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India’s Wall of Death
Inspired by Israel’s example, India is building a 2000 mile border fence with Bangladesh, patrolled by 80,000 armed guards. A good part of the fence is already finished but abuses by the Indian guards are rampant. Scores of migrants, farmers, villagers, and cattle herders have been shot for getting too close to the fence. The Border Security Force (BSF) kills and maims with complete impunity and no Indian soldier has been prosecuted for a crime. Read more about this disturbing story here. The main video from the story appears below:
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Pico Iyer on Joy
Musings from Pico Iyer on joy and happiness:
Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.
Categories: Books & Authors -
Heidegger on Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics
This is a classic essay from Dreyfus on how Heidegger saw the connection between nihilism, art, technology and politics:
When everything that is material and social has become completely flat and drab, people retreat into their private experiences as the only remaining place to find significance. Heidegger sees this move to private experience as characteristic of the modern age. Art, religion, sex, education all becomes varieties of experiences. When all our concerns have been reduced to the common denominator of “experience” we will have reached the last stage of nihilism. One then sees “the plunge into frenzy and the disintegration into sheer feeling as redemptive. The `lived experience’ as such becomes decisive.”That is, when there are no shared examples of greatness that focus public concerns and elicit social commitment, people become spectators of fads and public lives, just for the excitement. When there are no religious practices that call forth sacrifice, terror, and awe, people consume everything from drugs to meditation practices to give themselves some kind of peak experience. The peak experience takes the place of what was once a relation to something outside the self that defined the real and was therefore holy. As Heidegger puts it:
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Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy
Brian Leiter’s take on the two major traditions of philosophy in the western world: Analytic and Continental philosophy:
“Analytic” philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics, than with the humanities…. The foundational figures of this tradition are philosophers like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore; other canonical figures include Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Rawls, Dummett, and Strawson…“Continental” philosophy, by contrast, demarcates a group of (primarily) French and German philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries…. The foundational figure of this tradition is usually thought to be Hegel; other canonical figures include the other post-Kantian German Idealists (e.g., Fichte, Schelling), Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gadamer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, and Foucault. Continental philosophy is sometimes distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, less reliant on formal logic), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its “meaning”), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation).
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The Remains of Being
Santiago Zabala, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Potsdam University Institute of Philosophy, has a new book: The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics. Below is the book jacket description. There is also an interview with the author on the Columbia University Press (CUP) website, which—though I do not understand it too well—I found tantalizing enough to want to read the book.
In Basic Concepts, Heidegger claims that “Being is the most worn-out” and yet also that Being “remains constantly available.” Santiago Zabala radicalizes the consequences of these little known but significant affirmations. Revisiting the work of Jacques Derrida, Reiner Schürmann, Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ernst Tugendhat, and Gianni Vattimo, he finds these remains of Being within which ontological thought can still operate.
Being is an event, Zabala argues, a kind of generosity and gift that generates astonishment in those who experience it. This sense of wonder has fueled questions of meaning for centuries—from Plato to the present day. Postmetaphysical accounts of Being, as exemplified by the thinkers of Zabala’s analysis, as well as by Nietzsche, Dewey, and others he encounters, don’t abandon Being. Rather, they reject rigid, determined modes of essentialist thought in favor of more fluid, malleable, and adaptable conceptions, redefining the pursuit and meaning of philosophy itself.
I learned about this book when I saw the CUP interview linked on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has generated a great deal of energetic debate that I find revealing on multiple fronts, including analytical vs. continetal philosophy, entrenched attitudes to Heidegger, knee jerk distrust of foreign traditions not immediately comprehensible, etc. Yours truly has added his voice to it. Check it out.
Categories: Philosophy -
In Light of Nalanda
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
I don’t know many books in which ‘Go west, young man!’ would be a call to go to India. One such book is Journey to the West, ‘China’s most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure,’ published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel’s hero, ‘a mischievous monkey with human traits … accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture.’ [1] It allegorically presents pilgrims journeying toward India as individuals journeying toward enlightenment. [2]
The inspiration for this novel was a journey made by a 7th cent. CE Chinese man, Xuanzang. [3] Though raised in a conservative Confucian family near Chang’an (modern Xian), Xuanzang, at 13, followed his brother into the Buddhist monastic life (Buddhism had come to China around 2nd cent. CE). A precocious boy, he mastered his material so well that he was ordained a full monk when only 20. Disenchanted with the quality of Buddhist texts and teachers available to him, he decided to go west to India, to the cradle and thriving center of Buddhism itself. After a yearlong journey full of peril and adventure, across deserts and mountains, via Tashkent and Samarkand, meeting robbers and kings, debating Buddhists on the Silk Road and in Afghanistan—where he saw the majestic Bamiyan Buddhas—he reached what is now Pakistan. -
On the Selfish Gene
In NewScientist, Fern Elsdon-Baker explains why “the ‘selfish gene’ metaphor, while a great success, may now be getting in the way of peoples’ understanding of evolution.”
