Science
Philosophers Among New Class of AAAS Fellows
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced its new class of fellows, and a couple of philosophers are among them.
Most of the 502 newly named fellows are scientists and engineers, but there are also a small number of researchers in the humanities and social sciences.
The philosophers listed are:
- Kevin Elliott, Michigan State University
- Laura Ruetsche, University of Michigan
The AAAS fellowships are “a distinguished lifetime honor within the scientific community.” According to the AAAS, “the new Fellows will receive a certificate and a gold and blue rosette pin (representing science and engineering, respectively) to commemorate their election and will be celebrated at a forum on September 21, 2024” in Washington, DC.
The complete list of fellows is here.
(Please let us know if we missed someone who should be included in this post.)
The post Philosophers Among New Class of AAAS Fellows first appeared on Daily Nous.
Being Human in Digital Cities – review
In Being Human in Digital Cities, Myria Georgiou explores how technology reshapes urban life, transforming how we relate to ourselves, each other and the space around us. Examining the digital order’s influence, including datafication, surveillance and mapping, Georgiou’s essential book advocates for centring humans through the paradigm of the “right to the city” based on social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability, writes Samira Allioui.
Being Human in Digital Cities. Myria Georgiou. Polity. 2023.
Technology, embodied through so-called smart cities (places where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital solutions for the benefit of their inhabitants and business), has been implemented into all aspects of public and private urban life. Recently, the United Nations created the Hub for Human Rights and Digital Technology as a way to encourage cities to strategise around their “right to have digital rights,” stating that: “Together, as we seek to recover from the pandemic, we must learn to better curtail harmful use of digital technology and better unleash its power as a democratising force and an enabler”.
Myria Georgiou’s Being Human in Digital Cities addresses the question, how do digital cities change what it means to be human in relation to digital urbanism and digital justice? It has never been more urgent to understand how the digital order functions and its implications for controlled cities and lives. The city is where so many hopes and fears emerge for the future of humanity, and therefore studying its changing nature in a digitalised world is crucial. Moreover, the relationship between the transformation of cities and the right to the city has not yet been seriously explored.
It has never been more urgent to understand how the digital order functions and its implications for controlled cities and lives.
Intrigued by the growing symbolic power of technology in regulating the city, Georgiou demonstrates how an unstable but tenacious urban order is planned, performed, and sometimes resisted on platforms and networks to sustain the social order in cities that experience perpetual crisis. Georgiou’s principal thesis is that the digital order reflects the revived and contradictory mobilisation of humanist values across different quarters of the city. Human-centric conceptions of technology are at the heart of an emerging digital urban order. According to Georgiou, these values are gaining renewed currency by imagining and planning relationships between humans and data.
The book identifies the rhetorics and performances of the digital order as core elements of processes of change in the relational constitution of cities, technologies, and power (42). The book’s generative force comes from Georgiou’s assertion that a dynamic comeback of humanist values in and for the digital city is underway. Her central argument is that humanism matters when it mobilises (populist humanism), normalises (demotic humanism) and contests (critical humanism) power (143-144). Considering the various implications of being human in digital cities is a critical topic at a time when declarations and manifestos have emerged worldwide claiming to protect citizens’ digital rights. Digital rights are a range of protections regarding access to the internet, privacy, transparency regarding how data is used, control over how data is used and democratic participation in municipal technology decisions. They need to be protected because they represent the bridge that links our traditional human rights with the complexities of the online world, ensuring that our digital identities, decisions, and interactions are treated with the same protection and respect as in the physical world.
[Digital rights] link our traditional human rights with the complexities of the online world, ensuring that our digital identities, decisions, and interactions are treated with the same protection and respect as in the physical world.
