Samir Chopra's Blog, page 50

A Seinfeldian Encounter In My Barbershop

For the past few years, I’ve had my hair cut at a local barbershop, a few blocks down from where I live. It is an old-fashioned family establishment, owned and manned by a father and son pair (Italian), backed up by a Ukranian gentleman. (A classic Brooklyn institution, to be sure.) Initially, I would get my hair cut by any member of this trio, but then, eventually, I gravitated to the Ukranian barber, who seemed to have got my preferred style–a military-flavored crew cut, with a very close cut on the sides–just right. Nothing too complicated, but still. This establishment of a ‘favored’ barber brought with it, for the first time, a certain awkwardness to my visits to the barbershop.

For on occasion, when one of the father and son pair were done with their customers, they would turn to me and indicate they were unoccupied–at which point, I would say that I was going to wait for my friend to finish with his current engagement. After the first couple of times, they stopped asking me, moving on to the next waiting customer. My preference had been indicated, and matters soon found a new equilibrium. I would walk in, stake out a spot, wave on other customers while I waited for ‘my man.’ ‘P’ is a taciturn man, and my haircutting sessions with him only included a few conversational exchanges; a few pleasantries, and then, both he and I would lapse into silence while ‘P’ went about his work, competently and efficiently. (On my left, the barber’s son cut his customers’ hair in rather more conventional style: a free-wheeling conversation about sports, family, television, music–the whole nine yards.)

Then, a few weeks ago, awkwardness returned. I was due a for a haircut–badly. Unkempt and rough around the edges, I was dying to get cleaned up. My busy schedule meant that very few times in the week would allow me to visit the barbershop. One opportunity went by after another; finally, on a Friday morning, I resolved to reduce my hirsuteness before I went to work. Haircut or bust. I walked in only to find ‘P’ missing. On asking where he was, I was reassured–by the younger owner– he would be at work soon: “he shows up around this time; grab a seat.” I did so, and opened up a book to read. The minutes ticked by; my Friday could not wait for too long. As I read, I noticed that I was the only customer waiting in the shop. Once the haircut currently underway was completed, I would have the floor to myself. A previously unthinkable option had presented itself: betraying ‘P.’

And so it came to pass. As the customer ahead of me was cleaned up, I stood up and removed my jacket. I could not wait any longer. If I was lucky, my haircut would be complete before ‘P’ walked in and caught me cheating on him.

But as the white sheet went on, and as the clippers began their work, ‘P” walked in. We exchanged pleasantries; I cringed. My treachery was now a public matter. I could only hope that while my haircut proceeded another customer would engage him and distract him. But it was not to be. Bizarrely enough, for the next twenty minutes, while I received my haircut, the barbershop remained pristinely empty, even as ‘P,’ standing by his station next to me, stared moodily–and perhaps darkly and grimly–at the street outside.

That was one long haircut. It was made even more so by the fact that my barber kept up his usual stream of friendly chatter, to which I, with guilt racking every fibre of my being, reciprocated as best as I could (the Yankees, the Mets, local schools.)

Finally, the time came. I handed over my payment, included a tip, and then, as I headed out, bade everyone goodbye. Thankfully, ‘P’ squeezed out a smile–it looked like one–for me. So did the beaming young man who had just cut my hair.

I have no idea who is going to cut my hair the next time I walk through the doors of my barbershop. Stay tuned. I’m rough around the edges again.

GK Chesterton On Conservatism’s Necessary Changes

In Orthodoxy (Image Books, 1959) G. K. Chesterton writes:

Conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of changes. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must always be painting it again….Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. [pp. 15]

Wikipedia makes note in its entry on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, in the section on his most famous work, The Leopard that:

Perhaps the most memorable line in the book is spoken by Don Fabrizio’s nephew, Tancredi, urging unsuccessfully that Don Fabrizio abandon his allegiance to the disintegrating Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and ally himself with Giuseppe Garibaldi and the House of Savoy: “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

Indeed. And that conservative adage, as expressed above by Chesterton and Tancredi, has been quite vividly on display this election season. The ‘conservative’ party’s leading candidate for president is a decidedly unorthodox one who threatens to upend the hierarchy of the party’s leadership and is leading a revolt against the ‘establishment;’ riots are threatened if his march to the candidacy is interfered with by the party leadership; he is most definitely not reading from some prepared party script. That same conservative party has no interest in abiding by its constitutional responsibility to vote on the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice by the sitting president–a responsibility adequately established by historical, legal, political precedent. Should this be confusing to those thinking the Republican Party is a conservative party? Not really.

