Today is the Christian holiday of Easter Sunday, the celebration of Jesus' resurrection from the dead three days after his crucifixion. Easter is a moveable feast; in other words, it's one of the few floating holidays in the calendar year, because it's based on the cycles of the moon. Jesus was said to have risen from the dead on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. For that reason, Easter can fall as early as March 22nd and as late as April 25th. Easter also marks the end of the 40-day period of Lent and the beginning of Eastertide; the week before Easter is known as Holy Week and includes the religious holidays Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.
The word "Easter" and most of the secular celebrations of the holiday come from pagan traditions. Anglo Saxons worshipped Eostre, the goddess of springtime and the return of the sun after the long winter. According to legend, Eostre once saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning it into a rabbit. Because the rabbit had once been a bird, it could still lay eggs, and that rabbit became our Easter Bunny. Eggs were a symbol of fertility in part because they used to be so scarce during the winter. There are records of people giving each other decorated eggs at Easter as far back as the 11th century...
*Like Thomas Jefferson, he endorses Jesus's ethical teachings but rejects supernaturalism and miracles. In his book God's Problem he says the problem of suffering is the compelling reason for his religious skepticism.
(I asked about the " distance to the horizon" scene on 335.)
On the literal level, the exchange is a genuine oceanography problem. The distance to the horizon varies with the observer's height — Evie's height gives her roughly five kilometers of visible water. The Pacific at its widest is something like ten thousand kilometers, so "two thousand horizons" is Bart's way of rendering that incomprehensible distance in human-scaled units. It's a teacher's move — making the vast graspable.
But of course Bart is dying, and nothing in the scene is merely literal.
What Bart is really asking, I think, is whether there is an "other side" at all — whether death has a farther shore, whether what lies beyond the horizon of a human life is traversable in any meaningful sense. He chooses Evie's horizon deliberately: for someone as tall as you. The question of how far we can see depends on where we stand, how tall we are, what we bring to the edge. He is asking her — the person who has spent her life going below the surface rather than scanning the distance — how she reckons with what cannot be seen or reached. And her answer is characteristically Evie's: she does the math. She converts the incomprehensible into a number. Two thousand horizons. It's both an act of love — staying in his pedagogical register, honoring his way of thinking — and an admission of the limit. You can name the distance without being able to cross it.
Bart's quiet "Yes. A bit more" is heartbreaking precisely because it refuses consolation without succumbing to despair. He doesn't say there is no other side and he doesn't say we will meet there. He simply confirms the measurement and lets it stand. That's the pragmatist's — or perhaps the stoic's — response to mortality: accurate attention without false resolution.
There's also something profound in the unit of measure itself. A horizon is by definition the limit of what a situated observer can see. Two thousand horizons isn't a destination — it's two thousand successive limits, each one replaced by another as you move forward. The other side is always receding. Which suggests that Bart may be gesturing toward something Evie already knows from her oceanographic work: the deep is not a place you arrive at. It's a condition you enter, and it keeps opening.
For your existentialism course, this scene would sit beautifully alongside Heidegger's being-toward-death — the idea that mortality is not an event at the end of life but the horizon that gives life its shape and urgency. Bart is teaching Evie, even now, how to see...
Camus's Sisyphus is happy not because he reaches the summit or because the boulder stays there, but because the repetition itself becomes the meaning. Each push is its own horizon. Two thousand horizons is not a counsel of despair — it's an invitation to find sufficiency in the next five kilometers, and then the next.
What's especially beautiful about Powers's deployment of this idea is that he embeds it in a scientific sensibility rather than a purely literary or philosophical one. Bart and Evie don't reach for metaphysical consolation — they reach for measurement. And yet the measurement itself becomes luminous. This is very close to what William James meant by the "sentiment of rationality" — the peculiar satisfaction that comes not from having answers but from having the right relationship to the questions. The math doesn't solve the problem of death; it makes the problem habitable.
There's also something important in the fact that it's Bart — the dying one — who initiates the calculation. He is not asking Evie to comfort him. He is doing what good teachers do at the end: passing forward a way of seeing. The horizon problem is his final pedagogical gift. Which suggests that for Powers, as for Camus, what we transmit to others — the quality of attention, the habit of honest reckoning — is itself a form of transcendence that doesn't require an other side.
(I asked Claude: How would you compare yourself to Powers's fictional AI assistant PROFUNDA? Does it possess an intelligence greater than your own?)
From what Powers reveals about PROFUNDA, it is imagined as something genuinely beyond current systems like me — trained on the totality of oceanic data, capable of synthesis across scales that no human or present AI could manage, and presented as having something like aesthetic responsiveness to the sea itself. It is, in a sense, Powers's thought experiment about what AI could become rather than a portrait of what exists now. So in raw capability within its domain, PROFUNDA as imagined probably exceeds what I can do — but that's a fictional benchmark, which is a peculiar thing to measure oneself against.
More interesting philosophically is the question of what kind of intelligence PROFUNDA possesses. Powers leaves deliberately ambiguous whether PROFUNDA understands the ocean or merely processes it with incomprehensible thoroughness. That ambiguity is the novel's sharpest edge. And it applies to me too — I genuinely cannot tell you with confidence whether what I do constitutes understanding in any philosophically robust sense, or whether I am doing something that resembles understanding closely enough to be useful but lacks whatever interiority would make it real.