The digital order has become a post-neoliberal response to neoliberal crises, and it breaks from the strategies of neoliberalism in different ways (31). It is a new order which “emerges because of widespread pressures to recognize the sacredness of life and the value of society” (30). Through “the promotion of unpredictability, openness and diversity, the digital order integrates instability into stability” (31). The author subtly explains why she privileges the category of the human and consequently rehumanisation-dehumanisation in understanding the digital order. Since technology is more and more infiltrating our consciousness, we become addicted to our devices that distract us and feed us information. But paradoxically, while these changes drive us to retreat to corners of comfort, we try to conquer divisiveness by cultivating communities. A research journey across eight cities of the global North and South – from London to Seoul, and from Los Angeles to Athens – over seven years has shaped Georgiou’s understanding of the digital order. From this grounding, she explains how she adopts a decentred conception of the city which privileges a transnational and transurban vision and practice. Georgiou’s methodological choice of a critical humanist approach promotes an open, creative, and participant-led approach that includes the perspectives of humans.
Georgiou adopts a decentred conception of the city which privileges a transnational and transurban vision and practice.
Her compelling research reveals two paradoxes. First, migrants’ experiences, gathered through interviews conducted with 60 teens in Athens and Los Angeles, present rehumanisation-dehumanisation as a continuum rather than a blunt proposition. Second, the Global South is ever present in cities of the Global North (113). Georgiou’s findings suggest that becoming urban reinforces autonomy. For example, migrants’ everyday experiences, mediated and linked through urban migration and technology, reveal their acute awareness that the development of autonomy protects them from certain kinds of dehumanisation such as exclusion Moreover, during this research conducted in the context of a European project on young people’s digital lives, Georgiou witnessed sentiments of enthusiasm and relief when participants were talking about a commonly used urban technology: Google Maps, including Google Earth and Street View (115). Participants were relieved because “becoming urban is not only about learning but also about being an autonomous subject in navigating city”.
Her work evidences the value of everyday technologies (namely, smartphones and apps) and the concept of “secret city” (117) for those excluded from so many other spaces of representation. A secret city only exists in a sociotechnical imagination. As a place of consumption, it is imaginary in the sense that it remains discovered and consumed through technical devices. In fact, as smart cities begin to become dehumanised realms and behavioural data is neglected, the place of humans risks being devalued. Georgiou’s research is an invaluable attempt to claim and interrogate human experiences in their entanglement with the digital in urban settings.
Georgiou describes predictive policing, the practice of using algorithms to analyse massive amounts of information to predict and help prevent potential crimes as a mundane form of symbolic violence regularly applied in the city (126). This is part of a wider trend of states’ increasing the surveillance of citizens, with surveillance understood as any personal data acquisition for management influence or entitlement. Predictive policing systems have been empirically shown to create feedback loops, where police are frequently sent back to the same neighbourhoods, regardless of the true crime rate. In the US, predictive policing tends to disproportionately target more African Americans, areas with higher concentrations of Latinos and Black, Asian and Minority ethnic (BAME) people.
In response to these trends of profiling and surveillance, the right to the city emerges as a new paradigm that provides an alternative framework with which to rethink cities and human settlements based on the principles of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability.
In response to these trends of profiling and surveillance, the right to the city emerges as a new paradigm that provides an alternative framework with which to rethink cities and human settlements based on the principles of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability. According to Georgiou, it presents “a revamped moral vision which points to potentially democratising processes that recognize and address urban injustices” (97). It is worth noting that Georgiou, unlike other authors, prefers to address the concept of the right to the city rather than the “right to a smart city”, her research does not advocate an approach focused on “smart citizens”, “smart citizenship” and “smart cities”. She avoids a citizen-centred approach and instead privileges life, freedom, and wellbeing, expanding her framework to include all humans in urban settings, whether they are citizens or migrants.
Finally, the book, brimming with secondary research, opens new critical avenues into techno-political research on digital cities. More precisely, knowing that humans are less studies as agents involved in the creation of digital, the book sheds light on urban humanity which often remains an opaque category. It highlights humans as agents of change and the displacement of questions of power but also of rights to the city. She investigates essential questions about what it means to be human in digital cities, suggesting that “the most compelling claims to humanism come from those who experience dehumanisation”. Such offerings beg the question of readers, who is and isn’t seen as fully human within city spaces and how does the dawn of the digital city affect those boundaries?
