Sampling the 2024 blogosphere: Part 3
The Intrinsic Perspective's summer subscriber writing extravaganza
The heat recently broke here on Cape Cod in a palpable lifting, and the summer is now a thing sleeping at its end, inattentive, lethargic. August creeps to a close with closed eyes. The sun never looks directly at you, but to the side, distracted. And this all means that subscriber writing is now at its end for this year.
Please do give the following excerpts a read, and consider checking out in greater detail a few of the authors as well. All submissions were quite good this year, lots of great bits and bobs, washed up flotsam, things not urgent but intriguing in shape or form. One must never lose the instinct to pick up interesting pieces of wood on the beach, the way a child does.
As before, links and excerpts are given, and the descriptions by the authors themselves are in italics while my further comments are in regular text.
1. “Gutenberg in the Whirlwind” by T. Scott suggests that we are in a period of cultural change unparalleled since the post-Gutenberg transition to the Age of Print.
Somewhere around 1447, Gutenberg (and others) construct a printing press with reusable movable type. Not a singular invention de novo, it's the clever combining of existing innovations. The press borrowed from the vintners, beautiful permanent rag paper, precision metal casting with just the right degree of durability, inks that would adhere in a thin film to the type and resist bleeding into the paper, a rising commercial sector with mercantile fairs and trade routes crossing the continent.
Surely there was money to be made. All over Europe, entrepreneurs leap in, setting up print shops, intent on making their fortunes. The demand for luxury goods is high among the nobility, the upper clergy, the richest among the merchant classes. But the traditionalists frown on the notion of printed missals and religious tracts. They hear rumors of a 42 line Bible. Duplicated! Multiple copies scribed by a machine! Which borders on sacrilege! Does it not, Father? Their sons, however, building their own fortunes, find the printed works to be worthy markers of attainment, particularly when they can hire the finest illuminators to ink in the Initial Cap.
Most of the printers quickly go bust. Some clever few survive... The successful printers turned to indulgences, playing cards, and, of course, pornography. Demand ramps up so much that there’s a paper shortage near the end of the century…
I think this is true but I do wonder if technologies like social media and AI are more like television, which we still, after all these decades, have a complicated relationship with (watching too much, being careful of child exposure, etc) vs. books, which we no longer have a complicated relationship with.
2. “Love’s Labors Lost: The Meaning of The Title” by John McGee cracks the meaning of the title of Shakespeare's most popular comedy in his own lifetime.
This is love-as-warfare, in which the men are soldiers entering a battlefield, ready to engage in “conflict.” “Pell-mell” suggests close, hand-to-hand combat. By “get the sun of them,” Berowne means attack them with the sun in their eyes, so they’re unable to ready a defense. The king’s “down with them” indicates the men intend to subdue the women. They will raise “standards” or military flags as symbols of their conquest.
But things don’t quite go according to plan. Having overheard the men’s stratagem, the Princess’s attendant Boyet goes and warns the ladies of the impending assault. “Prepare, madam, prepare!” he cries, “Arm, wenches, arm!”
3. “I want it, and I want it NOW!” by Michael Gentle, shows how the internet has made us slaves to instant gratification.
In pre-internet times, before the age of pointing and clicking, few things were immediately available. You had to wait for stuff to happen… TV shows and series were aired weekly. If you didn’t want to lose the plot in, say, The Fugitive or Yes, Prime Minister, then you’d stay in that evening, otherwise you’d have to find out from someone else what happened. If you didn’t have the latest hit music, you waited for the weekly Top-10 hit parade on the radio or TV…There were typically only three weather forecasts per day: morning, noon and night. Those were the days when the weather still had the power to surprise. If you took a picture with your camera, you waited until the entire roll of film – usually 24 or 36 exposures – was used up. That could take weeks, especially if you only took pictures on special occasions like birthdays or vacations.
Heck, I still remember the waiting for the internet itself, with that dial-up tone (god forbid my sister was on the line).
4. “The Sacred Arts: Conference Review” by H.E. Negash is about a gathering at St. Andrew's in Riverside, CA (home parish of Archpriest Josiah Trenham) to learn about liturgy (sacred music) and icons (sacred paintings) according to the Greek Orthodox tradition, featuring guest speaker Jonathan Pageau.