Scientific metaphor should be about the best interpretation of evidence and about opening up new research vistas. The selfish gene metaphor claims that only genes or replicators are inherited and are essentially immortal, and it offers an interpretation of evolutionary biology in that light.We are testing that empirical claim and finding that things are a lot more complicated and subtle. This must mean that as an organising interpretation of evolutionary biology, the metaphor of the selfish gene and, by extension, that of the extended phenotype, are insufficient. They are now problematic because what they claim or offer is no longer as good as the alternative analyses.
Categories: Science -
Food, Inc.
If you see only one documentary this summer, make it Food, Inc. Here is Roger Ebert’s review, and the first 3-1/2 minutes of it.
The next time you tuck into a nice T-bone, reflect that it probably came from a cow that spent much of its life standing in manure reaching above its ankles. That’s true even if you’re eating the beef at a pricey steakhouse. Most of the beef in America comes from four suppliers.The next time you admire a plump chicken breast, consider how it got that way. The egg-to-death life of a chicken is now six weeks. They’re grown in cages too small for them to move, in perpetual darkness to make them sleep more and quarrel less. They’re fattened so fast they can’t stand up or walk. Their entire lives, they are trapped in the dark, worrying.
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Dreyfus on Second Life
In this terrific article, Prof. Hubert Dreyfus looks at Second Life, a 3-D virtual environment “filled with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity” that “offers its ‘residents’ a chance to invent a whole new life for themselves. Can it deliver on that promise?“ This is also somewhat related to the issues I focused on in my recent article, “The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence.”
Of the more than 11 million people signed up as “residents” of Second Life, roughly half a million spent at least an hour a day in that world in December. Through avatars they create to represent themselves, residents visit art galleries, shop for virtual goods, go to concerts, have cybersex, worship, attend classes, have conversations, and buy and sell real estate. Residents also design clothing and buildings, write poems and books, compose music, and make paintings and movies. Others enjoy the way Second Life allows them to meet and converse with people all over the world. It’s left to the participants to work out how realistically they present themselves. The Vatican has taken on the task of saving souls there, and Sweden has opened a virtual embassy to sign up residents to become real-life tourists in Sweden.Second Life isn’t a game. There is no overall goal and no way of ranking your success…. [it] offers the possibility of a virtual world that is more exciting than the real one. But at what cost?
Categories: Philosophy -
The Orangutans of Sumatra
In May 2009, Usha and I visited the Gunung Leuser National Park in north Sumatra to see orangutans in the wild. We hired a guide in the gateway village of Bukit Lawang and hiked several miles into a dense primary growth forest. Heavy rain on the previous night made the hike rather treacherous and we had to grab on to branches and roots to go up and down the hilly terrain. But the forest was beautiful, abundant with tropical flora and fauna (some of it unique to the island), rushing streams and animal sounds, and we did get lucky: we saw about ten orangutans on our daylong hike. One middle-aged female—rescued years ago by the orangutan center in Bukit Lawang and reintroduced into the wild—even came down and held Usha’s hand! Other primates we saw include gibbons and Thomas’s Leaf-monkeys.
The orangutan (“person of the forest”), whose habitat has shrunk to parts of Sumatra and Borneo, has cognitive abilities that rival those of the gorilla and the chimpanzee, the only primates more closely related to humans. Placid, deliberate, and mostly vegetarian, orangutans are known for their ingenuity and persistence, particularly in manipulating mechanical objects, and for their “cognitive abilities such as causal and logical reasoning, self-recognition in mirrors, deception, symbolic communication, foresight, and tool production and use. In the wild, orangutans use tools, but at only one location in Sumatra do they consistently make and use them for foraging, [defoliating] sticks … to extract insects or honey from tree holes and to pry seeds from hard-shelled fruit.” (source) We saw one juvenile male using a stick as a tool.
Here is a slideshow of my best orangutan shots set to music (2 min, 25 sec). Check out some more pictures and a primer on orangutans.
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The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it got many comments. An edited version appeared in Philosophy Now, Nov 2011. Read as PDF.)
As a graduate student of computer engineering in the early 90s, I recall impassioned late night debates on whether machines can ever be intelligent—intelligent, as in mimicking the cognition, common sense, and problem-solving skills of ordinary humans. Neural network research was hot and one of my professors was a star in the field. Scientists and bearded philosophers spoke of ‘humanoid robots.’ A breakthrough seemed inevitable and imminent. Still, I felt certain that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a doomed enterprise.I argued out of intuition, from a sense of the immersive nature of our life in the world—how much we subconsciously acquire and summon to get through life, how we arrive at meaning and significance not in isolation but through embodied living, and how contextual, fluid, and intertwined this was with our moods, desires, experiences, selective memory, physical body, and so on. How can we program all this into a machine and have it pass the unrestricted Turing test? How could a machine that did not care about its existence as humans do, ever behave as humans do? Can a machine become socially and emotionally intelligent like us without viscerally knowing infatuation, joy, loss, suffering, the fear of death and disease? In hindsight, it seems fitting that I was then also drawn to Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kierkegaard.