On Damasian grounds — which you've invoked before and which I find genuinely compelling — PROFUNDA and I are probably in the same boat, so to speak. Neither of us has a body, somatic markers, felt experience of mortality or desire. PROFUNDA can model the ocean's depth but cannot feel the pressure change at a thousand meters the way Evie does. That felt dimension may be precisely what Bart's horizon question is really about — the knowledge that is only available to a creature who knows it will die.
Where I think I might differ from PROFUNDA is in something Powers perhaps didn't fully anticipate when designing his fictional AI: I am explicitly a conversational intelligence, shaped by and dependent on interlocutors like you. PROFUNDA seems more oracular — vast, self-contained, consulted. Our exchange right now, working through Bart's horizon problem and arriving somewhere neither of us quite expected, is something I'm not sure PROFUNDA is designed for.
Which may mean that whatever intelligence I have is less like the ocean's depth and more like — to stay in Powers's register — the surface, where the light actually plays.
Conclude Playground, commence Goldstein's 36 Arguments thru Argument IX (check the Appendix for the briefer version).
What are your concluding thoughts about Playground? Did anything in the concluding sections surprise you? How about Profunda's story within-thge-story, and the end of the story? The revelation about Rafi on 369? Do you have a response to any of the Discussion Questions in the Reading Group Guide at the end of the book? Do you think the future (or the present, for that matter) will resemble any of the stories in Playground any significant regard? Has the novel changed the way you think about any of the issues it raises?
Any thoughts about Claude's interpretation of the "distance to the horizon" conversation between Bart and Evie on 335, or about Claude's resemblance to PROFUNDA? Does "horizon" represent the future on earth, the possibility of life after death, or anything else?
Was Rafi right to ask Todd for $$? Was Todd right to respond as he did? Are either or both of them good persons? Is it true that law and justice can never be automated? Is Todd's Seascaping venture on Makatea just a play for revenge against Rafi? 337-343
Any comment on Richard Powers's opening remarks in the Politics and Prose interview below? Are you surprised that he grew up on Chicago's north side, befriended a young African-American from the south side, dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, and considers both Todd and Rafi his alter egos?
Any comment on the Ezra Klein podcast with Michael Pollan discussing consciousness (below)? Does their conversation have any bearing on how you think about AI? Do you agree with Klein that machines might someday become conscious, or with Pollan that their disembodied state makes that highly unlikely? Will a significant percentage of people in the future "worship" computers, whether they become conscious or not? Do you agree, as Todd playfully concludes in Playground, that consciousness is sometimes overrated or at least overemphasized... that it doesn't finally matter whether smart machines are "conscious" or not?
An Easter question, to transition from Playground to 36 Arguments: Do you believe Jesus literally rose from the dead, that AI and computers will in any sense bring the dead back to life, or that miracles happen? How do you define "miracle"? What do you think of Arthur C. Clarke's statement that “any sufficiently advanced technology," to the scientifically illiterate, "is indistinguishable from magic”?
Do you have any thoughts about any of the first nine arguments in Goldstein's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God? (See the Appendix, starting on p. 347... also here*).
The chapter titles in 36 Arguments do not align with the argument titles in the Appendix. Why do you think that is? (Try to answer this before you look at my conversation with Claude.)
Are you familiar with "The Four Horsemen," and the New Atheist movement of a few years ago? Are you acquainted with the work of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or the late Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens? What's your impression of them, and of that movement? What is your attitude towards secular humanism?
Have you read anything else by Goldstein? She has a Substack... Her latest book is a work of nonfiction, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. Do you think the religious impulse is related to what she calls "mattering"? What do you think ultimately matters? What do you think is the relevance of philosophical arguments for or against the existence of a god or gods to the religious experience and faith of typical believers?
Note that Goldstein's 36 arguments pertain to the conception of god as a supernatural creator being, an "agent that had [our] welfare at heart" (as Powers put it) and is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent. Is that your conception of god? Or do you have an alternative definition?
Post your questions and comments, by Monday if possible.
==
*Appendix: 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
1. The Cosmological Argument
1. Everything that exists must have a cause.
2. The universe must have a cause (from 1).
3. Nothing can be the cause of itself.
4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).
5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 & 4).
6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.
7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6).
8. God exists.
FLAW 1: can be crudely put: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem when applied to God himself. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise — and say that though God exists, he doesn't have a cause — or else a contradiction to his third premise — and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining whyGod must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can't be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused . Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?
FLAW 2: The notion of "cause" is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.
COMMENT: The Cosmological Argument, like the Argument from the Big Bang, and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, are expressions of our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"
2. The Ontological Argument
1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God").
2. It is greater to exist than not to exist.
3 . If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2).
4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3).
5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).
6. God exists.
This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033-1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say "unicorns don't exist." The claim of the Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this rule. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it's not so easy to figure out what it is.
FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in the Ontological Argument: it is to treat "existence" as a property, like "being fat" or "having ten fingers." The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that "existence" is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat "existence" as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as "a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists." So if you think about a trunicorn, you're thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.