As I noted in my review of Lee Fang‘s The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right: 

The modern Republican Party supposedly suffers from ideological confusion. It is for the regulation of gay marriage and reproductive rights; it is against the regulation of industrial pollution, healthcare insurance, and workplace safety. It is for the reduced power of the executive branch, except when it comes to spying on Americans and declaring war. It is for the religious freedom of Christian evangelicals but not Muslim Americans. These seemingly disparate platforms actually display a coherent unity: the American Right is committed to preserving all hierarchy and imposed order: men over women, white over black, rich over poor, bosses over workers, Christian majorities over Muslim minorities. This love of hierarchy, of entrenched power, is manifest in the most visible face of opposition to the Obama Presidency: the Tea Party and the new crop of Republican representatives it has sent to Congress.

The Trump candidacy is a classic conservative candidacy: it seeks massive, sweeping changes precisely so that crucial hierarchies–like the ones made note of above–will be preserved. Populism to prop up hierarchy: that’s conservatism at its finest. (These thoughts have been expressed far more eloquently by Corey Robin in his The Reactionary Mind.)

Note: The GK Chesterton quote above is cited in Garry Wills‘ Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders pp. 143.

An Unsettling Vision Of An Ugly Word

I’ve been reading Garry Wills‘ Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1994; a light and entertaining read this election season) over the past couple of days–on the subway, naturally. On Monday night, as I rode back to Brooklyn from Manhattan to pick up my daughter on daycare, I came to the chapter on Andrew Young (under the rubric ‘Diplomatic Leader’). In it, I read the following paragraph on page 75:

One of [Martin Luther] King’s tactics was to go around the police and politicians to ask businessmen if they did not want peace for their community. Young was especially helpful here. He played a key role in forming an accord with Birmingham businessmen. “As the night dragged on, both sides tended to credit the mild, unflappable Andrew Young with ideas that achieved overall balance by proceeding in mixed stages.” [citing Taylor Branch, Parting The Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 (Simon and Schuster, New York, pp. 781)].

As I read this paragraph I did a double-take. I thought I had seen a word, which in point of fact was not present in the passage I had just read. Now, I sometimes see,  when I quickly glance at a portion of a text, a kind of verbal mash-up: words formed by running together the preliminary portion of a word in one below with the closing portion of a word in the line immediately below. Imagine for instance that I had run together the ‘gl’ of ‘glance’ above with the closing ‘ow’ of the ‘below’ which closes the sentence to form ‘glow.’ (A line intervenes between these two, but you catch my drift I hope.) When I look again, the word is gone.

But the ‘vision’ I had just had was of a different kind. For I had, disturbingly enough, seen that vile word, ‘nigger.’ Apparently, I had run together the ‘ni’ of ‘night’ with the ‘gge’ of ‘dragged’ (present in the quote from Taylor Branch’s book.) This was distinct from the kind described above, because I had ‘used’ words in the same line.

I think I have an explanation for why this happened. Look at the words that surround ‘night’ and ‘dragged’ in this passage: [Martin Luther] King, police, politicians, peace, Birmingham. When I see these words, especially in the context of the situation being described–the Civil Rights struggle in the Deep South–images present themselves to me. They are iconic; they arise without conscious invocation–you might know the ones I mean (police dogs, water cannons, marches, truncheons). They bring with them other connotations and associations.

One of them is the unending racial abuse directed at those who went on sit-downs, marches, rallies, and university and school integrations. The most common word in that torrent of abuse was ‘nigger,’ hurled again and again, with venom and spite and anger, conveying an unconcealed hatred and violence, spat in the face of those who dared step into the front line. I’ve seen it in the pages of every book on the civil rights struggle; I’ve heard it in every documentary.

