Huenemanniac

Getting distracted by ideas

  • Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary

    I spent an hour today with a 1734 English translation of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique. It is really a multi-volume encyclopedia, ostensibly covering both known and obscure topics found treated in the history of ancient texts, but in fact Bayle sneaks in commentary on religious and philosophical controversies of his own day. It’s Continue reading

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  • Waiting for Ludwig

    (from a conversation with Rick) ACT THREE Next Day. Same Time. Same Place. VLADIMIR sits on the ground, staring at nothing. ESTRAGON surveys the landscape expectantly, is about to speak, looks at VLADIMIR, loses heart, and then speaks anyway. ESTRAGON: A fine day! (No response from VLADIMIR.) Yes, a fine day! The sort of day Continue reading

  • a life on the philosophical playground

    Daniel Dennett, I’ve Been Thinking (Norton, 2023). Daniel Dennett died last week, and I took the occasion to read his autobiography. I don’t know how interesting the book would be to anyone who didn’t know Dennett, or anyone who hasn’t read at least 3 or 4 of his books and been captivated by them. I Continue reading

  • Information is using us

    Caleb Scharf, The Ascent of Information (Riverhead Books, 2021) Scharf is a physicist who argues in this book that the main subject of our planet has been information. Life itself is a system of storing and reproducing information, intelligence is a way of collecting, storing and sharing information, and our current preoccupation with digital intelligence Continue reading

  • Mid-sized explanatory messes

    I was in a conversation recently, and somebody tried to explain a small group’s weird behavior in a Nietzschean or Freudian fashion: “They couldn’t exert power over others, so they began punishing themselves” or some such claim. I instantly judged that that explanation couldn’t possibly be right, even though I didn’t have a better one, Continue reading

  • Here comes Brainzilla

    Roman Yampolskiy, AI: Unexplainable, unpredictable, uncontrollable (CRC Press 2024) It’s coming, and probably sooner than you think. Open AI’s Leopold Aschenbrenner noted recently on X, “One year since GPT-4 release. Hope you all enjoyed some time to relax; it’ll have been the slowest 12 months of AI progress for quite some time to come.” You Continue reading

  • An attempt at radical hope

    I decided some time ago to pretty much give up on writing. I am still not sure why, but it was some combination of the following: I had done my fair share of it, and the the general army of “content producers” would get along just fine without my efforts, and the feeling that the Continue reading

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  • A first adventure with ChatGPT

    It has taken me this long to interact with Chat GPT. I can’t explain why. It hasn’t seemed that interesting to me, in terms of any philosophical questions about consciousness or intelligence. I know many people have found some questions to raise that they and others find interesting; I just haven’t felt the need to Continue reading

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  • Tim Urban, What’s our problem?

    [Reading: What’s Our Problem? by Tim Urban] Tim Urban is a smart and funny guy. He explains all kinds of things in clear and entertaining ways on his website, Wait But Why. Now he is out to explain a great big thing, namely, why it is that we are so smart but are acting collectively Continue reading

  • Overview of AI and potential threats

    Here is a sensible, informed, and wise essay by Ali Minai at 3QuarksDaily that offers a clear picture of the general way AI systems like Chat-GPT work, and some sober recommendations for minimizing the disruptions they are likely to cause. His general conclusion: The problem has to be addressed at least at three level: Regulation, Continue reading

  • Complexities of medieval islamicate thought

    Interesting and illuminating essay here debunking Neil deGrasse Tyson’s ignorant, repeated, and insistent claim that Al-Ghazali killed medieval science. Physicists very much like to invent history according to their preconceived notions. Key paragraph: I could keep listing astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians in the Islamic world who continued to do high quality and influential work in Continue reading

  • Magic circles

    I recently had the chance to visit two centers of the arcane. The first was the Warburg Library, an academic library at the University of London. It attracts a notable but somewhat rare subspecies of academics: those interested in how ideas in religion, philosophy, magic, mysticism, and the arts evolved from ancient times into the Continue reading

  • A fuller explanation

    I feel that in my last two posts (on Tár and postmodernism) I managed to miss the big idea that was lurking in both of them. The idea is that the study of culture, and especially popular culture, is no substitute for understanding (what we might call) “the human condition” (if we didn’t know any Continue reading

  • Approximating post-modernism

    “Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the “grand narratives” of modernism, rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power.” [Wikipedia] Postmodernism = … a bunch of over-educated privileged urban types who like to make contradictory assertions Continue reading

  • Reflection on Tár

    [Spoilers to follow, in case you’re worried!] We recently watched the film Tár starring Cate Blanchette. It’s a film with a lot, I mean a lot, of talking. We split our watching over two days. But the acting was so compelling, the camera work was so fascinating, and the story was so gripping, that we Continue reading

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  • Steven Pinker on linguistics

    I just came across this excellent overview of the field of linguistics by Steven Pinker. Highly recommended. Continue reading

  • Some AI art

    When I put together the “Two and a half minutes” piece for 3QD (below), I experimented with DALL-E to compose some art to accompany it. I ended up going with something less literal, but here’s what the AI did with the prompt “A painting of a muddy landscape with humans climbing out of brown pods”: Continue reading

  • 3QD: Two and a half minutes

    There is nothing new in this thought. But it’s worth revisiting now and again. There’s an unbounded muddy terrain as dark and timeless as night. Drifting slowly over the landscape is a disk of light from an unknown source, like a spotlight. There’s no predictable pattern to its motion, and no place is illuminated for Continue reading

  • 3QD: Sea monster

    Vasco da Gama was the first person we can name who successfully commandeered a voyage around Africa’s southernmost point, the Cape of Good Hope. It is a treacherous passage, where warm currents from the southern part of the Indian Ocean clash against the icy currents of the south Atlantic, leading to dangerous waves that have Continue reading

  • 3QD: Give me monotony!

    “Monotonizing existence, so that it won’t be monotonous. Making daily life anodyne, so that the littlest thing will amuse.” —Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith, section 171 Senhor Soares goes on to explain that in his job as assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon, when he finds himself “between two Continue reading

  • Knowledge for Humans

    I have taught “Epistemology” for many years, but it has always been for me a difficult course to plan. I want to cover traditional philosophical questions about skepticism, justification, induction, and belief in the external world. But then I also want to cover topics arising from the social conditions of knowledge: how cultural ideologies and Continue reading

  • The argument from design, and the surprising significance of evolutionary explanation

    At least on the surface, there seems to be something incongruous in regarding some artifact (like a watch) as clearly implying some kind of intelligent, crafty mind, but then regarding that intelligent, crafty mind as not implying any sort of further creator, but coming about through natural causes. A watchmaker is if anything more impressive Continue reading

  • The Thing About Mary

    One of the cleanest and most compelling arguments against physicalism in the philosophy of mind is the “Knowledge Argument”. (Here is a quick summary. The response I am going to offer doesn’t show up there, though it fits in as a variant of the “No Learning” objection. It’s also the reply Daniel Dennett gives in Continue reading

  • 3QD: Rat Man? Ewww!

    It was announced last week that scientists have integrated neurons from human brains into infant rat brains, resulting in new insights about how our brain cells grow and connect, and some hope of a deeper understanding of neural disorders. Full story here. And while no scientist would admit they are working toward the development of some Rat Continue reading

  • Psyche: How to Read Philosophy

    It might seem daunting to read philosophy. Giants of thinking with names like Hegel, Plato, Marx, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard loom over us with imperious glares, asking if we are sure we are worthy. We might worry that we won’t understand anything they are telling us; even if we do think we understand, we still might Continue reading