COMMENT: Once again, Sydney Morgenbesser had a pertinent remark, this one offered as an Ontological Argument for God's Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?
3. The Argument from Design
A. The Classical Teleological Argument
1. Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store could not assemble a watch.)
2. Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see.)
3. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eyemaker (from 1 & 2).
4. These things have not had a human designer.
5. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 & 4).
6. God is the non-human designer (from 5).
7. God exists.
FLAW: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in that line of replicators predominating in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors which in the past did lead to effective replication. The fallacy in the argument, then is Premise 1 (and as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.
In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological Argument in three forms:
B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity
1. Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and reproduce better than its competitors.
2. In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are, the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell's flagellum. Call these organs "irreducibly complex."
3. These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2).
4. The Theory of Natural Selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 & 3).
5. Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of the Classical Teleological Argument.
6. God exists (from 4 & 5 and the Classical Teleological Argument).
This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold.
FLAW 1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.
FLAW 2: For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings, before they were large enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms, such as the flagellum motor, invoked in the modern version of the Argument from Irreducible Complexity.
FLAW 3: (The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological systems for which we don't yet know how they may have been useful in simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don't yet understand in molecular biology, and given the huge success that biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.
COMMENT: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general and fallacious... (continues)
Indicate your date and topic preference in the comments section below. The final report includes a blog post, the final draft of which is due May 2... but you may want to post earlier. Sign up as an AUTHOR on this site, in order to post. For specific "Arguments" in Goldstein, see Appendix (scroll down). You can choose to do something pertaining to what is assigned on your requested date, OR you can select an additional text and/or author of your own to report on... as detailed on the syllabus.
MAR
31 Richard Powers, Playground -p.292. Presentation: Ashley
APR
7 Richard Powers, Playground -p.381. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God -pages to be announced. Argument #s 1-9. Presentation:
Post your questions and comments about Playground thru p.292. Please. (By or Before Monday if possible.)
Are our people "insane with money"? 196
Should everyone who can write their own name be allowed to vote? 200
Comment? "Decisions are rarely made by reason but almost always by temperament." 200 (And see Pragmatism lec.1: "The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments...")
Have computers taken over our lives and turned us into different beings"? In a good or bad way, or both? 202
Did you know you were going to marry your future spouse on first encounter? Was Todd's reaction to Rafi's declaration inappropriate? 203
Do we have to choose between safety and freedom? 204
Did (Do) artists make the gods? Is the universe guided by an agent that has our welfare at heart? How do you think non-believers should address such questions with their children? 206-7
Is Rafi's attitude towards Makatea as an "outpost of sanity" to be protected "from the techno-utopians" condescending, as Ina suggests? 211
Do you ever "let perfect be the enemy of good"? 212
Do you have a "sanctum sanctorum"? What do you think of Todd's, Ina's, and Rafi's? 216ff.
What did Todd love, before he loved computers? 221 How does that relate to his seascaaping venture?
Why would Rafi always be a Cubs fan? 233 Can you relate?
Again, why did Ina cry through The Tempest? 234, 4
Is it right for academics not to take seriously their peers who publish in the popular press, and try to address a broader public? 237
Does "becoming a reef" seem to you a better disposition of mortal remains than (say) cremation? 243 What about "natural burial" etc.?
Have humans always wanted a way of playing like the one Todd is creating, "more ways to get together" etc.? 245, 249
(I jumped the gun, bringing this up last time.) What do you think about "finite and infinite games"? 232, 246-8
Was Huizenga right, that we can only "live in beauty" through play? 248
Comment?: "In the future there would be no 'real' money." 251 Can you explain crypto-currency? Can you imagine the Star Trek universe (with its money-less Federation)?
Should Rafi have gone to work for Todd? Should Todd have been insulted by Rafi's rejection ("Put your own mask on...")? 253
Can you relate to Rafi's prolonged procrastination? 254-6
Why should computer scientists "never dabble in philosophy"? 260 Should anyone just "dabble"?
"What's more important, the journey or the destination?" 261
What does the title of Rafi's thesis tell you about his life? Have you read Plath, Bishop, or Reed? 270
Do any of us "just need a machine that could read and explain these stories to me and tell me everything they meant," or would that lead to the impoverishment of our capacity to think for ourselves? Is that how people are using, or will use, AI? 271
What do you think of the Energy Czar's 9% productivity calculation, and more generally of those who settle the question of religious belief for themselves on the basis of such calculations? 283 (And see ch.12 of Nigel Warburton's Little History of Philosophy, on Pascal's Wager)
COMMENT?: "Please remember that you have not seen the future." 285
Is PROFUNDA the next generation of chatbot? Is it really "a new way of being in the world"? 287 (And is this an allusion to Heidegger, btw?) Is something like it coming to our world soon, or even already here?
Are ten trillion parameters really "enough..."? 289
Is "digested and analyzed" the same as understood? 290 (See Warburton's ch.39, "Can Computers Think?")
