arcane, argued Aristotle, as he led by example, writing treatises for peers and public alike
  2. Notes
Footnote 722: Aeon: Brox - Disturbing the silence (WebRef=8411)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Jane Brox
    • Aeon Subtitle: The writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton embodied a paradox, chasing both the purity of silence and the need to break it
  2. Notes
Footnote 723: Aeon: Wampole - Strange and intelligent (WebRef=8599)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Christy Wampole
    • Aeon Subtitle: Estranged but not alienated, devout but not obedient, philosophical but not a systematiser, Simone Weil defies conventions
  2. Notes
Footnote 724: Aeon: Kaag - William James - The greatest use of life (WebRef=7836)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: John Kaag
    • Aeon Subtitle: The pragmatist philosopher William James had a crisp and consistent response when asked if life was worth living: maybe
  2. Notes
Footnote 725: Aeon: Rogan - Why Amartya Sen remains the century’s great critic of capitalism (WebRef=8454)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 726: Aeon: Setiya - How Schopenhauer’s thought can illuminate a midlife crisis (WebRef=8428)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 729: Aeon: Video - Pleasure and the good life (WebRef=8710)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 735: Aeon: Botting - Mary Wollstonecraft - Bringing down the patriarchy (WebRef=7835)
  1. Aeon
  2. Notes
Footnote 736: Aeon: Schulz - Picture this: why mental representations evolved (WebRef=8805)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: Nabeelah Jaffer
    • Aeon Subtitle: As Hannah Arendt argued, there is one common thread which connects individuals drawn to all kinds of extremist ideologies
  2. Notes
Footnote 739: Aeon: Video - Furniture poetry (WebRef=8566)
  1. Aeon
    • Aeon Subtitle: Playing peekaboo with Wittgenstein: what do objects do when we’re not looking?
  2. Notes
Footnote 745: Aeon: Owen - I and Thou (WebRef=9044)
  1. Aeon
    • Author: M.M. Owen
    • Aeon Subtitle: When we encounter another individual truly as a person, not as an object for use, we become fully human: Martin Buber
  2. Notes
    • See Also:
      → Martin Buber


Live Version of this Archived Note

Date Length Title
01/07/2025 11:31:12 1367071 Aeon Papers

Table of the 12 Earlier Versions of this Note

Date Length Title
01/10/2021 13:17:46 1151058 Aeon Papers (01/10/21)
02/07/2021 20:32:38 1040834 Aeon Papers (02/07/21)
03/04/2021 19:58:05 938507 Aeon Papers (03/04/21)
02/01/2021 14:29:46 852516 Aeon Papers (02/01/21)
15/11/2020 18:17:17 823115 Aeon Papers (15/11/20)
04/10/2020 00:27:22 771593 Aeon Papers (04/10/20)
13/05/2020 18:57:36 486457 Aeon Papers (13/05/20)
04/04/2020 00:14:24 378409 Aeon Papers (04/04/20)
19/01/2020 23:41:17 226375 Aeon Papers (19/01/20)
19/12/2019 14:00:58 129158 Aeon Papers - Summary Document: 2019+ (19/12/19)
30/11/2019 22:58:05 70867 Aeon Papers - Summary Document: 2019+ (30/11/19)
29/11/2019 14:34:05 62431 Aeon Papers - Summary Document: 2019+ (29/11/19)

Table of the 5 Later Versions of this Note

Date Length Title
01/04/2024 20:08:10 1278187 Aeon Papers (01/04/24)
06/07/2023 00:43:12 1196397 Aeon Papers (06/07/23)
15/10/2022 21:57:36 1639894 Aeon Papers (15/10/22)
03/07/2022 01:29:17 1475776 Aeon Papers (03/07/22)
11/04/2022 00:01:26 1360085 Aeon Papers (11/04/22)


This version updated Reading List for this Topic Parent Topic
03/01/2022 23:58:34 None available None


Summary of Notes Links from this Page

Aeon Papers - Summary Document: 2017-2018 (2) Animal Rights (5) Animals (11) Body (4) Brain (5)
Brain State Transfer Buddhism (7) Computers (3) Consciousness (8) Death (8)
Embryo Evolution (10) Fiction Forensic Property (5) Free Will (8)
Human Beings (2) Intelligence Language of Thought (3) Life (3) Logic of Identity
Memory (6) Mind (2) Modality Narrative Identity (15) Natural Kinds
Near Death Experiences Ontology Person (2) Personality (2) Plants (2)
Pregnancy (3) Probability (4) Psychology (6) Psychopathology (35) Quantum Mechanics (2)
Race (21) Reincarnation Religion (4) Self (13) Sleep (5)
Society (3) Time (5) Time Travel Transhumanism (14) What are We? (2)
Wittgenstein (3)        

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Summary of Note Links to this Page

Brief Thoughts on Language & Languages, 2 PID Note, Book & Paper Usage Status: Consciousness Studies (2021 - December) Status: Mathematics (2021 - December) Status: Personal Identity (2021 - December)
Status: Priority Task List (2021 - December), 2, 3, 4 Status: Summary (2021 - December), 2, 3, 4 Status: Web-Tools (2021 - December) Website - Outstanding Developments (2021 - December), 2 Website - Progress to Date (2021 - December), 2, 3, 4

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