On Monday night, I looked at a reminder of the battle for Civil Rights, and I saw it again. Perhaps this election season has primed me for it.

Note: For a similar experience, do read this post related to the Vietnam War.

John Dewey On The ‘Wonder’ Of Communication

In Experience and Nature (Chapter Five, ‘Nature, Communication and Meaning’) John Dewey writes:

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful….[its] fruit…participation, sharing, is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales. When communication occurs, all natural events are subject to reconsideration and revision; they are re-adapted to meet the requirements of conversation, whether it be public discourse or that preliminary discourse termed thinking. Events turn into objects, things with a meaning. They may be referred to when they do not exist, and thus be operative among things distant in space and time….Events when once they are named lead an independent and double life. In addition to their original existence, they are subject to ideal experimentation: their meanings may be infinitely combined and re-arranged in imagination, and the outcome of this inner experimentation which is thought may issue forth in interaction with crude or raw events….Where communication exists,  things in acquiring meaning, thereby acquire representatives, surrogates, signs and implicates, which are infinitely more amenable to management, more permanent and more accommodating, than events in their first estate.

This morning, as I worked through this passage with my students, I tried my best to convey what Dewey was getting at in his quite-accurate judgment of communication being a ‘wonder,’ a secular miracle. And that is because communication is something quite fundamental, an almost constitutive part of ourselves. Transubstantiation merely transforms one substance into another; communication makes us who we are. If it is through civilization and society and politics we become ourselves, it is because all of those ‘joint activities’ rest on, and are made possible by, communication. (Language is not mentioned in the passage above, and yet it is present.)

For theorizing about the world is communication with others; thinking is communication with ourselves. (Recall that Dewey said elsewhere that ‘thought is intrinsic to experience,’ which suggests that communicating might be intrinsic to experience too.)  Through it–and its linguistic medium–we make a subjective world objective and receive confirmation we are not mired in a solipsistic maze. (As one of my students noted, the distinction between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ is one established by dint of communication.)  The world acquires meaning through our theorizing; through communication with ourselves and others, we are able to make ourselves into creatures of temporality, possessing both a remembered past–memory is a kind of communication with an older self, where we receive sensations and images as signals and messages of times gone by–and an anticipated future. We are no longer mired only in the present even as it is all we have at any given instant. The matters we communicate about, by virtue of being public and shared, acquire new meanings and shadings; they can be subject to different uses and experimentations to solve this world’s challenges as when they arise to pose barriers for our intended projects.

The theorized world is really the world tout court, and it is so because we have communicated about it with ourselves and others.

RIP Hilary Putnam 1926-2016

During the period of my graduate studies in philosophy,  it came to seem to me that William James‘ classic distinction between tough and tender-minded philosophers had been been reworked just a bit. The tough philosophers were still empiricists and positivists but they had begun to show some of the same inclinations that the supposedly tender-minded in James’ distinction did: they wanted grand over-arching systems, towering receptacles into which all of reality could be neatly poured; they were enamored of reductionism; they had acquired new idols, like science (and metaphysical realism) and new tools, those of mathematics and logic.

Hilary Putnam was claimed as a card-carrying member of this tough-minded group:  he was a logician, mathematician, computer scientist, and analytic philosopher of acute distinction. He wrote non-trivial papers on mathematics and computer science (the MRDP problem, the Davis-Putnam algorithm), philosophy of language (the causal theory of reference), and philosophy of mind (functionalism, the multiple realizability of the mental)–the grand trifecta of the no-bullshit, hard-headed analytic philosopher, the one capable of handing your  woolly, unclear, tender continental philosophy ass to you on a platter.

I read many of Putnam’s classic works as a graduate student; he was always a clear writer, even as he navigated the thickets of some uncompromisingly dense material. Along with Willard Van Orman Quine, he was clearly the idol of many analytic philosophers-in-training; we grew up on a diet of Quine-Putnam-Kripke. You thought of analytic philosophy, and you thought of Putnam. Whether it was this earth, or its twin, there he was.

