Brad Weslake

@bweslake.org

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Associate Professor of Philosophy, NYU Shanghai • https://bweslake.org/

There is an important respect in which Armstrong's analogy between materialism and the equation of the gene and the DNA molecule fails. Pre-molecular genetics was an exact scientific theory: the concept of the gene was introduced in the service of scientific explanation, and subsequent work in molecular biology which makes the equation plausible has had the same aim. But the psychology of common sense, embodied in the ordinary concepts of belief, desire, sensation, perception, emotion, and so forth is not a scientific theory. The mental states for which Armstrong offers causal analyses are picked out by a system which has evolved naturally, and whose form may depend significantly on its extra-scientific functions. Our dealings with and declarations to one another require a specialized vocabulary, and although it serves us moderately well in ordinary life, its narrowness and inadequacy as a psychological theory become evident when we attempt to apply it in the formulation of general descriptions of human behavior or in the explanation of abnormal mental conditions. The crude and incomplete causal theory embodied in common-sense pyschology should not be expected to survive the next hundred years of central nervous system studies intact. It would be surprising if concepts like belief and desire found correspondents in a neurophysiological theory, considering how limited their explanatory and predictive power is, even for gross behavior. The physical behavior which, on Armstrong's analysis, a given intention is apt to cause, may be the product of causes whose complexity cannot be brought into even rough correspondence with the simple elements of a present-day psychological explanation.
1 Happiness 1 2 Death 61 3 The Remainder of Life 106
Mirror: A film by Andrei Tarkovsky
The historiography of class struggle, one might add, has been systematically distorted in a state-centered direction. Everyday resistance does not throw up the manifestos, demonstrations, or pitched battles that normally compel attention. It makes no headlines. But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political and economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any movement that is particularly newsworthy. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the ship-wreck (for example, a fiscal crisis) itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. It is seldom that the perpetrators seek to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in anonymity. It is also extremely rare that officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination. To do so would be openly to confess that their policy is unpopular and, above all, to expose the tenuousness of their authority in the countryside. Thus, the nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness of the antagonists conspire to create a complicitous silence that is reflected in the historical record. In this context, the events that claim most attention are typically those to which the state and ruling classes accord most space in their archives. Thus, for example, a small and futile rebellion claims an attention that is often all out of proportion to its impact on class relations while unheralded acts of flight, sabotage, and theft that may be of greater long-run significance are rarely noticed.
A crowd of penguins captioned BREAKING: MASSIVE ANTI-AMERICAN PROTESTS IN HEARD AND MCDONALD ISLANDS.
Did you go back and study “Severance” before filming season 2? I don’t have technology. I only have a satellite dish on my house. So I’ve seen “Severance” on DVDs that they’re good enough to send me. I don’t have a cellphone. I’ve never emailed or, what do you call it, Twittered. Does it make you feel a bit alien in a world where everyone is attached to their phones? Not really. I’ve never had a watch either. But if I need the time, I just ask somebody. Likewise, once in a while when I need to use a phone, I just ask if I can borrow one.
No. 7. JULY, 1877. MIND A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. I.-A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AN INFANT.
Surrounding the great, circular ocean is a ring of mountains known as Cakravāla (also Cakravāḍa), which forms the external boundary of the world. The disk-shaped earth that supports all these oceans, continents, and mountains floats atop decreasingly substantial layers of fundamental elements (earth, water, sometimes fire, and wind) that ultimately float in the void of space. Most traditions acknowledge a multiplicity of such single world-systems (loka-dhātu), often abutting one another horizontally and sometimes also layered vertically. Groups of thousands, millions, and billions of such worlds play important roles in metaphors for vastness and innumerability. When described in such collections, each world typically has the same basic geographical features, including its own Sumeru, four major continents, great ocean, and so on, making this a generic model for all worlds in Buddhist cosmology. In other cases, however, alternative worlds are described with quite different landscapes to emphasize specific contrasts with this world (see the section “Mahāyāna and East Asia”). Within each single world-system that follows the generic pattern, there are also numerous heavens and hells above and below the relatively flat surface of the world. While the heavens generally rise directly above Sumeru, the hells may descend—depending on the tradition—centrally below Sumeru, peripherally below southern Jambudvīpa, broadly filling all of the elemental layers below the entire cosmos, or even externally in the deltoid interstices between adjacent discoid worlds. Based on these layers above and below the surface of the earth, many cosmological systems also propose vertical divisions of space, most commonly distinguishing the more-or-less geographical realm of the earth, hells, and lower heavens (kāma-dhātu, realm of desire) from more ethereal realms of form (rūpa-dhātu) and formlessness (ārūpya-dhātu) above.
