Anil K Seth in Aeon:

What is the best way to understand consciousness? In philosophy, centuries-old debates continue to rage over whether the Universe is divided, following René Descartes, into ‘mind stuff’ and ‘matter stuff’. But the rise of modern neuroscience has seen a more pragmatic approach gain ground: an approach that is guided by philosophy but doesn’t rely on philosophical research to provide the answers. Its key is to recognise that explaining why consciousness exists at all is not necessary in order to make progress in revealing its material basis – to start building explanatory bridges from the subjective and phenomenal to the objective and measurable.

In my work at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in Brighton, I collaborate with cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, brain imagers, virtual reality wizards and mathematicians – and philosophers too – trying to do just this. And together with other laboratories, we are gaining exciting new insights into consciousness – insights that are making real differences in medicine, and that in turn raise new intellectual and ethical challenges. In my own research, a new picture is taking shape in which conscious experience is seen as deeply grounded in how brains and bodies work together to maintain physiological integrity – to stay alive. In this story, we are conscious ‘beast-machines’, and I hope to show you why.

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From The Sync Project:

Let’s start by looking at a certain musical arrangement: the tritone. Defined in the simplest possible terms, a tritone is “a musical interval of three whole steps.” For those who can read and understand music, the definition of a tritone can get a lot more detailed than that, so it’s best illustrated with an actual audio sample.

We immediately recognize the tritone from its use to create tension in film, or even to act as a marker between scenes in a play. It’s not that the tritone arrangement is particularly scary per se, it’s that it’s lacking in harmony (it’s dissonant) and is somehow incomplete, throwing the listener off balance and leaving you expecting more (or rather fearing the worst) as it’s played over and over again…

In the Middle Ages the tritone was named “diabolus in musica” (devil in music) and the church in fact banned it from being played. It was seen as the very antithesis of God, which the church believed would be represented by beautiful angelic harmonies rather than incomplete sonic dissonance.

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Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

In the 1960s, the English psychologist Peter Wason devised an experiment that would revolutionize his field. This clever puzzle, known as the “Wason selection task,” is often claimed to be “the single most investigated experimental paradigm in the psychology of reasoning,” in the words of one textbook author.

Wason was a funny and clever man and an idiosyncratic thinker. His great insight was to treat reasoning as an enigma, something to scrutinize both critically and playfully. He told his colleagues, for instance, that he would familiarize himself with their work only after doing his own experiments, so as not to bias his own mind. He also said that before running experiments, researchers—quixotically—should never really know exactly why they were doing them. “The purpose of his experiments was not usually to test a hypothesis or theory, but rather to explore the nature of thinking,” a pair of his students wrote in Wason’s obituary. (He died in 2003.) “His aim was to reveal a surprising phenomenon—to show that thinking was not what psychologists including himself had taken it to be.”

The groundbreaking nature of Wason’s selection task may have been a result of his unconventional style. In one version of the task, one subject (always one—he spurned testing subjects in groups) is presented with four cards lying flat on a table, each with a single-digit number on one face and one of two colors on the other. Let’s imagine that you’re Wason’s subject. The first and second cards you see are a five and an eight; the third and fourth cards are blue and green, respectively. Wason liked to chat with his subjects, but he probably didn’t tell them that this logical puzzle was “deceptively easy,” which was how he described it in the paper he would later write, in 1968.

Wason tells you that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is blue. Which cards must you turn over in order to test the truth of his proposition, without turning over any unnecessary cards?

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The Dalai Lama and Arthur C. Brooks in the New York Times:

In many ways, there has never been a better time to be alive. Violence plagues some corners of the world, and too many still live under the grip of tyrannical regimes. And although all the world’s major faiths teach love, compassion and tolerance, unthinkable violence is being perpetrated in the name of religion.

And yet, fewer among us are poor, fewer are hungry, fewer children are dying, and more men and women can read than ever before. In many countries, recognition of women’s and minority rights is now the norm. There is still much work to do, of course, but there is hope and there is progress.

How strange, then, to see such anger and great discontent in some of the world’s richest nations. In the United States, Britain and across the European Continent, people are convulsed with political frustration and anxiety about the future. Refugees and migrants clamor for the chance to live in these safe, prosperous countries, but those who already live in those promised lands report great uneasiness about their own futures that seems to border on hopelessness.

Why?