I was already quite uncomfortable with analytical philosophy’s preoccupations, methods, and central claims as I finished my PhD; I had not become aware that the man I thought of as its standard-bearer had started to step down from that position before I even began graduate school. When I encountered him again, after I had finished my dissertation and my post-doctoral fellowship, I found a new Putnam.

This Putnam was a philosopher who had moved away from metaphysical realism and scientism, who had found something to admire in the American pragmatists, who had become enamored of the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations. He now dismissed the fact-value dichotomy and indeed, now wrote on subjects that ‘tough-minded analytic philosophers’ from his former camps would not be caught dead writing: political theory and religion in particular. He even fraternized with the enemy, drawing inspiration, for instance, from Jürgen Habermas.

My own distaste for scientism and my interest in pragmatism (of the paleo and neo– varietals) and the late Wittgenstein meant that the new Putnam was an intellectual delight for me. (His 1964 paper ‘Robots: Machines or Artificially Created Life?’ significantly influenced my thoughts as I wrote my book on a legal theory for autonomous artificial agents.)  I read his later works with great relish and marveled at his tone of writing: he was ecumenical, gentle, tolerant, and crucially, wise. He had lived and learned; he had traversed great spaces of learning, finding that many philosophical perspectives abounded, and he had, as a good thinker must, struggled to integrate them into his intellectual framework. He seemed to have realized that the most acute philosophical ideal of all was a constant taking on and trying out of ideas, seeing if they worked in consonance with your life projects and those of the ones you cared for (this latter group can be as broad as the human community.) I was reading a philosopher who seemed to be doing philosophy in the way I understood it, as a way of making sense of this world without dogma.

I never had any personal contact with him, so I cannot share stories or anecdotes, no tales of directed inspiration or encouragement. But I can try to gesture in the direction of the pleasure he provided in his writing and his always visible willingness to work through the challenges of this world, this endlessly complicated existence. Through his life and work he provided an ideal of the engaged philosopher.

RIP Hilary Putnam.

The Trump Rally In Chicago Was Not ‘Shut Down’

The Donald Trump rally in Chicago on March 11th was not ‘shut down.’ It was called off by Trump himself, a decision for which the Chicago Police stated they had not extended any support (they did not consider the situation to be out of hand.) The protesters showed up in numbers thanks to advance organization, and were greeted in the same way all protesters are at Trump rallies–with abuse, and threats of violence. But this time, the protesters were different; they had come in numbers and were much, much louder. And there is strength in numbers, which means that the same bullying which saw single, isolated protesters get beaten, abused, mocked, and ultimately ejected from other Trump rallies, ran up against a wall of locked arms and even louder chants. Violence against such numbers quickly fades from viability: if anyone had dared throw a sucker punch at a protester, it would have been responded to with ten punches. Bullying works when you have superior numbers and/or perceived or actual strength. When you don’t, you get bullied right back. Bullies always, always, back off when they are first confronted with anything resembling a credible threat. Trump behaved like all bullies do when an ostensible victim fought back – he ran for the hills.

One reaction to these events is that the protest and the ‘shutting down’ plays into Trump’s electoral strategy: he can play the role of victim, claim his right to free speech is being infringed (an idiotic claim because–other than in exceptional cases–First Amendment rights cannot be infringed by private actors), and enable him to fire up his ‘base.’ Now, it can’t possibly be a consequence of this position that no one should protest at Trump’s rallies–that would have had the ironic effect of shutting down Trump opponents’ rights to protest. This suggests there are only two options for protesters. Either loners show up to to protest and get beaten and abused as before, or for safety’s sake, masses show up as in Chicago, provoke loud, angry responses, and Trump shuts down again. In that case, he will keep whining like a bully, perhaps his base will be ‘energized’ and they will become more ugly, which might in turn lead other Trump-opponents becoming even more turned off by him, and possibly becoming more ‘energized’ in turn. Or, perhaps protesters could protest outside Trump rallies, and not inside their venues. But in that case,  my guess is that those protesters would still be attacked and abused by Trump supporters–remember, this is a crowd that has been fed possibly illegal incitements to violence from Trump for a while now. Either there are ‘rumbles’ inside, or they will happen outside. That’s what Trump folks do. And if there is a rumble, I suspect the protesters will fight back–if they have the numbers–and take the chance that the Trump rally will be ‘shut down’ and for that fact to be blamed on them.