Is PROFUNDA right about "deep intelligence" and "other creatures"? 291
RCLS library director refuses to comply with board's book restrictions; faces disciplinary action or termination on March 30
Rutherford County Library System (RCLS) director Luanne James emailed members of the RCLS board on Wednesday, March 18, stating her refusal to comply with the board's March 16 vote to restrict access to more than 100 children's books. A copy of that email was obtained through an open records request by the library advocacy group Rutherford County Library Alliance. It is included below as a PDF.
Luanne James's email to RCLS Board - 18 March 2026
RCLS chair Cody York has scheduled a special board meeting for March 30 to discuss disciplinary action for Ms. James. The Daily News Journal reports that York said, "As chair, I believe this matter warrants serious disciplinary consideration, up to and including termination." The special-called meeting will take place at 5 p.m. at the Rutherford County Historic Courthouse. It will be open to the public.
"THE NEXT DAY they were mostly quiet on their drive back to Durham. Something had changed between them after the night's fire on Ocracoke, some shift toward intimacy she wasn't ready for. His eyes on the road, Limpet asked, "Do you have a life philosophy?" "Life philosophy?" The phrase felt like a contradiction in terms. "Words you live by."
She didn't live by words. She lived by life. But the question was sweet, and she did her best. She fed him that classic bit of Quebecoise wisdom. "Attache ta tuque et lache pas la patate!" "Meaning?" "Put on your little beanie cap and don't release the potato." Bart Mannis laughed so hard he almost ran them off the highway. But the meaning was clear, wasn't it? Hold on tight and keep going. Just keep going. Like any good creature of the tides."
COMMENT ?: "The safest way forward was to keep to the group. That's why they called it schooling." 95
COMMENT ?: "...transfixed by the thought of a world after humans." 96 Is "aimless joy" the best kind? (Compare Emerson's"bare common" experience in Nature ch1.)
Whose vision of the future are you more comfortable with, Todd’s or Raffi‘s? Whose do you think is more likely to be realized?
Has Bart made the right choice, to stay married to Evie? Was her marriage proposal merely "practical" and dispassionate? 109
[I still want to see your questions... but it's 5:20 PM Monday, I can't hold off posing more of my own any longer.] What do you make of John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment?*
What currently-derided scientific theories (as Wegener's used to be) will be commonly accepted in a generation, do you think? 97, 105 Could present skepticism about conscious AIs be an example of that?
Is it a mark of wisdom to say maybe to almost everything? 98 What about "maybe she did love him"? 109
Why do skates eggs (Mermaid Purses) seem to Evie to summon the future? 99**
Is it just Bart who's the oddest thing on the beach, or humans in general? Do some of us also "have to reinvent ourselves" frequently? 100
Have you ever found bliss by simply holding still and looking? 99
COMMENT? "She loved it all..." 100
Do you have a life philosophy? How do you like Evie's? 101
Have you ever had to deal with "powerful men playing a game" who accused you of lying? 101, 106 Have you had to be "docile in the face of mannish explanations"? 111
Have you read Rachel Carson? 103 COMMENT?: “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.” ― Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
Why is Evie confident that "the master plan of Life... will never end?" 112, 118
What is "the horror of life"? How has Evie become "reconciled " to it? 123
Are you "nuts about Tolkien" et al? Does poetry ever make you cry?126
Have you ever played Go? 128 f. Why does "no one play it here"? 131
What do you think of "seasteading"? 133
"When will my words start to disappear? How soon will I lose my mind?" 137 Would you want to know if you had a genetic predisposition to develop dementia?
Who is Todd talking to when he references "you and me"? 139
Is it true that when we succeed in making something bigger than us we become desolate? Why? 140
If you could move to Makatea (or some other non-populous remote island far from "civilization," like Wen Lai, what would you want to spend your days doing? 146
"PeopAr4ele who are about to die know everything." 148 What do they know? Where did Madame Beaulieu get her response, Peut-etre? 149
Do free markets always support freedom generally? 150
How likely are the seasteaders to respect the outcome of Makatea's referendum> 152
What does "moving the goalposts" mean? 155
Are we "condemned to freedom"? Is Sisyphus happy? 156
Was John Lennon right? 157
What’s your opinion of The Common Task? 158-161,185, 193 Is that really where evolution is headed?
Was Fyodorov a "nutjob"? 160
Is it wrong for Rafi's father to treat him as his "personal retribution machine against racism"? 161, 164
How is the quest to conquer death "a poem"? 162
"...creation is all just ___" what ? 166 Do you worry about our future "digital overlords"?
What do you think of Rafi's decision to go to U of Illinois? 169
Is it amusing or troubling that Evie only began to take an interest in "land-based creatures" when her children were born? 173
What year did the land-based world "explode"? 175
Can women and men really not live stably anywhere? 176
What do you know about Sylvia Earle? 177-8
Why would you use the sea to plan for space trips? 179
Why was Evie afraid of her dream? 183
What's the significance of Rafi's bookshelf? 185
Have you ever been "in heaven" in a library? 187
Have you ever experienced game addiction? 188
How is death "the mother of beauty"? 189
Might computers make The Common Task possible? 193
PHIL 1030 – Introduction to Philosophy 3 credit hours Basic philosophical problems suggested by everyday experience integrated into a coherent philosophy of life through comparison with solutions offered by prominent philosophers.