On icons, Fr. Maximos says going to view icons in a museum is the equivalent of watching animals in a zoo. It’s not the right place and time. The right place and time is the liturgy, in which we don’t focus on the icons themselves, but use them as reminders to focus on the sacred music being sung in unison. In icons, we can see what it cost God to become man, that transience and death are human, and the act of kenosis (self-emptying Christ did for us; Philippians 2) greater in his incarnation than his crucifixion. In other words, the mystery of God being born as man is greater than God dying. But obviously both are great.
5. “The Saugatuck Cosmology: Artistic Perception as a Hidden Reality” by Ted Wade is an illustrated story about an artist plunged into an imagined reality, the creatures he met there, and what he saw.
The way the RiverPlace character talked reminded me of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, where the superintelligent AIs always talk in koans and poetry.
6. “Why Learn Esperanto” by Galactic Beyond (briefly) explores the relationship between Languages, dreams, metaphors, imagination, art, and evolution.
Most of our language-myths see our six thousand languages as a curse inflicted upon humanity for some transgression, or as a consequence of a deluge visited upon us in the oldest Babylonian poems because the gods thought us too noisy. But, there is one myth that stands apart. The Kunwinju people believe that a goddess from dreamtime gave each of her children a distinct language to play with. As far as we know, this is the only myth that sees language not as a human invention, and that sees diversity of language not as a divine punishment, but as gifts from the realm of dreams.
7. “No Better Time to Wake Up” by Alex Olshonsky reveals the unsettling connections between ancient indigenous prophecies foretelling the end of the world and the spiritual decay, collective madness, and existential threats evident in our modern world.
It’s all too easy to brush aside these indigenous prophecies as antiquated, primitive beliefs from cultures seemingly unaware of the laws of physics. Personally, I find myself wary of neo-mythic reductionism wherein there’s an inclination to portray indigenous rituals as the only path forward in a digitized world dominated by global supply chains… And yet, perhaps more problematic than the mere existence of these prophecies is our modern arrogance, which so swiftly dismisses them… Prophecies enduring through time tap into a reservoir of collective intelligence, finely tuned to the rhythms of civilization and culture. I, for one, find it impossible not to notice the eerie precision of certain predictions—particularly around spiritual sickness and collective insanity…Despite our technological and medical advancements, we find ourselves in the midst of a severe spiritual crisis (of existential magnitude).
8. “Opinions Are Bullshit” by David Pinsof is about what "opinions" are and why they're bullshit. In this Wittgensteinian piece, Pinsof makes the case that opinions are bullshit because they are usually no more than moves in an “opinion game” and therefore, ultimately, about social standing, judgement, and distinction.
For all the opinions we have and hold, we spend very little time wondering what, exactly, they are…
One thing is certain: they’re not facts… “Paris is the capital of France”—that’s a fact. “The Barbie movie is feminist propaganda”—that’s an opinion…. So maybe they’re preferences? No, that can’t be it. We already know how to express our preferences: we say we “like” this or that, or we “don’t care for” this or that….
So maybe they’re perspectives—our way of seeing things? No, that doesn’t make sense either…. So maybe opinions are beliefs—what we take to be the facts? No, facts are facts. If we believe the facts, then we’re correct. If not, then we’re mistaken….
So there’s something puzzling about opinions. They’re not facts. They’re not preferences. And they’re not perspectives, which are just other kinds of preferences. But they’re not beliefs either, because beliefs are either true (which makes them facts), false (which makes them mistakes), or perspectives (which makes them preferences).
9. “The Universe Syndrome” by Johann Oesterreicher is a tour from microscopic marvels to cosmic colossi. All the big numbers, and bigger numbers, and even bigger big numbers. To give some intuitions, we’re talking quadrillions here.
An example would be 1 quadrillion hour as slightly more than the age of the universe. Or, according to Randall Munroe*, as of 2011 the total economic production of humanity so far has been 2 quadrillion dollars. So, in dollars per hour of the universe existing we have earned $2 each of us including our ancestors…
The Burj Khalifa is the tallest building on earth at 830m and 163 floors. If you let each meter of it correspond to a power of ten, then you see that the number of molecules on earth or even in the observable universe is only a small percentage of it but that the googolplex (p100^p100) would bury it.
10. “The maybe in your mind, the maybe of JSON, the maybe of history” by Boris Tseitlin is about how sifting signal from noise could be a theme of our times.
The conventional is to smash the maybe. There must be no doubt. Pick a career and stick to it. Or leave your job and pursue your dreams. Fuck yes or not at all. Leave your partner and be done with it. Or stay till death do you part. Pick a side and wave the flag. Or pick no sides… Interesting things happen if you don’t shatter the maybe. If you accept the fear that comes with it. You will discover it has many facets to it… There is not much reasoning when things are definite. Which is why we remember the uncertainties and the decision points, but not the times of conviction.