The claim that the Trump campaign got what it wanted, and that therefore, loud mass protests at Trump rallies should cease misses out on the fact that Trump opponents also got what they wanted: a demonstration of unity and capacity to mobilize, and strength in numbers, . They too will get ‘endless publicity;’ they too know how to manipulate social media.

This is democratic politics–messy, crude, with all its rough edges–in action. People speak, people protest. Democracy would be absent if the government intervened and threw people into jail just for speaking their minds. Those who have been inciting violence for months now bear all the responsibility for the curvature of the arc that has tended from speech to violence.

Hillary Clinton On The Reagans’ AIDS Legacy: Anatomy Of A ‘Triangulation’

Here is my take on what went wrong with Hillary Clinton’s ‘the Reagans started a national conversation about AIDS‘ statement (for which, after a ginormous shitstorm on social media had broken out, she apologized.)

In preparation for her remarks, Clinton must have been briefed–by not very competent people–that Nancy Reagan‘s funeral was a good opportunity to ‘reach out’ to, say,  ‘Reagan Republicans’ and ‘Reagan Democrats’ (the ‘Reagan Republican’ is a mythical creature more moderate than today’s flecked-with-spittle and foaming-at-the-mouth Republican types.) She could do this by acknowledging the Reagans’ ‘legacy’ in a domain of interest to Americans–hopefully crossing ‘political divides’–and show herself to be continuous with that American political tradition, which does not denigrate America or its greatness, or see anything fundamentally wrong in its social, economic and cultural polity that cannot be fixed by ‘more of the same.’ She would, at once, show herself concerned with public health issues, and also, by saying nice things about iconic Republican figures, perhaps ensure a softer reception for herself in the Republican demographic at the time of the general election.

Hillary Clinton was not prompted to give the response she did give by a Reagan-sympathizer questioner, who artfully used a leading question like “And what do you think about the Reagans’ starting a national conversation about AIDS at a time when no one else was interested in doing so?” To which, Clinton, in an awkward attempt to avoid saying “What are you on, crack?”–might have said instead, “Yes, it was a good thing.” Instead Clinton volunteered the response she did make, and moreover, she explicitly did it as a way of making the point that the Reagans were an outlier in an atmosphere that was not conducive to their efforts to begin a ‘national conversation.’ Clinton’s mistake might have seemed more genuine had she simply said something like “Nancy Reagan worked on many public health initiatives like those for stem-cell research, Alzheimers, AIDS, and other deadly diseases.” Then, she could plausibly say that she had mistakenly included AIDS in that list. But she did no such thing. Instead, as noted, she set the Reagans’ ‘work’ on AIDS apart from an otherwise dominant attitude towards the disease.

Most reasonably competent students of American politics and history know about the shameful chapter that is the Reagan administration’s response to the AIDS crisis. A supposedly liberal politician, one as experienced as Hillary Clinton, should know much better. (The interview linked above shows that Clinton has fairly detailed knowledge of that period at her disposal; she invokes the Brady Bill and stem-cell research as examples of ‘unpopular’ political positions Nancy Reagan took on.) Did she somehow imagine that this aspect of American history has been forgotten? Even more problematically, and this is where a cynical politics becomes acutely visible, did Clinton act on the basis of a calculus that suggested it was perfectly allright to anger the gay community while reaching out to Reaganites? Clinton might have, of course, thought that the folks who were activists in the 1980s had simply died off, leaving no traces of their battles with an uncaring presidential administration. All of these calculations would be very peculiar for a candidate to make in the America of 2016, one which has legalized same-sex marriage.

On a purely electoral reckoning, this incident shows, yet again, an uncomfortable truth: Hillary Clinton is not a very good politician. On a moral reckoning, this is cynicism, pure and simple.