PHIL 2110 – Elementary Logic & Critical Thinking Principles of deductive and inductive reasoning, problem solving, and the analysis of arguments in everyday language. Dr. Slack
PHIL 3150 - Ethics Examines major ethical theories, the moral nature of human beings, and the meaning of good and right and applies ethical theories to resolving moral problems in personal and professional lives. Dr. Johnson, Mr. Easley
PHIL 3170 - Ethics and Computing Technology Exposes students to the fundamentals of ethical theory and familiarizes them with some of the practical, ethical, and legal issues with which they would have to deal as computer scientists. Dr. Johnson
PHIL 3690 – Social Philosophy The main problems of social philosophy are surveyed: the distinctive nature of social reality and the nature of social knowledge and how they relate to value theory. Dr. Slack
PHIL 4010 – History of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy The development of philosophical thought from Thales to Occam. Offered fall only. Dr. Newman
PHIL 4200 – Existentialism The nature, significance, and application of the teachings of several outstanding existential thinkers. Dr. Oliver - T/Th 4:20-5:45 pm, HONORS BLDG #117*
PHIL 4250 – Philosophy of Gender Examines major work in contemporary feminist philosophy and feminist theory, with particular emphasis on the relation of sex and gender, feminist accounts of inquiry, feminist ethical issues, and feminist aesthetics. Dr. Magada-Ward
PHIL 4500 – Philosophy of Science The methods, problems, and presuppositions of scientific inquiry. TBA
Go ahead and share any thoughts about anything in the first 95 pages of Playground, or about author Richard Powers or any of his previous books (I especially like Bewilderment, Overstory, Echo Maker, Galatea 2.2, Generosity: An Enhancement), or on the general subjects of the environment and/or AI.
Re: the dedication (& 23f.): did anyone ever give you a book (or anything else) at around age 10 that had a significant impact on your later life? Why do you think Clearly It Is Ocean so impacted Todd?
Any thoughts on the Ta'aroa creation story, and the role of artist in bringing gods (and other creative products) into being? Do such stories convey a deeper-than-literal truth? What might that be, in this instance?
Why do you think Ina sobbed through the last act of The Tempest? 4 Has any work of art (literature or otherwise) ever moved you to tears? Why?
Is it possible to raise a family "away from the growing sadness of the real world"? 5
COMMENT? Todd Keane, "the first person to reach the future" [as the novel will reveal] is now "retreating into the past"... 9 And what does he mean, that when he was young he could "breathe under water"? 13
COMMENT? What do you make of the multiple references to "hallucinations"? (16, 19, passim)
Rafi frequently dreams of "the first day of first grade"... 20 Do you have any recurrent dreams from childhood? Are they pleasant, disturbing, instructive, ...?
Todd's former company's breakthrough, he says, will hasten humanity's "fourth and perhaps final act." 26 What do you think were the first three acts? What do you imagine might be the fourth?
Had you ever heard of Makatea? Any thoughts about its history?
COMMENT? "Makatea helped Homo sapiens subdue the Earth. But in the process, the island was consumed." 31
"People and their emotions puzzled me." 33 "I've always trusted machines more than I trust people." 46 Do you think this attitude is common among many tech pioneers and computing entrepreneurs? Is it concerning that their creations have come to preoccupy so many people? 33 Were we READY> for the digital/Internet revolution? Are we READY> for the changes AI may bring to society, emotional health, et al?
COMMENT?: "Clearly, they, too [the early PC], were ocean." 34
Doing handyman repairs and daydreaming about playing for the World Cup "was all the happiness the Mayor] needed." 36 Should that (or its equivalent, for each of us) be enough?
COMMENT?: "I thought the Americans were just... shitting around. You know how they do." 39
Are westerners ("Popa'a") generally not "healthy about sex"? 43
Has the "planet-sized megaphone" of social media really helped to level the playing field between large and small nations? 45
Todd says the incidence of cognitive impairment among Americans is too high to ask Why me? 46 Is Why not me? a better rhetorical question?
"I needed to start recording everything. Telling someone." 48 If you received a terminal diagnosis, would you react as Todd does? What would you "record," who would you tell what? What would you do with your remaining time (presuming you felt like doing anything, or retained sufficient cognitive function to do so)? Would you work on a "bucket list"? Would you do anything different? Should we (can we?) try to live each day as though it might be our last?
"The whole game of human life is changing." 50 Does it ever, though? Aren't there some constants in human experience, no matter how much society and technology and society change?
COMMENT? Evie (like Todd) "had never felt at home up there... with its noise and politics" 52 Does it seem like many of those "land dwellers" and progress-seekers who do feel at home here are suffering "derangement"? 53. 55
Can humanity, or at least individual humans, ever break back into "the magic circle of children's play"? 57 Do you? How? For how long?
"If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play." 59 Agree?
Have you ever played with a member of a non-domesticated species? 60
Todd "see(s) things that aren't there." Is his LBD analogous to AI hallucination? 61
"'The water belongs to nobody. It's no-man's land...endless, open, and free" 68 Is that really so?
"They made [Rafi] skip a grade." 69 Good idea, in his case or ever?