11. “Nick Cave and the Nuanced Nature of ChatGPT” by Joanna George is an explorative piece inspired by a newsletter written by Nick Cave on AI's limitations.
ChatGPT and other LLMs (large language models) have joined the growing list of ‘internet things’ that pop up in my vocabulary every day. Think Wifi. Zooming. Apps. Googling. Followers. You get the picture. Maybe it’s because I’m a child of the 90s, and I’m too young to remember the dawn of the internet, but the launch of ChatGPT feels like a very specific moment in time in which you’re aware that something significant is emerging – possibly a new communication and social paradigm – but you’re not entirely sure what it will turn out to be. What will its impact be a decade on from now? How will we – humanity – change as a result? How will we feel living in a world with ChatGPT at our fingertips? Should we even care?
As the title suggests, this is also about Nick Cave’s perspectives on AI—and while reading, I got confused, since I thought it was the artist Nick Cave, famous for his “sound suits” (these are best seen, as below, not described). But it’s actually the other Nick Cave.
12. “What data rights are for” by Mahdi Assan is about the importance of exercising data rights as we navigate this evolving digital world.
Think about your social media feed. As you scroll through it, you might see all sorts of content that appeals to you, which you like, comment on or share. You might see funny memes, the latest online trends, and other weird quirks of internet pop culture. All fairly innocuous, all quite normal. But as you scroll, like, comment, share and so on, you are constantly being monitored. All this activity is being recorded. What happens to this information? It feeds a recommendation engine, a system that powers your social media app… But this recommendation engine is not limited to learning what you like. It will learn what makes you scared, what makes you angry and what makes you sad, too… Perhaps this takes you down a dark rabbit hole that seems impossible to escape from. Your digital existence becomes clouded with a pervasive negativity, emanating from a pane of glass in the palm of your hand.
13. “The Evolution of Consciousness” by Nicholas Moore argues that consciousness first evolved in the very earliest nervous systems of primitive jellyfish.
In the spirit of Occam’s Razor, I am proposing a hypothesis which only requires a single assumption – that, as defined by Thomas Nagel, consciousness is an emergent property of the animal nervous system. This assumption implies that consciousness evolved alongside the first nervous systems in primitive relatives of modern jellyfish, over 580 million years ago, and that everything else we see and understand as part of our conscious experience is variation in scope and scale. This means that there is something that it is like to be a jellyfish.
I like this because “Are jellyfish conscious?” is a great intuition pump for figuring out people’s real ideas about consciousness. Personally, I do think consciousness is graded. I’m not against it being conceptualized as an emergent property, but I myself am agnostic on if jellyfish make the cut for a non-zero amount at all. It may be, e.g., that having any consciousness requires some sort of self or self-model, and jellyfish could lack such a requirement entirely. But perhaps not, in which case, we should keep in mind that some trees can drag themselves up to 60 feet a year to find sunlight.
14. “Introduction to Critical Fallibilism” by Elliot Temple explains a new thinking method that uses binary evaluations and breakpoints.
Critical Fallibilism (CF) is a philosophical system that focuses on dealing with ideas. It has concepts and methods related to thinking, learning, discussing, debating, making decisions and evaluating ideas… It was created by me, Elliot Temple… CF’s most important original idea is the rejection of strong and weak arguments. CF says all ideas should be evaluated in a digital (specifically binary) way as non-refuted (has no known errors) or refuted (has a known error)… We shouldn’t evaluate ideas by how good they are (by their degree or amount of goodness); instead we should use pass/fail evaluations.
15. “Socrates and the possibility of artificial intelligence” by Niko Kovacevic is about political philosophy, the limits of knowledge, and the possibility of building mechanical minds.
Yet, for the student of classical political philosophy, the headlines, whitepapers, and dramas unfolding across the A.I. landscape can yield to what might be characterized as a rediscovery of essential insights that Socrates, himself, brought to light in ancient Athens…
Our foray into Socratic science and dialectic will provide a standard for human intelligence. A truly intelligent computer would have to meet or exceed the human ability to derive knowledge from an experience of being, and it would have to be able to adequately apply that knowledge to some end.
16. “Into (And Out of) The Abyss” by Nick Bacarella is a brief history of his experiences dealing with a debilitating physical condition he later learned to be psychosomatic.
