Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  We return to Andrew and Briony.  There is a bit in chapter three in which Andrew is describing to his therapist a road trip: our two young lovers drive from southern California to New York City, taking turns at the wheel.   For the final stretch, beginning in Atlanta, the one not at the wheel was reading out loud. From Mark Twain, whom Andrew refers to, familiarly as MT.  The book of MT's that enlivened those hours and days of driving?  The therapist guesses Huckleberry Finn.  Andrew corrects him. The book was The Prince and the Pauper.  And he puts what I take it is a Doctorow-esque gloss on this book: The two boys exchange identities, the prince is the pauper and the pauper is the prince. Briony liked the romance of that, Clemens saying there's nothing to royalty but the assumption. But it's more than a democratic parable: it's a tale for brain scientists. Given the inspiration, anyone can step into an identity because the brain is deft, it c...

Once, many years ago, when I was working in a junk-mail mill, I got some joy out of a simple sign just about a mile away from the site of this employment. The sign, on a smallish road, warned drivers that racoons and other small critters were crossing thereabouts, so it would be wise to proceed with caution. Or, at least, that is what I imagine was the point of posting the sign. It said simply, "Slow animals crossing". I found it joyful because I would always say to myself while passing, "Gee, I guess the smarter animals cross a little further down the road."  I guess we're supposed to imagine a punctuation point after the word "slow" to foreclose such an interpretation. 

  Beyond the usual concern that the total or partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz drives up the price of the stuff we put in our cars, there is a concern only slowly bubbling to public consciousness -- that it will also drive up the cost of fertilizer and accordingly of food. The traditional route for the manufacture of fertilizer is through what chemists call the Haber-Bosch process, which makes ammonia, which can be used as a fertilizer in itself or can be combined with other stuff for more elaborate fertilizers.  There has been a lot of talk about moving beyond Haber-Bosch, finding alternative ways of making  ammonia and growing the world's food, in part precisely because natural gas is an input, and relatedly because CO₂ is a major byproduct of that process. A move toward alternative processes is a move toward a low or net zero carbon emissions world. It is certainly possible that even a partial blockage of Hormuz will kick-start the implementation of alternatives...

More on the novel, Andrew's Brain , by Doctorow.  We discover soon after the passage I quoted yesterday that the narrative voice saying "I can tell you about my friend, Andrew" is himself Andrew.  He has a proclivity for speaking of himself, and I submit a proclivity for seeing himself, in the third person. This discovery has weight in the unfolding of the not-especially-narrative tale. For one of the key themes here is the relation of mind to brain, of a self to its physical stratum.  And one might say that to the extent we reduce self to brain, we are trying to escape from the responsibilities of a first person point of view, into a world in which there is no subject, there is only the third person.  The first chapter is the longest in the book, going 50 pages. That is one-quarter the length of the book though there are eleven chapters. That is not remarkable -- the long first chapter feels like leisurely scene setting.  Anyway: as the second chapter opens we ...

  I've been reading a short novel by E.L. Doctorow, ANDREW'S BRAIN (2014). Let me quote for you the opening paragraph: "I can tell you about my friend Andrew, the cognitive scientist, but it isn't pretty. One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died." That paragraph throws us in the middle of things. It works from and, I think, presumes our familiarity with, a number of conventions. Andrew's job sounds like an academic one, and the paragraph primes us for a campus novel, where love triangles, ambitions successful or foiled, human tragedies, all play out amidst faculty, students, administrators with well-defined social roles.     The speaker may be addressing us, the readers, here.  Or he might be addressing a therapist -- not an unusual expository device in contemporary fiction.  We also cued up here have a rather ordinary-seeming love triangle.  A mi...

 Presidential authority as the commander in chief of the armed forces, under Article II of the US Constitution, is real and important, but it surely isn't all that President Donald Trump needs it to be for this war to be even remotely lawful.  To review six familiar points: (1) The US Constitutional reserves to Congress exclusively the right to "declare" war; (2) Probably because the framers considered the point too obvious to require stating, there is no specific statement that undeclared wars are illegal wars; (3) The courts have refused to make that inference leaving a gap in the whole notion of the checking of war powers, but (4) Congress, overriding President Nixon's veto, filled that gap with the War Powers Act of 1973, and (5) if Congress does not approve President Trump's action, then under the War Powers Act, the President will have to end hostilities within 60 days of starting them -- which would be by the end of April, but (6) nobody expects President T...

For a long time, much of the political appeal of  President Donald Trump has come from his professed opposition to “forever wars.”   One of his many explicit statements to this effect dates from his State of the Union address in 2019.  He said, “Great nations do not fight endless wars.”  If you need a link for that: behold. Given his goal to make America “great again,” this language clearly amounts to a commitment to use his position as commander-in-chief to keep the United States out of endless wars. Yet here we are, with Trump once again the commander-in-chief and with his commitment to war with Iran open-ended. He began the attack on Iran at the end of February and throughout March he has put his renunciation of his earlier view front-and-center. He has used his own proprietary social-media platform, “Truth Social,” to explain to us that “Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies (which are better than other countries fin...

  Ladies and gentlemen, behold the much-discussed Strait of Hormuz. The white space above is water, the greenish space is land.  To the left, the Persian Gulf -- to the right (east), the Gulf of Oman.  To the north, Iran.  To the south, Oman. At its tightest point, there are just 21 nautical miles between Oman and Iran. That is even smaller than the mileage between England and France at the narrowest part of the Channel. Within that span, only an even smaller portion is actually useful for large vessels such as oil tankers, about two lanes, each two miles wide, separated from each other by a 2 mile buffer zone.   Until a few days ago, roughly 20% of the world's oil supply was passing with regularity through the Strait of Hormuz.  The name of the strait comes from nearby Hormuz Island, and the name of that island may come from a corruption of the name Ahuramazda, the Supreme deity in Zoroastrian religion.   The closure of that strait for any l...

  Killing schoolchildren is wrong.  Let's start with that for today's comment on this war.  (This is the first of a set of four comments on the US and Israeli war with Iran this week, looking at it from four different points of view: economic, political, constitutional and, today ... human. )  As the war began, children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School were already in the two story building dedicated to their education, a building in the town of Minab, one with walls painted with pink flowers. A missile slammed into that building midmorning, leaving rubble and dead bodies.  Survivors of the first strike gathered in a hall, and there became victims of a second strike. In  all there were apparently 175 people killed, 108 of them children.  The first response of the President of the United States was,  "In my opinion and based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran. They're very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions."  The secon...

  " Time as a whole and in its parts bears to Space as a whole and its corresponding parts a relation analogous to the relation of mind to its equivalent bodily or nervous basis; or to put the matter shortly that Time is the mind of Space and Space the body of Time....[We]  are examples of a pattern which is universal and is followed not only by things but by Space-Time itself." Let this be your random quote for the day, from ...  Samuel Alexander, SPACE, TIME AND DEITY (1927). Like other great books, that one began as a set of Gifford Lectures ... specifically as Glasgow Gifford lectures. The Gifford lectures were established in 1887 by the will of Adam Gifford, Lord Gifford. The will requires that they "promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term." They are given are four ancient Scottish universities: St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. To be asked to give a Gifford lecture has become in the fullness of time a signa...

There's an old story about Ernest Hemingway. Faced with a bad case of writer's block he overcame it by telling himself, when faced with the dreaded blank page, to begin by writing something simple and true. I often remind myself of this, especially when faced with the difficulty of writing about a complicated subject.  When complexity IS the block, start with something simple and true. Not long ago, for my monthly newsletter, the first issue of the new year 2026, I had given myself the challenge of writing a brief item about artificial intelligence. Then I froze.  I'm not an expert on the field.  I know of coding only what a late 1970s course on APL could teach me.  [If you really ARE into computer science, you're giggling at that sentence.)  So I started with this sort of intentional simplicity.  "The year 2025 may go down in history with a lot of labels." It may indeed. Getting just a little braver having taken that step, I continued, "But I, for one, w...