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Samanth Subramanian in Aeon:

The old mill town of Winooski in Vermont gets an average of 75 inches of snow per year, and temperatures in January fall below -10ºC. In 1979, in the clutch of a global oil shock, Winooski’s 7,500 citizens found themselves paying an annual $4 million for heating – around $13 million in today’s money. Desperate to spend less and still keep warm, the city council approved a tremendous plan: to build a dome over Winooski. Manufactured out of clear plastic, and held aloft by metal cables, the dome would enclose a square mile in area. Fans would pull in fresh air, to be cooled or heated as necessary. To leave or enter, cars would have to pass through a double-doored airlock, as if Winooski had turned into a space station. Within the controlled climate under the dome, heating expenses would fall by 90 per cent; you could, one planner exulted, ‘grow tomatoes all year round’. A federal government agency promised research funding. The next year, R Buckminster Fuller, the designer and inventor who had popularised the geodesic dome, came to Winooski to bless the project.

Through the preceding decades, Fuller had become a darling of the counterculture. He defied disciplinary boundaries, describing himself as a ‘comprehensive anticipatory design scientist’ working across architecture, science and economics. Marshall McLuhan, that other great hippie hero, heralded Fuller as ‘the Leonardo da Vinci of our time’. It wasn’t just in his work that Fuller described a famously eccentric orbit. He wore three watches, and his diet consisted for years of steak, prunes, Jell-O and tea. He compiled many of his sage-like musings – as well as his laundry bills and other irrelevancies – in 4.5 tonnes’ worth of scrapbooks, known as the Dymaxion Chronofile; in this manner, he recorded his life in 15-minute chunks for more than 60 years. Fuller wasn’t the first person to dream of domed cities – they’d featured for decades in science fiction, usually as hothouses of dystopia – but as an engineering solution, they feel thoroughly Fullerian. Implicit in their concept is an acknowledgement that human nature is wasteful and unreliable, resistant to fixing itself. Instead, Fuller put his faith in technology as a means to tame the messiness of humankind. ‘I would never try to reform man – that’s much too difficult,’ Fuller told The New Yorker in 1966. Appealing to people to remedy their behaviour was a folly, because they’d simply never do it. Far wiser, Fuller thought, to build technology that circumvents the flaws in human behaviour – that is, ‘to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions’. Instead of human-led design, he sought design-led humans.

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Ryan Leeds in Manhattan Digest:

Harris, known to television audiences as Frasier Crane’s manipulative agent, Bebe Glazer on Frasier and the slippery Felicia Tilman on Desperate Housewives, is also a familiar face to New York theatergoers. She was the Evil Stepmother in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella and recently, was featured in the musical comedy It Shoulda Been You. She scooped up a Drama Desk and Tony Award in 2002 for her role as Mrs. Meers, a nasty white slaver owner in the long running hit musical, Thoroughly Modern Millie.

The Texas native has donned the mantle of malevolence for many roles, but she couldn’t be more soft spoken and genteel as a human being. She’s currently starring in the late Horton Foote’s quiet and beautifully acted play, The Roads to Home. Set in 1920s Houston, the play explores the intimate, day to day conversations between three women and the men in their lives. Michael Wilson, who was Foote’s longtime collaborator, directs Primary Stages’ critically acclaimed production.

More here.

“Oh, nation, think hard on which who of you
you choose to rule the house
because it is not easy (once it's in)
to evict the soul of a louse.” —Roshi Bob

The Double Voice

Two voices
took turns using my eyes:
One had manners,
painted in watercolours,
used hushed tones when speaking
of mountains or Niagara Falls,
composed uplifting verse
and expended sentiment upon the poor.

The other voice
had other knowledge:
that men sweat
always and drink often,
that pigs are pigs
but must be eaten
anyway, that unborn babies
fester like wounds in the body,
that there is nothing to be done
about mosquitoes;

One saw through my
bleared and gradually
bleaching eyes, red leaves,
the rituals of seasons and rivers

The other found a dead dog
jubilant with maggots
half-buried among the sweet peas.

by Margaret Atwood
from Selected Poems
Touchstone Books, 1976
.

Scott Lemieux in The New Republic:

The next president will enter office with a potentially pivotal Supreme Court seat vacant. It’s an issue that may pale next to such world-historically important questions as Hillary Clinton’s email management, but it’s still very important. If Clinton captures the White House but Republicans retain the Senate, it is extremely likely that the Supreme Court blockade the GOP started in March will persist for four more years. Just as congressional Republicans have reconciled themselves to Donald Trump, they have already convinced themselves that the only principled course is to deny Clinton the ability to nominate anybody to the Supreme Court. The result would be the hobbling of an entire branch of government, which is just one example of how the chaos of Trumpism will live on even if he loses the election on November 8.