A menu box allowing you to “Undo send” at timescales of 0, 5, 10 or 20 seconds.
Paul Frambot | Morpho @PaulFrambot Last week, 6 out of 30 candidates interviewed by our recruiter were likely North Korean hackers using deepfakes to disguise their accents and facial expressions. Now implementing stricter hiring protocols eg. thorough background checks, in-person meetings, ... Any suggestions?
Abstract Could the Chinese philosopher Confucius have supported Donald Trump?
Shibata Zeshin, Monkey Posing as a Collector, 1835.
The earth has been turning for 3,500 million years. Humanity has lived for one million years. The history of human civilizations has lasted for 10,000 years, without being either continuous or evolutionary. The civilized, artistic, noetic, literary part is only an imperceptible fraction of the species Homo. Imperceptible by the species itself, as a general rule. There have been only a few works, a few objects, a few sounds, a few books, a few walls glimpsed by a few human beings who, from time to time, bow reverentially to them.
Analia Saban, Perceptron, 2024.
Photograph of Shanghai at night, taken by a crew member on the International Space Station, 27 March 2012.
There is, though, a catch. I have been referring to Mansouri as a “translator.” But by contemporary standards, the most popular translator in the history of Iran translated hardly anything at all. Most of his works are a hodgepodge of source text mixed with his own additions and musings, which he offered so generously as to sometimes overwhelm the original. In some cases, the author of the book Mansouri was supposedly translating didn’t even exist. He would write something of his own, then make up a French name and publish his work under the fictive author’s byline. Many would say that one of the most popular literary figures of twentieth-century Iran was a full-blown charlatan.
The mechanical daughter of rene descartes: the origin and history of an intellectual fable Minsoo Kang History Department, University of Missouri–Saint Louis E-mail: kangmi@umsl.edu This article pursues the origin and mutation of a fantastic story concerning an automaton in the shape of a young girl that was supposedly built by Rene Descartes. In recent decades it has been retold and reimagined so many times that the tale has become an iconic narrative in the context of the reassessment of Descartes’s significance in intellectual history. But a close reading of the original story, found in a 1699 work entitled Melanges d’histoire et de litterature by Vigneul-Marville, reveals an overtly stated agenda of saving the philosopher’s moral reputation, which makes most recent interpretations of the story problematic. The vast majority of modern retellings demonstrate no awareness of the content or the significance of the first tale even as it has been used to shed light on Descartes, Cartesian ideas, and early modern thought in general. I A fantastic story concerning Rene Descartes relates how the philosopher once built an automaton in the shape of a young girl and took it aboard a ship. When the captain of the vessel found it, he became terrified by its mechanical movements and threw it overboard.
The intriguing thing about Hosen's death is that he was about to do a painting when it happened. He had spread two folded blankets on the floor of the storeroom, and neatly lined up a few dishes holding paints and, beside these, the box holding his inkstone with five painting brushes on its lid—their tips, too, precisely aligned. A single sheet of fresh white paper had been centered on the blankets, spread out so that there wasn't a wrinkle. He had not yet begun to paint.
The Problem of the Essential Indexical JOHN PERRY STANFORD UNIVERSITY I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch.
Daddy says the cameras are God's eyes.