  And this could be big... in a bad way.  Most adults remember the period 2007-08.  The great global financial crisis of those years arose because mortgages and mortgage derivatives were the horse that the whole of the developed world's economies rode upon. That horse was over-loaded and in due course it died. What is the horse now?  On some accounts, a certain sort of software firm, one in the business of selling "software as a service", or SaaS for short, has taken on that role.  Equities in these companies, the "app" economy if you will, are the new mortgages. Loans to those companies are the new mortgage derivatives. It is all, again, an overburdened horse.   But what will general artificial intelligence (GAI) do to them?  Could its very generality make most of the specific apps that are so important today seem obsolete and pointless? How much wealth will be destroyed if that is the case?  Do we face a SaaSpocalypse?  The St Louis ba...

Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) was a fascinating and powerful thinker whom I do not think I discuss enough in this place.   But someone asked a question on Quora thus: whether there was anyone who continued Nietzsche's work in something akin to the way in which Hegel continued that of Kant.  There are many ways I might have gone about answering it.  To be quite honest, the querent actually mentioned how "Kant" had continued the work of "Hegel".  That is a chronological absurdity of course, so I presume that Kant (1724 -1804) and Hegel (1770 - 1831) were simply reversed in the question by typographical haste.   If as I suspect the querent meant to ask about a continuance of Nietzsche in the manner of the continuance of Kant by Hegel, we also have to consider what kind of continuance THAT is. I infer that the querent meant not someone calling him/herself a Nietzschean and dedicated to exegesis of a Master, but someone who continued-with-a-difference. So I repl...

Routledge has published a 14 essay collection of work b y some renowned neuroscientists. NEUROCOGNITIVE FOUNDATIONS OF MIND.  https://www.routledge.com/Neurocognitive-Foundations-of-Mind/Piccinini/p/book/9781032602981      Consider that title. It is NOT saying that the mind simply IS the cognitive consequence of neurology. It is saying that there is genuine cognitive activity going on at different levels, and that the cognitive activity we recognize as ourselves is distinct from but dependent upon cognitive activity at a more primal level, neutral.  The latter is, as the title sounds, foundational re the functioning mindful brain in its environment.   Gualtiero Puccinini and  colleagues call this an "integrationist" view as distinct from  autonomism on the one hand and reductionism on the other. The mind  can be neither reduced to nor is it autonomous from the body. The book appears to have begun as a conference at the University of Turin in ...

  Tried to make a regular post here. Going all haywire. C'est la vie.     

 Back in late January I wrote here about a book by David A. Phillips that examined efforts at re-organizing the World Bank.  Phillips, who worked at the Bank for 14 years himself, looks with especial care at a 20 year period, 1988 - 2008. He ends up quite disenchanted.   I continue to read the book in small pieces. In chapter 8, Phillips quotes Gavin and Rodrik thus: "There is something more than a little schizophrenic about an agency that preempts potential private lenders because they are allegedly too risk averse (a main rationale for Bank lending), then demands that its loans should be senior to any other, thereby shifting most of the risk onto private lenders."  Yes, you might say,  "rings true, but who are Gavin and Rodrik?"  The answer, M. Gavin and D. Rodrik are the co-authors of an article in the American Economic Review in 1995, "The World Bank in Historical Perspective." That's what I get from a footnote in Phillips book.  Can I dig a ...

  I indicated in a late January post in this blog what I thought the Supreme Court was going to do about tariffs.  I said that it would likely affirm the decisions in the courts below striking down the tariffs, but that as to remedy it would find a way to allow the administration to avoid rebates.  I was right as to the questioning of the permissibility of the sweeping tariff powers the President sought to assign to himself here. I was wrong as to remedy.  As you surely all know by now, the Supreme Court by a 6-3 reading upheld one of the central pillars of our constitutional system, the unique role of the legislature in matters of taxation. And noted the obvious point that tariffs ARE taxation.  What did it say about remedy? Nothing, really. It left the matter open for further litigation, with the implication (I submit) that the importers who have been paying these charges since "Liberation Day" have a claim. The litigation is already underway. THAT I did not e...