There are scenarios in which we could see the confirmation of a ninth justice to fill the seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death. If Trump pulls off an upset victory, it would almost certainly come with a Republican Senate. This would lead to generic Republican nominees being confirmed to the federal courts. Some conservatives have been skeptical that Trump would reliably nominate conservative judges because of his less-than-robust commitment, historically speaking, to social conservatism. But such doubts are almost certainly misplaced. Even if Trump secretly wanted to appoint moderate judges, it’s not clear where he would find them (David Souter, one of the last of his kind, is not going to come out of retirement). And as George W. Bush’s failed nomination of Harriet Miers showed, Senate Republicans would reject any Supreme Court or crucial circuit court nominee who doesn’t have a demonstrable record of conservatism.

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Adam Shatz in The LA Times:

He had inherited the catastrophic wars that his predecessor had launched in the Middle East, and just before he entered office, came the financial crisis. But the hope that Obama’s presidency would be (as he himself put it) “transformative” also reflected an older longing that he might help the country to overcome its racial divide and become genuinely united.

Hand in hand, we would follow him to the “post-racial” Promised Land, as if he were one of those “magical Negro” characters in Hollywood films who devote their lives to solving their white friends’ problems. There was always something a bit kitsch about this dream, which was mainly expressed by whites; for obvious reasons, black Americans tend to have a far more sober view of the country’s ability to address, much less transcend, its racial divisions.

As it turned out, the Obama era would supply only one racial miracle: his election. Determined not to be seen as the “president of black America,” he studiously avoided the subject of race; when forced to address it, he succumbed to banalities about the need for a “national conversation.” Faced with the deepening crisis in black America — police killings of unarmed civilians, including children; the epidemic of mass incarceration; economic and political disenfranchisement — Obama seemed unwilling, or unable, to respond with the sense of urgency that once had led him to become a housing organizer in Chicago.

As late as July 2014, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote that for many black Americans, “the thrill is gone.”

In the last two years, however, Obama has finally assumed his historic role with moral seriousness, in part, one suspects, because he accepted the fact that his presidency would not be transformative, and that he could, at best, be a bulwark against the racist furies that it unleashed; a civilized counterpoint to the vengeful white noise of the red states. As Régis Debray famously argued, “Revolution revolutionizes the counter-revolution.” And so it has been with the racial counter-revolution in America, a know-nothing white nativism that has found its führer in Donald Trump.

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Andres Velasco in Project Syndicate:

Many of the men and women who turned out for the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund in early October were saying something like this: “Imagine if the Republicans had nominated someone with the same anti-trade views as Trump, minus the insults and the sexual harassment. A populist protectionist would be headed to the White House.”

The underlying view is that rising populism on the right and the left, both in the United States and in Europe, is a straightforward consequence of globalization and its unwanted effects: lost jobs and stagnant middle-class incomes. Davos men and women hate this conclusion, but they have embraced it with all the fervor of new converts.

Populism is not about taxation (or jobs or income inequality). It is about representation – who gets to speak for the people and how.

Advocates of democracy make some exalted claims on its behalf. As Abraham Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, it is “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” But modern representative democracy – or any democracy, for that matter – inevitably falls short of these claims. Voting in an election every four years for candidates chosen by party machines is not exactly what Lincoln’s lofty words call to mind.

What populists offer, Mueller says, is to fulfill what the Italian democratic theorist Norberto Bobbio calls the broken promises of democracy. Populists speak and act, claims Mueller, “as if the people could develop a singular judgment,…as if the people were one,…as if the people, if only they empowered the right representatives, could fully master their fates.”

Populism rests on a toxic triad: denial of complexity, anti-pluralism, and a crooked version of representation.

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Zygmunt Bauman in Eurozine:

As with other “movements of the indignant”, the occupation of Wall Street was, so to speak, an “explosion of solidarity”. Explosions, as we know, are sudden and shocking, but also short lived. And sometimes these movements were (and are) “carnivals of solidarity”. As Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin taught, carnivals are breaks in the monotony of the mundane, bringing a momentary relief from the all-powerful, overwhelming and revolting day-to-day routine. They suspend, declare the routine null and void, albeit only for the duration of the festivities. Once the energy is spent and the poetic exultation subsides, the revellers return to the prose of the quotidian.