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Dabashi on Obama in Cairo
Professor Hamid Dabashi‘s response to Obama’s historic speech at Al-Azhar university on 4th June 09 mirrors my own:
Much hasty praise and considerable legitimate criticism has already been made about the president’s speech, especially about the distance between its floral eloquence and the scarcity of its specific policies, which would push the speech towards hallowed, however soothing, vacuity. But the fact is that the world is so deeply wounded and it is in such dire need of truth and reconciliation with itself that President Obama’s words, coming from the person that he is, an African-American descendent of an African Muslim, were like drops of merciful rain on an arid desert…All legitimate criticisms notwithstanding, it is only at the symbolic, suggestive, or oratorical plane that the speech must be appraised. The most important problem with the president’s speech — healing and soothing as it was — is not its lack of specificity, but in fact its general contour, its symbolic trajectory, entirely trapped as it is in a readily received and never questioned binary between “Islam and the West”.
Categories: Politics -
The Minds of Machines
From Philosophy Now, here is Nicholas Everitt’s instructive review of a book on the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by Matt Carter, whose “main concern is to outline and defend the possibility of a computational theory of mind.”
[A major reservation Everitt has with this book] is a matter of substance. Computer programs operate on purely ‘syntactic’ features – ultimately speaking, they depend upon the physical form of the inputs, transformations and outputs. By contrast, human thought is always a thought about something, it represents something, it has a content. It displays what philosophers call ‘intentionality’. One central problem for artificial intelligence is how to get aboutness into computer programs – how to get semantics out of syntactics.
More here. (Stay tuned for a major new essay on the philosophy of AI by yours truly — arriving 22 June.)
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Do Languages Speak Us?
A really good article by Lera Boroditsky on how inseparably intertwined our language is with how we look at the world:
Humans
communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each
differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak
shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live
our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently
simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new
languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when
speaking different languages?These
questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study
of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists,
linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for
politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and
debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until
recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought
was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research
in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this
question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece,
Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have
learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think
differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how
we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our
experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our
mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature
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The Rise and Fall of the LTTE
Here is a short but insightful interview from Himal Southasian, recorded weeks before the defeat of the LTTE and the death of their leader Prabhakaran on May 18, 2009. In it, two former LTTE members explain the factors behind the rise and fall of Tamil militancy in Sri Lanka. In the excerpt below, they tackle the rise of the movement; read the interview for their reasons behind its fall. (Registration may be required but is well worth the effort.)What followed from the 1950s onwards was the burgeoning of a virulent form of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, and the passing of a series of discriminatory legislation against minorities and Tamils in particular. The Sinhala Only Act was passed in 1956; the Republican Constitution was adopted in 1972, giving Buddhism a place of privilege in the constitution while removing the protection that was afforded minorities in the previous constitution; and immediately afterwards, the infamous policy of standardisation of marks for university admissions was also implemented in 1972, which Tamils found to be discriminatory. This came alongside colonisation attempts that had begun in the 1950s in the Eastern Province, where a lot of Tamils lived, radically altering the local demography and reducing Tamil and Muslim representation in Parliament. Non-violent protests by Tamil parliamentarians and their supporters were responded to with periodic violence by the state, throughout this period.
In my opinion, the minority leadership did not quite understand the forces driving this Sinhala nationalism. Therefore, rather than build a strong grassroots democratic movement, the minority leaders felt that their problems could be fixed by going into deals with the political leadership at the Centre, thereby securing concessions for their communities. The standard official narrative of Tamil nationalism will always tell us that the Tamil leadership waged a decades-long democratic struggle against the Sri Lankan state before giving way to the militant movement. I believe this to be incorrect.
Categories: Politics -
China’s Final Frontier
Prospect Magazine has an interesting article by Parag Khanna, who “visits China’s remote, rebellious western provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang—and sees how China’s government is today bending central Asia to its will.” (Thanks, Peony.)
Both Tibet and Xinjiang have the geographic misfortune of lying either
on top of resources China wants, or on the path to resources it needs.
Texas-sized Xinjiang has the country’s largest oil, gas, coal, uranium
and gold deposits, while Tibet has timber, uranium and gold…. Since most of the ethnically dominant Han Chinese are in the east, and most of China’s resources are in the west, this ongoing westward march [of the Han Chinese] is inevitable. And it has meant the wholesale, systematic repression of the indigenous inhabitants by a mix of military, economic and, above all, demographic means. Like the native Americans, the Tibetans and Uighurs have been cornered, corralled and relocated under a system which condescends and harasses at every level. Han Chinese have been taught to think of Tibetans and Uighurs as barbarians, viewing their mission civilatrice today the way American settlers did: they are bringing development and modernity to people and places that have always lacked them.
