When the Cranes Cry

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The crane has a symbolic resonance in Celtic mythology. A magician, assuming an elaborate pose—one eye open and one leg drawn up—was said to see into the otherworld, just as the crane itself moved from sky to land to water. But there is the other meaning of the word crane: the ancient lifting contraption that helped build Greece and likely had a role in Egypt and Sumeria before that. And now they protrude into the urban sky, raising up our buildings and even other cranes as we densify our cities. It was this mechanical meaning that Dan Dennett at Tufts chose to contrast with conceptual skyhooks, the unsupported contrivances that save protagonists in plays by dangling gods above the stage. For Dennett, the building crane is the metaphor we should apply to the mindless, simple algorithm of evolution. The algorithm raises up species and thus creates our mysterious ideas about meaning and purpose. No skyhooks or Deus ex Machina are needed.

Dennett passed away at 82 in Maine leaving a legacy as a public intellectual who engaged in the pursuit of reason throughout his adult career. He was committed to the idea that this world—this teeming ensemble of living matter—is intrinsically miraculous, built up by something dead simple into all the convolutions and perilous ideas that we now use to parse its mysteries. He was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse during the so-called New Atheism craze of 2008-2010, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, but even then he was committed to the crane metaphor to displace these ancient skyhooks of belief rather than, say, a satirical impact-analysis of religion a la Hitchens.

There is another phrase that Dennett championed in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life: universal acid.… Read the rest

Begging the Pseudo-Question

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I recently got involved in an “audiophile” online discussion thread replete with devious trolling, commenter bans, incivility—the works. I do this from time to time because raucous argumentation forces one to think in tactical and strategic ways that are not the norm in everyday life. I also learn new things. In this case, I went on several quests, hunting down papers on the ability of Chinese language speakers to disambiguate tones in Gaussian noise, how distortion artifacts impact our perception of spatialization in binaural audio presentations, and even Rayleigh wave detection by sand scorpions (I actually worked on a simulator for that as a late undergrad). One of the key disagreements in the thread was over the notion of “science.” There were several perspectives on this, with the first one being that science requires experimentation and therefore using scientifically-derived tools for investigating the performance of audio equipment does not amount to science. This is obviously a shrugger and a distraction. The other primary perspective is always that science is in constant revision and there may be new insights that prove this-or-that subtle hearing capability since human hearing is just sooooo amazing. We are sooooo amazing.

There’s a bit of a Two Cultures-like tension in this universe of audio equipment aficionados: while engineering and science brings them audio gear, they want it to be poetic and ineffable and the work of mastery based in genius rather than Fast Fourier Transforms. Graphs are boring. Listening is beautiful.

Part of the reason for the disagreement is clearly that we just don’t have shared meanings about concepts like science. We circle around them and try to triangulate using metaphors, analogies, and explore the logical consequences of limits and extensions to their meaning.… Read the rest

Erotics of Interpretation

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I reread Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” yesterday. Amusing and challenging at turns, the essay calls for an erotics of art in the final sentence, rebuking the need for analysis—interpretation—of what art really means. But how can we proceed with this sensual understanding of art? How can we write about it?

Modernism was plagued by form cut away from content, leaving open how exactly any given piece of art fit against our expectations, the semantic churn of meanings that we want to apply to a work of art. There must be a framework but the depth of analysis is really what Sontag is questioning. Take the examples she gives, like Auerbach’s The Scar of Odysseus. In it, we are scanning around a particular event in The Odyssey, namely the recognition of a scar on Odysseus’s thigh. The author asks us to understand how Homer uses the scar as a focus in the verses, then takes us back to the events in his youth when he was injured. The narrative form is then contrasted and compared with the Old Testament, which might have been compiled around the same time frame as Homer’s work. But what might rise to erotics rather than interpretation? Take the following:

The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to one another, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; like the separate phenomena themselves, their relationships—their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations—are brought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.

… Read the rest

Inferred Modular Superparrots

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The buzz about ChatGPT and related efforts has been surprisingly resistant to the standard deflationary pressure of the Gartner hype cycle. Quantum computing definitely fizzled but appears to be moving towards the plateau of productivity with recent expansions of the number of practical qubits available by IBM and Origin in China, as well as additional government funding out of national security interests and fears. But ChatGPT attracted more sustained attention because people can play with it easily without needing to understand something like Shor’s algorithm for factoring integers. Instead, you just feed it a prompt and are amazed that it writes so well. And related image generators are delightful (as above) and may represent a true displacement of creative professionals even at this early stage, with video hallucinators evolving rapidly too.