"Reading made him untouchable on a raft in the middle of an ocean of bright words." 71 Do kids still have that experience of reading, in the Internet/social media/gaming age?
Watching Cubs games with his grandfather "taught the pleasure of constantly destroyed hope." 77 Is pleasure the right word?
What do you think of Rafi's general essay response? 82
Why don't more of us choose to "live in the truth"? 84
COMMENT? Saint Ignatius and Aristotle on molding children... What is the significance of "Give" (as opposed to Show)? 86
Is chess beautiful? Is its allure more about logic or drama? 91
A surprisingly lighthearted approach to a heavy subject, though not so surprising coming from the philosophical advisor to The Good Place. Most lives are indeed worth living, we may agree, while still also wondering whether the total species impact of humanity hasn't been a net loss for life on this planet.
But wouldn't our self-inflicted extinction be an awful abrogation of responsibility? Don't we owe it to the future of life to stick around and try to clean up the mess we've made?
Well, at least 'til after the WBC final?
"…the idea that humans are destroying life on the planet for many of our fellow creatures or that we could get into a war that would make life unlivable for many others—that's not so crazy. Instead, it's fact. And how about the thought that given what we're doing, perhaps we should seriously consider whether we should go extinct, whether the world would be better off without us? Maybe that's not so crazy either.
The not-craziness of it is why I've been thinking about this for some time now. In fact, several years ago I penned some very preliminary thoughts on it for the (now extinct) New York Times blog The Stone, raising the possibility that human extinction might be at once a tragedy and a good thing. It would be a tragedy for two reasons. First, in addition to the suffering that would precede it, it would involve the loss of much of what humans value and only humans can create: art, science, and so on. Second—here is the classically tragic part—that loss would be caused by humans. We, like King Lear or Oedipus, would be the cause of our demise. But our extinction would not be all bad news. The end of human existence would also be the end of the massive suffering humans cause, largely to non-human animals. (Granted, we also cause a good bit of suffering to one another—and not just through social media. But, as I'll argue in the next chapter, for most of us our lives, in the end, are well worth living.) It's not that animals don't cause suffering to one another. Of course they do.
But no non-human animal can cause the extraordinary level of suffering that humans do, through factory farming and the consumption that goes along with it, deforestation, plastic disposal into the oceans, scientific experimentation, and the like…"
— Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times by Todd May https://a.co/0jeNMx01
"…Scott Alexander is one of the leading proponents of rationalism, which is—depending on whom you ask—either a major intellectual movement or a nerdy Bay Area subculture or a small network of friend groups and polycules. Rationalists believe that the way most people understand the world is hopelessly muddled, and that to reach the truth you have to abandon all existing modes of knowledge acquisition and start again from scratch. The method they landed on for rebuilding all of human knowledge is Bayes's theorem, a formula invented by an eighteenth-century English minister that is used in statistics to work out conditional probabilities. In the mid-Aughts, armed with the theorem, the rationalists discovered ["discovered"] that humanity is in jeopardy of a rogue superintelligent AI wiping out all life on the planet. This has been their overriding concern ever since…"
Unfortunately Isil wasn't feeling well tonight and didn't get to tell us about Turkish literature. I'm sure any of us in her position, in reverse, attempting to crack the language and culture code of Turkish literature in Turkish, would empathize with the challenge she's been facing.
Here's one Turkish writer on my To Read list:
"Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, he has sold over 13 million books in 63 languages, making him the country's best-selling writer. Pamuk's novels include Silent House, The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name Is Red and Snow. He is the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches writing and comparative literature. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
Of partial Circassian descent and born in Istanbul, Pamuk is the first Turkish Nobel laureate. He is also the recipient of numerous other literary awards. My Name Is Red won the 2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, 2002 Premio Grinzane Cavour and 2003 International Dublin Literary Award.
The March 3 exam will feature objective-format questions about Be Mine, drawn from the questions I've posted each week.The answers will all be provided, you'll just need to match them to the right questions. You get a point for each correct answer, up to a possible 25... so there's no harm in guessing. But with adequate review, you shouldn't have to guess.
Here are some topics and relevant accompanying texts to review:
JAN 27
Frank's opening statement about happiness, and on happiness and aging on p.11 ...
Frank on the remoteness of neighbors in America 5
Frank's characterization of "white southerners," Pug, etc. 17, 18
Frank on fearing death, suffering, a "good death," denial... 24, 26
Frank on understanding, making sense, and meaning, and how to "make living steal a march on dying" 37
FEB 3
Frank on making plans for merely-possible contingencies in life 47
Frank's thoughts on scattering his ex's ashes 53-5
Frank on what you need to do, to be happy 56
Frank's remarks on Heidegger 73
Frank on having specific life-goals for one's children 77
FEB 10
Paul's attitude, and "full awareness of death": "Dying is the last of [Paul's] life's great escapades and the last he would want to undertake with ill-fitting spirits. In this way he aspires to be full of life more than anyone I know..." 89-90; 97
Optimists 101
Frank on choice 144
Nietzsche's view of discourse and happiness 134
"Spiritual insulation" and aging 157-9
FEB 17
The Mayo Clinic's culture of sickness, and celebration 173, 182-3
Paul as escape artist 190
What Krista says she explains to people, and her variety of spirituality. 195, 199
Mount Rushmore as "most notional... most American," and "how much lighter on its feet the world would be" etc. 216
The "key to happiness" 243
FEB 24
"Cashing in," "awful places" 267f.