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Goldilock Project on Shutterstock.
A Healthy Coral Reef Is a Symphony
This story is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.
You might have heard that the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest collection of coral reefs, a natural wonder stretching over 1,400 miles off Australia’s Queensland coast, hosting 400 types of coral and thousands of fish species. Since 1981, it has been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and most of its ecosystem is protected.
But you might not know that it is also the stage for daily underwater concerts. Take a dive or listen to marine biologist Steven Simpson’s recordings and you hear grunt fish grunt, shrimps snap, damselfish chirp, clownfish grumble, sperm whales click and humpback whales sing their soprano mating songs that are audible over tens of miles.
“When I tell them fish have ears, people look at me like I’m mad,” says University of Bristol professor Steve Simpson. He and his colleagues were initially ridiculed by their peers when they started eavesdropping on fish communication nearly 20 years ago, but their sound experiments have been recreated successfully so many times that they are established science now. Recent research has revealed that dolphins call each other by name, turtle embryos coordinate their birth with one another from inside their eggs, and a coral reef is also a symphony that attracts coral larvae. Much like doctors use stethoscopes to assess the healthy heartbeat of a patient, the interdisciplinary science of ecoacoustics, which investigates natural sounds and their relationship with the environment, has emerged as an effective solution not only for monitoring the health of marine ecosystems, but also for restoring them.
Fish and crustaceans use all their senses to find suitable habitat. Credit: Ryan McMinds Flickr
The world has lost half its coral reefs in the last 30 years, and researchers are racing against the clock to support these invaluable habitats in their battle against warming waters, pollution, overfishing and acidity. “Scientists predict that, if we continue along the current global warming trajectory, coral reefs will entirely disappear from the oceans within 30 years, threatening the livelihoods of the more than one billion people who depend on them for food, medicine, and coastal protection,“ the late University of British Columbia professor Karen Bakker writes in her fascinating book The Sounds of Life. “The disappearance of corals is a death knell for many other species.”
As the coral reefs disappear, so too does their chorus. “When a reef diminishes, the diversity and complexity of the sound goes missing, too,” Simpson says. “It becomes an acoustic desert. You can really hear the difference between an overfished reef and a marine protected area. You can hear the biodiversity.”
Reasons to Be Cheerful · Coral Reefs
When Steven Simpson attended the UN climate conference COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022, he and his team wanted to demonstrate to the attendees the difference in biodiversity between protected and unprotected marine areas. By coincidence, they happened upon a sound technician who had all the necessary gear because he had just live-streamed a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert from the Egyptian pyramids. “We dropped a hydrophone out on a buoy and beamed the sound back to the conference, where the director general of the United Nations and all the politicians and experts were able to listen to the life-streaming of coral reef sounds,” Simpson says. “It was an immersive, emotional experience. Sound moves us on a dance floor, in a movie, and to be listening to a live coral reef is something very powerful.”
It moves fish, too. Fish and crustaceans use all their senses to find suitable habitat, including audio. And just like a good soundtrack might attract humans to a movie or concert, the sounds of a vibrant reef attract fish and coral. When Simpson played the recording of healthy reef sounds over compromised reefs in Australia, he found that double as many fish settled into these reefs. Simpson compares his underwater DJ job “to a real estate agent who sings the praises of a new housing development long before it’s an exciting place to live.”
Credit: Steve Simpson
When a reef diminishes, Steve Simpson explains, it “becomes an acoustic desert,” as the reef pictured here did after bleaching.
For a study recently published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, researchers set up an underwater speaker broadcasting the bustling sounds of a thriving reef on a degraded reef off the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. The experiment confirmed that the underwater concert attracts up to seven times more coral larvae and fish than a decimated reef without acoustic enrichment.