Routine needs periodic carnivals as a safety valve – to release the pressure. From time to time, dangerous emotions need to be discharged, bad blood drained off, repugnance and aversion to routine unloaded so that its debilitating and disabling might can be restored. In short, the chances of solidarity are determined less by the passions and hubbub of the “carnival” than by the silence of the dispassionate routine. Do you want solidarity? If so, face and get to grips with the routine of the mundane; with its logic or its inanity, with the powers of its demands, commands and prohibitions. And measure your strength against the patterns of daily pursuits of those people who shaped history while being shaped by it.

Devaluation

To put it mildly, at least in our part of the world, day-to-day drudgery is inhospitable to solidarity. However, it has not always been so. For within the society of builders, which formed on the eve of the modern era, there was a veritable factory of solidarity. It was built upon the vigour and density of human bonds and the obviousness of human interdependencies. Many aspects of contemporary existence taught us a lesson about solidarity and encouraged us to close ranks and march arm in arm: the teeming platoons of workers within factory walls, the uniformity of the working routine regulated by the clock and imposed by the production line, the omnipresence of intrusive supervision and the standardization of disciplinary demands – but also the conviction of both sides of the class divide, that is the managers and the managed, that their mutual dependence was inevitable and didn't leave any room for evolution. So it was only sensible to work out a permanent modus covivendi and self-imposed restraint, which this compromise absolutely demanded.

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Dwight Garner at the New York Times:

Marina Abramovic’s first major performance art piece was based on an old Russian drinking game. In front of an audience in 1973, she took a series of sharp knives and stabbed each as quickly as she could into the spaces between her fingers. (In the game, there is only one knife and you take a drink for each nick.) Blood went everywhere.

The art crowd loved it. Ms. Abramovic knew she’d found her medium. “No painting, no object that I could make, could ever give me that kind of feeling,” she writes in “Walk Through Walls,” her new memoir. “It was a feeling I knew I would have to seek out, again and again and again.”

This finger-stabbing phase was followed by one that might be described as, “I take off my clothes and cut myself, sometimes while lying on ice.” There was her I-run-into-things-while-naked period. There was a crawl-on-the-floor-with-snakes era.

She was there early, and she became known as the godmother of performance art. Her pieces combined masochism and spirituality, often to intense effect. They were a form of “body horror,” to use a phrase that has been applied to films directed by David Cronenberg.

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Jedediah Purdy at Bookforum:

Could there be a more propitious time to come out, as the title of Jason Brennan’s book announces, Against Democracy? From the Brexit vote to the Trump nomination, both liberal and conservative bien-pensants are grumbling that, if this is what the people decide, then maybe the people should not decide after all. If that is your mood, Brennan has catnip for you.

Brennan divides citizens into three gimmicky species: hobbits, who don’t care much about politics and just want to live their lives; hooligans, keenly interested in politics, who tend to be hyper-partisan and filter everything through their tribal loyalties; and vulcans, who just want to reason about the facts. He is fond of hobbits, but thinks they shouldn’t be encouraged to care about politics, because more civic engagement would probably just turn them into hooligans. In fact, most of political life is a twenty-four-hour hooligan party, bringing out the most strident and irrational in its participants. The trick is to make the world safe for hobbits by giving more power to the vulcans. So Brennan proposes to replace democracy—or at least leaven it—with “epistocracy,” rule by those who have knowledge.

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Sally Potter at The Guardian:

John Berger is 90. An excellent age. In his presence, however, age seems utterly irrelevant. This is not just because John seems to live in a perpetual present, forever scanning the world around him with as much intensity as he might ever scan the world within – and therefore seems to live without a trace of nostalgia – but also because he is full of excitement and curiosity about the future.

The story of my encounters with him begins before I was born. John taught art to my mother. She was a teenager and he was only a few years older. It was probably for no more than a few months, a temporary job in a school in north London. Yet somehow, throughout my childhood, his name floated in my consciousness, conjuring up the image of a dashing young soul, handsome, charming, militant and dedicated to the making of art. At 21, already an inspiring teacher.

The next moment that he came sharply into focus for me was with his book – and the television series that it emerged from – Ways of Seeing. His way of expressing ideas – pithy, plain language, bold – and, above all, the ideas themselves that he shaped with such clarity, had the startling effect of feeling both brand new and yet obvious, creating a feeling of recognition. Of course, of course, we all thought; that is how it is; it’s just that we hadn’t found the words for it before.

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