A Cup Final On The Playground’s Jungle Gym

On Wednesday evening, as is my usual practice, I picked up my daughter from her daycare, and began walking home with her. The unseasonably warm weather suggested a little detour in the tot-lot on the way back was a very good idea. (I remain unenthusiastic about visiting playgrounds but my sense of parental duty overrides this unease of mine.) There, in the playground, my daughter confronted a familiar challenge: the combination jungle-gym/slide which serves as centerpiece for juvenile mayhem.

This particular variant features two slides, three sets of stairs, and two ingenious tests of balancing/climbing ability on the side: a set of semi-circular rings with a running bar which can be traversed by a child who grasps the side and then walks from ring to ring, and a set of interlocking metallic ‘Olympic rings’ set at a slope, which can be used as steps of a sort. My daughter had mastered the first challenge a while ago, but the second remained out of reach. The leg length and the grip strength it required were bridges too far. Moreover, my daughter would often freeze when I would start to instruct her on how she could solve the various challenges the rings posed. I had backed off, worried that I might be making her more anxious.

Now, there we were yet again, staring at a familiar nemesis. We had visited the playground last week, and then again, a familiar pattern had manifested itself: my daughter ascended partway, stopped, overcome by doubt and anxiety; I stepped closer, offered some advice; she froze; she dismounted. Now, she went off again to climb the rings, and I hung back, checking my phone for messages. I was determined to stay out of this one.

My daughter took her first steps, and soon hit a dead-end. She shifted her feet and moved left. Then, she reached up and pulled, moving up to the second level of rings. Now, again, she was stuck. For a moment, she took one foot off the rings, a sign that she was considering dismounting. I groaned inwardly. Then the foot went back on, and she moved right, looking for a better foothold. Crucially, she had not turned around to look for me. Perhaps she was going to go ahead with this thing. She looked up, saw a hold. She would have to reach and pull herself up to a spot from where she would be secure and could then use the bars on the side to take the final step to safety.  I tensed.

I realized, at that moment, that I was experiencing a sensation that I had previously only felt while watching sports: cup finals, penalty shoot-outs, tennis tie-breaks, the frenetic closing stages of a one-day cricket game. I was ready to be overcome with elation, while simultaneously terrified at the thought of failure. I was urging ‘my team’ on.

My daughter pulled, and swung up. She fumbled on the bars, but grasped them nevertheless, and then stepped to safety. As she did so, she suddenly broke into a grin and announced, “I did it; all by myself!”

Standing behind her, I had executed, as circumspectly as possible, the kind of punching-the-air ritual I often execute when a goal or touchdown is scored, a catch taken, an ace served. My team had won. Against itself.

Gramsci And Nietzsche As Philosophers Of Culture

In ‘Socialism and Culture’ (reprinted in The Gramsci Reader, Selected Writings 1916-1935, David Forgacs ed., New York University Press, 2000) Antonio Gramsci writes:

We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopaedic knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture really is harmful….It serves only to create maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity….It serves to create the kind of weak and colourless intellectualism…which has given birth to a mass of pretentious babblers….The young student who knows a little Latin and history, the young lawyer who has been successful in wringing a scrap of paper called a degree out of the laziness and lackadaisical attitude of his professors, they end up seeing themselves as different from and superior to even the best skilled workman…But this is not culture, but pedantry, not intelligence, but intellect, and it is absolutely right to react against it.

Gramsci’s critique here resonates with the kind that Nietzsche offered of the ‘educated philistine,’ the superficially educated man who runs about collecting ideas and consuming the cultural products that are considered the ‘trophies’ of his ‘culture,’ but who never learns their value, nor masters their relationships and interconnections so as to raise himself to a higher state of being (where a ‘unity of style’ may be manifest.) This pedant remains hopelessly confined to accepted and dominant modes of thinking and acting, unable to summon up a genuine critical, reflective viewpoint on his place in this world. As such, he is all too susceptible to becoming a reactionary, a defender of the established status quo, a hopeless decadent. These attitudes would be benign if they were not also affected with a fatal arrogance that breeds a dangerous politics.