But are Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT doing much more than stitching together recorded fragments of texts ingested from an internet-scale corpus of text? Are they inferring patterns that are in any way beyond just being stochastic parrots? And why would scaling up a system result in qualitative new capabilities, if there are any at all?

Some new work covered in Quanta Magazine has some intriguing suggestions that there is a bit more going on in LLMs, although the subtitle contains the word “understanding” that I think is premature. At heart is the idea that as networks scale up given ordering rules that are not highly uniform or correlated they tend to break up into collections of subnetworks that are distinct (substitute “graphs” for networks if you are a specialist). The theory, then, is that the ingest of sufficient magnitudes of text into a sufficiently large network and the error-minimization involved in tuning that network to match output to input also segregates groupings that the Quanta author and researchers at Princeton and DeepMind refer to as skills.… Read the rest

Humility is Pervasive

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We are having an intimate holiday season with food, family, and small adventures along the Oregon coast. There were hints of Christmas with presents and music, as well as new Yule poetry that celebrates the cycles of the ocean in a natural dialogue with the seasonal flow: “King tides pull the world upward / … / Whales coast through gabled waters…” And then there are the swirling culture wars out there somewhere trying to deny us our diverse ideas and new traditions. We don’t worry much about their misdirection, but find the lack of creativity disheartening. Why not learn and invent new ways of thinking about society and culture?

Rabbi David Wolpe at Harvard Divinity has a more historical and intellectualized take on modern life in the Atlantic where he tries to collapse all the complexity of modern political instincts into an amalgam about insufficient humility about our own ideas and capabilities. I like critiquing these kinds of intellectual histories because I am humble enough to doubt that singular ideas can explain all the myriad ways of flourishing in human history. “The Return of the Pagans” maps the contemporary left with their environmental worship—and the right with heroic icons like Donald Trump—to something like the Greco-Roman idolization of beauty, power, wealth, and creativity. It is the invention of monotheism that focused the ancient mind on a singular divinity that we poor humans can always prostrate our tiny plans before. Elon Musk shouldn’t strain to get to Mars. Tech Bros shouldn’t accelerate technological change without deep humility about the impact on society. The ultra-wealthy used to be more concerned for using their wealth for good. Everyone should instead contemplate their imperfect sin-nature in the face of perfection.… Read the rest

The Rubbery Road from Original Position to Metaphysical Naturalism

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From complaints about student protests over Israel in Gaza, to the morality of new House Speaker Johnson, and even to the reality and consequences of economic inequality, there is a dynamic conversation in the media over what is morally right and, importantly, why it should be considered right. It’s perfectly normal for those discussions and considered monologues to present ideas, cases, and weigh the consequences to American life, power, and the well-being of people around the world. It also demonstrates the fact that ideas like divine command theory become irrelevant for most if not all of these discussions since they still require secular analysis and resolution. Contributions from the Abrahamic faiths (and similarly from Hindu nationalism) are largely objectionable moral ideas (“The Chosen People,” jihad, anti-woman, etc.) that are inherently preferential and exclusionary.

Indeed, this public dialogue perhaps best shows how modern people build ethical systems. It looks mostly like Rawl’s concept of “reflective equilibrium” with dashes of utilitarianism and occasional influences from religious tradition and sentiment. And reflective equilibrium has few foundational ideas beyond a basic commitment to fairness as justice using the “original position” as its starting point. That is, if we had to create a society with no advance knowledge about what our role and position might be within it (a veil of ignorance), the best for us would be to create an equal, fair, and just society.

So ethics is cognitively rubbery, with changing attachments and valences as we process options into a coherent whole. We might justify civilian deaths for a greater good when we have few options, imprecise weapons, and existential fear (say, the atom bomb in World War II).… Read the rest

Be Persistent and Evolve

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If we think about the evolution of living things we generally start from the idea that evolution requires replicators, variation, and selection. But what if we loosened that up to the more everyday semantics of the word “evolution” when we talk about the evolution of galaxies or of societies or of crystals? Each changes, grows, contracts, and has some kind of persistence that is mediated by a range of internal and external forces. For crystals, the availability of heat and access to the necessary chemicals is key. For galaxies, elements and gravity and nuclear forces are paramount. In societies, technological invention and social revolution overlay the human replicators and their biological evolution. Should we make a leap and just declare that there is some kind of impetus or law to the universe such that when there are composable subsystems and composition constraints, there will be an exploration of the allowed state space for composition? Does this add to our understanding of the universe?

