Bruces

This might help some students remember how to pronounce "Nietzsche"... but never mind "Kant"...

Knowing vs. understanding

To understand anything — another person's experience of reality, another fundamental law of physics — is to restructure our existing knowledge, shifting and broadening our prior frames of reference to accommodate a new awareness. And yet we have a habit of confusing our knowledge — which is always limited and incomplete: a model of the cathedral of reality, built from primary-colored blocks of fact — with the actuality of things; we have a habit of mistaking the model for the thing itself, mistaking our partial awareness for a totality of understanding. Thoreau recognized this when he contemplated our blinding preconceptions and lamented that "we hear and apprehend only what we already half know."

…

Maria Popova

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/CvU0v4cu73-/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Hannah Arendt’s Gifford Lectures

When Hannah Arendt became the first woman to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures, she delivered a staggering meditation on the life of the mind, thinking vs. knowing, and the lacuna between truth and meaning themarginalian.org/2014…

https://www.threads.net/@mariapopova/post/CvSHJ-HOiGE/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Turing, Searle, Chomsky & ChatGPT

Post by @osopher

View on Threads

An admirable legacy of BS

Harry G. Frankfurt, Philosopher With a Surprise Best Seller, Dies at 94

"...The essay was originally published in the journal Raritan in 1986, but it was not popularized until nearly two decades later, in January 2005, when Princeton University Press repackaged it as a small, spaciously lined 80-page book. It was an unexpected commercial hit, becoming a No. 1 New York Times best seller. Soon Professor Frankfurt was making television appearances on "60 Minutes," the "Today" show and "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

The book's popularity seemed to be fueled in part by the recent re-election of President George W. Bush, many of whose critics viewed his administration, with its purported dismissal of what one Bush aide called the "reality-based community," as exemplifying the very blitheness about truth that Professor Frankfurt had described..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/books/harry-g-frankfurt-dead.html

Harry Frankfurt (1929-2023)

Historians and philosophers of the future will look to his work for insight into these inglorious times.

https://www.threads.net/t/Cu0MrvSLazY/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Genius of the Modern World: Nietzsche

And see Marx, Freud

Genius of the Ancient World, ep.2: Socrates

And see Buddha, COnfucius

Misplaced doubt and certainty

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5 Philosophical Answers to the Meaning of Life

https://www.worldatlas.com/philosophy/5-philosophical-answers-to-the-meaning-of-life.html

Can you choose to act as if you have free will…

if you don't have free will? I choose to think so. Or I would. I think.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CtlqzP5MxEA/?igshid=NzJjY2FjNWJiZg==

Succession’s iffy American grip

The Great Genius of 'Succession' Was Hovering Two Inches Above Reality

The show captured the terrifying, mesmerizing interplay between fact and fiction — and turned it into great television.

"...the blurring of reality and fantasy isn't merely fascinating. Americans' knack and weakness for these mixtures amount to a founding national predisposition — what made America the global center of show business, from P.T. Barnum to Hollywood to televangelism to reality TV. Our wise forebears also built walls between important reality over here and entertainment and make-believe over there and installed useful establishment gatekeepers to decide what belonged where.

During the past half-century, those barriers crumbled gradually, then suddenly. America's iffy grip on reality turned from a chronic condition to acute and pathological, metastasizing beyond entertainment and spreading throughout the real world, most disastrously into our information and political systems, a phenomenon for which no single individual and enterprise has been more responsible than the real-life inspirations for Logan Roy and ATN. Early this season, Logan told his children, "I love you, but you are not serious people." He could have been talking to America, where people now feel entitled to their own facts as well as their own opinions..." Kurt Andersen

What College Students Need

...Dr. Peña-Guzmán dismissed the idea that a course like his is only suitable for students who don’t have to worry about holding down jobs or paying off student debt. “I’m worried by this assumption that certain experiences that are important for the development of personality, for a certain kind of humanistic and spiritual growth, should be reserved for the elite — especially when we know those experiences are also sources of cultural capital,” he said. Courses like The Reading Experiment are practical too, he added: “I can’t imagine a field that wouldn’t require some version of the skill of focused attention.”

The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with it. Ms. Rodriguez, the economics major who took Living Deliberately and Existential Despair, said that before those classes she “didn’t distinguish technology from education; I didn’t think education ever went without technology. I think that’s really weird now. You don’t need to adapt every piece of technology to be able to learn better or more,” she said. “It can form this dependency.”

The point of college is to help students become independent humans who can choose the gods they serve and the rules they follow, rather than allowing someone else to choose for them. The first step is dethroning the small silicon idol in their pocket — and making space for the uncomfortable silence and questions that follow. The experience stuck with Ms. Ouyang, the nursing major: “I didn’t look forward to getting my phone back,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/opinion/college-students-monks-mental-health-smart-phones.html?smid=em-share

Against Despair: An Open Letter to Graduates

My generation has wrecked so much that is precious. How could I dare to offer you advice?

...You are children of the 21st century, and yours is the first generation to recognize the inescapable urgency of climate change, the first not to deny the undeniable loss of biodiversity. You have grown up in an age permeated by the noise of a 24-hour news cycle, by needless political polarization, by devastating gun violence, by the isolating effects of “social” media. You have seen hard-won civil rights rolled back. You have come of age at a time of existential threat — to the planet, to democracy, to the arc of the moral universe itself — and none of it is your fault.

I wouldn’t blame you if you’re wondering how somebody of my generation, which wrecked so much that is precious, could dare to offer you advice. My only response is that age has exactly one advantage over the energy and brilliance of youth: Age teaches a person how to survive despair...

Margaret Renkl https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/opinion/letter-to-graduates-hope-despair.html?smid=em-share

Q & A

"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."
— Richard P. Feynman

Degraded personhood

"The Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?"

Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto [2010]
https://a.co/6Rs2n1i

Natality

"… And so maybe the twenty-first century is a time to think more carefully and deeply about birth, about what it has been throughout history, is today, and could be in our future. Maybe it is time for all people, and not just new mothers, to wrestle with human natality—to think anew about how birth has shaped our lives and societies, and how it has altered the course of our planet's history. Can our reckoning with birth's ubiquity and magnitude, its private and public significance, re-attune us not only to its difficulties but also to what Hannah Arendt called a "shocked wonder at the miracle of Being"? Can it remind us of our innate capacity to always begin again?"

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/natality-mortality-banks-arendt-children-india-feminism

Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

Something to consider in MALA's tag-team course on Knowledge, next semester.

Our minds haven’t evolved to deal with machines we believe have consciousness.

"...Future language models won’t be so easy to catch out. Before long, they may give us the seamless and impenetrable impression of understanding and knowing things, regardless of whether they do. As this happens, we may also become unable to avoid attributing consciousness to them too, suckered in by our anthropomorphic bias and our inbuilt inclination to associate intelligence with awareness..." Anil Seth

https://nautil.us/why-conscious-ai-is-a-bad-bad-idea-302937/

George Berkeley’s Name Removed from Trinity College Dublin Library

Trinity College Dublin has decided to seek a new name for its central library, the Berkeley, after concluding that the alumnus it honors, the 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley, owned slaves in colonial Rhode Island and wrote pamphlets supportive of slavery...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/world/europe/george-berkeley-trinity-college-dublin.html

Presentations conclude Thursday May 4, 10 a.m. via Zoom

Thanks to all for participating.

Grades should be posted by the registrar early next week.

Have a good summer.

jpo