Questions MAR 31

1. Post your questions and comments about Playground thru p.292. Please. (By or Before Monday if possible.)
2. Are our people "insane with money"? 196
3. Should everyone who can write their own name be allowed to vote? 200
4. 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...")
5. Have computers taken over our lives and turned us into different beings"?  In a good or bad way, or both? 202  
6. Did you know you were going to marry your future spouse on first encounter? Was Todd's reaction to Rafi's declaration inappropriate? 203
7. Do we have to choose between safety and freedom? 204
8. 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
9. Is Rafi's attitude towards Makatea as an "outpost of sanity" to be protected "from the techno-utopians" condescending, as Ina suggests? 211
10. Do you ever "let perfect be the enemy of good"? 212
11. Do you have a "sanctum sanctorum"? What do you think of Todd's, Ina's,  and Rafi's? 216ff.
12. What did Todd love, before he loved computers? 221 How does that relate to his seascaaping venture? 
13. Why would Rafi always be a Cubs fan? 233 Can you relate?
14. Again, why did Ina cry through The Tempest? 234, 4
15. 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
16. Does "becoming a reef" seem to you a better disposition of mortal remains than (say) cremation? 243  What about "natural burial" etc.? 
17. Have humans always wanted a way of playing like the one Todd is creating, "more ways to get together" etc.? 245, 249
18. (I jumped the gun, bringing this up last time.) What do you think about "finite and infinite games"? 232, 246-8
19. Was Huizenga right, that we can only "live in beauty" through play? 248
20. 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)?
21. Should Rafi have gone to work for Todd? Should Todd have been insulted by Rafi's rejection ("Put your own mask on...")?  253
22. Can you relate to Rafi's prolonged procrastination? 254-6
23. Why should computer scientists "never dabble in philosophy"? 260 Should anyone just "dabble"?
24. "What's more important, the journey or the destination?" 261
25. What does the title of Rafi's thesis tell you about his life? Have you read Plath, Bishop, or Reed? 270
26. 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
27. 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)
28. COMMENT?: "Please remember that you have not seen the future." 285
29. 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? 
30. Are ten trillion parameters really "enough..."? 289
31. Is "digested and analyzed" the same as understood? 290   (See Warburton's ch.39, "Can Computers Think?")
32. Is PROFUNDA right about "deep intelligence" and "other creatures"? 291

I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

Claude’s perspective on Playground

https://claude.ai/share/eb537cb6-4e4c-4d1f-9174-955ed9497049

Librarians on the front lines defending 1st amendment

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

417KB ∙ PDF file

Download

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.

https://open.substack.com/pub/indecentlibraries/p/rcls-library-director-refuses-to?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Just keep going

"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."

— Playground: A Novel by Richard Powers
https://a.co/0c1VZjoK

Questions MAR 24

1.  Go ahead and post your questions and comments about Playground to p.193.
2. Have you heard of Easter Ellen Cupp,  "the first woman to get a Ph.D. in oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography"? 95   [NOTE: She was from Iowa, not (like Evie) Quebec.]
3. COMMENT ?: "The safest way forward was to keep to the group. That's why they called it schooling." 95
4. 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.)
5. Any thoughts about my conversation with Claude? https://claude.ai/share/eb537cb6-4e4c-4d1f-9174-955ed9497049 Have you looked at or listened to any of the Powers conversations Claude recommends? 
6. 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? 
7. Has Bart made the right choice, to stay married to Evie? Was her marriage proposal merely "practical" and dispassionate? 109
8. [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?*
9. 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?
10. Is it a mark of wisdom to say maybe to almost everything? 98  What about "maybe she did love him"? 109
11. Why do skates eggs (Mermaid Purses) seem to Evie to summon the future? 99**
12. 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
13. Have you ever found bliss by simply holding still and looking? 99
14. COMMENT? "She loved it all..." 100
15. Do you have a life philosophy? How do you like Evie's? 101
16. 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
17. 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
18. Why is Evie confident that "the master plan of Life... will never end?" 112, 118
19. What is "the horror of life"? How has Evie become "reconciled " to it? 123 
    
20. Are you "nuts about Tolkien" et al? Does poetry ever make you cry?126
21. Have you ever played Go? 128 f. Why does "no one play it here"? 131
22. What do you think of "seasteading"? 133
23. "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?
24. Who is Todd talking to when he references "you and me"? 139
25. Is it true that when we succeed in making something bigger than us we become desolate? Why? 140
26. 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
27. "PeopAr4ele who are about to die know everything." 148  What do they know? Where did Madame Beaulieu get her response, Peut-etre? 149
28. Do free markets always support freedom generally? 150
29. How likely are the seasteaders to respect the outcome of Makatea's referendum> 152
30. What does "moving the goalposts" mean? 155
31. Are we "condemned to freedom"? Is Sisyphus happy? 156
32. Was John Lennon right? 157
33. What’s your opinion of The Common Task? 158-161,185, 193 Is that really where evolution is headed?
34. Was Fyodorov a "nutjob"? 160
35. Is it wrong for Rafi's father to treat him as his "personal retribution machine against racism"? 161, 164
36. How is the quest to conquer death "a poem"? 162
37.  "...creation is all just ___" what ? 166   Do you worry about our future "digital overlords"?
38. What do you think of Rafi's decision to go to U of Illinois? 169
39. Is it amusing or troubling that Evie only began to take an interest in "land-based creatures" when her children were born? 173
40. What year did the land-based world "explode"? 175
41. Can women and men really not live stably anywhere? 176
42. What do you know about Sylvia Earle? 177-8
43. Why would you use the sea to plan for space trips? 179
44. Why was Evie afraid of her dream? 183
45. What's the significance of Rafi's bookshelf? 185
46. Have you ever been "in heaven" in a library? 187
47. Have you ever experienced game addiction? 188
48. How is death "the mother of beauty"? 189
49. Might computers make The Common Task possible? 193

