This is pretty clearly a political murder. The murderer was simply carrying the rhetoric of the hard right to its logical conclusion. This is John McCain’s & George Bush’s belligerent America. The killer’s derangement will be described in psychological terms, but it is a social & political derangement. [Link fixed.]
Monthly Archives: August 2008
Theodore Solotaroff
I was really too young to have been influenced by the New American Review during the main part of its run, but I remember in the mid-seventies picking up copies in used bookstores & feeling nostalgic for a scene I was never a part of. Ted Solotaroff is dead at 80. Those beat-up paperbacks, for my generation, were tokens of bravery to be lived up to. And they were printed (at a loss) by major publishers. Now there is something to be nostalgic for. Another believer in the efficacy of writing as an art is gone.
Pretty Quiet Around Here: Reasons for Not Blogging
Seems like I haven’t had much worth reporting on the blog recently. I’ll read something & think, “I should blog that,” but then never get around to it. It’s not that I’ve been terribly busy — some work around the house & getting ready for the semester, but nothing overwhelming. Maybe the prolonged rainy weather we’ve been having since I got back from BMC has depressed my spirits. And there was a big blowup on the Poetryetc email list (a real nest of ninnies, where overt plagiarism goes unremarked & clique-politics is called “democracy”), of which I was one of the managers. My resignation from the list a week ago left a very bad taste in my mouth. Then there was the anxiety leading up to my annual physical exam — I always feel this for days — though I am routinely in “excellent health,” according to my doctor. I have been doing a lot of visual art, which is satisfying, but feels kind of mindless. I’m so used to thinking of imaginative work as involving language & a certain kind of verbal thinking that the processes of making collages don’t feel like using my mind, though I realize of course that I’m just doing another kind of thinking. And I’ve been spending too much time by myself — one of our cars is in the shop getting body work done, so Carole takes the remaining car, leaving me at home in south Colton. It’s funny, because in many ways I’m a quite solitary person, but if I don’t have conversations outside the home for several days I get way too much up inside my own head. Anyway, school responsibilities will really begin ramping up next week, we’ll have two cars, & I’ll be much busier. If past patterns hold, this will lead, paradoxically, to more posts on the blog. I think I’ve got a bunch of drafts, in any case, to finish up & post. So life will resume out here on the very tip of the long tail — somebody has to live out here!
Justice Matters
Are justice & peace incompatible values? Certainly, they compete, but in terms of contemporary atrocities, justice seems pretty often to pave the way for peace. Aryeh Neier, one of the founders of Human Rights Watch, offers some recent examples. What, I wonder, would be the pragmatic effect of bringing George W. Bush & Dick Cheney to justice. Just a little historical thought experiment.
Rapture of the Nerds
Note: I began this post several weeks ago when I first ran across the linked article, then let it drop for some reason. I responded to it, I think, because of my visceral reaction against all forms of messianism & scientism.
Ray Kurzweil has taken over from Marvin Minsky, but the computopians are still peddling the same tired bullshit. Via Three Quarks Daily I see that there is a powerful critique of the “singularitarian” fantasy at the IEEE website. What I liked best about the analysis — & hadn’t thought of myself, explicitly — is that this “singularitarianism” represents a utopian religious movement.” The article is not unsympathetic, but it highly critical of the naive utopianism of the true believers. (It also offers statements in support of the coming rise of the machines.) The Singularity — almost always capitalized — is that moment in the future when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, or when machines become conscious, or when humans will be able to upload their minds into computers. Never mind (for starters) that we have barely adequate definitions of intelligence, consciousness, or mind. I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of perception during my month out here in the country, not that one can’t think about perception elsewhere; but I’ve had time to think about thinking, one of my favorite hobbies. [The IEEE link above leads to a symposium in which the
All these fantasies are based on the literalization of the metaphor the brain is a computer. Taking metaphors literally leads to all kinds of logical confusions. The brain, let's say, is an organ -- & it organizes experiences. (Far more useful to think with puns!) But here's the crux: human experience does not exist "inside" the brain, but is the result of the the human body (including the brain) being alive in the world.
Notably, singularity enthusiasts tend to be computer specialists, such as the author and retired computer scientist Vernor Vinge, the roboticist Hans Moravec, and the entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil. Intoxicated by the explosive progress of information technologies captured by Moore's Law, such singularitarians foresee a “merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence,†as Kurzweil puts it, that will culminate in “immortal software-based humans.†It will happen not within a millennium, or a century, but no later than 2030, according to Vinge. These guys—and, yes, they're all men—are serious. Kurzweil says he has adopted an antiaging regimen so that he'll “live long enough to live forever.â€
For a realistic assessment of current neuroscience's ability to track specific brain functions -- to say nothing of consciousness -- to localized regions of activity, I recommend Matthew B. Crawford's report on the state of the art, which also contains a good deal of basic philosophy of science that the singularitarians are either ignorant of or ignore. [See also: The Singularity Summit at Stanford University.]