Void and Object David Lewis The Deadly Void The void is deadly. If you were cast into a void, it would cause you to die in just a few minutes. It would suck the air from your lungs. It would boil your blood. It would drain the warmth from your body. And it would inflate enclosures in your body until they burst.
See: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-d344-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Part I. Adaptation 2. The perfection of sponges 3. Why are there as many men as women? 4. How do shells grow? 5. The evolution of snail and squid 6. Biological clocks
the biggest dunning-kruger problem isn't dumb people who think they're smart, it's kinda-smart people who think they are polymath geniuses
Once this has been done, if ever further controversies should arise, there should be no more reason for disputes between two philosophers than between two calculators. All that will be necessary is that, pen in hand, they sit down together at a table and say to each other (having called, if they so please, a friend) "let us calculate"
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This letter derives from separate, similar contributions of the coauthors originally submitted at about the same time. The two authors were put into contact with each other, and the present contribution is a revised and extended version of their earlier efforts.]
Robyn Faith Walsh, “The Mouse of the Mysteries“, in Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 22 (2024) 219–236. This article presents an imaginative exercise in which a fictional author from the year 4025 details results from excavations of archaeological sites dating to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Based on analyses of small domestic finds, as well as the discovery of a monumental complex utilizing similar imagery, the author concludes that people must have worshipped an anthropomorphic mouse god – the Historical Mouse – in the Mechano-Digital Age, keeping devotional votives in their homes and traveling at least once a year to a primary space of worship centered around the experience of various ritual mysteries. This article calls upon students to perform a self-evaluation about their own assumptions and approaches to the ancient world as they witness a hypothetical historian make outrageous, yet plausible, errors in the course of trying to describe an ‘ancient’ religion.
I mean this category of “evaluation” broadly, to cover all sorts of responses that include some assessment of good or bad, attractive or repulsive. Evaluation or appreciation is a special kind of receiver-side behavior. I say it is “receiver-side” although some of what we evaluate was not produced for that purpose. A lot of what we evaluate was produced for a reason of that kind, though, and a huge amount of effort by animals is aimed at getting particular evaluative responses to occur.
Frontispiece of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.
László Krasznahorkai, A Mountain from the North.
There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being fve minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.
It’s like the story of Picasso and Modigliani, when they were having problems. Modigliani’s girlfriend gave Picasso some pieces and in the next week or two they had a group exhibition and what happened was Picasso painted his art on top of Modigliani’s art. He just left small pieces that you could recognize as Modigliani but it was Picasso. This is the same thing what happens now, but in a concept. Concept gets another concept.
Jupiter, The Great Red Spot
Hal Finney, “Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation”, 27 January 2009.
On another occasion, but still in Germany – in the Neander valley – a human skull was found. And this was also immensely interesting because nobody alive today has a skull like this one either. Instead of a forehead like ours it just had two thick ridges above the eyebrows. Now, if all our thinking goes on behind our foreheads and these people didn’t have any foreheads, then perhaps they didn’t think as much as we do. Or at any rate, thinking may have been harder for them. So the people who examined the skull concluded that once upon a time there were people who weren’t very good at thinking, but who were better at biting than we are today.
Cover of the Eric Karpeles book Paintings in Prouts.
Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.
All chitons have aesthetes, a wildly synesthetic all-in-one receptor that enables them to sense light as well as chemical and mechanical cues in the environment.
For example, a debate occurred during the sixteenth century concerning the treatment of the leaves and pine needles fallen over bridges, paths, and stepping-stones. The most noted sixteenth-century tea master, SEN Rikyū, preferred the natural atmosphere of the fallen leaves and pine needles. Some of his disciples, however, thought it best to clear the path or stepping stones.
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
In the preface to this work, Albinus described his goals and working methods in considerable detail, and in terms that seem self-contradictory by the standards of mechanical objectivity: he is at once committed to the most exacting standards of visual accuracy in depicting his specimens, and to creating images of "the best pattern of nature". To the former end, he goes to lengths until then unheard of among anatomists to meticulously clean, reassemble, and prop up the skeleton, checking the exact positions of the hip bones, thorax, clavicles, and so on, by comparison with a very skinny man made to stand naked alongside the prepared skeleton. (This test cost Albinus some anxiety as well as time and trouble, for the naked man demanded a fire to ward off the winter chill, greatly accelerating the putrefaction of the skeleton.)