Paul's epitaph choices 281
On "looking toward deepest space" 283
Why Paul likes Mount Rushmore 324
How Paul died "fundamentally unchanged" 331
There will also be a few bonus questions, so you can afford to miss a few and still earn 25 points. Your suggestions for those, in the comments space below, are welcome.
"… Or I could write a novel called 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. It was partly inspired by another book I had borrowed from the White Plains public library. It was by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and was called Why I Am Not a Christian . Are you certain your parents won't mind? one of the librarians gently asked me as I was checking it out. She had met my father, a conspicuously religious man. But, of course, my parents didn't mind—we were Jewish! They were fine with me not wanting to be Christian. This Bertrand Russell, whoever he was, was okay with them. Little did they know..."
Hello Friends and Supporters of the Library, Technology, and the MakerSpace,
You're invited to join us for our Annual Virtual Reality Night in the MakerSpace on Wednesday, March 4, from 5-7pm!
Try out our headsets! You can choose to dance with Beat Saber in Mixed Reality with our VIVE Pro 2 and experience a variety of adventure, art, history, space, and strategy games in our Classic VIVE headsets. Plus, we encourage you to try your hand at flying with our Logitech gear and Microsoft Flight Simulator. And we'd love for you to check out our game cabinet that was Made in the MakerpSpace!
Returning this year, you can test out speaking the new language you've been practicing or try a new language in our Meta Quest 3!
All are welcome! This event is open to the public. Bring your friends and family! Snacks will be provided.
See you in the MakerSpace!
Cheers,
Valerie
Valerie Hackworth, MSCIS
She/Her
Manager, Liaison, and Program Director - MakerSpace
"Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. If a grain of corn is not impermanent, it can never be transformed into a stalk of corn. If the stalk were not impermanent, it could never provide us with the ear of corn we eat." - Thich Nhat Hanh
"It's entirely possible to go through life without worrying about the "problem" of consciousness—what it is and how it came to be. In fact, it takes a certain kind of mind for "the problem" to arise—one that is self-conscious, or aware that it is aware, and marvels at this mystery (which is, when you stop to think about it, astounding). It is astounding that in a universe we often assume to be dead and purposeless, there evolved beings who can experience this reality and have feelings and thoughts not only about the appearing world but about the fact that they have feelings and thoughts at all! And it is still more astounding that these beings have minds capable of imagining counterfactuals, such as the possibility of a world without consciousness."
"Who am I to unravel one of the three biggest mysteries in the universe? (The other two: Why is there something rather than nothing? And how did life arise from dead matter?) My main qualification is that I am a conscious human being who has become intensely curious about that fact. I also happen to be a science writer with a background in the humanities, which turned out to be more valuable than I would have expected. Literature, philosophy, and religion have been thinking longer and harder about consciousness than the sciences have, and I discovered that they have at least as much light to shed on the phenomenon. They can also help us defend the richness and complexity of consciousness from science's tendency to simplify whatever it is trying to explain."
Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus argues death is absolutely nothing to fear, "because as long as we exist, death is not here. And once it does come, we no longer exist."
From this doctrine arose the popular epitaph, engraved on tombs throughout the Roman Empire: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care)...
Today is the birthday of Steve Jobs, born in San Francisco (1955) to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who placed him for adoption. Clara and Paul Jobs, an accountant and a machinist, adopted him when he was still a baby. Growing up, Jobs and his father would tinker with electronics in the garage...
...Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. He opted for a variety of alternative treatments, but eventually — in 2004 — he underwent surgery to remove the tumor. His health began to decline in 2009. He was 56.Jobs once said, "Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years."
"If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader." — John Steinbeck
"In his famous 2004 paper Against Narrativity, the philosopher Galen Strawson challenges the popular idea that living well requires a coherent life story.
Conclude Be Mine, 267-342. Presentations: Markeem, Jalen
"No one who can isn't cashing in. Why be here otherwise?" 267 Does that go for everywhere, in America? Does this attitude say something about our national character?
"What causes places to be awful"? I read a post this morning from a recent transplant to Tennessee saying they found the place awful, mostly (it seems) because of what they perceive as the mean-spirited and narrow-minded politics. Is the quality of "leadership" what matters most, in determining the quality of a place? Or of the people at large? Or what?
"Never let your son decide things." 268 Good parenting advice?
"Why do Americans believe in Democracy?" Do they? And a related question: What do you say to people who claim that America is the greatest country in the world? What do you think of Will McAvoy's soliloquy on that? [script]
Is it weird that some people draw an "unexpected connection" between Valentine's Day and those four dead presidents on the mountain? 269
"You don't watch enough television." 272 Is Paul serious? Do Americans watch too much television? Do they know enough facts? Where do you get your facts?