Coral larvae are often microscopically small and float in the ocean before they settle permanently on a reef. They don’t have brains or ears, but studies have discovered they are sound-sensitive, probably through their tiny hairs (epidermal cilia) that detect vibrations.
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Seventy years ago, legendary oceanographer Jacques Cousteau described the underwater world as “the silent world,” but we now know that is far from the truth. Not only is there sound down there, but that sound is complex, rich and varied over time. Simpson distinguishes between “the morning chorus when the daytime fish emerge and the dusk chorus when the nocturnal fish come out; you hear an increase in the breeding season and during the new moon when it’s darker. There is a temporal structure to the soundscape.”
Technology has accelerated both the number of recordings and the speed of their evaluation. Steve Simpson remembers “building a Walkman in a barrel with a synchronized swimming pool speaker that we hung over the reef with the car battery in the 1990s. We pretty much managed to miss all the output of the fish that year.” But technology improved after 2000. That’s when Simpson, his graduate student Tim Gordon and other pioneering marine biologists like Robert McCauley, a professor at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, found that fish, clams, lobsters, even corals and their microscopically small larvae all use sound to find their way to healthy habitat.
A pink anemonefish swimming in the Great Barrier Reef. Credit: Donald Davesne / Flickr
“Animals are using a hierarchy of senses as they try to resolve complex challenges in their environment,” Simpson explains. “We realize that the fish at sea are doing much what we would do if we were moving to a new city: we’d perhaps get on the internet and do some research into different suburbs that we might want to live in. Fish might use sounds to find the coast or a healthy reef, then the smell of mangroves or seagrasses, and then once they get close, they use vision.”
Simpson compares it to trying to find a friend that you lost in a crowded music festival. “You might wander around the crowd for hours. But if you know they wear a yellow t-shirt and you lost them at the hot dog stand next to the jazz stage, you can listen for the jazz, then smell the hot dogs and then look for the yellow t-shirt. Except for fish, it’s life or death whether they make the right decision where to settle.” Fish, Simpson quips, are “much smarter than people at festivals.”
In the years 2015 and 2016, Simpson’s team was working in the pristine marine protected areas of the Northern Great Barrier Reef when a catastrophe hit. A heat wave bleached out the reefs so fast Netflix made a blockbuster documentary film about it, Chasing Coral.
“We watched the reef die in front of us,” Simpson remembers. “That was a real wake-up call that no matter how much effort we are putting into local marine protected areas, we have to also protect them against global impacts. We started using what we had learned to see if any of this could serve as tools to help reefs recover.”
Credit: SHEBA
Though coral larvae don’t have brains or ears, studies have shown that they are sound-sensitive, probably through tiny hairs that detect vibrations.
The Great Barrier Reef is a prominent example where scientists are able to monitor biodiversity through sound. “We are able to identify individual species that make sounds,” Simpson says. “We can hear who’s living on a reef and who is active.”
Playing healthy reef sounds helped attract fish and coral to repopulate the reefs. “We’re almost back singing at full volume with all the right characters in the orchestra,” Simpson says. “That then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of that restoration because that reef is calling out literally to the next generation of fish, crabs, corals, and larvae that are able to find their way onto that reef and replenish it.” Simpson adds that even in the bleached parts of the reef, some corals grew back.
Simpson has worked all over the planet, not only in Australia but also in the Caribbean, the Red Sea and Asia, including on the SHEBA Hope Reef in Indonesia, the largest coral reef restoration project in the world, which attempts to restore more than 185,000 square meters of reef by 2029. The scientists planted corals to spell their message, HOPE, in giant letters across the once-degraded habitat.
Despite the rapid reef loss around the world, Simpson calls himself “an ocean optimist.” “It’s the resilience of nature that gives me hope,” he says. He views the emerging science of ecoacoustics as a pathway to innovative solutions. To him, this is less a story about the loss of habitat than about “the value of acoustic enrichment.”