Gramsci goes on to claim that:

Culture is something quite different. It is organization, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations.

The invocation of ‘organization’ and ‘a coming to terms of one’s own personality’ also strikes a Nietzschean note here. The truly cultured person, one possessing a ‘unity of style,’ has brought together his disparate drives and energies and inclinations into a unified whole, an act requiring a ‘discipline of one’s inner self.’ He has also, as Nietzsche suggested, recognized his own self for what it is, and ‘joyfully’ accepted it.

The concentration camp commandants who read Goethe and listened to Beethoven at night in their offices were philistines in this view; they were mere consumers of ‘culture’; they lacked ‘discipline’ and remained susceptible to their atavistic urges. Their ‘pedantry,’ their philistinism, and the lack of intelligence it implies were an integral component of their moral failures.

Artificial Intelligence And Go: (Alpha)Go Ahead, Move The Goalposts

In the summer of 1999, I attended my first ever professional academic philosophy conference–in Vienna. At the conference, one titled ‘New Trends in Cognitive Science’, I gave a talk titled (rather pompously) ‘No Cognition without Representation: The Dynamical Theory of Cognition and The Emulation Theory of Mental Representation.’ I did the things you do at academic conferences as a graduate student in a job-strapped field: I hung around senior academics, hoping to strike up conversation (I think this is called ‘networking’); I tried to ask ‘intelligent’ questions at the talks, hoping my queries and remarks would mark me out as a rising star, one worthy of being offered a tenure-track position purely on the basis of my sparking public presence. You know the deal.

Among the talks I attended–a constant theme of which were the prospects of the mechanization of the mind–was one on artificial intelligence. Or rather, more accurately, the speaker concerned himself with evaluating the possible successes of artificial intelligence in domains like game-playing. Deep Blue had just beaten Garry Kasparov in an unofficial chess-human world championship in 1997, and such questions were no longer idle queries. In the wake of Deep Blue’s success the usual spate of responses–to news of artificial intelligence’s advance in some domain–had ensued: Deep Blue’s success did not indicate any ‘true intelligence’ but rather pure ‘computing brute force’; a true test of intelligence awaited in other domains. (Never mind that beating a human champion in chess had always been held out as a kind of Holy Grail for game-playing artificial intelligence.)

So, during this talk, the speaker elaborated on what he took to be artificial intelligence’s true challenge: learning and mastering the game of Go. I did not fully understand the contrasts drawn between chess and Go, but they seemed to come down to two vital ones: human Go players relied, indeed had to, a great deal on ‘intuition’, and on a ‘positional sizing-up’ that could not be reduced to an algorithmic process. Chess did not rely on intuition to the same extent; its board assessments were more amenable to an algorithmic calculation. (Go’s much larger state space was also a problem.) Therefore, roughly, success in chess was not so surprising; the real challenge was Go, and that was never going to be mastered.

Yesterday, Google’s DeepMind AlphaGo system beat the South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol in the first of an intended five-game series. Mr. Lee conceded defeat in three and a half hours. His pre-game mood was optimistic:

Mr. Lee had said he could win 5-0 or 4-1, predicting that computing power alone could not win a Go match. Victory takes “human intuition,” something AlphaGo has not yet mastered, he said.

Later though, he said that “AlphaGo appeared able to imitate human intuition to a certain degree” a fact which was born out to him during the game when “AlphaGo made a move so unexpected and unconventional that he thought “it was impossible to make such a move.”

As Jean-Pierre Dupuy noted in his The Mechanization of Mind, a very common response to the ‘mechanization of mind’ is that such attempts merely simulate or imitate, and are mere fronts for machinic complexity–but these proposals seemingly never consider the possibility that the phenomenon they consider genuine or the model for imitation and simulation can only retain such a status as long as simulations and imitations remain flawed. As those flaws diminish, the privileged status of the ‘real thing’ diminishes in turn. A really good simulation,  indistinguishable from the ‘real thing,’ should make us wonder why we grant it such a distinct station.