So began my journey into the world of psychosomatic conditions, disorders with no physical cause and no clear cure. These range from the commonplace—back aches, knee twinges—to the obscure—chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and many others. For the past four years, I’ve spent a small part of every day learning about how these conditions develop and how they’re rectified. There’s no single skeleton explanation to each unique condition, but I do believe there is one thing that unites me and every other reluctant member of this club: we’re afraid all the time. Afraid of everything, but most importantly, afraid of our own bodies.
17. “One motive to rule them all?” by Sander Van de Cruys is about overcoming obstacles as our fundamental motivation, giving rise to our other, possibly idiosyncratic, goals and desires.
If there’s one motive governing all our behavior, supervening and bringing about all our other goals or desires, what would it be? Some might say ‘survival’, pointing to Darwin’s theory of evolution. But in practice, this motive is hard to implement: It is impossible to predict or compute what, at any specific instance in time, would increase your fitness or chances of survival… Worse yet, there seem to be plenty of ways of life that blatantly go against this principle. Think about hunger strikes, vows of chastity, extremely risky occupations, or merely spending hours in computer games. One cynical solution to this is that these are all status games… The cynicism is appealing, in keeping with the motto of this Substack, but I can’t get me to buy the content, in the wholesale way it is intended…
I too think that often theories from evolutionary psychology are pretty unconvincing or sparse. In a way, the entirety of The Overfitted Brain Hypothesis came about because I was deeply unsatisfied with the standard reductive explanation for why humans make and consume art. “It’s attractive to the opposite sex” just doesn’t seem enough reason to me.
18. “In Conversation with Pi: Lightbulb edition” by Bruno Rivard is about how Large Language Models can be driven like a car on manual transmission: persistent, and deft escalation can make them take off with greatly improved performance.
Learning systems, particularly LLMs tend to have built-in “dynamic resource allocation systems” of diverse implementations that regulate the use of scarce, costly “compute”, and the associated consumption of energy, in the form of electrical power. This is not unlike automatic gear switching in a car. Likewise, humans have an inclination to laziness (nothing wrong with that!). Now as an apprentice LLM pilot you can go manual, and take charge [sometimes]! The computational neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski proposed that LLMs can act as a mirror to their users, and certain “darnedest things”, emergent pearls coming out of them may be a kind of “Reverse Turing Test” that reflects the intelligence, and consciousness of their interlocutor back to them.
19. “BETTER TO GOSSIP THAN BE MURDERED” by Jane G. Goldberg, Ph.D. is about the history of gossip, and how it has served as a valuable function throughout cultures by providing a discharge of negative feelings through words, which is a lot less damaging than the alternative of murder.
If you declare that you are above enjoying gossip, you are probably lying. Researchers estimate that today, personal stories, to each other and about each other, make up between 65 and 80 percent of talk-time, and the effect is consistent with both age and gender… The history of human gossip is interesting. An early appearance was the scandal of the day when Kushshiharbe, the mayor of Mesopotamia, was having an affair with married Humerelli. He denied the rumors, declaring “No! Emphatically no! Not a word of it is true! I did not have sex with her!” …
I am happy to say that I have murdered no one, other than metaphorically, nor have I been murdered, other than metaphorically. Yet, I routinely engage in metaphorical murder, because my very advanced human brain gives me the ability to do that, and because it doesn’t inflict harm to anyone (as it is always between me and me), and finally, because it is exquisitely pleasurable, almost as nice as a three-layered ice cream cone on a hot day.
20. “On the language of LLMs” by Rob Nelson is about the semantic confusion created by using the vocabulary of human cognition to describe transformer-based language models.
Take Attention Is All You Need, the paper Wired Magazine says, has “reached legendary status” because it was the first to describe the deep learning architecture in LLMs called a transformer. The paper also popularized attention as a word to describe the information processing that occurs in a transformer-based model… Jacob Uszkoreitabou, one of the co-authors of the “attention paper,” was the first to use “self-attention” to describe a computational process that allows language models to account for relationships among different words in a sequence that are not near each other by assigning words a value or weight. He also came up with the term “transformer,” which sounds like it might have been inspired by electrical engineering. But according to Wired, Uszkoreitabou was just thinking about how the mechanism completely changes or transforms the information it takes in. Transformers also had fond associations with toys from his childhood.
21. “Does This Political Category Exist?” by Vincent Kelley profiles the Conservative, Egalitarian, Individualist, Spiritual-Intuitive (CEIS) political personality type. It’s on the ways that this chart:
can be complexified in a way similar to the classifications people do for personality types.