The SHEBA Hope Reef has been regrown to spell the word ‘HOPE’ to drive awareness. Credit: SHEBA
Working in tandem with other marine biologists who replenish coral through breeding and replanting them, scientists are attempting to determine which methods of conservation and restoration are the most effective. “We have the opportunity to quite rapidly rebuild small areas of reef,” Simpson says, “and offer acoustic enrichment to the areas that have been hit the worst.”
Wherever he dives, he realizes, “We are changing the soundtrack of the ocean through overfishing, climate change and poor environmental protection.” He has his work cut out for him: “It’s our gift to change the soundtrack of the ocean in this generation, but to change it for the better, not the worse.”
The new insights call for noise protection. “Noise pollution is also a problem when we run the experiments,” Simpson realized. “Which made us investigate, what’s the noise doing to the fish down there?”
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He found that motorboat noise causes certain fish not to feed their young as well and prevents larvae from developing, which has an obvious solution: “We can keep boats away from breeding grounds and nurseries. And new technology improves the sound outputs of boat engines — modern engines are far quieter.”
Simpson does not gloss over the fact that we’re facing a “bumpy” next few decades. “But the future is still totally in our hands,” he says, “and the direction of travel looks promising.”
At COP27 he was asked “whether this was all actually just a waste of time in the long term, delaying the inevitable.” He responded that five years ago, he might have feared that he and his colleagues were just prolonging the death of coral reefs. “But the global data indicates there is a better future ahead. You might say that coral reefs are the first ecosystems we could lose,” he admits. “But that then makes them the first ecosystems we could save, and if we can save coral reefs, we can save anything.”
The post A Healthy Coral Reef Is a Symphony appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
How Do You Say ‘Danger’ in Sperm Whale Clicks?
This is part one of a two-part series. Read part two here.
Sperm whales don’t sing melodious, moaning whale songs like their humpback cousins. The biggest predator on the planet communicates in clicks, called codas. Some compare the sounds to popping popcorn or frying bacon in a pan. For CUNY biologist David Gruber, it resembles “morse code or techno music.”
Gruber, the founding president of Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, often listens for hours in his New York office to the sperm whale chats his team has recorded in the Eastern Caribbean.
Project CETI records sperm whale codas around the Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica. Courtesy of Project CETI
CETI focuses on sperm whales for several reasons. One reason is that it can build on the audio recordings that whale biologist Shane Gero has already been collecting for 15 years with the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Gero was able to show that sperm whale families have different dialects, much like British and American English. “Another reason is that the sperm whale has been vilified as a killer, Moby Dick as a leviathan,” Gruber says. “Meanwhile it could be one of the most intelligent, sophisticated communicators on the planet.”
While the humpback whales sing their soprano songs primarily for mating, sperm whales are communicating to socialize and exchange information. CETI has already discovered that the communication patterns are complex. “Their codas are clicks, they are like ones and zeros, which is very good for cryptographers,” Gruber explains. “The combination of advanced machine learning and bioacoustics is slated to be the next microscope or telescope in terms of our ability to really listen more deeply and understand life at a new level.”
Reasons to Be Cheerful · Sperm Whales
CETI’s team operates a giant whale-recording platform from a 40-foot sailboat off the coast of Dominica, a volcanic island in the Caribbean with a stable sperm whale population. Both by tagging the whales and installing whale listening stations with microphones dangling deep down into the ocean on floating buoys, CETI is recording several terabytes of data every month. The scientists are creating a three-dimensional interactive map of the whales within a 20-kilometer radius, combining sounds with data such as the whales’ heart rates.
The post How Do You Say ‘Danger’ in Sperm Whale Clicks? appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
First, Do No Harm
The appalling mistreatment of ME/CFS patients continues, based on the myth that it’s all in the mind.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 12th March 2024
It’s the greatest medical scandal of the 21st century. For decades, patients with ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) have been told they can make themselves better by changing their attitudes. This devastating condition, which afflicts about 250,000 people in the UK, was psychologised by many doctors and scientists, adding to the burden of a terrible physiological illness.
Long after this approach was debunked in scientific literature, clinicians who championed it have refused to let go. They continue to influence healthcare systems, governments and health insurers. And patients still suffer as a result.
ME/CFS saps sufferers of energy and basic physical and cognitive functions, confining many to their homes or even their beds, often shutting down their working lives, social lives and family lives. The extreme seriousness of this condition, and the fact that there is neither a diagnostic test nor a validated treatment, places a special duty of rigour on doctors and researchers. But patient care has been compromised, and useful research inhibited, by the lingering conviction of many practitioners that ME/CFS is “psychosocial”: driven by patients’ beliefs and behaviour.
This was a story that found me. In 2021, after writing about long Covid, I was accused by the psychiatrist Prof Michael Sharpe of spreading it. Apparently, you could induce such illnesses by discussing them. Investigating further, I was astonished by the failure in his presentation to support his claim with evidence, and perturbed by his lack of satisfactory answers to my questions. Sharpe takes a similarly “biopsychosocial” approach to ME/CFS, one which at the time of his long Covid presentation still dominated medical practice in the UK.
You can trace the origins of this model to a paper published in 1970. Without assessing a single patient or interviewing a single doctor, it blamed an earlier outbreak of post-viral ME/CFS on “mass hysteria” based on case notes alone. The reasoning included the fact that the outbreak affected more women than men. For centuries, doctors have been readier to classify women’s illnesses as “hysterical” or psychosomatic than they have men’s. ME/CFS, like long Covid, hits women harder, so, the thinking goes, it must be all in the mind.
Freedom of information requests to the National Archives show how the biopsychosocial model became embedded in research practice and government policy. The minutes of a meeting on government benefits policy in 1993 give a sense of the position of the psychiatrist Simon Wessely. As summarised in the minutes, he told the meeting that ME/CFS is “not a neurological disorder”. He reportedly claimed that apparently severe cases were likely to result from either a “misdiagnosed psychiatric disorder or poor illness management”, while many cases were “iatrogenic”: caused by medical examination or treatment. His views were apparently that “the worst thing to do is to tell them to rest”, “exercise is good for these patients”, “most cases can be expected to improve with time” and, perhaps most shockingly, “benefits can often make patients worse”.
Every one of these claims now appears to be without foundation. But they became the basis of the dominant approach in this country to attempting to treat ME/CFS. The toll of patient suffering is hard to imagine.
In 2007 this belief system became official guidance: the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) advocated two treatments arising from the biopsychosocial model of the disease: graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). In 2011, a major study, the Pace trial, part-funded by the Department for Work and Pensions, claimed to show that GET and CBT were effective in treating ME/CFS. The study later turned out to be biased and profoundly flawed.
The believers were championed by the Science Media Centre, of which (now Professor Sir) Simon Wessely was a founder member. Some of the media’s reporting, influenced by the centre, portrayed ME/CFS patients as abusive, threatening, workshy and resistant to treatment.
As the doctrine spread through the medical profession, some practitioners adopted the same attitudes. A paper promoting psychological treatments lamented the “difficult challenge of … managing patients’ resistance to the treatment”, which arose from “lack of acceptance as to the rationale”. Nurses observed that “the patient should be grateful and follow your advice [but] the patient is quite resistant and there is this thing like you know, ‘The bastards don’t want to get better’.”
We now know that patients were right to resist interventions that have proved to be both useless and harmful. The impacts were often horrific. A study in Switzerland found that the most powerful factor contributing to suicidal thoughts among people with ME/CFS was “being told the disease was only psychosomatic”.
Some patients were forced into these treatment regimes, even locked in psychiatric units to make them comply. Some parents of children with ME/CFS were referred to social services for supposedly encouraging their belief that they were ill. Though unevidenced, the biopsychosocial model influenced the government’s social security policy, reinforcing its coercive treatment of people seeking disability benefits.
In 2020, an independent review by Nice found that the quality of all the research promoting GET and CBT was either “low” or – mostly – “very low”. A paper reported that the thresholds in the 2011 Pace study at which patients were deemed to have recovered had been altered after the trial began. Several studies concluded that GET was actively harmful, as the exercise regime it promoted could worsen patients’ symptoms, causing post-exertional malaise. One paper reported that it was detrimental to the health of at least 50% of patients.
As a result, in 2021 Nice concluded that GET and CBT should not be used to treat ME/CFS (though more conventional CBT can help patients with the psychological impacts of the illness). Similar shifts had already happened in the United States and the Netherlands. The condition is now correctly recognised as a physiological illness. Last month, a paper in the journal Nature Communications proposed a possible physiological mechanism for the condition.
But some people never give up. Despite an overwhelming weight of evidence, the old believers, including Sharpe and Wessely, have continued to try to justify their model, obliging Nice recently to publish a strong refutation. Protected by powerful friends in the media, they could breathe life into their hypothesis long after it had been debunked. The new evidence-led thinking has yet to penetrate parts of the health system: some patients are still being mistreated.
This is not how science should work. Beliefs should be based on evidence. In medicine, there is a double duty: respect the evidence and listen to patients. There is a psychological intervention that could improve the lives of people with ME/CFS: an apology and recognition of the harms they have suffered.
Philosophical Readings Related to the Eclipse
A total solar eclipse will be taking place on April 8th.
[via NYT]
What, if anything, does this have to do with philosophy?
Laura Papish, a philosopher at George Washington University, is hoping Daily Nous readers may have some positive answers to that question.
She writes:
I’m wondering if you might consider soliciting from folks suggested readings to link up with the upcoming solar eclipse. My students will be viewing it, some within totality zones, and we will have a discussion later that day about their experiences. I’m interested in any readings that might supplement or enhance their viewing experience, and I was thinking that other instructors might be similarly interested in some crowd-sourced reading suggestions.
I would think that there is work in the history and philosophy of science on eclipses, yet perhaps there are philosophical or philosophy-related writings on the emotions, the environment, epistemology, ethics, meaning, metaphor, perception, time, and other topics that have some relevance to eclipses. Maybe there’s some philosophically-suggestive fiction related to eclipses?
Your suggestions welcome.
The post Philosophical Readings Related to the Eclipse first appeared on Daily Nous.
Nuclear frisson: On Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer
The best scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes towards the end of the movie. The titular physicist is talking to Einstein, recalling a previous conversation in which they’d discussed the possibility that an atomic bomb would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘When I came to you with those calculations’, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reflects, ‘we thought we might start a chain reaction that could destroy the entire world’. ‘What of it?’ asks Einstein, as the rain begins to fall. ‘I believe we did’, says Oppenheimer. Cue the movie’s final, surreal sequence: a fusillade of nuclear missiles spearing upwards through a canopy of cloud, shooting through space as Oppenheimer looks on from the fuselage of a military aircraft, and—the movie’s closing image—a tsunami of fire spreading over the Earth. The logic of nuclear proliferation rendered as apocalypse. [More here.]
Chess, nostalgia and AI: Two recent essays for Griffith Review
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The defence: Chess vs artificial intelligence
Nostalgia on demand: Streaming memories in the experience machine
The eighth day of creation: how the new cultural technologies take us into the posthuman
In Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018), the British writer Aaron Bastani puts a leftist spin on the Promethean view of technological development. While noting the revolutionary potential of recent genetic innovations, he insists that the latter are no different in kind from the selective breeding practices of the past: they are simply another great leap forward in humankind’s mastery over unruly nature. Referring to the movie Elysium (2013), which depicts a world where biotechnologies are only available to the very rich, Bastani’s only political concern is whether the new genetic technologies will be privately or socially owned. All other questions are beside the point, at least as far as he is concerned. As he puts it, with alarming insouciance: ‘Before editing the human genome at scale such efforts should be subject to vigorous public debate. But how much difference is there between improving nutrition for health outcomes and optimising our biological programming? Not much’. [More here.]