…Study after study after study have proved what we feel, intuitively, in our gut: Walking is good for us. Beneficial for our joints and muscles; astute at relieving tension, reducing anxiety and depression; a boon to creativity, likely; slows the aging process, maybe; excellent at prying our screens from our face, definitely. Shane O'Mara, a professor of experimental brain research in Dublin, has called walking a "superpower," claiming that walking, and only walking, unlocks specific parts of our brains, places that bequeath happiness and health.
I have no beef with any of this, but I believe we have it backward. We are asking what we can get out of a walk, rather than what a walk can get out of us. This might seem like a small distinction, a matter of semantics. But when we begin to think of walking in terms of the latter, we change the way we navigate and experience — literally and figuratively — the world around us...
Something to consider when we talk about Descartes...
We had a serious and sober conversation in Environmental Ethics yesterday about the difference between living longer vs. living better, between a life of many years vs. a life of completion and earned satisfaction. I was encouraged by the maturity and wisdom of the young people in the room, whose acceptance of mortality stands in striking contrast to that of futurologist/transhumanist Raymond Kurzweil.
Ray's the guy who pioneered optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology etc., and then went to work for Google to help Larry and Sergei figure out how to conquer aging and the biological restrictions of mortal life. He's the very antithesis, in this regard, of Wendell Berry.
I first became aware of Ray when I read his The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, which audaciously and (we should see now) prematurely, if not ludicrously, predicted that we'd have self-conscious machines "before 2030"... We'll talk about this in CoPhi soon, when we turn to Descartes.
Descartes’s famous dictum “I think, therefore I am” has often been cited as emblematic of Western rationalism. This view interprets Descartes to mean “I think, that is, I can manipulate logic and symbols, therefore I am worthwhile.” But in my view, Descartes was not intending to extol the virtues of rational thought. He was troubled by what has become known as the mind-body problem, the paradox of how mind can arise from non-mind, how thoughts and feelings can arise from the ordinary matter of the brain. Pushing rational skepticism to its limits, his statement really means “I think, that is, there is an undeniable mental phenomenon, some awareness, occurring, therefore all we know for sure is that something—let’s call it I—exists.” Viewed in this way, there is less of a gap than is commonly thought between Descartes and Buddhist notions of consciousness as the primary reality. Before 2030, we will have machines proclaiming Descartes’s dictum. And it won’t seem like a programmed response. The machines will be earnest and convincing. Should we believe them when they claim to be conscious entities with their own volition?
Ask that again when they make that claim. If they do.
At least Ray has inspired entertaining films like Her, Ex Machina, Transcendence...
But his desperate quest to "live long enough to live forever"-- see the Wired Magazine feature story on Ray,wherein it was revealed that he'd daily been popping upwards of 200 pill supplements and downing oceans of green tea every day in hopes of beating the Reaper (lately he's cut back to just 90)-- really does look sad and shallow, alongside the mature view we've explored in The World-Ending Fire and that I was gratified to hear echoed by my fellow mortals in class yesterday.
Montaigne, Descartes, & Pascal-LH 11-12. FL 13-14, HWT 14-15 MEETING TODAY for Library instruction in LIB 264a
HWT
1. What familiar western distinction is not commonly drawn in Islamic thought?
2. According to Sankara, the appearance of plurality is misleading. Everything is ____.
3. The Islamic concept of unity rules out what key western Enlightenment value, and offers little prospect of adopting modern views on what?
4. What Calvinist-sounding doctrine features heavily in Islamic thought?
5. What deep philosophical assumption, expressed by what phrase, has informed western philosophy for centuries? To what concept did Harry Frankfurt apply it?
* BONUS QUESTIONSMachiavelli, Hobbes-LH 9-10. FL 11-12, HWT 11-13.... MEETING THURSDAY (not Tuesday) for Library instruction in LIB 264a
The philosophy tutor, Matthew Thomas, will begin tutoring next week (September 12 - 16). The tutoring will be via Zoom, at the following times:
“There is a reason the iconic photograph of earthrise taken during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968 has become one of the most influential images in history and has been hailed as the beginning of the environmental movement…” https://t.co/9XHk4OFX59
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 13, 2022
As darkness settled over the small German town of Jena in the late winter of 1798, large groups of young men rushed to the town university's biggest auditorium to listen to their new philosophy professor. They jostled for seats, took out ink and quills and waited. At the lectern, a young man lit two candles. He most likely couldn't make out the students' faces, but they saw him bathed in light.
There is a "secret bond connecting our mind with nature," the professor, Friedrich Schelling, told the students. His idea, that the self and nature are in fact identical, was as simple as it was radical. He explained this by pointing to the moment when the self becomes aware of the world around it.
"At the first moment, when I am conscious of the external world, the consciousness of my self is there as well," he said, "and vice versa — at my first moment of self-awareness, the real world rises up before me." Instead of dividing the world into mind and matter, as many philosophers had done for centuries, the young professor told his students that everything was one. It was an idea that would change the way humans think about themselves and nature.
To me it seems that we sometimes forget that we're part of nature — physically of course, but also emotionally and psychologically — and this insight is missing from our current climate debates. As a historian, I have looked at the relationship between humankind and nature, and I believe that Schelling's philosophy of oneness might provide a foundation on which to anchor the fight for our climate and our survival...
“Tragedies will always garner public interest. That’s just human nature. But tragedies should never be reduced to tweets and talking points or turned into a narrative to justify a political agenda.” This medium in particular does seem built for reduction. https://t.co/l0RtnfuaB2
— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) September 12, 2022
LISTEN. In Environmental Ethics today, I need to re-assert my general admiration for Wendell Berry after last class when we went outside and I raised my voice to be heard over those obnoxious Peck Hall blowers. I didn't want to shout my challenge to what I see as his reductively binary approach to Two Minds, I just wanted to put it out there for our consideration. I just think we need all kinds of minds, and need all kinds of minds to make room for the consideration of other kinds.
So let me quickly agree with Wendell (in his 2004 essay "Quantity versus Form") that "the ideal of a whole or complete life" is not replaceable by the "ideal merely of a long life." Quality matters. "Ripeness is all." (continues)
Calvin sounds like (Thomas) Hobbes describing the state of nature. Hobbes (the tiger) behaves like Machiavelli's Prince. (And check out Hobbes, Machiavelli & others in Existential Comics...)
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Novels can serve a moral function by enabling us to enter the lives of others imaginatively. It is an ekstasis in which we step outside the self, leaving it behind, and embrace a different perspective — realizing, for example, the attractions of evil at the same time as we are made to recoil from it. Novels force us not only to face but to experience the terror of illness, sorrow, poverty and infirmity. They enhance our compassion by compelling us to feel with others, taking us out of the comforts of solipsism... Karen Armstrong
A novel recommendation, on the heels of our discussion of cosmic philosophy: Bewilderment, by Richard Powers...
The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain…
With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?
“They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.”
“Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from only a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another.”
“Nine is the age of great turning. Maybe humanity was a nine-year-old, not yet grown up, not a little kid anymore. Seemingly in control, but always on the verge of rage.”
“Oddly enough, there’s no name in the DSM for the compulsion to diagnose people.”
“...everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow.”
'... if some small but critical mass of people recovered a sense of kinship, economics would become ecology. We’d want different things. We’d find our meaning..."
“It came from Buddhism, the Four Immeasurables. “There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.”