What Aharanov and I had to say about it (Aharanov and Albert 1984) was that in so far as frame K is concerned, the interaction “disrupts (as it were) the transformation properties of the state and disrupts its covariance, without in any way disrupting the history of the state itself.” But precisely how it is that the transformation properties of something can be disrupted without in any way disrupting the history of the thing itself I confess I can no longer imagine. It seems panicked – looking back on it now – and incoherent, and mad.
Chinese text of the Heart Sutra, arranged in the shape of a pagoda. Pelliot 2168 held at the National Library of France.
The old man, who had passed his simple and innocent life in the neighbourhood of Verona, was a stranger to the quarrels both of kings and of bishops; his pleasures, his desires, his knowledge, were confined within the little circle of his paternal farm; and a staff supported his aged steps, on the same ground where he had sported in his infancy. Yet even this humble and rustic felicity (which Claudian describes with so much truth and feeling) was still exposed to the undistinguishing rage of war. His trees, his old contemporary trees, must blaze in the conflagration of the whole country; a detachment of Gothic cavalry might sweep away his cottage and his family; and the power of Alaric could destroy this happiness which he was not able either to taste or to bestow. “Fame,” says the poet, “encircling with terror her gloomy wings, proclaimed the march of the Barbarian army, and filled Italy with consternation”; [text continues]
He’s a fortunate man who has passed his life in his ancestral fields; the same home saw him as boy and old man. Leaning on his stick, he walks over the same sand where he once crawled, and numbers his long years in a single house. Fortune didn’t drag him through a variety of upheavals, and he wasn’t a stranger on the move, drinking from strange rivers. He didn’t fear the ocean as a merchant, nor the war trumpet as a soldier, nor did he endure the noisy Forum’s lawsuits. He was untrained in other matters, unaware of the nearby town, but enjoyed his freer view of the sky. He counted years by the alternating harvests, not the consuls: his fruits marked the autumn, his flowers the spring. The same fields see the sun rise and set, and the peasant measures the day by his own sun’s path. He remembers the mighty oak when it was a little acorn, and sees that the grove has grown old along with him. [text continues]
If It (Ultimately) Makes You Happy It Can’t Be That Bad: Separation (Viprayoga) in Aśvaghoṣa’s Works, Roy Tzohar
Similarly, the history of attempts to rebut inegalitarian claims and to demonstrate the equality of the Cs and the non-Cs supports the view that scientific evidence in favor of equality does not translate into further eradication of older prejudices or the provision of greater opportunities. The Bell Curve outsells the egalitarian competition. Despite a barrage of negative reviews in the intellectually oriented media, R. Herrnstein and C. Murray The Bell Curve (New York: The Free Press, 1994) persisted on the “Best Seller List” of The New York Times for several weeks. None of Gould’s writings on intelligence testing or on biological determinism has had a similar record. Other attempts to combat inegalitarian doctrines—for example, R.C. Lewontin, S. Rose and L. Kamin Not In Our Genes (New York: Pantheon, 1984), N.J. Block and G. Dworkin The I.Q. Controversy (New York: Pantheon, 1976), and my own Vaulting Ambition—have made far less impact on people outside the academy.
Contents of Volume II Preface vii Oration 2: To those who called him tiresome 1 Oration 50: For the Peasantry, about forced Labour 53
Un Lugar Llamado Música
LITERATURE Carnap, R. 1938. The Logical Syntax of Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Hilbert, D., und Ackermann, W. 1927. Grunduge der Theoretischen Logik. Berlin: J. Springer. Russell, B., and Whitehead, A. N. 1925. Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
7. K. CAMPBELL Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Sydney Colours 8. C. B. MARTIN Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Sydney People