My political instincts have always inclined me toward an Egalitarian rather than Hierarchical perspective. While I read many authors who fall squarely on the other side of this spectrum (and often agree with their views on various political and philosophical issues), the defense of hierarchy as a political value has never appealed to me. Perhaps I can trace this instinct back to growing up in the United States and witnessing the realities of racism from a young age. Or maybe it has been my time living in India, where I have had the opportunity to observe the distinct social hierarchy of caste as an outsider.
22. “First Lesson From Papi Mescalito” by Philippe Rivet is about a transformative experience that the author had while on a San Pedro retreat in the mountains of Peru.
The shaman carefully laid out the ceremonial apparatus while Natalia brought out the cactile elixir. It was a dark green colour with bright white flecks, which meant that the plant material had been sliced and ground up rather than the more time-consuming method of slow boiling to make tea. Given their production volume for frequent retreats this was understandable although it also meant that the mescaline-containing liquid would be much harder to get down. I eyed the mind-expanding beverage with apprehension as it slowly oozed out of the 1 L plastic bottle into the same kind of cup I’d drank the volcano water out of the previous afternoon. After the maestro had performed the necessary solemn recitations the medicine was ready for the patient. Natalia handed me the cup with a sly smile.
23. “Catfished by scampi” by Tobi Ogunnaike starts with the story of a disappointing dish but ends up asking interesting questions about human perception.
In a culinary world of backflipping TikTok chefs trying too hard to be sexy, sandwiches too tall for human mouths, edible gold flakes, and overpowering truffle aiolis, maybe there's something romantic about the simple scampi. It doesn't pretend to be something it's not–no bells and whistles, yes, but it's honesty on a plate. It's a sheathed dagger to the heart of the gastronomy cult where meals are served with instructions that teach you how to eat them.
This made me want to eat scampi.
24. “She Said I Want Something That I Want” by Stefan Kelly is about the effect of symbols on perception and how this relates to desire to do things.
Saw a new article last week. “Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out” in The Atlantic. I’m a fan of Derek Thompson, but I think this article accidentally explains a lot more than he intended it to. It explains a lot of it just by existing. Thompson takes us from mid-90’s Bowling Alone to 2020’s scrolling alone, citing numbers from the annual American Time Use survey along the way… An initial reason to suggest this is the wrong answer is because, well … none of this makes the slightest bit of sense. The Atlantic pivots to the causes and identifies (1) more time on screens (2) more time on work and (3) less time in community… So we have people that are hanging out less because… they are hanging out less.
Good point on the tautologous nature of these claims: of course, if people are hanging out less, their screentime goes up… what else are they going to do? But that doesn’t automatically make it the cause (although I, personally, think it does have some impact).
25. “Big Fish/Little Fish” by Jonathan Weil, concerns a (fictional!) encounter between a small girl and a sinister ancient Being on a chic Costa Brava beach.
Dad had been telling us the Story of the World on the long winding drive through the mountains. We’d nagged him into it—in that year he was too exhausted to resist us much—me in English, Lisey in the private language she’d adopted since the Accident. Before, the Story of the World had been a tag team effort, delivered in installments by Mum and Dad, beginning with the formation of the first stars from pockets of density in swirling clouds of primordial hydrogen, working its way via various clumps of expertise (Dad never forgot the gist of anything he read in New Scientist or wherever) towards the present. We’d got onto the first humans, who according to Dad had lost their fur, and habit of walking on all fours, through shoreline living - wading about foraging for seaweed, trapping fish and diving for oysters. Like the cetaceans, we were mammals who’d returned to the sea, only without quite taking the plunge. This, he told us, explained our species’ fascination with beaches.
If your submission was not included in any of the parts, please know that it was not because I hated it. It was because it got eaten by the email black hole of a spam filter. Send it again or respond to it so I can figure out what happened.
Erik -- thanks so much for including "Gutenberg and the Whirlwind"! I really appreciate it. Two quick responses to your gloss: one of the big differences between social media and television is that the phone is always with you and you're actively engaged with it, making it a blistering hot medium (in McLuhanesque terms) rather than cool passive TV; and here in the deep south (I'm in Alabama) the battles going on in public and school libraries indicate that we still have a very complicated relationship with books. Anyway, I'm working on another piece that extends some of these themes, going into more detail about how my granddaughter incorporates her phone use into her life.