Wong, et. al. say exactly that in “On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems” in PNAS. The paper reminds me of the various efforts to explain genetic information growth given raw conceptions of entropy and, indeed, some of those papers appear in the cites. It was once considered an intriguing problem how organisms become increasingly complex in the face of, well, the grinding dissolution of entropy. It wasn’t really that hard for most scientists: Earth receives an enormous load of solar energy that supports the push of informational systems towards negentropy. But, to the earlier point about composability and constraints, the energy is in a proportion that supports the persistence of systems that are complex.… Read the rest

An Ancient Mind Plague

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In addition to Cormac McCarthy, Milan Kundera died this summer after a remarkable run of 94 years. I first read The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the early 90s and loved the strange detachment of the narrator and small moments like the critique of muzak in restaurant settings (I am now much more critical of restaurants that poorly manage sound reflections; how am I to enjoy my company in a cacophony?) But I had little use for his central philosophical pretense concerning eternal return or the use of metaphors as placeholders for people, though I have known people who strain to operate that way. Structuring a narrative around flimsy Continental ideas from Nietzsche, in turn influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Pythagoras, was too conspicuously self-absorbed with an intellectual airiness. It’s easy to achieve pretension but quite another thing to convey lofty thoughts effortlessly. I might have accepted a narrator musing on the topic among many others, playing with it while laughing at his own ridiculousness, and concluding that such concepts were mythological at best.

But there is a certain circularity in that otherwise educated people continue to latch onto narratives and metaphors that are appealing and unexpectedly strange, from little dioramas about the motives of people in our lives to grand conspiracies and mythologies filled with resurrections, demons, and eschatologies. The conspiracy narratives are a special contemporary problem accelerated by modern communications technologies, but there is nothing particularly new about them in thrust, focus, or pervasiveness.

Aluminum cans cause Alzheimer’s disease? Procter and Gamble’s logo was satanic? When I was in the Peace Corps in Fiji, the Hindu kids thought that certain toothpastes from Australia were adulterated with cow fat or something to undermine Hinduism.… Read the rest

Contrasts and Failures, Hope and Awe

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Russell Moore writes in the Atlantic that American evangelicalism is in crisis. There is a Faustian pact of unholy MAGA politics, conspiracy theories, and religious feelings that can only be remedied with a revival of the faith itself, laser-focused on Moore’s conceptions of what Christianity should strive to become. He acknowledges that there is a dark history to America’s evangelical movement through the 20th century. It was always political in close focus, with the maintenance of racism and exclusion at its core well before abortion was even a talking point. Anti-Catholicism and antisemitism were equally bundled up with the evangelical mindset. Beyond the moral failings that sloshed into politics, there was the structural marketing of the faith by televangelists and traveling ministries that turned the hoped-for internal conversion into a more cynical plot:

In the end, a market-driven religion gives rise to a market-driven approach to truth, and this development ultimately eviscerated conservative Christianity in the US and left it the possession of hypocrites and hucksters.

I’m not at all surprised. As information has become unlocked from the vaults of academic pursuits by modern technologies, the ripples of uncertainty about faith claims have spread and clashed with the desire to totalize the political, personal, pragmatic, and moral dimensions of evangelical beliefs. If a thing is so unquestionably right and good, it must infiltrate and own the mind, the body, the soul, the community, and the nation. So why is the world drifting away, seemingly inexorably?

But even those who leave their faith communities feel adrift, clinging to vague spirituality or buffet gorging across traditions in search of something that is satisfactory but different. But that is only in the best of moments, when a song triggers nostalgia or late after eggnog on Christmas Eve.… Read the rest

Reverse Engineering the Future

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I’ve been enjoying streaming Apple TV+’s Foundation based on Asimov’s classic books. The show is very different from the high-altitude narrative of the books and, frankly, I couldn’t see it being very engaging if it had been rendered the way the books were written. The central premise of predictability of vast civilizations via “psychohistory” always struck me as outlandish, even as a teen. From my limited understanding of actual history it seemed strange that anything that happened in the past fit anything but the roughest of patterns. I nevertheless still read all the “intellectual history” books that come out in the hope that there are underlying veins that explain the surface rocks strewn chaotically across the past. Cousin marriage bans leads to the rise of individualism? Geography is the key? People want to mimic one another? Economic inequality is the actual key?

Each case is built on some theoretical insight that is stabilized by a broad empirical scaffolding. Each sells some books and gets some play in TED and book reviews. But then they seem to pass away out of public awareness because the fad is over and there are always new ideas bubbling up. But maybe that’s because they can’t help us predict the future exactly (well, Piketty perhaps…see below). But what can?

The mysterious world of stocks and bonds is an area where there seems to be no end to speculation (figuratively and literally) about ways to game the system and make money, or even to understand macroeconomic trends. It’s not that economics doesn’t have some empirical powers, it’s just that it still doesn’t have the kind of reliability that we expect from the physical sciences.… Read the rest