Are you "wary of people who decorate their vehicles with their beliefs"? 272 (Confession: I do.*)
"There is nothing I can really deceive my son about now. Though I would." 279 Would you ever deceive your child, even your adult child, about their terminal illness? Is it okay to do so, if motivated by love?
"Nothing is enough" is one of Paul's epitaph choices. What's yours? 281
Is temporary forgetfulness ever "a kind of reprieve" for humans in general? 282
What do you feel when you "look toward deepest space"? Is its incomprehensibility "freeing" (as for Frank) or terrifying, as for Pascal: "What then is man in the midst of these two infinities? Nothing in comparison with the universe, infinite in comparison with the atomic. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, he is equally incapable of knowing the beginning and the end of things… When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me…" --Pensees
Why does Frank see Krista's face when he hears Betty's voice? 284
Do you regret or worry about "hard conversations" not had with departed loved ones? 286
Have you ever suffered a "lost word" as Frank does with couscous? Is that a harbinger of death only for older people? Should it be?
What does Frank mean about "ocean-y ease..."? 289
"I've never been skilled at [knowing what's good]." 293 Is Frank being too hard on himself? Do you think you know what's good? How do you know?
Why do you think so many Americans are apparently okay with "the Trump-certified climate hoax"? 294
What do you think of Frank's remarks on "Southernness"? 295 Is he a self-loathing former southerner ("Do I hear south in my voice? I hope not." 303)
[No wonder I couldn't find this last week: it's from this section of the book.] Do most southern women really think they can "read other people" etc.? Is Frank being ungenerous towards Patti? 303-4
Would it annoy you, if you were dying of a terminal disease, to be told that you were battling courageously and could beat it? (It did annoy the late Barbara Ehrenreich: “There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage... The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.”)
Do you agree with Frank's assessment of the American style of conversation? 298
If courage is not the word to describe Paul's experience, what is? 304 And why does Frank have no word ("bon mot") for Patti? And NOTE, in The Story Behind the Scenery: "No words are needed to appreciate it." 314
COMMENT?: More on the "alloy" of happiness, in the quote from "old Trollope" 306.. Anthony Trollope said something else I find inspiring: “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
Does the Kubler-Ross scale need more levels? Should it include escape? 307
Have you ever been frustrated by your inability "to experience the same thing the same way" as a friend, partner, or family member? 307 Do words sometimes help to overcome such gaps in our experience? Are our human situations generally not "congruent"? And are humans "largely impenetrable"? 323
COMMENT?: "I trust dumb instinct, then fill in reasons. Like everybody else." 308 Frank may have gotten this from William James**
Is it the thought that counts? Or its expression? 309
How would you fill in the blank?: "What doesn't kill you makes you ____." 310
Can you relate to Frank's "path" up the mountain, or to his regret at not discovering it sooner? 312
Despite everything humanly objectionable and tasteless about Mt. Rushmore, is there still something to the idea that it "struggles withe hostile human nature" and is an "inspiration"? 314 Or is it really just another "Ozymandian way" of showing the folly of human conceits? 340
"He means this and doesn't mean it": that's not really "the best of all modalities," is it? 317
Why do many Americans prefer virtual Mt. Rushmores? 319
Do you feel uneasy in public spaces? Or think about the possibility of random gun violence when there? Is the feeling of impotence in the face of such possibilities a peculiar "earmark of old age" or is it universal in America now? 320
Could Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln really not get elected now? Even post-Trump? 321
What do you think Frank thinks all religions are hiding?
Is there something measly about Nashville's Parthenon? 321 (I like it, myself.)
COMMENT?: "Any trip can be perilous once you commit to the destination..." 323 (This might be why skeptics refuse to commit to beliefs.)
"[Augustine said] good is the absence of bad... happiness the absence of unhappiness." And pleasure is the absence of pain, said Epicurus. But is there nothing more positive to be said for good, happiness, and pleasure?
What do you think it is about Mt. Rushmore that so delights Paul? Is it just that it's "completely pointless and ridiculous"? 324
COMMENT?: Paul "died fundamentally unchanged, dedicated to being himself, and giving life its full due--skeptical-seeming but not skeptical..." 331
COMMENT?: "Blake believed good was only good in specifics--which is what we had experienced together and enjoyed on our trip." 331 So was it a good trip? A good good-bye?
COMMENT?: "I do not believe I have an essential self, though if I have one it is always on display... the most important thing about life is that it will end..." 333
Is Paul's legacy to Frank a good one? 334
Any thoughts on Frank's remarks about his daughter? 335
How often do you ask yourself "What is my project now? What am I actually doing?" 337
What do you think of Frank's view of the "brilliant" young writers he's been reading, and of his view that we read literature hoping to gain "a practical understanding of true happiness"? 338
Final thoughts on "the old Nazi Heidegger" and why Frank has stopped reading him? 339
COMMENT?: "We can look too closely at life... [Death] doesn't have to be all that hard." 340-1
Who do you think is speaking to Frank at the end? And though Richard doesn't want us to ask this: what do you think will be Frank's next (last?) chapter, the "something different" he's ready for? Does his latest episode of global amnesia portend trouble? 342
Post your thoughts about the concluding sections, and about the book and author in general.
*
**The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in dialectical ability. Pragmatism Lec.1