* 

**

Philosophy classes, Fall 2026

 

• 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 

*PHIL 4200-Existentialism Texts Fall '26
Required

• Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger,... - 978-1590518892
• Mariana Allesandri, Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods - 978-0691242699
• Irvin Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept - 978-0062009302
• tba

Recommended

• Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe - 978-0226421049
• Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters - 978-0691154503
• Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife - 978-0190469177
• Soren Kierkegaard, tba
• William James, What Makes a Life Significant; Is Life Worth Living; On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings; tba
• tba

Lyceum Apr 17

 

Questions March 17

1. 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.
2. 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?
3. 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?
4. 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? 
5. Is it possible to raise a family "away from the growing sadness of the real world"? 5
6. 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
7. COMMENT? What do you make of the multiple references to "hallucinations"? (16, 19, passim)
8. Rafi frequently dreams of "the first day of first grade"... 20  Do you have any recurrent dreams from childhood? Are they pleasant, disturbing, instructive, ...?
9. 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? 
10. Had you ever heard of Makatea? Any thoughts about its history? 
11. COMMENT? "Makatea helped Homo sapiens subdue the Earth. But in the process, the island was consumed." 31
12. "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?
13. COMMENT?: "Clearly, they, too [the early PC], were ocean." 34
14. 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?
15. COMMENT?: "I thought the Americans were just... shitting around. You know how they do." 39
16. Are westerners ("Popa'a") generally not "healthy about sex"? 43
17. Has the "planet-sized megaphone" of social media really helped to level the playing field between large and small nations?  45
18. 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?
19. "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?
20. "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?
21. 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
22. 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?
23. "If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play." 59  Agree?
24. Have you ever played with a member of a non-domesticated species? 60
25. Todd "see(s) things that aren't there." Is his LBD analogous to AI hallucination? 61
26. "'The water belongs to nobody. It's no-man's land...endless, open, and free"  68   Is that really so?
27. "They made [Rafi] skip a grade."  69   Good idea, in his case or ever?
28. "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?
29. Watching Cubs games with his grandfather "taught the pleasure of constantly destroyed hope." 77  Is pleasure the right word?
30. What do you think of Rafi's general essay response? 82
31. Why don't more of us choose to "live in the truth"? 84
32. COMMENT? Saint Ignatius and Aristotle on molding children... What is the significance of "Give" (as opposed to Show)? 86
33. Is chess beautiful? Is its allure more about logic or drama? 91
34. Is Evie right about the secret of life? 95
35. 
    

Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times by Todd May

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

“Rationalists”

Child's Play

"…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…"

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee

Take a break

 

Orhan Pamuk

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 European Writers' Parliament came about as a result of a joint proposal by Pamuk and José Saramago. Pamuk's willingness to write books about contentious historical and political events put him at risk of censure in his homeland. In 2005, a lawyer sued him over a statement acknowledging the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. Pamuk said his intention had been to highlight issues of freedom of speech in Turkey. The court initially declined to hear the case, but in 2011 Pamuk was ordered to pay 6,000 liras in compensation for having insulted the plaintiffs' honor." g'reads

Exam review

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

1. Frank's opening statement about happiness, and on happiness and aging on  p.11 ...
2. Frank on the remoteness of neighbors in America 5
3. Frank's characterization of "white southerners," Pug, etc. 17, 18
4. Frank on fearing death, suffering,  a "good death," denial... 24, 26
5. Frank on understanding, making sense, and meaning, and how to "make living steal a march on dying" 37

FEB 3

1. Frank on making plans for merely-possible contingencies in life 47
2. Frank's thoughts on scattering his ex's ashes 53-5
3. Frank on what you need to do, to be happy 56
4. Frank's remarks on Heidegger 73
5. Frank on having specific life-goals for one's children 77

FEB 10

1. 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
2. Optimists 101
3. Frank on choice 144
4. Nietzsche's view of discourse and happiness 134
5. "Spiritual insulation" and aging 157-9

FEB 17

1. The Mayo Clinic's culture of sickness, and celebration 173, 182-3
2. Paul as escape artist 190
3. What Krista says she explains to people, and her variety of spirituality. 195, 199
4. Mount Rushmore as  "most notional... most American," and "how much lighter on its feet the world would be" etc. 216
5. The "key to happiness" 243

FEB 24

1. "Cashing in," "awful places" 267f.
2. Paul's epitaph choices 281
3. On "looking toward deepest space" 283
4. Why Paul likes Mount Rushmore 324
5. 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.

Rebecca Goldstein, philosopher/novelist

"… 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..."

https://open.substack.com/pub/rebeccanewbergergoldstein/p/ecstasy-immodesty-and-obedience?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios