Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Nearly two years ago now I wrote here about Country Garden, a Chinese property development company, which had just then (October 2023) defaulted on its bonds, which I noted was "one of the manifestations of a sudden slowdown in China's property sector" which had for years until then been one of the PRC's key sources of wealth creation. Country Garden and its cooperating creditors have been struggling ever since to turn it around, making it once again a viable concern (not a "zombie" company). This month, there has been progress. Country Garden announced an agreement with a core group of banks that together hold 49 percent of its offshore debt. Its restructuring plan requires it to slash its offshore debt burden by 78%, so this agreement could be a key step.   In February 2024, Ever Credit, a wholly owned unit of Kingboard Holdings of Hong Kong, filed a winding-up petition against Country Garden effectively demanding a liquidation. The demanded liquidation st...

  Yesterday we discussed the limit of the process of compounding interest. As we move through even shorter periods, from semi-annual to quarterly to monthly compounding and so forth, and as we approach an infinity of infinitesimal periods, i,e. continuous compounding, we find the number 2.71828 arises to stare us in the face as a limit.  This was Jacob Bernoulli's result. So why is the number called Euler's number, and sometimes just e? Did Euler name it for himself? And, if so, isn't that an injustice? Shouldn't it be called b? Well, Bernoulli found 2.71828... but he neglected to name it.  Gottfried Leibniz, the man recognized as THE founder of calculus in the German speaking world, seems to have called it "b" in letters he wrote in 1690 and 1691.  Perhaps this was a recognition of Bernoulli's role.  More important, though, Bernoulli neglected to explore the properties of this number outside of banking.  It was Euler (pictured above) who defined it as the...

 How does continuous compound interest work?  Well, suppose the magical "Bank of Bernoulli" offers you 100 percent interest per annum. Or, in decimal terms, a return of 1.0.  Great. You put a dollar in the bank and the bank gives you two dollars at the end of the year, one dollar representing the principal, the other the yield. Only one simple computation has to be made, so we can say of this situation that n = 1. It gets better.  Bank of Bernoulli [so named after the great 17th century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli] decides to compound semi-annually.  You put in one dollar, and on June 30 you are credited with 100 percent interest for half a year, or $0.50. In the second half of the year, you earn the same 1/2 of the underlying annual rate, for the redefined principal amount, this time on $1.50.  So you earn $0.75 between June 30 and December 31. This means you have $2.25 waiting for you at the end of the year. You can keep this up, presuming a calculation...

Brett Kavanaugh: champion of free speech. Really?  Well, he seems to be on the right side this time, and in a perilous time one takes one's help where one can find it.  On August 14, the US Supreme Court rejected an emergency bid from a social media sponsors' industry group, NetChoice.  NetChoice had sought a block to enforcement by the state of Mississippi of an age certification law. So by refusing to hear the matter on an emergency basis, SCOTUS has allowed enforcement to proceed for now. But it has not yet addressed the substantive issue.  The law in question says that social media sites must verify the ages of their users and make efforts to protect young people from being exposed to harmful material.  Non-compliance brings civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation, as well as the possibility of criminal prosecution. This case seems to me to belong to an enormous set -- the set of all cases in which "think of the children!" is pretext. The real goal is...

I'll just let yall watch this for yourselves without much ado from me. Enjoy.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU8mj9lid0s

In recent discussions of artificial intelligence, the idea of "large language models" has become closely associated with that of AI itself.  A "large language model" is an algorithm that is fed, as a training set of data, a huge array of human-generated writing, generally internet available, that includes relevant problems (the questions that users might ask it) as well as their solutions.  Anyway, in a new paper computer scientists challenge how intelligent this sort of artificial intelligence is. The paper is called "The Wall confronting large language models" and it is the work of Peter Coveney and Sauro Succi.  The idea is that LLMs aren't some wave of the future, about to be scaled up in ways that will put people like me out of work. Rather, LLMs are hitting a wall at their current level of application. (Whew.)  LLMs, they say, are built o n stochastic, non-Gaussian architectures that make them prone to error accumulation.  The models can be rewor...

Tariffs have long been understood as a form of taxation -- indeed, the Trump administration brags about the revenue they are bringing in. But from whom? Not from China or Brazil -- in the first instance, from the importers, and then from whomever it is to whom the importers can raise prices. This is not a mystery. The founders/framers perfectly well understood that tariffs are taxes and they provided that Congress would have to enact just as it has to enact other revenue measures. It has the "power of the purse," while the executive has the power of the sword.  Within Congress, it is important that the chamber closest to the popular will, the House of Representatives, is supposed to take the leading role. Article one, sect. 7 speaks broadly of 'bills for raising revenue" as Congress' prerogative. Article I, section 8 turns that broad phrase into a list specifically including "duties, imposts and excises" -- i.e. tariffs.  The Trump administration seeks ...

  Viktor Orban of Hungary has become paradigmatic of a sort of soft dictatorship, maintaining at least some of the mechanisms of an open society, a republic, with one hand but subverting those mechanisms in favor of an illiberal authoritarianism on the other.  When did Orban and his regime earn this paradigmatic status?  The key years were 2011-2012. That is when his regime drafted a new constitution behind closed doors, rushed it through parliament in nine days and passed it on a party line. This tailor-made constitution saw a reduction in the number of seats in parliament from 386 to 199. Orban maintains tight control over this shrunken body. A few years later (2020) he had that parliament vote for a bill that created a state of emergency without a time limit, essentially giving Orban the power to rule without them.  Now, though, there are signs of life in resistance, forming around the figure of a former disciple of Orban, now on the outs largely over the issue of...

I went not long ago to a viewing of TOGETHER, a supernatural body-horror movie with, I was told, a philosophical angle. It stars Alison Brie, best known as the voice of Diane in BoJack Horseman and as Annie in the sitcom Community.  TOGETHER does have a philosophical angle, and I admire Brie, but I cannot recommend this movie. SPOILER ALERT.  Do not read further if you want the plot twists to surprise you.  The plot plays out at two sites: one a rather generic US "big city," the other a much more bucolic environment at least an hour by car or train ride away.  The screenplay offers few specifics about these locations (and the principal photography, I'm told, was done in Australia) but from what specifics we do get the story begins on the US west coast -- let us say Seattle -- and the bucolic scenes are well inland.  The central couple are Tim and Millie, played by Dave Franco and Brie.  Their relationship has fallen on a bad patch -- they are not sure whe...

An old joke comes to mind.  The joke is from a comedy team that once had a primetime television show but that has now been largely forgotten. Burns and Schrieber.  "Is there life on Mars?" "Only on Saturday night." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Less amusingly: NASA's Perseverance rover has been analyzing the chemistry of a rock they call Cheyava Falls, within the Jezero Crater.  Those names mean nothing to you?  Fair enough. What may mean something, though, is the fact that Cheyava Falls shows evidence of the passage of water through porous rock. and contains organic compounds, i.e. compounds that on earth would be associated with life.    "Are we alone in the universe?" "No, but the neighborhood has been pretty dead lately."  

  A year ago I devoted a post to the name "Myron Kriegman". Just for the heck of it, because it is the middle of August and a time traditionally devoted to something less than full seriousness, I will reproduce that post here. The illustration, of a random mnemonic device, is new for this year.  --------------------------------------------------------      Myron Kriegman !  I had a moment recently in which I had been blocked looking for the name for a certain character in the John Updike novel ROGER'S VERSION (1986).  Now I am determined not only to remember the name but to make it the subject of a blog post. So ... here it is!   I no longer have the book around: I may have donated it to a library at some point in recent years. The novel turns largely on a three-way argument over God and the worshipper: whether there is a God and whether that question can be answered by reason or requires faith. Kriegman occupies the "no to God -- and yes to ...

  Last week I quoted Plotinus about how the soul may use the body as an instrument without thereby sharing the experiences of the body.  In the comments beneath that post, one will see Henry's observation that, if "soul" here means "mind," the observation is unremarkable. If soul means something else, it is nonsensical.  Allow me to expand. Plotinus is using "soul" here to mean "active intellect," and he is expounding on a distinction between the active and the passive intellect.  Centuries before him, Aristotle had written in De Anima , that "knowledge in activity is identical with the subject; but knowledge in potentiality pre-exists in the individual...."  That is one of the more mysterious of his observations! And no, more context would not resolve the mystery but would deepen it.  Here is the context if you want it. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Vital_Principle/Book_3/Chapter_5 The "knowledge in potentiality" ...

This is the final post of a "philosophy week" and this is a blog with the phrase "Jamesian Philosophy" in its name.  So we come around to James' philosophy today. To his mind, I am sure, the relationship of mind and body was THE snaggiest and most consequential of philosophical issues.      In 1904, James wrote an introduction to an English translation to a work of Fechner, THE LITTLE BOOK OF LIFE AND DEATH,  He (James) wrote in the introduction that energy fluctuations "can be superimposed and compounded, the smaller on the greater, as wavelets upon waves.  This is as true in the mental as in the physical sphere. Speaking psychologically, we may say that a general wave of consciousness rises out of a subconscious background, and that certain portions of it catch the emphasis, as wavelets catch the light." A lot is happening in this brief passage.  One part of it is that James had a history of hostility to the idea of the compounding of consciousness....

 For fans of the original Star Trek .  Let us remember for a fleeting moment an episode in which Captain Kirk, with some help, defeats a robot that had been holding him prisoner. In part at least this victory is won by telling the robot "I am a liar." The paradox is too much, the robot blows its fuses, and Kirk gets back to his ship.  This is of course a tight version of the old Cretan paradox. The original version was just "All Cretans are liars" spoken by a Cretan. Not much of a paradox at all, actually.  And St. Paul makes a brief reference to it without mentioning its paradoxical nature.   There are lots and lots of Cretans.  For any one Cretan to say "we're such a lying bunch" is not paradoxical. It may seem like to speaker is giving himself too much credit as a supposed exception to that generalization: still, no paradox.  A Cretan might even say " all Cretans are liars" and be considered to have spoken hyperbolically.  Perhaps a commun...

Rest in peace Paul Kallagas. I read in Leiter's blog about his passing.  Letter is just passing along what he encountered from a professor at McGill University.  Kalligas has been the leading scholar on the work of Plotinus, a great Greek philosopher of the third century AD (or, if you prefer, CE).  He wrote a thr ee volume commentary on Plotinus' major work, the ENNEADS. Kalligas writes in (modern) Greek, but two volumes of these three are available in English.  Since this is our all-philosophy week, and since Kalligas would probably like it, let us quote a bit from Plotinus -- the founder of neoplatonism, a systematic re-working of Plato's Platonism.  Plotinus is nowadays much more read about than read. Most of those of us who read philosophy, or even read about, philosophy at all have essentially left Plotinus' texts as a reservation for such scholars as Kalli gas.  But let us read one paragraph together. Plotinus:  We may treat of the Soul as in th...

Existential Comics, a very philosophy-literate humor website that I'm pretty sure I've invoked here before, has a funny item up about Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. You can read it and behold it yourself here: www.existentialcomic.com/613.  The gist of it is that Frege and Russell are portrayed as boxers, engaged in a championship match to become THE defining philosopher of a logicist foundationalism about mathematics.  During the actual "bout" on this subject, Frege famously said "arithmetic totters!"  At any rate, in the comic version of it, Russell and Frege are portrayed as both knocked out and flat on their respective backs at the end.  I gather the point is that logicism, as to the philosophy of mathematics, tottered.  And after, as folks like the barber who shaved every man in town looked on from the audience, I imagine (the comic does not go this far) that Cantor and Godel strode into the ring, bent upon developing a humbler conception of both m...

Only recently heard of it.  The term apparently refers to jobs in which a worker is expected to work from 9 in the morning to 9 at night, six days a week.  Quick arithmetic: 12 x 6 = 72.  So a 996 schedule is 72 hours.  Sounds like either a sweatshop or office work for workaholics.  The very existence of such a casual nickname for such conditions suggests that talk of "work-life balance" and such has become passe.  That's unfortunate.  I liked that kind of talk.